Mike Andes breaks down two mowing setups: trailerless ramp racks (around $3K) for solo operators on smaller properties, and enclosed trailers for bigger crews and larger jobs. A basic mow-and-go runs $1.5–1.8K. Pick based on property size and crew size.
Questions this video answers
About $1,500 to $1,800 (spoken as '15 to $1,800').
Around $3,000.
7 by 14 (7×14).
Properties averaging less than about 12,000–15,000 square feet of turf.
Under roughly 10,000–12,000 square feet (spoken range).
Chapters
Hey, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I want to go over what type of mowing setup you should have on your truck, whether it be a trailerless setup with a ramp rack or an enclosed trailer. Now, there's other options obviously out there in terms of a open air trailer, as well as different types of a trailer setup type, whether it be different types of racks. So let's start with this one and we're going to talk about that one. But really today I not showing you so much about the setup, I'm showing you about which one you should choose based upon your area and the type of customers that you serve. So it's really going to come down to two different things, and that is how many people in your truck and what type of equipment do you need to service the properties that you service. So last week I had a video about how many people you should have inside of your truck. I said, hey, should you have one person like solo routes, or should you have two or three or four people on a mowing setup? Now the type of truck setup that you have is going to also correlate with the amount of people that you have in the truck. If I'm going to have two, three, four people inside the truck, I'm probably going to want more equipment. And if I have more equipment, this type of setup is not going to work. Now the reason I would have, like I said last week, two, three or four people working in that truck is if I'm working on bigger properties, I'm working on commercial properties where I park the truck and I work for three, four hours on one maintenance job. But if I'm going from job to job to job to job, I have 20 in a day. I'm probably going to want a solo, maybe two people on a mowing setup, and I'm going to be very likely to be able to use one of these trailerless setups. So this is the ramp rack. There's other different options. One is a cheaper option called mowing go systems, especially if you're down the southeast mow and go systems is about 15 to $1,800. The ramp rack is going to be running around $3,000. What this allows you to do is be able to get a zero turn or any sort of push mower in the back of your trailer or back of your bed of your truck without having to have a trailer. So we use 30 inch mowers and we put them in the slot here because we have to use that area for Bed for clippings. The bed of the truck, we have to use it for grass clippings. You can see they use the bins here and that's what they basically keep organized for the grass clippings. But if you didn't have to bag your clippings, you could easily put a stand on mower or even a sit down mower, zero turn into the bed of the truck and be able to do larger properties. Again, what's really going to be the determining factor if you use a trailer or a trailer setup is the size of the properties. Because the size of the properties is also going to dictate the type of equipment you need. And the type of equipment you need is going to dictate the type of setup that you require and how many people are in the truck. Okay, so this is the trailer setup. If you want more video on this, I do a full walk around, show you exactly how it's all set up. In a previous video. Just type in ramp rack. Mike Andy's over here though. We have the trailer set up. Has an enclosed trailer. This one's a 7 by 14 enclosed trailer. I really like enclosed trailers over open air trailers for one reason. That's the marketing. So on the side you can get a big thing of marketing. If we were really focusing on trailer setups, I'd probably paint this thing yellow too. Just to kind of make it more of a marketing piece. And so it's also great because it's almost a form of storage. You can lock that thing up. It's going to protect all of the equipment from the elements. And you don't have to worry about getting a storage facility or a shop or anything like that. That's indoors. The thing I hate about these is how thin they are. This metal is so thin it dents easily. You can see the wheel well here. This gets all dented up just from rocks. Driving down the road all the time, things get bent out of shape. People back into things. It's again, look at the length of this truck and trailer. I don't know, probably 30ft. By the time you add this all up, probably more than 30ft. It's a lot harder to train your new employees on how to drive this versus you can see over there, that trailerless setup. So the question is, what type of setup should I have for my mowing? Should I have a trailer whether it be open air or whether it be more of a enclosed trailer where I can have a massive piece of marketing on the side? I really believe that if you're doing small properties, again, properties that are on average less than 12, 15,000 square feet of turf, you might want to be using that. And if you use that, you're probably going to have solo, maybe two people in a truck. If you're having a setup like this, you're probably going to be servicing larger properties. You're going to have a zero turn, maybe two or three zero turns, and therefore have two, three or even four people on a truck. You know, there's some commercial companies that have an ISUSA or they have like a crew cab and they'll take five, six people on one crew. So I really believe when it comes to which type of setup you should have, and a lot of people ask me, kay, hey, you're really pushing the trailer setup. I'm not pushing it. I'm just saying that if you're going to have smaller properties that are under 10, 12,000 square feet, that makes a lot of sense. And if you have that type of setup that's really cheap to get started with and you don't need a zero turn or you can handle only a 36 inch stand on, that's a great one to have. For solo routes, we have one person on the job in the truck. If you're using a bigger truck, a bigger trailer, more equipment and servicing bigger properties, probably gonna be wanting to go with something like this where you can get more equipment in the back, you can get bigger mowers in the back and you can have more people in the cab of the truck to actually be driving around. So hopefully that was helpful. Thanks so much everyone for watching. I'm Mike Andes, Atlanticbusinesscourse.com we'll see you next time.
