Buying a Mower? [Watch This FIRST!]

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes from landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm going to be talking with you about choosing a zero turn mower. And I'm going to go through the numbers. This is for the commercial business, the operator that is running a lawn care company. Whether you're mowing residentially or commercially, these are the numbers you need to think about. This is the cost of this machine and where your prices need to be at based upon having this mower. Now, all that being said, I was enjoying my Saturday, right? Today is Saturday. And I then got a video pop up on my YouTube channel that showed another YouTuber giving advice to buy these brand new really, really nice zero turns. Very, very expensive. So I'm gonna go through the numbers and I'm gonna go through what you need to be thinking about when it comes to buying a zero turn. Now the first thing before we get into the numbers, we're gonna get there, don't worry. That's why I'm in front of.

We buy equipment to make money. Now if you buy equipment for any other reason, everything I'm about to share with you, you can just take it all with a grain of salt. You don't need to listen to it, okay? If you buy equipment because it looks cool, if you buy equipment because it makes you feel happy, if you buy equipment because you enjoy driving a mower and want it to be really fun, these are not reasons why I buy equipment. I buy equipment to do one thing that's make money. Alright? When it comes to your business, I do not look at equipment as any other reason. Pride. Looking good in front of others, looking good in front of my competitors, looking good in front of my customers, I don't really care. I just want to make money. And so if you have other reasons why you would buy equipment, then everything I'm about to share with you is null and void. Because you should buy, you should pay for stuff that you don't need if it's going to make you feel good in front of other people. But I don't, alright? So I look at the numbers alone and that's why we have at our local shops really pared down how much equipment we have. In the past few years. We really stripped away zero turns and trailers and big trucks. We really, really got down to the basics because of the numbers I'm about to share with you today. But I buy equipment to make money. I wanna make that clarification first. Number two reviews from other YouTubers that share about zero turns and share these big mowers and talk about them. There's a two parter that you need to think about when you listen to these other reviews. Okay, number one is, have they actually used this equipment for months or years? Cause in my opinion, I don't really care what the equipment looks like and all its features. How does it actually operate over the course of six months a year, once you put 300, 500, 1,000 hours. Because that's what really is going to make the difference for my bottom line. It's not whether or not it looks cool, what color it is painted. If it has an electric, you don't have to use your to move the deck up and down. It's like electric. Or if it has a LED light bar or if it has cup holders, I could care less. I want to make money with this thing. And whether or not the numbers make sense is going to be the deciding factor as to whether or not I buy that equipment. Not if it's red or green or whether or not the tires pop or they don't and they have air in them or they don't. Those are all. But at the end of the day, the only thing I care about is does it make sense on paper with the numbers? Okay, so number one is you've got to ask yourself when you're looking at a review from a landscaper, is do they have experience actually operating this machine or are they just going to a dealer and observing it making, oh yeah, it's beautiful, has this great feature, this great feature, all this. But does it make sense on paper? I'm not going to go buy it because it has a nice feature. I want to buy it because it's going to make me money. So therefore I need to know how, how does this piece of equipment operate at 500 and 1000 and 2000 hours, or does it constantly break every 25 hours? The belts.

Does the suspension get messed up, does the motor give out after 500 hours? These are all things that are much, much more important. Alright. The second thing is, if you're going to listen to a review from an online YouTuber and they have a lot of subscribers, you need to ask yourself, are they getting paid for this? Are they getting paid for this review? Whether it be the brand giving them the mower and saying, hey, here's your mower, you can use it for free. Of course they're not going to say anything negative about it, of course, because they want to keep that stream of free equipment coming to them. They're also, they might also be Getting paid to just come do a review. So I really feel like in this community we've got to do a better job as YouTubers that if we're getting paid for a brand deal or if we're not getting paid, we need to disclose that to our audience. We need to tell our audience whether or not we're getting paid to make a review on a zero turn because our review, our opinions are going to be changed if we're getting money as a YouTuber to make a review. Okay, so I wanted to preface all of that and I know for some of you you don't like how I preface things, but now let's get into the numbers of actually what a zero turn is going to really cost you. And I also want to say I'm not against buying zero turns. We have some zero turns we are paring back, but there's also in our corporately owned stores across the country that are buying equipment. For right now we're buying stand on mowers. Like we're buying six and seven. Well one's five, five, six, seven thousand dollar mowers because they have big properties and we've got to buy zero turns. So is the solution to just go buy cheap push mowers? No. If you're market you need bigger mowers, then yes, you should be buying them. What I want to talk about today is knowing what the numbers, the costs are to you for that said piece of equipment. So today I was watching this video and it was for a piece of equipment, it was $11,000. Now I know most of you watching this know exactly what video I'm talking about. I'm not going to talk about the person because everyone when I do that, they think I'm trying to pick on the person or I'm jealous or something crazy like that. It's not to do with that. It's the fact that someone watching this video, just getting started, an 18, 19 year old, they need to know the numbers behind whether or not they buy equipment. Not if it looks good, not if it's going to to have a cool feature that's never been seen before. This is what matters when it comes to our business. And the reason I'm so passionate, the reason I literally drove and came, like I have to go back to the student and make this video and I gotta get it out today. The reason I did is because for the 18 or 19 year old that watches the video like that and is like I need that to make a successful business. Let me tell you news alert, the Equipment doesn't make your business successful. Marketing, branding, hiring, that's what makes a really good business. But let's break down the numbers. So if you are considering buying equipment like this. So first of all, $11,000 for this mower. Now we need to keep in mind that by the time we add taxes, we're gonna be at $12,000. Okay? Now if you are going to be like me in a market where we gotta bag clippings at least occasionally when it gets really, really wet, or for us, we always have to bag clippings, we have to add a bagging system to this. And for most people, they buy a bagging system, even if it's going to be for the leaves and things like that. But in our market, we have to buy a bagging system. So we've got to add $2,000. Is it really $2,000? Yes. For a three bushel bagging system where you're looking at 16 to $1,900 plus tax. So plus $2,000 for the bagger. So now we are at $14,000.

For this zero turn. Okay, so now over the course, the lifespan of this zero turn, we're gonna say that we use it maybe for a few years, two, three years. And at the end of the day, the retail value that we're gonna sell this back to the dealer for, maybe exchange it, for example, we're gonna assume is $4,000. So the resale value back to the dealer after a few years is gonna be $4,000. So the total cost to us for having this piece of equipment for those few years is going to equal $10,000. So the cost of owning this piece of equipment is going to be $10,000. Okay, that's fine. Now let's talk about some more things. In terms of hours. How do we break down what this is actually going to cost us per hour? Because a lot of times it's like, oh, well, it's only $200 per month. Like I need this on payments or whatever. It might be great, that's fine. But let's actually look at the numbers from an hourly perspective. Because a lot of times the people that buy this type of equipment that I find, they're also the people that go to gie. They're the ones who go to their dealer all the time and they're literally buying equipment every two to three years. And they're not using it until it dies. They're not using it for 2000 hours. They're using it for like 6, 7, 800 hours. These zero turns and then getting new ones. So let's run the numbers here. Let's assume that we got an 800. We used this thing for eight over the course of a couple years. We used it for 800 hours, like on the mower. Like 800 hours on the mower. And our cost over the course of a couple years, the loss that we're going to have on the value of this equipment is going to be $10,000. So if you do simple math, you take the total cost of that piece of equipment over the course of the couple years and we divide that out by 800. What that is going to bring is the fact that it's going to cost us $12.50 per hour.

To buy this piece of equipment. Alright? So if we're going to use this piece of equipment for 800 hours out in the field for a couple years, and that's going to mean that we're going to pay $12.50 per operating hour for the piece of equipment. Now, the reason, there's several variables. I know I'm moving around here. Number one is the fact that this person, whoever bought this piece, piece of equipment, is only using it for 800 hours before they resell it back to the dealer and trade it in. Now, if this person literally use it for 1600 hours, this price right here would go from 1250 to $6.25. So I already know right away that this is a person that likes to buy lots of equipment. And you have to remember that a manufacturer at GIE or a YouTuber that's trying to sell equipment, they are incentivized to sell you more equipment, not make good business decisions for you and your company. Because I'm literally going to spend $12.50 an hour to just have this piece of equipment versus if I use it longer, take care of it, maintain it correctly, all the rest of it, I could literally get 1600 or 2000 hours out of this piece of equipment, driving the cost per hour way down. All right? But all the, the ads, the magazines, the sponsorships, the YouTubers that are presenting this equipment pushes a lot of young entrepreneurs in this industry to sell their equipment much sooner than they should. Again, I buy equipment to make money, not to get new flashy stuff every couple years. So that way I can look good and be proud of my fleet. Okay, so. But this is not where it stops. This is not where it stops. Okay? That $12.50 per hour is for the. Really just the acquisition cost. Misspell this. I'm sure acquisition cost of the equipment. That's the $10,000 we lost over the course of those couple years. Now we need to also add though the fact that this is going to be fuel and let's go ahead and assume that we burn about 1 gallon per hour. So let's assume $3 per hour for fuel for on this zero turn. Alright? So let's do fuel. Okay, now let's go ahead and we gotta do maintenance. We got tires, we have the belts and if you've broken a belt, you know they're expensive. We got oil and oil filters. We have little things that happen wrong with the springs or the spindles or the blades or whatever it might be like. If you include all of that and you actually start thinking about the blades, the time it takes to do the blades, all the different stuff that goes into maintenance, let's go ahead and just call that let's say $3 per hour, another $3 per hour. And honestly, there's a good case that you could say this is actually more than this $3 per hour. And that is just for maintenance.

So what's the real cost of this piece of equipment? Actually, the real cost if we add all of this up is $18.50 per hour that we use this piece of equipment. That's what it's costing us, alright? That is the cost of this zero turn. $18.50 per hour. Now, why is this so important? Because if I'm also just looking at, okay, I got $18.50 just for my 10 turn when I'm out working, okay, $18.50. Now what about when you have an employee that is going to cost you, let's say $20 per hour, okay.

Per hour. Now all of a sudden we have this equation where literally we're at $38.50 per hour of cost, strict cost to operate. We have not included a truck, we haven't included a trailer. I never include the cost to insure this mower or the cost to store this mower inside of a storage facility or a trailer or some sort of shop. Literally the cost to us of having this zero turn and a labor, one labor, not two, just one labor, is $38.50. This is why I say if you're under $40 per man hour, it's almost impossible to make profit. Okay? The only way that you can, the only way that you can is that if you use your equipment a long, long, long, long time, or if you have really, really cheap labor. So this is another reason why if you're going to be Spinning through equipment and only using them for a few hundred hours and then buying new and getting more. This number could get a lot worse. If you're getting new equipment every single year, you get inspired, like, oh, that looks so cool, I'm gonna go buy. You should not buy equipment because it's cool. You buy equipment because it's gonna make you money. Okay? So when I look at $38.50 per hour of cost on a solo route that has one mower, we're not talking about the weed eaters, the push mowers. If you get a second, if you get a second zero turn on top of this, your trailer, your truck, your insurance, your overhead of having management, all of those things drive this number up. Now some of you are like, oh, well that's crazy. You're really inflating the numbers using this. And like, I don't actually use the mower all day long, but I'm also leaving a lot of stuff out. Like the truck cost all the other equipment. That's not the zero turn. So I wanted to make this video for two reasons. Number one, if you're buying a zero turn, run the numbers. What does it cost per hour? Assume that you can hopefully use this for at least 1500 hours. Because again though, you shouldn't go buy the equipment because like it looks, looks nice. You should go buy it because someone's used it for years and you're like, okay, if they can get 2000 hours out of it and they've seen really good results, I can too. Not because it's a nice light bar, not because it has cup holders, not because it has USB chargers. Those things do not make you more money. They might make the job a little bit easier, but they don't make you more money. Alright, so keep this all in mind when you're looking to buy a zero turn mower. And when you see ads, ads from manufacturers, when you see YouTube videos and reviews, keep all of this in mind. Remember, at the end of the day, we're here to make money. We want to use our equipment for a very long time. We want to keep it maintained. By the end of the day. Those mowers cost you money. And when you break it down per hour, you need to make sure you're running a profit. If your price per hour that you're charging the customer is too low, you will not be able to afford it, you will not be able to make a profit and you will not be to able able to grow your business. So I hope that helped. Comment below, what other pieces of equipment, trucks. What do you want to see next when you actually break down the numbers? And this is what I feel is toxic to this community is going buying out a ton of equipment because they see it on YouTube. It looks new, it looks flashy. It is the new thing at gie when that's not really what moves the business forward. It's numbers, it's money. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com We'll see you in the next video.