Mike Andes breaks down whether robot mowers make money for lawn-care businesses. A fleet of 100 costs around $150,000 upfront, with individual units at $50-60k each. He says break-even could happen in one season, but the economics don't beat scaling to 400 traditional clients yet, though prices may drop to $20k and labor savings could hit $250 a day.
All right, so I've been researching this industry heavily in the past six months. With the current prices of the mowers, I could break even in one season. Would require two to three contract for the service with a hundred clients. You could service them with one employee who would reset the mowers when required and do the trimming and edging. So this is the problem in my opinion. Okay, so if I get a hundred clients and I have to go buy robot mowers for them all, I'm literally looking right now at $150,000. For $150,000, I can go do the marketing, buy the truck and equipment for probably five employees and have 400 clients otherwise. So this is the problem again though, as the cost of that, that piece of that robot goes down, it makes more and more and more sense. That's why I'm saying that as that price comes down, we've got to get more and more creative. Zachary this is absolute business model that is in my mind, I'm actually thinking less. This is what actually gets me more, more excited. There are now mowers and I've tested these out that you program, you program all of your properties into it. And how you do it is basically the first time it's like on a joystick or it's like a Xbox little controller. It comes out of your trailer, you manually back it up and then you basically program it the first time and actually mow the lawn manually with your joystick. And it programs in the, in, into the machine, how and how to mow and everything. But it's a big mower, it does, it just. It's like a 48 inch deck. And so it goes as fast as you would edging. This is really interesting to me because now a one person crew to one employee can haul this thing along in a trailer and push a button and it starts to mow the property while they edge and blow. And literally, if you take the cost of a labor, say $25 per hour, once you take into account the fact that there's waste was when you have an employee, it's not just time on the job. It's like the drive time, the unload time, the load time, hiring them, training them, all the rest. You take all of that $25 an hour, now you're looking at $250 a day, a day in savings by having this machine. Yes, right now it costs 50, 60 thousand dollars. But wait till that, that thing is worth only cost $20,000. That becomes very, very interesting to me in my opinion though I would rather go get the 400 mowing customers now and then when that technology comes along bring my prices and my margin bring my prices down and my margins up and solve the labor problem and be able to scale using that technology instead of trying to go buy a hundred mowers that are robots right now that all cost fifteen hundred dollars that would be a huge expense now you can do that on a leasing program make it work a little more Then the problem is okay what happens in three years when now that equipment is obsolete and I got to go buy more equipment because in three years guess what robot mowers are going to be a hundred times better and you're not going to want to be doing lines in the edges you're not going to be wanting to have to do flaps for the for the mowers to get in the backyards there's gonna be such better technology and in three years in my opinion it's going to be a completely different ball game.
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