How to Make $1 Per Minute Mowing Lawns! (REAL PRICING REVEALED!)

Good morning, everyone. It is Saturday morning today.

We are going to go out and.

Mow some lawns here with Max and Brady. And so stick along for the ride. Make sure you like this video because, you know, it takes a lot of work to make these videos. It takes a lot of work to go out and mow lawns and get out of my office and put on work boots. Please push a like. If we get 500 likes, we'll do it again. Let's go make some money.

All right, so.

These are the storage containers. We keep all of our equipment in pretty secure stuff.

They're actually really heavy duty. But then as soon as you start drilling into these, you actually realize they're not very thick at the end of the day. These are shipping containers. They try to make them as rugged as possible but as light as possible to come across the ocean. All right, now we have decisions, decisions, decisions. Do we take a 30 inch or a 21 inch? Brady, what should we take? Got a big mower or a smaller mower? 30 inch.

All right, here we go.

So let's take this bad boy. So first of all, these are all labeled 30x number 7, 30x number 6. So I can look over here and see which one I should be taking up here on the board. So I should be taking number eight, but I'm not going to take number eight because number seven is the furthest away and no one else is mowing today. So we can take whatever mower we want.

All right.

It's the perks of working on Saturday.

Make sure it works.

It's alive.

We're doing a visual inspection of all the premises before we get started on the day.

Oh, mercy. Things are made cheap these days.

All right, so now I'm looking through my schedule, making sure that I have.

Everything in my truck that there's not some crazy shovel or trimmer that I need that I don't have in my truck like this one. I need a spray.

So sprayer intact. Fantastic. All right, all aboard. Let's get out of here.

All right, we have three properties here. The beautiful thing about route density is when they're all close. So we have a dentist office, a house, and another house, all while being able to sit the truck right here. So that's where you can make money, is when you have route density, you park the truck once and do two to three homes. All right, so this is a small commercial lawn that we mow. We don't do a lot of commercial properties, but we do some of the smaller ones because we still just are using a push mower. Same setup that we would use for residential. That's what we use for commercial. So we can't do massive 2, 3, 4 acre headquarters or whatever like that. But if it's small like this, it still works great. So let's do a walk around, show a little bit about this property. So this property specifically we actually have to mow after 3pm on Fridays. So it's very difficult to do that in terms of scheduling sometimes or you know, today's Saturday, so it's closed. We got a lot of space and time to, you know, figure these things out without having a whole bunch of.

Parking lot filled up.

So this is a dentist office. So I can see in my notes here the main thing is, hey, you.

Must service after 3 o' clock on a Friday.

We got spray weeds in the parking lot and surrounding sidewalks and anything gravel. So any all this gravel bed area, there's really no weeds you can see in the parking lot. Once you spray a couple times, you usually pretty good. But this is the lawn area out next to the road. Again, pretty small. Even if I had a big zero turn, it's not like I'd use it very much because there's not a ton of square footage of lawn. So when we look at this, we got 34 minutes. So I already know based upon this that we're going to be charging this client $45 per cut. We do this every single week and the edges are all really established, so I don't have to use like a stick edger. I can just use a wee whacker and it's going to be pretty straightforward. So again, a couple things that we're looking for in a property like this in terms of pricing is like this is probably only going to take me 20 minutes. But the problem is it's going to take the office time every single week to make sure the scheduling is correct to be after 3pm every Friday. As well as the fact that, you know, the parking situation is not that great either because I got to be in the parking lot behind. There's like a one way street here. So it's pretty annoying. So all those little things what we also keep in kind of keep in mind when it comes to pricing a job. All right, let's go ahead and start mowing.

All right, so I'm going to add a little bit of color to this and do a voiceover and hopefully add a little bit of context that you can learn about business mowing lawns, making money in landscaping and in lawn care. And I think today my biggest thing is just to show that it doesn't have to be big properties, big equipment. You can do small properties. And a lot of people ask, do you have to do commercial or residential? Well, technically this is a commercial property because it's a dentist. It's not a residential home. However, even if you don't have big, big equipment, you can't compete with regional or massive companies in your area. You can still do small commercial if they're willing to pay for a premium product. For example, this company, this, this place I'm mowing, this dentist office, they can never hire a massive company because that massive company can never accommodate the fact that they can only be mowed on Fridays after 3pm or Saturdays. Right? So we accommodate that and therefore we're able to get the job for commercial. Now, if that did not fit into our schedule, we would not take it. By no means is that something you should build a job around or a business around. It just so happens that we always are mowing this on Friday afternoon already and so it works. But that being said, you don't have to pigeon your hole and oh, I'm going to be residential or I'm going to be commercial. Especially if you're just getting started. Especially if you're in your first year or two of business. Realize that look, the property size really give me the thing that dictates which customers you take on. Not necessarily, you know, how you know if they're commercial or the residential is an apartment or an office. It's really the size of the property that dictates the type of equipment you need and the type of setup you will need for your long hair jobs. So you can see here I'm edging. Traditionally we like to use a stick edger with an actual metal head. However, in this case the edges are already really established and so we just use the line trimmer just for the sake of speed. And what you didn't see there when I was going along the road, it was a little bit tight because my weed eater head was actually like stick sticking out into the road itself and is a little bit precarious, I must say. So in this sort of environment, you know, on this type of job, it's a corner lot. This would be a great spot, honestly to put like a door hanger or, sorry, a yard sign. You could do a yard sign in this area and be able to show, hey, this is our work. You can see, you know, see the nice edging and things like that. It's a great place to put a yard sign if you're looking for a commercial spot. That's the nice thing about commercial, a lot of times they're more inclined to allow you to throw a yard sign up in their their grass. And again, if you're looking for customers in that area, it's a great place to be able to advertise your work and show that you do a good job. So here, one thing about the 30 inch mower which you're going to see and you saw me load it up earlier, but you're going to see me use it here in a second. The one thing about the 30 inch mower, it has two blades and that's great, you get more width and mowing. The problem can also be that you can scalp lawns a lot easier than if you had just a 21 inch mower. So you can see I'm actually wearing whacking this slope mostly due to the fact that if I brought a 30 inch mower over this, there's a really good chance I would sculpt the top of that lawn or top of that ridge, I should say. Or I. If I went over the, the edge, there's a massive drop on the edge you can see right there. And it can cause again a scalping on the edge.

Exmark. I have another little bone to pick with you because small people like me, this is pretty high. All day long I have to do a tricep extension. I need this to be a little bit easier to adjust on the side, bring it down, bring it up, depending on your size. Otherwise all day long. This is Michael doing push ups on the mower. Come on now.

So the 30 inch mower is great for getting inside backyard gates because it's obviously less than 32 and 36 inches. Which is most standard gates are 32 or 36 inches. And so this will get in the backyard gate of just about every gate unless it's very, very old and very, very narrow. So that's a pro about this. You don't have to worry about having different mowers for different use cases. The downsides though, like I mentioned, the scalping, it's heavy. You know, someone like myself watch my triceps the entire time I'm doing like push ups. And especially for someone smaller, it's quite a workload. It's not easy. It's a lot more taxing on the body to have this machine. It's quite a bit more heavy than a 21 inch mower.

You can see on the bottom there I keep grabbing for that is the self propulsion lever. And the top there is a lever to keep the motor on. What's nice about that is, is you can keep the motor running without having to necessarily have the propulsion. And you can use the propulsion without the motor. Right. So it's not like one gear. Look at a cheaper mower. Like you get a Honda 3 $400 mower from Costco or you know, Lowe's or Home Depot. They have one lever. That one lever is the motor and the self propulsion. In this case though, I can have blades off but then also use a self propulsion. Very helpful with a big mower like this because it's pretty. It's a lot of work moving this thing around all day. We definitely get your exercise.

A lot of people ask us where we get those patches from. They're actually on Amazon. Just type in us flag patches. And then we use invisible thread as well as the fact that they are iron on. Like you can iron them on and they stay pretty well. But honestly after like 20, 30 washes, sometimes they could fall off. So what we do is we iron them on and then we take invisible thread and just on the perimeter sew the patch to the actual sleeve of the shirt.

So a lot of people will sometimes ask me, I'm going to talk about, in just a second about why we go back and forth. You know, you'll notice the reason, the only reason I'm doing this is to make sure that the lines are continuous and that I do not have one direction on one part of the lawn and a different direction on another part of the lawn. Again, most people aren't going to pick that up. Even this property, honestly probably wouldn't find to go the same, you know, different directions because it would have been a whole lot more efficient for me to go back and forth long ways. I'm actually going to explain it here in just a second and talk about just how much time I would have saved if I would have messed it up. But again, if you're a bit of a perfectionist and if you want again all these people driving by to see a good product, you do it this way.

You might ask me why I did all these stripes going this way. Cause the faster way would have been to go this way because I would have had to turn less time. So if I would have gone the long way, probably would have had maybe six or seven stripes going this way. I probably had like 30 or 40. So it takes longer. However, I'm on an L shaped property and I'm going to keep my maintain the direction of my stripes the entire property. What you don't want to do, if at all possible, is try to change directions of your stripes. It does not look good if at all possible. If you're in a really really big property you can change directions totally fine. But if at all possible, keep your stripes the same. Stripes, stripes the same way the whole whole lawn.

I have to give credit to exmark on the pool starter on this bad boy. Although as much as I would love an electric start, it's not feasible on a cheaper mower. Like obviously electric start is nicer, but every single time I pull this cable it starts up right away. I'm going to talk a little bit more about later. But the downsides for us that we've seen on these larger mowers, these exmarks is that they just have not had enough iterations in my opinion. Like the 21 mowers they've been around for so many years. Honda, Husqvarna, Toro, they figured out what works and what doesn't. These larger 30 inch mowers are relatively new and somewhat niche becoming more popular. And a lot of the manufacturers honestly in my mind are just figuring out what works and what doesn't. Because the things that break on this thing is like the throttle adjuster, certain, the parking brake, all those things are the things that break all the time and give us the most hassle and but the motor crate, the bagging system.

Great big bag catcher.

When you have to bag clippings, there's nothing I'd rather have.

So I'm just putting this the X mark here now on the ramp rack.

One nice thing about these mowers is they do have a separate drive channel versus just the blades for the self propulsion. So even though the blades are off, you can still be running self propulsion. You need that because it's such a heavy mower. Pretty exhausting, but it's nice. You know, when you're done a lawn you can turn the blades off and still use the self propulsion of the of the drive shaft.

So in case you're wondering, that was the ramp rack system there allows us to put the mower in the back of the truck. You can put larger mowers in there up to 52 inches wide. So like a zero turn or a stand on mower. And we do have setups that are like that in our corporate owned locations around the country and our franchisees use them as well A lot of times. 48 inch stand on is most common to put in there. But again, this route is much smaller properties. So I don't need the big zero turn. There's no reason to be driving around town with a 60 or 72 inch zero turn. If I'm doing properties that are four or five, 6,000 square feet of turf, there's just no reason. For example, even in this area, you can see a tight narrow alleyway, not much parking area. If I had a big 20 foot long trailer trying to back into here, get out of here. It take a lot longer to train someone up, get them employed and, and be profitable in their mowing route if I had to train them how to drive this massive mower. So that's why we like the trailerless setup we call it. It's great for these smaller routes and being very profitable and efficient and not needing a huge amount of skill to back up trailers. Worry about denting the trailers, all the rest of it.

So if there would have been a ton of edging and a lot of debris come off onto the sidewalk, there's a good chance I would have blowed the. The are blown, I guess the correct English blown off the sidewalks prior to mowing. Because then that way would have sucked up all the clippings when I was actually bagging the lawn. Now for everyone out there wondering why I'm begging the lawn, trust me, there's. I do not want to. It's the worst thing in the world. I hate it. But in our market, Washington state, we have to bag the clipping. That's pretty much commonplace and standard in our area.

The blower I'm using Here is the BR600 from Steel. It's not necessarily like, I don't think there's a good, better or best, honestly, when it comes to blowers. I know there's great videos out there comparing the, you know, different brands and things, but honestly, if you get a commercial blower, you're set. These ones, the ones with the backpack, give a lot more volume.

So.

So there's two things when it comes to a blower you're measuring. One is the speed of the air coming out the end of the nozzle or the tube and then also the volume of the air. These backpack blowers give you so much more volume. But this BR600 is gonna cost you a pretty penny, 5, 600 bucks. Whereas you can get started for a lot less by using a handheld blower. But it might only cost you 150 or 200.

Okay.

Last thing we gotta do is spraying the gravel. So there's really not too many weeds in the parking lot, but over on that area there's some weeds. Again, the importance of having notes on your CRM. Every single property is very important. So we had 34 budgeted minutes for this property.

I have four more left, so perfect timing.

Gonna go ahead and spray some weeds.

Again. We use an organic spray so it does not have any harsh chemicals. And we do that mostly due the fact that that in our area, a lot of customers do like the fact that we have all natural and organic sprays. We don't use chemicals or anything like that. It also allows us not to have to get applicators, licenses and a whole bunch of training and licenses for all the team. So as we grow and scale the business, we're able to not worry about everyone needing a whole bunch of certification.

Before they even get started with us.

So this stuff is great. I'm not going to give you the name of the of this stuff simply due to the fact that we will use it for our franchisees and we don't want 100,000 other people trying to get it because there's a small little.

Organic farm that makes this stuff. So as much as I would like to tell you, the problem is the people that make this is a small little organic farm that we have to get this shipped in from. It's a great product. And I would just say try to find, if you want an organic product, just do your homework, do your research, trying to find someone locally, hopefully that can supply this product for you. Because ideally in our market we have to have an applicator's licenses and a whole bunch of certification and training around the spray. Whereas this stuff is all natural. It works really good. It's not as good as Roundup, obviously. Roundup is like the best, but it's definitely going to be better than having Roundup when it comes to applications and the need for licenses. So this property, again, 34 minutes budget. We have $80 per man hour that we try to achieve on these mowing routes. So. And that imputes the fact that we're going to make $45 on this specific service that we just.