How to Mow Lawns and Make Money: REAL-TIME Mowing Video! [Analysis]

It is Saturday morning.

Usually I try to sleep in, but today I'm gonna be heading to the Bellingham shop and so, yeah, come along for the ride.

Alright, we are in route. I had a couple phone calls this morning.

One of the franchisees is having a.

Problem, but we are en route to the Bellingham shop. We're gonna knock out some of these mows.

They're a little bit hind.

It's in peak season for us. I haven't mowed lawns in over a year now. So it's good to just kind of hop back in sometimes and. And this week we had a pretty important meeting at the Bellingham shop. And I think sometimes it's just best to lead by example, hop in and help. So not really making a big deal of it, just kind of hopping in here for the day and going to help them with some of the jobs.

All right, this is what we have.

To work with today.

One of our newer trucks, P13, has the ramp rack. Let's get it. All right, so this is actually the storage box where I actually keep the mowers. A lot of people ask us where we put the mowers at night. So we put them in these 40 by 8 storage containers. They're shipping containers from China, but it's actually cheaper to get them, leave them in the US than it is to ship them back empty back to China sometimes.

All right, so we're at our first job.

It's actually commercial property here.

We don't do a lot of commercial, but H and R block here and things.

And we don't do a lot of.

Commercial, just small stuff usually in this.

Regard, we're not even doing any mowing today. We're just doing a bunch of weeding and we blow off all these walkways. There's no grass here, so I think a couple times you will trim the bushes and things.

But really just kind of blowing everything.

Off, cleaning things up. We gotta blow out the AC units, we gotta blow these out inside of.

Here, just get the leaves out of there.

But yeah, we do these once a month. So this one's pretty straightforward.

Alright. So I'm gonna try to do a bit of a voiceover throughout the times when I'm blowing things off. Weed, whacking, mowing, stuff like that. So I had some questions coming via YouTube, but this property here, I had two budgeted hours and so $160 like it said in the video there per visit. So we really make sure it looks really, really good. We don't do a lot of Commercial. At Augusta, we really do focus more on residential, but these small commercial ones, we can still charge our premium price.

I guess I was proud of the fact that I found a NOS bottle. But yeah, so we don't do a lot of these. But again, some property managers, they see the value in our service where we answer the phone, we are professional, etc. Especially around more high end properties. If this had like three acres of lawn, there's just no way we'd be in the ballpark of reality in terms of price just because we're gonna use a push mower and our competition is gonna be using a 60 or inch zero turn. So a couple of the questions that came in the YouTube, some people asked who makes the trimmer and backpack racks on the truck. So we use the ones from trailerracks.com and our franchisees get a discount with them. They're the ones that are green. You can get them painted, I'd imagine. The thing I don't like about them is they do fade in color quite a bit. So even the ones in this truck are about a year old and you can see like they're a paler green versus when you first get them, they're like a nice bold, darker green. So you'll see that the trailer racks here, just a second on the truck, the truck itself here, I'm going to blow technically the neighbor's property, but trying to blow it off.

So yeah, these are the racks here. These ones actually don't look too bad yet. But again, these actually, these are, I guess we bought, this is the one truck we bought in this spring. So they still look pretty good. But again, after like a year, two years, they start to fade and not really as much of a fan of those. So when it comes to these little commercial ones, we. There is no lawn in this one, like I said. And so it's a lot of weeding, blowing things off. And this, this rake right here, you know what's called a leaf rake or tine rake, depending on who you talk to. I love this thing. It just kind of turns the mulch over, makes it look fresh and new. So even though here, I'm not pulling any weeds in this, this place is basically weed free in that section behind the gate. It was really a matter of just trying to make it look fresh by using that leaf rake. Someone asked what was our process for training new hires. For example, on a day like this that you're watching, this would be a great time to take a new hire along with me and train them and we don't necessarily have videos, we don't do anything like that. We basically have a checklist of things they need to get done. And they start at the most simple. So for example, I would show them what I'm doing right now installing trimmer line. But I probably wouldn't do that the first day. The first day they might literally just use the blower. And then day two, they use the weed whacker. And then in that process, the person training them would be showing them how to do the spool of line. Doing spool of line is one of those weird things in lawn care that is oddly satisfying after not doing lawn care for a whole year. So right here I'm using the weed whacker to basically get the weeds out of the curb or, sorry, that the cracks of the asphalt. And this is a great thing to do. One thing you got to keep in mind is across the street there, there is a little, you know, there's a shed and a garage. You gotta be careful of the rocks that are spitting out, especially on asphalt. So you see there, a lot of people will keep their throttle at about half speed or even less on the weed whacker to prevent any sort of gravel or little stones being, you know, kicked up, hitting garages, hitting, you know, even worse windows and making Danny damages. So here I'm pulling weeds. Of course, yes, The Home Depot 5 gallon bucket is dented on the side, but hey, it stands up and it works great. It's easier than hauling one around one of those big 55 gallon brute bins around. So you can see I'm pulling out a lot of dandelions. Again, those are pretty mature weeds because we only come here once a month. I know in some climates you couldn't even get away with that unless you put some sort of pre emergent down in the beds. This stuff here is called kinnickinnik, that kind of ground cover there. It's a very woody type of plant and weeds can grow like through it. So you can see here, it takes me quite a bit of time. I'm just literally digging through and trying to get as many weeds as possible. But really they just break off because you can't get all the way down to the roots. Many times he's out next to the road trying to get more of the weeds.

All right, this job site, we're in this alleyway and this is when it's really nice to have a trailer set.

Up because it'd be very difficult otherwise to get a big trailer in here.

There's nowhere really to park. So small areas that are downtown like.

This are great for trailer setup. Alright, so someone asked if we create a contract on these lawns. We do not, for example, even that commercial property come once a month, year round. I guess theoretically you'd say it's kind of like a contract, but we just change the services that we offer each time even though it's the same price. Whereas 99% of our properties, we might say 98% of our properties at the local shop, we do not have contracts. It's the per cut price. So this property here is out next the road. A lot of the properties on my route today aren't like high end. You know, you're not going to be like wowed by how nice they look. These are, these are definitely leaded streets, these are downtown. These are small properties and they're not full service. They are literally just mo, blow and go properties. And you know, it's great for this type of a trailer setup for these smaller properties. We can still make money, be efficient and you know, some people like, oh, I'm not going to take anything but full service. As soon as you open yourself up to full service, there's a lot more complexity. You know, you got to get timing of fertilization and got timing of when the weeds are pulled and the timing when the bushes are done and there's more room for error in those categories. Whereas this is really, really simple stuff. So this one for example, I had 34 minutes budgeted for mowing, 23 minutes budgeted for getting the weeds out of the flower beds and there was not very many weeds. Honestly it said knock the weeds down. So just using the weed whacker line on this one I have 34. I'm going to add this up. So I have 57 minutes. So I can assume pretty much that I made $75 on this property because we charge an hourly rate of $80 on a MoW route. And even if it's weeding, we still charge 80 because we have all the equipment, we have all the trucks there and so we charge the $80 per hour. The one thing the mower I'm using today is a 30 inch 30x mark. So this is the X version, which means that the Kohler, which is a little more powerful of an engine than the Kawasaki that he had prior to this year. The one thing I don't like about it is the fact that the bagger is pretty wide and doesn't fit into the. When I'm dumping out the clippings you'll see. I can't push that down into the clippings and kind of compact them down because the bag is just too wide. This is the ramp rack system that we use for our trailer setups. You can see that it extends the back of the truck by about two or three feet. I'd say almost three feet, honestly. See right there, when I dump those little clippings, like, it just spills because I can't compact them. I can't shove them down into the. Compact them more. But that's the trailer, the ramp rack. And then, you know, here, getting my blower out. But you can see the one thing about the ramp rack, it's a little bit annoying, is the fact that it's so tall in the back there.

Some of you wonder how we lock in our mower in the back here. It's actually just this thing we made custom. Caleb made it at our shop.

He welded together, like, this little bracket.

That holds this wheel in place so it stays locked on the back end of the ramp. A lot of people wonder why I hop out once in a while and mo. And they say, well, you should be selling franchises or helping the franchisees or something like that. And I think the biggest thing for me. Oh, someone's coming down the alley.

Thank you.

I think the biggest thing for me is. I think the biggest thing I fear as we grow Augusta is the ability to connect with the guys in the front and cultural drift as a whole. And so I don't think that, you know, my place as a leader and our places as we grow, our business is to about be on the field all the time. But I do feel it's very, very wrong and detrimental to lose connection and feeling for the guys out in the field. I think it's really, really bad in any organization if the leader becomes disconnected from the frontline people in the organization. It's just never good. And so, you know, to know what it feels like to have a really long, stressful week and then ask to be out mowing on a Saturday for the guys, it's important that we know what that feels like and not forget what that feels like. It's good for them to see it, and it's good for us just to.

Feel like this is a really stressful week.

And so, you know, to go out on a Saturday and work is good. It's good to know what it feels like for the guys when you ask them to do the same thing every single day.

Okay.

This next property is actually several duplexes all these properties, there's six different homes.

Or six different addresses. I should say. Today we're just weeding. Just weird.

The grass has grown a bunch already.

In a week, but only dudes is weeding today.

Grass has been growing crazy throughout May. I could really use it mowing. But I looked back at the job history on their profile and sure enough, they only have been doing bi weekly. Bi weekly mowing. See, this is another kind of part of town where having a trailer set up makes a lot of sense because.

You have like no space. If someone's driving this way, you.

It's like impossible to get by. There's nowhere to park your truck and trailer. If you have a big long trailer. Really the only place to park is.

In the driveways of the. Of the client.

So again, this is why we have.

The trailer set up for routes like this.

All right, this is our next property right here. It's a little bit overgrown. Supposedly here in the backyard, we're supposed.

To look for an alleyway.

Yeah, this one has serious growth in the back alleyway. We got weeds that we got knocked down.

So this property I never actually been to before. The other ones I'd been to before because we've had them for several years. However, this one, the reason I was walking in the back before even getting the start of the mowing and whacking is because it had a note on our app that said there was weeds in the back alleyway that we make sure we knock them down. So that's why I was walking back there. This property right Here, I have 40 minutes budgeted or $50 is what we charge on this one. It's a bi weekly cut. We do not like bi weekly moe's. We actually now on our estimates we record require that during the month of March, April and May, the person has to do weekly service just because it is so hard for scheduling purposes and messes everybody up. So if this lawn is in our area, this is considered would be considered like basically overgrown. There's grass here between 6 and 12 inches tall, definitely. So that being said, I got this job done in about 32 minutes, 33 minutes still. And it's because it's just such a small property. The whole lawn area is literally only about 2500 square feet. I think I talk about that here in just a second of our minimum price. But a lot of people ask about on the questions how to deal with customers that have a bunch of dog poop. And this one did. I didn't actually talk about in the video. But in the, there was one area where there's a whole bunch of dog poop up against the house in the front yard there. And what we do is we have a, we put a tag on the user profile in our CRM and then we have an automation that when that property is dispatched the night before, we're going to send them an email saying, hey, your property is going to be serviced tomorrow. Please pick up, you know, the dog droppings. And if they don't, then eventually we just have to drop them as a client because it's just the worst thing to be weed whacking like I am now and hitting in dog poop and it's splattering all over your face. Especially if it's like your first job in the morning, it's like the morning dew, it's all over you. That's just horrible. And so this job, like I said, $40 and it is definitely going to be, sorry, $50, $50, 40 minutes. Now you can see here I am using the 30 inch mower. I'm doing a time lapse, you'll see in a second just how slow I'm walking because it's just so long. The one thing about the exmark or any 30 inch mower that has two blades, you gotta make sure you walk a little bit slower in the heavy tall grass because otherwise it will leave a bit of a strip down the middle between the blades of the dropped a couple things. But it did a nice cut. It just really had to walk slow. So, you know, traditionally with the 20 inch mower I could go a little bit faster and just not overlap basically. But the way that the drive system thing works on these is you definitely have to slow down a bit.

I was doing so good, we're like.

Five or six jobs in.

And then I started to sneeze, my allergies started kicking in. This is like kind of like prime season for pollen.

And I remember the good old days.

When I'd have two shirts, I'd bring two shirts with me for mowing and.

I would just use the one I was wearing for like a snot rag. And then when it was really bad.

Like halfway through the day, I'd switch out to my second shirt. So in remembrance of these good times, when it gets hot like this in the middle of the day, that's when it starts getting pretty bad.

All right, so this property is $35 per cut. And you'll see here, actually 32. You'll see here I talk about our minimum price and how you've seen a lot of these properties are very small.

All right, so this is one of our lawns in Bellingham. Again, it's one of our minimum lawns. So $32 is our minimum charge. So regardless of how small the lawn is, that's the minimum charge it is. So these are really small lots. There's probably about 1500-2000 square feet of lawn and turf on that property. All right, we got a couple more.

So this lot right here is the.

House we're about to mow. Now, probably the grass is probably only about 2500 square feet max. However, we're still going to charge $45 per cut. Even though it's our by square footage, it's our minimum size property. Again, it's going to take way longer because these hillsides are extremely steep. You can hardly tell necessarily until you stand up against them. Extremely steep. You have to weed whack the whole thing. So again, this is the reason why we do them. Not by just square footage in our area. This can double, if not triple the time it takes to do this property.

We'll still knock it out pretty quick here. So like this day, I didn't necessarily work the entire day. I worked about five hours. Six. No, six. Six hours. However, traditionally a one man solo crew should be able to knock out 12 to 15 of these type of lawns pretty easily. If you do the math on that, if they're like say 35 or 40 bucks, that person's gonna make about 5, $600 gross for the day. As a solo operator, obviously if you had two people, we should, we would expect them to knock out 20 plus of these type of small little lots that are close to each other downtown. Using the trailer setup, you can park right next to them. A lot of people were asking too, in terms of, you know, seeing the efficiencies of us mowing. And one thing I'll try to do in the future is try to show more of a real time of us getting to the job site, unloading, etc. One thing that you keep in note, and I know for some of you more experiences is common knowledge, but make sure your stripes are going to and from the road or wherever people are. That's where they're actually viewed and look the best.

All right, well that is the conclusion of the day.

Gonna hook up my keyboard here. Still got a couple guys out. Charlie, Mitchell and Kent. They're still out. Cuz they're awesome. David's here today and he does all.

Of the cleanup of all the trucks.

And everything on Saturdays. Lee, put a cool quote here from Jocko. Willink up higher on the board.

So, yeah, this is Saturday.

Wrapping things up. We'll see you guys tomorrow.