Mike Andes bought three used Chevy Silverados in one day for about $30,000 total to expand his landscape business. He walks through each truck's specs, condition, and price, then explains why used trucks with good maintenance beat buying new when you're scaling.
2014 Chevy Silverado, long bed (2-wheel drive), bought for $13,000 (about 90,000 miles).
Approximately $30,000 cash for all three combined.
Chapters
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, landscape business course. And today we're at the Bellingham shop. And I wanted to show three new trucks that we recently purchased yesterday. And they haven't been painted yet, so kind of showing them in the raw form.
Last week, I showed how I find these type of trucks on craigslist. Lee also contributed to kind of helping find these. And we went out and bought three of them yesterday. So what we did is Seattle's a couple hours away from us. We don't have a lot of trucks close by. So what we did, we sent like five guys down or four of our crew members down the other day. And they picked up the trucks one by one and then drove back. So I'm going to show you all three of them. Kind of walk through what they're going to be used for. Pros, the cons. Then we're going to show these in later videos. I'll show them being painted and also being having their decals put on. All right, so this is like in their raw form. We just got these on craigslist. They've got to be painted yellow, and we still got to put decals on them. So this is the first one here. This is a 2006 Chevy Silverado. And it has a little under, I think 95, 94,000 miles on it. So. So pretty low mileage. Brand new tires and new brakes. And really, really simple. They give us two studded tires, snow tires in the back here. But honestly, we're not gonna use this truck for snow. This is gonna be absolutely a mowing truck, right? So we're gonna put a ramp rack on this. It's gonna be a trailerless setup. It's a long bed. So great for the ramp rack, great for us. Cause we need haul clippings around. And then you can see it's red, has some scratches, which we love. So like a little scratch here. There's a little scratch here. These will all come out with paint, though. It'll look brand spanking new. It is 2006, a little bit older than we get now. This is pretty average for our fleet. But now, obviously, we've been around for seven years at the local shop, but this one was 8,500 all in, including taxes. And we got this private party. We got one of the trucks from a dealer, but usually we get them from private party. But again, this one's two wheel drive. Not super complicated, expensive. We're gonna put this as a mowing truck. We'll put a 36 inch mower on this or 30 inch, 36 inch push mower. On this bad boy, you could always put a 36 or a 48 stand on or zero turn in the back if you have a ramp rack. But we'll be just doing a 30x mark. So nothing really. You know, don't need anything expensive. It has low mileage. We'll easily get 10 years out of this thing if we treat it right. And we make sure that we send down some of our more mechanically inclined crew members to be able to drive these things. Test them out, make sure they're good in terms of motor. They take a look around and kind of do a diagnosis of everything. All right, next two trucks over here are probably gonna be using our other corporately owned locations, not for the local shop. And so we did go a little bit higher in terms of quality year and things like that. This is a 2014 Chevy Silverado. This is also a 2014 Chevy Silverado. The difference is this bad boy is a four wheel drive. It's also just a regular, a regular bed. So usually we like long beds. 99% of the time I want a long bed. Kind of made a mistake on this one. I thought it was a long bed. Crew went and picked it up, came back yesterday, and I realized. Well, Lee realized it was a regular bed. But it's okay because this is gonna be a truck that is used to pull a 5 by 10 dump trailer. And so having the four wheel drive is nice around here. Cause we get so much rain. So driving over mud or lawn, things like that is nice to be able to have the four wheel drive. And we're not gonna be putting a ramp rack on it. So it's not quite as important. But still. I still ideally like to have an eight foot bed, but we got this one for 12,500. Let me think, let me think. No, this was. This one was. Yeah, this one was 12,500. We got this one. It's a 2014, has 90,000 miles on it. You can see inside here. Nothing super fancy or special. Vinyl seats. But honestly, pretty nice. Like this is the nicest truck interior we have of all our trucks. By far, by far. So kind of an upgrade, a little bit of a step up. But it is for a corporately owned location. So it's far from kind of headquarters. And you know, this one has that someone put like an aftermarket backup camera, which is kind of cool on it. And I think they put a stereo or something in it. But it was good enough price to make it worth it in Terms of just being a newer truck, yes. Usually we're looking at 10,000, 12,000, but we went ahead and paid 12,500 for this guy all in. And 2014, less than 100,000 miles. It'll last us 10 years easily. And I think, yeah, new tires on that one. This one does not have new tires. And it is a two wheel drive, but it is an eight foot bed. And oh, I apologize. This one is gonna be used at the Bellingham shop. But we still gotta paint these. Obviously, tires are probably one more year out of the tires. Probably before. Not this winter, but the next winter we'll need to change them out. If you look at the craigslist ad, you saw that like, you know, little dings and imperfections like this one, when I'm looking on craigslist is actually what I'm looking for. Because I know when we paint over that it's not gonna be a big deal. And if it's a work truck, little things like this happen all the time. So that's actually what you want to find. Because as a work truck, we know we're gonna paint it, it's gonna look brand new, and we're gonna. Little dings like this, you know, probably every several months. So this is an eight foot bed. This is also 2014 Chevy, Chevy Silverado. And it has again, about 90,000 miles on it. We bought it all in for 13,000. This one was. This one was $13,000. Again, I like the long bed, again, a little bit more than we would usually pay. But this one came from a dealer. And also due to the fact that as you get older, bigger in size and things, you do want to get lower mileage trucks, especially when you know you're gonna be around for a long time. So when we first got started, we started off with trucks that were 140, 150,000 miles. We're still using them today, seven years later. Good maintenance, good preventative maintenance. Doing checks on the trucks. But these trucks, they're 2014. So this one's only six years old. And it'll last like 10 years easily. So paying a few thousand dollars more for a newer truck, I don't mind that now. We did not pay $50,000. We didn't pay 60 or $100,000 for these trucks. They're cheap, they're work trucks. At the end of the day, all three of these combined cost $30,000 cash. And so when people say, well, you know, you're gonna have to have deal with maintenance, all the rest of it, and all the rest of it. Like if you could preventative maintenance and check these trucks, do your oil changes, check the fluids. Every quarter we have the guys just walk through the truck, spend an hour on each one, just kind of looking through everything. We don't have breakdowns a lot. And when they do happen, if you take that into account, it's still not worth buying a 70, $80,000 truck for the price of a $30,000 truck. We have three. And so we've tripled the production value of that $30,000. I could go out and buy a much nicer truck for 30 grand. Leather seats, have like a touch screen heated seats, and, you know, warm my steering wheel for 30 grand. But these three trucks combined will be able to house three to five employees easily and easily. These three trucks alone could be doing 30,000amonth in revenue very easily. And so taking that into account, that's why we go with used. Still, as long as you do good preventative maintenance and you're constantly taking care of the trucks, you shouldn't have to worry about massive repairs or breakdowns. Breakdowns do not happen a lot for us because we do the preventative maintenance. So this is the first step of kind of the journey. We're gonna show them again once they're painted. We're gonna show them again once they're decal. But again, 2008 Chevy, or sorry, 2006 Chevy Silverado. Long bed, two wheel drive, 8500 all in. Over here we got 2014, four wheel drive, regular sized bed, 12,500. Over here we have a long bed, two wheel drive, 2014 Chevy Silverado. And that one was 13,000. And that's the three trucks we bought. Stay along for the ride. We will show the painting as well as the decals later on.
