Seriously!? Making Money Mowing MASSIVE Lawns - [with a PUSH MOWER!]

Hey, everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today we're going to be talking about mowing large, massive lawns, one acre, two acres, big properties, and how you can make money doing so in your lawn care and landscaping business. Let's go ahead and jump into it. So this property is literally over an acre in size. You can see there's camping trailers and trucks and all the rest of it. We got Charlie on the mower today, and then we got also Brad. Two awesome team members here at our local Bellingham location. This is a gravely zero turn. And yes, we do use zero turns. And yes, one of those bags is new, One of them is old. The one on the left is original. And so it's a lot smaller. But we've gotten the bigger ones now, more recently. Now people always ask me about zero turns, why I don't like them as much. In our air, we have to bag clippings. I know that seems crazy for most of you, but it's very standard in Washington state. And so the thing that we don't like about zero turns is the fact that if I get a zero turn for, say, 8,000 doll, I got to go buy the bagging system. And that bagging system that you're looking at right now was well over eighteen hundred dollars. By the time it's installed and taxes and all the rest of it, you're looking at $2,000 more on top of the price of the actual zero turn. So I have a little bit more of a bend in the direction of not wanting to have zero turns. That's why we have trailer setups. That's why we primarily focus on smaller properties. But again, a lot of our markets for Gusta lawn care, we do have zero turns. We do have stand on mowers, etc. This is a Gravely 152. We do. We don't get the 252s or 352s. Like there's a big, big mowers. We don't get those. These are basically the lowest entry level kind of commercial, fully commercial property. There's some other ones, the pro turns, that Gravely makes that aren't fully commercial, but they work for a lot of small landscapers just getting started. And they're a couple thousand dollars cheaper. So check that out. So this is Brad, by the way. You'll notice by the fact that his shirt has a our old logo on the back. He's basically bragging that he's one of the original gangsters here locally at the shop. He's been around for a long time. Really appreciate Brad, and he helps us with a lot of things with numbers and all the rest of it. He's a very smart. He's actually a cpa. So shout out to Brad. So we're talking today about large lawns. Couple good things about getting these big properties that you can do an acre, two acres of lawn. Good thing is there's less drive time. So I might get two or three of these massive lawns done in a day, maybe four. Just depends, depending on how big they are, versus 15 or 20 really small ones. Therefore, there's less drive time on these big properties. And at the end of the day, you do not want to be driving around a big truck, a trailer, a bunch of equipment all day long. It's a bunch of waste. So the fact that I can park my truck and mow for an hour, two, three hours solid is fantastic. Another positive thing about having these big properties is I have less customers with the same amount of revenue. So, for example, I might make $500 in a day doing 15 lawns. So small properties. Or I might make $500 a day doing $500 lawns, same amount of revenue, less drive time and less customers to deal with. Less customers means less headache, less phone calls and emails, and less customers have to invoice at the end of each month or end of each week. Less invoices that you have to keep their credit card on file, less back and forth, less people that can complain. So traditionally, the less accounts you have on your books, the less headache and customer service you have to deal with. So having these bigger properties and is really, really nice when it comes to that. Also, on average, again, massive simplification, oversimplification here. On average, bigger properties have a higher value client because if the client owns property, traditionally the value that property is higher, traditionally, then they're going to be the type of client that wants other services like bush trimming, mulch installation, and a whole host of other services besides just mowing, because they have a higher value, higher property value. So typically, those type of clients are really awesome to have that you can upsell and get other services. Now, some of the downsides of having these big type of properties is the fact that the crew can forget things. When you have a sprawling estate with little nooks and crannies and things laying all over the place, and little patches of lawn here and strips of lawn behind fences, and big, big properties you're going to have where your crew forget things more Often just more opportunity to do so. It's a bigger property. It's harder to keep the notes aligned to where they don't make mistakes. A lot of times what we do, you've seen me do it in the videos in the past, is have an aerial picture attached to the customer's profile so the crew can actually see exactly from an aerial standpoint all the different areas and lawns and where to edge and areas. Not forget like a diagram and a aerial map of the property. Very, very helpful. But definitely something that can be a bit of a pain on these bigger properties is just getting the employees to remember all the little details. If that property isn't just a square rect. Square or rectangle of lawn where you go back and forth and it is a little bit more spread out or little pieces of lawn throughout the property. Now, the biggest downside of these big properties is the fact that you have to have bigger zero turns, bigger trucks, bigger trailers. Like the mowing setup that they're using today. Let's say for example, this gravely is $10,000 plus the bagging system, let's say $12,000 plus you have a trailer. The enclosed trailer is probably 5 or $6,000, plus a larger truck, which was probably 10 or $15,000. You add all of that up together, you might be looking at $30,000 to get the setup with the mowers, the weed eaters, the trailers, the blowers. Like everything is at least 30 to $40,000. Whereas I might be able to get two setups that are trailerless setups for the smaller properties. So it's not which one's bad or good, it's just there's highlights and low lights of having these big properties. And the low light, in my mind, the biggest one is you're gonna have to have bigger equipment, bigger trucks to haul that equipment, and bigger trailers that are gonna be pulled around to house that equipment. So that's, you know, we have to have an enclosed trailer for this bad boy because we add a 52 inch mower. Plus you have another 12 inches on the right hand side of this big bagging system. You gotta have a. You gotta have a pretty big trailer. And if you're gonna be hauling a trailer around, you ain't gonna have no Ford Ranger pulling the thing around. So you've gotta have a bigger truck. So bigger expenses that go into those bigger setups to be able to actually make these jobs doable. And you're going to see in a second it's not so fun using a push Mower on these big properties. But how do you price these big lawns? How do you make money? How do you actually give an estimate of how much these are going to cost? The bottom line is you got to come up with an hourly rate. An hourly rate that you want to target. Let's say it's 50, 60, 70, 100, whatever dollar amount that you want to target in your business. And that's time on the job. Oh, I see bad things happening. Something has stopped working on the gravely is giving up the ghost. But we're going to get into that in just a second because right now we're talking about pricing up. Here comes Brad. We got to figure it out. Time to figure out what the problem is on the gravely. Time to talk about it. Oh, maybe the blower. Oh, no, no. Not working. Okay, what's happening? Something's not working. The blades aren't turning. Check the belts up. Check the efi up. Nope. Uh oh. We have a big problem, Gravely. We need help, and we don't know what's happening. So it turns out what actually happened here was there was a short on one of the electrical components of the mower, and it wasn't allowing us to turn the blades on. And that's something that we can't fix out in the field. I think it was a fuse or something like that. So we had to pull out the trusty push mower. This is a backup push mower. It's a 21 inch exmark. We do not. We don't like these as much as the Hondas for a variety of different reasons, but mostly just the throttle, the cable, brakes, all the time. Anyways, here we are mowing an acre plus property with a push mower. 21 inch push mower. We're mowing this property because something broke down. And we're going to get into that in just a second. But I want to finish up pricing because when it comes to pricing, you got to get an hourly rate that you would charge the customer. And then ask yourself, how long is this lawn going to take? And if it's small property, maybe it's 30, 40 minutes. If it's a big property like this, maybe it's two hours, just for example. But then you're going to multiply that by the hourly rate. Now, some people are like, well, if it's a big property, I can charge less per hour because I don't have to move my truck. And I get it. I'm able to not have to do drive time. That's true. But got to remember that in order to get that big property, you're going to have a bigger truck, more equipment, more fuel cost with that bigger piece of equipment. And therefore you actually might make less profit if you lower your hourly rate. So in my opinion, keep your hourly rate the same and ask yourself, when you come to an estimate, how long will this job take? Period, End of story. If it's a big job, it's gonna take bigger equipment. Great, I'll get it done faster, but I'm going to need and I'm not gonna have to drive and all the rest I'll save there, but I'm gonna have bigger equipment, I'll have more cost. For example, a zero turn like that Gravely152 might cost 8 to $15 an hour per hour of operation. By the time you include fuel and maintenance and wear and tear and breakdowns like this, as well as just the cost of acquisition. Like it cost us 10+,000 to buy that piece of equipment versus 2000 less than 2000 like this. This mower for example, is like 11 or $1200. It's literally like 8 times more expensive to get 10 turn compared to the push mowers. So you've got to take that into account when it comes to the cost per hour of operation. Now, if you're doing big properties, you're not going to want to use this 21 inch mower. But this brings in the point. And that is, even if you have big mowers and you're doing big properties, keep a backup small mower just in case. One of the genius things that Brad and Charlie did here is that they both didn't take the mower back to the shop. They did not go take it to get fixed. They left one person to keep mowing. Yes, it's inefficient. Yes, it's a 20 inch mower. Yes, it's not ideal, but at least work was getting done. Two people driving this thing back to the shop is a waste of money, it's a waste of time.