Video: BEST Landscape Tools and Equipment to Save You Time and Money in Your Lawn Care Business

Hey, everyone. Today we're at Augusta Lawn Care. It's early in the morning here. Everyone's rolling out. But I wanted to show you around today and show you 10 or 12 different things that we love in terms of tools and equipment. I never do this. I'm always talking about business. I'm always talking about the marketing side of things. Hiring people, managing those people, growing your business. And I never talk about our equipment. I never talk about the little things that we love in terms of tools. And so today, I want to walk you through a few of those. I don't think that the most important thing, I do not think having the newest, best little tool or gadget is going to make you a great business owner or is going to have attract great employees, but it's definitely going to make your job easier. And so I wanted to show you that and show you a little bit around our shop. And it's not going to be a full tour, but just some of the things that we use that might be helpful for you and your business. Looks like everyone's kind of rolling out for the day. Most everyone's left the shop already, but this truck going out looks like it got some mulch in the back. Most trucks are gone. These are all the parking stops for them. Guys are loading up material over in the dump trailers for materials. Most guys are out for the day, but a couple more still heading out.

So this is another piece of equipment that we really love, and that's the dump trailers. These are projects, cleanups. All of these ones are the load trail, which is just, you know, really hardcore. Really good tires. All of ours are 7 by 14. They have a little solar panel here on the back to kind of do a trickle charge. And inside you got a remote for up, up, down, and then gravity down. And then you can just plug it in at night right here. So you got three of these plugged right into the seven pin for the electrical, and it can dump £10,000. So we try not to go over like four yards of gravel. And then really as much mulch as you want to fit in there you can do. So usually I think you get about 10 to 12 yards max. And then what's nice, you've got this part that goes over the top to kind of keep mulch from flying out or debris. And it just locks in the back. And then also on the back here, you've got these, which have the ramps, which allows us to put the skid steers inside. And so all you have to do, you can actually see Underneath stored. But you just take these pins out and then the ramps come out and you're able to drive right back into the back. With it being seven feet wide, you're able to get an excavator in there, Like a small mini. So we got three of these and we really like them because they're all the same. So all seven by 14. So really, regardless of what trailer is being used, the same setup, same color, same size, we really like them. The worst thing is when you run out of a charge in the middle of the day when you're working. So that's why we have that little solar panel on there. Usually you'll get about five dumps, depending on the weight of your dump. So if you're doing like four yards of gravel, you're probably gonna get like four dumps in a day in one charge. But if you're doing like mulch, you might get six or seven. And then that trickle charge usually gets you an extra one or two a day from that little solar panel thing. So the one thing that we've had issues with and that is the guy just remembering to completely open up the back doors when they're dumping. So you can see we got carabiners and then there's these hooks on the side that when they open up, they click on there. But sometimes they forget. And then we bend the hinges off and we gotta re weld those. And then what's nice too, on the back here, we have these foot pedestals that we can put down for when we're putting heavy equipment in. If you try to put like a skid steer in the back. If you have a light truck, you can literally pick up the back of the truck back axle. Just because the amount of weight that tilts this whole thing backwards. So having those down is really nice. All right. So one of the things we do use is these 55 gallon drums for. For doing fueling. And traditionally we would just go to the gas station. But the problem is we live on this highway and we really can't drive our skid steers down the road to the gas station. So what we do is we have these on pallets and they're 55 gallon drums just like this. And we'd go over there. We able to fill up the 55 gallon drum with diesel. And then this is a really simple pump, but it works great. It's $23 on Amazon. It's a really flimsy plastic thing. But you could probably get some rubber if you were really serious about. And then you really just hand crank it and it brings that fuel right out of the 55 gallon drum. What's really nice about that is a lot of your. If you're leasing land, they won't allow you a lot of times to get like a 300 or 400 gallon tank fuel tank. And that's a lot of times in your lease is like no fuel storage. But those 55 gallon drums are nice because you can literally just. We put forks on one of the skid steers and then we pick it up, put it in the back of a truck and I'm able to drive the truck that then over to the gas station and get more diesel. So we only use it for diesel. We used to use it for unleaded gas. But the problem was water started getting in. Eventually what we're gonna do is build a overhang, kinda like a lean to here. So that way we can keep the unleaded fuel there and not worry about water getting in. That happened one time, messed up some of the carburetors in the trimmers and the weed whackers. So we stopped doing that. But we still use it for the diesel. Because the two skid steers and the track loader all need diesel for loading up mater or taking care of the debris in the back or even at job sites. So those are the three right here. Probably seen that before. Okay, so out here we use this ramp here for blade sharpening. I know it kind of looks weird. And what they do basically is they have these secured with straps to make sure they don't slide back when they're sharpening blades. And they pull them out a little bit and are able to get underneath the decks. We used to do a much more sophisticated model that had like a whole like system where you move it up. Actually, I think we've got the piece of equipment over here. But the problem was it just take an extra 10, 15 seconds. Whereas with this ramp, you can just drive your front wheels of your zero turn right up. So we used to use this thing right here.

So you can see that you drive the front wheels there. This is adjustable. And then you can just use this little thing here and make it go up. Just super cool in theory. But the problem was it'd just take extra few seconds, which was enough to make a new efficiency. And so the guys came up with the idea to get these ramps. That way they can just drive up the mower front tires really quick, put it in a parking brake and then have direct access from underneath here to the Deck. They also use it, you can see, for scraping out clippings and debris. Another thing we do is try to have a standard toolbox inventory to make sure that when hardscaping crews go out, they know exactly what is inside, and when they come back, they know exactly what should be going inside those boxes. So there's not a lot of running around trying to find tools in the morning. So what we do is we have a bunch of these hardscaping toolboxes. This is the toolbox inventory. What's supposed to be in every single one. And then inside is where all of that stuff lives. They're labeled. So HSB3 stands for Hardscaping Box 3. I think there are five of these. And they have a general toolbox, which is other stuff that's not for hardscaping. And so what's nice about this, again, is you don't want to be running around the morning looking for pieces of equipment, looking for little hand tools, looking for a screwdriver, looking for a line level or pliers or whatever you might need. So we kind of got, like, 90% of the little tiny tools that you would need on a hardscaping job. We put them in those toolboxes. That way, when they grab one in the morning, they know they got everything they need, and they don't need to be running around trying to find stuff. All right, this is another thing that we love. I know it's super simple, but it's a bench grinder. We used to use an angle grinder, and it was just not as good of a cut on the blades. And so we have a gentleman come in on Saturdays. He sharpens all the blades, cleans all the trucks. But this bench grinder has been game changer also. This whole setup here with the cabinet and everything has power. And it was $199 from Home Depot, so pretty good deal. So what we did, we just took the bench grinder, drilled it, screwed it right directly to this board, and that's what we use. And it is a hundred times better than trying to use an angle grinder when sharpening blades. Quick note, we use all the same wheelbarrows, and I don't really care about the brand that you use, but make sure you get good wheelbarrows, Otherwise, you will go through them so fast. If you're just using ones for, like, true value or, like, cheap places, and you're paying, you know, $50 for a wheelbarrow, they're gonna last, like, a year max. The amount of weight that you're carrying. Especially if you're doing gravel mulch, like lots of heavy stuff. Get some good wheelbarrows, they last forever. Get the ones that have punctureless tires. These things have lasted years and years and years. And we have them usually all the way lined up the door here. It's the only kind we get because it's the best ones. And if you're gonna spend money, spend it on a wheelbarrow. It will absolutely take care of you. All right. Another thing we use here is on our trailerless setups is this back ramp. And we have use this because we have to keep the back open for clippings and debris. Since we have to bag clippings for our mowing rounds. We have quite a few of these trailer setups. That's the direction we're moving. We do have larger ramps that are 32 inches wide. And those would afford to have a 30 inch mower push mower on there. Right now these ones that I'm showing you right now, These only have 21 inch mowers capacity. That's only 26 inches wide. But what's nice about this one is it's aluminum. So it's really, really light. It's easy to get on and off. And it just connects directly the hitch receiver right onto the 2 inch mount there. And so you can see here, the dovetail goes right out. Would go out onto the sidewalk. And really, really handy for being able to carry a mower. And again, like if we did not have to have bagged clippings, we would take out the tailgate and do a ramp where you could put your zero turn in here like a 36 inch or something. But we have to keep this open to bag clippings. We have the bungee cords and the straps that we use in order to tie down the mowers to make sure they don't hop around.

Another thing on these trailer, the setups I'm just showing these real quick because the guys are about to head out is really, really simple. But back in the day, I remember always needing to make sure I had a knife or scissors to cut my trimming line. And now with this one, you can just put the line through here and then use this mechanism on the side here to basically cut your line really, really handy. Just another thing you don't have to worry about getting in the morning is scissors or a knife or being stranded somewhere not being able your line. All right. A couple other tools that we use a lot, and that is these storage containers. They're not really a Piece of equipment, I guess, but definitely something that we love, and that is these massive storage containers. These are 8ft wide, 40ft long, and I think I want to say 8ft or 10ft tall, but what's really nice about them is they're very, very secure, really easy to lock, really hard to break in. So we have three of these, and we actually have one up front too that has been converted into kind of an expansion for the office. But these are awesome. They're about, depending where you live, 2000 to $3000. Ours have power built in, so I'll show you in here. This one got a light switch with some power. So just an LED light. In the back there is our treatment box. And one other thing that we love is this system that we kind of came up with. So if you're doing like a treatment route, we always like to have a ton of bags because we're gonna go out and we're gonna install a bunch of granular applications. However, sometimes, you know, someone will get started late in the season on their treatment package or they just want like one treatment of weed and feed. In that scenario, you don't want to open up an entire bag because then you got like leftover bags and all that. So what we do is we have these bins where we have all the different types of granular products as well as grass seed, castron perine, etc. And then what you can do, for example, like we got moss out and we got weed and feed, we got grass seed here. So it gives you an application rate. And so it kind of talks about the type of seed that's inside of here, as well as the application rate, as well as one scoop being £2. What that means is if we're doing a new lawn and we need 10 pounds of seed because it's a thousand square foot lawn, means I need five scoops of seed. So I can do is just open it up, grab the scoop and scoop five scoops of that into a bucket. And then I know exactly that my application rate is exactly right for that size of property. So that's why on all of our lawns, we have a custom field on our CRM that allows us to put in the square footage of the turf. Because that way, whenever someone has a treatment, they're able to very quickly just duck in here and get exactly how many scoops, how many pounds, or, you know, the application rate is perfect. So that's why we have that system there. And we use that when we're doing like one off Treatments here and there. Another thing you'll see all over our shop is pegboard. This one's new. We haven't filled it up yet, but pegboard is awesome. You get this for, like, five or ten bucks from the hardware store and grab some hooks from Amazon and really organize your stuff, really, throughout our entire shop, we try not to have this happening. And that is shelving. Shelving is like anything flat. All flat surfaces are literally asking for a bunch of stuff to be collected, a bunch of junk to be sat there. It's easy just to throw stuff on flat surfaces. When you have stuff hanging up. When you have stuff in their place, we have things on pallets, and you have an area for them to go. You absolutely are much more organized. So we try to reduce the amount of shelving and increase the amount of pegboard. So I'm actually walking over to the very first truck and trailer I ever bought for Augusta. But it's not about the truck and the trailer. I want to show you about the lettering and the numbering system that we use for these. So all our trucks, trailers, they have this naming convention that we use. So P stands for pickup. This is the very first pickup. So it's P1. And then ET1 is enclosed trailer. And it is labeled also. And. And we use that so that way we can quickly communicate with the crew in terms of.

What trucks are hooked up to, what trailers, as well as organization where certain trucks are at. It's very difficult, especially for new employees, to know all the different types of trucks. If they're all the same color, all the same type of truck. It's very difficult. So instead of trying to tell them, hey, hook up the 2004 Chevy Silverado to the 7 by 14 trailer. Instead of doing that, I can just say, hey, hook up the P9 to the ET3. And they know exactly what's going on. And so really great way to do scheduling as well as on our boards. And then you can also see just organization. At the shop. We have their parking stops all labeled as well, where they should be parking. So just a way to keep management of and organized. Also something we love is our front sign. And this thing's a beast. It has. It's really big. So had to really make sure that these posts, they're six by six treated lumber. I think they go about. Down into the ground about 5ft and then concrete it. Just because the amount of square footage we get this nasty north, the northeasterly come through here and hits this sign. So it had to be really, really sturdy. These are actually four panels you can see from here because we're pretty close, the seams. But these are like 4ft wide and then 8ft tall. And so we got four of those panels. So I guess it'd be 16ft wide, 8ft tall. But once you step back, like 20, 30ft, you start to. You don't. You don't realize there's panels. It just becomes one big sign. So this is the front of our shop here.