How To Make $2,000 Per Week Mowing Lawns As A Teenager

While everyone is rushing to start a Shopify business or make money with ChatGPT or even do YouTube automation, there remains a hidden opportunity that has the potential to make you millions. This business allowed me to make over $2,000 a week as a 17 year old still in high school. There's very little sophisticated competition and an endless amount of customers. This business is so recession proof that it's literally illegal to not to have this service done in most US Cities. This business is Mowing Lawns. In this video I'm going to show you exactly how I built a six figure lawn mowing business while still in high school. And I'm going to show you exactly how I build a $10 million lawn care business starting from scratch based off of everything that I know now. Now Before I started a lawn care company, I used to wait tables at a Greek restaurant. One week there was a forecast for a massive snowstorm. I figured that the restaurant would be closed down so I decided to shovel driveways to make up for the lost income. I made a post on nextdoor.com and next thing I knew I had three crews shoveling driveways all across my hometown. Over the course of four or five days we shoveled over 60 driveways grossing a little bit over $5,000 in net revenue, making both me and my business partner 2000 $2,500 each, leading total of $4,500 in profit. What happened next would lead me into getting into a business that I never could have imagined. A few days after the snowstorm cleared, I started receiving texts from my customers asking me if I was going to do lawn care in the spring. I personally hadn't planned on it, but after about five people asked me, I decided it might be a good idea. I started by mowing just a couple yards for about $40 a piece. I started literally spamming nextdoor.com and posting something every single day so that whenever somebody logged on, I would be the first thing that they would see on Nextdoor. This continued to grow until I was doing about 10 yards per week. I still had a sedan so I had to recruit this kid from my high school who had an old pickup truck to drive me around on the weekends so I could mow all of my yards. Few months later I ended up giving away my sedan and ended up getting my pickup truck so I could run my business and put the two push mowers that I had into the back of the truck bed. I kept posting on Nextdoor, but around this time I decided it was time to turn up the marketing. I spent about $2,000 and sent roughly 10,000 direct mail postcards across my city to various neighborhoods. And my phone started ringing off the hook. Every single day that summer, it would be me and one of my friends riding around my hometown mowing yards eight hours plus per day. The postcards worked so well that I would literally have to stop while I was mowing to take calls. And before I knew it, we were doing roughly 50 to 60 yards per week. I kept upgrading my equipment until I had a trailer and a stand on mower. Now, remember, before this, we were push mowing every single yard. All right, so this was all leading up to my senior year. This was a summer prior to me being a senior in high school. But the only problem was all of my best employees were the ones who went to school with me. So with summer coming to an end, all of my employees were going to be busy during the day when I needed to be mowing yards. My plan was to not go to school, Just focus on the lawn care business and build it out. My parents were super awesome, and we're going to let me just do online school so that I could focus entirely on the business. So by the time that August came, I was mowing all of my yards myself. So something had to change. So I decided to look for help elsewhere, and I eventually hired some landscaping employees who were much older than I was. I was 17, just about to turn 18 at the time. The problem was these older landscaping employees were a lot more inconsistent and difficult to manage than the people that were my age that were just working over the summer. They wouldn't show up to work. I even caught somebody drinking on the job. Crazy, crazy stuff. But I pressed on, and in September, I sent out a ton more mailers. This time it was advertising for aeration and overseeding, which, for anyone that doesn't know what that means, is basically where you poke a bunch of holes into people's yards with this little machine. The idea behind it is supposed to help, like, the yard breathe. And then you go behind it and sprinkle a bunch of seed into the holes so that the grass grows back fuller and greener. So after sending out these postcards, they were a massive success. I was making about $1,000 per day for an entire week doing aeration and overseeding. It was back breaking work. It was like trying to wrangle a bull. You'd have to hold on to it, and it would just, like, ride you around the yard. You'd be trying to hold on, you know, keep it in a straight line. It was insane. But anyway, the money was worth it. At the end of the day, after the entire aeration season was over, my plan was to get into blowing leaves on a weekly, bi weekly basis. Because most people leaves are falling from about November all the way to January. And then by that point, you know, there's other people that haven't gotten their leaves, so I would have work for them entire winter. Problem was, on all of these jobs that I quoted, I significantly underestimated how long it would take and I ended up not being profitable on a lot of those yards. And if I was profitable, I was making about $15 an hour as a business owner. So this, coupled with inconsistencies in my business, ultimately led me to get out of lawn care and get into e commerce. However, looking back on it, there's still a ton of potential in lawn care. And if I would have known how to scale a business and how to recruit good employees, I could have blown this thing up. And if all else fails, I know that I could still go back to my roots and start a massive lawn care business from scratch. And you can too. Here's how I build a $10 million lawn care business from ground zero. So first of all, I wouldn't just base my business on lawn mowing, right? The big bucks are in the stuff like aeration and overseeding, and that's called lawn care. I would begin my business with the end in mind of ultimately offering a high ticket lawn care package. So that would include like weed control, aeration, overseeding, fertilize, all that kind of stuff. However, my first steps would just to be getting a few customers on a super basic mowing packet. So I'd start out with just one crew, one guy and one truck. With a mower, with a mower and a weed eater. Now if you don't have a mower, you can go to Craigslist Facebook Marketplace. I actually did this when I was younger and I found a lawnmower for like Facebook 50 bucks. But I guarantee you could find something for free on there that probably works pretty well. And if you don't have a truck, you can literally do what my business partner did, which is where he would literally just push lawnmowers to his neighbor's house and cut the grass there. There's always a way around it, but for this example, let's just assume that you already have a truck and a mower. So I would start off by posting on Facebook, on Nextdoor and on Craigslist to get my first few customers, I would charge about 45 to 50 bucks per yard. Now, once I got to the point where it was difficult for me to get all of my yards done by myself, I would bring on an extra person. And now one thing you need to realize is whenever you hire someone else, they're not going to like double your productivity. They're usually going to increase it by about 50 to 70%. So let's say by bringing someone on, I can now do 1.5 times the amount of yards I was doing before. So I'd continue to stack up, grow the business, and at this point I'd be starting to accumulate a little bit of cash which, which I would dump back into advertising. Now, I personally really like the direct mail postcards just because of their ability to target a very specific area and how in your face they are. Now, when building my route, I like to keep it within a three mile radius so that all of my houses are close and compact together. One of the biggest things when running a lawn care business is having a very efficient route because a lot of money and time is burnt driving from house to house. So now that I built up a pretty decent route, I'm going to go get something called a pesticide applicator's license. This cost about $150 and is the certification that I need to start spraying lawn care treatments. Now once I'm able to do treatments, I'm going to do another direct mail campaign and hammer all of the houses within a three mile radius to sell them a high ticket lawn care package. This would include mowing and all the treatments that you would need. Now from there I would continue to scale up and add in another truck into the mix where I have two to three trucks on the road. All right, now let's get to the part that actually got me out of the lawn care business and that is finding good talent. First of all, I would just start off with hiring a few people off of indeed.com ziprecruiter or some kind of site like that. However, since it's such a competitive market, you have to pay high wages and have a good company culture. My cousin in law actually runs a landscaping business. So I reached out to him and asked him how to get good lawn care and landscaping employees. Now he told me that the best way is word of mouth. So basically once you find those initial employees, you find the ones that are good and you ask them if they have any referrals of other people who would like to work with you. Now, in order for them to give you a referral. You have to be a good place to work at. So what does that look like? Again, competitive pay, good culture, good systems, good management. And one thing that he mentioned is a lot of landscaping. Employees appreciate the small things. So if you buy like a new weed eater or just something that makes their job easier, they're going to stick with you for the long term. All right, so now that we have a consistent pool of employees and we're starting to scale up, I want to touch on one thing. Now, the best part about having a lawn care treatment package is I'm guaranteed to be paid all year round. I would charge them on a monthly basis, so they're paying to have a pretty yard for the entire year. Even in the winter there's some treatments that need to be applied. So my crew is going to have work to do year round. Now, at this point, a lot of people would probably go and start doing a bunch of commercial work, but for this business, I'm just going stick purely residential and you'll see in just a moment. My next play would be to start a Facebook group about having an attractive yard. I'd start posting free content on YouTube, answering people's questions in my Facebook group and build an entire community about having a good looking yard and nice landscaping. I'd then funnel all the people that are getting my content for free and getting free information from me into being my clients. And I would use this to grow my business up to its first thousand clients. Now, the cool thing about a Facebook group and a YouTube channel is it's not location specific. So my next step would be starting to launch franchises into other cities. And since I have a massive audience online, I could easily do that and hire other landscapers to be franchisees and help me expand the business. Next step here is to just scale the absolute shape out of it. That is how I build a 10 million dollar lawn care business from scratch. Thank you guys so much for watching. I appreciate you guys spending your time and attention with me. Without any further ado, I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.