2 Mistakes Holding Back Your Mowing Business!

2 mistakes are keeping your bank account flat while your revenue climbs. Almost every lawn care owner makes them. I made both. I'm going to show you the exact fix that took us from broke and busy to actually profitable. But first, you have to understand why you're doing this wrong in the first place, because if you don't get the reasoning, you'll go right back to the old way in a month. My name is Will Kelly. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Military Lawn Cuts. We have 3 locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and we almost have 25 team members. We do mowing, weed control, fertilization, and landscaping. I didn't start there. I started with one truck, dirt cheap pricing, and had no idea what I was doing. Everything I'm about to break down, I lived through, so stick with me because mistake number 2 is the one that quietly bleeds owners dry for years and nobody talks about it. Let's start with mistake number 1: price the job, not the hour. Here's the reasoning behind that. The customer is paying you for a result— a clean cut, edged, blown off, a yard that looks sharp. They are not paying for your time. They don't know and don't care if you took 20 minutes or 2 hours. We do not care. The value they receive is identical either way. So think about what happens when you charge hourly. You get better at your job, you get faster, you get more efficient with your equipment and your route. And what's your reward for all of that improvement? You make less money. Same yard, same result, less pay because you did it quicker. That is completely backwards. You should get paid more as you get better, not less. We did this ourselves in the beginning. We charged hourly. It felt safe because it felt fair, but it punished growth, punished skill. The better our guys got, the less we made per job. That's when we knew the model was broken. Here's the pain point: if you still are doing this, you will hit a ceiling and you never know why. You'll get faster, take on more lawns, work longer days, and your income will barely move. You'll burn out chasing hours instead of getting paid for the value you bring. That is mistake number one. But mistake number two is the bigger problem. It's the reason guys can grow revenue for years and still feel broke. And I'm going to show you exactly how to calculate your way out of it in a minute. Stop pricing off your paycheck. Here's what I mean. A lot of new owners that are getting into this as side hustle or a side gig, have a day job. I did too. Say they make $25 an hour there at their job. So when they start mowing lawns, they think, hey, I already make $25 at my job, let me charge, you know, $25 or $30 an hour for this too. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? It's not. That $25 number has nothing to do with what it costs you to run a lawn care business. And mow yards. Here's what it doesn't cover: fuel for your trucks and your equipment, insurance, wear and tear on the mower, the trimmer, the edger, every piece of gear that you need to own, the mileage you racked up on your vehicle every single day, time spent quoting new customers, scheduling, following up, billing customers, dealing with cancellations, none of which you're getting paid for directly, but all of which costs you time and money. None of that shows up when you're comparing yourself to a paycheck. A paycheck is guaranteed. It has zero overhead attached to it on your side. A side hustle or a side business has overhead built into it every single job, whether you see it or you don't. Look, building this kind of business can feel lonely. That's why we built a private school community that is based off of a ton of other home service business owners that are literally going down the same pathway as you. We are winning together. You get all tools, resources, and direct access to us. Join the movement today. The link's in the description below. So here's what happens when guys don't account for this. The business grows. Trust me, I talk to a lot of these guys in the industry. In fact, I just had a guy call me last week and, uh, he started mowing lawns on the side. He, he very do— very big successful guy, and he already acquired like 25 customers. And he's calling me, hey man, this is too physical for me. I'm charging these guys $25, which our minimum is like, like 30. So like, I guarantee you our prices are double that. And guess what happens? He burns out. It's not making a ton of money. The business grows. You're getting more customers, you're growing more revenue, more lawns, sometimes more trucks, which makes it worse. Sometimes more team members, which again just multiplies the complexity problems. Revenue on paper, it looks great, but the bank account doesn't move. Sometimes it goes backwards. Honestly, revenue up, profit down. That is the trap. Now here's the fix that I promised you. Add up your fuel, your insurance, your equipment replacement cost over time, your mileage, your unpaid admin time. Divide that across your jobs. That number is your real cost to deliver a lawn. If your price doesn't sit well above that number, you're not running a business. You're funding a very expensive side gig hobby that happens to make you very tired and get you a lot of exercise. This is exactly what we teach guys inside of our Home Service Scalers community, because it's the same conversation over and over. Owners or side hustlers come in, they're doing $200, $300, $500K in revenue and can't figure out why the bank account isn't making money. 9 times out of 10, it traces back to these two things: hourly pricing and paycheck-based pricing instead of business based pricing. So here's what I want you to walk away with from this video. There's two framework and mindset shifts. One, price the job based on the result, not the hours it takes you. Number two, price the business based on its real cost, not what you'd make sitting at a job. Comment below and tell me this: are you still charging by the hour, or have you already made the switch to pricing per job. I want to know and see how many of you are still stuck in the old model. If you don't know your real cost per job, you don't actually know if you're profitable. It's like trying to play an NBA basketball game and getting to the second quarter and there not being a scoreboard. Like, nobody's going to know what the heck the score is. Like, seriously, you're not going to know the numbers. If you don't know the numbers in your side hustle or even your business, you're just super busy and you got a side hobby. Busy and profitable are not the same thing. Price the job, know your numbers. That's how you actually grow a business. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you guys are subscribed if you want to build a more successful mowing business.