In this instructional video, Will Kelly—CEO and co‑founder of Military Lawn Cuts—addresses lawn‑care business owners who earn less than $300,000 annually. He argues that the real barrier to growth is not lack of market demand or hard work, but the misuse of the owner’s limited, non‑renewable time. Kelly identifies three operational tasks that most owners perform themselves: (1) equipment maintenance and management (sharpening blades, oil changes, repairs), (2) the actual mowing of lawns, and (3) material pickup (mulch, fertilizer, tools). He explains why these tasks should be delegated to employees or outsourced, and provides a concrete “cost‑to‑hire” exercise where owners list daily tasks and assign a market wage to each, revealing which activities are draining profit. After freeing up this time, Kelly stresses that owners must reinvest it into high‑value sales activities—sending and following up on estimates, door‑to‑door prospecting, meeting customers on‑site, and running marketing tactics like door hangers. He offers a rule‑of‑thumb: at least 25 % of a workweek should be spent on sales, with 50 % being ideal. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to comment on a task they’ll delegate, and a reminder to like and subscribe for more growth advice.
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You are capping your own income, not the market, not your competitors, not bad luck. You. If you are out there trying to make real money mowing lawns and you haven't crossed $300,000 annually yet, there are 3 tasks sitting on your plate right now that are quietly keeping you stuck there. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly what those 3 things are and where your time actually needs to go instead. Here's something most owners never stop to think about. You can lose money and get it back. You can go broke this month and build it back next year. You can borrow money from a bank, from a partner, from your own savings, but you cannot borrow time. Nobody on earth can hand you back the hours you already spent. Money is renewable. It's transferable. Time is not. And yet most owners under $300,000 are spending their most non-renewable resource on tasks that don't require them at all. Let me paint you a picture. Imagine you hired the best team member you possibly could find. Always on time, knew every lawn on the route by heart, knew every customer's name, their dog's name, exactly how they like their edges done. Reliable. Cared more about the business than half the other owners out there that I know. Would work Saturdays, work long weekends, show up early, stay late. Knew how to sell. Knew how to talk to homeowners standing in their driveway. Knew how to hustle a neighborhood with door hangers until the entire street was calling you. Now imagine you took that best person, your hire, and you had them sharpening mower blades all morning. Then you sent them to go pick up and drop off broken equipment from the repair shop. Then you had them drive across town picking up mulch, fertilizer. That's insane. You'd never do that to your best person. You'd be wasting everything that makes them Valuable. Here's the problem. That's exactly what you're doing to yourself. I'm Will Kelly, the CEO and co-founder of Military Lawn Cuts. We run 3 locations across North Dallas, Fort Worth. We have close to 25 team members, and we're one of the fastest growing lawn care companies in the region. We're building towards 10 locations. I'm telling you this because I've lived every bit of what I just described. You see, early on, I was the guy sharpening blades over the weekend. I was the one driving across town to drop off a broken mower at the repair shop in the middle of a workday. Instead of standing in front of customers, door knocking, selling, I was loading mulch and fertilizer into the truck. Instead of knocking on the next door, I held on to all of it way longer than I should have, and it slowed us down more than I want to admit. So by the end of this video, you're going to know the exact 3 tasks that you need to get off of your plate before you hit $300,000, and exactly where that time needs to go so it actually grows your business. You see, most owners think the answer is working more hours, waking up earlier, grinding harder. That's not it. The problem was never how many hours you're putting in. The problem is what those hours are being spent on. A $12 an hour task done by you is still a $12 an hour task, no matter how hard you work Here are the 3 things we hand off to every single new team member that comes into our company, because we learned this the hard way. Number 1, equipment maintenance and management. Sharpening blades, cleaning air filters, doing oil changes, dropping broken equipment off at the shop and picking it back up. Every hour spent on this is an hour you're not in front of the saw. of a paying customer. Number 2, the actual process of mowing lawns. This is the biggest time trap of all 3, and it's usually the hardest one for owners to let go of because it feels like the actual job. It's not. The actual job is growing the business. The mowing is a task inside of the business. The second you can hire one reliable crew member and hand them The mower, you need to do it, and you need to spend that freed-up time focusing on sales. Number 3, material pickup. Driving around, picking up plants, bushes, mulch, fertilizer, tools, whatever the job needs. It's necessary. It just doesn't need to be you doing it. Quick gut check for you right now. Think back to over the last 7 days. How many hours went to one of those 3 things? Be honest with yourself because that number is the number that's been keeping you under $300,000. Here's a simple exercise that'll make this real for you. Take a piece of paper and write down every single task that you do in a normal day, one at a time. Next to each one, write What it would actually cost to hire that task out. Washing the trucks? We could literally grab a high school kid and pay them $10 an hour to wash our trucks every Friday. So why would I ever be the one holding the hose once you have a team? Do that for every task on your list. Anything sitting at $10, $15, $20 an hour needs to come off of your plate Immediately, starting with those 3. Here's where that time needs to go instead, because this is where most people get hung up. When they start to delegate these tasks, they start to kick back, put their feet up, relax, like, oh yeah, I own a business. No, that's where you fall into the trap and you start to lose money. You need to replace that freed up time with things that are much, much more valuable than the tasks that you were doing. You need to be going door to door, calling every pending estimate that's been sitting untouched. Let me ask you a question. How many estimates have you sent out in the last 30 days? How many of them have you called? How soon do you call back a pending estimate when you send them an estimate? These are the things that matter the most. This is how you grow a business. Another quick rule of thumb is like if you ask or kind of dissect your 40-day workweek. So let's just assume like you're— you have 8 hours in a day. How many of those hours are you spending on sales. If it's under 25%, that's a problem. You're in maintenance mode. You're not growing the business. Ideally, we want that at least 50%, a minimum. Like, half of your day needs to be spent trying to get more work, meeting customers face to face, walking the property with them and putting together the actual quote, following up to make sure the quality is right, selling, talking, putting out door hangers yourself when the season Calls for it. That's where you are worth the most. Nobody else in your business can build trust with a new customer, close a deal standing in their driveway, or catch a quality issue before it becomes a lost customer quite like you can. Well, at least not yet. Drop a comment with one task on your list right now that you. already know inside of your brain and deep down that you should be handing off ideally months ago. I want to see how many of you are still sharpening your own blades. You came into this video wondering what was actually holding your growth back under $300,000. Now you know it's not a marketing problem. It's not a pricing problem. It's not a I got to get more customer problem. It's equipment maintenance, mowing and material pickup that's eating the hours that should be going towards sales, estimates, and your customers. Hand off those 3 first, then you go and spend your time that you just bought back on the one thing that the business actually needs to grow, which is sales. Thank you guys so much for watching. Hit the like button, subscribe to the channel if you want to grow a more successful lawn and landscape business.
