How to Start a Lawn Business with $5,000 ✅

Hey everyone, this is Will with Military Lawn Cuts, where my wife and I have built three locations, a seven figure lawn care business in the last six years. And in today's video, we're talking about how to start a lawn care business with $5,000. So mentally right now, if I completely erased all of the progress that we had today, this is the exact roadmap and blueprint of how I would spend my first $5,000. Because if there's one thing that I know, every dollar in the beginning matters. And so the last thing you want to do is take that money and spend it on something that's not going to move your business forward the fastest. What I'm going to be sharing with you today is the literal fastest way to grow a lawn care business with $5,000. And if you took everything that we built over the last five, five years, six years of a $1.1 million business, three location, multi general managers, multi location, if you took all of that away, this is literally exactly how I would redo it. I'm actually going to share my screen with you guys so that way you guys can see exactly what we're talking about. First thing is first I would jump on with my $5,000. I would go to Vistaprint immediately. This is literally the first thing I would do. I would come down here, I would put my name, address, phone number on here and then email so that way customers can reach out. And also the services that I offered, I would include all of that I would not focus on. I would list everything that I do. Mowing, bush, trimming, mulch, whatever you want to offer. 10,000 door hangers, I would order all 10,000 right now. That's $600, $601. I'm going to just kind of round these for simple mathematic terms. So now we're down to $4,398. We bought our door hangers. I would start to put out three to 500 per day in the busiest time of the season. I'm not putting this out in the winter when there's no demand. I am putting this out in the spring, spring rush or at least beginning of summer when people actually need mowing services. Now the next thing I would do is I would jump on fiverr. I got $5,000 and I would go to some expert, just like this website design. I will build a lawn care gardening landscaping website with SEO. So you basically get, he'll build you one to three pages with a contract, all of that stuff. I would have him build a lead Submission form. I would also have him incorporate the name, phone number, address, email. Email, what services the customer wants and then how they heard about you. I see a lot of people miss this. How did they hear about you? Make sure that is on the lead intake form on the very first page above the fold. Right. When a customer gets to your website, I would pay him. How much? $600. That's about $1200 that we've spent. We're down to $3798 with our budget. The next thing I'm going to do, I am going to go to Google and I am going to build a Google my business just like this. I want to add photos completely free. Take some pictures of you maybe mowing your own lawn. Put them up here, put your address, put your phone number, put your email. Once that guy builds you the website, put the website on here too. Get the Google my business. And once you start to get customers, ask them for reviews. Every single customer you get, they should be leaving you review also your friends and family tap into that network. I would lean into that. Google my business is free. You don't have to worry about it. Very cool. The next thing I would do, I would go to ChatGPT and type in top 50 free business listing services. It will spit out a list of 50 people or 50 business listing websites. And I would go in there and make sure my address, my phone number and the service area and the website is uploaded with the pictures that I already created on every single of those 50 business listings. Why? This is building real estate on the Internet side. So when people come and say lawn care near me. If there's 50 websites that says military lawn cuts is in Aubrey, guess who's gonna show up first. Your business. So you have to do this stuff. Guess what, it's free. Cool. Next thing I would do, I'd go to copilot CRM.com and I would sign up for the free membership. Why? Because I want to grow a scaling business that I eventually one day will run without me. And guess what? They allow you to sign up and get your first 50 customers completely free. I would utilize that. So those three things are freebies can do it for free in the evening hours. The next thing I would do is I would go to Harbor Freight and I would order a cargo hitch for for my vehicle. When I first started I had a Pontiac Grand Prix. I went to U Haul, I had them install a hitch receiver on the back end. I don't recommend that for people. If you have very very low Cars like a low sitting car because it did drag across the street when I drove across it and it didn't work. So as long as your vehicle is somewhat like off the ground, or maybe you can have them raise the hitch a little bit a couple of inches. Have like a reverse kind of hitch receiver so it goes up, that will help you load up your mower in the back. And that is $200. So now we're down to $3,508 available for us to spend to grow our lawn care business. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to go on Facebook Marketplace. I am not going to buy brand new equipment. This is where I see most people get hung up. Also, let me backtrack here. You should not buy any mowing equipment at all until you at least have one customer, one paying customer. I see too often, too many people, they go out and buy a mower and trailer and cargo hitch and weed eater and backpack blower, and guess what? They're not even making any. They're just spending money. That's not a business. You just spending money and going massively into debt. Getting a truck and trailer and equipment get the customers first. That's why the door hangers was the number one thing we did. We got to get the customers first. Then when the phone rings and says, hey, will I need my lawn cut? Cool. It'll be 50 bucks per cut. Want to sign up? He says, yes. Great. I'll be there on Monday. Now I am giving you the green light to go out and actually buy the mowing equipment. Now you have. You made one sale you had, now have one customer. Now we buy equipment. If you're tired of guessing your way through this home service stuff, we built a shortcut inside our private school group. We give you access to every SOP document and every blueprint that we've built that took us years to figure out. All you got to do is go down in the link in the description below. Join the group and you'll gain access to all of this stuff, including myself, to help coach you and grow your business. The first thing I'm going to buy is a commercial grade used mower. These things are generally $2,300 brand new. In my market, you can jump on Facebook Marketplace and get them for literally a third of the price. And they're commercial mowers. They're made to get run into the ground and made to run for years. For 800 bucks, we could pick up a commercial toro push mower that gets us down to $2798. Next thing I'm gonna need is a weed eater. Same thing. I'm buying this off Facebook Marketplace. I'm not paying full retail on my very first set of equipment. Not happening guys. Why? Because I want to use this money to get people more customers. And then when I get more customers, 25, 50, 75 customers and I'm actually making good money, then we will buy brand new equipment to make sure it is sustainable. That is the mindset I see where most people get hung up on. Next thing we're going to do is we're also going to buy a blower, which I don't see it in here, but we're also going to do the combi system. Okay. The combi system is nice with the steel because you get a hedge trimmer. You can now trim bushes. You get a nice little pole saw so you can kind of prune some, some tree limbs like light, light tree trim. This setup. 680 bucks out the door saves you a ton of money. This would probably, probably be like 1200 brand new, but instead you get all of that for 680 on Facebook marketplace. Which brings us down to a whopping $1,568 left. What I would do with the remaining $1,568, I would keep that in the bank as operating expenses because you're going to need to buy fuel cans, you're going to need to buy gas, you're going to really need to buy trimmer line and just mo mulch you, you may have a mulch job that comes down. So you need a little bit of operating funds in the bank and ideally a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars will allow you to actually go and buy the tools and equipment that you need. The small tools and equipment that you need to do the jobs once you win them. Also buying your rakes and things like that. If you follow this process and put out 10,000 door hangers, the average return on door hangers is anywhere from a half percent and I've seen upwards to 2%. As long as you're doing it when the demand is the highest. Again, don't be putting these door hangers out in the winter when it's not needed. Do it when there's actual demand. And even if you got run on the low end, 5% of customers, that 10,000 door hangers should get you to 50 customers. If you do it at the right time for the right pain point and put the right call to action on your door Hangers, it's not that difficult. It's just putting the work in. And I see most people not putting the work in. A lot of people have these very, very high ambitions to grow a business, start a business. The actions are what actually grow your business. You actually going out and putting out the door hangers is what actually moves the needle forward. So please guys, put the action in. If you have a truck, you can go the magnet route in the beginning. Also, what I left out on here is truck wraps. I don't really recommend a full truck wrap in your first year. If you're starting with a truck, you may want to look at putting at least some signage on the side. Your company name and a phone number and a log, something very simple of vinyl stickers, nice and big. I see that range anywhere from 600 to up to about a thousand dollars. So I would give you the green light once you get at least one customer to put that signage on your truck as just vinyl stickers on there, it'll look more professional than a magnet. But it's not as cool as a full wrap. But at least people will start to see you, they'll start to call you and you'll start to actually grow your business. And if you do this right guys, and actually put the door, all of those door hangers out, build the website, do the goog, Google my business, do all the free business listings, which again I see most people not do. And then you buy the equipment and actually start to perform the jobs by the end of the season. There's no reason you should not have 50 customers. And if you're anything like our services, where we literally just offer simple services, mowing, weed control, bush trimming, de weeding, mulch, leaf cleanups, that's it. We're not doing paver patios, we're not doing all these, this extra deep layered services. It's very simple services. Trimming bushes, pulling weeds, mowing grass. 50 customers down here in Texas gets us on average $2,000 per customer per year. And if you ran the numbers on this like I did, 50 customers times 2,000 is a $100,000 business. I just gave you the blueprint on how to build a 100,000 six figure business in your first year. If you follow that blueprint, make sure you are subscribed to the channel. If you guys like this kind of content, if you've thought about starting a lawn business or you are already actively doing it, highly recommend hitting hit that subscribe button right now.