YouTube advice from Will Kelly on starting a lawn care and landscaping business with little or no capital. He recommends aggressive door-to-door outreach (knock ~500 doors), offering a focused 'bush and bed' service, estimating jobs as quarter/half/full day to set quotes, and treating low early earnings as the cost of hands-on learning.
This is exactly how I would start a lawn care and landscaping business. If I had literally zero money in the bank, the very first thing I would do is I would knock on 500 doors. I would go door to door and I would knock. I would introduce myself and say, hey, my name is Will. Just got out of the military a few years back. I am now starting my lawn and landscaping business. I'm offering bush and bed service primarily right now. I notice your bushes need to get trimmed. Do you mind if I could add you to the schedule? And I would literally, like, that would be my pitch. Can I get you on the schedule? Bush and bed service. Now, mind you, I have no truck, I have no equipment. I don't even have a uniform. I'm probably showing up in whatever, polo. I got literally nothing. I would knock on 500 doors out of every hundred doors. As long as you're somewhat, somewhat competent in conversating with people and kind of making a laugh a little bit, just having a good time, having, having a conversation, one of them is going to book, One of them is going to say, you know what? Yeah, sign me up, get my bushes and bed service done. Then what I would do, I would look at the job because again, I have. I have a little bit more wisdom now because I've done a lot of this before. But I would look at the job and say, okay, cut it up into three components. Is it going to take me a quarter day, half day, or full day? I have no idea how long these jobs are going to take. Part of growing a business is paying the price of being uneducated. So you're going to quote this job, and you might quote it 20 bucks and it might take you three hours, and you're making $7 an hour. It's horrible. But that's the cost of doing business. When you don't know, that's how you get started. That's how you learn. That is the price of education versus sitting in a traditional classro with a whiteboard in the front and a teacher. This is real life education. The more you fail, the more you learn, the more you get better. This is part of the game of business and part of entrepreneurship.
