Will Kelly built his mowing business to $1.5 million in annual revenue without taking on debt. He argues that loans let you buy trucks and mowers faster, but equipment doesn't bring customers. His approach: get customers first, use that revenue to buy what you need, then reinvest to grow.
We grew this business to roughly $1.5 million a year without taking on business debt. Our trucks are paid for, our equipment is paid for, and there were definitely times borrowing money could have helped us grow faster. But knowing what I know now, I still wouldn't change how we did it. Because imagine if somebody had handed me $50,000 or $100,000 when I started. I probably would have gone and bought a nice brand new truck and a new trailer and all these commercial mowers and a bunch of brand new equipment, and I would have felt like I had a real business. But there's one massive problem: none of those things give you customers. A customer gives you business. So from very early on, our focus became generating revenue and then using that revenue to buy what we needed next. Get customers, do the work, make money, reinvest the money, add capacity, then do it all again. And that sounds slow, and sometimes it was, but there's something really powerful about making your business earn the right to grow.
