The BEST Mower (And Anything Else) You Need To Start Mowing!

You do not need money to start a lawn care business. You need $100, a Facebook account, and the willingness to look stupid for 2 weeks. That's it. That's the whole barrier to entry. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to prove to you why with my own numbers, my own broken down car, and my $100 mower. My name is Will Kelly. I am the CEO and co-founder of Military Lawn Cuts. We run 3 locations across North DFW area, close to 25 team members on the payroll, and we are one of the fastest growing lawn care companies in the state of Texas. Our goal isn't 3 locations, it's actually 10. And I want you to hear something clearly before I go any further. Every single thing I'm about to walk you through. I did before any of that existed. I did it with no money, I did it with no truck and no experience. This isn't theory, this is the exact path. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to start mowing lawns for money this week, even if you have $0 in your bank account right now. Not someday, not once you save up, this week. Most people who think about starting a lawn care business think that the problem is money. They think, I need a truck, I need a trailer, I need a commercial mower, I need insurance, I need a logo, I need a website, I need an LLC. So they sit there, they watch the videos, they price out the equipment that they can't afford, and they never start. That's what they think the problem is. Here's what the problem actually is. They have the entire sequence backwards. They think you build the business, then you get customers. It's the opposite. You get the customers first with whatever you've got, and the business builds itself around that. I didn't wait for the right equipment. I got customers with a a $100 lawn mower that I bought off of Facebook Marketplace, and it paid for future customers. Most people get that backwards, and it's the single reason why they never take the first step. So let me walk you through exactly how this went down step by step, because every piece of this you can copy starting today. Step 1: in this process. Go and buy a $100 push mower like I did off of Facebook Marketplace. Not a good one, not a brand new one. Literally a $100 lawn mower that probably needs a tune-up. That was the entire equipment budget. If you're sitting there telling yourself that you need 3 grand in gear before you can start, I want you to sit with that number. A hundred $100. That's less than most people spend on a night out. Let me ask you the question: what is your future worth? What do your goals mean to you? If we constantly make excuses of why we can't do something, you're never going to accomplish what you want to accomplish in this life. All right, so step 2: I printed pieces of paper— not a fancy flyer from a designer— printed paper at home with Lawn care at the top in big letters. In fact, we didn't even have a name yet for what was going on. We just said lawn care. And underneath it, I listed exactly what I offered: mowing, bush trimming, weed removal, bed and leaf cleanup, mulch installation, plant and flower install. And I put my personal cell phone number on there. And I walked door to door on the block that I live on, and all of my neighbors, knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. If they didn't answer, I put the flyer underneath the doormat. In my own neighborhood, there was no website. I didn't even have business cards. Paper and a Sharpie and my own two legs. Step 3, I waited. And this is the part that nobody tells you. It took about 2 weeks of consistently going door to door and putting flyers out before I ever got my first customer down here in Texas. 2 weeks, not 2 hours, not overnight, not in a week. If you start this today and nobody calls you tomorrow, that is normal. That is not failure. That's the process working exactly the way it's supposed to. Step 4: when the calls started coming in, I charged $19 a cut. For anybody that is ever remotely in the lawn care industry that is currently mowing understands for $19, like, that is so underpriced. It is absolutely astronomical, insane. But when I got started, I didn't know what I didn't know. So $19 for literally 45 minutes of work, that's it. I wasn't trying to get rich off of the first or second or third lawn that I started mowing. I was trying to prove I could show up, do the work, and do it well enough that they would want me back next week. And here's the part that matters the most: I didn't chase one customer at a time all over town. I stacked the customers on the same street right around that first yard that I acquired until I had about 5 recurring mowing customers all within literally walking distance of each other. 5! Reoccurring customers on a $100 lawnmower before I ever upgraded a single piece of equipment. Write that down. Get the recurring customers first. The gear comes after, not before. Most people get that wrong. All right, so step 5, and this is where it gets real. I didn't have a truck, I didn't have a trailer. I had a Pontiac Grand Prix, a small sedan vehicle. I went to U-Haul and got a hitch receiver installed on this vehicle thinking that this would fix all my problems. I would be able to put a hitch receiver there, put a cargo hitch on there, and drive it to customers that were maybe a mile or two away from me. The first time I drove it over my intersection right by my house, the bottom of the cargo hitch carrier literally dragged across the street. It was a wreck. I spent $150 on this cargo hitch carrier and it didn't work. Long story short, I had to get my mom's car, which she gracefully let me have for the weekend, to get my 5 mowing customers done. And she had a, you know, Chevy, just a, a 4-door SUV. That's basically what it is. But the good thing is, is it had a hitch receiver on there. So I took the cargo hitch, put it on her vehicle, put the mower on the back with the gas cans, and I put the weed eater and edger inside side of the back seat. I was showing up to cut people's grass in literally my mom's SUV. That is what it takes to actually get started, and that actually happened. And customers didn't care because the grass got cut and it looked good when I was done. So step 6, I couldn't afford a blower, so I used a push broom, a literal push broom, sweeping clippings off the driveway and the sidewalk by hand. And I remember specific days showing up to customers' houses, walking up to their front porch, plugging in the corded blower. The outlet literally didn't work. So here I am now. I got to walk back to the house, grab a push sweeper, and literally hand sweep the clippings again because there was a dead outlet. There was no power, no blower. But I did what I had to do. There's going to be problems. There's going to be issues. That hold you back from getting started. If you can't persevere and be a good steward of the problems and the issues that are occurring when you're just getting started, what makes you think that you can handle 20 customers or 50 customers or do $100,000 in annual revenue mowing lawns? If you can't handle the small problems right now and figure out a way to place the mission first and get the job done, because at the end of the day, the customer doesn't care about the problems you have or the schedule or the weather. They just want the job done and they want it to be left in good condition. Nobody was coming to save that moment. I had to figure it out with what was in my hands. That is the part that nobody puts in their highlight reel. Overgrown lawns, that $100 mower literally bogging down the grass that was way too tall. For this subpar mower that I bought, a 45-minute job took me probably 2 hours or at least an hour and a half. It is a grind. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it is easy, because if I tell you that and you go and try it, the first hard day is going to convince you that you failed. And you didn't. You found the part where everybody else quits, and that's what separates the successful people and the unsuccessful people. The people that say they wanna do it and the people that actually go and do it. Here's the real question this video is asking you. Are you willing to do the hard work where most people would quit? Because that's who wins. Not the person with the best equipment, not the person with the nicest truck, the person who's still knocking on doors in a week or two when nobody has called yet. The person's still sweeping with a broom because the blower didn't work at the outlet and the job still needs to get done. When it gets hard, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, when you feel like you want to stop, like you want to quit, like you want to give up, that feeling is not a sign to stop. That feeling is the exact reason you go one more day, one more week, one more month, because that valley does not last forever. Nobody stays in it. You either quit in the valley or you walk through it and come out the other side as a completely different person, someone who's actually capable of doing hard things and following through on what you said you would do. That version of you is the one who ends up with the boat, the car, the house you actually own instead of rent. Mowing lawns isn't the goal, it's the vehicle. But you don't get the vehicle if you quit at the first dead outlet. I want to hear from you guys directly, so drop a comment right now and tell me honestly what is actually stopping you? Not what you tell other people. What's really keeping you from putting $100 into a mower and a stack of paper flyers on porches this week, knocking on doors? Say it out loud in the comments right now. There is something magical that happens when you take those thoughts that are in your brain and you put it down on a piece of paper, or you type it out, or you write it out. Sometimes writing it down is the first step to proving to yourself it's not as bad as it feels. I told you at the start of this video that by the end you would know exactly how to start this with $0 in the bank. Here it is again, plain and simple: find a used mower for close to nothing, print flyers with what you offer, walk your own neighborhood and put them out, give it 2 weeks before you judge whether you should keep going or not. Stack your customers close together instead of spreading all over town. And whatever you don't have, whether it's a truck, a blower, or a working outlet, figure it out. Figure out what's in your hands, what's in your garage that you can use instead of waiting for the moment that you can afford the perfect setup. The mower doesn't make the business, you do. So go get the $100 and go put The Flyers out. Thank you guys so much for watching. Make sure you are subscribed to the channel if you want to grow a more successful mowing business.