Will Kelly says owners waste time on three tasks they should delegate: equipment maintenance like blade sharpening and oil changes, the actual mowing work, and material pickup. Mowing is a task within the business, not the business itself. Freeing yourself from these lets you focus on sales and growth.
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 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 up 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.
