Why Mowing Lawns is a Terrible Business

Everyone says mowing lawns is the easiest way to start a business, which I agree. But honestly, it might be one of the worst. There's low margins, the equipment constantly breaks down and you're fighting for literally the cheapest customer that will drain your energy and your physical capabilities. And so in this video I'm going to share with you why I believe mowing is a bad business and how you can fix this problem problem if you are in the lawn and landscape business. So if you ever thought about mowing lawns on the side for cash or you find yourself already in the game. Welcome to the jungle, my friend. We're going to be talking about how you can take your terrible mowing business and flip it around so you can actually make real money, real cash, not get stuck doing every job out in the truck and eventually burn out. That is the goal. That's what we're trying to avoid here. So let me share with you why I believe mowing is bad business. To give you a little bit of context for you guys that are watching, my wife and I have built a seven figure multi location business. We have over 500 recurring mowing customers. We do do mowing, by the way. I'm not knocking it too much, but I'm going to knock it in this video and share with you why it's a bad business to just focus on. So number one, which we talked a little bit about, you are fighting on the price with literally the Chuck and the trucks that have no logo, no signage, they don't care. They just quite frankly want some weekend money. Everyone with a mower is competition. You're fighting with const constant low profit margins, which means your margins are so squeezed thin, which means you're not going to have a lot of profit or cash in the business to actually deploy and pay really good team members and really build a constructive business around that and support it properly, to really pay well, take care of the customers, brand your trucks properly, get uniforms and really spend money to make money. Low profit margin, that's number one. Number two, there is very extremely high equipment and maintenance cost, especially especially if you start getting into larger properties where you have zero turns and trailers like this stuff costs so much money. And I see these people that roll up in these 30, 40, $50,000 rig setups with mowers and weed eaters and edgers and blowers and trailers and three guys hop out to spend 30 minutes mowing a one acre property. There's high, high maintenance costs, high equipment costs, belts break, tires break, trailers break, down. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts when it comes to mowing lawns. The third thing is it is very seasonal and weather dependent. So guess what? If it rains, basically business shut down. If it's lightning, businesses shut down. You can't make money in a seasonal business. Depending on where you are in the United States or overseas. We do have people that watch this overseas. Thank you guys for the support. By the way, hit that subscribe button if you're finding value in this or the like button. Or preferably both. Do both. No matter where you're at, there's generally an off season unless you're in some kind of Florida market or California market or a southern Texas market. But you have a seasonal business or which means demand slows down. You have to manage the workload personnel, and it's not fully consistent. You get ramped up very heavily, typically in six to nine months out of the season and then the other three to six months you're like, hey, what do I do? And you got to figure out, solve problems and execute like good owners do. Number four, the labor headaches. Here's the winding circle of why mowing doesn't work and why it's a terrible business. If you are just focusing on mowing again at the end of this video, I'm going to share with you how to fix this problem. Because it's such a low market margin and low profitable business, you can't find people often, like, they don't just show up at your door that are studs, that are a players that work extremely hard, that go out there, grind and crush it, that are blue collar dudes or girls, right, that go out there and crush it every single day, that show up, that are consistent, that show up to work early on time and like don't call off that aren't tardy. Like we're dealing with a lot of times lower labor team members because of the pay that most businesses can afford to pay nothing on those teams members. It's just where we find ourselves. Like the labor headache, by the way, in any industry is a big pain point. But when you can't pay more than 20 to $25 an hour to mow lawns, it's really hard to find a quality good candidate. It just is. It doesn't make sense. It's a recipe for disaster. And it is extremely hard to differentiate yourself from the competition when everybody is just basically the lowest, cheapest cost for mowing. Like, how do you really separate yourself? Okay, you can edge with a stick, edger like okay, you can, you know, blow off all porches, which you should be doing already. What really separates you from the competition outside of you just mowing the edge and blah. Okay, you're reliable. Cool. There's probably like five other lawn care companies in your area that are also reliable. How do you really separate yourself when you're just focused on mowing? So now here are some things that I want to completely flip it on its head. The reason why mowing is good is because it's a reoccurring revenue service. Which means you sell a customer one time and you're there for 32 visits out of the year. Now granted that's down here in Texas, but you could tailor it and get your data for your area. It doesn't matter. And ideally you would want to keep that customer for three, four, five years because if you could do that, you will be able to get so much more revenue from that customer and have consistent schedules for you and your team. But focusing on mowing itself is a recipe for disaster. So I encourage you to branch out side of the mowing service. The mowing business. Hey, real quick. My business partner and I built a private school community for people just like you trying to build their home service based business from the ground up. We managed to build a seven figure lawn business from the ground up and we're sharing all of the SOPS documents and templates and systems inside of our coaching program. You get access to us. So click the link in the description below. Let's scale this thing together. Find other jobs that you can upsell the customer a really good leeway into. This is basic lawn and landscaping services. Bush trimming, de weeding, mulch. These are easy upsells that you can take A very generic low profit customer that only generates you 32 visits at a very fractionable cost. Once you actually factor in all the equipment and the maintenance and all of those things like you're left at the end of the day with often 5 to 10% profit. That's not good. You build $1 million business and only pull $50,000 off of that. That's a lot of work. $50,000. It really make sense for me if you want to do it right. If you want to really build a true business to get out of the truck, get stuck in that physical grind and I've been here before, it's not fun. It is very physically and emotionally draining being in that hamster wheel of feeling like you can't get out of the field or get out of the truck. Because you don't have the systems in place or you don't have the people, the right people in place, because you can't pay them enough, because you're only focused on mowing. The way that you fix that is by packaging your deals or your services inside of one another. There is a reason why we only offer mowing and weed control services. We do not offer just mowing services to all of our customers. In fact, I think I can count on one hand the amount of customers that we still do today with the 500 recurring customers that we have, that we still mow only for, because we got rid of those people. We either upsold them into other stuff, mulch, weed control, property cleanups, et cetera, or we said, hey, if you don't want any of those other services, I'm sorry, but we're not, you're not the best customer for us. And that's fine. You should do that. You should get rid of the 10% every year of your customers and open the floodgates for more, better paying customers that are actually going to clean up their dog waste, want to be cut weekly instead of monthly or bi weekly, that actually want their mulch installed, that actually want their bushes trimmed, you know, three to four times a year to upkeep the appearance of their lawn landscape. Those are the customers that you're trying to go for. And in the beginning, you don't go for those customers because you're probably not charging enough because you don't have self worth yet. You don't know how to price. You just price low just to get your foot in the door. And that's okay. Like you should do that in the beginning. But after you get 25, 50, 75 customers, we need to start to filter out some of the bad ones. We call them PIBs in my business, pain in the butt customers. And I could tell you right now, if you think in your business, I'm sure you can think of a couple of customers in your mind that you could tag them as a pit. Those are the ones we want to get rid of, the ones that constantly call, the ones that constantly email, constantly text. Constant problems, no matter what team or crew, even if you're there, there's always a problem. Those are the ones that you want to get rid of and focus your time and energy on finding the really good paying customers that are busy people that work all day, that don't care that it's 5 or $8 more per cut, they just want it done consistently. You send them an upsell hey, we noticed you need mulch. Cool. Put me on the schedule. Let's go. Those are the ones that you want to focus on. So, yes, I believe mowing in its itself is a terrible business. And anybody that gets into this game in the lawn and landscape business that focuses just on mowing, it's a recipe or disaster. Figure out a way in your business to increase the lifetime value of a customer. Not just the mowing service, but also additional lawn and landscape services that you can add right now in your business, no matter what season you're in, there is no off season. Get it out on a piece of paper, crumple it up in a ball and literally just throw it away. Stop thinking there's an off season. There is always a season to upsell. Promote a holiday, something to make more money in your business. Don't get hung up on just mowing. Please build a real business that you can actually pay people a very fair wage above industry standard. Figure out a way to pay your team based on performance and not just hourly. Otherwise you're going to get stuck in a hamster wheel of always doing it. The goal is to get you your freedom back so that way you can spend more time with your family and spend more time on the weekend weekends with the people you love doing other things instead of caught in the hamster wheel of the grind. And let me know in the comments below what other additional services that you are going to add to your business outside of just mowing. Because I promise you, if you go all in on just mowing, it is a terrible business. Use it as a leverage opportunity to upsell other people. That's what gets you in the door. There's a reason why these grocery stores put the eggs and the milk which people need every single day. That's that stuff that literally goes bad after a couple of weeks. So guess what? Just like mowing, it's a demand, it's a need. Every couple of weeks it needs to be cut. That's the low margin service. And these grocery stores are putting milk and eggs and guess what they're doing. They're not putting it at the front of their store, they're putting it all the way in the back. And they're forcing the customers to walk all the way back. The pop aisle, I'm sorry, soda down here in the south soda aisle, chips, snacks, Mac and cheese, like all this other food option, every aisle they have to walk by to get the milk and the eggs in the back. And I promise you, I've seen it time and time again. Sometimes they slash those prices so hardcore just to get people in the door. People do that same thing. For the moment they get people in the door. But don't let that be the true business you're building. Build something else upon that build a landscape business. On top of that build a fertilization a weed control business. On top of that, build an insect control service. On top of that, build a pet waste removal service. Additional to that, figure out a way another avenue stream that you can add to your business so you're not 100 reliant on just mode. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have a great day. Wish you guys nothing but the best.