Did you ever start your own lawn mowing business????????
So, I'm thinking about a new strategy problem. Adolescent youth all over America are planning on starting their very own lawn mowing business this summer, just like they do every summer. Few succeed at making a profitable business. I know I attempted Hightower Lawn Care a few times and wasn't ever hugely successful from a profit standpoint. I made enough money to pay for my mower and gas, but that was about it. At one point, Hightower Lawn Care became Hightower & Co. Lawn care, or HCO Lawn Care for short, because I hired one of my best friends from High School to work with me. I thought we were true entrepreneurs because of our partnership and budding clientel base.
The tough part about a commodity service business like lawn mowing is getting intitial clients and differentiating yourself from other service providers. The next hard part is managing your clients. For a teenager, that's a pretty difficult job. I was often scared to call on my clients for jobs (I thought that they would think I was hitting them up for money when they just had their lawn mowed a week ago.). I hoped they would just call and remind me. Probably what really happened was I sat at home wondering if it was too early to call again and they sat at home and wondered why I never just came and mowed their lawn.
Perhaps customer management was a challenge peculiar to me, but assuming that it isn't, I want to develop a system where kids can manage their clients. It's all about MANAGING EXPECTATIONS. If I had come to my clients with some sort of semi-formal agreement on paper, such as a lawn mowing calendar or a written list of services I would provide and just how often I would provide them, my business would have been much more lucrative and legit.
So, I'm thinking about making a new website, kind of a non-profit help yourself consulting page where young 12-16 year-olds entrepreneurs can learn from my mistakes and get a leg up on the competition. If anyone has some suggestions for this site or advice for how I should set it up, or wants to tell me what their lawn mowing business was like, I'd appreciate your comments!
Mar 9, 2009
Consulting for Lawn Mowing Business Owners
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Brandon-
ReplyDeleteI too started my own lawn service when I was 12 and did it all the way till I was 18. What I found to be the most lucrative strategy for me was my strategically close proximity of jobs. When I took over the company from my older brothers I was to young to drive so I also inherited the Go-Kart with the home made trailer for towing the mower, weed whacker (sp ha), and blower along with gas etc. This was not only embarrassing to drive around but also very time consuming going to different neighborhoods for jobs. So I let the far away customers go and specialized in front yards in my own neighborhood. At $10 bucks a lawn I could mow and trim 5 of these little square lawns an hour. Making more money per hour. It worked for me and it can work for all those 12-16 year old entrepreneurs out there!
The fun part will be getting the young lads to read it, especially the stubborn ones. I myself would have avoided a website of this nature because I would have thought that I, being the bold business man that I am, would not fall into the snares of other chillens! Perhaps an interactive website that allows kids to post their own sucsesses and failures, then allows businessmen who are already sucessful to comment.
ReplyDeleteWhen you own property, it’s easy to overlook how much work lawn care can be and it’s something that is not always factored into the routine maintenance. It’s easy to assume that you’ll have an area that requires little lawn maintenance.
ReplyDeletelawn mowing Lynn ma