Lawn Business

Choosing the best lawnmower for your lawn business is an important step and you should take your time deciding what you need before spending all your spare cash on a machine that may prove unsuitable.

If you are just starting out with little knowledge of what you need just pick up a cheap used lawnmower to get you going. You will soon start noticing things both good and bad about your lawn mower and you will be better placed to make a decision about what to spend your hard earned cash on.

The priorities must be that whatever lawn care and grass cutting machinery you do decide to purchase must, and I do mean MUST, be totally reliable. The last thing you need is to get to a job and spend ages trying to get your lawn cutting equipment running. Personally I have always had a problem with two stroke engine powered grass trimmers and hedge cutters. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t like me but I always go for a four stroke machine myself.

Most lawnmowers are pretty reliable these days but if you are using your lawnmower as a commercial lawnmower it will have to work a lot harder than the average piece of garden equipment that is dragged out of the garage once a week through the summer. Your machines will be working for several hours each and every day.

They need to be rugged yet lightweight and easily managed and lifted or driven onto your truck. They need to be tough enough to cope with all the everyday knocks and bangs they will get. The blades need to be able to keep an edge for a long time even though they are in constant use and you want a lawnmower to cope with damp weather. It will obviously depend a lot on your local climate but a mower than can’t cope with a bit of damp grass sometimes is a timewaster if you ever need to be able to cut grass after a rain shower. Some mowers are much better with dealing with damp grass and if you get much rain in your area you should have at least one lawnmower that is ok with wet grass.

Wehn you expand your lawn business and start to employ people to work for you, you may find some of them are lacking in common sense. What seems obvious to you may seem very difficult to get, for them. You need lawnmowers and gardening equipment that will survive the thoughtless and clumsy actions of people who don’t stop to think.

I well remember a young guy working for me who managed to break a spade I had been using for years while I was away getting some materials. How he managed to break it I have no idea. I couldn’t of broken it if I had wanted to but I expect he jammed it under a rock and jumped up and down on it or something. Whatever the reasons  and however he did it, this is the sort of thing you need to be prepared for. You need really tough equipment that can be used by people who don’t have any commonsense and don’t stop and think but the equipment must be able to cope with their clumsy actions and still survive.

It may seem daunting when we first imagine running our own business. We may want to have our own company and a lawn business seems like a good business to be in but where do we start and will it be a big gamble to take for the future of our family. It doesn’t have to be and if you want to know how to start a lawn business read on to see how it could be done.

The lawn-care business is different to many other businesses in several ways. You are independent so you can choose the days and hours you work. It doesn’t need to have a retail store or even an industrial unit, you can work from home and use your garage to store your equipment. You do not need to invest in a lot of grass cutting equipment to start out.

Let me give you a real world example. A friend of mine began thinking about the fact that some people need to employ someone to cut their grass. He wasn’t thinking so much about private homes and gardens. He was thinking about businesses that have premises of all types that have a grass area around them and they must employ someone to cut the grass.

Having realized this he decided to test the idea out with a small ad in a local newspaper offering a grass cutting service. Sure enough he got a response to his small ad and met and agreed a contract with this customer.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that he didn’t even have a professional lawnmower at this stage. He already had a full time job and he wasn’t looking to build a full time business but he thought this could be a way of earning some extra cash to help his family.

So, having got a contract for grass cutting he went through the small ads in the paper and found a secondhand, used lawnmower that seemed suitable and went and bought it. He started to do the grass cutting contract in the evenings or at weekends and it wasn’t long before he began to pick up other jobs from recommendations  from his first client.

Before too long he had to make a decision about how big he wanted this lawn business to get and he chose to keep it as a part time business but he could easily have developed it further and become a totally self employed business person.

He decided that wasn’t for him but this example shows what is possible and remember, when he started out he didn’t even have a lawnmower. So, if you have the ability and the enthusiasm to work for yourself this example lawn business shows one way it could be done. Start out small doing lawn care as an extra job and if it develops you can choose to expand it and make a full time business out of it or just keep it small and work evenings or weekends. If you are concerned about losing the benefits of being employed this way shows how you can dip a toe in the water to find out if you are cut out for running your own business.