IA_James

If so, what are you using for equipment? How much for pricing? How many lawns? What about insurance? I'm thinking on this as a way to keep from having to go back on call, but not lose the dineros from it. I figure if I can pick up $250 or so a week's worth of work, I'll be very happy. I'm figuring 6-10 lawns to make this. I plan on mowing and weed eating, and offering sidewalk and border edging. Also, yard clean up and such. I've already got an Echo trimmer and blower/leaf vac+shredder. I've got a line on a used Gravely rider to check out in a few days, but that's not set in stone. So basically, tell me all about it.

Lrdchaos

I mow on my days off from the fire dept. My father and I have 44 yards, and we use Toro mowers, we have 2 37 inch walkbehinds, a 21, and a 62 zturn. As far as weedeaters go we use shindaiwa, and stihl blowers. Pricing varies quite abit, as far as insurance goes with have liability and thats it. The money is good, if you don't mind being hot and nasty at the end of the day, every yr you see businesses in the paper for sale because someone bit off more than they could chew.

IA_James

I don't mind that, and I like going out and playing in the dirt. I've seen the businesses for sale, and am kind of leery of them. Aren't you basically just buying the mowers and a list of phone numbers? Seems like there's alot of blue sky involved. I had figured on just starting out myself, and keeping it smallish. I'm more looking for a part time job in addition to my other one, rather than a new career path.

jrs_dodge_diesel

I ran my own lawn business in high school (summer break). The only equipment I had was a push mower, gas trimmer, rake, a couple of trash bags, and a gas can for the mower (weed eater doesn't use much at all). Fairly low over head, gas was really my only expense, given that I only catered to the surrounding neighborhood. Each lawn took an average of 5 hours or more to complete (i strove to keep my customers happy), and I worked just about any day of the week (as needed, no set mowing schedule).

It was definetly hard work, but I enjoyed it. Due to my hard work and satisfied customers, I had made $1200 in 3 months, with just a push mower. Some of my customers kept me busy the next year when the grass turned green again, and I also did hourly work with small landscaping projects.

Basically, if you like outdoor work, and can keep your customers happy, you will do well. One other thing, buy ear plugs or ear muffs. Not fun on your ears to listen to small engines for a couple hours a day. If you would like any more info, please let me know.

PistolWhipt

I was talking with a buddy of mine who mows and weed-eats as a side job to being a train engineer ... he said that at first he was just charging 30-40 bucks per lawn until there were just too many yards to take care of.
He said he thought that if he jacked his price to some ridiculous amount that it would thin things out ... WRONG !! People are paying him almost 100 bucks to do their yards anyway !!

My teenagers mow mine for a Dr. Pepper and a Moon Pie !!

PISTOL

Geico266

Living in a college town we get all our lawns mowed for $25 a pop. Even I (low buck slum lord) think that is low, but that's what they charge.

DynoDynamicsNE

I mow the front, back, and on the sides...

Sorry, I just had to make that stupid remark because of the title. Several years ago, my girlfriend and I did lawns for several people in the neighborhood. If I remember correctly, we charged $100-150 per lawn, depending on the size, and there were some big lawns around there. She was a school teacher, and I was a firefighter. Our schedules gave us a lot of opportunity to grow the business, but that isn't what we wanted. We did that for about 3 years, and when we decided to stop, we still got calls asking us to come back.

Just keep your customers happy, and you'll soon have more than you can handle.

dssimecek

Here in Houston most of the yard workers do it full time. Grass grows all year and the yardwork needs doing. The one that our daughter uses lives just across the street. He does it full time, has mowers, edgers, weedeaters, blowers and rakes. Takes about two hours to do the yard and clean up. Must be doing ok, he pulls his equipment trailer with an 05 CTD. Not sure what she pays for the yard.

AkTallPaul

I used to when I grew my own....My equipment was a small pair of garden shears for the bigger stems...and a few small snipperes for fine trimming...It would take about 4 hours to do 1 plant which yielded about 1200 bucks of primo grass.....

nirion

How big are the yards?

Nate-03 D

I was waiting for a comment about this.

When I was younger(13-14) me and some buddies would mow/clean up the neighboors yards. Not to make tons of money but just enough to cover our hobby, paintball. We would work all week and blow all of our money on paint and supplies. Ah the good ol'times.

ccbooth83

I mowed commercially for 12 years. The only mowers I have ever used for "small deck" mowers were 2 cycle toro's. They're great mowers with little maitainence, although I think they discontinued the 2 cycles. IF you are mowing fairly big yards I would stick with TORO but get the big deck (37 in to 42). Echo, stihl trimmers and blowers all the way. I would stay away from riding lawn mowers unless you get "zero turn" radius mowers. Traditional riding mowers usually end up being more trouble than good unless you are mowing fields. Hope this helps.

BigBlue

I used to when I lived with my parents to make money. Then I moved out and went to college. I refuse to mow a lawn ever again. I hated doing that. But when I did do it I used a self propelled honda that was around 20 years old and an echo weedeater and blower. Got about 10 years out of the weedeater and 15 or so out of the blower. Bought a new honda mower and it sucks. Doesn't hardly crank, dies the second you hit anything thick, and it's all plastic. The new echo stuff is good though.

Hoss

I don't recommend this, but I have a Craftsman 2 cycle weed-eater and a Yard Machines edger. I've had both for going on 9 years. Neither of them have EVER been serviced...EVER. The edger still has the same oil that I poured in it the day I bought it. I've never changed plugs or filters or anything on either one of them. Both still crank up and run exactly the way they did when they were brand new. The edger takes 3 pulls to crank and the weed-eater takes 5 pulls...every time. For almost 9 years all I've done is put gas (or gas/oil for the weed-eater) in them and went to work.

Last year I replaced my broken Lawn Boy mower with a Toro self-propelled, which has worked very well so far. Also, two years ago, I was given a Stihl blower for Christmas, which has also worked very well.

bentwings

I worked one summer down south while I was unemployed for a guy cutting grass. He had 2 Turf Tigers 54 inch I think and one smaller ride on. Didn't use it much. Plus the 3 weed whackers, 2 blowers, power hedge trimmers. We had a GN low boy trailer for everything except the sweeper which was a tow behind. 3/4 ton DCTD 6 spd plus my 1 ton. Also did tree removal. He had another similar trailer for that so we could haul some wood!!! He had 2 30 inch chainsaws and one smaller one. Also had a fueling station on the truck.

The average 3/4 to 1 acre lawn with no fence took 20-25 minutes from the the time we stopped to the time we were rolling again. Cut, trim, and blow. Roughly $50-60. $5-$10 extra for a fence. We actually cut the larger lawns at a faster rate as there wasn't so much slow going around bushes and trees and they cost over $100. A couple big places took 2 of us 2 hours to do everything including trimming about 100 yd of hedge on both sides. Every 3-4 days. A good day was 14 average sized yards plus one or 2 big ones. 6 days a week. A couple of rain days made the next couple days dawn to dusk hard thrashing to say the least.