Has anyone else noticed how many rookies are popping up on Lawnsite in the past 2 weeks? I'd say 1 to 3 a day! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Furthermore, (no offense rookies) how many of these guys are going to stick around for the long haul, and how many are gonna pack up and ship out when the weather gets unbearable???
Well might as well welcome me to the site. I am 25 and my father and I own a small lawn care business here in Maryland. It's just the two of us. It use to be 3 of us but we got a lazer z hp and his brother decided he didnt want to do this work any more. My father has had this business for 23 years now and we still have a couple of our original customers! I am a newb to this forum but I am by no means a newb to lawn care. I started working at the age of 15 everyday with him after I got out of school. So I have 10 years in of doing this everyday except in the winters. Depending on the year and how many customers we have that decide they can no longer afford, move or decide they are going to start doing it on there own, we average 65-75 lawn a week. Not to bad for just 2 guys and my dad is now 54. In the next 2-3 years he is going to turn it over to me 100%.
By the way LawnRanger I noticed you live in Hershy pa and we have a "LawnRanger" here in MD. Would this be apart of your company?
Must be that time of the year lawnranger, well in your neck of the woods anyways, I'm in Australia and were just heading into Winter and I'm starting up now! I have no overheads though so I can spend all Winter lying on the lounge watching the footy and waiting for Spring if the phone don't ring.
16 and ill mow lawns untill i cant walk, then ill buy a rider. Untill then my 36 and 48 inch bobcat do the job.
I though theis site was all about helping people getting started. More power to them. I have found through the past few years for every new guy getting started that there is a grizzled vet getting out of the business.
Ther's nothing wrong with rookies--any industry can benefit from new blood. Better they show up here and hopefully learn something about the right ways of doing business, than wing it and screw things up for the established lco's where they are. When I started, I had a lot of dumb--REAL dumb--misconceptions, and I confess, I was a lousy lowballer and semi-scrub. I didn't get much help from anyone in the area, I guess everybody hesitates to help a competitor. It would have been very beneficial to have found out about Lawnsite early on, instead of learning so many things the hard way. And maybe I still haven't learned a lot of basic lessons, because I still do a lot of things different from a lot of you. So I'm hard-headed. What's a guy to do?
