Best Mower for Your Lawn Care Business ($500 to $12000 Budget)

now that our camera guy almost got ran over by this truck let me show you this fuel tank this thing is huge [Music] hey everyone mike gandes here with landscape business course.com today i'm at carl's mower here in ferndale none of this day's episode is sponsored or paid for in any way i'm just going to give you the different options when it comes to buying a mower whether you're just getting started or you're in been in the industry for a while and you're looking for what mower to buy i'm going to talk you through everywhere from a 420 mower all the way up to a 10 000 plus dollar mower and what those might look like and where you might think about buying these different mowers all right this is the gcv 170 this is a honda mower it's not even a commercial mower okay so this is actually the first mower that i started with when i started andy's lawn care at 11 years old so it's very very light it's cheap though like plastic wheels uh it is definitely not grade construction for commercial type work everything from the deck just this quality of the build et cetera the power on this thing it's really not meant to be mowing all day every day for weeks on end so if you only have 10 15 20 lawns that you do it's a really great option when you're just getting started it's cheap it's light has a great self-propoled system here at the top and the thing i like i love about it the most is it's very light so for example if you're just getting started you can actually pick this bad boy up pretty easily and put in the back of a truck so you don't need to get a big fancy trailer or a ramp rack or anything like that you can literally pick this thing up and put in the back of a truck if you need it so that's 420 a residential grade mower and it's definitely not going to be used if you're starting to grow really big now let's move over to a commercial mower this is an x mark x mark 21 21-inch mower 21-inch mower is pretty standard when it comes to push mowers in our industry so again i don't really care about the brand i'm just trying to talk about the general price ranges that we're talking about now we're stepping up the game to a commercial-grade mower so now this this deck is much much more solid it's probably three times as thick now these wheels are very very heavy duty they come right out and they're just wider so they're not going to leave as many you know deep imprints into the lawn they're rubber just a heavier duty build on everything on this mower including the engine so now we have a kawasaki engine on this bad boy this is the fj 180 v engine on the 21 inch mower now there's upgraded versions of this it has a bigger tank and all the rest of it but this thing's only going to run you like eleven hundred dollars so it's almost three times as expensive as our first mower but again you got commercial grade you can use this thing all day long and this is the mower that i started with once i really started getting serious about augusta lawn care so that was the early days of andy's lawn care this was the early days of augusta lawn care because it was a commercial grade i could run it all day long the bagging system was actually built for a commercial use to be able to be opening this thing up 100 000 times in a day as you're mowing your whole route also what's really cool is it allows for two different types of up top here to both move and engage the blades so you can actually run this thing without the blades actually turning so great option again twelve hundred eleven to twelve hundred dollars on this bad boy you got your primer on the side here and overall this is what you're gonna be looking at when you start getting 30 40 50 mowing customers you definitely are going to need one of these now does that mean that you need to start with that one then move to this one and then keep going up no if you know you're going to grow you're probably going to want to start something with something like this if you have the money go ahead and start with something like this but if you don't have the money and you're wanting to get started that is a great option to get started let's move on to what we now currently use for our push mowers at augusta lawn care and it's a 30 inch mower now there's two different variations of this this is the kawasaki it's a little bit of an older edition and it's going to run you about 2 200 21 2200 depending where you get it we actually recently upgraded to the kohler engine that has a little more power because in our market it rains a lot and we need the extra power to get the clippings bang but this is going to this is going to run about 2100 so again we got 420 1100 and now we almost doubled the price all the way up to a 21 2200 mower but now we get 30 inches wide so you'll notice this is a lot wider but we went from 21 inches to 30 inches also now we got two blades underneath on the deck so now there's two blade system makes the cut look really nice and it has that same quality build as an as the x-mark 21-inch mower that is commercial you have this bar in the front that protects the engine from getting hit and you also have the ability to have a lot more bagged clippings because this bag is so much bigger look at this come around here come see this bag here you can see how much bigger this is in comparison to those other mowers that we had in the past it's gonna have a lot more capacity which allows you to do bigger jobs soon when you get hit now that our camera guy almost got ran over by this truck let me show you this fuel tank this thing is huge again great for commercial use to be able to run this thing all day long without having to constantly refill if i'm using that 420 honda i'm probably going to refill it three or four times if i'm using it all day long now with this bad boy you fill this thing up one time maybe twice throughout the day it'll run all day long these commercial mowers they're meant to run all day so you can grind them into the dirt run 20 30 lawns in a day and they're just fine again this is the kawasaki version of the xmark 30 inch mower there's a 30x mower that has the kohler engine a little more strong but that one's going to cost you 2 500. this bad boy costs a 200. now let's take it up a step further all right so now this is the gravely zt hd 48 inch mower again i'm not getting sponsored to say any of this i'm just giving you different price ranges that you might be thinking about when it comes to buying a mower so now we're getting really efficient because we're not dealing with 21 inches or 30 inches now we're at 48 inches we're getting a lot more capacity and when we make one stripe on the lawn we can get a whole lot more done now it's even better though in terms of the quality of my life i don't have to have to walk behind these mowers all day long i can sit down much more simply go much faster on this thing because this thing is going to be able to go five six miles an hour versus me walking all day long takes a lot longer so the capacity the amount of you can get mowed in a single hour is going to increase dramatically when you get what this is called a zero turn mower and that means that i can basically turn on a dime these go back and forth i can turn really great system here now this is gonna run you right around five to six thousand dollars depending on the different upgrades and features and what type of motor you get and things like that but this is gonna be a great place to get started if you're doing commercial and you need a big zero turn if you have properties that are running over five six seven thousand square feet in their turf square footage you're probably going to need a zero turn of some sort now you might get a stand on which we'll show you in a second but this is gonna be something you're gonna need if you have large properties if the average lot in your area is like a quarter acre you're definitely gonna want something a little bit bigger now i will say this the zt hd although it might be only five thousand dollars it's not still not commercial great on this deck you have a three year commercial warranty which means they don't really expect this to be used in commercial settings but they do offer a little bit of warranty there's a year on everything else like the actual body of this only has a year warranty so it's not really built for commercial but it's a great place to get started if you only have you know 15 lawns in a day and four or five of them need a zero turn like a big mower you might wanna go with this there's only five thousand dollars in comparison to the bigger version which is literally double so great place to get started if you're just starting your business you need a commercial mower but you don't really have the money to spend ten thousand dollars go with the five thousand dollar version use this for a couple years grow up your clientele until you're actually using this consistently all day long and then you can upgrade let me show you now the stand on version which is also gonna run in that price range of five to six thousand dollars this is the gravely pro stance very similar in price but now instead of me sitting all day long i'm actually standing here on this platform it's called stand on mower what i really like about the stand on mowers is i can see all of my tires in my periphery vision so it's much less likely to back into things less likely to hit things accidentally like sprinkler heads so i really like this a little bit more wear and tear because i'm standing all day long however these platforms have great springs lots of suspension so as i'm going over bumps and things like that it's not going directly to my knees and my hips so again another option in that five to six thousand dollar range what's really cool about a stand on is it's a lot more compact than a zero turn a zero turn like this one much much more long a little bit wider whereas this is very compact and get in and out of backyard gates and it's just a great mower at that five to six thousand dollar range most stand on mowers when it comes to bagging has what's called a side discharge unit this is aluminum so it's relatively light and then you can just put it right back onto the mower deck and you're good to go so if you don't have the bag clippings don't have to worry about this but it's great for leaf collection as well as bagging clippings and the holes the perforation allows the air to get out and the grass clippings be caught inside the bag now let's go look at a sit down zero turn that cost ten thousand dollars so this is the gravely pro turn 152 so there's other higher even more expensive versions but the 152's the first commercial grade gravely mower that they make now this thing's gonna cost you nine thousand dollars to get started with this thing so if you're using this all day long on big properties this is going to be a slightly higher grade of material and quality compared to the five thousand 000 version there's more quality in the build the deck is thicker everything is just heavier duty everything from the bearings on the wheels to the motor power everything just built like a tank so you're gonna pay for it though we're looking at nine thousand dollars just for this mower you're going to be using this if you have properties that are consistently above half an acre an acre or larger this one's 52 inches wide you can get 60 inches or more but again the cost is going to go up so 9 000 is where we're starting with this guy now you can actually if you have a bagging system like the one over here it's actually going to run you an extra 1800 to 2 000 just to get this bagging system on here so at the end of the day this mower once you have a bagging system on it is literally going to cost you 11 000 plus tax after tax we're looking at 12 000 for this mower you can do the math on that and literally we're spending 30 times what our initial honda little push mower costs so the question is is it worth it is it worth getting a big mower like this it is if you're doing big properties you're consistently using it what i hate to see is having this twelve thousand dollar piece of equipment sitting on a trailer for you know eight out of ten hours on the on a day's worth of work your crew goes out for 10 hours and eight hours things are just sitting on the trailer this thing makes money when the blades are turning so if you have big properties lots of lawns tight routes getting this type of efficiency is gonna be much much better than getting a cheap mower but even this thing right here it's still literally four to five times more expensive than our 30 inch mower over here that's also commercial grade also has 30 inches of deck width but definitely is not going to be as fast or as efficient as a big zero turn so great this is a great mid-size mower we have our early adopter at the beginning if you're just getting started as the business grows and if you have large properties definitely moving to a zero turn is gonna be something you need to do in the future for your mowing setup i'm mike andes landscapebusinesscourse.com comment below which mower you're choosing to buy and why you love the brand that you currently use thank you so much we'll see you next video [Music] you

Channel: Mike Andes

Views: 215,037

Keywords: lawn care, lawn care business, mowing lawns, mowing franchise, lawn care franchise, agusta lawn care, augusta lawn care, augusta lawn care franchise, lawn care youtube, mowing, cutting grass, how to landscape, landscape business course, lawn care business course, mike andes, michael andes, mike andes podcast, lawn mowers, mower, mowers, gravely, lawn care equipment, choosing equipment, business advice, decision making, budget, exmark, honda, scag, push mower, zero turn

Id: tmHi4r3Txtg

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021