TORO Grandstand VS FERRIS Soft Ride

[Music] hey guys Freddie here owner of lawn thumbs where I've grown this business from zero to over two million in revenue and I'm here to help you succeed so what I want to talk about today is efficiency with mowing I don't care how you cut it it's really hard to make a profit Mowing and I've been doing this for a long time we've got 400 or so accounts doing really good but one of the reasons for that success is because I have the most efficient setups and equipment that I could find for my guys in order to have efficiency you also need experienced people who know how to use these things and can make sure that they can do it without damaging property because what we're going to talk about today are grandstand mowers whether the Toro grandstand or the ferrous soft ride stand on both of these are the my choice mowers because with these they don't sit down they can hop on both and uh and just let the mower do a lot of the labor for them as far as walking we've had years where I've tried to save money by just going little mowers although those mowers aren't good the sustainability of my workers it was not good for that they were getting tired you know it was hard on them going up hills and working on them all day so I said you know what I want my workers to have a fun day at work I want them to do good so that's why I got them grandstands when we tested out one of these Ferris soft rides we did a demo again I always thank Ferris for letting me use the smoke use a mower like this and when I tested this out with the demo with one of my crew members he was in love with it and he's used these Grant these Toro grandstands in the past but once he started using this he fell in love with it and so I had to buy him one because he's such a good worker and I wanted to keep that efficiency going so one of the reasons why he prefers this mower over the Toro is because of how compact it is right so if you look at the tires and the front tires are really close to the deck whereas the Toro grandstand is not so close to the deck and that difference of I don't know I'll say three inches is huge when you're doing corners on properties so that's one of the things that he noticed on this on the soft ride here Ferris has this patented system here with the springs that I mean it basically absorbs your shock when you're when you're mowing which is kind of cool um not that it's a big difference here with the Toro grandstand um the thing is you will bounce on this one a little bit higher if you hit bumps but you know if you're used to this mower you don't know the difference so really these are both mowers that we use I'm happy with getting either one at this point it's which dealer has it available and and the price on a new one you know what kind of deals I get by buying bulk or Fleet in this case so I have a fleet account with Toro so they give me a really good deal and the ferris this mower is a little expensive side by side this one's this one's a little more expensive um but it doesn't really matter for me it just matters on the crew member which one they want one of the things that stands out right away when you look at this ferrous mower is the size of the tires I mean look at that compare that tire to this one it's a big difference it's almost three times the size so um I was reassured when I first demoed this mower that the size was actually going to help the rut situation on properties because of the width of the tire even on wet Lawns you kind of get a more balanced pass whereas this tire is kind of small so when it's when it's wet and you turn on a soggy part of the yard it kind of makes a dent a lot faster just because of how narrow the tire is and I have actually found that to be true I haven't had any issues with customers saying you know the tires on this thing to be honest with you because the machine is a little bit more compact than you know than in other machines that you sit down and stuff most customers don't really notice how big the tire is compared to another one because you usually don't have two machines right next to each other on the same property but this mower because of the tools that and not tools and on this Toro grandstand because of the parts are so available at my dealer where I go to that's why I love this machine and we've actually used this one this particular style of grandstand for so long that we actually have a lot of the parts too just from over the years finding you know something replacing something keeping it even though it's in good condition or buying belts hoses hydraulic hoses some of the screws and bolts I have a lot of these things extra I even have some of these blade buttons for spare sometimes those things kind of fuse out they're both great mowers they're easy to maintain one of the problems though since we're talking about maintenance on this ferrous it does not lift up all the way because of the soft drive it does have these wheels here to kind of keep you from falling the machine falling over you I don't it won't do it it it almost can't so when we lift this up this machine up we have to use a jack or get the Bobcat hook chains up right here and hold it up because because of the soft fried system you can't just lift it up and change the blades clean the machine like you can with the Toro grandstand the Toro Grand sand you lift up the the stand on pad and then from here you know it'll take a little bit of muscle but you can lift the machine up and it'll stand straight up and then you can take the blades off or clean the machine um another thing that you might want to know is this this is a 36 inch mower so is the ferrous both 36 inch mowers Toro actually discontinued the 40 inch mower in 2020 probably because of covid and getting parts I don't know the whole story but they discontinued the 40 inch so they now go from 36 all the way to 48 and I believe that's the same case with the ferris soft ride so with the 36 inch you get two blades and in the past when you could get the 40 inch mower it did have a stronger engine because you had three blades so in wet grass the 36 inch is not as powerful as a 40 inch or even a 48 inch or higher so it does have a smaller engine in that case but honestly it's very rare that it's it's a big issue like as far as thinking about your whole operation it doesn't really affect us we use the smaller mowers if we have to uh every once in a while just to get it short and then we'll use this the rest of the year so really it's a non-issue for us but it is something I wanted to point out we also have the deck shoots bolted shut on both of them so right here and over there so we can't put a bagger on them which is fine and if you've lift it up you'll notice that we have every blade area covered separately so it's got a full mulching kit on both of these and we covered the deck so we can't put a grass Chute on it but that's fine the reason for that is so that we don't bag this does a great job mulching sometimes you'll have to do two passes but again it's very rare and there are other attachments you could put underneath for the cross blades if you had to to mulch even better but we haven't done that we have had some requests with some of the workers so we may look into that this year they both hold a lot of gas here's the gas storage for the Toro and this one is right here too I believe they both have five gallons of storage available one thing I do love about the gas on the ferris is the cap in the hose here is so big so when you fill it up with gas you don't really have to worry about any drips from the gas gun because it will all go in there um whereas this one's a little smaller and you know sometimes you do lose a little bit of drips here and there when you're filling it up and when it when when it tops off a lot of times you will get some spillage because you're not really paying attention and the mouth is so small whereas that one's so big that you can kind of see when you get to the mouth with plenty of time to shut the gas off over here we've got the the hours this one's in the front easy to see I believe this one is as well the the only difference really here well there's there's a few differences here but the gas gauge is really far in there at first I thought that was I would say that was my initial complaint when I did my first review of this machine but the reason was so you can actually see the the gauge better and I think there might actually be another reason beyond that but I can't remember so the the handles here actually so it's got a brake system that's right here which you can't even turn the machine on if the brake is on and the other thing I wanted to point out is that I haven't used this machine in a while but to go forward this is this is adjustable this bar on the speed so if I wanted to go uh you know this all the way to the end goes as fast as you can go which I believe is six miles per hour on this machine but if I didn't want to go that fast and I wanted to kind of keep a safety guard on how my speed was I would bring the the speed bar back that way when you go like this when you when you go forward you're probably I'm just guessing you know you're probably a couple miles an hour slower and then all the way back and it's going as slow as the safety bar will let you go so that's kind of cool it doesn't have that on the Toro grandstand other than that everything else seems pretty standard I do like the handle on this Ferris a lot better it just feels easier to to raise and lower but you know this one's not very hard or again you wouldn't notice if you didn't have the two side by side the speed bar here or the handle grip bar you know just stays in place which is fine I don't have any issues with that I I know that the guy that uses that ferrous soft ride has used that speed bar adjustment periodically he tells me about it every once in a while and this one you can't do that so my guys that have used these grandstands exclusively don't know about that feature but you know I don't think it's really that important it's just a nice addition okay the PIN to raise this and lower it it's really easy to change right here so you can go from two inches all the way to four I'm gonna keep it at three to not mess with my guys adjustment setting and on this one I'm so used to it that it seems pretty easy in fact it it almost seems easier with the grandstand um because I'm so used to it but honestly because it's sideway like it's on the side there is a more susceptible to being dropped and lost if you're not really paying attention but honestly I think it's it's just as easy but if I had to pick one I think that I would like the ferrous adjustment setting a little better since it's up and down rather than on the side okay these both have the Kawasaki engine I don't really need to go into that into what the specs of the machine are other than it's the way to go combine that with the with the custom bed where they can drive straight up and put everything away it's a winning combination for efficiency professionalism it looks the part when you're on a property and that's really important for me and to make sure the brand stands out so those are some of the things I recommend and I just wanted to show you what I've got and hopefully that inspires you to maybe look into this if this helped you out guys subscribe like put in the comments what you think and let me know and I'll catch you on the next one foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: Lawn Thumbs

Views: 15,351

Keywords: Lawn Care, Lawn Mowing, Lawn Care Business, Lawn Mowing Business, Mower Reviews, Fertilizing, Lawn & Garden Company, Tips for Lawn Care, Lawn Care Marketing, Landscaping, Landscaping Business, Gardening, Gardening Business, top 5, Entrepreneur, Startup, Fertilizing mix

Id: 91_BzLVHgSw

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023