The Lawn Squad Case Study

Back in 2012, when I was unsure of the success of my storage venture, I casted a few other nets. One of them was a Lawn Care google place and wordpress website with a few pages. As you know I had mowed a few lawns in high school so I got a few of those old customers to leave me Google Reviews.

I then forgot about the site. Each week during the spring I would ignore a few calls coming to my cell phone from that Google Place.

My brother decided to take over the website and give it a shot. The site was actually lost when I forget to pay for hosting so he started over and built this. An even crappier website.

In May of 2017 he started answering the calls and started slowly adding clients. He bought a mower. He bought a nice 2009 Ford F150 with 50k miles on it for $7900 in the spring of 2018 using this guide. He bought a used mower for $5k that a guy had bought for $12k two years (and only 60 hours) prior.

In 2017 he did about $10k in revenue and had 15 solid clients on a bi-weekly schedule by the end of the year.

In 2018 that turned into $30k in revenue (about 20k profit) and 32 solid clients. This is with no adwords. No advertising. He was a full time student and and athlete at Indiana University in Bloomington.

December of 2018 I got him a little excited and he decided to get his herbicide / pesticide applicators license. Studied a few hours each week, took the two day course and three weeks later he passed both tests in the 90th percentile.

Yesterday we bought the X Theme on wordpress and built this site using Cornerstone (a free page builder that comes with the theme) and some stock images we found for free online. We got the logo done in 2 days on Fiverr for $49. He got a student version of Adobe Illustrator and put together all the graphics.

Follow along here as he works through this checklist and lets see how far he gets this year.

Don't know where to start?
About Me

I started the Sweaty Startup in December of 2018 because I believe the Shark Tank and Tech Crunch culture is ruining the real spirit of low-risk entrepreneurship.