Dad came home one day with a brand new shiny red 21” Toro push self-propelled lawnmower. I guess his old one died or something, I’m not sure, but all I can remember was that Dad explained to me and my brother that if we wanted to cut grass with the lawnmower commercially, then we had to make payments towards ownership. “A what? A loan?” I thought.
A short-term loan contract, “or agreement” as dad would say, was taken out from dad so Jason and I could go into business as a partnership. It was dad’s idea for us to work together. Form a business together and cut grass to pay him back for the lawn mower. Obviously, I wanted to make money, but I had never thought about the idea of partnering with my brother. But he did have a truck…so, why not, I told myself.
I was clearly the cheap labor, however this experience taught me that the harder I worked, the more I would get paid. J&M Lawn Service was formed by me and Jason. As brothers, our main goal was to make as much money as we could before Jason went away to college. The first yard was Stuart Bethea for $20. It was WAY too low, but we were trying to get out there. Now a days, I learned that that was called “buying the business.”
“Buying the Business” is where you put your price so low that you don’t make any money or might even lose money on the deal to get the business. You must start somewhere. That was the only job we did for $20. The next yard, we charged $25 for Mowing, edging, weed eating and blowing. We quickly got the word out in the neighborhood and were maintaining about five yards a week by the end of the first summer. In two years’, time, the business had accumulated over 12 regular accounts.
Jason had a small, red Ford Ranger and we would put the two push mowers perpendicular in the back of the truck, then we would lay the weed eater, edger and the hand blower in the back on top of the mowers. I don’t remember there being any truck magnets or flyers when we had it “J&M Lawn Service.” Most was spread slowly by word of mouth.
Dad was a kind of father who never missed an opportunity to teach us a and he made sure we put 10% away for Jason for keeping the books, 50% away for equipment and future repairs and then we would split the labor between the two of us laborers of the 40% remaining. We could not just split the money down the middle and put it in our pockets.
We were trained early on to squirrel money away for a rainy day. Dad would say “What happens when your lawn mower dies, and you have 12 homeowners looking at you wondering where you are? Boys, you have to have some money set aside to make repairs so you can get right back in the field and minimize downtime.”
That was a critical less learned from dad at such a early age and it was exactly what I needed to hear. After the second year in business, Jason left for Clemson. I pulled out a pencil box of cash from my desk drawer and bought him out and changed the name that day to Matt’s Lawn Service.
