VJ is Back!
After having a 2 year break and stupidly selling most of my big gear I have decided to come back to mowing.
I had an operation after a burst appendix, a death in the family, relationship break down and depression which forced me to get out of the game and find a new job.
I ended up doing sales for solar. Although we were selling the genuine commercial gear, it has and always be a dirty industry. Being ripped off so many times by solar companies (and other sales based companies) and a poor job market in Townsville I decided to put all my skills and knowledge into starting my mowing business again. I did, however, get a lot of experience and life skills doing sales and being always in the deep end and fighting to put food in the table.
Back then, I was unorganised and reactive to what was happening. It wasn’t totally a bad thing as I can look back and see what worked and didn’t work. Using what I’ve learnt from sales and marketing and a whole lot of professional development resources, I am confident about starting a really amazing business once and for all.
Basically what I really liked about my old mowing run was that I had a compact run from 3 minutes to 10 minutes max. I see contractors doing 20-30 minute travel time in between regulars. That could add up to extra hours per day using extra fuel, paying for ‘windscreen’ time for offsiders.
Here is my new plan:
• 50-100 regulars in my suburb
• Rename my business that has the suburb name into it to make it more familiar to the area
• Learn to barter/trade to minimise financial overheads ie for trailer, massage, bookkeeping, marketing
• Concentrate on mowing mostly by aggressively marketing to lawn only houses (there’s nearly 2000 houses in the area that rarely have trees and maintenance heavy gardens. That means only get the best gear to the best that I know. This is to :
o Reduce the amount of equipment to bring as other jobs are not in high demand
o Eliminates rubbish and dump runs
o Outsource to other contractors in my network who love what I don’t like to do or they are better experience at it.
o I will however still get a basic hedge trimmer or chainsaw if needed
• Possibly get a large trailer for dump runs which will be a share ownership between me and a few contractors. My trailer will only carry the self propelled mower and ride on. My ute is a large xtra cab Hilux which has a large lockable styleside tub to keep all the equipment out of sight and my rig looks very neat.
At the moment, everything is on hold, but possibly be in operation in a week or 2. Everything is set in plan just waiting on a few things like my ute is at the panel beaters (long story), trailer is getting modified to have a tailgate ramp to make it easy to quickyl load/unload with ease, getting all my foundations solid and getting fit again.
Stay tuned and I’ll update more