The mowing round that loses money between lawns

Two mowing rounds turning over the same amount a week do not sell for the same price. Benchmark Business, which brokers these sales, values a small round at 30 to 50 weeks of its average weekly cut, and its guide says the same weekly income from contracted clients in a small radius is valued differently from the same income spread across random work. A buyer knows what you already feel on a Thursday afternoon: the drive between lawns is the part of the day that earns nothing.

The useful part is that you can find the lawns doing it, one by one, and decide what to do with each.

Work out what each lawn really pays per hour

The price of a cut is not the number that matters. The number that matters is the price divided by all the time that lawn takes out of your day.

Take an example. A $50 cut that takes 30 minutes on site pays $100 an hour. If it also takes 20 minutes of driving to reach it from the previous lawn, it pays $60 an hour. Put two of those in a day and the day looks full while earning like a short one.

Count the drive from the previous lawn, not from home

A customer five minutes from home is cheap on a Monday when you start there, and expensive on a Wednesday when you reach them from the other side of town. Measure the drive as the round actually runs.

Count the tip run

A lawn that fills the trailer with clippings and forces a trip to drop green waste before the next job owns that trip. If a customer does not take the clippings in their own bin, the tip run is part of their cut.

Count the season

In the growing season a fortnightly lawn can take longer than a weekly one, because there is more to catch and more trips to empty the catcher. In winter, when customers stretch out to every three or four weeks, the time on site drops but the drive does not. A lawn that paid its way in November can be a loss in July.

Put the whole mowing round on a map

A spreadsheet of addresses hides the problem. A map shows it in seconds. Drop every regular customer onto a free map tool as a pin, and colour the pins by the day you do them.

Three things usually show up straight away:

• A pin sitting alone, well away from every other pin of its colour.
• Two colours overlapping in the same streets, so you drive to one suburb twice a week.
• A day whose pins run in a long line across the map rather than a tight group.

Decide what to do with each outlier

There are four honest options, and they are worth trying in this order.

1. Move the lawn to the day you are already in its suburb. Most customers care that the lawn is cut, not which weekday it happens.
2. Charge for the distance. A travel charge or a higher minimum for lawns outside your suburbs makes the drive pay for itself.
3. Hand it to an operator whose own round covers that area, and ask them to send you the strays they have in yours.
4. Let it go, with notice and a name to call.

The fourth feels like losing income. If the hour that lawn took is filled by a customer two doors from an existing one, it is the opposite.

Draw a line for new enquiries

Most rounds spread because every enquiry gets a yes. Write down the suburbs you work, and quote anything outside them at a price that covers the drive. Some of those customers will say no, which is the point.

GUS's guide to starting a lawn mowing business in Australia recommends keeping early work inside two or three suburbs and building groups of jobs within a few kilometres of each other. The same rule applies to a round that has been running for years. It is just harder to follow once the map is already messy.

Grow along the street

The cheapest new customer is next door to an existing one, because the drive to reach them is zero. The lawn you have just cut is the advertisement. A letterbox drop to the ten houses either side of a regular customer, done while the edges are still sharp, targets exactly the customers who make the round denser.

Then run each day in one direction. Start at the lawn furthest out and work back, or the other way, but do not cross the same main road three times. Once the pins for a day sit in a tight group, the order mostly sorts itself out.