Is it just me, or does the noise from lawn care equipment seem really bothersome to you also? Many people are bothered by loud lawnmowers, leaf blowers, mulchers and other equipment. Yet they feel the noise is inevitable. It is not!
The latest battery-powered electric lawnmowers can be much quieter. I’m sure one who looks around or is willing to do some of their own mechanical work can come up with much quieter lawn care equipment. Then it is a simple matter to advertise that you’re doing quiet lawn care. You should have a full clientele in no time!
Perhaps your quiet lawn business can grow to the point where you have 800 employees throughout the country or maybe even throughout the world.
You might enjoy this bit of background information: One of my first businesses was quiet lawn care. When I was fourteen years old, my neighbor across the street had a go-kart. I, being a typical kid of the era was green with envy. I wanted some sort of engine-powered ride also. But even then, I though of the go-kart as silly entertainment. I wanted a machine that could do something. So, I asked my father to lend me the money for a riding mower.
He bought me a Toro 500 lawn tractor. I immediately went around the neighborhood and set up weekly lawn care jobs. I was able to pay my dad back half-way through the first summer.
Now, my neighbor’s go-kart was much faster than my Toro, which went 5.4 miles per hour (8.6 kph) in high gear and that bothered me. Plus, it took ages to drive to lawns a few blocks away. I learned that I could replace the pulleys between the engine and the transmission, and managed to make that Toro go 25 mph (40 kph) in high gear, while low gear was still slow enough to properly mow lawns. It was a terribly dangerous thing to do, but I survived.
I found that in my community, whereas no 14-year-old boy could legally drive o go-kart, there was a brilliant legal exception: Farm equipment was legal on the streets without any sort of license or age restriction. So, my little Toro mower was technically a farm tractor as far as I was concerned. I don’t know whether a policeman would have bought that argument, but I was never stopped.
If you’re astute, you’ve already picked up on the part of this story that doesn’t yet fit. You see, my Toro was terribly loud, like all lawn care equipment of the era.
One day, while mowing a lawn, a neighbor beckoned me over. I rode my mower over to her, and shut off the engine so I could hear what she was saying. She complained that my little tractor was way too loud. I had to agree. It was so loud it was even bothering me. Leaving her in high gear with the engine near idle speed to be as quiet as I could, I went home and stuffed the muffler with coarse steel wool. Suddenly the little tractor made 1/10 the amount of noise. I was so pleased!
One problem remained: Every now and then, the steel wool would catch fire, blowing a remarkable shower of sparks out the exhaust pipe. I learned to carry spare steel wool and re-stuff the muffler from time to time.
After two summers, winter came, and I bought a snow plow attachment for the little tractor. I figured I could continue to make money by clearing driveways. However, the tractor was too light-duty to do the job. That’s when I gave up lawn care and moved into another business, photography, which I have described elsewhere.
So, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
For the general business information about how to start and build a quiet lawn-care business, see General Business Action Pack.
To promote your business, you’ll probably want a website and some reasonably priced marketing. You’ll have to be careful because there are a lot of bad players in the business: People Being Cheated in Website Development, SEO and Promotion.
See also, Green Lawn Service.
