it's summer you don't have a job but you need a laptop for school can you make
enough dough mowing lawns that's what we're going to find out on this episode
of laptop or Bust the vitess mouse from Phoenix
features a lightweight design and an aago 3310 Optical sensor check it out at
the link in the video description
okay first up is lawn mower we've got a
gas mower you can go electric or manual but Electric's going to slow you down
and manual means you're going to have to rake up all the clippings as you go so
ideally a gas mower is the uh way to be
and then we have two weed whackers both of these are electric we don't need two
we just have two because I guess we had them so we might as well bring them and
a long extension cord cuz you don't know where people's Outlets are going to be
yard bags and rakes this way we can take
away any of the grass clippings that are left over from the uh weed whackers
a broom for cleaning up the sidewalk cuz you don't want to leave people with grass covered sidewalks and a spare gas
can so we can fill up the lawnmower extra trimmer line and a clipboard huh a
fresh haircut and a clipboard says professionalism there's nothing on it
but lots of water we're going to be in the sun we're both wearing pants it's
going to get hot we're going to sweat a bunch going to need to rehydrate an
entire pack of earplugs you know for
hearing protection of all our ears and orices and uh a couple garbage bags just
in case we got to haul some garbage away that's pretty much it let's get
going now a car with a trailer for getting from job site to job site and
Hauling equipment is ideal it increases
your maximum range and means that you don't have to carry equipment with you
while you're cold calling and knocking on doors but obviously if you're not
able to borrow something like that that dramatically increases the cost of your
business and may not be something that you can afford till a little bit later a
good solution to this problem would be some type of wagon that you can fit your
lawnmower in and ideally your weed whacker as well they're pretty cheap and
you could just pull them from door too if you're somewhere in Suburbia walking
from door to door isn't going to be that long anyways and it shouldn't be that
hard to do so if there's anything that I learned from my days of
painting counterintuitively you don't want to go after the people with the
worst lawn because they probably don't
give a rat and you definitely don't want to go
after people with the most manicured lawn because they're probably doing it
themselves or they have a professional service already this this is a prime
candidate because it's a little bit on the long side there's some weeds in it
so they're probably not doing it that regularly but you look at their house
they have flowers or Christmas lights they don't completely not care so it's a
good door to knock on I just pushed the clipboard under the mower Oh Come Out
clipboard ow so what do you think for front front door should be be wearing
our safety goggles I don't think we should be wearing our safety goggles
whatever we do decide to wear on our face like I'm going to have my glasses
in my pocket oh and gloves I want to have like strategically hanging out of
my pocket so that it looks ah ready for
use ready for use but I'm not doing it yet you have to pay me to put the gloves
on uh all right okay yeah good call so I
won't I think we should have the safety goggles with us though that looks really
professional like having safety equipment like are sunglasses or safety
cuz we're both going to be wearing the I plan to actually wear sunglasses but I
wanted like the safety goggles to be kind of part of the uniform we can do
that so I was just going to have my sunglasses kind of hanging out of my
pocket and we don't want anything that covers up our super professional slogan
yeah well I'm not hanging it from yeah
yeah I know I know Wonderful naming choice I really wanted a w but Ivon
screwed up the shirts like we mow your grass we mow your problems I got it
okay all right it has been a long time
since I have done like door to door sales me too you you have you have
experienced my my door to door sales was like literally elementary school trying
to get that thing from the flyer you actually did it
professionally okay oh there's no cars in the driveways that's a bad sign
there's another Pro tip for you guys car in the driveway means they're at home
usually uh means someone's at home well that was
anticlimactic I guess we'll move on to the next place then so that one
unsurprisingly due to there being no cars in the driveway nobody home try the
next one yep the next one with no cars in the
driveway okay 0 for two now I remember
why I hated door to door Sal we should also not spam people so we
should bail
okay what is it we're mowing lawns yep
we're charging $30 we'll do it right now we've got all of our gear in our trailer
it's just parked around the corner and uh that's pretty much the whole thing
we're actually well what we're actually doing is we're creating a video about earning money in the summer as a student
and we're evaluating different methods of doing it so today we're trying mowing
lawns and uh that's pretty much all
there is to say so that house did seem like they would have been interested and
it did seem like we were going to get some work there but unfortunately they
actually already have a company who's going to be coming and doing their la they just moved in so that would have
been a prime candidate uh we're doing uh we're Lo M
mowing lawn oh no you don't need it no okay thanks H hello we're uh mowing
lawns it's $30 well we've got our gardener com you do nobody home son
claims he already mowed the lawn I don't think his mom checked so we're already
discovering that the right now nature of
when we want to do The Lawns is a bit of a disadvantage we've had some people who
I think would have been interested but just they're busy right now or they
their lawn doesn't need to be mowed just yet but uh still feeling
confident to make sure that we're on the same page uh we mow with the mower and
then we go around with the weed whacker and do the edging and we will take away
the clippings with us thank you very much all right let's do it well I was
feeling a little discouraged before but
um I mean hey we're seven eight houses
in and uh hle 30 bucks I mean I think
that that's a good competitive rate so you know I think we're uh I think we're
being very fair about our rates let's just get our trailer of equipment pulled
up here and we're ready to rock I'm excited yeah sure okay we'll be we'll be
right back our trailer's just grabbing lunch so uh we'll be back in probably
about 15 minutes okay thank you hi is your mom or
your dad here oh hello my kids will know not to answer the door when I'm not home
but you know whatever cold calling can be a bit of an emotional roller coaster
so we went from being like depressed to we booked a job to now kind of nothing's
happening so on the bright side at the rate we're going if you can book like
three jobs a day if you were by yourself you'd at least be making minimum wage
which is a whole lot better than no job at all anyway here's our equipment let's
get going pro tip guys it's going to be
hot it's not uncool to wear sunblock I
mean it is if you wear it like this but but we all knew I was uncool
already Pro tip have your gear ready including extension cords when you
arrive at the person's house you don't want to look like an idiot standing outside untangling a cord that you could
have had prepared before you showed
up Pro tip so familiarize yourself with
your equipment before you start this one is supposed to auto feed the filament
but there's actually a manual Advance button here so uh I'm going to hand this
back over to Luke and he should be uh should be ready to go with the full
length of his cutting line as we said earlier we brought a lot of water I
would also recommend trying to have something clipped to you being able to
take sips and drinks as you go is pretty sweet then you don't have to stop
working stopping working is bad
Pro tip this guy has a pretty sweet car there's also rocks right next to grass
right beside the pretty sweet car maybe don't do that maybe try to get them to
move it first or just move on and tell them about it later on do not screw up
the person's car or any property for that fact let's see how big the backyard
is something I probably should have
checked I never claimed to be a professional at this it's uh fairly
large okay good little extras like walking around in the
yard and picking up garbage or loose rocks might seem like they're cutting
into your margins on the first job but remember guys going a little bit further
could help onetime jobs turn into regular repeat business and for certain
things like removing rocks from the lawn a you'll only have to do it once and B
it keeps your equipment safe so it's not damaged and you can continue to well M
on for the rest of the
day so so there you have it it's an hour
later we're sweatier we're dirtier and we are $30 Richard no this is not quite
minimum wage here in Canada when you consider that there were two of us working here
but we have cash in hand and we're ready to continue our day this is kind of a do
as I say not as I do thing but make sure you're packing yourself a bag lunch it
not only wastes money when you go out to eat like say for example at Subway but
it wastes time that you could be spending knocking on doors or mowing
lawns so last time we made the Mist M AK of giving our flat rate quote before we
had seen the backyard yeah that was not
great it was pretty messy and there was a lot of edging to do this time we plan
to do the exact same thing because we're trying to make a video not create a
lawnmowing business oh yeah something for you guys to consider we'll be right
back after these messages you know what makes you look professional in addition
to a clean haircut and a clipboard a clean shave and if you're a member of
Dollar Shave Club you can have one affordably and comfortably every day of
the week just by being a member Dollar Shave Club delivers razors and other
highquality bathroom supplies directly to your door once per month and you get
to save money and speaking of saving money they've actually got a special
offer right now you can get a free month of the executive razor when you buy a
tube of Dr Carver shave butter this is the first time they've ever done a promo
like this and once you try Dollar Shave Club you'll be a proud member like
millions of others I guess the reason
they're doing it is they figure once you try Dr Carver shave butter you'll be
hooked it's got a conditioning formula made of high quality natural ingredients
and leaves your skin soft and smooth not to mention it goes on clear so you can
actually see what you're doing Dollar Shave Club also has their one WIP
Charlie's peppermint scented butt wipes from men and their After Shave and it's
available in the US Canada and Australia so go check it out and take advantage of
the promo at the link in the video description hi there do you have a mom
and dad here or something no all that work no it all that work okay I'll leave
you alone thanks a lot hi there we're doing lawn mowing and Edge triming for
30 bucks oh no no okay thank you thank
you that one had a no soliciting sign uh we're doing lawn mowing and trimming you
interested at no okay thank you it's been a while since we've got a bite make
it uh we're doing lawn mowing and
trimming and stuff maybe be ready for some nudity naked dude might answer the
door you never know okay
it is not going to be hard to do a fail Montage of my efforts
here it's amazing I keep thinking wow we've been like at this all day you know
we're going to run out of time but I think time just really drags when you're
doing this cuz I'll look back and it's been like I think it's been an hour and
it's been like 10 minutes this will be a lot of grass t
do you think you could get closer to like a six out of 10
creepy cuz right now you're at about an 11 Brandon so I guess I'm to believe
that a house with literally five cars in
the driveway in front of it has nobody
home our recurring frustration for us today has been Prime candidates that are
not home but again if this is something that you're doing on a longer term basis
then you should definitely have a bunch of Flyers that you can leave on homes
those kinds of follow-up leads will be incredibly valuable as you try and build
your customer base over the course of the summer bunch more houses still no bites
no call from lus so I'm assuming he's not doing any better either
unfortunately so it hasn't been the most productive afternoon ever what we
realized is that if you want to see
every house walking is is fine because the distance between the houses actually
isn't that far in a typical Suburban neighborhood but if you want to skip
over the ones that are already perfectly manicured or where the owner obviously
doesn't care then having a bit of a faster mode of transportation helps a
lot I was able to hit probably three
times to four times as many promising leads with a bike versus what I was able
to do on foot so in spite of doing our marketing at what I would consider to be
a suboptimal time of day in spite of not
having any flyers or a phone number to give anyone to contact us back we still
manag to book our second job of the day for this charming couple and uh it's
time for us to get to work this pile of mushroom manure stays you have to pay
money for this they don't want us to take it away they've just asked that we
exercise you know Common Sense when it comes to where the obvious well
apparently this was a problem with a previous Gardener this looks like a weed
is not here is a rose bush that is going
to be transplanted don't go in there okay uh cuz there are some flowers in
there so she needs to weed okay I think we're clear so it's become obvious to us
now looks like this job is going to take anywhere from 20 to 30% longer than our
first one even though we quoted it the same cuz it's about the same square
footage that it's going to take a little while to really get the hang of quoting
these things at the very start of your Endeavor borrowing the client's
lawnmower uh using a cheap lawn mower or borrowing one from a friend may be
viable but if you're serious about doing this for the entire summer or even
multiple Summers the main features that I look at from my experience are going
to be the size of the cutting blade so
the wider the better for large Lawns the smaller the less expensive and the
better for tight Lawns with a lot of uh
narrow places that you have to work as well as the grass bag on the back that
saves you a lot of cleanup and the uh front wheeel drive gas
assisted push I mean yeah it sounds kind of wussy but if you're doing this all
day you'll thank
yourself so there we have it in about 10
man hours yeah so 5 hours each we made
60 bucks which is going to be like under minimum wage for most people but that's
also our first day first day um it
assumes nothing about moving forward
being able to bring people on as recurring customers so based on the
interest that I had about that from people some people didn't want to talk
to me about today but wanted to talk about I also had a lot of people that
seemed like they would have been been open to us undercutting them on a
recurring service but that doesn't make sense for us doing a one- day thing
either so that could have been pretty good yep so based on our rough numbers
it would take about 5 to six days to make back what we spent on our startup
costs it would take about 2 and 1/2 to 3 weeks to make $1,000 for our back to
school laptop and if we stuck with this
for the entire summer we could expect to make about
$3,500 assuming that the first couple weeks is like feet to the pavement
running around cold calling like this and after that you have mostly recurring
customers and assuming you can only do about 3 to four Lawns a day which which
you can do more than that um and like
the the last lawn we mowed we probably could have gotten his neighbors if we
wanted to do recurring stuff as well so you can do more than that it depends on
the density of the hoses and the density of the customers that you have and the
other thing is once you're working on something weekly or even bi-weekly you
won't run into something that's quite as far gone as that we could do that place
in an hour which is what we estimated if it was in the condition that it would be
in a week from now well especially cuz I wouldn't have had to spend any time on the driveway yep and that took so much
of my so overall laptop or bust yeah I'm
going laptop yeah definitely a couple of them if you wanted that for some reason
so thanks for watching this episode of laptop or bust I hope you guys enjoyed
it please leave a comment letting us know what you thought this is a
pretty different video for us so uh yeah
let us know hit the like button all that good stuff and money
we should go buy ourselves like some uh Slurpees or something we should all go
up for Slurpees all right good work today everyone yeah