Summer Job Mowing Lawns - Can you Earn a Laptop?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
3,568 words · ~17 min read
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it's summer you don't have a job but you need a laptop for school can you make
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enough dough mowing lawns that's what we're going to find out on this episode
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of laptop or Bust the vitess mouse from Phoenix
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features a lightweight design and an aago 3310 Optical sensor check it out at
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the link in the video description
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okay first up is lawn mower we've got a
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gas mower you can go electric or manual but Electric's going to slow you down
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and manual means you're going to have to rake up all the clippings as you go so
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ideally a gas mower is the uh way to be
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and then we have two weed whackers both of these are electric we don't need two
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we just have two because I guess we had them so we might as well bring them and
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a long extension cord cuz you don't know where people's Outlets are going to be
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yard bags and rakes this way we can take
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away any of the grass clippings that are left over from the uh weed whackers
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a broom for cleaning up the sidewalk cuz you don't want to leave people with grass covered sidewalks and a spare gas
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can so we can fill up the lawnmower extra trimmer line and a clipboard huh a
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fresh haircut and a clipboard says professionalism there's nothing on it
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but lots of water we're going to be in the sun we're both wearing pants it's
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going to get hot we're going to sweat a bunch going to need to rehydrate an
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entire pack of earplugs you know for
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hearing protection of all our ears and orices and uh a couple garbage bags just
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in case we got to haul some garbage away that's pretty much it let's get
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going now a car with a trailer for getting from job site to job site and
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Hauling equipment is ideal it increases
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your maximum range and means that you don't have to carry equipment with you
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while you're cold calling and knocking on doors but obviously if you're not
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able to borrow something like that that dramatically increases the cost of your
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business and may not be something that you can afford till a little bit later a
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good solution to this problem would be some type of wagon that you can fit your
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lawnmower in and ideally your weed whacker as well they're pretty cheap and
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you could just pull them from door too if you're somewhere in Suburbia walking
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from door to door isn't going to be that long anyways and it shouldn't be that
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hard to do so if there's anything that I learned from my days of
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painting counterintuitively you don't want to go after the people with the
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worst lawn because they probably don't
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give a rat and you definitely don't want to go
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after people with the most manicured lawn because they're probably doing it
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themselves or they have a professional service already this this is a prime
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candidate because it's a little bit on the long side there's some weeds in it
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so they're probably not doing it that regularly but you look at their house
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they have flowers or Christmas lights they don't completely not care so it's a
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good door to knock on I just pushed the clipboard under the mower Oh Come Out
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clipboard ow so what do you think for front front door should be be wearing
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our safety goggles I don't think we should be wearing our safety goggles
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whatever we do decide to wear on our face like I'm going to have my glasses
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in my pocket oh and gloves I want to have like strategically hanging out of
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my pocket so that it looks ah ready for
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use ready for use but I'm not doing it yet you have to pay me to put the gloves
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on uh all right okay yeah good call so I
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won't I think we should have the safety goggles with us though that looks really
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professional like having safety equipment like are sunglasses or safety
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cuz we're both going to be wearing the I plan to actually wear sunglasses but I
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wanted like the safety goggles to be kind of part of the uniform we can do
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that so I was just going to have my sunglasses kind of hanging out of my
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pocket and we don't want anything that covers up our super professional slogan
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yeah well I'm not hanging it from yeah
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yeah I know I know Wonderful naming choice I really wanted a w but Ivon
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screwed up the shirts like we mow your grass we mow your problems I got it
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okay all right it has been a long time
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since I have done like door to door sales me too you you have you have
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experienced my my door to door sales was like literally elementary school trying
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to get that thing from the flyer you actually did it
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professionally okay oh there's no cars in the driveways that's a bad sign
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there's another Pro tip for you guys car in the driveway means they're at home
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usually uh means someone's at home well that was
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anticlimactic I guess we'll move on to the next place then so that one
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unsurprisingly due to there being no cars in the driveway nobody home try the
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next one yep the next one with no cars in the
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driveway okay 0 for two now I remember
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why I hated door to door Sal we should also not spam people so we
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should bail
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okay what is it we're mowing lawns yep
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we're charging $30 we'll do it right now we've got all of our gear in our trailer
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it's just parked around the corner and uh that's pretty much the whole thing
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we're actually well what we're actually doing is we're creating a video about earning money in the summer as a student
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and we're evaluating different methods of doing it so today we're trying mowing
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lawns and uh that's pretty much all
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there is to say so that house did seem like they would have been interested and
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it did seem like we were going to get some work there but unfortunately they
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actually already have a company who's going to be coming and doing their la they just moved in so that would have
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been a prime candidate uh we're doing uh we're Lo M
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mowing lawn oh no you don't need it no okay thanks H hello we're uh mowing
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lawns it's $30 well we've got our gardener com you do nobody home son
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claims he already mowed the lawn I don't think his mom checked so we're already
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discovering that the right now nature of
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when we want to do The Lawns is a bit of a disadvantage we've had some people who
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I think would have been interested but just they're busy right now or they
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their lawn doesn't need to be mowed just yet but uh still feeling
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confident to make sure that we're on the same page uh we mow with the mower and
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then we go around with the weed whacker and do the edging and we will take away
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the clippings with us thank you very much all right let's do it well I was
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feeling a little discouraged before but
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um I mean hey we're seven eight houses
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in and uh hle 30 bucks I mean I think
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that that's a good competitive rate so you know I think we're uh I think we're
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being very fair about our rates let's just get our trailer of equipment pulled
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up here and we're ready to rock I'm excited yeah sure okay we'll be we'll be
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right back our trailer's just grabbing lunch so uh we'll be back in probably
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about 15 minutes okay thank you hi is your mom or
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your dad here oh hello my kids will know not to answer the door when I'm not home
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but you know whatever cold calling can be a bit of an emotional roller coaster
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so we went from being like depressed to we booked a job to now kind of nothing's
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happening so on the bright side at the rate we're going if you can book like
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three jobs a day if you were by yourself you'd at least be making minimum wage
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which is a whole lot better than no job at all anyway here's our equipment let's
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get going pro tip guys it's going to be
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hot it's not uncool to wear sunblock I
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mean it is if you wear it like this but but we all knew I was uncool
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already Pro tip have your gear ready including extension cords when you
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arrive at the person's house you don't want to look like an idiot standing outside untangling a cord that you could
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have had prepared before you showed
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up Pro tip so familiarize yourself with
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your equipment before you start this one is supposed to auto feed the filament
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but there's actually a manual Advance button here so uh I'm going to hand this
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back over to Luke and he should be uh should be ready to go with the full
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length of his cutting line as we said earlier we brought a lot of water I
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would also recommend trying to have something clipped to you being able to
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take sips and drinks as you go is pretty sweet then you don't have to stop
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working stopping working is bad
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Pro tip this guy has a pretty sweet car there's also rocks right next to grass
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right beside the pretty sweet car maybe don't do that maybe try to get them to
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move it first or just move on and tell them about it later on do not screw up
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the person's car or any property for that fact let's see how big the backyard
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is something I probably should have
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checked I never claimed to be a professional at this it's uh fairly
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large okay good little extras like walking around in the
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yard and picking up garbage or loose rocks might seem like they're cutting
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into your margins on the first job but remember guys going a little bit further
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could help onetime jobs turn into regular repeat business and for certain
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things like removing rocks from the lawn a you'll only have to do it once and B
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it keeps your equipment safe so it's not damaged and you can continue to well M
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on for the rest of the
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day so so there you have it it's an hour
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later we're sweatier we're dirtier and we are $30 Richard no this is not quite
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minimum wage here in Canada when you consider that there were two of us working here
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but we have cash in hand and we're ready to continue our day this is kind of a do
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as I say not as I do thing but make sure you're packing yourself a bag lunch it
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not only wastes money when you go out to eat like say for example at Subway but
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it wastes time that you could be spending knocking on doors or mowing
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lawns so last time we made the Mist M AK of giving our flat rate quote before we
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had seen the backyard yeah that was not
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great it was pretty messy and there was a lot of edging to do this time we plan
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to do the exact same thing because we're trying to make a video not create a
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lawnmowing business oh yeah something for you guys to consider we'll be right
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back after these messages you know what makes you look professional in addition
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10:34
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10:39
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the promo at the link in the video description hi there do you have a mom
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and dad here or something no all that work no it all that work okay I'll leave
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you alone thanks a lot hi there we're doing lawn mowing and Edge triming for
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30 bucks oh no no okay thank you thank
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you that one had a no soliciting sign uh we're doing lawn mowing and trimming you
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interested at no okay thank you it's been a while since we've got a bite make
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it uh we're doing lawn mowing and
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trimming and stuff maybe be ready for some nudity naked dude might answer the
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door you never know okay
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it is not going to be hard to do a fail Montage of my efforts
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here it's amazing I keep thinking wow we've been like at this all day you know
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we're going to run out of time but I think time just really drags when you're
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doing this cuz I'll look back and it's been like I think it's been an hour and
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it's been like 10 minutes this will be a lot of grass t
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do you think you could get closer to like a six out of 10
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creepy cuz right now you're at about an 11 Brandon so I guess I'm to believe
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that a house with literally five cars in
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the driveway in front of it has nobody
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home our recurring frustration for us today has been Prime candidates that are
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not home but again if this is something that you're doing on a longer term basis
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then you should definitely have a bunch of Flyers that you can leave on homes
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those kinds of follow-up leads will be incredibly valuable as you try and build
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your customer base over the course of the summer bunch more houses still no bites
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no call from lus so I'm assuming he's not doing any better either
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unfortunately so it hasn't been the most productive afternoon ever what we
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realized is that if you want to see
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every house walking is is fine because the distance between the houses actually
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isn't that far in a typical Suburban neighborhood but if you want to skip
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over the ones that are already perfectly manicured or where the owner obviously
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doesn't care then having a bit of a faster mode of transportation helps a
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lot I was able to hit probably three
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times to four times as many promising leads with a bike versus what I was able
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to do on foot so in spite of doing our marketing at what I would consider to be
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a suboptimal time of day in spite of not
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having any flyers or a phone number to give anyone to contact us back we still
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manag to book our second job of the day for this charming couple and uh it's
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time for us to get to work this pile of mushroom manure stays you have to pay
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money for this they don't want us to take it away they've just asked that we
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exercise you know Common Sense when it comes to where the obvious well
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apparently this was a problem with a previous Gardener this looks like a weed
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is not here is a rose bush that is going
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to be transplanted don't go in there okay uh cuz there are some flowers in
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there so she needs to weed okay I think we're clear so it's become obvious to us
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now looks like this job is going to take anywhere from 20 to 30% longer than our
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first one even though we quoted it the same cuz it's about the same square
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footage that it's going to take a little while to really get the hang of quoting
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these things at the very start of your Endeavor borrowing the client's
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lawnmower uh using a cheap lawn mower or borrowing one from a friend may be
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viable but if you're serious about doing this for the entire summer or even
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multiple Summers the main features that I look at from my experience are going
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to be the size of the cutting blade so
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the wider the better for large Lawns the smaller the less expensive and the
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better for tight Lawns with a lot of uh
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narrow places that you have to work as well as the grass bag on the back that
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saves you a lot of cleanup and the uh front wheeel drive gas
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assisted push I mean yeah it sounds kind of wussy but if you're doing this all
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day you'll thank
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yourself so there we have it in about 10
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man hours yeah so 5 hours each we made
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60 bucks which is going to be like under minimum wage for most people but that's
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also our first day first day um it
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assumes nothing about moving forward
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being able to bring people on as recurring customers so based on the
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interest that I had about that from people some people didn't want to talk
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to me about today but wanted to talk about I also had a lot of people that
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seemed like they would have been been open to us undercutting them on a
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recurring service but that doesn't make sense for us doing a one- day thing
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either so that could have been pretty good yep so based on our rough numbers
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it would take about 5 to six days to make back what we spent on our startup
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costs it would take about 2 and 1/2 to 3 weeks to make $1,000 for our back to
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school laptop and if we stuck with this
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for the entire summer we could expect to make about
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$3,500 assuming that the first couple weeks is like feet to the pavement
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running around cold calling like this and after that you have mostly recurring
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customers and assuming you can only do about 3 to four Lawns a day which which
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you can do more than that um and like
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the the last lawn we mowed we probably could have gotten his neighbors if we
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wanted to do recurring stuff as well so you can do more than that it depends on
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the density of the hoses and the density of the customers that you have and the
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other thing is once you're working on something weekly or even bi-weekly you
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won't run into something that's quite as far gone as that we could do that place
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in an hour which is what we estimated if it was in the condition that it would be
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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
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of my so overall laptop or bust yeah I'm
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going laptop yeah definitely a couple of them if you wanted that for some reason
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so thanks for watching this episode of laptop or bust I hope you guys enjoyed
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it please leave a comment letting us know what you thought this is a
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pretty different video for us so uh yeah
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let us know hit the like button all that good stuff and money
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we should go buy ourselves like some uh Slurpees or something we should all go
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up for Slurpees all right good work today everyone yeah