You work for yourself, on your own prices, with your own customers ringing your own phone. The way in costs about what a good second-hand mower does, not the $16,000 the franchises are asking.
Free area check. One licence per area — ring me and I will tell you straight whether your suburb is still open.
Half of it goes straight back out into your own Google Ads.
And their headline price is not their price. One is $20,000, and then another $12,000 for the gear on top. Another sits at $16,000 with the tools and equipment bought separately again. Here is the same page you have been looking at, drawn to scale.
That is a real line from a real listing on the same page. It is not a business. It is a wage with a buy-in.
This is the other way round. You invoice your own customers. The money comes to you. If you ever walk away, you keep every client you built.
One deliverable per obstacle. Every part carries its own weight.
$2,000 + GST, once, and half of it — $1,000 — goes straight back out into your own Google Ads. There is no $12,000 gear package bolted on at franchise prices. You buy your own van and your own mower, at your price, and you own the lot.
You invoice your own customers and the money comes to you. The $200 + GST a month is a flat fee for the marketing and that is the whole of it. No royalty, no percentage, no call centre clipping every job. Mow $500 a week or $5,000 a week and the $200 does not move.
You trade as Gecko Lawns with your suburb on the end. Your own domain, your own website with your name, your suburb and your phone number on it, and your own Google Business Profile set up and verified. That is what puts you in the map when someone searches your street.
$1,000 of your joining fee runs Google Ads at about $3 a day for 10 months. Switched on the day you tell me you are ready to mow, not the day you sign, so you are not paying for calls you cannot service yet.
Then the handoff. By month ten your website and your Google profile are ranking on their own, so the ads switch off and the leads keep coming.
Site, listing, citations built by hand in every NZ directory, review chasing and rank tracking. That is what the $200 + GST a month is. You never open a dashboard. No contract, stop any time.
Quoting guide, phone scripts, insurance, invoices, business structure, artwork for the van and the cards. What I worked out the slow way, written down in order.
Here is how it usually goes. A bloke mows the same lawns for ten or fifteen years. He gets full, he is happy, and he never touches his prices. Then he wants out, and he rings me to help him sell it — and most of the time I have to tell him I cannot. His prices are a decade old. The work is there but the money is not, and nobody wants to buy it.
I worked out a way around that. I call it the traffic light system. It starts the day you are full, and it is the difference between a round that stands still for fifteen years and one that gets better every single year.
I am not going to write the method out on a web page. Ring me and I will walk you through it.
Call 027 487 1518
You are sending $2,000 to a bloke in Hamilton you have never met. So I will go first.
Your own domain and your own website — your name, your suburb and your phone number on it — live within 7 days of you paying. If it is not up on day 7, ring me and I will refund the $2,000 in full. No forms and no argument.
All I need from you is your trading name, your suburb and your phone number on the day you pay. That is one text message. The 7 days start from there.
What I am not promising, so you know where you stand. How many lawns you win. That is down to you answering the phone and quoting the work, and no honest man can guarantee it. I also will not promise you a date on your Google profile, because Google sets that timing, not me. About nine out of ten of the profiles I build are live within 5 days. The website is entirely mine to deliver, so that is the one I am putting my money behind.
Everything in the six parts above, for the number beside this. No royalty and no percentage of what you earn, ever. It is not everything you will spend to get on the road, though, and the next section is the rest of it in full.
Ring first — the area check is free.
Website live in 7 days or your money back.
The licence is not the only thing you pay for. Nobody selling you a lawn business puts this bit in writing, so here it is. These are the numbers I would give you on the phone.
So call it about $5,150 plus a van to be trading. The cheapest franchise on Trade Me is $16,000, and most of those make you buy the gear as well — one of them is $20,000 and then another $12,000 for the equipment. The difference is not that you avoid these costs. It is that you buy your own gear at your own price, you own it, and nobody is charging you a franchise margin on a mower.
You keep every client you built. Every one of them, to keep or to sell. You give up the website, the Google profile and the Gecko Lawns name, so you would rebrand — and I would rather you knew that now than found it out at signing.
It is not the disaster it sounds like, either. That is how you finish. When you are done, you call it Sam’s Lawns, you stop paying the $200, and you keep mowing your own book. The Gecko slot goes to the next bloke who wants a go at it.
No. Nothing stops you mowing where you like. What points at your 5km is the marketing — the site, the listing and the ads — because that is where a local listing ranks and where the money is. A job 25 minutes away has spent its profit on the drive.
My own Gecko Lawns profile brings in 2 to 3 a week, all year round. That is what a properly set-up listing does once it is ranking, and it does not stop when winter comes. I am not going to put a revenue figure next to it. The ones who guarantee you an income can do that because they own the client.
A van, a mower, a line trimmer and a blower — about $2,500 for the gear. We just run vans, so there is no trailer to tow. Get one with a towbar if you are thinking about tree work as well. You do not need a ride-on either: my own round is built on small lawns at a $35 minimum, a lot of them done in 10 to 20 minutes.
No. You need to be reliable. Turn up on the day you said, do a tidy job, answer your phone. That beats flash every time, and the quoting guide and phone scripts in the pack cover the rest. All I ask is that you do the work properly, because other men will be trading under the same name.
One licence per area. Ringing is faster and you will get me. If it is after hours, leave your details and I will come back to you.
Call 027 487 1518“If your area will not work, I will say so. I would rather tell you now than take your money.”
— Stuart Clifford
Your own website, your own verified Google profile, and $1,000 of ads running from the week you are ready — for $2,000 + GST, when the next cheapest one on Trade Me is $16,000. Your customers, your prices, your money.
Call 027 487 1518Stuart Clifford · Hamilton · the area check is free
