Consolidate Your Lawn Mowing Round: Earn More Without Working More Hours

Most lawn guys who want more money do the same thing. They take on more lawns and work longer days.

That works for a while. Then you’re mowing six days a week, eating lunch in the van, and the bank account still doesn’t look like it should.

The problem usually isn’t the number of lawns. It’s where they are. Every minute you spend driving between jobs is a minute nobody is paying you for.

Consolidating your round fixes that. Same hours, more lawns in them, more money at the end of the week. My own round turns over about $2,000 a week on roughly 20 hours, and the main reason is that the lawns sit close together. Here is how to do it.

The short answer

• Drive time is unpaid time. A spread-out round can drag a $60 an hour charge-out rate down to about $50 an hour once travel is counted.
• Aim for lawns no more than 7 or 8 minutes apart. That’s the rule I run my own rounds on.
• Split your round into 4 or 5 areas, one per day. Monday is one suburb, Tuesday the next.
• Swap your worst lawns, don’t just add more. The far-away, low-paying ones go first. One a week is plenty.
• Grow in the streets you already mow. The best new lawn is next door to one you already do.

Where your money is really going

Think about a normal day. You leave home, drive to the first lawn, mow it, load up, and drive to the next one. Somewhere in there you fuel up, dump clippings and take a call for a quote.

You only get paid for the time the mower is running. Everything else is downtime: driving, loading, unloading, fuel stops, dumping, chasing money.

Most of that you can’t avoid. Driving you can.

Say you charge $60 an hour for the time on the lawn. If you spend an extra 10 or 15 minutes on the road between every job, your real rate for the day sinks closer to $50 an hour. You worked just as hard. You just spent more of it sitting in traffic.

Now picture a round where your next lawn is two doors down. You finish, push the mower along the footpath, and start again. No van, no traffic, no fuel. That’s the round you’re building towards.

If you don’t know how much of your week goes on driving, track one week. A free timer app like Toggl does the job. Start it when you leave a lawn, stop it when you arrive at the next. Most people are shocked by the total.

More: The best way to plan my daily lawn care route

The maths on a tight round

Here is a made-up round to show how it works. Plug your own numbers in.

40 regular lawns, $40 each, about 25 minutes of work per lawn.

• Spread out: 15 minutes driving between lawns. That’s 40 minutes per lawn, start to finish. 40 lawns take about 27 hours. You earn $1,600, which is about $60 an hour.
• Consolidated: 7 minutes driving between lawns. That’s 32 minutes per lawn. The same 40 lawns take about 21 hours. Same $1,600, now about $75 an hour.

You just got back about 5 hours a week. Fill those hours with 10 more lawns in the same streets and you’re turning over $2,000 a week in the same 27 hours you were already working.

And that’s before the fuel you’re not burning, and the wear on the van you’re not paying for.

Want to see how many lawns your own week can hold? Try my free route capacity calculator.

Step 1: Put every lawn on a spreadsheet

You can’t tighten a round you can’t see. Put every customer on one spreadsheet. One row per lawn, with these columns:

• Customer and address
• Suburb
• Day you mow it
• Price per mow
• Average time for the whole stop, including the drive. Time it every visit for a few weeks and take the average. One visit tells you nothing. Long grass after rain or a wet day throws it out.
• Hourly rate: price divided by average time. Let the spreadsheet work it out.
• Distance from your place. Put the address into Google Maps, get directions from home, and type in the kilometres (or miles).

Now sort it by distance from your house, furthest away at the top down to the nearest. Most people see the same thing straight away: most lawns sit in a few close-in suburbs, and a handful are way out on their own at the top of the list. Those far ones are where your time is going.

Step 2: Give every area a day

Split your list into 4 or 5 areas. Use suburbs, main roads or rivers as the borders. Then give each area its own day.

Monday is the north side. Tuesday is the next suburb over. And so on.

Now you only drive across town once a day: to your first lawn in the morning. After that you’re hopping a few streets at a time.

Each morning I plan the day’s order with a free route tool called RouteXL. Paste the addresses in, set the start and finish, and it works out the order. Then I tweak it with what I know about the area, like which road is jammed at school time.

Customers need to fit your days, not the other way round. If someone wants Thursday and Thursday is the other side of town, they get your day for their area. Most people don’t mind at all once you explain it.

More: How many lawns can you mow in a day?

Step 3: Find your worst lawns

Now use the spreadsheet to find the lawns that cost you the most. Your list is already sorted by distance from your house. Look at the hourly rate on the lawns at the top. Most of the furthest ones also have the worst hourly rate, because the drive is eating the price.

Then sort by hourly rate, lowest first, and look again. A lawn that shows up near the top of both lists is your first one to fix.

I run this as a traffic light system in Excel. Green lawns pay well and sit close in. Red lawns pay badly, sit out on their own, or both.

The red ones are where you start. A far-away lawn that pays well might be worth keeping. A far-away lawn that also pays badly is costing you money every single visit.

More: Are you charging enough for your lawns?

Step 4: Swap them, one a week

This is where people get it wrong. They drop five lawns in one go and then panic about the gap.

Don’t do that. Swap, don’t cut. One lawn a week is plenty.

For each red lawn you have three choices:

1. Raise the price. If the lawn is far away, the price should cover the drive. Tell them the new price. If they stay, it’s now a green lawn. If they leave, you have your time back.
2. Sell it. Another lawn business whose round runs past that street might want it. This August I sold 30 lawns from my own round to another local lawn business for $7,200. That’s $240 a lawn for work I wanted gone anyway.
3. Let it go. If nobody wants it and the customer won’t pay more, give them plenty of notice and pass on the name of someone who services their area.

Each time one goes, fill the slot with a new lawn inside one of your areas. That way your income never dips. It just moves to better lawns.

When you sell lawns, do it properly. I ring every customer to tell them who’s taking over and when, then the new owner and I meet them in person. Buyers lose hardly any customers that way.

More: How to value and sell a lawn care business

Step 5: Fill the streets you already mow

Once your areas are set, change how you take on new work. The best new lawn is one you can push the mower to.

• Quote inside your areas first. A lawn on a street you already mow is worth more to you than the same lawn across town, even at the same price.
• Charge more outside them. If someone outside your areas really wants you, the price has to cover the drive. If they say no, that’s fine.
• Pass on the rest. I sell the leads I can’t service to other lawn businesses for $20 each. Even if you don’t sell them, handing them to someone in that area builds goodwill.
• Market where you already are. Drop flyers on the neighbours of the lawns you mow. Your signwritten van parked outside a fresh-cut lawn is the best ad on that street.
• Ask your customers. A happy customer telling the neighbour over the fence is how clusters grow on their own.

More: Lawn care flyers that work and Setting up a lawn care referral program

Mistakes that undo all of this

• Saying yes to everything. Every lawn across town you take on “because it’s money” drags your hourly rate down for every other lawn that day.
• Cutting too many lawns at once. Swap one a week. A big gap in your week is stressful and hard to fill.
• Letting customers pick their own day. You decide the day. They pick whether they want the service.
• Only looking at price. A $50 lawn 20 minutes away can earn less per hour than a $35 lawn next door to another job.
• Forgetting what it does to the value of your round. When you sell, buyers pay more for tight rounds. Lawns 15 or more minutes apart pull the price down.

Do today: open a spreadsheet and list every lawn you mow, with its price and its distance from your place. Sort it furthest to nearest. Start timing each lawn this week. The three at the top with the worst hourly rate are your swap list for the next three weeks.

Frequently asked questions

What does consolidating a lawn mowing round mean?

It means getting your lawns closer together so you spend less time driving and more time mowing. You do it by grouping lawns into areas, giving each area its own day, and swapping out the lawns that sit far from the rest.

How far apart should lawns be in a mowing round?

I aim for no more than 7 or 8 minutes between lawns. Closer is better. Once lawns are 15 minutes or more apart, the drive starts eating a big chunk of your hourly rate.

Should I drop customers who are too far away?

Not straight away. First try raising their price so it covers the drive. If they say no, sell the lawn to another lawn business in that area or pass them on. Do it one lawn at a time and fill the gap with a lawn inside your areas.

Can I make more money mowing without working more hours?

Yes. Cutting drive time frees up hours you can fill with more lawns, so your turnover goes up without your week getting longer. Raising prices on your lowest-paying lawns does the same thing from the other side.

How many areas should I split my round into?

Four or five works well for most solo operators, one per working day. Use suburbs, main roads or rivers as the borders so it’s easy to tell which day a new lawn belongs to.

Stuart, Lawnmowing101

34 years mowing lawns. Built it up to five vans and 450 contracts, then cut back to a 20-hour week on the best lawns. My story.