Six years ago, Chuck Knuppel and Lisa Engle worked highway construction, but both wanted to be their own boss. So they quit and started a lawn maintenance company. Since then, their revenue stream has doubled annually, and neither has any regret about their decision.
“We left construction just at the right time,” says Lisa. “The market totally dried up. Still, we had some work to do to generate any income in our new venture. That first year we started with zero customers and ended the year with six, maybe seven residential properties. The next year we landed a big 28-acre estate and we’ve been doing well ever since.”
In fact, Get On It Lawn Care & Snowplowing, located in Columbia Falls, Montana, now provides lawn maintenance services to 20 commercial and HOA customers, most of which are located in nearby Kalispell. The company operates five crews during the summer months, and gears-up to seven during the long Montana winters. It’s during these months, when the area gets upwards of 100 inches of snow, that the company’s Walker Mowers get a second-season workout.
“Our snow removal lineup includes Chevy pickups with V-plows, and our Walker Mowers with several attachments,” Chuck explains. “We have two of every attachment, including blades, brooms, blowers and cabs. If you’ve experienced a Montana winter, you can understand why the cabs are important, and why we run gas instead of diesel engines. When the temperatures are consistently in the minus range for several weeks, gas engines just start better.”
Get On It runs five Walker Mowers outfitted with three 48-inch GHS decks, one 52-inch rear-discharge/mulching deck, and one 62-inch side-discharge deck. In the winter, the mowers are used primarily to clear sidewalks. The blower attachments replace the blade and broom when snowfall reaches the 4-inch mark, adds Chuck. Even though the winters are long and arduous, they can also be profitable.
Formula for Success
The couple says they work in a closeknit community and have rarely, if ever advertised. They let their work, and word of mouth, do the advertising for them. Their formula for success reads like this: Treat properties like they’re your own, take time to talk with clients, be detailoriented (they employ a “weed pulling” girl who visits every site), and offer full landscape maintenance. The company doesn’t provide weed control or repair sprinklers per se, but instead subs it out to an area contractor with whom it has established a good relationship.
Lisa and Chuck also attribute part of their success to Walker Mowers and Kalispell dealer Penco Power Products. “The machines will do the job for you,” says Chuck, referring to his Walker lineup. “No other mowers on the market will do the job they do.” Lisa quickly adds how important is has been to work with someone who knows the business like Penco owner, Vaughn Penrod, does. “He understands how important it is to match machine to application and how valuable service is to his customers just as it is to our customers.”
Get On It’s first Walker Mower was a 1987 16-hp model with a 42-inch GHS deck, and just this spring it purchased two more from Penco, a Super B with a 52-inch deck and a 26-hp Walker Mower with a 48-inch GHS deck.
“The new Super B is amazing,” says Chuck. “It’s very fast, and like our other Walker Mowers, it is virtually trouble-free. Unlike some contractors, we don’t rotate them out every two or three years, but instead run them as long as we can before trading them in or selling them to another contractor or homeowner. A used Walker Mower, one that we put between 500 and 1,000 hours on in a year, will still last a lifetime for a homeowner.”
Long Season
If Lisa and Chuck have one regret about the mowing and snow removal business, it would be how long the seasons last. Spring cleanup begins the first week in April, and two weeks later crews are mowing lawns and continue mowing through October. There’s a small window for leaf cleanup before the five months of winter set in. Most clients are on a two-year contract, which includes approximately 26 cuttings, snow removal, and three fertilizer applications a year.
“We have one commercial client who wants his lawn mowed twice a week.” relates Chuck. “Another has 13 acres that takes us 2.5 to 3 hours to mow with three Walker Mowers.”
There’s no question, the young entrepreneurs are working just as hard now, if not harder, than they were on construction, but the trade-off by being their own boss is worth the added effort, they emphasize. “It takes good, hard work to be a success in any line of work,” says Chuck, who also credits his father for helping them get a start. “He helped finance some of our first equipment purchases, and that’s a break we needed. I think one of the biggest challenges today for any new contractor is to find a lender.”
The next biggest challenge is to put that money to work for you. These owners have definitely made their investment in equipment and people pay off for them.
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