What’s the secret to growing a successful lawn maintenance company? For Tony Lowe and Chase Hall, owners of Top Notch Lawns in Montgomery, Alabama, the answer is quality. Deliver it, and customers will come.

One of the first ways people like to measure a business is “how big are you?” or “how many employees do you have?” The size question follows popular thinking: “the bigger the business, the more successful the business.” After 44 years in the manufacturing business, we have never been a big business, so we don’t know about being big. However, we have worked with many different sizes of businesses, and our experience says that a lot of success has been found in small businesses as well as big.

Robert Lodge wasn’t in the lawn maintenance business nine years ago when a neighbor asked Lodge to mow his front lawn. Lodge worked full-time in the sheriff ’s department. Yet, he mowed the front lawn as requested, and, as he walked away, the neighbor asked him to mow the back yard, too.

The Baptist St. Anthony’s (BSA) Hospital in Amarillo, Texas, is consistently mentioned among the top health care facilities in the country. The hospital has nearly 500 beds and offers full-service health care to patients in and around the metropolitan area, living up to its billing as “A Great Place for Patients.”

Freddie and Clifford Adkins are not your typical Walker users. Freddie is a technician for Kentucky Fish & Wildlife. He also raises beef cattle, and, for extra income, mows a few lawns in his hometown of Sacramento, Kentucky. His father Clifford raises cattle, too. When not tending to a small herd on land that adjoins his son’s property, he is mowing his substantial home lawn and maintaining four duplexes.

If you purchased a new mower or two this spring, by now you’ve had a chance to grade performance. No doubt, some new owners are as pleased as they can be with their purchases. Others may question whether or not they made the right choice.