Not every contractor wants to be big. There's a reason. Being big means incurring more overhead in the form of employees, equipment and property. Large contractors invariably assume more risk and higher insurance premiums than small contractors and there's that feeling of loss of control. So why grow?

Riders with steering levers and zero turn radius performance were already on the market in '77 when we started designing the Walker Mower. Our vision and innovation was to make a very compact, frontcutting machine with a built-in grass collection system. This package would optimize the performance available from a zero turn radius-type machine. In the years since then, there has been very little offered by other equipment manufacturers competitive with the Walker- we've had a niche of the market to ourselves.

What has your mower done for you lately? That's a fair question for any contractor. The answer for Ruth and Gordon Ewerks, owners of KK Enterprises, Lady Lake, Florida, is, plain and simple, "doubled our business."

When Scott and Company, Bay City, Texas, decided to get into the maintenance business, it took a short cut. Instead of starting from scratch and learning the business on their own, owners Scott and Pam Evans took the advice of an industry expert and visited a firm that already "cracked the maintenance code."

In one way, Kenneth Vaughan, owner of KLV Landscape Services, Inc. is your typical contractor. "From my early childhood, I wanted to mow," he explains. He mowed lawns while growing up in Arlington, Texas. He worked his way through college mowing lawns and when the opportunity arose, he purchased the lawn maintenance business from a landscape contractor... and never looked back.

Asked to name one of the most challenging aspects of their job, and most lawn maintenance contractors will define it in one word, bidding.