Mark Hathaway had spent the better part of 12 years watching from the sidelines. The lawn mowing company he’d started in 2006, in which he still had a small ownership stake, was floundering. Mark could no longer just watch. He decided to leave his full-time job in IT to fully immerse himself in the company. Just a few years later, Beast Mowed Lawn Care in Deer Lodge, Montana, had grown 500%.
“I’d always felt like the company was on the edge of being able to do something great,” Mark says. “My boss at my full-time job wasn’t happy with me spending so much time on my side gig. I decided it was time to give this lawn mowing thing a legitimate try. Like a bad penny, this business found a way of making its way back to me.”
Mark took over the company in the middle of 2020. By the end of 2023, that “bad penny” was generating more than $500,000 in annual revenue. In addition to mowing and maintenance, Beast Mowed provides fertilization and weed control, light tree trimming, and snow removal. The company has expanded into landscape installations in 2024. Mark gets his hands dirty with all of it, which doesn’t bother him at all.
“There’s something surreal about an early Montana morning when you’re out plowing snow,” Mark relates. “It’s like no one else exists. Those three or four inches of snow suck up all the ambient noise, and all you can hear is the scrape of the snowplow. Honestly, it’s that same kind of feeling that has drawn me to lawns. When you get done with a lawn that looks perfect, when the sidewalk edges are crisp and the stripes are just bangin’, there’s a sense of satisfaction you can’t get from a lot of jobs. Honestly, I don’t even feel like I have a job anymore.”
Tristan Smith, part of the team at Beast Mowed Lawn Care, mows in picturesque Deer Lodge, Montana.
Monster of an Opportunity
Mark Hathaway moved to Deere Lodge, Montana, from Utah in 2004 to run the IT operation at a saw mill. Realizing that homeownership would increase the odds of Mark sticking around, Mark’s boss wanted to help Mark find a house. They found a nice place, but it was attached to an adjacent parcel with a huge lawn. Mark’s boss decided to buy the property, had it divided, and sold Mark the smaller portion with the house.
“It worked out great for me, but now my boss had this big lawn he needed to have mowed,” Mark recalls. “I had done some mowing in college and always enjoyed it. I saw the job the contractor was doing on my boss’s lawn and thought I could do better. I suggested that I get a used commercial zero-turn and start mowing it myself. So that’s what we did. Before long, other neighbors started asking me to mow their lawns. Next thing you know, I’m mowing quite a bit. It was almost starting to get in the way of my IT job at the saw mill.”
Mark ended up leaving that job to work for the company that made the saw mill’s software. That job required a lot of travel, though, which Mark quickly grew tired of. His mowing business was still going strong, so Mark continued to make a living by mowing and doing IT consulting.
With his IT consulting gig going well, Mark thought it might be time to get out of the mowing business. He had a problem, though.
“I was really impressed with one of the kids who worked for me, and would have been crushed if he lost his job because I closed my business,” Mark says. “So I basically sold my lawn company, which was called Lawn Monster at that time, to this kid’s dad for what the equipment was worth.”
Beast Mowed Lawn Care employs primarily high school students. Pictured here in the top row are, from left, Gideon Rubink, Chace Henze, and Mark’s son, Zach Hathaway. In front are Mark Hathaway (left) and Tristan Smith.
It was just a matter of time before Lawn Monster became too monstrous for its new owner, too. Mark had another idea. A brother-in-law in Utah, Chaz Frandsen, was struggling to sell insurance after losing his job. “I told him he could make way more money mowing lawns,” Mark says. “I suggested he move up to Montana to take over Lawn Monster. He finally agreed in 2018.”
Lawn Monster’s biggest contract at the time, a church, was looking to consolidate service vendors. That meant Lawn Monster would be asked, if not required, to do the mowing at all of their churches in the area. Furthermore, Lawn Monster would have to provide all of the fertilizing and weed control, tree trimming and planting.
“My brother-in-law realized he was in a little over his head now, especially with the chemical spraying part,” Mark says. “I figured I could help him with that. So I did a little research and ended up buying a stand-on spreader-sprayer on my own. I got my chemical applicator’s license and took care of those church properties for my brother-in-law.”
The rest of the business still got to be too much for Chaz, however, and he wanted to call it quits. Another one of Mark’s brothers-in-law, Doug Bull, had also recently moved up to Montana. He ended up buying Lawn Monster from Chaz.
Things were going pretty well for Doug, but not good enough to encourage him to quit his full-time job. “I could see that, at some point, the business was going to fail,” says Mark, who at this point was working full-time in IT again. “As busy as I was, I inserted myself into Lawn Monster even more to help Doug manage things. I also started helping with some of the mowing. We needed more help, and were able to convince Tristan Smith to come back, who had worked a short time for Chaz back in 2018.”
Beast Mowed Lawn Care likes to hire high school kids to teach them how to work. The boys they have sure do work hard, and do a fantastic job. Pictured here is Chace Henze mowing a residential property.
Tristan has been Mark’s right-hand man since Mark took over the company in 2020. By the time he took over, Mark had already put a lot of money into the business to buy more reliable equipment, including a new Walker Model T. “To justify the investment, I figured that if things didn’t work out with Doug and Lawn Monster, I’d just keep the new Walker for myself,” Mark says.
Things didn’t work out with Doug, but they’ve been working quite well since Mark took over the company. Mark and Tristan immediately changed the name to Beast Mowed Lawn Care, and have been feeding the beast ever since.
Bad Penny Becomes a Booming Enterprise
Southwest Montana is pretty sparsely populated. Thus, Beast Mowed’s two mowing crews have to rack up considerable drive time to service all of their account base. That’s why Mark says one of the best investments he’s made is in vehicle branding.
“The way you make good money in lawn maintenance is by keeping a tight route,” Mark says. “With truck branding, you’re advertising in the areas you’re already working. Plus, there is no doubt who did the work when they see our truck driving away. The bottom line is that we want a lawn to look perfect when we’re done, and we really don’t care what kind of equipment we use to make that happen.”
It just so happens that a Walker Mower has been Beast Mowed’s best option in certain applications. The Model T with a 48-inch collection deck is Beast Mowed’s mower of choice on properties of a half-acre to an acre. Mark and Tristan also deploy a Model T on the higher-visibility areas of larger properties. Then, on the outer areas of those larger properties, crews mow with a 60- or 72-inch stand-on with a side-discharge deck.
“I’ve always liked analyzing data to make better business decisions,” Mark says. “I’m constantly looking for the most efficient way to get in and out of a property without cutting corners, because we want our properties to look perfect. Our Walker Mowers have played a big part in that. They are so fast and agile. Even though a Model T is technically slower from a ground speed standpoint, it can beat any stand-on mower on smaller to medium-size properties.”
“The Walker is really nimble,” Tristan adds. “We also end up trimming a lot less because the Walker can really maneuver around and get things done the way we want. And on lawns with rolling hills, we don’t scalp things up. The floating deck on the Walker really helps on lawns that aren’t completely flat.”
Mark and Tristan still spend a lot of time in the field working with the crews, especially when they are a bit short-handed. Their employee base consists almost entirely of high school kids. It’s something Mark and Tristan take a lot of pride in.
“My belief is that kids need to learn how to work,” says Mark, who grew up on a farm. “If you can teach them that when they’re young, and can put a little money in their pockets, they’ll leave high school as a bigger asset to the community. Along with producing perfectly manicured lawns, the biggest thing we do is grow people. That’s important to us.”
Just another way they’re feeding the beast in the Montana foothills.
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