Last Updated on August 29, 2023 by ILGM Ninjas
Every few years we have extreme weather that makes working outside difficult if not impossible. When the weather defeats your ability to provide a quality service you are typically left with the options of sacrificing safety and quality for productivity often with very bad results. At the end of the day you are left with either showing up late and doing a good job or showing up on time and doing a very bad job. Lawn equipment is not designed to operate in the rain to be blunt. In our fast paced world we tend to be very impatient and we often tend to think that we are the only ones on the planet and there is no one else. We are all guilty of this. The affordability of the lawn maintenance business depends on the necessity to provide the service on a route and not an appointment basis. This is essentially the same as standing in line, or how I like to compare it is the difference between riding a bus for $2 and calling a cab for $18. You pay for the luxury of having a vehicle wait on you to take you and only you to a point or destination. Often the rendering of a service that is not appointment based is confused by one much like a person who rides a bus expecting the bus driver to take you to a 7-11 at the expense of the others on the bus. The reality is that the route is what keeps you from paying $18 to expect more than that is unrealistic. Buses also depend on stopping and leaving on time without delay in order to get from stop to stop within a reasonable amount of time. So what happens when the bus gets stuck in a snow drift or has to cross a road that has been washed out by a flashflood? Well it is delayed and the circumstances of the conditions that affect the bus affect not only the people who have to get off but also the people who have not yet gotten on the bus yet. Here lies the problem, how do you get around this flaw in the system? Well, I’m not going to spend the time to figure out the transportation problem but I have figured out the problem as it pertains to the lawn maintenance business and that solution is AUTOMATION. What? I don’t get what you are saying. Let me explain. What if there were no such thing as a mow route, a mow day, weather delays, transportation to, arrival or departure from the customer’s lawn? What if a lawn could be cut before it needs it, before you sense that someone is late, right before a rainstorm, during a rainstorm or right after one? There is no down time and you are not limited by day or night maintaining a lawn? Sounds crazy right? This is the challenge facing the lawn mowing business and some of the factors that cause it to fail when the weather gets really bad. We have been maintaining a lawn day and night since 2018 without gas powered equipment, completely automated, at night with a lawn that is always maintained. If you want to get yourself out of an outdated paradigm you need to check out robotic mowing.