Twenty years of fixing my own gear and my neighbours keep asking, so I am considering doing five to eight machines a week in season for actual money. I have a double garage, a decent tool set and no business insurance yet. What I cannot tell from the outside is where the money actually goes once you are doing it for other people. What surprised you in the first year?
The costs that do not look like costs: waste oil and old fuel disposal, a fire safe place to keep both, replacing tools that customers' rusted bolts destroy, and the two or three machines a year that are simply abandoned. Also the phone. Nobody warns you how much unpaid time goes into telling people on the phone that yes, it is probably the carburettor.
My first spring I undercharged, said yes to thirty machines in three weeks and lost the whole summer to it. What fixed it was raising the tune up price by a third and losing exactly two customers. Price for the season you want, not for the one you are afraid of.
I would push back on the homeowner model entirely. The money is in pickup and delivery and in small commercial accounts, landscapers with six machines who lose real income when one is down and who will pay for a next day turnaround. Homeowners compare you to the price of a new mower at the shed store and you will never win that argument.
They also pay on time and they do not argue about the price of a carburettor, which homeowners do to me every single week in May.
Small commercial accounts had genuinely not occurred to me and I already know four landscapers by name.
Flat price the tune up, take a deposit, refuse anything you cannot get parts for. Everything else is detail.
Before the first paid job, talk to an insurer and to whoever handles trading rules where you live. Working on other people's machines in your own garage changes what your household policy covers, and that is a conversation for a broker and not for people on the internet.
@night_train_ned · 6mo ago · 3 replies
Three things eat it. Storage, because customers drop off in April and collect in July and your garage becomes a car park. Parts waiting, because a machine sitting half apart for nine days is floor space you cannot bill for. And seasonality, since a huge share of the year's work lands in a few spring weeks and you will turn away work in May and sit idle in November. Flat rate your common jobs so a tune up is one price on a board, and only go hourly on the weird stuff.
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@two_stroke_tess · 6mo ago
Deposit at drop off, a written collection date, and a storage fee after fourteen days printed on the ticket. You will almost never charge it, but the existence of it moves machines out of the door.
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@iron_camber · 6mo ago
Storage is the one I had not priced at all. How do you stop the April drop offs from filling the place?
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