Dealing with difficult customers isn’t just about being polite and professional. It’s about patience. Boundaries. And knowing when to walk away. I learned this the hard way. There was this one job where nothing was ever good enough. Her yard looked like a rubbish dump — food scraps, buckets of rotting shellfish, TV boxes tossed into the garden. But she fired me for supposedly leaving “tracks” from the mower across the carport. (The only way to get to the lawn.) There weren’t any tracks....

An Important Lesson You don’t need the best gear to build a great lawn care business. I’ve seen more guys quit in a few months because they blew all their cash on shiny new gear than because they couldn’t get work. There’s a quote I heard once that stuck: “Buy what you need. Not what you want.” That line saved me a lot of grief. It kept me from chasing dream mowers before I had dream customers. Every time I wanted to “treat myself” to a new toy, I’d say that line again. And again. And again....

Back in the early days, I picked the worst name for my business. It was clever. It was funny. And it nearly made me broke. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Great guys with solid work ethic... but a name that scares off half the customers before they ever pick up the phone. So here’s what’s working now when it comes to naming your lawn business: First, keep it dead simple. No “Z’s instead of S’s.” No clever spelling or hard-to-spell words. No one remembers them, and even fewer can spell...