A little deeper look
It’s hard to convey on a website all the thought that goes into the decision to launch a business so I thought I’d utilize the blog to give a little more insight for people that want a little deeper look. So this initial post is just a bit of a flush of some of our ideas. I’ve never blogged before so I’ll ask your grace up front.
We have been in the property maintenance field in different capacities for years. Everything from lawn care to construction. We’ve witnessed many cycles of companies going into and then out of business. It’s a tough industry to be in. It can be hard work and you work in every kind of weather throughout the year. It’s also a very competitive field to be in and many companies don’t survive beyond a handful of years.
The decision to go all electric and launch a new brand began with a comment from a random person in a parking lot. The question and the thought irritated and intrigued me and so began a conversation between me and my brother and the idea of eLawnz. The market is going that way but the equipment is just beginning to meet the needs of a commercial application.
Run times for the bigger machines are just becoming capable of a seven hour range but all the smaller equipment requires lots of extra batteries to get through a day and those are expensive. We also wanted to go completely green which for us meant solar charge support and EV towing. All that tech comes at a high price and so the real tough choices began.
Optimize everything. Shed what doesn’t produce the required results. Figure out how to make tech that isn’t quite there yet viable as a business model.
We began by looking at what has and hasn’t worked since we joined forces as Allard Brothers Enterprises. Some of that is for another post but we started with my beat up 96 GMC and a handful of customers and grew in every direction. We found that if people like your work they ask you to do more, often unrelated work and we were doing it all. Rehabbing rentals, building decks, replacing windows, almost everything. Subbing some and doing the rest and it just kept coming. Last year we began to cut back on some of the side work and focus more on what we wanted to do in the beginning. That and the electric idea came along about the same time.
Optimize. Our work was scattered all over Chittenden County so consolidating our work was important. Also because of the large investment of going all electric we needed to take a look at who our ideal clients would be in the sort term. We have several HOA’s which are our bread and butter and they maximize efficiency of both time and equipment. The other aspect is winter vs summer work. Summer has a much more consistent work load with the exception of beginning season and end of season. Winter is much more all or none and it’s difficult to staff winter. The end result is developing two separate business models. Part one became eLawnz.
The two models we chose to meld together was Geek Squad and Nascar pit crews. Visually and professionally these two in concept were what we were looking for. Visually sharp and clean, functionally efficient with no wasted energy. Sort of poetry in motion.
Shed. One of the harder things was the decision to release some of our long time clients to other people’s care in order to take new clients in the areas we had chosen to concentrate on expansion which were closer to our existing larger commitments.
Figure. Making the tech viable now. Redundancy was the only way to make the jump to electric now and as is briefly mentioned on the site we determined a phase in was necessary as many of the pieces of the vision just weren’t possible in one fell swoop so we began with the trailer and ordering the equipment and phase one became the support trailer and the equipment as our first season goal. The trailer will ultimately have all onboard charge support for the equipment. Phase two is full solar charging for end of day where the trailer will dock all the the mowers and chargers inside and charge all equipment and the trailer batteries fully overnight via a smartwall connection at home. Phase three will be towing with an electric truck when a capable model becomes available. This vehicle will also charge via the same solar overnight.
That’s it for this post. We will try to post regularly as our plans unfold and keep you all current on the latest happenings.