Build your own lawn round and the customers are yours to keep.
You build your own round under a name that ranks, with your name and number on everything. No call centre filtering calls. Walk away whenever you like and you keep every one of your customers.
Free area check. One licence per area — ring me and I will tell you straight whether your suburb is still open.
This includes seven months of local Google Ads, front-loaded so your phone rings hardest at the start.
Every other way in costs $14,000 or more.
And their headline price is not their price. One is $20,000, and then another $12,000 for the gear on top. Another sits at $14,000 with the tools and equipment bought separately again. Here is the same page you have been looking at, drawn to scale.
“Head office invoices the customers, collects the payments, and pays the franchise businesses.”
That is a real line from a real listing on the same page. It is not a business. It is a wage with a buy-in.
This is the other way round. You invoice your own customers. The money comes to you. If you ever walk away, you keep every client you built.
Six things, one price.
One deliverable per obstacle. Every part carries its own weight.
The way in
$2,300, once, and $1,150 of it goes straight back out into your own Google Ads. There is no $12,000 gear package bolted on at franchise prices. You buy your own van and your own mower, at your price, and you own the lot.
Your own book
You invoice your own customers and the money comes to you. The $230 a month is a flat fee for the marketing and that is the whole of it. No royalty, no percentage, no call centre clipping every job. Mow $500 a week or $5,000 a week and the $230 does not move.
A name that ranks
You trade as Gecko Lawns with your suburb on the end. Your own local website at geckolawns.co.nz/yoursuburb with your name, your suburb and your phone number on it, and your own Google Business Profile set up and verified. That is what puts you in the map when someone searches your street.
Ads from week one
$1,150 of your joining fee runs Google Ads for seven months, and it is deliberately front-loaded: about $7.50 a day for the first three months, while nobody knows your name and you have no reviews yet, then about $4.50 a day for months four and five, and about $3.15 a day for the last two. Switched on the day you tell me you are ready to mow, not the day you sign, so you are not paying for calls you cannot service yet.
Then the handoff. By month seven your website and your Google profile are ranking on their own, so the ads switch off and the leads keep coming.
The marketing done for you
Site, listing, citations built by hand in every NZ directory, review chasing and rank tracking. That is what the $230 a month is. You never open a dashboard. No contract, stop any time.
The onboarding pack
Quoting guide, phone scripts, insurance, invoices, business structure, artwork for the van and the cards. What I worked out the slow way, written down in order.
Most guys spend fifteen years building a business nobody wants to buy.
Here is how it usually goes. A bloke mows the same lawns for ten or fifteen years. He gets full, he is happy, and he never touches his prices. Then he wants out, and he rings me to help him sell it — and most of the time I have to tell him I cannot. His prices are a decade old. The work is there but the money is not, and nobody wants to buy it.
I worked out a way around that. I call it the traffic light system. It starts the day you are 80% full, and it is the difference between a round that stands still for fifteen years and one that gets better every single year.
- Your round gets tighter, not bigger. Small lawns, close to home. The long drives and the cheap jobs work their way off the run sheet.
- Your profit goes up every year while your hours stay exactly where they are.
- You cherry-pick. The leads keep arriving, so you take the good ones and sell the rest on.
- At the end you own something a buyer actually wants. Current prices, a tight run and real books — not a decade-old price list.
I have designed a system that will help you become the best paid lawn guy in town.
Call 027 487 1518
Stuart Clifford, Hamilton. Still out mowing.
Years ago I paid an agency $5,000 to market my lawn business and they did nothing. I took them to court, and to prove they were not doing their job I had to learn what they were meant to be doing. I won the case, and I came out of it knowing how to market a lawn business. From then on I did it myself and grew my round to over 450 lawns.
In 2017 another lawn company asked me to help them, and that side of the business grew from there. I now work with over 50 lawn businesses in NZ, Australia and the USA. I am retiring next year, so I have decided to do the same thing under my own Gecko Lawns brand and help other people build highly profitable lawn businesses.
Proof on file
- In the trade since 1992. Built three lawn businesses from scratch, grew the last one to 450 clients, then scaled it back to 200 in 2017 to focus on the consultancy. Still mowing, about $2,000 a week on roughly 20 hours.
- Over 50 lawn care websites and Google Business Profiles built for independent lawn care businesses around the world. 12 lawn care Google Ads accounts run for other businesses, retained for years.
- My own Gecko Lawns profile brings in 2 to 3 leads a week, all year round.
You put the money in. I put the time in.
You are spending $2,300 with a bloke in Hamilton you have never met. So I will go first.
Your website live in 7 days, or your money back.
Your own local website at geckolawns.co.nz/yoursuburb — your name, your suburb and your phone number on it — live within 7 days of you paying. If it is not up on day 7, ring me and I will refund the $2,300 in full. No forms and no argument.
All I need from you is your trading name, your suburb and your phone number on the day you pay. That is one text message. The 7 days start from there.
What I am not promising, so you know where you stand. How many lawns you win. That is down to you answering the phone and quoting the work, and no honest man can guarantee it. I also will not promise you a date on your Google profile, because Google sets that timing, not me. About nine out of ten of the profiles I build are live within 5 days. The website is entirely mine to deliver, so that is the one I am putting my money behind.
- An even trade. Your $2,300 buys my hands on your website, your Google profile, your citations and your ads. The $230 a month keeps me working on it.
- The area check comes first, and it is free. One licence per area, so before you pay anything I check whether your suburb is still open. If there is already a Gecko Lawns business there, I will tell you on the call. I will also tell you straight how fast a round will build where you live — 10,000 people or more will carry a full round, and a smaller patch just takes longer, it does not stop you.
- No ongoing contract. Stop the $230 any time. You keep every client you built.
- One licence per area. I will not put another Gecko in your suburb. That is a promise from me, not a clause with a get-out.
- Bonus: sell the work you cannot take. Every operator ends up with leads outside his area and jobs too big for him, and everyone else throws that away. I sell mine in Hamilton at $20 each. The last couple of years that has been about $2,000, and our best year was $10,000 — it depends on how hard you advertise. I have also sold hundreds of lawns. I will teach you how I do both.
What the licence costs.
Everything in the six parts above, for the number beside this. No royalty and no percentage of what you earn, ever. It is not everything you will spend to get on the road, though, and the next section is the rest of it in full.
- Your Google profile is usually quick. About nine out of ten of the ones I build are live inside 5 days. Google sets that timing, so it is the one date I will not promise you.
No contract. Stop any time.
- Your own local website
- Verified Google Business Profile
- $1,150 of Google Ads
- Citations built by hand
- The full onboarding pack
Ring first — the area check is free.
Website live in 7 days or your money back.
What else you will spend.
Every business has set-up costs. Nobody selling you a lawn business puts them in writing, so here they are. I have kept the lot to a minimum, and the licence itself is the cheapest way into this trade on the market. These are the numbers I would give you on the phone.
So call it about $5,690 plus a van to be trading. The cheapest franchise on Trade Me is $14,000, and most of those make you buy the gear as well — one of them is $20,000 and then another $12,000 for the equipment. The difference is not that you avoid these costs. It is that you buy your own gear at your own price, you own it, and nobody is charging you a franchise margin on a mower.
Questions I get on the phone.
What happens if I walk away?
You keep every client you built. Every one of them, to keep or to sell. You give up the website, the Google profile and the Gecko Lawns name, so you would rebrand — and I would rather you knew that now than found it out at signing.
It is not the disaster it sounds like, either. That is how you finish. When you are done, you call it Sam’s Lawns, you stop paying the $230, and you keep mowing your own book. The Gecko slot goes to the next bloke who wants a go at it.
Am I stuck in one suburb?
No. Nothing stops you mowing where you like. What points at your area, about 5km across around a pin in your suburb, is the marketing — the site, the listing and the ads — because that is where a local listing ranks and where the money is. A job 25 minutes away has spent its profit on the drive.
How many leads will I actually get?
My own Gecko Lawns profile brings in 2 to 3 a week, all year round. That is what a properly set-up listing does once it is ranking, and it does not stop when winter comes. I am not going to put a revenue figure next to it. The ones who guarantee you an income can do that because they own the client.
What gear do I need?
A van, a mower, a line trimmer and a blower — about $2,500 for the gear. We just run vans, so there is no trailer to tow. Get one with a towbar if you are thinking about tree work as well. You do not need a ride-on either: my own round is built on small lawns at a $35 minimum, a lot of them done in 10 to 20 minutes.
Do I need to be a good mower?
No. You need to be reliable. Turn up on the day you said, do a tidy job, answer your phone. That beats flash every time, and the quoting guide and phone scripts in the pack cover the rest. All I ask is that you do the work properly, because other men will be trading under the same name.
Tell me your suburb and I will tell you if it is still open.
One licence per area. Ringing is faster and you will get me. If it is after hours, leave your details and I will come back to you.
Call 027 487 1518“If your area will not work, I will say so. I would rather tell you now than take your money.”
— Stuart Clifford
Your own lawn mowing business,
trading under a name that ranks.
Your own website, your own verified Google profile, and $1,150 of ads running from the week you are ready — for $2,300, when the next cheapest one on Trade Me is $14,000. Your customers, your prices, your money.
Call Stuart 027 487 1518