Lawn Mowing and Yard Work: A Summer Business at 12

What you actually do

Once a week you turn up at a neighbour's house, cut their grass, trim the edges, sweep the clippings off the path, and leave. Thirty to forty minutes for a normal city lot. Then you do the next one.

In spring there's raking to do, and in autumn there are leaves, which is the same customer paying you for a different job. Weeding a flower bed is an hour of sitting in the sun for someone who can't kneel down any more.

Nobody is buying a cut lawn. They're buying a Saturday they get to keep. Some of your customers physically can't do it, and for them you're the reason the front of the house doesn't embarrass them.

What it costs to start

You can start with nothing if you borrow the family mower, and most people do.

• A rake is about $20 if you don't have one.
• Work gloves, about $12. Your hands will thank you by week three.
• Garden waste bags, about $5 for a pack, though customers usually supply their own bins.

Don't buy a mower. A decent push mower is hundreds of dollars, and you have no idea yet whether you'll have six customers or one. Borrow, or use the customer's mower, which many people prefer anyway because they know it works.

Ask a parent before the family mower goes down the street. Agree who pays for fuel, and what happens if it breaks. That is a two-minute conversation in April that saves a bad one in July.

Find your first lawn this weekend

1. Cut your own lawn first, and time it. Now you know what half an hour of this feels like and roughly what a lawn takes.
2. Pick the three houses on your street with the longest grass. Long grass means somebody has run out of time or can't do it.
3. Knock, with a parent nearby, and say: "I'm cutting lawns this summer, $20 a cut, and I can come every Saturday morning." Say the day out loud. "Whenever you need" is much harder for someone to say yes to than "Saturday".
4. Do the first one, then ask that customer one question: "Do you know anyone else on the street who'd want this?" Almost every yard business grows exactly like that.

What to charge

Price by the time, not by the guess. If a lawn takes you half an hour, and you want somewhere around $30 to $40 an hour for hard physical work, then $20 a cut is fair and $25 is not greedy.

Say you land six lawns at $20, once a week. That's $120 a week and about three hours of work. Over a twenty-week season that comes to roughly $2,400, which is more money than most people expect a 13 year old to be able to earn.

Charge separately for the jobs that aren't cutting. Raking a yard full of leaves is two hours, so it isn't a $20 job. Say "$40 for the leaves, it'll take me about two hours" before you start, and there's no argument at the end.

Ask two neighbours what they'd expect to pay before you set your price. Prices differ a lot between a small town and a big city.

Rules and staying safe

Read this section with a parent. A mower is the most dangerous tool on this whole list of ideas.

• Closed shoes, always. Never sandals, never bare feet. A mower blade does not care.
• Never put your hand near the blade with the engine running, and never lift or tip the mower while it's on. If it jams, the engine goes off first, every time.
• Clear the lawn before you start. A stick or a stone thrown by a blade travels faster than you can move.
• Don't refuel a hot mower, and let a parent handle the fuel until they say otherwise.
• Never use a ride-on mower or a gas trimmer unless a parent has trained you on it and agreed.
• Some towns have noise bylaws about how early a mower can run on a weekend. Ask a parent to check what yours says before you start at eight in the morning.
• Sunscreen, a hat, and a water bottle. An afternoon of this in July will flatten you.

Get paid when the job is done, in cash or by e-transfer to a parent's account. Weekly customers often prefer to settle up once a month, which is fine as long as you write down every cut.

What Jenny would do

Jenny is 16 and lives in a small town where the lots are big and the nearest lawn service charges town prices for a forty-minute drive. That gap is her business.

She'd take four houses on one street rather than six spread across town, because walking a mower fifteen minutes between jobs is unpaid time. She's the artist of the three, so her hand-painted sign at the end of the road does the advertising she'd otherwise have to knock on doors for.

She'd also say yes to the leaf raking in October, when everyone else has lost interest, and that's the month she'd make her best money.

When it stops being fun

Week eleven. It's thirty degrees, the grass is wet because it rained on Friday, and wet clippings clog a mower every four metres. You have four lawns to do and your friends are at the lake.

The fix is a smaller round and a set day. Four lawns on a Saturday morning is a business you'll still be running in September. Eight lawns whenever people ask is one you'll quit in July, and quitting halfway through a season is how you lose customers who would have paid you for three summers.