How many lawns can one person mow in a day?

There are a lot of variables involved in this question, so I will try to keep that answer generic. 

For the sake of this post, I will assume that I am talking about one person with an 18-20 inch push mower.

The research

When I had five sole-operated vehicles, I took the opportunity to do a bit of research. I timed all the vehicles for around three months and worked out standard times for

• Mowing a lawn
• Travelling time between jobs
• Amount of lawns cut in a day. 

It was not a very scientific study, but at least I knew that all the core information I was pulling in was consistent.

Also, before I give you the results, remember that we are talking about average-sized lawns in a build-up area. 

I started with the average travelling time. We were working in an area of 110 square kilometres and were gaining some efficiencies by splitting the day’s workload between the five vans. 

It turned out that the average travel time between each job was around 7 minutes. 

After working this out, I turned my attention to the cut times. 

Looking at the records for the three months I tracked, it turned out that we were arriving at a new job every forty minutes. 

The Answer

So how many lawns can a person mow in a day?

After I worked the times out, the rest was simple arithmetic. 

Forty hours divided by forty minutes = 60 lawns

Now divide that by five days = 12 lawns a day.

Before I go any further, I would like to say that although it was accurate then. It is not a true reflection of my business anymore.  

Nowadays, there are a lot more infilling and smaller lawns in our city, and I now target this kind of work. 

I average around ten lawns in my five-hour workdays with smaller, more compact lawns. So this works out to one lawn every 30 minutes. 

It really depends on the work you are targeting and the area you are working in. 

Over the years, I have worked on making my business more and more compact, so my first example is probably closer to your average business.

I will discuss exactly how I do that in a future post.  

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