Tom Snogles is the founder and owner of Sun Power Lawn Care, a Gainesville, FL-based electric lawn care business dedicated to quiet and sustainable service.
Sun Power Lawn Care has come a long way since we launched back in 2014.
From expanding our team to upgrading our electric lawn care equipment and more, we’re able to bring quality electric lawn services to more and more Gainesville properties.
As the summer winds down, I wanted to take some time to look back on our successes, consider some lessons we’ve learned over the years, and look ahead to the future of our growing lawn care company.
Plus, we’re hiring!
Learn about all this and more in the video above.
Raw Sun Power Episode 11: Transcript
Good day, I am Tom Snogles with Sun Power Lawn Care, and this is Raw Sun Power Episode 11.
Last time we shot was November 2015, so I have a bit of an update for you. And this is brought from rainy Depot Park on this wonderful pre-Irma hurricane day. So I’m going to go over growth, lessons learned and our future plans for Sun Power Lawn Care.
Well firstly, growth: we have been keeping up with 100% to 150% growth each year. I owe this to my referral partners Chad Hanna with Shade Shifters, Kevin Green with Naturally Green Landscape, Kevin Smith with McCall Service. And this has led to us going from one employee to five employees.
We’ve also got a second truck to do a bit of irrigation work and some extra tidy ups. And we’ve also gone carbon neutral thanks to our friends at We Are Neutral. I’ve also helped them up at Bonnaroo to sell carbon offsets for people traveling to and from the festival. Bonnaroo’s also a carbon neutral festival and they’re also getting a couple more festivals—it’s a lot going on with We Are Neutral, they’re fantastic.
So two: lessons learned. Setting expectations for incoming staff. This is my first proper business that’s a real business and not part-time, so there’s a lot of learning experiences that I’ve had. Setting expectations for staff coming on so they know what to expect from me, from management, and we know what to expect from them.
We’ve also been setting goals. So our goals for this year are to get 100 yards, because 100 yards is a touchdown. And that is perfectly in line being in Gainesville, Gator season right now. Our first home game is this coming Saturday as long as Irma doesn’t cancel it—we shall see.
And third are future plans. So next year, we’re going to have our second trailer. This year we bought a 48″ mower to take on larger properties, so this larger trailer will mean we can take on more, larger commercial properties. We’re also going to upgrade to a different premises so we can have a second trailer, third trailer, fourth trailer, and really transfer the mowing in Gainesville to electric mowing. Quiet, environmentally friendly electric mowing as opposed to gas mowing.
And we’re also hiring! so currently we’re looking for an operation and sales manager to take on al of the responsibilities and duties I have in my current role, so i can focus on infrastructure, training people and growing the business, and making sure that phone keeps ringing and everyone’s doing their job.
I hope you enjoyed this video—expect more to come! It’s been great talking to you today, have a wonderful day. I am Tom Snogles with Sun Power Lawn Care, where we mow grass but don’t use gas.
