It's mid-August. I'm sitting in my living room, thinking of all the things I'll need to bring with me upon my return to college. My phone buzzes, it's Brandon, a friend from High School. He's mad at me.
"you should have re-posted the add by now. you've had plenty of time."
I hate when Brandon gets all self-righteous like this. I founded the damn company. I found all our clients. All he had to do was wait for my phone calls.
"We posted too many times. Craigslist thinks we're spam. Besides, you're making 12/hour landscaping. What are you complaining about?"
It was true that Craigslist blocked my IP, but Brandon knew this was a very easy obstacle to work around. He's heard me make many excuses, and he doesn't stand for them.
"It could have been sick", he sends back. I don't reply. He's right. I fucked up.
Cut back to the beginning of the summer. The whole crew is back in town for the first time in over a year: Tyma, Matt, Burdzy, other Matt, Brandon and myself. I'm in my room, looking at my life compartmentalized into boxes and bags (I never really unpacked). Brandon texts me, "bonfire tonight".
That night felt like high school. Everyone was sitting around the campfire, telling jokes and stories from college. Burdzy has been fixing planes in Ohio since graduation. He's wearing nice clothes. Everyone told me that a degree was the way you make money in this world. I felt naive.
The next morning, Brandon is driving me back to my house. We've been talking about college and the eminent threat posed by student loans six months after graduation. Between the two of us we don't have a lot of money. I wanted a car, Brandon wants a new phone.
"We should just throw up an add on Craigslist," says Brandon, "like, we'll do anything. House work, painting, garden, stuff like that."
I'm mulling this over in the passenger seat. We would need equipment, and an unlicensed 'we do it all' project seems sketchy, especially on Craigslist.
"What if we just do one thing, something we have all the tools for".
"I could get paint from my work."
"But we have lawnmowers. I have a weed whacker. You have a truck. We have shears, saws and all that stuff just chilling in our family's garage".
"Okay, Landscaping then. Throw up an add tonight".
It would be two more days before I finally got around to posting the add. By that time, Matt had found his way into the scheme. We called it "3 Broke College Kids". We posted a picture of Brandon pushing a lawnmower. The add read, basically, like this:
"3 Broke College Kids
We are 3 college students with construction and landscaping experience, willing to do your yard work for cheap! Services include:
-mulching
-mowing
-planting
-weeding
-hedges
-edging
-and much more!!!
Call now for service in the Southern New Hampshire area!"
We got our first two clients that afternoon. We charged 30 dollars an hour for all three of us. 10 dollars an hour was more than Brandon was making doing construction, more than Matt was making painting Saint A's and a lot more than I was making at D'angelos.
After Matt quit on us, Brandon and I were more than happy to split the extra cut.
The first job was rough. Matt and Brandon couldn't show up, so I had to call on some friends from the neighborhood. Matty Mccue and I brought along a kid named Chris, he had a pickup truck. The call made the job seem easy, "cut our grass and trim our hedges". What they neglected to tell us was that they had done zero maintenance on their lawn for what must have been a number of years. The grass was a foot high. It had rained the night before. Chris broke his lawnmower. There was an ingrown vine in the hedges, which were about 11 feet tall. I spent two days crawling around the bush with a weed whacker, trying to cut out the vine at it's many routes. I cut down a small tree with a hand saw. Matty McCue held my feet as I dangled over the hedges, so I wouldn't plummet to the sidewalk bellow. Chris's lawnmower did a terrible job. The final product was patchy and uneven. But, we made $150 per day, split up between three people. At the end of the job, I explained that this was our first and that I wasn't working with our regular crew. They never called us back.
The second job went no smoother. Brandon and I drove out to Atkinson, NH to trim a lawn that was even more overgrown than the first. Brandon's lawnmower kept snagging on the grass. I was out of oil, so I took his truck to a nearby convenience store to buy some more. When I returned, Brandon was sitting on the edge of our client's property, head down, looking hopeless and defeated. "What happened?" I asked.
Brandon is very strong. Apparently, when he was upset at the frequent stalls of his lawnmower, he gave the starter rope a good yank, snapping the very thing in half. I wasn't there. Brandon went to talk to the owner. The man gave us $30 for our trouble and sent us on our way. We spent half of it on tacos.
Then, out of nowhere, came a godsend. His name was Patrick Smith. He lived down the street from me and needed his whole lawn redone. He had ordered a pile of dirt, about 5 ft. high and long, which was sitting on his front lawn. We were to smooth the dirt in an even layer across everything: front, back and side yards. There were obstacles in the way of his dream yard, such as a large boulder that had to be cleared from the ground. Brandon and I did the job well and it took weeks. In that time, we made some other clients, including one other sustaining client (an old lady needed her lawn mowed every week). By July, it felt like we were rolling in dough. We even talked about hiring my little brother at 9 dollars an hour.
Then, as it is prone to do, reality set in. I was on the phone with a guidance councilor from school who informed me that, due to my transfer, I was not actually a Jr. Instead, I was floating between Sophomore and Junior and not on track to graduate on time. I had to take summer classes. Logic and Spanish ate up all of my time. I had no time to schedule appointments, or even hang out with my friends.
At the beginning of August, Smith called back. I scheduled an appointment for that Sunday. The next week was hell. I struggled to complete the final tests and assignments for logic. I learned the entire last chapter of Spanish in a day and took the final test (Got a B. Not Bad). Sunday morning I woke up to a call from Steve, a friend from school and my superior at work, "Can you come in today? Derek boned us".
"Yeah, I'm on my way".
My dad gave me a ride. As we were driving, we went right past the Smith house. I saw Patrick mowing his lawn. We made eye contact. I remembered my previous engagement. We were done for.
I called Patrick from work, he didn't answer. I called him after work, no answer. He paid us 300 dollars a week and now that fountain had run dry. Due to the time I had been putting into my school work, our other clients began to fall through. I was missing calls left and right. We needed new clientele.
It was then that I first realized Craigslits was no longer letting us re-post our add. Brandon had posted the same add under various company names, due to an argument about which name would be the best, Dependable Landscaping, 3 Broke College Kids, or Dirt Poor. After our add appeared under all three names, our IP's were booted from the server.
Then, I gave up. An anticlimactic ending, I know, but it is the truth. I stopped posting and stopped calling. I focused on my school work. When that was done, I went to my two minimum wage jobs and didn't do much else. I was defeated.
We made a lot or rookie mistakes, but for about a month, it really seemed like it was going to pay off. Brandon's a little less mad at me now. Hopefully he's not opposed to trying again next summer.
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