How Mike Andes Started Augusta Lawn Care at 18 and Built It to 200+ Locations

How Mike Andes Started Augusta Lawn Care at 18 and Built It to 200+ Locations

I started mowing lawns when I was 11 years old.

Not because I had a business plan. Not because I saw an opportunity. Because I needed money and I had a mower. My brother Tim and I would walk the equipment around the neighborhood in Birch Bay, Washington, knocking on doors and asking if anyone needed their lawn cut.

In our first year, Andes Lawn Care made $3,000 in revenue. That was a big deal to an 11-year-old.

Paying for College With a Mower

Over the next several years, the business grew slowly. By the time I was in high school, we were doing around $30,000 per year. That money funded my education completely. Starting at thirteen, I earned enough from lawn care to pay for my tuition and expenses.

I graduated from Western Washington University at eighteen years old — debt-free, with a pre-med degree. I had also traveled to Kenya, where I volunteered at orphanages and hospitals in Nairobi and the surrounding communities. I assisted with surgeries, administered injections, and worked in a pediatric burn unit. The experience changed how I thought about what mattered.

When I came back from Africa at eighteen, I had a decision to make. I had a pre-med degree and could pursue medicine. Or I could go all-in on the business I'd been building since I was a kid.

I chose the business.

Starting Augusta Lawn Care

I started Augusta Lawn Care at eighteen. At night, I went back to school to get my MBA. Why Augusta? Landscaping was all I knew. Since I was 11, mowing grass had been my income, my education fund, and my identity. I knew how to do it. I knew I could build something bigger.

The early years were not glamorous. I was sleeping in the closet of an office I rented next to an Anytime Fitness gym I also owned in Blaine, Washington. I was 26 years old, Augusta Lawn Care had over 90 locations, and I was still sleeping in a closet. A freight train went by six times a night. The ground shook. I used earplugs and white noise to sleep.

I wasn't sleeping in a closet because I had to. I was sleeping in a closet because every dollar I had was going back into the business. I was obsessed with building something that would last.

The Franchise Model

The decision to franchise [blocked] Augusta Lawn Care was not obvious. Franchising is complicated, expensive, and risky. But I had built systems that worked — for hiring, routing, pricing, customer acquisition, and quality control. And I kept seeing other lawn care operators making the same mistakes I had already figured out.

The franchise model let me take those systems and give them to other operators who wanted to build their own businesses without starting from zero. Instead of figuring out everything themselves, franchisees got the playbook, the brand, the software, and the ongoing support.

Today, Augusta Lawn Care has over 200 locations across North America. We've been ranked in the Landscape 100 — the top 100 landscaping companies in the nation. And the operators who follow the system are building real businesses that generate real wealth.

What I Learned That I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Looking back, there are a few things I would tell my 18-year-old self:

Recurring revenue is everything. The difference between a lawn care business that struggles and one that scales is recurring contracts. One-time jobs are exhausting. Recurring customers are the foundation of a real business.

Systems before scale. I tried to grow before I had systems in place, and it was chaos. Every time I added a crew, everything broke. The operators who scale smoothly are the ones who build the system first and then add capacity.

Your price is a reflection of your confidence. I undercharged for years because I was afraid of losing customers. Every time I raised prices, I lost some customers — and the ones who stayed were better customers. I should have raised prices earlier and more aggressively.

The people you hire define the business you build. I've made every hiring mistake in the book. Hiring too fast, hiring the wrong people, keeping people too long after it was clear they weren't working. The quality of your team is the quality of your business.

Invest in yourself. The best investment I ever made was in learning — books, courses, mentors, masterminds. The knowledge compounds. The operators who read, study, and seek out mentors build businesses that are 10x better than the ones who just grind without learning.

Augusta Lawn Care is not the result of luck or genius. It's the result of 19 years of showing up, making mistakes, learning from them, and building better systems. That's available to anyone who's willing to do the work.

If you want to learn more about the Augusta Lawn Care franchise model, visit MikeAndes.com. If you want to build your own lawn care business from scratch, start with the free resources at the top of this page.