Ashton Walden runs a lawn care company in Texas that carries his own name, and he also started a pest control company called Southwest Pest and Mosquito. We had been trying to set up this talk for close to a year, and it was worth the wait.
Ashton started mowing lawns at 18, and he was broke back then. Now he runs about 25 lawn trucks, and his pest control company did $700,000 in its first year. On top of that, he has grown about 17% a year for the last three years.
Here’s what I took away.
For another great startup story, hear how Jared Lajaunie climbed from zero to $25M, and catch every episode on the Pest Control Millionaire podcast.
Ashton did not fall in love with spraying lawns. He just looked at the numbers. A buddy of his kept griping about his mowing job, and Ashton could not figure out why his friend did it for someone else. So the two of them printed flyers and started mowing grass.
But mowing did not last, because the real money was in spraying. As Ashton put it, “if I’m going to send four guys with $50,000 worth of equipment to mow a $40 lawn or spray one guy with $10,000 worth of equipment to spray an $80 lawn.”
That line stuck with me. The work that pays is not always the work that looks busy.
He started with what he had
Ashton did not start with nice trucks. He sold about a hundred spray accounts before he even owned a sprayer, and then he had to figure out how to service them.
His father-in-law had given him an old van that he could not get rid of. He tried to sell it, and he even tried to give it away in poker games, but no one wanted it. Then he found a guy with a 100-gallon skid sprayer and traded the van straight across for it. That was his first rig.
He also could not get a bank loan to buy his first mowing route. Every bank laughed at him, but a local cattleman who owned a bank took the bet instead. Ashton thinks the man loaned it out of his own pocket. Small starts like this are normal, and most big companies began just as messy.
Get in the room with bigger people
This was my favorite part. Ashton went to a conference thinking he was a big dog. He was spraying five to seven hundred lawns at the time. Then he started talking to other owners, and some of them sprayed 2,500 lawns. He had no idea that was even possible.
I told him proximity is power, and he agreed. The room changed what he believed he could do. As he said it himself, “if I had never gone to the first Real Green conference, I would have no idea I could spray 10,000 lawns.”
You do not know what is possible until you stand next to someone doing it.
Just do what you say
I asked him what made him successful, and his answer was simple. He just does what is right. He answers the phone, fixes his mistakes, and keeps his word.
As Ashton told me, “if I tell you something, I promise you, you can write it on the wall.”
There was no secret trick here. He built a good name by being good to people, and that is really all there is to it.
Let people do what they are best at
Ashton’s first hire was a guy named Doug, who has been with him about 12 years. He is loyal and works hard, but Ashton still learned a big lesson with him.
He kept trying to make Doug a manager, but Doug did not want that. Doug loves running his route, knows all his customers, and barely drives five miles a day. So Ashton left him right where he was happy, and now Doug also helps train the new techs.
People are wired different, and that is the whole point. As Ashton said, “when you empower people and you trust them and you hire the right ones, sometimes you figure out that they do it better than you do.”
I see owners make this mistake all the time. They take a great tech and turn him into a bad manager.
Build the pest company as its own thing
Ashton could have just bolted pest control onto his lawn company, but he did not. He gave it a new name and a new lane so it could stand on its own.
As he put it, “I want a pest control company. Not a lawn company that does pest control and not a pest control company that does lawn care.”
He even buys different trucks for each side. Pest control gets new half-ton pickups, while the lawn techs get nice used vans. He did not want his lawn crew asking why the other guys got new trucks. Smart move.
Lawn care is harder than it looks
A lot of people think lawn care is easy, but Ashton knows better. You fight the weather, the soil, and the bugs and weeds all at the same time. You can make a lawn green and still have weeds sitting in it.
He thinks pest control will be simpler over time, since you either have bugs or you do not. But the marketing is harder. No one brags to a neighbor about not having roaches, and you cannot see the result like you can see a green lawn.
His fix for that is mosquito control, because people notice mosquitoes fast. If your patio is clear and your neighbor gets eaten alive, he is going to ask why. That kind of peer pressure sells.
Build systems until you work yourself out of a job
Ashton loves logistics. His new office is about 18,000 square feet, and he moved the building closer to the property line so he uses every inch.
He set up three mixing stations and three teams, and each team leader fills their own seven trucks. The old shop had one gate, so the trucks backed up every morning. The new one lets them pull right onto the street, and he still gets every truck out by 8 a.m.
He has built so many systems that his crew now tells him to get out of the way. As he said, “I’ve kind of hired myself out of a job. I don’t have anything to do.”
That is the goal. Build it so it runs without you.
What I am taking with me
Ashton is proof that you do not need a fancy start to build something big. You need to do good work and keep your word. You need to get around people who are bigger than you. And you need to build systems so the business does not need you every day.
I had a great time with this one. Go check out Ashton and his crew down in Texas.
