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Andy Schlueter loads smaller equipment in the front of his trailer.Landscaping and lawn maintenance is primarily a warmer-month job, so when the snow hits Brown Deer, Wis., a proper storage-house for lawn mowers and hedge trimmers is a must.

Andy Schlueter found that an enclosed trailer does the trick for storage but also doubles as a great device for moving from job site to job site in the Milwaukee area during the prime summer months.

“Everything is in there,” Schlueter says of the trailer. “Your equipment is going to be dry. The weather is controlled.”

Schlueter inherited the company, Gary’s Landscaping, after his father, Gary, died in 2006. It’s the definition of a family-run business: Mom works in the office doing the billing and accounting, and Schlueter is out working the jobs with two employees during the summer and fall.

“I am running my dad’s business. My dad left this all for me,” Schlueter says. “I worked with him as a kid, and I’ve been running his business the way he taught me and continuing his legacy. We keep the spirit of my dad running here.”

With a lack of manpower on his crew (the $150,00-a-year company has three employees), Schlueter says an enclosed trailer speeds along daily tasks and helps get jobs completed more efficiently.

“In the morning, I’d come to work, and I’d have to pull out the rakes. I’d have to pull out the shovels. But now I don’t have to move things back and forth from the truck and the trailer,” he says.

Schlueter estimates that about 90 percent of his customers are residential, and an enclosed trailer helps present a professional look. Gary’s Landscaping does lawn maintenance and cleanup, fertilizing and weed control and tries its best to keep the majority of its customers in the winter for snow removal. Showing up in an organized, enclosed trailer definitely makes his business look that much better to the customer, Schlueter says.

Along with the mowers, the bulk of the equipment is kept in the trailer all year. Schlueter built shelves for the front of the trailer to expand storage space.

“I’ll load the small equipment, like hedge trimmers, chainsaws, oil for the equipment (in the front),” he says. “All of it sits in the front of the trailer on two shelves. Maybe I’ll bungee cord some things, but everything is in there. It’s a security guard.”

And when winter finally does roll around, Schlueter says getting things prepared for the colder months is easy with the trailer.

“In the winter, I pull out all the batteries, I put the locks on the doors, and it’s a self-enclosed storage unit,” he says.

Schlueter says the overall security of an enclosed trailer is what made him switch from an open one. If the crew is in a hurry, gas cans and other odds and ends can be thrown inside the trailer without having to be tied down.

The author is a freelance writer based in Kent, Ohio.