Before the recession, Luke Hansford wore a suit and worked in an air-conditioned office. He and his wife Lana worked for an IT staffing company, where he managed the sales team and she ran operations. Although they’re still in similar roles today, their surroundings have since changed drastically.
In 2008, they found themselves out of work in the wake of the Great Recession. A few weeks later, they found out they were expecting their first child. They needed to pay bills, but no one was hiring.
A neighbor suggested they start a lawn care service. Luke had previous experience cutting grass for a friend who owned a landscaping business in Michigan, so he knew he could hit the ground running.
They leveraged what they had learned about sales, management, finance and customer service from their old employer to start building a business. It helped that they were surrounded by support: Luke’s brother loaned them $5,000 to buy some used equipment from Craigslist. A friend from their church shared his knowledge from several decades in the industry, and several volunteers from the congregation helped secure the company’s first customers in exchange for a barbecue dinner.
“A big group of people from church came over and helped me go door-to-door asking people if we could cut their grass,” Hansford says. “You would be surprised how well it works when you say, ‘Hi, we live down the street. My pregnant wife and I are out of work, and we were wondering if we could cut your grass?’ We picked up about 30 residential lawns, and that’s how we got started.”
