I’m sure many of you mowed your neighbors or family member’s lawns as a teenager, but did you start doing it at the age of 8? In 4th grade Emil Motycka was told by his teacher to start exploring career ideas for a paper. He read a lot about the landscaping industry and thought that charging $10 to mow a lawn would be a great business. He could make $20 an hour by cutting 2 lawns, which was a lot more than all his friends were making at 8 years old…. Which is more than I was making over the summer as a junior in college. At 13 he took out an $8,000 loan to buy a commercial lawn mower and by 16 he bought a truck. The rest was history. By the end of summer Emil was making 135,000 per summer. Emil then started purchasing other landscaping companies in order to expand his own. He now is 26 and his business is thriving.
I think this is a cool story and shows that you just have to find something you are passionate about and have the right mindset. Emil said, “The biggest failure you can have in life is not trying at all.” Success is out there to be taken. You just have to be persistent and understand the basics of the market. Emil was able to provide a service and kept trying to optimize what he had in his business taking it one step at a time. That is a great business mindset to have.
Great post! This really is a classic success story. A kid had a dream and was very successful at what he did. Very inspirational, thanks for posting
I’ve been the kid that cuts lawns in the neighborhood, but it blows my mind seeing how much money he is making. If you assume he can cut 7 months out of the year, and that he can cut 25 days out of the month due to weather, that means he was bringing in almost $800 per day. What I find cool about Emil is that he took his business beyond what other kids do with their mowing businesses. Usually there’s one kid or a pair of kids that cut lawns together. That’s fine, but they aren’t going to make more than a quarter of what Emil made. What made it all possible was Emil took his business to the next level by taking his profits and reinvesting them into multiple crews, something I haven’t seen another kid with a similar business try yet. Very cool.
That’s awesome that he was able to find something that wasn’t a long term plan and turn it into a business idea that has allowed him to make a career. Even at the age of just 8! Never too young to start trying I guess!