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mulch masters
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How It Started

The origin story of Mulch Masters is simple: one summer afternoon in high school, my dad handed my friend and me a couple of shovels and asked if we wanted to mulch our yard for cash. We said yes. Three hours, five cubic yards, and $100 each later, we were hooked.

 

That first job sparked a question: What if we could do this for other people? 

We started small. We asked friends’ parents if they needed landscaping done, and we guessed at pricing (badly). But one job led to another, and soon enough we found ourselves managing a full-blown seasonal business. Over the next six years, Mulch Masters grew into a six-figure operation with 15 part-time employees and over $280K in revenue.

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Project Management IRL

We didn’t have Gantt charts or Teams channels. We had iMessage group chats, Google Sheets, and gas station hot dogs. Every job became a micro project:

Scope: How many cubic yards of mulch? How many yards do we need to edge? How many weeds are in there?

Timeline: Can we fit this between rain delays and rescheduled jobs?

Resources: Who’s free? Who has a truck? Who’s ghosted us?

Risks: Vendor delay? Client cancellation? Someone forgot the wheelbarrow again?

To keep it all together, I built a quoting model, mapped out a weekly staffing schedule, and even created a referral system that rewarded repeat customers and boosted our ROI.

It wasn’t perfect. But it worked.

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Marketing With a Shovel and a Sense of Humor

We leaned hard into social media. Facebook Groups were goldmines. Instagram became our brand playground. We cracked jokes, made memes, and turned mulch into a lifestyle. I figured if Duolingo could make people care about language learning through chaos and the death of a bird mascot, we could do the same for landscaping.

 

That approach (authenticity with a twist of humor) worked. Combined with Facebook ads, referral cards, and some clever boots-on-the-ground tactics, we hit our first 50 leads in no time. After that, word of mouth took over.

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Leading your Friends

Managing people who are also your friends is one of the most delicate balancing acts out there.

 

I learned early that leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice, it’s about:

1) Setting the standard by doing the work yourself.

2) Creating a culture where people want to show up.

3) Being clear, fair, and direct - especially when expectations aren’t being met.

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What Mulch Masters Taught Me

Mulch Masters taught me how to build something real from the ground up. I learned how to lead a team of peers, manage projects with limited resources, and market a service with nothing but humor and transparency. It wasn’t about landscaping. It was about taking ownership, solving problems fast, and creating systems that scaled. Most of all, it proved that with a little creativity and a lot of sweat, even a backyard gig can turn into a six-figure business.

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© 2023 by Leo Yu. All rights reserved.

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