Evan Collins started Premium Lawn Maintenance before he finished high school
Evan Collins builds his Davison lawn and snow crew’s week around one idea: keep the jobs close together and fill the dump trailer once.
Davison, MI
Take five houses that each need two yards of mulch. Evan Collins does not see five jobs. He sees one load. “We know these five houses need two yards of mulch,” he says. “Why not just fill a dump trailer full of 10 and then get them all done?”
The same goes for shrubs. Landscaping is easier, he says, “if we can just trim bushes for one day and do 10.” Collins calls the goal route density: work packed close enough together that the crew spends the day working, not driving.
Collins owns Premium Lawn Maintenance, a family-owned lawn, landscaping and snow company in Davison, Michigan, and he started it in 2021, about three years before he graduated from high school. One customer wrote in a Google review that Collins has been the lawn service she relies on for the past five years.
He is frank that the company is still young, and that most of its growth has come since he left school. “Most of my growth literally just happened within the past couple of years,” he says. Plowing is the newest big piece.
The work runs on the clock and the map. Premium Lawn’s customers stretch from Fenton and Flint to Grand Blanc, Oxford and Lake Orion. Lake Orion is the far end, about 40 minutes from Davison, and Collins counts about 30 clients there, enough that the town works almost like a route of its own. Most of the rest live in and around Davison and Fenton. “Really our travel time is about 30 to 40 minutes,” he says.
Time in the truck is time nobody is mowing or planting, so Collins tries to stack jobs that sit near each other. A quick landscaping job takes three or four hours. If he can fit two or three of them near each other into one day, he says, the crew is “not having to drive out.” He says the company has gotten better at that kind of scheduling. Its listed hours run from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week.
Mowing and landscaping make up most of the work, about 88 percent by Collins’ estimate. The lawn side covers mowing, edging, cleanups, core aeration and overseeding. The landscaping side runs to mulch and rock, pruning, weed control and paver or plastic edging. The company works for homeowners and businesses, and some of the work goes beyond the menu. A commercial property owner wrote in a review that the crew handles all the lawn work there and has also built a retaining wall, done tree work, laid sod and designed the landscaping.
Most jobs are modest, and Collins plans for that. Houses in his area mostly are not big, he says, and neither are the jobs. “We’re not doing huge landscaping jobs like that, where you need 15 yards of mulch,” he says. A typical job is a small mulch bed, the kind of work where the drive can swallow the day if the schedule is careless. That is why the dump trailer matters. One load, split among several nearby houses, turns a string of small jobs into a full day.
When the grass stops, the plows start. Premium Lawn clears driveways and parking lots, shovels walks, salts lots and walkways, and marks edges with snow stakes, and it offers 24-hour service seven days a week. Snow does not keep a schedule. Once, the crew went out to plow just three times in a month, Collins says, then was out “damn near every day” the next.
Collins has two employees and plans to hire more, starting with a couple of extra hands for plowing. For now he still works in the field, and customers tend to write about him by name rather than by company, as Evan or as Evan and his team. One review describes him as quick to come out, dependable and careful with details. He does not plan to stay on the mower forever. “Ten years from now, I don’t want to be working in the field,” he says.
The slow months are when he works on the company itself. “I have a lot more time to really fine-tune the business for the springtime,” he says, “because spring, summer, fall, we’re busy.”