“I’d still make it happen somehow,” Coleden Lucero says, “whether that’s hiring a friend to go do it for me and not making any money or getting it done a different day.”
He is talking about the days when football practice or another game landed on a customer’s mowing day. Lucero ran Whipper-Snapper Lawn Care all through high school. His rule was to tell the customer about the conflict, then get the lawn cut anyway. Sometimes that meant paying a friend to cover the visit and clearing nothing on it himself.
The business began when he was 14, with a bike and a trailer that he pushed around his neighborhood in Johnstown, knocking on doors. For the first stretch it wasn’t a registered company. It was a kid with a route and a promise to show up. “I was there every week no matter what,” he says.
He traces that habit to two places. One is his father. “He always just taught me to do things 100%,” Lucero says. The other is the town itself. “If people are saying we’re not reliable, it’s going to get around town, especially when you’re local in Johnstown,” he says. “It’s a small town.”
He has employees now, and he says the same rule applies to them as it did to him on the bike. “I can’t be slacking, because then they’re going to be slacking,” he says. He talks about the crew as people he plans to keep. “I do have employees that I get close with, and I try to bring them along with me.”
What customers notice tends to be small. A homeowner who has used the company for two years pointed out in a review that the crew reminds her when it’s time to aerate, so she doesn’t have to remember and call, and that they close her gate on the way out.
The work has spread well past that first neighborhood. The company’s own pages list Milliken, Loveland, Windsor and Berthoud along with Johnstown, and it handles mowing, aeration, cleanups and snow removal for homeowners and businesses alike. Lucero doesn’t rank one kind of customer over the other. “Customers are customers,” he says. “I’m not going to pick or choose who we go for.”
He is not shy about where he wants it to go. “I just basically want to build a community, eventually, with everyone knowing the Whipper-Snapper name,” he says. Then, more bluntly: “I want to be the biggest, and I think our brand has the potential to be that.”
He has since finished high school. Asked what it was like to run the company while still in class, he keeps it short.
“Yeah, it’s been a challenge,” he says. “I wrestled and I played football as well.”