What has your mower done for you lately? That's a fair question for any contractor. The answer for Ruth and Gordon Ewerks, owners of KK Enterprises, Lady Lake, Florida, is, plain and simple, "doubled our business."

When Scott and Company, Bay City, Texas, decided to get into the maintenance business, it took a short cut. Instead of starting from scratch and learning the business on their own, owners Scott and Pam Evans took the advice of an industry expert and visited a firm that already "cracked the maintenance code."

In one way, Kenneth Vaughan, owner of KLV Landscape Services, Inc. is your typical contractor. "From my early childhood, I wanted to mow," he explains. He mowed lawns while growing up in Arlington, Texas. He worked his way through college mowing lawns and when the opportunity arose, he purchased the lawn maintenance business from a landscape contractor... and never looked back.

Asked to name one of the most challenging aspects of their job, and most lawn maintenance contractors will define it in one word, bidding.

When Jim Dubberly saw the light, it had nothing to do with the house he was wiring. He was observing a mowing crew tackle the new housing development in which he worked, and thought he could do a better job mowing and improve his lifestyle doing it.

There's the old saying, "leadership is earned and not given." And how is leadership earned? There's another old teaching (Biblical) "Whoever would become a leader, let him be a servant" That sounds like a paradox. and as a business principle, it just wouldn't work... "You'd be eaten alive in the dog-eat-dog business world." But this is a principle that Walker Manufacturing was founded on and is trying to follow.