Growing Green

By Dick Hughes  

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010 9:18 p.m. (0)

It’s not easy being green, and, as Chad Lane knows painfully well, it’s even harder if the green you need are dollars to bring an environmentally friendly riding mower to a market wedded to fossil fuels.

It’s been a tough 18 months for Lane’s Eco-Mow, the fledging Spartanburg company he and his wife Janice formed to build battery operated-riding mowers designed, engineered and built by Lane.

Production is limping along, and Lane is not giving up. He’s developing new products for a total sustainable mower system, making improvements to his market-ready mower, exploring alternative fuel sources, and looking to a brighter, though probably slower developing, future for Eco-Mow.

In May 2008, Lane’s first mowers had been built, tested and readied for sale to a small but growing community of consumers who live and act in sustainably environmental ways, including mowing their lawns.  Everything looked promising.

To get cash to build more mowers, he applied for a government-guaranteed SBA loan through a local bank, got referred to a group in Columbia, and got turned down for lack of collateral.  What he discovered was banks don’t view a good idea as collateral. They wanted his house.

“It was a situation where we would have had to put everything absolutely on the line, including our house,” he said.

Lane refused.

“It’s not that you don’t have confidence in what you can accomplish with your product but in the event things don’t turn out quite like you want, you end up homeless, and that’s a commitment we couldn’t make,” he said

He said they had $70,000 cash to put to the project.

“We were basically looking for a loan of $200,000 and that was to purchase initial inventory to kick the whole thing off,” he said. “When that fell through, we ended up disappointed, depressed, whatever you want to call it.”

To keep going, Lane sold two personal vehicles, including a new Chevy pick-up, relied heavily on credit cards, borrowed from a family member, cut the staff from five to zero, and went back to work on occasional jobs as an engineer.

By cobbling together money on his own, Lane has been able to buy enough components to build at least 20 more mowers beyond the five or six he has sold.  And he has individual parts for perhaps 100 more if he could afford what’s missing for a complete product.

Doing all the production work himself, Lane figures 20 mowers would bring in enough money to pay off his debt but not leave enough to add more inventory and build and develop more equipment.

“Sometimes it feels like you are taking more steps in reverse than forward, but sacrifice is part of being an entrepreneur or small business owner. If you are not willing or incapable of stomaching that, then you are in the wrong business.”

He’s been encouraged by the feedback on the mowers in service.

“So far, everything has been positive – the cut quality of the equipment, the durability of the equipment, the finish. Everybody has been very happy with it.”

The basic Eco-Mow model is zero-turn mower with a 48-inch cutting deck run on four deep-cycle rechargeable batteries similar to those used in golf carts. Under normal wear, it will cut 1.5 acres on a single charge.

Even though the funding problems remain unresolved, Lane is pushing ahead with determination, developing new accessory equipment, developing other landscaping products and working on new energy sources such as propane and fuel cells. His market focused has changed, as well.

“We felt like we were going to end up building a residential unit, but really the demand that we saw was not so much residential as municipalities, people with very large properties and landscape customers. So we ended up developing a fully commercial grade piece of equipment and that in turn demands a higher price.”

The higher cost of materials and fabrication of a more robust mower raises the price from around $4,500 for the residential model to “between $8,000 and $9,500 depending on options, which oddly is still pretty much in line with our competitors.”

Lane developed a solar charging kit to sell along with the mower to make the system “truly sustainable” for people who draw power off the grid.  He is working on a charging system so landscapers can recharge mowers while moving between work sites.

One potential client in Colorado wants a custom-built mower, and Lane sees other opportunities to tailor products, such as offering paint coating specific to a customer’s needs, which is “something not offered in the market right now.”

Lane, at 33, feels like the last 18 months “shaved a few years off life expectance” but he has not lost faith in his product and his ability to carve out a market niche and develop even more advanced sustainable landscaping products.

“Realistically, I will keep plugging ahead with this until it literally doesn’t make sense any more. But basically having funded the project myself there’s no reason not to stick with it. There definitely are people interested in the equipment.”

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