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HOLLIS, N.H. - Jason Ekstrom’s small business began on his parents’ front yard, where a hand-painted wooden sign advertised “Lawn Mowing: $10 an Hour.”
Back then, all the 12-year-old Ekstrom had was a push mower — and a kindly mother who drove her boy to lawn care gigs around the neighborhood.
Seven years later, Ekstrom’s little operation has come a long way.
Now entering his sophomore year at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, Ekstrom is the 19-year-old owner of Ekstrom Lawn Care LLC, which boasts 80 accounts, two employees and six-figure annual revenues.
“A lot of people are surprised to find out how old I am when they first meet me,” Ekstrom said.
The company, which incorporated in February, offers mowing, seeding and mulching during the summer, plus snowplowing during the winter. It’s been a taxpaying business for four years now, since before Ekstrom was old enough to drive a car.
With uniformed crew members and a team of bright-red trucks and trailers, Ekstrom says many clients who ask to speak with his boss are surprised to learn they’re already talking to him.
“It’s the image you project,” Ekstrom said. “You would have no idea it’s a 19-year-old if you saw us, and that’s the way it should be.”
Ekstrom comes from a line of self-starters. His father, Dave Ekstrom, owns a development company, and his grandfather used to own two Exxon gas stations in Chelmsford, Mass.
“We always encouraged him to be his own boss,” said Ekstrom’s mother, Diane. “It’s much nicer being able to set your own hours, your own pace.”
When Ekstrom was in the seventh grade, his mother offered to drive him to neighbors’ homes after school, throwing his push mower into the back of her pickup truck. She would run errands or read a book to pass the time while Ekstrom mowed, then pick him up and take him to his next appointment when he was done.
His goal was to save up $800 to buy a riding lawn mower. After two summers, Ekstrom had made enough to buy an expensive commercial mower.
“He turned around and instead of blowing money on CDs or concerts — all those kinds of things — he always put the money right back into the business,” Diane Ekstrom said.
When he turned 16, he bought his father’s old truck and started driving himself to jobs. Before hiring a staff to help him, Ekstrom was juggling 40 accounts on his own, often working until sunset and handling paperwork in his bedroom after dark.
Ekstrom estimates he was working 40 hours a week throughout high school. Still, he managed to earn a 3.4 GPA.
Zack Mangold, a former classmate who now works as a full-time supervisor for the company, approached Ekstrom for a job during their senior year. Ekstrom used to bring his trailer around the Hollis-Brookline High School parking lot, and he had a reputation as an advanced businessman, Mangold said.
“Everybody knew he had his own business,” said Mangold, also 19. “People would ask him all the time, ‘How much are you making?’”
Since then, Ekstrom has both hired and fired friends and classmates. He has also beefed up his tools, which now include two trucks, a 20-foot and 14-foot trailer and two mowers. Each mower cost $10,000, he said.
Ekstrom runs his business from an IBM Thinkpad and a printer in his bedroom, where he is surrounded by posters of trucks, celebrities and girls in swimsuits.
He doesn’t spend a lot of time socializing, he said. His days are mostly divided between schoolwork, paperwork and mowing, and that keeps him busy enough. In the spring, when the grass is growing the fastest, he can be working as much as 75 hours a week, he said.
Ekstrom is studying business management at Daniel Webster. In his only business course so far, he got an A, he said.
“Everything you would probably learn through college, I knew probably halfway into high school,” he said.
Recently, he received an honorable mention from the Mississippi Coastal Student Entrepreneur Awards program, run by Saint Louis University’s business school.
Other than running his own business, he’s never had a job, and he’d like to keep it that way.
“This business is already seven years old. I’ll probably keep it another seven years or so,” he said. “I’m hoping to move into larger businesses.”
His goal is to make enough money to buy his own house in three years, Diane Ekstrom said.
“I believe that will happen for him, because he’s so motivated,” she said. “You’ve got to be very motivated to do what he does.”