This physician makes house calls . . . . but with a mower

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Emergency room doctor Nathan Arnold makes house calls.

But he won’t be bringing a little black satchel of pills and ointments. He’ll be showing up in a pickup truck sporting a solar panel on its cab and a trailer carrying a battery-powered lawn mower.

Arnold is a franchisee of Clean Air Lawn Care, an environmentally focused landscape service started by a Kelly Giard and a handful of other sharp young people in Fort Collins, CO, four years ago. It offers mowing and trimming with rechargeable battery-powered equipment and organic lawn care services.

You might wonder why a doctor would get into lawn care, as we did when we read the article in The Grand Rapids Press.

“I just feel good about doing it,” he told reporter Garret Ellison of the newspaper.

Obviously, he also thinks he sees a potentially profitable business opportunity, this in spite of Michigan’s economy, one of the hardest hit in the nation.

Checking the Clean Air Lawn Care Web site we see that the idea is growing with new franchise locations in Illinois, North Carolina, Texas and several in the Inner Mountain West and the Pacific Northwest.

By the way, Arnold just charges $40 for a house call . . . meaning mowing a standard-sized lawn. — The LM Staff