For many of us, when we hear about a kid having a business, the typical lemonade stand comes to mind, or the local neighborhood kid that will mow your lawn for a couple dollars. But one Neuqua student is going above and beyond that and breaking the stereotype of a teenager with a business.

Senior, Aidan Murphy began his business, “Good Lookin’ Lawns,” in 2016 when it was just himself and a couple pieces of regular lawn equipment that he owned. From there, Murphy became motivated to get his business out to the public and went door to door “handing people flyers that [he] printed off [his] mom’s computer,” in hopes of gaining the clientele he wanted. Jump forward a couple  years and after some more successful marketing on Craigslist and Nextdoor.com, Murphy has now expanded his small lawn business to a full property management service saying, “we do lawn maintenance, clean ups and mulching jobs in the spring, summer and fall, then in the winter we set up holiday lights and we do snow removal for our seasonal clients.”

Of course, he does not do this all by himself. Murphy has a fully assembled crew of workers that he hires right from the Neuqua student body.  When asked about his hiring process, Murphy said quite simply, “if you want to work, then you’re hired.”

Being the head of a company as a teenager, Murphy faces the risk of people not taking him seriously so Murphy behaves as professionally as he can for his customers and realizes that people may not give him the respect he deserves.  As his business grows and becomes more serious, Murphy is looking to hire real subcontractors, but acknowledges the fact that he’ll “have to go through a lot of subcontractors before [he] find[s] people that actually respect [him] and listen.”

Nonetheless, Murphy hopes to work on his business. After Neuqua, he will be attending College of Dupage for two years, while continuing to grow“Good Lookin’ Lawns.” After the two years, he will be transferring to a four-year university, at which point he plans to sell his property management business and go into the health industry or aerospace engineering. In regards the sudden change in career paths, Murphy explained he does not plan on working in the lawn maintenance industry his whole life but saying that “There are a lot of lessons from this [business] that carry over to anything in life.”