Customers have no objections.
A 24-year-old Georgetown Law dropout is all the buzz on Long Island as he commands the only local fleet of silent, self-driving lawnmowers that are revolutionizing the industry with their motion sensor capabilities.
“We market them as a Roomba for your lawn,” Kevin Boodram, who started Huntington-based Serenity Lawncare at age 21, told The Post.
“When we first told customers about them two years ago, I remember it like yesterday, they were extremely interested and hardly anyone was skeptical.”
The futuristic device made by Husqvarna, which Boodram and his team leave at people’s homes and check in on weekly, also allows customers to cut their lawn at pre-set times.
“It’s so quiet that some people will set it to cut their grass overnight because neighbors can’t even hear it,” he said.
Admittedly, Boodram “had no interest in getting into the lawn care industry,” but was compelled when the noise from other landscapers working in his Floral Park neighborhood made it hard for him to do his law school studying.
“Law school was the plan, but I got fed up with the gas lawn mowers making noise in my neighborhood while taking classes remotely. I literally couldn’t concentrate because of it.”
That was enough for Boodram to begin his grassroots business.
And in just a few years, it has grown into 60 all-electric mowers — quieter than birds chirping and about the size of a car tire with no handlebars — that service about 80 customers on the North Shore of Suffolk County, all the way to Western Nassau.
Serenity installs guidewires to curbs to keep it from going onto a driveway or street and implants a battery port on the lawn as well.
Guidewires also lead the mower back to charge automatically when its battery is getting low.
“It’s also extremely safe around children and animals,” Boodram added after sticking his hand below the $700 unit to show how it will automatically stop for obstacles.
Boodram does have some traditional, non robotic, employees, who do things such as seeding and edging that can’t be so easily automated.
The grass is always greener
Needless to say, at first, Boodram’s family wasn’t thrilled to hear their son had foregone Georgetown Law for lawn care.
At the time, he didn’t even have robots as part of his company; instead, he was driving a noiseless push mower from job to job in his black 2001 Mustang.
“When I was mowing lawns in my neighborhood, I had random people come out and yell at me — people had never met in my whole life and say, ‘What are you doing? I thought you were going to school!’” Boodram recalled.
“Random people thought it was crazy to see me, because they didn’t really understand what I was trying to do…dropping out became the best business decision I could have ever made.”
Initially, before calling it quits academically, Boodram was awarded grants from Georgetown for his eco-friendly business model that got the motor for Serenity running.
After initial success and proof of concept, last January, Boodram hit it big with another grant for $20,000.
The extra green to invest in greens allowed him to expand his robotic fleet — one that complements other all-electric devices. It includes a supplemental drivable lawnmower for customers who want their grass cut faster than the robot, which moves slowly.
Now, conventional gas-guzzling landscapers are shaking more than their mowers as some customers literally tell Boodram, “Serenity now!” like Frank Costanza of “Seinfeld” iconically proclaimed.
“One of the other landscaping companies who does some of the houses got out of his truck and started yelling at me,” Boodram said. “‘You’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re doing, your company’s trash, your equipment is trash, this battery stuff is garbage.’”
Really, it was fear of the future vocalized, Bodram believes. As it is, Serinity’s next step is leasing the electric mowers — and landscapers are the most interested market.
“The house they were working on when I was yelled at is now my customer.”
