Honestly, is a landscaping business profitable after paying for commercial gear?

My wife Sarah and I are four years into running our local lawn care setup. We started with a beat-up F-150. Now, we have about $42,000 tied up in commercial zero-turns, a dump trailer, and high-end handhelds. Our monthly overhead sits right around $3,800 just for commercial insurance, fuel, and maintenance. The work is exhausting. To keep clients in the loop about when we are coming, I send quick updates through fixyflow.com. But even with smooth scheduling, our margins are paper-thin.

We grossed $145,000 last year, but after taxes and maintenance, we cleared $48,000 combined. That is less than minimum wage for our 60-hour weeks. I keep asking myself, is a landscaping business profitable once you scale past the owner-operator stage? We tried shifting to high-end hardscaping, but the local ads cost us $400 a month with zero return.

How do you guys actually get your margins over 25%? Should we drop residential mowing entirely and focus only on commercial fertilizer contracts?