One summer afternoon when David Williams was 8 years old, his father Roy Williams led him out into the backyard of their Malvina, Miss., home to teach him to use a push mower. At the time, David was only barely tall enough to reach the handle of the machine, and he had an even harder time pressing and holding in the control bar on the handle required to keep the mower running while pushing it at the same time.
The young Williams spent the next four hours completing the job, but he was determined to finish and prove he could work as hard as his father did to provide for his family.
After he got the hang of using the push mower, Williams soon began mowing his neighbors’ yards to earn money, though he did not have many neighbors to assist. Malvina, which Williams says is known for a distinctive three-way bridge next to the small town’s railroad station and “not much else,” only had roughly four other houses when he lived there in the late ’90s, he recollects.
Even after Williams grew up and had a family of his own and other jobs, he continued mowing lawns on the side. In 2020, he finally decided to make lawn care a full-time profession and opened Dingo Dave’s Lawn Care & Home Repair in Boyle, Miss.
‘Cut Me a Check Right Then and There’
When David Williams first moved to Cleveland from the nearby Malvina, he took a job as a mower for ServPro, a company that helps mitigate fire and water damage in Mississippi. He simultaneously mowed lawns on the side, spending roughly seven years doing yard work for 11 families in the area.
Delta State University hired Williams as part of the grounds crew, a position he held for two years before the college’s faculty promoted him to manager of the university’s golf course in 2017. The university closed the golf course down only a year after he took up the position, however, which Williams says served as part of the impetus for him to begin looking into going into business for himself.
Williams began working with the Cleveland City Fire Department shortly after losing his position with DSU. While there, he underwent a divorce that left him with custody of his two sons, Hayes and James Williams. The experience left him feeling unhappy with working for the station, so he reached out to his brother, Mike Carr—a lawyer who had recently gone through a divorce himself—for advice on what he should do next.
“My brother told me the best thing he had ever done was setting out on his own and starting up his own law practice to get out from under other people,” Williams says. “He helped me organize a limited-liability company so that I could get my own business going, and that was Dingo Dave’s.”
The entrepreneur founded his business with nothing but a push mower and a weed eater that he took from house to house in his truck. As Dingo Dave’s slowly grew through word-of-mouth advertising and support from the Cleveland community, he acquired two commercial-grade riding and push mowers, edgers, blowers and other equipment and now services roughly 40 dedicated yards across Bolivar County.
“I’ve gotten a lot of support and even donations from people I’ve worked for since starting Dingo Dave’s,” Williams says. “Last year one of my mowers went out, and I had to start fundraising to try to get a new one. After two weeks a customer I had only ever talked to on the phone called me about a job, and I told him I might have to quit without a mower. He cut me a check right then and there for a new one. That kind of thing makes me feel blessed, because it shows that people think I do good work and want to help out because they care.”
‘I Want to Be an All-Inclusive Package’
David Williams’ father may have been the person who taught him to operate a lawn mower, but it was his mother, Verlee Williams, who indirectly provided the namesake for his business.
Before opening Dingo Dave’s in 2020, Williams had been working as both a groundskeeper and volunteer firefighter for Cleveland, Miss.’, fire department. At the station, everyone received a nickname, and Williams’ fellow firefighters began calling him “Dingo Dave” because his mother was originally from Sydney, Australia.
“Somebody at the station called me that as a joke early on, and I actually liked it so it stuck,” Williams says. “I liked it so much, in fact, that I decided to carry it on when it came time to name my business. You need a basic name in lawn care, something that’s short and to the point, and ‘Dingo Dave’s’ was perfect for that.”
Working out of his Ford F-150 and Toyota 4Runner trucks, Williams services Bolivar County, Miss., which consists of 15 cities and towns in the western part of the state. Dingo Dave’s services include mowing, weed eating, landscaping, edging, leaf blowing and leaf cleanup, planting flower beds, and other similar offerings. The only lawn-related services Williams cannot currently provide are sprinkler installation and pesticide spraying because those tasks respectively require necessary training and a license to spray chemicals legally.
In the winter months when lawn care becomes less feasible, Williams changes gears and offers his services as a handyman, performing home-repair tasks such as painting, patching walls, fixing broken steps and anything else his customers may require.
“When it comes to home and lawn care, I think a lot of people appreciate having one guy they can call on rather than needing four different guys to come out and do different things,” Williams says. “I want to be an all-inclusive package, and I can be that because of all the years I spent doing this kind of work before I made it into a business of my own.”
Aside from acquiring, maintaining and transporting the necessary tools for his line of work, Williams says the greatest challenge he faces is the Mississippi summer heat, which can easily reach higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. During his first year running Dingo Dave’s, Williams suffered a close call when he fainted from the heat while mowing a yard. The heat often drives away employees Williams hires to assist him with his work, leaving him with more to shoulder.
As hard as he works, Williams puts in the effort to balance his career and spend quality time with his family, taking weekends off to be present with his sons no matter how busy the lawn season may get. After doctors recently diagnosed his father with cancer, Williams and his sons moved into his parents’ home to help his mother care for him.
“This has become a time for important make-or-break decisions for what I need to do for my family,” Williams says. “It’s been giving me the drive to keep going but also weighing on me at the same time. I don’t ever want to give up, however. I’ve learned that if you want something and work hard for it, you can make it happen.”
For more information on Dingo Dave’s Lawn Care, call 662-719-8915 or find the business on Facebook.
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