#1 Reason Why Lawn Care Businesses FAIL... and how to avoid!!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike, and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about the number one thing that I see makes some landscaping companies do really well, and the same thing not done makes other landscapers fail miserably within five years of starting their business. And it's very, very simple. Like, if you want to just listen to this one sentence and then turn me off, that's fine, because you're going to get the entire episode right now. And then I'll explain. And that is the people that invest in learning, education, and knowledge are the ones who will win in the landscaping industry hands down, without fail. And the reason I don't talk about this a lot, like, let's just be honest, is because I do sell a course, I do sell a book, and I do sell a franchise. And those are. Obviously, a lot of people would say that I am trying to sell. Sell my products if I say that, that having access to just the coaching from the franchise is worth the 1200 bucks a month. Like, I believe that. However, some people would say, like, I'm just trying to sell my course or the book or whatever. And I get that. I understand that. That's why I don't talk about it a lot. But when you look at the people that come to conferences, educate themselves on the industry, go to trade shows, go to places where they can learn more about this industry and the work and the marketing tactics and their specific territory of zone for growing trees and different tactics for different landscaping projects and being on the cutting edge of technology, like, those are the people who win. And so a lot of people ask me, what do you do? Like, how did you become so quickly Grow Augusta Lawn Care? How do you so fast, like, learn all about business and all this stuff? And that's very flattering, but this is the bottom line is I absolutely saturated myself in learning and education and being humble enough to realize I didn't know everything. And that doesn't change. I don't feel like I know everything now. And so when I first started, I was going to school at night, getting my master's in business administration. I spent tens of thousands of dollars out of my own pocket going to get a business degree. That was investing in my education, investing in my knowledge, investing in what my business acumen and marketing skills. And all of that was tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds and thousands of hours being spent on that during the day, because that was at night. That was at 6, 10pm I would go to lectures. And then after That I would work on projects and then I'd start the whole thing over again in the morning early because I was starting Augusta Lawn Care and. And throughout the entire day as I was working in the field, as I was doing the work myself, and I did not have employees right away, I did not have people doing out the jobs right away. And I was the estimator, and then I was selling franchises within a few weeks. That's not how it worked. The first year and a half I was out in the field, I was working 10, 12 hours a day in the field, let alone the estimates and everything else. While I was doing that, I was plugged into podcasts, I was plugged into audiobooks, and spent several thousand dollars on just audio books. And you're like, that's crazy. Well, think about it. They're 20 bucks a piece, let's say, for example, and you buy a couple hundred of them, they add up pretty quickly. But guess what? That was part of the education process. That was part of investing in my learning and in my knowledge and in terms of educating myself. And so I really attribute a lot of my business success early to the, you know, and I use the success thing lightly. Like it's all. You could compare me to someone like Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm a miserable failure from a financial standpoint. I'm just saying what I've accomplished. A lot of I can attribute to the two years, three years, where literally it was 18 to 20 hours a day of learning business. I learned so much in that time and I invested a lot of money into that. And that doesn't change. And that's what I wanted to make this episode about today. That does not change for me. I still am listening to books, I'm still changing and improving and realizing I'm wrong on things when it comes to business. So, for example, and I'm willing to spend money on it. Like, let's just be clear, literally today I went and I bought an online course about stocks and about real estate. And I paid a lot of money, a lot more than my money the landscape business courses, a lot more. Because I'm wanting to educate myself. And I'm very happy to spend dollars which are depreciated, like going down in value over time because of inflation. I'm very happy to spend that money on the education that is going to give infinite returns because if I can learn something and make money from it and then that compounds and it becomes over the course of a career, a 5, $600 course can make you A lot of money down the road. One correction, one bad hire that you don't hire because you learnt something in a program is very, very valuable. You know, P4P and what we taught at like Landscape Summit could literally save people like lots of headache, hundreds of thousands of dollars and allow them to scale their business twice as much over the course of the next five years if they would have otherwise had a higher turnover rate, lost key employees once they became really proficient at their jobs, were not as efficient. In the workplace, there's just so much. And so I think the thing that I want to get across today is you've got to continue to educate yourself and invest in your learning. If I had $500 today, and that was it, all I had was $500, I would money on educating myself, I would learn skills because those skills are part of me. They're with me forever. Like I can go buy a phone or I can put fuel in my tank and it'll get me so far, but it's gone, it's over. There's no more value to that. Information and knowledge and learning is just an incredible way to grow your skillset. And if you look at the companies that are big, you look at the companies that have a profitability margin that's substantially over 10%, you look at the companies that have systems in place where the owner is no longer working and they have 10 plus employees and they have an estimator and they have people in the office and the owner can go away on a vacation for a week. And not everything fall apart. Those are the businesses where that owner is educating themselves. They're spending money on coaching, they're spending money on getting help, they're hiring professionals to do their website, they're hiring other people to do the work they're not very good at. And that's what I see so often people fail at in this industry. The landscaping industry is so far behind in so many different areas because people are caught in this notion that they know everything, they have the best way of doing things and that the way they've done it for so long is always gonna be right. And guess what? You're dead wrong. Because what I did last year or the year before that is going to, I'm going to improve it, I'm going to prove myself wrong. Like we implemented P4P. And literally the first thing I say to franchisees when they come here is, number one, P4P is the pillar of everything we're doing. The next words out of my mouth is P4P will be obsolete in three to five years within this organization because we're going to improve it, we're going to change it, we're going to make it better. And these are the things that we've got to learn is like, you can't stay stagnant. And one of the reasons that companies go stagnant is because the owners, in their mind, in their education, in their level of disciplining themselves and learning in this field, this industry of business and landscaping, they stagnate. They don't go anywhere. They're not learning anything new. And so I just even like, for example, the gym. The gym has been shut down for the past three months because of the coronavirus. So I own an Anytime Fitness location. I'm a franchisee, which gave me a lot of insight to becoming a good franchisor for Augusta lawn care. And one of the things I've learned from over there is I still have a lot to learn. We were in the top 5% of the Anytime Fitness franchise. They have 4,500 gyms across the world. We were in the top 5%. It was going really, really good. But then this whole coronavirus thing came, and I was left with decision. Do I just kind of shut myself in? Like, hey, we've always done it this way. I'm just going to keep doing that, or am I going to realize that the world's changing and I've got to start pivoting and focusing on other things? So what did I do? We pivoted to virtual training. Now I was left with the decision. I knew that theoretically that's what needed to happen, but I also knew that it was going to take me a long time to figure out exactly how to do that most proficiently. So what did I do? I went out and I spent money to get the education. Like, I'm talking five to six thousand dollars a month to get the education to be able to implement this process. Now, that five to six thousand dollars a month is probably going to save me two to three years of trying to figure it out my own. And this is what I see so many business owners fail to realize. You've got to invest in yourself, in your education and in your learning. And the best dollar spent, the best ROI is on you and your education and improving you and your skillset to run your business more efficiently. And so I went out, I went out and tried to find the best virtual trainer, the best coaching for my sales staff. How do we figure this out? How do we pivot? And I don't want to take two or three years to figure it out. I don't want to have to trial and error and work on Facebook ads and the scripts for sales on the phone and the scripts that we would send for texting and creating the marketplace online where they can buy things and click. I don't want to figure that stuff out. It's a long learning curve. The reason we've been able to scale Augusta is because I've realized I'm not good at everything. I've got to hire those things. I've got to buy someone else's education because the company that we hired to do virtual training for the gym has done this for years. Why would I go along and bumble along and try to figure out what they've learned for years, spend tens of thousands of dollars, go through employees, bad customer experiences, when I could just buy that knowledge, buy that experience, cut out the learning curve and get start becoming profitable. And so when people choke over, you know, like a $20 book, whether it be my book or you know, good to great or rich dad, poor dad, or the E myth, and like, oh, $20, like the amount of learning that you're going to get from that can be tens of thousands of percent ROI. And people get into the stock market because of 8 to 10% a year when literally 200, 510,000, $100,000 they spend on themselves could have much greater returns. If you spend 100,000 doll and your own education and learning and you were able to make $110,000 the next year, that'd be a 10% return on investment. And I truly believe that if you spent $500 on self improvement, whether it be books or whether it be a course or not, for me, I don't care. Like go to a community college, get an accounting course, get a marketing course, get some books, get a landscape business course, get lawn care, web design, the stuff we build for you. Like, why would you try to figure out how to code and how to design websites and how to figure out how to do mobile and HTML and JavaScript and all these different coding languages and figure out SEO when you can just hire it out, cut out the learning curve, cut time out of the equation. We talk about that in the sales process, but in the evolution and the growth of your business, you've got to cut out the learning curve. Don't be doing things that you could get other someone else that's much more educated, much more skilled at when you can hire those things out. Invest in yourself, invest in education, and those are the things that are going to exponentially give ROI to you and your business. So when I look at this industry, landscapers in general, the ones who succeed are the ones coming to conferences, the ones that are looking into books, improving their business, creating systems that are willing to pay to cut out that learning curve, hire out their SEO, hire out their website design, figure out systems and procedures, and hire on someone's good at sales because they're only good at performing the work. Like, maybe you're really good at landscaping, maybe you're really good at lawn care, Maybe all your employees love you. But if you're not good with sales, you're not good with numbers. You've got to go hire that out. You don't need to bumble along 150, $200,000 a year in revenue when you should just go hire somebody and that void in your business will be filled. Or you go educate yourself. You go take a marketing class, you go take a sales educate. You go take a Dale Carnegie and learn how to talk to people and express yourself. These are things you've got to do if you want to improve your business. And if you want to improve your business, the best ROI is improving yourself, educating yourself, learning, realizing that you're wrong, fixing things, changing, creating systems. And that's why when it comes to the franchise, that's the first thing we talk about, is that, hey, we've created systems, we've created procedures, we've created standard operating procedures. I'm going to tell you what's working, what's not working, but guess what? It changes. And you've got to continually be improving yourself. Literally, the way that we market three months ago, before this whole pandemic, is completely different. How we're marketing right now, where we're spending our money, there's certain avenues that are much better. ROI right now, and guess what? That changes over the course of different markets. Now we have 18 locations for Augusta Lawn Care. I'm really, really beginning to realize just how incredible one market to the next can change. And the marketing dynamics, you've got to educate yourself, you've got to learn, and you've got to be willing to invest in yourself. And so I encourage you, get some education. I bought a course literally today on stocks and real estate. Am I doing a whole bunch of stocks in real estate? Is that taking a bunch of my time? No, but I got to learn. I got to improve myself. I've got to realize that there's going to be franchisees that in five years they're going to need help with real estate. They're going to need help investing the money that they've earned from their business, and I need to know what they're talking about. I need to be able to give them decent amount of advice or point them in the right direction of professionals that can help them. These are things you should be thinking about. And this is what separates landscaping professionals and Landscape Joe down the street that doesn't last five years in business. And you can call me whatever, seeing that I'm trying to get people to buy my book, buy my course, sign up for Lawn Care Web Design, sign up for Augusta Lawn Care, and guess what? You're right. Because I truly believe that's what separates the good from the great and the people who fail. Thank you so much for listening to Landscape Business Course. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pay.