10,000 Subscriber Special Q&A MARATHON!

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We're live. We're live. Let's go. Welcome, everyone. Mike Andy's here. Today we are doing a 10,000 subscriber special Q and A. So if you have any questions, go ahead and post those. And.

We'Re doing this for a long time. So next few hours I'm going to try to be live. There's not a chance in the world I can do that without staying connected. So you'll kind of probably hear me respond to a few people. You might even see me record some stuff elsewhere. So yeah, we'll just kind of go for the next few hours. As long as questions are coming in, I'll stay on and kind of celebrate our 10,000 Subscriber Special. So thank you everyone for making that happen. And I know I had promised that we'd have a Q and A marathon, so I wanted to make sure I held up my end of the bargain. And I'm sure over the next couple hours, if we do stay on that long, if we have enough questions.

That I will probably answering a few people making some comments, but feel free to ask me pretty much anything. They was a cool day in the stock market. Made some purchases because a bit of a dip in the morning. That was fun.

So if you have questions, really anything like I know usually I talk about lawn care, landscaping, and I'm totally fine with doing more of that. There's other stuff you want to talk about, by all means, let me know and we'll spend hopefully next couple hours here hanging out with all of you. I know a few people have been asking the last few days kind of what I've been buying in the stock market. So I guess I'll go over that while there are some questions coming in. So feel free to comment. Anything and everything. So recently.

I have been buying up a few companies like Enphase. I think it's really good energy play, especially with the new administration coming in. They palantir dived 13%. I had sold out of them like a week ago. Fortunately we'd have to two weeks ago because they went up to like $40 and then they just dove to because of dilution. And so I bought some in them. I bought back into mimecast. I sold out of Mimecast like a month ago. And then they recently had a hack on their system and it's not good for a security company to have a hack on their system. So I ended up buying some more of them. I bought today. What did I buy today? I bought a little bit of Tesla. I'm Not a huge proponent of Tesla in terms of like I feel like they're fully valued now, but I did buy a little bit. Just nibbling in on them. They're less. They make up less than 3% of my portfolio.

But other than that, today I did sell a little bit of Salesforce. I bought a bunch of sale force at 215 and when they did the acquisition of Slack, they dove down. I bought quite a bit of them. I released some of that today. So yeah, that was kind of a fun day in the stock market. Having a dip there around. It was around 9, 9 o' clock my time. 9 11, 9 10. Somewhere in there if able to buy a little bit. So anyways, that was the stock market for today. Let's talk about lawn care, landscaping business. Anything else that you guys want to. I do have some messages coming in on my phone that we can talk about in just a second. All right. Son asks, I have a question. Is it good to market with a marketing agency or market yourself with basic marketing methods? I'm a big fan of controlling some stuff that's very important to you in your business. That's like really the key drivers. And if advertising, which I feel is, is a big, big part of your success, I don't want to outsource that. Obviously if it's super technical and then take a lot of your time to figure it out, then by all means you want to do that to save yourself time and be able to focus on what's going to actually move the business forward. However, for a lot of people, figure out YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Google Ads, these are things that if you sent six or eight hours on YouTube, figuring out you would be well equipped to be able to run your own ads and not pay an agency $0.50 out of every dollar just for the administrative elements of that ad campaign and you actually put more money towards the actual marketing itself. So for all 20 of you, hit the like button. Let's get this thing going. Come on, let's go. All right. So Skag, Should I buy two trucks, one with a ramp rack and one with a dump dog? It's really up to you. I don't really like having a dump bed. Oh, thanks. All those likes. Thank you. I don't really like having a dump bed. Honestly, in a truck it puts a lot of issues. A lot of times I've seen issues with suspension, the frame of the vehicle. Like basically if you look at it from a material standpoint, you're using the truck and the chassis and the engine and all that to transport like heavy, heavy stuff like gravel and mulch and all the rest of it. I'd much rather have a dump trailer that doesn't have an engine and as many moving parts on it and is bent, is literally built just to dump things and transport things. That's just my, my two, my two cents. In terms of two trucks. Your, your thought though is right. Like when we start a corporately owned store, we do one truck that is for a ramp rack for mowing and one truck that is for a dump. A dump trailer. And so one truck is like fully for mowing right from the get. One truck is fully set for landscapes cleanups, things like that. So that's a great setup. Andres, what would you Recommend For a 16 year old starting a landscape company in South Texas? Well, right now in South Texas, I sure hope you're not buried in snow and you have power. But in terms of South Texas specifically, where there's not a lot of grass, what you really gotta do is get creative in terms of how you're gonna create recurring services because you're not gonna be as much mowing, you're gonna be doing things like weeding and weed prevention and trimming bushes. And like, how you can get creative to make sure that's recurring is really, really important. Best advice for second year in going full time this season. If you're going full time this season, buckle up. That's usually a big step when someone goes full time. It's a big step in terms of amount of revenue, the business growing. And then when you get your first, you know, your first full time employee, another big step. And so these are all steps. And then the next big step is really you getting out of the field again. The business had a lot of room to grow when you do that. What's your thoughts on crypto? Meticulous gardens. Crypto, wow. So I did invest in crypto. When it dipped down about 30, I sold out around 40.

I don't understand it. I don't really understand crypto. So I'm not going to stand here and say that I know what the blockchain, how it works exactly and everything like that. I do believe it's definitely in the future. It's a great hedgehog. Uh, but honestly, it's. There's nothing that is supporting it. There's no fundamentals. It could very easily go, in my opinion, down to five or six thousand dollars. Do I think it's going to. Probably not. It could go down to 20. It could go up to 100,000 but like what? Like, there's no justifying. Like, just because Elon Musk, you know, text the word doge does not mean that any asset value goes up 40%. And so I don't like the fundamentals of it. I don't like the hype around it. Anything that's hyped, I run a mile away from, like, some of my favorite stocks that I'm in. When it get. They start getting hyped, I jump because I get very scary when I. When there's hype. And if people bought into Bitcoin or not Bitcoin, GameStop at 300 and they're like, oh, my word, I went up to 450. Well, yeah, now you're down to what, 40. Whatever it is, 50. So I. I shorted it once. It went to $450. Are you kidding me? Like, my goodness. But yeah, in terms of hype, crypto is right up there with hype. Honestly, like, again, if Elon Musk can type one word into his Twitter and make an asset value up by 40%, I'm sorry, that is a hyped asset. There's no rhyme or reason to that. And I'm not going to invest my last dollars in that. I might have some fun in or if I really believe in that asset class, whether it be stock or a crypto. But I'm definitely not, like, putting my investing dollars into that at all. All right, Dean King, how would you sell service? How would you sell or service your plow accounts and get enough people? I think you mean employees or how you sell or service your plow account. So we only do commercial in our local market. We do have several franchisees that have a lot of snow and they do it year round or like, they use six months out of the year, they're plowing and they're really good at residential. Uh, and they just have to figure out how their setup is very important. And when it comes to plowing and snow plowing and snow equipment, that's like the one time I say do not buy used, buy new, expend good money. Because the last thing you want to do in the middle of a snowstorm is have, like, a plow stop working. I've had it happen. It's horrible. Um, yeah. Some crazy stories you could tell about our first couple years in snow environmental services. Hey, from New Zealand, mate. I'm deciding on my first push mower residential properties whether to go for a bigger one with a mulcher or just a standard one that would be easier to move around discussion. Yes, I would start with the smaller one, probably. But honestly, like, don't get bogged down on your first push mower. If you're, if you're planning to grow a bigger business, you know you're not going to make or break your business based on what type of mower you buy. Honestly, especially if just a push mower, like, you're not going to make or break yourself. So just, it's all about action. Like, take action. I was talking one of the franchisees a couple weeks ago about this. Like, it's more about taking action and swinging than it is trying to get on base. Like, everyone, you know, looks at baseball players and if they can get on base like 30% of the time, like batting average of.300, like, they do really well. And yet we as entrepreneurs are always so conserved. Like, oh, no, like, I got everything perfect and I've got to make sure, you know, I got the right mower and the right blower and I got my truck set up correctly and all. Like, look at the other day. Those things are not going to make or break you. I'd rather just keep swinging. Like, keep trying, making decisions, taking action and realizing that sometimes you're going to fail and you're going to mess up and you want to make sure that you protect your downside, that you're not going to like, spend your last dollars on that first mower that is a bad, bad purchase. But like a bad purchase on a 21 inch mower or push mower is not going to make or break your business in the grand scheme of things. And just, it's more about speed of execution. Right? Like just saying yes and going. And that's the way I make decisions with Augusta and with a lot of our different businesses is like, look, we're going to have a talk about this in five minutes. We're making a decision and that we're not going to spend a week. We're going to think about it. We're going to talk to everyone. We're going to, we're going to address it. We're going to make a decision. We're going to go all in on it. And we might be wrong occasionally, but if I can swing 10 times and get on base six or seven times, I would be an all American, like, incredible athlete when it comes to baseball. So I think it's all about swings and, and like the people who hit the most home runs, they strike out the most. So I swing for the fences. I make very clear decisions on swinging and not just Watching the balls go by, like, oh, man. That's why everyone like, oh, I could have done this and I could have done that. Like, just swing. And if you hit, you hit 1 out of 10 out of the park, you'll still be like, really successful. So.

The nice thing about business. All right, Mrs. Ms. London, what would you advise a longer company that's struggling to make net profit over 30%? So it really depends on the size of your business. If your net profit 30% and you're running a $4 million business, you should be really, really happy. If you're running a business that is doing 100,000 in gross revenue and your net profits under 30. Yeah, like, that's definitely. There's an issue there. Because that small of a business, you should be running well over 50% margin because you don't have many expenses. So I would be talking if someone. My advice to someone like you, Ms. London, or someone that you're mentioning hypothetically would be, look at your overhead. Where are you spending money? Do you have sh. Do you have loans? Do you have debt? This is why I fight so hard against this mentality that we need new equipment and need to go into debt is because this is what leads to a really, a higher monthly costs and leads to a lower net margin on small companies. And that's not what's needed in a small business when you're that small. Ninja Pirate. This is my first year and I'm very nervous. Ninja, you got this. Stick around, watch some of the content, do things right. Don't be nervous, just swing, just go like, sorry, I'm a little bit under the weather. I was under the weather all last week. Getting through it right now, it's been brutal.

But anyways.

My first year, I'm very nervous. Yeah. Ninja Pirate. Like, I just can't overemphasize enough. And I hope that, like, in 10 years, when people look back at like all the content I've made and they can go back to when, like I was still out in the field, that they can be like, he kept saying yes and. And like there were some things that didn't work out. There's some things that he messed up on. There's some things he. He swung and like killed it and crushed it. And that's what we're knowing he's known for. But there'll be other things like just don't fail. They fail to exist in 10 years. Like Tito Cups, Ketosis cups that we created a year ago. Covid completely shut down the kitchens and all the Rest of it, the. All the expos we had set up to go sell it, but it was all shut down. Like, that was a loss. I swung. I swung hard, went all in on it. We got some national contracts up front, big purchase orders, and then nothing. Right. Like, Covid hit and wiped out all of our sales prospects, all of food buyers getting new products. Like, it just wiped it out. And so. But again, I'm not going to let that thing hinder me from swinging hard again. Right? And whether that be, like, Augusta, whether that be software that we're trying to develop, like, I'm going to go all in on it. I'm going to mess up sometimes. Like, last night, I had to admit, the franchisees, like, I really messed up on delivering the software that we've been expecting the past month. We're behind and, like, you mess up. Right? And so is that hard? Like, has it been really brutal for me the past week? Yeah. Like, I hate disappointing people and I hate messing up and, you know, ketosis, because I have no pleasure joy in messing up and losing money. But. But it's all about swings. And if you swing hard and you know that you're 100% into it, and, like, I know that I gave everything I can for the software and continue to do so. Like, I can't be too hard on myself. And I got to realize that net that's going to lead to good things down the road. And so I just encourage you, like, if you're nervous your first year, just go start. Like, I was talking with Danny, our new. Our new camera guy, the other day, and I was talking about a show I want to do. I just don't know if I'll ever have the time. And that is. Excuse me. And that is, I want to go put, like.

Glasses. Camera on. Like, put glasses on with a camera in the middle. And, like, start in the middle of nowhere, start a lawn care business. And I'd have to take at least a few weeks to do it, and I'd probably hand it off to a general manager once I got it established. But to prove that, like, you don't need a bunch of money, you don't need a bunch of trucks, you don't even need, like, the brand of Augusta. And you can get started, you can grind and you can hustle and you can knock on doors. And if I could wear that camera, you could see me actually having to talk to people and persuade them to allow me to do service in their property for half the price that I would otherwise charge. Like, I Would love to be able to make that video and just show that it is possible. If you're willing to grind, you're willing to say yes, you're willing to put in the work, you're willing to knock on doors, you're willing to pound the pavement. And that's the beautiful thing about lawn care. There's nothing complicated, there's nothing complex. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to get an education, you don't have to have a bunch of money, you don't have a bunch of experience. You can get started with very little if you're willing to put in the work. And that's why I love this industry so much. The people that are attracted are the people who are willing to grind and hustle and work. They're not educated as much. Usually they don't have as much money. They don't come from really posh backgrounds. We're here to work. That's why we use this industry to get ahead in life. Start our businesses, start investing, start hiring, getting experience. That's the beautiful thing about this industry. And so I just, you know, I, I really want to do that one day. I want to like spend like a week where I just am putting a random place where I'm not close to anyone. I'm giving like you know, a truck and a thousand bucks or leaving less like 500 and or even less like I just need a rake. Give me a rake and a blower. Like that would be fun. Drop me in the middle of nowhere, a rake and a blower and just like I gotta start and I think I could do it. Like give me a couple weeks. I think I can have my first employee. Anyways. Anyway, Colin, thanks everyone. Keep posting your questions. I will get to them all. What does the P stand for on your trucks? P stands for pickup. Colin. So we have P for pickup. We have ET for enclosed trailer, DT for dump trailer. D is for dump truck. So I know it's a lot of E sounding words kind of is confusing sometimes hitting the 2. What are your thoughts on next door? Desperate landscapes and lawn care. Yeah, so my thoughts on nextdoor are that the local deals. Sorry, I get some water. I'm going to be talking for a long time. You should be able to hear me. Still though my thoughts are nextdoor is. Is great for impressions. The amount of impressions that you get per dollar is incredible. On nextdoor, especially for local deals, there's two different ad products. They have one's local deals. The other one is sponsorships it's called the sponsorships. Something is new and you basically sponsor like a neighborhood and they kind of sell it because they, they say, hey, there's only so many sponsors in a neighborhood. Which is great and all, but the, the sponsorships part we have not seen perform very well. I think they're going to improve it, but recently they reduced the cost of local deals by 30%, which made it even a better deal for us. So we're going all in on nextdoor. I like it a lot.

Hitting the 250,000 plateau. Any advice for sustaining this year, working towards the next level? Matt. So to get past 250, usually what you're going to need is a part time office person. And so I'd recommend trying to find that person. And if you're like, well, financially I can't afford it, then you need to raise your prices in order to be able to afford that person. Because that's going to be the thing that gets you to the next level, is getting an office person. That can take a lot of the minutiae. The emails, the phone calls, sending things, all that stuff needs to be taken off your plate so you can focus on growing the business through marketing and through growing your team. So. All right, now there's 46 people in here. Hit the like button. There's only 18 likes. Hit that thing up. All right, while you're doing that, let me pull up. I gotta, I gotta stay on top of this because if we're gonna be here for a couple hours, I do have to answer some questions. One of our French as. He just asked me a question. One second here. He's talking about the SBA 7A versus the micro loan. Okay. And then I just respond to him real quick, and then I'll actually explain what, what the SBA loan stuff is, so why it's so important. Give me one second here.

Hey, Mike. Yeah? That's awesome. Like, if. Honestly, I haven't been hearing any banks getting back to SBA applicants that fast. So if they can do a turnaround in a month or less and push it through, I think that's awesome. I don't know if that, if that's for both the 7A and the micro loan, but that'd be fantastic. Especially with 7A that had some flexibility in terms of like, you know, 50 or 60K. So congrats on that. Any projection help or business plan stuff, let me know and I can definitely help. I'm pretty familiar with it.

All right.

Sorry. I got general manager, general managers. Give me a Call. All right, now give me a call. You left me a voice note. Give me one second. Sorry. You're going to have to kind of bear with me occasionally for the next couple hours. Hey, Mike. Hey. Just want to touch base real quick. Just spoke to a customer. Oh, that's going to have to be for later. Can't get. Listen about customer intelligence. All right, back to questions. That was our. Sorry, that was our general manager over in North Carolina. And then I was talking to one of our franchisees in South Dakota and they are applying for an SBA loan, which again, for anyone out there getting their business started, the sba. Right now, sba, Small Business Administration is literally trying to give money away. If you're in the MBA online, MBA online course, that section was just uploaded and that is all about the SBA process and all that good stuff. But the 7A loan is kind of the most standard. Excuse me, sorry. And right now they're trying to give money away. So, like, I would really recommend, with the rates as low as they are, if you are trying to grow, expand the company and you need access to capital, if you're just getting started, I would recommend it even if you're high, if you're doing a lot of your cash flowing, if you know how to, you know, your numbers and everything like that. And like this is. I'm not. Again, I hate debt. I hate debt. Okay, you guys know me about this. But when it comes to the amount of money that they're willing to give away on a 27, 30 year term at these incredibly low interest rates, I have enough confidence that I can produce more than 5 and 6% a year in returns on the money they give me. And so it's incredible. And it's the only thing that I feel, I feel like they're trying to stimulate the economy, right? And they're trying to create jobs and all the rest of it. So if you need a debt, if you need debt right now, I would consider the sba. Again, I hate debt. And if your business is going down and you're losing money and you don't have a profitable model and you have overcomplicated systems and you have a bunch of payments on all of your vehicles and like, you're struggling, don't go into debt more. You're probably just going to compound your issues by having more money. You need to figure out your business model. But if you're growing and you're really profitable, I would consider it. The interest rates are just looking too pretty right now. Okay, questions, questions. Questions? Let's get back to these.

Okay.

Have you considered using vans rather than a pickup truck for long care? Yes, we have. I'm still interested in it. The problem is in our market, locally, we have to bag the clippings. And also with a pickup, I can do a cleanup and throw branches in the back of the truck. I can haul a trailer. I can use it for a ramp rack. The pickup truck's a little more versatile in terms of debris for cleanups, branch cleanups, leaf cleanups, things like that. So that's why I traditionally default to that. However, I like the idea of vans with lawn care. I really do. Especially if you don't have bag clippings, obviously. But like, even like wet, like water getting inside, like clippings. I don't know.

Yeah. But I think it's super slick, super cool looking. Okay. Have you considered company is making $120,000 a year and I want to rev it up with Facebook ads. What would you recommend the first year spend should be and what's the right realistic number that can be targeted, in your opinion? So, Elias, in terms of real realism, I would be looking at 10 to 20x multiple on your marketing dollars over the next 12 months. Right. So if you spent 5,000 in marketing, you should be expecting 50 to 100,000 in new revenue, new revenue from that marketing dollars over the next 12 months. If you're getting recurring work that's going to build on itself each year, and that's the power of, you know, recurring work is having it build on itself each year. As long as you have a good retention rate, you're not losing customers all the time. How many applications did you get the first time you hired someone? How difficult was it to find your first employee? It's always hard to find your first employee because you have, sorry, you don't have any brand awareness. You don't have much of a database, you don't have much of a social media following. So, like, first employee is always difficult. And that's why a lot of times I always say, like the first few employees, I'm okay with somebody getting like a family friend, people they know from church, whatever it might be. It's great because you trust them. They know you and like, you're not having to go up against the biggest thing that is like, you're a new business. It's very hard to get that first employee, like, as a stranger, literally. Sorry, Chuck, the guy I was just talking with, you know, he's just getting started. It's very difficult to find Your first employee in a place where you're new to, you don't have a lot of brand equity. People haven't seen your trucks all over the place, so they don't have as much confidence starting to work for you, et cetera. So in terms of how many applications we get, it vary depending on our market. But like I would say, that's the one time getting someone you know or is related to you is okay because you trust them a lot. And that's the main ingredient for their first few employees.

All right, action steps. To go from 150k per year to 10 million with no debt, you need to be highly profitable, and you invest every single piece of profit back into growth and not overhead. Ninja Pirate. Congrats to 10k. Well, 10,000k now that. That would be cool. Jimmy Lassard. We were in interior and exterior window cleaning and gutter cleaning when Covid hit. We went to exterior window cleaning and gutter cleaning only. Should we bring back interior window cleaning in 2021? Window cleaning is something we haven't done. Take that back. Take that back. I had Augusta Cleaning Services back in the day, way back, and I did it as a way to try to stay busy in the winter. What I found out is I can't charge my hourly rate in doing cleaning as I can mowing lawns. That being said, window cleaning is something that people are willing to pay for because it's a little more technically difficult and it does take more skill and it's more dangerous. However, finding people to clean windows and not leave streaks or little smudges and things like that is harder than teaching someone how to mow a lawn based on my experience. So we haven't done a whole lot. I don't have enough experience to be able to kind of give you a lot of info on the interior window cleaning thing, but I have done windows myself from Augusta Cleaning Services, but it's a very different skill set, and the margins are just very, very different. You're selling more labor than you are equipment and things like that. All right, Colton King. Would you advise someone trying to go full time solo. It's my first year. To slightly drop your prices to get the sales need to switch to full time? Yes. Okay. The one time. The one time I'm okay with people dramatically reducing prices. I'm going to make a video about this. I have it on Danny's list for us to make a video on this.

The one time when you're solo, when you're first getting started, you should absolutely reduce your prices. You should absolutely sell people regardless. You need momentum, you need the work, you need to fill the schedule. And if you're definitely trying to in that zone of like being part time but then wanting to go full time, I would highly recommend using price as a way to sell the jobs. Literally letting people, you know, calling them like, hey, I saw you got the estimate yesterday. What do we need? Like what? You know, did you get it? Yeah, yeah, I did. It's a little too much, too expensive. Okay, you know what, Mr. Jones, I want to earn your business. What, what price does that need to be in order for us to do business together? Like if you do that and someone says, hey, yeah, I need like a hundred dollars off of this 500 cleanup. Like do it, get the job, get it on the schedule. Am I going to tell you that when you have 10 and 15 employees, more overhead, a lower net profit margin? No, I'm not going to tell you to do that. But when you're first getting started, when you're solo and you're trying to get to full time, do it. Book yourself, get some width, some depth, I should say on your schedule. Highly recommend doing that. Undercover Billionaire Lawn Care Edition. Love that. Is Mike using questions from the chat or questions he already has? Jeff I'm using them in the chat. I'm just a little behind.

Sorry. Let's see here. Can you, let's see here. Can you explain how you do P4P? Like more in depth and not just a general idea? Jeff I could, but like it take a long time. So it's in the course and I don't, I don't like to, like everyone thinks I'm trying to sell the course, but the bottom line is you're no one's going to watch a six hour video where I explain everything, go through the two page document, all the rest of it. So at conference we talked about it. It's on landscapebusinesscourse.com very more in detail in the weeds of things.

Teresa, any suggestions on retraining employees? Teresa we do retraining to some extent. Like I think next week they're going to be training everyone before the spring rush again. And so it's just constantly making like what we found really helpful is kind of having one person in the company that's kind of designated as the pro in certain areas. So for example, we have one guy is really good horticulture and trees and bushes. So he trains everyone on the trimming side of things.

And he's great for that. And then we kind of have Someone else who's like really into push mowers and like the mechanical side of how they work. And like for us, the 30x mowers is what we use on all our mowing routes. And they figured out like little ways to make them work better, how to fix them really quickly in the fields. Like they will train everybody on that element. So that's kind of what we've seen work as we've grown in terms of retraining. When you're smaller, it's really a little more hand to hand combat, like you going out for a day with the crew member. If you have three or four employees or less. I'd go out with your crew once in a while and just make sure everyone's quality is up to your standards.

Kevin Fairbairn Hiring. Hiring. Just do hiring ads on Craigslist, Facebook, indeed, Google and point them all your careers page on your website. Yeah, so this is a good question, Kevin. This kind of goes back to yesterday we talked about on the video about hiring, where I talked about your hiring process as your filter. And one of the ways to filter people out is to make them go to your website and submit an application. Because let's just be honest, most laborers are going through Craigslist. They're going through, indeed, they're going through these other job boards. They're literally checking off a hundred different jobs and clicking submit application. Right. And so you, you traditionally, I don't want to be in that category of getting people who are literally just applying for another 50 jobs. I'd rather be getting people that have looked us up or they've seen our trucks or they saw our ad, went to our website and then watched a bunch of information like, I'll show you. Can I share my screen on this thing? I don't think I can.

And you should zoom. Yeah, I can't. Sorry. I was going to show you our screen, but like augustalongcservice.com you know, Wacom slash Careers, for example, that's our local office. They have a careers page. You go there, you submit your application. There's some videos on there. The goal is to try to weed people out, right? I'm trying to weed out the people that are literally trying to apply for 100 other jobs. And when you, when you ask for an interview, you don't even hear anything back a lot of times. Or they get you confused with another, another company altogether. Like, you know, storage. A storage company. Oh yeah, you were a storage company. They get confused because they literally applied for 100 and they just hope, you know, throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and hope something sticks. Right. We try to weed them out again, that's another filter by sending them to your website and making them apply there. But again, if you're not getting any leads, you might just allow them to do that. And then you're kind of the filter manually going through a lot more applications and their resumes and all the rest of it. So for us, we have the ad as really just pointing the direction to our website. They fill out an application and submit a resume on our site. All right. Hey Mike. This is from Travis.

Thank you all. Thank you for all you do for our community. Do you require money down before you schedule landscaping work? Anything over $3,000 total project cost? We require 50% down.

Next question.

Kevin Fairburn. Nothing. Ramp rack rocks. Nothing. Ramp rock. That's like a tongue twister. Nothing. Ramp rack rocks. Say that 10 times. Mercy. Matt Sargent. Thanks, Mike. I've been working on the part time office person. I'm closing on another 200,000 in sales. Should I consider a full time office person? And software suggestions would be great. Okay, so in terms of 200,000 sales, should I consider. Yeah, like a full time office person in my mind, usually around 500,000. You need someone full time. Even beyond that, honestly, you can get to like 7,800,000 without needing a full time office person because they're expensive. If they're really good, they're probably going to cost you at least 50 grand a year. And that's a big chunk of overhead. That's straight overhead. And so you better make sure if you're hiring someone at 4 or 500,000 that you know that by having them on board you're going to be able to get to a million because like you need to have.

Overhead recovery. And if you're spending 50 grand of your 300,000 that you're making in revenue, 5, 50 grand of that, that's a sixth. That's what like 18% is going to out the door for overhead. You might as well kiss. Like if you had a 40% margin business, you just cut out 18%. That's half your profit gone in overhead for an office person. So you better be very confident that having that office person having that overhead is going to lead to lots of growth.

In terms of software suggestions. I talked about that before. Ms. London. We got the SB loan and it really helped the new spring season preparation to add another mower. We've already started to pay down on it. Congratulations, Mike and the team Never ever hire a friend. Yeah, like, you know, lawn one. You know, I would traditionally say that as well as you grow when you're first getting started, if you really trust that person and you know they're a hard worker and you, you've known them for a long time, like sometimes you can do really well with them when there's only one. Like you and them working in a truck. Right.

Obviously though, like as you grow, you know, now where I'm at now, like only one person, my company is related to me. Whereas like the very beginning, the first three people were all related to me. But again, it's because I need the trust up front. And then over time, those people kind of start to leave because there's less of a personal connection as the company gets bigger and it becomes more about the team and the culture than just like individual relationships.

Okay.

A long one. Hey man, how are you?

Congratulations man. You're my business hero. If anyone deserves this, it's you. Thank you, Dylan. Andrew Peterson Cost of employees, cost of employees workers compensation insurance cost. What are your thoughts? Thanks. Hey Andrew. So through QuickBooks Online.

You can get pretty good decent rates on workers comp. We found the reason I only bring that right now is because we are, we just had to recently get that for our corporately owned stores that are in other states and I don't know anyone locally. So we just kind of went with what was on QuickBooks Online for our payroll and they have great suggestions in terms of getting good rates on workers comp. You can actually get it right through their system. It's super easy. I go for, I default for simple and as like me not having to worry about things. I'm happy to pay a little bit more. Like when we got insurance. Like I don't pitch insurance, I don't work for insurance companies or anything. But my goodness, Progressive.com allows you to get general liability and auto insurance so fast. It was fantastic. So I got insurance for all the trucks, all of the general liability for three locations in three different states in an hour and a half. Okay, so that's a total of nine policies because two trucks at every location and then a general liability policy for each one in three different states. Got less than an hour and a half, probably about an hour. All like paid for it. I got it bound, got all the paperwork, got insurance card in like an hour, maybe an hour and a half on a flight from California to Washington state, 30,000ft in the air. It was fantastic. So I would default to that even if I paid a little Bit more. I don't want to go into insurance agents. I have to talk to people and, you know, send documentation back and forth and all the other hoopla. I just want it simple. And so when it comes to workers compensation, I found that really a good resource on QuickBooks, their resource. Okay. Congrats, Mike. You guys still under snow on the west side? We. We did have snow Sunday. We plowed Sunday locally. They did. And then Monday a little bit. Is today Monday? No day's Tuesday. It's. The streets are all good. Good. Like, we don't have any more snow on the streets, really. It's just on the grass a few inches. Not as bad as, like, Texas and stuff, though. All right.

Jeffrey. Hi, Mike. The course is great. Got it about a couple months ago and has helped great with implementation. Mike, can. Can you unlock the templates for handbook? Okay. Okay. Anthony and Graham, I think I emailed you this morning. I did email you this morning. I left you a voice note. If you're in the course and you're having trouble downloading documents and templates, you need to download the document and then either have your Excel or then upload it into Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets. Because the documents that we have in the course, I can't unlock them for editing because everyone could then edit them and it would change the document. So what you gotta do is download the document and then either edit it in Excel or then upload it into your own Google Drive where you can edit it with Google Sheets. Hope that makes sense. But like all the templates and the documents and all the rest of. I can't do that. I can't make everyone allow everyone to edit them. It would be hectic. Can you give us an update on what results you're seeing advertising on YouTube and what you're doing? Brent? I could, but I have to kill you. No, I will come out with that later this year. Right now, I am holding it pretty close to the franchisees and the stuff that we are testing out still. I want to have more testing and data before I make it public. My stance on YouTube and what best practices are, I don't think it's going to change dramatically the next few months. So don't worry. It's not like a ticking time bomb. But there are definitely some best practices we've seen working and based upon so far. Next. It's similar to nextdoor in terms of the amount of impressions you can get for. The cost is very high, but there's some differences. It's not going to be as great a tool for direct sales, things like that. So we'll talk more about in the future. Definitely, Brent, once we have a lot more data. I have, you know, all the corporately owned locations, running them for the next, you know, six months, stuff like that. Ultimate Land Care, that lawn goat. Jeff George, what should I be doing today if I do not do plowing? If you're snowed in and you have no snow plowing, you should definitely be working on your business. You should be making sure you set up all of your mowing route for the rest of the year. You should be making sure that your treatment packages are all set up for the rest of the year. You should be doing equipment maintenance, all that good stuff.

I am working towards my goal of becoming the Gusta franchisee in Delaware. And I can't wait to be able to join the team within the next year or so. Cool. Jeff George, usually they think they can slack because you're a friend. Yeah, Jeff, that are. Sorry, Lawn one. Yeah, that is, you know, a problem. But again, if you know the person really well, and I don't mean just like friends, I mean like, you know, they work hard, they bust their butt. They work, they work hard, they come to work early. Like you know them that way. That's when I have more confidence to hire a friend. Right. I'm not just gonna hire them because they know me. Like that is no grounds for a good hire.

Hi Mike, thanks for the great videos. I'm going into my second year solo part time.

Have around 25 customers been using Honda HRX 217. Wanting to upgrade to a 30 inch mower would be a tour. What a Toro Time Master be okay? Yeah, Toro Time Masters are great. Even if you went from an HRX to 217 to a Honda commercial mower, that'd be nice. But yeah, Time Masters are great. Like honestly you guys, like I don't care about the mowers. Like you could give me a, you could give me a 72 inch mowers. Like that's it. And we make it work. We make it work. As long as you have good marketing of a great team, you can make things work. The semantics is what everyone gets wrapped up on. That's like what type of truck you're having, what type of equipment you have. Do you have a 130 steel trimmer or do you have a 111? Like guess what? Those are like very marginal differences. Even if you went against some of the stuff that I talked about, like you get a brand new Truck and you got.

Your whole mowing set up with an enclosed trailer and big mowers. Like you had $100,000 set up. Guess what? You can make that business work if you have good marketing, good team, great profit margin, great systems in terms of P4P. Like a lot of the semantics of equipment doesn't really matter if you do good business practices. Now, do I think going into debt for a $100,000 setup if most of your lawns are 5,000, 6,000 square feet. No, I don't think that's a good idea. But.

Here. Hi, Mike. Okay. Reading 12 week year right now. Oh, yeah, cool. I love that book. Do you plan your goals out annually or every 12 weeks and break everything down on a week by week basis? Okay, Dylan, So full disclosure, I used to do that. I had little boards over there that I would have each week laminated on. The problem was so much stuff is in flux with me.

Like what? I think in three months something's gonna look like. Even three months in a road is so different than what it's gonna look like. It's ridiculous. And so I don't necessarily do that anymore, but I think about every single day, every single hour, every single minute in terms of efficiency. So my problem is not like, not getting things done. I know that, like, that's my strength. So. But it's something that is great if you have. If you have a problem with, like, like I said, taking action. If you have a problem with procrastination, definitely the 12 week year is a great. You basically trying to cram in what you would be done in 12 months. You could try to get done in 12 weeks. And I love the concept, but for me, on a broader level, what I try to think about is, like.

I try to push myself. Like, okay, so we have a. We have, we have a plan. I want to get to 500 franchisees, okay? Like, realistic. It's going to take me 10 years. Okay. And I'm like, okay, well, why, like, what if it's like a gun was put to my head? What would I have to do to do it in two years? And is it possible? Probably not. No, it's not. But it starts unlocking thought processes. Like, okay, well, if I had to, this is what I would do. Like, I'd have to take bigger risks here. I'd have to make this connection with this person. I would have to create more content. I have to hire a video guy. Like, that's why last year we hired a video guy. I'm like, okay, so Do I want to have the overhead expense of having video equipment and a studio and a full time person that is like not cheap and like equipment and all the rest of it, do I want that? No. But when I start looking at the goals that we have and then asking myself, okay, so it's going to take five years, what would I have to do to make that happen in 2? 1. And whether or not you do it in 1 or 2 is irrelevant. The thing is it forced you to start making decisions and thinking in ways and when you come up with creative solutions that will bring that time frame down. Right? So it might not take me one or two, but it's not gonna take me five. It might take me three or four. I just saved a lot of time by having a different whole mindset process change. Right? So, you know, people sometimes get mad when someone like me comes along. Is like, okay, so yeah, that deadline that we said was like in a year, well, what about next week? Like, what about next week? And like, no, it's impossible. It's like, no, it's not about whether it's impossible, it's possible or not. It's, it's about the fact. By saying that and thinking, okay, if it had to be done next week, like if someone put a gun to your head, I think about this all the time. If someone put a gun to your head, could you, what would you have to do to get it done next week? If you have to get it done next week, what would you do differently? Well, I'd have to put money in here, invest in this. I'd have to get this different type of equipment. Like if I'm trying to scale my lawn care business really fast, I might have to like, okay, I have to cut out some services, I'm going to have to buy some more of this. I'm going to have to move my shop, I'm going to have to cut out.

Residential mowing customers that are 20 miles away from me. Like, those are things you have to do and you only can make those decisions if you start thinking in terms of speed and start thinking like, okay, yeah, it could take me a year, but what if I did it in a month? And so that, that idea, Dylan, that 12 week years, that concept of taking a 12 months, smashing that into 12 weeks. Is there a term limit for franchisees? What if someone becomes a franchisee and eventually wants to stop? What is the exit strategy? If there is no compete, there is a no compete clause. Okay, so there, the term for Frankie is 10 years. If someone Wants out, they can leave. Ideally, they're able to sell the franchise and they're able to get a big roi. If they didn't and they just wanted to leave and you know, it's only been a few months and they're in, it's not really worth anything. I would probably just send a general manager and keep the location running.

Yeah. Matt Sargent, thanks for your advice to this platform. I will be contacting you for a one on one. Oh my goodness. I don't know, I get kind of scared. One on ones take a lot of time. I'm at a point that the business is building at a fast pace and I respect your advice. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. Congratulations. Thank you. How and why versus what? Thank you, Daryl. Or the Time Master really isn't a good choice. Used in a commercial setting, the commercial version is much better. Yeah. Full disclosure, I've never used Time Master based on what I've heard. Actually that is the residential model, so probably don't do that. Good call. Should use a commercial mower, even if it's a smaller one. It's traditionally better, but the idea of a 30 inch tine master, I like that idea. Just the 30 inch is great. If you're going to use push mowers for your setups, what is the cheapest. Full disclosure, when I talk about push mowers, we use that locally at two corporately owned locations. But for two out of the three new ones we're starting, we are having stand ons in the trucks. Okay. Because they have larger square footages. So keep in mind your business model needs to be flexible based upon the size of your properties, your, your market, etc.

Okay. What are you guys talking to Mike for? Go out and hustle. Hey, hey, hey. Pinellas Premium office. Now, now, now. We only do this once in a while. You can, you can. Hey, if you have, if you have YouTube Premium, which by the way is a very good investment, you get YouTube Premium. The nice thing about it is you can be listening to a YouTube video, but the screen be off and just be listening. So, Canela, don't rain on our party here, man. Like we only have 10,000 subscribers once a while. I'll only do this for a couple hours again when we have like a hundred thousand subscribers. So wait for Skag 30. Yeah, good point. Audie Skeg is coming out with a 30 inch mower. I have seen some of their stuff on this. I have not used one. Full disclosure. What's that water bottle drinking of? My sister gave this to me. For a Christmas present. She got it off of Amazon Oprah. I don't even.

I don't know. It's cool though. I like it a lot. I use it like all the time. It has all, like my times of the day to make sure I'm drinking enough water. I like it.

All right, questions. So glad I tuned in. I'll be talking to you tomorrow. Checking into the small business loans. Now, Mike, I think we all want you to grow a beard. No, no, no, no, don't. You don't want me to grow a beard. So when I got hurt, when I went underneath the dump truck and got hurt, I got scars. Like, here's one I can show you. I can hardly see it, actually. It used to be worse. It's much, much better now. I don't get like where it gets all hot now this where all the scars are at. But I kind of have scars here. Kind of go under here and a little bit across my chest. And when I got underneath the dump truck and got strangled, like here, see this spot here? There's like no hair growing there. That was a scar. Used a scar down here, but since there's no hair, you can't really tell. And then kind of over here too, this scar, there was a scar and so no hair grows in those spots. So if I grew a beard, it'd be patchy and it would have two round areas where there'd be no hair. It would not be fun. You would. You do not want to see me with a beard. I promise you that. Does anyone sign up for mowing in winter? I've had no luck with people so far. Is it just me or just bad timing? People don't usually sign up for mowing in winter. Yes, we do get a few occasionally, people who like, move into a new house. Like, they want to get set up their go getters and like into planning and everything. Yes, we have those occasionally, but it's more, much more likely that. Excuse me, sorry. It's much more likely that people are only going to think about it, like most human beings when there's a problem. And that is when the grass is growing. And so that's why most of your marketing dollars will be best spent during the spring rush. And if you're going to spend $10,000 this coming year on marketing, I'd spend at least half of it in the quarter that is spring rush for you. At least, at least half of it in that quarter. Okay. Is anyone signed up with. Hey, Mike, do you ever plan to cancel your online consultations Alex, probably yes, I'll let you, I'll give a heads up before I do. But like it just, I don't have the time and like I know it's, it's expensive and I'm not regarding. Some people say, oh, it's raise the price. But like, I don't want to come across stupid anyways.

I'd rather just be able to answer questions here honestly when I get time. Hey Mike, this is John.

From the Netherlands. Lean management and agile thinking seems cultural bound. Could you elaborate on your battles with these concepts and growing your business? Ooh, wow. This is a great question. All right.

Yeah. So lean management, agile thinking. There's some great videos on this on YouTube. This is one part of like getting my MBA that was probably helpful is thinking about manufacturing and then taking those concepts and bringing them into the labor market. When we talk about service based businesses and running your business lean and like when you talk about lean manufacturing, it's all over. Like it's super popular. Trying to cut out waste, trying to make things where you don't touch them multiple times in a process. But the same thing can be said for a service based business, for a small business, all of those concepts apply. And so lean management trying to cut out layers of bureaucracy or different layers of hierarchy is very important in my mind. And so like today for example, I was at a team meeting and I didn't know it was like I didn't run the team meeting, I was just there. But they needed middle level managers, need to communicate with the team. And so I as the owner did not need to run that meeting. Like a lean management model means that whoever needs to step up and lead in that moment is going to do so because the ball is in their court, not and not push it off to someone else and say, that's not my job. Right. And so lean management, lean thinking, constant improvement, all of that is just so, so important. And you could talk, I could talk a lot about that. So make sure you push the like button if you've been. If you're new here, I appreciate you all hopping on this video. 10,000 Subscriber Special Edition marathon of Q and A. And we're gonna keep going here for at least another hour because we hit 10,000. So like we deserve this. That's fun. Let's see here. Let me just check in. Hey, someone just scheduled a introduction call for the franchise. Who is this? Shay? I won't say their last name. Cool, that'll be fun.

Let's see here. I just gotta make sure everyone's okay? That's fine. That can wait till tomorrow. Okay.

Cool. Sorry, when I'm going this long on Q A, I kind of just gotta check in occasionally. All right. Does anyone. Let's see here.

I wish I could use all push mowers. My properties are from one acre to ten acres. Yeah, Daryl, so you obviously not going to use push mowers. It would price you out of the. Out of competition. Joker. What is the cheapest way to market besides word of mouth and Google my business when so low. Thank you Mike for taking the time to help us. It'd be door hangers. It would be actually when you're doing the door hangers, knock on the door and talk to people. I cannot overemphasize the fact that you go from knock from door hanging to knocking on said door before putting door hanger on, your close ratio will dramatically increase. Okay. So I highly recommend that if you can get the gumption and the nerve to do so. A couple days ago I posted a video. On Saturday I posted a long video. All my longest videos get the least amount of views, but they probably have the best content. Like the short four or five minute clips. Like they're funny or they're little informative tips that are very shallow usually. And that's fine, that's good for some people. That's what they want. The hour long videos. If you're new to the channel, I would highly recommend you watch long YouTube videos of mine. The one that I did like a year or two ago, more than that ago, a few years ago on acquisitions, lawn care acquisitions and improving the valuation of your of your company. If you're trying to sell like that is one of, in my mind one of my best videos ever. But no one watches it. It only has like 14 or 1500 views. But the long YouTube videos are good. So last Saturday I made one specifically with a young man and we talked about door knocking and all of that good stuff. So I would really recommend watching that one. In terms of if you're solo and you're trying to get more jobs, that would be. My thing is like yes, you can put a door hanger on, but if you can also then knock on that door, talk to the person, say hey Mr. Jones, like I saw the maple tree out front. Like do you want an estimate for me to take care of that for you? Like that relationship building. Then we'll ascribe your face with the brand. Even if it's down the road, when they need service, they will contact you a lot More especially if you strike up conversation, stuff like that. And then you can use that closed tactic we talked about earlier, where you actually do lower price when you're trying to book jobs. What type of numbers do you look at in your business to keep it successful? I'm learning bookkeeping for the business and wondering if you have any tips for a beginner. I do.

Let me get some water.

I've been relatively sick the past week. Been fun.

It's been brutal because we've been in crunch time for this software that has been keeping me up all the time. And I was a miserable failure at getting that rolled out. And so been a little bit under the weather. Okay, what was the next question? Oh, yeah, the question was a good one. I forgot. Oh, yeah. What type of numbers do you look at? Okay, so here's the number you gotta look at. Okay? This is the one number every lawn care professional needs to know. Okay? What percentage of your revenue goes to labor? All right? Everyone can talk about how profitable they are, but if that number is too high in a lawn care business, you will not be able to run a profitable operation, and you will not have enough profit to grow the business, and you will not have a profit. Take money home. So the next question, everyone is like, okay, the what's.