100 Minutes of Business Advice & Tips from Lawn Care Millionaire

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes for another edition of Roundup. I want to welcome you to the show. We're going to answer a bunch of questions and answers today. But before we get into the show, a big thing to sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp and use this software to be able to not just do your timesheets and clock in and clock out and pay your employees, but also see great options for benefits when it comes to health, dental and vision. To check that out Today, go to gusto.combootcamp Try it out for 90 days completely free, and you'll love it. So we're going to go to Q and A today. I'm going to be answering a whole bunch of questions about lawn care business, just about anything and everything you want. Basically an ama Ask me anything. However, I am going to make a couple announcements while the questions are starting to come in. First and foremost, there is one of our franchisees out in Texas that is hiring a general manager. Now, this location is doing 1.5 million in revenue. It's actually a second business that he's going to be converting over to Augusta. Ryan is the name of the owner and he's going to be switching over to Augusta this winter for his Rockport location in Texas. So if you are interested in becoming a general manager for this location, you're going to learn a lot. $1.5 million in revenue. You need to be able to move to Texas, to Rockport. Just go to Augusta. Lawn careservices.com actually, I can show you exactly where to go. Augusta lawn careservices.com/ Let me see here, window. I want to pull this one out. Here we go. I'll show you the exact place where you can go. So. AugustAlongerServices.com corpus/careers. And when you get here, you're going to see some stuff about Augusta, obviously. But here's where you can submit your application, submit your resume, and this will go directly to Ryan over at Corpus. So Corpus is where they have their first location. Their second location is the Rockport, which is already a big location. He's converting it over from his existing brand into Augusta Lawn Care. So if you're interested in that, definitely reach out. It's a big commitment. It's a very. It's gonna be profit sharing of salaried position. It's very, very well paying. But you need to have your stuff together. You need to know stuff about project management, employees, all the rest of it. So if you're willing to move there, definitely reach out to Ryan. He's a great guy. You're gonna learn a lot from him. He has a nursery, a dealership that he sells skag and a whole bunch of other brands and he's opening up multiple Augusta Lawn Care locations. So definitely wanna reach out to him. Go to that link augustalongerservices.com corpus/careers and you can apply for that position. Last announcement before we get into is actually another personnel announcement and that is one of our local team members is actually moving to Hawaii and he's an incredible employee. He's been with us for a few years and he has a lot of experience. If you are in Honolulu or anywhere around the University of Manoa, definitely reach out to melandscape businesscourse gmail.com and I can set you up with someone that's going to be an awesome asset to your team and to your company. And is looking to move there next month, August, September. So let's go ahead and jump into the Q and A and I'm going to try to get through as many of these that I possibly can. And let's go ahead and jump into it. Let me take away this banner one second here. Boom. Okay, what advice would you give to a 16 year old person who is trying to create a lawn care business but doesn't have a vehicle to arrive to their clients? Yeah, so if you don't have a vehicle, you know, this is where I was at when I was 11, 12 years old. My brother was, didn't have his license yet either. So really focus on one neighborhood, ideally the neighborhood you live in, door hangers, yard signs and really get to know the local community. And when I say community I mean like that neighborhood. Zero in on that really dense route. And if you have maybe 100, 200 houses within, you know, your neighborhood, try to get 30, 40 of them on mowing service, try to get spring cleanups, fall cleanups. Like I would just double down on every single person in that neighborhood. I'd make sure they know your name, I'd make sure you'd be talking to them every few months, just talking about their, their lawn and everything. And don't worry about needing a, a vehicle right off the bat. What's the brush busk, brush cutter out there? I have no idea. I'm not the best at that. Obviously there is ones that you can do a handheld like a metal head on a steel combi system, but then there's also like an attachment for a skid steer that would take a lot more brush. Do you buy new or used mowers? We typically buy new.

How should you pay an estimator more than they make crew leading? So we don't necessarily pay our estimator a whole lot more in terms of their wages. We put. But we do allow them to have a lot more in profit sharing. And so I would prefer that someone in admin or sales much more of their revenue or much more of their profits or much more of their wages be governed from profitability of the business and not just their salary or their hourly rate. I'd much rather them be involved in the bottom line and be very keenly aware of that throughout. Mike. So the employees in the company that I just bought her all salary and 1099. I was going to keep them that way to the end of the year and then transition over next year. What are your thoughts? Yeah, that's fine. Just keep in mind that you're opening yourself up somewhat of a liability by doing 1099 when they're not supposed to be. It sounds like. And it sounds like you're the owner, you're putting on salary, which is fine, you know, but yeah, if you're going to transition out from that and you know that's the right thing to do and you have a date on the calendar circle, that'd be fine. That'd be totally fine in my opinion. But yeah, you don't want to do 1099. You can really run into a lot of issues unless they are real 1099. 1099 if they are showing up at your shop, they're not a 1099 if they're using your equipment. It's tough to say they're 1099 if you're telling them what time to show up or they are considered. It can be considered late. Tough to say they're 1099 if they are you wearing a uniform. Tough to say that they're 1099 if they're using their own equipment, showing up when they want. And the only thing you're really governing is the end result, I. E. The lawn being cut that then you can be a 1099. But if they're using your equipment, your uniforms, you're telling them when to show up certain places. The fact that the matter just not gonna. You're not going to be a legal 1099 and you're gonna run into some issues down the road. And I have talked to plenty of people who have been caught and now their tax bill put them out of business. All right.

Yeah, the video from last night, the ones like that get like hardly any views, but they're, they're honestly probably the ones that help business owners the most. Hey, Mike, should the weekly MO price be $1 per minute, including travel Ideally, or the bi weekly price is going to depend on your hourly rate in your area. So if you're assuming that your hourly rate was $60 per hour that your target was, then you would be doing a dollar per minute in terms of against budgeted hours. Obviously be more if you're going above that or less if you're doing 40 or $50 per hour. Target in terms of bi Weekly, we charge 50% more per cut compared to weekly. And at the beginning I was charging 5 or $10 more for BI weekly and. And I ended up switching to 50% more and no one batting an eye. So, Lee, shout out to Corpus. What seed blends or cultiv cultivars do you recommend for a high sun yard? I am not the best at that because it depends mostly on where you are at in your climate and what area of the country. How do you buy blades for your 21 inch Honda mower? We just buy them from our dealer. Whatever ones they have is the ones that we buy because I don't want to depend on shipping and I want to be able to pick some up. I want them to hold my inventory and not me. Hold inventory. Mike, My name is Eddie. I started my business last year. I'm 16 and have 20 properties. I am considering going to school in another country for university. Should I keep investing in my business? I don't think no. This is a very, very individualized question. However, I wouldn't invest into my business if I was going to go out of town, like out of the country, and I only had 20 properties because you're not going to be able to afford someone that's high caliber enough to manage this and like being a general manager and pay them really well. Unless you got an own another owner, like split equity with someone, for example, and said, hey, I'm gonna give you, you know, let's start a partnership. But that's gonna be tough too because why wouldn't they just go start their own thing if you're not gonna be around at all? So you'd probably have to be the money person and they would be the person boots on the ground. Operationally that might work, but it'd be very difficult to hire someone for 14, 15, 16 bucks an hour and expect them to run the business when you're out of the country. And they would be doing everything in the business.

All right, Yeshua. Hey, Mike, what is a good revenue milestone for a business first year? I'm starting off this year. I want to make sure I have a good target to shoot at. It's really going to depend on how much money you have up front in terms of starting capital. So I would be looking for a 10-20x multiple on your marketing dollars. So if you're going to spend $5,000 on marketing, I would expect this year to do at least 50 to $100,000 in revenue.

All right. Does Augusta add a profit percentage to products installed as well as a profit percentage on labor? So in terms of products, we do markup, our materials. And that can range anywhere from 100% markup to. To 30% markup, depending on if it's plants or bulk materials or mulch or soil, gravel, whatever it might be. And then in terms of a markup on labor, yes, you're obv. That's you got to make money somewhere and you're going to typically be charging, let's say to the customer, 60, 70, 80 per hour, whereas you're going to be paying your employees, you know, anywhere from 15 to 25 per hour plus taxes and all the rest of it. And that's, you know, obviously, you know, you have overhead you got to pay for and all the rest of that as well. How should an estimate be paid versus a maintenance crew leader? I answered this question earlier. Do you have an employee handbook or resources or pay grade increase standards? I need a system for this so it doesn't seem like I play favorites. Yeah. So in landscape, businesscourse.com, you can get the employee handbook template and use that in terms of pay grade increases. I don't like pay grades because I would rather use P4P pay for performance where the harder they work and the more experience they get and the more efficient they get, they can make more money. So I'm against pay grade increases. However, if you don't have P4P and using an hourly rate system. Again, I don't want to make a pay grade based on how long someone's been around because. Cause there's people who've been around for five years at your company and they make less for the business than the guy who just started two weeks ago but is a go getter and works hard and runs to their jobs and gets up, shows up early and all the rest of it. So I want it to be much more based upon their performance and not just the fact of how long they've been here or which is more common, how much they ask for more money and then based upon how much you need them. And so that's the kind of thing you don't want to get into. It's like based upon performance. It's on. Based more fair for them. Because if they're a great employee and they're just starting out, why should they be making less than the guy who's been there for three years but is sleeping on the job, stops at every single gas station, lazy as I'll get out. And the new guy is making less money, but making two to three times as much profit for the business does not make sense. It just does not make sense. It's not fair for the employee and it's not good for the business because what happens is you end up having people who have you like, man, I've had someone with my business for five, six, seven years. Great, they're fantastic. But I have to pay them $25 an hour to keep them around and they go a little slow. That's not the type of employee you want. They, they end up just being entitled and they are going to be going for the lowest common denominator of how hard they have to work. And you want the young hungry person that comes into your business to be able to achieve more money if they're actually producing that much revenue for the business.

Are you an llc? How can I start my own business? You? Yeah. So an LLC is a great way. It's a limited liability company. It's going to offer some protection to you in terms of if you go bankrupt, you know, someone can't come after your assets, theoretically. That being said, if you're signing on a loan, almost every single loan is going to ask for a personal guarantee. When you're a small business, which basically means an LLC or any sort of limited. Limited liability goes out the window because you just signed on it personally with your Social Security number. So yes, I would start with an LLC over a sole proprietorship because it does offer some liability protection in terms of getting sued by a customer. They can't come up. Your personal, personal assets if you have delineated your business expenses from your personal expenses. If they're all mixed up like, oh, like I use my business expense, you know, business card. Sometimes it's all mixed up. Good luck trying to defend yourself in court by saying that that LLC is a separate entity from you and therefore you're going to end up probably being liable personally in that case. So I would Certainly see over sole proprietorship it usually going to cost you like 200 bucks. You can do it online, usually it's very simple. But starting a sole proprietorship, if you're just getting started out and that's a big issue for you like that 200, you can usually start for like 50 bucks for the sole proprietorship. Get started a day and get rolling.

Hey, I'm starting a business. I'm 14 years old. There's a 99, 100 weed eater at Home Depot. It's 26cc straight shaft. Do you think it's a. It's good also it's hyper light.

Yeah, you go ahead and get started with that but as soon as you cross five or ten lawns you're going to want to upgrade to something that's a little more hard, a little heavy, heavier duty. Doing five lawns with a hundred dollar weed eater, if there's of significant size, you're probably gonna like start running in the issues and it's also not gonna have too much power at 26cc. So I get started with that. But once you cross 5, 10 customers you definitely are going to want to upgrade to a commercial type setup. What's your favorite zero favorite zero turn brand? I do not have a favorite zero turn brand. Basically it's whoever, whichever factory or whichever dealer is closest to me, if they're good and they have great customer service, that's the brand I'm probably going to go with. How are you handling the truck prices going up and the shipping wait time? So in terms of truck prices, we're trying to avoid buying trucks at all cost. Only reason I would be buying a truck right now is if I have maxed out the capacity of my existing trucks. In other words, I have two people in every single one of my trucks, then I'd go buy another truck. If you have solo routes going right now, I would not be buying more trucks. I truly believe in 6 to 12 months the prices of used vehicles will go down 25 to 35%. And I only say that because in the past year they've gone up 45 to 48% across the board and some markets significantly more. So I'm pretty confident they're going to go down 25 to 35% at least in the next six to 12 months. So if you can hold off, I would if at all possible. And in terms of shipping wait time, yeah, that's like everything, equipment, trailers, fertilizers, seed, everything's delayed right now. Even getting trimmers or blowers right now. You're going to be backed up probably just because of all the delays in shipping as well. And a lot of that was backed up from the factories and the shortage of, in the supply chain. Best advice when doing service on wet lawns, if at all possible, try to do the wet lawn. Whether you have to weed, whack around a puddle, it takes a little bit longer, especially as you grow. This becomes a bigger issue when it comes to scheduling. When you have to start moving tons of jobs off, it really, really messes your schedule up. It messes crews up, messes their schedules up. Now you're going to Saturdays and Sundays and then if you have a whole week of rain, then you have a real big problem. I, I get there's times you're not gonna be able to mow grass because there's just so much rain. It's like a deluge. But I would be trying, if at all possible, to stay on top of your schedule. And if that means it takes a little bit longer, if that means you, if you know, rains in the schedule, like get your lawns done sooner, like tell your guys, hey, we're working 12 hours a day. We've got to get lawns done. Grains in the forecast. If it rains, you guys should be able to know that, hey, if we're going to take the day off, it means we're going to be catching up over the weekend and we're going to be doing some long days. So thoughts on water barrels that are fed from downspouts to water gardens. I love them. Very efficient. Anything efficient I love. How long does the paint on your trucks last? Do you repaint them on a recurring basis? Yeah, they last, I'd say three to five years and then they're going to need a repaint. That being said, we have not repainted any of our trucks and some of them have already been a few years, so I'd say five years. You'd probably want to repaint them. That being said, once you repaint them, they look brand new. So I can't say that about a wrapped vehicle. And that's why we've stuck with the paint, because we're around rocks and we're, you know, skid steers and dents happen all the time, scratches and with vinyl I'd have to peel the whole thing off and redo it. Whereas with the paint, I can repaint the thing, put the decals on for relatively cheap. It's less labor intensive in terms of wrapping versus wrapping. And that's why we stuck with paint and when you've done, if you do good paint job, it looks brand new when you're done, even a used vehicle. And so I really like that. And so it depends on the cost of the paint in your local area. There's some places where painting is the same price as wrapping and then it makes it, you know, you have a good case as to why you'd wrap instead of paint. However, we, in our market, it costs about three to four times as much to wrap, four times as much to wrap compared to paint. So I could paint my truck four times. So 20 years instead of one time wrapping. So, Michael Johnson, how would you ask or request for an employee to pick up the pace without being a slave driver? Again, I think, I think we've got to take ownership of this and be like, hey, what can I do to make sure that they are incentivized to work harder and it's in their best interest, not just like me telling them what to do as the boss. P4P pay for performance. There's going to be employees that hit base pay every single pay period. There's going to be employees that make 6, 7, $8 more per hour every single pay period because they're thinking efficiently. They make sure they, when they show up to a job, they have a plan of action. There's no wasted time. They make sure they don't have wasted trips back and forth from the shop. They make sure they check all their equipment before they get rolling in the morning and they make significantly amounts more money. So I would rather, instead of trying to change someone else's behavior, I can't control that. Like, at the end of the day, I can't control their, how much they sleep, what they eat, you know, their family life. I can't control any of that. So I'm going to try to take ownership of it and be like, hey, how can I align their interest with mine? And that is, I don't want to be watching. They don't want me micromanaging and watching over their shoulder and tracking their truck to see where they're at and showing up on job sites to see if they're sleeping. Like, they don't want that. So create a system that allows them the autonomy where you can trust and know that they're going to be acting in the best interest of the business and their best interest of their pocket. So P4P is again my answer to that. How is your legal case doing so far? Any word? I guess, I guess you're probably talking about the city. There's really no new news. It's been a week, over a week now. We still haven't got a permit back from the city, which is kind of sad because we've always gotten permits from them in one to two days. So it'll be interesting to see if in the next two weeks before we start work again on the property, if they get back to us. If they don't and then they get us in trouble, they're going to have a few choice words for me. Mike, it is 2021. What is your opinion on sustainability? I'm assuming you're talking about like fuel and electric vehicles and electric equipment and things like that. My opinion on sustainability is the fact that it needs to make business sense before I go electric. It needs to make business sense before me to think about a better watering mechanism for my lawn, for a customer's lawn. Until it costs cheaper or is more efficient, it's going to save them money and not in 10 years, but going to save them money up front. Then it starts to become a conversation. So whether it be artificial turf, better watering management, electric mowers, those things need to make sense from a money standpoint. Otherwise it simply will not, it will not take off the way it should. The reason that Tesla is starting to get so much traction is because the, the cost of that vehicle has gone from $80,000 down to $35,000. That becomes an actual conversation around is it worth getting electric vehicle? The same thing will eventually happen with electric motor, electric mowers, robot mowers. A lot of this sustainability stuff that we're seeing, it will eventually catch up, but it will not actually take over until from an economic standpoint. It's cheaper upfront for the customer.

Hi Mike, I have 30 customers making about 900 to $1,300 a week in mowing. I have $10,000 saved right now with no credit and want to know if I should continue to save up to pay cash for a franchise or take out a loan. Any thoughts? Jeffrey, that's something on, on a one on one coaching call. We can talk about Augusta longer services.com franchise. We can talk about that. Your individual case. There's. This is something that I know for a lot of you you're doing and this is what I would recommend. If I was starting out, I wouldn't just be like I want to start a lawn care business. I'm going to go start a gust of lawn care because you're going to probably waste three to six months just figuring out mowing and trimming bushes and Looking, figuring out budgeted hours, go get 10, 15, 20, 30 mowing customers like Jeffrey has and then join Augusta, where you're going to pour the, pour the fuel in the fire because the branding and the marketing, all the rest of it, and not have to, I don't have to teach you how to like, mow grass and trim bushes and, you know, you don't have to. I don't have to know every, you know, guide you so much in those first few months on just like the mechanics. That's not really the benefit of doing Augusta. It is the, the scalability, the systems and the marketing. And so I, if I was starting out, I would go get 20, 30 mowing customers like Jeffrey and then join Augusta. So hope that makes sense. Does P4P only work for repeat business? I find it hard to use. For H vac, electrical, plumbing, we give employees a percentage of the sales. So you're giving a very close to P4P right now. Except we don't give a percent of the sales. We give a percentage of the labor revenue. And in my opinion, it's more accurate simply because if I am selling a $10,000, let's say heating system and the heater, let's just say costs $10,000, I don't want to be giving a percentage of that to the employee because now I have to mark it way up just to recoup my cost that I'm giving to the employee. I would much rather be giving them a percentage of the labor revenue. And so I do believe P4P works for all of these industries. And this is something that absolutely, in the next five to 10 years, I'll be attacking for other industries outside of landscaping. We're still honing in the software for landscaping and lawn care, but it's definitely in my mind something that we will eventually make a revenue stream for the rest of the franchise. For us to keep continue getting revenue is by selling exterior other services besides mowing and landscaping using P4P. There's minor tweaks, but the same concept I've seen it used with some of the people I've consulted with in terms of restaurants, roofing companies, a fencing company, concrete pouring, a whole bunch of different Anywhere there's labor involved, P4P can be implemented. Absolutely. Do you feel lawn care is the easiest service industry to scale? Why or why not? It is not the easiest, by no means, but it's absolutely pretty simple. The easiest would probably be something like cleaning where you have no equipment, no upfront cost. It's very, very low Barrier entry. Mowing is still relatively low entry. But you got trucks, you got equipment, you got equipment that could kill people. Like, more, there's more liability, there's more workers compensation, it's higher, and there's some skill involved. That being said, I can charge a higher rate per hour mowing lawns compared to cleaning someone's house. The average cleaning company, they're struggling to get 30 to $40 per hour. Whereas for mowing in that same market, you might be able to charge 60 to $80 almost twice for mowing, but you're going to have more overhead in the form of fuel and trucks and higher skilled laborers, et cetera. So there's no right or wrong. But easiest is a very hard term because easiest really is probably something like cleaning or pressure washing. But even pressure washing, like, if you start getting into fences and like the siding of houses, you can really. There's liability in that. So it's really a matter of like zeroing in on one niche of a specific industry. So, for example, if you're going to do the landscaping industry, which. Well, am I just going to do mowing, like go really vertical on that, or am I going to do, let's say I'm going to do koi ponds, go really vertical on that, that's fine. In my opinion, easiest is simple. And simple doesn't mean basic. Simple means where it is systems centric and it can be systematized. And that's most easily done when you have one or two or three very simple services and not 20 different services that you do for your customers. Which one would you do first, mower or trimmer? Do you mean in terms of buying or actually mowing versus trimming? It depends on everyone's market in terms of. And what type of grass they have, what type, the. The climate, things like that. Can you make more videos further explaining how the crews see the estimator video and instruction in the field to make sure they are doing the job correctly? Yeah, we talked a whole bunch of this at conference, but basically it's what we call project management video. After the estimate, the estimator gets a video on their phone. They file that away, make sure that it's saved. And then the day before, when the. Before the crew is going to show up to the job, they get a video from the estimator with what exactly is supposed to be done. And the goal is that the estimator never has to show up back to the property. And our opinion, if the estimator ever has to go back to the property, throughout the job that there's been a lack, like a breakdown of communication and we failed. Unless you know something crazy happens on the job, the estimator should never be going back to the job site.

Hello, Mike. Commercial landscapers, ones who service public grounds, parks and neighborhoods face penalties for leaving clumps or not showing up. That be really dependent on your municipality and their rules and their regulations and the contract that you set up with them. I'm 17 and have the equipment I need. What's the best way to market to get started? I'd start with door hangers and knocking on doors and you can just type in knocking on door, not door knocking. Mike Andes and there's a really good video on that. How many employees should you have? Really depends on how fast you're willing to grow. I'm being pushed to the very edge at current job and have already delayed starting business for a year. I'm house hunting and we, we use all income besides my W2 to get approved so I can, so I can quit and start. What would a good complimentary part time job be for first year business? Okay, so you're trying to get started part time with the business and then have a part time job. If you could work like a nursery, that'd be great. Or potentially a, a retail landscape materials or delivery of materials like at a landscape supplier, those would all be great. You'd get to know a lot of people, you get to know a lot of stuff about the industry, get some good connections, you'd probably get your first few employees there. That's what I'd be thinking about. What do I look for in a new hire? Right now it's more about attitude than anything. If someone's going to be able to show up on time and have a good attitude, they're probably going to get hired.

Andrew Gonzalez My mower is pretty old and might just die soon. So should I get the new mower now or wait till the mower dies? Also I have enough money to get the new mower. Again, really depends on your situation. But I think it comes down to if you have employees, you're probably gonna want to buy the new mower. Because if you're crossing your fingers every day hoping that your equipment starts or that when they show up at the job site it works, you're gonna be, it's gonna cost you a lot of money, right? And especially if we're talking about like a 3, $400 weed whacker. If you're talking about a ten thousand dollar mower, I think Preventative maintenance will keep this sort of thing from happening and more importantly, keep you from guessing whether or not it's going to work. The fact of the matter is you just need to be. It needs to be reliable enough to when you send your crew out and you know it's going to work. Now if you're so low, the cost of something going down in the field is less because you could just drive it to the dealer and get it fixed and it's not as much of a down for you. But if you start filling your schedule, that could become a big issue. But if you only have 20, 30 lawns and you have like three or four days worth of work a week, you could probably get away with like waiting till it dies and then, you know, canning it and getting a new one. But again, right now with the whole labor, with the whole shortage and the supply chain, you might be waiting weeks to get a mower. So it might not be a good idea just to wait till the day it dies and then go try to pick one up right then. What is the best way to price fall cleanups? Have you found hourly pricing or per cleanup pricing to work the best? Thanks for all your videos. Because we use P4P, we do use a per cleanup pricing. What I would recommend is try to sell someone on their initial fall cleanup, for example, and then offer them like a monthly service. And you're going to be somewhat rounding because there's going to be if it's dry and it's super windy the day before you show up, not going to be hardly anything, any leaves to clean up. Whereas if it's wet and rainy for the week before you show up, it could take a lot longer. So. But the ability to be able to consistently get that revenue throughout the entire winter months is super invaluable if you're doing leaf cleanups. Hello, Mike, can commercial landscapers. Oh, we already did this one. We currently are doing a two man mowing crew with a truck with a ramp rack, x mark, commercial 30 and average yard size of 5, 000 square feet. Our goal is to have one man cruise once both are fully trained, but will probably be another month and a half. I'm raising prices next week. Should we price lawns based off of two man mowing crew times or one man crew mowing times? If we're not fully efficient for a month and a half, I would always recommend going off as if there's one person in terms of your pricing and then I would also be assuming that you always have that 30 inch mower. You always want to default if you have multiple crews, multiple setups. In terms of equipment, you want to make sure that your pricing is an hourly rate is based upon the smallest mowing setup. Because otherwise now you are depending, your guys are depending on having the correct setup in order to get the job done in budgeted hours. So if you have a 30 inch mower, great. All of your lawn should be budgeted in terms of hours as if you were using a 30 inch mower. Even if you have a 48 inch stand on. Because guess what? There's gonna be a day when a 48, 40 inch, 48 inch stand is on a cleanup and you need to use the 30 inch. And now your guys are way behind budget hours and they're not gonna be able to hit P4P. So in my mind, whatever the smallest setup is, that's what you need to use for budget hours. And I would base it upon a solo route in terms of the most accurate way of doing your budgeted hours. I'm 12 and I got a Gravely ZT42. I start with a push more awesome.

KTS Sports. Check out the rest of my videos on my channel. Those will help P4P. If employees average over budget hours to complete a task, do you adjust price for the customer? If so, when do you increase the price? No, we do not increase the price for the customer. We've never done that. Let me just think. The only, the only way you would ever change the price on a customer is if the work, if there's a work change order and they change the scope of work. But if you made a mistake on the estimate, we have to eat that and the crew has to realize that, you know, 1 in 10 jobs or 1 in 5 jobs, even the estimator is going to be off a little bit and maybe one in five jobs, two in five jobs are going to go over budget hours. But three or four out of those five jobs, they're going to be able to beat budget hours. So there's always human error. And the fact of the matter is, as time goes on, you get more accurate. And unless, in my opinion, unless a customer changes the scope of work and asks for a work change order, then we shouldn't change the price on them. Even though it's called an estimate. It's just, it's bad business in my opinion. And that means that too, when you crush budgeted hours, we're not going to bring the price down. It's part of the business. They accepted a dollar amount. They didn't accept how long it was going to take us. They paid for the results. They're not paying for the process. So.

When you first started, do you have insurance? Yes, we had insurance from day one. I'd highly recommend that, especially when you're first getting started, it's like literally 50, 60amonth to get liability, general liability insurance for your business. When you're so low. How to displace yourself to do lawn care, you're going to want to make sure you have a software system that keeps good notes of every single lawn. So when, when your employees show up, they have all the information that you have in your head on notes. So the first thing I'd be trying to do is if you're solo right now, every single property you go to, okay, Mr. Jones, he likes to, he likes his lawn cut at two inches. Okay, great. You know, Mrs. Smith, she got to make sure we close the door, close the gate on the right hand side because if we don't, the dog's going to get out. Like all those little notes need to be on every single property. If you're going to ever get employees to do the lawns the same way you would without you being there. Adrian, should I sell two used trucks and buy a new one more reliable? 156k and 240,000 miles on trucks, both are 200 or 2000 to 2004.

That's tough. That's really tough. It depends on how mechanically inclined you are. If you're a good mechanic, you could probably keep those limping along right now. Yes, your trading value is going to be good and you're going to go get one more reliable new vehicle. However, are you. Do you like. If you have two used trucks and you're solo, this is a good move. If you have two employees right now, you're all of a sudden gonna have you and two employees in one truck. And now you're ultra inefficient. Three guys in one truck doing lots, small lawns, hardly ever makes money. It almost, it can't make money. So I would recommend it's really based upon your mechanic, your level of mechanic. Like for me, I could not handle a 240k mile truck that's a 2000. Because if it broke, like stuff would be breaking all the time. I can't fix it and I would be having to take it to the shop all the time and it's bad. So if, if I was you and you were solo, this would be a go in terms of going and getting a new One, if you have two employees, I would definitely not do that because you're going to be much more inefficient by doing so. Hi Mike, would you share the profit sharing percentages based on roles you use? Yeah. So it ranges everywhere from 10% of profit being shared with crew all the way up to 25 for general manager and there's places in between that based upon the size of the business. If there's middle management they can have different, varying degrees of that. But most of the locations that I own that are corporately owned, I give away between 25 and 35% of the profit to the employees because I'm not there every day. I'm. I'm not there like on a day to day basis. And so it really depends on the roles. It going from zero, you know, if there's no profit in the business you can't share profits. But the fuel crew is going to make at least 10% split up between everyone and then you know from 0 to 25% depending on, you know, if you have a general manager or office people, etc. How do you discipline yourself to do a lot of work in a day?

I'm really bad at this. I use this app here which is the reminders app. So in here and I have different notes, different whatchamacallit, what's it called lists here based upon different things like this week's list this month list, I have a franchisee update list, I have command center meeting list, I have a media so our media team, I have a list for them. I have an anytime fitness one, I have one. I have a list for every one of the corporate locations. So I have about 12 lists here. I spend 95% of my time though in this, the, the list called this week. It's basically things I need to get done. It's my to do list basically. Great. The Reminders app on iOS. Hi Mike, do you feel long care is the easiest service based business to grow and scale with employees? I answered this earlier. Is there a good way to increase the quality of my clients in terms of job frequency, willingness to be upsold, et cetera? Honestly, this is going to come from left field but raising your prices, by raising your prices you're going to tap into a higher demographic and premium customer that is also going to be the one that's going to want upsells is going to want weekly instead of bi weekly service. They're not going to cancel services in the middle of the year. So just by raising your prices and then having Value, like having a great website, having trucks that are painted or decal, having professional uniforms like all of those. Ad value ads is what allows you to charge a higher price. And charging a higher price traditionally puts you in a completely different bracket than chucking a truck, driving around trying to do lawns with no insurance, no good employees, very unprofessional. Estimates are scribbled out online, paper, things like that.

How do you get your, how do you get team members to follow new standard operating procedures when you implement them?

I think it depends, right? So sometimes, usually you got to take it from the angle of how it's going to best benefit them, right? So for example, we say, well, how does it benefit them? So for example, I'll take this example. So some of, some of our team recently at one of our meetings came together and said, hey, like we want to work four tens instead of five eights, right? And I know that from a business standpoint makes a lot more sense, you can make more money. But I had to explain why we haven't done it at our local, this is our local shop, why we haven't done it. And there's a lot of pros to it. I get that and I understand that from a business standpoint in so many different areas. But I also had to explain the fact that.

You know, the reason we don't do it is because I can't. If someone calls out right now, hey, everyone works an extra hour or two, we're working nine or 10 hours and everyone's a little overtime. But if you're working for four tens and a couple people call out or we get behind a little bit, you're working 12, 14 hour days. And that's not going to work for people who have families. They will literally not see their kids in the morning because you have to start earlier and you're gonna have to, you're gonna be getting back home at seven, eight o' clock at night. And so we've made the conscious decision that hey, we're, we're not gonna make as much money. It's not as efficient, I understand that, but it's going to allow people with families to still work with us. And so I explained that as well as the fact that like, hey, if you leave here at 6 o', clock, the office has to stay here till 7 or 8 to make sure that the routes are ready for the next day. And so by extending the workday, we now extend their day by even more so explaining that. But in terms of if we decide, hey, we're Going to do four tens and there wasn't people on board. You got to convince everyone that it's the right thing for the team, it's the right thing for the business. And if it's just the right thing for the business, you've got to somehow draw a line between what's better for them. And so if it's gonna make the business more profitable, you better have profit sharing so that they feel like they're getting a piece of the pie. In my opinion, one man's a pov.

Mike, how you char decorative stones Delivered? Installed. Thanks. We don't do decorative stones. The cost for those can be hundreds of dollars per yard. We don't do that. We only do bulk materials. Just part of simplification. Not that I have anything against them. I'm sure there's great money in them. But every single decorative rock is different. Customers get picky about it, then you run out of it. And it's hard to get a lot of times from the quarry. Whereas I'd rather get something that I can just get anytime and replenish it. Or if we run out a little sooner, we can go back and get more. Would buying a used $3,000 truck be smart for starting out? If not, what would you recommend? If you can find a truck for $3,000 that runs and looks half decent, that you can paint and it look good, I'd be all over it. Especially if you're mechanically inclined. If you're not mechanically inclined like me, you're. You might want to spend a little bit more in the truck. Sitting down with a local business owner looking to sell his landscaping business. All equipment and customers. Three full time employees included in the sale. Two trucks, four zero turns, two plows included. What would be a few key questions or things to look for? Hey, Nathaniel. So I would recommend first of all, just type in acquisition. Mike Andes. I like an hour and a half webinar about valuations and acquisitions. I talk about this one a lot because I think it's one of the hidden gems in my channel and probably only has a few thousand views. But it talks all about valuation and when you're approaching someone from a buyer standpoint, how to approach them to get the best deal and how to convince them that your offer is is legit and that your low ball offer is actually what they should be charging a potential buyer. So definitely check that video out. Instead of me trying to explain it now, I just go watch that whole video. My cousin just started a lawn care business and we joined the Army National Guard, we have training two weeks out of the summer. Should we hire employees for those two weeks or the entire year or. Any advice? Yeah, I'd definitely be trying to get employees. So the thing about the National Guard, you do have to leave for two weeks at least once a year for training, sometimes twice a year, depending on where you're at and what rank and things like that. But it's tough to be unemployed because it's tough to lose a really good key employee. Like if you're a manager, it's tough to lose someone for two weeks in the middle of season sometimes. But if you're an owner, you're definitely going to want to get some employees to at least handle the mowing right. Because if you time it right and you schedule around it correctly, you should only really have to have them do like, you know, part time. And then when you, you know, just make sure you don't have projects, make sure it's the, ideally it's the time you're mowing is a little bit slower. If you can do it during the winter or when the, when it's really hot and the grass is slowed down, you might be, might be able to get around getting all together if you can just skip two weeks on the mowing schedule. But it really comes down to how many mowing customers you have. If you have hundreds, then you're going to need to have employees. If you have 30 or 40 and you talk to all of them and just send them an email, they're probably really understanding if you're in the National Guard that they might skip one service or that they have to wait, you know, 14, 15 days instead of seven. Right. So Justin, with P4P, are you going off of commission or flat rate? Especially specifically labors on install crews? Yeah, So I guess you could call it commission. Basically they're going to percentage of the labor revenue. So on an install crew, let's say there's 50 hours of budgeted time and we're charging $50 per man hours, that's $2,500 worth of labor. So they're going to get a percentage of that. And doesn't matter how long it takes them, if it takes them, you know, if it takes them 40 hours, they're making the same amount. If they hit some 60 hours, they're making the same amount. So what that does is it incentivize them to be as efficient as possible. And so they're getting a percentage of the labor revenue, not of the, the material, non materials, non estimate fees and dump Fees and all the markup of materials, just the labor revenue.

Just starting. What is recommended? Priority order register, Business, business bank account, insurance. You're gonna have to register your business in order to get a business bank account and get insurance. So you're gonna have to do that first. I had guys that tried P4P. They made 15 extra on, on one week and then they never went back to it. How do you have a two person long crew stay motivated when the bonuses is very small? So a couple things. If the bonuses are very small and they're working their brains out, then it means that you probably have inefficient and if inefficient route or inefficiency somehow baked into the business in terms of equipment or a setup or how you're routing things, there's inefficiencies or they aren't being efficient in terms of their work ethic. If they're stopping at gas stations, taking naps throughout the day on their phone all day long, which is a big one now, then they're, they're not going to be as efficient, they're not gonna make as much money. The problem is you want to have at least half of your crew making above base pay. If that's not the case, you're going to lose people's morale. I gotta look at last paycheck, but I think I'd say almost everyone besides one or two people at our local shop hit above base pay last week, our last pay period. And that's what you want. You want the majority of your team to be above that. And there's going to be times when you hit a bunch of yellow slips or really bad weather and just everyone hits base pay and hey, it stinks. The business didn't make any money though, so there shouldn't be any more dollars to give. But when they're killing it like they have the past couple of weeks and there's not yellow slips, they should be making more money, in my, in my opinion. And so Carlos, if you are doing P4P and they made like 15 bucks extra, that's not enough usually for someone to be inspired to work harder for two solid weeks or a week, even if you're doing pay periods every week, it's not enough for someone to be incentivized to work hard like that all the time for that much money. So you're going to need to make sure that you're more efficient either maybe give them better equipment, maybe you give them, you know, raise the rates, raise the hourly rates, or raise the budget hours on the job or I. E. The pricing on the jobs. And now they're getting more revenue that way. So even from last year we've raised prices significantly and that's what allow has allowed them to be because again, a third of it's going to the employees. When you raise the price by $10 a cut, technically $3.33 for us is 33 is going more to the employee on every time they cut that job. Thanks for all the golden nuggets of knowledge on all the videos. You are welcome. Tony. How much money is to start a smart start a mowing business? You can still get started for as little as probably a thousand bucks. I will book that call. Cool. Jeffrey, I'm thinking of getting a $10,000 loan from an angel investor who's a close friend and giving him a 10 return to buy some more equipment next year. What are your thoughts? If someone's willing to give you $10,000 for 10%, I'd be all over it. Because you don't have any collateral. You probably. You probably don't have a. Sounds like you don't have other options. 10% on an unsecured loan is very, very good. I'd be all over that. You can hardly get that from a bank, let alone the sba, let alone, you know, just getting it immediately from a friend. So a 10% is good. If you had $10,000 today and next year had to give them $11,000, but that allowed you to get started or like double your size, your business, I'd be all over it. Fresh marketing ideas. Heard you're coming to Burleson, Texas. It will be good to have some real competition. Jeremy, make sure you reach out to them. They're going to be there end of next month. Devin, how do you deal with inexperienced employees? How would you do training? Talked about this a little bit in terms of using a checklist, in terms like, hey, here's all the things you need to know. Day one, you're going to start on this. Once you've mastered that, you're going to move to this. So like day one might be literally using a blower and using your mobile app, like your. The technology, the CRM that you use. And then it might be day two, it's like you're going to use the weed whacker. Then you're going to learn how to restring the trimmer. Then you're going to learn how to use a push mower. Then you're going to use a zero turn, then you're Going to learn how to drive the truck, then you're going to learn how to back up the trailer. Then you're going to learn like have it all stepped out and then basically have it to where the. At the, at the end of it. They can manage everything in terms of equipment and you can trust them 100% and until that time they're in training. I do not have a blower of choice. We've tried the BR600, the BR800 and they're both good. 800 has a lot more volume. My region dump stopped taking grass clipping so I started mulching back in onto customers lawn. It looks quite messy as I have to pass through with a trimmer on the mowing lines that has, that has. Do you know of tips to be more efficient in mulching or what options for bagging with no dumping support from region? That's very tough. It depends on the market. Like for example, in our area we could not get away with mulching because the grass gets wet. It does not look good. It sits top. It's not like a lot of your areas where the grass gets chipped up very easily and broken up and then falls down. It's ours sits on top and it looks very, very messy if we don't bag it and just unfortunately standard in our area to bag. So everyone just expects it. But in terms of mulching, I would be looking at different types of blades. I would be looking at potentially having to double pass your lawns and then baking that into your hourly pricing or your pricing. I should say that you're going to have to double pass. Like if you're going this direction now, you're going to have to go this direction and try to make it as clean as possible.

How do you bring up the pricing on a job when you're doing an estimate? I try not to bring up the pricing on a job unless I think the person's being a little bit cheap. They're going to be cheap. I might ask them on a project, if we're booked out, I might say hey, do you have a budget established for this job? And if they're like yeah, $2,000 and I know this is a $20,000 project, I'm probably going to get out of there as fast as possible. But in terms of bring up pricing on a job, I don't want to do that as the estimator, I want that to be on the office side because especially if you're the owner, if they know that you can start talking pricing with them, they know right away that you're, you are the owner. If you start haggling with them and doing pricing stuff right with them in person, I would much rather have the office handle that. And even if you as the owner are the office have that delineation where it's like, hey, I'm the estimator when I show up to your property and you can email the office or the office is going to handle the setting up the schedule with you because you do not want to. As soon as you start hanging with price, they know you're the owner, you've given that card away and they will pull that card again when they are unhappy, when they want another price cut, all the rest of it. So in my opinion, I want the estimator to go there, get budgeted hours and materials. I want the office to handle the pricing and the scheduling. I wanted a project manager to show up and install the work. Now at the very beginning, you might be the self same person for all those roles, but it should feel to the customer like they're getting handed off because one day when you grow that is going to be the case. And you don't want them to be like, oh, but I want to talk to Mike. You don't want that. That's why you don't give you out your phone number and talk to your customers on your cell phone and haggle with pricing. You will be the bottleneck for the business going forward if you do that.

What services would you consider? Yard maintenance. Really? Anything that's recurring. Bush trimming, weeding, mowing, Anything that's recurring. Vincent, do you know how severely is the labor shortage affecting the landscape industry? I know that many landscape companies in my area looking for employees. Yes, it is the hardest thing for any company that's scaling this year. I love watching you. You have taught me so much. I own Wilson Lawn Care, Pope, Mississippi. Thank you for everything. How do you feel about buying used trucks? Watch the video last weekend it said don't buy or don't buy this. I forget it's a big truck on the front. And I'm saying like don't buy trucks right now. Listen to that. When I talk about inflation, I talk about the supply chain issues, the cost of used trucks going through the roof and what I would do in terms of trying to delay that.

All right. Welcome Sydney, Australia. Found your channel a month ago. Yeah, thank you to everyone that subscribed in the past like month. We, we have more views in the past 48 hours on YouTube than we did all the entire month of April, we went from usually getting about 60 to 70 to 80,000 views a month to now we're getting 700,000, 700 views a month. So big shout out and thank you to everyone that subscribed in the past month. I really appreciate it. And if you guys enjoy these Q and A's, give me a thumbs up. Give me a little love. Let's keep going here. Hey Mike, what is your opinion on local bans on leaf blowers and gas powered lawn equipment? How would you react? Yeah, so we have a franchisee in, in California where this is happening.

Unfortunately, when the government gets involved, they're pushing us towards more expensive stuff because right now it's more expensive to operate.

You know, a battery operated system. And that's what's going to drive though the change towards electric, electric stuff is, is somewhat going to be laws and regulations, not just costs and the free market, which, hey, we can't control that. So what I would do is realize that you're gonna have to raise prices, right. If, if we're gonna add value to the customer in terms of either a warm fuzzy feeling because we're using electric or, or because it's quieter and they can, they don't have, they don't like the noise aspect. We're going to charge a higher price because we're adding value to our service. Mike, for our situation, we found it to be worth to have a mechanic. We also do tree work. Things always break. Yeah. So like ideally you don't have a mechanic until you have at least, at least 15 to 20 employees. In my opinion, the cost of a mechanic, let's say, let's say you're paying a mechanic 50, $50,000 a year. Let's say you're running a 20% margin business. Right. So 20% of your business is profit. That's a very good profit margin. Let's take it a little bit back. Let's say 15%. Okay. If you're running a 15% margin business and you're paying a mechanic $50,000, what that means is that you have to make like 200 and no. So 15, that's like seven. Do the math, Michael. You have to like do $300,000 in more revenue just to get the profit that's going to cover their overhead cost. I do not like overhead, people. I'm sorry. That's why with Augusta, we want to build a business that does about 800,000 to a million dollars in revenue with one general manager and eight to ten employees. That's efficient. As soon as I add an office person and an estimator and a project manager and like all these overhead people, I've got to create way more revenue and I've got to buy more equipment and get more employees just to fill to pay for these overhead expenses of all these non revenue producing employees. I like it. I don't like it. I want to have one general manager that's overhead, that uses a command center or a remote office and has a bunch of employees underneath. That's the most efficient in my man, in my mind. So in terms of mechanic, as much as they're good and great, until it comes to the point where it's like okay, we're paying in labor, we're paying the local shop $5,000 a month in labor for a mechanic, probably a good time to go get a mechanic. I don't usually see that happening until companies have 15 to 20 trucks and 15 plus employees. Traditionally that's what I've seen. There's obviously benefits, you know, there's soft benefits of having things done faster, them knowing the equipment a little bit better, etc. But I see I most the time people jump into it too soon in my opinion. I saw someone the other day, had three employees and a full time mechanic and I just about lost my mind. I just about lost my mind. I, I was so mad. When starting off, is it a good idea to get backup equipment? It is if you have employees. When you're first getting started though, honestly, I'd much rather that money be going into the business in the form of marketing to grow the number of customers. When you get to the point though, when you're, when your schedule is maxed out, that's when you need backup equipment because you can't afford downtime. But if you're only mowing for 20, 30 hours out of the week, you have time for downtime. You don't need two mowers, you don't need two blowers if you're the only person. So yes, I like backup equipment, it's obviously better. But if you, if that money is either going to go into a second blower or marketing. And I'm only mowing 10 lawns a week and I have plenty of time if something breaks down to sit out for a day, don't go buy a second blower. Spend that money on door hangers. Oh, this is a great time. Check this out. You guys are gonna, this next week is gonna be awesome. We got these, we got these door hangers coming out with the ability to be able to write in the prices for mowing and mulch and property clamps. We're gonna actually have the templates where you can actually write on these. But like, this is what I would be doing. I'd rather much rather you spend, you know, that 500 on, you know, a core aeration.

Door hanger or, you know, mowing. And, you know, if you're doing hardscaping services, this is pretty cool. Hardscaping services.

So I'd be doing. I'd much rather you spend 3 or 400 on that than a second blower. It's going to move your business forward a whole lot faster by getting the door hangers and marketing material. What is the formula that says you are getting your hourly rate or more on a yard? Is it time divided by hourly rate? What is the formula that says you are getting your hourly rate or more on a yard? Is it time divided by hourly rate? I don't know exactly what you're saying there. If you can explain it. I'll try to get. I'll circle back. I can go like four different directions with that question.

For your estimate fees, do your customers see that specifically or do they not know that they are being charged for that? Yeah, they don't know about it. It's basically overhead recovery. People have called me a scam artist and that I'm lying to customers by saying we're giving free estimates. That's a bunch of garbage. At the end of the day, we are not charging the customer for the estimate. It's simply on the back end that we're tacking that overhead recovery into the estimate and we charge based upon the line item and it's very fair. So we do get free estimates. If you don't accept, you're not getting charged for it. If you accept it's baked into our pricing, we could very well. There's no difference between charging a hundred dollars to a customer for five hours worth of labor at $20 per hour versus charging them $90 for labor and $10 for an estimate fee. The customer still sees a hundred dollars to get the same amount of work done. So just. It's just a matter of moving numbers around. And I want to make sure that I see that my estimate fees cover the cost of my office and estimator. That's my goal. Best residential mower you have had. The Hondas are really good. They're like four or five hundred bucks and they work great. How to get more clients?

This is a trick question because, yeah, there's lots of good ones. Jobber Lawn Pro.

Yard book. All great options to get started if you want to go really more complex and complex. Larger servers, autopilot, real green lmn. All great software packages. And one day we will build our own for Augusta because none of those really fit us now. Thanks for the tips on the website. We implement all the changes except for the video portion but are working on it. Very good. Slim tactical. What is the best mower for starting a lawn business? Would a bobcat mower work perfectly? Yep. Every mower, any mower that will work well and make you money. How old are you, Sir? I am 25. What apps or technology used to set up schedules, track finances, etc. Yes, we use QuickBooks for the finances part. It's this the best software. Honestly, it's still the best.

Oh, you know what? I should show you guys this. This is great. I might have deleted it. Let me look at this up really fast. I wanted to show how QuickBooks raised their prices recently and show you. Yeah, here we go. Let me. Let me try to there. Here we go. This is how you're supposed to raise your prices. Okay, I everyone not complains. Everyone's like, oh, I gotta raise my price and they overthink things way too much. Let me show you how QuickBooks raises their prices. This is exactly how I recommend. This is exactly what the letter inside landscape business course shows is what we use for our franchisees in terms of the. The method of raising prices is. Here's your new price. It's going to start on this date. Thank you for your business. No other further. No further action is needed. You don't know. Explain and go into great detail and if you have questions, give us a call. If you're having financial difficulty, let us know and we'll work with you. Like don't go into that garbage. Let me show you what QuickBooks does for their sharing their price increase. Okay, so this is QuickBooks for the gym. They're raising the price. Hey Mike, the price of your subscription is changing. Just thank you for being a valued QuickBooks customer. We want to let you know about an important change that will affect your account. Beginning they give me one month. We always give people plenty of time. Two to three weeks, four weeks sometimes like they are here and just tell me, hey, your current price is 40. It's going to 50. Thank you. Price will change. You know, we're the product better for you. Thank you. Have a nice day. Short, sweet, beautiful. Trust me, this company knows what they're doing. You're a massive conglomerate. They Figured this stuff out. So why are we like trying to write paragraph after paragraph and talk to our customers and leave voice message and apologizing explaining ourselves? No. Here's the new prices.

How much? Oh, sorry, I didn't really answer your question. QuickBooks for finances. And then we have quite a few things in terms of schedulers. We use like team up, we use WhatsApp for videos, we use service autopilot. We you. We use a whole bunch of different stuff. How much more inefficient is a two man mo crew versus a one man crow on your. On your average four to five thousand square foot lawn, does it usually take one guy? 1.25, 1.5, 1.75 et cetera? As long as it would take two man crew. Yeah. So.

A two man crew is going to be better the bigger your lawn is and the bigger setup you have. So if you have bigger mowers, bigger trailers and bigger trucks and bigger lawns that you're servicing, it's going to make more sense to have a two, three man crew. Or even more if you're doing massive properties. If you're doing small properties like this, where your average lawn is like 4 to 5,000 square feet, it makes most sense from an efficiency standpoint to have one man crews. That being said, if you have two man crews, you're not going to be perfectly efficient. You're not going to do. You do 10 lawns in a day with one person. You're not going to do 20 with two people. You're not going to, it's not going to happen if you have all that drive time. So again, what I would be shooting for somewhere around 70%. Okay. So if I'm going to get 10 lawns from one person, I might expect 16, 17, maybe 18 lawns out of two people. But you're going to expect at least a 10 to 20% drop off by having that for that person. But it really depends on your drive time too, because the more drive time, the more it's going to impact when you have two people. If there's just one person, it's less impactful. So.

All right, what iOS app do you recommend for organizing a daily route? There's a whole bunch of these. Invoice. What's Invoice? Now there's a whole bunch of like apps that run off iOS that you can do all of your scheduling and stuff here. Yardbook has a pretty good one for that too. Lawn Pro. Those are great. Hey Mike, I'm looking into getting your course shortly. The Two things that stand out that I'm very interested in is the employee handbook and of course the P4P system. Awesome. Very cool. Yeah, a lot of times that like those two things alone is what a lot of people will get it for if they're a larger company. Because you know, if you're a larger company and you already have five, 10 employees, half the course is going to be reviewed for you. A lot of the leadership stuff that'll be helpful but like you're getting it for P4P software as well as the employee handbook and some of the other resources like the price increase letter, stuff like that.

Good, good, good.

Well, yeah, a lot of questions coming in. Let me try to catch up here.

How much should I charge at my age? Hourly or per job? Do you think you could give me a shout out to. So yeah, do it per job. Get in that habit. As you get more confident in your hour, you know how long things are going to take. You'll be better at giving flat rate prices instead of the hourly thing. What's your thoughts on doing a roll up and sell to PE Private equity.

For me or for you, Taylor? You're going to have to give me a little more, a little more info there. I don't like the idea of selling to private equity for Augusta. Not really interested in that. We've had plenty of offers and people willing to spend gobs of money to do it. But I'm not too interested in it right now in terms of people doing it for you. Hey, if you're willing to retire, let's go. Just make, just keep in mind you're going to have to build a systems oriented business. No one wants to. Private equity is not going to come by your business if it requires an owner operator to know everything it needs to run on systems and procedures. I'm wondering if the P4P system works the same for Canada. I'm wondering not so much an in depth of P4P but just curious if the system works the same as the info you would enter. If that makes sense. Yes, it does work the same and it will work just fine in Canada. What is the most cost effective way for marketing ever? Door direct mail, Facebook ads, Google Ads, door hangers, yard signs, et cetera. The most cost effective way is to get a really good ranking website from lawn carewebdesign.com Just kidding. Any, any website that's going to rank really well because you don't have to pay for your ads and the thing that you don't want to be doing is paying for every single customer, every single lead you're paying for. Because of these ads, you want to be ranking well in Google. And this can take, you know, three to six months even if you have a really good web design like long hairweb design.com, but if you don't have a good design, I talk to someone today, they've been in business for three years and they're still not on the third page of Google and they're paying for every single lead. And the problem is you're getting this treadmill of pouring money into ads as your business grows and it's tough, you don't make any profit. You've got to get to the place where, especially year two, where leads are coming in from either word of mouth or from your website, people searching and finding you organically in the search results. And that's going to come from SEO. SEO, Google reviews, having lots of content on your site and a whole bunch of other things to do with your website. So that's why you should join lawn carewebdesign.com but it is good. But if you can't afford longcarewebdesign.com I know it's a premium service. If you can't afford that, just make sure that you are constantly changing your site, adding to it, you don't let it go static and that you test how fast. Like make sure it's mobile, responsive. Watch the two videos I made a couple months ago about websites. It gives you lots of tips about how to make your website better. What do you do if you underestimated your per man hour rate on a recurring mowing customer? Yeah, David, So what I would be doing is I just try to raise their prices when you are really busy, right? So whether it be now or in the spring or whenever you're really busy, that's when you want to raise prices. Because if you lose someone, you really don't care. And if they say accept like okay, great, now they're profitable. So I would always be raising your prices when you are busiest.

Do you do door hangers in no soliciting neighborhoods? We do not.

Should I I let box drop? Should I let box drop flyers or just not worth it? I do not know what let boxes. I'm going to guess you mean putting stuff. Don't put flyers in people's mailboxes. So these are flyers, beautiful flyers from lawncaremedia.com where you can buy them today for the low price of just 49 or you can buy all 160 designs for just 3.99. But I would not put flyers on people's mailboxes, if that's what you're asking. I would not be doing that. It's illegal. How do we charge the customer more if we run over on time or materials? Best way to approach that with the customer. So again, it has to be different than what's in, in the estimate. So if I run over on time, the customer is not paying for how long I I work there. They're paying for an end result. So unless I put the number of hours in the estimate or I put the amount of materials that I'm putting in on the job, I'm not changing anything. Therefore, I really, in my opinion, if you're going to be professional, you should not be changing the price. So what that means is if I put install 7 yards of bark mulch and now it's going to require 14 because the customer wants it really thick, I can go to them and say, hey, Mr. Jones, it says here, install seven yards of medium brown bar mulch. You wanted more. So it's going to be a work change order and I'll get that estimate to you. And you're gonna have to get that accepted before we get the rest of the work done. But if you just said install bark mulch and flower beds, you're in a pickle because they're in their mind, they thought 4 inches thick, you were thinking 2 inches thick, I. E, 7 yards, and now they need 14. So that's why it's so important that estimate notes are very specific because it allows you to not have these type of issues. If you go over on materials and you've stated how much materials are included on the estimate, you should be able to easily go to the client, say, hey, there's a work change order. We thought it was gonna take 5 yards of soil. Turns out there was a stump width tear out. Now we're going to be, there's going to be five more yards of, of material. And by the way, you should have also got a work change order for that stump removal. If you have to do that as well, if that took a whole bunch more time. So things like that is what you want to do. And you can have, you should have fine print in your estimate that says if you're, or in your estimate notes, you should be saying, because if you're digging, if you're digging, you need to have something in there saying, because this is excavation or grading or soils being removed and we're going below the surface of the soil. This estimate is subject to change if there are other factors. Once we break the surface of the ground, roots, gravel, water, water lines, septic, whatever is buried. You don't know. As soon as you break ground, you could run into all sorts of stuff. You need to have that in the estimate. But again, if it's not in the estimate, it takes you more time. Sorry, if it takes you more materials. And you do not specify how much materials we're going to be on the job site. Sorry, you don't have it in writing. And in my opinion, you're going to be asking for an angry customer. Daniel, what age do you start mowing? I started at 11.

Any tips on setting up an LLC? Legal Zoom is okay, but honestly, most, most states you can do on their online licensing and you know, save yourself a couple hundred bucks and it's pretty simple. Hi, from Belgium.

How soon do you send out a reminder notice when trying to collect payment? 14 days. Once they're overdue by 14 days, we are sending them out all sorts of things.

We start the process, actually the automation automated sequence. How soon do you send out a reminder notice that payment is due? I said that 14 days. Did you answer my question already? Probably my phone cut off. What is the coolest job you've ever done in your life? Ooh, I do not know. What do you use for job notes and how do the employees see them? So make sure whatever CRM you do use has a mobile app and your employees can see all of the notes for all the jobs.

What is a good rule for minimum cash reserve for a business making between 500,000 to 700,000? How to implement PPP into a tree care and removal service. So first of all, number two, in terms of implementing P4P into tree care and removal, it's the same exact thing. Percentage of labor revenue. All right, so if you're doing budget hours or say for example, you're charging by the tree, well then you need to figure out by the tree if you're doing it based on size, like how much of that revenue is labor considered. And then the employee should be getting a cut of that as P4P. In terms of, number one, what's a good cash reserve? It's going to depend on your risk tolerance. It's going to depend on where you're at financially and where you're at in life. If you have dependence and a family and a mortgage, you're going to need more cash reserves. If you're in hyper growth and you're 14, 15, 16, 25 years old, you're probably gonna have a lower cash reserve. Okay, so for myself, I don't have dependence. I live really, really frugally. I don't need a lot to spend personally, so I run very low cash reserves. I do not have much money in the bank. I invest every single dollar, basically. And if people looked at my bank account, they think I was poor. Tomorrow we are putting down 35% on our land. So that's $160,000 that has to go down. And so, yeah, I pull out of investments. I don't have that much money in my savings account because I'm single. I don't have dependence. I don't have a lot of personal expenses. I don't take much money out of the businesses. So all my money is in investing. And so cash reserves are lower. For myself, it's going to be higher. The more stability you need in terms of cash flow. Like, if your cash flow is really wonky, you're gonna need more cash reserves. If you can stay profitable year round and manage your cash flow throughout the winter, you don't need as much reserves, and you can put more money into growth. Hey, Mike, is $12,000 a month in revenue good for a crew of two guys or more? No, it's not if they're full time. I'm just giving you yes or no answer. I could give you all sorts of, like, flowery answers, but the real answer to that is no, in my opinion. You want 8 to $10,000 at least per employee. It's very possible, especially if you have two trucks. If you have one truck and two guys, 12 to $14,000. I can see that. But I would be shooting for at least $15,000. At least $15,000 for two guys.

I've seen, like, Mount Vernon, when they had two guys, they did 20. Their best month was 23,000 or 24,000 in one month, but they had two trucks. So, yeah, I just started my business. We use a lot of direct marketing. We just picked 13 locations today. Very good.

Carlos. What roles would would that one general manager be responsible for? A general manager for Augusta Lawn Care does everything. Basically, they do hiring, they do marketing, they do everything. If you're referencing Corpus Christie's the one I mentioned the very beginning. He's looking for a general manager. Make sure you check out Augusta longer service.com corpus/careers. If you want to become a general manager for a $1.5 million operation over in Corpus Christi, actually, it's going to be in Rockport.

Have any even tried Buying a new mower. What do you think about Jobber? Jobbers? Okay. You will eventually outgrow it. If you get above about five to 10 employees, in my opinion, it starts falling apart, but it's fine. Jobber is great. Jobber is fantastic if you're getting started. Very easy to interface, great team, good customer service. But as you grow, you might outgrow it. If you only want to grow to five or 10 employees, probably a good thought for you though. Good, good, good software. Love your content. Keep it going. I like having someone that spends more time on the business side of things versus just a ton of equipment. Videos, Grandiflora. If anyone is on the fence about buying Mike's course, don't be. It's excellent and 100 worth the money. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. How do you juggle jobs when you're completely booked through the week but the new customer needs it done this week? You raise your prices so you don't close as much work or you go hire more people or you tell them, sorry, you're not a good fit. So it's one of those three at the end of the day, right? And I think you'd be, you want to move towards raising your prices. You also want to move towards higher capacity, I. E. Another truck, more employees, etc, but if that's not possible, you're going to want to charge premiums. If you're booked out six weeks right now, raise your prices. If you're going to estimates and half your estimates are being like, oh, sorry, we need the job done next week, raise your prices so that way you're not six week booked out, you'll be three weeks booked out and you'll be twice as profitable. Like, if people realize if they could just raise their prices from 50 an hour to $60 an hour, you're not going to make $10 more power you're making, you're gonna triple your profitability. You're gonna triple it. All right. So yeah, we could go into that for a long time. What do you think of thumbtack? It's a great place to get started. Same thing with Home Advisor, but again, it's kind of like you're renting, you're renting real estate. I'd rather own real estate. Have a really good website that's bringing me leads in with no additional customer acquisition cost. Instead of being on like the stream of like, give me more leads, give me more leads. Like, I would rather have my website being owned by me and that traffic being governed. Like, if I'm gonna give $30 or $20 to HomeAdvisor. You know what they're doing, right? They're spending 10 of that on a Google Ad and they're trying to bring in traffic to their website and then clicking on, giving you a lead. That's what you're doing. You're giving them 20 so they can take 10 and go spend money on ads and drive that traffic to their website and have a customer, not your customer, their customer. Because the information is submitted through HomeAdvisor. And so yes, it's good to get started. It'll be great. But you will eventually hate it because it's like renting from a landlord. You eventually want to own the thing and have more control. And the way to have control is own your real estate in online, which is your website.

You do not need to be very old. How do you think of sure cans? Sure cans are okay, but we don't, we don't use them anymore. Mark G. You can buy a mower anywhere. It basically depend on your, your price, your budget. If you're wanting to go commercial, I'd recommend a dealer.

What's a good brand of lawnmower to start with? I've already talked about this. Okay. I'm gonna get through all this stuff. Great, great. Local dealers go to the store. Mark. Okay, I'm just scrolling through all these. How should I speak to my employees, firm or friendly? And what system should I have to determine employee pay and growth if based on hourly. Okay, speaking to your employees, firm or friendly. I think there's a balance here. I hate the firm part. I like the friendly part. But there's times you gotta, you gotta be really honest with your team. I think it's, it's just as harmful to your team members by speaking to them rough and mean as it is. Just always everything is fine and Danny and wonderful. There's times you gotta pull them up short and say, you guys did a horrible job. We dropped the ball as a team, we failed. And I had a conversation like that yesterday. And there's times like those are not fun. I don't enjoy those conversations. I hate them actually. But they have to be said if you're going to keep a professional team. And if you want the, if you're looking out for the best interest of the, the careers of your employees, because if they go do that, their next job, they might get fired. If they do that, they're never going to get promoted. They're never gonna make more money. So it's really. You owe it to Them to tell them when they're not doing a good job. And I believe that most people want to know when they're not doing a good enough job, in my opinion.

How do I stop watching YouTube and start my business? Delete the YouTube app right now. Get off the stream. Go to your local website. Local. You know, go to legal Zoom because it's easier. And startle LLC right now. But delete YouTube. Get out of here. Go. I don't want to see you, Robert Delac. I want you to go start. I just want to know what reliable brands to look for. Anything commercial is going to be just fine. How big of a lawn? Like, I'm sorry guys, but the brand of mower does not matter. I'm just sorry. You will never talk to a multimillion dollar lawn care business operator or any lawn care operator for that matter and say, I switched from this brand to this brand and it just changed everything. They might change the equipment setup, like going from standard to sit down or getting a larger mower, a smaller mower. Going from trailered setup to no trailer setup, that might change it. But that's not the brand. The brand of mower does absolutely. Like, I've never talked to someone them like, oh yeah, that brand of mower is a make or break for my business. It just doesn't happen. I'm sorry.

In terms of using a push mower. Yeah. So overgrown mows. We still have zero turns. Everyone thinks we only use push motors, but you have zero turns and we're going to put them on a overgrown mow. But when it comes to push mowers. Yeah. If you're. If your average lawn size is above 6,7000 square feet, you're probably going to need zero turns and we have zero turns. Most of our locations use 48 inch stand ons on the ramp racks. They do not use just push mowers like we do locally at most of our lawns. So just keep that in mind.

Yeah, there's other videos that do that. Ron, I'm having issues getting employees. I know it's hard everywhere, but I'm now out of options. Yeah, we just increased our with $500 offering to our employees. If someone, if they refer someone that will sign up and work for us, they get $200 up front, $300 after they've worked 60 days.

Do your employees have sick days? We give them two weeks of paid time off and they can use that for their sick days if they want to.

Yes. It's okay to get started with just a push Mower in terms of getting your license. Yeah, go to your dol. Just do your, your state name, department of licensing. Boom. Go there. It's right. You have a tab that says like start a business or license a business. Click on that. It'll probably walk you through the whole thing and you won't need legalzoom. You probably get an LLC for $200 or less or start with sole proprietorship for like 50 bucks.

I'm 14 starting my business. How many yards should I do and how should I charge people? You get as many yards as you possibly can and you should just flip it, flip a coin in terms of price. Because right now you're 14 and your experience that you get in the first five lawns will do more for you than get trying to get just perfectly right.

Yes, I've heard of hyperinflation. I've made a couple videos about that. Should I get a $2,000 30 inch mower or a $5,000 36 inch walk behind? In my area, a lot of backyards have small gates and big yards. Keep in mind when, when there's 36 inch mowers, a 36 inch stand on, for example, some gates, it won't fit through, it'll scratch the edges. Just keep that in mind as well as if you have to have a bagger on that 36 mower, you got to get it off the mower, take it off anyways. So keep in mind if you have big backyards that's on a 32 inch or 36 inch might make sense. But I, we just, I'm just talking to one of our franchisees right now out in Louisiana and he's switching out of his 36 and going up to a 52 or a 48 simply due the fact that there's not much of a difference between a 30 inch push mower and a 32 or 36 inch stand on. There's just not enough to make it really worth your going from $2,000 to $5,000. Like you said, there's not shipping product because our money is worthless. Today's labeling. So basically If I'm charging $60 an hour and it takes me 45 minutes to mow the yard, how much profit did I make? Or if it took me one hour and 26 minutes, how much did I lose on profit? Okay, so If I'm charging 60 an hour and it takes me 45 minutes to mow the lawn, all I know based upon that is that you made $80 per hour by doing that. That's All I can tell from that, I can't. I don't know how much profit because I don't know, I don't know your labor expense, I don't know your truck expense, I don't know your equipment set up. If you're using a weed whacker to do that entire lawn and you show up in a Prius, your overhead is going to be so much lower than if you show up with an F450 diesel, a 30, a 25 foot enclosed trailer, and 30 turns on that trailer. Okay? So again, I can't tell you your profit based upon how long a lawn took.

Riley. Hey, Elliot. I am. Hey, who's Elliot? I am 13 and I have seven accounts. Oh, you're talking to someone else. Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. All right, Michael, those are great answers. As to the P for P for tree service question, I am worried about P4P causing the crew to move too fast with very dangerous work. Any way to counterbalance the risk? Risk? Yeah, you just have certain standards in place that you will not compromise on. Like, look, guys, you can be as fast as you want and that's fantastic. So you can make more money. But if I see anyone put their hand inside that chipper, you're gonna get docked all of your performance dollars. Like, if you've got to make stuff like that, you've got to do it. If I saw someone that was, for example, like, not using eye protection all the time and they're weed whacking, like, I'm going to dock them if they don't listen to their manager and get eye protection, lots of things like that. So just make it a matter of. Again, you can't expect an employee to really care about the, the procedures that you implement until it affects their paycheck. So if you want them to work faster and not be on their phone, you better tie their performance to their paycheck. They can make more money if they don't be on their phone. And if you want them to be safe, tie safety standards to their paycheck. For example, you could have a demerit system. You have five demerits in a month, for example, maybe two demerits. You have two demerits in per pay period. You get one demerit. That's for safety, that's fine. But if you get two immediately, you lose P4P, like, or your performance dollars for that pay period. All of a sudden you get people to align, all right? And you have, you know, the crew leads could be the ones that Hand out demerits, for example. So it's, it's just a matter of figuring out what to incentivize and what to balance out. Have I ever thought about selling merchandise? Yeah, we have a couple things we're thinking about right now. I'm going to be wearing a shirt here in the next couple weeks. That is very cool. I'm very much looking forward to it. But I won't ever make much money. I won't. I'll sell them for cost basically.

How big of I want to push how. Okay, that's okay. You gotta write a little better than that.

Where do you see yourself when you're 40 years old? I'm gonna be 40 years old. I'm gonna be very fit. I'm gonna be very healthy and I'm gonna love my businesses still. How long you staying live? I don't know. We're just gonna keep answering these questions. What's a good percentage of revenue for office staff? I would not give a percentage of revenue to your office staff. I think that's a big no. No. Oh, I see what you're saying. I think, I think you're saying you're saying what percentage of revenue is going towards your office staff like their wages and things? Got it. It's going to depend completely on your structure. Like for example, if you're a design build company, that's going to be a lower. If you're commercial, that's going to be lower versus residential mowing where there's a lot more touch with the customer and you got to have more people in the office. There's a lot more communication that's going to be higher. So little difficult to give you an exact number. But 12% sounds pretty good for a little on the high side because like let's say on a million dollar business that means you're doing $120,000 in cost of the office staff. That's like two full time killers in the office.

If I include your estimator, I'd give you a pass.

Learn how to make an LLC from YouTube. Yes. I am starting a long care business at 14 with my friends. How can I market my business with just starting out? Oh, just such a perfect segue. Lawn CareMedia.com get some of these awesome flyers and door hangers. Oh we got postcards. Postcards, Postcards. Let's go. Postcards. I'm half joking. It is really a good deal, I'm telling you. Is there an app so to post my post? Yeah, you can. Like next door is a great place to post Facebook groups in your local area. Great place to post. How long do you see the average lawn or landscape employee work with a business? When do they usually burn out due to work or management? The average tenure for most employees in this industry is less than six months. So the thing is, you've got to figure out how to make it a place where they can stay a year or two. That's the goal. I don't look at this like, oh, I got to keep people for 10 years. No, my goal is to keep someone for two to three years. And I hope that in that two or three years they can get skills and do something better in their career. Move up in the company, make more money, go start their own business, do something better. The ideology that you're going to keep people forever is, is, you know, airy fairy, you know, good luck. Good luck with that. Shoot for that two to three year marker, in my opinion. And that's going to be profitable only if you can get lower skilled employees, get them trained up very quickly. So you don't need a year to make them profitable. You should be profitable within a few weeks. If you've simplified your services, how do you deal with very steep hills? Mike? Yeah, man. What percent should I put away from maintenance and wear and tear per yard?

There's no set percentage, honestly, to be perfectly honest with you. Have you had to deal with over regulation in municipalities or counties that seem to restrict competition for existing business? I haven't seen this touch our industry industry very much at all. I don't think it will because even if you look at Brightview like the biggest company, like they literally control like 1 or 2% of the of the revenues that come into this industry. Like it's very small. Enjoy 1 or 2% of the contracts. It's a very fragmented market. It's not like there's someone controlling 50 of the market when it comes to lawn care and landscaping. And by the way, there never will be. It's going to always remain a fragmented marketplace. I am wanting to branch out to a new city or town. Do you have a recommended population size? I come from a town of 15,000 people. I don't really have a target size. I've seen companies do really well in small cities. We started in Blaine, Washington. Population is like seven or eight thousand people. We grew to 1.1 million in revenue before we moved to Bellingham, which has, I think I want to say about 80 or 90,000 people that live there. So we grew significantly until when in a small city. So I'VE seen both do very well. How many days before of working before you apply sick time. So we have, we have paid time off and there we allow them to accrue that as they work and so they can use it really whenever they want. We don't make them work a certain amount of days before they can use it. It's just a matter of them accruing it over time.

All right.

Brady Allen, if you would like to know more about the position with Corpus and with the general manager position, just go to augustinlaungerservices.com corpus/careers and submit your resume. Ryan will reach out to you. It's going to be a pretty epic position. You're going to need to know your stuff. You're going to learn a ton of a ton though. What kind of revenue would you expect one crew to make of lawn mowing a month? If it's a one man crew, I'd be shooting for about $10,000. If it's a two man crew, I'd be shooting for at least 17 to $18,000. I'm just giving you numbers. It's going to depend totally in your market. But my boss is thinking of dropping a lot of MO and blow houses. But I feel.

Do you and your employees hang out. Okay, one second. That this was not, this is not complete, complete question. How do you dispose of clippings on route? We don't usually. Usually we're able to contain them all in one one truck. That being said, maybe a couple times a year in the middle of spring rush when the grass is growing super fast, the guys will have to come back in the middle of the day to empty things out. How has the pandemic challenged your company? We really didn't see anything crazy besides the first two to three weeks when Washington state wanted landscapers to shut down and no one really listened. But some people thought you should listen and there was like HOAs that were locking us out of and telling us, threatening us to not come inside of their air, their neighborhoods and crazy stuff. But it didn't really affect us besides the labor shortage.

All right. Whoops. Have you ever done door to door aeration sales in the spring or fall? Yeah. Using these bad boys right here. Coration. Let's go let your lawn breathe.

Do you and your employees hang outside, hang out outside of work? Yeah, sometimes I only have a bad thing but it's not going to keep me from bringing down the hammer if there's poor performance. I enjoy having friendships but eventually at the end of the day there's got to be a level of professionalism that's upheld. What investing app would you recommend for someone that's starting? Robinhood is great. Weebly not Weebly. Weeble is really good. Raptor turf. If I spend a couple hundred dollars a week on Facebook ads, how many quotes should I expect to get from that? I'm currently getting about three every week from Facebook ads. Is this good? If you get three a week and you're spending a couple hundred dollars, that's like $70 for lead acquisition. If you close half of those like 50 close ratio, you're looking like 140, $150 customer acquisition cost. I don't really like that. I like my customer acquisition cost to be under a hundred dollars if at all possible.

How would you go about social media marketing in first year and second year? I'd first of all get a really good business. A really good website, of course, Created by Lawn CareWebDesign.com I'll get a really good website so that whatever social media I am doing is driving traffic to my website and looking really, really strong. But in terms of what I'd be doing, I'd be posting consistently. Whether it be daily or twice a week or whatever you're doing, post consistently on your channels. What's the longest time you want to spend driving from job to job? When you're first starting your business, it's going to be a little bit longer, might be five or 10 minutes. But as the business gets established, I don't want to be driving more than two or three minutes between jobs.

All right, let's see here. I don't have Facebook. I have a digital business card. Essentially every time I see someone asking about a lawn care service or landscaping service on Facebook, I posted tons of lead from that. Very cool. There's a company in my town that has a monopoly. Should I push back or branch to somewhere else? I have never seen a true, true monopoly in lawn care, landscaping. It's almost impossible to be perfectly honest with you because there's just so many ways to differentiate yourself. There will never be regulation or put. You won't be able to push back. You'll never win that court case because lawn care, you can't create a monopoly. Like they can't prevent you from buying mowers, they can't prevent you from hiring some other people. It's almost impossible to win that. Like even the app store for iOS and Google and Android, they can't. They win these legal cases by saying they're non monopoly. They're duopoly, basically. Like if you don't have an Apple device or an or an Android, like, you're kind of out of the league. They have a duopoly. Right. And there's plenty of court cases against them. Unless you have one lawn care service in your entire city and they're preventing you from buying mowers, hiring people, marketing, and they own the newspaper and they don't allow you to post on Facebook, then you might have a chance at winning that that case. But you will never, in my opinion. What's your life like outside your business? Like, do you have a family and a way of life? Yes, I have a family and I have a way of life. I only post about business on here. Dustin Bowers, where do you find great employees? We are turning down two to three estimates a day because of a lack of employees. I have not been aggressive yet. Paying 16 to 1750 per hour. I know you are P for P. Yeah. So I definitely push you towards P4P so you can afford more than 16 per hour again, raise your hourly rate to your customers and maybe you can charge. Now your base pay can be $18 per hour.

We are newer and wondering when you should file for taxes. We don't want to get in trouble, but don't want to file when we technically don't need to right away. If you're filing for taxes on a state level, it's going to depend on how big you are. Typically if you're quarterly or monthly. If you're talking about like the IRS for your income tax, like income tax, your tax return at the end of the year, you don't have to file that till April 15th. So I, I always, almost always ask for an extension because I want to prevent paying my taxes as long as possible. But I want to leave mowing and selling all my equipment to get a mini skid sear to do other work. Okay. With P4P in tree service, would you recommend going back two or three pay periods and taking bonus pay? If, for example, they were to fell a tree in a house, this would be a part of the agreement with them. Whoo. That would be a big one. If they cut a tree down in a house, I don't think taking 2 or 300 from their paycheck is going to be the, the make or break for you. I think if you just take, take it from one paycheck, it's a little bit of hurt for them. It proves a point. It makes them more cautious. But I don't want to be going Back two and three paychecks to get people's money. It's just my personal opinion.

I don't want that. I don't want them to give up on P4P either. If I'm like, okay, for the next three months you're owing me money because you fell this tree on someone's house. They're not going to work harder. They're not going to want to be motivated to work hard on P4P if they know that their money, they can't make anything above base pay no matter what. So as a business owner, we take on some risk and you get insurance to cover some of that risk and you realize that there's just going to be things like that happen and you have insurance. Do you get a new franchise down in the Marriott? Did you get a new franchise down in the Marysville area? Have been seeing your eyes down here late. Yes, we have a Nick is down there in Marysville. He's got two. He's got a second employee, first employee and a second truck. But I feel like the quick mo and blows is easy money for us. How much money do you get from YouTube? We are making good money from YouTube. Very good money from YouTube. We're making all these views and subscribers are up like 50%. We were getting about 6 to 700 subscribers a month a couple months ago. Now we're getting 5,000plus per month. So we're growing a lot. So we actually. We're gonna make like $4,000 a month on ads. Let's go. But that doesn't even cover half of the wages, not even a quarter of the wages and the cost of doing all the media side. So. But it's good that's. I'm gonna make $4,000 on AdSense from YouTube this month. Let's go. We're gonna have like 700000 views, something like that. I remember you said you made a 300 profit jump after going to trailer setup. Have these numbers held up since 2018? So you're referring to a post I made on Instagram and Facebook about this. And I said that the one change you made operation from last year to this year was going trailer setup. And we also raised our prices, so keep that in mind. I'm not saying, okay, you're gonna triple your profits if you go trailer setup. I'm not saying that. We did raise prices too, but operationally that was the main change was going to trailer setup. And we did that a hundred percent change this year. So that's the statement I was making in terms of 2018. We were not 100 trailless. We were kind of half and half. So it's last year is when we went like all in on trailer setups. Wonder if you or your employees take a smaller ballberry, take a small barbecue on the truck for lunch break. Do it the Aussie way. We do not do that. Having propane and open flame would be bad news. There was a company in my town that has a monopoly. No, Come on, Blake. I remember you said, oh, mercy, we're having or I. Is it bad if I want to grow anymore? I got 80 lawns, two guys total, including myself. No. If you want to grow, let's go.

Yeah, both of them will work. It just depends on the type of mower that you have. There's definitely mowers that are going to be better, like brush hogs. And then use a weed whacker is going to be the slowest way, but probably the most safe way in terms of if you have a lower budget, having proper insurance to cover unexpected risk makes more sense than penalizing them by making multiple months of bonuses. Can you explain workers comp. Workers compensation is fully explained in a video that I talked about last week. It's a video. It says, fired employee gets revenge. Check that one out. Is it that one? No, it's not. No, no, no, no, no. It's the one that I made a few days ago. It says injured on it. It has like an arrow of me going to the hospital. I talk all about workers compensation and how sometimes through your state, sometimes through private. But it's basically a way of keeping your customer, your employees safe. So if they get hurt on the job, they have protection from a medical standpoint, they get fixed up and it's all covered. And if you get a lot of claims, like if people are always getting hurt on the job underneath your business name, then you're gonna have to pay higher premiums typically. So you want to prevent that by having a safer workplace. Do you think you will save more money when you use electric weed whackers? In a long term.

That'S a tough one. I would say in the short term, everyone's different. I would say it's you generally, right now, you'd use electric mostly for the fact of wear and tear. It's like lighter. They're much lighter. The equipment. I don't think it. Saving money is a huge, huge deal right now. Mike, can you give me a small loan? No, I cannot. Best advice for landscaping business in Florida.

What is the trailerless setup. What is a trailer setup? I think, Bobby, you're talking about trailerless setup. It's basically, we don't have a trailer. We use a ramp rack or a cargo rack to basically keep the mower on the truck and not have a trailer enclosed or else otherwise. How'd you come up with your business name? Augusta Lawn Care. Whoops, there's Augusta Lawn Care. I used to play a bunch of golf, so it comes from Augusta national where they play the Masters. Are you still consulting? Doing consulting calls at an hourly rate? Yeah. In the description there's a link if you want to book a call. I try to have these, these code, these Q and A's though. So if you can't afford it, you can ask your questions here. Do the consulting call if you want, like really in depth stuff. But honestly I don't have very much time for those. So please, if you have questions, ask them here. Have you tried trimming your edging while simultaneously mowing? That'd be hilarious, but it sounds like a OSHA issue. Thanks, man. I think you are awesome. How much for franchise in my area? We could talk and possibly make some moves. Cave in, check out Augusta longer services.com franchise. All that information is there. What things would you hazard or caution against growing too fast? I'd be watching your cash flow. I'd be looking at where your cash flow and your bank accounts are at during the winter time or when you slow down. And I would be cautious about hiring a bunch of people that are all two, three, four weeks with your business. If you have a bunch of employees right now and they're all like less than a month been with your company, you're in a massively fragile state because they could all leave tomorrow. I want to grow at a sustainable rate. Where I have maybe I slow down my growth and get two or three employees. I've worked for six months, then I go out and hire a fourth person, then I hire a fifth person. In my opinion, you gotta have at least one experienced person to every one brand new person. If you have 10 new people and five experienced people, you're gonna have a ton of headaches, a ton of callbacks. It's gonna be a lot of hair pulling out and gray hairs and all the rest of it because it's stressful. You want in my opinion, to have one experienced person when I say experience, like they have three to six months at least on the job and then have that paired up with a new. A new person.

When did you start mowing? I started mowing when I was 11 was a cheaper option to the ramp rack. Cheaper option would be the MOW and go systems guy down in Florida makes those. They're cheaper. I am not concerning a political career. In no way, shape or form do you give your long term employees any kind of insurance such as Foreman and people who have been with you for a while. I have, I have for cruise, but I'm thinking about adding insurance to get better employees. So first of all we are adding health insurance for all our employees locally in January of 2022. However, in my opinion it's not about getting better employees, it's about getting different employees. Because if someone is 19, 20, 21 years old and they have free health care through their like through Medicaid underneath their parents, there's no reason for them to get health insurance. They'd rather get $2 more per hour. So you got to realize that by giving health insurance you're just attracting a different demographic. And if that's your desire to get older people. When I say older, I'm talking like in their later twenties, have families, etc, you're probably going to want to do health insurance. If you're looking for a younger demographic, cash is going to speak to them a lot more. So keep in mind it's a balance. Like if you're not spending money on benefits that you can afford more money in cash. Right. It really depends on the state. Dave, in terms of obtaining a Landscape Contractor's license, Commercial 30 or Honda 216. If you only could only choose one.

I would do a Honda 30. When should I start advertising for leaf cleanups? The moment the leaves start falling and the moment that you have got flyers from lawn care media like this. It's a fall cleanups. Where's the door hanger one? Where's the door hanger one? So yeah, lawn care media, you guys gotta check out lawncaremedia.com here's the door hanger one for fall cleanups. You gotta check that out. Like there is 160 designs of all this stuff that you can look through and purchase. It's epic. You know everything from core aeration, flyers, door hangers, yard signs, postcards, etc. Do you fertilize often for grass? Yeah, we usually have fertilization packages, different options that the customer can choose from. I know you've talked about before, but how much revenue should I try to target per employee? Talked about that earlier. I'd be targeting between 8 and $14,000 depending on your market and depending what services you're selling.

What does your business do during winter we try to focus on like bush trimming, yard cleanups, et cetera. We do some, some snow plowing, but not a ton. Would you do an electric 21 inch mower or a gas one for commercial? I would do a gas one simply because again the electric system for mowers is just not up to par yet. It will get there eventually, but like anything long grass wise, especially when we're bagging Thomas in Washington state.

The weight of that mower gets very heavy with just the bagged clippings. Have you gotten community support regarding the issue with fixing up your your city property? Yes, we've got a lot of support, a lot of people reaching out and I have a bunch of voicemails I need to get back to. How do end. How do you end a job when already started after finding out the job is going to take way longer than you can give, being more than you can handle, not worth it, etc. Talk to the customer, be really, really honest, be willing to give them some money back or find a subcontractor. But I would definitely, if it's above your head, we've got to do this before go get a subcontractor, pay them to do the work, make the customer happy. But if it's a fact, a matter of like you're just behind like you, you know it's taking way longer than you thought. I just kind of take it in the teeth and realize that you're make it up on the next job or just have a very honest conversation like hey Mr. Jones, I thought this was going to take 100 hours. It's probably gonna take us 300. No. I would like to finish this job for you, but I just can't without extra. We're going to lose our shirt on this. And if they're reasonable, they'll probably work with you. If they're not reasonable, you might just have to eat it.

What's your go to camera and lens for the vlog? I don't know, we use like a Lumix something or rather it's expensive. It looks good though. It's okay. On commercial properties such as an apartment complex when you do your contract. And how do you do bush trimming? Right now I give some to trims a year, other ones two or three times a year. Yeah. So standardize this based upon your climate, what you need in terms of bush trimming, whether it be twice a year, three times a year, quarterly. I've seen HOA contracts that want it done every single month. So again, figuring out budget hours per service for that and then baking that into your contract pricing. When you first started finding employees for your team, did you ever think it was impossible? Yes, I did. Do you have state contractors licenses? Yes, we do. Any advice if someone starting out should go down that route to get it? If your state requires it, they might require it for projects like down in Oregon. Anything above 500 for any sort of cleanup or anything, you need a contractor's license and so our franchisees have to go through that process. How do your estimators figure out how long a job will take? They start out in the field before they become estimators and they get very, very good at determining budget hours and material quantities because they're looking at P4P all the time and they're always watching budget hours. So when they switch to becoming an estimator, it's actually pretty simple. Would you ever change your standard standard trimmers to the steel 90? Yeah. Much two stroke engine with no valves to maintain? Potentially, yeah, maybe. We have the 94s. So I've got lots of questions. I'll ask them all in person. Ken. Hey, brother Mike. Hey, brother Mike. Congrats on this. Is Crime out? Cool. All right guys, I'm gonna go ahead and close down. Thank you so much for joining here on another version episode of Roundup. We've been almost two hours. I really appreciate all the support. I try to do these live Q&As every couple months at least. I know I've been doing them less just because I haven't had much time, but I try to do these. So that way if you do have questions and you can't afford a monthly coaching call that you can just do it here. So. But I do appreciate all the support. Like I said, in the past month our subscribers on YouTube has gone through the roof and all of that. You're sharing the videos and support and everything has been incredible. I really, really appreciate it because I've made these and I want to quickly go through them because I want to use these occasionally. Let me go through these real quick. MBA for Entrepreneurs course. I added five more episodes yesterday about getting loans and looking through your loan documents and what to look for in your loan documents, like the right to call a loan, the terms of the loan, all that stuff. I just recently uploaded five more videos in the MBA for Entrepreneurs course. Check that out. Link in the description. Landscapebusinesscourse.com has everything. When I talk about P4P has the software in there. This is version one of the software. It's very rudimentary, it's very basic and then it comes with Excel documents. So it's very simple. It's not complicated at all. Again, landscape business course. If you're getting started, great place to get started. We talk. I start with exactly what to start with, your initial budget, which truck to buy, etc and I hope that it saves you at least a year or two in terms of just your learning curve. Join the texting group. Text landscaping to this number and maybe once a month I send something exclusive to them in terms of like a freebie or just live Q and A for them only. So check that out if you want a personal coaching call. See, I gotta go through these at least when I get on here. Occasionally you want a coaching call, click the link below. But honestly, I'd rather you ask your questions here on the live Q&As because it helps so many other people. But if you, you know there's something private or something really specific you want to go over like your financials, we can do that. Join the Facebook group Landscape business course. I think there's like almost over 4, 000 people now in there now, so that's pretty cool. Or join Augustination if you want to become a franchisee. It's super cool. Lawn carewebdesign.com $399 per month. There's no upfront contract or fee. You start paying monthly. And I think in my opinion it's great. Usually within two to six months we get on the top of Google. We are constantly looking at SEO to make sure it's optimized and you're ranking very high. And if you look, you look at Augusta Lawn Care, our local site, our franchisee sites, they rank high within two to three months usually. And if you look at lawn care web design companies, look at their city name and lawn care into Google and you'll see they rank really, really well if they've had Google reviews. And it's something about in long care web design we actually talk about a lot is getting your Google reviews. If you don't use longer web design, I don't care make a website. I don't care if it looks crummy, but get online. It's where our customers eyeballs are at. And as the baby boomers age and everything that happened with COVID in 2020, 2020, they've figured out how to get on social media, they figured out how to use the web, they figured out how to use their mobile devices. You've got to be online this is like the real estate of, of digital real estate that you've got to own right now. You can no longer be renting it from Home Advisor and Andy's list and all these other companies. You've got to own territory. And in my mind, long curve design is where it's at. So check it out. Our team will walk you through that. And there's some new videos on there and some new examples of other sites that we built. So check that out. It's. It's really, really, really good. And if you wanted to cancel in three or four months because you're like, it's just not worth it, that's fine, I'm not going to get on the phone, like, please, please stay on. I'm not going to do that. If you don't see the value. And in my opinion, you need three months or so to rank really well. And in my opinion, you know, we've had only one or two people cancel and it's because they either close their business or moved. So anyways, thank you so much, everyone. I really appreciate it. Have a fantastic rest of your evening and we'll see you as usual. As usual. On the next episode.