11 Tactical Lawn Care Tips in under 27 Minutes

What do you do when a customer refuses to pay?

So ideally we have their credit card information on file. Assuming that we don't, then we're going to be taking them to collections. Now before we do that, we're going to take them down some less threatening paths and that's going to be through email, text messages. But eventually, like putting a lien on their property or taking them to collections agency that affects their credit score is typically the way to go. That's why typically getting better customers that have more money actually impacts them when their credit score gets hit. Because it's harder to rent a house, it's harder to get a loan for a car. And so ideally, if you have a good enough clientele, when you actually take them to collections or when you put a lien on their property, it actually means something.

How do you deal with customers leaving garbage in their yard? And it's a continuous problem.

Ideally I'm reminding them via automations like the day before being like, hey, you gotta pick this stuff up. And then eventually if it just continues, you gotta make a call of do you want this customer or do you want your employees? Cause it's no fun for the employee to have to deal with that sort.

Of stuff all day long.

Especially when it comes to the dog poop. It's like the very first job of the day, the dew is on the ground, it's all wet and then that splattered all over you for the rest of the day. You gotta smell it. It's not fun if the crew's complaining about it. I've notified the customer multiple times telling them to pick up after the dog or even their garbage all over the place. Then it's like either A, I'm going to upcharge them massively and make sure I give a lot of that to the crew. Or secondly, just let the customer go.

In the past, people have gotten pretty upset about being charged a dollar a minute. Why do you think they're upset?

Anytime that we as consumers don't know the exact price, it's understandable that we are unhappy with the end result. The bottom line is there's some jobs that you can't give an accurate time on. As soon as you go below the surface of the ground. I don't know if there's rocks down there, I don't know if there's a tree stump. And so for me to give you a bid, I usually need to be able to see the entire scope of the job. And so if I am doing a per minute pricing, it's usually because I don't know exactly how long something's going to take and the customer has to agree to those terms. And yeah, some people get really unhappy when it takes us longer. But we're not like slacking off. We're not trying to make it take longer. It's just simply a function of the job, has a indefinite amount of time to work on it. And when it's at your satisfaction, we'll stop. But we could go way more in detail and take way longer, but it's going to cost you. And so then it's really just up to you. How much do you want to spend?

When do you know, okay, I need to move out of the storage container and I need to go into a shop.

When it's making operations super difficult. That's usually when you're going to have to move. And a lot of times this will be forced on you by the storage facility. But usually once you cross the two truck marker, you usually need to move on to some other storage space. But more importantly, it's even the cost like a storage facility that is say 10 by 10. Get one of those and you need a second one and you get a couple of parking spots. All of a sudden you're spending 8,$900 per month. You might as well go get another space. That's a lot more room for you to be able to grow for maybe a thousand or fifteen hundred. So it just comes down to cost as well. And sometimes that alone will be preventative enough to. Once you hit about two or three trucks, it's time to move on to something else that's bigger.

How do you know you're getting a good deal?

Ideally, it's close to your service area, so you're not driving a long ways to actually meet your customers and be on their property. So you might have a five mile radius that you serve, but if you're 20 miles outside of that, where you have your shop space, that means every single day your crew is driving 40 miles just to get to the customer's property. That's going to cause a lot of wasted windshield time and a lot of wasted gas and fuel. And so the number one thing I'm looking for is how close are you to the central center point of your service area to get access to all your customers as most efficiently as possible.

What's the importance of having somebody who can do those repairs?

That's nice. But being close by, it's going to mean every single day I'm having hundreds or maybe dozens. If you're smaller of customers every single day. I'm much more interested in how close I am to them compared to whether I'm close to the mechanic or close to a gas station. There's a lot of gas stations. There's a lot of mechanics. And if I have to drive the mechanic every single day, we got bigger problems. And if I have to go to the mechanic once a month or twice a month, great. Same thing with my dealer for equipment. It's like, so I'm going to prioritize being close to my customers, not to my vendors.

Say you're the guy who's hit his capacity. He's no longer welcome at the storage unit or his mom's garage or maybe his house. He searched for properties in the area, and there's nothing open. What's a temporary solution to that?

You can look at farms. You go to places that have lots of commercial space. Like, big contractors will have acres worth of just graveled area. And you're like, hey, can I have this tiny little section in the back? I'll give you a thousand bucks a month. Same thing with farms. They can be like, hey, yeah, you can absolutely just park a couple trucks here and dump some debris. Sometimes the best spots are on the edges of town. There are lots of big gravel open spots to park your trucks. And it really comes down to then a matter of, you need dump material. Do you have materials on hand? Do you have fuel on hand? If you use it to park your trucks and trailers, then you're just looking for space and industrial spaces where contractors or even concrete companies have massive space because they have these huge dump trucks to do all their big turnarounds. So that's a good spot to get started.

At what point do you pay your highest performer salary?

It's not about performance. So in most states, you can't pay a labor position in, and they have to be a management in order to be able to be on salary. They have to be a manager. They can't be a frontline team member that's doing labor positions. This is around worker protections for employees, overworking employees, et cetera. It's really a matter of. For me, I want. When they work like, crazy hard, they see the results, and they're gonna get time and a half when they're working their brains out. And then when they're taking time off, they're not making any money. I like that. Just to be like the simpler way of saying, look, if you want to take time off, you can take as much time off as you would like as long as it doesn't affect anyone else on the team, you can do it. And that seems very fair to me. When they're getting paid by the hour, if I'm paying them salary, there's like these unsaid rules about taking time off, and then people feel bad about taking time off, and then it becomes a political thing. So it's. Look, pay someone by the hour is like the most simple way for me to think about it. When they work crazy hard, they make more money. When they work less, then they're gonna make less money. Assuming I can't pay them based upon performance, which is my number one recommendation. My preference for frontline team members that are doing labor is to just give them a percentage of labor revenue. But if it's a position that's overhead or it's something that is like a mechanic or some other position that I'm paying by the hour, I would rather do hourly over salary. And even if I was allowed to do salary based upon them not being a labor position, I would still probably want to do hourly because the harder they work, I want them to see more money in their paycheck. It's very important, in my opinion, to remember that just because someone's a high performer out in the field or even a frontline team member, that they somehow need to be a leader. And unfortunately for a lot of small businesses, the only way to be promoted is to become a leader. And to manage other people, unfortunately, sometimes puts really good team members in bad spots in their career. Because the only way for you to actually appreciate them and give them more money and authority is to make them a manager. And a really good team member can become a really lousy manager. It's very difficult many times to create positions where someone can make a lot more money than based upon just execution and extreme skill. It's a lot more difficult to do that in a smaller business compared to where usually the way to give someone more money is like, hey, you're the manager of these five or ten people. And then you can give them more money. But you gotta remember, a high performing frontline team member does not necessarily equate to a great manager.

How are you supposed to determine and put a number on that hourly employee who is say, a manager or something above that rule?

Yeah, like the thing is, like, what do we willing to spend if this person put in their notice tomorrow? That's how I always think about it. And really what that comes down to is replaceability. And so if someone can get skills that are very hard to replace. If they take a long time to get a new team member trained up on them, they're basically building up the difficulty of what it would cost to replace them. And so if I was talking to a team member, get skills that are so irreplaceable that you become so valuable that the the employer needs to keep paying you more. Because if they lost you it 6 months to get someone else ramped up, but if it would take someone two months to get ramped up, then you're worth less to the company. And so really getting skills that no one else can replace is the important part. To be able to differentiate yourself and make more money as a frontline team member that is just doing the work is get really skilled. And whether it be efficiency, whether it be project management, whether it would just be doing whatever the task is better than anyone else can, that means that your hourly rate is going to go up. Assuming again that your employer actually pays attention to what's going on. Sometimes the only way to pull their bluff, if someone's worked for someone for five or 10 years, gained all sorts of new skills, they're taking courses on the weekend, listening to audiobooks, improving, and for five years they don't get a raise, then it's a matter of you might need to go call the bluff on your employer, like, I'm leaving. And then they'll really have to assess, oh, am I actually willing to pay this person for them to leave. And if you have employees that are being paid by the hour and they have the opportunity to make P4P and they're not really management material to where you can move them up in terms of the organization to make more money, then a matter of just like always asking yourself like, okay, so if they left tomorrow, what would I be willing to pay them? Oh, they're making that much, that's about what I'd be willing to pay them. If it wanted a dollar more, I'd be telling them to go pound sand, I go find someone else. And then that's the equilibrium. And so then it's just a matter of if you're a team member that, you know, you don't have management experience and you don't want to go into management, then just a matter of get skills that are so outlandishly better than anyone else that they can't replace you, and then, you know, just hope that you're working for a company that actually recognizes when you get new skills that are hard to replace. What do you say to the guys.

In the industry who are going to make the excuse that they're having a hard time finding leadership and you as the owner, don't have time to train them.

It really comes down to if you're having a hard time finding a manager or a leader, it usually means you just need to pay more. Like, ultimately, if you pay someone more and you offer more money for a position, you will eventually find enough talent because you will upgrade the talent pool that you're pulling from. No profit sharing, no equity. The thought that you're going to attract great leadership talent is laughable because if they're a great leadership talent, they'd have 10 other people willing to give them a whole lot more. They'll be less inclined and less worried about their pay per hour or their salary. They'll be much more concerned. Like, I want a piece of the profits, I want a piece of the revenue, I want a piece of the equity. And that's usually the best managers because they actually have some entrepreneurial chops to it.

At what point do you have to let somebody go from tardiness?

It really comes down to it sounds horrible, but how bad does a business need them? In the perfect world, I would say, hey, when someone's tardy and you've warned them and then they were tardy again, that you're going to let them go. However, in the real world, you need to get work done. And that tardiness happens in the middle of the time when you're. The rest of your team is stretched really thin. And you got to be careful of firing someone in the idea that it's going to be good for the culture. But by firing them, the hours that they would have worked is now having to be replaced by everyone else. And all their slack has to be picked up by all your other top performers that are staying and are showing up on time. And now all of a sudden, you're overworking your team. And so sometimes I have deliberately delayed someone's firing simply due to the fact I need to get the business through a certain amount of time. If I would have fired that person, all of the weight that they were holding even was maybe subpar or a little bit less than average, it would have fell on my top performers, and that would have actually been worse for them than if I was just a lower performer. Get along for a while, but take some pressure off the team. Then you have all the leverage in the world and you can fire as needed based upon being tardy or whatever other policy. But keep in mind that if they're dropping a whole Bunch of slack. Someone else has to pick that up. And if that's your best team members, you could potentially overwork them and cause them to leave.

Are you still going to hang on to them?

Yeah, if they change. Ultimately I would want to keep everyone. It costs a whole lot more to find and train someone than it is to retain someone or to retrain somebody. I would much rather take an existing member that is a B player and coach them to being A than trying to find some brand new person and hoping they work out. I only fire someone's. I've exhausted the ability to be able to retrain them or they've crossed a certain line where I said regardless of whether or not they are retrained, they have crossed a certain line that we have to make a put our foot down. It just becomes a matter of what happened. Then give me the context and then figuring out whether or not there is a fireable offense.

Okay. Going to a more difficult scenario. Say they just lost a family member and for one they're going to need some time off. But beyond that they might have some mental issues moving forward.

Yeah. Ultimately if it affects the team negatively, I as the leader have to pull the plug on them. And if it affects the business and like financially I'm taking a hit. I'm willing to forbear that for a little bit and hopefully I can see progress towards them getting out of their situation. Assuming that they are negatively affecting the team, that's when I bring out the chopping block. Because I am not going to allow someone's misfortune to affect the rest of the team that is working hard and trying to put food on their table. And if it's going to negatively affect the business and the business is a fragile state now, one person holding onto them in a charitable likeness and trying to help them could potentially bring down the rest of the team. And so sometimes you have to make the really hard decision to cut people for the sake of financials even though your humanity wants to keep hold of them. But by holding onto them and being charitable to them, you actually affect 10 or 20 other people because now their jobs are put in jeopardy because you can't afford to have this person work for nothing or take all this extra time off or have an empty spot on the team for months on end.

Does that vary with bodily injury?

Bodily injury is very different. If someone got hurt on the job, it's totally a different job thing. You're going to be trying to give them easier work to come back when they can. They're going to get incentive from the state if they were hurt on the job, workers compensation, things like that.

I was going to touch on all points.

Yeah, if someone's diagnosed with cancer, hopefully we have things like healthcare in place to be able to help them. Hopefully we can give them some sort of role that they can still provide for their family. Then just a matter of, like, how long can we sustain that as the business? Because as much as I want to be able to just continually give people money, infinitely, if it's going to affect the business as a whole, the whole team gets affected. Now all of a sudden, I have to make hard decisions as a leader for the sake of the whole team. Not because I don't like this person, not because I don't think that it's unjust that they have cancer or that I wish I could do more for them. But if one team member's detriment is going to then cause pain for the entire team, I have to really take that into the calculus as to whether or not is a viable thing for the business. And if the business doesn't do well, the whole rest of the team can be affected. And so that's very difficult because, like, I want to be able to provide for other people. I want to be compassionate if the business is not going to put in a bad spot. Awesome. Let's go. I wouldn't. I would rather take the hit with that relationship or even people judging me for not being as charitable if it's going to affect the entire team. And that's the number one thing that I, as someone who, if I was coming to a job for a paycheck, I want to make sure that my leader is guarding my paycheck. And that means making hard decisions around team members that might not be contributing and are in really gray areas. I would want that job security for.

The individual who might be coming across that scenario. And they're at the point where they have to let someone go. What's a good way to phrase that?

I would. If you're trying to be compassionate about, try to get them a position that they can potentially do.

They can no longer work for the company.

So then it's a matter of can we transition in some other career path or some other job that they can do? So, for example, if we need them in the office, okay, they can't because they're on chemo. They're very weak. Okay, can we transition them to something inside the company that does not require them to be in the office? Maybe they take less money and It's a lower position. Maybe they can't manage people, but can they take a position that is lower pay but allows flexibility and work from home? There's no, we don't have that. Okay, great. Can we train them up, get them in a little course online or something so they can go do another career and leave the company on good terms and we can throw a celebratory leaving party for them.

You've been asked this a lot of times. How do you retain employees in the wintertime?

Yeah. In a seasonal business, there's two things that you really have to do. Either A, you to cut down on your supply of labor in order to be able to meet the fact that your demand has massively dropped, or in order to be able to sustain the supply of labor and keep your team members on is you're going to need increased demand. It's very basic. You either increase demand or you decrease supply. And the way to increase demand is creating services that you can still do during the winter. And so creating season specific offers is something that's very important. You'll have different services, have different offers that you can give to customers, and sell is a way of increasing demand so that you can keep the supply of your labors and still keep them busy. Or you're going to have to just lay them off for three or four months, tell them to come back May 1 or whenever you're getting started. They have a guaranteed position and ideally, if you're paying them well, if it's a good place to work, and typically over the winter, retail, everyone's hiring, there's plenty of work, and so they can go get something indoors, outside the elements, and then come back during spring, fresh, renewed, ready to rock and roll. And they're looking forward to it.

Do you have any potential solutions for that?

Yeah. So like at Augusta, our goal is to have five different tracks that people choose going into winter. And these five different tracks will be different types of specific services and specific offers that are used to increase demand. And then one of the tracks is like cut all expenses, lay off everyone, et cetera. And so it's just a matter of which of those tracks are you going to do and then applying yourself like very intentionally to the script of that specific track. And so whether it be Christmas lights, snow plowing, winter services, continuing to mow, or shutting down your services completely, applying yourself and actually having a plan in place to keep your revenue high, all your expenses low during the winter is really the goal, like having a very defined path for them to go Down.

What's your response to a customer who's going to complain about the service that you provided them?

Yeah, because someone's complaining ultimately means that the price that they paid, they believe is greater than the value they received. And the discrepancy between those two things is where we had to realize that expectations were not met. Now whether or not those expectations are realistic or not is a different story. And that's when you might have to fire a customer. If their expectations are so out of this world, there's no, no way to please them. And regardless of what you do, the value that they perceive will never be greater than the price. And that's when I'm going to let them go. But if there's a way for me to be able to go back to a property or do something small to simply move that value equation where the value is higher than the price, that's when you get your best five star reviews. That's why so many people have stories when you go back to customer's property, fix the mistake and they flip from being super mad to making a five star online review. And in doing that, you literally switch from the price being graded to the value. Now the value is greater than the price and then there's extra goodwill between the price and the value. And that's where you usually get a five star review.

What is an efficiency score?

Efficiency score is basically just tracking how efficient a team member is when it comes to their labor. And one easy way to do that is doing budget hours on the amount of time that the crew was working divided by their clocked hours. Say six budget hours completed work in a day and they worked clocked in for eight hours. That would be six divided by eight. That's 0.75 or 75% efficiency. Which means 75% of their day was generating revenue. The other 25% was waste. That's drive time, load time, everything else besides creating more money. And if you're not producing revenue, it's waste. Anything above 70% we are usually okay with above 90% gold stars under 50%, the business will probably never make money.

What are you going to use that.

How you would track is using software tracking how many budget hours are completed divided by how many clocked hours that they were on the job. Or like just clocked in in general. And then in terms of using that, then you can create a leaderboard of your team who is the most efficient team member and have some fun giveaways or competitions around being more efficient. And ultimately the whole goal is for people to be more efficient, make more money themselves on pay for performance, make more money for the business, and most importantly, learn the art of looking for waste and extinguishing it in any process. So when they show up at a job, oh, there's four budget hours in this job, I think I get done to because I found a more efficient way of doing X, Y and Z. That's a valuable skill that will allow any employee, if they're given the opportunity to think that way when they move on to the next job, they'll make a lot more money because they'll actually go into systems and processes looking for waste and areas of opportunity to make it more efficient.

When an employee has a low efficiency score, what's that expectation or like the.

Learning curve like, then it's just a matter of what's your performance improvement plan. Right. If someone's underperforming, what sort of notice do you give them? Do you give them a written up report or a PIP performance improvement plan? Hey, by this time you must have these certain skills up to this certain level of efficiency, and if not, you're out. And that's be cut from the team.

Has anyone ever threatened to sue you?

Yeah, I get lawsuits either because of the franchisees. I usually get put on anything that they get. I get threatened probably every week. And so at first, like when you first get your, your very first lawsuit, it's like very freaky and summoned to court or you even just get threatened like a cease and desist, for example. Anything legal from an attorney can just be really overwhelming and terrifying. And so I've gotten more and more used to it and a little more callous to it. Until someone literally is standing across from me in court, I usually don't really pay a lot of attention because most of the time it never gets there. And so me spending a whole bunch of time being super concerned about it usually doesn't do any good. And so after so many times, you just get numb to it. And then you have to just also realize that you should only really be getting in trouble if you did something wrong. So if you, as long as you just don't do things that are stupid and you're trying to do, it's good for everyone else. Yes, you'll slip up occasionally and yes, you'll be put in bad situations occasionally where a truck gets damaged or you get in an accident or something like that, and then you get a lawsuit. But most really bad lawsuits are the ones where you did something wrong and you're trying to Hide something from it. And as long as you do business without those sort of things happening, you're not trying to evade taxes, you're not trying to pull things over in your team members, you're not trying to stiff competitors or partners, then you should be able to find. I see lawsuits all the time and I just know I never willingly have done anything wrong to see this on my desk. So therefore it's probably a good way for me to know that I can explain this away with an attorney and get this off of my chest. And so far so good. Besides the very first one, that actually was legitimate because I made a big boo and I fired someone because they got hurt and I didn't know that wasn't allowed. And they used some things twisted some of my words. But ultimately I didn't know the law and I didn't know I couldn't do that. And it was, it was a mistake on my part. I had to pay him a bunch of money outside of court. So we settled. So I can't talk a lot about it, but by that time I realized I was wrong and I had made the mistake and it was like my very first non friend hire. And so like I just didn't know I was doing. I was super young. This person was more than twice my age and was probably trying to take advantage of the situation to let that is what it is.

On another, why are people trying to sue you every week? What are the claims they're making?

Stuff gets my attention, like if it has my name on I care and I'm looking to guard my reputation. So I don't allow people to throw frivolous lawsuits and win over me, even if it's small. So I've never let someone win a small lawsuit against me. My goal is to try to keep it from going to attorneys because I think it's really expensive for me. And so I usually try to negotiate myself at the beginning without it going to the attorneys. But there's some. Sometimes you just have to let it go to the attorneys because it's the only way to communicate with the person. And if they have a bunch of lawyers involved like me talking doesn't mean anything. Yeah, like I don't know. What was your question?

I think you answered it. I was wondering more specifically, you take the brunt of their lawsuits.

Ultimately, once you start to grow and you get bigger, you just get a bigger target on your back. And if you're going to build a big business and you're going to make a bunch of money, just make sure that once they penetrate the target, I.e. they hit you, that, that there's nothing there for you to actually be in trouble for and just doing everything by the book and doing everything above board and doing it as if everything was going to one day be shown is important. And so when I first met my attorney and my tax accountant, I basically said, hey look, we're going to pretend like one day all of my tax returns will be seen. Whether it's because I'm running for public office or someone tries to say something stupid about me. Everything needs to be to the point where I can publicly show my tax returns. And so once you start getting to that level, you don't concern about lawsuit. It's just a matter of some people are going to try to tear you down. That's life. And I've always thought about from that perspective of actually feeling bad for them more than feeling mad towards them.

Why might said big company want to come after you is on the come up thing.

Yeah. If a big company is coming after you, it's typically because they want to shut you up or to shut you down and keep you from competition. So there are certain laws in the country that prevent anti competitive behavior. But one of the ways around that is to just sue people. And if you have a lot of money, you, you can put so many lawsuits on someone until they finally have to stop working, they have to close the business. Ideally, as an entrepreneur, you should have a lot of your T's crossed and I's dotted in terms of legally before you get involved in something. So there's never an opportunity for an incumbent to come after you and just throw lawsuits at you until you literally either have to relent and pay up or just stop working in that industry. So it's definitely a way to be anti competitive is just throw lawsuits at little guys. And that's why I've been really careful with Augusta. We've never thrown a lawsuit at someone that is infringing on our trademarks. We've always been able to deal with it very civilly, use it myself, just being like hey, the law, there's no bad blood. And prevented us from ever having to sue the small guy because I don't like that look either. I don't want to be the big guy trying to sue the small guy for them to shut up. Anytime there's a lawsuit, the only people win, usually the attorneys.

Is not that calling individuals out or it's not necessarily individuals but companies. Is that a preventative strategy to save you some money? Not calling them my name.

You gotta be careful if you're gonna damage people's reputation or damage brands. And so if you're gonna say negative things about someone, you better have proof, because you can be documenting something and you can be reporting on some sort of bad behavior. But if you don't have evidence and it turns out that you're wrong with your facts and conclusions, and then you made judgments on said brand, said company, said person, then you are liable for slander. And so that's where you want to be careful. And that's, again, just. It goes back to, would you want people to say negative things about you with incomplete data? Probably not. So unless you have really good data, don't say anything negative about people.