12-MONTH CONTRACT | $300k Business in 30 Days (21)

I'm traveling 3,000 miles across the country to build a $300,000 lawn care business in just 30 days. This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general manager and go back home. I'm starting with no employees, no equipment, and no customers to prove that systems build great businesses.

All right, it's day 21. Just finished my morning workout. And today the game plan was do a bunch of work and estimates and then hold the sign and try to get more property cleanups on the schedule. However, it's me very difficult to get any work done in this wind and rain. And we're running out of time. We literally only have 10 more days for us to hit $1500 per day in revenue. So rain like this is going to do nothing but damage to that goal.

And it's starting to rain again. Here we go.

One of our friendly competitors, they said this is the best dealer in town and we need to get a blower. We need to get some speed feed heads for the trimmer, see what we can do.

Hi, how you doing? Good. I just need to get a couple speed feed bump heads for the echo trimmers. Let's get three of them, please.

Yeah, we wanted to get a handheld.

For like around bushes and things. We got a bunch of the backpack blowers already.

All right, so Terrence had asked that.

I get one of these little handheld blowers. And honestly, for $130, I can do that. It's mostly for.

Going around bushes and when I'm doing cleanups. Sometimes getting a big backpack blower in between a bunch of bushes. It's kind of a bit pain in the butt. So it also kind of stands as like a. Almost a backup if we ever need. It's a third blower.

Alright, so the rain has stopped now. I'm going to go get some estimates done. This first one is pretty interesting. Let me read the notes to you. She got our door hanger yesterday, but she would like to meet and discuss what's included in her property cleanup. Sounds like there's some English ivy she wants removed that other landscapers don't want.

A pool, but she wants her gone.

She has landscaping presently. She has a landscaping company presently. But she is considering switching. Has never heard of Augusta and would like to learn more about the company. And meet. Bring a big smile. Might be able to capture a mowing client. Scheduled estimate from 3 to 4pm Gonna bring the smile. Here we go.

So they said just me drop by.

Kind of see what was included in the property cleanup. And they mentioned a little bit about the iv, so just wanted to kind of see what we can do.

So somebody hung this on our door last week.

Perfect.

So do you know, if I wasn't here, whoever dropped by, did they just include front yard and back?

We don't look at the backyard Just.

Because we don't like to go on people's property. We try to stay on the driveway.

So this is just a front yard?

Yeah.

Someone mentioned that they didn't want to get rid of it before. Is there a reason why they said.

It wasn't considered a weed? So when their contract or when their estimate was weeding, they didn't include the ivy.

Got it. I gotcha.

I gotcha.

Okay. Are you wanting it out or just.

Trimmed kind of like away from the. Okay. All right. Yeah.

She's gonna kill them.

No, it's vicious.

All right. We're in the backyard, and so for the initial cleanup, we're going to be looking at, we really need to focus on cleaning out all of the beds in the backyard, Getting all the leaves out. But most importantly, is this English ivy right over here? Literally just take a trimmer right down to the ground.

Exactly.

The thing is, if we tear them out and we. We're pulling them, it's going to take us, like, five times as long. And then what's going to happen is we're still not going to get all the roots anyways. So what we found is just clearing it, and then as they pop back up, then we're pulling them more sel collectively, Just to save on that initial cleanup, because otherwise, it will take us five times longer to kind of get rid of it. All these bushes need to be trimmed and shaped. Every single bush, basically, as well as these ones. She wants these ones. These azaleas dunk down quite a bit. However, we don't want to take too much off this late in the season. So just a tiny bit off. You're shaping these up, getting them looking good, cleaning out all these beds. This is all part of the initial cleanup. Trimming all these bushes is part of the initial clamp, too. But I'll be having a separate price option for all of the.

Recurring maintenance going forward. If not this evening, by tomorrow morning, I'll get something put together for you.

Oh, that's fine.

It's going to be an initial one time. Get it to where kind of the standard, and we make sure we do a walkthrough with you, because that would be, like, where we always want it to be at and then it'd be more of an ongoing basis. So you know exactly would be for each service each month. Okay.

So less the chemicals which I'd have to get.

Exactly.

Yeah. And we really recommend fine turf. I'll put that in the email for you just so you have their information. We work really well with them.

All right. So I think that's been a great client for us. Obviously she just wasn't happy with her previous provider and a lot of it just again stems around communication. She never mentioned price one single time. And it's about the communication with the.

Customer and that's what we can just kick butt on.

And so we have good job notes. We can make sure that we communicate.

With automations we can make sure that.

She can always call and talk to.

Someone at command center and she was.

Already impressed with talking to them on the phone so I think we can get her on lock.

I know we're going to be more.

Expensive than our current provider.

You know it'll be exact and it will not change. The only reason it change if like you put in a new hedge or something like that. The customization of the notes is really just for you to be able to convey certain preferences. So for example some people are like do not touch these roses only in December for example. Anything specific like that we can document for you but the price isn't going to change. It'd be like hey we're trimming bushes, we're doing leaves, we're doing you know, bed maintenance. It'd be all the same.

But I think she values the communication.

That we offer and if we can get that client.

I genuinely believe that's a 800 to $1,000 client but I'm going to.

I'm not going to put the number together now. I'm going to wait till I get back to the house and I'll put.

Together those with you. So you can see exactly how I.

Put together a 12 month contract like that.

Now to this day it is still extremely painful for me to have to say no to specific services Like I did with Karen. She wants the irrigation done, she wants the chemicals done. And could I do I know how to do that personally yes I do. But in this case when I have a general manager stepping in and. And I want to make the business as hands off for me as the owner. I want as little friction and as simple services as possible.

So again the would be extra for irrigation and treatment of the lawn for weeds. Do you do seeding or.

We don't I know there's lots of money to be made in fertilizer and irrigation, but when I'm first getting started, I've done this mistake in the past. That is, I just offered everything to everyone. I did. Putting greens and patios and everything from the get go. I'm not saying you shouldn't do those services. There's lots of money to be made in those services if you can figure out the labor behind it and figure out how to train it and make systems around it. But for me, in my case, where I'm not going to be here every day, and I want to make this as scalable and simple as possible. We decide what our core competencies are, and then we can train our staff and make sure we're most efficient at those specific services. And maybe one day we will actually offer those services at this location. But I would rather add those services once I have a database of customers that I can immediately sell into and have really good cash flow and a good base of that service actually being needed, instead of from the beginning just having one customer does this and one customer does that. And all of a sudden, it's just so hard to find laborers and that make an efficient route and make a profitable company.

All right, so we're out here at this other property. There's actually this one here and this one here. Both referred to us by the competitor that I talked about last week that we refer all of our chemical treatment and applications to. So again, just being friendly with the local competition and referring people to them. What goes around comes around. So two jobs. We are going to get these on the schedule for mowing. Recurring work still coming in. Command center couldn't get a really great shot of the backyard because of all these trees. So if we don't have a. If they're not super confident in what the pricing is going to be, then they'll send me here for an estimate. So you can see here, this one hasn't really been upkept a whole lot. You can kind of probably actually see have a hoarder house. However, this property is actually the mother of the owner next door. And so both these properties were going to take care of, But I just want to make sure it's a little bit overgrown. You can see this is actually monkey grass and technically a flower bed, but we could just trim it all back. Now this customer has taken care of their property very nicely. We'll get a quote for them as well. Now, I think I found a chink in the armor of copilot CRM and that is offline mode. When I was in the calendar view and I refreshed my page, there's no cell service out here for some reason this side of town. Verizon, no bueno, nothing. And so something I'd have to bring up with the dev team tomorrow. We've got to make sure that the app has an offline mode for areas like this where service might be spotty or non existent altogether. And when that sun pokes through, this yellow just looks gorgeous. Just mighty fine.

All right, so I'm just going to.

Copy all of my notes that would.

Typically just put directly into co pilot. I'm going to actually show you exactly what I'm doing thinking in my brain when I'm putting together a year round weekly property maintenance contract or why it's called like to call it level billing.

Because we don't make them sign anything.

And yes, there's always the chance they walk away during the busy, during the slow season when you actually make all your profit. However, I'm not too concerned about that one and especially on this one because there's so much work to be done even during the winter.

So again, this is my thought process.

And I would not typically write this all out like this, but I want to show how, how I'm thinking about this.

So first of all, I have five different line items.

I break those down here below. In terms of just finding out what.

The hours are for each item, there's two hours for every single visit. And if I'm doing it bi weekly.

The bed maintenance, that's how I come up with 26 visits. Two hours a pop, it's gonna take me two hours. Clean out the beds, pull the weeds, et cetera.

Again, this is after that initial service.

Of getting it to baseline. Next thing is gonna be the leaves.

For seven months out of the year.

We're going to be doing it twice each month.

So bi weekly for seven months out of the year, we're literally just going to spend two hours doing all the leaf cleanup.

And I think it'll be easy just to blow all the leaves on the lawn, suck them all up with the mowing service now for five months out of the year. So seven plus five is 12. So year round we're doing leaf cleanup.

For five months out of the year. We're going to do it every single week and it's going to take three.

Hours because there's going to be so much more volume for mowing.

We're going to assume 38 visits and.

A $70 mow, which is one hour. All right, Bushes. We are going to assume a monthly visit. So 12 visits multiplied by six hours.

We're also going to assume there's six truckloads of debris. So basically half a truckload of debris every single month. We know that the vast majority of.

That'S going to be in probably October, November, December, when the leaves fall down.

But in terms of finding out the.

Numbers, this is the breakdown.

52 hours for beds, 78 hours for leaves, 38 hours for mowing, 52 hours for the.

Oh, wait, did I do something wrong? 12 by 6. Ooh, 72 hours. That's what I get from doing math in my head. All right, so now I'm going to do is simply add 52 plus 74 plus 38 plus 72 equals 236. I basically missed out in 20 hours that did this in my head. All right? Plus, I'm gonna. So that's.

That's how many hours I'm gonna spend.

On this entire project for the entire year, this property. I'm gonna add in my dumping fees. And now what I'm going to do is take this and actually recalculate because this is incorrect. I'm gonna take 236 hours multiplied by.

$70 per hour equals 16,520.

Add that to my dumping fees, which is. Is 5, 9, 4. So that's $17,114 is my total for the year. Divide that by 12, and I come up with a total of exactly 14, $26.17.

If this customer's customer accepts.

I now have the schedule and the frequency for every single service and the.

Budget hours for every single visit.

So when the cut.

When the crew shows up, they know exactly what they're supposed to be doing.

And how long it should be taking.

Them each visit, not just a blended average of like, oh, okay, 236 hours.

236 hours divided by 52.

Okay, we're going to spend 4.5 hours every single week. That's not accurate because during the fall, you probably need seven or eight hours to do fall cleanup. During the winter, you're not mowing. The leaves are gone. You're not going to need four and a half hours. So you've got to make sure you have the correct amount of budget hours for every single visit, especially if you're.

Doing pay for performance, what we call P4P.

You can get all the free training that@p4psoftware.com training.

And that's essentially where we give Our.

Employees a percentage of the labor revenue for every single job. And one of the reasons people say I can't do, I can't do P4P.

Is because of this 12 month contracts.

But if you break down each visit by budget hours, you know how much.

Labor revenue is associated with, with every single visit.

All right, so I'm doing some follow up calls and the client that I'm actually supposed to go do a job for today, literally last night called command center and told them that we need to rebid the job because her lawn maintenance guy that does her lawn did half the project. So I'm going to give her a call and see if it's even worth going out there. We'll see how this goes.

Could you like lower the price to remove that weed a bit?

Well, in 10 days, if he just.

Knocked them down, they're still going to come back.

So we're still going to have to do that work. In terms of the spray, it's all our minimum charge.

We really can't go any less than that, unfortunately.

But then are you able to promise that you remove the bamboo? Because currently on a quote you said you try to remove the bamboo but it's not guarantee that.

Yeah, like we're going to do our best to get it out of there.

And cut it down.

The bottom line is like with the.

That bamboo, we can't guarantee it because we don't know what exact, like when we start cutting into it, exactly what it's going to look like.

But we definitely try our best. And if we didn't get it, we.

Would give you, we'd give you a discount off of that.

Okay, wait, wait, wait. When I get that tag, I, I think I get a 70s five bucks for the, for the property cleanup. Why is there all of a sudden a minimum charge of 140 y service?

Yeah, so that was for the front yard area there. Just that, that for the gravel, like the lava rock area there that they.

Could see when they did the door hanger.

So yeah. Okay, so let's see if you can remove the bamboo. If not, could you just give me a discount on that?

Yeah, that sounds good.

Okay. So she was pushing back on price a little bit because her current landscaper did some of the weeds. He literally just took a trimmer to them. So we're still gonna have to pull them out and do most of the work. So I didn't even respond when she started like trying to do price negotiation. I didn't even like talk a whole lot. I just like was quiet because, like, look, take it or leave it. That's kind of where I was at at this point. It's such a small little job. I'm not gonna spend more time going back and forth or negotiating. It's like, you know, if you want it, you can have it. If not, that's fine.

All right, so I'm going to actually.

Show you exactly how I use this inside co pilot to make a route for Terrence's projects that he has on the schedule for tomorrow. This is his route. You can see he has 7.04 budgeted hours. He's going to $493 in revenue for the day. Should be a pretty manageable day, honestly. And I've already optimized it, so all I had to do was select these all, and then I went up here and just did the fastest route for the day. And then this one specific customer, Henry Davis, he wanted to be first because he leaves for work at 2 o'.

Clock.

He want to make sure he saw us before the end of that. So we didn't move him to the first. But it worked out perfect because if I zoom in here on the map, if I select this, I can see all of my jobs for the day. Number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number six. This is literally like a mile, a mile and a half away from home base. So that's perfect. And, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I can see all my job notes in terms of what is on each project. And then he's got basically the mowing route after this one single cleanup.

What's up, Augusta Nation? We're out here in the Walmart parking lot at 11 at night. I just picked up some Sharpies for the next batch of flyers, which is about 3,000, so we'll get all those out probably this week.

Yeah, I did like 600 a day, so we're getting there. I was driving by in a lot of the places that I hit already, so that's good. Catch you later.