$2M Landscape Business is Stuck —and He Doesn’t Know Why

He doesn't have a plan or a.

Goal for the business.

I don't know if he wants to.

Grow bigger or not. I understand I don't have a clear role, but I also have never had this role. I've been doing it, but it's all over my head. So I'm trying to get it in here yet again.

My profit and loss statement I received.

Today is an Excel spreadsheet.

I got my degree in accounting, but I hate math. But I can do. If I get a formula, I'm okay. I can work with that.

She's the one talking to the customer.

Well, I bet there's customers that freak out over it too, and probably cancel jobs.

Yeah.

According to the Excel spreadsheet, we made $1.1 million in revenue. $789,000 in. There are no expenses listed on the.

P and L. Today we're visiting Trent from TLC Landscape Management. He's on pace to do $2 million in revenue this year, but he doesn't know any of his numbers.

We have so many jobs lined up right now, and, like, my mind just kind of like, ugh, there's so much.

Manual entry here right now. Oh, God.

This is my CRM.

Nice. Yeah.

These are my notes for phone calls.

So leads are pouring in, but he has no systems to sell or schedule the work.

So when am I on the schedule?

We say we get back to you.

When do you get back to them?

When we remember, you know, we're not.

Really looking at the big picture right now. We're just in the muck. Right.

Sometimes I'm like, if I just maybe pull an all nighter, I can probably get all these quotes sent out, at least the majority of them.

In the short term, what's comfortable can actually be the most effective thing for the business. But in the long term, it breaks or it bottlenecks the. He can't fit any more estimate sheets on the wall. If Trent can solve this one thing, the business can grow to $5 million. This is the business turnaround show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 175 locations around the world, and I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. Our goal is to give Trent a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks and get the business back on track. What's up, dude?

Mike, how you doing, man?

I'm good, man.

Good to see all the guys are.

Rolling out this morning.

It's always a good feeling, especially on a Friday.

How long you been at this Spot.

Then probably like close to three years now. We started out of my house and we pretty much ran it to where I. We had no more rooms. So I found this.

We.

We. There was a contractor here. They offered it to us and like, I'm like, yeah, we'll take it. Take the whole thing.

What do you have to pay for this? Is it over renting?

Yeah.

What does it cost for this?

1600.

That's not bad.

It's really not.

But it's pretty central, like in.

In your area too.

Like, it's like right downtown and it's like three minutes from the house. That's like our parts areas, but we do use over there.

There's the least amount of parts and equipment I've ever seen in a one million dollar business.

Really?

Oh, yeah, 100%. I love it. I love it. Usually you go and it's like, stuff is everywhere.

Oh, God. Well, there is stuff everywhere.

Yeah, but still for that shop space looks good. You can tell everything's labeled, everything's organized. There's tape on the. On the floor for where the mowers are supposed to be at. Like, it's D. And that then carries over into the trucks, carries into the equipment. And then the crews themselves are usually more organized on the job site.

What were you doing before. Before you started the lawn care business then?

I played football in college. I was working at a local concrete place here, and then I was mowing lawns on weekends and nights. And I was known to have a lawn mower in the back of my truck when I'd show up to class, and sometimes I'd come in early for practice, my coach would let me mow the front lawn. And it was just, you know, something I just love to do. I was making more money mowing lawns on nights and weekends than. And so that's when I kind of started it.

Let's go. Yeah. Like, what was the progression those first few years in terms of revenue?

I think the first year I did like 13,000, we had a. One big leap from 22 to 23, a half a million to like 980. We like doubled that year.

So basically like 13,500,980. Got it. Yeah.

See you. Let's see.

And then this year, what do you.

Think you're doing for 20, 25? We're gonna shoot for 2 million. Okay, cool.

Let's go, dude.

We'll see. We'll see. That's the goal. Elise, Katherine, this is Mike.

I'm Mike. Good to meet you.

I got my Degree in accounting, but I hate math. But I can do. If I get a formula, I'm okay. I can work with that.

The big jump right now you got her starting full time? Yes, Admin. And is that just this year?

She started last year. We had a part time lady. She was just working from nine to one, pretty much answering phone calls. I still was struggling to get invoices out. Like probably 30, 40, 50,000 in missed invoices. I'm like, we need someone full time. So we hired her back in September, October. Ish. She's been great so far.

I'm really excited. I feel like just in the few months that I've been here, we've created some processes. I mean, they're not perfect, but we're getting there.

Yeah.

So this is her office space. Cool. Got a little sitting area. Sitting area. That's cool. Little kitchen back there. And then this is Ulysses, the one that was just leaving. He's been kind of helping over with some of the. Taking over some of the operation stuff.

And how many guys are there total now on the field?

Let's say around 12.

And these jobs that are estimates that are.

These are estimates that need to be sent.

Got it.

All of these need to be sent out.

Yeah. Wow.

Let's go.

Yeah.

The 4L framework allows to identify the constraints in the business so we can continue to grow.

There's four different components.

The first is liquidity. Liquidity or cash is simply the money in the bank. I then take that liquidity and I turn it into leads.

I go spend money on advertising to get more customers.

When I get a bunch of customers, I have to get more labors. And those labors. Once I get a bunch of those, I got to get more leadership. General managers, admin, etc. But once I hire all those leaders, I usually have less cash because all.

The extra overhead costs money.

Obviously we have a software that we send it through. They can view it, accept it, whatever. But also just how the physical copy. So when she's talking to someone, she could write notes.

So if you're not tech enabled or like you're not. You don't like technology. You usually default to this very analog.

System, which is like, I'm gonna have.

Paper or I'm gonna like print off receipts or I'm gonna like print off the estimates.

And so are all these. These are residential and commercial.

Yeah, everything's mixed. So this is like all estimates like sod, irrigation monitoring, irrigation, print repair, complete landscape management, shrub removal.

And so it's like this is more about if someone calls in, she can just come over here and look at it. Is that. No, she.

So she has a stack of these papers on her desk.

I take the phone call, I write up the estimate sheet.

She gets all the information, email all that.

I either measure and get them whatever pricing Trent has said or give it over to Trent.

And depending on if it's like a mowing, we try to like measure it and send out that way.

It's a.

It's basically a price sheet kind of. It's just blank and Trent would just need to fill it in and it has the square footage. And then on the side it has like the blank spot where he would put the price in for square footage.

And then that would go from here over to here on the. On the scent wall.

Let's go. I know. Okay, so you already have it in the software?

Yeah.

Why do you just keep it in the software though? You just like the paper?

I guess. I don't know.

Oh, man. Okay.

I just feel like with all our estimates. Yeah, it's just like a huge list on FreshBooks. And then that's when I feel like I start to miss stuff.

And so these ones that are still waiting to be sent, are these like basically within the past week or so or two weeks? Oh, well, yeah.

Some within a few days, some of them a while.

In the short term, what's comfortable can actually be the most effective thing for the business. But in the long term, it breaks or bottlenecks the business because he can't fit any more estimate sheets on the wal.

Some of these we try to put in there, like urgent, like send out ASAP within a day or something.

Got it.

Okay, I have another pile here. This is like my other pal that I've been taking home and like working on.

You know, when there's chaos like he's having, he's like, I'm missing estimates. Great.

I'm gonna print them all off, I'm gonna put them on the wall. Makes perfect sense. Until you have 50 of them that are like behind. You're behind on. And so it doesn't scale.

You all use crew control. Right, Right. Does that not have estimating in there?

I mean, I haven't dove into it.

Is this connected in any way to FreshBooks, though? That's invoicing them?

No.

Got it.

So that's what's. That's what's the pain. Luckily, a lot of our customers are on set on like a 12 month contract.

Okay, cool.

I think it links with QuickBooks. So Catherine's been working on switching all our stuff to QuickBooks. And then I think it will automatically, if you finish a job, it will create an invoice.

But then for the estimates, you're saying fresh books, though, right?

Yes, that's your fresh books. So you can see these are. These are all our drafts. Plenty of leads that was viewed accepted. Viewed accepted, draft accepted.

There's more than 60 estimates have been accepted that have not been put on the schedule. We have plenty of leads.

They're gonna fill out a sheet. You're like, okay, great. These are the essence I need to fill out. You're gonna take that information, look them up on a map, do the pricing. You're gonna create that in FreshBooks.

Yeah.

And then just move it to sentence. Yeah.

Or she creates it in fresh books.

Got it. When does it move off of that side of things?

If they accept it, then we make sure that it's scheduled in crew control. And then I shred it.

Got it done with. And then if it's just pending.

If it's pending, we'll check in. We'll check in, we'll check in. And then I'll eventually just shred it.

And that process of checking in, is that automated?

It's definitely not.

So they're just like, walking in here.

Like, honestly, pretty much how much more work we can take on? Like, we had some landscape jobs I bid back in, like, February, March, when we had, like, openings, and now we have no openings. And so I'm like, I don't want to reach out to these because they're going to say yes. And like, okay, we can get it done in August. But, yeah, there's no process to it. Honestly. I figure the ones that have been there for over a month, they probably went with someone else or went another route. And so we usually check in one more time, and then we shred it after that.

So if someone accept a project today and they're like, so when am I on the schedule?

Where you say we get back to you.

Okay, and then. And then when. When do you get back to the.

When we remember, literally, there are leads.

Coming in and they forget about them. They never get back to them. They don't follow up with them.

That's when Kathyn's like, dude, I could help you with these sales, but. But she's like, I need to know what to charge. And I'm like, well, I. I don't really know. I'll look at it. And like, all right, this is going to take us two days to do this. Or Two crews, one day, whatever. And then I'll.

And do you have like some sort of rate in your head that. That number that comes out to be.

Usually 65 an hour plus a dump fee or something.

Okay. And then. So when you're doing a 12 month contract. Okay, we're coming like once a week for one day for a whole crew and you just like multiply that out.

Yeah. So like for most of like the 12 month contracts, mowing 32 mils for the year, $200 a time startup.

So that's how I do that. Because all they need to know is the monthly price, 985 and the yearly price.

Yeah.

So only thing I would want to.

Be adding in here is this. You're coming up with this number using. We want to add one more row in commonly, which is budget hours. Oh, okay. So you're saying, okay, there's 32 visits, $200. Instead I want to say there's 32 visits and that's going to take me 3.5 budgeted hours at $65 an hour, which equals $200.

The reason is. And this is the part where I.

Have to talk to Catherine, because this is the part where you're gonna. It's very difficult to track budget hours if you just make up numbers and then give the price to a customer. When it comes to today's job, he.

Doesn'T know his pricing.

So it's been hard for him to hand things off to an admin because like how do you do pricing over the phone when you really don't have any sort of pricing?

So we have the estimated hours or estimated time and then we have the actual time. So like you can see like this one, right. Estimated man hours and then how long it actually took. We had estimated 15, it took 18. So we do have that feature in crew control. Cause it's not on there for every job.

So for example, like next week, can we see how many budget hours are on the schedule?

No.

It's very common for a business owner to be able to juggle everything inside of the business, including all the pricing, until a certain point. And then it becomes the bottleneck.

It was the first time on. Hey, Kath, if someone calls in, I would be really careful on scheduling me out because I'm starting to do like a lot of estimates right now. I think we should start to be really careful on who we want as a customer at this point. I hate saying we'll be there next week. Next week comes along and we're a little behind and Next thing. Hey, sorry, we're not going to be there next week. That's so frustrating to me. I know it's with her.

TLC Landscape Management, this is Catherine. Well, I don't have a set date for you right now. We are working through our irrigation startups and repairs. So I will give you a call next week and give you an idea of when we can get out there. Okay.

Well, I bet there's customers that freak out over it. Oh yeah, and probably cancel jobs.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

What's easy to do when you come into a turnaround and we have an hour or two with everyone is like just attack the glaring problem with every business. And sometimes that's not the right thing to do because the glaring problem is not the constraint of the business. And so it's not necessarily always the thing that looks the worst. I look at the website like, oh, we can immediately improve it, but who cares if we have 60 jobs that have been accepted and we haven't put on the schedule? Like, we need to create better systems around admin.

It all comes down to a prioritization during the spring rush of like, what jobs do you even want?

Exactly.

Because when you're booked out and you have 66 unscheduled jobs, like we should not be going after a huge project. We know we're probably not going to do to August.

Right?

Even if you just said so. Like if you take time insensitive jobs, like big projects and one time jobs and say, hey, anyone that calls in if they're not a recurring mowing customer, just tell them that we're three months booked out for now. So if they're like in a rush, it needs to get done next week. I don't go do an estimate. And then we just basically say, sorry, we can't help you. Time insensitive jobs and one time jobs are, I'm always booking out in my off season, then that allows you to take on the recurring customers during the spring rush because all the leads are coming in now. And even from like a, you know, from the crew perspective, you know, pay them more, being able to get them more efficient. Yeah, we want to do pay for performance. We need budget hours. Budget hours is the crux of it all.

Once I got a lot of customers, I need laborers and they have 12 plus laborers now. However, I've got to make them more efficient and to do that I've got to actually give them a benchmark of something to beat on every job and that's budgeted hours.

How many mowing customers do you think.

You have like 150, 200.

You get a great operator like Trent, you can manage them no problem. But when you start getting above 12, that's when I consistently see people realizing, oh, I need a sales system.

I feel like if we had like a dialed in like a price sheet. Yeah, she could just send a quote out instantly, measure it real quick.

I need a system for pricing. I can't just like make stuff up anymore.

Something like that is easy. So for example, if you're like, well, I don't know really what I charge, one way to do it is that tell her, hey, take 100 of them just random or take all of them literally. Just do a Excel spreadsheet square footage price and you're going to just plot them all out and what you're going to see is it actually follows a trend and then you're just going to group them up and like, okay, we're going to have six different groupings of price and if it's over this square footage, it starts to get really spread out. So then over here I'm going to.

Do anything above this.

We do need to have an in person estimate, probably your big commercial stuff, etc. But like 80% of them she'll be able to handle over the phone. And then you'll probably increase your close ratio. Simply the fact that she will give the price on the phone while measuring the property and close the deal. Then we can remove half of these, right? Then it's a matter of okay, what's the other half? Okay, if it starts to become like 12 month contract stuff where there's irrigation, etc. They can't do that. Then it starts to become a function of okay, what's the bottom like the business? Because now we start to grow and we get 3,4 million and now you're filling your sheets up again. And so you start figuring out either a, do I remove those from the business and systematize, like just simplify or do I standardize it in some way like I did with Moen, which is square foot versus pricing to be able to hand off to them, I would probably push in the direction of budget hours.

And so that's why we see so often at times 1.2 million. And around that 12 employee marker I see where people start having problems around systems because all the juggling that allowed them to grow quickly and was actually the most efficient for them to like get estimates out quickly for pricing doesn't work anymore. And it's right around that 12 employee marker and that 1.2 million dollar revenue marker. We see that over and over and over again.

I'd be interested to see in freshbooks like why we couldn't put it in there because I just feel like this is a very analog system as you have an admin person like who' scheduling right now?

Me and Catherine and a little bit of Ulysses.

Like what's your POV on like the current setup. Just like software where things are at.

I think we're using too many. We're using too many.

It'd be nice if everything was on one spot and you're all looking at the same thing all the time. Especially if you're going to keep growing. It's like, okay, well if you have a second and a third admin person, is everyone running in your office to pull these sheets off the wall? Like there's. There needs to be like a record of truth.

Right.

And if you have to guess right now in terms of close ratio, what do you think that is? 50. 50.

I mean springtime, I feel like it's higher. Like 50. Well over winter it's like. Yeah, it's low, you know.

Do you keep most crew busy all winter?

Yeah, we try.

Yeah. You can book out the landscape jobs on.

Yeah. And we have all of our. Which is Matt. We've been doing a lot of commercial HOA work and so they're on monthly recurring cleanups which is. I mean it's not full time but we've been able to keep like our.

Core group like having printouts of estimates and like the estimate follow up process being calls us the most and is mad we then schedule them.

Kind of amazing that someone built a seven figure business. Honestly like you.

You've surprised me. You do very good for the fact.

That you are so still so manual on stuff really like the paper and like all this stuff. Like very surprising and like the fact that you only have one admin person. Kudos to you, dude. You're doing something right. I look at the business like you have sales, operations and admin.

Right.

I see your operation is extremely strong from a. The crew going out there and doing a good job to them being trained correctly. I think that's the part that I'm guessing you have. People have been here for like a year, two years, three years. You have a good crew. I can just tell like walking around here. You can tell that. I can tell by this and the fact that you don't have three admin people means the operations are really, really solid.

He's really good with the team. He's really good at operations. He has high quality work and he really cares and he works his brains out. The question is, is that sustainable?

I would imagine she's pulling her hair.

Out though, because the way it works.

Is very, it's all over. It's the sales on the admin side where there just needs more systems, right? The sales, operations right now leaning all on you. And then the admin side is like kind of in five different spots. Everything from sheets on a wall to fresh books to crew control and like all that can just be brought in one spot. This is the part like I was really thinking about and that is like what, what do you want the business to do? Like do you want to do a five million dollar business? Do you just want it to run without you? Like what's the goal of the business?

Because the business has grown to over a million dollars. Trent is going to have to work.

On his leadership skills.

We can't just be like going to grow the business.

Why?

What's the purpose? Why does TLC Landscape Management exist?

I mean I, I would like to make, go past five hit 10 million. You know, I feel like we got a great, great group of guys. I would like to be helpful, bring them up and you know, able to make more money and all that stuff. I was a big Dave Ramsey fan. I started learning his stuff with like entree leadership and running a business. I had horror stories of buddies that started businesses that like they had a nice jacked up truck but then they couldn't make payroll. And I'm like, I'm never, I'd never want to get to that point. Like our guys are come first obviously. I know we have to get this stuff dialed in in order to grow and I think it's kind of a stop in our growth at this point.

You know, we're not really looking at the big picture right now. We're just in the muck, right, trying to get through the daily. So it's really cool to be able to hear kind of what his vision is for the future and see that to come to fruition and how we can make things better.

Someone was commenting the other day and one of the turnarounds like is every business you visit 1.2 million in revenue? And I went back and it was like more than half of our turnarounds for the past, like 15 or 20 were 1.2 million in revenue, like right around that. And it's a function of, it exceeds the number of team members that one person can effectively manage. And usually you can get past that six to eight by just having a great operator. But once you get above 12, you need systems, not just personalities to be.

Able to manage that size of business. I would imagine some of these careers, based on my. I'm quickly glancing through here, crush budget hours. Oh yeah. Others are way behind 100%. That's just, that's a scoreboard.

First we have to create the hash marks on the field.

That's budgeted hours.

Are we close to the end zone? Are we way away from it? Like, we need budget hours to determine that.

Now when they come in, it's like, who's the top performing crew? Then you can tie incentives to it.

Do all the crews see that? Yeah, everyone sees it.

Yeah.

So they see, do they do it by crew or half of them care.

More about what everyone else thinks about.

Them than their paycheck.

And we paid them more if they.

Are higher on the leaderboard.

Once we determine budget hours, then we can compensate people based upon the yards that they get.

I, E, P4P. Like even if you didn't do P4P, like you didn't actually change their paycheck.

If you just had a leaderboard and.

Said like, yeah, crew one, crushing it. 84% efficiency.

Love it.

Crew four, 37% efficiency yesterday. And everyone just gets to see the scoreboard. You don't have to say anything.

Right. And then when someone asks for a raise, you say, well, here's the. Yeah, your Crew, your Crew 4.

Right, right.

You're right. Crew 1's doing something different.

Well, that's I big sports background. So I'm like, I feel like right now what we're doing, we're playing a game without keeping score. And I hate it, you know, so that's where I was like, we have to keep score and you have to know if you're winning or not. And that goes back to like, oh, I'm like, well, I'm not trucking budgeted hours right now.

And so anything about sports, like, what kind of people do you attract if you don't have a scoreboard? People who want eight place trophies. Right, right, right.

Everyone should be winning. We all want make more money. It's like, wait, wait, wait one second. Like there are high performers and there.

Are winners and losers in this game.

So in football, like to use the analogy is like, you will get bonuses if you get 2,000 yards this year. You'll get bonuses if you get 14 touchdowns. I need to be able have a way first to measure budget hours. Then I need to compensate people Based upon those budget hours, pay for performance. And then once I do that, people are going to start wondering, oh, so, like. Like, what are the stats for the team?

We have a leaderboard. When they pull up their app, they see the top three paid employees.

Okay.

And the reason I do that is because when they're like, I'm not making enough money, I just pull up the leaderboard. I'm like, they made 40 bucks an hour last paycheck. Oh, and the paycheck before that. They made $37 an hour. And so, you know what was different about them this morning? They showed up, and they were out of here within three minutes. They packed a lunch. They didn't stop at the gas station because they filled up their truck on the way home last night. Like, these are the type of things you can start to teach them, but it's incentivizing them, and they make more money if they do it instead of just telling them what to do.

And then I can do profit sharing based on. So they actually care about the open.

Books that I am sharing. We don't have a scoreboard right now because we don't have a way to keep track of the score. And so budget hours becomes a scoreboard for the crew out in the field. I feel like you could double the business, and operationally, you get the right people, you train them correctly, you have good Systems with Ulysses, etc. I think your bottleneck is not an operational. It has sales, and it's in on the admin side. And ulysses wants clarity in terms, like, what does this position become? Right. Can I make more?

That's been our biggest issue right now, is clarity on his role and all that stuff.

Have you talked to him about it? Not really.

Yeah, we've tried. Like, I tried to get him, like, a clear goal. Like, I typed up, like, these are the things we need each day.

He's still on the field.

Right. He just started this week because we. I fired a guy this week.

Got it. So he basically stepped back in.

Yeah.

So is he considered operations manager? What do you.

Kind of supervisor? Operations manager. And so I'm just like. I'm trying to figure out one. Like I said, we reach agreement of.

60,000 a year without the salary thing. Was he, like, a hard worker on the field kind of thing?

Yeah, but since it. Since then, it's like he hasn't been working.

Does he want to be doing operations? Yeah, the same way, when it comes, like, budget hours and efficiency for the career out in the field, you got to create metrics. For him to succeed in that role, because in the past, he knew what to do, work hard, and he did it, and that's why you promoted him. But now he's in this new role where it's like.

I know.

I don't have the answers. Like, all this stuff's in my head. I'm trying to get it to. But I'm working as hard as I can to get you clear role. But it'd be nice on the back end to have you come in and say, oh, I can do this, this, and this too.

The ability for him to step in the field means that it's not clear, because if there was an actual role, it mean, like, oh, no, that's not even an option. We have to hire someone, and if neither, we gotta hire someone fast, that's fine. But there's no option of you hopping in the field because you need to do all these other tasks. Like, you're no longer in the field. That's not even an option. If we're overbooked, you're not in the field. And yes, I work crazy and on the weekend. And he wants help, and help the guys go for it. That's awesome. You want someone like that, but you incentivize more. Like job completion on time, et cetera, down the road. Once you have this efficiency score, you'd actually tie the entire efficiency of the team to him. I will incentivize based on that number. And I'm going to give you a sliding scale up to 80 grand. Like, that will get his attention.

Oh, heck, yeah.

And then it's a matter of, like, in order to get there, these are things that need to get done and then unlock revenue at each stage for him. So, for example, 60 is where you're starting. Great. Leave it. 65 is when you take off my plate. When people are calling in and out every day, you're taking the calls. You. You unlock base, and then you unlock incentives. So the base goes up based upon them taking things off your plate. Incentives go up based upon performance. And, like, the goal is that phone calls don't come to you from the crew. And when you can say that line, he gets a bit. He gets an increase of pay. Okay. When you can say to everyone, if you have something in terms of calling out for the day, you contact Ulysses. When you say that, he gets more money. And then on the back end, he gets more incentive based on performance, which is efficiency of the crew, profits, and revenue. So I have three metrics that he's being tracked on.

So you think where we're at, you think that job is of.

Yeah. Your size, you can afford that.

Yeah.

You also need it.

Right.

I think that you can optimize your current role by 50%.

Right.

Like, you can get twice as much done by simply getting rid of this, getting her on the phone, doing sales. Like, you can really optimize your schedule. I would make it more clear cut. And so I kind of see you as like right here. Like you've just started getting an admin person. You got Ulysses, but now it's like that's going to put a crunch on the capital. Right. Again in terms of profit margins.

Right.

And so I like to go through this like, where. Where. Where are like the bottlenecks in the business? And then like, what are we gonna try to actually fix? So from a liquidity perspective, I know, like, we don't have a solid P and L right now. And I know she's pushing you to get into QuickBooks to do that. But like, if you had to guess, like, is there.

Is there.

Is there a cash crunch really?

Or is it like, wait, Katherine, what do you think?

Hey, the person that knows the numbers, perfect timing.

Cause like, I know you're pushing him to get into QuickBooks kind of thing. Right. Does FreshBooks do a P and L right now?

Kind of, yeah.

But we don't track our expenses in FreshBooks. It's just our income.

So that was the Excel trade I got probably from. Was from FreshBooks, which is income only. Yeah, got it.

Okay.

And then from your perspective, Catherine, like, because I see it like we've been talking here. I don't know if you overheard, like the bottom, like, is simply systems on the admin and sales side. And like this situation doesn't really scale well.

Yeah, we're going on some hiccups.

Yeah.

So like seeing this, to me, I know I would frustrate my admin people like crazy because they would be like.

Yes, Jen, I can't see you in my system, but I will go into.

The other office and pull your thing off the wall. Like, where's the pain points for you?

I think right now it's the amount of work that Trent is doing between sales and estimates and leading the cruise that sometimes our estimates are. Do fall to the wayside, you know, the non emergent ones, not yelling at you on the.

And she's the one that has to.

Deal with them when they call back. So I think that's probably where our biggest hurdle is right now, is figuring out how we can get the estimates Out a little bit quicker.

And I would say once the estimates are accepted. The problem is also the fact that you don't know when to put them on the schedule. Right.

We are working on the schedule and it's been a monster.

Right? I know. I bet we have a problem of getting the estimates out, and that's because of this situation and the fact that only he knows pricing. You can't do it over the phone. And then we have a problem with once the estimate is accepted, how do we get this on the schedule or tell the customer a reasonable time frame in terms of when are you going to be on the schedule? Got it. Okay. And right now, you can't do either of really those two things like give pricing or tell them exactly when they're.

On the schedule in a roundabout way. But no, not exact person.

Okay. Technically, you should be able to answer someone that calls in and accepts a 50 budget hour job and say, yes, you will be on June 3rd. Because you can just see like, hey, these are the budget hours is what our capacity is. We're booked out until this date. Same thing when it comes to pricing, instead of asking what price should this be? Say how many budget hours is on this job? You say 10. She says, okay, great, at $650. Okay, I want to have an. I want to have 10 budget hours, an estimate fee, and a dump fee. That language then means something to you because you just have a pricing sheet of budget hours, estimate fee, cost this, and my dump fee, cost this.

And this is the challenging part.

Even the timing of this. Like, you guys are going into the teeth of spring rush, right? So, like, I almost am very cautious to be like, all right, let's just change software. Like, let's change budgeted hours. Like, I'm like, okay, we also just need to get through the spring rush. I was in the off season switching to any software, anything. Because right now, what you're doing in FreshBooks, what you're doing in QuickBooks, and what you're doing in Aspire, like between invoicing in one spot, dispatching in another, so estimates in a different one, doing pricing, Excel, all it can be in one spot. And in the perfect world, like when someone calls in, you make a call note, he then is literally be able to see that on his side as he's doing the price. It's all in one spot. The crew is able to see that, like, we're all speaking on one language instead of, you know, notes on the board.

Board.

What software are you referring to where we can have all that in one spot. I know QuickBooks. We can do our estimating, we can do billing, all of that stuff out of QuickBooks.

I would use it for like my profit and loss, my balance sheet. Like my accountant likes it. Right. That's like the standard. And no CRM is going to do a good, as good a job as QuickBooks at like actually reconciling your books and having a solid P and L. But I can do that separately and have all of my transactions coming in there and like categorization, etc. But in terms like field dispatch, estimating, invoice, that can all be done in one spot.

So CRM is just customer relationship management. Think of it as you are managing the relationship with a customer. So all their calls, invoices, estimates, everything that their job, notes, automations around their text and emails, every single thing inside.

The business goes in one spot.

This is my CRM.

Nice. Yeah, exactly.

These are my notes for phone calls. So.

Something would be.

You looked at other software systems besides crew control?

We got a quote from Aspire.

Okay. It was.

It's expensive, it's freaking expensive. But we. I was like, thought about it, I'm like, maybe we should just invest in it.

There's 600,000 landscapers in the US. The difference between the ones that will make the majority of profits and the ones that will fail to scale are the ones that are using software. And today is a really good example.

Of why, like, honestly, it's a flip of the coin. I used ID Copilot. So like I'm completely biased. So whether you do Copilot or you Java or you Service Autopilot, which are cheaper options compared to Aspire, all of these systems can be in one spot.

Adding software, even if it seems expensive, a great move for the business.

I think one thing that you could take off his plate and then also like kind of do whatever you want is figure out what software he should move into Winter.

Well, I'm kind of interested in this co pilot thingy.

The systems he's already put in place has allowed him to get to 1.2. There'll be more systems required in order to get to 3 and 5 million.

Budget hours become as and you guys really do lock it in. Then I would say Copilot's the move because we revolve everything around budget hours.

Do all of these, all of them include invoicing, estimates, scheduling, dispatch. All of this in one step?

Yeah.

100% more systems beget a larger size business. That is possible using the infrastructure of the business.

When I see on that wall with all his estimates and he's like, if they don't respond, just like shred the paper. Like you can just create an automation like to text and email them like day one, day two, day three, day five, day seven. And then eventually you delete the invoice or the estimate. But like the goal is to get a response, even that, like the manual part of having to just click like send it again. You just want to set an automation where it's like, hey, if someone hasn't responded to me after one day, I'm going to send it via text.

And I don't have to track who.

Hasn'T received it either, right?

If I'm building a bridge and I am going to only have a two lane highway, I only need to put the pillars so far deep. But if I'm Gonna put a four lane highway or a six lane highway or a 16 lane highway as a bridge, I will have to dig deeper and make the pillars bigger. And so if I wanted to build a bigger business and be able to scale, quote unquote the business across the river of like, whatever, I've got to dig deeper. I've got to have bigger systems, better systems, more hierarchy. And that comes in the form of software.

So in here what we have is we have customer notes and we have call notes. So customer notes are things that are sticky things like the person's hard of hearing, you need to see it every time you pick up the phone. Call notes is like if they ever call, I'm just gonna pop it in there and save it and then I can have it and that. So that if you do that, once you create the call, it'll, it'll make it a to do for you like in 3 days, 5 days, etc. The notify user would be that if for example a customer calls in, I want to work order change. Essentially instead of giving a contact him, you click notify user and it just texts him and says, hey, this customer called and this is the call notes.

So this customer call and wants an update on when they're gonna get their estimate exactly.

And they'll push it to him and just click notify user.

That's cool.

Here would be a searchable database of all the notes.

Oh cool.

Then like he can just go into someone's account and like say what are all have they been talking about the back and the force. And for us like we don't allow paper on our desks because I want every single note in that in here.

Okay.

So even if you get someone under you down the road, like, you want to be able to walk in if you start at 10 and they start at 8 and like go into people's account, know everything. There's like paper just. Yeah, it's hard to track, especially if, like they're happening. Ulysses is jumping there from a job like, it's just one spot.

The immediate pain of getting inside the systems of software is why most people will not do it. Because in the short term, it does take more time. It does take more time to dig the pillar deeper. It costs more money. It takes more concrete, more infrastructure, more architecture. But it allows for a bigger business. It allows for a bigger bridge to be built.

These are all the jobs. There's only eight of them. But this is what is. It's maximize all the information you can see. You have like your notes time track right there. The track time, as they would clock in, that number goes up, it goes red if it goes over the budget hours, which is right next to it. So there's your budget hours. Now see at the bottom you have seven budget hours. This is why it's easier from a budget hour perspective. Like, if I want to determine their efficiency score at the end of the day, I say, okay, there's seven budget hours. They completed great. They clocked eight hours for the day. Seven divided by eight, that's like 82% efficiency or whatever that is.

Everyone wants to have the end result, which is like a team, where there's information flowing, everyone cares about the bottom line, everyone's coming up with ideas about the business. There's a great culture because everyone knows what's going on. But no one wants to like, do the hard work of implement budget hours across every single job, then compensate based upon that and create software and systems to be able to track budget hours and pay for performance.

From a liquidity perspective, I kind of see it as we just need to know our numbers. Like any sort of. We need a solid P and L. Right? You've got to have where at the end of the day every month you say, did we win? Did we lose? Like the same way we were talking about a team. Your scoreboard is profit and loss statement.

In order to fly a plane, I've got to see metrics. I've got to see a dashboard of where I'm going and what I'm doing. If you're going to run a business correctly, especially if it's a big business, I've got to know my numbers. And what is knowing our numbers, it's having a profit and loss statement. It's knowing the key performance indicators of the business. If we don't know those things, we're going to run the business into the ground.

You have no debt, right? Besides like some trucks or something or.

What do you have besides a mower?

One?

Yeah. We're not completely debt free, but for the most part we have been. We owe one mower right now, which we had two breakdowns happen in a couple weeks and I had a panic attack and I wouldn't finance a mower.

Literally what you've done is phenomenal. Like even at 65 an hour is phenomenal the way that you built it and everything. Like no debt, like awesome. But like we are flying blind in terms of knowing our numbers for sure. And so I would say knowing our numbers, having a solid P and L, like the most important thing.

We've identified some of the opportunities with the liquidity of the business and knowing our numbers. But the next Stage of the 4L framework is leading from a leads perspective.

I don't think there's a constraint of the business. You have tons of leads pouring in. One thing I would say on your website, talk to your web designer. Move your estimate request form up above on the top instead of the bottom.

Of the page or above the fold. In other words, when a customer gets the website, they don't have to scroll down or go to a different page to actually enter the information and request a quote.

If you move it just to the top, you'll increase conversion by 30%.

Really?

Yeah, because everything else at the bottom and hardly anyone scrolls beyond the fold. And then there's a different page too for your estimate request. So they have to go to a different page. People go to your website and they're there for five seconds and if they're not capturing what they want right there, you're losing a bunch.

If you want people to give you more money, make it easy for them to give you money. Make it easy for them to find the estimate request form. Don't hide it on a different page. Don't put at the bottom of your homepage, make it very accessible above the fold on the homepage. Off to the side.

That picture behind is just a random house. You guys have great trucks. I would get a nice crew shot out front here with like four or five of the trucks. That would be my back picture. Okay, See TLC all over the place. When people see your trucks and they come to your website right now, besides just the three letters, there's no recognition of brand but if they see the truck and then they go to your website and it's like orange and oh, I saw that trailer. And like, oh, the TLC thing is on every single truck. That's brand recognition.

Okay.

And a lot of times people probably like when they call in, they're like, oh yeah, I see, I see your trucks all over. Right, right, right. I need them to go to my website and like ah, same truck. And I fill out my estimate request form.

Not like guessing like, oh, was this the company?

Well, it's a random house.

Like that could be off of Google. Is it local?

Is it your photo? I don't know.

It should be, hopefully.

So like I would say like just.

Those two things will increase conversion.

The next step in the 40 framework after leads is labor.

We've got to use budget hours. So this is a quick win. It's budget hours on all jobs. Every single project. It's gonna take you probably a week to get all the recurring done. Then it's probably gonna take you a few weeks to kind of like as jobs come in, you're putting budget hours on everything. And then you just consistently know when to schedule it just because clear game. And then you really have a really good idea of like, okay, where can we put these big projects that we told them they okay, we can actually see we only have 200 budget hours of mowing on. Oh, it means 100 budget hours can be projects.

This is how I'm able to schedule three, four, five months in the future. But we'll give the customer an exact date for when their service going to begin.

Okay, we have a 300 budget hour job. Massive. It's gonna be a three week job and we're now booked out from June 1st to June 21st.

Once I have the budget hours on every single visit and every single job, I can calculate my efficiency score.

Score.

My efficiency score is budgeted hours divided by clocked hours. In other words, how long should the job take versus how long did it actually take?

You could literally have to tell them about it. You just like one day they walk in, there's a leaderboard and then what happens is we always try to get done by like 11, 12 o' clock the next day for the day prior. So what, what is happening? Because like you're not gonna wait for them all to finish their jobs. Do all the math, do the scoreboard like it's you what's gonna happen? You're gonna come the next morning, morning. You're gonna quickly run the numbers, put the efficiency score Up. You're also probably gonna fire two people within a matter of.

There are people that you are paying.

A $2 less per hour that is making half the amount of revenue. It's happening. We just don't know.

No, I mean, yeah, I've got a good idea.

But now you have the math. Right now it's not a matter of.

Like, I don't think they're really doing. I see them on their phone all the time or I see them at the gas. It's like, oh, they literally completed half the amount of revenue as everyone else the other day.

Okay.

And their efficiency score is 36% and other crews 94%.

And then they come in and say, oh, I got to freaking step it up a little bit.

And that will be an easy win. Just from a cultural perspective, down the road, you incentivize it. You actually chart paying.

I love that. So cool. Yeah, I love it.

If I know this number, I am able to calculate what percentage of my cruise day is spent actually producing revenue instead of drive time, load time, and wasted time.

Since the day we implemented P4P at my shops, I've never had a single person ask me for a race. Not a single person. And you give everyone a base.

Make sure everyone's good.

Like, even if they have a bad job will go bad. Sometimes the weather gets bad. But when things go good, when they crush it, when they hustle, when they make sure the job gets done because.

They'Re an hour from here.

Like, I don't want to drive here tomorrow to finish up for 30 minutes, so I'm just gonna finish it tonight.

The next constraint in the 4L framework is leadership. We've had liquidity. We've turned the end of a bunch of leads. We have a big business. We've done a bunch of labors. But now Trent's got to focus on leadership if he wants to take the business to the next level. And that's really the one secret to how he's going to take TLC Landscape Management to a $5 million business.

The leadership side, this is the part that I think you could. You, like, would be super beneficial. And I was like, the same way. We talk about the guys actually having a plan now to make more money. Like, I would love it if you can get really crystal clear on this, because if you can, then as the leader of the organization, you have something to talk about.

He's gonna have to keep people like Ulysses in operations and Catherine in admin so he can focus on sales and grow the business. But to do that, he's gonna have to share his goals, the vision of the business and why it exists. If he does that, $5 million is.

Absolutely on the horizon for TLC landscape management management. I didn't, didn't really share my vision very much until like last year. I'm like, oh, I need to get people that are way ahead of me, have 20 years experience in this industry, software.

They're not going to come around.

As someone's like, yeah, I'm like kind of figuring this thing, right?

No, this is what we're doing.

Here's the track record, here's what we're going to be doing in the future. You have a great track record. Like in 3, 4, 5 years you've grown this business at 2 million. Awesome. When you stand up in front of them and say we're going to go to 10 million and here's the roadmap for it. And by us doing that, you're going.

To make more money because here are.

All the positions that will be created if we're going to have a $5 million business. I need an estimate, I need a couple more people in the office. I'm going to need an operations manager, I'm going to need a full time mechanic. And I can pay these people more than where you guys are doing right now. And so if you're willing to grow with me and support the vision of the business, I would love to move you up into those positions. I'm not going to guarantee it.

Just by being around here does not mean you're going to get a better.

Position, not mean you're going to make more money. We're using pay for performance. You make more money the harder you work. But the hardest workers I'm going to promote and I would love to do that. And if there's not anyone that can.

Take that position, I'm gonna go hire.

Someone from outside the organization. But the reason I'm sharing this vision and this goal with you is that you have something that you know you can work towards. Because I would rather hire from inside.

The company for sure, 100%.

You would rather hire someone for three.

Four years, put them into an operational manager role. Like I don't have to go hire Someone has 10 years of experience in a different company and different cultures and all this other. Just get them. And then once you do that one or two times, you keep all the other guys, they're like, oh, there is a future for me in this business. Like for us, like we are frontline guys can go start their own location and they don't have to pay a franchise fee. So like we actually just have pictures of like all the people that have come here at the shop, worked here for two years and got started their own business.

That's awesome.

And they start oh like this is not a dead end job. So retention goes up, culture goes up. They get paid based on how hard they work and there's a roadmap to make money like the boss. Like if a customer asks me like why should I choose TLCO version. Another long care business, low cloud.

Right. What is it?

High quality. Great guys work here. We care, we do the small things. I mean all that stuff.

Yeah. And then, then, then it's a matter of like if you listen is walking here today. He's like why should I stay with you? That will give you clarity in the business's goals, the business vision. What makes you different than the other position he could go go get. Right. And then when someone walks in here like boss I need to I'm gonna go lead to another job. And then you find out they they not making any more money. But just with a company that has like a bigger org shark they can move up inside of.

Right.

You don't want to lose those people. No.

Heck no.

Like the reason we franchise is so that I could retain my top two or three people. I just knew they would not stick around with a one location shop that was at 12 million dollars.

You, you'll have to have a big enough goal for their goals to fit inside of if you're going to keep them. And for high performers, their goals expand.

Right.

So you got to stay on the same page.

Yeah.

And so whether you want the business to be that way, which is much more passive or. Or you want it to be where you're still involved in growing and you're still they're not making 55% of the profits. Doesn't matter. Either way the business becomes more valuable and it's an easier business to run for your lifestyle.

Right. Totally. Yeah. I get it. That's awesome.

From like a six week plan perspective, we simply need a solid P L. Like I need it to be where when they contact you back in for May. Like yeah May, here's my piano. I know exactly what it looks like. In the next six weeks too. It's going to easily just change the website update.

Okay.

Little stuff like picture estimate requests for moving that up top that will improve leads. I'm hesitant to say even do that right now because you already have quite a few leads. Coming in, literally just changing the picture and the estimate request form up that top part will increase conversion by 30%. So don't lose money on ads. When you want to grow the business. Just fix that. You'll fix a lot of stuff. And then when you do spend money on ads, you'll be driving to a website that converts better. Okay, so I think in part of the six week plan, I would love to have a team meeting about the vision of the business. What that's gonna mean though is you getting clarity on what that is. Yeah, right. And ideally something to fight for. Do you want to be the best landscaping business in the tri cities? Do you want to be the biggest? Do you want to be known for X, Y and Z? Do you want to be able to run a survey of random people in this area and 50% of people know who TLC is, like what is the goal? And I would, I would recommend making that more than just making money. We got to use budget hours. So this is the quick win is budget hours on all jobs. Every single project. It's going to take you probably a week to get all the recurring done. Yep, that's easy. Then it's probably going to take you a few weeks to kind of like as jobs come in, you're putting budget hours on everything and then you just consistently know when to schedule it just because like a clear game. Instead of literally Thursday and Friday's high, hoping we get kind of finished, wrapped up. Do we need you guys to work on Saturday doing you guys to work longer on Friday? It should never ever be that way. So budget hours on every job. You'll need a little bit of grace as you figure this out. And then what will happen is like in a year from now when you're determining like what are we doing with the business, you're going to look at the jobs that we go way over on budget hours. Like you know what, those are the jobs I always get called to. Customers hate us and I hate my life during those jobs. We're just going to cut that service out. CO makes 5% of our revenue.

True, so true.

So the same way that like just simply getting her to be able to do pricing over the phone for moaning is cutting out 50% of estimates. You can cut out 50% of your headaches usually by removing like 5% of your revenue.

Love it.

Good stuff.

This is great stuff.

Just been going pretty good. I feel like six weeks didn't. It flew by. I was talking with Catherine. I'm like, was it really six weeks since They've been here. I'm like, I swear they were here like two weeks ago. Still spring rush, still busy as ever. Honestly, I feel like we've hit a, like, almost a plateau with possibly adding another crew. We almost expanded so much and added so many jobs that we're like, okay, do we add more people? Do we add another truck here soon? So that's been something we've been talking about recently. We went through all of our routes and we put in putting labor hours on every single job we've been doing, which has been helpful, very helpful. And we're still doing. We're trying to do a better job of tracking it. It's been one of those things where we're like, I know, like, I haven't been going by every single job and looking at them, but for the most part, yeah, like, I definitely look at it like, we made announcement to our guys and say, hey, guys, like, just let, you know, like, we're trying to grow, we're trying to expand, but we have to know our numbers. So we're going to be putting labor hours on every single job. We're going to be creating a leaderboard here soon. It's definitely been easier estimating now and basing it off of jobs that we've been completing. And then we were doing this thing like Mike was talking about. He's like, hey, instead of calling every single job, like every landscape project, we've been pretty much been telling those people, like, hey, we can come out and quote it, but we're not going to get there until like, summertime. So, like, we'd still love to meet with you. And it's helped, like, saved a lot of my time going meeting with every single person throughout where we live. And then we've been trying to send quotes, like hourly or quoting stuff over the phone. Catherine's been sending more quotes, like by square footage and stuff like that. Just trying to get stuff out faster and without spending so much time checking out the property.

Meeting with.

Meeting with the guys. As far as just kind of going every. Over the labor hours and all that, doing good. I honestly, I told him we met. I said, hey, here's where we're at. Our goal is to.

Down the road, it's probably going to be a year from now is to start building like a bonus. But we have to start by tracking our numbers. And we're going to start by doing random crew of the week. Whoever killed their times that week is going to get, you know, whatever 50 gift card, you know, a sweatshirt, some swag something. And so they're all for that. I mean, they're all excited for potential, you know, down the road, starting to do some kind of bonus something like that, which we'd like to get to. But I'm like, but first things first. We have to start getting our baseline. And so they were all understanding and they get it. There was. There was no one like, oh, no, they're going to look at my times now.

Yeah, not going as good as I wanted to go. I feel like if it doesn't start going better now, then I'm going to have some tough decisions to make. But I'm just trying to take it slow, trying to give him as much information, as much help, guidance as I can before we have to do anything, you know, dramatic or anything like that. We still have a lot to fix, a lot, a lot more to improve, but I feel like we've definitely taken a better step in. In the better in the direction we want to go.