Mike Andes argues that the second major barrier keeping landscaping and lawn-care businesses from reaching $100,000 in monthly revenue is the lack of proper software systems. He lists specific tools his company uses (LawnPro, Stripe, Square, Mailchimp, PayPal, Weebly/Jimdo, Aspenta) for CRM, routing, payments, email marketing, websites, and vehicle tracking, and stresses eliminating paper/manual record-keeping to create a scalable, efficient business.
Chapters
Alright. Now the second thing that keeps small businesses small, keeps landscaping and lawn care businesses from breaking the $100,000 per month revenue marker is their software systems. So literally there is no way to hit $100,000 in revenue each month without the correct software in place. In our business we use Lawn Pro software, We use Stripe, which is a processing, we use Square, which is also card processing. We use Mailchimp, which manages our email, email marketing, we use PayPal, we use Weebly and Jimdo for our website stuff. We use Aspenta for tracking all of the trucks. So all of these software systems should be in place for your routing, for your tracking, where people are for payment, for billing, for invoicing, for creating estimates. And you really got to eliminate the paper trail. And so the second thing that keeps small business small is that they don't have the correct software systems in place. If you're trying to keep your books in Excel or on Microsoft Word, or you're trying to keep all your customers information on pieces of paper or even just spreadsheets on your computer, you are going to fail. Or let's not say you're gonna fail. You might be successful and profitable, but you aren't gonna hit $100,000 per month in revenue and do it in a scalable fashion. In other words, you might get to 100,000, just barely by asking your teeth, but it's not gonna be a scalable model that will get you to a million the next year and 5 million the year after that. So in order to create a.
A business that's gonna get to $100,000 a month, every month, and you're going to be able to scale that and create profit. You've got to create an efficient system. And one of the best ways to do that is have a software system in place, a CRM that keeps care of all your customers, relationship management, and when phone calls are made, when payments were processed, when invoices were sent, what type of emails were sent to each customer, that's important. Like Stripe is what we use for keeping all of our credit cards on file for, for our customers that want us to charge their card every single month. We use LawnPro software for our CRM, routing, tracking, estimating, all that stuff. We use Square for our retail business, so we have a register that is just our iPad and we're able to do mobile payments with any sort of credit card. We use mailchimp for our email marketing so that we keep track of all our customers as well as our potential customers, the ones that we have given estimates to, but they haven't accepted. And so we're able to send them email blasts during like fall, spring and other times of the year. To market our services, we use PayPal because our invoicing system from Lawn Pro allows people to pay with PayPal directly from their invoice. We use Weebly and Gymno to create our website online. It's a nice drag and drop system and like I said, we use a spent up for all of the tracking. So those are just some of the software systems we use and without it you cannot get to $100,000 per month in revenue. This is Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com Sam.
