3 Must-Have Tips for Landscape Business Owners

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be talking about the three must have tips that you've got to have to run a successful lawn care landscaping business. Regardless of whether you're just starting out, you've been this for years and you're wanting to grow and scale. These are the three things that I would tell you. But before we get into that, I want to say a big thank you to everyone joining the course@landscapebusinesscourse.com everyone that has been signing up for the conference. We're just like, what is it now, five, six months away? Less than five months away from Landscape Business Course conference, which is Landscape Summit. So if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference, you get all the details and sign up there. And then lastly, for everyone that is signing up for Pro plus, there is a wait list and so we're full still, so feel free to sign up for that. I'm hoping I can start another one here in the next few months. Another small group. So basically, Pro plus is a small group of of landscape business owners that get individualized time with me. We do monthly webinars and we look at your numbers specifically and in detail, so you can check that out on the site as well. But if you are signing up for that and registering or applying, it is just a wait list right now because that's full. So thank you though. Just wanted to check in with everyone that's doing that. So let's jump into the three things that I would tell any landscape business owner, any lawn care entrepreneur. These are the three things I would tell them. These are the more kind of general tips. Obviously, if I don't know your situation, I don't know exactly what you're going through. Your business, the size of your company has a lot to do with what tips I would give you. However, these are the three generic or general tips, the common threads of weakness that I see in lawn care and landscape business owners. So let's go through these. Number one is knowing their numbers. So knowing your numbers is super important for any sort of business. But in our business of lawn care and landscaping, it's even more crucial. There's so many different moving parts within a landscaping business. Everything from trucks and equipment. Then you have your employees. There's so many things that's moving every single day as you start adding people within your organization, there's so many. There's no project that's the same as the next. It's not like you're building something that is the same all the time. You're not building a water bottle or manufacturing a water bott. Same exact product millions of times. That is not the case with lawn care and landscaping. Every single product is different. Every single project, every single house, every property, every single job is completely different. And there are so many moving parts. So what makes it makes it even more crucial to know your numbers. It's less, less. It's not as hard. If you have the same product all the time, it's a consistent cost, and then you're looking at numbers that are a little more steady. Whereas landscaping. Every single project is different. Everything is always moving. Things are in flux. Some jobs take longer, sometimes they take shorter than expected. And so knowing your numbers is super important. If you've heard me talk about the scoreboard, if you haven't, check that out, one of the earlier videos on exactly how to create a scoreboard for your team to know the numbers. It's not just important that you know the numbers. As the business owner, it's also really important that your team know exactly, exactly what the numbers are. Things like efficiency, what your gross revenue is for the month compared to the goal that you have for the company. Those are important numbers for a scoreboard. But you as a business owner have to know these numbers all the time. Literally. It's comical to say, or a lot of people say it, but someone should literally wake you up at night, two in the morning, three in the morning, they wake you up and you know what your profitability margin is. You know what your revenues are for that the day before. You know what, what the dollar per hour of your crews are. And so that's super important. It's super important to know those numbers. And I would suggest this daily, you need to know at least two things. That's how much money you made. Revenue, and then the dollar per man hour, the efficiency. So number one, production, number two, efficiency is what you have to keep an eye on every single day. I don't keep track of my expenses every single day, but at least weekly I do. So on a weekly basis, you want to have things like, like your net profit for that week. You want to be looking at what is the expenses like, really. In order to get to know your net profit, you need to know what those expenses are. And so every single day I'm looking at revenue, I'm looking at. So I'm looking at revenue, which are production and then productivity, which are, sorry, efficiency. So productivity and efficiency, how much do we produce, how much revenue we produce and then how efficient Were we at it? So that efficiency indicator is a dollar per man hour and then I'm also at a weekly basis of expenses and thereby the net profit margin. The bottom line is you have to know your numbers. You need to know what your CLC is. What is the customer lifetime value clv? What is the customer the cost to get someone to click on your Facebook ad or your Google page? What is that cost? What is the revenue that is generated from that sale once they do come in? What's the conversion ratio? How many people are visiting your website? These are numbers you know, because if you change your logo and you improved your website and it tripled your web traffic because you're now on the first page of Google, it's very important to know that and then also know how many people that's actually leading creating leads within your business, how much business actually coming in, what the dollar amount from that change that you made. And then it's easier to determine whether or not you should spend a thousand dollars on your website and to redesign it or create a new logo or rebrand. So these are things that you have to know. These are numbers you have to know at very least daily you should be looking at what's the revenue that was created in that day, was it 5,000, was it 500? Whatever, what was the revenue? So top line revenue, you should be knowing that and number two, you should know productivity or efficiency, sorry, and that should be some form of dollars per man hour or some form of figuring out how much money you're making per unit time for, for your company. So that's the thing you should know daily, weekly, you should be at least knowing your expenses and that net profit margin. And then the numbers that you should also be knowing are things like how many people are visiting your website, how many emails did you get last week versus this week, how many estimates did you get accepted, lost and how many did you do? So for instance, did you do 100 estimates last week? How many of those were won, how many of those were lost and how many never even got back to you. And now they are, you're, you're just in the follow up process, you got to know the numbers. As far as that follow up process, when do they actually respond back to you is after the first email, the second email, the third email, a phone call, a text. You have got to know the numbers. You've got to know when it makes a business that has so many moving parts much less moving, much less vulnerable. When you can really know the numbers and be able to project forward. The number one is, is know your numbers. Number two. Another tip that I would give all landscape and lawn care business owners is a much more general one again, but just absolutely imperative to have, especially as you grow your business. And that is leadership. So number one is know your numbers. Number two, I would say, is leadership. This comes in very much into play as you start to grow your business. It's very easy. You could take an entire episode just on leadership. But everything from being humble and to being a leader, as far as being able to get your hands dirty, actually go work. Like if it's 100 degrees where you're at and you won't get out of your truck, that's AC'd to go talk to the crew or show them something, or dig a trench with them, or when they're working at 6 and 7 o' clock at night to wrap up a job. You can't jump in and get your hands dirty. You're not being a good leader. Obviously there's better uses of your time to be out instead of being out digging that trench. If you have a big crew of 20, 30 people and all of a sudden you're digging trenches, obviously that's not the best use of your time from a monetarily standpoint, but from a morale and leadership perspective, it's in your best interest to jump out of your truck. That's so nice and cool and you've been in all day, driving around, it's all clean and shiny. Get out of the truck and work with your crew. This is one element of leadership, showing up on time, leaving late. The one, the person that can talk about hard things that are going in people's life and cares about their people and really has that balance of empathy versus really being results oriented. So I think there's a balance and a lot of people misunderstood, misunderstand me. And then I think that we should be like really all fluffy and like nice all the time to our people and all of that. And in general, I would lean. I would rather people lean in that direction. However, there is that certain factor that you still want to create a presence around you that this is something you don't want to lose. And that is you don't want to lose the presence around you that your employees want to make one to impress you. You don't want to lose that where they respect you so much and they see you working so hard that they don't get admiral, they don't get a joy out of going the extra mile and making you happy or Making, going the extra mile and seeing a project, getting completed and getting that smile out of you or that high five or some admiration like those, does that balance? You want to have that very results oriented. Not being a slave driver, but being results oriented. They should be very clear that you are focused on running this business, that you're scaling it up, that you want to see it succeed. You got to make sure that they realize just how important it is to you, being very results oriented and then balance that with empathy, caring for other individuals, and as you build out your team, you will be the leader to the culture that you create. If you aren't showing up on time and, and showing up early to work, they will not either. If you're not putting the extra time working on the weekends, working late at night when everyone else is sleeping, like if you're not doing it, you can't expect your people and the employees that you hire to do the same. So you've got to lead by example. And that's leadership is leading by example. Number three, the third tip I would share with all lawn care and landscaping business owners, regardless of the size of your business, regardless of whether you just started yesterday or you've been in it for 10 years and you have 20 employees, is continuing education.

And this is one that I think separates. I can literally just look at this one thing of any landscape and lawn care business owner, any company. I can look at whether or not the company is successful long term by one factor. And is the owner of the business continually educating themselves on the industry, on business owners, on marketing, how are they better preparing themselves for the future and for the future of the company? This is the number one thing I would say our industry fails at miserably. We continually think that we've done it the same way all for many years. We've cut grass the same way, we've treated our customers the same way, We've done estimates the same way, we've done the same methods, same system, same procedures. We've treated our people the same way. And we are constantly bucking against the trend of technology, constantly bucking against the trend of continual progression and evolvement of your business. And because of that, that's what leads people to fail. They've done their estimating the same way for so long and now 10 years, fast forward 10 years and now all of a sudden that's antiquated. It's old, it's inefficient. And now they're wondering why they can't compete, why the bigger companies are wiping them Out. And this is the number one reason. Continuing education. What do I mean by continuing education? I'm talking about the landscape business owner that goes to seminars, that could listen to podcasts, that will read the books, not just about lawn care and landscaping, although that's a majority of what they many times will consume. I'm talking about just business in general, how they're continually educating themselves on how to be a better leader. Maybe they're even educating themselves on knowing their numbers number one. And number two, maybe they are going to seminars on how to make their landscaping business go from 100,000 to a million or to become a better leader or become, you know, how do I hire people, how do I fire people? These are parts of leadership you've got to know. But if you haven't educated yourself, then many times people just guess or they adopt a methodology that is incorrect, antiquated, old, and they adopt it and they don't change. And so constantly continual education is super important. And that's the reason I started landscape business course from the foundation standpoint. I still, if you know my story, you know that when I before I started my landscaping business, I remember typing into Google landscape business course. I was looking for a course that would guide me through a lot of these things because I knew education was important. There was a reason, you know, I went to, I was become, I was going to become a medical student and I had done four years of pre med. I knew how important education was to longevity in my career as a, as a medical professional. I ended up stopping that and getting my master's degree in business. However, it didn't take away from the fact that I realized I how important educating myself was in my industry. Like to become a doctor, you spend 12 plus years of education before you even start, you start doing things. This is a lot of times in our landscaping lawn care industry is our problem is anyone can go out and mow grass. Anyone can go out and pull weeds or trim trees or put a retaining wall in. And because of that we fail to educate ourselves on our industry, on how to estimate, how to market, how to treat our customers, how to treat our, our employees, how to run a business. And that is why I started landscape business course. That's why I have the conference in January. That's why I have Pro plus because I'm trying to help a lot in this area. The education standpoint, and this is what boils is really the determining factor in our industry of landscaping lawn care. Who wins? You go to the seminars, I've gone to Seminars and paid a lot of money to go there and left with one thing, literally. I'll actually give you this example. Last November I went to this conference down in Dallas. Four days I was gone from my business for five days. It cost me $700 for the ticket and for the motel and all of that. Probably another thousand dollars for food and accommodations and all the other stuff, you know, taxi and all that stuff. That was education. Alright, I went for four days there. Literally. I got one thing out of that entire conference. There's a little other stuff, but like one big change I made to my company and that was I learned how to, how to effectively create estimates without having to go to someone's property for lawn care. So for mowing, for fertilization, for aeration, all of those things. We learned how to do that via gps, effectively efficient, within a couple minutes and have it in a form. And I learned how to do that and I didn't even actually learn the whole process. I just realized, and really through that conference, realized that that was a change we had to make to stay up with the evolving technology and to be more efficient with our estimating that entire week. All the money that was spent, the time I spent away from my business was education. That one piece of advice was well worth the couple thousand dollars, well worth the days and the hours of travel. And that's why I'm having the conference for landscape business course. That is why I run this podcast, why I run these videos is I want to help you. It might be the one thing in this video, it might be the one thing in a podcast, might be the one thing on the course that I hope you listen to and it can change your business. So these are the three things that are general to almost all businesses. But most importantly, I would tell this to every single landscape owner, landscape business owner, every lawn care professional. These are the things you have to do. You have to know your numbers. We aren't running a charity here. We aren't going to be working our tail off and then realize at the end of the day that we didn't make any money. You've got to know your numbers. If you don't know your numbers today, you won't know them tomorrow. You definitely won't know them in a week. And at the end of the year, you're going to be absolutely horrified when you realize you haven't made any money. Net profit. So knowing your numbers, number two, leadership. Probably the most important thing in a business as it's growing and scaling up. Number three, the determining factor of whether or not you become great, not just good, but a great company is whether you're not continually educating yourself with podcasts, audio books, physical books like I don't care if you like to listen or read or watch. Like continually educate yourself on our industry. Whether it be my podcast or other people's podcast, I don't care where you learn it from. Just be continually educating yourself on all aspects of business from hiring to firing to leadership to knowing your numbers. Take an accounting book, take an accounting class on YouTube. Listen to the accounting parts in the course that can teach you the things about knowing your numbers. Continually educating yourself is one of the most important things you can do to make sure you are part of the 1% of businesses that grow and become very successful in our landscaping industry. Again, I'm Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com until next time. Be great because nothing else pay.