3 Ways to Start a Lawn Care Business PART TIME!

Hey everyone, it's Mike and you are listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today is going to be a short episode, but we're going to be talking about how you can have a job, a 9 to 5 job, and run your lawn care business. This isn't for everyone, but it's great information even if you don't have a job and you're running your business full time. So today we're going to be talking about how you can have your job, whether it be something you've been trained for, your profession, something you're passionate about, and you like to keep that 9 to 5, but also have your lawn care business. How is that possible? What can you do and what have I seen work? Because I've seen companies as big as 4 or 500,000 in revenue being having an operator, an owner operator that is literally still doing their job. They're eight to five out doing that specific one was a chiropractor, but he had a lawn care business on the side and was making really good money. How is he doing it? We're gonna be talking about that today as well as other people that I've seen it work and what I've seen fail when someone tries to their lawn care business and their job at the same time. But before we get into the show, I want to make sure that everyone knows to sign up for Landscape Summit 2020. That is going to be the conference I host in January. I'm going to be the one speaking at all the events, the keynotes, the workshops, et cetera. It's going to be January 16th, 17th and 18th. That's a Thursday, Friday and Saturday here in Bellingham, Washington. It's at a really nice Holiday Inn. We get really good rates by using the code on the website. So if you want more information, just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com, this URL right here, landscapebusinesscourse.com conference or just go to the homepage and click conference. I'm gonna have a link in the description below the podcast or the video. There'll be a link that you can sign up for the conference. And a couple of the things we're going to be discussing at the conference this year is going to be there's gonna be a whole bunch of stuff like last year we talked a lot about open book management, we talked a lot about numbers and market year. Here's some of the topics we're talking about this year. Number one, in depth analysis of pay for performance systems with a personal Q and A to customize it for your business. Number two is, and let me just make a note there, if you have questions about pay for performance, this is the conference to come to. And a lot of your questions and comments on some of the videos have been like, hey, can you give more details about pay for performance? It would take a four or five hour video and I wouldn't be able to customize it to your business. So having you here live in the conference, I can answer your questions, you can customize the system to your business and it will work. So that's why I highly recommend you come to the conference. Even if it was just for that one day. When we talk about pay for performance, we're gonna be talking about how to get out of daily operations and still remain 15 to 20% net profit. When you're doing a seven figure business, we're gonna be talking about creating accountability and making scoreboards for your team and then also looking at some of the new marketing techniques I see really working well as we go into 2020. That and a whole bunch of things including like we're gonna talk a lot about standardization and efficie, really how you can double your net profit margin by doing those things. So we're gonna be talking about a whole bunch of that stuff. Lots of more information. You can book your hotel and all of that right from the conference website. And it is $299. That includes all three days. It also includes four meals, two on Friday and two on Saturday. So just a lot of value. And I have a money back guarantee. If you come and you don't feel it's worth it, I'll give you your $2.99 back. It's not about the 299. It is 100% about you coming and changing your business and making it better place to work as well as more profitable for you. So I highly recommend you able to come out and see me then live and in person. It'd be a lot of fun. But today we are talking about how you can run your business while working your full time job. There's three different things that I want to talk about really briefly today. I don't want to make this a long video. Number one is subcontracting. So I've seen this work for people that are running a 9 to 5 and they cannot be out in the field, they cannot be doing estimates, they literally have to do subcontracting. So subcontracting is going to be you go out and get the jobs, you go out and do the marketing. You get the leads, you get the customer set up, but then the work is done by some other company. And what you do in that scenario is you are going to have the customer sign a contract with your business, and then you are gonna do a 1099, which is a subcontractor to some other business. Usually it's going to be a small business. It's gonna be, you know, a guy in his truck, or maybe him and his friend in a truck mowing lawns. And then the big challenge on subcontracting is keeping them accountable, your subcontractors accountable to the standard that you have set in place. Without going over certain labor laws and legal issues of hiring subcontractors, you can't tell them certain things to do as subcontractors. So there's just certain guidelines. And the way that you make sure that you don't cross that legal line is that when you're trying to find a subcontractor, make sure they already meet your requirements before you hire them. So, in other words, have certain requirements they have to fulfill in terms of their level of professionalism or the times that they are in certain areas or however you want to do that, make sure that they meet those. Then you hire them, and then they already fall in alliance in accordance with your kind of standards. Instead of hiring subcontractors and then trying to change them and their business, you're going to get into some trouble. So subcontracting is the one way to do it. What's nice about subcontracting is if you're running a 9 to 5 job, you do not need to be liable for employees or for trucks and trailers and for equipment, because now a subcontractor is going to do those things for you, and then you're going to get 10 to 30% of the money will come to you. The rest would go to your subcontractor. And so this is definitely a business model that works if you love sales, if you love are good with managing subcontractors, and you don't want to have the liability of having a truck, a trailer, employees, having a shop, having maintenance on all that equipment, all of those things can be avoided by having a subcontractor. And even from a liability standpoint, you can defer some of those things to your subcontractor. Again, from a liability standpoint, too. You need to make sure you're covered for those subcontractors in the case that, unbeknownst to you, they are not covered with insurance, which again, in your vetting process for subcontractors. They you need to make sure they have insurance that you're listed as an insured on their policy and really make sure you're covered on that end. All right, number two way to be able to have your job working nine to five as well as a lawn care business is that you simply do it on the weekends and on the holidays and on the evenings. And so this is the most common way of doing it. And that is after you get back from your job, you're gonna start working doing landscaping. This works really well if you have shift work. So if you do like five days on, five days off, or you do four tens at your job, it's great. If you do four tens and you have three days in the week where you can go out and do mowing, do estimates, be out in the field, manage a crew. Even if you did three days, you can literally spend one day maybe doing estimates and office work, two days managing a crew of one or two guys with you and really operate a nice size business. I've seen businesses get as big as 2, $300,000 doing the weekend model where they have a couple employees. They schedule really tightly on those three days, and they only work for their lawn care business on those three days that they're off from the four days of 10 hours at their job. And so that's another way to do it Again. This is gonna be weekends, holidays, evenings. This can be a burnout. This is gonna be tough. This is the kind of the model I used when I started Augusta Lawn Care. And I was also a trainer at Anytime Fitness as I was making my money there. But then I would go and I would.

Do, you know, mow the lawns and do all the landscaping stuff. And basically that was my ramp to jumping off and going full time was as I got more and more work and I started needing people and more hours, then that's when I made the jump to full time. But even if you want to just stay part time and you just want to keep it where it's only in the evenings or only on the weekends, you can definitely make it more efficient. And if that's your business model, you can make money doing that. It's definitely possible. If you're very intentional about your business model, what you're going to say no to, in terms of which customers, because you're going to, you know, some people will not want you to mow on the weekends. Well, guess what? That's your only time you can do it. So being specific about what customer demographic you're going to serve and what your pricing is going to be and your scheduling being really on top of your scheduling, you can make that work. It can lead to a lot of headache and burnout because you're working long, long hours. You got to work, you know, be your full 100% self at your job and then go and perform as a business owner wearing a whole bunch of other hats and things like that. For some people that is like the coolest thing because they can go work at their one job, use one side of their brain, maybe it's analytical or whatever, and then they can switch over to like lawn care landscaping mode and it's kind of a way for them to unplug. So again, knowing yourself, being really self aware and intentional about your business model is really important. If you're going to do the weekends and evenings and keep it that way Usually also the way that people use before they integrate or transition over to full time landscaping and lawn care business is they use that model of weekends and evenings to slowly transition to the point where like, okay, I'm already working 30 hours a week on the weekends and the evenings, now I'll switch over to full time my landscaping business and just focus on that and quit my day job. And so that's an option. But if you want to stay just. Some people love their job, some people want to keep doing what they were trained to do in college or they love, love their profession, they love their employer, they love the benefits and the stability of that job and they want to see lawn care as more as kind of the gravy and their side hustle. And that's totally fine. The third thing that I've seen work as well for companies or business owners that want to run their business alongside a job, excuse me, is having a pay for performance system. The biggest drawback of having employees while you are working in your day job is that you can't actively be managing them. Like if something happens, you can't just drive there. Like if there's an absolute catastrophe, flat tire, broken down truck, whatever, you can't just drive there if you have a 9 to 5 job that you're tied down to at a desk, right? So it's not like that. Flexibility is very difficult when you have employees that might need something or they run into a big issue or trouble and so, or worse yet they're lazy and wasting time and inefficient and you can't be there to monitor, guide, teach.

Manage them at all. And so that's very Difficult. So using pay for performance is a great way to be able to know that when you're working at your job and you have employees out in the field that they're working to the best of their capability. They're working as fast as possible and they're aligned with you in terms of efficiencies and profitability. And so those are the three ways I see that working. If you want to work your day job job and do stuff on the side, lawn care, landscaping on the side, number one way is subcontracting. You're going to 10 to 30% commission or fee on top of that is going to go to you. Another 70 to 90% of that is going to your subcontractor. That's one way to do it. Word of caution, make sure your onboarding process for subcontractors is very in depth, very diligent about their liability insurance and the specifications and standards you want them to have. The second way to do it is just do weekends and evenings, grind, hustle, push. And as you grow, you're not going to grow how many hours you work in the business. You're going to just basically add another helper on. You're going to then raise your prices and you're going to keep focused on the fact that you want to keep your job and you're just supplementing it in the evenings and the weekends. And you can make it very profitable by having a helper. And then as you continue to get more and more busy, raise your prices and just keep raising your prices until you're making really good profit margins. And that is a very good business model if you just want to keep your job. The third way is pay for performance, which is going to pay your people based upon their production. And therefore you don't have to be constantly managing them or tracking them throughout the day when you're at your job and they're out working. That way is the way to scale. If you want to scale the business and have employees working for you five, six days a week while you're at your job, that's the way to do it, is have a pay for performance system, but subconscious contracting and weekends and evenings work too. So if you have any questions, post below. And again, don't forget to sign up for Landscape Summit2020 in January. I can't wait to see you then. Thank you so much. Have a great day.