5 steps for YOUR side hustle!

This owner inside of Augusta Nation started last year and this is their first real spring rush and first full year and they're doing $20,000 per month in revenue. Now at Augusta Lawn Care we have what's called a solo operator model to help people get started that don't have as much cash available. And he did this on the side and so he does trucking and that's his full time job. And then he does lawn care on the side and he builds up to $20,000 per month by himself. And so today I'm going to be talking about what you can do in any home service business, but using lawn care as an example of what you can build without having to leave your 9 to 5 job. A lot of times what really works well for doing a part time business is things like firefighters that work 24 hours at a time, or teachers that have the summer off, or other professions where you work the weekend or three, four days in a row. So that's usually a great starting point. But even if you have a job that you work at night or you work from nine to five, there's ways to work around that schedule. And I'm going to talk about five things you've got to do if you're going to make that work. Where your business is sort of like your side hustle, the first thing you have to do is have systems. I was trying to think about what did Mike do that allowed him to be able to do $20,000 per month in revenue by himself and still have his other job, which is a great segue to the next spring. I'm imagining he probably will get a few employees, go $50,000 per month in revenue and make a big jump and be able to go full time into the business. But even if you don't want to, it's a great side income if you're just trying to build a small business on the side. And so of course, being part of Augusta Nation, Mike gets access to a lot of systems. If you're not having software, if you're just doing everything on, you know, sticky notes or your reminders app, you're just not going to stay on task. You don't have things like automations, you're not be able to invoice people digitally, you're not going to be able to build a business that is 20,000amonth in revenue while you're still doing your. You need software to stay organized. You'll need to be able to use what I call estimate videos so that when you're on the Property. Doing the estimate, you make the video of the property and of the entire job. So that way when you go to your regular job and you're staying busy, you're going to forget about a job that you may you didn't the estimate for three or four weeks ago and now it's accepting like oh man, I forget exactly what they wanted. Make a video of every single job before you leave the estimate and leave the appointment with the customer. That's just one other system called estimate videos that you'll need. And that's the way you'll need to think if you're going to have this income is how do I create systems to be able to stay organized. The next thing you'll probably need to do is outsource your admin. So because you're having your 9 to 5 or your other job, you're not gonna really answer phone calls. Be able to take all incoming leads and act on them quickly. You're going to need to have it remotely handled. You can get someone overseas, you can get someone that just works remotely, or you can have your spouse or someone else even that works with you at your business but works on a different shift that might be an available option for them to do the admin work. Remember that most of your admin work is going to come during office hours. So if you have a nine to five, that's going to be a little more difficult because you need someone to answer the phone when the customers are actually calling. And so I believe that down the road AI and software will be able to answer phone calls and collect incoming leads. But until then you'll have to get someone that's remote or is able to take those calls during the the day. Automate your sales. And this is something I know Mike's done. And that is where you can go to Augusta Lawn Care's website, have an instant price, be able to accept the estimate and not have to always be going out and doing estimates in person. Reading every single estimate in person, I would first try to get you to try to do some estimates over the phone. If I can do a drive by estimate where I just drive by the customer's property on my time, I can probably get 15 or 20 estimates of those type a day easily. Whereas in person estimates I might only get 8 or 10 in per day just because I have to meet with the customer. It takes a lot longer and I've got to get them all scheduled, which makes it much more difficult when I'm trying to work around my other job. Then what's even better than that is doing the estimate over the phone. So can you collect information or can the person that you're hiring remotely to do this take information over the phone and be able to give pricing based on specific questions, measuring the property from satellite images, et cetera. And then the very tippy top of the five ways you can do an estimate is automated. And that where the customer goes on your website, gets the pricing and accepts the estimate. And that's what we do at Augusta. That's really what allows Mike to not have to worry about doing all these estimates throughout the day, is he just knows people are going to the site, they're checking out, they're accepting their estimate and they're getting on the schedule. And that is how you automate your sales. Number four is you gotta minimize drive time because you only have so many hours in the day and you know you're working already 30, 40 hours. At your regular job, you probably only have 30 or 40 hours max. If you're really working hard to be able to actually do the work out in the field. And that's going to be a lot of work. But if you're willing to do that for the first year or two to get the business off the ground, that's probably going to be what's required. If you don't have a bunch of money, just go hire someone to do the work. So the very first thing we want to do is minimize the amount of drive time. Because if we're not making money in the properties, it's a waste. It's absolute waste. I can get more customers by serving a wider service area, but it also means I'll be driving the majority of my day. I see people that spend 20, 30, 40, 50% of their day just driving because they're serving such a massive service area. Mike has zoomed in on his area, even though he's in a rural area, to really focus on a very small area that he can drive very quickly from. He's not driving 20 minutes to one property, then 15 minutes to another property and 30 minutes to another property. He's driving a matter of couple minutes between each property. You have much better route density. You'll drive to all of your customers houses much more efficiently. The fifth and final thing you'll have to do if you're going to have a side business that does $20,000 a month in addition to your regular job, is going to have accurate scheduling. The ability to know exactly where you're booked out until because you're using budgeted hours. And so the reason that Mike is able to stay so disciplined with his schedule and you have to if you're doing a side business because you can't just like work more on your business and then be late for your job and like things fall through the cracks. I think he's a truck driver and like, you can't just like not show up. You're going to need to have budget hours in every job. In other words, what is the estimated time it's going to take for every single project, every single task, every single job of my day so I can accurately build my schedule and know that I'll be able to get off in time to be able to go to work. So those are the five things. If you're trying to build a side business in the home service industry, whether it be lawn care or whatever, those are the things you're going to need. And I really hope that this channel helps you subscribe and we'll see you on the next one.