5 Things Lawn Care Businesses Must Do Over the Winter

Hey everyone, it's Mike Endes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today we're talking about the five things you should be doing this winter to make sure your business is ready for an explosive 2020. Before we get into today's show, a big thank you today's sponsor, which is Jobber. If you haven't already, go to getjobber.com IM Andy's on there. You can see all the comments I make about their software as well as why I think it's one of the best softwares out there in terms of ease of use and user interface is just super simple. So if you are typically kind of overwhelmed with software or you look at something like Service Autopilot, just like way too comprehensive for you, this is a great place to start. Check out getjabber.com im.

Andy and that ties into number one, the first thing, this is your winter checklist. Like as we roll it, we're coming up to Christmas right now. Maybe you're watching this in five years, so maybe you're not rolling into 2020, whatever year you're rolling into and you're going into the winter. What are the things you need to be thinking about? What are the changes you should be working on in your business? This is your winter checklist. Number one is upgrade your software for CRM. All right, so this kind of ties into Jobber and what we just talked about them as a sponsor but has nothing to do with the fact that important. I don't care who the sponsor is Jobber. No, there is lawnpro, there's Serviceof there's a whole bunch of other providers of software out there. I don't really care what you use. I care that you use it and that it works well for you and it has automations and these things really, really is going to systematize your business and push you in that direction. And so if you get the course, you get Lawn Pro as part of that, you can buy that for it's a lot cheaper. But then there's ways to upgrade it, right? So like that might be a great place to start, but then you might want to get Jobber down the road. Once you're really larger, you have automations and things you might want service Autopilot. So there's I'll put a link in the description for another video that talks about just software. But this is the time you want to upgrade your software for your business. The reason for that as your CRM, your customer, customer relationship management tool, you want to use this as the time in the winter to transfer all the data from your old CRM. Or maybe you're not using a CRM, you will need to transfer all that data into your new software system. All right, so customer data, addresses, phone numbers, what their pricing is, the square footage of their lawn, if you have custom fields, what services they want, you have import a lot of customer data into that new CRM. Especially if you already have a couple hundred or thousand customers, it's going to take quite a bit of time to not just import them in the new CRM, but then also like put in their contact details, put in the office notes and their billing details and all of those things. So this is the time you want to make the switch over, get used of how do you make an estimate in the new CRM? How do you send out and make a to do for an estimator and go do an estimate? How do you process payment, how do you send out invoices, how do you do routing, how do you do scheduling? All of those things are super important and you need to know them by the spring rush. Like you can't be waiting like, oh, I need to change my software and I'm gonna do it in like April or May. Like there's just no way you're going to effectively implement the new technology when you got a thousand other things going on in the middle of the spring rush. So I highly recommend as we go into winter, upgrade your software system. If you're thinking about it, do it now because I promise you in six months, when you're in the middle of the spring rush or, or in the middle of the season at all, you are not going to want to have to spend that time and that time is much better spent on sales, hiring and things that are really important in the middle of out in the trenches. So as you kind of retreat for the winter, if you're slowing down at all, most of you are kind of having a lull holidays. We got January, February. Maybe you got some snow, maybe you don't do snow plowing yet. This is the time to make that switch on your software. Get really, really good at how to use your new software system. Run through test accounts, see what happens if enter the wrong numbers into an invoice, see what happens if they pay by card, all of those things. And I highly recommend getjobber.com im andy if you don't have a CRM or if you're looking to upgrade it to something else. Number two, standardize your truck, your trailer and all of your Equipment. So this is the time you need to, like, go through your truck, go through your trailer and standardize everything. So racks should be all the same in all of your trailers. Or if you have a trailer set up, they should all be set up the same way. Same number of racks, same number of trimmers, same type of trimmer, same type of blower. The racks should be positioned the same place on the trailer. There should be the same number of tools in the trailers. There should not be like, oh, well, some of them have shovels, some of them have rakes, and kind of mix it up, and they kind of go in and out of the trailers into the shop. No, every single trailer should have the same setup, with the same equipment, with the same racks, with the same type of equipment. So not just like, oh, we have three trimmers. It's like, no, no, we all. They're all whatever they're called. FS110s or whatever they're called. Steel trimmers, I don't even know. But all of them should be the same. All of them should be standardized. There's time to label them as well. As you begin to grow. You want to label your trimmers on the date. Okay, so here comes like a tactical tip for you. All right? Get a label maker on the trimmer right behind where your hand is, because that's where a lot of debris doesn't get. Right behind your hand is where you want to put a label that puts it. You say the date that you bought that trimmer and then give it a name. Like trimmer 1, 2, 3, whatever. Give it a name and then what date you purchase that trimmer. The reason for that is because in three years down the road, when you have 40 trimmers and one starts giving out, you don't know if that's a four year old trimmer, if it's a one year old trimmer. If you bought it two weeks ago, you can kind of judge it based upon how it looks. But the reason you want to have the buying date as a label on that trimmer is because in four years, if it requires a $200 repair, trust me, get rid of the trimmer, buy a new one. It's just not worth it. Those hand tools can go out after several years, and it's not worth your guys pulling a string 3,000 times in the morning on a cold day. So standardize your equipment, standardize your trailers, Standardize your trucks. Like what should be inside the trucks. You know, do you have pylons? Do you have, you know, triangles for Hazards. Do you have a safety vest? What do you have in there? Should all be standardized. We try to keep as much as possible out of our trucks, like, completely cleared out, besides the absolute bare necessities. And then in our trailers, everything needs to be in the same spot, regardless of which trailer. Same type, same tools in every trailer. And then the hand tool, the little stuff we put all inside of a little toolbox. We don't want stuff floating around loose. And I'm against shelves in enclosed trailers because flat surfaces, whether it be in trailers, in the office, in storage, whatever, flat surfaces are like a magnet for clutter. And I find this time and time again when I go to people's shops, if they build shelves inside their enclosed trailers that, like, you know, all of a sudden hand gloves end up on there, string, pieces of string, someone's sweater, earmuffs, earplugs, like, it just becomes a clutter fest, right? And so either A, you clean that out all the time, like every week, just like clearing those out and making sure you stay on top of it, or B, just have everything hanging up on the walls and make sure that everything is standardized, labeled, you know, what should be there and what should not be there and set anything loose. You know, half a thing, half a bag of fertilizer or a mask or whatever it is laying around, you know, that needs to be gone, right? So this is the time to standardize it. Label those things. I know someone's out there going to comment, like, oh, I have enclosed trailers and I have a bunch of shelves and they're great. That's fine, that's fantastic. That works for you. But in general, when you have lots of employees and you have lots of different crews using that trailer, traditionally, flat surfaces become clutter fest. Okay, number three, the third thing, the checklist that you need to be doing this winter is implement new systems. So we talked about updating your software, but like other systems, it could be tracking your trucks. So if you're getting like a truck tracking system, there's a whole bunch out there. If you're going to implement that, if you're going to do a fueling system, either you have fuel on site or you have where someone comes on on Saturdays and fuels up all the trucks and the equipment so that your crew doesn't have to, maybe you implement a new system at your shop. How's it set up? Maybe your storage needs to be moved differently so that way it's a better flow in the morning from the trucks and the guys parking the trucks in the evenings. Unhooking the trailers. Where's the bottlenecks in your shop set up? If you have a shop, maybe you're just at your house. Where does your truck go? Where should it not go? Where's it best for the tools to be stacked so that quick in the morning to get them all into the truck and trailer and head out for the day. So really looking at your shop set up, what's that flow of traffic looking like? The time in and out of the shop, how can that be reduced? By moving things around in your shop to make it more efficient. So for example, last year we moved our collection bins because we have to collect clippings. We moved those from one side of our shop to the other side because it was closer to the where the trailers are at. And so the guys were able to, when they do their visual inspection in the morning, kind of make sure everything's in their trailer. They could just grab the bins instead of having to spend an extra 30 seconds driving over the other side, picking up the bins and putting in the back of the truck. So little things like that, those 30 seconds adds up and allows you and your guys to make more money. Another thing is meetings and off sites. So if you don't have team meetings, if you've never had an off site meeting, this is a great time to get started. Have a Christmas party, have an off site meeting where you share the numbers and open up the books on your business. It's a great time to do it. You don't have a bazillion people calling you for work. And it's a great time at the end of the year to be able to look back at 2019 or whatever year is in the past and be able to look and see how did you guys do, what are the finances, how much did you profit and share those numbers with your team. Have an off site meeting and get in the habit of having weekly meetings with your team. This is a great time to get started with that number four. The fourth thing you must do in the winter on your checklist is know your numbers. Okay? This is a great time to be able to look down, really buckle down and see what your numbers were in this past year. Look at your customer acquisition costs. If you did advertising, look at the lifetime value of your customer. You know, how do you figure that out? Or how much do you look at the annual value? That's what I was looking for, the annual value of your customer. Like how much is the average customer spending on you each year? How do you do that? How many customers did you service? What was the total revenue generated? Divide those two numbers. You're going to get an average number. You want to track that year over year. But how do you go from, if you're doing $800 a year on average per customer, how do you get that to a thousand? Well, you could really promote aerations. You could core aerations and fertilizations or maybe some mulch treatments. Or really you should have hit leaf cleanup harder. How do you do that and how do you make sure it's actually effective? Is knowing your numbers to be able to track and gauge what worked and what didn't? Knowing your numbers this time of year is absolutely important. You gotta dig into the P and L. Don't just print off a one page quickbook statement or whatever you use and throw it at your accountant this year and say, alright, do my taxes. Like you wanna dig into that P and L. Look at every single line item. Why is it that number? What can we do to improve it? What can we do to reduce the fuel expense? What can we do to reduce the insurance cost? Like this is the time to go and really get a second opinion on your insurance. Insurance, you have to have it. But it's a great time of year to go shop around and make sure you're keeping your agent and the company that you're with honest. You might be able to save $200 a month. You might be able to save a lot of money by thinking about these things line item by line item on your P and L and asking yourself, how can you reduce the cost on these things? Insurance. It takes a while to do an insurance audit and get all your information together and get all your documentation together. This is the time to do it. And is the winter. Okay, Number five is come to Landscape Summit. All right? Landscape Summit's in January. It's three days long. I host the whole event. I'll be speaking probably 80 to 90% of the time. The other time will be spent with my operations manager, my estimator, people who work for me. They're all gonna be there. And so they'll be doing Q and A. So if you wanna bring your team along, they can answer a lot of questions for your team. And sometimes it's good to bring your team along to hear the things that you guys talk about or you want implemented. They can from someone else. I'll be able to say it. The people who work for me as employees, they'll be able to say it. From an employee to you, your Employees, which sometimes is taken better. So I really, really recommend you come to Landscape Summit. Couple announcements about that. All of your expense when you bring yourself, your team, all your travel, the cost of the conference, everything involved with this trip is a complete tax write off. So you can write this off on your taxes as a complete write off and reduce your tax liability. Another thing is, another announcement is we are doing a shop tour. So on the Friday of Landscape Summit, we're going to take five buses, take you over to Augusta, Lawn Care, the local shop, and you'll be actually see and we'll do a tour around the facility, be able to see the efficiencies and the things that we do and why we do them. And a lot of what you hear about in the podcast, a lot of things we talk about even at the conference are going to make a lot of sense when you start seeing it in person, seeing how we do things and what we've talked about actually being implemented and being real life. Like it happens, it's real. So I'm really looking forward to this. Landscape Summit's huge. The reason I made Landscape Summit is because I went to conference after conference, leaving feeling like it was surface. It didn't go really deep, it didn't get into the numbers, it didn't get like strategy. It was just kind of like surface information that I could have like heard on a different podcast or I could have like read in a book or something. Like I wanted strategy, strategy, strategy. I wanted tactical things. I wanted to create a plan. And that's what I couldn't find. And that's why I made Landscape Summit. We had it last year, we're having it again this year. I really look forward to it. And I know you're gonna, it's gonna change your business, it's gonna change how you look at 2020. It's going to change the outlook of what you do with your business for the next 12 months. And so we're gonna be talking about a lot of different things. I made a video a couple weeks ago about the schedule for Landscape Summit and exactly what keynote subjects we're gonna be talking about. But I completely guarantee that this is going to change your business. So if you want to sign up for that, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference or just go to the homepage, click the conference tab, sign up for that. It's $299 per person, which is, you can compare it to every other conference out there. It's extremely cheap, it includes four to five meals, includes us taking you over on the buses includes all the training There we go to rent this massive facility. We prepay for all that. We prepay for all the meals. So that's what it covers. And so I'm really looking forward to it. I know it'll change your business. We will be talking about this winter checklist in part at the conference. But I promise you, these are the five things you've got to be thinking about this winter. You got to upgrade your software, your CRM. If you're going to, this is the time to do it. Number two is standardize your truck, your trailer and your equipment. Number three is implement new systems. Number four is know your numbers and the historical data of your business. And number five is come to Landscape Summit. I'll see you there. It's January 16th, 17th and 18th. Until next time. Be great, because nothing else pays.