$54,000 in Monthly Lawn Care Revenue in Half a Year! (Chuck Fought)

Hey, everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today we have a very special episode again here of Roundup. A couple of you've been asking if you could hear from other participants and people that work with me directly from Augusta Lawn Care. So today I'm really happy we're have our first general manager on the show. And then next week I'll probably have Lee from the local shop, who's kind of worked from the field to an estimator to an office person and really going to be like, kind of give you some good perspective, I think. So. Really fortunate and happy to get that started. Let's address the first that I am not in the studio. This is a green screen. This is not anything you've ever seen before. It's not a new office or anything like that. But let's go ahead and get started. Without any further delay, let's go ahead and bring in Chuck from our Mooresville, North Carolina, location. Chuck, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

Hey, no problem, Mike. I appreciate it.

Well, so first of all, I want to. Wanted to kind of just. I know most people obviously don't know who you are on the channel, but I wanted to kind of introduce you and what you were doing before you even started doing Augusta Lawn Care in general. What were you doing and a little bit just kind of how you got into things.

All right. Yeah. So I'm Chuck, obviously the general manager here in Mooresville. So I'm originally from Ohio. I've never lived in Mooresville up until when I took this job with Mike in January, which at first was.

Which at first was a handicap. Remember that when you moved over, it was.

It definitely was. So before I took this position, I originally started at 20 years old. Right before I turned 21, I started with the state of Ohio Department of Corrections. So pretty much everything I've known in my adult life was centered around law enforcement, corrections, things like that. So I did. I was an officer for a long time. I worked in the offices. My last position was I was a financial supervisor in the business side of it, trying to get away from just the crazy schedule, the nights, the weekends, the, you know, 24 hours of overtime a week that they would mandate us to third shift. I have a young family. You know, I am married with my wife Brooke. And then I have two young boys that are 7 and 9. And I missed a lot of their stuff early. So on the side, I had started landscaping. In 2010, I started Chuck's Yard Care. Very simple, not a whole Lot did it for a season, maybe two. Wasn't, you know, profitable. All over Columbus, which is a major market, huge area, but I didn't have a zone. I didn't really know much, you know, at that time. I'm, you know, 24, 25 years old, just mowing grass. So I did that. And then in 2018, I stepped away from the state of Ohio, gave all of that up. Me and my wife sold our house, traveled for a year and bought a camper. Sold every other possession other than what we could fit in a couple totes in her grandma's basement. Traveled along. And then in May. Yeah, May of 2019, we stopped in Charleston, South Carolina. And then I started. Fought for Lawns, which is another landscape company in Charleston, South Carolina. Loved it. Told Brooke, this is eventually, this is what I will do long term. But we didn't know how that would play out. We got it up to. My last month was August of 2019. Got it up to it was either 85 or 80 $900 for the month in revenue by myself.

I had pretty much did all the mowing myself four days a week. Tried to do some projects, things like that, while also staying in a campground because we were, you know, obviously in an RV until we could decide, are we staying, are we going? All of that stuff. So did all that and then decided some things happened personally with our family. My father was diagnosed with heart failure, and then her grandfather has dementia. So we decided, you know what, let's go home for a little while. So we did that. And of course, what do I know? With an easy job, easy money, I go back to security, that kind of stuff. So I became a regional manager for a private security company and then saw your YouTube ad for looking for general managers, not knowing where they were. So I told my wife, I said, hey, don't think I'm crazy, but watch this video because I like doing different things. So she. She's not. It's another one of my ideas. We're gonna do this. We're gonna. Always trying to find something to do on my own, be a business owner, that kind of thing, which this kind of wasn't that, but it's turning into be that because of the, you know, the 3F program.

So did that. So she watched. It was like, okay, you're going to get a salary. We're going to relocate south back to the Carolinas, where we loved it. So that's kind of where we ended up. And now we worked through it. It was, you know, had two locations that weren't Charlotte, you know, in the Charlotte area. And then I ended up working out, you know, mysteriously through God's ways that we have now, this location here. And yeah, now we're in Mooresville, North Carolina.

That's awesome. I wanted to kind of speak to someone maybe listening that isn't necessarily going to go own their own business and they perhaps have a family, they need a little more stability.

Just kind of speak to the fact like you kind of did it one way, which is doing it on the side, you know, kind of doing it by yourself, that sort of thing. And then you've also done it more of a general manager kind of using the structure of another company to kind of grow into you owning your own business. Can you kind of speak to those. What would you say to someone that's kind of thinking about. But they, they do need that solid paycheck and they necessarily can't take a massive, you know, hundred thousand dollar risk on trying to scale something and not making profit right away.

Yeah. So honestly, that's the only reason we took this job ultimately was we had a steady paycheck, there was a steady income. You know, I am a salary employee. So in the spring rush when we're working till dark, it is what it is. And in the winter time when, you know, we are in that transitional zone, so we do have winter work. It didn't snow at all. January, February, March, here, there was no snow. So we will have work here in the winter. And you know, if there's not a ton of work, I still get paid the same. So it's very nice to have that with a family, to be able to then say, hey hon, I want to do landscaping, but what's the way to do it here? This was a perfect example for us to do it. And I think if you get with the right company and personally with me, I've loved every minute of Augusta. There's ways to promote and that I think that's what kind of highlights Augusta from other companies, especially talking to my guys and different things. My brother worked for a major, major brightview. So he worked back in the day. He became an arborist, quit because they worked him to death and everything. And there really wasn't the promotion. There was just kind of do what you can, come in work, here's your paycheck and we'll see you later. So the culture at Augusta is great for an employee. So, you know, we do have the, you know, the two year program. You work for Augusta for two years and you can move up and Promote to an estimator, to a general manager, or if you want to go, you know, start and run your own, you can and not have the franchise fee. So I think that, you know, Augusta builds that whichever direction you want to go, you can ultimately do that. And I think that that's a fantastic thing and a great thing. It was amazing for me because it gave my. I'm a little more of a risk taker. That's just what it is. My wife is not. So it's got to be. She's a planner. I. I could tell you everything we're going to do this weekend, next week.

She likes to have things planned. But I've come to love that, and I like that. So it's nice to know, okay, I have a paycheck, but we're taking a big risk to go do this new job, this new career in a new state, a new city. I have no idea. These people down here are completely different. Are they going to be the same or, you know, is it going to be same climate? You know, so there was some research that went into it, but with us, the. The safety net of I have a paycheck was there was great. Now let's go and actually focus on the business, growing it, whether it's, you know, buying this, which is the goal, or starting my own in another location. If that changes down the road, you know, I could do that factor or just stay a general manager. Those avenues are there, and I think for somebody as an employee, that's what is great about this company is there, the paths are clear. It's just, what do you want to do? Do you want to go in entrepreneurship? I have a guy now that I think eventually he's talked about owning, but he also has talked about being a general manager because of the security that goes along with it, and he likes that. So there are just so many different avenues that you can go, like I said, to promote to an estimator, to go to an office manager or general manager or be an owner and not have that heavy burden of, well, I got other franchise fees to get that, and you don't have those. You still have your initial startup through equipment, things like that. But you don't have to worry about the big upfront fee and the different things that Augusta provides for you, I think outweighs any other company.

So when it comes to, you know, what you've done, even the past, I guess, February, so we're looking at six months now. And, you know, I think a lot of the success you've had is attributed to the fact that you had experience coming into Augusta when it came to hiring and managing people. And like I've always said, you know, getting to 500,000 in annual revenue is going to be around if you can sell and then getting beyond that's going to be, can you manage people? And I feel like that's probably your strong suit in terms of managing people hiring. You know, really just looking at someone saying, like, are they going to be a good person to work with all the rest of it? Can you speak to that in terms of drawing on that experience that you've had in the past as a manager for someone that's potentially wanting to get in the business for themselves, but they're kind of questioning whether or not they really do have those skills required to hire, you know, manage money, all the rest of it. Maybe they do have some of the flaws on the sales side, but they do have skills. And I feel like looking at your. Your track record the past six months, taking, you know, now to over 50,000amonth in revenue, so quickly becoming profitable within four or five months, which our goal is six, and you did it in four or five. Can you speak to that experience that you've had in the past and how that helped you, whether it be as a general manager or as an owner down the road for someone that potentially might have some corporate experience and background?

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, like I said previously, I hadn't been a supervisor, so I managed a small office of four people with the state of Ohio. But then when I went into the private security for them, it was another franchise national company, similar to Augusta. Like I said, franchises. I had two markets. One that had about 20, 25 employees, and then the other market in Cincinnati, because I was from Columbus, the market in Cincinnati was 30 to 40, depending upon the season. So I could be anywhere from 45 to 65 employees at any given time. Hiring, you know, firing.

Didn'T really do so much of the financials, but I had that before because we had an office lady and they kind of handled their own money, But I did that with the state of Ohio. So there's a lot that kind of goes into it, but I think there's enough support from Augusta or anything you can learn. You can learn how to mow grass like that. You can YouTube how to lay stripes. And, you know, most of the time, your customers, they honestly don't care about your stripes. They just want their grass mowed. Show up, mow the grass, do your job. As far as hiring and things like that. That stuff you can learn as you go, but a lot of it can just be common sense. So if you come in and you treat people right and you explain to them and you kind of, you know, we had a couple of complaints. We didn't have any. Like, all. All month of June, we had probably two, maybe three the whole month. We've had three or four this week alone. You know, and yellow slips, as you call them, you know, and damage cases or what, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, it's just telling them how to fix it, but then also then remind them of the good stuff. So, hey, look, we've been crushing it. Don't let this one thing kill you. But we got to improve our, you know, our edging or our weeding and. Or want to be careful. Watch for sprinkler heads, whatever it is. So it's a. It's a little bit of that. But I mean, it's really just a lot of common sense of teaching people, you know, how to kind of just take ownership of all of their things. And it makes my job as a general manager, you know, that much easier, you know, and pay for performance is. It has its downsides because guys rush, but then it also has the upside of they slow down. Because I got one guy, he hates going back to Prague. He hates damage claims because he's all. He's money hungry, but you tell him. And now he's slowed it down and he hasn't got a complaint for probably the whole month. And he wasn't one of the ones that got the complaints. So, like, he realized, hey, I can run through and I'm still gonna make great money, but I need to slow down a little bit so that I don't miss things and I don't rush things. So there is some managing people, and that's where we're starting now. The guys have been with a little bit longer. I had to get. I've weeded through some employees. You know, I fired two people this season already.

But it's really. It's honestly not a hard thing if you use common sense and just kind of talk to people in a respectful way and just, you know, like, for this, because I just treat it as my own. If you take ownership as an. As a manager and say, you know what? I'm going to treat this if it's my money, if it's my equipment, if it's my business, and then you treat your employees the kind of the same way. Like if I was this guy mowing grass because I get out and get dirty with them. I mow grass with them and do treatments with them, lay mulch and all that stuff. How do. How would I want to be viewed? How would I want to, you know, to take care of equipment? You got to show them kind of the same thing. So I show them by doing. Is really how I feel you should do it.

And in your market, like you really scale it relatively quickly in terms of size and just revenues and getting it to profitability so quickly. And we spent probably about 5 to $6,000 less than we usually would on a corporately location to get it to that point. Talk to me kind of though about some of the hurdles in doing that. We skilled relatively quickly. There was a lot going on. You had to juggle, whether it be hiring, finding the work for those people. What were some of the obstacles or things you had to learn in the past six months?

Yeah, so first the work was easy to find. Like the work is here now. It's slowed down this month, but a lot of that, you know, people are on vacations, spending tons of money to go out of town. You know, you see all the reports of people spending tons of money on travel now and hotels and things like that. So it slowed down and I'm not so worried about that. But the work was easy. The work was here. You just had to show up and do it. Now finding the people in the beginning, I found everybody I needed. We were good. I lost a guy. Then I had to find the right guy. So weeded through them. But like, as you said, like, we. We started in February. I went to training the first week of February, came back, it was me and one truck. That was it. And we bought another truck to have a mowing setup. So then we had mo set up with trailerless. And then, you know, if everybody wants to know, Mike does run mowerless setups even in his corporate stores with zero turns.

Trailerless trailer list.

Trailer list.

That's one of the list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no trailerless setup. So we run a 48 inch standard beat in the back of a 1500 pickup. We have. We now have two of those setups plus our. We always call the guys call it the landscape truck because it's the one that we hook up to the dump trailer. And then we have an estimate car now. So it's. And we started nothing to where then, you know, basic. No revenue to where we started with Some, I think $11,000 to end February. 15,000, something like that. I have to go and look to where now we 54,000 last month and we just we keep gaining mowing customers so is kind of growing and progressing. The honestly the biggest hurdle was getting our equipment. We or I ordered an edger attachment for the steel convey system on the 111combi and I think the end of March and I just got it at the beginning of June for a straight shaft edger. Like that's crazy to me.

Yeah.

So but that's just kind of how everything goes. So getting the equipment has been a problem. Getting some supplies like mulch.

One of our suppliers that we consistently use that has the best price they ran out of brown mulch. Well brown we we use a ton of mulch here and pine needles. Then the pine needle guy caught fell out. He ran out. So then I was having to call down into Charlotte and a lot of guys didn't want to come up to Charlotte because we're about 20, 25 minutes outside of Charlotte and they just didn't want to bring the supplies up here. The orders were too small or whatever it was. So that that became a problem really was just a big supply issue. And then honestly not knowing the market. Not knowing the market was probably the biggest hurdle that I came across from start to finish. I didn't know pricing. I had no idea you know what they were going to pick as acceptable.

And that was really kind of the people here are very. You're either because it's a smaller town, it's like 40,000 people but. And I want to say smaller town but to me that's a little bit of a smaller town but it still has that the older Morrisville people and the newer Mooresville people. So learning the pricing the customer just this market was really my biggest struggle. My wife will tell you I complain like hey these people do this but these people do this and they don't like me because I'm. One guy called me a Yankee because I'm from the north. Like it was just like it was just a different market. But I. I feel like I've kind of gotten the pricing dialed in what's acceptable for certain.

Areas of town I guess you would say because Mooresville really is divided up and two separate markets how I kind of treat it. There's the more affluent side that's closer to the lake and you know multi million dollar homes that you know are. We're mowing you know today we mowed our a new client. It's a three million dollar house and then you go to the other side and it's 5 acres and $100,000 house. So they, they want different things. You know the farm people just mow go and get out of here and leave me alone kind of thing. They don't they're not real picky. The other side is every blade of grass has to be perfect edges crisp, you know, that kind of thing. So it's just learning the wants and the needs of the market that's really been the biggest struggle here in Moore's Own. Now we honestly could use more work.

For someone that might be watching that is a manager or is a number two or trying to support their owner or maybe one day wants to own their business but currently is an employee. What would you say to them has been some of the things that you've had to, you know, adapt to or have been challenging that the fact that you aren't the owner, whether it be dealing with employees or customers or even just the expectations of somebody else.