7 Steps to Become a Lawn Care MILLIONAIRE & Why Most Won't Get There

I'm a perfect business owner. I never make a mistake. Everything I do is perfect, which, by the way, is impossible. And yes, we are human as owners. I'm amazing. It'll be like a gut punch to your face. I don't know how you can have a gut punch to your face, whatever that is. It will feel like.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes from Landscape Business. And today I'm talking about the number one thing that I see for the lawn care and landscape community that keeps people from their dreams, keeps them from growing their business, keeps them from being more profitable, and keeps them ultimately from making their business better. And this really comes after the past week being at Gie Green Industry Expo out in Louisville, Kentucky. At that event, I met hundreds, if not thousands of landscapers, talked to many of them, and I was, I'm always trying to just kind of get data. Where are, where's my audience? Where is the landscaping industry in general? And one of the things I first off realize is the fact that most people who watch my videos, even though a lot of the views come from mowing lawns and other types of videos we've done, the thing that actually people talk about and actually have changed their business is the business content. So I'm going to stay true to that in this video. And that is talk about the things that in your business I see consistently. And this comes from looking at Gie and talking to people. Where are they messing up? Where are the inflection points they're failing to capitalize on in their lawn care business? We say, what's an inflection point? An inflection point is a part time in your business that you should be able to grow, scale and expand the business. And I see seven different main catalysts for these inflection points and I'm gonna go over those really quickly. I've talked about them in previous videos, but I'm gonna talk about how at every single one of those stages, every single one of those seven inflection points in a lawn care business, that there is the common denomina of what causes a landscaping business owner to fail to get to the next step in their business. Everyone's like, I want to get to the next level. I want to get the next step in my lawn care business. Here are the seven different catalysts.

The first one is when you go full time, right? So if you're doing it part time, you're doing on the weekends, maybe you're doing it as a secondary job or side gig. Side hustle to your nine to five, when you go full time, massive catalyst, obviously, because you can spend more time on the business. Massive amount of an inflection point where maybe you're growing the business inflection point, it kicks up and it can grow much faster. The second inflection point is when you hire your first person out in the field, your first labor, you can literally double production, you can put them in the truck and you're off to the races. Then you do that a few more times. That leads you to the third catalyst, which is you hire office admin help, whether that be an actual office person and you get a building and a shop, or you get office help from a virtual staff, which I recommend, someone that answers the phone, someone that can do your invoicing, your billing, et cetera.

Number four. The fourth catalyst in a lawn care business I see time and time again is when you hire a salesperson. So now you've hired office person, you hired many people out in the field. Now you hire a salesperson. And a lot of times this can be kind of the same self person as the next, which is the fifth, and that's a manager. So fourth is hiring a salesperson, the fifth is hiring a manager. Sometimes that can be the same person. But hiring a salesperson again, you now are giving off all of the estimates. So all the estimating all the sales, which is the lifestream to the business, you now delegate that. You hire that position out. Massive catalyst to the business. Because now you get to focus on hiring and firing and training and all the operational sides of the business. Now if you continue to grow, that salesperson might become the manager or you hire another manager. You're not doing seven figures in revenue. You're having a general manager run this whole location without your involvement. They're doing all the hiring, the marketing, they're making all the buying decisions. And that's another massive catalyst to the growth of your personal wealth and to the business itself.

The sixth catalyst is going to be replication. Okay, we've done this successfully in one location. Can we do it in another and then another and replicate your success? This is again a massive catalyst and a massive inflection point to the growth of the business. The seventh catalyst to actually growing your personal wealth is now investing that money into the stock market, into real estate, and more passive streams of income outside of this mammoth business you've started to build, which has multiple locations and can replicate itself time and time again. So now all seven of these steps, all seven of these require you to trust and the ability to delegate to other people and not micromanage and not always be trying to get your hands into every single thing. And I no means am the best at this. I'm still learning this a lot. And I can say confidently, I've gotten better in the past couple years as I've been forced to do this. But the bottom line is you will not be able to know everything that happens in your business. You will not be able to hire every person. You will not be able to do every single little thing, answer every call, answer every single customer complaint. You will not be able to do that if you're trying to actually grow and scale the business. Now, if you're wanting to stay at stage number one, which is you're going full time, that's the highest level of inflection that you get to. You could probably not have the ability to delegate and not really require trusting other people in your business and growing your wealth. So without understanding the fact that you need those things, trust and the ability to delegate, you might never get past that first inflection point of going full time. That might be the extent to which you get to. Because you can never go to step number two, which is just hiring your first employee. And again, this comes from Gie talking to so many of you and so many landscapers, I should say that they just say, like, I can't trust no one else to do the good job, the job as good as myself. And so they never get past stage one because they're. They do not trust or they do not have the ability to delegate to that inflection point number two, which is hiring their first person. So they'll always state number one. So you may never grow your business past step one if you are not able to trust or delegate to other people. But you will certainly never pass inflection point number five of hiring a manager because you will never be able to go replicate. You'll never be able to. The stress test to every business is can you do two of them? Because as soon as you have two locations, you immediately means you can't be there all the time. And it's the ultimate stress test to your business. Because you cannot physically do everything in the business. Cause you physically are in different spots, you have different locations, and it forces you to depend and trust and delegate to other people.

I think the big unlock for myself because again, I had to go through this. It was not easy. It's not easy. It's further compounded the challenge of delegating and trusting other people when they're stressed Financially and when you're growing your business and there's money going out, trust me, I get it. I understand what it's like to be losing money and then seeing problems and issues that other people that you've hired are making and you feel like you can do a better job. But you have to realize that you will never, you will never get past stage five and it's likely you won't pass stage number one without delegating and trusting other people. You've got to realize that this is the unlock for me. Like when I started thinking about it this way, it helped me a lot. And you've got to realize that someone else doing 90% the efficiency as you, 90%, even 80%, if they can do 80% as much as you in an hour, or they can do 80% the quality as you as the owner, then you should definitely keep doing that. The math is completely skewed their direction. Right? If I can do 100% everything right, and I make no faults or errors, which by the way is impossible. And yes, we are human as owners and we do make mistakes, by the way. But even if you, let's assume I was perfect, I'm a perfect business owner. I never make a mistake. Everything I do is perfect. The thing is, if someone could do 80% of your job, they could get 80% of what you do in an hour done. And let's say maybe they're really efficient and they get just as much done as you, but they make 20% of the things they do as mistakes. They only get 80% done correctly. I would still rather go hire three people that do 80% of the match as I can do. Because guess what, if you accumulate 80% times three, it's 240%. I'm still at 100%, I'm perfect, I'm amazing, but I will never get past the first inflection point of being full time. Amazing awesomeness. I'd much rather go to stage two or stage three. Hiring multiple people that are 70, 80, 90%, maybe they're really good, 95% capable of what I'm able to do. And you've got to do the math. You've got to simply do the math and realize that hiring more people if you're wanting to grow your business is the way at which you're able to get past inflection point number one. Now, if you're not even at inflection point number one and you're still doing this part time, that's the big goal. But you've Got to realize, if your ambition is to go past that first inflection point, if you want to hire other people, if you want to ever get to the point where you're not selling every single job, when someone else is hiring the employees that are actually working for you, you've got to realize you've got. You are the biggest problem. You, as the business owner, are the biggest problem. And this is something at GIE I can't really say because people are coming up to you and hugging you and giving you handshakes and all the rest of it. But I very quickly can, after asking a few questions, can determine almost 80. I'd say 80% of the time, the business owner is the bottleneck for the growth of that business. The business will only grow to the extent at which that owner is able to delegate and trust other people. Period. End of story. And so when I hear someone says that they don't trust their employees, they went back to solo. Because employees making mistakes can't find employees. It's really tough to find employees right now. And everything is about the fact that really, they can't trust other people to manage their customers. They'll never get past stage number one. If I hear that people, you know, I could only get 200, 300,000, then, you know, I tried getting someone else to do the sales, but no one else really knows how to do our type of work. In mine, I'm a. That is the bottleneck. They do not trust, and they do not delegate to somebody else. If I hear someone that tries a second location and then they realize that it just falls apart. The business was doing great with one location falls apart too. What do I immediately think? Stage number five, they failed at inflection point number five. To actually hire a manager and allow someone else to make the strategic decisions in the business. Allow someone else to figure out what they're gonna purchase, Let someone else figure out who's gonna take vacation. Let someone else figure out scheduling and billing and invoicing. And people are going to make mistakes. You do too. We just justify them as business owners all the time. And the bottom line is, if you want to grow, you want to get past these inflection points at every single stage. It requires another level and another exponential level of trust and delegation to your people. If you micromanage, you constantly will not trust other people to and allow them to make mistakes and allow them to figure things out and allow them to do things on your dime. You will stay small. You will not be able to grow your business. You'll never get to investing your money at a level at which you're potentially probably have dreams of doing without being able to trust and delegate to other people. They will make mistakes. It'll be like a gut punch to your face. I don't know how you can have a gut punch to your face, but whatever that is, it will feel like because when that customer calls and you can't take care of them and you've allowed someone else to do the service and now you don't even know who that customer is because you allowed someone else to onboard them or, or take the phone call or set up the estimate and they made a mistake on the phone number and now there's a mistake on the invoice. That happens. And that's part of growing a business. That's part of going from one inflection point to the next. And obviously we're always trying to improve and make our businesses better, but it's going to happen. If you allow those errors and those omissions and those, those times, they will disappoint you. If you allow that to keep you from getting to the next inflection point, you will never be able to get all the way through those seven steps. And those are the seven steps to growing a really successful business and generating a massive amount of personal wealth. So I hope that was helpful. And I know some of these things are not easy to say. I had to figure these out. I had nights where I'd cry. I have nights where I couldn't sleep because I had not figured this out. And that is at every single stage, every single time I ran into a brick wall in my business, it was usually because I wasn't trusting other people or because I wasn't delegating to other people and allowing them to mess up and figure things out without my constant involvement. It is a massive unlock for me. If you can do it in your long care business, it'll lead to a lot of success. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and if you like this type of content, make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. Come visit me for landscape summit January 13th, 14th and 15th. We're gonna have a great time and it's gonna be a fantastic summit landscaping conference that you come visit. We'll see you there.