99 MINUTES TO DOMINATE SPRING RUSH 2023

Welcome everybody. Welcome to another live stream. Happy Saturday. Hope you're having a fantastic weekend. We're gonna get things kicked off. I'm enjoying playing with my toy here while we got intro music this morning. So if you have not seen a live stream with a call in show before, 361-733-3333 is the number and we're gonna be taking callers a day. This might actually be one of, if not the last live stream call in show we have before the spring rush to give your hard hitting questions that you must get answered before the spring rush. Make sure you call in today and get those answered. I have a couple questions that have been coming in on the chat so I'll jump in on those. But if anyone wants to ask a question, call the number below and you will get priority. All right, let's see here. Tar Heel Ariels says I've been watching you for three years or probably three years or however long you've been on YouTube. I'm still kind of confused on what systems are. What would be a system if I owned a lawn care business and how would I implement it in my business? I used to have the name William I on here. Okay. All right. So in terms of systems, I look at systems creating systems as two. The simplest two steps to that are simplification and standardization. So simplification would be taking out the unnecessary, taking out the waste, taking out the things that are encumbering you from being able to do to make things repeatable. And standardization is how do we do the same thing the same way every single time. So whether you have massive projects, you, you can still standardize. You might not be able to simplify, but you can standardize. And so those would be the two things that I'd be asking yourself. If you want to create a system for sales, how you standardize and simplify the process to where you could train it very easily, very quickly, very efficiently, and all the aspects of variability are removed. Whether that be types of services, simplification. We're going to take our 15 services and simplify them down to five. Or is it standardization? We're going to take these five services and we're going to have the same exact process that we follow every single time. We're going to use the same type of block, the same color of block, if you're installing walls. These are the type of things that you can do to create systems in your business and then create systems for every single aspect of the business is standardize and simplify. Now that might mean you're actually willing to give up some efficiency in order to standardize or in order to simplify. You might be willing to leave some money on the table and leave some revenue on the table in order to be able to cut out certain services that are distribute distracting you from your core competency. I guarantee you, if you just took your 20 services that you currently offer, and trust me, if you're in the green industry, you're literally probably offering 20 services. Bush trimming, weeding, fertilization, mowing, mulch installation, all these are different services. If you took the 20 that you offer and focused on your five core competencies, not only would you be more profitable, your marketing would do better because you'd be more focused on what actually the services you actually are profitable and efficient at. And it'd be easier to find employees because they would could be lower skill level because you'd only train them on five things and you'd get them up to profitability much sooner than if you were to have to train them on every single service. And they need to know everything to be efficient and profitable. So when you're talking about talking about systems, the number one thing I'd be asking is. And the first steps I'd be looking at is simplification, Standardization goes to that. All right, let's see if we got some other questions. There's a whole bunch coming at Mercy.

Okay. We got tons of questions. Okay. All right, I gotta get started at the top. If you had a limited budget for marketing in the spring, which methods would you choose? Second year, under 250k, I'd make sure I have a website in place and then I'd be making sure that I have two things. One, if I'm going up to specific neighborhoods, ever door, direct mail and yard signs, it's very, very cheap to be able to target the very specific neighborhoods. If you're trying to cast a wider net, probably Google and be using Google Ads to be able to advertise to people have intent to buy and are searching for a specific service. All right, if you have a question and you would like to get priority above all these other people asking questions, call this number right here, 361-733-3333. This is potentially the last, if not one of the last live streams and calls that we'll be able to do before spring rush. Because I'm going to potentially the next four to eight weeks will be the busiest weeks of my life. So we are not going to be able to have time for any sort of Live streams. All right, next questions. When you give profit share, are you going off operating profit or net profit before or after amortization and depreciation? I am going off of cash basis. All right, so if I am buying a truck for $20,000, that $20,000 is coming off on the P and L and that's what I'm using for profit sharing. If you start putting in things like.

Amortization and depreciation, your guys are not going to understand it and they're going to think that you're cheating the system and you're trying to cheat them out of their profit sharing. In my personal recommendation, in my personal experience, what I've seen work well, for your frontline team members to be able to understand and comprehend what's going on, you're going to want to ensure that you have.

You have cash basis. Yes, you could use accrual. That's what you're going to be using for your accounting, likely, and your taxes, etc. However, your crew is not going to understand when you start depreciating your truck over the course of five years or when you accelerate the depreciation versus not. These are the type of things that it's usually cash basis. They understand money in, money out. At the end of the day, they're getting a piece of all the extra money that's left in the bank account. That's the simplest way to explain it. All right, let me make sure that I have my phone line set up correctly.

Okay, good.

I do. All right. Just making sure because no one's calling in. And that's how it always works. No one calls in the beginning and then we're flooded with calls. I have to cut everyone off. So if you have a question, make sure you call in. All right, Mike is spring rush will be different this year with massive layoffs in tech industry. Thanks. So, in my opinion, there's going to be a shift towards the more professional operators. Here's why, number one, you have a decreasing amount of consumer demand. Less people need our services. So in theory, we should all get less calls, we should all get less people needing our services, et cetera. Because we're going into recession, there's going to be layoffs, things like that. However, at the same time that that is happening, it's going to be more important than ever to get customers that people have a great marketing strategy, they know how to have good branding, a good website, have the ability to be able to make an offer on their marketing and their advertising, get creative with the type of Door hangers they're putting up get creative with the type of emails that they're sending out. And so the people that do that I think will actually capitalize and become even stronger because the smaller operators will get wiped out. The people that are price competitive, always chopping price, they're in a race to the bottom. They'll continue that race even in a faster clip because now the consumer will be even more price sensitive. But for the operator that is, has been going after that customer, that expects, brand, expects professionalism, expects a higher type of service, then they're going to be insulated. That customer will be insulated from a recession. And so I think there's even more of a segmentation of chucking the trucks. And the operators that I don't use that terms disparagingly. I mean, the operators that are racing to the bottom in terms of price, they're unprofessional, they don't have a website, they're doing things under the table. They're going to keep going down because their target market, the person that's going after bargain basement pricing is going to get hurt very much so. Whereas the customer that is real estate, owns a bunch of real estate, has multiple businesses, extremely wealthy, retired, they're going to continue to need our services, they're going to continue to buy and they're going to go after the operator that is more professional, is insured, is and is making sure their team is adequately paid to be able to be professional and to be trained up correctly. Just my opinion. Where do you recommend hiring people from? Our base is $4 over our markets hourly, so pay as high, just need applicants. Yeah. So obviously indeed right now is crushing it. Facebook jobs, by the way, is going away. So if you've been advertising on Facebook, that is going to be going bye bye. They, I don't think they give us a specific date yet, but is going to be going goodbye indeed is going to be the place I think for most people there's definitely zip recruiter, there's a couple others. Obviously Craigslist is not a bad option in some markets. It crushes, honestly. But I'd say Craigslist and indeed is going to be the ones that kind of run away with this and indeed is the one running away with it from a corporate standpoint. So they're going to do really well. They've really refined their hiring, the whole process of applying as well as just getting the whole interview process. Now they've, they've conquered and things like that. So I think they're Crushing it. I would definitely say if you're $4 more per hour, try to incentivize things with other things than with things other than dollars and cents in terms of benefits, like paid time off, maybe do a gym reimbursement program.

Like.

So if they pay their membership for their gym, you pay them back potentially doing P4P pay for performance. So it's not just $4 more per hour they can make than the average going rate in your market. They might be able to make 8 or $10 more per hour if they're a go getter and they're hu going to attract all the best people doing that. So again, a massive proponent of P4P. All right, next question or next call is going to come from area code 216. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Hello.

Hey, how's it going?

So, yeah, man, I had a couple questions. I'm calling people about, like, calling everybody in my contact about landscaping this year. And I mean, I have objections and I just want to see how you get past that.

What's the objections you're hearing?

Just move on.

If they have somebody that they're worried about the price or that they usually do it themselves.

Okay. And so those are the three, the most, three most common. What do you say to the first one?

To, oh, that they have somebody.

The first. Yeah, let's start with that one. That's okay.

Yeah, I say that it's always good for a change that, you know, I asked him if there's anything wrong with their service or, you know, how their service is. And I mean, I basically just try to be honest about my business and.

Relationships with one of my goals.

But, and so are these cold calls. Are you knocking on their doors? What, how, what's the format of this outreach?

Yeah, it's cold. Calling everybody in my contact that I've had, you know, as a potential prospect. I just save their number and give them a call if they'd be interested in, you know, landscaping or snowballing.

Are you saving them in your phone?

Yeah.

Okay. And how many, how many contacts do you think you have?

500.

Yeah, so like, I would, I would highly recommend using email and text messages through a CRM to be able to reach these people because doing 500, I understand.

I don't have many their email addresses, so don't really.

So you're calling them? Okay. Yeah, like, I think that's definitely fine. You're reaching out. It's going to take you a while, but if you have time on your Hands, you could probably knock out 500 calls in a week. So like I would say if they're coming back with a bunch of objections or like they're having someone else, et cetera, you're probably going to have 80, 90% of people not be serviceable out of the 500 anyways. So I wouldn't necessarily, especially if you're calling them all, try to fight that battle if people are saying no. Right, because like out of, out of that 500, guarantee you that 450 are either doing their own service, they don't need the service they have someone else doing, et cetera. So I think just getting in their ear is important. Keeping them warm. This is why I'm a big fan of the email side of things. Because you can keep them warm with like a monthly email without having to call them all and make a full time job for yourself of calling them. Keep them warm. Right, because like you could, you can yes, absolutely, try to go over the objections or prove why you're better than the other service they currently have. But what's better is stay, keep them warm so that when they, that service does let them down or that service goes out of business in a recession that they then do call you because you've stayed in contact with them. And so I would probably honestly do my very best to get everyone's email going forward. And then, you know, even if you're reaching out to these customers, trying to get their, their email would be, would be beneficial. And if, even if you make that part of your estimate process, you like, you must have an email on file because that's how you're in the future going to be able to reach out to them in a less aggressive way and not take so much of your time, but just keep them warm because it might be two years of you sending the monthly emails before finally they actually need your services. So stop trying to sell the unsold. Like, like they're, if they're unsellable, there's no reason to spend your time, you know, trying just leave it alone, keep them warm, stay professional. And then down the road if they need your services because their current provider drops out or they, you know, have an injury and they can't do it themselves anymore, or they have a second house and they need, need someone, then they'll think of you because you, you've kept them in your Rolodex.

Okay, yeah, you, you've dealt with people that are like, hey, yeah, we spoke in and then my landscape, you know, stop coming.

So yeah, exactly. So be the person that they think of when that happens.

Okay? Okay. And I just have one more question. I want to see about re grading. Like if the, if the yard has like a slope, I could put some dirt in. Have you ever done any, anything like that?

Yeah, we used to a bunch of them back in the day. What's your total annual revenue right now?

At 50,000, 60,000.

And do you want to take this in the direction of more lawn care and recurring based business or are you trying to do more project services?

I say definitely for this year. Long care, repetitive service and then just try to, try to get more long term with those people, you know, get projects out of them.

Yeah, like I think, I think going into the regrading game is a completely different industry in my opinion, compared to mowing. Right. And so you're going to be talking about excavation, you're going to be talking about knowing grades, you're going to need to know about laser levels. You're going to be working with other contractors. Typically if they are doing a big hardscaping project or a pool or they're just trying to regrade their lawn. Like you're tearing out a lot of the lawn, you're having to haul away debris.

I don't need, I don't mean to cut you off. I, I wanted to see like, should I be accepting these jobs from customers or. It depends.

Like, I wouldn't recommend it.

I wouldn't recommend 50,000 in annual revenue. You know, one regrading job's gonna be 5, 10 grand. You're talking about 10% of last year's revenue in one project. Like those are the type of projects I see people lose their shirt on. And it's easy to get involved in that because like, man, a couple of those jobs, I could literally double my revenue. Yes, you could. But you're also going to need more equipment, more experience, bigger trucks to be able to haul this debris away. So it's just, it's a complete different ball game. I'd just be careful with trying to sprint before you've really started a jog. Right. You've got, started like you got 50,000, that's definitely something. But like, you know, do 150, do 200, then maybe you start to focus on these regradings. When you have the capital and the experience and you've been jogging before you start trying to sprint, which is really what that kind of project is like. Regrading is no monkey business. Like you really got to know what you're doing when it comes to Bases, the grit of the, your compact base level and stuff like that and you know, really figuring out grades. So it's definitely a very much more complicated than mowing. So figure the mowing side out, figures the business side out, hiring, etc and then jump into something like that, I would say in a couple years.

Okay, for sure. And I want to say to everybody on the live stream, you know, we're dedicated, we're dedicated, we're looking to grow. So salute to everybody on here.

Awesome. All right there. Yeah, take care. All right, next call is coming from 5, 6, 3. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. I got a question on advertising for mowing and treatment. So basically I want to promote a sense of scarcity in my advertisements. And when I do this, when I send out a print mailing piece, I want to give, you know, give that sensitivity. But I don't want to do it in a phony or full of crap kind of way because it is kind of a, you know, it's a commoditized product in many ways. And I'm just wondering what the best way to go about that is. What maybe what verbiage to use or how you would do that.

What service are you trying to pitch?

Mowing and treatment.

Okay, and when are you going to be doing this? Marking can be do you know?

Yeah, the first one will be March 10th.

And is every door direct mail or door hangers?

Every door direct mail.

Cool. So what you want to do is two things. One, the main scarcity you have is time and the second one is capacity. Right. So the first one you can use is, hey, at this specific time we start booking out or we stop taking customers. Right. So you can say for example, selling spring cleanups. A great way to do that is say, hey, our mowing season starts March 1. We you must get your spring cleanup done before February or done before March or otherwise you're going to be three months. We're going to be three months booked out because we get really busy. So that's going to be your timeline when it's like, hey, like there's a certain cutoff time. The second is your capacity. And the biggest one that we can use in this industry is we have X amount of spots available on our schedule. Now if that's not true, I'm not a huge fan of using that. However, if you actually know your capacity like we talked about, conference and like you actually understand like, okay, I can actually realistically get 120 customers. I'm currently at 90. Right now I have 30 spots available. And you actually, then you can use that in your market. Okay, we have 30 spots available. They go quickly. We're going into the spring rush, get on the schedule now. So that sort of scarcity definitely helps as well. So I would say the capacity, like how many jobs you can take and secondly the timing of when you take certain projects or services. Because like for example we don't take big projects during spring rush. So like if someone wants their product done, we push them hard in January and February to get it out of the way to try to like just know that hey, during spring rush you can't get it done. Does that make sense?

That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. I got one quick follow up question on that too. So with my, my one click estimate at the end of the month, would you recommend sending that out and then several days later sending out another email saying that we've, we've, we've sold out, essentially just letting all the customers know to kind of get them ready for the next time we do a one click estimate.

The only reason I wouldn't say to send the, that you were sold out is that you are going to have attrition and you'll need to fill those spots. Right? So you might get the 120 but every week you're going to lose one or two because people move, they pass away, they are unhappy with service and you're going to need a little bit of a stream of people to still come in and fill their spots and it'll be ingenuous then at that point if you're accepting them, they won't understand. So I would not necessarily send that email out, especially three days later because you doing an email three days later, you're going to start, people are going to start unsubscribing from your email list. And so I would just focus on use the scarcity in that initial rush in and then if people ever ask you about it, you should be able to be honest with them. Like hey, we lose customers periodically because they move, they sell their house, et cetera. And we still do have a couple more spots available.

Okay. Okay, that makes perfect sense. Thanks a lot, Mike. I really appreciate it.

You got it. All right. Next caller is coming from nine seven two. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hi, thanks for taking the time to do this. I've got an interesting question that I don't think I've heard you talk about. On the front end only on the back end is charging for estimates that come out and give an estimate to help get rid of target.

Yeah, absolutely.

You've talked in the past about working on the back end to raise your prices to have a profit margin, but what about on the front end? Because I do mowing in small and large projects, and I've got a lot of tire kickers for people that just aren't that ready to go about it. So just trying to find a way to weed them out. Because even if I ask qualifying questions up front, people will say, oh, I've got a budget or this. I got some things that are ready, but they really don't.

Totally. So two questions. Number one, are you trying to grow the business very quickly right now or is it more focused on profitability?

I'm kind of in the middle. So last year we grew a lot. We went from 600k to about 1.2. And this year that's gross concerns with not knowing how the. Yeah, it is. But this year I don't want to. I don't think I want to get anymore. I want to focus more on the profitability side. If I could grow also, I would. But big shout out to you guys for website. Last year we were doing maybe three or four estimates a week, where I'm doing three to four a day today because our website's ranking so much better because of long care media. And so.

It'S just turning into February. I'm doing way, way more. I can only expect the spring is gonna be more, so I'm not gonna be able to handle everybody. And I'm the only estimator.

Mm. Yeah. So two. So first and foremost, I can't.

And I can't expand crews.

Right.

I don't have the people for that.

Okay, that's important. That's the capacity question. Great. Okay, so here we go. So first and foremost, thank you for the shout out for long care web design. Appreciate that. Note that that's going to get even more leads this year. So your second spring rush, We've seen across the board a doubling of leads on all our websites. So that's going to increase substantially. If this is your second year of the website, Is this your second spring rush of the website?

Yes. So last year, I believe we started in January. So we went through this fold last year. Oh, no, no, it was in August. So it was like August is when we got the website started. And I think like November or so is when it went up and then, you know.

Yep. So that was your first one. This is your second. Yeah. So your second spring rush. Is going to be significantly more. So I, I this in this case, that's when you might want to actually charge on the up front. Right. So a charge for the estimate and then you could do it as one of two ways. A, you just charge across the board for a quote to come out to their property or two, you simply say, you know, you charge a higher amount but then it goes towards the quote if they accept. Right. I'm actually in the camp if you're going to do this, to do it on the upfront, like hey, we just charged to come to your property. Right. And it's a service that we provide. We do an inspection and we look at everything you need. You're going to eliminate a lot of the tire kickers like you said and you're probably only going to get customers that have already known your service is reputable and they've been referred to you. They have word of mouth, their friends and their family, they've used you. Those are customers you're going to get because they're, they're the only ones that will pay for you to come out. Right. And what you could do. Go ahead.

One thing about that, we don't, we. So we do have a lot of reviews. We've got about 30 something, five star reviews but we don't really get any people that refer us.

But, but this is the thing when.

Everyone that we get is new.

Right. But when I say referrals, I'm also talking about people just knowing your brand, like seeing your trucks, they search on Google and they see you in native search. Those I would almost, I just consider that like referrals, like people that have come to your site, right. They found you without you paying for them. That's what I should say. You aren't paying for these leads. Like last year for example, what did you spend on marketing do you think?

Probably about 70k.

Yeah. So that's what I would be chopping out. Right. If you chop that 70k out, honestly, your leads, even though you're in your second spring rush, will be massively diminished and then you'd be able to. The leads that do come in are going to be much more qualified. They're going to be your referrals. The people find you on native search and that 70k is going to be like literally can go in your pocket now and then it'll bring your leads down just organically in that manner. But in terms of my general thought process is to not charge on the leads. Here's why. Because I'd rather get them in the door, prove my service, and then be able to raise prices on them. Whereas if I would have just from the very front say, hey, I'm gonna charge you $80 to come to your property and just say hello, I might not get them. Whereas if I get them in the door and they accept, I might be able to raise their prices three times over the next 10 years and make them an extremely high lifetime value customer in that time period. The only reason you would ever.

That's kind of conundrum. I'm in. So this is what I have.

Go ahead.

I'm in a little different. So I feel like what are. The reason this is. What's difficult is because I don't have the capacity. I don't have the people to get either another estimator or another crew leader and experienced crew guys that'll be able to expand this. And if I'm doing, I can do probably eight appointments a day. So if I'm already half that right now, Spring Ross, I'm gonna have too many. And I'm not marketing right now. Yep, that's all organic.

So what's the bigger capacity? The ability to do more estimates or the ability to get the work done?

Okay, so I would raise your prices. I would raise your prices dramatically. Because what you're going to do, I don't.

I have a very low. So it's. I have a very low closing ratio. I close maybe one out of eight. I mean, I. I'll do a full day of appointments if I'm booked out to close one, but.

I know. But if you're at capacity. But if you're at capacity and you're worried about taking more clients on, like, from the labor perspective, you're at capacity regardless, you should raise prices. Because even if you lost 15 or 20. I'm talking about existing customers. Not new customers. Existing customers.

This is more. Okay, so I might have misspoken. So it's more the estimator side. I can't see this many people.

Got it.

If it doubles, let's say, do you do any crew. I can ask on the crew. I can make it work.

Got it. Do you do any of your estimates over the phone? Like mowing stuff or just. This is most landscaping.

All my mowing over the phone.

Got it. Okay. You're talking about landscaping.

I'll get pictures. Cleanup. Yeah, landscaping.

Can you simplify these services that you're doing to be able to train a lower level, skilled estimator?

I've got a guy that can do it. He's Got more experience than I do. He's just also the guy that has more experience doing the work. So if I take him out of the field, the crew is going to be limited.

So this is, this is the conundrum.

I just don't have the guy, so I can't plan for it.

Yep, this is exactly what happens with most companies when they get above a million. And that is that it's so difficult to find a salesperson that can be adequate enough to replace the owner. And if you're closing one out of eight at your level, the fact is there's probably everyone's going to be at 1 out of 15. Like they're. You're that good, right? And you have all the years of experience, you know how to sell, you are the owner. There's probably no one going to be as good as you. So in this case, what you have to do is create systems around the sales process. If you're ever going to get out of daily operations, if you're ever not going to be the salesperson, you've got to have systems. And like we talked about earlier in the call, that means simplification and standardization. And that might mean looking at your. All of your services and be like, hey, we're going to cut five services. Like, this is what we did over the course of four years to get me out of daily operations for my existing. From my very first location, we used to do artificial turf grading, excavation, we had massive dump trucks. Um, and every year we just took away one or two services. Until last year, we took away anything with blocks. Like, we don't do any walls or retaining walls, and we used to do tons of them. And we just, every year is chipped away. And the reason you can't do it in one fail swoop is because you'd cut your revenue in half. And that usually won't work because your, your overhead structure won't support that and you'd be unprofitable. But if every year you just slowly chip away at the services that are most complicated and, and then what happens in two or three years you'd be literally be able to get someone that's worked with you for six or eight months and, and pull them in the estimator position, assuming that they have a decent personality because they reduced the amount of services and then the simple services. And I say air quotes on that because you can have very complicated services, but standardize them. It's easier to sell those when you only have five or six services versus 20 or 25.

Right? Okay.

And then I actually.

Charge for this.

Charge for the estimate.

Yeah. Or have people booked out a week to wait and see if they can meet with me.

I would personally.

Not now, but in a month.

Yeah. I would personally take a look at, you know, obviously you're trying to qualify them and everything from the office perspective before you even get to the estimate. However, I would personally make sure the services that you are willing to offer are even on that estimate. Right. Because if immediately you cut out half of your services, you just reduced how many estimates you're getting by half and they're never even going to make it on your schedule. You just solve the problem there. And then if you're also having problems with capacity on the labor side, you raise prices, lose 10, 15% of your customers. Now you're more profitable. You spend that money now on training another estimator. Take your spot. And now they can do it because you simplified services and then standard. Then this next third part is standardization of the estimate process. How the notes go. You have a template where you copy and paste those. They only need just a few things. So I would be focused on that. And this is why most operators get above a million and then realize like they're tied to their business and they're the ones almost always doing all the sales. And the estimating is because they have so many different services, they can never hand it off to anyone else with any level of experience. And if they do find that person, they're paying out to wazoo for them.

Okay, and then one follow up question that's a little bit different I haven't heard specifically, do you guys charge your hourly rate to include your load up and unloading or is it just when you're on the job site?

We just charge when we're on the job site. But our budgeted hours, we accommodate the fact that they're going to be unloading and loading. But we never tell the customer our hourly rate. So they just see a dollar amount, they accept that. But in terms of like how we, how we schedule and you know, schedule the guys on P4P, we assume that there's drive time, unload time, etc.

Because like for projects, if I think it's gonna be one day and it's a nine hour day to start to finish, I charge for nine hours times 80 an hour.

Yep.

So is that what you do even though we're only on job eight? Okay.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I appreciate it.

Good stuff, brother. Best of luck. All right, next caller is coming from 509. Welcome to Show. Sorry for the delay.

Hey Mike, thanks for taking my call. My question is right now I have about $70,000 worth of work lined up for the springtime, but I have no employees. All my employees, they have, they have left, moved away so I could keep hiring and training, but I'm in the field all season hiring and training people. So my question is, should I sell my landscape company and start a brand new mowing company or should I subcontract my work and then start to train for mowing? What do you want to do, like a mowing division?

I want to build up a company. So I think that, you know, mowing would be, would be the best route for that.

Okay.

Why can't you, can't you train someone up right now before that work needs to be performed in March or April?

I could. I just feel like it's like consecutive. Every year I'll train somebody up all season and then like at the end of the season, they stick around for maybe like a season or two. And then I'm always retraining for. Because we do hardscapes, patios, retaining walls, water features. So it takes a lot of my time to be in the field and train people on that. And then once I get them to that level where they can kind of, you know, start to work on their by theirself, they end up, you know, usually moving away or something. So.

Yeah, so one of two, I think a, either A, you raise your price to the point where you can pay them substantially more so they don't leave like I'm talking 5 to $10 more if they're a skilled hardscaper and. Or secondly, you simplify the services you're willing to offer so you don't require that high level of skill and you'll, you're okay with them only staying with you one season because you can train someone else up in their place after just, you know, a week or two worth of work. If it's taking someone three months to get them fully trained up in this labor market, it's gonna be extremely difficult to ever be able to make them profitable because there's constantly. You're gonna be churning and burning through employees.

That's what I'm. That's where I'm at right now. Yeah, so.

So what I would personally do is. Yeah, you know, because these, because these contracts, you really could care less if you keep them at this point. You're considering subbing them. I would potentially go find that higher, offer them more money and, and then go to these contracts and be like, hey, I've got to charge X amount more because of cost of materials, cost of labor, everything's gone up and if you lose some of them, who cares? Maybe only 50,000 of that actually comes through. But now it's going to be done at a much higher profit level and you'll be able to handle it with the person that you are now training and know that you're able to pay them 5$10 more per hour because of the increased, you know, the increased cost you've passed along to the customer.

Okay, so if I want to add a lawn care division to my company, I would be training them in the hardscape and then I'd have to also, I believe, hire somebody else to start training them in mowing.

Not necessarily, because like with mowing, mowing, if you have a decent training system in place, within a week or two, you should be able to be up and running and very profitable with someone who's very green. And so there would be no problem with having project based work. And then they also figure out mowing. If someone can figure out building a retaining wall, they can figure out how to mow grass. And so the training perspective isn't going to be the problem. The thing is, when you have a skilled laborer that can also do retaining walls and pave your patios, the fact is they're typically worth more than what you can pay and afford to pay doing simple services on lawn care. So that's why you got to be careful with doing cross training at a small size company like you're at to where, you know, guys are cross trained. Because if like someone can do paver patios, they can literally make $30, $35 an hour. Well, you can't afford to pay that unmowing. So just be careful with that aspect. And that's when the second part might come into play. And that is you simplify the services that you're performing in order to be able to accommodate a shorter training cycle. And you're okay with a little bit of churn and burn.

Gotcha. Yeah. Cause that was my problem last last couple of years is if I paid somebody 30 to do a patio, I couldn't have them go mow lawn for that rate. So it was kind of. So maybe I should just plan on hiring two people because right now I have no employees. So maybe two people, one for mowing and then one for the hard states and kind of train them both. Is that what you'd recommend?

As long as you think you can get Enough leads and enough work coming in, then. Yes.

Okay.

Because. Because the problem is, like, you're considering doubling your capacity in terms of labor. Just make sure you have enough leads, enough work to be able to keep both of them busy.

Perfect. Thank you.

You got it. All right, folks, we have a hundred people on the live from exactly 100. Don't leave. All right, I'm going to go get my laptop charger because this thing is dying. If as long as when I come back there's still a hundred or more people on the live stream, then we will continue. So hold the phone. Hold the phone, people in the waiting list. I know there's a whole bunch of people waiting. Just give me a second.

Oh, we did it.

Let's go.

Oh, man.

Exactly 100 down to the exact. I love it. All right, let's keep rolling. Next caller is coming from.

229. Welcome show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike, how are you? So my question for you is we changed up our billing and basically our entire recurring system for our mowing route. So what we had before was a bill per service. But the issue with that was say we're charging for a weekly service and the customer may put it off for a month during the winter, but in our market we still have leaves falling and things like that. So it almost takes. It takes the exact same amount of time during the winter in order to be able to do that service. So what we have changed is we changed over to a subscription based mowing. And so we only take weekly. We only have card on balance. That kind of allowed us to do all of those things that we were wanting to do separately, all in that one package. So everyone is subscription based. It may be 100, 200, $300 a month per person. And then we charge however much their monthly rate is. We bill that monthly. We charge that monthly rate to get started. So we have a $25 customer acquisition cost. And then if we acquire them for $25, say we have a minimum of $100 monthly cost that we recoup. So basically every customer that signs up, we get four times the return without doing anything just for signing them up. But my question for you is, should we cut out projects if we haven't found a way to make those profitable yet? And should we sub those out? Should we recommend other companies? Should we continue doing those and just figure out a way to make this profitable and hire more team or open and like separate the two divisions? I don't know.

What was your total annual revenue last year?

250.

Okay. And why do you want to add projects?

So we're currently doing projects, so we're looking to possibly cut projects. And so what we have right now is two to three days of recurring mowing, and then we have maybe three days of project for our team. But what we're looking to do is possibly cut those projects, dump the money into marketing, and then we can recoup that amount quickly and hire more team and purchase more trucks and things to account for that. Because we're trying to go to 2 million this year.

So you're trying to go to 2 million this year?

I don't know. What.

Yes, sir, I would not recommend that. Why? Why are you going from 200,000 to 2 million? What's going to. Like how much?

We're trying to go to 10. Go ahead, do what? We're trying to grow to 10 million by the time I turn 20. So currently I'm 16. We're aiming for 2 million. And so I wanted to try to grow this location.

To the point where it's large enough and we can just swap in a profitability mode this year. And then after this year we can begin opening up other locations and we can kind of learn the systems on this one to know what works and just kind of plug and play.

So you're saying we. Is it just you as the owner right now?

We have two. Two people right now that are full time.

Okay. And I mean, like, in terms of ownership, are you top and like, there's no other owners or is someone else involved?

Yes, sir, that's correct.

Okay.

Yes, sir. It's just me.

So let me. Look, I do not want to be negative and I appreciate the hustle, but this is my problem is going from 200,000 to a $2 million business is probably going to require at least 2 to $300,000 worth of acquisition of just your trucks and equipment. Like, do you have that kind of capital?

Okay, we don't.

Right. So the reason I'm saying this is because what I don't want you to do is set yourself up for. I'm going to make $2 million this year, and then it comes out to 400,000. You feel like a failure because that's like 100% growth and very admirable and incredibly amazing at your age. So I don't want to. I don't want you to set up these goals too much for your. For what is going to become a failure in your mind. But it's going to be a phenomenal success if it's actually step back and taken a look at from a much more objective standpoint. And so there's just no way without the capital that is going to be or massive amounts of debt that you're going to go from 200,000 last year to 2 million this coming, this in 2023. I appreciate the massive aspiration, but I don't want you to quit because in August you realize you're going to make 500,000 and you're like, oh man, I'm way shorter. My goal. Right. So I would take a step back. I would do a projection for this year every single month of what you're going to do in revenue. And then ask yourself, in order to hit these revenue targets, what am I going to have to buy in terms of trucks, equipment? How many people am I going to have to hire? You're going to upgrade your shop massively, even if you double in size in revenue this year, let alone 10 exit. Right. So I would be much more objective about the size that you're going to grow this year. And whether or not you do projects or mowing is inconsequential. Right now, what I'm trying to prevent you from doing is setting a goal so high that you do an amazing job as a teenager this year, and yet you see yourself as a failure because you fall short of your $2 million goal. And so I don't. I'm not saying you're not capable of that. I'm just making sure that you set realistic expectations of amount of capital that's going to be required. And experience that is requ to build a $2 million organization is pretty intense. Does that make sense?

Yeah. No, I completely get it. I like shooting for big goals, and so sometimes I hate them, sometimes I don't. And so honestly, if I don't hit it, it won't kill me. But it's also something where I don't want to get halfway through the year and say I am for 500,000. I don't want to get halfway through the year, hit 500,000, then kind of sit back. So I try to aim for whatever's unreachable. So last year we were at 10,000 at starting of last year, and we wanted to hit a hundred thousand by the end of last year and we hit 250. And so we grew by. I don't know what would that be, 2,500% or 2,500%, something like that. And so that's just kind of the number that we set to aim for this Year, when I say we, that's just all of us, workers included.

Okay, cool. So your question is, is, should you split the divisions? Is that kind of what your question is for projects versus mowing?

Yes. And so like if basically if we have a profitable mowing system and we can do shrub trimming, things like that should be cut out because we're currently. We don't have the equipment, we rent the equipment for projects just because the maintenance on the equipment doesn't make sense to purchase it at this point. And so before we grow that massively, would it be a lot better just to focus down on mowing and get that so perfected that with all of our advertising and everything, we can hire someone because right now we have a week or two turnaround time before someone's profitable. And so just to keep that system and just grow mowing and not even offer anything past something that we can do with hedge trimmers and like obviously spreading, straw edging, bed weeding, stuff like that we can offer. But should we cut out all of these retaining walls and sod jobs? And like for instance, this weekend we had a $3,000 sod job and I was out laying sod till 2 in the morning because it's raining and we just don't have enough time to do it all.

Yep. Yeah. So my recommendation would be like, just step back and realize your age. And I'm not into age. Like obviously I started when I was really young too. But realize that the number one thing you don't have right now is experience. And so what you should be focused on is getting experience, because that's your lack of. And so in my opinion, building the organization size. Because if you have aspirations to grow a $10 million business, what you need is management experience. You need to learn how to grow with other people. And that's going to be much done, much easier by growing a mowing and simple service business where you have a bunch of employees, you got to train them versus trying to also then stack on top of that, the fact that you lack experience of excavation and grading and a lot of this equipment, you don't have the equipment, you're trying to rent it. So that's going to be a whole different ball game, a whole different business, in my opinion, compared to like what the skills you're going to be required to have to just manage the team, manage the people, do the marketing. So in my personal opinion, I would focus on what was work is working well with your subscription model for mowing and simple services. And that means you can do push trimming, you can do pulling weeds. You might even do some fertilization or mulch installs. But you're not going to do these paver patios and stuff you got to rent massive equipment for. And then focus on getting the skills required for marketing, hiring, building a team, managing them. That's what's going to be useful down the road when maybe you add projects to go from a $2 million business to a $10 million business down the road. But I would focus on those skills that are going to be much more.

Transferable as you begin to grow the company.

Okay, so with that, with those leads that are still coming in for projects, should we just tell them that we don't offer that or should we refer someone else? Or what would you recommend? What would be the most professional way to handle someone that we've marketed to, marketed sod laying to for the last year? And when they call for sod laying, what's the best way to kind of tell them that we don't offer that anymore?

Yeah, it's rare that someone saw an ad eight months ago for sod Lane is giving you a call because of that, because they didn't have the need back then. It literally was white space in their brain. So as long as your current marketing cuts that out as well as your website doesn't offer that as a service anymore, and you're very clear on what services you do and do not offer, then you just weed out whatever gets through on the ads and on the office side, like the phone call side or even lead intake from your lead estimate request form. So just, just weed them out. Realize that that's going to be more at the beginning because people have seen you're working out, doing these type of projects, but literally within six months, you will get way less of those type of leads coming in because you wouldn't have been doing the work, you wouldn't have been posting about them on social media. And so that those type of services will just diminish in the amount that you're getting in terms of leads.

Should.

We find a company in town to sell those leads to?

Or like, I would find a person.

I would find them to. Or just tell them that we don't do it.

I would find a hardscaping company that you kind of.

Where I'm at is like, yeah, I.

Would find a hardscaping company that you can refer them to and then just tell that hardscaping company like, hey, here's the agreement. I will give you all my hardscaping Jobs. If you can just give me all of your mowing customers because they're getting the same thing on there, which is they're getting all these mowing customers and people asking about their service. Just, hey, can you guys just hand those all over to me? I'll hand you all my leads. That's going to be the cleanest way to do it. Don't try to do subbing. Get five or ten points on something. You're going to have all the headache and all the liability. And again, your focus is going to be scaling up your organization on the, on the lawn care side.

Okay. All right. All right, brother.

Best of luck to you. Take care. Our next caller comes from 806. Welcome the show. Thanks for coming on.

806.

Yeah, I can. How's it going?

Hello. Hey, Mike. My name is Frank Garcia. How are you doing today?

Fantastic.

Hey. So I just wanted to kind of detail my business plan to go full time. I wanted to see your thoughts and opinions on that.

Cool. Let's do it.

Okay. So.

Last year I pulled 60k, just working pretty much three days a week. And this year I'm going into making just 100% profit. My equipment's paid for, my trailer's paid for. No debt on anything.

This is my passion. So I wanted to see, you know, spending this year to pay off personal debt and then in a my second year fully into the business, going full time and leaving a $90,000 a year paying government job.

Cool. So you made 60,000 from the business, you made 90,000 from your.

Other job with the government and now you're thinking about going full time and do you think you're going to do that this year?

I think that I can pull more this year. I've already got more customers lined out and I'm offering services of spring and fertilizing that I'm licensed for. So I'm made it to where I'm only taking on new customers that also sign up for spring and fertilizing and that's at 100 success rate right now. But we owe this year about 20 to 25,000 in debt. So if I paid off all of that this year personally and then went.

Next year, do you see that as being a good, legitimate plan for life?

What does your wife think about this?

She knows it's my passion and for her, she sees me being at home more and she just sees my overall happiness with this, with this work.

And is she supportive of doing this when there's still debt?

Yes. Even when there's still debt. I mean, she, she even helps me on the sides as far as like getting supplies for me from the local landscape shop, getting just, you know, anything for me that I need and coming to a job she'll do to help out Anyway.

Then I think, then I think you kind of answered your question yourself. Right. Because like you yourself want it. You think that financially you can check the boxes to make it work and then most importantly, you have the support system to be able to make this happen without a whole lot of bumps in the road or opposition. And that is your, in this case, your W. So as long as you're both on the same page there, I think you're good. You know, I think the more conservative route might be to say let's take one more year, keep kind of grinding this out. Maybe I only make 70 or 75, but I'm still getting my paycheck so I can pay off this other debt. That'd be like the most conservative route. It's whether or not you can, can stand to stay with your current position in your nine to five for one more year. Right. So that, that's a personal decision. I think that's the decision has to be made with your family because they're the ones that are kind of at risk if you try to jump in full time.

Yeah.

And I think it's right now something you enjoy doing. I'm not saying you're not going to enjoy it. And right now there's a lot of flexibility because you can do on the weekends and all the rest of it. But just know when you jump in full time, there's now that financial pressure. What is going to be taking away from the family is the business. So being very clear with your wife and what your goals are, I just realized that it might be the opposite of what you feel now in terms of the business being flexible. It might actually flip because now you've got to replace $90,000 of W2 income and that means you're working a lot more.

Yeah. And I. My background with that is app development.

Cool.

So, you know, I'd eventually like to maybe find some way to incorporate maybe an app because I don't really want to lose that sense of my degree. But you know, maybe that's another business path or something on down the road. But I just wanted to get your opinion on that.

Like what if. Right. Like right now you're kind of doing your full time programming and then you're doing part time lawn care. Why not do lawn care? And then on the Side, try to make an extra 30, 40 grand doing stuff on the side with app development. Right. Because that way you stay sharp with those skills. You still are able to kind of stay in that game, but then you're able to scratch the itch you have for the entrepreneurial side, but then also retain that flexibility in terms of being a freelancer and a project based. From a project based perspective for the app development.

Yeah, actually, you know, I, I never really thought of it that way, as doing side stuff or doing work on the side like that. It's just being a part time employee doing stuff, you know, when I have the free time.

Yep. It's kind of like school. It'll always be there. App development, you'll be fine forever. So, like, you can always go back to it. And if you just stay sharp with it on the side, then there'll be a sense of security too for you and your family. Knowing that there is a little bit of money coming in, you can cover at least the debt payments and your fixed expenses. No one's going to go hungry if something goes bad. And then furthermore, you also can then, you know, go full time into the business. Still.

Perfect. Yeah. And this year as well, I ventured into Christmas lights, which I use the different CRM for. So I don't really have the numbers off the top of my head. But that kept me busy from November to December and January. So, you know, that's kind of a revenue that I don't really have on top of my head. I wish I did, but I was literally at the gym watching your show and I was like, hey, I'll try and call in. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Cool. No, man, I think, I think you kind of answered all the questions yourself. So best of luck to you this year.

Awesome. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time.

Yeah, Frank, bye. Bye. All right, next caller. I think this one's coming from Canada. I think it's from. Coming from Alberta. 403 number. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Yes.

Hey, Mike, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Hello?

Yeah.

Awesome. So I, I'm kind of like you. I started mowing lawns when I was 10 with my dad and brother. On acreage here, I worked up to like seven lawns from like the age of 10 to 18. It wasn't a lot or anything, but it was enough for like one or two a night. And then from like 18 to 23, I tried out like college and stuff and then, and like oil field and stuff. And then at 23, I started.

I dropped to a college. When Covet hit, I started. I made a website. I got a business name. DS Lawn Care. I named it. Got like a business bank account. And then that summer I made 6 grand. And then that was 2020. And then 2021, I made 20 grand. And then last summer, 2022, I actually made 60 grand. And I did snow in the winter. It was my first winter. I actually did snow all year. And during the summer of 2022, I actually hired a couple guys to do some landscaping jobs, like sod. And actually they helped me mow too. And then also did some rock jobs too. So it was really cool, like hiring people. I felt like I kind of made it. I actually ended up spending all my money. I was watching you every day. I ended up buying a ramp rack for like 7, 700 bucks. It's not even on my truck completely yet. Ended up going like 18k in credit card debt. So this summer, I don't want to screw up, but I have over 200 contacts on my phone and I'm like, I signed up for your web design lawn care website and like, I put my name in for co pilot. I'm thinking about doing P4P as well. I want to scale up to like, well over a million. My parents kind of think I'm crazy. I'm 20. I'm almost 26. I still live at home, but I think I can do this. I just, I don't know what, what's a realistic goal for 2023 as I made like 60k last year. Like, well, I have to hire a guy to maybe get to 200 this year or maybe just try for a hundred. But yeah, I. I don't know. I have a truck. I have like two push mowers, the weed lifters and everything.

Okay. So I hate. I don't like to be the. The dream basher on this show, but let's take a step back. All right, so last year you did 60,000 in total revenue. Is that correct?

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Okay. And did you work full time?

Like, yeah, I was pretty full time.

Okay.

I wasn't like going all. Well, it wasn't like, I don't know, 30 to 50 hours a week.

Okay, yes, that's full time. So. And then. But then you were hiring people as well. So, like, I already know without asking your pricing that you're not charging enough. Because if you went full time, you have employees working for you. You have project based, which means you have cost of goods sold and supplies and materials, and you Only did net a gross of $60,000 in revenue. I know you're not charging enough. Like, what are you charging per hour?

Like, well, I was charging $50 of cut last summer. And so we. It would take, like, half an hour to do lawn. So the lawns were good, but I didn't have enough lawn.

Like, I didn't have enough reoccurring customers. Like, I maybe only had, like 20 or 30, but then I was making money off, like, I was doing some landscaping jobs, like putting in mulch and rock. And like, I did the one job last summer for six grand, and it was 3,000 in materials and employees, and I took home three grand in five days. So that's what kind of got me up to closer to 60. And then I had, like, three or four saw jobs. A couple of them are worth two grand. But reoccurring customers for weekly mo's was like, maybe 20 or 30.

Okay.

I think I need to get that number up more and. Yeah. And not focus so much on the bigger jobs.

Okay. So, like, if you. If you run the math on 25 customers and you. Let's just say you mow them.

Yeah.

Okay, so we have 25 customers. Let's say you mow them at 50 bucks a pop, like you said, and let's assume that there's like, 25 cuts in the year. That'd be $31,000. So that would assume that about half of your revenue came from mowing. The other half came from landscaping and projects. Right. What are you charging per hour when you go to an estimate for projects? Like, when you look at the job. Okay, that's going to take me 10 hours. How are you coming with the number.

Is, I think, well.

A hundred dollars, I'm thinking. That's what I am thinking.

Okay. So the problem with that. Go ahead.

I think.

I think I wasn't working as much as I think I was. Like, there's. I don't know, Like, I was doing hedge trimmings too, and I was doing gutter cleans. I made three grand just from gutter cleaning. Probably two, two or three grand from hedges. And then I was doing fertilizing and spraying as well. And I didn't use job or anything. It was just. I would text them. They'd be at work, I'd get their lawn, and I would text them, hey, do you want your lawn fertilizer? Do you want some sprayer? And they said, yeah, okay. And then I said, okay, just e transfer extra 50 bucks.

Yeah. So. So here's the Thing. When you take, when you take the 30,000 out of the mowing that you did, that means there was $30,000 worth of other project based work. Now, let's assume that there is zero, zero.

Material cost. Okay. And no employees. And all of that was straight labor revenue. That would mean that there are 300 budgeted hours if you're charging $100 per hour. Okay. So if you're charging $100 per half, that would mean there's three.

I didn't start till June.

Okay. Okay. So you only worked half the year?

Yeah, I had a DUI actually, and I couldn't get my license back till June.

Got it.

I did quit drinking, though.

Yeah. So I would just really focus on ensuring that you, every single day, you're tracking how many budgeted hours you're getting completed, because I think you might be less efficient than you think you are. And you might be working 40 or 50 hours a week, but you might only be completing 18 to 20 budgeted hours worth of work a week. And so that's a number that would then imply a 50% waste, whether that be, you know, just inefficient routes, whether that be taking a lot of time at gas stations or going to the supply yard and taking a lot of time there. So I would be tracking every single day how many budgeted hours worth of work you get done. Not how many clocked hours are completed, but how many budget hours. Next caller comes from 57 5. We got to keep it moving here on Saturday. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

What's up, Mike? Can you hear me?

I can. How's it going?

What's up, man? My name's Evan. I'm over here in Virginia Beach. I just had a couple questions for you. So just a real quick, you know, synopsis of my story. I. I was in college, left, started doing lawns on the side, decided to get an LLC two years ago. I made 13 grand net my first year. And this year I'm doing about 46 nets. And I want to leave fully My. My job. I didn't. Well, I don't do it much anymore because I. I used to deliver pizza and then my car got totaled and then I bought a work truck and it's kind of old, so I can't do that anymore. But it's six months ago. I want to fully commit to my lawn business, but I'm kind of foreign in which direction I should go. And I was just gonna tell you a bit about what I'm thinking and get the two cents okay, so just.

So I'm clear, 46,000 net. What was your gross?

It was about. Well, I haven't finished doing my taxes, but I'm thinking about 55.

Okay. Okay. So you're okay. Got it.

Okay. These are kind of, these are kind of estimate number quite a bit.

Cool. You're fine, go ahead.

Yeah, so I do edge mode blow pretty much. I'm trying to do 80 to 100 an hour for that. I'm doing solo off when I do that. And so I have about 35 customers that are weekly. And so I guess it would be about $50 per customer.

And so I, I have them on a schedule so that in Virginia it's, it's like a lot of rain in the spring and summers, but then the winters get dry and it's about three months of this dead period.

Yep.

And so I've been doing bi weekly through the fall and then monthly through the winter. I have a lot of people who suggest to me either do weekly year round or do bi weekly through the winter. But if I'm being completely honest, there's a couple properties, when I say a couple, I'd say maybe five to 10 to where I'll show up every two weeks. And I mean like, I'm not making a difference at all. There's no sticks being picked up, there's no lines being made in the graph. It literally looks exactly the same as when I'm leaving. And so I kind of feel almost like I'm doing a disservice to these people. Like that some of them don't have a problem giving me the money. But then some of them, I'm like, you know, I think I could have not charged you for this. And then, and then you'd be better off. Does that make sense?

Totally. Yep.

So are you asking kind of how to reconcile it in your brain?

Yeah. So sorry. I'm so sorry about that. I'm going to get the point. So I'm, I've been guided. I try and find local entrepreneurs, local business owners and connect with them and hear what they have to say, give me advice, stuff like that. And so what I've heard is that some people are like, hey man, you should hire five dudes and start doing sod installs and start doing hardscaping. And some guys are like, no man, stick to edging, mowing and blowing and just do that and just provide, you know, mediocre quality to get your clients up by the numbers. And then some guys are like, no, have personal based packages for each customer where you take care of the whole property. And you do, you do, you know, aeration and you do multi and you do trim, bush cutting and stuff like that. And so I can offer, and I already do offer bush trimming and mulch and pine style install with the edge mo blow. But people will be like, hey, can you do a garden box or a retaining wall or a small gravel patio? And I'm like, yeah, sure, I could do that. But I'm kind of not understanding, you know, if as soon as I get multiple dues, I feel like it's going to be a headache. And I kind of want to remain a solo op. So I'm trying to maximize my profits while not overworking myself because I'll be by myself.

Okay, so I think the biggest problem that you have is you're listening to too many people.

You're not focusing on what you want from the business and rather you're trying to figure out what you want based upon what other people's results are. So you're listening to one guy because he built a big, big mowing business and he's telling you should grow Boeing. You're listening to some other person on YouTube or whatever saying you should do hardscaping because that's what they did. You've got to figure out what you want from the business and why you want that. And so I don't think you should be listening to so many people. There's too many influences in your head right now. So, like when I run the math on $55,000 worth of revenue, and I divide that out by $50 per cut, and I divide that out by how many cuts per year, which are probably doing about 30 per year. How many mowing customers do you have right now?

Routine. See, that's the thing. Some of them don't want the fall and winter cleanup packages. So the routine spring and summer, it's upwards of almost 40. So a little over 35 people. And a good, a good portion of them are like, yeah, we don't need anything in the fall and winter, essentially. So, yeah, it would be more like 26. Okay.

Yeah. So, so my numbers, based upon that math that I just kind of quickly ran was like 36, 37 customers that you would have as on a recurring basis. Now is your question, how do you make sure that those people stay? Like, are you having a struggle with charging people and mowing their grass when you don't feel like they need it?

Okay, yeah, sorry, that was, that wasn't really the focal point of it, it was more. So my area calls for, you know, or not messed up. In my area, some people I talk to. The majority of people that want the grass mowing in these, in this community is medium sized yards. They're not too big, not many like acres or anything like that. They kind of just want you to come in and cut it and leave, you know, I'm aiming toward the clientele of higher end people, but it almost seems like those are the people that want the aeration and the sod and the, and the thing. But what I want for my business, it's consistency. I like showing up and knowing, hey, it's going to be X, Y and Z today and there might be a problem or two, but you'll, you know, it's not going to be like a new giant job that I'm unfamiliar with and there's going to be a giant hiccup. I like the repetitiveness. I like, you know, long character, just relaxing and stuff like that. So that's the direction I'm trying to continue toward.

Okay, cool. Is there a specific question I can answer about that? Because it sounds like you kind of made your mind that's what you're going to do.

Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna suggest to you. Should I, again, I'm trying to. Should I go towards the path in your opinion, since I want to remain a solo operator, get as many lawns as I possibly can and charge just kind of a mediocre rate, or should I lean more towards getting individual customers and charging more per stop?

I would focus on filling your route because right now you're not at capacity with 25 mowing customers because you could probably get to 50 or 60 pretty easily the solo op and still, you know, be able to handle all of them. So I would focus on doing that and then raising your prices to those customers. And then if you lose some customers when you raise prices, totally fine, you're then going to refill them with new leads coming in. And so I would just really focus on filling to capacity your current schedule. Whether it be mowing or whatever, I don't really care. But let's focus on mowing because that's what you want. Get 50 to 60 mowing customers, fill the capacity, then raise your prices and be able to get more profit from each customer. Next call is from 431. I think this one's coming from Canada as well. Welcome to the show.

Thanks Mike. Yeah, my name is Bjorn. I'm at a Winnipeg. Just to kind of give you a back story. Here last year we went from 10k in February and all of a sudden to 20k. And I had a real business running more than one truck, a couple employees, and we're doing great. We took some of that money, forked it into website marketing, all that great stuff and suddenly, you know, within a couple months we're doing 30k a month again. Coming into winter, we quadrupled our snow business. 4X acquired some machinery to do that, so we got a little bit of debt, but essentially we went from you know, 200 to 350 and we're on track to probably do 550 this year. So my main question is now we're just closing out the winter. It's been pretty weak here actually. We were expecting a lot more snow. So we're sitting in on a bit more money than we expected, but not a ton because we did grow a lot. My question is, is what's, what's the best position to put myself in so that I'm not running around like a chicken with my head cut off in spring rush and lose a ton of leads from our Google Ads Last year because I was being pulled in so many different directions, having a whole new crew, having to be in the field, having to answer emails and just, just all over the place, I, you know, do I, do I move to a shop so I feel more organized. There's an opportunity to basically upgrade. For an extra 1600 bucks, I'll have an office space, I'll have decent shops space instead of running out of storage containers and out of our garage. So have more space and organization or do I hold off on that and invest in an office person, Just kind of see what direction you'd recommend so that this spring can be success.

Are you, are you eventually, eventually going to want to grow the business to like a million dollars? Is like that eventually the goal?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Cool. So all the things you're mentioning you're eventually going to have to do. You're eventually have to move to a shop. You're eventually going to have to get an office person. The question is the sequence of events and when she should do this. And so my personal recommendation, based upon you feeling like you're a chicken without a head running off during spring rush is take a year and stop growing. All right? And so what I mean by that is raise your prices, cut out services that are causing you to be running around that cause 80% of your headaches. You know what services those are, cut those out. And then realize that this year you might not grow double. You might only grow 50 or 100 grand in top line revenue, but it'll be much more profitable and much more sustainable because you'll be cutting out services that are causing all of your headache. And if you do that for one year, then next year you'll have the profitability and the systems in place to be able to actually scale to a million without it being chaos.

I see, I see.

Because you're going to have to eventually move to shop eventually you're going to have to hire an office person. But if you do those things too quickly, you're going to burn yourself out. And if you double the size of your business right now, you're going to double the amount that that's on your plate because you're doing a lot of these estimates. You're running around. So you've got to make sure you have a healthier profit margin and you aren't taking the brunt of all that growth on your plate.

I guess the thing for me is that I just want more time because I'm, I'm four years old, we have two young ones under two, married and, and I just don't, I want to be home by the end of the day and I wish I had someone in the office. So I just want to, I almost want to just buy back my time even if it means we don't grow. I'm not looking to grow double during this summer necessarily. I'm happy sitting at 35 to 45k.

Then I would recommend doing is get the office person move to the shop and raise prices at the same time. Because if you raise prices even 10 to 15%.

You are going to be able to make enough margin on that to be able to afford the sixteen hundred dollars for the shop and an office person. Even if they're four or five hours a day, you're gonna be afford both of those things. And then what I would recommend doing. Go ahead.

No, it's four or five hours a day. I like the sounds of that. I didn't think that you know, would be able to find someone that, that's acceptable to not have eight hours. Because four or five hours is awesome.

Well, because affordable. There's like for example, a single mom that has another job where they, where they won't allow for overtime, but she needs an extra few hours on her paycheck. She might be a killer. She might be getting 25, $30 in her other job, but she needs a little extra to make ends meet. She might be the best thing that ever happened. To you because she can come in the afternoon and make sure everything's routed for the next day, send out invoices, go through the email, answer phone calls. So I'd look at that and again, $1,600 a month, maybe a couple thousand dollars a month for that office person. Maybe 3,000 if they're really good and like, you need them a little more, that's $4,000. That's a 10% increase in your gross revenue. And that could literally be happening with one email and raising your prices. You can accommodate all those expenses.

Yeah, that. That sounds great. Yeah. And I'm looking to really ramp up the snow removal business again. And I just want to have them trained to handle all the customer service. So that sounds doable. Appreciate it, Mike.

You got it, brother. Take care. Let's go. Appreciate it, brother.

Yeah.

All right, bye bye. All right, next caller, we got some. Sorry, the queue is full. I'll just contract, you know, these pretty quick. If I drop your call, I have nothing against you. It just we got to keep moving along. Next callers from 704. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Good, good.

My name is Justin. I'm actually, I was a full time real estate investor. Me and my wife own a real estate business, but we've recently jumped into junk removal. I don't know if you know anything about it, but it's really just trying to reach out and see you because I'm having trouble finding out how to be.

Yep. So what's your biggest struggle right now? So you're switching from real estate into the junk removal. The ma. A massive exodus of real estate agents right now because the market the way it is. So what's your biggest struggle?

Getting a lot of jobs through real estate since we've been in it for a while. But they're mostly full. Full clean out. And, you know, everyone says, you know, go by the load, but it's kind of hard to figure out what a load is doing full clean out, so it's hard to give out estimates. I'm kind of catching myself, you know, just not even bid in jobs at times.

Yep. And so are you trying to diversify from full cleanouts and focusing more on, like, construction maybe?

I like doing the full clean out to me, but we also do demolition. But I'm just really trying to figure out how to hone in on. On pricing and, you know, that way I can offer them a better service and know that we're both coming out because in the Past like four jobs we have been after we paid out two people and, and paying dump fees and all that stuff. We've been just you know, grossing about a hundred, two hundred for a whole, for a long ten hour day.

Right.

And so are you, are you having struggle getting more of those? Like what's the problem? I can help with.

Just trying to figure out how I would hone in on getting a better pricing chart as far as estimates and stuff.

What percentage of your estimates are getting accepted? Like when you give a quote out, is it pretty much everyone accepting it? Like, or what percentage of. Or do you think are accepting the quote?

Well, on the full, on the full. On the full cleanouts we have gotten four and we've only been rented since January 1st and we've gotten four set and we gave out five offer.

Got it. So you're running an 80%, you know, close ratio. Is it this bigger struggle is getting the leads? Because my thing is at 80 close ratio I would be raising your prices to be able to accommodate a better margin for yourself. However, there's only five estimates that have come in. So like do you think you can move that to where on a monthly basis you're making 20 leads. Like it. Is that possible?

Yeah, I believe that's possible. I've been doing on the weekends because I run a run heavy equipment too. So I've been doing it on just the weekend. That's kind of why I've been scheduled back. But I kind of wanna, I think I should just charge more but I'm not sure about how they do it.

That's fine. So doing something five times you're not going to be great at anyways. Regardless what industry you're in, you're not going to have the experience to be able to appropriate budget hours accurately. So what I would do is focus on getting more leads, focus on getting the reps of doing more quotes and then just track your close ratio. That is the determining factor of how if you're too expensive. So if you start getting only 30% of people accepting your quotes should probably. That's an indicator you're probably a little bit higher on the higher end of pricing. Don't worry about your cut, what your competitors are doing, don't go. It does not matter. All right. Your close ratio determines whether or not you're too expensive. And so if you're 80% now and then you. But you do another 20 or 30 bids and you're still closing 80% that means it tells me that you can absolutely raise your prices and make more margin. When you start getting a 50, 60% of your quotes being accepted, that's probably where you might want to stick around in terms of maximization of your profit and still growing a little bit. But I would definitely just focus on getting more leads. Like if you had, if you had a hundred leads come in next month, I promise you'd be able to increase your prices because you have so much work coming, you would not be able to get them all accepted. You'd have to raise prices. So focus on lead generation because if you get more leads, you'll feel more confident to raise your prices and not care about letting you know 30, 40, 50% of people say no because you can't actually take on that much work.

Okay, so basically just focus more on getting more leads and worry less about being correctly.

No, because you, because you'll get better and better as you get more of those reps and you get more quotes in, you'll get better and more accurate on budget hours and what your quotes are. Next question comes from 708. Welcome to Show. I think this is William.

Hey, what's up Mike?

How's it going brother?

What's up? Hey, two questions for you and hopefully make it pretty quick. But for the profit sharing, so let's say for example, there was a thousand dollars at the end of the quarter for the profit sharing and you had five guys that worked the entire quarter. If four guys didn't have that good attendance, do you give that one individual only 200 or do you give him the full thousand?

Nope. So basically whoever is eligible. So let's say you have 10 employees and only five of them were stayed the whole quarter. That means that that thousand dollars gets divided by, by 5. So $200 a pop like you said, if four of those people then are not eligible because they were late at call outs, whatever, then you are, that person's getting $200. We used to actually divide by the total number of employees that were there to account for the fact that there's churn. But we decide, hey, we're actually going to make it just the people who have been here the entire quarter and are eligible. And they typically know that if they're eligible, they definitely want to make sure that they are not, you know, losing out in profit sharing. So we still do it by the number of people that are eligible. We divide it out by that and then it's based upon who's actually who gets the. When I say eligible there, I mean who's been there the whole quarter and Then it's based upon lates and tardies, stuff like that.

Gotcha. And then a caveat to that additional question. So to my understanding, you guys like have like the time frame that if they do need the day off that they have to let you know by maybe like 5 o' clock the night prior. But like do you allow like unlimited times for that or do you, how do you like regulate that if somebody like calls off or like needs a day off? And as long as they tell you by that first time that they're not doing it like two days a week consistently, you know.

Yeah, like there's one thing. So from profit sharing perspective, like you said, they have to give us a certain amount of heads up the day before, you know, losing out in profit sharing. So we still do it by the number of people that are eligible. We divide it out by that and then it's based upon who's actually, who gets the. When I say eligible there, I mean who's been there the whole quarter. And then it's based upon lates and tardies, stuff like that.

Gotcha. And then a caveat to that additional question.

So if they don't then it's gonna go against their profit sharing. The other side of the coin is if they're calling out two or three days in advance but every single week. Yeah, it might not help be held against their profit sharing. They just might not have a job because we can't do that with our scheduling. Eventually we have to let them go and be honest like hey, like this not gonna work out. So even though they're not getting penalized.

On profit sharing, to my understanding you guys like have like time frames that if they do need the day off that they have to let you know by maybe like 5 o' clock the night prior. But like do you allow like unlimited times for that or do you, how do you like regulate that if somebody like calls off or like needs a day off? And as long as they tell you by that first time that they're not doing it like two days a week.

They might not have a job. If they're doing it so consistently, even if they're giving two or three days heads up so it's eventually there's not going to work out.

Gotcha. Okay. And then my second question was for the. So I really like the idea of the door hangers and like we do that with the estimates and stuff. But it was like how do you handle when you're doing that in HOA communities that they like require a solicitor's badge to like. And then you have consistently, you know.

Yeah, like there's one thing. So from profit sharing perspective, like you said, they have to give us a certain amount of heads up the day before. If they don't, then it's going to go against their profit sharing. The other side of the coin is if they're calling out two or three days in advance but every single week. Yeah. It might not help be held against.

The pay a fee for like each individual employee because like back in the day my mom helped me kind of hand out buyers and she actually got like $400 ticket because the like police came and like shut her down because she was like helping us build her company and going door to door and stuff. Like, how do you handle that?

Yeah. So if you're in a market where it's like gated communities, hoas and they're going to have, you know, no soliciting, for example, the way around this is just every door direct mail because everyone still has a mailbox. And honestly, when you take the cost of labor of distribution for door hangers and you run that against every profit sharing, they just might not have a job because we can't do that with our scheduling. Eventually we have to let them go and be honest, like, hey, like this not going to work out. So even though they're not getting penalized on profit sharing, they might not have a job if they're doing it so consistently, even if they're giving two or three days heads up. So it's eventually just not going to work out.

Okay.

And then door direct mail and the cost per delivery, it's relatively close. So in markets where you have lots of h ways, no soliciting allowed, that's probably the you're going to be your go to. Next question comes from eight to eight. Welcome to show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, how you doing today?

Good, good.

I'm actually calling for another. And my second question was for the. So I really like the idea of the door hangers and like we do that with the estimates and stuff. But it was like, how do you handle when you're doing that in HOA communities that they like require a solicitor's badge to like and then you have to pay a fee for like each individual employee because like back in the day my mom helped me kind of hand out buyers and she actually got like a 400 ticket because the like police came and like shut her down because she was like helping us build her company and going door to door and like, how do you handle that?

Yes. If you're in a market where it's like gated communities hoas and they're going to have no soliciting. For example, the way around this is just every door direct mail because everyone still has a mailbox. And honestly, when you take the cost of labor of distribution for door hangers and you run that against every door direct mail and the cost per delivery, it's relatively close. So in markets where you have lots of h ways no soliciting allowed, that's probably. You're going to be your go to. Next question comes from 8:2:8. Welcome to Show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, how you doing today?

Good. Good.

I'm actually called for another caller. He's in the chat. His name is Casey. They don't like talking on in public. I don't either myself. But I'm gonna try to help him out. He's trying to start a. He's talking like a new, like a landscaping business. He's having trouble getting leaves you.

I kind of give him what, what I've learned from you. What would, what would you. He said he lives in a, a populated area.

Coming, you know, like developments in his area coming up. What, what, what advice would you give him as far as like he's struggling getting leagues. He's just now starting like a, like a mo and landscaping.

Absolutely. Cool. Yeah, I'll go ahead. I'm kind of looking through the chat too and taking a look at what he's been saying. Yeah, sounds like cody. He has 30 customers from 600 door hangers in my first year. If you want to grow quick, your pricing need to be low, but not too low. Don't go bleed. Okay, so you have 30 customers. You got that from 600.

I think that's who you're talking about, Cody. Yeah. Okay. So can bring leads in from and execute all throughout the spring. You have no choice but to grow. Yeah. So like, I think, you know, if you can get, if you can get 30 customers from 600 door hangers, you got yourself a strategy. Right. So keep doing the door hanger thing. If you can get like that's an incredible amount of customers to. It's like what, 5% close ratio on the amount of people you delivered door hangers to. So I just keep doing that. And then also realize that as you grow, your time becomes more valuable. So instead of doing door hangers and spending time, take some of the money you're making and go get yourself a website. Go spend some ads on marketing so you can switch instead of paying in Terms of time, you're paying for your ads and your leads in the form of money which is going to be pay per click, a website, things like that. Next caller comes from six one five. Welcome to show.

Hey Mike, how you doing?

Good. How you doing?

Pretty good. So I started my business last fall. It's still in its infancy. I got licensed and insured, did some leaf removals and try to get my name to these customers for the spring rush. But my question is, how do you approach the transition from a full time job making 50k a year with good insurance to a full time lawn care business? Like how do you know when it's time?

Totally. So like right now you're trying to transition away from your nine to five then.

Yeah.

So what I'd personally do is take them out of revenue that you are making the business, you know, extrapolate with your profit margins on that and then figure out what you are going to have to make in the business in order to be able to replace your current W2 income. So are you making like, like if you don't mind me asking, what do you make at your current job in terms of revenue, in terms of your income?

It's 50k before taxes.

Cool.

So probably maybe 40, 35, maybe.

Yes. Let's just call it 50, right? This is the sake of example, let's call it 50. So then it's okay. Well if I can make 75 or 80,000 in GR revenue in my lawn care business, that's probably going to equate to about $50,000 in profit. So the question is, can you get it to 40 or 30 part time on the weekends kind of hustling. And then know that based upon your experience doing it for one season on the side that when you switch over to being full time, you're immediately going to get above 80, 90,000 which will replace your personal income. And so especially if you have a family and things and like you're like, hey, I'm pretty, you know, cautious about leaving my job. The dependable paycheck is get a year where you're doing 20, 30, 35,000 on this, weekends, on the side, in the evenings, and then make the jump in one spring rush, probably next spring rush to being able to go full time and knowing that you'll then carry 70, 80, 90,000 in annual revenue and be able to replace the income that you had from the job.

Okay, Mike, Well, I appreciate it.

Absolutely, brother. You take care. All right, I misspoke on the last question. Looks like Casey here, he's In a very populated area. A lot of retirees here just need to tap into the market so I apologize Cody. I am on nextdoor. Doesn't seem to be much use in my area.

I had posted earlier I'm a new startup. I'm just struggling to start leads in right now. I have all commercial equipment needed, zero payments, no debt. Besides my house making this full time, I don't. I do not don't have the personality to call in. Definitely need to help though. Okay, I gotcha. Thank you whoever called in earlier for him, I appreciate that. If you're only bringing in 60 red there's no way you can bring anyone on. Okay, let's see here. Going back. I'm trying to go back in the scroll finding Casey. Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey. There you go. Ariels. Is there anything doing signs and intersections. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm just trying. I have a bunch of business cars and my truck magnets will be here in this week. I will look at getting door hangers and signs made up. I just started my business here. Struggling to find customers. Don't really have budget for marketing. Been using Facebook but everyone already established keeps knocking me out of the running. Okay, so I think honestly just based upon the amount that you're commenting and things you are looking for no's instead of yeses. I'm not being hard on you, I'm just saying this is the reality of the situation is instead of looking for every single way that your business could is being shut down or why the market is bad, dense population. This doesn't work. That doesn't work. Be okay with the fact that you're. That's how business is. Like if it's. If it was easy and like all of these things work and I could just give you a magic pill that we all be millionaires and we'd all be able to figure out what marketing worked in our specific demographic. Then it'd be. It'd be easy and everyone would do it and that would crush our returns. I would crush our profit margins. And so what I would recommend doing is opening yourself up from a mentality standpoint to the fact that you're going to try multiple things, you're going to have to push yourself hard and that you're going to have a lot of no's before you have yeses. Which means you might try some every door direct mail. You might do some door hangers, you might do some cold calling. You might go talk to some property managers, you might post on Facebook and it not work like all these things might happen and they might not work out. Two things, one, you might eventually swing and actually hit something and get lucky and you hit the one thing that would start to work really well and you keep pounding that. Or two, you just got to keep grinding and hustling and realizing that when you have 50 people say no on door hangers or door knocking, that number 51, 52 and 53 all say yes. And now all of a sudden you've done 53 houses and you have three new jobs on the schedule and you have a 6% rate of people accepting quotes of knocking on doors and just a numbers game. So just don't, don't allow the 4 or 5 or 50 no's to prevent you from the next three yeses. And so most people will just give up way too soon. And they say oh, every door direct mail doesn't work or print marketing doesn't work, websites don't work, only word of mouth, only Facebook like they get so locked in on that nothing is working. It's like look, be open to the fact that it might not be working in the short term but you making a few tweaks, be improving your sales ability, improving the way that you do your door to hanger, improving your salesmanship, approving the way that you appear professional when you knock on someone's door. Those are things that you can work on and if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Next call comes from 95 4. Welcome to Show. Thanks for coming on.

Hello.

What'S up?

How you doing Mike?

Good, good.

I have 40 customers last year I started in May. I'm thinking of doing every door direct mailing.

Yep.

And I have like 5,000 mailers. But in my service area it's like in my five miles I have just about half a million people and I'm thinking of sending my first round to.

An area where I only have like two customers in. But this area, they, they offer like they, they accept full service. Far as my other area they only want mowing but this area they want mowing, bush trimming. Basically I can give them other services. So I'm trying to figure out which area should I hit first with the every door direct mail.

Do you think your brand and the business as you've built it currently is going to appeal to the customer that's higher end and wants full service?

I'm not sure yet. That's my question. Really?

Yeah. Because that's what everyone wants, that customer. The question is does that customer want you? Right. The reason you might be Getting customers from the places that just want mowing is because your brand has been associated with that type of service. And so if you're wanting to get in those other markets instead of trying to force yourself in by spending a bunch of marketing that might not have never worked because your brand and your business is not built for that type of customer in terms of the branding, the professionalism, multiple trucks having, the dependability automations, the CRM, if it's not built for that, you might, you might literally be spending money into oblivion even though those are the better customers.

Right, right, right, right. Even I, I have like one or two customers over in that area. So I'm like, let me see if I can try to get more over here or the other area. I have maybe five or six over there, but they're all the, I'm only just mowing there.

So your, your sample size is too small. Right. So if you have two in one area and five or six in another, I would recommend splitting the first little bit of your every door direct mail like I would do. Instead of doing 5,000 in one or the other, I would do like a thousand in one area and a thousand in another and then figure out from there which one pops off the best and then spend the other 3,000 mailers on the better, the better performing area of those two because you do not know based upon just five or six customers which area is going to receive your marketing and your brand the best. Next caller comes from 71 9. Welcome to show. Thanks for coming on.

I'm John and I have this business and I just ordered these door hangers. I was just wondering like, if you get shut down by a customer in the neighborhood, could you go back to them and like keep advertising to them.

Or just what do you mean by shut down? Like did they get mad at you because you came to their door?

Or like they just be like, no, sorry, I don't think you're so good.

And were you doing door knocking?

Yeah, yeah, I would just not come back. Don't try to sell the unsellable. Right. Go to the next door. Spend your time on the person that potentially might take your service. Don't worry about the person that said no. Be professional. And then down the road if they need your service, they'll remember that you were professional, they liked talking to you and you were, you know, amicable to talk to when you. Even though they declined you. So just stay professional and focus on the next time you see them. Otherwise focus on the next customer that might potentially say yes. Next caller's from 573. Welcome to Show. Thanks for coming on.

573 unmute.

Oh no. They were in the waiting room for so long. 5, 7, 3, can you hear me? I think it's from Missouri. Oh, no, we're gonna end, we're gonna end on a no call, no show.

Oh, man. All right, sorry about that. 5, 7, 3, I'm gonna go ahead and drop you out of the queue. All right everyone, I'm gonna go ahead and call it there. Hope you have a fantastic Saturday. 93 minutes. 93 minutes. Potentially one of our last live streams before the spring rush. We got a lot going on here at Augusta. Lawn Care as well as co pilot CRM is going to be launching. I just want to say thank you all for your support. Lawn CareMedia.com has been crazy the past little bit and people have been buying a lot from there. So I really wanted to say thank you. Same thing with lawn care web design. It's allowed us to get more media team members. We now have five people in the media team producing content for industry every single day. And so obviously some of their time is diverted towards Augusta, but the vast majority of it is to create content for the community. So I just want to say thank you all so very much. We have some really cool stuff we're going to be bringing new to lawn care media and I think it'd be very helpful especially for people that are just getting started. So definitely check that out. Long care web design, if you're above 200,000, I'd recommend that. So I'm trying to do is kind of create long care media for people that are very small, under a hundred thousand in annual revenue. Just trying to get customers with door hangers, postcards, etc and with some really cool stuff we're going to do for them in terms of like trying to create their CRM on paper. I know it's horrible. Like that's horrible. That's. It's better than in your head, it's better than inside of your phone and I mean like documenting a phone call and documenting a lead intake form and things like that. So we're going to be working on some stuff when it comes to lawn care media. But I just want to say thank you. I really do appreciate it. We run our profit and loss and the media team knows this so that you can talk to them and ask them if this is true because they see the numbers we run, the profit and loss where like every dollar we make we're able to get More team members and just produce more content and videos. So LongerMedia.com LongCareWebDesign.com, homeService Web Design.com, all the support. I really do appreciate it. And you know, we have, we have copilot coming out next week. We're starting to roll it out to all the users. And yeah, I'm pretty stressed out. Lots of work going into it and just to start honestly in my mind of like a pretty long journey of what we're trying to build. So I'm pretty excited about it.

But it has been a lot of.

Work and I appreciate all of your support.

Make sure that you check out like the Facebook page and the YouTube channel for Copilot. There'd be updates on that. Copilot CRM.com you can sign up pre register and it's gonna be crazy. The next few weeks are gonna be absolutely nuts. So that's why I'm. I'm kind of going longer today. I don't think I'll be doing a live stream for the next couple months just because of the spring rush with Augusta lawn care as well as copilot being launched out. How, however we are trying, I'm trying my best, hopefully. I don't even know I should say this, but hopefully in June, I'm going to go out, I'm going to start a brand new Augusta lawn care location out in the middle of nowhere, hours and hours away from where I live, on the other side of the country, actually. And I'm going to document over the course of 30 days, kind of vlog style, me starting up a business from scratch. So we'll see how that goes. Hopefully I can grow it up enough in a month to be able to hand it off to a general manager and then I can own that location remotely through Augusta Long care. And the command center can handle everything. So that should be really interesting. But that'll probably be after the spring rush. It will be after the spring rush. We really got to focus here at command center and on Augusta lawn Care. If we're in our spring rush, we have a lot new locations. We just had 28 people here last weekend getting trained up and ready to roll. So we moved into the new office at command center for Augusta lawn Care. We're gonna have probably 50 plus people there answering phone calls, doing estimates, doing payroll for command center Augusta. So really locked and loaded on that. But yeah, for a lot of you, looking forward to copilot, really looking forward to launching that next week as well. And yeah, it's me crazy, crazy. We're really focusing on stability of the product and really making sure that it is going to work well from day one. And then the features that we want to roll out will probably start in March and April. Start adding more features and more, more enterprise level features for larger operations and it's gonna be fun. Really looking forward to it. And yeah, I appreciate all of you supporting what we're doing. Supporting whether it be just watching the channel, whether that be buying stuff on long term media.com or longer web design. Mikeandys.com we just, we just made a new website by the way, if you haven't checked it out. Mikeannies.com brand new website. You just redesign that. There's a brand new free course for P4P. Just go to mikeannies.com P4P walks you through how to do pay for performance step by step inside of a course. It's completely free and we got some really cool stuff coming up. So really looking forward to it and I appreciate all of your support. Have a great weekend. And as we head into spring rush, stay strong. Not gonna be easy. Never is. If it was, everyone would be doing it. And just discipline yourself in every aspect of the business. So that way when times get tough, the discipline rise. Something we talk about with our franchisees and that is I personally see the person, the people that are most disciplined, the ones that succeed in every aspect of life and the discipline, it trickles over, right? The person that is disciplined in their physical health and being able to eat right and not over drink and not have habits that are really negative for them and their family. The person that's disciplined their self that way they're typically will roll into discipline their business, discipline in their schedule, discipline, the ability to be able to be a leader. And I just recommend as we head into spring rush, focus on the low hanging fruit. The things that might be simple like okay, I'm going to go out and do a workout, I'm going to get a gym membership, I'm going to eat, start eating healthy there. I'm not going to drink myself into oblivion every weekend. I'm going to stop doing drugs. I'm going to make sure that I clean my life up a little bit here. I'm going to focus on my relationship so that we can have a healthier balance and a healthier lifestyle going into the spring rush. Those things matter when you hit spring rush because the threshold at which you're able to start taking on stress in the business becomes extreme. Much, much Higher when other aspects of the business have discipline, have systems in place. And we talk about systems all the time for your business. But if you can create systems in your personal life, your personal relationships and your health and your family, trust me, it leads to a massive higher capacity that you can grow into in the business. So I wish you guys all the best and go kill it. Take care. Have a great spring rush.

Caller, he didn't get. His name's Casey. He don't like talking in public. I don't either myself, but I'm gonna try to help him out. He's trying to start a. He's talking like a new. Like a landscaping business. You. He's having trouble getting leads.

I kind of gave him what I've learned from you. What would you. What would you. He said he lives in a populated area.

Up and coming, you know, like developments in his area coming up. What, what advice would you give him as far as, like, he's struggling, getting leagues. He's just now starting like a, like, mo Landscaping.

Mm, absolutely. Cool. Yeah, I'll go ahead. I'm kind of looking through the. The chat too, and taking a look at what he's been saying. Yeah, sounds like cody. He has 30 customers from 600 door hangers in my first year. If you want to grow quick, your prices need to be low, but not too low. Don't go blue. Okay, so you have 30 customers. You got that from 600.

I think that's. You're talking about Cody. Yeah. Okay, so can bring leads in from and execute all throughout the spring. You have no choice but to grow. Yeah. So, like, I think, you know, if you can get. If you can get 30 customers from 600 door hangers, you got yourself a strategy. Right. So keep doing the door hanger thing. If you can get like, that's incredible amount of customers to. It's like what, 5% close ratio on the amount of people you deliver door hangers to. So I just keep doing that and then also realize that as you grow, your time becomes more valuable. So instead of doing door hangers and spending time, take some of the money you're making and go get yourself a website. Go spend some ads on marketing so you can switch. Instead of paying in terms of time, you're paying for your ads and your leads in the form of money, which is going to be pay per click a website, things like that. Next caller comes from six one five. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Mike, how you doing? Good.

How you doing?

Pretty good. So I started my business last fall. It's still in its infancy. I got licensed and insured different leaf removals and try to get my name to these customers for the spring rush. But my question is, how do you approach the transition from a full time job making 50k a year with good insurance to a full time lawn care business? Like how do you know when it's time?

Totally. So like right now you're trying to transition away from your nine to five then.

Yeah, So I would, what I'd personally do is take them out of revenue that you are making the business. You know, extrapolate with your profit margins on that and then figure out what you are going to have to make in the business in order to be able to replace your current W2 income. So are you making like, like if you don't mind me asking, what do you make at your current job in terms of revenue, in terms of your income?

It's 50k before for taxes.

Cool.

So probably maybe 40, 35 maybe.

Yes. Let's just call it 50, right? This is the sake of example, let's call it 50. So then it's okay. Well, if I can make 75 or 80,000 in gross revenue in my lawn care business, that's probably going to equate to about $50,000 in profit. So the question is, can you get it to 40 or 30 part time on the weekends kind of hustling and then know that based upon your experience doing it for one season on the side that when you switch over to being full time, you're immediately going to get above 80, 90,000 which will replace your personal income. And so especially if you have like a family and things and like you're like hey, I'm pretty cautious about leaving my job. The dependable paycheck is get a year where you're doing 20, 30, 35,000 on the weekends, on the side, in the evenings and then make the jump in one spring rush, probably next spring rush to being able to go full time and knowing that you'll then carry 70, 80, 90,000 in annual revenue and be able to replace the income that you had from the job.

Okay, Mike, well, I appreciate it.

Absolutely, brother. You take care. All right, I misspoke on the last question. Looks like Casey here, he's in a very populated area. A lot of retirees here just need to tap into the market. So I apologize, Cody. I am on nextdoor. Doesn't seem to be much use in my area.

I had posted earlier. I'm a new startup, I'm just trying to start leads in right now. I Have all commercial equipment needed, zero payments, no debt. Besides my house making this full time.

I don't. I do not. Don't have the personality to call in. Definitely need to help though. Okay, I gotcha. Thank you. Whoever called in earlier for him, I appreciate that. If you're only bringing in 60 red, there's no way you can bring anyone on. Okay, let's see here. Going back. I'm trying to go back in the scroll finding Casey. Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey. There you go. Ariels, is there anything doing signs at intersections? Okay, I'm sorry, I'm just trying. I have a bunch of business cars and my truck magnets will be here in this week. I will look at getting door hangers and signs made up. I just started my business here. Struggling to find customers. Don't really have budget for marketing. Been using Facebook but everyone already established keeps knocking me out of the running. Okay, so I think honestly just based upon the amount that you're commenting and things you are looking for no's instead of yeses, I'm not being hard on you, I'm just saying this is the reality of the situation. Is instead of looking for every single way that your business could is being shut down or why the market is bad, dense population. This doesn't work. That doesn't work. Be okay with the fact that you're. That's how business is. Like if it's. If it was easy and like all of these things work and I can just give you a magic pill that we all be millionaires and we all be able to figure out what marketing worked in our specific demographic, then.

It'D be easy and everyone would do it and that would crush our returns. I would crush our profit margins. And so what I would recommend doing is opening yourself up from a mentality standpoint to the fact that you're going to have to try multiple things, you're gonna have to push yourself hard and that you're gonna have a lot of no's before you have yeses. Which means you might try some every door direct mail. You might do some door hangers, you might do some cold calling. You might go talk to some property managers, you might post on Facebook and it not work. Like all these things might happen and they might not work out. Two things. One, you might eventually swing and actually hit something and get lucky and you hit the one thing that would start to work really well and you keep pounding that. Or two, you just got to keep grinding and hustling and realizing that when you have 50 people say no on Door hangers or door knocking. That number 51, 52 and 53 all say yes. And now all of a sudden you've done 53 houses and you have three new jobs on the schedule and you have a 6% rate of people accepting quotes of knocking on doors and just a numbers game. So just don't, don't allow the, the 4 or 5 or 50 no's to prevent you from the next three yeses. And so most people will just give up way too soon. And they say, oh, every door direct mail doesn't work or print marketing doesn't work. Websites don't work. Only word of mouth, Only Facebook, like, they get so locked in on that. Like nothing is working. It's like, look, be open to the fact that it might not be working in the short term, but you making a few tweaks. Be improving your sales ability, approving the way that you do your door to hanger, improving your salesmanship, approving the way that you appear professional when you knock on someone's door. Those are things that you can work on. And if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Next call comes from 95 4. Welcome show. Thanks for coming on.

Hello.

Mm. What's up?

Oh, how you doing, Mike?

Good, good.

I have 40 customers last year. I started in May. I'm thinking of doing every door direct mailing.

Yep.

And I have like 5,000 mailers. But in my service area, it's like in my five miles, I have just about half a million people. And I'm thinking of sending my first round to.

An area where I only have like two customers in.