Adding Services: Is Landscaping Better Than Mowing?

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast. Today we are going to be talking about why you might want to think about putting the brakes on adding more services, especially landscaping, to your repertoire. Before we get into today's show, though, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Jobber. If you haven't already, go to getjobber.com im andes a n D E S It's my last name. You can go there, you'll see my picture there and kind of my blurb about Jobber. But one of the things I love about Jobber is that has its own dedicated app. What that means is that a native app on an iOS or an Android device that can really talk to the software out in the field. So if you have your employees, they can all go out on their own, separate trucks, own separate vehicles and their own devices and all be communicating to the software, whether it be tracking their time, whether it be tracking which job they're at. Very, very helpful. Very, very efficient. And one of the reasons why I love Jobber so much, if you want to try it out, get the free trial and the first six months at a discount, go to getjobber.com im.

Andy'S so today we are discussing why I think some people need to put the brakes on adding landscaping services. And today I'm just talking about mowing and, and landscaping and kind of a comparison versus the two. But I also, if you are existing landscaper, existing lawn care company, this is also a really good topic for you to think about just in terms of adding more services. All right. So one of the biggest reasons and the biggest things I see in the landscaping industry, in the lawn care industry is guys that start off with a mowing company and they're going and they're just, they're really busy. They're usually during the spring rush and just like very, very lots and lots of work is coming in. Leads are coming in. Things are breaking though, because employees are messing things up. There's complaints coming in. You're not making a lot of money. Cause it might be the spring rush. And it just like everything is, you're drinking from a fire hose and at the same time you're not like getting paid for it. It's literally like, it seems like super unprofitable work. And what so many mow think during that time and owners think during that time is that, oh, I need to get into landscaping because it's so much better. Because instead of going after these thirty and forty Dollar mows. I can go after thirty and forty thousand dollars projects, and I don't have to worry about people driving anymore. I can hire people that have DUIs, and I don't need to worry about them having to drive all over town for mowing jobs. I'm tired of customers calling and complaining about grass clippings and skid marks in their lawn. I want to operate an excavator, and I want to use a backhoe. I want to get a bigger truck, and I think I can charge a lot more. And I would. You know, you have to. This is their logic. You know, I'd have to mow a thousand lawns at $40 per mow to get the equivalent of just one $40,000 hardscaping wall and patio install. And so the logic starts becoming that, you know, mowing is looked down on. Landscaping is this thing that is where all the money is at. And that's what I'm trying to break today, because there is lots of money in landscaping. Don't get me wrong. Our company at Augusta and the business model we have, we focus on mowing, property cleanups and landscaping. And so landscaping is part of that. And some of the franchisees are even going into hardscaping or even ponds. So there's. It's not to say that landscaping isn't profitable or you should not do landscaping. What I am warning you against today is getting into it too soon, before you know your numbers and before you've actually figured out something as simple as mowing. So mowing is not rocket science. Most of us would recognize the fact that just mowing a lawn is not super hard. But when you start adding complexities of landscaping and then tree work and then all these other things, you start adding to the business, other services, that's when things start really falling apart. But what I find a lot of mowing companies doing, and like I said, they get these visions of grandeur. A lot of it is predicated upon this videos they see on YouTube or stuff they see on Instagram of the big projects and people making like $100,000 in a month on one project. And so they get this vision of like, okay, if I can get $100,000 project, all I have to do is make a 10% margin. I made $10,000. And then they look at their own situation. They're tired of multiple. And all these employees that can't do what they're told. And employees are breaking stuff. There's complaints, and they just hate it. And so they think that landscaping getting into Landscaping and.

Changing their business name from Bob's Mowing to Bob's Landscaping is gonna fix everything. And this is my comeback to all of that. If you think that.

If you know you can't make money on a $40 mow and there's no money in mowing, we can't make it work. There's just too many mistakes, there's too many callbacks, there's too many complaints. The guys aren't efficient enough. If you cannot make a $40 mow profitable, I promise you is not the time for you to go fishing for a $40,000 project. Because at a $40 mo, if you lose 10%, if you are negative 10%, like you messed up, took longer, there was a blown tire, whatever, you're gonna lose four. If you go to a $40,000 project and you're off by 10%, you're gonna lose $4,000. And so some people think that just getting into larger parts is more exciting because they get bigger equipment and all those sort of things. I'm gonna bring four points today. Why I feel that mowing and maintenance is a very good place to start and that as you grow your business, it's okay to add other services, but don't think that just adding more services is going to solve the problems in your business. You can easily, easily, easily make a million dollar business simply by adding a bunch of different services. And you've heard me talk about this before in terms of, like, you can have $100,000 worth of mowing, $100,000 worth of tree work, $100,000 worth of weeding, $100,000 worth of fertilization, weed control, $1,000 worth of excavation, $1,000 worth of artificial turf, $100,000 worth of core aeration, $100,000 worth of spraying. Like, you can have like 10 different categories in your business that make $100,000 each to make a million dollar business. And each one of those is not very difficult. Like, it's not difficult to make $100,000 worth of mowing, that by itself, it's not hard to do $100,000 worth a year of property cleanups. But when you add all of those things up and you get a million dollar business, and everyone thinks that's so fantastic, all of a sudden, now you've introduced a huge amount of complexity to the business. Different types of skill sets, different types of equipment, different types of overhead, different types of people are needed, different types of estimating, different types of software to make each of those categories run. I would much Much, much, much, much rather have a $500,000 business that focused on one or two core competencies than I would have a million dollar business that did 10 things but really wasn't super good at any one of them. Was, wasn't super profitable. Didn't really know the numbers because they were so spread out. And so I'd really recommend you, if you're just starting out, most of the people watching this video are probably gonna be people just starting out. And you're thinking like, should I go mowing or should I go landscaping? I'd highly recommend that you figure out the mowing. And I'm gonna tell you why in just a second. If you're an existing landscaping business and you're watching this, I promise you adding more services will not add to your bottom line. It will increase your top line revenue. Adding more services, even if you just take your customer base, send them all an email and say, hey, we XYZ service, you can easily pump a bunch of revenue into your business, but it's not gonna actually add bottom line revenue, just adding more services. The act alone of adding more services will not increase your bottom line. Okay? It'll usually actually defeat your bottom line because you start spreading resources, you start spreading attention, you start spreading talent into too many different places. So before I jump into the reasons why, I feel like you should start with mowing and then ease your way into landscaping. Before I get into that, and this is kind of the fine print, is that landscaping. There's plenty of money in it. Different niches of landscaping, you can find money, every single one. Even the ones that people say online or on YouTube that things are not profitable, they'll throw mowing under the bus and say you can never make money mowing. They'll say you can't make any money pulling weeds. They'll say all of that. The bottom line is there are plenty of landscapers I know that literally just do mowing and make millions of dollars in gross revenue and hundreds of thousand dollars in gross profit. I know landscapers that just do spraying of trees and they make a ton of money. And why they focused all of their energy, all of their time, all of the talent, everything on that one thing, all their marketing dollars spent on that one service. And so I really embrace the fact of concentration and focusing on the services and the core competencies that, you know, you can deliver to your customer at a.

Better or the same, at a higher value than any of your competition. So if you're just getting started, let me tell you why I Recommend you would start with mowing and maintenance instead of landscaping. At first, number one is there's a low barrier to entry. All right, Low startup costs. Some people think that this is a bad thing about mowing is like, oh, it's so easy, anyone can do it. And so you're competing with so many different people. And that's true, that's fine. But it also means that before you go out and invest a bunch of money in equipment and trucks and all the other stuff, make sure that you even like mowing lawns and landscaping. You like being outside, make sure you don't have allergies. Like I had that literally for a few weeks. It was hard to breathe outside. So before you go out and buy a bunch of stuff for landscaping, why not do some mowing, Figure out if you even like the work, if you like the industry, if you like the customers, if you have the right area of your city that you're working in, like it's a really low cost way to get in, figure things out, and then maybe down the road you do some landscaping. Another great thing about this low barrier to entry with the low startup cost is you don't need a bunch of debt to get started. So maybe you've had a bankruptcy in the past, maybe you have bad credit score, whatever it is, and you can't get any credit, you can't get any loans. This is a great way to get started. For literally just a couple thousand dollars, you can go out and get cheap mowing equipment, some hand tools, and get started on maintenance. Second thing, why I feel like you should perfect mowing and maintenance before you move into landscaping is that for maintenance, less skilled labor is required. Finding skilled laborers that can run excavators, build retaining walls, install paver patios, build decks, build fences. Those are very, that's very skilled labor. And you're tapping into a talent pool that could also go out and become a contractor, also go become a mason, also do other things that could would usually merit a higher dollar per hour rate than you're customed or possibly even might not be able to even pay. And so maintenance, it's very easy to train them up and get them going and making them a profitable employee. You don't have to train them for years on how to on angles and base prep and all the other things like hardscaping, you would need someone to know. And if they make a mistake, those less skilled workers we're talking about, like adding some soil and seed to a skid mark or like blowing off something some Clippings instead of. With a hardscaping job, if you have unskilled labor doing skilled work and they mess up, all of a sudden you have foundations being eroded away, you have landslides, you have trees and materials that are now wasted. So lots and lots of risk because you need more skilled labor for landscaping and hardscaping jobs. The third reason why I would focus on the mowing first, before landscaping, is that you need larger equipment and machines for the landscaping and the hardscaping things. So that's like a bobcat. You might need a skid steer, a track loader, an excavator, a dump trailer. And then to pool that equipment, you're going to need a bigger truck. So Instead of a 150, you need a 350. And instead of a gasoline, you need a diesel. So all of a sudden you need all this bigger equipment, bigger machines. You might have to go into debt if you don't have the money up front. And I'm not so much against the machines and things. Like some people like machines and big trucks and using excavators and things like that. But that larger equipment and machines leads to an increase in overhead. So now you gotta insure that truck. Well, that truck as a 150 might have cost you $100 a month for insurance. As a 350 diesel, that's twice the weight. All of a sudden now you're gonna be charged $250 per month for that insurance. Cause the truck's worth more, it's bigger, it's heavier. You gotta get a heavier load limit on the roads. So depending on what your state is, you gotta pay tonnage on that. So licensing it will literally cost two and three times more. Like these are things you gotta think about the overhead of, not just the insurance, but now the fuel is more because it's a bigger truck and it's hauling more equipment and it's heavier. So the fuel also just the maintenance. A diesel truck breaks and you might as well count on spending a couple thousand dollars. Whereas an unleaded gas 150, you know, cheap Ford 150, just about every part in there can be under 500 bucks. Like if it needs a new motor, for crying out loud, for a couple grand, you get the whole thing changed out. Or if a motor goes out in a diesel truck, you better be willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars, literally. So on a bigger one ton truck or a dually or something like that, just hope the transmission doesn't go out too. And so the fourth reason Is that scalability of the maintenance is usually much more scalable than landscaping. And you say, well, how can you say that? Well, look at the top hundred largest companies and businesses in this industry. You can look it up on lawn and landscape. Every year, they publish the top hundred companies by revenue in this industry. Look at the percentage of those services that their number one service is maintenance, and then tell me that maintenance is not more scalable than landscaping. Now, to say that landscaping is therefore not. You can't do it. No, there are people, there are companies in that top hundred that focus on landscaping. So I'm not saying it's not scalable. I'm saying it's less scalable. Because out of those hundred, if you look through there, nine out of 10 of them, they focus on maintenance, whether it be commercial or residential or whatever. They focus on maintaining things for all these reasons I've discussed. And the landscaping is much less scalable. It's also more volatile to the economy, to the time of year. It's less stable in terms of cash flow in general, the landscaping side. So.

Those are the reasons why I would recommend, if you're just getting started out, to start in mowing and figure it out. Maybe landscaping is where you want to go. Maybe that's what you're passionate about and you're like, hey, I'm not worried about making it super scalable and having 100 employees. I just want to do something. I love to do. My precaution. My word of advice would be like, great, that's the goal. Maybe it's two, three employees and you're doing landscaping jobs and you're focused on that, and you're generating enough leads to keep yourself busy, great. But before you jump into that and lose your shirt or spend five, 10 years trying to become profitable and paying off your equipment, why not focus on mowing, focus on maintenance, get some accounts, get your name out there, figure out where your pricing's at, figure out how much you can afford, figure out how much you need to charge, what your costs are, how much it is going to cost to drive people and your employees and know what you can pay them and what they're worth. All of those things are so valuable. And if you can figure them out on something as simple as mowing, it's a much better chance if you can make a $40 MOW, 20% profit margin, that when you get to a $40,000 landscape install that, you'll also make it profitable. I just see so many people thinking that the solution is switching services when really it's looking at your business, finding systems, finding inefficiencies, finding ways to make it better, and making the business profitable at a smaller level, at a smaller dollar level with less overhead, less skilled employees. If you can't do it there, you're not going to be able to do it. When you're talking about $100,000 projects and much more picky clients. And insurance is going to go up because now you're doing hardscaping other things, just your general liability is going to go up. All of those things are part of going from mowing into landscaping, not to say it's not profitable. There's plenty of money in landscaping. All I wanted today is to. Number one, if you're just getting started, I'd highly recommend you get started in maintenance. Even if you know you want to get into landscaping, figure the numbers, figure out the industry, figure out paying people, figure out management style, figure that out. If you're in the industry already, I'd say this. If you already have mowing and you have landscape and you have other services, don't think that making another service, offering another service to your customers is gonna solve your problems. I would actually highly recommend you cut services out in order to become more lean, more efficient, and more profitable. At Augusta Lawn Care at our local shop, because now we're focusing on franchising. We. We're like, look, we don't need to have artificial turf. We don't need to have tree service. We don't need to do any irrigation. We don't need to do spraying. We just cut those things out, and we still made this year. We'll still grow our numbers. Our gross revenue will still go up, but our net margin will drastically go up. We don't deliver materials anymore, so therefore, we could get rid of our big dump truck. When we got rid of the tree services, we were able to sell off the tree chipper. Those are things we had to insure before, and they were expensive, and we had to maintain them, and they were expensive, and, you know, artificial turf, we had to warehouse that stuff. And the skilled labor behind artificial turf is so much greater than for someone that's mowing, where in a couple weeks they can go from knowing nothing to being a profitable employee after being trained. And so I'd highly recommend you to stay focused on the services you offer. Even cut out the extraneous ones. The ones that are doing 5, 6, 7% of your revenue, just cut them out. They're not moving the needle. They're sucking up your time and attention. And you need to focus on your core competencies. They're going to become the profit centers for your business. I'm Mike Andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse. Com. Until next time. Be great because nothing else. Pay.