Are Fuel Tanks On-Site Worth it? (Q&A w/ Mike Andes)

So first one up, let's just go ahead and jump right in. Jeff Bryan from Blue Sky Property Services asks, hey Mike, I want to keep my crew, my key crew member on this winter, even if it's part time. I have some credit card debt that I accumulated through due to some personal expenses that had to be covered. So without digging that hole deeper and actually gaining ground, what formula should I use to accomplish this? I would like to get some office work done like a website and implementing Copilot. So having someone covering the labor and would be beneficial. I do have regular income that mostly covers my needs this time of year. So basically wanting to keep a crew member on throughout the winter. And what I would say most of the time is whenever I've tried to do part time work throughout the winter, especially if I'm doing like odds and ends for that crew member, a lot of times it backfires on me. And I have seen it where I try to keep them busy like shop work or like doing free services for some of my customers or doing some door knocking. And a lot of times they end up leaving anyways or worse off you get to your spring rush and they leave like right around that same time because of life, like they need to move, they have another opportunity, they go back to school, something like that. So I would do what's right for the business and in this case what might be best is simply offering them to come back in the spring when you are busy and laying them off until that time. And then you would do the part time work. Maybe it's 10, 20, 25 hours a week in the field and be efficient and productive and profitable at it. Otherwise you're gonna dig yourself this big hole during the winter. Now in the perfect world, you would actually focus on producing more revenue, getting more leads during, so they wouldn't even be part time. And this is what we're talking about at Blue Collar summit in January is like, can we go on the offensive during this time instead of trying to cut them back to part time or even like what I'm saying is actually laying them off. But I would rather lay them off, give them a start time. Okay? You're guaranteed to come back full time at this time. That way they can go get a full time position, seasonal position, retail, indoors, usually much more consistent hours than what you can offer if you haven't figured out your Q4, if you haven't figured out that off season to actually make sure you get leads. So I would recommend that at the very beginning, when I was getting started I was very afraid of losing my crew and not having them in the spring. And because of that, I made bad decisions and did a lot of inefficient work throughout the winter, causing me to lose 70 to $100,000 in cash every single winter simply because I was trying to keep people busy. Just keeping people busy is not the goal. It's doing profitable work. And so if I need to lay them off for that period of time, I'm going to have to do that. And then my ultimate goal is how do I actually produce revenue, get more leads, and go on the offensive during that time. And that's something we'll be covering at blue collar summit. Caleb Bartlett says he's from Spruce Lawn Care. What are some great ways of incentivizing employees to use the upsell feature? I give them $15 if an upsell turns into an accepted estimate, but it does not motivate them at all. Yeah, I would ask yourself, like, what's the value of an upsell to the business? And. And the bottom line is like, it's funny because a lot of times we are willing to spend, you know, $100, $120, $150 cost per acquired customer to Google or Facebook or other platforms, and yet we're giving $15 to our employees. Realize that your customer acquisition cost on an existing customer that they are upselling is zero. You didn't have to pay for the customer. They're already existing. And so I'm willing to spend significantly more than this. We've done as high as 50. Now it starts to move the needle. And then I would also, you know, be careful with, like, you can set your inside copilot. You can just set to where, you know, your crew members are brand new. Potentially, you have to approve the upsells. And then your crew leaders, for example, you can have where immediately the text goes out, immediately an email goes out trying to upsell the customer into the other service. I would spend a lot of your time, like, honing those emails and texts too. Like, really, really taking the time to actually what's going to convert. What actually gets people to respond? Do you have them click a link? Do you have them go to a form? Do you have them just respond back via text? That's usually the highest convers hurting. So I would spend a lot of time on that. But then I would also increase the incentive. I would also train them on what to look for. Like, I actually go to a property. Okay, guys. So if we assume we need. They need mulch what would we do? Okay, here's in the app. Go here, click upsell, click mulch, boom, you're good. And here, over on our side, this is what we see on the dispatch board, this little handbag sign and we click on it, we approve it. If that goes the customer and they accept the job for that service, you're gonna get 50 bucks. That starts to move the needle. Usually people underpay for upsells and referrals from their current team in comparison to the cost of acquiring a brand new customer from a third party like Facebook or Google. Next question from Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and snow plowing. When we have a large snow event, usually happens a few times a year, we have many leads come in. Sometimes to the point it overwhelms office staff at this time of year. Owners out in the field working long hours. Employees are putting extremely long hours, coming at 2am to 4am while going sometimes to 8 to 10pm and need to start again at 2 to 4am depending on the storm whale.

When we have a smaller event, it can be much different and some are looking for many more hours during these events. When a large event happens, what is best way to harness those leads? Knowing we are too busy to service them during the current event though, wanting to get them on a recurring schedule moving forward. Yeah, so you'd want to really work on your scripting with your office. And so if you have capacity for recurring customers but you can't really take them on during the middle of an event, what you're going to want to do is say, hey, we are at capacity. However, if I can take your information, we will get a price to you and we'll get you on the schedule. So in the future, within 24 hours, we'll be at your property. Now keep in mind, most time when people are calling in the middle of it, they're not thinking ahead. They're not the type of person that does that and they just want service today. Like they're like freaking out about it. And a lot of times they'll just be like, well no, I want, you know, whoever can service me today, then I'll maybe give them my future business. Sometimes they'll do that. But also just like you're crazy smashed and super busy. The all your competition is. So they might not be able to even get someone to come out today and get taken care of. And so you can just say hey, what we can do, here's your pricing. We can put you at the end of today, of today's route or the end of the route tomorrow, whenever our we or even just say we prioritize the customers that are on a recurring schedule with us and so we can give you pricing and then on the next event you'll be prioritized within the first 24 hours. But for today you're gonna have to be put at the back of the route, right? So you could definitely just work in your scripting. I would probably just be like hey, you're in priority now cause you're already set up prior to the event happening, you're on recurring service. However, we will put you at the back of today's route and then we will make sure that in the future you are prioritized as part of our existing crew, our existing route. And maybe the first visit you have a higher price. It's like hey, your first visit is you know, you're not set up so you at the end of the priority and your price is higher. But, but here's the price for being on schedule and in the future you'd get higher priority. So I really like using that, the priority of things as well as the fact that like they need the service done today and they hate calling around like it's a pain in the butt for them too. So how can I get to like hey I can't get to it right now, I will get to it as soon as I can. Here's the pricing for that service and if you sign up for like our recurring and you're on our schedule, we get priority and a lower price.

Brendan from Berger Harris Landscape Management what are some of the best uses of tags? I understand this is a loaded question, but I was curious what you have found to be some of the most creative and effective uses for the tag feature. I was also curious if there was an easy way to use tags to help the managers differentiate between the jobs on the dispatch board when scheduling their crews. We have a lawn care manager that oversees the fertilization jobs, a landscape manager that oversees project based jobs, etc. So some of the best ways I've seen people use tags is mostly around the automation side. What you want to be careful of is tags are still going to be dependent on the office actually adding the tag. So if they don't remember to put like the poop removal reminder tag then like that automation will never get triggered to notify the customer if you have it. Like for example we have ones like out of service area, that's great but if they don't take action, actually put the tag on there, it becomes Useless. So I've seen some people use too many tags and because of it, and the reason I say that is because now they're expecting their office to have like five different tags. Okay, this person's residential, okay, they're in this zip code, okay, they're in this type of service. Like all these crazy amounts of tags when a lot of those can be done just through filtering. So I would, I would lean as much as possible on filtering and so even like on the dispatch board I would do it based on like filtering by service, et cetera instead of trying to do all by tags because you can begin a slippery slope of just like where every customer needs 4, 5, 6 tags just to like get in your system. And if the office doesn't remember now all of a sudden automations don't get fired off, etc.

Next question is also from Brennan. While with the coming wait list update in 2025, I was curious what is the best workaround for scheduling in the meantime? We have approximately 800 fertilization customers to schedule for this spring season with five visits each. I don't know the best way to organize all the visits on the calendar until that feature becomes available. Thanks Mike. There's a couple ways to do this now. So this waitlist feature we do plan and anticipate to have this ready to go before everyone gets crazy busy later in spring, especially around the fertilization side. However, when it comes to doing in the meantime, there's two ways to do this. One, you could just do an Excel spreadsheet of like, hey, here's all the jobs. And then when I, when I want to put them on the schedule, then I actually put them in copilot and I put them on the dispatch board. Another way you could do this is just put. This is what we did with fertilization when we back when we did it is we would just put it on. We would schedule all the visits, like all five visits usually from the first week of the month. And then if we as we came up to that we could see on our budget hour capacity chart when we like inside copilot we can see oh like there's a massive spike. It was because we were dumping all of those visits just on that spot when they got accepted. And then as we got closer to that time we would actually schedule them out like a week or two or move them around and make it, make it work with the schedule. So it just depends. Just be careful. If you're doing automations based on like three days before you want to be careful of actually putting them on the schedule, obviously. So that would be. That's what we've done to kind of get around the work. The wait list workaround is either A, put them on the schedule all in the same day and then as you get closer, you can't move them where you actually want them to be, or B, just have an Excel spreadsheet and have them all. And then as you want to segment them over, you can just do them in batches. But you probably would probably be like maybe your first round of treatments that you actually would need to use that system for before. The wait list would basically have all the jobs there and then you can move them from the waitlist to the dispatch board when you have time on your schedule.

Marco Garcia from estrella lawns at 7 to 800. Lawn mowing and cleanups. Do you have another truck aside from the 3 to 4? So you can do sales in person and estimates. So essentially once a general manager becomes a full time estimator and full time like they're out of the field, essentially that's when I am going to move to this model. Now I have locations inside of Augusta that do 6, 700,000 and the general manager is still working in the field to two to three days a week. And that's a very, usually very profitable location. If you're running around that 7, $800,000 per year marker, let's just assume that's your revenue for a second. That's when you usually do start to see that you again need a full time general manager. And that's when I'm usually gonna give them like a car, right? So it's a little cheaper for them driving around doing estimates. I would really push you to say how can I do estimates over the phone and how can I do them? Maybe I can't do. Okay, I do over the phone. I need to do a drive by estimate. So instead of doing in person estimates with the customer, I'm trying to drive by estimates and I can't do drive by estimates. I would really like to do over the phone estimates and ideally I like to instant pricing for my website, right? So like in the best case scenario I'm having instant pricing right below that. I'm gonna have over over the phone pricing. So I have to go drive around below that. I'm gonna have my drive by estimates. So I can stack a whole bunch of estimates in one day. Usually you can get 20 or 30 of these done depending on your route density. Instead of like maybe 8 or 10 in person estimates and then very last is like I do in person estimates. So if you can simplify and standardize your services and the way you do your estimates enough, you'll be able to do, you know, get higher up on that continuum in terms of, you know, how you send out estimates or how estimates get created. Kayla Willems from Elevate youe Landscape, a competitor that is primarily weed and fertilization company offers their customers discounts for prepayments of services from November to December and then another due date for April 1st. I believe the discounts are on 10%. The actual service is May through September. This is something you have tried before and is worth modeling after. They got really stung by the volatility of fertilizer and pesticides as they locked in the pricing without purchasing the inputs to match. I can lock in my fertilizer but have to prepay our expected annual use which I had to do during COVID the herbicides I could pre purchase if would increase my storage ability. We have the cash flow for the off season so we are more interested in long term profit. Yeah, it just really depends like if you have a churn problem, like this is going to help with churn, getting people to buy ahead, right? So what you're doing here is you're reducing churn by getting everyone locked in for the whole year versus you know, we're giving up your margin. Now be careful because if you have a 20% profit margin business you give 10% off you half of your profits. So be careful about that. I would also say this will reduce your churn. Like if you make people pay up front, they won't think about it for the rest of the year. So it really comes like what's the constraint in the business? Are you losing 50, 60, 70% of your customers every year? Like they're churning like mad. If that's not the case, I'd probably take the margin. I would probably also. You could also just bake this into a price increase. So increase your prices due to the price of fertilizers. Like hey, like this is what's, you know, price of fertilizers can go through the roof. Everyone's getting a price increase unless. Unless you prepay all of next year today or like this before this time period. So I like that. I'd rather bake in a price increase than a discount. That's kind of how I like to do it. You'll get more people to probably opt into that and you're not reducing your margin. So I would do it like a 15% price increase across the board. I tell everyone, hey, the way that you can help us is we can go ahead and purchase your product for fertilizer now to do that and you can even just say like, like due to rising costs, tariffs, whatever the volatility, we have to increase prices by 15% now if we want. If you want to lock in your current price and not get the rate increase of 15%, buy today in full for all of next year and we will pre purchase your your chemicals. And that way allows us to have the stability of the pricing for the rest of the year. That's probably what I would do. And then the extra cost of storage, you kind of eat that because you didn't have to give any away any margin.

Will Kelly from Military Lawn Cuts I spoke with our insurance broker in regards to having completely separate workers comp policy for each location or having one main location hold the comp, worker's comp and policy and then doing journal entries for other locations. He basically said it was our preference. How do you do this? Do you have separate policies or combine them into one? What would you advise?

I'd probably just do one just for the sake of simplicity. And then the journal entries are really easy just inside quickbooks to do at the end of the month or even if you you pay like for the whole year you can just like or quarter or however you're doing your workers comp. It depends on each state. But like I would just do do the journal entries. That way you're just having to file one quarterly like for each one. It just makes it simpler. That's probably what I would do. Just know that like hey if you have one crazy, you know, claim it could affect you a little bit more across the system but I would not concern myself. You want to like reduce your defensive measures as much as possible and like you have to pay workers comp but it's a defensive measure. It's not going to make your business bigger and better and more profitable by having workers comp. You have to have it. It's a defensive measure and so I'm trying to eliminate how much time I'm spending on that. And if that means getting one policy instead of five and six as you get more locations, that would be my recommendation. Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing do any of your locations have an on site bulk fuel? We currently spend roughly 3% of annual revenue on fuel and curious if there is a significant savings on this in your experience. We're projected to do north of 1.5 million next year. So a 1% savings could lead to an additional 15%, $15,000 to the bottom line. So assuming that you're going to get a 1 savings, that would mean that you're going to get 33% off on your fuel. I don't see that happening. And even if it was, is saving $15,000 going to be worth the tanks, the insurance? And a lot of times if you're renting, they're not going to want you have fuel on site, especially if you're in big tanks. Like the management of this is going to cost time too and money and like storage space and like the actual leasing of the space becomes more difficult. So I think most time people overthink this. If you own the property or your landlord just does not care, it makes it a little bit easier. But I most time I don't see a 33% decrease in cost of fuel simply by having the storage tanks. And the storage tanks, the bigger they get them, they're expensive too. Unless you get like if someone was giving you the tanks for free or like basically nothing because they didn't want them anymore and you had really, really loose leasing agreement or you own the property, I'd probably start thinking about it. But storage of fuel is always a big red flag for, for landlords it's difficult for storage units as well as the savings of the fuel is usually not 33% and so I wouldn't see the 15K actually happening like that. You might say 5 or 6,000, maybe $7,000 over the course of a year. And then furthermore it is a matter of you're locking a certain price. What if prices go down and now you're fueling up a higher price Number four. The opposite could be true though too. So now you're starting to play a different game. I just again, this is a defense measure. I need fuel to run my trucks and I'm going to try to no get tight route like tighten my route density. That'll save you a lot more fuel. Getting more more fuel efficient trucks will also impact us way faster. And I would just focus on the aggressive measures like $15,000. Yes. You could add to your bottom line. You could also just add another hundred thousand dollars in upsells or raise your prices once and you'll get more than 15 like 1% savings. I could also say what if you raise your prices by 5%? Right. So like I think that you have less operational drag of raising your prices by 5% and making $75,000 more than trying to get fuel tanks and approvals and insurance etc. For the fuel tanks. So.

A 1% measure can usually be beaten by like 10 other things inside the business. And so if you don't have any of those issues though with the fuel tanks, then yeah, hey, save money, let's go. But by how you buy them, you store them, you anchor them, you get approvals for them, you get insurance for it. Sometimes I've seen that 1% get wiped out pretty quick. Jim from Moose Lawn Care from memory you spoke recently about Sequence Automations getting an update or rebuild. Can you elaborate more on this? What we can expect, timing, et cetera. I've been having trouble with rogue sequence automations reaching out to customers for a full year now without any definitive answers from atc. Is it the rogue sequence automations? If you, if you see that and you can report it, that'd be excellent. They are rebuilding this though and so there's a whole group of ones of these we've been tracking throughout the year and the rebuild is happening in 2025. There'll be a lot more definition around that from Josh coming up here pretty soon in January. But it's already like the back end infrastructure being redone of Sequence Automations and so tracking anything that is like if you do see a rogue one, please let us know and document it. It's super helpful to us. Now there's a bunch of them that in this fix are going to get fixed at the same time. So we haven't been like releasing all these little tiny fixes to Sequence Automations. We are rebuilding the backend infrastructure. But if you can send these. Excellent because a lot of times I' when they get submitted there is an actual problem or like something that we can show you. Hey, just build the automation differently. Like this is why it could potentially be triggered elsewhere. So feel free to submit those as like a bug report and then you'd get an answer back on that if they could actually say hey, it was built incorrectly and if it is an actual rogue issue it's super helpful for them to document and make sure that's getting fixed in the rebuild.

Another one from Jim from Moose Lawn Care. I was working quickly through the software yesterday and received a pop up requesting I complete a survey related to chemical apps and tracking. I dismissed it as I didn't have the time right then but would like to chime in. Is there another way I can access this? Yeah, feel free to reach out to the product team.

Jim, the product team actually watches these. They'll reach out to you. But yeah, they have a form. They're getting information and watching. We've already done this before. We have a bunch of tracking. We've seen other softwares, we've seen what other people are doing inside the software. We've been doing some.

Reach outs to our current members that are using chemicals and how they would like it improved as this will be something that going into 2026, we really start to push in to copilot. And so, yeah, feel free to the product team will see this, they'll reach out to you, they'll see the name of your business and reach out. George or Josh will reach out and set something up with you or at least get that form filled, sent over to you. Marco from Estrella Lawns. I've heard you say when you're in profit mode, you don't spend any more money on marketing. Is it really just solely organic leads that you rel in profit mode? Would it make sense to market for more recurring customers so you can reach capacity faster and raise prices even higher, but not buy any more trucks, get more employees, et cetera? Yeah. So typically you want to grow as quickly as possible to capacity and it's at capacity. You have the decision to enter profit mode. Now, there's no reason if I'm going to be raising prices and cutting customers to also be marketing and buying more customers. So I do need natural demand to optimize for profit. Right. It doesn't make sense if I'm gonna raise prices by and lose 10% of my customers and then go pay money to refill the 10%, I would rather let natural demand and like, okay, I can only handle 200 customers. I'm at 205. Time to raise prices. I now lose 10%. Okay, back to 185. Okay. Now over the course of the next month or two, I gain 15 more customers, I'm back at capacity and I can raise prices again. So I do not want to have to spend money on marketing because it defeats the whole purpose of, of raising prices and losing customers.

So you're kind of finding, speaking on both sides of your mouth. If you're marketing and buying more customers, but then raising prices and losing customers, it's very rare cases I would do that because if you're at capacity, you need to lose customers and you only would do that if you are, if you know that you're not going to spend more money to then refill those customers. So ideally you are basically, you know, pushing up demand past where your churn is at and if that's not happening, then you have a problem because you can't raise prices without having to then refill that churn with marketing advertising, which defeats the whole purpose of being in profit mode. So I would usually market like mad, get up to capacity, then be able to raise prices knowing that I'd lose some customers. But that's fine because I have enough lead flow coming in organically to be able to replace that churn.

So, yes, that's like what profit mode is defined as. As long as your natural lead and organic flow is greater than churned, you'll be okay. Now, if every single ad or every single lead you've ever gotten is from, from like a Facebook ad or Google Ad, and you have no website, you have no Google local services or no Google listing, you have no Google reviews, you have no Facebook presence, your trucks aren't painted. Now, you're not going to get organic leads. So then that's your problem. But I'm assuming that you have those things in place. So when you turn the ads off, what most time happens, people still get most of their leads. Even once they turn the ads off and they're all afraid to do it, they turn their leads off and still leads are pouring in, they're getting referrals, et cetera. Especially if, like, by raising that price, you're able to serve the customer better, your referrals will go up. So something to keep in mind, I've seen that happen time and time again. I would challenge anyone to turn off their ads when they're like really overwhelmed with work. Turn ads off for a month and see what happens. Most of the time, a lot less lead drops off than you think. And we all attribute all of the new leads to this marketing game that we're like pouring money into. When reality, the person was going to go to your website anyways. Like, if you're ranking really well, natively, yes, they might click on your ad and you're going to warrant the fact that they came from the ad. Whereas if you didn't have the ad, they'd be clicking on your site anyways because they were searching for your lawn care business, they saw your truck, they saw your guys in uniforms. So having those other things that are driving traffic to the ad platforms many times don't get the actual credit they deserve for bringing the lead in because Facebook or Google or some other ad captured that lead information. But in reality, what drove them to look for your service was the truck being painted, the paint and decals in the truck, the uniforms of the employees, etc. Etc. I appreciate you all tremendously. Have a fantastic Christmas season and a Happy New Year. Take care of.