Mike Andes compares mowing services to recurring revenue treatments like fertilization and bush trimming. Treatments generate higher profit margins and build customer loyalty through regular visits, while mowing is competitive and seasonal.
What's up, everybody? It's Mike Andy's landscape business course. I'm in the studio today. This is also where we do the training facility for the franchisees. But today I am answering a question that came in on the Facebook group. If you're not already part of it, make sure you join today's question. Let's see here. We are going to pick up one of these. Let's do this one here. Jeremy Law, what are your thoughts on not offering mowing services anymore and instead focusing on more profitable recurring revenue services such as fertilizations, bush trimming, et cetera? All right, so this is my opinion on this.
The bottom line is that you're right. Fertilizations, weed control treatments, bush trimming, those ancillary services are some of the most profitable services you can get to get into in this business. And they're still simple. It's not like it's landscaping and hardscaping where you need a bunch of equipment and things like that. Oh, by the way, if you're watching the video, you can see this cool new slider I got here. Very, very cool. One of these days, I'll actually maybe show you how it works. But basically, when I'm at the podcast, this thing can move back and forth. If you look at my last video on Dave Ramsey, you can see how it works. It's pretty cool. It's automatic. But those ancillary services are high profit margin. They're still recurring services and recurring revenue, which you all know I like. And the thing that I have a problem with in terms of growing your business that way is most of the time they're not gateway services. In other words, usually someone who has a mowing service and they have a landscaper that come and does the mowing, usually they're gonna ask that landscaper to do their bush trimming. They're going to ask them to do their treatments. They're going to ask them to do their weeding and trimming of bush, like property cleanups and things like that. I see mowing still in this industry as the gateway service. In other words, the top line, top of the funnel type of marketing to get them in the funnel with mowing and then upsell them on all those ancillary services. It's a little more difficult to just sell somebody on, on, say, for example, treatments if they have someone else mowing their lawn. Usually most homeowners and commercial properties want to have one service provider for as many services as possible. And so they don't want to have a Separate person to do lawn care and then a separate person to do their bush trimming and a separate person to do their fertilization and weed control and a separate person to do their snow plowing, they generally want someone who's going to do all, all of it. And so what I see time and time again, the people who are most successful in treatments, they start in mowing, they build up a big base of mowing services and then they focus on those ancillary services. Now that is not to be said. I'm not saying it's impossible. Like obviously, TruGreen, Spring Green, all these other companies have made a business model of just selling the treatments side of things. But if you're also trying to do all the other things like weed control in their beds, like pulling weeds, their flower beds, bush trimming, property cleanups, leaf removal, all those other little things that, you know, maybe if you're solely doing gutter checks or pressure washing, all of those things are generally going to be first given or first the best person to get that job is a person that's mowing their lawn and coming every single week. The thing I don't like about treatments in terms of generating a business model on is that it's maybe five to ten times a year you come and service that property. The thing about mowing is you're going to service that property 20 to 40 times in a season. And then if you can convert them to winter services and then if you can get them a leaf cleanup and you know, property cleanup and you can get them on fertilizations, like you can literally service that person 50 times in a year, like every single week of the year if you continually upsell them. And I like that recurring base. And the other thing that is we're finding out right now is with treatments and applications, they are not essential to the health of the property. In other words, we go through this whole pandemic thing and we are going through a time of economic contraction. People are more willing to let their weed in feed and their aeration and thatching just go on the wayside. But guess what? The lawn still needs to be mowed. And so I see mowing still as a more economically buffered service in comparison to definitely hardscaping, but even treatments and applications. And so still to this day, if you're trying to grow your business, the low hanging fruit is mowing. Everyone needs mowing. The population of people that mow is so much greater than the people that do treatments and applications. If you're trying to grow the business. Most of the time mowing is going to be the low hanging fruit and then you're going to sell a subset or a percentage of those customers on treatments, applications, property cleanups, you know, all the other ancillary services where you actually make a large portion of your profit. Again, if you want to do a smaller business and grow slower, you might just focus on one of those ancillary services, become really well known for them and dominate that. And that'll work. In terms of growth though, growing your crews, growing the number of people, and seeing returns on your marketing for that low hanging fruit type of service like mowing. I still recommend that if you're trying to scale the business and get it to the point of a faster growth per percentage. So just my two cents. My takeaway definitely by no means is correct, but in general that's what I see most homeowners and commercial vendors using is trying to get one service provider to do all the property maintenance and especially the mowing if they're going to get the treatments to do those together. So anyways, just a quick tip. Thank you everyone for joining me today. Make sure you hit the like button comment below. If you are doing mowing and treatments, if you're just doing treatments or if you're doing a bunch of other services, what's your experience been with customers and how has it gone for you? Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com We'll see you next time.
