Are You WINNING? - Ep.80

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and listening to the landscape business course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or on Facebook. Big thank you for doing that today. I haven't made a video for a while so I wanted to jump on here. I've been really busy growing the company as well as if you listen to Business Bootcamp podcast, I'm buying a gym and so I've been busy with that. But thank you all for listening. Thank you for all those that are joining the course@landscapebusinesscourse.com it's been a lot of fun and, and today I'm gonna be giving kind of a higher level view. I'm recording the podcast so I wanted to do something a little bit different and that is I'm gonna share all about the scoreboard and if you listen to Business Bootcamp podcast, you heard me allude to this already. But I wanna go a little bit deeper for us as landscapers. And then on the course, if you go to recently updated videos, recently added videos, you are going to see just for course members. Exactly how I make the scoreboard, I'm gonna walk you through how I make on Canva and then I'm going to show you how I make onto our whiteboard and how you can make that for your team. So you're going to definitely want to check that out if you're on the course. If you're not a part of the course, check it out today. So the question of the day is, are you winning? And before we jump into today's show though, I want to give a few updates and announcements that have been coming in via email. A lot of questions and things like that. Number one, the conference this January. If you haven't checked it out already, check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com/conference. The conference is going to be great. We've changed the format due to so many people asking this and a lot of people are saying, hey, we don't want to have just another conference with a bunch of speakers. We want to have a more of a workshop style with me directing most of that. So if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference, you are going to see the different days. There's three different days and we're going to do three different workshops within those days of marketing, sales, building your team out and scaling your company. And we're going to take different two a day, two different workshops where you're going to bring in your financials, you're going to bring in your data, your website. We're going to go through your website and we're going to really make it a workshop, less of a speaking thing because you can get a lot of that online, more of a hands on workshop for your business. And you'll be able to have other landscape business owners look over your work. I'll be able to go through it with you. It's going to be a smaller group, probably 70, 80 people. And so you want to get in now because we're filling up already and we're still six, seven months away. So check it out right now the prices are phenomenal. Check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com and so you'll definitely be checking that. Another announcement, September. We've already confirmed and booked our site visits. We're doing two site visits. One is down in Tennessee, one is in Houston, Texas. And really looking forward to those. And so you don't, you can't really apply anymore for this year, at least this season we're gonna be going to two different landscape companies down there, Houston and one in Tennessee, just outside of Memphis. And we're gonna be going there and we are going to be videoing me going there for two days and trying to help them scale up their company more, fix problems. And you're gonna be able to watch that this fall. So look forward to that. But just as a notice that the registration is closed, you can't apply to be on the show anymore. So sorry about that. Thank you for everyone that did apply and congratulations to two winners of the site visits. Last thing is, if you are a course member, do go to that recently added videos tab. There's a webinar that we recently had and I recorded it and put it on just for you guys. All about hiring new staff. All right, today we're going to end this show. Are you winning? This is the question you need to make very clear to yourself, number one and number two to your team. And that's what we're really talking about today is making it clear to your team. Are you winning? I want you to think about the last time you went to a soccer game or a baseball game, a hockey game, a football game. And if you walked in halfway through the game, walk. What's the first thing you do? You look at the scoreboard because you want to see who's playing, you want to see what the score is, who's winning. You want to see who's winning and you want to see where you are at in the game and what I encourage you to do to keep your team motivated, keep you Motivated is constantly keep score of where you are at in your business. What I mean by that is, in hockey, they keep track of points. In soccer, they keep track of goals. And there's all. They keep track of a certain metric to determine are you winning? When it comes to your business, you want to make it very clear to you and your team on a scoreboard whether or not you are winning the game of business. A good scoreboard, within five or 10 seconds, you can tell who's winning and where you're at in the game. And so if you are a course member, I'm making this video to show exactly. Exactly what I'm describing right now, exactly how I made our scoreboard for our company. But basically, there are certain metrics you want to be keeping in mind when it comes to the scoreboard. These are the things you're going to be keeping track of every single day, and these are the things that you and your team need to be aligned on to make sure the company is going forward. So what we do, basically, we have. I'm going to kind of draw it out for you guys here that's on the video, just roughly, but we have our scoreboard. So this is basically almost the size of my whiteboard. Here is what our scoreboard is at our team, in our. In our break room. Basically, this is where it's at. Everyone can see it. It's about this size. Two by three. Let me think. Actually, yeah, it's about two by three. And over here we have our revenue goal. Revenue goal on this metric here. Right here on this bar graph. It's kind of like a thermometer, actually. And then basically what we can do is every single month, we can mark what our goal is. What our goal is, appears. You know, let's say this is $200,000 for the month. And then this is like 13th of December or whatever, the 13th of the month. And when we. Maybe this is where we should be at based upon, you know, out of 30 days of the month. But we're right here, so we're ahead of schedule. To be able to quickly look at this, you can say, okay, are we ahead of our goal of $200,000 in the month? Because if it's $200,000, it means on the 13th that we should be at $130,000. No, it means we should be almost at $100,000 in revenue if we are at the 13th of the month. Right. So if right now we're down here, you know, this is where we should be at on the 13th and we're only here and we're only doing 80,000. We're behind schedule. We've only made, say, $60,000 when we need them up here on the 13th at 80,000. So. So quick way to look at your revenue goal versus where you're at. Then we also have the different weekly performance goals that we have. So we have our damage cases. So these are things when guys break something on the equipment or we break something on someone's property. Then we have yellow slips, which for us is like complaints, callbacks, et cetera. Then we have reviews tonight and comments. These are positive things. And so basically how we do this, these are red, yellow, obviously yellow slips, and then green. This is positive. And so that's kind of the setup there. And then down at the bottom here, we have our sales metrics. So keeping track of our sales, and we keep track of our lawns, our new lawn clients, our new landscaping clients, and then our new artificial turf.

Turf clients. So this is another way that they can look very quickly and see red, green, yellow. That is the whole goal and premise of the scoreboard is that you can look at this quickly and know, are we winning green? Are we doing okay? Yellow tide or are we green? Are we winning? Are we ahead of schedule? Over here, this is the biggest indicator for our company, and that is our efficiency.

Indicator. All right, over here we have a red like a traffic light. So we have green, yellow, and red. And then we have a different, different ranges of dollars per hour. Dollars per hour is what we're tracking here. And when we say dollars per hour, actually doing revenue, total revenue divided by total hours on payroll. So not just the people out in the field, not just, you know, when we talk about hourly rate, usually we're talking 30, 40, $50 an hour, whatever that. That's hourly rate for a man hour out in the field. But we're taking dollars, total revenue of the company, divided by the hours of the entire company, including office staff, delivery drivers, estimators, project managers. So we are really determining what is the efficiency of our company based upon our revenue and then how many hours we are totally spending on the business. So then we have different ranges. For instance, if it's going to be red, it might be between. I'm just going to use an example. Between 10 and 20. Yellow might be between 20 and 30. 30 to 40 is going to be green. This is obviously not our numbers. We never would even be close to this. But just as a way to give you an indicator, an example of what the ranges might look like for you, it might be 40, 50, 60, might be 60, 70, 80, whatever it is, might be 20, 30, 40, whatever these numbers are. But what happens is we then, for instance, if these are our ranges and let's say we look at the past week, so this is the past week efficiency indicator. And if we look at the past week and we made $25 per man hour, so we made $1,000 and there were 40 hours worth of man hours total in the business, I'm just rounding these numbers off for you. That'd be a $25 per man hour. That's not just the people in the field that include, we're going to assume that includes office staff, everybody else, all the overhead people included. So we're at $25 per hour. Now, 20 to $30 is a yellow light, which is we're not doing very good. We're not doing horrible, we're not doing great. And so what we're going to do is we're going to put 25 in here and then we're going to color that yellow. And we already have the color already on there and we just have a dry erase, so we just have to put that number in there. People can quickly look at this scoreboard and say, okay, what's our damage? Yellow and what's our reviews like? Are we doing good? Are people leaving comments and reviews online? Over here we can see our revenue goals. This is like the lag indicator. If this is all going well over here, then this is going to take care of itself. So this is a lead measure, this is a lag measure. This is going to come back at the end of the month and we're going to be able to see did we meet our goal? However, every single day we can track it according to where we should be at, according to the goal. But this stuff over here determines what happens over here with the revenue. This is the most important and this is the beautiful thing. When you start seeing your guys come in Monday morning and they are looking up here and they're like, how do we do? How did we do last week on our efficiency? How are we doing on mowing routes? And they'll start to pick up on the fact that if they mow a little bit faster and then they begin to get a little bit more efficient and they cut out some time at the shop. The reason they'll start seeing that and they'll start seeing how this measure starts to be affected by them making more efficient decisions in the field. And the reason I track per man hour and we do all the man hours, not just the man hours at a job site, is because we have to pay people to drive, we have to pay people to be in the office. And we want them to start thinking about ways, how do we maximize time on the job and how do we make this efficiency indicator go from 25 because we want to be at 31, because that's our goal for this week, is because we were at 25 last week, but we want to get to 31, and we want to make it green because this is our 30 to $40 green light right there. And so very quickly, you can look at a scoreboard and determine what whether or not your company is winning. And I promise you it'll keep your team on track. It'll keep them motivated to continually be efficient. Reduce damage slips, reduce callbacks, increase the amount of customer satisfaction and the reviews that you get from them, increase the sales for your lawn care and your landscaping, and the bottom line eventually gets affected. So I promise you, if you keep score and you constantly ask yourself the question and you make it very clear to your team all, are you winning? Mike Andes, you've been listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com thanks, and I'll see you next time.