A motivational YouTube speech by Mike Andes addressing lawn care/landscaping business owners. It opens by empathizing with the physical, financial, and emotional burdens of running a landscape business—long hours, demanding labor, unhappy customers, payroll stress, unreliable staff, and aging equipment. The speaker then pivots to encouragement and concrete advice: persevere rather than quit; charge appropriately and focus on profitability over raw revenue; simplify services and concentrate on core competencies; invest in people and culture (training, uniforms, websites) to build high-performing teams; and differentiate from low-cost competitors.
Chapters
Look, I get it. I'm a landscape business owner too. It's not easy. Not easy. Not easy.
It's not easy working 14 hours a day out in the blazing heat. It's not easy lifting bag after bag of grass, clipped things, sweating allergies. But at the end of all of that, the employees go home and you go back to your house, only to be visited by a full inbox of emails and your voicemail full of messages, all filled with customers that are unhappy, unsatisfied, unhappy with their prices, unhappy with your employees, unhappy with your customer service.
Questioning your integrity. And it's beginning to wear down on you. And all the pressure and all the weight of the financial responsibility and the employees and your family begging for your time, it's all crushing down on you. And that physical pain and stress turned into anxiety when the financial burdens begin to make themselves so clear to you. At the end of each month, you send out the invoices, you collect payments, you charge credit cards and send out invoices in the mail. And you get the money. But short lived, because that money quickly is being spent on payroll. To the employees you don't think deserve it. To the employees who don't show up on time, that call out sick last minute, that don't care about you, your customers or your business.
You're beginning to question whether it's really worth it. Is it really worth the struggle and the fight and the burden and the stress.
Maybe you're not a business owner after all.
You're tired of the long days.
Short nights, weekends that should be spent with your family, spent on estimates, paperwork and emails.
You're tired of constantly looking at your bank account to see if you make payroll. You're wondering where the next job is coming from. Or maybe you have too many jobs and you can't get to them all and they're just constantly running behind.
The job you do have.
The machines get stuck, the customer's unhappy, you're way behind on your budgeted hours.
And just in that moment is when your project manager leaves. Your key employee, the employee that started this business with you, that's been with you from day one, leaves. Why? No real reason. They just wanted another job. They just wanted another extra dollar or two per hour, but you couldn't afford it. And so what did? You took more of the stress on you. You took more of the responsibility. You're gonna keep grinding and pushing and shoving, but it's wearing down on you now. Physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You're drained.
The equipment, it's old now. It used to be new. You used to love to shine that thing up.
But now it's beginning to get a little bit rusty and now it's breaking down. And now there's costs and expenses and the truck is breaking down. And things are happening every single day. Broken windows. The employees are leaving the gates open. The employees don't seem to care.
You're beginning to wonder, should I quit?
Should I just give up?
Maybe being an employee isn't so bad after all. Maybe this business owner thing, I'm not really cut out for it. You feel like you're spinning your wheels every single day, 400 horsepower ahead, but yet you're not getting anywhere. Don't give up. Don't give up. As long as you don't give up, you will succeed because you might get hit down 10 times. But if you can get up one more time and constantly resolve within yourself to get up one more time, you will eventually succeed.
Know what you're worth. Charge more to the customer. Do not fall into the trap of charging lower and lower prices. Trust me, it's a race to the bottom. Charge what you're worth. Know your value and use that profit to increase the value in the form of websites and uniforms and training those employees. To become high performing employees. You need to simplify. Reduce the number of services that you're offering. Don't try to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Figure out what you're going to focus on. What are your core competencies? Don't focus about your revenue numbers. Focus on profitability, scalability. What can be done without you. Simplify things.
You've got to focus on creating a culture, a culture of high performers inside of your company. Yeah, that's going to take some time. It's going to take a little bit humility. It's going to take maybe scaling back for a year. It might mean investing less in your trucks and your equipment and more into the people, the men and the women that put your uniform and your logo on every single day.
But if you can create a culture, a team of individuals that are dedicated to becoming high performers at work and in their lives, it will reignite the passion and the desire for achievement and success that started your business. Remember, back to the why of why you started your lawn care business. Why did you start your landscaping business? It wasn't to stay where you're at now. Focus on your goals. Focus on what you're trying to achieve. Simplify. Raise your prices, increase your profitability. This is what this industry needs we do not need lower prices. We do not need less quality. We do not need lower levels of service and and less value to the customer and less professionalism. Become different. What differentiates you from every other landscaper in your market? Every other $25 per cut? Joe and his mower with his pickup truck? What separates you? What makes you different? Are you just the same as everyone else?
You might feel down, you might feel discouraged, you might. You might feel beat up. But at this moment, at your lowest point is when you need to focus on the simple things of your business, reduce your services, increase your prices, and focus on creating a team of high performers. Do not give up. Don't give in. You might be down, but you're not out. Share this message with another landscaper that could use this encouragement and inspiration. Going to change the level of professionalism one landscaper at a time.
