Mike Andes (landscapebusinesscourse.com) argues that mowing and other recurring lawn-care services—not one-off landscaping projects—are the long-term path to financial freedom and operational freedom for small lawn-care businesses. He explains the seasonal dynamics (a May 'spring rush' with faster grass growth and longer mow times versus mid-summer months where cuts are quicker), shows how recurring revenue compounds customer acquisition costs over years, and recommends using projects as short-term schedule-fillers while prioritizing recurring services for stability and scalability.
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May 20, 2021
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Hey everyone, It's Mike Gandies landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm going to talk about mowing versus landscaping, not in terms of what you should or should not do. What I'm going to talk about is why I feel mowing and recurring services is the long term game and future for your business if you want to create real freedom for your lawn care and landscaping company. So this is the big thing is right now, we're in the spring rush. Right now, as I record this, we're in May. For most of you, you're in the middle of spring rush, the grass is growing extremely fast, it's hot, hard to find employees, and you're overwhelmed with work when it comes to mowing. And the thing that you're really starting to think about right now is like, look, why would I keep doing all these mowing jobs and I'm only making 20, 30, 40 bucks a cut when I could go out and get $1,000 cleanup, $1,000 mulch, install $5,000 paver patio, a $10,000 retaining wall? Those all sound great and wonderful, and they are. They're good money. I'm not saying anything negative about those, but what I want to change your mind on is this. Those are short term fixes and jolts of revenue in your business. They're great. I love those one to $5,000 products. Those are money in the bank. Lots of budget hours, maybe 40, 50 budget hours are in there. We can beat those and make money every single time. They're simple, they're not super complicated. I love those projects. But the end of the day, what I truly believe is that mowing and recurring services, so weeding, bush, trimming, all the basic things we do in our business is the actual key to unlocking financial freedom and more importantly, freedom from daily operations at your business in the future. So this is what I want you to think about, because right now, the reason I'm making this video is the fact that we got January, February, March, we got April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December. So the 12 months out of the year, right now, we're in May. And for most of us, our mowing season is somewhere inside of here. If you're in Florida, California, et cetera, you basically mow year round. I understand. But for the most of us, you know, we're going to start somewhere around here and we're going to end somewhere, you know, somewhere in here right now, inside of this mowing season, we might call it our growing season. So let's Call it our growing season there. You know, this is the thing. We're going to charge the customer the same amount per cut. But guess what? The lawn is not growing at the same rate during these months here. The grass is going to be growing much, much faster. This is what we call the spring rush. Because not only is the grass growing faster, but that's when people call the most. That's when customers are wanting service the most, is during the spring rush. This is where we're at right now. And you are overwhelmed with work. And it's very tempting to be like, I can't afford these $40, $50 lawn mows. I need to go focus on the $2,000 cleanup, the $2,000 mulch install. But this is the problem and the opportunity. The problem is that when I sell that mulch install, when I sell that one time paver patio, I can't sell them 10 paver patios. I can't sell them a paver patio every month, let alone every single week, let alone every single, even once a year. I can't sell the same paver patio to the same client. Whereas with mowing, I sell it once and it keeps coming back to me over and over and over again. I pay customer acquisition costs to get that lead, that advertising cost one time, and I keep them for years. Hopefully, if I do good customer service, I keep them for a very, very long, long time. Now, right now, you're discouraged because in the spring rush, the grass is growing very tall and you're not hitting budget hours. It's taking you twice as long to mow the grass as it will through the months of June, July, August, and September. This. These are the months where money for mowing really happens. Most of our profits, if not all of our mowing profits, come from these months. And in the middle of the year, when we're past the spring rush and we're now mowing a more consistent basis and the grass isn't growing at an incredibly fast rate. And we're actually able to settle down from the fact that we're not getting 10 estimates a day, 15, 20, 30 estimates a day at some of our locations, we can actually settle down to, okay, here's our route. We got our route set in place, maybe getting a couple leads trickling in for mowing, but it's not as much. The grass isn't growing crazy fast. We're not coming back a week after mowing the lawn, and it's already a foot and a half tall. And that's not happening anymore. And we can actually get the jobs done in literally half the amount of time that it took in the spring rush. So Instead of spending 35 minutes to mow a lawn and making $45, now that same $45 cut is only taking me 15 to 20 minutes to actually mow the lawn. Literally doubling the efficiency, doubling the production of every single one of my employees. I'm not going into overtime anymore. They're making more on P4P. We're killing budgeted hours. All the money is made in June, July, August and September when it comes to mowing. Now these other months, I still want to get projects. I still want to fill the schedule with projects. This is what I want you to think about. I want you to think of projects.
Projects as really being the short term. So I'm going to do equals short term. This is the way to fill the schedule. Get more revenue under your belt and as you grow with employees, fill in the gaps of time. So for example, I might need 40 or 50 mowing clients to get a full time employee. But guess what? They don't come in blocks of 40 and 50 customers. They come one by one by one. Well, I might not be able to go get a full time employee because I don't have 40 or 50 lawns. So what do I do? I go hire that employee when I have 20 or 30 lawns and and then I fill their schedule with projects. Now I might have, I get my first employee and I have 40, 50 lawns and now I'm like, well, I want to keep growing. Well, if I get a second employee, I really need like 80 to 100 lawns and I'm not even close to that. So what do you do? You go and hire the second person and as you slowly get lawn by lawn, 50, 60, 70, you keep the projects as a way to fill the schedule for that employee and give them hours. But at the end of the day, recurring work is the freedom that we seek in our business. There's no way, there's almost no way in your business unless you grow very big and you get a lot of middle level management that it's very hard to have a project based business where 100% of your revenue is coming from projects. It's very difficult to run a business that's just doing projects and you as the owner also doing the estimating and the hiring and you run team meetings and everything else. Very difficult for you to have a three week vacation or go away for a weekend on the spare of the moment because it's very hard to create systems, hire people. It's expensive, there's lots of equipment, there's a lot of overhead, there's a lot of big equipment and trucks and excavator and skid steers and all the rest of it. I'm not begging on this. You can absolutely make money, lots of money using just projects. But what I believe most of us as entrepreneurs want is the freedom in our business to, to go on a vacation, to leave for the day and have a team in place that's going to easily be able to manage the simple services that we've created in the business. So recurring in my mind equals freedom. Freedom to be able to step away from your business when you want to. Can you do that with projects? Absolutely. But it's much more difficult to create systems and have people and hire people in places of management and know that a $50,000 paver patio install is going to go just, just perfectly. Even though it's a custom build, custom block, custom area, you got to do all sorts of irrigation, all that much more complex. These simple recurring services are much more simple, easy to systematize. And when you create systems in your business, at the end of the day it creates freedom for you as the entrepreneur to go and do other things to either focus on growing the business and not be stuck in day to day operations. If you want to go invest in real estate, you want to go start a second location, and if you want to expand services in a different category or sector, this is where it is possible. All right, so check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for other tips and tricks to grow your lawn care business. And I really look forward to hearing from you. Do you focus on recurring or do you like the projects only? I'm not against projects, but if you want the freedom, the simple systematized services is where the money's at. We'll see you next time.
