Before Starting: What I Wish I Knew! (Q&A with Mike)

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the podcast is all about starting, maintaining, and growing your small business. Ever wanted to pick Mike's brain? Well, this episode's for you. Mike did a live Q and A a week ago on the topic of everything he wishes he knew before starting Augusta. Lots of great answers to some tough questions in this one. If you have any questions of your own, you can text landscaping to 360-227-6362 to get notified whenever Mike goes live on YouTube so that you can jump in and be a part of the conversation. And as always, you can get the video version of this interview and more on the Mike Andes YouTube channel. Well, let's get in the car with Mike and see what running Augusta is all about.

And we're live. Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, and today we're going to be answering your questions about whether it be landscaping, lawn care business, any sort of service business, your small business. I'm happy to answer any questions I possibly can. If you don't know who I am, my name is Mike Andes and the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have almost a hundred locations around North America. We do mostly lawn care. We do landscaping. I do a whole bunch of stuff online to try to help other small business owners grow their business. And the day, I'm happy to answer any questions. So whether you join on Facebook, Instagram, Face, wait, YouTube, whatever it is. Thanks for joining. Sorry, it's been a long night. Okay, let's go ahead and get started and just start answering questions. This is perfect for me because I'm getting ready to start my own lawn care business. Let's go. That's why we do what we do. Mike, I wanted to ask two things. One, what or how do you say to the client when your crew will film at his property? So typically we would just ask them if they're going to be in the video. We'd say, hey, we're going to be filming your property. Is that okay? And I have yet to say, someone say no. I think maybe one time the media guys, they asked him not record. And that's fine. Oh, wait, a question here. Number two, where do you get uniforms? Thanks for everything you do at Augusta Nation. There's actually one of our owners there's there his wife has a whole embroidery and uniform making company, and so all of the uniforms from Augusta Nation come from her. So probably here in the next few months, she's going to try to open it up to where everyone else can buy Augusta swag through her. But that will be down the road.

Javon, would you recommend someone start with landscape business course or MBA for Entrepreneurs? What's the main differences between them? I would say if you're doing lawn care and landscaping and you're below a million dollars in revenue, I would probably start with landscapebusinesscourse.com and if you are bigger than a million dollars in revenue and your landscaping business or you are anything besides a lawn care landscape company, I'd probably start with MBA for Entrepreneurs. MBA for Entrepreneurs is going to be much more theoretical in terms of balance sheets, tax stuff, and a lot to do with marketing from a theory standpoint. Landscape business course is very much like this is what I did, X, Y and Z. It's very lawn care landscape specific, mowing estimates, landscaping estimates. It's very specific to lawn care landscaping. But if you're larger and you're in lawn care and landscaping, a lot of landscape, businesscourse.com is going to be repetitive for you. So I'd recommend MBA for Entrepreneurs where I dig really deep. There's like hundreds of videos now on there that goes really deep into balance sheets and understanding more business topics. When working with lawns, they are extremely hilly, mossy, and otherwise uncuttable. With a mower, is it acceptable to strictly use a trimmer? If so, can you still charge the same amount? I would actually charge more if I could only use a trimmer because it's gonna take me longer. And ultimately I am charging by the hour, a budgeted hour, and I'm gonna charge by the cut. But I'm going to. If it's gonna take any longer because I'm using a trimmer instead of a mower, I am gonna charge the customer more. So it really would come down.

You know, you want to even take that kind of work because I don't want to trim an entire lawn with a weed whacker. Wondering if Augusta is seeing a decline in work this season? No, not year over year. In terms of the whole system, we're not seeing a decline. Obviously there's seasonality, July and August. You usually have a slowing down of revenue just because you're not in the spring rush. But there's. We're still 24%, I think, year over year increase. But again, that's natural evolution of just people growing their companies too. Box truck or enclosed trailer? I'm leaning more towards the box trucks. That looks more professional and commercial. But what do you think? Like you said, there Looks more commercial. If you're going for more of a commercial look and you're trying to focus on commercial maintenance, you might want to go that route just to have that appearance. I really like the box trucks because one, you can just lock them up, but you can do the same thing with an enclosed trailer. The thing about a box truck, if the truck goes down, all of your tools and stuff is inside of that truck now. And so it kind of puts down, puts two things down so it's less interchangeability. It's really about systematizing, you know what your setup is going to be and then trying to stick to it. Like if you're going to do box trucks, just do box trucks. If you're going to do trailers, just do trailers. It really doesn't matter. Honestly, in my opinion, my opinion, until you have four or five setups and four, four or five crews at least to start even thinking about this, if you have a need for either one of those, I would go with the cheaper option. Figure out if there's certain weaknesses or flaws in it and then just keep moving forward. You're going to have a few less damage cases and like people like jackknifing things comes to a box truck because with a trailer, a lot of people do not know how to drive a trailer. And when you're trying to focus on trying to make your business systematized, you want to reduce the amount of things like that. That can always happen. You know, tires on, on trailers, brakes on trailers. There are a lot of like, you know, thin sheet metal enclosed trailers. That stuff can get annoying. That's why we got rid of enclosed trailers. A lot of maintenance and just wear and tear and you know, a box truck is going to be more expensive though, especially if you're looking at new. But if you can find like an old u haul truck or an old like delivery or moving truck, you can sometimes paint those bad boys and be in it for way less than even a pickup truck. So just because the buyer pool is so much lower for them, I ask. Here in Newfoundland, Canada, there is hardly ever flat ground and most lawns are extremely uneven and mossy. Make zero turns or ride ons almost impossible to use. Yeah. I would go towards a strategy that we use at our more urban locations, which is push mowers, typically a residential one, because they're lighter and you can move them around, you can put them go up slopes faster and then, you know, walk them up and downstairs and then, you know, trimmers, obviously. So I'd be very much Going after a zero turn, you know, zero turn less and trailer less setup, push mowers, weed whackers. And that's typically what I would recommend in an urban area anyways for your own locations. How long do you invest? How long are you investing before you expect to become profitable? I'm really thinking about pouring money into branding and getting employees instead of focusing on profit. So I pay for everything with cash. So that delays the actual like getting out of, you know, zero. Right. So here's how I look at it, okay. And I talk a lot about this in MBA for entrepreneurs actually when it comes to balance sheets. So. And your statement of cash flows. So for me, when I start a new location, I'm usually going to budget between 80 and $100,000 to get it ramped up to several employees. And so when I get started, I expect that first year, the first three months for us to dive like spend a ton of money on trucks, equipment, hiring, tons of marketing. Probably spend 10 to $20,000 on marketing in those first few months. My expectation though is that by months four through six, somewhere in there, hopefully four, sometimes as late as six, that it becomes profitable on a month to month basis. Now if you're growing really fast, that might be more like six. But if you grow really fast during three months and then slow down your growth, that's when you can become profitable in like month three or four. And so that's how I do it. And I still will not get out of the hole for the first year. Like for the first year because when I started location, I'm assuming I'm paying a salary gm, right. So if you're the owner, you could do this faster. But if for me, my distributions are after the take home of a gm, so what happens is that first quarter, because we do quarterly profit sharing, I try to spend as much money as possible, ramp it up as fast as possible and then become profitable in Q2. So they actually get some sort of profit sharing and then the goal is that they're profitable thereafter. And I would say though that it takes the first year just to get out of the hole, I. E. Spend, you know, get back all the money I spent ramping up the location. Years two, usually mildly profitable. Years three is when I expect a very healthy profit margin. And so that's kind of how I look at it. Years two is stabilization because you're usually trying to get your team aligned, usually standardizing equipment, raising prices, evening out your demand. You're not as taking it, you take, you start cutting out Services, et cetera. So it's kind of how I do it. Thanks, brother. Tips for optimizing overhead. Ooh, that's a big question. Go ask me something a little more specific because overhead is such a massive topic. You got overhead for labor. You have overhead for a whole bunch of different things. How much money should you be making annually or monthly before hiring your first employee? Very much depending on your cost of living in your local area. Right. I see this varying anywhere from, you know, in my opinion you want. It depends. Like if you're trying to grow really quickly, you might hire people way before this. Right. And you have, you have the capital required. But if you're trying to like provide for your family, I would recommend making sure you, you maximize your output before hiring an employee. Because as soon as you hire an employee, you have more overhead cost. And so I would recommend in most markets you can do between 8 and $12,000 per employee out in the field in terms of labor revenue. Okay, that's very doable. Very doable. So I'm always shocked when I see people doing 15, 20,000amonth in revenue. I have like four employees. I get very worried about their efficiency. I get very worried that people are just sapping the clock or that they're just really inefficient routing. Because you should easily be able to eight to $10,000 a month in revenue by yourself without hiring employees. And if you're not, probably need to raise your prices. So raising prices, inefficiencies, and route optimization is usually the holes I'd be looking at. If you're not hitting that, what steps should I take to get my first clients? And with everything going on in the world currently, is it a bad time to start? Let me be very clear. Whatever is going on in the world, there will always be bad things happening. And with social media and the news the way it is right now, there will always be bad things happening. There is never going to be a perfect time to start. There will always be bad news, wars happening, economic recessions, economic bubbles, presidents and politics. Like it's always going to be happening. Just start. There will never be a perfect time.

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Temperament training for staff, mostly for dealing with customers. But not everyone, even the best workers is a people person. Yeah, really, you know, team meeting is really trying to focus on things like nonverbal communication, how to deal with unhappy customers and ultimately though an employee that will do the best in these situations is the employee with information, the employee that is open book management. That's basically what it is. They know the numbers, they know what's happening in the business, they understand the business side of things. So they, when they have an unhappy customer, they understand the ramification of losing that customer. They understand when they should go ahead and let this customer go, et cetera. We had a, last week we had at our local shop on the team chat one of our, our team members. I don't think he'd mind me saying his name. Tyler. He, he, he used to be in the military and things like that. And so he's come back working at the local shop and he actually got on his phone recording of a cut client freaking out at him, like getting mad and he was just like literally recording on his phone and then he turned it around and did a really good job of kind of like diffusing the issue. And then we use that as an example in the team meeting to talk about what to do during the situation. So it's really about having good team meetings and be able to get everyone on the same page around what to do in those scenarios. Also, if there are like four to five other people who are mowing lawns, would you just offer them work and pick up their lawns, try and gain a total grasp on all the lawns in the location? Would you just offer them work and pick up their lawns to try and gain? I don't really understand your question. Sorry. I have a gardening business and the gardens in the UK are a lot smaller than the ones you seem to have. Yep, that's fine. It's just really about, you know, now you're going to optimize your trucks and your equipment, your marketing around a completely different scenario than, you know, what you might see, you know, Keith or Brian or any of the other influencers and they're dealing with an acre, two acres. You have to realize that everything that you hear in terms of advice needs to be going through the context filter of how big your business is, how much capital you have and what the Goals of the company are, keep in mind, I did not mention climate, I did not mention area, I don't mention timing of the year. But those are the three things you gotta synthesize through. Because everyone else has different goals for their business, how big they want it to become, they have different capital reserves which is going to completely change how you run the business. And the first one, I don't remember, I said, oh yeah, cost of living in their area that does have have something to do with it as well as like size of properties, things like that. No, where, where is in the business? That's what I was saying, where they're at in the business. Like first year, completely different advice that I give someone in their first year versus their fifth year, completely different business. So what percentage of time do you put towards the different things you're working on? I would still say I'm 90 to 95% Augusta. And then.

The gym is less than 1%. Real estate is 2%, maybe 3% now because the Airbnb's like I mentioned the vlog, but those that'll come back down to 1%.

The media is still 5 to 5 to 6% of my day. Probably just trying to like create the vlog, work with the guys on, you know, landscape business course, lawn care, web design.com all that stuff. I have a lot of people working on it, but I still am the face of it and still stay very in tune with what's going on. So landscape, landscape, businesscourse.com we revamped that whole site so you know, that had a little bit of my work behind it. But the guys did 90% of the work on the media team. And then like lawn careweb, design.com, obviously I'm not designing the websites, but I am having meetings, we're going over SEO stuff. We're always looking at what's going on with Google and the changes they're making and you know, optimizations and things like that. So those a lot can be done though. If you have a good team, a lot can be done in a 30 to 60 minute meeting a week. And that's typically how I try to arrange all the different businesses. How do I get started in lawn care? I'm a kid and I don't know how to start. Just keep watching the channel, lots of good content on there. What's the first step when taking your small side hustle landscape jobs into a licensed actual company? Landscapebusinesscourse.com would be a good step for you because you really got to get down the basics. But honestly I would focus on sales before you start trying to figure out licensing, insurance, getting all those other things in order. Because those things, the minutiae you can always get done. Focus on ramping up the business. If you're just getting started, the first step in my opinion is customers. Then it's focusing on making it legit and licensed and all the rest of it. Because everyone can license business. Not too many people can get customers for a business and actually ramp it up. I currently hold contracts with 10 households and three commercial cemeteries in my town. I found that people are so against paying an amount where it makes it profitable. Yeah, ultimately you have the price versus value equation, right? If you are struggling with people accepting you need to improve value over price in order for the exchange to happen. What everyone does is they keep thinking price, price, price to lower it and it will make the transaction go through. You will improve your close ratio. But what I'd be focusing on is how do I improve value? And what most people fail to realize is the thing that I mentioned the most time are like things like your website, your logo, your truck, your uniform. Those are all things that offer value. Right. Your social media and all the rest of it. But also you also have to realize that if you're meeting people in person, you might actually have to take a really introspective look at how do you communicate, your non verbal cues, your sales ability, the ability to be able to communicate with people effectively. You might need to improve those things because those might that might actually be what is off putting to customers. And for most people actually have those communicative issues and are actually putting people off. They are too stubborn to actually realize that they have those problems and they push it off on everything but that issue. And that is they need to realize and learn how to communicate. And I do believe it's a learned skill you can actually improve in those areas. Mike, what's the next steps for a business at 10 to 15k and 1 to 2 employees? What should I be focusing on? Depends. If you're trying to grow the company. I'd be focusing 100% on I take one year or six months, six to 12 months. I'd focus 100% on profitability because if you have one or two employees, you should be able to be doing more around 20,000 plus per month. So I'd be optimizing your profitability, optimizing your routes, optimizing your services. Then take that being much more profitable at that two employee location size. Like two employees, you should be able to do over $20,000 a month, no problem. And so I would try to focus on that and then optimize, make it more efficient, more profitable and then be able to take the efficiencies and the profit margins and roll that into marketing, a better website, etc. So that way when you can scale up from there but being, but by taking that six or 12 months originally to become more profitable, not only to make the enterprise value of the company larger, but you, you make that ramp up and scaling up phase much more.

Much less risky because you have a profitable business to, to weather the cash flow issues of growth.

Are you hiring? Are you guys hiring? Yeah, we're always hiring. Just go to augustalongerservices.com hiring or/careers. My bad. Should pricing be solely based on size or size and obstacles in yards? If you're doing it over the phone, you can do it by square footage. If you're going in person you can look at things like obstacles and things like that. But if you're going over the phone estimates then you're going to do it by square footage and you're just going to use a law of averages because you're always going to have mistakes in terms of gate size and you know, people putting square, you know, a flower bed in the middle of their lawn. It's going to slow you down but you're ultimately going to look for law of averages and realize that there's inherent efficiencies gained by doing it over the phone because you have to go to the property. But there's inherent inaccuracies by doing it over the phone because you don't get to see all the obstacles. I'm currently charging a quarter acre basic trim low at 50. Is that decent? That is very, very contextual. Like you need more information to be able to answer that question.

What kind of mowers are you using? What's the cost of living in your area? What do you charge people per hour? This is why comparing dollars per acre and things like that online is a joke because every single business is different.

Have you ever considered requiring ACH payments, checking rounding number in order to save on credit card fees and extract a better quality client? I have considered it. Due to our current CRM we don't focus on it. That will potentially change down the road. What are some good places to put your lawn? Lawn care signs that more people see them on a regular basis? Just type in yard signs. Mike, Andy's and I have a video about this. Where to place them? Basically what you're going to do is you want to place them in the line of sight at an intersection. So not like underneath the stop sign. Because if you're putting them underneath the stop sign, guess what? When someone in their driver's seat in the driver's seat rolls up, they can't see below the stop sign because they're across from their passenger seat. That door is blocking it. You want to be actually putting across the street. So when they're looking to their left, the driver is looking to their left and looking for oncoming traffic, the first lane of traffic, they're going to see your sign there. So that would be my recommendation.

Sorry. There are four to five other companies. Solo personnel would. It makes more sense to just start a business and hire them as employees and just absorb the lawns they have into the route. Typically, people who have their own business and are solo operators don't want to become an employee employee. It's very difficult to find people that want to do that. You can offer it, but typically solo operators don't make very good employees. Would you recommend going to school for landscaping or taking courses before starting up a real business? I would 100% start a business and then go figure out courses if you think that you need it down the road. But for in my experience who go get a business education, actually doing it will be much more successful in learning about horticulture and plants and soil types and ph and things like that. If you're looking at business, if you're. If you're genuinely passionate about those things and like to learn them, then by all means. A horticultural degree is probably going to be helpful or enjoyable for you. But it's not going to help your business. It's just not. How does P4P work when workers get on overtime? It's pretty simple. So you have hourly plus overtime that you're always tracking. That's why they stuff the clock in. And then you're tracking P4P, which is a percentage of labor revenue that they earn for the business every day. You take the higher of those two things at the end of a pay period. Now when they hit overtime, it's obviously going to accelerate this one much faster. The hourly plus overtime. So it makes it to where the employer and the employee both want the same thing. And that is no overtime. That's always the goal because the employee knows that that is potentially eating in their porn style. It's not taking away money from them, but it's not as benefit. Overtime isn't as beneficial to them if they are a high performer. But that being said, they also don't want to be like, oh, I'm stopping at 40 hours. Because if you do that now the employer has to hire more people. And what's going to happen is when there's a slowdown in the market, when there's a slowdown in the winter or drought in the summer, guess what, there's not going to be enough hours for the person that was not willing to work overtime. So this is what needs to be communicated with the employees. Like, hey, there's this balance. We don't want you to go into overtime, you don't want to be going into overtime. But we also don't want to everyone to stop at 40 hours. We have to hire more people. And then when there's a slowdown, we have too many employees and we gotta lay people off. And now you're gonna make 20 hours. So this is always something that happens. It's definitely a sticking point for some people. Is pricing based on size alone or. Okay, I already talked about this. For non lawn mowing, what is the best way of attracting leads and potential customers? Every single market, every single industry is different. I would say for most people getting started, they focus on the broad way too soon. And they should be focused on very specific. They should be zeroing in on the one, the 1,000 people that they want to actually become clients instead of trying to boil the ocean by doing Google and Facebook ads and massive campaigns. What steps should I take to get my first clients? Check out lawncaremedia.com get some, get some postcards, get some door hangers, get some flyers and get started. When I calculate customer acquisition cost in the equation, do I use the money spent that year on total spent? Do I use the money spent that year or total spent overall? Oh, it's for, it's for whatever time frame you're talking about. Right. So your customer acquisition cost will just basically be based for any time frame. So you can say my customer acquisition cost for this past month was. And you're simply going to take your total marketing spend divided by, you know, customers one during that month. So your CAC or your customer acquisition cost is going to change based on whatever time frame you're talking about. So your CAC might be higher during certain months. When it's slower, there's less demand. Maybe the wintertime, it's going to be higher. Sorry, lower. The customer acquisition cost is going to be lower during spring rush or in times when demand is higher. But for any given window of time, you can determine Your CAC by simply taking your marketing spend during that time frame divided by the customer's one during that time frame.

Advice for hiring when you have built a pretty decent sized business based on word of mouth because of quality work. I've try help having helpers but get frustrated when they don't care about the work quality and end up just going back to solo. Yeah, this is very, very difficult. It's very hard to find people and it's harder to find people when you have two or three employees because you don't have a culture. When you have a company that's much larger, you have 10, 15, 20 employees, you have a culture that brings a magnet people they want, they come to work and you can take a B player from a B player to an A player because they rise. The occasion of the culture when you have one, two employees, three employees. It's very difficult right now, compounded because you're smaller.

When do I go legit like paying taxes? I would do this as soon as possible, but I wouldn't make it such a priority that you don't get started.

Hey Mike, I'm looking to join the franchise by October. Missing calls a lot of the time and believe it's hurting my close ratio. I don't want to spend money on a call service to save for franchise. If you, if you're, if you're trying to save money, just realize that even if you got like a calling service, like for example, Landon. So if you're gonna join the franchise later this year and you're gonna have command center answering your calls, realize that command center, the only reason they're so cheap per minute is because we're all on the same systems, right? So that's why we're charging between 90 cents and a dollar and 10 cents. Now I do know that going to call boss or to Ruby or to Jill's office is gonna cost almost double of that. However, if you sell one new job per month because of that service, you'll pay for it immediately. And if you believe that you're missing a bunch of calls and that's leading to a lot of lost customers, then you just need one more job a month and it'll pay for it. Okay? So if you're going to spend a thousand, $2,000 a month even on a calling service, that is one project, maybe two cleanups that you need to get per month in addition to what you would have got without that calling service. Okay? Not, not even to mention the attrition, like your attrition will improve because your customer service has improved. You'll lose less customers if you're responding to people when they answer the phone instead of letting it go to voicemail. Sorry sir. Didn't think the Facebook questions are being answered, so I switched to YouTube. My bad. Great show.

If you made it this far, you probably can't get enough of Mike Andy's. Which is why you should absolutely sign up for the text club. We promise it's not a ton of spam. We really like to make sure our audience gets exclusive access to our new products and services before anyone else. You'll get notified when Mike goes live, so you can jump in and be a part of the conversation. Join today by Texting Landscaping to 360-227-6362.

I tried logging into LBC and don't have access anymore. Do you have to sign up again? Rec check your spam email? There was an email sent out yesterday to all Landscape Business course members showing you how to access the new site. It's all a completely new site, completely new login, everything you got to do again. But there's a, there's a code that we're giving to all of the members that were in the past. So definitely check your spam. If you don't get one, just email media@ Augusta Lawn Care Services.com and we will make sure you get that code and get set up correctly. Some people are bosses and some people will always be an employee mindset plus education hey Mike. Oh, I already got this one. I know service offers ACH payment, which is why I asked, are you no longer using service Autopilot? What do you think the pros and cons are of ACH payments? I think the pros are that you have less fees and that people are more inclined to run their credit cards to the max instead of their bank account. So if you get an ach, it's always more constant. There's less expiration dates, changes, and people, you know, getting spammed, whatever might be and have their cards getting closed. So that would be, you know, it's much better from that perspective. In terms of credit cards, the pros is everyone has one and they're much more inclined to give it out because people, if they get, if you get a credit card compromised, it's pretty easy to close down. Your bank account is a pain in the butt because your bank account is tied to everything else. So people are less likely to put in their bank information and they don't memorize typically their account number and their routing number as much as having their credit card where they can just swipe it or have it out. So I would prefer ACH payments. Absolutely.

How do I market to the neighbors of my existing customers that are in. That are in a no soliciting neighborhood? I want more route density but know if I get. I'll get in trouble for trying to get more work. Every door, direct mail eddm. That's what you're going to be trying to do for those, those neighborhoods that have HOAs and things like that. Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate all the value bring along care industry. You should end your vlog with a let's go. It amps me up. Oh man. All the, all of the owners in Augusta Nation are currently on this kick of picking all my innuendos that I don't even think of. Like boom. And what was the other one they were talking about the other day? Mercy, Mercy. Goodness. Merciful heavens. Those ones, I don't even think about them but my goodness, they're picking on me pretty good.

Getting many Facebook and next door inquiries from for one time maintenance. Should you do those? If they fit in your schedule. Okay. I would jack up my price if I had time and I would do them to get started because you can get those one time clients to turn into recurring customers. But if you're busy, I definitely wouldn't be doing them. Can you say customer acquisition cost three times? Yeah, no, totally. Right, Luis. Hey Mike, did you ever have your equipment stolen when you started and how did you bounce back? Yeah, we, we constantly have equipment stolen like literally all the time. And at the beginning I did too. But it just, you literally, you can't let it bog you down. You just have to move on. How can I close more jobs in my area, the competition charges very little. You have to prove to every consumer that your service is not comparable to their low price service. So if they roll around in the truck that has no lettering on it, you have a painted truck, you have decals. When they show up, they can't speak English or they write out their invoice or their estimate on a piece of paper and give it to the client, you have a CRM that sees you send it to them, you have someone answering the phone and they don't like all those little things. And then furthermore, when you do show up and you do talk to them, you are presentable, you are a professional. And so a lot of, a lot of times people quickly jump to like, oh, I need a new website, I need a better logo, I need a better truck. And that's fine. But if you're meeting people in person and you're selling in person, you are like 90% of the equation. And you're gonna have to do some work on yourself in terms of sales and communication abilities. 25 customers a week, all under 12,000 square feet. Is it worth to go electric or stay with gas? It's completely up to you. Like, I don't think there's. From a business perspective, I don't have an opinion on that yet. Was wondering if you had any suggestions. Actually, 12,000 square feet is pretty big. That'd be tough to go with electric mowers if you're doing a lot of those. 25 a week. Maybe you'll get away with it if you're doing a few a day. But I was wondering if you had any suggestions on services that can be offered in the winter to produce more revenue for those that deal with snow and can't do landscaping. Snow last season was not great. Yeah, we do what we call winter services, where we try to keep the customers on throughout the winter at the same pace that they were for mowing, same price. And we basically just switched to other services besides mowing. And usually we have a pretty good conversion of mowing customers into those services. I talk a lot about that on landscape business course and other videos. Is your landscaping business course worth it for someone already making 500k per year? I would say. I would say probably 40 to 50% of it will be review for you if you're doing 500k per year. I do feel like there's definitely value and we'll be adding to the course going forward to kind of really focus on those larger companies. But there's gonna be a lot of review, especially the first. Like, probably 10 videos will be a lot of review for you. But the content that's on there now is brand new. Like, there's a lot of new stuff on there now. How can I convince my boss to let me come to Washington for Landscape Summit? You would probably want them to see the video on the site. So if you go to mikeannies.com there's the banner for the conference for Landscape Summit. There's gonna be a second track called the support track, and it's gonna be for people that are employees, managers, spouses, and it's gonna be great. If I was an owner, I would want to send my employees to that track because it's gonna talk a lot of stuff from the employee's perspective. And I'm gonna have my managers, my employees and spouses talking about how they've dealt with the business side of things. So I would definitely lean into the fact that the investment they spend on you coming for a few days and talking to those type of people and talking to other managers and other owners and other employees and spouses in this industry is going to be extremely beneficial to them and their pocketbook. So I want to have your trucks in Calgary. Way to go. Let's go. Ryan. Is there a disadvantage to paying guys their P4P on a daily per job basis versus per pay period like every two weeks? Yes, there is. Because the reason you have the two week pay period is so that way they have accumulation of performance dollars that if they make a damage case or they're going really fast, they mess stuff up that you have money to tap into if needs be. John won't let me call in sick. Let's go. John Garrett's and John's gonna be speaking, so.

Hey Mike. I'm 15 and we make 65k a month on average. I have my goal of 10 million in revenue in 5 years. And we're opening our first franchise location at a corporate location and then the GM plans to buy it. Any tips? Be very careful about the franchise. If the way that you're describing that that's a legal nightmare.

If you're going to set up a franchise, do it legally, do with an fdd, go the full fledged thing. I'm only saying this because I know you, Caleb, and I know your whole situation. So yeah, if you're going to franchise something, you better make sure you have franchise disclosures, franchise agreements, operations agreements. All the legal stuff needs to be dotted. Like a franchise is not just, oh, I'm one of my employees going to own a location with my name. That is not a franchise. And you will get messed up or wrecked. Have you ever heard of Nantucket Island? There's a crazy landscaping industry. Yes, I have heard of that. We're starting a lawn care YouTube channel. Yeah. If you want to document your journey, I think it's good. Don't do it though because you think you want to make a bunch of Money on YouTube. It'll take you years and years and years to do it for most people.

How did you learn so much? There is so much knowledge in your brain. What books do you like or what do you follow to keep growing in knowledge. Like I did go to business school, so that's that. I learned some there but like since I was a kid I, I liked reading a lot and so at first that was a medical field and, and anatomy and physiology and I knew how to like do all sorts of surgeries and all that sort of thing. And I hate reading now because I got burned out in college. Like I never read anything now. I only listen to stuff and, and, or watch videos. So in terms of learning, I'm just constantly trying to like there's no silence ever. I'm either listening to a sermon, I am listening to an audiobook, I am listening to a podcast. I'm always trying to learn and I learn at two times speed because I'm really good at auditory so I can learn it. I listen to everything at 2.2x to 2.5x and unfortunately that causes me to talk fast because it's not good. I need to work on that. Slowing down when I'm talking. But it's because I listen to everything at 2x to 2 1/2x. Do you think Facebook ads are worth it or door to door for acquiring new customers? I would stick with door to door. If you have low. If you don't have a lot of capital, Facebook is going to be much more broader. You're casting a wider net. At what point do I need to hire a secondhand? Okay, I talked about sooner earlier about, you know, in terms of revenue size. But if you're going to be burning out like physically, then you should be hiring someone. The last thing you want to do is quit and quitting. If quitting is a burnout physically for you, then you'd want to stop sooner than later and have an employee. The reason we are having the location open as corporate and then the GM buy it is so we can have more time to gain funds for the 25k. If you're only spending $25,000 in franchise disclosure document, it's not legit. I'll just be perfectly honest about that.

Yeah, I believe you. I don't mean to be so negative, Caleb, by the way, I just know what a franchise, there's a legal definition of franchise and if you don't dot your I's and cross your T's and go all like just to the teeth with legal stuff, you will get burned. And it happens over and over and over and over again. I believe you use QuickBooks for payments, but what do you use for routing and employee employee tracking so your employees know what to get? We have several different CRMs that we use and we're transitioning to a different one that we're getting customized for us next year at Augusta Nation. Do you guys do irrigation or low voltage lighting? If no any plans. Some of our franchises do irrigation, we don't and we don't do low voltage lighting either. Those are things we used to do back in the day and have stopped since. What's the best resource for going legit business? License, taxes, etc. Is a CPA crucial? I think talk to your local SBA office. They'll really help you with the actual departments in your local market literally to search SBA in your city. And most cities have an SBA office that will help you guide. Every single state is different in terms of what site to go to, things like that. I started with Facebook ads, but over time I stopped because I was getting more word of mouth clients. Also list your business on Google. Is building business credit something I should spend time and effort on or is paying cash the only way to go? I would not be worried about this. People worry about building business credit way too soon because they launched people that talk about buying things on with loans using business credit. It is like you will have to be a person have a personal guarantee on those loans for a very, very long time. So I would not overemphasize that.

Thank you. I am not quitting, that's for sure. Is there a company you would refer a franchise? I receive a quote from someone online, but yeah, I don't have anyone to honestly because the one I went through was not great. And then I had to redo a whole bunch of stuff and pay attorneys out to wazoo to actually do it correctly. But if you're. Yeah.

I don't know who I would recommend that because I didn't know your situation. If you're not willing to spend $100,000 to really go for it and do it right and get attorneys, lawyers and a lot of consultants to know, make sure you're doing what you're doing is right. And you need to know that FTD like the back of your hand so they need to educate you. The reason I'm willing to pay consultants when it comes to franchising is you need to know the franchise disclosure document. You need to know the ramifications of the law around franchising. And so okay, if you're opening like one and a half years, maybe by then you can do it. But it takes a long. It's a long process too. Right. So I would never rush that stuff. How much should you make per year before you start franchising? I want at least 100 locations across the US man. A lot of people want to franchise Mercy. You need to know that you're gonna get 100 locations. And you need to have so much confidence in that. And if you need to have enough, you need to have money to burn until you get there.

It costs millions of dollars to get to 100 locations if you're going to advertise, and it cost millions of dollars more if you're going to support the franchisees. Well, and so I didn't have to spend any money in marketing because everyone came from my social media and my following. But typically people spend between 10 and $20,000 per location in advertising. And even without me having to spend that, still, it's very difficult financially up until a hundred locations. So. All right, I'm gonna have to jump off of this because I got other things I got to get done. I gotta work on this bank stuff. I got a whole bunch of projections I gotta work on and a couple reports I have to work on. So take care everyone. Have a great rest of your weekend and we'll see you tomorrow.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. We hope that you got some good insight into some helpful things to know before starting your business. We have tons of lectures, interviews, and more on the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. That'll be be right up your alley. Anyways, that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.