Behind the Scenes of Spencer Lawn Care! w/ Mike Andes (RoundUP)

Landscapebusinesscourse.com today. Very looking forward to today's episode. Sean from Spencer Lawn Care is gonna be joining us and really been great to watch them grow, seeing not just on YouTube, but also their business. We're gonna be talking about a bunch of different things today, including their new truck, their new employee, a lot of different developments that are going on with them. Really looking forward to it. As most of you have probably seen, they've really taken off on YouTube, but also their business has as well. That's what I want to talk about today. So without any further delay, let's go ahead and welcome Sean into the show. He just finished working. So if there's a little sweat trickling down, if there's a little bit of grass on the forehead, he just finished uploading a video literally 35 seconds ago. So let's go ahead and welcome him. Sean, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on.

What's up, Mike? Yes. Everything you just said is very true, guys. Like, I don't even have a fresh cup of coffee, and that's very rare for me. You know what?

One thing I have to ask. How do you mow lawns with glasses? Like, so I was supposed to have glasses way back when, but I never got them. Then I got a prescription and I couldn't. I could never wear, like, reason I got contacts is because of mowing grass. Like, how do you do it?

So my sunglasses do have my prescription in them, so I have to have those. I just get the safety lenses put into my sunglasses, which I have very sensitive eyes. That's why I had to lower my light real quick. So I have to have sunglasses on or I will have a migraine by.

About 10:00am oh, man, that's awesome. Cool. So I want to go ahead and jump into it. I know we're a little bit abbreviated time here, but can kind of share why you guys got started. And obviously I'm talking about your wife, T.Q. in that regard. But we'll get to kind of what's happened more recently. But how did you start with the lawn care business back in 2011?

All right, so I was working security and I was at a facility, roughly 900. They had a ton of employees. I don't know exactly how many, but they had a ton of employees. Ran over all three shifts. And I was the second shift security supervisor, and I had three people under me on my shift. And the economy was going very south at that point, and it continued south and all those employees started getting let go. This is right around the holiday time of the year. So people were very upset, People crying. You know, they just lost their entire livelihoods. And, you know, all of us security guards, I think there was probably 15, 20 of us between all three shifts, were like, hey, we got nothing to worry about. You know, they have to have security for the building. If not, people will break in here, yada, yada, yada. And long story short, everybody got let go all the way through the security. I personally ended up leaving before I was cut, but, yeah, after that, it was kind of like new year. I mean, just holiday time. We had just found out our son was going to be. We were going to be having a son. And it was just like everything just compounded at that point. And I pretty much went home, and I was at my wit's end, and I said, look, Savannah, I'm going to start this lawn care business. I had been wanting to over the last few years leading up to that point, and I just never could take that leap because I had a daughter at that point. We had a house, and I couldn't get myself to take that chance.

So finally talked myself into it. I told Savannah, or as most people know her, as T.Q. i said, I need five years. I said, if I can't get it done in five years, I said, I'll go back to college. You know, I'll finish my degree, Whatever I got to do, Give me five years. This is something at this point in our lives I think we need to tackle and need to take this challenge on. And I just simply was done with people holding my future in their hands. Okay. So I started Spencer Lawn Care with a push mower. I had a craftman mower at that time, But I didn't want to use my personal garden tractor just because I needed it for my house. I didn't want to destroy it. So I was like, look, I'll just start off push mowing, you know, and get whatever. So very quickly found out push mowing lawns is not the funnest thing to do. So brought my garden tractor out very quickly, and then it just kind of steamrolled from there. We continually saved, reinvested, bought a little bit better equipment, saved, reinvested. I was big against using any kind of credit back then, and it was simply because I didn't know if it was going to succeed or not. I didn't want to get a bunch of credit. And then it fell, and then my family's in this big, you know, hole to pay back all these loans and everything. So, yeah, we Just kind of washed and repeated and all that cycle all the way up through commercial equipment. 2015, 16, we made a huge leap. And then it progressively just kept growing. And then Savannah came on in 2018, and that was kind of out of needing an employee. She said, hey, I'll come on for a couple weeks. And she's been here ever since. She absolutely fell in love with being outside and, you know, messing with flowers and getting dirty and just all that stuff. It was the first time she really got to experience that in her life, and she fell absolutely in love with it. And then two years ago, she came to me and she said, no, three years ago. Now time is just flying by. Three years ago she came to me probably like January, February of that year, and she said, look, I just want to go full time with Spencer Lawn Care. I'm going to give my business to my sister and I just want to move on. She was over her personal cleaning business at that point, even though it was going really good. And yeah, it's all, all just scattered from here on out, Mike. It's just. There's too much to talk about in that very little bit of time. I don't want to keep rambling, but it's just been a true blessing.

So at the beginning there, when you, when you kind of. Your current position as an employee was kind of melting away, you might say, for someone that might have had the same thing happen to them last year with COVID and they may have got laid off or, you know, reduced hours, they started mowing lawns on the side and now they're kind of in that area. Well, should I go full time? And maybe there's pressure from needing to provide for their family, what would you say to that person? I kind of like your strategy about kind of, you know, give me five years, you know, let me give this a shot, kind of a once and, you know, one more time to give this a full time go. What would you say to someone, though, in that case? That right now is kind of in that same sort of balance between going part time or going back into the workforce now that things are picking back up with the economy.

So, yeah, I get asked this almost every single day through Instagram messages and just through other avenues, email, whatever. And what I tell people, because I don't want to tell somebody to make a bad decision because I can't know everything about their life, where they're at, their work ethic, you know, their family, everything. So what I tell them, hey, if you're working and you can no longer do all the work yourself. It's probably time, if you can afford an employee to go ahead and make that leap and get yourself an employee. And then it's fairly simple after that. You just got, you know, like I kind of hinted on a little bit ago, you just wash, repent, you know, that whole cycle, you just redo it over again and you will continue to have success as long as you don't make dumb decisions.

Was it 2018 when you kind of started realizing like, hey, this is going to actually be like, I'm not going back to school, I'm not going back and doing something else. When did that kind of click for you?

So my aha moment that I was going to make it was 2015, and that was simply we maxed out a six day mowing schedule and this was with a Toro time cutter at the time. So residential, 50 inch, 52 inch, whatever it was, unit. And we had six days. I had already hired my first employee two years before that. I believe I was on, like my third guy at this point. And I kind of knew, like, hey, I'm not going back ever again to allowing somebody else to dictate how much money I make. When I get off work, when I have to be at work and things that I'm going to do, it's on me. So I knew right off the rip when I told Savannah, hey, I needed five years, I was going to make it happen. I just didn't know 100%, like, hey, you know, it's going to take five years, I guess you could say. And it ended up taking probably about four years, personally, before I knew 100%, like, hey, we're going to be okay. We can afford to pay bills, we can save money, we can buy new equipment. You know, we're going to be okay.

Cool. And now things have evolved. Now every single day, you and Savannah are out mowing lawns, you're coming back home, you are editing videos. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of time. What have you done to sort of prevent burnout? Especially this time of year in the middle of season, it's extremely hot. What do you do to make sure that there isn't burnout come this time of year?

So I'm like everybody else. I do go through little periods of burnout. So what I like to do is just take little breaks on my days off and do something totally different. So like yourself, you like hiking and going up in the mountains and everything? My family and myself, we like going hiking as well, so our new thing is every weekend, especially here in the summertime, because winter is coming very quickly, we want to go find as many new places we can, adventure on, make new experiences on, and new memories on. And that's just a big thing that I found. It's a really good way of burning off a lot of steam, Getting completely away from the business, the social media, any of those responsibilities whatsoever. I can get in the woods. I feel calm. So, you know, there's rocks to climb on and get dirty. The kids are having a great time. We're all getting a good workout in and, yeah, just making great memories. So that's the biggest thing for myself. But I am like everybody else. I do go through burnout myself. I guess this year was kind of. I hit it a little bit earlier. I probably hit it a month and a half ago. And it was simply because we went from last year lawn care straight into leaf removal, straight into snow plowing, Had a very successful snow plowing, and then went right back into landscaping, mulch cleanups, spring cleanups, and then the lawn care followed right behind that. And it has been super wet here in Ohio all year, thank goodness. It is a blessing, but it's also stressful because it's like going through three springs back to back to back here in Ohio right now.

Got it. And one thing that I think is most interesting to me when I watch your videos is just to know that you and Savannah spend all day working together, which is one feat. Then you come home and you edit videos together, which is another feat. And then. Then you still have to maintain, you know, a family life and be a mom and a dad. How have you, for those listening that might work with their spouse in the office or perhaps on the truck like you do. What's some of the things you all have done in terms of either parameters, or is it just you get along so well and every moment together is, you know, hunky dory? Like, tell us a little bit, kind of some of the things that you might have had to do to make sure your relationship stays healthy.

So, yeah, it's not always honky dory, as you say it. We have our moments, especially this year, having an employee in the truck. We gotta pick our moments when we need to because you don't wanna be looking like some psych in front of your employee. So we definitely have our moments. We don't ever just scream or yell at each other. We've never had that in our relationship whatsoever because we don't want our kids to see that we don't want them to take that into their lives and their relationships. So screaming is never going to happen now, hey, like, you know, that was dumb, or hey, I need a break. Something like that. You know, that happens almost daily, probably three to four times. I just choose not to record them and share them because that's our personal side of things. That's my, you know, that's my wife. I'm her husband. That's family stuff that doesn't need to be out there for everybody. And yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong though, there's times on the channel where she's like, yeah, that was dumb. And I'm like, yeah, I gotta agree with that. But, yeah, we're not perfect. You know, we just take it day by day. We just celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. We've been together since 2002. So Savannah had just graduated high school. I was still in high school. And yeah, man, we just, we mesh really well together. So I guess the biggest thing we do is at the end of the workday, we try to leave work at work. I tend to go into the editing more myself. Now she'll finalize like the thumbnails, putting the title on the thumbnail, stuff like that. She likes doing the pink and green and she'll work on that sometimes on the side. But we give each other that space that we both need. Like right now, she's outside moving rocks around the landscape. We're about to have some work done at our house here tomorrow. So we're getting re rocked on our foundation and our chimneys needing getting a ton of work. So she's out there pulling those cobblestones back away from the foundation so the masons that are coming can do their job tomorrow.

Very cool. So getting back to the business side of things. Recently, new truck. The branding is in my mind really solidifying in terms of what you've done on YouTube. Bringing that brand now into the truck side of things. What has even more recently a new employee. What is kind of the vision now that the business growing even beyond you in Savannah, Is it to grow to a few crews? What's kind of the goal and how has that evolved over the past couple of years as the business has grown?

Yeah, so when I started out originally I was just by myself, a sole proprietor and I didn't know how far I wanted to take it. At first I just wanted to make money. That's it. Simply make money, be happier, provide for my family. My kids were starting to go into sports. I wanted to be able to go to all their practices and games and all that stuff. So originally, I didn't start off with like, hey, we want 10 crews, 15 crews. I want to be this huge company. Now. We're more or less probably at the point where we're going to end up probably right around three trucks. And we'd like to have two crews, Myself and Savannah, we can do lawn care, but we want a specific lawn care truck as well that we can send a couple employees out on, and then we can tackle landscape jobs and stuff like that together as well. Our snow removal side of things is actually growing really, really well the last two years. So we're expanding that truck side of things coming into this fall for sure, and new avenues with that, too, Going from bagged salt and skids of salt to now bulk salt, because my back can't handle many more thousand pounds bags of salt. But the truck that you actually mentioned, that is new. That truck is actually now almost four years old. We've had it. It's the same one. We just had it wrapped, so we got a three quarter partial wrap on it. Just change the lookup, make ourselves stand out from the competition in the area. And it's honestly a good selling point and good advertising for the business. It paid for itself very rapidly. I mean, couple thousand bucks it costs. It's going to protect the paint on there. So, you know, it's just one of those things, you know, you're kind of like, should I get magnets? Should I get some smaller lettering? You know, because you can do whatever you want. You spend a couple hundred bucks, you can spend 10,000 bucks. If you want to wrap up an entire truck, It's. It's all just personal preference and how much you want to spend. So I went through all that as well, and we decided, you know, a couple thousand bucks. Talking with our cpa, and he was like, yeah, go for it, man. He's like, you got it there in advertisement. Throw it at it. So I don't remember the rest of the question you asked, but definitely going into employee side of things, that's a new venture, having them in the truck with us as a husband and wife. So I've had 11 employees, I think, throughout the year, since 2013. I hired my first employee. So now 20, yeah, I think 10 or 11 there, roughly. But it's a whole new avenue being husband and wife with an employee in the truck as well. So we're kind of learning that balance as well.

What. What was it. Has it been like in terms of pricing over the past now, what, 10 years that you've had the business? Where did you start out in terms of pricing? Where is that look? What does that look like today? And how has that changed even the past couple years, as you now have an employee, have more overhead? What's your pricing structure somewhat look like?

So, starting off, I did what everybody does. You know, you go out there, you undersell yourself, and you make mistakes, and then you learn very rapidly after making those mistakes multiple times. Like, hey, mowing a lawn for 25 bucks stinks. Especially whenever you're doing a phenomenal job, you're spending 40 minutes there putting in quality time, flip edging, you know, hard edging, all the above stuff. You know, I'm not just talking, going out, mowing and going. You know, we still have some of those where the customer just simply wants it mowed, trimmed, and cleaned off, and you head on down the road.

And.

And we know those customers, those are our minimum customers. So those are what we typically consider a $40 mow. Sometimes they can come in at like, 37 bucks, but it really just depends on the size of the lawn anymore. So that's how we've kind of maneuvered things learning over the years to make sure we're recouping all of our costs. So our truck makes money. Now while it's sitting there, our trailer is making a little bit of money. Now while it's sitting there, all of our equipment is making money. So it's not a lot. So don't think I'm sitting here making 30 bucks for the truck sitting there. It's not that it might be $0.57. It might be $1.25, but over every job and repeating that over and over and over, you have this lump sum of money sitting there. When it comes to, hey, we need to get another truck, or, hey, the truck needs some maintenance, you can say, okay, well, we got this money sitting here. We recoup that from every job, and it helps. It takes the hurt away from you know, saying, oh, you know, we got to go drop 5,000 bucks to replace the whole front end on our plow trucks. So I guess there's different ways of pricing everything. For us. It depends if it's commercial versus residential, is it snow removal versus, you know, lawn care landscaping? So it really just depends. We have our set marks now. You know, quarter acre, under half acre, under three quarters of an acre, one acre, multiple acres. You know, if you get two plus acres and up, we give a slight discount because, you know, we're going to Be there. You know, we're not driving all over town, but it's really just figuring out the pricing structure for your area and your demographics. Because, you know, here in Ohio, it might not be the same as where you're at. You know, your prices might be way higher, they might be a little bit lower. And it's really just finding that out. And you also have to dictate what your competition's doing a little bit as well. So in my area, I'll give you a quick example. We no longer bid HOAs, especially HOAs that I know the larger companies in our area are bidding against because we can't compete with them. A quick example would be I went in and bid a 44 unit, I think, five years ago almost, and I put in a bid of like $27.11 apiece, which I thought was very low. Okay. But coming to find out hoas bid way, way lower, and the lowest bid ended up getting, I think, for like $9.78 or something a piece. So they're going in there, knocking them out, you know, very quickly because they have a larger, you know, company based, more employees and making 400 plus dollars, whatever, very quickly. But for my company at that time, when I would go in there, you know, me and an employee, we would be there half a day knocking out 44 units and making them look right. So it just wasn't priced competitively for ourselves. So we no longer even go after the HOAs whatsoever. They're just bid so low in our area. But it's finding out what works in your area.

Recently, you and Savannah were able to go away for a little bit of time away, and the employee kind of took things over. For someone that's doing that for their first time, what were some of the hurdles or things that you had to make sure were in place before you could go away? And the business still function without everything falling apart.

So first and foremost, I'll say it was probably the most stressful time of this entire year. Stepping away from your business for the first time. At any point, you're going to be like, what's going on? You're on your cell phone. I'm like, hey, you okay? You know, the truck didn't get wrecked today, did it? You still got all four tires. The trailer's still good, mower still good. So very stressful and I guess a learning curve as well, and trusting people, because, you know, whenever you're giving your livelihood to somebody and you're just, you know, you're multiple states away, you Know, you really have to trust that person. So we started back over the wintertime, but we went down to Anna Marie island and we got away for seven days, I believe it was. And we allowed my nephew and my father at the time to kind of just go sit in the seat, make sure he was plowing right. We took him out and trained him for about six weeks. But I'll tell you what, I was like, you know, if he gets a huge snow event, I'm, you know, I'm very scared for what he's going to entail. Long story short, the day after we left, he gets hammered by like a six inch snowstorm. And they helped. They handled it very well, which was great. The first hiccup though, came about 6am I got a phone call from my nephew talking about, hey, we can't get the salt spreader off. We ran out of salt. You know, we got to go get another skid. How do we get the salt spreader off? Well, long story short, on the Boss, TGX Tailgate Spreader, TGS 1100, there's a little hook that you have to flip to the left. Well, that was what was holding them up. They couldn't get it off because they didn't remember that I told them to flip that hook. So what did we do? We hop on like any people today and we do a video call. And I'm laying in the bed at six o' clock in the morning, can't see anything in Florida. And you know, they're looking there and I'm like, hey, right there, that little hook, flip that hook. And they flipped it. And here, everything else was already taken apart. So it literally fell on the ground on them. I'm like, okay, at least you guys know what you got to do now. Next time, next time, before you unhook all the straps, flip that hook first. Okay. So, yeah, man, we worked through it. It was very stressful. I bought two skids of salt because I was like, you know what, there's no way they're going to go through two in a week. They went through two in a day. So, yeah, I didn't really train them too much on taking the salt spreader off because I'm like, you know, there's no way they're going to have to take this thing off. You know, I already got the salt already in the bed of the truck. You guys are good to go. Okay, I got it all set up for you. They blew through it in like a day and a half and had to go get more and yeah, we worked through it, but now with Tyler, Tyler's been really well. Tyler's a young guy. He's 22. He's gung ho. Very, very responsible young man. You know, he has his own very nice pickup truck. So he knows how to drive a truck. He knows how to drive a trailer. He came to us with some experience, which I don't always like guys and gals coming to us with experience. I prefer to train them on the things that we like to do our way. Just so, you know, we don't have to sit there and like, no, we don't like it like that or any of that stuff. But Tyler went ahead and came on with a bunch of experience, and it was a true blessing. We just kind of re honed him in on a few things. Turning a little bit slower so you're not ripping the sod. A little bit of trimming techniques. You know, we like to trim a little bit different than other people. Just, we found that our customers. And we like the look of it a little bit better. And other than that, man. Yeah, it's just learning every single day and figuring each other out what we're best at, where to capitalize on our time and each of our skills. So he's really good at mowing. I'm really good at mowing. I'm a little bit quicker at trimming. So there's a lot of times I'm like, yo, bro, you go ahead and just mow. I'll trim this one out. Let's. Let's knock it out. So it's training and also learning, managing just all of the above. You know what I'm talking about, Mike?

There's kind of that weird kind of size almost of business that's kind of tough. In my mind, that is when you. You are.

You.

You. You're solo, or like. Like, you and your wife are willing, and you have one employee, and it's almost like you're afraid to grow too much because then you need them so much that they left. You're. You're working way too many hours. You're working overtime. Like, how do you deal with that? Do you just make it like, hey, in your mind, he's backup? And so that way, if someone like him left or an employee left, you could still manage it. How do you kind of balance that risk of him leaving versus still wanting to grow the business?

So I'll give you a real quick story. At the beginning of this year, we were really looking to start a whole nother truck and crew. Okay. So we wanted two employees, another truck, another trailer set up. Throw the mowers on there and then send them out. Okay? We had roughly 24 accounts extra at that point. And eight days before we ended up hiring Tyler. I took my ad down after we spent, like, 1300 bucks trying to hire an employee. Nobody wanted to work. You know, this year's been very crazy with COVID and all the craziness, you know, the government giving out, you know, money and stuff to people for, you know, being out of work and whatever. So people aren't just eager just yet to go back to work. So wasted a ton of money, ton of time. I interviewed five guys and six guys, and I just didn't feel comfortable with any of them. And a few of them kind of made comments and, you know, watch the channel, and it's like, you know, I want you to come to Spencer Lawn Care to want to work. You know, I don't want you to come to want to be on camera. I don't want you to come for this side of things. And, you know, we explain that to people, and, you know, not everybody gets it. You know, some things we just weren't comfortable with the guys and gals that we interviewed. But, yeah, any. Anyways, we got rid of a bunch of accounts, like, eight days before we hired Tyler, and he just. He. He messaged me out of the blue. He says, hey, I saw your ad. You know, I think he said something about, I noticed it was gone, but are you still hiring? So he had no clue about the social media side of things, any of that. So right off the rip, I'm like, great. You know? You know, I don't gotta. I don't gotta explain anything to him. We can train them right off the rip with the social media side of things, find out what he's comfortable with, and if he's not comfortable with it, that's perfectly fine too. He's coming here to do a job, first and foremost. And then after that, you know, if he wants to be on the channel a little bit here and there, and he's okay with it. We'll plug him in here and there. So, yeah, man, tons of, you know, money spent at the beginning of the year trying to get employees. It just didn't work out the way we wanted. So we got rid of 20. I think it was 23, 24 accounts right before we hired Tyler, literally a week beforehand. So when we brought him on, I'm kind of like, oh, man, you know, I wish I would have kept those, but you just don't know. And that was the thing, you know, at that point, I think we were gonna be right around like 78, 79 accounts. And taking those away put us back down to where myself and TQ can manage it, which is we like to be in between 55 and 60. Now we keep the top and we'll cut the bottom. You know, the customers that are giving us issues, complaining too much, just being headache customers, we like to call them or you know, slow payers this or that. If I got to chase my money, you know, you know, more likely you're going to be at the chopping block on the bottom end. So if it comes down to it, we'll chop you. But yeah, I ramble on and up.

Those 20 or 30 that you let go. Did you do that by organically, like just raising the price and then letting some people go, or is it like, hey, we're not servicing you? What was the deciding line between we're going to keep you versus not? Like, were they far away? What was, what were some of those determining factors?

No, so simply it was, we couldn't handle all of them, just myself and Savannah. So we did 74 three years ago. Four years ago now, her first year coming out. When I had an employee, it was a lot different then because myself and the employee would work till 5, 6, 7 at night. And it didn't matter, you know, because Savannah was at home with the kids in the afternoon, you know, doing her job. That was all handled. So now we, with me and TQ being out in the field, you know, our kids, you know, the babysitter's gotta be gone three, four o' clock in the afternoon. So now we're having to slow down a bit, you know, we're not able to go till 5, 6 till dark if need be. Now don't get me wrong, if we have to absolutely do that, say we got bad weather or whatever, we'll make adjustments in our schedule, get the kids taken care of babysitter wise and get that handled there. But just a lot of things changing, a lot of things moving and just adapting and learning and ever evolving. But yeah, it's not easy. I'll tell you that.

From all your experience with talking with a lot of guys, getting started with the lawn care business, families, couples doing this together, what are a couple of the biggest hurdles that usually cause them to quit? Obviously there's struggles we all face, but what do you see as some of the common things that people are like, look, I've had it, it's enough, I'm Quitting. Now, what are some of those? Just for someone that might not have hit those. Those hurdles yet, but they can expect those down the road.

So the number one thing just from. I mean, I've probably talked to thousands of people over the years. The number one thing is pricing. People price themselves too low and they're afraid to raise their prices. They're afraid to charge what they should be charging to be competitive in their area and to be able to save money on the back end to reinvest into the business. So they come into it gung ho, they're working, working, grinding it, gonna make it happen. And then they realize they took on a bunch of accounts and underbid them all, and before they know it, you know, it's no fun working for nothing. And you realize equipment's expensive, truck maintenance is expensive, you know, having insurance, all the above, it's expensive. So if you're not pricing right, it's only a matter of time before it's either gonna cut your head off or, or you're just going to get completely burned out and feel like you're just spinning your wheels. It's just. That's the number one thing that I hear the most. But now with the family side of things, a husband and wife, the biggest thing I would say is finding out what. Finding out what each other is good at and then going with it. Because not everybody's the same. As, like me and Savannah, I got very fortunate. She loves trimming. She's really, really good at it. I was really good at mowing. So it was easy to train her specifically on trimming, get her professionally at that, and I could focus on the mowing. And we just meshed really, really well. Now everybody else, you know, a lot of times it's a guy calling me, hey, I'm trying to get my wife out here. You know, she just lost her job. You know, she's got extra hours. Her hours got cut at work. And I'm like, yo, train them how to run the mower. It's a lot simpler to train them how to run the mower. You already know how to trim. You can, you know, how to keep the pace up so they can learn to mow faster and safer over time. But it's a lot easier to teach somebody to mow better than it is to teach them to trim, flip edge, clean properties up properly. You know, you can handle all that side of things. Teach them how to mow, and then move on to another thing.

Awesome. One thing I wanted to ask you about. I know you Mentioned it several times on your own channel. That is not just from a business standpoint, the changes that you've made, but even personally, you really had a whole transformation in terms of losing a massive amount of weight. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know even a couple of our own franchisees, they've lost well in excess of £100 the past couple years. What was that like? And how does that kind of translate over to some of the things that you've been learning on the business side the past few years?

So 2016, I really started holding myself accountable for, like, hey, if I set my mind to something, I'm going to do it, okay? There's. There's no excuses whatsoever. It's just simply, you're either going to do it or you're not going to do it. So. So whenever I write something down now, I make sure I do it. That's the biggest thing. So 2016, going into 2017, my weight was just, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. I'd be okay through the summer. I'd lose 30, 40 pounds. You know, winter come along, and boom, it just go up, and then I would gain more. So I ended up maxing out at, like, 306 pounds. And this was going 2017 error. So I was. I was coming out of the season, and I'm like, yo, I want to get gastric bypass. Okay. Knew nothing about it. I thought, hey, I'll go to the doctor, you know, we'll set this up, get the gastric bypass and like, next month or something. Found out very quickly it doesn't work like that. Okay? So started that process, like, late 2016, early 2017, went almost an entire year, so probably about nine months. And I actually backed out at one point because they wanted me to get the surgery done in, like, October. And I knew we were going to go into the snow removal side of things, so I'm like, look, I got to be back so I can work if this thing gets bad in December, okay? So I told them I need to have it done by this. This time period. They were like, okay, yeah, definitely. Well, they kept pushing it out, pushing it out, and it got too late into the season. I'm like, okay, you know, I can't do it right now. So I ended up telling them I'm not doing it. Well, long story short, it ended up not being that bad of a winner, and. And I ended up scheduling it for December 6th of 2017. So right at the end of that year, so I thought I was Going to get it at the beginning of 2017, ended up not getting it till the end. And that's just because there's a lot that goes into it. You know, they want you to show that you can lose weight and maintain it. You got to get all kinds of like heart checks. They check your sleep, you know, they check your lungs, your liver. Just, they do a mental test on you to make sure you're not nuts. I mean, just all kinds of things that take a lot of time and got it done. And I'll tell you what, I simply got it done because I can no longer do my job anymore. It was becoming extremely hard and I say to this day, for myself personally, that it was the best decision I ever made. It's not easy now because now I'm back to the point where I can pretty much eat as much as I want, being almost four years out here. So I really have to monitor and watch what I'm eating, make sure I'm staying active, make sure I'm not sitting around too much. So we like to stay very active here in the household. Not always easy with the kids and everything, but it's just holding yourself accountable and doing the things that you say you're going to do.

Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you coming on. I was going to take some questions from the Q and A, but there's been a bunch. I'm going to leave those alone.

For someone that is really thinking about doing this as a full time gig and, and they're thinking about like equipment, they're thinking about, okay, do I hire someone right from day one? And they just seem like they're completely overwhelmed with a lot of the different decisions they have to make to get started or establish the business. Can you kind of point them in the direction of just making a decision? It's kind of, it's such a video I'm making tomorrow. But just like making decisions over making perfect decisions, what would you say to someone that is really just overanalyzing every part of the, the process?

I would say so the biggest thing is if you sit at home and you say, kind of like myself when I originally told you guys, you know, I was pondering it for two, three years. Like, you know, I want to start this business, but like, you just don't know what you're getting yourself into. So that fear is there and the fear of failure will hold you back a lot of times in your life. But, you know, there's a lot of good quotes out there now about failing and, you know, failing forward. And you know, failures are great. You know, you learn from them and those are all absolutely true. You're going to learn from them. But the biggest thing is just getting yourself to take that leap. And you know, you have to self evaluate and make sure it's the right time for you or do you know what you're doing? For one, do you know how to price properly? You know, you're not hurting yourself or your family, you know, taking this chance because that's the thing. A lot of guys just want to quit their job and gals want to quit their job and go right into it and it's like, nah, man, take your time. Have you ever done landscaping? Have you ever done lawn care? Have you ever been out in 100 degree heat for, you know, two and a half months straight? You know, it's, it's going to kick your butt. So get yourself some experience, try it out, make sure it's something that you're absolutely going to want to do and stick with and be able to stick with. And just make sure you have all your ducks in a row there. Equipment wise, finances wise and yeah, take that chance, man. If you're, if your ducks are in a row, go for it, man. What do you, what do you got to lose? That's what I say, you know, and I say that with an asterisk there, you know, make sure if you really have something to lose like your house, your cars, whatever, that you're keeping that other job or working another side job, a part time job, so that the bills are at least being covered while you go through that growth period and making those mistake period as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Sean. I really appreciate you coming on. I know everyone needs to go check out your video that you just uploaded before coming on today's show, but I really.