Best Time to Market Leaf Cleanups

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast. Today we are going to be answering your questions that came in on the Facebook group and I am looking forward to that. I haven't looked at them yet but I know there's at least 20 here. So we'll get through maybe half of them today and then maybe next week we'll answer the rest of them. But thank you for submitting those on the Facebook group. And before we get into the show though, I do want to say a big thank you. Today's sponsor, so many of you have tried out their software and been very happy with it. Go to getjobber.com im andys my last name A N D E S Check out that link. And for the first six months of using their software you can get a discount in addition to the free trial. So one of the things I really do like about Jobber, it's so unique about what they do is on your way to the job they will actually text the client and let them know. Same thing with being completed on a job, it can text them. These are things that we can build on higher end sophisticated like service, autopilot and things like that. However, you're gonna be paying a premium if you're a small business just getting started a smaller landscaping company get jobbers more than sufficient and you're not gonna have to figure out all of the automations and building things out yourself because they've done such a good job of making it simple and just making it very easy to implement. So check it out today. Go to getjobber.com im.

And check that out. So let's go ahead and jump into the Facebook group. I'm gonna go ahead and just open it up here and like I said, there's a bunch of questions here so I'm just gonna get through some of them today. I don't want to make this one go too long and let's go ahead and get started. So I'll start right from the beginning. First question that came in is from Ezra Payment. He said your handyman services, just how you do it, what you offer and success rate. Alright, so as many of you know, last winter in order for our crews to stay busy, we started like a handyman services. We call it Pro labor services. We had a website, prolaborservices.com. we ended up actually taking that site down because during the summer we're getting all these calls and things and it's just not in our best interest to be doing handyman services at a rate so much lower than what we could have the same employee doing landscaping for. So whether or not we continue to do it in the winter, I'm not sure, but it's something that we were able to start, implement, start the website, got leads coming in, and helped us really keep our crew completely busy last year. We actually were hiring people in January and February last year because we had pro labor services, and we're doing the handyman services. What we really focused on is just like, what. What services can we do? Like, do we know we can do? So in the landscaping industry, a lot of times, you're gonna have someone really good with their hands, and they can do a lot of things. And so knowing what the skills are that they can do is really important because we didn't do an estimate for the clients. They would just tell us what they wanted us to do, and we would show up, and they were just. We were basically getting paid hourly. That's what it was. Hours plus materials. And so, again, it wasn't to make. We didn't make a killing in terms of profiting from it, but it kept our guys busy during the winter. And what services. Again, it really just came to what our guys could do. And so one of our crew had done roofing and things like that. So we do some roofing things, and other ones were just really handy. So it was like everything random. We really wanted it to be labor, though. Anything to do with labor we could do. And so it was tough getting insured for it, to be perfectly honest. But you want to be. Basically, we do everything from, like, moving people to moving just, like, big pieces of furniture around in their house, like, older individuals that can't do those things. And what's beautiful is once you build a sizable enough of a. Of a contact list for your landscaping business to generate that revenue and generate that work during the winter, you can garner, like, leads from the existing clients you already have. So in our database, we have like 4,000 plus people that we've done landscaping services for. So when we send an email out for handyman services, that those individuals are retired, they're affluent in general, and they're the ones that can also need our services in other areas of their house. And how he pitched it was like, hey, we've done landscaping for you on the outside of your house. Now we're offering services to help you on the inside of your house. And so really, it was just like a professional set of labor inside their house doing whatever, because they could go on craigslist and get someone for 15, 20 bucks an hour. But they're not insured, they're not professional. Who knows what they're doing? They're inside your house now. They really need to trust you. So that's what we did. It worked well to keep the guys busy. I wouldn't say it was like super profitable necessarily, but again, that wasn't the reason. It was to keep the guys busy throughout the winter when in our area we slow down for about two and a half months. Kevin Fairburn asked ever looked into putting up and taking down Christmas lights as a service in the winter months? So we have not. The reason for that is because during the period of installing lights, we're still pretty busy with cleanups. And so again, cleanups we can. We have a system for it. We do it all year round. So it's just an extension of our season really. We usually end mowing around Thanksgiving, but then that next month from Thanksgiving to Christmas, we're still doing really busy doing cleanups, leaf trimming, tree trimming, all that sort of thing. So it's for us, in our market, it's never been an issue of trying to stay busy during that time. If people wanted Christmas lights put up in January, we might get interested, but unfortunately that week or two after Thanksgiving is when people want their lights being put up. And so we've never really made that a core competency of ours. Again, Pro Labor Services did some of that. We could do that, but we're just already. We're still busy during that season in our market. I have talked with several people in terms of how to systematize the estimate standpoint and people renting you can, you know, lease out lights when you are also installing. And so that's really a great revenue source is like leasing lights out in addition to the installation and hanging them from people's houses. So I've really looked into that a lot for. I know for some people it's really good. I just don't like focusing a whole bunch of time and effort on one to two, three max weeks. And then of course you get to take them down too. So you really need to invest in the upfront if you're going to buy the lights. And then you got to also make sure you're actually good at it and you've trained your people. So for us, it's just not worth it in our market. However, I know in some markets it's a really big deal if you really get into the leasing side of the lights.

Brandon Robinson asks fall cleanups by the hour or by the job. So we do it by the job all the time. We'll send an estimator out, we charge an estimate fee. And so those are it's a great service for us. We pitch them hard for fall cleanups during November as well as what we have at Augusta, what's called the Green Jacket experience, where during the winter we still come. Even if they're even if we aren't mowing the lawn, we still come and do other services.

Popeye Welty asks Brother and I are wrapping up our first year of landscaping. Both still in school and work full time at our day jobs. With our limited funds and time that we have, where is our money best well spent to get our name out there so we can hit the ground running come springtime. Website, question mark, decals, signage on truck and trailer, question mark, etc. Trying to get enough work to justify hiring employees so we can do more managing and sales. So first thing is your brother and you both sounds like you're both owners. So there's a lot you can get done with two owners without having to hire someone else. In terms of how much production you can get done in addition to the managing and the sales aspect, you do not need to both be doing that. I find a lot of times this is the problem with 2, 3 owners getting involved into a business is they're all wanting to manage, but they literally have four people working for them. And you don't need two people to be working full time doing sales and management. I sure hope not. So I would say you should easily be able to both of you working a lot of hours, production, and then maybe split up. If you want to split up the management and sales aspect or have one of you focus on that, maybe half the time. And then if you're going to hire someone, I would say in order to really launch for next spring, you'd want to start your website and you want to start that by November of December this year at the latest. So, for example, like everyone's asking why we're starting Augusta Lawn Care in November for the first 10 franchisees and then they don't have to pay any fees till next June. The reason I'm doing that is because I want to launch their website in November so that come spring that the website's already high on Google, if not the front page, first few results, that's the goal. And so that's what we want. And so if any of the things that you've just mentioned pop by in terms of website decals and signs in your truck, et cetera. Website is gonna drive the most leads next spring. And right behind that I would do decals and stuff on your truck. That's not expensive. Get it done, paint your truck, whatever you got to do. I really don't care if you wrap it, if you put decals, if you paint it, just do that. You're looking at 1,000, $2,000 if you paint it and then put really nice decals on it. So.

I would do that and then also do a website. And again, how much you want to spend on website, it's up to you. Do you build it yourself and it's more or less just contact information or do you go out, get it hired and get, you know, someone really professional do it? You know, building a site like we have at Augusta is not going to be cheap. So you might just want to go ahead and go use Weebly or Squarespace or GoDaddy and just make it more of a contact page. But it's better than nothing, right? And so is that going to get you on the front page of Google? Probably not. That kind of a site's not going to be optimized. So you know, then it becomes a throw up of is it even worth doing it? So I would say number one though, like website is going to be the biggest thing if you have limited funds. The lowest hanging fruit is probably going to be putting decals in your trucks and that's going to help you a lot. But the website long term is the play. If you really want to scale the business, if you really want to have create perceived value for your customers, perceived value for potential employees, a website is big game. A lot of people talk about the website for attracting leads and I believe in that 100%. But it's also a massive tool to attract great talent to your business. If you, if you send them to a great website that has a good form to submit their application, there's pictures, there's video, it's just really professional. That's something that is going to attract that caliber of individual that you want to hire. Whereas if it's just like not formatted correctly, there's no like good design, there's no pictures. The pictures are all stock images. It's all messed up on their mobile device. Like they know it's just going to be a smaller operation. Which that's the. You're going to attract, someone's going to perhaps thrive in that environment, but you're not going to usually get the caliber of individual that you're Thinking you want in your business. So I would start with the website. Decals and truck would only be first. If your limited funds are below $1,500 that would then probably be the lowest hanging fruit. And then go to your website after that.

Amity Morales. Which by the way Amity, I sent you a letter recently. I hope you got that.

Number one. Okay, so she has three questions. It looks like best system for routing over 30 houses a day, multiple crews. So this question actually is in reference to a question I believe you asked Amity in the landscape business course Facebook group that talked about Lawn Pro. And so there's this thing with Lawn Pro that I don't like and I know Amity ran into and that is 24 properties or stops per crew is the most it will route, which is super annoying. So there's a couple workarounds you can do with that. Like you can break up say you have 30, 30 houses. You can break it up into 15s and then optimize them separately as long as like. So for example, if you know you have from north to south you have 30 stops. I would trying to like break the top 15 and the bottom 15 in two different crews and then just optimize crew one and then crew two. But then give both those crew sheets from Lawn Pro the printouts to one crew. But essentially in Lawn Pro right now they have a maximum of 24 stops per crew for route optimization. Which I don't like. I don't like it at all. Which only usually becomes an issue when you have multiple people on a crew and they're busting them out in the middle of summer and they're hitting 24 plus houses.

That's what I would recommend. Either a, you gotta switch companies like service, autopilot, real green job or they're gonna have, they're gonna cost more. You know, let's make that clear. But they're also gonna be allow you to route more. Number two question for Amity.

Scheduling maintenance on equipment and keeping employee accountable about them. Who should be responsible, one person or the team? So at Augusta Lawn Care we kind of divide and conquer. So we have one or two people that are really focused on the equipment. So they come in early. They're the ones that do the sharpening of the blades, cleaning of the trucks, everything with maintenance and equipment we have a designated area where broken equipment is placed. And then they're responsible to make sure that information is.

Translated to the office on the whiteboard. So that is kind of our system is anything that breaks can goes In a certain spot, it needs to be marked with pink tape. And then that information needs to be relayed to one or two of our crew that's kind of responsible for the equipment. And then they are supposed to go and put it on the whiteboard. And that whiteboard is so that the office and everyone knows what piece of equipment is at the mechanic or broken. So that scheduling and people aren't like wondering where equipment's at, if it's at the mechanic. And so that's kind of how we keep track of it all. We do have it as one or two people so that the information we know who to go to. Like if you need something, if something's broken, you know who to go to. On the other hand, we have, we have everyone kind of cross trained. Like, they know what to do, they know kind of the system that we use. But one person, in our case it's Austin, is kind of the most involved. He comes early a lot to get those things done. But then also Charlie and Daniel can change blades. They're pretty involved. But everyone knows Austin's kind of like the contact person. If Lee or Liz or like the office or anyone has a question about equipment, they're probably going to turn to Austin.

How often pay increase? Okay, so Amity's third question. How often do you basically increase pay yearly? Question mark. So we've just switched to pay by performance. So the only way that we will increase wages is increasing the percentage of revenue that goes to the employees. And so that's all part of our pay by performance system.

And so before when we paid by the hour, we basically had a structure where the first couple years it was tiered based upon their time staying here, like staying in Augusta. And then after two years, it was based upon performance. In other words, like when I say performance, back then it was, you know, if you became a project manager or you'd be doing an estimate, like, you'd make more money per hour. But we basically, what happened is like, everyone was staying. And so what is happening is we couldn't raise the rates anymore. We couldn't pay anybody anymore. Like, we just, at the end of the day, we're doing lawn care, landscaping. You can't pay people 30, $40 to mow lawns. But that's why we switched to pay by performance is because it gave them the opportunity to make more if they're really kicking butt and if they're working hard. And so now we don't have to deal with the paying. Like, if someone wants to make more money and they're like, hey, I want to. I need more money. Then now someone can just be like, okay, well, train yourself some more. Go educate yourself. Ask someone else to teach you some things. Make yourself more efficient, work harder, come earlier. So now, based upon performance, when we're paying that way, it's a little bit easier. When someone says they need more money, it's like, well, you can work harder. You can make more money by training yourself, making yourself more efficient, not going to the gas station because you're not getting paid to do that anymore. So it's a little bit easier now. But it's a challenging thing to do because a lot of people are asking for raises in the spring. Cause that's when the work gets harder. A lot of times you're asking more of them. But it's also when the cash flow is the least from the business standpoint, usually. And so how often we would do it, the first couple years we did it based on how long they were there. But they could excel. Like, they could beat that time, which most of them did. So if they started at say $18 an hour, they are guaranteed to be at 20 after a year or two or whatever. And so. But a lot of them would beat that just because they performed really well. But now we have a floor for pay by performance, and then they can make more based upon how much revenue they bring into the business. And so what's really big announcement, really cool thing is we're actually.

Launching it. We're building it right now for the franchisees, which is the pay by performance system. Where no longer will it be like an Excel spreadsheet. It's gonna be an actual software that we're building. So it's just for the franchisees, but it's going to actually do all the payment performance system for them every single day. And it's just like, basically what it does is it asks prompts. They just ask prompts on each, like each page of the website. And they just work their way through each employee each day. Super easy. And so we're building that right now. A lot of work that I'm putting into that with a web developer to develop our own software just for our franchisees. That is for the pay for performance system. And what's cool about that is if you want to give a raise or like the business can afford it, you have to change one number on that, on that website that will say you were doing 50%. You're paying your employees 50% of revenue you're giving your employees. If you Want to give everyone a raise and the business can afford it, you could just move it to 52% and immediately they're going to make more money. So it just makes it so much more objective when you have that sort of system in place. Because if they make the company more money, they make more money. Like, it's very, very objective. So let's get a couple more questions in here. We'll call it a day and we'll get to the rest of these later on. Next question comes from Jaeger could tell us when to start advertising for fall leaf services. So leaves are one of those things. People do not think about them until they're on the ground. From my experience, that's the minute you want to. And so if you have a windstorm, if you like, if the weather changes and then like usually weather changes, leaves change color and then you'll get a windstorm and that's when you want to be hitting everyone. What you need to do, make sure you have everything ready to go. So if you're doing door hangers, I would say make sure those are ready to go so that the week that storm hits, you can just send it out with your mowing crews. And they all got put out. If you're doing flyers, same thing if you're doing Facebook and Google. It's a little bit easier because you can just click a button and then immediately you have that presence. And so one of those things, it's kind of like snow for residential, which we don't do residential snow plowing. But if you do snow plowing for residential, you know, it's very similar. People, you don't think about it until the snow's on the ground. Leaves. We found the same way people usually don't think about, oh, I'm going to need leaf cleanup in two weeks. They think about, oh, the leaves are completely filling my walkway, my driveway, my lawn. I should get leaf cleanup. So generally it's right when it first happens for the first time of the year in terms of like a windstorm. Josh Kessling asked best way to start building systems for a lawn care business. I just get started like creating systems, having things being put in place like I started from day one of Augusta. I knew that I was not going to be in the field working, doing it all the time. And really even the reason was back then was I have really bad allergies in the spring for about three weeks where I would go out, I would start at like six in the morning when I was mowing out in the field. So that way, because by 10 o' clock it would get warm and dry and all that pollen would come up. And so I could. I would literally, like, my throat would swell up, my eyes would swell, my nose keep running. Like, I'd just have. I'd just be going. I actually have two shirts every day. So I take one shirt and wear it and I'd start blowing my nose into the other shirt after I switched it out from sweat. So usually by 10 or 11 I have to come back because, like, sometimes I couldn't breathe. My eyes are just horrible, like itching and I get rash all over my chest. So it was horrible. So I knew from the get that like, I could not work out in the field. And so I knew that I would have to create systems in order to make sure that I can hire people and they can run the systems. So way back I knew that and I was able to start right from the beginning thinking about, okay, who's gonna do estimates, who's gonna be taking the office, who's gonna be taking the calls, how are they gonna do it? Having those systems in place is something that I did from the beginning. And so it's not an overnight thing, the franchise thing. Yes, you do get the systems a lot faster. You're gonna pay for it. That's the downside. You're gonna pay your initial franchise fee to get trained and get those systems. Things like pay by performance and things that we figured out. If you're gonna do it yourself, I'd just get started. I don't care if you use the franchise for gusta. I don't care if you do it yourself. Just make systems. And it's just so easy to say. And I talk about so cliche sometimes, and I don't like that. It's just like, it's so important though, to make a system centric business instead of where you are. The business is so dependent on you. And I say it so passionately because I see so many times business owners don't do that. And then eventually something happens in their personal life, something happens with their health, and the business just falls apart. It's not about making more money, it's about making the business sustainable. And so some people love working out in the field and I think that's fantastic. But still make systems, have systems in place even as a backup. So if something did happen to you, the work still gets done, you still pay your bills, you're still able to pay your employees, you still have leads coming in, they're getting taken care of. The customers. And so building systems is imperative. And basically what Augusta Lawn Care is with the franchise is everything that I've created in systems. I'm giving that to franchisees, helping them develop and systematize their businesses. And so that's what the franchise is really. But if you're doing yourself 100%, I don't really care if you do a franchise or do it yourself. Just start. Like, it might take you five years to get some of these systems down, 10 years even to figure out pay by performance and hiring systems and getting leads from your website, and then, like, the sales process and how to follow up and doing automations and, like, it might take you a while. And that's fine. If you want to figure out yourself, that's fantastic. Just please, whatever you do, do it. You know, it's worth it. It's worth the time, it's worth the effort. It's worth sitting down and, you know, racking your brain over numbers and over spreadsheets like it's worth it. So I really do encourage you to make systems based upon numbers and not just, like, stuff. Like, don't just take what I tell you here and be like, oh, I should do that for my business. That's why I can't get super specific so many times on both my podcasts, because people were like, oh, I should do that. That's the answer. It's like, no, no, no. You need to test it and know that it's coming from a numbers standpoint. I don't implement the systems at Augusta or in the franchises until we've tracked it and we know it works better. The numbers. The numbers do not lie. If you're tracking your numbers and you know your numbers, you're reporting and you have ratios of revenue compared to your labor burden and overhead costs and cost of having an office person, and you know what your expenses are for insurance and all those things, you know, all that stuff. And you can calculate and dictate what the changes you're making, what implications they have on the bottom line. That's when you create a system, is when the system proves itself by numbers, not you feeling better. Like, oh, I thought that was nice. Like, I don't care. The numbers have to prove that the system works. And so that's where I'd start. Look at your numbers. Know your numbers create systems at every single junction of your business to make it more dependent on the systems instead of you as the person for everyone else to ask all these questions. I've seen there's quite a few in here. We will make another video next week and I look forward to it. But thank you for joining me today. There is everyone's been asking, is there more spots for the franchises as of Today, which is September 13th, which is my birthday, by the way. It's also Kevin Fairburns, which is one of our franchisees over in Mississippi. But if everyone's been asking, is there more spots in the franchise? So I'm just gonna tell you right now, as of the 13th, this is where we're at. We have four people completely signed up. We have four more people that are in the process. It takes us a couple weeks before they're able to actually legally. So right now we have two official spots completely open, and that's for the first 10 that will start in November and are getting massive discounts. 50% off your initial franchise fee and then no more monthly fees until next June. So there's just a couple more spots really open. The other ones are filling up. So if you do want to get in the franchise, please do contact me again. I've probably had 250 or so phone calls now about the franchise. So I'm pretty selective. I want you to know a lot about why I'm doing the franchise, about the, you know, I want you to be a avid listener of the podcast, perhaps a member of the course, come to the conference, Pro plus member. Like, I want you to know why we're doing this and a lot of the ethos behind what I'm doing so I can vet you more and that you can ask me good questions. And so if you are interested in the franchise, I would love to talk with you. If you just go to augustalawncareservices.com franchise, there's a bunch of information on there, a bunch of videos. It might not be the right thing for you. It might be better for you to take five or 10 years and figure out the system yourself. Some people like that's they have to do it themselves and trial and error and figure out things themselves. And that's what you should do. So on there, the website, it'll give you videos and kind of show you if it's good or not for you. And then if you want to have a call with me right from that page, just book a call with me and we can talk about it. So thank you all so much for listening today. And like I said, next week we'll get to the rest of everyone's questions here and I do appreciate you for tuning in. Take care.