BEST Way to Make Your Lawn Care Business More PROFITABLE and Efficient!

Hey everyone, it's Mike and you're listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. Today we are going to answer more of your questions. And again, if you want to ask a question to me in the future, the best way to get a hold of me is by texting the word landscaping one word to 855-575-1267. And every couple weeks I will ask for questions. You send them in and and I get them and read them here on the show. So make sure if you want to ever ask me a question for the next episode, send that one word landscaping to 855-575-1267 and then I will ask you for questions before next show. Also, as a reminder, if you are looking to get your website built, make sure you check out lawncarewebdesign.com $399 per month and that covers everything. There's no upfront cost for your initial design checkout today. You'll love it. A lot of the people who have signed up for it are enjoying the benefits already. Let's go ahead and jump into questions right off the bat. First question comes from someone with an area code of 574. Again, I don't know the names of these people unless they put their name on here. So first question, when you are trying to start new policies, how do you get your team to come along with the changes and not buck at every turn? Is it more and more communication or just fire all the old and hire new? Some are good employees, but they don't want to stop smoking or they don't want to do better for the customer. So it's actually really interesting that you asked me this because last night the local shop fired somebody. And again, I've said this a hundred times. You can say stuff, do policies all day long, but until you fire people, I truly believe that firing sets the standard of what your business, your organization allows and what it stands for. And so if you want to make a statement about a certain policy, fire someone that's not abiding by that policy. And people either get in line and abide by that policy or they will, you know, go get fired by themselves. So at the end of the day, until you start firing people over certain policies and until you're willing to fire people over a policy, your employees know it and they can bend the rules as much as you want. So if you're going to make a no smoking policy, you better be ready to fire someone if they go against that policy. So in terms of new policies, we are Always trying to be as, like you said, as much communication as possible, getting their feedback. But once that thing is implemented, once that policy is implemented, if someone breaks that rule, breaks that policy, we are going to fire them. And that is what really sets the standard. All right, we got questions, questions, questions. Here we go.

What is an effective way to get flyers out to potential customers that may not want to engage in conversation during the COVID 19 situation? Are door to door sales still a good idea? I do not think door to door sales is good in terms of knocking the door, opening up the door. Depending on which state you're in, door hangers might still be okay. Definitely we're seeing a drop in a response rate for actually mailing those flyers out via eddm. So I would definitely wait. We are really encouraging our franchisees to really be working on their 30 day plan once their state opens up and once the restrictions are less and really getting those 30 days honed in, because that's when you're going to get an influx of work and making sure you have the systems in place, making sure you have a plan of action for those 30 days in terms of marketing. And so that's what we're working on.

Call out, how do I stop it? Okay, this is a long question. I'm going to read it just as exactly as it says. Call out. How do I stop it? Yet at the same time, all the call outs seem to be for legit excuses. But today it is a beautiful day and we do not have one person working because three called out right away this morning. Two more called out yesterday, but they came in today and one of them took a COVID test yesterday. He then told the other guy about it and scared him, so he left and went. Then the COVID tested employee went home. No results for the COVID test have come back positive yet, but he should have stayed home. Okay, so this is a tough one. This is very, very difficult. There's a lot to do with culture right now in terms of your employees and the fact that they can stay home if they have Covid like symptoms or even if they're afraid to go to work literally and get unemployment. It's ridiculous. And for a lot of us, they are going to make as much on unemployment as they would be working, which in usual terms, when everything is normal, that's not the case and they want to be working. Whereas right now, in this weird scenario that we're in now, they can make more money or the same money not working as they would if they were working. And so in terms of call outs, you have to again, make it a policy that, like, hey, if you don't, if you do not have give us two weeks notice in terms of asking for time off, then it's going to be held against you. Like, that's an unexcused absence. If it's a sickness, obviously you're gonna allow them to take off. And especially during COVID you want them to stay home. And we have a paid leave program so that they can feel like, hey, I'm still gonna get paid even if I stay home. And so having those. That's why we actually created the paid time off policy is so that way we can govern people when they take their vacation. Cause what we were having is people like calling out the day of and being like, oh, I wanna take the day off, and then expecting that to be able to be paid time off. Whereas in our state, we're required to have paid leave for family, for family sicknesses, things like that. However, if you beat the program, like, if you give them more than what's expected from the state, you're allowed to create your own program around paid leave. So what we did is we offered two weeks instead of the regular one week. So we offered a lot more. But because of that, we're able to put restrictions around when they use that paid leave. And so they can't just call out and expect that to be used. And so in general circumstances, I would say create something like that. I would also say from a cultural standpoint, you might want to fire all these people and start over if you're actually having no one working today because it's a beautiful day and yet they are playing the system or they are just not working because they know they can get paid otherwise. That's a cultural issue. And so even with our crews locally, we had no one try to play the system or, or pretend like they were sick or do anything weird like that. So we actually gave them all a bonus just because I really appreciated that and it really.

Helped the business. And so I really didn't feel right keeping a lot of that money that we, you know, stuff we got from the government and all that. We wanted to give a piece of that to the crew because culturally they all stayed on board. They want the business to succeed. They know the vision behind Augusta. And so it's a big cultural thing. If I was you, I would fire all these people. I would create a policy around paid leave, and then again, I would stick to that policy. And even if it's as little as keeping track of unexcused absences. And that would be excused. Unexcused absences would be when people ask for time off without a week or two weeks notice. And even if you just keep track of those on their employee profile and then every single time they ask for a raise, if you're doing hourly wages or anything like that, in terms of if you ever have to fire them, you have it documented all of the times that that happened. And if someone's asking for a raise and you look in their documents and you can show them they had 10 unexcused absences, that has some weight to it. So again, you gotta be willing to fire on that policy if you're gonna create that. But to allow that to be happening in a small company, we have two, three employees. You're gonna have a very hard time trying to build a team on that kind of a culture. Just my opinion on all that. Next question. I am currently only doing low margin landscape maintenance and lawn care work. I have no experience with landscape construction or hardscape. I really want to grow to a point where that's a big part of my business. How do I start learning and gaining experience with this offering? Okay, so before you start thinking that landscaping and big jobs are going to make you more profitable, I would really, really recommend that you think hard about your landscape maintenance and lawn care jobs. If you cannot make that profitable, you are going to have a very difficult time making landscape construction and hardscaping profitable. Period. End of story. Now, if you're trying to keep your business small with just you and maybe a few workers, maybe you'll become more profitable in hardscaping. But if you're actually going to scale the business to the point where you don't have to be there on a day to day operational level, you don't have to hire really skilled people, you don't have to have a lot of expensive equipment. You're going to want to be able to have maintenance and making sure that's profitable. I'm going to have a debate with myself, my manager, my estimator and one of our crew members this weekend. We are going to be here and we are going to talk about projects and the downfalls and the upsides of projects versus maintenance. And we're gonna debate things, we're gonna just give our opinions and kind of go back and forth and be devil's advocate on things. Because in someone, there's so many people in this scenario where they are allured by hardscaping and construction work when they cannot even run a small scale maintenance and lawn care division. And if they can't do that, I'm sorry, but I just have not seen people be able to go into landscaping and hardscaping and somehow become profitable. It's more capital intensive. Higher skilled labor is needed. And if you are not going to get high skilled labor, you are going to have to be in the field all the time and it's not going to allow for you to be an absentee owner or you're always going to be in the business. And so that's just my opinion, but we're going to have a debate on that. You're definitely going to want to see. That's going to be a great debate. You're going to get the fields perspective, you're going to get an estimator's perspective, you're going to get an operations manager's perspective and then you'll get my, you know, 2 cents as the owner. Next question. How, how are you doing, Mike? Hope you're staying safe. Diego with DC Lawn Care from Central California here. Something that I've been dealing with is customers wanting the bare minimum. My town is medium to low class residents who for the most part are looking for the bare minimum. Done. There are a couple higher class subdivisions that I can upsell. What would you say? Would you say I should try to slowly dominate these subdivisions or should I just do more volume of bare minimum houses all around town? Thanks Mike. Stay safe, brother. So what I would say to this is try to make each part of your business profitable. And I understand there's loss leaders and there's ways of having lower profit margin stuff to get more business. Like he's talking about trying to upsell people on treatments, applications, bed maintenance, bush care, bush trimming, I get all of that. But if you can make it scale the bare minimum and you can really scale that out and make it profitable where there's route density enough to where it's actually profitable, then I would definitely, you know, definitely allow that to keep happening. I wouldn't necessarily spend a bunch of money on marketing in those neighborhoods if you know that they're all going to accept bare minimum. Like I want to have that affluent retiree that is going to not be able to do their lawn care themselves physically. And they have the money to be insulated from economic events like we're going through now. So that's gonna be ideal. And they're gonna be the ones that get full service. They're gonna be the ones that get all the add ons. And the upsells. But if you have people that are buying more value proposition based buyers, that are middle class, that are working class, that are just needing to just mow the grass, that's fine. Make sure it's a profitable part of your business. So you can continually do that work and then get route density in those areas and make money. And that might mean raising your prices by a few dollars per cut in order to actually make it profitable. It might mean not spending a bunch of marketing in those areas. It might putting a trailerless setup or a cheaper truck in those areas to make sure that you're not spending a bunch of capital expenditures to serve those individuals that don't really care about a big truck or nice bright and shiny equipment. Like these are things to think about. So I would try to look at all of the divisions or services of your business and try to make them all profitable. And if you have a loss leader, that's fine. If there's trackable results to knowing that there's going to be upsells. But for someone like this who is knowing that your loss leader, like for example, mowing is not going to lead to upsells, you need to make sure that that service becomes profitable. And you can do that by increasing route density, reducing capital expenditure, going to solo routes, or increasing prices by a few dollars to make it profitable. And once you get a bunch of jobs and a bunch of volume, it actually becomes profitable. So hopefully that helps. Next question. When buying equipment, should we spend more money up front on equipment that might be overkill for now and so that way we are ready for growth when it happens, or should we just buy the equipment that fits our small company and then later on buy bigger equipment? Thanks. So this is a good question.

I am a big proponent of letting the business come to you first and then buying the equipment. Spend your money on marketing. And then when you're so busy and revenue's coming in and you're like maxing out capacity and maxing out your asset utilization. In other words, your truck isn't running all the time. Your mowers are running all the time. Like you're doing it from night to day, like day to night, like everything in between weekends, then you go up and buy the equipment. I'm a big proponent of that. That being said, if you have money and you want to be able to scale faster without having to maximize your hours all the time, not having a weekend crew, not having the guys work 4 tens and then having another crew work 3 tens, like if you don't want to do that. You can go out and buy equipment, but until then, I would highly recommend you spend your money on marketing to generate the work coming in. Like, if you have lots of work, like sales, fix stuff. If you get lots of work, like an avalanche of work coming through, that will fix a lot of your problems in terms of equipment and trucks and employees and things. Like, if you have a lot of sales, you can jack up your prices and therefore you get better margin, therefore you can get a better employee. There's a lot of things that fixes if the sales are coming in. So I would recommend always get the marketing out there, get the job flow, get those, the jobs coming in. And then when you maximize your asset utilization, then go buy another truck and buy equipment and things like that. But again, if you have the money and you know your growth trajectory, you can go out and buy, you know, an extra truck or employee ahead of what you actually need. And that's fine.

What steps can you take? What steps can a new business take to help ensure that they receive a 10x return on their initial marketing investment? This is somewhat difficult. I know what you're referring to. I mentioned on my last episode that I'm looking for a 10x to 20x return on my marketing dollars. I should have made it a little more clear. And that is, I've done this for a while. I've tested this around the country with hundreds if not thousands of landscaping businesses. So I'm pretty good at knowing what works and what doesn't about creating scarcity and having an offer and things like that, on whether it be direct mail or social media and things like that. So.

I would say, what steps can a new business take? Honestly, learn, educate yourself. That's why there's an advantage to becoming a franchisee, is because you cut out that learning curve. But if you're not, you should go listen to Dan Kennedy books and direct marketing books and about print marketing and digital media and learn, learn, learn. It might take you a year or two to figure it out. It might take a campaign where you spend money and it just flops. But it's worth the learning. You gotta learn it. And so if you're going to get to the point where you're looking at 10-20x return on your marketing dollars, you need to be like, that's a good marketing piece. Like, that's what we do at Augusta. And so you need to learn it. You need to go out and you need to spend time. You're gonna go do something. They're gonna flop and you're gonna learn from those. And.

What I would recommend in terms of getting immediate 10x is like do the, don't go. Do a campaign to learn. Learn from podcasts, learn from books, learn from all these professionals. Like I'm still learning, my goodness. Like I still listen to the books to try to learn like the best marketing methods. And where are we going with this whole coronavirus thing? How is that going to change customer behavior? And I'm tracking it all as I'm doing stuff like as I'm doing campaigns. But that's a lagging indicator. Like where's this going Is what I'm trying to, trying to figure out. And so that's the only way that you can keep your marketing skills sharp and keep that 10 to 20x return on your marketing dollars. Next question. Thanks, Mike. We are wondering how to bridge the gap between too much work for one crew and not enough work for a second. Trying to find part time help is almost impossible in our market. Thanks for all you do. Cheers. So usually what I would say is, is do a 4 10s and then do a weekend crew. That's usually what I would say. That way you can keep one truck and you know, one setup, then have part timers. That being said, this person says that part time help is almost impossible to find in your market. What I would do is I would hire a second person. One of two things. I would either a hire a second person. This is going to depend on how hot and how hard your labor market is. I would either a hire a second person to go inside the truck or another person to go inside the truck with the crew which is going to speed up the work and you're going to get work done in a more efficient time, not more efficiently. You're gonna get it done faster and therefore you'll be able to get the jobs done. You'll not need that second crew or two, you go out and buy a cheap truck and you split your existing crew in half. So if you have two employees right now, the alternative is to go get a third person or it is to buy a second truck and split up two solo routes. That will be more efficient. So again it's going to come down to do you have five to ten grand to go spend another truck right now if you do that might be the best thing to do. You're going to be more efficient. Those crews are if you're on P4P and you're paying them based upon performance, solo routes work and so you could do that Otherwise, I would get a third person in that crew. It's going to be less efficient, but it's going to keep you from having to go all the way to a second crew and a whole other setup. And if you're doing a big truck and a trailer and zero turn and all that, you're looking at a big capital expenditure and you might not be able. So I would either hire a cheap laborer to be a grunt laborer with that crew, or two, I would buy a cheap truck that you could split up crews. And again, it's going to come down to how much capital you have on hand.

All right, next question. Coming from Adam. Well, Adam just wrote his name only, so that's all I got from Adam. Okay. All right, next question. What are the best push mowers for someone starting up? And what do you think about the 30 inch Toro time Master for a first mower? If you listen to me long enough. You know, I don't really care about brands. I don't really care about size of the brand. Like, I don't care about equipment. I care about marketing. I care about business. Do I think the 30 inch time master is great? Yeah, I do like the 30 inch X mark. These are great mowers because they're in between a 21 inch mower and a 36 inch zero turn. And they're a lot cheaper than the zero turn. So I like them as a starter. Some people say that if they only have the 30 inch, they seem limited in some capacity and so they get a 21 inch as a backup. That's a great setup. But in terms of brand, I could care less. Get someone that has get. If you have a dealer that's close by that's going to be really good at servicing you, has parts for backup, allows you to drop in if something breaks, they give you a loaner for free. That's the brand I'm looking for. I answered my own question. Okay, let's see here. See here we got two questions. How to be prolific. I get swamped in the day to day. Feel like I'm treading water just to stay afloat. I answered my own question. Wake up an hour early every day for 67 days to form a habit. That's funny because it looks like he Woke up at 4:00am Nice. Okay, next question.

Thanks for all your work. Mike, how does the one click estimate work? How do you have to bag clippings? What's your. Okay, these are a bunch of questions. Here we go. So first one, how's the One click estimate work. So that is an automation we build for the franchisees of Augusta Lawn Care that basically in the estimate they can click a button and, and it automatically says what you know, that they want an estimate and you're able to do a drive by or if you already have data on that customer, you might be able to send them an estimate right away. And it prevents a lot of back and forth, it prevents them having to call. You want to reduce all friction of them asking for an estimate, whether it be on your website, whether it be calling you. And so when you send out newsletters, if you just are talking about your services and like, oh, let us know if you want this or contact us today, there's a lot of steps. For example, if you say call us today to get an estimate, they got to 1 pick up their phone, 2 turn it on, 3 put in the password 4, they got to go to their calling app, 5, they got to type in your number, then they got to call you, then they got to take two minutes to explain who they are, what their account, what address they're at. Maybe they leave a voicemail, maybe they get your office staff. There's a bunch of steps in there just to get an estimate request. Oh yeah, I saw the email you just sent out. I'd like to get X, Y and Z service that you mentioned. Like all of that can be cut out by having a one click estimate where you say, hey, these are the services we want to offer. Click here if you want an estimate for it and if they click on that, it should automatically tell you that they want an estimate. And then you either do a drive by or you have that data based upon square footage or based on existing pricing in your CRM and you're able to get the estimate out there. This is huge. This has been the biggest thing for us by far and away. As your business grows and you have customers that you've contacted or given estimates to in the past, by keeping them warm with those, it's tremendous. Like when you're just getting started, that's not going to be super beneficial because you don't have a database and you don't have customers that have been not in your client cycle of being a customer for maybe months or years. But as you begin to get like 12, 24 months old in your business, having those customers in your database and having been in touch with them every single month is every absolutely essential. And so that's how that works. One click estimates are great. It's all automated and it's really good. How come you have to bag clippings? Yeah, I know clippings are horrible. In Washington state, where we live, it's pretty much standard that everyone bags clippings. It's the type of grass and the climate that we live in. It's required. Otherwise, yes, I would like cargo vans instead of trucks or even box trucks. I really like those. If you didn't have to. If we didn't have to beg clippings. And I'm not about to have that whole side dump discharge thing because that costs a huge amount of money anyways and maintenance and stuff like that. Automations aside, do you think Service Autopilot is worth it? Thanks again, Vlad.

If Automations were not in Service Autopilot, I would not use Service Autopilot. Just being honest, I don't have any like financial connection with them, so I can say whatever I want. But if Automations were not in Service Autopilot, I would not be a fan of them. They're. It's a large learning curve. It's a complex system that's built to scale, but it can be very cumbersome if you're just small and you're not using half of the functionality. And I get it, it's hard learning curve. But the bottom line is the automation platform that they built is the most flexible and allowing us to do the most custom stuff and some really, really cool stuff. I do not like the actual CRM. I don't know if I've said this publicly, I've said it here and there, but like, I do not like the learning curve. It's a large learning curve. The franchisees, that's their hardest thing right now is really that learning curve of switching from simpler systems to something like Service Autopilot. I know they're going through V3, they're trying to change things up. Hopefully that simplifies it. I'd be really happy if it does, but I think they actually need to take some functionality away or allow people to unlock greater levels of functionality as their business grows if they want to. But for the vast majority of small businesses under a million in revenue, there's just a lot of complexities that make for a big learning curve and it gets people discouraged. And so one of the hardest things for me right now for our franchisees is getting them to really understand Service Autopilot because it's a big system and we've built all the standard things that we use, like Documents and our Automate, we built it all for them. But still, it's hard for them to understand. Like I can only imagine if someone was getting started with Service Autopilot without, you know, us building out all the systems for them and all the documents and all the emails, like everything we give to our franchisees. If they didn't have that, I can only imagine how lost people would be. And so taking, taking Automations out of Service Autopilot, we would not be using them. I'm just being perfectly honest. Maybe that'll change this year if V3 rolls out and it's much more simple. But as of right now, that's where I stand on that. And again, I don't have any financial interest in any of these companies. So I just share my honest truth. Next question. What is the best and most effective way to market strictly landscape installs and not just mowing our lawn care in general? In general, I use an ad company, but we still get more maintenance calls over landscaping. So this is probably also having to do with the coronavirus. Maintenance is definitely what's selling right now because it's non discretionary. You have to cut your grass, otherwise it becomes a problem. Whereas you can get away with not putting your, your hardscaping wall and your pond and your paver patio in like those. That's discretionary. You can push that off. And so that might have something to do with that if you're, if you're talking about immediately. But in general, mowing and maintenance is going to be your gateway drug. It's going to be the thing that you get people in the door with. They're going to be, it's going to be the easiest thing to get estimates and it's going to be the best way, the best response rate is to mowing and to maintenance. And then you get them in your funnel and maybe a year, two years down the road when they're looking for a landscaping job to be done, a hardscape, whatever, if you've been connecting with them every month, if they, if they, if you stayed on their radar, if you're constantly, you know, if you're mowing their lawn every week, they're going to ask you first, as long as you've made it clear that you offer those services. And so I wouldn't look at this as a bad thing. Just realize that your response rate to gateway services are always going to be higher. Get them in the funnel and then you can upsell them to landscaping down the road, if that's what you want to do. Alright, we're gonna get a couple more questions here. How can you improve efficiency to Increase bottom line revenue without spending a lot on labor or equipment. This is very simple pay for performance.

For the people who have heard me talk about this for the past year and the people who definitely came to the conference and heard me yak about it for three solid days, I cannot overemphasize this. It does not take any more labor and it does not take any more equipment to switch to P4P. It takes good culture, takes a lot of hard decisions, takes a lot knowing your numbers and it's not easy to switch, but it doesn't take more. Like this is, it does not take any more labor and does not take any more equipment to increase those efficiencies. I can talk a lot about 100 different efficiencies. And at Landscape Summit in January we talked about a whole vast array of things that can increase efficiency in your business, but all of them combined will not touch the efficiencies that you will gain by having a P4P system. It's not easy. It's very difficult to change. It's like you might have, if you're a bigger business, you might need to fire everyone if you're going to actually try to implement. It's very difficult culturally and trust and like you got to have a lot of stuff in terms of trust between employer and employee. If that's not there, you will. Like I've seen a few people switched, try to switch to P4P and they do not have trust built in their business and there's no camaraderie, there's no culture and they ruin their business trying to switch. And so this is why I do not tell everyone like, oh, you need to switch to P4P because if you, and this is actually really funny, I don't know if I said this before. So at the conference I give a money back guarantee and I tell people, hey, if, you know, if you don't see you got enough value from the conference, I'm willing to pay, you know, give you your money back. And so one person asked for their money back and, and they actually weren't there. They sent their employees and they wanted their money back. But anyways, they were arguing that the P4P system, whatever, like they weren't, they weren't happy that like they could not just implement it. And I said, look, like they said that 90% of the conference was not about P4P and that it was a waste of time or whatever, whatever. I think they said half, not 90%. They said half of it was not for P4P and they sent their employees there just to listen to P4P stuff. I said, look, the other 50% was absolutely necessary for P4P to work. And I said, look, I'll be really honest with you. I can give you all the documents I can give you, I can come over there and set you up on your numbers and go through your numbers and do exactly what we did at the conference for you. But if you do not have trust with your employees and they don't trust you, they don't want to go to bat for you, you don't go to bat for them, you're not doing open book management, you're not sharing the numbers, they don't feel invested in the company. If that's not there, P4P will not work for you. It'll actually turn on you and it will completely wreck your business because they can do a lot of damages. They can really work the system and it'll really, really affect you if you're not. So I just don't understand why people do not implement P4P. On the other hand, if you do not have fundamental foundations of culture and trust with your employees and they don't trust you, this will not work. If you do not have off site meetings and you do not have open book management, good luck trying to switch to P4P. It requires a lot of trust and there's gonna be times where they have to trust you to make a call and a judgment on who makes money. And if they don't trust you, you're gonna have a revolt and you're gonna have a lot of mutiny. Not between you and them as much as between the crew and people infighting and all of that. So. But to answer this question, how do you improve efficiency to increase bottom line revenue without spending a lot on labor, equipment? P4P is the answer to this. Alright? There's a reason why we're spending almost all in probably 80 to $90,000 to develop version 2 of our P4P software for the franchisees. So this is not for sale or anything like that. We're developing it for the franchisees. There's a reason why we're spending that much money. Like we did not collect that much money in royalties all of last year for the franchisees. But we're doing this because it is so fundamentally game changer and necessary for this industry. I can't stress it enough and I'm a living proof of an owner that's able to not have to be in the business simply due to the fact that everyone's thinking like owners and if they don't, they get fired. But their paycheck is governed to make them think like an owner. They want to produce as much as fast as possible and they want to reduce inefficiencies and cut out waste. And they come up with great ideas to do that. And so I just can't overemphasize it enough. There's a reason, like, look what I'm doing. Like, I am spending more money than we made on the franchise all of last year, let alone all the expenses that we all legal costs. Like, I don't know how much. Maybe I shouldn't say all this stuff, but we spent a ton of money on legal costs last year to get the whole franchise set up. I'm spending more than that this year on developing P4P software version two for our franchisees because I need to make it where it's less than 30 seconds per day to calculate the P4P. And we're going to be able to SMS, text or report to the employees every single day. I know the value of that. I know the importance of having incentive as close to performance as possible. By delaying it a month, our quarterly bonus or an annual bonus that goes into a pot like that just defeats the purpose. And so I believe in it so much. Watch what I do. And there's a reason why I'm investing all that money in there and why it'll take a long time for us to ever recoup that money. Like, a long time. But I know it's fundamentally foundational to the success of the franchisees and we're like risking the farm on it. Because I know it'll work. Because I've seen it work and I've seen the companies that have helped implement it and it changed their business and changed the scalability and change the fact that the owner does not need to be there and does not need to be watching over the shoulder of the employees and does not need to be wondering if they're inefficient. Like, they're going to come up with great ideas for figuring out inefficiencies and they're going to snuff out people that are on their phone all day because they don't want to work with them because it's bringing their paycheck down by working with someone that's lazy. And that's why we're able to get rid of people fast that are not going to work well in the system. And people that are great, they want to work with other great People, they do not want to work with the C players, and it's gonna bring their morale down. If you have a few really good employees, by mixing them with a bunch of people who are lazy, you're gonna bring their performance down. And so I truly believe that if you have five employees, if you cut out the two bottom performing ones, the three that you have remaining could probably do the work of the five, and you would have no change or lapse in work. I just believe that. And so you can disagree if you like, but I've just seen what P4P can do, and there's a reason why. There's a reason why I'm spending so much money on creating software for the franchisees. It's the game changer, and it's not easy. It's not a fast switch for culture, but once you do it, it's amazing. All right, last one, last question here. Coming in from area code 615, are you still selling materials? I'm thinking of opening a garden center that sales materials as well. I'd like to operate our landscape business out of the same location. How has your experience been with selling materials? So when we were in a small market, away from any sort of other garden centers or material, competitors worked great. We made a decent profit, and it basically paid for the office person that was in the office, and that was great. We were able to charge 35 to 40% gross markup on those materials. When we moved to a more competitive market, we did it for the services side of things because there's a bigger market. However, we were competing with other material providers that were much larger, much, much larger and could squeeze our profit margins. And we decided to go away from that. We'd much rather have recurring work. Again, a delivery or materials is similar to a project. It's here and there, hit and miss. You don't schedule in deliveries for the next year. You don't schedule in how many people are going to show up and ask to be loaded up today. Like, you can't do that. Whereas with maintenance, you can do that. It's very, very scalable. You can schedule it for the whole year, all your maintenance visits, and you know exactly how much labor you're going to need, and you know exactly what your profit margin is going to be like. It's very, very scalable. Whereas materials like you have big swings. Like, some days it's like 50 people would show up. Other days, two or three people would show up. Some days you'd make thousands of dollars in deliveries. Sometimes you make nothing so like it was all over the place. I don't like that type of business. I want solid cash flows. I want everything in the black and I don't want to have days where I'm in and out and up and down. I don't want big trucks that cost a lot to maintain as well as you require more skilled labor to drive. Don't want any of that stuff so we do not do it anymore. So hopefully I answered your questions. I hope that something was said today that would help you in your business and if if anything was said please let me know below. Comment Hit the like button. Smash it, kill it, destroy it, annihilate. It really helps with the YouTube algorithm so we can reach more landscapers like you and hopefully help them in their business. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Mike Andes on the Landscape Business course podcast. Until next time be great. Nothing else pays.