Breaking Down a $130K Lawn Care Business

This is Chris. He runs a lawn care business and made $130,000 in revenue last year, but his profit margin is 3% and he wants to make enough money for his wife to quit her job. This is the Business Breakdown Show where we take real home service businesses and analyze exactly what's holding them back. Our goal is to give Chris a strategy to turn around the company in the next weeks. All right, so the name of the business is The Shrub Guys, and they offer mostly property cleanup. So they do shrub trimming and they do a little bit of mowing for recurring revenue. So let's go ahead and take a look at the application video.

My name is Chris Friedel, and I am the proud owner of The Shrub Guys here in Windsor, Connecticut. Currently, through winter, it's just been myself, um, but it's, it's been a good winter doing solo. It's been our best winter yet. We're actually doing better this winter than we did in spring of 2025, which is crazy. I picked up a rock star this past fall after going through a couple of guys throughout the whole season. And unfortunately, that rock star got hit by a car on his way home from work and his leg was broken pretty bad. So very excited to have him back in spring. His doctor said he should be cleared for the end of March, which would be incredible. The goal for 2026 is to add 2 or 3 guys to the roster, including myself, and make it a 3 or 4, 3 or 4 man team in total. What is our annual revenue? $130K in 2025, $130K in 2024, and $65K roughly in 2023. It's been a bit of a learning curve, uh, but it's been fun to say the least. We typically do a lot of one-off services, mulch installs, bed revamping, and patios, and of course Shrub Guys, lots of shrub trimming. And I can't really do that anymore because of my shoulder, which We'll get into that. We also mow, but I think I only have like 4 mowing clients, which we plan on changing in 2026 big time. Our goal for 2026 is $300K on the low end and $500K on the high end, uh, with the respective employee count. If we wound up somewhere in the middle, I'd be very happy, ideally with 70% of that coming from mowing and recurring services. I'm the sole provider for my family. We've done the math and weighed out the options to have Alexis, my girlfriend, get a job and help pay the bills, uh, we wouldn't have a free babysitter to help, um, and it would leave us spending money on daycare. I'm busting my butt to make sure that my, my future wife can be a stay-at-home mom. So Alexis has since decided to take part in the business and take over the admin role, which I'm super grateful for. It's taken a huge load off my plate and allowed me to work normal hours to make a pretty good living. Unfortunately, we need to make a great living to be able to support our bills between home and business with me being the sole provider. We need more leverage from the business in order to make this lifestyle truly sustainable. I have an injury in my neck and shoulder from early 2025. I pulled an extension cord apart, felt a tweak, and my arm declined really badly over the next 3 months. I immediately went to the doctors. They weren't able to find anything wrong with me, but I now have atrophy and missing muscles in my right shoulder pretty bad. And I've also had a lot of trouble with leadership. As much as I hate to admit it, also really need some help with that. I think I know what the bottleneck is, and it's me. I think there's a lot of key man risk involved here with myself. I could really use your help, Mike. We could really use your help, Mike.

All right, so let's go ahead and look at the Shrub Guys website. Now, one thing to keep in mind is we just recently finished building this website for Chris. In late 2025. And so I really do expect, even at the time as I'm recording this, that his leads are going to start going up dramatically. And I've seen him even inside the HomeWorks Facebook group, and it sounds like he's growing a lot. So this is a couple of months old from the time that this is going to come out, and it's likely that he's drowning in leads, mostly because I saw his old website and what it used to look like versus this site. Going into your spring rush with a good website can very easily double a business. Simply with the same amount of traffic coming to it. And so let's look at the website. One thing that I did notice, this video here, Chris, I think we could change this. It shows, yes, some shrubs, some trees, but I'd love to see you, your crew in your blue uniforms with your dog on a truck doing stuff. Like this is just a cool widget to put in there, like a video widget, but I would love to see it include your brand. The dog is awesome. Like it's on your website, It's on your uniform. I'm assuming it's on your truck. I want to see those as the pictures, not these random videos and pictures that could be really recorded by anybody. So overall though, the website is great. You have service pages as a dropdown here of all the different things that you do. So I love that underneath landscape design installation, you have even more specific services that you offer. When you click get a free estimate, let's see where this goes. Okay, so this is going to input directly into HomeWorks. So I like all of this. This is Really basic, really simple, easy to understand, well-designed, and looks really good on a mobile device when I crunched it down. And it makes it really simple to understand. High-quality landscaping services designed to impress, serving Windsor, Connecticut. I would like the less words, like I don't think high-quality needs to be in there. I don't think designed to impress needs to be in there. It's like, we do property cleanup and landscaping services and we serve Windsor, Connecticut and surrounding areas. That's what the customer needs to know. Like the whole design to perfection, design for harmony. These are starting to get words that are hard to define. Customers don't understand what you do. The Shrub Guys already tells me you do shrubs. And so that's excellent. I think that when they get to the site though, they still need clarity or what do you actually do and do you actually serve my area? And I would take anything that distracts away from that or just make the font smaller and less focused because build to perfection, Design for harmony. Great word salad. I just don't know what it does for me as a customer. So I truly believe, though, with the upgrade of the site that you did in the past few months, that this spring you'll probably double the amount of leads you get. And whenever you get a lot more leads in the 4L framework, it kind of helps a lot of other problems that come up. For example, when you get so many leads, you can raise your prices. I love the website. I love the design of your logo. The fact that— to— that's your dog adds a lot of flavor to it. And Augusta Lawn Care, Max, our mascot. I've never owned a dog that was named Max. Way back when I was a kid, we had a couple dogs, but I'm not really a pet guy or a dog guy or a cat guy now. So Max doesn't have any, like, special place in my heart. But it is cool when your logo has some sort of meaning to you. Just remember, it means nothing to your customer. So as long as it stands on its own without that explanation, we're good. And it does. But I would change that video, make it much more focused on whatever you're trying to promote. One thing to be careful of the name of your business says shrubs. This is kind of like if you're doing lawn care and you're like, well, I also do hardscaping. We've got to show more hardscaping on the website if that's what we're focused on. In your case, Chris, The Shrub Guys and your logo scream bush trimming and property cleanup. If you're wanting to focus on mowing and you're saying you want to go heavily into that this year, I need to see more mowing action happening on this website. So this background video, that is a random house with some stripes. I would love to see your truck, your crew with a mower as a picture or video right there. Same thing down here below. Like I'm showing a lawn, great, probably lawn care and mowing, great. I would love to see a mower actually mowing grass if that's going to be your big focus. And so a lot of times if you're trying to change the type of leads you're getting or you wanna focus more on a specific service, just make sure that your storefront, your website screams that you're changing the type of services that you offer and highlight the services that you want from customers. If you're like, I don't really want a whole bunch more property cleanups, mulch installations, I don't really want patio installations, for example, then don't show it on your website. Don't show it on your Facebook. Don't show it on your social media. Don't promote those services to your customers and voilà, you will have more of the services you want. It just so happens that the name of your business says The Shrub Guys, and it screams property cleanup to me. And so if you want to focus on mowing, the pictures, the video on your website really needs to emphasize those things. If we go to your Google Business Profile, looks like we got 68 Google reviews. It looks like you are posting once or twice a week directly into here. So adding photos, images, yeah, sometimes 4 times a week. Awesome. You have a solid description. You've added your profiles in here. Let's go and look at your reviews on Google. See if you're responding. Very good. You are responding. I love it. Let's go. Let's go ahead and look at Windsor, Connecticut, and see where you rank. Windsor. I know that you just finished this website, so it might not yet be ranking. I don't think you're going to rank well for lawn care right now. That's where I'm struggling because on your website doesn't scream lawn care. But let's try what Windsor, Connecticut lawn care looks like in terms of rank. So you are— you're second on Google Business Profile. You're third already on the first page for lawn care. That's pretty impressive. Honestly, that you've already in the past few months since the website was done, you're already ranking there. That's excellent. I think if you really focus more on the website being focused on lawn care, mowing, et cetera, you'd probably rank even better. Let's put in like a shrub trimming. I bet this is where you're gonna dominate. Yes, there you are. You're number 1 on Google Business Profile and you're number 1 on regular native search. You're beating out Yelp for crying out loud. Let's go. The website is cranking and you're ranking pretty good. I think focus on lawn care and mowing, if that's where you want to take the business, needs to be more relevant, needs to be more focused on when it comes to your website. So overall, when I look at your website and your online presence, I give it an A-minus. Really solid change in the past few months by using Home Service Web Design to build the site out, and you're ranking well on Google. Awesome. If your focus is going to be on mowing, we need to focus the website on that. And I would love some more clarity on the initial title, the headline of the homepage. So it's really clear to customers and they get it. I don't want someone to have to read for 15 seconds to figure out what do I do and whether or not I can help them. Let's go ahead and jump into your financials now. We know you're doing $130,000 in revenue. It's been kind of flat the past few years. You tried to add an employee last year, kind of had some churn, it sounds like, then got a really good person. Then they got injured, but they're coming back in spring. And we're hoping to really scale up this year. I know personally Chris has invested a lot in the business on the website side, and he's also joined HomeWorks, and I've seen him in the Facebook group. So I know that he is taking a big step this year, already taking huge action. And I find that extremely commendable given the fact that he has this big goal of trying to get Alexis to be able to be a stay-at-home mom. But let's go ahead and look at the financials and see what we're working with. Okay. So you gave me a kind of a printout of every single month of the entire year. Looks, we got $2,000 a month that we're paying in rent. To your point, you had a really, really slow spring rush. So 2025, your spring rush was really slow. Like, at all costs, we got to fix that problem in the future. But to your credit, you know, your fourth quarter was like 3 to 5 times more than your first quarter, which is actually kind of the opposite usually in lawn care. So kudos to you. You're in $17,000 a month in October and in December. So it sounds like you're really primed to already grow by 2 or 3x. I definitely see a huge problem whenever I see months where we lose money. So down here, the nice thing about seeing this breakdown across every month is I can see that you lose money for 4 months out of the year. If we can just solve that problem by making sure we have off-season revenue, very beneficial. And that's why moving this mowing side of things will help you during the spring, the summer, and the fall. But we've then got to figure out how to sell the winter services so that it doesn't happen again and again and again. I would love to see you inside QuickBooks. I know that you're using the HomeWorks side of things right now to just like track your expenses. I do think you should get QuickBooks and spend $80, $90 a month, whatever, so you can have it all inside of an accounting software where it's all automatic from credit cards, your bank accounts, your loans, anything is coming into QuickBooks. And once you pass $100,000 in revenue and you're going from solo to having employees, investing in QuickBooks, it just, By far, hands down, the best software for small businesses to be able to manage everything. And if you need help, you can always use Home Service CPA. We have a free course walking you through bookkeeping, payroll, tax information, and you can use the professionals here that I use. And for $500 a month, get all of this done for you. So I would recommend that. Now that you have the one employee, just this one employee coming back to you in the spring should easily double the business. I don't see a world that you need 2 or 3 employees to get to $250,000 in annual revenue. When you're solo, you should be able to do $100,000, $150,000 in annual revenue easily. And the thing that I'm concerned about when I look at your profit and loss statement, given the fact that we have $4,000 of profit on the P&L on $130,000 in annual revenue, the problem with having 3 or 4% profit margins when you're solo is you're doing a lot of the work yourself. And so to have that low of margin, Usually I see several issues. One, very low pricing. Two, lots of inefficiency when it comes to getting work done. And three, a bunch of expenses that should not be there. And so let's look at the financials and see which of those three it might be, because having basically a solo operation with $130,000 in revenue and only making $4,000 is not great. Okay, so right now we have the major expenses being like the rental property, so like $2,000 a month. We got $29,000 in materials and supplies. I really don't see a lot of wages in here. I'm guessing you're either just paying some of these guys part-time, like under the table, but like, I don't see any wages on here. So I would highly recommend using something like QuickBooks to not only organize your numbers a little bit better, but also when you start getting these employees, pay them above the table, make sure everything's locked and loaded. So as you scale, in 4 years, 5 years, you don't get an audit and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in back fees and penalties because you're not paying them through QuickBooks or paying their taxes. Yeah, I'm pretty confused here because I don't see any wages here whatsoever. But it sounds like you had a couple employees and then this really solid person. I don't see it anywhere on the profit and loss statement. So that's not great. I'd like to get that W-2 paid correctly and that way it's on the profit and loss statement. So to grade the financial organization of the Shrub Guys, I'm going to give you a B-minus. Because I would love to see this in QuickBooks and I'd love to see the wages and W-2 breakdowns as we begin to hire employees. But overall, I'm glad at least tracking these expenses. For now it's manual, but by putting it in QuickBooks, you'll save yourself some time and whatever you spend in that subscription you'll make up for in the extra time you can spend doing more work. Let's jump into the 4L framework. The 4L framework shows the 4 reasons why every home service business stops growing. It's either a lack of liquidity, a lack of leads, a lack of labor, or a lack of leadership. Now, in the same way, if we can unlock one of the 4 L's, the constraint for growth in the business, we can continue growing. Because ultimately, when I take money, liquidity, and I turn it into leads through advertising, and I take those leads and I get more customers, I need more laborers. And if I continue to get more laborers, I need more leadership. And if I get more leadership and managers, that also reduces my profits because I have a whole bunch of overhead. And so I have a liquidity problem. So every time you get to the 4L framework, that's basically the next stage of growth. It's the next level in business. Let's first identify where are the problems in the business. When it comes to liquidity, I see a big problem that we only have a 3% profit margin on a business that's essentially a solo operator. Solo operators should be able to have 40%, 50%, 60% profits because you're doing the work and you don't have any employees that you have to pay and less overhead. Less insurance, less fuel. Like, it's a simple business and you should be able to make more than 50% of your revenue should be straight profit. When it comes to the lead side of things, I believe he's going to have about 2x in spring. Now that he's ranking so high on Google, he's got the website dialed in. I have a feeling he's going to like double. I will say we have a big problem with the offseason right now, and I hope this gets fixed as we head into 2026. And next year with a great website, but the off-season, he's losing money for 4 months out of the year and setting up in a really bad spot to where he doesn't actually get above zero until July or August. And so if you're having that problem, check out the Off-Season book or the Off-Season workshop that's completely free to be able to solve the off-season in your business and make sure you get revenue. That really ties into the fact that he's wanting to focus on mowing, and I would love to, for him to be able to sell those mowing customers winter services. And that is the fourth cure inside of the Off-Season book is to sell an off-season package, recurring services revolving around your existing customers, but selling them something that can be done during the off-season. And because, Chris, you're inside of HomeWorks, just use the text blast feature to upsell as many customers as possible into that service. When it comes to labor, I think that I really want to make sure you get to $20K per month before you get another truck or another employee. So before second truck or employee, there's a good chance by the time I make this and you are watching this, Chris, that you already have surpassed this revenue amount, number of trucks, you've already got another one and got another employee. But from what I can see here, I just want you to be careful around adding more trucks and more expenses when right now I think you might be underpriced and you might see you seem like you're expensive in your market, but the numbers are telling me otherwise because if you and one other employee are making $130,000 in annual revenue, that's about $70,000 per year per person. Let's say that they aren't exactly full-time. Even if you're making $80,000, $90,000, $100,000 in annual revenue, if you divide that by 2,000 hours that you worked, you're only charging around $50 an hour. I would love that number to be more on $80 to $100 per hour. And it might mean that, What happens is you get only one employee, you get your truck to $20,000-$25,000 a month in revenue, and you raise prices and you hit capacity and you raise prices. So be careful about extending capacity and buying more trucks and hire more people before you raise prices to the point where you're actually profitable on the work. All right, when it comes to leadership, Chris has said that he's not really feeling strong as a leader. So I'm just gonna write feelings 'cause, you know, Honestly, I look much more at the evidence and the stats and the numbers as to whether or not someone is a strong leader. And I honestly feel like we don't have any evidence of that because he only had one employee. When you have one employee in your truck and you're going from solo operator to now being a manager, it's actually pretty simple to be a manager at this size because you have a system, which is your eyes on them all day long. And so sometimes, In terms of management, you actually just need to improve your communication skills and the way that you talk to your employee, the way you train them, the way that you reinforce good behavior, the way that you offer criticism. These are actually communication skills. And because you're directly with them all day long in that first truck, it usually revolves on how you train them versus how you lead, how you manage, how you have one-on-ones and offsite meetings. That will come down the road. But for now, as you become a manager, your first one, maybe two employees, I'd be much more focused on your communication style, and that's certainly something you can learn, whether it be YouTube University or communicating with someone that might be able to coach you through these things to become a better communicator, is likely the thing that's gonna make you most profitable this year. Down the road when you have 5, 6 employees, yes, there'll be offsite meetings and we'll figure out one-on-ones and how we do anonymous peer reviews and all these other more complicated managerial type things, and you'll create systems and SOPs for getting people trained up and having a checklist. Those will come down the road. But right now, to be most profitable at this size, you're gonna be wanting to improve your communication style and your communication skills. So let's jump into the 6-week plan. What can Chris do to make sure he turns around The Shrub Guys in the next 6 weeks? I want you to focus on recurring work only during the spring rush. So as you're gonna get all these leads pouring in from your new website, which is awesome, it's going to be tempting to take everything as it comes, which means first come, first serve. First come, first serve scheduling is the bane of my existence when it comes to home services, because in spring rush you have all these leads pouring in for all these different services. I want you to filter out the ones that you want to prioritize, and I want you to prioritize recurring jobs. That's likely gonna look like mowing or people that want you to do shrub trimming, or property cleanups on a recurring schedule that is either weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly. I'm going to prioritize those people first. And so if you're only scheduling based on when someone calls you and then the next available slot, this leads to where now you're 6, 8 weeks booked out in the middle of spring rush and you can't get anyone that you really want— your mowing customers— on the schedule because your schedule is completely swamped. All right. The second thing I want you to do is adjust your website to focus on recurring services. So I want you to show the bush trimming. I want you to show mowing. Right now, having random videos of lawns or pictures of a random house and a lawn that could be any lawn care landscaper's website picture, could be any of theirs. Like, like, I believe that the image behind your header on your main website is yours, but the customer doesn't know that. And if any of your images or video on your website could just be put on any other landscaper's website, there's a really good chance you should change it because it's taking up valuable real estate that's not actually contributing to your brand. And so what I want you to do, Chris, 'cause you have lawn care web design and home service web design, you can email them and be like, hey, I want this video and this picture swapped out. And I also want you to do is swap in fall. So in spring, we're focused on bush trimming, we're focused on, all this mowing that we want to add. In the fall, I want you to switch to leaf cleanup and winter services being shown in those pictures and video. And again, all you need to do is submit a ticket to the support team at lawn care web design and they'll take care of you. The third thing I need to do is upsell. This is going to be texts and emails inside of HomeWorks. I want you to put on a schedule throughout the entire year. Once a month, I want you to focus on the specific service that, you know, in that month is going to be most likely to sell. But I also want to make sure that during your summer, that's when we're going to promote projects. We're not going to promote projects in Spring Rush when we want to be focused on recurring services. I also want to focus on this upsell in the winter when I'm trying to take my existing mowing customers and sell them that same recurring schedule at the same price using winter services. Okay. And that's going to be Off-Season Fix. And that's gonna be winter services. Winter services is where I show up on the same weekly or biweekly schedule I was for mowing at the same price, but now I'm going to focus on trimming the bushes away from the house, cleaning out the gutters, getting cobwebs out of the eaves of the house. I'm going to be doing any leaf cleanup, branches that fall down during a windstorm. I might even put some salt down on their walkway or driveway. I've gotta get creative with services that I can offer during the winter that's not mowing, but keep that revenue flowing all year round. All right, I also need you to do two other things. Read a book. It's going to be from Jocko and it is called Leadership Training and Tactics. It's a very short book. It's a 2 to 3-hour book that you can read. It's very tactical of the things that you'll need to do to be able to get past these feelings of inadequacy when it comes to leadership. It'll give you the exact things to say. Like, one of my favorite books when it comes to leadership is this one, highly recommend. I also need you to get QuickBooks. As the business grows past being a solo operator, it's time to become a pro. And a pro is going to track every single penny in QuickBooks, and they're gonna make sure they pay employees as a W-2. And inside of QuickBooks, you'll be able to now have a balance sheet where you can actually see what are my— how much do I have in my bank account? How much do I owe on my credit cards? How much is payables? How much is receivables? Having a snapshot like that from Home Service CPA will be super beneficial. So as a recap, we're focusing on recurring work. We're gonna make sure that our website conveys that to our customers. And then we're gonna swap it in the fall to focus on winter services, 'cause that's gonna be our off-season fix so we don't lose money for 4 months out of the year. We're gonna make sure we build out texts and emails inside of HomeWorks to upsell customers projects during the summer. And during the winter, we're gonna upsell them winter services. We're also going to read a leadership book from Jocko and get QuickBooks set up. Set up. If you'd like me to fly out in person for free and complete the 4L Framework and do a turnaround for your business, just go down in the description, click on the link and submit a quick video. And I'd love to come out in person and make sure you get to the next stage of your business.