Build a Landscape Empire! (Lawn Care Business Q&A)

What's up everyone?

It's Mike Andes here and today we are going to be using live Q and A about lawn care and landscaping business related topics. We'll go ahead and let some of you enter in as you're joining the group. And so should be better, a little bit better video quality because I just yesterday had. Now I have an actual ethernet cable connected for these live streams instead of going off the WI fi. So should be a little bit better. Make sure you. If you haven't already, make sure you sign up for. For landscape summit. It's gonna be in January. Just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference link is in the description. We're gonna have a lot of fun for three days, January 13th, 14th and 15th. We do it locally here mostly just so we can accommodate our team. I think down the road I'll probably end up taking a little further south. But for now is in Ferndale, Washington. You can actually fly directly into Bellingham, which is like 10 minutes away from the conference center. And it's gonna be great. We're gonna have food for everyone on the breakfast and the lunch on Friday and Saturday. But we start Thursday evening. Make sure you're there for Thursday evening. It's gonna be good, solid four hours of learning and it's gonna be a lot of fun. So really do encourage you to. Oh, audio is still slightly high pitched. Okay, thank you for letting me know. Give me one second. This is why we get started without jumping in the Q and A. Give me one second here. I gotta open up my MIDI settings. I wonder if it's because my computer reset the other day. Sound.

Where's my input? Ah, there it is. Midi.

All right.

Well if you have questions for your lawn care landscape, feel free to start punching those in. I'm gonna get through as many as I can. I just go from the top and work my way down. There it is now 44 4, 100 now let me know if my.

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There you go. Boom. Audio ih4cool. Is my audio better now? Let me know if my audio is better and then we'll keep going here.

I got about 30, 40 minutes. So I wanted to get some questions in. Will there be a talking point on P4P? This year's landscape summit there will be talking about P4P. It's not going to be like the main thing last two years ago is really the big topic thankfully and but this year it's not going to be the main bread and butter. We will talk about P4P. Absolutely but it's not like you need to be on P4P in order to get a lot out of the conference. Let's jump into the questions. Brent, the great how does one create systems for non billable employees? How are the positions held accountable to the systems created? Yeah, so I think when it comes to following systems in general, I think the first thing I look at is instead of trying to create systems for things that are really complicated, like how can I simplify the systems, right? Because the more and more simplified I can make my maintenance schedule, the less number of different types of trucks I have and different types of mowers I have, it's going to allow me to make those non billable hours much more simpler and I'm not going to need a highly skilled person and it's going to be easier to create systems around. Simplicity makes systems much simpler. And so simplicity of services, simplicity of your truck and your equipment maintenance, all the rest of it can be simplified by just making things easier and reducing complexity and reducing variety. And so that'd be the first thing I look at. The second thing is it's not easy to find a mechanic type individual. If you have a business under 15, 20 employees out in the field, you usually aren't gonna have a full time mechanic. So how you take care of these non billable tasks like blade sharpening, oil changes, et cetera, you're typically going to find a couple people that are more mechanically inclined or take responsibility for things like washing out the trucks or pushing debris. If you have a pile of debris that you kind of store at your shop, these are the things you should delegate to each person they're responsible for. And if you have a question about or they're not doing a good job in any certain area, there's someone that you have that is accountable for it. That'd be my recommendation.

Do I invest in a winter beater or a nice truck for the long run? I think it really depends on the size of your, of your business and what services you're offering. As well as going into the January, when we finish the end of the year, everyone's thinking about tax returns and tax write offs again. You should never write off a piece of equipment simply for taxes. You should only do it earlier because of taxes. So if you're going to buy something in February and March, might as well buy it now in order to try to regain those, you know, get those tax benefits. Now. Really quick tip for everybody out there next spring, the, the mowing mowers and equipment is extremely hard to get a hold of the. The supply chain is backed up. I don't see it getting actually better for another year. I thought this was gonna be much more short term, but because of some of the things that have been happening in the economy, not just Covid, but a lot of other things with the supply chain, we're gonna have big problems. Next 12 months, it's gonna stay this way. I don't think the prices of even used vehicles are gonna go down as much as I thought, maybe 10%, but not much more. They're not gonna go down 50% like in some places. They have gone up in the past 12 months. So that being said, going next spring, you probably, if you think buying more equipment, you should. What you should do is go to your, your dealer, say, hey look, I want to get invoiced, I want to pay for all this equipment I'm getting next spring. Because again, you can get your tax write offs. Now again, you should only be taking tax write offs if you have a gain or a profit in the business. There is no benefit to getting a tax, to getting a deduction or you know, going to taking an expense on your business if you're not making money. And remember, your first usually $12,000 is not taxed by the government. That's the standard deduction. So keep that in mind. Talk to an accountant. That's why you should always talk to your accountant come December to see, hey, where are we at? Here's the financials. Should I be spending more money on equipment and assets that I can write off, etc. Oh, right. Do wide area walk behinds give good stripes. I want to start with quality emphasis. Looking at the 48 turf tracer. I am not the best person. There's plenty of videos comparing stand ons. But stand on mowers are great. I love them. If you don't have to bag clippings. If you, if you have bag clippings, you're gonna need a sit down zero turn typically to have the bag the larger bagging bushel in the back the bags. But if you are doing, you know, if you just do side discharging, in my opinion, you'd always want to stand on. Will there be. We already talked about P3P. Are your work trucks two wheel drive or four wheel drive? We have a mix of both. We typically use the four wheel drives if they're going to be going off the road at all. So typically the landscape trucks will have those. The mowing trucks never leave the road. So we typically will just get two wheel drives because they're cheaper and you know, cheaper maintenance typically as well. Have a call with you November 3rd for the solo franchise call. Really looking forward to it. Based out of Miami. Very cool. All right. Is cutting overgrown grass for free good for your elderly neighbor? You know, if you're wanting to give, give something away, absolutely. I wouldn't look at it as like a marketing strategy. I feel like if you're going to do something free, you got to determine is this a marketing expense and a marketing play or is this going to be just doing something out of the goodness of my heart and you know, there's no right or wrong there in my opinion. Do you think used truck prices will go down at all? Yeah, I do think they'll go down a little bit, but they started inflecting down. They've come back up though, and it's because the supply chain shortage. We have a massive amount of chip shortages still happening. It's still going to last, persist, I think for at least another six to nine months. And a lot of that has to do with even shipping in and out of China. Right now with the ports being closed in China, they're backed up like LA is just switched to 24 hours at their port being open because they literally have like. I think it was like. I want to say, don't quote me on this, but I think I want to say like 80 ships that were in the harbor when usually there's one or two just because there's a massive backup. There's a lot of employee and labor shortage. It's just, just a bad situation with the, with the whole supply chain. And I think a lot of it is caused by actually is back like the supply chain that you see at the consumer level is usually a year lagging of production. So what a year ago was happening was, you know, manufacturers were closing down their factories in China, for example. And so when that happens, you're going to now, a year later see that backlog as well as the fact that.

Companies were predicting that we'd have this massive slowdown in 2021, after 2020, when you know, there's this massive scare of a recession. So typically consumer spending will go way down. So auto manufacturers, all these people in terms of their parts and their independent contractors, all their supply chain, they just slowed it way down thinking, hey, we're gonna have like this, you know, very frugal time of next couple years where people are trying to recover from this Covid thing. Well, because of the amount of capital injection from the government that Never happened. There is no liquidity crisis in the United States, I'll tell you that. And so there has been not just a, there has definitely not been a decrease in consumer spending, but actually a massive increase. So that's why we're seeing this massive lag in the con in the supply chain and therefore putting massive pressure on everything in terms of steel and commodities like lumber and oils going up through the roof now it's like over 80 a barrel. So when you start seeing those kind of economic shifts, you just know that hey, we're, you know, cost. What's going to, well, how's it going to affect our long term businesses? Okay, used truck prices are going to stay inflated for the next six to nine months, in my opinion. They're not going to go up a lot more, I don't think, but they're going to stay inflated. They'll come back down eventually though. But you're going to probably have to buy a truck. Most of us have to buy trucks every couple years and so fortunately we bought quite a few in 2020 and so I don't think we're going to buy any locally. But like the corporate locations that I started in 2021, we had to buy trucks and we're spending 15 plus thousand when before 2020 we never spent more than 8,000 to $9,000 on trucks ever. And now like you can't get anything for under 15 grand if you can find a truck. So anyways, how long should we wait until we stop mowing? In my opinion, you should try to figure out after your, you know, hopefully if you know the market, you should kind of know when people stop mowing. My opinion is that you have a start date and you have an end date. And the only reason we would move those is because of their snow. And so for us in our local markets, like hey, March 1st, we start mowing, we stop at Thanksgiving, November 30th, we stop then. And unless there's snow on either end of that is the only time we would ever switch someone's mowing schedule. And that way when a customer comes out and is like, hey, how much longer are you going to be mowing? We haven't given answer already. Okay, next question. Are you going to be at gia? Yes. I don't have my booth numbers. I could probably pull them up real quick. But we're going to have two for Augusta lawn care and we're going to have one for lawn care Web design. I'll post on, on, on the channel here next couple days. I'm gonna be flying out Monday, and then Lee, Liz, they're flying out Tuesday. Chuck's flying out there later in the week. So, yeah, there'll be several of us from Augusta there. It'll be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to it. All right, if you guys have questions, feel free to post in the comments. We are talking lawn care and landscaping here on the Saturday. I'm in the middle of onboarding with Gusto for my first two employees. Good move. You still recommend also any pondering of my invention question. Clever. Clover Lawn care. I do not remember any sort of invention. Sorry if you comment or DM me if I don't remember. In terms of Gusto, yeah, I'd highly recommend it. If you're looking to onboard employees, they have all the digital signatures there, as well as pay your employees through, like, automatic transfer, as well as give benefits for your employees, I'd highly recommend Gusto. Right. And they've been a big supporter of the podcast, so obviously I am biased, but I do think they're really, really good and their customer service is better than QuickBooks, in my opinion. So just check out Gusto.com Bootcamp. You can try it out for 90 days completely free in 2023. For electric stuff, what are you going to do? Every state's gonna be a little bit different. Like on, in terms of the regulation around electric equipment, I think it's going to keep getting pushed more and more in blue states. Right. So you already see it in New York, California, where there's regulations around electric equipment. Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of the government stepping in and subsidizing it, because that's really what's happening is taxpayers are subsidizing for this transition of technology and that puts a huge, like, why are we switching to electric in California when the electrical grid is not built for it? Like, it's just not. So it kind of boggles my mind. It's mostly politics, unfortunately. But in terms of us, we're not switching to electric right now. We're staying on gas. And until the cost of the electric electric comes down, I'm not going to even consider it. I love this stuff. Don't take me wrong. It's great. The electric handhelds, amazing, they're better. But the electric mowers and things, they're still ways off from actually being cost effective and actually the right business move instead of just a political or potentially a marketing play, which is not a bad idea. Not a bad idea to have a marketing play around electric Equipment. Do you think the ramp rack sport is worth it or should you just save up for the ramp rack? I love the ramp rack sport. Okay, so if we would have had this a couple years ago, we would have got them for all our trucks. It would have saved us, I don't know, a thousand dollars or whatever per truck. And unless you're trying to get a 52 inch mower in the back of a truck, you don't need anything but the sport. So for us we use push mowers and we use at some of our locations, 48 inch mowers, etc. Well, you can get a 48 inch mower in that sport still. So I love it. I think it's great. I'm very happy they made a more competitive priced model. Obviously there is the. What's the other one called? Not ramp rack. It's the.

MOW and go system down in Florida. That's a great product as well. It's more homemade, but that was always my go to for price because it's fifteen hundred dollars or so. Whereas this new model from ramp rack, I really like it. I'm a big fan. How to get first recurring and I'm not sponsored by them by the way. How to get first recurring customers starting right now in Tallahassee, Florida. Should I save marketing dollars for spring? Yes, I would definitely be thinking about spending that money more in the spring. If you're. If you have dry powder set aside, I. E. Marketing dollars ready for spending. I would wait till spring if you can, because that's going to be when you get the best bang for your buck. It's also going to be when you're so busy that you can deploy that with those marketing dollars. And because you don't have the time to actually go knock on doors and go door to door and knock and put door hangers. So I'd be focusing right now if you're trying to get recurring customers on leaf cleanups, fall cleanups, winter services, and then try to upsell those customers come spring into mowing. But right now, next few months going, you know, trying to sell mowing services, probably not the best use of your funds. Typically your customer acquisition cost is going to be a third or less than a third of what it is the rest of the year when you're spending in the spring rush. So we try to spend 80 plus percent of our marketing dollars. If we're spending any at all, we're going to spend it during the spring rush because your, your customer acquisition cost is so much lower and that's creative. Due to the fact that your customer demand is so high. Hello, Mike. I hope you're doing well. What month do you recommend to start mowing next season? I always recommend talking to your customers two to three weeks before the grass actually needs to be cut. Okay. So telling them a specific date and usually you can look in the 14 day forecast and kind of know when you're going to need to start mowing. I'd give them a two weeks heads up. Hey, we're starting on this date. Let us know if you don't want service this year. I'm not into like hey, just wondering if you wanted us to do mowing this year. That's crazy. You don't want to do that because there's gonna be customers who just don't see the email. And then two months into mowing season they're like, why am I mow? My grass is two feet over tall, overgrown. And you're like, well you never responded. You want it to be where they have to opt out of service when it comes to mowing, which is contact us if you don't want us to start, but here's the date we're going to be starting. Do you like a trailer or ramp rack? Really depends on your market. Again, if you are wanting to lock up your equipment, enclosed is great. A box truck is great and those are far superior to ramp rack because you are leaving your equipment out to the elements with the ramp rack. However, if you're doing a solo, one small truck, one employee and smaller lawns where you don't need a big, big zero turn or multiple zero turns for big properties, then it definitely is something I would, I would recommend. Looking forward to training in January. Default camo. Very cool. Coming for the solo operator training, what is the best way to get people? I think in my opinion, you know, it's kind of like I was thinking about this the other day like Tesla doesn't have any PR firm and they public relations and they don't have, they don't do any marketing. Tesla, they focus on one thing, the product. So now I was thinking like, well if we start looking at our employees are, sorry, our place of employment as our product, which is the culture, the compensation package, what we have to offer for future career prospects. I want to focus on the product, not just like how do I find the next employee? Like should I use Craigslist, Should I use Facebook, Should I use a newspaper ad? Should I use what's it called?

Job hiring thing? What's it called? There's like monster. What's the one I'm thinking of though? Indeed, indeed. Wow. So you know, that's not really what I'm going after. Those are all marketing strategies to find employees. The same way you would look at Facebook and Google, et cetera as marketing strategies to find customers. Those are the different avenues for finding employees I truly believe. Work on your product, work on your team culture, work on what you can afford to pay your employees with P4P. Work on having profit sharing and open book management make the product of working for you so good that they see people leaving your company and doing good things. The best thing for our culture locally, best way to meet for me to make the product better and attract great talent is for them to see other employees go start their own businesses. Other employees that I'm help, I'm trying to help get started in their careers, get to next place in their financial future. That's the best way to build the product which is going to attract great customers, that is in this case employees. So I'd highly recommend working on your product and your actual culture and what you have to offer in the way of employment and not using this platform or this platform or should have this gimmick or should use yard signs. Those are going to bring in leads, but the same to the customers. Not all leads are created equal. I'd much rather getting an applicant for hiring if they came from a referral for one of my team. And the reason that they are referring is because the product is so good. Tesla, the un the unspoken genius of Tesla is their referral model. You get a thousand free supercharging miles if you refer someone and then they get a thousand free miles. And so what this does is like it's con. You're talking, you're referring, you're always talking about it's a great product, it's a great, great car. It's always talking about it. They don't have any marketing spend, they don't spend money on trying to find employees. What did they do? A few months ago they had this thing called AI day, right. And all it was trying to do is find it was to attract great employees for their AI division, right? And so it's a complete, you know, they don't spend money on marketing, they focus on the product. And when it comes to employing people, I think we got to work more on our product which is our culture and what we have to offer in the way of compensation and career prospects. Focus on the product. And it's not to say that marketing doesn't work. I'm a big fan of marketing and doing job postings, but I think most of us focus too on the short term from getting the next applicant instead of how do I make my place of work an applicant magnet that when anyone comes in they don't want to leave or when they do leave, they're going to be telling five of their other friends that they should start their career with us. David Klein how do you keep your employees busy during the winter, winter slow months also do you give holiday pay or bonuses? We give two weeks of paid vacation. We do also quarterly bonuses for profit sharing. And then in terms of the winter months, we basically have a sit down meeting. After our off site meeting, the managers will have a sit down meeting with each of the employees and basically say, hey, we're planning for you to work X amount of hours and if you don't want that, that's fine, you can go find another place full time and you'll be a guaranteed spot to come back here in February and that's great. And if they want to go on unemployment, I'm not going to stand in their way or tell them they shouldn't. But I think most people want to work. I just generally believe the type of people who work for us. They want to be active, they want to be productive. And there's no shortage of work right now, especially in the retail sector as we go into spring, into the holiday rush, so they can go get a job, they can work indoors. It's not fun to work here in the winter. It's wet, it's rainy, it's cold. And so most of them don't have a big problem with it. And then we just try to keep the core group of people to do winter services and keep our recurring contracts and customers satisfied throughout the winter months. What's a good amount of operating capital to keep for the upcoming year? It's going to be really just based upon and determined by how fast you're wanting to grow. Right. You're typically have less capital set aside for just reserves if you're trying to grow really quickly. And so if someone's in hyper growth mode, you might want a much smaller percentage of, you know, revenue that you can contain as reserves in your bank account. It also has to do with risk tolerance. If you don't have a family and you're single and you're trying to get growing and you all want growth, you'll take on more risk and so and you'll grow up faster typically. But again, how much operating capital you have set aside in reserves is gonna be extremely important for security. If you have a family, if you have a mortgage, like you don't want to go cash negative. You do not want to like you run out of oxygen. Cash is like the oxygen in your business. If you run out of oxygen, you die. You don't wanna die. This game of business, there's a funny thing about it. The longer you stay alive in business, the higher probability of success. There's not too many businesses that have been around for 50 years that are unsuccessful. They might have become unsuccessful because they were lax and lazy or didn't change at the times. But if someone's done something for 50 years and they're consistently able to turn a profit and are consistently in the market, they're just alive. They're typically doing pretty good. And so the biggest thing is stay alive in business. Don't worry about always conquering the next thing and bigger and better and going into debt. Like stay alive, Keep growing healthily, have great margins, keep constantly tweaking the business. But if you can just keep oxygen cash in the business and stay alive, you will typically over time do, do okay. If you can get past year three in this law in the lawn care landscape industry, typically you're going to do really good. It's the first three years where most people will give up. It's not, it's not easy. What are your thoughts on service autopilot? We just purchased the software a week ago after five years of QuickBooks and printing, mowing list, Excel Spritz only. It was pretty overwhelming. Still after a week. Yeah, it's pretty overwhelming. Service all pause. A pretty complex program. It is pretty dense. It's built for big companies. If you're just getting started, I would not recommend it. But definitely if you're willing to pay a premium price for a product that can scale with you, has Automations, et cetera. It's a great, it's a great product. Right, right up there with lmn. Real Green is good. I've heard some really good thing about. What's the other one? Just came out. I haven't used it myself but I have heard good things about it. It is called.

Ah.

What'S it called? Titan. No, not Titan. I forget, I don't know. Sorry. I didn't sleep much last night. So there's the gym next door, right. And if someone power lifts in the middle of the night, it can wake me up. I was like 10 or 15 minutes into sleeping last night and someone started powerlifting. So like the first time I woke up because something crashed the weights, right? I have a white noise fan that keeps it quiet, like it's enough for me to sleep. But they started banging, right? It's fine. I woke up, like no problem, went back to sleep. Well, that happened four times in the space of probably 15 or 20 minutes. So by the time the fourth time rolled around, I was wide awake. And that's like, like I got to bed early. So it was only like 12, 1 o' clock. When I woke up. I was like, forget this. So I worked those two videos I recorded on both the channels. Last night was at like 3 o'. Clock. And so if I looked somewhat tired, that's probably why. But I'm a little bit tired today. Hey Mike, you have great content, applies to over many fields. Keep up the great work. Thank you. The Southern Collector what do you recommend or how do you have any tips for a 13 year old with a lawn care landscaping company? I would lean into what makes you different and that is your age at 13 years old. Don't be afraid of that. That is totally fine. Lean into that. You are cute. People will buy because of you. You're cute and just lean into that. You will lose that in the next seven years when you're 21. No, people will not look at you like, you're so cute, you're so cool that you're making a lawn care business. And some people like, oh, you got to be professional. No, you're 13. Lean into it. Lean into the fact that you're saving up for college or you're trying to make extra money for something on the side and tell customers that it sells. Do you know if anyone makes a side loading ramp rack so you can still put a trailer? Yeah, I think there is a few. I've seen some people modify them. I don't know specifically of a company that makes them just for that though. Hey, Mike, how would you go about learning new skills? Why? I already have my own company. I have only done mowing before actually. Just push mowing. Maybe books, courses, or should I just work for another company? It's not a large company, but I do have a decent amount of customers. I think when you talk about skills, I think you might be talking more about like how to add more services like hardscaping, project work, et cetera. I personally don't think you should go add more services. I think you should zero in. Especially if you're a small business, keep zeroing on that one thing and build that to the point where when you Switch to a different service or you get another skill. You can upsell a massive amount of customers and make it worthwhile. Well, from day one, instead of right now just making all these different revenue streams, everyone gets into this game of like, gotta create multiple revenue streams. So you're gonna have a mowing revenue stream. You're gonna have a lawn care and treatments revenue stream. You have a bush trimming revenue stream. You gotta have a patio revenue stream. You gotta have a retaining. Like, you gotta diversify. You're gonna diversify. You don't want all your eggs in one basket. The thing is like, look, all your eggs in one basket. Okay, great. I understand that. But you have 50 baskets with one egg in every single one. I'd much rather just have a couple baskets with full of eggs that can put food on the table. And that's probably a horrible analogy, but what I'm saying all that to say I'd focus on one service, get really good at it, and then add more baskets and then move some eggs around. But don't try to like, that was a horrible analogy. Shame on me. My goodness, that was horrible. Let's just keep moving on. Ivy Johnson. If I pay the 4k solo. Oh, this is for Augusta. Let me try to answer this real quick. If I paid the $4,000 today, would I still. Would I have to wait until training to get started. And is there a number of franchisees you're doing for the solo next season? Yeah, so the first solo operators are going to be coming in January 10th, 11th and 12th, right before the conference, which is the 13th, 14th and 15th. It's gonna be like a whole week for them. And in terms of. Yeah, you gotta. You gotta be at training before you start because otherwise we would have a. You wouldn't be following the systems. You need to follow systems. And leads need to come through correctly. At command center, they only trained in the system. So you need to come for training prior to getting leads and actually getting started. And that will be in January. But right now we already have. I think I want to say like five or six that are coming for January, a couple more coming that are going to be signed up next week. So probably seven or eight for January. And we will already build your website. So it's ranking. The ideal is that you join now. It's your website is built and it's ranking by the time spring rush comes. So if you're thinking about doing it, I would definitely be contacting Lee. I know he only has a couple slots on Monday available. This coming Monday and then we're gone for Gie for like a whole week. So if you're interested, book Monday and then otherwise, when we get back from Gie, he'll have some spots available. All right. Our walker mower is good. They are very good. They are very good. They're very expensive and they're expensive to fix. And sometimes it's hard to find a dealer, but they are good mowers. I'm ready to start the biz, but it's October. What jobs do I try for? Mulching and cleanups? Yes, those are the ones I'd be. I'd be targeting right now. And then try to upsell those customers. You always want to be marketing to the service that is going to have the lowest customer acquisition cost, period. And the story, do not be marketing mowing in the middle of winter. Do not be offering leaf cleanup in the middle of summer. Okay, I know it seems obvious, but I've seen it. You always want to be targeting the service that's gonna have the lowest customer acquisition cost. And the service with the lowest customer acquisition cost is gonna be the service that has the highest demand. Okay. Success leaves clues. Thank you for answering all your questions, all our questions, Mike. It's greatly appreciated. God bless you.

Thank you.

Jobber. Get some noise canceling earplugs. Lol. Yeah, that's the, that's the thing though. Then they fall out. I don't know. I have like AirPods that would probably work too, but they fall out. I'll have to look in the noise. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. Javelin landscaping. Should the landscaping industry professionals push back on states starting to outlaw gas equipment? Oh, man. It's a political thing. Honestly.

I don't think we're going to win that one because there's, there's more powerful companies and politicians pushing for electric mowers than U.S. landscapers. But at the end of the day, right now it is the taxpayer that is paying for this, this change. And in my opinion, in a lot of the states that are pushing it, they. It's the last states that need to be switching to electric because their grid doesn't actually isn't able to sustain electric. You know, all their equipment's being switched over. It's called full flag landscaping. I am saving for a truck. What is your thoughts on California becoming the first state to ban the sale of gas powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers in 2024? I would not consider that the law until it's actually in place. And I would just switch. Like, I'm not going to plan for that in 2023. I'll think about it. But until it's actually like done deal. And I, I don't know, man, I would move out of California. That's what I'd first of all do. But secondarily, I think when you do that and you're gonna have so much people buying electric equipment, it's going to bring the prices down. So it's actually a good thing for the rest of the market as these companies are now investing more into electric powered equipment and they're having higher demand because of the political push towards that direction. We are going to see the cost come down and that's what I want. So in the long term, I'm okay with it. Right? Like, I'm not going to push, I'm not going to go against it. This is the way of the future. It's the way things are going. The technology will catch up, the price point will come down. I'm, I'm all in favor in the long run. I just think that it's not really smart from an economic standpoint for it to be politically motivated. And most of it is. Do you ever tell customers that their lawn is too wet to mow? Typically we will if it's really, really bad. But ideally we try at least mow like the front yard or if we have to like go around a certain area, then weed whack the really, really wet areas. But in our market, like we can't just wait till tomorrow because it could rain 8, 10 days in a row. Right. So we do have to keep mowing and we just, we don't really have rain days. Door hangers are roadside signs. I really like door hangers if you're trying to be more targeted. Because if you put a yard sign next to a really busy highway, for example, you don't know if the customer that is driving by lives 20 minutes away. Right. So these are the door hangers that we have. You can get these on lawncaremedia.com property cleanups. This one's the lawn mowing one. Then the, there's the mult installation. What I like about these, I can actually put the price on them. So when I'm walking up the door actually have a price to give the customer what we call an instant quote. All the customer has to do is take a picture of this and email it to you. You put your email at the bottom here and you, you basically have a customer right off the bat. You have, you know how many Days. The quote is good for. So I like door hangers because it's more targeted. And in my opinion, for 99% of us listening to this, targeting and high density is much more important than volume. Definitely door hangers until your customers.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. March. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, one second here. We got questions coming in. Hey, Mike. I'm 24 years old in Houston, Texas. I have one crew with three men doing around 800, 900 a day, Monday to Friday. Daily expenses total is around 420. That doesn't really add up because if you have three people, $420, that's a hundred. It's $120 a day. So I guess you. You're $15 an hour. Okay. It's not too bad. Fifteen dollars a day. Yeah, I guess that would work. Okay. But that's just your labor.

So what's your question here? I currently have over $100,000 saved that I'm going to use next year to build more crews. My goal is four maintenance crews and one landscape crew. Thank you for all your information that you put out. I would really recommend raising your margins because right now over 50% of your revenue is going out the door towards wages. And you watch the video I made last night. You want that to be more on. You want it under 40%? Definitely. So I would definitely recommend trying to increase your price a little bit before you scale up. I see too many people growing and they're growing a low margin business that ends up sucking all the cash because growth sucks cash. Can you talk about the discounts for the franchisees? Yeah, we're getting more and more of those. Like Hustler, they give us 27% off everything. Gravely, we just signed a discount. Then they get, we get 22 off of everything. We have discounts with like ramp rack, trailer, trailerx.com Ballard so we're adding more. That's a big reason why I'm going to gie. And right now a big thing I'm trying to work on throughout the winter is trying to get us under a health plan, a group health plan for the entire franchise. I don't know if we're gonna be able to pull it off. I still don't know. It's like 5050 I but definitely looking into not at least getting a preferred vendor, but ideally trying to create one massive group for the entire franchise and reduce the cost dramatically. Hey, Mike, will you be having a meet and greet at the gie? Yes, I will. Having a meet and greet at the GIE every single Day at my booth. I'm not going to set up like a separate one off site or anything. I just come to the booth, say hi and I'd love to meet you guys. What's your opinion on foreign laborers who are willing to work for much more for less? That's a very political question. I'm going to dodge that bullet. Zachary Henig is 310 to 320,000 revenue too small for servers? Autopilot. I figure it was time to switch to a CRM. Yes, I think you do. You're having the revenue. It's going to be the thing that you need to grow. If you don't have any CRM, you definitely want to get started with something even if it's, you know, jobber or lawn pro or yard book something. But service autopilot, that size revenue, you're definitely starting to get into the range where it's worth it. Thank you for the $5 Seraphine Andy. People call me Andy because my last name is Andy's but my name is Mike. My middle name is Joel. My last name is Andy's with an Es like the mountains. Andy does lawn care web design make websites and SEO for design build based companies? Yes we do. We will do luxury maintenance also like Marini landscaping. Yes we do also do hardscaping and construction style. We, we do all home services. So we have lawn careweb design.com. we also have home service web design.com and so we do all home services but absolutely. Landscaping, hardscaping. We have several of the companies that we have done that for. I got a 48 inch walk behind. Should I just try and get big lawns? I cut my aunt's lawn and her backyard is heavily dogged damaged. So my big mower did a bit of scalping.

This is the thing when it comes to equipment, my opinion on this is figure out a setup, a mowing setup that is going to work for 80% of your market. Okay. And so in our market there are big properties that are two acres or more. Right. But we don't really go after those and they're maybe 10% of our market. So I let those go knowing that us using 30 inch mowers, we're going to alienate those people. But anything under half an acre, we're going to be competitive on pricing. And we do have properties. We have a property that just signed up the other week. They pay, wait, hold it. Sixteen hundred dollars per week for us to mow their lawn because we priced it as if we're going to use a 30 inch push mower and it's a couple acres. So is that a crazy price? Well, if they want our level of service and they want, they know we're going to do a good job, we tell them we're going to be higher because we don't have 60 inch zero turns. Come knock it out in a few hours. It's going to take us the whole day. So when is the next book? The next book is coming out in January. We're going to give it to everyone that comes to Landscape Summit. You're going to get the opening editions signed by me. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It'll be free for everyone at the conference. And it's going to be a really, really cool book. I'm looking forward to it. Zach from the media team is helping me on it a lot and I, I think it's gonna be, it's definitely gonna be my best book because Millennial. Millennial Millionaire. Oh, you can't see it. Look at that. Millennial. Oh, you can't even see it. I can't reach it. Sorry. That, that looks like it's right here, but it's like a good eight feet behind me. But I'll do it. This is, I wrote this book in 2016. It's not that great. Don't buy it. If you listen to one of my podcasts, you'll get more out of those. This is zero Turn. I do like this book. It's a short read. It's about a landscaper that changes his business. It's more of a fictional story, but actually is rooted in reality. There's a real Larry Lawn, Larry's Lawn Care. But the new book is gonna be much better. The new book is going to be awesome. We're gonna do a hardcover as well as an audible program for it. It's gonna be fantastic. We put a lot of time into it already. How do you encompass a backyard into an instant quote when you can't see it? Typically, if you're doing tracked homes in a neighborhood, you kind of already know what the backyard looks like. And most lawns are actually the same price in a track neighborhood. And also you can use Google Maps to typically see. All you need to really know is the access. Right. And so, yes. Is there occasionally a time when someone potentially could have a. A backyard that's like two feet overgrown? You don't see it? Yeah, that would be problematic, but we don't really have that ever happen. Okay, last question here. Oh, I see Gas. Gas and expenses were including that number. Okay, that's fine. But you still have like truck expense insurance, you know, rent, all those other overhead expenses too. But Arturo, I would stay then. So you're probably around 45% though, in wages.

If you have the cash, you have 100 grand. You know what, you have 100 grand. You have the go grow. You have the money to grow depending on where you're at in life and what your other liabilities, financial obligations are, then you should grow. You have $100,000 cash. Go grow. But just keep in mind, I would definitely be thinking about margins taking a year where you raise prices and increase margins. Hey, quick question. It's a f. If you hear the dog barking, it's because on the other side of the studio is a veterinarian and a dog place where they sell like pet food and everything.

So bless their heart.

Yeah, I got crashing weights on this side from Anytime Fitness. And then I got dog place over here barking. It's fantastic. Great place for a studio. It's fantastic. Okay, okay. The dog's like right behind me. Okay. Hey, quick question. Is it F150 with a six foot bed? A mistake. Should I look for an F250 instead? My ultimate goal is to mainly mow lawns and mulch, but also do small retaining walls. If you're going to be doing retaining walls and you're going to be hauling around a dump trailer with a bunch of mulch, probably a good idea to get an F250, especially if you're doing a six foot bed. You know, for. I would go get a 250 if that's the one truck you'd be looking at. That's what you should be getting because it's a nice blend. You can still do the mowing, but then it also has the towing power for the trailer or any like pallets, if you're getting retaining wall blocks, etc. So just getting started. How much did I pay my employee? You should ideally be paying them 25 or less than what you're charging per hour to the, to the customer. Mike, you're crazy. You're probably right, actually. I know you're right. Max is next door. Let's go. That's awesome. Javelin. How would a landscape company get into roof blowing? Lots of pine trees here. I would try to make it an upsell, right? So take, try to build your low hanging fruit of mowing customers and landscaping customers. And then during the fall, during the winter, then try to upsell people. Send them an email, say, hey, we do we now do offer gut out, gutter cleanouts or blowouts, whatever you want to call them, get the pine needles off of your property. I think that's a definitely an upsell sell type of opportunity. So that is it for today. I appreciate everyone hopping on here and making a very cool Saturday with all these great questions. Sorry if I did not get to your question, but do make sure. Make sure. Make sure. Hold it. Suspense, drumroll. Make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. See, now you can see. If I do this, there should be a cursor. There you go. So go to landscapebusinesscourse.com I'd love to see at the conference in January. It's three days, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I know people talk about like, oh, I can't make it because the snow. Okay, I'm telling you, if you make a couple thousand dollars on that weekend, sub it out. Sub it out. Guess what? Your employees can probably take the pain for a couple days while you're gone. Book the tickets, get out here. Now you can use Southwest and fly directly into Bellingham, which is like 10 minutes away from the conference center. It's going to be great. You're going to meet a lot of really great people. And we talk business and we talk numbers and we have a lot of fun. We meet a lot of really good people and I really do believe it's a good business conference, not just mowing and equipment and hype up conference. It's gonna be a lot of numbers, a lot of fun. Bring your profit and loss statement from 2021 and I promise you, you will learn some great people and learn some good things for 2022 to grow your business. So landscape summit, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com commerce. I would love to see you in person. We lose at least I don't know how much we lose. Every single person. Someone asked me the other day, I will, he's like, hey, I'll buy. How many, how many tickets do I need to buy for Landscape Summit for me to get a, a free consultation with you via Zoom. I said, well, it's a bad trade for both of us because you're going to spend more money than you need to buying tickets and I'm going to lose money on every single ticket. So it's a bad trade. We don't make any money on the conference. I can promise you that. We lose a lot. I'm spending a wazoo amount of money right now for the conference. We will not make that money up on 2.9, 9 per person. I promise you that. We got food, the venue, speakers coming in, got massive banners. We're going to be having swag that we give away that are really cool by the way. We're going to be sweaters, give books, etc. So it's gonna be great. You gotta be there and I'd love to see you. It's like the one time of year I throw an event because I just want to see everybody and so please be there. It's gonna be great and I look forward to seeing you there. And I will see a GIE next week as well. So if I don't see in until January, make sure I see a GIE. Kentucky Louisville, two different booths. We have one for Augusta Lawn Care, one for Lawn CareWebDesign.com until then, have a great weekend.