Building A $1M Lawn Care Business That Runs Without Me

All right, so you guys said you liked raw and unedited videos, so here I am sitting in the middle of a field of dead grass, sitting crisscross applesauce. I'm gonna talk to you about how I'm gonna start a lawn care business in the next year and grow it to $1 million of recurring revenue. So I've been in the industry for 19 years. I started mowing grass when I was 11. I'm now 30 years old, but in the next year I'll be going down to Dallas, Texas and starting a location from scratch and And growing it to $1 million. And I'm gonna talk about some of the things that I'm doing differently now than I did 19 years ago, 10 years ago, and even 5 years ago. What I've learned and what I'm doing differently with this location. So that really, hopefully, when I hit the challenge and people come back and watch these videos, they realize what went into it in terms of planning. Because you don't just start a $1 million business. You have planning, you have strategy, and you have to say no to a lot of things. So that actually takes me to my very first thing that I'm doing differently this time, and that is simplification of services. We are doing 2 things. We are doing mowing and we're doing fertilization, weed control, and that's it. We're going to get asked to trim bushes, trim hedges, pull weeds, install mulch, install river rock. We'll be asked to remove lawns, install landscaping, do a design, put in some paver patio, or wall, and all those things. Every single one of those things I just mentioned, I can do. And my tech, my general manager John, absolutely can do them way better than I can. He's from the area and he could absolutely demolish all those services. We're not doing any of them. We're just doing mowing and we're doing fertilization, weed control. So I believe that in home services, one of the slipperiest slopes and the biggest mistakes that we make is we add too many services. Makes it hard to train technicians. Hard to train admin, hard to really focus your marketing dollars on the services you want. And I only want recurring revenue. Honestly, I'm not interested in one-time revenue. I'm not interested in having to go do in-person estimates. So we will not do in-person estimates. All of it will be done over the phone, uh, command center answering the phone, giving the price over the phone after measuring the property. Or it'll be done from our website via instant quote forms where we just show The price for their property, and they can accept it and put a card on file. Another thing that we'll be doing is simplification of the offer. So we aren't having a whole bunch of types of mowing prices. I'm not changing the mowing price based on every 100 square feet. There are 3 prices for our mowing: small, medium, and large. And if you're over large, we don't really serve— you're not ideal customer profile. We probably won't even service you. So there's just 0 to 4,000 square feet of turf. 4,000 to 8,000 square feet of turf, and 8,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet of turf. Those are our 3 ranges of pricing. And furthermore, we're not even doing a biweekly and a weekly price. We're just saying, here's your cost per cut, but you have to stay on a weekly schedule for 9 months of the year and biweekly for the other 3 months of the year. You have to. And if you don't want to, that's fine. I understand that I will get some customers saying no. And I think the thing that keeps so many small businesses small is saying yes to everyone, all the services, Different frequencies, different pricing, saying yes so often to customers, and then also being afraid of customers saying no to them, being— saying no to their frequency, the schedule that they want for their services. And the offer is going to be very simple. We mow your grass for small, medium, and large. And same thing is true with treatments. The offer is very simple. There is one treatment package. There's not 4, there's not 5, there's not 3, there's not 2. There's one treatment package. And I do believe that this will reduce my close rate. I don't think that's the best sales strategy. However, it also positions ourselves as the authority that we know exactly what needs to happen when it comes to treatments and fertilization, weed control. And we actually guarantee the outcome of the service, which is you have no weeds in your lawn because we know this package works and it's premium. Like the average customer on the treatment program will be spending over $1,000 per year For us to do service on their property. It's expensive, but it comes as a guarantee, and there's one package. The idea behind this, uh, the simplicity of the offer— and that is weekly services required, biweekly during the winter, and then having the treatment program 9 steps throughout the year— the, the logic behind that is we're able to move some of the treatment services, especially around weed control, during the offseason. But also It ensures that any property that's serviced by Augusta Lawn Care in that market is going to look prime, incredible, amazing, because it's maintained year-round and we're always making sure it's staying green and weed-free. And this is your best marketing. People seeing you showing up to properties that always look good in the long run helps the brand. In the short term, I will get customers that will say, sorry, I don't want you to do weekly service, I only want biweekly. There'll be customers that say, I don't want 9 treatments, I only want 3. There'll be people that say, I want core aeration and dethatching. I'm saying, sorry, we don't offer those things. And that'll be hard. Saying no to customers, them saying no to you is never easy. But you have to determine the simplification that you want in the business so that you can have it run without you. And that's the, that's the reason we have to simplify the services and the offer and the pricing is because I'm going to be leaving in 6 months after starting the location. And I need that location to run without me. I need my general manager and the technicians and the team to be able to run the business without me. And The more complexity you add to the business, usually the tighter the golden handcuffs are on you as the owner. The harder it is for you to step away, take a vacation, hire someone else to manage the team in operations, in sales, in admin. And so simplification is not just a matter of, oh, I wanna make it harder for customers to join. I wanna make sure I make people mad because I say, sorry, we can't offer that service. It's building the business that can run without you. And it is easier to build systems around simple services, simple offer, simple pricing, than it is a whole bunch of complexity. That leads me to the next thing we're doing that's different is we're not having an office. We aren't going to even have storage. We're going to have vans, and each of those vans are going to go back with the employees, the technicians, every single day back to their house. And I see that as a perk. Is there more systems that are required when employees are taking vans home? Yes. We're going to have to make sure we track the vehicles with GPS. We have a geofence and we have a front-facing dash cam. We're gonna have to make sure those things are in place. But the whole objective is that when their alarm goes off at 6:00 AM, by 6:30, they could be on someone's property mowing their lawn. They could be on someone's property spraying weeds instead of driving through traffic for 30 minutes. They get to the shop, they're dinking around, having coffee, talking to people for 20 or 30 minutes, and then they go to go drive again for another 30 minutes through traffic to get to their first property. I want them to be able to wake up, take their van, walk outside, and go to the first property. It allows them to make more money also and pay for performance because they get a percentage of all the labor revenue that they earn for the business. So It makes them more efficient, it makes the business more money, and ultimately it cuts down on waste. Again, all of that though requires simplification. I can't do a whole bunch of weeding, trimming bushes, mulch install, project-based work if they're driving vans that really can't haul debris away. And so I know one of the biggest hiccups and hardest parts is gonna be people that want their bushes trimmed, want weeding done, uh, and bed maintenance. We just can't do that because— I can't be thinking about where the dump site is and how much the tarps and do you have bins? Okay, do you need hedge trimmers? Do you need chainsaws? Do you need loppers? All these other little bits and pieces of tools get added when you start adding more services. And so by having no office, I'm having no overhead team members. Even the general manager will be out in the field producing revenue and will make more in labor revenue than their salary. This is in order to have no overhead in the business. You're either a Labor revenue, revenue-producing team member, or you don't exist. Because command center's answering the phones. We don't have anyone out going out and driving to people's property, visiting with customers and doing estimates. It's all done over the website or over the phone from command center. And this reduces our overhead dramatically. By having the technicians take the vans home, there is added more systems, but also it's a huge benefit to someone that doesn't have to then worry about the maintenance, the wear and tear, the fuel to get to work, and it allows them to make more money, like I said, on pay for performance, 'cause they get to the jobs faster. All right, some other things that we're doing. I have not, I have never spent so much time setting up automations for any of my businesses. In the past, we didn't have MCP or API access at HomeWorks. We do now, which allows me to set up all sorts of alerts, automations, reminders, dashboards, daily recaps for my general manager and for me. So my general manager is going to get a lot of information at the end of each day of kind of a recap of what happened that day, whether it be complaints, new customers added, callbacks, customers having a problem, technicians' problems, efficiency problems out in the field. I'm going to get another dashboard that is going to talk about customer acquisition costs and where the leads are coming from in terms of ads, whether it be Facebook ads or Google ads. And the ability now with MCP, which MCP is just like connecting Claude or ChatGPT to HomeWorks and being able to synthesize the data, give us dashboards, give us information. It can go in and write like dispatcher notes, like a whole bunch of stuff, send emails to me. Like it's phenomenal. And the ability to do this now is amazing. In the past, one of the things we always had to do at the end of the day, for example, was Any initial mows, we charge a per-minute rate per person. That way, if the lawn's overgrown, if the edges need to be established, anything like that, the first service, because it's done over the phone, the price is given over the phone or measured on the, on the website. And so sometimes you show up and it's, the grass is totally overgrown. On a $50 lawn mow, it's technically 4 hours worth of work. So we make sure on the first service that we charge a per-minute rate. So for us, it's $2 per minute per man. And in order to make sure that happens, once they finish the initial mow, you need to go back into HomeWorks and adjust the pricing. Typically, that's what we've always done. Look how long it took. Adjust the pricing of the visit and then you can charge them. And by the way, another thing that we're doing that's different is we're going to charge every single day. We're not going to wait weekly. We're not going to bill monthly. We're going to charge at the end of every single day. As soon as that job is completed, HomeWorks is auto-charging the card on file for that customer. In the past, when it came to initial mows, the general manager would have to adjust the pricing based upon how long we spent. Now, all that can be automated using the MCP and API, and that is he's gonna get a report of all the initial mows. Here's how long it took, here's how much you should be charging. It's gonna leave a dispatcher note inside HomeWork so you can quickly see in the dispatch board, and now he's just approving the initial mows to make sure they're all accurate. It's great. So if he needed to check, for example, like the van, make sure they clocked in at the right time, he could do that if he wanted to, but it probably reduces the time he spends by 70 to 80% on just making sure the initial mows are corrected in terms of pricing. In the past, that was something that we just took for granted that we had to do. Now, with MCP and API access and HomeWorks, it makes things so much more simple. So we're making a lot of automations, reports, and dashboards for both the general manager on the operational side, and then for myself, more on the lead acquisition side. What's my customer acquisition cost? Where are the leads coming from? What's working? What ads are working? That's in a dashboard as well. Super useful. We're using a lot of video. So inside of Field Force, which is the mobile app that we have for HomeWorks, we can take video out in the field. It compresses the file down, but I can take that, copy that link, and send it to customers for upsells. And so we made upsells inside of HomeWorks for every single one of the problems that a lawn might have, whether it be grubs or ants or weeds or it's just looking kind of gross, uh, upsells for the customer to go from mowing into treatments. Because when you only have 2 services, the whole objective is get them to buy both. You gotta upsell. the mowing customers into treatments. Anyone with treatments, I wanna sell them into mowing. And so really dialing in the upsell options inside of HomeWorks, but also using video a lot. And so even like our thank you and welcome email, which is like after someone accepts the video or the email that goes back and tells them what day of service, there's a video on there. I'm constantly using video for upsells within the crew. They can just like, for example, if someone goes, does an initial mow, they're like, hey, this back alley is not super clear that you've gotta include this. I'm just gonna shoot a quick video, attach it to the property, And then that way every single time someone shows up at this property, they can see the video. So we're leaning into a video like a lot. Same thing with follow-up phone calls, whether it be command center or the general manager doing follow-up phone calls. We're going to be using video and making sure that we are using that a ton. And because now it's all inside of HomeWorks, so I can track the video. It's not like it just like lives off in this own world of iMessage or some like Loom over here. It's like, or like a YouTube link or like Google Drive. It's like It's all now on the property, it's on the customer profile, and we can make sure that's actually tracked in the long term. So we're using a lot more video. Those are some of the things that we're changing that over the past, you know, even few years, like MCP API a few years ago wasn't even possible. And so those are some of the things that are new. It's mostly around simplification, allowing us to focus on what actually matters, which really when you're scaling quickly, assuming you have budget to be able to spend money on getting new ads, spending money on ads to get more leads, Then you only really need to focus on the other side of the equation, which is doing the work, your technicians, your general manager. And that's what I'm gonna be spending my time on is making sure John, my general manager, is set up for success, making sure new technicians are constantly being hired, onboarded. There's a bench of technicians that we can pull from, especially when we hit spring rush. That's what I'm gonna be focused on. Ultimately, I need to get customers and then I need to service their property. Those are the 2 parts of any home service business. And so that's what we're gonna be focused on. General manager really focusing on the operations, doing of the work. I'm gonna be focused more on getting the work. The sales side, and I look forward to it. So hopefully that was helpful. If you're trying to scale quickly, doing some of these things will likely get you there faster compared to how I would have done things in the past, which is offer every single service. Would have had a salesperson, would have an office person, would have had a $3,000 or $4,000 a month rent to have an office. I would have had pickup trucks that did not go home with the crew. They had to drive there. I would have offered way too many services, way too many different marketing ads, marketing offers. I would— this is like focus, and we all talk about focus. We hear other people talk about how important focus is in business. When it comes to home services, the number one way to focus is cut things out and simplify. Simplify your offer, simplify your pricing, simplify your services, simplify the type of training that technicians need. And by doing that, you'll build a more successful business. Well, but we'll find out. I'm going to Dallas and documenting the entire journey, so make sure you subscribe.