Building a $650K Landscape Business with Population Less Than 2000

Hey everyone, this is Mike and you're listening to Landscape Business Course Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about how you can grow your business even though you might live in a small town or live in a small area of population, how you can grow your business and make your landscaping business successful. Before we get today's show though, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Jobber. If you haven't already, go to get Jobber to IM Andes A N D E S that's my last name. One of the things I love about Jobber is the user interface. It's very, very simple. I've talked a lot about a bunch of different options for your CRM, but Jobber is by far the easiest to navigate around. So if you're new to having a CRM, if you're kind of overwhelmed by other software systems that have a lot of complexity and you're like, I don't really need all of this and I'm kind of confused and I know I'm not using this as efficiently as I could. This is I love Jobber. The user interface is clean and very efficient and easy to get around. They have a great app as well as a desktop version. I highly recommend it. If you haven't already, you can try out the free trial of their software. Just go to getjobber.com im.

Andy'S so today I'm actually I was kind of inspired to do this episode from a phone call I had with Justin Cooper. Justin lives in Tennessee and he came to last year's Landscape Summit and at that time he had been in the business for 14 years and been doing landscaping, lawn care related stuff and he had been doing like never above 200, 250,000 in revenue annually. This year he is set. I just got off the phone with him last night. This year he is set to do over $650,000 in revenue. I was just blown away. I was super excited and happy for him. I know he's implementing a lot of things we talked about at last conference at Landscape Summit. So I'd love to see you at Landscape Summit 2020, which is just coming up in a couple months. So just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference or just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com and click the conference tab. Sign up today and you're going to be able to get some of the strategies that Justin Heard is implementing this year to really turn his business around. But what made the difference why I'm talking about this today is that Justin comes From a little, tiny town in Tennessee that has less than 2,000 people in its pop. I think that was like, a 2010 census, actually. So maybe it's like 2,500 people now, but it's super, super small. And so I want to talk today about what he's doing and what you can do to grow your business if you live in a very small town. So let me just kind of give some backstory. And that is. I know what it's like. We are in a little, tiny town called blaine, and I think it was like, 7 or 8,000 in population, and we grew Augusta Lawn Care to 1.2 million before moving from here to a big market, which is bellingham, and that has like, 70 or 80,000 people. And so I know it's like to grow in a small, small market, But I also don't like when people use the excuse of, oh, I only have 10 or 15,000 people in my town, so I can't grow a very big business. Like, you do not need a lot of population to grow a big, successful landscaping business. Like, even when I say big, like, you can grow a big business even with 15, 20,000 people in your local market, it's totally possible. It's really like, are you being smart about your marketing? Are you dominating that small market? So we're going to talk about some of those things today. We're going to talk about the three ways that you can grow your business in a small market. The number one way you can grow your business in a small market, in a small demographic, there's not a lot of people, not much of a population, is just to grow the number of services that you offer. So if you do mowing and you're like, oh, well, I'm kind of capped out. Like, everyone knows who I am. I already have all the mowing customers as possible to get in this town, which I don't believe, but let's say that it's the case. Then you can add fertilization and literally might get 20, 30% growth just from adding the service. You might go ahead and add tree trimming or landscaping and literally double the size of your business. So the number one way to grow the size of your business in a small market Is literally just adding services. The second way is to increase your service area. So instead of just working within, say, five miles of your shop location or your house, maybe you extend out to a different location and you start working in a different town or the next town over. And a couple ways to do that, you can either one have like a satellite location where you have a crew starting from like an empty lot or a storage facility in that new neighborhood or sorry, that new town. Or you can just be like, okay, I've grown as much as I can in my small town. A few thousand people may be living there. I'm going to send a crew one day a week and they're going to work in this other town, maybe 45 minute drive away. I know that it's inefficient to drive that far away. I know that they're not gonna make as much of a profit margin cause they're driving that far away. However, I'm going to do that and I'm gonna do that for a couple years and then continue to grow that until it makes it worth it for me to have a shop and a crew that starts from that new town or city. And so that's one way to grow, is to grow this service area because you only have so many people in your area. So you might grow out, you're willing to drive or eventually start satellite locations to grow your business. The third way is actually not really growing your business, it's growing your bottom line. And that means staying focused on your small town, on your small demographic and population and just dominating them. That means literally, if there's only a few thousand homes, you can easily get a flyer on their doorstep, a door hanger, Facebook and Google Ads literally for a very low amount of money. Simply due to the fact that you don't have a huge amount of customers you're trying to reach. You only have so many potential customers to even contact, you can easily dominate the market. You can become the company in your area. And in that small of a market, a lot of times there's lots of word of mouth, everyone knows everybody. So once you get the ball rolling, things really begin to take off. So instead of just growing the size of business, what you can do is focus on, okay, I'm gonna dominate this market and I'm just going to increase my prices as I increase the value for the customer. So as I get better and better at these services, I'm not going to add more services, I'm not going to grow the size and area the service area that I'm covering. I'm going to focus on my core competencies, I'm going to increase the value of the customer, I'm going to get more efficient and I'm going to be able to raise the price and increase my bottom line. And I don't think this is a bad idea. I think you can dominate a market. I think you can have really concentrated marketing. I think you can force the value up and the standard of your competitors. Because if there's only a few thousand people in your market, there's not enough room for dozens of landscapers to grow big businesses. So what you can do is become that one person that really begins to take a lot of either the tire kickers and the weekend warriors, they can get along, they can be a little bit cheaper than you and things, but you can differentiate yourself by the value you provide the customer by having a great website, having a great logo, having uniforms and trained staff and clean trucks and all of those things, adding value to the customer experience so you can charge higher prices and have a really solid profit margin. So those are the three ways I would recommend you grow your business into a big business, maybe not necessarily big, a more profitable business. If you are in a small market, it's absolutely possible. You can absolutely make a million dollar business in a demographic that has 5,000 or less people. For Augusta Lawn Care, our franchisees get five mile radiuses around an address and they get 100,000 people. So there's just absolutely no excuse if you live in a. I just hear it all the time. People are like, oh, I only have 20, 30,000 people in my market. I can't really grow a big business. It's really not true. You're allowing a lot of preconceived ideas and negativity in our industry to pull you back. Have an open mindset like Justin, who in a town of less than 2,000 people is going to do over 650,000 in revenue, is going to almost triple the size of his business this year. And I really look forward to seeing him again at conference in January. You can talk, talk to him if you come and see what he's doing. But I'd love to see you at conference just before we head out here. I want to make sure you do head over to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. Book your tickets, bring your office staff, bring your co founders, bring your wife, your spouse, your husband. Bring everyone along that you want to see your business succeed with. I look forward to seeing you there. And until next time, be great because nothing else pays.