Business Bootcamp: Dylan's First Zoom Call

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. For the next couple of episodes, we're going to have one focus Business Boot camp. We've been challenging four different home service business owners to overcome their challenges and build their business into something great. Part of the challenge is a zoom call. Check in we do along the way. Mike has tons of great advice in here for anyone that runs a small business. So here's what we're getting into. We're talking to Dylan from Urban Roots Landscaping out of Tacoma Walk, Washington. Dylan's goal is to grow their business to about 400k and they're going to do that by going from 40k a month in revenue to 90k a month by next year. Mike's going to give him the guidelines and strategy he can use to make sure he meets that goal. As always, you can find all this and more over at the Mike and his YouTube channel. So here's the first call with Dylan from Urban Roots Landscaping.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we're actually watching a full consultant call that I had with Dylan Moy, who's the owner of Urban Roots Landscape down to Tacoma, Washington. Now, Dylan is actually part of Business Bootcamp, which is a 30 day program we're running through trying to turn his business around and improve it. You can watch the entire episode from last week here, but this is gonna be the full consulting call that I had with Dylan and we're gonna go over how he can double the size of his landscaping business this coming year. He's already doing $400,000 in annual revenue, but his goal is to get to a million dollars. We're gonna be going over what he needs to do to have someone on the field doing training for his new team members that he needs to hire, as well as taking the estimating, routing and the scheduling off of his can focus on sales and doubling the size of his company.

It's gonna be a great episode.

I think you'll get a lot out of it. Again, if you missed last week's episode, check it out. But today it's the extended version. Here we go.

Can you hear me now?

I can. How you doing, Dylan?

How are you doing? Good, man.

What a week. Lots of good weather. The Pacific Northwest this week.

Yeah, I've been loving it and it looks like we still got probably another seven to 10 days of super nice. Yeah, I know, man.

It's been awesome. Cool. Cool. Well, before we jump into it, because we only have 15 minutes, I'll try to be as concise as I can be. Anything right off the bat you wanted to ask, or do you want to jump into some of those questions that you fill out in the form? Because I do have a few things to go over as well.

So I did send an email to you. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you saw that email. I had some bulleted points, but.

Geez, where do I even start? You're right. 15 minutes is pretty short.

You're good. So I kind of think my. My big thing is, as I look at what you're doing now, I'm looking at a couple things. One, you don't have the confidence necessarily to grow because you feel like you have a lack of experience in the marketing side. My question would be, when you did the marketing this past year, what were you spending it on? Because, like, when I look at like this entire year, you spent $5,000 in marketing. The peak of that was about $1,200 in January. And throughout the spring rush, you were spending like 3 to 400 bucks. What were you spending on during that time? Especially during spring?

So I think the bulk of that was probably like putting logos on my truck. So that was maybe that big thing in January. And then I did some Facebook posts. You know, like, I would boost posts from my Facebook and I think I could do the same thing on Instagram. I had, I've had like one continuous, like, I don't know if it's like $10 a week ad on Nextdoor that I've never updated. It just keeps recurring. I need to change the picture of the text probably.

But pretty limited. I have Google local services going.

Pretty continuously and it's kind of hit or miss. Some weeks I'll have one or two calls and a message. It's not like real heavy leads from that. And then my, my flyers I sent out last year, but I didn't do any flyers this year. So I think that pretty much sums up like the marketing I've done. I've kind of, like I said, played around with nextdoor, Facebook, that kind of stuff.

When did you get your website done? Like, finish the design? Was that like spring of last year or winter of last year?

It was winter of last year. So okay. I have not done before.

It looks pretty good. And I, I would say, like, trying to spend more against the, the digital side. But like, when I look at what you were spending last spring Again, and I know your market really well. March, April, May. That's what I want you to spend, basically 90% of your marketing. And so when I look at that, and you spent, you know, 600 on marketing, and that potentially is including other things outside of actual ad spend. Like, almost all of your growth is due to organic growth referrals and people seeing your trucks and your website. Right. You do. You do pretty good, actually, in terms of ranking, in terms of Google, your Google listing, as well as even on your SEO. You're on the bottom of page one. But you've got a whole bunch of lead services above you. Right. So, like the fact that you grew all this year, I'd say 99% of it is due to those things. It's not to your marketing, like nextdoor and whatever else, because you just don't have enough spend for me to be like, oh, like, that's definitely the reason why. And so I really do believe that, like, you know, if there's any unconfidence, you know, it comes to growth because of marketing. You put that against Google Ads next spring rush, and you just really pour that on during March, April and May. Like, I'm talking 60 to 70% of your marketing spend during those months. That will do. You'll do. You have the same amount of growth as you had this past year when. Because you were at like 15, 20,000amonth, if I remember correctly, you jumped right to 4,050amonth through that spring rush. That'll happen again if you deploy that against marketing. And I honestly believe you'll pull back your marketing because the demand will still be too much.

Okay, so I've never used Google AdWords. I've only done the local services, I think, so that I'll kind of research into that more.

Yeah. And take a look at what they call. They just launched this new product a few months ago we've been really excited about with the franchisees, and that is called Google Performance Max. So when it gives you the option for what type of ad you want to run, it'll have like search, video, banner display, all this other stuff. Do Performance Max. And what that does is allows you to put like a bunch of videos, a bunch of pictures, like eight headlines, and then it just basically optimizes your budget across all the different Google platforms. And we've seen that work really, really well. It's a new product, so it's changing quite often, but it's. It's nice because you can put. Give it so much video, like, like five links. You Know, a bunch of pictures, a bunch of display, you know, headlines and then it just optimizes the best across all the different types of Google platforms.

But like, oh, so Google Maps it like it'll do like my Google business page. It'll do like Google AdWords. It'll Google it kind of like disperses it.

Yep, Exactly. Yeah. Google AdWords is no longer a thing. They've just emerged that all into Google Ads. And so if you just go to ads.google.com and when you create a new campaign, it's going to ask you what type of campaign use performance max. It'll basically ask for all the videos, it'll ask for everything that you would need across all those different ad platforms and it just optimizes your budget accordingly. But I truly believe like if you spent 5,000 that you spent this year, which like you said most, that was your decals for your trucks. If you spent that in next spring, 5 to 10,000, I truly believe you'd go from 40, 50,000amonth to 80 to 90. Like I really believe that.

And, and so I, I want to take that. The reason I addressed that first because I want to take away that fear of like, I hope I don't grow so much or I hope I get, I don't get all this trucks and equipment and getting a GM and all the, an office person and then I don't grow again. I don't think that's going to happen. And part, part of the reason why you're kind of feeling that now is because for the past four or five months you haven't grown a whole lot. It's mostly just been maintaining what came in through that spring rush. And a lot of that has to do with just you don't have the marketing that is able to continually put pump leads back into the system when they're not organically coming in. And so I really think you're going to grow just as much next spring. I really, really do. And so when I say that, that's when it's like, okay, now what do we do to prepare for that growth and making sure it's profitable? Because honestly, you could easily take what you have now in terms of business, raise your prices, stay at 50 to 60,000amonth in revenue and be very profitable. And that's not a bad business model. Like you could really make it profitable. My concern is more a matter of the work life balance, the amount of hours you're working and the fact that it's just not sustainable because you know, you have $150,000 in the bank. I think if you spent 40 to 50 of that strategically between now and spring rush, it will set up the business to be able to go up to that 9 to 100,000 marker and have a general manager in place and give you a little more flexibility.

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So like when it comes to Michael, what's your thoughts on making him sort of a hybrid? Working on like the dispatching, the estimating and taking away some of those things that you're doing like early morning and in the evening. What sort of your thoughts on that?

So Michael's strength, I think where he's going to shine is going to be answering phones, customer service, back end manager. He was a manager at a couple of fast food restaurants. Um, so I really do. And then we have somebody else named Jose who's extremely strong with like operations. I mean just all around a good. I could see him down the line being kind of like an operational like manager in some way. I just don't know how organization structure would look, you know, based on what to delegate first. So I think Michael, he definitely has a wherewithal to pick up service autopilot basically like really secretarial type tasks. He could, I think he could write up the estimates for me if I do estimate videos and get that to him. So all those type of tasks I think he could definitely handle. I think he can handle emails. He seems to have enough business savvy to where if I had a. It's scary to think about handing off your emails to somebody. But I think over time, especially after the first year, if he kept checking with me on how I'd respond to emails and he'd eventually know how to respond to emails like I would. So I think that could be a good fit for him is office work. Whereas Jose, you know, hopefully if we're able to retain this team that we have, Jose could do like he's killing it in the field. Like in terms of he does walkthroughs with clients. He gets us good reviews, quality work, trains well. I mean it's, it's great operationally with him.

So, so what, what if we do this? Like, this is kind of the model we use for our locations once they get past 800,000. Because once they get past 800,000, you can't just have one person at the top anymore. And you're kind of starting to bump that and that, that's you at the top. Right. What I recommend is having an office manager and then a general manager dynamic. For now, you're going to be the general manager and then you're going to have an office manager, which in this case would be Michael. And so you're going to still be doing estimates throughout the day, you're going to still be a point of contact for the guys throughout the day, but there's going to be that secondary person in the office, quote unquote. But they are doing estimates, they're doing email, they're doing the phone, they're doing everything back end that they possibly can take off your plate. So you're really just focusing on selling and hiring, sharing. And then your Jose would be a great person. I feel like in the training side of things, like out in the field to get you off of doing that so much right now.

Yeah. And so when, when we start to shift to this model, one of my questions was like, I want this to be viable for them as a career, like. And I, I find that this is a good partnership, the three of us, right. Between office estimator and.

More of the operations with Jose. So how and when can I start to have that conversation with them? And what can I afford in terms of whether it's profit sharing or some other model that's going to make it enticing to them? Because I don't want to lose either one of them. And I truly believe like I realized like this foundation if we lost other employees, not to say that I don't value all employees, but I could have other more seasonal people kind of come and go. But if these guys stick around, it's something we can build on. Right. And have more stability. So I can't remember I read your listened to your P4P book, but I don't remember if you talked about profit sharing in there. So I just need or whatever your suggestions are to make it enticing and at what phase can I phase in more of these benefits to make it enticing to stay.

As I look at the next six months of making sure they stay, it's going to be more the promise of what's to come. It's not really going to be the profit sharing. And what I mean by that is like showing them an org chart what that's going to look like. And I would have a date circle in the calendar when they're rolling goal changes. And I would Recommend that be March 1st. Just knowing your market in terms of just how quickly it changes after the first week of March, you know, March 1st, you're going to be in the office, you're going to be in charge of as we hire four or five more people next spring. You're going to be the one training them. You're going to be responsible for that. I'm going to be focusing on selling, I'm going to be focusing on hiring those individuals. And I would recommend in terms of incentivizing more long term, giving them a piece of the profits. I would say, you know, especially as you start stepping away from the business after next year. Because after next year it's how do we replace you at the general manager side of things. Right. But in terms of going next spring, what I would recommend is something like a 5% going to, to Michael, 5% going to Jose and then 5% going to your crew. Right. And that's a profit and it's on a quarterly basis. And it's going to be quarterly mostly. Like Jose and Michael will get their, their profit sharing 100%. The 5% that goes to the crew. They have to earn that obviously by not being late. The typical thing that we talk about in the book. But that would be enough I feel like, because I really feel like next year you're probably going to bring at least 150 to $200,000 to the bottom line. And so if you give, if you give 5% of that to, you know, either of those individuals, you're talking about ten, five to ten grand at least in just profit sharing. And I think that's motivating in of itself in addition to, you know, obviously what their ever their hourly rate is. But I think Jose honestly should stay on PvP. Honestly I, I just keep him on P4P I because, because you already are running that. And then the profit sharing would be basically to accommodate the fact that he's going to be training other individuals and probably having meetings with you and Michael and staying on on task with that sort of thing. But then you're probably going to have to increase the hourly base pay of Michael as the office person because he's not gonna have the opportunity to make P4P anymore.

Yeah, and that was my question. So how does that look? I mean, in the winter, he's built up over time. His production wasn't great in the beginning, but now we're all sitting at 24, 25 an hour. But again, it's probably gonna go down with the leaves and everything. So on average, it's probably low to mid-20s. Right. Is that even affordable for a business like this or.

Yeah, I think so. Especially for an office manager. Right. I would highly recommend being around that $22 per hour, 23 max for the hourly role. But then again, he's getting that 5% of profit sharing, right? Like, our RGM just got over 12. No, it's over $13,000 in his profit sharing for the quarter. Like, that's the motivation. It's not his hourly wage. His hourly wage is 22 bucks. So the. The more you can put it on that incentive, the better. Especially when you start office, the office manager and the general manager, who has so much control over the business, you want most of it to be wrapped up in incentives and not the hourly wage.

Okay.

And that might be a conversation you wait on having for another, like, month or two in terms of the wage side of things, simply due the fact that he is potentially thinking 24, 25 now. It's like, look, it actually comes down considerably during the winter. Why don't I give you something in between for your hourly. With upside potential for profit sharing.

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Okay, so just for clarification, you said kind of wait and sell them on the dream of what's to come. All right, so are you saying hold off on the property sharing until like, would that be 20, 24 or you're talking about this coming spring, we're gonna switch over to profit sharing.

I would do it as soon as they switch roles. Right. So March 1st, if that's going to be your switch over. I would. That's when they. They would buy, then know their. What they're getting paid per hour as well as what their. Their profit sharing is from now it'd be like here, here's what the organization is going to look like. You've probably already kind of go over, gone over the goals of the business, but it seems like the, the goals and direction of how big you're going to grow and things probably hasn't been clearly defined to them. And I would go in with very clear, here's how many guys we want to hire. Here's what we want in terms of revenue, here's what we want in terms of profit. Oh, and by the way, I want to give you 5% of this number next year to be part of this different org chart. And here it is. That's going to keep them throughout the winter and you can train them throughout the winter. But then there's a hard set date when their actual role changes.

Okay, okay, can we, can we just break down how Jose's role would look? So you said keep him on P4P. So he's doing well on P4P. Right. So can we keep him on P4P? But how would that training role look? He's just still being subbed in as your standard kind of like person in the field and he's training all the new hires coming through. So what, what? Why would we start him on profit sharing? Not saying I'm opposed to it, but why would we start him on profit sharing? I mean, I guess what is the bump and responsibility for him that would justify us doing that now? Is he going to be doing other additional roles and responsibilities as a trainer?

Yeah. That role is going to start to look a lot different when you start hiring four and five people in a given month. Right. So like right now, when you're hiring one here, one there, you're doing all of that hands on stuff and that is a big part of what you're doing now in terms of why you need to be in the field is just for those, those entry level positions. He's the person you will turn to if someone's not performing well. Lots of yellow slips, damage cases. You're going to be turning and looking at Jose. You're not going to go to the employee, you're going to go to him. His level of responsibility is basically every single yellow slip that comes in, he's partially responsible because he's responsible for the training of the team. And so because I don't want you jumping in back into the field to get newbies started or like, okay, they're a weaker performer, I'm going to jump in, I need that completely cut off so you can Focus just on the selling and the hiring. And then you hand off from hiring, it goes onboarding to Michael. So he gets them all set up in terms of the office and it's off to Jose and he should have a checklist of the things that needs to be done for that trainee over the first two weeks and then I'll.

Help develop that maybe my by myself or with him as to like what that checklist look like and ideally with.

Him so he takes ownership of that.

Okay.

Okay. So questions in my mind is, and I know we're probably already out of time, I don't know what time it is, but what are the next steps? What are. Some homework. Some homework. Because I want to report back to you and show that we've had some of these conversations. I've completed some things working towards our next visit.

First and foremost, I want you to run a Google Performance Max ad. If you Google it and find a YouTube video, make one up. Don't spend a lot of money right now because you're not going to have a good cost per click. You're not going to have a good customer acquisition cost. But I want you to do one of them simply so you know how to do it so you're more confident in the process of doing it. Run an ad and see that, okay, you're probably going to Pay at least 3 to $5 cost per click right now. Your customer acquisition cost abhorrent right now. But just know how to do it because I know that number gets massively discounted during the spring rush. So that's the first thing I want you to do. Second thing is I want you to have a meeting with Michael and Jose and just present the the opportunity and have very clear goals of what revenues are going to look like next year and how many employees you're going to have, what items you're going to be purchasing over the winter and have them know that you're going to be buying those things throughout the winter to set up for that growth next year and at starting March 1st. And it's a presentation of here's what the org chart would look like, here's how your roles would be changing and here's how your compensation would be changing. And it really pitched them on the idea that the biggest benefit to them in their career is just seeing the behind the veil, behind the scenes of what's going on and learning the management side of things in addition to obviously the profit sharing and the higher responsibilities. And I think based upon what I've already seen, they've already bought into a lot of that. Now it's a matter of how do we retain them. The next six months is simply going to be giving them a clear vision.

Right.

They bought into you right now, and that's fantastic. And they're above what an average employee is going to be. You've got to give them the bait of the. And the sales pitch. That's really what you're doing. You're trying to sell them on what Urban Roots is going to be in the future. And you got to give them a very clear picture of what next year looks like. Because right now, everything's good. P4P is going good. Lots of jobs coming in. When you start hitting December and January and that tails off. You need to have something beyond just the work and great P4P that's going to keep until next spring.

Okay, so quick question.

You're saying this meeting needs to happen, which I'm excited about, but did you say you think we have the potential of 60 to 80,000amonth in revenue next year?

Absolutely.

Yep.

I think that would be as a minimum.

Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. So we need to.

I need to kind of reverse it and figure out, like, how many trucks and trailers. And we can also talk about that as a. As a group. We can kind of take ownership together on that and just say, hey, what kind of revenue are we producing with two trucks? And we have a third just kind of sitting most of the time. And then we'd look at needing to buy a fourth. You think at least.

Yep, I'd be creating a budget. Well, and again, you have plenty of capital. This is why we're talking about this. You have plenty of capital. You don't need to buy the trucks now. You don't need to buy anything now. We obviously later this month and you start thinking about a shop space that's 100%. Something is very important based on what the media guys have told me about backing up trucks out of your driveway and all this other stuff. We have to get that.

Don't get me started on that.

We'll figure that later in the month. Right now, though, the more important part is, number one, taking away the question of can I grow next spring? That's not going to be an issue. The second thing is, in order for that to happen, you need more infrastructure. And that's going to come down to Michael and Jose being on board. So I want to have that meeting. You being clear with that revenue is going to be figuring out what they're. Okay. We're going to need one or two more trucks. We're going to X, Y and Z. Here's the budget for that starting March, you guys are moving in these roles and I'm going to spend all this money up until that point so that once we get there, it's now profit game. Right. So if you have to spend 40, 50,000 getting to that point, spending the marketing for next spring rush, they know that from the beginning. Basically, the profit should be there, assuming they are firing in all cylinders and they've been trained up over the winter.

Okay, and what are your thoughts on right now? I have booked out for four or five weeks, enough to keep four people, so five of us total. So that takes me out of the field, so I'll be able to do some of this legwork. Right.

And. But I think I'll start getting busy here with the fall myself in the field. But shoot, I'm drawing a blank on my question. Oh. So how much do you think I should like draw back or be conservative about budgeted hours, or should we just go full steam, make as much revenue as we can this fall? Or should I start pulling Michael out of the field and teaching him on service, autopilot and things like that? Or do you think we'll just see enough of a slowdown and say January, February to take care of the miscellaneous training?

Yeah, after Thanksgiving, you'll have a massive slowdown. So I just burn it all at all ends of the of the candle right now, using them out in the field, knowing that after Thanksgiving it will get cut in half. Even with winter services and things like that, you're going to have a big drop off. And so, you know, December and January, you'll be able to get them up to speed, have their roles defined, find, move into the new shop space, all that good stuff.

Okay. All right. All right.

A couple chores to do this week. I, I look forward to it.

Awesome, Dylan. We'll stay in touch. Thanks, brother.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. If you liked what you heard. We have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at the Mike and his YouTube channel. It'll be right up your alley. That's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.