BUSINESS OWNERS: do this NOW (warning!)

Hey everyone, Mike Andes here. Gonna do a quick live. I had a call cancel. I got 30 minutes here to do some Q and A. So if you have a question, comment below. But before we do that, I'm gonna have a warning that I think is extremely important based on some data that came out today. So I'm gonna share that. Before I do that, I want to make sure that if you do have a lawn care landscaping business that you check out lawncaremedia.com all your door hanger needs, just about every service you can possibly think of from coration to bush trimming, there's the corporation one, all the services that you need for door hangers, flyers. These are just great. Everything from, you know, we got mowing coming up here right now. So there's mowing one, there's one for hardscaping. Check out the flyers. Check Those out. Lawn caremedia.com there's also postcards. So again these are already all ready for every door direct mail. They have the stamp on there. So regardless of what services you offer, this is a great method to be able to get those designs and then edit them however you would like. So check them out today. Go to lawn caremedia.com for the day. I'm talking about something that happened today and is extremely important for everyone that's listening to this to think about for the next few months. And I almost put a deadline in the, in the the title saying like you must listen to this by April 1st. But I do feel like it might extend a little bit beyond that. And that is the fact why I'm making this video is because today, this morning the producer price index came out are called ppi. Like well what in the world does that have to do with what my business is? Well, the thing is it came out 1% month over month increase, which is a 12% annualized increase on what the cost of wholesalers is. What this is basically reiterating is the inflation is going up like crazy. So over the past, you know, everyone's tracking inflation and saying it's 7% where that's CPI data that just came out a week or two ago. Consumer Price Index 7.5% highest we've ever had. That's inflationary. That's very inflationary. Highest we've had in 40 years. But this morning the producer price index came out at a 1% month over month, which is 12% annualized. And over the past 12 months has gone up almost 10%, 9.7%. Now that is an indicator, a lead indicator. What's going to happen to the consumer. Because if the producers costs are going up, guess what's going to happen? The cost of goods and services are going to go up. So the reason this is so important is because inflation is here and it's running extremely hot. And the reason I'm making this video and I said there's an alert and this is a warning is because we only are going to have a few months of it being really, really high before is going to peak and you're going to lose the opportunity to raise prices in an environment where consumers are expecting it. They expect the prices to go up. So if you have your business right now, I highly recommend, if you're like, oh well, we'll get through this, we'll raise your prices. I truly believe if we go into a downturn, you're not going to be able to raise prices in the environment, you're not going to be able to increase margins then. So I highly, highly, highly recommend if you're getting started this spring and you have customers you're going to be getting started with, send them a letter saying hey, we're going to start service on this such and such and day, here's your prices for the upcoming year and just raise them. You don't need to go into why and have a dialogue and all the rest of it. Same thing if you want, if you have a busy part of your season, raise them in the middle of that. Why? Because to be almost impossible to find contractors, it can be almost impossible to find products and services that are months behind. So if you're going to raise prices, do it now, do it now. Before you get started. If you're doing mowing, for example, you know, first of all you should go ahead and get some flyers, door hangers and some flyer postcards from long term media dot com. However, we should also do is on the notice to your customers that you're getting service started and you tell the date, give them new prices, raise the prices. Customers are extremely price insensitive right now because everything's going up in price at the pump. Their rent is going up, insurance is going up, food is going up, everything is going up. So raise your prices. People are going to be so numb to prices going up right now. They will not be, mark my words, in 12 to 24 months this will not be happening the same way next spring where people are just used to prices going up. We can't do this forever. Eventually it's going to pop. And that's going to come in the form of either a, a Recession or interest rates are going to go hike up through the roof and people are going to stop spending money and inflation will come down. It is not sustainable to be at 10% inflation for many years in this economy. It's not, it's not possible. So you know, we're going to go back to 2, 3% eventually and you don't want to lose this window of opportunity to raise your prices. Okay. And so I just truly recommend and that you raise your prices as we head into the busiest time of the year for many of us in the service based businesses, home service industries, lawn care, landscaping, et cetera. Highly recommend you do it. All right, today we are going to take questions live from the chat. Last week we took some calls and that was fun. But today we are in the chat. I'm going to try to alternate my Q&As from doing the chat and then also doing calls sometimes. So today is in the chat. So if you have a question, go ahead and post those and I'll try to get to as many of them as I possibly can.

All right. Raising prices on mo clients that were raised as recently as September 2021. We will have no regrets. Absolutely. Just raise my prices 9% on February 1st. Yeah, I'd recommend it raising everyone at least 10% if you haven't already because that's just staying up with inflation. And again I talked about conference inflation might be say 7, 8% that they telling us. But the actual impact to you as a business owner is more on 15 to 20% because if you look at CPI data and that 7, 8% inflation number is a blended average of a whole bunch of different things and a lot of them don't have anything to do with you. But what actually moves, you know, affects you the most as a business owner is going to be things like used vehicles, cost of fuel, wages. Those are the things that are going up 15, 20% and are going to dramatically impact the amount of pricing issues and pricing increases you're going to face for your business. Yes, thank you. All right, I'm starting out. So is this, so is this advantage? Yes. If you're just starting out, lawn care media would be a great place to get started. Mike, what are your thoughts on running older equipment for residential properties? I'm a one person business. If you're a one person business, it's the one time when you want to maximize your efficiency. So as long as you can work on a broken down piece of equipment and get it back up and running, you're good. But if you can't. I would potentially invest in a more dependable piece of equipment if that older piece of equipment is constantly breaking down.

Have you heard about callbacks? Do you recommend it for small business owners? I've heard good things and bad things about Call Boss, but the same thing applies for any calling service. No one is perfect. No one's going to do it. Exactly right. But I have heard good things, and I'd recommend you use Call Boss especially during your spring rush. So you're not spending all of your time answering the phone, but rather you can focus on getting more leads and hiring because that's going to be the. The bottlenecks to your success.

How much did you raise them? 5? At least 10. There's no reason to raise someone's prices less than 10 right now. They're just not like, because if you can't raise them every couple months, so you might as well raise them at least 10. I'd be shooting more from 15 to 20. If you're going to actually go to the hassle of raising everyone's prices, I'm going with the Walmart strategy this year and lowering prices by 25 and driving most of my competitors out of business before raising prices back up. I do not believe this is a good strategy. I disagree with this strategy simply because.

First of all, if you lower Your price by 25% and prices are going up, that means you're gonna have a 30 to 40% differential. And that would mean that you currently would need 30 to 40% margins, which is only possible if you're very small. So if you're actually trying to scale that, you're run out of cash. And then secondarily, the reason I wouldn't recommend this is because there's gonna be so much work. It's the reason why right now no one's advertising on Facebook and why Facebook's stock price just tanked. Because no one needs to spend money on marketing because everyone is trying to buy stuff. So big companies do not need to spend money on marketing. The same thing's going to happen in spring rush. People are not going to be able to find contractors. So why would you lower your price? You're just giving money away. There is no. There's not going to be a matter of, like, getting the most customers this spring. It's going to be who can retain the most employees. And the only way you're going to be able to do that is be competitive on pricing to your customers so you can give a higher wage to the employee. So I would not suggest this as a strategy in the service based business. Walmart is a multiple hundred billion dollar company that has money to burn, is a publicly traded company and trades on growth, not profit. How should I raise prices for longtime customers? I'm starting an LLC this year, but I've been mowing people's yards for five years. How should I tell my old customers this and raise their price? I'm telling you people are insensitive to this right now. Raise your prices. I know I'm coming across hard on this, but. But I cannot overemphasize. If you've had someone for five years and not raise their price, you are losing money on that person's property. The only way you've been able to stay profitable is because you've become more efficient. It is not the game of the business owner to become more efficient. To become profitable. Raise your prices to combat inflation. All right? You should not be needing to buy bigger trucks and bigger equipment in order to stay efficient enough to make a profit. You should raise your prices so that your current setup and your current efficiency and your current employees are able to make money. That's what inflation means. All right? So don't, don't buy into the notion that raising your price is going to lose customers. Guess what? Apple raised prices by 100 on all their iPhones. Not a single person blinked. Okay, Prices on everything is going up right now. Jump on the bandwagon or get left behind.

Yeah, if you're buying trucks right now, it's going to be tough. You know, use price for vehicles extremely high. I would definitely be trying to think about how can I make a vehicle work for the next two, three years and not buying something that is $20,000 over bid right now because of the environment we're in with inflation and the supply chain. I'd try to get something that could work two or three years and then hopefully by that time two things have happened. One, you have better cash flow so you can afford a better vehicle. And two, hopefully some of this craziness dies down a little bit. And use price, car price of used cars go down. Can P4P work for both 1099s or just W2 employees? Yes, it does work for 1099s as well. The mowing market is too fragmented for the Walmart strategy to work. Preach. Might get it done. People raise the prices. Do you recommend I slow down at 250000 to stat cash so that the following year I can scale past 500, 000? Yes. This is a good strategy. I really think this is an underrated strategy. And that is taking one year at that 200 to 250, 000 range and then accelerating the next year to past 500,000 instead of. If you try to grow a little bit right now, Mr. Guerrero, if you grow a little bit more to like 350, 400, you're gonna start needing an office person. And either you're gonna be like right in that middle spot of needing someone, but you can't afford them. And if you do go buy them, you go get an office person, you get an office space, and all the rest of it, you're basically unprofitable, and you might as well be at 250. And then if you don't get them, you're gonna run yourself ragged because there's gonna be so much work at 4 or 450,000. In terms of just admin side of things.

In terms of the. You're talking about this right here, the right mower. You can change this if you want. You get the access to the Photoshop files, so you could literally just pop on a new picture if you would like. We do have custom services to actually design these for you and change the pictures out, but that's an additional charge. But honestly, you can just use the Photoshop file and pop in a new. If you don't like yellow mowers, for example, you can just change that. Welcome, Lee. Mike, what do you think about being subbed out lawn maintenance clients? I'm not a huge fan of subbing out, mostly because I lose control. I found especially with lawn maintenance, you end up babysitting the contractor a lot and just basically dealing with all the complaints from the customer. And then you can't control it because if they're technically a subcontractor, there's not much you can do in terms of someone smoking or taking their shirt off on the property. There's just some things you can't technically change as well as from a valuation standpoint, a company that has a bunch of subcontractors really doesn't have much value.

Do you have a form or piece of mail regarding credit cards on file? And can you remind us of your thoughts on credit card on file? I believe you should have a credit card on file. I believe that, yes, if you. You should have credit cards on file. I'm about 7% higher than my competition. After I raised in 9%. Should I raise it more? I was 20. Yep. If you can raise your prices. The indicator of this is if you Have a higher close ratio. Okay. If you're above 50% close ratio, you should definitely be raising prices. If you're not trying to grow. If you're trying to grow, you want to be at 70% close ratio. That's awesome. But if you're closing 80, 90% of your estimates are being accepted. You need to raise your prices and you'll still grow. So I would just recommend everyone just flat across the board, raise your prices on your hourly rate. Raise your prices and dump fees. Your estimate fees, your material markup, like the cost of trees have doubled. So you should make sure you address what your calculator is for estimates.

Murphy's Lawn and Landscape off subject, does your website use generic themes and backdrops or do you customize those during a consultation process? Oh, you're Talking about Lawn CareWeb Design.com we do not use any sort of generic themes. Every single one is custom. We don't even use WordPress now. It's just too slow. And speed is extremely important right now with Google. So we actually custom code our our sites. Can P4P work? I already did this one. Garrett. Mike, I'm a pressure washer and lever channel. Thanks Garrett. I appreciate it. Foolproof way to hit 45 high paying weekly mowing customers. Got 25 carried over from last year, 65 per cut on average. Been doing door hangers every day for the last few weeks. Thanks, Mike. Yep, I would definitely say talk to the next door neighbors of your existing customers. Focus on one or two neighborhoods. If you have 40, 50, 60, 100 mowing customers, you do not need to be going miles away from a certain location and figure out the 1000 homes, figure out the 1 mile radius, figure out the few neighborhoods and just pound those. Don't try to boil the ocean. At this size of company, you do not need to worry about geographic expansion until you hit $1 million in revenue. All right, Getting there, you can easily focus on a thousand, two thousand homes and get a great business. So I would just highly recommend focus all of your marketing efforts as you head in the spring rush on that ideal customer in an ideal market, in an ideal neighborhood, in a very geographically dense area. When you talk about raising prices, what if your prices are already pretty premium? Should you only raise prices if they are too low? No, I don't recommend that because over the next 12 months, if you say, hey, I'm going to raise my prices once a year, just rec just realize that 10% of your cost, everything's going to go up 10% over the next year. And so that means if you're running a 20% margin business right now, if your costs go up 10%, that means that you just had 50% of your profit go bye bye because you'll go from 20 to 10 profit. So I highly recommend you still raise your prices. You've got to stay up with inflation. If you haven't raised your prices for two years, you literally have lost 15 to 20% gone of margin like not of your profits, 15 of gross like it's gone because of cost inflation. So I'm going to my second year of double my clientele and hire my first employee. I am outgrowing my garage. Do you think it's a good idea to buy a shop? I would highly recommend not buying a shop. I would prevent that and push it off as long as possible. Is extremely overhead heavy. It's going to keep you from investing into the marketing and hiring which is going to actually move the needle for your business. Having a geographical spot for your shop very rarely moves the needle for the business. From a profit or from a gross perspective, raising prices really are not that big a deal with your clients. Some of my clients got a 15 to $20 increase this season and they're all yeah, this is the time to do it. Everyone is numb to it.

Think I should implement P4P with only one employee? I would definitely do it if you plan on growing. If you only are going to stay at one employee, there's no reason to have P4P. You should not get P4P software.com but if you're going to grow past two employees, you should absolutely be getting P4P. You should get the book right there and you should Definitely go to p4psoftware.com and check that out.

Charging $40 to $45 for my customers is a good method. Just depends like that's only going to work if you have very very.

Same lot sizes. So like a tracked home neighborhood might work just fine there. I understand everyone's man hour rate is different. We are sitting at $65 per person. We are new and learning. Does that sound about right? I think that's a minimum right now. You need to be at least at that amount with the way that wages are going right now and that what you're gonna have to start spending to get labors outside in the field working. I'm starting an llc. Been doing lawn and trees on the side for a while. I have, I have a customer that wants to invest, but I don't want to give up 25% of the business he does marketing and would really benefit. Check out the video I made called Acquisitions and Mergers. Just put Mike Andy's Acquisitions talks a whole lot about valuation and whether or not you should take on partners, things like that. How do you get weekly customers? In my area, average cut is monthly or bi monthly. Average yard is 1-8-2-2 to 1 acres. There's a lot of different areas. Well, you should probably do an every door direct mail. You should not use door hangers if you're that spread out. If you're doing large properties, one acre, etc. Do not do door hangers. I would tell you do not use these. These are great. They're on longcaremedia.com but they're not going to be good for, you know, one, two, three acre parcels because you're going to be so spread out. What you should do is you should be getting flyers like this one here, this one's for mowing and you should be sending those out via every door direct mail. That is going to cost 16 to 18 cents per delivery. Can P4P work in security and janitorial services? Absolutely, James. We have pressure washing companies, pool companies and a whole lot of other services on p4psoftware.com that's not true. Mike. Know your subs have the Ma', am, I don't know what you're talking about. Sorry Justin.

Mike, I was asked if I could till a garden with my garden tractor or on fence about this. What extra services should we as landscapers offer? Pressure washing gutters or avoid that? I highly recommend sticking to simple services or whichever services you're wanting to offer, even if they're complex. So stick to just 1, 2, 3, 4 services. The more you start to diversify. It's tempting, but always the least profitable way to grow is geographical. In other words, you're growing further and further away and adding services. Always the least profitable way to grow. So yes, most people do what I did and that is you add a bunch of services, you grow, grow, grow. And then you actually have to start cutting services out to actually become profitable. You can save yourself a lot of headache and losing hair like I did by simply from the beginning taking a little bit longer but growing profitably and not having all this excess equipment and insurance and employees you have to let go and all the other garbage and wasting money on marketing services that you end up not really wanting down the road. Get all over that by just from the beginning realizing what your core competence are going to be is a $400 per month fee on lawn care web design, permanent or temporary? It's permanent. It's $400. There's no contract. You can cancel anytime. And yeah, if you stop paying, then the website goes away. Basically you keep the domain, but we keep the design. That's kind of how we make money. Any tips for scheduling admin work while still completing all the jobs as a solo operator? Thanks, Mike. Yeah, so I would highly recommend, you know, Jeffrey is part of Augusta, so like I would recommend on your dispatch board for command center letting them know that certain couple hours of the day that you are leaving available for admin. That way they don't schedule estimates. That way they don't schedule any jobs at command center. And so for anyone out there, just have time blocking, like, hey, from this time to this time, every single day is admin, right? So if you do answer all of your phones, if you do answer all your emails and you don't have a call service or you don't have command center, I would say, look, I'm not going to answer my phone 300 times throughout the day. I'm going to spend from 1pm till 2pm or whatever timeframe you want to give yourself a block to focus on administrative. Because if you don't, admin will suck you in. Because now you're answering that phone call, you look down, you're like, oh, now some pictures on Instagram, oh, and then a text from your wife, like, and you get wrapped up in that and you times it by 20, 30 times in a day. You lost your entire day. And that's how people start working on their business way too soon, is because they're not working on their business, they're getting distracted 300 times throughout the day with admin work. And I highly recommend time block yourself so that doesn't happen. I usually charge 80 to $120 per yard once per a month cut just now. And edge, does that seem like an okay price to you? Depends on a lot of different variables. I have a rental property contract. I'm working on 200 plus lawns. My minimum is $35 and I can mow 10 to 15 per mower drop. Is $25 per lawn still reasonable for them? You know, this is really a commercial contact at the end of the day because you're only dealing hopefully with one point of contact. My issue with $25 per cut on this type of contract would be if every customer can talk to you and you build them separately. If you're building all of these houses once in one massive bill Then the economies of scale might work to where it would work. If they're all tight, they're all like, literally just go, one house, one house, one house, one house. That's when potentially this might work. But rest assured, this will not work. If every single one of these residential customers has your ear, I. E. Your email and your phone number, and you're going to complain.

How long does it take your web design? Reach out to discuss the website? I signed up about a month ago. Thanks again. Yeah, so it takes us about six to eight weeks to finish the website. Once you've signed up and they will contact you, we'll go through the initial design process and do all of that. But, yeah, usually it's six to eight weeks. We've had some as small as four or five weeks. It depends, really on how fast you get back your logo, all of the pictures that you want, how developed those are. Because if we have to go, you know, get pictures ourselves and do a lot of that other legwork, it takes us a little bit longer. But six to eight weeks is the general time frame to expect that. So if you're wanting to get your website built before spring rush, you got to get on that. Now, I do know we've had a rush of people in the past couple weeks just because I know everyone's trying to get up before spring rush. So I know we're kind of pushing that six to eight weeks pretty consistently when. When usually we would be beating it. How much cash do you recommend saving to scale past $500,000 when we are at $250,000 currently, a standard mowing setup costs about $25,000 for us. Yeah. So ask yourself, like, you're probably gonna need two mowing setups, right? So you need 25k in terms of capital expenditures, then you're also going to need to train a couple, you know, probably three employees to scale up that size as well, which means for a month, they might be unprofitable, which means that that might be like $10,000 worth of wasted, quote, unquote, payroll to get that team set up and trained and efficient. So I'd be looking at 60 grand in addition to any sort of other expenditures in terms of insurance, if you have to upgrade your shop because you're getting two more vehicles if you have to also. What was I thinking? I was thinking something. I forget what it was. We're firing all cylinders, and I saw the time. But, yeah, there's other costs. Oh, advertising. If you have to advertise to get from 250 to 500,000. Keep that cost in, in mind as well when you're trying to think about going from 250 to 500. How about renting a shop? Yeah, that I would definitely rather rent. The thing that you're, you're going to handicap yourself to is as you grow, eventually you will keep growing inside this rental space and then they're like, they'll want to sell the area. And it's very difficult when you have 20 vehicles to go find a space to go get a shop. So it's this delicate balance of renting and then being like realizing the fact that eventually you're probably have to buy land as you get really big. So it really depends on your size. If you're smaller, I would definitely be renting a shop. And when I say shop, I don't mean an office building. You're going to Pay at least $1,1500 if you're going to have an office building with electricity and utilities, a bathroom and all the rest of it. Whereas that same exact plot of land without a building on it and you just put a storage container on it and maybe a mobile office, you want to bring a drag, a trailer on, on or something like that, you could get for 3, 4, $500 per month. And so like literally down in Mount Vernon, our franchisee down there just got a corner lot where you would usually put like a gas station and it has a trailer on it, like a semi truck trailer. He's using as like a kind of storage area and he's paying $300 a month and he gets to dump on site. That piece of land would literally cost at least $800,000 to buy. It's maybe I'd say three quarters of an acre. At least. At least $800,000 to buy that commercial piece of land. So there's just no reason to buy land and more importantly, buy a shop, I should say with a physical structure. If you can get your office off site, I. E. Virtual and have a call service and someone else handling that stuff, that's where you save and it's overhead. I'm down in Vancouver and things are getting busy already. I did 500,000 last year. What's your opinion? To add lawn care to my soft wash business. Completely different businesses. Garrett, in my mind, I would highly recommend you stick with one thing. So you're doing soft wash right now, which for those of you don't know, it's not. It's the opposite of pressure washing. It's basically you're going to Put chemicals up and then, you know, do a soft wash, rinse it off, which is extremely lucrative. Extremely high profit margins. I would double down on that. Don't think about diversification until you passed a million dollars, in my opinion, in the service based industry. I truly believe you can take the simplest service, make it a million dollars in revenue before you need to diversify. We talked about this at conference. Diversification of your services, businesses and then asset classes is late in the game when it comes to your investing career and your business career. So when you get past a million in revenue, that's like, okay, great, now I'm trying to, I can diversify services, add more services. I might even diversify businesses in the next stage of diversification, like, go get another completely different industry, which for you, Garrett, is a completely different industry. Lawn care. Totally different than softwash. Then the third stage of investing and growing your career even further is investing in different asset classes outside of business like stocks, paper, real estate, et cetera. That is the steps. But do not be confused that none of those things happen before growing the business to a certain size and 500,000 in revenue, you're still discretionary, scratching the surface of the opportunity that is in your market. And every dollar that you spend on your softwash business will be much, much better return than if you go start a new, new something. That's why people always lose money, because they go from one thing to the next and they never actually get penetration in one market. And if you're doing a softwash business, 500,000, it is infinitely more simple, is infinitely easier to go from 500,000 to a million in your softwash business. It is from 0 to, to 500,000 in your lawn care business. And not only is it simpler because you already know what you're doing, but it's also much, much more profitable. And from a net worth standpoint, it's way better. What questions would you ask to qualify customers through the phone? Several things. If they're going to give you a credit card over the phone, that's a big validation point, Right? So that's a big thing that we use as well as what we're looking for is things like they're not at home. Like if they're saying like, oh yeah, we haven't been there like three months, you're looking for signals like that that they have potentially abandoned the property.

Garrett, I apologize. Garrett, I don't have. Oh, I see. Okay, okay. You were watching Spencer Lawn Care, it sounds like, and then you're thinking about going to Lawn Care. Yeah. Stop watching other people's lawn care channels. Focus on your software softwash business. Yeah, everyone gets too wrapped up in diversification far before they go deep into their business and make it really profitable. Audible. I got your P4P book and I am glad that you narrated it. You are very clear and concise. Thank you. I appreciate it. I hate reading, so it was actually a big pain in the neck. Should I raise my prices from $20 to $30? The average price is 35 to $40. Yes, you should absolutely do it. Have you looked at the company? Oh, Ken, I saw your question on the Facebook group. I apologize. We have seen this. Company cam is basically take pictures. I think it's good, but I think videos is still the way of the future and something that we're working on to make sure it is internalized in terms of our software. But company cam is. It's great to take pictures and take pictures of properties and all the rest of that. But video, in my opinion is going to be much, much more influential as processing speeds get better and better on mobile devices with good profit margin after overhead. Check out my one video called Stages of Growth and it talks about the different profit margins at different sizes of business. Who do you follow on YouTube or podcast? Not a whole lot, honestly. I don't consume a whole lot of information just because I don't have a lot of time. But I do listen to books. I'm listening to a book right now that I should have listened to far before now. It's why the Mighty Fall or why the Jim Collins Book. It's old and this is why I didn't listen to it in the past. Yeah, how the Mighty Fall. Let me see if I can pull this up. Come on. Load. Yeah. Why how the Mighty Fall Audiobook. Really, really good. It's like 12 years old, so it's a little bit dated, which I don't like typically, but it's a good book. I really enjoy it. How do you introduce yourself in your company going door to door? I just introduced myself. Especially if you're new, this is a really easy way to do it. Like, okay, so for example, mowing. I'm going to take this postcard from lawn caremedia.com I'm going to edit it, put my phone number on there and I'm gonna go up to the door and say, hey, Mr. Jones, my name is Mike. I started Mike Mike Mowing services local to the area. If you ever need anything this coming spring, by all means, let me know. Hand this to them. Mr. Jones is gonna take it like oh cool. Oh by the way, what would it cost to mow my lawn? Or what about that tree out front? And by the way, you should have as you're walking up the door thought about the pricing, thought about the things that they need done in their house and that's the thing that you're gonna be pitching them if they actually stop, 1 out of 10 people will do that. If you have a a good presentation. How much are the custom changes on the postcards? It's 299. You can check it out on lawn caremedia.com how does P4P work on the winter off season visits? At the same price per mowing visit. Yeah. So you're talking about winter services and basically for that it's the exact same thing. They get a percentage of the labor revenue. The only difference is that they only spend the budget hours. They don't try to beat the budget hours. So it's slightly different. Taylor, you probably heard me talk about conference on the landscape, businesscourse.com and things like that. Dig your ditch deep, not why. Yeah, that's a good one. First year going full time. My partner and I are 5050 coming from minimum wage jobs. We're charging $40 per manner up here in Canada. Does this seem too low? Yes, it's too low. It's going to work just fine for you. But as soon as you get an employee at $40 per man hour, assuming 25% of their day is wasted because of drive time and load time, now they're at $30. You pay them $20 per hour after taxes, $25. You're running on a five dollar gross profit. That's before you start thinking about fuel, insurance and all the rest of it. So it's way too low. Have you been buying trucks? I've been looking for use but it seems like a lot of junk with high mileage and abused. Even U haul pickups have gone through the ceiling. Yeah, I talked about a little bit early on the video. We have not been buying trucks. Fortunately the last ones we were buying was in 2020 so fortunately.

All right, couple more. Do newspaper advertisements work? Not usually.

All right, a couple more with this. Tons of questions. Sorry. How does profit sharing work in P4P? What percentage do you recommend? Samuel, you're gonna have to read the book or just go to p4psoftware.com training. All of it's completely free. That answer, that question is ex. I extricately answer for free on P4P software.com training. Okay. I'm just trying to skim through some of these. Got offered a buyout. A solo operator, lawn care company. 30 to 50 clients and all the equipment. $50,000. He won't just sell the contacts. I think that's high. Personally watch my video about acquisitions. Just type in Mike Andy's acquisitions. It's a full out, you know, and a couple weeks ago like an abbreviated like 10 minute 1 about buying just the contacts. But that's very high. You're paying literally a thousand dollars. Over a thousand dollars per client. Okay. If you take out the equipment, it's still like 500. It's. That's very high. Okay. Okay, cool. This is a whole bunch of questions here, so hopefully that was helpful. I'm gonna log off here. I gotta hop on with some developers and have a call. So thanks so much everyone. Do check out lawncaremedia.com. get some door hangers, get some flyers, get some postcards. It's gonna be great. Check it out as well as go to check out the book.

Gotta check it out. P4psoftware.com training. You literally have like four to six more weeks until things are gonna get crazy. You are not going to have time to implement P4P in the middle of spring rush. Do it now. I promise you won't regret it. And I promise you in the spring rush when you're wanting to implement P4P, it will be too late because you're already gonna be losing employees, not being able to afford to or find any good employees. So I highly recommend you do it now. We have our franchisees that I've been beating the dead horse for the past month to get them to get people hired up. And I'm very proud of the fact that a lot of them have really staffed up and are ready for a spring rush like none other. And it's going to be that. And I think we're going to win big. The companies that can keep employees and get employees right now are going to crush it this spring. I hope that's you. So please check out p4psoftware.com training and it's going to be great year. Take care everyone. Have a good one.