Complete Guide to Start a Lawn Care Business in 2023

Welcome back to the mikeandys Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the mikeandys podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. Today we have a big one coming in. At just over three and a half hours, Mike has taken the time to put together every video he's ever made about growing your business in 2023. All the way from $0 to 1 million plus every step in between. This is the most comprehensive guide in video and audio form that Mike has ever put together. We're leaving uninterrupted, so get comfortable, grab your notebook and get ready to learn. As always, you can find all this and more over at the Mikandi's YouTube channel. But let's get right into it. This is the full course on how to start your lawn care business in 2023.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we're going to be doing a massive, comprehensive, step by step tutorial of starting a lawn care business from zero and growing it to a million dollars in annual revenue. Now, this is a long video. Typically this would be like an entire course and it's a lot of content. So this is what I recommend. Number one, save this video for when you're watching on desktop or even on your tv so it's a little bit bigger of a screen because I do a lot of whiteboard demonstrations and there's a lot of writing. And I really believe if you can take some notes, watch the video on a larger screen, maybe watch it a couple times, it's gonna be extremely valuable, it's completely free and I think it's gonna change some of your businesses if you're existing company or if you're just getting started from absolutely nothing. We're gonna talk about getting your first few customers, getting set up with your business, and then all the way to the point of hiring employees and getting more trucks and profit margins. It's gonna be a phenomenal video. So sit tight, watch this one a couple times. Get your notepad out. I think it'll be a lot of value for you in the upcoming videos. Now, now, the first video is going to be about how to go from 0 to $100,000 in annual revenue and what you need to know. And you don't need a bunch of employees, you don't need to focus on all these massive marketing campaigns. 0 to 100,000. Let's go ahead and talk about how you can get started with your lawn care business and what you need to focus on.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm gonna show you how you can take $10,000 and turn it into a business that does over $100,000 in annual revenue and is on its way to make a million dollars in annual revenue. And in five to 10 years. I'm gonna use lawn care. I feel like it's something I can confidently talk about. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have almost 100 locations around North America. You can check out augustalongareservices.com franchise and see all about it. But today, regardless of whether or not you're a part of Augusta, I'm gonna show you how to take $10,000 and in one year, $10,000 in cash. And in one year, our goal is to get above $100,000 in annual revenue in the first year, 100,000 plus. And within the next five to 10 years, we want to be doing a million dollar business. So today is going to be part one of the video and it's going to be right here. How do we take that $10,000 and turn it into 100,000 plus business? I know there's a lot of people making videos about how to mow tall grass, how to mow grass in terms of the edging and how to do everything just right. I'm not super passionate about that. I'm more passionate about the business side of lawn care and landscaping. I really could care less about battery operated versus gas. I could care less about what type of truck you use, what type of equipment. I really could care less. You could flip a coin in terms of what mower you use or what brand, and I really don't see any difference. I look at businesses regardless if it's lawn care, landscaping, roofing, construction technology. I look at simply at a black box where, where I put money in and I want a return on that money. Okay? All I look about when I look at a lawn care or landscaping or any other business is I have money coming in in the form of customer acquisition cost, buying customers via advertising and marketing. And the other side, I expect to have some form of return on investment. This is the only thing that matters. And ultimately all the landscaping business is landscaping business or lawn care business. It's just a different type of box, a different type of vehicle, a different mechanism to create a return on the investment that I spend on my customer acquisition. Now, this box could be mowers and trimmers and trucks and all the rest of it, but ultimately I don't get super worried about the box. And what is inside the box. I want to optimize this machine in order to get the best customer acquisition cost and the best return on investment. So I don't get super worried about type of truck, what type of blower. All I know is that those are the tools that are required for me to do the work. And ultimately all I am trying to do is to take the labor that might cost me about $20 per hour. And I'm trying to, through this black box, I am trying to make this where I can sell it to a customer for $80 per hour. This arbitrage of taking $20 hour labor and selling it to a customer for $80 per hour and is where you make a real business. And this business just so happens to be cutting grass, installing mulch and churning bushes. I don't really care what services they are. That's what a business does is it creates this arbitrage by providing the labor, the materials, the supplies, et cetera. Alright, let's go ahead and jump in. $10,000 to start off with. Now if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com I go way more in depth on this stuff and I use a $15,000 budget simply because that's what I used when I first got started. And on landscapebusinesscourse.com I walk through the first three years completely using that $15,000 budget. But $10,000 looks better than a thumbnail. So we're gonna use $10,000. So our starting budget is $10,000. Now, if I make a mistake, it's really late at night. I record these videos really late. And secondly, I have absolutely no notes. I don't have any paper. I wish I could just tilt the camera down. I don't have any paper, no notes. I'm not looking at anything. I'm making this up on the fly because I feel like I know this industry pretty well. All right, so we have $10,000. Now with $10,000, if you're trying to scale quickly, you're going to have to probably use some leverage. That is debt. I'm not a huge fan of going to debt. Most people know that I don't like to spend tens of thousands of dollars on trucks and, and equipment and all the rest of it. However, if you only have $10,000, you're not going to buy a truck and all the equipment that is required with cash. You're going to need to use a little bit of debt so you can get the business started. However, if I grow fast enough and I do it at A profitable rate. I am going to be able to pay off those loans and those debts very easily. But I need to make sure I'm charging a high enough price to cover my debt service. So let's start running some numbers. And remember, I'm doing this on the fly, so give me a little bit of grace. Now, there's going to be some assumptions because everyone could easily start disseminating this $10,000 and spending it. But I want to assume a few things. Number one, I need to assume that I have a $3,000 per month that I have in personal expenses that I literally have to take away from the business every single month. That's tough, but that's the reality for most people. Now. When I first got started, I was living with my parents. I was living really cheap. I didn't need $3,000 a month in personal expenses. But let's assume that you need that to provide for your family, pay off your personal car, maybe you have a mortgage, your rent, your food, et cetera. So that means that this $10,000 business, literally in three months, would be bankrupt if we just didn't create any revenue. We've got to really start growing this business because our initial cash reserves, our initial capital is only $10,000. So first things first, we need to go get mobile. All right? And you can see the whole breakdown a lot of this stuff@landscapebusinesscourse.com in much more detail. But I'm gonna break this down as if I am going all in from day one and I don't have any other job. I talk a lot about if you have a job. Try to ease into your lawn care business. Try to get a few customers on the weekend or a few customers in the evening. Ease into it. That's a better method. I'm going to assume right now that you are going 100% full time. Maybe you just lost your job, maybe you were fired, maybe something happened and all of a sudden you have to make this work tomorrow. I would not recommend doing what I'm about to say. If you have a current job that you can slowly ease out of and then grow your lawn care business on the side, that's the most optimal way to do it. But let's assume you're jumping in the deep end. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and go try to buy a truck now. We're gonna try to put around $3,000 down. So $3,000 down payment, down payment on a truck. Now, this truck is probably going to be about a $15,000 truck. Not a great truck, but not a shabby truck either, right? So the truck value is about $15,000. Let's just go ahead and put that in red here. 15k is going to be the truck value.

All right?

Now that means I'm going to have to borrow $12,000. Now, just for the sake of easy math, let's go ahead and assume that that's going to become a $300 per month payment. So $300 per month is going to be the payment on this truck loan. Maybe it's a five year fixed interest rate, maybe 3, 4, 5% on this interest, whatever it is. I'm just going to assume $300 per month is my payment. Now this is what you got to keep track of. Number one, you got to keep track of your capital, your cash position. The other thing I want you to keep track of is your monthly expenses, your expenditures total, including your personal expenses, by the way, because guess what, you gotta eat and you gotta pay for your food and you gotta pay for your rent and all the rest of it. So right now, and you can assume these yourself or make them your own. And that is right now, our cash position is 10,000, minus the $3,000 payment. So now we have 7K. And now our monthly expenses, I'm calling me m e is going to equal $3,300. Okay? So $3,300 is our current burn rate or the amount of money we're burning every single month just to get by, because we have $3,000 in monthly personal expenses and $300 per month for that truck. Now, I'm going to go to my local dealer and I'm going to go buy my hand tools, that is my weed whacker, my blower, my trimmer, et cetera. And I'm also going to then get a loan on my mower. Now, you can get Sheffield Financial a lot of times at your dealer for 0% down, and that's great. I'm going to see if I can't just put this on my credit card for now because I'm hoping I can pay this off within one month. And I don't want to spend this cash. $7,000 is starting to get pretty slim because I now got this new truck. Okay, so, so I'm now going to assume that I am going to spend $300 on a blower. Not top of the line. I don't need the best right now. $300 for a blower. So we got $300 for a blower. We're going to Go ahead and spend $400 for a trimmer.

And then we're going to spend, we're going to go ahead and put $500 here for miscellaneous, okay? And this is going to be everything from.

Gas cans, weed, whacker line, little oil, two cycle engine oil, all the other random little things you're going to need. But ultimately, the beautiful thing about mowing grass and lawn care, and even if you want to do some landscaping, it's very low cost to entry. I need a blower, I need a trimmer, and I need a mower. Okay? So now we got 300, 400, that's $700, plus this $500, that's 1,200 plus. I'm going to go ahead and spend 8, $800 on a good residential push mower. I do not need you to go buy a commercial mower and spend thousands of dollars. I do not need you to go buy a massive zero turn right now to go and spend 10, $15,000 on a massive 60 inch zero turn with a big trailer and all the rest of it. I don't need you to do that. For all I care. Right now you can get a little ramp on the back of your truck. You could put two little wooden ramps just to get the stuff in the back of the truck. And that's fine. I just need to get started. When we start Talking about stage two, getting past 100,000 in revenue and trying to get past go up to a million, then we can start thinking about trailers and larger zero turns and all the rest of it. But I can guarantee you in your market, there is a subset of the market, maybe it's only 30% or 40% or maybe only 20% if you live in a really rural area. 20% of your market, though, I guarantee you, you can use a push mower and these tools to get started. I know you might not be able to do the big properties and the big fancy commercial projects and the massive estates that are three acres. You're not going to do that with a push mower. But I guarantee there's a subset of your market that you can get done. I see Most markets, 20% at least, of the properties in that market can be done with the push mower. In our market, where it's a little bit more, a lot more residential neighborhoods, smaller lot sizes, 80 plus percent of our properties are done with a push mower. And guess what? Even though the one location I'm talking about right now, there's over $1.5 million in revenue, we still use these $800 push mowers from Honda. They're fantastic. 21 inches, they're really light and they last a good year or two even if you're using them every single day. Alright, so all in now we have spent $2,000 on all this equipment. Alright, $300 for the blower, $400 for a trimmer. $500 being pretty generous for miscellaneous other things. So shovels, rakes, a bin, whatever it is, all that stuff, I'm going to throw in at $500. $800 for my push mower. There's your $2,000. Great. Now what happened to my cash? Well, take away $2,000. Now my cash position is down to $5,000. I don't have any more monthly payments though, because I bought all of this small stuff with cash. Theoretically, you could go put this on a credit card. Like I mentioned, you could get probably a loan from Sheffield Financial or a dealer has some sort of program or lending program with a bank. You could probably get this on debt and turn this into more of monthly expenses and getting some more loans on it. However, I'm just going to go ahead and pay with cash because this small stuff is sometimes a little bit harder to get debt on compared to big zero turns or a big truck and trailers and all the rest of it. But we're not getting fancy, we're trying to make money. So cash is only 5,000. I don't like that. That's pretty scary. I gotta go make myself some money. But guess what? A truck and all this equipment doesn't make me a business owner. I have created $0 in revenue and this is the number one mistake that I see lawn care landscapers do. And that is, oh, I'm in business because I have a mower and a blower and a trimmer and a truck. No, you're not in business. You simply have the equipment and the tools. That box that we talked about, you filled it all with a bunch of tools. But guess what you haven't done? You don't have any incoming customers. You haven't gone out and spent any money on advertising to get more leads and generate business. That's what a real business is created by the way, when you get customers, not when you get equipment and trucks. These do not pay the bills, your customers do. So this is our cash position. Let's go ahead and move on to the next stage. Alright, so we have the $5,000 in cash. We have $3,300 in monthly expenses that we need to make sure we start making some money on. So what we're going to go ahead and do is allocate $1,000 to be able to go do some marketing. Alright? So we're going to spend in our marketing budget $1,000. Now $1,000 is not a lot of money to spend on marketing. Now that might seem like a lot to you, but if you're trying to build a big business, this is not a lot of money. Alright? So we've got to be very diligent about how we spend this. The first thing I'm going to go ahead and do is get door hangers. Now I'm not gonna get any door hangers@lawncaremedia.com lawn caremedia.com you can actually buy these designs and these designs have the ability for, when you're doing these door hangers to actually give a real price on the door hanger. And you can literally, as you're walking up the door, write the price for weekly and bi weekly service and put it on the door. So that way, guess what, you don't have to come back to do an estimate. The customer takes a picture of it, sends it to you and you have yourself a customer. So I'm going to go ahead and use door hangers. And these are called instant quote door hangers. Instant quote door hangers. And these are going to be literally where I can go hang them on the front door of all the people. I want to serve the exact neighborhoods. And I'm trying to go after like a thousand houses max. Okay, so 1,000 houses. We have $1,000. That's our marketing budget. So let's go ahead. This is our marketing budget. I'm gonna spend on door hangers. Probably about to buy 1,000 of them. Let's just say I'm gonna spend $120. Okay? That's 12 cents a pop if I buy 1,000 of them. Cause my goal here is to go after 1,000 houses. I'm not trying to go after the entire county or a million people inside my metropolitan area. No, I'm gonna go after 1,000 houses in several select neighborhoods that I'm trying to target. So first thing is door hangers. Spend $120 on those. Great. I'm gonna go spend some time, several weekends, gonna put all those door hangers out. Now that same exact week I'm also going to go onto USPS and I'm going to type in eddm. That's every door direct mail. So my next step here is to do an every door direct mail campaign. Now, what that means is the United States Postal Service is going to deliver a postcard to every single house in a given mail route. And remember, I've chosen 1,000 houses. That's probably two or three mail routes. And these houses, again, I've chosen these because on the every door direct mail website, you're able to actually see the average income of every single mail route and the average age demographic of every single mail route. So I'm targeting, trying to find those neighborhoods that have a high income demographic and a high age people that are 67 years old, they're retired, they have plenty of money, high income, and they're in their older years where time is very valuable to them and they're literally wanting a quality job being done and they really value someone that's going to take their time and make their property look good. So I'm going to do every door direct mail campaign. I am going to go target 1,000 houses. Now, right now, as I'm speaking, 18 cents is approximately the cost for delivery of every piece of mail using the every door direct mail campaign. So if I times it by 1,000, that's gonna be $180 for my delivery. But now I'm gonna go onto lawncaremedia.com, delivery, I'm gonna go onto LawncareMedia.com and I'm gonna go ahead and buy 1,000 fly flyers, a thousand flyers, or sorry, not flyers, you could do flyers or postcards either way, because onlinecoremedia.com they're already optimized for every door direct mail. They already have the stamp on there, so you don't have to put any more stamps or any sort of postage whatsoever. You literally take a stack of them from the designs on lawn caremedia.com you take them literally to the post office and they will put them at every single house on that mail route without any more stamps or postage or anything like that. So we got 1,000 of these flyers. Let's just assume it costs, let's call it another 12 cents. So we got 12 cents times 12. There you go. That's $120, $120 for 1,000 of those bad boys. And that's going to be for the printing of all of those flyers, postcards, whatever you want to do. All that can be purchased on lawncaremedia.com okay? Now we have spent a while whopping $300 now on the every door direct mail campaign to these 1,000 houses.

Okay?

So we went $120 on door hangers to Put door hangers on all thousand of those houses. We then also did a postcard or a flyer in their mailbox. On average that's costing 30 cents per delivery, including the printing of that flyer or postcard. $300 spent. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is I have now spent $420 of my budget. I'm now also going to go to lawncaremedia.com all of these advertising mechanisms are available here. You can download the designs and make them your own. The next thing I'm going to do is going to be yard signs. Okay, Yard signs. Now I'm going to go ahead and get 50 of these yard signs. So 50 of these yard signs and let's just assume that they cost, I think they probably cost about $6, let's just call it $7 to be safe. $7. That's going to equal, what is it? $350. $350. Now these yard signs, I am going to put literally all around these two or three mail routes that I just sent my every door direct mail campaign to. Now I'm doing this all in one week because I've got to start making myself some money. I got monthly expenses racking up. I got to make myself some, get some customers here. So I'm going to get 50 of these yard signs. Alright? I'm going to get them ordered, get them printed. Maybe you get used. There's so many different services, but you can use Vista Print, a whole bunch of different services to get the yard signs printed. Lawn care media is where you get the designs, but you can go in and print it wherever you want. So I've now spent $120 on door hangers, $300 on every door direct mail campaign and $350 on yard signs. Okay, so if I add all of that up, that is 650. That is 750, $770. All right. I didn't even spend the entire 1,000. I'm going to go ahead and just round it up to 1000 just because there's going to be some other expenses. Maybe something happens, maybe I order some wrong flyers or do something wrong. Okay, great. Let's just assume that $1,000 is kaput. That is our marketing budget. And even though we only spent 770, let's put some fudge factor in there. But now what we've done is we've gone up to a thousand houses. We've put door hangers in every single one. We've now done a mailer inside of their mailbox with a flyer or postcard in their mailbox. And now they're driving around and they're also seeing us all over their yard. They're seeing us all over their neighborhood. And I'm doing this all in one week because guess what I'm gonna do. This is gonna go out on Saturday or Sunday, this is gonna go to the mail place on Monday. It's going to go out and be in their post office box or post their mailbox in probably Tuesday or Wednesday. And the yard signs, they're going out Wednesday night. So that way I get the entire week. Just massive saturation in their market. Now one thing else I'm going to do to hit them four different times in the same week is I'm going to do a door knock. And ideally this is going to be the weekend after Saturday. Put out door hangers, a thousand of those bad boys. Going to be a long day. Maybe it takes Sunday as well. Every door direct mail campaign, I send those out Monday, they show up in their mailbox on Tuesday or Wednesday. Yard signs go out Wednesday or Thursday. They're now being seen by everybody. They're on the corners of the stop signs, they're in the roundabouts, they're all over town. Then I'm going to go ahead and knock on every single one of those 1,000 doors and that's literally going to take me three or four days, alright? And I'm gonna start doing it Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. I'm gonna just keep knocking on those doors. And my goal here is just do that all to these 1,000 people. So they literally now have seen me on their door, in their mailbox, around their neighborhood and throughout the city. And now I'm at their front door knocking. So when they see me at their front door, they have literally seen my brand. I know at least a couple times around town in their mailbox and on their front door. And now here I am standing, standing here with a branded logoed shirt. Oh guess what? That's where I'm going to spend some money. Alright? So this extra $230, because remember we have a thousand dollar budget for marketing is going to go into promotional material like business cards and a nice logoed shirt just like this one. A polo shirt might cost you $20, $30, maybe $40 if you get embroidered or some nice logos on it, get a T shirt or two, get a nice uniform, wear some nice pants, a nice hat, look professional. Especially if you're door knocking, you want to look very professional. And guess what you can do when you open up the door, when the customer opens up the door, you're knocking and you can literally hand them one of your door hangers or one of your flyers or one of your postcards if they answer the door. And if they answer, you don't need to try to pitch them. You're simply going to say, hey, my name is Mike. I just got started with Mike's Lawn Care in the local area. If you have any questions about your lawn care landscape, if you need anything done, you know who to give a call. I'd love to be of service to you. Anytime you're not trying to sell, you're not trying to say, hey, can I sell you on your lawn care? No, just be a happy, friendly face. If you really like to sell and you're good at it, obviously you're going to have a better close ratio and more customers if you can actually try to ask for the sale, but you don't have to. Most people don't want to be in that uncomfortable position. So don't do that. Introduce yourself, make yourself available to be of service to the customer. Next stage. Now we've actually done some advertising is what's the conversion on these thousand houses and how are we gonna get some customers now? My cash position has gone down because I spent $1,000 on marketing. So we gotta take away at $1,000. Boom. Our cash position is now down to a measly $4,000. It's time to make some money, folks. We only got literally one month's worth of cash on hand because we got a $300 car payment for that truck. And I got $3,000 in personal expenses. So now I'm not gonna get no fine weeds of like tiny little other details and costs. You could throw a couple hundred dollars extra in there for some extra weed whacker line or fuel for your weed whacker, whatever it is. We'll jump into the fine details in landscapebusinesscourse.com. i want to give you the macro here to get started. $4,000, we got leftover in cash. Now we've got to start converting these bad boys. That's why I'm doing the door knocking last after doing all those other things in marketing because I'm going to close some deals. My goal is to actually make some customers. Hopefully the phone is ringing. Hopefully I'm getting some customers now. So let's go ahead and assume that when I'm knocking on these, I'm knocking 1,000 doors. By the way, it's Gonna take you at least four or five days, literally, probably maybe even a week in doing so. My goal is to get one lead every hour. And I'm going to assume that I am going to be doing door knocking for 40 hours again. After doing all the other advertising, I. I'm gonna knock on people's doors for 40 hours. My goal is to get one lead every hour. So one lead every 40 hours. And my goal is to take 80% of those leads and turn them into customers. So that means I'm get 40 leads. And then my goal at an 80% close ratio, that means I'm gonna get 32 customers. 32 customers out of 1,000. I think that's possible. That's only 3% of people. Probably 80% of those people have to mow their grass. Probably 50% of those people already have a mowing service. Why not choose you if you're doing this during the spring rush? Really good chance this is extremely possible. 3% penetration after doing all that marketing, after knocking on the door, introducing yourself, saying hello, this is absolutely possible. It's whether or not you're willing to do the hard work of, like, knocking on a thousand doors. Most people aren't willing to do that. And that's why most people will not get 32 customers in one week's worth of advertising and marketing and only spending $1,000 as a marketing budget. But I'm not satisfied with 32 customers. I've got to grow. You know What? It is $100,000 business. And guess what? I ain't shooting for no hundred thousand. I want to be making more like 150,000 my first year, at least. So 32 customers, let's assume that we are going to charge $50 on average per cut. Okay? And if you're like, that's crazy. That's insane. You can absolutely charge $50 per cut on average. It's 100% doable. At Augusta Lawn Care, we do this all day long. And I truly believe $50 per cut is what you want to be charging at minimum. You got to show up. There's costs involved in just showing up. There's fuel, there's expensive equipment you're using. Now, we're going to assume that there's only three cuts per month, because some people you might only cut twice. They're bi weekly. Other people we might cut every single week. Let's just assume, on average, we're doing three times per month for each customer. That means each Customer.

Equates to $150 per month in revenue for our business, $150 per month. Now, right now, in that first week, I did all my advertising in week one and then week two, I did all that door knocking. After two weeks, I literally have 32 customers all giving me $150. Not so bad. You do the math on that and that is $4,800 per month that I'm generating in revenue from my business after two weeks of doing marketing. Now you see, that's impossible. There's no way you can make $5,000 a month after just two weeks of doing $1,000 worth of marketing. It is absolutely possible. There's just very few people who have the guts to go and knock on a thousand doors to go out and put the door hangers out on a thousand doors. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of grind, it's a lot of hustle. But someone that is willing to put in the kind of work they're making $5,000 a month. However, hate to break it to you, $4,800 per month ain't no hundred thousand dollar per year business. We got to make some more money around here. Alright, now here's the deal. Because now you have 32 customers. We got fuel, we got to buy ourselves some insurance, got to do some registration for that business. All those things. We talked a whole bunch about that on landscapebusinesscourse.com but trust me, don't get bogged down in those details. You just need a business license to be in business and get yourself a business checking account at the bank. You need that business license so you can go get yourself some insurance. When you're this small, your insurance is literally going to cost you 50 bucks a month.

Month.

For general liability insurance. You can go like next insurance, they'll set you up 50, 60, $70 a month max. But let's go ahead and assume. Let's go ahead and assume right now we got to get some fuel, some insurance, pay for some registration, licensing. Let's go ahead and just say that it's going to cost US$500 a month. I'm really pushing it. Okay, let's just say that's going to cost US$500 a month. So now we got $500 per month in extra monthly expenses. Expenses.

Because we got fuel and insurance. And you might have some dumping fees in there. Hopefully not too much. Hopefully you can mulch the clippings. Let's just assume $500 a month in other business expenses like insurance and fuel. You know, weed whacker line, other kind of things in your business. Alright, so now our cash position is still 4,000. However, our monthly expenses have gone all the way up to 3,800. This is not looking good, folks. This is not looking good. However, after our first month in business, we created $4,800 per month in revenue. Our total expenses were $3,800. So guess what? After one month, our cash position went up by $1,000 and we now have $5,000 in the bank. We are cash flow positive, baby, from day one. This is absolutely possible. Now you might be saying, well, I have seen six or $7,000 per month in monthly expenses. That means you're probably going to need to start off with more cash because you wouldn't be able to get this low. However, if you're able to keep those monthly expenses, your personal expenses low, this is absolutely possible. I had $3,000 in my personal expenses, $300 for the truck, the payment on the loan. I got $500 per month in fuel, insurance, registration, other business expenses. That creates $3,800 in monthly expenses. But I've created $4,800 in monthly revenue right from the get. And that's assuming I only mow their grass. I'm not even taking account a mulch job or property cleanup and trimming the bushes and pulling the weeds, that's all gravy. That's all money on top of it. Let's just assume we're just mowing their grass. I literally made $1,000 in profit after month one. So first two months I was advertising, I was door knocking, I got my customers and then the next four months, weeks, this is what happened. Okay? So I'm not going to stop there. I'm going to go and get hungry. You know, I love the fact that I'm able to build a business that does $5,000 a month in revenue, but I'm really shooting for $10,000 a month in revenue. I literally am trying to make $10,000 turn into a $10,000 per month business. I like that. These are the numbers I like.

Alright?

So now what I'm going to do is instead of going on the defensive and be like, you know what, I'm going to save that money. Guess what? Right Now I'm making $4,800 per month. I'm spending 3,800. I'm making a net positive or net cash flow of net profit of $1,000 per month. Okay, 1k per month. I ain't getting no rich on that. I got to make myself some more dough. So what am I going to do? I'm going to go on the offensive. I'm not going to go on the defensive and try to save my way to become becoming a millionaire or save my way and becoming rich. Or, you know, you're going to work the next 10 years and you're going to make $100,000 that gets you stuck away underneath your mattress at just $1,000 a month. I'm not interested in doing that, alright? I got to grow my business faster. So what am I going to do? Well, I'm only $1,000 per month in net profit. I'm going to stay on the aggressive. I'm going to keep spending money on marketing. Now I'm going to get some door hangers. I'm going to put door hangers on all the neighbors of my customers. But I already did mowing last month. Now I'm gonna focus on bark mulch. Later in the spring rush, I might do some spring cleanups. All of these, by the way, you can get door hangers on LongacreMedia.com, you can get flyers, you can get whatever you want. And on there I'm gonna put the price for the neighbors of my customers. So every single time they see me out mowing, five minutes later, I'm on their door, I'm knocking, I'm putting a door hanger if they're not home with a price for a mulch job, for a property cleanup, I am trying to now do upselling. My goal now is to sell five jobs per month. Five jobs per month, and these are going to be cleanups. Trimming bushes, pulling out some weeds, installing some mulch, whatever it is, I'm trying to sell five jobs to my existing 32 customers. These are my recurring mowing customers. I'm trying to sell either to them or to their neighbors. Because guess what? If they, if I'm mowing their grass, I might as well pull their weeds, I might as well trim their bushes. I might as well pick up their leaves and do their leaf cleanup. So I know for a fact I can sell at least five jobs per month to my existing 32 customers and their neighbors. And I'm trying to sell things besides mowing now because that first month was the go time for mowing in the spring rush. I focused on mowing then. Now a month and a half, two months later, I'm focused on mowing, I'm focusing on property cleanups, and I'm going to spend maybe a couple hundred dollars on Door hangers again on lawncaremedia.com I'm going to spend an extra one or two minutes putting them on the five houses around all of my customers property. Alright? So if this is the road And I'm mowing, Mr. Sally, Mr. Sally, Mrs. Sally Jr. S house. I'm going to put it on the five houses, the three across the street and the next door neighbors of Ms. Sally Jr. S house. Okay? So that literally means I'm gonna probably put a couple thousand of those bad boys out by the time I do this for a couple weeks to all 32 of my customers and their neighbors. Alright? My job is five jobs. My goal is five jobs per month. And my goal here is to be able to sell each of these at a minimum of $300 each. Okay, $300 in profit. This is after I cost, I take some cost for debris or I do a little bit of mulch. Whatever it is, my goal is just five jobs. At $300 per job, that's an additional $1,500 per month. This is very doable by the way. A $300 job for us is literally just a few hours worth of work at the get. You might be charging $50, $60 per hour. Do not charge less than $50 per hour. I beg you, do not charge less than $50 per hour when you're charging these jobs. And we talk all about pricing these jobs@landscapebusinesscourse.com and how to do that and come up with your hourly rate. But right now let's just focus on the math of finding five jobs per month. That's like one a week for $300 extra. We're now talking about an extra $1,500 per month in your business. And guess what, you got the same truck, you got the same equipment. Equipment. You still got yourself a shovel, a rake, a blower, a weed whack. That's all you need. You might get an attachment like a hedge trimmer attachment so you can trim some bushes, maybe some loppers so you can lop off some branches. But you don't need a lot of equipment. This is all 100% based upon can you find customers.

Month number two rolls around, guess what happened. I got myself five jobs in that month. $300 per job. That's simply by throwing out a couple door hangers. And now What? I got 5,000, $6,300 in month two of my business. Great. We are growing month number two, $6,300. But guess what? $6,300 ain't enough to make me happy. I want to grow up to 10,000. This is where you need to keep your pedal to the metal. You've exhausted mowing. You're like, man, I got my 32 customers. I'm getting one or two jobs a week. If you can get this up to 10, that's month three. Now month three, we're gonna go ahead and up this up to 10. Cause now people are starting to see us around town. We're really starting to move and groove. And now our goal is to up this up to $3,000 per month in projects. Alright, $3,000 in projects is what we're doing. So now we're doing a whopping $7,800 per month. This ain't no 10,000. Now we're doing pretty good on our cash flow. If we look at our monthly expenses. Let's go ahead and assume now that we've grown, maybe we're driving the truck a lot more. Let's add a little bit more to our monthly expenses. Let's assume there's an extra $300 per month because we're driving the trucks around more. And you know what, we're gonna go ahead and spend $1,000 on some extra attachments for the trimmer, a couple extra bins, a couple spare parts and tools, things like that. We're gonna spend $1,000. So now at this point we're talking, okay, this month here we made $1,000 in cash flow. In month two we did 6,300. And therefore we would have made an extra two or $3,000 in profit. Our cash position would have gone up to about 7, $8,000. Okay, now in this month we take our 3,800. Now we add an extra 300. So this now goes up to what, $4,100 in monthly expenses, including our truck payment, all of our fuel, our insurance, and all this extra cost. So 4,000, 3,100. Now out of this is going to be $3,700 in profit. Alright, this is now our profit. But now remember, I'm going to take $1,000 out of that. $1,000 is coming out of this for extra tools and supplies so that way I can do some extra jobs. I'm able to do some better trimming, maybe invest in some really nice loppers, some boots. I'm going to need some gloves. I need some other things in my business now that I'm starting to grow. So I'm going to split spend $1,000 of that so that $3,700 instead of being 12,000, might only be 11,000 now in my pocket. But guess what? I am now officially above $10,000 where I started. We are just three months into my business and I have gotten all the cash back from the investment I originally put in. I started off with $10,000. Three months later I'm at $11,000 and that's after. Now I have all this equipment, I'm in business, I got myself some customers. You can absolutely do this in lawn care and landscaping. Anyone that tells me otherwise is not willing to put in the work. I know it's not going to be easy. I'm not saying this is easy. I'm saying this is going to be very, very difficult. To put in the long hours and do this much revenue while also doing the door knocking and the door hangers, putting yourself in uncomfortable positions. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is not like you can do this so easily. Just like type these keys and you make an Amazon fulfillment by Amazon. That's not how this is. It's gonna be really hard work, but it's absolutely possible. This is the beautiful thing about lawn care. I started mowing lawns when I was 11 years old. When I was 18, I decided let's ramp this bad boy up. And by the time I was 21, we had more than a seven figure business, more than a million dollars in revenue. This is absolutely possible. Now let's take it to the next level because we still got to get past $10,000 in annual revenue. And this is the last step we're gonna do in part one, and that is we're going to really take it to the next level. We are going to start to invest in the business because guess what, I'm running out of time. I've got $7,800 a month in revenue. I'm starting to run out of enough hours in the week to get those jobs done. I've got to raise my prices. But why can't I raise my prices? Well, customers aren't going to accept that higher price. I need to be more professional. So what am I going to do? I'm going to invest in a website. Now@lawncarewebdesign.com you can get a really nice website. Website. I'm the owner of that company and it costs you $400 a month. I'm going to use that example. But if you're not trying to grow very quickly and your goal is only to get to $100,000 a year, you do not need lawncarebdesign.com but if your goal is to grow past that and get to a million, you will need a website that's professionally done to give you the brand image you need to charge premium prices. So we're going to go ahead and use lawncarewebdesign.com now. Lawncarewebdesign.com, what's really cool is guess what? I don't have to spend my cash because I could literally spend all of this cash on building a really great website. $11,000 to build a great website. You can actually spend that kind of money. What's cool about lawn carewebdesign.com is you spend $3.99 a month with no upfront cost. So for $399, $400 per month, there's no contract. I got unlimited changes and I can make an incredible website. Alright, so what that's going to do though is turn that $4,100 now into $4,500 per month in expenses. However, now I got my money working for me. I don't have time to be doing door hangers. I don't have time to be going to all the neighbors and my customers and trying to upsell them. I got to get the work done. I'm already doing $7,800 a month in revenue. I'm busy. So I got to get my money to work for me because. Cause now I'm profiting a few thousand dollars every single month. I've got to put that money to work for me by buying myself a website for 399 per month on lawncarewebdesign.com so I added to my monthly expenses that $400 so that I can now have my money working for me. It's going and getting leads for me. Now I got a website getting leads for me every single day so I can start to get more customers. Now it's gonna take a few months. You're not gonna get customers right away. I'm gonna get myself some Google reviews. I'm gonna put pictures up on Facebook. I'm gonna drive as much traffic to this website as possible. I'm gonna make sure my Google listing for my business is optimized and has pictures and reviews and lots of reviews, at least 30 or 40. I'm gonna talk to every single one of the customers I've ever done work for, probably 50 or 60 by now. I want a review from every single one so I can start ranking well in my area. And when I do that, after three or Four months. Guess what's going to happen? I'm going to start getting people coming to my website and I didn't have to spend any money. They're just going to find me. When they're looking for lawn care, when they're looking for property cleanups, when they're looking for landscaping. And so what happens is leads start trickling in. Let's just assume that after three months you're just getting just four leads per week. Alright, four leads per week coming in from the website. That's literally one every two days. That's very, very small. Just our local shop gets over 20 to 30. Gets about 20 to 30 leads per day. I'm assuming four leads per week because we're just getting started. And so after just three months. So this is now, let's talk about month six of your business. Alright, month six in your business. We've now stacked away a little bit of cash. We're still, you know, we're burning 4,500amonth, we're making 78. Therefore we're able to stack aside what, like three, $3,000 a month. I should now have at least a good $16,000 at least stacked up in my bank account. I'm still focused on the same projects, same customers. I'm assuming I haven't grown my business at all. I'm three months in, but I made sure I invested in a website. Now I'm getting four leads a week. And let's just assume that we close only half of them and I'll show you why in just a second. So now Instead of getting four new customers, I have a 50% close ratio and that's leading to two new customers.

Every single week. So 50% of my leads, they come in, they fill an estimate request form out, maybe they give me a call and they want to get a quote, I give them a quote and only half of them accept. Why? Because I raised my prices and I raised my prices from, instead of being just $50 per hour, I raise my prices all the way up to 60, $75 per hour. That's impossible. There's no way you could do that. Almost every single one of the franchisees at Augusta Lawn care charges over $70 per hour for the services that we provide. And there's many that are almost $100 per hour. It's absolutely possible with the right brand image by having this website. Now, when people see you, they see you as a very professional service. Great logo, great layout of design, SEO, search engine options optimization is ranking high. When they type up lawn care in your area, you're ranking there, you're right there. You look great on your Google listing. This is what makes a professional company. And when they call you now, they're expecting for you to charge a premium price because your website looks amazing, your branding looks strong, your logo looks fantastic. And that's what lawncarewebdesign.com can do for you. And now because of that great brand image, you raise your prices. By raising your prices, you can really start to make some good money. Because guess What? On this $7,800, when I raised my prices by 50% to my existing customers, I now went from $7,800. 50% of this is going to be an extra $3,900. Because I raised my prices, $3,900 is what I'm going to be able to get in extra revenue. Alright now I've been going the last three months and I haven't even added a single customer. Let's assume we got one, maybe a week. Yeah, you might lose some customers when you raise your prices, but I guarantee you if you've been doing a great job for six months, they'll stick with you. Now you have a great website, maybe you update your CRM. Alright, well if we get a good CRM, we have to, you know, man, we have to pay extra money. My goodness, we're going to pay $200 per month for a good CRM. Now all of a sudden we're paying $4,700 in monthly expenses. But with that extra CRM, with that website, our professionalism to the customer, customers so much greater and we're able to charge this kind of money. Well guess what, we just did, baby. We just got above $10,000. In fact, we are now doing what, $11,700 in monthly revenue. And that's before we start getting the new customers. That's literally just by raising your prices. After three months of having a great website, investing in a CRM, that's where you keep track of all your customers information. And now they can pay the credit card. It's all very simple. This is fantastic. I just broke the $10,000 per month in revenue marker simply by making sure I got enough customers, number one. And then I was able to increase my professionalism, my brand on my website, having a great CRM. I'm six months deep into my business and I got myself more than $10,000 per month. And guess what? That $3,900 is almost straight profit because I raised my prices so that $399 per month that I paid for that website. That sounded like a good deal. That $200 a month I paid for the CRM, that sounded like a really good deal because that extra $600 in extra expense by professionalizing my company allowed me to raise my prices by $3,900. Who in their right mind would not spend $600 per month? So you can raise your prices by almost $4,000 per month. That's what premium products do. That's what premium brands do is they raise their prices. They charge a premium price because they have a premium brand, because they have a professional service, they have a great looking website, they have a great looking software that allows the customer to keep track of information and for you to stay organized and be quickly responding to them and communicating with them. That's high value to these customers. They want to see that and they're willing to pay for it. We just made ourselves a ten thousand plus dollar business. But guess what? It gets so much more fun after this. Because I'm getting two customers per week, I raise my prices. So Instead of closing 80% of my jobs, the estimates that I get, I'm only closing 50, 50%. One out of every two leads they don't accept because they think I'm too high in price. That's fine, I don't care. I know my 50% close ratio is going to give me two new customers per week, two more customers per week. Let's assume eight customers per month. What does that mean? That means if I'm charging on average $150 per customer, come charging that $50 per cut, average average of three cuts per month, that means that $150 per customer, if I multiply that by eight, that's gonna be an extra $1,200 per month in recurring revenue that I am adding to this amount every single month by getting myself two customers per week. At $150 on average per month, that's $1,200 in recurring revenue every single month that I'm tacking onto this. Literally by the end of the first year, if we go a few more months, I'm gonna be making over $15,000 per month for my little lawn care business. Maybe by that time I have 50 or 60 customers, I, I have several projects that I do each week and I'm basically tapped out $15,000 per month. You're working your butt off, but you're making 75 bucks an hour. So you can do it. It's absolutely possible. I've seen it done time and time again at Augusta Lawn Care and other people that follow this channel.

Now, you might be wondering, how in the world am I going to get my first few customers? How do I get my first 10 or 15? Honestly, door hangers is a great option. Yes, we're going to talk about Facebook ads and Google Ads and websites down the road, but if you're just trying to get to $100,000 in annual revenue, I'm now going to tell you how to go get those customers. Now, we use what we call instant quote door hangers, where you can literally put the price of the lawn care job of the property, clamp of the mulch install on a door hanger, put it on the door for a customer, and then they just send a picture of that to you and you have your job sold, it's done, and you don't have to go back to the property. And it's phenomenal. So I'm actually going to go out in the field and show you exactly how to fill these out. And I think you're going to really enjoy the fact that you can do 120, 200 houses in a day and.

You might get two or three new.

Customers just by walking from house to house.

And this is the cheapest way to do it. If you're just trying to grow to.

100,000, you don't need 100,000 customers, you don't need 500 customers, you don't need 100 customers. You probably need 20, 30 or 40 customers to grow your business to $100,000 in annual revenue. Doing door hangers and using the instant quote door hangers is going to be game changer. So let's go out in the field and actually watch exactly how to fill out a door hanger and how to get more customers out in the field.

Today we're actually in a neighborhood and we're going to be passing out door hangers. Now, these aren't any door hangers. These are the instant quote door hangers that we just most recently made available on lawncaremedia.com so you can actually access these, but then I'm going to show you how to use them in the wild and actually do an estimate for a customer that might need service.

So I'm actually going to pretend like.

If I was walking down the street.

And this is what exactly I would.

Do have a few different types of these services. So for example, we got a lawn mowing one, we got a mulch cleanup or a mulch installation one, and we got a property Cleanup one. So what you're gonna do is based upon the property you're walking up to, you can determine which one do you wanna highlight and get them on service for.

So for example, right now the grass is basically dead.

And I don't think they really need a whole lot of landscaping. But look at these bushes. They're really overgrown. So the cool thing about when you're doing door hangers, otherwise the time you're walking to the front door is wasted. You're basically just like walking from door put in the door hanger, go to the next one. Well, the time in between doors, I could literally be writing up an estimate for them. So the beautiful thing about these instant quotes is there is no question for the client about what price you're going to charge when the estimate. To get an estimate, you don't even have to come back the property to give an estimate. What's really cool about these is I'm going to go ahead and put the.

Notes for my estimate directly on here, the price.

And if they want to get scheduled, all they have to do is email a photo of this door hanger to my email here at the bottom. Now, we have a fake email, but you would put your email in. This one's like number one, lawn care guys, gmail.com. it's fake, but I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. If you were doing this out in your. Out in the wild, out in a neighborhood like this.

So I'd be walking up this, this house.

I'm going to do this slower so.

I can teach you.

But this is really fast.

For example, right here, I'm going to.

Say, okay, bush trimming. They definitely need bush trimming. No leaf cleanup, really to speak of. There are some weeds in the bed, so I'm going to check that one off as well.

And then I'm going to say, okay, any notes?

Well, I want to make sure I'm clear to the client because I want to make sure they know it doesn't include that hedge over there. It doesn't include that tree. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do front yard.

Bushes and flowers beds. And again, the reason I'm going to.

Make this clear is I don't want.

To go trouncing into their backyard and try to look at, see if there's other bushes or other flower beds.

You're going to get called for trespassing.

I'm going to stay on the sidewalk. I'm going to look at what the front yard is looking like. And that's the most important for most homeowners when it comes to curb appeal.

So I'm going to just check off.

Bush trimming, weeding the beds, front yard bushes and flower beds. Only going to look around.

Everything looks good.

I'm going to put in here, haul debris to dump, haul debris to dump.

And I'm going to go ahead and put a total in here. So right now I'm going to be. Okay, let's say, for example, it's, let's.

Say five hours, whatever your price is.

I'm just going to go and put.

$379 up here in the total.

So now let's go ahead and give this the client. But the last thing we're going to do is make sure at the top here we're going to put the date.

So going to. We're going to put 7:28.

And we're going to do that because I don't want to get this emailed to me in three months saying, yes, we want a property cleanup for $379. And now the bushes are twice as overgrown. There's way more weeds in the bed. So we make sure it's only good for seven days.

So this is literally an estimate.

It's ready to go. Let's go ahead and knock on the door, see if the client's home. I'm going to show you what to do if they are home and what.

To do if they're not home.

So let's go check it out. All right, so I'm gonna go up to the door and I'm going to go ahead and knock on the door. Because honestly, if you're going to be at the door and you're the owner and you know the pricing, you might as well knock on the door. Your close ratio will go through the roof in comparison to just putting it on the door.

Let's just see if they're home.

Hi, how you doing? My name is Mike. I'm with Augusta Lawn Care. We're actually new to the neighborhood and I was just going by, we're doing some work in the neighborhood and I noticed you might need a property cleanup. So I just want to give you my information here. And actually what I did on the.

Back, this there is actually gave you a price.

So in case you ever are needing.

A property cleanup, there's your prices and.

We'D love to be of service to you. What would it all entail? Yeah, here, I can kind of show you. So out here, obviously right now the, the Bushes are a little overgrown. I saw some weeds in the front flower beds.

So I was thinking we'd come in.

Here maybe half a day, we get.

It all trimmed up, we pull the weeds. And that price includes also hauling all.

The debris to the dump so you won't have to deal with it, you know, putting the recycling bag been out.

Or anything like that.

But we can definitely get in a schedule next week.

We do have an available spot.

We're gonna be your neighbors just across.

The way, and we'd love to get.

You on the schedule. Sure. Like, what do I need to do? Well, yeah, absolutely. So what I can do actually for you is I will go ahead and get your name, address, and phone number, get the contact info. I'll get it sent over the office, and they'll actually call you at the time to exactly get it on the schedule. But we are gonna be in here next week.

They can get you on the schedule.

And we can knock this out, no problem. Sure enough, that price includes all these. Exactly. So we trim up all the bushes. Those grass plants up front will basically.

Cut them down to the ground just.

To get them ready for winter. But all these bushes, we'll trim them back. So, for example, here you probably have a good 12 to 18 inches of new growth. We'll get it all cut back, trim them all up, get off of the.

House, away from the window sills, just for security and things like that.

Sounds good. Yeah. So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and get your info. The office will come, contact you, solidify the date, and then you don't have to pay until after.

Make sure you're happy.

We'll do a walk through the property.

With you and make sure everything is perfect for you.

That sounds great. Okay, cool. I'll just get your contact.

What's your name?

Jane Smith. Jane Smith.

Perfect. And what's the address here?

1234 Main Street.

Perfect.

And phone number for you? 360-582-39111. Perfect. All right, well, I'll go ahead and get that back to the office, and they'll actually send you an email with this estimate just so you have it in writing. And then they'll tell you what day they'll get you on the schedule.

My pleasure.

I really appreciate it. You have a great day.

Thank you.

All right, so now if someone's not home, we can actually just go ahead and put the door hanger on the front door. So of course I'm going to knock. I want to address them and hopefully sell the job right in person right now. But they're not answering. I already have the estimate down here, so I'm just going to head put that on the front door. But now instead of just a random door hanger with someone's phone number, they.

Actually have a quote, an actual price.

They can call us and get it on the schedule. These other two instant quotes are great too for lawn mowing and mulch insulation. So for example, if I came up this property and the grass wasn't completely dead and dormant, I'd be looking at what can I sell this person in terms of lawn mowing? Well, on the back here, great thing.

Is I can do a weekly and.

A bi weekly price any specific notes and do the exact same thing. So let's go ahead and fill this thing out. I want to give this person a mowing estimate. I'm not going to be able to see the backyard that kind of stinks. But typically when you're walking in a neighborhood that doesn't have a fenced backyards.

Or gated areas, you get pretty accurate.

Like let's be honest, you get within pretty, pretty, pretty accurate in terms of.

Budget hours and square footage, etc.

So for example, this property, like, you know what, I'm going to do this one for $40 weekly, $60 BI weekly. There's my prices for weekly and bi weekly mowing. And there's really no specific specific notes. But I do want to clarify that.

This piece of lawn here along the roadside is included.

I want to specify that to the client. Again, what I'm going to be putting.

Here is exactly what I would otherwise be putting on the estimate. And if I was doing an estimate.

For this property, I want to make.

It clear to the in the job.

Notes and in the estimate that this is included. So I'm going to go ahead and put grass between road and sidewalk included. Right, perfect. Gonna go ahead and put my date again to make sure that they don't call me in three months when the grass is 2ft tall and say they.

Want this estimate for $40 per cut.

That's not gonna fly as well as if it was overgrown.

In the note section I would put.

Initial cut will be $85, for example, if it's overgrown. So again, put the date 728. Go ahead and hang this up.

The third and final door hanger that we have for instant quotes is for mulch. So when I look at this property, I'm trying to determine, okay, first of all, I can only see the front yard beds I'm going to make sure in my notes that this includes front yard beds only because I'm not going to trounce in their backyard and check out their backyard. If they want an estimate for that and they're not home, they can call.

And we can get that added later on.

But for now I'm just going to include the front yard beds, front yard beds. And then on here I'm going to include the area. So I'm going to do front yard, front yard only. I'm going to do what type of molt. So for us we're going to do main medium brown.

All right, we gotta make this very clear. We want to make sure that we.

Cover all the bases of the estimate. So there is no question that the customer can literally just send a picture of this, get accepted on the schedule. And there's not like, hey, what type of mulch or what areas does this include, etc.

So mulch, it's going to be red.

Or sorry, brown medium sized mulch.

And the quantity is going to be.

I think it's probably going to take at least five yards. I'm looking over here, on the other.

Side of the driveway here as well.

We've got some mulch over here. Can tell pretty obviously that there's a property line up to the neighbors. Again, I'm not going to be walking over here inspecting their property, but I.

Am, I am able to get a.

Quick glance at what areas I'm going to need to cover. So includes all the front yard beds and on left side of driveway. So includes all the area over there.

And I'm going to put six yards of that mulch.

Now go ahead and put the price. All right, so let's just say it's $729, for example. All right, good for seven days from the 28th and again, go hang it up. Doing door hangers like this is a great way to do two things. One, get started. For a very low customer acquisition cost, if you don't have a bunch of money to spend on Facebook ads or Google Ads or do fancy campaigns, this is free. Basically you can get these printed off on Vistaprint very cheaply. So great way to get started number one. And number two, this is a great way to get great route density. If I'm doing a mulch job across the street, there's no reason why I should not take one of these mulch installation instant quote door hangers and give it to the 10 or 15 houses around town or around their neighborhood. Because guess what, they just Saw the property that I completely changed, made it.

Look so much better, customers happy and it looks great.

So why not give them a price and take out the extra step of the sales equation, which is calling get an estimate. Then you got to come out to their property, go got to talk to them. All that can be done very quickly. And if they have additional things they want to add, you can upsell them on the backyard or other services they might want. All right.

Now you might be wondering, well, how can I get door hangers like that? I highly recommend you go to lawn caremedia.com those instant quote door hangers, their design and the template is right on there. You can have a Photoshop file, a jpeg file, a PDF file, and then you can just drag it into VistaPrint or Postcard Mania or your local printer and print these off. So I highly Recommend it. Lawn caremedia.com there's also not, not just the designs for those specific door hangers I just talked about in the video. There's also ones for yard signs, postcards and flyers. So for just about every service you can possibly imagine, from snow plowing to Christmas lights, it's unending. So check it out, go to lawn caremedia.com but now I'm going to talk about how to grow that business to $100,000 in annual revenue without having to get a bunch of employees. You literally could grow to $100,000 by yourself. So let's just not think, well, oh, I got like three trucks and a bunch of employees if I'm going to build a six figure business. No, just by yourself. With one truck you can grow to $100,000 in annual revenue. Let's go ahead and talk about how to do that and what you'll need to focus on if you want to be able to grow to six figure business without hiring employees. Today I'm going to be talking about how you can run a profitable lawn care landscaping business without any employees. And stick around until the end of the video because I have a big announcement that's going to change a lot. So let's jump into it first and foremost, and that is I've been wrong in the past. I made videos a few years ago about running a solo operation and how it was a bad idea that you couldn't make money, that it was just all around a bad idea. And I think I did not add enough context and I believe I was wrong on some of those points and I want to make those clear today. I don't think that everybody needs to run a big Business. I don't think running a big business and with a bunch of employees is for everybody. And it will run some people emotionally and mentally into the ground because they're just not built for it. Not to say that they're any less of an entrepreneur or any less of.

A business owner, but they simply do.

Not want to deal with having a bunch of employees. With having a bunch of employees comes a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure, financially, mentally, et cetera. And for some people, they'd rather just work hard all day long and have the physical pressure of working outside and doing the work. Mowing lawns, trimming bushes, installing mulch, and doing the hard work themselves instead of the mental pressure and financial pressure caused by having employees that might not show up, employees that might disappoint, create callbacks to a customer's property. That's a lot of stress. So I don't believe that building a big business is for everybody. I do believe it's the way to go. If you want to create a business that runs without you, if you want to have systems in place, if you want to scale it, grow it, and make it really big, obviously it's a completely different mindset. So today, though, I'm going to talk about the five or six different things that I would share with someone who's just starting their lawn care business or wants to run a very profitable business without employees. Number one is fill the schedule completely, fill it full as much as you want, and then diligently raise prices and reduce your service area. So once you've filled up your schedule, which can be done very quickly, as a solo operator by yourself, you literally only need 30 to 50 customers, typically. And typically you can fill that within a few months of starting your business if you have a good website and good branding. And so the goal is fill your schedule and then keep raising your prices. Like, even if every year you're like, hey, I'm just gonna raise my prices by $5 an hour. I'm going to raise the cost of an estimate. I'm going to raise the price for my debris removal. Just constantly keep raising your prices, and that's gonna be how you can do 100,000 in revenue and a really, really healthy 60 to 70% profit margin. Even when you're solo without any employees and keep reducing your service area, you do not need a big driving 20 minutes this direction. If you're solo, you need to be ultra efficient. You need to try to get to 90% or more of your day being spent actually mowing lawns actually doing services. Cause that's when you're actually making money. Number two, the next tip I would share if someone doesn't want employees is do not spend money on branding type marketing. Focus on direct response. And the type of ads are what I call where there's intent to buy. Alright? So instead of spending money on Facebook ads or YouTube ads or Big banners outside where it's mostly a branding play, you're not getting direct response. You're not getting someone to pick up the phone and call you or fill out their estimate request form. You do not want to focus on branding because you're not trying to get 20 estimates a day. You can't even do them. You want to focus on how can I for the lowest customer acquisition cost, get the leads and get their direct information. So you're going to be focusing on things like door hangers, flyers, maybe every door, direct mail to very, very specific neighborhoods. Not a big billboard that's going to advertise to a 20 mile radius. And you're going to focus on the ad platforms where there's intent to buy or which means people search on Google lawn care business near me or landscaping service in Bellingham, Washington. They search their area, they have intent to buy your product and service, lawn care and landscaping. So why would I go advertise on places like Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat and just hope to get in front of somebody and that they happen to need lawn care Where I'm casting a big net and hoping for a few fish. I'd rather focus on casting in with a fishing pole and going off that one big fish. It's much more efficient. So you gotta have extremely efficient marketing and direct response. When you get started. You don't have 10, 15, $20,000 to spend on marketing. Maybe a few thousand, but that's gonna be spent on direct marketing like door hangers, every door, direct mail and places like Google and Google local services for direct marketing. One on one, just great customer acquisition costs. You've gotta have that when it comes to your advertising. The next thing number three when it comes to not having any employees and running a very profitable business is do not answer your phone. And you're like what? I thought you were supposed to answer your phone when your customer calls. You are, but you're not supposed to answer the phone, get an answering service. Because if you just have no employees and you're relatively small, you have 30 to 50 customers, you don't need having hundreds of calls a day.

So it's relatively cheap.

If you Have a low call volume to go get an answering service. Get someone remotely to answer your phone calls, and they maybe charge you a couple bucks a minute. But you might only have one or two calls a day, especially once you've got a really solid route of customers that you've established. It's not like they're calling you every single service. They shouldn't be. You're going to let them go as you begin to harvest your best customers.

So you're going to have a low.

Call volume, only several calls a day. You might pay a few hundred dollars a month, but at least you don't have to stop 100 times a day looking at your phone. And every time the phone does ring. Now you're out in the field and you're like sweaty and hot and you're trying to pull up your laptop or, oh, now the data isn't working on my cell phone. If you want a professional service, get an answering service that can pick up the phone, charge you a couple bucks a minute, and you're not gonna have a huge amount of call volume. So it's not Gonna cost you $10,000 a month just to get your phones answered. So number three is don't answer your phone, have an answering service. Number four, you need your website to really bring in 100% of your leads or organically by year two. So you really need to have a great website that has SEO search engine optimization to where you rank well in Google. Because by year two, I don't want you spending any money on ads. I want 100% of your leads to be coming from everything on your website. SEO. Just ranking well, getting good Google reviews, having great SEO and backlinks and all of that. So you're ranking well in Google. And then secondarily you're getting word of mouth. You should have good customer base by year two to where people are actually talking about you, they're sharing about you.

So if you're trying to stay silly.

You don't need to keep advertising, you.

Don'T need to keep growing.

You're gonna take what you got in that first year and then you're gonna keep harvesting, getting in new customers from your website. 100% organic, no spend on money, no money spent on more advertising after year one. So by year two, your website better be good so it can rank and it can actually bring in all the leads required to keep refilling spots as people move or they sell their house or whatever might happen that you're able to keep good leads coming in that are High quality, high premium service, high premium profit type customers. All right, number five is you've gotta have automations running for follow up billing and collections so you can schedule time off. All right, so a lot of times what happens with solo operators when they get their one day off where they can actually, you know, take some time off, recuperate, refresh their body, they spend all their time following up with estimates, you know, going after invoices that are overdue or sending people to collections that are way overdue. You've got to automate that process, you've got to have automations, you've got to have a CRM that can do this. Most CRMs now, especially on those, you know, follow up process of an estimate, asking the customer if they want, you know, if they want to ask if they have any questions or just following up with them on the estimate is in most CRMs now. And so you should be able to build that in. But collections, billing, having credit cards on file that are automatically charged, all of this should be done by automations so that you can schedule time off to actually recuperate and refresh your body. Cause you're gonna get worn out otherwise. And I see it time and time again these solo operators will burn out and it leads to really, really bad news because they can't get any time off. Cause when they do get time off they're still spent doing all this office work.

Try to get rid of that as.

Much as possible through automations and having a virtual staff. Alright, sixth and final thing that I believe you need if you're going to run your business solo and have a long term landscaping business without employees is get support, be part of a community. It can be very lonely being a solo operator because everything falls on your shoulders. All the physical stress of working outside falls on your shoulders. There's no one else to delegate or give things off to if you're not feeling well. So it can be very, very lonely. I recommend locally and online, get part of a community and get support. Get someone else that's willing to jump in and help you when you don't feel well, when you need help on a project, that's gonna be a huge thing for you online join landscape business course the Facebook group is completely free. Join there locally, go talk to some other landscapers, stop with the whole, oh it's competition, there's so much work out there, go get support, go talk to other people, help them. And if you do that, be part of that local community of landscapers in your area, it's not going to feel as lonely. You'll be able to beep and wave at people and if you need help on a project, they will help you. If your mower goes down, you'll have someone that can lend you equipment. We recently had one of our franchisees that got really sick from the pandemic and everything and we were able to get help to him from another owner that was nearby. That's all because he's part of a community. He's part of getting support. And you don't have to be necessarily a franchisee to do that. You can get that from your local landscaping and business owners that can absolutely create that support network for you. Now I want to jump in and give a massive announcement that I'm very excited to share with you and that is that Augusta Lawn Care is now going to be offering what we call the solo operator franchise model. And what this is is now a different a second option to become a franchisee and an owner at Augusta Nation without having to spend $15,000 on your initial fee and being able to get started, just get started out. It's much cheaper. So let's go ahead and jump into the website. You can get more information on this@augustalongerservices.com franchise but let me actually show you what this option is. To be able to get started without a bunch of employees, without a $15,000 fee and at a much, much, much lower cost. So you can grow your business up to $20,000 in monthly revenue without a big, big initial fee. Let's go ahead and jump into it. All right, so we're here on the website augustalongerservices.com franchise. Most of you have probably seen this before. It's where you can book a call directly with Lee who will walk you through all the options and talk to you. More personal founders guarantee for the franchise is if you come to our three day new owner training and are not willing to swim through shark infested waters to stay with Augusta Nation, I will personally refund your initial franchise fee. Also, unlike any franchisor, if you at any point in your franchise term feel that you would be better off working without Augusta Lawn Care, you may terminate your franchise contract with no penalty. You can read more information here. Watch this video and this has always been what we've offered in terms of offering a exclusive territory 5 mile radius where no one else can advertise. Inside of that radius it's $15,000 for initial fee and it's really built to scale and grow very quickly. You you know, you want to be at 30, $40,000 a month in revenue within year one, it's possible to use this method and these, this kind of goes over all the different things that you get as part of being an owner at Augusta Nation and what you're saving as part of being part of Augusta. So whether it be the P4P software, the brand discounts, access to command center like they talk about, where they answer the phone for you and do all the backend work, all your website, the ads, all the rest of it's done for you. This is what we've always offered, but this is the part that's different. If you scroll down to the bot bottom here, now you'll see on the initial investment chart that there's this option for 399 and that is what we are calling the Solo Operator franchise model. If you scroll down a little bit more, you can see this button here. Learn more about the Solo franchise model. Click on that. And this is the part that's brand new and this is what I want to share with you today because I feel like if you're getting started brand new and you're like, man, I want to join Augusta, but that $15,000 fee, I just can't afford that or I have 20,000. I don't want to spend 50. Like I've told many of you, don't join Augusta if you have 20 grand and you can't have access to any more capital because you're going to spend 15 on the initial fee and then you're at five grand and you're not going to have. That's not enough to scale very quickly. There's no point in doing that. So what this is going to allow people to do using the Solo Operator model, as it says here, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. As it says here, the Solo Operator franchise model is built for two people. First, the owner doesn't want to grow into a massive company and just wants like maybe one employee. And because you can do up to 20,000amonth in revenue using this model. Second, the second person that might want to get this is the owner that can't afford the initial franchise fee for the growth model that has the five mile radius that comes with a protected territory. The Solo Operator model allows you to get started, learn the systems of Augusta Lawn Care and then grow your cash flow. Then have the choice to grow beyond $20,000 per month in revenue. You'll make sure you're comfortable, make sure you like doing lawn care. It's a big kind of thing you want to make sure you do before you jump into a franchise. Like, is this going to work for me? Am I good at it? Do I want to actually scale? Do I? Can I handle the pressure of having employees and growing a bigger business? Make sure to see the differences between the growth model and solo operator model in the charts below. All the training and resources you have as a solo operator are exactly the same and you legally receive all the benefits of a franchisee. This lower price point allows you to have the firepower of the Augusta brand and get your business off the ground at a very low upfront cost of just $3,999. So basically for $4,000 you can now join and build your business up to $20,000 per month in revenue. And so watch this video here on your own time. It explains it even in more detail. And this is the part I want to zero today. What's the difference between what we've always offered at Augusta Lawn Care and the solo operator model? So let me zoom in here and show you this chart. So this is the difference between the growth model, which is what is. We have a five mile radius, a protected territory. There we go. A five mile radius, protected territory. It's a $15,000 initial fee though. It's $1,200 per month. In terms of your monthly fees. Your first year is 600 under this model. We want to make sure you do have that money to grow and expand that first year. But it's twelve hundred dollars per month. You get a monthly coaching call. That's going to be where we fill out a scorecard for you. We look at your numbers, talk about strategy, where you're spending your money in marketing, hiring issues that you're going through, all the rest of it, access to full service at command center. So at command center is kind of like our virtual, you know, call service, you might say. But with, with the growth model, you get full service, which means like they'll help you with payroll, they'll do all of your email management, they'll help you with billing and everything. On the back end, they'll help you with basically a full service office. For solo operators, they're going to only pay $3,999 for, for the initial fee. So 4,000 bucks and then 699 per month for the monthly fee. That's going to start right away. There is no protected territory. So what's going to happen, our goal is, is to be able to have three or four of these operators in one city where they're going to be like harvesting, getting their best customers in a very centralized area, but then have a few other owners to give that support and that network ability to. All right, they're not going to be competing because there's so much work and it's a matter of just getting your customer, filling your schedule and maybe one other truck and then that's about it. Right? And so someone can always start as a solo operator and then become a growth franchisee where they actually lock in a territory and they're able to upgrade into using all the services at full service at command center. So you still get a bi monthly, so every other month coaching call and you get access to basic service, which is all the phone calls and your estimates being sent by command center. So still a massive help. At least all your phone calls are being answered, all your estimates are being sent out. You just don't have access to the full service like payroll. QuickBooks, they do all the accounts for that. They can do a bunch of stuff for full service. But again, if you're really small, you could probably handle that yourself or you can have your spouse handle it, or you can handle on the weekends because you don't have a bunch of employees to run payroll on or run P4P every single day for them. So it's manageable. Now. Both of the franchise models include brand discounts, the phone number and email address that commands in a week. Set that all up for you. We set up your CRM, your P4P software. We have on the back end access to that. We've built that. We build your website. You come today, come to three days of training as well as all of your marketing material. So, you know, door hangers and postcards and flyers, all of that, along with Facebook ads and Google Ads, everything that we have as templates for you as part of being a part of Augusta Nation is all included as part of the solar solo operator model. So definitely feel free if this is of interest to you. Go check this out. Definitely sign up for a call with Lee. Let me just zoom out here. Lee is the franchise business consultant that is going to. You can schedule a call with him directly here. Just click on a day that works for you, schedule a time and you're good to go. He'll answer any of your questions, make sure it's a good fit for you and it's a great way to get started. And then maybe down the road you actually do become a growth franchisee, tap into full service, get a Guaranteed protected territory and really focus on going past $20,000 per month revenue and really scaling up. So I hope that answered some of your questions, and I hope that even for solo operators, I truly believe that they can become extremely efficient using this model, and they can do 10 to $15,000 a month in revenue and easily be taking home 5 to $10,000 per month in profits. It's absolutely possible, especially after year one and in year two and three when you start harvesting your customers, raising the prices, cutting down your service area. And so we want to make this available. We want to make being part of Augusta Nation, not something that's too expensive, an entry point for those that want to stay small or just get started and then grow and do actually locking up a location, having a protected territory. And we truly believe this is going to be what allows us to really plant our flag and grow substantially throughout the nation, is by offering this lower model that we truly believe is extremely profitable. It's a great step for an employee or someone that's very small to get started with because they get all the brand power that we can offer. And we really, really do look forward to this. Creating that network of support that people can lean on is. Being solo can be lonely.

Just.

Just downright lonely. Having someone to call and get support from and get help and understand your numbers. That's the value of this solo operator model. All right, so we've talked about growing to $100,000 business. Now how do we take that to $200,000? Because now you're gonna have to hire someone probably. You're probably gonna have to get your first employee, even if they're part time, maybe full time.

So let's go ahead and talk about.

What you need to focus on in the business to grow from 100,000 to $200,000 in annual revenue.

Today, I'm gonna walk you step through step how to build a $200,000 in annual revenue business when it comes to lawn care and landscaping. Now, this applies for most every home service business, but specifically, specifically lawn care and landscaping is what I want to focus on today. I'm going to go over the six different things that I think you must know in order to go from maybe by yourself working to getting that first employee and being able to go to 200,000 plus in annual revenue. Now, I've made videos about 100,000, and I made videos about a million, But I want to go over 200,000, because that's where a lot of people make some big mistakes. And if you follow these Six rules. I think you'll be able to get through them. Number one is budget for your salary. You have to realize that if you go past $200,000 in annual revenue, you will need a second truck. Budget for it. What's the truck value going to be? What's the amount of the price you're going to pay? And make sure you budget for it. Don't do it too soon. I see too many people going on their second truck and then bringing their cash balance down to like zero and then they run out of money because like in the middle of winter and they don't have much work. Focus on budgeting for that second truck. No. Okay, if I need 15, $20,000, whatever that dollar amount is, make sure you have an excess of working capital on top of that amount once you pull it from the bank. Because if you starve the money from cash, you run out of cash. It's like running out of oxygen, you die. Number two, track your close ratio and your customer acquisition cost. Your close ratio is simply the number of estimates that are accepted divided by the total number of estimates that you send out to customers. That's your close range ratio. Track that number like crazy. Because if it's 30% and you are closing 30 out of every 100 estimates, if you can just get that at 60%, you'll grow twice as fast. And so you gotta make sure that your close ratio is being tracked. I would track it every week and just look at, okay, how many estimates were accepted this week divided by how many estimates did I send out to customers. This is gonna give you a great way of tracking. How good are you at selling? How good is your system for selling? How quickly do you get to customer's houses? Are you good at talking with them? Is your estimate template that you send to them via email or text message, or even if you do it in paper, whatever it is, you've got to make sure that looks buttoned down and professional because that will affect your close ratio. There's so many different elements of changing your sales process that can affect that. It's very important to track. The next thing is your customer acquisition cost. This is the cost you have to pay to get one new customer. What do you have to spend in marketing in order to get one new customer? If you spend $1,000 on marketing and you get 20 new customers, that would assume you have a $50 customer acquisition cost. That's $1,000 divided by the total number of new customers I get from that marketing campaign, it would equal $50 customer acquisition cost. Because if you know that number, you can literally predict exactly how much you'll need to spend in the future to be able to to get more revenue growth. Now remember, as a seasonal business, your customer acquisition cost might be 40, $50 in the spring. And if you spend the same, do the same exact marketing campaign at the wrong time of year, because now there's no one needing your services, it's seasonal. You could literally be spending 3, $400 customer acquisition cost. So seasonality is extremely important in the lawn care and landscaping industry. If you're thinking about tracking that number, number three is build a database of emails. You have to have a good CRM, a customer relationship management tool where you're going to be able to build a database of emails. Because down the road the real value to your business is going to be found in this database. Because you'll be able to send an email out to get people to people like 3, 400 people you have inside your database and get 5, 10 estimates based upon sending them a well timed email at the right time of year. Now I personally recommend Copilot CRM.com, but I'm biased, I'm the CEO of that company. But you gotta have a CRM that's gonna have a database of emails to allow you to be able to down the road. Cause at the beginning you're like, oh, I only have 20 emails, I only have 15 people in my database, right? You might not get a lot of recurring traffic and people asking for an estimate from that database. But down the road, if you just keep adding to it and keeping those customers warm, when you have 100, 200, 300 leads and 300 people in your database, you send an email and you get multiple estimates immediately. And guess what? You don't have to spend any money on marketing. There's no customer acquisition cost to people already in your database. At my very first Augusta lawn care location, we keep people warm by sending them emails in our database. And now when we send an email out to people and ask if they need service, we have over 10,000 people in our database and we're able to get hundreds of quotes by sending out one single email. Very, very valuable as you begin to grow the business past 100,000. Because at 100,000, hey, you can keep it in your head, you have 10, 15, 20 customers. It's not super difficult. But when you want to go to 200,000, you better make sure you have a database of customers that you can begin to continually keep in touch with. Number four, Overpay and over train your first employee. Why would I overpay them? The reason for this is because if your goal is to get to 200 and that's it, 200,000, 250,000, you only need one really good employee. If you're going to scale to a million plus, maybe don't overpay someone. You're going to need to create a system like P4P pay for performance in order to be able to scale. However, if you're just needing one employee to get 200,000, just overpay them. And I mean like maybe three or four dollars an hour. Because look, if you look at them working, let's call it 1500 hours in the year, if you pay them an extra $4.00 per hour, that's $6,000. So $4.00 per hour multiplied by 1,500 hours that they work in the year, that's $6000. Ask yourself, is paying $6,000 for the whole year of them working with you?

Is it worth $6,000 to get a really good employee that is like the best of the best for $6,000 a year? The answer to that when you're running a $200,000 biz is yes, that's 3%. $6,000 is 3% of your $200,000 in annual revenue. You should want to do that. It's better to have a good employee that you can depend on and you're not burning through them. Because if you try to make this really low pay, you're going to burn through people every couple weeks, every month, and you're going to get super discouraged. Quality is going to erode. You're not going to be able to have confidence in them. They're not going to help you take on projects and so overpay them by four or five dollars per hour. Just so that way you're able to trust on someone being there and you don't have a bunch of churn in that specific that first employee. As well as over train them, spend some real quality 3, 4, 5 days really training them on the systems. Because since you've overpaid them, they're gonna be with you for a while and they're gonna not leave. Well, over train them, make sure they know exactly what they're doing and they can take more things off their plate. Number five is direct marketing needs to start becoming your brand. So when you first get started, $100,000, $150,000 in annual revenue, you're focusing mostly on direct marketing, which is you're sending them a Door hanger or your flyer, and you're telling them, call now. Click here. If you're doing Google or Facebook ads, click here. You're telling them to do a direct marketing action. Take action now. If you have this pain, I have the solution. That's what direct marketing is. But as time goes on, as you pass 100,000, 150,000, you get to 200,000. If you're willing to get to 200,000 plus, you need a brand. Now, this brand is going to come in the form of doing a lot of direct marketing. People becoming aware of you. But now they're starting to see two trucks rolling around. Now they're starting to see one of your employees. Now it's like, oh, this company is growing. And furthermore, you have a brand. People are talking about you. They understand, and they recognize your logo. Your trucks, your trucks are painted. Your trucks that maybe have decals or wrap on them. That allows you to have a. A brand in the marketplace where you're recognized for a certain color truck, for a certain color uniform. At Augusta Lawn Care, our brand is yellow uniforms, yellow trucks, and dog on the truck. Max. Max is our mascot. That's what we're known for. That's our brand. And that's what you'll need to go past 100,000 and get to 200,000. And one of the best ways to create a brand is have a great website, because people will immediately judge your brand based upon your. Your website and your trucks. This is the number one thing in the home service industry. In person, they're gonna judge your trucks and your uniforms and online, which more and more people are shifting that way. It's going to be your website. I highly recommend lawncarewebdesign.com if you need a great website. Now, when it comes to number six, very important, we need to focus on the fact that if you have a decrease in your personal expenses and how much you're paying yourself, that's gonna allow you to grow faster. It's very basic math. If I have a $200,000 business, but I'm pulling out a lot of money because I have a massive house, several fancy trucks. I take four vacations a year and a really nice boathouse. And I do all these crazy, exciting, buying really fancy watches and all the rest of it. If I do that, it's simply going to lead to the business growing less. So if you're at 50, $60,000 in annual revenue, like, I want to grow my company, fantastic. But if you're taking out a bunch of money from the business and siphoning off the cash. It's gonna lead the business not to be able to grow. Cause you're not gonna be able to spend money on your second truck, on the ability to be able to overpay. Where is it? Overpay your first employee. You're not gonna have the money to be able to build the website and create a great brand. And furthermore, you're not gonna be able to have the money to spend on marketing, to be able to go out and get new customers. And you're gonna be like, oh, no, I can't spend the $200 a month on my CRM and my. My database. You're going to do all those things because you're siphoning up all this cash for your personal expenses and you're living some lavish lifestyle, driving a Lamborghini, trying to be something that you're not. Because that is going to hurt the business. I promise you, you will not grow the business fast if you're siphoning off cash for personal expenses. Otherwise, that money could be spent on growing the business. So These are the six things you've got to do to get to $200,000 in annual revenue. And don't forget, forget the gentleman's agreement. And that is give a penny, take a penny. I give all of these great videos for you to watch for free. I expect you, in return, to hit the subscribe button. Thank you so much.

So now you've grown the business of $200,000 in annual revenue. But we've got to determine how do we go from 200,000 to 500,000 or half a million dollars in annual revenue. A lot of lawn care businesses fail in this stage. We call it the wilderness, where you don't make as much money. Now I'm going to talk about why. I'm also going to talk about what you can do to avoid the wilderness and be able to grow very quickly from 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue, because your profit margins start to go down and you start working on the business, doing estimates and hiring and all the rest of it. But your profit margin go down very, very quickly because now you have all this extra overhead and shop space and trucks and equipment. So let's talk about the warnings that you must know going into 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue.

Today I'm talking to the home improvement business owner that is doing between zero and $500,000 in annual revenue. If that's you, I highly recommend you pay a lot of attention over the next few minutes as I'm going to summarize a longer form video that I made at Landscape Business course and on mbaforantrepreneur.com where I talk about the most important things that you need to know if you're going to grow your business past 200,000, 300,000, $400,000 in annual revenue. This is also the reason why so many people you see in business on social media will grow their business to three, four employees and then retreat back to being a solo operator. This is what keeps most people in the home improvement industries under $200,000 in annual revenue. Not to say that's a bad thing, absolutely not. And there'll definitely be people in the comments saying only way to do it is do it solo, do it yourself. I definitely can sympathize with that. But if you're wanting to grow a business that can run without you, can run on systems and can run while you're on a vacation or doing things with your family or giving yourself a little more flexibility so you don't have to do work in the business, this is extremely important to know. I'm going to run the math of why people run into issues once they cross $200,000 in annual revenue and why they'll go to 3000-004000-00500,000 and they'll retreat back to being a solo operator. Because here's the thing, I've talked about this before. I truly believe that between about $200,000 in annual revenue to about $500,000 in annual revenue in this range, there is not a lot of extra profit being made in this area. Between 200,000, you could say 250,000 maybe. But in this area, I call this the wilderness.

Okay?

The reason this is the the wilderness is because this is where everyone wanders around and they literally don't make any more profit at 200,000 compared to 500,000. And so people get disillusioned because they're like, why am I working over here with maybe one employee and I'm making $200,000 in annual revenue and I'm making a good living. I'm making 70, $80,000 home in profit that I can live on. And over here I have five, six employees and yet over here I might be making the exact same amount. I might be making the same 60, 70k take home pay, whereas over here I'm making the same exact amount. Why is that? Okay? Why is my profit the exact same at 200,000 to 500,000? Let's go ahead and take an example, run the math here because I want you to stay till the end because I'm going to talk about what you can do to avoid this issue. And if you look on social media, especially in the home improvement space, in every single industry there are what I call micro influencers. And I would consider myself a micro influencer, okay? And in these industries, these influencers have a following. And what they do is you will see them document their business as they grow. That one employee, two employees, very exciting. I'm going to work on the business now. I'm going to be able to scale up. It's exciting. You get three, four employees and all of a sudden you'll see them switch and in one year things will kind of fall apart. Things start to get, they get really stressed out. They usually have some sort of burnout and they go right back to being a solo operator. Not to say that that's bad. I think that some people should actually stay at being a solo operator. That's where they should stay at. But for the person that wants to grow beyond that, I want to make this example so you're prepared mentally and financially for what's to come and so you can get past this stage of the wilderness. Let's go ahead and use this example. I'm going to make this up on the fly. So if I make some bad math mistakes, forgive me. Let's go ahead and assume that we are charging the customer $80 per hour and we're going to start our business. Now in this example I'm going to use lawn care landscaping, but you could literally use for any home improvement business, we're going to charge $80 per hour. Now we are going to work our brains out, alright? Because we are brains working hard by ourselves out in the field every day. We're going to complete 40 hours every single week. And this is hours of budget hours, hours actually on the property we're probably working 50, 55 hours. But hey, we're a solo operator. We're kicking butt. We're super efficient. So this is literally making you $3200 per week. Alright? Now we don't necessarily have year round work. Most home improvement industries are somewhat seasonal. So I'm going ahead and assume that we are going to work 40 weeks in the year, alright? We have a bit of a down season. So if we do the math that, that's 120 times 4. It's $128,000 in revenue and that's all from labor. Now let's Go ahead. And just for the sake of this example, say that on top of the 128,000 in revenue for labor, we probably have another. Let's just call it $20,000 in. Let's call this cost of goods sold. This would be like your materials, any sort of extra cost, like dumping fees that you charge a customer. So your total annual revenue literally being so low, and some people are going to say, I'm crazy for saying this, but you can absolutely do this. And that is $148,000 in annual revenue by yourself. Now, keep in mind, you're. You're extremely efficient and you're working crazy hours. The amount of hours you're gonna have to put in to get 40 hours on the job site means that you're probably gonna work 50 hours, 55 hours plus then do work when you get home. So you're working like crazy. Now out of this $148,000. Obviously this is gross revenue. This is not net profit. This is literally just the top line revenue. Let's go ahead and look at some of the expenses that you're gonna have from this business. First and foremost, foremost, let's just go ahead and assume about $12,000 for your truck, and that's going to be like $1,000 a month. Brakes, tires, fuel, all of that good stuff. Now let's go ahead and say about $100 a month, $200 a month for insurance. Let's just call that $2,000. Let's go ahead and get some shop space. Maybe three, $400 a month. Let's call that $4,000. Let's do it. Titling insurance, making sure you have a good bookkeeper, all the rest of it. Let's go ahead and do $10,000 for that. We get some, a good accountant, a good lawyer. We get everything set up in terms of our legal, maybe an llc. What else we got in the business? We got miscellaneous things. These are going to be things like for a lawn care business, you got blades, you have your trimmer line, you have fuel cans, little trimmer tools, things like that are expendable. I'm not talking about the initial start of the business. Right. That 12,000 for that truck, by the way, is just $1,000 a month in equipment or the maintenance of the truck, the fuel for the truck, et cetera. I'm talking about expendable. This is not the initial outlay of the buying trucks, et cetera. Let's just go ahead and assume with like trimmer line and all these other expendables that we kind of gloves things that might break occasionally. Let's just go ahead and call that like $500 a month. Let's call it $6,000. Okay, great. So let's do 6,000. That's 16. That's 20. That's 20. 34,000. So $34,000 in expenses. There we have it. I'm being pretty conservative, but let's just go ahead and run the math on this. So if we take $148,000 in annual revenue and we take out $34,000, that means our net profit for the business. Let me go and take a red marker here. Is going to be what, 30. It's going to be 18, 118, 100. Is that right? 114. 114. $114,000 in profit after taxes. You're probably going to take $90,000 home in take home profit. Not bad. Now you are working absolutely like a dog, absolutely crazy hours. You will need to work 60 plus hours a week just to keep this up because 40 is on the property, another 10, 15 driving around, getting the job done, another 15, 20 potentially even doing estimates, et cetera. You are working like a dog, but you are bringing home some serious bacon. So let's go ahead and see what happens now as the business begins to grow and we start to get some employees. Because this is what starts to happen. Let's go ahead and assume now that this person is making $300,000 in annual revenue. Okay. And they may get their first employee. Very exciting. Getting focused on the estimates, the marketing, very excited about the fact that you'll work on the business now instead of in the business. And that's all fine and good. However, let's go ahead and look at the math on this because check this out. Let's go ahead and do this one before. So over here we had $148,000 was our revenue and we had a profit of 114k in profit. Okay. What this implies, implies if we go ahead and do the math, let's go ahead and take our trusty calculator out here. We're going to take $114,000. $114,000. Divide that by $148,000 and we're going to get a 77% profit margin. Okay, let's go. This is the reason why you're so profitable when you're so low. And maybe one employee. Because even if I get one employee, I'm not going to be 77, 77% efficient. I'm not gonna be 77% profitable, I should say. However, I am gonna be like 40, 50% profitable even after I paid their wages. Cause you don't have to pay someone out of this, pay them 20, $30,000 a part timer, still not make a bad profit margin. I might be 50, 60% in profit margin even if I have a part time helper occasionally. So again, I get one employee. Things are going great. Let's go ahead and look at the numbers with one employee, alright? This is what draws people into growing the business. So now let's go ahead and see. With this first employee, I'm now able to have $200,000 in annual revenue. So now this is one employee, $200,000 in annual revenue. But you're not going to make $114,000 in profit. Why? Because now I've got to get a second truck. Doubling the cost of my insurance, doubling the cost of, of what I'm spending on car payments, doubling the cost of my fuel. Everything's gonna go up. I'm also gonna pay wages. So I've got to pay someone $30,000, $40,000 for the year to have them be my employee. And I have to spend money on advertising to find those employees. And now I'm not gonna be able to do 40 hours out in the field. I might only be able to do 30 hours out in the field on a customer's property because I've got to do more estimates. I've got to train, manage, hire, interview, try to find a new employee. Because guess what? First employee doesn't stick around for about two or three weeks. I got another one and I got another one. And I'm always interviewing, I'm trying to find somebody else. And so I don't get my 40 hours in, I only get 30. And now I've got to hire them and they don't get 40 either. They get 25 or 30. So all of a sudden I don't go up to 300,000 in revenue, I only go up to 200,000. And yet now my profit might literally be $120,000. A little bit more than before, but not a lot. But this is the thing, if I look at my profit margins, it just went down to 60%. So our margin is decaying. And this is normal. As you grow a business, as you scale up, your margins typically go down because you're having more overhead, you're having more insurance, you're having wages. And this is what happens now. As we cross the $200,000 marker, watch what happens to our Profit margins. And this is why people, they look very excited about this because guess what, it's a nice spot to be at this stage. 200,000, 250,000, you got one, maybe two employees helping you out. Good profit margin, 40 to 60%, very doable. But now let's go ahead and bump it up to say, four employees. Now at four employees, you're so busy doing estimates, managing the crew, hiring people and answering the phone, doing emails, just doing customer service, people that are unhappy, all this other stuff that you do zero work in the field. There's no 40 hours of you doing work in the field. And instead of being a revenue producing machine and literally producing $148,000 in revenue by yourself, instead of that, now you have four employees that you're just managing all the time. And you actually are an overhead expense to the business. You cost money because you drive around all day in your truck and you're not producing any revenue. The most efficient, most profitable person in your business, which is you, that was the best at doing the work, is no longer out in the field working. Instead you're trying to manage other people that get maybe 50 or 60% of what you would have got done in a day. That's what they're performing at. So now with these four employees, we're going to go ahead and do $400,000 in annual revenue. But because we have four employees now, have four trucks, now we have a bigger shop space. So our rent went from three or $400 a month at a storage facility. Now we're paying $1,200 a month for a shop space because we need the extra land to be able to park the trucks, have some space to dump. We got to make sure it's locked up. So we got a fenced area. We're paying way more in rent, we're paying way more in insurance. Because now your general liability is at no hundred dollars just for your trucks, you're paying 5, $600 a month. Now for your general liability, you might pay paying 500, $600 a month because you got four employees and you're doing other jobs, you're doing bigger services, you're offering services outside of the basic stuff you were doing by yourself. And this is the trap that people fall into. So at $400,000 in annual revenue and now all of a sudden we have all these employees, we have all their mistakes and things are happening. And guess what? We only make 60k. And if we actually do the math on this, this is a. Is it 15%. I think it's 10, 10, 15. I think it's 15%. Yeah, I think it's a 15% profit margin, which, honestly, if you actually look at the industry average for lawn care landscaping companies, if you run a 10% margin business, you're kind of like, not great, but okay, 12% is the average. 15% is actually half decent for a larger company. Obviously over here, not the case, but when you start hitting a million plus, 15% margin is fantastic. But 15% margin here just so happens that my profit, because this is my profit right here, is actually going down. I'm making half as much in profit at 400,000 annual revenue because guess what? I stopped becoming a producer of revenue of 148,000, and that went to zero. Instead, now I actually cost the business money because I'm driving around, I'm spending money on gas and fuel and an extra truck to keep everyone. I might even have to go get an office person, answer the phone, do emails. My shop space, now I got to get an office space and pay for utilities and Internet and computers. All this other stuff, all of that is costing what's called overhead. These are things that are not attributed to the actual job getting done, which before that's the only thing we were paying for. Cogs, cost of goods sold, direct labor, direct materials. No longer is that what we're paying for. We're paying for, for what's called overhead. Things that have nothing to do with the actual job itself. The office person is overhead. The shop space is overhead. All the extra insurance is overhead. All the extra fuel is overhead. This is what's eating your profits for lunch at this size of business. And you're only now making $60,000 in profit. And now instead of having the physical pressure and pain and stress of working 50, 60 hours a week, now you're working 50, 60 hours a week,. But you're not working physically hard. In fact, you're actually gaining 20, 30 pounds because you're driving around all the time doing estimates, not actually doing physical labor. But at this stage now, all of a sudden you have the stress of all these employees that call out, they call out sick, they do bad job. Now you have to fix their problems, and you're running after them, and you're always making sure they're not slacking off and you have to fire them. And then all of a sudden they don't show up and you're trying to hire more people, and you're caught in this vicious cycle of psychological stress and financial pressure, because now all Of a sudden, you're not taking home as much pay. Now you have to pay workers compensation. Now someone gets hurt on the job and you have to deal with all these issues and people are complaining and then they want more money and then they're not working hard, and then they make a mistake on someone's job and they make a $5,000 error. And you can't go to the insurance because you already did that last month. And now all of a sudden, if you do it again, they might drop your insurance. And these are the type of things that wear down on your. You as a business owner, to everybody, including myself, I now have eight locations that I own of Augusta Lawn care and over 120 locations that are franchised. I went through this. Everyone goes through this. And if you're struggling right now and you're in this stage, I promise you, everyone has gone through what you're going through. Now let's talk about what you can do to get out of this death spiral. Because as you grow this business, it'll go get more and more psychologically damaging and hard and stressful and less and less financial rewarding. And that's why people give up and they're like, forget this. Forget making $60,000 in profit, dealing with all these employee issues and customer problems. I'm just going to go back to becoming a solo operator. And for some people, that is the right thing to do. For some people, this is actually. I actually think for a lot of people, this is where they should stay at 200,000, 250,001 in employee, they can manage that employee with their. Have their eyes on them all day long, make sure that they pay them very well. They're not a lot of churn, not a lot of psychological issues. They're working more in the business. For some people, this is really where they should stay at. But if your goal is to grow the business beyond that and build a business that runs without you and provide jobs for your local community and build a business that you can pass on to your family down in generations. Here's the thing that you gotta be focused on. There's definitely ways of being able to prevent this type of burnout. There's ways to prevent this sort of psychological damage. As you go through that wilderness of 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue, first and foremost, it's very simple. Prepare for the wilderness. Know that it's going to come. So what that means is have enough.

Dry powder. What I mean by that is have enough money to be able to Scale the business from 200,000 in annual revenue to $500,000 in annual revenue very quickly because there's not going to be any additional profit because there's a lot of overhead that comes in that space. You're not going to be working in the field anymore. You become an overhead expense. You have to upgrade your shop space and insurance and get an office person and all these other things. So you're not going to, you know that you know you're not going to make any more profit. So what do you do? Have enough dry powder, which means you might stay at $200,000 or $250,000 for a year, two, three years and stack some money up so you can go get a couple trucks, get a few employees and very quickly spend money on marketing and get to the place of 500 plus down the road. But make sure you have enough dry powder so that financially you're not going to have to give up in that period of time. And you can do it quickly even if you have a little bit of waste, Even if you don't figure everything out just perfectly in your marketing, you don't hire the exact right people, have enough dry powder, at least take some of the financial pressure away that's going to be there. If you don't prepare for the wilderness of 200,000 to 500,000, the next thing you can do, simplify services. The reason that most people simplify services, the reason that most people give up during that period of time is because the reason they're growing their top line revenue is because they're adding more services. Because when they were so low, they just did mowing for example, and now they're adding bush trimming and mulch installs and paver patios and retaining walls and excavation. And they're doing using a big flail mower on an excavator. And all of a sudden they're doing all these projects and they're growing top line revenue, but not profit. But what's causing them to eventually quit down the road isn't actually so much. I see the financial issues, it's the psychological pressure. And by simplification of services there's less intimidation that comes with these massive projects that you can lose your shirt on, massive contracts that you can make hundreds of thousand dollars on a massive commercial maintenance package. And so year round it's so fantastic. And you can lose your shirt on those by adding in services that are complicated, highly skilled. You can become vulnerable now to potentially losing your shirt on a job to employees that know a lot about the work, but you have to hire them and deal with all of their junk because you don't know how to do the work yourself. So simplify your services. And the third thing is exactly what I just did that you'll need to do for your business. That is run the math.

Now before I talk about this one, because it's the most important, important, let's just be very clear. I expect, and I really do think that I deserve a subscribe. Okay. There are thousands of people that are going to watch this video and they've watched many of my videos and never subscribed. It's like when you go to the store and you see the little thing, it's like give a penny, take a penny. Now I am currently giving a penny with the hopes that one day someone is also going to give a penny back in return. Now, this content doesn't cost you a single penny to watch. I put my. It's literally right now 11:30pm by the time I finish this video, edit it, put it up, it's going to be one o'.

Clock.

I do this completely for free. That is my penny that I give. And the only penny I ask for you to give in return is a subscribe. So please do that. It's the gentleman's agreement. Give a penny, take a penny, I give something. I also expect you to go ahead and give a penny as well, which is subscribe. Thank you very much. Number three. Comment below if you subscribe for the first time after watching many of my videos. Because I know there's a lot of you out there. Alright, let's go ahead and run the math. This is so, so important, especially for your first and second employee. Because if you'd run the math of how profitable you are in your business without your salary, very important. Here's the thing. If I would take my 118. What was it? 114,000? Yeah. Profit. There you go. Okay, great. That's what I was making in profit in the business. However, if I take away my salary, what I would have to pay someone else to do the work themselves. It gets very interesting because if I was working 60 hours a week and I would pay someone, what is it, $20 an hour? Let's just call it 20 bucks an hour. You're literally looking at $1,200 a week. Add on taxes and insurance, you might be looking at $1,500 per week for someone that's all of a sudden $75,000 that I'm kind of fudging because I'M doing all the labor, and down the road, I'm not going to be able to do all the labor. So if you actually take your $114,000 in profit and you take away what you would otherwise have to pay someone else to do the work, oh, it's not going to cost me $75,000 for one person. You're right. You're going to have to get two people to do the amount of work that you're doing, because you're working like crazy hours. Like crazy, man. So if you take out that 75,000, now, all of a sudden you have, what, 25. That's $39,000 in actual profit. And this is what you should be counting yourself up against. This is what you should be comparing yourself to. Cause now, now when you have the four employees making $60,000, doesn't seem so bad. Why you're actually making 50% more than you were before. Because before you were doing all the work yourself. Now, if you were to hire out all the work, do the math of what you're actually making in profit for the business, not for you doing the work. But how much does the business make after you take away your salary? What you're constantly working, working in the business. There's a dollar amount associated with that. So what would the business be making if you were to go hire out your position and you didn't have to be there? That's truly how much profit the business makes, not how much you take home, but the business makes after you would have paid yourself. And that is where the most people fail, is that if they actually took out what they would otherwise be paying someone else to work the crazy hours that they're working in the business, they're actually not very profitable. And this is a very, very generous situation. I actually feel like most people are taking 60, $70,000 in profit as a solo operator. And like, this is great. And they start growing and they wonder why they literally go to zero in profit. It's simply because they're not charging enough. They're not running the math on being able to make sure that they're charging a high enough price to accommodate the fact that as you scale up, you're gonna have to hire wages, you're gonna have to pay wages and, and hire people to be able to do the work for you. Very, very important.

All right, now, I hope this so far has been super helpful, this marathon of content. And if it has been, please subscribe. There's a gentleman's agreement we have here on the channel and the gentleman's agreement is this. It's kind of like when you go to a store, on the checkout counter there's like a little bowl and it's like, take a penny, give a penny. The social norm, what we expect from everyone is that when you have an extra penny, you put the penny inside. And when you have an extra penny to give, you put one there so that one day when you need the penny, you can take one. Now here's the deal. There's a social construct that I can't, I can't see you right now. I'm not watching over your shoulder. I can't prove that you push the subscribe button. But what I do expect is that you subscribe in exchange for the penny that I've put into the bowl. I put all this time and energy, we have a whole media team, all these videos, hours worth of content that.

Typically would be high.

A paywall in terms of a course is going to be completely free to you. And the only thing we ask, the only thing we ask is you press the subscribe button. That is the gentleman's agreement. I cannot check on you, I cannot make sure that you do this, but if you've watched this far, if you're getting this much content for free, I just ask for absolutely no money, not even one penny's worth. I just ask you to subscribe. It's a social construct of the Mike Andes YouTube channel that you subscribe despite no one watching. Just click the button, subscribe and it'll be great. Because now we're going to talk about what you need to do to grow past $500,000 in annual revenue. So hold on to your seats because it's about to get exciting because we're now going past half a million dollars in annual revenue for our lawn care business.

Today you're going to learn how to grow your business up to a half million dollar lawn care company. And I'm going to walk you through, step by step of the things you need to know how to get through three, four and half a million $500,000 in annual revenue in your lawn care business. It's going to going to be a beautiful thing. I'm going to tell you the major things that I learned. And after building now 90 plus locations at Augusta Lawn Care, these are the things I always see people make mistakes on. Alright, these are just some of the highlights. If you want more information like this, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com it's awesome. All right, so let's go ahead and Talk about a few things. First and foremost, I would highly recommend keep doing what you are doing to get to to 100 and 200,000 in revenue in terms of advertising. Again, that video from before, great starting point, but keep doing that. And this is the thing I want you to focus on. $200,000 equals the rest stop. It's like when you're driving to some crazy state across the country and you take a rest stop, you take a little break, take a little breather, you go to the bathroom, maybe get some gas, get a little food. This is the rest stop. The reason you want to stop and slow down at $200,000 is if you are low on capital, if you don't have a lot of cash in the bank, stop at this level. Why? Why would you want to stop your growth? Because ultimately if you run out of cash, you can run a profitable growing business into bankruptcy. Like how is that possible? Because ultimately it takes time to recoup the cost of growth. By the time you buy a truck, you do the advertising, you hire people, you get uniforms, get insurance. It takes time before you then acquire a customer and then mow their grass long enough to actually recoup the cost of all of this other stuff. So you can be growing too quickly and run out of cash. And if you run out of cash, it's like running out of oxygen. You die, kaput. Bye bye. Alright, so 200,000. The reason I want you to take a little rest stop, a little pause, a little break here if you're running low on cash, because at this stage you can literally have one truck, one other employee besides yourself, and make $200,000 in annual revenue. Some of you are like, no, that's impossible. Okay, let's run the math because I see this all the time at Augusta Nation and I truly believe you can do one truck, one employee and $200,000 in revenue. I also believe that you can literally get to about 450 with two trucks and three employees. But hold on to your britches before you start commenting in the description. Oh no, no, that's impossible. There's no way whatsoever. Gotta run the math. Okay, all right. See it time and time again. One truck, one employee, 200,000 annual revenue. Remember, annual revenue is not just labor. It includes your estimate fees and your dump fees and your material markup and everything else. Okay, so one truck, one employee. Because at this size, this is a beautiful thing about 200,000 annual revenue is. I can do one truck, one employee. That one employee is in said truck with me. Okay. And I, as the owner, so I the owner with one employee, I'm able to go out and do usually well over 100 yards a week easily. In addition to projects that I am able to, to fill in, to be able to keep us busy and get to that 200,000 marker. In order to get that, I got to do about $18,000 approximately per month in revenue. Alright? Now at this stage when I do the little rest stop, what I mean by that is don't stop growing because like, oh, I don't. No more leads. I'm not going to take any more customers. Don't do that. No, no, no, no, no. If you're getting customers coming in through your website, because you have a website by now, if you are getting more leads coming in, just take those customers and charge them a higher price and then raise the price to your existing customers. So what you do is you have all these customers, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all these customers, right? And what you're going to do, these are high priced customers, lots of money, okay? And then down here is your lowest priced customers. What I want you to do is keep taking leads, taking more customers and then as you are at capacity, you're filled up, no more customers. And what people say, stop taking leads, don't do that. What I want you to do is raise the price until some of these people leave. So that way you're able to actually go and get more customers but be at the higher prices. That is what's going to allow you to optimize at this size of business, you'll make more profit even though you have the same number of customers. And you're like, well, when do I do that? When you're at capacity, when you need to go buy another truck and get a bigger shop and all the rest of it. Before you do that, ask yourself, do you have the cash? Because if you do, you can grow to 500,000. But you might need to take a little rest, stop, a little break and take a year. Take a year or two where you have one employee, just one truck, and with you in the truck working and you, you can easily get to this $18,000 per month level. Assuming again that you have back in support. If you're working these many hours in the field, you're probably going to need your spouse or potentially a virtual office to be filling in some of the gaps, taking calls, emails, et cetera. But this is absolutely possible. This is what you should be doing, taking this little break. If you're growing to 500,000 it's okay to take a year or two and stack some cash because this size of business, you are very profitable. And we're going to get into why you're very profitable towards the end of this video. But we don't want to stop here. At 200,000, our goal is still to get to 500k. So the goal is still to get to the elusive $500,000 in annual revenue. Now, here's the thing that is a little bit not so fun, a little depressing. There is really no more profit being made in the journey from 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue. Everyone wants to get to 500,000. Here's the deal. I consistently see the people who give up in this industry that say, this industry, there's no money in it, say that they can't find employees and they're going to just scale back to being solo. I consistently, consistently see them being somewhere between the realm of 200,000 to 500,000 in Amazon revenue. If you look at YouTubers and people have done social media and they have 2, 3, 4, 5 employees, and all of a sudden they're like, I just found out I wasn't making any more money than when I was by myself. So what do they do? They go back to being under 200,000. And the reason for that is because there is no more profit typically seen in this range of 200,000 to 500,000 in revenue, especially if you're growing relatively quickly in debt here within five to six years of starting. Okay? So there is no more revenue here. I call it the wilderness. It's like wandering in the wilderness. There's no more profit, okay? And so what happens is people start to wonder in the wilderness, on their way from 200,000 to 500,000, and they get lost and they get disillusioned because they're like, man, I was making just as much profit. Take home pay at 200,000 and here I'm at 400, 350, and I'm not making any more. But now I got a couple trucks, multiple employees, people call out all of this headache, all of this drama. I got to deal with employee issues and they make a bunch of mistakes. And so the wondering in the wilderness is what many times cause people to turn back to being solo operator and back to this one truck operation with one employee max. And the bottom line is that might be what's right for you and your business and the stress levels that you want to handle. And it's okay to be at this level. There's a reason why you make just as much profit here as at 500,000, your overhead is way less. At 200,000, you have one truck, you can like literally operate it out of your house and your garage. You don't need a lot of equipment. You have one employee, and guess what? That one employee. You're managing them in person all day long. You don't have to worry about them taking a truck and doing something stupid without you being around. Because guess what, you're in the truck with them all day, eyes on them, making sure that they are being efficient. So why in the world would I want to grow my business from 200,000 to 500,000? In doing so, I'm gonna have to buy more trucks, more equipment, my liability insurance is gonna go up. I'm going to have to get further types of. There's so much like risk, like what if someone gets hurt? There's lots of complaints. I got to deal with employees now. Like, why would I want to go to 500,000? Well, here's the thing. At $200,000 in annual revenue, you are working every single day very hard with that employee out in the truck. And that can become very physically taxing. As you get 40, 50, 60 years old, that's not a sustainable career for you anymore. You might be able to take home 70, 80, $90,000 in take home pay at this level, and that's fantastic. But you're not going to be able to do it for a very long period of time. After 10, 15, 20 years in this industry of mowing lawns, it's taxing on the body and you're going to need to grow to the point where you're able to start working on the business, growing the company and investing in your team and training other team members to do the work that are younger, that are just getting started, and give them a place to grow, give them a good job, but make sure that you're not doing the actual work itself. When you're in your 40s and your 50s and your 60s, it can start to become very, very taxing on your body. And furthermore, at this size, guess what? If you get hurt, if something happens to you, if you have a family emergency and you leave this employee is likely inequipped and not able to go out and perform the work and get the job done by themselves. So the wilderness, is it worth getting to 500,000? It is. If you're trying to grow, if you're trying to build a business that can run without you, if you're trying to work on the business instead of in the business business. But there's absolutely no logical reason why you're going to grow to 200,000 to 500,000 and think that you're going to make more money.

Alright?

And everyone argues with me this, oh no, I make more money at 400 than I did at 200,000. Okay, let me break down why this is typically not the case. Like I said, more overhead, you're going to have to go get shop space and rent out now because now you cannot. Now at this size you're going to usually have like two or three trucks at least. I've seen some people have like five or six trucks. I'm like what are you doing? All right, that's a whole other video, different topic. But you don't need six and seven trucks to do half a million in revenue. Two to three, I'll give you to four. Okay, if you really, really want it, I'll give you four trucks. But you don't need it. You do not need five, six trucks. Definitely not to do half a million in revenue. But again that's going to be way more in terms of cost per month for the that truck, maintenance for the truck, fuel for the truck. And now you've got to get shop space. You can't just park it in your garage or in your driveway. You've got to actually go like get a shop space that has a roll up door or maybe even some land, you might have to buy some land. Like there's a whole bunch more expenses now because of this size. And at this size of 500,000 you can't be out in the field working. So guess what you become, you become a non revenue producing employee. So instead of working the field Field for 40, 50 hours a week producing revenue, you're working on the business, taking calls, doing estimates, managing the email, running payroll. And that does not generate any revenue for the company. And that is a massive overhead weight on the business. And that's why 200,000 to 500,000 as the business owner gets out of the field, the company typically will not make any more in profit because the owner is not working on the business and produces revenue. That is why most people will go back to this size of business is because at this size you are a revenue producing employee. You're running 40, 50, 60% plus profit margins. Whereas at this you are not running 50, 60, 70% profit margins at 500,000 revenue. Why more overhead and you are not producing revenue. So what do I expect you to do? What do I think you should do? I want you to stay at this level, take this little rest stop, get ready for the journey ahead and then quickly grow from 200,000 to 500,000 quickly do it. Ideally do it in one year because the room in between, this wilderness in between is a pain in the butt and most people get disillusioned by it. So going into it, me telling you this, just stay here until you have enough capital and you're ready to quickly grow the business. At this size at 200,000, how do I get to, how do I get through the wilderness? How do I get through all of this? Well, let's go ahead and make little work writing on the whiteboard because all good things come on a whiteboard. So in the wilderness, how do I get through it? How do I get through this wilderness of pain? From 200,000 to 500,000. Revenue number one is you must, you must have a great website. This is no longer a suggestion, this is a must. In my opinion, if you are growing through this, if you already have a 5 million dollar lawn care business, you probably don't need a website because you got lots of leads coming in, lots of brand awareness. But if you are trying to grow your company, this is a requirement. Now I do own lawn carewebdesign.com and we produce hundreds of landscaping websites for business owners. And yes, I think it's a great and amazing and I'm obviously biased, so check it out because they're incredible. But if you're like, nope, I am not being sold right now. No one's telling me what I should buy. Okay, great, go into weebly.com, go into Squarespace, you can make a site for literally, I don't know, like 30, 40, $50 a month and they look half decent. But if you're one to really scale and in one year jump from 200,000 to 500,000, you're going to need a great website, great Google reviews and you're going to need a site that's optimized for mobile, has great SEO and has a great design. And that's what lawn care web design.

Can do for you.

So check that out. But again, I'm okay with you doing something else or whatever you want to do. Just give it a great website. I beg of you, please, please, please, please. Alright, it is going to help you so much and it's going to be the thing that always you will look back on. And the reason for the website by the way is really that is just a result of the fact that really.

What I want you to focus on.

At this stage is organic leans people. Because guess what? Over the past year, two, three years, whatever, you've been growing up to $200,000 in annual revenue, you've been paying for every single customer. Like, no, no, no, no, no. They've been calling me just out of the blue because I am like, I was like a gift from God just dropped down and people started calling me.

For their lawn care.

That's not what happened. They saw a door hanger, they saw a yard sign, they talked to the neighbor, they saw your truck, they saw all of these other things, but most of the time it was a paid advertisement of some sort, whether it be in their mailbox, at their front door, you knocking on their door, by the way, that costs you money because it costs you time and an advertisement online somewhere. They saw you, and typically you had to pay for that customer. The beautiful thing about a website is the fact that you own the website and you're able to get customers for no additional customer acquisition cost. I don't have to keep paying the machine of Google or paying the machine of Facebook or paying, oh, my goodness, the usps, the government. I'm paying the government to give me. Give me some postage to go and do print to all my customers. I'm not doing that anymore. I don't want to be on this treadmill of constantly paying for customers. I want customers to find me when they're looking for lawn care, landscaping in my area. And the number one way to do that is have a great website. Now, the other way you can make sure you're getting leads organically. Organically just means not like organically, like, let's go get some organic oat milk. Not like that. Not organic, like from the farm. Not like that. Organic is. I didn't have to pay for them. They came to me of their own. What's the word? Their own volition. Their own volition. They came to me because they were looking for lawn care, they were looking for landscaping. They search searched me on Google or they talked to their friends and family, and they just referred me. Either the search engine did or their friends and family. And on the search engine side, guess what? You need a website with really good search engine optimization. SEO. That's what you need. Or you need to have brand awareness. When they talk to their friends, their families, people around the water cooler at work, guess who they talk about? You and your brand. How do you get brand awareness? Yes, a website helps a little bit, but not really. What's really Gonna help is you doing a good job, you doing a great service to your customers. And furthermore, it's gonna be your truck, your uniform. Your truck should not just be a random truck that no one can tell what your business is. It should have your name big on it, your phone number big on it. Because now when they see your truck driving around you and your employee kicking butt at 200,000 in the rest stop, they give you a call and that's organically. They saw your truck. Ah, that's a nice little truck. Oh, they're doing good work over there at so and so's property. And they give you a call. That's an organic lead. And really what's going to get you from 200,000 to 500,000 without dying in the wilderness is organic leads. Because the biggest issue that you're going to have between 200,000 and 500,000 in revenue is financial stress. Because now that you are no longer producing revenue for the business, you are overhead. And if you are overhead, you got to be really thrifty in everything else in the business, including, including advertising. You don't have a budget now to spend thousands of dollars on every door, direct mail, thousands of dollars on Google and Facebook. And you're gonna need more and more leads in order to achieve this type of size and growth. So I need organic leads, I need a great website and I need a brand. So if you haven't already, make sure that you have these things, a brand and a website. That brand could come in the form of a truck with decals, a rat painted truck, phone number on there, looking great, looking beautiful. The name of your company is on there and it's a recognizable image. People see it because they have a brand. They start to tell their friends, their family, and if you're doing good work, you're gonna get referrals. All of that is organic leads. Those are the ones that you must have because you need a lower customer acquisition cost in order to be able to get through this wilderness and grow quickly. Now, when it comes to to organic leads, the other thing we must remember is that there's a very important thing that you need to start doing at this point, and that is called upsell.

Up, up.

Whoa, whoa, we gotta spell it right. Upsell, upsell and nurture. Because guess what? At this point, you should have a whole database of customers. You might already by this point have 4, 500 contacts in your database. And, and you should be making sure that you nurture them. What does that mean? That means you should be staying in Touch with them. You should be sending them emails and newsletters and trying to sell them into services based upon the seasonality, the time of year. You should be nurturing them. You should be staying in touch with them. You should be offering them services. If it's fall, you should be offering them fall services and leaf cleanups. If it's mowing season, in the spring rush, you should be offering them mowing services. Make it easy for them to come back to you, you to want. You want to nurture them. Stay in touch. Don't let those leads go cold. This is like, keep them warm. Why would I go after cold leads, ones that have never heard about me on Google or Facebook or advertise to them, when I can literally go after the ones that are warm leads. The customers I've already done service for, at least I've performed an estimate for, and I have them in my database. Why in the world would I not nurture them? Keep those customers warm by staying in touch with them. Very important. That's the number one way you can increase organic leads is by nurturing the existing database and existing customers that you have. And then secondly, because nurturing. I'm assuming they're leads. They're not yet customers. They're leads. So you got to nurture them, keep them warm. They've never done service with you, but you have their contact. Nurture those relationships, keep them warm. But for the customers you already have. I don't know why I'm using my fingers on a whiteboard as if I'm drawing underneath the line, but there it is. You gotta upsell them. Your existing customers. You upsell and existing leads, people in your database. Those are the ones you nurture. But when it comes to upselling, what are we doing? Well, same exact thing in terms of staying in touch with them, nurturing them, et cetera. But now we're really trying to get them to buy a second, a third, a fourth service, winter services. I don't want to just be mowing their lawn. I want to be installing mulch. I want to be pulling the weeds. I want to be trimming the bushes. I want to make sure that they're on a schedule for fall cleanup. I want to make sure I have them on winter services during the winter months. I want to make sure I am selling everything I possibly can to that customer in order to what? Increase the lifetime value of the customer. That's what the whole game of business is all about when it comes to home improvement and our business is the beautiful thing about our business in the home improvement industry and lawn care landscaping is the fact that, number one, we have price elasticity, which means if you have a good brand and you're able to raise prices and create instant margin, it's a very good business to be in when you have a recession or when you have inflation, which we're happening to have right now. The other reason why this industry is fantastic is because I can upsell and increase the lifetime value of a customer by offering them different services. Now, there's a risk here. I don't want you offering every everything under the sun. Because the worst way to grow and the number one reason why people will go out of business in this wilderness of 200,000 to 500,000 is like, I can just add services. The number one way that people grow in this industry is just adding more and more and more and more services. Why? Because they started to realize that upselling is a very good thing. But what they fall trap into, they fall into the trap of is is offering services that are way outside the scope of work that they should be doing. Now they're getting a tree chipper. Now they're doing artificial turf. Now they're doing sod installs. Now they're doing retaining walls. Now they're doing paver patios. Now they have a massive dump truck. All of these things they start to do and it's killing, absolutely destroying, annihilating their profit margins. And that is why people don't make money between 200,000 and 500,000. And yet their business growing and they're getting another truck, they're getting more employees, and they wonder why they don't make any more money. Because the worst way to grow through this wilderness is adding more services. And secondly is adding geographical expansion like, oh, we're going to service this place over here and then 10 miles over here and 5 miles in this direction, we're going to service this neighborhood because it's the best neighborhood in the whole county. And then we're going to go over here to this town over here, that expansion. Yes, you can grow fast by adding services and geographical expansion. You can absolutely do that. But it's the least profitable form of growth and the number one reason why people are not profitable inside of the wilderness. So what I want you to focus on is upselling those same type of services that are simple and you don't need a whole bunch more equipment and a whole bunch of more skill in terms of training your team. Now, if you're doing hardscaping and landscaping, that's fine. Just standardize those services and don't get pulled in 100 different directions to where now you're doing pawn features, and now you're doing fencing, and now you're doing decks, and now you're doing pergolas, and now you're doing roofing. All of a sudden it's like, what in the world? You built 10 businesses inside of your small little company, very hard to make a profit on. So upsell, but don't upsell to the point where you're selling them every single thing under the sun, and you've opened up 10 different businesses under the one entity that you've already started. Don't do that. We need to upsell, though, and we need improvement and increase the lifetime value of every single one of the customers. Now, in this stage, in order for this to work, you're going to need this little thing with three letters. Well, there's more than three letters, but it's an acronym, CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Which means you must now have software to keep track of the nurturing, keep track of the upselling of your current customers. So you can actually have a system and a way to be able to communicate with them and upsell them and email them and bulk, mass email them. You've got to be able to keep this all controlled and organized because at 200,000, 40, 50, 60, 100 customers, you can kind of keep track in your head, oh, yeah, Mr. Jones, he likes his gate closed. Oh, Sally, okay, yeah, she likes it at two and a half inches. But you must have a CRM that's so important, we gotta write it on the whiteboard. Custom Customer Relationship Management. This is the name of the game as you scale. And the number one reason why so many small businesses will not be able to scale their business even though it might be profitable, is most of the time because they don't adopt technology that's gonna allow them to scale in a more efficient manner. So everything becomes very difficult and hard when it doesn't have to be right. You're like, man, emailing all those customers just sounds like such a pain. You can do it like two minutes if you have the right CRM. So you need the right CRM. And if you want to know what type of CRMs, that's a whole different video. You can check out landscapebusinesscourse.com I talk more about CRMs. What size of business I recommend for different types of CRMs. That's a whole different video. But you need a CRM. You need to keep care of your customers in A software software that is doing the work for it. And there needs to be automations inside of here. If you're doing things like following up on quotes, following up on invoices, that's just dumb. You gotta have it automated where it's following up for you. And if someone's overdue it, automatically send them an email. If they haven't accepted a quote after two days, it's already in there in the email or texting them SMS and making sure they follow up. You don't want to be doing that manually. You can't be doing that manually at 500, 600 and beyond. So just start now at 200,000. Get the website, get the great CRM. Cause those are the tools that are required to get past the wilderness and past 500,000 efficiently, profitably and without losing your mind. You've got to have a CRM to stay organized. Now the last thing I want you to focus on is the fact that at 200,000 in revenue. So let's do 200,000 in revenue up until this point. So from 0 to 200,000 revenue, the type of structure stress you are going to have is going to be physical. All right? So at this stage you are working like your brain's out every single day, 8, 10, 12 hours out in the field, hot, cold, wet, rain, whatever it is, you're working very, very hard. So physically you're going to have the most stress in the business because like you're just worn down every single day, seven days a week, you're working hard in the business. Now everyone thinks that, that if I just grow the company and I get employees, everything is going to become better, I'm going to become less stressful, I can work on the business instead of in the business. It sounds so wonderful, but for some people they should actually stay at this size because they deal well with stress. That's physical. But the thing is this, when you get from go to that 200,000, in the wilderness of 200,000 to 500,000, this stress now becomes not physical stress, but financial stress. Why is there financial stress? Because all of a sudden you got payroll, you have more overhead, you got shop space, you have more trucks, insurance, liability, fuel. Everything goes up in terms of cost. And remember, the biggest thing that no one talks about is the fact that you as the owner are no longer a revenue producing employee. You are simply overhead at a cost to the business. Instead of producing what in the past was 8, 9, 10,000amonth in revenue, you now cost the business money to be there, potentially four or $5,000 or whatever you're taking out of the business as a salary. You cost the business money. There's a massive change. You went from producing 10,000 in revenue a month to costing the business $5,000 a month so you can pay for your personal expenses. That is crazy. That is why most businesses go from.

60 to 70% profit margins at this size. And in this wilderness, those profits shrink down to 10, 15, 20, 25, maybe 30% profit margins. Okay, so the stress you're gonna have now is financial. And the reason I say that is because do not think that just growing your business is somehow going to make your life better, less stressful, or it's gonna become easier. Do not put buying that logic. It's completely false. The type of stress will change, and stress does change, but just a different type of stress. Now you have the financial stress of trying to run a business that has a lot of overhead versus the physical stress of being out in the field every single day for very long periods of time, out in the elements. Just a different type of stress. And keep in mind, if you're going to go past 500,000, just know that stress just changes. It does not go away. And you, you might actually do better dealing with the physical stress instead of the financial, because it might just run you crazy. Dealing with one or two employees that make a bunch of mistakes and a couple trucks that constantly are breaking down. And that could literally just be so stressful that you should stay smaller. There is no pride in growing your business. If it's going to make the business run you and run you into the ground and your relationships and your family and your finances, it's not worth it. So that's why I like people to take the. This little rest stop. See if this is the size of business you want to stop at for a while, potentially get some cash in the bank so you can quickly grow to this level. And there'll be less financial stress if you have plenty of cash to deploy throughout this wilderness. And making that journey through the wilderness is something I do recommend you do quickly and hopefully in one year or even one spring rush. At Augusta Lawn Care. That's what we teach is try to get through this level, usually 18, 20,000amonth in revenue to 50, 60,000amonth in revenue. Try to do that in literally one month. 40, 45,000amonth in revenue. Try to get there in one spring rush. Because if you can do that, it eliminates this massive chunk of time where you can get disillusioned and lost I see people wandering around in this wilderness for years, 4, 5 years, at 300, 400,000 in revenue, and they're not making any more money than if they just went solo with one guy in the truck. And that can be very, very hard to deal with. And that's why I recommend speed through this stage, this wilderness of growth, using the techniques we talked about. And stay tuned, because I'm gonna make another video about what you gotta do to get from 500,000 all the way to a million.

Now, we've talked about a lot, and you probably already have a whole lot of notes about what you can do to get your business started. Grow it to $500,000. But now I'm gonna pause for a second and we're gonna talk about the three things you need to focus on. Cause you're mine might be spinning if you're just getting started. And like, what should I focus on? And you might be getting up to 500,000. Like, well, what should I focus on? Now I'm going to give you three things, because you might have 50 things written down, but there's only really three major things you need to focus on. When we Try to do 100 things in your business, typically nothing gets done if you can focus on one, two, or maybe three things. Core, most important principles and what we call rocks. The most important things in the business. If you can focus on those and get those accomplished, usually you'll see great results. So let's go ahead, sit back for a second. I'm going to talk about the three things you need to focus on to grow to 250,000. And then from that 250,000 to 500 and beyond. What do you need to focus on? Just three things to get past half a million. Let's go ahead and talk about that. Now.

One of the biggest issues I see with most home service business owners, whether it be landscaping, construction, cleaning, is the fact that they focus on so many different things in their business business that nothing gets done. And in reality, if they just focus on one or two key things in their business, it would dramatically change the course of their company. They'd grow much faster, they'd be much more profitable, and their life would stay in more balance. So today, I'm gonna tell you exactly which are the 1, 2, or 3 things you should be focused on in your business based upon what your revenue is. Because if you're doing under 500,000 in annual revenue, there are certain things I think you should focus on. And if you're doing above $500,000 in annual revenue. These are certain things I think you should focus on. Now I'm going to break it down to the three driving forces in the business and that is systems, KPIs key performance indicators, and lead generation. This could be marketing, sales, but lead generation, bringing in more leads. How are you going to do that? You need to have a strategy for each one of these and based upon your revenue, that is what you need to be focused on. And that thing excels exclusively, not what kind of trucks you have. And all these other little things that can distract us from your website and this and that. These are not the types of things that you want. To have 500 things on your plate, you need a singular focus. Okay, what's the one thing I got to work on? And then nail that, alright? That will dramatically change your business because most people try to do 500 things and in doing so get nothing done. So we're gonna talk about systems. The first thing we want to talk about when it comes to a system for a 0 to $500,000 business is their estimate process. Now you should have a process in place and a system in place for making sure that when an estimate comes in, when someone asks for a quote, that there is a process in place to make sure you get to their house efficiently, that you look at the property, you assess what needs to get done, you talk to the client, whatever it might be, have a process for. When you're at the property with the customer, what do you give them? What kind of literature do you give them? How do you wrap up the talk, the interaction? Do you take a video after that interaction for your crew? And then how do you get the estimate? Actually the proposal sent back via email or text message back to the customer in a timely manner. There needs to be an estimate process. The reason this is so important is because one of the things that we so oftentimes neglect is the fact that time is one of the most important things that our customers have. And they're willing to part with their money before they're willing to part with their time. And so if you're going to take five days to get to their property, another three days to send them the quote, and when they click accept another week to get them on the schedule for three weeks down the road, you're literally talking about weeks before you actually solve their problem. And they don't want to go find five contractors and ask for a bunch of estimates and call a bunch of people. They just, you just want someone to take care of their problem. And so you've gotta have an estimate process so you can efficiently and very quickly get to the client's property, assess what needs to get done, and then send them a proposal. And then when it's accepted, make sure that it's getting on the schedule as soon as possible. That is an estimate process. There needs to be certain systems in place to ensure that it's done efficiently. Now, the system that you need to implement if you're doing above 500,000 in annual revenue, is going to be P for P. Now, everyone always says you're trying to sell software. Here's the deal. We still don't make money on P4P. I lose money every single month on P4Psoftware.com I truly believe that pay per performance, if you're doing above $500,000 in annual revenue is the only thing you should be focused on right now. It is the only thing. It'll change your business. It completely changed the way I thought about my business, the way I thought about my employees, the way their interaction with me, and more importantly, the product profitability of the business dramatically improved. I have yet to ask anyone to ever ask me for a raise since the day that I instituted P4P out in the field. The reason for that is because the harder they work, the more money they make, the more skill and experience they get, the more money they make. P4P is the perfect meritocracy that you are trying to look for. And right now you're scrambling around trying to find entry level laborers at hourly rates. You're, you're trying to track their trucks, you're paranoid whether they're on their phone, whether or not they're working hard. P4P will solve these problems if you actually institute it and do everything inside of the system. All of that can be found@p4psoftware.com Now, I'm not gonna go above too far above 500,000 in annual revenue on landscapebusinesscourse.com and mbaforantrepreneur.com I'm gonna do a long video, probably 40 minutes long next week and go quite a bit further, further down the road in terms of what you'd be focusing on. But I know the vast majority of my audience here on YouTube are in these two categories. So now we're going to go ahead and look at KPIs. What KPI, or key performance indicator. What sort of data do you need.

To be focused on?

Because there's so much you can be focused on. There's hundreds of key indicators in your business and data and numbers that you can track. And everyone's like, you should focus on this and this and this. I'm gonna give you exactly what you need to focus on. First and foremost, you need to focus on close ratio. If you're doing 0 to 100 or, sorry, $500,000 in annual revenue, the only number you need to be tracking, in my opinion, is close ratio. Close ratio determines how fast you're going to grow. Close ratio determines how profitable you're going to be. You say, how is it possible that close ratio determines how profitable you're going to be? I can guarantee you if you raise prices and increase your profits, your close ratio will go down. I can guarantee you that if you have a 90, 95, 85% close ratio, which means that 80, 90% of your estimates are getting accepted, I can guarantee you you're leaving profit on the table. I can guarantee you that if you raise your prices 10, 15, 20% and dropped your close ratio down to 60 or 70%, you'd be dramatically more profitable in your business. Close ratio is simply the number of SS estimates that were accepted divided by the total number of estimates that were sent out to customers. You're gonna get a percentage there. And if you're under 50%, typically you're gonna be not growing as fast. If you're doing 60, 70, 80, 90% of your estimates being closed, in other words, being accepted by the customer guarantee, you're probably growing very quickly. So KPIs key performance indicators, there's hundreds of them, lots of them. If you listen to my channel, you've heard lots of them. But if you're doing under 500,000 in revenue, the only thing I care about is close ratio. By the way, it also tells you is a very good indicator of how good you are at selling. It also is somewhat indicative of how well your estimate process is ran. Because if your close ratio is way too low, the first place I'm looking at is the system of your estimate process intact. Because getting that estimate to the customer as quickly as possible, typically that's the contractor who gets the bid. Now, when we talk about KPIs for larger companies doing over half a million dollars in annual revenue, the one thing I want you to focus on is attrition. Attrition is not sexy. Attrition is like the defense on a football team. No one really cares about it, but it actually wins championships. Defense wins championships. Not sexy, not fun. We all want to talk about getting new customers, but what we don't want to talk about is attrition, and that is losing customers. Every single day, every single week, every single month. There's a percentage of your customers leaving because they're unsatisfied with the service, they're unsatisfied with your office and not answering the phone and your communication, unsatisfied with any part of what you're doing for your business, your professionalism of it, or potentially just the fact that they move away, they pass away. These are a lot of different things that lead to attrition. And in some industries, 20, 30, even 40% annual attrition of your recurring customers can easily happen. You need to track that number because ultimately, if you're building a recurring base of revenue is the deciding factor of how much you'll need to spend on marketing or how many leads you'll need to put in the top of the funnel just to keep your revenue the same. Cause I can guarantee you, if you're losing 20, 30% of your customers every year due to natural attrition, people move, people pass away, people sell their house, people quit service. If you're losing 20 or 30% of your customers, that means just to break even, even with the revenue that you did last year, you're going to have to get 20 to 30% of new customers coming in the door. If you can, half your attrition by increasing your communication, your professionalism, making sure your service is top notch. If you can increase or decrease your attrition, decrease the amount of people leaving by half, you could theoretically, in a matter of just several years, double your business just by making sure your attrition is lower. The number of people leaving every single single day, every single month, and every single year. Let me really quickly just write down here what this close, what these KPIs are so close. Ratio is number of estimates accepted so positive divided by total estimates. All right, over here we got attrition, which is going to be customers that have left, customers that have left, they went bye bye, they left your business, they're no longer recurring customer divided by total recurring customers. That's going to give you your percentage in any given day, week, month or year of customers that are leaving to attrition. Extremely important because the larger your business gets, that number starts to get inflated and inflated and all of a sudden you're wondering why you're not growing anymore and you're at 5, 6, 700,000 annual revenue. You've been there for five years. Why? Because 20, 30, 50% of your customers are leaving every single single year. And therefore you're just churning customers every single six months, 12 months, and you're never able to grow. Alright, let's talk a little lead gen. Making more customers. This is the offense, this is the thing that people like to talk about and that's why I put it last. Because this is what everyone wants to do. Like I want more customers, when in reality fixing these problems honestly a lot of times gets you more leads. Better word of mouth, faster estimate process, better close ratio. Getting your employees on track and making sure that they are professional and efficient throughout the day. They're not slacking off, taking naps, they're a good professional representation of your brand and making sure that you don't lose customers honestly fixes a lot of the lead gen issues. But because that's what everyone wants to talk about, let's talk about lead gen. The number one thing you can do if you're doing between 0 and 500,000 in annual revenue is getting a great website. A great website that is mobile friendly, fast to load, has great SEO search engine optimization. These are things that we talk about all the time@lawn carewebdesign.com I am completely biased because I have a web design firm and we do hundreds of lawn care and landscaping websites as well as homeservicewebdesign.com where we do other types of industries, contractors cleaning, garage doors, we do flooring companies, the whole nine yards. I know all about websites and search engine optimization and making your Google listing is dialed in. And when you get a website with us, I will literally give you a tutorial on how to make sure your Google listing is optimized and make sure it's running well and getting your reviews, all of these things are extremely important, especially at this level now when you get into past 500,000 in annual revenue because everyone's gonna say I'm biased on this one, let's move along because I actually think this next one is just as if not more important, especially as your business is growing and that is upselling, that is how do I take my warm customers that customers that have already done business with me either in the form of asking for a quote and they maybe they denied it or I actually sold them on recurring services or a one time project. But now I'm going to upsell them into a different type of service. I'm going to cross sell them into a different type of service. These are the hidden gems of a $500,000 business. Because if I can just take all my existing customers and upsell them on 20% more revenue by giving them a different service or potentially a different type of package that's a little bit bigger. If I can do that, I can literally add $100,000 in revenue. And by the way, that is the most profitable revenue usually is adding to your existing customer base, adding revenue there. But if I can go from 500,000 to 600,000, I can literally do that by just adding 20% to the annual value of each customer. And I can do that through upselling. How do you do that? You stay in contact with your customers. This is something that Copilot we are making sure we have here in the next couple months. And that's the ability to be able to send out one click estimate emails. When you send an email out to a customer, they click on one button and they are able to initiate the process of asking for a quote. They don't have to respond back to you, they don't have to call you, they don't have to fill out a form. This can all be done. And I don't care if you use Copilot, by the way, just upsell people. Keep your customers warm. Send them a monthly newsletter, talk to your customers, make sure that you are staying in touch with them. So that way when there is leaves on the ground, you can send them an email and they ask for a quote. These are the type of things that you can absolutely do. And this is why in home service it's so beautiful, is because if someone asks for one service, there's a really good chance that they need other services done. Because if they're the type of person that has their lawn mowed, there's a really good chance they're not going to be installing mulch by themselves. There's a really good chance that they're not going to pressure wash their driveway. They're the type of person that has someone else and they hire someone else to do it. And so that's your opportunity to upsell customers. You can do this at all stages and size of business. But at this size, it starts to really move the needle when you start getting above 500,000 because you move tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of revenue without getting any new customers. Just upselling the existing customer database that you have that are already warm or hot. Leads, people who've already contacted already raised their hand and said, I need service at some point, even if they rejected your offer, that's fine. Or potentially even people you've done work for, these are the best leads. Stop neglecting them, stop focusing on the next shiny thing, getting more leads and Facebook ads and Google Ads. I guarantee you a website and upselling will absolutely demolish any other lead gen, Facebook, Google Ads, whatever it is. You have a great website and then you make sure you upsell the customers inside your database. You will absolutely have a fantastic business.

All right, so now you've grown your business past $500,000 in annual revenue, but a lot of people are like, well, how much profit am I making? Because this is something that changes as your business grows. Your profit margin goes down, but then it starts to turn around and go back up because of economies of scale. So let's talk about what your expected profit margins are going to be as you grow this business from zero to a million dollars in annual revenue. Now if you enjoy this deeper content about profit margins and really deep content that isn't necessarily great for YouTube, I really recommend check out landscape businesscourse.com I have a whole bunch of videos in there walking you through. Exactly. You can see all my trucks, my equipment. You actually have a shop tour as well as every single month. I add more content on a regular basis about things that are happening in the current day and exactly what you need to be doing to adapt and take advantage of things like recessions and housing markets and what is happening in our economy. That's what we talk about. Landscapebusinesscourse.com so go check it out. Oh, by the way, Landscape Summit, the recordings are on there and you get to hear from people like Corey Ballard who has a 20 million plus dollar business and it's phenomenal content like over 30, 40 hours worth of just the recordings from Summit are tremendous. So check out landscapebusinesscourse.com if you like that deeper content. Until then, watch this video about profit margins and what you can expect as the business grows in terms of profit margins. And remember, profit is what percentage of your total revenue is left over after all your expenses are paid. Let's go ahead and roll the tape.

I'm gonna be doing some demonstrations here.

On the whiteboard and try to explain a concept that I actually teach during our Augusta lawn care franchise training program. So it's usually three days.

One of the first things we do.

Is talk about this and that is the stages of growth. Alright? So to just demonstrate today, going to draw this out on a graph here on the whiteboard and kind of show you how you should be thinking about your business over the long term.

And the reason I really want to.

Talk about this today is because so many lawn care business owners get unhappy with where their business is at, they get frustrated by some of the things that they're struggling with. And I'm going to explain exactly why that is today. Now, I'm not going to spend two hours like we do during franchisee training, going through each stage, but I'm going to kind of briefly go through each stage and then explain why people get discouraged along the way.

Alright, so there's gonna be five different.

Stages of growth in a lawn care business. And I know some people might disagree with, you know exactly how I am breaking these up in terms of the numbers. Actually let me just make this a.

Little bit bigger.

So we take this across the whole board.

Here you go, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four and stage five.

Alright, so stage number one here on the bottom. Stage number one is really going to be from zero to 100,000 in revenue. That's going to be this first range. And during this stage of business, this is usually going to be you solo routing.

Alright, so you by yourself, solo entrepreneur.

Out in the truck by yourself, 0 to 100,000 revenue. Pretty easy to do 100,000 revenue by yourself.

You're doing all the work, all the.

Invoicing, all, everything basically.

Alright, next stage is going to be 100,000 to 200,000.

And some people like, why would you even make this a separate phase?

It really is a different part stage.

Of the business because now you're going to get a helper. Usually it's part of the timer, sometimes.

Is a full timer, but you're going.

To be getting help at this stage. It's very difficult to do $200,000 by yourself in revenue without completely losing your marbles during the spring rush. So that's the next stage.

The next stage we talked about is 200,000 to 500,000. In this phase, usually the owner is.

Still in the field to some degree.

But not as much.

They're focusing on estimates, they're on, focused, focusing on really growing the business now. And they have multiple employees.

And just for the sake of the.

Video, I'm gonna make these all a little bit bigger. Bear with me for a moment here. Alright, so we got 0 to 100k, then we got 100k to 200k, then we got 200k down to 500k.

Is making sense for everyone.

Alright, so these are the different stages.

Next stage is 500,000 in revenue. Again we're talking about annual revenue to 1 million in revenue. All right, that's the next stage. It's a fourth stage of growth. The next stage of growth is 1 million plus. Alright? So at each of these phases, when we talk about with the franchisees at.

Augusta Lawn Care, we talk about some.

Of the problems you're going to face.

At each one of these stages.

And we talk about the different questions and struggles and doubts and fears you have at every one of these stages, financially, in terms of employees, et cetera. So for example, out here at 0 to 100,000, you know, really a lot of people get, they just get so.

Enamored by the fact they're getting customers.

And all this and they forget that they're still in stage one. They're still in the first inning of.

A very long game. And, and the great thing about being.

In the first inning of a long game is if you get behind, you have a lot of time to make up. If you mess stuff up. If you don't know you're estimating exactly right. If you don't know how to advertise exactly right, you have a long time to figure those things out.

The other thing is, if you can.

Really figure out systems and procedures here.

It'S going to set you up for success down the road. But don't get so enamored by your.

5 run lead in the first inning. Realize that that could be taken away from you. If you continue to grow and you don't have systems and procedures and you're not scaling the business correctly, you could lose that lead.

So don't get enamored by your customer base. At this level, it's nothing to talk about.

You're not running a business, you own a job. Alright, then we go into this next phase.

During this phase is really where a.

Lot of people get excited because they're making more profit.

A lot of times people change their.

Standard of living during this stage stage.

Because there is a high profit margin.

We're going to talk about that in a second.

And you're having a helper.

So now you get that feeling of being an employer, the boss, the boss man.

A lot of pride of ownership starts.

To begin in this phase and then you get really excited here because now.

You'Re really running a business. 200 to $500,000 in revenue is an actual business. You're doing less and less out in.

The field, maybe once in a blue.

Moon, but not very much.

And you are really focusing on finding people, doing marketing, creating systems. If your business is going to pass this stage right, if you're going to stay at this stage for the rest of your business life, you're going to probably be in the field more, you're.

Not going to focus in systems as.

Much because you can still touch almost everything. And really at this point, any employee is kind of like the extension of.

You, like an octopus, many, many arms, but everything leads back to the octopus.

And you are the octopus in this scenario and you have arms called employees.

But everything kind of leads back to.

You at this stage.

If you stay here, you create systems.

And procedures, you can always get to the next stage of growth without correct systems, without correct procedures, you're never going to be able to get to the next level of growth. And certainly you're not going to get past $1 million in annual revenue without systems and procedures.

Now, today is not necessarily about the stages of the growth, because I talk.

About in depth in terms of the podcast, the different struggles that we face at each point. You know, the different scenarios where, for example, during this phase, the 200 to.

500,000 in revenue, that's when people get.

Really, really discouraged with their employees.

And during this phase is when they.

A lot of times have turnover, they.

Have a lot of callbacks, they have.

Things breaking on job sites and people get very, very discouraged and very easy to retreat back in the stages of growth cycle. And so whether you look at YouTubers or people in your local market, landscapers.

That have built a business have three.

Four, five employees, two, three, four trucks.

And then all of a sudden they retreat back to this stage and they're.

Like, you know what, I'm just gonna.

Go solo, maybe have a helper occasionally.

I'm gonna just cut out all these employees that waste my life and are horrible quality and they can never take care of the customer and they're always breaking things.

That is the person that goes from.

This stage three into stage two. So stage one is here two, three, four and five.

And for the person that retreats in their business, they go from having employees.

Having multiple trucks back into stage two.

And I'm going to show why that happens.

That's really the whole reason of this video, is to explain why people retreat from stage three to stage two. I'm going to explain it here.

So on this side of the graph.

This is going to be profit.

Profit margin as a percentage.

All right, As a percentage. All right, so down here would be 0,0%. Then let's say this is 25% and this is 50%, this is 75%, this.

Is 100% profit margin.

Alright, so let's say, for example, someone made $20.

If they were 100% profit margin, that.

Means $20 would go into their pocket, there'd be no expenses. Essentially 75% profit margin means it would mean that $15 would go into their pocket at the end of the day after all expenses are paid for. So what happens many times is that when someone is starting solo zero this.

Stage one, they have high profit margin.

Due to the fact that they don't have employees, they don't have multiple trucks, they don't do even have to spend a lot of marketing and advertising simply.

Due to the fact that $100,000 in.

Revenue, you could probably do some door hangers, you could probably do a bunch.

Of word of mouth, talk to a.

Lot of your friends and get 100 grand in revenue or up to it in that range.

So at that stage you're very, very profitable. Many times 75% is not abnormal by the time you just pay for your.

Truck, your fuel, some maybe a little bit of insurance.

A lot of people in this state don't even get insurance, unfortunately. But let's just say 75%, that's a.

Profit margin that people will get because they're so small.

They don't have employees, they don't have.

Overhead, they don't have an office, they.

Don'T have anything in terms of overhead. It's just like them, their time and.

They'Re not paying themselves a salary.

So very high profit margin. The only this 25% that's coming out.

Is like fuel, cost of equipment, things like that.

Very, very minimal. Now in this stage second, stage two, they get a helper. And so they actually start having some.

Overhead because they have an employee, they have payroll expenses. And so the margin begins to slip a little bit, you know, still, you.

Know, above probably 50% margin in terms of profit margin here. But as the business is growing, their.

Profit margin is going down due to the fact that they have employees, another truck.

Now maybe you have to get a.

Storage facility to keep those trucks.

Maybe they have to, you know, you're.

Paying L and I and insurance and.

You get a bond at the state. All these things cost money.

You got payroll taxes and all the rest of it.

Now this is where it really gets.

Interesting is because now as you go.

From having one helper, maybe full time, now you dip down to where you're.

Now you have three or four employees.

This is where, this is why people retreat back in time. And that is when we go from.

Stage two to stage three right here.

That's when we really hit a really.

Deep decline in percentage of profit margin.

Now, I know there's gonna be a Ton of people out there saying, I.

Run $400,000 in annual revenue and I'm taking home $200,000 in profit.

Kudos to you, great job.

You figured out how to systematize at that level.

I'm talking about in generalities. 90% of the landscapers I talk to.

This is the graph that they're going to follow.

Okay, so here we are, we're going from stage two to stage three. Now we have a few employees, maybe three or four trucks, maybe five trucks.

Depending on your market, what your billing rate is.

And now you can see the profit margin is like 10, 15%, maybe even less.

And again, this is a range, obviously.

As we go down into here, it's probably more like something like this in.

Terms of what you could be at.

And what that means is that you might be at 5% profit margin during this stage.

If you're growing quickly, you have a bunch of employees, maybe you don't feel.

Like if they're not on P4P and.

They are draining the clock, they are breaking things, they're not being responsible.

So during this phase, it's very, very hard for a lot of small business owners because we look back and we're like, look, I was making half as much money money.

So if we go from here and.

Go back, I'm making half as much money right here. But look at my profit is significantly more than when my business is twice as big because now my profit margin is so low. So in this case, maybe this person is doing 300,000 in revenue. But if they have a 10% net profit margin, like money in the bank.

At the end of the day they're.

Only going to be taking $30,000 home. Whereas at $150,000 in annual revenue, you know, half of that 150,000, if they were doing 50% profit margin, they were taking $75,000 home. So they're actually making less money, take home profit when the business is smaller than when it gets bigger. And the reason for that is because at this point of the business, stage.

Two to stage three is when your expenses, the rate at which your expenses.

Go up is greater than the rate at which your income goes up. Alright? Because up here you have such high profit margins.

No employees, no storage costs, no trucks.

Little insurance on those trucks, not as much fuel expense, not as many damages for these employees. All the things that go along with having employees.

It's very, very expensive to have employees if you pay them.

A third of all your revenue goes.

To your employees and wages.

You might as well, tack on another.

20 in all the related expenses like payroll taxes and uniforms and things that they break and all the rest of it.

So that begins to happen and this.

Is where people get discouraged.

This is where landscapers begin to retreat.

You know, we've all heard of people.

On YouTube having three or four employees.

Five, six employees, maybe a few trucks.

Making 200 to 500,000 revenue and then.

Retreating back to this point.

Now, do I think that's wrong? No. Like for some people, this is where they should be at. They should make the 150,000 revenue, have a helper take home 70, 80 grand.

A year for themselves.

And that's a great little business, you.

Know, it's a great little way to stay out in the field.

You're not going to ever be able to manage a team. You're not going to ever be able.

To go on a vacation for two weeks and still make money. That's never going to be possible in this state.

So this is what I push the.

Franchisees to do when we do training.

Is get through this stage three and four, alright? This is the stage where it starts to tick back up.

Okay, and maybe I did that a little too steep. Let me just fix that real quick. I want to actually make this scale so you guys can see this.

I look at this in my mind.

When I am talking to people, whether it be franchisees or I talk to.

People that listen to the podcast. This is the graph I'm always looking at in my mind when they're telling me where they are at in their.

Growth and in their revenue.

Because this is what happens. As you begin to grow past 500,000.

In revenue, you start to see a.

Slight increase in your profit margin. What is that due to? Why is that? There's this something called economies of scale, alright? So as you begin to grow the.

Business past half a million in revenue, you begin to get economies of scale. What that means is now you get.

Discounts for the number of trucks that you have for insurance. Now all of your trucks are the same and your guys are more efficient. Now you get more equipment.

That is all the same.

The crews, they begin to learn faster.

There's economies of scale as you grow.

Because now when you rent out a shop for $500 a month, you have 10 trucks there essentially paying $50 per.

Month per truck instead of when you.

Had two trucks and equilibrates to $250.

Per truck for that rented land.

There's economies of scale as you begin.

To grow and there's inherent efficiencies as you grow because route density increases. If you're doing lawn care, landscaping.

Other economies of scale that happen is as you get more trucks, you get more word of mouth, you get people.

Seeing your trucks, you don't have to spend as much on marketing.

These are things that happen after you get through stage three, alright? So in stage four, maybe you're at 15% margin, at stage five, maybe you're.

At 17 or 18% margin and this.

Continues to go up. That's why you talk to someone that does 4 or 5 million revenue and they can have a 25% margin. That's very difficult to, to do in this scenario down here, many times they might be at 30 or 35% because they've continued far along enough on this graph to actually have inherent economies of scale. And again, this is generalities, right? Like some people are at a million plus and still at 5% because they.

Just have not created systems. And if you don't create systems in.

Your business, what's going to happen is you're not going to get the economies of scales bump. And this is what's going to happen. You're going to run a low margin business and you're, you're just gonna have to keep growing and growing and growing to make even a small profit. And that is the business that has.

No economies of scale.

And economies of scale comes with size and systems. In order to get this bump that happens after stage three, you have to.

Have economies of scale, I'm sorry, you.

Have to have systems and procedures to create the economy, the economies of scale.

So efficiencies.

And systems, alright? This is what leads to economies of scale.

So this is really where I see.

Like for example, the franchise, listening to.

This podcast, all the training that we.

Give, this is the point at which.

I see the people who start to listen to what we talk about and.

Create systems, create project management videos, have P4P.

All of those things can kind of get hidden in this space. When you're growing because you have a.

Higher profit margin, there's a lot of waste.

But as you go here, you start.

Getting larger in size.

This is where it determines whether or not you've created those systems or if you're going to bumble along at a low profit margin. Business past a million in revenue and always, you know, if you make a.

Million dollars in revenue but you're at.

5% net profit, take home pay, you're looking at 50 grand in the bank.

At the end of the day, at.

The end of a year and running A million dollar business running probably 8, 10 crews, lot of work. And you're still gonna be running a very low margin business that's very susceptible.

To recessions, very susceptible to people leaving, susceptible to market changes.

So this is what I want you.

To keep in mind as you're growing your business. Because in my mind, you want to be over here in your business where there's economies of scale, you have systems.

In place and when you have those.

Things, you can afford to go out on a vacation and the business still.

Run and it's sustainable. Like going on vacation does not mean that you're weak.

It means that you've built systems to.

Be able to withhold and keep the business supported. Without you.

That's going to be a better for your employees, can be better for your customers. If not everything is bottlenecked as you as the owner. This is where in my mind you want to be. Most people when they start their business.

Here at stage one, they have the.

Ambition to get here, but what happens.

Is their net profit margin dips and they get discouraged here because they're actually making less than they did the year before.

And yet they're working twice as hard.

They're cleaning up after employees, they damage cases and callbacks and people making complaints.

Because of those employees and they've met.

Many times, will retreat backwards and that's okay. Maybe this is where you need to be.

In my mind though, most of those people need a push, push through that stage.

And when we talk about Augusta Lawn Care, we talk about these stages being the stages where you want to speed through them, you want to get through them as fast as possible, you want.

To save your cash in this phase. So when you hit these phases, you.

Can advertise and market create the systems.

To get through them quickly.

Because once you're on this side, you can afford a manager, you can afford.

To get someone to do the sales, the estimate and create these systems and economies of scale.

You have enough trucks and redundancy built.

Into your business model to where it.

Becomes boring to run the business. That is the goal and that is the ambition behind creating systems. How do we make this business boring where like anyone can do it, anyone can mow the lawn, anyone can do.

An estimate, anyone can run the business.

And that is created through systems and.

Efficiencies and, and getting a certain size.

Where you can afford management. Alright, so these are some things to think about. Again, these are a lot of generalities.

I know maybe you don't disagree with this. The rate at which this declines or something like that.

But this is just general information and things that. The concept that I want you to get is that as you begin to.

Grow into stage three in the 200 to 500,000 revenue, your profit margin dramatically decreases because your expenses are increasing.

And as you begin to grow the.

Business, if you don't change, you're going.

To run a low margin business for the rest of your life or you're going to retreat back into stage two.

Now, you might be asking, well, profit margin is fine, Mike, but I want to know exactly how much money I can take home. What can I actually take out of the business and put in my personal bank account? Well, let's go ahead and talk about that because that's also going to change as your business grows based upon when you need employees and when your overhead is expanding. So let's talk about how much money you can expect as you grow this business from zero to a million. Exactly how much you should expect to take out of the business and use for your personal expenses.

Today, I want to share some numbers because a lot of times I and anyone else is doing, you know, they're doing justice to their community by not really sharing these numbers. But I want to give you a benchmark because I read all my comments and someone has commented recently asking, hey, I want to know, like, am I making enough compared to everyone else when it comes to my size of business? So I'm going to talk about, I'm going to give you actual numbers and percentages of what you should be taking home for yourself personally. However, I'm also going to be giving some caveats to that in terms of why these numbers might not be reflected in your numbers. So let's just break it down real quick. I'm going to do four different stages of growth. So revenue. This is going to be gross revenue. And we're going to do it at 100, $100,000 per year in revenue. We're gonna do $300,000 in annual revenue. We're gonna do $500,000 annual revenue, and we're gonna do a $1 million lawn care or landscaping business. Okay? So first of all, we gotta figure out direct labor. Okay? So this is gonna be the direct labor out in the field.

Okay?

So this is not necessarily going to be like if you have officer, whatever it might be, but this is direct labor. So revenue at a $100,000 revenue business, direct labor is zero because you can make $100,000 in revenue by yourself. And if anyone tells you you need employees to get to that one of two things is happening. A, you're not being very efficient with your time and you're spending most of your day doing admin work and estimates. But you can do $100,000 worth of labor at revenue easily by yourself. And that's the first option. Either A, you're inefficient or B, you're just not charging enough. Cause as a solo operator, you should be charging a premium and you should be harvesting your customers, which means you are letting go of the ones that you don't want. You're raising prices consistently each year and you are charging a premium price. Now the next thing I'm gonna show is what everyone wants to know and that's like net take home pay. Okay? Now everyone take home pay. Everyone is going to say, or some people have said, this is your profit, this is your net profit, this is not your net take home. Okay, well what I'm assuming here is that we're going to take whatever profits are from the business and you're going to take them home and you're going to live happily ever after, okay? So yes, I agree that the things I'm going to talk about right here are considered profit margins. But I'm also assuming that you're going to take those profits and take them home. Okay? Now if you're talking about what your salary should be, you're not going to take all of the profits from the business. Okay? You might go 20% lower than these numbers in order to keep cash in the business as it grows. There's enough cash reserves, okay, alright, so for $100,000 revenue business, zero direct labor, because we're by ourselves, we're solo operators, I believe that someone should be able to take home in their bank account $60,000. This is a 60% implication, 60% profit margin. So 60% of their revenue became take home pay, or again profit. Now if you wanted to say, okay, well this is profit of the business and I'm going to leave 10,000 in the business just for cash reserves. Well then 50,000 would be what you'd actually take home. But I'm just going to assume this for the sake of easy numbers. Now all of the numbers I share today, I'm implying a couple things, okay? Because you will not make $60,000 take home pay your first year of doing $100,000 in revenue. It's very rare. If you actually are taking it from the perspective of you having to buy the truck that first year. You have to buy equipment, you have to, you know, license your business and get insurance and all the other things that start starting off the business, you're not going to probably get 60% profit, 60% take home pain, you're not going to. So what I'm implying here is twofold. One is that these numbers is after one year of growing less than 10%, cause I've always said growth sucks cash. So if I go from 0 to 100,000 in revenue.

That'S a bit of growth. That means that it's gonna suck some of this cash out of the system.

So if I'm going from 100,000 to $300,000, like tripling my business in a year, that growth is going to suck cash. And you're not going to hit the amount I'm about to share now for the $300,000 marker. These numbers that I'm sharing here, these take home pays, these profit margins are going to assume that you have now kind of not plateaued, but you've stopped massive growth and you've taken one year where you've grown less than 10%. And a lot of times you go, I'm not profitable, I'm not profitable. And I ask them what their business is doing in terms of revenue and they're like, well, I doubled last year, I tripled the year before that, and now we're on track for a million. We did 500,000 last year. That's a massive amount of growth. You're gonna suck up all the cash in the business, you're not gonna have a lot of take home pay. So you can slow down your growth, stop marketing, stop buying more trucks, you raise your prices, increase margins and stabilize the financials of the business. And when you get. That's why I always have year to three to five. When people start doing that, they stop growing so fast, usually they start actually focusing on profitability. That's where this is at. Okay? This is not first year. I do $300,000 and take home a bunch of money. That's not what's happening here on this board. This is after one year where you've grown less than 10% than the year prior. That's when you start making money in the lawn care business. Because to quench your growth, usually what you're doing is raising prices, increasing margin, not buying as much stuff because you're not growing as much. That's when you start making money. And I'm also assuming that your marketing spend is under 1%, so you're basically not spending any money on marketing. Most of your leads are coming from your website and they're coming from your just word of mouth, people that know your customers, they talk to them or you're upselling.

Right.

So there's not much marketing happening at this stage, what I'm showing today. So just don't expect. The reason I'm saying this, don't expect to build $100,000 business this coming year. And you're like, I'm gonna start a business this spring, I'm gonna do 100,000 revenue. Great. You're probably not gonna have $60,000 profit. Cause you're gonna go buy a truck, which right now, good luck trying to find a truck for under 20 grand. And then your equipment, which you're gonna have to wait three months and you're gonna pay 10 grand, 20, 30% more than you did last year.

Year.

So trust me, you're not going to make $100,000 business this coming year, including all your equipment expense, all your setup costs, all your insurance and come up with this. This implies that last year I maybe did $95,000 in revenue, this year I did $100,000. And that's why this is possible. Alright, second stage of the business, $300,000 in revenue. I am going to assume that $100,000 is going to be paid out in the form of direct labor. So that's basically 33% of my revenue went to labor. So again, this is the ratio. You always want to know, we've talked about this before, what percentage of your revenue is going out the door to labor? So in this case it's 33%. This is usually going to be like two and a half employees. So during peak season you'll probably have three, maybe four employees. And then during the winter, maybe go down to one or by yourself. So you can actually get as high as probably four employees using this model here during peak season and still be inside this $100,000 range. Now again, I'm being pretty conservative here. I think you're going to take around 70 to 75,000. Let's do $75,000. Take home pay. Okay? I've already changed my numbers up on this. Okay, so that's going to be 20, 25%. Okay. So 25% of my revenue is what I'm going to consider. I take home pay and again, that's profit. You could say then I'm going to leave 15,000 into the business and take home 60,000. That's fine. But for the sake of the example, this is a profit, alright? 25% profit margin on the business, alright. At $500,000. I believe that you should probably be paying about $200,000 direct labor. This is usually because you have now got out of the daily operations in the field. You are now doing estimates, you're doing admin work, hiring, training people. So therefore this number actually will go up. Okay.

I've talked about this bell curve before and you're gonna see what happens. It's very interesting here. But at 500,000 annual revenue, again, maybe last year I did 4A80. This started 500 and I didn't grow very much. Why? Because I raised prices, I didn't buy more trucks. I'm starting to actually like really harvest the business. Therefore I'm going to probably make right around let's say 500,000. Let's do 80,000. Okay. I'm already off my notes because I make changes like that. So again, at this stage of business, $80,000, if we do the math on that, that's 8. That's about a 20, 16%. I want to say 5. Yeah, it's around 16% profit margin. Now this is why I always talk about this wall that people get in their lawn care business. When they hit 300,000 and they start going towards 500,000, a lot of times they'll usually quit is because you don't make more profit. You literally made like $5,000 more in profit in this example, your profit margin sank almost in half. And the reason for that is because at this stage of business, you've stepped out of the field and you're now doing estimates and admin work. And now you usually get an office person or you get a calling service. Like there's extra expense when you do that. Now our direct labor is actually 40% of our revenue and double, double what we did at 300,000 in revenue. Because we stepped out of the, the daily out in the field. And now we're not actually producing revenue as an owner, therefore our margin slips dramatically.

This is why so many people retreat back to doing 300,000 in revenue. Right. When you're doing 30 to 40,000amonth in revenue, that's easier than trying to go to 50 because 500,000 in annual revenue is very difficult to get to. Is that barrier of getting past that sound barrier of getting past you being in the field doing the work. And now you're actually working on the business, doing sales, et cetera. Alright, at a million dollars in revenue. Now this is the interesting part and again, this is, I've talked about this before, this whole bell curve. Now you're gonna spend $350,000 in direct labor. And again, I'm assuming kind of a nice blend of some lawn care and some landscaping. If you're doing, like, hardscaping and construction work, your direct labor is going to be lower because you're going to have this massive cost of goods sold, like the material cost. So it'll inflict your revenue. So $1 million in revenue, though. $350,000 in direct labor, and then again, that's 35%. You're like, well, why did it go back down? Because now we're achieving economies of scale. All right, so here we're at 33%. One third of our revenue was being spent towards labor. Then it went up because we got out of the field and started doing estimates and office work and all the rest of it had to hire more people to get the work done. So we actually went up to 40%, but it goes back down to 35% because we start achieving economies of scale. At a million dollars, well, really past 500,000, up to a million, we start achieving economies of scale, which means now we can get more and more employees with less trucks we don't need. The percentage of our revenue going out the door to our insurance is actually lower compared to when we had less employees. It's actually lower. When we look at our shop expense that we paid $500 for per month is the same shop that we're still at a million, just more trucks on it. So there's so much more economies of scale and you get much more efficient, typically. So 35% direct labor. Now, at this size business, the first year that you again, are kind of harvesting on the business, I believe conservatively you can do 160k. So that's going to be again, that same 16% profit margin. Not great, but good. I'm not going to complain. Making 160k a year, that's not bad. 16% margin. This is the first year, though. This is the beautiful thing about when you pass a million dollars in revenue and you just really start honing in the business. You start raising prices, start tweaking things, adjusting it, and you're not growing the business bunch, right? So, like, our local office hasn't really grown for the past few years, but every year we're tweaking everything to where the now it's very, very profitable. So again, I'm assuming at a million dollars in revenue that last year I did maybe I did like 940,000. Well, this started in a million, so I didn't grow a ton. I probably Literally only grew in revenue because I raised my prices. Literally probably didn't get any more customers, no more jobs, no more budgeted hours that owe a complete. I literally probably just raised my prices to achieve going from 940 to 1 million. That's the year I'm looking at. So if you are going from 500,000 last year to a million dollars this year, you will probably not have $160,000 in your pocket at the end of that year. You probably won't because growth sucks. Cash. To go from 500,000 to a million, you're gonna need three or four more trucks or you're gonna need five or six more employees. You'll probably need a different shop. All of those things are going to be taken out of what would otherwise be going in your pocket. So I'm always amazed how people complain or not complain. They're concerned or anxious by the fact that they're not making profit, but yet they tripled their business last year. Growth sucks cash. These numbers are implying that you're not growing and that you're growing below 10% year over year, which is usually simply because of price increases. So at this point though, this is what I want to make. Kind of a caveat to this would be, let me make a different marker color. This would be the first year of slowing down growth. So maybe year one, you did 200, then you did 500,000. Year three, like I'm going to a million, like I'm really going for this. Great, but you're not going to make 160,000 profit now. The year after that you're like, you know what, I'm going to raise prices. I'm not going to do any advertising. I'm just going to take, take what comes through my website and through my word of mouth and upsell my existing customers and I'm gonna make probably just over a million. Just right around a million bucks. I don't need top line revenue to grow. I just want profit. I want money in the bank. That year you're gonna do 160k. Now what's interesting is in the second year without raising your revenue a whole bunch, again, less than 10% a year is when I see the most profits. Being in a business, I'm gonna assume that this person's probably gonna make 200k and that is the 20% that we all strive for. If you can do a 20% margin business, take home pay after all expenses on a million dollar company, that's great. That's a fantastic lawn care landscape business. It's running beautifully. At this point is when you're gonna start really considering, well, if I can in year three make it even a little bit more profitable, year third, third year I can do. If I can get to 250 and make it 25% profitable, but I don't want to actually work at the business at all. I'm going to hire a general manager, I'm going to give them 60k and I'm happy to make 190k but not have to be there every day, not do the hiring, not do anything. The admin, the office, all of that can be done by somebody else. That's where the business gets interesting. But again, it takes patience. And if you last year grew by more than 10%, you can almost guarantee yourself that that level of growth you had is sucking cash until you're less than 10% year over year growth, maybe 15%. But unless you're growing below 15, 10%, that growth is changing your bottom line because you're requiring to buy more assets, buy more trucks, hire more people, advertise more. And so until you actually have a year where you're like, look, I'm not gonna grow top line revenue because that's usually an ego metric. Let's just be honest. More trucks, more equipment, bigger shop, more employees. How many employees do you have? How many trucks do you have? Once you get over that ego stat and you realize all that really matters is how much I take home. And I'm gonna take this year and I'm not gonna go from 500 to a million. That's gonna take a huge amount of cash, by the way. Instead of doing that, I'm gonna take one year, I'm gonna raise my prices. I'm not going to spend a bunch of marketing. I'm going to try to solidify the team that I do have.

On my crew so that they can become more solid and there's not this massive churn and I'm hiring people and there's chaos because people are making mistakes. I'm going to take it easy, raise prices, make it really profitable, and then I'm going to jump into the next year potentially making that big jump to a million. So I really believe that sometimes you want to stay your growth. If you're starting to feel wiped out, you're starting to feel tired, if you are starting to feel frustrated, look at what you grew year over year. And a lot of times it's 50, 60, 100, double 200% what last year's revenue was. And that creates Chaos. I've always said growth creates chaos. Growth sucks cash. But once you stabilize your business, you stop growing dramatically and you're really starting to focus on profitability. And less than 10% year over, over your growth. That's when massive profits are available in this industry because of the recurring ability, the recurability of lawn care and the fact that I think there's a great, great market and economy right now for landscaping. If you can find people and you might be willing to take a hit down here, just to give back to your team, whether it be in health Benefits or doing P4P so they can make more money, that is again another option to retain your team. Hope that was helpful. I know usually people say, oh, I'm not gonna give an exact number, I'll maybe give some percentages. But I wanted to give actual numbers from what your revenues are to what you should be taking home. And yes, these numbers get really good as the company has grown, scaled, you have a team in place and there is less growth. Less growth is going to mean more profit.

Now throughout this entire comprehensive review and tutorial of growing your business from zero to a million dollars in annual revenue, you've heard one thing come up several times and it is your website. I truly believe that having a great website is the most important thing you can do for your business in this century. Like being a great brand and having great logo and colors is fine and having great trucks and all the rest of it. But when you actually go into the online space where there's hundreds of people that are looking at your website every single day, and that's how people vet you. If you want to have a premium product with premium pricing, you better be sure you have a website looks good, that is mobile responsive, they can look at on a mobile device. They don't have to like pinch in and they can push a button and call you, they can submit an estimate request form, it all flows really well and looks really professional. Guarantee you you can charge five $10 more per hour just by having a great website. And I really recommend lawn careweb design.com we build your site from scratch, completely custom. And I have seen massive results for a lot of our businesses that we have done this for. It usually takes like six to eight weeks. We can build the whole site and it's only $399 a month. Now it's a subscription, which means you don't have to pay 5 or $10,000 to get it built. It's just you start paying every single month and if you're ever unhappy, there's no contract you can cancel anytime. But I truly believe that the search engine optimization where you can rank well in Google is going to get you more customers. And furthermore, if you're not happy, you can leave and there's no penalty. And you can keep your domain name. Like if you have mikeandys.com or your domain mike andes lawn care.com you keep the domain name if you don't aren't happy with the service. But time and time again we have seen customers use lawncarewebdesign.com and double triple their business very quickly and rank high on Google to get more customers. So I highly recommend check out lawn careweb design.com but I just wanted to say thank you and congratulations for getting to the entire marathon. If you watch the whole thing through, you deserve something. You deserve a prize. You deserve something. And I really hope that this is helpful for you. If it was, check out mikeandys.com.

Is another free course you'll probably enjoy and it's gonna go through the entire process of how you can use Pay for performance to be able to train your guys and use your team members as make them more productive, pay them more. I think it'll be really helpful for you. Also go to mikegandy.com to see all different resources that we offer, including tax prep and making sure that your payroll is done correctly. We have a lot of services for you as small business owners in the landscaping industry to be successful. I look forward to seeing you there.

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

Sa.