Confessions of a Landscaper

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you might be watching or listening to the landscape business course podcast and you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook as well. But today we are going to be talking about the confessions of a landscaper. In fact a landscape business owner. And one of those confessions are coming from me. And I'm going to talk about three confessions of a lawn care business and landscape business owner and the three headaches. The things we don't talk about very much. Three things that we hate. The things that we have to deal with on a day to day basis. That is not fun, that is not to be advertised as something. If I was wanting to get someone to start a small business or start a landscaping business, these are not the things I would tell them about. But this is just the facts. Even if you're a successful landscaping company, I deem my company has been pretty successful the past several years. I deal with this stuff every single day as a small business owner. It's the things we don't want to deal with, but it's the things I have to confess to you. So. So the three things starting with number one is hr, human resources. I don't like that term, human resources. But however it is what it is, it really comes down to hiring, firing, dealing with people within the organization. This is the caveat I would add to this confession is that although it is bad and horrible and no one likes to deal with a lot of this stuff, it's also the best part about being a small business owner. But on the other hand, it's not fun to fire people. If you've ever had to fire someone, it's a little bit awkward. I don't really. I'm not really the type to fire someone over the phone or even with a letter. I always do it in person and I just feel obligated to do that to them. But it still doesn't take away from the fact how weird it is to have to fire somebody. And when it comes to HR in general, you're not just managing like a robot that just goes and does work for you and mows lawns and trims trees. That would be a robot. This is a human that has emotions and has a family and has a wife and children and has things happening in their life and they're going through cycles of how old they are and if they're coming out of school and they get married and all these things that are happening and you gotta deal with that as the business owner. All of their life events affect you and they affect the Business.

When it comes to my confession as a small business owner is HR is a massive part of being a small business owner. Regardless of how successful your company is, Humans are not robots. And if you want to be successful, you have to learn to adapt to the people within your organization and adapt to them as they adapt to their life and they go through events and they get married and they do have kids and they have financial struggles or they lose. Sometimes they get in a car accident or they lose someone in their family. These are events in their life that make them change and make them adapt. And you have to evolve with them. It'd be great if we had robots. And that's why people are getting robot mowers, because this confession is too much for them. They can't handle dealing with people that ebb and flow and have good days and have bad days. And one of the confessions as a small business owner is you as the employer have to deal with all of the garbage, all of the trash that your employees bring along with heavyweight. That being said, I have to add one caveat to this confession and that is dealing with people is the best part of being a small business owner. Being able to see being able to provide for their families, being able to see them grow as individuals, be able to see their professionalism grow, see their skill set grow, see their confidence grow, see them develop as human beings and develop those connections with, with their family, with the community, and really begin to develop as a professional in what they're doing and dealing with customers and getting that wow experience to the customers and then you step back and say wow, that was exactly the way I trained them. That was exactly what I told them to say at that moment. And look back, those are the greatest moments. But it doesn't take away from the fact that still confession number one is hr. Because when you're firing people and when HR turns bad and people are trying to sue you because of something you did and you had great intentions as a business owner, but yet they go to L I or they go to work through the labor issues and laws and all that stuff, go to that realm of things and start trying to get you in trouble, it starts to get really bad really fast. So that's number one. Number two, confession of a small business landscape owner is bad customers. It doesn't matter how great your company gets, if you are still involved in day to day operations, you are going to get bad customers that are wanting to suck the life out of you by trying to get you to come back and do free services. They are trying to complain just that you do send your crew back and they get some extra stuff for free. Or perhaps they are just customers that can't be satisfied. No matter what you do or how good you treat them or what you give them or how many freebies you give them or how much free delivery or free free material or free labor, they are just not going to be satisfied. And those customers are like lead inside of a balloon. They're the one thing that keeps me up at night that will make me agitated and unhappy is when I know they're not happy and sometimes not even my fault. It might be someone on the team's fault. It might be just that individual is just not ever going to be happy. But dealing with customers, which, by the way, kind of ties back to number one, which is HR is hr. People within your organization are humans. They make faults. They have good days and have bad days. Well, number two is your bad customers. They have good days and they have bad days, too. And if you just happen to intercept them on a bad day, suddenly you have to deal with it. And you have to take all that extra baggage on top of everything that comes with hiring people now, all of your customers baggage is part of your baggage as a business owner. You. That is confession number two. Number three is.

You might be growing your business, but growth takes cash. Growth sucks cash. And a lot of times, what happens with small business owners and landscapers, we start developing our company, we become successful, and things are growing and we double the revenue that we made last year, and things are going great. Everyone thinking that it's going wonderful and great. Employees think it's wow. We're hiring more people, getting new trucks, we're getting more equipment, we're growing, we're getting another shop. We are getting all of these things. Your customers see that, your friends see that, your family sees that, but they don't see the one thing you see, and that's your bank account, and that it's not going up very much as your company is going up, up, up. As your company's scaling, it's going better and better. You as the business owner see your bank account and it is not going up. In fact, it is going down because growth sucks cash. And we so often, especially on this podcast, we talk about growth and we talk about scaling up and we talk about making the numbers go bigger. And 50% growth this year, going from 250,000 to 500,000 in revenue this year. And all those things that we talk about going from 1 million to 2 million this year, growing fast, like that, fast growth. But growth sucks, cash. And another confession of a landscaper is I might be seeing, like, I might look good on the outside. Hey, I'm a landscaper. I might be looking good, things might be going good. Scaling up the company, more trucks, more equipment, more people, more employees, more everything, more marketing. The trucks look nicer, but I don't really have a lot of money on me right now. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. You have to find the perfect balance between growth and profitability and figure out what that needs to be correlating to your lifestyle if you want to grow faster to get to a certain level and then at that level, plateau so you can get more profit out of the company. But this doesn't take away from the confession that all of your friends and your family and all the expectations around you is that you now are successful and your company's making a bunch of money and you're hiring people and you got new trucks and equipment, and I see your trucks everywhere. And they expect you to start living a lifestyle and of being the great successful business owner when you and yourself know it sucked out all the cash you had. And so that third confession for a lot of small business owners will push them into getting the fancy truck that they drive for personal use, to getting the fancy house that all their friends can see, to getting the fancy sports car that can drive on the weekend, to getting the nice boat that they can go surfboarding or whatever it's called, boarding on at the lake every single weekend. And so the third confession is what leads to a lot of bankruptcies in the landscaping industry is that people try to stay up with what everyone else is thinking. But at the end of the day, growth sucks, cash. So figure out. You got to figure out. So let's figure out. Let's look at these three things. Okay? We talked about HR issues, the confessions of a landscaper, right? HR issues. We talked about customer issues, bad customers. We talked about how growth sucks your cash and cash flow and how it's such a big issue. Okay, so what are the solutions to the confessions of a landscaper? Number one is hr. You've got to have a hiring system. You got to figure out what type of people you want on board so that they don't take you to court when they do leave, that you leave on good terms, that they are going to become more successful somewhere else, and that your organization is going to be left in a good spot to continue to grow when they leave the organization. It's not if they're going to leave, it's when they're going to leave. And you want to keep them around as long as possible. But at the end of the day, with the averages of how long people stay on a job for a while, you're not going to have them for 10, 15 years. Probably not. In our industry, there's a massive turnover. If you can keep someone one or two years, you're doing a good job. So when you go into it with that expectation, but on the other hand, thinking long term and training them as if they're going to be there for 15 years, then you have better chances of retaining your people. But when you are hiring people, when you are prospecting for people to become your hr, your human resources, when you are trying to get those people in your system, you got to have a system to get them in your system. You got to have a procedure of how do I vet out all the losers? And when you make a bad decision, which you will, no one's perfect with hiring. And if anyone tells you they're the best hire, they got the best feeling about people. They can just read people. They've probably never done it before. Because if you've hired enough people, you realize you're going to make mistakes, people are going to fool you somehow they're going to get through. And then you ought to be the one though, that realizes your mistake and has to cut them fast. We just fired someone after their second day of work. They didn't do anything wrong necessarily, but we just knew after those two days they weren't going to be a good fit with the culture of the company. And we have to cut them fast. And that is one way to negate a lot of those HR issues is to cut people when they're not going to become part of the organization. And for the people that are in the organization that are going to be around, invest in them. Make them part of your focus more on the good part of hr, which is being with them as humans and their family and being able to contribute to them, knowing them as people and being able to see them evolve and grow professionally, those are the rewarding parts of hr. Focus on those by making sure that the wrong people don't get in the system. I've had employees try to. I have had employees sue me or try to sue me, like because of L and I stuff. And they make things up and like, you gotta take them to court. Like, I've gone through all of that. That's HR Issues. That's why it's the number one confession of a landscaper is HR issues. But focus on the good part by getting good people through and having a system to hire them. We're going to be talking about this in a webinar that I'm going to be having a few probably next month actually. Stay tuned for that. But we're going to have an entire live webinar open to the public where you can come on and listen exactly how we hire people at my company. So stay tuned for that because it's going to be. We're going to talk about how do you attract people to apply, then how do you take them from application to hiring process? What does that look like? What are the interviews like? Should you just do an office interview? Should you have them come and work for a while? How do you do that? What are the logistics of that? Can you do that by labor laws? We're going to be talking about all of that in this special webinar that we're going to be doing in a few weeks. Stay tuned. I'll get you those dates. But that's number one, hr. How do you fix that? Get good people. How do you get good people? You have a good system for getting good people. Number two, good customers, bad customers is the number two confession of a landscaper. And how do you negate that? It's the same thing you've got to figure out how do you position yourself within the market to make sure you only attract the people that can afford your services and that are going to refer you to other people? Once you do a good job a big way, you can actually take out a lot of the people you don't want in your system is to charge higher prices. You say, well, that's just horrible. I can't just charge more money. If you charge more money, it all of a sudden makes. You have to make up for that extra cost to the customer by adding value in terms of professionalism and customer service and tidiness and being able to have uniforms and people that are professional when they come to the job site. It forces you and your mind to start thinking about ways how do we differentiate ourselves outside of price. And then when you do that, you're going to attract those customers that are willing to pay the top dollar. They're willing to stick with you. They're willing to do the extra services and not just mowing. They're willing to do the tree trimming and the mulching and the pressure washing and the gutter clean out and the snow removal and all those things that are high value add and high profit margin. So getting good customers is the best way to weed out bad customers. And one of the best ways to get good customers is raising your prices. And people think that's horrible, that you can just raise your prices. You can, you will lose customers if you just raise your prices. But if you raise your prices and then in your mind start having to figure out, how do I keep these customers, you're going to start coming up with creative ways to do things besides lower the prices back down. Increased professionalism. Uniforms, cleaner trucks, cleaner equipment, people with a smile, people with a name tag, people with a nice hat with a logo. Those are things that people are willing to pay for. And you got to figure out how you can raise the value and thus increase the price, thereby cutting out a lot of the bottom feeders, I use that term lightly, the bottom feeders of the customers. The people that are going to try to suck you dry. They're going to try to call you back time and time and time and time and after a job to try to get free stuff from you. That is one of the best ways to fix, number two, bad customers. Number three, confession. The third confession of a landscaper is that growth sucks cash. And so as you grow your company, you got to realize you're not going to have a lot of cash on hand. If you're scaling by 50, 60, 70% a year. When you're going from 100 to 200,000 a year, that's 100% growth. That's not a massive jump necessarily, because only 100 grand. When you go from like 500 grand to a million, that's a massive jump, $500,000 difference, and you still have that same 100% growth rate. But when you start making those big jumps in a year, in a quarter, and when you hire three, four people in a couple months, these are big jumps. And that growth does suck cash. So how do you prepare for that? You make sure that during the winter you have enough cash to get you through so that you don't have to go into debt. So when it comes spring, you have the cash on hand to go out and hire those people to get the better equipment, to make the advertising and the promotional campaigns, to go out and get the customers. When everyone needs the services, you have the cash to go out and knock on their door and to give them a mailer, to make a Facebook ad, to give them a Google AdWords campaign, whatever it is. You have the cash in hand because you figured out I need cash throughout the winter. I need cash through the winter. But more importantly, when come spring, I need that cash to funnel and to fund the growth of my company. You got to figure out that cash is needed to grow. And when it comes August, September, and everything is going wonderful and you have a ton of money in the bank and it seems so easy to go out and buy a nice car or make a down payment on a beautiful, beautiful house. That is not the time to go out on a vacation and spend 20 grand because there's money in the bank. It's so good. This has been a great year. I've worked hard. No, remember that you need cash through the winter to get to the spring and still have cash on hand. Too many people forget that they get through the winter and they're like, oh, that's fine, I got through the winter. But then they fail to capitalize on their growth opportunities in the spring because they have no cash left over. Or worse, off they go in debt, get a line of credit, go on credit cards. All of a sudden, now they're paying off a liability in the form of a house or a car or a boat or some other crazy thing that they've bought over the winter. And they failed to realize that when times are good, you've got to save the money because cash is needed for growth, and growth comes in the spring. And so if you don't have the cash after the winter, you're going to be stuck and you're not going to have any growth. So those are the three confessions of a landscaper. Number one, you got it, it's hr. Number two is bad customers. Number three is that gross sucks cash. You can fix all three of those things and make your business more successful. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for more information. You want to be signing up for this bad boy? It's very, very good. And check out the webinar, which I'm going to be announcing on the next episode of Landscape Business course on the podcast. I'm here on this video. I'm going to share when that webinar is. It's going to be a live webinar. It's going to be 60 minutes and I'm going to share exactly all the steps and procedures. What the, you know, dotting the I's, crossing the cheese of how we have our hiring system so you too can get great people on your team again. This is Mike Andes from landscapebusinesscourse.com check it out today. We'll see you next time be great because nothing else pays.