Corporate Job to Gardener… in the UK! | RoundUP ep.21

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course. Today is another episode of the Roundup podcast where we're going to interview another landscape and lawn care professional. And I hope it's something that you can gain tips, advice and tricks to grow your business. Here we go.

Let's go.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and another episode of Roundup. Today. We're going once again international. We're going to England today and we're actually going to be hearing from an owner that just a couple weeks after Landscape Summit this past year decided to quit his full time job and go full time into his lawn care and landscaping business. Really looking forward to this one. Is again another one of our entrepreneurs from Europe. Really looking forward to this one. I specifically have some questions about what I see happening in the US and how I can learn from someone like Matt that we're having on the show today because I feel like a lot of our labor force and the way that we look at labor in the US Is actually trending towards what has already happened in Europe, England, et cetera. So without any further delay, let's go ahead and welcome Matt. Matt, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot. Looking forward to it.

So maybe, maybe kind of walk us through what you were doing prior to lawn care and then what kind of pushed you to actually want to do it full time.

Yeah, so I guess I kind of, I left education, left school at 16.

Didn'T do particularly badly. I just, I just didn't like the educational system. I just, it just wasn't for me and kind of, I couldn't really wait to get out and didn't really fancy doing college or university as we do here. And so I just went straight into the working world. And that was with a retail company which you don't have in the US which sells bicycles and like automotive parts. So it's kind of service based, retail based, little bit of, kind of jack of all trades, anything around automotive and did that for a couple of years and at the age of 18 found myself in a like a departmental manager's position. So they really looked after me and I enjoyed it. It was a great buzz, fantastic team, fantastic time. So I ended up staying there for quite a number of years and worked my way up to like store assistant manager. And at that point I was kind of at a bit of a little bit of a loss, I guess in my career because I've been doing it for quite a number of years. And I thought. And I got the opportunity to go and do.

Like, basically a couple of years down at our head office, which is in the south of the country, I'm up in the north. And it was a project base where we were looking at continuous improvement, lean thinking, anything to do with kind of streamlining processes. And it was just a fantastic opportunity to do something I'd never done before, to look at a business and to look at the individual service elements that we do and just see if we can cut out, waste, refine them, and then eventually present them over to the CEO, which was just completely alien to anything I've done before. So I did that for a couple years, and then the project turned into something where I'd have to move, so. And it was about 200 miles away, so I didn't want to commit to that. So I went back into the stores and I was retail store manager for around.

Well, two years. And then I. And then, yeah, I guess I started the. I started Meticulous Gardens, which is my lawn and landscape company, and then I ran that for two years side by side.

Got it. And so when you were running kind of side by side at the time, were you married? Did you have family and kids by that time? Where was kind of your life stage during that transition between retail and then your own business?

Oh, yeah. Married, mortgage. One child at the time, and I've got two. So, yeah, my oldest was about six months old when I started. I had done. Which I kind of left out because it wasn't massive, but I did about three months with lawn care when I was about 15, 16 in my uncle's company. He was.

Borderline solo into Pete. He'd have two crews, but he never really. He never like, owned two vans or, you know, it was kind of. It was very much a solo operation with a.

Like.

With a. With us. With a sidekick, so to speak.

And did you kind of intentionally do the two years part time with the intention of kind of growing it to the point where it could go full time, or did you sort of stumble into it and just like, hey, I'm gonna go full time? It was more of a spare the moment decision.

No, I think the plan right from the offset was to turn this into a business and a business that I could move into full time. But I also.

Wanted to do it and try out because I'd only really done three months worth of, you know, work within this industry. And, you know, it was all in the nice, sunny middle of the year. You know, I've not done I did. I haven't experienced every aspect of it. So there was a lot that I needed to learn as well in terms of delivering a good customer offer. You know, what does. You know, the only lawn that I'd ever mowed was when I was like 15 and then my own. So, like, I needed to make sure that I could, you know, because I'd never worked for a landscaping company, so I had to really kind of, you know, that's why I sent to YouTube, ultimately, to, you know, learn these little things that people take for granted that they just pick up over the years. I needed to. I needed to learn it because otherwise, you know, I'd be delivering a really bad customer offer, which is not the intention. But, yes, going back to it, it was something that I wanted to do, but I also didn't want to just commit straight away because I had. I have got a real stable career, you know, I've got family life that I needed to look after.

And I also wanted to kind of like, just make sure that it was the right thing for me as well, because I'd spent so long with. With the other business that, you know, to kind of throw that away of just a bit of a, you know, a holiday, A holiday job that it could have been. It would have just been, yeah, a bit silly. So I kind of thought, you know, we'll run them side by side, see what it's like. And, yeah, obviously really enjoyed it and, yeah, now doing it full time, did.

You have any pushback or what did you. Did your wife think about this process? Obviously, young family, you know, great career, you know, very stable. Going to. Now this lawn care thing. What was her thought process, as well as even co workers at your, you know, career previously, was there any pushback in your kind of entrepreneurial ambitions?

I think at first everybody thought I was. I'd gone mad because it was so out of the. It was just so out of left field. There was just. There was no links to it, there was no rhyme or reason why I would do it. And. But I think the confidence that everybody. There was a few people that were just like, what, like, what are you doing? You've got like, you know, at work, you the line manager to like 35, 40 people in a retail store, like, like. And then you spending your Wednesdays picking weeds. Like, why? Why would you do that? And, you know, there was a, like, quite a bit of confusion around it. But I think the longer it went on and the more I kind of proved the concept and you got, you know, then you got like, customer number five, six, seven, you know, and then all of a sudden, my one day a week that I was doing it was rammed. Everybody was like, oh, okay, yeah, okay. I kind of, you know, he's proving that the concept, so to speak. And I think confidence from other people grew at that point. But there was definitely some people that thought I was a bit. That I just had a bump to the head or something.

And kind of. As you were preparing for that jump, did you financially kind of prepare a Runway? Obviously there's some time where, you know, you were. You were part time, so you were able to build up a clientele. Did you kind of wait until you had enough revenue to kind of COVID your. Your 9 to 5 paycheck, or was it a matter of like, hey, if I can get no half of that, I know I can get there within a few months, Something like that. What was kind of your mentality from just a financial stability standpoint?

So obviously last year we had Covid, which was obviously made employment for people in retail quite tough. So what I actually did when I got to around.

June, July last year, I was full. So my Wednesday round when I was working was. And I filled a Thursday night, I think, as well. So I really was doing like 65, 70 hours a week, and I couldn't take any more customers on. And obviously we were like, halfway through the season, I was like, well, this is just, you know, I'm going to be leaving a lot of money on the table, so to speak. So one of the chaps I used to work with that found himself unemployed, I hired him on a just a seasonal basis. So there was actually two of us on the books last year with the idea that when I did eventually go full time, I would have two days a week of reoccurring services. And that was. And then two days a week, you know, you can push a little bit more and probably get to two and a half, you know, spend a little bit extra at this property, upsell somebody, and then on half a week filled already. So that was kind of my, you know, taking the foot off of, you know, and just jumping onto the boat. It was kind of. That was my mitigation. Meanwhile, all the money that we were making and we were. The profit that we're making was going directly back into the business. So I didn't take a salary or any penny until April this year. So we did a couple of years where just everything went, got reinvested. So got reinvested in equipment and didn't really need to do marketing, to be perfectly honest, after a certain length of time because it just, it just didn't really feel like there was any capacity to take anything else on. So yeah, it was mainly into infrastructure, to be honest, and equipment. So we put it all back into that and then a little bit of, a little bit of a buffer of a couple of months of salary just within the business. Obviously I had personal savings and stuff which we didn't really want to attack into, but I just wanted to make the transition as smooth as possible and you know, I guess pretty cautious. But yeah, I wanted to just make sure we'd be okay as a family and you know, because Covid obviously has been around this year and it was still we didn't know if anybody we were going to lock down and. And you know, it was.

You know, it's been an unpredictable couple of years and you know, you've just got to try and mitigate as best as possible.

Thanks for watching the episode so far. If you haven't already get your tickets for Landscape Summit, it's going to be January 13th, 14th and 15th. Either click the link in the description down below or go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. Enjoy the episode.

You talked about hiring your first person last year. Talk, talk to me a little bit about that thought process because I know in England, I guess I shouldn't say England because I know Europe is a little bit different, the EU and things. But like I know that hiring there is a bigger deal. It's not like even the way you mentioned full time and seasonal, I know it actually means something. Whereas here pay people by the hour. What was that thought process? Like what has your experience been just hiring your first employee and getting that actually set up legally. Like what has that process been like for you?

It's pretty long.

There's a lot you have to go into.

So in the UK and Europe you've got to provide statutory pensions, so we've got to do pension contribution. You've got to set them up with the national insurance. Obviously there's loads and loads of things that you have to go through.

I guess part of the mitigation and part of kind of the transition period. I've managed to get an accountant on board that I got on with pretty well. So they, he really, really helped me with exactly what I needed and obviously my background I'd hired within a corporate structure, you know, hundreds of people. So I kind of knew the basics. But yeah, we needed loads. So you need like.

Employee handbooks and stuff like that. That's like a mandatory thing is that it's regulated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've. You got to make sure that you do everything by the book and that's. And that's what we did. But he was seasonal, so I'd kind of done everything that we needed to do and then obviously at the end of the season he dropped off, went to work somewhere else. But we still had all of those things set up. And I've been paid for by the. So I probably didn't make a great deal of money off of having him. But obviously I've created that system. I've created the ability to have to take on that capacity of customers as well. So it was well worth doing. Blooded at it.

Can you explain a little bit, just from my knowledge, even in that is like the difference with seasonal. Because my biggest concern in a place like Europe now I see a lot of solo operators, maybe one side employee with them is because it's so hard to get full timers because there is so many things around the pension. Is it a matter of making them seasonal so that you can fire them easier? Is there a distinction between a full time and a seasonal? Because my biggest concern in this industry where it is, you do have a revolving door to some extent. It is entry level position. Some people work out three months or three weeks. How does that work in this industry? Or is it a little bit different there? Do people tend to have a longer term with a business? As an employee?

I don't think, I think, yeah, being like an entry level employee, I don't think we've got longer. I don't think people have got longer staying power with businesses particularly. But in terms of being seasonal, yeah, it's a temporary contract. So you have, you have a start and you have an end date. And if you wanted to for whatever reason, get, you know, fire somebody, get rid of them, you have to provide less information in terms of why you're getting rid of that person. So you couldn't really have any legal comeuppance unless you've done something really stupid. But if it was just like timekeeping or you wouldn't have to go. It was this date, this date, this date and this date you could just go, his timekeeping was bad. So we ended the contract early. And that would be good enough for any legal, any legal situation because you've got that end date. If you didn't have that end date and you took on somebody permanently, which is like what we've got now, you'd have to provide the Certain correct steps and you'd have to go through a certain disciplinary procedures. Stage one, two, three, that might be verbal, written and then final or whatever. Whatever yours looks. Looks like within your. Within your organization, you have to provide a half decent amount of information because if you, if it got taken to tribunal, then, yeah, you could get. Yeah, you could be in a lot of trouble for certain things like that. Fortunately, I've done a lot of that stuff in the past, so I was kind of aware of a lot of that. It was just how to get. Actually get them employed was the. Was the barrier that I needed to get over.

I know, I know in the UK there's been quite a few lockdowns and things over the past couple years and. But from an employee standpoint, has it been challenging as well there to find people? I know obviously you have some connection with the retail side of things. Did that help just bringing some people over once they started slowing down or shutting down last year. What was your experience with the labor force and finding people?

Yeah, I mean, so during the first lockdown, everything my retail didn't shut, but we had to operate behind closed doors. So it's basically turn the shop into a warehouse, but the majority of shops shut. But we had a furlough system, so our government was paying up to 80% of people's salaries and they continued to do that for quite a long time. So to be honest, we were paying people to stay at home a lot of the time, but they physically couldn't go to work. So it was. Yeah, it was. In that market, nobody knew what they were doing. So if you were on furlough, you wouldn't leave a job because you're in the best position possible in terms of safety, because the government's deemed your business as one that's worth saving. If things really did go bad in terms of now, obviously all that's ended. We don't have any kind of government help now.

It's getting tougher to find people. And I'm noticing job adverts from.

Other landscapers and gardens. I'm noticing their price that they were paying per hour last year is significantly higher this year on their adverts or was earlier in the season. You're talking like one or two pound more, which is a lot. It's a lot. It's like three or four dollars. It's, it's. And I think that's simply because people are struggling. Fortunately, I've been okay and I haven't needed to.

I haven't really faced any of those Issues, but it's definitely becoming. You see in salary, people that are offering jobs are a lot higher than they were. I think it'll continue to rise because it's a bit of an employees market out there at the moment.

I know next year you're planning to grow. Your plan is to add a second crew. Walk me through the idea you're adding fencing. I know. And of other services. Why those services and have you tested out or is it just a matter of customers asking for those service? How did you come upon those specific services to be the ones that you add in your second year?

So obviously a lot of it needs to be. I need to be able to do it.

Which I can do those services straight off the bat. I wanted to add something that there was a lot of demand for. Obviously I've been asked a lot this year to do that. I was asked a lot in my first year to do stuff like fencing.

But I didn't. If the job took two days, obviously I couldn't say I'm going to come back the following week. So it wasn't, it was impossible to take it on. And this year, to be honest, the reoccurring services has just carried me right through. Even now it's so I haven't really needed to, but I think with the second crew, I think I've got to work out systemically how I managed to get everybody onto reoccurring services. I think in terms of relieving pressure on myself, I think it's a lot easier to take on a larger project and have them do it, me supervise, you know, and start to offload some of the reoccurring stuff. So that's kind of how I wanted to start it, but with the, with the goal in mind that we'll all be on, you know, this is, this is a fairly simple operation. We pull weeds, we trim shrubs with mow lawns. That's, that's all we've done this year. And you know, I don't want to get away from that too much, but I think there's massive opportunity in fencing because there's. The population's so big and the houses are so small. You know, I see some of your videos where you're on like big zero turns and stuff. I just laugh and I'm like, It's like a 5 million pound house.

Because everything is so small. So you've got, you know, and that's why fencing is such a, you know, there's such a high demand. The only slight caveat to it is that Materials are becoming harder to get to get and they are going to prefer the people that use higher volume. So yeah, we'll see on that one. But I need to see what happens when March rolls around and see how the winter treats us because this is, this is my first winter where I've needed, you know, needed the work, so to speak. Last year if I didn't get any work, it wasn't a problem. But this year, this year I do. So it's. Yeah, I need to need to see how we come out, how we come out of the winter. But yeah, the second crew is definitely on the cartoon.

In a market like yours where there is much, much smaller size properties, you don't have big equipment, you don't have big trucks. I would imagine what sort of the main drivers for profitability. Just knowing that it is such small, small properties. Right. You don't like. The thing about equipment typically is you can charge a higher price because it's a barrier for the consumer to not be, to do their own property. Right. So if I can pull weeds, well, theoretically now I'm just only selling time. Whereas if I'm selling having a bigger piece of equipment, I could theoretically charge a lot more per hour because there's a barrier by which the consumer can't do it. What, what's your sort of claim to fame or what makes you different in a market where a lot of your services are mostly labor, especially from the gardening element. And what part of your of your revenue is gardening versus like actual mowing?

So.

The gardening, the cleanup side of it is quite a large percentage of it. So I'd probably say it was around 60% of overall turnover. It's pretty big. But rather than trying to do it in terms of your local friendly gardener, we do it as cleanup packages because it's a lot more profitable and there's always kind of, there's always something to do and there's less of kind of the customer going oh, don't worry about this week, you know, nothing's growing, so to speak. Whereas if you do, if you're trying to package it up into, into cleanups, it's, it's a lot more reliable. The mowing side of it is, I mean we use obviously really, really high end push mowing equipment. There would be no, if I was to get a stand on mower, I could probably use it on 5, 10% of properties because, because of garden gates.

Just, they just wouldn't fit through. And to be honest, the lawn sizing is what I have. They just, it Just be pointless. You'd be turning around three times and you'd be back in the truck and you spent like £4,000 to mow like 3 square meters. It's just. Yeah, you just wouldn't. So yeah, yeah, push line all the way for us. And obviously there is markets out there for zero turns and stand ons. But you really, if you wanted to do those types of places, you really do have to niche down your marketing to get those types of customers. And I think for a lot of solo operators and.

For a lot of solo long guys, that's what they do. And they really do over the years they cultivate the customer base to make sure that the zero turns, the relevance things. Whereas I'm mass market and you know, yeah, push up. I don't, I can't foresee me ever getting one, getting a zero turn or a stand on. I think robots have been mowing the lawns before. I would need to do that.

Hey, thanks for listening to the episode so far. If you haven't already, check out lawn caremedia.com we have templates, available, door hangers, postcards and much more so that you can plug and play with your own information and find new customers in your area. Go ahead and check us out@lawn caremedia.com Enjoy the episode.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to kind of talk about a little bit, drill down a little bit more into what you talked about there and that is packaging the cleanups. Talk to me a little bit about how you did that, why you came to that conclusion in terms of it being more profitable, less, you know, the client not having as much authority over whether or not you come. But tell me how you do that, how you do an estimate for that kind of, is it a 12 month contract? Is it more of a, hey, we come four times a year. How do you do the cleanup side? Because obviously 60% of your revenue is coming from the gardening element. What exactly are you doing to sell those packages?

So obviously we do, we do gardening alongside the mowing. So if we're turning up to a property, we might do all the garden beds, 50% of the garden beds, you know, the front of the garden or the back of the garden, depending on what we've arranged with the customer. So there's that. I was including that as part of it. But I mean the cleanup side of it is.

It'S customer dependent really in terms of how often we would come. But what, when we run a quotation, obviously we walk around all the garden beds, establish kind of what needs you know, what needs cutting back and you know, like you would do on a normal. On a normal quotation and then on the quote, I provide my recommendation for how many times per year that should be done, dependent on what perennials they've got. Dependent on. And then they can either. I use jobber, so it's a nicely packaged quotation. And then I put on how many times I would recommend that per year. And then it's up to them whether they choose. And then if they do choose that, I will book them into the diary. Six, like three, six, four months or whatever, whatever that looks like. And then I'll provide them their annual dates and then send them a reminder a couple of days later.

So is that the same price, same services for all, let's say four or five visits a year or. And then you just list all of them, including things that you might only do in fall or only in spring. Like, is it just like a whole laundry list of things that's going to be on that quotation?

Yeah. So if it's a little bit ambiguous in terms of what needs, obviously there's not going to be many leaves in April, for example, and there's obviously going to be slightly less cutting back than there will be than there will be in fall. Yeah, I just kind of take the average and make that. And make that the price. So it covers. So it covers it all the way through the year.

And for the winter months, do you still continue to do cleanups throughout the winter? And what do you do to stay busy? Because obviously, unless I'm wrong, you guys don't have a whole lot of snow and snow plowing isn't necessarily a thing. What do you do to kind of stay busy during those winter months?

No, snowplowing is very, very niche, so that would be restricted to like, private car parks or private retailers. The council pretty much takes care of everything else. And in terms of where I am, it's. We've had like, we get like two, three days of snow a year. It's really, it's really minimal. So. Yeah, it's not. It wouldn't be wise to get into that. The. Yeah, it's just. Yeah. Cleanups. It's trees, small trees and, you know, like just what we do day to day. Just keep, just keep. Just have to push it a little bit more. But a lot of, like a lot of places, a lot of landscaping gardeners that they tune off for the winter a little bit. But there's still, you know, I'm booked out till Christmas and we've got a little bit of work in, in January and then February kind of starts to pick up again. Anyway. I like February customers because they're really organized. They're the ones that are like the lights they're planning the year they're planning to have, the longer they're planning to, you know, everything. So yeah, I'm kind of. Yeah, take a couple weeks off in January and then straight back at it. But yeah, just, yeah, just, just, just push it. And it, it's. Yeah, I guess it gives you an opportunity to really test your marketing and just test what you. And if you have to pay for a few leads just to kind of see you through, then that's what you, that's what you do. But it's. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's business as usual. We just don't, just don't take the mowers out.

Last, last thing before we head out. Matt, for someone that is just getting started or considering even quitting their full time job and going full time, what would be the kind of the one key that you've learned? Either a hurdle you had to kind of overcome or something you had to kind of break through over the past year. That was challenging but you were able to kind of figure out what would you tell that person that is thinking about going full time into their now.

One of the best decisions I've ever made and I don't regret it for a second. The most challenging thing was cash flow. It really was a stickler in the beginning and that wasn't because I was spending money left, right and center. It was just when you go from one day to five days, you've then got five times the amount of invoices that need collecting chasing up and then using the equipment five times more. So five times small things break. You know, there was all of these things that was just eating into it and there really was a point where I was owed out a ridiculous amount of money. We've tried it back now. We're in a good place and there's a much better with the system at getting things sorted and sorted quicker. But you kind of, you're really protective at first over like every customer that you get. And that's not to say that you care less when you grow. But you know when you've got 20 customers and you lose one, you, you panic and you're like, oh, but you can be. Once you've got a bit more confidence, you can, you know, you're not as bothered about sending that invoice after like 20 minutes after you've left and you know, and then a week later, chasing up, a few days later, chasing up, you know, you get into that routine and you do, you know, you start to become a little bit, get a bit of a bar of a backbone. Whereas at first, you know, you're a little bit, you know, you don't want to lose that person because you know, the lovely Mrs. Jones. But like event, you know, you're running a business and you need to get, you need to get that. But yeah, cash flow, that 100% was the biggest challenge I've had this year. And if I'd have implemented job of the previous year, I don't think I'd have found it quite so difficult. I'd only done jobber in and around January, February this year when it was really easy because it was like one customer one day, you know, and whereas when you start to put like 20, 25 mo's in or 30 mo's some days, yeah, it's tough. It takes a long time to get everything properly set up and then retrospectively go back, get their emails, get all the details, you know, it's just the lady at the bottom of the street. Whereas actually now you need the house, you know, you need the house number, name, email, you need to get them set up properly. And I think, yeah, that would have helped. I think that was probably once we kicked that in properly, got over that hurdle, I think it really started to smooth things out. But yeah, I think if I could go back and do one thing again, it would definitely manage cash flow better.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Matt. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and wish you best of luck next year as you kind of foray into the second crew. But I really appreciate you hopping on here and if anyone wants to kind of find your website and then maybe, maybe you share that and then I just really appreciate you coming on.

Yeah, yeah. So it's www.meticulousgardens.com.

And yeah, I'm starting up on YouTube over the winter as well when we've got the dark nights. So I'm just gonna do a couple of tutorials and see if I can help.

You know, who would want to watch Push Mowing though? Who would want to watch small Push Mode?

Well, yeah, to be honest. Yeah, I mean it's. I, I used, yeah, I use a lovely Honda, but yeah, it's not as. Yeah, it's not.

Don't worry, we're in the same boat. We use 21 inch Hondas, we use 21 Hondas all the time.

Yeah. I mean it's. If it's. Yeah. I mean a lot of the people in the English market, if I turned up on a zero turn think I was gonn house.

Yeah.

Well I appreciate it Matt. You have a great rest of your day and we'll stay.

Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Thanks so much for tuning in today to another episode of Roundup. If that was something interesting to you and you learned something, comment below, share the message with other landscapers so we as a community can come together and learn and grow our businesses. If you would like to be on the Roundup show and actually interview with me just like we did today, feel free to go in the description. There's a link there. Fill up the form and we'd love to talk to you if you are wanting to share with the industry and help other people grow their business. Thank you so much. I'll see you next episode.