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. This 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 didn't like the educational system. 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 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 star 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, now 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 peak. 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 didn't 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, I'd never worked for a landscaping company, so I had to really kind of, you know, that's why I turned 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 because otherwise, you know, I'd be delivering a really bad customer offer, which is not. 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 the other business that, you know, to kind of throw that away of just a bit of a, you know, 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 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 was doing it was rammed. Everybody was like, oh, okay, yeah, I kind of, you know, he's proven 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 of 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 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 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 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 you 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, in 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 what we did. But he was seasonal so I've 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 and 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.