Mike Andes walks through when to buy a second truck for a mowing business. Start with one truck and two people, then hire a second employee before buying truck two. Rotate your trained person to the new truck so you can train the next hire on the original one. Keep hiring before buying more trucks to stay profitable.
It's a beautiful thing.
Especially when you don't have a lot of money. This is how I recommend that you scale. You are working right here, okay? You have a truck. You're going to get employee number one, okay? And he's going to work with you in the same truck. What I see so often is some person have one employee and, like, three trucks, and I'm like, what in the world are you doing? These trucks sit here all day long, and maybe he hops into one of these. But this is really poor asset utilization. And it's also extremely unprofitable because you got these two trucks, you got payments on these, insurance, all the rest of it, liability, et cetera, et cetera. Then what I would do is the day or the week that I hire employee number two, that is when I would also go ahead and get truck number two, okay? Now, what's usually going to happen is this. It's not going to be employee number two over here. What's going to actually end up happening. In my opinion, this is a great way to start your business small and slowly grow is you're actually going to have employee number one go over to truck number two, and employee two is going to come with you that way. You've trained up, number one, employee number one, to be really, really efficient. You've trained them on what you expect, your culture, quality, et cetera, pace. And now, number two, this new employee gets dropped into the passenger seat with you. Now, at this point, you might only work six or seven hours a day with him. So that way you can go do estimates at the end of the day in that first truck. Now, what's really cool is I can go ahead and get employee number three, kick this guy out. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and get another employee. Again, not getting another truck at this point. And again, I get my first three guys with just two trucks. And as they come in, I train them with me. So quality is consistent, speed is consistent, my expectations, the culture, I can set those tones. Now, after this, after this point, probably not realistic to think that I'm gonna be able to get every employee to sit with me. But I have three solid employees with only two trucks. This is the beautiful model. This is exactly what Mount Vernon is doing, our corporately owned location. But you do not get truck number three after getting one employee. That is a pet peeve of Michael. And I hope that doing These Q&As helps bring that percentage down. But this is the model. This is beautiful. It's profitable from day one. You get to implement your culture and your team and your quality standards. It's a beautiful thing.
