Customer CONFRONTED for NOT PAYING ► Lawn Care REPO

She hasn't paid me.

This customer is trying to avoid paying the bill for a job that's already been completed.

About a seven hundred fifty dollar service.

As a team member at Augusta Lawn Care, there are many opportunities to make more money.

If you make a basket, you get.

An extra $20 performance based pay or P4P.

That's crushing it. That's P4P stems the numbers.

But sometimes if customers don't pay, you gotta take matters into your own hands.

Whoops. Very sorry. I'm gonna knock on your door. I'm gonna bother you until I get my payment.

Let's check in with Marcus. From Aug to Lawn Care, Redmond, WA to see what happens when you're a customer and you don't pay him on time.

Trying to be as nice as I possibly can. You guys okay?

This video might get my franchise license revoked. Both of our trucks going down at the same time. And somebody stole the catalytic converter from it. There you go. Pretty low on cash. Here's our truck for today. U haul between both the trucks. $14,000. Gotta do what you gotta do. You gotta make it work. All right. Our other truck's ready to go. Moment of trut.

Looking good. No engine light, so that should do it. Thank you God.

The great pacific northwest. Beautiful.

Not a lot of sleep last night. Got to bed one 1:30am finishing emails, estimates and things. Which means I need to delegate more. But that's springtime, baby. Today we're doing some initial overgrown mows. This one is actually the best out of all of them. It's not too overgrown. Looking for some things in the lawn. So before my guy comes through and mows the rest of this, looking through it. No dog toys, no huge rocks that's gonna go on and shatter these windows. Setting my guy up for success is what it is. It's that time of year. Time to grind.

Initial mow done here. It's not going to look perfect, but we did dig out and define the edges. Took us two hours. So for initial visits we say $1.50 per minute per man. This visit being about two hours, that's cumulative. So we each took about an hour here. So between two people it's $180. Nice quick cash. And that's a about initial modes is you don't have to budget them, you just have to work around your schedule. Cuz you never know when it's going to be a lot of debris.

Cole got two five star reviews today.

Awesome.

Helps our business a lot. And you know what that means. They get A shoot for even more. Let me show you. There's the rules there. 5 star Google review get $30, but if you make a basket you get an extra $20. Get three attempts. Basically that line. It's about eight feet to make the ball in the hoop which fell down because that hook up there. So I'll hold it for now.

All right, but you got three attempts per review. You just gotta make one.

That's all right. I'll still give you up for one and then the other one $30. So that's another 20.65foot then weigh that. What's your vendor?

Look at that tree. Just levitating.

We have levitating trees over here in Washington. I don't know if you knew that but.

Little overgrown mow back here swan up the size of my knee.

Much better. Just down the street from me here, right behind me here. She hasn't paid me. She was one of the first clients I ever serviced too. About a $750 service. Everything was good to go. At the very end we did a final walk through. I thought everything was looking good. She said it was looking good. They even gave me a five star review but.

Apparently they thought that would be a good substitute for payment. Instead of paying me the $750.

Then and now it's been about a month and a week. Sent her about 15 emails, all of which she is open on our software. It'll be able to tell us if she opened it or not. And she did. We called her five times in the last week and a half. I called her today and she actually answered. She just kind of listened. She didn't say anything. I don't know if she meant to answer or what but I'm gonna figure out what's going on. I'm in the neighborhood so it's 7pm and rats are eating dinner. Whoops. Very sorry. I'm gonna knock on your door, I'm gonna bother get my payment and if not I'll try a couple times here more. And if I don't get the payment then I'm sorry, I'll have to send you to collections which will destroy your credit. And we're going to get the payment anyway so is what it is. But yeah, they, they literally gave me a five star review. They said the service was great. Love to get paid. So that's what I'm doing right now. I'd love to be serving more clients but some clients you kind of got to come back to make sure you know you're actually getting paid for it. God forbid, right? So let me do that now and I'll let you know how it goes. Stand by.

No answer. Who would have guessed?

All right, Leaving them a little bit note.

There you are.

Hopefully.

Should be pretty obvious for them to see it.

There's your note.

Trying to be as nice as I possibly can, you guys. Okay? I could have left 20 yards of mulch in their driveway so they couldn't get in the garage, but I decided to do this instead. So at least we'll see it now. We'll see what happens. I'll keep you updated.

Perfect.

Let me share with you the beauty of P4P. This is what happens when things go right. We did a perfect eight hour day. We made $29.70, which is well over a day to day of 22. Let me run down the math for you here. So we did a big property cleanup today. Branches, leaves, debris, a little bit of pruning and shaping, but mostly a big clean. That was 16 budgeted hours. We charge $90 per hour in labor revenue, so 16 times 90 equals 1440. 1440 times 0.33. 0.33 resembles 33% of all labor revenue, which goes to the employees or the people doing the work. So 1440 times 0.33 equals $475.20. That divided by two, since there's two of us. Equals $237.60 is what each of us made today. Divide that by eight. Since we each worked eight clock hours, that's equal to $29.70 is what we each made on P4P. That's crushing it. That's P4P. Doesn't always happen like that. What I told our employee is that that's not guaranteed. If the client calls us back tomorrow, that's going to take away from our pay because we're inefficient. We should have got it done right the first time. We did a full walkthrough with them. They said they were happy. Sometimes they take another look, they say, ah, those two branches I want gone. You missed this in the backyard. I didn't notice. We were walking through the first time. So those things happen. Walkthroughs are to avoid that, but sometimes you have to go back.

Them's the numbers. Check me on that. I may be wrong. If you're making about $30 per hour mowing, doing property cleanups, breaking out pine cones, I'd say that's pretty good no matter where you are.

Great. Thank you so much. It's a beast, but we're getting it down. It's great. Great. Thank you. Yeah, just getting it all mowed down, the edging. I'll finish in the front. Yeah. If you'd like, I can just knock on the door towards the end. We could walk through it and just make sure everything's okay. Also, are you going to trim the.

Weed over there? You just include the lawn. But if you'd like, I could just knock it down. Yeah, just knock that down. Okay. Yeah, yeah, we'll get this mowed down. That way she can play more soccer back here. Thank you so much. Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah. Good talking to you. It's awesome. Great work. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it. Hey, if you don't mind, you know, if you. Towards the end of the service, it's looking good to you. We rely heavily on Google reviews. If you could just give us a five star review. Sure, sure. We would love that. Thank you, sir. I'll knock those down. I'll mow this down and then I'll connect with you as far as that goes.

Okay.

Just knock that down too. Okay, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Things are changing. Lots of ups and downs. A week ago, I was very, very stressed. Super low on cash. I got about $6,000 that just came in, that was from two big projects that we just completed recently. And another $750, about a little bit more than that from that client. You remember that client? I left a note on that cone outside of their garage kind of blocking their driveway. They paid, so didn't have to send them to collections. Collections takes about, I think, 20% off the top or whatever they collect from us, which is basically our profit margin. So you're basically breaking even if you do send someone to collections. So try to do everything before it gets to that case, which in this instance, it worked. They paid up. Let's keep at it. Crushing it.

Sometimes you're wrong on estimates. You got to take it on the chin. So I could only video the good times in the business, but that would be.

That would be false. That's a lot of what happens on media and it really doesn't help. There's so many landscapers out there on YouTube that only video about the good times, even if their business is in shambles right now. I wouldn't say I'm in shambles, but today was definitely a bad day. Rough, rough day.

Started out explaining my first employee, Cole, going on the whiteboard, showing him P4P. Kind of the whole breakdown on how it works in the pay period. So we started A little bit late. I would say that times necessary because it's good for him to know, you know, it's, it's not wasting time if you're taking time to explain P4P and the pay structure or other business concepts to him. It's more than right for an employee to know how much they're going to get paid and kind of what that looks like especially on P4P because for all pulling the same direction, that's great. And for him to know how the whole game works like Tommy Mello says, they need to know the rules of the game.

You tell people how to win the game. You tell them exactly how they're going to get paid. You tell them how to have a sick day, how your PTO works. You explain when a truck breaks down, you're giving them the rules of the game and how to win.

So we got a little late start to the day and I'm an idiot and I forgot these bins. So we put debris in bins back here. So I forgot them. We're about halfway to the project filling up on gas. So about $125 for gas to fill up my truck. And these two tanks a little two cycle in the other one spent another hundred on getting four more bins. So 25 each. So basically down $250. Worked about an eight hour day. He makes $22 per hour base. It doesn't look good anyway. Spin it. So today definitely probably lost money net if not only made a little bit because we got on the project today and we went way over budget. It was due pure to estimate or error. It had nothing to do with anything extra that we uncovered during the project. Just ended up being a lot more debris than I thought. So like I said, you take it on the chin. I told him, I told the employee, I said hey, this is my error as an estimator. I take full ownership of it. And sometimes these things happen. We still have a full pay period. So the pay period just started basically today.

So we still have a full pay period to make this P4P back. And he understands. You know sometimes when you're angry, you're mad, you're frustrated. I had to move other jobs off that were on today. So you know, you're letting down clients, you're. You're over budget on these projects and you still need to get them done. And it's a longer day. Today was 95 degrees out. No, no shade on the property at all. So you're just baking in the heat all day. Going way over on a project. So I was frustrated. I was mad.

Basically. You know, when everybody's pulling in the Same Direction on P4P performance based pay, sometimes there, there's estimator error and no matter how hard they work, even if it's in 95 degree heat and they're crushing it, sometimes you're still over unbudgeted hours and that sucks if you're on P4P. So like I said, I took it on the chin, took extreme ownership of it. I talked to him about how that happens. Their estimates. Not exactimates. But yes, I was wrong on this one. He understands. So that's just transparency. Sometimes when you're mad, you're in denial. I could have said, well, if we were more efficient or this morning, you know, you could have remembered the bins as well. Even though I forgot them. No, you take ownership. You're the leader. You take ownership of those things. Everything that happens is on you. The bad is on you. Try to project the good on them.

Just worked a full nine hour day, plus two hours at the end for estimates now gonna take care of some emails, miscellaneous things and we'll stretch, we'll work out, we'll do it again the next day.

More pain, more suffering, more growth tomorrow. Good night.

All right, bleeding is not going to stop. Viewer beware. I'm a little unsure if my index finger is still on or not, so we're going to go to the ER right now.