[Deadline Announced!] Lawn Care Business DEEP DIVE: When to Work ON Your Business!

What's up, everyone? It is Mike, Andy. Today we're having another episode of Roundup. We're doing some Q and A. I'm looking forward to it. Today's gonna be a little bit different because I'm going to actually make sure that we do a little more in depth, detailed questions and not just like as things come in live and answering a bunch of random questions. I want to actually add value so you actually stick around and want to watch the show. So we. What I did is I went ahead and texted everyone in the group last yesterday and said, hey, if you have a question, let me know. And I kind of cherry picked the ones that are most in depth, things I might not have explained or been super in depth on. So I want to make sure I do that. And today we're going to go through some of those questions. So if I don't answer your question, I'm sorry, text on the next one. And if you do want to be part of that texting group, make sure you text this number right here. Just text 360-227-6362 to, sorry, text the word landscaping to that number right there. Text that number with the word landscape. You'll be part of the group. And I don't spam anyone or anything like on that. It's just a place where I can interact directly with you. I get those messages and that's where these questions are coming from today. So let's go ahead and jump right into. I think I had some announcements, though. Let me jump into this real quick. Oh, yeah, the deadline. So there is a deadline. A bunch of you have been asking about this, so I wanted to be really clear because I've said that, you know, the initial fee for joining Augusta Longcare has always been $25,000. But then we've allowed for the first 50 franchisees to be at $15,000. So everyone's always asking, like, when are you going to move it? Is it going to move up to 25? When is it? So it's going to be the end of this year. So January 1, 2022, we're moving that up to $20,000. I'm waiting to go all the way to 25 simply because I know there are some people because of COVID they want to join one year later. So we are going to delay it somewhat. But starting January 1, 2022, it is going to be $20,000. And you say, well, why are you doing that? Well, I'm pushing everyone to raise prices and charge what you're worth and to realize that cost of everything is going up and the same thing goes for us. So the initial fee would now be $20,000 and that's again for just new franchisees joining Augusta Lawn Care. If you join before the end of this year, it will be only 15,000. And so make sure if you are interested in joining us to nation, you contact me, go to augustalongerservices.com franchise and I think we'll be good. All right, let's go ahead and jump in. Oh yeah, the shirt, last little thing. But while people are here, still hopping on, this shirt is only going to be available for two more weeks, 14 more days. It says mowing is for stupid people.

Stupid rich. So again, that was from a video that T. Gringerz made saying that mowing is for stupid people. And I decided to just make a shirt about it because I didn't really feel like making another video. So let's go ahead and jump into it though. Got some really good questions today. It's going to be a lot of value and I hope to make these like 2 to 5 minute responses that are a little bit more in depth and a little bit more context to a regular Q and A which is just answering a bunch of random fluffy type questions. So first one came in again from the texting group is hey Mike. Yes, My question is how do you keep your head in the future when this is my fourth month in business and we're struggling to pay our rent and we're just down. It's a really tough spot. Right? The first year and second year in business are the most difficult. The third year is where you'll start. I always tell people that's when you'll start to see like, oh, like this is a business and like I can make money doing this. But the first year or two is brutal because any sort of profits that you're making are likely going back into the growth of the business. And if you're just getting started in your fourth month, like it is going to be difficult because for example, if you go from generating $5,000 a month and maybe work on the weekends, you're working the evenings, you work in the holidays and then you stop your full time job and you start doing your business full time. Now all of a sudden you got way more opportunity to grow the business. But with that growth comes cost. You're gonna have to buy another truck now, you're gonna go get insured and register your business and make sure it's legit because now you have liability if someone sues you and you don't have another a 9 to 5 to depend on, you know, benefits and all the rest of it, the stability of a job. So when you first get started your business, it is not easy. I have never pitched starting a longer business as easy. If you're gonna scale it up now, if you're gonna stay at one person just by yourself, you know, you can get busy in this type of market, very easily, generate, you know, eight, $10,000 a month in revenue by yourself. That's not difficult. What's very difficult is scaling the business, getting employees, getting more trucks. And that first year, too, is extremely, extremely difficult. It takes a very special person to be able to go from zero to a hundred thousand in a couple years. Traditionally, it's more common that you're going to go from, say, zero to say, 30 or 40,000 in its first few years. But that third year is where you start to see the profits actually hitting your pocketbook a lot of times. Because if you've been growing really quickly in years one and two, that money is likely going towards more equipment, hiring more people, and just a part of growing the infrastructure of the business. You got to get a bigger shop space, more storage. These are all the types of things that you're going to have to go through in years one and two. So year three is always where I say, hey, make it through year three and then make a judgment call of whether or not you can or cannot do the business. Some people, like, they throw in the towel at month four or five. It's like, hey, wait, wait till like year four or five before you really can make a judgment call in the business, especially if you're growing fast. Now, if you're not growing and you're in month four and you might, there's a really good chance you need to raise prices and increase your margins, especially if you're a solo operator right now. You should be profitable, you should be making good money. You should be super efficient. And if you're not, and you're not making money being solo or maybe one employee, then it's really, really a time to say, hey, maybe I shouldn't keep growing. Maybe I should may, I should raise my prices, really focus on the services that I want to provide and become ultra efficient and profitable before I start to scale. All right, let me just bounce back here. I want to make sure that everything is good with my audio. Okay, good. Welcome everyone. Copper Creeks. Tony. Welcome everyone here. I am not going to be in the, in the comment section right Now I'm going to be answering these questions that I got in from the texting group just fit. Which by the way, tomorrow everyone is listening. Tomorrow we're going to be releasing like a 12 minute video when I'm at the whiteboard and I'm going to go over the numbers behind raising your prices and why, saying that it is saying that your excuses to why you can't find employees right now is because the labor shortage is actually not a good excuse in my mind anymore. All right, we're going to talk about tomorrow. I'm going to break down the numbers, but I do not believe that we can use this as an excuse because honestly, I don't think it's going away. I only. It's going to become magically easier to find employees in the next couple months. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be very hard. I don't feel like we're going to have easing of the amount of money being printed and given to unemployment for quite some time. And even if it did go away, people do not want to work in this industry. Outside working hard, sweating, it's going to be difficult to find employees. And so tomorrow though, I'm going to break down the math of why I don't feel it's a good excuse anymore to say, oh, we just can't find employees. I'm not going to grow my business. You know, I can't succeed or do anything because you know, I can't find employees. I don't think that's a good excuse. I'm going to show it why tomorrow using numbers and how raising your prices can easily solve that problem. We're going to talk about tomorrow though. Make sure you come for that. All right, next question. Should we expand geographically, spreading ourselves out further to different towns or add services in our current locations such as hardscape, pressure washing, tree, arborist work or by land and used for dump compost, soil, bulk material and other nursery type activities. Currently have landscape maintenance focus lawns, gardens, hedgings and stratas. Matt with Bayside Lawn and Garden, some other info, we're at 800,000 revenue this year and could still grow maintenance in our area by 1.5 to 2 times before needing to go down one of the above expansion routes. Okay, so that's the big kicker. I'm glad you gave me the second text message. Matt, about the 1.5, the 2x more opportunity on the maintenance side, I would 110,000% recommend you exploit the 2x multiple of 800,000 so what you're saying is you think you could grow to basically $1.5 million business still doing maintenance in your given area. Do that before you start adding services. Do that before you start expanding. The geographical areas are going to serve. I've said this to our franchisees during training. I'll say it again. I'd much rather have a hundred mowing customers in a 1 mile radius than 200 mowing customers in a 5 mile radius. The amount of profit I will generate if they're all in 1 mile radius, no traffic, very little windshield time. All of my target demographic, not spread out, all very similar property types and sizes. That's where the money's at with, with mowing. So spreading yourself out thinner and going, going in terms of like 5, 10, 15 miles away is crazy. It's always easiest. The path of least resistance is always adding services and adding how far away you're willing to serve. Those are the two fastest ways to grow your top line revenue. They're also the least efficient and the least profitable way to grow your business. And so everyone typically will go through this expansion period in their first few years like they're wanting to grow. So what do they do? They keep serving areas further away. They start adding more and more services. They oh, I'll do junk removal. Oh, I'll tow weight debris. Oh, I'll do the gutters and I'll do the moss on people's roofs. I'll do treatments, I'll do. And all of a sudden, and that is the path of least resistance. Going after the more services or further geographical reach is the fastest way to grow your business. It's also the least efficient and least profitable. The most profitable is focus on your core competency, mowing or maintenance in this regard, or if you're focused just on hardscaping, focus on hardscaping. Don't listen to someone like me, like you got to do mow. I'm like, oh, I should do mowing now. And now I should do bush trimming and train my guys on weeding services. No, focus on whatever niche you're good at, whatever service you're really good at and efficient and profitable at, and just zero in on that thing. And this is actually something I thought about a bunch with lawn care media because we have all these different, you know, postcards for different services. And in one regard I was like, okay, as much as I want to give a big package, like we have 160 designs in there, right? I was thinking like, this is actually almost against what I believe in that is, I don't want people to offer all these services at the same time. I don't want you to offer all 16 of the services that are in the package. I want you to focus on, like, three or four of them and really, really drill down deep on those. You know, if you did. I thought about this today. If you dig down like, three, 400ft or even less, you're typically going to be able to get water from a well, right? You drill down, you dig a well, you. You get water. Great. Let's go. If you dig down though thousands of feet, you know what? You hit oil.