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

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What's up, everyone? It is Mike Andes. 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 once you. 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 that. This number right here. Just text 360-227-6362 to, sorry, text the word landscaping to that number right there. Text that. Text that number with the word landscaping will 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, these questions are coming from today. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. 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 Lawn Care 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. 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 the 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, 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 really good chance you need to raise prices, 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 a really, really time to say, hey, maybe I shouldn't keep growing. Maybe 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 FYI, 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 excuse as 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 of months. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be, it's gonna 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 no, I can't find employees. I don't feel like 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 location such as hardscape, pressure washing, tree arborist work or buy land and use 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 to 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 you're 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 then 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 start, 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 mowing. I'm like, oh, I should do mowing now and 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, if this is, I thought about this today. If you dig down like 3, 400ft or even less, you're typically going to be able to get water from a well, right? You drill, drill down, you dig a well, you get water. Great, let's go. If you dig down those thousands of feet, you know what, you hit oil and you, the value of that oil is so much greater than the water. You know, the water might, you know, you get to flush your toilet, you get to have a shower, you got to drink some water. Woohoo, great for you and your family. But an oil, an oil well can literally supply thousands of people with energy. It can make millions of dollars if you hit oil. And so I highly believe, I truly believe people keep drilling for oil and all they do is keep hitting water. It's okay, it's a good business. They're getting lots of water, lots of gpm gallons per minute. But they got to drill deeper. You know, they got to take the mowing and just keep pounding mowing. They get the postcard, they get the door hanger, they drill down on mowing. And so for you, Matt, I'd say drill down on what you're doing now and the geographical area you're servicing. Do not expand other services. Do not expand to different areas. Especially when you know you are only hitting half of your existing, your total addressable market tam, especially when it comes to software, everyone's always asking what's your total addressable market? Your tam, your total addressable market, you're only hitting half of it right now. So double down on that because your customer acquisition costs me much lower. If you're going after services and people that are already used of seeing your trucks, they're used to seeing you mow their neighbor's lawn, the customer acquisition cost on them will be much lower than you trying to go the next door city or 10, 15 miles away. And those, those services and those customers, we much less profitable for you too. So I'd highly recommend drill deep and get oil. Stop drilling a whole bunch of dry wells and settling for water. All right.

How do you suggest business owners pay themselves a percentage of profit each month or salary? We are a small business still growing and it's hard to decide sometimes if we want a paycheck or, or to invest in a business while we are profitable. Our personal income is very inconsistent. Yeah. So before you even start a business, in my opinion, it's like, let's pare back our personal expenses to exactly what we need to be able to afford just to get by. Pay for rent, pay for insurance, whatever you need to get by. For some people, they need health insurance to be able to just feel like they can go take the step into self employment entrepreneurship. Great. What is the bare necessity that you need personally? Let's say it's $1,000 a week or you know, $800 a week, whatever. The smaller you can get it, the better. Usually the sooner you'll be able to start the business and the more money you can invest back into the company and grow it faster. But get that number, what is that number? Let's say it's, let's say $800 a week. So you know, I've got to get $800 a week just to cover my personal expenses. And I know that because I've budgeted, I've put everything together, I've tracked my numbers for my personal finances, for rent and all the rest of it, food, etc. Bam, there it is. That's what you should be, auto debiting, auto debiting, auto depositing, whatever from your business account into your personal account. At the beginning it doesn't really matter. Everyone's like, well, should I do myself as a W2? If you're an LLC, there's no point in doing a W2 to yourself. Obviously talks, talk to an accountant. But with an LLC or an S corp, any profits in the business are going to be taxed at your personal tax rate. Now in S Corp you can give yourself a W2 and you actually have to pay yourself a salary as an employee. But for most of you are sole proprietors or LLCs, don't worry about oh, I've got to give myself a paycheck. Everything in the business that's profit is going to be taxed at your personal tax rate because it's going directly onto your schedule C on your personal tax return. So don't get too worried and in the weeds on that. Figure out what you got to spend, what you got to pay yourself every single week for your personal expenses. Have that money coming out and that money's, that is like non negotiable. You have to have it to survive. Everything that's left in the business. That's what you Get a plate, quote, unquote, play with and use to grow the business. So if that money is running low, guess what? We're gonna, we're gonna raise prices. We aren't gonna grow or expand. We're not gonna be able to afford another truck and another employee. We're gonna have to, you know, focus on the existing customers and make it more profitable, raise prices. And then as time goes on, you're going to get more cash in that account, grow the business, and eventually you'll raise that weekly amount. So back in the day when I was just had Augusta longer, like, that was my main thing. We had the one location. I started off with $500 a week, and I slowly moved that up as I. My personal expenses went up because I was going to college at the time. I needed to pay for that. I need to pay for living expenses, my car, etc. So I just kept moving it up. I think I started at $300 a week, went to 500, went to 800. By the time I hit a thousand, I had other businesses and I stopped. But basically that's what I kept doing is it kept moving up the amount that I was making personally, auto moving the money over, across. And then what was left in the business was the businesses. Whatever was coming to me was mine. And that kept me very accountable at the beginning a lot.

Okay, let me just double check, make sure everything is going good. Very cool. All right, so let us talk now. Really quick. For those of you I saw a couple questions coming here. Lawn careweb design dot com. There's gonna be a video come out next week for everyone in there. We have some new updates. We're streamlined the way you can request additions to your site. It's gonna be really, really good. We've been working hard on that. It's gonna be next week. You'll get that video. And we have some giveaway stuff we're doing too. So stay tuned for that. Okay, next question. How do you decide between paying cash or getting financed for anything? Business. Are there situations where even a 6 plus percent interest rate is worth paying because you can use the cash elsewhere to drum up more business? Great question. And I think a lot of times I get painted with the paintbrush of like, oh, debt is bad. Like a lot of people think I'm the Dave Ramsey of the landscaping industry because, like, I talk about not getting debt and I kind of talked about Tigran and all the, the debt that he was going into.

And, you know, I appreciate that. However, I don't Think debt is a bad thing if it's used correctly. And I still remember when I was working as a personal trainer at Anytime Fitness and the current owner back in the day, because he ended up selling it to me. But at the time, the owner, I remember him talking to me. He's a young guy, he'd just come out of the military, owned like four or five gyms at the time. And I really looked up to him. He's kind of like my first quote, unquote boss. I was, I would've been like 15 or 16. I was a personal trainer there. And I remember him telling me, he's like, whenever there you can get money for less than 5% on a loan, you should take it no matter what. You should always take anything less than 5%. And it stuck with me because the reason I had always been like, man, how does he afford? He built like four or five gyms really quickly coming out of the military. And it's not like he had gobs of money, but literally he just leveraged himself to the point where like, hey, I know the business model, I know exactly how much money I need to start one and I know exactly how much my payments are going to be. I know exactly how many members I need to buy have on board before I get become profitable. I know how long that takes me. Like he had everything down to a science and a system and so he could confidently go into debt. And the biggest thing I have against people going into debt is they do not have a plan, they do not have a system, they do not know their numbers, they have not been tracking their efficiency score, they do not know how efficient their labor is. They are not on P4P pay for performance and they, their, their labor expense varies like all over the place. That makes me very scared because now you're paying interest on a debt that again, you could put your family's assets like your home and your house into jeopardy if you aren't managing that debt correctly. Now, if I believe this is the bottom line, and I talked about this at last year's conference, which by the way, everyone should sign up for confidence conference, it's going to be great. But last year at conference we talked about the return on investment and when we look at your business as a money machine, your small business as a money machine, to where you put a dollar in and you get $2 out on the other side, how can you get your business to that point? We have a predictable outcome. I put a dollar into marketing, a dollar into new equipment, a dollar into hiring someone and on the other side, I get a return on that money. The beautiful thing about small business is you can get 100% returns, you can get 200% returns on your money if you have a good system. Now the problem is if you don't have your good, good margins, if you don't know your numbers, if you are running unprofitable services and you're running a bunch of water wells that is not drilling deep and making profit in the services that you're offering, if you're doing that, the problem is it's massively risky because if you're not profitable and now you have a 6%, 7%, 8% interest, interest bearing loan, you've got big problems. And so the bottom line though is if you can confidently predict you're going to make 50, 60, 80, 100% return on the money you get from that loan, then yeah, you should go get a loan. You should spend that $40,000 instead of paying spending cash. You should go use that $40,000 to get a snow plowing truck. But guess what? You should know what your pricing is for snow plowing. You should know how profitable you're going to be. In my opinion, you should have sold jobs for snow and plowing before you go get $40,000 worth of debt. My biggest problem is people see other landscapers with this equipment and thinks that the equipment somehow leads to the contracts. No, no, no, no. You should get the contracts and then go get the equipment. And you should make sure that when you get that equipment, it's going, you have a dependable way. Okay, I know if I buy this equipment, I need 12 customers to make up for that. Okay, how am I going to get those 12 customers? Well, I'm going to knock on doors, I'm going to spend money on this much on advertising, this much on equipment, this much on wages. And that's going to lead me to X amount more profit. That's what, that's why I'm very hesitant to tell people just go get loans what the story. The bottom line is I'm about to go millions of dollars in the debt to grow the franchise. That's the bottom line. We're building this big, you know, headquarters, trying to bring four offices under one building. I'm going to tons and tons of debt. And the bottom line is because I feel like I can beat out the five and a quarter percent interest rate that I'm getting on that debt, I believe that the money I'm spending is going to reveal a higher return than Five and a quarter percent. And at the end of the day, when you look at your business from a number standpoint and an ROI standpoint like cash on cash return standpoint, if you're looking at real estate, that's a term they use, you have to realize that your small business can be the most incredible money machine if you have predictable outcomes. And if you do, that's when debt is something that I would stand behind 100, 110%. So I'm not against debt. I do not believe everything needs to be paid with cash. I use credit cards every single day. I pay them off every single month. I don't carry a balance. But I'm just saying cash is not everything in your business. You can grow your business much faster using debt, but you better make sure you, you know, you're going to be having a higher return on those dollars than the interest going out the door. And that's why I'm afraid with people that are just starting brand new with no systems, they're just like getting started and they're going to go, you know, get a bunch of debt. That makes me very afraid because they don't know what their customer acquisition cost is. They don't know what labor efficiency numbers they have. They don't know how much they have to spend on marketing to get the customers that they think they're going to get tomorrow. So next question. When I started my business two years ago, I took on mostly bi weekly customers. Most of them should have been weekly. How do I approach customers to switch them all to weekly without losing them? Learning a bunch watching your videos. And that's from the little guy Landscape maintenance in Clover, South Carolina. Cool. All right, so great question. I made an entire webinar like an hour long about weekly versus biweekly. And if you should have bi weekly service, I would recommend if you're just trying to switch people from bi weekly service to weekly service, there's two different routes I would go. The first route is if you know, you need to raise prices anyways, I would pitch to everyone the two different prices. Here's your new prices for weekly. Here's your new price prices for bi weekly service. Which one would you like? And I truly believe you can charge 50% more for BI weekly. All right. I don't believe in like, oh, it's $30 for weekly and $35 for biweekly. Not a fan. 50%. And I truly believe that if you went to all of these customers say, hey, look, look, Mr. Jones, right now you're paying $40 for biweekly service. We're needing to raise our prices, but what we're trying to do is make it more affordable for our clients. So we're gonna $35 bi weekly and then $55 for bi weekly service. What? Did I say that right? $35 for weekly, $55 for biweek. I'm just making up numbers, but you see what I did there, right? 40 is what they're paying for bi weekly. Right now I'm going to raise that price, let's just say to 50, but then I'm going to give them the option of the 35 for weekly service. So again, that would be option one. If I'm trying to raise prices and do what you just talked about, and that is switch people the weekly. Now if you're like, hey, my prices are good, my prices are fine, but now I'm trying to change people from bi weekly service to weekly service. What you need to do is pitch to them that they're getting a cheaper per cut price by switching to weekly. Say, hey, hey everyone. We are now offering weekly services. We are trying to encourage our customers to go to that option because better for us from a scheduling standpoint, in order to facilitate this change, we're now going to be charging only X amount and give them like a 5 or 10 discount or even $15 depending on your price. Let's say for example, you're doing $60 BI weekly and you say, hey, my prices are good, my prices are good. Okay, well then let's give them $40 weekly. So $60 bi weekly. Give them a discount to go to weekly service if that's what you were trying to push towards. Again, in that second scenario, I'm assuming your prices are correct. But if you're wanting to do it where you raise prices now, you're going to kind of split both ways. So if you're doing 40 right now, you're going to offer them 35 and for weekly and $50 for BI weekly. So I hope that made sense. And I truly believe weekly is better. It's better for scheduling. It's just so much easier in terms of when you have employees and making sure that there's level amounts of work that is on the schedule. But that's how I would go about trying to switch people from bi weekly to weekly service. Always remember that choosing weekly service gives them a discount. There is not, not an upcharge for going bi weekly. Same exact thing. But how you, how you, your verbiage behind that is important instead of saying, hey, Mr. Jones, look, you're at $40. I'm gonna have to charge you $60 to go bi weekly. How you look at it, Your price is $60 per cut. That's on a bi weekly basis. But if you go to weekly, we can give you a discount at 40 exact same prices. How you phrase it is the part that's important.

Next question. What are your thoughts on achieving a philosophy that we should work? Oh, Michael Gerber. That's what it says. What are your thoughts on achieving Michael Gerber's philosophy that we should work on the business instead of just working in the business? I'm a solo operator. I'm a solo owner operator of a small lawn maintenance and landscape enhancement business with one part time slash full time employee who has no experience. I have to be there for any work we do because he isn't equipped to work solo. I find that I can. I have no time to work on the business because if I'm not working in the business, nothing will or, or can get done. I plan on using my winter downtime to create an employee handbook as well as written standard operating procedures for each service we provide. Thanks man. You're the actual man. Okay, so this is a big, big misnomer. And this is the thing I hate about just education in general, like audiobooks and podcasts. The reason for that is because even for someone like me saying things, people will listen to one part of it and they forget that context is everything. The size of your business really does matter in terms of what business advice you should be taking. You should not be working on your business when you have one employee. I'm sorry, it does not make financial sense. You can't do it. If you're working on your business and you have one employee on the field working, it means that 50% of the labor hours in your business are non revenue producing from the get, let alone. Let's assume that this, this employee over here is perfectly efficient. So remember last week we talked about numbers and labor efficiency like clocked hours versus budgeted hours. If, if you are one of you as the owner are working all the time on the business, that is not making money for the business because you're just in the clouds thinking about your future, thinking about SOPs and systems and all the rest of it. And then you have one employee over here doing the work, you're immediately 50% inefficient in terms of budget hours to clock hours. You have a ton of non revenue producing labor, I. E. Your time because that is part of the business. And I think people jump to working on their business way too soon because this catchphrase that everyone wants to get to and attain to, and they hear me talking about, and shame on me for not clarifying the fact that if you have one employee, you should not be working on your business. You should be working in your business and generating as much revenue as possible.

You can be out making 60, 70, $80 per hour out in the field, or you can be sitting at home working on a standard operating procedure for your one employee, which by the way, probably won't stick around with you very long if you're out doing standard operating procedures and he's working, working his butt out, all, all brains out every single day, probably not going to stick around for your standard, standard operating procedures anyways. So I think people jump to this way too quickly. People like, oh man, I want to get out of the field. You have two employees, like what are you thinking? You have one or two trucks. It's not time to work on the business. It's time to work in the business, to grow the business to the point where it makes economical sense for you to actually work on the business. Because the only reason you would ever want to work on a business is to make it more efficient and make it more profitable. And guess what? If you're doing 100,000 revenue, you making the business more efficient by 10% is going to bring in a whopping $10,000. But that $10,000 is inconsequential to the fact that you could have generated 50 grand more if you would have worked in the field. You would have had 5 more times 5x the amount of revenue and profit if you were working in the business instead of on the business. Now if you have a million dollar business and you're working on the business and now you work on the business and actually create 10% inefficiencies by having standard operating procedures, having checklists, having team meetings, all the rest of it. Now you're talking about a hundred thousand dollars, I. E. More than what you could make if you were out in the field working in, in the business. I truly believe until you pass half a million in revenue, you should be working in the business. I just believe that maybe not full time. As you get to 3, 4, 500,000, you're going to be kind of like part time doing estimates and training and all the other admin stuff and then part time in the field. But I just think people jump to it way too fast. And you know, when we do franchisee Training. It's not till the fifth stage of growth that they start thinking about working on the business. The first three stages, all about one thing. Sell, sell, sell. Don't worry about close ratio. Just sell to everybody that has breath in their lungs. And that's the thing that people forget is that's what makes a business is sales and getting more customers. Your standard operating procedures will not do any, will not move the needle for you until you have scale. And that's why I talk about scaling your business so that way then you can work on the business and actually move the needle because you're actually. Your percentage of efficiency gained by having standard procedures is actually equal or greater to the value of you otherwise being in the field and just generating revenue as an employee working out in the field. All right? So I would highly recommend if you have one employee that's part time, full time, you, they don't have any experience, be out with them working. Go do door hangers. If you have extra little time because now you're working with them, go put out some door hangers. See here, do I have door hangers? Yeah, go do some instant quote door hangers like this one, the lawn mowing instant quote door hanger property. You know, if you've got a little extra time because now they're. You're working with them and you're getting done faster, you know, go ahead and you know, go do some door hangers while they're finishing up the job, while they're cleaning up the mulch after you've dumped it and you're blowing everything off, you go try to sell some more customers, all right? Sales make a business. Customers make a business. Standard operating procedures do not grow a business. You can have all the shiny sops in the world, best systems, beautiful, whatever. The same thing goes to trucks and equipment, but it doesn't make a business. Customers. Profit, cash flow, that's what moves the needle. All right, well, kind of got a little fired up there. All right, next one.

Which, by the way, you should, you should check these out. If you are listening and you are part of lawn care web design, I would hold off on buying these. We're going to be giving some of them away next week, but everyone else should definitely go get the one click or not the one click the instant quote door hangers for mulch, lawn mowing property cleanup. We got the after treatment little door hanger here so you can put on like the wind speed, date, applied product, applied technician. Great little thing there. Postcards are on there. Flyers, got core aeration here coming up. So great. Coeration flyer on lawn caremedia.com check that out. Comes with the Photoshop files. Etc. All right, next. Next question. I think we're going good here. Let make sure that everyone is still connected. Audio is good. We are good. Whoa. Spencer. Lawn cares gave me a hundred dollars. Spencer. Sean, you're. You're awesome. I watched your video about the the shop. I am on board and thanks for giving me a call. That was super fun. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. You have to do that. Thank you. Okay, next question.

I currently run two man mowing crews. Thinking about switching to do a one man mowing setup to be more efficient. How much more efficient do you think one man is compared to two? What size square footage yards would you continue to run two man's crew? Two man crews, if at all. So as your property gets bigger, the the percentage of efficiency gained by having one person decreases. So if you're having big properties, it's not so much the size of the property. It's actually about how, how much of what percentage of your day is spent driving. Okay. So the more stops you have, the more likely it is that one person is going to be more efficient. Okay. Now again, I've talked about this before. You've got to balance out the fact that If I have $50,000 worth of equipment, it's not going to be a good idea to go buy two setups so I can go to solo operations. This only works well if I'm doing smaller setups. Small residential. I'm not doing a ton of equipment and I'm not having five mowers on a trailer. If that's, if you're doing that model, you need three or four people in the truck because you need to use those assets. You know, I do not want you having 30 turns on a truck and having a solo operator. That's stupid because that means that every one of those mowers might get used an hour or two a day. That's crazy. I would rather have the occasional breakdown and have to go back to the shop than have four times too many mowers. That is assets not being used on my trailers. So when it comes to solo versus two man cruise, what you're really looking at is size of property is going to dictate usually how many stops you have in a day. If you have 20 to 25 stops in a day, most likely solo operator is going to be the best for you. Especially if you're doing small properties. If you're doing two or Three big commercial properties, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't have two or three people in a crew. And so again, context matters. When you hear someone say, oh, you should only do solo people, one person in a truck, well, what's the context? What size of properties are you having? Yes, it is more efficient to have just one person, but is it really good that one person is on one property for eight hours? Like you might lose commercial contracts for an entire day of one guy doing a lawn. Whereas if you set three guys there, they knock it out in a couple hours. Yes, there's going to be a little bit less efficiency. But with that massive property of as much drive time so the two or three guys make it makes sense. It's totally fine. So it's all about context. The bigger the property and the, and the less stops you have in a day, the more inclined, I'm say, to have two people on a, on a truck. I would only have three people on a given mowing crew if I was doing one to three stops a day. So big commercial areas, that's when I would go above two people. Two people is a nice sweet spot for training the double set of eyes on the property. But if you're going for ultra efficiency and you're on P4P where your crew is self motivated and they don't need someone watching over their shoulder, solo operation is very, very efficient for small properties. And if you're doing 10, 15, 20 lawns a day, you're going to be more efficient using that setup.

Next question.

Should you invest in an IRA 401K or try to add more lawn accounts is from sunset mowing. This goes back to what we talked about earlier and that is looking at your business as a money machine. Looking at and say, okay, what percent of return on my money will I get? As your business grows and you make more money, you start thinking like an investor and you start looking at your business as an investment tool. The same way that a piece of real estate or a stock or a bond or crypto for some people is considered an investment might have to scratch the crypto part as an investment. It's kind of speculation, but let's just say real estate and stocks, for example, the same way you look at those as investments and you expect a return on the capital that you risk, you should also expect a ROI return on investment from your business. And as your business grows and as you charge the correct price pricing and have a consistent profit again, usually around year three is when this becomes more consistent and you Actually can trust it. That's when you start looking at your business as a money machine. I. E. If I put $10 in, I expect 15 out by the end of the year. Guess what? That's a 50 ROI. That's going to beat most stock market years. It's going to be just about every bond that's going to be almost all real estate. It comes down to the fact that small business is the number one way to build wealth in America quickly because the ROI is unparalleled and unmatched. If I start off a thousand dollars today and I go start a long care business, I could theoretically in five years have a million dollar business by slowly growing it, putting the money back in, etc. If I have a thousand dollars and I have a hundred percent return on investment in the stock market, that means that year, years one, I would go to 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, 16,000, 32,000. I would have $32,000. If I invested $1,000 today in the stock market and I made 100% ROI in five years, I have $32,000. With that same thousand dollars, I'm confident that with the right systems in place, the right pricing in place, someone could build a million dollar business that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets and generating cash flow and not just a straight asset that's going to be taxed. That $30,000 will get taxed at capital gains if you were to then take that money out of the stock market or whereas the cash flow that is coming in and the asset value of my business is not taxed because equity and it stays inside. So I really think it comes down to whether or not you're going to invest in an IRA or 401k, you got to ask yourself, okay, so over the course of the next 20 years that I'm locking this money up, I am taking this money.

Locking it up and I am giving it to the government or I'm giving it to Wall Street, I should say, because the government has sanctioned this event and not taxed me on that money. And so I'm going to lock it up for 20 or 30 years. The question has to be this, what do you expect in ROI from the money you put in every year versus what could that money otherwise do for you and your business? And if you're only confident you can make a 10% return on your IRA or your 401k and by the way, you don't have any control over it and you have a small business that you've now built that has systems in place to actually be profitable and become a money machine with a predictable ROI that's 30, 40, 50%. Guess what? You should probably put it in your business. But if you don't have that confidence, the safer option for retirement, for dependability, and sometimes it's the right thing to do for your family, is to invest in something that's a little bit more stable than your business. Because guess what, you can have 50, 100%, 200% returns on your investment in your business, but you could also have negative hundreds, like lose it all. You could lose everything. Whereas going your 401k is unlikely. It's going to go to zero, it's unlikely, it's going to go to half. So it's typically a little bit more stable. But again, high risk, high returns, starting a small business, very risky. A lot of them fail over the course of the first five years. That's also has unmatched, unparalleled ROI when it comes to an investment vehicle. And when you change your mindset to looking at your business as an investment tool. And I put money in and I get money out on the other side, instead of I work like crazy, my brains hurt, and I just work as much as I can and make as much money I can because I'm working. And the more I work, the more money I make. That switch is in my mind. When you then start working on your business, okay, if you're still thinking about dollars per hour when you're out in the field, all the rest of it, you're still working in the business. When you're working on your business, and when you start looking at the business as a tool, a tool, you say, okay, this little money machine is a lens. This little money machine, I'm going to put $10,000 in and I'm going to get $15,000 out. And I know that why, because If I spend $10,000 on a new truck and some marketing, for example, I'm expecting my revenue to go up $30,000 and I expect 20% profit on that. And so over the course of two or three years, I'm gonna make X amount. Like, that's the type of thing you need to know if you're gonna start investing in your business. And usually that starts happening around year three. So don't get impatient and be like, oh, man, I'm in month four or five. And that's not. I don't look at my business as a money machine. You shouldn't. You're not. You're working in the business. And that's where you should be. You should be generating revenue, making more customers. But when, usually around year three and four is when someone starts changing their mindset. They've now grown the business and they're working on it because they're starting to look at it like a tool. What can I put money in, money out, coming out with an roi. So that's what you have to determine. That's how you decide if you go IRA and 401k versus your business. What's the expected return? How dependable is it that in 20 years I'm going to be able to beat the returns of a 401k and the expected benefits of taxes that I don't have to pay versus investing that money in my small business? And as the numbers get bigger, a 401k or an IRA doesn't make as much sense. Because if you're making so much money saving 1,000 or $1,500 a year in taxes because of the tax deferment and doesn't really move the needle for you. You'd rather keep the money. Like, I don't want my money going anywhere else. I want to lock my money up. Like there's an opportunity. I want to go spend some money. If the market dips 30% tomorrow, guess what? I'm going to be buying. And I don't want that money locked up. All right? So I don't like the idea of money being locked up behind without my control. And if I take it out, there's a massive penalty. I'm also very young and I'm much more risk friendly right now versus if you have a family. A 401k or an Iraq might be the right option for you. Next question. Let me just double check, make sure. Whoa. Someone else gave me $100. This is too much, folks. Sunset mowing. Great work. Bought a CNC Haas mill. Sunset mowing. Thank you. I don't think I've ever had two people give me $100 on a chat, but I do appreciate it, I really do. It makes all of this possible. We're trying to hire another person with the media team. And that's why over the next few weeks, you're going to see just the quality of the videos you've probably been seeing already. Last week or so, getting better. Stephen came to the team. Great, great addition. And he's only been a week or two in. So all of you, I do appreciate this stuff. Even though I say don't do it, like I. I do appreciate it because it does allow us to keep doing what we're doing. And I really, really appreciate that. All right, back to the questions.

How do you handle leaf cleanup pricing? They seem to be tough to estimate budget hours on. Do you offer packages? Okay, so I include this question in the Q and A because we're coming to fall season. We're coming to leaf season. And what I want you to know is if you're, if you don't know how to price fall cleanups, realize that you might make a mistake or two, and that's fine. I talked about this. I said, I sent this to our franchisees the other day. Let me go ahead and read it. I put it on our, our Facebook group and I want to read this to everybody here. I'll probably end up making a video about it, but I've kind of talked about in the past, but it kind of came to me pretty strong and I wanted to. So here it is. So we've been talking about price increases. We had five locations yesterday, like three or four more today for Augusta Long because it all raised their prices. So I was giving them a congrats. They had commands and raised their price today. Great. I said, perfection is the brutal enemy of progress. Most long hair companies stay small because they want everything perfect before they grow. Most owners never delegate because they are afraid other people won't do it perfect like them. Most businesses, it won't raise prices because now is not the perfect time. Progress over perfection. So if you're just getting started and you're going in the fall season and you know, hey, I can make good money doing this fall cleanup thing. Cleanup leaves, let's go. You know, Kevin, who's a great member of the landscape business course, the Facebook group, always very giving to everyone in terms of advice. Probably listening to this live right now. He's a member of Augusta Nation. They do cleanups for leaves all winter long. That is what they do all winter long in Mississippi and in Tennessee. Same thing. They just clean up a ton of leaves. And so there's good money in it. So if you're just getting started, go get started. Don't be like, okay, so if I don't have the pricing just right and if I don't have the budget hours, I don't know how much debris I'm going to have. I'm just not going to be able to do it. And if I don't have one of those big leaf cleanup things that Spencer Lawn Care just put on, it looks so cool. If I can't afford that, I can't do leaf cleanups. No, go get started and then realize that, okay, great way to be able to produce recurring revenue throughout the winter is to give someone a fall cleanup and then say, look, I'm going to do a fall cleanup. Here's the budget hours. That's an easier part because you can look at what's on the ground and give a price. And then the little harder part, but I'd really push you to do this, is tell them, hey, look, I'm cleaning up your leaves in October. I'm going to come November, December, January and February once a month. And here's the price for each of those visits to maintain the property and make it sure it's up to these standards. Now, the reason that's difficult is because if you have a really dry week and it's windy, you're not going to hardly have any leaves. Unless they like fences and things like that that keep the leaves from blowing away. Now, if it's raining and you had a windstorm last night, guess what? All the leaves haven't moved anywhere. They dropped through the rain and the wind and they sitting right there. And you're going to be cleaning up a lot more. It's going to take you way longer. There's going to be some variety in there. There's going to be some gray area. You've got to realize, you've got to take the average of the fact that sometimes it takes no time at all because, like, they just blew away. And then there are other times where they're wet and they're sitting right underneath the tree and there's a way more debris that you gotta haul off. But I'd really recommend go after the fall cleanup and then try to sell them on at least monthly, even bi weekly. Some people will sell those recurring services. Try to make fall cleanups and leaf cleanups a recurring service throughout the winter instead of just a one time, like I made a bunch of money in October, November. Great. Now you're gonna not see that person until next spring, in March, April or May when they want to clean up their property. Try to get them on monthly at least. We do bi weekly. We do bi weekly this throughout the winter. Keep the branches off their property, keep the leaves off their property, weed the beds, edge up the lawn. You're not mowing, but you're able to keep that recurring revenue coming in highly recommended. We talk a lot about this at last year's conference. It's extremely important, in my opinion, to be able to keep that recurring revenue. You don't have to make this as seasonal a business as mowing typically is. If you can sell recurring services throughout the winter and when you're slow, and if you don't have snow to plow and do salting, you're gonna have to get creative with leaf cleanup, bush trimming and property cleanups. And the best way to do that is sell recurring services to have dependable cash flow so you don't have as much of a dip during that winter season. Next question. Mike, on average, how many budget hours should be on a goal, be a goal for each field employee average market? Oh, this is a great question. So you kind of actually infer this if you looked at the whiteboard video we made last week about efficiency score. Because I was saying like, hey, you know, if you can be above 75 efficiency, that's great. What that means is because we're looking at budget hours versus clocked hours, you can basically infer that for every eight hours of bud, eight hours of clocked, I then therefore expect six hours worth of budget hours being completed. So to break that down, let me go a little further. When we do projects, we do expect our per team member to do eight budget hours. If they're doing mowing, we expect more like six to seven budget hours worth of work being done because there's drive time, loading and unloading, a lot more non revenue producing time the day. And so that is why we look at budget hours as the measuring stick for that. So for projects, eight hours, why? Because you're going to park your truck, going to stay in the same place all day long and if you have two cleanups, you just got to drive one time in between them. So you shouldn't have to, you know, spend three hours. Like you can do a four hour cleanup and then another four hour cleanup. Or I can do 30 minute mo, 20 minute mo, 15 minute mo, a whole bunch of stops. I'm probably only going to get six to seven budget hours completing the day because there is more drive time, therefore there is more waste. And therefore I'm also. That's why we're looking at efficiency from the stake of budget hours versus clocked hours. It's a great way to measure what, what is the average day's worth of budget hours per eight or ten hours that you work on the clock. So very, very important, make sure you watch that video from last week. Those, those videos never get a lot of likes or comments or views. So I'd appreciate it for everyone watching these, they go and you know, share it. Definitely watch those I feel like those are probably the most valuable content. Like, hey, watching me. Molan's not going to make you much money. Me watching that video about efficiency scores of your labor that will change your business. They'll completely change your business. Okay. And then when you start realizing the reason P4P pay for performance is so important is cause it locks that efficiency score in at a certain number. Cause they get paid based upon budget hours. So it locks that number in. And that makes start making more sense when you start thinking of it from that standpoint. Whoa. $20 from Florida Lawn care experts. A super sticker. Thank you man. I appreciate it. Wow. There's a lot of questions. This is, this would have been a good episode just to do Q A live, but thank you for. There's 110 of you on here. I appreciate that. Thank you for hitting like. We're gonna keep diving through some of these questions though. And if you. Do you guys like this more? Like, do you like when I add a little bit more context to the questions instead of just going through live? I feel like there's probably a good balance. I can do, you know, the live Q A sometimes as well. But I feel like these are probably more helpful for you. Just let me know in the comments what your thoughts are. I'll go through later and, and watch and see these. But do you like it when I go a little more deep on these questions instead of just going super surface and answering, you know, a lot of the questions we've, we've heard before or we've talked about or I've done enough videos so I kind of feel like doing these ones sometimes I can go a little deeper and add a little more context and value. So let me know in the comments. Obviously I like doing live. It's fun. I feel like for the people really going to watch an hour long video of me talking these deeper, this deeper content might be better, but I could be wrong. Next question.

Hey, Mike. I'm a new owner prepping for a 2022 launch. I am going into business with 60 to $70,000 in starting funds. My 2022 target is $250,000 in year one. Good. I feel pretty confident that I have a marketing and branding strategy that will set me apart from the competition in my community. What should I be focusing on today pre launch to be prepared for spring rush of 2022, I will be setting up a 45 minute coaching call with you soon. Okay, cool. So first of all, for everyone saying, oh, you can't do 250000 the first year. Yes, you can. We always are shooting at Augusta longer for a 10-20x multiple on our marketing dollars. Which means if I spend a thou, spend a thousand dollars in marketing, I expect in the next 12 months to make at least 10 to 20 thousand dollars in revenue. So from that thousand dollars in marketing, so what I'd be focusing on if I was you, which I don't have a name here, but for this person that wrote this question in, I would be focusing on the fact that nailing your marketing strategy, what you're going to do for ads where. How much are you going to spend on Google? How much are you going to spend on Facebook? What is the creative, the video, the text, the picture? What's the offer you're going to make? This is something like, you got to invest into this part, like right now, if you're, if you're thinking about next spring. To start, I would be reading marketing books like crazy. You know, go through the marketing module in landscape business course, like five times. Watch me create the ads. Like, watch me talk about marketing customer acquisition cost. Like, go get a book about Facebook ads. Go get a book. Like, right now we are spending, we're gonna, we're about to spend gobs of money to hire a media agency at Augusta Lawn Care because the change that we just made on iOS 14 has obliterated the customer acquisition cost for Facebook ads because it removed a whole bunch of the targeting. So instead of me trying to take the next three to six months, try to figure it out, I want to make sure that we figure this stuff out and get ahead of it. And so I'm going to spend a bunch of money. Everyone, you have a course for $519. That's just insane. Yeah, well, I'm about to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to learn about Facebook ads because of a recent change that Apple made. Okay, so invest in that. And if you're trying to grow that quickly, $250,000, you better make sure that when you're gonna go out and spend 10, $15,000 in marketing, what you're going to need to do to get that type of revenue, you better be sure that you know where you're spending your money and you know how to spend that money. And I'd be educating yourself like crazy on marketing. I'd be definitely doing door hangers. I'd be definitely doing postcards. I'd figure out every door, direct mail. And I would be figuring out Facebook, YouTube. I'd start off with a Starting budget, let's say, let's say $3,000 per month. Where am I going to spend all the money on those different channels? Then what I'm going to, what am I going to be shooting for in terms of customer acquisition costs? Then how am I going to decide which platforms performing the best? These are the type of things you have to do and that's going to be the best ROI for your time. Now if you're starting next spring, I'd also get your website up and running so it's ranking well on Google. We have two, three sites at Lawn Care Web Design that just got started that aren't actually starting mowing until next spring, but they want their site ranking well. They want their Google my business page having reviews having so that next spring they're already ranking well on Google. So if you're thinking about starting your business next spring, start now. We got people coming in October for franchisee training that are not going to be starting their business till February. Why they want their website ranking well so that when the demand goes up, you are the supply, I. E. At the top of Google. So I'd be recommending marketing, focusing on educating yourself on marketing, creating a plan around your marketing and making sure your website is up, has Google reviews and is actually ranking well on Google by the time next spring rolls around. All right, let's keep going here.

Next question. Kind of a loaded question here and could be its own video, but I have scoured the Internet and haven't seen anyone talk about this. I'm a teacher and have a lawn care landscaping business on the side in southwest southwest Missouri. How would you structure your business? In my case, to have the most lean company where I could comfortably take $1,000 in income, rough I. E. Rough number of yards, landscaping jobs, truck trailer, equipment marketing, budget strategy, and not working in the business during the months I'm in school. Excuse me. Maybe I just need a coaching call. Lol. I don't think you need a coaching call. Let me try to break this down for you. So if you're trying to make $1,000 in profit per month, that's easy to do when you're working in the business because you literally need to go sell. Like let's just say your average lawn is 50 bucks, right? And let's say you do an average of 3 cuts per month just because you have some weekly, some bi weekly, let's say it's 150 per client, you could easily go get 10 customers and there's your 1500 dollars and you're going to make a thousand dollars in profit that because that's 60, 66 profitability. Because you're doing all the work. You're probably not having a bunch of insurance and overhead and shop expense. Really great. So literally for 10 customers, you're going to be able to, if you're working in the business, make a thousand dollars in profit. Now what gets a little hairy is the fact that you want to make this money thousand dollars per month. When you are working as a teacher and you don't want to be working in the business, that's tough. Because what I would recommend if you're just trying to make a thousand dollars extra in profit each each month is just do your lawns, those 10 lawns on the weekend you and still stay in the business. Because as soon as you want to go work on the business, that is not be the one doing the work, you're going to have to triple the size of the business. And now you're going to have more overhead because you're going to have an employee. You're going to have insurance. You need to have insurance if you have an employee like you need to. So there's a lot of other expenses that suddenly get dumped on as soon as you have an employee. And your margin is going to go from like 66% to like 20%, which means I'm going to have to like triple the size of my business just to make it the same amount of profit. So I would recommend if your goal is just $1,000 in monthly profit, probably a better idea to try to squeeze those in on the weekend if you can, while you're doing the work. Or what you could do is go hire that employee to help you. Or they work once or twice a week to get the lawns done. And then maybe on the weekends you do like a property cleanup to justify the fact that you're going to have to get more revenue to pay for the employee. That might be an option. Just a thought. Next question. Hey, Mike, I'm curious how you budget for uniforms and what is your policy when an employee quits or gets fired? Do you have. Do they have to turn in uniforms? We do uniforms, but as we are growing, it's getting fairly expensive. Especially when people don't stay, don't last very long. Some turn the uniforms back in, but most don't. And we cannot pay an a person earned wages. Oh, and we can't not pay a person earned wages. So they can't take money out of their pay because they didn't return their uniform. So honestly, case by case basis here, sometimes when it's an ugly firing or it didn't end well or we had to fire them over text message, we're probably not getting the uniform back. If it was really, you know, kind of a mutual thing, we talked them in person. A lot of times they will bring their uniform back and we don't really stress out about that part. Honestly, you're not going to lose so much there as much as your current employees misplacing their uniform, tearing their uniform up, leaving in the truck, and then again soiled with dirt and oil. So what we did that really helped us with this expense because it is literally hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month spent on uniforms as your business grows. You know what I'm talking about, like, if not thousands, when you got to order batches of them. And so what I recommend and what we did is we said, hey, look, we're going to charge $5 if you want a new T shirt and we're charged $10 for a new hoodie. It cost us like five, four or five times that to actually make the hoodie and make the T shirt. But it actually was enough for them to warrant or like think about not leaving it in their truck or letting it, you know, just get, you know, stuff underneath the seat or left on a job site. So they actually started thinking about a little bit more and we have the ability, if it's really, really bad looking, just to give them a new one and take it off their paycheck. Now we have P4P where they have a bonus that we can take off of. So it's a little more difficult if you're making it where.

You don't have P4P if you just have hourly wages. That being said, there's absolutely something you could do in terms of like, if you have a bonus check or you have some sort of profit sharing that out of that comes their uniform. That would be my recommendation. Like literally all of a sudden, like 90 of the, the things that like every single Saturday I would be back when I was cleaning the trucks out and we had several employees, I'd be taking like shirts and sweaters and hats and all the rest of it. Now maybe once one a week will get left in the trucks because they know it's like, it's, it's something, it's five, $10, not a lot. Not. We're not trying to make money on them. We're losing money still. Like, it's not a money grab. It's a matter of like, hey, we want you to be accountable and take care of your uniform so it's not burning money for the business.

Next question. Oh, which, by the way, I know I mentioned it. Landscape Summit. You should definitely come to Landscape Summit. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. It's gonna be in January of 2022, and we're gonna have in person three days. It's all of Thursday evening, all of Friday, all of Saturday. And I'm gonna be bringing in some speakers this year. People that are super awesome big business owners to kind of even me out a bit. Cause they do a bunch of commercial hardscaping, they do a bunch of commercial maintenance, and they work with tons of companies. These are consultants and professional speakers that have had massive business in the lawn care and landscaping industry. So the first one that we have, Marcus Vanderbilt, he's awesome. I've been to two or three other conferences where he spoke and he is fantastic. So he's committed. He's gonna be coming to the conference for one of the days and I'm probably getting someone else. I'll announce those people as they come up over the next couple months. But check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. It will be in person and it will be great. So I'm looking forward to that. All right, let's do three more questions here. I got. Hi, Mike. Thank you for all the content. Without you, I would have never thought I could start my own business. My question this, the market here in San Diego seems to mostly want full service gardeners rather than just lawn care. What are some ways I can structure my prices to be all inclusive? I want to offer pruning and mowing services ruled into one price. However, it's hard to be consistent with estimating time. Yeah, so I would recommend doing. Because this is the problem when you get into a market like this, where we have several locations that are like this for Augusta, people were just used to a monthly flat rate for all of their services. That's great. But don't get in the trap of, oh, that looks like a $200 property. Oh, that looks like a $300 property. And just literally making numbers up. What you need to do is you still need to use budgeted hours. All right, so for example, let's say I'm going to assume we have 32 mows and each one's going to take 0.5 budgeted hours. Boom. That's mowing. Okay. I'm just sketching this out really fast. Obviously, be more organized in your software. But then it's like, okay, there's 32 hours. Sorry, 30. 32 visits times half a budget hour per mowing visit. Great. Okay, now weeding. What are all the services this person needs? Okay, they want weeding. And for 16 visits per year, we're going to do. And it's also going to take half a budgeted hour. Great. Now we're going to do quarterly bush trimming. So four times a year. So four visits per year, we are going to bush trimming. Every single time. It's going to take eight budgeted hours. Boom. Eight budget hours. Okay, and that's going to be for bush trimming. Bam. Okay, great. What else do we want to do? Fertilization. Fantastic. We're going to do six fertilization. Every single one is going to be 0.5 budget hours, just for example. And then there's also going to be $20 worth of supplies and material costs for those fertilizers. And that is going to be for fertilizers. Great. Okay, so what I've done now, 32 visits, half a budget hour for mowing. 16 visits, half a budget hour for weeding. This is per year. Per year we're gonna do four every quarter, bush trimming. And each one's gonna take eight budget hours. Now what am I gonna do? I'm gonna add up all the budget hours. So for mowing over the course of the year, we have 16 budget hours. For weeding, we have eight budget hours. For bush trimming, we have four visits times eight hours. That's 32 budgeted hours. For fertilization, we have six times 0.5. So that's three budget hours. Plus the fact that we have $20 per visit of material costs, that's $120. So I have three budgeted hours.

Plus $120 of material cost. Boom. Now, let's assume. I hope you all can see this. Let me see if I. Oh, you can kind of see it. Okay, let's go. Okay, cool. You can see it. Look at the light. There we go. Okay, so now over on the left hand or the right hand side here, I'm going to add these all up. I got 16 plus 8. That's 24. 24 plus 32, that's 56. 56 plus 3, that's 59 budgeted hours, plus $120 of fertilizer. Now, if I wanted to add some dumping fees in there, I probably should have, like on the bush trimming, et cetera. But you can see what I'm doing. Here I got 59 budget hours, plus $120 worth of supplies for all these services for the year. Now let's assume that I have a $50 per per hour rate. So what is it going to be? I'm going to do 59. I don't think I've ever done one of these before, like live like this. 59. This is really simple. I know I'm simplifying this a little bit, but this is really how you get started. It's a great place to get started. Yes. There's better ways to do this. Have you do not want to just put mowing and put a number on your estimate. You want to have more verbiage. Clear. We talked about this stuff in the course. Okay, so 59 budget hours. Multiply that by 50. Boom labor on this is going to be two, $2,950. Plus I'm gonna have $120 worth of supplies. So plus 120 bam. The total cost for the year is gonna be $3,070. I'm going to divide that by 12. Boom, boom, boom, boom. $255.83 per month on a 12 month contract. And here, Mr. Jones, are all the services you're going to get. You're going to get mowing. You're at 32 visits a year and that's gonna be for eight months, four times per month. We're gonna do weeding and we're gonna do that. We're gonna do that every other mowing visit. Okay, so that's 16 visits. We're gonna do quarterly bush trimming. And again you're going to notice all the things are holloway debris. Includes all bushes and shrubs, does not include the tree along the road, whatever it might be. Fertilization. You're going to list all the types of fertilizer actually apply. But figuring out the price, that is how you figure out prices based on budget hours and supplies. Not oh, that loan looks like kind of like Mr. Jones down the street and I charge him 250. Doing a little bit bigger. I'm going to do 275. Like you're literally pulling things out of thin air. You're not going to give your crews. The scheduling is going to be a miserable nightmare if you don't have budget hours because you're not going to know how much, how much time to give them on a specific job. You're not going to know that four times out of the year it's going to take an entire day versus 32 times of the year it's only going to take half an hour.

That's how you do a 12 month contract using budget hours and supplies. All right, next one up two more.

Do you use trackers on your trucks and or other timekeeping devices? I am needing something more reliable and accurate than employees tracking time on main on mainly accounts as well as time spent traveling etc. Yeah, so we use a product called Zoobie Z U B I E. I don't think it's the best and just something that we've used for so long now we're used to it. It's basically a little tracker plugs into the computer of the vehicle. There's a whole bunch of other options like Verizon fleet and a whole bunch of other products you can get. Basically it gives live mapping as well as it's plugged into the computer of the vehicle. So it can actually tell us like fuel levels and any sort of codes that come from the computer of the vehicle. We can tell the mechanic what the code is before they even come and see the issue of the truck. So it's a great kind of like monitoring system for the truck as a whole. It also gives you feedback on who's driving in terms of if they do fast acceleration, fast braking, erratic driving. We've actually been able to contact people when they got in an accident like they hit somebody before they contacted us at the office simply because we got a notification that there was a fast breaking that we should contact them like there's possible impact. So great. If you have more than a couple trucks, if you only have a couple trucks, you probably know where they all are all at at all periods of time. But especially if you're not on P4P you should have track truckers track your trucks. Truck trackers, there you go. And the reason for that is because you it's the easiest way to not be worrying all the time. Like where are they at? Are they not. Are they just sitting on the side of the road? Are they sleeping in their truck? Are they at the gas station? Well, if you have a track trucker you can tell like if there's 20 minutes of drive time and the property is like half a mile down the street and they clocked into one job 20 minutes before, like you know something's up. They're not, they're not taking 20 minutes to drive half a mile. Right. So those are the type of things that are great for the track. The truck tracker, once you're on P4P, pay for performance. You don't really Use it to like just see if they're slacking off as much as you're really just trying to look at a map that's live all day long and be able to see where everybody's at, all their trucks. So for example, you know, someone goes down their, their weed whacker broke and they want another one. Well, typically everyone text everyone like hey, where you at? What could I who should be all the rest of it. Whereas now contact command center, come up, contact Lee the office manager and say hey, I, I need a weed whacker. Who's closest to me? Oh, Joe is just down the street. Okay, great, I'll go pick one up from him. So it is really nice to have truck truck trackers as you get more, more trucks as well as if you're less mechanically inclined like me. It's really nice to have those codes to be able to give to a mechanic so you don't have to spend a bunch of money on diagnostics because it's going to give you exactly what's wrong with the truck before you even have have to bring a mechanic in. All right, last question of the night. I've built my business and now wanting to cash out with no more than three years, what should I be focusing on to structure the company, get the most out of it? We have done 400, 500,000 and on track this year for 600,000 respectively over the past three seasons. That's gross revenue with lawn care and snow services, I should add. We lease shop space and have no real estate assets other than some trucks and equipment, which makes selling service based companies difficult in my opinion. Would love your input. Yeah. So you know, if you've only been in business for three years, that's a little more challenging. Selling a business that's been around for 10 or 15 years, that has customers have been with them for a very long time. That's great. The problem is right now, all of your customers, if this is your third year, I don't know if this is your third year or not, but if this was your third year, you know, most of your customers have probably been with you for less than 12 months and so that's challenging to sell. You do have recurring services. It was great lawn care and snow plowing. You probably have contracts for snow plowing, lawn care, have a whole bunch of people set up on recurring. So there's value to that. There is value to that a lot more than if you did one off landscaping projects. Because every single project is the next job. There's no dependability There is no, there is no recurring revenue. So you do have some value here. Just keep in mind when you're at 4005-000006-00000 revenue and you're that young of a business, you better have like systems. And you got to have brand to make this business worth anything. Because like otherwise it's asset value like trucks and equipment plus goodwill. And that goodwill is gonna depend on your brand. Do you have a website? Do you have a phone number? Do you have an established brand in the community? People know about you, have you been around for 10 or 15 years? That holds some weight. Do you get the phone number? Do you get the website as part of the transaction? That's all goodwill. And then there's a client list. And that client list is gonna depend on how long you've been around. Is that like 300 names? Is that a thousand names, is that 10,000 names? All gonna depend upon, upon so many different factors. There's a great YouTube video I made about acquisitions and selling and valuating your company. If you're trying to sell, check out that video. Just type in acquisitions. Mike Andy's. It's like an hour and a half long webinar talk talking about all the different angles of selling your business, the different ways of valuating your business and how to set yourself up. If you're trying to sell your business down the road, if you're trying to sell your business down the road, you should get as many of those, those contracts signed. And like on paper, you should get as much recurring revenue as possible. You should kind of push aside any sort of one time projects because there's no value beyond just the money you make in the job. There is no value long term, whereas if I have a recurring customer, it's worth something. Now in that video, see it can range anywhere from like a hundred dollars to five hundred dollars depending on the way the business is set up. That recurring customer contracts, great. If you want to start getting all of your customers on contracts, that's going to increase the value of the business as well. So check out that video and I hope that is helpful. Cool. I have a couple questions. Well, there's a ton of questions come in today, so I'm not gonna get to all of them, but let me answer a couple of these ones that just popped in. So McIntyre mowers ask, could you break down performance pay, pay for performance. Watch the video I made a couple weeks ago and it says, it says something like I, I fixed the labor shortage or something like that. It talks all about P4P. It's 20 minutes long, very in detail. Of course, not too many views, but it's a very good video. So anyways, there's a ton of questions. If you did ask one, I do want to do one of these live instead of these, these questions via the text messaging group. So down the road we will get to them. I absolutely will come back to them. And if you want to join the group so you can ask these questions and get the next because these, these are great where we can go a little more deeper and I can, I can not be waiting through a bunch of unnecessary questions. Just text this number right here. Text the word landscaping to 360-227-6362. You'll join the group. And then whenever I want questions like I did today, I'll just ask and you can submit them. Just text it right back to me. So anyways, thank you so much for joining everyone. I really, really do appreciate it. I appreciate all of your support. The people gave money in this chat. Like, my goodness, I appreciate that. I appreciate everyone, lawn caremedia.com that have been purchasing the door hangers, even purchasing shirts. Let's go. Two more weeks and this bad boy is gone. Limited edition, better pick it up. But I appreciate all your support everyone at lawn care web design.com as well. I really do. And we're trying to take that money and spend every single one of those dollars well and just create more content and more tools for the community and the landscaping industry as a whole. So thank you so much everyone for coming tonight. I hope this was helpful. If it was, please comment below what was helpful and what you're applying to your business. Thanks so much. We'll see you tomorrow.