DON'T GET COMPLACENT!

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course podcast. This is an episode for only the podcast today because I shared some of this information on a video, actually a live video from our shop the other day. So if you are listening to this on the podcast, go in the description. I have the link for the video part of the live video that I shared this information and kind of did a little bit of a behind the scenes at the Augusta office. But for those of you listening with earbuds in your ears as you are working hard out in the field, driving, whatever, working out, I wanted to share this audio only for you guys. So these are some of the things that I really encourage you to be working on this time of year. It's January, we're heading into 2020 and it's easy. So many landscapers this time of year just kind of on cruise control, just kind of gliding through. It's not so busy for them. They've just finished, you know, two weeks of holidays, lots of food. They're just trying to like roll into 2020 and there's not much going on, not a lot of calls, not a lot of leads coming in. Guys aren't working 60 hours a week and it's easy to just get complacent. I encourage you to the utmost. This is not the time of year to get complacent. This is the time of year to do the hard work. This is the time of year to work on your business, do the things that you need to be doing that are going to actually move the needle for your business. You can buy a mower, you can buy a truck any time of year, but you don't all year round. You don't have the time to work on your business. This is the time to do it. As we head into January and you got all the motivation because we got this new year, this is the time to capitalize and start getting things done. I'm going to go over some of the things that I encourage you to be working on this time of year. For most landscapers that are not in Florida and California and like the southern states that have a lot of work year round for a lot of you, especially if you don't do snow plowing, you're going to have a slow couple months here as we hit January and February, this is not the time to cruise control. And if you don't have another job that you work during the winter to make ends meet, this is the time to work on your business. Number one, software. If you're going to be switching software. This is the time of year to do it. You do not want to be switching software or figuring out a software or figuring out how to use it in the most efficient manner. In the middle of the spring rush. You want to have it down, know what you're doing, and be efficient with that software. And so if you're going to go from excel in your spreadsheets and try to, like, move up to something like Lawn Pro, or if you're going to go from Lawn Pro and upgrade a little bit better to even go to Jobber, or if you're really going to take the plunge and really scale the business and upgrade to something like Service Autopilot, it's a little more expensive. Regardless of what you're doing with software. You know my opinion, software, you have to have it. It's absolutely imperative. Get something. Get started with something. Goodness gracious. I don't know how many people I've had to tell this to, and they don't do it. And it just completely revolutionizes your business if you haven't done it at all. But if you're going to upgrade your software, this is the time of year to do it. Figuring out how to import your customers, how to transfer all your job notes over, schedule out the jobs, put the information in, get credit card information, be really comfortable with the mobile app of the CRM that you're using. These are things that take time. You can't do this in the middle of the year when you got 40 calls a day and all your employees are running around. You're hiring people and you're trying to figure out jobs. You cannot be figuring out your software. This is the time of year to do it. If you're gonna change, this is the time of year to do it. Number two, thinking about efficiencies in your trucks and your trail setups. So last year, when winter rolled around, we completely revamped the racking systems on all our trailers so that everything was completely identical. The number of tools and equipment in every single trailer, the way that the trailer setups were set up, their configuration so that the equipment was completely standardized. Everything was labeled. You know, without having to look inside the trailer, we could tell exactly what was inside in terms of equipment and where it was all at, making it much more efficient because every single truck and trailer was standardized. And so we did that last year. This is the time of year to think about that efficiencies. This is the time of year to think about where your truck's parked. If you have a shop thinking about the workflow and how trucks come in and out and how can you save 30 seconds? Where can you put the keys in your office to save an extra 30 steps every single morning to get the keys? These are things you can start thinking about this time of year when there's not a lot of work to be done or a little bit slower. This is the time to work on these things. Number three is figure out your ad campaign, your budget and your plan for spring. Alright, so this is a time to really do some hard work. This is what we're gonna be doing at Landscape Summit in a couple weeks is creating a plan for this year, figuring out a budget and making an ad campaign for spring rush. If you're wanting to grow, if you're wanting to advertise this coming spring, this is the time to actually create the flyer, design the postcard, make the door hangers. Do not wait until March, April, when everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Okay, this is the time to do it now. When you have time, you can get other people's opinions, you can show it to friends and family, see what works, see what doesn't, Test with several people to see which postcard is most effective, which one stands out. This is the time of year to do it. Make a plan for 2020.

There is something about people who write down plans, goals and with numbers and deadlines. So at last year's Landscape Summit, I had everyone do their plan for this year. And it is amazing the amount of emails that I've received of people who have reached their goals and eclipsed them, and the amount, the power of writing those things down and not just writing down random goals, but actually having step by step, actionable items to get and achieve those goals is very important. And so we'll be working on that in Landscape Summit. But this is something you must be doing in January, especially as we head into the new year, especially if you want to grow your business, especially if you want to make it more profitable and even more especially if you want to get out of day to day operations. All right, last thing. Number four, you must be doing this time of year. There's a new one. This is something I haven't talked a lot about. This is the season to hire people. Tis the season to be jolly. We just passed that season, but tis the season to hire, all right, Every single person in the labor industry, whether it be painting, contractors, framers, roofers, whatever, come spring, guess what? They're all hiring for great people too. They're all trying to find great talent. And in this labor economy, in this labor market is very difficult. And if you're gonna, you're not just competing for landscapers, you're competing for every single laborer that can pick up a shovel, that can pick up a rake, that can use a blower or a weed eater. That's what your competition is. And so it's very, very difficult to find great employees. Very, very hard to scale your business when you can't have a dependable labor market. So what do you do? You need to hire people now. You do not need to put them on payroll, you don't need to start paying them now if you're gonna not have much work for the next couple months. But this is the season to actually interview, hire, get them on board, give them a contract that they can sign that starts them in March or April. And it works because these people have just been laid off by their job. If you can hire them and give them a better culture, better pay, they will sign even if they know it's gonna be in a couple month start date. So we've just hired two people, we're gonna be hiring a third here this week that will be starting in two months from now. They will not get any money till then. We will get them set up, they'll get uniforms, they'll get our employee he book, they'll get an orientation day, and then they'll be set up to come the week before they start work for a training period. And that's it. They will come. And the reason we're able to do that is because we do have P4P pay for performance and we do offer better, you know, pay than the average competitor out there in our market. But also it's the fact that the labor market is so open this time of year, every other home improvement contractor that's going to be looking for labor has laid off their employees this time of year. This is the time to go find those grade A type amazing one people that are out there that are laid off for the winter because work is slow might not be landscapers, but there's a really good chance your competitors who have laid off their employees, you're going to gobble them up. The good ones, the good ones. And I have never, I have never seen as high quality applicants applying as I have during the winter months, because that's when everyone's laid off. All right, so highly, highly recommend you start hiring people now, interviewing them now, putting out ads. Now. We have never, never ever had as good quality leads for applicants as we have had in the winter months. So I highly recommend you do that. If you watch the video below in the link that I have in the description, I actually show a truck that we just bought this time of year, in the winter, we got for $3,000. It was a 2004 Sierra 2500 4x4. And in that video, I'm talking a lot about the importance of making money with your trucks. Instead of buying nice stuff and trying to be flashy, I'd much rather make money like that truck we bought for $3,000. We'll probably have to put about $500 to put a brake controller and change the O2 sensor on it. And then we're gonna paint it, put decals on it for less than five grand. We're gonna have a truck that is going within literally a couple weeks of being on the job. No payments, all paid with cash. That's the type of things you need to be focusing on. Moving the needle in your business is not buying more trucks and more stuff, more depreciating assets, more things that can get damaged, nicked, scratched, dented. And you start losing sleepover. Because now you're underwater. Now you have high premiums, now you have on your insurance. Now you have high payments on your loans. These are things you do not want to be doing these time and time again. Why I see companies fail in the landscaping industry, and so that's included in that video also. But I want to make sure I'm very clear to everyone today. These are the things you must do this time of year. Do not get complacent. If you're going to switch software, do it now. If you're going to make efficiencies and improvements in your business, this is the time to do it. If you're going to change how you're tracking your receipts or how you're going to track expenses or anything like that, this is the time of year to do it. Make your ad campaign for 2020 spring. Make a plan and a budget for the rest of the year, and make sure you're hiring and interviewing people this time of year when no one else is. In general, if you want to be successful, do what other people are not doing. And when everyone's doing something, there should be red flags all around you because you should be realizing that that is basically a herd of people going towards the wrong direction. So when no one is hiring in the winter, that's your time to do it. Because guess what? When everyone's hiring in spring, it's Very difficult to be successful and get good applicants. Okay. I highly encourage everyone to sign up for Landscape Summit. It's a conference that's starting in less than two weeks, 12 days from when I'm recording this. I recommend you bring you and your management team. Maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's your operational manager, maybe it's your office manager. This event will change your life, it will change your business. We're gonna be talking very in depth about what I've done at Augusta to get out of day to day operations by hiring an estimator, having a great office manager, how I compensate them to make sure that they're working for the best interest of the business as well as they're able to make a very good living. And so really looking forward to it. I absolutely believe it's going to change your business. I believe it so much that what I've done is given a money back guarantee. But not just that, but if you come and you pay for your ticket and you come and you come to the conference and you come to the hotel where the venue's at. If you do not feel when you leave that 100% value like the education you received is blowing you away. I will pay for your ticket, the $299. But I'll also pay for your hotel fare of you staying there at the Holiday Inn where we have the conference center. I will pay for that as well. Because I'm that confident that this is gonna change your business, it's going to change your life and your mentality about the way you look at your business, the mentality around the way you look at your employees. When we start talking about P for P, pay for performance, we're gonna be going on a tour to Augusta and you're gonna be able to see what a company looks like when it's doing multi million like that is huge amounts of value for you. So that when you're in your business, you're not just kind of like grasping at straws. You actually have a vision of what it looks like, where you wanna get to and what that looks like. A vision for your mind to be able to encapsulate what you want it to become and actually strive towards it. Alright, we're going to be, you're gonna actually hear from Liz, my operations manager at Augusta Lawn Care, she's gonna be doing a keynote. Lee, who is my estimator, he'll speaking there. You'll hear from office staff members and people that are from, I guess the team. So that's Why I encourage you to bring your team. I can be talking all day long. You might wanna share things from this podcast with them. But when they come and they hear my employees, my operations managers, them talking about how they helped me get out of the day to day operations, how the culture changed, what they do to support my mission for the business as well as the team and the culture, these are things that are getting absolutely life changing and business transformational in 2020. I highly recommend you come. It's in Bellingham, January 16th through the 18th. We start at 5pm on the Thursday. And that $299 covers at least four meals, possibly five meals. And as well as all the training, your handbooks. I think I'm gonna give everyone a hat. So, like, it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's not about the money here for me. We don't make, we don't even break even on this. Honestly, as I was running the numbers yesterday, we don't even break even. That's gonna be there from our team and everything. This is completely a labor of love for you to grow your business. I absolutely implore you to make a decision to commit to that in 2020. All right, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. I absolutely hope I will get to see you in person, live, get to answer some of your questions and see you shake your hand at Landscape Summit. I'll see you there. Thanks so much. Have a great day.