DON'T GET COMPLACENT! Live Video at Our Landscape Office

Hey, everyone doing a quick live here wanted to jump in and say new year to everyone. Happy new year. And just here at the shop in Bellingham, Washington. I'll wait for a few of you to get online. When I do that, I'll show you outside.

It's raining like crazy here in Bellingham. But wanted to hop on here and encourage everyone this time of year to not stop the hustle. Don't stop the hustle. I just was driving and I saw one of the local competitors or landscapers. They're at a bowling alley and I'm like, what are you doing? This is the time to like work on your business and get stuff done. I'm out here at Augusta Long. This is our Bellingham shop out here on the Guy Meridian.

In case you haven't seen it before. By the way. We're going to be having a tour when we come to the conference. When you come to the conference. Landscape summit starts in three weeks, less than three weeks. We're going to be having a three day conference here in Bellingham. And on the Friday we're going to take a bus and we're going to take five buses actually. And we're going to come here and we're going to do a tour of this whole facility. You'll be able to see all of our trucks here, the trailers, the setup here we have three of the boxes for storage in that yellow or that green shed in the back. We got the skid steers and the track loaders here. Several of the crews are out for today. That's the offices. Office there and then another. Whoops. That box right there is also office with solar panels. But really looking forward to landscape Summit. Make sure you sign up. Now there's several spots left, so make sure you sign up. I wanted to show you guys this real quick before we jump in today. And that is this guy right here. So this is a 2004 Sierra 2500, four wheel drive, extended cab. It's not pretty. It's not the best truck in the world. But let me tell you what I paid for it and maybe you'll see why I'm pretty excited about it. Paid $3200 US for this. So I'm showing you real quick. It's not the best truck in the world. But guess what? We're gonna get this thing painted. I gotta get an O2 sensor replaced on it. About 200 bucks. But we'll get it painted decal and this truck will be able to pull trailers, do whatever, and it will make money I'd much rather buy three or four of these trucks. Maybe I put five grand into it, total. It has less than 110,000 miles on it.

I'd much rather buy three of these trucks and make a whole lot more money than buy some nice vehicle, 20, $30,000 dump truck. Much rather buy one of those bad boys right there. A whole lot more revenue can be achieved. I can get six employees if I buy three of these. I can keep six employees busy doing landscaping jobs, mowing. It's a 2500 so it can pull trailers. Get that thing painted up. It's gonna look great. And guess what? I'm not going to cry if it gets a dent in it, for crying out loud. It was $3,000. Right? So, you know, is it pretty? No. Does it have little things and dents? Yeah, But I don't care. I'm going to get it painted. You can get your truck painted for like 6, 700 bucks from Mako or economy paint or one of your local places. So don't spend a bunch of money on trucks. This is not the time of year as we head into January to go buy expensive equipment. Your cash flow is low. It's the winter season. This is the time to be looking for economical ways to grow your revenue. But I wanted to show you the truck. I want to show you quickly around the shop, but make sure you sign up for Landscape Summit. We'll be doing a full tour inside the office here. You can see we already just today we got a bunch of trailer racking for the trailer setups, but we'll be doing a full tour here at Landscape Summit. You'll be able to see the office, everything that goes on here. Make sure you sign up. But today I wanted to kind of refresh everyone's memory that this is not the time of year to just sit back and get complacent. This is the time to work on your business. All right? You're not as busy. You know, there's not a ton of people calling you. There's not a ton of jobs rolling in. You're not doing 20 estimates a day. You don't have a bunch of projects. Your Crews aren't working 20, 30 hours every day, it seems. So this is the time to be working on things that you need to be doing in your business. Number one, software. If you need to change software, time to upgrade. Whether it be going from Excel to Lawn Pro or from lawn Pro into jobber or from jobber into service autopilot, this is the time to make that Transition. All right, I got a few points I want to hit here of the things that you should be working on this time of year as we go into 2020. Start off strong. Don't start off complacent. All right? If you have a question below, post it in the comments. Another thing you need to be working on is efficiencies and your truck setup. All right, so, for example, we got these bad boys right here from green trailer racks, and that cost about $2,000. I think it was $2,200. It's going to be the full racking system for two complete setups. I'll show you real quickly what ours looks like, our trailerless setups. But that. That right there, that $2,200 is going to get us two complete setups just like this. This is what we have. All the equipment's off because it's the winter season, but this is what our trailer list setups look like. All right? This truck right here can do 5 to $700 of revenue in a day, profiting 3 to $400 per day. All right, this whole setup with all the equipment and everything is going to cost less than $7,000. Guess what? An enclosed trailer alone is going to cost me more than seven or cost me almost $7,000. So.

That'S the trailer setup. We got two more setups for that, and I'm going to make a video next month. But you can come here in January, a couple more weeks from now and see those trailer setups. But that's something you should be working on this time of year in the winter, as we head into 2020, work on efficiencies. Are your truck set up efficiently? Should be thinking about trailer setups. Should you be organizing the racks inside your enclosed trailers? These are things you need to be thinking about. Where are your trucks and your trailers parked? If you have a shop, maybe you're just working from home, but is it efficiently placed that you can get out every single day as quick as possible? I'm gonna hop back outside of here, and you can see where we have our trailers parked. Enclosed trailers. There's a bunch of the trucks out today, but we got trailers, the dump trailers there, the trailer. The trucks are parked there, all organized. Why is. Why are they out here? Number one for frontage out against the road, as you're going to see here when you come for landscape summit, we're out next to this highway. But more importantly, look. That's our entrance and exit. I want people out of that gate within minutes. Every single Morning. So what do I do? I make all these trailers lined up, ready to go so they can just hook up to the trailer and then run right out of the entrance there. I want them out working as soon as possible efficiencies, planning out where materials are at. How do we set up these bins? This is all about cutting down on waste, cutting down on minutes, seconds every single day. And this is what you gotta be thinking about this time of year. You're not gonna be able to work on these things in the middle of spring, right when you're getting 20 calls a day and every single one of your guys are working overtime and you're behind on projects. You're not gonna be able to start thinking about efficiencies and where you should be putting your racks and where you should be parking. This is the time of year you gotta be doing those things. Okay? So to be complacent this time of year, to be doing other things and just thinking that, oh, it's slow, I don't need to be working. There's not a bunch of business coming in. This is the time to do the hard work that actually moves the needle in your business. Guess what? You can buy a truck any time of year. You can buy a mower any time of year. This is the time of year, though, that you've got time to spend doing the things that actually matter. What? Working your software, working on efficiencies, making sure your trucks and trailers are set up efficiently. Another thing you should be doing is working on your ad campaign. What are you gonna be doing in March and April when everyone is thinking about lawn care? Do you have an ad campaign ready to go? Have you designed your flyers, your postcards, your every door, direct mail for your flyers, you're doing Facebook ads. Those things need to be created now. You have the time to spend and make sure they're actually gonna work. All right? You should also be hiring right now and interviewing people. This is something I haven't talked a whole lot about yet, but we are actively looking for people to work here. And this is the best time because guess what? Every other contractor in the labor field is not hiring right now. They're waiting till spring, too. All your general contractors, your framing, your painters, they're all waiting for spring as well. So instead of waiting for when everyone else is going to be out trying to hire, this is the time to take advantage of the slower speed season for labor and go out and try to hire your competitors, employees. We are getting some of our best applicants right now. And we've already hired two, probably three coming up here this week of people that are going to be starting in two months from now. You don't have to hire them and actually get them on payroll now, but you can give them a job offer, give them a date to start and get rolling. Get some really good A players. When everyone else is being laid off, this is the time of year to do it. Okay, I think that's it. Let me jump into the Q and A. A whole bunch of people have questions. So let me answer some of these that are coming in. Nathan asked, what size ramp do you use for that truck? So let me show you that again. Nathan, what that truck ramp looks like. This ramp is aluminum. And we did that so that way it wouldn't rust and wouldn't look bad over time. So we're pretty happy with it. This One here is 29 inches wide. So it's able to get a 21 inch or. Sorry, is this 32? One second, I forget. This is the. This is the brand right here. You can get this on Amazon or pretty much anywhere. 500 pound capacity, but it's aluminum so it doesn't rust, which I kind of like. It's really light. Like this whole thing probably weighs 30, 40 pounds. But we get a 21 inch mower back here. You could get a 30 inch mower in here actually. So it's probably 32 inches to be perfectly honest with you. And it just a bi fold so it just folds out. It's really nice and easy. What do you think about cube trucks, Brandon? Yeah, I love cube trucks, Brandon. I would totally do cube trucks. I'd actually probably do something like those, the vans like Ford Transit or something. However, in our market we have to bag clippings and so we have to have space in the bed of the truck to store clippings. And if we had box trucks, we wouldn't have anywhere to put clippings or it'd be a pain to get them out each day. So I do love cube trucks. I don't like the fact the ones that have are dually just more maintenance and more expensive to maintain for the tires and all that sort of stuff. And harder to get people to drive those. Like the trailer, the setups. What makes them so nice is people can drive a pickup truck. It's simple. When you start throwing an enclosed trailer on, when you start having a box truck where they can't see out of back mirror, the. Those are things that complicate the process of getting a newbie up and running and profitable. And so I want to minimize those as much as I can. Nathan, where do you get the rack to hold the mower? What size is it? So I think I just gave that to you, Nathan. I think it's 32 inches wide, and I'm pretty sure it's 36 inches across. Jordy asks, where are you located? This shop here is in bellingham. Bellingham, Washington. It's also where we're going to have in the conference here in a couple weeks, landscape summit. And so if anyone is listening to this, you definitely want to join, just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference, sign up today, and we'll be here in a couple weeks. And on the Friday, we're going to come here and do a complete walkthrough tour of the entire facility. I'll show you a little bit more outside, but if you have any questions, just post it. I'll answer all of them here on the live. But in the back here, you can see we got some of the employees working today, but we got the track loaders, skid steers. We'll be talking about why I bought these types of equipment. Why did I buy a $3,000 truck? Whoops. Can't even point at it. That $3,000 truck right there, we're gonna paint that thing, put decals on it. It's gonna make money. I don't care if it doesn't look shiny or flashy or new. It's gonna look clean, it's gonna look organized, and it's gonna make money from day one. Literally one project. And that job, that truck is gonna be paid off. That's all I need. That thing gets dented up. A little scratch on it from when it's actually getting work done. I'm not gonna cry about it. And guess what? That truck out front completely paid off. I don't have to worry.

So these are the boxes. We need a bunch of storage. We'll be going through these.

More questions. Coming in with a trailerless truck, do you run one guy or two man cruise? So we traditionally do one on the trailerless setups, but you can do two. We'd only do two on a trailerless setup if we were. If we were running way behind, like we were behind and we needed to double up everyone to get mowing done. Like at the end of a week or something when it was really wet. It's the only time we do that. Robert asks, say, if you're parking on the road, why would you want that carrier ramp going into the traffic should be on passenger side, in my opinion. All right, so, yeah, you're right. This goes onto the passenger side, this ramp. This goes off to the right hand side, which is the passenger side. So I don't know if maybe it's messed up because of the cameras flipped around, but yeah, that does go off to the passenger side of the truck, and so it goes off onto the sidewalk. You're correct there. So. And we have two other setups that are trailerless, setups like this. And we make sure that everything on this side, like the passenger side, is going to be the stuff that you grab fast, like the blower, the weed eater, stuff like that. Whereas the other side, that would be where the traffic is at, is stuff like gas cans and things like that. All right, any. Any more questions, guys? When you're here, we'll show you this whole, like, we're off grid here. So we have solar, we have the fueling system there that we got. I will show you all the kind of different things that we talk a lot about in the podcast. You'll kind of see them live and in person. I was about to walk all the way to the back of our property, way back there, where that green shed is at. There's more storage back there. And I would show you all the. The materials, how we standardize them, and how we make sure that we were able to use the same materials all the time. We're gonna be talking a lot about conference. I was gonna show you, but our WI fi starts dropping off at the back there, so I'd lose you all. But I hope you all can join us at the conference Landscape Summit. A couple more weeks. Any more questions? I'll take one more and then I'll head off for today. But make sure you guys join Landscape Summer Summit. Just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. A lot of the things we talk about on the podcast in these training videos, you're going to see them live and in person. You know, for example, we talk about the yellow slip system all the time. This is where it all started right here. These are yellow slips, so you'll be able to see when you come here for the tour, yellow slips. So fortunately, there's none out there today, but when there's a yellow slip, the office fills this out, and they're then going to put that there. And then it's the employee's responsibility to fill this out, take it to the customer, resolve the issue, and then put it over here where it says resolve yellow slips. We're also going to go over our P4P system, which is right there. And we're going to develop your own P4P pay for performance system on the Friday when you're here at conference. So a little bit of our office here in the background, the logo with Max. But I look forward to seeing everybody, everyone in a couple weeks. Landscape Summit. Make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com to sign up for more details for the venue. Thanks so much everyone. Have a great day.