Mike Andes walks through scaling a lawn-care business: language barriers force hands-on training, the founder becomes a bottleneck managing callbacks, and mowing at $40-60 per yard kills margins. The fix is bigger landscaping projects and systems to catch bottlenecks early.
The guys I'm working with don't know any English, so I have to be there and I show them. I point to eat I actually like.
What I'll do is I'll.
Touch each thing we're doing. Because when I was just pointing, oh, do this, do this. They didn't understand. So I'm like, this, do this. I'll grab the bush. This bush has to be trimmed again.
As you scale, you're gonna hit all these issues that you being the bottleneck for everything right now for mowing, you're still micromanaging all the callbacks. That's impossible if you have 500 customers. Yeah, right. If you just take everything to the extreme, you'll figure out where all the bottlenecks are. Like if what you're doing at 170. If I had 500 customers, can I do all the call? No. If I had three project crews, would I be able to go and show them the projects in the morning? No. So figure out those bottlenecks now. Otherwise you'll just.
Hit that.
Extreme eventually as you grow the business. Otherwise, you're just gonna constantly, as you grow your business, be banging your head against the wall.
I see. I thought.
Why can't I make money on mowing? Well, because you used to be out in the field mowing, and you made sense of it. And in 20, 21, you're like, man, this is good money.
That's exactly what it was then.
You hired people, your margin gets massively compressed, and all of a sudden the pricing at 40, 50, and 60, bu. It doesn't work.
Yeah.
And she's like, mowing doesn't work. I'm going to go to landscaping. And the exact thing is going to happen when you stop managing those jobs. You're going to get an operations manager or a project manager here. You're going to get a guy to be able to manage those guys, the Hispanic dudes that can't speak English. He's going to come along and take all the profits that are currently in landscaping. You're like, there's no money in landscaping.
