Finding Great Lawn Care Employees and MORE! - Q&A Session

What I would be looking for if I was you is one thing. Just take one thing away from the entire conference.

Hey everyone, it's Mike andes and today landscapebusinesscourse.com we are going to be doing Q and A. About an hour ago I asked for questions on the Facebook page and a bunch of you responded. So I'm going to get through all of those if I can today. Quick clarification. I know I only put these notifications like an hour beforehand and so I got a bunch of questions and then some of them start coming in after I actually record these videos. So I'm going to go back to last week's Q and A and answer a couple of the questions that came in afterwards and then we'll get into the ones that came in today. If I miss your question, I don't address it on this Q and A. I'll try to get to it on the next one. In the future I'm going to do a call in show where you can actually call your questions in and we'll talk about it. So that's gonna be coming here pretty soon. Looking forward to that. But we just gotta get the technology set up so you can actually hear the phone on that feed. So I'm just pulling up the Facebook group right now, the page and I'm going to start going through these questions. I haven't even seen these questions yet. So I'm just gonna be kinda giving my raw take on it. A quick thing I wanted to say and that is on the Facebook group Landscape Business Course Facebook Group there's been several questions recently about people like employees that don't show up or employees that are good but then they like call in sick a lot, things like that. And so this is kind of my stance on this and that is you are at the mercy of your employees that are slacking like that. If you don't have a backup, if you don't have a bench of employees ready to go. And what I mean by that is I recommend, especially once you have five or more employees, to have at least one extra employee. That is, you don't need them all the time, but they're there when someone doesn't show up. They're there when you want to fire somebody and you, you're super busy but you can fire them because you know you have that backup person. And so I would really recommend, especially once you hit 10 people because that's only 10% of your workforce, that becomes like overkill. And a lot of times like by adding another person 10 people, you're not. You're going to basically just bring down the amount of overtime that you're paying other employees by having another person there. So it's going to be a win win. And then optimally, though, you have that person there in case you want to hire, you want to fire somebody, you don't. You don't have your hands bound by the fact that you are super busy and you can't do without that extra person, without that person. And so I feel that a lot of times if we want to fire people, we don't, because we're simply so busy. We know that if we do fire them, we're going to lose customers or we're not going to be able to actually perform the work that we have scheduled on the calendar. And so I think that we are really at the mercy of the employees, and they are in the driver's seat if we do not have a backup person, if we do not have a game plan for what happens when you need to fire somebody. If someone doesn't show up to work and they have not called in, like, they would have an amazing excuse, if they do that again, they're fired. Like, I'm not going to deal with it. It's not the. And you're making a precedence for everyone else in the company when you do that. In my opinion, when you're, number one, you're making a precedence if you allow it to continue, and number two, you're making a precedence when you fire them that, hey, that's just not acceptable. And so I've fired people over being late multiple times in a row. And so it sets a precedence for people that, hey, look, that's just not acceptable. You could be fired over it. And it's not the standards that.

We allow here. And so I want to be in the position as the employer, as the owner to be able to make those decisions by firing people. Because like I've said in the past, I feel that firing people is the way that you dictate the culture of your company. And so if you don't want people to show up late, you don't want people to call in sick, last minute's notice, or without a doctor's note, and you can fire them. You're making the culture of your business, you're making it very clear, I don't care what your employee handbook says, what everyone does, if you fire people on certain standards, that becomes the standard for your business. And if you don't fire people and they're doing those things, it Also sets a standard that those things are acceptable. And so I'm going to go ahead and start going through the questions here, but I'm going to quickly go back. Sorry, I'm gonna go back to last week's. Cause like I said, there was some that we missed. So let me just go back on the Facebook page. Facebook group, sorry, Landscape business course. All right, so this is gonna be from last week. There was a couple questions that came in after I had finished the episode recording. So let me just scroll down here. I wanted to address that. That was a couple people had posted those things on the landscape business course group on Facebook, and I wanted to address that about people not showing up. I feel in order for you to be in the driver's seat, in order for you to be able to fire people on a dime and make that decision, that it becomes very powerful with the rest of your team. You need to have people in the backup so you're not in the back of your mind, like, oh, I'm just going to put up with this person or hope they come to work because I need them in order to get the job done. What that means is you're usually means you got to constantly be interviewing people, constantly be finding and hiring people, constantly be upgrading your team. Like, don't just get enough people. Like, okay, I'm good. I'd still interview. Like, I still take applications, even though it's not as many throughout the year. I still interview a couple people a week. I'm still like, trying to find because if, at the very worst, I find a. If I can get a great hire, I can put them on the bench, maybe lose a few dollars over the course of a few weeks. But when something happens, I can fire a low performer and make a very clear statement if I need to for the rest of my team. So a couple questions that came in last week that I didn't get to. Marcus Love asks, when should I start paying myself? Company has a small amount of monthly income. I have one employee. What dollar amount should I be looking at hourly to start or salary? I'm still doing most of the labor at the moment. So, Marcus, when you only have one employee, you're gonna have a very high net profit margin because you don't have a lot of overhead. You don't have a shop, you don't have multiple trucks. You don't have an office person. You're still doing the work, so you should be able to take money out. And I would really ask yourself the question, what you want? What's the goals of the business. Do you want to make it 10, 15 people out in the field? If not, if you're gonna make it one employee in yourself and you want to stay out in the field, I would focus on raising your hourly rate and then making sure that you're taking a salary out of that. And some people like to take hourly, like pay yourself a wage and literally look at yourself as an employee in the business and you clock in and you clock out. I like. I've seen people do that. I like that. And then just taking a distribution every year or every quarter as the owner, that's a cool way to do it. But again, it has to do with. I think there's a question I just saw here about growing your business. Basically, if you're gonna do that, if you're gonna take money out, that's not going to align with fast growth because you're gonna be putting your money back into the business. Not that everyone should do that, but if you're going to want to grow and scale really quickly, you're probably gonna be putting most of the money back in. But if you're doing the labor and you. I would suggest taking an hourly paycheck, paying yourself hourly, and then every quarter taking an owner's distribution or in terms of like QuickBooks, whatever. It's going to be like an owner retained earnings or whatever you want to do. You can take a distribution as the owner of the business every quarter. And that would be basically based on the profitability of the company. And in order to increase that number, I would slowly raise your hourly rate to the point that you can either A, hire more people and absorb the extra overhead or two, just take more money off the table. Amitymore Alice asks Awesome Mike and he's. I saw both videos. Good stuff. Pay on performance. Thank you for taking the time to teach. I am learning and making lots of improvement by your teaching, trying to come to your event. Oh, there's no question. Okay. Sorry. But yeah, by the way, coming to my event, make sure you sign up today. Landscapebusinesscourse.com.

I'm forgetting now. Oh, yeah, conference. You gotta check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. It'll be the best conference you've ever been to. If you were at last year's. That's gonna be this good compared to what's coming in 2020. So 2020, January, it's for three days in Bellingham. Locally, it's gonna be fantastic. We're gonna do a lot of really cool stuff. I already have A couple one theme I'm really gonna be pushing which is pay for performance and really showing everyone how that all breaks down. Really pushing that. Last year we had some common themes were like showing your numbers to your team.

A lot of team and hiring stuff. Marketing, adapting to change. That was the big push last conference about adapting the changes in the labor market in online marketing, things like that. Super big. So this year I know one of the things that's gonna be paid for performance and how to implement that for your business. I know a couple other ones I'm working on right now, but it's going to be fantastic. I'm going to really am pushing to get a couple buses to take us over and you can actually tour my facility in person. Lots of really cool stuff. You do not want to miss it. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference I already know the tickets are filling up, so check that out. All right, so now I'm going to go back to today's the questions that were asked that were answered today. I'm going to refresh the page because I'm sure more questions are coming in as we speak and I'm really looking forward to like I said, doing a call in show. So in the future what I'm going to be doing in the several weeks, I'm going to get the system set up so that you can call in and live. We can record your questions, talk together and answer your questions. Get a little more context. Some of these questions, like for instance that one I asked answered there about taking a payroll, taking pay out of your business. I'd really like to get context on what the goals of the company are, where he's at, how many trucks, blah blah blah and be able to get a better comprehensive answer. And I think that help a lot of you a lot more than me just answering these questions based upon one sentence. So I'm looking forward to that. Stay tuned for that. But for Today we got 23 comments on this post and their questions for today. So let me just scroll down here again. If I don't get to your question, I'll try to get to it next time, but I'll try to get to all of the ones that I've seen so far that come in the past hour. All right, so Nick Brumfield asked tips on purchasing a well established company that I have worked for since my dad and family friends started eight years ago. Okay, so Nick, your dad and your family friends started eight years ago. Now you're wanting tips on purchasing it and it's A well established company. Okay, so like I had said last time in Proplus, we just went, we did spent like two hours on acquisitions and how to value these companies. I'd be happy to look at anyone's P and LS if you're looking at a company that wants to get acquired. As long as you haven't signed a non disclosure agreement, I can look at them and tell you what I think about them. I have not got to everyone that sent me these, so this takes me a while to go through these and get to them because not a fast email I can quickly respond to usually. But if you have an acquisition on the table, I don't mind looking over the P&Ls and giving my two cents on it. I would say that many, many times the majority of the businesses in the landscaping industry are not worth anything beyond the physical assets, the trucks, the trailers, the equipment that they have. And so most of them aren't. But if they built a business, they have systems and they have a team and they have procedures and it's well oiled, then there's value to it. But I feel like a lot of acquisitions end very poorly. And I think I had mentioned one a couple months ago of a gentleman I was trying to help after he spent like a million, two, like $1.2 million on a business that really was probably worth about $200,000. And I was getting the call to try to help him prevent bankruptcy. And I'm not sure 100% what happened to him in that situation, but that's what I want to prevent people from getting into. So.

Just be careful, consult, take it slow. If it's your father and a close family friend, you at least have the trust aspect. And so like when I bought Anytime Fitness, I knew the previous owner from working for him. He was a previous boss of mine and so I trusted him enough to where I didn't need to look over his shoulder at every single turn in the road. And so that is a big plus for you, Nick. But without like basically there's multiple ways to value these business. And in the lawn care industry, like you can look at just physical assets. At physical assets and the bank, you know, the, the balance sheet, that's a great way to start. You can look at the profitability of the company, you can look at how long it's gonna take for you to recoup your initial investment. You can look at return on investment based on percentage, like roi. Like you can look at all those. There's so many different ways to look at it in my opinion, if it's a poorly ran business, I don't want their equipment, I don't want any of their employees. I just want their contacts and their current contracts. And so again, that has value. Like is it a 12 month contract, do they have signed contracts, do they not accept, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Lots of variables, lots of ways to value a company. And so yes, I could talk about that for three hours. I'm not going to Travis Sumner's asked. Some tips on getting clients when you're first starting out would be greatly appreciated. I've got my truck lettered, business cards, Facebook and word of mouth from friends, family and co workers. Any other ideas that might be helpful? Yes, I would work on a website. You didn't mention that. I could be wrong. You might have one, but I would work on a website. It is the modern day business card and more. And the reason I say that is because even a simple website will be is the equivalent of the business card. You want to make it more than that. You want to make it where people can watch videos and have an experience and experience your team and what you do and begin to develop a relationship with you. However, I would start a website today. I don't care if it's on Weebly or Squarespace or wix, make it simple, whatever. Go hire someone. If you have the money to make it nice. If you have the money to invest some time and money into videos on that website. If you can, if you have money to Search engine optimization, if you have money to et cetera. Quick note, actually for search engine optimization I'd really make sure everyone has pages that are named after the services you provide. So like for example augustaloncare services.coming augustaloncareservices.com landscaping augustalawncareservices.com mulch installation. Those pages should then have information about that service item. And that's strictly for search Internet optimization. I'm not going to go into why exactly. Like why all the factors of that. Basically Google, many times people are looking for mowing and then something or landscaping and then something, sod installation and then something. If you have a page that's named that thing, that service item, that's gonna be great for search engine optimization. And it really helps Google. It helps Google recognize what your business is all about and what services you provide by having those pages named after your services. Richard Base Richard Bates asks. I have no idea how to market. All I know is I'm mowing two yards a night after my dead End full time job and then three or four on Saturdays and I leave Sundays for catch up on landscaping and whatnot. Should I be going full time and how do I market to push for more work? Okay, so first of all, this is the someone like Richard is exactly why I'm starting a lot of you. Since the last couple weeks, since I actually made it public that we are kind of franchise Augusta Lawn Care, a lot of you have privately emailed me and things and asked me why exactly and all that stuff. This is the person that I feel I can help that has all the skills to mow the lawn, but doesn't have the marketing skills, doesn't have a website. I can do all of that on the back end for somebody and pump leads to them. So, Richard, I would again point in the direction of creating a website. I would point in the direction of like some of the stuff Travis had already done, like getting your trucks lettered, business cards, Facebook and telling people like, if you want to make the best bang for your buck, I would go knock on every single person's door in your neighborhood. The 1 mile radius around your existing neighborhood, I'd knock on every single door. That's gonna be the best bang for your buck. You're gonna get the most clients in one day. If you go knock on people's door and just say, can I do your lawn and look professional, have business cards and yeah, that's gonna be the best bang for your bucket. It's gonna be nerve wracking. It's gonna be embarrassing for some people. Some people aren't gonna be able to handle it, but that's gonna be. And when you're just starting out, that's the thing you should do. Yes, there's regulations. Yes, some people can't do door hangers because of regulations. If you're in a homeowners association, you can't do door hangers many times you can't solicit. So there's a lot of regulation in my area. There's a lot of HOAs and a lot of gated communities and you cannot go door to door. You can't do that. So to break into those, it was like every door direct mail. It was telling every single person at the store, at the barber, at the gym, like just telling everybody about what you do. That would be my recommendation for just starting out. And for those of you that have asked questions I haven't got to everyone have asked about the franchise and things like that, I know about 12 or 13 of you now have filled out a Form about interest in the franchise. AugustAlongCareServices.com franchise and that is going to get you the contact form actually. Is that what it's called? Let me just double check that actually. But that's going to. Basically it's just a form that.

You can fill out to get more information down the road. I'm not sending any information out right now but as soon as we are able to we will have a webinar for everyone that filled out that form and I will share all the details, the financial requirements, all of that sort of thing. But if you go right now to Gus, okay, it is augustalongcare services.com so augustaloncareservices.com/franch. There's just a form you fill out. You fill that out and then I'll get in touch with you in a couple months because in September we're going to be selling the first 10 franchisees. And so from the pool of probably 40 so people that will get I'll be choosing the 10 to launch next spring. And people like Richard are the ones that I'm really building the franchise for. And so for you to ask me the question, I'm answering it now that emailed me and things asked why am I doing this route? It's not the most profitable, blah blah blah. And it's hard. I get all that and I fully understand the implications of running the franchise model that for me it might not be the most financially easy way to go. I get all of that. But I know that for people like Richard we're gonna make a big impact and change the way that his mark like this is the person I need. I need the person that's honest, hard working, has skills in landscaping and is going to be very professional. I can do the part on the back end for marketing and getting them leads and gener revenue and then they need to manage their business and they can have the option of growing it and scaling it up or they can keep it at 12 people do it on the side and just make higher profit margin. So anyways Nathan Plague.

And the only reason I shamelessly plug the franchise is because I just so believe in it. Especially for people that are just starting out, young entrepreneurs and for people that are wanting to start off part time and and generate a high enough revenue per hour like an hourly rate because they're so professional online and things to generate a high enough profit margin to where they can go full time. I find so many people, they jump from their job going into full time scale it up to a Couple employees and then they don't have enough profit margin to accommodate that extra overhead and thereby they end up closing the business and going back to the regular job. And so I don't want that to happen. And that's why I believe in the franchise and that's why I'm doing it. So that's why I shamelessly plug those things. I just believe in them that much. Nathan Plague says yearly contracts versus 28 or 32 cycle services. I sometimes find myself being persuaded into year long contracts for the same price as a regular season services. Cash flow is my problem in winter. But am I being ignorant in doing this? Should I charge say 20% more on these properties? So Nathan, I think someone replied. Nathan. Oh, Nathan replied. And he said we doubled in revenue for four years. But not seeing profits. I saw once, I once saw went from 35% profit margin to 25 to 30 to 23 to 25% over the last few years. Okay, so he went from 35 to like 23 to 25% profit margin over the past few years. FYI, added three new trucks and six guys.

Excuse me, got hiccups. Okay, so Nathan has doubled his revenue for the past four years, has three new trucks and six guys.

And his profit margin is slipping. So excuse me, sorry. Great time to have hiccups on a live Q and A. Fantastic. All right, so this is a normal thing. And that is to. As your business grows, especially if you're doubling in revenue, your profit margin is going to go down. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Growth sucks. Cash. Okay, so if you're going to be growing super fast, it's going to take more money because buying three trucks and hiring six people takes money. You got to train those people. You got uniforms for those people. You got to get more insurance. You have to get three trucks and insurance for the trucks and fuel for the trucks and maintenance for the trucks. And then you're also getting mowers for those trucks and you got to get trailers to put the mowers in and you got to have the trailers that the trucks pull. Like lots of more costs. So it's very normal for your profit margin to slip as the company grows. What you don't want is to grow by twice as much. Like grow by. You know, you double the size of your business, but then your profit margin to get cut in half. Then you're making the same amount of money on a bigger company. So especially if you're going doubly doubling your company size every year. Just expect the fact that your profit margin is gonna get lower. And this is the reason going back to the franchise why we are some of you asked questions about this and this is why I'm asking, answering it now. This is why we're just charging a flat fee.

For the franchisees instead of a royalty. Because as your business grows revenue, your profit margin gets smaller. So why would I charge someone a royalty? So that they have to pay the franchisor more as their business grows. It's very hard to grow a seven figure business with a grounds guys or a US lawns because they have a, they have a royalty based on gross revenue. So that as your business grows, they're making more and more money. But then your profit margin is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. And eventually you can't, you can't grow the business anymore. And so that's why I'm doing the set flat fee. So if someone wants to make $100,000 a year, they're still going to pay that set $1,200 a month as a, as a franchisee. But this goes back to Nathan's point is he's asking about, you know, the falling. I would say try to keep your percentage over 20%. Like a 20% landscaping of net profit margin in our, in our industry is great. That being said, it should be a lot higher if you have only one, two, three employees. Like if you're small, you're going to have a higher profit margin. Like I think it's hilarious when people are on these Facebook forums and they're like, oh Well, I make 50% gross net profit margin money in the bank. Yeah, but it's you and one other person. Like when you start getting other employees and trucks and equipment and office staff, that overhead eats into your profit margin. But you're the size of the business is 20 times the size of what you were before. So I would much rather have a business that makes 20% and has a million dollars in revenue than a business that does 100,000 in Reven but has 50% margin. That's just me. So it's interesting, more sellable asset, it's a better business model, it's less risk, et cetera. Anyways.

Okay, here we go.

Nathan's other part of his question was about yearly contracts. I like yearly contracts. If you can get your customers into it. This is my suggestion, this is what I would do is to get scale and to get more customers. Don't go contracts right from the beginning. If you're doing residential for commercial, always do contracts because they Always want it and it's better. But for residential, if you're wanting to get started and grow, I would do buy the cut services like you're talking about, same price sort of thing and then slowly evolve. So once you get to the size, okay, I have four or 500 customers mowing or whatever it is, 100, whatever you want. And you're like, okay, now I want to make the company more profitable and I want to make sure I'm tighter and better cash flow. Then what you do is just start adding more requirements. So for like us we have added in certain things like credit card on file. We drop people if they don't pay, you know, paying via credit card. You can add like where you require weekly service. Then you can slowly move into like where you charge them day on every single day like their lawn is mowed and then they pay that day on a credit card. You can, then you can do where you contracts that's like the end all be. All is you have prepaid contracts, they pay May 1 for all their services in May and you do that 12 months out of the year. That's the optimal place to get to. It's harder to scale quickly using that model. It's hard to sell stuff over the phone using that model. And so for scalability I would focus on residential price per cut and then slowly evolve it to where they're on full service 12 month contracts. That's the place you want to be at. It's not easy to get there fast. It's not easy to scale quickly to that point. If you Want to spend 10 years growing your business, that's the way to do it. Use contracts, full service customers. But if you're not in that position now, you can get there by slowly making those requirements every single spring, changing them. And then you're going to weed out customers, you're going to weed out leads and you're going to get down to the most profitable people. Chuck Burchfield asks the best way to prepare for the jump from one employee to two. I thought it would be an easy step, but the numbers say otherwise. It looks like going to two is a really big hit in the profit book. It is. And especially if you're going to buy a second truck, I would recommend that you buy a very cheap truck and it be used as more of a transport vehicle. So you still have your main truck and your main setup that those two employees would go out on. But then that other truck can just be cheap and that truck can be a Ford range or like A smaller truck doesn't need to be a big truck and that can be used for estimates. It can be used for getting supplies. It can be used for transporting one guy to a different job and so you can do like a cleanup while the other guy's mowing. And it can hold like half a yard of mulch. It can hold like some plants. It just can't maybe tow a big trailer or anything like that. It could do a mo. You could do a trailerless setup on it with like a ramp and mowers, a push mower with like weed eating racks. Make a cheap second setup would be my recommendation for if you're trying to get to that second crew or second employee. Johnny Ireland what is the best lime and fertilizer for your lawn? So Johnny, every single market is different in my opinion. And Landscape Business course is more about the business side of things, less about the fertilizers and all of that. I would google your local market, lots of really good information online. That's just not my strength nor is it something that I try to focus on. This is more the business side of things or even just ask in Landscape business course the group, there are people in there that might be your market that know those things a lot better than I would. Kevin Johnson Time tracking software and Service Autopilot lacks and what's LMN software offered?

Okay, so time tracking software. We use Zubi for our trucks, we use Service Autopilot for our, like our, our main CRM. And there are things that LMN is stronger than Service Autopilot and vice versa. Every software package is gonna have its strengths and weaknesses. We've chosen Service Autopilot and we're sticking with them for now. It's not cheap, it's not maybe for someone just starting out, but it is definitely a solid package that we like and we are really, we really like the automation side of that software. LMN offers some great budgeting stuff that I really like. Their estimating software is really nice. We don't use it but I have played around with it before. Catherine Barber how do you fire a client when they ghost you for payment? So we have a series of automations and contacting them to try to get payment. If they don't, they go to collections. And we also make first time MOEs have to be prepaid. And so the reason for that is because usually a first time mo it takes us like three times as long and I don't want to spend three hours of the customer's property edging everything Mowing it because it's overgrown all this work and then not getting paid for it because they just were trying to fleece us. And so I would. What we do is we get credit cards on file, and they have to be prepaid for that first service. And that helps a lot for the mowing side of things. Landscaping. Get 50% down before you even put them on the schedule. And if it doesn't seem like they're going to be accommodating with that 50% down, it means they're probably not going to be accommodating when it comes to paying the final 50% at the end of the job. So that might be a warning sign to drop them. How do I fire a client? So if they're not. If they're. If they're not paying, they're going to go to collections, and before they even go to collections, we're stopping service. So if they don't pay for 30 days, we're just going to stop service their property. It's going to do one of two things. Either they're going to pay up right away, or B, they're not paying anyways, and I'm glad I'm not doing service still at their property. So I would just not do service at people's place. And either A, that's going to kick them into, like, paying you right away because they want you to come back, or B, you're not going to spend three or four months doing service for them and then not pay you anyways. So don't work for people for free. That's ridiculous. It's not fair to you. It's not fair to your employees. It's not fair to your business. It's not fair to anybody.

Will Vanderhoeven asks.

What copy do you use for your recruiting ad for potential employees? Okay, so I showed this at conference, the form that we use for Craigslist and Facebook and stuff like that. Basically, I have a couple different methods that I use. One's, like, very much like, shows our big idea of what we want to do for the landscaping industry and, like, the franchise and what we're trying to do. One is very tactical. Like, hey, just here's your hourly rate. Because you're gonna get people that are just hard workers that need a paycheck for their family, and I want to attract them with an hourly rate, and then I want to get the big dreamer, the person that's willing to take a pay cut, the person that wants to stay with us for the big, like, what we're really trying to do for the whole industry and with the franchising and all that. And so I try to bounce around and subject lines are really important. The heading that what you call the title of that, that position is really important. And we really try to show off pictures of our team, pictures of like our award for best place to work in our county. So stuff like that is what we really try to use.

Josh Smith how do you price out extremely large properties, not commercial properties, residential farmhouses that are several acres with a pool house, shop and a couple houses on the property all by hour? We don't use the square footage rate matrix. Once I think we get over like 20,000 square feet. And that is because usually once you hit 20,000 square feet it's. There's like he said, pools and other houses and shops and fences and it just gets so convoluted. So it's strictly done by budget. Like an estimator goes there and budgets how many hours it's going to take and then that's their price. And.

Yes, that's how we do it. So large, large properties that are not under 20,000 square feet, we go and send an estimated there to budget how many hours it's going to take. I'm going to refresh my page because there's more questions coming in here. I'm going to try to get a little bit faster here because there are a bunch of them coming in and I don't have much time. So one second here. All right, so we're just refreshing the page. More questions on the way. Let's see here. Okay, got this one done already? I did that one. Okay, more questions.

Alright, next question comes from.

Brett Cole, Penneguy Penigui. Sorry. How do you go about finding good helpers? Not only that, but retaining them. What's your opinion on door hangers and clover leafing? So first of all, finding good helpers. I do feel like the ad that you go out and you send to other people is important. I feel like a business really begins to mature when you start hiring outside of your friend and family circle. And so because eventually that taps out and if you're growing the business to a certain size, if you're wanting to keep it small, I would recommend friends, family, local people, you know, just because you can trust them. And.

That'S a big part of their first few employees is just trusting them. Hopefully you can trust them.

But yeah, that's how I would, I would recommend for finding them and retaining them. I would recommend using some sort of bonus structure, pay for performance or paying them more than your competitors. And to do so, you need to have a very profitable business and a price correctly. What's your opinion on door hangers and cloverleafing door hangers? Certain markets works great depending on your local regulations as well as just your market demographics.

Okay. Greg Porco asks owning your business for as long as you have and growing every year, what has been your biggest challenge goes back to the fact that growth sucks. Cash, cash flow is a big part of when you're growing very quickly. So I had Augusta for about five years. It's grown a lot. And now we're getting the point where it's not so much about growth. I don't want it to become over two and a half million dollars in revenue. It's more about making it super, super profitable by cutting out the people, employees, customers that we don't want and focusing on the ones that we do want and making more money profit wise.

What was the question?

Biggest challenge is finding great people and retaining great people.

Johnny Ireland, what is the best.

Micah Fortenberry asks, is there a given number of accounts or given number of specific type of accounts do you need to have before hiring a second crew? No, is nothing to do with that. People that ask on forms and people give definitive answers. I think that's ridiculous because it depends on the size of your properties. Like if your average Property is a 4 hour mo, you only need like 20 of those before you need to get another employee. If your average M.O. is a $30 mo, you, you're gonna need like a hundred before you hire another person. So I don't feel like giving that. There's no specific type of accounts. There's not. It depends on your market, your target market. Like if are you going after small residential, you have to large commercial, like that's completely different businesses. You got to realize if you're going after a 3,000, 4,000 square foot lot mowing, that's a completely different business than going after a massive commercial complex or an apartment building or like some sort of strata. Like it's a completely different business. A different business model, a different employee type, a different margin. Like it's different equipment, trucks, everything's different. So it's very hard to give that answer. And anyone that gives you like a specific answer is just, they're just guessing without knowing more about your markets. Like if I could call you right now.

Micah, I could give you a better answer. Quinn asks, what ratio of payroll versus revenue, labor revenue do you have weekly or annually? What is the industry Standard or goal? So standard in Our industry is 26.7% labor to revenue. The 26.7% on average in our industry goes to the person out in the field based upon LMN software that like their accounting software and some of the statistics that they run. That's the number they come up with. I pay more and so I end up paying quite a bit more. Like 34, 35% plus, like sometimes even more than that. But I'm willing to pay a little bit more because I'm able to charge a little bit more. I'm able to keep people a little bit longer and not so interested in the profit of the bottom line yet. I'd much rather give up a few dollars and instead of making a 25% margin, I'd rather make a 19% margin business but keep the guys have people that I like, people that are professional, people that don't smoke, people that don't do drugs. I'd much rather pay them a little more and have those things. But.

What ratio of payroll revenue the labor.

Average in the industry is? 26.7. I would shoot for like 30%. Ish. Again, totally depending on your goals, what you want out of the business and who you want to be working with. I want to be working with people I like, people that I would have over to my house and so I pay a little bit more. Casey Stewart asks, why does mixing Sledgehammer and Roundup render both ineffective? Again, Casey, I'm going to focus more on the business side of things. There's great articles, great videos and better people to answer that question than me. Cody King asked, as you grow, do you seem to help the crew work the office? Do all the billings have time for estimates to keep it all rolling?

Okay, Cody asked, as you grow, how do you seem to help the crew work the office? Do all the billings have time for estimates and keep it all rolling? Okay, first of all, I have really great employees and team. I have a really good operations manager.

That we have like really good relationship in terms of I can get angry and I can get moody and we can like just debate things and we won't get hurt feelings over it. And like yet at the same time we love each other and we want each other to succeed and all of that we. But like she is the perfect operations manager for me and I have really good project managers, I have really good people out in the field and I have people in the field that probably could be product managers elsewhere because they're that good.

And so how do I Grow and seem. So yeah, I'm somewhat of a micromanager still, but there's next year is really where I'm cutting ties locally and focusing on the franchising because I want to be able to go and help all the franchisees start and be able to train them here at this facility. Facility and all of that. And so I need to be 100% away from them. And but yes, now I am still very involved. I'm involved not so much in the working on the field, not so much in the office, not at all at the billing. But I am still, I am still involved with estimating process.

So yeah. Nestor Sanchez asked, what's the best response to say when another company is hired and you haven't received any notice.

They won. Like if a customer doesn't get back to you and another company is hired, it means you did something wrong. Either a, your pricing wasn't good. Usually it means you didn't follow up correctly or you didn't create a good enough relationship at the estimate to make sure that they warranted you valuable enough to hire even if you were more expensive. So I would focus on what's the experience of getting an estimate. Are you selling yourself? Are you professional? Are you coming across as someone that they want? Are you providing them value there? Secondly, I would ask yourself, are you following up, are you following up the day after and seeing if they got the estimate? Are you following up and giving them more information? Are you answering their question about pricing? Are you making sure that every single of their questions are answered and everything is very, very streamlined, automated, and that they know that you're not going to waste their time? Juan asked, what's a good way to lay pavers? A couple people answered him. And again, I'm gonna focus more on the business side of things. There's a great answer from Aaron and Jan about decomposed granite and getting it all screened. All that. That's fantastic. Manny Mendez asked, ever replace a FJ118 motor on into a residential time cutter unit? No, I haven't. I'm very bad with mechanical things. Fixing mowers is not my forte. Fixing trucks is not my forte. I focus on the business side because that's what I'm decent at. I am not good at mechanical stuff. Manny, if you have questions about that, there's lots of forums. Check out Landscape Business course.

The Facebook group. Some people could probably help you with that.

Issue this year. So Steven Silva asked issue this year. Finding help now put me to having an issue with front money for Help. Not exactly sure what this is saying, but I'm guessing it has to do with money.

Finding people. Yeah, like finding people costs money. You're going to advertise for them, you're going to do career fairs, you're going to market for finding new people. It's going to cost them. It's going to cost people. It's going to cost you to find people and then hire them and then train them. Because when you're training them, they're not making you money as much as usually like once they're trained up. And so it's going to take money. Like that's why I always say growth sucks cash. Because if you're hiring a bunch of people or you even worse if you have turnover of people, that's constant training that makes your people that are in the field are usually making you say 50 bucks an hour. Now, they can't produce that much income because they're training someone else and that person's not as efficient because they're not skilled. And so yes, cost money to hire people. I'm going to stop the questions there. I know a couple more have come in. I don't see them yet, but I know my notifications are going off, but I will get to them eventually. I hope that helps someone out there. Big announcement for today, the very end of the day show. I am announcing a tour. All right, so I am going to give you the web link right now. I'm announcing a tour tour. Here it is. So if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com tour2019.

I'll make sure this is active. It is. All right. Landscapebusinesscourse.com Tour Tour T O U R 2019 that's the web link. And the reason I'm sharing that with you now is because I only want to get the people who actually listen to this whole thing because it means you're hardcore. What it is, is if you, this is only for business owners in British Columbia, Canada, Washington state or Oregon. All right, so those are pretty close to me. If you are within those three, those three areas, Oregon State, Washington state or British Columbia, Canada, I want you to go to this URL and you can sign up to try to be on the tour. So what this tour is going to be, it's going to be a week later in the summer that I'm going to come, I'm going to bring my video guy and we are going to tour your facility and then you're going to get up to two hours and I can help you with whatever you need. So if you go to the form it's going to ask you a bunch of information about your business and then like what you need help with and things. And then I'm going to select probably 10 customers, companies or so that are within like 10 hours drive of me and we're gonna do a big tour and we're gonna visit all of you. What we require is that you allow us to video your whole facility and you do a tour with us. With me, like could be like 30 minutes, 40 minutes, I don't care. And then you have up to two or three hours with me and I can answer whatever you want. Help me with ever you want. I can get a lot of context by seeing your setup. I can see a lot of con have a lot of context by senior project managers, your people. Even if you just have one or two employees or you're solo, like I'd be happy to come see you. Lots of people would get information for this. The whole point in doing this is to try to help other business owners that are in the same position as you. So even if you only have one or two employees, I'd happy to come and see what I can do to help. So. Landscapebusinesscourse.com tour2019t o u r 2019 only if you're in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon. I'm not going outside of those yet. I know we're gonna get flooded with responses and so I'm only gonna stay within that area for now. And we're gonna do 10 or 12 this summer if it works out good next year. So this is gonna be season two of zero turn the video series. Last year we did season one, we did Master Cuts in Oxford, Mississippi and then over in Texas we did Imco. Those are on YouTube and Facebook if you haven't seen them. We did the like on site tours and then I tried to help them for a day or two. This one is going to be 10 to 12 companies that we're going to do. We're going to create season two of zero turn. If this goes well, season three is going to be next year and we're going to do it around the entire nation and it's going to be absolutely amazing. So this is where a lot of the money that is going how I'm finding this is through like pro plus the course for all of you that are wondering where the money goes. This is where I'm putting the money is doing these tours. So this summer we're going to go to 1012. For those of you that are in ProPlus, there's two members down in Washington that we're going to go visit and spend a little more time with. But for everyone else in Washington State, Oregon or British Columbia, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com tour2019. Sign in, apply for that. It's going to be absolutely amazing. I love to come get a tour, spend a couple hours with you and your team, try to help in whatever fashion I can. It'll all get videoed and then it will be presented to the entire community completely free to everyone out there on YouTube and Facebook so that they can learn. They can learn from your mistakes. They can learn from what you're going through. They can see that they're not the only one having troubles and issues and that there is a way to figure it out. And if there's any sort of help I can give to you, I'd be everything that I have, I will give when I'm there with you. So Washington State, Oregon or British Columbia, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com tour2019. And if you're not in those states, go to landscapebusinesscourse.Com conference. See how I tie that in there. January 2020 is going to be a fantastic place for you to be here in Bellingham. You're going to see my facility and we're going to have an absolute blast. You're going to meet other landscapers and I cannot wait to see you there. Check it out whether you're going to the conference or whether you want to be on tour for season two of zero turn. I'd love to see you there. Thanks so much, everyone, and have a fantastic day.