Friday NIGHT at the Office - Q&A Landscape Business Marketing

Hey everybody. Mike, Andy here lancyuscourse.com we're doing some live Q and A. It's Friday evening here and I am at command center here in the office. So I figured I would go ahead and answer some questions because on our last couple videos I haven't really get to Q and A. So feel free to go ahead and post your comment or question in the chat box and we will go ahead and pound through as many of these as we possibly can. Brandon, Matthew, Ken, Paul, Jeffrey, welcome. Thanks for hopping on tonight. Nothing like a Friday night to talk some some business.

Hey, Dean, how's it going? Dean, I've been watching your videos. I didn't watch this week's yet, but those are cool. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Diego, how's the California franchise going? He just got started. Forest is killing it. He's going to be a force of nature. He actually owned a.

A metal fabrication company before. So he's actually trying to work on a really cool bed system similar to the ramp rack. But it's going to have a dump ability to have a dump insert in as well. I told him he has to keep it under $5,000 though if it's going to be of any value to anyone. So he's working on it. He thinks he can do it. All right, let's see here. Lawn care monster from Mansville, Kentucky. Matthew, what's up brother? I could just talk to our Madison, Kentucky franchise yesterday. Matthew, do you know Anthony and Zach? Okay, Mark. Hello Mike. Hope things will clean green Lawn care. What are you looking for in a potential franchisee? What? Red flag steer. Well, okay, I got one second. The questions are kind of coming in one second here. What would here. What are you looking for in a potential franchisee? What? Red flags tend to steer you away from a person. For me, red flags are going to be mostly if they they're speaking bad out their employees, number one. Number two, if they just want to stay small, I usually push them away. It's only about one out of six or seven, I think it was last month. At least one out of six or seven of my calls actually go to a second call because usually I am encouraging them to start their own thing, start their own lawn care business. They don't need Augusta. If you're trying to stay small, it's not not the right thing for us. But in terms of red flags, in terms of red flags it is definitely going to be if they're speaking bad out their, their employees and things like that. Red flags too. If they're completely Unexperienced with business whatsoever is also red flag because it's difficult. Based in Benton, Larry. Based in Benton, Arkansas. And I see your Bryant, Arkansas location every now and then. That's crazy. I just got off the phone with Dave. Doing good, John. Hey, Mike. How do you determine if a market is oversaturated with other lawn and landscape providers, or does competition e even factor in much? You know, it's really funny is it's like when you're driving down the street and you see landscapers all over the place. But then today we. I went and got a whole bunch of Red Bulls and then I got a whole bunch of ice cream sandwiches, and we literally were trying to drive around in an. You know, I took off my uniform and everything, and we're just gonna hand out like, you know, ice cream sandwiches and Red Bull drinks to, like, guys on, like, a hot Friday afternoon and literally could not find hardly anybody. We ended up actually taking a whole bunch to the local dealership, the lawn care dealership, and just handing them all out there. There were landscapers there, but it was good. In terms of how do I determine if a market is oversaturated? Honestly, I don't feel like you can get oversaturated, really, because if there's a whole bunch of competition, it really just means there's a large demand for the service. And if I'm looking at going into a market, I am actually really happy when there's a lot of providers. What I'm looking for is a under saturation online, because if there's an under saturation online, it means I can get great SEO. My website can rank really, really fast. So, for example, because Larry was the question before, he's in Benton, Arkansas and Bryant, Arkansas in Saline county, we have a franchisee there. And because that market was so undersaturated with people online doing a good job with lawn care. Within about 48 hours of his website being up for Augusta Lawn Care, he was ranking number one on Google. That's very, very, very rare. But it's the type of thing I'm looking for when I'm looking at a market is I don't really care about how oversaturated how many competitors there are. My concern is how many of them are online doing a good job with SEO, doing a good job with their website, because that's really what is going to be determined of whether or not my customer. I get customers from that or not. I really love the markets where there is like hundreds. I see landscapers all over the place, but I go online, I can only find one or two. That's opportunity. That's, that's a really good market. In my opinion, this week is being a bum. Dean, I didn't watch your most recent video. I saw it was something negative. So hopefully your employees are sticking with you. And Dino, how do you charge mobile home park since they're so small? We have a minimum charge, so that's what I would stick to. If you have a certain amount of square foot, you say, hey look, anything under 5,000 square feet is a certain price or whatever it might be, minimum charge per cut, I would say just implement that.

Chase dying from not being able to hire. What's the best advice for times like these? Listen to my last video about the labor shortage Chase. I talk a lot about what to do until the labor shortage begins to get better, which I feel potentially, knock on wood, fingers crossed, will get better in September once the unemployment boost is is up. However, until then, you should really probably buckle down with what you got, raise your prices, increase your margins, maximize efficiency and not be spending a whole bunch of money on indeed ads and Facebook ads and you're getting bad hires and you're spending your time and wasting your time with people who don't show up for interviews and things like that. So I would buckle down for now. Unless again, we're assuming that you can't find people that you. We're assuming that when you put out ads you don't get anyone showing up. If you can double down and go, go grow. But I would definitely otherwise lock down with what you got. Maximize the profit from now until the end of either September when it gets better or maybe even next spring. So when you come to next spring, you have the capital to actually deploy against growth. Double brusky. Do you think you need to have passion for lawn care in order to be successful in this business? Well, I do not have passion for lawn care as much as for the business owners themselves, so that could be an inclination of my answer, but I don't think so. I think lawn care landscape is a great industry to learn business in general. And so you might be passionate about a completely different industry altogether, but the fundamentals of business don't change. So if you can learn how to market, how to hire, how to have meetings with a team, how to figure out your website and all the rest of that, how to sell, how to upsell, all of those skills will translate to any industry. And whether you know you're passionate about sports or some of down the road, you can start start a business around what you're passionate about but learning those skills. I think lawn care Lansing is a great industry for that to get started with. Roberto Martinez. How are you Mike? Roberto from New Jersey. Elegance, lawn and land and garden care. Should I get a dump truck or dump trailer? What are your thoughts? Good question. I like the trailer. It's more versatile because I can use it for a bunch of different stuff. I can transport materials, I can transport equipment. If I'm behind on a mowing crew, I could potentially take it out for a mowing a trailer as well. I really like dump trailers for debris. It's a lot faster and traditionally I can carry more weight on a double axle trailer than I would dollar costing average for a dump truck. So for what I mean by that for example is I can get a $15,000 truck, maybe a half ton or a three quarter ton or a one ton truck along with say a seven, $8,000 dump trailer. So now I'm looking at let's say $25,000 all in for a good setup for a dump trailer. Whereas if I go get a dump truck, I could be spending 30 or $40,000 just to get in the door. And my bigger concern is all that weight is over the chassis of the vehicle and where all the motor and all the internal components are. And there's a lot more wear and tear on a very heavy, a very expensive piece of equipment. It's on my, you know, 30, $40,000 dump truck is all that weight and all that wear and tear versus just a simple, you know, chassis of a dump trailer which is just metal. And two, you know, whatever they're called the axles. Sorry it's getting a little late. Methodical cuts. Matthew Gordon. What's up? Hey. Yes, I do really good friend with them. I am one, I'm the one he talked to you about joining them. Oh really cool. Matthew, you should reach out to me if after you've talked to them. I talked to them last night so that's awesome. I'd love for you to get on board with them. They're just awesome people.

Gabe, when if at all do you think you'll switch to battery operated fleets provides customer with a unique value prop that I think is becoming more appealing. Yeah Gabe, at the end of the day I've talked to several providers that have done this and test this extensively across the country and to based upon what we're seeing, 95% of people are not willing to pay one penny more for electric operated equipment versus gas. So at the end of the day, if the customer doesn't care and is not willing to pay more for it, it's going to take a while for it to actually become mainstream. Right. In terms of my. I agree with you. There is people who see it as a value proposition and it is increasing in value proposition. Especially when it comes to commercial work, especially when it comes to home hospitals. When it comes to corporate headquarters, they want it quiet. They don't want all that noise. That being said, the traditional customer, residential client is not willing to, they're not willing to pay for it. Right. So it's like you go into a restaurant and they're, you know, they're coming out and they're, you know, washing your hands with, before the meal with like some golden water. That's like $500 a gallon. Like you could really care less. Like, I just want to eat, I'm here to eat. At the point, at this point, battery operated equipment is that equivalent. People are not willing to pay more for that kind of upgrade of service. But you're right, it's trending in that direction. I think there is absolutely value.

Even if you're trying to go after city work, for example, which usually is low margin. I'm usually not a fan of. However, if you are going after that type of work, they see value in that. The biggest value buyers of these, especially the zero turns that are battery operated and the mowers and the robot mowers and all the rest of it is municipalities. And a lot of it is they're just trying to look green and they're trying to make a nice little checkbox. And it's a marketing ploy for them. So it could potentially though be something, an opportunity there. The homeowner Currently right now, 95% of them are not willing to spend anything extra. And so if you're looking as a value proposal, I would definitely say, you know, if someone had to compare apples to apples, like battery versus gas and both are 45 a cut, yeah, they might choose the battery, but if it's $, if it's $45 and $0.01, they're probably gonna stick with the gas. Most people still are. And I think that is changing. I think you're right. But the cost of that entry doesn't allow you to make it $45 and $45. Because if I spend $30,000 for a mower because battery operated versus have to pay $7,000 for a comparable fuel operated mower, I can't charge $45 if I bought the battery Mower, I'll have to charge 55. And that differential most customers are not willing to pay for.

Julian, do you think a new lawn care owner should go with an agency to start online marketing or should try and figure it out on their own? It's a really tough question.

I would say if you don't know and you're completely oblivious to online marketing and digital anything like video, you should probably hire it out, right? So that's why we started started long here. Oh, look at this. See, when I do Q and A, I really need to get better at this here. Let me see one second. Give me a second. Oh, oh, oh. Comments. Take it away. See, there you go. See, like long care web design.com for example. You know the company we have here. Let me take this away. It is absolutely for this type of reason for people who don't want to code, don't want to build their website, they don't want to worry about, et cetera. That being said, when it comes to social, there's two different ways of looking at social. One is posting your own page. I think you should do that yourself. It's not too difficult. And social media is a little bit nicer to organic content. You and your truck, you doing a before and after photo, you sharpening blades, showing it on your page itself. You know, Instagram, Facebook, etc. That's fine. What I would say you might want to hire out this for the advertising side of things, like you mentioned here. But again, I wouldn't go ahead and hire an agency if you're not already creating content at a local level for your own Facebook page or Instagram page. Do that first. Really test that market out. See if you're something you're good at and then maybe just boost a post or two. That's not going to be obviously as good as someone who potentially has a lot more experience. But you have to look at the dollar, you know how much you have to spend, right? If you're a $50,000 per year business, you should not be going out and getting an online marketing company. You should focus on posting pictures and videos on Facebook, on Instagram, for free, on your own business page. Now, if you're trying to go from 50,000amonth to $100,000 a month and you have no idea how to digital media, no idea how to do marketing, designing ads, et cetera, yes, you should probably go hire somebody. It's going to take out the learning curve and the speed. Like if it's going to take you 15, 20 hours a week to figure out the digital marketing side for your business. And you're a operator doing 800, $900,000 in annual revenue. Probably worth your time. It is worth your time to let someone else do it that's going to be able to do that same task in two or three hours.

All right, let me pop this up. Sorry, this messed me up. Now here we go. Comments Gabe As Mike says, to be the most successful, you need to find a sweet spot between what you love, what you're good at, and what you're passionate about. Check up Flip for dope content. Yeah, Flip. Actually, yesterday came by again and we did a video on business ideas. So I think it goes up next week. Do you think, do you think you can make a landscape company only from subs? I think you can, but again, I don't like to be at the mercy of a subcontractor because especially like, like right now, if they're busy, they can just change their price. If they' busy, they don't have to show up. It's very hard to regulate and create a good brand. Right at the end of the day, when you can create a good brand, you stop spending money on ads. Lawn Starter Home Advisor, all these companies, they're incentivized by us not creating our own brand. As long as we just become abc, whatever, Lawn care, Mike's Lawn Care, Bob's Lawn Care, and we become just a commodity of mowing lawns. That's why they do so well is because we are constantly dependent on new leads from them when we create a brand. That's when you stop spending money on ads and people start coming to you because they've seen your trucks, they remembered your slogan, they've seen your advertisements, they go to your website and you own the brand. That's the value of the business actually becomes part of the valuation of your company is the brand itself. It brings people to you, it attracts new leads without having to pay for ads all the time. So my problem with subs is similar to the same problem I have with HomeAdvisor or, you know, Angie's list of paying for leads because I feel like a sub. I can't control them. I can't control what time they show up to the job. I can't control if they wear a uniform. I can't control if they're smoking on the job. I can't control if they cuss out to the customer. I can't control those things. And so in my mind, it's very difficult to create a good brand around Something I don't own. And in this, this ideal, it would be that I don't own or have any control over how the customer is treated by the client or the standards by which that subcontractor acts. S and t Lawn care. I am in a small market and there is still enough work for everyone. Do you think.

Do you think you could make. Hey, same question. Okay, ask the question one time. I will get to, I promise. When you recommend. Ken, when, when you recommend giving a discount for everyone the same neighborhood. Oh, do recommend giving it a discount for everyone in the same neighborhood so you can build route density 50 plus all on the same street. I would not. For the first few especially, I think sometimes you were like, oh, this is a great neighborhood. I'm going to give everyone a discount. And then they realize that they only got like 4 or 5 instead of the 50 that they expected. So we don't really use that metric. It's like, look, every single client is different. Every single property is different. And our goal like that is the goal. Why would I bring down my prices when my whole goal is to create route density? And so I would, I would recommend allowing your route density to be. To be the. The like. Like we talked about on the vlog the other day. Like, your best defense is a great offense. Your best defense against someone else coming into that neighborhood is going to be the fact that you get 50 of them. And again, branding all day, every day, people in the neighborhood see your team mowing. That's branding. Focus on that instead of trying to use price as the only way to get into a neighborhood.

D3Winnick what are things I can do to set myself apart from the aside from online marketing stand out from the competition. Honestly, at this point you can answer your phone. That is going to help you stand out right now, especially this time of year when everyone's so far behind. If you can answer your phone, get back to people within 24 hours, even if you miss a call and it goes a voicemail, you call them back. Like that's the sort of thing that is going to set you apart right now, this time of year, people are just packed super busy. Okay, I have way too many questions coming in. I'm going to get to them, I promise. Zachary Trigger, how do you. How do we get to see our website performance stats with else long care, web design meaning pages, et cetera? Zachary, we are working on a dashboard for this through Google Analytics so that you'd be able to access contact our team. You probably are in contact with Tory, probably contact him and he can get you set up right now. But we're working on something that's a little simpler than Google Analytics. But we just gotta, it's gotta be simple but then effective. So Zachary, reach out to Tori. He can probably get you set up for now. And then we're pro. We're just trying to create something more simple than Google Analytics because for most, well, it's too deep. And it's not that a lot of it's just not useful. It's just a matter of like what is useful when you don't jump in and see 500 data points. Sonoma Green landscape. Hi Mike. Small company jobber or what? Thanks. Yeah, jobber's great. I love jobber. Especially a small company size. Lawn Pro is good to get started as well. Lawn pro is really cheap. Same thing with yard book. Great cheap option to get started. How much do you charge for bagging? Traditionally, you're going to want to charge at least 20% more for bagging. It depends on if you're hauling debris to the dump too. We just had this in New York with our corporate location there. We're really trying to avoid having to bag clippings. And they're just doing double passes because it's only for about three weeks out of the year, four weeks out of the year where they'll need to even, you know, even need to beg. And so it's like, hey, avoid it at all possible. If you can avoid bagging at all possible, please do it. It. It kills you. And so in terms of pricing though, if we're going to start bagging, we do want to charge at least 20% more. So on a 40%, $40 lawn, I want to charge 50. Now in some markets like our Bellingham location, locally in Mount Vernon and Washington state, basically all our franchisees here we have to bag. It's like completely standard. It's crazy. And the worst place you could be mowing lawns is in Washington because it's standard to bag clippings and it's just part of our pricing, honestly, like if we don't bag clippings, it's put on the notes because it's just assumed that we bag every lawn. Dean King. We are actually doing well on the labor front, up to five people. But has become clear I am a terrible estimator. So the guys aren't consistently hitting P4P on landscaping thoughts. It's also part. Don't be too hard on yourself, Dean. It is part of it is this time of year, right I'll probably share a little bit more next week on the video. But like even our local team that's been on P4P for years, we have to have a meeting this past week, get everyone on board, clear up some questions about it. Especially this time of year when it's very difficult, everyone's working lots of overtime, it is sometimes difficult to comprehend and to think forward in terms of the summer when there's not going to be lawns that are a foot tall and you want to keep that core group of guys so that way they can, you can give them full time hours and they can go crush it on P4P. Right. So if you have to hire more people in the spring rush because there's so much work, but then in the, in the summer when things slow down, the grass isn't growing as much, you have to go, you can't give them all full time hours at that point. So we're trying to explain things like that. I'll talk a little bit more about next week. But even Our team on P4P with the new people joining and all the rest of it, we still have to explain things, questions and things like that. So don't be too hard on yourself. This time of year is always difficult for estimating because the weather can literally double the job as well as like for lawn, same thing. Gas grows like crazy. Brian Connor, what is the Bellingham locations SOP for when projects go over budget or when larger products have punch lists after the project is finished? Yeah, so this is when, you know, kind of two questions here. Number one, when a product goes over budget, if the, if the client didn't change the scope of work, we never go back after them. We just don't. Even if we're way over, if they, if we did the scope of work and it just took us longer, we eat that cost and we realize that maybe one out of, you know, four or five our jobs are going to go over budget hours and it's going to be bad for the crew unfortunately, as well as for the company. But at the end of the day, we're going to stick to our guns and our estimates and not go back and say, oh well, actually it took us 10% longer, we need to charge you 10% more. We won't do that in terms of the client to the employees. This is the same thing with P4P. They got to realize that there's human error, there's weather, there's random things that happen and we can't control that. And there's Going to be times when jobs go over budget hours, but they aren't going to complain. And they got to realize that there's also times when they're going to crush budgeted hours. Not like we take money away from them on P4P. So that balances itself out. If they don't understand that, then they potentially won't work well because there's a mistrust there and that's not an easy thing to do in the spring rush when a lot of the jobs are taking above budget hours, the mowing takes a lot longer, etc. So a lot of this is explanation process, training your team. It's an ever going process. Like again this past week at the Bellingham location where they've had PVP for a long time. We still have to explain, especially this time of year. It's pretty discouraging because it's not like they're crushing P4P all the time in terms of someone having a punching a punch list for the crew after the job is done. Again, it needs to align with the scope of work. If there's a list of things done, being asked by the client, hey, I need this done and this done. This wasn't finished or whatever. Like, look, here's your punch list. Here's the cost of what is. Here's what's included in the scope of work. And these things are not. And it's gonna be work change orders. And we're gonna put dollars for per. Per line item. They're asking on that punch list if it's not in the scope of work. So that is that. By the way, these are some amazing people over here. They're working right there. And then this is Liz over here. They're still working here. Friday night command center. All right, Jose, I am making 30350 to $450 a day. Is it worth getting a guy and paying him a hundred dollars a day? Well, yeah, you do that all day long. If that's what happened.

Yeah. If you're making. If you're making 450 bucks a day and you can pay a guy 100 to work for you, today, I would do it. Lee Park. Friday nights are for grinding. Hit that like button. Lee is working too. He's at the Bellingham shop. They're pulling a late night there. Jeffrey DeSalvio. How do you recommend building credit? I currently have no credit and want to be able to take out a loan to start a franchise because I may not have the cash flow to pay initial fee plus less cash for marketing to build your credit just in general, there's a few things you should do. Number one, start a line of credit with your local credit union or local bank, whoever you kind of have a banking relationship with. And in order to make sure that those fees are low and you're not paying a bunch of money, you could potentially collateralize your equipment if it's been paid off. So if you have a skid steer or trucks, you could say, hey, I'll put those collateral against this line of credit. They're going to give you a much, much lower interest rate. And then maybe you just use that once a year for pay it off. And that's going to be good for your business credit. Obviously your personal credit. There's all sorts of, you know, you have certain things like revolving lines of credit, certain types of loans are revolving, other ones are more fixed. So if you have a mortgage and you're paying that every month, you have a car payment, you're paying every month. Whereas a revolving line of credit, for example, you can take money in, you can use it, you can take it out. And so there's all sorts of things that go into credit score. But I would definitely say a great starting point is to have your create a business line of credit. Now I was actually talking to someone today on a coaching call and they were asking, hey, is it a good time to start opening up? Is it a good time to open up a business line of credit? I say, look, when you don't need it is when you need to apply. Because when you need it, the banks don't want to give it to you. When you need money is the wrong time to ask for a loan from a bank. So right now, if you're doing good and you don't need a line of credit, you should probably go get a line of credit. That's, that's the time they're going to actually approve you and give you the best rates. When in like, for example, I was telling them in the middle of last year, March 2020, when contractors that had seven, eight weeks booked out in projects all of a sudden had all of those wiped out and they had no work and they were laying everyone off, they went and tried to go get lines of credit. Guess what? The bank's like, no, thank you. And I actually, last March 2020, I actually took all of our line of credit and liquidated, like pull all the money out just in case the bank froze the line of credit. I did not want it to be where we ran out of cash for whatever reason. This Is March when, like, everything's shutting down. You know, they shut down the gym. They like, they're just crazy. Everyone's fear, you know, fearful, right? So I pool all our line of credit because again, your line of credit is your cheapest form of insurance, right? It's the thing that's going to potentially be the last thing, the last line of defense for your business. We are finally finding quality employees in Michigan. Shocked. Phones exploding organically. Plus Facebook ads. Two full time employee, full time crews right now. So put up some solo crews to scale fast, or two man crews.

If you have the cash, you could do solo. If you don't have the cash and you're growing that fast, go ahead and do two man cruise. You'd only do the solo cruise if you have the capital for the trucks. And your truck setups are really cheap, like trailerless setups. If you're gonna. If it takes 50, $60,000 for a setup, you should be doing two people in the truck because asset utilization. Whereas if I can get away with a 10, 15 or, you know, $20,000 setup for my mowing setup, I want, I want solo crews all day long. Bhag, clean, clean green, long hair. What is your bhag? BHAG stands for big hair, Audacious goals. In case you haven't read the book, I would say for Augusta, it's definitely getting to 500 franchisees. Can you pass out flyers to an HOA neighborhood?

You could. You might get some people mad at you, but hey, it's sometimes better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Chris, when do you know when it's time to hire an office person full time? A full time is tough. This is the hardest thing about an office person. There is rarely a time where I say, oh, yeah, you need to go from no office person to full time office person. That's a very big, big, big step and a big commitment financially because you're gonna have to get an office space. You're gonna have to get. If you're gonna pay someone full time in office, and by the time you pay taxes and all the rest of it, plus you got utilities, you're looking. By the time you include all extra overhead costs, straight overhead cost, fixed expenses, you're looking at probably 5, $6,000 a month at least. And so that's a big, big jump to go from nothing to full time. If at all possible, I'd try to get someone part time to start taking some of the minutia off your plate. Things that are really, really simple that you're doing like answering emails, sending invoices, the basic stuff and then down the road things like customer problems, setting up contracts, setting out estimates. Potentially down the road you could have them do that as they grow into more of a full time role but zero to full time is a big big jump. So I would try to I try it all possible to go part time at first especially if you and then maybe align the fact that you're not going to go get an office space until you get someone full time. The part time person could maybe work for a year from home just doing some basic things for you, maybe answering the phone. Take the basic things off your plate as soon as possible.

Ken Lynn Brandon, are you an Augusta franchise? If so where you located? Oh, you're talking to Brandon. Brandon is not a franchisee. How you can get Roberto Thanks Mike. I'm more confident to make the next step. Time to go to bed. 22 to 11. Long day tomorrow. Del Bruski know anything about the pressure washing business? Thinking of switching over? I feel in my market it's hard to make decent money in lawn care. People are always shocked when I give them a price. Trust me, if you're in lawn care, if you're in pressure washing, if you are in building skyscrapers some people are going to think you're expensive. There's gonna be some people think you're cheap. What you got to do is make sure you produce value in the form of a better website, better marketing, better branding, uniform to get them above that price equation. And it's a numbers game.

And the fundamentals of business doesn't change. So in terms of you know someone saying hey like I can't make my marketing work in lawn care, I'm going to switch over to landscaping, I'm going to switch over to something else and make it work. It it rarely works that way. Finding labor is going to be just as difficult in pressure Washington, right. Getting, getting like there's some people out there that literally think to pressure wash a driveway should be like 30 or $40. So and you don't get recurring revenue as much in terms of weekly on pressure washing. So you're giving, you're gonna have a bigger cash flow problem. So I'm not saying yay or nay double brewski. But what I am saying is don't let the services be the solution. It rarely is the problem. It's almost always business fundamentals.

Whoa, there's a big long here. Anybody have experience with Andrew Patocin at Lawn Care Marketing expert. I hired him to build my website and do SEO. After I paused service, he took down all my web pages that he did SEO for essentially destroying my business's web presence. Now he is playing games and not giving me full access to my website. I don't know what to do with this. I've spent around $20,000 on SEO with them. Mercy goodness. This is exactly what he told me wouldn't happen when I signed up. I'm not going to comment on that one. Leland Smith ID landscape installation. Hardscapes only. Would you recommend adding lawn care? I would if even if it was just simple mowing and or even if it was maintaining the landscapes that you install, simply do. The fact that it's going to be okay if I don't respond to this, people are going to think I'm weird. Okay, so here's my take on this. Okay, so you should not spend $20,000 on SEO. When we talk about Long Care web design, we do SEO with our Designs and it's $400 a month. 399. But it's not 20 grand up front. My opinion, I have not used Andrew Pradoznik. I have met him, I've talked to him in person. And.

There'S a reason why we started Long Care Web design. Okay, Harry plays Hey, Mike. I'm a full time high school student who wants to scale his business. How would you go about managing an employee? This is very hard, very hard to do. One of our franchisees, Tyler over in North Bend, Washington is doing a great job of this. He has four employees out in the field and he's in high school still. And it's very difficult though, to keep that employee engaged, manage them well, keep them part of the culture. When you're still in school, it's very difficult. In terms of tips, I would say if at all possible, try to be there in the morning to get them started. And then I would say communicate, communicate, communicate. Whether it be through WhatsApp, stay engaged with that team. It's very important because there has to be a level of trust when they go out and start mowing and you're at school all day long or same thing goes with a job. If you have a job, another job. Colton, will you touch on clocked in per hour versus man hour?

I track both, but I usually pull 45 to $55 an hour from unloading, from loading to unloading. What's good? First year clocked in hour rate solo. Yeah, this is really difficult. This is why I always talk about hourly rate as a function of being on the job site, because everyone's drive time is going to be different. If I were really tight, dense route, only about 15 to 20%, maybe even less than 15% of my day is going to be wasted when it comes to drive time. Again, we're assuming a mowing route. Okay. So if I have a really spread out route, I am going to be wasting 25 to 35, potentially even 40% of my day just in driving. It also depends on the size of my properties because if I have big properties, the majority of my day is going to be spent mowing, it's not going to be spent driving. So If I have 20 stops that are all small throughout the day, I'm going to spend a higher percentage of my time unloading and loading my trucks. I have to do it 20 times and I'm going to spend more windshield time because I'm in between jobs so many times. There's inefficiencies baked into every single time you load and unload a truck. So in terms of your clocked hour rate, it's very difficult to say that. All I would say is, you know, when you look at your clocked hourly rate versus your on the job hourly rate, if you can stay under 25% inefficient, very good. Okay, so if you're charging 60, for example, and you're able to get 45 clocked hour rate, that means there's a 25 inefficiency. That's not super bad. I try to improve that. Like you said, up to 4 to 55. That's good. So I hope that helped a little bit.

Thanks for treats today. Oh, that's great. That's awesome. Josh from Carl's Motors here. We took over a bunch of ice cream sandwiches and Red Bull and stuff like that to them. That was awesome. Best answering service for non franchisee. How much should it cost? Yeah, so Call Boss is good. Pink Callers is good. Ideally you find a calling service that integrates well with your CRM and your software system. So that way they can make call notes and they can, they can integrate really well into your already your system. So they can, you know, actually make notes in the client's profile, etc. So if you're using Jobber, make sure they use Jobber. If you're using service offput, make sure they use service offbot. That's what I would say. First of all, what you're usually going to get is you're usually going to end up paying either for a package of minutes or hours or you're going to pay for, you know, by the minute. Right. So traditionally for by the minute, you're gonna pay between a dollar and a dollar and fifty cents per minute. And then if you buy batches of hours, that's when it becomes a little bit cheaper. However, there's a lot of waste because now they potentially could just be sitting there for some time. So that's, that's kind of pricing wise. I would assume between a dollar and $1.50 per minute. And then I would assume that if you're going to hire some of them, they'll charge by like a K. If you get someone for 20 hours a week, you might be charged only 40, $50 per hour. But again, you're getting charged blocks of time, not minute by minute by minute. I like when they charge me my minute by minute just because it's going to mean that I'm only getting charged when I am. They're actually working for me. Call boss. Yeah, good call.

Brandido. How do you get better at landscaping? Is there a way to improve more knowledge? Yeah, Greeniest is a good option. Stanley Genedik is a great YouTuber. Brian's Lawn Maintenance, all those other guys are really good at giving us some of those sort of advice. How many times do you pass out flyers to the same neighborhood? As many times as you possibly can't afford. Serious soul. Hey, Mike. First year in business and this spring, I've had massive organic growth. I'm considering the first, the next step and if I should narrow down services and scale maintenance. Thoughts? It really depends on your size. I traditionally see a company wants to either hit around 500,000 or a million. Somewhere in that range, they start to think about this. So I'm assuming you're somewhere in that. But if you're, oh, you're in your first year of business. So the sooner you can do exactly what you're talking about, narrow down services and get focused on your core competencies, the sooner you're, you're not going to have to do it when you get bigger. So I would do it right away. Excuse me. If you're being massive growth with a couple of services that you can be really good at, get really efficient at, bring down the level of the amount of customization and simplify it and systematize services. Now you won't have to go through that massive hurdle to your growth down the road, which is going to be basically saying, okay, I'm not doing this, and now I'm not doing this. Now you have equipment you got to sell off for less. Like when we got rid of zero turns we had to sell zero turns. When we got rid of artificial turf it's like get rid of a bunch of, you know, valuable artificial turf and give it away basically. So those hurdles of growth that you will hit eventually as you grow, you can get around those by simply being aware that they're going to happen and just doing it now. So that's why when we start our corporate locations we don't start with artificial turf and big dump trucks and gravel and you know, skid steers and track loaders. We, we focus on the simple things. So layman's growing. I have an HOA120 houses that I'm confident we can beat everyone else's price and still stay at $75. What is the best method for ranking on Google? There's a whole bunch of things that go into it but I would say the quick, fast, easy, simple tip I would give is Google reviews. Google reviews. Thanks. Talk to you on the 20th. Check your coaching call schedule. We'll be talking acquisitions. Zachary I look forward to it. Man. Home advisor is horrible. Matthew Gordon Layman's growing I have a 120 house HOA and I and one push more and one part timer. Should I buy a zero turn to get them all done in one to two days or buy a whole other truck set up and get another full time push mower 24 hours at $75 an hour? I would just, I wouldn't make that decision based on that one hoa. I would figure out what business model you want to follow. If you're trying to scale and grow, you might want to default towards the second option. If you're trying to stay small and you want to just optimize yourself, go get the zero turn, you're going to be much more efficient. If you want to scale it out though, get employees and all the rest of it down the road there's potential that it's much more simple to stick with that smaller setup. Brent how booked out so you allow yourself to get before hiring more employees? Traditionally around two to three weeks. It's usually what we're shooting for. At that point we were either going to be raising prices or we're going to hire more employees. Paul, what do you recommend for advertising? I already have a great website but turned off SEO and pay per click campaign last year. In your opinion, where do I put the most dollars for the best ROI? Yeah, Google Local Services Next Door, YouTube ads, Facebook ads and Google Ads. Those are the ones. The top five that I kind of am focused on right now. Did I say next door? I think I did, yeah. Dinking. What does your estimate follow up look like with the video and everything? Yep. So after 24 hours. So one after one day we follow up. Two days we follow up. Three days we follow up and then day five we give them a phone call. So those first three are emails. The fifth one is a phone call. The video goes out with the estimate conference 2020 22. Any updates in person? Yes, it is already up. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference it is already. I've already paid for the venue. So yes, we are having in person no matter what.

Sonoma Green Landscape we are trying out battery equipment. Just bought the Toro Heavy Duty 21 in commercial. Love the cut and great work on my smaller lawn. Thanks for your help. Congrats brother. I still remember the first day about my first commercial mower x mark 21 hello Mike, is there a way I can do installment payments to get the franchise? Victor getting a call with me. Traditionally we do not allow that, but hop on a call with me. Last week's talk with that long guy was awesome. Need more videos like that. Him sharing his business and thoughts could help a bunch of people. Yeah, I'm assuming you're talking about John Garrison from ABC Lawn Works G Outdoor Service. When do you know it's time to jump into a bigger mower? I have a 48 inch now, but I am thinking about buying a bigger mower. I would not buy it bigger than a 48 inch mower, but again my business model is copy and paste. Small right? Smaller setup, cheaper setup, trailer this setup. Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. If you're going to stay solo or maybe have one or two trucks potentially getting a 60 or 72 inch mower. If you're in a in market where there's two 3 acre lots, you're mowing all the time. Probably a good option. Good idea to do that. And for us we target smaller lots. So we're a 48 inch mower is the biggest one we'll get.

All right. Profitel, would you quote an hourly rate or a fixed rate, fixed price on removal of an IV and BlackBerry strip that covers the backyard fence line? If at all possible, I would give a fixed price because the problem with that is like well what you might be thinking is this. Oh, if I charge, If I say 300 it takes forever, then I'm going to. I'm toast. Like I'm going to. You know, I'm Going to lose money on this job. Well, what's worse is you charge, you say hey, we'll charge $50 per hour. And then guess what, it takes you longer than you think. And now you technically need to charge them 1200 and they don't want to pay. Or you stop at five or six hours and tell them that hey, this is gonna go really expensive. They say oh no, I don't want that. You, you should have done this for like a couple hundred bucks in my mind. So I'd much rather have a fixed price in my mind for all jobs. And yes, that is some. You're opening yourself up to some risk. But again, over time you should get much more accurate with your budgeted hours longer. Joker. What's up, Kevin? Chris dyer. We have 100 own our land and new shop. We will do over a million this year and I've been doing 90% of everything outside of my wife helping at night after she's got home from work. Okay, I must have. That must be a second part of a question. I do apologize. Tyson. Is a push mower enough to start up a mowing business in the city? When would it be worth to upgrade to a stand on? It is absolutely totally awesome to start with a push mower. If you're going to focus on properties under 8,8010,000 square feet of turf starts getting more than that consistently, you're going to need something bigger in terms of a stand on. You're probably going to need it sooner than later. But what you can do is focus on, focus on the smaller properties to get started with the smaller mower so you have less startup capital and you can spend more money on marketing as you get more clients then potentially if the property sizes are requiring it, you go get the zero turn stand on using the money you've made from using the push mower on smaller properties. Which means at first you might only be able to mow for 60% of the population. I have to say no to customers or be so priced out of the league because it's going to take you twice as long as everyone else. Chris, office person yet? Oh, you're only if you have need an office person. Okay. And you're saying you have you own everything. You do a mil, you'll do over a million dollars this year and I've been doing 90 of everything outside my house. Yes, you should get an office person, especially because your wife is probably eventually not going to be thrilled with working at night doing your work. Hey, Mike Mons, lawn maintenance from Squamish BC question for you. Would you quote an hourly rate or a fixed rate? I already did this one. Sorry guys.

David, going to two crews this year. We, we including me, there are three employees. Should I send one guy solo or go myself? Go solo myself. Also, what is the best way to split up my schedule? It really depends on how many estimates you have in a day. If you have a bunch of estimates in a day, probably a good thing to let those two guys go by themselves. So you can do maybe a half day's worth of work and then go to your estimates. If you don't have airman estimates, I'd prefer if I was going to work the whole day that I would have someone with me because I can train them, I can teach them, I can talk about the culture and talk about the business, show them, teach them things about business, tell them why we're doing certain things and it's beneficial for them. And so I would like that, especially when you have those two guys because you can really ingrain the culture into them now and get them to think long term in the future they're potentially going to become not the paid attention. They will become the cultural standard for the third and fourth employee that you hire. So whatever you can do to spend more time with them, probably a good thing. Tyson Vickers okay, we'll get a couple more questions in here. Do you have a recommendation on a push mower to begin with? Also when would be a good time to upgrade to a standom stand on As a solo operator in the city? I just talked about this different question though. In terms of a recommendation for a push more, I don't really, I think commercial is good. Get a 20 inch push mower as commercial to get started. Commercial is good. It is worth the extra money. What's the best CRM for small company in your opinion? I wouldn't say there's a best one. I would say the if someone was just getting started and they need a really low cost, I'd say probably their lawn pro or yard book. Then like medium size would probably be like jobber and some other ones. So John Avery, for your small shipping container gravel lot locations, best way to find those locations that are open in for those kind of lease agreements. Honestly a lot of times it's residential land or it's going to be behind like a contractor's yard or gravel lot like that. And so to find them it's rare that they're just sitting on craigslist and like hey, like come rent my land. It's rare that that's the case. So what you usually have to do is usually you'll have to, you know, proactively go after them. Like, you know, you'll see a corner lot has a bunch of gravel parking space or you'll see like someone with five acres the farm. Even like if you see them on the farm, they have 200 acres of land. Hey, look, can I have like 3 or 4,000 square feet? I just need a little bit of gravel, shipping container. I'm good to go. And I'll give you x amount per month.

That's usually the way we find them is actually actively going after people and asking about it. It's rare that you'll find those type of locations, especially the residential ones on Craigslist. What is your opinion on raising mowing prices in May now? I can't reach budget on some considering raising them now versus next season. Colton, if you're very busy and you're wanting to grow but you can't find employees and this is happening to you, you need to raise your prices now. And this is the thing too. And when it's growing like it as fast as it is right now, the thing is it's a good time to raise prices because the the customer can't wait around for five weeks trying to find some other another contractor. They're kind of stuck because if they don't have you mowing next week, it's getting really long. The grasses and everyone else is really busy and everyone else can't find employees right now and it's going to be really hard for them to go get an estimate done within 24 hours. So it's a great time to raise prices, as bad as that sounds because it seems like you're trying to take advantage of customers bad that sounds it's the best time to raise prices is when they can't find a competitor to come get an estimate to you. Antonio, hey, man, I'm following your business model of only simple services such as only lawn bye.

Such as only lawn mowing. Where do I send the clients or just tell them I don't do it and that it or what's a better approach? Yeah, Antonio, just say, look, that's not our specialty. It's not what we focus on. I can refer you to these other people that could do those services for you. And when you do that, it puts a lot of confidence from them to you that when you say you can do something, they're going to believe you because when you said you when there was something that you could not do you told them about it. So if you say, I can do that, they actually trust you. It's great way to sell.

Which franchise location you close and you talked about in your video. Do you ever buy them out and keep them as a corporate franchise? I'm not going to disclose on here the corporate location, the actual physical place where it's at right now. However, we are not buying them out. We potentially could, you know, open a corporate franchise. A couple of other franchises asked about starting that location up again and. But we are not right now. Do I ever buy them out? Yes, I potentially could if. If we wanted to at the time. But this is not the time of year we're going to get another corporately owned location.

Do you guys implement a referral program? Not really, to be perfectly honest. Several reasons for that.

But we do not have an actual program aside from our crews out in the field. They get $50 cash if they get a customer while they're out working. That's about as close as we get to a referral program. We don't like send out to customers saying, hey, please refer us if you're gonna do that. I think that a really great strategy is sending an email or a picture to your customers and ask them to forward this to people. That's potentially a great way. And two, like, you know, yard signs in their yard is a great referral kind of type of program, in my opinion. Do I charge sales tax when I invoice people or should it be a flat rate? Eric, you need to contact your department of revenue, say, hey, I'm doing lawn care. I'm doing landscaping services. Do I need to charge sales tax? You might ask you if you're doing projects or hardscaping. That might make a difference. Every single state is different. So do not take anyone's word besides the Department of Revenue, their website, or calling them directly in your area. Layman's growing. Monthly maintenance with me and one part timer is around 4, $900, takes one day a week. How much of recurring revenue would you recommend to spend on a CRM? Is 5% too much. So 5% would be dividing that by 20. So that would mean that you are spending $200 on a CRM.

I don't like that. Honestly, at $5,000 a month, you don't need anything more than like lawn pro or yard book. Like, honestly, you don't. Like, we did about 40, 30, $40,000. It was beyond what, you know, like, we should have switched sooner, but we were doing like 30 or $40,000 a month in Lawn Pro.

And so I would not be spending 200amonth if I was doing $5,000 a month in revenue unless I had the ambition to grow, right? So like our locations for Augusta, right? From zero, we start using service all time, paying like 250 or 300amonth. It's horrible. However, we have the intention to grow bigger, right? So, and there's absolutely something to be said about the fact that when you have to switch CRMs, it's a pain in the neck because you don't get to get job history and credit card information and all the rest of it. So if you can avoid that and pay the $200 in a month, now Lehman's growing and with the intention and the knowledge that in three years you would have or even two years or one year, you might have to make the switch anyways, I would do it now. Pay the extra money. If you pay $200 a month, let's say it's $100 savings. If you went to a cheaper product, but you're able to spend two years, that's $2,400 that you're paying essentially not to have to switch CRMs. And it's worth it. Promise. Switching softwares is not fun. Elijah Vista Valley for your commercial clients, do you charge by each service or do you bill them for the whole season in a bundle? Traditionally for commercial clients they are going to want a 12 month contract and you're going to have to have level billing to fit their budget. Most hoas commercial contracts are going to require that and we still estimate based on budget hours on each and every service. But then to the customer they're going to get a specific cost per month. That doesn't change level billing. Our products are about $4,000 a month as well. We are trying to grow. Okay, so you're doing around $9,000 in revenue and not the 5,000 I anticipated. So that means that you're paying, my goodness, that means you're paying $400 a month for your software. So again, unless you're, that's fine if you have intentions to grow, but if you're going to stay at 8, $9,000 a month in revenue, you do not need to be spending 3, 4, $500 a month on software program. If your plans are to grow to 20, 30, $40,000 plus in monthly revenue, you should invest in the better software now so you don't have to do it down the road and make the change. Vladimir, do you have any experience with the pink collars? For a call Service, they charge $1,000 per week. Seems high. I do not have any firsthand experience. I do know that they do integrate with service autopilot. And so if you use service autopilot, I would recommend them because you want that call service to integrate with your CRM. I can't overemphasize that enough. There's a reason why we still use service all pilot is because we are able to integrate it with it at command center here. That's the only reason why. Doug, how do I start in Texas for yard mowing? How much for equipment? And what about rain days and winter is the seasonal only to want to start in this business?

Doug, watch some of my other videos. Probably answer most your questions. What software do you use for scheduling? And calendar essay is unusable. I would recommend. Oh, for software. Okay, well, if you're just talking about scheduling a calendar team up or Google Calendar is great. We use team up as a very visual way of seeing our projects when we're. How far we're booked out. Because like you said, service autopilot, their calendar view is not great in our opinion for projects. So we use team up. It's very similar to Google calendar. John Avery, 50 minutes of op content and only two thumbs up. Oh, you must be on YouTube. Yeah, so yeah, John has a good point here. You know, we have. We've had over 200 people watching this and we only have seven likes. This is. This is very, very bad. The ratio is not good. We talked, we talked about the consumer price index and many ratios the other night, but that like ratio telling you what. All right. I think that's most of the questions. Did I get through all of them? Okay, if you have a question, say it now or forever hold your peace.

Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, I think I got them all. That's it. Let's go. Yeah. Thank you, David. Pump the stock. Let's go. How much do you charge per acre of commercial grass mowing? We do not charge by the hour, by the. By the acre. That being said, we probably have less than a quarter percent of our franchise system has properties that are under an acre of mowing. We focus much more on the smaller properties under one acre. Hey, Mike, what do you think about how to charge for project Hardscaping in California? I smash like button. Yes, Doug, do you have any business in Texas or Augusta? Yes, we have franchises in both. Cool. Awesome. All right, guys, have a great rest of your evening. Have a great weekend. Probably won't see you till Monday, but it'll be a good video today. Make sure you check out that one video if you are looking to make some extra cash during the summer. I gave 10 different kind of out of the box ideas for making some extra money. Everything from creating zoom rooms to staining fences to There's a whole bunch of stuff. Just check it out. Thanks guys. Have a great one.