How I Grew My Lawn Care Business to $200K Per Year!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. Today I'm going to walk you step through step. How to build a $200,000 in annual revenue business when it comes to lawn care and landscaping. Now, this applies for most every home service business, but specifically, lawn care and landscaping is what I want to focus on today. I'm going to go over the six different things that I think you must know in order to go from maybe by yourself working to getting that first employee and being able to go to 200,000 plus in annual revenue. Now, I've made videos about 100,000, and I made videos at a million, but I want to over 200,000 because that's where a lot of people make some big mistakes. And if you follow these six rules, I think you'll be able to get through them. Number one is budget for your second truck. You have to realize that if you go past $200,000 in annual revenue, you will need a second truck. Budget for it. What's the truck value going to be? What's the amount of the price you're going to pay? And then make sure you budget for it. Don't do it too soon. I see too many people going on their second truck and then bringing their cash balance down to like zero, and then they run out of money because in the middle of winter and they don't have much work. Focus on budgeting for that second truck. No. Okay, If I need 15, $20,000, whatever that dollar amount is, make sure you have an excess of working capital on top of that amount once you pull it from the bank. Because if you starve the money from cash, you run out of cash, it's like running out of oxygen. You die. Number two, track your close ratio and your customer acquisition cost. Your close ratio is simply the number of estimates that are accepted divided by the total number of estimates that you send out to customers. That's your close ratio. Track that number like CR, because if it's 30% and you are closing 30 out of every 100 estimates, if you can just get that to 60%, you'll grow twice as fast. And so you've got to make sure that your close ratio is being tracked. I would track it every week and just look at, okay, how many estimates were accepted this week divided by how many estimates did I send out to customers. This is gonna give you a great way of tracking. How good are you at selling? How good is your system for selling? How quickly do you get to customers? Houses? Are you good at talking with them? Is your estimate template that you Send to them via email or text message. Or even if do it in paper. Whatever it is, you've gotta make sure that that looks buttoned down and professional. Cause that will affect your close ratio. There's so many different elements of changing your sales process that can affect that. It's very important to track. The next thing is your customer acquisition cost. This is the cost you have to pay to get one new customer. What do you have to spend in marketing in order to get one new customer? If you spend $1,000 on marketing and you get 20 new customers, that would assume you have a $50 customer acquisition cost. That's $1,000 divided by the total number I get from that marketing campaign, it would equal $50 customer acquisition cost. Because if you know that number, you can literally predict exactly how much you'll need to spend in the future to be able to get more revenue growth. Now remember, as a seasonal business, your customer acquisition cost might be $40, $50 in the spring. And if you spend the same, do the same exact marketing campaign at the wrong time of year, because now there's no one needing your services. It's seasonal. You could literally be spending 3, $400 customer acquisition cost. So seasonality is extremely important in the lawn care landscaping industry. If you're thinking about tracking that number, number three is build a database of emails. You have to have a good CRM, a customer relationship management tool where you're gonna be able to build a database of emails. Cause down the road the real value to your business is going to be found in this database. Because you'll be able to send an email out to people like 3, 400 people you have inside your database and get 5, 10 estimates and based upon sending them a well timed email at the right time of year. Now I personally would recommend copilotcrm.com, but I'm biased. I'm the CEO of that company. But you gotta have a CRM that's gonna have a database of emails to allow you to be able to down the road. Cause at the beginning you're like, oh, I only have 20 emails, I only have 15 people in my database, right? You might not get a lot of recurring traffic and people asking for an estimate from that database. But down the road, if you just keep adding to it and keeping those customers warm, when you have 100, 200, 300 leads and 300 people in your database, you send an email and you get multiple estimates immediately. And guess what? You don't have to spend any money on marketing. There's no customer acquisition cost to people already in your database. At my very first Augusta lawn care location, we keep people warm. I send them emails in our database. And now when we send an email out to people and ask if they need service, we have over 10,000 people in our database, and we're able to get hundreds of quotes by sending out one single email. Very, very valuable as you begin to grow the business past 100,000. Because at 100,000, hey, you can keep it in your head. You have 10, 15, 20 customers. It's not super difficult. But when you go to 200,000, you better make sure you have a database of customers that you can begin to continually keep in touch with. Number four, overpay and over train your first employee. Why would I overpay them? The reason for this is because if your goal is to get to 200,000 and that's it, 200,000, 250,000, you only need one really good employee. If you're going to scale to a million plus, maybe don't overpay someone. You're going to need to create a system like P4P, pay for performance in order to be able to scale. However, if you're just needing one employee to get 200,000, just overpay them. And I mean, like maybe three or four dollars an hour. Because, look, if you look at them working, let's call it 1500 hours in the year, if you pay them an extra $4.00 per hour, that's $6,000. So $4.00 per hour multiplied by 1,500 hours that they work in the year, that's $6000. Ask yourself. Is paying $6,000 for the whole year of them working with you?

Is it worth $6,000 to get a really good employee that is like the best of the best for $6,000 a year? The answer to that when you're running a $200,000 business is, yes, that's 3%. $6,000 is 3% of your $200,000 in annual revenue. You should want to do that. It's better to have a good employee that you can depend on and you're not burning through them. Because if you try to make this really low pay, you're gonna burn through people every couple weeks, every month, and you're gonna get super discouraged. Quality is gonna erode. You're not gonna be able to have confidence in them, they're not gonna help you take on projects, and so overpay them by four or five dollars per hour. Just so that way you're able to trust on Someone being there and you don't have a bunch of churn in that specific that first employee, as well as over train them, like, spend some real quality 3, 4, 5 days really training them on the systems. Because since you've overpaid them, they're gonna be with you for a while and they're gonna not leave. Well, over train them, make sure they know exactly what they're doing and they can take more things off their plate. Number five is direct marketing needs to start becoming your brand. So when you first get started, 100,000, $150,000 in annual revenue, you're focusing mostly on direct marketing, which is you're setting them a door hanger or your flyer and you're telling them, call now. Click here. If you're doing Google or Facebook ads, click here. You're telling them to do a direct marketing action. Take action now. If you have this pain, I have the solution. That's what direct marketing is. But as time goes on, as you pass 100,000, 150,000, you get to 200,000. If you're willing to get to 200,000 plus, you need a brand. Now, this brand is gonna come in the form of doing a lot of direct marketing. People becoming aware of you. But now they're starting to see two trucks rolling around. Now they're starting to see one of your employees. Now it's like, oh, this company is growing. And furthermore, you have a brand. People are talking about you. They understand, and they recognize your logo. Your trucks, your trucks are painted. Your trucks that maybe have decals or a wrap on them. That allows you to have a brand in the marketplace where you're recognized for a certain color truck, for a certain color uniform. At Augusta Lawn Care, our brand is yellow uniforms, yellow trucks, and dog on the truck. Max. Max is our mascot. That's what we're known for. That's our brand. And that's what you'll need to go past 100,000 and get to 200,000. And one of the best ways to create a brand is have a great website, because people will immediately judge your brand based upon your website and your trucks. It's the number one thing in the home service industry in person. They're gonna judge your trucks and your uniforms. And online, which more and more people are shifting that way, it's going to be your website. I highly recommend lawncarewebdesign.com if you need a great website. Now, when it comes to number six, very important, we need to focus on the fact that if you have a decrease in your personal expenses and how much you're paying yourself, that's gonna allow grow faster. It's very basic math. If I have a $200,000 business, but I'm pulling out a lot of money because I have a massive house, several fancy trucks, I take four vacations a year in a really nice boathouse, and I do all these crazy, exciting, buying really fancy watches and all the rest of it. If I do that, it's simply going to lead to the business growing less. So if you're at 50, $60,000 in annual revenue, like, I want to grow my company, fantastic. But if you're taking out a bunch of money from the business and siphoning off the cash, it's going to lead the business not to be able to grow because you're not going to spend money on your second truck, on the ability to be able to overpay. Where is it? Overpay your first employee. You're not going to have the money to be able to build the website and create a great brand. And furthermore, you're not going to be able to have the money to spend on marketing to be able to go out and get new customers. And you're going to be like, oh, no, I can't spend the $200 a month on my CRM and my database. You're going to do all those things because you're siphoning up all this cash for your personal expenses and you're living some lavish lifestyle, driving a Lamborghini, trying to be something that you're not. Because that is going to hurt the business. I promise you, you will not grow the business fast if you're siphoning off cash for personal expenses that otherwise that money could be spent on growing the business. So These are the six things you've got to do to get to $200,000 in annual revenue. Watch this video here if you're not at $100,000 in annual revenue yet, because this, this video will get you to that first step, then come back. Watch this video again. And don't forget the gentleman's agreement. And that is give a penny, take a penny. I give all of these great videos for you to watch for free. I expect you in return to hit the subscribe button. Thank you.