how I made $100K per year mowing lawns (numbers revealed!)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be talking about how you can make $100,000 in annual revenue mowing lawns and doing basic landscaping with no employees. It's absolutely possible. I'm going to walk you through the steps and the math today. Now I make a whole bunch of videos about how to do this, how to find your first 5, 10, 15, 20 customers, all the rest of it. So if you don't know that part, watch this video here I made last week about your first 100 customers. How you get 100 customers in 100 days. Make sure to watch that video. But now let's run through the MA because a lot of people say, well, you can never make $100,000. It's impossible. You always talk about building these million dollar businesses and I can't build past $2,000 a month or whatever it is, and it's impossible. I'm gonna take you through the math today. Not how to do it, but the math of how this will work. Okay? So our goal here is to make $100,000 in annual revenue. So what our goal needs to be first and foremost is to get 50 clients. Now if you don't know how to get that again, you need to watch that video. Just type in 100 customers in 100 days. Mike Andes, you'll find it. Get 100 customers. Well, let's just assume you get to 50. That's the goal. And what we're going to assume is that on average, we're mowing these people's lawns for $50 per cut. Now we're going to assume that we are charging by the cut, not by the month or by level billing. Just to keep things simple, we're going to charge $50 per cut. We're also going to assume that we have 30 cuts in the year, alright? Per year. Now, if you live in Florida, Texas, certain parts of California, you're probably going to have more like 40 or 45 cuts. But let's just assume 30 for the sake of this example. Now if we do the math, 50 clients at $50 per cut, and we do 30 cuts per year, that equals $75,000 in revenue in the year. Okay? That's going to add up to that amount in annual revenue. Now the problem is that's not 100,000. So what we have to determine is, well, how do I get to 100,000? I need $25,000 more in annual revenue. So what we're going to do is we're going to do $25,000. And again, you can do all of this math. Customers, do you have? What's your average cost per cut? How many average cuts per year do you do? That's going to give you your recurring revenue. Okay, so let's go ahead and put this in red here so we can see this is our recurring revenue. It's happening every single week or bi weekly. If you're mowing people's lawns, that's going to be the bulk of our revenue. 75% of our 100 grand is coming from this recurring base of mowing customers. But now the goal is, okay, I got to get $25,000 in additional revenue. And what we're going to do in order to get this is we gotta determine how many hours do I need to sell in order to make this possible. Well, if I am selling my labor at $80 per hour, we can take this total amount of revenue we need to make $25,000. Divide that by $80 per hour means that we need to sell 312.5 hours to customers. Because ultimately, when it comes to lawn care and landscaping, or really any home improvement business, we're really just.

When you come and do projects of any sort, landscaping projects or cleanups or anything like that, you're going to have material costs. You're going to have costs to deliver materials, you're going to have costs to haul away debris and all the garbage from the site, et cetera. There's going to be extra costs and potentially revenues. But really what you're making money on is markup on your time. So we're going to charge you $80 per hour. That is the goal. And if you think that's crazy, watch some of my other videos about what you should be charging. Because if you're the owner, owner, operator on site, you're worth a lot. You're going to be the best employee they'll ever have on their property. So $80 per hour is absolutely achievable if you're an owner operator and you're on the property the entire time. So what we need to do is we need to sell 312 hours per year. And in order to do that, we'll say, okay, well, if we take 312 and we divide that by, let's just say 52 weeks in a year, that's going to mean that we're going to approximately need six hours or six labor hours per week.

Sold to a customer. Alright? So if I take 60, or sorry, six labor hours and I multiply that by 52, I come into approximately 312 budget hours. What that means is every single week I need to sell one project that's not mowing, that has six labor hours attached to it. Now that could be a mulch installation, that could be a bush trimming, that could be a leaf cleanup, it could be a whole host of different things. And if you start looking at it even more granularly, you can literally start, start breaking this down. Like, okay, well that's 52 weeks in a year that I need to sell six labor hours. I essentially need to sell one per customer. If I can go down here, if I can sell one job per year to each recurring customer, I would actually be able to make this. I don't even know if I can sell recurring recurring client. If I can sell one six job to each of my customers, my existing 50 customers per year, I'd be able to hit $100,000 in annual revenue. Alright, this is absolutely achievable. Can you sell that mowing customer, one leaf cleanup, one mulch install, one property cleanup, weeding service, something on their property? You absolutely can. And this is the type of math that you want to try to figure out. And you might say, okay, well my cut is $40 and maybe I only have 25 cuts per year. Do the math and figure out how much you need to sell in one time jobs and projects to actually make this work. It's absolutely possible to do this in one day. So now you can start working this backwards. Like what does my schedule look like? Okay, well if it's six hours on a project, it's probably going to take you the entire day because you got to drive to the property, you got to haul material away, all the rest of it. Let's just assume it's going to take you eight or nine hours to actually do the job. So immediately one day out of your week is kaput. It's gone. So that means that I've got to mow 50 clients in a matter of four days. So again, you can do the math on this and realize you've got to do about 12 to 13 lawns per day for four days a week. And the other day of the week you're going to do this six hour job. You say, well, it's impossible for me to do 12 or 13 jobs. I can barely do 10. Okay, great. That means that in order to hit this, this 100,000 revenue, you're going to have to do 10 jobs per day for five days in the week. And then on Saturday or Sunday, on the weekend, you're going to have to make sure you get this project done. So this is ultimately how you can run the math to figure out how to get to $100,000 in annual revenue that does not include your taxes and all your expenses and all the rest of it. If you do this model right here, you're probably only going to take 50 to $60,000 home in your bank account. And that's assuming that you're not growing year over year. That means like this year did 100,000, next year you do 100,000, year after that you do 100,000. If this is your first year and you do 100,000 in revenue and you just grew massively your first year, guess what, you're not gonna make any profit. You're buying trucks, you're advertising, you're trying to figure things out. You're losing some of these customers. You're spending a lot of money on setting up your LLC and your website and business cards and getting your marketing material together. That's a lot of cost. You're not gonna have a lot of profit if you're growing really, really fast. But you can absolutely make 50 to 60 to $70,000 in profit take home pay on this type of a business after year three. Because the first three years you're trying to get to these customers, then you're trying to figure out how to sell these jobs, then you're trying to make sure you're efficient and you can actually get these done correctly and efficiently and profitably. And you're not having to buy more on marketing, spend more on marketing and all this other stuff. You're not spending money on unemployment at this point, nothing like that. You're not trying to scale a big business, but you can absolutely turn a profit in your pocket, 50, 60 grand home take home pay on this money. Now if you're trying to keep growing past 100,000 to 200,000, 300,000, that's going to require what's called cap X or capital expenditures in the form of trucks, more marketing. You're going to start have to hire people. You're going to run out of time after you start passing this too much and you're going to need to get enough employees. And so that's going to, that's definitely going to cut into that 50,000, $60,000 in profit if you're trying to grow the next year and double or triple your growth. So keep that in mind. But absolutely, it's possible. This is the math you'll want to run if you're running a lawn care business with side jobs and side projects that are landscaping, mulch installs, cleanups. This is the math you need to run so you know exactly how many customers you need and work towards this. And then figure out how do I take those customers and sell them on other UP sales, other projects where I can really make good money. Now, if that was all helpful, make sure that you watch the video about how to get 100 customers in 100 days. It's great. Check that video out. Just google it. But then watch this video on the one thing you need to know to get to 250,000, because it's gonna get you to 100,000. This video here will get you 250,000 and it's the only thing you need to know.