How Much Can You Make Mowing Lawns? (My REAL Financials Statements)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing with you the revenues and profits and the expense, the all income statement from the Mount Vernon location where we do Augusta Lawn Care down in Mount Vernon, which is a smaller location, just has one manager, one employee. A great place for you to start. And if you're interested in starting your own franchise, make sure you check out augustalongcareservices.com franchise. Before we get into today's show though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't Already, go to gusto.combootcamp for a free 90 day trial of their software where you can pay your employees through automatic transfer. You can, they have an app where they can actually see all of the deductions from their paycheck and you can actually get some really, really cool benefits in terms of medical, college, savings plans, really really cool stuff. Check it out today go to gusto.com Boot Camp. Alright, so this is the Mount Vernon location we're talking about today here. In just a second I'm going to have the report pop up here. Josh is going to edit here on the screen and we're going to be talking about this income statement. So this is the income statement for the Mount Vernon location. If you're not familiar with Mount Vernon location, it is a manager owned, manager operated location down in Mount Vernon which is about 30, 40 minutes from from our first location in Bellingham. I made a different video for the Bellingham location which is more established, did 174,000 revenue last month. This location is smaller, it just started, has a manager, one employee and we've been running it for now six or seven months. So I've done a couple videos. I did one last month on the Mount Vernon location. I did another video a couple months before and showed the first three months where we lost money every single month as we were starting to grow the business, invest in marketing and get the the business established. So some of you been wondering, I ran the business into about it cost about 47,000, $48,000 of a whole before the business was profitable. Right. So it cost about $48,000 to get it to, you know, its burn rate, I guess you'd say before it was super profitable and able to make a lot of money. And we run the Mount Vernon location like a franchise. It pays monthly franchise fees, it pays command center, it pays initial fee like the whole nine yards. So it costs about $47,000 and that got it to the point of being profitable every single month since month four. All right, so I'm gonna be showing September 2020, which I guess is our sixth month, seventh month, something like that. But the whole quarter is our first quarter where every single month was profitable and really, really good profit margins. I didn't actually run the numbers, but the profit margins for this one's probably about 30 to 35%. Really, really, really strong. And that includes the salary and profit sharing for the manager. So at landscape Summit next January, so just, you know, we're gonna talk about profit sharing for your field workers, for your managers, and when you have a manager that runs the entire location, like a satellite location, like we're using at Augusta Lawn Care. So we treat Augusta Lawn Care, Mount Vernon, like a franchisee. I don't spend more time with them. I haven't been there in probably four or five months, outside of a one visit for about five minutes to show a potential franchisee the location. And that was a week or two ago. But literally haven't been there for, like, five months. And so, sorry. Four months. At least four months. So this is the income statement. I'm gonna pop it up here. Sales for September 2020 were $24,290. I guess with cost of goods sold, it was 23,935. So just shy of 24 grand, all in all. Then we got expenses. So we did spend money on marketing in September to keep the jobs flowing in. We had a very dry September in our market, so the mowing was pretty slow. So we went ahead into some marketing, got some more landscaping jobs down in the Mount Vernon location. They run the model of Augusta Lawn Care perfectly. They run trailerless setups. They have no offices because command center does everything for them. They only do mowing, simple landscaping services, and property cleanups. Like, literally, it's nothing complicated. They don't do excavation. They don't do irrigation. They don't even do, like, you know, edging on lawns. Like, they'll just do mowing. When I say edging, I mean, like, pulling in bullet pavers. Like, they don't do any sort of pavers or walls, nothing like that. It's all very simple services that are super scalable, super simple, and can be really accurate on budgeted hours for P4P. And so, yeah, this whole operation is ran by one manager and one employee and very, very happy. What they've been doing down there in terms of profitability, revenue numbers, and this coming month, I know will be a little Bit less, just because the goal here for Mount Vernon is to be able to just run profitable every single month. And as we go into the winter, it'll make less revenue but still remain profitable. And so we did do some advertising to bring in the landscaping jobs. A credit card processing, $582, got fuel expense in there, insurance. That includes two trucks and then also the general liability. Again, that's not a lot of money for two trucks and general liability insurance, simply due to the fact that. That.

There'S really simple services that we do. We don't do landscaping. We don't do hardscaping. We don't do irrigation, we don't do tall trees trimming. It's all really basic services. So the insurance is very, very reasonable. Legal and professional services. Here. This is for command center. So that $1,900 includes $600 monthly fee. So the first year of a franchise, you pay $600 per month. And then every month after that first year, you pay $1,200. That's a flat fee. Doesn't change. And so they paid $600 for the franchise fee. And then that other. What is it, $1300 was for command center services. Now command center does everything for Mount Vernon. They do all their phone calls, they do all their emails. They do the scheduling, they do the invoicing, they do the routing.

They do the P4P run P4P every day. They run payroll. They do everything. So what that allows the manager to do is focus on the other employee and the jobs are going smoothly as well as his estimates. That's the two things he has to do. And so he doesn't have to worry about running payroll and doing the book work or even putting together estimates on service autopilot. Command center does all of that for him. And that's what that number is right there. So some people get kind of choked up, like, oh, my goodness, like 19, like $2,000. And for command center, it's like, look, that includes the $600 per month in fee for the franchise, and that includes his website. That includes everything. His email. That's all covered. You know, the designs, everything that we provide at the franchise. That's all covered in that, as well as the fact that he has people at the command center answering his phone all the time. He's not distracted by it. His emails, customer service emails, all of that stuff. The back and forth of getting someone set up on the schedule, they do all of that. Command center. So he's able to be a profitable employee out in the field and then do the estimates in the afternoon and, and keep busy. And it's just a well oiled machine. Like I love, love, love the model in Mount Vernon. I don't see any reason why someone can't start a business and have it very systems oriented if they use command center and they can focus on generating revenue instead of doing a bunch of book work. I just love this model. I know $1900 is not small, it's expensive and some people would have a problem with that, but trust me, they would not be doing 24,000 in revenue with a manager and one employee. And that employee was gone for a week by the way, and this past month. So like you know that it wasn't like they hit capacity and that $2,000 is the best money they spend in terms of allowing that manager to still be a revenue producing employee out in the field. And we will keep it that way until there's probably four employees. Then he'd step out of the field probably completely and just do estimates. But we're not going to try to like push a bunch of money into marketing to make that happen. We're going to let you know, to let the business grow. The profits from the business will go, you know, just be profitable every single month. That's the goal here. For the Mount Vernon location. Whereas for the Augusta Bellingham location, the first couple years, like it was pretty choppy. Profitability, like breaking even was we were pretty happy with because I was just pouring money into trucks and marketing and getting employees. But that's why we grew so fast, right? Whereas this location, you know, Tim the manager, he's not really interested in trying to grow this super, super fast. Probably get an employee every year, a truck every year, just kind of slowly grow it. He's able to make a really decent salary and profit sharing every single quarter. And trust me, it's very, very warranty will do profit sharing. One of the best things we've ever done, we do at the Bellingham location and the Mount Vernon location. And I can't wait to share about that at Landscape Summit in January. So make sure you sign up for that. Links are in the description. Office supplies and software that includes like service, autopilot and other office supplies, print mailing things out, et cetera. Rent and lease. We pay $300 for our rent and lease and we have a specific way that we really are targeting, trying to get to specific residential homeowners that are willing to rent us this type of land and we dump on there. So this includes all of our dumping fees. We don't have to pay for dumping fees. That rent includes us to dump all of our debris there. Our clippings and of all our branches and leaves and all the rest of it. And they manage it, they burn it, they take care of it. It's a great little place. Not massive, not big like the Bellingham location, But just an awesome little location. And what's cool is that we built the lease in a way that it scales with the company. So every time we add a truck, it goes $50 more per month. So if we. Five trucks, we'd be paying. If we added five more trucks, we'd be paying only $550 a month. That puts that. Seven trucks. Like that'd be a great. Right. So great little place there. And you've probably seen previous videos Where I actually show you around the Mount Vernon location. It's not big. It's a little gravel spot with a storage box and place for parking. Really, really simple. But that's what that money goes. Repairs and maintenance, 158 bucks. That's probably for like, weed eaters and things like that. Tools and supplies. 2900. That's a little bit higher than usual. Because we did have some landscaping.

That were this month. Instead of just the mowing. We spent some money on advertising, Got those landscaping jobs. And there's some more tools and supplies. And there. There you can see the wages and employee related for the two. Two employees. One is a manager, One is a field worker. And then next month, you're gonna see the actual profit sharing that goes to the manager. And that's a substantial amount. Really, really happy to share it, though, Because I didn't have to do anything. He does all the work, all the estimates, Manages the jobs, Works with command center. And between command center and him, they do 99.9% of it. I probably spent all of an hour and a half Even thinking about Mount Vernon last month. Maybe an hour. Probably less. Honestly, probably less than an hour last month. Because this is completely managed by the manager. He has command center to help him in so many different areas. In terms of the back end of the business. And then our net income for September 2020 was $9,509. Again, that is after the wages for the. For the. The manager, everything. At the end of the day, $9,500 is what we had to pay. So I hope that encourages you. If you're doing a smaller business than the Bellingham location. If you'd like to see a bigger location, Check out The Bellingham locations video. Again, the profit sharing, I cannot overemphasize the importance of that. To have a location like this where the manager actually cares and wants the business to grow, wants it to succeed, wants it be to most importantly profitable. And so I really look forward to sharing all about our profit sharing program in January. So if you haven't signed up in the link below Landscape Summit just check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and look forward to seeing you there. If you have any questions, post down below. I'll try to share these as much as possible. You'll be able to see the good, the bad, the ugly. And our goal with Mount Vernon is not necessarily massive growth. It's just going to be able to support like Tim for example. The, the manager there is kind of like as if he was the franchisee. He's treated like the franchisee. That's what the model would support. And hey, if someone's able to take a good salary like he takes from the business and top of that gets a nice profit every single month, that'd be great for a franchisee. This is the model I'm very, very keen on because this model, if Tim was the franchisee and he took his salary plus all the profits in the course of the year, he can make 120, 140,000 in profit, take home pay with his profit and his salary, that's a very good pay. That's something that a franchisee can definitely do with this size of business over the course of a year. And so it's a model that I want to prove in addition to the larger model that obviously makes more money, but with more money and the larger businesses, more trucks and more employees, comes more headaches. And this is a model we want to prove for the Augusta model to work at this size of a business, 20 to 30,000 revenue, but also at a larger company that's doing multiple hundreds of thousands in month revenue. So definitely check out that other video if you want to see the larger business. But post your comments below. Let me know what you'd like to see next. But do not forget I want to see you at Landscape Summit. Check out the links below and sign up there. I'll see you next time you listen to Mike and these on the Business Boot Camp podcast.

Sam.