How Much Money Can a SOLO OPERATOR Make Mowing Lawns?

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course. Today we're going to be taking some questions from other landscape business owners like you. And all I'm going to ask today is that you share this video or another video in the chat on the channel with one other landscape business owner that you know. So if you meet, have a meetup locally or a group that you talk to, other competition or people in this industry, even if there may a market over from you, it's. If you could share this video with them, I'd really appreciate it. You can copy the link if you're listening to the podcast or if you are listening to YouTube or Facebook. If you could share this with one person, just one other landscaper, I would really, really appreciate it. Today we're gonna be taking questions from the texting platform. So if you want to get in this group where you can get your questions answered, just text the word landscaping to 855-575-1267. And I know a lot of people use texting platforms to sell you stuff. I don't do that. I use this as a way to be able to ask for questions and immediately get like dozens and dozens of questions I can use for the podcast and literally post it and then walk over here and start recording. So I really enjoy it and I don't try to sell you stuff and things like that. So without any further delay, let's go ahead and jump into the questions. All righty. First question. Hi there. When your crews are out doing aerations and overseeding on properties you mow weekly, do you stop mowing them for a week or two or do you keep mowing them like normal? Okay, so this is a good question. If you're gonna do overseeding, I do recommend that you not cut the lawn for a few weeks. Now, I'm gonna be the first one to say I am not the best lawn care guy. There's some really good YouTube channels about the actual grass. I focus on the business side, and so we really try to make sure that we are not going to do aeration and overseeding too much in this part of the season where we want to be mowing weekly. We might mow, we might skip, because you can't overseed and then mow right after and definitely not like even a week later sometimes to get the grass established. So for us, we tried to mow the lawn and then do our treatments right after. So the most, you know, we only have to miss one service and we can maximize the Revenue on that customer. What you don't want to do is mow the customer, come back a week and a half later, do the treatments, and then you still can't go there for two or three more weeks. Then you come to mow the lawn and it's so tall because you haven't mowed it for like four or five weeks. And the customer expects it to be the same price as always because they're just used to the per cut price. And so highly recommend that you try to mow the grass and then do those treatments. Do you guys always mark up materials? Let's say you're installing a new fence and the materials are only $1,000. Do you mark up that price or do you only make money on the labor? All right, so I always recommend that you do mark up your materials between 20 and 50%. And so if you're spending $1,000, like in this case on a fence, which we don't do fencing, but if you were getting materials for $1,000, I would be wanting to charge the customer at least 1,250 to $1,500 in material cost. Cause you gotta go pick them up, you gotta call the supplier, you gotta have that relationship. You probably get a wholesale discount. So you can pocket a little bit more there. But all the admin time of setting up a delivery or picking it up and the equipment you need to pick it up, or the office person, you need to set up that delivery or pickup that needs to be covered. And that overhead of that office person or that equipment can get covered by material markup. And so I always recommend 25 to 50%. And so if you're charging 30, if you're getting charged $30 per yard for mulch, you probably want to charge like $40 of material cost onto the estimate. And again, you're probably not going to show that to the customer unless they ask for like a breakdown of materials versus labor. But you know, they're not going to see, they're just going to see the number and the bid. But you do want to mark those materials up. And the next question here is, do you mark up that price or do you only make money on the labor? Yeah, so you definitely want to do a markup on the materials. Highly recommend that you do that. All right, next question. How do you recommend paying managers? I was thinking when I hire a manager to run for, run everything for me, it should be percentage of revenue, possibly about how much should a manager of a million dollar per year company make? Okay, so this is a big question. I talked a lot about the last conference. You definitely do not want to pay someone based upon revenue. It's called a perverse incentive, which means you're incentivizing them to do something that's actually not in the best interest of the business. Okay. Because you could grow, grow, grow, grow and not be profitable. And yet you're paying this person more and more and more and more money. Because at the end of the day, if you're paying them a percentage of revenue, they are going to go after that incentive. And the perverse incentive, the perverse part of it is that that could run your business into the ground. Just growth is not necessarily sustainable or profitable. So you want to have a good balance between that growth and profitability. So you want to give them a percentage of profitability as well as a percentage of growth. That's my recommendation. A lot more. We talked about that at the last conference about creating that balance and what that balance needs to be. But you want to do a percentage of revenue, a percentage of growth. So year over year, revenue increase year over year growth. Give them that and profit. The reason you need to do that is because if they do grow, it's going to come at the expense of profit. Because they're getting trucks, they're getting equipment, they have to get more employees that cost money and it's going to reduce their profit. But you don't want to just pay them on profit either because if you just pay them a percentage of profit, they wouldn't upgrade the equipment, they wouldn't invest in training the guys if they knew they were leaving in the year. They would just try to keep everything that's old, all the equipment, and not fix anything because they'd be just trying to make it as profitable as possible. So having that good balance makes them think in a very balanced manner. Just like you as the owner would in terms of profitability and growth and. And balancing those two things out. Next question. Hi Mike. Just turned my side hustle into a full time career and want to build the business. I'm on Vancouver island in a small valley or town with about 30,000 people which by the way one of our franchisees is up on Victoria island just outside of Victoria bc. Can't come down here. Hasn't been able to come down here for training for like six months because of the coronavirus. But anyways, back to Vancouver Island. About 30,000 people since April. I've probably done 60 to $70,000 in sales and I am hoping to reach another 20 before the end of November. They're small goals only because it's just me. I guess my question is, when should I hire my first guy? I have a part time guy two days a week, but he has other commitments and I need a guy full time, but don't feel at the moment I can generate enough revenue to supply us both while I have a family. As winter is approaching, my goal is to start someone full time starting next season and just bite the bullet and take the dip in revenue. I think he meant profit there. As a solo guy, how much should I be making before I hire a full time employee? Thanks for everything. And once Covid is over, you best believe I'll be at the next landscape summit. Thanks again. Awesome. Can't wait to see you there. All right, so in terms, so this gentleman over in Vancouver island gonna do about a hundred. A little short of 100,000 in revenue. It looks like this year has a part time guy, works with him two days a week and wondering when he can hire a full timer. So this is the big deal here. I can give a range here. I'm gonna give a range in terms of what revenue you should be doing before you hire your first employee. But gotta remember, the reason there's a range here is based upon two things. Your service mix. So if you're doing maintenance, it's a lower number because if you're doing landscaping, there's a bunch of material costs and equipment and you're usually charging a higher hourly rate. So let me make it very clear, service is going to change this range in terms of dollars until your first employee as well as your labor rate in your local area. For example, in our market, our base pay is $18 per hour for our employees. Our franchisee down in Texas, in El Paso, like his base pay I think is $9 or $10. I think it's $10 per hour. And it's not that he's way lower, it's just that cost of living is way lower. He char. And so therefore the amount of revenue he needs to get an employee is so, so much lower than us. Almost like half, like 10 to 18. So it's not even right to say, oh, you need $20,000 in revenue, then you get your first employee or you need 10,000 in revenue. Like you can't do that because it's gonna based upon services. Because if I'm selling hardscaping, waterscaping, pools, walls, things that are really dense in materials. In terms of cost structure, most of the estimates are made up of materials or a lot of it? Yeah, it's going to be like $25,000 per employee that you make every year because 10,000 of that is just materials. So looking at revenue is definitely not the best thing. But this is the range I'm going to give you. I would not hire a full time employee until you were doing 7 to 8,000 in monthly revenue. All right. And I know that's a general number because I know down in El Paso that's difficult to do with one person. Or I'm just saying El Paso is an example. But in our market, seven or eight thousand dollars, you can do that literally three days a week if you work some long days as a solo operator, because we're charging more, but our labor rate to hire someone is a lot more too. So what I would recommend is do not, don't even think about hiring someone full time, full time until you're making at least 7 or 8,000amonth in revenue. Cause you can do that. You can do that by yourself working in the field. When you start hitting like 10 to 15,000 in revenue, that's when you're going to be forced almost to have someone working full time. So I'm thinking about one of our franchisees right now over.

Just outside of. In the Carolinas. I'm just gonna say in the Carolinas. In the Carolinas. That has really started to grow the business in the past couple months. And I can see on his dispatch board the fact that, hey, now he needs that full time employee like consistently. It used to be part time, now he's needing them consistently. He's been, I think three months, three, four months now in the franchise and the first couple months just kind of getting things started, getting things figured out. And now he's getting to the point where this month he'll probably do like 14, 15,000 in revenue. He needs that full time employee now and it becomes pretty organic. So if you can get this guy that was working with you for two days a week, if you can get him to commit to full time, you got to look at it as if I spent that time working on the business and focused on selling and marketing, would I be able to generate twice as much revenue? And a lot of times the answer is yes. And so in terms of dollar per month, I would be saying don't hire anyone until you're hitting 6 to 8,000 in revenue. Don't even think about it. In terms of hiring someone full time, between 10 and 15,000 in revenue, you're going to feel a natural. Like you will have to Hire someone full time. If you're growing, like, it'll just push you. Like you'll be doing 14, 15,000 revenue. You're working every single day, you're working your brains out, and you get home, you still have a bunch of estimates to do. You have to hire someone, it'll be forced on you. And I would do that first person just with you in the truck. Don't go out and buy a bunch of equipment and buy a shop. Just put one person in the truck. Then you're gonna keep working and you're gonna get more revenue. And now it's like, okay, I need to be able to do estimates throughout the day. I can't just do them at the end of the day when once this employee's gone, therefore I gotta get another truck so that that person can be working all day long. Which now you've trained them for a few months, they've been with you working for you for a month or two, and they can go out and work in the second truck by themselves. Now you can do estimates throughout the day and do a little bit of work. And that might get you to like 20 or you know, in our market, we can do like 25/000 in revenue with just that setup. An owner, an employee, and two trucks. And so again, you might bet 15 to 20,000 in your market. If your labor rate is like really low, if your cost of living is lower, what you charge the customer is lower and what you get charged from that employee is lower. Okay, so a few things that kind of like go with each other, like the ebbs and flows is labor. The cost of labor traditionally mirrors pretty closely what you can charge the customer in terms of your hourly rate to the customer. Therefore, that's going to also correlate with how much revenue you need to have in order to make it worth having a full time employee. So, you know, locally we try to hit between about, let me see here, 15, about 15 to $16,000 per field worker per month. Okay. But you gotta realize you have a lot, we have a lot of infrastructure in terms of office and efficiencies of trucks and all the rest of it that costs overhead. Right. So there's always a balance. But I've seen solo operators pull in 15, 20,000amonth in revenue by getting tight, tight routes and really focusing on efficiencies and their setup and all the rest of it. So it's definitely possible. But if you're trying to scale quickly, that's kind of the ranges I would give you. But don't think about if you're doing 5,000amonth in revenue. It's just not going to make sense if you got someone working two days a week. I'd try to get them three, try to get them four, try to get them five. And definitely knowing your market in Vancouver island, wait until next spring to make that big jump to a full time employee. All right, next question.

Okay. People that own money and it is not worth going to cut because they will drag your name to the ground saying to people, they took me to court, but really the deserve, they deserve to be in court because they don't pay. Okay, so I think you're kind of asking like, should you take someone to court? Is it worth it if they're going to drag your name down?

That's a tough one. It really depends on the situation. Every situation would be different whether or not we would take someone to court over something. I really wish about 2 years ago I would have had Josh following me with a camera when we went to a specific job that the owner was lying to us and trying to get us to do work and he was going to try to sell the house and leave the state. And so I actually confronted him and basically had the guys truck their, park their trailer across his driveway. And then I basically said I pulled up the public record and showed like the fact that he was the owner, not the renter and like all this other stuff. But anyways, we would have taken him to court because there was so much proof against him and we had it all clearly chronologically, you know, put in writing. Whereas if it's something like, oh, they didn't do a good job, that's a tough one because it's kind of, it's subjective. Right. And so it's a tough question whether you take someone to court and because they could go out and say this service provider's horrible, they're going to take you to court if they don't agree with you, blah, blah, blah. And that can be damaging to your brand. Next question. How do you transfer the systems you come up with from your mind to your employees? Computer files, binders, emails. I have it all in my mind, but I'm not sure what the best way to pass it on would be when I begin hiring next spring. Thanks, Thomas. Okay, so yes, computer files, binders, emails. We've done videos. Honestly, I would start with this weekly team meetings and then do two weekly meetings with your team. So we do Mondays and Thursdays and we've added a third one on Wednesday. That's Optional where we actually talk about stuff outside of just lawn care and landscape. We talk about their personal finances and their careers and leadership. Doing that is going to get whatever's in your mind into their mind a whole lot better than computer files or binders. Like you got to remember these are hard working guys. They don't want to sit down and watch videos. We've tried this before where they have an orientation system of videos for their first day or two. And, and my goodness, they don't like it. And they glaze over after 10, 15 minutes. And if you have five, six hours of video like we did and we had all videos and all chronologically showing them how to use certain equipment, guess what? These are workers. Unfortunately, they're not gonna sit down and absorb information for six hours from a video camera or a video screen. Like they're just not going to do it. So definitely have a system in place for training. Whether it be the big part of just making it incremental. So like day one, it's like you got to learn how to use the software, use a line trimmer and a blower, like that's all you learn. Then like maybe day four you learn to push more. Then the next day maybe you learn zero turn. The next day you learn how to drive the truck, then you learn how to backup the truck. Then like you just have it. That's the best way in terms of making sure it's systematic. And then the biggest thing though, in terms of getting your mind into their mind is those team meetings to check in with them. We've also had where when we have a lot of new employees, we try to actually get mentors to for every single new hire. So they have a mentor and a mentee and they get like a buddy system. So I think we have like four at a time. So when there's new employees, there's four assigned mentors to them. And those mentors are the ones that check in with them on all their jobs. They make sure that they are the ones that kind of sign off on that person being ready to go solo and being ready to be able to run a route themselves. And so that's what I would recommend. If you have a lot of team, team members do the mentor mentee thing, where the mentor who's been around for a while is responsible for the success of the mentee, the new hire, and then have a systematic way of training them where it starts with very, very basic. And then there's kind of a last thing that they got to do in order to Be able to kind of be like, all right, you're out of training. The initial part at least. Obviously you're going to train them ongoing through those team meetings and things. But in terms of culture and then getting that culture of learning and education and getting what's in your mind and in their mind, yeah, you gotta start with team meetings and then I'd definitely say you gotta do open book management. That opens up the culture to where when you do have something in your mind, they actually care because it affects their paycheck, it affects their pay for performance, it affects the profitability, which then they know and see and they can start to learn business and things. So that's just my two cents, my opinion. Hey Mike, I'm a solo guy. Next question, last one. Hey Mike, I'm a solo guy that has been in business for about six years. Since the start of the business, I've been doing lawn and landscape maintenance and some softscape jobs. I'm currently going to school school for landscape construction and want to get into some hardscape jobs when I get my certificate and I'm comfortable with the jobs. What tips do you have to advertise and close on bigger softscape and hardscape jobs to existing and new clients? Appreciate all you do for everyone in the industry, Ben. Thank you. All right, so in terms of selling softscape jobs and hardscape jobs, definitely you need to be emailing every single month your customer database. Whether it's email, phone call, I don't care what you do. Keep them warm, keep them in your. Keep them in your. Keep yourself at the top of their mind by just staying in touch with them, letting you know what services you offer based upon the time of year, you know, sharing new things that are developing in your local area climate wise or news or what you're doing in your business. If you have a new hire, a new piece of equipment or a new service you're offering, that's what I would do by keeping your existing clients warm. Even if you did an estimate for them five years ago, they might become a customer and do a $40,000 project. Once you start doing hardscaping and you did mowing for them years ago, but now you've kept them warm. And the problem is if you just like, oh, I'm gonna send an email to all my customers, guess what, 90% of it doesn't get even opened because you haven't kept them warm. You haven't kept, you know, staying in touch with them every month. And so that'd Be my first thing if you want to get those type of jobs hardscaping. The second thing I would say is you are solo. Getting into hardscaping jobs can be tough because if you're taking on big hardscaping jobs that are 3, 400 hours, you're going to either need to get temp work, people that can just help you for that one job, which is tough to get good people, or you're going to need to hire somebody, or even two or three. Because when you get big jobs, people are not going to want you to work on their project for three months, even if that's what you would like to do. Just work on itself and chip away at it. Most people don't want their their property looking like a construction zone for three months and so usually bigger crews will get those jobs. So keep that in mind. Or just start small. You know, start with two day, three day projects that you can do by yourself that are like 20, 30, 40 budgeted hours. You know, little flagstone pathways or little paver patios, little stuff that you could do. Start off with that and then see how it goes. Use those pictures to then market to your existing customer database email newsletters to get more of those type of jobs. If you want to push your business in a certain direction in terms of service mix, just advertise more and more of those pictures and those videos. If you want to go towards hardscaping, post those videos. If you don't want hardscaping, take those off your website and don't make it such a big tab. And then on your social media, don't be posting all your hardscaping photos. If you want to go towards more maintenance, right? So what you're pushing on your website and your social media magically begins to be the thing that you get more and more leads for and so you can hide or elevate certain things that are going to get you more jobs that the kind of service that you want. So that's all I'm going to answer for today. Remember, if you want to join the texting platform and submit your question, just text the word landscaping to 855-575-1267. I appreciate you all so much for watching. Make sure you subscribe and share this video like with one other landscaper. We're going to change this industry one landscaper at a time and I appreciate everything you all do for me. Thank you so much. Have a great day.