How Much Money Can You Make Mowing Lawns? [Financials Revealed!]

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today I'm going to show you where the money is going, what revenues I've been making in all of my businesses, from Augusta lawn care to the gym to everything I do online, to my real estate to my stock portfolio. We're going to get in all of it today. We're going to share everything. Before we get in the show, though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.com boot camp, try their software completely free for 90 days. You can. If you have employees and you need to onboard them, doing it digitally is so much easier than sending them the PDFs, and they have to sign and they got to print them off and all the rest of it. Do everything digitally. Onboarding is so simple. Check it out. Today, go to gusto.combootcamp all right, so today I'm going to do like a two or three minute preface. So if you've seen these monthly financial statements before, you could probably skip the next two minutes. But I'm going to say this now because over the past one month since I did this last time, my YouTube following has increased by about 40%. So for a lot of you watching this right now, you've never seen one of these monthly financial statements and monthly financials that I share. So I need to give a little bit of background, and that is, this is June. This is when the landscaping industry is doing really, really well. Every single month for the past almost year, I have shared my financial statements for you publicly, and I encourage you to go back and see the months where we don't make a bunch of money. The. The months where we lose or investing. A month when the franchise lost six figures in one month because we were investing back into the business. So today, when you start seeing these big numbers and all this looks good and all the rest of it, keep it all in perspective of the year and that some of these businesses have been, have been. I've been growing these for seven, eight years. These are not like, I built a lawn care business and then next year I'm making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. That's not how it works. All right? So I wanted to put that caveat there. And the reason I make these is not to gloat, not to show how much money I make. There's two reasons I do this. Number one is to educate, inspire those who are just getting started that there is a future down the road if you continue to grind. And number two is to really just be honest and transparent with everything that I do because so much of it is because of my franchisees that are listening as well as everyone that supports the, the digital side and the media side that buys courses and lawn care, Web Design and LandscapeBusinessCourse.com and all the stuff that I do there and the podcast and all the rest of it. So I want to be as honest and transparent as I possibly can, as long as I possibly can, until probably one day when we have a public company and I won't be able to do it monthly. Let's go ahead and jump into it. Augusta Lawn Care Corporation. It's the first location for Augusta Lawn Care. The revenues in June 2021 revenues were $185,158. The profit was $63,240. This is one of our best months ever for June. And very, very proud of the guys over there that have built this up. The guys and the gals out in the field and in the office. And a lot of this is attributed to Marcus and Lee who run the day to day operations there in terms of the estimates and the sales side as well as operationally. And by the way, they're 25 years old, Lee and then Marcus is 19. Next year we're gonna have two 19 year olds running those two spots. And that is because the systems that we built. All right, so when I talk about systems and simplification and all the rest of it, that the proof is in the pudding. The fact that they're gonna run a $1.718 million operation and two people that are 20 years old and below are gonna be running it next year. It speaks to the systems that we built. It does not, is not complex. It doesn't take a lot of, a lot of experience or skill. Six months in the field and they're ready to be in the operational side of the business and management side because it's simplified systems and command center can run a lot of things for them. And this, this number here that the 63,000, the caps off quarter two. So every quarter is when we do profit sharing for the manager side of things. And I'm very, very proud of Lee and Marcus just killing it over there. They have more than 3x the profit from quarter two of 2021 versus 2020 of Q2. And over the past year, we've actually taken away a lot of the best people from this organization because Nick was one of our best out in the field most experienced, he left and started his own franchise. Liz used to be there every single day. She's no longer there. She's working on the franchise level. So this location has actually had some of its best people taken away. I'm. I'm there for maybe 30 to 40 minutes a week, just for a couple of team meetings. But besides that, they do an amazing job of running this place and they 3x the profit. And guess what the biggest difference was between last year and this year? Trailerless setups. Yes, we raised prices, but trailerless setups is the one thing that operationally was the big change. We had trailer setups last year, but this year we, we actually sold off trailers and we went 100% trailerless. And trust me, that's the biggest operational change we've made in addition to raising prices, but we tripled our profit in Q2 of 2021 while taking away some of our head people at the organization. So for those of you that like to mock the zero, the no zero turns and the trailer setups, then the proof is in the pudding. The proof is in the numbers. And for those of you that might saying, oh, well, you're making these numbers up because I had this last two months ago. Oh, you're making these numbers up and you're. No. If I shared these numbers because all of my team watches these videos, they get profit sharing. So if I'm sharing numbers that are wrong, they would be mad because their profit sharing would be less. So the fact that I shared these publicly, they hold me accountable to the fact that right now about 30% of profits go to the team. So 30% of this is not going to them. They would be unhappy and they would be mad. So big shout out to them, though they've been killing it. I wanted to kind of take a little extra time on that one. Blaine. Anytime, finish the gym that own. I am, I am a franchisee. I bought this place now about three years ago to really figure out what the expectations of franchisor and a franchisee were. In my opinion, Anytime Fitness has really fell apart over the past year because of COVID in terms of their franchisee support. Their communication has been horrible. I've had nine different FBCs franchise business consultants in the past 12 months because the turnover and I don't even know who mine is now. I haven't had a scorecard. I haven't had a monthly coaching call in over 15 months. And I'm learning a lot of what not to do and when crisis happens, what not to do as a franchisor and really buckling down on communication within Augusta Lawn Care. And that's the main reason why I join Anytime Fitness, is to learn these things. So as bad as it's been the past year for their corporate and for their franchise, I've learned a lot about how I need to manage Augusta Lawn Care in times of crisis, when things are going bad in terms of communicating when things are bad and that it's not a bad thing to communicate that things are bad. Just communicate and share with the people that you're leading. We've been investing quite a bit in equipment, and so that's why the profits are $13,179 for the month of June. But our memberships are going up. And for the summer months, that's unheard of. Usually you basically get a bunch of memberships in January, February, and then you basically try to maintain throughout the rest of the year. You usually lose about 10% throughout the course of the year in attrition. But now, because Covid restrictions have been coming down and people feeling more comfortable, we're actually going up in membership, which is good because we were down like 30% after Covid came through. So. All right, the next part of the business is the online side of things. This includes landscape business, course Business bootcamp podcast, lawn careweb design.com where we build your website for lawn care and landscape professionals. Teachable. Teachable is where we have the MBA for entrepreneurs course. It's where I do one on one consulting call with me and you can get the MBA for entrepreneurs course Business Bootcamp podcast. Is this right here with me. And so it was a really good month. We had $20,000, $21,000 given to me by For Gusto for the sponsorship of the show. But the reason this is so important is because the franchise and Augusta Lawn Care, our goal is to change the level of professionalism in this industry. In order to do that, I cannot have outside investors so early in the game, and I can't have debt burning us down. So a lot of what I do on the media side is simply to fund the franchise to be able to continue growing and actually developing that footprint that we want and being able to continue to add more products. Like, we just, you know, last month offered all the print designs. Well, next week we're going to be launching lawn caremedia.com and making a lot more available. We're going to have a whole bunch of stuff in the works, but basically allows me to keep keep the company private and away from Private equity from other firms that would come in and immediately want to change the model for Augusta Lawn Care to be much more profit taking and much less long term thinking. I'm thinking this is like a 10, 15 year long, you know, public company. I'm not thinking about the next five years, how I'm going to extrapolate and get the most profits from my franchisees. Not even in my mind. And so in order for us to keep growing though, I do need these funds from the online side. So the online side and all of you that buy the course, support me on Lawn Care Web design has been huge because Lawn Care web design is a subscription based where there's no upfront fee, but I can depend on every month getting about $140 in profits from each subscription. That really, really helps me. And yes, I did just tell you my profit margin. We charge 3. 99. I make about 140 in profits when everything is all said and done. But that subscription really helps us because we now have three full time people on the media team. We, we invest a lot even this past month in cameras and equipment and trying to make the media better. And that's why in the past month you've seen the quality of the media is going up. It will continue to go up as we have the resources to do so. So thank you so much for doing that. I know for some of you you'll never become an Augusta Lawn Care franchisee, but you get the long care web design, you support me in so many different ways and I really appreciate it. And that's why I feel so obligated to share these numbers because I just want to be as transparent as possible with where that money is going. So when it comes to Augusta Lawn Care franchise, we had a small loss of $5,142 on revenues of 48, sorry, $83,448. As you know, most of you for 2021 and really the next few years, I just expect the franchise to be just breaking even. We're in pretty high growth mode. We hired seven more people in the month of June. This does include a $34,000 cost. So this is a cash accounting by the way. So this includes a 34,000 doll headquarters project we're designing in the design phase and permitting phase of building out a five acre headquarters for Augusta Long Care. We need it. We've already like in the month of June, we just have to get another office for the command center which is fine, but now we have 1, 2, 3, 4 we have 4 different offices that we're now renting and leasing around our county. And we need to bring that all under one house. It'll be much cheaper in the long run and also be able to live on site. It's like really five different uses will be what that new headquarters is for. So we're building that. It's going to be done end of 2022, but right now we're doing all the design work, the permitting, etc. So this does include a $34,000 expense towards that project for permitting, designs, etc. But we're growing a lot. The past four years, four months, I've only. I've literally not allowed any new franchisees in because we've been just. We've had a lot of struggle commands that are up to speed in terms of amount of people that we had to hire. The volume just could like quintupled. Quintupled, whatever over the past year in terms of the volume of calls and estimates and all the rest of it. We didn't expect it to go that high and we were understaffed as well as the whole labor shortage thing really, really killed us throughout the spring rush. And so I really did pause putting new franchisees in. We just recently had a few more though, and we're going to be really adding a lot of franchisees throughout the rest of the winter as command center is now fully staffed and we're really kind of honing in on a lot of our systems there. And so really looking forward to this winter. We're going to add at least 20 or 30 franchisees. So definitely if you want to join Augusta Lawn Care, click the link below. I can have a call with you directly and see if it's a good fit. All right, so now the corporately owned locations for Augusta Lawn Care. We always have a couple corporately owned locations outside of our first location. Just to always have that kind of day one mentality of what it's like to get started, get marketing, get traction in a new market. So Mooresville, North Carolina, headed up by Chuck, my general manager out there, they did $33,843 in revenue, $3,200 in profit. And this was June was what was expected to be our last month of unprofitability. But Chuck's been profitable all the way since May. So he's actually two months ahead of schedule. I expect July going forward, him to be about 20 to 30% profitable and really looking forward. Chuck's doing amazing. He's really doing well. There's with all of these locations, whether it be franchise or general manager, it takes a good six months for them to figure out the systems. Get confident. You're spending a lot of money on growth and marketing. So all those things he really was able to iron out pretty quickly and achieve profitability very quickly. Make sure you watch last week's episode of Roundup and I actually interviewed Chuck for about an hour and talked about his learning and what he did as a general manager and really would encourage you to give this to your employees that has the mindset that they want to become an owner one day or become the next place of their career. Chuck really offered some great value for those employees that are looking to become an owner or just get the most from their current position and grow their career. So definitely check out last week's Roundup episode. Dix Hills is our New York corporately owned location. We used to have another corporate location in Mount Vernon, Washington, but that's been sold and is now owned as a franchisee location because the the general manager are allowed to buy us out and become their own operators as franchisees. So Dix Hills is in New York. They lost $6,688, did a revenue of just shy of 22,000 because of weather and just because of getting the timing of getting the general manager to this location. They really only had a few months under their belt. They had to start like in April in terms of this spring. So I do expect though this to be the last month and the last quarter of unprofitability. We always say with our general manager locations at Q3, which is July, August, September, we expect that to be the profitable quarter. So really kind of on schedule. I really do believe July will be profitable and if not at least quarter three will be profitable for that dick sales location. And in case you're wondering, those general managers do get a salary, I am, I spend less if not if the same if not less time with them than I do with the other franchisees. Command center really helps them on a day to day level. I do a monthly coaching call with them as I would with any of the other franchisees. All right, so now stocks and real estate. So if you are interested in stocks, watch the video I did last a couple weeks ago, maybe last weekend. The title is like, you know, this landscaper made $300,000 in the stock market in the past year. But this past month, June was a very good month in the stock market because everything that I invested in February, March and April in the dip when everything was really going down has really started to rebound. So for the of June, the change in portfolio value 126,000. The margin was 183,000. So I still owe but you notice I've been paying that margin down as the stocks have been going up. And then our total invested, I actually made a mistake here. It's 956,000 is total invested. That's the total amount of money in the market. And you can basically do the math. If you take take the total invested minus the margin is actually the portfolio value. And again, if you want to really thorough breakdown of all my stock picks and what's been happened the past few months and kind of how I'd been playing the market the past four to five months as it's been pretty volatile with inflation. Check out a video that I made a couple weeks ago about that. In the real estate market side of things, not a human huge amount of changes. I have 10 real estate units that I rent out and revenues were about 16,000. Expense about 14,000. Debt on that is 1:1.7 million and the value of those is around $2.9 million. So nothing super new or different there. I hope that was somewhat beneficial and helpful. My bottom line for today, the takeaway is the fact that yes, we made $60,000 plus in one month in profit at the Landscape one landscaping location that tripled from last year when we the same quarter trailer setups, massive efficiencies. The fact that we have young unexperienced people in the management side of things. And when I say unexperienced, I mean like they don't have 20 years in the industry. They haven't been with us for 20 years. They are relatively unexperienced, but they follow the systems. They work on themselves. They work very diligently to improve themselves, whether it be the audible program, podcasts, audio books, team meetings, trying to make themselves better, the profit sharing that's in place. And really like I really look forward to July, August and September. That's when the guys out on the field can really Crush it on P4P and so really looking forward to that. We did in June. We actually did have quite a few yellow slips. We had to go back and fix a couple big properties. But July, August, September I'm really looking forward to because they're going to really see some great P for P. But at the end of the day, this comes down to being strictly looking at the numbers, raising prices like we did this for this year going to trailer setups because of the numbers making more sense and reducing our cost of maintenance. All that being said, that location is in its like seventh or eighth year of being in business. Do not buy an Augusta lawn care franchise or start a lawn care business thinking that you're going to make 180/,000 revenue and $60,000 plus in profit in your first year, that's just not going to happen in a month. This is over years. Like it wasn't passive like it is now until like years five, six and seven. The first four or five years was me pouring money into the business in order for it to grow. It was losing money all the time. There wasn't no profits to talk about. I didn't take money and take a paycheck out of Augusta Lawn care for years. So the audacity that someone is in like their second year, like, I just don't know if I can afford it. And I know I'm growing, but they're just, I just don't see any profit. It's like, look, this is a long term game. If you want to build a business, it takes time. Don't give up. Keep pushing the needle, keep raising prices. Okay, if it's like, well, I need profits and I'm growing and I'm growing and I'm growing, but I don't see any profits, Raise prices, slow your growth down a bit. We're not going to grow, you know, 30, 40% this year at that location. We're going to grow maybe 5%, maybe 10%. That's all that's needed for healthy growth. But then we're increasing our margins and our profits massively. So I really encourage you, those first three to five years, you're just growing. You're getting the volume and the revenue to the point where now when you raise prices, it's meaningful. When you go to trailer setups and start becoming efficient and creating those efficiencies by working on your business and having systems, it actually moves the needle. So that's my takeaway for today. I hope that inspires you, encourages you and I just wanted to say thank you for all of your support. Like I said the past month, the subscribers here on YouTube have got 40%. We're getting over a hundred subscribers a day. I really look forward to the future of what we can do here and having our impact on the industry and it really does. Again, so much of you have supported me. Lawn care web design is a big, big part of what we've seen the past couple months in terms of our growth because it gives me the confidence to go out and hire more people for the media side and invest in that side. And that's ultimately what helps the industry the most, because I'm able to provide this content for free to someone who just gets getting started and then as they grow, they might get the course. As they grow, they might get lawn care, web design. As they grow, they might want to become a franchisee and support the work what we're trying to do even more so. So I appreciate all of you, I really, really do. And I hope that you can build a business that also runs on systems. It runs passively, but don't think it comes easy. Don't think it's going to happen overnight. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication, a lot of long nights and short, short sleeps to get to where you can run a business like that. So I hope that this channel and the education that we have in the course helps do that for you. That's really why what gets me motivated and wakes me up every single day. So thank you so much, everyone for watching. We'll see you on the next video.