How Much Profit My Lawn Care Business Made in One Month!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Handys. And today I'm going to be sharing real financial statements from my two Augusta Lawn Care locations that I own. So these are, these are them. I will show them on the screen digitally. So if you want to pause it or if you want to take screenshots, that's totally fine. I'm going to give you the backstory of each of these locations and talk about their financials. So this is from last month. Here in the near future, I'm going to be showing the entire past 12 months so you have a full comprehensive picture. The reason is because quarterly we do distributions.

And profit sharing for the team as well as the general manager. So sometimes every few months, the profits go a little bit down. And so I want to make for full disclosure, be able to Show a full 12 months. Now in both of these profit and loss statements. This is from August 2025. In this month, there was profit sharing given to the team. So what we do is we have every quarter. So every three months the team gets profit sharing. They get 10% of the profits of the business. Now we slide one month forward for that same quarter for the general manager. That way, eight months out of 12, profit sharing is being given either to the team. Four orders, four times, four months out of the year, or it is to the general manager. But this makes the, the profitability much more consistent throughout the year instead of having where general managers and employees get their profit sharing on the same month. Now, the reason we actually do that is because in my market, March 1st marks when we have to hire up and really get started. So in order for someone to be eligible for profit sharing, they have to work in March, April and May. And so that's why in, at the end of May, we consider that the end of the first quarter for profit sharing. Now if I said, hey, January, February, March, that's Q1, well, a whole bunch of people start in February and they would not be eligible because you have to work the entire quarter to be eligible for profit sharing. So what we do for the team is we start a March 1st is considered the beginning of Q1 for their profit sharing. So March, April, May, and in June, they'd get paid out. And so this, this, this actually does include some profit sharing, but not all the profit sharing. So here in the near future, I am going to share the past 12 rolling months at these locations so you able to see the full picture. So that's kind of a side bar. Now at these locations, I give 10% to the team and then somewhere between 25 and 35% of profits to the general manager addition. Additionally another 5 or 10% to the regional manager. So the reason I do this is because I don't show up to these locations. I have never even been to the shop space for this location and this location. I've been there one time and it was there. I was there to make some videos for the content and for the ads, but that's it. I've never hired any team member that works here. Not a single one. The general manager does all the daily operations and then the regional manager makes sure and checks in with them on a weekly basis to fill out their scorecard. So you've probably heard me talk about the scorecard. Upcoming here I'm going to be launching a new book inside of that is going to be what that scorecard includes and what they do on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to ensure that the general manager is held accountable. But I wanted to go over August 2025. So what you're going to notice is that these locations, profit and loss even look very, very similar. Why? Because we intentionally have made it that way. Neither of these locations do massive projects. I would say probably the biggest project at either of these locations is something like three to $5,000. And it's probably going to be like a property cleanup with some mulch install. We don't do complicated things. Now this location, the Bellingham location, used to be significantly larger in terms of revenue. And we would do putting greens, excavation. We had three track skid steers and track loaders. We did. We had a tree chipper. We had dump trucks like the whole nine yards. So it used to do a lot more revenue. But in terms of profitability, I'm happy with this. So let's go over the Bellingham location. Let's give a little background to it first. This one's been in business for 11 or so years. The first four or five years I ran it like grow, grow, grow. Take every project. Massive expansion. Not simplified services, not standardized, nothing. It was like. It was crazy. We grew really fast though. Just didn't have a lot of profit to show for it. So then I had to simplify the business and create systems have pay for performance where the team gets paid based upon how hard they work and how much revenue they produce for the business. And so that was the first few years. Now the location has been in profit mode for about five years. Meaning we're not trying to grow, we're not trying to get more customers. What was their advertising spend it was $520 last month for their advertising spend. That includes things like wrapping the trucks and other limits to anything. I can almost guarantee didn't run any actual, like, advertising campaigns because we're usually just sending out text messages, emails to our customers from copilot CRM to upsell them more services based upon the time of year. And so a lot of times in August 2025, for example, our local area gets really hot. Everything dries out. And so we usually lose a lot of our mowing customers. And what we start to do is upsell them projects. So mulch installs or tearing out lawns, putting fabric, and then mulch over a lawn that's completely dead and they don't want to deal with. That's the type of products we're upselling them. And we text blast them through copilot. Now let's go ahead and look at some of the numbers at the Bellingham shop. So, $89,000 in revenue, $26,000 in profit. That imputes about a 30% profit margin. Again, that's a little higher than normal because there are months where I paid the profit sharing to the general manager. And even though they get a percentage of the distributions that come to me, that amount is going to show up as a wage, as a w. Because they're a W2 employee. Okay. So you'll see when I do the 12 month, I'm not running a 30% margin. It's usually more around 20 to 25% because I do give those distributions. And it shows up as a W2 wage to the general manager and the regional manager. Now, this includes some profit sharing to the team for this specific month. But we'll get into that in just a moment. So, okay, so you can see here, if you take 89,000 and then you. $35,000 Cost of goods sold. Now, most of that, I think almost all of it. Yeah. Is either labor taxes or labor wages. So we can roughly say that about 38 to 40% of the revenue goes out the door to wages. I always want that number to be under 40%. I've always seen that as the benchmark. Getting the total amount spent on wages under 40% of what revenue is is really a great target to hit. Now, this location, you'll notice here, spent $6,000 at Command Center. All right, so that's a little bit higher than usual. And you'll see this at the next location. That's around 7% of revenue. That being said, this allowed the general manager to be able to take Some time off, they're in a relationship and so, like, they need some time off and things. And so command center takes everything off their plate. Both of my locations, Command center does all the email, all the Payroll, runs their P4P software, takes all their phone calls, manages their text inbox, like everything. So that way the general manager can just simply focus on managing the team, having team meetings, training them, ensuring their routes are efficient, scheduling, et cetera. And so that's why there's that $6,000. And then the $1,200 is the flat monthly fee that we pay for franchise fees. That's a flat monthly fee, which is not bad. That's like what, 1.5% of revenue, which is not bad. A lot of people wonder, what do you actually get when you join Augusta Lawn Care as an owner? Well, in addition to all the coaching and the training and the support, you also get access to two custom websites for Augusta Lawn Care and Augusta Lights. You get access to p4psoftware.com, you get access to an applicant tracking software to be able to do virtual interviews with all of your team that's joining for your lawn care technicians. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole lot more. Go check it out@Augustalawncareservices.com franchise. Now back to the video. There's months that this location has made 170,000 in monthly revenue. We still pay $1,200 per month flat fee. So that's kind of in a nutshell. If you're wondering what the taxes are on these, in Washington state, we have to pay tax on everything. So it averages out. I think it's 8.4, 8.6%. So that's why you'll see that it's, you know, we have to pay taxes and the taxes are from the month prior. So for example, this one is like 11% of revenue. It looks like that's because the month prior they made like 117 or 110,000 in revenue. So the taxes came out this month. So if you're trying to do the math between sales tax and the top line revenue, that's why there can be a little bit of fluctuation from month to month, is because the taxes come out for the last month's revenue. So hopefully that makes sense. So this is the reason I'm sharing this is because I found great joy in the fact that both these locations, revenue and profits are extremely close. If you go back to Bellingham's, it was like Within a matter of a few hundred dollars. This one also is $89,000 in revenue, $25,500 in profits. So similar, similar amount of. Of of profit margin. Around that 30% margin. Again, slightly higher because the. Like the general manager at this location will probably get 25 to $30,000 as a bonus for this quarter. But it's going to come out next month. And so that month will probably only be like a 5 or 10% margin because that huge bonus will show up in the W2. So just keep that in mind. I don't expect 30% margin all the time. I'm always shooting for 20% profit. 10% of that is coming to me. Now I'm okay with only taking half of the profits because I don't ever. In operations, the general manager and the regional manager are paid well and they got a huge chunk of the profits in order for me to be able to not be in operations. And if we buy trucks, et cetera, that's going to come out over the course of time and affect their distributions because they get a percentage of the money that comes to me. So every time I get a dollar, they get a certain percentage. It's not a matter of just the profit and loss statement. This doesn't do much for the actual general manager. They care about how much money actually comes out of the business to me because they get a percentage of that. Now you'll notice on this location, the command center fees are on $2200. It was only. It's less than 2% of revenue is spent at command center this location. The general manager is much more streamlined in terms of the projects that they're taking on and takes on a little bit more from command center. So I think they handle their texting. I think that's the only thing that they were handling. They were handling their texting as well as the type of products that they have. The they are simply doing really basic, simple services. Also, I don't think they took any vacations and didn't have to rely on command center as much for this month. And so that's what it is. Now the reason I like the size of location in terms of both of them is that I only need one gm. That general manager is a working gm that when things get slow, especially during the off season. So if revenue started getting down like 60, 70,000, that general manager is out in the field producing revenue. Now there's been months and I've shown them in the past where these locations are doing 140, 150,000 in monthly revenue. That's a full time out in the field doing estimates and doing sales and trying to drum up more work and getting estimates done and just managing the team. But when, if we ever slow down, if we ever get lower than this, they're going to end up being in the field. I expect 30 budget hours worth of work to get done. But then I take away one hour, that's per week, 30 budget hours of work completed for a working GM and I take away one hour for every estimates and completed or interview that is completed. So if they're growing the business and doing sales, or if they're growing the business and hire more people, I take away the expectation of how much work actually needs to be produced in the field. But I'm a huge advocate of keeping the business at six to eight employees and not going above that. Could we have dumped money on marketing and spend a bunch like what Mount Vernon spend on marketing? They spent $900 on marketing, so they probably have, I would imagine, like a 10 or $15 per day Google Ad. That's usually what they kind of run if they're just kind of in stasis and kind of just maintaining. That being said, there is all these. Both of these locations have been in profit mode for years. Like the Mount Vernon location has been in business for five years. The first two to three years growing very quickly. I think profits were like 2, 3, 4%, like very much. Just like take the money, put it back in the business. The past two years though, every single quarter it has put money back in my pocket, owners distributions. And it's in profit mode, meaning we're not buying more trucks, we're not hiring more people, we're not spending a bunch of money on advertising. We are simply raising prices when we hit capacity. And so by doing that now, like this location is like $100 per hour, whereas I think probably four years ago it would have been at 60 or 70. And so the ability to be able to hit capacity, raise prices, not buy more trucks, not hire more people, not keep spending money on ads. And both of these locations have thousands of contacts. This one has this. The Bellingham shop has I think about 13 or 14,000 contacts because it's been in business for a longer. Mount Vernon, I think has around 4 or 5,000. When we send a text message via copilot or email blast, we can get 30, 40, 50 estimates today. And those are from people that have a credit card on file if they've accepted an estimate in the past. But even if they haven't accepted an estimate. They're in our database. It doesn't cost me anything. And so I don't want to spend money on ads. That's what profit mode looks like is I don't spend money on ads. I don't hire more people. I don't get more trucks. I simply raise prices when I'm booked out so far I can't get to the work. And so this is what we consider the copy and paste Augusta model. And that is a working gm Having admin support from command center and having the working GM being out in the field if things get slow and not needing a fancy office. Both of these locations operate from spaces that like the Mount Vernon's is from a farm. I've never been there, but I know they operate from a farm. I think they pay $600 a month. It's really, really cheap. Bellingham paid a little bit more. It's a really nice facility right on the interstate with a massive sign that we were able to get it. So they pay a few thousand dollars per month for that space. However, they. They still run off of generator and batteries. They don't even have running power. So there's more expenses at the Bellingham shop. However, because they've been able to raise prices over the past several years in profit mode, They've been able to make up for that and still maintain a healthy margin. This is the type of thing that I believe can be copied and pasted Because I need one working gm. Finding that working GM is the key. Finding a great team member that wants to optimize and constantly look for little improvements. They're not trying to grow and massive. I want do more locations, get more trucks. And high. They're like, hey, you know, like I want to take this to make more profit. And they're incentivized to do that because they have a percentage of the distributions that I get as the owner they get. And so they want to make things more efficient. They want to make maintenance better. They want to optimize their out. They want to bring the service area closer. They want to make sure that P4P is everyone's incentivized to move quickly. And having that type of person that only needs to manage six to eight employees max at peak season and maybe three or four during the off season. I'm a happy man. And so that is the Mount Vernon and the Bellingham location here. Shortly I will try to share the 12 month rolling 12 months of the past 12 months so you can see a more comprehensive picture. But My goal once a location has been in profit mode for a couple of years is that 20% of revenue is profitable and is distributable to me. And then I I get 10% of it, or like half of that. So 10% of revenue is coming to me. 20% is considered profit. The half of that I half of the profit I'm happy to give away to my team and my general managers in order to make sure I'm not in daily operations. By doing that, I can copy and paste this and be able to start a location, have it be in pro in growth mode for a couple years, switch it to profit mode, get a good working GM in place, and do the model over and over again. I love you all. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and we will see you next time.