How to Build a $100K+ Lawn Care Business in One Year

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. This is part one of Mike Andes teaching how to take an initial 10k investment and turn it into 100k annual revenue per year. This could be the start of your lawn care empire. If you're ready to follow through. As always, you can find all this and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. We're going to get started. Go ahead and get your notepad out.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to show you how you can take $10,000 and turn it into a business that does over $100,000 in annual revenue and is on its way to make a million dollars in annual revenue in five to 10 years. I'm going to use lawn care. I feel like it's something I can confidently talk about. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have almost 100 locations around North America. You can check out augustalongcareservices.com franchise and see all about it. But today, regardless of whether or not you're a part of Augusta, I I'm going to show you how to take $10,000 and in one year, $10,000 in cash. And in one year our goal is to get above $100,000 in annual revenue in the first year, 100,000 plus. And within the next five to 10 years we want to be doing a million dollar business. So today is going to be part one of the video and it's going to be right here. How, how do we take that $10,000 and turn it into 100,000 plus business? I know there's a lot of people making videos about how to mow tall grass, how to mow grass in terms of the edging and how to do everything just right. I'm not super passionate about that. I'm more passionate about the business side of lawn care and landscaping. I really could care less about battery operated versus gas. I could care less about what type of truck you use, what type of equipment. I really could care less. You could flip a coin in terms of what mower you use or what brand and I really don't see the difference. I look businesses regardless of its lawn care, landscaping, roofing, construction technology. I look at simply at a black box where I put money in and I want a return on that money. Okay? All I look about when I look at a lawn care or landscaping or any Other business is I have money coming in in the form of customer acquisition cost, buying customers via advertising and marketing, and the other side, I expect to have some form of return on investment. This is the only thing that matters. And ultimately all a landscaping business is. Landscaping business or lawn care business is just a different type of box, a different type of vehicle, a different mechanism to create a return on the investment that I spend on my customer acquisition. All right, now this box could be mowers and trimmers and trucks and all the rest of it. But ultimately, I don't get super worried about the box and what is inside the box. I want to optimize this machine in order to get the best customer acquisition cost and the best return on investment. So I don't get super worried about what type of truck, what type of blower. All I know is that those are the tools that are required for me to do the work. And ultimately all I am trying to do is to take the labor that might cost me about $20 per hour. And I'm trying to, through this black box, I am trying to make this where I can sell it to a customer for $80 per hour. This arbitrage of taking $20 hour labor and selling it to a customer for $80 per hour is where you make a real business. And this business just so happens to be cutting grass, installing mulch and trimming bushes. I don't really care what services they are. That's what a business does is it creates this arbitrage by providing the labor, the materials, the supplies, et cetera. Alright, let's go ahead and jump in. $10,000 to start off with. Now if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com I go way more in depth on this stuff. And I use a $15,000 budget simply because that's what I used when I first got started. And on landscapebusinesscourse.com I walk through the first four, three years completely using that $15,000 budget. But $10,000 looks better than a thumbnail. So we're gonna use $10,000. So our starting budget is $10,000. Now, if I make a mistake, it's really late at night. I record these videos really late. And secondly, I have absolutely no notes. I don't have any paper. I wish I could just tilt the camera down. I don't have any paper, no notes, I'm not looking at anything. I'm making this up on the fly because I feel like I know this industry pretty well. All right, so we have $10,000. Now with $10,000. If you're trying to scale quickly, you're going to have to probably use some leverage. That is debt. I'm not a huge fan of going into debt. Most people know that I don't like to spend tens of thousands of dollars on trucks and equipment and all the rest of it. However, if you only have $10,000, you're not going to buy a truck and all the equipment that is required with cash. You're going to need to use a little bit of debt so you, you can get the business started. However, if I grow fast enough and I do it at a profitable rate, I am going to be able to pay off those loans and those debts very easily. But I need to make sure I'm charging a high enough price to cover my debt service. So let's start running some numbers. And remember, I'm doing this on the fly, so give me a little bit of grace. Now there's gonna be some assumptions because everyone could easily start disseminating this $10,000 and spending it. But I wanna assume a few things. Number one, I need to assume that I have a three thousand thousand dollars per month that I have in personal expenses that I literally have to take away from the business every single month. That's tough, but that's the reality for most people now. When I first got started, I was living with my parents. I was living really cheap. I didn't need $3,000 a month in personal expenses. But let's assume that you need that to provide for your family, pay off your personal car, maybe you have a mortgage, your rent, your food, et cetera. So that means that this $10,000 business literally in three months would be bankrupt if we just didn't create any revenue. We've gotta really start growing this business because our initial cash reserves, our initial capital is only $10,000. Alright? So first things first, we need to go get mobile. All right. And you can see the whole breakdown a lot of this stuff@landscapebusinesscourse.com in much more detail. But I'm gonna break this down as if I am going all in from day one and I don't have any other job. I, I talk a lot about if you have a job, try to ease into your lawn care business. Try to get a few customers on the weekend, a few customers in the evening. Ease into it. That's a better method. I'm going to assume right now that you are going 100% full time. Maybe you just lost your job, maybe you were fired, maybe something happened and all of a Sudden, you have to make this work. Tomorrow. I would not recommend doing what I'm about to say. If you have a current job that you can slowly ease out of and then grow your long care business on the side, that's the most optimal way to do it. But let's assume you're jumping in the deep. Okay, we're going to go ahead and go try to buy a truck. Now, we're going to try to put around $3,000 down to $3,000 down payment. Down payment on a truck. Now, this truck is probably going to be about a $15,000 truck. Not a great truck, but not a shabby truck either, right? So the truck value is about $15,000. Let's just go ahead and put that in red here. 15k is going to be the truck value. All right? Now that means I'm going to have to borrow $12,000. Now, just for the sake of easy math, let's go ahead and assume that that's going to become a $300 per month payment. So $300 per month is going to be the payment on this truck loan. Maybe it's a five year fixed interest rate, maybe 3, 4, 5% on this interest, whatever it is. I'm just gonna assume $300 per month is my payment. Now this is what you gotta keep track of. Number one, you gotta keep track of your capital, your cash position. The other thing I want you to keep track of is your monthly expenses, your expenditures total, including your personal expenses, by the way, because guess what, you gotta eat and you gotta pay for your food and you gotta pay for your rent and all the rest of it. So right now, and you can assume these yourself or make them your own. And that is right now, our cash position is 10,000, minus the $3,000 payment. So now we have 7K. And now our monthly expenses, I'm going to call them me, M E is going to equal $3,300. Okay? So $3,300 is our current burn rate or the amount of money we're burning every single month just to get by. Because we have $3,000 in monthly personal expenses and $300 per month for that truck. Now I'm gonna go to my local dealer and I'm gonna go buy my hand tools. That is my weed whacker, my blower, my trimmer, et cetera. And I'm also going to then get a loan on my mower. Now, you can get Sheffield Financial a lot of times at your dealer for 0% down. And that's great. I'M gonna see if I can't just put this on my credit card for now because I'm hoping I can pay this off within one month. And I don't want to spend this cash. $7,000 is starting to get pretty slim because then I got this new truck. So I'm now going to assume that I am going to spend $300 on a blower. Not top of the line. I don't need the best right now. $300 for a blower. So we got $300 for a blower. We're gonna go ahead and spend $400 for a trimmer.

And then we're going to spend, we're going to go ahead and put $500 here for miscellaneous. Okay? And this is going to be everything from.

Gas cans, weed, whacker line, little oil, two cycle, engine oil, all the other random little things you're going to need. But ultimately, the beautiful thing about mowing grass and lawn care, and even if you want to do some landscaping, it's very low cost to entry. I need a blower, I need a trimmer, and I need a mower. Okay, so now we got 300, 400, that's $700, plus this, $500, that's 1,200 plus. I'm going to go ahead and spend $800 on a good residential push mower. I do not need you to go buy a commercial mower and spend thousands of dollars. I do not need you to go buy a massive zero turn right now to go and spend 10, $15,000 on a massive 60 inch zero turn with a big trailer and all the rest of it. I don't need you to do that for all I care. Right now you could get a little ramp on the back of your truck. You could put two little wooden ramps just to get the stuff in the back of the truck. That's fine. I just need to get started. When we start Talking about stage two, getting past 100,000 in revenue and trying to get past go up to a million, then we can start thinking about trailers and larger zero turns and all the rest of it. But I can guarantee you in your market, there is a subset of the market, maybe it's only 30% or 40% or maybe only 20% if you live in a really rural area. 20% of your market, though, I guarantee you, you can use a push mower and these tools to get started. I know you might not be able to do the big properties and the big fancy commercial projects and the massive estates that are three Acres. You're not going to be able to do that with a push mower. But I guarantee there's a subset of your market that you can get done. I see Most markets, 20% at least, of the properties in that market can be done with the push mower. In our market, where there's a little bit more, a lot more residential neighborhoods, smaller lot sizes, 80 plus percent of our properties are done with a push mower. And guess what? Even though the one location I'm talking about right now, there's over $1.5 million in revenue, we still use these $800 push mowers from Honda. They're fantastic. 21 inches, they're really light, and they last a good year or two, even if you're using them every single day. All right, so all in now we have spent two, $2,000 on all this equipment. All right, $300 for the blower, $400 for a trimmer, $500 being pretty generous for miscellaneous other things. So shovels, rakes, a bin, whatever it is, all that stuff. I'm going to throw in that $500, $800 for my push mower. There's your $2,000. Okay, now what happened to my cash? Well, take away $2,000. Now my cash position is down to $5,000. And I don't have any more monthly payments, though, because I bought all of this small stuff with cash. Theoretically, you could go put this on a credit card like I mentioned. You could get probably a loan from Sheffield Financial or a dealer has some sort of program or lending program with a bank. You could probably get this on debt and turn this into more of monthly expenses and getting some more loans on it. However, I'm just gonna go ahead and pay with cash. Cause this small stuff is sometimes a little bit harder to get debt on compared to big zero turns or a big truck and trailers and all the rest of it. But we're not getting fancy. We're trying to make money. So cash is only 5,000. I don't like that. That's pretty scary. I gotta go make myself some money. But guess what? A truck and all this equipment doesn't make me a business owner. I have created $0 in revenue. And this is the number one mistake that I see lawn care landscapers do. And that is, oh, I'm in business because I have a mower and a blower and a trimmer and a truck. No, you're not in business. You simply have the equipment and the tools. That box that we talked about, you filled it all with a bunch of tools. But guess what you haven't done. You don't have any incoming customers. You haven't gone out and spent any money on advertising to get more leads and generate business. That's when a real business is created, by the way, when you get customers, not when you get equipment and trucks. These do not pay the bills your customers do. So this is our cash position. Let's go ahead and move on to the next step stage.

This January, we'll be holding Landscape Summit 2023, a conference by landscapers for landscapers. We'll have talks from industry experts and breakout groups for focusing on your business. New to 2023 is a separate track specifically built for your employees and loved ones who tag along. We only have 300 spots open yearly, so make sure you secure your tickets before they sell out. You can get your tickets@mikeandys.com summit.

Alright, so we have the $5,000 in cash. We have $3,300 in monthly expenses that we need to make sure we start making some money on. So what we're going to go ahead and do is allocate $1,000 to be able to go do some marketing. Alright, so we're going to spend in our marketing budget $1,000. Now, $1,000 is not a lot of money to spend on marketing. Now that might seem like a lot to you, but if you're trying to build a big business, this is not a lot of money. So we gotta be very diligent about how we spend this. The first thing I'm gonna go ahead and do is get door hangers. Now I'm not just gonna get any door hangers@lawncaremedia.com lawncaremedia.com you can actually buy these designs and these designs have the ability for, when you're doing these door hangers to actually give a real price on the door hanger. And you can literally, as you're walking up the door, write the price for weekly and bi weekly service and put it on the door. So that way, guess what, you don't have to come back to do an estimate. The customer takes a picture of it, sends it to you and you have yourself a customer. So I'm going to go ahead and these door hangers and these are called Instant quote door hangers. Instant Quote door hangers. And these are going to be literally where I can go hang them on the front door of all the people. I want to serve the exact neighborhoods. And I'm trying to go after like 1,000 houses max. So 1,000 houses, we have $1,000. That's our marketing budget. So let's go ahead. This is our marketing budget. I'm gonna spend on door hangers. Probably about to buy 1000 of them. Let's just say I'm gonna spend $120k. That's 12 cents a pop if I buy 1000 of them. Cause my goal here is to go after 1,000 houses. I'm not trying to go after the entire county or a million people inside my metropolitan area. No, I'm going to go after 1,000 houses in several select neighborhoods that I'm trying to target. So first thing is door hangers. Spend $120 on those. Great. I'm going to go spend some time, several weekends, going to put all those door hangers out. Now, that same exact week, I'm also going to go onto USPS and I'm going to type in eddm. That's every door direct mail. So my next step here is to do an every door direct mail campaign. Now what that means is the United States Postal Service is going to deliver a postcard to every single house in a given mail route. And remember, I've chosen a thousand houses. That's probably two or three mail routes. And these houses, again, I've chosen these because on the Every door direct mail website, you're able to actually the average income of every single male route and the average age demographic of every single male route. So I'm targeting, trying to find those neighborhoods that have a high income demographic and a high age people that are 67 years old, they're retired, they have plenty of money, high income, and they're in their older years where time is very valuable to them and they're literally wanting a quality job being done and they really value someone's going to take their time and make their property look good. So I'm going to do every door direct mail campaign. I am going to go target 1,000 houses. Now, right now, as I'm speaking, 18 cents is approximately the cost for delivery of every piece of mail using the Every door direct mail campaign. So if I times it by a thousand, that's going to be $180 for my delivery. Okay, but now I'm going to go onto lawn caremedia.com delivery. I'm gonna go into lawn caremedia.com I'm gonna go ahead and buy 1,000 flyers, a thousand flyers or sorry, not flyers. You could do flyers or postcards either way, because on lawncaremedia.com, they're already optimized for every door direct mail, they already have the stamp on there. So you don't have to put any more stamps or any sort of postage whatsoever. You literally take a stack of them from the designs on lawn caremedia.com you take them literally to the, the post office and they will put them at every single house on that mail route without any more stamps or postage or anything like that. So we got a thousand of these flyers. Let's just assume it costs, let's call it another, you know, 12 cents. Okay, so we got 12 cents times 12. There you go. That's $120. $120 for a thousand of those bad boys. And that's going to be for the printing of all of those flyers, postcards, whatever you want to do. All that can be purchased on lawn caremedia.com okay? Now we have spent a whopping $300 now on the every door direct mail campaign to these 1,000 houses. Okay? So we got $120 on door hangers to put door hangers on all thousand of those houses. We then also did a postcard or a flyer in their mailbox. On average that's costing 36 cents per delivery, including the printing of that flyer or postcard. $300 spent. Okay? So now what I'm going to do is I have now spent $420 of my budget. I'm now also going to go to lawncaremedia.com all of these advertising mechanisms are available here. You can download the designs and make them your own. The next thing I'm going to do is going to be yard signs. Okay, Yard signs. Now I'm going to go ahead and get 50 of these yard signs. So 50 of these yard signs and let's just assume that they cost, I think they probably cost about $6, let's just call it $7 to be safe. Okay, $7. That's going to equal, what is it, $350. $350. Now these yard signs, I am going to put literally all, all around these two or three mail routes that I just sent my every door direct mail campaign to. Now I'm doing this all in one week because I've got to start making myself some money. I got monthly expenses racking up. I got to make myself some, get some customers here. So I'm going to get 50 of these yard signs, alright? I'm going to get them ordered, get them printed, maybe get used. There's so many different services, but you can use this to print a whole bunch of different services to get the yard Signs printed long term media is where you get the designs, but you can go in and print it wherever you want. So I have now spent $120 on door hangers, $300 on every door direct mail campaign, and $350 on yard signs. Okay, so if I add all of that up, that is 650. That is 750, $770. Alright? I didn't even spend the entire 1,000. I'm going to go ahead and just round it up to 1000 just because there's going to be some other expenses. Maybe something happens, maybe I order some wrong flyers or do something wrong. Okay, great. Let's just assume that thousand dollars is kaput. That was our marketing budget and even though we only spent 770, let's put some fudge factor in there. But now what we've done is we've gone up to a thousand houses, we've put door hangers in every single one. We've now done a mailer inside of their mailbox with a flyer or postcard in their mailbox. And now they're driving around and they're also seeing us all over their yard. They're seeing us all over their neighborhood. And I'm doing this all in one week because guess what I'm gonna do. This is gonna go out on Saturday or Sunday. This is gonna go to the mail place on Monday. It's gonna go out and be in their post office box or post their mailbox in probably Tuesday or Wednesday. And the yard signs, they're going out Wednesday night. So that way I get the entire week. Just massive saturation in their market. Now one thing else I'm gonna do to hit them four different times in the same week is I'm going to do a door knock. Okay? And ideally this is going to be the weekend after all right? So Saturday, put out door hangers, a thousand of those bad boys, going to be a long day. Maybe it takes Sunday as well. Every door direct mail campaign, I send those out Monday, they show up in their mailbox on Tuesday or Wednesday. Yard signs go out Wednesday or Thursday. They're now being seen by everybody. They're on the corners of the stop signs, they're in the roundabouts, they're all over town. Then I'm gonna go ahead and knock on every single one of those 1,000 doors. And that's literally gonna take me three or four days, alright? And I'm gonna start doing it Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, I'm gonna just keep knocking on those doors. And my goal here is just do that all to these 1,000 people. So they literally now have seen me on their door, in their mailbox, around their neighborhood and throughout the city. And now I'm at their front door knocking. So when they see me at their front door, they have literally see my brand I know at least a couple times around town in their mailbox and on their front door. And now here I am standing here with a branded logoed shirt. Oh, guess what? That's where I'm going to get spend some money. Alright, so this extra $230, because remember we have a thousand dollar budget for marketing is going to go into promotional material like business cards and a nice logoed shirt just like this one. A polo shirt might cost you $20, $30, maybe $40 if you get embroidered or some nice logos on it, Get a T shirt or two, get a nice uniform, wear some nice pants, a nice hat, look professional. Especially if you're door knocking, you want to look very professional. And guess what you can do when you open up the door. When the customer opens up the door, you're knocking and you can literally hand them one of your door hangers or one of your flyers or one of your postcards if they answer the door and if they answer, you don't need to try to pitch them, you're simply going to say, hey, my name is Mike. I just got started with Mike's Lawn Care in the local area. If you have any questions about your lawn care landscape and you need anything done, you know who to give a call. I'd love to be of service to you. Anytime you're not trying to sell, you're not trying to say, hey, can I sell you on your lawn care? No, just be a happy friendly face. If you really like to sell and you're good at it, obviously you're gonna have a better close ratio and more customers if you can actually try to ask for the sale but you don't have to. Most people don't want to be in that uncomfortable position. So don't do that. Introduce yourself, make yourself available to be of service to the customer. Next stage now we've actually done some advertising is what's the conversion on these thousand houses and how are we going to get some customers? Now my cash position has gone down because I spent $1,000 on marketing so we got to take away at $1,000. Boom. Our cash position is now down to a measly $4,000. It's time to make some money folks. We only got literally one month's worth of of cash on hand because I got a $300 car payment for that truck and I got $3,000 in personal expenses. So now I'm not gonna get no fine weeds of like tiny little other details and costs. You could throw a couple hundred dollars extra in there for some extra weed whacker line or fuel for your weed whacker, whatever it is. We'll jump into the fine details in landscapebusinesscourse.com. i want to give you the macro here to get started. $4,000 we got leftover in cash. Now we've got start converting these bad boys. That's why I'm doing the door knocking last after doing all those other things in marketing, because I'm going to close some deals. My goal is to actually make some customers here. Hopefully the phone is ringing. Hopefully I'm getting some customers now. So let's go ahead and assume that when I'm knocking on these, I'm knocking 1,000 doors. By the way, it's going to take you at least four or five days, literally, probably maybe even a week in doing so. My goal is to get one lead every hour. Okay. And I'm going to assume that I am going to be doing door knocking for 40 hours again after doing all the other advertising. I'm gonna knock on people's doors for 40 hours. My goal is to get one lead every hour. So one lead every 40 hours. And my goal is to take 80% of those leads and turn them into customers. So that means I'm gonna 40 leads. And then my goal at an 80% close ratio, that means I'm going to get 32 customers. 32 customers out of a thousand. I think that's possible. That's only 3% of people. Probably 80% of those people have to mow their grass. Probably 50% of those people already have a mowing service. Why not choose you if you're doing this during the spring rush? Really good chance. This is extremely possible. 3% penetration after doing all that marketing, after knocking on the door, introducing yourself, saying hello, this is absolutely possible. It's whether or not you're willing to do the hard work of like knocking on 1000 doors. Most people aren't willing to do that. And that's why most people will not get 32 customers in one week's worth of advertising and marketing and only spending $1,000 as a marketing budget. But I'm not satisfied with 32 customers. I've got to grow. You know what it is $100,000 business. And guess what? I ain't shooting for no hundred thousand. I want to be making more like 150,000 my first year at least. So, 32 customers, let's assume that we are going to charge $50 on average per cut. And if you're like, that's crazy, that's insane, you can absolutely charge $50 per cut on average. It's 100% doable. At Augusta Lawn Care, we do this all day long. And I truly believe $50 per cut is what you want to be charging at minimum. You got to show up. There's costs involved in just showing up. There's fuel, there's expensive equipment you're using. Now we're going ahead and assume that there's only three cuts per month because some people you might only cut twice, they're bi weekly. Other people you might cut every single week. Let's just assume on average we're doing three times per month for each customer. That means each customer is equals. It equates to $150 per month in revenue for our business. Right? $150 per month. Now, right now. In that first week, I did all my advertising in week one, and then week two, I did all that door knocking. After two weeks, I literally have 32 customers all giving me $150. Not so bad. You do the math on that. And that is $4,800 per month that I'm generating in revenue from my business after two weeks of doing marketing. Now you see, that's impossible. There's no way you can make $5,000 a month after just two weeks of doing $1,000 worth of marketing. It is absolutely possible. There's just very few people who have the guts to go and knock on a thousand doors. To go out and put door hangers out on a thousand doors. It's a lot of work, It's a lot of grind, it's a lot of hustle. But someone that is willing to put in the kind of work they're making. $5,000 a month. However, hate to break it to you, $4,800 per month ain't no hundred thousand dollar per year business. We got to make some more money around here. Alright now here's the deal. Because now you have 32 customers. We got fuel, we got to buy ourselves some insurance, got to do some registration for that business, all those things. We talked a whole bunch about that on landscapebusinesscourse.com but trust me, don't get bogged down in those details. You just need a business license to be in business. And get yourself a business checking account at the bank. You need that business license so you can go get yourself some insurance. When you're this small, your insurance is literally going to cost you 50 bucks a month for general liability insurance. You know, like next insurance, they'll set you up 50, 60, $70 a month max. But let's go ahead and assume. Let's go ahead and assume. Right now we got to get some fuel, some insurance, pay for some registration, licensing. Let's go ahead and just say that it's going to cost us $500 a month. I'm really pushing it. Okay, let's just say that's going to cost us $500 per month. So now we got $500 per month in extra monthly expenses.

Because we got fuel and insurance. And you might have some dumping fees in there. Hopefully not too much. Hopefully you can mulch the clippings. Let's just assume $500 a month in other business expenses like insurance and fuel, weed, whacker line, other kind of things in your business. Alright, so now our cash position is still 4,000. However, our monthly expenses have gone all the way up to 3,800. This is not looking good, folks. This is not looking good. However, after our first month in business, we created $4,800 per month in revenue. Our total expenses were were $3,800. So guess what? After one month, our cash position went up by $1,000 and we now have $5,000 in the bank. We are cash flow positive, baby, from day one. This is absolutely possible. Now you might be saying, well, I have six or seven thousand dollars per month in monthly expenses. That means you're probably going to need to start off with more cash because you wouldn't be able to get this low. However, if you're able to keep those monthly expenses, your personal expenses low, this is absolutely possible. I had $3,000 in my personal expenses, $300 for the truck, the payment on the loan. I got $500 per month in fuel, insurance, registration, other business expenses. That creates $3,800 in monthly expenses. But I created $4,800 in monthly revenue right from the get. And that's assuming I only mow their grass. I'm not even taking account a mulch job or property cleanup and trimming the bushes and pulling the weeds. That's all gravy. That's all money on top of it. But let's just assume we're just mowing their grass. I literally made $1,000 in profit after month one. So first two months I was advertising, I was door knocking, I got my customers and then the next four weeks this is what happened. Okay? So I'm not going to stop there. I'm going to go and get hungry. You know, I love the fact that I'm able to build a business that does $5,000 a month in revenue, but I'm really shooting for $10,000 a month in revenue. I literally am trying to make $10,000 turn into a $10,000 per month business. I like that. These are the numbers I like. Alright? So now what I'm going to do is instead of going on the defensive and be like, you know what, I'm going to save that money. Guess what? Right Now I'm making $4800 per month, I'm spending 3800, I'm making a net positive or net cash flow of net profit of $1,000 per month. Okay, 1k per month. I ain't getting no rich on that. I got to make myself some more dough. So what am I going to do? I'm going to go on the offensive, I'm not going to go on the defensive and try to save my way to becoming a millionaire or save my way and becoming rich or you know, you're going to work the next 10 years and you're going to make $100,000 that get actually stuck away underneath your mattress at 100,000, just $1,000 a month. I'm not interested in doing that. Alright? I got to grow my business faster. So what am I going to do? Well, I'm only $1,000 per month in net profit. I'm going to stay on the aggressive. I'm going to keep spending money on marketing. Now I'm going to get some door hangers. I'm going to put door hangers on all the neighbors of my customers. But I already did mowing last month. Now I'm going to focus on bark mulch. Later in the summer, spring rush, I might do some spring cleanups. All of these. By the way, you can get door hangers on lawncaremedia.com, you get flyers, you can get whatever you want. And on there I'm going to put the price for the neighbors of my customers. So every single time they see me out mowing, five minutes later, I'm on their door, I'm knocking, I'm putting a door hanger. If they're not home with a price for a multi job, for a property clip, I am trying to now do upselling. My goal now is to sell five Jobs per month. Five jobs per month. And these are gonna be cleanups, trimming bushes, pulling out some weeds, installing some mulch, whatever it is. I'm trying to sell five jobs to my existing 32 customers. These are my recurring mowing customers. I'm trying to sell either to them or to their neighbors. Cause guess what, if I'm mowing their grass, I might as well pull their weeds, I might as well trim their bushes, I might as well pick up their leaves and do their leaf cleanup. So I no folks for a fact, I can sell at least five jobs per month to my existing 32 customers and their neighbors. And I'm trying to sell things besides mowing now because that first month was the go time for mowing in the spring rush. I focused on mowing then. Now a month and a half, two months later, I'm focused on mulch. I'm focusing on property cleanups and I'm going to spend maybe a couple hundred dollars on door hangers. Again on lawncaremedia.com I'm going to spend an extra one or two minutes putting them on the five houses around all of my customers property. Alright? So if this is the road And I'm mowing Mr. Sally. Mr. Sally. Mrs. Sally Jr. S house, I'm going to put it on the five houses, the three across the street and the next door neighbors of Ms. Sally Jr. S house. Okay? So that literally means I'm gonna probably put a couple thousand of those bad boys out by the time I do this for a couple weeks to all 32 of my customers and their neighbors. Alright? My job is five jobs. My goal is five jobs per month. And I'm gonna be. My goal here is to be able to sell each of these at a minimum of $300 each. Okay? $300 in profit. This is after I take some cost for debris or I do a little bit of mulch, whatever it is. My goal is just five jobs. At $300 per job, that's an additional $1,500 per month. Okay? This is very doable by the way. A $300 job for us is literally just a few hours worth of work at the get. You might be charging $50, $60 per hour. Do not charge less than $50 per hour. I beg you, do not charge less than $50 per hour when you're charging these jobs. And we talk all about pricing these jobs@landscapebusinesscourse.com and how to do that and come up with your hourly rate. But right now let's just focus on the math of finding five jobs per month, that's like one a week. For $300 extra. We're now talking about an extra $1,500 per month in your business. And guess what? You got the same job, you got the same truck, you got the same equipment. You still got yourself like a shovel, a rake, a blower, a weed whack. That's all you need. You might get an attachment, like a hedge trimmer attachment so you can trim some bushes, maybe some loppers so you can lop off some branches. But you don't need a lot of equipment. This is all 100% based on can you find customers. So month number two rolls around. Guess what happened. I got myself five jobs in that month. $300 per job, that's simply by throwing out a couple door hangers. And now What? I got 5,000, $6,300 in month two of my business.

Great.

We are growing month number two, $6,300. But guess what? $6,300 ain't enough to make me happy. I want to grow up to 10,000. This is where you need to keep your pedal to the metal. You've exhausted mowing. You're like, man, I got my 32 customers. I'm getting one or two jobs a week. If you can get this up to 10, that's month three. Now month three, we're gonna go ahead and up this up to 10. Because now people are starting to see us around town. We're really starting, starting to move and groove. And now our goal is to up this up to $3,000 per month in projects. Alright, $3,000 in projects is what we're doing. So now we're doing a whopping $7,800 per month. This ain't no 10,000. Now we're doing pretty good on our cash flow. If we look at our monthly expenses. Let's go and assume now that we've grown, maybe we get we're driving the truck a lot more. Let's add a little bit more to our monthly monthly expenses. Let's assume there's an extra $300 per month because we're driving the trucks around more. And you know what? We're gonna go ahead and spend $1,000 on some extra attachments for the trimmer, a couple extra bins, a couple spare parts and tools, things like that. We're gonna spend $1,000. So now at this point, we're talking, okay, this month here, we made $1,000 in cash flow. In month two, we did 6,300. And therefore we would have made an extra two, two or $3,000 in profit. Our cash position would have gone up to about 7, $8,000. Okay, now in this month we take our 3,800. Now we add an extra 300. So this now goes up to what? $4,100 in monthly expenses, including our truck payment, all of our fuel, our insurance and all this extra cost. So 4100. Now out of this is going to be $3700 profit. Alright, this is now our profit. But now remember, I'm going to take $1,000 out of that. $1,000 is coming out of this for extra tools and supplies. So that way I can do some extra jobs. I'm able to do some better trimming, maybe invest in some really nice loppers, some boots. I'm going to need some gloves. I need some other things in my business now that I'm starting to grow. So I'm going to spend $1,000 of that. So that $3,700 instead of being 12,000 might only be a 11,000 now in my pocket. But guess what, I am now officially above $10,000 where I started. We are just three months into my business and I've gotten all the cash back from the investment I originally put in. I started off with $10,000. Three months later I'm at $11,000 and that's after. Now I have all this equipment, I'm in business, I got myself some customers. You can absolutely do this in lawn care, landscaping. Anyone that tells me otherwise is not willing to put in the work. I know it's not gonna be easy. I'm not saying this is easy. I'm saying this is gonna be very, very difficult. To put in the long hours and do this much revenue while also doing the door knocking and the door hangers, putting yourself in uncomfortable positions. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is not like you can do this so easily. Just like type these keystrokes in and you make an Amazon fulfillment by Amazon. That's not how this is. It's gonna be really hard work, but it's absolutely possible. This is the beautiful thing about lawn care. I started mowing lawns when I was 11 years old. When I was 18 I decided let's ramp this bad boy up. And by the time I was 21, we had more than a seven figure business, more than a million dollars in revenue. This is absolutely possible.

When you're just starting out in the landscaping industry, building your customer base is one of the hardest Things to get going, especially when your website looks amateur. Make the first impression count by using lawn care web design. We build easy to use lawn care websites for a flat monthly rate. Your new lawn care website will work on all devices and be specifically tuned to attract local customers. We handle every aspect of your website for a fraction of the cost of other web design services and consistently outperform the SEO of our competitors. If you need the perfect site for your lawn care business, head over to lawncarewebdesign.com and see what our team can build for you.

Now, let's take it to the next level because we still got to get past $10,000 in annual revenue. And this is the last step we're going to do in part one, and that is we're going to really take it to the next level. We are going to start to invest in the business because guess what? I'm running out of time. I've got 7, $800 a month in revenue. I'm starting to run out of enough hours in the week to get those jobs done. I've got to raise my prices, but why can't I raise my prices? Well, customers aren't going to accept that higher price. I need to be more professional. So what am I going to do? I'm going to invest in a website. Now, at lawncarewebdesign.com you can get a really nice website. I'm the owner of that company and it costs you $400 a month. I'm going to use that example. But if you're not trying to grow very quickly and your goal is only to get to $100,000 a year, you do not need lawn carewebdesign.com but if your goal is to grow past that and get to a million, you will need a website that is professionally done to give you the brand image you need to charge premium prices. So we're going to go ahead and use lawncarewebdesign.com now. Lawncarewebdesign.com what's really cool is guess what? I don't have to spend my cash because I could literally spend all of this cash on building a really great website. $11,000 to build a great website. You can actually spend that kind of money. What's cool about lawn carewebdesign.com is you spend 399amonth with no upfront cost. So for $399, $400 per month, there's no contract. I got unlimited changes and I can make an incredible website. Alright, so what that's going to do though is turn that $4,100 now into $4,500 per month in expenses. However, now I got my money working for me. I don't have time to be doing door hangers. I don't have time to be going to all the neighbors and my customers and trying to upsell them. I got to get the work done. I'm already doing $7,800 a month in revenue. I'm busy. So I got to get my money to work for me because now I'm profiting a few thousand dollars every single month. I've got to put that money to work for me by buying myself a website for 3.99 per month on lawn carewebdesign.com okay? So I added to my monthly expenses that $400 so that I can now have my money working for me. It's going and getting leads for me. Now I got a website getting leads for me every single day so I can start to grip customers. Now it's going to take a few months. You're not going to get customers right away. I'm going to get myself some Google reviews. I'm going to put pictures up on Facebook. I'm going to drive as much traffic to this website as possible. I'm going to make sure my Google listing for my business is optimized and has pictures and reviews and lots of reviews, at least 30 or 40. I'm going to talk to every single one of the customers I've ever done work for. Probably 50 or 60 by now. I want a review from every single one so I can start ranking well in my area. And when I do that, after three or four months, guess what's gonna happen? I'm gonna start getting people coming to my website and I didn't have to spend any money. They're just gonna find me when they're looking for lawn care, when they're looking for property cleanups, when they're looking for landscaping. And so what happens is leads start trickling in. Let's just assume that after three months you're just getting just four leads per week. Alright, four leads per week coming in from the website. That's literally like one every two days. That is very, very small. Just our local shop gets over 20 to 30. Gets about 20 to 30 leads per day. I'm assuming four leads per week because we're just getting started. And so after just three months. So this is now let's talk about month six of your business. Alright, month six in your Business. We've now stacked away a little bit of cash. We're still, you know, we're burning 4,500amonth. We're making some 78. Therefore, we're able to stack aside, what, like $3,000 a month. I should now have at least a good $16,000, at least stacked up in my bank account. I'm still focused on the same projects, same customers. I'm assuming I haven't grown my business at all, and I'm three months in, but I made sure I invested in a website. Now I'm getting four leads a week. And let's just assume that we close only half of them, and I'll show you why in just a second. So now, Instead of getting four for new customers, I have a 50% close ratio, and that's leading to two new customers.

Every single week. So 50% of my leads, they come in, they fill an estimate request form out. Maybe they give me a call and they want to get a quote. I give them a quote, and only half of them accept. Why? Because I raised my prices. And I raised my prices from. Instead of being just $50 per hour, I raise my prices all the way up to $75 per hour. You think that's impossible? There's no way you could do that. Almost every single one of the franchisees at Augusta Lawn care charges over $70 per hour for the services that we provide, and there's many that are almost $100 per hour. It's absolutely possible with the right brand image by having this website. Now, when people see you, they see you as a very professional service. Great logo, great, great layout of design. SEO, search engine optimization is ranking high. When they type up lawn care in your area, you're ranking there. You're right there. You look great on your Google listing. This is what makes a professional company. And when they call you now, they're expecting for you to charge a premium price because your website looks amazing, your branding looks strong, your logo looks fantastic, and that's what lawn carewebdesign.com can do for you. And now, because of that great brand image, you raise your prices. By raising your prices, you can really start to make some good money. Because guess What? On this $7,800, when I raise my prices by 50% to my existing customers, I now went from $7,800. 50% of this is going to be an extra $3,900. Because I raised my prices. $3,900 is what I'm going to be able to get in Extra revenue. Alright. Now I've been going the last three months and I haven't even added a single customer. Customer, let's assume we got one, maybe a week. Yeah, you might lose some customers when you raise your prices. But I guarantee you if you've been doing a great job for six months, they'll stick with you. Now you have a great website, maybe you update your CRM. Alright, well if we get a good CRM, we have to, you know, man, we have to pay extra money. My goodness, we're going to pay $200 per month for a good CRM. Now all of a sudden we're paying $4,700 in monthly expenses. But with the extra CRM with that website, our professionalism to the customer is so much greater and we're able to charge this kind of money. Well guess what we just did, baby. We just got above $10,000. In fact we are now doing what, $11,700 in monthly revenue. And that's before we start getting the new customers. That's literally just by raising your prices after three months of having a great website, investing in a CRM, that's where you keep keep track of all your customers information. And now they can pay the credit card. It's all very simple. This is fantastic. I just broke the $10,000 per month in revenue marker simply by making sure I got enough customers, number one. And then I was able to increase my professionalism, my brand on my website, having a great CRM. I'm six months deep into my business and I got myself more than $10,000 per month. And guess what? That $3,900 is almost straight profit because I raised my prices. So that $399 per month that I paid for that website, that sounded like a good deal. That $200 a month I paid for the CRM, that's sounding like a really good deal because that extra $600 in extra expense by professionalizing my company allowed me to raise my prices by $3,900. Who in their right mind would not spend $600 per month? So you can raise your prices by almost $4,000 per month. That's what premium products do. That's what premium brands do is they raise their prices. They charge a premium price because they have a premium brand because they have a professional service, they have a great looking website, they have a great looking software that allows the customer to keep track of information and for you to stay organized and be quickly responding to them and communicating with them. That's high value. To these customers, they want to see that and they're willing to pay for it. We just made ourselves a ten thousand plus dollar business. But guess what? It gets so much more fun after this. Because I'm getting two customers per week, I raise my prices. So Instead of closing 80% of my jobs, the estimates that I get, I'm only closing 50, 50%. One out of every two leads they don't accept because they think I'm too high in price. That's fine, I don't care. I know my 50% close ratio is going to give me two new customers per week. Two more customers per week. Let's assume eight customers per month. What does that mean? That means if I'm charging on average $150 per customer, come charging that $50 per cut, average, average of three cuts per month, that means that $150 per customer. If I multiply that by eight, that's gonna be an extra $1,200 per month in recurring revenue that I am adding to this amount every single month by getting myself two customers per week. At $150 on average per month, that's $1,200 in recurring revenue every single month that I'm tacking onto. This literally by the end of the first year, if we go a few more months, I'm going to be making over $15,000 per month for my little lawn care business. Maybe by that time I have 50 or 60 customers, I have several projects that I do each week and I'm basically tapped out. $15,000 per month. You're working your butt off, but you're making 75 bucks an hour. So you can do it. It's absolutely possible. I've seen it done time and time again at Augusta Lawn Care and other people that follow this channel. So I appreciate you subscribing Comment below what you like to see. Because guess what? We aren't settling that $15,000 per month, baby. We're moving past $100,000 per month in part two.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. The next part is going to be about going from that 100k annual revenue and taking it to 1 million. Stay tuned if you like what you heard. We have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at The Mike Andes YouTube channel that will be right up your alley. But that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.