How to Build a $500K+ Lawn Care Business (BIG WARNING!)

Today you're going to learn how to grow your business up to a half million dollar lawn care company. And I'm going to walk you through step by step of the things you need to know. Alright, so if you haven't built your business at all and you're just getting started, you need to watch this video. Just pause here, come back later, watch this video here. I'm going to talk about how you can get from 0 to 100,000 using these steps. Now, assuming that you already have a business 100 200,000 annual revenue, this is the video for you. Cause this is gonna walk how to get through three, four and half a million, $500,000 in annual revenue in your lawn care business. It's gonna be a beautiful thing. I'm gonna tell you the major things that I learned and after building now 90 plus locations at Augusta Lawncare, these are the things I always see people make mistakes on. All right, these are just some of the highlights. If you want more information like this, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com. it's awesome. Alright, so let's go ahead and talk about a few things. First and foremost, I would highly recommend keep doing what you were doing to get to 100 and 200,000 annual revenue in terms of advertising. Again, that video from before, great starting point, but keep doing that. And this is the thing I want you to focus on. $200,000 equals the rest stop. Okay? It's like when you're driving to some crazy state across this, across the country and you take a rest stop, you take a little break, take a little breather, you go to the bathroom, maybe get some gas, get a little food. This is the rest stop. The reason you want to stop and slow down at $200,000 is if you are low on capital. If you don't have a lot of cash in the bank, stop at this level. Why? Why would you want to stop your growth? Because ultimately if you run out of cash, you can run a profitable growing business into bankruptcy. How is that possible? Because ultimately it takes time to recoup the cost of growth. By the time you buy a truck, you do the advertising, you hire people, you get uniforms, get insurance. It takes time before you then acquire a customer and then mow their grass long enough to actually recoup the cost of all of this other stuff. So you can be growing too quickly and run out of cash. And if you run out of cash, it's like running out of oxygen. You, you die. Kaput. Bye bye. Alright, so 200,000. The reason I want you to take a little rest stop, a little pause, a little break here if you're running low on cash. Because at this stage, you can literally have one truck, one other employee besides yourself, and make $200,000 in annual revenue. Some of you are like, no, that's impossible. Okay, let's run the math because I see this all the time at Augusta Nation and I truly believe you can do one truck, one employee, and $200,000 in revenue. I also believe that you can literally get to about 450 with two trucks and three employees. But hold on to your britches before you start commenting in the description. Oh, no, no, that's impossible. There's no way whatsoever. Got to run the math. Okay, all right. See it time and time again. One truck, one employee, 200,000 annual revenue. Remember, annual revenue is not just labor. That includes your estimate fees and your dump fees and your material markup and everything else. Okay? So one truck, one employee. Because size, this is a beautiful thing. About 200,000 annual revenue is I can do one truck, one employee. That one employee is in said truck with me, okay? And I as the owner. So I as the owner, with one employee, I'm able to go out and do usually well over 100 yards a week easily. In addition to projects that I am able to fill in to be able to keep us busy and get to that 200,000 marker. In order to get that, I gotta do about $18,000 approximately per month in revenue. All right? Now at this stage when I do the little rest stop, what I mean by that is don't stop growing because like, oh, I don't. No more leads. I'm not gonna take any more customers. Don't do that. No, no, no, no, no. If you're getting customers coming into your website, because you have a website by now, if you are getting more leads coming in, just take those customers and, and charge them a higher price and then raise the price to your existing customers. So what you do is you have all these customers, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all these customers, right? And what you're going to do, these are high priced customers, lots of money, okay? And then down here is your lowest priced customers. What I want you to do is keep taking leads, taking more customers, and then as you are at capacity, you're filled up, no more customers. And what people do is they stop taking leads. Don't do that. What I want you to do is raise the price until some of these people leave. So that way you're able to actually go and get more customers, but be at the higher prices. That is what's gonna allow you to optimize. At this size of business, you'll make more profit even though you have the same number of customers. And you're like, well, when do I do that? When you're at capacity, when you need to go buy another truck and get a bigger shop and all the rest of it. Before you do that, ask yourself, do you have the cash? Because if you do, you can grow to 500,000, but you might need to take a little rest, stop, a little break and take a year. Take a year or two where you have one employee, just one truck with you in the truck working, and you can easily get to this $18,000 per month level. Assuming again that you have back end support. If you're working these many hours in the field, you're probably going to need your spouse or potentially a virtual office to be filling in some of the gaps, taking calls, emails, et cetera. But this is absolutely possible. This is what you should be doing, taking this little break. If you're growing to 500,000, it's okay to take a year or two and stack some cash because this size of business, you are very profitable. And we're gonna get into why you're very profitable towards the end of this video. But we don't wanna stop here at 200,000. Our goal is still to get to 500k. Okay? So the goal is still to get to the elusive for $500,000 in annual revenue. Now here's the thing that is a little bit not so fun, all right? A little depressing. There is really no more profit being made in the journey from 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue. Everyone wants to get to 500,000. Here's the deal. I consistently see the people who give up in this industry that say, this industry, there's no money in it, say that they can't find employees and they're gonna just scale back to being solo. I consistently, consistently see them being somewhere between the realm of 200,000 to 500,000 in annual revenue. If you look at YouTubers and people have done social media and they have 2, 3, 4, 5 employees and all of a sudden they're like, I just found out I wasn't making any more money than when I was by myself. So what do they do? They go back to being under 200,000. And the reason for that is because there is no more profit typically seen in this range of 200,000 to 500,000 in revenue. Especially if you're growing relatively quickly and getting here within five to six years of starting. So there is no more revenue here. I call it the wilderness. It's like wandering in the wilderness. There's no more profit. And so what happens is people start to wonder in the wilderness, on their way from 200,000 to 500,000 and they get lost and they get disillusioned because they're like, man, I was making just as much profit, take home pay at 200,000 and here I'm at 400, 350 and I'm not making any more. But now I got a couple trucks, multiple employees, people call out all of this headache, all of this drama. I got to deal with employee issues and they make a bunch of mistakes. And so the wondering in the wilderness is what many times cause people to turn back to being solo operator and back to this one truck operation with one employee max. And the bottom line is that might be what's right for you and your business and the stress levels that you want to handle. And it's okay to be at this level. There's a reason why you make just as much profit here as at 500,000. Your overhead is way less. At 200,000, you have one truck, you can like literally operate it out of your house, in your garage. You don't need a lot of equipment. You have one employee and guess what, that one employee. You're managing them in person all day long. You don't have to worry about them taking a truck and doing something stupid without you being around. Because guess what, you're in the truck with them all day, eyes on them, making sure that they are being efficient. So why in the world would I want to grow my business from 200,000 to 500,000? In doing so, I'm going to have to buy more trucks, more equipment, My liability insurance is going to go up. I'm going to have to get further types of. There's so much risk, like what if someone gets hurt? There's lots of complaints. I got to deal with employees now, like, why would I want to go to 500,000? Well, here's the thing. At $200,000 in annual revenue, you are working every single day very hard with that employee out in the truck. And that can become very physically taxing as you get 40, 50, 60 years old. That's not a sustainable career for you anymore. You might be able to take home 70, 80, $90,000 in take home pay at this point level and that's fantastic. But you're not Going to be able to do it for a very long period of time. After 10, 15, 20 years in this industry of mowing lawns, it's taxing on the body and you're going to need to grow to the point where you're able to start working on the business, growing the company and investing in your team and training other team members to do the work that are younger. They're just getting started. And give them a place to grow, give them a good job. But make sure that you're not doing the actual work itself. When you're in your 40s and your 50s and your 60s, it can start to become very taxing on your body. And furthermore, at this size, guess what? If you get hurt, if something happens to you, if you have a family emergency and you leave, this employee is likely inequipped and not able to go out and perform the work and get the job done by themselves. So the wilderness, is it worth getting to 500,000? It is. If you're trying to grow, if you're trying to build a business that can really without you, if you're trying to work on the business instead of in the business. But there's absolutely no logical reason why you're going to grow to 200,000 to 500,000 and think that you're going to make more money. All right? And everyone argues with me this, oh no, I make more money at 400 than I did at 200,000. Okay, let me break down why this is typically not the case. Like I said, more overhead. You're going to have to go get shop space and rent out now because now you cannot. Now at this size, you, you're gonna usually have like two or three trucks at least. I've seen some people have like five or six trucks. I'm like, what are you doing? All right, that's a whole other video. Different topic. But you don't need six and seven trucks to do half a million in revenue. Two to three. I'll give you to four. Okay, if you really, really want it, I'll give you four trucks. But you don't need it. You do not need five, six trucks. Definitely not to do half a million in revenue. But again, that's gonna be way more in terms of cost per month for that truck, maintenance for the truck, fuel for the truck. And now you've got to get shop space. You can't just park it in your garage or your driveway. You've got to actually go like get a shop space that has a roll up door or maybe even Some land, you might have to buy some land. There's a whole bunch more expenses now because of this size. And at this size, at 500,000, you can't be out in the field working. So guess what you become, you become a non revenue producing employee. So instead of working the field for 40, 50 hours a week producing revenue, you're working on the business, taking calls, doing estimates, managing the email, running payroll. And that does not generate any revenue for the company. And that is a massive overhead weight on the business. And that's why 200,000 to 500,000 as the business owner gets out of the field, the company typically will not make any more in profit because the owner is not working on the business and producing revenue. That is why most people will go back to this size of business is because at this size you are a revenue producing employee. You're running 40, 50, 60% plus profit margins. Whereas at this, you are not running 50, 60, 70% profit margins at 500,000 revenue. Why more overhead and you are not producing revenue. So what do I expect you to do? What do I think you should do? I want you to stay at this level, take this little rest stop, get ready for the journey ahead and then quickly grow from 200,000 to 500,000 quickly do it. Ideally do it in one year because the room in between, this wilderness in between is a pain in the butt and most people get disillusioned by it. So going into it, me telling you this, just stay here until you have enough capital and you're ready to quickly grow the business at this size, at 200,000, how do I get to, how do I get through the wilderness? How do I get through all of this? Well, let's go ahead and make a little more writing on the whiteboard because all good things come on a whiteboard. So in the wilderness, how do I get through it? How do I get through this wilderness of pain? From 200,000 to 500,000 Revenue number one is you must, you must have a great website. This is no longer a suggestion, this is a must. In my opinion, if you are growing through this, if you already have a 5 million dollar lawn care business, you probably don't need a website. You got lots of leads coming in, lots of brand awareness. But if you are trying to grow your company, this is a requirement. Okay? Now I do own lawn carewebdesign.com and we produce hundreds of landscaping websites for business owners. And yes, I think it's a great and amazing and I'm obviously biased, so check it out. Because they're incredible. But if you're like, nope, I am not being sold right now. No one's telling me what I should buy. Okay, great. Go into weebly.com, go into Squarespace. You can make a site for literally, I don't know, like 30, 40, $50 a month and they look half decent. But if you're one to really scale and in one year, jump from 200,000 to 500,000, you're going to need a great website, great Google reviews, and you're going to need a site that's optimized for mobile, has great SEO and has a great design. And that's what lawn carewebdesign.com can do for you. So check that out. But again, I'm okay with you doing something else or whatever you want to do. Just give it a great website. I beg of you, please, please, please, please. Alright. It is going to help you so much and it's going to be the thing that always you will look back on. And the reason for the website, by the way, is really, that is just a result of the fact that really what I want you to focus on at this stage is organic leads. Because guess what, over the past year, two, three years, whatever, you've been growing up to $200,000 in annual revenue, you've been paying for every single customer. No, no, no, no, no. They've been calling me just out of the blue because I am like, I was like a gift from God. Just dropped down and people started calling me for their lawn care. That's not what happened. They saw a door hanger, they saw a yard sign, they talked to the neighbor, they saw your truck, all of these other things. But most of the time it was a paid advertisement of some sort, whether it be in their mailbox at their front door. You knocking on their door, by the way, that costs you money because it costs you time and an advertisement online somewhere. They saw you and typically you had to pay for that customer. The beautiful thing about a website is the fact that you own the website and you're able to get customers for no, no additional customer acquisition cost. I don't have to keep paying the machine of Google or paying the machine of Facebook or paying, oh my goodness, the usps, the government. I'm paying the government to give me some postage to go and do print to all my customers. I'm not doing that anymore. I don't want to be on this treadmill of constantly paying for customers. I want customers to find me when they're looking for lawn care, landscaping in my area. And the number one way to do that is have a great website. Now the other way, you can make sure you're getting leads organically. Organically just means not like organically, like let's go get some organic oat milk. Not like that. Not organic, like from the farm. Not like that. Organic is. I didn't have to pay for them. They came to me of their own. What's the word? Their own volition. Their own volition. They came to me because they were looking for lawn care, they were looking for landscaping. They. They searched me on Google or they talked to their friends and family and they just referred me either the search engine did or their friends and family. And on the search engine side, guess what? You need a website with really good search engine optimization. SEO. That's what you need. Or you need to have brand awareness. When they talk to their friends, their families, people around the water cooler at work, guess who they talk about? You and your brand. How do you get brand awareness? Yes, a website helps a little bit, but not really. What's really going to help is you doing a good job, you doing a great service to your customers. And furthermore, it's going to be your truck, your uniform. Your truck should not just be a random truck that no one can tell what your business is. It should have your name big on it, your phone number big on it. Because now when they see your truck driving around you and your employee kicking butt at 200,000 in the rest stop, they give you a call, and that's organically. They saw your truck. Ah, that's an nice little truck. Oh, they're doing good work over there at so and so's property. And they give you a call. That's an organic lead. And really what's going to get you from 200,000 to 500,000 without dying in the wilderness is organic leads. Because the biggest issue that you're going to have between 200,000 and 500,000 in revenue is financial stress. Because now that you are no longer producing revenue for the business, you are overhead. And if you are overhead, you got to be really thrifty. And everything else in the business business, including advertising, you don't have a budget now to spend thousands of dollars on every door, direct mail, thousands of dollars on Google and Facebook. And you're gonna need more and more leads in order to achieve this type of size and growth. So I need organic leads, I need a great website, and I need a brand. So if you haven't already, make sure that you have these things, a brand and a website. That brand could come in the form of a truck with decals, a, a wrap, painted truck, phone number on there, looking great, looking beautiful. The name of your company is on there, and it's a recognizable image. People see it begins to have a brand. They start to tell their friends, their family, and if you're doing good work, you're gonna get referrals. All of that is organic leads. Those are the ones that you must have because you need a lower customer acquisition cost in order to be able to get to this wilderness and grow quickly. Now, when it comes to, to organic leads, the other thing we must remember is that there's a very important thing that you need to start doing at this point, and that is called upsell. Up, up. Whoa, whoa, we gotta spell it right? Upsell, upsell and nurture. Because guess what? At this point, you should have a whole database of customers. You might already by this point have 4, 500 contacts in your database. And you should be making sure that you nurture them. What does that mean? That means you should be staying in touch with them. You should be sending them emails and newsletters and trying to sell them into services based upon the seasonality, the time of year. You should be nurturing them. You should be staying in touch with them. You should be offering them services. If it's fall, you should be offering them fall services and leaf cleanups. If it's mowing season, in the spring rush, you should be offering them mowing services. Make it easy for them to come back to you. You want to nurture them, start, stay in touch. Don't let those leads go cold. This is like, keep them warm. Why would I go after cold leads, ones that have never heard about me on Google or Facebook or advertise to them, when I can literally go after the ones that are warm leads. The customers I've already done service for, at least I've performed an estimate for, and I have them in my database. Why in the world would I not nurture them? Keep those customers warm by staying in touch with them. Very important. And that's the number one way that you can increase organic leads is by nurturing the existing database and existing customers that you have. And then secondly, because nurturing, I'm assuming they're leads. They're not yet customers. They're leads. So you got to nurture them, keep them warm. They've never done service with you, but you have their contact. Nurture those relationships, keep them warm. But for the customers that you already have, I Don't know why I'm using my fingers on a whiteboard as if I'm drawing underneath the line, but there it is. You gotta upsell them. Your existing customers, you upsell and existing leads, people in your database, those are the ones you nurture. But when it comes to upselling, what are we doing? Well, same exact thing in terms of staying in touch with them, nurturing them, et cetera. But now we're really trying to get them to buy a second, a third, a fourth service, winter services. I don't want to just be mowing their lawn. I want to be installing mulch. I want to be pulling the weeds. I want to be trimming the bushes. I want to be make sure that they're on a schedule for fall cleanup. I want to make sure I have them on winter services during the winter months. I want to make sure I am selling everything I possibly can to that customer in order to what? Increase the lifetime value of the customer. That's what the whole game of business is all about when it comes to home improvement. And our business is the beautiful thing about our business in the home improvement industry and lawn care landscaping is the fact that, number one, we have price elasticity, which means if you have a good brand and you're able to raise prices and create instant margin, it's a very good business to be in when you have a recession or when you have inflation, which we happen to have right now. The other reason why this industry is fantastic is because I can upsell and increase the lifetime value of a customer by offering them different services. Now, there's a risk here. I don't want you offering everything under the sun because the world way to grow. And the number one reason why people will go out of business in this wilderness of 200,000 to 500,000 is like, I can just add services. The number one way that people grow in this industry is just adding more and more and more and more services. Why? Because they started to realize that upselling is a very good thing. But what they fall trap into, they fall into the trap of is offering services that are way outside the store scope of work that they should be doing. Now they're getting a tree chipper. Now they're doing artificial turf. Now they're doing sod installs. Now they're doing retaining walls. Now they're doing paver patios. Now they have a massive dump truck. All of these things they start to do and is killing, absolutely destroying, annihilating their profit margins. And that is why people don't make money between 200,000 and 500,000. And yet their business is growing. They're getting another truck, they're getting more employees, and they wonder why to they want don't make any more money. Because the worst way to grow through this wilderness is adding more services. And secondly is adding geographical expansion. Like, oh, we're going to service this place over here, and then 10 miles over here and 5 miles in this direction, we're going to service this neighborhood because it's the best neighborhood in the whole county. And then we're going to go over here to this town over here. That expansion. Yes, you can grow fast by adding services and geographical expansion. You can absolutely do that. But the least profitable for of growth and the number one reason why people are not profitable inside of the wilderness. So what I want you to focus on is upselling those same type of services that are simple and you don't need a whole bunch more equipment and a whole bunch of more skill in terms of training your team. Now, if you're doing hardscaping and landscaping, that's fine. Just standardize those services and don't get pulled in 100 different directions to where now you're doing pond features, and now you're doing fencing, and now you're doing decks, and now you're doing pergolas, and now you're doing roofing. All of a sudden it's like, what in the world. You've built 10 businesses inside of your small little company, very hard to make a profit on. So upsell, but don't upsell to the point where you're selling them every single thing under the sun, and you've opened up 10 different businesses under the one entity that you've already started. Don't do that. We need to upsell, though, and we need to improve and increase the lifetime value of, of every single one of the customers. Now, in this stage, in order for this to work, you're going to need this little thing with three letters. Well, there's more than three letters, but it's an acronym, CRM, Customer Relationship Management, which means you must now have software to keep track of the nurturing, keep track of the upselling of your current customers. So you can actually have a system and a way to be able to communicate with them and upsell them and email them and bulk mass email them. You've got to be able to keep this all controlled and organized because at 200,000, 40, 50, 60, 100 customers, you can kind of keep track in your head, oh, yeah, Mr. Jones, he likes his Gate closed. Oh, Sally, okay, yeah, she likes it at two and a half inches. But you must have a CRM that's so important we gotta write it on the whiteboard. Customer Relationship management. This is the name of the game as you see scale. And the number one reason why so many small businesses will not be able to scale their business even though it might be profitable is most the time because they don't adopt technology that's going to allow them to scale in a more efficient manner. So everything becomes very difficult and hard when it doesn't have to be right. You're like man, emailing all those customers just sounds like such a pain. You can do it like two minutes if you have the right CRM. Okay, so you need the right CRM. And if you want to know what type of CRMs, that's a whole different video. You can check out landscapebusinesscourse.com I talk more about CRMs, what size of business I recommend for different types of CRMs. That's a whole different video. But you need a CRM. You need to keep care of your customers in a software, software that is doing the work for you. And there needs to be automations inside of here. If you're doing things like following up with on quotes, following up on invoices, that's just dumb. You gotta have it automated where it's following up for you. And if someone's overdue it, automatically send them an email. If they haven't accepted a quote after two days, it's already in there and you email or texting them SMS and making sure they follow up. You don't want to be doing that manually, you can't be doing that manually at 500, 600 and beyond. So just start now at 200,000. Get the website, get the great CRM because those are the tools that are required to get past the wilderness and past 500,000 efficiently, profitably and without losing your mind. You've got to have a CRM to stay organized. The last thing I want you to focus on is the fact that at 200,000 in revenue, so let's do 200,000 revenue up until this point. So from 0 to 200,000 revenue, the type of stress you are going to have is going to be be physical. Alright? So at this stage you are working like your brain's out every single day, 8, 10, 12 hours out in the field, hot, cold, wet, rain, whatever it is, you're working very, very hard. So physically you're going to have the most stress in the business because like you're just worn down every single day, seven days a week. You're working hard in the business. Now everyone thinks that if I just grow the company and I get employees, everything is going to become better. I want to less stressful. I can work on the business instead of in the business. It sounds so wonderful, but for some people, they should actually stay at this size because they deal well with stress. That's physical. But the thing is this, when you get from go to that 200,000, in the wilderness of 200,000 to 500,000, this stress now becomes not physical stress, but financial stress. Why is there financial stress? Because all of a sudden you, you got payroll, you have more overhead, you got shop space, you have more trucks, insurance, liability, fuel. Everything goes up in terms of cost. And remember, the biggest thing that no one talks about is the fact that you as the owner are no longer a revenue producing employee. You are simply overhead at a cost to the business. Instead of producing what in the past was 8, 9, $10,000 a month in revenue, you now cost the business money to be there. Potentially four or $5,000. Whatever you're taking out of the business as a salary, you cost the business money. That's a massive change. You went from producing 10,000 in revenue a month to costing the business $5,000 a month so you can pay for your personal expenses. That is crazy. That is why most businesses go from 60 to 70 cents, 60 to 70% profit margins at this size. And in this wilderness, those profits shrink down to 10, 15, 20, 25, maybe 30% profit margins. So the stress you're gonna have now is financial. And the reason I say that is because do not think that just growing your business is somehow going to make your life better, less stressful, or it's gonna become easier. Do not buy into that logic. It's completely false. The type of stress will change, and stress does change, but just a different type of stress. Now you have the financial stress of trying to run a business that has a lot of overhead versus the physical stress of being out in the field every single day for very long periods of time, out in the elements. Just a different type of stress. And keep in mind, if you're going to go past 500,000, just know that stress just changes. It does not go away. And you might actually do better dealing with the physical stress stress instead of the financial, because it might just run you crazy dealing with one or two employees that make a bunch of mistakes and a couple trucks that constantly are breaking down. And that could literally just be so stressful that you should stay smaller. There is no pride in growing your business. If it's going to make the business run you and run you into the ground and your relationships and your family and your finances, it's not worth it. So that's why I like people to take this little rest stop. See if this is the size of business you want to stop at for a while, potentially get some cash in the bank so you can quickly grow to this level, and there'll be less financial stress if you have plenty of cash to deploy throughout this wilderness. And making that journey through the wilderness is something I do recommend you do quickly and hopefully in one year or even one spring rush. At Augusta Lawn Care, that's what we teach is try to get through this level. Usually, you know, 18, 20,000amonth in revenue to 50, 60,000amonth in revenue. Try to do that in literally one month, 40, 45,000amonth of revenue. Try to get there in one spring rush. Because if you can do that, it eliminates this massive chunk of time where you can get disillusioned and lost. I see people wandering around in this wilderness for years, 4, 5 years, at 300, 400,000 in revenue, and they're not making any more money than if they just went solo with one guy in the truck. And that can be very, very hard to deal with. And that's why I recommend speed through this stage, this wilderness of growth, using the techniques we talked about. And stay tuned, because I'm gonna make another video about what you gotta do to get from 500,000 all the way to a million. I'm Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com subscribe to the channel, for crying out loud. I make these videos for free. And if you like it, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com going into a ton of depth, and I think it'll be useful for you. I really do.