How to Build Systems and Reduce Employee Damages

What I would be looking for if I was you is one thing. Just take one thing away from the entire conference. Hey everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're doing a Q and A and answer like 15 or 20 questions probably of come from Facebook. And so we're gonna go ahead and jump right into that. Two things right off the bat. First of all, sorry for my sniffing and looking like my eyes are all puffy and everything. I have allergies to this time of season when the pollen's falling and everything. So I get all stuffed up and all that good stuff. Sorry about that. I'm doing just fine though and I will make it through secondarily. The conference Landscape Summit, it's already starting to fill up, so you're definitely going to save your spot. It's coming up in January 2020 and it's going to be three days if you haven't been into it already. It's just going to be a great event. Bring your manager, bring your operations person, bring your office person. I'm going to have my team on staff, my managers, my office people doing keynotes, giving talks and we're still seeing if we're gonna actually have breakout sessions for crew leaders and breakout sessions for office people. But regardless, there'll be lots of content for everybody. So bring them. We're gonna try to get some buses to take us over and do a tour of Augusta Lawn Care, my facility and it's gonna be really, really awesome. Get to learn, meet a bunch of people and it'll be jam packed full of learning. We don't do a bunch of advertising. I'm not trying to sell stuff there. There's not gonna be other people trying to sell stuff there. There's not a trade show. It's just straight learning and it' business. We're going to talk very little about equipment or anything like that. It's marketing, it's hiring, it's system, it's procedures, it's building, it's scaling, it's planning. It's really the groundwork for your business. And so it includes meals for breakfast and lunch on the Friday and the Saturday. You come in Thursday and we have that evening and then all of Friday, all of Saturday. So it's going to be a great, great event. It's a lot of learning. It's a long, it's a marathon of learning. But I think it's going to be life changing for some people and definitely chang their business. So check that out. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and make sure you sign up today. So let's go ahead and jump right into these questions and I'll just go right through them. I haven't read any of these yet, but just yesterday I posted on the landscape business course group, if you haven't, if you're not a part of it, make sure you join the group on Facebook and that way I can get your questions. So Andrew Martin asked a question. First off.

He says marketing towards more landscape construction with established lawn companies. For example, dirt work, retaining walls, sod patios. Also how to cut expenses without cutting quality or needed tools. Okay, so there's two questions here. And Andrew Martin asks marketing towards more landscape construction for established lawn companies. Okay, so it sounds like there's you've been in an established lawn care company and now you're wanting to market towards more the landscape construction. And the key word here is established lawn care company. I don't, I feel like a lot of new lawn care companies, 1, 2, 3, 4 years old.

They are, they're chasing the next shiny thing. They're chasing the more glamorous thing of landscape construction with the bigger equipment, cooler projects. And I find, and a lot of times they think better customers, better paying customers. And a lot of times if they can't figure out lawn care maintenance, landscape construction is just a bigger headache. Like if you have little problems and it's annoying for lawn care maintenance, if you try to go take your business and make it into big landscaping jobs, you basically just magnify the size of the problems. Like if you have employee problems, you're going to have more employee problems. If you have cash flow problems, you're gonna have more cash flow problems.

If you have quality control problem, you're gonna have bigger quality control problem. And this time it's gonna be on a $40,000 patio instead of a $40 per mow lawn. So my advice in terms of marketing, you might want to do a brand change lawn and landscape instead of just lawn care. We have specifically stayed with lawn care services because we do not want to get into massive design build because the labor is too specialized. It's too hard to find people that will do that at a decent rate in this labor market. It's very difficult if people leave. And you'd be amazed at how we still get a lot of landscaping projects even though we're called lawn care services with an S. So I think the naming of your business does have something to do with it. I see more and more people that want to transition to landscaping, they'll go from like Bob's lawn care to Bob's landscapes. And it just is again just a terminology aspect. It comes down to what your. So to answer your question, Andrew, someone that's wanting to pivot even if you don't change your name, the pictures and videos and the media you have on your website and your social media really indicates what type of work you do. And so if you have a whole bunch of walls and patios and landscaping jobs that you've done on your website, on your social media, on the newsletter emails that you send out, if you have those, then they're going to start thinking about you more in terms of full service landscaping company instead of just mowing and vice versa. If you're wanting to go the other way and you're wanting to go from landscaping to mowing, same thing, change your change maybe your slogan, change maybe some of the pictures and videos that you have on your website and you will change your image to the type of services that you want to provide. Andrew then went on to ask also how to cut expenses without cutting quality or needed tools.

So when it comes to cutting expenses outside of needless expenses like.

Food, like lunch, having lunch out, and spending $20 every single day, outside of just dumb expenses, the next expense category I look at is labor because it's one of our biggest expenses as a service based business if you have employees. And so that's the first place I'm looking to improve and not cut, not like reduce their hours or reduce their dollars that we pay them. It's more about efficiency. And so how can I make them more efficient, thereby produce more labor, more labor for the same amount of dollars that I spend. And so first thing I would do instead of cutting quality or needed tools is to increase efficiencies. Terry Neely asks when will I start to see any money? Lol. Okay, next one. Robin Snow asks team member inconsistent performance. I would like to help them improve if possible. So training is a big part of this. Training is one of those things that's very difficult in our industry because we don't know how long people are gonna be with us. And it's very hard to like invest a whole bunch in training when you don't think they're gonna be around for very long. So there's this balance of do you hire people that don't have much experience in the industry and you train them a bunch and maybe get them at a lower dollar per hour rate, easier to find and you train them or B you go out and try to find people who are experienced in our industry but they can hit the ground running. You don't have to train them very much. And if they leave in three months, you've actually produced money from them and not just like barely got them to the point where they can start mowing lawns. And so it really depends on your market, depends on your labor market. Honestly this one, in my opinion, a big time, a big amount. If you want to see them improve and they're having inconsistent results, I would really pair them up with somebody that is having consistent results, is more experienced than them and is going to be able to watch over them so that they don't mess anything up on their off days, but then can also point them in the right direction, give them tips, tricks. And so the people in your team that are really, really good and are like kind of like the standard bearers and the ones that kind of set the benchmarks for everyone, those are really important people. You want to make sure you know them very well because they're going to be the people that you put your lower performers or people who are not doing very well or like Robin mentioned, inconsistent performing, performing team member, you're going to put it with that individual. And so if you're going to want to help them, I would say number one, can you train them? Number two, can you.

Have them with someone else that's going to have consistent results and is going to help them? Basically training, but more almost a mentoring position. And then next thing I would say is if you can try to incentivize them in some way, not just money, but incentivize them in ways to get creative about ways to incentivize them to be more consistent. Whether that be tracking like get the yellow slip system and doing that or whether it be giving them a certain truck and trailer if they don't get any yellow slips or if they don't do any damage cases. A lot of times this time of year, damage cases, a big deal is for us, it is for everyone that has employees, people breaking things. How can you incentivize them to not do those things? That would be the three things I would say.

Ismail asks I need some recommendation on systems to run my business when one gets hurt. I had a big injury two years ago and learned somethings but I feel I could use your help and input. Thanks. So this is a good question. This is really what spurred me to make landscapebusinesscourse.com I don't know if I've ever said this but it was about three and a half years ago, I want to say two and a half years ago, August 4, 2016, that I got hurt myself. I got stuck underneath the dump truck with a pto, grabbed the back of my hoodie, strangled me, had to go to the hospital. And in that moment, like for a few weeks, I couldn't really work. And that's when I really realized that I needed to build systems for my business. And luckily I had great people to keep the business going and everything was fine. But systems and procedures are what will run your business when you do get hurt or when you do have to go on a family vacation or when you do have a family emergency. And so.

How to do that, how to make those systems and how to make those procedures, that is a very long discussion. Every single aspect of the business has systems, has procedures. And it's one of those things that I've been thinking about a ton recently because of Augusta and the franchising and trying to create those systems and actually put words to the systems. It's difficult on some of these things to create systems around certain aspects of the business. And I've actually come, this is gonna come from left field, but I've actually found in the process of creating the systems for Augusta Lawn Care and the franchise and actually verbalizing and putting into words the systems that we've created, I found that reporting, this is gonna come from left field for some people. But reporting is a big part of.

Really being have systems and procedures, because how can you know if a system or procedure is effective if you're not tracking the reports and you're not tracking numbers? And so with the Augusta franchise, like, we're really pushing daily, weekly and monthly reporting and really knowing everything from profitability to revenue to labor burden to percentage close of estimates, like knowing all these numbers on a day by day basis so that you can test the system, figure out how it makes any changes to those key performance indicators.

And then continue to improve and whether you alter the system and the procedure. And so that's something I've been thinking about a lot recently. And in terms of getting hurt.

It'S definitely something that you can't do once you get hurt. You can't create systems and procedures in a really a great business that runs well without you. Once you're hurt, it's something that you gotta do now, and God forbid something does happen to you, the business is ready for it and can continue running without you.

Rudolpho Lopez asks or says, I remember you speaking about selling nine applications of fertilizer I've been able to sell four. But how do you go about persuading them to nine? And what are the different types of applications you sell them?

Yes, we have two different treatment packages that we upsell our lawn care customers and our mowing customers for one. First of all, you just want to give them two or three options. So we decided to do two. One's called the basic package, that's the four treatments a year and the other one's called the premium package. The and when, when we give them a 9 and a 4 like that includes core aeration and thatching. So it's not necessarily nine fertilizations. And so it's dependent on your climate in terms of what fertilizations you do, whether that be a weed and feed moss control, lime treatment, grub control.

I'm just trying to think of other ones that we do just like a general 16, 16, 16. Like depending on your climate and your, in your demographic, your geographic depending is going to depend on what you actually implement in those applications. But basically how we kind of pitch it is that the, the basic package will keep your galan green and kind of keep it okay and keeping it, keeping it up to like it won't allow the weeds to overrun everything. It's going to just kind of keep it where it's at now, keep it healthy. The 99 visit program is going to be like it's going to look perfect and it's amazing. And so that's kind of how we sell it. And the different types of applications are going to just vary depending on your market. Hunter Boone Davis asks how to calculate your overhead accurately and what all needs to be overhead.

So some people have different ideas on what overhead is in the lawn care industry. For me, if it doesn't produce income out in the field, it's considered overhead. So labor, for example, some people would say that, you know, overhead is, you know, labor is not overhead. Well, if they're an office person, in my mind they're overhead because they're not producing any income for the business. So in my mind overhead is anything that has a fixed expense, like rent, you know, insurance, all those things, they're fixed expenses that aren't going to change regardless of whether or not you do business tomorrow as well as labor in the office. So those are kind of my very generalization. But overhead is basically anything that's not producing the work. And so the biggest expense that's non overhead and not overhead is labor production, like production for labor hours. And so in terms of determining your overhead. I'd really recommend LMN use their free budgeting software use you can put all your numbers in there and it gives you a dollar per hour that you need to recover for overhead. And so it's really valuable for when you're budgeting and when you're doing your.

Man hour rate. And figuring out what that is is knowing that, okay, is it like 10, 20, 15, what's that dollar amount every hour that you need to recoup just to pay your office staff, pay for the truck insurance, pay for maintenance, like all those other overhead costs and that are a part of your business? Gerardo Hernandez asked on how on average, how long does it take to get out of the field? This is really comes down to personal preference. And for some people it's, and I know I talk so much, like I've said on the other podcast, and things about how you want to get to a million dollars in revenue. For some people, they do not want to and that's totally fine and they should stay solo. So to get out of the field, maybe you have two or three employees and you stay with them kind of working. You have two or three trucks, you have a few employees and you still stay out working out in the field. And like your spouse or a friend might do the office work for you part time or something.

That's totally cool. You got to build the business you want. For some people, having 15, 20 employees and 10, 20 trucks is going to make them completely stressed out. And and so I've been lucky enough to build a great business that has great people. And so like right now as I'm recording this, it's in the middle of the day and they're working and this is where I was able to slot in some time and everything's gonna go fine. Like my phone's not ringing like crazy from them or anything. Like they have it under control. And so that's the business I wanted to create. And it took me, you know, four or five years to do that. And now there's nine, 10 crews and three, four people in the office at all times. And so that's the business I wanted to create. And it's not necessarily the right business. It's not necessarily even the most profitable business. There's other models that work and that might be you in a truck with someone, some guy, and then two other employees. So you have three employees, two trucks, and you can literally still make great money. But how long does it on average get out of the field?

I've seen it range anywhere from four to six years, if someone's. If that's their goal from day one. And again, it really just depends on what type of services you're providing, how much upfront capital you have. Like, if you have a couple hundred thousand dollars to go buy a bunch of trucks, lose money for a couple years by hiring people and figuring things out. Like, you can be out of the field. Out of the field, day one with a few employees. Like, for me, I was out of the field completely.

After three years.

In terms of, like, doing the work completely out. And then.

This year I'm getting out of estimates and I'm not really there as much, and I'm doing this sort of thing.

So in terms of timing, I would say four to six years, if you're really dedicated to getting it done. I did it sooner simply because.

There was money that I was making. I can make money doing this. And so it's not. So thereby I'm able to take money and give it back to the company or not take as much money out of the business because I have other money coming in, and I have a gym and things like that. And so by being out of the business, you are going to leave money on the table from that business. And so in terms of getting out of the working field, I see four to six years, and then like five to eight years, if you actually want to get out of estimates. But again, completely dependent on the scale, how fast you want to grow, how much money you're willing to spend, and also how good of employees you get for those management positions. So Nuna Pavayo, Nuno Paveo asks.

How to start putting a system in place. This is a very broad question. Number one, you gotta identify what the problem is. Like, okay, we are having a problem with complaints. Let's create a system that fixes that. And so that might be the yellow slip system. That might be an incentive program that you take money out of a pool of cash that is dispersed to the employees if there's still money left over at the end of the year. Like, there's so many things you can do. How to put a system in place, you got to recognize the problem in my mind first and then create a system that fixes it. And so whenever someone comes or we're having a big issue at Augusta, it's okay, what system? It's not about, like, let's try not to get too wrapped up in the problem. Like, it's easy. Any of your employees can do that. Anybody in the world can get wrapped up in Problems and issues and what's going wrong. It's how do we think creatively to make a solution for the problem and then create a system that enforces the solution. So that's kind of how I think about it. Jose Cova. Sorry guys. Coat. Jose asked, how do you keep new work coming after June? Oh, good question. What services do you target this time of year?

So, Jose, this is kind of how we broken it down during, during the spring months, we're just focused 100% on recurring maintenance revenue. So mowing and those type of services, that's what we're selling that most of our crew is focused on that we, we have, we have landscaping, we're doing cleanups and all that stuff year round. But we're focused primarily on recurring revenue and setting up mowing customers Come this time of year, as we hit June, July, August, getting hot, mowing slows down a little bit and not so much slows down as much as it speeds up. Like guys can get the jobs done a lot faster. And so there's more labor to go expend at other jobs. So basically what we do in the summer is we focus more on project based work. And so that being said, if you don't do landscaping, there's other things you can do in terms of focusing on figuring out route density. That'd be a big one. I'd be focused on if you're just doing mowing, if you're just a mow, blow and go, like during the summer is when you want to focus on things like route density and really focusing on efficiencies and things. Whereas if you have the capability to do property clamps, bush trimming, even just weeding, just weeding in general.

That'S the time to focus on. It is in the summer. So we will be focused on getting new mowing customers during the spring, but we're booking landscaping jobs deep into the summer. And so it's nice to know too, when you know you've booked out four, six weeks of landscaping jobs, to know that you're going to be able to keep your crew busy when the mowing does. There's less mowing to be done in this June, July, August months. And so I'd really encourage you if you, if you are in just doing mowing, try to figure out ways to do cleanups. And that could just be trimming back bushes, weeding and edging. Like literally those things will keep you busy. Just property cleanups, overgrown houses, going to realtors, going by houses that are overgrown and just asking them if they want to clean up, especially if it's a nice neighborhood and if it's overgrown, looking bad, either contact the real estate agent that it's for sale or go up to the house and just knock on the door. You'd be amazed at how much work you can get. And so I just get really creative during those slow times, during the summer. During the summer it's different than the winter because in the winter they do not need your services. Like there's nothing growing in the middle of summer. Their stuff's still growing. Like if it's overgrown, it's still growing and the grass is still growing, the trees are still growing. And so there's a huge opportunity to go after those properties that are overgrown. Even if you're not doing project based work like walls and patios and things like that, there's still tons of work if you go out and get creative about it.

Marcus Love.

Oh, fun. This is not a question for me. How do you keep life, how do you keep personal life and business life balance? Also, what do you try to capitalize on marketing wise in the middle of summer? So I answer the second question. How do you keep personal life and business life balance? So I'm not very good at doing that.

For me personally, I'm not really good at balance personal and business. I just kind of live my life and sometimes I'm like 100% business. Sometimes I'm like focused more on personal side of things. Whether it be personal like family, church, working out, physical side of things.

I don't think a lot about balance. Honestly, what keeps me centered as a person is probably working out every day and then praying every day from a spiritual aspect and then a physical working out exercise standpoint, like if I don't do those things, I'd be a wreck within a week. And it kind of allows me to. I don't sleep a ton. I try to stay as productive I possibly can. I'm always trying to be more efficient and I kind of have to do that to run the businesses and be thinking forward. And the franchise now is taking a lot of my time developing the systems and stuff and putting those all in writing and legal things and all that. So I'm always trying to take on new stuff too. And so I stay busy and there's not a lot of balance in that. And that's fine for me. I like that I wouldn't like doing the same thing every day. And when I get into the pattern of having to do the same thing every day for months and years, on end, I get kind of agitated. And so I'm always looking for new stuff. I'm always looking to make things better. I'm always looking to grow and expand. And so, yeah, I don't think a lot about balance, to be honest. That will change once I'm, you know, if I get married, if I have kids, like, that all changes. And I'm just not in that position in life right now. So I'm probably not the best person to answer that question. But I do understand now I'm in a different place than most people in terms of I don't have a family, I don't have a spouse. So, like, I can work 20 hours a day and that's fine and enjoy it and that's fine. You can't do that day in and day out. If you have a family, like, it's just not going to work. And to me, family is more important. To me, health is more important than business. And, you know, my spirituality is more important than my business. And so there's going to come times. There's. There's ebbs and flows and there's times in life when you do more business, you need less business. And for me, I don't think about a balance a lot. I just think about what's, what feels right in the moment. And for me, right now, I can focus a lot on the business side of things because I don't have a family. And they would take preeminence over the business. And if and when that time comes. So Kevin Fairburn asked a question.

Is service autopilot really worth the money? Does it make that much difference? Why? So to answer this question, I know a lot of you, a lot of people who even started listening to landscape business course heard a video I made about the different types of software out there. And my recommendations and my recommendations are pretty straightforward. If you're just starting out and you're making less than 50 grand a month, I take a look @lawnpro lawnprosoftware.com if you're making less than like 200 grand a month or 200 grand a year, like Lawn Pro is probably sufficient for you. If you're making over 200 grand a year, service autopilot starts becoming something you want to look at. It is expensive, especially if you're in like that two, $300,000 a year range. It's expensive because it has great functionality, but you have to pay for each of those things. And so you do end up spending like, yes, the starting package is only like $49, but that's without Automations, it's without a client portal. That would be without QuickBooks sync, that would be without.

Employee user mobile, the mobile app portion. So like we spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month. Like we spent, I don't know, I think we spent up to $800 a month before on Service Autopilot and I know we're right now like 5, $600. And so it's not cheap. Is it worth it? Yes. If you had the scale, it is worth it. For the automations, Automations is really the secret sauce of Service Autopilot. It's what they've been building for years and is really powerful. Really like it. That being said, Lawn Pro has automations as well. It's just not as sleek and highly sophisticated and specialized as Service Autopilot. But they do have rudimentary automations that like will send people emails after their estimate was sent and all those sort of things. So it's actually I check out Lawn Pro. The reason I don't have a lot of experience with Lawn Pro is I haven't used it for the past three years but I know they have added those rudimentary automations in there. And so it's something I'd look at and it's literally like super cheap. Like I think it's like 250 bucks and you get full time access to it. So it's super cheap Lawn Pro. But Service Autopilot is great if you're going to scale, if you're going to go to a million plus, like you want to have the software that's going to back you up to do so. And I would recommend getting Service Autopilot and I would only recommend it because that's what I use and I can't recommend anything else at this moment because I haven't actually dug my teeth into it. I've looked at lmn, I've used them a little bit. But from a full service package standpoint I would, I like Service Autopilot. It is expensive and if you're over $200,000 it starts to become.

Starts to become. And I've talked to the CEO Jonathan Patosnik and he said that is where their sweet spot is. Once people hit like a quarter million plus in revenue, that's when people start buying into Service Autopilot. Paul west asked a question you mentioned. Augusta might be eliminating some services in the near future. Which ones and why? Also do you recommend any podcasts or audiobooks? So Paul? Yeah, we are eliminating services even though you know, this year we're still growing revenue probably by like 25%, I want to say year over year, since 2018, we will, in doing so, we will still have cut out services. So trim out where we've stopped doing artificial putting greens. We stopped doing deliveries of material. And so those things, you know, were big chunks of revenue. These weren't super profitable as much as other services that we focused on now. And so even though our, our gross revenue this year will grow, we are cutting services out, which is great when I look at that. I think it's the dream that means you're becoming really profitable. And so that's what we're doing. And why are we doing that? Because I want to get where I don't need specialized labor. I want to get where I don't have specialized drivers for the delivery aspect of things. And it simplifies scheduling by taking out the deliveries. That's why we took that one out. And then for putting greens, like I said, just specialized labor. Hard to find, hard to train people and get really good at it. And in our market, it's not the biggest thing because our, our housing market and our housing values don't really support, you know, installing 20, 30, $40,000 putting greens. We did it, and it just wasn't enough of a demand slash. Not, not so much that, like, I think we could have sold it. It's more the fact of having to hire specialized labor that knows what they're doing and training them really well. And that's harder to scale versus mowing, landscaping and property cleanups and the things that we're focusing on now in terms of audiobooks. Let me think. Oh, yeah, Profit First. The contractor one. So Profit First, Michael Michalowicz. Most people have heard of that one. But there's another one that his contractor actually wrote that is not written by Michael Michalowicz. It's written by his contractor, but it implements plc Profit first for pfc, Profit first for contractors, types of things. So it's just a little more tailored to our industry. It is a good read. I did like it. Another one I was listening to was trying to think. I'm trying to think. It's coming. It's coming.

I listen to Elon Musk biography, but there was one before that. Here, Give me one second. I'll give you one more. It's coming. It's coming. It was come on. Audible loading up. I will tell you in just a second here. So, yeah, Profit first was the last one. I was looking at the automatic customer.

Creating.

Creating a subscription type business. The magic of Thinking big. Those are the last few that I've read. I have kind of been off of audiobooks for a while. I just been really busy. But yeah, any pod. Oh podcast. I always like.

What's it called? Built How I Built It. How I Built it by. I think it's npr. No it's not. I forget who made it. Sorry. How I Built it is a great podcast. It takes on some of the biggest businesses that have become successful and they tell their story over the course of an hour and I really like it. Really, really like it. How I Built It Anyways, move on. Paul west asks, you mentioned one of the best things to advance a company is to be putting out content. How do you do that if you a Hate being in front of a camera? B. Don't have time to even get your work done, let alone learn how to edit videos or be posting to Insta or Facebook. C. Your crews are extremely against being on camera or having anything to do with it.