How to Dominate Spring Rush 2023

Welcome back to the mikeandys podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the mikeandys podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. It's about that time again. Spring rush is finally in full swing. We thought we'd share with you a live stream Mike did over a couple years ago about the checklist that you need to follow to make sure that you're ready. Mike talks about five ways that you can prepare your lawn care business for the spring rush when work estimates, leads and jobs come flying your way. As always, you can find Aldos and more over on the Mike and his YouTube channel. But let's get right into it. Here's how you can dominate the spring rush.

Hey everyone, Mike andes here. Landscape businesscourse.com we're going to go ahead and jump into it. Welcome to an awesome Saturday. I'm going to be trying to do these more often. As you can see, we're trying to get a little more creative here. We got my social handles. Over here we got landscape businesscourse.com oh, you can't see the little cursor. There you go. So we're trying to get a little more creative here, make it a little bit more enjoyable to watch these and not just listen on the podcast. So we're going to go ahead and jump in the day. I'm going to be going over five things that I really recommend you focus on for before the spring rush. Now, for some of you, you're literally have just started the spring rush. If you're in certain markets, you're already starting to mow. We started to mow last week, but we're going to go ahead and talk about the five things I think you need to do before the spring rush. So if you have a few more weeks, you have time to do the things we're going to talk about today. Right now, I'm not looking at your questions. I'm trying to keep them off of my screen. But I'm going to talk for the next few minutes about these different things that I think you should be doing before the spring rush. And then we're going to jump right into your questions. Now, if you're asking why I have these really cool overlays that I now have created for us all. The reason is, as I mentioned on the video earlier this week, is we are hiring not one, but two more social media folks to be able to produce content for our industry. And so I'm going to be getting on all of these platforms and actually posting consistently instead of this like once in a blue moon, creating a TikTok. So I'm trying to reach a younger demographic. I'm trying to get them ingrained in the business of lawn care and landscaping before they're in their 40s and their 50s and they're struggling with things, trying to give them, you know, some sort of help in that area. So we are hiring two more people. So to cover those costs, I am creating these banners to be able to kind of fund that operation. So let's go ahead though and jump into today's topic, which is the five things I think you need to do before the spring rush to get ready again. I know some of you are in the middle of it, but trust me, it only gets worse, which is a good thing. From here it's only getting busier. You're only going to get more and more estimates, more and more phone calls. It's only going to increase in scale and quantity. And so we, what do we need to do now? Like even if it's this week, weekend that you need to focus on things that you need to do, number one is you have to this, this is going to surprise some of you that why it's number one, because I don't talk a whole lot about this. But that is you've got to create a plan for your physical and mental health. As we head into the spring rush. If you're going to be working 12, 14 hour days in the field and then coming, coming home and doing estimates, you need to have a plan, a schedule. You need to know what's going on when it comes to your mental health and your physical fitness. If you don't have a, a fitness regimen, if you're not waking up at a certain time to be able to get some time in for workouts, you need to get that stuff scheduled now. If you can get it done now, you don't have to think about it come spring rush. All the things I'm talking about today is really trying to take off things off your calendar, your to do list, off of your mental checklist. So that way when it comes to the spring rush, you can actually focus on doing work. Because getting money and getting more customers. Because spring rushes, the rush of spring is created by demand, the demand curve increasing as demand goes up, your cost per click and your customer acquisition costs are going to go down. That's the time to be able to pour money and pour fuel on the fire of marketing and on growth. But if you do not have Certain systems in place, like creating a plan for your mental and physical health. You're not going to be able to take advantage of the high demand and the low customer acquisition cost. You're going to like, oh, no, I can't spend money on market. I can't hire anybody right now. Like, I'm just so overwhelmed. So create a plan now. All right, when are you going to wake up? When are you going to work out? Are you going to go to the gym? Are you going to do it at home? Do you need to get a program? Do you need to get a trainer? You need to invest in a trainer at a gym or online or get a peloton bike. I don't care what that system is, but you need to have a plan for your physical and your mental health. All right, Are there going to be certain times that you require yourself to check out when you come home from work? So that way, mentally you can unplug, declutter. These are things you've got to create a plan for now because it's going to get crazy. If you've been in this industry for more than just a few years, you know how crazy the spring rush can get. You've got to create that plan for yourself. Now, number two. Oh, I should create. I should make these like, there you go. Let's go. We'll change it on every new one. So number two is ready. Get, you know, really ready your price increase now. All right, so if you're going to do a price increase, I always recommend that you do it in the middle of the spring rush. The reason for that is because you want to do the price increase when it's hard to go out and find supply. All right, so again, we're talking about the supply demand curve. If you don't know what the supply and demand curve is, just search that Mike Andes and I explain on the whiteboard. But when we talk about the supply and demand curve, as the demand increases from. For our services, the other thing that's also decreasing is the supply, like the amount of landscapers available to get more clients is decreasing. And that's usually why people increase their prices during the spring, so that they can actually not have too much work. And so what I would recommend you do if you're going to, if you know you need to increase your prices, and I would recommend that probably 95% of landscapers raise their prices. So if you know that's what you want to do, get your price letter, your price increase letter ready, get your email ready, have the list of the customers that you want to raise ready, have what prices they're going to be raised to ready, do all of that now. If you need to run reports, if you need to go back and look at clock in and clock out times, if you need to somehow figure out who's underpriced and overpriced, go for it. I talked yesterday about doing these blind price increases sometimes, and that's better than doing nothing at all. Because this is what's going to happen for so many people watching my content, is they're going to tell me like when, when they know they need increased prices. Guess what they're going to tell me in June, July. You know what? I'm going to wait until winter so I can have some time so I can run reports, figure out who's going. I'm going to increase prices and I'll do that next year. But that is one of the most fundamental levers of the business. We talked this at conference. Price is one of the biggest levers in your business. And what people, you know, what happens is you get so busy with the spring rush, you don't have time to run reports, you don't have time to send out the letters to the, the clients, you don't have time to take all the emails on the phone calls that come in after you increase the prices. So what do you do? You do nothing. And then what happens is the spring rush comes, you realize you're, as you already know, you're underpriced, and then you're literally stuck because you don't have the time to go make the price letter, the pricing increase letter, send the email out, figure out who you're going to increase the prices, what their prices need to be at, do that. Now. I'm literally telling you, do that this weekend. And if you're like, oh, you know what, that's going to take me weeks to do that. You just need to increase prices blindly, like I talked about yesterday. Literally like, okay, from 0 to 30, I'm going to raise those people all $5 per cut. Okay, from 30 to 40, I'm going to raise them $7 per cut from, you know, or 50, $50 and up. I'm going to raise $10 per cut. I would rather have you do that and talk about speed like we talked about yesterday and get things done than paralysis by analysis and trying to figure out all these reports and all the rest of it. But if that's your character, if that's you, your personality is to have the reports and do all of that stuff, you better make sure you're doing that now because you're not going to have time in the spring rush. Right? So that's number three. Number no, sorry, that was number two. Number three is hire early. This is going to be the hardest thing if you have employees in 2021 is getting employees, attracting good talent. We have seen a dramatic increase in the, in how hard it is to find good employees this year. I can almost guarantee you, if you, if you're paying attention right now, this whole new 1.9 stimulus package coming out of the government that is going to make it very, very difficult to find good employees this year. Especially if you're in a market where you're paying 10, $12 an hour. Because if someone works 40, 40 hours in a week, they're going to get $400 or 450. Well, guess what? Right now, if they do nothing and they sit at home playing Xbox, they're making 300 a week on unemployment. So it's going very difficult for your entry level labors this year. So if you're like, oh yeah, we're going to get busy in a few weeks, I'm going to start hiring then. No, you start interviewing now. You start putting out ads on Craigslist and Facebook. And indeed now if you don't, you're going to, this is what's going to happen. You're going to get really, really busy. You're going to need the labors, you're going to need more employees to be able to produce the work. But you're not going to take advantage of the spring rush simply because you don't have the employees. And you're not going to have the employees because you're going to go try to find them when you need them actually out working in the field. And you're not even going to have the time to go interview them and put up ads and manage the applications and call references. So what you're going to do, you're going to hire whoever has a pulse, whatever warm body with two hands can come to work you, you're going to hire them and they're going to create infinite problems for you the rest of the season. If you mismanage the spring rush, it will cause you to create poor decisions that will affect the rest of the year. So what you need to do is plan for it. Start putting up your ads. Now, there's no reason you can't do interviews right now and then give them a job, a good job offer for starting in three to four weeks. We've done that three to four months in advance before and gotten great talent. So the reason is if most good employees have a current job, they're not unemployed. Most really good, you know, grade A employees in this industry, they already have a job. They're not unemployed right now. Therefore, they have to give their two to three weeks notice anyways. So don't think like, oh, I don't really need. I'm not really there yet. I don't have quite enough work. Like I'm just going to see until I need them. No, you need to hire them now, give them a start date out in the future, and then from a scheduling standpoint, you know that you've got to fill the schedule more given a certain start date. Okay? So I had highly, highly recommend that you go out and use, indeed, Craigslist, Facebook. Create the ads now, set up interviews, call the references when you have the time. Right now you'll actually weed through some people because you don't really need them. You don't need them tomorrow, so you're not in a rush. When you're in a rush, you start making bad decisions. When you are pressured to get labors tomorrow, you make bad decisions. When you're pressured to go buy a truck tomorrow, you make bad decisions. You do not want to get in a point in a place where you start making bad decisions in your business simply because the amount of pressure coming from customers, the amount of work coming in, that is not what you want in the spring rush. Hire now and give people a job offer starting in three, four, five weeks down the road. And if you get two or three good applicants, stagger them. Okay, we're going to have you start April 1st, you're going to start April 7th, you're going to start April 14th. Just stagger them. And then you know that the spring rush is going to pick up and you can schedule accordingly when it comes to projects and actually putting enough budget hours on the schedule. All right, number four. Oh, this is a great segue. Look at this. I'm going to put this up here while I talk about this one. I didn't even expect that. Finish your website and social media accounts. I've talked to so many people that like, oh, man, this coming winter I'm gonna. This is like June. This is June. Oh, man, I just don't have the time to set up my website and set up my Facebook accounts. I don't have time to get pictures. I'm gonna have to do that next winter. It's June. You're gonna you're gonna sit around with a bad website and bad social media that has no pictures, no video, no personality. You're selling on there, no engagement with your audience. You're going to do that the next six and seven months, eight months, because you don't have the time. So right now, right now is when you need to dedicate yourself to go get some pictures, go get your website. If you need to use this, go for it. I don't care if you do or not, go use Weebly Squarespace. There's so many different places you can just get started. This is a premium product, okay? This is a premium product. If you want SEO and design and unlimited changes and all the rest of it, go for it. But I don't care if you're not online right now, you need to go start, you need to go do it now. You're going to take, you're going to take the next 24 hours. You're going to lock in. I don't care if you don't have to sleep tonight, you're going to get the website done. Because in two to three weeks, four weeks, when the spring rush is hot and heavy, you aren't going to think about it. You aren't going to have time. And you should, you should be busy doing the work and actually creating revenue for your business and focusing on growth and being able to double down on getting customers when the demand is high. Get all those things taken care of now. Number five, last one. We gotta change this every so often. Here we go, number five, last one. Do all your little improvements and purchases now. All right, so if you need more weed eaters, if you need more bins, if you need to get more weed whacker line, if you need to improve the efficiency of your shop layout and where things are hanging up and the flow is not good and things are on the ground, you know, you need to organize things more. By the way, we're on our fifth one. We only have several likes on this video. Please hit the like button. We have like 80 people watching this on YouTube and Facebook. Just smash it and we'll get to this last this fifth one. All right, number five, do all your little improvements now. All the little purchases. If you need more rakes, if you need more shovels, if you need to organize things, if you need things on your software, if you know there's little things that you need to improve in the business, do them now because you're not going to have time. I can't stress this enough, and I'm going To I just already know. I'm going to have a consulting call and I'm going to try and get it to be alive where the person's literally everything I say, they're like, oh, I just don't have time right now. I'm just so busy. And I'll do that next winter. That happens like all the time to me. Please don't be that person. Go figure those things out. You. For some of us, we're in the middle of spring rush. But if you have a spring rush and your mowing season starts in April or mid April or even the next couple weeks here in March, please go do all of these things now. Do the little improvements now. Organization, shop all of your tools, your fertilizers, where things are kept, where you keep debris, making sure your tires are not bald. Why would you go into spring rush with bald tires? You're asking for a breakdown. Everyone asked me like about used cars, used trucks, like, why go in them? Look, do your maintenance now. Go do. Go hire a mechanic to look at all of your trucks and make sure everything's looking good. Do it now. Because in the spring rush, you can't afford to have a truck go down. You can't afford to have a truck in the shop for three days getting fixed because a timing belt broke. All right, You've got to do that, deferred that recurring maintenance now. Get your oil changes done now. Why are you going to the spring? What's rush with bald tires and bad brakes? You're asking for trouble. You're asking for a breakdown. In the time when you need to be making money to do all those little things in our business, that is the minutia. Do it now. If you need new logos, all of that stuff you need to get done today. All right, so those are the five things. I'm going to go ahead and hop over into the comment section. So let's go here. Comment section. I am going to move to the top here on the comments and go ahead and go through those. I have a few minutes. Oh, I got about 15 minutes. So let me go through as many questions here as I can. Go ahead and comment. Oh, you know what? I think I got a little banner here. Yeah. Post questions in the. I'm so excited about this. We're posting right now a landscape business course Facebook group. We're posting on my personal Facebook page and we're posting on YouTube at the same time. I love technology. All right, back to comments. I gotta take this down. Comments. Here we go.

Thank you so much. For making landscape summit 2023 an amazing experience for all of we had such a good time that we can't wait another year for the next one, so you don't have to either. Coming this October 16th, we're holding a whole new Landscape Summit. We've outgrown our hometown and we need a much bigger and better location to host the largest business conference the green industry has ever seen. For the first time, we're holding Landscape Summit in Louisville, Kentucky. Start your week out with great talks from industry experts and key notes to remind candies that will complete change how you do business. Once you're done, head over to Equip Expo just down the street at the Kentucky Expo Center. This isn't like any event we've held before, but we need your help to make it happen. So get your tickets now@mike gandies.com summit.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Sounds great. Hey, my Covid shot. Oh, mercy. Hey, yay. Is a tough decision for me, Jeff. Hey, Ron. My trailer is still frozen to the ground. Need some spring vibes. I hope this is bringing spring vibes to you, Ron. It's coming. I promise. Every single year after winter, spring shows up. I promise. I promise. It's been a long winter. It's been cold, but spring is coming. And this is why you need to do these five things. There's some spring vibes for you. All right. White Pine Land Stamping. Hi Mike. We were trying to change all our maintenance customers over to full service only on a contractual basis. Do you have any thoughts on that? My thoughts behind it is it is. It is. We were flying by the seat of our pants before and now with a GM in place, I need us to have things in place for him to schedule as needed and can follow the contracts. Also, I see that it would add value to company if we ever sell. Okay, good thoughts. So in terms of you're switching from per service based pricing to contractual based pricing, what you need to do is you need to sell the customer on the benefits and you can both ways. Whether you're going contractual to, you know, page time or from page time to contractual, regardless whether you're increasing prices, you need to focus on the benefits of the customer. So when we're raising prices, we don't say, oh, we're so sorry, we're raising prices and all the rest of it. By the way, this cursor doesn't show. That's horrible. Anyways, we don't show the negatives. You want to always focus on the customer. They don't care about Your business, they don't care about, you know, what you need to pay for the cost of things going on. Look, they just care about themselves. Let's just be honest. So what you got to do is you got to pitch everything to their benefit. So why are we going from per cut prices that they've maybe had for years to contractual? Why you want to tell them, look, we want to make a budget friendly option that you can depend on the same price every single month. Here's why we're doing it. Always pitch it to the customer in a really good way. Here's your dollar amount, which, by the way, last June you paid $240 on your new 12 month contractual agreement. It's gonna be 199 or whatever it is. It's gonna be a lower number because you're gonna have no 12 month payments. Right? So you always got to pitch it in the best interest of the customer. This is negotiation 101. Like whenever you're trying to negotiate with someone or convince somebody of anything, you've got to think in their best interest. When you talk to your employees about changing a system, improve, you know, making pay for pay for performance, everything needs to be from their perspective. They don't care about if it's better for you. Okay.

Watching from the shop. Let's go. Burnett, welcome.

Okay.

The spring rush is upon us. Okay. Well, Eric, I think, you know, I definitely think it's a premium product. I mean, in terms of the, the website cost. But if you go out and try to find someone to do your SEO and then we have unlimited changes, every single. You can just literally email us and literally within 24 to 48 hours, get stuff up. Pictures, videos, change banners, time of year. If you're like, hey, I want to put this banner on the top for, you know, we do all of that. There's no extra cost. We meet every single quarter in terms of SEO for every single website, et cetera. All right, Kylie Hoyos, great tips. Thanks for all you do for small businesses. All right, hit that. Thumbs up. Let's go. I'm just getting through some of these and we'll get to actual questions probably here in a second.

Thank you, Brian. Appreciate that.

Oh, thank you, Tony. Great. Okay. Super muddy up here in Iowa, but we need. We are getting spring cleanup clients already. Let's go. Kylie, Jerome. Should I go after property management company that have volume of work but low price, or should I go after my own customer base? Only go after high volume, low price. If you're just getting started and you need momentum. That's the only time. Watch the video I did a couple days ago. About the only time I would lower my prices is to get momentum. And, and if this, if you need it now, go for it. But I would do it now. And as you go into the spring rush, start getting less and less of those contracts. I will not go sign a long term property management contract. Someone just give me $499. Let's go. Super chats on YouTube. Let's go. I will not go sign a long term contract with a property management company where I'm locked in for the rest of the year. Because in the spring rush I want to be taking advantage of my customers that are willing to pay a premium price for my premium service. I do not want to be chasing around taking pictures for a property management company. I would not go into the trap of going for those companies that offer you money for repossessed and foreclosed houses and they want you to take pictures. That is an absolute rabbit hole. Even if you're just getting started, I wouldn't recommend it. It's a rabbit hole. You got to take so many pictures and they won't pay you because of.

The insanity of them wanting the pictures from every angle of the property. So if you're getting started, don't do it. But in terms of pricing overall, I don't mind you going lower to get momentum when you first get started. I made a video about that a couple.

Zachary, are you cross posting the same ad on different platforms? Are you creating different. Okay, this is a good question. Ads need to be specific to the platform. So if I am doing video, for example, I can, as long as I'm thinking about it in the creative process, make a video for multiple platforms. I can like, I can think. Okay, for example, you can't post a two minute video on Instagram ads. You can on Facebook, but you can't on Instagram. So I'm going to be thinking, okay, 15 seconds or less if I want to make this video for Instagram and Facebook. Okay, now I'm thinking about okay, and I'm also going to put this on YouTube. I've got to make sure the first five seconds I actually show my brand and I have some sort of a hook to keep them watching. Okay, that's got to. Your creative process is going to be governed by if you're going to cross do go across platforms using that same creative. That being said, I am not going to traditionally use the same video across all platforms or pictures. And I'm Going to make sure I change it up if I am. Okay. So more importantly than trying to use the same video or creative or picture on different platforms, I would focus on creating more content and seeing what's working on those platforms and then adjusting accordingly. But there's certain things that you just, you have certain confines. Like for example, Instagram, most people are looking at pictures more than if you go to say obviously YouTube. But like Facebook, video is usually going to do better. So there's certain platforms that do better with certain types of creative based upon the demographics, what type of people are on that platform as well as the just the physical constraints constraints that that platform puts on you in terms of media. Like, like I said, 15 seconds or less you want to have if you're doing Instagram, you know, you can do long form video if you're doing Facebook. But you better make sure you keep their attention or else they're just going to, you know, scroll on. Right.

All right.

Mike Eisenhardt, thinking about pulling the trigger on send gym with a small office. I feel the cost be worth it and we would actually get postcards out. What are your thoughts on this type of software that integrates with CRM? I like it. We have tested this and not seen it perform as well against digital. However, I'm not against it because you can automate syndrome and I do like that fact. However, again, I'm comparing against the cost. Let's say I've spent a dollar per door hanger that let's say I do 10 neighbors around each of my clients. The question I have is, okay, that's $10. What if I do door hangers to those people when I'm mowing next time and it takes me five minutes to knock all their houses like, or I even pay my employees to do it and I'd rather give them $5 instead of paying $10 a send gym. Right. So that's where my mind kind of goes. But again, if you're super busy, you want things automated. That's a great place to get started. Anything that you can automate in terms of that side of things is great. We have just not seen a great ROI from, you know, print in comparison to Digital the past 12 months.

Juan, if you want to do brick patios and need more experience, you aren't going to be on my channel. I am not the best by no means at brick patios. Let's see here. Have you ever seen adding overages into the contracts? I would have some sort of fine print in there.

About like just making sure. That hey, if things are not included in this contract, there's gonna be an upcharge and it's gonna be based upon, you know, a dollar amount per hour or it's going to be a based on estimate per service or something like that. Like where they have to agree or approve of any added services. And that price would be in addition to this set contract. So for example, your contract has mowing, weeding and bush trimming included and then all of a sudden it snows. That's not including the contract. It needs to be clear in the contract though, the added services are going to be given an estimate for a. On a per basis, a per service price and they would have to accept that separately.

Hey, Mike. Last year I grossed $95,000, netted 68. I have about 50 weekly accounts with a minimum of $45 per cut. This year I, I'm going to have two employees, one in their own truck set up with a ramp rack. Great job. Emmanuel. Thought there was a question coming there. Tony Lev toured. Oh, thank you, brother. I appreciate you guys supporting that. And I know it is a premium product so I don't, I don't blame whoever comment definitely that's definitely true. And one other employee calling with me all day. Is there anything you would recommend for me in my situation? Emmanuel, know that you're growing very quickly and know that you're profit percentages last year that were like 65, 70%. That's not happening this year. Just get accustomed. Know that it's part of growth. Be okay with that, but make sure you track it and you're. Make sure you're charging appropriately to your customer. As you do grow, you're going to have more overhead. You have employees, you have shop space now. You have storage, you have more trucks, more insurance. You've got to keep in mind that you're obviously your. Your profit percentages are going to go down simply because of overhead. Guys, let's get Mike a like. Yes, get me a like. Come on. I deserve a like Saturday and I'm here live. I stayed up till 2am making these graphics for you guys. Let's go, Emmanuel. Also with my customer base and all the emails and info I have, should I send all my previous clients and a la carte for all services with the price I can provide on their property specifically. Yeah, I'm a big fan. If you're going to raise prices, literally send people an email saying the date you're starting and then the prices for the upcoming year. Don't address it. And Then try to go on this long diatribe of why you're raising prices and you know why and all the things that you're benefit. Don't do that. Just be like, hey, we're starting on this date for mowing. Here's the prices for your season this year, weekly, bi weekly. Here's. Maybe you have some other a la carte stuff you want to throw in there. You're raising prices. Just go for it. Assume the date of service and assume the prices are good. Put them on the schedule and you only hear from them if they have an issue with it. And yes. Or one or two people are going to call you after the first month of invoicing and be mad because you didn't tell them about the price increase. They simply didn't get the email. Okay, Mike, already at 100k in revenue this year after applying what we learned at Landscape Summit. Yearly revenue last year was $250,000. Jeffrey, I'd like to implement profit sharing for Q2. Is there a percent you'd recommend also as four to six employees? Is it okay to me implement at this time? Yes, as soon as you get three employees, in my opinion need to have profit sharing. The Mount Vernon location just hit four and they implemented a few weeks ago before they hit that. And so you want to have profit sharing in terms of percentages. We talked about very specifically Jeff, at.

Landscape Summit a couple. A couple months ago at the conference. So definitely watch that one again. But in terms of just a short notes, 10 to 25% is going to be given to the employees based upon their role. So a general manager is probably going to get more and then frontline employees are probably 10% and then just split up based upon how many people are out in the field. So if you have 20 employees, they're technically getting half a percent of the profit. 10 divided by 20. If you have two people, they're getting 5% each. But then again the profit's gonna be lower because a smaller business. So it scales. All right, so but definitely check we what we did a couple hours of this at Landscape Summit. Watch that one again, Jeff, just to kind of refresh your mind on general managers versus employees, et cetera. All right, I'm debating on switching from bulk bark mulch to bag mulch because I believe it would be easier and faster to install. We can stack bags in zero turn. The only downsides is that's 45 a yard for bags and 27 for bulk. Thoughts on what I should do? I actually really like this idea when you're small, if you're only doing like one or two a month, bagged is great. Now if you're doing large installs, you know, 20 yards, all of a sudden the 13, $18 per yard difference really starts to add up. Right. And as you begin to grow and get even bigger, you're going to simply get a bin at your shop space. You're going to have a space where you have the bark bark mulch there and you have a loader and all the rest. But that's down the road when you're first getting started. I like this idea. Keep in mind, inventory is, kills cash flow. Having 400, not 400, let's say 100 bags of bark bark mulch, that's, that's $2,700 that you go to store. And inventory kills cash flow. It costs money to store things. The space to store it, okay, that alone costs money. If you're paying $11,000 for shop space and you take a quarter of it up in, in storing these bags, you better make sure you know that that costing you $250 a month. So there's pros and cons. As you grow bigger, I would lean more and more to actually having the, you know, using it in bulk because you're having more jobs. You're doing 20 of those in a month, not doing one or two. That's when you want to save the, what is it, $18 per yard. But as when you're first getting started, bags are great, really efficient. I like it. I just. And all my existing clients handwritten thank you cards with a little flyer with a referral deal. Are there any other things you recommend me doing to get more, retain more customers? We talk about that a lot. In terms of referrals, I really like the idea of sending an email and saying and asking them to forward this email to their friends. Possibly. But at the end of the day, a lot of times your best referrals are literally neighbors talking to each other. So I would double down in areas. Did someone just give me $5? Let's go. Tony. Bless your heart. I didn't even know your last name. You gave me $5. Okay, I'm gonna do a couple more of the. Let's see here. Do you have websites for hardscapers? There's lots of training out there. Stan Genic is really great. There's a podcast like how to hardscaping. Really great. I'm not the best guy for hardscaping. I'll answer your business questions though. Vancouver island just blew up overnight the phone's ring. Yes, it is sunny outside right now in the Pacific Northwest, which is crazy. And so, yes, the phones are ringing. It literally snowed a couple weeks ago. Hey, Mike, what's your best advice for lawn care business? Just starting off to get clients as a female business owner. All right, Natasha, I love when the females get involved in this industry. They kill it with the HR and the people side. Okay, so this would be my recommendation. Double down on your usp. Your USP stands for unique selling proposition. Well, we're going to hit 100 people live here. Let's go. Okay, so, Natasha, I would double down on usp. Your USP is your unique selling proposition. Your unique selling proposition is that you are a female. Double down on it. Be in the videos. Make it an avatar that's on your website of you in your uniform. Like make a little digital art. Like that's fine. Like, don't do what this is, which I'm going to show you. Like this right now is just a picture of me, which I can't now you can't see because that's horrible. Okay, here, don't do this where you see me like your person, your face. You don't need to do that. But create like an avatar, like a digital art. And now I got to go back to my comments so people can see, but my banner is still up. Give me one second, everyone just bear with me. I'm still learning this stuff. I'm still learning. What I would do, Natasha, is double down it. Create that avatar. Make sure it's in all of your. Your social media. You're the video, the ads. We're at 96 people. Let's go. We gotta get to 100. No one log off. There's a freeze. There's a moratorium on going off the live stream. We are at 96 people. Okay, next question. Do you do websites for hardscapers? Yes, we do. Lawn care. Web design does do it for webs for hardscapers, absolutely. We just basically have you fill out services pages and we can create different pages like patios, walls, etc. Emmanuel, how do you find your exact overhead price and how do you break it down or divide it to break it down monthly to make sure I am having enough to pay an employee and make profit for the company. Okay, first and foremost.

Lmn, great option for free budgeting software. Go in there, create a free account. You can do a lot of budgeting and figure out things like percentage of overhead, et cetera. It's free. 100% free. I'm not endorsing their CRM as much. This is their budgeting product for especially lawn care and recurring services. Now, that being said, the biggest thing, if you don't even want to get involved with that, that seems daunting. The biggest thing you need to control is the biggest variable cost in your business, and that is labor. That's why we talk about pay for performance. Oh, I have a banner for that. I have a banner for that. Let's go. Let's go. Oh, there it is. So we, you know, pay for performance is super big. Watch the other stuff that I do. But at the end of the day, pay for performance is going to allow you to.

Make a consistent and level profit margin much more so because you know exactly what the percentage of your revenue is going to the labor side of things. You've got to get your. Your. The. The revenue that goes up and down or like cost to go up and down as level as possible. The same way you pay insurance the same every single month. And you can depend on it. You can budget using those numbers you've got. You want to do the same thing for your labor and paper performance is important to do that. Okay, next question. Don't worry about being a female. Yes. Cut. Can lawn care web design make services like security and janitorial? James? Not yet. We're not set up for that yet. We don't specialize in it. I'm not the best at SEO around those things. And so our team, we're not really doing that. And the green industry is what we feel very confident in. Emmanuel, should I use Yardbook and send invoices with the tip option? Yes, do that. It backs up to QuickBooks also. What are your thoughts on that? I'm not a huge fan of QuickBooks integrations with CRM right now because when QuickBooks changes things, the CRMs are playing catch up. And a lot of times you're gonna get double entries, double payments, double customer things. Weird stuff happens. And so I, we, we keep QuickBooks and our CRM separate. But in terms of the tip option. Yes, use the tip option. How do you get in touch with commercial accounts in the city for mowing bidding? I wouldn't get in contact with the city if I was you personally. Unless you're in a small town and they have limited options in terms of big players. In terms of commercial accounts, you need to cozy up with your property managers in your local area.

Everybody knows how important a good website is to running a successful business. That's why our web Experts build in features like integrated Google reviews and homepage estimate forms that will build your brand's reputation. So if you need to expand your online presence, our team at Lawn Care Web Design has you covered. We combine great designs with search engine optimization into the perfect website for you. We handle every aspect of your website for a fraction of the cost of other web design services and outperform the SEO of our competitors consistently. You can find out more@lawncarewebdesign.com.

All right, Zachary, what platform are you using so your estimator can share their videos with the crews that are performing the work? Are you using YouTube and making the videos private and then labeling them by address? No, we don't use YouTube because it takes too long to upload videos. I would highly recommend WhatsApp. It will take about 10% the time that it takes to upload to YouTube. It compresses the file, but it's still very clear enough for the crew. On the day of the job, create yourself a group in WhatsApp and just name it estimates. And literally, if you're the only person in the group, you just send videos after doing a job to that WhatsApp group and then name it the customer's last name so that when the day of service, when you they are, when the cut, the client is, is on the job, on the schedule, you search their name and then send that video. Forward it to your employees. All right, we're still at 94 people on the stream. We should hit the like button, folks. We're going in for the home stretch. A few more minutes here. How late in the spring should I continue to do door hangers for grass mowing? You should be doing door hangers and door knocking while you have time. And then what's going to happen is demand picks up and you get super, super busy. You're not going to have time. You're going to be working, making money, doing estimates. So what you should be doing then at that time is scale back on door hangers and then pick up on the social media advertising stuff that you don't need to spend time and you spend money instead of. Because if I can go make $300 in a day and I but then not go door hangers, why wouldn't I want to spend $50 of that 300 extra that I made on ads on Facebook and all the other platforms that I can next door and Instagram and YouTube and all these other places? Why would I not want to do that when I don't have time? So when you have time, focus on those things that you can do hand to hand combat with. When you don't have time, that's when you double down on the any up your your advertising budget on on other marketing methods. Okay, let's see here. One second. Tony, thank you for the money. I need to answer your question. Hey Mike, is there any email address that I can reach you at? Yeah, in the comments there's a landscape businesscourse gmail.com but hey, I do not answer those emails. Very good. I'm going to be perfectly honest, the franchisees get first dibs on my inbox and it takes me a while but my inbox is down there and I do usually get Back to you 99% of the time. How many employees should I hire? One or two as a startup? Natasha, it depends on what you expect to spend on marketing. If you're just getting started but you have 10, $15,000 in marketing set aside for this spring rush, definitely you should be thinking about hiring somebody because you have the money to go deploy and bring in leads. If you don't have that money, you're going to be probably slower growth and you might want to take your time when it comes to hiring. Mike, in your experience, at what point should one build a shop? Design, build maintenance company currently running out of a storage unit and it works. But it's hard. This is tough. So this is why we have command center for the franchisees. Oh great segue. No, I'm not gonna put a banner up. This is why we have the command center for the franchisees. Building a shop with an office, very expensive Internet utilities. You have the whole building process like right now I'm going through. It's a pain in the neck. It's an absolute pain. If you can get around that and have where you just have shop space like storage facility in terms of like even just graveled area at someone's property and you have like a mobile storage container or even like a mobile office. I'd recommend that like way before, before you actually start building like a building and bidding land. Like I'd be looking at millions in revenue before I would recommend doing that for someone. Honestly, it's a massive overhead and distraction from your core business.

Please tell us about your website building service and how it compares to other similar services. Facebook user this must be coming from the group. Yeah, so we, we charge 399 per month. Check it out on lawn carewebdesign.com I make a whole video about it right on the homepage. Watch that in Terms of being similar to other services. There are cheaper services out there. Yes. Do I feel like we provide great value for the 399? Yes. Because we do SEO unlimited changes. We're good. We're good. I'm really confident what we do and I'd say 98% of the people that use our service like it. We have. Nobody has canceled Long care web design to be perfectly honest. Even though we make that process really simple. There's been no one canceled besides one person that closed their company altogether. Drop the likes, guys. Come on. Basically bros, let's go. Drop those like it's Saturday here. I'm live on this. We've been here for 40 minutes and I stayed up like I said till 2am to make these graphics for you all and do all this stuff now paying for the software. Drop the likes. Trying to get out of the field this year but have a self employed. Any help in how to overcome this flaw? Junior, watch the video I made yesterday about being an octopus. Very important. If you're trying to do that well, it's gonna be, it's gonna say like growing your business and it has like bottleneck thumbnail but that's what it's about. Octopuses and rabbits, very important. Create gray areas when pricing. Throw curb roll. Could just got five bids on this. Okay, I can't really read this. Sorry. All right, I'm going to do a couple more questions and I'm out of here. As a disabled veteran, should I focus. Thank you for your service. As a disabled veteran, should I focus on that form from a marketing standpoint or only when I'm using veteran owned business listings? Ken is really up to you. This is a tough one because a lot of people, they feel same thing with age though. People like, oh, I don't know if I want to share that. Like that is your usp right? I would at least put a banner that says veteran owned business in your marketing on your website. Like we have one of our lawn care web design guys. I really pushed this past quarter when we looked at his website we said hey, look like you really need to have a banner that says that. And he did. And he just said like that was a game changer. Like people stayed on the website longer. From an analytics standpoint, you got much better social media presence. So I just double down on your unique selling proposition, whatever that is. I don't care if you're an immigrant. I don't care if it's your age. I don't care if it's, you know, your Gender. I don't care what it is. You've got to focus on that.

Okay, thank you, guys. I see all these questions coming in. Hey, Mike, do you do snow removal service during winter or do you lay off crew? We do snow. It's not as big here, so we keep about. We keep most of our crew with winter services. Where are you currently at? Looks like the new. Oh, no. So this is a green screen, guys. Come on. I'm trying to upgrade the creative abilities here on the channel. This is a green screen. Come on now. I wouldn't have this much open space at my shop anyways. My goodness, that's a waste. I would have office people here making money. Come on now I'm muted. I'm not muted. I don't think I'm muted. Where is the like button? Yeah, hit it, Jerome. Find it. Let's go. When moving into a new service area, would you pay a slight premium to buy clients from another company to cut down on travel time between clients initially? I don't mind this idea. If you have the money for it, you need to search on YouTube acquisitions valuations. Mike Andes. I make like an hour and a half long video about this very topic about valuating when you should buy all the rest of it. What do you recommend for CRM for a 90 to? I was thinking jobber. I'm using QuickBooks only. Yep, jobber, Yard book, Lawn Pro. All great options at that size. If you're really trying to scale and grow and you're looking for automation, maybe real green LMN service, autopilot. Hey, Mike, how do you feel about including a big offer such as an iPad raffle or door hangers on Door hangers and other market media. Something like sign up for recurring service and enter winner. I don't know. I just think it's overused. People have seen this so much, right? I've said this before. When it comes to referrals, people do not do referrals for any giveaways or freebies. They do it because it gives them a good feeling and makes them elevates their social status in their network. So if they tell their neighbor that they should use you as a lawn care professional, it's not because they want them to get a good professional and they want to care about their neighbor. They're giving them that referral because it elevates their social status and validates their decision to choose you as their long care provider. So you've got to really just think about that and not like people do not share your name. And things for the chance to win something. And that just been overused in my opinion over the past 10 to 20 years.

All right, what type of work, what work do your court do do? We do mostly recurring maintenance, especially during the winter. White pine landscaping. We focus on winter services like we talked about at the conference. We do a little bit of snow plowing, but it is very, very negligible. Can you make a video on how to be professional? That's a good. Actually there was a good keynote on this at the conference from our operations manager, Liz. She talked about, you know, presenting like a professional. Definitely check that out. How many franchises do you want to add in 2021. I want to add you. That's what I want to do if you're the right fit for the culture. But yeah, in terms of how many Right now we're at 38 locations. I'd like to get to 80. I know it's a bit of a stretch goal but I think we can do it and that's why we're doubling down and really investing in creating the content and all the rest. I'm trying to make things look nicer. I'm spending my time on Friday nights till 2am making things for you guys, making green screens. I'm trying to get better.

Who do you recommend for payrolls? Gusto. Gusto.com Boot Camp. Get a 90 day free trial there or QuickBooks if you're already integrated with them. They do good as well. Hey, my great video. Where's the link for P4P? It's on on landscape businesscourse.com this guy right here. Go there. Sign in. There's a new module I know for some of people they like signed up three years ago and they haven't gone back on landscape business course. So new module P4P. Click on it. There's training videos on P4P. How to present it to your team. The software need to calculate the Excel documents needed to keep track of everything. It's all on there. So it's new module. So I'm guessing str 355 that you your course number from way back when. There's a new module last fall added winter added it. It's all there. Check it out. And the code and everything for P4P system.com is on there. What's more beneficial for a Facebook page? Total likes or likes in the zip code you service Likes in my opinion have absolutely no bearing whatsoever. You can buy likes. What's going to be more important is making content that is actually Engaging so that Facebook in the algorithm actually pushes your content onto people's pages. Remember, there's a thousand people that they have as friends and they like different pages and different groups and all the rest of it. Facebook has to make the decision in terms of what is going at the top of their page when they're going to their news feed. You only get there if you have engaging content. So you want to make engaging content, not trying to get a bunch of likes and things. However, if your organic reach is liking your comment and liking and commenting and sharing your posts, that is engaging. Facebook sees that and they will put you at the top of the newsfeed.

Seth, to be perfectly honest, I have not tested this. I'm not going to give an opinion on this. I in my opinion when it comes to door hangers, probably midday. So when they come back from work, but I don't have any data on this one. Will today's viewers get a special offer for your landscape business course? Yes, they will. It's 5:19. It's never changed. There's never been discounts. Just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com and the value there is a discount today.

I really believe that. I do. P4P is really good. Location 39 in Utah. Let's go. Let's go.

How many franchises you need to be profitable? I know you need. You said you're at a loss. Yeah. This year we will be consistently up and down, advanced profitability and probably level and I think loans will get about 50 to 60. It'll become more consistently profitable. There's a difference between profitable of course a year and then consistently profitable. Right. So we will be consistent. We will be profitable this whole year over the course of 2021. But we will not be consistently profitable. We lost 25000 last month. Two months ago or a month before that we got. We were up 25 000. A month before that we were down a hundred grand. That's not good, right? In terms of consistently profitable. When you get consistently profitable you can take bigger risks on investments like into software, hiring more support, things like that. Someone just gave me a $10. Xavier, I love you. You'll get 100 franchisees soon, no doubt. I believe it, brother. We're getting to 500. Let's go. I waited all time to get my question answered. What? Billy, I skipped your question. There's too many coming in. Sorry. Let me scroll up. Okay? Billy, I can't scroll. There's too many. Put the question again. I promise you I won't skip you, Billy. I promise. And then I'm going to hit Billy's question and I'm going to bounce. Have you considered offering a paid service that shares very specifically what is working with marketing, how to do it? That's the franchise. Honestly, like, right. Like I try to share annually at the conference what's new, what we've been testing, but kind of like cutting edge, week by week stuff. That's changing. Honestly, that's the franchisees, right? Like I try to share as much as I can for all of you guys for free and everything, but I got to keep something of value for the franchisees. Billy, ask it again. I don't see questions. Yeah, I guessed it. Yours in a green screen. Thanks, mom. My mom always doubts my ability to create great sets. Goodness. Thank you, Xavier. I appreciate it. How do you do contracts for residential or just commercial? Mostly just commercial. Unless it's a very large residential full service customer. We will potentially do.

A contract for them, but we, we don't really like to. Billy, get your question here before I head out. Recommended CRM for six figure, low seven figure design, build and heart. I would say lmn. If you're trying. If you're doing design build hardscaping. Based upon my experience, that's probably the best offer for projects. And big hardscaping type work less for recurring mowing fertilization. I haven't seen. Natasha gave me $10. Natasha, thank you so much. Thank you so much. And you didn't even ask a question. You just gave me money. Like, if you ask a question, I'll answer your for $10. I guess I answered one before, but goodness. Did you buy your new car yet? I was gonna buy a new car. I don't think so, no. Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. My annual goal, one of them was to buy a car for myself. Yeah, that's kind of put on the back burner. I got a lot of stuff I'm spending money on right now. We're building software for the franchisees. We're building the headquarters for Augusta. We're building reset. I have a big tax bill coming up from 2020. What else is. Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff that I'm paying for right now. So buying a car is low on the priority. But I love my little Honda 2010 Accord. It works great. And if I bought another car, it'd just be a Honda Accord, honestly. But yeah. What's your thoughts on dump trailers? Oh, Natasha. Oh, cool. Thank you. You're welcome. And thank you for $10. What's your thoughts on dump trailers being being running or on open trailers for five years? It is a real game changer. Makes sense. Yeah, dump trailers are awesome. I love dump trailers. Especially if you're cleanups. So. Okay Billy, I'm waiting for your question but in the meantime we're waiting for likes I miss. I skipped your question too, Kylie. I'm not seeing your question. Oh, here it is Mike. Sorry. We. I do have a lot of questions coming in so I apologize. I'm very sorry if I missed your question. Very sorry. You're just gonna have to hop on live faster or give me $10 then. I really see it Mike. We do specialty hardscapes and lawn care but but it getting hard to keep up with both. We make most profit from hardscape projects but lawn care keeps us going during slow times and tips. Okay. Yes. I would highly recommend you focus on recurring services and then allow the projects to come in natively from your existing customers. From your marketing. People are going to ask.

Sorry, I thought someone gave me money.

The yeah, I we always recommend marketing for recurring services and allowing that that brand awareness on your website, on the marketing that says you do other services to bring in those native those native leads for hardscaping and projects. So that's kind of what we do. I like that recurring revenue. I like to be able to build slowly. I don't like being dumped with projects and booking out eight months. I'd much rather be booked out three to four weeks with projects but have a very steady recurring like where I have like 10 employees working on recurring services, five or six working on projects. And if I need some more on projects I can just take a couple from the mowing guys and then they just work a little bit longer. So like I like that a lot.

Answer these what's your thoughts on dump trailers? We talked about this. Okay folks, I'm going to go ahead and sign off. Have an amazing weekend. It's a Saturday but make sure we do the five things that we talked about. If you just knew. I'm going to rattle these off real quick. Number one, you need to create a plan for your physical health and mental health as we go into the spring season. Number two, you need to get ready to raise your prices. Get the letter ready. There's one inside of landscapebusinesscourse.com There is a letter that we have used many, many times just for you. Let me go ahead and pull this up. Boom, boom.

Boom. There is a inside landscape business course. There's a link. There's no excuses now. People always ask me how to spell this like I don't know how hard it is. Landscapebusinesscourse.com There is a letter in there, a price increase letter that we use literally every single year and it has worked great. 98% of our customers stick with us after the price increase. Use that letter. Get it ready though. Now who are you going to raise? What's their price is going to be? That's number two. Number three, hire early if you need to get. If you find good people right now, you're going to hire them. You're going to offer them a start date 3, 4, 5 weeks from now when you know the spring rush is going to be around. This is going to be the hardest year in the history of lawn care landscaping to find good laborers because this new stimulus package with the $300 per week in unemployment boost, literally people are going to make four or five hundred dollars sitting at home doing nothing per week. You're competing against that this year. You're competing against the government. It's gonna be harder than ever. You need to have P4P in place more than ever before. You have a great culture more than ever before. You need to be profit sharing more than ever before. And that's just my opinion. Number four, you've got to do this before the spring rush. You got to finish your website, you've got to design it, you got to go to lawn carewebdesign.com get it done. If you're a little bit bigger and you can afford it, do it is a premium product. Otherwise go start your own. Get that stuff done. Get your website, get your social media, get your Facebook page set up. Get all of that ready to roll. Make sure you know how to run Facebook ads. Make sure you know how to send out emails to all your customers. Number five, last thing, do those little improvements. Organize your shop. Buy more blades. Got get more weed eater line. Whatever you got to focus on before this year coming up, make sure you do it now because you're not going to have time in the middle of the spring rush to be able to do this stuff. Okay? So. All right. Thank you so much everyone. I really appreciate it. Have an amazing weekend and make sure. Let's see here. Let's go with this one. Yes. Make sure you guys follow me on these other platforms. There's on Facebook by the way, landscape business course, the Facebook group. It's free join. It's really fun on here and here and here. Those three middle ones. I'm gonna get much better content in the next month. We're hiring two more people and I appreciate all of your support people buying the course lawn careweb design.com even MBA for entrepreneurs. Everyone that has been buying this. This money goes directly in the content. I'm trying to get this save up for this. Right now we're getting two more people from media to be able to get more content for all of you and that's why I'm the software and all the rest of it that we're doing. I appreciate all of you supporting me. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

This has been the Mike Candies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level and if you liked what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at the Mikeandy's YouTube channel that'll be right up your alley. But that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.