How to Get Out of the Field (Lawn Care and Landscape Business)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to Landscape business course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook. But thank you for joining. Today I want to do a short episode and tell you about how you can get out of the field. So I'm talking to solopreneur, the person that might have one or two employees. The person that is right now, you're a business owner, yet you are the one mowing lawns, trimming trees, installing mulch, pulling weeds. List goes on and on and on. You're out there driving a truck, sweating every day and, and you are trying to get through it. Now the elusive desire of every landscape entrepreneur is to get out of the field. To stop being the one that has to do the labor side of things and really start focusing more on sales, marketing, growing the business from a strategic standpoint and building the team. That's kind of like the, everyone wants to get there. It's the golden pot at the end of the rainbow that everyone tries to go for. And it is well, well, that achieved that rank of order because it is definitely a place you want to be at. You don't want to be out mowing until you're 67 years old. It's not something you can do for the rest of your life. It's taxing on your body. So how do you get out of the field? Whether it be in the next five years, 10 years, or if you're in the course, you know that we really push for that within the first couple years getting out of the field. So I'm going to, I could literally take an entire hour on this topic of how to do this, but I want to share three very tactical ways of doing this. So there's a lot of this getting out of the field has to do with your mentality and how you from a strategy point, 30,000 foot view of how you're looking at your business. But I want to look at three ways that you can, are very strategic, very, should I say more like very specific ways that you can look at your business and ask can I get out of the field? And what can I do to get out of the field? So I remember being out in the field working for myself when I first started my company, Augusta Lawn Care. And I remember I had allergies really, really bad. I still do. And I still remember my one eye being swollen completely shut. It would happen for several weeks at a time, usually beginning of June, through the end of that whole month of June. Basically I would have lots and lots of allergies runny nose all the time. I would have two shirts on me because I would get soaked in sweat and then I would use. And by the time I got soaked in sweat, that's usually my allergy. We'd start kicking in like 11 o' clock or so and I'd take off my shirt, put my new one on, and then use the old shirt as like my snot towel. So I would just like blow my nose constantly in it. At the end of the day, my nose would be raw. I would get rash all over my chest, so I get itchy. I'd get. When it get really bad, I would get constricted in my throat and so I'd be harder to breathe. And so then you're trying to do a really physical job, trying not being able to breathe very well, your nasal cavity blocked up. It was just horrible. So there were several times I, I remember I'd have to stop the day early after like six or seven mows because I was just like an absolute wreck with my allergies. So I knew from the second year of mowing. Well, it really, I knew before that, like. Cause when I started, when I was mowing 11, I still had allergies a little bit. It got pretty bad when I was like 15, 16. So when I started Augusta Lawn Care at 18, I knew that like I couldn't be in the field very long. Like literally just my body couldn't handle. As far as from the allergy standpoint, the month of June was like hell. It was allergies and just horrible. And so it was like I would, even if I was sleeping good, exercising well, I would just be drained every single day, even after five, six hours worth of work, when usually I could work 15, 16, no problem. And so I knew I had to get out of the field. And you might be in that position or you might be in the position of just knowing that in order to scale your business and make money, you got to get out of the field. So I'm going to give you three really tactical, like very specific ways. Like I said, you could take a whole entire hour long webinar or something like on this very topic and go into a lot more detail. But I want to give you three really specific ways of doing it. So number one is pricing. So when it comes to pricing, a lot of times the problem is people can't afford to go get out of the field simply because they have not priced their product, they're not processing, priced their services correctly, and they haven't put enough margin in their pricing in order to compensate for employees. So what that means is there is.

The entrepreneur that is charging $30 per hour, and they are going to charge $3 per man hour while they are on the job. And that works fine for a while. For a while, while they're out there mowing, they can make $30 an hour and then say $15 in overhead and, and they're making 15 bucks an hour. Honestly, I don't know why you wouldn't just go to McDonald's and make 15 bucks an hour instead of running your own business. But let's just say that you're out doing that, running at $30 an hour and making a little bit of money. The problem is you can't afford an employee at $30 an hour. If 15 of that is overhead, you can only afford to pay someone like 10 bucks an hour before you start losing money. And if you're going to try to find a good employee, you're going to have to pay them 15, 20 bucks an hour. And then after taxes and payroll and L and I and all the other stuff that goes along with it, workers compensation, all of that comes out. And now you're losing money because you didn't price the jobs correctly. So what I would do if you're not out of the field yet and you're wanting to, is when it comes to your pricing figure in the cost of employees. So what I mean by that is every single solopreneur out there, or even if you have just a couple employees is thinking like this, okay, I have 10 mowing jobs a day. They're, they're $45 each. I'm making $450 a day. That's amazing. I made 450 bucks a day. That's how they're thinking. Now, if you want to scale your business and get out of the field, you have to start thinking like this. Okay, I made 450 today. 250 of that dollars is gone in cost of an employee. Even though you don't have an employee, even though you're the one that did all the labor, that money is in your mind, set aside. Then you have $200 left. 100 of that is moved out in just the cost of doing business like overhead, things like that, gas, fuel, ins left with $100. So really, you made $100 in that first day or in that day of mowing in your mind, because you got to start thinking like, if I set the money aside for an employee and I set the money aside for the Extra insurance and the overhead and all that stuff, then am I actually making profit? Because if you're not, you can't get out of the field because you can't afford to go hire someone and put them in a truck and pay for the insurance and the overhead. You can't afford it because there's no margin left over. So number one, pricing. You have to figure in the cost of employees from day one. You have to figure in what's it gonna cost per hour and are you gonna still make any money after you figure in their wages. So if you're charging $30 now, I promise you, you cannot get out of the field. It's not a long term sustainable way of running a landscaping business. You have to be over $40 an hour, in my opinion, in order to get out of the field. Alright, number two, number two thing that I would recommend, again, I could take an entire hour on this and go beat around the bush. But I wanna give you specific things, and that is get to four employees.

As soon as you possibly can. There's a reason behind the number four, and that is your profit margin. So if your profit margin is like 20 to 25%, like really pretty good, that's what we're shooting for in the course 20 to 25% net profit margin, then you need four employees in order to compensate for the 100% that you would usually make as a solopreneur out there mowing lawns. You don't have much overhead. You make that 20, 25%, no problem. You're like at 50, 60%. All good. Because it's all just after gas and a little bit of equipment charges. It's all money in your pocket. Well, once you have one employee, all of a sudden you start paying that person. That's all fine and great. Then you're like, okay, this is good, I'm growing my business. Then you get two employees. Well, now you gotta get another truck and a trailer and more equipment so your overhead goes up and you're not actually seeing any more money being brought to the bottom line because your overhead's gone up, payroll's gone up, and you have three employees and you have to get another truck and you have to get more equipment and now you have to rent a shop and you have to get, you know, all these other things involved. Now you get four employees. That is where you need to be in order to get to the place where you can really, like this is where you need to get as fast as possible.

Any landscape business that has like 1, 23 employees is a business very, very susceptible, susceptible to economic changes. Losing a big job, one or two employees, leaving, get to four employees as soon as possible. Another reason for having four employees is if you have four people out in the field, usually you need to be out of the field just to make sure to manage these jobs, to sell this amount of work, to keep four people busy, to do customer service for all the job that these people are working on. So you basically become like the office manager. You are obviously doing all the estimates, doing all the billing, doing all the phone calls. But you can get out of the field once you get about four people working outside in the field. So get to four employees as soon as possible. Don't stick around at one, don't stick around at two, don't stick around at three. Get to four as soon as you possibly can. There's more math behind that. But I'm just going to kind of give a blanket statement for employees as soon as possible. Obviously, if you can get 1 to 10, 10 employees fast, do that too. But for the bulk of you that are just solopreneurs or have one or two employees, get to four employees as soon as you possibly can. It'll generate enough net margin that you can get out of the field and focus just on sales, marketing, customer service. Now that leads me to my last statement here. This is number three. And this is what's gonna really push you over the edge. And that is hire.

An office manager. Now this seems crazy. If you're a solopreneur right now, or you're just out in the field mowing, or you have one or two employees. But I will tell you this, get four people out in the field and then get an office manager. The reason for that is this. When you have four employees out in the field and you're starting to look for a fifth field worker, when you get about five people out in the field, you literally have a full time job of just billing, invoicing and customer service, answering phones, answering emails. That job needs to be handed off to an office manager because once you do that, then you as the business owner can start focusing 100% of your time on sales and marketing, going out and getting more estimates, following up with those estimates, creating systems within the business, training new people, hiring new people, finding new people that could work for your business. And that's where you're really going to start to see growth. So in order, you have to work on, number one, pricing to get out of the field. The pricing is the number one reason why people can't get out of the field, they're not charging enough that they can actually go pay someone else to do the work for them. Number two, you gotta get at least four people on the field as fast as possible because you're not gonna see much more bottom line revenue or sorry, bottom line profit going from 1, 2 and 3 employees. Get to the 4 as soon as you possibly can. And that means working longer hours, getting the sales, getting more estimates, getting more leads, doing more marketing, doing more advertising, knocking on more doors, putting up more flyers, doing whatever it takes, networking, whatever it takes to get to where you have enough jobs, enough work to keep four people busy out in the field. Then you'll be able to step out of business, I mean, sorry, out of the field, and start working on customer service, sales, marketing, all the other stuff to do with the business. But you'll also be answering the phone, answering the emails, all of that good stuff. When you go to hire that fifth person out in the field, that's when you hire an office manager. Because when you hit number five, when you hire this office manager, that's a big amount of overhead. Because that office manager, 100% of their salary is an overhead. It's an overhead cost. They're not generating any money by being in the office. They aren't a field crew. Working, you're able to charge a customer 40, $50 per hour. They are an expense. The office manager, however, they are worth their weight in gold once you get to five employees out in the field. Because now they can manage those people out in the field. They can do the calls, they can print out the schedules, they can do all your accounting, they can do all the things in the office, answering phones, emails, customer service, billing questions, all those things. It'll be a full time job by the time you have five people out in the field. Get the office manager and then it's off to the races. You're out of the field and then you're focusing less on the clerical side of the business, less on the field side of this. And you can focus on sales, marketing and growing your team. That's my recipe. My three tips to getting out of the field. You've been listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com I'm Mike Andes. Check it out today, landscapebusinesscourse.com Check out the conference. It's gonna be amazing. Thank you all for signing up. I can't wait for it. It's in January and we're gonna sit down, we're gonna go over stuff like this in depth in your business with your numbers. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and I'll see you there if you're in the course. And keep your eyes on the recently added videos this week. Within the next week, we're going to be launching, we're going to be uploading a video just for the course members in the recently added videos content area. That is going to be me giving you a tour of both of our shop locations. So you can see exactly how I run my business and the efficiencies within it, all the different things of why certain things are placed in different areas, the storage areas, the trailers, the organization inside the office, out in the shop. So I'm going to show you both different offices, all one that we've had for several years, one that just started and is growing. And it's going to be good. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com I'll see you next time.