How to Go From "Mow and Go" to a Full-Service Landscaping Business

Hey everyone, it's Mike with Landscape Business Course. And if you haven't checked it out already, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're trying something new. We are doing IGTV. So Instagram has launched a new product via IGTV. So if you have Instagram follow that landscape business course, you can check it out today, YouTube, Facebook, on the podcast, if you're listening. Thank you so much for joining. Today we're reading a question. I'm going to go ahead and read it and answer it. And we're talking about how to add services. How do you add in hardscaping and other landscaping services in addition to lawn care and treatments? A lot of times people get into mowing and things like that first. But the more profitable services, how do you add those on? So let's go ahead and read this question. It comes from Jim from Tom, who works at a company and is a CEO. So here we go. Good afternoon. We are a course member and have been struggling with adding new services. We do basic services such as mowing, mulching, planting, and some aeration and fertilization. Our biggest issue is that we cannot find solid educational materials to learn how to exactly do new services. So you can train our employees since they do not have that experience. We would like to go into full fertilization and weed control as well as hardscaping, drainage and irrigation. How do you go about adding these services? The only direction I can see is to hire an employee or consultant with experience in these fields. We appreciate everything you do from the podcast to the course and look forward to learning more. Tom CEO so I've already actually answered Tom via audio note because I'm able to do that a little bit faster. But let's go and jump into this really quick. There's two different ways that I would recommend doing this. So you could hire someone, you could get a consultant to come in. The problem with that is this. If you hire that person and you start adding these services, what happens if they leave? They haven't created some sort of system, some sort of training manual. It's hard to keep those, those, those different types of services sustainable and repeatable throughout your business. If they're not training other people in your organization so they might leave and you've sold services. For instance, if wanted to get into hardscaping and you've sold a bunch of hardscaping jobs and now all of a sudden that person leaves, you're in trouble. Same thing with a consultant, really. Like they can't be there all the time they're expensive and so you can't keep them all the time there. So if they leave and all of a sudden there's a project you're not really comfortable with, then you're stuck too. So here are two different ways. Those are definitely ways you can do it. Hire people that are experienced. That's expensive a lot of times. And then consultant, which is also expensive sometimes. But the big problem with the consultant thing is they're not always there. They're not going to be able to be as accessible long term. It's not as long term a strategy. So here are two ways I would recommend going about this. Two, just different ways. Those are definitely ways you can do it. Here are two ways I would recommend. So number one is subcontractors. So both of these ways I'm telling you about today, we, we have used with our business. So let me give you these examples. So with subcontractors, this is the beauty of it. You can go out and sell a big landscaping job. For instance, we had a massive paver installation. It was like 1400 square feet or so. 1500 square feet of pavers on a cliffside. And we have to raise up the whole elevation with a wall around the edge. It was on this massive, beautiful house. 180 degree view of the ocean. The house is probably worth several million dollars. And the project was going to be like, ended up being like thirty something thousand dollars. Right. Our guys could do paper, we can do pavers. But we've never done something this magnitude. We're adding that much material underneath. What I was worried about is with that large of square footage of pavers on this cliffside, if we haven't graded just right, if we haven't prepared the base just right, that it would. When you look at the large area of pavers, you actually see some sort of a dip. Even if it's like graded well or there's a good slope. I just didn't want to look at it and see any sort of a bump. Right. Because it's easy to see that when you have that large of an area of pavers. And so we've done pavers. We've never done that type of a job or that magnitude of a job. So I decide, hey, let's get a subcontractor. So we went ahead and hired a subcontractor. And the beauty thing about when you hire subcontractor, you are their boss, which means you can manage and ask them questions about everything they're doing. So what we did is we hired a subcontractor that has lots more of hardscaping experience in our area and what we did. And yes, there's a risk that you lose that client down the road to that subcontractor if they get to know them somehow. But this is what you do. You have a manager on site or even a couple people on site throughout the entire project. So what we did is we did all the base prep, drainage, all the things that we were really competent at, and organizing the job, project management, stuff like that. And then we had the subcontractor come in and do the actual finalization of the pavers, laying the pavers, cutting them around this really nice aluminum hot tub in ground that they had. And so great job. And we were able to learn from this contractor throughout the whole process. So because we are hiring them, we can ask them why they're doing certain things, how is the process they are grading and how is the process that they are laying the sand and installing the pavers and what's the method for cutting that they're using? Because we hire them, we can ask them all those questions and we still made money on the job. So number one way is sell a job that you want to do, like hardscaping. If you want to do a big weed control job, something like that, spraying, sell the job, then go find a subcontractor and then manage the job while they're on site and just basically pick their brain about everything they're doing. That's a great way to learn. And whether it be tree services or whatever you're doing, if it's something that you need on the job, training for subcontractors is a great way to way to do it. The second way to get into new services, do different kinds of services is by soft sell. So this is, this could be termed 100 different things. But the soft sell in my opinion is like this. You basically email your customer and say, hey look, we're launching a new service, we're launching a new different sector and we are inviting 5, 6, 10, however many people to be the pilot group, the people that pioneer this new service. Because the new service we're going to give you a discount, 10, 15, 25% off. And but you have to, you know, you're telling your customers, hey, we've never done this before, we're going to basically learn on your property. You know, we've never done pavers, but we're going to learn your property, we're going to give you the discount. It's probably going to Take us a little bit longer. But we are just learning we're launching this new sector. And like for instance, we did this with our artificial turf. So we launched our artificial turf several weeks ago. We sent an email blast out to several thousand of our customers and said, hey, look, we're looking for X amount of people. I think we got five of them to buy an artificial putting green to be installed. They got 25% off, but yet they know that we are just starting, we just got certified and it's gonna be a learning process. Gonna take us a little bit longer in the job. We might make a mistake or two, but they trust us enough to know that we're gonna make sure it's done right, it looks good when they're finished. And so they have the trust to know that even though we're just learning, they're gonna get the job done right. So the soft sell is tell your customers that we are launching in a new space, we're launching service, and we would love for you to be the pilot group to join that. And in order, in exchange for you doing that, we're going to give you 15% off, 20% off, 25% off. We're going to give you something free. We're going to basically, basically learn on your property. So that's how I would recommend going about it. These are two different ways besides hiring people. Because if you want to get into irrigation, to hire irrigation tech, you're looking at 30 plus dollars an hour for one. That's really, really good.

If you're wanting to get into hardscaping, same thing, someone that can drive an excavator and do drainage and all these other things you're talking about. And so a lot of these things in the landscaping industry, it's just so much better to do on job training, like get something done instead of like watching videos, which, hey, another alternative is watch videos on YouTube for 24 hours and you're gonna get to know a lot like people information has been commoditized by the Internet. YouTube, you can learn so much about drainage and French drains and how to lay pavers and, and yes, there's a billion different ways to do like for instance, laying pavers. But if you watch all the videos on YouTube, you're gonna get a really good understanding of kind of a balance of what you want to offer and how you want to perform those services. And so like literally, that's probably the easiest way is literally spend a day and just watch video after video after video on YouTube of how to do this and the ones that have 2530 minute installs and show every single process right to the ones that give you a five minute overview with before and afters and problems along the way. Very valuable. But these are two ways you can do it on the job. That is subcontractors, where you actually tell the person, hey look, we can sell this project and you actually sell the project like you actually, we've sold this $30,000 project, then went and found the subcontractor. We told the client, look, we don't have enough manpower to do this. We're going to get someone really experienced here. We're going to get a subcontractor, but the price won't change. So we've already sold the job. And then we tell them, hey look, we're going to need a subcontractor. And they're always fine with that. They just like the fact that we're going to manage the job still. So we still have a presence. We sell at least a few of our people on site. That's one way to do it. Number two is email your people, email your customers and say, hey look, we're launching this new space. We want to give you a discount to be the first of this group, this new sector that we're growing into and give them that discount so you can learn on their property. So I hope that helps a little bit as you grow into new sectors and new services. And if you have any questions in the comments below, let me know. And if you haven't Already, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com and check out the conference in January. It's gonna be absolutely phenomenal. Three days you're gonna be with me and we are gonna go over your numbers, we're gonna go through your specific business problems and we're gonna solve them together. Marketing, hiring new team members, the work. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com we'll see you next time.