How to Grow Your Lawn Care Business WITHOUT MONEY!

Hey everyone, it's Mike. I am in my car. And today is another quick tip for you in your lawn care and your landscaping business. Today's question comes from the Facebook group. If you're not part of it, make sure you become part of it Landscape business course Facebook group today. This question has come from Thomas and he asks the question how to get out of the field as fast as possible with limited funds. Alright, now you've heard me talk about before and you've probably heard before in just general business.

News and things that one of the biggest reasons why small businesses fail is the lack of capitalization, the lack to be able to use funds to grow the business. And this is where it comes into play the most, is going from solo to getting your first employee, or from your first employee to two or three employees, or going from your first crew to your second crew. That's when having money helps a lot because it bridges that gap of lower profitability while you're in that scaling process until you have all of your crews being completely full time. So how would you go about doing this? The number one thing is when you have a consistent lead flow, that is when you have confidence to scale. So if you're looking to scale your business, the reason people fear to go full time, if they're just doing lawn care part time, the reason people fear to get a second or third crew, the reason people fear to hire or more employees is due to the fact that they do not have confidence in their lead flow. Now usually you could buy lead flow, you could do Facebook ads, you could do Google Ads, you could do print media. And just that is a way to actually buy your lead flow. And when you need more leads, you turn the faucet on, that is buy more leads and buy more ads. And when you are really, really busy and you don't really need the leads, you can just turn that flow down a little bit. And that's what's great about paid media, is you're able to govern lead flow. That being said, if you don't have money now, it becomes a game of what can you do to get those leads consistently without spending a bunch of money. And so there's really a two tiered question because if you don't have a lot of funds, not only do you need to go out and market and get the leads, that gives you the confidence to hire those people, you're also asking the question, how do I have limited funds and, and.

Hire all these people and get another truck and whatever it might be. And so this is a question that a lot of people run into. This is the reason why a lot of landscapers go to one crew and then go retreat back into solo. And you can see time and time again, Whether it be YouTubers or people you probably know, they get one crew, two crews, maybe two or three employees, and then they retreat back to being solo almost all the time. It's because they don't figure out the two pro through processes necessary to get through that time. And that is consistent lead flow as well as finding those great people that are going to be able to be self managed, self directed and out in the field. And all of that needs to fall into the fact that in regardless of how busy you get, if it's not being done profitably and you don't have a consistent profit margin, it's all for not. Okay, so first things first. How do you create a lead flow of marketing lead, a flow of leads coming in consistently that's going to give you confidence to go out and hire and grow and scale and invest in another truck and invest in another employee. If you're not buying those leads, it's going to come down to hand to hand combat. It's going to come down to pounding the pavement. It's going to come down to a lot of things because if you're going to get leads, they don't just magically appear, right? Like yes, if you have good Google ranking over the course of, you know, six to 12 months, your website's gonna get a lot of traction. It's going to rank natively in Google search. But you don't have time necessarily to wait on those leads. Those will come and go. Those will usually be governed mostly by the weather in your climate. For example, if you're in the spring and you get a really couple really nice sunny days, you're gonna have a ton of organic traffic to your website because people are searching, they're looking for it. The problem is you need to consistently have work for another employee, you need to consistently have work for another truck. You can't depend on good days when the sun is out and you get a bunch of leads and that's when you either are paying for those leads or you're going out and you're hustling those leads. And hustling those leads can come in the form of a bunch of different things that can be in the form of emailing your existing database, which again, if you're that small and you're just starting out, you don't have hundreds and thousands of emails and Contacts to go and ask. You know, try to send them an estimate or an email to ask for estimates. So in this scenario, it's going to be, how do you work your power base? How do you really contact the 15, 20 employees, 15, 20 clients that you do have, and ask them if they need a cleanup, ask them if they want a mulch install. And when you have 15 or 20 customers, you call them. You don't give them an email. You call them because you can call them all in an hour. Now, if you have thousands, you're gonna do an email because you don't have the time to call all those customers. And so I've said this before, either you have time or you have money. And so to get that consistent lead flow, either A, you're gonna buy those leads via advertising, or two, you're gonna spend time and go out and hustle. You're gonna call your existing customers. You're gonna go to every single one of your customers when you're mowing those jobs and try to give them an upsell for mulch or for weed control or for fertilization or for bush trimming, or for gutter cleanouts or. And you're gonna get really creative on increasing the value of each customer. That's what you're gonna focus on. Cause you have time. You have the time to make sure you spend an extra few minutes on every single property, touch base with the customer, talk to the homeowner and ask them if they want extra services when you notice things on their property. You're going to have the time to call all 75 of the contacts in your CRM. You're going to have the time to walk into the property management offices of, you know, the top five property managers in your market and just, you know, talk to them, ask if they have any open estimates. Like you're gonna have the time to do those things because you're not out in the field. You don't have crews to manage. So you either have time or you have money. Where it gets hard is when you start to actually get a little bit of success with the lead flow and you become busy and no longer do you have time, but you still don't have the money because you haven't had the time to reap the benefits or the profits from doing the work. And so in that scenario, that's when it becomes a capitalization question. Should you go out and get a 5, $10,000 loan so that you can go and hire somebody, get a second truck, get that crew working, and pay $120 a month on that payment. Because that $120 is like one job. You know, you get that job, one job. And if you have an employee and they can get 20 jobs, let's say, because they work 20, 20 days in a month, maybe one day out of the month they're gonna be working. And that money you can allocate in your mind towards the payment on that loan. Again, you've gotta be doing it smartly, you gotta make sure you have a consistent profit margin, things like that. But if you use debt, that 5, $10,000 to bridge the gap when you are too busy to go out and get new leads and spend time on getting the leads, but then you don't have the money yet to buy those leads. And that's the position where most people fail or retreat in their business. And that's the time you should be using debt. If you don't have the money, and I don't mean you need $50,000, you might only need five or $10,000 to confidently go get a second crew, get another truck. And it's not need a fancy truck, it needs to be a simple truck that you can just paint, make it look decent, get a second employee out and working, which is going to either a free you up and spend time to go out and do those things that are calling customers, following up with the customers, walking into property, man doing networking, calling insurance agents, connecting with contractors. Like if you're doing design, build and landscaping projects, you should be contacting contractors. They are working for homeowners to get their landscaping done once they've built their property or the remodeling. These are all connections that you can make for very little money if you have time. And so the hardest part in any business is when you don't have the money and you don't have the time because you're out trying to get things going and you visit like your marketing stops because you can't buy leads. But then you don't have enough time to go out and get new leads because you're doing the work. That position right there is where you need to commit to your business. If your long term goal is to scale the business, you need to commit to it. Say okay, I'm going to take out this loan in order to get an employee on board. And then the time that I save by not having to be out in the field, I'm gonna invest that in going out and getting leads. And then over time you build the business, you get three or four crews and now it becomes where you have the profit to go out and make sure the leads are coming in by paid leads instead of spending time. Alright, so that's just my two cents on that. It's the hardest point of your business is going from one employee to two employees or from solo to one employee. That's the hardest spot because you're gonna come to the point where, where you are doing the work and when you don't do the work, you're making $0. You're not making any money if you're not performing work. And so a lot of people will just retreat back into okay, well I'm just gonna focus on staying in the field and I'm going to just get the work done cause that's where I make my money. And that's true, you do. But to scale the business you're going to have to go out and spend time or money on generating those leads. And you've got to be consistent. So that way you have confidence to go out and hire someone full time and know that you're gonna be able to give them full time work or part time work or agreed to. So big thing with coming to scaling your business when you're that small is you've got to figure out how do I create consistent lead flow and then how do I then be able to get that consistent lead flow leading to consistent work which then will lead to be able to go out and find a great person. It's a completely different topic. But when you're getting started, those first 1, 2, 3 people are so important to the long term success of your business and making sure that you get those hires right. Because they're gonna have to be very self directed people. And a lot of times people will just hire anyone or people that get excited, they'll hire them for their first or second employee. This is why most of the time for your first or second employee I don't mind and I recommend people actually hiring a friend, a relative, someone they know really well, that they can trust, they don't have to be micromanaging that person. They're self directed, they take ownership of their job. And the reason I, I recommend that it's one time I say hiring friends and family is probably a good thing, is because you don't have to micromanage them and you can trust them to go out, take a truck and trailer and get work done that day. That's what I would recommend. Because you need to be able to go do that and have the confidence that you can leave them and go do the marketing. Because that's the whole point. That's the whole point why you hired them is that you have the time to go out and do those hand to hand combat things that you need to get the leads to come in and consistently grow the business. So if you've any more questions, post them in the comments below. Another quick tip here from me. And if you have any more questions, check out the Facebook Group Landscape Business course. And make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com if you are interested in seeing how I grew my business for the first three years and scaled it up to 100,000 in monthly revenue over the course of the first three years. And I'll see you next time. Keep your comments coming. Keep the questions coming, coming. I'll answer as many as I can. Take care.

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