How to Start a Lawn Care Business and Make Money!

So usually I go live on Facebook or Instagram, but today I figured I'd try out YouTube. So if you got a question, feel free to post it in the comments. And I'm just working here, I have a few comments before I have another call. So if you have any questions, go ahead and post below. I might, like I said, have no one actually jump in here because I've never done one of these on YouTube. Let me actually send out a text message to the text messaging platform. But again, you've got questions, hit me up. Live chat. Cool. Dave Olson. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Oh, there's actually eight people in here. Mercy. Cool. Thirteen people. Let's roll. Okay. Hey everybody, I'm gonna send a text message out to get more of us in here. Wow, it looks like there's actually some people here. I've never done a YouTube live, so if you like this, you know, keep doing these. I guess so. Hey, Patricia or Patrick. Derby guy, Gaia Phi. All right. Whoa. 30 of us. How do you figure out what. Okay, well, I don't guess I'm not gonna have to send text message out. There's a bunch of you in here. Airflow. How do you figure out all of your metrics to track for your business?

Yeah, so there's a few that you really need to know every day. Then there's ones you need to know every week or month.

Opinion in terms of what metric is the percentage of your labor versus revenue? Okay. That's probably the biggest one in our industry that people should know. Start with that and then you can always add more down the road. Jesus Paramo. Will the summit be recorded for us to watch later? So. Jesus, it will be. You need to buy two tickets to the live event and you will get a recording afterwards. A veteran lawn care interested in joining the franchise. Cool. If you're interested, check out augustalongcarservice.com franchise. Junior Costa. Hello. Hello. Ulysse Pacheco. Hey, what day you can do a class for design? Not fill me in a little bit there? What you're trying to say there, I'm not understanding you. Okay, guys, if you got questions, go ahead and post them. I will. How do I get my overhead? Yeah, so like, you know, a lot of times when you look at cost of goods sold, that is going to include cost of labor, cost of materials. Excuse me. And anything outside of those things is going to be considered overhead in terms of like if you look at your shop expense, your office expense, you know, for an office person, things like that. In my opinion, you Just want to keep that as low as possible.

Audi asks one of the 25 things that Joe Biden's going to do is bring a minimum wage up to $23 an hour. I don't see that happening across a national. I don't think he'll do a national. $23 an hour. I don't see that happening. It's very difficult for that to get passed on a state by state level across the whole country. Junior Costa so what happened? If you, if I have to go snowplow during the conference, how do I make YP the time? I don't know what YP means, sorry. But basically, yeah, you need, you need to have the recording or just keep your phone on and put it in a, like a holder on your, you know, truck and put in your AirPods or you know, earbuds and just keep watching. Like we're going to really encourage everyone to keep their, their cameras on even if you are busy or driving, doing whatever. What plans do you have for after Augusta Airflow? I don't ever plan on leaving Augusta. I'll always have a stake in controlling interest in Augusta. Patrick Ferreira Key procedures and systems one just key procedures and systems one just implement into their company to set them up for success a few years from now. I have implemented employee handbooks, truck and equipment checklists. In terms of systems, I would say a pay for performance model and whether or not you use mine, I don't really care, but just a way to make sure that you can incentivize your employees to work efficiently. That's what you got to figure out. A veteran lawn care how do you conduct employee training in the field? For example, I'm currently trying to train a few new hires for weed eating. Do you have a system for that? Yeah. So we are pretty simple in terms of. I feel like the easiest way to make that an easy transition is to simplify your services. So we've simplified a lot and so now when we have someone out in the field, they are usually gonna start the first day and the only thing they touch is the weed eater and the blower and maybe not even the weed eater. They'll start with just the blower and then as they get checked off on certain easy each thing they can continue on. So maybe day two or three they start doing the push motor. Day four they maybe learn how to use the zero turn. Day five they learn how to drive the truck. Day six they know how to use the service autopilot and route their own things. Right. So if someone has A bunch of experience. They'll probably speed through all of that in a couple days. If they're brand spanking new, it might take them two weeks to get up to speed. But we basically just have it build on itself and have experienced employees have to sign off on them being. I want to work on the pitch in terms of the top package. Yes. You're going to want to think, what does someone need to do on their property and what can I do for them? And just include everything. Big shout out to Kevin Fairburn for giving me this yeti thermos. I use it for my protein shakes.

Yeah. So your top package. Just think in terms of, like, every single. Every single possible thing that someone could do on the property, including mulching, gutter cleanups, property inspections, looking at the property throughout the winter to see if there's bushes touching the side of the house. Just a whole bunch of stuff. Dylan Knowles started in June, did $300,000 in hardscape and $100,000 in snow. Stupidly didn't track metrics. Have all my expenses in QuickBooks. What did you do to figure out a good QuickBooks online system? Did you watch a series? I didn't watch a series.

Honestly. In terms of knowing metrics? Yeah, like knowing metrics. If you never started anywhere, you need to know your labor percentage versus your revenue. That's the biggest number you need to know. You can standardize that and make that constant using something like P4P, where you give a percentage of revenue to your employees. But absolutely, you need to know that number. If you're doing hardscape, snow, etc. You need to know what percentage of your revenue is going to supplies and going towards labor.

Domain Man 86 says, what is the best form of advertising that has worked for you? We're gonna talk about this at the conference this coming weekend. I'm gonna be talking about four different ways that worked really well for us. And again, those things are always constantly changing in terms of the best form of advertising. If I just pick one right now, I'd say Google local services. But again, that's gonna change based upon your specific scenario, what type of services you're offering, your area. Like a whole bunch of stuff. Carlos Ramirez, can you explain the P4P? How does it work for you guys? Carlos has a bunch of content on that in landscapebusinesscourse.com and we are going to go over that at the conference this weekend. Dave Olson. Hey, what is the process to get on the Zoom call? Are you going to email a link I'm assuming, yes, David, if not today, tomorrow you're going to get a schedule for Thursday and then there'll be a link on there for zoom.

Sean Porter, how do you think of starting a lawn care company and hire only people suffering from mental health aged under 30? I think that's an awesome cause. Just keep in mind that.

There'S going to be issues with that. Right. And as long as you're aware of that, and as long as that is worth it to you to hire those type of individuals and give them a second shot and a chance, then by all means I think that's a great cause. I'm a big fan of that or I should say a big advocate of mental health. And I've seen it affect a lot of people. And so I think that's great that you're thinking about that. Just keep in mind it's going to come with other complexities. Right. So some I would not recommend someone that's just starting out their lawn care business to do that. I would, I would have someone that knows their systems, knows their numbers very, very well before you would make some sort of a policy or program where you just hire those people. But great for good on you for thinking about that. Sean Colton, Building a base of clients for postcard marketing. How early would you start sending those out? And consistency. So Colton I would be sending out if I was doing every door, direct mail or postcard strategies, I would send them out two to three times at least, maybe even four or five. And I would be sending them out approximately two weeks before the mowing season starts. And I would continue on a bi weekly basis because you're going to have people who jump the gun early, like before the mowing season starts. They want to get on the schedule. And then you're going to get people that wait three, four weeks and their lawn is overgrown and you'll get them as well. Mark Hanson hello Mike. We wanted to get started early this year. We are in Utah. What services do you recommend we get started get we get going to start off the year before we the grass grows in the end of March. Yep. So winter cleanups right now is the only thing in our area. For example, you can do. Trimming bushes is a great time because the plants are dormant. And so using it as kind of a leverage point to be able to tell your customers, hey, this is the best time of year to trim your bushes, trim your shrubs, cut trees back because the plants are dormant and the leaves are falling off the trees. It's a great way I'm going to keep answering questions, but I need to open up my computer because there's so many coming in. So give me a second here. Okay, this is better. Great. Now I can see on my computer. All right, next question. Airflow. Does the landscape business course go over winter services Airflow? It does not. I'm going to make a new segment that in 2021, but. But we are going over it extensively during conference this weekend. All right, Mark Hanson, do you do any postcard mailing with Syngim? Any ideas to maximize return on it? Yes, we have used Synge. We've tested out a little bit. It's not been as good as I would have hoped and it's not say it's bad, just not as good as the next. Like when I look at market, I think about, okay, where's my first dollars being spent? Where's my next dollar's being spent? Where's my next dollars being spent? And I'm only gonna get to that fifth one if I've filled up and used as much money on the first four. Right. So in my opinion, the postcards using Senjim was not as good in our market. We are going to do some more testing on that. Right now we're testing things like the radius bomb where you do voicemail for people in an area. We're testing that. Kevin Ferber, I don't know if you just hopped on, but I just. I gave you a shout out for this awesome mug or thermos you gave me. I use it for my protein shake all the time. All right, next question. We got Mark Hanson. Shawn, thanks. Started running my business last year and rebranding this year with that as my goal for 2021. Prairie Rose, I know this isn't a business question, but what type of protein shakes do you drink? Do you make them yourself? Yeah, I drink. I'm trying to read it from here. It's called Amazing Grass and it's a chocolate but it has a whole bunch of greens in it. And the other one is Orgain Health I think it's called. And that's more just strictly protein. So I try to get some greens, sneak some greens in there. I like spinach omelets, but if I can sneak some greens in with my chocolates shake or chocolate protein, then life is good. John Romano, Romanelli. Hi, Mike, Solo guy here. Winter time, have hard time keeping motivated. What's good recommendations, preparing or marketing right now here in Pittsburgh, hands down, the best way to be able to keep busy during the winter is Staying connected with your existing customer database and that is through emails, right? So we do one click emails where every single month we're seeing an email out. And most of our work through the winter comes from existing customers. It doesn't come from new customers. It's very hard to market and go spend money on say Facebook ads. Right now your cost per your customer acquisition is going to be three to four times more expensive than it would be in the spring or summer. And so I really encourage if you're going to spend any money on marketing, you want to put it towards intent based marketing. Sorry for the noise. The septic system outside of my studio got backed up and they're pumping it out right now. So if you're spending money during the winter, spend on intent based marketing, which is going to be Google, you're going to pay more money because less people are searching your keywords. However, people are looking for your product to search service that is lawn care landscaping instead of something like Facebook where no one's caring about lawn care right now. No one's caring in a lot of our markets. So if you are going to spend money on marketing, spend it on intent based marketing. And then I would also say to focus most of your energy should be focused on mining your current database for customers and for jobs. And right now, this time of year it's great time to do trimming of bushes and educate the customer on why this is the best time time of year to do specific services because the plants are dormant. All right, next question. Colton, you're the bomb. I literally middle of searching this. God bless good Kevin. Ready to rock and roll. Let's get it. Meticulous Gardens. I have been approached to buy out a company's client list for mowing. Due to them retiring, there are zero contracts. How would I go about working out a price? Okay, great question. Meticulous Gardens. Just search out acquisitions and Mike Andy's. I did a whole like hour long video on this of different ways to valuate a company and also when you're looking at your own business, how to increase the valuation of your company. So check that out. I think an hour long. It's a piece of a webinar I did for members like a year and a half, two years, two and a half years ago. Next question.

My question is where's Liz Kodiak? Colton, do you have an option on Turf Hop? I use that software now because free and can collect credit cards. Here, let's see here. One second. Okay, cool, cool. So turf. I do not have any Sort of software or any sort of connection with them. Colton. So cool. There's. So there's still 55 of you guys on here. So if you got any questions. Fire wheel. I got like 10 more minutes here till my next call.

All right. Yo, real quick, actually, while you're on here, while you're posting a question, it was really cool. So I just left a contractor. So we're looking to build the headquarters for Augusta. Right. We've been looking at land, and we just. We just went. Got into. We had purchased a piece of land, and it was. We're in escrow, and basically it fell through because of wetlands in Washington state. Wetlands is a big pain in the neck. And so you might have a good piece of land. Looks flat, all the rest of it. And then you try to build, and they won't let you build. So first piece of property didn't work out well. However, it looks like we got another piece of property. It's actually better. It's five acres industrial. So we put an offer on it is $500,000, which I know for some of you it seems like a lot, but for an RA That's a really, really good deal for land, for industrial. So today, though, it was really cool because I went to meet with a contractor just to start. Start trying to get estimates together, stuff like that. And what was cool is the. The company I went to to do the contractor, the contractors that I went to, their headquarters was the very first commercial mowing customer that I ever did. When I was like 11 or 12 years old, my brother and I, we would go in our Dodge Caravan to the push mowers in the back, and then, you know, prop up the back of the trunk with like this piece of wood, and we would go there, we'd mow it for $90. Lots of fun. I still remember that. Anyways, questions? Okay. Michael Decelman says you seem to be a fan of 30 inch push mowers. What's the limit on property size that's efficient compared to buying a 36 standard? Great question. For our corporately owned stores and for franchisees that have an average lot square footage of over 10,000 square feet, definitely going to be going for a zero turn. 36 inch stand on and. Right. Sorry. When I say lot, I did not mean lot square footage. I meant turf square footage. So if someone's turf square footage on average in their territory is above 10,000 square feet, that's what I'm going to be suggesting. A 36 inch stand on over a 30 inch push mower. And that's just kind of a rule of thumb. Obviously there's other things that play into that like are people, do they have backyards more often? Little stuff like that. But for example we have one franchisee up in Vancouver, Canada that just joined and he I suggested a 21 inch mower only not even a 30 inch because a lot of his properties are 2,3000 square feet of turf. You don't even need a 30 inch, it's too big. Long Commander just joined Benjamin Harms biggest tip of advice for a solo guy. My biggest advice would be to raise your prices and then look for a second person to hop in your truck because you double your efficiency right away. Hector Alonzo. Mike, good to hear from you. When should I make a switch to two trucks instead of one? Any thoughts Hector? Great question. You should do that when you're hiring your second guy. So hire one person when he is full time with you in your truck and you don't have time to do everything else you need to do in a day. That's when you get your second truck. Alright. And when you get your second truck, that's when you're also hiring your third guy. So so usually I suggest you hire your second employee that is your third person because including you. So your second employee and your second truck should be purchased at the same time. And then usually what's going to happen is your first guy who's experienced will go by himself in the new truck. You will take the next guy that's the younger or the less experienced guy in the truck with you while you're working. So it's kind of a good system there. Next question. Fast cutters lawn and landscaping looking Start P4P next year. Do you think there is a way to do it without sharing numbers with your employees? Yes, there is a fast cutters lawn and landscaping. We're going to talk about this at conference. I believe that P4P is the foundation and then you do open book management and then you do profit sharing. And I feel like they need to go in that order. You can do P4P without profit sharing. You can do profit sharing without doing. Sorry. You can do open book management without profit sharing. But in my opinion at the top of that, at the pinnacle of that, of that pyramid is culture. And that's in my opinion doing it all together just compounds the effect and the positivity that has on your team.

Next question. You may Nassir hi Quickbooks for your real estate. How are you setting it up? Thanks. Great question. So for the Real estate I have it set up under all under one llc but then each property is a different category category in QuickBooks. So I have repairs, income and improvements on each property. So each duplex that I have I have them categorized in QuickBooks. I can do another video on that some other time. Hector, Congrats Richard, do you take checks or cash for mowing or is everything online? Ideally everything's online. We will take checks but never cash. A veteran lawn care how much does the franchise cost and would I have to rebrand the entire company? Avet and lawn care we don't require a rebrand but usually most franchisees decide to do it but sometimes they don't. It's up to you. The franchise cost. All that stuff's on the website. Augusta longer services.com franchise Whoa. Bunch of conference. Okay, let's hear one. Couple more. Oh BNB long care what's up Blake thanks for hopping on here John Isaac what up from from mb. What's MB Sick Manitoba. Yeah, let's go. I knew the provinces and the capitals of Canada before I did the states of of can of the United States which is horrible.

Where do you order awesome polos from? We get these from a local place. I think the brand is sport tech.

Do you have a franchise location where the whole pickup only setup is really not viable? Viable? I feel that setup only works for you since the crew can dump on site where you park. Honestly the pickup setup really is going to depend on the lot square footage and the turf square footage not so much where we dump we have to dump because we bag clippings. Colton Best promotions for new customer clients I'm trying to build a base of clients to double my jobs income so I can go full time. We talked a little bit about that already. Would you go into debt on equipment like John Deere? 0% financing? Yes, that's the one time I would do financing and don't mind. Debt is on equipment that is 0% down and there's no additional. There's no, there is no discount for doing cash over the financing.

Carmelo, are door hangers better than using online marketing with useless or homeadvisor? We are thinking of canceling our marketing. I'm going to talk about this at conference a lot in terms of ideally you own your marketing avenue so that way you get SEO and traffic to your website. Instead of basically giving $20 to HomeAdvisor they take 15 of that to go run ads and get the clients. That's why in so many of our in our markets home Advisor. And you just list these other companies beat us out in terms of SEO is because we're literally paying them to run ads by buying the leads from them. So I'd rather that go to my. My website. Free Shot. You just talked about buying land. Would you consider leasing a shop or land? Yes, we would. Free Shot. If we could find the ideal land, we would continue to lease. However, with the franchise growing as much as it is, we need a lot of space now. And I also. It's tough to have a space where you can do lawn care, landscaping, like the actual shop, but also have offices and all the stuff we need for the back end of Command center and the franchise. So that's the. The debacle we had that we had just had to pony up and have to build. And it's going to be a pretty penny. It's gonna be multiple seven figures, which a little bit scary, but it's gonna. It's gonna be good. And I know that in three to four years, we'll probably outgrow it, honestly, and we'll have to. We already have contingency plans to build on and add to the building. It's gonna be pretty cool. Charles. Got a shade before the conference, big fella. Yes, sir. I know, because I got patchy. See, that's. That's from getting hurt back in the day. My. My beard. I can't grow a beard if my life depended on it. Shout out to Chuck. He's one of our new GMs. John Smith, do you have any thoughts on offering the first mo free in order to get in a specific area? Not a big fan of offering things at any discount, but if you're going to. I'd rather be free than discounted. If people. People get addicted to discounts, they don't get addicted to free. Okay, you know what, guys? There's a lot of you on here. Let me text someone real quick and just tell them I'm gonna be a little bit late so I can stay on here for a couple more minutes.

Okay. All right, more questions. Here we go. Smash that, like, button friends. Jeremy Wilson. Thank you.

Oh, yes. In terms of free and things, I don't like to do that because usually you're attracting the wrong type of client. The person who's going after a discount or free is going to jump ship and go to the next person who offers them a good deal on a better price or a better offer up front. And I don't like that. So I hope that noise isn't so bad for you guys. That's the septic getting pumped outside.

So sorry about that. Try to talk louder. I don't have my AirPods in.

Questions here. Okay. Yo, grasshoppers lawn care. I love what you do. Along with the other guys on YouTube. It's sick. Keep going, Josiah. Love the videos. Can't wait for the landscape summit. Where do you get good polos? This is from sport Tech. We get from a local place. I have a bright green color scheme. Can't find too many choices. Yeah, even for yellow, the gold color we use. Tough to find sometimes.

Whoa, there's too many questions. One second here. Okay, here we go.

Paramo, in your opinion, I have a very low budget for marketing right now. Would you think it's okay to leave business cart in good neighborhoods even if it says no soliciting? I would not do that. If you're gonna go after a neighborhood that says no soliciting, just do every door direct mail.

In my opinion, we have a lot of NO soliciting and HOAs and gated communities in our area. And that's because come my perspective on it. Josiah, where do you get high quality coat? Oh, a high quality coat. There's one I got. I'll just show you guys what brand it is. I forget. I really like it though. I got for Christmas. Seth theory. If you become a franchisee, can you open up multiple vacation. Does the frank monthly fee then multiply? Yes, you can open multiple locations. We have as of this year we'll have five corporately owned locations. We're trying to nail down exactly how to do that precisely. It's open up multiple locations. And in terms of the monthly fee. Yes, it would multiply per location. We know. We know pretty much well how much we it costs us to run and maintain each location. And so we do it just beyond that. Twelve hundred dollars per month. However many, many locations you have and. And our corporately owned locations, they pay that fee as well because we know it costs money to service them as well. Okay, one second here. Oh, we're live. Are we back on? Yeah, we're live. I know that. Ah, sorry guys. Let's go. Keep going through the questions here. Yeah, we're live. Okay, cool. Ideal high quality coat. Oh man, that was Jason sick. Okay, I gotta go here in a few minutes. Make a couple more of these in if you become a furniture. Got that. What's the ideal percentage of labor compared to revenue for a two to three man maintenance crew? Just don't let it get over 40%. That's when I start getting nervous. Robert, can you donate a string trimmer or leaf blower instead of trashing them? We won't trash them. We'll use them in some regard. Audio. Andrew, what is the family dynamic like with your brother working for you? I'm talking to my brother about working. Running a crew for me. Yeah. It's very much business.

What is going on? Sorry about the Internet, guys.

Okay, I think we're live again. Sorry, it's horrible. Okay, I'm gonna have to bounce here. I'll jump back on here live after the conference next week when I'm gonna be out of town at Palm Springs. Thanks so much, everyone. I hope to see everyone at the conference Landscape Summit, if you haven't already, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. It's gonna be great. Lots of Q and A. I look forward to it. I gotta close this out, though, because Jason, our new franchisee over in Tennessee, has given me a call. So take care, everyone. Bye.