How to Start a MASSIVE Lawn Care Business in 106 Minutes!

In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you the secrets I use to grow my lawn care business. Over $50 million in revenue. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care where we have over 150 locations around the world. I also run Copilot CRM where we transact over a million dollars every single day through the system for the green industry. I'm going to give you the step by step tools in terms of choosing trucks, trailers, equipment marketing and making sure you get your first customers to be able to get over $100,000 in annual revenue.

Alright, so before we even get started talking about equipment and trucks and all the exciting things about starting a lawn care business, it's important that we actually fill our schedule and remember that customers are what make a business. You get all the trucks and equipment in the world, but if you don't get customers, you do not have a business. When someone comes to buy a business in a lawn care business, they're buying two things, contacts and contracts. All the other stuff you can buy anywhere else. You can buy that truck just about anywhere in the world. I can't buy customers and contacts. That's what the real business, intellectual property and the value. That's where it's really at. So what are we going to do first? Before we talk about anything else, we're going to talk about getting customers. And you say, well, how do I get customers and if I don't have money, how do I get customers? If there's people that are way cheaper than me, you're going to get customers regardless of price? Yes, regardless of price. I don't care if you've got to go do services for free. You're going to fill your schedule. Because once you fill your schedule, we can raise prices down the road. But right now we've got to get jobs. And I literally don't care if you do them for free. Why? Because there's other ways that people can pay for your services besides just transacting with money. Let's go through these. First off, we can ask for a referral. In other words, If I do Mr. Jones house over there for free, his first lawn mowing service, or a bush trimming, or I pull some weeds or do a fertilization for him, I just simply afterwards ask him, hey, what about Miss Sally over there? Or what about Mr. Junior over there? Do you know your neighbors? Do they need any services? And he might be able to introduce me literally in person, walk me over their house and introduce me to someone else that also needs those services. So the first way he could pay me, even if the actual service I provided for them was free, he could give me someone next door as a referral. Another thing is I want to be able to get at least 30 Google reviews as fast as possible. Because if I can get good Google reviews, I'll be able to rank well on Google and people find my website and I won't have to pay any money in marketing because they'll just rank better on Google. And people find me when they type in my keywords like lawn care, landscaping in my area. This is what it looks like when you go and search on Google. These all the top are from Google listings. You can see here. This is our location locally. And I see in three places and I haven't paid for any of these. I see it right here as the number one spot for Google listings. I also see on the map because I have a physical address. And I also rank well on native search. There's a few things I want to focus on. Number one, look at how many reviews we got. 492 Google reviews. Now, that's been over the course of 10 years. Get at least 30, and you'll likely usually get on like the first page or two of Google just by getting 30 Google reviews. It's completely free. It's not going to cost you anything. Now, you can't pay people to give reviews, but what you can do is do a great job, do it for absolutely nothing, and they're going to feel obligated to give you a great review. And if you do that 20 or 30, 30 times, all of a sudden you're starting to rank well on Google and people that are searching for lawn care and landscaping in your area actually start to find you. And those people are the ones that you charge. Those are the people that actually will give you money for your services. But when you're first getting started, just go get busy. And guess what? That person driving by, they saw my truck. And so even if I'm doing services for free in this neighborhood, people are seeing my truck, they're looking over, and they're seeing my uniform. They're seeing me doing a great job and great service for a customer, to me as a customer, to them as their neighbor. And so I'm able to get now more jobs in this neighborhood simply because I have my truck out in the community. Most of the time, if you're out working in the field, a customer's not gonna actually walk up to you and ask you for your information. In order to be able to do business with you. Rather, they're gonna be looking for a truck like this that's wrapped or painted for them to be able to get contact information like your phone number, or go to your website, or at least just know what your brand is. This is like a massive walking billboard wherever you go. That's why I want you to jump right in and get working. Get the truck rolling, get it in neighborhoods, get it in the community. Have the neighborhood see, See you often working in their area. And guess who they're going to call when they have lawn care and landscaping services. And guess what? You're going to charge those customers to actually pay you for your services. Now, the third way that you can actually get someone to pay you without giving you any money Is for an upsell. And an upsell is essentially this. I'm going to give you something for free, But I'm going to notice five other things on your property that I could do for you, and I'm going to upsell them to you. I'm going to try to get you to buy more of the service I just gave you or other services that are kind of adjacent or similar to them. There's actually a feature inside of copilot where when you're at a customer's property, you can really quickly upsell them a whole bunch of different services and send them a text or an email automatically with a tap of a button. For example, I might say, you need bush trimming. I know it's gonna take me an hour. I'll do that for free. Say, oh, no, you can't grow a business on free. No, I'm gonna get the bushes for free. I'm gonna ask you for a review, and then I'm gonna tell you that you have five other services on your property that I can do for you, and I'm gonna charge you for those. I'm gonna charge you for the fertilizer, and I'm going to charge you for an extra mulch install. I might get you on a 7, $800 mulch install because of one hour of free that I did on the bush trimming to get you hooked. And so the goal in offering free services to grab customers, to hook them in. And nothing hooks people in more than free. If they can get free services, they are then going to reciprocate by giving you a referral or review. Or you get the opportunity to upsell them on all the other services they do on their property. Because guess what, if the services aren't done on the bushes, there's a really good chance they also won't be done on the mulch or the beds or the weed and feed that needs to be on the law. These are all other services you can offer and make a customer that is. Yes, they're free and you gave $100 worth of value added them and you could turn that into a customer that pays you 1,000, $2,000 a year on recurring services. When I'm giving services away for free, I'm typically looking for things that don't cost me a lot of money but can provide a lot of value to the customer. Things like free core aeration, a free inspection and their irrigation system, or a one time bush trimming or something like that. Something that's low ticket. But I get my foot in the door because once I got them as a contact inside of my database instead of a CRM like copilot, I can upsell them over and over and over again and turn what was a free customer into a lifelong customer over the course of the next several years.

All right, so we're out here at one of my locations out in Bellingham, Washington. Big sign next to the road. This location does about 1.5 to $1.7 million in annual revenue. And when you're first getting started, it's easy to sometimes try to act big. Whether that be through your marketing signage or be having a lot of trucks or looking, having the appearances of being a bigger business. And yeah, like all this traffic, great for advertising, but this shop space is expensive. Having all these trucks is expensive. You don't need to do that at the beginning. At the beginning, you want to be focused on being you. Your unique selling proposition or your USP is the thing that makes you different than everyone else. And if you're just getting started, your unique selling proposition is not that you have a massive sign. It's not that you have massive business. There's a bunch of trucks and a bunch of employees. That's not your unique selling proposition. Your unique selling proposition when you first get started is usually price and quality. In other words, you're going to be cheaper than everyone else or you're going to because you as the solo operator are doing the work yourself. You're going to be on the customer's property every single time. To a lot of customers, that's actually really valuable. But the problem is they never know that because you're trying to act like something you're not. So instead of trying to act big, try to just be who you are. What I mean, by that is in your marketing, don't try to come across some massive company. If you got a pickup and you're just getting started, lean into that. If you advertise some massive company, you have everything put together and your phone system sounds like you're a Fortune 500 company. Customers are going to get confused when you show up. And you're the only worker employees that down the road you might want to hire. They're going to be confused when they also think it's like this massive company and they join and it's just you and you're in your garage just getting started. You got to ask yourself, like, what makes you different than every other landscaping company? If there's other competitors that you look up to, like, man, they're so big and they're such a massive company, well, great. Stop trying to be them. Be something that they can't be, which is small, where the actual owner operators on the property of the customers every single day. If you advertise like you're a massive company, you're getting massive contracts and big commercial jobs and property managers reaching out to you, it's likely you're probably not going to be profitable on those jobs anyways, and you don't have the manpower to get them completed anyway. Just be who you are, market that way, and realize that by doing it, you're going to attract the right type of customer.

All right, so now you fill your schedule. Now we're going to get more customers so we can continue to grow the business. And to do this, if you don't have a lot of money to spend on Google Ads, Facebook ads, billboards, and more expensive marketing channels, all of those things do bring in customers, but they also require a lot of money to spend on advertising. If you don't have money, you probably have time. And so we're gonna use the rule of 100. The rule of 100 doesn't take as much money when it comes to advertising costs. We're not gonna run the fancy ads on Facebook or on Google. We don't have that kind of money. But what we do have is some boots. And we're gonna go pound pavement and do door hangers, door knocking and talk to as many customers as possible about our services. The Rule of 100 was created by Alex Hormozi, and it's basically this. Every single day, you're gonna do 100 cold outreaches to potential customers. Now, 100 customers could be knocking. It could be 100 door hangers that you go out and put and Put the actual price. Lawn care media has the actual templates for this where you can put in the price as you're going up the door and get more mowing customers, get property cleanup, get a bush trim, get weeding jobs. And so do that 100 times a day. I can guarantee you you're going to get one or two jobs every couple days, and all of a sudden, you're going to continue to grow your schedule even more. So we got door hangers, we got door knocking, but you could also go online, you could go on to local Facebook groups. Get inside those Facebook groups. It doesn't cost you anything. And because you already have the trust built up of being a local community member, you. You can pitch your services and do it in a delicate way. You know, don't tell them, like, right off the rip, I'm trying to do my mowing. My mowing service, like, come buy for me, it's $40. Like, don't go that direction. Introduce yourself. I live in such and such a neighborhood. Make it really local, because that's what that community, what makes it really different now. This is not fun. This is not exciting. You probably don't love waking up every day with the thought of knocking on doors and talking to strangers about your services. However, doing the boring work, as Alex talks about, is extremely important at this stage of business. We don't have the money to go spend on the ads. What we do have is our time. And we need to do the rule of 100 every single day. Just grinding, finding the next customer.

So now that you've started to get a lot of customers, we need to talk about whether or not you are in growth mode or you're in profit mode. Growth mode is likely where you are at when you're first getting started, because you're always trying to get new customers. You're not even really thinking a lot about the profit because we just wanted to get as many jobs as possible. And we don't even care if they're for free because we're simply trying to get more jobs so we can get referrals, reviews, and upsells. So the alternative to growth mode, though, is profit mode. And the reason you get into business is eventually to get into profit mode. I find so many of the time that people will stay in growth mode so long, they'll eventually go out of business because they don't ever make a profit. And if you don't make a profit and you're in debt and you grow, grow, grow, and the business is getting bigger and Bigger. All of a sudden you can have a million dollar business and be massively in debt and never actually turn a profit in the business and you will still go bankrupt. So staying in growth mode is not the objective. The objective in business is always to get into profit mode. Like, oh, these big businesses, they just keep growing. No, the reason investors invest in them is cause they're getting bigger and bigger with the expectation that one day they will make a profit. So the question is, am I in growth mode or am I in profit mode? Because in my opinion, you have to choose which of these two modes you're going to be in. And it's likely that if you're watching this and you're just getting started, you are in growth mode. You're just trying to get customers at all costs. You don't care about the prices and you're okay doing low cost jobs, low price bids, because you're doing the work yourself, you're providing the labor yourself. But now what's going to happen is all of a sudden we start getting more jobs. So if we look at this, we say, okay, well I can do, let's just call it 30, 40 lawns, whatever it is for you. And all of a sudden you're growing, we're growing, we're getting more and more customers. And now you hit here, you can keep going a little further. And we work weekends, evenings, holidays, work longer days. And eventually you've got to do one of two things. Either A, you're going to collapse, your body's going to give out, or two, you're going to have to eventually hire someone, ie, increase your capacity to get more jobs. At this point, when you cross your capacity for you to like, hey, any more jobs and I'm tapped out, like I am working full time, overtime, et cetera. When you hit that capacity, you have a decision. The decision is, do I continue to get more customers and increase capacity or do I instead when I hit that same exact point and I have let's call it 40 customers as sort of our capacity of how many lawns we can do before we have to either hire someone or we're gonna like just be working way too many hours, determine what that number is. The secondary aspect is, what if I get to 40, I've been growing my business, I get to 40 customers, I don't wanna work way more hours and go crazy and overwork myself. I wanna have some good balance with my family, have some weekends off, et cetera. Great. That's when you're gonna enter profit mode and Raise your prices. You're going to raise your prices on your customers so that you stay around this level. You're gonna lose customers sometimes, you're gonna gain some customers sometimes. But if you're in profit mode, if you hit capacity, you raise prices. If you're in growth mode and you hit capacity, you're gonna buy more trucks, buy more equipment, and hire more people so you can increase the number of customers you have. And by doing that, in order to do that, you're going to increase capacity. So it's like, well, should I grow my business more? Should I raise prices? It is very much of a binary decision here. You're either in growth mode or you're in profit mode. And it is determined by when you hit capacity. Do you either a raise prices so that you get less customers and you increase your profits, or do you go out and buy more trucks, more equipment, get more customers, and hire people to increase your capacity? Inside copilot, we literally have a chart and that measures this exact thing. And that is, are you at capacity? Are you below capacity? Are you starting to get above capacity? Because if you're above capacity, that is this line right here. You have more jobs than you can actually get completed. You're going to have to hire more people, you're going to have to buy more trucks and buy more equipment. I talk in other videos about labor capacity, asset capacity, and personal capacity. But at the end of the day, when you hit capacity, if you're raising prices, you're going to be more profitable. If you continue to grow, that's awesome. You're gonna grow the top line revenue more, but you are jeopardizing your profits. And I believe you have to choose one or the other when it comes to your business. While we're here, I wanna take a moment to look at what happens if you're switching from growth mode to profit mode. You might be in growth mode and doing say a 10% profit margin business. Say, for example, you're running $400,000 in revenue. And after you pay yourself a regular salary, after all expenses, you, you have a profit of $40,000. This is after you pay yourself a salary, you're taking $40,000 home. Now, what happens if I raise all of my prices by 20%? So what does that look like? Well, if I'm charging customers $80 per hour or $80 per lawn, however you want to look at it, if I'm going to charge 20% more, that means I'm going to be charging an extra $16. So that means now they're going to be paying $96. So an $80 lawn just became a $96 lawn. I increased my prices by 20%, in this case, $16. Now, let's take a look at what happens when we raised our prices. Yes, you're going to lose some customers. That's why you will stop growing, because you're in profit mode and you raised prices and less of your estimates will get accepted. However, by raising our price from 80 to $96, that's only 16 bucks. Watch what happens. I raise my prices by 20%. What happens to my revenue if I raise my prices by 20%, it's going to go to $480,000. Without any more jobs, I'm just raising my prices. If I go from 400 to $480,000, this is what's crazy. My profit is simply going to go up $80,000, which means I'm now going to make $120,000 of profit. I tripled my profit, triple it by increasing my prices by 20%. And that's the power of switching from growth mode and into profit mode. So as you grow, your business, always know two things. One, what is my capacity? How much revenue can I do? How many jobs can I do without having to hire more people and buy more trucks and equipment? Two, I need to know, am I in growth mode or in profit mode? So that when I hit capacity, I know if I'm going to continue to grow or am I gonna go into profit mode, raise prices, reduce the number of customers I have, reduce my close ratio, but increase my profit margins dramatically. This is why you get into business. This is the magic of creating a brand and a service that people love. It's a very sticky thing. Say, oh, no, people are all gonna leave when I raise it by $16. Here's the thing. If you have the right customers and they came to you because you have a great website, you have great insurance, your trucks are branded correctly, and all of those things are right. If you have the right customer, they're not going to leave over 10, 15, 20% price increase. They're just not. Why? Because they don't want to have to go get five other bids and talk to people who don't answer their phone. And people don't show up to appointments, and people don't show up to do the job, what they're actually asking for and paying for. And so they're going to stick with you, a large percentage of them. We raised prices at my location this past year by over 25%. Guess how many people left? Less than 10% of customers left. But I more than doubled my profit margin. In the lawn care landscaping industry, we are always super conscious about price. But here's the thing. If you create a brand, create a business that people don't want to leave because you do a great job. You have automations and a credit card on file and you show up when you said you were going to. And when they ask for more work, you get an estimate to them within 24 hours and you're available to answer the phone as much as possible and you get back to them on emails. If you do that, they don't want to leave. And by creating a sticky service with a great brand, you're going to be able to raise prices. And when you do that, all of a sudden you have a very interesting business.

As you begin to grow the business and add more jobs, I want you to future proof the business by making sure you keep P4P in mind. Let me explain. As you're gonna be able to grow the business and have more employees, we're gonna want to eventually institute something I call pay for performance. Now I'm not going to go into pay for performance here because we're just talking about getting started. But when you're getting started, I want you to have the groundwork of the business being able to eventually transition into pay for performance. Pay for performance is where you pay a percentage of the labor revenue to your employees. It's great to cut out waste, be able to pay your employees more and be able to make sure you don't have to micromanage them all day long. Now if you're just getting started, like, who cares? I don't care about paper performance. I just want to get more jobs. I agree. And I'm not going to talk about P4P here. You can go to P4P software.com, there's free training. You get the book for free as well from there. What I want you to think about though is what do I need to do now in my business? So when I have 3, 4, 5 employees and I want to use P4P and pay based upon their performance, I have everything ready to go. And to do that, we need to use budgeted hours on every single job. So instead of just looking at a job and be like, oh, it's gonna be $40 for that lawn or $80 for that lawn or $60 for that lawn, instead of just coming with a dollar amount, use a rate that you're trying to target your target Hourly rate for mowing. Your target hourly rate for bush trimming, your target hourly rate for any service that you have in your business. Ideally, keep it consolidated to one or two different rates. For us, we usually have a project rate and then a mowing rate. So for projects, you might charge a little bit more. Takes more skill if you're doing things like paver patios or retaining walls, et cetera. And then you might have another rate for mowing, or just keep one same rate. Keep it simple, but you're gonna use that. So, for example, now instead of saying, oh, that's an $80 lawn, I'm gonna say, well, my hourly rate is 80. So that would mean that that's one budgeted hour. Oh, that's a $40 lawn. Okay, well, if I divide 40, divide that by 80. This is my target hourly rate for mowing. That's a 0.5 or half budget hour lawn. And now all of a sudden, you're starting to use budget hours for mowing. When you're doing projects, things like a mulch install, instead of just saying, oh, $400. Well, how did you come up with that number? We're going to actually use budget hours. We're gonna say, okay, well, we need three cubic yards of mulch. So there's gonna be three times $40, $120 for our mulch. For the labor, it's gonna take us five hours. Well, five times 80, that's $400 right there. So I have $400 plus $120 for my materials. I'm gonna charge $520 to the customer for that mulch installation. The reason that's important is because I used budget hours. Five budget hours multiplied by my rate of $80 per hour gave me how much labor revenue $400 is for that job. And you say, that's not important. I don't care about P4P. You're right. But down the road, if you've used that way to do your estimates with budget hours, now we'll actually know that we have $400 of labor revenue. And that's what the employees get a percentage of on P4P. And so right now, all I want you to think about is doing your estimates using budgeted hours inside of copilot. On every single visit, you can put your budget hours and then compare it to your actual hours. This will allow you, once you get employees, to see which employees are the most efficient, which ones you might need to train up on, which ones you might have to actually let them go. Because they're just not hitting budget hours. It'll also allow you to switch from paying them by the hour. In other words, the longer the job takes, the more money they make to P4P pay for performance where the faster the job gets done and when customers are happy, they make more money. The harder they work, the more money they make. But if you right now, when you're getting the business started, you can use budgeted hours to calculate the pricing on jobs. Very good.

Something I've always said is property, equipment, truck. What I mean by that is your property size determines the the size of equipment you need. So a lot of times people are always wondering, well, what type of mower should I buy? How big should the deck be? It should really be determined by your property size. If you're doing massive commercial jobs, you're going to need a much larger piece of equipment. And if you're doing small jobs like this, where it's 2,3000 square feet of turf, you're only going to need a push mower or maybe a 32 inch deck stand on. You're not going to need a massive 60, 72 inch sit down mower with a bagging system on it if you never bag and there's small little properties like this. Now based upon the property size is gonna be determined, like I said, of your equipment. And then the type of equipment you have is going to be really determining whether or not you do trailer. If you do trailerless setup and exactly the size of that trailer that's gonna be needed and the size of that trailer or whatever your setup is, that's gonna be the determining factor of what kind of truck you need. Cause if you have a massive trailer, you're not gonna pick it up with a Ford Ranger. And if it's a 16 foot massive trailer, three massive zero turns. But you could potentially do a Ford Ranger if you're doing a push mower, a weed whacker and blower and doing small properties like this. Now another thing to take into consideration when it comes to your property size, determining your equipment size is other factors on the property. For example, terrain. If you're going to have a lot of slopes, it might be best to have a stand on mower where it's much safer to hop off of the mower. Also, you want to be keeping an eye out for gates. Most gates are 32 to 36 inches wide, which will be a big indicator of how big of a mower can I get into the backyard? I like to think about it like this. Look at the 80% of your property sizes. As the general rule of thumb, you don't need a mower for every property in your market. If you try to do that, you're going to need literally a 20 inch mower all the way up to a 72 inch mower because you're trying to do everything in between. What is 80% of the customers that you're getting? The leads that you first got when you started their business, base it on that. And you just look at your market, even if you have no customers and be like, okay, what's the average size of the properties? In my market we use the ramp racks and like trailer setups because we usually have push mowers only going out to properties. Why? Because we only have properties that have 3,4000 square feet of turf max. And so if the vast majority of your customer base is really big properties, you're going to need bigger mowers, you're going to need bigger trailers and you need bigger trucks. If the vast majority of properties are much smaller, you can get away with smaller pieces of equipment, smaller trucks and trailers and so on and so forth. And so we're looking also at property square footage. That's the main factor. How big is the properties? We're looking at the gates and we're looking at the terrain. These are the indicators of what type of equipment you're going to buy. So now we've talked about the fact that property size and all these things are on terrain and the gates, etc. Is the determining factor of what type of equipment you buy. Type of equipment you buy is really what indicates what type of trailer you buy. And what type of trailer you buy is the type of truck you buy. Now let's go to the dealership and actually look at the types of equipment you could be purchasing with this in mind.

So now the big question, if you're starting a longer business, what kind of mower should I be buying? Let's walk through some of these options. So I'm really independent of brands. I really don't care what brand you choose. Choose the dealer. This is our dealer here. You really want to focus on having a deal that's close by, that's going to have great service, that's going to really help you as a commercial operator and give you priority over their residential customers. So this is an ex mark, but literally use anything that's close by you that's going to service you well. So this is a 21 inch mower. I highly recommend when it comes to your mower and Your trimmer and your blower, you go commercial. Yes, you could go cheaper and get things that are not commercial. But a lot of times if you mow more than 20, 30 lawns a week, anything residential is going to start to fall apart. Back in the day, we actually did used to use residential Honda push mowers, but they're not even being made anymore. So in general, when it comes to your basic equipment of mower, blower and weed whacker, that is a lawn care business, I recommend going commercial. And don't skimp on just on those basic things. You know, if you want to skimp on gloves or a nicer shovel, sure. But like these things are going to be using all the time. And at the beginning, I don't want to buy two or three of something just to have redundancy. I'd rather just buy one that works well. So this is a 20 inch mower. This is going to fit in all of your gates. It's very easy to be able to teach someone how to use this when you get employees. So the smaller the mower, it's easier to train people. It's also going to make less damages. For example, if I'm running this bad boy right here, I got myself a sprinkler head. If this thing is up slightly elevated out of the ground and I hit it with a 20 inch mower, not going to do a lot of damage. However, I hit it with a 60 inch zero turn that weighs 800 pounds, I could completely wipe this thing out. Also, if I hit a fence panel with a 60 inch zero turn, I'm going to completely obliterate things. This is probably going to leave a scratch and that's about it. So think about your liability, think about your training of future employees when it comes to your equipment. Remember, we're trying to match the equipment size with 80% of our properties. This is a 25 inch mower, so a little bit wider of a deck. Similarly, it's made, it's going to, you know, help you get an extra 4 inches. Is it worth going for a 20 inch? 2025 inch. Are you going to see a lot more efficiency? Maybe, marginally, yes. Again, this is going to come down to this one's lighter. For example, we use this one quite a bit, the Y Bravos, simply because super light, it's literally lighter than this piece of 21 inch mower from Exmark. There's a lot of different factors you're going to consider when it comes to the type of mower that you choose. If you want to take it even a step further, we got 20 inch, we got 25 inch. Over here's a 30 inch mower. So this one's actually going to have two blades. Underneath. There's a commercial 30 inch mower from Exmark. Also, it's gonna come with a bigger bag. But this thing is a beast in terms of weight. This thing is extremely heavy. This one you're not gonna be able to pick up by yourself. At least most people are not gonna be able to pick up this mower by themselves. And you do have two blades, so sometimes, you know, twice as much blade sharpening. You do have a bigger tank for fuel, so you can mow for longer. This one's nice because you do have now significantly like 40% more actual deck width. To be able to cut down on how long you have, how many passes you'd have to do on a lawn. Again, if I'm mowing an area like this, that's maybe 3, 4, 5,000 square feet, having the extra deck width would probably reduce my actual mowing time by 30, 40%. Very cool. The question is, are you willing to pay the difference? This is probably about a doubling of cost going from the 21 inch mower to the 30 inch mower. The thing that we found, when it comes to push mowers, the biggest struggle is actually all of this stuff up here. Usually when it comes to a commercial mower, the deck is solid. Honestly, a decent Kohler or Kawasaki engine, etc. It's gonna do great. It's all these little knobs and levers and the cords and the cables. This stuff is what gets broken. So if you're gonna use these cheaper push mowers, I do recommend having some training and terms of maintenance as well as making sure that all of your crew and yourself know how to change out the cables, sharpen the blades, do basic little functions like the handles, like this one over here. The biggest, our biggest problem with this thing is literally the fact that this plastic knob breaks all the time. You know, this pull string cord breaks a lot. These are the type of things from a maintenance perspective, you want to make sure you know how to fix these things. Because these machines, it's not the big stuff that breaks, it's all the little small stuff that breaks quite often. Now, if you're going to upgrade, because that's going to be looking at anywhere from 1500 to $3000 typically for a push mower. Again, if you're doing property sizes, they're under 5,000 square feet, you might be able to get away with just that using something like the ramp rack or not needing trailers at all. However, if we want to take a step up, we're going to move up to a zero turn. Now these are sit down zero turns. I actually sit down and underneath me is going to be the deck. There's also stand on mowers. If we go over here where you're going to stand behind the machine and this one's usually going to be helpful for a couple things. Number one, it's super helpful for when there's gradients, when you have a lot of slopes. This one's a lot safer because if I need to get off, boom, kill switch, we're good to go. Much safer. And a lot of them like this one here, I can simply push up this and now turn it into a walk behind. Very cool. When it comes to the sit down mowers, the thing that's nice about them is usually there's less operator fatigue. Because I'm able to sit down, I'm not standing behind this machine. And if I'm doing this for 1, 2, 3 hours, yes, it has some shock absorber for your, your feet, but you're standing up and doing that for three hours straight can be taxing on the body. So this one's a little bit easier in terms of ergonomically. Also if you have to bag clippings, this one's gonna be better because what you're gonna have is a big unit that sits in the back here though you actually have a chute and collect all the clippings inside the back bags. This is a 60 inch. Again, great. This one's actually not even a commercially rated unit. And this is where even when it comes to zero turns you have the decision do you go all the way to the commercial stuff? And then what size of like how much commercial do you want to go? These HD heavy duty type models are kind of an in between of, you know, heavy use residential and then very commercial. So there's a lot of price range here. You're looking at anywhere for something like this from five, six thousand dollars. That's not quite a commercial ready unit. And then you have different sizes. 52 inch, 48 inch, 44 inch. This is all going to be determined by simply what size of property you're using and what are you going to have on the back of this thing. Do you need the bagger on the back of this that has a bunch of bushels to be able to gather clippings as we move around Here you can see all goes all the way down to 42. And this one's like much cheaper of a unit. I could probably pick up the front of this unit. It's much cheaper. So don't go cheap on these. In my opinion, if you're doing more than 40, 50 lawns and you're going to be using this thing and you're doing large properties, just go ahead and bite the bull on a commercial mower. Now if we scale up, we can actually go to a more commercialized model that is going to cost you probably 8, 9, $10,000 or more. And these can get very expensive. If you throw a bagging unit on the back of this bad boy that has like three bushels, you could literally be looking at 12, 14, $15,000 all said for this mower, which ultimately is probably what, like 10 times the cost of a 20 inch mower. The question is, are you going to use this often? And the biggest question I have when it comes to these zero turns is what's my asset utilization? How many times am I going to actually use this massive 60 inch mower on lawns? If I'm going to be mowing grass and I have 20 lawns in a day and 15 of them, I'm just using the push mower and five of them, I'm using this bad boy. Guess what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna get rid of the five customers that I need this on. Cause they're two, three acres. And I'm just going to go stick with the 15 customers that just need a push mower. So again, look at 70, 80% of your customers and ask what's the largest piece of equipment I need to sufficiently service those customers. Another thing is if you get the larger units or if you have a good dealer, you're typically going to be able to get 0% financing on a lot of this equipment. So here, this is Carl's Mower out in Ferndale, Washington. They're very close to us. A lot of the locations from Augusta Lawn Care come to this location. Why? Because they take care of their commercial operators and give them priority. One of the things you want to focus on when it comes to choosing a dealer and you're just getting started is if a unit goes down, will they give you a demo unit? Will they give you a loaner for the day? The reason that's important is because instead of having to buy two mowers in case one goes down, I can just rely on knowing that my dealer is going to take care of Me, if one does go down in the field, I have a flat tire. If something happens with the battery or a spindle, I hit something with my blades and it wrecks everything. It's gonna take a few days to get the part in. If that's the case, I would usually need a second mower. But if you have a great dealer, very important to keep those relationships. And like, I would bring them pizza sometimes, I'd bring them ice cream sometimes. I wanted to make my dealer as happy as possible. So when they saw me drive in or they saw my crew drive in, they would give me priority and they make sure they take care of me if one of my, some of my equipment goes down. Because at the beginning, you don't want to have to be buying trucks or buying equipment that just sits around. Asset utilization is super important. Let's go inside the dealer. I want to talk about other aspects of your equipment when it comes to your weed whackers and your trimmers. Now, one thing to keep in mind again, you can probably get 0% financing a lot of this stuff. And so don't like be like, oh man, I can't get the 48 inch mower. Even though I'm doing these big lawns, I'm going to have to do push mower. Look, if you're going to have 80, 90 of your lawns being an acre plus, you're gonna have to get a zero turn. And if that's gonna cost you, what, $180 a month, $200 a month? Yeah, you might pay $300 a month for a zero turn, but if that means getting. That's just a couple more customers, if you can get a couple more customers because you got this piece of equipment. Let's rock and roll. Just know I want to make sure my asset utilization is very high. In other words, how many days, how many lawns am I actually using that piece of equipment? If it's just sitting in my trailer and being dead weight and I'm just pulling around town all day long, it's costing me fuel, it's costing me insurance, and more than anything, it's dead weight. It's not actually doing anything for me besides needing a bigger truck and a bigger trailer. Let's go check out the trimmers and the blowers, see what's inside. All right. So when I first got started Augusta Lawn Care, I actually started with this system over here where I had interchangeable parts for all the different tools that I needed. And I just bought one motor. So this is definitely an option, it's going to save you a little bit of money. But ultimately, as you grow the business, you're going to need to move away from this piece of equipment. What I found is a lot of times, after changing out the heads many, many times and breaking them many times, I just realized I got so much better power out of having an actual backpack blower, an actual trimmer, an actual edger that was fully connected. But this is definitely an option. At the beginning, you could literally have this as an attachment, as a blower. And this bad boy is what, 150 bucks? Throw this onto an existing unit and you got yourself a blower. Instead of having to go pay 3 or 4, $500 for an actual backpack blower. But eventually you're going to want to upgrade. And what I recommend highly on the hand tools especially is don't skimp out on this piece of equipment. Yes, your mower, you might go from a, you know, $2,000 mower that you really wanted to maybe a fifteen hundred dollar mower, but that five hundred dollars, you know, it's a small change here. And spending an extra 100 or $200 might be the difference between, you know, having a lot of breakdowns and having a piece of equipment that you can really rely on. For example, these are the trimmers. So if you want to upgrade away from an attachment system that's going to kind of be the jack of all trades, master of none, where you have an edger attachment, a blower attachment, a chainsaw attachment, a trimmer attachment. Like, look at all these. You got all these stuff, you got bed edgers, you got. I don't know what this is for a reciprocator. Don't know what that means. Blower, chainsaw attachment. You literally attach all of these things into one of these motors. This is an articulating scathe. And then you got a bush trimming thing. Let's go. Rototiller, edger. These are great. Cool. It's going to save you a little bit of money. But if you want to upgrade, you're going to step up to the actual straight edge trimmers. So over here we got a trimmer looking at $229. If we go all the way to the other end though, we have a trim that's literally $629. So like, oh, well, you said get the best, so we should get this one. Not necessarily. Keep in mind that some of these units are built to be able to operate literally six, seven hours straight throughout the day. If you're doing small lawns and you're using this thing for 5, 10 minutes here, 5, 10 minutes there. You don't need the biggest piece of equipment, mostly from a weight perspective. This one, for example, is 14.6 pounds. If we go down, down to this one, for example, this thing's only $149, and it is 9 pounds. That's a lot less weight. And it's going to be a lot, lot easier on your shoulders and your arms if you're having a lighter piece of equipment when it comes to a trimmer. Now, if you are doing large railways, if you're doing along fence lines, if you're going to be using a unit for a long period of time, doing ditches, for example, yeah, you might want a larger trimmer. But usually something in the middle on the commercial end is what I'm going for. I don't like these bended shaft ones. This is usually a residential type of trimmer. I'm not a huge fan. I'm gonna usually upgrade to something a little bit better in the range of 2, 3, $400. I'm not going cheap on this. I'm going to go a little bit higher end and make sure it's a commercial unit. Also, I'm also gonna upgrade on things like trimmers. So at the very beginning, like I said, I was using the combi system where I can just throw attachment. As I got a little bit bigger in my business, I started getting these straight line trimmers. They're straight edge. Then I got these bush trimmers again, separate. These are expensive, like $600, $400. These are not cheap. However, if you're doing a lot of bush trimming, this is going to help you save time on every single job. Ultimately, these tools are meant to give us efficiency. And ultimately, when someone comes and try is paying you to trim their bush or cut their lawn, they're essentially asking for the result. If we can get to that result faster because we have better equipment, good things happen. I don't want that piece of equipment to be sitting on the trailer never being used. And I don't want to be paying extra for something that I don't really save any time for. So the real question is, when it comes to these pieces of equipment, is their reliability and is it going to make me more efficient? Am I going to cut more grass in the same amount of time efficiency, or am I going to have less downtime because things break less often? I highly recommend when. Especially when it comes to your weed. Whacker your blower and your hand tools that you stay above quality. Higher quality. I'd rather go a step down on my mower in terms of quality if I'm on a budget. And then have this stuff be really high quality because you don't want this stuff going down. And I don't have to get four trimmers when I'm just getting started. I want one, two really solid ones. I'd rather invest in that higher grade equipment.

Remember that the property size determines the type of equipment you have, and the type of equipment you have is going to determine your trailer size. Let's go over the different types of trailers you might consider when starting your lawn care business. The utility trailer really has a lot of different ranges. This is going to be kind of the lowest you're going to go. It has a single axle. It doesn't have any sides to this. And it's going to be the cheapest when it comes to cost on a trailer. Now, this one's looking like about 7, maybe 6ft by 14ft or so. That's going to give you plenty of space if you wanted to put, you know, bins, debris, some push mowers. The thing you want to be careful of with these trailers is the fact that this one only has a single axle. So if you want to, yes, for a space, you might get two, three different zero turns. But you got to be careful with the weight rating on that axle if you're going to really start to weigh this thing down. If you want to step up a little bit in terms of cost. Now we actually have the metal siding all the way around. This one's going to be a little nicer because now we got the rail a little higher. Your weed whackers are going to sit higher on the rails versus over here. They're going to be a little bit lower. What's nice too, about this is you can throw things that are loose without worrying about them rolling off the side. That's a little bit difficult with having the cheaper model is you can't just throw a wheelbarrow in here. You can't throw a bucket in here. You're going to have to strap things down. If it's on a flatbed, look like that. This is going to cost you a little bit more though. And it's also. This one only has a single axle. If you wanted to upgrade, we're going to move to a double axle. And that allows us to be able to store a lot more weight on the actual trailer. So double axle, plenty of Space. Now, we can get maybe 2, 3, 0 turns. But remember, why would I want 3, 0 turns if I'm driving the truck by myself or even having a crew of two people? Always be asking yourself, what's the asset utilization going to be? When I'm on the truck and trailer, am I going to actually use all the pieces of equipment? This should be a determining factor when it comes to what type of trailer you buy. So we got several considerations. The axle. So how much weight is going to actually be on the trailer, cost, how we're going to do our mounting racks in terms of blowers, weed whackers, et cetera, gas cans on the side, as well as if we want to use the trailer for something other than mowing. This trailer is going to be much more versatile in terms of putting molten soil and other landscaping jobs that you might be doing in addition to your mowing. If you're doing large landscape projects or hauling a bunch of equipment around, having an equipment hauler trailer like this is going to be super nice. If you're doing other landscaping projects that require a lot of material and you're dumping actual mulch, soil, gravel, having a dump trailer also super handy. But for now, let's focus more on the mowing side and see if enclosed trailers are better than the utility trailer. An enclosed trailer is going to cost you a little bit more than a utility trailer. The advantages are you can lock everything up at the end of the day and not worry about what's inside. Although I'll be honest, a lot of times this is pretty thin metal. If someone really wanted to get inside, they probably could. But it's going to be, you know, out of style, out of mind. You don't have to get mowers in and out. You can leave stuff inside. Now, I like utility trailers for the fact that I'm able to get a trimmer off the side from outside of the trailer. In this case, I have to go inside the trailer, I have to get inside the rack, etc. On a utility trailer, I can just grab it right from here. What's also really nice about an enclosed trailer like this is I do have all this space to do branding. So whether I paint this or I put my decals, my logo, lots of opportunity for branding on an enclosed trailer. Now, one thing people will say a lot of times is that an enclosed trailer keeps all of your equipment out of the elements. And that is true. If it's raining snowing, you can just leave it inside of here. One thing to keep in mind if it gets really, really hot inside, this is like a sauna, it gets even more hot. And I've seen a lot of equipment struggle, weed whackers, mowers, etc struggle when they are inside of these for the entire day. And so all of a sudden things are getting flooded, things aren't working great. And yes, there's things you can work around that, but I have seen that being issue with enclosed trailers once equipment is put inside.

All right. The most fun and exciting part of starting a lawn car business, buying a truck. Now if you're getting started. A lot of times people, if they watch my content in the past, think that I'm against getting any sort of debt or financing. Also some people think that I shouldn't get I don't think you should get nice new trucks. Not true. I'll explain more when you're first getting started, the chances of you succeeding over the next five years, statistically speaking is low. So when I generally give my advice to people watch my videos, I say stay away from fancy brand new trucks and financing them for 50 grand. I usually tell people not to do that because statistically speaking the vast majority of them won't be around in five years when that thing matures. In terms of the debt that they are, they are getting on that truck. The reason I say that is because if you have 20, $30,000, I don't want you to go blow it all on a vehicle. So there's going to be two things you do because I want you to be able to get customers. So the first option is get debt, then spend your cash on getting those customers via marketing. The second option is to get a cheaper truck for maybe 15 or $20,000 but still have some money available for marketing. I just don't want you to blow all of your cash on a brand new truck. Does not get you a business. A business is contracts and contacts. It is actually generating revenue and getting customers. So the three C's contacts, contracts and customers, that's we're after, not trucks. You need to go find customers and I need you to spend that money if you have a smaller budget, on marketing, on Facebook, Google, every door, direct mail, doing door hangers. These are all things you can do to actually get customers. Then down the road you can get nice trucks. Recently I've bought newer trucks, ones that are only a year or two old. Why did I do that? Because the business established it's already been in business for 10 years and I know it'll be in business for another 10 years. So getting debt, not a post to it. Getting new trucks, not opposed to it. But make sure you know you're going to be in business for five or 10 more years. And if you're just getting started, I'm sorry, but the math is against you. The likelihood of you succeeding is low. So just focus on what actually will increase the odds of you succeeding, which is getting more customers. I promise you, you can have all the trucks in the world and you have a lousy business, but if you have all the customers in the world, you will be able to find the trucks to be able to do the work. And if you're like, well, I want to go get debt on a truck, but they're not going to finance me because of my credit score, I don't have enough money down. Guess what? If they don't want to give you money for a loan on a truck, this is probably a good indication. You should probably not be getting the debt because they're going to do their underwriting and see whether or not they think you're going to be able to pay them back. And so in that case, you might have to go start with something really janky. When I first started out with my brother, we had push mowers that we put in the back of a Dodge Caravan. And a lot of stories of people starting in lawn care started that way because they didn't have a lot of money and they couldn't get debt. So be okay with the fact that your truck, your equipment, all those things might not be perfect at the beginning, but the goal is to start getting customers and start generating revenue. All right, so let's talk about some non traditional types of vehicles you might use for your lawn care business. The traditional pickup truck is the standard. Why? Because it's versatile. You can use it for basically anything. Pulling a trailer, putting mowers in the back. You can also put rock in the back, you can put grass clippings in the back. It's just a lot of versatility when it comes to a pickup truck. Now the other option is using some sort of a utility van or a box truck. Now let's go over the pros and the cons. The pros, when you get back to your shop, you lock this thing up, it's secure, and immediately you can just walk out of here, lock up the truck or the van, and you're good to go. There's no sort of storage required if you just keep your equipment inside. The downside, though, is the fact that it's usually going to be constrained A little bit more in terms of your space. And so getting large like zero turns in the back of this going to be a little more difficult. Even if you upgrade to a larger size Ford Transit or different type of cargo, Master vans from Dodge Sprinters, etc, even if you do that, getting a zero turn in the back sometimes a little more difficult. Now the biggest con of a enclosed space like this is again the versatility. I cannot put a cubic yard of mulch in the back of this thing. Unless I do bags, I'm not going to be able to put my grass clippings as easily being able to store them inside of here. I've seen some people get very creative though, and if your constraint is the fact that you don't have shop space, getting something you could lock up would be nice. But again, you could also do this with an enclosed trailer. So really the only reason to use this is if you don't want trailers and you want to be able to lock up your stuff at the end of the day. All very good things. Just know that you're not going to be able to haul debris. Getting your truck tools in and out of here is gonna be a little more complicated than just reaching over the back of a pickup. So there's pros and cons to it, but it's definitely an option if you want to get started. The thing I like most about the vans as well as box trucks is all of this space. This is one massive billboard. And if you get a big box truck, you can have a massive billboard driving around all day long with your branding, your logo and look really super unique. I really like that feel stand out. However, there's definitely limitations to what you can do with this van in terms of size of the mower and other landscaping services you might want to offer.

Another way to avoid using trailers for your setup is using ramps to get the mower in the back of the truck. So this, this one here is called the Ramp Rack. There's other models that are a little cheaper called Mo and Go systems and other ramps that you can find just getting the mower in the back. Now this model here specifically cost us around 25, $2,600, but we do get a 25% discount from ramp Rack for Augusta Lawn Care. But usually these are gonna cost you somewhere between 2000 and $5000, whether it be from Mow and Go systems, the ramp rack or other people I've seen that have prefabbed things. Now come around here. I'll show you actually inside using a couple things We've done, we've actually put this rubber here just to prevent any sort of damage to the bottom of the blades on the mowers. So we will bring in a larger mower if we need to. But this does prevent any sort of damage as it comes over this hump. Now if you have a, a truck that's lifted or anything like that, you'd probably need even more a longer ramp to be able to get this thing in. This one specifically has this massive spring. It's a spring loaded assist which makes it really easy to just open this thing up, put it back down. Very simple. Now once you get up inside the truck, this is where your mower is going to be sitting. And so one thing that kind of constrains you is simply the width deck or your deck width when it comes to your mower because it's got to fit inside of these if you're going to bring the mower to the front of the trailer. I've seen people be able to get two massive mowers, the stand ons in these back of these trucks. Usually what they got to do though is somehow modify this if they're going to bring in a 52 or 60 inch mower in order to get that mower up front. But what you can do is have the deck sit behind the wheel wells and then the wheels sit back here. If you come around to this side, you can actually see that off the back of this truck I have an extra about 2 and 1, 2 to 3ft before the end of this ramp rack, which gives me, I'm going to an extra 2, 3ft. I'm looking at 10, 11ft. That's a lot of space. Now I really, I really, really like this setup. If you don't have to bag clippings, if you have to bag clippings, it makes it a little more complicated. So in our market we have to bag clippings for two to three months out of the year during the spring rush. So usually what we will do is we will put all of our clippings up front, we will have our mowers in the back, a couple bins behind that, and then at the end of the day the bins come off, the mowers come off and then we can get rid of all the clippings in generally, bagging clipping is just a horrible thing. But what's nice also is I have all my equipment relatively accessible from inside and outside of the cab. Now all of these attachments are going to be separate from greentouch trailer axe.com there's a whole bunch of other equipment Defender. I don't really care where you get them, but what's nice about these is I can lock all of them up so no one can steal stuff. And it's all attached to the same rack. The nice thing about the ramp rack system is ultimately the fact that I don't need that trailer. However, it kind of marries the best of both worlds in terms of.

Not having a trailer, but also having the access to my equipment that I would have if I had a utility trailer. Because obviously with a utility trailer, I can come up right to the equipment and grab stuff right off of the truck. Or in that case, a trailer. In this case, I can grab all my tools very quickly still from the outside of the truck. A lot of people ask why we put the blower and the weed whacker over on this side. It's because in really tight urban areas, we usually are parking on the right side of the road, which means over here on the sidewalk, I can get to my blower, I get to my weed whacker. Whereas the other tools I use less often, I'll go into the truck and access over there. That way, if there's traffic, no one's life is in jeopardy. When we are walking and getting the equipment, we don't have to worry about that because we're on the sidewalk and then we're right off to the lawn. So if my mower is inside and I need to get gas, can I need a tool, I need to get a weed whacker blower. These are things that I can quickly access from this as if it was a utility trailer. So pros and cons, bagging clippings down. If you want massive mowers or you want two or three or four mowers and you want big jobs like these big commercial job sites. Boo. If you have smaller properties, smaller mowers, you don't have to bag clippings. And you want to be able to scale quickly without having to train all of your crew on backing up trailers and driving trailers around town. These ramp racks are a good deal.

When it comes to storing your equipment and everything that you buy. As you grow, you can grow with your storage. You don't need to start off with a big fancy shop space. You don't want to be spending all of your money on having a really expensive shop that is going to drain your money away, especially during the off season. So this is an example of something that we do. Shipping container. This thing's 8 by 40. So 8ft wide, 40ft long. And we have a bunch of these at our shop. So inside we can store mowers just like these. These are 25 inch mowers. And if all the crew is here, this would be lined up on both sides with mowers for every single truck. And so we got aerators, dethatchers, got mowers back here. And this is great because it is completely airtight in here and water's not getting in. It's also super secure. So in terms of security, really nice because we can lock the front and no one gets inside. Now this bad boy used to only cost like $2,000. Now they're running like four or six thousand dollars since 2020. Now this, you don't even need this. If you're just getting started, you're probably going to be in a garage or potentially just using your enclosed trailer to lock all your gear inside. When it comes to whether or not you should be having a smaller shop or more expensive shop, I like for my dump fees that I charge the customer to cover the cost of my rent and my shop space. For example, if you're paying $800 per month to have a storage facility, for example, and you've kind of gone from garage, maybe you have an enclosed trailer you lock up in your driveway, then you move on to a storage facility. Let's just say it's $800 per month. I want to be able to collect at least $800 in dump fees, fees from my customers. I'm going to charge $99 per pickup load of debris coming away from someone's house. That's going to go towards obviously the actual dump fees if I have to take it to a dump, but also the cost of storing all my equipment in trucks. This is what we call overhead recovery. Overhead shop space, rent, etc can be covered by the extra fees that I charge on top of my labor and my materials. So I'm going to charge estimate fees to cover the cost of my estimator and my admin team. And then I'm gonna charge my dump fees to cover the overhead of a shop space. As I begin to grow and have more dump fees, I can afford to pay more money for my shop space. Whether it be for a big old storage container like this shipping container, whether it be an enclosed trailer, a storage facility where you get a locker and you have to drive inside there every single day, or if you actually get land, actually pay for a massive shop space. A land like this would cost over $1.5 million in my market, that's insane. I'm not going to spend that kind of money when if I just spent a quarter of that on the business, I could triple the business. And so realize if you're going to go buy a massive shop space and have a bunch of land, etc. The cash you would pour into that if spent on the business usually has a better return. And remember, if you do buy real estate and you actually buy the land in the shop space, you're getting in a different business. Real estate is a different business than lawn care. So until you've built a large enough business to really sustain, actually having a mortgage and buying land and buying a shop space, just keep renting until it makes perfect sense and you can basically not find any other shop space to be able to rent.

One of the best ways to make you actually get paid is to have where you have automatic payments coming from your CRM and as well as making sure you accept credit cards on file. Now when you're going to accept a payment method of credit cards, you are going to pay 3 to 4% of processing fees to the payment processor. Something like Stripe is going to have to do the transaction of pulling the money from the customer. But then what's really cool is within a day or two you are going to get your money and ultimately we are willing to forego the 3 or 4% extra in fees and in order to be able to get the money faster. So yes, there are going to be the 3 to 4% of payment fees. All right. This is why most people say, well, I'm never going to accept credit cards, cash only, checks only, but I am not going to pay the 3,4%. The bottom line is, I'll ask you this, when was the last time you did business with a really reputable company that was really high quality that it was like, no, you must send us a check. The only people I can think of is like the utility company and no one likes them. But like restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, all the rest of it, you just assume that you can pay with a credit card. And so this 3 to 4% is simply going to get marked up into your costs and you're going to charge this to the customer. But I can guarantee you that the customer is willing to pay 3 to 4% more in order to be able to, to use a credit card. Because this type of customer that wants credit card and is willing to pay this is also much more time sensitive, which means they value their time a lot more than someone Else. And they're gonna be looking for and expecting things like having a credit card on file that has automatic payment. Now, inside of copilot, you can actually make it with just a click of a button right here. You can just click this button and immediately require automatic all credit cards on file before a customer can even accept an estimate. So that way, when an estimate gets accepted, you already know just by the fact that you got a notification saying an estimate is accepted, they've already had to put a credit card on file. And they can do that really simply using the client portal. They click add a credit card, and boom, just like that, they're able to quickly add a credit card, and it's able to be charged automatically from inside the software. Whether you're doing daily, weekly, or monthly payments, you can charge the card anytime. As long as on the account, you can also add ach, which is like basically a bank transfer, also from their account. Now, on bank transfers, we're not going to be at 3 to 4%. Inside of Copilot, we only charge 0.5%, and that caps out at $5. So if you have a $20,000 down payment on a massive project and you don't want to pay 3 to 4%, just require that they put a bank account on file or ach on file. And they're going to put their bank details in. They're going to have to confirm their bank account. But once they do that, now, you're only going to top out at $5 per transaction. So on $20,000 payment, $5 transaction fee. So you can definitely save money by having an ach instead of credit cards. But achs are a lot more difficult to get on file. And for the customer to actually validate inside of any software, including copilot, because they have to actually get a couple deposits, they put their bank information in, and it takes a few more steps. And so I just need a payment method on file, and if I'm gonna give up 3 to 4% to credit card fees, I don't really care. Now, if the customer calls in to accept the estimate, you can also put a credit card on file directly from the customer's account. I'm simply gonna go to.

I'm simply gonna go to add a credit card and exactly the same thing. Add a payment method for this customer to be charged every single time. I can then automatically charge them without ever asking them again for any sort of payment. They literally never have to even see the invoice. I'm gonna send them a receipt for you Know, end of the month or when I send them a big bill and I charge their card or I charge their bank account. But I don't have to always be asking for money. I have a payment method on file, I charge it, and we're locked and loaded. The type of customer that likes that is your premium customer. The person that wants to put cash underneath the mat, the person that wants to pay check only and they take 30 to 40 days to just pay you. That's also gonna be your lowest value customer. They're gonna be price shopping you and they're gonna jump along to the next vendor that's going to offer them a lower price.

Now, when it comes to big projects that get accepted, you want to make sure you get a deposit before the job starts. In other words, I want to actually collect at least 50% the value of that project before I even go out and buy materials or get employees to go do the work. Here's why. Because when I do the actual work itself, this is the actual work doing the job, that's fine. But I don't want to wait until afterwards to actually get paid. Here's why. Because in order for the work to get done, what has to happen, I have to have employees and I have to pay them money. Also, before the job even starts, I have to get materials. And that's going to come in the form of, let's just call it a landscaping job, some mulch, soil, gravel, trees, whatever it might be, also have to spend more money. This is why someone that's growing really fast can run out of cash is cause ultimately I can be paying for materials, buying all the trees and the materials for the job. I can then have to hire my employees and pay them on a weekly or bi weekly basis. Let's just say this is a three month job. All right? If I am waiting to the very end of the project to actually get paid, assuming they pay like maybe 30 days later. Now all of a sudden I have been spending money to materials and to my employees and then waiting for the payment before I actually get paid on the job. This is why you need working capital. But I can solve a lot of these problems by collecting 50% of my money up front. So that way this 50% deposit or down payment is able to cover the cost of my cogs, cost of goods sold, materials, direct labor, all of this stands for cost of good sold. If I can cover up 50%, usually that's going to cover my direct labor and the cost of materials before the job even starts. That way I don't have to have negative cash flow throughout the entire project. I'm able to get that money up front. And then when I actually end up collecting on the project, the last 50%, that goes into my pocket to cover the cost of overhead, and I actually make some profit. So in order to get a deposit or need a down payment, I need to have certain rules in terms of when I collect a deposit. Now, back in the day when I was growing really fast, I wanted to make sure I didn't have to add more friction to the sales process by asking for a deposit. And the reason for that is cause, like, look, if someone wants me to do a $10,000 job, I want to get on it right away. I'll put on the schedule next week, send them the invoice for $5,000, and I hope they pay me beforehand, but I just want the job on the schedule. What's really cool inside of Copilot is you're actually able to collect the deposit using a deposit threshold, which means if the project, the estimate getting accepted exceeds a certain amount of amount of dollars, like over a certain size, the customer will have to pay the deposit before they even click accept on the estimate. So that way, it ensures that I'm always collecting my deposit. There's no chance ever that I'm going to go out, buy materials, hire my employees, and then they don't pay me, and I am out. Like, literally, I've seen big projects that take a couple months wipe out companies because they don't collect a big enough deposit, or they relax on their deposit threshold and they only collected a little bit of money, or they had a deposit threshold. Yes, only $10,000 or more jobs. Well, then an $8,000 job comes along, they don't collect any deposit, and now they're stuck out $8,000 and the customer is not paying. So inside of Copilot, inside your settings, you can just go to your estimate settings and make sure you have a deposit threshold. For example, I'm doing anything over $1,200, I want the customer to pay 50% before they even accept the job. Before they even accept the estimate, they'd have to pay this. That way, when I get an estimate being accepted and I get notified, I know two things. I know credit cards on file. So forever and ever on their account, I can charge for any sort of invoices that they owe me. I will never, ever have an overdue invoice. Secondly, I know now I have a deposit threshold that if they do have a project over that dollar amount that I have set, they're already paid before I'm even notified. Which means as soon as I get that notification, I can just put the job on the schedule. I don't have to send them an email or text message or call them. Okay, great. Let's get that 50% deposit. If you do that, you could be waiting another week to get the check. You could be waiting another week to actually play phone tag with them and finally get their credit card information. Just make it to where when they accept the job, they have to have already paid the deposit. And as we've already talked about, already have a credit card on file now inside your settings. You can make this a dollar amount, too. I've seen some people, they just make it where it's like, look, if you accept any estimate, we just want 100 bucks. Cool. Like, if you're in growth mode and you don't want to ask for the 50% down, sure. Make this easier. You could literally just do exact amount. I want $50, and that's it. So you can make a dollar amount or a percentage. But ultimately, making sure you have a deposit threshold is important. I recommend. If you're hurting for cash and you don't have a lot of working capital, you need to make sure your deposit threshold is lower. In other words, instead of doing a deposit threshold at $3,000 like I used to, like we used to do 50% down on anything above $3,000. The problem is, if someone did a $2,500 job, those were always the ones I never collected on and never got paid for because I never got any money up front. And so they held me hostage to that final invoice. Whereas now, because of the feature in copilot where I can be full before I even accept the estimate, I can require the deposit to be paid. I bring that way down $1,200. Anything above that, I want 50% down before the job is even accepted. And if you're like, well, some of my customers, I want to have a deposit threshold. Other customers, I don't want to have a deposit threshold. Some customers, I want to have auto pay and a credit card required. Other ones, like my commercial clients, I don't want to great inside of copilot on an individual customer's account. I can actually go in here and have individually for each customer whether or not a credit card is required. I can also have custom rules and change the rules I made for the deposit threshold. So maybe there's a vendor you've always used, you know, they pay well and you don't want to have to add that friction to the deposit. Fine, you can go right in here and change it to whatever you want.

When you're first getting your lawn care business started, something that's super appealing is getting commercial job sites like this one. There's a strip mall. It's probably going to take you a couple days just to mow this property though, because like 20 or 30 acres, a lot of small little spaces, grass, flower beds, bushes, etc. These type of jobs and these type of contracts can completely change your business and it's very tempting to be able to jump right into them when you're first getting started. I highly recommend to not take a commercial job if it's going to make up more than 30% of your revenue. Why? Because if that contract falls through and you've already purchased trucks and equipment and hired somebody, if you're just getting started, like, just focus on the smaller things. We say, oh, I'm gonna double or triple because there's one contract. That might be true assuming things go well. But if they don't go well, and a lot of times they don't, when you're first getting started, it could really damage your business for the long term. The reason I say that is because when you're first getting started, you likely don't have the exposure, experience, the manpower, the equipment, or the pricing strategy to actually be able to make this job profitable. It's a massive project, and if you're going to be the lowest price bidder on a project like this, against competitors that have been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years, and they have lots of equipment and trucks and employees, and they've done this a million times and they know they're pricing their numbers, there's a really good chance you could lose your shirt. So if you're the lowest price bidder on a massive job like this and you're just getting started, there should be red flags everywhere. A lot of times when you do commercial work, there's of course pros and cons. The pros are that we don't have as many customers calling us all the time, having complaints. For residential customers, if you have four or five hundred customers, you basically have a full time job just answering the phone, email, billing, invoices, scheduling these sort of jobs. You might be able to do the same amount of revenue with four or five or six, six customers, meaning way less admin, way less phone calls and customer service. That's a pro. The con is that they a lot of Times aren't going to put a credit card on file and they're going to want 30 or 60 days to be able to pay an invoice after you've sent it. These sort of payment terms are very common for commercial properties and property managers, but it can be a real tough thing to swing when a third or 40 or 50% of your revenue from one customer is locked up for, for 30 or 60 days after you send an invoice. When it comes to big projects or contracts like this one, when it comes to commercial jobs, you can definitely grow a business much faster. I've seen people be able to build multiple million dollar businesses in one year just getting five, six, seven massive commercial projects. I know that's appealing, but most of the time in these commercial environments you're up against brightview and other large competitors that have tens of millions of dollars in revenue, massive crews, and if they're publicly traded, they will actually sometimes move into a market, undercut the competition and lose money on contracts and they're going to go after these big commercial jobs. Usually a residential customer is willing to pay a premium price for a premium service. Commercial vendors, usually they just want to hit the minimum threshold of quality and then they're very price sensitive and it usually goes to the lowest bidder. I would personally rather be in a market where I can have a premium service, charge a premium price and get way better profit margins. I'm not against commercial work. Just keep these things in mind. When you're competing against really big players and competitors. They're going to kind of really be okay with 3, 4, 5% profit margins. I'm not okay with that kind of thin profit margins. I'd rather go after 10, 15, 20% profit margins in the residential space.

One of the things that kills lawn care businesses is having overdue invoices and not charging late fees. Ultimately there's gonna be some percentage of the work that you do you send an invoice and never get paid for. Ultimately you're working for free. If you do that too much, you're gonna run out of money. This is actually a big reason why profitable lawn care businesses can go bankrupt. And that is they simply never collect on the invoices once they've been sent to customers. And one thing that we are not is, is a bank. Chase bank is a very good business model, but you need millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to open a bank. If you're starting a longer business, guess what? You aren't a bank. And if you're Going to allow people to be able to finance their invoices. In other words, not pay for 30, 60, 90 days, have late fees attached inside copilot, you can simply just have where at the end of the month they get charged a certain dollar amount or percentage fee if they're not paying on time. Ideally we collect right away, ideally even more so we collect before the job is even started, whether it be a deposit or prepayment. But if you're going to allow the customer to pay after they have the service done, either have a credit card on file so you can collect right away or have payment terms that are very tight, 7, 14 days. If you allow people to pay 30, 60, 90 days, you're gonna go become a bank. And a lot of times the bank of lawn care business owners. We don't charge interest. We stink at banking. We give these interest free loans essentially to people. When you say yeah, it's $5,000 and you do the job and then you invoice them at the end of the month and then three, four months later they pay you, you gave them an interest free loan for three or four months. Months. That's insane. And unless you're the White House and the government throwing money to everybody and anybody, we don't have the money for that. We don't have an unlimited budget. And so I've seen time and time again where from an accrual standpoint on a profit and loss statement, a business is profitable. But then I look at their overdue invoices or also known as accounts receivable. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're losing money because they run out of money in their bank account. They literally have no cash in the bank because they're simply not able to collect on the invoices that they have sent out to customers. Those late fees will absolutely put pressure on your customers to pay quickly. Another thing you can do is make sure you have an automated sequence of text messages, emails and phone calls going to customers to remind them to pay. So for example, after three days of an invoice being overdue, they may get a text message. Maybe after seven days they get an email. Maybe after 10 days you get an email back to your office saying hey, give this person a call. Maybe after 14 days you go knocky knocky on Mrs. Sally Jr. S door, door. And like you owe me money. Here's the invoice. Maybe after 28 days you stop service. Some sort of automated sequence. You can build these in automations inside copilot to remind your office and you to take them off of the service. Like it boggles my mind when people aren't paying and yet we're still going back every single week, every single month and doing service on their property. If someone's not paying, stop doing service on their property and collect from them immediately. At the very worst, if nothing works and they're months overdue, you got to send them to a collections agency. A collections agency is usually going to take 30, 40, even 50% of any revenue they collect on your behalf. However, they're going to send threatening emails and mail to the customer telling like, look, if you don't pay, we're going to ding your credit score. And if you have good customers, they don't want their credit score dinged. And if it really gets bad, you can put a lien on the property. But ultimately the goal is to not become Chase Bank. We are not in the banking business, we are in the lawn care business. So either get paid before or immediately after using credit cards. And if you're going to allow checks collect within seven days, if you go beyond that, you start having serious cash flow problems.

The software you use for your lawn care business is super important. It's extremely tempting when you're first getting started and you have 5, 10, 15 customers to just kinda keep track of everything in your head or even use your cell phone like the Reminders app or your calendar to keep track of everything. A CRM or customer relationship management tool is a lot more than just a calendar or a to do list. It's gonna keep track of everything of your business. It's an extremely important piece of software that's going to differentiate you from all the competition, the number one differentiator between chuck and a truck, and people that go really, really low on price and really bring down the professionalism in our industry versus the people that charge a premium price, have profit margins, employees logoed, trucks insured and bonded, etc. The difference, if I could group it up very quickly, is the professionals have a CRM and a software service behind them. The truck and a truck. Solo operators usually do not. The vast majority of solo operators do not have a CRM. And if you are planning to stay as a solo operator, I know that you can charge 5 or $10 more per hour for your labor simply by having a CRM. Why? Because it makes you look way more professional. You can send reminders to customers, automated follow ups via text or email. There's so much you can do inside a CRM beyond just the calendar and the to do. When we say CRM, customer relationship management. It really is trying to manage the relationship with the customer every single call. Putting the call notes inside of there, inside of copilot, you can make it where you put call notes and then have a reminder set. In three or four days you do a follow up and it goes back and reminds you to follow up with the customer. Keeping track of all the payments, invoices, the jobs that you've done, and making sure that job notes are on every single visit. When you're a solo operate stand tempting to do this in your head or in your phone or just think about it and you know, store it somewhere on a sheet of paper or something like a notebook. I've seen this be the CRM for many home service businesses. The reason that doesn't work is because it only works as long as you are doing the jobs. For example, only you, no Ms. Sally wants all the flower beds cut down with a weed whacker instead of pulled by hand. Only you know that the Mr. Jones doesn't like his beds edged. He only likes them to have a trimmer on them. He likes them no stick edger, just the weed whip. These are the type of things that you know, but you've got to put them inside of the database. You've got to put them inside of your CRM. If you don't, you will become the bottleneck to your business because you have all this knowledge that's only tied to you. And as soon as you get hit by a bus or you get injured or something happens in your family and you can't do the work itself, literally, the business will dissolve completely. Most small businesses in home services, including lawn care, dissolve. They go bankrupt or they sell off for pennies on the dollar due to one thing and that is an injury, some sort of something with their health, family, something puts them off track. And because they had no information inside of a software system and it was all in their head, the business is essentially worth nothing. Even if you're a solo operator. Having all of that information inside of a CRM is your best insurance policy against something happening to you and preventing you from being able to work for a week or two. And all of a sudden the business is completely gone. For the sake of your family that you're providing for, for the sake of the people that you might want to employ down the road. Keep a CRM, keep detailed notes, make sure that every invoice, every single estimate is documented. You can keep track of your close ratio simply by marking estimates as won or lost. There's so much you can do inside of a CRM. I recommend copilot CRM.com you can go there and see all the different features, including things like keeping track of your budgeted hours. The ability with one tap from the mobile app to be able to upsell customers via text message or an email is super powerful. Just one of those jobs will pay for the entire month subscription to a software program. I know it's a little bit daunting to spend a couple hundred bucks on a CRM package per month when you're first getting started. One job, one job per month that you do is going to pay for that software program. And I can guarantee you that if you email or text message a estimate to customers and it looks professional and clean and they can go to a client portal and see all their information, you will absolutely close more jobs. You will absolutely make more money. In fact, at copilotcrm.com we have a guarantee that we'll grow your business by at least 10% in revenue or 10% profit in the next 12 months. If we don't, we'll just give you all your money back. Because I'm so confident. This one thing alone differentiates the unprofessional in this industry compared to those that actually scale the business past 100,000 in annual revenue and make it very profitable.

Another super important aspect when you're starting your business is your phone system. This is Command center behind me, where thousands of phone call calls are answered every single day. And the reason we make that a priority at Augusta Lawn Care is because I know that many times the very first person that answers the phone and gets the estimate to the customer will win the job. And so if I can just answer the phone, I'm gonna be head of so many of my competitors that are maybe answering their phone one or two hours a day between jobs. Things go to voicemail, or if they do answer their phone, they're out in the middle of a job site and everything's super loud around them and sounds super unprofessional. But choosing the right phone system for your small business is super important. Here at Command center, we use AI to be able to answer the phone 24 7, but we also have live agents to be able to handle the things that what we call Max AI, it's the name of our mascot. If he can't answer the phone call and actually help the customer, then it's going to go to a live agent. If that call does get forward to a live agent, we use RingCentral Now, RingCentral is going to be a little more costly, but it's definitely going to be helping the business that is going to scale up to have a lot more locations and a lot more staff inside of the command center or your office here at command center. During our peak season, we have over 70 people that need to be inside of Ringcentral and being able to utilize it. If you're only having one or two people, I recommend something like Grasshopper or other voip. V O I P just stands for Voiceover Internet Protocol. Those sort of softwares will be helpful in order to be able to make sure you have rules around when voicemails are what happens when a voicemail goes out, as well as directing calls. If you want to delineate between sales and something like customer service calls, and make sure that it might go to your cell phone during certain hours or to an office manager other hours. Having that VoIP service will allow you to be able to have everything on a single app instead of having to give it your personal cell phone number to all of your customers. Now, it might not be necessarily a bad idea to get a second cell phone. And then that way you have your personal cell phone and then another phone that rings only if it's a business call. This way you can kind of make sure that when you go home or you're on the weekend or the evenings, you turn one phone off. I do believe, though, it's really important from day one to not be giving away your personal cell phone to customers. It will haunt you in the future if you grow the business because all your original customers will have your number.

When it comes to getting new leads, having a great website is super important. Back in the day, most of your leads or your new customers would come from people giving you a call on the phone. They would see your truck, they would see your uniforms, maybe an ad in the newspaper or the yellow pages, and they'd give you a phone call. Now, the majority of all our estimates come from our website. On that website, there's multiple ways to be able to get a lead. They could click on the phone number and call your office. But guess what they're not going to do if you don't have a great website is find the phone number. So a lot of times now, even in order to get a phone call, you have a great website. So they could call you. They could submit an estimate request form, which is the bulk of estimates we get nowadays. Augusta Lawn Care come from an estimate request form. A customer could also do web chat with you directly from the website. This is usually only beneficial if you actually have an office staff that's sitting at a computer most of the day, where a customer can actually directly message with your office staff from your website itself. And it just takes a lot more monitoring of the website in order to make that happen. These are all ways that your website can bring you in more leads. But if no one can find your website on Google, which is the predominant search engine of our time, you're not still, it's still not helpful. You have a best website in the world, but if no one finds it, we have a problem. I believe there's a three step process to be able to convert a great lead. Number one, they've got to be able to find you. Usually this is going to be from your trucks, your uniform ads that you run. The second thing they got to do is recognize you. This is usually when they come to your website and this is the ability for them to be like, oh yeah, the truck I saw out mowing someone else's lawn, I called or I went to their website and there's that same truck, there's that same brand. The ability for them to find, recognize, and then buy from your website, super important. This is why on your website I recommend that you don't just have bland Google images of random yards and random beds and random houses. Use your branding, use, use your uniforms, your trucks. Those are the things that make you different. If it's an image or a video that any of your competitors could just plaster on their website, there's nothing unique or different about it. So if someone's going to see your ad on Facebook, or see a door hanger or a flyer, or see your truck drive down the road, they found you. But make sure that when they come to your website, they actually recognize the brand that they're actually buying from. And what makes you different is your custom colors and your logo and your name, not just the random piece of grass or trees that looked like it could be any of your competitors. So the very first thing when someone shows up at your website is they're asking themselves like, okay, do they even service my area? So make sure you have a city name, zip codes, things that make it very easy for people to understand whether or not you even service their property from a geographical standpoint, then they're gonna like, okay, well great, they service, service my county, my city name, etc. Now do they provide the services that I need? That's the next thing that you're going to want to make very Clear. Lawn care and landscaping, lawn care and property maintenance, mowing services. Whatever you actually provide to customers, make it super clear right when they come to the homepage. So they're not guessing. I've seen it times where I've gone to the websites and I have to scroll to the bottom or click on a contact page just to figure out what areas of the county or city they service. And that's the very first thing customers are thinking about. Now when I come to a page, again, I've got to make sure I get found. Because remember, I've got found, then I get recognized, then I purchase. So in order to just get found, I need to have a website that gets ranked well on Google. In order to do that, I need Google reviews, I need to be on Google listings, I need to make sure that I, I have a lot of pictures and all the details of my business are on my Google listing page. I also need to make sure that the website that I've built actually loads fast. This is actually becoming much more prevalent and important when it comes to ranking on Google. Back in the day, you could just type a whole bunch of keywords on a page, put it behind an image, and all of a sudden Google would rank you higher and show you to more customers. Now that sort of behavior is looked on heavily down by Google and what they're really looking at is things like your web design, does it look good, does it load quickly, or are all your images like 5 megabytes in size and they take forever to load. And on mobile devices, people have to like pinch way in. You gotta make sure that when 50, 60, 70% of your traffic is coming from mobile devices, that your website actually is designed differently for a mobile device compared to a desktop or a laptop. So when the customer first comes to your site, they want to know, will they service me in my area, what services do they offer and will that suffice? The problem that I have and third is like, all right, now I want to actually ask for an estimate. Make it easy for people to give you money. Like, make it easy for them to submit their information for an estimate proposal. Ideally we would actually allow the customer to be able to purchase our services from our website. But even if you don't do that, make it easy to, for them at least give you their phone number and their name and their address. You don't need a long 20 field estimate request form where you're asking for everything, including their shoe size and their Social Security number. Just get the relevant information. You need to be able to provide an estimate. If you make that form too long, people are going to drop off and not fill in all their information. You just need enough to get the process started. And one of the best things you can do to make sure you get more estimate request forms is just put the S request form form above the fold. What that means is when a customer comes to your website, they see the SM request form without having to scroll down any further on the website. That way they, they come to the site looking, I want to know what the price is for this service. Great, there's where I put my information. I've already checked off the box that they do my services and they do it in my area. Great. Now I can just submit my information. I don't have to go to the bottom in the footer. I don't have to go to a different contact page. I don't have to like scroll through things or click on buttons. It should be right there. The whole goal of having a great website is getting more leads and getting more SEO request forms submitted to you. And so I really want to break down the three different ways that you can build a website. The first is like good, better, and best. Good is that you have any website, I'm talking like, it's basically like your online business card. It has your contact information and tells people what you do. If you, you can build that for literally like 50 bucks a month or less on Weebly Squarespace and a host of other platforms like WordPress, you can just build your site yourself. You're gonna be paying less than 50 bucks a month to host the website and have a generic design. Now if you want to take it to the next level, so go from good to better, then you're usually gonna be paying 3 to $10,000 for a professional web design firm to actually build the website for you. So it looks really good. They're going to look at your logo, they're going to look at the shapes and the colors and the fonts and really make it look very cohesive, especially the ones. What really takes you from good to better is when the mobile version of your website looks really good. And that's what they're going to help you do. It's a little bit more expensive, but it is definitely going to take you to the next level. And when it comes to your website, this is the thing. Instead of choking over the money that you're spending on website design, realize that when customers come through to your business, they're coming through your website and they're going to Get a value perception. They're gonna be asking themselves, okay, is this a premium service or is this like a cheap service? Is this someone like on Craigslist, someone I can haggle with, someone I can ask for a cheaper price, someone I can not pay forever because they're never gonna come after me. These are the type of things that your website conveys. And if you have a premium website, there's a good chance you're gonna be able to charge a premium, premium price. If you can charge us 5 or $10 more per hour on your labor, you will make up for in double, triple, quadruple the amount of money you spend on a good web design. And so good, build it yourself, $50 a month better. Probably going to spend three to $10,000 for someone else to build it for you. Now the best version of websites being built for you is lawn care web design, where we're going to actually have it on a subscription model. The reason I think it's really important for this is because immediately instead of spending ten grand on a new website, you're gonna get it built really professionally for 500 bucks a month. Furthermore, it's gonna be an ongoing basis. So we're constantly updating your SEO, your search engine optimization, as well as any updates you might have. So for example, you might be doing a promotion for fall cleanups. We can put a new banner, we can change the pictures out in the winter when you're offering other services versus in the spring when you're doing mowing. So instead of having a one time design build and paying a big chunk of money and having a static website, you can actually have constant upgrades and changes to your SEO and your design. Why is that important? Because Google is always changing their algorithm of where they're ranking different websites. To be able to build one thing and expect it to perform well 3, 4, 5 years from now is crazy because in 3, 4, 5 years from Now, Google's completely changed the way they do search engine optimization. In other words, when they in one or two seconds glance at all millions of websites, they've got to determine which ones are the ones they're going to rank first for viewers. And if we're not adapting, constantly changing the web design to actually match the needs of Google, we're going to fall lower in the rankings. And so whether you have a $50 per month budget, you're paying an upfront 5, $10,000 for initial build, or you're doing a subscription model, being online is the place to be able to get most of your Leads.

Now that you started your lawn care business, the next question is, when can I hire somebody? A lot of times when it comes to lawn care landscaping, people will hire their first one or two employees and realize they're not making any money. In fact, they were making more money as a solo operator than when they actually got their first few employees. So I have what I call a sniff test that I believe you can use to be able to make sure you can actually afford employees. Why is that important? Because a lot of times people actually hire employees thinking they're going to make more money, thinking that they're going to be able to grow the business and they grow top line revenue, but they make less profit. And that's why a lot of times in lawn care and landscaping, people actually be retreat back to being a solo operator. After they try to hire three, four, five employees, they, they'll retreat back to being a solo operator. Why? Because they made more profit back when they were a solo operator compared to when they have a bunch of employees. Why they didn't pass the sniff test. There's a couple sniff tests to make sure you can actually afford an employee. The first one is what I call the 25% rule. This is the golden rule when it comes to home services. And that is I don't want to be paying more than 25% of what customers pay me per hour to my employees. So if I am going to be, if I have to pay $25 per hour for an employee, I need to be charging at least $100 per hour to the customer. Ideally, I can charge like $120 per hour to the customer and only have to pay $25 to get the frontline team members. Why you say, well, that's not fair. You're making 75% of the employees making 25%. Well, well, yeah, you've gotta pay for trucks, insurance, fuel, equipment, taxes, your rent, your phone system, your software, and a host of other things that go into running a business. So the costs do mount up. So the first thing the sniff test is, do you pass the 25% rule, which means less than 25% of what a customer pays you per hour is what goes towards the frontline labor of doing the work. The second step, sniff test, to ensure you can actually afford employees is to take all the work that you do in a day. Let's just say you produce $400 worth of revenue. But right now, probably 300 or 350 of that is profit because you're doing the labor. If you hire Someone though, to do the labor, and you pay them 25 bucks an hour, and they work for eight hours a day to do those jobs, that's $200 you're gonna have to spend in wages. All of a sudden you might not be as profitable as you were before. Yes, you'll be able to grow because you're using someone else's labor. But in the first one or two employees, you got to be careful that you're actually charging enough and your prices are high enough to actually accommodate the wages that come with a new employee.

So assuming you pass both the sniff tests and you want to still hire an employee, now it's a matter of how do I actually work it into my schedule. One way to do this is to make sure you have plenty of work in the future. So you actually know there's lots of jobs to be done. So once you do hire an employee, because the last thing you want to do is hire someone, get them onboarded, they're ready to roll, and all of a sudden you have maybe 10 or 15 hours of work a week for them and not enough to keep them busy. One way to prevent this from happening is try to fill your schedule as a solo operator, mostly with a bunch of recurring jobs. That's mowing, weeding, bush, trimming, anything that's happening weekly or bi weekly. And so I want to fill my schedule up as much as possible. And then maybe on the weekends I do a project here, there, molten stall, or a property cleanup, et cetera. But then what you can do is use one click estimate emails to be able to fill your schedule two or three weeks with projects. That gives you plenty of space then to hire someone, knowing you have two to three weeks where you know they're going to be busy and then you're going to be able to have time to go get more recurring jobs. Because at the beginning there's that weird crossover when all of a sudden you hire an employee, you double the capacity. The amount of work jobs that you can get done in a day basically doubles almost. And now it's like, well, man, I got to go from 20, 30 jobs, I now I need 50 or 60 to keep us busy. So what you can do to kind of help this crossover is send a one click estimate email and email to all of your customers saying, hey, we're doing these projects. Then you're gonna have four, five, six jobs that will then fill the schedule for a couple weeks. That will be then the first couple weeks of your new employee. Also what you can do is since they'll help you go faster on all of your jobs by having the extra labor with you and the truck. Now you'll have extra time to go do door hangers and yard signs and other door to door marketing to get more recurring jobs and continue filling their schedule. Keep in mind you want to be careful because if you start getting so many jobs on schedule and then that person leaves, you could be in a really bad spot. So I really recommend, as you get close to like being at capacity for two people, you might want to get the third one just as a way to make sure you're never left in a lurch. If someone doesn't show up to work, they get sick, they get hurt, or they need to leave. Things happen all the time when it comes to employees. So you want to make sure you don't put the business in a vulnerable spot by putting all the eggs in the basket of one employee sticking around. And if they do come on, I want to make sure I have at least two to three weeks of work on the schedule booked out in the future so I know I can keep them full time. And then any time that I save from them working with me, I want to spend that on getting more customers to continue growing the business.

In the lawn care and landscaping industry, traditionally the last few months of the year is when all of our profit and loss statements get obliterated. I call it Q4 collapse. And it's during October, November and December. A dramatic decrease in revenue happens in many parts of the country. And this is simply due to the fact that revenues from the services we typically do during the mowing season start to dry up. People aren't thinking about even doing any projects because it's cold, it's wet in many parts of the country. This is when you have to start thinking about the fact that seasonality kills many lawn care businesses. We don't want to have seasonal services. And you're like, well, lawn care, it only the grass only grows for eight or nine months. You're right. So we've got to figure out what to do for the other three or four months out of the year. Seasonality kills businesses. We can't have an off season. And so when everyone's like, oh, we're a spring rush, then we have an off season. Off seasons will keep you poor. And so how do you keep from going having an off season? You create season specific offers with season specific services for your customers. It's pretty obvious if you're in lawn care and landscaping that the offers and services we give to customers during the spring, the summer and the fall. You got spring weed and feed. We got, we got bush trimming, we got spring cleanups, summer, we got projects, fall we have leaf cleanups and mowing throughout those seasons. However, Q4, when the revenue typically drops off, leads dramatically fall off is when the creative business owners that actually figure out how to generate revenue throughout Q4, they really crush it. I've seen businesses that are 25, 30% profitable, but because of Q4, they go back to being 3, 4 or 5% profitable. You've got to figure out how to make sure that you have no off season. And that means usually getting creative with your services. Unless you're in an area where you mow year round or you're able to do projects year round, it doesn't rain very much or you have warm and cool season grasses growing. That can be very helpful. But for the vast majority of we've got to figure out a service that we can offer to customers during the off season. And for most of us, that's the winter. At Augusta Lawn Care, we train our owners on five different tracks. We have Christmas lights, augustalights.com a lot of people will do that. Then we have people that will do snow because they're in the northern part of the country. They do actual snow plowing and they'll really focus on doing snow and getting those contracts in Q4. The third one is the people who do mow year round. The next person is going to do winter services where they're going to be able to do bush trimming, trimming up the edges, checking the gutters, doing all the other things around a property for all their mowing customers, and trying to keep that recurring revenue coming in all winter long. The fifth person is going to shut down completely. And if you're not going to have season specific services, you've got to make sure you just lock down everything. This is easier said than done. If you have a lot of debt and fixed expenses like rent and really high liability insurance payments that are fixed expenses all winter long. But if you don't have those and you don't have a lot of debt payments, you can literally just lay off everybody and go into lockdown mode for two or three months when otherwise you'd just be paying people to do nothing. The last thing you want to be doing is having a whole bunch of employees working throughout the winter just to keep them busy. If you don't have efficient labor, you will not make profit. And during the off season, if you don't have work for them to do, lay people off. And a lot of times during Q4, that's the perfect time to get a job in a shopping center or retail or shipping or transportation, because that's their busiest season. So if you can also figure out a way to be able to offload employees during the off season and give them another seasonal position in another industry, that's also great. So you don't have all this fixed expenses dragging you down during the winter Q4 collapse, where revenue dropped, causes a trough that usually takes most landscapers four to eight months just to get out above zero. Because in January, February, March, they're so in the red and they're losing so much money that it takes them literally to the second half of the year just to actually have a profit on their profit and loss statement. And they're literally like negative 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000. And they slowly start to rebound. And by the time they hit zero, it's June, July or August. And to avoid that, you've got to figure out Q4 collapse. Everyone's like, oh, spring rush needs to be better. No, fix Q4, because Q4 is what causes that massive lull in revenue, leads and profits in the first and second quarter of the year. Look at your Q4, where is your leads dropping off? Where's your revenue dropping off? And figure out season specific offers for your season specific services and pitch those to your customers that you already have in your database. So if you already sold the mowing, sell them Christmas lights. If you already sell them bush trimming, sell them something else during the winter, maybe it's salt or snow services. Whatever it is, make sure that you keep your revenue balanced and you don't have Q4 collapse.

All right, so let's talk about what you can expect in terms of profit percentage. So what percentage of your revenue should be considered profit? At the very beginning, when you're first getting started, you're actually more profitable than when you start getting employees. The reason for that is because the beginning, you're doing all the labor yourself and you don't have as many expenses, you don't have any overhead, you have less insurance liability, you're probably not going to shop space, you can do it from your garage. And so when you're first getting started from zero to like 100,000 in annual revenue, you should be able to do most of that revenue yourself. You don't need to go out and get employee, you don't need to get a shop space, you don't need a bunch of fancy Trucks or equipment, and usually out of 100 grand in annual revenue you create yourself. In terms of revenue, you can usually get 60, 70, even 80,000 of that to be profit that is left over that you can take out of the business and use for your personal expenses. Now, as you grow the business past 1000-002003-00400,000 in annual revenue, now you need employees. Now all of a sudden, you're not making 60 or 70% profit. Now you might be only making 10, 15, 20% profit. And that's what sometimes gets people very discouraged. I call this the wilderness of profitability. And that's from 200,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue. During this period of time, I usually see people make no more profit in the business. Although they've literally doubled from 200,000 to $400,000 in annual revenue, they don't actually get any more profit. Why is this? Because at 200,000, it's literally you and one employee, you're super ultra efficient. You make lots of profit. There's very little expenses, you don't have a lot of overhead. And ultimately, you can be like a lean, mean machine out in the field with one crew member helping you. Making $200,000 a year, you're probably going to be able to bring in six figures into your bottom line. The question is, why would I want to grow? Why would I want to go to 3, 4, $500,000 in annual revenue if I'm going to make the same amount of profit? If you're going to go from 200,000 to 400,000, you aren't going to probably take a whole lot more home in terms of profitability. However, if you can grow past $500,000, it means you started to build a business that has redundancy, employees, people in place that if you got hit by a bus, if you got sick, if something catastrophic happened to you or your family, the business would still survive. Because right now, when you're getting started and you're doing all the labor, if you break an arm, if you got hit by a bus, you know, and something happened, your family's livelihood, your health, like, there's so much at risk to the business if that happens. Because you are the key man, everything goes through you. You do all the work, you generate all the revenue. As you grow the business to 1, 2, 3 employees, you might not make any more actual profit take home because your expenses start to go up. You have to pay payroll tax, then you have workers comp. Then your insurance goes up. Now you got to pay for more trucks, more equipment. Now you got to store all this trucks and equipment. These are the type of things that keep many Lawn Care landscaping business owners small. Usually solo operators, maybe one employee, because as they go to 3, 400,000 and get their second, third, fourth employee, they actually make less money in profit than they did when they were just working by themselves. That's very discouraging. But ultimately, if your goal is to build a million dollar business or beyond and be able to have the business run without you doing the work in the day to day operations and you actually pushing a mower and pulling weeds and spreading mulch, you're going to have to scale up. You're going to have to have employees to do the work for you and create systems and procedures. If you want a step by step breakdown of exactly how to go from just getting started all the way to a million plus and get the 2.0 version of this video, check this video out here where I go in depth. Also check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for full tutorials and consider joining Augusta Lawn Care as a franchisee.