How to Turn a $720K Lawn Biz Into $1M+ With ONE Fix

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm doing some in person consulting from a workshop where we're talking to Simply Lawn Care. Brandon and Scott. You might have seen them before on the turnaround show. They've grown their business. They've been really successful. They're thinking about starting a second location and they also are trying to get into commercial snow plowing, but it might require rebranding of their Simply Lawn Care website and name. So this one's gonna be fun.

If you think about trying to start.

A new service or an adjacent service or an off season service, this might.

Be helpful for you. Let's go ahead and roll the tape. All right, next up on the is simply Brandon, Muse and Scott. Is it 50?

50 still?

Yeah.

Cool.

Lawn mowing, lawn care, landscaping, cleanup, seven trucks, 12 employees. At peak 2023 was 700,000. 2024 is 800,000. 2025 is 950k. I'm assuming profit mode. Pretty much. Okay. Very good marketing. Google Ads, local services, Facebook ads and organic yard signs, truck marketing, door hangers. And 2k a month, is that across the board? Every month of the year is 2k or on average.

We'll come back to it, so don't worry about it. 45% close ratio in the last 90 days. 2,400 leads in the past 12 months. Owner's salary between the two peoples are 127k and $30,000 in owner distributions. Across those two owners, about 100. So about 75,000. $75,000 each distributed. Okay, cool. And then current obstacle is leads. Cool. To clear up the marketing budget. What's it for months?

The actual marketing budget is.

Okay. And is that averaged across the 12 months?

Yes.

Okay, so in spring, is it like five or six grand?

No, no, sorry, it's. It was like eight grand.

Okay. So much higher. And then comes down to like a thousand bucks.

Yeah, it opened this year.

Got it.

So we had this map we were testing for. Entertains. Got it this year. So there's this massive jumping.

Cool. Makes sense.

There's a lot of usually.

Yep. Okay.

All right.

How much revenue? How much cash in the bank right now?

115 grand.

Okay, so you're right around a month worth of revenue. You're right around it. Okay, so Leeds, you see that as a shrink. The new location, what's it doing in monthly revenue? Right now.

We'Re gonna do 160 grand total for the year. So divided by 12 is 11,000.

But like in. In July, how much is doing revenue.

Just the second One, we're basically working.

On our shop space, but we have routing over to that location.

Oh, okay, okay. Let's just assume it's one for now.

Okay.

Okay, cool. Because like even like the marketing technically for now we can just say you were marketing in a nearby, an adjacent service area and thinking about expanding into it later now. Right. Okay, for now is the plan to break that second location off next spring? No, got it. So you're just going to keep growing over there and you think that maybe 10, $11,000 a month is coming from that area currently. And if you get to say 20, then you break it off and put a GM. How far along, how far of a drive is that right now?

Well, so it's a 15 minute drive anytime there's no traffic and then about 30 to 40 minute drive whenever there is traffic.

Yeah, it's all over more and more traffic than not.

It's very hard to organize optimization wise. So it's either they go there in the morning, go in the afternoon. It depends on. They like add basically 30 minutes of time, two guys per truck. It's a waste of an hour pretty much depending on the time of day.

Okay, cool. And you can get shop space over there, you think? Pretty easily.

We're looking into it. It's kind of very vague. There's not much options. There's not. It's basically very.

I wouldn't say it's not. Not industrial at all. So does that like it's mostly just houses with the occasional parking lot that looks. Looks vacant maybe.

Right.

But tr. We already tried a little bit this.

Year to see we could find truck parking. No material would dump it on site. It all has to stay in the trucks.

Just like. Got it. Okay, makes sense. So what have you done for like you said the door hanger thing was big. Was that most of where your marking dollar this spring was spent?

No.

So in that marketing, I'm also including uniforms, vehicle marketing. We bought all our yard signs for this year and a half next year. And then door hanger was $6,500 in material.

And then the rest was just.

Okay. Okay. So not like tons like because 6,500 labors, like how many door hangers you put out? 20,000? Yeah. 15 to 20.

Yeah.

Okay. One thing I will mention on your.

Website.

You have, if I remember correctly, 27 to 28 megabytes of data being loaded on this homepage. You condense that a lot just for reference. Like you want that under three to four. So you can this the video is actually not Bad in terms of size, it's the images. So these images are extremely high resolution. You just literally compact them a bunch. It'll make this load way faster.

This is actually our old.

So we have a new website on WordPress. This is still on.

Oh, this is old one.

Oh, you haven't migrated over.

Because I'm paying all the expert. Five people that make it. I'm having them do the compression.

Got it.

Cool. Okay. That'll help with some. With some lead stuff, like just showing up. Same. Okay, cool. Oh, I know that video. Let's go.

Okay, then. I can't really assess that too much from a leads perspective. Seeing that you see that as the constraint. Are you changing the fact they have to click twice to get an estimate?

That wasn't doing that before.

Okay, you're fine. Okay, cool.

I guess I can't really pick that apart because it's changing. It's probably gonna get a lot better. So from a leads perspective, you did door hangers right now. Is it leads during the summer? It's slow or, like, just overall, we just need more leads.

Yeah, the summer's fine. We get consistent flow to keep one project, which is what we want. It's more of you. Just, like, you're going quicker.

Right.

So it's obviously a conversion. Right. Increasing that. The big thing right now is snow. So it's. I'd like to grow spring quicker. That would be nice. It's really snow.

Got it.

That's a big constraint.

And right now on your site, do you push snow very much?

No, we don't. Because we want commercial.

Right.

The average value is. It's 8500. Our average snow client. Commercial, 1200.

I highly recommend making a separate website called simply Snow Services.

So I. I did. You told me to do this, and.

I was looking into it.

Oh, really? I told you to do this before?

Yeah.

Oh, really? I don't remember.

So I actually started it.

Okay.

The reason I held off was I wanted to have a separate Uber. My business for it. Google is obviously very weird about you having two businesses at the same address.

Yep.

So I was just like, even if.

You just do service area.

Just service area.

I just do service area. Just so it's something you will convert. You will get way more traffic. Everything will be better.

Even though the site's dead for nine months of the year, essentially.

And yeah, like, yeah, I would still, you know, get a bunch of reviews and stuff like that. But, like, I'm just saying, like, the loss of not having an address verified is less than the loss that you're having by being called simply lawn care versus simply snow services.

Like just out of curiosity, because obviously the downtime, that was his concern. But like it's sitting there. Obviously the traps can go down. So it's not going to show up. But would it be worth. Obviously we target residential, but promise it's like commercial clients. The biggest thing in the snow is commercial. Would it make sense for us to have that secondary be more of like a snow and commercial kind of maintenance?

I would just like when they get to the site, you only show commercial sites, large properties, HOAs. And then like your titles at the top are like serving HOAs and commercial properties in Peabody. Is it Peabody? Peabody, Massachusetts. Like that. I would just focus on that.

And the branding is the same style of branding.

Don't change your trucks. Yeah, exactly. Because the big simply is all you need. The lawn care service just becomes snow services. Because you have a snowplow on there.

Yeah.

So you can just make a site put as a DBA on your LLC or S corp and be rolling. But that will like dramatically increase your leads for snow.

And you don't think. Obviously we just go service area. Not a set address. But when we run into verification issues. Because I remember when I verified the new address in the location, I had to show them a video call of my actual car proving that it says simply lawn care services. If I'm showing our trucks, do you.

Think I would just do service area? Like I just generally believe, like I agree that having an verified address is better, but like having a URL that says that like 5 extra leads versus maybe a 20 or 40% bump. By having an address verified, I meant.

By this, if we select service area, do they just not require all those verifications?

Correct. Okay, yeah. Service area. They're like, yeah, sure, throw it up. You serve this whole area. Yeah. They just won't show you up on a map. Right. So I would still take the snow in your URL as a bigger win than the address being verified.

And you can lean that one very commercially designed and this one stay residential. Right. And then from the truck's perspective, they don't see your truck until it snows. And when they see your trucks and it says longer, they're like, you guys are here.

Right. So I think that's, that's like I would take whatever you're building. WordPress, they say, thank you guys. Do the same thing at this URL now and change it to simply snow services.

Because you have no ability to cross sell anyways. Like you're not serving the same customer. And so even if you had to change the branding, I wouldn't care because you're serving a different customer. Right. It'll crush. Like that will prevent so much explanation to commercial HOAs and property managers when they just can go to simply some services.

Okay.

Just like yeah, we don't do.

If you just say serving hoas apartment buildings and commercial properties in Peabody.

Are.

So like commercial properties.

Yep. Serving all your commercial snow needs. Snow and ice management needs. Like that's all you need.

Okay.

And you don't think.

Yeah.

Cuz something we did toy with is well maybe we do have one crew that can service larger properties. 20,000 square feet of turf. Our max is eight. Do we just have one crew that does service commercial only because we, we're looking. We love pull but we want one company to landscape in the snow and we run into that.

You could always merge your snow brand into simply commercial services for example if you really wanted to. And then, but more importantly when you show up for the simply lawn care they. Oh they do lawn care too. And then you just upsell your snow services people into snow. Also if anyone ever says what you just said, you say great. Yeah. We actually do both have different websites.

Yeah right. And then maybe see it, it's almost square footed. It's almost s footed but maybe it's not, you know.

So you're saying like for, you're saying for smaller commercial you're willing to do the mowing too.

It's how we get set up. We're just all pickup trucks with the mo like push mowers.

Yep.

8,000 are maximum because like after that pointless to charge that much. No one's going to do it. And it's labor intensive.

Yeah.

They're not paying too much.250 a week for their 20,000 square feet of grass.

Yeah. And then, and then you could just, if you do that then your commercial properties you get for mowing you're. You're only going to go after the smaller ones and upsell them in snow and vice versa. Yeah. But yeah, the different brand will crush like you run into so much explanation of like yeah it's simply lawn care but we do snow.

That's what we kind of do.

Yeah.

That was everything.

Yeah. I would just do the new brand do service area for the Google listing. And then I would also say is once you find a shop space you could just use that in the interim as the address verification if needs be. Different service area though. Probably. Yeah. Okay cool. So you could use that. You could. You also use a customer's house. We've done this before. We've been like, hey, can we use your verification address? I'll do your snow for free. Really?

And they were really.

Guy to do a month. Month rent in his office.

Like something like that. If you were really concerned about it. But I think if you did service area, you'll get a bigger bump than not doing it at all.

Okay.

Yeah. And you don't have to change inside the dba. Yeah.

Okay.

On that topic.

So it could also help with insurance by the way, having the different dba, you could split them out and then you can have like the trucks being owned by one. Like you could really move things around for insurance on snow specifically. That's what some people will do.

Yeah.

On this topic of snow, something we've been debating is like do we. So we could just break even over Q1. That's a season where we lose all our money. If we just do 180 grand, 200 grand in for that whole quarter, we'll just break it and we'll be fine. Which would be a immense. That's 60 grand more profit for the year. Which we could probably do by just saying picky, each down and just these smaller commercial. We can get like it's like 20 customers essentially. Or we've been debating like do we want to make snow a bigger thing? Because for example we have companies right next to us who do 20 million in snow and 2 million in landscape. So they're real seasons of snow and they're off season. It's the landscape.

Yeah.

So we're just like because of our market, should we move in that direction or. Or I guess what kind of.

Yeah, I would go into snow and then I think what will open up is the commercial side. I think.

Yeah. Cuz in your market people are looking for the snow and then you can get them into the mowing and if that works out great, it's a little harder to be like yeah, we don't really like the snow thing is not our main jam. So they don't come to you for it. Like I. That's why we want the different brand because they'll come to you and then you'll just pitch them on their mowing while you're there.

Because we don't get a lot of usually get big requests from property management companies. We used to get a good amount of cable like over email.

Because your branding is very residential, very targeted obviously. Yeah. Residential lawn care.

So it's like they probably. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. And, like, realistically, if you really wanted to expand this, like, what you end up becoming is, like, you'd also have simply commercial services.

Right.

And you could even just make it literally just another website that you could send people that. It's very clear that you do commercial both, and. And you do all these other things. Like, so the branding is, like, it'll double your leads for snow, and then the snow is a nice segue into. Okay, we can also do your other property maintenance if you want it. Right. So cool. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Cool. Good stuff.

I was hesitant. I was.

You're good.

I was overthinking it.

Oh, that's great.