I had to fire 2 MORE employees....

Don't worry, I'll take it over the vlog and I, we're gonna do the estimates together.

I was gonna wait, but it looks.

It's pretty long.

Okay. She was not kidding.

Now, today we had to fire two.

People down at the Mount Vernon location.

And I find absolutely no joy whatsoever when firing people. I hate it. There's nothing inside of me that finds.

Any sort of pleasure or pride or joy in firing people. It always kind of stings. And Xavier pass. Having fire people or let people go, that is normal. Probably means you're a good person, you have feelings.

It always makes you feel sick when people leave.

They always go sour and say really hurtful and horrible things. And you just have to realize that.

Why you're doing what you're doing and.

Keep moving forward and. Yeah, it's still not fun though. Takes you a couple hours to kind of like, get over it.

In today's episode of Mike Minutes Mastermind at the Gusta Nation, we talked about comparing different types of alone products and.

How you can buy down your interest.

Rate using discount points on your mortgage.

So that's what we learned about today. Last night, I recorded three brand new.

Lectures for landscapebusinesscourse.com, so if you're a current member there, make sure you check those out. And if you're not a member, what are you doing?

Everyone watches those videos that I made where I took away a $600 bonus because someone was 15 seconds late, which is a true story. And you can watch that video, but it doesn't take away from the fact that when you fire somebody that it is still emotional. And when that happens, they lash out at you. And it's very difficult time to keep yourself in check from lashing out at them and saying everything you want to say and going right back at them with emotion. So finding someone that's emotional with more emotion usually just lead to a bunch of unnecessary drama. And I definitely don't want to be on this emotional roller coaster in my business. So making the decision is never easy, especially when they're great workers, when they work really hard and when they show up to work and when they're on the team that they do a great job. But ultimately you have to look at the whole picture, the whole business, the whole team, and make a very difficult decision, stick to it, and then try to be unemotional.

But that's almost impossible.

Now, we are currently actually going to do an estimate. One of the GMs had a few estimates on their plate today. I was like hey, don't worry, I'll take it over. The vlog and I, we're going to do the estimates together, so let's knock them out.

So this property is pretty interesting. We got five condos that are actually here and they want monthly maintenance. So a quick tip for everyone is when you're doing maintenance, even if it's commercial property or like full service maintenance on a residential property, you want to make sure that the initial service is going to get it up to standard and you charge separately from what you would charge for like a monthly or bi weekly maintenance. So for example, when I come here the very first time, we got weeds that are underneath these bushes. We got stuff coming through here. If you look at this ground cover, it's going to have actually a lot of work because you got all these weeds popping through and little starters of trees and everything. You got to trim away the ground cover away from the base of these plants. There's a lot of work on the very first service, but then after the first service it won't take, you know, not even half as long. So what I recommend, if you're doing full service, weeding, bush trimming like this one, we're blow off every single time. Your first service needs to be a separate service that they have to accept in order to get on the recurring service that is going to be much more manageable in terms of time and affordability. So here, for example, we'll get this.

Off the sidewalk, clean this up, it'll.

Look so much better.

You got to comment below how much you would charge for that property for a one time cleanup. Trim all the bushes, pull all the weeds, blow everything off and haul the debris out of there. Comment below what you would charge.

Well, what do we have here grown mo.

Hi.

So sorry, I'm on the phone for work.

What you need?

No, totally fine.

I'm just here to do the estimate. So if you see me walking around, don't worry about it. That's great.

So it's with all the front, front and then this side, the little skinny part on the side. And then the back is mulch. So you don't need to worry about the mulch.

Perfect. I'll make a video for them and I'll email you. If not tonight, tomorrow morning.

That'd be wonderful.

Yeah.

I was going to wait, but it looks.

It's pretty long.

I was doing the all meadow approach.

Do you just need us to do it one time to kind of get down for you?

Get down.

Okay.

Add on services would be like the Prune. And the hedges?

Oh, just the bushes and things. I'll have them throw in there as an extra option.

Yeah, I mean, if I can't do the line item of the hedges, that's cool. It's just basically the grass.

Yeah.

Get down for you.

Manageable. It's.

It's hay. I think if I had a horse, you could give me the hay.

Let's go. Take care. Okay. She was not kidding. So this is the front yard. Completely overgrown. How long do you think this is going to take? Now this is the thing. You got stairs, you got a bunch of lights and you got a bunch of rocks all around the perimeter of those lawn areas and then a small gate to get in the backyard. So you're probably gonna do most of the push mower, honestly. Got your front yard over there. And this is the kind of backyard side area, mostly weeds. These are like 2 or 3ft tall, but then they're pretty thin. But all of this is super overgrown. We typically don't do one time mows, but she kind of called and asked for other things so we kind of got pulled into it. I'm out here, I might as well give it to him. Got grass all the way here. All the way here. How long is this gonna take with a push mower and a weed whacker? And it's gonna take like a full. This will fill up an entire pickup truck with debris, honestly. So now the reason we don't typically do one time mows is because you're dealing with a property that is gonna have a whole bunch of maintenance on your equipment. Because it's just tall grass, there's a lot of wear and tear. It's very difficult on your engines and your mowers. It's also super demoralizing in really hot weather to be mowing grass that is super tall like that. It's also where we get the most callbacks in yellow slips. Because mowing a grass after it's been two feet tall never looks very good. So you get a lot of people complaining about, oh, it doesn't look good, it looks dead, didn't get cut right. Well, if you've cut it five times, it's not going to look super fantastic with nice straight lines afterwards it's been overgrown. Probably not been cut for eight months. That's why we don't typically do one time mows. But we will do one time mows, our initial mows if they plan on doing recurring service. So she kind of got away with it because she asked for a property Cleanup and then also said that she would do recurring mows. So I'm gonna give her the price. I'm here. I might as well give her a price for everything. Price for an initial mow, recurring mows, the trimming of the bushes. I'm gonna give her the whole nine yards, Just in different options of the estimate.

Now, on the flip side, there is good with the bad. For example, the other day, I was very proud because one of our team members got $28 per hour on their fourth paycheck. So typically, it takes a few paychecks for them to kind of P4P how to be more efficient and profitable. If you have no idea what I'm.

Talking about, check out P4P software.com training.

It talks all about it. But on P4P, it usually takes them a little bit of time to figure out how to be most efficient and actually make above base pay. Our base pay at this location was $18 per hour. And on his third paycheck, I think he did like $23, $24 per hour. That was great. But then yesterday he blew it away. He did like $28 per hour. So there's definitely highs and lows. And those moments I'm like, so happy. I'm so thr be able to provide better. And they deserve every single penny because they kick butt. Like, to make $28 an hour mowing lawns, you are hustling all day long. Like you are figuring out the most efficient way to get in and out of the door. And very proud in those moments to be able to offer a position in a job where they can make that much money if they work hard and they apply themselves to their job.

Well, well, well. What do we have here?

All right, so it is day two.

Out here at the property. You can see it's taking pretty good shape here. This is where all the gravel is.

Going to be at.

Fence will be going in next week. Right now they're installing the secondary driveway. So we have our own separate driveway that'll come in here.

Pretty cool idea.

They actually got here the excavator. They got a big piece of wood and they're using that to kind of.

Level it all out.

So that'll come back in here and then, yeah, plenty of space here to grow, park all the trucks, the trailers, dump all the debris in the back there. So really looking forward to it. Starting to take shape and look pretty good. So the plan will be is once the people enter in here, this is where we'll be able to Keep all the debris and material. We'll keep all the employee parking over there. And then this whole corner will end up being trucks, trailers. And where the equipment goes, we'll have a storage container probably somewhere at front just to have all the mowers to where the guys can grab those right before they're heading out in the morning. But this is where they are prepping for the tiny house. And then what we're going to do is make a ditch, like a one foot ditch. We'll have to cut through this concrete, and that way we can hook up to the electric panel here. And fortunately, this has already been permitted and it's zoned for an adu. So this electricity is already ready to go for an actual secondary hookup. So we'll come over there through the driveway, connect to this bad boy right here.

I remember before P4P, before pay for performance, when we did hourly, I always thought like, man, I just wish I could pay like 25, $30 an hour where someone could actually make a really good wage and provide for their family. And no matter what math I did, I could never make it work on hourly. But if someone really kicks butt on P4P, they can make that kind of money. It's just a matter of them figuring out the processes and then reflect refining.

Their systems throughout the day of how to be more efficient.

But there is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone consistently do 25, $30 an hour where I feel like that's a livable wage and they earn every single dollar of it. And I can only afford to pay that because they kick butt all day long. You got to remember, we're not like in the software industry where we have 90% margins, lawn care and landscaping. We're never going to be able to charge $5,000 for an hour's worth of work. Therefore, it's not easy to pay someone 50, $60,000 a year when we're doing.

Hi, how's it going? Yeah.

Are you Mike?

I am. Hi, Mike. Hello. Good to meet you. This is our third property here. And this one is kind of like a once a year, twice a year type of cleanup. The first is to trim these two bushes up here in the front yard. A rhododendron, and I think it's a Magnolia. I'm not 100 sure on that. She hasn't been able to deadhead for quite some time. So it's really taken off. So what we'll do is we'll remove the branches that are the lowest and we'll try to remove them right up against the base of the plant. Just go back underneath and make sure. We can either use a hand saw or chainsaw to get those because they're pretty thick. Got some edging, weed whacking, trimming this area here. She can't get to underneath all these trees with a the mower. So we're just going to weed whack this really all the way to that ditch right there. There's all this weed whacked as well as we will define these edges. Just put the metal edger on and just try to trim these up. Make this really nice, clean and defined around the deck and this front flower bed. A bunch of blackberries in the back of the yard that need cleared out. Weed whack this down really, really nice and short. This patch right here, this whole patch. She wants this cleared out and then sprayed. We get down maybe down to like 3 inches or less if I, if we can, and then spray it. So number three for the day.

So right now I am calling Sam. She's the events director for a restaurant locally that I'm trying to book the entire restaurant for all of Augusta Nation to meet at the night before and after Landscape Summit 2023, which if you haven't booked your tickets Already, go to mikeandies.comsummit come visit us for three days. It's going to be an absolute game changer.

Hi, Sam, this is Mike Andes.

He left me a message just a few minutes ago. I apologize for missing that entitled.