I Made $100/Hr Mowing Grass...But Still Prefer Walmart Sunglasses!

All right, this is an Ed Mowin blow.

You might.

If this property looks familiar, it's because it was actually on a video.

I did, like, a year and a half, two years ago with Josh, and.

We were doing like, 10 estimates in.

A day, and we brought you guys along for the ride. So obviously we still have the property. Now, if you're gonna give me a.

Lot of flack over the fact that our lawns don't look beautiful and they're not perfect and there's not flower beds and gardens and, hey, look, we don't.

Discriminate against what type of money you give us.

As long as it's green and it goes in the bank, makes the numbers.

Go up, I'm happy.

And if they're willing to pay, I'm willing to take it. So here we go.

We got 37 minutes on this one.

Hey, everyone, Mike Gandies here, landscapebusinesscourse.com I'm going to be doing some voiceover and add some color commentary as we mow a couple of these lawns today. Hopefully you learned something about not just mowing lawns, but running a lawn care and landscaping business and how to be profitable on these smaller properties. And yes, not all of them look great, but they make money.

Quick, shout out to piranha the $5 glasses from Walmart.

They have lasted years and years with the mower and the weed whacker. So you can put your Oakley back in your pocket. Put the money back in your pocket and get some piranhas.

Literally. Again, not sponsored. Not sponsored. Post. Hey, Piranha. Walmart can always reach out, but in general, when it comes to gear, I'm a big proponent of spending good. Like, for example, boots, pants, gloves, especially rain gear is extremely important in my mind to actually get. Helly Hansen. Get some really good Carhartt stuff. When it comes to my sunglasses, the reason is because I break them or I lose them literally every couple months. So I have decided that Dollar Store and Walmart glasses are the way of the future for me. All right, so this lawn here, we have 37 minutes. You'll notice that I talked about. I talk about that almost every job is how many minutes I have. And that's because on P4P pay for performance, that's what the model we use. We don't pay our employees and our field workers by the hour. We pay them by budgeted hours completed. How much time is actually completed on the job? And therefore, that's a big part of what they see on every single project. Every single lawn is how many minutes or how many budget hours do I have on this lawn? They can also determine from that the price. So if you actually want to know the pricing on this one, 37 minutes, if you divide that by 60. So 60 minutes in an hour, that gives you 0.62 budgeted hours on this job. Which means that we're charging 50 bucks for this cut.

Now this is the one thing I hate about the 30 inch mower for the Exmark. They really gotta figure this out. Adjusting these is a pain in the neck. Like you can see, I'm using my other foot to actually prop it up because you can't have any weight on that wheel when you're needing to adjust the height. Cause you gotta pull the pin out of the hole, which makes it extremely annoying. And again you're putting all that strain on your front shin. And it's a really weird, you know, to put that much weight on your tibia. Like that can, can hurt someone. So I don't know why they don't figure this out. The Skag 30, which again in the link below, I'm going to put a video to this, a review of the Skag 30 that Ryan Payne from our Corpus Christi location down in Texas made, made a great video with his crew. He sells skag and I feel like they made some really good improvements and they're going to continue to iterate really well with that machine. So check out the link below for that product review. But again, we use the 30 inch mower because a lot of our lawns, if you've been following the past few days and this week when I've been showing a lot more of these videos of me mowing, you will see we have a lot of properties, backyards and the only way to get inside of Those is a 21 inch, a 30 inch push mower. Or you get a 32 or 31 or maybe a 36 inch stand on.

Gets it back there.

But a lot of time a 36 inch stand on is actually about 38 inches wide by the time you get the tire and the deck, depending on your brand. And you potentially might not be able to get that stand on mower into the backyard. And again you're going to have to take off the bagger because we bag clippings, you're going to have to take off the side accelerator bag clipping catcher thing when you go in and out of the gate. So again, that's why we use these push mowers so much, is because we have so many gates and small backyards. Like this backyard is maybe 2,000, 2,200.

Square feet, the backyard.

So, yeah, it took me a little bit longer, but even if I had a 40 inch mower, it might have saved me two minutes. So.

I want to talk a little.

Bit about the highs and lows of business. And I know this might get a little bit longer, but I want to talk about, you know, there's definitely times in our business when we're extremely forked. The business is growing, we're super excited. We see leads coming in, businesses growing, got new employees starting, we're buying new trucks, we're offering new services. Like, we're so excited. That's the highs of owning a business. The lows of owning a business are when employees leave, they don't show up on time. You're disappointed by them. When financially you're kind of struggling, when customers are complaining and writing bad online reviews, when you kind of look at your finance, like, look, I love growing and all, but I don't know if I can sustain this because growth sucks cash. We've talked about that before and growth creates a lot of havoc in the business as well. And there's highs and lows and that's the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. And a roller coaster would be probably better than what I'm trying to do here. Being small, I don't have the leverage to pull down on this thing very much. You can see it's kind of trying to lock in our tire. If you watch previous videos, of course, Danny's offering his help. Of course he has a camera in his hand. He's offering to move a 200 pound mower. Here we go. Yes, I messed up. So you have to kind of have a certain angle of approach on it to get the tire just exactly right. So I messed up.

These are actually a really nice house. I could just use a little tlc. Lots of weeds in all these beds here. You can see here all the gravel. All these are super tall. So I am going to take a quick picture. I'm going to attach it to this job. So on the dispatch board, the office can see and I'm going to give them an estimate for this. Boom, there's one.

And then.

Do over here.

And let's do the front yard area too. I'll give them an estimate for knocking down the weeds and spraying all the gravel. And I don't know if the customer cares enough to do it, honestly, but do a quick buck if we can.

So again, this is the importance of having a CRM where you can attach A photo, create notes. You can see I'm blowing off that car. By the way, when you're blowing off things and you get clippings on a car, especially when they're somewhat moist, you better make sure those clippings come off, otherwise you will get a complaint. But when it comes to taking pictures, adding notes to a job, it allows your crew to upsell the customer if they see needs on the property. Do they see a bed that needs weeding like I did there, and then having it sprayed, or an area where it needs mulch or a bush that's overgrown and touching the house? These are all things that if you have the right correct software, they can just attach a photo and note and upsell the customer.

See, I'm already starting to itch my allergies. Brutal.

Did you.

What?

Oh, did you take it this morning? Smart man. All right, so this lawn is a.

Little different because it's pretty big. So instead of weed whacking first, I'm.

Actually going to mow first. Instead of doing all the trimming and then mowing on a property like this, there's a few clippings left out after weed whacking.

Not a big deal. So usually we whack an edge first. That is correct.

But if cage is not big open.

Lot like this, we'll mow first.

All right, so I'm going to get back on my soapbox about the highs and lows of business. But before we get that, let me give you the numbers on this job so as you're watching, kind of have some context. So you saw, I have. Well, you didn't see. I have 49 minutes on this property. If you divide that by 60, you're going to get 0.81 budgeted hours. That's what we always are talking about. Budgeted hours. Budgeted hours. Again, it shows us in minutes on our. On our CRM here because it's a little easier to calculate for the crew. If you do the math that, at $80 per per man hour, we're going to be at $65 cut. So this lawn is $65. And if I recall correctly, I did this in about 38 minutes. So I beat budgeted time on this, if I remember correctly. All right, so let's go back to my soapbox about the highs and lows of business. So I think what we've really got.

To focus on when we're growing, our.

Business is having lower highs and higher lows. What I mean by that is just creating stability emotionally and financially within the Business instead of having months where you make 20,000 and the next month you make six because you just absolutely collapse and you're stressed out and you literally hit a wall and employees are leaving and morale is down. Like instead of having ups and downs as much, I think the goal needs to be stability and that should be the goal over massive wins. And then just like grow, grow, grow. And you get super excited. You're hyped about your business, you love your business. You're working 18 hours a day and all the rest of it.

And then.

But if that's not sustainable and that's not stable, it's not going to last very long. And you will have the low lows. You'll have the time when the employees are leaving, when you're disheartened, you want to quit when there's not much money in the bank. You want to stabilize your cash flow before growing. Right. Because adding new employees causes a lot of stress financially. You're training people which makes their work inefficient and it really hurts the morale of the team when they see people coming in and then they're training and they leave. And as you add growth the business, it creates chaos. There are going to be more complaints because you're adding new customers, you're doing overgrown lawns, you're doing properties that you haven't been at before. You're going to have more complaints if you're growing massively. You're out doing estimates. You can't be out managing the crew and training them. Exactly.

So it takes a huge amount of.

Time commit from you even to maintain the business. And it is a wild roller coaster. Just while, while I'm looking at the video, the sh. This is a sure can. You can see the little button here is broken on top. It makes it a little bit finicky. We don't use sure can anymore. We actually use the no spill cans that have the button. The only problem with those is they get pressurized if they, if they aren't used for a while, like they're out in the sun, for example, they get pressurized and you press the button and just like has a whole bunch of pressure, which means you want to release the button, release the pressure in that gas can before you actually pour it. But those are in our opinion the best. They work super well, especially for two cycle engine oil and for the smaller cans of gas. But we love the no spill cans. The sure cans like that one is broken. It's because super old and we need to replace it. But I Think like I said, we really want to try to take out the make lower highs and higher lows. Don't get so incredibly euphoric about your business that you make stupid, stupid decisions, overwork yourself and stress your business so thin that you have more issues financially, morale, mentally, you know. And I think it's important. Don't try to rebuild the boat, get new customers and like grow, grow, grow when you have holes in the boat taking on water. So if there's issues in the business, fix the issues. Don't try like, oh, we're going to like keep growing and we're just going to keep adding weight to the boat. Like fix the issues, take some time, take a couple months of stable cash flows, the same employees and really creating the business from more stable standpoint.

So a lot of people wonder what numbers you need to know in your lawn care business. I'm going to give you four really quickly. And again, there's a lot more videos about this I've made in the past. Number one is the percentage of your revenue that's going towards field labor. So if you make $1,000 in a day and you have to give $300 away in labor, that'd be a 30% of your revenue that went towards field labor. If you're solo, ask yourself what we would have had to otherwise pay an employee and that's how you can figure out your labor cost. Number two is you want to figure out your ratio of non revenue producing employees to revenue producing employees. A non revenue producing employee, like people in the office, an estimator, you want to keep that ratio as low as possible. You do not want five people in the office and have six people out in the field. That's extremely inefficient and creates a lot of overhead. The third thing you want to know is your monthly fixed expense percentage. I mean that by that is of my revenue. What percentage of that revenue is going out in the form of fixed expenses. This is going to be things like a lease that you might have on shop space or insurance. These are costs that don't change based upon how much work you have in comparison to variable costs like labor that change based upon how much work you've sold.

Alrighty. Basically it for today. That one was 48 minutes budgeted. We got it done in 36 minutes. Stop job. Is it complete?

Yes.

Good. All right, so I want to go over a couple quick things. First of all, I know for some of you look at a lawn like this, you're like, well, why wouldn't you Use a zero turn?

Yes.

A zero turn would take much shorter time to do this lawn. At a 48 inch or 52 inch, I probably would have shaved off at least five minutes off this property. At least the trimming gonna be the same. But the mowing definitely could have made that different. However, when I look at the setup we're using today, of course Danny's leaving the doors open and then thieves get in. But if you look at the, look at the setup, I got a truck that was about $12,000. The rack set up that was about two or three thousand dollars. And all the other equipment with the mower, maybe another five.

So I don't have to get a.

Big dump trailer or a big trailer. I don't have to get a zero turn. That's to cost eight grand. This is half the cost of a trailered setup with a zero turn.

At least half.

And furthermore, I'm able to pull all the way into this driveway without having this big trailer. I got to back out then, you know, jackknife it into the road and all that stuff. I'm literally able to back out. I'm good to go. Much simpler to train new employees on. Would it have been faster with a zero turn?

Yes.

Are the 30 inch mowers perfect? Absolutely not. When it's raining and the grass is tall, we have a lot of issues with them. And, and we still are perfecting exactly, you know, what our setup's going to be. But we're definitely not going to get big 20 foot enclosed trailers with 52 inch or multiple 52 inch zero turns on a trailered setup. So yes, it takes me a little bit longer. Couple more things I want to go over. This is an older house and probably built in, I'm going to guess like the 1920s, 1930s. A couple of things on older homes you would need to take notice of. Number one, the windows. These are aluminum windows, they're not vinyl windows. But more importantly, these are single pane most of the time. These windows, they're very easy to break. You gotta be much more careful around them when you're edging. So I don't know if you saw in the video a couple times, I'd look up behind me, I'd see if there's a window. It's the only reason why we keep our guards on our weed whackers. A lot of people ask, well, hey, why do you keep your guards on your weed whackers? I understand it's easier to trim. It's faster to trim without These guards on. Let's take away the fact that the OSHA and and worker safety is gonna want you to have these on. But taking that aside from that, when you're edging up against a single paned window, you can put that guard down and then just put low revolutions and not worry as much about rocks going through the window. Also, you're gonna want to keep note of on these older houses, cable literally goes right down to the house. So if you're weed whacking and edging, you literally can snip these cables if you're going fast enough with a line trimmer over here, you'll notice this is a grounding rod.

Pretty sure this is what this is.

You'll notice these on these older houses.

This is literally how they would ground.

The electricity electricity of these older homes.

Literally put a stake in the ground.

And tie the wire of the, of the home to it. So you got to keep, keep track of those because easily when you're weed whacking hit that wraps up the cord. Also, older vehicles, same thing here. When you're weed whacking around a an older vehicle like this, you want to be careful the tires, low revolutions, yes, these can get brittle rubber. And your weed whacker line can slash these tires. If you're going fast enough, at least chip them and damage them pretty substantially. Same thing with the windows. These are much less hardy in terms of to rocks debris as your weed whacking and edging.

And yes, we have repair replaced some.

Of the ones that we have broken in the past. So a couple things for you today.

Hope you enjoy this again.

If I get 500 likes, I'll do this again. So comment below, hit the like button, and we'll see you in the next vlog.

Hey, it's Mike here and I just want to say a big thank you.

For watching the video.

Trust me. Click the other video over here. It's really, really awesome and it really helps the YouTube algorithm. So click it.

Just, just go ahead now.