I Was Doing Live Q&A... and then Copper Creek Cuts Came (starts at 31:10)

Happy Friday, everybody. We're gonna go live here for next 20, 30 minutes. Answer any questions I can for everyone at Command center in Friday afternoon. Everything's kind of getting wrapped up, but if anyone wants to hop on here and have some questions and answers, go ahead and do that. We have been busy here at Command Center. Always wanted to hop on here. Let's see here. Cool.

Tell us if you're just hopping on get. Go ahead and tell us where you're from and what your revenue goal is for 2021. What's up, Michael Johnson. Welcome.

Paradise Landscapes. What's up?

What's good? If you guys have any questions, feel free to go and just start firing away and I'll get through as many as I can here in the next a little bit. Ariaga Lawn Maintenance. Welcome, brother.

For some of you guys, you haven't started your mowing season. OkC $200,000. Ohio. Lorraine. Lorraine, Ohio. I don't even know what it is, actually. Some of my family's from Ohio. They're actually up in town this weekend. West Des Moines, Iowa.

Sup, Emmanuel? What's up?

Okay, let's go through here. Paradise Landscapes, 50K. Just starting out. Ariaga, 2200K this year. Cool. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for hopping on. Feel free. Just type your questions in. Try to get through some of these. I got a call here at 5pm our time, but I got a little bit of time before that. Okay. Not too far from Cleveland. Very cool.

Filled up my spring cleanups before because of your help with Facebook advertising. Awesome. Very good. It is the time to do spring cleanups early in the spring rush. Get them out of the way so you can focus on mowing, getting recurring maintenance throughout the rest of spring rush.

Good work there.

Cool.

Welcome, everybody. Cool. So yeah, if you get any questions, go ahead and post them below and stick around here. I'll try to get some more in depth stuff today because I don't really have a topic. So if you have anything you want to go over in terms of marketing, hiring. I know right now, like the biggest thing for most of us if we're trying to expand and grow is going to be finding good people. And trying to hire and find them right is just very difficult. I keep saying it, but it's just very true. It's very difficult to find people when their alternative is to sit at home and play Xbox and make three or four hundred bucks a week. And so definitely very competitive in the labor market right now. And the same way we go after customers, we almost do the same thing to go after employees right now and whether it be finding them from other, other employers, other lines of work, industries. You know, I was talking with someone the other day, like a big reason why you want to.

Simplify your services is not so much just because of profitability and efficiency and reducing the sales process and all that. It's also because you don't have to have, you don't have to find people that have experience in the landscaping industry. I think that's the thing I've learned even the past couple months, as the labor markets have become incredibly difficult, is can we simplify services enough to where you can take someone from Walmart or Taco Bell that's worked for five years and just wants to make some more money and. But you don't have to require them to have two or three years of lawn care, landscaping experience to actually make them a profitable employee. Luis, what revenue should I bring? A serious helper, solar operator. As of now, 35 plus properties. Luis, what I would do if I was you, I'd keep bringing on properties for mowing and then use projects as a way to book your schedule out. So say, for example, if you are able to get those 35 properties done and mowed in say three days, I would then, you know, reserve those days on your schedule. May it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then, you know that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days that you can schedule projects. And as soon as you have, you know, four days worth of projects that would fill up two weeks, I'd go hire somebody. If you want to grow, if that's your goal, if you want to just stay solo and maximize profit, I would raise your price at that point because you obviously have a lot of demand. I just hired a great team leader, had a few good choices. Good job, Steve. Congrats. What should my goal in revenue be this year, in your opinion? I had $94,000 gross, 68k net all by myself last season. This year I am having two employees. What would be a good reasonable number based upon your projection from last year? I don't think you're gonna be able to do 300,000. Like you can't take 94 and multiply that by three just because your employees are typically not quite as efficient as you, But I think 250 is definitely doable. Very, very doable at that. You're not going to again, you're not going to triple your profits either. You're not going to make 240,000 in or 200,000 in profits. You're probably gonna do more like 120, right? So like, as you're gonna grow from here, you're not with employees, your overhead's gonna increase. You're gonna probably need some shop space, another truck and trailer, etc, more equipment. And so that's going to definitely bring your profit margin down. But again, scalability is not all about just making the money. It's about building a business that works for you. And that means you don't have to come to work every single day. And you know, your health is not the determining factor of whether or not work gets done and whether or not the business continues going forward. And that's, that's the part that's more interesting. I'd much rather make $50,000 a year on a business that had systems people in place, scalable. I had great team members that knew how to use the systems. I'd much rather have that business than a hundred thousand dollars per year business in profit that I had to go there every single day, work 15 hours a day. And if I didn't, everything stopped. I would much rather have a $50,000 business. And in terms of valuation, we try to sell that company. The company that can run without the owner and that isn't a job for the new owner is going to be valued a much higher valuation metric. Steve today was doing all estimates while the team was out doing mult installs. Very cool. Dylan Martin. What author or business leader do you look up to the most and why? I don't know about that. Give me one second though. Let me show you guys a book. I put a post on my stories a couple days ago. This is a really good book, especially if you have a company that has, I'd say like a million or more in revenue or even like 700,000 revenue if you have kind of like a number two in your company at all. Me just get it here, audible. I'd really, really recommend this book. If you have a business where you have like a number two in command, an operations manager, someone that is kind of a key person for you, really recommend this. This helped me a lot in terms of knowing what the visionary and the integrator and their roles in the business and how important it is.

That back there is Liz. She's talking to Lonnie and she's probably what would be considered my integrator from that book. And, and so realizing their roles are really important in my opinion. But in terms of business leader, there's a lot of them. I don't really hunker down on one necessarily. Hey, Mike, we are doing way better now. I have someone starting on Monday and another person starting next week. Thank you so much for the motivation and support. You got it, Dean. Congrats, brother. What are your thoughts on raising hourly rates? I charge $60 an hour and had it at 15 an hour for base pay. Okay, this is a question I think you had talked to me earlier about, Dean. I think I sent you a voice note and had it at $15 per hour because it's, that's ideal. But couldn't get any people. So now my hourly rate is at 15 is at $18 an hour. Yeah. So Dean had sent me a note and I had responded back. What he's basically saying is here he was charging the customer 60 bucks an hour and had his base pay for P4P at $15 an hour. And that's a good ratio, that 25%. However, he is finding it's very difficult to find anyone that wanted to work for the $15 an hour. Plus, you know, obviously P4P. They could make 15, 20, 20 an hour. But again, that hourly rate on P4P is what an entry level employee is looking at because that's what they've been trained to do. No matter how much you convince them of P4P and the opportunity to make more money per hour, et cetera, they're going to think about that dollar per hour rate. That's what's going to attract them. So that's why that number needs to be pretty competitive in your market, just to attract people. And then they figure out P4P and the benefits of that later on, honestly, in my opinion. So Dean kind of had to bite the bullet, pay 18 an hour. And then what that means is he to need to raise his rates to at least 66, $67 per hour to his customer down the road. But for now, because of the pinch he needed for employees, I kind of gave the nod for for now just giving the 18 base to attract good employees. Instead of hiring and training new employees, I decided to hire other lawn care pros and sub the workout to them. That's one way to do it. Brian Connor. Awesome book. I finally popped the question today and my integrator said yes. That's awesome. It's basically, basically like that proposal. Hey, will you be my integrator? I do. I accept. Hey Mike, do you have any GM quality employees looking to relocate to this beautiful southern Oregon? Yes, I do. Andy, on our next call, make sure you talk to me. It's about 30 or 40. I have kind of like As a backlist, I don't know if they're all quality, but I'd say about four or five of them are really good. I have in the wings. How would you get your business from small, like me to a big business? I think first thing and first and foremost is start not just thinking bigger, but really starting to educate yourself as an owner that has bigger potentials and bigger objectives. Instead of looking at content about mowing and how to mow straight lines and what type of mower by, you should be focused on marketing. You should focus on leadership. The thing that's going to take you from small business to big business is leadership. I always tell our franchisees, the ones that usually get to 4 or 500,000 revenue the fastest are the people who can sell really good. The people that go past $500,000 and in past a million. They're the people who are great leaders. And so if you want to start going from a small business to a big business, in my opinion, you got to work on one of those two things, depending on how big you are. Now, if you're really wanting to grow, it comes down to leadership. 110%, developing people, getting great people like this over here. That's Rachel. She's a great, incredible person. That's Liz and that's Lonnie wrapping up Friday. And so they're doing kind of a recon on some stuff. We got some more great people over here. You can't see them behind the wall there. There's more, but anyways at command center here. But yeah, you gotta start thinking more about your leadership abilities and really focusing on honing those skills instead of just like how to mow grass better, it doesn't. It does not move them. Mowing grass better, that will not make you a big business. Being a leader and inspiring other people and getting them to the next level in their career, that will make you a big business. Let's talk shop about you selling me one of those 30 x's x mark 30s like you have in the thumbnail. All the dealers around me are sold out. Oh my goodness, that is so true. Same thing with Honda mowers. You can't get these things, those things anywhere right now. When Covid came, like a lot of their plants got shut down for between 30 and 90 days. That set everyone back. Then all the truckers, they all got blocked up because there was so much stuff that was backlogged. So, yeah, people are so far behind right now, it's horrible. How do you go about creating and documented systems for future employees, it really depends on the different position. So for example, if you're out in the field, honestly, we really like having more of an approach of hands on and having a scalable system. Like the first day they're going to learn something very simple like weed whacker and blower and it's going to slowly scale up, like push mower, zero turn, you know, then we're going to show them how to drive the truck. Then we're going to show how to drive the truck with a trailer. Like that kind of building process for that system. And out in the field works well or somewhere like in the office where we do a lot of screen recordings and we try to teach them that way. So in my opinion, like the way that they're going to be working is the way you want to be training them and that's usually the best way that they're going to learn. So thank you everyone for hitting the like button. We have a high like ratio today. Steve, Mike, I think you have filled the void since Lawn Care Millionaire. I, I'm really disappointed Jonathan doesn't hop on more and shares the community. Honestly, it was a great channel. I think almost all of us learned from him when we were first getting started and I really wish he was on the. On the channel more. Have a good weekend. Have a good trip.

See here? Yeah, Nothing new. So most YouTubers are just a commercial for products. So thanks for taking on the business side of things for us. Yeah, you got it, brother Javen. I started my business when I was 14 with my two brothers. I graduated college in May and we hope to really start growing this year. Any advice for growing a business when you share it with someone else? Yeah. Be really clear what roles you're going to fill. And if you're all out in the field, like if you guys are all mowing kind of together, doing estimates together, etc.

Just be really clear. Excuse me? Be really clear. Sorry, that's probably blowing your ears drums out. Be really clear on what the expectations for each person is. Whether it be hours in a week that everyone should be working, whether it be different positions. Like someone's gonna do the estimate, someone's gonna do the invoicing, someone else is gonna answer the phone. Be really clear about what each person expected to do. Be considered that they are, you know, fulfilling their role in the partnership in, in general. Any partnership needs to have that.

We are. I am. You can get both of these mowers.

Okay, If I am 85 an hour mowing, what should. What would I Be what would be an hour to plant plants because I'm wasting at a lower price when I could be mowing. Oh, I see what you're saying. So if you're, if you're charging $85 per hour, you're asking, why would I charge less than that if like plant plants or do landscape jobs? The reason for that is because if you are planting plants, your truck stops, and for straight eight hours you can work. Whereas with mowing, you're start, starting, stopping, starting, stopping in and out of the truck, there's windshield time, a lot more windshield time. Whereas if I'm just parking my truck and stopping, I can make more revenue in less time because I'm not. There's no windshield time, there's no unloading clippings in our market. Dropping the trailer, all of that stops. And every single time a truck stops and a route is stopped on, on like a 20 stop route, every single stop is waste. Getting in and out of the truck, waste. Putting the, the trim rack in and out, in and out 50 times in a day is, is a waste. Taking the blower rack off, filling up the gas cans 20 times, that's all waste. And so when you are able to go to a project like planting, you actually might charge less per hour. And we do this in our market, we charge less per hour on landscaping than we do for mowing. Because when it comes to mowing, you're going to have an innate 20 to 30% inefficiency if you're doing residential mowing because you have all these stops in date. Now, if you're doing commercial, you're traditionally not going to have as much waste in terms of percentage, but you're also usually going to be charging a lower rate per hour because the commercial is going to be a lower dollar cost per hour to the customer.

Emmanuel, if you have a good friend that does weed control and fertilizer, I do the mowing and maintenance part in my company and we send each other work. Do you think that's a good relationship? I do, I do. I'm not a huge fan of subcontracting, to be perfectly honest. Or should I just do weed and fertilizer? My company, in terms of keeping a good relationship, that's tough because now you're bringing the whole aspect of whether or not you're going to ruin that relationship by adding one of their services. And so that's, that's a whole different, you know, conversation altogether. But in terms of that relationship, if it's working, just keep doing it, right. If you're happy that they're growing their business and you don't have any interest in getting certified and getting tanks and, you know, learning all about fertilizers and all the rest of it, then I would just keep doing what you're doing, you know, simplify your service and focus on what your core competencies are. Jerome Harden Should I buy a backup use 60 inch mower or invest the money in advertising? Personally, I would say invest the money in advertising. Unless all of your properties needed a 60 inch mower. And for example, the reason I say this too is if you develop a good relationship with your dealer, a lot of times they'll let you take a mower out for a day, which means if your mowers, bigger mowers break down, they'll probably let you take another one out for a day or two. I would much rather my backup mowers be push mowers, especially if they're going to sit there all the time like you've got to think about asset utilization. I want to be using every piece of equipment, every truck, every trailer, every single day, as much as possible. If I've purchased it, I made the capital expenditure and it's on the balance sheet. I want to use it as much as possible in terms of hours per day. And so I don't like buying backup big, big mowers. Now, if all of your properties require 60 inch mowers, then maybe that's, that's something you can do. But if you can get away with a day or two without one, if something goes down, or maybe get one from your supplier or your, your dealer for backup, I would recommend that even if you have to rent one for a day or two, it's better than having $10,000 sitting and only being used, what, once a month. And then when you need it, it's been if the battery's dead or something's wrong with it because it hasn't been used enough. So. George. Hi, Mike, this is George from Utah. This is my second year on business and I'm wondering if I should offer fertilization and how to figure out a square foot price for it in this area. George? Yeah, so there's lots of different ways to figure out price per square foot for fertilization. It's one service where it doesn't, it definitely makes sense to use square footage. However, you're really, at the end of the day going to still be looking at what are your costs in terms of material which is going to, in this case be the fertilizers. The product and labor. Right. So that's still how you're going to be calculating things. But in terms of that per square foot price, what you need to know is what are your costs and then what is the markup that you want to have on that? And very high markup on fertilizer. But look at your materials. Say, for example, if it takes you 3,000 square feet, track the time it takes. Let's say it takes 30 minutes. Now you're looking at what is 100. 100 square feet a minute? Yeah, 100 square feet a minute in that case. And so you're like, okay, if I can do 100 square feet a minute. And now it's just a function of time for my labor. If I got to charge, you know, pay someone 30 an hour to be there. They're spray tech. Just run all the numbers. You know, keep running the numbers, and eventually you'll be able to come up with something really strong. Let me just make sure I have on the right microphone here. Can you guys hear me okay? Yes. Okay, you are cool. All right. Bought Zero turn and read the whole book. Man, what can I say? Such a good book with good advice within. It really opened my eyes. Just bought the emit that was referenced as well. Yeah, emit is 10 times better than my book, Let me tell you that. A lot of my book was rep was inspired by the E myth, honestly. And I do not think the Zero turn book was that great. It was kind of a fun little book. But I'm hoping I can get a better one here in the next couple years if I get some time. Are you a landscaper? Some would say so. If running only two locations, how would you handle the need of a phone number for clients to call? There's a 1.5 hour between both locations. I'm running. Lorraine, Cleveland, my boys in Youngstown. How would you handle the need of a phone number for clients to call if it's an hour and a half away? I'd probably have separate phone numbers. Honestly, just because otherwise it doesn't look local. And we really do still see a lot of value even for all our franchisees. They have local numbers just to make sure that people actually have that hometown feel. And when they call us, they. They do believe we are local. So I would get two separate phone numbers. And in terms of, okay, you're using your phone number.

Definitely do not recommend doing that. Try to get something like Grasshopper, Google voice. There's like a hundred different voip v O I P. Just look up voip phone number you can get on your app, on your phone, whatever and please do not use your cell phone. I can't overemphasize enough. If you want to scale your business, you need to get away from texting and calling the customer. If you don't have your own office, go get a calling service. If you are going to call from your phone, make sure it's very clear that you are the estimator, you are not the owner. It's all very important to make sure that you can scale the business without you being locked into every single project, every single job, etc. So Mark, do you have any examples of your follow up emails to help with wording that helps close sales?

I do but that's for the franchise. The the actual one click estimate emails are in the course. There's like a batch of 10 of them that hi Lonnie, this is Lonnie everyone. She is awesome. Hello. In terms of on the course there there is the 10 emails for one click estimate emails that I show in there. But in terms of follow up emails it's mostly for our franchise. S T Jerome Harden I got a blown up 61 right ZKL trading trade for a blown up or working 30 to 36 inch more sand on make sure you have your license the heavy fine if not yes thanks for what you're doing. Are you at school? I don't know who our typical fortnite lives but maybe watch some of the channel. No, this is command center. This is not school. Although, although Liz is my principal, Lonnie is my teacher and Rachel is my peer. How's that? Sou.

Would you ever be open to creating a video series on what type of insurance you should get or any advice on it unless that leads to legal trouble for yourself? No, it doesn't lead to legal trouble. I've had good experience with progressive honestly in terms of auto insurance and then using their platform you can get general liability insurance as well and they'll kick you off to hiscox his C O X insurance and I really like that popcorn but super fast. I can you can literally in 10 minutes get insurance bound. Not 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes but like I got three locations worth of insurance for liability and for the trucks in about an hour in the middle of a flight from California to the Washington state. So it's really really simple and really efficient. You can get bound really quickly, add drivers really fast, add new trucks really quickly and that's really cool. Hey Mike, I have 40 properties all right next to Each other. Is that good? Yes, it's always good if you are right next to each other. Route density is key to buy a first mower. Should you rent or buy one? I would definitely go buy one. I think the thing that's more important or the thing that is going to be as you scale is going to be the size and the quality of that mower. So when I first started started with a $400 mower, actually I watched that video the other day and my mom corrected me. We actually did not start with a Honda mower. That was like our third one because before that we bought like these $150 mowers from Toro at the Home Depot and they lasted all of like a week each. We went through two of them and then we went and got the Honda for 400 bucks a pop, which lasted us a lot longer. Copper Creeks what's up brother? Which by the way, your humor on that video about the subscription or the memberships was. Was awesome. I love it. No lie. I was just watching your upflip video from this year then saw you were live. CIA conspiracy confirmed. Oh man, if I could only have your sense of humor, I'd have more subscribers. How's that sound? Thanks, Brad. My 52 inch fits in my truck. Yes it does. Good job, ken. Hello. I'm 19. I have a couple bi weekly routes. What is something I can do to bulk up on more routes? So I would really try to focus on if you have a lot of bi weekly routes, try to get them to switch to weekly. Try to include increasing the value of a customer on an annual basis is always super important. So if that for example, a customer to you right now is valued at say you know, a thousand dollars a year, how can I get them to 2000? Well, I could literally get them to about 16 or 1700 just by getting them to go to weekly service. And then I can try to sell them a leaf cleanup. Then I can try to sell them a multi job and all of a sudden you get, you know, $2,500 out of the exact same customer. Not getting any more customers. But increasing the value of that customer on an annual basis is really important. So for you, Ali, I would say, you know, trying to get them to go to weekly with the first step and then trying to upsell on my consistent basis using a one click SME mo using staying in touch with them and making sure that they are. You stay constantly, keep that lead warm. Those would be some of my principles for kind of increasing the value of that Customer. When growing your business, at what point should your personal vehicle no longer be your mowing truck? I don't know. I, I'm. I, I don't know because I guess I haven't grown my business big enough to get out of my own vehicle. It's company owned. Honestly though, it's, it's personal right? Like some people really don't like to be known whenever they go that they own the long hair business. Like I can't tell people I can't run stop signs. I can't do anything bad on the road because it's a representation of the company. So I know that's annoying for some people and everyone knows who you are when you're driving around. What brand or type of vehicle do you guys typically use for your mowing setup? We really like quarter ton pickups, eight foot beds. They work really well for the mowing side of things and we usually will get a half or three quarter ton pickup, eight foot bed for the four wheel drive for the landscaping crews that have a dump trailer. I do own a lawn care business running on a radio ad focused on mowing. Let's see how well it works. Very, very. That will be very interesting. I have not seen rated do super well but again every mark is different. I've seen some people run one. It's like everyone in their and everyone their dog watches and listens to the radio show in a local market. What is your policy for toy toy toys and chairs in the customer's yards and moving them? Ken? We basically would give someone like a couple times of grace but if it gets really bad and the crew starts being really unhappy, we're basically set them up in automation so that every single time we dispatch them they would be getting a notice the night before and we'd be saying like you need to clean up your yard. For our crew we're coming tomorrow and so if they don't then eventually it becomes a matter of we're going to have to raise their price to co op to account for the fact that the crew is spending budget hours cleaning up their property. Thoughts on stockpiling your own materials like mulch, loam etc or buying at local yard. Is overhead versus times time savings worth it? Yeah. Honestly what not take into account here is the fact that your space to make those bins cost you money every month to rent that land as well as the fact to build the bins right. Like those bins are not. If you build like a big ecology block ones. If you are going to actually use those they're not cheap to buy, let alone transport, let alone install. Like to transport those things you need a semi truck to, to install them, you need a mid size excavator. And so you're going to be looking a pretty penny to put that down. It's going to come back to you in the form of efficiencies gained by your crew not waiting around at a, at a shopyard as well as bulk pricing. So you're going to wholesale pricing instead of, of retail pricing. So that's again another savings. So what really the, the tipping point there is how big is your business? Right? If you're doing one mulch install a week and that's the only time you're gonna need to get bulk materials, don't be putting bins at your shop and buying land to get those bins. Now if you're doing, if every single day you have three or four dump trailers go out with material like we do at a local shop. Yeah, it's okay to go get one. But thing is, remember, you gotta go buy a loader. So whether you're going to get a dingo or a skid steer or a track loader, you might be looking at 30 to 60 thousand dollars just to get the loader to load said material into your truck. Especially if you're doing sand and gravel and loam, you need something pretty hefty in terms of a loader. So keep that in mind too. I spent $150 my first Google Ad today and three hours later I got a customer. Congrats, Matthew. Can we see your truck on next video? Yes. There's trucks on almost every video asking for a Copper Creek cuts. Yes. Let's go. Oh, we should totally do a collaboration. I agree with that, Brad. If you're on here right now, I could actually send you a link and you could hop on here. So in, in the, in the event that Brad from Copper Creeks is live on here, which he just posted another comment, I can send you a link and we can like, we can do something pretty cool. So let me know if you're down for that and I will send you a, a link and then we can make this like an impromptu tag team here. Give me a few minutes. Okay. Yes, Brad, I'm going to email you a link and we are going to go live together here on the same channel. No one will have to leave. It's pretty cool. I can do this. Brad from Copper Creeks. Don't worry, I'm not going to share your email with everybody, so just do Link. I'm going to send you an email, Brad. Just gonna in the subject, it's gonna say link and then there's going to be a link in the email. And if you click on that you should should be able to become a presenter. Let me make sure I actually have this set up correctly.

See, it's so much worth it to stay on here live. Let's go. Okay, so let me go scroll up and get some more questions and then I've never actually had a guest on, on the stream. So Brad, go ahead and click on that. If you have issues, let me know. But I should be able to see you pop in here. S T. How is the transmission change on the new 30 commercial X for this year? It's been pretty good so far. We liked it. And the thing is we don't really know the alternative because we never bought the Kawasaki.

What do you do when a client gets a dog and doesn't clean up after? I hate when my mower smells like dog crap. Yeah, so the same thing. We have an automation that goes out the night before when we dispatch. And if they don't cooperate, literally it takes one or two times, the crew getting pretty unhappy. If they don't cooperate with the automation that tells them to pick up after a dog the night before, then usually we're going to bail and just tell them to go find someone else. See price molten. 120 for first yard including delivery and 80 for every yard after that. Would you prefer to pay employees at a fixed rate per yard or hourly? I do not like this model. The reason for that is because.

If you're charging by the yard, not all yards of mult are created equal. If I am trying. You know what? This is the beautiful thing about being a command center. Let me show you this. Okay, so let's look at this. So out here is outside the yard, outside the window here you can kind of see, I think here, let me see if I can point. Ah, you can't see anything. But anyways down there you can see that, that little piece of, of mulched flower bed. If that needs what, maybe 2 yards of mulch, maybe 3 yards. If I do the side of the house and stuff, like I can park my trailer right there and in one hour install all the mulch, no problem. Now consider the fact if over here at this house there was a flower bed in the backyard where that wood pile is and I have to bring mulch all the way from the front yard where the driveway's at, all the way to the Back that same three yards of mulch would take me like five or six hours to move all that material down to the back of the yard. So to price by the yard is super.

It's, it's easy, but in my opinion, not very accurate because the thing that you're paying for is labor and materials. So you should be charging by how many materials, how many yards of material, and how many hours it's going to take to do the job.

You just can't. It's very inaccurate to do that and it's going to be difficult because your employees will really love you when there's a tiny little lot like that first one and you just dump the molts basically and get a. They'll make a bunch of money if you charge, if you pay them by the, by the yard. But what happens when they get to a property and it's down a bunch of steps in the backyard and you're like, oh, yeah, by the way, you're getting the same amount per yard as you were the first job. They're not going to be super happy about that. Oh, we got Brad. Okay, folks, we're going to take a quick break. What's up, man?

Harry.

Mike. I can. In one ear. I don't know why. This one's not working.

This is too cool art. So I hear you okay, but are you bleeding back over the microphone?

I don't think so. Can you. I feel fine.

That's. This is too cool. How are you, man?

Good.

I know we've corresponded. You sent me a book one time. I know we've done emails, but is this the first time we've ever, like the closest real life interaction besides an email?

Man, that's awesome.

This is too neat. And I wish you would have put me on before Mr. Boris's question, because I just two days ago watched your video and I would have told you 80 to $120 is going to get you there most of the time. But here's something you got to consider. Location and access, because that's, that's what you were talking about. You're. You had, you know, some real big slopes. So I didn't end up getting a job. But I think for once in my life, I actually bid it to where while I was doing it, I wouldn't have been like, oh my God, I can't believe I underbid this again, because it was. They had landscaping around their entire house. So I was like, well, those back ones, I'm going to do 120 a yard. And the front ones, I'll do 100 because, you know, you'd have to wheelbarrow it all the way around. It was very helpful. Good job.

But it's okay because we, we heard, we heard that you make most of your money on your videos. The other day.

People are like, they're calling me for work. I'm like, yeah, you know, two or three grand.

Well, I'd say follow him.

You got some of my treatment the other day on your Q and A video, you only had a couple thousand views and then the day you make it, it just proved your whole theory there.

Yeah, it does.

That was.

And what if you don't know what Mike's talking about? I, I do a lot of like silly videos and more entertainment because they're more successful and they take.

Because he has a personality. He has a personality unlike myself.

So I did like a 40 minute Q&A for 200, 000 subs subscribers. And it's just. Yeah, it's very difficult. And like, this is one of the reasons why I admire you because the fact that you are trying to teach people and you're doing it so regularly to me shows that it's something that's important to you. Like I tried it a couple of times. I'm like a thousand. I worked three hours on this video and it's got this.

Again kind of a thing.

It's tough.

It's really tough.

So from your perspective, Brad, because like, I usually don't have someone like yourself on here and I really appreciate you hopping on here so quickly.

Someone like myself.

What is that? That's so like up here, like, come on, man. You stoop down to the, the, the, the gutter here to talk to me and my lowly 11, 000 subscribers.

10K. By the way, thank you and thank you for the Letterman.

I appreciate that is. That's pretty significant. There's a lot of guys and you know, it's not about comparison, but there's a lot of guys who have been doing this for a lot longer that still haven't hit that number. So that's good on you because your consistency and effort has paid off, my friend.

Thanks. But, but back to my question. And I was like so listening to my content, obviously, you know, you have the YouTube side, but just from the business side having a smaller operation. What's something that you kind of either not disagree with, but you kind of like look at what I look I say and like, hey, that's great for Mike. But like I need to kind of change that a Little bit for a smaller operation like myself.

So I don't think I've ever seen anything of yours where I say I disagree with that. What I say is that's for a mentality. That's I'm, I'm gonna be happy just being me. I consider myself mainly a stay at home dad who mows a couple days a week and does YouTube videos on the side. So I think a lot of your stuff, which you even admit this in some of your videos, your recent who Wouldn't Be Good for Augusta Landscapes? A lot of your stuff is geared for someone who wants a big company. So it's not that I've ever. You've said something, I'm like, oh, that's dumb. It's just that's, that's for a company that's much bigger than me. So I take it and I listen to it, but I just file it away under for, for folks with bigger aspirations than me when it comes to the size of the business.

So here's a question for you. You didn't, you didn't address it? I don't think I listened to the whole video, your Q and A in the background, so I might have missed something. But have you ever had a customer address the fact that you're going to be videoing their property or like mention your YouTube videos and that got you a customer?

So at least for the first part, they say something about the videos. Very rarely do I even have anybody ask. A lot of times that's just because of the nature of lawn care, where when I'm there, they're either at work before COVID they were, you know, in town, an hour away at work, or now they're just doing, you know, so they don't even pay attention to me in the camera. So I haven't ever had anybody really challenge me on that. And at least as far as Getting Business from YouTube, there have been a couple of times, and I mean like three, over the course of four years, where someone from Jacksonville, Florida, which is about an hour away, has said, hey, I found you on YouTube. Do you travel out here? But it actually very little business I get from, from YouTube. I don't know if I get a lot less spam calls than I would think too, because my numbers like plastered on every single video. I'll tell you who calls me the most. And it's weird. It is. I'm going to sound weird saying this, but it is like preteen boys who are crank calling me and they're always like, yeah, I've got a lot.

So basically anything that's not a 904 area code, I send a voicemail. If it's a customer who's just got a weird sale, I'll return the call. But yeah, so that's pretty much the extent of it.

So. So right now, like, I know you're focused on the video side of things. Do you think you'll ever kind of focus on the YouTube only and then have like a crew of two or three guys to get more content? Or is it more like you're always gonna do the one, you know, the one job that way?

At least for now, I don't have any. And the main reason is to do it legally. Like, and this is something that I don't know if, if you've talked about, but the jump to go from just me to somebody else, I've got to have, like, if I've got this much work and it keeps me busy, when I bring on somebody else, I almost immediately have to like get another 30 or 40% of that because even though I might only be paying them 10 or $15 an hour, you've got your workman's comp, you've got your insurance, you've got all this stuff on top of it that now you have to account for. So that's why when I look at the costs of adding somebody, I don't think I would. Because I can do the. At least for now, if nothing changes, I can do the YouTube thing with just me, you know, one or two days a week. So I don't think I'd want to change it.

So I'm going to let you go. I'm going to let you go because I know you got your 200,000 subscribers over there ringing you up, calling you up, Frank, calling you right now. But your opinion on robot mowers, have you played with them at all? Or even electric mowers? I've been playing a little bit recently. I know. What, what's your take on it? Since you have all the, all the talent and the skill and experience, experience with lawn grass, etc, it won't be.

As oddly satisfying to watch.

That's my.

No, the issue with that, that's a real threat to your, to your business model.

The issue to me with robot mowers is that now for everybody who wants to, to be serviced by you, and this is from the solo guy, you've got to invest 2,500 bucks in a machine. You've got to install the wiring. Where I live, there are tons of fences, so I'M going to have to figure out how I'm going to communicate to them. I've got to cut a hole in your fence. Where's that hole going to be? Where's the charging station going to be? I'm also very cynical about like I, I don't think, I think some, some dumb kid teenager is going to see it and try and steal it or vandalize it or they're going to think it's, you know, I was an idiot when I was 16. So I'm thinking if that idiot me was, oh yeah, it'll be a great idea to bash this robot mower. Not thinking like I'm gonna have, this is some guy. I'm taking three mortgage payments out of this guy. You know, something like that. So that's why I mainly don't like the idea because for a solo guy, at least for me, it would be a ton of time before I would recoup the, the investment on, on that one mower. And I guess if you scaled it enough, you could, you know, it would make more sense. But then as, as a one person thing that scares me a lot thinking, oh, let's just add more $2,500 mowers everywhere we go. That's what, that's what I don't like about it. Why the math? I don't think for me would work.

Okay, so what we need to do before I let you go is you need to make sure everyone watches your membership video. It's the best way to lose money. And you're talking to the perfect audience. We love equipment, we love spending money. So you just need to picture right here. You can take me off if you want.

I still got a couple of minutes. I don't have to get rushed off.

I, I have to get off here because I have a franchisee call. Fair enough.

Yeah, blame it on me. I'm ready to go.

We'll definitely have to do this again, brother. I really appreciate all your support.

Like gie stuff like that in person.

And you need to keep track of all the questions that you missed because people are going to be mad at me if they had a chance to ask you question and then I started mouthing off. We'll come back to the chat's transcript another day.

All right? All right. Thanks, brother. You have a great evening, everybody. Bye bye. That was fun. All right, everyone. Well, thanks for hopping on here. I have a ton of questions I didn't get to, but it was cool to have Brad hop on here. And so I guess you have a great weekend. Maybe I'll do one of these tomorrow to make up for all the lost time there, but it's definitely worth it. Take care, everyone. Have a great evening.