is it worth it? | $300k Business in 30 Days (22)

I'm traveling 3,000 miles across the country to build a $300,000 lawn care business in just 30 days. This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general manager and go back home. I'm starting with no employees, no equipment, and no customers to prove that systems build great businesses.

It is 11:30 at night or at the Charlotte airport as an absolute zoo. Absolute zoo. But we're picking up Terrence because he has eighth baby last week, and so for father's Day, went back home, and now it's time to get back to work.

So it's almost one o' clock in the morning. I was able to pick up Terrence, get him back to his hotel, but now I am actually setting up his laptop because this week I've got to get him trained up and getting him ready to go as a general manager because he's going to come in a few weeks for training at headquarters. However, there's going to be a couple weeks there where he's got to really run this location on his own.

All right, this is where we meet every morning. Currently, I drive this P1, but we're going to have to get in a parking spot for here at the shop. So when we get an employee, it's a little bit more organized, and we have both the trucks here at the shop space. Well, well, well. Look what we get to do here today. Once again, cleaning trucks. Last time it was P2. Our last time was P1. This is P2. My goal this week as well is to make sure that Terrance is completely taken care of in terms of, like, truck maintenance. Everything is cleaned out, oil changes are done, blades are sharpened. Everything is spick and span and ready to go. So that way he has a clean slate to get started next week. And this week, I'll really start handing things off to him. As the general manager, we ordered new locks because literally we have one key that's different than this key, and that key is different than this key, and this key is different than these keys.

Nope.

It only opened up the blower.

See, if I hire someone this week, I want to make sure that they almost feel like Terrence is really the general manager right from the get go, because I don't want it to be where they feel like I'm the owner, I'm their direct report, and then I'm leaving. So if I can train Terrence as much as possible this week on being a general manager, he can really be the leader from the get go for that new employee. The reason I'm also kind of doing a little bit of busy work today is because I want to kind of excuse guard the business. And that is, once I leave, I don't want there to be any excuse or reason. Well, the trucks didn't work. There was no oil changes. The tires need change. We need to do the brakes. All of that needs to be cleared in a blank slate given to the general manager so they have the best opportunity to succeed in their new role. And the game plan is simply to figure out whether or not we should be having another employee full time hired here at the south park location. The schedule's filling up, but should I hire someone full time when we're in the middle of the season? And this is just a nail. I found it literally out in the storage facility parking drive area. It not good news.

All right, so we need to go get another parking spot for another truck as well as head to the dump and get rid of a whole bunch of debris.

I don't know if you can see literally there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 employees just inside that door. But I'm trying to channel my inner Karen at this moment in time because we're 15 minutes past opening day. Opening time, 10 o'. Clock. You know, just chilling out while I wait for the public storage office to actually open up after their opening time. Let's talk a little bit of lawn care calculus. Because for a lot of us, we didn't enjoy math in school, but lawn care calculus, very important. You open at 10? No. How about 10? What's that?

Sorry?

You doing a parking space? I'm trying to. I gotta get my registration and get another parking space. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's what you gotta be in right now. Okay, no worries. Thanks. Because the question is always, should I hire another employee? Whether it be your first employee, your second employee, or your hundredth employee, you're always wondering, should I keep hiring? I was online. They didn't have the car spaces. Okay, well, this store, we're having a meeting for our district right now, so we're not gonna be opening till 11:30. Okay. All right, thanks for letting me know.

Thanks for letting me know. After me sitting out here for 30 minutes. I really appreciate that. You are awesome. You are fantastic. You are amazing at your job. Now, the good news is, if you're using budgeted hours for all of your jobs, whether recurring jobs, estimate jobs, or actual projects, and you're using budgeted hours, it's actually really simple. To determine what your budget hour capacity is. And that determines when you need to hire employees. So let's do some math.

Alright, so the first part of the equation is realizing that there's waste in every single day. So someone might work 40 hours of the week, but only complete about 30 budget hours worth of work.

That assumes about a 75% efficiency rating.

Which basically means about 25% of someone's day is wasted driving around unloading or loading the truck.

So 40 clocked hours multiplied by a 75% efficiency score equals 30 budget hours per week.

Now if a working GM is just getting.

A location started like this one, I do expect them to do 30 budget hours of work every single week minus any sort of estimates or hiring they might be doing.

So if a general manager has an estimate, that's an in person estimate. That would be one hour of budgeted time that we would now no longer require them to be on the field. Which means that they had 10 in person estimates for the week. We now instead of requiring 30 budget hours of working on, we only require 20.

That guy was so nice. I paid the ultimate dumb tax. But this guy was awesome. Threw all the garbage bags away for me in that trash bin and instead of me looking like a fool trying to jump and throw them over in the pouring rain here, call it dumb tax. Because I just had no idea that they would not take the bags here. We never have to go to the dump where I'm at. We have a facility at our shop where we just put all the debris over and it's like a landfill there. Here it's different. Can't do the plastic bags. I thought that was pretty obvious too. But I saw bags people putting next to the road. I was like, oh, I can do it too. That was wrong. So yeah, we will use tarps and we will put the debris directly into the dump trailer in the future. Now we got ourselves another problem. After I got all that wonderful holly and all the branches out of the bags, I realized that this is not lined up correctly. And these hinges have somehow this will not latch. It's a good inch off on the bottom. And I tried everything I possibly could, But I think we're gonna have to like shave a little bit off or potentially bend these hinges a bit. But these are not going to fit. It's a good half inch off.

So back to the calculus of whether or not we should hire another employee. This week we have about 30 budget hours, a little over 30 budget hours worth of work on the schedule next week. We already have 45 budget hours worth of work on the schedule. So this week, basically keeping Terrence completely busy, just doing work out in the field. Next week, though, he won't be able to get it all finished. So we'll have to get some help. Unless I go out there and help him for, like, you know, 20 hours in the week. Because right now, as a field worker, he has 30 budget hours of capacity. If he becomes general manager, he'll probably only have 20 or 25 budget hours of capacity in terms of actually getting work done throughout the week. Oh, brother. My gate. The gates on my trailer just came swinging open. Oh, brother. All right, Onto a busy road.

Horrible.

See, look at this. It's hitting, like, way below, at least inch. But it's not like these were hit. And if they were hit when it was like getting dumped, it would be the opposite way. It would be pushing them up. So I'm gonna have to bungee them together for now.

Figure out a better solution. So my thought is that this location will have a capacity, about 55 budget hours of work each week, 30 hours for someone that we hire, and then Terrence will be able to do an additional 25 budget hours worth of work each week. The challenging part is that we don't have a lot of recurring work, so the majority of that work is coming from one time projects, which is much less dependable in terms of knowing you're going to have that work on the schedule. So I'm going to hire someone else, but I'm going to give them the understanding that there might be a couple days here and there in the next couple months as we grow our recurring base of revenue, that we just wouldn't have work. But if we didn't have a lot of work, Terrence would then know that his job was to go out in the field and do door hangers to be able to produce more jobs.

Okay, well, that's as much chalk as we have right now. So revenue is not going to have an E today. R, E, V, E, N, U. This is not spelling class. This is calculus class. Okay, so if we get 55 budget hours very considerably done each week multiplied by four, that's about 220 budget hours on the schedule completed every single month. If we multiply that by $70 per hour, that's $15,400 in labor revenue. That does not include materials or estimate fees or dump fees. So it will end up being about $20,000 in revenue in July. That's the goal. Now, that would be for the month of July. If Terrance can continue to grow the recurring revenue and hopefully get it above 20 to 25 budget hours of recurring jobs or mowing jobs every single week, we should be able to do about 25 to $30,000 per month in revenue by the end of the year without spending too much more money on marketing. Then next spring rush, he can hire one or two more people, potentially get another truck if he wants, and grow it past 30,000amonth.

Hi. I'm just trying to get an oil change and then check my brakes. I think they probably need to be redone. Okay. But not right away. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you wait. Okay. How long do you think you say you want to check the brake and what else? Just an oil change. Just an oil change? Yeah. On the other side of that building. Okay. Right there. Maybe they can do it right away. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Hi, I'm trying to get a brake check and oil change done. Are you trying to get it done today? Yeah, yeah, we won't be able to do it today. Okay. All right. All right, no worries. Thank you. Well, we are going to go here to a franchise where they are nice and speedy. Doing good, sir. How you doing today? Good. I'm looking for oil change and some brakes. Okay. Yeah. If you want to pull up right here to the first B for me. Okay. Just back up, Pull up up there, and somebody will come out and get you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You notice back brakes or front brakes? I actually don't even know. I just know they're squeaky and we just got this truck. So.

Awesome.

We'll get you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Look, I'm not a huge fan of getting a quick service place like grease monkey, do my brakes and my oil change, But I can get anyone else to do it today or tomorrow. So I've got to come to a place where they got their systems in place and ready to roll and serve me right now.

If your team says things differently, like asks for things differently, we'll definitely want to know that. So as again, if you can get anyone else to help, it's super helpful. Basically what you'll do is you'll just go through and you'll speak to Max the way you normally would. So we see callers occasionally, you know, think it's a human and say, hey, Max, like, how are you? You know, and talk to it, say, hey, I'm looking for this. X, Y, and Z. We see people come in and kind of recognize that it might be a virtual assistant and say, like, new estimate. So you can kind of test the gambit of how you might speak to the virtual agent. I'll talk to you soon.

I appreciate it. Take care. Have a good one. Bye Bye.

Max the robot is now coming to life. We're now doing what's called uat, which is like actual testing. So starting tonight, we have about 60 use cases that Max, our virtual agent from AI is going to be now answering the phone after hours for command center. So we analyze the data, and based upon what we believe, just answering the phone 24, 7 instead of right now, we do about 70, 80 hours a week will probably increase leads by 4 to 8%. Just that one thing. So we're looking forward to it. Max has always been close to my heart as a dog, but I like Max much more as a computer. It's gonna be.

All right. So I posted the ad on Indeed just a few hours ago, and I already got three pretty good candidates. So I'm gonna reach out to them and try to get some interviews set up in the hiring ads. I really try to lean into what makes us different. We use pay for performance P4P, so they can make one third of all the labor revenue they earn for the business. High performers like that also the opportunity that, hey, we have 130 locations, and high performers typically become general managers within a few years. So great opportunity to move up inside the company.