Keys to Growing a Successful Lawn Care Business w/ Mike Andes

What's up, everyone? It's Mike Andes. Today we are going to be doing some Q and A. Had one of my calls for the day cancel. And so I wanted to go ahead and do a Q and A real quick here on the YouTube and the Facebook. So if you got questions, go ahead. In the comments, post them. I'm going to be doing these live for the next 30 minutes or so, so feel free to post those questions and we'll get through as many as we possibly can. First question comes from Brent the Great. What should I look for in an operations manager? I think first and foremost, they must have operational experience, I. E. In the field. I think if you hire someone that does not have operational experience, does not have field experience, you're going to have a revolt from your guys that are out in the field because they don't respect someone that just comes in with a suit on and a tie and gets a big bonus and sits in an office and an AC unit all day. Like they need to see someone that's done it, been there, knows what they feel like. I personally look for that in an operations manager. Same thing with estimators. I want them to be knowing what it feels like to be out in the field and for the crew to know that that operations manager, that estimator, that office manager knows what they are feeling when it's super hot, when it's super cold, et cetera. Next question. What do you do when an employee walks up the job? Honestly, you get over it. You just have to. It's not easy. It's extremely emotionally taxing. You start to doubt whether you should grow. You start to doubt morality. You start to doubt whether or not there's good people in the world. You doubt whether or not you can find good employees. And it's very tough to bounce back from that. But you have to. You absolutely must just realize that, hey, I've got to move on from this. My business's destination future is not going to be determined because someone walked off a job. It's going to be determined whether or not I, as a leader and able to overcome that. And I'm able to overcome a lot of things throughout my business's journey, so. All right, Joseph, where do you announce when you'll be doing these live chats? So we know where they are and good to see you. Yeah, so I do not announce them usually just because, for example, right now I had a call canceled 10 minutes ago and decided I would make this live chat. So I don't. I don't usually have the schedule really, is it mini skid steer a good investment long term? If you're going to do hardscaping and landscaping and that's something that you're going to do consistently and you want to keep raising price, the cost of your labor, the rate to the, to the customer, yes, I think it's a good investment. You'll use it every single day. It's a fantastic piece of equipment. That being said, you're gonna have to train every one of your crew members on it. So make sure it's something useful that you use all the time. Do not make it where someone uses it once a month or even once a week. If you're gonna get a mini skid steer and spend, you know, even 40, 50 grand on a new one, you better make sure you're using that bad boy every single day. Caleb. Anthony. What's up? Colton King? Out of all your locations, which market areas the most competitive? Honestly, the ones that are most competitive are my favorite. So in terms of competitiveness, the closer you get to large metro areas, the more competitive they are. And in terms of when I say competitive, I mean harder for us to penetrate. When we go into suburbs and smaller cities, we can crush it on SEO because no one else is is doing a very good job at it and therefore we can dominate that market. It's a lot easier in a smaller market. Same thing with long care web design. Our websites that we build that really, really do well are usually in smaller markets and suburbs and they get to the top of Google within a few months. Whereas if you're going after like a big cup city like Chicago, it might take you a year even if you're doing really good SEO just because you're up against people with tons of traffic. So in terms of market area, the more competitive they are, but smaller in size, that's a great market in my opinion. John McGuire. Hey, Mike, do you send customers appreciate appreciation gifts towards the holidays? And if so, what would you recommend is appropriate? The first couple of years I did it at Thanksgiving, actually. I sent a gift card and a letter that I then signed. It was my own hand and I sent it out to all my customers. I think I stopped doing that when I hit about 400 customers served throughout the year. Not recurring customers, but customer served probably had like 120 mowing customers. I don't think there's a huge return on that. I think if you spent that same amount of money on marketing, you'd probably grow the business more. But again, if you're trying to lock down on 100, 200 customers and just make them ultra profitable and not grow. You'd probably be a good idea to really make sure that you do lock in on those customers and do that kind of a care package or holiday package. Integralons. Who do you recommend to help create an FTD ops manual, etc. Honestly, you just need to get with an attorney's group. Every single industry is different. It's extremely expensive and I would, I would question whether you should do it. That's what I would say. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars if unless you're going to get massive amounts of funding. And yeah, I don't complain about it at all. But it's not an easy business model. By no means. How does a person get more clients with zero starting cash? You need knock on doors. If you have absolutely no cash, you're not even gonna be able to get door hangers. But if you did have a little bit of money, I would get door hangers like this.

From lawn caremedia.com where you did instant quotes for property cleanups, mulch installation, mowing, etc. I'd be handing those bad boys out. But if you don't have any cash and you can't even get door hangers, you gotta knock on doors. You gotta pound pavement. You either have time or money. And if you don't have money, the only thing you got is time. Therefore you gotta go knock on doors. You gotta get in front of people. What brand skid steer would you buy? I. I am not a the best person to answer it. Answer this question honestly. I would buy in New Holland only because there's a dealer local to us that serves us really, really well. And New Holland is a relatively cheap brand compared to Bobcat, Kubota, etc, and for us it serves us really, really well. I would not buy Ditwich, but we don't use them every single day. So again, from someone who does mostly landscaping, mowing and maintenance and maybe uses a skid steer three times a week only, that's my opinion. But again, I'm looking for a cheaper model like a skid steer at New Holland. I can get for 40 grand and it'd be pretty good. Like it's going to serve me and my purposes. I don't need an enclosed cab with AC and a radio and all the rest of it and all the fancy things. So therefore I can get away with a cheaper model like New Holland. Brian Connor, what are your thoughts on team members working on Saturdays? Do you actively make attempts to mitigate the number of Saturdays worked. It's always our goal to keep it from them having to work Saturdays. And I'll be making a video here pretty soon. We've tested now the past several weeks doing 4 tens. And I'll kind of report back on how that's gone and what our restrictions are, how we rolled it out and why I originally did not do it, why I haven't done it for so many years. And now we are trying trialing this out. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that our team brought it up. And so I'll talk more about in a specific video about four tens. But in terms of actively working on Saturdays, we try to avoid it at all costs. But there's always two or three weekends each each year where we will have to work on a Saturday just because we get so far behind in the spring rush. All right, Austin, what brand? Skid steer. I already talked that one, Stephen. Mike, is it a good idea to give customers branded sweaters and hats from your company?

I don't know whether it's a good idea. Again, I just look at the cost and I look at where could those dollars be spent otherwise? And if you're trying to grow your business, I don't think it's the best use of your funds. I think that money would be better spent on advertising, getting in front of more customers. And at the end of the day, if you really believe that your product or service solves the customer's problems, doing that is the best way to serve them, not give them swag. Because, like, why would you know? I don't go up to my, I don't even know what brand this is. This is A, O, P, D, R, D. I don't even know whatever this thing from Amazon. But I don't use this because it has this brand logo on it. Right. I use it for the utility of it. And let's just be honest, for most of us, our lawn care landscape businesses, people are not buying from us because of our brand. They're buying for the utility and the function that we bring, which is not a bad thing. There's, you know, this potentially could be a million dollar company. There's lots of different businesses that are made without the brand being the thing. And so for many of us, utility is important. It doesn't mean that your brand isn't important because your brand is extremely important in terms of retention, in terms of acquiring new customers, in terms of word of mouth, et cetera. But to say that giving a branded sweater or hat is going to make someone somehow like good is a good marketing metric or a good marketing tactic? I would say not. I just don't and I don't think that they're going to wear it. Most customers are not gonna be like, yeah, I'm wearing this sweater because it's my lawn care company. It's rare that they're gonna do that even for most of us. Ask yourself, like, would you wear a Google sweater? Right. Would you wear a Google sweater? Most people wouldn't even wear it because it's branded first and foremost or something that they don't agree with or just they don't feel akin like they should be advertising for Google. And so the thing goes, they do. Do your customers have a strong enough connection with your brand that they're going to wear your swag? Unlikely. So Cool Breeze, which by the way, we're working on some really cool Augusta swag and the sweater we made for Landscape Summit is fire for everyone that's going to be there. Cool Breeze. How many yards should I take on if I'm just starting out and it's just me and I can only mow Friday, Saturday, Sunday. For now, I wouldn't take on more than 20 because that's probably about how many you're going to get done in two days. Again, I'm just assuming how the property size is going to depend on that obviously. But I would probably stop at 20 just because let's say you did 10 a day. You want to make sure you just have the two. Because if you have another full time job and you have a rain day on the weekend, you want to make sure that you're not going to, you know, mess up your main thing which is your job, your full time job. Because you go over into Monday on Moe's Austin Mike, is it a good idea to give customers branded sweaters? Okay. Please don't post your comment twice. I appreciate that. Do you like John Deere? Yes, I do like John Deere. They are good company. We actually use their stamp. That was like my very first zero turn was a stand on John Deere. How short would you cut the grass or does the customer tell you how short you want it? We always start at a certain length which in our market based upon our, you know, we have a blend of rye and fescue. Typically, we typically start to start mowing it between two and a half and three inches and if the customer specifically asks it for shorter, it's fine, we'll just put it in the job notes to Modus at You know, two or two and a quarter. And so we were pretty flexible with that. I know some people say, oh, you only have to. We have to mow at a certain type. But we have job notes on every single one of our visits. And our crew gets. Is pretty good at reading those and making sure they cut it the right. Right size, right height. Caesar, do I replace employees that cannot complete jobs and budget hours or change budget hours? Although for mowing, I believe I know what time it should take to finish. I think it depends on if it's a trend. Like if all of your employees are not hitting bud hours, there's a good chance you need to raise budgeted hours. If there's one employee that's not hitting budget hours, they're probably so either slower, less efficient, they're taking too many breaks, they're quote unquote lazy. Maybe there's taking too many smoke breaks or going to the bathroom a hundred thousand times or on their phone or whatever it might be. And so I think it's all trends. And that's why it's so important to track the performance of each employee every single day to know what their efficiency numbers are and to be able to, you know, pick up on those trends and see when certain employees are consistently being inefficient or consistently being, you know, a high performer. That might be the person you want to give a raise to if you're on hourly or potentially give a promotion to or have project manager, et cetera, et cetera. So if you guys like this format where I actually read the questions, I'd appreciate a, like, I would really appreciate that. Next question for your first customers. Should you start with a lower price so you can get started or go with a high, high price but have a higher chance to get rejected by the customer for when you're first getting started? I would, I don't mind lowering your price. That's the one time that I would lower your price in order to close the deal. So you give the estimate. If they say, hey, it's too expensive. Okay, well, if you're willing to do it at X, I can get it on the schedule for next week. That's the only time I do it to get momentum, get the ball rolling. I just can't overemphasize the power of momentum in this business. When you get one customer and then you get their neighbor, and then all of a sudden you're parked there for an hour and so the people across the street and then all the neighborhood starts to see you more like it's just momentum. It's all about momentum. It's funny how when people get booked out one or two weeks, all of a sudden they're four or five weeks. Like it just. Momentum is so important. And it goes the other direction too. When you're going kind of through a slump, you all of a sudden just like, it's just like breaks, breaks, breaks. You need momentum. And so at the beginning when you're getting your business started, you got to get momentum by just getting jobs on the schedule. Get working at people's house. Don't be sitting at home like, oh, oh, I wish work would come. I'm going to place ads. No, like go get jobs. And if you got to reduce the price, that's fine. Just go get work. Because it's a funny thing how all of a sudden you start, the neighbors start to see you, they talk to you, they ask for an estimate. You know, then now you get some word of mouth between your customers and their friends and family and it just gets the ball rolling. What's your advice for someone who is trying to grow a big lawn care business in a rural area? I would say that you're going to have to diversify services. But don't do that too soon because you will water down your offering and you'll become a jack of all trades, master of none. But you will event actually need to diversify services if you have say three or five thousand people living in your whole city. That being said, keep in mind like when we, we started in Blaine Washington with 7 to 8,000 people living there before we moved and we did 1.1 million before we ever moved to Bellingham, which has 80,000 people. So just keep that in mind. I think people overthink the fact, oh, if I'm a small city, I can't build a million dollar business. We didn't do anything crazy. We, you know, we just did mowing and we do basic services. So Mike, I am planning to move slowly from gas product equipment to battery powered ones. Some appreciate eco friendly setup. Yeah, it's expensive right now for the mower side, last weekend we made an incredible video. It's going to be coming up here in the next few weeks where I mow, I rode a mower. It was electric mower for 24 hours straight. So little teaser coming up for you guys in a couple weeks. That should be really fun. But that mower costs literally four times as much as a regular sized gas powered mower. It, the performance was great. I'm not gonna lie. It was Fantastic. But I think over time, like Tesla cost, you know, the initial cost of a Tesla was over $100,000. Now it's down to 40,000 simply because over time cost of production goes down scale and they figure out their supply chain for the batteries. Etc. How do I do W2? I wanted to get some employees check out QuickBooks Payroll or Gusto.com if you go to Gusto.com Bootcamp you get free 90 days where you can get up all all your payroll set up and then the software does all of the paperwork in the background for you. Hope that helps. Adrian, do you recommend company T shirts for all employees while on the job? Yes, I do. I think it's important for the customer to know who's on the team and not just a bunch of random people with a bunch of random clothes on. It's nice for the customer to be able to know who is from the business versus just random other people walking by their house. Are we hiring? We're always hiring really, really good people. But right now I think the local shop is not command center. Just hired three people yesterday.

Do I prefer Echo or steel? I do not prefer. I don't really have a preference. Howdy from Vancouver Island. Josh, how do you track individual productivity on a crew for P4P? So we divide the total labor revenue that they earn for the day divided by the base pay times their hours worked. All right, so let's say, for example, I just do some quick math here. Sorry, I'm not in front of the whiteboard. Let's say for example, their total revenue that they earned on their mowing route was $600. Let's assume that our base pay is $20 per hour. And then let's assume that they worked for 10 hours. Like clocked on. Like on the clock, they worked 10 hours. Right. So $600 total labor revenue divided by the base pay. Let's just assume $20 for the sake of ease of numbers. They work 10 hours. This is going to be 600 divided by 200. The total on this is going to be 3.0. Okay. So for us on our team, we're always shooting for this number or higher, 3.0 or higher. And if it's between 2 and 3, we're profitable, but not profitable enough. It's not where we want to be. And then at 2.0 is when we say that we are breaking even. Anything below that, we're losing money. And that would impute a 50% labor expense burden, which means 50% of the revenue they bring in is going out the door to wages, and that's horrible. 50% is not good. We want to be at 40% or below. And so we shoot for 3.0 or above, which would impute a 33%.

Percent of your revenue, your labor revenue going out the door to wages. Currently not spending money on online marketing. Is my money better spent painting and branding my truck or spending about $2,000 on online ads? Oh man, that's a tough question. If you only had the 2000.

I would take the $2000 and actually do door hangers and postcard. Not postcards, I would just do door to door. I would take $2,000. Like $2,000 is not a lot, right? So I would really recommend trying to take 500 of that into door hangers, doing that to make another 2,000 so you can go get your truck painted. That's what I would recommend. $2,000 just doesn't move the needle very much on online marketing. I'm starting to realize this more and more. You might get some Google Ads, you might be able to post a next door ad, but like you gotta be able to see what's working for a month or so. And everything is moving so quickly right now in terms of what's working in every single market. You've gotta test it, you gotta know what's going on. And it's very tough to do with just $2,000, to be perfectly honest. So, so I would say either paint your truck and focus on that or take $500, go get a bunch of door hangers flyers, go do a bunch of door knocking, really push that to get enough money. Cause again, $2,000, you need to go out and get five, you know, four or five cleanups, right? And try to get the money to do both when starting out while still having a full time job, only able to call customers back and answer emails on a lunch break or after work and then work on the weekends. What is the best advertising? Okay, this is a. Okay, I think there's kind of two questions here. What do you do if you are. Oh, you know what, I wish I had this one second. Let me pull something up for you guys. These are two services. I know some people, I think I'm crazy because they're competitors technically of mine. But I'm just going to show you guys something real quick. These are a couple calling services you might want to consider. These are. Let me pull them up one second here.

So what I would recommend if you still have a full time job is get a calling service, someone that's going to answer the phone for you, going to actually make sure that you get back to customers on time. Sorry, I wasn't planning any of this. Just give me one second here. Let me share this screen. All right, so this is Jill's office, a virtual receptionist. And they charge $199 to get set up. And then you basically pay a monthly fee. You can see here. And then plus, you know, you get certain amount of minutes and then you get additional minutes for a certain amount per minute. Right. So let's just say, you know, you paid $400 a month, you know, 355amonth. You get 120 minutes. That's probably going to be about 40 or 50 calls. So if you're part time, that's going to be enough to basically get someone to answer the phone all the time when they call. When you're small, right. You're doing this on the part time basis. And it's $171.70 cents per minute. You know, and I know some people are like, why are you showing this? Because Command center actually does this for our franchisees, but we do this for a much lower price for our franchisees. We do this for a dollar and nine cents. Whoops. Let me show you this other. Other. This. This company is called Pink Collars. So that first one I showed that Jill's office works really well with Jobber from what I've heard. This one that I'm showing you right now is called Pink Collars. They work well as service autopilot. Let me just hide this. Oh, I'm sorry. I hope that you guys could see this. Let me just bring this question down. So here, this is another one. Again, they have a different business model. They charge by the week. This is going to be a better one. If you have a larger company, you need me doing a substantial amount of revenue for this one to work because you're going to be paying over $5,000 a month just for their service. And so again, this is going to be for a larger company service, autopilot, they integrate with. So usually those are going to be running you about, on average about $1.50 to $1.70 per minute, depending on what service you use. At Command center, we charge $1.09 cents per minute for when we're on the phone and then $0.70 per minute when we're doing like scheduling, invoicing, other things like that, what we call full service. And so it's a lot cheaper. But it's because they're franchisees and we all use the same system so we can be a lot more efficient. And that's why, for those of you asking that's why I don't make a lot of money on a command center is because we are it's a loss leader. We know it's extremely important for the franchisees to have it and so we take it a bit as a loss for now. How long should you spend on one yard? Really just depends on the square footage and a whole lot of other variables. How can I call you Mike? This is in the description. There's a link you can book a coaching call. Are you invested in the stock market? Yes, I've cut my position 3 weeks ago I cut my position in a little over half because I'm doing a real estate deal. You can check out my other channel link in the description talking more about investing stocks, real estate, etc. Will you ever move to fully electric? I think most of us will down the road, but it's probably 10 to 20 years out before the cost is actually comparable. That being said, in our New York location, for example, they're already giving incentives for people to switch over. So like when we did our registration, our licensing renewal for the annual renewal, if you had five pieces of electric hand equipment, you didn't have to pay the $120 re registration fee or whatever. So I think it's gonna become more and more, especially in coastal states, I think there's gonna be more and more of that pressure. And then I also believe that the cost of those electric pieces will come down and the manufacturing will get better and it'll make economic sense. And until it makes economic sense and it doesn't cost five times as much, that's when we'll get mass adoption. Like the hand tools are already there. I feel like it's the mowers. Those are the things that were still a little bit cost from a cost perspective. I can't make sense of it. How much percentage do you spend on marketing website advertising? At the very beginning, you're just paying a much higher percentage because your revenues are lower and you're having to pay for every single lead. The goal is that you have a great website so that you're not paying for every single lead. And as you grow, you get customers from word of mouth, you get them from your website just searching you online on Google and you're not having to pay for every single one. So at the beginning your percentage is going to be much higher.

Podcast recommendations I would say how I built it from npr Guy Raz is the. Is the host really great. That's really my only YouTube or not podcast I'm listening to right now. Best advice from growing from solo to your first employee and growing income to pay for that employee. Sorry, give me a second, guys. My agent, we have this, we're trying to closing this deal and I'm trying to get this appraisal done. Gotta love it. Okay. Every door, direct mail. Thoughts on that?

It's good in certain markets and if you want to go after very, very centralized and targeted areas like A1 neighborhood. Right. So if you go throughout their whole neighborhood and you do door hangers on, you know, for fertilizer, for example, and then you, the next day you get they got postcards in their mail and then the next day after that you're knocking on their door like just that. Penetration is really, really powerful in my opinion in regards to what you just said. One year in and those referrals, word of mouth and neighbors asking, that rarely happens. We do way better work than most. But the market here is just way oversaturated. So I would just disagree with you on that one. I believe that within, within the first or second year of business, most of your business should be coming in from organic SEO from your website and word of mouth. If after two years that's not the case, typically a website's not doing well, the branding is off and the website's just not ranking well. But that's just my opinion. I think at the beginning you're trying to get traffic to that site, you're trying to get reviews, you're trying to get ranking, you're trying to get enough traffic to actually have weight in Google. But if by at the, at the end of year two, if most of your leads are still coming from paid advertising, there is something wrong with the branding or the website. Just my opinion. Do you think $12.60 is a good start day? Good starting pay for quarters? I don't understand the quarters part. Do you recommend a software program for estimating billing, route tracking and customer management? I do not have one that I can publicly talk about right now. There's several really good ones. LMN is great service. Autopy is great. Real Green is great. Jobber is great. Lawn Pro is great. Yard Book is great. It's going to depend on the size of your business and all of those.

Vlad and Kogan, what do you do with leads in your city that are more than five miles away from your shop? Do they still go through your lead flow? So how we work at command center is we have a map that shows all of the customers for every one of our locations. And how they are trained is basically to look at that map and they have to kind of make a judgment call whether or not that franchisee would want to take that lead. And so we can usually tell where they're trying to focus on just by like, where their customers at. And if it's like, you know, way out of that territory, that area, then they're not going to set up the estimate. But if it's on the border, usually we'll set it up. And then if it's in that gray area and the franchisee is too busy or they don't want the customer, then they'll. It's up to them just to cancel the estimate. Or those can text the command center or, you know, respond back and say, hey, just cancel this. I don't want it. But typically, in terms of going through our lead flow, we don't want to waste the customer's time, like getting their address, getting their phone number. What services do you want? And then at the end, they'd be like, oh, by the way, we don't serve your area. Like, I think that's kind of rude. Ideally you would be able to do that because you get their email address and be able to service them or market to them in the future. But then again, why would you want to market to them if you're never going to serve them right? So it doesn't make sense. So in our opinion, it's like, where are you at? That's the first thing that we're trying to determine. Are you in our service area? And if you are, we'll proceed with getting the rest of the lead flow. When is the right time to get a manager? In my opinion, you should not need a manager until you're above eight employees. Just my opinion. If you're getting a manager before that, it's likely that you have some inefficiencies in the business and you need P4P to keep your account, your employees more accountable for their own work. Maybe seven employees. But that's why our. We like that eight to 10 field worker employees per location at Augusta, because one person can manage them, have command center in the background running the back end. And then that manager is doing estimates, sales, hiring all the other admin work outside of answering the phone, doing clerical work that command center can handle. How to get a loan without credit, it's almost impossible unless you go to the sba, right? So Small Business Administration There is options for someone with very low or little or without credit. Even that though is tough. You need credit. So I would recommend first and foremost going and get a credit card. And so slowly building your credit score to the point where you do have credit. Okay, I just have a few more minutes here. I gotta bounce. How do I get into franchising if I'm close to 1 million and my business is doing good? I don't know if you mean being a franchisor or a franchisee. If you're willing to be a franchisor like Augusta Lawn Care, I just can't overemphasize. I know people watch me, they're like, oh, like I could get into that. It sounds great. You need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars and you need to know how you're going to sell locations. It's extremely hard business model if you don't have capital like a bunch of funding behind you. And I know everyone thinks I'm just complaining, but I don't talk about it enough. It's extremely difficult to do without funding.

Little Matt, I watched a recipe for a seven figure lawn care video and I'm wondering how did you get your three estimates per day? Did you divide 160 days of work or something? I saw your, your comment, Little Matt, and yes, I can't remember exactly. Let me try to think how I did the math on that. I know I had estimates per day. Oh, the number of leads. So I had how many leads I needed in order to get the number of customers that I needed. Right. So if you have a number of customers that you want and then you have your close ratio, that will give you how many leads you're going to need and then based upon how many leads, I. E. People asking for an estimate, that's what I divide by 160 to get the 3.125. So I'm just going off of memory, but that's, I'm pretty sure that's what it was. You're welcome. Zachary. Hi, are you landscaping? I'm looking for my yard mode. Okay. Pump for landscape summit 22, let's go. It's gonna be great, ma'. Am. We got some, we got some speakers coming that are awesome coming in this time. $40 per hour is extremely hard here in Houston, Texas due to almost everyone mowing lawns for 25 for the basic lawn care service. One of our franchi was not too far from you and in Austin, very similar, similar market. And at the very beginning they were, they thought the same thing. $40 per hour is tough. They had 25 $30 lawns on my last coaching call. He's raising his price into 80 to 90 on some of his per hour and he's not charging $25 for mo anymore. It comes down to branding. There is a segment of the population willing to pay for a premium product and they're willing to pay a premium price for that product. If you can deliver, if you have a great website, if you answer your phone, if you get the estimate back to them quickly, if you have uniforms and professional staff that speak English, these are all things that are absolutely valuable. And if you look at all the competition that are charging the $25 per hour, just ask yourself, how are you different than them? If you aren't offering anything different, then don't expect to be able to get anything different in terms of value from the customer. Okay, so I'm not trying to be hard on you at all. This is just. Our franchisees go through this too. They join, they're like, I can't charge more than 30 or $40 per hour. And usually within a year they're raising their prices by double. And that's because of value and brand and website and training and being professional and caring about the customers. Do you think that scaling business is better done with residential or commercial or do you like a mix of both? I think either or is great. I don't really like mixing a whole lot, to be perfectly honest. I think they're different business models and it's tough until a business is very sizable and you have managers for both departments. I think that would be a tough, tough model to run. Again, I just think they're different businesses. Whole different process of sales, whole different process of managing projects, whole different process of customer retention. Just totally different business model, in my opinion. So it's not that I like one or the other. The only reason we focus more on residential is because I feel like there is a less price sensitivity in the residential market because people are willing to pay a premium price where in the commercial market they're going to get five bids, they're going to go with the lowest bid, et cetera. And they're not going to look at the kind of the full package because there's less one on one contact with you and the property manager. Whereas with a residential homeowner, they actually see you on their property, which is their asset, every single day with their family close by and their home at risk. So that emotional connection with the residential homeowner allows us to charge a higher Price as well as the fact that I see things like what's happening with Brightview, massive consolidation this in this industry. I need to make a video about this. I said it before. But the amount of consolidation that's happening right now at the top end of this industry is not frightening to me. But it is, it's going to make a big difference the next five to 10 years because there's a lot of money moving into consolidating these big companies and Brightview is buying people up left and right.

And so I think that's bigger problem for commercial than it is residential. Are you a crypto trade? I swing trade crypto, maybe 3 to 5% of my portfolio. David Klein, when going from one truck to two trucks, what properties do you keep and what properties do you add to the second truck? It's all geographic, right? So if I have, you know, 40 customers, I'm literally like half second truck, first truck, right? So it's all geographic. Whichever ones are closest to each other. Or if you're going to have different setups, you could potentially break them up based on size, right? Like if you have a bigger mower set up and then you have a trailer list set up, the trailers could be like all the ones in downtown that are smaller and then the other one could go do the more county wide larger properties that would require a bigger setup. At what point is a good financial move for investing in a piece of property dedicated just to lawn care business? I think ideally you try to buy a property that's residential like that you live on and you have a shop and you can get away with the fact that most states allow you to operate a business out of that kind of land just depending on your zoning. And if you can do that, that's a great way because you don't need commercial property, right? So commercial property typically going to be extremely expensive compared to residential. So if you can build your house, I. E. Take care of your mortgage and then at the same time build your shop and have space, the goal there is have delineation, right? Have different entrances or some way of splitting up your house and your personal life with the business just to keep it more professional for the employees. But I think that's a great starting point. And then down the road, if you've got commercial or industrial land, that's definitely a step up. It's going to cost a lot more. Great questions by the way, on this Q A. I'm gonna have to do one of these Again, these are just some really, really great questions. If Fisher and Eastern plow equipment had announced 16 price increase for all equipment and products. Do I increase customers prices across the board? Yes. Grumpy one. I, I did a bunch of videos on price increases several weeks and a couple months ago. Definitely watch those. You should be raising your prices as you absorb those extra costs of equipment, fuel, labor, etc. Would it make sense to have a call center when I don't have franchise? Yes, it would. I really, really believe that if you're small it makes sense because you're not bothered all day long by this thing ringing your phone in your head all day or answering calls at the end of the day and now there's four hours in between the time that they you missed a call and they get you get back to them. Or better worse yet, you answer the phone, you're on a mower and like hey, hey, yeah, yeah, okay. Like that's just unprofessional. And then as you grow and you get bigger, the tendency is then, well, I got to get a shop. Now that shop can't be on my property because I need an office and I need a building and I need computers and I need an office manager and I need coffee and I need utilities. Like so as you grow, it actually makes sense too. So in my opinion, there should be no reason to have an office or a building where you have office people working. You should have it virtual. Hello, Mike, I live in neighborhood where lawn care providers are undercutting prices and it's getting difficult to get customers. What would you do? What should I do? Thank you again. Look at what they're doing and ask yourself, what am I doing differently? If you can't, if you don't have a good answer that is actually measurable, then you need to go to the drawing board. Maybe perhaps you do something crazy from a marketing standpoint, really differentiate yourself. Maybe your slogan becomes something that is very apparent that none of them else can. None of them else can match you on. Those are the type of things you want to look for. Are you allowing people that smoke weed to work for you? We try not to. We have drug tests that kind of weed them out. We get about 8 to 10 job, 8 out of 10 jobs. When we go out for quotes, does that mean we are too cheap or just a good service? Typically, labor is 50 to 40% of total invoiced. Yes, you should raise your prices. If your total labor is costing you 40 to 50% of total invoiced, you need to raise your prices. And if you're getting Even further compounds my answer by saying that 8 out of 10, 80% close ratio, I'd be telling you again to raise your prices. So you got two green lights there because of your close ratio and your labor expense ratio being too high.

Every single schedule, every sing, everyone's schedule is going to depend a lot on their, you know, time, their climate, how much daylight hours you have, etc. Best way to obtain commercial clients is going to be getting in contact with property managers and developing those relationships.

I don't. I did not. No, sorry. You'll be proud. Just raised my prices and lost no customers doing it. They said it would made total sense given fuel and equipment costs. Also, sorry I haven't chatted. Life has been hectic. All right, great. Contact Daniels. Thanks for your response to my emails. I'm saying it for new trimmer blower and then maybe your course. I've got to buy flyers too. Let's go. I would actually do that backwards, by the way. I would. I would get lawn care media first get the flyers the door hangers get because it'll generate more sales. I think that's first number one. Then I would think about getting a trimmer and a blower to actually produce that work. Then think about getting the course. That would just be the way I'd think about it. How many houses a day do you think is best? Just depending your size. How do you use team up in conjunction with service autopilot's calendar? Once I get a second truck, I'm wondering if team up will help. Team up is just what we use. It's any sort of calendar. You know, Google calendar just fine too. We just find that servers autopilot calendar is not visually that great in terms of being able to tell project based work. Colton, you should start a channel and dealing with the emotional struggles of running a business. Yeah, check out my other channel, Colton. I talk a little bit more about that. More generalized business concepts outside of lawn care landscaping. We disagree about the work you did. Oh, I work at the city of Blaine. We disagree about the work you did. Spraying chemicals on our property. We didn't spray any chemicals. We sprayed vinegar. And also whatever happened was a good thing because guess what? City of Blaine is now maintaining that area. So people want to disagree with me all they want to. But it obviously kicked someone into high gear. They went and cleared the trees back that were 10 to 15 years overdue. They actually have maintained that area now. So whatever I did that people might disagree with is now in my opinion a positive thing for all Involved. Thank you Mike for your input. I've watched listen to every single video you have three times while working with AirPods. Let's go everyone like the stream just to help Mike to help out Mole. Let's go Mole. It's great. How do you minimize breaking windows and glass? Guys are trained and aware, but do it's gonna happen at least one time in my opinion, for every employee. They do it. Once it hits them on P4P, they get a damage case, wipes out their P4P for one time. I hate doing that because I've done it and it's, it's just like you don't mean to obviously and you're trying not to. And a lot of times the one window that you're like, okay, gotta make sure I don't hit that one, that's the one you hit. It's extremely annoying. But it is just one of those things they've gotta learn, unfortunately, the hard way. Have any incentives to not break them? Yeah, the incentives is have pay for performance and then any performance dollars are on the table for damage cases. Which means if they wake the window and they have performance dollars, that money's gonna evaporate and it makes them think a little bit more and take more ownership of their job. And think about the window and the cost of the window and that, you know, keeping the guard on the weed whacker might save them or cost them five seconds, but it might save them the window. Right. How many man hours would a two man crew spend mowing versus projects? How many? So typically we put six budget hours for a mowing crew, six to seven, just depending on the time of year, sometimes go eight or nine and then for projects we just do eight across the board. Eight. Eight budget hours per day, we can do up to 10. If we're doing 10, four tens. What are a couple ways to hire new experienced employees? I think as your business grows and gets larger in terms of brand awareness, that's when you're able to attract more experienced people. If you're getting started. It's extremely difficult to convince someone who knows a lot about this industry has a lot of experience. It's tough to convince them to join your business. That's why I recommend start with simple services so you can deal with a younger, more junior, less experienced workforce. And then as your brand grows, you'll attract more experienced talent in your local community. Okay. Hey Mike. I run my business with my brother in law. In the five years we have grown the company 140% from 120k that the previous owner did. We are stuck on a plateau. I want to raise our prices and restructure a little. My my brother on the other hand is nervous and seems scared to do so. What could I do to turn the switch in his head and try and agree? I would recommend watching the video I made several months ago about the.