Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

Labor Is Killing You… Not Gas #lawncarebusiness #podcast #lawnmowingbusiness #homeservicebusiness

10 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:26

In this segment, Mike Andes addresses concerns about rising fuel prices affecting home service businesses. He references an analysis of over 600 companies, revealing that fuel accounts for only about 4.5% of revenue, while labor (wages) consumes roughly 57%. Andes argues that the real lever for profitability is labor efficiency, not fuel cost fluctuations. He emphasizes the use of budgeted hours for each service visit, pay‑for‑performance models, and the HomeWorks software platform to track and optimize crew productivity. The core message is to ignore hype around fuel prices and focus on systematic labor management to drive meaningful business improvements.

Chapters

This is a great question from Daniel, and I want to dive into this because recently we've heard a lot about fuel prices over the past few months, and I've seen people freak out about fuel prices and headlines, and it's in the news and it's politics and it's economics and people are freaking out. And so I ran analysis on over 600 home service businesses and their financial statements. And what's crazy is that on average, about 4.5% of their revenue was being spent on Fuel. Okay. Not, not nothing, but like it's only 4.5% in comparison to wages, which made up 57% of their revenue. 57% of it was going out the door to wages and labor expense. And so this question that Daniel's having around budgeted hours, pay for performance is in my opinion, the most important thing. That's why inside of HomeWorks, we talk about budgeted hours for every single visit. It's on the calendar. It's on the dispatch board. It's when you create every single visit, we're tracking your budgeted hour capacity. Because this is the thing that actually moves the needle, making your crew efficient, having software and systems. It's going to move the business dramatically more than a couple percentage points based upon fuel prices. And so I encourage you to not buy into the hype, not to get distracted with all the noise and just focus what actually moves your business forward, which for home service businesses, it is making your labor efficient. Use budget hours, use pay for performance, and use HomeWorks as your software.