Landscape Business Q&A: Finish the Year STRONG!

Foreign.

What's up everyone? It's Mike Andes and today we're doing Q and A. It is actually the day after Black Friday. It is Saturday morning and wanted to jump in and do some Q A. Looking forward to December for several reasons. Number one, the last month of the year, pedals of the metal. We still got a whole nother month to throttle before the end of the season. This is not the time to say, oh, December's a write off because it's. We have, we just had Thanksgiving and Christmas is coming up in a few weeks and we're just going to kind of like coast along. So I'm a big believer in just staying dedicated, especially the first few weeks of December and really trying to finish the year strong. Also, I'm looking forward to December because we have four zero turn episodes coming up. If you don't know what zero turn is, you probably haven't watched for more than a couple of years because we haven't done it the past couple of years because of COVID and just my schedule with the franchising where we travel and we actually go visit other landscapers and we tour their facilities, we go and interview them and so I'm not going to be on these four episodes but our team went out, did an amazing job. Like the level of production is going to triple quadruple compared to what used to be. So really looking forward to it. They're going to be traveling down to Texas and it's going to be four companies down there. So really looking forward to it. Thomas down is quads coming up for training? Yeah. Next weekend we have a franchisee training which we have 20, 20 people coming up here for training. It's our biggest one yet so it's gonna be a lot of fun. So this morning just want to do some Q and A. I'll be sticking around for as long as I possibly can here and answering any questions you might have about landscaping or lawn care business related related questions. So feel free in the comments. Whether you're on Facebook or YouTube. Go ahead and comment there and I will see your question and highlight it here. In terms of the thumbnail it says my favorite truck. I get this asked a lot of times. I don't even usually address it. But my favorite truck personally is anything that is a 3/4 ton pickup. So whether it be a 2500 like a GMC 2500 or a Chevy 2500 or F250 if you like Fords. The reason I like that size truck is because it is a nice is the perfect medium between a mowing truck that we can use for like a trailer setup as well as it can still pull a dump trailer and haul some material. So it's kind of that happy medium. We're not talking about a full ton pickup like a F350 or doesn't have a dually and it's not usually diesel, but it's that happy medium where it can still pull some weight and can still pull a dump trailer with some, you know, gravel or mulch or soil. But it's not going to break the bank in terms of fuel economy. Me. And it's also going to be a little bit smaller just in terms of wheelbase and just length. So that way we can actually still use it for mowing. It's not so big that you can't really use it for a mowing setup. So let's jump into the questions again. If you have questions, comment in down below and we'll go through these. Can you run through the process used to determine budgeted hours for a property? Yeah, Travis, so there's two ways of doing this. One is using a more or less, hey, I look at it, how long is this going to take me? It's usually the most accurate, just usually not the most scalable. Because if you have 100 estimates in a day, there's just no way you're not, you're going to be able to have one person do all those estimates. Whereas one person could do 100 estimates if it was using some sort of production rate like square footage for lawns or for bed maintenance, etc. That being said, I think too many people get into production rates when they're getting one, two estimates, three estimates a day. And they're, they don't need to like literally they, if they could just spend 20, 30 minutes a day, they'd be able to drive by those properties. Probably less than that. If they have a good tight route, 20, 30 minutes a day drive by those properties, you'd be very accurate. If you start going to production rate, you're going to start giving up accuracy for.

Scalability. And it's totally fine once you start getting a ton of estimates. When you're getting two, three estimates a day, you want to close as many of those as possible. And accuracy is extremely important. If you're doing P4P or if you just want to close many deals as possible, you want to make sure that, that when someone says that's too expensive, that you're like, no, I know exactly how long it's going to take Because I came and saw the property. It's a little harder to be that confident when you have not been to the property. And you literally measured the square foot of the flower beds by a satellite. So again, if you have 20 of those in a day, though, 30 estimates in a day, you don't care if you lose one or two people because you are inaccurate. And you know, they recently took out half the flower beds and put in lawn and now you're way over quoting them. So those are the type of things that I think about. I think too many people jump to, oh, I should do everything by square footage, which, look, you get two or three new customers a week, you want to make sure you get every single one. You want to go talk to them, you want to introduce yourself, you want to create that connection. Being a person on the phone getting square footage like Trugreen is not going to differentiate you at all. All right, next question. Do you think that is a bad idea to price lawns using a production rate for a larger mower than what you currently use? If you know what you'd like to be using to fit your business model, yeah. So my big thing when it comes to production rates and when it comes to finding a price per for square footage, and this is something that at Command center we are digging deep into right now because we are going to be offering it to our franchisees this coming winter. And that is, hey, give us we have certain production rates based upon the type of mower you have and then we can figure this out on the phone and give a price over the phone to the customers for mowing. The problem with that is you want to make sure you have the same mower setup across the board when it comes to your pricing. You don't want to be using different production rates based on what type of mower you're going to use on the property. The reason you don't is because if something happens to that one mower that you have, that's 52 inches and all of a sudden the crew with the 21 inch mower has to be mowing that property. Now, their production rates are way off skill. So in my opinion, you want to use one type of mower in your production rate and your setup. That way it's standard. That way it's always the same and it's not dependent on you having bigger equipment. So what we use in our local shop, just the local Bellingham location for Augusta, is we use a 30 inch mower as our production rate factor. So that means, hey, if we have a 48 inch mower on that property. Great. They're going to get done sooner, but we're not going to be like, oh well, we could use a 48 inch mower on that property. So therefore we're going to bring down budgeted hours and bring down the price. No, I'm going to charge based upon the square footage using my standard setup. And if the guys get a bigger piece of equipment randomly because we still have one from years ago, that's fine, that's great. But I'm not going to depend on that because then that's what locks you in to constantly getting bigger and bigger equipment is. Well, I've got to stay competitive on price, so I'm just going to keep buying bigger stuff when really the customer is paying for the service and they're not paying for what type of mower you use. They just want it done. Okay.

Yeah. More heavy rain is coming our way. We had record rainfall a couple weeks ago. We had a whole bunch of flooding in our local area. We did not miss a single day of work in our local area. I was very proud of our team. No one called in. We had a excellent group of guys. And it again, I made a video about rain days and I did that after we had the worst rainfall in decades. In our era, we still have roads washed out. Literally the road like a few miles from my house is washed out and there's massive detours and all the rest of it. But we did not a single day of work. And I truly believe you can do that when it comes to rain, rain delays. So if you haven't seen that video, last week I made a video about rain delays and how to deal with those to make sure you're still efficient. I use all electric equipment and plan to stay, stay pushed for a while. But my only viable option is 21 inches currently on a 25 inch that is coming out next spring. Then finally the 30 inch, hopefully next fall.

Michael says just acquire a commercial crew with clients, employees and equipment. Any tips for successful transition? Yeah, the big thing is that you want to make sure you retain as many of those clients as possible. And if that means, you know, operating at a loss on their property for six or 12 months, I'm okay with that. I usually look at that as part of the acquisition price. So if I know that I go into an acquisition and they have their properties are on average $10 less per service, I'm going to assume if I keep their current prices for 6, what is that going to be costing? Me, I'm going to add that to the acquisition price in my mind because if, or I'm going to reduce it because in, in theory, if their prices were correct, I could just keep the same prices. I'd be profitable from day one. Everything would be up to my pricing standards. But if I'm going to be taking a hit, every single property, every single cut for six months, I'm going to factor that in my acquisition price. And so.

I would definitely be looking at your pricing. When do you need to raise that price? I'd keep the same prices as long as you can, six to 12 months. Again, if you want to keep those customers and so keep them for six months, knowing that you're going to take a loss and then raise the prices. And then also on when you actually do the acquisition, make a video with the other owner. That's a great way to do a transition to where customers feel like there's not a massive change happening and they're going to be all in. You know, everything bad is going to happen if after this change is. Hey, this is Mr. Bob, I'm Mike. Mr. Bob is selling his business to me. From now on you're going to see our trucks. We have all of your database, we have all of your information, we have all your billing information and you don't have to worry about anything. Your price is not changing. Here's why it's going to be better for you. You know, we have a better office staff. We have people that can answer the phone. We have uniforms and we have trucks that gonna show up. They're this color uniform. Our trained staff, we. These are the things that you want to focus on when you do an acquisition is what's better for the customer, what's in it for the customer. And if you don't change your prices, you'll usually have a higher retention rate on existing customers. My dad just recently quit his job to work his lawn mowing business that's been in business for 10 years. We hope to get to six figures in the near future. What advice do you have for growing our team? Honestly Monica, if you're trying to get to six figures, you don't need a team yet. You need to focus on raising your prices and improving sales to the point where you can easily do six figures by yourself. Type in six figure long term business. Mike Andy's I've made a couple videos on this. How to make a six figure long term business without employees. I would focus on that first and then use the profits from that business. That is now actually profitable to go and get employees. And at that point you're gonna be able to afford a higher wage, therefore attract greater, better people. And if you can have a business that's already doing six figures without employees, how do you calculate variable cost in your break even point? Most of my variable costs, minus gas, are in the name of growth. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, this is, this is something that changes so much it's hard to have a percentage usually because as your business is growing, your variable cost is going to change. As you raise wages, your variable cost is going to change. As you buy more equipment, as fuel goes up and down, your variable cost changes. Basically how I like to look is to look at your total expenses. Take out what is fixed. That is insurance, rent, utilities, whatever is fixed, any loans that you might have, any, anything, you know, fixed, take it out. Everything else is variable, right? Wages, variable, fuel, variable, all that other stuff is variable. And then in terms of buying as a piece of equipment, theoretically that's a balance sheet activity. It's not on your profit and loss statement. Theoretically. Right. I know you take a hit from your, from a cash standpoint, but that's under the balance sheet. So you're not going to actually look at that as a variable expense. That's going to be totally separate. It's not even considered an expense. It's looking at a balance sheet line item because it's an asset. So I hope that makes sense. But I would, I would just basically take all of your expenses, take out your fixed expenses. Everything left over is variable expenses, unless it is a balance sheet item, which it means an asset of some sort. You're buying a truck, you're buying a trailer. That is not a variable expense. Although you can look at it as, hey, as the bigger I get, I'm going to need more trucks and trailers. So it's kind of a variable expense, but not really. Because if you buy five trucks and you don't have any more work tomorrow, the five trucks, you're still paying for the five trucks, right? So some people look those as fixed expenses, especially of loans on them. But I like to take them out of the equation when I look at a variable versus fixed expense ratio. Can you list the daily, weekly and monthly reports of business less than 300,000 should be running to analyze performance, labor percentage, top line revenue, etc. Yeah, I don't have it with me now, but we have the scorecard that we use for our franchisees every single month. I'm gonna go off the memory here, but there's several that we do. There is obviously top line revenue. There is close ratio. There is what percentage of revenue is coming from recurring work. There is.

Year over year growth from the year previous month. There is what percentage of revenue went out the door to frontline wages. There is.

How many estimates have gone out and we compare them against all franchisees. There's several metrics like that. So I think I named up most most of them there. But we do every single month kind of obviously things like where we're spending money on marketing and things like that as well.

And did I say like what percentage of revenue is recurring versus not so things like that. Bigger mower is not always better. A 48 can be more productive on small residential than a 40, 52 inch mower on the same mower. Same mower simply due to being able to get entire spots. I agree. How does P4P work in a payroll software like Gusto, does the hourly get adjusted or the bonuses at the end of the week or month? Yeah, every software is a little different. And we typically have found most softwares it's easiest to change the bonus based upon performance dollars. Right. So they're gonna have a set base pay as an hourly rate inside of the software and then we can just manually change the bonus based upon P or performance dollars. We have some really cool stuff coming out in January on P4P. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm hearing rumors of seed supply shortages for spring. Yes, I'm hearing the same thing. Jeff, do you have a sample of chart of accounts for QuickBooks on your landscape business course? I don't think I do. I don't think I do on landscape business course, to be honest with you. But honestly, you should, you should talk to a bookkeeper like I know lawn carebookkeeper.com we do this, but you should talk to a bookkeeper in your local area. At the very least, I think you should use lawn care bookkeeper because we know what we're talking about when it comes to lawn care landscaping industry. We know the norms. But if you have someone local in your area, they're going to be the best to set up your cookbooks. I've seen way too many people that think they know their numbers and then they come to me like we're bankrupt. But it says in our QuickBooks we have $200,000 and they're not. Things are not reconciling. Credit card statements are not reconciling. They're marking things wrong incorrectly. And then they go to the irs. One day and the IRS says this is all incorrect and you're getting fined massively for it. And I've seen too many people go out of business for it. That's literally why we started lawn carebookkeeper.com is three weeks prior to us starting it, I heard of another landscaper going out of business because of an IRS caught a fee, a penalty that was so big they could not pay it and they basically went bankrupt simply because they did not on. They honestly did not try to scam the irs. It was a matter of, they just did not reconcile things correctly in QuickBooks and over the course of the three years that they got audited for, they had not paid enough taxes and now all of a sudden that hit them at their weakest moment and they went out of business. So I recommend you get a bookkeeper 30 inch mower or 36 inch stand up mower for small medium residential homes. Yeah. If you have properties that are like 5,000 to 15,000 square feet, that's pretty average. I would try to get a stand on mower. I would. If you have lawns where your Average is like 2, 3, 4, 5,000 square feet, a 21 inch or a 30 inch is totally fine. If your average lawn is like 2, 3,000 square feet, I'd go 21 inch mower. The 5, the, the 30 inch mower. For, for us, we do acres worth of property with 30 inch mowers. People think are we crazy? But we still do it standard setup. We only have a few of those properties. They're the, the outliers. Most of our customers, 80% of them work very well within that, you know, under 6,000 square feet of turf range. So if you're under 3,000 square feet turf though, you know, 20 inch mowers be fine. Under 5, 6,000 square feet, 30 inch is going to be fine. When you start getting above that consistently on a lot of your lawns, I would get a 36 inch stand on just because you're, you're the time that mow the lawns and be so high that your price is going to have to be higher and therefore you're just not going to win as many properties simply due to the fact that you have to have a higher price due to the fact it takes you longer to do the lawns. How do you handle customers that say you broke a sprinkler when you know for a fact you did not break it? Do you just fix it or what? Yeah, a sprinkler usually like 10 bucks, you know, you can fix it in a few minutes, I would just go ahead and fix it. Honestly, I would keep that in the back of your mind though, if that, if you know that you didn't break it in. The customer's being unreasonable. If that becomes a pattern, I'd probably just lose the customer. Right. I would let them go or raise their prices significantly. Right again. Sprinkler has 10 bucks, so maybe I raise the price of that customer's per cut price to buy $5. I'd recoup that cost within a couple, couple cuts and I'd have a higher price for them in the future. So you know that sort of thing. Unless it's consistent, it's consistently they're being a pain in the neck. I'm just going to let them go. How do you determine all those little expenses when mowing lawns, Insurance, maintenance, gas, etc. Total cost of equipment divided by total hours of use equals cost per hour.

What do you mean? Oh, I see. You're saying total cost of equipment divided by total. Yeah. So you can typically ask a manufacturer what they think that they're, you know, the total hours on a piece of equipment are. I, everyone has a different opinion on this. Some people say, hey, once it hits like a thousand hours, I'm getting rid of it no matter what. Some people like, I'm going to run it till it dies and it means I get 2 or 3,000. Great, depending on who you talk to. So if you're going to recycle your equipment every two years and have 600, 700 hours, your cost per hour is going to be higher typically. But we're also going to assume that we don't have as much maintenance cost. So usually kind of balances out honestly. But how you determine those things is tough because you're getting, if you're growing because you're getting more equipment. So you'd have to rebalance the equipment equations. Honestly, I'd just be looking at the percentage overall to get started with. 95% of people don't even look at that. So if you do that alone, I'd be happy. I would not be too concerned about breaking down every single piece of equipment. I know people don't like this. You're like, I need to know every single thing. Honestly, for Most businesses under 2 to 3 million dollars in revenue, their time is better spent focusing on sales, marketing and hiring. Instead of figuring out the cost per hour for the 52 inch mower for insurance. It will not move the needle. If you're a small company, I know People don't like that. They're like, Michael, you're so anti numbers. You should be, you should be telling people that they know their numbers. No, most people, smaller businesses under $2 million in revenue, their time is better spent on sales, marketing and figuring out their branding, figuring out their website. They'd be much better off doing those things than they would be trying to figure out how much insurance costs per hour on their 52 inch mower. I'm sorry, it's just not the case. That's going to save you more money compared to if you went out and did door knocking, if you went out and did some interviews, if you went out and did training with your staff and got them on board, it's just not going to move the needles on. Now when you have 50 mowers and you have 40 crew members and you have 40 trucks, probably a good idea to do that sort of thing. Your time as the owner spent doing that is actually gonna have an ROI. Hey Mike, I'm 16 and started a lawn care business earlier this year. My monthly revenue is around $12,000. Right now I want to hire someone. What would be the best way to hire someone next spring? I would actually not be thinking about Muhammad. I would not be thinking about next spring. I'd be asking yourself, can you hire someone earlier, before all the construction, all of every other landscaper in lawn care starts looking for hires next March, April, May, when everyone else is trying to look for hires, you should be trying to pick people up after the retail rush of, of the holidays. So after January is typically when a lot of retailers let a lot of their frontline staff go because it slows down after Christmas, New Year's, etc. That's when you want to be picking people up and that's when you want to eat the cost of potentially creating work for them. Or right now be doing marketing to try to fill jobs in January and February so that you can keep those crews busy before mowing season starts. Because when by the time March, April, May rolls around, you're too late, you're out. You're going to be competing against every other contractor, every single other industry in the trades for employees once we roll around to spring. So I would be trying to say, hey, if I can set aside four or five grand to be able to pay somebody for a couple months and I'm going to do other work, I'm going to do nor docking, I'm going to have them do maintenance on the equipment, whatever it is, try to keep them busy. That's what I'd be focused on to try to find a good employee. Are you stocking up on supplies in anticipation of shortages this coming spring? No, we're not really stocking up. Honestly.

I don't see it being that bad. And so I do know it's bad. I'm not saying that, but it is definitely.

We haven't seen it be bad enough for us to start stocking up. You gotta remember that inventory crushes retail for a reason. Okay, so there's a reason why Amazon wins the game and that's because if you have stuff in an Amazon warehouse, you are paying for that inventory to sit there per month. You pay by the volume of your packages. Whereas other every other retail buys massive warehouses or they have back rooms for their retail stores with inventory that sits there and costs them money. Same thing goes for your lawn care business. We don't talk about it a lot because we don't have a lot of product based inventory in the lawn care landscape industry. But if you're paying for things now, there's because the time value of money you're paying now and you're going to use it in six months and because of the fact that some things will waste and some things will spoil, there's actual cost of buying sooner now that has to be offset with the question is question of well, am I going to have nothing in six months? Yes, that's potentially you might be willing to pay a premium. You might be will be able to be willing to pay for spoilage, you might be willing to pay for the real estate of storing something. But you've got to keep those costs in mind. And if the price goes up 50%, you might actually end up paying the same amount. And even if it goes up by 50% because you didn't have to store it over the winter, you didn't have to get storage, you did not have to worry about some of it getting ruined like fertilizer bags opened up by rats or whatever it might be. Just keep that in mind. I'm not saying that you shouldn't stock up, but it's definitely something you should keep in mind when you start thinking about stocking up on stuff. Do you think a 36 inch standout is more efficient than a 30600 turn? Yes, it is. Once you get over a certain size property, I'd say once you cross like you know, 8, 10,000 square feet of turf on a property, you're probably going to be more efficient. On a 16, 0 turn the question is, is it worth the extra $5,000. And that's again going to depend on the size of the property. If your average property is 15 to 20,000 square feet, probably should get a 16 inch mower over a 36. Again, just depends on the averages and what percentage of your customers you're going to be uncompetitive on if you don't get bigger mowers. What percentage of revenue should a business spend on office staff? Really depends. Honestly, it really depends in terms of what type of service mix you're. You're using. Ezra. Good. Good to hear from you, Ezra.

I would say if you can keep it under 10% of revenue, that would be ideal. But I would say that when we're growing our locations, we spend over that because we have way more leads coming in and all the rest of it. And so if you can spend 10% of monthly revenue or less on office staff, good. If you can be under five, you're typically going to be less growth, you're going to be more stable, you're going to be growing maybe 5, 10% a year. You're not going to be doing massive amounts of ad campaigns where you need more leads coming in, calls are coming, et cetera. But when we're launching a new location for Augusta, for example, I expect to spend like 15, 20% of revenue on office staff for the first few months. Once it's at profitability, that drops below 10, I want usually under like 5 or 4% as we stabilize the business and become much more profitable. So let me think, actually the Bellingham shop, they're around around 4%. They pay command center. Let me think 3, like 3, 3%, 3 to 4% and then it'll go down during the winter months when there's not as many leads as well.

What's the best way to draft a rate increase letter from customers? If you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com There's a template that we've used with a lot of success. Basically you wanted to highlight all the things that you've changed to make the customer's experience better and explain why you need to raise prices potentially, or which I also kind of like doing is don't worry about the price increase letter. Just wait till next spring when you're getting everyone started and emailing them and hey, we're going to started mowing April 1st. Here's your prices and just list your prices. Don't need to say why don't you say they're new prices. Don't you say here's your prices for this season. Boom. Boom. Weekly, bi Weekly. Right. And 95 of people just roll with that. If you want to do a price increase letter, I think a lot of times it leads to a lot of admin work because people call, they want to ask, whatever. And so I would just prefer either a. A letter like we have at landscape business course that explains why, explains the positives of the customer and just, you know, going forward, this is your price. You don't need to contact us about this. You only contact us if you don't like it and you want to quit service, which is a very, very small percentage if you do it right. Thank you for the Thanksgiving Day text and video. Happy holidays to you all. Yeah, if you're not part of the texting group, you should do that. In the link in the description, there's a thing. You can text text the word landscaping to a number and you get in texting group. Has your organic weed killer been effective alternative? Yes, it has. The franchisees have access to it. I can't give it away to everyone I know. Everyone asks people email, like, hey, could you just let me know? I'm like, hey, look, there's a very small farm that makes this stuff. It works really well. We like it a lot. And if I let everyone know, they'd be overwhelmed with a bunch of orders and we would not be able to get access to it. So I'm somewhat selfish trying to protect the interest of the franchisees. I apologize. It's like the one thing I got to hold on to because we really, really like it. Daryl or I stocked up this past spring. By the end of the year, I found myself hitting up different dealers for oil blades, filters and trimmer line because they were having trouble getting product. Cool. What are your thoughts on a weed and fertilizing business? I love it. Very high margin. Depending on your area, you can get very profitable. We have one of our franchise locations. They actually started our second location and all only thing they're doing with our second location and is weed control, fertilizer treatment packages, et cetera. They're not doing any mowing, any landscaping. And that's their second Augusta Lawn look lawn care location. And that's all they're doing. And in their area, they crush it.

At what point should the owner or GM get out of the field? I typically say around 500,000 in revenue. Really depends on your business setup. But I think a lot of people get out of this trying to get out of the field too soon. And they're doing like 150, 200,000 in revenue per year and they have like two employees. It's like, why are you getting out of the field? You should be out in the field working 75 to 80% of the day because you're only getting a couple estimates a day. Like when you're getting 10, 15 estimates a day. Now you're a full time estimator. You can go out, you can be considered working on the business and going out and doing sales. But if you're getting one, two estimates a day, you should not be working on the business. You should not be doing estimates all day long. It does not take all day long to do two estimates. I'm sorry, it just does not. You should be working 75% of your time out in the field. Still, if you're at one or two employees.

Hey Mike, is it smart to buy a back up stand on mower just in case of a breakdown? I think it's always good to have a backup. What I would recommend is that being an older piece of equipment potentially, or smaller piece of equipment, like a 36 inch mower. Wait, backup stand on more? Yeah. So I would just, I would scale back your, your smaller mower. Right. If you have a really good dealer in the past, they would have just let you use another mower. And that's typically what happens. So keep that in mind. I don't like to have. If I have a $10,000 mower, I'm not gonna go buy another $10,000 mower. I might buy like a $5,000 mower. That would limp me through. So for example, just a kind of a quick tip for everyone. If you're buying commercial grade mower, let's just use Gravely for an example. You're like, you know, I'm gonna buy a 252. It's just kinda like a commercial grade mower. Really great. Well, I could go. What you could also do though is get like a pro turn 152 or even the one that is like considered a residential mower. That would be your backup. Right. For like half the price. Or again, most dealers, if they're really good, they will just let you loan a piece of equipment like kind for a day or two. The problem is right now is they're waiting on parts for so long, they can't give you a mower for two weeks and they don't have any mowers to give. So it's a bit of a different right now. Like a year and a half, two years ago, I would say, hey, just get a good dealer they're going to let you use a piece of equipment for that day or two days or three days. Now, hey, I see you needing a piece of a backup a little bit more. We use like the smallest piece of equipment, 21 inch mower as our backups because we use a smaller mower setup so it's easier for us to have backups. It's not a big deal. That's why I like smaller setups on mowers is because backups are easier and cheaper and I can have three of them and I don't really care because they cost 1200 bucks a pop. Right. So I would say try to use your dealer and then just keep in mind if that doesn't work out, use a cheaper mower. Use a, a lot of these, a lot of these brands make a really good residential high end mower. They actually will, they'll have a one year commercial warranty on these. Won't offer a three or five year warranty like they will on their higher grade equipment. But that works great for a backup where you're going to use it for like a couple days a year.

Any ideas on someone who wants to start lawn care with only a car? Oh yeah, there's this, there's this really great company I want to have on Roundup or on Zero Turn that does all of their mowing with electric equipment from Priuses. It's great. I think it's clean air lawn care. I forget Quiet, Quiet lawn care. I forget. I met him at gie. I'd talked to him before. I think he's a member of the of landscape business course and I'm hoping we can go out and actually film his, his setup, film his crew. And that's why what Zero Turn is all about is just trying to get us out in front of other landscapers that using different business models to give us all ideas. So again in December we have four more, four more Zero Turn episodes coming out. We're going to be going down to Texas. We just, just did one in Seattle. And so it just to give us all these ideas like how it doesn't even fathom for most of us that we could use a Prius and push mowers with electric only. But it's a great business model, it works in his area. So it's good for us to learn these things. Why we're trying to do Zero Turn where we get out and see these. And I know at the pop have been doing all these banners. This is what supports that happening. Right? So like next week is Going to cost us thousands of dollars by the time I send a team there for, for media and hotels and flights and rental cars and all the rest of it. And this is what all this goes towards. So I appreciate it. How to grow your business Wonder. Hey, Mike won't be able to make it to Summit 2022. My wife is pregnant. How can I get a recording? Everyone that buys a ticket is going to get a recording in February of Landscape Summit. So if you buy a ticket, you will get the recording after the. After the conference. What's your thoughts on electric stuff? Yeah, I've made several different videos on electric Tesla truck. 2022, let's go. I put it on. On the thumbnail. I actually think down the road it's going to be a really good idea because I know everyone's gonna hate me for saying this, but down the road, I actually think having electric truck will allow electric tools and mowers actually become better because you're gonna have a massive battery that can charge all of your hand tools and your mower. So everyone's worried and I. And rightfully so, about a mower that only, you know, lasts for a few hours of time on a charge. I agree because, you know, I gotta buy all these little batteries and some. But if you have a cybertruck or a like cybertruck electric vehicle, everything just gets plugged into and overnight it's already plugged into. Is wireless charged or better yet, it just has a bunch of retractable cables that come out of the side and you plug in at the end of the day or during between trips. I'm telling you, that is going to be the gateway to actually making, in my opinion, the tools be more efficient. What do you use to stream? I use streamyard Zach. I run a JDM forester. When will you do more videos of the other franchises? Kind of tired of the one dude, Nick is close by and really good on camera. And then you're probably also seeing a lot of Upflip, which I don't own upflip. People think I own upflip. I don't have no affiliation with them. They're just local guys. And so they've filmed a bunch of Augusta stuff and they've done a bunch of videos of Nick. Other franchisees are going to be coming up as part of Zero Turn. We're going to do some filming with some of our franchisees. I try not to make this. This channel so much about Augusta that people like all they see is Augusta. That's why, like, for Zero Turn, we're going to have four different brands. But if you want it, I can mix in some other Augusta locations. By all means. And a lot of the videos, the B roll of on Nick's videos, for example, like upflip uses or even we use is actually B roll from around the country of Augusta. Like we have Arkansas, we have. Who else do we have? Georgia.

South Carolina, North Carolina. We have a whole bunch of locations that we filmed and we use their footage. We just don't go there and interview them as much. So we are going to add to that though, as we head into zero turn, we'll try to drop by some of our franchisees and get footage of them as well. But I don't want it to be where you guys feel like every time you come here all you see is Augusta. I do want to see. I, I get some people want to start their, you know, run their lawn care business independently. I totally understand. And I want you to get value from the channel. Still, can you make just a recording ticket that's slightly cheaper since we won't be going in person? No, I can't. Sorry. We lose enough money already. Come on now. Wilson Friesen. Hey Mike, thank you for all your great good content that you put out. I've been following your advice since I started my business for one year. Now I'm doing mowing, aeration, power raking, leaf cleanup. Good job. Let's go, Marcos. I have a question involving snow removal. I'm trying to offer seasonal contracts and I'm not sure how to present it to new or current lawn care clients. Okay. Yeah. So there's two ways to do this. Typically for residential mowing clients, you're either going to have a cost contract like you're talking about for the whole year. You're going to have to really know your numbers in terms of average amount of snowfall in your area. I really recommend you've been around for a while, you know how much snow comes, how many times you're going to have to shovel or snow plow their driveway or you're going to do it per push a per service. And typically if you're going to per service, I recommend doing like, hey, between zero and three inches is one price. Anything above three inches we're going to charge more or something along those lines just because a 10 inch snowplow or snow event is going to take you way longer than a 2 inch dusting. Okay, so. So insulation. I've been 120 in the revenue for the first year. Congrats. Good work. The truck with the cheapest EV out, only 40k. Wow. Well, they said it's going to be 40k. That was a couple years ago or a year ago, I should say. I think it's going to come over on 50 because. Just because the shortages and honestly the tech, the, the Cyber truck is like on the back burner for Tesla right now because they have such a backlog of all the other, other vehicles that are. They currently have and the model Y has to get up production. So I think we're going to be waiting a little bit longer for the Cyber truck because they like. Why would you make the Cyber truck if you have back orders for six months of other vehicles? So they're not gonna, they're not gonna dedicate production space yet. I know they're building, you know, gigafactories though, in Berlin as well as in, in Austin. Thank you for the good content you put out. It's really helped me in every way possible. Peyton, how to make your business more in your neighborhood. And some advice for kid business owner. I made a couple videos on this. Peyton, look back at some of the other videos about that. You don't want to hear from the rest of us.

Ryan, actually I want to do come video you. Ryan is out in Corpus Christi. He has a second Rockport location going to Augusta as well. And he does what's really cool. What Ryan does is he has a, he has a dealership, a nursery and then all the lawn care and does like hardscaping and construction work. And then he has a company that actually does like concrete and like hardcore construction. So I actually do want to come out and video you. Ryan.

Have you checked out make money mowing channel? If yes, do you think, what do you think about his business model? I've seen a couple of his videos. Younger guy I believe is who you're talking about. Great, great. I think for getting started and making, you know, a side hustle out of mowing and really just trying to get, you know, 20, 30, 40 mowing customers. That's awesome. I think it's a great entryway. And then it's a matter of do you even want to. Not everyone needs to build $1 million business. Not everyone needs to have a great website and great branding and have premium pricing. Someone like make money mowing. Make money mowing. Yeah. Channel typically is gonna be a lower, a little bit lower priced, smaller setup, not as professional. That's fine. I'm not dissing against that. It's a starting point and it's a matter of if you want to scale and grow. I believe you want to focus on brand. You want to focus on creating a premium product that you can char premium price and make more profit on those type of lawns. I haven't watched them for a while, but I should check it back on this channel. What's the etm? Electric mowing video. I was thinking about doing that as well. Oh, ega. I don't know, Zach. I think you're talking about if when we go out and do zero turn for that one one episode, I'm hoping next spring. But he has not applied to be on zero Turn. So if you want to be part of zero Turn, where we actually come to your and do this type of video thing, in the description there's a link. If you're on Facebook, you're gonna have to go to YouTube. But in the YouTube description there's a link. Oh man, I forget the exact. Let me give you the URL real quick. I believe it is lawn caremedia.com. it's not apply. It's not that. I think it's form.

I should know this.

I don't know. It's in. It's in the description. But if you go in the description, you'll see Here it is one YouTube. Mike Andy, let's see this real quick. Give me two seconds, I'll find it. But basically you can apply to be on Roundup where we come out to your, your specific location, we do a tour, we do a walk through whole nine. So let me just give this to you if you go to.

Man, I don't have it on here. Oh, shame on me. Okay, don't, don't worry, don't worry. Let me get this video for you. Oh, it's the lives. Ah, sorry. Okay, here we go. This is the link, right?

Man, do we not have it on YouTube? Shame on me. Okay. Oh, I know why. Because we. Here we go. I gotta do an actual Roundup episode. Here we go. So if you want to be on Roundup, which is the podcast and we do you and I do a, you know, 30 minutes so.

Interview, you can go to this or if you want us to come in on video, you in person, you can go to lawn caremedia.com pages/signup, okay? That is where you want to go. Lawn caremedia.com pages/signup. And that is where you can register to be part of zero term, where we come out to your, your, your, your business and we video you interview you and you're going to see four of them in December. It's gonna be a lot of fun. What is the best way to get line of credit for the winter? You always want to get a line of credit when you don't need a line of credit. So right now you have lots of cash in the bank, you have had a great year, and you don't really need a line of credit. That is the best place, best time to go and go get a line of credit. Go talk to your local credit union is my recommendation. If you have a banking relationship already with a banker, I would talk to them first just because they're going to usually be able to be more flexible with you. If you've already had a relationship, you already have the money with them, they can see your bank statements over the course of the years that you've done business with them. So start there. You know, if you go in there, they're going to want typically collateral. So they'll say, hey, can we collateralize your trucks as part of the line of credit? So if, you know, you default on this line of credit, we can come get it. That's a little bit of a pain in the neck because then you got put a lean on your vehicles. As you grow your business, though, as you get lots of profit, you don't. You can have an unsecured line of credit, which means they don't need a piece of equipment or a truck or a trailer to be is collateral on the line of credit, because they're looking at your business and the profits, and that's going to be taking a little bit more time. So your first ones, though, typically you're going to go to bank like, hey, I wanted a secured line of credit, I want 20 grand. And they're gonna say, well, what do you want to collateralize it with? What do you want to secure the loan with? And you're saying, well, I got a bunch of trucks that are paid off, and if you want to come look at them, they're fine. But I can give you the titles and you can become the lien holder, and that will allow me to have this $20,000 line of credit that I don't have to use. Typically, you're gonna pay 1% as a fee. So I got to be like 200 fee on a $20,000 line of credit. You'd be able to get that though. So it's like, hey, if craziness happens, you break glass, you get that money out. So I'm going to talk a little bit about this at the conference when Covid happened in March of 2020 I broke glass on all of our lines of credit, all of my, my home equity lines of credit. I brought tons of cash out. Two, two reasons why, because I didn't want the bank to lock them up. And basically, hey, we're not allowing people to take this money out now because they can do that. Lines, credit. They can just. They can withhold lines of credit. They're less likely to do that if you have money out because then they actually have to start collecting.

So I pull out all the money. One, for security. I wanted to make sure that we did get through it. And two, because I want to invest in the stock market and real estate because everything crashed. But more importantly was just like safety. And I told a lot of managers like, hey, I'm gonna pull a whole bunch of money out of all of our lines of credit. We've never used these, but here we go. Because opportunity to buy other stuff that's cheap as well as just security to make sure that we actually got to that time. No one knew in March 2020 what was going to happen. Hey, Mike, I have a question. We do mostly residential homes. I'm looking to get into commercial. What's the best way to get noticed or get contracts for hoas? I would recommend talk to property managers and go talk. Go talk to property management companies, bring them cookies, be nice to them, etc. Oh, by the way, conference. Everyone should go to conference. It's gonna be great. Everyone should go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference today and sign up. I don't think we're going to hit capacity, but it could happen. The amount of people have signed up and then we have all of our franchisees there the day before conference. So. And then we have all the people that are training for franchisees the on the 10th, 11th and 12th. So we are already from Augusta Nation, have over 100 people. So the fact that on top of that we're gonna have a couple more hundred, it's gonna be a great time. And if we hit 300, I'm probably have to start restricting amount of people that can come. So please get in now if you want to come, just go to landscape business. The price doesn't change. I don't do that stuff. I'm like, okay, if you get in the day, then it's. So then it goes up. Like, look, I know it costs us about $450 per person to put on the event. I charge 299. I think it's a fair exchange of value. I really do. And you really didn't Think it was valuable. After the conference, I'll give you your money back. But like, in all the years, three years that we've done conference, one person has asked for their money back. And that person sent their employee to come to the conference. And the employee didn't know who I was, and it was not. It was not good. So I ended up actually giving. Just giving him some templates that he wanted because he thought that was part of the conference. I'm like, well, no, it's part of the course, but here you go. But that's the only person who's ever asked for their money back. But I lose a bunch of money on every person that signs up. So by asking you to come to the conference, I'm actually saying, please take my money.

So anyways, Liz, if Kevin Fair care. Kevin Fairburn shaves his beard, we will come film Ryan Payne.

Ryan Payne is Corpus Christi Augusta Longcare. He's, by the way, lost over a hundred pounds. I don't know exactly the amount, but kudos to him. He, along with Felix, had lost like a couple hundred pounds the past couple years of past year. Kudos to them. But Kevin Fairburn shaving his beard, I don't know if that's a good idea because we would not recognize him, and that would be. That would be pretty intense.

While we're in a very inspired. Keep it up, Tori. How can I create better route density? We use Nextdoor. What type of deals should I advertise to get people to reach out?

Create better answer. Yeah, route density is great with Nextdoor because you can individualize the specific neighborhoods in terms of what type of deals you want to keep it. You just want to keep it current to the type of service that is relevant to the specific time of year. I think it's kind of funny when I see ads on Facebook or Nextdoor and it's like, get your mowing for today. And it's like, okay, well, we just had snow. I don't think anyone's gonna be contacting on that ad. All right, so my biggest thing is with Nextdoor is now they allow you to have a recurring ad where it just keeps going. It used to be you only could go only from like 7 to 30 days. And you have to do a new ad every 30 days. Now you can have it where it recurs every 30 days. It just renews every 30 days, which is fine. Great. Woohoo. I like it. But make sure you change your creative. Make sure you change the type of service that you're offering based upon the time of year. Can you make more stock videos and crypto on your other. On your other page? Yeah, the other channel is for that. I don't have a lot of time. I try to make at least one or two of those a week. But if you like this YouTube channel at Lawn Care, I do have another channel about stocks and investing and I'll eventually spend more time doing that down the road.

I have a lot to share on that stuff, but I just don't have the time. I'll get there one day. Mike, do you have Augusta franchisee in Seattle area or Eastside Bellevue? We have like four around Bellingham or Seattle? We just had one join in Issaquah Thomas is actually on this on the, on the stream today. But yeah, feel free. If you, if you're interested in a franchise, just go to Augusta longer services.com franchise. Talk to Lee, watch the videos. There's a whole bunch of videos on there. You can literally watch all those videos and know if you want to join Augusta or not. Like the calls are like a formality, right? Like, I try to share everything I possibly can here and on those videos. So watch them, see if it's the right fit for you. And then on the call. Our, our goal, Lee's ambition is to make sure you're a good fit for Augusta Nation and going to work well with the, with all of us inside the company. Zach, should I be trying to get clientele now even though I don't have any equipment and have no idea when I'll get it, or should I wait until I'm able to get equip, you know, in my mind, go sell, go get jobs. If you go get 10 jobs tomorrow because you're such a good salesperson, you will have no problem going out and getting a loan on the equipment because you know you'll pay it off within a matter of a few weeks, right? So you know a 21 inch mower, a weed whacker and a blower gonna put you back maybe two grand. Okay, you can do even less if you want residential, but let's just say two grand. You got some commercial stuff, 2500 max. So what I would recommend is go, go knocking on doors for a weekend. Sell 5, 6, 7 lawns or a few cleanups and then immediately you have the money to go buy the first setup. So any advice for someone with a main 9 to 5 job looking to hire someone looking to hire people to grow a mowing route simultaneously? Yes, Tom, I did a roundup episode with a police officer Last week and the week before that, I also talked to someone who also was part time had a 9 to 5 and running their longer business. I've done a few of these videos so definitely check out the last roundup episode and video just put like part time lawn care business. Mike Andes should pop up somewhere on YouTube. Do you think providing services in the off season with a Ventrac would be a viable source of income for the winter? Are you familiar with the Ventrac Liberty Lake and Spokane, Washington? Okay, so I know Spokane really well. I know Ventrek very well and I know your, your market pretty well. We have a Spokane Valley franchisee starting up in January. So the, what I would say is you should know this before you get a Ventrac event. Track is expensive. You can finance them. Yes. But if you're getting already asked for a lot of work that a Ventrac could be used on, that's when I'd be like, hey, go get a Ventrac and you can stay busy over the winter, great. But if you're like, I'm going to buy a Ventrac and then I'm going to go find the jobs, I'm going to find the work, just realize that's a completely different business than mowing, pulling weeds, bush trimming, total different business. Now if you're already getting a bunch of requests for said services of Ventrac where Ventrac would be needed, then maybe that's good option for you to use. But just keep in mind, just about every single green industry correlates with lawn care and mowing. All right, so even hardscaping and patios and walls still are going to get busier in the spring and they're going to get slower in the winter. All right, so there's, there's the possibility that you can still do them in the winter if you book yourself out far enough, but still going to correlate somewhat. So someone having a Ventric, yes, you can do stuff in the winter, but if it snows in Spokane, like you can't go clear a property if it is, you know, raining crazy. You might not be able to use the Ventracs in some areas. So again, I would just make sure, you know, before you go spend thousands of thousands of dollars on a Ventrac that you have the work and you could, you could pre book it. Like people always think I got the equipment, then I get the jobs. No, if you want a Ventrac, say okay, I'm going to get a Ventrac in January 1st. So what I'm going to do right now is go advertise as if I'm going to have that Ventrac January 1st and I'm going to start booking jobs like the first week of January. Then I'm going to book out the second week of January, third week of January. Well, guess what? You're going to have a lot of confidence going and buying event track if you just booked yourself out all of January and February before you even bought it.

Burnett. I hope to be able to afford to come next season for online school. Is Green.

Kevin not going to shave his beard? Didn't think so. Got an opportunity to buy a larger business. Owner retiring, few crews doing residential mowing. They have a yard with building offices. Should I buy the property with the business or separate the two? This is a good question. I would look at this as two different ways. Obviously every single scenario when it comes to negotiations with a larger company, there's a lot of wiggle room. There's a lot of ways you can look, a lot of ways to skin the cat, right? And if you looked at, you know, type in Mike Andy's acquisitions, I do a whole video, like an hour and a half video about acquisitions and how to look at valuations when there's real estate involved. What you want to try to do is buy the real estate for, without any other cost of the business. Okay. If you can get away with that, it means you basically underwrote and you can basically go get a property loan to buy the business, right? So what I'm saying is here is if, let's just say the value of the Property is worth $600,000 and you're like, well, I'm willing to pay 200,000 for, for the business, try to go buy the property for 800,000. Okay. Because if you can convince the bank that it's worth $800,000 and you can get an FHA loan like 5% down and get a 30 year mortgage on it. Let's go. All right, if there's like, if you can live on the property and get an FHA loan and there's a nice shop or whatever and you can have a FHA loan for 5% down on a 30 year mortgage, you're going to have a much lower payment in comparison to you going out buying the property for six, I would rather pay 800,000 for the property, getting an FHA loan or even like, you know, 20% down, whatever. But a 30 year mortgage at 3% interest versus a 10 year mortgage, which is like an SBA loan or a business loan and paying it over the course of 10 years at 5% or 6% interest. Like I would much rather pay more. So don't get locked up over your initial cost. If the bank is going to allow you to roll into a property loan to try to just like have the owner throw this in, that'd be something that. This is something. If you're buying a bigger business, you might want to book a consulting call with me. I don't usually say this, but you can book a consulting call with me. This would be one. It's probably worth it to book one with me. Hey Forest, what's the benefit of having a 36 inch stand on mower? Won't it leave clippings all over the customer's lawn? It just depends for. So if you're bagging the clippings on a 36 inch or you can just have a side discharge accelerator bag or on the side.

But if you're mulching, what you can do is if you don't have to bag your clippings, then you just put the unit on the side where it blocks the clippings from coming out and then you get mulching blades that would actually mulch up the clippings and then filter them down into the lawn so it won't leave clippings all over. If you either have a side bagger side like an accelerator type bag or if you have mulching blades on the lawn or on the mower. Hey Mike, I'm about to start handing out flyers and would you say it's a good idea to knock on the door and try to talk to them or just drop off the flyer, where should I put them? I would recommend door hangers if you're doing this. So if you go to lawn caremedia.com we got all sorts of door hangers, we got light installations, door hangers, let's go. We even got snow, let's go. I would recommend door hangers if you're doing door too and talking to people because that way if they aren't home, like you said that you can just leave the door hanger. Yeah. So like there's a whole bunch of these on lawn caremedia.com if you're looking for templates, but I would recommend these if you're doing door to door. Because otherwise if you put flyers, you start sticking them in people's doors, they don't like that. And then if you don't put them correctly, then like they fly down the street, then people call you for littering. So I like door hangers if I'm doing door to door and talking to them. I agree. If you're gonna do door to door and knock or just put door hangers out, I should say if you're gonna put door hangers out, I would recommend just knocking on the door and seeing if you can talk to them. You might as well. You've already. You're already right at their doorstep. How much is the franchise fee, Tanner? It's either 4,000 or 15,000, depending on if you do solo or the growth model. And the 15,001 is going up to 20 January 1st. So just check out land Augusta longcare services.com franchise book a call with Lee. There's no. We do not try to sell on that call. Anyone that's. Anyone that's been on that call knows we do not try to sell on that call. It's a matter of like, let's make sure this is the right thing for you and make sure it's the right thing for Augusta Nation. Do you know Utah's market? I do not know a lot about Utah. We do not have anyone in Utah yet for Augusta Lawn Care, so I do not know that market very well. I know a little bit just because I obviously have worked with other landscapers in the area, but we don't have any Augusta Long Care franchises in Utah currently. Yet. Hit me up. Do you have, do you have or do you know a good video of different types of shrubs on how to trim them for winter? I do not have a video. I know. Not. Not no one specifically. The goal is always to try to find a YouTuber that is in your local area that does those type of videos that are more instructive. Right. In terms of knowing trimming the type of bush that you see in your market. So you know, where there's Brian's Lawn Maintenance and Keith Kalfus's like that kind of Midwest area, Ohio, Michigan and stuff. They're lucky because they get to see a lot of those, you know, crepe myrtles and the different types of trees in there. We don't have crepe myrtles in our area. I don't have a lot of YouTubers in my area on the, on the west coast that trim the type of bushes that we see all the time, like ferns and evergreens and cedars. Like, they. We don't have as many training on that. So try though, to find a YouTuber that is in your local area that when they're trimming bushes and giving instruction, they're trimming the type of bushes that you need to see. In your local market.

I'm looking to pull $150,000 out of the business at some point as my personal income between my salary and profits. With that being said, what do you think, what do my top line business need to be doing to get to that goal? I would say just because you're looking for a number, I would say a million dollars. Okay, now could you do it at 4 or $500,000? Yes, you can. But you're going to be out doing estimates every day. You're going to be in the business every single day. If you're trying to build a business that you take $150,000 as personal income between salary and profits and you don't have to be there every day, you need the million dollar business. You could, you can totally disagree with him on that, that's totally fine. But in my opinion, I believe you need a million dollar business, 800, 800,000 to a million dollars business. If you want to be able to not work at the business every day and still pull out 150 grand. Now you can do pull out 150 grand at probably 5, $600,000 revenue, but you're going to be working a lot of hours in the business. Okay.

Liz and Kevin, you guys need to go offline and DM each other about the beard issue. 80 of our revenue comes from weekly mowing, FYI. Okay, Ryan, I. Oh, that's that same question here. Okay. Yeah, so I would say, I would still say 800,000 to a million dollars in revenue if you don't want to be there every day. If you want to, if you don't mind working because you like working 60 hours a week, like in the business doing estimates, working on jobs, you could easily pull out 150 grand at 5 to 600,000 business. 5 to $600,000 in revenue as long as you're not growing by 30, 40% a year. Right. So if you do 500 this year, 510 next year, 540 next year, 580 next year, 600 the year after that, if you're kind of like that kind of growth level, you can easily pull 150 grand out. If you're working in the business.

Having multiple businesses or one business. Appreciate your time. Caesar. We're actually talking about this at the conference. A whole bunch talking about once you've filled one location, like how you do two locations, how do you do satellite locations, how do general managers. Should you try to do some sort of a network where people like pay you a per percentage or Something like that. We're gonna be talking all about this stuff at conference, so. Should be fun. Good evening. After hiring new employees, how do you know when he's ready to do lawns on his own with his own truck? Yeah. So we just recently at Augusta for the franchise, we create like a checklist based on certain things that need to be done. And then the employee that is the trainer gets paid more on P4P. But they're also responsible to make sure that they're finishing this checklist over the course of a couple weeks. So that means everything from like line trimming to backing up the truck with a trailer, to hooking up the trailer to using service autopilot, which is the software we use. All different things that are required. There's a checklist and every single, like, it starts and ends, right? It's like the first day, they might literally just be like, how to do spool of line in the trimmer, how to use the blower. Like, it's very, very basic. And it basically gets to the point where they finish the checklist and then they become what we call they can become a solo op. Solo mower. Right. They can go out and solo on their crew. And so once they finish the checklist, in our opinion, they're supposed to be able to be able to go solo. They're able to be able to go on their own truck, their own job site by themselves. And we have a checklist to get them there. We have kind of a cultural checklist, and then we have a technical checklist. And so some of our franchisees helped us on this, kind of put together what would work well. And then we made it kind of a checklist for the whole franchise. Do you know any franchises coming to Texas? Yes, there's always franchises coming to Texas. There's a whole bunch of franchises coming to Texas in January. Price increases for 2022. Yes, everyone should do it.

Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and cut it off there. It's exactly one hour. I appreciate you all coming to the show for these little banners that have been coming up for the past hour. Those are what kind of funds? Zero turn. So I really do appreciate, even the past couple days with the MBA course, a bunch of people buying that. That helped us to buy a bunch of new camera gear for the the team that's going out for zero turn. So I really do appreciate that this new zero turn approach is going to be take the channel next level. I believe we're going to help a lot of people, but it could not be done without all of your support. So I really do appreciate it. It's not cheap to send people the other side of the country for a week and you know, by the time you pay for flights and hotels and rentals, rental cars and all the rest of it. So I really do appreciate all of you that support like Lawn Care web design. I think I can actually click through real quick. Lawn Care web design, landscape businesscourse.com lawn caremedia.com, lawn care, bookkeeper.com all of the, all of you have done that, really allow us to do this. And so I really, really do appreciate it. So if you haven't, you know, check out these sites. I really think they're, they're going to be beneficial for you longer. Bookkeeper is, is awesome. You get your QuickBooks and your, your salaries and your payroll done for you. Lawn caremedia.com you can get all these door hangers and flyers and different designs on there. And we're actually adding to this in January. End of January, we're adding to this. We have a whole bunch of more templates that will be added. So if you've bought the full package, you'll just get all of those for free. It's going to be coming in January. We have a whole bunch of new designs that we're adding. So yeah, feel free to check these out. Lawn carewebdesign.com obviously where you can get your website built by us. Check out the website, you can see other sites that we have built. I really do appreciate it. And this one I'm losing money on, but I'll still allow you to come. Landscape businesscourse.com conference it's gonna be great. Three days. If you can bear me for three days. If you can just put up with me for three days long, you'll enjoy this event. We have Marcus also though coming that has done a bunch of hardscaping and big, big projects working with massive companies that have hundreds of employees. So it's going to be a really, really good balance and we go deep. I am not going to have 20 speakers that are all a bunch of influencers because influencers, we know what they think. We, we see their videos every single day. It's great. But we want to go deep with deep with a few individuals and get as much as we can out and really know our numbers. Going to 2022. It's gonna be a great event. I'm really looking forward to it. As I do more of my notes, I'm already starting to prepare my keynotes and things like that. I'm really looking forward to it. It's gonna be a great event, so make sure you check it out. I thank you all for hopping on this Saturday and hanging out for the past hour. So have a great rest of your weekend. Have a great rest of your Thanksgiving weekend with your family and have a very happy holiday season.

Sa.