Lawn Care Biz: Team Culture, P4P, & Profit Sharing [Behind the Scenes]

We are live. Very cool. Facebook Live. So right now we're doing something very different. This is really just to kind of test something that is. I'm actually shooting on the GoPro that you're watching right now. And usually I'm using my phone or computer, but now this gives me the freedom to show you around while getting my questions, hopefully on here. So I'm learning this new. If you're just hopping on, post your comments or questions below. Question about landscaping as we head into the fall conference coming up. Whatever you might got, whatever you have, post it below. I am going to make sure this is actually working correctly and to where I can actually see your questions, hopefully. Yes, I can. Four of you are on here. Let's go. Okay, so now I'm here. I need to turn down my audio, and I should be able to see your questions if they come in.

Let me do this testing. If you got questions, post below. I'm in the studio. I'll show you around in just a second. Great. I can see the questions on my phone. Okay, so this is the new GoPro. I'm testing it out. That's why I'm on live today. But this is the studio. If you haven't seen it before, this is where.

I do all the recordings, all that good stuff. Today I'm testing out this new Go GoPro. So here, you know what I can do. So if you're. I know there's 13 of you, 16, 18 of you watching, post your comments below. If you have question about anything with marketing, landscaping, the business side of things, I can see your questions coming in here. This is very cool. This is. This is progress, trying to do this where there's less kinks in getting me on here more often and answering more questions. So while you guys are posting comments or questions, I'm gonna show you a little bit around the studio. So this is where I do all the recording. If you haven't seen this before, if you have, it's kind of probably boring. I got lights up. That's for the camera. This is the angle you guys see usually. And then back here is actually how I get all the lights to work on that back. These are the new lights that light up the back screen here.

Let's see here if I can turn this on. It's really simple here. So literally, that's how it works. And lights up the background. So that on the podcast, that's kind of what you're seeing, a little bit of disarray. I did a bunch of training videos last night. For the franchisees. And this is where I'm recording the MBA course. So you can see here is my camera setup. And then this is where I do all the writing and all that good stuff. So on module 5.3, do the right on here. And then when I'm looking at the camera, I get my kind of teleprompter ish thing right there with my notes. So. All right, if you have questions, comment below and I will try to answer some of them. Now I only got a few minutes before my next meeting.

Alright. Oh, that's cool. I can actually bring you guys on camera if I wanted to. That is legit.

Any questions?

Either I'm not seeing your questions, which is not good, or no one is posting. Can someone just comment something? Because I don't know if I'm even able to see, which is not a good thing. Let's see here.

All right, sorry. Bear with me as I learn how to use a GoPro. Okay, let's see here.

Back.

Oh, look at that. We're live. Okay, now I should be able to see questions coming in. Come on.

Well, for those of you bearing with me, thank you. I'm trying to learn how to use this new. Here, I'll show you what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing.

So behind so right here is the GoPro. That's all I can see. But I want to be able to be where I can video from there. But then see your questions incoming separately. So let me open this up, see if I can see questions. Oh, I see questions. Yes, let's go. Okay, question time. Now we can actually do something. Let me turn my audio off. Very good. Alright, questions, we got questions and answers coming up. So first question, will the food be good at conference? Yes, the food is gonna be very good. You know what, actually I'll show you the menu real quick.

Keep posting questions. That's awesome. I'll get to all of these. I should get. I have about 15, 20 minutes. So we're good.

Let's see here. Let me pull up the menu for the conference. I'll probably do this on a video later on. But like we're talking some very awesome stuff, homemade things.

The last night is gonna be awesome. The formal dinner, we're having a whole bunch of different types of meat. So there's gonna make burnt ends, br ribs. There's gonna be a whole bunch of stuff. It's gonna be great. So about 10 times as better as last year. So if you're there last year, it's gonna Be a lot better. We're getting catered by local company as well as some really great restaurants. So looking forward to that because now this year we can actually do our own catering. All right, next question. Tom or Carlos, what are your favorite automations for the guys on the field? My favorite automations are pro probably for things like making sure they close gates to make sure that when they are finished a job that is supposed to have their gate closed that it reminds them before they close out the job on service autopilot. So that's probably one of my favorite ones in terms of the guys in the field. Also, if the customer always wants pictures, then we have an automation that every time a job is complete on their property it sends the office a notice and just reminds them to do that. And it also reminds the crew out in the field to make sure they post pictures to that person's profile and then those pictures are then automatically sent to the office and the office can then forward them to the customer. We don't usually have the guys in the field email them to the customer. They're usually not very, they're not good about that and we don't usually want them to be emailing from their phones. So basically the automation reminds the office every time a picture is added to send it to the customer. And very few customers have that. But great, great content. I'm at Camano Island. I run Junior Gardens Landscape. Justin. Fernando. Hello. Hello Tony. Should I pay my employee for the hours when we come to conference? We are covering travel and everything. I'm thinking I should cover it. It really good question, Tony. It really comes down to if you're telling them they gotta come like a manager or if they like hey, can I please come? And you say yep, you can come. I'll pay for your food, I'll pay for your lodging and your hotel. Now if you're telling your team they need to be there like managers, I would pay even if it was a set amount, not like an hourly amount being like hey, 200 bucks a day or like some sort of like salary for that week if you're coming to conference. That's what I would do. So when we took our team, our whole team to a seminar a couple years ago, we, we just paid them as if they worked an eight hour day. But I've taken managers to places before and it's like, hey, look, if you want to come, you can come and I'll pay for your accommodations but you're not going to get paid while you're there. So that's kind of my. If you're requiring them to be there, you should probably pay them. If they want to be there and they're just like super thrilled that you're going to pay for their flights and everything, then I would not worry about it. Jacob. Hey Mike. I'm 18 years old with 28 lawns. I'm looking at hiring any first part time employee in the spring.

I'm still getting a grip on things. How do you suggest I go about hiring that first person? Yes, that first person. The big thing is to make sure you talk about the future to them. If you're trying to attract good talent, you need to be able to sell them on the future of what the business is going to become. Because right now it's obviously small and there's nothing super exciting and you probably can't compete against other businesses, other larger landscaping companies in terms of prices, what they're offering, in terms of dollars per hour or benefits and things. So you really got to sell them on what your future is and the goal and the mission of the business. And that's very difficult. That first hire is tough and they are going to be the one that sets the standard for the business and the culture going forward. Mark Hanson. Mike, I just got my trip all booked this morning for the conference. My question this week is how much capital do you have at any given time to make sure you have money for just in case, payroll, et cetera. Do you always keep a certain percent, certain amount or a certain percentage in the bank? Yeah. So I wanna have at least a month's worth of revenue in the bank and that's working capital, what you're talking about there. That's a technical term for it. Basically money that's in the bank just in case something happens. I want at least a month's worth of revenue. Some people don't have that much. And if you're growing really quickly, you're probably not gonna have a month's worth of revenue. But I would have at least that if you can. Especially if you're starting to like balance between growth and profitability and then risk management. I would be trying to get least a month's worth of revenue. At least. Like if you're being very conservative, you'd have two or three months worth of revenue in the bank. Just to be easy, just to make sure you're good. Hey Lee. Welcome Mark. Got that one, Lee. Dustin, how do you feel about task easy or lawnstarter? Big deal in Texas here. One second folks. I gotta make sure.

My. I'M not gonna die on my battery, am I? Well, if we die on our battery, it's because my GoPro is just out of the case and I'm literally just testing it out. By the way, some of you probably looking at that is some drawings I made a couple nights ago for the new headquarters that we are planning to build. And literally in the next few minutes, I'm signing an offer for some property, which I will give you more updates on that as it comes comes three acres. Really fun. How do you feel about Task Easy or Lawn Starter? Big deal in Texas. Dustin. All right, so I have not used them specifically. A couple of our franchisees used to use them before coming to Augusta. So I know a little bit about these not huge fans in general. You gotta remember that these companies are giving you these leads. The customer is their customer, it's not yours. Like, you do not own that customer. Same thing with, like HomeAdvisor, because they send you a lead, but then the next time that person needs a service, guess what? They're going through HomeAdvisor again because. Because HomeAdvisor is the one staying in contact with them. And I've said it before, I say it again. The value of your business is in your contacts. And so keep that in mind when it comes to taking leads from a third party like that. They own that customer. And even though you might have them in your database, they're gonna be great at following up, trying to get them to do. Every single time you wanna do upsell, it's gonna be coming through another lead. You're gonna be paying for that lead again and again and again. I don't like that. And I don't like the fact that they didn't come through me organically. And I'd rather pay for leads that is driving traffic to my website because it's gonna give me other kind of fringe benefits of SEO because traffic is going to my site. And I would prefer. Man, that looks good. That green over there and the purple, nice. So I would prefer driving leads or traffic to my website, even if the dollars, the cost per lead is a little bit higher. Because I'm getting fringe benefits in terms of ranking. If you, if you are paying HomeAdvisor, they are literally running ads in your area. They are then funneling those leads to you. They're getting a markup on that, but then they're getting a bunch of traffic to their site. That's why when you search lawn care and your city name, a lot of times you got Angie's list, HomeAdvisor, all those at the very top. Because they're getting all the traffic. Yes, they have good SEO, but more importantly, they're getting all the traffic from the leads that you're buying from them if your customers are going there. And so I really, really encourage, I'd rather pay a higher cost per lead, but that is driving traffic to my website, where I'm getting the SEO, I'm getting the recognition from Google, and I'm getting the sort of search engine credibility. If you were. All right, couple more questions here. All right. I'm gonna die if I don't plug this in. Probably. So let me see here. Okay, I'm gonna answer the next question, which is.

As far as bringing people field guides or sales team estimators. Dustin? Yeah. So in terms of coming to conference, definitely would recommend managers, estimators, office managers, like those are big times. Your number two, even if you're just starting out and you know you have a number two which is gonna become your estimator, become kind of your project manager, I'd highly recommend bringing them. Highly. In terms of your team, I know there's about two or three companies that are bringing like their entire team and that's a big investment, first of all. And two, it shows your team that you really do care about your culture. And that's what we're talking about a lot at this conference. And so if you want to make a very clear statement to your team that you're willing to invest and you really believe in this, it's not a bunch of just hot air that you come back hyped up on a conference, then you might want to bring your whole team. If you want to make big changes in 2021 in terms of implementing P2P open book management, having the culture that we talk about, the conference, it might be a great stepping stone. It's gonna be a pretty penny to get everyone here, but I think it would be worth it. Brandon. I've got three part time, three full time, year round employees. My business is two and a half years old. Would you start P4P now? Should I wait until we have more employees? All right, good question, Wesley. So I would implement P4P as soon as you possibly can. It usually is easier to do that. Whoa. It usually is easier to do that once you're out of the field, to be honest. Because when you're in the field, if you're answering phone calls and working, it's kind of back and forth. That can be a little bit difficult. In terms of calculating P4P but you can still do it. Absolutely. We talk a little bit about that on landscape business course. In terms of the calculation aspect, just make sure if you are working out in the field and you're running P4P that you actually give yourself hours. Like if you're working, you should be getting paid and so make sure you do that in terms of P4P if you're out in the field still. But I would implement P4P as soon as possible. And you know, we talk about if, even if you're planning to do P4P, you need to have budgeted hours on every single job. Mowing jobs, you know, fertilization jobs, projects, everything needs to be done, estimated as well as performed on based upon budgeted hours as well as comparing actual versus budgeted hours. All right, I'm gonna get this next question, all these questions, I'm gonna answer them all. But I gotta plug this in. So bear with me if you oops if it's all shaky and all the rest of it. Otherwise I'm not gonna be able to get through all these. Alright, next question is from David Lindbergh. Scaling my business, I've been able to grow via cash flow up to this point. Now looking to scale more, what options should I look into and stay away from? I'm not a huge fan of going into debt, as most of you know. Oh, I'm have to take this off the stand. Alright, bear with me folks. We're learning together. Promise you this will be good down the road because I can hop on, live a lot faster via the GoPro.

But now here we go. I pop this off. Okay, that's what I'm shooting on by the way. Let me pop this off though.

Okay? Hopefully I can keep recording and plug this in at the same time. Let's go. Okay, now let's see if I can put this back on and screw this bad boy back in. We're still rolling. Good. All right.

Oh, we're almost there. Questions keep coming in. Thank you. In terms of, David, in terms of staying away from. Stay away from all the people who call you on the phone saying that your business has been approved for $200,000. Don't do that. Don't do anything high interest, don't use credit cards.

Definitely don't do doing that. I would highly recommend keep growing based upon cash flow and if you need to raise your prices, go for it. If you need to take a year where you don't grow as much and because you raise the price instead, I would do that first before going into debt. Just my opinion, though. Dustin Drymond. They are free for us. They pay for us. Okay, Josiah, I want to do P4P next year for my four guys. Will you help with that in the conference where I can completely set it up, or can I get it with a phone call from you? Thanks for the great content, Josiah. Yeah. So, Josiah, on landscape business course, I actually walked through all the training and everything like that at conference. We are going to be talking about that on Friday morning about implementation of P4P, but honestly, most of that information is out there and a lot of people are running P4P already. We gave away the first version of the software with the course as well as the Excel documents that you'll need to run that. So definitely check that out. But yes, at conference, we're going to be talking about P4P, or we're gonna be going over all the rules. We're gonna answer a lot of Q and A. And we're doing that Friday morning because that really sets up the foundation for a lot of what we talk about the rest of the week in terms of profit sharing and the whole works. All right, next question.

Michael Bryce. I put my guys on P4P. Now they complain that they aren't making a big enough percentage, even though they are making way more per hour. They complain that they are working so much harder and not making that much more. Yep. So this is when open book management is really important. Again, this is all a building process. Right. And so you gotta have P4P, you gotta have open book management, you gotta have profit sharing. These are the things you have to do. And P4P is great, but this is the problem. When you start making all this money, they're gonna be like, oh, I should make more, because they just want more money. So then you gotta have open book management and show them the numbers. Then you gotta have profit sharing on top of that. So especially as you're growing, it sounds Bryce like you have quite a few guys. It's very important to have all three of those layers. And then that's really when you can start building the culture is once you've implemented all three, then focusing on the culture becomes really important. So again, it's very foundational. You have to do all three. I don't believe you can do one and just leave it at that forever. We did P4P for about a year before implementing profit sharing, but we'd been doing open book management before that, like, for years. And, you know, but when you had that Profit sharing factor. On top of that, the cultural aspect just begins to take off and that's what you really want. That's what we're talking mostly about at the conference. Like that's what is P4P, open book management, profit sharing. And then culture is really what tops that all off based on that foundation. Yovani, tips for creating a culture that excites your team to be motivated and continue learning, no matter their experience. Honestly, at the end of the day, a lot of times, Yovani, hopefully I'm saying your name right, it comes down to them being money motivated. Because if they're money motivated, you can then use things like profit sharing and P4P to really get them excited about their job and get them excited about learning new skills. And like we implemented the 3F program, which is the franchise fee forgiveness program, which allows all our franchise locations to their, their employees to get into, into becoming an owner after they've worked two years at a location out in the field. So if they work in Augusta lawn care for two years, they're able to actually become a business owner. And so it gives them the long term vision of like investing in themselves, learning about business, learning about marketing, listening to audio books and really setting that up through open book management is important because at the end of the day, open book management is not effective unless it's affecting their paycheck. Right? So unless you're doing profit sharing, like open book management doesn't do a whole lot unless you're just growing and you need to explore to them that hey, like I'm not making a bunch of money and we're just trying to get through here and grow here. That's one that's great if you're not doing profit sharing. But when you actually start making a lot of money and become profitable, you need to have profit sharing there. Otherwise they don't care about open book management, they don't care about knowing the numbers, they don't care how much money you're making, they don't care about efficiencies because they just see you lining your pockets. And when they get a piece of that pie, that's when they start caring. They actually start caring about how, why we spent so much on insurance. They start caring about why do we spend so much on fuel. They start caring about inefficiencies of other people on the team and damages because they know that's coming out of the bottom line. All right, next question. Oh, that's all the questions. Look at that. If there's any more questions, go Ahead and post up Mike Zachary, Trigger Mike, with just starting out, what should I do not having a P and L for conference? Good question, Zachary. So if you just are about to get started and you haven't got a P and l yet from 2020, don't worry about it. Definitely. If you do bring your P and l from 2020 to the conference, a couple weeks before conference, everyone that signed up is going to get an email from me of exactly things like what you should be bringing and if you need a laptop, a little bit about the formal dinner on Saturday. So you'll get more details a couple weeks before the conference. However, in regards to a P and L, we will absolutely want to bring your P and L if you have them because we're going to actually practice doing open book management and sharing your numbers with your team. We're going to practice it like we're going to break up into groups and you're going to have to explain your profit and loss. And for some of you, that's going to seem super, super, super, like overwhelming and scary because you're like, oh, I'm losing money, I'm not doing things right or I don't even really understand these numbers. But you've got to start somewhere. You've got to get comfortable with sharing those numbers and explaining it to other owners. At least before you go start, explain it to employees who have no idea what you're talking about. So we're going to be practicing that and having that P and L will definitely come in handy. If you don't have your P and L though, we will be breaking you up in different groups and we will be going over different things not using a P and L. So totally fine if you don't have a P and L. Zachary, I know you're coming. I look forward to seeing you there in January. Clark asks, Second year, 19 years old, do you suggest getting more equipment or another truck before or after the work is there? I really recommend, honestly waiting, like, don't buy equipment before you need it. There's no point in having a truck sitting idle. One thing that I always track is asset utilization. So if I'm not using a truck at least four days a week, I probably don't need it. And so when you start getting like 15 trucks or more, you start getting one or two extra trucks just for redundancy in case something goes down, something breaks, tire flat, whatever it is. But until that point when you're growing, don't go out and get a $20,000 truck and have it Sit. It's not making you any money, it's just costing you money. People forget, even if they pay stuff with cash, that it costs money to keep the truck there, like maintenance, oil changes, tires, but insurance and liability, trust me, it costs money to have a truck. So don't just go buy one unless there's revenue and you know you're gonna keep it busy. One way to do that in terms of making it work really well is, you know, have two guys in a truck. And then when you're still growing, you got all this work. When you buy the next truck, just split up the two guys and then go, hi. And then you can literally keep growing, keep growing. Hire two more people to fill both of those truck up with two or even three people, depending on your setup and your services. If you're doing landscaping, three people and then go buy another truck. So I would use employees as the buffer between trucks, right? So I get a bunch of employees, buy another truck. Now there's only one or two people in a truck. And then. And I buy another truck, right? So if you have two employees, you should not have four trucks. It doesn't make sense. All right? You should have maximum of two vehicles at that point, maybe a third one. If you always do solo and you go out and do estimates. But I just see time and time again people with like six trucks and four employees. Like, it does not make sense. And even six trucks and six employees doesn't make sense because you're not gonna have all your employees there all the time. You could probably go with four of those trucks instead of six. So asset utilization is very important in my mind. If the truck's not being used four times a week, it doesn't need to be used unless you start getting larger and you start having a couple trucks that are literally just there, so there's not downtime. That's more acceptable in my eyes. This is my opinion, though, Josiah. So I just got. Go to your courses. And you have one for P4P. Yeah, Josiah. So the course covers. There's a new module inside of there called P4P, and it's brand new. So definitely P4P information is in there. We are going to go over a lot of that in conference, but not in as depth as we do in the course, because I'm not going to have like a whole day. Like last year, we spent most of the conference talking about P4P. This time we're going to go over it, refresh it, get some of the questions out that people had from last year and implementing it. And then we're going to go right into profit sharing and open book management and culture because, like all of that stuff is so important. P4P is that bottom foundational aspect though. So definitely the course is where I would start. And if you're coming to conference, I would recommend trying to listen that stuff beforehand because you're gonna have so much. You're not gonna be like, trying to figure out all this P4P stuff when you come. You'll just be like, be able to jump right into like, why that is necessary and how it implement how it works into open book management and profit sharing.

What's the percent of profit sharing? Hey, Victor, we're gonna go over all that at the conference because we have different models. We have one for like a manager's model. We. We have a field workers model. And so we're going to go all in detail. Otherwise I'm going to spend like, that's a big chunk of the conference. And so it ranges anywhere from someone on the field getting a very small percentage all the way up to 25% and based on managers, people in the field, et cetera. And it's not complicated. You want to keep it simple so they can always understand how much money they're making in terms of profit sharing. And we post our P and L every week in the office. We post it, you know, out on the board so they can always see, like, how we doing this month? And they start to see like, oh, if there's three pay periods in one month, then yeah, it affects our net profit for that month. And they start to see like, oh, there's an equipment that broke down and we have to pay for it. And that's why the profit and loss statement looks different. And they only care because they're getting profit sharing. So anyways, all right, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Thanks so much everyone for hopping on Juve Sosa. Sorry, I didn't say where do I buy the course? Landscapebusinesscourse.com is where you can buy the course. And then landscapebusinesscourse.com conference is where you can sign up for the conference. Thanks so much, everyone. I really want to just hop on and test out this GoPro where I can now live stream to Facebook. I'm also gonna try this on YouTube in the next few days and make sure I can do this more often. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a great day. Now I gotta figure out how to turn this off. Oh, man. Let's see here.

This is pretty cool.

GoPro app. Oh, look at that. And then I just go here and I enter.