Lawn Care Business Advice Q&A (ROUND-UP Episode 1)

What's up, everyone? It's Mike Andes and you're listening to landscape businesscourse.com. today we are going to be starting something new. It's called Roundup at roundup episode number one. I literally came with this idea 30 minutes ago. So we'll see how this goes. I'm sure today will be a flop, but down the road it will become something very cool. I hope to. Obviously it's named after the spray Roundup, you know, gloss, fate, whatever it's called.

But hopefully in the future, what I want to do is bring on some landscapers and talk shop with you guys. Because it's cool, if I see someone in the comments that I want to talk to, I can send you a link and then you can pop up here on the screen, like off to the side here, like right, your face could be here. So what I'm going to do is we got a pester, you know, like we gotta get Keith Kalfus on here. We gotta get Brian's lawn maintenance. We need to get Florida turf pros. We need long hair juggernaut. We got. We gotta get some of these guys on here and talk shop about business. But today, because I came up with this idea just a second ago and figured we should start because we got to just start. I'm going to go ahead and do some Q and A. If I do see someone in the, in the comment section that I want to chat with and you have your video camera on, I would definitely like to have you here on this video screen. Now, Dean, you said get Jonathan Ptosnik on here. Unfortunately, he's probably too busy and it would take too much coordination. I'm not going to be able to coordinate these. These kind of episodes have to be kind of somewhat sporadic and on spare the moment. So I did invite Florida turf pros. So if, if Florida turf pros is watching, I emailed you and I said, hey, if you're, if you're going to come on the live, you can come on the video. So. But let's go ahead and answer some questions. If there is someone on here and you want to come on the video, I, uh, you can ask your question on video, but you gotta have your camera on. You gotta be ready to roll. I'm not gonna sit around and wait for you. This is the roundup session and so let's go ahead and see how this works. I've done one time before with Copper Creek Lawn Care on the spare of the moment. So I have, I need to open up my email so I can send you a link. Uh, so basically how this is gonna roll is I'm gonna ask questions or answer questions and then if there's one that you potentially want to share yourself, a video I could potentially show you on the screen. I know like for example, John Garrettson, you just shared a really cool milestone on the chat or on the Facebook group. Would love to maybe go over what you've done in the past few years, for example. So hopefully this show can kind of go on. I'd love to do it on like a Thursday evening every week where we kind of get other landscapers perspectives than other than my own and we're able to share a little bit. So I'm looking at my screen because this is where I can see all my questions and everything. But let me go ahead and go start going through some of these and if you want to, if you are okay with being on video, just put video at the end of your question. I'm not going to, you know, force anyone to come on video, but let's just see how this rolls and I'd love to make this a show every week where we can learn from other landscapers and lawn care professionals. All right, let's go. Last night's video is great. Showing the troubles everyday problems is more realistic in my opinion. Yeah. So last night of several people, a couple people in the comments, a couple people email me like, oh man, you're like over your head and like you should take it easy. Like trust me, I love this, I love what I'm doing and if I didn't have that much stress and things going on I'd probably be somewhat worried. So I really do enjoy it. All right, next one. Mike, what's your follow up process after a quote? Our follow up process is we use three emails on a phone call over the course of five days to follow up with them. Three. Those three emails are through automations. Oh my goodness, my, my WI fi is suddenly dropping. That's not good. So you're probably, probably chopping up a little bit. But let's make it worth it here. How do you invest $5,000 in a startup equipment? I made a TikTok on this the other day. I did like a thousand, five thousand and ten thousand. But if I was to spend $5,000 in startup equipment, I would go get a commercial push mower. I would get probably a high end residential steel trimmer and edger and a blower.

That'd be sweet. Yeah. Cd I want to get Jonathan Patosic. I would love to Talk shop with Jonathan Potosh. Because I have a few things to say about service autopilot. I do. And I would love to pick his brain in general about business as well. But Gabe, have you ever read Disciplined Entrepreneurship? Great read that reminds me of some of the work you teach about starting and running a business. I have not read that book. I need to write it down and take a look at it. So disciplined Entrepreneurship. Disciplined entrepreneur. See, I still can't spell it. Entrepreneurship. There it is. Cool. Oh, by the way, a couple of you have been emailing me. Let me just go ahead and show this real quick while people are on here. Oh, I can share my screen. Look at that. So let me share this. Let me make sure I'm doing this right. I'm going to mess it up. I just know it. I'm going to share with you while we are all on here. Share. Share screen. Share screen. Share screen. Yes. Window. Aha. There it is. A couple of you been asking about lawn care web design. Let me go ahead and take this stuff off real quick.

How do I take this off? Comments go away. Thank you. Okay. Brand boom. Okay, so now you can see this. This is Lawn careweb design dot com. There's some new. There's some new sites on here that we've uploaded so you can see. So feel free to go through these and preview these. There's different designs that we've created and you know, for example, like this one, et cetera. You know, they're all. These are all new ones we just put up. So we have about 40 landscaping companies that we do websites for right now. If you'd like to be part of that, definitely sign up. At least just book a call with our team and we'll go over and see if it's a good fit for you. Let me go ahead and shop. Stop sharing my screen after that wonderful little pitch there and jump back into the questions. Okay, Junior, I don't agree with you about these influencer being part of the Q and A. Well, this is the thing, Junior. It's good to have different perspectives. And so this is the bottom line is by having those influencers on, I'm going to be able to bring in an audience that would otherwise never hear about what we talk about in this channel. And as much as I would like to be selfish and be like, oh, we're only going to. We're only going to keep it to ourselves, I want to share this as much as people and my goal is to change the level of professionalism in this industry. And if I'm going to do that, I got to reach as many people as possible. If I can tap into their audience and people that know them, I'm more than happy to do that. Most. A lot of people, A lot of people listening to this video right now found me because I made a video reaction video or because I made an equipment video. Two things that I don't really, really care about. But it's, it's the hook that gets the fish and. Oh, no, no, it is the bait that gets the fish on the hook. And the hook is definitely the business topics we talk about here.

Ben, thanks for the video yesterday, Mike. I have never had more stress and anxiety in this past month. And it's good to know even the big guys are going through it. Just gotta hustle through it. Hey, Mike, thanks for doing these videos. Okay, I think we got, we got the point here. Junior, what books do you most recommend when being beginning to scale your business from one to multiple crews? It's really gonna come down to marketing and selling. I always say, like marketing and sales is what gets you from 0 to 500,000 in revenue. And if you're gonna go past a million and beyond, it' to be management of people and definitely hiring and all the rest of it so that people side. A lot of times you just gotta be self aware enough to realize like perhaps maybe you're not cut out for the people side. If you don't get along with, well, well with people. They make you mad, they make you stressed out. That's not a bad thing. Just be self aware and be like, hey, I'm gonna stay around that 3, 4, $500,000 marker because sales will get you there. The ability to go knock on doors, the ability to go out and sell customers and upsell customers, that will get you to 500,000. And so that's, that's what I would say in the. Junior. Most of them are only doing for the sponsorship. Yeah, it's fine. Junior though, you know, like, honestly, like everyone is out to make a buck and that's capitalism. That's the beautiful thing. At the end of the day, there are people that the reason that they can provide content is because they monetize and they make those sponsorships, right? So I'm not against them as much as people think I am. And I think partly why they don't like to come on my show or they don't accept sometimes because I've asked several of them, is because I think I'm gonna like tear them apart. I'm not that way. Like this is the thing. If you want someone to create value for this community, they need financial support to make it worth their time, right? So instead of, let's say Keith Kalfus making a video, he could potentially be going out mowing some lawns. Now, if there's financial return on creating the video, he'll make the video. And if the video is going to help somebody, we as a community should want him to make the video. And so I am not against the sponsorships of them making money. In fact, last weekend I spent.

$950 between two different creators. I'm not gonna say their name, but I spent $950 and just bought their programs, bought some of their stuff. I will never use it. I actually bought a book the other day from. I forget his name. Jim. Who? Jim Huston. I forget I bought one of his books. Like $450 program, like a CD. Like I don't even have a CD player. I do not have a CD player and I will never read that textbook. But I wanted to support him because I know he's done a lot for this industry and so I want him to be able to have the financial wherewithal to keep doing what he's doing. And I asked the same thing of my audience from Lawn Care Web Designs Landscape businesscourse.com if you want the creator to keep making content of value, they have to have a better return than them just going out and mowing lawns. That's the bottom line, right? So I'm not against it. Junior. As much as I love and appreciate, I know your sentiment is really positive, but that's why I would have them on this show.

Harford Lawn and Landscape Service being record on Lawn Care Web Design. Oh, I need to email them to turn down the SEO. Jack. Zachary, I saw your post the other day, man, you're killing it. Just the past few months and honestly, the way you set yourself up over the winter, Zachary, a lot of your successes attributed to you. Like you set up things really, really well. Like I know we had like one or I think we had two. You did two consulting calls with me. You came to the conference, you got your website built like you did a lot of prep work and really thought things through. So kudos to you for all your work and getting killing. I think you said you were doing like on track for like 40,000 this month in revenue. So kudos to you.

H H P Progressive. How was visiting your franchise this past week? And. And are you happy where they are? At or disappointed in some areas. You know, this is the bottom line with franchising as.

You. You don't have control over some things. Right? Like, I am not there every single day. There's absolutely gonna be areas where you look at a franchise like, man, they should be doing this differently. I can't. I don't have. I don't have equity in the company and like their business. Right. So I can't force certain things. What you basically do is in, like, my role is you. You show them the systems, and then you just have to prove that it keeps working. And then they either trust you or they don't. And I understand that sometimes there's that, like, maybe it doesn't work or like they try to go off a little bit. Cause it's a little easier. And so it's a matter of sometimes just being. It's like a father, like. Like a mother. You're trying to get someone to walk, you're trying to get them to run, you're trying to get them to sprint. And eventually sometimes you gotta let someone fall down, and then other times you gotta kind of correct them. So it's. It's not like I was disappointed or anything like that. By no means. It's just sometimes there's bad habits that are created over time. And then when they join the team, it's like, join Augusta. I'm looking. I'm like, that's gonna take a year to iron out. And that's. And I know they're gonna go through some pain the same way I know that a kid if. If I had a child and they were trying to learn to walk, they're gonna have to fall down a couple times to start figuring out how to walk. And it's like that sometimes. And so you just try to, you know, you try to be as nice as you possibly can, but then also be strong. And like, that balance is sometimes difficult. It was a great trip. Really, really enjoyed it. You'll see more videos come out next week. We're a little bit delayed in our video editing just because some of personal issues with some of the editors and they have to be out of town. So we're a little bit behind. That's why I'm doing some of these lives as well. What's your opinion of leaf removal? Never noticed a vacuum in your videos. Does your crews tarp them or what are leaf. Our leaf season in our local market is not as long as other areas down south. Your leaf season is a couple months where you can use a leaf back Every single day we don't have that. We usually get, you know, a couple weeks where we do a lot of leaf clamps, but we don't do a lot of leaf clamps. We do fall cleanups and we do trimming bushes and weeding and all the rest of it along with the leaves. But it's not as big a deal here. However, like our corporately owned store in like New York for example, and possibly even South Carolina, maybe not, but definitely New York will be getting a leaf back this fall. Antonio, what do you think about having contracts versus not having contracts? Is that a negative look on my business? It really depends on your local market. The more you have 12 month services, like you have your weather, your climate facilitates 12 month services, the more likely 12 month contracts make sense because then you're not, you're showing up to the property consistently throughout the whole 12 month contracts. What's hard about 12 month contract is when you have to convince a customer that you never showed up in the whole month and that they're still paying you $300 a month. And then other months you show up 10 times a month or like, you know, spend hours and hours of their property. So that is difficult. Like for example, one of our franchisees like Ontario or Dakota, in the Dakotas they, they only mow for like six months a year and there's snow, like a ton of snow the rest of the year. It'd be difficult to sell someone on lawn care and landscaping. 12 month contract versus like our franchisees in Georgia or Florida where like they basically DO service and 12 month contracts are pretty common. Drew Martin how far in the season should I keep advertising lawn or mowing? What is the next services after lawn mowing? Honestly, it really is going to be, you know, the peak growing season is usually when we focus on lawn mowing and lawn care and treatments and all the rest of it. And then we focus on project based work. Usually about two months after the spring rush has started. Right. So in our local market we probably have a few more weeks where we're still focusing on mowing and lawn care and then we'll transition to projects and usually as it gets really hot and the grass slows down, that that's the perfect time to transition into more project based stuff. A staffing agency said they have guys ready to work, cost 18 per hour. What do you think about using them and booking more jobs in a day until I can find a full time employee, I think that's a good idea. Now just be ready for one out of five of those people actually working or even less because $18 an hour in a lot of places in the the US right now unfortunately is not going to get you much, let alone if they're going to a temp agency and not willing to do the work themselves, going to get a job, you might not have the best applicants on your hand, but one out of ten might be good. Then there's desperate, they need work right away. So they went to temp agency.

Where do you think the best, where do you think is the best place to find a licensed lawn applicator? Had multiple ads out for 19 to $26 per hour and got one applicant that didn't have much experience. Yes, this is absolutely the reason why I talk about simplification of services is why locally we went to all organic and natural treatments so we don't have to have applicators licenses. As soon as you require applicators licenses or a CDL or someone to know a whole bunch of about certain pieces of equipment. If you do all of those things right.

If you simplify and they don't require it, therefore you are not going to need as much skilled labors and it's gonna be easier to find them. And so that's, that's really the 19 to 16, $26 per hour like for an applicator's license. Yeah, you might be 30 plus out per hour in this labor market. Whereas I want to, you know, you want to simplify as much as possible to be able to get that lower level skilled labor. Jim Huston is not struggling. I spent 3, 500 for him to come compete out for eight hours this January. Yeah, no, totally John. I don't think he's struggling nor did any of the other crazies that I, I was, I bought stuff from last weekend. It's just a matter of supporting them so they keep doing what they're doing. Harry plays hey Mike, I'm just wondering how to do breaks work. I'm just wondering how do breaks work for your guys? Do your guys get paid lunch breaks also? What about overtime? How many hours are you guys expected to work a week? So every single state is different. You need to check your local labor laws. In our state, for example, we have to give 10 minutes per 4 hours. Sorry the 15, I think it's 15. 15 minutes per 4 hours of paid break time. And then they have an optional 30 minute break. But that optional 30 minute break they would clock out for. Our guys in the field never take their 30 minute break. They just take the 10 minute breaks twice a day. And in terms of how many hours your guys are expected to work a week, honestly, we just expect them to work when we ask them to and we don't. We try not to overwork them like 50 plus hours. We try not to get there if at all possible. Daddy Mike.

Oh, that's so funny. You're killing it over there. Ryan. Ryan's over in Corpus Crispy. Corpus Crispy? Corpus Christi. Him and his, his manager is doing great. Zachary about to schedule another call in talks with another company to buy them. Ooh, just waiting on 36 month P L and balance sheets. Ooh, that will be a lot of fun to look over. All right. When doing a mulch rip out and insulation, do you charge hourly as well as buy the yard of mulch installed for. For instance, I charge $60 per hour and also charge $80 a yard for mulch. So when you do, you charge hourly as well as by the kind of. I guess. Yeah, we charge by the materials and we charge by hours. Right. We do not charge by the yard of material installed like, like, oh, $120 of. Of per yard installed. We don't do that. We look at how many yards of mulch, how many hours are going to take me to do it. It's most accurate form of doing so. And if you wanted to scale that, you could potentially do it by square feet. But you're going to have a larger margin of error when it comes to the labor. And when you're on P4P. Not. Not a good thing to have. I've seen a video about one of your guys mowing and you charge your minimum of $32. How do you deal? How do you deal about non billable hours? Okay, I'm going to try to dig apart this question, junior. I've seen a video about one of your guy. Oh, this was on TikTok. Everyone should follow me on TikTok because this is where I have fun little videos where I get to share like a job and how much it costs. It's so much fun. People get so fired up about the minimum price mow and that I'm charging over too much. I'm overcharging people. I'm ripping people off. Oh, it's so much fun. TikTok is a wonderful place for getting ripped to shreds in the comment section. My goodness. I've seen a video at one of your guys mowing and you charge your minimum of $32. How do you deal about non billable hours? I don't Know what you're asking there, junior. But basically our non billable hours, like it has to be figured into the cost that we're charging the customer per hour we're on the job. And so how do we figure in non billable hours? It's going to depend on so many variables like your drive time, your route density, all the rest of it. But basically in terms of. Yeah, I don't know what you're asking. Sorry. Pristine auto detailing. Yesterday's event session was much needed for me. I'm going through the same stuff and it's awesome to hear. I am not the only one. Keep up the great content. Yeah, like this. We're not, we're all doing this and just so funny like how people will, they think they're like, they're. They get bogged down and unfortunately when we get bogged down a lot of times we will isolate ourselves. When that is the time you need to reach out for help, that is the time you need to ask for help or you need to get advice or you need to go talk to another landscaper. And this is why in this industry I think it's not humorous. My God, it's not humorous. It's. It's sad that we don't communicate with other landscapers in our market. Cause we could really help each other a lot. But unfortunately we look at everyone as competition when it comes to labor and every customer and like we get all like that way and therefore we don't talk to each other. And you drive by people. It's like no, no, I'm not looking at them. Not looking at them like, like that is so silly. Like oh my goodness. If we just all communicated well, like a rising tide floats all boats. If everyone in your market was raising labor rates and raising the cost to the customer and charging more like you'd all make more money.

Dean, we have been doing four days a week, 10 hours per day. Problem is they go over on jobs, they're working 11 hours a day and then no one really wants to come in on Mondays, day off even are swamped.

That's the, that's the one thing I feel like 10 hour days can be a little bit. It burns people out and when you need them on a fifth day they're just so burnt out because they've been doing 4, 10 and so that's the one drawback. But there's also efficiencies. I totally get that. But you know, at the end of the day you got a staff to the point where when things go wrong you have capacity and schedule, if you possibly can, the last day of either four or five day schedule, schedule it a little bit less. Like we always try to make sure, like our routes for example for mowing end close to our shop at the end of the week. Right. So we work from like north to south in our county because we're on the south end of our territory. And so we try to work our way. So that way the last day if we're if a cruise behind or whatever, we can scramble and help finish the last few jobs on the routes. And so that's the advantage of cross training all our guys and having landscape and mowing. Everyone does it because if a project gets done early on a Friday, they're going to go out and just help guys mowing two or three jobs and they're going to be close to the shop. So it's not an inefficient route. They can just jump in a truck, grab a mower and be off.

Have the crews been loving not having to pull trailers and just use the ramp racks? Yeah, they like it. I think at the end of the day they just want to make more money. Right. So on P4P definitely right now like this week and last week, the grass is growing like crazy in our market. It's raining, it's wet. So they're not going to be big P4P bonuses. But even a couple weeks ago and like obviously in the future they're going to make a lot more money on P4P because of those. We standardized, we made sure all the billing or made sure that all the pricing was correct to actually match what a 30 inch mower and a trailer setup would would require. So they're going to make more money and at the end of the day they do like the fact, especially when they're in the downtown routes, they don't have a big trailer and they can just park in someone's driveway. Sorry. How do you factor in your non billable hours on a $32 mo? Again, it's very difficult to actually do that accurately because you're every single job. A$32 mo on one side of your territory is completely different than right next to your shop. Same $32 mo, same property, whatever it might be. So determining that as a function is going to be a bl when you start running numbers on your non billable hours for a specific job. Well, I'm going to be looking at more as out of eight budgeted hours that get done in a day, how many hours of work times let's say it takes 10 hours of work and they get eight hours of budgeted hours done. Like time completed, you know, estimated hours on the job site. That would mean that would impute a 20% inefficiency on that route or 20% of the time that they were clocked in was inefficient. That is the number I try to track and it's more immediate. And that's going to be hard to tack onto one specific job, especially as you add jobs into your route. What leaf blowers and string trimmers do you guys use? We use steel BR 600 and then.

111Rs for steel for the trimmers. I'm not really sure. I made it a point to wave to other companies in my area and approach them when they are out of. Out of their vehicle. Has led to some good new relationships. Yes. That is so important. Guys, we should all do this. You gotta wave to the other crews. I don't care. I don't like. It's just being a good person. Like I. It's just so funny to me how landscapers, when we drive by each other, it's like, like I just said, like you're just like, oh no, they're not there. And it's so funny to me how landscapers, when we drive by each other, it's like I just said, like you're just like, oh no, they're not there. And like you're like, look over this side. Or like you pretend you're on your phone. Like, come on, we're in the same industry. We deal with the same issues. Like, just wave. Be nice. You're correct, Mike. Gotta talk to your competition. Just had another guy that went full time this year reach out. There is too much work out there to not be friends with them. They are. They help more than hurt. How do you calculate P4P? Joseph King. Yeah. Basically give a percentage of the labor revenue to the employee. Landscapebusinesscourse.com goes through a bunch more, but basically we give a percentage of the labor revenue that they earn. They get that. That's the basic concept. And there's more fine details and it gets a little more complic on a project. For example, like what happens if there's three people? What happens if one person leaves halfway through the job? All of that is where the calculation side of things comes into play on landscape. Businesscourse.com Keith itch so glad that I took your advice and raised my prices significantly. My closing ratio didn't drop either. Should I raise it again? Getting Greedy on me. Keith, should I raise it again? Still booked out over two months currently. Potentially, you know, potentially. You raise prices again. I'm never, I'm never going to. Oh, Keith, this is the. Yeah, we had a call together. I remember now. Okay, so we had a consulting call like three, four weeks ago. I'm so happy. Great. Fantastic. You raise your prices. Let's go. And you didn't even see. I knew it. I told you raise your prices if you're booked that book that far out. So Keith was like, book like six or eight weeks out and raise your prices. And he was so nervous. The foreclosure ratio is going to. I'm so happy. Good. If you want to raise it again, I would. And then maybe in your mind you say, hey, look, after a certain amount of time that I'm Maybe I. When I'm booked out only three to four weeks, that's when maybe I bump the prices back down. For example. Right. Like this happens all the time. Like Uber, they charge extra when it's really, really busy. I forget what they call it. I forget what the Uber calls it, but they've charged more. When there's a bunch of people needing service, I. E. Demand is high. Demand is high in the spring rush. There's nothing wrong with charging a higher rate during the spring rush. Absolutely nothing wrong. And for like one time moe's or not one time mows. First time mo's are a little overgrown. And there's a more edging. Charge more. They're during peak season. It's like blackout dates on the airlines. Charge more. Matthew Etchy, for a new startup business in lawn care, do you recommend any good tools to pinpoint a good market area to focus on? Yes, the census. So these are the tools that I use for the franchise for determining territories. I look at the census information. I look at USPS using the every door direct mail campaign. I look at all the different neighborhoods looking for their age and income demographics. Look, then using the census, population growth or decline, real estate prices, average income, Average median income of a household Income is important as well.

What about when jobs are not profitable because of delays? I'm assuming you're talking about P4P. That's part of the game. Usually about one out of four. One out of five of our jobs go over budgeted hours. Part of the game. The other three or four out of the five they beat. So they make above base pay. So it's part of the game. They have to take that. They have to realize that there's a human that's doing the estimate. There's absolutely room for error based on the weather and all the rest of it. So we're doing a couple more questions here. But I really appreciate a. Like, I'd really appreciate it, like, if you like the Roundup. And next time, I promise I'll try to get someone on here to actually be a video with me and have a little more of a dialogue on these Roundup episodes. What book do you recommend right now? Just got done with the. Never Split the Difference. All right, let's see what book I am listening to right now. Let's see here. I know I'm listening to something. I have not had time recently. Oh, this one's decent. It's not great.

I judge books pretty quickly. This one. I've gotten through a couple hours on this one. Let me see if I can show you this. Oh, man, I keep showing. This one's pretty good. Oh, you guys can't see it now. It's called Start by John Acuff. Punch, Fear in the Face, Escape, Average Do Work that Matters. It's kind of fluffy, like, kind of like, you know, surface. But, you know, usually I don't like these books. I don't know if I'll actually finish this one. Let's see if there's one I have finished recently that's actually good.

Multipliers. I've already talked about that before by Liz Wiseman. That was a good book. Anyways, next question. How many lawns a day do you guys do? That's a bad question. I'm just joking. It's just so many variables I've talked about.