Lawn Care is HARD...

Not all unicorns, rainbows, and whatever else they say that crap.

Starting a lawn care business is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Lawn care is hard work.

Today I'm going to be showing you the behind the scenes of starting four brand new lawn care locations at the exact same time. And what happens when it comes to finding employees, retaining employees, and making sure they don't milk the clock throughout the day.

We're losing money.

They should have been done with this hours ago.

I can't teach you to be a good dude.

And some people ask why we show all the negative and the behind the scenes of starting a business. Honestly, it's because that's what real business ownership is, especially your first few years. The first year is very difficult.

Feeling pretty defeated today.

The first three years, very hard.

How hard do you want to work?

And now we're running into issues with employees and general managers. We're getting yellow slips and payroll bouncing.

Currently, we don't have enough money in the bank to cover payroll and yellow.

Slips and callbacks from customers.

You're going to be fired.

Starting a new location and finding new general managers and finding new employees and trying to grow a business from nothing is like creating something. And it's not easy. And that's what we're going to be covering today.

But it can get emotional.

We got to get it figured out.

Lawn care is up.

Without any further delay, let's go to Chuck, my regional manager out in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This is real life with Chuck right here.

All right. It is freezing this morning. I don't know about you guys, but in North Carolina it's like 50 degrees. And that's terrible for May. I'm freezing. This cold snap is wearing me out. And you never know. I'm from Ohio.

We have an amazing crew. That's kind of really what I'm touching on here. Not everybody has these, but there's a gas station here called QT. Quick trip. It's awesome. Most. I've ever handed out three $100 gift cards to the crew. Perfect attendance. In order to get perfect attendance, we start at 7:30. And we start at 7:30. That's it. Not 7:31. Not 7:31 in five seconds like it is. Literally when my phone says 7:30 and it rolls to 7:31, you're late. There's no deviations. There's no exceptions. There is. There's nothing there. There's not. It's. That's what it is. I. I don't. That is one thing I'm very on and the guys know. I tell them, I need two things from you. I need you to be upfront and honest with me, and I need you to be on time. If you can do those two things, we're good. You'll have a job here for a long time. Even if you're not the best mower, even if you're not the most technical with the weed eater or, you know, you're not the best pine straw installer, any of that mess. Like, I can teach you all those things. I can't teach you to be a good dude. You blow a sprinkler head with the mower or weed eat or whatever, or landscape lighting, whatever it is, tell me so we can tell the customer right away so they don't think we're trying to hide it. That's my biggest thing. Just be up for front, honest with me about everything and we're good and come to work and I'll. And I'll. I'll give you money. Like, I will give you money to show up to work. So three gift cards, 100 gift cards. It's the most I've ever handed out. We have five team members here. Let's see if they can keep it up. So far, so good. I'm gonna try to go 5 for 5 in the month of May. If all the guys have perfect attendance, that's massive. It makes the business go so much better. So we're gonna keep pushing. Hopefully they continue their great attendance because it makes the workflow go good and everybody's on time. We don't have to work Fridays, so they don't. We do. We us managers, we still do estimates and stuff, but, you know, hey.

We worked like 16 hours yesterday. From the time I woke up, was on my computer doing stuff at 5:15 till when I went to bed at about 9:15, worked non stop, was out in the field for 11 hours yesterday. It was a long day. Today's gonna be another long one ton of estimates. I gotta finish up a job for one of the guys that couldn't do it yesterday. With the way things are working right now, I have to take one of the trucks to go do a ton of estimates that are spread out all throughout our territory. So I'm going to send the two guys out mowing together. They're gonna try to bang out 18, 19 properties today. I'm gonna go finish up his job, do another job, and then do like 10 estimates. It's grind time right now. We'll get it. Let's get it today, boys.

All right, well, we lost one in Morrisville. Good kid. Liked him, did decent enough work. Unfortunately, he could not adhere to the attendance standards of Augusta, Lawn Care, Mooresville, and more importantly, myself and the team. So I let him go. Plain and simple. It is what it is. We move on. I'm very easy to get along with. You can ask any of the crew members or the general managers. I'm very direct. I am very blind. I am very matter of fact, which is to me, I would prefer. But I. I do not tolerate tardiness and I do not tolerate disrespect of other crew members. And he was tardy four times in his first month. The la. I gave him his third. Third strike and I said, hey man, this is it. If you're late again, you are fired. No idea where he's at today. So he's late. So it doesn't matter either way, he's fired. It's what it is. I'm pretty clear on that. And most of the guys appreciate it. As you guys all know out there, like, you got to hold that. And most of your employees will love that you have that standard. Because they don't want to work with people that show up. They don't want to work or that don't show up. They don't want to work with people that are lazy. And it is your job as a leader to hold that. And I do very, very dearly. That is my number one thing. I, I just don't. I just don't do well with it. I never have on to the hiring board that gives us 14 members in Mooresville. One guy's training to be the general manager slowly starting to give him things. But I can't. We don't have another training for Augusta until July, so there's only so many things I can off to him. And then we also then have. We have work, right? So should be interesting. Woo. Yay me.

It's funny, Connor Steed was just talking about this, about how, you know, clients expect us to be very timely. You know, we'll get rain delays, different things like that. And they're still mad that we don't show up to their house, even though we would tear up the grass, blah, blah, blah. But then people want to schedule drive by estimates for you. And so I had an estimate from 3 to 4 it is.307. Got to this house early, client answers the door and says, I'm on a meeting until 3:30. What do you want? What do you want me to do about that? So I got guys working today I dropped a guy off at a property and he's trimming bushes. I told him I'd be back in 20, 30 minutes. And here I am, going to have to wait 30 minutes just to talk to this client. I'm going to hope to make a good impression, hopefully win this job. It'll be a big mulching job. I kind of took a peek around the property. They want to talk about a few things and hopefully win them as a mowing client. So, you know, see what happens. Sit here and wait.

So fired a guy today in Morrisville just kept being tardy. Four tardies. Yeah, in six weeks. So puts us behind today because now he couldn't do his work today or his work tomorrow. The guys worked and crushed it today in Mooresville. Had people in the pipeline because I, I generally leave a free ad posted all the time on Indee. Need reach out to the crews, the four guys I have left and say, hey, anybody refers. 250 bucks cash in 30 days, another 250 bucks cash. If they make it 90 total, another 250. It's now 9 o' clock here in North Carolina. Hired command center, processed all the paperwork. Absolutely dominated on their end. Guys on board and ready to rock and roll. Already hired a guy. Stay on top of it, don't stress about it. Keep working your systems. Got a guy that starts on Friday or on Monday. So ready to rock and roll.

Well, it happened again. Ghosted by an employee. I mean, it averages once a month, once a month that an employee will quit. And this is not just in Mooresville. This is kind of lawn care wide. My wife is a corporate director of talent acquisition for a large, probably Fortune 100 company company. Thousands upon thousands of employees. And it's the same thing for them. It doesn't matter. Like, pay is not the determining factor. So all you YouTube wonderland people that say, oh, you pay your guys a livable wage. No, that's not how this works. Indeed. Did a survey that pay was like fourth or fifth on the consideration, right? So it's not pay we work like. And all you guys know out there though that lawn care is hard work. We work for a living. Lawn care is toug. It is a tough, physically demanding job and some people just don't work out. Now we'll go back to the drawing board. He's 45 minutes late. No calls, no text messages, nothing, Right. So move on. And I was so excited because on the first we gave out three 100 gift cards, right? So like our guys are averaging probably 22 to $25 an hour. We give sign on bonuses, we give referral bonuses, we give a hundred dollar gas cards for perfect attendance. But like they legitimately can up to probably $5,000 if you hit incentives. You did, you know, 10 upsells a year. You did like all these different things. You can hit four to $5,000 and bonuses just by upsells and things like that as, as a employee. So there's money to be made. There are crew members in Augusta nation making $50,000 a year to mow grass, like as crew members, right? So like, I mean it's, it's possible they just, it's, it's. How hard do you want to work? We'll go back to the drawing board, going to find us some good crew members and just keep plowing along, man. Like there's, there's not much else to do. We'll just keep moving forward.

Well guys, that's a 12 hour day. Sun setting, it is 7:30. We got here at 7 this morning. I mean this is what it takes. We're trying to scale to $400,000 in one year. So 400k revenue isn't gonna, isn't gonna happen on its own. Gotta get it done.

This is real life with Chuck right here. Real life with Chuck. Not all unicorns, rainbows and whatever else they say that crap.

Here's the deal going to me with a gm. He's got employees, which is a whole new dynamic for when you go from solo to having multiple employees. Now it becomes a scramble to get work. Gotta get work, Gotta get work, gotta get work. He's got about 45, 50 customers, which is fantastic in six weeks. The struggle is now it's a P4P issue. They're not quite as fast. They're not hitting P4P. Their thought is, well, I really gotta get hours, so I'll just go slow.

I'm feeling pretty defeated today. So I got the guys mowing today and today's mowing is also light. They had nine lawns today. I think they're through number six. You know, these guys are at like a 1.5 efficiency score.

Nine mows and they're still mowing. It's 2:30 in the afternoon. They should have been done with this hours ago. And they have two or three left to finish. And I can't do my job because I'm having to go back and fix things.

No, that's not how it works. Because then you become inefficient and there's a point where your inefficiency becomes so bad that your performance is now no good. Like their base pay is 18 doll no matter what their performance for P4P dictates. Cause they get a portion of the labor revenue.

I understand if we're at maybe 16, 17, $18 an hour and they're just not quite getting those P4P dollars every single day. But the fact that we're at almost 50%, we're at like 60% of base pay is just straight up unacceptable.

So right now they're averaging between 1150 and 13 an hour. That's what their performance earning. We're losing money and quite frankly we.

Don'T have, you know, the resources to be messing around with this. It sucks. It's getting kind of, it's getting kind of tight in the budget. You know, we have payroll next week and currently we don't have enough money in the bank to cover payroll.

So his whole thing is like, how do I approach it? He got a streak of yellow slips.

We have spent almost the last three hours now fixing yellow slips that have came in already for the day. And I just went and looked at this yard and the back was not blown off. It looks like it almost wasn't weed eated. Half of it wasn't edged. The quality is just terrible. And we're already losing customers one month into our business because we're not doing a good job. And so thank God, the second yell slip that we just left their property, they went back and fixed it. He's going to keep us on because I, I said I don't care how you guys do this, you guys need to fix this property. If it was me, I would restart start from zero. I would act like I'm just pulling up on this property for the first time. And the worst part was it was an initial MO so we get to build a client at A$33 per minute. They had no rush on that property and yet for some reason they tried to rush through it. They rush through things but then they're not hitting budgeted hours. It just doesn't make sense. So we have to go back to the drawing board and figure things out.

And when you get three or four of them and they come in pretty close, it can get, I don't want to say emotional, but it can get emotional, right? Like it can get frustrating. It can get very frustrating.

No one really sucks. I feel destroyed because like I've been working like 70 hour weeks and it feels like it's getting pissed away.

Feels like like all my hard work was, was for nothing.

It's little things like this. And so we're gonna have our meeting and we'll kind of talk and we'll go through this and we'll see. Right. Like, there just isn't a good way to approach it, to be honest. Like, some of it, I, I can't give you all the answers. I don't have all the answers. I, I never will. I can guide. This is what I have done in my 20 years of managing people.

I'm gonna take blame and assume that I need to train them more. And so we're gonna go back to the drawing board and I'm gonna, I'm gonna work with them individually again. But this is spring rush, I guess, you know, it just sucks. It's hard.

This, it's just different. Right? Like, you have to learn what to let go and what's important, what are sticking points, what to prioritize, what are going to be your non negotiables with employees? Are you okay with them going a little slower but having zero callbacks and complaints, or do you want them to bust hail, be crazy efficient, but get three to four callbacks in a week? It sucks.

We're going to have to be more strict. You know, been being pretty friendly with the guys, but I think.

I think I need to be more of a leader and, you know, be a bit harsher on them. So.

Yeah, we're gonna have a fun Monday morning meeting.

It's a balance that only you can dictate as a manager or an owner. Like what, what you want the happy medium to be. We'll see how the meeting goes. Like I said, he's got P for P questions on how to present that, how to present with them, what needs done as far as like coaching them up efficiency wise, tips on how to make them more efficient, how to manage them, how to talk to them. So it should be good. It should be a good meeting.

If this was my business, I'd be cutting my paycheck to keep them on because they both have families and have kids and wives. And I'm 23 and I have a fiance and two dogs. I can live on very little.

Blows. It sucks. All right, rant over. I'm done.

So somebody answered my prayers.

Pretty quickly after recording that video. We had a couple jobs get accepted, some landscaping work. So we got some mulch work. We're gonna get that done, keep the project revenue coming. We're gonna hopefully shoot for just over $20,000 this month. I think we can do it. The goal was 30. We're gonna be low. It's just not gonna happen. There hasn't been enough work. Had a serious talk with the guys last night. I think they got it. We. So I'm feeling a bit better. Sent them out mowing again today, and we're gonna see if they can do better. Their schedule is pretty light, so they have no reason for poor quality. But, you know, we do. We do want them going quickly and not just sapping the clock. That's the whole system of P4P. Today I'm gonna finish putting out the other half of these. These 1500 door hangers. We got about 700, 600 to put out. We're gonna get those out today. We need to get the density up, the route density, because these guys just need to make more MP4P. They need to be parking the truck and mowing 4, 5, 6 lawns instead of driving 10 minutes in between each lawn right now. Yeah, I just need more work for them so that they can see that this. This P4Pmoney is real. It's been kind of a battle because they haven't seen it yet. They haven't got a taste of it. So, you know, it's just a struggle to, like, tell them that, hey, this is their. But they're not. They're not really getting it. You know, they can only get close on projects. Mowing is really tough, so we got to get the density up. We're gonna get more customers. We're on our way to see Chuck right now. We're gonna see what goodness he has in store for our weekly meeting.

Yeah, hopefully all good things.