LAWN CARE: Turn Your Part Time Side-Hustle into a FULL TIME Business!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how you can take your part time side gig and make into a full time business, regardless of what industry you're in, especially if you're in the home services or running a lawn care business. Before we get into the show though, a big thank you to a sponsor, which is Gusto. If you're going to be going full time and needing employees, you're going to need to track their time and pay them direct transfer right into their bank account. So check out gusto.com/bootcamp. They're giving listeners of the podcast 90 days to try out their software completely free, does time tracking ach transfer directly into your employees accounts. And what's really cool is you can do all the onboarding documents completely virtually. We're actually working on using this feature right now. Check it out. They go to gusto.com boot camp. Okay, so today's episode is actually inspired by one of our franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care that recently went full time. So they came to training about two, two and a half months ago and was even two months, about two months ago and over from Michigan, had a really good job and they started building lawn care business on the side. And now it's come to the point where it's like, either you gotta go full time or you gotta really put the brakes on things because it's growing very quickly and you're basically working night and day. You're working during the day at your day job and then you're doing evenings and weekends and holidays and everything else in between on, you know, your business, your side gig, the thing that you're building. So he builds it up at about $10,000 in revenue last month. And now it's like, hey, if we're going to keep growing, I've got to go full time. So I want to ask you some several different questions. If you're deciding if you can go full time, can you afford it? And is the business going to actually be sustainable once you quit your 9 to 5? First things, first thing I would ask you is, are you, are you getting organic leads? What I mean by organic leads is are you having to pay for every single lead or are they coming to you? Whether it be through word of mouth referrals, people just finding you on your website and on Google, if they're coming in organically and you're having to pay for every single lead, that's a very good thing because that means that if you ever need to get more leads, you could always put the throttle back on advertising. But if you're paying for every advertiser, every single lead right now is coming from a Facebook ad or, or a Google Ad, or a door hanger or a flyer or an ad you put in the newspaper or whatever advertising you're using. I would be less confident going into starting your own business full time and cutting the cord with your 9 to 5 simply because you're now getting into a business of transactional value where you have to put money in in order to get money out because you have to get lead, you know, pay for advertising and then get, you know, a customer if they're coming to you natively though, or organically without that, because you're, you do a great job. Your clients tell their friends, their family, their neighbors about you. And now you're getting customers just for free. Like there's no customer acquisition cost. That is a very, very positive sign that it's time to jump ship. And especially if you are working day and night, working 40 hours at your regular job, then you're working another 40 hours on your side gig mowing lawns or whatever you're doing. Probably a good time to take the jump. Second thing I'd be asking you, are you not advertising or, or upselling current clients? So maybe you have 20, 30 lawns that you're mowing right now on the side on the weekends. And I would be asking you, are you not currently up trying to upsell them? Are you sending them one click estimate emails or emails every month that ask them for a different service, trying to upsell on gutters or on fertilization or on mulch or on trimming their bushes, all these other things that you could sell them. If you're not doing that simply because you're so busy, it's a really good sign that if you quit your full time job and started your, your business full time and focus just on that, that you have plenty of work. A lot of times people don't want to quit their full time job because the security that that brings in for the form of a paycheck and they're concerned that if they went and did their own thing, there's not going to be enough work. Well, if you're already really busy doing 20, 30 hours a week on your side hustle. But you're not actually tapping into your customer base trying to ask for referrals. You're not asking them for upsells. You're not, when you're mowing the lawn, you're not look, looking for the weeds that could be pulled and the bushes that could be trimmed and oh, like use some bark mulch right there, it's bare over there. Those are all opportunities to upsell the customer. And if you're not doing those now just because you simply don't have the time, that's a great indicator that you should be going and taking your business full time. Number three is, are you making more from the business than your job? If you're making a 20, $30,000 at your job and your business on the side is already making 40, $50,000 and in annual revenue, there's a really good chance that you should be able to make that jump without any sort of financial issues. That's a really good point. Also, especially a family or dependents to know that from day one you can get money out of the business, take a, take a paycheck and provide for your family. Very, very important. And if you track your numbers correctly, you'll be able to know that from day one when I quit my job, I can replace my income or with the revenues from the business. And not just the revenues, but the profits. So this is the beautiful thing about doing a side gig. I love when people start their lawn care business on the side. On the weekends and the evenings they get 15, 20, 30 mowing customers. It's a brilliant strategy to be able to soften the blow that is going to happen. When you go into full time business from day one, you don't have a bunch of money coming in, you don't have a bunch of customers lining up. So to be able to get through that awkward period of a few months of getting kind of the wheel started on the business is a great way to do that is through a part time gig, get 10, 15, 20 lawns. Even before you get incorporated, before you get a big a nice truck or get your licensing and your insurance, go get a few lawns, make sure it's what you want, make sure it's actually something that you can do and over time maybe it becomes a full time business. All right, number four, are we in four? Yes. Number four, how much more profit could you have if you quit? You got to ask yourself, okay, if I quit my job and I focused 100% of my time on the business, would that immediately lead to more revenue? Would it lead to me being able to upsell more people? Would it lead me to be able to do door hangers and do the five arounds, which is a door hanger you know, around all of my. The neighbors of my existing clients, would it lead me to have a little bit more time to do those things? And what would my revenue jump be to. So with D. Derek, the one I was talking about earlier that made this jump recently with Augusta Lawn Care, he believes that, and I believe very much we're going to go from 10,000 to 20,000 monthly revenue very, very quickly, probably next month, simply because he's going to go full time and quit his job. And, you know, on a small operation, a small business like that, your. Your gross profit is very high because you don't have a lot of overhead. Okay, that leads me into number five, and that is if. Do you. This is a question I would ask, do you already have the assets necessary to grow the business? What I mean by that is, do you already have the trucks? Do you already have the equipment? And if you do the asset utilization of it sitting in your garage or sitting outside while you're at your job is bad. Like, yes, you could get an employee and potentially they could be running lawns while you're at work. That's very, very hard to find employees that can do that. And it's very, very stressful to have employees out mowing lawns while. While you're at your job, trying to focus on getting your job done at work. So the question is, do you have assets like a truck, a trailer, equipment, all that sitting there ready to go? Do you have two trucks sitting there ready to go, ready to grow the business? You already have the assets required to grow the business, and yet you're only using it two or three hours in the evening, maybe a couple days on the weekend. Asset utilization. If your asset utilization rate is very low, it's a good sign that there's untapped potential in the business. Because if you have two trucks sitting there and you're working part time on the business, there's a very good chance that you could triple the revenue without having to buy more trucks, without having to buy more equipment, simply by increasing the asset utilization time of those. Those assets, the equipment and the trucks, and all the rest of it. Last one, number six. This is what I would do if I was you and you were part time and you're trying to figure out how to like merge over into full time. I would set a date on the calendar and book out as if you were full time from that date. For example, let's say today is July 1st, and I make the decision, you know what? I'm going to take this thing Full time. But I'm not 100% sure. And I will make sure that I'm going to have enough work. When I, when I go from part time to full time, this is what I would do. I would say, okay, July 1st is today. I am going to go full time. July 21st, that's three weeks from now. I'm going to go full time into my business. And what I'm going to do is, I got it. I got to give two weeks notice to my employer. Therefore, the latest I can give my notice is July 7th. So from July 1st to July 7th, what I'm going to encourage you to do is go out and sell, go and upsell all your customers. Try to upsell them fertilization and the treatment package, or the bush trimming or the mulch that they need, the weeding that's, you know, needs to be done in their flower beds. Upsell them on all those things and then book those jobs starting July 1st. So you're going to have the first week, July 1st to July 7th, where you're going to upsell. You're going to be a selling machine. You're going to be doing late, late days, you're going to be long nights, you're going to be working on the weekend like crazy. But what your goal is to do is to book your schedule starting July 1st as if you were full time. That will give you so much more confidence to walk into your boss's office and give your two weeks notice on July 7th, knowing that in two weeks, when you finish your two weeks notice, you have full time work and you're booked out already from July 1 to August, or sorry, July 21 to August 1, with already full time work. You're already going to have plenty of work because you actually booked the projects. You actually upsold the customers on those jobs that you could do if you were full time. Those are my recommendations. If you're part time and doing a side gig now, kudos to you. Don't get in a rush if you don't have a lot of money. It's a perfect way to slowly ease your way into the business without a huge amount of risk. Because if you start from day one full time without any safety net, without any, you know, you're starting at zero customers and you don't have a job, there's going to be a few months where you don't make money. There's going to be a few months where you might burn money actually trying to advertise and get customers. So having a side gig. Having a part time job mowing lawns is a great way to break your break in the market. Figure out the business side of things and then basically run yourself through these six questions to determine when can I go from a part time business into a full time lawn care entrepreneur? I'm Mike Andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse. Com and if you appreciate commentary like this, push the like button because I really appreciate it. We'll see you in the next video.