Mike Andes LIVE (Christmas Giveaway)

Okay, we're back. I think everything is good. I think Comcast literally went down and for some reason, my dongle went down. No idea why, but we are back in business. I do believe.

I don't know what's up. Yeah, everything just died. So let's see if this works. Hopefully it'll be okay. I have to switch WI fi networks probably.

But we will make this happen. All right, let's get this show back on the road.

Okay. Yeah. WI Fi. We are good. Chris. Thank you. Thank you. Everyone. Actually came back on. Okay, let's see if we can't get this thing back on the road. Let's go ahead and give away some course tickets. Actually, let's go ahead and give away landscape business course. So whoever calls in next was is going to get a free lifetime access to landscape business course. So feel free to call in if you have a question and then you will be the lucky winner of landscape business course. Let's see here. Why everything is just down today. I don't know what's up. We are in a snowstorm. I got to give some credit there, but everything is running very slow in terms of WI fi and everything. So I apologize if it's all messed up. I just. Yeah. Don't know why. So if you have a question. All right, let's get the first one here, coming from a 602 number. Welcome to the show. Can you hear me?

Yeah. Can you hear me?

I can hear you. Yes. How's it going?

Pretty good. You?

Good. Good. And what's your question?

Yeah, so me and a couple of friends actually just started a landscaping company a couple months ago, and we're just starting it up, getting a couple recurring customers on the. On our schedule. But, I mean, it's our first winter. I know it's gonna slow down, but do you have, like, any advice on how to handle it? Because, like, our business has gone. We started off good over the summer, but now it's, like, dropping a lot.

Yeah. Like, you know, as you get more and more recurring customers, the goal is to try to get them to stay on recurring services throughout the winter. That's always the dream. Right. And so we can usually get between 60 to 80% of our mowing customers to convert into what we call winter services, where we still come to their property every week or every two weeks, et cetera. But until that time, like, I would really recommend you. You just basically gotta get very creative with what other services you can offer. They can still trim most bushes, no gutter cleanouts. Great option. Potentially Even doing things like gravel or molten stall. But most people aren't thinking about those things. So you really just gotta get creative. Like, the gutter cleanouts can be. I know some people like. Like, for example, we just. At Augusta, we just made the. Our newsletter for gutter cleanups. Because a lot of times after January 1st is when it really dies off. Because November, October, November, December, you got leaf cleanups, bush trimming, people wanting their house to look good for the holidays, Thanksgiving, all the rest of it. Well, then after January 1st, it dies off hard. So something like gutter cleaning might be a good option for you. Have you done those before?

So I'm actually in Arizona and we don't really have a lot of gutter cleaning. Especially the areas that we. That we target. We don't have a lot of gutters. It doesn't rain over here. So what we've been trying a lot is tree cleanup. We, like, targeted just normal trees and then palm trees. That's what's keeping us afloat right now. And then our recurring customers that we were. That we got the rice seed with.

Yeah. Well, what's nice about in your area is you don't necessarily have a winter necessarily. So you should be able to. You know, I would really try to lean into projects a little bit more. And I know, like, you've probably been doing mowing, but when we say projects, like, it can be a whole host of other things in terms of whether it be, you know, installing gravel, taking out lawns is something that's something to think about in your area. And that's the only reason why I really like projects is to fill in the times when mowing does slow down. Right. So I would lean into the project side of things a lot more. And what's really cool is because you called in, you're going to get a free membership to Landscape Business course. So if you could email me@landscape businesscoursemail.com and then I will give you access code to get into that. And I think that'll help too, with as you kind of grow the business and make it more legit.

Okay, and then what was the. What email do I send that to?

Yeah, it's just landscape businesscourse gmail.com. do you got that? It's in the description of your other video, too.

Okay, awesome. And right there. Because another thing that we've been struggling with is also marketing.

Yep.

Yeah. They'll give you a lot of different ideas in terms of just templates and what to do, what not to do, and when you're first getting started. A lot of it is you have a lot of time and not a lot of money. So it's going to be more of that, you know, hand to hand combat, knocking on doors, doing door hangers. But then it'll also kind of talk about, you know, advertising from Facebook, Google, all the rest of it. So I think you'll enjoy it and I'll send it over to you later today. Just email me so I can get that to you.

Okay, awesome. Thank you for everything you got.

Take care. Bye. Bye. All right, next caller is from here. Next caller is from Spokane, Washington.

Let's see, pull in. Hello, Spank Spokane, Washington, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Hey, how's it going?

Good, good. Yeah, I just had a question. Like, is there like a certain number that I, I should be spending on marketing? My business should be spending on marketing.

How, how big is your business now, like in terms of revenue?

Well, gross, we just did a little over a million.

Okay, and do you do mostly snow plowing over in Spokane or kind of a mix of that and then landscaping during the summer?

Yeah, it's mostly just mowing in the summer and then just very minor landscaping.

Got it. And then are you wanting to grow top line revenue or just trying to like do more, be more profitable? What's kind of like the goal for the business growth or are you getting out? Trying to get a daily operations? Like what's the goal?

I'd say the goal is more trying to grow a specific division. Like I feel like we've done, we do a lot of mowing, but I want to grow more of like the sports spray side of it.

Cool. And then how many mowing customers do you currently have? I'd imagine a couple hundred at least.

Yeah, probably around 2, 300 weekly clients.

And have you marketed them yet when it comes to the spraying and the treatment side of things?

Yeah, I just started doing because a lot of my customers are big HOAs, big commercial properties. I'm just starting to get more into the residential side of it.

Oh, I got you. Okay, so when you say 2 or 300, are those like a lot of HOA properties then?

Yeah, we do. Yeah, a lot of HOAs, a lot of big businesses.

I would recommend because I, I like the sequence of going from mowing into the, the spraying, treatment side because really immediately you should be able to market to a lot of your existing mowing customers and convert a lot of them into treatments because you're already on their lawn, you already have done work with them, treatments are relatively easy upsell for a percentage of people that actually want their lawn looking really, really nice. So I would really focus especially that first year to kind of kick things off. If you're doing Even let's say 4 or 500,000 in revenue just for mowing, let's just say, for example, there's just no reason why you can't immediately have 150,000 in spraying and treatments just by marketing to your existing customers. Because there's always a subset of them that are going to want spraying at such a high margin service that you can, it's relatively easy. Like I would put together a couple of packages, I would send them an email with a couple options with a button for which one they want and then you know, make a really low hanging fruit one. Like for example, you could say, hey, if you want no. 1 spray in the spring for weeds, click this button. If you want a four treatment package with all these other things with aeration and detachment. Or here's a, and then here's like a nine or ten step program that's going to be like the end all, be all of treatments and then just literally just have a button for them to click or potentially have some other way for them to communicate what they want. And that usually will convert pretty big. However, you have a lot of HOAs, so I'm assuming that's a lot of stuff in the contract. Am I right on that?

Yeah, yeah. We do a lot of spraying already for those clients. We did, we did pick up a, I'd say probably 150 residential clients this year alone. And we've slowly converted a few of them, but not as much as I wanted to.

Yep. Did you do any sort of.

A lot of them were kind of like, well, we are, we're already.

Go ahead. Sorry.

Oh yeah, like a lot of the residential customers we picked up, they were like, oh, we already have a spray service. So I'm hoping this year I can convert a little bit more of those.

Yeah, I just try to beat, beat those other companies to the punch. So right when you're telling them, hey, we're going to start mowing, let's just say April 1st, I would send at the beginning of like March and just say if you want to add on your, you know, treatment package, click these buttons below or give us a call or however you want to do that and just try to get that easier upsell at the beginning of the year. But residential is an easy drop. Sell into treatments like, like and are you going organic or do you have your, your certification? Like what, what's your, what's kind of your pitch for the spray side of things?

Yeah, we're all, we're certified, so we kind of do a little bit of everything. We don't really do much organics, but yeah.

So, you know, it's just a matter of like I, I just really focus on creating those packages and then I try to upsell the existing customers. Then it's a matter of, okay, well how do I get new customers for just treatments? Right. But I would really go after your low hanging fruit first, which is you've already done business with them, you already do their lawn. But then even if you look at your database, you probably have a couple thousand, I would imagine, emails and contacts. Like that's again just another massive opportunity that I would go after before I spend a single dollar on marketing is how do I send them an email, how do I send them a newsletter, how do I do something to convert them into the treatment side? Because that's going to be your lowest hanging fruit and that would immediately, I think do 150,000 revenue just by trying to upsell them before I go spend money on actual ads to get cold leads to become, you know, customers for this treatment side. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, definitely.

Cool, cool. Are you able to make it to Landscape Summit this year? I know you're relatively close, but you also have snow, like the whole pass and everything.

Yeah, no, we're not going to be able to. Yeah, we're just, we've already, just in the last week, we've already had like four or five snow systems, so we're, we're staying busy.

Oh, good, good, good. Well, stay in touch with me, let me know how that goes with the rollout. But I would just, I'd say double down on the low hanging fruit of not just your mowing customers, but also just people in your database. Because at your size of business, you have so many people in your database that are warm that you've either done business with or even they just asked for an estimate. So I would really exhaust that before I even try to go into, you know, getting more ads or advertising of any sort to get new customers.

Okay, definitely will do, man.

You got, brother. Take care. Have a good one.

Awesome, thanks. You too.

All right, next up in the calling queue, the call. The call list is now full, so if you call in, it might just stay busy, but I'll just keep pounding through these. Next one is from Hernan, Virginia. Let's go and bring them in the show. Welcome. How's it going?

Hey, Mike, how you doing?

It's good. What was your name?

Carlos.

Carlos, welcome.

Hey, man. Hey. I just had a question. We've talked before. I don't know if you remember me. I just have a question. I asked you just right now about.

You know, for like the general manager, you know, like. Like percentage. How much you. You would give a percentage, you know, from the. From the net profit, like on a quarterly basis.

Yep.

Yeah. So, like, you know, I. I do anywhere from 5 to 25% for general managers in terms of profit sharing a quarterly basis. And that really varies based upon how involved I am. Right. So if someone, if I'm. If I'm. If I was an owner and one of our franchises, like, hey, how much should I give this person? They're really, really good. They're kind of like my second in command. They do a lot of project management. They do some estimates. Maybe for me, I'd be like, at 5%. If I am there every day working 40, 50 hours. If I'm out in the field doing stuff like that, that's where I would be at. Whereas if someone is like a couple of my general managers run the entire thing themselves. They do all the marketing, all the hiring, they do all the project management. They talk to me, you know, occasionally, but not very much at all, then they're going to be at 25%. So it's really gauged by how much involvement I am in the business. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, because I had one, a guy that he, you know, he was actually really happy this year because he got P4P. And so he was like, okay, well. And I offered him like a thousand a week, but he said, okay, well, you know, with P4P, you know, I end up making more than that, at least in the springtime. But kind of like, you know, he, like, let's say, like at the end of the year, it's pretty much, you know, maybe 25 to 30,000. But if he were to make a thousand per week, that would be, you know, 48,000. So. But it still wasn't, like, interesting to him. So, you know, he really likes the bonus thing. So how would I kind of make it so that it sounds interesting, that offer, you know.

So are you saying that you're. Basically the percentage you're giving him is not appealing? Like, it's not high enough for him to be interested? Are you giving him an and or like, he either has to do P for P or profit sharing?

Well, no, I mean, I told him that, you know, it'd be a, you know, a thousand a week. And I had told him he just didn't really know how much percentage he'd be, he'd be making. But you know, if I said 25%, he'd probably be, you know, very interested. I just want to make it so that he's interested because he had said he wanted like 1400 a week. And that just sounds like a bit much.

Yeah, well, it just depends like if he's, if he's mowing out in the field doing labor's work, it's probably a lot. But again, that's why P4P is important. Because if he wants to make 1400, great, you've got to go kick butt every single day in order for that to happen and be worth it. Now if he's a manager and he's doing estimates and things like that, then I have to ask the question, like, why is it so complicated in terms of our systems that we need someone to pay them $1,400 a week to go do estimates, right. Or to project manage. Like we've got to simplify the systems if we're going to ever be able to pay a salary that we're going to actually be profitable on. Because paying someone $1400 a week and you have, how many employees do you have? Five? Six?

Yeah, yeah, like, like five or six employees. And then an owner and then if someone making fourteen hundred dollars a week, that business will not be very profitable. And so like, then there's not gonna be any profit sharing to be had. Right? Profit sharing only comes about if the business is profitable. Right. And so, you know, you don't want to hang out profit sharing in front of people like dangling a carrot in front of a horse. And they never get it. It just, it makes you sound stupid because you're always trying to incentivize them with something that doesn't exist. So when you, when we implemented profit sharing, it was only after we were very consistently profitable, where I knew every quarter there'd be profits. That's why I institute it. Because otherwise it just, it's just hot air that you're telling employees like, oh, you're going to get this profit sharing. We should care about how we do efficiency because profit sharing, it doesn't mean anything. It was an actual number. And so I would really be encouraging you to do one of two things. Either a, if you really want this guy and he's going to be an all star down the road, you, you believe that he could potentially run the whole business. Then it's a matter of, okay, well maybe do I sacrifice short term profits and give him fourteen hundred dollars a week so that down the road I can leave the business. But I wouldn't be paying someone $1400 a week as base salary in a management position unless I was doing $2 million a year in revenue because I would want the majority of the day to be performance based.

So if he was just working as a general manager, you know, pretty much doing this half guy, do you know, estimates and you know, just pretty much what I'm doing right now, do you think it would just be a good, you know, a thousand dollars at 25 net.

Percentage per, per quarter?

It just depends on what you know, because you're gonna be the only person that knows what that 25% actually going to entail. And the problem and the legitimate argument he's going to have is that you can go buy a truck and eliminate the profit immediately. So it's really still a very subjective. Profit sharing is very subjective, right? And so if you have the ability to go buy a truck at the end of the quarter and wipe out profit, like you're going to lose all trust with him. But on the flip side, you know, the business needs it. So like it's a very subjective thing. So profit sharing is. And that's why P4P and something else besides profit sharing needs to be the driving force of a business if you're making the decisions. Now, for example, when I'm giving 25% of profit to a general manager, they make the decisions, right? So if they are going to buy a truck, they know it's going to hurt them in the short term, but it's going to set them up for bigger growth down the road, which will lead to more profits and they're thinking more long term. So if, but if you're making the decisions, you're basically able to manipulate their profit sharing. And that's not, in my opinion, very good for an employee. It's not good for you. And usually there'll be friction there, right? So when a manager comes to me like hey, I want to buy something, it's like, hey, it's up to you. Like you know the ramifications on your short term profit sharing. But you also know that could potentially set you up for bigger growth, right? So I think it's just the balance that you, as the owner, I would recommend, you know, if this person is not willing to do P4P out in the field and is not willing to Go work out in the field. Like, I don't think your business is ready for it. You only have five, six employees, and you're looking for someone to come manage the whole thing. Or if he's just helping you now, like, then he should be on a lower salary.

Okay, okay. So you're, you're saying.

Like, if he were to do the whole. Manage the whole thing, it would be a salary, like, let's say like a thousand a week.

I would do a thousand a week and then profit sharing. And if he's running the whole thing. Because I know your situation some somewhat, Carlos, and so, you know, if you're gonna run the entire thing for you, I would start him at a thousand per week. I don't ever want my base to be more than that. I want everything in addition to that to be bonus, and I want it to be based upon profit. And again, though, that's him running everything. That means the chunk of his paycheck, a big chunk of it is coming from his decisions to whether to grow, to market, to hire. And if you're making those decisions, it's. It's very counterproductive because you can manipulate what that profit is on a quarterly basis.

And so when he says, oh, yeah, but sometimes I'll have. I'll be working like 60 hours, and it's at a thousand, that means I'm only making, you know, that's why I.

Don'T like salary very little. That's why I don't like salary. I'd still keep people on hourly. I keep people on our. There's only one person out of any. Let me try. I'm saying that, right? There's only one person out of all of my businesses that is on salary. I still want hourly. So when they work really hard and they work overtime, they're getting. They're getting overtime. And if I need to move their hourly rate up, let's do it. But I'm going to make sure that it's hourly. So the harder they work, the more money they make. And then I'm going to put at the much as possible based upon performance.

And you would pay a. You would pay a general manager hourly.

So take that back. You're right, I misspoke that my general managers are on salary plus profit change. So you're 100% right. I, I forgot about my general managers. So they are on salary, but they make all the decisions the business, right. So if they want to take off for the week, they can. Like, they don't ask me like, oh, I need to have a vacation this week. They don't ask me. It's up to them 110%. But they're making that decision knowing that's going to hurt them in the short term. On profit sharing. Right. So that's gotcha. The only way I'd put someone on payroll is, are like on, on salary is if I completely trust them to make up any schedule they want and do anything in the business without my involvement. If they have to ask for vacation time, I don't really feel like they should be on salary. That's just my opinion. I should. They should only be on salary if they make all the decisions in the business and they can determine when and where and what they do. So that just, you know, my general managers and one other person is the only person that would ever be on salary.

So pretty much your general managers have as much freedom as you did when you were in that same position.

That's what I want a general manager to do. I want them to feel like it's their business because if I'm giving them 25%, a quarter of all profits and they don't have to take any of the upside, the risk on the upfront, if I'm giving that much to them, I want them to treat it like their own. Right. And there's just no way you do that by saying like, okay, you got to ask me when you're off and give me times. So I give them a ton of liberty. There's like, go for it, right? You're going to get a base salary which is not very much for a general manager. But the opportunity to make six figures is there in two years if you execute. And then that's, that's the tension. If they want to go take a four week vacation, okay, it's fine, but you're not getting any profits this quarter probably because you're going to probably not be around and that's going to hurt you this year. So like, it's their decision then. Right. And that's when it comes down to my, my prerogative is I either hire them or I fire them. And that's my decision. So if they're not working out, they're not pushing it, then I go fire them. Right. But at your size of business, Carlos, I would not be looking for a general manager. If you're going to be there, if you're going to leave, I'd be trying to get as low a base salary as possible with a higher upside for them. And if you want to tie that to other metrics besides profit, because they're not super profitable. I'd just be very cautious. But that might be what you need to do if you are in a pinch where you have to leave because.

You just do not want someone that is in. In a management position not thinking about the bottom line, only.

Merry Christmas. Stay in touch with me, though. Like, you know, we're going to talk a lot about at conference, and when it comes to multiple locations, that's some. One of the breaking points. You have to essentially. You essentially have to get a general manager and you have to put someone on salary. You have to put. So I talk a lot about conference. We're talking about doing multiple locations. And then in P4P, I talk about a lot about profit sharing. So the book is coming out. It's not for sale or anything. So let's go ahead and go to the next caller from Victoria, British Columbia. Let's go in three, two, one. All right, we're live. How's it going?

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Good, good. You guys got some snow there? You got any snow there today? We got small.

We're done. Smoke? Yeah. Getting snow here over the weekend, over Christmas. That. Yeah, that's where my first question comes in. I wanted to get your thoughts on, like, I'm trying to convert some of my clients to contracts, and for us, we get, like, very little snow. So I was wondering your thoughts on including, like, free snow removal.

Yeah. What I would do, especially in your market, because you're similar to ours, is try to get your recurring mowing services on winter services, and then just include it like, hey, if there's snow on the ground, we'll plow or we'll salt. And then that way you could keep them on more of a contract that's more consistent. That. Yeah, because like, in our area. I know your area. My area, people are not used to paying a contracted price at the beginning of the year for all of their snow plowing. They're just not used to that. Whereas if you go to, like, Ontario, Michigan, you know, they're like, hey, I'll pay $2,000 up front. And then you got to come whenever there's snow. Basically, in our market, it's just not like that. Right. So if you want more recurring work, you've got to try to figure out how do I sell to my mowing customers a winter service where I still come on a weekly biweekly basis, and I either turn the bushes, pull the weeds, check the gutters, trim bushes off the house, pick up Branches blow out the bushes blow out, the leaves out of the beds. And then if there's snow on the ground, I'll shovel it and I'll salt it. Right. So that's the direction I would be trying to take it from. If you're focusing on residential.

Yeah, yeah. It's my first, first winter in business, so I'm trying out the snow removal thing. But I'm also over the winter working on writing up some contracts for my clients and expanding on that. I got a couple more to fire off on you real quick here.

Go for it. And also, also, also I want to do. You're gonna get the. The full subscription to Lawn Care Media. So that has all of the. The door hangers, the flyers, the postcards, all those designs. So if you could just email me once you get off the call, landscape businesscourse, gmail.com I will get you to set up with that and that will set you up for next spring for sure.

That is awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. That'll help me out with. I have so many expenses coming up on website building and all this other stuff too, GST and all that. But yeah, for younger guys, like, I. I guess you're a little bit older than me. I'm 23. But what are your thoughts on hiring older guys? I've been having trouble trying to find experienced guys who are young, and I just don't want to hire someone who's a lot older than me and end up button heads with them or they not listening to me or wanting to do things their own way when I have. I had horticulture experience through college and I've been doing this for eight years. And I'm just worried about if I hire someone older than me, they'll kind of look down on me in a way.

Yep. You know, so I. I dealt with this, you know, for a long time and. And it's only now that some of the people that we hire are younger than me. That being said, I'm no longer doing the hiring, to be perfectly honest. So. I know. It's like when you're actually the one interviewing, doing all of that and you're hiring people that are twice your age. Right. I've done that. So the thing is this. If you think about it and you make it a big deal, that's when it becomes a big deal for them. Right. That's just my opinion. Right. Probably wrong. But like, for me, I just never thought about it. Deal in my head. I never made no. Never talked about it. I never, like Got nervous about it. Like, I had to deal with it all throughout school, though, because, like, I was 13, 14 years old, going to college. So, like. But it never, like, came a big deal to me because my parents never talked about it. We never. They never made a big deal of my age. And so I just thought it was very normal. And I never talked about with students and things like that. So I think it's your level of maturity. And, you know, yeah, people might know your age, but if you're mature, you speak like a good leader. You have team meetings, you know your numbers, you're organized, you work hard. That's what people want to see in a boss, in my opinion. They're not really too concerned about your age. Yeah, like, when they get their W2 at the end of the year, how much money they made for the year, it does not say your age on there. It just says how much money you gave them. Right. And that's what they're usually going to be concerned about. And typically, if someone's super insecure about your age, it's probably not going to be a good fit for you either way. Like, even if that person was. If you were older and then it would work out, there's probably other insecurities that would lead to them not being a good leader down the road for, like a management position. So I wouldn't be too concerned about that.

Yeah, exactly. All right, I got one more. What should I be worried about? Uh, if I've expanded. Like, I've expanded so fast over the last year, I've had to turn down a bunch of work. But what were some issues that you had with fast expansion and what should I be worried about or focused on?

Yeah, I think you gotta realize that you're probably more price elastic than you think. Like, you can raise your prices without losing customers.

And especially if from a financial standpoint, that's been. It's been a struggle. Like, you've got to relay. How many million customers do you have now?

I have about. So some of my work is subcontracted out. I got one guy who just. He gave me about 15 clients when I first started out. And then I had gotten. My first month, I spent about 500 on Facebook ads and I got about 40 of my own clients. So, like, right off the bat, within the first few months I was working. This was right in spring rush, I was working 10 hours a day, seven days a week, some weeks trying to catch up on all those. But right now I have. I honestly, I should do more book works. I probably have around 60 or so regular, BI, weekly and weekly MO clients and hedging and whatnot.

Yes. Like, I would double down this coming spring. You could easily double that. Like, if you just did as good as you did last year, you'd be at 120. So let's just assume, though, that we go into the spring and instead of just starting everyone up, just raise everyone's prices. 5 to $10 per cut. Guarantee you you'll keep 50 out of the 60. Guarantee it. And that $10, whether it's subcontracted or you do it, is going to be literally doubling your profit margin. That's going to give you more confidence to then go actually grow. And now when you grow, your prices are going to be higher. So you're actually more sustainable. Right. So many of us, like, like, we think if we raise our price just a little bit, we're going to lose customer. It's not true. Like, you'll keep more than you think.

Yeah. Yeah, I should. I've been meaning to. That's what something I'm going to do over winter, once we hit spring, is send out a big email, call my cl. Changes that are going to happen, and one of them is going to be that raising of prices. Anyway, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but that P4P book, is that coming out to the public or how do I get in on that? I just have to. I want to come down for the conference. But Covid and everything and all these other expenses.

Yep. No, the 16th. 16th January, it'll be available on Amazon for ebook, the. The actual hard copy, and then also the audible program, so.

Awesome. Audible is my thing. All right, Mike, thank you so much.

You got it, brother. Good to hear a Canadian voice. All right, let's go to. Let's see here. There's a couple of people been waiting a while. Let's go ahead and go to Shreveport, Louisiana. Gamez, I believe. Gomez. Sorry. Welcome to the show.

Hey, how you doing? Good.

You sound like you got a lot going on. You got sirens behind you.

Yeah. Can you hear me good?

I can hear you. Yeah. You're fine.

Okay. Yeah, I had to step out a little bit. I was here in line getting my haircut. Hey, man, just a good question, man. I got the opportunity to hop in this line. I wanted to take advantage of this. I know this doesn't come too often that you're here taking calls. So.

Can you hear me good now?

I can hear you. Yep.

Okay. Yeah. So. Oh, Mike, my Question is, we've been. We've been in business for a few years, and then last year, you know, we kind of went. I kind of went full time with just being another guy. And this year, thank God, it's been a great year. You know, we've doubled our. Our profit from last year, and now it's four of us, so me and three other guys. And this next year, I'm kind of trying to kind of follow the same trend and, you know, continue to grow, double our. Our profit and go with, you know, instead of being four of us, I want to. I want to try to get three more guys, three to four more guys set up for March, you know, when business really starts to kick in. So I was just trying to get some advice. I'm kind of asking people and just, you know, I'm just trying to pray about it, make sure that I'm making the right decision and I have peace in the decision that I make. I know it's. It's a really hard decision to make. Even though, you know, you're growing.

Still, of course, more headache and things. Things to worry about. So I kind of just wanted to get your idea, man, kind of see what you. What you thought and what kind of advice you can give me.

Sure. When you say you want to double last year, were you profitable enough to do that? Like, do you have enough net cash flow right now to be able to go get a couple more trucks? Probably have to upgrade your storage area, things like that?

Yeah, so that's. That's one of our issues now. I mean, we do have the money to, you know, you know, buy a few more mowers and. And, you know, two more trucks. Well, I think we actually. I actually have another one older truck that I'll. I'll use for myself, and then I'll just use the truck that I'm using now. I'll put it. I put it, you know, with one of the crews. So we do have that.

I really haven't really added it up what it would take. I know it takes a lot more money, you know, especially having to. To provide for the. The cost of labor, you know, for those first couple of weeks until we get rolling.

So, I mean, you know, one of our things that I'm.

That I look at the most is that we have never advertised any. I mean, we. This year we probably spent a hundred dollars advertising if maybe $200. That's just, you know, I think we ran a Facebook ad for Christmas lights here in like, September and then one before. But you know, we didn't really get much work out of it. So most of our work is coming from word of mouth. So I'm thinking if, if I can really, if we can really focus on that, on advertising, on marketing, things like that, I think we could, you know, definitely bring in a lot more work.

Yeah, for sure. Like, I, like, this is where I'm at. And that is only, you know, kind of financially, what kind of pressure you would be to get to two more trucks, three or four more employees, et cetera. I'm of the opinion that when you kind of hit that, you know, 4, 500, $600,000 marker that you're kind of up against right now, that taking one year or even three months, raising your prices and just really getting cash flow nailed is not a bad idea. It usually will lead to less headache.

Okay.

Because like if you go into next spring, let's, I'm just making up numbers and you don't need to share numbers. So let's just say though, you have $40,000, $50,000 cash ready to go. Like by the time you buy a couple trucks and you get go and employ a few more people, you're going to be under such financial pressure, even if you go get debt on those things and you got to put some money down or whatever, you're still gonna be like, your payroll is going to be $10,000 every two weeks, right? So you're going to be under a lot of financial pressure which will then usually lead to short term actions in the business. You'll go get a big project because you're running out of work and that project you have no business doing. You'll go hire someone that you don't really, you really shouldn't. But because you bought the two trucks, you want to fill them up and you got all this work coming in. So you start making short term decisions because financially you've made a, you've just stretched yourself too thin. So only you can make this decision. And that is, do I just take the first three months of next year? March, April, May. I'm going to raise all of my prices. I'm going to really zero in on the services that I want. I'm going to like simplify things. I'm not, I'm going to actually say no to some of these customers coming in because they're just the type of jobs I, I always get into trouble in. I can't let my crew do by themselves. Because when you go from three to four employees like you have now, you can be on Every project that's complicated, when it goes to seven, eight employees, you can't be. You've got to figure out project management videos so that way you can show them the video of the job before you go. You don't have to show them every single project in person. Those. That's a big step from three to four to seven to eight. Right. So it's not a bad thing to take three months, be like, hey, what services are we going to focus on? Here are the prices we're going to charge, we're going to raise them. That's going to slow down growth a little bit. Yes. But now when you go into month four or five, when you go into June, July, August, you're to know what projects you want to do. You're going to have the systems to simplify the business so your employees can do the work without you having to be there. And that's extremely important. Right. So I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think only, you know, the financial kind of pressure that growing to that stage is going to bring. Because going from where you're at now to four and adding four more employees basically will wipe out the profit, the net profit, all from a cash basis for 2022, you doubling the business, getting a couple more trucks, four more employees, the amount of equipment you're going to need, you will basically wipe out your profit, which is fine because you're double in size of business. The question is whether or not that's going to put pressure on you financially and personally and in your, you know, family to the point where you start making dumb decisions. And that's what I see a lot of times.

Right. Wow, that, that, that's so good. Yeah, I mean, I thought about it that way, but I mean, now you, now that you're saying, I mean, you know, there was pleasure this year, you know, with us growing double the tires and not really trying to. I think it's just, it just came that way just from the work we were getting. And. Yeah, that's another thing that I know, I know we have to focus on is just staying low, like even though.

The money could be good or whatever, but it's not really our. And I know, I've watched videos of you and explaining how we can just focus on the services and, and most simple services, you know, that doesn't take up a whole lot of knowledge, you know, from people that, that been doing it for years. And I can see us getting some of that. We've been getting some of that Work that, you know, I have to be there the whole time or, you know, my brother, which is helping me out, kind of has to be there because it's just we need more experience, you know.

And so a lot of times people will do.

Yeah, I appreciate you.

They will put themselves financially kind of at a thin line because of growth, for the sake of growth, but they don't realize that that growth creates bigger problems. And that is going to be the fact that you can't be in every project. There's going to be projects that are complicated that you still can't get to because you've got to go do enough estimates in the day to fill the crew schedule so you can't be there. So then things start falling through the cracks. That's when people start like literally, you know, falling apart mentally because they're working so long, so many hours, they're financially stressed out. And so it's not a wrong thing to say, hey, for a few months we're going to start slim back on services which will reduce demand and then we're going to raise prices which will also reduce demand. And then we're going to grow from there in a profitable manner in much more systems and like controlled growth because we know what services we're doing and which ones we're not. And before I let you go, could you email me? I want to set you up with the MBA for entrepreneurs course that I got because it's going to help with a lot of the stages, like next year and beyond. Right. Like really once you start scaling and really some of the more in depth business stuff. So if you just email me landscape, businesscourse, gmail.com, i will set you up with that later today.

Okay, awesome. Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely do that, man. I appreciate your time, man. Appreciate you what, what you're doing for, for this industry. You know, it means a lot to have someone like you that really shares everything, man. I mean you're. I know, I know I talk so much about you with, you know, other people here locally in Shreveport area. And I mean you're a great person that, you know, if you don't know much about, I mean you, everything's free. I mean like your videos, you know, time like this that you, you're investing, man. It's awesome. So I'm really, I appreciate what you do, man, for all of us. I know a lot of people think the same, so keep doing what you're doing, man.

Thanks, brother. Merry Christmas, brother.

All right.

All right. Bye bye.

Have a restful Man, Cool.

All right, so the call Q is full. I'm gonna get to the next question or next caller. But we got three more tickets we're giving away to Landscape Summit. So Warren with an area code of 727, he's gonna get a free ticket. David from area code 503, he's gonna get a free ticket. And Joel from 778, he's gonna get a free ticket. So these are all people that submitted, uh, just they were in need and viewers of this channel donated tickets. They bought tickets at Landscape Summit co and said, hey, I'll just donate this to somebody. So thank you to everyone who donated. I'm not going to say your names and I don't think you did it for recognition. So thank you so much though. And for those of you who are getting free tickets, you guys are awesome. Let's do two more and then we'll hop into the calls. The caller queue is full though. Let's go ahead and jump into those actually real quick. Next caller is from a four six nine caller ID. Let's bring them into the show. Welcome 469. I don't know your name, I apologize.

It's Justin Drama down here in Dallas, Texas.

Justin, how's it going?

Hey brother, quick question.

About the estimators. Your quick opinion on it? I've got an estimator that I pay strictly salary. And what's your, what's your take on salary or straight salary based pay? I mean this guy's out here killing it and he's making about 15% per job. He sells. Everything that he's getting is coming in house through our channels that we, that we market for and trying to make a few changes to maybe help benefit me more on that side. Just trying to get a quick opinion on what your thoughts on that.

Totally.

Right. What's the, what's the revenue total for the business in 2021?

2021 we're peaking about nine, about 900,000 this year. Last year, this is our second year, one was 300 and this year is nine.

Awesome. And then you're expecting what in 2022 you're about to say?

I'm shooting over a million.

Cool, cool. All right. So what's your role in the daily operations? Do you do basically everything besides the estimates?

My role in the daily operation now is to customer service, production field production, running the jobs. I've kind of put the load on him a little bit more jobs, you sell more, you have to run these jobs. And so trying to push it towards a project manager slash estimator.

So this is my concern with giving an estimator a percent, a percent of the jobs they close.

And that is they have perverse incentive to basically sell the job under budgeted and they're less inclined to worry about the profit. And this is a bigger deal if you start paying your employees based upon performance because they're going to be paid based upon how many budget hours are on the project. And then I'm also concerned because if they're getting a percentage of say 15 of a job, then they're very inclined to go sell a big job and potentially a job that we shouldn't be doing. Go ahead.

That's what I mean, he's, I mean he's making eight to ten grand a month. I mean these jobs that we're getting in aren't ten thousand. I mean they're not fifteen hundred, they're twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollar projects that he's making five, six grand every two weeks on. Yeah, which I love it. I mean it's, it's great because I mean he makes, basically how I do it is he puts in the estimate, he does the markups and I overlook it and he'll, we'll mark up 15 just for his cut before we even get into the actual profit and all of that. So I've, I've worked through the punches of that part. What you're talking about, you know, really getting into our company part of it. But, and he wants it that way. I mean he wants it the commission way and it's easy, you know, if he sells, I mean it's kind of like, kind of like being an owner of a company. So.

Yeah, I just try to figure out.

A lot of times I see a big struggle that your size, you're growing so quickly and a lot of it's because that's what you're incentivizing. Whatever you incentivize will grow and be do better. Right. If you're incentivizing growth and you incentivize, hey, you get a percentage of sales, they're going to do well in that. If you, if you incentivize them, hey, it's based on close ratio. Guess what? They're going to sell more jobs if you do it based upon how many estimates are finished in a day, they're going to get more estimates done in a day. So whatever you incentivize is going to do really well. So that's why, you know, year one you did 300,000. Awesome. You're cheated 900,000 next year you're doing over a million. That's awesome. The thing is that you're going to run up against is projects that you don't really want, projects that your crew can't really install. Jobs are under bid him wanting bigger equipment because he knows if he can get an excavator, that or whatever piece of equipment, he can charge more, which he gets a cut of. But that doesn't necessarily mean more profit for the business. So what I'm afraid of is growth to unprofitability because of perverse incentive. Right. And so I would, if, if I was you, and this is me, I would have a really honest conversation around these things. Like, hey, you do an amazing job. I don't want our relationship to end badly because I'm incentivizing you. Something that could potentially actually hurt the business down the road. Especially if you're wanting to switch to P4P. Like, do you do any sort of pay performance for the guys in the field right now or are they strictly hourly?

They're strictly hourly. So everybody knows what I mean. I basically pay. I mean, this is how I've done it to make sure. I mean, pretty much everybody's salary because of the, you know, I know what I'm gonna get each day. They know what they're going to get each day because I've done the hourly. And no hitting you in the ass, I've done. I mean, I've been very. I follow you a lot. I've even reached out to you about, I guess the lawn care franchise with you. And by the way, I have seen your trucks in plano, Texas and McKinney. So you're out there. Your name is out in Texas, my friend.

Yeah. So like, you know, if salary is what you're gonna stay on this again, this is the challenges. You, they're going to get paid a certain amount. No matter how long a job gets take, the employee does not care. Officially, the job is being done. They're just there for their salary. Then you have on the other side an estimate who creates how many hours are allocated to that job that does not care that that number is high enough. So typically, let's say, for example, you were paying your employees P4P. It would be okay to have your estimator based upon the way you're doing it.

So.

Because there'd be a perfect tension because your employees would always be nagging your estimator for more hours. So that tension creates a balance. Right now you have your employees basically wanting to they don't really care how many hours are on the job. And then your, your estimator is just wanting that number to be as low as possible so he can close the deal. Because he would rather close a deal at an $8,000 job and him get 15% then close it at 10,000. But that, that two thousand dollar difference is your profit. But he still makes his cut. Right. So my concern is that your incentive structure is in a way that as you grow you'll keep paying more money out but not necessarily bringing more money to the bottom line.

That's exactly that repeated a few days ago. Yeah, I appreciate the feedback that I am interested in the people at the end.

Yeah. I want to send you a signed copy so I know it's not really that great, great. But I want to send you one in person. I'm going to write inside of it. So if you could just email me justin landscape businesscourse gmail.com I want to send this to you and then please stay in touch because that's. You're a stage in the business that's actually pretty delicate if you where you're at because you do really have incentive structure going two different directions and I don't want you to grow too, too much more without fixing some of those up, to be honest.

No, I understand. I mean that's what. So it's landscape business course at Gmail.

Yep. And I'll get this over to you because it'll talk about why we do that with the estimators at work certain way, how we do the profit sharing and then it might change your mind on P4P and then you can sell it to your employees as a way like hey guys, you guys can make more than salary if you do it this way. So just send me that email and I'll get that over to you.

Hey man, thanks for taking the time out for us guys out here man. We love your show.

You're awesome. Thanks brother. Take care. All right, we're gonna give away two more tickets. The lines are full but feel free to call in. They'll just keep you on hold. I believe it might kick you out, I don't know. But the lines are full. We only have five lines open. So Garrett from 860 he's getting a free ticket. The Landscape Summit. These are people that submitted due to financial hardship and those of you in the show donated tickets to them. So thank you so much. Ken from 203 Area Code he's going to be getting a free ticket to Landscape Summit. We're giving 10 of these away today, total. We still have a few more to go. How many have I given out? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Cool. So we still have three more to go. Three more tickets to give way to Landscape Summit. I've given away the business course, MBA for entrepreneurs, lawn care, media, and books. So we got more books coming too. Let's go ahead and take the next caller from area code 720. Welcome to the show. Can you hear me?

Hey, yeah, how's it going?

What's your name?

Zach.

Zach, welcome. What's your question?

So I've been watching you for a while. We've been in business for a few years and just kind of stabilizing our systems and everything, you know, taking the long route. And so last time we did door hangers, we got back about one and a half percent. I was just, I had a. Just two questions on that, first of all. So we're upping it now. And last time I did 500 just to test the waters and I'm doing 5,000. I'm wondering what you think, you know, I should expect coming back from that.

Yeah. Like when you said 1.5%, was that just passive hanging on the door, like just, just the door hanger?

Yep, yep. No knocking.

Cool. And were you doing that or was that someone you hired?

It was me and my two others.

Cool. So two things to that you could potentially improve that number, which, by the way, one point, 1.5% is actually pretty good for just passively, like no door knocking or anything. The only two things I can think that would actually increase as one knocking on the door and actually introducing yourself. That's always really positive. But if you're not going to do that is, you know, actually putting the price on the door hanger. Right. So I think I. Yeah, yeah. Have you seen that one before?

Yep, yep. That's actually what we did. We did, we did a fall clean out one and we put the fall clean out price on them and dished them out. And so we got 1.5, you know, so I got 5,000 now. And I'm like, okay, so I'm gonna smash it out, you know, and try to get all these. So. And I'm just wondering, like, should I expect somewhere around that, you know, 1.5. I got a really nice mo price on there because our overhead's really low and it's a dollar for the first mo and same setup. You know, they sign the back and all that. Take a picture, send it in, and I'm Just wondering, like, you know, do people normally go for that kind of stuff or not?

Yeah. Like, it really comes down to customer acquisition costs, right? So when we look at 1.5%, that's gonna be, what, one in 60? No, one in 50. One. One in 40. One out of 40. No, that's wrong. I'm doing something wrong. One out of 60. There you go. About one out of 60 houses. You're getting a customer, right? That's really good, because let's just say we can do 120 door hangers in an hour. So that's basically every 30 minutes of door hanging. You are getting a customer. So let's say we pay someone $20 an hour, so that's $10 in labor. Then we got to do the printing. So let's just say, you know, two bucks. Well, actually, let's say $5. That's $15 to get a customer. That's a $15 customer acquisition cost. I would do that all day long. I wouldn't touch Facebook. I wouldn't touch Google. I wouldn't touch any of those things. As long as that number holds up, I wouldn't even. Honestly, I wouldn't even mess with knocking on the door and putting prices. Like whatever you've been doing at 1.5. If you can. If you can run this number, like, how many of those do I do in an hour? You might be only doing 40 or 50 per hour simply because you're putting the price on there. It takes a little extra time and don't know what he's talking about. I had it somewhere here. He's actually putting the price of his property cleanup, like, that's super smart. Increases your conversion ratio dramatically. And if you're not going knock on the door, it's the next best thing to actually have a price and then know exactly what the cost is going to be. So I would just run those numbers. But if you're at 15, $20 of customer acquisition cost, I wouldn't touch anything else. I just keep doing that. It's working, and I double down. Just like you are, going from 500 to 5,000.

Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Sweet. Sweet. Thank you for everything you've done.

You got it, brother. You have a great day. Merry Christmas.

Me too. Merry Christmas.

All right, next question coming from a caller in Alamante Springs, Florida, from Daniel. Let's bring him on the show. How's it going.

Daniel? Can you hear me?

Daniel? Daniel?

Hello? Hello? Yes.

Hey. How's it going, brother?

I'm doing great, thank you. My name is.

Mike, thank you for, you know, the life. And I wanted to ask you something. I'm about to start.

You know, with the business, with the landscaping or mowing business. And I don't have too much information on the legal part of things. I know to be able to do Google Ads and Facebook ads and stuff like that, you need to have a company set up. And I was wondering if you could give me more information how to set up, you know, like a small company for a solo person. Just me, basically, just starting.

Yeah. If you're just starting and you want to keep it small, sole proprietorship is not a bad idea. I would rather someone do an llc. And just to protect yourself, if you have personal assets, a family vehicle, a family house, etc. I don't want those to be in jeopardy. So I try to do an llc, limited liability company. I would contact your local, your state's secretary of state office and just ask them, like, hey, what's the steps? Usually you can do it online. You're looking usually around $200 to get one set up. Then you're going to get a. An employer identification number. And that is going to be used to be able to open all these business accounts up. That being said, you do not need those to create a Facebook page. You do not need those to create a Google my business page. You could literally just go start one. And from those accounts, you can still run ads. So don't think that you need to go get the LLC or an S Corp or anything fancy or a bank account that's commercial if you're just trying to get started. I'm very much okay with someone even doing cash under the table just to get started. Right. And then maybe you get five, ten customers. Okay, now we go get an llc. Now we go get insurance. Now we get a bank account that's a commercial bank account, not just running it through a different, you know, different checking account that's personal. So it really depends on how fast you're wanting to grow. You're just trying to kind of dip your toe in the water right now.

No, I'm trying to. I'm trying to go hard in the business. I'm 24 years old and I was in school, but due to the pandemic and all of that, I had to stop. And this next year, I'm gonna be off, you know, education. So I thought of doing something like landscaping. Not even landscaping, more like mowing and like, fertilize. Fertilizing. And after that.

Yeah. So I'm going to go Ahead and give you access to landscape business course because it walks you through like from when I first started my first truck. Very. From the very elementary all the way up through your third year of when you're doing a hundred thousand in monthly revenue and it's going to walk through like the differences of sole proprietorship, llc, the tax stuff, setting all those things up. So just email me if you could landscape businesscoursemail.com just put your name in there and then I will get you access set up for landscape business course.

Sounds good. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it.

Merry Christmas, brother.

For all the videos. I've been. I've been watching you. Yeah. Thank you. You as well.

Take care. Bye. Bye. All right, next question is coming from Forest Grove, Oregon. Let's go ahead. And it says Christina Kraus, but it could be wrong. Welcome to the show.

Hello. This is Reed.

Hey. What was your name?

It's Reed.

Reed. Awesome. What's your question, Reed?

How, how, how.

What size yard do you.

Charge to bow lawn? That.

Yeah, how do we charge. How do we charge prices for the lawns we cut?

Yes.

Cool. Yeah, totally. So right now, do you have a couple lawns that you're mowing? Are you wanting to start your own business?

I have four.

Awesome, man. Good for you. Are you doing it like in your neighborhood? Like you kind of pushing the lawnmower around the street?

Good for you. How old are you?

Awesome. Awesome. So what I would recommend is when you go to a lawn, like let's say, for example, the first lawn that you got, how much did you charge for that one?

$10.

Okay. And is that per. Every week that you cut that lawn?

Yes.

Okay, great. And how long do you think it takes you on average to mow that lawn, the $10 lawn?

30 minutes.

30 minutes. Okay. So if, if I asked you how much are you making on that lawn per hour, do you. What would, what would that amount be.

Per hour?

$30.

$20. Yeah. So you're making $10 and it takes you 30 minutes. So you would be able to do two of those in one hour. So you will make $20 in one hour. Right. So that. That's what you're going to be is your rate. Right. Your $20 per hour. And so when you go to a lawn, what you want to do is ask yourself, okay, how long would this lawn take? And maybe you'd say, well, it's going to. This is a large, bigger lawn. It's going to take me 45 minutes. Well, if I take 45 minutes, that's three quarters of $20, right? Because my $20 is. Is my hourly rate, and if I'm doing three quarters of $20, that's $15 for that lawn. So what you want to kind of do is start getting in the habit when you're looking at a price or a lawn and you're trying to price it. Ask yourself, instead of what dollar amount should I give this? Ask, how long will this take me? And then multiply that by your hourly rate of $20. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Awesome. Hey. Hey. Do you. Are you trying to get, like, five or six customers? What's your goal for next year?

Maybe 10 customers.

10 customers. That's awesome. That's very cool. And then why don't we do this?

What I would recommend, Bud, is try to do at least $25 an hour as your rate, right? Because at $20, at $20 an hour, you know, in a few years, you get a job for almost $20 an hour. I want you to make a little bit more, and I think you're worth it. You do a great job. So I want you to charge $25 per hour, at least when you're going to do a property. So when you look at a property, say, okay, well, that's going to take me about an hour to mow the lawn. Well, then you should charge $25. And just keep in. Just keep in mind, Reid, that people right now are hiring you because you are young, and that's okay. Don't feel like you got to be a big professional company or anything. Just know that people right now are hiring you because you're young and they want to support you. Right? So don't be afraid to charge higher prices. You could probably charge $20 on that lawn that you. You cut the lawn for $10 now, and they would be happy to pay you. So don't be afraid to raise that $25 number up to even 30. Maybe next year. You're definitely worth it. You're doing an amazing job.

How old should I be to start an llc?

Typically, you. You want to be. You know, there's no age requirement in our state, but every state's a little different. But I wouldn't worry about an LLC quite yet until you maybe have 15, 10, 15 customers, then go get an LLC. But the thing is, at your age, read like you don't have a house, you don't have a car. You got to protect. So there's really no reason to have an llc, because if someone sued you, they can't. They're not going to sue you for your house or for your car. So a limited liability company means it limits the amount of liability you have. So if someone tried to sue you, like if you ran into someone's car or you dented their garage door, right. They can't sue you and go get your personal assets like your house. If you have an llc, but you don't really have those things, so I wouldn't worry about that right now. Maybe when you get 15 customers, maybe when you get, you know, 15, 16 years old and you get your own car, that's personal car, that's when I would start thinking about the llc. For now though, just focus on getting more customers. That's the only thing that matters.

Thank you so much. I watch all of your videos.

You're awesome, dude. Best of luck to you. Merry Christmas.

Bye bye.

It's so awesome, man. That's so awesome. All right, Phoenix, Arizona, next one up. Here we go. 602 number. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Mike, My name's Dave. I had to follow the eight year old, didn't I? I'm 60 and I'm still listening to your videos.

Oh, it's awesome.

So.

At, at what point do you, do you have a number or a account number at which you enlarge your office staff? For instance, if you're doing 50 customers and a million dollars a year is one office staff, does that number work out? Or if you're doing 200 accounts and a million dollars a year, do you need two people? How do you have a guideline for that?

Yeah, so I don't really have a guideline because honestly, the answer is as little as possible. It's overhead. So like your business specifically in terms of revenue, just approximately what do you think in 2021 it was at.

Right at 1.5.

Cool. And then how many office people do you currently.

Three quarters of one. One person that works about six hours a day.

Okay. And then do you.

It's clearly not enough. I just don't know how, how off the mark I am.

That's really good. Depending what services you offer. So do you do commercial or residential do your projects or you mowing what's going on?

It's all up. It's, it's all upscale residential maintenance. So. But here in Phoenix, when you do, when you do maintenance, you're also checking irrigation, you're placing low voltage lights, you're fertilizing your, you know, yada, yada yada, lots of, lots of extra things that you do. You just don't mow and blow, at least in our market you don't mow and blow and go.

Yep. And then. Do you have an office building right now, like at your shop?

Well, I've got a facility, yeah. But to my. All my office work happens in a very small office in my house. My wife, that my wife does.

Okay, yeah. Like, honestly, if you need another person, you're making the revenue to do that. Right? Like, as long as the business is not growing like 50% from last year, I'm going to imagine you have a pretty healthy profit margin and. But you're working crazy hours because you're doing all the selling. Are you doing the sailing right now?

Well, selling kind of. I don't really need to sell because there's plenty of work. It's, it's very different. But, but I did grow by 50% in the last year and, and I definitely have dropped the ball in the last two months. And I'm just wondering, you know, am I off the mark by like, I need a full time person or do I need to. Do you have two full time people? Because I know people, my competitors, they'll have two and three, four people in the office. Now they're a little bit bigger than me, but they're not that much bigger than me. And I've always thought that was way too much, that there are ways to manage that part of the business a little bit better. And I was just curious, you know, what your thoughts were on it.

This is what I would do. You definitely need two people at that size of business in terms of revenue at that.

That type of services that you're doing. You're going like, if you said, hey, we have like 10 massive HOAs and that's all we do. You don't need hardly any office admin for that. At your type of work though, high end, you're doing a luxury service, you're charging a premium price. You need the two people because the headache it creates by you dropping the ball occasionally because you don't have the help is driving you more crazy than anything. Like you've got to get that help in the office if you ever even want to expand or just stay in business because it'll drive you crazy otherwise. That's a lot of revenue for one person to be handling in the office. And it's also a vulnerability for the business at your size because that one person left or got hit by a bus or whatever, you'd be. You would be the one answering phone calls. Right. And so I would definitely look at as an insurance policy and then how to afford it. I'd encourage you to do e fees, estimate fees. I'd charge 30, $40 per estimate on the back end of the estimate to be able to afford that other person. Because every day you're probably doing what, 10 estimates a day?

No, I don't do any estimates today. It's a completely different market. I mean, I provide a yearly budget to these clients. I mean, my average base is a little over 2,000, a little over $2,000 a month. So these, these people are business people and I charge time and material and I do a budget. But we have so many variables here. I mean, if you get an irrigation system that's over five years old, you know, you could spend a third of your time just monkeying with irrigation in the summer and to have service call guys running all over town, I just didn't find that efficient. So we've elected to keep enough stock on the truck so we can deal with almost any problem within 30 minutes if we're there.

But like.

If you grew by 50%, like you're, you're getting new customers. So are those coming in via just upsells?

Oh, oh, well, we sell more, we sell more services to our clients. Now as far as we did get a, we did get a boost in the client number, but it was only in the last two months of the year. But the revenue, you know, we went from 1 to 1.35, you know, without this, this boost of customers. I hired somebody that had some accounts and we took those on the last two months. But they really only provided about $70,000 worth of revenue.

Yeah, like I understand where you're at because like, that much growth would have sucked a lot of the cash. And so it's like, well, can I afford another person? But the bottom line is you need the other person. Like it's an insurance policy because if the other person gets hurt, you're literally going to be answering calls. You're going to be just working crazy hours and it's not sustainable. Right. So whether you got to raise prices a few dollars per hour, it sounds like getting more work is not an issue. So why not raise the prices to accommodate? Like if you raise prices by $3 an hour over the course of your whole crew, like you would immediately pay for another full time person in the office, which would probably alleviate things off of your plane.

Yeah, I've raised prices over the last year. 7, 8, $12 an hour. So on average, I mean, that's how much I've gone Up and, and we're kind of at the top of the market for what, what the service we provide. But I don't really even have the call. I don't have calls. I mean, I've got to get the occasional call. But mostly, you know, I really hired, hire and trained top notch people in the field, so they can handle most everything. Each little crew is like their own little business and the foreman handle the upsells and they handle, you know, they tell us what we need and unless it's, you know, a lot, a lot of work, we have an enhancement crew. But really the foreman handle their business. I have three of my foremen were supervisors for HOA companies, you know, big companies, but they're. So it's a different market and my business model is definitely different. And I'll get a chance to meet you. I'm coming up to your business, your summit.

Cool. That's a very excited, very cool business model because that's why you've been able to have one person at 1.5 in the office, is because you are doing time and materials and that high level person, that high touch customers like, hey, I just want everything perfect. I'll pay whatever. So that's very, very interesting. That's very cool. So I would definitely though, from a revenue standpoint, like you can definitely, you need it. It's like the cheapest insurance policy in the world. To pay someone $40,000 a year right now or whatever to come help you in the office. I would definitely give you the green light on that.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. So. Good, good. It's only one person, not two or three. I know somebody that's got like five people and it's because he's always doing collection because he's such a jerk and he won't warranty a thing and instead he'll argue with these people. And my motto is, it's like, you know, it's broke, let's fix it. That' that's a dollar that is well worth spent that I would have to spend marketing if I lose this client, you know. So we warranty a fair amount of stuff and we don't even question it. We just do it because it's something nobody else does. So anyway, well, thanks for your input. I, I enjoy your, your videos and some of the guests you have on. So thanks very much.

Thanks James. I hope you can bring up some of that sunshine from Arizona for the summit.

Take care. Oh, really? Take care. Bye Bye. Oh, it's awesome. Cool. All right. So let's go ahead and give away some more tickets to Landscape Summit. So let's see here.

We got Joshua from area code 251. He's getting a free ticket to Landscape Summit. You're just joining us. These tickets are going out to people that submitted financial hardship and those of you watching donated tickets. So we're giving away 10 of them today. So there's one Joshua from area code 251. I will reach out to all of you and make sure you get registered and everything. Set up next one for Sean from area code 870. Congratulations, you're coming to Landscape Summit for free. My JL area code 703. Also coming to Landscape Summit for free. So thank you to everyone that donated to get other people there. Like, this is incredible. I know a couple of franchisees hopped on it and a few of the other listeners. So thank you so much. Means so much. I'm really looking forward to that. If you have a question, by all means you can call into the show. You actually will get in now because there's availability and we'll just keep going here. What else are we going to give away? Okay, we're going to wait some P4P books. So the next three callers are going to get a signed copy of the P4P book pre launch. You're going to get it pre launch. I'll sign it and send it out to you and then it'll be available for everyone publicly, Amazon on this January 16th. So really looking forward to that. So congratulations to all the people that got the free tickets. Looking forward to seeing you there in person at Landscape Summit. Let's see here. Yeah, the next three callers get a signed book and I'll send it out in the mail. I'm glad this is working again. The first one was pretty brutal. I don't know what happened. I honestly think either Comcast dropped or my dongle just gave up the ghost. I have no idea what's going on, but. All right, cool. Let's see here. Any more callers? There's no one in the waiting room for the calls, so if you want to call, get question answered, feel free to give the call. Give this number here a call and then you'll go directly into the show.

All right, what else can we give away.

Your hats.

Way over there? Yeah. So we'll give these away for the next three callers. Anyone that has a question, feel free to jump in. I'm interested in P4P. Don't know anyone else is doing this in England. There are a few course members that are doing it and they are in Europe. But I am not as familiar with the tax regulations and employment laws when it comes to repeat, the number is right here.

361-733-3333. Give that number a call, you'll go in the waiting room and I'll bring you right in. Okay, let's see here. Thank you all for all your comments. Green up, we blink twice, then it's spring mulching. Yes, sir. Okay.

Your channel. Sorry, I'm just going through all the comments.

That was a great call. Reed. You are awesome.

I'm 16, trying to go hard next year. Do you have any information for me? I currently have four customers made $5,000 this year. I get my license this summer. What should I do? I would honestly not try to use their vehicle too much to expand. I'd try to still stay focused around wherever those four customers are. Just really get better route density before you start driving out everywhere. But wherever those four customers are, that's where I would start my marketing. Right. So if they are on different side of the city, start in those neighborhoods. Don't be like oh I can just do 15, 20 mile radius now because I have a car. Try to focus in on those areas you already have. All right, we got callers. First caller that's going to get a free book is from Baltimore. Is this Carlo?

Hey Mike, what's up?

What's up brother? What's your question?

Can you hear me?

I can.

I don't know. I don't really have too many questions. I just wanted to give call and say hi.

Hey, you get a book for calling in.

Call and say hi.

Yeah, cool.

Well send me an email at the gi.

Go ahead.

What's that?

No, go ahead. You're good.

Nothing. I was saying I met you at the gie. I probably don't remember me but. Well, there was a cutting force long service.

Wait, were you you with your wife there?

That was my friend Billy. Remember we were talking about the certain list?

Yes, I remember that.

That's hilarious. You know, send me an email. Landscape businesscourse, gmail.com. i'll sign one of these and send them out to you.

Do the put it in the description or something so I can. I can find it because I. I can't wouldn't remember that.

Oh yeah, it's in the. Yeah, you're right. It's in the description of the video. There's just. You can. The email is right in there.

Where's that landscape summit thing? And I do have a question. What's it all about?

Yeah, so there's one other speaker, his name is Marcus, he now does consulting, but he used to have a massive design build company, like 7 million dollar company over on the east coast. So he's coming, he's, he's a professional speaker. He's awesome. I've heard him a couple times before and then I'm speaking throughout too. So a lot of stuff about culture, hiring we're doing about marketing, planning for 2022 and then yes, just a lot of, you know, really good stuff I think, you know, kind of going into next year. So kind of where I kind of break ground on all the stuff that's new in my head and where I think the industry is going and even kind of from an economic standpoint where the opportunities are. And so I think there's actually be quite a bit of opportunity around. You know, the fact that the Fed is raising interest rates is going to actually move this industry a little bit. So things like that we're going to talk about. So we find.

Yeah, I'd be interested in about the, the, the price range for our industry because of all the, you know, the economics, everything has gone up in price and we're actually suffering because it's kind of harder for us I think to justify. But we have to.

Yep. No, absolutely. So we're going to talk all about like price electricity and kind of what, what we're seeing with inflation right now and kind of the, you know, where demand is going. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. But I'll send you this book. Send me that email. I'll get that out to you right away.

All right, nice talking to you. Have a merry Christmas.

And everyone, you as well, brother. Take care. Bye bye. Yep. All right, next caller that's going to get a book as well is from Salt Lake City, Utah, I think this is Taylor Hansen. Am I right on that?

You got it.

Cool. How's it going, brother?

How are you?

Good, good.

It's going good. Going good. Well, thanks for, for doing this, like watching all your content.

Wanted to pick your brain on marketing a little bit.

So I'm wondering at what point does it make sense in your mind to bring on an in person marketer? So for example, say your budget's 200 grand on marketing, is it worth spending, is it worth paying a marketing company to do all your Google Ad management and your Facebook ads and kind of own that and call it pay them 70 grand and then pay 130 in ad spend or would you rather pay a higher dollar value in ad spend and have a company manage that for you? I don't know if that makes sense.

But totally, I would imagine you're probably doing 2 to 3 million at least in revenue, right?

Not quite. So I guess a quick background, we were doing right around a million dollars of maintenance. No landscaping, just mowing fur and some, some bed maintenance and stuff like that. We actually.

Sold off the majority part of our business and just went straight towards the chemical side this year. So we're doing fertilization and pest control only. And we'll, we'll end this year right, at around 750,000 in revenue, but planning to, to double this next year, but putting a disproportionate amount of money towards marketing, just focusing on growth.

Yeah. So like the reason I asked that is because like when, when you look at your marketing dollars for a given year, what I'm always trying to track is, you know, what, what's the return on that money going to be in the next 12 months? Right. Honestly, in this industry, you know, typically you're going to have a 20% attrition rate. So if you can keep someone on average for five years, great. But when I talk about marketing, I need to get that money back in my pocket as soon as possible so I can keep growing the business. Right. So I look, okay, If I spend $1,000 a day, how much revenue will come from that thousand dollars in the next 12 months? And so when I, when, when someone's proposing spending $200,000 in marketing, I want to see a minimum of $2 million in new revenue in the next 12 months. Right. And so that's a 10x multiple. Right. And so anything under that I would see as, as a disappointing metric for my marketing dollars. And so.

If I was you, and I was saying I'm going from 750 to 1.5, let's just say that's $750,000 in new revenue. That means that I need to spend less than $75,000 for that to be a really good marketing play. Right. So I don't think you need to spend 200 and I definitely don't think you need a full time person because I can deploy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads and manage it in an hour a week. Right. So you know, it doesn't take a huge amount of time unless you're doing a national campaign with different, different targeting, different.

Ad groups, different way, different creative and text and all the rest of it. If you spent $50,000 to behind Google Ads. Google local services. Google. Sorry, not Google Next door and Facebook ads. And you did that in a 5 to 10 mile radius around a given area. You would demolish and you would do much better than spending that 50 grand on even a marketing person. I went to a business a couple years ago and they did about 7, $800,000 in revenue. Revenue. And they had a full time marketing person. That full time marketing person costs more in their annual salary than I, I had ever spent on marketing. So like I'm very apprehensive to spend marketing dollars on managing the marketing campaign. Unless you just have no idea what you're doing.

Yeah.

In which case you just go get a course.

Of course. Like I, I, I agree with you. I want to keep as many dollars freed up going towards actual spend versus the management of the spending. I was just wondering if you had any. I guess you've answered the question, but I was just wondering when does that make sense? Right?

Yeah. Like let me ask you this question. Do you already have someone in mind for that position?

No. No.

Oh, okay. That's surprising. Okay, cool. So then like there's a reason why.

When you go to mice, my main problem.

Go ahead.

I'm just gonna say my main problem is.

The bottom left me. I drop the ball on the management of the ad and I feel like I.

And it's not even an excuse of me getting sucked into anything else. It's just.

I feel like I dropped the ball on the management side of things and would love to some sort of assistance in that. I don't know if it needs to be like a highly paid marketer or if it's worth hiring a company to help manage that. It's like I don't do a lot of the field work.

I don't do any of the field work with that being said. But I just want to make sure that my, I mean it's selling season is so important and making sure that you're, that you're, you're not wasting any of that precious spring selling season and got a lot of, a lot of stuff coming up this year. I've got a baby being born in the perfect time of mid April.

Yeah. Like you know, in your situation it might not be a bad idea to hire somebody. I would definitely not be hiring someone full time in house though. I would definitely go to an ad agency that's built for small businesses because literally all they're going to do is run ads for you. They're not going to train you on anything. They're not going to run massive campaigns. There's a reason, if you go to like a big agency, they require like a $10 million retainer or they require a certain amount of revenue because like there's gotta be. At the end of the day, if you pay someone fifty grand and then you have a fifty, fifty thousand dollar marketing spend, they've got to, by having them, you have to double the impact of that, of those marketing dollars in order for them just to break even on having them around. Right. So I would recommend going and getting like an ad agency that's going to charge you $500 or $1,000 flat fee and they're going to run your ads for you and then you're going to tell them how much you want to spend and they're going to track which ones are doing good and boost those. I would do that. Right. Because there's a really good chance that you're going to run ads for three to four months in spring rush and get overwhelmed with work and not need any more work. And therefore if you would have hired someone on salary or payroll, like now you got to lay them off or their waste. So I would go get someone, say hey, for a flat fee of a thousand, $2,000 a month, we'll run all your ads on your Facebook or on your socials and you'll just tell us the budget. I would do that. And this is the thing though, like, like there's a reason why I haven't made this a service. It's because I don't feel like I offer a hundred percent value doubling the value of someone's ad spend yet. I've got, I haven't even gotten to the place where I feel like I could do that. So unless I would, I would avoid trying to hire someone full time or them being like hey 50, 50 split, like hey whatever you give us, half of it goes to ads.

Yep.

I'd be trying to hire someone on a fee basis and if you can't find someone locally, upwork.com search for Facebook ads, search for digital marketing strategist, whatever, and they'll charge you a couple thousand dollars a month. You'll give them that money and then you'll funnel whatever you want for budget because they're on a fee basis instead of retainer or a percentage of it going to the ad spend.

Okay.

Hope that helped.

Okay, well, yeah, yeah, that clears up a lot. So thanks, appreciate you and Merry Christmas.

And make sure, make sure you email me because you got a book you got a book coming your way, so email me landscapemail.com and I'll send that over to you. And stay in touch with me too, once. If you email me, I'll know it was you. And I would love to hear kind of how that goes for you. And if I can help at all, I will.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And then also just another plug for piece rate. So we run all our vertex on piece rate. And man, that's been life changing. I couldn't endorse it more. So, yeah, I'm excited for the book.

Good for you, brother. Take care. All right, bye bye.

All right, next caller is from.

Malvern. Coming up in 3, 2, 1. Malvern. Coming from Malvern, Arkansas, I think, right?

Yes, sir. Hi, Mike.

Let's go. Robert. How you doing? Thanks for calling in.

I'm good, man. So I started a little lawn care business about three months ago to try to help my son get something going. He's 16.

It has turned out more than I thought it was going to be. So I'm trying to talk my wife into letting me quit my job to run this full time.

Cool.

And she just doesn't. She's. How would I say it?

She likes the security of a paycheck.

Hey. Yep.

And I have not done any marketing or anything other than set up a website, Google my business, and.

We'Ve already done.

$2,000 worth of cleanups in less than two months.

So what's your total revenue?

Trying to push it.

What's the revenue been in the past three months?

A little over 2000.

Okay. And how many hours per week have you been allocating towards the business so far?

Let's see, maybe eight a week.

Oh, it's like one day a week, basically.

Yeah. Is there any way I haven't been pushing it more? I mean. Go ahead, go ahead.

I haven't been pushing it because all we have is basically Saturday, Sundays is family days.

And then I work Monday through Friday. So there's no time during the week because I go to work, it's dark, I get off work, it's dark.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, this is the thing. She kind of has every right to be somewhat alarmed because you've only done 2,000 in the past three months. Now, that being said, if you were able to work five, six days a week, now we're talking about, you know, that being a meaningful, you know, eight, $10,000 a month potentially in revenue and if you're working longer hours, etc. Right. So I think no, every single situation is different. But if there's any possible way to squeeze more hours out of the week, whether that be you having someone help you on the, on the Saturday. So now instead of 2,000 over the next three months, we get 4 or 5,000. Right? And then potentially it's like, okay, well can I work with my, work with my current job to get Fridays off? So that way I can do four tens and then work, you know, on the business on Fridays and then maybe get that to four or $5,000 per month in revenue. Then that's when it becomes a little more easy for a spouse typically to accept the fact that like, okay, this is a meaningful business. We've grown it a bunch. It's gonna, it's gonna make, we're gonna make just as much from my part time business as I do from my full time job. That's when it becomes more of a no brainer. Right. But that's a difficult transition when you're trying to do the full time thing and run a business that's growing like that.

Right, right. I mean, I see the potential. I know I could do it if I can get out there and market is a little bit more. It's just trying to prove to her that everything will be fine.

What if you, what if you asked her like, hey, you know, baby, what is it going to take in terms of revenue for you to feel comfortable? Right? And then just have it in writing in terms, not like it was a contract, but it says like, hey, this is the goal, you know, this is what we want to make per month. This is what we need to replace our income. That's the biggest thing. Right? If you can replace your income from your job and be happier and have growth potential, like that's a win, win, win. Right? So it's a matter of how do we, how do we get to that spot without there being a leg? Because what you don't want, this is what she's afraid of, I'd imagine, is you quitting your job and going to this thing and all of a sudden you're making a thousand dollars per month. Because there we thought there was gonna be business, but there wasn't for whatever reason. And that's what she's afraid of. So it's like, how can we potentially bridge that gap by saying, okay, can I squeeze work into less days so I can work more on the business? Can I hire someone to work with me on the weekend to be able to do the business? Is there potentially even someone that could work while I'm at work so I can grow the Revenue of the business to the point where it makes a lot of sense to me go full time. Because my part time employee working out in the afternoons while I'm at work is making more money per hour than I am at my job, that's when it starts to become easier for them to accept a lot of times.

Right, right. I, I just know, I mean, it's winter time. The.

You know, the revenue is not really there during the winter as much as it is spring, you know, And I know spring. I just want to be on the point to where.

When spring comes, I can hit the ground running.

Yep. You know, I try to open up as much as possible to open up either Fridays or they'd be hiring someone for Saturdays only. And then maybe that Saturday person starts working three days a week for you, two of which you're at work. But they know the route, they know which job you're doing, they know the cleanups. That's possible. And if you get it to the point where you're like, man, I just made $6,000 per month in revenue for my lawn care business that I'm doing on the weekend and I'm only making four grand from my job, like, why would I not switch? That's when it becomes easier for her. But when she looks at $2,000 for the past three months, there is no guaranteed tomorrow in business. There is no paycheck that comes in every week. So, like, I would be completely understanding of her position. It's just now it's like, how do I prove that this is a sustainable thing and it's not just based on hope of it growing. It's like, hey, look, babe, we did a thousand the first month, 2,000 the next, 3,000, 4,000. I'm stressed out the max because I'm working on the weekends, but I'm making more money from my mowing and my, my landscaping than I am working full time. Like, why would I not jump? That's when it makes more sense. But I would just take it from the position of like, hey, we both understand why she feels that way. What do I need to do in the business to get you to the point where you'd be like, yes, that makes total sense. And a lot of times that means replacing their income, replacing your income. So they're just that, that, that, that sense of security for them.

Right, right. Okay. I was hoping you were going to have a math formula. I could sit down. Here it is, you know.

Like, like that's the go.

That's the go number, you know?

Yeah. Like, well, this is, this is the go number. Then if that's what you're looking for, is what do you bring home? I'm not asking this question. I'm just saying this is what you determine. What do you bring every single month in terms of, from your job? Let's just say I'm just going to make up a number. $4,000 per month. Okay. If I go bring $4,000 a month per, per month right now to replace my income, I'm probably gonna have to go do $6,000 per month of lawn care and landscaping. Now, I can't do that while I have a full time job. But the question is, can I somehow do that by having an employee work with me on a Saturday by potentially getting Fridays off to be able to do that by potentially having that person who helps me on Saturday also mow lawns or do cleanups during the week while I'm at work. If you then get the business to say, $7,000 $8,000 a month in revenue by doing that. And then it's like, hey, look, last month we brought $4,000 a month for my job and I also profited $4,000 for my lawn care business. Just think what I could do if I could go full time on the lawn care business. Right? That's, that's what I'd be doing.

Right.

How fast can you get to replacing your current income? That will set the security kind of thing a little bit easier for her. I believe.

That makes sense.

Best of luck, brother. I'm gonna. Can you email me? I want to give you landscape business course, the actual course, because it's gonna help a lot with getting to that part. So just send me an email landscapebusinesscoursemail.com and I want to. That's my Christmas present for you. And then, you know, just grow the business. And I think your wife will come along for the ride once she's seeing traction. But $2,000 in three months isn't gonna provide for a family or give security. And I think the challenge is how do I prove that by keep but still have my full time job? And that's when you gotta like, just get creative, you know?

Right. Well, thank you very much, Mike. Merry Christmas.

My pleasure, brother. Merry Christmas. You have a good one. Take care. Bye. All right, next question is coming from Philadelphia. It's saying Christoph Quinn, but it could be wrong. Philadelphia, how's it going?

Good. How are you, Mike?

Good, good. Thanks for calling in. Am I right on the name or wrong?

Yep, in Philadelphia.

Okay, very cool. How's it going?

Just got, you know, one question for you. Bait mostly. You know, one marketing tip. What would your best marketing tip be?

Honestly, it would be to stay in touch with your current customers and. And make sure that you're not neglecting warm leads, and that is people that the warmest lead is someone you've done work for that you're still doing work for recur on a recurring basis. The next person that most people forget about is people that are in their database that they haven't done work for, but you've done an estimate or they're somehow in your database. Staying in touch with those people and trying to constantly be selling them, that would be the number one thing I would do.

All right. Yeah. I'm 15. I run a little lawn and landscape business and I just got into tree work a little while ago, too. Thank you.

Absolutely. I'll send you a book. I know it's a little bit down the road, but send me an email and just put in there, hey, this is Philadelphia Christopher. I will send you this in the mail and I'll sign it for you.

All right. Thank you, Mike, so much. You do so much for us.

I appreciate it, brother. Take care.

A lot of work.

You're welcome. Merry Christmas.

All right, next question is coming from Columbus, Ohio, Cedric Owens. I've seen you in the chat, Cedric. How's it going?

Hey, Mike is actually Cedric, but no worries about pronunciation.

Cool. How's it going?

Going pretty good, sir. I met you down at gie. It was nice to meet you. I also sent you a message on Instagram or comment on Instagram. Last week you were announcing the book Bertha still cuts lawn and landscaping out of Pickerington, Ohio, suburb of Columbus. But my question I had for you then was how did you feel about how P4P would work with a when you have only like two or three employees and how it would look with scaling. So, yeah, I made a comment on that. You said you completely believe in that and I appreciate for that. But my main question was or thing I want to talk about was that I'm going full time this upcoming spring. Right now I also do it work for a big bank here in Ohio, but we're going full time this upcoming spring. I currently have employees that help me for trimming. They trim for me. I got a guy that helps me on the weekdays and I got a guy that helps me on Sundays and we do landscaping work on Saturdays. So I was originally working it out where, let's just say a house. We were charging $35 to do a cut on. I was paying them $10 per house. And then for houses that are like 45 or 50 bucks, I was paying them $15 per house. So I was kind of doing a P4P that way. But it wasn't something that I think is the most beneficial for the business. So I went to the idea of converting them to $20 per hour, but I don't think that's the answer either. I do think P4P is probably the answer. I just don't. I'm ready to implement. I just don't have the information yet. So that's what I'm saying. I need the book. I can't wait till the 16th.

Cool, I'll send you the book for free. So that will get that out of the way. But.

I think the big thing is something I talk about at the beginning and the end of the book, and that is, unfortunately, all three of the things we talk about in P4P are easy to implement in and of themselves. And most people have, to some extent, they've always. Everyone was like, they fundamentally understand that profit sharing is important. Get people to think about the profit line, the bottom line. Everyone. You know, some people, I should say, think open book management is important. And that's an important part to show your numbers of the. To the team, they understand, they have information. And then some people try to implement P4P. In my opinion, it has to all be done if it's going to be effective. And furthermore, when we talk about P4P, we can't take it as one thing like, oh, we're just going to give a percentage of labor revenue to the employees. Or like, okay, in a $45 job, just everyone gets $15. It's too micro and the employees will find the loopholes. And it's just human nature, not their fault. It's the fact that you create. We create an incentive structure that, that actually incentivizes people to do things wrong. So if I'm just giving them a percentage of revenue, they're going to make a bunch of mistakes. They're going to go way too fast. They're not going to care about walkthroughs with the customer. They're not going to make sure that the customer's happy before they leave. And that's not good for the business. So in order for it to actually work. And the people that say that will come out, will come out when this book comes out and they will make comments that says, I tried P4P and it didn't work. I will ask every single one, did you follow all the steps? Because most of them will leave parts out. They'll leave parts out like open book management. They'll leave parts about profit sharing. They'll leave parts out that you need to do. The yellow slip system, which is they go back to the property if they were rushing and they made a mistake, or if they made any mistake, they go back to the property. The employee talks to the customer. And so the biggest thing, biggest mistake I have seen, and I know I will see with P4P is people taking bits and pieces of it and not implementing it fully. Right. And so I think by just offering a percentage of revenue to an employee, you're doing what we talked about earlier with an estimator, and that is you're incentivizing speed, but you're not incentivizing the quality and the, the, the, the fact that the customer needs to be satisfied. So that would be my kind of thought. And I think the book will hopefully help with kind of understanding why it's so important to have the full system. Like, we don't have times, we're like, oh, like that's not P4P or like that job is a paper job. We're not going to do P4P on that. Like, it needs to encompass everything. Right. Maintenance of equipment needs to cover that. It needs to be in the system. Right. And it needs to be understandable, it needs to be simple. So I think the book will help you with that and I'd love to see how, how that kind of helps you. Even with two or three employees, as soon as you get above two, that's when P4P is needed. If you have two or less employees, you'll get, you're just fine without P4P because you have eyes on them at all times. You can manage them well. But as soon as you get above 3, you're either tracking their trucks, you're either always rolling up on them and checking. You're doing quality assurance, you're doing quality control, you're doing damage control. You go back to complaints. And so you've got to have the system police the behavior and make sure that they're doing a great job. And they, they don't want you micromanaging them. Right. Employees don't want you rolling up on them randomly to see if they're working hard or questioning whether or not they are going to the gas station to go to the bathroom or just chill out for 30 minutes. Right. They don't even want you asking. So create A system where they can work as hard as they want or as little as they want and make as much or as little money as they want. Right. So I know it wasn't really your question there, but it was just a matter of saying like, the whole system really does have to implement it, in my opinion, for to see the real benefit.

And I think that really helps because my goal is to take, you know, from me and my trimmer guy. So being able to have two lawn crews, I want to have a landscaping crew and I want to have a, you know, our fertilizer and spray crew. So to have that within the next few years and be able to make sure that everyone is paid fairly and that allows the business to be profitable and love the business to scale, that's the big thing for me.

Totally. I appreciate the call. And I wanted to say too, like in the book, I talk about the fact that not everyone employing P4P wants to make more money as owners. When I implemented P4P is because I wanted to keep people and pay them appropriately. There's two reasons why you'd implement P4P. One is because you're not making money and there's massive amounts of un. There's a massive amount of waste in your labor. You're losing money. And the second reason you'd implement P4P, which can be completely separate from the first, if you're already making good money, you're like, man, why would I implement P4P? I'm making a bunch of money. Well, the fact of the matter is you would implement P4P so that you can actually tie performance to pay and that you can leave the business and know that people will work just as hard and you don't have to worry and micromanage and you can cut back on your overhead and put that money into profit sharing because you don't need management always watching over the shoulder of the employee as long as they're above base pay. So anyways, next caller who's already been on hold for 18 minutes from Nashville, Tennessee. 615 caller, go for it.

This is Jack in Corral, Oregon. How are you today, Jack?

How's it going? I don't know why it said you were from Nashville, Tennessee, but I'm glad you're in Oregon.

It is a natural number. The computer's not lying to you.

Let's go. Cool, what's your question?

So I'm actually a full time facility manager, have been for almost 20 years and I'm in the middle of buying a landscape business.

Cool.

I found you during my due diligence review of the business itself and after going through most of the landscape business course, I'm looking forward to coming up to conference and your content and the information there helped me make the final decision to go ahead and purchase this business.

Cool. Good for you.

And my question for you. Thank you. It's an awesome business. It's been great reputation, great name, good Cruise does almost $500,000 in top line revenue, three trucks, five workers, decent equipment. But there has been almost zero use of software, automation or anything else that the management aid the business topped out two years ago with capacity. They added another truck last year and grew a little bit. But what they ran into now is an absolute limit to what they can manage without software. So I'm rolling out things like service autopilot.

To communicate with customers to do automation, all those awesome things that I'm comfortable with doing. But do you have any recommendations for how to change the culture of the workers to use those things and to change the culture of the client to move towards using the customer portal, putting cards on file, participating in e invoicing.

Have you already like that? Have you already launched it and tried to convince customers or not?

No, that the closes in mid January. I'm just now starting to build out all the service menu and importing all of the client information into service autopilot.

So I don't think you'll actually have a whole lot of friction especially after 2020 and 2021. Like everyone's online, everyone's very comfortable with paying things with their credit card online. There's going to be a few, especially if they haven't done any of that in the past where they've been putting cash under like mats or checks or anything like that. That's going to be a little bit of a struggle. But this is how I would do it. And as make a video when you acquire the business, ideally with the other owner because obviously they have interest in being going well too if obviously you trust them enough. So hey, why don't we make a video? You're going to say hey, this is the new owner. And then you're going to say hey, here's the things that we're changing. Not your price by the way, don't raise the price when you're doing acquisition. Say hey, prices are saying the same. Here's what's going to improve. Now you're going to be able to pay online. Now you're going to be able to do auto pay where we just keep your card on File and now we're going to have an office staff. Now we're going to have automations that are able to tell you when we're at your property, whatever it might be. Those are the things you want to focus on value proposition to the customer. Like oh wow, great new owner, all these new things, my price isn't going up. This is great. Um, and so I, if you lean into that, 80 to 90% of them will accept that change. Okay. Um, on the employee side.

That'S a little harder because if they're all used of not using phones, like are they all like computer illiterate or they just apprehensive to use technology or do you not know you haven't changed it?

I have seen enough to know that they all have phones but the, the owner tried to roll out Yardbook a couple of years ago and the employees effectively revolted and just would not, would not use any of the software. And they're great workers. They're just.

Disinterested in what they perceive as an additional non value add process. For them it's not a choice. We're moving towards the route management and everything else that provided by service autopilot. Because I'm not willing to spend 80 hours a week managing the business which is roughly what the previous owners put in together.

Right.

I think I can cut that down to well under 40 just by automating all of the invoicing and billing and collections and everything else and dispatching folks with phones in the field. If something goes wrong on a route right now they have to drive back to the office to find out what to do next leading to just obviously huge inefficiency.

That's what I was really looking for. P4P is something that I would like to move towards one so that the employees will take better care of the equipment because they know that it's coming out of their potential, you know, P4P above base pay and close the loop on the owner that goes out and does quality control. Just like you mentioned to the previous caller. I want that to be done by crew lead and the Boeing crew in the field before they check out at the end of a job. I just was looking for some guidance or some pointers on changing that type of culture without of course leading to a mass accident.

Yeah, honestly if they are threatening to all leave over software to changed, I don't know how much you know them but if ownership changes there's a good chance they're going to leave. Like have you talked to the employees already?

No, the Sale is still not being advertised.

Got it. So I would put an 80% likelihood that they're all going to leave based upon them potentially doing that over software two years ago. I would also say that people are more adapt to software over the past two years. So potentially that could be an improvement. I think the biggest thing though is what you just said, and that is making a switch to something, whether it be P4P or whatever, that aligns your goals with theirs. The reason you want them to change the software is because you're going to be, the business will be more efficient. You will go from 80 hours to 30 hours a week and you will make more money. What's in it for them? That's the question you gotta ask yourself. That's why there would be a mutiny. Cause they only see upside potential for the business and for the owner. So what you've gotta think about is how do I align their best interest making more money, making their job easier with this change of software. And that's going to come down to, hey, if, if I know I'm paid based upon performance and based upon, I get a percentage of the revenue I make every day, I want to be as efficient as possible. I want to be able to log in the night before and see, see my job notes so I can come to work early and get a plan and get out of there. So we actually, when we, several years ago we had a team meeting at an off site and one of the older team members said, hey, look, we don't, you guys should not be texting us outside of, if we're not clocked in, you should not be texting us. And okay, like let's try it out. Let's try. No one gets text messages after hours or before work. And literally within three days, everyone wanted it changed. The reason was because they're based upon performance. They want to see their job notes the night before. They want to see their, their project the night before. They want to get that communication and get there early, get their stuff ready and get out of there. Not wait till like the time that, you know, I'm supposed to clock and now I can get my job notes. So the only reason that happened though is because they were incentivized for, for efficiency and based upon P4P. So I think that's the number one. And then I think below that though, I would definitely say if you're going to try to change their pay structure and ownership and they were about to leave over software being changed, you might be just in the back of Your mind thinking about the fact that a lot of them are going to leave. And I don't think that's a bad thing because if they leave over you trying to make positive changes like that in the business, there's going to be bigger issues down the road anyways. But I do believe you got to think about what's in it for them. This technology change, not just making the business better, not just reducing the amount of time you have to work, work of the job, on the job, not just making the business more money because there's nothing in it for them. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. The first thing I was looking to roll out would be performance bonuses on daily and weekly route completion. Because the current business owner has frequently has holdovers to the following week because of inefficient routing or because of return trips to the shop for missed items or return trips back to customers from this services. And I was thinking that one of the easiest ways is to show them that, look, this, this software is going to show you everything that needs to go on for the job. And you're going to know every job you need to do before you leave for the day. If everything is done when you come back, you know there's, that's a, that's a check in the positive for that day. If that happens for the entire week, you know, there's a, there's a weekly performance incentive.

Yep. Yeah, I think that's the first step. Right. That's kind of a hybrid of PvP. It's a first step in the right direction. And I think it's a matter of being really open. Like hey, here's what it costs us every single week for us to go over, okay, $500. That $500 is going to get broken up. Of course, of everyone who finishes their out correctly. Right. That becomes an incentive. The reason I'm. That's a good step. Let's say it's weekly basis. I want to get it down though to where on Monday morning they are going to make more money today if they get more jobs done. I want that incentive to be as close to the performance as possible. I always want the compensation to be as close to performance as possible. Because most employees, frontline employees, don't have the forethought of on Monday morning to run to the truck in order to get their bonus on Friday. What they'll do is they'll wait till Thursday and be like, oh, where are we at? Right? Should I be working harder? Should I be working less? And I don't want Them filling up the time. I don't want them thinking, oh, Thursday, man, we're crushing it. Weather's been great. I can slack off the next two days because I just got to get, you know, the work done by Friday and then I got my bonus. So you've always got to think about perverse incentives when it comes to giving a bonus because over time.

Your quantity of work that you actually get out of them would slowly decrease over time because they just start to realize that they've just got to hit a certain marker on Friday and they get a bonus. Which means if they could have got it done by Wednesday, why push yourself?

Right? So you basically say, increase that Pavlovian response, meaning move that reward as close to the behavior that you're trying to encourage as you can.

Exactly. That's why the daily reports are so. Yep.

Cool. Thanks for calling in, brother.

Restrictions don't happen. I'll be up there at the conference.

Awesome. I look forward to seeing you. Have a great, great Christmas, brother.

Thank you as well.

Bye. Bye. All right, next one's from. I know it's Utah, but I don't know how to say this.

2L E. Utah, are you there?

Yeah, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can. Sorry, I don't know even how to say the name of your city. I apologize.

Is Toele? Tooele, Utah.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, I was way off. Okay, great. Cool. What's your question?

So I am going full time with my business this spring. I've been in business like 5 years part time and I finally decided to make the jump. So my question is we're kind of in a. We're in a booming market right now. Twill is just kind of exploding and I know there's a lot of work and I know that this spring with me, you know, marketing, putting out door hangers and stuff, I can get probably a lot more work than I can handle by myself. So my question is, when it comes to hiring, I've kind of been thinking about hiring two part time guys and just staggering them instead of hiring one full time guy. Because my worry is if I hire one full time guy to help me out and then I just get way too much work and get overloaded and then for some reason he quit, then I'm just kind of stuck with all the work and can't handle it. But if I have two part time guys kind of staggered, if one leaves, I still kind of have a backup, if that makes sense.

Yeah, there's pros and cons of both. Like I Understand where you're coming from. It's a very defensive mindset that you're coming from, which is basically, God forbid I get too much work, God forbid I got a really good person and then they leave. Right? So it's a very defensive mindset that you're coming from, which is fine if that's what you want to do, run the business. But, but like if you're trying to grow, I would think more like, hey, if I get a good person, I want to give them as many hours as I possibly can and if they left, I would, I would make sure that my margins are good enough to where I could go get someone immediately because I can pay higher than, you know, average wage in the market, right? So like, you know, if, let's say you got a really good person, let's say they're full time and then they left. What I would do is immediately raise my prices. So hopefully I lose some customers and if I don't, I'm going to then be able to afford to be able to go advertise to pay someone 3, 4, 5 dollars more per hour if I needed to, like in a crunch, right. Or offer someone on Craigslist like, hey, I just really need help for the next week. I'll give you $25 an hour, just come help me. Like, so I would, I would take more of that aggressive approach. And the reason is too, because when you have two part timers, you also have, you have half the output for twice as much of the, of the effort of managing their schedules. Oh, I've got to work around school, I got a second job. Well now I'm bouncing around like, you know, their priorities and well, because at the end of the day, if I'm not going to commit full time to an employee, I don't really expect them to commit to me full time. And I really believe that we as employers have to realize that they're going to match the level of commitment that we have to them. Right? So if I'm like, hey, I'm only going to, I know you want full time hours, but I only gave you part time. Well, if I do that well now, like I either they're going to get another job and then I've got to work on that schedule or that maybe they're in school or doing an internship or something else and juggling some two people's schedule like that all the time is actually really, really tough. I'd rather have a full time person, if they're good, that wants to show up to work Every single day depends on the paycheck. That's their only job. That's the only thing they're committed to. It's easier to work with scheduling. Otherwise you're just going to feel like you're, you're picking people up and then you're, hey, could you, are you available as extra day? Could you work a little longer? This day I'm running behind. Whereas if, when it was a full time person, it's like, hey, I know that I have this person as my, as my employee and I can depend on that. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that clears it up for me. So thanks for that. I appreciate it.

Awesome. You got, brother. Have a great Christmas.

Thanks, you as well.

Bye.

Bye.

All right, next call is from Orlando, Florida, area code 3, 2, 1. Here it is on hold for 14 minutes. I apologize. Orlando, Florida, how's it going?

Hey Mike, it's Vlad. We just spoke not too long ago.

Oh yeah, cool. How's it going?

Good, good, good. I just had a quick question for you.

So as we're looking to expand here, I know you have this, I think you used to have that in Mount Vernon. But how do you guys go about or some of your franchises going about, like renting land from residents like as a shop space. Like do you guys send mailers out in the mail? Like, how do you, how do you get that place?

Yeah, so we kind of have a one page lease that we give our franchisees and the lease is not to necessarily go find a place. It's, it's the fact that most homeowners, farmers, anyone with land isn't like super receptive. Some random person showing up on their dorm like, I want to rent land from you. So we try to have a lease that we already have pre prepared for them. So that way when they go to a potential place, it's like, I'm legit. I'm willing to sign a lease that already tells like how it's going to roll when I leave and how much more I have to pay per truck when I start growing like that. We thought things through that we're going to provide insurance. So I think that is really important. But just, you know, getting in front of them in general, it's literally like the two or three places that you're going to want in your city usually. And we just go straight to them. Like we literally just go on the door, knock on, hey, like I see land, can I park trucks there? I will give you X amount of dollars here's. A lease. Would you be interested? Right. So we really go much more targeted. We don't really advertise. You can throw something on Craigslist under gigs sometimes that works well. Or under real estate you can put an ad up on there. But you know, it's rare that that's the case. Usually you're going and you've got to get a little hand to hand combat and actually like, okay, I want that piece of land. That's a great spot that they don't ever park their vehicles. They're just a bunch of gravel. I'll go knock on the door. That's literally how it usually works.

And then I know here, like for example, Florida, like just putting a small shed will require probably a permit to the city. I mean, I know you guys are sometimes putting those, the shipping containers. I mean, do you guys run into a problem like that ever where now? I mean, is that something that you're going to have to do or the owner wants to do now with the city is to maybe get a permit possibly for that shipping container?

Yeah, like I know in our area we don't have to get a building permit. I know most states don't, so I would look into that. But shipping container, that's why most people use them for storage is because you don't need a building permit. And you can go over like for example in Washington state, anything over 200 square feet you have to have a building permit. However, if it's a storage container, that's next. Right now you want to put correct ventilation in a storage container. Make sure it's not going to like get too hot or there's fumes, things like that. But typically you do not need a building permit. And that's why we like to use them on those mobile shop areas. Like we just moved our shop in New York to Connecticut and you know, just they rolled up, picked up the storage container and moved it to our new shop. Right. So it is simple and that's what I would recommend.

Go ahead. And you guys just use the gas generators to kind of power that shop. You don't pull power from the owner, do you?

It just depends. Every single owner is a little different. Like for example, in North Carolina they have a shop space in a gravel lot behind a contractor with a contractor and they already had power there. So if they need, they can plug directly in and the guy's like, it's fine. You're probably using a couple dollars a month and it's not a big deal. Other areas, yeah, we get A generator. And we just run off a generator when we're sharpening blades or we're trying to charge something up. But unless, like, the only reason you really need power, like, consistent is if you have an office. If you're just storing equipment, you only really need a generator for, like, sharpening blades maybe, like cleaning stuff out, vacuuming maybe. But there's really not much unless you have an actual office staff, which is, you know, a whole different ball game. You're not even thinking about renting land. You need an actual building.

Yeah. Unless we're an all electric lawn care company, you know, we need to charge a battery somewhere, you know?

Right.

That's the only other option too.

Yeah. And there's those really quiet generators that, you know, produce like a thousand watts or whatever. And those are really great because they're light. You can literally just toss them in. So I think, I think Mount Vernon has a couple of those. And they'll just throw them in the back of the trucks. That way if the dump trailer ever dies, that way if anything happens, like, it's. It's good to go and they're. They're really quiet and, and don't burn a lot of fuel, so.

All right. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Merry Christmas. I don't want to hold the line for other people that might need your help.

You're good. Thanks, brother. You have a great Christmas. Take care of. All right, next question. Catcher Alabama coming up here. 3, 2, 1. Launch talk. Here we go. Alabama, can you hear me?

256 number. Sorry, some people's names don't come up when they call in.

Can you hear me now?

I can. How's it going?

Hey, Mike, how are you?

Good, good. What was your name?

My name's Cole.

Cole. Awesome. And are you actually coming from Alabama or is that. Is that a mistake on my end?

Well, that's my hometown. I currently live in Northern California.

Oh, wow. That's quite the change. All right, cool. What's your question?

All right, so, and first off, I really want to say I appreciate everything you do, especially taking this time to have the live call. Means a lot.

But my question is I'm currently active duty Air Force, and that's kind of why I'm in California. But my question is I have, you know, the goals and ambitions to start my own lawn care company, but.

I don't want to do it in California. I want to do it, you know, another place. Because I don't see, like a long term value in my opinion, staying in California. Just due to the cost of living and whatnot. But I have about two more years left in California. What would you say to somebody that is, you know, potentially going to be moving and wants to get started now? You know.

You have two years. So the only really value that I would say then is your ability, like sharpening the skill of selling. And if you have time in the next two years to just basically stack cash. Right. So I'd be trying to do cleanups, I'd be trying to do bush trimmings. I'd be trying to do some overgrown mows, like high cash value and that you can basically put in your pocket. Right. So even if it was on a cash basis that you just deal with people that would want to support you, obviously you probably have connections if you had to pull in somebody to help with you on a bigger project. But I'd just be stacking cash. And at the same time, you're getting field experience, actually knowing what you're doing. Obviously not all that's going to translate to a different state, but just getting around the tools, getting around the equipment, learning how to sell. I think that's what I'd be focusing on. And then in two years, you'd have the capital and the knowledge to really see scale it much, much faster. And that's when I would, you know, get an LLC and insurance and all the rest of it.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I like that point of stacking cash, getting experience. And then, you know, after the two years, if I want to pivot to another state, you know, I'm looking at Texas and then possibly going to college as well, you know, or even pursuing a trade. So it's helping things, but kind of come victim of analysis paralysis. So do you have any tips on that of not like overanalyzing the situation to the point of, you know, just not taking any action?

Yeah. A lot of times it's caused by the fact that you're trying to, you know, cross bridges way before you're getting there. Right. You don't need to determine right now where you're moving. You know, you're in California for the next two years. So regardless if you go to school, regardless of you go different career, whether you move to a different state or you go to Texas or whoever, like wherever, it doesn't matter. So, like, don't. Don't think about that stuff. Like right now, you know, for the next two years you're in California. And then the question is, well, how do I set myself up for success after Those two years, regardless of where I go or what I do, number one thing is just stack cash aside because it's going to give you options. Money gives you options. So if you come out of the next two years out of the military and you have, let's just say I'm going to throw a number 50 grand, versus if you come out of the military with 10 grand, you're gonna have way more option with the 50. Because that $50,000 could immediately get you two trucks up and running in whatever facility or whatever state you move to. If you wanted to go the business route, it could also let you go to college and then have the money to hire an employee and kind of lose money for the first little bit, but you're fine. Cause you got 50 grand and they can be out mowing lawns while you're at school throughout the day. So it gives you way more options. I would not worry about any of that stuff. Paralysis by analysis usually comes because you're analyzing things that are going to happen way down the road. That more than likely the scenario will be different by then. Right. So I just focus on, hey, next two years. This is what I'm doing. I'm just stacking cash. That's only thing I'd be thinking about. Because when you come out of the two years, you're going to have so many more options if you've done that.

Okay, perfect. Nice. I love that. I love that. Thank you so much for that.

My pleasure. And when you do get out, let me know. Send me an email and just put in there that you would act in military and things. I'd like to send you a few things.

Okay.

Best of luck.

Sounds good. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Best of luck, brother. Take care. All right, bye bye.

All right, next caller is from Nashville, Tennessee. Let me pull it up here. One second. Nashville, Tennessee, can you hear me?

Earth to Nashville. 615 number.

Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Nope. Nashville, Tennessee. I can't hear any 615 number.

Testing, testing. Okay. Nope, that's it. Okay, cool. We're gonna go ahead and drop it there for the day. I appreciate everyone for coming on the show. Everyone that asked live questions, like, you guys are phenomenal. Like, it's just really good questions. And no one's on here trying to do stupid stuff. So I really appreciate it. Most people don't do these live shows because they're afraid that when people do call in, they're going to say stupid stuff or just do weird things online. When you're live. So thank you so much for keeping it so awesome. I'll do more of these because I think it is valuable to hear people where they're coming from, their opinions as well as their circumstances, and then be aligned where you're at in your business come compared to what they're doing. So this is the last weekend where you can join Landscape Summit and get the sweaters because we have to order those a couple of weeks in advance. So if you want one of the really cool sweaters that I've worn in some of the videos it says Landscape Summit has 2021, 2022 tag on there and all the rest of it. You'll need to sign up by the end of this weekend so you can, you can join last minute if anyone wants to know. You can come to conference and kind of come in last minute based upon like if you're just waiting on something like child being born, weather, whatever it is, you can, you can book a ticket last minute and fly here, but I just can't guarantee that you're gonna have a sweater and a book and all the rest of the other stuff that we give away. So if you are planning to come to Landscape Summit, join this weekend. If not, just do it last minute. I just can't guarantee a sweater. So really appreciate everyone's support. I know this is probably one of the last lives I'll do this year, so I have to say thank you to everyone watching. 2021 was a a chaotically awesome year. A lot of stuff on every front was improved and grew and etc. It was a crazy year for me. I learned a lot and I'll probably make a video something about this, but I'm making this at the very end of a two hour. Well, it's been actually three hours because the first video messed up. So three hours of live because you, the, you know, the 60 people watching now are probably some of my people have been around for a long time. You guys follow a lot of my content. You are in landscape business course. You are part of lawn care web design. Lawn caremedia.com and I have to say thank you to all of you so much. Augusta Lawn Care wouldn't be possible honestly to this point without everyone's support. And I know I've made videos about why it's important to make sure that we don't have to get outside capital with Augusta. And it's really been made possible because of everyone supporting the channel and then the media side of things. Lawn caremedia.com, landscapebusinesscourse.com lawn carebookkeeper.com lawn careweb design.com and so I really appreciate all of your support. It has helped us dramatically and we are continuing to invest in the channel and trying to get more people to help us with the content. Tomorrow is a fire episode of Zero Turn. They're just getting better and better as we start honing it in and just really hoping to add as much value to all of you and help grow your business. So all the best this coming year. If I don't see you at Landscape Summit, I'll cry. So I hope you can make it. But if you can't have a great 2020, a very happy new Year and a merry Christmas. I just want to say thank you to all of you. I know we gave out some tickets and books and courses today, but to everyone else, anyone that would hear this, I really do appreciate it. Most of what I've done with Augusta and with what we've done here on the channel is because of all of your support and I really, really do appreciate it from the bottom of my heart and I'm looking forward to Landscape Summit. We're going to do it in a much, much bigger way than we ever have. It's gonna be at least four times the size of last year's conference in terms of in person. So really looking forward to it. I appreciate all of you so very much and look forward to what 2022 will bring for your business and for this community. Thanks so much. Have a very, very great Christmas Eve. I hope tomorrow a great time with your family and enjoy the next week until the New Year's.

Take care and close the loop on the owner that goes out and does quality control. Just like you mentioned to the previous caller, I want that to be done by crew leads and the rowing crew in the field before they check out at the end of a job. I just was looking for some guidance or some pointers on changing that type of culture without of course, leading to a mass accident.

Yeah, honestly, if they are threatening, you know, to all leave over software change, I don't know how much you know them, but if ownership changes, there's a good chance they're going to leave. Like, have you talked to the employees already?

No, the sale is still not being advertised.

Got it. So I would put an 80% likelihood that they're all going to leave based upon them potentially doing that over software two years ago. I would also say that people are more adapt to software over the past two years, so potentially that could be an improvement. I Think the biggest thing though is what you just said, and that is making a switch to something, whether it be P4P or whatever, that align your goals with theirs. The reason you want them to change the software is because you're going to be, the business will be more efficient. You will go from 80 hours to 30 hours a week and you will make more money. What's in it for them? That's the question you want to ask yourself. That's why there would be a mutiny, because they only see upside potential for the business and for the owner. So what you've got to think about is how do I align their best interest, making more money, making their job easier with this change of software. And that's going to come down to, hey, if, if I know I'm paid based upon performance and based upon I get a percentage of the revenue I make every day, I want to be as efficient as possible. I want to be able to log in the night before and see my job notes so I can come to work early and get a plan and get out of there. So we actually, when we, several years ago, we had a team meeting at an off site and one of the older, a team member said, hey, look, we don't. You guys should not be texting us outside of. If we're not clocked in, you should not be texting us. And we're like, okay, let's try it out. Let's try. No one gets text messages after hours or before work. And literally within three days, everyone wanted it changed. The reason was because they're based upon performance. They want to see their job notes the night before. They want to see their, their project the night before. They want to get that communication and get there early, get their stuff ready and get out of there, not wait till like the time that, you know, I'm supposed to clock in. Now I can get my job notes. So the only reason that happened though is because they were incentivized for, for efficiency and based upon P4P. So I think that's the number one. And then I think below that though, I would definitely say if you're going to try to change their pay structure and ownership and they were about to leave over software being changed. You might be just in the back of your mind thinking about the fact that a lot of them are going to leave and I don't think that's a bad thing because if they leave over you trying to make positive changes like that in the business, there's going to be bigger issues down the road anyways. But I do believe you got to think about what's in it for them. This technology change, not just making the business better, not just reducing the amount of time you have to work at the job, on the job, not just making the business more money because there's nothing in it for them. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. The first thing I was looking to roll out would be performance bonuses on daily and weekly route completion because the current business owner has frequently has holdovers to the following week because of inefficient routing or because of return trips to the shop for missed items or return trips back to customers for missed services. And I was thinking that one of the easiest ways is to show them that, look, this software is going to show you everything that needs to go on for the job. And you're going to know every job you need to do, do or you leave for the day. If everything is done when you come back, you know, there's, that's a, that's a check in the positive for that day. If that happens for the entire week, you know, there's a, there's a weekly performance incentive.

Yep. Yeah, I think that's the first step. Right. Like, that's kind of like a hybrid of PvP. It's a first step in the right direction. And I think it's a matter of being really open. Like, hey, here's what it costs us every single week for us to go over, okay, $500. That $500 is going to get broken up. Of course, of everyone who finishes their route correctly. Right. That becomes an incentive. The reason I, I'm. That's a good step. It's, let's say it's weekly basis. I want to get it down though, to where on Monday morning they are going to make more money today if they get more jobs done. I want that incentive to be as close to the performance as possible. I always want the compensation to be as close to performance as possible. Because most employees, frontline employees, don't have the forethought of on Monday morning to run to the truck in order to get their bonus on Friday. What they'll do is they'll wait till Thursday and like, oh, where are we at? Right? Should I be working harder? Should I be working less? And I don't want them filling up the time. I don't want them thinking, oh, Thursday, man, we're crushing it. Weather's been great. I can slack off the next two days because I just gotta get, you know, the work done by Friday and then I got my bonus so you've always gotta think about perverse incentives when it comes to giving a bonus. Because over time.

Your quantity of work that you would actually get out of them would slowly decrease over time because they just start to realize that they've just gotta hit a certain marker on Friday and they get a bonus. Which means if they could have got it done by Wednesday, why push yourself?

Right. So you basically say, increase that Pavlovian response, meaning move that reward as close to the behavior that you're trying to encourage as you can.

Exactly. That's why the daily reports are so important. Yep.

Cool. Thanks for calling in, brother.

Restrictions don't happen. I'll be up there at the conference.

Awesome. I look forward to seeing you. Have a great Christmas, brother.

Thank you. You're as well.

Okay, bye. Bye. All right, next one's from. I know it's Utah, but I don't know how to say this. 22 L2LE. Utah, are you there?

Yeah, can you hear me?

Yeah, I can. Sorry, I don't know even how to say the name of your city. I apologize. Is it two two Ellie?

Oh, you're good.

Tooele, Utah.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, I was way off. Okay, great. Cool. What's your question?

So I am going full time with my business this spring. I've been in business like 5 years part time, and I finally decided to make the jump. So my question is, we're kind of in a. We're in a booming market right now. Twilla is just kind of exploding and I know there's a lot of work and I know that this spring with me, you know, marketing, putting out door hangers and stuff, I can get probably a lot more work than I can handle by myself. So my question is, when it comes to hiring, I've kind of been thinking about hiring two part time guys and just staggering them instead of hiring one full time guy. Because my worry is if I hire one full time guy to help me out and then I just get way too much work and get overloaded and then for some reason he quit, then I'm just kind of stuck with all the work and can't handle it. But if I have two part time guys kind of staggered, if one leaves, I still kind of have have a backup, if that makes sense.

Yeah, there's pros and cons of both. Like, I understand where you're coming from. It's a very defensive of mindset that you're coming from, which is basically, you know, God forbid I get too much work. God forbid. I got a really good person and then they leave. Right? So it's a very defensive mindset that you're coming from, which is fine if that's, that's what you want to do, you know, run the business. But like if you're trying to grow, I would think more like, hey, if I get a good person, I want to give them as many hours as I possibly can and if they left, I would, I would make sure that my margins are good enough to where I could go get someone immediately because I can pay higher than, you know, average wage in, in the market, right? So like, you know, if, let's say you got a really good person, let's say they're full time and then they left. What I would do is immediately raise my prices. So hopefully I lose some customers. And if I don't, I'm going to then be able to afford to be able to go advertise to pay someone 3, 4, 5 more per hour if I needed to, like in a crunch, right. Or offer someone on Craigslist like, hey, I just really need help for the next week. I'll give you $25 an hour, just come help me. Like, so I would, I would take more of that aggressive approach. And the reason is too, because when you have two part timers, you also have, you have half the output for twice as much of the, of the effort of managing their schedules. Oh, I've got to work around school, I got a second job. Well now I'm bouncing around like, you know, their priorities and well, because at the end of the day if I'm not going to commit full time to an employee, I don't really expect them to commit full time to me full time. And I, I really believe that we as employers have to realize that they're going to match the level of commitment that we have to them. Right. So if I'm like, hey, I'm only gonna, I know you want full time hours, but I only gave you a part time. Well, if I do that well now like I either they're gonna get another job and then I've got to work on that schedule or that maybe they're in school or doing an internship or something else. And juggling some two people schedule like that all the time is actually really, really tough. It, I'd rather have a full time person, if they're good, that wants to show up to work every single day, depends on the paycheck. That's their only job. That's the only thing they're committed to. It's easier to work with scheduling. Otherwise you're just going to feel like you're picking people up and then you're, hey, could you, are you available as extra day? Could you work a little longer? This day I'm running behind. Whereas if when it was a full time person, it's like, hey, I know that I have this person as my, as my employee and, and I can depend on that. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that clears it up for me. So thanks for that. I appreciate it.

Awesome. You got brother. Have a great Christmas.

Thanks, you as well.

Bye. Bye. All right, next call is from Orlando, Florida, area code 3, 2, 1. Here it is on, on hold for 14 minutes. I apologize. Orlando, Florida, how's it going?

Hey Mike, it's Vlad. We just spoke not too long ago.

Oh yeah, cool. How's it going?

Good, good, good. I just had a quick question for you.

So as we're looking to expand here. Yeah, I know you have this, I think you used to have that in Mount Vernon. But how do you guys go about or some of your franchises going about, like renting land from residents like that as a shop space? Like do you guys send mailers out in the mail? Like how do you, how do you get that place?

Yeah, so we kind of have a one page lease that we give our franchisees. And the lease is not to necessarily go find a place. It's the fact that most homeowners, farmers, anyone with land isn't like super receptive. Some random person showing up on their dorm like, I want to rent land from you. So we try to have a lease that we already have pre prepared for them. So that way when they go to a potential place, it's like, I'm legit. I'm willing to sign a lease that already tells like how it's going to roll when I leave and how much more I have to pay per truck when I start growing like that. We thought things through that we're going to provide insurance. So I think that is really important. But just, you know, getting in front of them in general, it's literally like the two or three places that you're going to want in your city usually. And we just go straight to them. Like we literally just go on the door, knock on, hey, like I see land, can I park trucks there? I will give you X amount of dollars. Here's a lease. Would you be interested? Right. So we really go much more targeted. We don't really advertise. You can throw something on Craigslist under Gigs Sometimes that works well. Or under real estate, you can put an ad up on there. But you know, it's rare that that's the case. Usually you're going and you've got to get a little hand to hand combat and actually like, okay, I want that piece of land. That's a great spot that they don't ever park their vehicles. They're just a bunch of gravel. I'll go knock on the door. That's literally how easy works.

And then I know here, like for example, Florida, like just putting a small shed will require probably a permit to the city. I mean, I know you guys are sometimes putting those shipping containers. I mean, do you guys run into a problem like that ever where now, I mean, there's something that you're gonna have to do or the owner wants to do. Now where the city is to maybe get a permit possibly for that shipping container?

Yeah, like I know in our area we don't have to get a building permit. I know most states don't, so I would look into that. But shipping container, that's why most people use them for storage, is because you don't need a building permit. And you can go over, like for example, in Washington state, anything over 200 square feet, you have to have a building permit. However, if it's a storage container, that's next. Right now you want to put correct ventilation in a storage container. Make sure it's not going to get too high or there's fumes, things like that. But typically you do not need a building permit. And that's why we like to use them on those mobile shop areas. Like we just moved our shop in New York to Connecticut and you know, just they rolled up, picked up the storage painter and moved it to our new shop. Right. So it is simple and that's what I would recommend.

Good. And you guys just use the gas generators to kind of power that shop. You don't pull power from the owner, do you?

It just depends. Every single owner is a little different. Like for example, in North Carolina, they have a shop space in a gravel lot behind a contractor with a contractor and they already had power there. So if they need, they can plug directly in and the guy's like, it's fine. You're probably using a couple dollars a month and it's not a big deal. Other areas, yeah, we get a generator and we run off a generator when we're sharpening blades or we're trying to charge something up. But unless, like the only reason you really need power, like consistent is if you have an office. If you're just storing equipment, you only really need a generator for, like, sharpening blades, maybe, like, cleaning stuff out, vacuuming maybe. But there's really not much unless you have an actual office staff, which is, you know, a whole different ball game. You're not even thinking about renting land. You need an actual building.

Yeah. Unless we're an all electric lawn care company, you know, we need to charge a battery somewhere, you know?

Right. Yeah. And there's those really quiet generators that produce like, a thousand watts or whatever. And those are really great because they're light. You can literally just toss them in. So I think Mount Vernon has a couple of those. And they'll just throw them in the back of the trucks. That way, if the dump trailer ever dies, that way, if anything happens, it's good to go.