Mike Andes covers crew sizing decisions for mowing operations: solo crews for efficiency, two-person crews for safety and morale, multi-person crews for large commercial jobs. A new GM boosted one location's revenue by $50k without hiring more people, using better P4P management, accurate budgeting, equipment maintenance, and morning meetings.
Hey everyone, hope you're doing super well. Let's go and get started.
If you have not already.
Seen the recording of last night's.
Roundtable.
I sent everyone's email last night so you should be able to see that. Let me just drop this into Facebook.
All right.
Cool. Yeah, so last night's roundtable was really good. Feel free to check it out. It's about 45, 50 minutes long. Put the recording onto the academy underneath franchise updates as well as email everyone a link to the recording. All right, let me see if there's any questions.
Two questions. All right, Share.
First question. Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma how much of an efficiency gain would two one man crews make versus one two man crew mowing? Is it always better to just make more mowing crews if you have the capital for trucks and equipment? Is there any case where you wouldn't want to have solar routes? I would not want to have solar routes. The less stops I have each day, which typically means the larger the properties. So if they're doing three or four really big properties a day, I would want two or three people on that route. The smaller the properties, the higher efficiency gains are from having solo trucks. So if you have 20 stops in a day, probably very likely that you want to reduce the number of people on that mowing stop, that mowing crew. If you have 323 4, you do massive properties where they're working there for hour two hours at a time. The efficiencies gained in having one person instead of two is lost by the fact that you have to buy so much more equipment. And the efficiency gains are smaller because the real efficiencies of having two 1 versus 2 is in in the transition at every single prod, every single stop. So.
In terms of is always better. It's going to help your crew make better on P4P and be more efficient overall in terms of how much revenue they can produce per hour. But it's not necessarily the best for the business because you might need to make spend that money on.
Hiring, marketing, expanding the business. So that's why again at the beginning of the business it's usually a little bit harder to get people to get make P4P because you are needing to spend the money on other things besides trucks and and equipment in the form of marketing. So typically when you hit at year 34 etc and you stop spending on money on marketing, you can deploy against trucks and equipment and thereby also increase prices, also thereby increase the all the crews P4P because you can afford to get them on solo routes, assuming they're doing residential jobs like for any project related stuff, we're doing 4, 8, 20 budget hour jobs. Like anything that's not recurring. Always having two people go into those pretty much all the time. And then if there is, if you ever had a route where there was two or three bits of a whole day, like an hoa, you want two, three, four people sometimes works well on those. So that's why commercial setups, if you have four or five people on it, it's totally fine because they're like stopping at one spot all day long and working. When you start stopping and starting throughout the day, that's when you start losing efficiency with multiple people on a crew. Kyle Tarvin, yesterday the roundtable you showed the bellum locations numbers between the two months. What specifically did the new GM do to turn around the location? How did you squeeze 50k extra revenue out of the same labor? Same, same labor. Better management of their P4P better management, their budget hours, more accurate budget hours. Motivating the team, getting the optional, getting the team motivated around like increasing their skills and just improving themselves. Coming to optional meetings.
Just better leadership, better management, better at the.
Meeting, morning meetings, managing broken equipment, much, much better. Making sure they keep tabs and all of that to ensure that the guys are most efficient out in the field and creating less drives back to the shop.
All of the above. So.
Yeah, and you all will meet, meet Corey likely at in October and definitely feel free to say hi to him then. He came to training last week and is a real rock star. He's worked for us about a year out in the field and so in my opinion having someone that is in the field and then we're in the GM role, they kind of garner a lot of goodwill and respect from the team. So it's a little bit easier of a transition.
And he was already kind of doing estimates already so it wasn't like a huge transition. But in terms of like again whoever that one person that is at the top, their, their leadership style is going to be a very dictating what the profitability of the location is. And then what they're still now doing is like they got to retrain people, get them back to being efficient, making more money on P4P, getting equipment back up to snuff, getting systems back in order for.
Maintenance of equipment, things like that. And then the question is like oh, why didn't we get rid of the previous GM sooner? I give a lot of rope to the GMs before I pull the plug on them, mostly due to the fact that a new gm, it's not an easy role if they've never done it before. If I was going out and hiring someone that had 20 years of general management experience, I would expect from day one a much higher level level of skill, but also be paying significantly higher. So I'm willing to take frontline guys and give them an opportunity to move up inside the company at the expense that, yes, you're going to occasionally have a GM that does not work out.
But knowing what the system should be, you can always come right back to it and fix it pretty quickly. And that's what I was showing last night.
All right, I know it was a quick one because last night we answered most questions at Roundtable. Again, if you were not there live, make sure you watch the recording of that. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Take care.
