Mowing VS Hardscaping: Which One is Better? (we do both!)

Are you thinking about starting a lawn care or a landscaping business? And you're not sure if you should do hardscaping and big projects or just mowing lawns? Today we're gonna talk about the pros and the cons of both. And if you want to start a landscaping and project based business, how you can make it more efficient and more profitable. Alright, so this is actually a paver patio installation that we're gonna show you here. This is just the first part of the job. We're not gonna show you the end result, but you're gonna see the excavation part as well as installing the pavers. And I'm gonna talk about landscaping versus mowing. Is there one that's better? And in my opinion, there's not one that's better. You gotta choose what is right for. I really feel like lawn care is easier to get started with because it's lower cost of entry. You don't have to get big equipment, you don't have to have a dump trailer, you don't have a big diesel truck or a compactor and a excavator and a skid steer, a track loader, all these things. You don't need those to get started. And that's why lawn care is so great. And if your ambition is to have a landscaping or hardscaping company with a lot of more equipment and doing really fancy patios and all the rest of it, that's definitely something you can work towards. But getting started lawn care in my opinion is a little bit easier. Same thing with mowing and get those recurring services. Great business model. But you know, is hardscaping better? Hardscaping better? No, I think sometimes to put that in front of someone, say, oh, you have to. Hardscaping like that is the golden goose. That's the goal at the end of the rainbow is really, really wrong. Because for some people, their goals are aligned with scaling the business to the point where they don't have to be there every single day, that they can scale the business to the point where they have employees and they're able to train those employees quickly. There's several reasons why you would want to focus on building a hardscaping business where you do pavers and you do hardscaping and you do retaining walls and you might build a pergola and all of these other cool hardscaping things that look amazing. First reason you would want to do that is if you are passionate about it, you love doing it. You literally think and dream about paver patios and doing custom work for Contractors and you love what we're watching right now. Like this is super interesting. You figure out the designs and all the rest of it. That is why you would want to do hardscaping. The other reason why you might want to do hardscaping is if you don't mind working in the business a lot more. The reason I say that is because if your goal is to get out of day to day operations and scale the business to the point where you don't have to show up every day, it's going to be easier to do that using lawn care and simple services. Because as soon as you introduce hardscaping and having excavators and trenchers and ditch witches and all these other big piece of equipment, it's harder to find talent and labor that is capable of doing that without more supervision. It's going to be a higher cost structure because now I'm going to have to hire a manager if I'm not there every day. If you're going to be there every day, this is fine. This is irrelevant to you. But if you're trying to grow the business to the point where you don't have to be there, that means that there's going to have to be a manager. There's going to be someone that the buck stops with them. They sell the jobs, they manage the jobs and make sure things are showing up on time. They train the crew and if you're going to do that, that's fine. Hardscaping is a great place to make really good money, especially when the housing market is doing really well. But when you want to get out of the business and you don't want to be there every day and you want to be able to hire a manager, take things over, it's going to be much more expensive to find a manager that is able to do excavation and building all these construction projects. It's going to be very expensive, very hard to find and they a lot of options. Why would they go start their own business if they can basically run yours? Whereas with mowing and simple services, you can very easily, within a couple of years get someone who's completely raw and new, never mowed grass in their life. Train them on outdoor services, train them on your sales process, because that's easier too. They don't need a whole bunch of experience and knowledge about equipment and maintenance of that equipment and all the different types of angle of repose and what type of gravel and the grit and all the other things that go into being a really good hardscaper. They don't need to know those things that therefore you can. With lower overhead structure, you can get a manager in place and you can find the laborers to do the work. Because if you're going to be doing paver patios every day along with pools and 15 foot retaining walls, you're going to need very, very skilled laborers. That's going to be harder and harder to find people that know how to operate excavators and trenchers and a skid steer and all these other different pieces of equipment. And furthermore, it's going to be more liability when you're doing these big projects. Because yes, you can absolutely make 20, 30, 50, $100,000 in profit on a job when you're doing construction work. But you could also lose your shirt if you don't do it right. If you make a mistake and you now are replacing or redoing work, it's high liability. And not only can you make a lot of money, you can lose a lot of money. So we're not against projects. I Love projects. About 50 to 60% of our revenue across Augusta Lawn Care at all of our locations, about 50 to 60% is through Project based work. I'm against it. But if you want to scale the business, your road out of the business on a day to day operational level is simple services and making sure that you're going to actually be able to hand these services off to a labor or a manager without breaking the bank or trying to find one needle in a haystack. And that's going to be how it is as it gets harder and harder to find skilled laborers. Now if you want to do hardscaping, great. Here's my recommendation to you. If you're wanting to grow the business and potentially one day get out of the business and have someone else manage it, yes, you're going to need more skilled laborers, etc. But it's still possible. Here's how you do it. Simplify those projects, simplify your services. Everyone says, you know Mike, you don't want projects and you don't want hardscape. That's not true. I just want to simplify those services. So the same way that I want to simplify from a 30,000 foot view, I want to simplify from hardscaping down to mowing and easier skilled services. I also want to take those higher level skilled services like hardscaping paver patios, whatever might be, and I want to simplify those. Well, how can I do that? Well, instead of trying to do custom work on every single project, you can have Maybe one, two or three different designs, colors or brands that you work with that you can easily show a customer. There's a lot of different positives around this. Number one is now my guys get really, really efficient at installing those pavers or installing that certain type of block. So for example, that paver patio that we just showed you, that was one very specific type of block. It was a Belgard. That's the brand Rio. That's the color Dublin cobble. That's the type of paver with a five piece design that is the only type of paver patio we will ever install. We don't give any other options. And 95% of people like that design. So when we show them a picture and say, do you like this? And they say yes, that's the type of paver patio we're going to install. We're not going to meet them at the supplier, we're not going to give them 10 different options. And then they're judging like which type of, of color do I want? That's not part of the sales process. It can be so much shorter if you simplify services because I don't need to take them to a supplier, show them different types of plants. That should all be really simplified. You only install the top 20 plants in your area and those are the options you provide to the customer. Not only is it making the sales process simpler, reducing the decision fatigue of the customer. Like if you go to a really expensive restaurant, they don't have a Denny's menu, they don't have an Applebee's menu with hundreds of options. They maybe give you five or six different entree options. If you want to be a premium service and get really, really good at a specific type of product or installation of a certain type of hardscaping service you want to specialize, you want to say, look, these are 1, 2, 3 different options. Here's different colors, maybe different styles that you want to offer. Show them pictures of the client. It reduces the time that it takes to sell the job because I have to meet them at the supplier, give them different options, go back and forth to talking their wife and their husband back and forth and none of that. Shorten the sales process. And furthermore, by having the same type of paver patio that we only install, that it's the only type we ever will install is Rio in color Dublin cobble Belgard five piece design. That's the only type of paver patio we will install at our local shop. And the reason for that is because now our crew, they can Install one, two, three different paver jobs. And now they're really good at it. The people in this picture, they also do mowing. This is not just the hardscaping job crew. The reason for that is because once they install a couple of these, there's no reason why they can't do it much, much more efficiently than if every single time they're trying to figure out a different type of paver and different design, a different color and a different brand, a different supplier. That type of complication and complexity is what makes waste in our business waste of materials. Because now you're taking back unused materials back to the yard. A waste of labor, because now you're trying to figure out a certain design you got to reach, retract some of it and refigure it out and make sure the design is all done correctly. A waste of time for your estimator, your manager, the person selling the job, because they've got to now show all the different options to the client. You can absolutely make a hardscaping company very efficient by simplifying what would usually be a complex service like a construction job. That would be my recommendation. If again, you want to get out of the business, if you want to be able to step back, go on a three, four day vacation and everything still run fine, and not just the projects run fine. I mean, like jobs get sold. In my mind, that is the variable that actually is determined when you're able to step away from the business is when not only can the work get done, but when can everything else go smoothly. Project management, the sale of the job, et cetera, it's absolutely possible. But if you love custom work and that's something you're passionate about, by all means, it's a great business. There's so much good money because people don't know how to do it in terms of pavers and walls and all sorts of construction jobs. So right now you might be watching this with the LAN fabric, and maybe you install fabric, maybe you don't. We really do it based upon what the client wants. Sometimes we do landscape fabric, sometimes we don't. But it does prevent the weeds come from coming through. I don't like it in some regard though, because if you're edging along a flower bed that has landscape fabric, it could potentially start grabbing at the fabric. And then, you know, if a bunch of wind comes or a bunch of rain, you start seeing the fabric. So I'm not a huge, big fan of it, but if the client specifically asked for it, we use that woven fabric. It works really well to keep the weeds at bay. So, I'm Mike Andes. Make sure you check the links out below. They're super cool. They'll help you more with your business and your landscaping company so you become efficient and very profitable. I'm Mike Andes, Landscapebusinesscourse. Com. We'll see you on the next video.