My Lawn Care Business: 2 Trucks, 4 Employees, $52,000 in One Month!

Do you use a promotional code at all?

Okay. Did you request a chargeback at all?

I think we just got to submit an appeal. I think they've messed something up. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the vlog. Already had several meetings this morning and boring stuff, just zoom calls and phone calls. But what I want to talk to you about real quick before we get started is hiring. If you're having trouble finding someone right now like me, most of us are in this industry, one of the things you might consider doing is making video ads instead of just a picture on Craigslist or Facebook or Indeed. So we talked about last night at our roundtable with our franchisees. We created three different variations of ads. Short 20, 30 second ads. Gonna go ahead and show you one of those and then I'll go ahead and show you one of the ones that one of our Brian out in Georgia, he made one also for his ads and actually showed the payroll and the numbers of the payroll for his team. So I'm gonna show you both of those back to back here. We created three for the franchisees. I'm gonna show you. But these are creative way again to kind of stand out from the crowd when it comes to hiring people. And when they're looking across all these different platforms and seeing tons of different landscaping companies, you'll stand out if you do something that's short, quick, to the point and make you look different than everyone else. Do you want to make more money? Are you tired of working your brains out and not seeing it in your paycheck? If you're tired of making the same amount per hour for the past few years and you want to make more, come give us a call at Augusta Lawn Care Services where we actually give you a percentage of the revenue you make for the business. The harder you work, the more money you make. On average, our employees make more than $5 more per hour working for us versus our competition. Give us a call today.

Good afternoon, Augusta Nation. Are you currently working in the landscape industry? Comfortable with using a line trimmer, push mower, and other tools of the trade? And tired of making 10 to $15.

An hour for your hard work?

I've got a solution for you. Here at Augusta Lawn Care Services, we pay a good bit more than that. And I'll get straight to the chase here. I'm going to show you last week's payroll numbers. And yes, this is for one week pay period. Pretty awesome numbers here for the guys. They've been doing great. If you're looking to make a change to the Augusta Nation team have the required experience. We'd love to hear from you. Give us a call. We're going to be hiring somebody next week and it could be you. So give me a call at 7:06.

Hey, Mike, just a quick question with the base rate. So you know, I took that to heart tonight, what you said. I'm gonna be in a bad position and you know, two to three weeks when we start mowing. Definitely need one person and certainly a second would help in a third if I want some good growth.

I'm just concerned. I raised my rate to 65 at the beginning of the year and I might as well do the 20 to get the employees the 20 base rate, which means I got to go up to 80 an hour. I'm really just looking for your blessing on that, so to speak. I guess this is just a biggie for me going to 80 bucks an hour because I know that's really on the high end of, you know, an hourly rate in the, in the green industry up here.

Hey, Jeff, good question. I got your email about the base rate. I would definitely give my blessing on it. But I would say this, you've raised your hourly rate by $5 just recently. Let's go ahead and just assume like kind of in our minds to say, okay, I can raise my base pay by $2 per hour because I raised my rate to the customer by $5 per hour. So for now don't worry about raising up to all the way up to 80 right now. Let's get the employees and when we start getting really busy down the road, we can always raise prices again.

Alright, so we just drove down to Mount Vernon. It's about 30, 40 minute drive from the Bellingham location. And this is actually my very first time being here in months. I have not met any of the new employees because they've all been recently hired in the past few months. This is a location, Mount Vernon, that was started a year ago in the middle of COVID Tim started here and last year we did 155,000 revenue. Last month alone they did 52,000 in revenue. And that was with two trucks, one car, and then you got up to four employees towards the end of March. So I want to show you kind of the lean stuff that they use here and hopefully inspire you to also think more lean when it comes to your overhead and your shop. So we're just pulling in now. It's pretty simple, very basic here. But I have not met the employees and I really look forward to doing that.

All right, so we're out in Mount Vernon, and this is Tim, the general manager. He actually just recently purchased this location and became his own location here as a general manager at Augusta Lawn Care. They're able to buy out. Buy us out. And so he just did this past week. But they're just getting back right now from a mo route, and then they clean up. So they got some stuff in the back here. Let me show you around their shop a bit if you want a more detailed kind of tour. I did one last year when we first got this place just wrapping up for the day.

But this is actually just part of a residential land. So one of the things we do at Augusta, especially for our corporately owned locations and a lot of our franchisees, as you get more and more locations, is you don't want to be having to look for a big office space and all the rest of it. You see a lot of the videos when I'm at the Bellingham shop, you have a bunch of space and you have a couple acres and, you know, an office and all the rest of it. It's very expensive in terms of lease and rent. Whereas here we started off paying $300 a month. We just had to recently go up to $500 a month. But it's very, very cost effective. And it's doesn't have to be commercially rated in terms of the zoning and all the rest of it. So over here, they have a trailer list set up. Let me show you that real quick. This is their most recent purchase. They got the third truck, and they got the ramp rack on it. So you can see here. This is actually a good example of being able to use the ramp rack for something beyond just a push mower. So you can see here, they got a zero turn right on the back of this. Really simple. I think there's a 48 inch and there's still room. So for those of you who have been asking like, hey, can I get more than just a push mower? There it is. We use these ramp racks. You've seen me do the tour of it last week, and you watched last week's video in terms of the tour of these things. But this is their third truck right here. But what I wanted to kind of talk about today and really highlight is the fact that this is the space they used over the past month. They had three to four employees throughout the month and did $52,000 in revenue. They have the capacity to do about 60,000 revenue with the four trucks they now have. So they got the third one this past week and they got fourth one coming. Gotta get painted and decal and all the rest of it coming next week. So as part of being lean, when we get on these locations, we either get a 40 or 20 foot container just like this one. So these shipping containers are great for storage, keeping things dry, obviously. Back here with the trailer setups, a lot of our equipment's out there. It's locked up. But then the mowers have to go inside of here. So these can open up. You get quite a bit of equipment in here. There's a 20 foot box. Come on inside here. They apologize because they say it's not too organized. That's usually what they do after Friday's route. But then we can sharpen blades and everything here they do have a little generator they bring in, so they can do sharpening of blades and other things. In terms of maintenance, they got two 30 inch mowers. But again, I want to make this point. The reason we came down here to video today is because so many times I see people with five or six employees, seven or eight trucks and doing 60, 70,000 in revenue. And they have like two managers, an estimator, a big office space. All of that overhead is what's keeping you from being profitable. The reason that this location is so profitable is because they don't have any overhead. Tim, the manager, the one person that is on salary, is still out in the field working today, making money and actually a profitable employee. You really want to take a look at how many people are in your office, an estimator, your manager and your owner that are not producing revenue. Like you don't make money until the mowers and the blades start turning and getting work done. And so the more people you can have working instead of just sitting around in an office or doing estimates, those things are important. I'm not taking away from those. But those are all just facilitating the work, getting done and making money. So by having command center, they don't need an office. All the phone calls, emails, billing, invoicing, everything's being done. What is it 100 miles from here, up in Ferndale, and can be done really anywhere in the country. So here they got the mowers. It's going to keep everything dry. They keep everything up on the side. You can see the ladders, blowers, spare tires, a little bit disorganized, but supposedly they clean it up here on the weekend. But yeah, really, really basic. It's only 20ft long. If you have a bigger shop, go ahead and get a few More of these. Go ahead and get a 40 foot container. Go ahead and maybe get one of these per crew. And then you can, you can just label them for each crew. Like, hey, this is your box. This is the landscape box. This is the fertilization box. This is the lawn care and mowing or maintenance box, for example. So these are great. These are going to run in between 2 and $3,000 typically delivered to your site. And what's really cool is they're mobile. So if they ever outgrow this space, they're at four trucks. You can see it's already pretty tight because of the employee parking and everything. If they want to move this, they literally can get a truck here and move it for $100 to every new location. No, like building, no building permits, all the rest of it. So this is, in my opinion, a lean setup where you have one general manager at the top and then a whole bunch of laborers that can all be producing revenue, not office people and managers and, you know, building a big shop that has a $3,000 a month lease. This is really the goal in trying to make it as lean as possible so when you're starting out, you can grow and be profitable doing so. One of the things that you want to look for, if you're looking for a space like this is you can get. You don't have to be in like a commercial area. You don't have to be on a busy highway. We're out in a residential area. Someone's got five acres, got us a lot of land that they don't mind leasing out to us. So we started off with $300 a month. It's now $500 a month. Because what we do is when we get these leases, we just build it into the lease where as we get more trucks, we pay more money. So now with four trucks, they're paying $500 a month. That includes the storage. Include them being able to dump here and include the landlord having to manage the debris and burning off all the brush that we bring in. So really good deal. If you can try to get one of these residential someplace. You just need space to park. Basically, that's all you need. Then you put this bad boy in here.