My Reaction to Blades of Grass Lawn Care: I'M LAYING IT ALL OUT!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to Landscape Business Course. Today we are talking and doing a reaction about Johnny from over at Blades of Grass Lawn Care. I am a new subscriber to his channel. I haven't watched a whole lot of his videos, but I've been, you know, kind of watching the past several weeks, really enjoying it. And definitely an awesome channel if you want to actually see in the field work being done, something you don't get a whole lot on my channel. Definitely a great place to actually see grass being cut, see techniques. It looks like Johnny has one employee named Hugh, and they do most of the work together. This specific day that we're doing a reaction to. Today is a solo route that Johnny did. And this is just hot off the press. I'm doing this right as soon as I possibly can. Getting these out to you as soon as possible. So I cut out the first part, which mostly just mowing grass. I don't have a huge POV point of view on mowing techniques or type of equipment. I really don't believe that moves the needle a whole lot with the business if you're trying to scale it. And I just don't have a whole lot of reaction to how he's mowing. But he does a great job. That's all I'd be saying, is that looks really good and that's really nice and that's a great way of doing it. So great, great place. I really recommend it if you're trying to learn how to actually mow grass, how to be a solo operator, make it most efficient. And some of the things he even says today. Great, great. If you're wanting to do a solo operation today, I'm going to give you a little perspective on some of the things that he says. I think it's very, very good. And possibly some thoughts if you're wanting to scale the business and not be a solo operator. So I'm going to cut out the first five minutes or so of the video. We're going to jump in about halfway through when he starts talking about some business things and give my reaction to that. So let's go ahead and jump to the video.

This is my one inch cut. I'm just cracking myself up.

But yeah. All right, guys. So today's video is just mainly.

Showing you guys some of the properties that we do.

And today I'm solo.

Yeah, today I'm solo. So, you know, Q is taking care of some stuff. And for you conspiracy guys, no, there's nothing going on the last time I made a solo video, oh my God, you guys just went like, you know, oh, what's going on? Is something going on? Q is not there. Oh, my God.

Come on, guys. Now and then you have to go out there and do your thing by yourself, right? So you can see exactly what's going on. It is currently 10:30 and yeah, I've done all these properties by myself. So what am I trying to teach you here? That you have to learn how to and do what you have to do. Guys, stop trying to have, you know, ask people, you know, oh, how do you do it? Guys, take the initiative and go out there and bust. Bust, man. Get out there and put out your marketing material. If it was that easy, everybody in their mama would be doing it, right?

So let me just say something like this. I first of all agree with what he's talking about. And that is people are, you know, paralysis by analysis. They start thinking about, okay, I'm going to do a lawn care business. I'm going to have a budget and I'm going to do this. And they start thinking so much and they think for one year and then, oh, they'll do it next year. They just keep thinking and thinking and they never pull the trigger. And that's the biggest takeaway from here, he's 110% correct, is just get started. Like, go do it and put work in. And that's the best way to learn. That being said, I do feel like we are in a very special time the past 10, 15 years and currently where you can learn a lot of things from other people and people like yourself. Who is watching this video you're trying to learn? People like me watching Johnny here from Blades of Grass. I'm trying to learn. So there's definitely a balance here. Yes, go out and do it and go for it. But there's definitely a lot of bumps along the way that you can avoid costly mistakes, things that take a lot of time. You can avoid a lot of those things if you're just willing to learn and be humble enough to realize you don't know everything and that you can learn from someone else. And that's the only thing I would add to this. But definitely what he's saying is right. Go out and get started. That's the most important thing for most people.

Put it that way. Get out there, put out flyers. There's no magic pill. You know what I mean? A lot of people like to ask, hey, you know, I'm about to start a lawn care business, how Can I get a lot of customers? Come on, guy, get out there and put out your marketing material. That's, that's the way you do it. I mean, there's no, there's no knock on all doors that have the number five and you're going to get a lot of people. There's no such thing, guys, okay? And I know I sound kind of sarcastic, but I'm the type of guy that I give it to straight up. I don't like to sugarcoat, you know what I mean? Because, you know, we're.

Entrepreneurs and people who want to move forward.

So I like what he's saying here. It's like, hey, look, you got to market to get people. And I made a video several months ago about talking about the relationship between growth of your business versus the amount of money you spend initially on marketing. I'll try to tag that below, maybe have a little pop up or something here so you can watch that. But this is the one caveat I would add to that. It's a numbers game, all right? And what that means is that this is what he's talking about. Get the marketing out. Just go out and put marketing out there and you're gonna get some clients. But what I would also add to this is having other. Like what he's saying here is 100% right? Let me make that very foundational. Go out, get marketing done. But as your business gets established, you should add things that are going to improve the ratio of people who call you back and improve the ratio of people who become customers. Because the amount of lead or, sorry, the amount of marketing material that you put out is one number. The amount of leads you get from that marketing material is another number. But then there's more numbers. How many of those leads convert to actual customers? And then what kind of customer lifetime value are those customers? So there's more numbers than just getting the initial lead and putting out marketing pieces. But definitely it's, you can't get to customer without putting out marketing pieces and getting leads. So that's a huge part of it. As the business grows, you can refine it and improve your close ratio. By improving your estimate process, you can improve the amount of people that do call you. Like, what's your response rate on those flyers? If it's 1%, could you get a better website? Could you have a better design flyer to make it 2% instead of just like, oh, we're just gonna do more and more and more of the 1% marketing material? Is there a way to actually improve the Funnel, So that way you work more efficiently and get more leads for less amount of marketing.

Yeah, get out there, put out your marketing material and keep. And keep hitting them. Keep hitting them, keep hitting them. Do a damn good job, and people will come to you, people will gravitate to you. It's all about the work you do, man. You know what I mean? And when you first start, keep in mind that a lot of people, they will be looking at you like, you know, I'm not going, you know, you're not going to make top dollars when you first start. I'm telling you right now, because people have to get, you know, people have to get to know you. They have to feel comfortable with you.

You know, I agree with this, and this is something that I think a lot about, because when I first started Augusta Lawn Care, I remember charging $40 per man hour. And at the time, you know, I was young, I was just getting started, I was so low. That was pretty good money. Now, the thing is this, which I thought about recently, how is it that people starting in Augusta Lanca franchise Now are charging 50 and $60 per hour minimum? Like I tell them, do not go lower than that. Right. And I'm in a pretty expensive market, and I was at 40, and now I got people that are in, you know, South Dakota and, you know, South Carolina charging 50, $60 per hour. How is that? Is because it's the value versus price continuum that we talk about. If you increase value, you can increase price, but if you don't have much value, you have to lower price in order for the transaction to take place. As long as value is greater than price, as long as it's higher than price, the transaction goes through. Which means you can either raise your value in order to raise to substantiate a higher price, or in order for a transaction to go through, you have to drop your price. I'd highly recommend trying to increase value. The reason I'm saying that is because you can charge a higher price if you have a great professional website, if you answer your phone calls as soon as possible, if you're out mowing and you're solo like Johnny is, but you get a phone call and get a voicemail, get right on top of that phone call, get the lead, get them in your system, make the estimate as soon as possible. And then once the estimate's in, don't let it sit there for two or three days before you actually send it to the customer. Prepare it, put it together, and send it to the customer. That's why we made command center for the franchisees is like we want phone calls answered ASAP and we want estimate sent asap. Those are two parts of the estimate process that you want to take time out of the equation. And a lot of times the first person that gets back to the client wins the job. Like right now I'm looking for a painter at three duplexes that I own and literally I cannot get someone to give me an estimate. Like whoever gives me an estimate first will win this job. Guarantee it. I will not price check them because simply it's been two weeks and I still have yet to get one estimate from six painting companies. Literally six painting companies and not one estimate's been sent back to me in the past two weeks. Are people busy? Yeah, I'm sure. But like if people were trying to grow their business, they would get back sooner. It creates value and when you create value, you can substantiate a higher price. And so what he's saying here is absolutely right. Like you're gonna usually when you first get started, start with a lower price because you don't have those valuable things like uniforms or a good branding of your truck and your trailer, or employees that are trained well, or a great looking website and marketing promotional material. And so I was thinking about the other day, like why is it that these franchisees are able to charge so much and they're getting really busy just getting started and I was at 40 an hour and I didn't even grow that quickly. It's very simple. They start off with a great website that looks like world class. I started off with a little weebly site that I made up myself. And there's no shame in starting off small like I had to start there. Everyone has to. And so it's just a matter of like having the uniforms. Having all that stuff up front does allow you to charge more. So work in that direction so you can raise your prices by increasing the value, at least the perceived value to the customer in the form of a better website, more professional staff uniforms, etc.

Just like true Green, let's say for instance, right? And True Green is going out there killing it, right? And even though a lot of people say True Green, you know, hey, True Green is killing it.

Why?

Because they're marketing. Everyone that's watching this video have gotten the True Green, what you call it, on their house. I've gotten them because they're market, they market, they market their market. And that's what you have to do. Get out there and market. Don't Tell me about the competition. We all have it. If you didn't have a competition, then it's not a field that you want to get into, right? So, so. And again, you know, don't take it the wrong way. Guys stop whining and girls stop whining. Get out there, put out your flyers. And one, one hint to you guys.

One quick thing here and I like what, what Johnny did here, you notice at the beginning he really focused on you got to be, it's all about quality. Like, do a great job and people will gravitate to you. That's awesome. And then he balances it out here by saying, hey, you got to focus on marketing. What I, how I look at that is like, it's like the sales funnel, right? You've got to have quality so you don't lose people, right? Like if you look at, think of all your customers as a bucket and all the customers that stay in the bucket are the customers, your customers. All the leads that come in the top are new customers. Like you got pouring in new customers, right? And a lot of people get no, they fall in love with pouring in new customers. Like, oh, just keep pouring new customers, keep spending money on marketing. But if you have holes in the bucket and you're losing customers because you're not doing a good job, you're not professional, you don't invoice correctly and you make stuff up on the fly and stuff falls through the cracks and customers leave you because they're not happy, you're not gonna do well. And so what he did, he said the first thing he talked about quality is like plugging holes. It's like, how do you create really happy customers, great customer service and great quality that's plugging the holes. Then you can focus on making sure there's a bunch of new customers coming into the bucket. And so if either of those two things are messed up, then you're gonna have trouble. If your attrition rate, that is the holes in the bucket. Losing customers every year is 20%. In other words, you're losing 20% of your customers in your bucket every single year. That means that you're paying a bunch of money for marketing and new leads and new customers to get into the top of the funnel when you should be focusing on higher quality, better customer service, answering those phones on time, a better website to keep all of the customers in the bucket. Alright? Very, very important. He brings out trugreen. A lot of people have trouble with them and problems with the way they market and they are a Little bit deceptive or whatever your opinion is of them. Those are the holes. And you know what, honestly, if you talk to them, they would probably recognize that, hey, we have substantial holes. We try to do our best, but we focus more on more customers pouring in, new customers, more marketing, more leads. And that's their business model, right? It's the type of business model you've got to figure out what works good for you. If you're a solo operator, you, you're going to want your holes plugged very, very well. High, high customer service, High, high touch, high personal touch. You know, very, very high standards of quality because you're not going to be spending a ton of marketing on leads. You don't have the money. And so as you grow in scale and you put more leads in the top of the funnel and you get more employees, it tends to be less quality because you as the owner aren't on every single property. And if you've got even a couple employees, you know what I'm talking about. It gets very frustrating when you get callback, for example. But a great perspective here that he's sharing here. Nice balance.

When you put out your flyers, don't fill your flyers up with all kind of crap, you know what I mean? You know, gutters and fertilizing and moist control and this and that and the other. It's too busy, man. It's too busy market mowing.

He said what he's talking about here is call to action. I'm a big believer in this when it comes to print marketing as well as email marketing, and that is having one call to action. So, for example, on the one click estimates we send out every month from the franchise, we make sure we're only marketing one service so that when they click the button, the call to action, they know exactly what they're asking for and we know what exactly they're asking for. If you market five different things in an email or five different things in a flyer, the likelihood that they're going to take an action based upon what you've shown them is much less likely and it's much less clear in terms of what they want. Because I can make a one click estimate where they click a button and I know exactly what they're looking for based upon the one service we were promoting in that piece of marketing, whether it be email, whether it be print, you want to make sure you have one call to action, very focused and trust me, it leads to more customers. And he says mowing. And that's, I think he's probably going to get into probably gateway services, but we'll see what he talks about here.

That's it. And when you get into those properties, then you start to upsell. That's the way you do it. You know, you don't put a whole bunch, man, you get.

What you call it, a pamphlet with all kind of stuff in it. What you gonna, you will scramble it and throw it away. Nah, man, mow it. That's it, that's it. Do mowing, market mowing and eventually you're gonna get a whole bunch of people and you can upsell. You know, you get to a mowing property, you mow it, you take a picture of the shrubs and send it to them and say, listen, if you want, you know, you want to schedule your shrubs, this is how much it's going to cost and this is what.

I can do it.

That's it. That's it. And what they going to say? Yes or no.

Okay, so what I like about this is he's talking about gateway services like I thought. So mowing is a great gateway service, is an easy sell. It's the reason I call it gateway services. Once you open up the gates, you get them through, it's easy and then you can open up to a whole lot more other services that you offer. So a great way to the best bang for your buck is going to be for gateway services. So for example, if you are a landscape only operation, you're going to get much better response rate on a piece of marketing if you do property clamps or mulch installations instead of going and trying to market for paver patios or for walls. Now what he's talking about here is once you get them on the gateway services, it's now up to you to upgrade, sell them and basically get them through the gate, give them the gateway service, in his case mowing, and then once they're through the gate, now it's time to upsell and show them other services they can buy from you. And a lot of times those ancillary services, those other services outside the gateway services are actually where the profits are. And it's also what can really double or triple your customer lifetime value, the CLV of your customer. Which means instead of them spending only $1,000 a year on you for mowing only, you get them $1,000 a year on mowing. But then you also do two property cleanups for $500 a piece and you install mulch which takes them from $1,000 to two cleanups at 500. So that's $2,000 and then do a mulch install for another thousand. You just turn a $1,000 per year value of that customer into $3,000 by upselling them on ancillary services after you got them through the gateway service of mowing. Because usually if someone, if you get someone on mowing or a gateway service, they're going to want you to do all the other services. If they need those things done on their property, they don't usually get other landscapers to do those services. It's up to you to make sure they know that you actually do those services. Because the worst feeling in the world is when you're the mowing company and you also offer mulch, but they will hire someone else to do the mulch because they didn't know who offered those services. So get them on the mowing, get them on the entry level services. Those gateway services depends on what your, your service mix is. If you're doing landscaping, only market property cleanups and mulch insoles. Those are the lowest hanging fruit. You're going to get the highest response rate. Get them in as a lead, get them into your customer database, and you can continually market them to upsell them on ancillary services with those higher profit margins to increase the customer lifetime value.

Right? That's the way it works, guys. All right, I'm into the other subdivision. Let me get hot again, guys. Don't take it this wrong way, but if you came to my channel, it's because you want to learn and you want to hear the real deal. You don't want me to sugarcoat it. All right, check it out, guys. This is my next property. Yeah, we stripe sometimes.

Okay, so I'm going to jump forward. He shows some of his properties here. Great stripes, great mowing technique here. I'm going to skip forward a little bit more just to go to where I think he's starting to talk more about the.

All these properties that you just saw. All 10 properties.

I started at, let me see, I want to say.

7:45Ish. Yeah, I started at 7:45. And all these properties were done by 1 o'. Clock. Okay, so in saying that, you got to remember, guys, you have to pick and choose where you want to work whenever you get established. And you also have to consolidate your properties so you can just hit them one after the other, pays yourself. And again, you know, also the equipment. Right. You can't, you can't expect to do all these 10 properties by 1 o' clock with a push mode. Right?

Okay, So A couple things here I want to break down. First of all, what he's saying at the beginning there is, hey, if you get, if you're just getting started, you want to be very careful about picking and choosing which customers you want. In other words, get route density. You don't want to get a customer here and then four over here and the other side of town over here, then 20 miles that way. Like, you got to stay focused on route density to make it really efficient so you can knock these mows out and make money. Now, if you're wanting to grow your business to a couple hundred customers, 3, 400 customers, get multiple crews, I recommend this. Instead of focusing on, okay, I got this neighborhood, let me just focus on this neighborhood, like only around here. What I would do is this. Look, I'm going to set a radius of where I'm going to operate within the next five years and I'll get customers inside of this radius, but outside the radius. No. That way you might start off your first year and get five customers in one neighborhood. But simply because you haven't started marketing, don't have a great website, don't have any SEO, you might not be popular on the other side of town where a bunch of your business ends up growing. So what I would recommend, if you're wanting to actually scale and not just do solo, where you are going to be very centralized, like I'm talking, like you want to say it was in a couple mile radius. And if you're going to grow and get multiple crews and hundreds of customers, you might set your radius to five miles, six miles max. And they'll be like, okay, I'll get customers inside of this radius. That's it. And at the first, you might get some over here and then get a pocket over here, then you get a pocket. But as long as I'm inside of that radius, I'll keep getting the customers. So that's what I would do. If you're trying to scale the business, if you're trying to keep it at solo, definitely what Johnny's saying here is exactly right. Focus on a very, very tight route. And less and less, the less drive time you can handle, the better. And then I think what he's going to get into here, I'll add a little bit more to this. He's talking about not having a push mower, not being able to do all of these lawns with a push mower. Let's talk about that in a second.

So it's going to get there, it's going to get there. Remember guys, I didn't get up one day and said, you know, bam, let me go ahead and buy me a stand on and all that good stuff, right? I started from the bottom, guys. Even though I had a military retirement, I started with a push more and my neighbors the same way. And then I build up with the monies that I made and got a trailer and so on and so on and so forth.

So what he's saying here is good. What he's saying here is in terms of the mowing, like he didn't start with a stand on mower, he started with a push mower. And I get a lot of flack about the fact that on our P4P, which is pay for performance, we pay our team based upon a percentage of revenue they bring to the business instead of an hourly wage. And I get a lot of flack from people because they say, oh, you're making your guys use push mowers a lot, like the 30 inch mowers instead of like a stand on or a zero turn, et cetera. And the bottom line is you gotta listen to the debate I've had on this before with my office manager because it'll hopefully clarify this and that is that when you're giving them percentage of revenue, you're able to move that number higher and give them more money based upon the fact that you have less maintenance for trailers and for big zero turns, et cetera. Now I know that doesn't work in all markets and trust me, some of our franchisees have zero turns. They're in big, they're in areas where the average lot, the average size of a property is half an acre. Like you're not going to do that with a push mower. But that being said, what he's saying here is exactly right. You do not need the biggest and fanciest getting started. Do not go out if you're just brand new and go get a enclosed trailer, a tilt trailer, a tractor, two big zero turns, a stand on. Like do not get equipment heavy, especially if you're staying solo. Focus on building your route, investing into marketing and then growing the business to then maybe if those are things you want to substantiate those costs, make sure you've built the business behind it. Don't go out there first thing and buy a bunch of equipment. What he's saying here is exactly right. Start with a push mower, go get some revenue, get a good demand of customers and then go out and buy better equipment if that's what you're looking to do.

Okay? So, guys, you can do it. Get out there. You got to have the motivation. You know, today's a pretty hot day, but guess what? It's one o' clock and I already did 10 properties, right? What's your excuse?

I love it. Awesome. Well, that was Johnny from Blades of Grasslanker. You can follow him on YouTube. If you like this, please comment below. I know some people have really enjoyed the commentary. If you like it, please comment. Because I'm following right now where people are commenting, what you're liking and what you're liking to view and learning the most from. If you like some of the concepts we talk about on the channel, make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com all the Money there is what we use to fund this whole operation in terms of creating more content. You've noticed that obviously in the past few weeks, better content more often. Couple videos a day at some point, adding as much different angles and behind the scenes as possible. So all of the money from landscapebusinesscourse.com as well as lawncarewebdesign.com where we build your website, all that money goes towards that. I appreciate you for supporting the channel, supporting what we're trying to do in the industry, and until next time, be great because nothing else pays.