My Reaction to SG Ninja: You Should Buy New Trucks For Your Landscape Business

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course. And today we are going to be looking at a new YouTuber that I have not really watched a whole lot until recently called SG Ninjas Lawn Care. And so really looking forward to his perspective on new trucks and a lot of, you know, my perspective on used versus new vehicles and when they're good and when they're bad. But I thought this was a really kind of a good balance to what I talk about. So I want to bring that perspective. If you don't know who I am, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have about 20 locations now around North America where you can become a franchisee. You can check out augustalawncareservices.com franchise for more info on that. And a big thank you to everyone that's been joining landscape business course. It lets me really do everything we're doing here, creating more content and more training. So I appreciate all of you joining there. Let's go ahead and jump into this video for from SG Ninja. Here we go.

Well, here we are. Finally picked up. Tiny busy bee is slowly transferring everything over. I've had quite a few stuff with me that I had to take because I figured it'd be a couple of days. But anyway, I got Tiny back. We're gonna go over everything of what they had to do and they also gave me a total of what everything cost, labor, parts, material, all those things. So I will be going over that. All I gotta say Ninjas is thank goodness for the warranty. This is why it's so important to have that warranty. Ninjas, when you are buying any kind of new vehicle, but in particular when you're buying a big, big diesel truck, you know, I mean, it's just insane.

So, so let me just stop by saying this. I don't think he says it again in this video about diesels. Diesels can be very, very expensive maintained. If you are not a mechanic and you're not buying the truck. New like Ninja is here actually, Pardon me, I don't actually know his name. I'm gonna call him Ninja in this video. But if you don't know his, if you don't know how to work on diesel trucks, they can be very, very expensive. Like if one of our gas trucks goes out, I kind of in my mind like, okay, a few hundred bucks, no, mostly labor, cheap parts. When it comes to a diesel vehicle, diesel truck, you can just count on at least a couple thousand dollars being Spent just seems like regardless of what's broken, it's a couple thousand dollars by the time you break it all apart. And then the parts are way more expensive. So definitely something to consider when you're just starting out. Maybe don't get a big diesel vehicle because it costs more up front and they do cost a lot more to maintain if you don't know what you're doing. Now if you're a really good mechanic, you like dinking around with trucks might be a good option for you. Cause they do last time if they are taken well care of. Taken care of. Well, there you go. But for someone like myself who's not mechanically inclined, we don't pick up on the little glitches and errors before they become big glitches and errors and they become big costs. So something we've really completely gone away from now is diesel vehicles. We do not touch diesels with a 10 foot pole at our company simply due to the fact that we have a lot of crew members and we don't have a whole bunch of mechanically implanted. They're not all a bunch of mechanics, they're landscapers. And so it's a lot harder to keep track of the little glitches that a mechanic might pick up on. So just a word of caution, but if you're solo, if you're someone like Ninja here that is doing has a big truck like this, is Solo, has one employee, has two trucks, maybe it'll work for you if you prefer diesel. If you've always wanted a diesel might work for you.

But yeah, I like this truck.

Ninjas.

As I've said it before, it's a nice truck. But hey, you know what he told me what this truck is basically.

Maxed at for towing, 8,000 pounds, roughly maybe nine. Heck, the trailer is that itself probably or close to it. So we've been knocking out a bunch of yards this morning.

So real quickly, let's just make this distinction real quick. Between these two trucks. You got an F150. That's probably, I'm just gonna guess about 2018, 2019. Then you got probably a 2019 F250 diesel between those two trucks. You're looking at probably $100,000 in truck right now. Do I think that he purchased with cash? I do not know. I have not watched enough of his videos to know that if he did buy it with cash, I personally in someone that was wanting to scale the business, would prefer to use that $100,000 in cash and go get five or six trucks that were used by four or five years, had maybe 60 or 70,000 miles on them and could last me 10 years. That were gas, unleaded, gas, fuel. I would prefer doing that. In terms of scaling the business again, if you want to have a diesel vehicle and you're gonna stay solo and you're gonna baby the truck and, like, not, you know, for example, I would never get those. That expensive a vehicle. Because when you get employees using your vehicles every single day, they don't treat them like an owner does. They dent them. They drop soil on you. Got mulch and gravel and dirt being put in the back of these things. You got skid steers driving around them. You got pulling a mowing truck. Trust me, if you have a lot of employees, trucks don't look like this after even a year or two. And so you start thinking about that a little bit more when it comes to purchasing the vehicles. Like, okay, am I okay with denting a five or $10,000 truck? Yeah, not a big deal. Am I okay with denting a $50,000 truck? Not cool. Because that dent probably cost me six or seven grand in value. So, again, not to say this is wrong. If you're solo and you're gonna be driving the trucks mostly by yourself and you're a good mechanic, getting a really expensive, nice vehicle is definitely not a bad option. Because as you're going to see here, there's definitely upsides to having a warranty. So let's check it out.

I've been slowly just working my way towards the dealership. And now that I'm in this area, I decided because they called me yesterday and they said the tiny was ready, but I did not make it, Especially with that dentist appointment that I had. But, yeah, so stay tuned. Oh, man, it's going to surprise you. Of all the things that they ended up doing and then what it cost. What's going on? All my lawn care Ninjas. What is going on on this crazy, wet, nasty, filthy Freaky Friday. Freaky Friday. So yesterday we recorded. I recorded just a little bit, letting you ninjas know Tiny is back. And back to attack. And, boy, are we. Are you happy Tiny's back? Yeah. Why do you like tiny better than the other truck, Busy bee? I like sitting higher and there. That's for sure. You like it higher. Busy bee likes it higher. Ninjas. You heard it from the man himself. Why didn't we get a chance to finish the video yesterday? Thirsty Thursday. Why was it. Did we lose a lot of time? We worked late yesterday, didn't we yeah, we didn't finish till like 7, 8 o' clock last night. So probably one of the reasons is because.

Is we have to stop in the middle of the day to go get tiny. And we lost a little bit of time there. And then I think we were just trying to haul tail. And that way we didn't have too much to do today. What have we.

One quick thing I'll mention here, while he has this angle of the truck is when you're adding, you know, things to your truck. For example, if you're going to multiply your fleet, try not to get specialized things. It's just something I thought of right now. Like, for example, if you want to have a crew trucks that are matching, try not. If you want, like all of your trucks to have those black fenders or whatever they're called, the guard things around the wheel wells, that's an additional cost. It doesn't add any value to the truck, the resale value. And so I always try to think about on the trucks, like, what can I do for the minimum cost to get it to where we can use it as a work truck? In other words, I don't want all my trucks to have to. I don't want to get in the habit of raising all my trucks 6 inches and adding the suspension or adding a special muffler or adding a certain light kit or. Or something like, I've seen that time and time again where people have, like fog lights on all their landscaping trucks. It's like, why? Like, does that add any more value to the customer? Not really. Does it add any more value to the employees besides a little bit of pride? Not a whole lot. So it's something that I stay away from. If you're gonna scale out again, if you're solo and you're only gonna have one or two trucks and you are going to be driving those trucks all the time. It's totally okay to spend the extra money to make yourself feel good and to feel comfortable in that truck. Cause you're gonna be in it all the time. But I would recommend, if you're gonna scale, if you're gonna get 10, 15, 20 trucks, don't start getting customizations on all your trucks. If you do it on five of them now, you feel like, oh, the sixth and seventh one, I gotta do it too. And all of a sudden you're spending an extra 15, 16, $1,700 per truck on just getting these accoutrements put onto the vehicle. And I've seen it time and time again, guys Lift their trucks. They put mud flaps on em. They tint the windows. They tint the lights. They put LED lights in them. It's like, come on. There's no more value adding the customer on those.

Been battling. Before we get into the topic of the video, what have we been battling with today? Rain all day. Rain all day. We got soaked on the same yard. We got soaked. What, last week? Last week, Ninjas, it's been raining like crazy. And then it would stop and then it would come back. So it got us again. We got soaked, we dried up. We were able to finish the yard. We have to wait, of course, for about what, 30 minutes or so. You'd say we were just sitting there chilling, talking to the customer, which is actually a friend of mine. But where are we, Busy bee? The church. The church. Your favorite?

No, not really. He does like this, don't you? You prefer this over to school? Why is that? This is like twice as big.

He likes it bigger. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you what they did on Tiny, what they replaced. Busy bee will tell you in specification right here, right as what they wrote, what was wrong with it and all the things that they did. And then I'm gonna tell you how much it costs. All right, Busy Bee, so tell us, what is the first thing on that page that they found wrong with?

So those rims. So, for example, again, I gotta make this distinction. I'm not saying that Ninja's wrong in doing this because he is a solo operator with a helper like this, Totally fine to spend more on your truck. I've talked about this before, but if you're trying to scale your business, I would recommend instead of spending money on those rims, those tires, I don't know what those wheel well things are, whatever they're called. And then the step going into the truck and then even the toolbox in the back. That could literally buy an estimate truck. I'd imagine all those things together is another eight to $10,000 when you're buying that truck new as options. Those are probably add another eight to ten grand. I'd rather get a second truck instead of getting all of those, you know, upgrades. But that's just me for thinking about scaling a business. If you're someone like Ninja who's buying it new and you're gonna drive this truck for a long time being solo. You're driving it so you don't have to worry about people denting it and abusing the vehicle, then by all means, spend a little extra.

A tiny Rear pinion seal and rear cover. So rear pinion seal and rear cover. What was it leaking? Yeah. And what did they do with it? They replaced. Removed it. Replaced it, resealed the rear cover and filled with fluid. Okay, so, ninjas, let's go down here and take a look at it.

And so this is the part of the video where I get completely lost. Because as soon as you go underneath the vehicle, I am completely, completely lost. I've never gone under a vehicle, and in a single thing. Let me just make this very clear. Ninja would slaughter me on mechanics. I've never changed oil in a vehicle. Would get probably completely lost and mess up the vehicle if I tried to do it. I've changed oil on a mower. That's about all I've ever done mechanically. And so what his point here is very, very good. And that is when you buy a new vehicle and you get a warranty of 1, 2, 3 years, whatever it might be, or even up to, like, you know, some of them do like 100,000 miles, you get all of the maintenance. That stuff can go wrong. You can get it done for you for no extra cost. So I'm going to kind of chop through this, but he's going to go basically through the list of things that were fixed on the vehicle. I think he's about 50,000 miles on this truck, and they're going to put thousands of dollars worth of maintenance into the truck, and he's not going to pay for anything. So there's definitely upsides to buying a truck new, Especially if you're not mechanically incline, there's even more upsides because otherwise you're gonna be actually having to spend this money. It's not like you can just do it yourself on the weekend. And so sometimes it can make more sense to get a nicer, bigger vehicle if you can work on it and fix the maintenance on a diesel truck, for example, if you can fix diesel trucks, maybe go get a diesel truck because it lasts longer and you can do the maintenance. But for someone like myself, I either need a warranty or I'm gonna be paying someone to fix all of my maintenance issues. And so right when he gets underneath here, you're gonna see where they sealed the rear axle pinion or whatever that's called. That's a huge job that I could never do. And you better make sure you have a warranty or you have a good mechanic. And so there's definitely upsides to having a new vehicle. I want to bring this video to bring a balance to what I always talk about. I'm always talking about buying five to $10,000 gas trucks and getting three quarter tons that can pull a dump trailer if needs be, but also can be a trailerless setup. Like that is what I live and breathe. 100,000 miles. I can use it for another eight to ten years just fine. The most expensive repair we've ever had was $4,000. And guess what? Got a whole brand new engine after six years of using a vehicle and decided, you know what, the transmission, everything else probably got another ten years in it. We'll put four grand into it. Yeah, it was expensive, but guess what? Got the whole truck for five grand. So, yeah, it's just a different business model. There's definitely validity and a reason why you would want to buy new so you can get a warranty. So he's going to show a couple things. I might skip through it, but basically he's going to go through the truck and show a bunch of different stuff like the oil pans and all the rest of the stuff that they fixed on this truck and didn't cost him anything because he had a warranty.

See if we can see what they're talking about.

Right, right there. And you can actually see the new seal all the way around and the new cover.

So that was leaking. Wasn't like a severe leak, but it was enough when I took it in for that oil change.

Okay, so let's skip forward here.

They're just going to replace the steering linkage dampener. Linkage dampener. Steering linkage. Dampener. Dampen. What is it? Go. Dampener, dampen. Something like that. Diaper. A dampener. Anyway, so what is that? Busy bee?

You're.

You're a little bit of a mechanic in Glenn Klein. What is that? You couldn't tell me? Are you not mechanically inclined? Not today. So what was tiny doing? You could tell him that she's shaking a little bit. It's a he. It's not a she, it's a he. Tiny was shaking ninjas actually severely. And I didn't notice it when I had the trailer hooked up, you know, because the trailer is literally constantly hooked up to a tiny. But I unhooked it to take it in for an oil change. And when I hit the highway. What was the steering wheel doing? Shaking a lot. How was it shaking?

No, no, give me like a sample.

Okay, so I think he's gonna go underneath the truck here and show an upper oil pan that they also fixed.

Showed him. Tell me, what did they have to do to get that Oil pan off, take the flywheel out, the transmission out and all that good stuff. Flywheel out had to be taken out. The transmission had to be taken or disconnected at least. And all that to take the oil pan out. Busy be all that. Isn't that crazy? Holy crap. So they told me that actually Ford.

Covers it for like 11 hours or pays it for 11 hours. 11 hour job. And how much an hour? 190. $595 per hour for 11 hours. That by itself is how much, Mr. Math Man? About $2,000. That's right. Busy be $2,000 just right there by itself to take the dang thing out. There it is. Ninjas. That is the oil pan right there. Now this is the bottom one, correct?

Yeah.

But they had to replace the upper one. Is that what it said?

Yeah.

So the bottom one obviously is pretty easy to get to. I could see this being a huge job, wouldn't you agree? Yeah, I wouldn't want to take it off. No, I would not want to mess with this. So I'm glad this was in the hands of people who know what they're doing and they have the proper tools and all kinds of things, so. And they had to redo the oil change. Again, I asked how much did all that cost if, let's say, for example, I didn't have the warranty. Correct. So let's. Let's recap one more time. Upper oil pan.

No, no, no, I'm saying total. I'm just saying upper oil pan, rear differential, and then the steering column. Right. Probably about $3,000, 3,500 actually, to be exact. Or very close to just. Well, not exact, but roughly. Because what I asked him, I said how much would that cost if I didn't have the warranty? And they gave me a rough estimate, about 3,500. And out of all those things, which one was the most difficult to replace? Transmission. I mean, not the transmission oil pan. The upper oil pan, which has obviously has something to do with the transmission. And what, since that is the most difficult, would you say that was probably the most expensive? Oh, yeah, for sure. But Tiny's back, back to attack.

So I'm gonna stop it there. He actually goes on and shows they got one of the mowers stuck. But today I really wanted to focus on the benefits of buying a new truck. And that's one of them is having a warranty. And so there's something you wanna think about if you wanna stay solo and you're going to use a truck for 10, 15 years. And you wanna get it brand new. And it's even better for you to do that if you're not mechanically inclined. Alright. Cause if you're mechanically inclined, you can go get a truck for literally half as much that's a year or two old and fix it in a few years when it breaks. Right? For someone like myself, if I was solo, I would probably go buy a new truck. Honestly, if I was gonna stay solo, maybe have one employee help me sometimes, I would go buy a new truck that I could know beyond the shadow of a doubt, was covered by warranty and would not have any issues. But when you're trying to scale a business and you have 15 trucks, you will not, cannot afford to pay $50,000 per truck if you're gonna also be spending it on hiring and marketing and all the rest of it. And some of you are like, well, I'll lease it or I'll get loans on it. Well, when you get loans, you start becoming less nimble because you don't have the cash to other things. It starts tying you up. I'd much rather have profit in my bank account than profit that needs to be like. My working capital needs to be bigger and bigger and bigger because I have these payments coming out every single month. On a $50,000 truck, you're going to be spending like 6, $700 a month on a payment. So if you have 15, 20 trucks now, now you're looking at 12, $15,000 a month on just truck payments. You don't own any. Like we don't have any loans on our trucks. They're all cheaper trucks. The average truck probably is about 8 to $9,000, probably not even that much, honestly. Let's just say $8,000 is our average truck. We have never lost a truck. We've only lost that one. I just mentioned where the engine went out. It was a cheaper truck, but we know.

On that thing. So we switched it out for $4,000. The reason we did that is cause it cost us about $1,500 to take any truck and turn it into an Augusta lawn care truck. Cause we gotta paint it, put the decals on it, put a trailer, brake, little controller on it. We try to standardize all of that. So it cost us about 1,500. So we figured, you know what, instead of spend, you know, if we can get $4,000 for this new engine on this truck, we can avoid having to spend 1,500 on getting another truck, painting it, putting the decals on it, putting the trailer brakes on It. So we decide, hey, throw the $4,000 in it, and we probably got another 10 years before the transmission goes out on it. So it's just a balance. What would you rather have, for example? Right. Would you rather spend. If you had 15 or 20 trucks, for example, do you want to spend 12 or $15,000 a month on truck payments? Or maybe you end up spending three or five thousand dollars a month on maintenance on the older trucks. It's just a balance. Which one is going to serve you best? There is no, right? There is. It's what do you want the business to do for you? And it depends on how big you want the business to grow. If you're trying to scale a business and make it cash positive and cash flow, like, very, very strong position to where when there's an economic crisis, you don't freak out because you can't work for a few weeks, or something happens to your job, your lead flow, all of a sudden, or something happens in the labor market and all of a sudden you're stranded. Having payments on a truck increases your fixed expenses, regardless of how much work you get done. It's not a variable expense. Cause you have to pay that regardless of how much work gets done. A variable expense is something like materials or labor that goes up and down based upon how busy you are. And so increasing fixed expenses is. One of the things I get freaked out about when lawn care and landscapers start buying equipment is because if you start getting your fixed expense of just paying loans to 12, 15, $20,000 a month, like, my goodness, if you make 100,000 in revenue and we're 20% profitable on it, that could literally all get wiped out Simply by like $100,000 a month. You're 20% profitable on that. That's pretty profitable. That could all get wiped out with payments. I've seen it time and time again where companies are actually profitable, great operations. But because they have so many loans and they have so many payments, literally all their profit gets wiped out. I'd rather grow a little bit slower with a little bit less. That's great equipment. If I'm trying to scale the business, if I'm solo, I'd invest in trucks like this that have a warranty because I have no idea what I'm doing when I open up the hood of a truck. So there's definitely a balance here. And I really appreciate Ninja for showing us that balance today. Thank you so much, everyone for watching. I'm Mike Andes. You're listening to the landscape business course, make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com. we'll see you next time.