My Response to Tigran Gertz

What's up, everyone? It's Mike Andes and you're listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com. today I'm going to be reacting to Tigrin Gert's mild slam on lawn care and landscapers that do mowing. So we're going to talk about that. I'm going to show you the clip and I'm going to go through some numbers because, you know, we love the numbers. And so I look forward to that. And then after that, I'm going to do some live Q and A. So throughout my first few minutes here, as I break down some stuff, feel free to post questions, comments, and I'll do some live Q and A. So anything lawn care, landscaping related. If you have any questions, post in the comments and I'll try to get through those as much as I possibly can. But first, we have to address what has been going on. I'm going to first all roll the clip of Tigran. He made a video yesterday and at the very end he had to throw mowing companies under the bus.

And.

And I'm gonna have to respond. And don't worry, I'm not like mad at Tigra and we don't have a beef between us. Don't worry about any of that stuff. It's not a bunch of drama or anything like that. I'm gonna show you the clip, though, gonna show you what we're talking about and explain my stance on whether or not lawn care and mowing guys need to grow up and become big guys. Big guys. And do landscaping and hardscaping projects. All right, so let me figure out if I can do this. I'm gonna share my screen. Share screen. Very good. I'm gonna do this one right here and I'm gonna play the clip. Hopefully you can hear this. If not, it's from yesterday's clip that he put out. Let me go ahead and just put this down here. Boom. To the very end of this video right here. Let's go ahead and roll.

You gotta have these bad boys right here, okay? You gotta have Mr. Caterpillar. You're gonna be going out on the weekends, tapping ass.

Okay? All right, so here we go for a little discussion. All right, let me take away this share here because that was Tigran said on his video end of the day. And now I'm going to explain my stance. And first of all, I need to make sure no sound, there's no audio. I'm sorry you guys couldn't hear that. Okay, let me. Let me play again. Give me a Second here. Cannot hear no sound. No sound. Okay, give me a second, guys. Give me a second. All right, we're going to play it again. We got to figure out how to do this. All right, add to stream. There it is. We're good there. Now I got to see if. Why won't it let me do my mute? See, guys, I'm sorry. I don't know why it's not gonna let me see when I'm streaming here. Give me a second, guys. Give me a second.

Okay. Well, man, it. Oh, it was just super quiet. Okay, thank you for letting me know that. I'm gonna turn up the audio and we're gonna play this again. And let's see here. That's all brought up. Okay, let me give a little more audio here. Hop back into here. Take this back to right about there and go.

And you're hating on me. That just goes to show more about you. I'm just doing my thing. I'm just telling you the truth. Stuff costs money. You need to charge for stuff. You're in business, right on your mowing lawns. You need to stop mowing lawns. You need to go a little bit higher, think a little bigger. Get jobs like this. Look at this shower right there.

Look at the driver.

Very nice driver. You think someone mowing lawns did that? No. We gotta have these bad boys right here, okay? We gotta have Mr. Caterpillar if you're gonna be going out on the weekends, tap an ass.

Okay. Okay, Time to react. Okay, One second. Okay, so now hopefully you could hear a little bit better. It sounds like you guys could. All right, so the concept that mowing lawns is somehow lesser than landscaping projects. And that if you're going to make a big business, you need to do hardscaping construction. You need to have excavators and skid steers and track loaders and dump trucks and big trucks and all the rest of it. Okay? So bigger jobs equal bigger problems. All right? If you are trying to get into work that you are not skilled enough for, especially you're going to have bigger problems, and there's going to be a lot more learning a curve. It's going to be much harder to find employees that are skilled. It's going to be much harder to just get through a day without massive fires happening. Because guess what? When it comes to mowing, when I have a customer complaint, you know what? It usually is about, like a skid mark or maybe a broken sprinkler head. Oh, $10. Mercy goodness. Okay, if we're talking about hardscaping projects, you can be doing 10, 15, $20,000 mistakes. If you're doing 100, $200,000 job, you can lose your shirt on this stuff. So the fact that the idea that like you have to do big projects is ludicrous. Everyone starts small and you can start with mowing, you can start with lawn care. And if you want to grow into doing projects and construction, you can. But to discount lawn care and to say that you need to grow up and to become a big business, you need to do hardscaping and projects is incorrect. Custom projects, custom projects where every single project is different and you do not systematize your your projects, what type of materials you're offering, etc. Leads to very, very big problems. It's very difficult to scale up and make that business big. For example, if you look at the top 100, you know I should pull it up right now. Let's do it. Let's do this live. Because I remember lawn and landscape, every single year they put out the top 100.

Businesses companies in the country for lawn care, landscaping based upon revenue. So let's go ahead and pull this up. I haven't actually looked at 2021, so maybe I'm wrong. We could, hey, we could do a public shaming here right now. Let's go ahead and open this thing up. I wish. See in the magazine they used to have which services they offered.

I'm trying to find one here. Let me show you what I'm looking at and then let's see here. Pull this out film. Okay, give me one second guys. I'm gonna pull up the lawn and landscape top 100 companies in the lawnscape landscape community based upon revenue. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and stop this one. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. Share screen, Boom. Window. Okay, so I'm sharing lawn and landscapes top 100 companies. What I'm looking for though is they used to have where would say what services they also offered. I'm just trying to look here, but we can just start at the top. Bright view. Okay. What percentage of the revenue is maintenance versus construction based upon my remembrance and you know what? I don't remember. Let me see here, one second. This is great. I love live. Let's go ahead and actually pull up the financial reports from Brightview, the biggest company, the only publicly traded company in this in the landscape industry. So therefore I can actually look at their profit and loss statement. I can look at all of their numbers. It's a Fantastic thing. So I'm going to pull up bright view. Here we go. All right, let's see here. There's their earnings call. I want to see where is it? I want to see their numbers. Brightview. Okay, so based instead of taking your time, I'm going to do go off my memory and I want to say that about 75 to 80% of their revenue came from maintenance. It could have even been more. I'm probably going to lower side because if I remember correctly, in the in they did $600 million in revenue and 500 million of it was maintenance related. And the other a hundred thousand was like small, adding color, adding mulch, trimming bushes, like small stuff. But most of it was recurring maintenance. Mowing, weeding beds, simple services, biggest company.

In this entire industry. Okay, let's work our way down. True, true green. We have a tree company, we got Yellowstone landscape, we got tree experts, landscape community. So, but, but this is the thing. If you pull up these companies that are saved, for example, like Gothic landscape, look at how much of their revenues come from maintenance. All right, Weed man, Land care. If you look at land care, for example, it's just, let's just take any of these guys. Land care, boom, boom, boom.

Okay, let's see here. What do they do here? Commercial landscaping company, blah blah, blah. Okay, great. Okay, so they do landscape management, design and installation, water management. I wish, I wish they were public so you could see actually the revenues based upon maintenance versus projects. But you can't tell me that you can't build a big lawn care business. Look at these companies, US Lawns, lawn doctor. A lot of these do mostly maintenance because maintenance scales. All right, One day Augusta lawn care will be on here. I can almost guarantee it. But if you look through, just scroll through here and see how many lawn care mowing companies and look up these different services, different businesses and ask yourself what services do they focus on? Maintenance scales. Maintenance is simple services that allow you to grow the business. How hire lots of people and make multiple locations and do it across the country, across your region. And most importantly for most of you who do not have the ambition to be on that list that I just showed you right now, you're like, hey, I don't need to be there. Most importantly, simple services allow you to make a business that you don't have to be there every day. You don't have to be selling jobs. You don't have to be mobilizing equipment, moving your big trucks and your trailers and your ditch witches and your excavators around. You don't have to worry about that stuff. You don't have to have to create 3D designs to sell these landscape projects that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the end of the day, if I want to build a business where I can build it and then not have to show up to work, or I can scale it to the place where I can hand it over to general manager and then go build another business or a second location or go invest in real estate or go on a vacation to some island somewhere and the business run without me. Simple services, maintenance and mowing lawns is a great place to get started. Ask yourself this question. If I am running a landscaping company where every single product is 80, 90, 100, $200,000 per job, yes, I can grow top line revenue. Fantastic. But let me ask you this. What was it cost to replace you as the owner? If I am running a big landscape hardscape construction type business, I need to know a lot of stuff. I need to be able to be active in selling 3D designs, managing big projects, big equipment, lots of liability, and in order to replace myself where I do not need to be in day to day operations, it is going to be very very hard to find someone. And when I find them, it's going to be very very expensive to pay them to replace me. So if I'm trying to create a business that can run without me, that isn't going to require my constant attention every day, 24, 7, on the weekends, at nights, all the time I have to create simple services that can scale with the business. And that way one day I can hand it off to a manager and not have to pay them $300,000, take on the stress liability and have the experience of running all of these equipment, all these different types of projects and managing these crews of people that are extremely skilled and highly, highly, highly hard to find. Bad use of language. But anyways, very difficult right now to find someone who can drive an excavator, build walls, build patios, build pools, build an arbor. Those are very hard people to find right now that are very expensive in this labor market. Okay, last thing, last thing before we jump into Q A because I see a whole bunch of people asking questions right now. I'm going to get to them. But before we get to that last note on landscaping and hard scheming versus long hair which by the way, if you do landscaping and hard steaming, great. That's fantastic. I have nothing against you, just don't throw mud at us lawn care guys like we're just down here trying to scratch out a living for ourselves. We don't need no mud thrown over at us. We like mowing our lawns. We like straight lines. We like the smell of cut grass. We like the smell of two cycle engine oil. Like that's a beautiful thing for us mowing guys. We're just simple folk trying to scratch out a living, make some good money, make a big business. And we can do it. We can make big businesses without big projects, big construction, lots of liability, big equipment, highly skilled employees. We don't need them. All right, last thing. Return on assets. Because we always got to talk about the numbers. We always got to talk about the numbers when it comes to rebuttals. Return on assets. All right, I'm going to have a little. My little whiteboard thingsy. I come prepared. I come prepared all day. We were training with the franchisees, but I had to make this video for everybody, okay? So we're going to do a little. A little less story time with Mike, okay? A little story time with Mike. So we're going to talk about return on assets. What does that mean? Return on assets are roa. Equals. Equals net income. Net income divided by total assets.

Right? This is not return on investment. This is return on assets. Okay? We talked about this in the MBA for entrepreneurs course. Net income divided by total assets. Let's compare a landscaping hardscaping company versus a lawn care and mowing company. All right? This is why it makes sense for most of us to start at least with mowing and lawn care. And if you want to graduate, graduate, become a big boy. Become a big boy and be doing landscaping hardscaping. Great. But let me explain why. From a return on asset standpoint, mowing makes a lot more sense. Okay? So let's take a company that does.

Net income. So net income of $200,000. $200,000. And this is a hardscaping design, build, construction company. To create that $200,000 in net income, they need a bunch of equipment. They need excavators, track loaders, skid steers, dingoes, dump trailers, big dump trucks. Okay? Let's assume that they need $800,000 worth of total assets. Okay? If you do this, ratio your total return on assets, this is going to come to.25. Hope you can see that. Can you see that? Look at that. Beautiful. 0.25. Now let's take a lawn care company, mowing company, all right, we're going to assume that they. They don't. They're not rich. Hey, us Lawn care guys, we don't make a lot of money. We're just poor guys trying to scratch out a living. We're going to make a hundred thousand dollars instead of $200,000 in net income. But we don't need big trucks, we don't need big equipment. We can use small trailer setups, push mowers, etc, do simple services like weeding, bush trimming, mulch installation, and our assets, our total assets. Hope you guys can see this is going to be only, let's see, $80,000, $80,000 to get you a couple small trucks. Some mowers get you a couple employees. All the rest of it easily get a hundred thousand dollars in net income. No problem. But now when we run this ratio, it's 1.25 instead of 0.25. So our total, our return on assets is five times greater in this lawn care example than this hardscaping example. All right, Return on assets. Really good little equation to figure out. Yes, you made twice as much in profit, but you needed ten times more equipment. You have way more liability. Oh, and by the way, your business model doesn't sustain the fact that you can leave for a month and your business run without you and actually grow without you. Because sales run through you, projects run through you, designs run through you, have to transport equipment, manage all of the crews. Every customer needs to talk to you. You can sell the job.

That's my little speech for today.

All right, let's do some Q and A. I hope that was helpful. I do not, I do not hate Tigran. I love Tigrin. He's a fun guy to tease, and he's a fun guy to have fun with. And that's why I make. I can feel like I can make videos about him because it's fun. All right, so I'm not against landscaping and hardscaping. Absolutely. If you want to do that in your business, by all means, go for it. But do not feel somehow inferior because during lawn care and mowing and somehow that by doing bigger jobs, you, you're going to have a better business. Okay, it's absolutely not the case. You get bigger jobs. If you have fundamental business problems, those fundamental business problems will carry over to bigger projects and create bigger problems. If you cannot cost do costing, if you cannot hire employees, if you cannot run a profitable lawn care business or small project business, don't think that doing $200,000 projects is gonna somehow make that better. Trust me, if you, you will die of old age much sooner. All right, let's go ahead and pull up some Q and A. He hires illegal. Okay, Come on. We're not taking shots. It's kind of the nature of the beast. Okay. It's your business is business. Doesn't matter what you do, but you got to love it. Very cool. All right, I got to read these. These question comments before I post them. Now, our customers ask for services we don't offer.

I believe that they are residential statusly challenged, not illegal. With Sleepy Joe at the wheel. Oh my goodness. Unfortunately, we don't offer that service at this time. That's great. Q. Q. Q. Mike, is your course for business doing over $300,000 right now. What in the world? Discount code. I don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, bro. Sub it out and make a profit. Yeah, subbing out con hardscaping projects is definitely one way to do it. Again, you got to be careful because a lot of times if you are the general contractor and subbing out, you are somewhat liable and you could be caught with your pants down if you actually are doing contracts to subcontractors. So just keep that in mind.

Oh, someone's owning some stock of Brightview. Let's go. Let's see here. I used to work for the most expensive landscaping company in Charlottesville, Virginia. Every month maintenance revenues would absolutely destroy installation revenues. Yeah, and I think there's to be said both ways. It's not about saying that like you can't do hardscaping and projects and become big. Not saying that. My point is you can become big just doing mowing and maintenance. It's hard to find quality people that can weed eat properly. This is true, Chuck. This is a true fact. Okay, what comes with lawn care pro? Hey, Damien, looks like you get some questions about the landscape business course. Just do it. Do it to me personally. Send me an email.landscapebusinesscourse gmail.com. what is good yearly growth percentage really depends on the size of your business. For example, like Chuck, who I just mentioned there, is probably doing like 100 month over month growth or 80% month over month growth. But he's in his first year, he's growing very quickly. Whereas like the Bellingham location, it's much larger. They might be doing 10 year over year growth. It just depends on what you're comfortable with and how much you're investing. Back into marketing. How much should a solo operator make a day? It's really going to be depending on your cost of living. If you're in a cost of living area as a solo operator, you should be charging Premium prices per hour. You should be shooting for like $100 per hour. If you're solo operator and not trying to grow the business. If you're trying to grow the business, you're probably going to have a lower, you know, 70, 80, and then you're going to try to get more employees and sell more work. But if you are a solo operator, you should be able to rake in good money. If you are trying to say it solo, allow the leads to come in from word of mouth, you have a great website, et cetera. And then just keep moving the price up. Wow. We have 105 people listening. If someone could just hit the hit the like button, I'd really appreciate that. And we'll keep going. Michael Johnson Lawn guys make landscapers look good. Without a nice lawn, the landscaping is junk. That's awesome. Layman's growing can you can hire specific people to manage each portion of the business to keep overhead low. Don't hire one managers for all aspects. If you have many. Yes, okay, I see what you're saying here. I disagree with one part of it. I agree with what your premise is though. Your premise is if you have a lot of different aspects of the business to hire a manager for each one. I would agree with that. For big, big businesses, multi million dollar businesses, having a manager for irrigation, a manager for mowing, a manager for landscaping, et cetera, it makes sense. But this is far too often people's premise when they are at 8, 700,000 in revenue, in annual revenue. And you do not want overhead, you do not want middle level management. All right, you want a general manager. And that's why mowing traditionally tends to be more lean and in management is because I can get one general manager and manage eight to 10 employees. I don't need a irrigation manager. That's driving around. I don't need a hardscape manager, I don't need a construction manager. Managers are overhead. Anyone that is not producing work is overhead in your business. If they're at the office, if they're answering the phone, the rent that you're paying for, your structure, the insurance, all of this is overhead. You want to reduce that as much as possible in this business.

Trulon Lawn Care Services. Hi Mike from Linden. I am looking into SOPs, standard operating procedures for new employees who aren't experienced. Do you guys have something similar? So we've, we've had videos for this. We've. I used to have them on the course, but we did not have a good experience with people. New employees, field Workers learning from videos. Now people in the office, managers. Great to learn from videos. People out in the field, you just need to have a step by step process of okay, day one, what did they. They, what did they learn? Day two, what did they learn? And they, in order to advance the next day, they need to have an experienced person that kind of checks them off on that service. Like hey, they use the weed eater. Now we can move to the next thing. Now we can use the push mower. Then we can move to a riding lawnmower. Then we can use to drive in the truck. Then we can, you know, backing up a trailer. Like all those different things that you know, they need to do, make a checklist out of that. Have, have a step by step in terms of days and then have someone check off that they actually know what they're doing.

All right. I started with one account of 100, 150 with a push mower. Now I have 5,000. Whoa, $5,000 or 5,000 accounts. Let's go. Do you plow? What about ROA? So we do plow and we only plow very expensive contracts to keep our guys busy. When there's snow on the ground in our market we only get usually a couple snow. Sea snow falls here. But we do have a few plows, we have a couple salters. And we only, we charge a very premium and we go after like the hospitals, border patrol, law enforcement, etc, they're willing to pay very premium price because again, what he just said is turn on assets. It's 100 true snow plowing. You better make sure you're gonna actually make good money if you're gonna go buy $20,000 on a plow. And I salter etc.

Are we being sold to right now? Lawn care is greater than landscaping. That's not what my point is. I'm just saying that you can't throw away lawn care and mowing because we love it. I'm a one man part time show. Should I get my first employee part time? I start with part time. If you're fully busy, you're making good profit margins, you know that your rates are going to be able to facilitate and afford having a part timer. Go for it.

Is California the only state that requires a four years of experience if you want to apply for your contractor's license? I can't do any jobs over 500, so it's definitely the worst state. We just have a franchisee here this weekend from Modesto, California and they were talking about today. It's a pain in the neck In California. There's other states that have similar licensing requirements. But to my knowledge, California is the worst in terms of having needing experience to even get a contractor's license, which is crazy. I think it's. I think it's almost anti American to say you can't go get started doing lawn care and landscaping. Need experience. It just sounds so European. Dalton, could you make videos on how to mow edge mulch and other services properly? You could explain things very well and would be great for beginners. Dalton, to be perfectly honest, I'm not the best at that. There are better people out there that can explain it better than me and maybe they're all do something little, but trust me, there are better videos, better software like Greenius. G R E E N I U S is a software for videos for training your guys out in the field. They do a much better job than I ever will. I am not the best at mowing, edging, using a mower. And that's why I don't make videos about it because I'm not very good at it. I'll stick to my roa. My business stuff. I love it. Finally, finally hired my first employee did $6,000 last month in revenue due to some very costly truck and equipment repairs. Low profit. On track for $10,000 this month, but that's not even fully booked. Okay. I work at Trugreen and even in the spray industry, the simple services always win. Let's go. We actually mow for Trugreen's headquarters in North Carolina. It's very cool. It's great. Wait, I think we still do it. I'm pretty sure we still have it. I'm from Northern Michigan and senior guys assigns. Did you guys just add a franchise up in Traverse City? We sure did. Let's go, Derek. I've been debating selling my maintenance route and focusing just on sod and sprinklers. Sometimes I feel maintenance gets in the way. So this is a great point. Simplification of services can mean that you focus. Like we talked about with Jonathan from Florida Turf Pros and about him focusing on sod. And he grew his business massively. Right. He talked about the growing pains in doing that, but he simplified his, his, his design, build or installation side of the business to be sod. I'm really talking about custom hardscape construction jobs. Very, very detailed, highly skilled labor required. Long sales process and very, very much high touch from the owner. Traditionally hard to systematize, hard to find labor. Okay, questions, questions, questions. Thanks, Mike. Always love the content. Okay, how did you, did you get my Facebook pm? I probably didn't, to be perfectly honest with you. Yes, it was questions about the course. Just picked it up. So I'll email if, if, if I have questions. Oh, cool. Thanks, Damien. I appreciate the support. Also forgot to add that Moe accounts are doubling every two weeks now. Unfortunately, we don't get started until late May, early June. Good for you, Ben. All things the great info. Oh, appreciate it, Mike. When are you opening a location in Oklahoma City? Austin? You're gonna have to give me a call. Quit my salary job to do a lawn care full time. Very nervous, but excited. Congratulations, Troy. If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. We still have it mode True Green yesterday. Oh, Chuck. Yeah, we still have the headquarters of True Green. We mow it from Augusta Lawn Care so they know who to hire when it comes to lawn care. All right, guys, I really appreciate you hopping on here. Please drop a like before you hop off. Thanks so much for being here. Okay, I'll do a couple more. Troy. I'll be winging myself out. Very nerve wracking. Leaving the security of a job. But it'll be worth it in the long run. Well, turning on a six figure job. Congratulations, man. I know it's a big sacrifice and a big risk, but he's the wealthiest heir of California. Great. Okay. All right, we're going to call it a day. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for everything you've been doing in terms of long care web design and the course and everything support. I really appreciate it. We're here this weekend with the franchisees doing training. I'll hopefully get a vlog up for you Monday, kind of showing some behind the scenes stuff. But thank you so much and we will see you sometime this weekend. I'm sure. I'm just going to be kind of exhausted from franchisee training. We'll see you.