Office Staff 101: Why Most Landscaping Businesses Stall at $300K

Hey, everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today we're going to be talking about why most landscaping businesses don't get past $300,000 in annual revenue and what you can do to fix that. I've been looking forward to this episode for a very, very long time. It's gonna be almost more like a webinar. So if you're just listening to this, you might wanna Watch this on YouTube or Facebook. Cause I'm gonna be having some visuals and some slides and showing you some charts. So let's jump into it before we do, a big thank you to today's sponsor, which is Jobber. If you haven't already, go to getjobber.com im andy. One of the things Jobber is going to allow you to do is to simply and very quickly accept credit card processing from your customers. Some people choke over the few percent that you got paying credit card processing fees. Let me tell you what credit card processing did for our business when we switched several years ago. We went from our our average collection time being 30 to 40 days, all the way down to our average time being 2.5 days. For our average collection time, we went from our average accounts receivable being 80 to 100,000, all the way down to 15 to 20,000. And that's while growing the business. So I highly, highly recommend you check it out. Go to getjobber.com im andys a n d E S and get a free trial today. All right, so this is gonna be a little bit of a longer episode than usual. So maybe this is when you pause it, you wanna take some notes. Later, you wanna do some screenshots of the slides I'm going to show. Usually this would be more like a webinar, but I feel like this is a really good time to share this. And it's something that I've been looking forward to for a very long time. And for some people, they're gonna think this is a big sales pitch for the franchise, but it's not. I'm gonna teach about why most people don't get through 300,000 and then going to share what we're doing with the franchise.

All right? So you're gonna learn either way. If you can't become a franchisee, you're still gonna get a lot of education out of this. So anyways, all right. I wanna make sure I cover all my bases. So most the time I get calls and I get contacts from businesses that are plateaued and are looking to grow Their business. And so many of the times, those businesses are between 200 and $350,000 in revenue. Those businesses have not really grown for a couple years. They're not super profitable.

The owners are almost always running in a hundred different directions. Chasing work change orders, chasing overdue bills, chasing bad employees, chasing disgruntled customers, always running in 100 different directions, then doing an estimate, then answering their phone, then on the email, working a ton of hours, then doing the billing. They're all over the place. And so the big thing that is going to allow them to get through that is hiring an office person to take a lot of the clerical work off of their plate. The bookkeeping, the billing, the answering the phones, the emails, all of those things, therefore allowing them to focus on sales, therefore allowing them to get to 500,000 and beyond in annual revenue. And so if you listen to the webinar, we did talked about $500,000 in annual revenue or more. We. We talked about breaking through that number. We kind of touched on this. But we're gonna dig deep into it today, and that is, when do you hire an office person? Why do you hire an office person? How much does an office person really cost? And why most people don't hire an office person is what we're gonna be covering today. So $300,000 is the cap. I see so many landscapers trying to break through. Usually it's like 250, but sometimes they'll get as high as 300,000 because they're a really good operator. And so the reason for that is because usually at 300,000, this is what I see. Two crews, four to five employees, and then an entrepreneur or a business owner that is doing all the office work, all the estimates, customer service, answering all the phone calls, doing everything. And so it usually works until you get about three or four crews or four plus employees. Then you start feeling like, okay, you have multiple projects plus a mowing crew going on. You are generating quite a bit of revenue. Like, $300,000 is substantial. However, now you're getting to the point where you can't have three or four trucks just sitting in your driveway at home, so there's more overhead. You start getting pooled in a bunch of different directions. And at this point is either where people kind of plateau and stay, which usually they get pushed to kind of overdrive because they're going in a hundred different directions and they give up, or they scale back to being with one or two employees down to like 150, 200,000 revenue, or they Speed through that time, get someone in the office and speed to 500,000. And so we're going to talk about why that is such a hard spot to be in. It's easy just to say, like, oh, just spend some money, get an office person and get through it. It's easier said than done. I'm gonna talk about why that is today.

So I just wanna make sure I'm covering everything. Cool. So I got some slides today. I'm going to show them up on the screen for you. I'm just looking at them on my iPad here. And so I want to look at the cost of an office employee. An office person is going to allow you to focus on the sales, focus on growing the business, focus on the hiring and the estimates. That's what you should be focused on to scale the business. And so in order for you to do that, you need someone to answer the phones, you need someone to answer the emails. You need someone to set up, dispatch and scheduling jobs and sell the jobs on the phone and all these other things. And so what does the cost of an employee like that cost? So let's throw up the first slide. We got the labor expense. Let's assume these are all assumptions, all right? Just for numbers sake, let's assume that the hourly wage of this office person is $18 per hour. All right? Now, again, these are all approximations. That hourly wage is not very high for someone super competent is gonna be able to do everything you want in the office. You might say, well, I can get someone for 12 or 13 bucks per hour. Well, guess what? They're probably not going to be experienced in office. They're probably not going to be a high performer, usually. Because if they're super, super good and that's who you want in the office, if they're super, super good, that means they got 10 other job offers in other offices that they could take up if they wanted. So $18 per hour, that's very low in my market.

But in some markets, 12 or 13, you might be saying that's more comparable. But for me, if I want someone that's good, they're going to be 18 to 20 at least. So let's look at $18 per hour. Just for the sake of this example. Assume that taxes and other things like that, L And I, whatever benefits, $6 more per hour, let's assume full time. This person's going to work for us 170 hours in the month. It's like 40 hours per week. And then usually there's like 4.2 weeks in a month. So $44,080 per month in their total amount of cost for their salary, for their pay. All right, this is the thing that most people don't take into account though is this next part is that when you get an office person, no longer can you just be operating from your cell phone or from your iPad or your laptop. Now you need to actually get a space for them to be in. All right, so let's assume that you need to rent an office space and it's going to be cost $1,000 more than if you just got the land. So let's assume that you come to the place of like 300,000 in revenue, you need space to park all your vehicles and things. You can get that land for say $1,000 to park all your stuff, whatever central location. But let's assume now it's going to cost an additional thousand dollars if it has like an office space with like a structure with like a roof and a bathroom and all that sort of thing. Okay, so let's assume that's gonna cost 1,000 extra per month to have that building. Just the building expenses right now. Then with that building's gonna go a water bill, an electric bill, a garbage bill, Internet, phone. I put $600 for that. I know that for our office, our Internet alone is $540 a month. All right? And that's like a three year contract. So I'm going low on both of these things. Like if you can find a really good office building for $1,000 a month that's built and you don't have to do any improvements, like kudos to you. And for $600 a month, all those things really, really good as well. So again, we're just walking through this example to show you the cost of an office person. All right, one time cost. These are gonna, you know, to get set up. Again, I'm on the low side on all of these computers and office equipment. Let's assume that you don't need to like paint the place, that you don't need to redo the heating or whatever like that. You go walk into this building, it's perfect. You're just paying $1,000 per month. But there are upfront costs of computers, printers, phones, chairs, desks. $4,000 is an absolute steal of a deal, by the way. I don't see how you can do that. But I'm just assuming this for the example. All right, let's assume now for this office person that there's a one time cost to get Them trained up. Let's assume that it only takes them a week to get fully trained on everything. How to answer the phone, how to use your CRM, how to do billing, how to do scheduling. They know everything within one week of you training them. And so we're gonna assume that your time is worth only $50 per hour. Again on the low side I really believe that you're more worth like 100 plus. But let's just assume 50. I wanna keep these numbers realistic. So 40 hours of your time at $50 per hour, $2,000 upfront cost to have that office person get started. Alright, so the total one time cost is $6,000. And the monthly recurring cost to have this office person is $55,680. So all of a sudden this person is like, oh, it's $18 an hour for an office person. All of a sudden if you want them full time, you're gonna be looking at a one time cost to get them up and going with a new office and training and everything. $6,000. As well as monthly recurring costs of $5,680 per month because of their salary and all the expenses attached with having an office building. Alright, next slide. Continue with the example. Let's assume that the average office person stays for one year, which by the way is really good. Most office people do not stick around that long in this industry. The average is more like eight months. But let's assume the reason it's eight months is because that's the average span of mowing season. But anyways, assume that the average office person stays for one whole year. Alright? The annual cost for one office person is $70,000. 160. How do you get that number? You go back to the last slide. You take that monthly cost, you multiply it by 12 plus the added one time cost to get them set up. Okay, $70,000. Now if a business does $300,000 in annual revenue, this added expense would eat over 23% of revenue. So at 300,000 in annual revenue, a good profit margin is 25 to 30%. Because you're pretty small still, you still are doing a lot of the work yourself in clerical work, estimating things like that. So usually the profit margin is pretty good. 25, 30%. You're making take home profit. 75 to $90,000. Like net net profit. This is a good business right now. This is a very good business that is taking that much money home. Like I'm talking like take home profit.

It basically makes it impossible to hire an office person at this stage of the business, because $70,000 is the cost for that person. And everyone's like, no, no, no, it's not. It's $18.

Salary. Take the taxes, take the cost of having an office space just in general, then heating the office space and having utilities and having Internet for that person. The amount of money it takes to get that first office person is tremendously expensive. All right, so this is something to think about. And this is why most people stall at 300,000. Because you need the office person if you're gonna get beyond that. And some people are saying, right now, oh, I'm doing 500,000, I don't have an office person. There's a really good chance that you are doing something other than maintenance. You're probably doing projects where it's a lot of materials and other costs. I'm just saying in general, this is the traditional kind of wall. I see people hitting is $300,000 in revenue at this point. You usually have about 120 customers mowing, sometimes a little bit more, depending on the size of your properties. And like I said, you have four to five employees, you have two to three crews. Like you're getting to that point, you're doing all the estimates, you're doing all the office stuff, you're doing all the phone calls, getting a lot on your plate, and yet you're bringing 90 grand home, 70 to 90 grand home. Let's say, for example, at a good business, it's a very good business. Take home, like net. Net net. But if you add an office person, then you need to get a building, then you need to pay them, Then you need to pay all these utilities, you need to get the setup of all the office equipment, you need to get all these things done. And that's what's going to allow you to get to 500 plus or more. And so what happens is one of two things happen. One, someone's like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to sacrifice and I'm going to not make any money for a year and invest in the company, put all that upfront, one time cost in for the office person. I'm gonna start paying them. I know it's gonna be a short term hit on my profitability and it's gonna take a couple years to outgrow it. But I gotta do it if I'm gonna get to 5, 600,000. And then from there I'll become more profitable, more take home pay. But I accelerate to that point. And so.

That'S the problem now. What's the solution? So what we've created with Augusta Lawn Care is Command center, all right? And before you turn me off like, hey, he's going to try to pitch Augusta Lawn Care, let me at least tell you the idea and so you can perhaps try to mimic some of it with your own office staff. And yes, do I think this is one of the biggest things that we're doing for the franchisees? 100%. Has every single one signed up for Command Center? Yes. And they have the option not to. The numbers are absolutely behind this Command Center. So much to the point, I'm going to show you our numbers for Augusta Lawn Care locally, and I'm telling you now, we're switching all of our office assistants. We're moving them all to Command Center. We will no longer take phone calls into our existing location here in Bellingham. They're going to go to Command Center. It's that much cheaper. I'm going to show you why. All right, so next slide. What is Command Center? All right, so this is the command center that we have for Augusta Lawn Care franchisees. It's pay as you go, it scales with you. I'm gonna read over these real quick. No overhead for office. No finding or training new office employees. It's 100% efficient and no waste of time. And some people are like, that's impossible. This is all like fairytale. Let me explain. Pay as you go scales with you. And I'm gonna show you the pricing on the next page. What it means is that as you use an office person, you pay for them. Because right now, the efficiency of your office staff is very, very low. By the time they brew the coffee, talk to each other about their weekend, look at their phone 20, 50 times throughout the day, chat about this and that, have lunch, go to the bathroom, all of those things combined, their efficiency is very low. I've looked at studies that say as low as 40% of someone's day is actually productive work time. And I've seen it as high as 60. I've seen some, like, really, really low. So I'm not gonna use any stats on it. But I know that they're not 100% efficient. They're doing other things. They're talking with other coworkers, and that's just fine. They're humans and that's fine. But you don't necessarily wanna be paying for that. And so what happens is that 300,000 in revenue, usually you don't need a full time office person, and yet you need Someone to be answering the phone all day long. Yet you need someone to be scheduling all day long. You need them to be there when the crew gets back. So you need the full time office person, but you don't necessarily need them all the time. Like you don't need them during the winter when you're slowing down. So what we've done with Command center is that it's pay as you go. So you pay by the minute and you pay by how much you use the command center. So that way in the winter, if you check out for three months, you don't gotta worry about someone going on unemployment. You don't gotta worry about trying to just make up projects to keep them busy because they're such a good employee. You don't want to lose them. All right? There's no overhead for office. As an Augusta lawn care franchisee, you become a part of the command center. You do not need to get an office space. You do not need to go get computers and desks and chairs and make lights, and you don't need to get an expensive rent facility that has a building structure and has all the permitting and the codes and all the inspections. You don't have to worry about all of that.

There's no finding or training new office employees. So you don't have to go out and find them, train them on your CRM and then they leave two weeks later. And then you gotta find someone else, then train them up. And it's all time like that. You don't have to train them. We do all that. So basically what happens is the phone calls. We take all the phone calls, we take all of your estimates and we take care of all of that. Last thing is number four, it's 100% efficient. No wasted time. How that's done is that the employees at the command center on our end, they're getting paid by performance. P for P. The same way that our franchisees pay their employees, we are paying Command Center. They're getting paid based upon how many calls they're getting paid based upon how many estimates they send out. So if they want to go and chat and sit on the nice lounge table and walk down the hallway and chill out with all the other employees, fantastic. That's fine. That's up to them. They're just not getting paid for it. So instead of you having to worry about paying someone that's not being efficient, you can be reliant on the fact that we are 100% efficient because you're only paying for the services that you're getting. You're not paying for someone lounging around yakking about what they did last week. All right, so, but the big golden question is, what's the pricing? So, next slide, you can see here the command center pricing. We do four different things for our franchisees. All right, Phone calls. Number two, estimate request form. Follow up. Number three, chatbot. We answer their chatbot. And four, estimate creation. Those are the four things we do for our franchisees. The one thing you see, the couple things that we can't do as a command center yet is like scheduling and invoicing. Those are something we don't do yet. In the future, we hope to be able to take all office tasks off our franchisees so they can reduce that overhead. However, right now, these are the four things that we do. We can answer all incoming calls. And basically the cost. You can see on the side here, I'm just showing exactly what the costs are here. It's $1.09 per minute. It's a $50 per month line. So they get a dedicated phone line that they can forward all their calls to. All right, so if you want to take calls for a day because you're bored, feel free to take the calls. But you can always just have the forwarding coming right to the command center. Never have to get a call. Never your phone ringing when you're middle of an estimate. Never a mad customer while you're trying to drive. Like, all of that will go directly to the command center. You get charged $50 per month for that dedicated phone line. So that way we know exactly when they call in, which territory you're coming from, and we know exactly, okay, this franchisee is in New York as soon as we pick up the phone. And so.

That way we can customize it and make it feel like it's your office. So we charge $1.09 per minute, which is very low in the call center space. If you look around, you can verify that $9 cents per minute. And there's a two minute minimum on that. So $2.18 is a minimum. Okay, Estimate request form, follow up. So if they sent. If a customer goes on your website, investing laundryservices.com you know your territory name. Let's say Wacom. That's ours in Bellingham. You fill out that form, command center is automatically going to contact that person, set up an estimate, put it on the schedule for the estimator, and be able to look at the estimator schedule to make sure it's slotted in the correct spot. They're going to be do all of that.

Estimate request form, follow up. That's that one right there. And the only thing you're gonna get charged for is the call time. When they call back and say, hey, Mr. Jones, I got your estimate request form. Just wanted to see if tomorrow at 4pm would work for you to meet with the estimator. That's all you're getting charged for. You're not getting charged for them inputting them into the CRM, them making call notes and sending those to you. So every single time we get a call, every single time you get an estimate request form that the command center handles, they send an email directly to the franchisee. So you always know what's going on. Okay, number three, we answer the chatbot. So the goal for command center is for it to run 24 7. So that way if someone is on your website at 2am and the chatbot pops up after 10 seconds and says, would you like a lawn care landscaping estimate? And someone says yes, they immediately have a live person they can talk to. That chatbot sometimes will take 10, 15 minutes to conversate with that person. Because you're like, yes, I want a landscaping estimate. Great. What's your address? And you're going back and forth and sometimes it takes them a little bit of time. They're like scrolling around your website. We do all of that for you. It's $2.18. That's the two minute minimum equivalent of a phone call. Estimate creation, that's the fourth thing we do. So that way when you or your estimator goes out to a property and puts all the notes on the estimate, they don't need to do all the calculations, they don't need to do any formatting, they just make the notes, put it onto the estimate, they click complete on their mobile app that then triggers an automation. They don't have to email, they don't have to text, nothing like that. It's all automated. Immediately notify our command center immediately. They will then be able to pick it up, format all the notes, all the pricing, they'll put in the estimate calculator, run it through all your numbers, send it to the client with a nice video that makes it very personalized to them. And that's gonna cost three to six dollars per estimate based upon if it's a lawn care estimate or a landscaping estimate, because lawn care is faster. And the landscaping ones, we gotta go through the estimate calculator and do more calculations for you. All right, so that's the pricing, that is what command center does. And I could talk about this for hours. The value of this to someone that's growing a business like this is a dream for me several years ago to have this. The cost of an office person is completely offset using this model because it only. It's cheaper, 100% cheaper because of all the reasons we just talked about. But, like, for your phone calls, you route all the phone calls in. You know, if there's 20 phone calls in a day, you might be looking, you know, in a few minutes each, you might be looking at 50, $60. Okay. If there's two in a day, though, guess what? You're not paying someone 20 bucks an hour times eight hours, $160, you're paying for two calls. And if they're two minutes each, you're looking up four bucks. Okay?

And so it's extremely, extremely. This is what's going to be the game changer for Augusta Lawn Care franchisees, I can tell you that. And as I said, I believe in this so much, and I know that it's going to save so much money.

Compared to a traditional office staff, that we are taking our existing location and moving our office staff to the command center. The only reason I'm keeping one person instead of four now at our shop is so that we can do scheduling and invoicing, because the command center doesn't do that. The command center can do everything else. Take the call. If it's a mad customer, they make notes on a to do it, then immediately triggers an automation to the franchisee that says, hey, the call center took a call. There's call notes on your dispatch board. They can go in there, they can see if they need to make an action. For example, if it's a complaint, they need to go back to a job site. Or it could just be like, hey, we took credit card payment. The person's paid their bill, just letting you know, and you don't have to do anything about it. No interruption, no you on a busy street with loud cars going by, can't hear the customer, they can't hear you. It's bad reception. None of that. All right? You focus on the things you're doing that are gonna grow the business, and that is sales and hiring. And don't get bogged down with all the minutia of phone calls, emails, complaints, and all the other things that we can handle for you. All right? So just to prove that how cost effective this is, I'm going to show you here on the next slide, the command center price comparison For Augusta Lawn Care locally in the month of October. Okay, so at Augusta, we will pay out over $125,000 for office staff salaries, not including office overhead, rental building, etc. I am going low on a lot of these numbers, by the way. I'm not exaggerating these. I know we're quite a bit more than 125 if you look at taxes and things. But anyways.

Approximately $10,000 per month. Let's just again, just rounding down approximately $10,000 per month is what we pay just in office staff salaries. Okay. We're not including the office overhead. We paid about 22,000 for the shell, probably another 20, probably about $50,000 to build our office space. Then like all the equipment the Internet set up like another 30,000, 40,000 easily. We're not even looking at that. We're looking at just their salaries right now. Approximately $10,000 per month in October. I took this. Real data, real data here. We had 812 active minutes on the phone. So remember, you're only getting charged for command center when they're on the phone, not when they're inputting data, sending you the note, doing stuff in your CRM, taking payment, nothing like that. Only when they're on their phone, it's trackable, it's traceable. Like we can record the calls, all of that good stuff. You're only getting charged for that. So 812 active minutes were on the phone. So for the cost on that, you're getting charged. Excuse me, $1.09 per minute, plus the $50k for the dedicated 800 phone line number two. We sent out 122 landscape estimates and 30 lawn care estimates. The reason for that difference is because in October we're slowing down for mowing, but we still sent out 30. So those, the cost for sending out all those estimates, formatting them, sending a video, doing the price calculations for all the materials and the labor, and estimate fees and overhead, all that stuff. $822 for the whole month. We had six chatbot conversations, which again is really low because our web traffic is way lower in October compared to the spring. All right, but in October where we spent over $10,000 to just the salaries of our staff using command center, our monthly cost would have been just.

$1770.88. Okay, now I don't want to over exaggerate. I would still need to pay an office manager to do what command center can't do. So you can't compare.

Over $10,000 per month versus 1700. I'd still need to hire an office manager to do the things Command center can't do. That's scheduling and billing. But no longer is that office manager getting phone calls every few minutes and then getting complaints and then trying to figure out sending out estimates as quick as they can. Now estimates are being sent out within minutes of being completed by the estimator. Now phone calls are being answered the moment they're being called. No longer like waiting and no longer leaving voicemail and getting back to them the day after. None of that. We are on top of it at the Command center, getting right back to people. We are answering the phone live, we are sending the estimates quickly. And your office person, as you grow to a million plus in revenue, you can have one person in there doing scheduling and billing, getting emails that are pertinent to them from the Command center. That's all they need. They don't need to be sending the estimates, they don't need to be answering the phones. All those things can be done by Command Center. Alright, So I don't want you to compare like 10 to 12,000 at Augusta versus the 1700. That's not really true because I'd still need to on the top of the 1700. I'd still need to pay one person to be doing the scheduling and the invoicing and the things that Command center can't do. But it's a whole lot better than four people and having 10 to 12,000 just in salaries. I'm not talking about office expenses and the Internet and all the other things that we have to do. Like we at least put $70,000 into building that office. The computers, the furniture, Internet setup, all of that stuff. Okay, let's see here. I think that's all for my slides. So that's what Command center is all about. Okay. And I got some Q and A about. I asked people what they wanted to learn about, you know, office staff hiring. So we're gonna go through those. But I wanted to share that today because I feel like it's a huge value for the franchisees. I think it's going to be the game changer on top of like p4psystem.com and the performance based pay system that we teach and everything and we give that software. That's all good. But I feel like the Command center is going to be a game changer because it's going to allow our franchisees to scale infinitely without the worry of massive amounts of overhead growing. So what we've done by doing this, this is this Is the key. Using P4P, we have taken your biggest variable cost, your labor and we've standardized, we've made that a fixed percentage. Okay. Then we've taken your overhead of your office, that usually grows as you scale and again we've made that gonna be completely inverse, completely correlated to your growth. Because no longer do you have to pay for an office person when you don't really need them. You only pay for them as you go. So you don't need to pay for them in the winter or when you take a two weeks vacation. You take all your ad down or whatever. You only pay for them as you need them. And so as you grow, instead of your percentage of overhead going up, it just correlates the same percentage as you grow the business. Okay, I want to go to some Q and A. I'm going to go to the landscape business course group and I had quite a few questions coming in about.

Office staff. So let's go ahead and go through those. Got quite a few, I'm just gonna answer some of them, see how many we can get through. But I wanted to make sure you're aware of that. Now. That being said, if you're like that sounds really good about the command center, I'd love for you to be a franchisee. We just had our first group of 10 come in and every single one joined up for command center. It's pretty obvious. That's amazing. Like I said, I am backing that up by moving 75% of my office work to command center from my local shop. Okay. It's that good. It's gonna save us that much. And so.

If you wanna become a franchisee, we have another session starting for training. Another 12 franchisees are gonna be joining in February. It's gonna be February 20th, 21st and 22nd, three days where you'll come here and get training. And it's a lot, there's a lot of information. We go over and as part of your due diligence process, you'll have the opportunity to talk to other franchisees that have been here and they will tell you there's a lot of information. We go over and you leave kind of your mind blown. It's the same way when I left anytime fitness training from their headquarters when I was getting trained in their franchise system. Like you leave like, oh my word. There's a bazillion things I need to do. Like, it's just overwhelming. That's how they left here. There's a lot of information, there's a lot of systems that we teach, but it makes sense. And as you get into the system, it begins to roll. And systems like Command center, systems like P4P and the P4P system.com and the system that we use for pay for performance and these systems that you made for estimate process and all these things, that's what's gonna make this business successful. That is what is going to take out the fluctuations of the landscaping industry and standardize your profit margin. Alright, so if you want to join, just to go to augustalawncareservices.com franchise, please watch all the videos, the FAQ videos. I get a lot of people requesting to be part of the franchise and they don't have any information, they haven't watched those videos. And it's a waste of time because I gotta educate you on the basics of like our fee structure and like the value prop. Watch those videos, you'll be able to have a really good understanding of whether or not it's something you even are interested in. So watch those videos and then if you are, you can book a call directly with me right on that page. Schedule a time to talk with me and we can spend 30 minutes seeing if it's a good fit for you. But again, February 2020, on the 20th, the 21st and the 22nd, it's a Thursday, Friday and a Saturday. So you don't have to miss the whole week of work. Those three days we're gonna come here, we're gonna really have a very in depth session of training during those three days. We'll go to the local shop, all of those things. And so I really look forward to having you on board. But yeah, I wanted to share that I'm very excited about Command Center. I know it's gonna save my local shop like tens of thousands of dollars. In addition to the fact that all the franchisees are going to save a massive amount of money and allow them to scale infinitely and not get the 300,000 bump, right? Cause that's the reason people don't at 300,000, that's the reason why they fail to scale is because they need to go hire someone and spend 70 grand all of a sudden like we talked about.

In cost and they can't afford it because they're only making 70 to 90,000 in profit anyways for the whole year. And so they don't do it. So what Command center allows you to do is at 300,000. Like we're running a multi million dollar business and we're at 1700 for the command center. Like it's not that expensive. 3000. This is what one of the franchisees said. The more money I'm paying the command center, it means, the better my business is going. Because I'm getting more estimates sent out, I'm getting more chatbots, I'm getting more scheduled estimate proposals set up. Like all those things are being done. It's a positive thing and you only pay for it. The bigger your business gets, the more you pay. You don't have to have this massive upfront at 300,000 and barely scrape by or go into debt. That's what most people do. Let's be honest. Most people go in debt, 100, 200,000 in debt to get through a year or two so that they can get through that period and they can invest in capital, capital expenditures and office and all the equipment and hiring that office person. So anyways, all of that being said, I think Command center is amazing.

I hate that it feels like a sales pitch because I just, I believe in it so much and I just, I just wish that. I almost wish I wasn't the franchisor, like the owner because I would be able to pitch this from like a third party perspective of how good this is going to be for the franchisees and how much I believe in it. And like I said, I believe in it so much I'm moving my office staff over there because I know we'll save tens of thousands of dollars. And so for people just starting out, like we're a big business, right? Most people would attain to try to get to 1 to 2 million in revenue. For small businesses, this is the best thing ever, best thing ever to scale the business and get through these periods, these walls in time. Like 300,000. Anyways, we're gonna get some Q and A. I hope you do join the franchise again in February. We're having those three days of training. Okay, so Kevin asks, what is the best way to conduct the hiring process where you advertise for hiring? So this is all about office staff. When it comes to the hiring process for these office people, you are definitely looking for someone that's very efficient. You're looking for someone that it can sell. Because like when we train people at the command center, for example, we are not just training them how to answer the phone or even just use the CRM. We're training them how to upsell how to make you more money. And they're getting paid based upon performance too. So I'd be looking for someone that is extroverted. They can take rejection and they can Take people being mad at them and as you know, if you're the owner, you get mad customers. So someone that can deal with that and can think levelly during that time, the hiring process for them is going to be a lot of, you know, personality, seeing how they interact in that interview, really good communication skills, extroverted, like I said, so that they can get through those times when someone's berating them over grass clippings on their sidewalk. And in terms of advertising, I'm going to be advertising around places for office, right? So it's a completely different dynamic than guys in the field. When we did an interview process for our office staff, we had like 20. Like no, not 20 because we had 20 that day. So usually I'd say we probably about five times as many applications for our office position in comparison to our field position. Right. That's why it's so much harder to find field people. But on the other hand, a good office person, it's hard to wade through all those applications because everyone thinks that everyone can be an office person when it's just not the case. You need to have sales ability, you get on the phone, you need efficient on a computer. You know, if you have computer skill, it's really good. So I'm looking for experience in some sort of office setting. And hopefully they stick around their job work places of employment for more than a year or two. Like hopefully because you do not want to invest a bunch into training an office person on the CRM, on using a computer, on selling and using the phone, and then them leave after three or four weeks or months. When that starts happening, you start not trusting them, you start holding on to a lot of the important things they should be doing for you. And so again, command center, you don't have to worry about that. We train everyone, we make sure everyone is up to spec. And then you focus on the things that the command center cannot do and you should not have to hire people to answer the phones and things like that. But anyways, where do we advertise in places where most people will be looking for office jobs? Amity asks. She said yes. Thank you. How do you know when is the right time to hire an office person? This week we have been considering hiring office's help. I manage the office, basically everything other than mowing. I don't pay myself. Investing back into company my pay. It's really hard to think about paying someone else knowing I can do it. However, I have another business that I also manage and work. So the company keeps growing. We have Three crews, possible four next season. This makes me work long. Seven hours. Long hours, seven days a week. Trying to make sure everything is done and catching up. My hubby said hired a help but I am not 100% sure he is the right, it is the right time. I see it as an expense. Help me. Okay, so I haven't hadn't read these questions before. Amity is in the exact same position. I almost can guarantee you they're making 300 plus a little over 300,000 in revenue. They have three crews, they're looking to go to four. She's working seven days a week, long hours. This is where most people stall out at right here. Okay. So you either invest in that office person, you scale quickly. You need to scale quickly because that money that you pay to that office person is direct overhead. They're not earning any money. They don't go out and earn dollars per hour like your crew does. Even if they're good on sales, they're not actually generating the revenue. They might earn the revenue, but they have to go generate, they have to go do the work. They don't do that. They sit in an office. Right. And so at the end of the day we're selling time and that time, we're only selling the time of our crew members, not the people in the office. And so that money that you're paying that office person is coming directly out of profit because it's an overhead expense. So that's why it's very hard to have a full time office person because coming directly out of profit. And it's very difficult, like you said Amity, because you know you can do the work. That's also the biggest struggle too is like, you know, you can do the work. And so you're in this constant battle of do I have enough money to allow this person to work? Yes. If I do, then I let them do more. Then I take things away from them. When like things are drying up and it becomes very convoluted, they never get comfortable in their role. They become part time, sometimes full time sometimes. And then they start, they'll just leave. Like a really good office person is not gonna stick around for a part time job. Let's just be honest. If they're really good, they're not sticking around for part time. They're going to go get money, they're going to get a full time job for a lot more. If they're really good, they are.

So it's like, I think Amity, this whole podcast would have helped you kind of with some of these questions. But again, this is what command center is built for right here. Anyways, Dominic Cerrone asks. Not sure about specific questions, but maybe address the pros and cons. While hiring office help is an expense, it does allow the owner to have more free time. What's that worth? I'd rather make a little less money per day or year and be able to go to my kids soccer games, practices or the beach for the day and know that things are running as planned at the office. 100%. All right, so I've said this before. You start in the field, you're doing everything in your business, right? As you start your business, then you grow a little bit, you become the office person and then you're no longer out in the field. The next step is what we're talking about right now. And that is when you hire the office position out and you become the estimator and you focus only on sales. That's the next position. Some people just like to stay there. Get an office person and you're still the estimator, you're still doing the sales, project management, stuff like that. Good to go. Usually that business is gonna do somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million in revenue. But if you're gonna go beyond that, if you're gonna scale up and you want to continue to scale the business, that's when you hire an estimator and you become the CEO. And it gives you the ultimate level of flexibility because you're not needed in the day to day operations. Not necessarily that you have to get there because you can be an estimator that's still very flexible. As long as you have the office covered, the phones that are ringing, the emails that are coming in, the complaints that are happening, as long as those things are covered, you can be an estimated role running a 500,000 to $1.5 million business, being the estimator and making this work. Okay. But in terms of the pros and the cons, the question is how much can you afford and how much are you willing to pay so that you can be at those kids games and you can be on the beach for a day without everything falling apart. So that's what the fallout is, like 70 grand per year for an office person. Okay. Then you start building it on your mind. Like how much do I need to build in annual revenue to get profit to cover that 70,000. Maybe it's a 6, $700,000 business for you. Whatever. It' going to fit your lifestyle is important to make sure Your priorities stay aligned and it serves you, the business serves you. But at the end of the day, I do not see a business owner being able to have employees and not have people there answering the phones and in the office and them having any flexibility with going to kids, soccer games, going away for a day, whatever. I know someone's gonna say in the comments, I'm solo. Like, no, you're solo. You don't have employees. I'm saying if you have employees and you have a sizable business, like you have any employees and you have phone calls coming in and complaints and all those things, it's almost impossible for you not to work really long hours and be able to just step away for a day or leave early. It's very difficult for you to do that. I'm just talking in generalizations. And so you've eventually gotta get an office person if you're gonna continue to grow the business or have flexibility. And if you just want the flexibility part without growing the business, it's gonna come at the cost of take home profit. The alternative is to scale the business, have that office person in place, and grow the business to the point where you can still make enough money and have the flexibility.

Gerardo Hernandez asked, we don't currently have an office, so what are some tips to hire someone that will work from home? We currently only have a warehouse for equipment only. In the future we will be looking into a warehouse office combo. So there are some options out there. Like you can have virtual assistants and things. Again, it's very difficult to manage their time in terms of hourly rates because you don't know what they're doing for that amount of time. And it's also very hard to keep cap on their culture.

If you want to have a certain culture in your business, them working from home is very difficult, especially if you want them to do scheduling and billing. You need them to be in contact with your crew all the time and being part of the team and the culture and see them in the morning and see them in the evening when they finish the job and they need to add job notes and they have work change orders. Like you, I highly recommend you have a person on site when the crew is around in the morning and evenings for your office. I would highly recommend not doing a virtual assistant to do like a lot of the things like obviously phone calls are great, right? The phone calls, the estimate, the thing that command center can do is great, but in terms of the scheduling and project management side, you still need someone that is going to listen to them. Take Work change orders. That is going to be a part of the culture. Like, if that's you, that's fine. Right? But I would not try to have a virtual assistant that you've never met before that has no idea who you are and that you're just paying them by the hour and just hoping that they're honest. Right. They're not gonna usually stick around very long. And again, if they're really good, they're gonna go to get a really good job and so. And they're gonna get a lot more money than you can pay for them on a virtual assistant thing. So. And a lot of people ask, like, how is it possible with Command center for it to be so much cheaper than hiring people? It's because they're going from one phone call, then they're picking up the next one in the queue. They're getting all the estimates coming in. They finish one estimate, they go to the next one, then they go to the next one, then they go, then they're on the chatbot. It's just like they're constantly able to be doing things instead of like, even in a really busy lawn care business, you might have, say 50, 80 calls a day, but there's like 10 minute gaps in between them and then 20 minute gaps, and then during the slow times, maybe you get five calls in a day. Right. And so there's a lot of waste, usually in a regular office. Keegan McGinnis, this isn't a question, but a useful tip others might like to hear. Our local community college has an internship program where their students have to complete a six week unpaid internship in the spring, which aligns perfectly for our busy season when we need an office person the most. Obviously you have to prove you are a legitimate company and not just taking them as a laborer. It's an amazing avenue to explore if you're kind of on the fence whether you need an office person or not. So thank you, Keegan, I appreciate that. It's a six week unpaid internship during the spring, so it's great for like the busy season. That's what he's saying there. If you can get that with a college, something like that, that's fantastic. The only downside to that is you train them over the six weeks, they're really, really good, and then they leave. It usually takes a couple weeks or months to really get someone proficient at the CRM, how to answer calls, knowing about the landscaping industry, what to say on the phone, things like that. But yeah, great, great in terms of doing some of the Other tasks that maybe your office manager could take things off their plate? Orban asks, can you touch? How about how to figure your number out to run your business or get by performance? Oh, this is like pay for performance. Yeah. So pay for performance. P4P we call it. We're gonna be teaching that at Landscape Summit, which is in January. I'd love for you to come to that. It's gonna take at least an entire day. We'll make a customized plan for every business. I can't do it on the podcast. It would generate more questions than answers. Last question, Jose. My question is after spring, what would they do? Do you really have enough work for them to keep them working full time after spring?

Yes. This is again, this is why we have Command center is because you don't have to worry about this. With Command center, you pay for the usage during the spring and then if you don't use them much throughout the rest of the year, that's totally fine. You don't have to worry about it. However, if you don't have Command Center, I would say you need to be looking at something like Keegan talked about, having an, you know, where you're getting temp workers for just that period of time during the spring and then maybe have a part timer that works the rest of the year or on call or something. It's just very difficult to get part time and temporary workers that are super amazing because if they're super amazing, they're gonna go get a full time, really good, well paid position. So that's the only struggle I have with that. But yeah, if it's just a little bit of a lag, if you have really busy in the spring, that just kinda lags a little bit in the summer. I would be focusing them on calling customers, making connections, doing marketing, more hands on hands where they're writing letters or they're giving calls to people about certain promotions and using it more like a call center almost. That would be one way to keep them busy. But if it goes 20 times busier in the spring and then drops to nothing, you don't want to be making things up for them to do. You want to make sure it's profitable again, they're straight overhead so you don't want to have them if you don't need them. And so again, that's why I believe so much in Command Center. That's why I look forward so much to it and what it can do for our franchisees. So anyways, I know for some of you you're thinking that Most of it plug for the franchise. And maybe it is. I just believe in it so much. I think it's gonna be a huge amount for large businesses. Small business. Like if someone's doing a million in revenue right now, the cost to join the franchise is like one point what, 1.4% of their annual revenue to join the franchise. Cause it was a set monthly fee. And so I've made it as reasonable as possible. And I think for big businesses, command center is amazing. You have one office person and scale the business like incredibly, without much overhead, without having to get a bigger and bigger office as you grow. For smaller businesses, it allows them to scale, get through the times when they need an office person but can't really afford it and otherwise would have to spend 70 grand a year. Now they can just pay those couple months where they're really busy or they can just pay as needed as they grow. Instead of a big chunk for a big office space all of a sudden and a bunch of computers and things. It's just a game changer. It is. It is the reason our franchisees will succeed on top of all the other stuff we're doing. So I really look forward to it. I hope you join the franchise. Augustalauntreeservices.com franchise I'll see you there. Thanks so much.