Preparing to DOUBLE Our Lawn Care Business... Shop Layout Changes NEEDED!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike. Landscapebusinesscourse.com usually you don't see the back of our shop here because I'm on live and I'm far away from the WI FI network right now at the office. But I wanted to show you a couple things that we're doing to reorganize our shop and the layout of the kind of whole shop area. So in. In the past little while, we've decided that we are going to scale up this location and grow it significantly. And the managers here want to double the size in the next two years, which is pretty aggressive, but I think we can do it. And so in order to accomplish that, we don't really want to move from our existing location. So we've really got to work on the efficiencies and making sure that the flow here is a lot better. So we're kind of, you know, same things I talk about all the time. Change is good, but hard. You know, efficiencies, all those sort of things that we talk about, we've got to implement here on a consistent basis. But even more so now when we have the same amount of footprint that we're doing at one and a half million now, do you get three million? What's it gotta look like without having to change any cost? Right. And that's the thing with efficiencies. You can always throw more money at the situation. We can just go buy a bigger piece of property. But when you get to actually create efficiencies, you need to take what you got and produce more with it. And so whether that be employees being more efficient with employees and their time, that's the biggest one. Labor efficiencies. But then also things like shop and overhead and asset utilization. How many trucks do you have and can you use less and make more money with the ones that you have without having to buy more? So this is kind of an example of, you know, what we're still doing at Bellingham Shop. And I only. I only come here two or three times a week for meetings. So I'm not here a lot. I'm a little bit out of the loop on some stuff. But this is something that I'm kind of, you know, bouncing things off of some of the team members as well as the managers here just to make sure that especially this winter, we grow and scale and can be more efficient here. So a couple of things worth thinking about right now. So right now, when we moved here, when we first got here, we only had a couple crews starting out of here. Because we had the other shop in blaine and this was a satellite location. And so what happened is we really weren't planning for the scale over here as fast as we did. So what ended up happening is we have a green she, I think you can kind of see. I'll show you over there in a second. A green shed over there. We got a box there, box one, and we got box two and box three over there, which is fine. The problem is it's not efficient to have them all spread out like that. It's just ridiculous. So we're going to move box number one, where all of those blocks are right now. So what ended up happening is when we first came over here, this was gonna be a satellite location, primarily focused on retail. So primarily selling materials, you know, bulk materials deliveries, things like that. Well, we've decided to nix that part of the operation. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Focus on recurring services and just the services side, not the retail. So we have all these bins, as you can see behind me. But over here, these ones we really don't use a whole lot. The mulch like these, these wood chips and things. We don't. We would sell quite a bit with retail, but not much in terms of us using on our projects. We usually push people more towards bark mulch instead of, you know, dyed wood chips, for example. So we don't use them much. And it's kind of right in this area that gets really, really congested in the morning with trucks going into the back of the shop. And then out front is where all the trucks are parked. So this is a really busy road in the morning with all the trucks. So what we're going to do is we're going to take out all of these bins. We've got to get a bigger excavator, A mini excavator can't pick these bad boys up, so you got to chain them up, pick them up. And then we're going to use those as parking stops where all the employees park. And we're going to kind of delineate between us and the property line of where we go. So what's going to happen is all these blocks are going to be gone. We're going to take box number one and we're going to pop it right there. So all the boxes are in a row. And then those blocks we're going to utilize to put in front of all the employees parking and be able to make them more efficient by packing them in a little bit closer then that green shed, which I'LL show you just here in a second. We're gonna totally nix it. We're gonna take it out completely and trash the thing for scrap. Basically it's an aluminum building shed that we bought back in the day for pro, I think like 2,600 bucks, like five years ago. Well, then the thing is we moved from that location and had to bring it here. Well, you had to deconstruct. We had to deconstruct the whole building. And it's not meant to be torn down and rebuilt. So even though we did our very best and it stands like this is the, the green shed. We call the green shed or box four. Even though it gets constructed, you know, it's very difficult to put a metal building back together after taking it apart. So you can kind of see like the, the garage is a little bit or the door is kind of like catawampus. It's kind of messed up. But most of the equipment's gone today because everyone's out working. But this is where everything is housed in terms of hand tools. But what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of this thing completely. Get a fourth box over next to those other boxes. But then back behind here there's a lot of wasted space. So we got. This is the back of the bins and then we got like 20ft here and kind of get. This narrows down over there where we can use this space. So what we're going to do, we're going to make this a one way road that we park stuff because that's going to be gone. We're going to nix that completely, that green shed and walk over here because we're just running out of space. So we got to take advantage of the fact that like, hey, we're paying for this land, we might as well use it. So over here. Show you. This is where all of the trailers and the trucks are parked out front. Usually just all the enclosed trailers. Well, we're getting rid of enclosed trailers, going to trailer setups. And we're going to take out these parking stops and bring a road into here. The only thing we really need to do is extend out this front entrance because it kind of extends out larger. After we get around this corner, you can see there's plenty of space out there to park, to drive. Then what we'll do is we'll make it. You know, what's close to the blocks will be where you drive and then the trucks would park kind of at an angle all along there. We probably get, you know, eight to 10 trucks in there if we had to. But we just got to build out this front part. That's kind of the main thing. So let me zoom out a bit for you. There you go. So that's kind of the plan for this area, is extend out this corner, get out to the side where we can park more trucks back there, because we're going to need quite a few more trucks. We're thinking about 10 more trucks, probably about 15 more employees, team numbers here. And so we'll keep all of these bins here so that we can be. Still be more efficient on property cleanups. We'll get another enclosed trailer as well, or a dump trailer, probably. For projects and moving material, we don't do massive hardscaping projects. It's not our forte. But we do like to do material installs. So mulch installs, gravel installs that soil, stuff like that we can do really, really good at. We're also moving. So the skid steers used to be all here. Used to have two skid steers and a track loader. For now, we're moving them over into some empty bins over in that corner. But eventually the salt is going to be stored there. But remember how we got all these coming out? So in the future, we'll have some more space up here, and we'll probably end up moving them back here. But for now, we're just moving in the corner because everything gets very congested in the morning because you got all the staff members coming around here, parking, going to the employee parking, and you got skid steers coming in and out. They used to be parked here. They used to. You know, it's too much movement. Right. So we're just trying to make the flow better and make sure it can scale without us having to go buy more land. Right. The easy thing right now would be to go get more land. And we. We did consider. We did consider the land over there. Another acre of land, taking out the trees, grading it out, developing all of that land. But then this increases our, you know, our rent every month and kind of ties us more into this property. It probably cost about 20 grand to level it all out, get the trees gone, get. Get a good base of, you know, six inches of gravel, like, really get it graded off. That's kind of. It's actually really hilly back there. So that was the plan originally, but we're like, hey, why not spend 20? You know, instead of saying 20 grand, let's spend 5 grand and just rearrange what we got over here and I think we can make it work even if we double in size. So just want to kind of give you guys a quick update and you know the game of efficiencies and improvements, never it changes. Doesn't matter how good you get, it's always change. It's always trying to make it better and that's the game we play. So just want to kind of give you guys a quick update. I know for some of you, you're like, hey, like it seems so big, like such a massive shop and all of that. And maybe this is not where you want to be. Like this is not for everyone in terms of the size of the shop, maybe like, ah, that's nothing I can do. Way bigger. Kudos to you. Like you got to find a size that's right for you, where you feel comfortable as the owner, where you can find the right amount of staff and that you can feel comfortable in that level of growth and that level of size and make a profit business. For some people, they just want to take 70, 80 grand off the table each year and that's what they're happy with. Other people, they're motivated by the fact that they can hire lots of employees. Other people are motivated by having a big shop and things like that. So is whatever is going to keep, you know, aligns with your goals. That's what you want to do. Another thing we did is we did move the porta potty and the trash bin. They used to be right there. The problem with that is we couldn't park any vehicles, employee parking here because the garbage truck and the toilet company would have to come and service those. So by moving those over, we only got two more parking spots because as you can see, parking is kind of an issue. Especially when we get a full day and everyone's here, it gets kind of congested in terms of just getting everyone parked. So anyways, hopefully that was cool. I don't know if you like this. Let me know in the comments below. This kind of video is not going to necessarily help you grow your business, but I do hope it inspires you, makes you think a little bit differently. Maybe if you have a shop, some of the ways we do flow here. Maybe one day I'll do an aerial view of our shop and kind of show you. I'll throw the drone up and show you kind of how we have, you know, traffic flow and all that good stuff. But anyways, hope you guys have a great day. Take care. I'll see you next time.