Q&A - Credit Cards, Selling Commercial Contracts, Off-Season Work and MORE!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast today. I'm just answering a bunch of questions that came into the texting platform. In case you're not part of the texting group, this is the number I recommend you get and text whenever I ask for questions. It's the fastest way to get a hold of me and I answer every single one of them eventually. So the number, make sure you write this down, put in your phone, whatever, 855-575-1267, and just type one word to that landscaping. Text the word landscaping to that number, and then you'll join the part of the group. And then whenever I ask for questions for episodes like this, you'll be able to ask your questions. It's the best way to get a hold of me, really. So again, that number is 855-575-126. And text the word landscaping to that number. So let's go ahead and jump into these questions. I haven't seen any of them. I just a few minutes ago, before hopping on set, sent out a text to everyone asking if they had questions. And so it looks like there's maybe 15 already. So let me just bounce through as many of these I can. Try to make this video concise. So I'll try to keep my answer short. That being said, I have a video coming out before beginning of next week that I really encourage you to watch. I'm gonna be doing more of a teaching lecture, and it's going to be explaining something that a lot of people get frustrated with our industry, and that is going from solo to two or three employees and then going four, five, six employees and really not seeing any increasing growth or in terms of their profitability. And I'm gonna explain why that is what to do about it, and I'm going to show it on a graph on a whiteboard and really explain net profit margins versus growth. And I think it's going to really help a lot of people because I see so many people will retreat after they get 1, 2, 3 employees. They retreat back to being solo. And I'm going to explain why that is and so you can understand why you need to accelerate through that time of your business. But today we're answering questions. Let's go ahead and jump into it. First question, again, I don't know the name of people when they ask these questions. I only see a number. So forgive me, I don't know your name. I don't have any context. So if you've said Something to me before, I unfortunately don't know it to you. I don't save these numbers in my contacts or anything like this. All right, so first question, what are the five best marketing books you've read? That's a tough one. I listen to a ton of books on Audible. I kind of go through this thing where I listen to a lot of podcasts, then I switch over and I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Then there's sometimes I don't listen to anything. Then there's sometimes I listen to more courses that I've bought online in stocks and real estate, stuff like that. So I'm kind of all over the place. I go through little like stints and I kind of will capture one person that I really like to learn from and then kind of dial in on them for several weeks or months or years and then I kind of move on. And so that's kind of, you know, five best marketing books that come straight to mind I would say is like the one page marketing plan is good, the state, what's it called? Scale, Scale up, Scaling up. That one's a good one. Encompasses some elements of marketing, but yeah, there's just so many. Next question. Mike, I'm about two and a half hours away from you and would like to come up and visit. Would this be possible even if there was a fee? Would. Thank you from a fellow Washingtonian. All right, so if you are anywhere in the world and you want to come visit me for a day, you can do that on Discovery Day for Augusta Lawn Care. Alright, so if you're interested in becoming a franchisee, that's the best way to be able to come up here for one day. June 20th. This is actually a perfect segue. I was going to mention this at the end. So June 20th is next Saturday, June 20th, 2020 and 9am is when we meet at the training facility and we'll do a whole day orientation. We'll go out for lunch together, we'll take you a tour of both of the local shops, the command center and so lots of fun. You're really going to see if Augusta Longcare and the franchise is a perfect match for you. But obviously you spend the whole day with me too. So lots of questions and things like that. I can answer one on one, but that's really the best way to come up and visit is going to be Discovery Day. The next one is June 20th and we'll have one of those every two months. All right, next one. Hi, Mike. Implementing lots of what we discussed when you Visited. Okay, I don't know who this is, but here we go. How do you tell guys no when they consistently ask for raises? Great team members, but not always worth what they think they are. Yeah, so P4P is the answer to this. We had the same issue. We had people where they'd be with us for a year, two years, three years, and they're asking for more money. And at the end of the day it's like, look, you're not producing more. Just because you've been here does not entirely do more money. And so when you implement P4P, which is pay for performance, which is not paying by hourly but by the amount of revenue they bring to the business when you pay that way they, they have the ability to go make more money if they are more skilled, if they are more efficient, if they are doing jobs under budgeted hours. And so if they're so good and they're so experienced, they should be able to perform at a level that gives them more performance dollars. And so P4P is what solved that for us. I haven't had to hand out any raises in the past year and I don't intend on ever.

Handing out more raises. The only way that we would ever raise wages and is to increase the percentage of revenue we give to the employees as a function of revenue. All right, next question. I'm just going to kind of plow through these. I know I could spend a lot of time on each one. What's the best commercial 21 inch push mower? I use Toro 22296.

Any commercial push mower that has a good dealer next to you and you like. I like too. I don't care if it's Toro, Exmark, Honda, you could just name every single brand in the book. I don't care if you have a good dealer and you like the mower and it works good for your demographic. Your square footage of lot 21 inches. If it's a commercial mower, I'm gonna use it as long as the dealer is good next to me. Alright, next question. This is a long one. All right, let's try to read this. So I know that you've discussed this many times, but unfortunately I feel that my case is a bit different. So I have eight mowing customers that are below what they should be, starting from $32 to $45. I got rid of one of them because he wasn't paying on time. So he managed to get rid of one. However, these remaining eight seem however, these remaining eight, some of which are on the same block as other customers, but so I feel like maybe I should keep them. But since I will be transforming my business to pay for performance, I need to really exercise proper estimating. How would you suggest me contacting homeowners and letting them know that I need to charge them more per mo? Alright, so if you're part of the landscape business, course there is a document on the templates and downloads that shows exactly the document we use to increase people's prices. Bottom line, be open, honest, transparent. Tell them why you need to charge the extra money that you want to be in business for the long term. You want to be sustainable, you don't want them to have to be looking for other providers down the road. And in order to pay your people and and stay up with inflation and extra cost of doing business, you've gotta raise prices and just be open and honest. Say, look, every time we mow your lawn we're losing money, it's just not sustainable. And so we need to raise the price to this. We totally understand if you would like to go somewhere else and find somebody else to do the work for you. But continuing on this will be the price. Let us know if you want us to stop service, otherwise we'll continue at that price. That's how I would address it. And in terms of switching to P4P, you're correct. If you have a lot of under bid jobs for mowing, you're going to need to correct those before you switch to P4P which will allow you to have the correct amount of budget hours on each job. Now if you get Some like maybe 10% of your customers are under bid, you can usually talk to your crew. Look, we're going to raise prices next year. Just stick with me like let's keep these customers where we will raise their prices next year. And we've had to do that recently because we acquired another business and if we would have raised all their prices immediately, we probably would have lost 30 to 40% of their customers. Whereas I know if we can keep them for a year at a lower price, we will be able to raise them next year and lose only like 2 to 5% of those customers. All right, next question, the off season dilemma. More specifically, as we scale, the one thing that I see holding us back beyond 5 mo crews is employee retention. We can't count on snow and is below freezing much of the time. So outside work is not really an option. We are looking into painting, flooring, etc. We but starting and stopping a part time off season Business adds challenges as well. More insight would be helpful. All right, so a few different things. You can let people go on unemployment, which usually if you have really good team members, they don't want to go on unemployment, really, they'd rather go get a job even if they're only making a little bit more than if they were on unemployment. And so traditionally, if you have really good people, they're going to go find another job during the winter. If you lay people off, the bottom line is what you want to do. If you want to be able to hire temporary workers, you need to be able to pay them more than any other work, any other company that when they come back in the springtime, they're going to come back to you because they can't make as much money on the off season as they would working for you. And they can't make as much money at another contract or another landscaping business than they would with you. So again, having a pay for performance system where they're ultra efficient allows you to pay them more, allows their base pay to be competitive, and then allows you to take away the ceiling of their performance in terms of them getting more compensation. And so if you can be paying people 19, 20, $21 per hour on average, then there's no way that when they go for three months, four months working a retail job for $12 an hour, and then they come back in the spring and they're looking at their options and, and the best competitor in your market is paying 16, $17 per hour for lawn care and landscapers, they're going to come back to you. And so at the end of the day, the best way to be able to do a temp kind of run is that you pay more. And you got to keep in mind by not trying to fill their winter with a bunch of work that's unprofitable or you're losing money on because you're not super efficient at it. Instead of doing that, realize that you're going to save money by letting them lay off. And you can then therefore raise their, their wages when they are working for you because you don't have that loss during the winter. So we usually scale back our crew to be able to make sure that our core crew, maybe half of our crew, is working throughout the winter consistently and profitably. And then when the other half comes back from working other jobs throughout the winter, that they want to come back due to the fact that we can pay more. And it's a culture that they really love. And I didn't even Talk much about the culture aspect, that's huge too. So pay more than your competition and be able to afford that by using a pay for performance model. And know that if you allow them to go off during the winter and you save that money instead of trying to just like fill their time with work and losing money, you should be able to afford a little bit more during the season. All right, next question. Hey Mike, I know you've probably talked about it in the past, but what are your opinions on contracts for commercial maintenance? Is it a good idea to lock them in yearly? Thank you, Diego with DC Lawn Care from California. Thanks Diego. Actually, you know what you guys, everyone that's on the texting platform, when you text me back, it'd be great. If you want your name to be said and where you're at, it's really cool because otherwise I don't know where you're coming from. And it gives me good context to know that you're in California too. So anyways, commercial maintenance in general, with commercial maintenance they're going to want a 12 month year round agreement. Whether or not you use signatures and have it actually like as a contract, that's up to you. But in terms of commercial maintenance, almost all the time is going to want a 12 month agreement where you annualize all of your mowing services, you annualize all your weeding services, you annualize all your, you know, you might have two or three trimming services but they want to pay, you know, 100 bucks a month, not 400 times $400 three times a year. So traditionally that's going to be the thing because especially if you're talking full service where you do all the weeding, you do all the bush trimming, you do all the mowing, you do snow plowing maybe obviously not in California, but any sort of commercial maintenance almost all the time they want 12 months because they want a consistent budget over the course of the year instead of having spikes in their expenses. All right, next question. Hey Mike, this is Hojuay with J House Lawn Care. I'm a solo operator. It's been getting hotter lately and with all the work I wanted to help hire a helper, but I'm working out four days out of the week for maintenance. Would it be smart to hire yet? Alright, so this is where I stand on this. This is what we teach with the franchisees is you're booking out mowing services. If you do projects, you're an advantage because with projects you can book out into the future and book your schedule out a Few weeks. Or for example, let's say for example, right now it's June 1st and you're like, okay, July 1st, I'm going to hire somebody. You can start booking projects starting July 1st. And when I say projects, I mean like weeding. You could do bush trimming, installing mulch, like little small simple stuff. I'm not talking like hardscaping, but you could do those and schedule those for July 1, knowing that that's when I'm going to hire someone. And then come June 15, start looking for someone, hire them, train them up, get them ready to roll, and then July 1st, it's game on. And so that's what's nice about small projects. And everyone here knows that I'm not a huge fan of projects. I'd rather recurring maintenance. However, when it comes to simple labor type projects where it's like weeding simple things, not like hardscaping and equipment and all the rest of it, when you're talking about simple labels, labor service services. Labor services for projects, I like those because you can book them out in the future and that's a great way to hire somebody. Now if you're just doing lawn care and you're just doing maintenance, you gotta think about it the way that hoseway is, hey, I'm four days out of the week doing maintenance. If I hired someone to do my job right now, they would probably take five days. Let's just be honest, they're not gonna be as efficient as you, especially if you're not doing P4P. But even if you're doing P4P, you as a solo owner are gonna be ultra efficient compared to your first employee. So I would say that, hey, you're ready to hire someone full time. That being said, now it's taken all of that off your plate. You need to make sure that you're going out and doing something too, which should be sales, marketing, and building the team. That's what you should be focused on. Especially number one, sales. You should be following up with estimates faster, you should be getting the estimates quicker. You should be actually spending some money on marketing. So I would really prefer that if you have just mowing services, you have some money set aside for marketing so that when you hire that person full time, you, you then go spend the money on marketing, which leads to an increase in leads, which then gives you the opportunity to actually focus on sales. That's what I would recommend. All right. Is it still worth it to market right now in June with a budget of $1,500? If so, what kind of marketing? Facebook ads, door hangers or SEO for a website. That's a tough one. $1,500 can go in a blink of an eye. Honestly, and I've realized this more and more, I could say a Facebook ad, you do a poor Facebook ad creative and, and spend $1,500 like that and not get anything for it. So in terms of $1,500, if you have no idea what's working right now, then I would recommend doing something cheap and spending time. Alright, so what I mean by that is if you have $1,500, in my opinion, it'd be best to go to a ton of door hangers, a ton of flyers and a ton of business cards and go house to house to house, go to property managers and just do a lot of boots on the ground work. Cause $1,500 is not gonna buy you a lot of ads. Like even if you had a really good, close a really good click through ratio, you're not gonna get a big business off $1,500. Let's just be honest now. If you take $1,500 and go get 10,000 door hangers and you knock on every single person's door and give them a flyer and a door hanger and a business card, there's a really good chance that you get a substantial more amount of customers. It's just gonna take more time. And based upon your question where your budget is $1,500, I would assume you have more time than money and therefore I would focus on what are the things you can do for cheap 5, 10 cents. Printing off a door hanger and then spending time to go out and knock on doors, talk to people, introduce yourself. Instead of thinking about where you can just deposit money and get leads out, which is gonna be the form of Facebook ads, Google Ads, all the rest of it. So that'd be my two cents. Next question. While there's a bunch coming in, I'll just try to get maybe five or six more. Excuse me. Hey Mike. Have any tips on what to do or say to project management companies for hoas? Thanks in advance. Yeah, so this is where. So for example, at Augusta Lawn Care we have what we call 30 and 30. It's an automation that over the course of 30 days they're instructed to do different tasks. And one of the things in the 30 and 30 automation, we call it dog tracks after Max, our mascot. And so we got dog tracks and hey, follow the tracks and you'll get to this result. So we have 30 customers in 30 days, where someone is just starting out, doesn't have a lot of money, can really put boots on the ground and get stuff done and get customers. Now part of that automation and that sequence is where you go and you introduce yourself with property managers. You make them cookies. Like the whole nine yards. Walking you through the introduction, the cookies, what you do afterwards to come pick them up, all that good stuff. And the whole objective here is creating a relationship with the property managers. If you create a good relationship with the property managers and you bend over backwards when they give you one estimate, they're going to keep coming to you. At the end of the day, the contractor who gets the job for a property management company is the one that makes the property manager do the least amount of work. So when you're at the job site and, and you're doing an apartment complex, if you send pictures of the siding that looks like it's kind of getting mildew on it, and you send that to property managers, like, hey, just FYI, or maybe the garbage is overflowing and you send them a picture to them for that. And you just take things off their plate, I promise you they're gonna pay. They're willing to pay more because traditionally commercial is gonna be much more price sensitive. But with a property manager involved, who's making the decision on who gets the contract, Your bottom line, like you are selling to the property manager, right? And so the bottom line is you need to make sure that you're doing everything in your power to take things off their plate and they don't have to deal with it. And you're going above and beyond. And they're willing to pay more because they're not picking up the bill on your invoice. That's the owner from the property manager standpoint. Remember, you got to remember the psychology of this is like the property manager wants to do the least amount of work to get their cut of the. The revenue from that apartment complex or hoa and so what you need to be doing is what can you do to make the property manager's job easier, their life easier, take things off their plate, and price becomes less consequential in their minds when you're doing that. All right, next question.

How long do you typically give a new employee for training with zero previous experience? I have a guy that's been with us for two months. Not been with us for two months, but not quite up to speed with certain things. I like him to run a solo route a couple days, but my trainer says he's not quite ready yet. Doesn't see the small stuff as experienced guys would see. Alright, so we've been really trying to focus on hiring people that have experience for this very reason, because it usually takes us about five to six weeks to get a newbie up and running where they can go solo if they're a good employee, if they have experience, that might be a week or two and sometimes less. And we've had it as low as like three or four days if they have experience, because they just gotta learn our system, our software and how we run things in terms of communication and then they're good to go. So we've been really focusing on that. But back in the day when we would hire newbies all the time. Yeah, a month and a half, two months is pretty common. If they're not picking up on stuff by then, that's when you have a really honest conversation like, hey, what can we do to support you more? What are we missing? Because there's, there's callbacks and yellow slips and things we're missing and customer complaints and that can't happen. So what can we do to support you more? And then just see what they say. Like, if they just are just super defensive and like, I'm doing a great job, that's someone you're gonna let go. If they're open to learning and willing to improve, then it's like, hey, we need you to be able to do these solo routes. In order to do those solo routes, we need you to be more.

Conscious of the little details. And so I'm gonna put you with so and so as a trainer, really just absorb everything you can from them. Soak everything up from them like a sponge. Ask them questions. We want to make sure we're setting you up for success. What can we do to support you? And that'd be a conversation I'd be having with that employee. And then sometimes people just don't work out, like two, three months. They still have not picked up some of the basics of edging and blowing off things. You're just going to let them go? All right, how long do you. Next question. How do you handle rain delays for weekly mowing? Do you mow what you can and skip the rest? Then on the next scheduled cut, do you cut them again even if it's not been seven days? All right, so as I'm recording this, it's a Friday, middle of June, and we're getting like a torrential downpour this week. It's the craziest thing ever in our market, we get so much rain, though, that we have to keep mowing. And so it just slows everyone down a little bit. It's harder for the crew. I get it. But we have to. We can't delay. Like, we can't cancel services because of the rain, and so we just kind of have to push through it. But in terms of if, like, you were in some markets where it is so torrential downpour, like, when I say torrential downpour for the Pacific Northwest, it means a consistent rain down south. I've been in places where, like, you physically can't stand outside. It would be impossible, and the mowers would die. Like, it's literally like a deluge. And in that scenario, then, yeah, I would just make sure that in your employment contracts that you're making sure people are aware that, hey, salaries are very likely opportunity or likely scenario to be working because of rain delays, and make sure it's very upfront and honest with them that, like, hey, there's a really good chance if it rains. We're working on Saturdays and to catch up.

All right, couple more here. Yeah. What do you do when it rains? Okay, I just think I just basically talked about this. How do you reschedule work if you have, let's say, the next two weeks completely full and no room to reschedule? Also along with rain, what do you do with the employees if it rains? Which employees still show up when it rains? Do only office staff show up and not only mowing crews? And do you tell your employees on the day it rains to not show up to work, or do they know if it rains to not show up? Generally, my question is, how do you feel with rain? Thanks, man, for everything you do, Kevin. So in terms of telling people about rain days, I would suggest that you be the one that makes the call. Don't let the employee make the call, because then if it's sprinkling, they might just, oh, I thought it was a rain day. And they just didn't want to work that day. So you make sure you're making the calls in terms of what rain days are which. And if you're booked out for two weeks and you literally can't push stuff off, sometimes you just gotta tell, sorry, guys, but we gotta just get it done. Or you go hire someone that's temp to get through the rainy season knowing that you're gonna have more work on hand. Next question. Do you believe credit cards on file should be a requirement for customers who want lawn care service in this day? And age. What would be the best way to pitch to a prospect that your company requires or prefers a card on file prior to any service? All right, so yeah, credit cards on file is a great thing. However, we don't require it. The reason for that is because we have a really good automation system for collections. So in the past year we've had to send nobody to collections and we've collected on all our invoices due to the fact that yes, a large part of our customers use credit card, but then the other half, they still do invoice. Not half, probably 30%, they still do invoices with checks. And the thing is, we have automations that are gonna follow up with them. If they are overdue, it's going to send them a form to try to get their credit card information. If they are overdue, it's gonna remind them several times, it's gonna warn them, it's then gonna kinda like it's gonna say something like, if you don't pay within the X amount of days, we're sending you collections and it's gonna affect your credit score. So like that sequence almost always gets a customer to pay. And so we haven't had that issue. So we like credit cards on file, but like we traditionally have a pretty good collection system. And so if you're not doing credit cards on file, you need to have a really good collection system. And if you do have credit cards on file, you need to make sure your pricing is incorporating the cost of those credit cards so that way you don't have to charge like weird fees. Okay, I got a whole bunch more coming in. I'm going to try to pound through these. Are you ready? Let's go. How do you systematically service lawn care maintenance accounts? Is it more efficient to take care of all the services at each visit? Mowing, edging, bed maintenance, fertilization, trimming bushes? Or is it more efficient to only mow and schedule separate visits for trimming and other services? This is assuming you are on a full route each day. Thanks, Dylan from Tacoma, Washington. We traditionally like to cross train all of our guys so they can do all those services. And it is more efficient if they have all the equipment and they're able to go and do a mowing job, but also all the weeding, all the bush trimming, all the fertilization, et cetera. That being said, if it's a bush trimming job, that's probably over four hours, they're not gonna be on a route. We're gonna put them as like a Project crew and they're gonna go do the bush trimming separately. But in terms of fertilization and weeding, those are definitely like small, quick services that can be done alongside a mowing route. And so basically I don't want someone trimming bushes and weeding for six hours. But. But have all the trailer and a mower and a truck and all that for a mowing crew, which could be out making money mowing instead of just sitting on a curb. So sometimes if it's a larger cleanup, larger trimming, we're definitely going to be putting those on. Just like a pickup truck can go there and do those things. We do not need an entire crew or entire setup for mowing. And so asset utilization is the big question there. But in terms of getting services done, if it's simple, we try to get them all done with the mowing services because otherwise you're just burning time and driving back and forth. But in that scenario, you do need to cross train your people and that is also a cost. So there's a balance there. All right. Hey Mike, really enjoy all your content. My question is, what are your thoughts on the benefit of being a part of organizations like bbb, bni, et cetera and if it's worth the membership fees. We are a commercial only company. All right, so commercial companies, I like those B and I and things because you're dealing with commercial clients. In terms of residential, I don't see the ROI as much based on what I've seen. We are not part of those programs. My, you know, my time I could spend creating a marketing plan and implementing it with the money for my membership and far outweigh the amount of leads that I would get from just networking and talking to people in person. I do feel that our marketing is. And advertising needs to be shifting more towards digital and less in person. Like with all this stuff with COVID especially, there's gonna be less people coming in, talking and shaking hands and all of that stuff. Like it's going to be digital, especially for the next year. And so especially if you're residential and if you're residential design build or residential maintenance, I don't feel like that is going to be the best use of your time or money. I do feel like you're going to use. You should use your time and money in terms of going out and doing door hangers or creating an advertising campaign with a budget and going implementing that. Val Thomas, again, any idea when we might get access to the P4P version one in the members site? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So landscapebusinesscourse.com course members are going to get access to version one of P4P software and that's going to be by the end of June. And the reason for that is because version two is almost done for the franchisees. As soon as that is done, I'll allow version one to be used by course members on landscapebusinesscourse.com Next question. I'm running a landscaping business on the side while I work a full time job. I should bring in about $15,000 this year with the lawn business. Is it a realistic idea for me to keep building until I can leave my full time job? Adam from Virginia. Yeah. So at $15,000 a year, you're not ready to switch from your job into landscaping. $15,000 a year is not much at all. Like, let's just be honest. And you probably are not going to be able to have a family or provide for yourself very well on that. And the thing is, I know that running a part time business, you can easily do 30 or 40,000 revenue. When you hit that point and you're filling your weekends, filling your evenings, then it's time to start thinking about going full time, in my opinion. And that again is if you are trying to be conservative with your cash, and I'm assuming that you don't have a bunch of money just to go out and, you know, spend two years building the business without taking any money from the business. If that's the case, then go for it. But like, based upon what you're telling me, with your job and 15,000 annual revenue, I would recommend building that to like 30,000 annual revenue where your weekends are maxed out, your evenings are maxed out, you're just trying to fit it all in. Then switch to full time and then it'll take off.

All right, next one. Hi, Mike. D from li, New York, Long Island. D from Long Island, New York. Wonder if you know how to get a homeowner's post office box information to send out introductory letters. We have quite a few neighborhoods in the Hamptons that we would like to introduce ourselves to and send a letter, but unfortunately they don't have mailboxes. Thanks, Mike, for all your knowledge. I just read zero turn. It was so informative and entertaining. All right, so a couple of different things. Yeah. Talk to your local post office about getting, you know, the post office names and addresses. But more importantly, a lot of times if you send something to an address and it's getting forwarded to a post office box, they will get the mail. So just talk, go in and talk to your local postmaster and see what their regulations are. Like, hey, just, just ask them straight up like, hey, I want to send mail to this address. If I send it to there, will it go to their PO box or do I need to do something different? And so just talk to them and see if they have that automatic kind of transfer already built in. All right. Hey, Mike. Oh, that's a big question. All right, this will probably be the last question. We'll call it a day. Hey, Mike. Two part question. But first, thanks for everything you've done for the landscape community. Your videos have really motivated and guided me with coronavirus shutting down school and the golf season. It allowed me to work 50 plus hours a week through the end of my junior year in high school. I am projecting hitting six figures this year with about 80% from landscape installs ranging from 2,000 to $15,000 and the other 20% recurring revenue. My parents are dead set on me having to go to college. Ooh, this is gonna be fun. I will be able to pay my way through and am a capable student. But I want to make sure that if I go to college, it doesn't slow down business growth. Any insight into college with your experience and what you've seen. All. Also, any insights or regrets concerning your unusual high school and college experience? I feel stuck between the teenage world and the adult world. Thanks, Garrett from Caldwell, Idaho. That's cool. Caldwell, Idaho. Actually, one of our employees is planning on starting a franchise in Boise, Idaho next year anyways. Interesting. All right, so you're making good money working part time. Oh no, you're working 50 hours a week. Got it. And you're gonna hit six figures. So you're gonna. 100 grand this year. 80k, that's gonna be landscape installs. 20,000, that's gonna be recurring revenue. And your parents want you to college. It's very difficult to be a good college student and run a full time business with employees outside of school. Like you could probably keep doing what you're doing with a helper on the weekends and evenings if you're gonna go to school, if you're not gonna go to school, then you can build the business again.

If your parents are providing for you and they're paying for your food and your housing and your car and all the rest of it, you're gonna have to listen to them and you're gonna have to go to college. Now if you're willing to go out and do your own thing and tell them, hey, Give me two or three years building this business, I can always go back to college, but I wanna try building this thing. Then you're gonna need to provide for yourself because as soon as they're paying your way for everything and they kind of have a lot of control over what you do with your schooling. And so that's just my opinion on that. I would recommend that either A, you try to keep doing it on the weekends and the evenings around your school schedule if you can. If, like, you're staying local with your schooling and then that way you just have a helper, you're going to reduce your profit margin a bit, but you still be able to keep your existing clientele. You're not going to really be able to grow the business much. It's very difficult. I've seen some people do it. It's very difficult to be a really good student where you are studying for exams for an entire week without anything else, and then still running a business that's growing and has employees and they're working while you're in class, like, that's gonna be very difficult. And so I would focus on one or the other and know that if you're gonna go to school, do it on the weekends, do it in the evenings with a helper, keep the clientele. And then when you come out of school, you can always grow the business. Or if you, if you're dead set on like, I do not want to go to college, I want to go learn business and do business, then you're going to need to realize that if your parents want you to go to school, they have all the control in the world until you pony up and go from teenage to adult world and go move out and take care of all your own bills and all the rest of it. And I don't know your exact situation. I'm just using what I got from this question. And so from my perspective, I did not learn a whole lot in college, especially my undergraduate. I learned a lot about how to discipline myself and study for hours on end and memorize things. But I don't think it helped me a whole lot in what I do now in my undergraduate, my postgraduate, like my mba, it helped a little bit, but eventually it was just like, it's not worth it. And so the amount of money I was paying out of pocket for my mba, combined with the fact that it was taking up every single evening chunk of my evenings was just brutal. And. And so do I think it was worth it? I don't know. You just don't know, because like maybe one thing I learned in that class or one person I met becomes a massive thing for me one day or is like maybe I don't even know that that's where I learned it and I've implemented it somehow. So I can't really say like it was worth it or not. But I would definitely say that, like, I would have made more money if I wasn't in school for those two years of my MBA and definitely the six years of my post collegiate education, right? Like, if I would have started Augusta Lawn Care at the age of 13 instead of going to college, I probably would be, you know, have grown it faster. But I don't know, like in hindsight, like, I don't think, I don't really think about my past a whole lot. I don't like regret stuff like that. I don't wish I would have like, it happened and it happened for a reason. It made me who I am today and I work with what I got now and I look to the future so I don't look back, I don't regret. And at the end of the day, I honestly, for someone like yourself, Garrett, either way, going to school or starting your business, you're going to be successful. If you can run the business the way you have and pivot the way you have from school into business, you're going to be able to do that when you come out of college. So best of luck to you and thank you everyone for that. Submitted questions Let me see here. There's more coming in.

But we'll get to some of these later. So thank you so much for submitting questions. Again, if you want to join the texting group 855-575-1267, text the word landscaping to that number and then you can join the group. And whenever I ask for questions, you can submit those. And also if you're interested in joining next Saturday, literally eight days from the day so June 20th, 9am we start discovery Day. You can spend the entire day with me, get a tour of the Augusta facilities from the training center, the command center, both of our local shops and really get to see see, you know, if Augusta Lawn Care in the franchise is the right thing for you. I would love to see you there. Definitely. Also check out lawn careweb design.com I know that they have got several people set up and in the next couple weeks they're going to be putting up the templates of a few of the people that have become we've already built websites for, but I definitely think that would help a lot. If you're not going to become a franchisee, it's at least going to help you with your website. So check that out. Lawn care, web design. What else do we got going on? Oh, yeah, that last thing. In a few days, keep your eyes open for a lecture that I'm gonna be doing on a whiteboard. So if you see a thumbnail with a whiteboard, please watch that video. Don't watch it while you're driving. Like, sit down and watch it. Take some notes. I think it's gonna be really, really good for a lot of people that are just starting out as well as people that are in that 300 to 500,000 in annual revenue range, which is a weird range. And then people that have gotten the other side of it and started to look back and realize what they kind of came through and why. So gonna be really, really cool. I look forward to sharing that with all of you and have a great weekend. It's Friday as I record this, but I just really appreciate everyone's support, whether it be, you know, lawn careweb design or lawnhairwebdesign.com, landscape business course. Just so many people supporting what we're doing here with the content. And I really look forward to next month, July, when I'm actually gonna have someone full time producing content for me and following with a camera and getting some cool stuff outside of the studio. But really looking forward to that. But thank you all so much for your support of the channel and everything that we're doing here. Until next time, everyone. We'll see you and be great. Nothing else pays.