Q&A - Is Lawn Care an "Essential Service"?

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. Today I'm going to be answering questions that came in from the Facebook group on Landscape Business course. And so we're going to jump right into it. If you haven't though, make sure you check out lawn careweb design.com a bunch of you have been jumping in. Now that some of you are a little slower, you have a little bit of time on your hands. Lawn carewebdesign.com check it out, see, see what we can do for you. Just get your website up and running. So let's jump ahead right into the questions. This is on the Facebook group from Landscape Business Course. I just posted a couple hours ago asking if there was any questions and just acknowledging the fact that this is gonna be a very different spring for the landscaping industry. So I haven't read any of these questions. I know there's quite a few, so we'll see how many we can get through and try to get to as many as we possibly can. For first off, Kevin Johnson asked, you got any more clarification on if we can work in Washington besides to prevent spoilage or damage? I noticed most companies shut down and a few don't care. Okay. So I can't give you legal advice right now. Honestly, no one knows how this is all gonna shake down in terms of all these gray areas. And I feel like about half the country right now is very clear that they are allowed to work in terms of landscaping services being spelled out in their states bill. And if they have a stay at home order, it's like spelled out. Washington state is one of the few and one of like multiple that are very, very gray areas. And some companies have been given.

Statements that say that routine maintenance is not part of essential services. Other companies have just been told nothing, even though they've been asked. So like it's all over the board. It's very gray area. I can't tell you whether you should or should not because I don't know your service mix. And furthermore, I don't know what you submitted to this. The governor, the state, the office of the governor in terms of the precautions that you're taking. And so you have to do what's right for your business and for your market. And for a lot of you, it's not even about whether or not you're considered essential. It's about the optics to the community of what you're doing. And so if you're going to stay in business and there's a gray area. And you have not gotten very direct clarification from your governor's office. You should absolutely. Making sure you take every precaution you possibly can in terms of disinfecting trucks and staggering your work time and your crews, having no team meetings, making sure that your keys are in the trucks for your guys, or at least they're very much disinfected, reducing all contact with your guys, having them having gloves, doing masks, doing whatever you possibly can, and then making sure you communicate that with your customer base to make sure that they are comfortable with you coming on their property and either A, acknowledge that you're allowed to come on their property, or B, give them the option like, hey, no, I'm just not comfortable with it. One of our customers, they have an immunodeficiency disorder or whatever, and they just weren't comfortable. And we're totally fine with that. And we're working with people in terms of billing, and we're trying to be as cooperative as possible. As far as right now, I know I'm taking some time on this question. For me right now, this is not about trying to make money at this time. It's about the fact that our unemployment department is so overrun right now that if our crews go on unemployment, they're not gonna see money for weeks. And I know that for a fact because our gym, I had to also close down, and they're on unemployment and they still haven't seen money. And so I'm trying to give them money, like, trying to do other things to keep them busy just so that they can provide. And for most people, that's not going to be a possibility when it comes to their landscaping business. If you have 20, 30 employees or even a few employees, if you're smaller, it's not going to be possible. And your guys are going to be very, very scared. And so you have to abide by the law. You have to make sure that you communicate with your customers. And the biggest blowback you're gonna get is from non customers. It's from the neighbor of your customer who is paranoid and is rightfully so. And they're scared, and people are on edge. And the people walking down the street, they're on edge. And so your crew needs to be educated in terms of what to say. They need to be knowing why you're doing what you're doing. And they need to know what. What to do in the event of someone that does blow up or is on a power trip or is just mad or has just been locked up in their house for weeks and is needing to vent at somebody and they take it out on your crew. And so they need to know what to say, they need to know where they stand. And they need to know like, do they walk away from the job if it's from a customer, do they just leave and they just get away if it's someone next door? How do they deal with those situations? Those are things you're gonna have to deal with. A lot of us are falling into these gray and we're not getting responses or getting responses that are still gray from the governor's office. And so I can't tell you whether you should or shouldn't simply to the fact of what services you're offering. You should be not doing landscape construction. Like let's just like you should not be doing walls and patios. It's very obvious that that is against the guidelines of the governor's office. And again, every state is different and everyone's mark is different in terms of how they're reacting to this. Some, some counties are very, very hyper vigilant and they have lots of cases. And this is gonna be a bigger issue. There's other states right now that do not have a stay at home order in place. People are not as worried and there's no cases being reported. And so massive distribution of what you should and should not do. I'm not really going to address it specifically because you have to do what's right for your business and for your local market. AB asks, hey Mike, I have a question for you. Number one, I hope you and your family are safe and healthy when someone does not want to do a spring cleanup, but they give you the mowing. How are you supposed to estimate the mowing when you know there is a pickup truck full of debris? Kevin responded exactly what I would say. AB charge for the initial MoW and then regular price after the initial mow. So yeah, if you have someone's property that is overgrown as we head later into spring, this is gonna start happening. If someone's grass is really tall, do not just give them a recurring mowing price. Give them an initial MO price and then have the recurring MO price after that initial MO price. Alright? So if the first MO is gonna take you 3 hours to get it under control, you cannot charge $30 like the $30 after the initial mow. That being said, if you're just getting started right now and you're not busy, I would reduce the amount of.

Hurdles that you make your customer go through. And a hurdle is a mo that's gonna cost $200 instead of 30 bucks. And so maybe you that hurdle in order to get that recurring customer. But again that's gonna depend on where you're at. So for an established company that is not necessarily trying to scale really quickly or just getting started or needing money to get to break even, they're going to be more in the position of charging what they need to charge for that first cut and making money on that one and not taking it as a loss leader, which is completely acceptable for a lot of businesses that are wanting to scale quickly or just getting started is to take that initial mo as a loss leader and get the customer on the schedule. Sam ranking asks do you offer mowing without fertilization treatments? For us the big profit comes from fertilizer and want to sell both as a requirement to use for service. So we do not sell it as a requirement. I always want to look at mowing as a gateway into our services and then having newsletters and promotions that upsell them into other packages. And so if you just said that hey, you cannot do service without mowing, that's one way to do it. If you're trying to reduce the amount of customers you have and trying to increase the value of each customer or how much they spend on average with you in a year. So it's not necessarily wrong or bad, it's just what type of business are you trying to create? Are you trying to have a business that has 500 mowing customers with 100 of them that do fertilization or are you trying to have a business that does 100 mowing customers but all hundred have fertilization? It's a decision you have to make. There's no right or wrong answer. It's what kind of a business do you want to make? I in general in terms of scaling a business in terms of speed, you're going to offer those lower hanging fruit, the mowing services and then have those premium services and those add on services that are more ancillary and higher profit as optional upsells that you give in newsletters, automations, things like that. Zach.

I'm sure this has been discussed in depth and if so, could someone show me where to find it? How to go about hiring first employee I'm currently a solo operator that is becoming overwhelmed with work and tasks need to start delegating and become and being able to get more accomplished. First thing I did is raise prices but in reality can only bring in so much revenue per day. Obviously we'd like to bring in more. Thanks. Listening to your podcast at work today. So this is the thing, I've talked a lot about this. Let me give some different from a different angle that I might not have said before in the past. So if you're solo working right now, this is what I would do. Could your business afford another employee? So if you looked at your profit right now, say it's $3,000 per month. Could you hire someone for $2,000 per month? If so, you should do it in terms of if you were going to scale the business. Okay. And what I would do for that first employee is they would be a tag along. They would be someone working with me in the truck that would allow me to make calls, do estimates, service, talk to the customer themselves while the lawn is being mowed, try to upsell them to other services, try to get them a mulch install while my employee is mowing the lawn. And so that would be my first step. That way I don't have to invest in more capital expenditure, that is a truck, more equipment, et cetera. I would just have to have the employee and the cost of labor. And so therefore, I know that if I'm profiting enough to at least cover their wages, I'm at least going to break even knowing that by having that employee, I'm therefore going to allow more revenue opportunities by me being able to focus on sales. Maybe I do door hangers around our existing customers while that employee is mowing the lawn. Those are all things I'd be thinking about. But in terms of looking and asking yourself, can I afford another an employee, I would ask, okay, number one, how much does it kind of cost for me to get this employee? Maybe it's $200 per day. You could just round it around like that. Okay, well, right now I do do $500 in revenue, $100 of that is cost. I do $400 in net profit. Okay, I can afford $200 to give to someone in labor, knowing that with that second person, I'm going to produce $750 in revenue per day and I'm going to be able to upsell people. So there's a lot of ways to look at it, but that's the number one thing I would do. If you are looking at your net profit and you're like, oh, I only net out $150 per day and it's gonna cost me $200 to get that other employee, I would raise your prices until you can make sure that you cover the cost of that employee and this is what most people fall into when they hire an employee and then back out of it is their prices were so low they could not account for having the extra cost of an employee, even if it's just the labor cost, let alone overhead of another truck and truck trailer and equipment and things like that. All right, Dylan Moey asks, what systems do you have in place to track customer acquisition costs and the performance of different modes of marketing? So this is important to be able to. There's several different ways to do it. Best way is by clicking ratios, and that is from like an email, for example, if you're doing an upsell, to be able to know what percentage of people, how many estimate requests you get from that, et cetera. Another way is to be asking every customer where they heard about your business or where did they come from. And if they mention a door hanger or they mention a Facebook ad and actually keeping track of that, it's very difficult in some regard because people will sometimes see your truck and call you. But they also saw a Facebook ad the other day and they got a door hanger the day before that and they heard about you at the barbershop. So sometimes you're actually getting the trailing the end marketing method, or usually it's things like seeing your truck or seeing your crew. And they'll mention that on the phone, when in reality, the advertisements that they've been seeing all along lead up to brand awareness and then conversion. So that one's a tough one. However, asking. And so at command center for our franchisees, we ask every customer, wait, did you hear about us? A lot of them don't know. A lot of them just say, oh, I've seen your truck's all over the place. And that's not a really good way to track your marketing because usually that's not the thing that initially caught their eye. It might have been the Facebook ad, the door hanger, the flyer, every door direct mail piece, all the things that. But they'll put the pinpoint. The thing they can remember is your trucks, is your employees, et cetera. And so we track though, if they mention things like Facebook ads or if they mention a door hanger or they mentioned the website or they mention that they found us on Google. Those are things you want to keep track of. And basically fanatically asking every customer that calls and then also making sure you track open ratios on your emails to your existing customer base, as well as how many estimates you get when you ask for the upsell.

I could go a long time on that question, by the way, but let's just leave it at that. Amity Morales asks, how do you deal with employees? Gossiping is like a daycare. I thought raising seven kids was hard. Now it's like, employees are terrible. Do you have a policy in place or handbook that speaks about their behavior? Hope you're all safe. So, Amity.

Yeah. So this is an employee issue. Basically, people gossiping. It comes down to your culture. I think it does start from the top. And so, again, I've said this before. Firing is the way that you create the cultural standards within your business. If there's someone that is a standout perpetrator of gossiping, I'd fire them. Just fire them. You will make such a statement to everyone else that that is not called for. And in the next team meeting, once that person is gone, and you tell everyone that they were fired, and you tell them it's because they're gossiping and they're not leading to the kind of cultural.

Team that you want to have, that's gonna be a massive statement, and people are gonna start paying attention. You can do incentives. You can do moments of appreciation. A great way to start trying to bend that culture. But until you fire someone based upon the behavior you don't want to see, that's when. Until then, it's just hot air. And so I look back at the times we fired people, and then when we have a team meeting and explain why and we get very clear, we start to see those actions not being done. If you start seeing people clocking out really late or clocking in before they even get to work or things like that, and you want to stop that behavior, you fire someone and you make an example of them. That's just like. Until you fire someone, the cultural standard is just gray. And people will sometimes get away with it. Sometimes they don't. Even if you have incentives, until you fire someone and take away their job and you make them an example, in my opinion, one man's opinion, there's no standard. And so that I think hiring and firing determines and creates the standards for your business. When you hire someone, you say, okay, we value this person and what they bring to the table enough to hire them, and then we fire people when they fall below this threshold of these certain standards. And so when you can make that clear to your employees, that's when a culture is actually built.

Jose Samaj asks, should I be passing out flyers if my state is stay at home order? I see a bunch of people talking about how you're gonna be Blasted over Facebook, your reputation will go down the drain. Someone posted about this lady got a flyer, blast them on review sites. There's a whole bunch of information on this. Yeah. So like, usually you're gonna want to mail these out. Right now we're seeing pretty bad.

ROI on every door direct mail, partly due to the fact that people are focused more on the news right now than what's happening in their mailbox. However, if you're going to be trying to do mailers and things like that, probably something to stay away from opening the door, knocking on people's door, definitely stay away from that. You're gonna get some kickback from that. And again, 90% of people are probably okay with it with the social distancing guidelines, but the other 10% that are going to say something online, that are going to spread bad things on the next door on Facebook or email their friends. You just don't want to go down that road. So just be safe for now. Try to get a few more of these in. Andy Bolton asks, how do you feel about walk behind mowers? Commercial like 48 to 52 decks as opposed to zero turns or stand ons. In our market we have zero turn sit downs because we need the bagging, we have to bag clippings. If I did not have to bag clippings, I would definitely be going with stand on mowers. In terms of walk behinds, I don't see the value of getting a really, really large deck for a walk behind.

In our market. But everyone's market is different. I'm just trying to think. Usually if I'm getting a larger mower, I'm going to go faster. I'd rather get a little bit smaller of a mower. That inflicts less damages. It is easier to drive and teach someone. It is generally less expensive to purchase. I'd rather get smaller but can go faster and usually a stand on go faster than a walk behind unless you go to sulky. Again though, it leads to other damages and things like that. So in our market we have to bag clippings. So if we're gonna get a zero turn, it's gonna be something that bags and has a bagging system on the back. Kenneth Elorie asks, what new PPE are you supplying to your guys and what new requirements or rules do you have while this virus quarantine is going on? We addressed some of this already. Some of the things that you can implement like.

Sanitization of trucks, no meetings with your team, et cetera, et cetera, et Cetera, we talked about that in terms of ppe. Those face masks are really cool. The ones that cover their whole face and they're like a dust mask. They. Those are cool. We tried to get some of those but they were like four to six weeks booked out because Amazon's so backed up with shipping and things. So anyways, those are cool, but lots of different things that you could be doing there. And lots of really good ideas have been coming up on the Facebook group. David Battersby, let's get a couple more of these in. But David Batterby asked, hey Mike, I just hired my first employee, had him about six months. He has now decided to self isolate, which has meant me working crazy hours seven days a week and I'm still falling behind. Do I hire someone else? And when he decides to come out of isolation, get rid of the new employee. But this could last months. And I'm not too sure if you're allowed to sack someone for self isolating. Any tips or advice would be great. Thanks again. This is like a big legal thing. Contact your local labor and industries, local labor department.

It's all going to depend. If this person has tested positive, obviously for coronavirus, you cannot like fire them for not coming to work. Their job is very much protected if they're symptomatic, if they are sick, things like that. There's certain protections here. That being said, they're an employee. If you're considered essential services or you do not have a stay at home order, they should be coming to work. And so I know some guys are relaxing some of the restrictions just because some people are more prone to be afraid of this time. And it's better if they stay home. It's better that they not be on equipment and driving trucks. Like they're so wound up and that's fine. But if you're in the case where you don't have a stay at home order or you're considered essential services and someone does not want to come to work and they don't have any symptoms and they don't have a doctor's note or whatever. There's definitely like you're still an employer, but contact your labor industries, contact your labor department, ask them for advice. But you can definitely, I would definitely try to work from a cultural perspective to get this person to come to work. If that does not work, I would definitely hire someone because this could be going on for months and this could stunt your growth big time. I'd go out and look for somebody else and then maybe this blows over in three months and you have a great employee that you've hired and this other guy wants to come back and you're in the perfect position because now there's an influx of new customers coming in after this is all blown over, and now you need a third person. So I wouldn't look at this as a negative. There's so many silver lining to everything that's going on right now. It's obviously a horrible situation. But in terms of from a business standpoint, I would say go find someone else. And when this person's comfortable enough, if they're a great employee and you want them to come back, there's a good chance you're gonna have a lot of influx of new work when that person is at the point of being comfortable to come back to work. Del Sol Lawn Care. One more Del Sol. What is the best way to keep the routine lawn part of a job and pass the ornamental grounds maintenance to other company? So this is basically saying, how do you keep the routine lawn part but then pass off like the other landscaping ornamental grounds maintenance to another company? You could do subcontracting, you could do where you just tell the customer, you refer them over. That's how we tradition is tell the customer, hey, we'll take care of your lawn. This is the person we would recommend for this other service that we are not the best at. And some people are worried about that because they think they'll lose the customer. A lot of times the customer respects you a lot more when you say, hey, this is not our core competency. We're not the best at ornamental, but we are the best at lawn care. We're gonna provide you lawn care and then give you a reference to someone else that we work with that can do the ornamental and is gonna be better at that than usual in that certain service kind of demographic. So hopefully it helps everyone. Again, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com, watch some of the other videos. It's a great time. If you are slower, if you have been shut down, some of your landscaping projects have been shut down, and you're just a little bit lower on work. Spend this time digging your numbers, digging into business, watch some of the training videos, and I know you'll come out better on the other side of all of this. Thank you so much. You can listen to Mike Andes on the Landscape Business sports podcast. I'll see you next time.