Q&A - Which Service Is Most Profitable In Lawn Care?

Hey everyone, it's Mike. You're listening to Landscape Business Course. Today. I am out at a park next to the water here in Whatcom County. This is actually called Larrabee State park. And so I wanted to shoot this a little bit differently outside the studio today and just answer some of your questions. So on my way here about 30 minutes ago, I just posted if anyone had any questions. So I'm just taking these questions today from Landscape Business Course the Group. So if you haven't already, make sure you join the group on Facebook. I'm going to throw in some shade so I'm not squinting at you the whole time. And we'll start going through some of these questions and see how many of them we can get through. So first off, Hunter Ziegler asks how to hire an estimator, how to ensure he or she can give good estimates without being too cheap or way off price in general. So the first thing I would say is you want to make it to where if you're having an estimate or hiring an estimator, that you've made it as simple as possible for them. So taking out a lot of the variables of labor, materials and really standardizing it as much as possible. So it takes out some of the guesswork which thereby can become errors in the estimating process. So that would be standardizing what you charge for materials in terms of block count. So instead of them having to determine the type of block and then, you know, finding the price from your supplier, they just need to measure out how many linear feet of of that wall they need to install, multiply it by how many courses high it is and know how many blocks is. And instead of having to then extrapolate that number by determining it's like $6.48 per block, all they should have to know is the number of blocks. All they should have to know is the number of yards of material. All they should have to know is the number of fence posts for that split roll fence. They should not have to know pricing. And so if you it should really be standardized as much as possible and simplified for them. Another thing I really do believe for an estimator is especially if they're starting to do project based work in terms of landscaping, patios, walls, et cetera, it really does help if they actually have experience out in the field. And so if you can make it where you have really good systems and procedures and it's really simple the way that you do your estimating in terms of hours plus materials, you. And when it comes to materials, all they have to do is count the number of yards or blocks or whatever they're needing. If you can simplify it enough for someone that has experience out in the field, it's really not going to be that difficult to do estimates. Because if someone worked out in the field under your business model for a year, two years, they get to know very quickly how long things should take and they get to know what type of projects take so long. And so I'd really just encourage you, if you're looking for an estimator, have them work for you as a project manager for at least a year or two before you actually step them into the role of estimator. Because after a year or two, a good field worker even, even if they're not even a project manager, a good field worker will get to know pretty quickly. They'll be able to look at a job site and be like, oh, that should take five hours or that should take another day. And so I'd really try to cultivate someone from the field and that just someone that has tendencies to be personable and communicating with a customer, that person that's outgoing and an extrovert, they're going to be probably a good salesperson. That's the estimator role that you could probably fill. And in order for them to be as close as possible, I'd really just make sure you're always giving them their budgeted hours so they know when they're above or below. So for example, if I do an estimate and I put 60 hours on there as budgeted time, the crew knows that. And so that way the project manager knows if they're above time or below time. And if I ever want to convert them into being an estimator, they've seen hundreds of estimates being done and what the estimated budgeted time was for that job and then where they came up short or where they went overtime on that budgeted hours. So making it very clear budget hours to your crew is one way to really help with that and making sure they are always starting to gauge what their budget hours versus actual hours is. Kevin Magnuson asked question jump from part time work, 15 to 20 hours a week with a full time job to all in not a 20 year old with no mortgage or family and medical relying on us first year and me and my partner already billed out $30,000. Best advice.

So I'm just looking.

So it looks like you don't have a mortgage and you don't have medical, family and things relying on you by the sounds of this question. And so it looks like you're going from like part time job to full time job. So that's what I did my first year is I was working part time at a gym as a trainer and and then I was starting Augusta Lawn Care. And once I hit about that first year, I did $28,000 in revenue doing it part time. And it was the second year that I knew that if I put all my energy into it, I could easily get six figures. And so that second year when I went full time is when we did $190,000 in revenue. And so that's really your first big jump in your business is when you go from part time to full time just because you can allocate so much more time and just mental energy to focusing on the business instead of your part time job and, and scheduling with that and everything. And so I'd really recommend, if you're looking for a part time job and you're about to start your business, look for a part time job that it's maybe like a teller or a checkout person where there's gonna be like spaces of time, you could actually do something else. And in that time you could be balancing your checkbook, you could be sending emails to a customer. It's probably gonna be a minimum wage type of job, but it at least will be something that you can still stay in contact with your business. And that's one way to transition away from your know, full time employee to being, you know, running your business full time. But I know it's like to be in that position and I would say in terms of advice, I would just scale back your expenses as much as possible because you'll be able to jump from part time employee to full time business owner sooner as the sooner you can bring your expenses down. So if you can bring your expenses down to a thousand bucks a month, you can make that jump to being a full time business owner pretty quickly. Especially in lawn care, landscaping, $1,000 a month isn't super unachievable. And if you're solo operator. And so I'd really be looking at what your minimum expenses can be. And there from that basing when you make the jump to full time.

Next question comes from Will Vanderhoven. How do your systems work regarding employee performance, workplace culture. So in terms of employee performance, we keep track of what we call yellow slips, which is basically complaints or callbacks as well as anything that they damage of the companies or on the properties of the clients. So we call those damage cases. So we keep track of those things in their employee profile and they know we do. And then on an annual basis we have an annual review where they're going to see their employee profile. We also keep track of if they're late or unexcused absence, or they.

Ask to be off 30 minutes before they're supposed to be at work. Those things are all kept track in their employee record. And then on an annual basis they. That's looked at. And in that same annual review is also when we talk about compensation. So if they're, if their employee profile doesn't look good because they had a bunch of yellow slips, they had callbacks, they had damage cases, they broke a bunch of stuff and dented trucks and things like that, we keep track of those damage cases, what those dollar amounts were. So you know, if they broke something on the truck and it costed 100, you know, say $700, $800 to fix, then that's gonna be in their employee profile. And if at the end of the year they had three, three, $4,000 worth of damages and five or six callbacks, and they had two or three, you know, they were late by a couple minutes a few times, that's going to be something to really look at when it starts, when they start asking for a raise or more compensation. Like, look, these things need to be improved and these are key performance indicators that will lead to a raise or becoming a project manager or somehow getting higher in the organization. So in terms of tracking those things and creating systems around that, that's what I'd be looking to do. And in terms of more of a less tactical, less numeric way of keeping track of it in terms of culture, I'd be looking at how many times you can give away compliments. So it's very easy to. When we're dealing with lower wage employees or labor type employees that are new and don't have a lot of experience, it's very easy to get pretty negative because they're breaking things, they don't know how to do certain things. You're always trying to train them. It can be pretty frustrating. But instead of trying to always nitpick everyone's issues, try if at all possible, to focus on the people that are doing the things that are right and just highlighting those in front of everyone publicly. And so that it becomes the way that people know that's the acceptable way to act, the acceptable way to do certain things. And so instead of trying to flush out the bad, try to highlight the good if at all possible. And Trying to accept and really make those people feel better. And by emphasizing those behaviors, they're going to want to do those more if you're the type of boss they want to actually please and impress. And I really do feel like if you've lost that, that's something that's very important to culture. If your employees don't want to impress you, if they don't want to make you look good and they don't want to look good in front of you, there's a certain portion of respect or advantage that you've sort of lost. And so if you have that, giving out compliments is a great way to compliment the behavior that's positive and then reinforce those individuals, but also make it clear that not doing those things is not acceptable. And so there's been times when I want to lay into someone or I want to get mad at people for doing a certain thing, but what I'll try to do is focus on the one person that didn't do it or did something positive in the opposite direction. And so, for example, several months ago, yellow slips, when people get complaints, they have to go back to the client's house. And what we found is that some people would be really negative and trying to give excuses. And that kept happening several times. And I was getting frustrated that people would just give excuses so quickly. When a customer is complaining, the customer is always right in their perception. And whether or not the perception is wrong is in the situation. But in terms of giving excuses when you make a mistake, I feel is like, was like a downfall or a shortcoming of our. Of our. Several of our employees. But. And I wanted to lay into that. But instead what I did is I focused on the one individual that had a yellow slip and owned it, even though someone else was on the property. And even else, he could have probably blamed someone else that they were doing the work or something like that, or the people that were at the project beforehand. But he just owned it, took ownership, went back to the client, spoke with them, fixed the issue. And so instead of getting railing on everyone that didn't do that, I tried to highlight that behavior and make it clear that making excuses was not acceptable. And I didn't have to go and nitpick the individuals that had not, you know, fell in accordance with that wish. So Ezra asked a question. Kind of running low on my battery for my microphone. So we'll see how far we can go here. Sorry if I don't get to everyone's question, but Ezra payment asks, break down the net profit Margins in each area like mowing and trimming versus irrigation projects. As to what you've seen, the average is, are kind of across the board. This is a good question. This is a very hard question because if someone is very focused on say mowing and that's their business model, they'll usually have a much, much better profit margin because that's what they're focused on. What I'm going to talk about like right now I think is kind of assuming that you're doing like a million dollars in revenue and you're kind of doing mowing, you're doing projects, you're doing irrigation, you're doing a bunch of different things. So I'll give you some of the.

The net margins that I've seen to pretty typical industry. So a good business that is doing mowing, 5 to 10% net margin is what I've seen. It's a pretty low margin business. And that's why people either lose money on it or barely make a little bit. It's one of those things that's all about efficiency. It's all about the pennies and the nickels and the dimes that you make on each job. And so, you know, for a business that has five, you know, is doing a million plus in revenue, 5 to 10% in net profit margin for mowing is pretty typical. And if they're focused just on mowing, that can be 10 to 20%. But in general, 5 to 10% is what I see for mowing. 10 to 10 to 20% is what I see for project based work. And then 20 to 25% is usually what I see for property cleanups. And then 25 to 35% is what I see for fertilizations, spraying and irrigation. So those are the highest profit margin businesses, our sectors and services. But most of the time you need someone's mowing, the low profit stuff to get the property clearance, to get the projects, to get the spraying and to get the fertilization. And so it's not to say that you shouldn't do mowing, you should just focus on spraying and fertilization, although some people have done that and have a great business model around that. But it is to say that there's, you want to focus on add on services and cleanups and the fertilizations. And if you have a solid mowing company. And so that being said, I've seen companies that have fertilization companies and have 50 plus margins and it's because that's what they focus on. They just do that I've seen companies that do mowing and make 20, 25% on just mowing. But all their crews are very efficient on it. They're, they're being paid based upon performance and they know their routes. And it's all down to a very specific system that they have for mowing alone with. When you start adding in irrigation and property cleanups and projects and you start cross training, you have multiple layers of management, which adds overhead, which thereby drives your net profit margin down. That's when you start to see those lower numbers of net profit margin. So that being said, the easiest work to get is mowing. So I look at that as your gateway drug. Get them in the door and then try to upsell them to property cleanups, fertilizations and those higher margin services. But those are just the averages that I've seen. Like I said, there's anomalies both directions. Some people will actually lose money on mowing or lose money on the property cleanup. In order to get people on other things, there's a loss leader. Jason Askins asks, what does the structure of your company look like at certain milestones? 25k, 500k. Got it. So 25 to a million. Okay, so you asked for four different milestones. At 250k, I see that being a point where you need to have someone in the office. And so that's usually when you have yourself and a couple employees. And for you to get the next level and have a second or third crew having a part start getting part time office work is really important, I feel, so you can focus on managing the projects and then estimates and sales. And so if you look back at the last video I made about office staff, that's something that you might want to watch at the $250,000 marker. At $500,000, that's when you really need to start thinking about getting out of the field. And not quite yet, not quite at that stage yet. But at 500,000, that's when you start thinking about like a project manager or someone that is going to or basically where you're gonna have a full time office person and then you're gonna have people in the field. But you will not be pushing a lawnmower, you will not be trimming a tree, you will not be pulling weeds. You might still manage those jobs, you might still do estimates and the project management, everything like that. But at 500,000, you're probably starting to think about how can I focus more on sales and getting more estimates and focusing less on actually performing the work at 750,000. That's when you start getting a second person involved on the management side of things and a million dollars in revenue. That's when you start really need to create systems and breaking up divisions of your business. And so if you have a mowing department or you have like an irrigation department and so you start sectoring things out a little bit differently. Traditionally those are the milestones that I see by a million in revenue. You definitely have to have systems in place. You definitely need to be focusing on just sales and estimate and hiring and training. And you should definitely not be focusing on project management or quality control. Like you either got to create systems to make your people accountable by having like a yellow slip system or pay by performance, some system that runs the quality control aspect of things so that you're not always running out doing, you know, complaints of customers and you're not always trying to, you know, work on projects when there's work work, change orders and things like that on landscaping projects. So I'd really be trying to focus on. If you're a million plus, the number one thing you should be focused on is sales. The second thing you should be focused on is hiring. The third thing you should be focusing on is training those people that you hire. And when I say sales, I'm talking about marketing, your online presence, social media, all that stuff. So those are the things I'd be focused on if you're at a million dollars in revenue. Everything else you should be trying to hire out.

Lewis Grounds Maintenance I got a lot more questions rolling in now, so I'm not going to be able to get to them all, I don't think, but I'll just try to get a few more in before my battery dies. Lewis Ground Maintenance asks, I know you've talked about trucks type of application in previous episodes, just looking for details on when to hop from one to two truck to two to three trucks, etc. So this is a similar question to last in terms of milestones, when to make jumps, certain jumps. And so I've always said that you go from solo and then once you have your full time schedule and you're like working like crazy, you hire someone else on. That guy becomes your sidekick so that you, he can be mowing the lawn while you're just taking the phone call. And then if you're not on the phone, you can be out doing the weed whipper and then blowing and things like that. So it's just kind of like a sidekick. That next truck is actually a big jump in your business, because now you have someone operating without your direct supervision, or you're doing estimates and then you have a crew doing the work. And so that second truck is a big jump. I still remember when I bought my second truck. And that's really when the business started to grow and evolve. Because now you have to have systems to run the employees when they're not under your direct supervision. And so going from one to two trucks is usually when you're getting your third employee, you have to have that second truck because your first employee can be your sidekick, the second employee, you can throw them in the first truck. And then you take your personal vehicle, for example, to do estimates. But when you get three employees, you have to have at least two trucks. And so that's what I traditionally see when you start going to three trucks. Once you have about four trucks, that's usually when you're starting to get like, you need a storage facility, you can't park these at your house anymore. You usually. That's also four trucks is when I'm seeing an office person being involved is right around that four truck area. And at four trucks, usually you're getting like a tracking software to make sure you know where those trucks are at at all times. Because not only do you not have direct supervision, you might not see them all day long. And so keeping tabs on their truck and where they're at is important. So in terms of when to make those jumps, I traditionally see those at like the $200,000 marker people are into their second truck. What I get worried about is when people have like 4 and 5 trucks and they're at 2 and $300,000. In re, if you do the numbers on just the maintenance, insurance and things on those trucks, that's a massive chunk of your revenue. So I would focus less on how many trucks you have at the beginning and how many and focus more on your billable hours, how many billable hours you're billing out. And those numbers I have a little more data on in terms of like how many billable hours you need to have before you get your next truck. And that really corresponds with how many people are on your cruise. That's a really loaded question. There's a lot you go into depending on what type of services you're doing. If you're doing landscaping, you have more people on a per crew or per truck versus like mowing, for example, or even like weed control. So, Rick Charles, please talk on how. Please talk about how on earth you self funded your own company's growth. So this is something we talked about at the conference and I talk about quite often. I poured a lot of the money back into the business. This is not something that everyone can do. I don't have family, I don't have a lot of responsibility. I didn't have any student loan debt when I started. I lived on less than $600 a month at the time when I first started. So I knew that I could pour basically everything back into the business. So I worked my part time job as a trainer and that paid for all my personal expenses. So every penny that was made by the business was able to be poured back into the company that was getting the first employee, buying that second truck, getting the trailers, getting everything set up, getting the logos. Like all of that was funded by the business. And so in terms of how did I self fund it? It's really all like growth takes cash. And the cash that you get is directly corresponding to how little you're willing to live on. And so if you're gonna, if you wanna take $100,000 out of the business, that's fine. It's just gonna come at the cost of having cash on hand to fuel the growth of your business. And so it's really just a personal decision as to which one's more important to you. There's no right or wrong answer for me. I don't wanna have a.

And a really nice car and things. So like I would rather focus on growing the business. And since I don't have people that I'm responsible for in terms of children and things like that, I don't have to worry about that being a cash, you know, having to take cash out of the business for that either. So I can still live right now on less than $900 a month personally. And so it allows me to put a lot of money back into the businesses. And then that being said, like most of my expenses now are written off because my vehicle is a company vehicle, you know, utilities, things like that, like where I'm living at right now. So whether it be the gym or you know, stuff like this, for example, I can write off this camera and the GoPro and the drone and things and then go use it for Augusta. I can use it for the gym, but I'll write it off under what I do online. And so it's, it's all my, almost all my expenses. I can somehow in some way write them off. So that is self funding. Your business really comes down to how little you're willing to live on and how Little you have to take out of the business. The more you can do that, the more you can grow your business because you have extra cash on hand. But if you have a family, obviously that takes precedence and you're going to take money out and that's just going to slow the business's growth potential over time. Thomas Salazar. Whoa. Long question. There's three questions here. It looks like all mowing service related. Okay, so it looks like there's three questions. Let's try to break these down and I'll get through these. Then we'll call it quits. Is mowing too important of a service in your business model, or would you consider removing this service completely in the future? So a lot of people, I see a lot of people doing this. I was just talking with someone last week about them wanting to get out of mowing and focusing just on landscaping. And there's several reasons why people do that in our industry. Number one, they get really tired of trying to work a work a service that is a 5%, 10% margin business. It's very difficult. It's going to be, there's going to be months where you lose money on it. In the spring when things are growing fast, when it's wet grass, things like that, bad weather happens and so on that low of a profit margin over the course of a year, there's going to be individual weeks and months where you actually lose money on that service. So that's the first reason is cash flow. People mowing is difficult. Second reason is complaints are a lot more frequent because you'll do 100, 200 properties, 300 properties in a week. And the chance of getting a couple complaints on that is a lot more, a lot higher than if you do two or three landscaping jobs and you're able to manage them all. And so it requires less responsibility for employees when you're always there. And you can do that when you have just a couple landscaping jobs happening. Whereas for mowing, they're all doing their own thing. They have all trucks, trailers, equipment, more damage cases happen, more complaints, things like that. And then the last reason is that this is the reason I hate the most, and that is people get into landscaping work more because they see the fancy equipment, they see the big projects that look really nice, they see the Instagram post of like before and after pictures and all this, see the drone shots and all this, and they fail to realize that, like, that doesn't pay the bills. The great pictures on Instagram do not pay the bills. It doesn't bring any more Revenue. And I find that people get into landscaping before the glitz and the glamour and, and they don't get into it because it's profitable. It's solid margins. They're dependable margins. The reason I love mowing is because you can make it really systems orientated. You can make it really like using a pay by performance model.

You get really zeroed in your budgeted hours. It's very easy to track which jobs are above budgeted hours, which ones are below, which ones you're making money on, which ones you're not if you have a good software system. And so you can really make a great business that's a predictable. I'd much rather have a predictable business that generates 10% profit margin than a landscaping project based company that one month makes 25% margin, the next month makes 2% margin, the next month makes 40% margin, the next month makes negative 5% margin. I'd much rather have a dependable small cash flow than a cash flow that's up and down, in and out. And so with project based work, I see a lot of people running issues with cash flow because they have not figured out how to do it on a smaller scale. Like if you cannot figure out cash flow with mowing, you're not going to figure out with landscaping. It just compounds the problems. And a lot of people get into landscaping thinking it's going to be a lot easier than mowing, when in fact it just compounds the issues if they continue to scale the business. So a lot of times anyways, the landscaping, the cleanups and all that sort of thing is a byproduct of having a good solid base of mowing customers. So I wouldn't, I would if I was to redo my business model. If people have asked me this before, and this is what we're pushing for the franchise for, for Augusta is if I was to do Augusta again, what would I do differently? And that is very simple. We'd stick to one or two services and that's mowing and property cleanups. And we would not have gotten into excavation landscaping like grading and big equipment and things like that. Chippers and tree work. Like we just focused on property cleanups and mowing because very systematized, very dependable profit margins. And you can make it a very, very scalable. You don't need really skilled labor, you don't need really trained labor. You can get someone profitable after being hired on as new person within a matter of weeks. It doesn't take them months to get proficient at the work that you have to train them on. Next question from Thomas is how do you demand solid, how do you demand solid profits when so many other companies are performing this service at such low prices? Most customers see this as a service that anyone can do. Is this a service that simply requires low profits in order to open the doors for higher profit margin jobs? So therefore it's vital to the success. I don't see it that way. If you have a business that has multiple service offerings, so you do irrigation and you do fertilizations and you do weed control and you do property clamps and you do landscaping, you do all these other things. That's usually when using mowing as a loss leader is effective because if you can do irrigation, it's a really good idea to get as many mowing customers that have irrigation because you might break even or make 2% margin on $2,000 worth of mowing. But then once a year you get a 5, 6, 706 or $700 project for irrigation, that's 50% margin. And so a lot of times businesses that have multiple service offerings, they'll use mowing as a loss leader to get people to those other services that are higher margin. And however I know, and I've seen just so often the people that focus just on mowing, they can make it profitable. The people that just focus on those couple services, that's when they get good at it. It's when you start to diversify that usually you lose. Because you don't need a whole bunch of middle management when it comes to mowing. Because it's like you mow lawns and the software and the office manager can do the rest. When it comes to project based work, you start having middle management. You have to have an estimator, you have to have project managers. And those people cost money. And so because of that it's harder to scale and it's harder to make that a repeatable profit margin. Where with mowing, if it's done right, you're able to have a smaller profit margin, perhaps maybe not as glitzy or glamoury, but like lower overhead. Because you don't have to have middle management. And the people that you're hiring for those positions are going to be less dollars per hour and they're going to be easier to find and someone that has to be able to build a retaining wall, able to operate an excavator, able to do an estimate. And so I'd highly encourage you if you're doing, there's no right or wrong, it's like if you're going to be multiple services and you're going to offer like irrigation and fertilization, like you want to push people towards that that are in mowing. But you got to realize that if you're going to offer, you know, project based work, you're going to have middle management that's going to be overhead and therefore is going to reduce your net margin overall and, and it's going to affect your mowing. So it's really, there's no right or wrong, it's what your business model is. But if you have mowing and you know it's low profit margin, you want to push people towards the services that you offer otherwise that are high profit margin. And if you don't do that, focus on mowing, have a very low hierarchy in terms of like you, an office manager and then a bunch of employees that just operate on a, on their crews for mowing and then that reduces your overhead and allows you to get really proficient at that one thing. So I don't think that mowing is, has to be a loss leader, but it usually does become your lowest profit margin business. If you have product based work, if you have fertilization, if you have weed control, tree services and all this other stuff that you're trying to push clients to. All right, last question and then we'll wrap it up from Thomas. Are you concerned with the robots or would you implement them into your company? Thanks for all you do. Okay, so Thomas, last question about robots. Robots for mowing. So I think robots are a good 10 plus years away from actually affecting a lot of our businesses simply because the technology still hasn't caught up not only the technology, but the cost of that technology. If once those robots become 3, $400, it's going to become really interesting. Right now they're still 1500 plus for a decent one like 2000 plus. And so once those become 3, $400 or what I feel is going to be more, more prevalent or more higher chance of happening is Home Depot, Lowe's, a home improvement store or even Amazon's gonna get involved and give these things away in order to get. They're gonna, it'll become their loss leader for this technology and they'll do it just for the sake of data in terms of getting the square footage of people's properties, being able to survey their properties, being able to give recommendations on like for instance, like fertilizer from Scott's at Lowe's based upon the square footage of someone's property or like true green things like that. That's where I see the robots becoming involved. Do I feel immediate threat? No, because right now you still got an edge, you still got a blow off. And they don't have the best technology for getting through gates and things like that down the road. I feel like the reason I don't think it's a threat either is because if I ask any successful landscaping company what their number one issue is, it's finding people. That is labor. And what do robots do? They do the labor of the least profitable service of our industry, which is mowing. Right. So I really don't see as a threat. Like I've seen some really successful business models of people that are using the robots to keep their loss leader going, their mowing going, and then they're just using as a funnel to get them people to fertilization and bush trimming and the cleanups and all the other stuff. So I don't feel like it's a threat to us at all. I think that if they actually become cheaper the mowers and if I actually feel like if their technology catches up, they'll actually be able to be a real advantage to us because they'll be able to do the stuff that we really don't want to do and we want to upsell to other people. That being said, if you go around your property, around your neighborhood, and you see people that have bought robot mowers, these are the individuals you want to market to. And the reason for that is because they have, they basically have this mower mowing their lawn, robot mower, that's basically saying, hey, I don't want to mow my lawn. If they are the type of person that doesn't want to mow their lawn, it means they're also the type of person that doesn't want to trim their bushes, doesn't want to install mulch, doesn't want to fertilize, doesn't want to clean out their gutters, doesn't want to pressure wash. And those are all the services you want to get that are higher profit margin. So I would actually target those individuals, those homeowners that have bought that robot mower because they're basically flying a flag to you saying, hey, I'm lazy or I don't have the time to do this or whatever the case might be. And those the exact customers you want to sell those higher profit margin services to. But I just don't see it scaling right now because it doesn't. You still gotta edge the lawn, you still gotta blow it off. And for companies like Robin that have really tried to use this as a tech platform to scale it out, the problem I see with that is the companies that are giving them these robots for zero percent. Like right now, if you're not familiar, Robin is a company that is using these robot mowers and then getting contractors to do the edging and the blowing, and then they're selling at a mass, you know, from a tech standpoint, these mowing services. The problem with it is that the reason they're getting these mowers for free from the manufacturers is because the manufacturers know that they're gonna end up selling these robot mowers to the customer. Like the customer of these manufacturers is the customer of these contractors and of Robin. So I don't think that. I think that as the cost of these robots goes down, Robin's going to actually be in danger because the homeowner will just realize that they can just go get the robot mower themselves for 300 bucks instead of paying Robin $17 per week. So I don't feel like their model is that great. And it's not great for the contractors and not really great for the homeowner, in my opinion. And so I feel like in the immediate five, 10 years, we're not going to see robots really affecting us. 10, 20 years. I see them being a real asset to us to eliminate our dependency on labor and allow us to focus on the higher net profit margin jobs. So I'm running out of battery and so I'm just going to cut it off there. I know you guys got more questions coming in. I'll try to get to those on me on another video, hopefully. This was kind of cool. You'll see here around. I'll throw my drone up hopefully here and get some footage of what's going on around here. But thanks so much. And if you haven't already, make sure you join us at the conference next year. So 2020 in January, it's going to be here in Bellingham, which it's not going to be this nice because it's going to be in January. But it is going to be here that we're having the conference in January. So if you haven't Already, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference, sign up today. Sign up your project managers, your office staff. We're going to bring a lot of value for all of them and I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much.