Revealed: How My $850,000 Lawn Care Business Generates Massive Profit

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be showing you how much money I made from my lawn care business that did $850,000 in annual revenue. So I'm going to show you the income statement. I'm also going to show you actually how much was distributed to myself as the owner. So sometimes I've shown in the past and other people will show their income statement or their profit and loss statement, but they won't show actually how much money did I take out of this business. And so I'm going to give a little bit of background about this location. And so you have full context. And I show you my income statement. And I'm going to actually show you how much I actually took out of this business in terms of owners distributions. So a little bit of background about this location. This is the fifth year in business for this location. It was started in 2020 and my brother was the general manager right from day one. And so he actually used to be a. A schoolteacher. During COVID with everything that happened, he became the general manager at this location and I started it. I spent about 60 to $70,000 to get this business off the ground and get the initial working capital. Couple trucks, a trailer, the mowers. We operate at the very beginning from a storage facility. All of that was about 60, 70 grand, as well as about 15, 20 grand that was set aside for marketing in the first year, year and a half. And so relatively low capital in terms of getting started. From day one, I did not go down to the location or work in the business at all. Since then, I now have a regional manager that's also involved. It wasn't from day one, but now as the business has grown in the franchise, I got other things to do. I can't. I don't. I'm not in daily operations at all. The regional manager is the one that is interacting with the general manager and the general manager is the one doing daily operations. And so I've never hired anyone at this location. I've never gone down like the location that they're at now in terms of the space is actually at a farm. They park all their trucks. They have a storage container. It's $600 a month. It's really cheap because. Because they don't need an office space. Cause a command center for Augusta Lawn Care. And so I've never even been there. I've never actually been to the facility. And so this is really interesting. Cause this is the fifth year in business and I always talk about the being the first few years, growing the business to over $500,000 in annual revenue, focusing on recurring simple services and then flipping into from growth mode where I'm growing and I'm spending money in marketing, I'm buying more trucks, hiring more people to flipping it to profit mode where I raise prices, I stop hiring, I stop spending money on market, stop hiring more people and I just focus on making profit. And that's exactly what this location did. Now I want to be very clear that the first couple years did not look like what I'm about to show you. We were in growth mode. We grew very quickly but meant spending every dollar back in the business. So the 60 or $70,000 that I spend to get things up and running kind of got us through the first few months of negative cash flow as you're ramping up and all the marketing to get started. Now in years one and two, we are a couple percent, 3 to 5% profitable in both the years, negligible amount. That money was just being put right back into the business so we could stay in growth mode. Now in year three, we started becoming more profitable. Four and five, every single quarter has been profitable and distributions given to myself, the general manager and the regional manager. So year three I think was like two or three of the quarters are profitable. But in the past two years every single quarter has returned distributions to me as the owner. Now again, another side side note here is that you're going to see today that the general manager makes a really, really good paycheck. But the first couple years his salary started off at 50 grand a year and there wasn't a lot of profits in terms of profit sharing. And so his take home was less than half of what it is now because he has been loyal and stayed at this location for almost five years now he's seen the benefits of that. So I'm going to go ahead jump into this location. This is down in Mount Version Washington. And what's really cool is I'm actually, I actually just have now sold this location to my general manager named Marcus that owns another Augusta location further south. So he now is going to own his second Augusta lawn care location. And what's kind of also meta is the fact that Marcus six years ago started mowing grass out in the field at one of my locations, became the estimator, then became the general manager and then using the franchise fee forgiveness program was able to start his own location at Augusta and now just bought my other location. So he has two locations and the first one he Started down in Redmond, Washington, now is profitable, has employees and is an also is also in profit mode. So big shout out to Marcus, but mostly big shout out to Tim, the general manager, Nick, the regional manager, and the entire team that made this location super profitable. Every single one of the team members at the location are transitioning to Marcus very well and it'll give them a lot of opportunity too, because he wants to get more locations and be able to bring general managers up. Whereas for that location, for me, it was just a profit center. I was very passive. We weren't trying to actively grow. So the teams, it's a big win for them and, and it allows the location to continue growing and underneath Marcus's ownership. So let's go ahead and now and jump into the profit and loss statement. So this is September 1, 2024 to September 1, 2025. And so this, this year, 2025, this location is actually on track to do around 950 to 950,000 to a million dollars in revenue. They've grown a little bit this year. And once you're in profit mode because you're raising prices each year by 10, 15, 20%, you slowly, gradually increase in revenue. What I'm really looking for though, is I want to have six to eight employees max during the peak season. I don't want to eclipse eight employees because then it usually means that the general manager is hiring more people than they can handle. Now, can a great owner manage 10, 12, 14 points? Yes, it's a lot of stress and it takes a unicorn of a manager to be able to manage that number of people. But I know that a working general manager with simple services, a lot of recurring services, can manage six to eight employees very effectively and very profitably. And the working GM in this case during the off season especially, is going to be out in the field doing work. Especially as revenue gets below 60, 70,000amonth in revenue, they can go out and produce revenue in the field because the admin's being handled by command center. One of the biggest benefits of joining Augusta Lawn Care is that you get access to command center. Command center is going to do a lot of admin tasks for you, like answering your phones, answering your email and, and even running payroll. If those things off of your plate would allow you to grow your business more. Go check out Augusta Lawn Care Services.com franchise and see if it'd be a good fit for you. And so let's go ahead and jump into the numbers, but a little bit of background for the location. So the past rolling 12 months. Because I'm recording this on September 5, 2025. This is as of September 1, 844,000 in revenue. You can see the cost of goods sold is 350,000. I generally am shooting for 40% or below all wages for the business. That's, that's ideal. If you're under 50, usually you're okay because I'm including all of your wages, general managers, regional manager, if you have an office, admin, anything like that. I want under 50% as a rule of thumb to be my wages. Under 50%. If you're under 40%. Very good. So this location is right around that level. This will be what, 30. So yeah, it's around like 38%. And that includes the general manager, the regional manager and all of the team members. So highly. If you get under 40%, all wages as a function of your revenue, very good. Now if that number is way lower, it could be the fact that you have a lot of material cost that inflate the revenue. But as a rule of thumb, it's something that you can use. Now if you scroll down here, you're going to see one of their big costs is Command Center. $36,000. So on average that's $3,000 per month. Usually during the winter it goes down to like 1500 or two grand. During the peak season it can go as high as five or six grand. But the reason I'm okay with that is because I don't need a shop space. And they pay $600 a month to park their trucks at a farm and they dump all their material there. If I was to have to go get an office space, it'd be very difficult to find an office space where I can also dump. I would need industrial land. I need an office space with Internet and utilities and electric and sewer and the whole 9 yards. I would easily be spending 2 to $3,000 easily in this market. More likely 4,000 per month in this market where this is at. To be able to have an industrial zone facility where I could dump all my clippings and branches and debris and also have my office staff so I don't have to deal with that massive expense. That alone that just that the rent is like, would be three grand a month. And here it is. Command center is able to handle all of their payroll, all their email, all of that. They run, pay for performance in the software. They manage a lot of the backend admin, take all their phone calls. These are the things that command center does for them. And that's what that cost is. And so it ranges though, based upon the amount that they use. Command center, because it's charged by the minute, technically it's charged by the second because we don't round it. And so on a permanent basis, they're being charged for all their admin tasks being handled. But I'm okay with that as an owner because I don't want to train office admin. I don't want to have to have an office to house my admin. I don't want to have to deal with admin in general. And so I'm okay with 80, 90% efficiency. 80, 90% accuracy from command center in order to have this as a variable expense that that goes down during my off season versus a fixed expense because I have salaries, rent, all the utilities that go into that could easily, easily be eight to $10,000 a month. All right, so other things we got credit card processing fees. We process through Copilot using Stripe. That's what those, those processing fees are for. A little bit of equipment maintenance. $18,000. That doesn't include any sort of new equipment that they purchase, I believe. Yeah, repair and maintenance. And so. So hand tools would go into this as well as a lot of their equipment is, is five, six, seven years old. And so there's a little bit more maintenance. I think that down the road this location would probably get new equipment and this number would probably come down a lot simply because it's newer. But again, from a profitability perspective, overall, pretty good. All right, so feel free if you want to actually scroll through this, you can and see more about this. But you got the rental lease. You can see it's very cheap. I think they originally were like $500 a month. Now it's like 600. We also have to pay sales tax in Washington State. That's what that $68,000 is. It's shown there. Non payroll tax. Now, in order to just be as transparent as possible on this, I showed everything, including even the credit card rewards and depreciation. So technically, depreciation is not going to actually show up in your bank account, but it's what this is the P and L that I would give to the irs. So the reason I'm showing this here is I want to be. If you looked at my tax and you would see this document. So that's why I'm showing everything now. I want to show you what I usually don't show, and that's distributions. Now, I've sold the location and there's no active team members there that I'm responsible for and that I am paying. I'm willing to share what distributions are actually coming from the location. So in the exact same time frame, that's the past 12 months from September 1st to 2024 to September 1st of 2025. This is the distributions between myself, Nick, who is the regional manager, Tim, the general manager, and the crew out in the field. Now, keep in mind, last year they had several team members leave in the middle of the year. And in order to be eligible for profit sharing, someone has to stay for the full three months. So because of that, crew profit sharing was lower than usual. But like this quarter that's coming up, for example, even with the two months in the quarter that I'm responsible for to pay payroll, we already had $4,000 of crew profit sharing. I am not including that in here because that's coming out in this coming paycheck. So just to be clear, crew profit sharing is lower than normal simply because the biggest quarters last year they had two or three team members leave and then there are new team members that are replaced, but they're not eligible for profit sharing in that quarter. So hopefully that makes sense. All right, so these are distributions you'll see here at the top. Tim, he is the general manager, made $73,000 in distributions. That is on top of his regular W2 salary, and right now it's 70,000. So yes, he made 140 plus thousand dollars as like an overall wage. But keep in mind, he was very loyal for five years. And when he first started, he started $50,000 a year as a salary. And there was not a lot of profit sharing to be had that first year and two years. And so if you're getting a general manager, you want to make sure that they have an incentive to stay with you. And certainly the fact that he's able to triple his pay over the course of that time is certainly incentive. Once you have a track record to be able to copy and paste this business model, you can actually show a general manager that's newer and say, hey, look, I know at the beginning the revenue, the profits aren't going to be great, and maybe you give them some revenue incentives. If I would go back and change something in year one and two, I probably would have given more revenue incentives. So that way the general manager would stay more engaged and be able to still make some bonus and incentive, even though they weren't profits to be had in terms of distributions. But it worked out for him. And honestly, like this quarter, like this month. When he gets his profit sharing, it's going to be huge. It's going to be over $25,000. And I just didn't want to show that now because I wanted to be 12 months rolling and I wanted to be much more the. The fifth year and not bring it out even a couple more weeks here to where it would inflate these numbers. We had our best quarter ever as we went into the sale in terms of profits, in terms of distributions, in terms of profit sharing. So to not inflate the numbers, I brought it back to September 1st, because if I was to extend it into even like next two to three weeks, the money, it's already hit the account and the profit sharing is happening, this number would go up dramatically. A lot. And so, but this is, I think, a really good representation of what's possible without trying to be. Make it look so super optimistic. And you can see here that tim makes about 35% of the distributions. How we do at Augusta Lawn Care is the general manager gets a percentage of the distributions, which means when I get a dollar, he gets 35 cents. And you're like, well, that's 35. That's a lot. That's a high percentage. But he's been here from day one. And so when someone has been with me for a long time, I give them a higher percentage because he had to go through two years of not making much profit. Like 35% of nothing is nothing still. And so he went through those couple of years, but now is able to reap the rewards of staying with the business. And we'll get a large chunk of the distributions. And then you can see that that's about 35%. And then Nick, he gets, as regional manager, he also gets a cut. And then the crew profit sharing, they also get a cut. And then I made $86,000. That's what I took out of the business. Now, keep in mind, I have never hired someone there, never gone there for an estimate. I have never even been to their shop space they're currently at. And so this is the copy and paste business model that we talk about at Augusta Lawn Care. And that I think is really, really beneficial to home services. It's not going to a million dollars. I gotta get like 20 employees. I gotta go fast. Grow, grow, grow, grow. I'm gonna get six to eight employees. Be able to manage them all with one overhead employee, maybe have one person in the office. If you're not part of Augusta, you would need someone to help you. The admin side Whether it be virtually or in person. But my objective is to stay lean and not spend a whole bunch of money on overhead, wages. And by keeping it six to eight employees, I don't need an operations manager and an estimator and an office person and an office assistant, because as soon as I build that infrastructure, I immediately need 1.5 to $2 million in revenue. And for the vast majority of people, they'd be better off in terms of profitability and sustainability to build a business that's doing 800,000, $900,000 in annual revenue. They don't buy more trucks, they don't hire more people. They're not spending gobs of money on marketing. If you go back to the profit and loss statement, look how much they spend on marketing. And they, in the past, little bit, $20,000. So on average about $1500, 15 to $1600 per month that they're spending on advertising. Now, that includes a lot of other stuff like truck wrapping, their truck, et cetera is wrapped into that number. So I would go, go out in a limb and probably say they're running a ad on YouTube or, sorry, running an ad on Google Ads, probably for 10, $20 a day. And then during the peak season, running a few ads on something like Facebook to be able to drive conversions during the spring rush. So it's not a lot. And we're just trying to focus on getting more profit. And that really needs to be the focus, in my opinion, for home services. You're not trying to grow the next Facebook where they're going to give you a valuation based on revenue. You build a business that's sustainable, that can run without you because of recurring simple services and things have systems in place and then you have where you raise prices when you hit capacity, when you're booked out to the. You're not going to go buy more trucks this time. You're going to actually just raise prices, reduce close ratio, because you raise prices and you'll stop spending money on marketing. The minute you stop spending money on marketing and raise your prices, your business would double or triple in profit overnight. And so the objective of a home service business, in my opinion, is to get to the point where you raise prices. If you raise prices by 20% and your profit margin last year was 10%, you just tripled, you just went, you just tripled your profits. You're like how it works, okay, if you made $100,000, let's just make up numbers and 10%, $10,000 of profit and you raised your prices by 20% and you did a good enough service where customers didn't leave, you would go from $10,000 in profit to $30,000 in profit by raising your prices 20%. And so the objective of home service should not be to grow top line revenue, it should be to get to the point where the business is of size that when you raise prices by 20% it has a huge impact on profitability. This is the copy and paste business model where one working general manager like Tim can run the location with six to eight employees and copy and paste this once at a time. And now Marcus is stepping in with multiple locations and he'll do the exact same thing. Thing if you have questions down in the comments, I do read these and we'll respond if I can, but hopefully that's helpful to see an actual income statement and how much money I actually took out of the business. And honestly, if I would have put 60 or 70 grand into the stock market five years ago, I certainly would not have begotten the returns that I got from just selling this location to Marcus, let alone the distributions I've been having the past few years. This year alone, the you know, the past 12 months making more than what I put into the business five years ago to get started. So not a bad return. Look forward to sharing more of these location breakdowns in the future.