Small Town, Big Profits: Growth WITHOUT More Customers

How many? What's your population in your current service area?

20, 30, 000 maybe.

So like and then, and then in your, in your market, like the largest landscaping company there, what do they do in revenue you think?

To be honest, they're. They kind of piggied off their dad. Their dad had a long company and you know, they took over and they do strictly just grass cutting. They don't do nothing else. So they pretty much locked in.

How many trucks they locked do they have?

Just them.

There's no, there's no one with employ employees in your whole market?

Yes, they. I mean they have employees but it's only one truck. Like if that makes sense. Like.

And that's the, that's the biggest business. So there's no one with more than. More than one truck in your market. Okay, great. So this is perfect. So your unique selling proposition that you're going to scale the business and actually be dependable because the problem in your market is going to be everyone is trying to be a race to the bottom because of what you just said. Like there is, you know, less, there's less money, lower income, etc. Everyone believes there's price sensitivity. You're going to become the premium market. A premium person in the market that can afford to pay people more, retain them, train them up, have the highest skill and people are willing to pay for that. And not everyone, not everyone. But there is a segment of the population and I know that out of 20 or 30,000 you can build a big business. The reason is because like if you look up Blaine Washington look it up, 6 to 7,000 population and it. There is, there is a segment of that population that has money and it's not the whole 6,000, 7,000, a lot of it. It's like pretty low income and it's the cheapest part place to live I probably say in our county. And so there's a segment though that's probably 2,000 of them that do have money and I just went right after them and we built the business to 1.1 million before leaving that market. And so I genuinely believe that what I'd be focusing on instead of going service because you can always expand services, you can always expand service area and grow revenue. Like I will never be able to say you will not grow. Like if you grow go to Lafayette, you will make more money, guarantee it. Revenue wise you will make more re. Make more revenue. But the likelihood of you making more profit is so low. What I would recommend doing is taking your current 20 or 30,000 people saying hey, I have let's say 100, 200 customers, whatever it is of these a hundred customers, who else has a problem that I can solve and that problem because like the tractor mowing is great, but it's unlikely it's going to cross over with your existing customers, it's going to be a new customer. What I would rather we look at is the current customers I'm serving. What other problems do they have that I can increase their annual value from $1,000 to $2,000? Because if someone's having you mow their grass, for example, they're not going to be cleaning out their gutters, they are not going to be trimming their bushes, they're not going to be installing their own mulch, they're not going to be doing a lot of other things around their house if they're having you mow the grass. And so I would look for adjacent services that your current customer has pain around that you can sell them to double the business without going out and getting new customers. And I genuinely believe out of 20, 20 to 30,000 people, I can guarantee you there's two or 3,000 that are willing to pay more money for company that shows up every single time, has automations, is professional, has wrapped trucks, etc because like right now that, that's your, that's your unique selling proposition. I would lean into the fact that no one else like it's all chuck in the trucks and the advantage that they all have is they can be custom and they can do everything exactly the way the customer wants and text them one off etc. We don't want that. Like we are trying to grow a business that will scale have four, five, six employees and that that size population can do that. Like the fastest growing locations inside of Augusta Lawn Care are the ones with 20 to 30,000 population across the board. Because we can boil the puddle so quickly with marketing and everyone knows about who we are versus when we have 150, 200, 300,000 people in a market. It's so much more difficult to penetrate.

Right. And that's true. I've, I think what really helped push me far as like you said scaling a small area is my social media because I followed all your school and your programs so I follow all of them. So I blew up my TikTok. So everybody on there and my Facebook and all my different marketing strategies, I did the door hangers, I did it all and it will kind of help me push was like in my videos I just threw like my slogan and just kept putting it out there. And people like, man, we see you cutting the area, we want you to cut. We want you to cut. But then, like you said, trying to dial in to that, like you said that one customer you might do two or three services for is always a cap off. Because it's one of those things where in my area, like, literally, if you want to, we have about. In my area, about 89 people cutting grass.

Like, it's.

It's everybody cutting grass. Like, in my area, I mean, they run to the $20, man, all day if they can. But then they're like, well, you know what? Let me just get, you know, Ahmad and his people to cut the grass. But it kind of takes it where, okay, they'll do it for a little while. Like, ah, little too much. I'm going to just go back to the $20, man, you know, or like, fancy. If I want to upsell some of my clients, like, I upsell pretty well. I do real well with the, with the.

My.

I call it my little. My little honey hole. But like, when I try to produce more to the other clients, then it's kind of like it kind of caps off at some point, you know what I mean? So, I mean, it's a growth stage for me. So, you know, I'm. I'm ready for it, you know.

Yeah. Ultimately, like, we all look at price as the reason why customers don't accept, because that's usually the reason they give you. But usually they say that price is too high, but they will never say is, hey, we just don't value your services enough. But when they say that price is too high, that's actually what they're saying. If. Because if price is lower than value, they will. They will buy. And so if they go back to the. The $19 guy, what they're saying is, you're not worth 39. And so what we want to focus on, instead of how do we reduce our price or how do we become price competitive, or how do we even become efficient enough to be able to lower prices? That's the wrong question. Instead, it's how do I increase. You said a $39 cut. Seems like crazy. I wouldn't buy it because I would pay $100 for this water bottle. If I was parched in the middle of a desert, and right now I'm not thirsty, I will only pay $10. Well, if the value that I have for it, if the price is 40, I'm not buying it right now, but in the middle of the desert, I'm buying a Bunch of these. And so what you want to do is increase the value to the customer. And you can increase value also by increasing the stickiness of your service by offering more services that solve more of their problems. So if you just mow their grass, the likelihood they'll go to the $19 an hour guy 19 dol higher. But if you also clean up their gutters, you also pressure wash their driveway, you also weed and you also pull weeds and you also trim the bushes, the likelihood that they'll go find someone else because now it's harder to compare apples to apples is much lower. And that the fact that they won't be able to provide all those services because they won't have the labor force is also another ability to be able to keep that customer. So I would keep this in mind. I would always reframe every time someone says the price is too high, just say rephrase it around. Is my value is too low? Because if you think that you can control value, you can, you can absolutely increase your website presence. You can increase the, the expectation of the, the result happening, I. E. Reviews, testimonials. You can increase uniforms, trucks, like, oh, there's so much value you can add to customer, you can get back to them faster. You can automate things. So I would really focus on value because price is one of those things that we never want to compete on. So thanks so much though. I appreciate the question.

All right, thank you.

You got it. Anyone else, just feel free to unmute yourself. I'm all ears.

Hey Mike, I was wondering when it makes sense to start a second location versus continuing to grow your main location.

Yeah, I think when I look at sort of the four different categories that until you go to past 3 million. So up until 3 million, I think there's four different kind of categories. You have your solo operator usually 0 to 250,000, 250,000 to 750,000 or so in the green industry and most labor industries is going to be what I call working gm. This is where the working the GM is managing the whole field crew, but they're also producing some labor revenue. Then you have full time GM, that's usually 750,000 to 1.5 million. This is the seven figure business everyone wants to be at because usually that means getting out off of the truck. So 750 to 1.5, 1.5 to 3 million. You're needing to become what we call, I call a GM plus. So it's GM with a manager over sales, a manager over operations, and a Manager over the admin side. So when I think about multiple locations, what I'm able to do is avoid having to get a full time general manager. And I keep them in the working GM size. That's my goal because I want them to be able to produce revenue. As soon as I get them off the truck, they immediately become full overhead and I have to grow the business substantially more. It becomes harder to find someone that can manage 10, 12, 14, 15 employees. So I'm looking at much more as a, a strategy to reduce key man risk and I'm looking as a strategy to improve my margins by not having an overhead person in the business. Now that can only happen if you have admin nailed down because usually when you look at sales, operations, admin, the first thing you want to delegate admin because the lowest leverage task and then operations is usually a general manager or something of the sort, that's the next thing you're delegating. So if you've delegated admin well and that is either through like a, a centralized command, so like what we call command center or like if you virtual, make it virtual and you have a really good admin that is working, whether it be locally or remote, doesn't matter. Like there's someone that is taking all the calls that if you, if you lock admin, really, really nail it. That's when a bespoke kind of hub and spoke model works really well because now I can go into say an hour away and instead of having to drive all the way there from my central shop space, I start a little shop with that's 5, 600, 700 bucks a month to rent some, some land and just park my trucks there. The crew is right next to all, all their, their service area and all the calls and everything goes to the main office. But I have this like hub and spoke model and so and then I have like a working GM that kind of manages the crew, hires fires, trains, but they're not respons, responsible for emails, not responsible for phone calls because that's all being handled the admin side from the, the hub. And so really the question becomes do you want to be in operations as the owner? Like if you want to build a one massive location. The, the bottom line is if anyone in your management team goes down until you're well above 10 million, if anyone in the management team goes down, you are likely stepping back into the business. And the reason is, is because it's hard to replace someone who is managing a 10, 20, 30 person crew. Very difficult to find Them, let alone pay them enough. And the risk of them doing a poor job could set you back hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, versus if they're managing four to six people and their general manager is working out in the field with the crew, they're not handling any of the admin like they are literally just working and managing the team and making sure things are good with equipment, et cetera, that is easier for me to replace. In fact, if someone drops out, I usually take one of the crew members and elevate them as the working gm. And so I'm reducing the key man risk there of me having to step back in now. So your value of that is really determining whether or not you go with one location or multiple. If you really value never showing up, you're like, in 10 years, I want to build this business so I never show up, then you'd probably want to go more multi location. If you're like, I don't mind getting in occasionally, I don't mind filling in if a general manager goes down, I don't mind doing estimates occasionally. I would probably stick with the larger one location because it's easier to manage a one geographical site and just keep your hands on everything. So there's not really a good or better. It really comes down to like what you want long term. And then I just work backwards from that. So which way are you leaning towards Adam and like, how can I help a little more specifically?

Yeah, I think I at least want to be involved for the foreseeable future, like in the business, since that's why I've been kind of leaning more towards the one. One location route. I'm also concerned at just like the geographical area on like there's. There's only so many customers that we can serve and so eventually we might be forced to start multiple locations. So that's kind of what I've. I've been thinking and kind of throwing that around. And also with like the general manager model, I'm. I'm somewhat concerned about like especially like the landscaping sales side of things. And like if we have general managers do that or if we just go all like straight mowing and just keep it super simple so that they are able to manage it. Just kind of logistics of the general manager there.

Yeah, in part the reason, like doing multiple locations, it forces you to simplify and standardize everything. And so you start realizing like, okay, if the lounge skill required to have a paver patio and the mill excavation and drainage is like so high, I will have to pay them so much, and they're not going to want to also go out and do work. And so that's when it's just like, why we simplified everything so much more. And if you. Whereas if you do one location, you could have a department for landscaping and then make it a little bit more like that. Right? So there's. There's pros and cons. There's no right or wrong. Like, if you want to be in the business and you don't mind that for at least, you know, five, 10, 15 years, I think doing one location is probably the easier thing, especially from a leadership style. Like, it's harder to lead when you have a dispersed workforce. And so when you have two, three, four locations, you can't be in all of them at the same time. So if something bad's happening in the organization, it's harder to lead. Whereas if you have one location, like, everyone get in this room and we're going to talk about it. And so that would be kind of my. My two senses. Probably I would lean towards doing one location for now. The challenging part is likely going to be as you grow, finding even shop space to be able to warehouse. All of that can get super prohibitive. Well, I would also say, Adam, if you're locked, like, landlocked from a service area perspective, what you can do is just have one crew go start in a new area, knowing it's not going to be profitable. And then if it starts growing and really taking off, you put some marketing dollars behind it. You know, you get two crews going over there. Okay, now it makes sense to break this thing off, put one of my best people. I'm going to lose if I don't make them some sort of manager, make them a general manager of the location. And now they start from a different site. And I save more money in just the drive time between the two locations and the extra rent of having that shop space. So that's like, what's. What we're doing now with Augusta. A bunch is like, people. What they're doing is they're saying, hey, I want this location. It's great. We'll lock this in for you. You can go ahead and get the website set up, the whole nine yards. But you don't have to break it off as a separate copilot account, as a separate General Manager. Separate QuickBooks. Like, just keep it all for one for now. Get it to 200, 250,000, and then break it off and grow it. 500,000.

Cool. Thank you.

You got it. So I'd say, like, in the short term, I'd stick with the one location. And then if down the road you're like, man, we're really landlocked here. Or more importantly, Adam, what can happen is you have a really solid person that you're going to lose because they don't have any. Like, they don't. They feel like they're constrained. That that's when you can give them that opportunity and then you stay with the hub. Right. Good stuff, Armando. Go ahead.

So I've been struggling kind of with something. I'm in Central Texas and like half of the year, the beginning of the.

Year, all the rains and floods.

Yeah.

So we get rain.

Oh, yeah.

I'm good.

Yeah, yeah.

Thankfully kind of a little bit to.

The left side of that.

So thankfully have to deal with that. But so right now we're getting a lot of rain. So that changes kind of my year.

Right.

Normally July through December, I'm not, you know, it's going to rain once or something. So the grass is dead. So my thing is right now we offer weekly and bi weekly. Majority of my customers are bi weekly. Obviously, I would make more money and it would be easier to do weekly, but I know that if I do like, I force everyone to go weekly, I would lose a lot of my customers because I do. I do kind of two different sizes, so I do smaller properties where I have one crew who does all the smaller properties and have a larger crew. I mean, another crew that does just large properties. And those are like acre, two acre properties. And majority of those are bi weekly. If I tell them weekly, they're. They're probably not going to want to stay. And they are still pretty profitable. So I'm not sure if it's even worth, like saying, you know, we're just going to do weekly lawns because it would change my business completely. So I'm not sure if it even makes sense to do that or not.

Yeah. So one of our locations out in. Or he has two locations out in Austin did this and it made him like 30 grand last month because of all the rain. He just text everyone said, hey, we're going to do a rain mow. So it's not requiring weekly. It's not. It's like, hey, we're adding an additional MOW in between your usual service because the grass is growing like crazy. And basically if you don't want that, let us know. But we're doing it for all of our customers so the grass doesn't get overgrown and we don't damage it and then he tied it into like, the fact that it helps reduce the amount of mosquitoes and a couple other things like the damage to the lawn, et cetera. And he just called it rainbows. It's not requiring weekly and. But he was able to get almost all of his customers technically on weekly for about six weeks. But all he called it was rainbows. He's like, hey, the rain. It's rain. Everyone knows this is crazy one off situation. So, like, they're not thinking that you're trying to take advantage of them. You don't require this. You're not forcing them in anything. I don't think a single one of his customers told him not to do it because they know the grass is growing more. And he's tied it into all the benefits of like, hey, we're just going to come in. Extra, extra service. And he just told them this is happening. And he called it rainbow. I gotcha.

The only thing with that would be a. I don't know if I could handle that, like, given that I have, like, you know, I. Because I have the schedule, like right now, I have my schedule. I want to say like 85% full. So if all those people say, yeah, go ahead, do biweekly, I probably couldn't do it.

What you could do, what you could do, Armando, is you could, you could send out rainbows to people that, you know, you could do each week. So, for example, like, I could get extra 20 people on this week. Great. Send out 20 rainbows, get them done this week. And then like next week I maybe got a project and like, we're just. Great, great. Don't send out the text messages. But that's what he did. He just sent out bulk messages via text and just told him, hey, there's a rainbow. This is what it is. And because of the torrential downpours, we're going to make sure your lawn's looking good. And here's the benefits to you and I. To my knowledge, I don't think anyone cancel.

I got you. So. So you wouldn't, I guess given that, I mean, that's something I could definitely consider for sure. What about as far as. Because I'm considering just switching like everybody to just, you know, weekly, because I know that, that, I mean, it's a different, almost a different business than what I'm running currently.

Yeah, bi weekly is very common in your area. Bi weekly is very common. What you could do is what you could do. Like, I don't know where. If you're at 85% capacity. When you get to 90, 95%, you're sound like you're pretty close there. And, and I actually think if you, you do the what I'm about to say, you get to 100% capacity and that is you could bake a rate price raise into this. So example, hey, your price is 60, it's going to 70bi weekly. But if you go to weekly It'll stay at 6. So you could bake this into like a negative price increase which is, hey, your price doesn't go up if you take this offer. And so I think this, this has worked well in several instances. It's basically like, hey, you're going to this new bi weekly price or sorry, this new weekly schedule at the same price. Otherwise the bi weekly service will be more. So you kind of get the best of both worlds which is you get a price increase on your current customers and, or you get higher frequency. And so it's just all you're doing is selling a volume discount. Okay, I got you.

All right, well, thanks.

Yeah, you got it, Thomas, Go ahead.

Hey Mike. Thank you for Mike. AI, I have to say that off the front that's been such a huge thing and I just always wonder like I read, I've read all your content, watch all your content, I read all your books and, and I was like, what am I going to ask Mike, you know, that he hasn't already like shared and all of his stuff. And I guess all I know to do is just share you like right where I'm at in the mud, what it feels like right now and just like see, see where you're at. So, you know, basically been solo for the first three or four years of my business. A lot of stuff going on, just family and stuff and didn't feel like I had the capacity to even try to like up that. Prior to that, I worked for a friend for four years. He got me, introduced me to lawn care and I really like look back and time to regret but really burned out like all my good like body and all my, all my youth, you know, doing that. But you know, here we are. I told myself my goals, I wanted to really focus on, you know, selling to my current customers and like that's how I was going to increase. So I guess, I guess I was right about 85,000 last year in sales. And so this year I was like, well, I'm going to get to at least, you know, I want to try to hire, I want to try to do that but like maybe I can if nothing Else I'm going to have like 125 or something just by upselling. I'll get a little bit of print mark. I'll do a little bit of stuff. And what happened is I bought yard signs. I bought some door hangers, I bought some postcards. And I started it off the spring rush and just fizzled it out. I still have a, like, probably 500 of them. I just never got them out. The yard signs all got picked up and, you know, so maybe just got a little discouraged with that. And I just have them because I feel like, well, now they say mowing and I've missed that prime stuff. So I'll just save these for another time when. When mowing is more, you know, a prime thing to go after. And now, you know, I have this college kid that came back that I had him last year, you know, and he's here for, you know, a couple of months, but he's about to leave at the end of July. And I've been so, like, in this, like, I want to sell, sell, sell, sell. I. I'm not at capacity really even. Probably even for myself, but I. Maybe I am now with the upsells, but I feel like my personal capacity is tanking because I just feel, I mean, burn out, to be quite honestly. But I feel like I'm in this, like, moment where, like, I have to do this. Like we.

I've.

I've got. I've got to. I told myself at the beginning year, I'm not going to have another year. Just a solo guy hitting that 80, 90 mark. Like, I've got to change. And, you know, I'm. I'm looking right now. I think I'm at just under 57,000 for the year, so hopefully that's on pace to at least be better. And I just don't know, like, the direction and how to feel or what to think, where to go, you know, as far as. I guess really it's on a hiring standpoint. Do I pay that guy? I mean, Dakula, Georgia, you have a location in Sugar Hill and Lawrenceville, I think, kind of near me. So maybe, you know, the market, this. It's nothing but residential. I mean, this is a huge right market for residential. But I feel like I've become this, like, I'm the chuck in a truck with a nice uniform. I got. I'm very professional. But this is what I feel like at the end of the day. And I'm just really trying to take that. That leap for the sake of, you know, family and and just getting like, like not like throwing in the, the ringer here. And like I don't know what to do. So I guess the direct question is that's where I'm at. Maybe the direct question is on like hiring. Because to hire somebody, I've tried to get some feelers. You're at like 2250, 2275. For a guy that can do the work, maybe drive the truck. Really a guy that could have drive the truck, you're probably up to 25 an hour. That's not including payroll taxes. And, and, and it's like I can't. If I hired that person, that would basically be my entire, like they would just have to do it. That would free me up 100 and I would have to go like full on board sales. But like I can't promise them winter hours. Like I feel like I would need to because they're getting these bigger companies, you know, they at least get 30 hours a week however they do that. And you know, I don't know, maybe I'm not looking in the right places, maybe I'm not thinking right. But I'm really scared to like pay that employee maybe to try to get them on board and just because they're relying on me and I'm going to let them down if I don't. And then there goes my money too at the same time. And you know, my wife works, she, you know, but it's, it's a tricky situation. So I don't even know if there was a question in there.

You're good. Maybe. No, I get it. Like this is the thing I would say, I would say Thomas. So you have not yet hit the point of making a decision to hire an employee. Because when, when, when, when it is so obvious that you must hire, that's when you hire. And what I mean by that is when we hit capacity, that is when we have the opportunity to either raise prices and go into profit mode or stay in growth mode, hire employees, get another truck, et cetera. The reason you feel like you're kind of a caught in between the two is because you haven't hit capacity yet. And so I would highly recommend take any discretionary time you have currently, deploy it against any sort of sales, follow up, better process, etc. To get to the point where you are forced to hire.

Higher is always your first one because you're doubling, you're basically doubling output and so your capacity doubles. And that's a very, very risky proposition because if you grow to, let's call it 160% and then they leave. Now you're completely overbooked. It's also scary because you've got to go from 30, 40 budget hours a week on the schedule to 55, 60 budget. That's a huge jump. So like you said, I've got to go all in on sales. And so I would highly recommend first at your size, let's just call it 120,000, you still have about 15% to 20% that you could get more and just fill your schedule. Now what that likely becomes is you working now will become longer days and in the evening you're trying to like door hangers, you're trying to follow up with people faster. You're creating automations, you're doing like just selling more. Now the objective here is that you get to the point where you have to hire someone. And I think that is the bridge we haven't quite crossed yet. And you're kind of trying to cross the bridge like I got to hire someone so that I can grow to capacity versus just go to capacity. Because here's the thing, if you can't find someone, you will raise prices. And if you raise prices, you'll be able to afford $23 an hour, no problem. 25 bucks an hour. Like $2 an hour is, is let's.

Raise prices going into July 10. And, and that's been, I mean I guess I'm seeing it, we're like mid July. And I think, I think the hump I need to get over to is maybe mentally and also maybe family wise because I feel like I don't.

What do you mean?

Go out in the evenings. Like I don't have any time. Like I have a two kids wife. I have, I have so much stuff. Like I can barely. I fall asleep in my computer trying to like my QuickBooks slowly gets to my bookkeeping, slowly gets out of hand. My, you know, it's like, so it's like I don't, I can't do that. But I don't know if there's two ways around it. Like to just say if you tell me to eat lima beans, Mike, I'll eat llama beans. Okay.

Just so you know, you're 100% right. So this is what's interesting is you said in one part you said, and I'm not picking any Thomas, I just want you to win. So I'll dive deep in this.

No, I'm good. I can take it.

So in one inside you say, hey, I'm not quite at capacity myself. But then you also are falling asleep at your competitor. You have no more time. And the reason that is in my opinion is because when you say you're not at capacity, what you're thinking I'm going to guess is I could get more jobs done in a day. But the reason that you have all this, you're so falling asleep at your computer and you have no time with your family is because you're filling it with other stuff. Other, other time sucks, like bookkeeping. I just heard QuickBooks. And so when you look at sales, operations and admin at your size, in order to be able to look at like what's the highest leverage use of your time? The highest leverage use of your time is sales. Below that is operations and below that is admin. And so I don't believe you're at the point yet of deleg, delegating operations and getting an employee to do the work. But I do believe you're at the size that you should be. Start thinking about is how do I delegate admin related tasks so that you can spend more time in the field. Because right now you could hire someone for 30 bucks an hour, let's call it 40 bucks an hour. If they're part time to do admin related tasks and by them doing it probably faster than you, you would then have that same hour to go spend out in the field making 80 to 100 an hour. And eventually, eventually we'll hit capacity. And what will we do? We will delegate someone that we can pay 25 bucks an hour and we will make 80 to $100 an hour on operations and we will focus more on sales. And so when you look at sales, operations, admin, I think you're kind of trying to hire an employee prior to delegating a lower leverage task in the business, which is admin. So I would actually think that instead of spending four or five thousand dollars a month on hiring an employee, I, if I was you, I'd be looking at how do I spend a thousand, $2,000, get a part time person to do my admin so that you can spend 30% more of your time and make 6 or $7,000 more on operations. Does that make sense?

It does. I just feel like I'm not doing the admin. It's like I'm not really buying a lot of, I mean I am, but I'm, it's just kind of going by the wayside. Like I'm just, I'm not, I feel like it's not going to buy me back a lot of time. Because I'm just, you know, as far as the, I mean, the bookkeeping, like, that's really it. The other stuff in copilot, I mean, I have to do, it's all on me. And you know, so.

But things like email, text messages, sending out invoices. Yeah. All the customers answering the phone, stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Is that what you're referencing too? Like.

Yeah, like throughout the day, like if you're answering the phone, if you're texting customers, if you're emailing customers, that can be handled by someone else and then that time redeployed to you doing more work. Okay. Okay. Because I, I genuinely believe that if you went out and got someone that even like did it by the minute or you hired someone, hey, three day, three hours a day or two hours a day. I need you to go to the inbox, I need to go to the voicemail. I need you to send out the estimates. I want you to do follow up phone calls. I'd create a list of, of every single admin task you're doing. And I actually think it'll increase your sales because they'll be more responsive. They will make sure follow ups things won't get left on the wayside. Like, I also think like growing this business will tie back to the fact that things that are going on the wayside right now are things like following up with phone calls to customers that are having estimates pending, upselling customers that have potential job work you could be doing that could be handled by an admin person. But right now you're doing all those little things. It's. You're kind of splicing it up throughout your day. Like the emails. You'll go between jobs, you'll take the phone call between the job and the voice will between jobs. If you just had someone do that for two hours a day or three hours a day just dedicated to doing that, you could then probably grow the business 30% without getting another employee. Yeah, you'd be able to focus on operations all day long because admin is now delegated.

And then it's not so scary when I got to go make that hire. Pay them what they need. What a better pay them because you're so busy.

Exactly. And what might not be a bad idea, Thomas, is you raise prices a little bit. So that way you're able to afford a higher quality employee. Because if you're like, man, I can't get someone with 22 bucks an hour. Great, let's try, let's try to afford 25 I'm right about 90.

Right about 90 per man hours. What? Roughly. Some are a little lower, some are a little higher. So, you know. But yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, I could ask you a hundred questions, but, you know, you're good. Keep my AI live.

Yeah, it's a delicate spot you're in. Like, getting that first employee is difficult because you extend capacity so high. And so it's one of those things when you have enough capital, you can really, to your point, just go all in on sales, take a little bit of losses in the. In the short term. But to kind of balance those two things out, I would delegate admin, which is a lower leverage, lower cost task so you can spend more time in the field. Because you think about like admin as being like a 25, 30 an hour task. Your operations out in the field is 80, $90 an hour. Sales is probably $150 an hour. So when we run out of time, quote, unquote, we want to delegate admin as quickly as possible. Okay. And right now you're doing admin. You're just doing it throughout your entire day.

Y. Okay, I thank you so much. You got it.

You got it. Anyone else? We got 10 more minutes. The chat came in.

Zach and Ray here.

Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

So we kind of had some questions because we're, we're kind of new at this. This is our second year of doing this, and one of the things that we've ran into with like commercial properties is a huge deal. Like, we tried to go through, like subcontracting through a company and do commercial properties, and we've had a lot of problems with them not paying. And so my question is, is do I just go right to the contract and just tell them, look, I'm not even going to do this. I'm not doing this? No more like, if you want us to continue with these mos, then I need to be. You need to be on a contract or do I continue since I don't have a contract? That is kind of my question.

Yeah, like ultimately you need them more than they need you right now.

Yeah.

And so because of that, you're willing to take these bad payment terms because you built the business, I'm assuming, kind of around these big contracts. It's a big chunk of your revenue.

No. So this is, this is our first year of taking on a contract with these. We actually passed up two of them because we weren't quite ready to grow into that. And so what we decided is let's, let's See how this folds in with our other scheduling. And here we are sitting here, and it was four months that the guy didn't pay us. And so that's a, you know, that's a lot of money. We're talking spraying weeds, weed whacking, mowing, parking lot cleanup. It's. There was a lot that. And there's still more, like bushes that need to be done. I just need to, like, figure out am I going to continue with this and not get paid, or do I have them do a contract and say, moving forward, this is. This is what I need.

I think, again, like, it comes down to do you need them? Like, if you are growing your business so fast outside of one customer, it is so easy to walk up to the customer and be like, demand whatever you want. Like, this doesn't become a question. If you are maxed out to capacity and you're like, we don't know what we're doing, you're gonna go to this person like, hey, you either pay me beforehand or I'm walking. So I think I would focus on that part first. Like, grow the business to the point where you do not need this person because the amount of confidence you have when you talk to them about payment terms will be so much greater. And so I would also say depending on your state, you could bake in fees on copilot automatically be charged ever so often if they're going to extend. So you can just be like, hey, we're not raising your price. We're not changing the contract, but if you don't pay us, when is the money is due? There's now fees being rolled into this, and you can make it as abhorrent as your state allows. Right? So like, whether it be 1% a month or whatever it is, and all of a sudden they usually start paying faster. Usually commercials, especially with the sub the way you have it set up, they're not going to have a card on file. That's just usually. But you can, you can bake payment terms in and be like, hey, after seven days, fees start going in. So it's like, if you don't get that check to us immediately, fees are going to start getting baked in, and then you are now okay with them going late because you're getting extra money. But I think this really comes down to grow the business so fast that you are. You have the leverage because you are willing to walk. Whoever has. Whoever's willing to walk in a negotiation has all the leverage.

So this. That was my. That was my thing is do I walk away from the guy that we're contracting through the company and maybe go to the actual company that we're doing it for and be like, hey, you know, we won't deal with him no more. If you guys want us, this is what we need, is to deal directly through us. But then we kind of cut that bridge if he does have work for us in, like, the future. Like, it's one of those things. But also we could remove those guys and fill that spot with customers that are going to pay.

So it's like, personally, like, like, from ethical perspective, I never cut out my contractors. However, what I would do is, again, build the business to the point where you could go to this person and tell them to pay up. And if he's like, well, they don't pay me. I have to wait on them. And then also it's like, if that person, that middleman is being scummy in some way, shape or form, you could go to the customer you built a relationship with and like, hey, I am willing to do this directly with you, and here's how this will be beneficial to you. And then you deliver that news in a professional way to your contractor. And so what that looks like is like, if the these things don't change in terms of how you're treating the customer, they're going to come straight to me. And so. And then you give them the opportunity to rectify their behavior.

Makes sense.

Makes sense. I like it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone else? We call it a day.

Am I allowed to ask a question? I feel bad taking up time.

No. Good. Go ahead, Brian, go ahead.

Okay. I'll save the next year questions for when I see you in a month. Let's talk about this year. So our biggest issue we're facing is we need to scale snow from 60k last year to a minimum of 200k if we want to break even because we keep burning about 50 grand in the winter. We did scale up winter services. Only issue with that is I think we did like three winter service weeks all year last year because we'll get snow and then it'll just stay on the ground. And we don't want to make that part of the winter services because we charge customers a contract. Everything we did was contract last year. Snow and OB pays a thousand bucks and we'll handle. It's like six visits a year or something. What are your. So we're in Massachusetts. Just a reminder. Something I found is a lot of the big landscaping companies near us, they don't actually do Landscaping as their main thing. For example, one of the companies next to me, I found out they consider landscaping their off season. They do 2 million in landscape, 30 million in snow in three months. So it's just kind of give me a bit of a dilemma here. Like, should I try competing with that? Because the issue we're having is we don't want to be a per push residential snow. It's just race to the bottom at that point. I want contracts, but I'm also struggling to figure like these people have salespeople who only do snow. So kind of struggling with this. What are your recommendations for helping us scale from 60 to at least 200k this year?

Yeah, the challenge with this is you're going from residential and B2C to commercial and B2 and C and B2C or B2B. So like it is a whole different sales motion. The way your website looks, the way you ask for estimate proposals, the branding, all of that like looks different when you start going B2B. And so I would really play with the idea, Brandon, because I know you're very handy when it comes to the website stuff. Like I would toy with the idea of creating pages that are specific or even a different URL that is specifically for this. Right. So simply, simply snow service could be geared towards commercial. So that way you're able to go after this different market. Like I think, I think it's a completely different business. Right. Because a different customer, there's no crossover, you're not upselling anyone because you don't have a bunch of commercial mowing, to my knowledge. And so I would very much consider treating this like a separate brand. And by doing that, then you have different marketing, you have different go to market, you have different branding. And I think that would be my move.

So legally keep everything as simply lawn care, but just start having a separate webpage. Simply snow services.

Exactly, whatever.

All branded to commercial.

Simply lawn is snow could be the Google listing. So it's all still running there, your reviews, et cetera. But then the website is built for commercial. You don't want to mess up your current business by making it look more commercial on your website and like changing, you know, the way you do estimate request forms, et cetera. But then you can make a new quote unquote brand with a just a different DBA on your current entity. But from a website perspective, change the marketing message and be able to compete with these people because that like if, I bet, if they go, if you go to the website, it's like, oh, there's a big company that services big commercial projects.

Yeah. Question on that. So, funny enough, I am recreating the website right now. WordPress moving from Squarespace. WordPress, I got 200 lines of custom code. I'm breaking Squarespace. We're moving. I'm doing it myself right now. That's my one of my three core objectives. Question for that is I did do some SEO testing. We do come up number one already. First, if you look up snow removal in our five mile radius, we're still number one. And I noticed we do not get a lot of leads, that we had a lot of residential leads. But is commercial snow just a different ballpark for lead Jen?

Yeah, a lot of them are going to be going to whoever did their lawn. That's going to be the challenge here. Um, they're going to go, whoever did lawn, ask them if they did snow. But more importantly right now you might rank well for SEO, but the conversion is Google doesn't track that. Like Google doesn't know if once someone gets to the site, if they actually convert. Right. And so I would also make sure that when you do your Google tracking codes, you make sure you put that on your conversion end page because then Google can see that when you're running ads against snow. So that way it's like, okay, people who look in snow actually end up becoming a customer of this business. And you will rank better for commercial clients versus right now you will rank well for it. But people aren't going like submitting an estimate request form.

And would you recommend just from an actual navigation standpoint like we have our Simply Lawn Care services website services. Drop down Snow. If you click Snow, it's just going to bring you to the new brand website, essentially.

Yep.

Okay.

That would also create a backlink between the two sites so they would, they would be paired in Google's eyes. Best of luck on the goal and we'll see in the next momentum call. Take care.