Software That Will Raise Prices for You! (Tech Coming in the Lawn Care Industry) | RoundUP ep22

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. Welcome to an episode of Roundup where we talk to other people in the lawn care and landscaping industry. They're doing really cool things. Today is going to be awesome because we're going to be talking about some high level software that is actually predictive of what you can charge and how to raise your prices incrementally without losing customers. This is kind of a new startup. We're going to be talking to them, they're out in New York. And what's cool is they actually have experience in the lawn care industry, but they're doing this for all labor. And again, whether or not you use the software is really irrelevant to me. This is not a sales pitch. I'm not, not sponsored or anything like that. This is a matter of thinking about how to raise your prices. And there's one key part in here I want you to pay attention to, and that is that you should raise your prices by 5% until you lose 20%. That's the way to maximize profit. So without me spoiling too much of it, let's go ahead and jump into talking to the co founders of this company that's getting started in New York and trying to make sure that your business is run most efficiently and based upon the geography of your customers. You, your pricing is indicative of that.

Here we go.

Let's go.

Jack and Tom, thanks for joining. I really appreciate it.

Hey, how's it been here?

Good, good. So what's funny is I think we got snow this year before you guys did. We had it last yesterday, but I only have you guys got snow. Any snow at all?

Very cool. So. So first off, maybe kind of give us a bit of a background on how you get started and also how the partnership between Jack, Tom and Juan, I'm assuming, are all partners, if you are, and how that is kind of broken up.

Gotcha. Yeah. So Tom and I actually worked for our uncle's landscaping industry company for around four years in high school. We were working summers with them and then, you know, after that we went to college and we both became computer engineers. Tom was working at Goldman Sachs, I was working at Amazon.

And you know, four years into that we decided, you know, maybe the landscaping industry is someplace where, you know, we haven't seen much innovation yet in terms of technology and maybe we can apply some of the things that we learned to that industry.

So yeah, it's the natural progression, you know, Goldman Sachs. Then you start a lawn care business.

Perfect. Yeah, I was definitely laughed, laughed at as I was giving My closing remarks at Goldman. That's all right.

Very cool. So. So then is it a three way partnership between your. Both yourselves and Juan? How is that kind of broken up in your roles inside the company?

So just about nine months ago, I left my job and then a few months after that, Jack left his and we started building what we can introduce as Labor Lad, which is, you know, landscaping specific software. It's kind of.

Mashup between a CRM and a marketplace for landscaping services. So we've been building that out for the past about 10 months now. And then a few months after, you know, officially launching it, which was, you know, early October, we met Juan. We really liked his story and we're hoping he'll join and be able to tell a bit about his story. But, you know, just if I could give the cliff notes. He started his landscaping business.

I don't think that long ago, maybe eight years ago, seven years ago. Yeah. And he kind of noticed a lot of the same things that we did where, you know, that we noticed when we were working in the industry where his day to day was very disorganized. And it's something that you also talk about on your channel a lot. You know, it's important to get organized, get all your customer data in the same place. You know, make sure you're, you know, simplifying your business, charging your customers, you know, online through credit card, if you can. So he noticed all those things and kind of implemented his own way of doing things through a combination of a whole bunch of different applications. I think he's using Jobber for his CRM and then for his sales pipeline, he's using Google Ads, Houzz, Angie Thumbtack, Basically, he's using it, he's used it. So he was able to give us a lot of good background on all those different applications and how they work because, you know, we had some understanding of how they work. But to hear it from someone who had used it and really who had used all of them, it was really helpful to get that information about what worked well for landscaping, what didn't work well for landscaping. So from there we started to work with him more and more on figuring out, you know, how we can make Labor Lad work best for his business.

Cool. So then right now, you know, it sounds like more like you all focus on the technology, he's focused on the actual operationals, and then you're kind of using him as a beta for what you're trying to build. Talk to me a little about his operations in terms of the all electric side of things, and then obviously the progression into robotics that you all would probably foresee in the future. Talk to me a little bit about that.

So when Juan first started, he had the vision of doing everything electric. So he did. He bought all electric equipment, you know, electric mowers, everything, everything was electric.

I think, like as he was starting, he was seeing, like it was difficult to expand because all of that equipment is, well, at the time was insanely expensive. Right. You know, it was like, you know, $15,000 for a ride on mower up to $20,000 where you can get a standard for like, I don't know, two grand or something used. So that was a limiting factor back in the day. Right. So, you know, obviously technology has progressed, battery technology has progressed as we've seen with Tesla. So now, like, I, I know we're in a unprecedented time where the shipping is super expensive and obviously that's affecting prices of everything. But, you know, hopefully when that clears up, we'll see the prices of these all electric mowers, you know, decrease over time. Then obviously there's some automated products out there. It's still like, they're still in the early stages. I know Juan bought a autonomous mower like back, you know, six years ago when they first came out. And he had the mindset of, you know, not even only automating the work, but actually just getting rid of, you know, a lot of the manual labor as well. So, you know, leaning heavily on automation on both, you know, the business side and automating on the actual, the maintenance side. So obviously that didn't really work out from a business perspective because it's difficult. You kind of have to still be hands on with those automated mowers, like if they get stuck and whatnot, you don't have the lines. They're not able to, you know, cut as, as low as some of these other, like, more powerful mowers. So it's more of, it's more of a consumer product at this point. Right. So hopefully as we see like technology progress, we'll see more, more of these autonomous vehicles. And funny enough, I have a friend, David Axelrod, I'll shout him out. This is like completely tangential but kind of interesting. He's working on drones to clean Windows. So, so, you know, we were kind of talking about some idea of using similar technology to trim hedges. So say you have a truck and you have multiple drones fly off the truck and just trim the hedges. I don't know if that's going to be in the near future or whatnot.

But one propeller to cut, the other propeller to lift.

Yeah, exactly.

So when you look from your perspective, obviously from Amazon as well as Goldman Sachs, like what was the opportunity from a technological standpoint that you saw or the sort of where was the industry appeal for you and the opportunity that you saw getting into the industry?

So we definitely had a background, as we mentioned, in the landscaping industry. So I just think having that prior knowledge and understanding kind of definitely primed the idea a bit. But I think also the industry as a whole has a fairly low technology adoption rate.

And the, the complexity of running a landscaping business is non trivial, you know, especially as you start to scale and you know, beyond really one crew, you know, handling maybe up to 120 houses in a given week for maintenance, it definitely starts to get complicated with scheduling. You have equipment failure, you have weather to work around. So, you know, all of these different things that you have to worry about as a business owner are things that can be automated and can be handled through software.

Well, even just beyond the automation. Right, so like Amazon, everyone knows Amazon. How does Amazon make the billions of dollars that they make? Right? You know, not just Amazon, Google, all these big tech companies, they use.

They use standard algorithms that enable them to adjust prices. You know, Uber does this too with Flex pricing. They have very automated pricing mechanisms. They have very intelligent, you know, sales ingestion workflows. So, right. So you go to the Amazon site, you don't just see a search bar, you see a bunch of products. So they're constantly honing.

This pipeline in order to get you to spend more.

Right.

And you know, there's CRMs out there that let the customers pay online, all this. There's also, you know, Angie and whatever. But those, you know, Angie is something that, you know, they're bidding landscapers against each other. They're trying to decrease your prices, they're not trying to make you more money and then they decrease your prices and they charge you a huge fee on top of it. It's insane. Like it doesn't make sense from the business side. Right. So what we're doing is kind of, you know, even opposite to that, we're focusing more on the increasing the amount of money that the landscaper can get from his current customers by using technology that, you know, some of the biggest tech companies in the world use that just, it hasn't hit the landscaping market yet. And once it does, it's going to be huge. Like you're going to see the first adopters making, you know, what we're seeing right now is double like 107% on average for certain products. We've been able to increase the price by like 500% just by having, you know, that, you know, that nice.

That nice sales sales platform to basically sell to. So, you know, you can use CRMs and whatnot, but these aren't going to enable you to maximize the profit in a way that, you know, some of this other technology can, can help.

And I think just to take it back to like a real world example, if I can, the business that we worked for was primarily a maintenance business where, you know, they had about 120 customers that they were doing a week for weekly maintenance. But where they made most of their money was on the upsells, on planting jobs, scaping jobs, and, you know, the fertilizing, weed control, pest control, that type of stuff which not all of their customers bought. And they did a really good job with those jobs. So the planting jobs, they always came out looking great. But the problem that they had was actually selling that, you know, they would manage through their personal relationship with some of the customers to sell a single planting job, they would do a fantastic job of completing it, but then they wouldn't really leverage that to actually get another one. So the idea that we have with laborlight is to keep your current customers in your sales pipeline, to keep them coming back and seeing the services that you offer and the great things that they can do that your business can do for them. And make it easy to order. One click ordering pay online. Get an estimate right now. Because all of those friction points of having to pick up the phone and call or not even knowing if you offer the service that they're looking for, that's all lost revenue. So if they're going on and they're paying their bill online, it'll automatically take you to take them to your sales page with all of your services listed, all of the photos of the great work that you do, and they can just one click order right there. So it's all about lowering the friction for your own customers to order more from you. Because your customers are obviously the best customers, right? You're going to keep all the good ones. So you want to keep them kind of in your sales ecosystem.

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So can you kind of give me some, some very tangible details of like, what those automations look like, what they're for? Like, I'm in this every single day, right? Like, I really believe in the future of the software industry. My daily operations within Augusta is mostly figuring out this sort of thing. And 100% of our profits are going to be in this world for the next three, four or five years of software. So, you know, from, from a tangible benefit for Labor Lad, for example, or just where do you see the opportunities here? Why can't someone just use a plugin like Infusionsoft or, you know, Salesforce along with HubSpot to be able to create these automations to keep people in the funnel? Or is this a matter of basically taking those tools and then making them really useful? And I shall almost say not dumbing them down, but making them applicable to the lawn care industry and our demographic.

Right. So it's definitely about making it seamless. Obviously, that's always the goal. But on top of that, what we have with laborlad is kind of a network effect, right? So, you know, you, you working as a standalone landscaper, you know, you can offer so many services and your customer might be happy, but.

The way Labor Lad works right now is our prices algorithmically scale based on geographical distance. So say you have, you're on laborlad and someone in the next town over is on labor, that as well, right? So you both have your customers onboarded to laborlad. Say you have some customers that are close to your competitor. He has some customers that are close to you. You're driving too far, he's driving too far. With labor that you're able to trade, you're able to trade those customers, right? So not only are you saving a bunch of time, you're saving a bunch of money because every time you're driving to those distances, you're paying your entire crew to basically sit in a truck for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. That's an insane amount of wasted time. So, you know, what we're doing is increasing route density by kind of enabling this network effect where you're kind of collaborating with some of the other landscapers in the area. Not only that, but also say, say someone needs.

A tree removed and your company doesn't do, hypothetically doesn't do tree removal.

Normally what happens is they Google tree removal and they try to find Someone, they never see any of your services, right? They never get advertised your services with labor lad when they need a tree remove, they look up tree removal, say your service, you don't offer tree removal, that's fine. They still see all of your, you know, they still get to, you get clicks on your page, seeing like more of your, maybe your promotional. You're promoting a sale on snow removal or something, right? They see all of that every time that they try to find a new service. So it's a constant. The more you keep people in this pipeline, the more you kind of, you know, the more you collaborate with some of the other.

You know, competitors in the industry, the more traction you get and the more money everyone makes. So that's what. It's kind of what Amazon did with books. They started with books and then they did books really well. Now, you know, they don't. Someone comes to the site, they don't necessarily need a book, but they can buy something, something non book related, but they still get advertised to. They stay in the sales pipeline. They stay in this, in this one platform.

So let me ask you this, let me be devil's advocate, just kind of push this envelope a bit. And that is so like when I buy a book on Amazon, I don't care where the book comes from. I'm more interested in the product. When it comes to lawn care landscaping, could it be that people actually do care about which provider they're getting? Because people do have different levels of insurance or different levels professionalism or different office desks and can you actually just say, hey, we're going to swap customers and the customer will be just fine with that. From not just the customer's angle like that, but also from the perspective of, hey, there is entrenched, you know, lines in the sand that people have made from a competition standpoint and now I'm sharing data with a competitor. So from a customer standpoint and from a competition standpoint, what was, what has you. How have you solved those problems?

So that's a great question and I'll handle the first one from the customer side first. This is something we thought about, you know, in terms of you need the job done, but you also need it done well. And maybe you've, you've used this landscaper for years and maybe you don't want to switch, right? So there's obviously going to be some friction there. One of the ideas we have to combat that is.

You would increase prices on your outlier houses first. So, so there's algorithmic ways that you can increase prices. I'm not sure if you know the kind of rules of this. So the rule of thumb generally is you increase prices at 5% increments until you lose 20% of your customers. And obviously it's different for the landscaping industry. Those numbers will vary.

When you're increasing prices for your customers, you don't want to increase them middle out, you want to increase them for the furthest people out because the value of that house may be less than the value of the houses that are closer. Right. The trading aspect is kind of a layer on top of that, where these are people that you would probably increase prices for anyway. But now you're giving the opportunity for them to kind of either, you know, keep the same prices or switch to someone that's going to do kind of the same job or, or, or they just say no and they're, they're going to keep you. But if they keep you, the prices have increased for them. So it actually makes it worth it for you always to have that either have that customer or trade that customer. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think, I think I totally get it from the customer standpoint of like the, the pricing. Like, for example, there's always inefficiencies for someone for their weight and then you should theoretically be able to trade that with another, you know, provider. My concern is that the product's not the same. Right. And that it is so differentiated because we're all using different softwares, we're different using different trucks and billing and all the rest of it. So is your idea, hey, get everyone on the exact same platform to try to streamline that and if so, why wouldn't you do a franchise in that matter that, that mind because you can control the brand more.

Right? Interesting. Yeah. So franchise we haven't really thought about honestly at all. So we haven't talked about the pros and cons of a franchise.

You know, our goal is to kind of long term, our goal is to have, be the single provider for all home services. So not just landscaping. Like we're, we're doing landscaping now because I know landscaping, he knows landscaping. We're very familiar with this. This is something that we know we can, you know, create software that helps these landscapers a lot. The once we have all, you know, a good foothold on the landscaping market, we plan to plan to expand. So that's why I'm not sure about the franchising aspect. I also want to let kind of, you know, every landscaper has their own personalities they have their own, like, little quirks and stuff. So I don't know if they want to keep their branding or whatnot.

Do you think it would be beneficial to make it more of a customer driven? Like, like even if Labor Lad contacts the customer and says, hey, so and so could be doing this service cheaper for you because they're closer. But then I've already had the, you know, acceptance between the contractors that we were willing to make this trade and then it be really the customer thinking they come up with the idea of switching based upon the recommendation of Labor Lad. Is that sort of what you're thinking?

Yeah. So the mechanisms and like the technicalities of the implementation, those are details that need to be worked out. Like I said, we just launched the beta. We're looking for, you know, if anyone's listening, we're looking for, you know, some people that are looking to try something new, try to experiment. We've had some success. I can show you the numbers. We've, you know, for Miguel, one of the guys we work with, he has about 20 customers right now. We able to increase his prices by over 100%. So we're looking for people that are, you know, trying to experiment with something new for the next season and work closely with them to, to build this out. But as far as the, the trading aspect, there are some details that we haven't necessarily worked out yet. And the actual, you know, implementation of that idea, you know, that that's something that we could even, like, we could talk with you about. I'm sure you have some great insight into the franchise and how franchises work. I have no, you know, experience in that, so.

But I think as you just said, in terms of, you know, the two business owners agreeing to something and then presenting that to the customer, that's more or less how we thought about it. Certainly we wouldn't be doing any, you know, trading of customers without the consent of both of the business owners and not even, you know, sharing of data without the consent of both the business owners.

So no, I think it's genius because like, as long as the product is consistent enough, then there's a win win for all three parties, both contractors, the customer. And then eventually it leads to price stability too, because their prices don't have to keep going up. Right. So I think it's really great from, from the competition standpoint view, Tom, I know we kind of addressed the customer side. How are you kind of dealing with that in trying to create more of an integrated network of labor professionals, not just landscapers, but labor professionals, when there is some lines in the sand being created. And people sometimes struggle with that in this industry.

So by lines in the sand, you mean people, you know, being unwilling to work in certain geographic regions or kind of let other people into that region. Is that.

Yeah. Or just even sharing client data on things like a transfer or when there.

Is just to stop you. Right. The client data is not shared at all. There's nothing. Your data is a hundred percent your data. We don't share that with literally anybody.

So the way the trade would work is you get notified that another business, you know, has a potential trade with you. It wouldn't tell you what house it is, what address, nothing like that. It would just be, you know, a proposal for a certain trade and, you know, letting you know which house you would be offering. And then in the event that you decide to accept that, then it would go to the next stage where it would let you know. Each business would then exchange the data about that singular customer and then you can make a decision on whether or not you would want to trade. So I think in terms of, you know, lines in the sand with sharing data, you know, it's not really a concern because no data is going to be shared. When you onboard your business and you onboard your customers, we know how valuable that data is to you. You know, that's never going to be publicly available to anybody.

Yeah. Does that answer the question or is.

Absolutely. And so I imagine, you know, your vision for labor led is connecting the customer with the, the contract really from day one, almost, correct me if I'm wrong, from an, from a lead standpoint, kind of like an Angie's List or. But then also through the process of being in their CRM and then that whole process after the sale, Right?

Yeah. So from the lead standpoint of getting new customers, the advantage you have of having your existing customer base onboarded is we know what areas you serve and not only what areas. I mean, of course, when you go on Andrew's list or thumbtack, you give it zip codes, you give it, you know, you can geofence the region, but we know exactly where your customers are. And so we can, we can have a much finer grain control on what the prices should be for certain customers based on where they are compared to your current customers. Like, let's say it's a neighbor of one of your current customers. You could probably offer them, you know, a little bit better of a deal than someone a few blocks away because you're going to have to pack up the truck so from the marketplace aspect, you know, definitely a, you know, huge benefit of having your customer data in there. But then I think probably one of the biggest benefits is really just keeping your customers in that marketplace because, you know, you put in a lot of effort to, you know, whether you're spending your own time or you're spending money to get people coming to photograph your jobs, you put in a lot of effort to create online profiles on all of these different marketing platforms. And then as soon as the customer uses that platform to reach out to you, they're no longer on that platform anymore. Anymore. And so you're not really putting in that effort to.

You know, grow the revenue from your current customer base. So it's a lot of time and effort just to get someone's phone number and, you know, maybe they're a good customer, maybe they're not, you know, depending on where they're located and what they're interested in.

So we kind of talked about like, you know, the inherent inefficiencies of having just different geographics and obviously how there's economies of scale with a business being closer to a certain customer, therefore being able to offer a more competitive price. What other sort of inefficiencies are you seeing in this industry from a project standpoint, from, you know, a maintenance standpoint that you're trying to exploit from and solve using software?

So certainly scheduling. I know that's something that's kind of been probably one of the more explored things with software in the landscaping industry. But I mean, you know, you've heard it, you've probably talked about it on your, on your channel before. But, you know, if you're not scheduling correctly and you're not, you know, doing job is the most efficient order, then you're losing time, you're losing revenue. So, you know, that would be another example of, you know, an efficiency that we could provide.

We're mainly focused on like, the, the pricing, though. So, like, I don't know if you, you've been hit with this, but especially in New York, there's a huge labor shortage right now, right? Hiring good guys is very difficult to do. That's always been a very painful problem when you're trying to grow a business because, you know, you're bogged down with the operations of the business. And if you hire a new person, you have to, you know, you have to have the work for them to do. It's kind of a chicken egg scenario, right? You don't want to hire a team if you don't have the houses yet. But you can't get the houses if you don't have the team. Right. That's a very difficult problem to solve. The way we think we can solve that and help someone grow is to squeeze out all this extra revenue from the customers you already have. We just really want to reiterate, we're very focused on maximizing profit without actually having to horizontally scale your business. And then once you have the money, you could do whatever you want. You can buy more machines, you can hire out a crew, you can expand horizontally once you're scaled vertically and there's so much money that people are leaving on the table that you can just take. You reach out and take it. Like we just, we just increase prices. It's not rocket science, right? Well, you know, there is some nuance to it and there's some. There's an algorithmic way that you should do it so that you don't tank your business. So, like, obviously we're trying to doing that, but once you use, you know, our platform, it'll be very easy to, to get that maximum price, that maximum revenue from the people that you've already done the work to on board. So that's kind of our main focus. We're not really focused on anything else. Like, I know, like a lot of these. You'll see all these softwares comparing each other. You'll see like the pro, the, the matrix of like, oh, the checkbox. We have this. We have this. We're not even in. We're not playing the same game. We're not. It's. We. We have the CRM. It's a good CRM. It'll work. Juan's switching to IT from Jobber because, you know, we may have less features on the CRM side. He doesn't care about that. Like, you know, all the bells and whistles of a crazy CRM. You don't really need much. You just need to know when, when to be and what time. So we have all that implemented. The business analytics side, the sales funnel is like the. Is what we're really going to be hammering hard in the next coming months because that's where we can see the greatest amount of profit. We've done the, we've done the math on a couple of landscaping companies around the area. And just, just to try and see, just from like you mentioned, the scheduling perspective, how much more money can we get by just optimizing their routes. Right. The number was 25%. 27% to be specific. But that's good. That's a Nice number, right? Like, you get 27% more money if you can optimize your routes better, but.

With perfect optimization, with perfect.

So that's no traffic anything. So that's. That's good, that's decent. 27%. Anyone would be like, all right, I'll have that. But what we were able to do with increasing the amount of money, you know, revenue from each customer is over a hundred percent. So you're literally doubling the amount of revenue you get with the same crew, the same guys, the same jobs, the same work. So why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you, you know, double your revenue without actually having to do, you know, pretty much any more work?

That's the main problem we're trying to solve right now with software and.

All the big. All the big. It's nothing new. All the big tech companies do it. Amazon does it, Google does it, all these companies do it. Why not do it with landscaping? Right? Like, you're leaving money on the table. And that's what. That's what we're trying to help with.

Do you believe that kind of with scale, that this will actually bring prices down even further? Just because when you start. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, when there is a. More of a demand, because at the end of the day, there's always going to be some other landscaper closer to your customer. Right. And so that they could always theoretically do it cheaper than you. And we come back to this situation of, you know, currently in this landscape in the industry, so are people able to go ahead?

So I don't think the. Certainly there's always someone willing to do it cheaper. I think regardless of the business you're in, that's absolutely true. I think from the customer standpoint, the switching cost of going from someone on Labor Lab to someone not on Labor Lad.

Is a lot greater than you might think. You know, if they're already using Labor Lad, they have a platform where they can go on, order things online, already has their credit card information. They trust the platform. It's easy to use for them to then switch to a landscaper who, you know, maybe put something in their mailbox or, you know, having to go back to the old way of doing things with Angie's List and calling a whole bunch of landscapers and hoping to hear back from one of them to maybe get a cheaper price.

I just don't see that being the case. And for landscapers on our platform, we're optimizing the prices for the landscapers. Right. So there isn't really going to be a case where a customer is seeing another landscaper on our platform doing it for cheaper because our algorithms are preventing that.

Right. So we'll. So if you have a competitor advertising, you know, $30 for average size house, you are doing it for $30. As long as they're. As long as they don't have customers that really like, tightly overlap with you, the prices that your customers will see.

For them will be adjusted based on distance. So it'll be upwards of. It could be even three times more expensive if they want to book this competitor than you through laborlad. And that's done on our side. The competitor has nothing. You, you, if you join laborlad, you, your prices are very strictly adjusted based on geography. And you know, you can't necessarily use labor that to advertise in a different town for the same price. We're going to raise your prices because we see that you don't have any customers in that area yet. So it prevents the. That overlap that you just mentioned in the.

For the competitors that are actually in labor land.

So it's probably not a great way to expand into a new area. But we think that the priority should be on protecting the businesses that are onboarded and making sure that a new business doesn't come on and just, you know, list a whole bunch of services at a much cheaper rate and steal all those customers.

Cool. Yeah. That's kind of why franchising came to my mind. It's probably more of a licensing play, just because it is somewhat territorial in my mind, just because if there is a cheaper player and someone comes that's more expensive, they can't really overlap that person then, because then the prices would have to go up. Would that, would that algorithmically be changed, the pricing be determined like by square footage? Is it an hourly rate that you all kind of use as an input for your contractors? And is that something that you're looking to change in this industry, which is typically like, oh, it's going to cost $25 and they just pull it out of thin air. What or how are you using software to systematize the estimating side of things?

So I think there's been a lot of work done from other companies on, you know, autumn automating the estimates. We more or less leave that up to the business owner. You know, they can set estimates themselves, they can set prices themselves. What we're doing is scaling based on geography. So we take whatever prices they set as kind of the base price for, you know, people within their, you know, very close geographic region and then we scale that based on how far away the other customers are in terms of, you know, software that maybe uses like property data to start.

You know, making smarter estimates on what the prices should be. I think it's definitely interesting. It's expensive from our perspective to actually get that property data and it's probably not something that we're pursuing anytime soon.

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And going forward, like in terms of robotics as we kind of wrap things up, obviously the thing I love about the software is that it can speak to the robot. Right? And so this, all this information that's being, you know, databased can talk to a robot that's on the property and make, you know, intuitive decisions. So what? Obviously this is more of a long term. I'm assuming you're focusing on the sales and the, the pricing side of things, which I think is a great niche to get into because it's not served based on geography and not focusing so much on the estimating or like automation even just like, you know, so and so show your property more on, on the pricing side. But when it comes to the robotics, the future of this industry, as that begins to take root and the pricing becomes more economical, how do you see pricing being determined by robots as that technology starts to take over in this industry, specifically to lawn care and landscaping?

Yeah, I mean, I'd certainly love to. You know.

I look forward to a time when, you know, we can drive around with a truck of automated mowers and kind of just drop them off from property to property and have them do the job and then go around and pick them up. In terms of how that would affect price, I think, you know, without having to, you know, have the labor laborers actually do a lot of the work, it could probably reduce costs for the consumer. But I think a lot of the same things will still apply. Like if you're running a business with those robots, they're not going to be cheap. There's certainly going to be a lot of maintenance costs for them and probably significant insurance costs above and beyond what you're paying, you know, with people doing the work. So, you know, probably a lot of the same things would still apply where you're going to be looking for efficient routes and you're also going to be looking for upsells on higher margin services because, you know, the robots can, you know, right now we've seen them, they can kind of cut lawns. I don't know if you have one. They do, you know, an okay job at that. But, you know, if they get to the commercial level, they'll be able to handle that type of maintenance. But you know that that's not the only thing that goes into maintenance. Certainly.

You know, even with the lawn mowing, there are complexities. And then as you get into the other services like planting jobs, you know, kind of the higher margin services, you know, I don't see robotics taking over in that anytime soon. So, you know, it would probably be even more beneficial now just thinking about it, to be on our platform because you can increase the number of maintenance jobs that you're doing in a given week, which would just mean you have more customers coming to your page, looking at all the additional services that you offer and buying those, you know, higher margin planting or, you know, scaping jobs.

Here's what a lot of smaller mowing and landscapers are somewhat concerned about. And I, you know, I'd be interested to see what your response is to it, knowing that you all are somewhat on the cutting edge of the technology side. And that is because it's such a capital intensive game when it comes to robotics. What prevents someone like an Amazon coming in or like a Home Depot or a Lowe's that has a network of professionals behind them, what prevents them from coming in, taking the lowest hanging fruit, like mowing, for example, with robotics, and then farming out and getting the customers because they can come in for pennies on the dollar and it's capital infusion and then farming out the leads to other services that like tree trimming, mulch installation, and then basically them being the governor and governing kind of center that we all have to revolve around. What is there? What is the need for a small town, small landscaper? And obviously that's who your current demand is. Why do you feel like that or do you feel like that's still going to be valuable to customers in the future?

I mean, the robotics were very far from that. Like, Amazon has billions of dollars. Billions. This is more than any other Lowe's, whatever, Home Depot, they're not even in the same playing field. They have the best engineers in the world working for them. They have thousands of people and they're, you know, they're working on drones right now. I'm sure you've seen like YouTube videos, they're doing drone delivery, which is so Much easier than manipulating somebody's lawn. You just have to pick up a box and put it somewhere else. That's the easiest thing you can do with drones, is that right? And they're not there yet. They're not even close with drone delivery because things like weather and like, you know, even just lobbying the government to allow these private aircraft to be flying around. Safety is a big issue. If Amazon isn't there yet with delivery, you don't have to, you don't have to worry and watch as I say this. Amazon's gonna launch.

A little blue robot mower comes out nomorrow, the prime mower.

But I think even in the event that it does get to the point, which it probably will in our lifetimes.

I think what you'll wind up seeing is the people who don't really care so much about quality will probably flock to these services, you know, where they're getting their lawn cut. And you know, those weren't really the customers who were paying for any of the upsells anyway. So I would almost look at it as a benefit in, you know, removing the customers who don't really care about quality, you know, who are really going to be problematic for your business, who are really just looking for the cheapest thing done as quick as possible and not have to pay for anything else. So you know, if they want to eat up all those customers and then leave the higher quality customers who are looking for the more expensive things to be done that can't be done with robotics, fine by me.

I agree and I think that's a great answer. I think the key is like of your software raising prices incrementally. Hey, if we lose some of those customers to a robot that is less service, less personality, less brand oriented, then hey, I'll take the higher end, higher margin customers, so. Right. I really appreciate you guys being on here.

In a kind of summary, what do you kind of anticipate? Obviously it's, you're in beta right now, next couple years you're trying to roll out something that can be a little bit more useful for all of the landscapers. Or is it somewhat still in testing now?

So right now the CRM, everything's built, you can go on to labor lad we're actually live in production. We have, we're doing snow. You'll see our sites tailored towards snow removal at the moment. But we do everything like anything, you know, multiple pricing options that you can do. All the geographic pricing's done, the one online payments, scheduling, all this, you, it's ready for people on board.

We'Re gonna take it a lot further. So, you know, if you want to get in the early stage, the way it works is you, if you onboard your customers, those are your customers and then no one else can onboard them. Right. So that's kind of an incentive to get in early. Like once you onboard them, it's kind of set there like became your customers and they have your prices. Whereas if you're late to the game and everyone else onboarded people and you don't have anyone to onboard, you're kind of dead in the water at that point. So it's definitely good to get in early it there. You know, we just launched, so there are some bugs. We're available 247 on call to fix these bugs. So, you know, if you're, if you're going to join, you might need some patience. You might, you know, it might be, you know, little diff. You might run into some issues.

But I think the flip side of that, you know, if you are looking to try something new, you'll have two engineers at your disposal. You have a personal cell phone, numbers, you know, if you need something done, you need something fixed, you need a new feature, you know, you pick up the phone, you call us. We're happy to discuss it with you. You know, happy to work with you to make it work for your business. And just to reiterate what Jack said, you can go to labor ladies, that's lad lad.

Or you know, you could reach out to us via email. I don't know if you. Do you want us to share our contact info or.

Yeah, for sure. Yep.

Okay. Yeah, so it's either Jack or tom@laborlad.l a b o r L-A-D.com so you can shoot us an email or you know, the contact info is on the site as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you guys for coming on. I think it's a great conversation around, you know, obviously Mike Hunt. I'm very much in pro and have a brand have higher prices and the fact that, you know, I think it's something that we kind of overlook sometimes. That fact that is. Hey, geography. Geography really does play a part in what you can actually produce a product or service for because we have to travel to their. Their location. So I really appreciate you guys coming on. I'll make sure to link up everyone to labor lad in the description. But thanks so much for all your advice and help.

Thanks for having us.

My Take care guys. You have a good one. Bye. Thanks so much for tuning in today to another episode of Roundup. If that was something interesting to you and you learned something, comment below, share the message with other landscapers so we as a community can come together and learn and grow our businesses. If you would like to be on the Roundup show and actually interview with me just like we did today, feel free to go in the description. There's a link there. Fill out the form and we'd love to talk to you. If you are wanting to share with the industry and help other people grow their business, thank you so much. I'll see you in the next episode.