Spring Rush Shenanigans (Q&A)

Welcome back to the Mike Gambys Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Gambys Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. So we saw the metrics on the last podcast episode we had on Spring Rush and the numbers were huge. So we're taking this as a sign you guys want more Spring Rush content. We had another previous livestream that Mike did last year in 2022, right around the last time Spring Rush was in full swing. This one was part War Stories, part Q and A. So we hope that you'll be entertained or at least get burning questions that you have answered. As always, you can find Aldous and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. But without further ado, here's Mike Andes with some Spring Rush shenanigans.

What's up everyone? Mike Andy's Here it is Friday evening and tonight we are going to talk about some shenanigans that happened today, in fact in the past hour. But before we get into that, if you have not already, make sure you go to mikeandys.com vote and here you're going to be able to vote on who goes from the Elite Eight into the Final Four. And so in a few minutes here, once we get things kicked off, I'm going to announce the winners of the Elite Eight and we will move into who wins and moves into round the Final Four. So looking forward to it. We have a couple really good matchups for this week from Stanley Dirt Monkey versus The Long Hair Juggernaut Top Notch versus Ryan. Ryan Knorr Lawn Care Blades of Grass versus Lawn Care Life SB Mowing versus It's his turn. So that's the Elite Eight and we're going to see who gets into the Final Four. Again, for all of you that cast your bracket, the very beginning of this, we're going to see who is getting closest. We do have several people that have got all round one completely right. So looking forward to seeing who will get this round correct. And so you can Help your favorite YouTuber win either $2,000 or a full film day with the and then again, any of the viewers out there that have cast their bracket for the the competition, they will also win one of those as well. So we're going to go ahead and talk about a few things. Some craziness that happened the past hour literally from some of the owners that I've talked to in Augusta Nation. But while I'm doing this, feel free to go to mikeannies.comvote get your last minute submission in. So that counts for this round. So let me talk about a couple things that happened today. So just in the past hour, two things that happened were just, just kind of indicative of what happens during spring rush. The craziness that happens. A couple of the owners and I guess the lawn care reached out to me. One of them had a, an employee that was working with him. He's just getting started. So it's him and one of his employees is in his truck and the employee wanted to call it quits for the day and was asking, hey, can we be done or whatever. Well, they roll up to the next job and they're just about to get out and all of a sudden an ambulance pulls in behind them because the employee called the ambulance to come get him while he was on the job without telling the owner, which is crazy. So that was one thing. The next thing, I just got contacted by one of our franchisees in California and that specific instance is actually still in progress right now. Let me pull my phone, see if he's figured it out yet. So they are. He's currently on the way to a job site where it's actually a tenant at an apartment complex that they service. And the tenant is saying that they scratched up their car while they were servicing the property. But he knows that all the work they do is on the other side of the car where he said it was scratched. So he's just kind of wondering what he should do. But he's doing great. He's awesome, awesome owner down there in California. So we'll see what happens there. But the craziest stuff happens in the spring rush. It is absolutely a crazy time because usually your employees are the most novice. They're just getting started. If you hired them in the spring rush of March, they're probably just getting the rhythm of things, learning the property, learning how the systems work. And that's also the time when the craziest stuff happens with employees, et cetera, as well as customers. So, for example, for the car situation, it's a matter of don't admit fault when you get there, actually see if it's possible that you could have potentially broken a window or scratched up the car. And don't admit guilt because if you talk to your employee like, look, we were 100ft away and we were on the other side of the car and that can never happen. And then one thing that happened to us back in the day too is they were saying we scratched the car. But when you looked at the zero turn, there was no piece of that zero turn that could have touched that high on the car without like it have tipped and like touched the roll bar. And so sometimes you can just kind of make it make sense of it once you see it. And so he was going there to go investigate. But sometimes tenants do that. It wasn't even like the owner, it was the tenant of the apartment, one of the, of the apartment complex. So interesting time. So we're gonna go ahead and jump into some Q and A. But if you're just joining me, make sure you go to mikeannies.com vote for your last minute opportunity to vote on the Elite eight as we head into the final four next week. And again, this is going to give you the opportunity to win a $2,000 prize or a full day where we come send our film team out, do pictures, video, lots of marketing stuff that you can use for your business. Let's go ahead and jump into things with some good Q and A. Hey Mike, I'm just starting out and registered as an llc. How do you recommend doing your taxes as a new startup, do it yourself or hire someone to do it. So I would recommend if you're just getting started out and you're really, really small and you're just doing a schedule C, which is typically what you're going to file as a single member LLC where it's just one more document inside of your personal tax return, I just recommend filing either with like a turbo tax or some, you know, H and R block or something simpler, simple like that. Unless you know someone locally a good cpa, I would definitely do that. I do believe even for a small business that is doing 50, 60, 70,000 in annual revenue, I still believe that having a CPA look at your taxes, you're going to save more. They're going to know the opportunities to be able to. You'll get those little deductions and hopefully save you more money than what they cost to file your taxes. So any business, in my opinion, should have a CPA do it. I don't recommend doing it yourself, especially because if you don't know what you don't know, you might potentially be understating how much income you have. And that's just as bad as not getting a good deduction because it's going to come back to bite you if you ever get audited. And that's not good news. And I have to say that too, because Brad is a CPA and he's back there.

So. All right, cool. Yeah, make sure. You go vote for blades of grass blake over@mikeannies.com vote vote for him for this upcoming round. See if he can get into the final four. I'm going to announce the winners here in just a few minutes. The title describes my life right now. Yeah, the spring rush is an absolute crazy, crazy time. Colt didn't think I need to hire this spring. I needed to hire. Yeah. Over hiring is what we talked about in January.

And it's extremely important. Who else can't breathe with all the pollen? Yeah. Pollen is nuts. I still remember way back when I would be mowing out all day long, that I have really bad allergies in the pollen for about two to three weeks in later spring rush. So, like May, end of May, when it starts getting a little bit warmer. And in our area, we have cottonwood trees, and when they start just dropping a bunch of pollen, it's horrible. So I would. I would have two shirts and what I would do is I would wear the shirt until you got warmed up throughout the day. And then I'd start, you know, getting all sorts of, like, I'd get a rash all over my chest. It'd get really itchy. And then, like, my throat would start constricting a little bit. And then my. You get snot all over the place. So I would literally use my shirt as just like a snot rag. And it would get really bad. Then I would switch it out, usually around like 12, 1 o'. Clock. And then that second shirt, I do the same thing until the end of the day. That was. That was brutal. And it's funny. It's funny how, like, literally half the guys that do lawn care and landscaping, it seems like we have allergies. It's. It's like God cursed us with. With allergies when he said you're gonna do lawn care. Are you live on YouTube? Yes, I am live on YouTube. I'm in Texas. I need to go. Go to bed. Suffocating. Yeah. Allergies? Yes. What's the status of landscape Summit? John, after land, after we are done with Mo Madness, we are launching the site. It's going to be great. Really looking forward to it. Some really cool stuff we have going on. First question, Mike, first. Should we go ahead and hire a virtual office, Jill's office, etc. We are getting a ton of leads and calls are falling through. Yeah, I would recommend that Jill's office calls call boss. Another one I looked up the other day. Let me see if I can find this. I don't Think I can, I think I might deleted it. Told Ruby it's another service much larger than these other companies. I just mentioned Jill's Office or Ring Call Boss. You're looking at between a dollar and 20 cents and $3 per minute, right? So it's not cheap. And the wrong equation to run in that in your mind is really why people no one uses virtual assistants like Call Call Boss or, or Jill's office or Ruby is like man. Okay, let's just say it's $2 per minute, right? $2 per minute. My goodness, that's a, that's a hundred and twenty dollars per hour I'm paying someone to answer my phone. Like why in the world would I not get someone at 15 or $20 an hour, $30 even an hour to answer my calls? The reason is because when you don't have calls you're paying zero, which means during the winter and has me slow down, you don't have to pay for anything. And furthermore, again, some of them have a monthly fee. Like if I remember correcting Jill's Boss, you do have to pay like a $50 a week fee plus any minutes use. But the bottom line is you don't have to invest in infrastructure. You have to buy a building, you have to rent a building. And finding commercial real estate right now where you're going to have an office space and space to park your trucks and vehicles is expensive and that lease is going to be expensive and you're going to be tied into a long term commitment. That's complete overhead. I'd much rather have a variable cost of minutes that correlates with how much, how busy I am than a fixed cost of overhead in the form of utilities and rent and an office manager and their, and their salary. So if you take, let's just say you have to pay 5, someone someone $5,000 per month after taxes and other costs of hiring. $5,000 a month for your office person. Then let's say you have $2,000 for your rent. Okay, now we're at 7,000, let's say a thousand dollars for your Internet, your electric, your water, all the rest of it now at 8,000. Okay? And when you start talking about $8,000 a month now you times that by 12, we're looking at $96,000 for the year. You have to ask yourself well how many minutes are, am I really on the phone? And ask yourself is it really worth getting a virtual assistant getting someone like a Jill's office, call boss, etc. And a lot of people Ask, are we going to let command center ever be outside of Augusta? And the answer is no. I see a couple questions coming about that we won't. That's the only reason why we're at between 90 cents and a dollar and 9 cents per minute and we're a lot cheaper is because everyone's using the same systems and it's only Augusta. So for all people asking, no, we will not ever open up command center ever outside of Augusta. We have enough problems as it is with just Augusta lawn care in our system, let alone all of your CRMs and your issues and your problems. So love your last video on your mind and body business. I hope you can do it later. Thank you, Integra. Whatever has happened or will happen on a property is your fault. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. Brad, what up? Good dude, Brad. People are saying hi to you. Spoke with him on P4P. Burdette Hayes. When do you talk to them? Yes sir. Yesterday. Was that yesterday? No, it was a couple weeks ago. A couple weeks ago. Nice. Let's go. Is working as a subcontractors for other smart. I've been given a ton of offers to do so, but I feel like I'd be cutting myself short because they take 5 to 10% right off the top. Yeah. Like just in cases of the subcontractors that tell you hey, you know property and you got to take pictures and you know these are foreclosed houses and you gotta take before and after pictures and upload them to a portal. If you do that, those are horrible contracts. They will, they have no regard for you as the subcontractor whatsoever. And I would highly recommend doing it. It's like, it's literally addictive because like they can literally give you 30. I, we get 30 properties tomorrow. Yeah. But like they all of a sudden don't pay you because you upload your 21st photo on their portal by 12 o' clock that night. Like it's the craziest stuff. So it's, it's easy to get those. There's lots. There's actually good money in it, honestly. And you can winterize the houses and they do like random services for those property management companies or those, those companies that are property preservation. But it's not scalable. Like you're not going to get, you know, get employees and do that for you long term. What's the best way to tell your client you are raising prices? Honestly, if it's mowing, I would just start your season off and tell them here's your Prices for the upcoming season, weekly, bi weekly, whatever it is, and just raise the prices. That'd be the first way to do it. If you need to raise them in the middle of the year but they're gonna be more conscious of what the prices were in the past. That's when I would explain. Hey, due to rising costs, we're raising the prices. I make it very short and simple. Aaron's Lawn Care. If you are in landscapebusinesscourse.com there's an actual letter that we've used to raise prices in the past and it's worked really, really well. Just to go into the templates and documents. Yeah. What is mo madness? You gotta go mikeannies.com vote. It's like March Madness where everyone voted for their bracket. And now we are going to the the tournament. What's next for lawn landscape business? Course I add to it every fall. So last fall we added a whole bunch of content in there. Every fall add to it and then.

Hey Mike, love your videos about how to grow your business. When are you going to start doing more business? Visit videos. I don't see that in the future, in the near term future, honestly, just because the time it takes for myself to go out and do that right now is not in the cards. As of now. Are your sales on pace with last year? We are getting tons of cancellations due to people moving, Liam. Yeah, so this is a good point. Um, our sales are on pace, you know, in terms of asking me, my, me personally. But in terms of the cancellation side of things, what I would really look at is what's your customer like? Who is your customer? For example, people in their 60s and 70s move a lot less typically than someone that's a working professional has a family. Because if you have a family of a growing family, you're going to need a different house, you're going to need a larger house, you're going to want to move to the suburbs. If you have a different job, you're going to move. Whereas if once you retire, a lot of times people settle down in the same place for 10 or 20 years. And so I would really look at seeing potentially where you're doing your marketing, which neighborhoods, what type of houses. If you're doing small residential homes and tracked new neighborhoods, again, that's probably going to be a working professional and I'm not against those as customers. But if you're struggling against lots of cancellation, that's a big problem for you is churn then that might be something you want to look at. Is like, where are you spending your marketing dollars? And can you allocate more towards an elderly population that's retired that's going to stay in that same place for a long time? And keep in mind that it's pretty common to have 20% attrition in this industry, which means every single year 20% of your customers are lost simply because they do move, they pass away, they sell their house, all the rest of it. So it's relatively common. And this is why a lot of times companies will grow, grow, grow, grow. And it's like, why aren't we growing anymore? And you know, in years 5, 6, 7, etc. Like, why aren't we growing as much? Bottom line is you might be in just as many sales as you did a few years ago, but because your, your size, the number of recurring customers that you have has got to a certain point where 20%, I. E. Attrition is equal to the amount of new customers you're getting. And so if your sales are on pace with last year, for example, but last year you went from 50 million customers to 200, well guess what? If you have a 20 attrition, that means you're literally losing 40%, or sorry, 40 of those customers, 20% of that 200 every single year. Which means if you sell another 50 this year, you sell 50 clients this year, you're literally just going to have 210 customers. So that's why a lot of times that will happen. You'll grow, grow, grow. And it's like, why am I evening out when it comes to recurring work, Typically your attrition will catch up to a certain point and then you hit that threshold. And the only way to break out of that is to market and artificially increase the amount of leads and the sales from there. But most time I don't recommend doing that. Like stay there, raise your prices, increase your margins, become ultra profitable, and then go start a second location. That's usually what my recommendation is. Get more geographically dense by doing that.

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Have you made the transition to four day work weeks? Have your franchisees? Some of them. Some of our franchisees do. We tried this out last year. It actually was something that our employees wanted and then most of them ended up not liking it. So we've switched back to five days. We might switch back to four during the summer months when it gets really hot and when there's less mowing. So it's something that we kind of do as flexibility. And we did it last fall really for the sake of culture, as so many of the employees wanted it and they ultimately decided like, hey, like, let's just go back to five days, especially during the winter. But I think we potentially would be flexible, go to four days during the summer. But we really pivoted more towards hiring so many people that if we would need to give people off Friday, we just give them off Friday. And if they only work 32 or 35 hours a week, that's fine. That's kind of our philosophy. Will landscape summits no longer be on Lawn care online? Oh, you're talking about the recordings. Not for now, no. There's two on there. The virtual one and the year before that is currently on landscape business course. How many employ the command center and how many calls per day do you get there? I can't tell you everything.

But we get a lot, a lot. Grass grows the fastest during like June, July and August when it gets hottest. And so you want to determine what window of time you require weekly. And most time people will go along with that. But the biggest way to overcome the bi weekly objection is make it in their best interest and that is use price. So that's why we always recommend giving a weekly and a bi weekly price. So they can say, look, I don't sell it as like, hey, your weekly is going to be 40. If you go bi weekly, it's going to cost you $15 more. No, what you should say is, hey, it's me $55 for biweekly, but if you go to weekly service, we give you a discount. It's only 40. So sell your weekly as a, as a discounted service instead of your bi weekly as an upcharge.

Do you strictly do residential? Any plans on going commercial? No, we just finished a commercial contract we just sent out right now.

And I'd say mostly we do residential, like 90%, but we do commercial stuff too. What is a good profit margin to go for on a basic Mow, trim, blow. I've heard you say that 15 is typical, but can you get a higher margin? If so, how? Yeah, so again, margin is something that people just throw around like it's. Yeah, it's candy. There's so many different ways of looking at margin. You have net margin and you have, you have gross margin, right? So gross margin, you typically, you know, on average, again, I'm using round numbers just for the sake of having a number because it's just so variable. But you know, usually you want that gross margin to be over 50%. But gross margin doesn't include insurance on the truck. It doesn't include all the other overhead like calls to a virtual office or having an office manager. Those are all expenses that are not calculated inside of gross profit margin. Whereas if we're looking at your net profit margin at the end of the day for a whole business, and when I say 15% is typical, I'm talking about a million dollar company, right? If you're doing a $200,000 per year business, I expect you to be able to do 30, 40% net margin money at the end of the day. That's, you know, profit. And again, another question has to be broadened. Well, is that before or after the owner salary? Well, if you're working in the business, your salary should come out before your profit. Because otherwise, if you have a business that does $500,000 in revenue and it does $50,000 in quote unquote profit, but that $50,000 is what you take home every single day to basically pay for your living, then you have to ask yourself, well, there's technically no profit in the business because if you have to pay yourself a nominal salary, a regular salary, let's just say you're worth 50,000. Now that business has gone from a 10% margin to a 0% margin. And that is an unprofitable business, is also a business that cannot be sold, has no real value because it is simply a job. And so once you take out of your, what most people call net margin is actually prior to the owner's salary. And so it gets me a little bit afraid because at the end of the day, if your salary is taken out of the business and that eliminates all profit, you essentially have an unprofitable business. You have yourself a job that is what you have built. So when I say a million dollar company does 15% margin, typically it's a very honestly, 15% at that size in this industry is not very bad. After the owner salary, it's not Bad. Now, as you, as you get to a point where you hire a manager, you can afford it if you have 150, $200,000 in profit after your wages, after your salary. So like at a local shop, the very first one, I do still take a salary and when I say that we run 20% margin, that includes after it's after I have been paid my salary as the owner. So. That was a long question. It was a long answer. Lucas. Hey, Mike. How are, what are your ways to handle all the pressure of running a business? I have a hard time dealing with losing employees, angry customers, etc. This time of year is tough. Yeah. Watch the video I posted this morning. I agree with you. It's not easy all the time. And I'm not gonna, I, I try my very best, my content to make it very clear that is very normal. Green splatter. Hey Mike, an update on EDDM results. Five calls after one week. Most spring cleanups. Yep. Every door direct mail is a very much of a hit and miss game. I've seen as much as a 1% response rate or 2% response rate and I've seen as low as 0.01% response rate, which means that for every 10,000 pieces, they get like a couple estimates. Like I've seen that. So it really comes out of timing. It comes out of your different markets. Like we're at completely different to every direct mail. The demographic of the type of people inside of your where you're targeting very important. The thing that you can control the most because you can't control the weather, you can't control whether or not the mail person.

Folded your postcard. You can't control whether or not there was a massive newsletter or a newspaper that week and you got lost in the shuffle of a massive chunk of mail being put in everyone's mailbox. You can't control that. What you can control is two things. One, which neighborhood you're putting, you're putting those flyers, door hanger or flyers, postcards, etc in. And that's going to be using the every door direct mail tool to be able to see the specific neighborhoods and making sure the income is right, the age demographics are right. That's. You can control that. You can also control the design. Right. So check out lawn caremedia.com if you want to take a look at some of those designs. What would you recommend to rank higher on Google? I haven't made a video much on SEO recently, mostly because at lawn care web design we're pretty backed up with some of People that are trying to get on board right now as we end the spring rush, but I will try to make one. I'd say that the fastest, cheapest way to rank well on Google is Google Reviews. And still to this day it's better than like, we can do an incredible job at SEO and we will be on the top of page number one, page number two, and then someone will go and get 20 reviews and immediately we'll go from the top of page number two to like the third or fourth spot in page number one, like immediately. So great SEO is fine and good, but good Google reviews is good, is awesome. And the third really big pinnacle of that is design speed, Design load. When it comes to what kind of code on the back end is for mobile, very important. Is it mobile friendly? Is there pop ups which is not good? Is it heavy in terms of the amount of data that's required to load the page? Lots of different things. And speed right now is the name of the game when it comes to SEO. It is no longer like the old fashioned keyword thing is so old news right now. People are writing articles that say their name, the city name like 20 times and say lawn care and landscaping 50 times. That is so old news and Google knows it. And it's starting to really, really pick up on these things and, and hurt and hurt. The ranking of websites that have lousy old fashioned SEO tactics that worked back in 2005. Because in the back in the old days, you know how you would rank really well on Google? You would take a color like white as your background of your website and then you'd take white text and you would do a whole bunch of keywords like lawn care, landscaping with your city name, with your zip code. You do a ton of that. And then you would put it up against that white background. No one would see it from a design perspective. But then.

The Google and the search engine would scrub it and see all of those and think that you're like this great website with all these great keywords, well, guess what? That does not work anymore. Okay? If someone's trying to convince you that you need to spend $1,000 a month because they need to write text and copy for you and write articles using your name and your city name and all the rest of it, that is not what drives results when it comes to SEO. Okay? It comes strictly down to your service pages are important. Your service pages, like the titles, those are important. The speed of your website is becoming 60 to 70% of what Google is looking at. The design do people stay on the website? How fast does it load? And we are looking at some really cool technology to improve Augusta's speed of literally where before you even click in the search results, it's already loading the site. So that way when they click on it, it's already preloaded. Because Google loves load time increases. And we've tested this across the board. We've taken a website in an old JavaScript and then put better design on it, made it where it was half the amount of speed, and immediately Google picks up faster in the rankings. So speed and design is extremely important. Now. That's why you look at, when you search for a website, you're not pulling up sites that have a whole bunch of text and articles that write. That's not who's coming up, it's who has the traffic. And traffic's gonna be resulting in who has a site that people actually wanna go to. Who actually has a site that is appealing that when you click on it, it actually loads. On YouTube. One of the things Google hates the most when it comes to ranking is when people click on your link, they click on your ad, they click on your website and they bounce back. That is a huge red flag to Google that says, I thought I wanted to go to the site and I decided not to. And if it's because your site did not load due to speed, you have a big problem. And so if your web developers have not figured out how or you have not been able to figure out how to like preload a site from the top to the bottom instead of just making like, I've seen it before, sites that load an image that is below the fold, you can't even see it on the front. The front. When you first come to the site and it's loading a 4 megapixel video or picture at the bottom of their web page, that's really, really bad. Really bad from a site speed perspective. So anyways, sorry.

Glc, Lawn care. Don't you think the money is better in commercial? Example brightview and Mainscape? Yes, it is. The money from a revenue standpoint is it's also extremely.

Competitive. And as I look at Brightview and lots of other companies, they almost all go towards commercial. And that's for a lot of different reasons. Economies of scale. And they can pump more money into infrastructure in order to become the efficient. Efficient enough to become competitive. Right. So if I buy bigger mowers, I can compete better on.

Commercial. If I buy bigger equipment, I can compete better on commercial. And so you're going to get this infinite game of who can just invest the most into these businesses in terms of infrastructure. And I'm not going to compete with brightview, a publicly traded company. I'm not going to compete against TruGreen. I'm not going to go against those guys because they don't need to have profits this quarter and take a salary. They just need to show growth on the next quarterly report to Wall street. And you're not going to compete against that. So in my mind, I think this video is coming out soon. When's this video coming out? There's a video coming out. Oh, it's coming out tomorrow. Tomorrow There's a video coming out. It's about my projections for the lawn care landscaping industry the next 15 years. And one of them is consolidation. And I truly believe that this is a really fragmented market. You know, Brightview has literally 2% of the market and then the biggest player in town by a long shot. The next player is like one and a half percent. Next player is like half a percent. So it's very fragmented. There's 600,000 landscapers in this, in, in the country. That's going to change. And I do believe that companies like Brightview will hold 10 to 15% of the market down the road. And so I'm not going to compete against Brightview. I think that's a losing game. They're too far ahead. And so just my opinion.

Do you know of any other green industry that uses a command center design for their office? And when would you recommend someone to do this? Do you know of any other green user command center design for the office? Yeah, I think we talked about this a little bit earlier. Colton. Jill's office is great. Call boss is great. Ruby is great. You're looking between a dollar and 20 cents per minute plus a fee. So let's just say $1.50 per minute to about $3 per minute for those services.

Can you rapidly grow your business by doing just residential mode trim blow or is it almost required to offer landscape and other cities in order to get over that revenue hump and grow large? This is a great debate and I 100% agree to grow revenue and go over the quote unquote hump. Yes. Offering hard hardscaping and landscaping and commercial is going to get you there faster and it's easier to scale that 110%.

But I also believe that there are competitors are too far ahead in the commercial game to actually compete with them without spending billions of dollars. So I'll talk more about that tomorrow in a video. What are your thoughts on a web store? A web store on the website. What are your thoughts on a web store on the website? Jeff, explain a little bit more to me on that one. Sorry. Web store. Web store. Are there any good businesses books you would recommend that have helped you a ton in your entrepreneurship journey? Yep, there's a lot. Let me see the most recent one I listened to one second here. Audible. Pull it up. Boom. Let's see here. Oh, this is a good one. Freakonomics. It's not really about a ton about business. It basically just takes economic principles, the way people look at, like, Wall street and things, and then applies it to other things like abortion, murder rates, crime.

Success against, like, races. It's really cool. It just like, looks. It looks at all those different social things through an economic lens. I really liked it. How do you win in this labor market, Kevin? You got to eat burritos like that, Kevin. I don't know if anyone can see, but Kevin's profile picture is from conference when he was having his massive burrito at our local Mexican restaurant. So if you. If you eat enough burritos of that size and you have a beard like Kevin, that is the way that you win the labor market. You have to differentiate yourself. You have to set yourself apart from the competition. And it takes a very special person to have that kind of beard and eat that size of burrito. And therefore, that's how you win in this labor market.

Okay, so you probably know about pay for performance by now. You already know that it can change the way you do business and increase the efficiency of your employees drastically. But it's never that simple.

Right?

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Just finished your book, Zero Trend. Great book. Was the story based on True story. Yeah, that is a true story. Even down to the name of, like, Carl's Mower. That's real. And Larry Lawn. Larry the landscaper. He's in There. And that did happen where he got injured and then we stepped in and helped him and stuff like that. You often say that a $1 million business would have a 20% margin. What is this margin for a solo operator? Yeah. So a solo operator, I believe, can do 110 to 120,000 in revenue, depending on your market and what you can charge per hour. In that case, I would be really shooting for at least a 50% net net margin, assuming you're not growing. Right. So again, if you're growing, you might be doing 120,000amonth, 120,000 in annual revenue, but you're not going to probably profit 60 or 70 grand if you're marketing and actively trying to go next year to be at 250 or 300,000 in revenue. Right. So it's not just about a snapshot. That's why you need to see a P and L over the course of three years, because it tells the story. Like you just take one year for example, as someone was ratting out on me on Social yesterday. Like, you have all these franchises and you're unprofitable. Like, you must be a horrible business owner. Like, maybe it's true. However, you have to realize that you have to look at the growth of business. Like Tesla only became profitable a year and a half ago. And yet to say that in 2020, 2019, as a bad business because it's unprofitable is stupid. You have to look at the rate of growth. And so not only is profit a measure of valuation, you have to look at rate of growth. And so when it comes to your profit margins in your business, it realize you just take a snapshot. This is why it's so toxic to get on social media and ask profit margins. Because one profit margin from one person makes 200,000. They could, they could have a, let's just say a 50 profit margin. They're taking home a hundred thousand dollars in profit from their business on a 200, 000 annual revenue business. That sounds great. It is. Then someone else comes along, they're on this, on this Facebook group. They see that, like, man, I did $200,000 last year in revenue and I only brought like 20 or 30 grand home after everything was done said. But the next year, scenario number one guy does $200,000 a year and brings a hundred grand home. But scenario two, number two guy, because that first year he invested back into business, was marketing actively trying to hire people, get more equipment. Now he does $400,000 in revenue. He just Doubled his revenue and maybe this year he only does he takes 50 or 60 thousand dollars home. Still less than the scenario one guy. Growth sucks. Cash growth leads to waste and growth is very painful. But it's also what allows you to eventually, once you do slow down growth, to have a meaningful size business. So instead of doing 20 $200,000 in annual revenue and $100,000 profit, like someone that could easily do that over the course of five years, very slow growth, get to that point and then stay there and make good money. That's great. I'm not against that. That's why we have the solo operator model. If someone wants to do that for a few years before jumping to a million dollar business. But I'd much rather have a million dollar business that has 20% margin, $200,000 in profit after my salary, my wages, than I would have a $200,000 a year business in revenue with a 50% margin. So don't get wrapped up in margins too much. You know, it just so happens that Walmart is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and they have a couple percent margin. So.

Size matters when it comes to margin. It's something that has to really be brought into the equation as well as the rate of growth. I meant should I set certain times, the day to call back leads? I'm averaging 25 calls a day and calling everyone back right of way. Even though I tell them to go to my website in my voicemail.

I'm averaging and calling it right away. Yes. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. If you don't have a calling service, which I would recommend first and foremost, like literally just have someone answer your calls. Even if they're charging you two or $3aminute, you're literally going to pay a few hundred dollars per month, maybe like five or six hundred dollars per month to get those calls answered and at least get them put in your system. Like most places, that's what they're going to do. It's like they're going to take that information from the caller, they're going to enter it into your CRM and they're going to make you a note. That's basically it. They're not going to like be able to put things on their schedule or invoice before do that. But that's fine. Get them on the phone, get this, get that scheduled up so that way they don't go to someone else and ask for an estimate. Right. That's what you're trying to do by getting the phone answered is don't let them go to another competitor. And so I would first and foremost say try to get a virtual assistant, virtual calling service. And then.

What you can do is like what you're saying is set aside a block of time, let's say from 12 to one that you catch up on all your voicemails and you go back and do call those people back. That's not a bad idea. From 4 to 5pm you knock those out instead of trying to be reactive throughout the whole day. That would be the next best thing. If you're not going to do an office assistant, you're not going to do virtual someone to answer your calls, then the next best thing is let the voicemails come in and you literally say on your voicemail I will call you back between 4 and 5pm today. You could say that as long as you time block that way. Okay, we're going to go really quickly here because what the main objective of today is to wrap up the elite eight and so check out mike andy.com vote to see who goes to the final four.

Okay. Are truck magnets a good tool for marketing like me just I think truck magnets are cheap to be honest. They just kind of looking kind of fuel cheap. John Gates. Hey Brad, just wanted to know my landscaping is going right now. I took a lot of advice from you and it has worked 100%. You are the man. John Gates. Brad says hello.

Is there an app to help get Google reviews? I'm sure there is, but definitely the main thing is that link in your Google my business account that's going to directly take people to your account and set them up for a review. How important do you think website to grow business growing their second season? I'm a sole offer that invested approximately $30,000 since last March and need to double revenue this year. Okay, I'm saying, I'm assuming you're saying when you say invested approximately $30,000, does that mean you made $30,000 in revenue? If you're going to $60,000 this year, I would not get a really, really like I wouldn't hire long term web design. I said this on, on a on landscape business course, Facebook group. I would not use long care web design unless I was planning to do over 200,000 revenue this coming year. So either if you're just getting started, you're trying to grow really fast, then you get a website from us. I would not use us. If you're doing 30,000 and going to 60,000, you don't need us. And you don't want to pay us what we cost. In order to do your website I would simply go into weebly. I'd use Squarespace. I do Godaddy. Do something free. Do it for 10, 15, $20 a month. It's not going to be great but it's all you'll need to go from 30 to 60,000 longer. Web design is for someone who wants to pass $200,000 in this year. Otherwise just it's not worth it. Google Ads is saying we have 1.4 thousand clicks on our ad. Squarespace says our website has 900 views and the widget plugin we said yeah, this is great. We use says we only have 200 views. Any idea why there's a discrepancy? Yep, big reason why people click on the ad the website is loading and they go back to Google. Cause they didn't mean to click on your ad or they, yeah they, they didn't get to your website. So sometimes that has to do with load time of your website. That is important. It's a big reason. Especially if you're paying for ads. You want to make sure that they get them to the site and if it takes them three seconds instead of two seconds literally that could be a hundred of those clicks being lost on an ad.

First year revenue was only 15,000 for the first year. Since I was only accepting weekly mos. Yeah. So green cuts. I would definitely say start with something free or cheap for your website. Don't use long careweb design.com quite yet. Is it possible to reach six figures solo? Yes, absolutely. Type in 100k. No employees on YouTube and I have a video I made last year about that. Is it important to have contracts with the residential clients that you have or can you just do your work through oral agreement? We just do oral agreement but we also do per cut pricing. If you're doing 12 month contracts where they're going to pay an equal amount for the entire year for service, then it might be a good idea to do contracts. My day is going fantastic. Cody, how would you go about growing a longer business from mowing on the weekends, evenings as a side gig to having one or two full time crews without ever going full time yourself? Yep. So in this case if you're going to have full time crews and you're not working, you need to book a call with brad@p4psoftware.com and because you need to have your crew on P4P they've got to be being paid based upon their performance. If they're going to be working full time and you're not and they're going to be out working while you're doing another job or you're doing something else. So you know, for everyone on here that had not gone to p4psoftware.com training and just watched free training videos, I walk you through the whole thing. How do you P4P definitely check that out. And then from that page you can book a call with Brad and he will make sure he gets any questions answered. Basically when people come to the website they plug in their address and zip code. Oh yes, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. We're looking at some technology right now that does this. Yes, there's a few issues with the sites that and companies that I have seen do this in terms of accuracy and we have tested a lot of them. I think in the future this is going to be a real deal though and something we are looking at.

Mike, do you think door hangers in every direction also have value in today's age? I believe it's powerful way to round out your marketing myself. Yeah, I talked about this a sooner up before. Cool. All right, I think I'm going to. Okay, we're gonna do a couple more questions and I gotta bounce. 50 mo clients last year majority were bi weekly and underpriced. We sent out new estimates with proper people pricing and Weekly only. Only 5 past customers accepted estimates so far. Advice? Yeah. The mistake here is that you set new estimates out, you should assume the sale. So what you should in my opinion have done is send out an estimate or send an email saying we're going to require weekly service from now on. Here's your price of the season. Let us know if you would not like us to do service. That's how you need to do it. Yeah man, you really pigeonholed yourself by putting doing that because now by not responding they've basically said no. When in reality half those people didn't get the estimate. They didn't open it up.

We're number one for mowing on Google in our town and most towns next to us spending $100 per day on Google Ads and good website.

Forget about all the past customers or send a follow up email. What should it say? Oh man, that's tough. You've sent the email with the estimate. Oh, what would I do in this case?

You're spending $100 a day on Google Ads. Mercy goodness you have 50 mowing customers.

What I did in the scenario I would email everyone and I would tell Them. We are starting mowing at your property on this specific day. Here's the prices that are going to be on your property and. Oh, you're not raising prices, so. Oh no, you said you are. Okay, so you're raising prices. I would say. Okay, we are starting mowing prop at your property on April 1. Here's your prices and we start weekly for these months or whatever your verbiage is for that. And let us know if you would not like us to service your property this year. Otherwise we'll see the first week of April or whatever you're starting. That's what I would say.

Okay, I'm just gonna, I have to kind of go do these as quick as I can. How would it be possible to convert my business directly into. Yes, it would be. You use that information to the augustalongerservices.com franchising franchise. What advice do you have? If my business model is focused on franchising, how much yearly revenue profit did you have when you decided to start franchising? Honestly, I would tell nine out of 10 people not to franchise. I'm not saying that like it's harder than you think. People think. You just like creating FTD and like it's a great business. It's. It's not like that. If you don't think you can get 100 franchisees within three to five years, you, you shouldn't do it.

I have an opportunity to buy 90 residential properties for a hundred thousand dollars.

And brings in 100. If you're just getting the properties that you're paying over a thousand dollars per mowing customer. And yes, I know he's gonna sell you in the thought that like you can. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. If you spent $30,000 that just the down payment that he wants on marketing, you should easily get 90 residential mowing customers. That would mean you pay $333. No, 300 and like $75 per customer in acquisition cost. And if you can't do that, there's bigger problems.

So I would highly recommend. I think it's too expensive.

Yeah, see this is the part that everyone falls into. It's like, oh, I only $4,500 a month. So this is gonna be life changing. Yeah, but you're also going to put $30,000 down and have $70,000 in debt. And those 90 residential properties will probably turn into 70 once they switch. And whether or not they're priced correctly is also going to be an issue. And the fact that you could spend that $30,000 and immediately get 100 customers. If you spent $30,000. $30,000. A lot of money. That's literally. If you spent $3,000 next 10 months on marketing.

Okay, I'm gonna have to cut it off. Thanks so much, everyone. We are going to quickly go to.

This. Whoops. We are going to announce the winners. The winners for the Elite Eight for the MO Madness Challenge. Let me pull up the winner here. Oh, mercy. I have forgot. Here we go. Let's pull this up. Give me a second here. I gotta pull up the. Because there's a bunch of new ones that came in through our chat. So if you haven't already, do it right now because I'm gonna do this live. We're gonna see who won the Mo Madness Elite 8 and who is making it into the to the final four. MO Madness. All right, so the. So match number one. Wait, you guys can't see this Go away.

No, we had an absolute crushing crushing by a long carry Juggernaut. But you guys can't see that. That. That's just not fair. Let's pop this out. There we go. Now you can see this. There we go. Okay, so the winner of round match number one between Stanley the Dirt Monkey and Longer Juggernaut by a landslide was Lawn Care Juggernaut moving on to the fourth or next to the round of the final four. Then we had Top Notch Lawn Care versus Ryan Knorr. Top Notch Lawn Care takes it to the house and is moving on. Ryan Knorr loses in match number two, in match number three between Blades of Grass, Lawn Care and Lawn Care Life. Lawn Care Life squeaks out of victory against Blades of Grass Lawn Care, which is very surprising. Lots of people in the comments saying Blades of Grass. But Lawn Care Life comes in and takes the win going into the final four. Then we have in match number four, the final round of the Elite Eight final match between SB Mowing and it's his turf. The winner of match four moving on to the final four of the MO Madness tournament is SB Mowing. All right, so there's your winners going into the final four on Monday. You'll be able to cast your vote for the final four. And remember, you have the chance to win $2,000 in cash or a day where we fly out the media team. They're going to do a bunch of videos, drone shots, pictures, interviews with you so that you can use that for your marketing and for your website. So thank you all so very much. There's a ton of questions that came in and I do apologize for not hitting those. Oh my goodness, there's a ton of them. But I could be here for another couple hours just answering these, and that's not happening. So you all have a great weekend. Thanks so much for hopping on here and we'll see you next time. Foreign.

This has been the Mike Gandies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. And if you like what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews, and more over at the Mykandis YouTube channel that'll be right up your valley. But that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sa.