Mike Andes opens a second lawn care location in Mount Vernon as a pilot for franchising. The property costs $300 a month, fits two trucks, and lets him dump on-site. He's adding a storage container and 10 yards of gravel to handle equipment and drainage.
$300 per month
$50 per truck per month
20 ft
25 ft by 10 ft by 14 ft high; about $250 per month
10 yards of gravel
Hey everyone, It's Mike Andes. Landscapebusinesscourse.com today is an update on our second location, the Mount Vernon location. And I know we started about three months ago, right at the beginning, this whole coronavirus thing. And it's still been growing really well. And so we've outgrown our storage facility and we are needing more space now that we're gonna have a second truck and some employees and things like that. And so I wanted to show you a quick kind of tour and give you some ideas what you can do to find a property where you can keep your shop and not pay an arm and a leg and not have to go into debt and get a mortgage and all the rest of it. So this is what I recommend for our franchisees as kind of a second step. We've kind of outgrown step number one, which is a storage facility where you have a self storage and you park the truck and everything's inside. I think we have a 25 by 10 by 14 high at that facility. We pay like 250 bucks a month. So that's awesome because it's super secure, super easy, 247 access, all that good stuff. However, it's not the best for dumping clippings and dumping debris and having to go to the dump every single day after you're done your mowing route to dump clippings. So this is kind of step two. This is gonna be before step three where you're gonna get your own shop. You're gonna probably buy or rent the land, really invest in an office and like lots of more space, etc. So this is. I'm gonna show you around really quickly what's going on here at stage two. Again, this is Mount Vernon location. This is our second corporately owned location. We opened three months ago. And the main reason we opened the corporate this, this location is to really go through the whole process like as if we were a brand new franchisee. So we have a general manager and he's on payroll. And we can really see firsthand what's like to start again, Augusta Lawn Care, using all the same systems, using command center and all that good stuff. So let me show you around. This is the property that we are working with. And, and you can see all this stuff is poking up because this used to be a bunch of blackberries. What you see right there used to cover this entire area. Now the homeowners, they actually live on the other side in a big house. And I don't know if you can tell, but this all slopes Down. So really good drainage, which I was looking for. And they have this shop down here. And kind of like some parking for their campers and things like that. So what's happening here is they cleared this all out for us. You can see they pushed up all of the BlackBerry debris up over here. And then we are gonna pay $300 per month to rent this facility out. And that includes dumping unlimited. And they'll burn and manage all the debris. So we'll be able to dump here. And then we're gonna be putting a culvert in that ditch, Having gravel come across here. And there's gonna be where these little flaggies are at. I marked that for the storage container that's gonna be dropped off. It's not gonna be a big one. It's only gonna be 20ft. This would be the back end. 20ft long doors on that side. So that way the lock is not being seen from the road. And that's where we can have dry storage. So because we have trailerless setups, we don't have enclosed trailers. Having that dry storage is important for little tools, things like that. And we can lock it up. It's really secure. And then the trucks will park right here. So trucks are going to go here and then storage container there. This will all be gravel. And then we'll dump there. And there's plenty of room to grow here, honestly. And so in our lease, what we did is we basically did $300 per month. It includes two trucks, the storage container, and unlimited dumping. But I built into it to get us to be able to grow with this property until we hit stage three, which is $50 per.
$50 per truck as we add them. So if we get a third truck, we go 350 bucks a month. Like, oh, that seems like a lot. Well, guess what? If we get five trucks here, that means we're gonna have to pay a grand total of $450 per month. And that includes all the dumping. Like, literally last month, we paid a couple hundred dollars in just dumping fees for the clippings and for taking stuff to the dump. And so it just makes it completely more economical to pay $300 and get all of the dumping fees covered completely free. And what's really cool is we have our own. We have our own entrance. So we don't even have to share the entrance. We got our own gravel entrance. We're giving them an extra $300 when we did the rent first payment to get them to get more gravel in here. Because this is, again, this Used to be a bunch of BlackBerry. So it was really, really muddy or could be really muddy even though the drainage is pretty good with the slope. So we got 10 yards of gravel coming in here, which is going to allow them to put in the culvert, install the gravel all around here, where the trucks are going to be parked and where that is the, the shipping container is going to be. So obviously the burn pile will be gone. We'll get all that putting nice gravel, but again, lot of space to grow. Like, honestly, I think you could easily get six to seven trucks in here, easily with maybe a dump trailer, a couple more storage containers if we needed it, plenty of dumping space. They burn here all the time. So these are the type of deals I'd be looking for if I was you. This is a residential property out in the country, you know, 10 minutes from all of our properties and really an ideal location. And again, we don't have to go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the property, go through the closing process, have a mortgage, have, have a long term kind of obligation to that property. This is what I'd Recommend, A stage 2. If you're just getting started, obviously your garage is the best place. Maybe you even have property that you currently live on and you already have this set up and that's even better because you're already paying for your house. So you might as well have your shop there and have dumping space and burn piles and all the rest of it. But if you don't, if you live in a neighborhood and you can't have your trucks parked out on the road and you get more than one truck and it starts becoming an issue with the neighbors. This is a great place, a great place to start and really grow the business because again, we can get to easily file to six trucks here before we even want to go out and get commercial land and buy it, make it something bigger, build, you know, bins and materials and have bigger equipment and all that stuff. So again, just a quick idea for you guys, this is kind of stage two. In the next couple months, I'm going to be showing the financials of the Mount Vernon location. One of the big reasons why we also started this location is because I wanted to be actually able to show you the financials. And so we've consistently grown each month and now we can afford a place like this. And I look forward to giving you more details on the Mount Vernon location as it grows. Take care everyone. Have a good one.
