The First 2 Years of Your Lawn Care Business are BRUTAL! Here's Why...

Hey everyone, it's Mike gandies here@lawncaremedia.com and today I'm going to be talking about why your first two years building your lawn care business is going to be horrible. So if you're looking for a rah rah speech, this is not it. This is not the one that's like, everyone can go start a lawn care business. This is not that video. So maybe you might want to check off. But if you're here for some real talk, that's what we're going to be covering today. Because in all honesty, the first two years of your lawn care, your landscaping business is going to be extremely difficult. I've seen time and time again, it's usually the third year in business where you start hitting your stride, you have better profits, you have a better team. I'm gonna talk about why that is today. Why is your first 24 months in this lawn care and landscaping industry so brutally difficult? The first thing is you're gonna have to work really long hours, typically. Now, all the things I talk about today, including the very first one that we just mentioned, can be alleviated and somewhat circumnavigated by having a bunch of money. So. So if you have a whole bunch of money, if you have 50, 60, 70, 100 grand sitting around, you can get around to these things because you can go hire a general manager from day one that has a bunch of experience and has a bunch of connections, knows the industry really well, and they can basically run the business for you from day one. You can go hire a bunch of people and a bunch of trucks and not have to have the fact that you're going to have to work long hours. But if you're starting with a small amount of money and you're trying to bootstrap this thing, there's going to be a lot of long hours at the beginning of of your lawn care business. And by the way, those long hours are being done with physical labor. This is not something easy. This is not a cushy white collar type job. This is hard back breaking at times work. It's very difficult. When I was out in the field, I had allergies to grass and here I am mowing lawns. Literally. I would sometimes have to come back home because I couldn't keep my eyes open and my throat would be constricted because of my allergies. I have a rash all underneath my shirt. I would take multiple shirts out with me throughout the day because my nose would be running all the time. I'd be blowing my nose into my shirt. And then when it'd get all gross, I'd switch it out. It was horrible. And allergies are a real thing. And it's hard work. It's hard, it's difficult, sweaty, and then it gets cold and rainy and wet. It's very, very hard work. So physically you're going to be drained. Especially in those first couple years when you're growing the business to the point where you can actually have employees doing the work and you are now doing estimates and maybe not outside in the elements as much. Alright, the next part, that's really, really difficult for those first couple years, the hardest part is the financial pressure that is going to be brought on you because of your growth. You're growing the business. Now, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Growth sucks cash. Alright? And this is the circle of how it works. So you're trying to grow. What does that mean? Growth sucks cash. And the more you grow, yeah, you get more cash. But great, I'm still growing. I've got to take that cash and grow the business. I got to keep going and going. And as this flywheel keeps spinning, because, hey, I want to grow a really big business, which again, I can circumnavigate this by buying my way into it or potentially staying small and not needing growth, we're okay. But the thing is this, out of this spinning, this centrifugal force of this wheel is something I like to call chaos.

And the reason I'm making this video today is whether you're starting. This is a good thing to know this topic. But if you're in the first couple years of your lawn care business, it's good to realize that this is what's happening. If you feel like your life is in a constant state of chaos right now, this is why we're going to talk about that. But let's talk about the financial aspect, because right now we got growth sucking cash. What did that come in the form of? That comes in the form of buying more trucks. You're trying to advertise and get your name out there and get more customers. You're then hiring people and it costs money to train them, it costs money to get uniforms for them, it costs money to paint your truck and put decals on and get a website built and get your advertising right. These are all things that take cash. And buying that truck and the trailer and the equipment and hey, we're going to start doing patios, we're going to start doing retaining walls. Great oh, I'm going to need a dingo, I'm going to need a skid steer. I need a bigger truck, I need a dump truck, I need a dump trailer. These are all things that require cash. And another thing is, by the way, usually in the first couple years, another thing I see is people are underpriced. So guess what? You're adding more financial pressure in those first couple years because you're underpriced. You're starting at 25, $30 an hour, $40 an hour. And it's not until year three you start realizing what you're really worth. And the fact that you can charge 60, 70, $80 per hour, per man hour for labor and get it and get higher quality customers that are willing to pay a premium price if you have a premium service. But what you gotta realize that you can create a premium service from the very get. So why do you have financial pressure? Growth sucks cash. That massive cycle gets faster and faster as your business gets growing and growing and growing creates chaos. And furthermore, you're usually underpriced during those first couple years. Now the biggest thing that as you begin to grow and you get employees is now you have the added pressure of employees. So we've added the pressure of physically just being drained in all the hours. Then we have the financial pressure of the growth that is sucking up the cash. Now we have the pressure of employees. And the thing is, when you're just getting started, guess what? You have no culture. Why? Because culture is something that's formed over time. If I talk about the American culture that has been formed over hundreds of years, whereas when you just started your business in the past couple years, you don't really have a culture. There's not standards. People don't really know anyone else here. There's no one been long tenured. Guess what? There's no profit sharing. Well, because there's no profits, growth is sucking up the cash and therefore there is no profit sharing. And therefore it's harder to get people motivated to actually work hard, actually care about the bottom line, actually care about the numbers of the business and actually participate in the business as if it was one their own and they wanted to grow with it. It's very difficult, it's very difficult to tell people like oh yeah, we're building a business for the long term, we just got started and they're just looking for a job for the next two months between school classes or between jobs or they just want to get off of unemployment or whatever it might be, make some extra Cash on the side. Another thing is because your employees, again, more difficulties that you're having, they're going to be unexperienced. Because a lot of times people with experience are going to go towards a business that's going to been around for a while, that has some brand awareness in the local market that people know about. If you're starting your business brand spanking new, first year, second year, a lot of times the most unexperienced laborers are the ones you're going to hire. In part because that's all who applies to your brand new business and also because you are probably unexperienced at hiring people and you might not be able to know what to look for in your interview process. So again, all of this, all of these issues with team, all the pressure that creates, what else does it do? It creates chaos. Cause in this whole process, these first couple years, we're running this cycle, we're running this growth cycle and it's creating chaos as a centrifugal force. So it gets faster and faster. And all this is high churn, right? No culture, no profit sharing, unexperienced laborers. All of this is creating churn. Churn is the thing that is going to keep you up at night. The thing is going to grate against you. People walking off the job in the middle of a project, people leaving when it's just bad weather and you're booked solid and you have 50 hours worth of work for everyone on a schedule and they literally just walk off the job. That's churn. And that's the worst in your first couple years because you have no culture, you have no profit sharing. You might not be able to have P4P at this time. And we're going to lead into why you might not be able to have P4P. You have unexperienced labors, and that's going to lead to people coming and people going very quickly. The average amount of time that people are going to stay with you might be only a few months in the first part because you don't have these things that are so important to keeping employees for a long period of time. Now this leads into number four, the fourth part that's going to create more stress and make these first couple years so difficult is the customer side of things. And I talked about the fact that why you might not be able to have P4P pay for performance. The reason you might not be able to do that, which would help with all the employee issues. The reason you might not be able to have P4P or might not be effective is because you don't have any route density. You just got started and you only might have 30, 40, 50 customers and they're all spread out in different areas and people are driving 5, 10, 15 minutes between jobs and you're not actually making any profit. There is no way to make performance dollars on P4P and you can't use it. And furthermore, you're not making a profit because route density is everything in lawn care and landscaping. Route density is everything for mowing and treatments and any sort of recurring service. You've got to make sure you eliminate or at least reduce your windshield time. Now, this is just driving. It's wasting money in terms of maintenance and tires and brakes, as well as the fact that your laborers are just sitting there making absolutely no revenue for the business. Okay, so unprofitable routes, again, that creates even more pressure on cash. You're trying to grow, but now you don't have the cash because you're running unprofitable routes. You only have 50, 60, 70 customers. They're not in a nice, confined, really tight route where you can make a bunch of money, park your truck and do three or four houses. That's not the case right now. Alright. And also, by the way, in the first couple years, I find so often is, we're trying to do this growth thing and we're trying to grow the business because we want to get to the point where we're able to work on the business. We have some good, provide good jobs for our local market, be able to get good employees. We, we want to do all those things. So we're growing and what do we do? We take on jobs that we have no business getting involved with. We start installing artificial turf, we start doing saw, we start doing pavers, we start doing retaining walls, we start doing water features, we start doing this and that and lighting. And we go from one thing, the next, the next, we're adding all of these services. And what is that doing? Yes, we're growing, but it's constantly sucking cash because we gotta keep training our guys differently. We got to buy more equipment. And this just keeps going faster and faster and faster. And what's that doing? Creating chaos. You continue this flywheel of working longer hours, working harder, you're getting just more employees, more employee problems. And that just compounds the financial pressures that you're having. Because you don't have the money, you don't have the culture, you don't have the profit sharing. You have unexperienced laborers. That's causing churn. This is the chaos of the first two years of your lawn care business. Now, are there things you can do to help prevent this? Yes. You can raise your prices so you aren't running on low margins. You have less, less of a cash crunch. But I consistently see it time and time again. The first years are the hardest because people are trying to figure this stuff out and there's nothing to say they're doing things wrong. This is not to point fingers and say people are bad. I did the same thing. I see our franchise, even franchisees of Augusta Lawn Care still do a lot of these same things. When you're growing fast, growth creates waste, creates chaos, and it sucks cash. And that's just part of growing quickly. It's not to say that these things are gonna, you can eliminate every single one, but to realize that this is part of growing a company, growing a business, building a million dollar business was easy. Everyone will be doing it. But if you're gonna have the audacity to say that you wanna build a great business in three to five years, there's going to be a lot of struggle, there's going to be a lot of chaos, there's going to be churn, there's going to be dealing with employees and financial pressure and physical, all the what you put your body through, the long hours. That's the beautiful thing about when you achieve it. You look back at the journey and just like I made it through. And so whether you're just about to get started and this is a preparatory course of what's to come in the next 24 months, or whether you're in the middle of your 12 or 24 month period right now and you feel lost, confused, like your business is in chaos. Maybe employees did just walk off the job. You can't keep anyone. It seems like at your job there's a massive churn. I encourage you. The year three and year four is when things start to come together. I see it time and time again is when, that's when the profits start to come up because you start charging what you're worth. You start getting employees that stick around with you for a while. You have better route density, so you're able to have P4P. You have profits in the business. You're able to actually incentivize your team with profit sharing. And by the way, now you have 10 employees that might have been with you for six or 12 months and they actually know how everything operates. So you're not running around Like a chicken without a head. These are the type of things that you can do in your business to as you grow, make sure there's less chaos. And if you're just getting started, there's absolutely all these things that you can do to prevent this from happening to, to the height and the degree at which it could. I hope something was said that was encouraging or maybe just warning to you if you're just about to get started. But if you're in the middle of this or about to get started, this is what it's like the first couple years of business. Don't be discouraged. Keep your head up, keep growing. Don't stop, don't retreat, don't go backwards. Realize you've got to figure some of these things out. And it's not like tomorrow you can just go get great employees. They're hard, they're difficult. You gotta train them. You might go through several. You gotta realize that just an employee walking off the job, an employee leaving, is not gonna tank your business. You getting low on cash is not gonna run your business into the ground. You and your dedication to the goals and objectives you have of building a great company will achieve and will be greater, will overcome all of these issues. It will overcome the employee issues. It'll overcome the long hours and the tiring days of long, long workout in the sun. It'll overcome the chaos that comes with growth. I encourage you. Keep growing. Keep building your business. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com We'll see you tomorrow.