The HARDEST Time of the Year for Landscaping Businesses

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. We have a call in show today and this one is very important to pay attention to. We're talking about the hardest part of the year for landscaping businesses to survive. Summer projects are over. The leaves haven't fallen yet and no one is thinking about snow. So how do you stay profitable? That's what today is all about. As always, you can find all this and more over at the Mike Andes YouTube channel. But let's get into it. Here's how to survive this four to six week slump that's coming for you right now.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Handys. Today we're talking about the worst time of year. If you own a lawn care business, landscaping business, any sort of contracting business, cleaning business. There's something I want to talk about and the reason I'm hopping on today a little bit earlier in the day than usual is number one, had a meeting canceled. Number two, I probably won't be able to get on here for the next couple weeks in terms of being able to produce a live show just because I have some projects I wanted to work on and I'm going to be locking in on those. So the main thing I want to talk about today though is this time of year, as we go into October, there's this weird four to six week window I constantly find that home improvement professionals struggle with for several different reasons. One, it's not really winter yet, and so you have a hard time like switching gears into winter mode. But yet then you still have all of the spring project. You kind of burn through. All those are done. There's not a lot of demand for our services for the winter side, the summer side of things, but yet we're not at winter yet. We're not even a fall season. Most of us haven't started up the leaf cleanups yet as much. We haven't really started thinking about snow or anything like that. And so there's this weird in between season because, for example, with mowing and landscaping, you book out like crazy during the spring, you're super busy, just absolutely like drinking from a fire hose. And you might book yourself out six, eight weeks out in the future. And then throughout the summer you're gonna burn through that backlog. Well, now it's September and you know, going into October and there's this weird sort of timeframe where you don't have enough Work, and yet you aren't really in winter. And you know that right around the corner you got fall cleanups, leaf cleanups. It's gonna get really busy, A bunch of property. The wind's gonna start blowing. They're gonna need branches cleaned up. I might eat some mulch down before the winter, all that that's coming. But you have this next four to six weeks where it's like, kind of slow, like. And you spend money on advertising. You just can't get any leads. Why? Because there's no demand. People don't have any pain right now. The grass isn't growing very much. The, you know, you don't need a project done for your outside living when you're going into winter. If someone needed a patio done, if they needed their outdoor living space spruced up, they got that done in spring or in summer so they can enjoy the landscape throughout that period of time. So as we go into fall season, it's gonna be this weird spot, this weird period before leaf season and before having it really, really busy, where you're gonna have a bit of a gap. And so what do you do during that period? And I am taking questions today, so if you have questions, feel free to comment below. I have about 30 minutes, so I can get through as many as I possibly can. What do you do for the next six to eight weeks? Well, number one, this is the time to make sure that you have enough employees to where if you need to, let one or two go, because random stuff happens that you're able to do. So now it's not super busy. You're not getting tons of leads coming in the door. So make sure that your work that you are doing is being done profitably. A lot of times I always encourage people to grow and expand during spring rush when there's tons of demand, because every dollar you spend on customer acquisition costs is so much more effective than during the spring season. So, for example, you might spend 20, $30 for customer acquisition cost during the spring rush, whereas right now, all of a sudden, that jumps to 150, because people don't really need your services. And then in the winter, it could even be even more than that, given the fact that it's frozen and there's no one really needing our services. And so I really recommend people focus. If you're trying to grow, I would always try to recommend doing that during spring rush because the most efficient now you can only grow so much in a given window of time, like two or three months during the spring rush. So therefore, sometimes Growing this time of year is actually a good thing because you're able to grow more sustainably. You're able to grow some say from 40,000amonth to $50,000 a month over the next few months versus trying to go from 40,000 to 80,000, sorry, what I say 400,000. I did $40,000 per month to $80,000 for like doubling next spring rush. That can be a big jump. That can be a lot of employees at one time, a lot of trucks and equipment that is needed at the same time, same time. And so if you're really trying to grow long term, you might still grow during this period. But you're the dollars that you spend on marketing right now. Your customer acquisition cost can be so much higher because demand is low. Remember, if demand is low, your customer acquisition cost is high. If your customer acquisition cost is really, really good, it means that like it's spring rush, tons of work is coming in. People are searching you on Google and there's so much work that's coming in that none of your advert, none of your competition is advertising. So your customer acquisition cost is way lower because no one's advertising on Google, no one's advertising on Facebook. Well now as we head into this weird season before fall because everyone is kind of like, oh man, I'm kind of burnt my backlog. I don't have a lot of work coming in. Well now what are they doing? They're spending money on ads, they're spending money on Google, Google and Facebook. And some of the cost per click on those platforms is going to go through the roof. Okay, this brings up a great point here. Gert said over aeration and overseeding season. Yes, absolutely. A great kind of in between service, between mowing season and then fall cleanup. Is that aeration overseeding, you can do dethatching in some different markets. Do any of you do Christmas lights? A lot of our franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care are doing Christmas lights this year. We had a, a, a gathering, a meetup with all of our franchisees down in Memphis this past year. And one of our franchisees, Ryan out in Texas, he did a full presentation for several hours about how to set them up. He's been doing them for years and so I think quite a few of them are going to be doing it that year. And what's cool is you can sell them way sooner. So they do like Christmas in July. You could sell them in August and September and Basically pre sell 800 $1000 packages for Christmas lights. But really early in the season. And so that way you can collect on the cash now, buy the lights, organize lights and look for like ultimately, when you're looking at a really seasonal business, what you're looking for is how do I kind of just dampen the demand curve of the seasonality. So instead of having massive amounts of being busy and then not really, really busy during spring rush, and then all of a sudden like there's nothing because the grass stops growing. Like, how do you even that out? You're going to be doing a couple things. One, you're going to diversify services. You're going to add ancillary services to your core product that you're able to fit in and around these other the main things. So for example, mowing is our main thing. However, it's gonna be crazy during spring rush. It's going to drop off during the summer, it's going to spike back up in September and October for us, and then it dies off during the winter. So what do we do? Well, we're going to have winter services. We are going to make sure that when we do projects, we do mulch, we do, you know, bush trimming, et cetera. And those can be done outside of spring rush. So we book way out into the future during the spring rush, anticipating the fact that we want to focus on mowing during, in our core products during the busy season. Okay, so regardless of this Christmas lights corporation, what other ancillary services you're offering? Adding services is absolutely a way to bring the highness. The highness, bring how high you go in terms of demand by when you go really, really low, having other services that are able to be offered and marketed during that time. Do you price on a per foot basis also? I'm doing it because we don't get enough snow to do much, but too cold for anything else. When you talk about per square foot, per foot basis, I'm assuming you're talking about Christmas lights. And so yeah, you're going to have a per linear foot type of pricing method for Christmas lights. And it really comes down to the ability to be able to resell them. Because your first year you are buying the lights, you're having the design, you're selling that client on using your services. Well, if you can keep all those lights, package them and then use them next year, that's when your margins really spike because now you don't have to rebuy the lights. The acquisition of the lights is the majority of your cost on that first year. What winter services do you offer? I've talked about this before it's in the course. And it's just about. Basically, we try to take our mowing customers and sell them on staying on recurring services throughout the winter season. But instead of mowing, we're offering other services like pulling their weeds, edging their beds, trimming their bushes, checking their gutters, et cetera. And so our goal is to keep the same recurring clients on the schedule throughout the the entire season.

Can I start? Will I have an SUV and not a truck? You can absolutely start with an SUV. We started, my brother and I with a 1993, I think it was a 1993 Dodge Caravan and it has a massive trunk. So we took out the back seat and we put two push mowers in the back. And yeah, you can absolutely get started 100%. So you charge the same amount year over year for lights? Yep, we would charge the same price year over year. And how you're going to convince them of that? You could give them a discount, potentially like returning customer discount to incentivize them to stay on with you. But alternative. The thing is, you're, what you're selling is that they're renting the lights from you, right? They're not buying the lights from you. They don't keep the lights. You keep them yourself and you rent them or you lease them out to the customer. So, you know, going into the winter season, it's like, okay, well, if I don't have snow, there's gotta be other services. But. And I would recommend try to stay as close to your core offering as possible. The further you go, the less profitable you're going to be during the winter. And so if you're trying to go from like landscaping, like, oh, well, during winter I'm going to wash windows or I'm going to, I don't know.

I'm going to build decks. I'm going to build decks and do fencing during the winter. Great. But that's far away. At least it's outdoors. At least they're working on the house. Like, at least it's home improvement. I should say that, but it's, it's a long jump away from mowing grass or landscaping. So try to stay as close to your core as possible and to try to stay busy. But I see a lot of people like, oh, like I'll go flip a house during the winter. This is not the winter to be flipping houses. I can promise you that with interest rates the way they're going, it's not the time to be flipping a house. But that was like my Very first property ever was that just to stay during the winter Today, busy during the winter for the guys. I went and bought a really cheap house, $95,000 and gutted the thing for that first winter. Again, way, way from my core competency did not do well on that flip. Well, it wasn't a flip. I still have the property day I rented out so it does well now. But it was not good for the first year or two because the market had not caught up yet. And so you're trying to look at for services that you can complement your core offering with that are not so far out of left field that you're buying different equipment, you're buying different trucks, you have to train all of your guys. It's super inefficient. And typically you're not going to be profitable simply because you're doing it for a small window of time and you're not. It's not your main core thing that you're doing.

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How should one charge for leaf clumps for non recurring versus year round recurring clients? Typically what we want to do is have that initial, we initial leaf cleanup or property cleanup being done and then we give them a price for recurring service after that for leaf season. So say for example, right now someone asked for hey, I want, I want my leaves cleaned up. It's like okay, great, your first service is going to be X, Y and Z price and then we're going to come every week for the next two or three months and it's going to be this price per week. So we're trying to get them on the initial service that we can get it to a certain standard and then a recurring service schedule after that. Therefore we eliminate the whole like okay, we'll just eat it on the first visit because it's really bad at the beginning and then that way too. Even if they, if they call you halfway through the leaf season, you still get that initial service to get them up to, up to the standards that you need before they get on a recurring weekly or bi weekly schedule. And what I'm not a huge fan of is people that just charge the same price for mowing services when there's leaves on the, on the ground. When, when, when someone purchased mowing services, they did not purchase leaf cleanup. It's a separate service. And so when you go to a lawn, it's covered with leaves, you don't just like, oh, well, I'll just, you know, not charge any extra, spend extra 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes. No, you sell, upsell them into leaf cleanup. And if that is a matter of, well, all I have to do is drive over the leaves. Well, if you're hauling the debris out now, that's more cost. If you are, even if you're mulching like, well, you're, now you're spending extra time blowing things off and getting the lines all done correctly. So I would highly recommend at least charge 10, $15 per week for leaf cleanup. And then if they say no, it's like, look, we don't do leaf cleanup. We're gonna take the leaves off of lawn, mow the grass. And then if you want a leaf cleanup done, it's an additional price. Like most people. It makes a lot of sense to them. Thanks for the value. Always bring our podcast Change my Mindset Forever. Mike. Andy's the realest entrepreneur out there. Thank you. How to convince clients to pay for Mo Edge Blow then stant when standard is $25 for mo edge Blow below, trim, prune and disposable for one monthly price. Yeah, simply make it where they're not comparing apples to apples. Right. Where then they see that 25 price and then they see your 50 price, they realize that, okay, these are two different service offerings. One is going to be in and out. They're not going to be able to communicate with me. They're going to have not. Their trucks are just, you know, random trucks that are dirty. And I don't have any sort of branding. There's no uniforms, there's no training. I don't have a CRM that I can pay my bills on and I put my check underneath my mat every day. Or do I offer to the 50 per person? Is that person able to offer me answering the phone when I call, quick communication via email, Being able to pay with credit card on a, on a software account, having uniforms, a truck, that's decal insurance, like all of those things, that's what you have to set yourself apart for. And if you're, if you're Branding and your website does not tell that story. You won't be able to sell regardless if your website does not convey to the customer that you have all those things. Insurance, great quality truck, great brand uniforms, trained employees do a great job, all that. If it doesn't communicate that in a very professional way, then you're just right back to square one when it comes to the fact that they're just comparing the grass versus the grass. That's all they're comparing. It's all the intangibles that allow you to charge a premium price by having a premium product.

Those lawns better be small and take no longer than 20 minutes. Does price anchoring work in lawn care? If you offer multiple options for recurring lawn care, inclusive expansive option and just a mow and go option, it's definitely something that is too, I think is a good idea that offering different packages in terms of different price tiering. So it's like, hey, we're going to do $30, $80 and $100. And you just know that they're going to choose the $80 one because they don't want the cheapest one because there's basically nothing in it. And then you don't want the hundred dollars is just their price anchor to basically show like the most premium of the premium. So you know they're going to go for 80. I always say there's definitely a logic to that. The thing is, most people want their, their products and services so tailored to what they need. So some people want leaf cleanup every week, some people want every other week. Some people want their mo. Their lawn mode every week, some people want every other week, somebody want the bushes trimmed every month, some people want every other month. So trying to create packages for that can become honestly more time than it's worth. And when you're talking about hundreds of clients, if you're really trying to scale up the business, you'll spend more time just creating packages and then creating the budget hours and assigning those and creating those routes and all the rest of it. When you can just sell one service and then upsell them into other services down the road. And if you have a system like one click estimate emails are a way to reach out to them and ask for specific services at specific times of the year, usually you could actually have a higher dollar amount because the blended dollars for the whole, like for example, if I sell someone two property cleanups a year and they're about a thousand bucks a pop, technically that's like $200 a month. If I average it out across the whole year. And that's just for the cleanups, let alone if they just do mowing. So I would what's easier for me, okay, do I sell them on two property cleanups a year or do I sell them on a 400 per month package to include their mowing and two property cleanups a year? I personally, I think it's easier to sell the mowing and then get them on the two property cleanups than it is to sell a $400 per month package and and then have to again deal with the fact that they could potentially cancel right after you perform the two property cleanups. And now during the winter when you're actually going to make all your money, there's a loss there.

What is your opinion on the recent trend of subscription based home services? I think it's going to be for the big players. I don't think that it is going to be great for smaller operations. It's harder to scale in some regards and it's more you become a bank. That's. And so the reason I say big operations, because they have lines of credit, they can get through all of that. But I think that most small operators are still better off using a per cut price and then upselling. Just having a very good system for upselling people because the ability to be able to sell and package services into the same thing. The subscription model is going to happen, it's going to continue going on, but it's not. I just don't see it taking over. I just honestly don't. The subscription thing is around for a long, long time and for some reason home services has not penetrated it to the point of like tipping point. Still 90, 90 to 95% of home improvement jobs are done by the job, by the invoice, by the bid. The subscription thing works great when the economy is doing good. But guess what people do first when they there's an economic recession? They cut their subscriptions. So the things that are being charged even though they're not using them. So in the middle of the winter when they're getting charged that $200 per month for their lawn service, guess what they're going to do? They're going to cancel it. With dispatching we use several different types. Service autopilot, several others we are using sell one best service plus upsell. Yeah, I'm not saying it's completely wrong to do packages. I don't believe that at all. But I see that tends to be the easier thing to sell. And for most people that are doing under 3, $4 million in annual re new. Their biggest issue is selling and getting more customers. It's not necessarily trying to do a subscription based model where they're basically the bank for the year. In my market Canada, we have to beg clippings. How do you get rid of all the clippings? At the end of the day I go to the dump, but it cost me $40 per visit. Yeah. So we try to look for space, shop space where we're able to dump and our goal is to be able to charge for dump fees for project based work and that should cover the cost of our rent. But in that rent we try to make sure that we're able to dump clippings and debris, et cetera. I only want to do landscaping, but would you recommend that I do mowing or some maintenance to have more consistent work? I would 100% recommend this, especially as we head into a recession. And that is even if you just want to do landscaping and not mowing, like forget mowing for a second. There's so much maintenance that needs to be done on the property itself, like trimming the bushes, installing mulch every year, fertilizing the trees that you installed. Like if you're installing landscaping and hardscaping, there's always maintenance work to be done on those projects. And so try to sell, when you sell that $10,000 landscape install, try to sell them on a hundred dollar per month, one time visit that you come, rake out the mulch, pull the weeds, trim the bushes, whatever it is, try to sell them on a recurring basis so you get some recurring revenue. It's much more stable throughout the year. Can you get in trouble for copying truck color as another company? Nope, you can't get in trouble unless they've copyrighted the color, which is basically impossible. What are your opinions on the greatest great reset and how it will affect home service businesses? Yeah, like the interest rates going up as high as they have already. Mortgage rates now being over 7% is absolutely going to wreck the real estate industry. I've been talking about this since January. In most markets it's already started, but it's going to continue to collapse. The real estate market is going to collapse over the next six to 12 months by in my opinion, 20 to 30%. And so, you know, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and selling a big chunk of my real estate. And so as that happens, home and home improvement business will absolutely be effective because as the equity in homes is lost, home owners typically spend less money on projects and so this can be a big tightening of the boomers. The boomers that have massive equity in their houses, had a bunch of money in the stock market. All those things have now compressed and so people become more price sensitive. It's also going to weed out a lot of competition in our industries. And I think this winter is going to be a bloodbath for businesses that have between three and 12 employees. A lot of them are going to go out of business because they were not able to find employees. They were not staying up with demand and they weren't able to stay with inflation. They did not create a brand that they could raise prices and not lose 50, 60% of their customers when they do so. And so that's going to be a big problem for our industries and a.

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I'm 20 and have saved 40k up and eventually want to move out. I operate my one truck and trailer out of our residential home but I want to drove to another truck next year. I'm at 100k in revenue, 50% net profit. Yeah. So just remember what I would recommend. You don't really have a specific question here, but what I would recommend is making sure that when you look at your profits, you take out how much you'd have to be paying an employee. So for example, if you were working full time, $100,000, that's great. 50% net profit, that's great. That means you're doing about 50k. If you then take out wages of say 30 or $40,000 to pay an employee now your margins get really thin, right? You're, you're on the lower end of what I want you to be at with one or two employees. So I'd really, really recommend when you look, when you're a solo operator, don't look at your profit as oh, like this is how much money I had in the business? No. What would that number be if you had to pay an employee to do the work that you did? That is why most people will not get out of the out of the field is because when they step out of the field, the business isn't profitable enough and they just lose money or make just same as if they were out in the field working by themselves. And so that's why they retreat back to going solo. Like look at, it's just, it's amazing to me how it happens. Every six to 12 months there'll be a social media person that has, you know, three, four, five employees and they'll go back to being solo with one person out in the field.

And it happens all the time. It's because they haven't created a brand whereby they can charge a high enough price, have enough margin to where when they pay an employee instead of doing the work themselves that the business can actually support that.

What should you register your business as? An LLC or a C Corp? You should definitely not be a C Corp in my opinion. This is not financial advice, I guess, but C Corp is typically going to be used best for a entity that has more than 100 shareholders, like publicly traded companies and a whole bunch of different investors, etc. You're going to be wanting S Corp. It's slightly different than a version of the entity. And I would recommend starting as an llc. If you're just getting started, you'd only want to actually register as an S Corp for, for very specific reasons. And now with the Form 1120s on the tax return, you can be taxed as an S Corp without having to register for an S Corp from the beginning. So you can be an LLC and then just file as an 1120s form on your taxes. What's the best way to get more garden maintenance and yard cleanups clients? During winter months it's very difficult because you have low demand. No one's thinking about their mowing or garden maintenance during the winter. So it's not really a matter of trying to drum up that demand. It's a matter of do you have everything in place that when the spring rush comes you're able to actually absorb all the work? Because most people, they under prepare for how much work is going to come in the winter in the spring rush. And so during the winter they're like trying to stay busy doing all these other things besides like getting the employees, the equipment in the trucks ready to go. And then all of a sudden you hit May and they're turning off their leads. They're turning away estimates. They're cutting out customers because they don't have, they don't have enough employees, they don't have enough trucks. And they should have spent their winter, like training people up, getting them onboarded instead of like running after 500 different services and next shiny things in their business. A great benefit of P4P is working less hours and making more money. Why isn't this a benefit you focus much on? I feel like people nowadays want to work less hours. I think you're talking from the employees perspective. I try to focus on that. I think you're, I'm assuming you're talking about, like, to the employees is they work less hours and make more money.

Ultimately, even on P4P, though, if you work too far less hours, you're gonna make less money too. So I don't really focus on this because there's definitely people who want to work more hours when they're on P4P and make way more money. So it's, it's, you know, I think every owner can kind of pitch P4P to their employees in whatever light is most relevant. There's some people that really want to work 50, 55 hours a week. There's other people that they just need to make a certain amount of dollars and like, that's all they want to do. And so they don't care if they only work 25 or 30 hours a week. They just got to make a certain amount of money. And so you'd want to pitch it to your employees. However, is most important for you and for your culture.

How to get more clients on Facebook. From a native standpoint, just keep posting regularly and consistently is the main thing. How can I cultivate more ideal clients using ad campaigns? What are some good variables to factor in my campaigns for best quality and leads in terms of, like, the biggest thing that's going to be age, it's going to be net worth, and it's going to be geographics. Right. So where, where are they at in. In relation to your city and how close are they to your, you know, primary focused territory? That's the main thing.

What's been your biggest stressor lately? Lately, it's mostly from a business standpoint. It's been the headquarters. And a lot of that's been kind of taken off my shoulders because I've decided to sell a lot of the real estate because I think that's going to be the better move in the next 12 to 24 months. Rentals will go up. I think you would have been okay, Mike, but think I know why you sold Augusta number one. I think that is a great move, but I could be wrong. Yeah, like, in terms of rentals, um, we've already seen, if you look at the national data, but Even me having 23 rentals, I already know this, and that is we are not raising rents as fast as we could have been. As we were in 2020 and 2021, we potentially might have to, on some of our rentals, actually bring it down by like 3 or 5% because the recession is hitting people hard. They can't afford, they're moving out. And so this is going to just compound more and more. I do believe rents have gone up quite a bit and they're going to be continuing to stay strong. They're not going to, like, collapse by 20 or 30%. But, you know, rents. Rents would have still done well. We were cash flowing really well. I had 50, 60% equity in most of the properties, and so I just need to cash out in the equity so we can build the headquarters. Because I know that's going to make me millions of dollars versus, you know, 20, $30,000 a month in profit from the rentals. Does a minimum of $50 weekly and $75 biweekly sound too high? No, doesn't sound bad to me. I want to go door to door next year, but I'm nervous. Do you have any advice? Think of it as you're introducing yourself instead of that you're trying to sell potentially on lawncaremedia.com you get the door hangers that actually have the price on there. So that way you can just knock on the door, introduce yourself and hand them that, and then you're good to go. That could potentially be a way of getting around it, but I would look at it as more of an introduction. Hey, my name is Mike. I just got to start a lawn care business in the area. If you ever need something, let me know. I'm here for you. 100%, that sort of thing. And then 1 out of 10 people like, oh, yeah, actually, how much would it cost to turn that bush? Or what would it cost to do my lawn, just out of curiosity? And then you can keep the conversation going from there. Where's your minimum leaf cleanup recommendation if you're actually cleaning out the beds and everything? If you're already mowing the grass, I'd be charging a minimum of 15 or 20 bucks per service that you come to do the lawns every week. Come on. So you can just blow the leaves in the lawn and mow over them. That's like minimum. I would rather you. And this is what we do and that is look at the leaf cleanup as a separate service that regardless of the mowing, if you were coming just to do the leafs, the budget hours would be accurate, the pricing would be accurate. So in that light we're more like 40 or 50 usually per service for leaf cleanup. If I am in growth mode, do I undercat my prices? So I have a higher close ratio? I charge $60 per hour and I have a 66% close ratio. So at $60 per hour, I don't really want you to cut your prices a whole lot. You might want to be able. I wouldn't mind if you cut things like estimate fees, dump fees, material markup potentially. But I would be first looking. If your rates are at 60 per hour and your close ratio at 66, I think you could raise your prices. But if you're trying to grow, then you want to keep that close ratio up. I'd be really looking at what is your.

Follow up process like for your estimates. Do you have an automated process? Do you give them a call the day after? Those are all the things that are going to lead to a higher close ratio without adjusting your prices at all. How quick, how quickly do you get the estimate back to them? Things like that is what you can improve on without lowering your prices. By increasing your close ratio, what do you think about the statement you will own nothing and be happy.

I'm assuming you're talking about the government. You're talking about all that fun jazz with communism stuff. How do you deal with hoas? We don't really. We're not a huge fan of hoas. Homeowners associations. They always seem good because they're big contracts and it's like, oh man, this will double my business. I remember what it was like thinking that when I first got started, like I was doing, you know, three, four thousand dollars a month and like, man, if I get this one contract, it's going to be double the size of my business. It's like, well, do I really want one customer to be 50% of my revenue? Do I really want where this one contract is? I've given them such a price discount to get the jobs, to get the job. And now I show up and every single homeowner somehow thinks they're my boss and they're telling me what to do. It's just a big headache. So we're not huge fans of hoas. Honestly, I'd rather the big guys go after them. And, you know, price, compete against it and do low margins. I'd much rather just charge what I know I need to charge to have a premium product and premium service for the customer. Can you get sued for cutting over the property line?

Someone could probably sue you. I don't think they'd win. Like, it'd have to be very, very apparent that they tried to stop you and then that you went against it. And there'd be a lot for you to actually get sued. You could, but a lawsuit can be pulled for anything. It's whether or not they actually get the money that is the difference. So. All right, I'm going to cut it off there. I got a medium hopping on here at 1:30 my time. Hope you all have a fantastic day tomorrow. You got to be on the text group, the Facebook group. Where else are you going to be hosting it? You want to be on the text group or the Facebook group? Let me see here. Else or if you've ever purchased anything from lawn caremedia.com landscape businesscourse.com There is an update tomorrow going out. It's going to be amazing. The opportunity. It's going to be super cool. I can't wait for it. You guys have obviously noticed the contents change the past few weeks. We're preparing for what we're going to be doing next month. It's going to be awesome. Really looking forward to it. It's going to be. It's going to be. I'm really, really looking forward to it. So definitely check out. If you haven't already go to go in the link in the description. Just text the number landscaping to that number and tomorrow you'll be notified as well as if you have ever purchased anything from lawn caremedia.com or landscapebusinesscourse.com all our courses members will be notified first. It's going to be an awesome thing. I'll give you a little hint. Basically, it's sort of like the profit which is Marcus Lemon is going in saving businesses. Except I'm going to be doing it and it's going to be for a whole month that we do it. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So a couple more questions that came in here. I want to join Augusta by. I want to wait 2 seasons to get closer to 500k. But I'm scared my location will be taken. Columbia, MO. Have a call with Lee. I think if, honestly, if you're trying to grow up to 500,000, you'd probably better off just joining. Growing up and having the systems underneath your belt. So when you hit 500, 600,000, you already have the systems in place to have a GM takeover. P for P question my raising. By raising your hourly rate, aren't the employees technically also getting a raise? Can P4P be presented this way when employees ask about raises? Yes, 100. This is exactly what you want so that when you raise prices of the customer that the employees are getting a raise. That way when you talk to your guys like, hey, we got to have a higher level of service, a higher level of professionalism so that we can raise prices and not lose our customers. And by doing so, you all are basically getting one third of that or percentage of that on PvP. And it's exactly like you said, it's basically a straight raise. So I purchased the course a couple years ago. Is that still valid since the update? Yes, it is. You will need to get the email that was sent out to you a couple months ago. If you have not got it, just email mediagustalongerservices.com they will verify that you have the old course and they'll give you a code to join the new one. All right, everyone, take care. Have a great day.

This has been the Mike Candies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. If you liked what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews, and more over at the Mike Candies YouTube channel. That'll be right up your alley. That's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.