The Key to Growth & Creating a Business That Runs WITHOUT YOU!

Hey everyone, Mike andes here@landscapebusinesscourse.com today. I'm trying a new software out where I'm actually streaming to Facebook and to YouTube. I'm gonna be able to see all of your comments, I think here. And so please feel free to leave any comments. As I'm talking here. For the next few minutes, I'm gonna kind of share kind of a thought I had about small business and what you can learn from an analogy that I was thinking about. And then if you have any questions, go ahead and comment those. I will see those popping up throughout the stream and then I will address them after I am done kind of sharing a quick thought. So what my thought is, I was thinking about today is thinking about like an octopus. And I've made this analogy before that so many lawn care business owners really operate like an octopus. And that is they are the head and all the tentacles are like their employees. And basically what that means is every decision has to eventually come to the head. Every single thing that happens in the company. Every decision when it comes to equipment, every decision when it comes to marketing, hiring. Whatever decision happens in the business, it ultimately runs through the head. And if you want something done in terms of you as the owner, you want to move the business forward, you basically have to use an employee, and they're operated by you. They are not independent of you. They can't operate without you, they can't do projects without you. They can't upsell the customers without you. They can't take care of the customers or the equipment without you. Everything kind of leads back to you and is somehow attached back to you as the business owner. And for a time, that's actually the most efficient method of growing your business and scaling. When you're really small, when you have 1, 2, 3, 4, even 5 employees, it can actually be most efficient to operate like an octopus, where everything kind of comes through you. If you need the blade sharpened, you have to reach out and tell someone to do it. If you need a project done correctly, you have to show up to the project, you have to show the crew around, show them what to do, introduce them to the customer, all the rest of it. If you need materials delivered, you again have to reach out as like a tentacle through an employee and go get stuff done. But at the end of the day, everything really connects back to you as the owner. And it's most efficient that way as a small business because things get done right. And what we're talking about today is getting out of that mindset. So you can actually grow and scale. Because an octopus can do so well for. So, you know, for a while. But when an. When an arm gets severed, like, that arm is goodbye. Like, the arm is gone. It's useless. There is absolutely no worth for it whatsoever. And, you know, the octopus can keep living because it's like when we fire someone or when someone leaves us as an employee, we're like, oh, no, forget them. Like, I'm just going to keep moving on with my company. And we keep going because we're the head of the. We make the decisions. And when that arm is severed from, it's like, okay, whatever, we lost the employee. Here we go. We're going to keep going with the people we got. But what happens is if the head gets crushed, if the head gets, you know, whacked as an octopus, there's going to be a lot of damage to the whole organism. The whole organism is going to fall apart. The whole organism is going to die. And that's what happens with small businesses, is because everything runs through the owner all the time. When. When something happens to the owner that's detrimental, whether it be a health issue, mental health issue, family, they have to move away, whatever it might be, the entire business dies. And there are no systems, there are no people, there is no team. There is no structure that allows the business to grow and expand and thrive and continue to survive without the head, which is the owner. Because everything's been flowing through them. They've been the nucleus by which every single decision in the company is being made. There's no autonomy from the employees to actually act without the instruction of the head. Right. That tentacle has no ability to do anything without being connected to the head. And you might be getting a lot of stuff done, and you might be. You pride yourself in multitasking. Well, guess what? An octopus can do eight things at the same time. They can be reaching, doing different things, but at the end of the day, everything really connects to them. The head as the owner of the business. And they're just multitasking. They're getting a lot done. They pride themselves on how much they get accomplished in a day, but at the end of the day, every single employee, every single team member is really just another tentacle that is attached to the owner and just kind of like a minion. They get done what the head is wanting them to do, but they do have. They have no brain of their own. They have no autonomy of their own. I want to. I want to kind of. You know, I was thinking about, okay, an octopus. What's the alternative? What's the difference in the analogy? And that would be a rabbit. And the analogy is like, you know, rabbits, you know, multiply really fast. And you say, well, they multiply like rabbits. Here's the thing. A rabbit, when they're born three months later, literally they're able to reproduce. And they might let, you know, live 10 to 12 years. And they gestation time is only 30 days. So they can produce babies very, very quickly. And every single litter can include, like four to 12 kits or like, I guess you'd say bunnies, right? Like little bit, little rabbits. And so literally, they can pump these things out. They can get like a hundred of these things in a year of new rabbits. What that means. It's like, when I think about a team that's three or four people or maybe even five, their biggest vulnerability, their biggest, like, offensive measure really needs to be the fact that they need to grow. Because if you have two or three employees, let's say you have three employees, really great employees, you have a great team. But then what happens if one of them moves away and the other one has a physical health issue? And now you're down to one employee and yourself, like you in a really bad place. For many, many of our small business owners, the best offense, or, sorry, the best defense is great offense. The best way to protect your business from being eliminated, being hurt. Going under is growth. And actually getting enough employees to where there's actually some systems in place, there's enough duplication. Like a rabbit. It's like, okay, if a rabbit gets hit, you know, gets hit while it's running across the road, it's roadkill. Guess what? Not a big deal. Because there's more rabbits coming. We're replicating them at such a fast rate, it's very simple. The process, the up, the time to train an employee, the time to get them up to speed, get them oriented to the systems, get them to our culture, get them to the standards that we require in terms of quality is so low, we can pump out rabbits like crazy. And so therefore, instead of getting worried about the head of an octopus getting hurt and then literally the whole organization falling apart, you're not really as concerned with the fact that if a rabbit gets hit, we got more rabbits coming because that Rabbit had probably 8 or 10 different brothers and sisters are going to also replicate and the chain is going to continue. And so literally, in the course of a lifetime of a rabbit, literally, they can produce like a thousand rabbits. And so when we look at someone in my opinion, that's a great leader. It's not someone that has a great brain and has. Is the octopus has everything, all the decisions coming through them, makes all this is made to do so many different things with all their different arms, and they're just. It just seems like they're getting so much done in the day and they're making all the decisions and making grain like, you know, they are the grand master of the chess game. They do all the decisions in the company come through them. That's not the successful business. The successful business is the one that can duplicate, replicate. And the leader who is successful in my mind is the person that can create a thousand, a thousand other people that have the same mindset, the same mentality, the same quality standards, the same way of treating the customer. Getting all of those rabbits to the same degree of speed. Okay, so the biggest thing about a rabbit is it doesn't have like a whole lot of defense mechanisms. It can't. It doesn't have big teeth. It does. It can't fight. The one thing a rabbit can do is speed. And that's one of the biggest things I find with small business owners. I talked about it a couple weeks ago, and that is when it comes to decisions in our small business, the biggest defense we have is offense. That is speed is making decisions. It's going quickly. The reason you're able to beat out your competitors in your local market that have 50, 60 and have done the same thing for 50 years, they don't have a website. They just go off of word of mouth. The reason you can beat them is because of speed. The reason a Rabbit can survive 10 to 12 years if it lasts its whole lifetime is the fact that it can run away when things are bad. So when a market crash comes, when a customer leaves you, a rabbit just goes. It just moves. It goes to the next thing. It's like, I'm out of here. Like, I'm going to go to the next thing. I'm going to figure out the next decision. I'm going to make a decision instead of trying to, like, camp down on making it perfect. And the perfectionism that we try to involve ourselves with as owners is what keeps our business from growth, keeps our business from moving forward. Because we're so constantly ingrained of being the octopus, being the one that touches everything in the business. That is, you know, we pride ourselves in our way of multitasking. Getting a lot done in a day and being busy. Like, being busy has absolutely no correlation to getting stuff done. And the rabbit. Guess what? I'd rather have a thousand rabbits all this size, maybe a 1 pound size, but able to do a thousand different things and get a lot done than one octopus that has eight tentacles but is constantly, literally vulnerable to them getting knocked out in the head. You, as the business owner, you as the leader, need to be constantly aware that the biggest vulnerability if you're a small business is the effect on you, especially if you're an octopus. If you are the person making the decisions, going to every single project, you're getting every single sale, you're doing everything in the company. You're making sure maintenance is done on all the equipment. You're making sure the oil is done, you're making sure the tanks are filled with gas. You're making sure the weed weed eater line is filled on the weekends. You're making sure everything is clean. And every decision, every single task and system is running through you as the head of the organism. If you get whacked, that company falls apart. And when it comes to valuation, it's lower. That kind of a business, that kind of organization, much lower. The business that can replicate, the business that can be fast, the business that has high growth, the business that can make decisions quickly and get ahead of the curve, ahead of their competition, and adapt to changes in the economy, changes in the marketplace, they're the businesses that win. So when, when I take that analogy of the rabbit versus the octopus, what does that mean for us? Hire fast. Fire fast. Okay, stop deliberating for four weeks about the best employee between two different applicants. Hire both of them. Go fast, make decisions quickly. The reason a lot of us don't do that is because. And we act so conservatively in terms of our finances is because we are scared. We're scared of making the wrong decision. But keep it in mind. If you were able to create systems in place and have a system that actually pumped out people and pumped out, had a duplicate duplicatable system, then you'd be like, the rabbits. Like, look, we lost. We made a wrong decision. Okay? Yep. You know, Susie, the bunny rabbit got ran over by the train, but guess What? We got 100 other rabbits coming next week, right? We can go out and we can get more. And when it comes to your employees, when it comes to decisions, you know, customers, the only reason you'd get really mad about a customer issue is if you're afraid that you can't get more customers and you can't replace them. If you're so concerned about, you know, you damaged someone's Lawn because of skid mark, because it was wet and you made a skid mark and now they're freaking out. And now literally you're losing sleep over customer. The reason is because you're afraid subconsciously for some of us that you can't go get more customers. You can't duplicate that system of getting new leads, new customers, new blood, new rabbits in the system. And the last thing I want to say about this is sometimes you need to make decisions that you know are correct. You need to make these decisions blindly. I was talking to one of our franchisees this past week and it was a topic that I knew we had to figure out and that was he needed to raise his prices. I said, look, making the right decision right now is irrelevant. Trying to get everything right, Running reports on which customers you should raise prices on and how much you should raise prices on, how far away are they from your shop and therefore should they be raised more if they're further away and if they've been with you for a long time, should they automatically get increased? All of these different variables that could go into how you raise your price. I said, look, we're going to do this wrong. And that is where you're going to do a blanket price raise across all of your customers based upon their price, just a percentage increase. Now is that the right decision? Probably not. Probably not fair for some customers. Might lose some customers because we got them last month or six months ago and now we're raising their price. But guess what? Sometimes when you know you need to make the right decision in terms of it's the right thing for the business. You need to do it blindly. You don't need to analyze. You don't need to spend six months trying to figure out the right way to do it. You just need to do it. The reason the rabbit prevails and continues to survive despite the fact that it has absolutely no ability to attack or defend itself is one thing and that's speed. So when it comes to your business, the best way to defend and keep your business surviving is to be able to make decisions quickly. Alright, so I hope that was kind of helpful. I'm gonna go jump into the comment section now and I'm live on YouTube and on Facebook, so I actually, I think I can actually click on your comments now and you it'll see on the screen. So let me go through these. I got a few minutes here before my next call. Matthew Jr. Arriaga James. Matthew, welcome. Welcome. Jeff. What's up guys? So I'm going To go ahead and keep, go ahead and ask questions. So Robbie White has a question here. What are your thoughts on monthly billing for services versus billing per visit? We currently bill per visit thinking of switching to monthly billing to have more steady income through the slow months.

Great question. So from a cash flow standpoint, like Robbie's saying here, it is better to have monthly cash flow throughout the whole year. This is the thing when it comes to speed of growth. Having someone sign a 12 month contract or trying to explain to them how that's going to work is usually just more friction to the sales process. And so if you're trying to scale, you're trying to grow, a lot of times you're going to rather go, you're going to prefer going for a per cut price on that gateway service of mowing and then you're going to upsell them other services and you're not going to make them do a 12 month contract. Okay, so that's going to be growth. Now as your business grows and matures, you might switch to 12 month billing so you can have that more consistent cash flow throughout the winter. That being said, even if you have per cut pricing, you can make sure you do winter services and stay busy during the winter. Convert those mowing customers into recurring winter services visits. We've talked about a lot at conference. So if everyone likes this format where I can, I'm streaming to Facebook and YouTube and you can see the comments, please give me a thumbs up. I'm paying for this new software but if you guys like it, I will continue to to use this more often. All right, welcome. For everyone that's just joining us, feel free to ask questions. All right, next question. Would you bill for mulch the month that is installed or break it total for mulch or pine? So this is the thing. I don't want to be a bank, right? I don't want to install mulch for someone in spring and then have them pay me payments for that mulch over the course of 12 months. I'm a bank in that scenario. I want to be as much as possible have the cash before. Ideally I even have to perform the service. So we collect 50% before. In this scenario I want to be paid when I'm doing it. So for some people they will take a mulch, install fall cleanups, winter services, mowing, trimming bushes, everything, put it as a full service and make a 12 month contract, totally fine. I'm not against that at all. Better cash flow, you won't have the ups and downs in terms of cash flow. But the bottom line is your labor. Your biggest variable expense is labor and materials. And that's going to go up and down based upon how much services you're performing. So if I'm doing a lot of services, my labor and my material cost is also going to go up. So it's going to be almost like counterintuitive in your brain when at that time you're actually making your lowest profit margin because now your variable cost is going to go down. Labor, materials, during the winter time. Okay, so just keep that in mind. It all balances out in my opinion, as long as you run the numbers correctly. All right, we're going through questions. Let's see here. I don't know about this talk. He's talking comparing rabbits to business. You gotta realistic at the very beginning. Come on now, Troxell. The analogy is good. Thank you. All right, Mark Hanson has a question. Hey Mike, I've recently been having an issue with my emails going out to customers. They keep finding them in their spam folder. They add us as contacts, but still goes their spam. This is a tough one. Gmail, Yahoo, they're getting better and better at filtering out CRM as well as even things like mailchimp. It's getting more and more difficult. There's several things you can do. It really depends on the different type of CRM. And it also is like you can try to do it on the phone. And a lot of times the biggest thing is if they don't get the estimate within like 24 hours, you want to give them a call and they tell them to check their spam. And usually if they open up their email, they can mark it as like a good email. If it did go to their spam folder, it's happening for both invoices and sales emails. Any tips or ideas why it is happening and how fix it? I would check in with your CRM and see if they have something that they're specifically working on. Honestly, from a email responder standpoint, it's a constant battle simply due to the fact that the filters are getting better and better on the email servers in terms of Google and places like that. Keith. Hello Mike. Thank you for all your advice and guidance. You share with us on a daily basis. How many months booked out before it is potential time to put another new crew on the road. So I usually look for three weeks book two to three weeks booked out. Especially when you're growing quickly. I'd say two, because when you get two weeks booked out, that's when you can go hire someone, have them give their two weeks notice and then you have two weeks basically to make sure you have enough work to keep them busy all the time. Alright, so for us, when you're in hyper growth, two weeks is all I need to be filled up before I'm going. Keep the video going, don't cut it short. Love the content. All right. Pr, that's a cool little head thing. See how you get to see various pictures too. That's great. Walking commercial property with the manager first time ever doing this. Second year in business. Tips to get the sale. Definitely just ask them specifically why they're changing services. They've obviously had a lawn care and landscaper in the past. Why are they switching? What do you need to do differently than their previous provider, their previous vendor and then just double down on that and make sure in your estimate you directly go after those pain points. Farm life I am currently part time lawn care. Do you suggest going full time then hiring or hire? First grow Fast, then quit my 9 to 5. It's going to depend on how much liquidity you have depending on how much money you have. If you don't have a lot of money, I'd recommend you go full time because lower risk. Again, I'm pretty conservative in terms I don't go into a bunch of debt. Now if you have some money, you have quite a bit of money set aside maybe three or four months worth of revenue for the business you have set aside in a savings account. That's when you could go hire someone, spend money on marketing to fill their schedule and then keep marketing to fill out your schedule and you go work with them. So definitely comes down to how much money you have honestly to spend on marketing. Hey Mike, during the spring rush, is it worth the focus on marketing and gaining as many clients as possible and let customer service slip during the short spring rush? No, what I would do in service. You don't want to let customer service slip. In my mind what you want to do is filter out customers better. So for example, you might make it a little harder to get an estimate. What I mean by that is instead of answering your phone, if you can't get to like you don't have an answering service, you don't have an office. For examp might leave on your message machine saying if you're looking for an estimate, go to our website at this email or at this address and fill an estimate request form. Again, trying to weed people out. Also, if you're doing big part projects and landscaping, I was Talking with one of our franchisees up in Ontario today. And I said, hey, look, the one time I would weed out customers with this question is when you're really busy. And that is, do you have, have you established a budget for this project? So if you're doing big project and you're booked out like months in advance. Yeah. And you're super busy, like I would say, look, hey, do you have a budget established for this? Oh, no, I don't. Okay, well when you've established that, give us a call back or oh, it's $5,000. Okay, well you're expecting a paver patio and remodel of your entire yard. Probably not going to work out. You're probably not a good fit for us. Right. So there are definitely ways to filter out clients. I definitely think whoever gets through those filters, I want to have a high level customer service. So I wouldn't recommend just like not answering your phone, not answering emails. That's what gives this industry a bad rep. What's the minimum percentage that should be used for P4P? Minimum? I don't really have a minimum. I would say a maximum of labor revenue should be 25%. In terms of what is going to the employees build privilege equals cash flow. What is the best weed eater? I really don't know. I am not smart when it comes to that stuff. How do you feel about lmn? I really like their budgeting things. The budgeting part is free. I recommend everyone do that. And then in terms of their software itself, I know it's really good for projects. Matt, if you need paid for every service right then and there, you're not running your business. Right. Facts.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. If you need the money like you're not running enough, you're not having enough money in the bank and working capital. But on the flip side, from a cash flow standpoint, it's always smart to try to get the money as quickly as possible or even before the job is done. I know what you're saying though, Matt. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying you do want to get money as fast as possible. Have you heard of profit first? Yes, I've talked about that in the past. Can you explain your pay system briefly? Okay, we've talked about this in the past. I gotta go here guys. In like 5, 3 or 4 minutes actually. Can you do P4P with customers? 12 month contracts, but instead of paying the employee 33% of visit, but pay them 30% of what their Route generates each month. So in the off season when we go to bi weekly, they still get paid. Okay, so the basic premise here is giving a percentage of revenue to the employees on a 12 month contract. You cannot give them 33% of every month because there's gonna be months. They work a bunch of months, they work a little bit. And they're not owners, so they're not, they're not used to a big curve of how much money they make in a week and every pay period. What you need to do is you need to go every single visit and figure out how many budget hours is for mowing, how many budget hours is for weeding, how many budget hours is for trimming the bushes. Every single visit. Because in, in October, November, you might spend 12 hours every week doing leaf cleanup. Whereas in the middle of dead heat of summer, the grass isn't growing, no weeds are growing. You might spend 30 minutes. You cannot give them a percentage of the monthly amount. And that's why it takes a little more time. If you're doing 12 month contracts, you got to spend a little more time putting together your P4P, splitting apart the visits and all the rest of it. But absolutely, it's the only way to Pay and use P4P. Alright, a couple more questions and I gotta bounce. If you get your customers to reply to your emails, you'll get better treatment from the spam filters. Yep, that, that definitely. How do you charge dollars per square foot of grass? What do you charge dollars? So we don't charge by the square foot. There's just too many variables. And when it comes to pay for performance, they're getting paid based upon their how long they're spending at the property and how long the budget, how many budget hours are allocated that job? So I cannot, you know, there's 5,000ft of grass I cannot charge based upon square footage. Because if that's 5,000 square feet of grass right next to the curb, where the truck can park, right next to the trailer setup puts the ramp down and they're on the lawn. Literally could take a few minutes. Now that 5,000 square feet of grass in the backyard, after having to go down a bunch of steps with a gate and with a dog in the backyard, that's a completely different ballgame that could take two to three times longer. So when it comes to budget hours, that's how we have to, we charge everything. All right, last question. Hey, Mike, how important is it an MBA to an entrepreneur? Does it make it easier to acquire success or can you learn on your own and be just as successful and knowledgeable with business. Honestly, in my opinion, you do not need an mba. Like, I don't know if you're referencing the MBA for Entrepreneurs course that I made on teachable. You do not need that. The thing about learning in general is it accelerates the ability for you to grow and expand without making as many mistakes. That's literally what it does. It allows you to cut corners. It allows you to get ahead faster. And so do I think that an MBA is required? No. Someone keeps saying please. I'll answer their question. Please. Tips for getting first commercial account marketing wise B2B. You got to focus on the fact that you probably only have 10 to 15 people. You're going after property managers instead of thousands in residential. So when it comes to commercial, it's a completely different ball game. I see people running ads and running YouTube ads and running all these different ads on. On these platforms. And literally they need to recognize that they literally need to be going after 10 to 15 people if they're going commercial. You're not going after every single person and every single residential customer. So. All right, thank you so much, everyone. Hit the like button. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already. I'm going to try to do these more often. I love the fact I can see your questions and you can see the questions, and I'm right now I'm streaming on YouTube and on Facebook. Thank you so much, everyone. We'll see you next time and have a great weekend.