The PROS and CONS of Starting a Lawn Care Business! [3 Things You Should Know]

Hey, everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder and CEO of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 40 locations around North America. And today I'm going to be talking about whether or not this is a good time right now to start your own lawn care business. The good, the bad, the ugly, and how you can prevent the bad and the ugly from happening. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. Let me be really brief and say right off the bat, let me give you the punchline. Yes, it's a good time to start now, but let me give you the three reasons why you should and three reasons why you should not. The first reason why I feel like this is the best time you could possibly start a lawn care business in the next several years is that the baby boomer generation is aging and they're getting older, and they have the wealth of our country really in their pocket. They have the money, they have the ones with the most investments, and as they age, they're no longer going to physically be able to take care of their property. And by the way, that property is a lot of times one of their biggest assets as part of their portfolio. If they have a 500, 600, $700,000 house, that might, that's a good chunk of their assets when it comes to their nest egg. So they're going to want to protect that. And they physically can't do the work because they are getting older. The number two reason why is you should definitely start a lawn care business is the fact that the real estate market is so hot right now. As the price of real estate goes up and people have equity in their home, they start to look at their home and their property as an investment. So what do they do? They make sure they maintain it. They make sure they improve it with additional landscaping and hardscaping projects. These are all opportunities to make more money. And by adding value to them, it increases the home value, and they feel like that's an investment in their property. By investing $2,000 in cleanup and bark mulch, they can improve dramatically the price of their home. If they're going to put it on the market and they're going to try to sell the property, and the value and the market value of that property dramatically goes up with curb appeal. And what's one of the best ways to increase curb appeal is getting better landscaping. So maintaining the lawn, making sure it looks green, watering it, treating it for any sort of insects or weeds, these are all great opportunities to start a lawn care business and double down the Fact that as real estate prices go up, we have great opportunity. And the correlation between real estate prices and the appreciation of real estate property is directly correlated with our industry and our ability to raise prices and increase the value to the customer. The third reason why you should absolutely start a lawn care business today is the fact that it has the potential to have recurring revenue. The beautiful thing about lawn care business is I can sell someone service today and then mow their lawn every single week for not just one year, two year, three year, year after year goes by and I'm able to sell them a recurring service for mowing. Yes, but maybe I can also sell them a nine step treatment package where every single year I come nine more times and upsell them and double the value to the amount of money that I get from them every single year. I could potentially offer them bark mulch or bush trimming, or weed control, or potentially even do pressure washing our gutters in the winter. These are opportunities in addition to leaf cleanup. And if you do projects, there's so much money to be made if you upsell those customers. And for most things when it comes to maintenance, it's recurring. Leaves fall every single year. And for October, November, December, January, you could probably come back four times and do a property cleanup for just leaves. So these are recurring services. Not just mowing every single week, but also leaf cleanup, spring cleanup, bush trimming, these are all things that need to be done. A recurring basis, which means that if I can sell someone once, the value of that customer is almost infinite as long as I can keep them happy and keep my customer service high. That recurring revenue allows me to scale the business quickly and it allows me to build a business that systems oriented and that I can actually step away from as an owner if I build it large enough. Alright, so we've talked about why you should start a long term business. But now let's talk about some of the challenges in this industry. I've been doing landscapebusinesscourse.com now for about four years and I've trained thousands of landscapers and I know kind of the areas that their biggest struggle right now. I want to talk about those three right now. The first thing that we're really, really struggling with in this industry is the labor shortage. And I don't feel it's going to get a whole lot better because no one wants to work outside, no one wants to work hard. It's almost like it's a fleeting characteristic. No one wants to do that. Now a lot of people either a want to sit at home and do nothing or B they want to go get a tech job or it's not looked on a landscaper that that's a trade or that's a great place to get your career started. We're looking to change that. Augusta Lawn Care that perception. But for the most part, the labor shortage is one of the biggest, hardest things to grow your business in the lawn care industry because a lot of people don't want to work hard, they don't want to get sweaty, they don't like working outside and it's not easy work. So finding good employees is very, very difficult. I'm going to talk about in a second how you can not just solve this issue, but at least make it better so you can grow your business and get employees as you grow your company. Alright, the second thing that makes it pretty difficult right now and why a lot of people would say no, you should not start a lawn care business is because of competition. So specifically competition in your area where you might feel like it's just you see lawn care guys all over the place. Every single time you're driving down the street, you see a new lawn care company and these are unmarked vehicles, they are illegal workers, they're raggedy trucks, they're not insured, everything's under the table, everything's done with cash. And you know that they're not insured, they're not licensed, they're not bonded, they don't have any sort of permit to be doing work. However they, they're out there offering much, much discounted prices. And that competition, that fear that competition is going to keep you from growing is something that keeps a lot of people from starting their lawn care business. Again, I'm gonna talk about why this is actually a good thing and why you should still start your lawn care business. But let's move on to the third reason why some people would say you should not start your lawn care business. And that is the fact that simply lawn care is not glamorous. Not only is it not glamorous because it is working outside and you're sweaty and it's not the most fun work to be doing. You're not like building the next Facebook or Google. But also lawn care in comparison, like say hardscaping or construction or excavation or tree work can be looked down on because it's such a simple service. But I want you to think about fast food restaurants that have made billions of dollars and hire hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in, in the country. They offer simple systematized routinized work. There's an entry level place for employees to get started and grow their career down the road. It's a great place for people to learn. It's a great place to make a business around and a great place to make money. As the operator, I think about lawn care the same way. It's simple work. It's not glamorous. We're not building patios and walls or trimming trees that are 300ft tall, or using massive chainsaws and doing massive work. And that's not part of what we do with lawn care. It's mostly mowing, bush trimming, installing mulch, pulling weeds, basic services. But the beautiful thing about that is I don't have to get really, really skilled laborers. And so, you know, these three things I've talked about, the labor shortage, competition, and the fact that this lawn care thing is looked down on so much. I'm gonna go through all three of these now and kind of disprove why they're not really legitimate reasons why you should not start your business. So let's start with the labor shortage. Okay, so it is very difficult to find people, but there's definitely some things you can do to ensure you do find good employees that can do the work for you. And you can scale the business. Number one is P4P, or pay for performance. This is where the employees get a percentage of their labor revenue instead of an hourly rate. What this is going to do is allow you to pay high performers more money. Now, the low performers, they're not going to make anything more than base pay. They're not going to make a lot more, and they're going to leave eventually over time. But high performers, they'll like the fact that they can make five, six dollars more per hour with your business in comparison to all your competition. Also, by having profit sharing, they now actually care about the bottom line. And it attracts people that actually want to grow. Learn the numbers. And that leads me to open book management. Another part of what you can do to counteract the fact that it is hard to find people is open up your books, share the numbers with your employees, tell them what revenues you're making, how much you charge per hour. Let them see how much a job, the revenues are, and where the costs and the expenses are in the business. Let them see the numbers is something that is going to set you apart from all the other people that are looking for labors now as well. But hide the numbers, don't share information with their employees, and don't share in the profits and via a profit sharing program. Another way that you can set yourself apart from your competition and help reduce the pain of the labor shortage is make sure you have upward mobility options in your employment. Which means that you allow your employees the option to become an estimator or become an office manager or maybe one day own their own business. Because you're constantly training them about business, marketing, leadership, lawn care, and improving their skills so they can move their career forward. This is going to be a place that people want to work because they know it's not a dead end job and they can get to the next place in their career. Number two, competition. Everyone's afraid of competition. They don't want to start their lawn care business because everyone's price cutting them and they see lawn care guys everywhere. So how can you counteract this? You basically need to realize that they're in a completely different market market than you. Those guys running around uninsured, unlicensed and all the rest of it. They're going to be serving a population that wants prices that are really low. But they're not as concerned about who's on their property and they're not as concerned about the fact that when they call, they don't get an answer for days on end or emails and no one responds to them. So what you want to do is focus on value instead of price. Instead of just thinking about, well, how low can I get my price? Instead of thinking about that, think about how can I offer value to the customer. That value comes in the form of uniforms, a painted truck, or decals in your truck. So people know who's showing up to the property. And your uniformed employees, they can speak English and they can converse with the client. And they know and they're trained on how to do their job. They're professionals. Also when they call, when the customer calls you, you pick up the phone. You get back to them within 24 hours. If they ask for more work or an estimate or proposal, you get that back to them within 24 hours as well. Stellar communication is what's going to set you apart from every Joe Blow out there with a push mower in the back of their truck running around doing lawn for 10, 15 bucks or the kid down the street doing the same thing. That's how you set yourself apart from price, is focus on value. There's always going to be a subset of the population that are willing to pay premium prices for premium service. You look at any brand, any type of computer, phone, apparel, there's always brands that command A high price because the value and the quality of their service and product is extremely high. That's where you want to be at because now your margins are higher and you have the flexibility to afford higher wages for those employees, which again leads best back to being able to offer more options for them like we talked about in number one. All right, let's move on to number three, the last. Yes, lawn care is not glamorous. But here's why you should still still start your lawn care business. I really feel like starting a lawn care business is great because it gives you the ability to learn so many different business topics. Everything from marketing to hiring to learn how to sell customers. These are all fundamental business things that you need to learn if you're going to go do something different. If your goal down the road is to start a bigger company or do it in a completely different industry and, and lawn care is just your first stepping stone. It's a great step, it's a great place to get started. Hone your craft, learn these skills, learn how to hire people, learn how to deal with tough customers, learn how to fire employees that aren't working well with the culture of your business. These are all great skills to learn and it's a great business to grow and become the financial pillar that allows you to go and do other things. You maybe you want to invest in real estate, maybe you want to go start a different business in a different industry. Whatever your passions are, you can do those things. When you've developed what I think of as your first financial pillar. That is a business that works and produces profits and runs on systems and has a general manager in place. Once you have that in place, you can then go and play with other money in terms of investments or other business opportunities. But a lawn care business is a great place to learn and grow. And that leads me to the last part about this. Yes, it's not glamorous high, you know, high fleet and tootin white collar job. But it's a great place to see entry level employees that are just getting their career started and really allow them the place to foster their growth, give them the skills, the professionalism that they need, train them on what they can do to get to the next place place in their career, whether it be internally inside your business or just getting the next place in their career in terms of professionally going and working for another company, getting them ahead in life that is extremely fulfilling is extremely rewarding. And to be able to look in five or 10 years and know you had a real impact on those entry level employees and they got the next place in their career is extremely, extremely rewarding. That's why I think you should start a lawn care business today. Whether you're listening this in 2021, 2025, or 2030, I think all of these points are very relevant. The baby boomers are getting older. They're willing to spend money to protect their real estate, and it's recurring work. You can build your business one customer at a time, and it scales, it grows, and can be extremely profitable. I'm Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com and if you're really serious about building your business, definitely check out Lawn Care Web Design, where we can build your website, get you online and in front of those affluent customers that are looking for value and not price. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you tomorrow.