The Recipe for a Million Dollar Lawn Care Business (Consulting Call w/ Mike Andes)

Hey, everyone. Mike Andes here. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care with over 80 locations around North America. And today I'm actually doing a consulting call with a young landscaper that's growing very quickly. Last year they did $997,000 in revenue. And they're trying to keep expanding and growing, and there's bottlenecks that start to happen even in a large business because the owner is so involved in the company. So today we talk a lot about systems, and I think it's a really, really good consulting call. And I am appreciative that he tried to. Geronimo allowed us to actually share this publicly. So without any further delay, let's go ahead and jump into it. Geronimo, good man.

I mean, we started off the year strong. You know, I got that GM in and he's been like, lights out the beginning of this year. So I've. It's taken a huge load off my plate. I started networking with property managers. We got some super big jobs, which is something I've never been able to do because I've been so in the day to day, but kind of. I had, like a list of questions here, and I know your time's super valuable.

Essentially. Like, you kind of heard our story, you know, over the interview, and I'm looking to scale it, and I'm actually kind of questioning myself if the way I've structured the business, if it's even scalable, because I don't want to grow something to $5 million and have it be, you know, just not efficient. Alexa.

And then also too, just scheduling. Like, I feel like. I feel like I've kind of mastered, you know, how to scale crews and get more trucks, hire more people, how many, how many accounts can we put per crew? But what I haven't figured out is how do I scale the office? You know, what, what positions do I need? What can they handle when I grow? You know, who do I hire on for what position? And obviously you've done, like a super good job at that, and you were asking some really good questions during the interview, which made me realize, like, this guy's been through it. I should just pick his brain about it. And honestly, like, like I put in the instructions or on your. The videos. Like, it's probably going to be an ongoing thing if it's something you're interested in, because I know this is going to take a lot more than one phone call to figure this out.

Yeah, like, I kind of remember being at your stage too, in terms of size and you know, being young, growing really, really quick. Right. And just a matter of, like, you know, eventually becoming the point where it's like, well, do I even want to build it so big if I have to be here all the time? If it's a. A lot of just constant firefighting. Right. Yeah. So especially on the opposite side on set becomes the harder and harder issue, and then it becomes very heel, if that ever. That person ever leaves, because they have all the stuff in their head.

Yeah. So this is kind of like how I structured my business. So I was like, I watch your videos. When I first started, I was. I was like, mowing, and then I would schedule cleanups.

Right.

And then when I purchased this business, there was another competitor. I purchased him, like, maybe a year ago. He told me, he said, your. Your. Your goal is to do landscape maintenance. And so you give him a set monthly price, and you just maintain the whole property. And he said, if you do that, then you get to. You get to stay busy all year long. Because during the fall time, you know, during the summertime, like, you catch up on shrub trimming, weed pulling. During the wintertime, you're doing leaf cleanup, storm cleanup, that sort of thing. And so all of our customers, like, we're able to stay busy 12 months out of the year. The only thing is, like, for your business, you know, you guys are trim, mo, blow, like, and that's what you do. I mean, I don't know your business very well, but I think it's mostly mowing versus us. It's like, I give them a. I give the customer a set bid, and let's say I charge them $60 per visit or $65 per visit.

I set the price, and I have a protocol list. When you show up to the property, what are you looking for? Does the lawn need to be done? Do shrubs need to be done, do weeds need to be done, et cetera. And then at that point in time, I leave it up to the foreman to make the decision on what needs to be done. And that little hiccup right there is what I'm scared about.

If.

If I go to grow it to 3,000 accounts, it's like. It's like, is that scalable? Yes. It's great because we can work 12 months out of the year, and there's always something to do at these properties. But I can. I can manage five or six crews myself. Can I manage 30 doing this? You know, and so I don't know if you've ran into landscapers that have that same setup before.

Yeah, we have quite a few like that. And so the bottom line is you never, if you're going to scale, like, you never want to leave anything objective to or subjective to the. What the employee on site thinks the standard should be. It always needs to be very clear with the start and the stop, what should be done. It should never be, hey, just go for it, right? Like, trim bushes as needed is what I see a lot of people's like, it's like that. You cannot do that. You need to tell them which days to melt, to trim the bushes or which bushes need to be trimmed. And so either time or completion, in my mind is the two things that will dictate the job being done to completion is trim all the bushes this day. Secondary option time is spend 45 minutes pulling weeds. Right? And so how we do it, even when we do winter, when we're not doing mowing and we're trimming their bushes, we're pulling their weeds, whatever, we tell the customer, hey, we're going to spend the same amount of time we would spend mowing. We're going to spend doing all of these things. Just like you said, we're going to start at the top, we're going to work our way down, and if we don't get the way to finish, that's fine. Like, we're just having to do it next week. Or if you want, we can do an estimate and get it done sooner to finish that out. But that's kind of how we do it because most of our customers like, to your point, we don't do full property maintenance year round. What we do is we do mowing, and then during the winter, we pivot to that. So we say, hey, look, instead of mowing, we're going to keep going your property the same pace. The price will not change, and we're going to spend the same amount of time we spend mowing, we're going to spend doing all these other things. Okay? And so that gives the guys a start, stop time, because they have some amount of budget hours they have to work on there and get as many of those things done as possible.

Okay, so what about, what about during the springtime rush? Because, you know, like, after springtime, those shrubs are, you know, they've got a half a foot of new growth on top of them. Do you just, you just leave that for. From all the way from spring to winter time?

What we try to do, honestly, is we try to get. When the grass is just starting to grow, like, and we've just hired a bunch of our employees to get ready for the spring rush. We really pitch our, our existing customers on. Get your spring cleanup done now and trim your bushes now. Because we're going to book ourselves out three months, right, like literally in a few weeks. So it allows us to kind of train all of our guys on our current customers property and then when all the work comes in, we've already finished our existing customers.

Okay, gotcha. So.

So for your maintenance schedule for you guys mowing throughout the year, you're cleaning up at the end of winter.

Or beginning of winter, we're typically kind of doing both. Some people do in the middle of the year as well. But what our goal is like if someone were to do trim alder bush and do a massive property plant twice a year, we want to do it right before the mowing rush and then right as it's ending like at the end of the year. So we can only control that for people that are existing customers. We can't control new customers coming in. And we already know that we're going to get a rush of those customers that are new during the growing season. So our goal is like, hey, get as much of the of our existing customers out of the way before that comes.

Okay, so for you, for you guys then, for the way your maintenance is set up, is, is you part of that monthly price or whatever the per visit price is, you're two times out of the year you're going to clean up the property?

No, if someone actually wants a full out cleanup, like, hey, we're going to trim all your bushes, all your leaves, we're going to pull your weeds, that's going to be a totally separate estimate. We do more of the a la carte thing. We don't do as many like, hey, it's 300amonth. We're going to do all of your services. We can do that. We do it some, but we really push for, hey, we're going to do a mowing price during the winter months. We're going to keep coming every week, same price versus different services. But if you want us to be doing that throughout like all the growing season too, that's when you're going to do exactly what you probably do, which is more like, hey, it's 450 bucks a month. Here's what you're getting, right? It's just a matter of being very clear in your estimate what is being included. Not just like we're going to trim your bushes. It's like you're going to get three bush trunes. A year. These are the months they're going to happen in. And then that way you can schedule it a lot better and put it on the months that you want it to be done. And if they come back, you're like, man, my bush. Bushes are overgrown. You say, Look, Mr. Jones, you paid for three. Do you want to add a fourth one? Because if we could do that, you're just going to pay for that one out extra. Yeah.

So for us, for us, then we'd want to schedule that because our grass dies off, obviously, during summertime, right around late May, June, and then winter time. So I should be setting up in my jobber twice per year, and then we still charge the same monthly price, but twice per year is when we really focus on. On the shrubs. And that might take a month or a month and a half or three visits. Right.

To get that, that.

Get that back in order.

Yeah. Your goal is to try to take out the seasonality of our industry. Right. Like when it's really, really peaking high, you want to be focused on what services need to be done this week. That's going to typically be mowing and maybe bush trimming and cleanups. But like, projects, for example, even as we head into March, April, we'll say we're three months booked out because we know we're going to slow down on all these new customers getting onboarded with overgrown grass. And in June, July, August, we'll smash a ton of projects and their big ones. Right. Because they're usually not time sensitive. A customer that wants a paver patio or something like that, they're willing to wait two months for us to get on the job, typically. So that's. It's a huge issue in a matter of, like, how do we just level out supply and demand and then the supply of our labors. Because, like, you only have so many employees and you don't want to hire 20 and then lay off 10 of them. Right. So it's a matter of, like, knowing what services are most time sensitive.

So essentially, it's like we, you and I pretty much have the same model. Just you've taken a step further by actually scheduling or differentiating the shrub trimming versus the lawn. The lawn maintenance. Correct.

Yep, exactly. And honestly, like, your model of, like, combining the two totally works. It's just a matter of.

P4P working well.

When. Because, for example, if you charge $300 per month for the whole year, $3,600, how much work you're actually providing on some Months might be $700 worth. Of work. Other months it might be $100 worth of work. Right. The problem is, well, where do they cancel? Because eventually they will. It's a matter of. I can't lock in. Exactly, exactly. Of what timing of the year. Because if they cancel for you either late spring or late fall, you're going to have a lower profit on that customer that year versus if they cancel with you late winter or early spring. And I don't. It's tough from a margin standpoint to be in that boat. And I just don't like the idea of being the bank, basically. And that is okay. If I get someone, if I sign someone up in early spring, I'm floating those first few months of unprofitability in hopes that they're going to stay with me for a longer time. Right.

Yeah, true.

Yeah.

So. So here's another thing too, about scalability.

The way I've bid my projects or my maintenance accounts. I don't know if you're going to like this, but. So I bid everything for labor, and that's it. And the reason why I do that is because my guys, they come into the shop, we're in a warehouse in the middle of town. So I don't have a place to dump green waste, so I have a dump trailer designated for green waste. The guys come in with their cans, they throw it in the trailer, and then once every two weeks, I dump it. And I dump it for like $65 every two weeks. The gas, the fuel and everything, like, really isn't that much for me. So for me Personally, I'll do $60 per man hour for the guys to be there. And I don't charge green waste, and I don't charge chemical spray because we just get it in bulk and it's super cheap. And for me.

It'S just, It's.

It's kind of.

It feels like pennies. You know, I'm. Oh, I made, you know, I made $50,000 off of my maintenance cruise for the month. And. And I'm dumping my dump fees for $150 a month. You know, it's like, it doesn't mean anything to me. So when I'm bidding out these jobs and I'm looking at it online, another thing is too, is I price a job like I'm in the middle of springtime. So how long is this going to take me when I'm in the middle of springtime? And then I make my margins when I'm in springtime, but I make better margins when I'm in My summer or winter. I want to know what you think about that estimating process and if that's scalable too.

It's a law of averages, right. Like you're going to do the same thing. Even if you were trying to be accurate. It's just that in the spring, you know, like when you say $60 per hour, my first thought is like, that's kind of cheap. However, you're using $60 an hour as the base because you're actually probably doing more like 75 or 80 if you're bidding in that way. Right. Where like you're taking the maximum and charging that year round. So the thing that I would say is like trying to start baking in the fact that you have a unique advantage to dumping thing. And that might not be around forever. You might have to mention new, go to a new shop, rent land. Like getting in the habit of charging dumping fees is extremely important in my mind because what you want when it comes to overhead recovery, the two main overhead is going to be your office and it's going to be land dumping and actual building. Right. When I say office, I mean staff, right. As well as overhead, like your GM or an estimator. So we have two fees. One is your dump fee and the other is your estimate fee. And those two fees should cover both of those big line items. And again, that will replace you, right? Because for example, if you do, let's just say 20 estimates in a week and.

20 estimates in a week and 10 of them get accepted and you put an $80 line item of an E fee on every single one, usually $800 in that week on E fees. That is going to be the thing that pays for your estimator and for your office person. Yeah, your dump fees is going to be the thing that right now you have a great setup. But if you want to expand, you need to grow. You get more trucks and you get some land rent that now you got to do. You got to at least manage even managing the waste $150. But you've got to like, it takes brain space. You got to manage it, get it taking the dump and all the rest of it. Like no, you definitely want to be charging for that. Like we charge $100 per pickup and then 199 for dump trailer of debris. And so I know that that's putting aside for the local shop at least like four or five thousand dollars a month. I know that that's going to be the thing that pays the mortgage down the road. Right.

So for my cleanups and installs all that. Those dump fees are included into the bid for maintenance. When I'm taking like one can of green waste away, I don't charge for that. And that's where, I mean, that dump trailer is filled up after two, three weeks. So for, for you guys, I know you're at your E fee. You guys don't put that on the estimate. It's just kind of worked into it.

Right.

So for the dump fees, you don't put that on the, like, you don't say $60 per visit. And then if you want to dump, it's going to be five, $5. You just. You work that in, correct?

Yeah, we worked it in. Right. So we basically have. You have labor and we separate labor and materials. Right. Essentially supplies, we call it in ours. But labor, materials. Materials is going to be dump fees, fees, any sort of materials. But if you're doing a project as a cleanup, for example, you're going to have an et. You're going to have dump fees, and then you're about how many hours that is labor is on that job. The customer is just going to see one line item with a dollar amount. Right. So it's baked in. It's just a matter of. Especially when you start getting to the point where you want to implement paper performance, the employees only get a piece of the labor. Yeah. And you want that separated out from the overhead recovery, which is going to pay for the estimator and your office person down the road. Gotcha. Okay.

So.

For, for, for. So here's another thing too, like in your guys's business, for me, because the way I've set up my business, if I get better equipment, my hourly rate doesn't increase because it's, there's. I bid it for 30 minutes being there. Right. But for you guys, if you get a better mower and you're only mowing, then your hourly rate just goes up. So that's another thing for me is like I'm, I like, is this scalable because I can't jump to $80aman hour or I have to raise the price per visit by X amount of dollars.

Yep. And so that's why most people are in a constant race to buy bigger equipment, because that's how they become more efficient. It's just. And I can't find labor. So let's go buy more equipment. That's why it's so important to get the guys on P4P because they'll, they'll, they'll match what a bigger mower would do. And at the end of the day, you're charging an hourly rate. So whether they get it done in 20 minutes or 40 minutes, if you do it, let's say, for example, I'm looking at a lawn outside here and say, okay, that's going to take me half an hour to mow. Well, if I get a bigger mower and I go from a 21 inch mower to a 48 inch mower, okay, well, it's just gonna go from 30 minutes to 20 minutes. If I'm still charging $80 per hour, I simply just move the price on the customer from 40 to 30. I'm still getting the same hourly rate of $80 per hour. So there's no reason to buy a bigger mower because I'm simply passing those cost savings all the customer, oh, by the way, I could buy a bigger truck and all the rest of the haul that mower around. So when you're on, when you're on, when you're giving your employees a percentage of the labor revenue, they, it's, that's where your efficiencies are getting in the labor side instead of, oh, I just got to keep buying more equipment to be more efficient.

Yeah, yeah, because right now it's like I, you know, I bid a customer or I bid a job for say $60 and per visit and I give my guys a 30 minute maximum on that property.

That'S $120 an hour, $60 per man hour.

If I get a better mower, if I spend two grand on a mower, I, I still, they still have to be there for 30 minutes to maintain 100.

You're taking all the cost. Now.

People wouldn't change that, would it? I mean, that's my business that I've, I've structured differently.

Yeah, you built it around a little bit different because you built where they spend a certain amount of time on the property. Right? Yeah. So that, that comes a little different because I would still think P4P should be implemented because it's going to cut down on all the time in between jobs, lollygagging around the shop, you know, spending 30 minutes getting their truck out the door. Um, so I would still say it would be useful, but in terms of the actual work, you have your completion being a time instead of job being finished. Right. So if they finish mowing, they've got to keep pulling the weeds for eight more minutes no matter what. Yeah. The problem with that is, well, if they don't like weeding, guess what they're going to do. They're going to make sure it takes 30 minutes to mow the lawn. Yeah, Right. And so that's that. I would imagine that sometimes your customer service issues, too, is the customer saying, these things aren't getting done, and. And you're basically like, well, we've got to add more time to the job. But in reality, it's very possible the guys don't want to do that thing, so they just make sure that the other services take longer.

But if we did it your way, which you had said, change the shrub trimming to a designated two times a year for these customers, then I could get better equipment and I could go through these properties a lot quicker, Right?

Yep. Because then you're selling the result. Like, at the end of the day, the customer. The customer's buying a result. They want the moat, their lawn mowed. They want the bushes trimmed. They don't care how long it takes to do it. Yeah, Right. So what I want to do is say, hey, Mr. Jones, I'm going to sell you lawn mowing. It's going to cost you $40 a week. I'm going to sell you twice a year. Come true bridges. It costs 450 bucks. I'm going to ala carte that on a menu of items, menu of options on the estimate. And when they accept it, my crew gets to go there and they can say, hey, go for it. You want to beat this time? Have at it.

That's so genius. And you're in your office. Staff knows two times per year. All right, let's gear up. We got to schedule these shrub trimmings, right?

Yep. So typically, what you want to do is you want to. You want to do your shrub trimmings, and then you just have, like, obviously fertilization is also another time of the year. It's going to get. Be busy, too. So you try to, like, get your spring cleanups done before that. Then you're going to go into fertilizations. Then usually the grass is taking off, so we let some time go by four. Then we're scheduling projects. Right. So instead of just like, as work comes in, if you schedule it, you're going to be so crammed and busy, you're going to need like 50 people. And then also, I'm crashing down come summer.

Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. All right. Thank you. That was. That's worth it right there.

The bottom line is exactly what you said, and that is when you're. When you're selling time, buying more equipment does absolutely nothing for you. You're Basically taking more overhead for absolutely nothing.

Yeah.

The way to change that is start selling a prop. Selling as a product instead of time. Right. And your guys can't. Like, there's no benefit to your guys right now to be more efficient. There's no benefit for them to kick butt or work harder because they just don't have to spend 30 minutes of this job. Yeah. And so what that causes, though, friction is the customer now becomes the boss because they're the ones deciding whether or not they were working hard, whether or not they. The last crew mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes. This crew only got the only mow the lawn. Like, it's inconsistent because at the end of the day, the customer just wants to buy a product. They want to buy a thing. They're not. They're not trying to buy your time.

Yeah. No, you're a hundred. Yeah, a hundred percent. Okay. So another thing that we're struggling with, too, is, like, as we're growing, I want to step out of this position, obviously, right now. Ryan. The way it's structured is we have Jocelyn in the office who does invoicing, scheduling, maintenance, handling complaints.

That pretty much any. Any special requests for customers.

All the headache.

Yeah. Ryan handles. Yeah. Cleaning the office. Ryan handles. He handles, like, larger customer complaints, you know, and maybe cleanup projects or whatever whatnot.

In more advanced scheduling where we might need equipment, where Jocelyn just. That's not her field of expertise. And then he handles, like, picking up the phone initially and estimating. So he'll go and do larger estimates, typically like under a thousand dollars. He's doing those. Any maintenance, customers? He's doing those. And so me, right now, I'm really just doing installation estimates. And if I continue to grow and open up my second location, hopefully in the next 12 or 24 months, obviously, I can't. I can't do that. And so I'm wondering, like, at my level, how do you. How would you recommend setting up my office so that we're most efficient and the job roles are clearly defined? Because right now it's kind of like everyone's doing a little bit of everything, and it's not. It's not efficient.

Did you come to conference or not? I'm sorry. No. Okay. No, it's so good. So one of the things we talked about is, you know, there's stages of growth. Right. And one of the last stages of growth towards the end is scale or diversify. Scale is I'm going to take one location and it's going to get bigger and bigger and Bigger. The second in terms of duplication is I'm going to go to second and third and then just copy and paste what I'm doing. Right. If you're trying to go to copy and paste method, ie, start a second location you've got, I would highly recommend simplifying your services because that's the step prior to doing scale. And duplication is simplify. Right. So either A, you're gonna say, hey, these are the three different types of projects we're gonna do for installation. And then your GM can take those over. Right now you're the bottleneck, the installation side, because that's the most complex side of the business. Yeah. So if you're gonna, if you're gonna, you're gonna copy and paste it. It needs to be either simple or it needs to be duplicatable. And so it's not to say, oh, you can't do, you know, paver patios or walls, but you've got to really, really discipline in what are the projects we're going to take and what you're not going to take. Because you've got to train someone how to do that without you having to be on the property to do a custom job on basically every project.

Yeah, yeah.

What.

At what point did you feel the need to diversify the general manager from the estimator? Cause I'm sure your GM was probably doing a little bit of the estimates at one point in time, right?

Yeah. Like, once a location gets over, like I used to say 800,000amillion, you need a GM and an estimator. But, you know, if you have the office nailed down and based on our call before now, I think Jocelyn's probably a rock star. And so.

I would say if that's locked down, you can easily do one person being your gm, that does the estimates. If you simplified services and really sure, everything's systematized and they can, you can be doing 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, like our local shop, 1.6 or 1.7. One person GM, he does all the estimates, manages the crews, the whole nine yards. But he had the office locked down because he has command center. Right. So if you have the office locked down, the management of people becomes, I've got to hire people and get enough estimates out the door. But if the office is able to handle like estimates over the phone for mowing, for example, and they do it by square footage, there's half of your GM doesn't have very much. Now, he can take over your projects. But the thing that's limiting now is they're complicated, so simplify them. Hey, there's only one type. We only need one type of block for walls and one type of block for pavers. And 95% of people are okay with that because we have in a book, we show them. Do you like this? Yeah. Great. Okay. Boom. That's the one we're doing. Right. And it's a kind of middle of the road price, middle of the road design. Gray colors, like, it works. And so if you want to go like, very, very custom, though, that's extremely hard to find someone that can be a GM for that position. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, so last six months, I've been networking with designers, and of course, every designer has a different. Different project in mind of or what they want for their project. And so I've. Yes, we're making a lot more money and we're getting a lot more larger jobs of softscaping, which, you know, I love, but it's not really scalable. As you were saying, every design's prod are different. So.

And it's not bad. Like, you can scale a complex business. It just takes a lot of infrastructure and skilled management. Right. Like, trying to replicate you is extremely expensive. Yeah. Right. So you've got to take out. Hey. We always ask owners, like, okay, if you had to replace yourself, how long would it take to train someone? And if that's more than two or three weeks, like, you're in trouble. Right? Yeah. Like, if it's gonna take six months, I gotta train them on the pricing. I've got to train them on how to do designs and redesigns and how to negotiate and how to talk to suppliers. Like, you're locked in. Yeah. Right. So you guys just like, what's the biggest bottleneck? What's the hardest thing I do? Cut it out. What's the next thing? Cut it out. Or can I take this thing and create a system around it? Like, maybe we continue doing paper patios, but here's the two blocks we're gonna use and that's it, right? Yeah.

So you guys have. So when you.

When you had. What was your.

That lady's name that helped you out in the beginning?

Liz.

Yeah, Liz.

Liz was probably a rock star too, in the beginning for you. And just as Jocelyn. So Liz's role, how did you diversify? And Liz was getting too busy, I guess.

One, at one.

At what point did you. Did you find that she started to get too busy? And then two. What was the first thing to pass off of her plate?

When you say pass off of her plate, you mean like give from her to an office assistant?

Yeah. Correct.

Yeah. So like I would say when you cross about a million in revenue, if you're doing simple services and you're doing a high volume of sales because you're doing lower, lower pricing. Like if you're doing $50,000 contracts or projects, you only got to sell 20 of those a year. Right. So you don't need a lot of volume of calls. There's not much customer service. Whatever.

At the end of the day though, an office assistant to help Jocelyn is a lot cheaper than a GM that knows how to put together $80,000 projects. Right. And so when we hit about 1.2 is when we got an office assistant for Liz. And then now, now of course, that's all at command center, but I would say when you cross a million, she's probably going to need help. Because you already had a million, right?

Yeah, 997 last year.

Let's go. So I would say she's probably hitting max. Is that kind of why you're asking the question?

No, not at all, man. She's 24 hours a week.

Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah.

And a lot of that's because you do have the model of the monthly set. Monthly. Right. That's lower. Um, and. But then you're also doing big projects right now. Like of your 1 million, what percentage of that is mowing?

Last year it was about 400,000 maintenance and then 600,000 cleanups. But we did 600,000 cleanups and installs with One Crew last year.

Got it. Yeah. So like at that relatively similar to ours. Right. So obviously you've got your customer service actually pre nailed down in terms of many hours. So I would just say, you know, when she start hitting capacity, the thing that you're going to let off off load of her first is email communication and phone calls. Right. So that she can focus on billing, invoicing, scheduling, routing, all of that stuff. Now when I, when I talk about an office person, I am talking about someone that does all of that. Right. It's not like the GM does those sort of things. They do all of the billing, all the invoicing, everything. Like that one person. Yeah.

So what, so what's the GM's role then? When you get to a point where you know, like. Yeah, just curious, what is really?

Just two things. One, hiring and two, selling estimates that can't be done over the phone. So that person's in the truck, in a car all day long going and doing estimates, but they're also managing the credit, making sure that everyone's good, they're touching base, and they're responsible to hire people. That's really the two things you have to do.

Office. Office lady handles the rest.

Yep. Everything else. Everything from communication, billing, invoicing. They put together the estimates the estimator shouldn't be doing. Again, you have to ask yourself, who's the most valuable person in the business? Is it someone I can hire for 15, $20 an hour putting together an estimate, or is it going to be someone that's worth $80,000 a year because they know how to do selling? And they're my gm. I do not want my estimate, my estimator, gm, to be putting together notes for an estimate. I want to be using shorthand that is then sent to the office. And the office put together pricing. They put together all the formatting. They send it to the customer with a nice video. They take the time instead of the much higher value individual, which is going to be a GM or estimator. Yeah.

So if we start doing stuff like that, there's no.

I mean, yeah, we can add time fast.

That's what. Yeah, exactly.

So, but that's doing that is what's going to allow you to get out. Because as soon as, let's just say, okay, Jocelyn, you're now going to be formatting and sending the estimates and doing a lot more of the legwork that we've been doing. That's going to fill your schedule immediately. You're probably going to now help a couple days a week just getting back to emails and phone calls. But now your gm, by the way, is going to have way more time. What's he going to do? He's going to take your estimates off your plate and you're going to simplify the other half of them so you don't have to even do them because you're not going to take those services.

The way I built my business was, you know, I never liked the guy.

That showed up to the estimate with.

The pen and paper and said, trim shrubs. So for me, I built my business the exact opposite way. I'm typing out two or three sentences on what needs to be done. And it's usually custom to each individual project. So you can imagine I'm spending five to ten minutes on each estimate. How do I like you? Have a large.

Templatize it. Templatize it. Right. So get a Google Doc or even your notes app. Have. Okay, this is what a property cleanup looks like. This is what a 12 month contract would typically look like. This is what a pave repay. We have, we have an entire document of what template is going to be in there. Because even though it's custom, you only usually change a few things. Right. And furthermore, I can make much more detailed estimate notes if I have a template. Because I could take my time, think about what I'm going to put in there and then just change a few things. Like for example, installing mulch, how much mulch, what type of mulch, how many hours. That's the three things I got to change on that template. That's a, that's 10 seconds for my estimator. He clicks one button, sends that, then the office takes the five minutes to format it, put the price together, send it in a nice email video. Let the, let the 15 to $20 an hour person do that over someone out in the field trying to sell. That's why an estimator should be able to do 20 plus estimates in a day.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean we're at like eight right now, you know, and then I've got to catch up at 6:30, 7:00 in the morning and type.

All those up and you're, and when you're typing it up, you're doing a $15 task.

Yeah, yeah. A lot.

Yeah. And you're running a million dollar business. So you have to ask yourself, well what, what are you worth? Well, my guys, I'm, they're getting 70, $80 per hour for labor. Well, you probably worth double that. So let's say you're $150 an hour late, you know, cost to the company and we were doing a $15 an hour task.

So how do you, you have a large command center, you've got a lot of people that you probably hire on with no landscaping experience, how do they answer customer calls with no landscape experience, how do you go over estimates for the customer when you don't have any landscape experience?

You know, funny, I think a lot of people over index on how much you need to know on the phone. When a customer calls in, like for example, you call Comcast, you don't expect them to know about how Ethernet works. You don't expect them to know how Internet works. Just expect them to get a tech to your place or get you to someone who does know what they're talking about. So at the end of the day, yes, you're going to be able to train them. You're going to give them a level of training on the phone to answer simple stuff. But at the end of the day, 1 out of 10 maybe is going to be elevated to you as the estimator. Again, that's you out doing your job or GM doing the job, getting a text message from Jocelyn saying, hey, so and so called. What do you think about X, Y and Z for their lawn? That's a quick text back. Jocelyn giving them a call. Right, gotcha. So I don't need someone that knows all that knowledge on the phone. I just need somebody on the phone to ask the person 1 out of 10 times when they need that information and they ask them. So, like, the commands that they would leave a call note saying, hey, action required. This person needs to call back or give us this information, leave a note for us, and we'll take care of it. And the same can be done for Jostle.

Okay. All right, that's good. So.

When I look at my business the way we've scheduled it for our maintenance customers.

When.

Oh, gosh, I just forgot my. Hang on, let me. Let me check this out. Okay, so when I schedule my jobs, the way I set it up is I have weekly, twice a month, or monthly. And I'm looking at my numbers here, and based on the accounts that we have, if I switch over from twice a month to bi weekly, I should get two months. Exactly. And so for me, I'm like, that's an extra 40,000 in profit or in revenue. And this year, with the size that we're going to grow to, that's going to be like 80 or 90,000 in revenue off of one schedule change. However, I cannot wrap my head around it. And I don't know if that's something that you guys are doing over there.

It's really funny is I can't wrap my head around doing it twice a month from a scheduling standpoint. Right. Because think about it. Like, if I'm going to do it on. Do you do it on a specific day a week, like Mondays or Wednesdays? Like, do you kind of lock those.

In first and third Mondays? Eureka. First and third Tuesdays is Arcata. That sort of thing.

Got it. So the thing is, there's going to be times where you have three weeks in between visits, right? That's going to happen twice a year.

Yeah, yeah, all the time.

And so that's. You're going to lose, you know, budget hours. You can't get as much. You guys sell time, though. So that's what makes this all a little bit weird, is because it doesn't technically affect you because you're only spending 30 minutes. I would assume though, if you actually looked at the numbers, most of your customer complaints would happen on the service after that three week period because there's so much more growth and now your crew is coming there and having the same amount of time to do a bunch more work.

So what ends up happening is they spend more time on those visits and we've like already tracked that. Like, you know, it's not only am I losing the revenue, but I'm also, my expenses are higher during those visits because, you know, sometimes it happens like right after springtime where we gotta stay there.

Yeah. The two, the two times per month is a very, you know, short term customer centric thing. What I mean by that is in the short term customers like it because they know they have set monthly no matter what. Right. In the long term though, they'll eventually hit a three month, like a three week one and they'll be unhappy and then that. Yeah. And then it's also for you as a, from a business standpoint, it's a, it's a long term negative because you're losing out on two visits a month, a year. Right. And on a $60 per mo, if they're only doing it twice a month, you know, you're looking at a 13, 14 by $1400 per year customer. And if you're losing $120 on that, that's 10%. Well, 10%, that's half your profits. Yeah. Right. So I would, I would highly recommend doing every other, every two weeks and the first or every other week. The more important thing is your scheduling from, from an office standpoint is so much easier because you don't have to remember where that three week gap is. You just know, hey, we come every two weeks on Wednesdays. What that means is next Wednesday we're not going to be here. Right. Answering the phones gets a lot easier too because they don't have to figure out which week they're going to be missing. Yeah, right. So I would recommend, it's an easy sell to customers in their mind from a budgeting standpoint will still think twice per month. So if you said $60 per visit, we're going to come every other week, they immediately think $120 a month.

Yeah, yeah. All the time. We have customers that are like, hey, I didn't see the guys this week. It's like, well, yeah, there's all the time, all the time, all the time.

Yep, yep.

Okay.

That would be more headache than what will also happen, which is you bill them for three and they're like, what happened? Well, we came three times because that will happen also twice a year now.

Okay, now do you get complaints about that when you guys go three times in a month?

Nope. A lot less than if we didn't go for that third time in a month and say, oh, it's only twice. Oh, you guys missed a visit. Like, half our customers will call. Maybe one out of 100 will call now, like, why did I get charged more this month? Well, there was three. Three cuts due to the 1st, the 14th, and the 28th. Gotcha.

Okay, well that's, that's solid right there.

So.

I guess when I started that model, it was, I started that when I was solo. So it was easy for me to do first and third Monday of every month because then I could fit cleanups in between. But now that I have set crews that are full time, there's no need for me. I mean, it'd be an easy switch to just switch everybody to a biweekly schedule. Should I. Do I have to make them resign all their quotes?

No. What I would recommend doing just to switch it easily is just pitch it in a very customer centric way and as email them all. Okay. We've had a lot of feedback from all of our customers mentioning that a couple times a year, due to the nature of doing it twice a month, we are having gaps of three weeks. We're going to go ahead and switch to a bi weekly schedule, which means every single time, you know, we're coming every two weeks, all the time. You can depend on that. And we're going to stick to that. People will love it. You'll get one or two people like, oh, no, no, I've got to stick to my set monthly budget because I'm on a fixed income or whatever. And that's fine. You can just. Okay, well, we'll cancel out those two visits in the year, but most people would gladly accept that.

Now, what about those commercial accounts though? You think I should probably. I should probably because, you know, they have budgets and stuff like that. You know.

Have they signed a monthly amount though, or is it per service still for them? Service, yeah, that one you'd probably have to, you know, get a signature on or explain it in that way and then see what they say. But typically when you don't have a contract signed, most customers actually prefer every two weeks because they just know when you're coming.

Okay, all right, I like that.

So when you, when you.

Built out, you know, the locations that you guys have, how did you, My My biggest thing is like, and even now as I step out from this position, how do you control the money coming in? How do you know when, like how do you track when somebody's.

If somebody's, you know, taking, taking money from the pot without asking you?

Yeah.

You mean in terms of employees or the customer not paying employees. Did you have a lot of cash?

No.

We have a lot of, we have checks that come in, we have a little bit of cash. And I guess the cash is really what I would be, I'd be worried about.

I just go cashless. Don't take cash. Okay, now what about everyone has a credit card. Everyone, you know, they don't have a credit card. Like, I don't know how they survived through 20, 20, you know, what about, what about checks?

Where did that. Like, what if an employee loses it? I mean, because I just, for me as a business owner, I just collect, I just collect checks. You know, I don't cross check it with invoices. So if you've got 80 locations and you've got all these checks coming in, do you cross check it with the invoices too?

Well, if it's a pay with check, you can make it typically your software that requires them to enter a reference number and so there would be a check number on there. So that's how. Then your bookkeeper should reconcile that with your bank statement. Okay. Okay. So like I would highly recommend if that's even a concern, you know, for a bookkeeper, like literally you're going to pay 100, 200amonth for them to literally take your bank statements and reconcile every single transaction.

Gotcha. Okay, well that's, yeah, solves that.

So that's easy.

Okay.

And you could even have, you could draw, you could also talk to your bank. Typically they'll have check scanners that you can sync up to where you could actually scan the check. It deposits from your office. You don't have to go to the bank. So that way you don't have to be handling the checks. You don't have to depend on anyone else taking the checks to the bank. They actually have a check scanner. It scans in and then that would send you a receipt that, that, that you could then reconcile with that invoice.

Office personnel scans that or the owner scans that.

Either one. Either one. And that's. I would use that. If you had trust issues or concerns about the office handling that is you the check scanner. Okay.

You guys, you guys eliminate cash from your business?

Oh yeah, no. No cash.

No cash.

Okay, cool.

Shoot.

That's actually kind of all I had right there.

Just because it's hard to track, right? Like it's, like it's not the employee thing. I've never really thought from that perspective. It's just like I don't have any record of the payment. It's not in a bank account. I don't see it on a credit card transaction list. So, like, it's so hard to track. I don't want the cash thing. And then furthermore, if that cash is going to the employees out in the truck, well, then it blows away. Well, I'm not going to let a customer for it because they did pay and so there's a loss, right? So even the guys in the field, they know if like someone wants to give them a tip, they say, well, on the invoice you'll see a button. Click the button for a tip and you can leave it there. Okay.

Okay.

So.

I mean, you know a little bit more about me. Where do you, where do you see me going wrong in the future? Where based off of everything that you've been through the last seven years, like.

You'Re, you really want to grow and it's because you're really good at it, right? Like that. I'd say that's your forte. What is extremely simple, like the two most inefficient ways to grow is twofold. And right now I feel like you've gone after one and you're trying to go up the second one and you're making a good decision by trying to focus right now. Because the first way to, to grow, that's easy and scaling fast is adding more services, right? What's going to do more of everything? We're going to trees. Now we'll do fertilization. Now we'll do, you know, this and that. Like, that's very easy. You can easily scale your business, right? If you have a $500,000 business and you want to double, just add one more service, right? You want to make it from a million to 2 million, add another service, right? That's the most inefficient way to grow. Most, least profitable, least scalable. The second way is through demographic expansion, right? Okay, we're going to go take this other city over now. That's also the least efficient way to grow because now you got more infrastructure, more overhead, you're splitting apart your team. You can't be in that both places at the same time. So geographic expansion is also inefficient, more drive time, guys are traveling further, etc. So I would just say it's okay at your size, even growing really fast to take a year, where you say, hey, we're going to actually cut services back and we're actually going to reduce our service area and become extremely profitable. That then allows me to go start a second location, knowing that this location is systematized to the point I can hand it off to a general manager. It's profitable enough to. To afford a general manager and an office assistant. And then I can go start the second location confidently knowing that this is financially, like, locked and loaded. Right. And just not falling into the seduction of more services. And then it's like, oh, well, we could do city. It's like five more minutes away, and we'll get a couple neighborhoods there and we'll go a little further. And all of a sudden, you're driving way further away from your shop to do projects and jobs that just becomes less and less profitable as you do. So. So I fell into that, and then I had to retrace my steps. Right. Like we were doing artificial turf. We had big dump trucks, we had tree chippers, like the whole nine yards. And that's why we scaled so quickly. And then we took a couple of years where we didn't really grow, but like that, those are the years I started becoming really, really profitable. And so you need that profit in order to then confidently go hire general manager and not be freaked out all the time. Right. Because if you're running a. If you're running a too small margin, you will not hire general manager and office assistant to get yourself out of daily operation because you just know financially it could be too much of a burden on the business. Yeah. Right.

Well, so here's my thing, man. Mike is like, you know, last year we did 31 profit at a million of revenue, which, you know, I. I'm. I'm listening to all your videos and all the business owners I'm talking to, and it's like, yeah, we're, you know, a good business. Growing business is 15 to 20% profitable. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, what am I doing? Am I overcharging customers? You know?

No, it's because you're really good. Because you're really good. Right. And so that, that can be your Achilles heel, though, because you're so good, you'll stay in the business to keep those margins. Yeah. When what you, when you want them to do is actually take 20% by having a general manager and you go out and do something else. Go start second location, go do whatever but, but don't get too in love with those margins because it's only because you're so good.

Well, that's what I'm wondering is like when I scale, is this, are these expectations that I should be setting forth, you know, as we grow? And I don't, I don't think so. Like, I should be okay.

You'd much rather have a business that you show up to once an hour, once a week for an hour, but you make 20% margins or 15% margins than getting 30%, but you work 70 hours a week.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Return on time. Right?

Yeah. So.

What, what does the command center take off your plate or take off the general managers and the office assistant's plate throughout the day? Like, what would those job roles be?

Basically everything besides meeting the customer in person. So phone calls, emails, payroll, running paper performance, sending the estimates out. Basically everything besides meeting the customer and hiring. And we, we onboard. Right. If someone gets hired, the office, the person who hired them, your GM should not be preparing their documents. Like have DocuSign have something digitally done for your office Note. Hey, Literally it's like, hey, Bob, who signed up? Who came in? Yeah, we're going to hire him. Great. That's all they need to know. Hey, we're going to send these documents out. We need them to fill out this paperwork. We're going to do it all digitally. So things like that, they do basically everything besides the things they can't do because they're geographically not able to.

So Bellingham location only has the gm, no office assistant.

Yep.

Gotcha. But for in our instance, because we're not that large, we would have the office assistant doing all that.

I think you'll. I think you would need it pretty quickly, especially if you have. If you've been handling all the estimate stuff. As soon as you give that to Jocelyn, her, she's now full time, I think. So if you continue to grow, you're going to need someone to take those lower skills because now she's going to become worth, let's just say 20, 25. So let someone who's doing. Who's 15 to 20 handle those more remedial tasks.

So how do you.

As far as.

Oh, shoot, I forgot to answer my question.

Shoot. I forgot.

You're talking about office. Office assistant. Jocelyn.

Yeah, Jocelyn.

Gosh, it was a good one.

The general manager doing. Having no office assistant.

I forgot.

Trying.

Yes. Good ones.

Good. Help my wingman. Yeah, I don't. I. I don't know.

I forgot. Good.

Okay, so take this next 12 months, figure out these systems. I mean, you gave me some super great data to run on my own and kind of figure this thing out. I know what question I was going to ask.

How many accounts is. Starts to become too much for what in my position with, with Jocelyn. Because I'm wondering, like right now for maintenance accounts, we're at 300. We'll probably be at 750 or 800 by the end of the year.

How much is too much for her?

I would say you need an office assistant. If you're going to double your maintenance accounts, the amount of incoming calls and number of estimates. Like that means you're going to send out 700 estimates to get that that many new customers. Right. So if they're typing those up, which they're going to need to, because now you have that many estimates to go do, you're going to need an office assistant full time.

Well, the thing is about our estimates is, like you said, I've done the templates for the maintenance side of things. So like we could send out five or ten estimates in a ten minute period. Like that's not, you know, not hard to do.

But I'm thinking more so like just call volume complaints, invoicing, that sort of thing. Going to need someone for that.

Yep. And then let Jocelyn handle the scheduling, the invoicing, the, you know, customer complaints, the things that the office is going to say. Well, let me have Jocelyn give you a call back on that and then just have someone. That's a frontline defense answering the phone call so she can focus on stuff. Because what's going to happen at that size is a phone will ring so much she can't get anything done until it stops ringing. And so you need someone just to guard her from that so she can focus on the other things like billing, invoicing, you know, ordering materials, whatever it is.

Okay, now you guys give out estimates over the phone, right? For maintenance?

Yep. For mowing? Yep.

And all that's based off of a square footage, correct?

Yep.

Now when you said during the wintertime when you guys do shrubs, Right. How do you dictate? Because you can't, you can't see the backyard from Google Maps. So if you're doing it off of square footage, how do you know how many shrubs there are or how big they are, how much time that's going to take to clean up the backyard?

We only do the mowing and treatments from square footage. We don't do the cleanup portion. So if someone did want cleanup of their property, like every week, we'd say, hey, let's get you set up on your mowing service, and then we'll give you an estimate once we're on the property for your cleanup part of the things. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

Gotcha. And all that has to be done in person.

Yeah, Anything besides mowing and treatments right now, we're still doing in person. Okay.

All right. You got any other advice for me? You think what you see.

No. Yeah, you're doing great. You're gonna crush it. You're gonna be great. So just if there's anything I can do for you, let me know. But even if you want to check in, like, you know, towards fall and kind of start thinking about once you've switched over to more of a.

Selling the product instead of selling time, that that's gonna allow you to get out of this customer service nightmare. You know, doing things like the two month. Two times per month, that's gonna. That's a customer nightmare. That's gonna help allow you to keep scaling without putting too much pressure on yourself and Jocelyn. So. No, you'll do great this year. You did an awesome job, man.

Yeah.

Just take this year's focus on the systems and that side of things, so that way next year it's. It's profitable. You can afford that gm, you can overpay somebody. That's fine, because you're. You're. You're gonna go do something else.

That's odd, dude. I can't. Dude, it's the amount of problems and hours that you solved in. In one hour, it's just unbelievable. I appreciate all your. All your input, and I gotta come out to conference, man.

Not doing that.

Thank you very much, dude.

My pleasure, brother. Have a great evening. Have a good one. Bye.