THIS Changes Everything for the Lawn Care and Landscaping Industry!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com today I'm going to be talking about why 2020 completely changed industry and what you can do to take opportunity and advantage of this big shift that I've seen. We're going to be using Google Trends to prove my point about what it means for the lawn care and landscaping world, our businesses, and how you can make money from it. All right, without any further delay, let's go ahead and jump into Google Trends. If you haven't seen seen Google Trends before, let me show you. Google Trends is a great tool to be able to use in your local market. I use this on a weekly basis for our franchisees to determine different types of services, when we should be offering certain types of advertising promotions based upon service searches in areas. So I really recommend you check it out. Now let's though, let's talk about the trends over the past five years. So you can see here, I got landscaping cert or landscape service, lawn care service, and mowing service. Let's change this to landscaping service. It's mostly just in terms of what people talk, how you'd probably say landscaping service. All right, so what I want you to notice here is when I take. Oh, here, one second here, let me change this out. So when I change this to landscape service. So this is Google Trends. This is what basically shows how many people are searching for different terms. So how many people search lawn care service, how many people search mowing service? Obviously there's going to be variables like, you know, a homeowner searching for mowing service, but traditionally they're going to be looking for mowing service, for example. Okay, so what I want to show you here first is I want to show you just how volatile mowing can be. So mowing in this case is the red on this graph here. Right? You can see it gets really, really high in the spring rush. And, and obviously in May, you can see this was when we're always the busiest. We're a seasonal business. But the one with the biggest delta is mowing. Okay, so this red line goes all the way up from 56 right here, and then this data points all the way down to one. So literally it goes down like 98%. And that seems right, like if there's snow on the ground and it's middle of winter, they're not people searching for mowing service. So the delta on this graph is extremely high. You compare that to landscaping, which in this case is the landscape service. The yellow line it definitely dips in the winter. Like, you know, here this Data point is a 5. In the spring rush, it is a 24. So it's five times bigger, but it's not 50 times bigger, like mowing. So the nice thing about landscaping projects is that you can do some projects during the winter and people are searching for landscape service still during the winter. So that's, that's a big pro, a big positive when it comes to looking at this graph. Is the delta or the change. How much is the volatility? How seasonal are these different services that you might be offering in your business? But this is the kicker I want you show. I want to add in here. Now I'm going to go add paver patio. All right, so now this green line is paver patios. You can see it basically charts along the graph of all the other seasonal businesses in this industry, pretty, pretty much, you know, along the same lines all throughout here. Then 2020 came along, and look what happened. First of all, I want you to take note that all four of these different searches, mowing, lawn care, landscaping, and paver patios, all went up between 20 and 80% in search volume in the past 12 months. Okay, so last spring, this is right when Covid was hitting in March, April, May, everything jumped. And then even this spring, even more so, for example, you're looking right here. Lawn care is at 78 on this data point right here. I can find it there. Lawn care 78. We go back two years to the same data point. We're at 50. So that is like literally a 50% increase in the amount of searches for lawn care service. Not lawn care, but lawn care service. People looking for our services. There's a huge opportunity. I truly believe that right now we're going into an era in the next five to 10 years when lawn care, landscape services are going to have a huge boom. We're going to talk why in just a second when it comes to the real estate market. But I also believe that it's going to be compounded by the fact that the baby boomer generation is, is absolutely getting older. They are going to be needing people to take care of their lawn because they physically won't be able to. I've said that for the past five years. It will only be a trend over the next 10 to 15 years that continues to get mature and more and more ripe. But 2020, and what happened with COVID was a big kicker to the real estate market. And so what I want to do now is see this massive increase in Paver patios. Like, look at this one. This Data point is 100, the data point here. Whereas last, you know, a couple years ago, for example, that same Data point was 57. So literally like an 80% increase in the search volume for paver patios in the past couple springs. Because of what? What is the reason that Paver patios and projects and our entire industry has seen this massive boom in people searching for our services? Let me show you using the Google trends. But it really comes down to something we talked about in January back at Landscape Summit 2021. We had to do it virtually, but next year is going to be in person, so make sure you sign up for that. But what we talked about is the fact that the real estate market is extremely hot. And when you have extremely hot real estate prices and extremely hot real estate trends, you are going to have a very, very bullish market when it comes to projects. Paver patios, retaining walls, any sort of construction is going to have a massive boom because people have equity in their home and they start to look at their home as an investment and they want to make sure that their house is optimized in terms of value before they sell their home. So again, use Google Trends to figure this stuff out before. Like, this is what I was doing a year ago is trying to figure out where consumer behavior was going and what code was doing to our industry. Let me show you what some things I found. So let's go ahead and search in Buy house. Now we're going to compare that against sell house. Okay, very cool. All right. Doesn't tell me a whole lot. Now let me show you this though. Oh, here I zoomed out to five years. Perfect. Look at the increase in people that are trying to buy homes in the past two years. Real estate falls kind of also a bit of a cyclic or seasonal business. You can see here during the summer months, much more volume. During the winter months, less volume. Much less volume. It's perfect for the our lawn care landscaping world. That's why the real estate market in my mind is to hide directly to lawn care landscaping. But look what happened in 2020 and in 2021 where we went from an average of, you know, you can see here like, you know, these numbers here are what, like 50, 60, 65. Look at here, we're at 96, 87. These are like literally almost double the search volume, I. E. Consumer interest in this term. People are trying to buy homes. Now what did not happen? You did not see a 50% or a doubling in the increase Amount of people trying to sell their home. So what you what happens? Example, this red line is the selling home, right? You do not see a massive jump here. Why? Because of COVID People were not wanting to move. They were not wanting to get out of their house. They wanted to stay home. But. But then there's people looking to buy the houses there. Everyone's trying to move out of California, move to Texas, move to Florida, all the rest of it. And what happened is the price of homes went up. Why? Because when you're trying to get a whole bunch of people trying to buy something and no one's really trying to sell, and there's no increase in sellers, that creates upward pressure on prices. So when you restrict supply in the, in the real estate market, there's no houses for sale, but yet people are really wanting to buy and inventory goes down to nothing. The prices of the real estate goes through the roof. And what does that do that makes people want to get projects, install pavers, install mulch, trim their bushes, make sure that things are looking good so they can optimize the value of their home before they sell. What's really interesting here to prove my point, if you look back at all the search history for Google, look at the one time when buying homes and selling homes were really close together back in 2005, 2006, 2007, right in here. That is when the real estate market crashed. That's when it was a buyer's market because no one wanted to sell their home. Everyone, sorry, everyone was trying to sell their home. No one wanted to buy homes. But look what's happened recently. Over the past 10, 15 years, we've seen where people trying to buy homes is much, much greater than people trying to sell their homes. And that has caused the price of the real estate to go up. The price of real estate and the cost of real estate in my mind is directly correlated with landscaping and lawn care and deciding between projects and lawn care. Right now we're having a massive boom when it comes to projects and installation work. So the question is, should I drop everything I'm doing in mowing? Should I drop everything I'm doing in lawn care and focus on projects? Yes and no. Let me explain. I really look at lawn care and landscaping, like the stock market market, the same way. I just showed you graphs that kind of look like a stock market. I really do believe it's like that when it comes to choosing what services you offer. And I've made some videos in the past. I know other people have been saying Also you should do lawn care, you're doing landscaping. It doesn't matter about, you know, what you do. Let's look at like a stock market. Okay. So if I look at lawn care and landscaping like stocks, I kind of want to diversify. I want to have a little bit of both. Because if you noticed the biggest, like lawn care, it just keeps going, right? There's no big drops, there's no massive ups, no massive downs. Lawn care, when it comes to search trends is a little more stable. It doesn't have, you know, massive, massive dips when there's a recession and it doesn't have massive, massive booms when there's an economic. No really what's happening right now, a massive boom. But this is the thing. When it looks at, when you look at stocks, you can kind of generally put stocks in the two different buckets. One stock is going to be high growth stocks. Like this is going to be Tesla. This is going to be the companies that just grow massively. They don't have a lot of profits necessarily, but they are growing incredibly. Pinterest, you look at not Gamestop and all these other companies, those are a whole different ball game altogether. But when you look at these high growth stocks, you look at special purpose acquisition companies, SPACs, they've become popular over the past year. You look at initial public offerings. When companies first go public, there's a massive opportunity to double, triple, quadruple 10 extra money on these high growth stocks. And I look at that kind of like project based work, right? There's jobs that you can make a bunch of money on and there's other jobs. Like there's more risk in these growth stocks. They go up and they go down. Like you look at Tesla, it's shot up like 10x in the past year and now it's gone down like 30, 40, 50% in the past few months. Why? It's a growth stock, it's volatile, it goes up and it goes down. Project based work in landscaping and hardscaping is amazing. When times are good, when the real estate market is good like it is now, it's the best time to be in the landscaping world because people have discretionary income to make sure that their real estate is optimized in value before they sell. And so projects is, there's lots of good money there right now. But when I look at my stock portfolio, I don't just have growth stocks. It's gonna be very volatile ups and downs. I have days and weeks when I make hundreds, thousand, I lose a bunch of Money. When it comes to lawn care, when it comes to mowing, when it comes to recurring services, I kind of look at those like, like the, the tried and true boring companies on the stock market. Like the, they're called value stocks. They usually have a dividend. A dividend is where you get money every single quarter from that company. Why they're not going to go, they're not going to triple this year in revenue, they're not going to triple their stock price in the next year. They might go up 10%, maybe up 15 or 20%, maybe 30% maybe they, you know, if there's a recession they go 5, 10% down but they're not going to go 50, 60, 70% down. Like we've seen on some of these high growth stocks even in the past few months that were just everything was amazing and February came in crashed 30, 40, 50, 60%. And so how I look at lawn care landscaping is the exact same way. It's very good idea to have a diverse set of services to be able to capitalize when things are really good in this real estate market and you're getting projects and there's really good margins and all the rest of it. But when the economy tanks or when houses prices go down or when there is a, an event that happens where people start tightening up their budget or it becomes a buyer's market and the prices of real estate goes down, you want to make sure you have the tried and true dividend stocks of our industry which is mowing, lawn care and recurring services. I hope that makes sense and bring some balance to the same way that you as a good investor in the stock market, the same way you diversify your portfolio when it comes to your lawn care and landscaping business. I look at the services like stocks and I look for the bulls and I look for the bears. I want a nice average so I don't have as big highs and I don't have as low lows. I'm Mike Andes, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com and if you enjoy content like this I, I'd really appreciate a like because it doesn't get a lot of views. People don't click on these type of videos, they don't like graphs, they like mowers and like trucks and like trailers. But if you appreciate this kind of in depth content to make your business more money and see what's coming in the future, I'd appreciate a like, well I'll see you tomorrow. When we do pull out the mowers and we do get mowing we'll see in the next video.