Mike Andes documents day three of a project to build a $300,000 lawn care business in 30 days, traveling to an Augusta/South Park location to start from zero (no employees, equipment, or customers). The chunk focuses on frontline marketing and sales tactics—yard signs, door hangers, holding a roadside sign, and planned direct mail—plus short-term hiring plans (paying $20/hr plus $20 per lead) to distribute materials and generate leads. Practical decisions are driven by simple metrics (leads per hour) and the aim to book project work that justifies hiring crew members.
Chapters
I'm traveling 3,000 miles across the country to build a $300,000 lawn care business in just 30 days. This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general manager and go back home. I'm starting with no employees, no equipment, and no customers to prove that systems build great businesses.
All right, it's day three. The game plan, very simple. We have to get more jobs, we get more estimates, and we can't get the minutia of the business get in our way. The only thing I'm focusing on today is marketing and sales.
Okay, great. And can I. Okay. And am I able to come by and just pick some of those up here in just a few minutes?
Give me one second.
Everybody trying to find stands for the yard signs. Cuz I thought I ordered them from vistaprint, but they didn't show up. This is a national franchise. Let me refer them and they'll take care of me. Okay, Give me one. One second. Okay, thank you. Appreciate it.
We could order these from Vistaprint or Amazon and get them here within, like, probably three or four days. But we don't have no three or four days. Okay. The total would be with taxes, $91.17. Awesome. All right, I'll see you in a few minutes. Thank you so much. Okay, perfect. Have a good day. You too. Bye. Bye. Let's go. All right, yard signs. Here you go. Most expensive yard sign steaks I've ever seen in my whole life. But at this point, we're desperate.
All right, so what I'm doing is I'm doing the yard signs and the door hangers in the same neighborhood. So my goal here is to get people to see my brand for the first time, but multiple times, because no one in this area knows Augusta Lawn Care. We don't have any other locations on this side of Charlotte. So I'm trying to get specific neighborhoods doing the door hangers, the yard signs, and then next week, I'll hit the most every door direct mail in their mailbox.
This is what happens when your video editor tries to take on household duties and puts in the dish soap instead of. What is it, a tablet? Something else besides whatever this is. All right, so I'm going back to hold my sign at the front of the shopping center and ask people if they want to quote. Some people in the comments were clowning on me, saying that I was doing it all for views and I should just be doing door hangers and door knocking. The bottom line is I'M just a man of the math and that is if I can get more leads per hour, holding a sign next to the side of a road, looking like a fool, I'll do that instead of doing door knocking and doing door hangers. The problem is if I do door knocking and not try to talk to people, right now about 2 out of 3 people are not home. And secondly, these properties are pretty large and there's not like cookie cutter houses in terms of neighborhoods. And so it's a little bit less efficient to do door hangers. I'm not against them, I've already done some of them. But I'm only getting, you know, maybe 40 or 50 houses in an hour doing door hangers. Whereas here at least I'm getting a couple hundred people driving by me every hour. And it just comes down to if I can get a lead per hour, if I can get two leads per hour, it might outperform the door hangers. And ultimately I just care about the math and the numbers of what gets me the most leads. So I'm gonna try it out for a hours because the other day I only did it for about 45 minutes. Got one lead, but it was in the pouring down rain and I was fighting up against the, the darkness. So I'm gonna do this for a couple hours and see how many leads I get.
I'm just kind of cleaned up and maybe some rocks moved in the creek toward the bank. Okay. Are you gonna be home this afternoon? I will be. I could swing by. You want to do meet around like maybe 4pm? Perfect. Not bad. 10 minutes, let's go.
Feeling good. Well, I need some chapstick because it's kind of windy and hot out here.
I'm listening to like three podcasts all at 1.75. Hey, Sal Starlet, Mike here with Augusta Lawn Care. You might have seen me holding this sign looking for anyone that might need mowing or landscaping services. If you have a summer project, if you have anything that we can do in your property, on your lawn, give us a call. Getting the business started up here in south park and we'd love to be of service at your property. Look forward to hearing back from you. Check out the website, give us a call, we'll see you soon.
Alright. So to be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed. Spent two hours holding the sign, got a lead in the first 10 minutes, but after that didn't get a single bite. So a little bit disappointed. I'm gonna go do some more door hangers, knock out that estimate. That did come in. However, I don't consider that yet enough data to really make a judgment on it. So I'll do it a couple more times over the next few days for a couple hours each day and see if I can't come up with better math. Tweak it a little bit because I'd really like to be able to just hire somebody to hold the sign for the next few. Got to be getting at least a lead per hour to make it worth it.
All right, we have arrived.
I can't.
Oh, wow, that's loose. It's literally hanging there. Mercy by a thread.
Gotcha.
Yeah. And we can cut it up definitely. For sure. So I am really wanting those jobs. Pam's a great client and those four line items could literally fill the first three or four days of my first crew member and team members position. So really wanting to get those on the schedule. The whole goal is to be able to use projects to book my calendar out, which gives me confidence to hire my first and second employee and then allow the recurring work from mowing to trickle in over time.
Oh, no soliciting. All right, we're out of here.
All right, so I'm literally sitting in the back of the truck right now and what I'm doing is doing a whole bunch of the door hangers. And I am simply putting the price of the weekly and bi weekly mo as well as the due date. So basically these, these quotes are only good for seven days. And basically I'm putting the mowing price already because I know the price is going to be the same for pretty much all these houses. And then when I'm walking up to the door, I'll just put the mulch and the property cleanup estimate as well. The client just fills in their information at the bottom, sends me a picture via email. Command center would get that email because they managed my inbox and they'd be able to set up the estimate on the schedule. So you can actually get these yourself@lawncaremedia.com but even if you just want to get inspiration from those, they're super helpful. That's what I'm going to be putting out right now. Okay. Now I was thinking about this and before I offered this position on Indeed in Craigslist, and I figured I'd offer it here to viewers of the channel. That is, I am willing to hire someone to come hand these out for me. And it's going to be for the next three weeks. And if you would like to do that, I'm willing to pay you. I'M going to pay you $20 an hour. I'm also going to pay you $20 for every single lead that you get, which very likely could be a 30 plus dollar per hour position just for the next few weeks. Now, this is not a mentorship program. You're not going to be touch with me all day long. This is an employee position. I will touch base with you once a day, make sure you're on your game, get the door hangers to you. I'll have dinner with you every night and I'll pay for that. And so if you have questions about business or anything, I'll answer those at dinner. But this is an employee position. This is not a mentorship. I have to grow this business and I need time to work on my other businesses. But these need to get handed out and if I didn't have those other businesses, I would be handing these out literally three to four hours a day right now. So if you are interested in that, go ahead and email me. Go to southparkgustalawncareservices.com I'll put that email in the description. And if you can move here to a south park area in North Carolina or you already live here, I want to hire you.
That is quite literally what you will be doing over and over and over again. You can listen to podcasts, you can do whatever you want. And ultimately this is the game we'll be playing.
It's almost 2am it's going to be a really short night. We put out a new release on Copilot CRM and there were some bugs and so we're just working with the dev team on it to make sure by the time everyone wakes up tomorrow it's working okay.
