Tigran Gertz Cancelled! PROJECTS/DESIGN/BUILD (RoundUp Ep.6)

All right, so I was fully expecting to have Tigran Gertz on the show today from the Goat Gang. However, he canceled last minute. So you're stuck with me. We're doing Q A. It's going to be one of those boring episodes where Mike just talks and answers questions about making money because we don't got no Tigran. So sorry for the, the build up. But then today, last minute, he. He had to cancel. So.

We'Re. We're canceling Tigran. We're canceling Tigran. Tigran is out.

And we are going back to the regularly scheduled program. So for all the people showing up right now and then leaving because Tigran's not here, we're gonna still talk about landscape, we're still talking about money, we're still talk about projects.

And yeah, it should be good. So I'm gonna do a bunch of Q A instead and I apologize. We had, we had schedule with Tigrin and yet to cancel. I do not know why, but he canceled last minute. So Tigrin, I forgive you. All right, comments. Here we go.

Okay, cool. A bunch of people. Dustin, Hello, Marcos, Michael, Paradise Pictures. Very cool. Things are hopping on here. We'll do some Q A. I don't know if you guys have been able to watch the recent videos. We're gonna make two or three more this coming week. Tomorrow's gonna be a really good one of projects actually me out mowing, breaking down the numbers and.

Actually seeing what exactly how to estimate what. How to look at a project in terms of mowing. So today we did one more in depth. Tomorrow we do we're going to like three or four lawns. And so this whole week I'm kind of stacking it, stacking these all up and hopefully helping. Some of you are just getting started. Those of you doing estimates for mowing and mixing a little bit more practical.

Applications in terms of mowing and the actual equipment, things like that. Rodriguez, what services do you recommend when doing landscaping services or not coming in the summertime are not coming in when. What services do you recommend doing when landscaping services are not coming in in the summertime? Oh, I got what you're saying. Yeah. So like during the summertime, that's the time in my opinion to double down on projects. If you're going to offer those as a. In your service offering projects. Literally just finished making the one click estimate email for our franchisees for June and it's around summer projects. And that's the only reason in my mind why I would Want to offer projects is to be able to fill the summer when the grass starts slowing down. When we get into June, July, August, September, and it's a lot warmer, the grass is stunted somewhat. That's the best time in my opinion, be able offer projects. And so in my opinion, the best way to get projects during the summer is to sell a bunch in the spring of mowing. Right. So you really focus on mowing services during the spring and then come the summer you're really just trying to upsell your existing customer database into projects. Whether the mulch, whether it be pavers, wherever you're installing that upsell, in my opinion is really where the money's made in terms of taking your existing database and selling them projects. All right. No, I don't think so. Maybe. I don't know. Dustin, how do you know it's time to move to two crews? I work full time as a teacher. We are servicing 65 lawns and a four day route. Yeah. So again, it really depends on the size of those properties. And I'd be looking more at your revenues and, and how many budget hours you're getting done in a day. Just search one man cruise on and Mike Andy's on YouTube. I make a whole video about how you should be breaking apart your crews by the end of the day. The size of your crew and when you should break apart your crew really is going to depend on the size of your properties, the average size of those properties. The smaller the properties and the more properties you get done in one day, the more frequently I feel like you should go to solo routes and more frequently you should be splitting up your crew and making more cruise instead of less cruise. Otherwise I would rather you, if you have big, big properties, I'd rather you go and do, you know these massive properties with five, six guys and knock it out in a lot faster time. So.

Okie dokie, Kevin, all good, Mike, for all the guys in the field, what is good for them to eat or drink during the hot month to keep everyone going? I'm a big proponent of water with amino acids. In terms of food, I just stay away from refined carbs and, you know, white flour. That would give you a spike of energy and then it'll leave you hanging. So that would be my two cents. Okay. One employee, 30 hours per week or so. Yeah, Dustin, So in terms of budget hours, we're just talking about this here at the command center here a few minutes ago. You know what is, in terms of what is the best number of budget hours to Schedule per day. Like I expect six budget hours of mowing at least per day. What that imputes is a 25% waste factor. So if I am, if I'm doing eight budget hours of someone working for eight hours and I'm going to impute 25% waste in the form of driving load time, whatever, that would mean that they get six budget hours done for the day. And so you're exactly right. 30 hours worth of mowing per week on a 40 hour. Someone who's clocked in for 40 hours would be very, very doable in my opinion. So this is the invoice. Okay, what type of projects? So we really like those smaller projects, again, simple services. And if we're going to do bigger projects like we do, we've done big projects that have been turned out well and have been profitable for us. But again, we are going to be focusing on the simplified services. So the same type of block, the same type of paver, the same design, the same color and really trying to simplify those things as much as possible. Yeah, we'll be at gie. We actually have three booths, two of them for Augusta and one of them for long care web design. We just booked the long career web design one last night. So yeah, we will be there. I'll be there all three days and I'll try to be on the floor the entire time. Is it a good idea to charge for weed herbicide and give a second application free included in price just in case I miss some spots? Yeah, this is a good question. Unfortunately, a lot of times when people get, you know, a her an herbicide, like for weed and feed, they expect that the next time they see the lawn, like it's just like no weeds and like no dandelions, like just perfect, no broad leaf weeds. And a lot of times that's not the case. And especially with spray, even with, you know, with granular applications, if it rains right after, you can definitely miss certain spots. So it's not a bad idea to just factor into your price, the fact that you're going to potentially have to come back or even I know some people will literally make a second route a couple weeks later and see if they missed any spots. You going to need a charge for that and there's going to be a substantial amount of cost to you in doing that. So I would rather you spend a little more time on the property while you're there already and just make sure you don't miss anything. That would be the ideal, you know, the ideal scenario.

Tuning in from the great Southland Australia. What's up? Serious? How would you go about handing off a maintenance route you built up to another team member and would. Where would you focus your time if you are able to generate passive income from the route?

Okay. As you're saying. Okay, got it. Okay. So in terms of handing off to that team member, I would focus on if you ever want to do that in the future or you're trying to do that now, you need to make sure that all notes about that job, all intel, all comments, customer information is in the CRM and is in the database so that when that new crew member comes up to that job, they have all the information. It's like today's video that I had on YouTube and you notice I went there, I could see right away that they wanted to really cut short. But then another employee had commented that it's there's too many rocks in the lawn. So all of that information is very, very valuable because you're setting your team up for failure if they show up to the property and every single time they mess up and have a callback, but simply due to the fact that you never gave them information, they needed to actually do the job correctly. And so you definitely want to set them up for success, make sure that they have the job notes that are needed for the job to be done correctly every single time. And in terms of where you would focus your time, you focus on selling because if you go create, you know you want to copy and paste these crews, right? So if you got one crew and you're ready to hand it off and give it to someone and make passive, as you call it, income, if you're going to do that, then it's a matter of, okay, well the time that I have now, don't know. You had to pay someone to take your spot in the crew, right? So you're going to take a hit on in terms of profitability, you need to make up for that with going and selling more jobs to be able to keep the pipeline full. And that's how you grow. Right. So the step that you're taking now is the first step to growth because now you're going to go spend the time you would otherwise be pushing a lawnmower. You're going to go do door hangers, you're going to go and talk to upsell your existing customers. You're going to go knock on some doors of the neighbors when you're doing a project, talk to the four or five neighbors around your bark malt install and see if they want the same service, those are the type of things you're going to be doing now with the time that you have on your hands. I do lawn maintenance on part time, but now I'm growing. Should I quit my primary job? Yeah, like I talk about this a couple spots. In terms of when you should, by the way, yes, we are command center. So sorry it's a little bit louder, but there's people that are getting work done. So in terms of when you should quit your job, it's really going to come down to how much you need personally to pull out of the business and your Runway. How much have you saved up? Where are your, your savings, your expenses every single month? How much money do you need to survive for maybe the first six months if you're not taking any money out of business? We generally don't turn a profit on our coping locations for the first six months. And so if you're starting out, don't expect to be making hand money hand over fist. So what you can do though is if you've built it up part time, that's the ideal situation. Cause you'll get to profitability a lot faster. But again, I would keep growing that lawn care business until it comes to the point where it's almost stupid not to go full time and quit your other job. Where just from a financial standpoint, it's like, come on, this is crazy. Why would I keep doing this? So my Internet is telling me that my. It's lagging. I'm plugged into the Ethernet. So I'm just gonna actually look at my phone here and see if that's actually happening. Let me know if it's really bad. I can always switch back to WI fi, but technically Ethernet's supposed to be. Anyways. Okay, questions.

Also wondering if you ever do profit splits from leads given by other companies. If you ever do profit splits from leads given. Oh, I see what you're saying. We don't really like in terms of no referrals. We'll do referrals all the time. We have a list of people that we will, you know, suggest when it's other service that we don't offer. But in terms of giving a cut of profits or anything like that, we do not. We don't do that. It's a matter of like, hey look, you give us jobs, we'll give you jobs. And then that way we're not liable anyway. And the customer's relationship is not. Same thing with subbing. Like, it's just. I made a video about it on Facebook the other day, Zach made it for me about subcontracting and the pitfalls of that. And a big part of it, in my opinion is like, if the sub does something wrong, you're kind of on the line. So even when it comes to this, like if you say, hey, I'm going to refer you to so and so and you know they're going to give you money for it, well, now you're kind of like involved in that relationship if something goes wrong. And I don't really like that. Jose, would you grow a lawn maintenance crew first or hardscape? It's a good question. I don't really say there's a first or, you know, what should be first. It's really a matter of like, for example, if you're not a hardscaper, I would definitely start with mowing. Cut simpler, right? Don't make your life miserable by trying to figure out something that's more difficult and complicated and try to create a business around that. Try to figure out something that's simple first. Build a business around that. And then if you want to go into hardscaping, by all means you can do it. That's kind of why I wanted to have Tigrin on was to just offer that kind of different perspective of, you know, he focuses on big, massive, multi hundred thousand dollar projects. We really focused like we showed today on our video. Small residential lawnmower. Right. Very different businesses in my opinion. Literally different industries. The fact that people even compare the two is actually quite humorous to me. It's completely different businesses. Just the fact that, you know, we're outside and you know, we're doing grass and soil and like they're completely different businesses. So.

All right, you've probably done this already, but what are your top book recommendations for other owners? I have this quite a few times right now I'm listening to a good book. I'm not very good at like give my top books. I don't really have that. But let me give you this book that I'm reading right now or should they listen to? I'm not good at listening to books. They take me forever to get through. But this is the one I'm reading to right now. As you can see, I'm only in chapter two. It's called Bringing out the Best in People. It's pretty good. So far so good. Meticulous Gardens. How late into the mowing season would you hire? This is really going to depend on your, your confidence in your lead flow. Right. So if you're spending A ton of money on leads right now, you know, and you know that's not going to be sustainable. You can keep spending that money throughout the whole rest of the year. Potentially might be a good option, a good idea to like not hire and not continue to grow. That being said, if you're not marketing right now and work is pouring in and you're behind, yeah, go hire somebody. Because there's a really good chance that yes, the leads will slow down throughout the summer and into the winter or whatever, but, but you are going to be able to turn the faucet on of marketing and fill that back up. Right? Especially right now. If you haven't been emailing your customers on a monthly basis, you haven't been touching bases and you haven't been trying to upsell them, if you haven't been doing all the things that are going to allow for more work to come in, then you shouldn't be concerned with like, oh, I shouldn't hire someone now, trust me, right now if you find someone good and you're busy, you should hire them. Because again, the best defense is a great offense. Having too many people on your team is a great problem to have because if someone is acting out of order, you have no problem letting someone go. So, all right, what is the best way to gain new customers in your opinion? If you have a good budget. Honestly, if you have a good budget, it's going to be digital. It's going to be a mix of Facebook next door, YouTube, Google Ads nextdoor. I think I said that already. If you don't have a budget, it's gonna be knocking on doors, door hangers, yard signs and you know, really getting very technical, tactical in my opinion. Door knocking is so underrated and several of our franchisees this spring have done really well with it last spring office because of COVID It really put some of our new franchisees in the ringer because they were depending on that and they couldn't do it. I think it's underrated. I think there's a massive opportunity to door to door sales when it comes to lawn care and landscaping.

Do you see your business moving to green battery operated yard tools like a hedge trimmer or chainsaws, etc, potentially down the road, if it was light, they're nice because they're lighter. It's easier wear and tear on the guys. But for now we have, you know, we'd have, we'd either do all or nothing. Like I'm not gonna do the whole like, oh, like some of our trucks do this and Some are truck like I'd want it standard and at that point that this point at our local shop for example, to change, you know, 15 crews would cost a lot of money. So it's going to be a while before we actually make the switch. But it's definitely going to be in the horizon because that battery technology is, is a lot better in my opinion than the mowers in terms of cost, in terms of, you know, the actual functionality of it. So it's definitely coming down the pipe, man. Yeah, I know, me too. Sean telling you cancel. He canceled. Rodriguez, if you did power washing services, how would we keep the two crew busy? As only one can spray? I would probably get two, two pressure washers. A cheaper one that someone could potentially like do a pre rinse and then the after soak or something like that and then have the second person doing more of the finer details or just do one person cruise. That would be another way to do it too. Again, if you are doing siding of like of a building, for example, you're going to need two people just for safety. But if at all possible in that regard you'd want one person. Unless you can somehow split it up and have two different pressure washers. One person with a lower pressure cheaper one, maybe one with a more expensive high pressure one. James, where's Tigran? Sorry, join late. Tigran canceled last minute. Hopefully we can get him on next week. Brandon, thoughts on acquiring local one man show into your team that was a. That are a good fit with their current route. Providing employment as a way out with back end support as a way to grow our business. We have a call center and automated estimates. Yeah. So I think this is a great idea. Again, it's going to come down to the fact that you need to know your customer acquisition cost to really know the value to you of this business. When it comes to acquisitions, in my mind not all the valuation to you might be very different than to someone else. So for example, if your customer acquisition cost is $50 per customer, the value on that business is going to be much lower than if someone else is looking at that business and thinking about their customer acquisition cost is $200 because then the customers are more valuable to that prospective buyer. So in terms of thoughts on acquiring a one man show, a lot of times it doesn't work very well. Just my opinion and I know this is more of a subcontracting route in my mind it's like hey you out mow the lawns. We'll provide all the back end Support and you have your own tools or it's very difficult for a business owner, even if it's a one man show, Chuck in a truck kind of deal to go from where they control their schedule. They show up when they want to, they tell the customer what they want, when they want like all that to go from that to like you telling them where, what truck to use, you telling them what their schedule is going to be, you telling them anything like that gets a little bit concerning. A lot of times it doesn't work out if you ever have to give any input. Now if you're just like, hey, you literally do exactly what you're doing now and we'll just do the back end support. It's almost impossible because going to be a completely different system. They're going to be like used to getting cash and checks underneath the front front porch mat. And you're like, no, you can't do that. And they're like, why not? Right? So like that's going to be there. And then if there is definitely, especially if there's a one man show, a lot of time there is cash and stuff being handed around, that's a little bit risky. Again, if they're out doing all the lawns, they have all the leverage of the customer and for all you know, they're getting payment. Right. So I would, I would avoid that scenario. I know it sounds very good, especially when the labor crisis is as hot as it is right now. It's like, why don't I just hire subs? They do all the mowing, I do all the back end and take the calls and all the rest of it and set them up. That's great. But the problem is, keep in mind too, you don't technically own that customer. Even if you wanted to theoretically say you were the owner of that from your entity standpoint, at the end of the day, that customer is tied directly to that employee, in this case this other person that has mowed their lawn for years. That's the only person they see in their property. They will leave you if that person leaves. And you probably won't get all the notes and customer data you need to keep that customer if that employee was ever to leave. Wander Guerrero. Hey Mike, what do you think I should do to be able to have more capital after a light winter? I would definitely raise your prices, but again, that's not going to give you immediate capital. I would definitely look into getting a line of credit, a working line of credit, a business line of credit, through your local credit union and when you don't need it is when you need to go apply for one when you need it the most and you're strapped and you're underwater, that's when they don't want to give you any money, right? So I would definitely recommend, especially if the spring rushes of time, when you kind of struggle with capital and having enough capital, I would definitely recommend that be the time that you make sure you have a business line of credit on hand ready to go. And it's kind of a break glass thing, right? It's kind of like insurance almost in terms of making sure that if anything happens it's really, really bad, you have that to tap into. It's like a last resort. So, like I think I mentioned on one of my other videos, but last spring when Covid happened, I took out all of our lines of credit for all the businesses, just in case. I didn't know what was going to happen. All I knew is that my gym was shut down, that we potentially were going to have to shut down landscaping in our state. And I had no idea we had to disband command center, go into doing it working from home. This craziness was happening. So, yeah, break glass, you get the money out just in case. We never ended up using it and needing it, thank goodness. But it was a matter of. It's kind of like a cheap insurance policy, right? So even if I'm paying, you know, 4 or 5, 6% a month on that line of credit, or even if I have to pay 8 or 9, if you're just getting started, in my opinion is a cheap insurance policy. All right, well, you have yourself a great day. Yes, I would too. Paradise. You good, Jose? I cut lawns two days a week and do landscaping product four days a week. How would you do. How would you do to create two crews, one for maintenance and another one for installs. So when you're smaller, that works really, really well. As you grow, it's really nice. When all of your crew is cross trained, you can basically move them around as the schedule permits, right? So you have a big, big project, you can move more assets in human capital towards that. And then if there is, you know, you're getting way behind on mowing, you can move some of the project guys over to mowing. So we really like that flexibility that is only possible if you simplify services, you simplify the project side and not necessarily the size of the job, simplify them and then. Same thing with mowing. Simplification is what allows you to cross train all your Guys. Because otherwise it just, it's cost prohibitive to have to train, cross train people on 30 different types of services. And the complexity, like, okay, so when you join with us, you're going to start new. Great. And five years, you're going to be able to be cross trained on everything we know because we do excavation and tree work and you got to use the chipper and the box, the box truck, and you got to be able to use this big mower and then you got to use this applicator's license. Then you gotta like all of those things combined. Now that person's not becoming profitable for literally months. And so we'd like it to be where like they can basically learn all of our services within a couple days for mowing and maybe a couple weeks for projects and be profitable from. From as soon as possible.

Viewers, let's give Mike some likes. 49 viewers and only two likes. 22 likes. Yes. This is disparaging Marcos Duran. Is there a cheaper way to cut hedges than trimmers, but better or more efficient than scissors?

Yeah, like if you go on, if you go on a TikTok or Instagram, there'll be plenty of options. Like the ones with like the arms, like they just like drive along and like cuts it all. Yeah, there's those. But nothing that I've really seen that's like way better than edge trimmers, to be perfectly honest. Mike, what's the story or inspiration behind Max the mascot? Oh, Max the mascot. That is Max the mascot right there. And so the inspiration behind that was the fact that when we wanted a franchise, we cannot get a national.

Trademark without separating from golf a little bit. So we used to have a golf flag as our flag way back in the day. We knew we would be able to get trademark for that, so we switched to our friend Mr. Max here. And that was the inspiration. Hey, Mike, I do alerts a day before I go. Cool. I forget the context of this question, but I'm assuming you're talking about when before you show up at a job you are doing.

You're doing like an automation that tells them you are showing up. Can you please explain what anti clockwise is? Very funny, Very funny. Counterclockwise. Yes. Very deep in my talk there. Yes, Count. That's actually really funny because you're being John, you're being sarcastic, and then Grayson took you seriously here. Yes, it means counterclockwise. Anti clockwise. Counterclockwise. Yes. Very funny, Very funny. But hey, that was a very good tip that I shared because if you're just for you, John, I say anticlockwise. If your trimmer goes anticlockwise, you should start and go anticlockwise in the perimeter of the lawn, also known as counterclockwise. To John Garrettson, Dawe Bruski. Currently just mowing, thinking of doing sod and irrigation installs. I have time for one project a week. Small projects only. I'm not sure what to charge. So figure out what your hourly rate needs to be and then charge based upon materials and time. Right. So time. You figure out an hourly rate that you want to charge the customer for the budgeted hours that you think the job is going to take and materials you're going to take. How much you'll go to your supplier, say, hey, I have see here, there's no confidential information on this. Cover up the name. Here we go. I have.

All these products that I need to have for my jobs and I want to know the price in all of these. And then you want to you do what's called material markup, usually 25 to 50% markup on those materials. And that's the way you're going to do overhead recovery. You're going to get back from your overhead by doing material markup and then you're going to add the two together and you're going to have a price and that's how you're going to do the estimates in terms of the projects you have one per week. I like that. Knowing exactly how many products you can take on is important. What your budget, hours, capacity is for the week is important as well. Brandon too, great advice. Thank you Mike for bringing up how tough the change would be. Some gems I didn't think about yet. Getting creative in the labor market. Lol.

Yeah. Andrew, do you think it is more professional or looks more professional to use a trailer rather than a bed of a truck? Well, if I thought that, I probably wouldn't be using the ramp rack. So in my opinion, from a branding standpoint, yes, the trailer is great. You get a big enclosed trailer, big branding. It's like a big billboard going down the street. Yes, I love it. But right now I'm not struggling with getting more leads. I'm struggling with keeping, you know, finding good employees. And it's a lot easier to find an unexperienced employee than requiring that someone knows how to drive a big truck, back up a trailer, know how to use big equipment, use big mowers. I want to lower the threshold of skill as low as possible in order to have a sustainable engine. And machine to keep pumping out the jobs.

That's what I would say. Antonio. Hey, Mike. I send out reminders a day before I go out to mowing their lawn. What do you think? Because sometimes it backfires if I can't make it. Do you send out reminders or no? So we use automations in order to be triggered based upon when the service is dispatched. So that way, like you said, though, there's times when you don't get to the lung. Right. So for example, you're gonna want to tell these people, this is what we tell our customers is we're gonna schedule on, let's say Tuesday plus or negative one day based upon scheduling and weather. So what that means is they can expect us on Tuesday most of the time, but plus or negative one day, which means I can come Monday, Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Gives me lots of flexibility and I'm still staying within the constraints of that time frame. That being said, some customers are gonna have unrealistic expectations of what time they want you to show up. I want you to show up at 9am every Monday. I don't want you to show up at 8:55. I don't want you to show up at 9:02, I want you at 9:00am it's not, it's not realistic that you're gonna be able to grow your business doing that. And so I would say, you know, if you're doing the reminders, add in the reminder the fact that due to weather or scheduling that potentially could get pushed out to the next day and just put as kind of a disclaimer for you, what is a line of credit? Just go to your bank, Go to your, go to your bank and ask, hey, I want a business line of credit. And then say, you know what, by the way, what about a personal line of credit? Ask both of those things and they'll, they'll educate you really well. Basically, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, what's called a revolving line of credit, which means you can take money in and take money out. It's like, hey, here's $50,000. You don't have to use it. If you do use it, you're going to pay interest on it, but you don't have to use it. That's what a line of credit is, right? So we get lines of credit out. They say, hey, we approve you for X amount of dollars of line of credit. I say, thank you very much. And I don't use it. It just sits there. But it's revolving, which means I can take it out, use it. I'm paying interest.

You know, 5, 6, 7, 10, whatever it is that you're qualified for on a monthly basis. But I only pay that when I'm using it. So it's revolving, which means I can use, you know, use the $50,000. I'm like, you know what? You know, things are profitable. I made a bunch of money, all right? I don't want to have this debt anymore. I'm going to put this back in the bank. And there's my line of credit. It's wiped out, right? So that's a revolving line of credit. There's also unsecured and secured lines of credit. And, oh, this is a great time. See, I have to do this once in a while. Just, just stick with me. This is why, this is why we have to plug occasionally, just occasionally, we have to plug the MBA for entrepreneurs course. Because in the NBA for entrepreneurs course, we talk more about unsecured and secured lines of credit. Basically the difference is with a secured line of credit, you're going to have collateral, which collateral is basically like your trucks, your equipment, your house. Like, for example, you could do a line of credit or a HELOC home equity line of credit on your house, which is basically, again, you're securing the line of credit or the loan with your house. So if something goes bad, they're going to come after your house. I'm not a huge fan of doing that in business, especially if you have family and things like that. Not a good idea to do that, in my opinion. But definitely walk into your bank, ask them about the options of a personal line of credit and then a business line of credit, and ask them about secured line of credit and then an unsecured line of credit. An unsecured line of credit is them basically just looking at your financials like, yeah, we trust you. We're going to give you as much X amount of dollars as you want. And it's, you can pay it off, you can do whatever you want. It's revolving and you don't have to do any collateral. So if you, if you go bankrupt, we can't come after you. We can't come get your truck, we can't go, well, they can come after you. This can't come after the actual collateral that you put into it. Now, if you have a secure line of credit and you say, hey, I want to better interest rate, because a secured line of credit is going to get you a better interest rate, they're going to want security in the form of collateral. And that collateral might be your trucks, your equipment, any sort of asset that they could come take. If you don't pay that line of credit off, that's much less risky for them. Therefore, your interest rate is going to be lower, your terms are going to be better. But again, you're collateralizing your assets, which no one wants to do that. So that would be my 2 cents on line of credit. Hey, Mike, I have an employee who gets angry when I try to teach him our standards of cutting grass. He can do the work, but not to our standard. I tried teaching him multiple times, but he gets angry and questions me. Should I let someone with this type of personality go? I'm not. I'm sure you've ran into a lot of personalities while building your business. Yeah. So traditionally, I'd say take him out behind the barn and shoot him. No, I'm just joking. I'd usually say, you know, let him go. Right. The thing is, right now, in this labor market.

We are putting up with more than we would normally put up with. Let's just say that and matter of just getting through, to some extent and honestly, to some extent, it's a matter of, well, if I let this person go, am I just going to put more stress on the people that are going to stay with me and that are really good? Am I just going to put more and more stress on these people? Because I'm putting more workload, the person I just fired? So that comes into my mind more these days. But traditionally that is definitely a. An apple you do not want around is going to cause a lot of issues. And if they're not teachable, you're gonna run a lot of problems. A lot of problems. Because if they can't, you know, when you're trying to teach them, if they can't take that criticism like you should have done that edging. Correct. In that safe environment of teaching, if they can't take that criticism, what's going to happen when they have a callback? What's going to happen when they make a customer mad? What's going to happen when a customer gets mad at them? There's gonna be issues. Life of Oscar, what is your thoughts on gas versus battery equipment for small landscape installs? I like the small handheld stuff for batteries. Also, when it rains a day before and the lawn is soaked, do you guys, I'm guessing you, you're asking, do we, oh, still go out or wait, we still go out in our market, we have to. But again, in Our market, we do not have torrential downpours. This is not Florida. This is not Texas, where when you guys get rained on or Tennessee or Mississippi, when you guys get rained on, you get a flood. Here you get a nice little trickle. It trickles for hundreds of days out of the year. But it's not bad enough to stop mowing. So we keep mowing. Marcus asking for website advice. Would it be a better idea to split snow removal service and lawn maintenance leaf cleanup in the home portal and have themes with different colors or combine them into one? I think combining into one is totally fine. And then during the winter, you can just pivot your front page to focus more on snow. Right. So every quarter at Augusta here, I'll show. I'll pull up our site. Just use an example.

You know what, instead of doing that, why don't I pull up Launcher Web design and show you some of the sites that we make over there. That sounds like a great idea. All right, so let me hide this comment, let me hide my banner, but I want to give you an idea because this is really an important question, honestly, in terms of using your website to highlight certain services. So I'm bouncing over to lawn carewebdesign.com where everyone should go and use the service. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wrong one. Chrome tab. Here we go. There it is. All right, so this is lawn careweb design.com I think you can see this. Let me double check, though. Give me one second. Yes, you can. This is lawn careweb design.com I'm just gonna go to one of our random sites that we've recently built.

Oh, this is a new one, Evergreen Lawn Care Preview website. So you can go here and check out other sites we've built in terms of the design and everything. But so, for example, like, they obviously do a lot of lawn care and landscape maintenance that their focus here. But for example, in the fall, they should really make property cleanup and pressure washing. Probably bump those up to the top. And they should also potentially change this background image or most of our sites have video to focus on the.

The services that are pertinent to that time of year. If I go to Augusta, longcare services.com there, this background video changes based upon the time of year. So we change it four times a year where it's going to highlight the services that we want to focus on. During the fall, we're going to focus on leaf cleanup, we're going to focus on trimming bushes, we're going to focus on different services, we're going to potentially focus on snow and ice too. We're gonna snow snow. Like there's no showing snowplows in this video because we aren't doing snow plowing for at least another five, four or five months in any of our locations. So we focus on mowing, focus on project. We focus on trimming bushes. Right. So what I would recommend. Let me take this off here. Wait, you guys couldn't see that? Oh, I'm so sorry. So you're wanting to get that on the side. Why couldn't you see that property cleaned up? Sure. I'm sorry. You guys didn't see the one I was trying to show you. Give me one second here. I apologize. Let me go ahead and remove it then. Share the screen.

Share screen.

Sorry about that. There you go. So this is the Augusta Launcher website. I apologize for that. And I was just saying that this back, this background video is what I was talking about in terms of we change that based upon the time of year and what services we are going to be trying to highlight. That's what I would really recommend first and foremost. So, okay, remove that and bounce back to my questions. So yeah, in terms of your asking for website advice, I would not split them up because your SEO then gets split up your ads, all your traffic is going on two different websites, two different URLs. I would personally recommend just highlighting snow and winter services during that time of the year. Like as you go into like September, October, November, and people start thinking about snow contracts, make sure it's highlighted in your video and in your pictures on on your website. And again we have to do a plug long careerweb design.com. it's unlimited changes. You just send us a video, you send us a picture and say, hey, I want this change now because it's going into winter. I want the picture of my plow. I want my guys out in the snow and you send us a picture. Guess What? Usually within 24 hours. Almost always within 24 hours. We can get those done. Okay.

See here. Questions. Well, we got a bunch of questions coming in. Any tips on how to ease the pain? Switching to service autopilot from jobber. Tried last season and threw in the towel. Seems like a full time grind to set up, but absolutely worth it.

Yes, I am going to keep going on Brandon.

Yeah, service autopilot is a little more complicated. I think that it needs to be and we, we have issues with it. I personally have issues with it. There you go. Antonio. Sorry my phone is being weird and sending a comment before I finished I'm using the company phone. I'm used to my iPhone. Okay, Thomas. Hey, Mike. Do you think financing is better than paying cash for mowers, trucks, etc? Definitely mowers. I'm becoming nicer about getting loans on equipment because so oftentimes, like Sheffield Financial or whatever, you can get zero percent for like three or four or five years, which is insane. It's awesome. And they're not going to give you any discount if you pay with cash. So why in the world would I want to pay today the same price that I could pay over the course of next 36 months? Doesn't make sense. So that's when it makes a lot of sense, in my opinion, to finance things is the equipment side right now with trucks, my goodness, the. The financing isn't as great because everyone wants trucks and they're coming to with cash to the dealership. So, like, right now, the used car market is just ridiculously, radically, horribly annoying. Wes, could you explain how you price mulching? I've heard a few different things and ways of charging. Just wondering how you figure it. Yeah, again, supplies and time do not get in the trap of being lazy and being, oh, I'm just gonna charge a hundred dollars per yard. Like, what if that is in the backyard? What if it's. There's steps to get down in the backyard. What if that is 1 inch, 1 inch thick over the course of 6, 000 square feet versus 4 inches thick over the course of 1500 square feet? These are all variables that is very difficult to think. Oh, it's based on square footage. Like, literally, if it's next to the curb, it's going to take a. A quarter of the time. And then compared to if I have to do wheelbarrows back into the backyard, down steps, and then through a gate. Like, trust me, it could take way longer. And so unless you have a very systematic way of doing steps, like, okay, it's $80 per hour, $80 per yard, it's 90 per yard, it's 100, 110. But then it's like, why not at that point just look at budget hours versus materials, which is going to be the most accurate when you're doing projects? Michelle, what is better a trailer or bed? Because I have a bike and trailer and towing it with a binder clip. Unfortunately, I have no idea what a binder clip is. I apologize for being so ignorant. Grass bro. Could you explain how I should let him go? Thanks for the answer. How I would let him go if you've already Talked to him. So again, if you just guys joined grassroots, asked question about someone that was being trained, not being very receptive to that, I would have a really honest conversation with him about, you know, the fact that when you're training him and you're giving him criticism, you're not doing it because you want to be big and bad or like, appear better than him. You simply want him to do a better job and make more money. Especially doing P4P. If you're new P4P, this is an easy one because you say, look, I want to make you, help you improve and make. Be more proficient and efficient and make more money on P4P. If you're doing hourly, this is a matter of, hey, I am not, I'm not trying to, like, you know, lord over you or appear like I'm the smart one here. I just want, when you go out, you don't get callbacks. And I know it's embarrassing. I want you to get yellow slips. You have to pitch these things if you want to keep them in the most positive thing for them. Right? So again, that's why P4P is so useful in this scenario. You can say, look, I want you to be more efficient, I want you to be more profitable so you can make more money. But in terms of letting him go, how I would go about letting him go, I would basically, you know, say, look, like, I just let him go. I'd say, bye, bye. If you, if that's the point where you're at, okay, I'm ready to let this person go. I just let them go. And then you just have to explain it to your team in the fashion of, like, look, you know, we're all here, we're trying to do our best, but if you can't learn from anyone and take criticism like, that's not going to fly. It's not what we stand for. Again, in this labor market that is going to potentially put a lot of more pressure on the people who stay in terms of getting that workload done and accounting for that. So that's, again, people, you know, the, the balance of, of leverage has shifted to where you might not do that. But again, if you're confident you can go fill that person's spot, I'd do it tomorrow. Because it's a really drain. A big drain in your culture. Exactly. He does not take the criticism well, Marco. I am starting with electric equipment, by the way. So there is limited choices and quite a large thought process of charging the batteries while doing lawn maintenance on property to prepare for the next house. Okay. Yeah. So there's solar options, There are battery generated generating options. I know there's some really cool ones I, I personally like, which is it connects to the trailer wires if you have a trailer, and then you can be charging the batteries while you're running. Like while the truck is running, it'll charge the batteries and the batteries will then charge your smaller batteries. Those work really well. But again, the more cost and infrastructure I have on those trailers and trucks, the less I like it. And so for now, again, until we have a complete overhaul, we won't switch. Even for handheld stuff. We also use service all PI. How do you input the hours plus materials in the estimate? So basically in terms of the hours you're going to use budget hours. And then in the rate, we just add the cost of materials and.

The hours together. The budget hours, like the cost of labor that because that's the price that the customer actually sees. That makes sense. Brian. I price per yard of mulch anywhere from 100 to $125 a yard. That's buying and putting out. Yeah. So, you know, it's definitely simpler to do it this way, right? Charge by the yard. It's simple. But again, even at $125 a yard, like in a really complicated area, I can guarantee you I can get 5 yards of mulch dumped and installed right along the curbside of a flower bed versus one yard of mulch in the backyard, down steps, through a gate, underneath the hedge. So it's not even comparable. Even though you're moving 25% is your variable rate from 100 to 125, you're moving up 25% based upon the variability of how hard it is to get places. I still believe it's more accurate. Again, more accurate, not simple. This is the easiest way to do it. Right. Because you can literally look at probably a Google map and have a really good idea of kind of general terrain and be like, Yep, we charge $120 per yard for your for install multi year property. That's awesome. That's great. Saves you time. You have to go go to the property. And if the customer wants more yardage that great, it's just $120 more per yard. So that's easy. But again, if I'm going to go to the property just to see how many yards of material I need and then multiply that by an arbitrary number, like a hundred, I might as well just put the amount of materials and the hours and be more accurate. Right. And especially if you're on P4P, pay for performance where budget hours mean everything in the world, that's when I would really, really recommend you have used budgeted hours. So one of your franchises, trucks in the Memphis area. Very cool. You would have either seen Nick Dentalsbeck from Cordova or you would have seen.

Kevin Fairburn out of Mississippi because he's just right across the border there.

Kraspro. Also, Mike, would you, would you get to know your employees? Would you ever become friendly or would you go the other route and have a very boss like relationship?

Do I have a very boss like relationship with everybody? No, you have a good balance. I have a good balance, according to Liz. I don't know, I probably lean a little more in the direction of more of a boss relationship because I work a lot, but I, I care about them. But it's not like I'm going to get super buddy buddy. But it's not like I ever think like, oh, I can't be more friendly because of I'm their boss. That never even crosses my mind, honestly. I usually there's ebbs and flows. Like if someone's going through a hard time, I'm probably gonna be much more indexing towards the friendly side. And then if someone is slacking and letting down the team, I'm probably gonna index much more heavily towards the boss side, which I don't even like the word, but it occasionally has to be pulled that card. How can I start a website? Well, you should have showed up a few minutes ago. And there's a great website called longcroweb design.com that can take care of all those problems for you. Brandon. Mike, Andy's next biz software.

To tba. Late to the party. What happened to interview? You were late to the party. You. You didn't miss that. You missed that Tigrin canceling us last minute. We're not canceling Tigrin. Tigran canceled on us. All right, Mike, when you recommend cedar wood chips versus regular mulch to your customers in our area, cedar mulch and across the country right now, cedar mulch literally is going to cost three to four times more than regular bark mulch. And so it's just a cost prohibitive thing. From a weed standpoint, cedar chips do amazing in terms of like, keeping weeds at bay. Cedar is like the best repellent for weeds, but the cost is usually the prohibitive part. Like if I'm going to get from my supplier $30 per yard and then I'm going to go and get $125 per yard for cedar chips, like, bark is 30, cedar chips is $125 per yard. I'm probably gonna go with the bark. At least the customer would. Right. If someone asked us to, we potentially would. I think we've done it like once or twice, though. It's literally three to four times more expensive in our area. And we live like in the woods.

How much dollars should you make with a helper before purchasing another truck, mower, etc, in order to start splitting up the work? Okay, Troy, so again, you'd have to have a lot of context here, but I'm going to give you a number because that's what you came for. So I would say as a round number, before you get a second truck and a whole nother setup, I want you to be doing at least $8,000 per month in revenue. All right? At least. Okay. I could go a lot higher because I could technically say 8,000 per employee. Like you could theoretically probably get 15,000 before you needed the second direction. But if you have another helper already, I would say that if you need to be over 8,000 per month in revenue, if you're like 3 or 400, 3 or $4,000 a month in revenue, you should not buy another truck because honestly, you could be solo and easily make eight to $10,000 a month in revenue.

Wes, I do gardening and landscaping, so not in and out of places so quick. And people always let me use their outlets for charging while working. That's a great point. If you have battery operated stuff, a lot of times people don't mind if you just plug in your stuff while you're trimming bushes. Etc. The challenge is on mowing jobs where, you know, are you really going to take out the battery portal every single time? Right. So but for gardening, landscaping, larger projects like that, where you're going to be there a long time, this is a great option in terms of charging up the batteries. In your MBA program, does it go over managing money in bank accounts, paying yourself, etc. Grass Pro. It will eventually. We're still only halfway through the program. The last module, because I have all the modules, what I'm going to say, it's a matter of getting them recorded. Right now in terms of the last module is going to be about personal finances. So investing, personal money management, savings, checkings, like how to move money around, keep track of for irs, all that fun stuff. But that is not in there currently. That's why it's on pre sale. Smash the like button. Thank you. Coming late to the party and Bringing all the gusto. Question about soil. Is it better to make my own via composting or just buy them from a pack? Buy the pack in a local supplier. Cost in supplier is about $10 Canadian per 25 kg.

In my opinion, the cost of composting is higher than a lot of us expect. Because if you're going to do it right and you're going to get a high volume of material, you're going to need like a loader, you're going to need a lot of space. And especially depending on where you're at in Canada, it sounds like you're in Canada somewhere. No, the cost of just the real estate to do that kind of an operation is going to be difficult, not only to find but to pay for. It's going to be cost prohibitive. Like if you got to spend two or three, let's say $3,000 a month for an acre parcel of land with an office and where you can have a loader.

Pile up all your material, be far enough away, but in a commercial area, because you're not going to get away with this in, like, in the middle of a residential. You're going to have to have commercial land. So by the time you pay for all that, you might as well go buy the stuff from retail and not worry about all the property and all the, you know, having all of that labor involved with turning the, turning the compost and all the rest of it. So there's a lot of hidden costs. As much as it sounds great to turn your grass clippings and leaf debris into money in the form of compost. That sounds great. Sounds great in theory. But again, there's other costs involved, indirect cost. And you just shifted your cost of goods away from cost of goods. That's zero technically, to cost of labor, overhead, space, all the rest of it.

Yeah, getting enough is. Is difficult. Right. Even for us. Like, we do, we do tons of lawn mowing. But, you know, one, one mulch job that has 20 or 30 yards is like, that's a lot of grass clippings. If 20, 20 or 30 yards of. Of compost, I should say that's a lot of grass clippings because it decomposes and just reduces in size so much. It's kind of like spinach. When you put on a skillet, it like literally shrinks by like 50 grass clippings. Basically the same thing over time, right? So if I need 20 yards of compost, I probably need 50 to 80 yards. Don't quote me on this. 50 to 80 yards. Of actual grass clippings. At the end of the day, that's a lot of clippings and a lot of leaves. So pros and cons of contracts versus pay as you go for long means. And what does Augusta use? Augusta uses a blend based upon the demographic. So in some of our demographics and our territories, it's very standard to have contracts, 12 month agreements and most of the time those are most common in areas where people are used to mowing year round or doing services year round, I should say growing season is year round. They don't really ever stop mowing. So Florida, Georgia, there's some areas, Texas, some areas where it's very standard. Like everyone expects 12 month agreements and when you give a price per cut, they're like, oh, that's a great deal per month. Right? Like it just. Everyone just used to that. That being said, the pros are the fact that you have stable cash flow, you have better cash flow during the winter and more dependable cash flows. The, the drawbacks is the friction that adds to the sales process of explaining a 12 month contract, holding someone to it. Are you really going to enforce it in the state in a court of law if someone drops out on you in the middle of the winter when you actually make all of your money on that 12 month contract, if they drop you then are you going to actually take them to court over that contract? Well, if not, then why in the world do you have a contract? Right? So.

Okay, we talked about this one already. We absolutely do. Give me a call. How to sell mowing going into summer. Honestly, this, I want to make a video about this.

Really? How there's only a couple different types of customers, right? Really there's really two that I can think of right now. One is customers that have never had lawn service in their whole life. I guess there's three people have never had mowing in their whole life. That's one demographic number two, if someone just moved and they, they need a new provider because they came from a different area. And number three is you're stealing it from another provider or they left that provider and they're coming to you like switching providers, right? So how you're going to sell mowing going into summer is the fact that you're not going to get very much the group one, because people, if they, if they decide to mow their lawn this year, they're mowing their lawn. If they decide to have someone else mow their lawn, they figured that out. What you're going to get from here on out in terms of mowing is people that are unsatisfied with their current provider. You're going to get people who just moved into town. So those. That's how you need to position your advertising. In terms like, how can I position my advertising towards people moving in town? How can I position my advertising towards people that are experiencing poor service with other providers? I'm not going to be making ads about. Tired of spending your weekends mowing your grass? Give us a call. Like if they're mowing their grass by now, in this late in the spring, there's a really good chance they're going to keep mowing it for the rest of the year. Okay, thanks, Mike. I got some real golden nuggets in this stream. How's the ramp rack going? The guys liking them over pulling trailers? They do like them over pulling trailers. But there's definitely downsides to the fact that we, you know, it's not so much the ramp rack. They all like the ramp racks. It's the fact that you can't have a zero turn. There's absolutely downsides that as I've been trying to point out my videos to show, it's not all hunky dory, it's not all great. There are problems with the mowers. There's problems. Certain things, elements when you're trying to do mowing. And that's why I'm trying to do those videos out in the field. It's going to kind of give some context. The stuff we talk about in a more abstract way on the podcast and the videos, from a business standpoint, like those things come from the fact that in the field certain things like 30 inch mowers have complications. Right. Like those 30 inch mowers are great. Love them. But the throttle adjuster is plastic and it breaks. And other random things like the parking brake breaks. It's not built correctly.

I think it's a matter of just over time they'll figure this stuff out because they're relatively new to the market. But that being said, when it comes to ramp racks, we love those way better than pulling trailers. There's just no comparison. It's a matter of the mower that can fit on that easily is smaller. Right. And yes, we could put stand ons, but again, in our market, we have to bag clipping. So we need the space of that debris in the back of the truck. All right, Ken Lynn. Someone drops me in the middle of the season. I charge 50 extra for every cut. I already did. Yeah, Again, that's, that's the ideal situation, the problem is, are you going to take them to court over it? Right. Because if you're charging someone 150 per month and they're gonna rob you three months early, are you really going to take them over to court over 450 bucks? And, like, would they have a legal standpoint to say they never gave me services and be able to take that, you know, somehow win that back from you? Right. So I'm not going to go over to court for 450. I'm just not. Right. And so I'm not going to make a contract that would say I have to go to court over this and have arbitrary and all the rest of it over $450. But that is exactly the case. I want that money if I'm. They're going to cancel early. But again, the enforceability of that, when you have hundreds and hundreds of contracts, am I really going to go to the court over it? Are people going to be fumingly mad and putting online reviews that are negative? Probably.

Next Discovery Day. We do not. We have not had discovery days due to Covid. We will probably not have one in the foreseeable future, because right now, I'm not focused very much on selling franchises. We are trying to really get command center ramped up and getting ready for the winter when we will onboard probably 20 or plus locations. We're really ramping up for that right now. So Discovery Day is not on my horizon, to be honest. Your card is on file, Ken, this is genius. This is very good. I wonder, though, if you've ever had people charge back on those. And that's when it gets really hairy. People always, hey, like, they charge my car without my consent. It's like, well, no, technically, you signed the waiver and you gave us your agreement and you gave us your credit card information. But people say the weirdest things. But that is true. If you have a car on file and you can just charge them the moment they cancel, that's genius. But again, if it's on a credit card, they can do a chargeback. And now chargebacks are so easy to make. I bet every single landscaper on here has had a time when they do a project. I think everything went great, and all of a sudden, a week later, you get a notice in the mail saying that someone's done a chargeback and said you didn't show up or you did the work poorly or whatever excuse is made up. And that's brutal.

AAT lawns. I bought the ramp rack this season and I love it. I put a 21 inch, a 30 inch, and a right standard B32 inch. Great you and long long care rookie inspired to buy the ramp rack. Marcos, what method would be good to collect credit card payment? I'm split between connecting Jobber or WIX for payments or at least figuring out organizing between the two. So again, in my opinion, Jobber is totally different than wix. WIX is gonna be your website. Jobber is going to be where you keep track of everything. If you're using Jobber, I would definitely use them for your credit card processing. That being said, the ideal scenario for everyone and anyone out there is that you control the data. There's a reason. There's a reason why Google makes billions and billions of dollars doing one thing, organizing and collecting data. So when it comes to the data, the information, the billing information for your clients, the ideal scenario is that you control it through like stripe, through authorize.net, some other portal like that. But at the very worst, if you're using something like Jobber for your CRM, it's ideal because it'll integrate with their processor and it stinks the fact that when you cancel your service with them, you're going to lose all that billing information. Data, data. That's where the value is.

I'm sorry, this is like my third question, but how would you go about price increases halfway through the season?

Halfway through the season is tough. But that being said, if you got tons of work coming in and you can't find employees and you're just overwhelmed with work, time to raise prices, baby. Let's go. So how I would do it, as I just explained to people, especially this time of year when everyone knows that there is like a ton of inflation, all the rest of it, I take advantage of that. Look, costs are going up, cost of labor is going up, fuel's going up. We need to charge more price, charge more in order to.

You know, stay in business and be profitable and make it sustainable. And at the end of the day, you want to do that when all of your competition is also very busy. So typically that's during the spring and fall rush. However, right now, a lot of our competition, a lot of landscapers in general, we're not, we're not on the offensive because we just can't get laborers. And so it's okay to raise prices now because the chance of them going and finding another provider tomorrow is less likely than would typically be this time of year.

Do you have problems with clients not watering their lawns and not being Able to cut them? Yes. Like in our market, we don't have a lot of sprinkler systems, but we don't stop mowing people's lawns until they ask us to. So I'm not going to take time from our office and our crew out in the field that's on P4P for them not to sit in front of a lawn like, oh, should we mow this? Should we not mow it? I just drove five minutes to get here and now like, I don't want that. We're going to mow your property on a weekly or bi weekly basis, whatever you agree to. And we're not going to stop until you tell us. Right. And then come the end of, of, of the growing season, we're going to pivot you right into winter services. Unless you tell us otherwise. Right. I want to control the scheduling. I want to control that, the scheduling relationship when it comes to the customer. Troy, I am making eight to ten thousand dollars a month solo and just hired a helper. How much of that do I let the helper do to relieve me to focus on sales and marketing? 25%, 50%, 100%. Okay, I gotcha. So honestly, the most you can afford, that's what it comes down to. Like if you can afford them to do 100% of the work and you go spend all of your day selling, you'd probably need another employee within a couple weeks because you'd be selling so much. So if you can afford that, let's go. But there's a really good chance you probably can only allow them to do, you know, 40, 50% of the work. You're with them in the field throughout the day, you get the jobs done sooner and then you go out in the evening or potentially with them, do door hangers, door knocking, et cetera. But in terms of, you know, this directly correlates with your financial ability upfront and capital is going to be determining how fast you scale. Right. So if you can have him do all of the work and literally you're not doing any field work, you get a lot more time, do estimates, do up sales, go do door hangers around all of your customers properties, go talk to all of your customers, like, like think about it right now, if you went through your 20, 30 mowing customers and you walked and walked up to the doorstep of every single one, would you be able to sell more jobs? Would you sell a paver patio? Would you sell, would you sell bark mulch? Would you sell a bush? Absolutely. But we get so Busy, like getting more customers new, New, new, like the next shiny thing, right? We need new customers. No, if you just took the ones you have right now on mowing, you'd be able sell them projects throughout the summer and stay busy. But the fact of the matter is we just spend, you know, we, oh, we gotta do marketing, get more leads, get more leads. Now we're running on doing estimates to people we've never done service for. When the warmest clients are the ones that we currently have on mowing service. And we just need to open up our eyes and then talk to them and convey the need their property has for our services. And they're gonna be the highest close ratio. You're not gonna have people like wondering what your price is as much and all the rest of it because they've done service with you in the past. Do you hire more experienced workers or inexperienced? Well, we prefer experienced, as does everybody else. But right now, with the labor market the way it is, we do settle for inexperienced and we really are just training for or hiring for attitude. That being said, obviously I'd like them to be experienced and have, you know, from day one be able to mow lawns and do all our projects, but it's just less likely going to happen. Will you be adding more to the Zero turn series? Greener than lawn care? Hopefully yes. Hopefully yes. I just gotta get time, gotta get time to go do those things. Who mentored you? Oh, mentored me. Who mentioned me? No one really specifically. Mostly just books and you know, online stuff. I didn't really have anyone locally or anything like that. Anyways, thank you so much everyone. I really appreciate you hopping on here. Sorry for the massive disappointment. I would have loved to have Tigran on. I sure hope we still have Tigran on. Tigran, if you're watching, we really missed you. You were canceled. No, you canceled on us. I understand. We will forgive you this once in this one time only. Hopefully we get you on the next week. And thank you so much for everyone hopping on here for the past hour. My goodness. And we'll see you tomorrow. Got some really cool videos coming out this week. Breaking down lawn care jobs, pricing estimates, thinking about actual tactical things out in the field. So I think it'll be a good application to everything we talk about business related. Have a great evening everyone.