TOUR: Starting Your Lawn Care Business IN A STORAGE UNIT!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today is a little bit different of a video. I'm actually showing you our new Mount Vernon location for Augusta Lawn Care. And yes, we are at a storage facility. And so the reason I wanted to show this today is a lot of times people see the big shop, Augusta Lawn Care, that's been around for five or six years and you know, 10, 12 trucks and you know, a lot bigger and couple acres property and really nice setup and they think like that's where they need to start. And it's not a lot of you won't start at that size of a location, that many trucks, that many employees. And so I wanted to kind of give you a frame of reference for another location that I've started. And we've started this one really to be able to see exactly what the franchisees are going through as they're starting their business and they're just getting started and they don't have a big budget and a bunch of employees and things like that. And so we've been here now for.

A month, just over a month. And right now we're on track to basically start being profitable after two months. And so that's what we're on track for. And that includes paying the general manager a salary of $1,000 a week approximately. So let me show you around. It's just getting started and it's brand new, so it's good. Maybe you don't even have to have a storage facility. Maybe you're starting out of your garage. Maybe you're just parking your truck at a storage facility. I'm going to show you what we're doing and hopefully you, if you're just getting started, you can see, hey, like this is the very beginning. And I really wanted to do this too, because in five years when this facility is much, much larger and a lot, a lot more trucks and employees and all the rest of it, you'll be able to go back and watch a video. When we just got started, when this place was empty and when it didn't look all fancy and new and everything like that. So just wanted to kind of show you guys today what it looks like and hopefully it helps you guys out. So this is the storage place that we rent from. And you can see there's all sorts of different sizes. And honestly right now we could probably do with a size equivalent to that guy right there, just like five by ten or something. But we went ahead and am preparing for the rest of this year when we hope to have a couple employees and really scale this place up. So this is the facility we got now. This is a 10 by 20, so it's 10ft wide, 20ft long, and then it's I think it's 14 or 15ft tall. So it's really, really tall, which we don't necessarily need. The truck we got isn't super tall or anything like that. However, it does allow for a lot of space. You can see it's completely empty. And usually I'd say you can park your truck in here. The problem is, as you'll see in just second, the truck we have has a ramp on the back and it makes it just too, just bare like literally about 6 inches too long. And sorry, this is actually 25ft, 25ft long and still it was just about.

A few inches too long because it adds about 4ft to the back of the truck. But if you got a 30 foot, you could park the truck with that ramp in the back here. So let me walk you through what we got here. This is the 21 inch mower. Right now this is all we got. But up in, we got a 30 inch mower coming next week which is a 30 inch X mark and it'll allow for a little more efficiency. And the ramp that we got for the back of the truck allows for a 30 inch wide deck. Actually 32 inches, but 30 inches. What we're going to be using, this is the backup blower. This is a lot of the stair fair piece. Again, like this is really, really simple. We don't even have the shelving down here yet. Over here he's got the drills for the getting the blades on and off, things like that. Over here we got the door hangers. So this is the same stuff that the franchisees get for the door hangers. Get some of these out. So there's two different versions we got right now. This is the first, the front side and then the back side of these door hangers. And these are all made for the franchisees. And then we made these new ones, these new door hangers. Since we're right now a lot of people are at home in quarantine with the whole stay at home order. And so these are the door hangers that we also have that we've created. Really simple using our color scheme, the green, the yellow and the brown. And we've been putting these out quite frequently too. So down here, our objective, our goal is to make is to get one new recurring mowing service every single day, business day. And so we're shooting for five a week and we're just behind that right now just because with the quarantine there has been less of an uptake of leads. However, that is the goal. So we're, we're doing door hangers, we're doing some Google Ads. As soon as the stay at home order is lifted, we will be able to do our 30 and 30 challenge. Our 30 and 30 automation that we have for the franchisees that allows 30 customers in 30 days and that is going to make door hangers knocking on doors and really gives a step by step process for every single day. What actions need to be taken to get 30 customers in 30 days. So that's the systems we'll be using here. So since we don't have an actual location with an office, we actually go to the UPS store here just about half a mile from where we have our storage facility. And this is where we get our mail, so checks, things like that. So I'm gonna go in there now. And again, you don't need an office, you don't need even a mailbox ups. This cost about $25, I think a month to get this done.

Okay.

Again I want to show you this place. Before you I let you go though, I want to show you the actual truck. So because it could not fit inside of here, we went ahead and just got a parking spot out at this storage facility. I'm going to show you around the truck. The trailer is set up and like literally we have done properties that are super big with a 21 inch mower. And the reason again for that is the startup cost on this facility was extremely low. We don't need a trailer, we don't need a zero turn. Like the cost of a zero turn, it costs less or cost more than the cost of our truck and all the equipment on it. Like the amount of money that we had to put into this and all that is just like really, really low. And so it's in probably about two months, I will share some more of the startup costs with everyone here. But you can watch my last video in terms of what that looks like in here where we're really on the lowest end of that because we've spent less than $10,000 marketing and not much in equipment and things like that. Really keeping our cost as minimal as possible is really the goal as we get this place started hitting break even within two months. And when I say break even, that is including the cost for me to cover for the general manager. And so that general manager gets a salary about $1,000 a week. And so if you were an owner, if you're a franchise owner or you were starting your lawn care business and you could get to within, within two months of starting where you can afford to pay yourself $1,000 a week salary so you can pay your bills, you can put food on the table. Like, this is why we're doing this location is to prove the concept for Augusta Lawn Care to be able, like to be able to tell franchisees like, hey, you can quit your job, have two months worth of living expenses, and if you follow these steps, you're going to have. Be able to provide for yourself, take a salary still and things like that. So this past week was actually our first week where we made money. But consistently in terms of monthly, I think it's gonna be next month. And so this was our fifth week in operation. We were profitable. Sorry, fourth week of operation, we were profitable. But I think in terms of having a whole month of profitability will probably be. This is April, May of 2020. So let me go ahead and show you the truck that's parked over on the other side of the storage facility. All right. So it's a little bit windy, hopefully you can hear me. But this is the truck now that we use for the Mount Vernon location. It's our only truck so far. This is a 2012 Chevy 1500 four wheel drive. Pretty good tires on it. Actually came from Texas. It was from a leasing company. So let me show you around. This is our trailer lift set up. This is the 32 inch wide ramp. So all you got to do is pull this pin out here and this dovetail sticks out and works really well for the push mower. So we get that 30 inch mower on there. So this is equipped with all of the trailer racks from Green Touch. So we got the version 3 system for all the racking. You got a weed eater and an edger, both using the combi system. So we're able to switch out the attachments on the steel system. Got the trimmer line gizmo here, back here. This is the rack. So it goes right into the 2 inch receiver. And the one thing I do not like is because it's so far away from the 2 inch receiver, you can see that it kind of tilts down right here. And so what we're probably going to do is drill some new holes right in here so we can actually move this closer to the truck. We haven't had too much of an issue with it dragging on the ground, but I can see like one time when we're on an angle or something and going or speed bump and like hitting the bottom there. So gonna try to change that out. Got the. Another racking system here for the hand tools as well as then the sprayer. These new fuel cages are super cool. Really, really secure. Great way to lock these bad boys. And so nothing's going anywhere. So that's basically it inside here, all pretty cleaned out. We got some door hangers. So this is where the general manager comes. And basically, because we're at this storage and u haul place here, right at the front gate, we can drive in and out really quickly. And what the general manager will do is he will go back to the shop area and get all his tools or anything, like the mower that he needs for the day, and then he'll park his truck here and then take this one out. So he brings his personal vehicle, parks it here, takes this, the work vehicle, and heads out for the day. And in the back, the truck has the bins. We do have to collect our debris as well as cleanups and things like that. And then we just have a place locally close by that he takes that all to the dump. And I think it's $6 per dump and includes an entire pickup, so 650. And so that's what we do right now. Eventually down the road, like I said, you want to rent a place like a farm or somewhere where you can dump as much as you want. And the farmer or the residential homeowner, they take care of the clippings and they just pay them a set fee. But that's this basic setup. We're at this affordable storage place down here. It's in Mount Vernon. This territory for the. For the franchise. It covers Burlington, Mount Vernon and Anacortes. And all of our territories are five mile radiuses. And so inside of this territory, about 80, 90,000 people in the entire territory. And that's more than enough. We started the first location in a territory that had 8,000 people and grew it to 1.2 million before we ever moved. And so a lot of people think, like, oh, you need to have like, millions of people inside your territory, and you need to have, like a really large territory in order to grow. Grow your business. But really, the facts of the matter is the smaller the territory, the better brand penetration you can get, because more and more people know about you in terms of percentage of your territory. Like, if you're trying to target a million people, to get a million people to know your brand is very, very difficult. Whereas if you're targeting 5,000 people. You can get all of them to know who you are with almost every single marketing campaign on Facebook or every door direct mail. You can literally do an every door, every door direct mail campaign to every prospective client in your territory. So this territory is still pretty big. 80, 90,000 people. But all our franchisees, we try to keep them right around 100, if not below. Plenty of room to expand and grow your business, but not so big that you really just become one of another million other landscaping companies. You can really penetrate using the brand. So hopefully that helps some of you just getting started. You know, I don't want you to be overwhelmed or to be intimidated by when you see the other shop or other landscapers that have lots of trucks and trailers and equipment and people like, we're just starting out here, and everyone had to start from a place like this. I still remember when I got my first truck and trailer, which I showed you on the last video, when I was at the other shop in Bellingham. And I remember using exactly like the same exact setup, storage facility, parking the enclosed trailer for $40 a month. Here we pay about $260 per month, and it's a little bit high, but eventually we're going to get, once there is an opening, we're going to get the bigger storage facility that would allow for the truck to be parked inside, and they'll actually be cheaper than right now, where we're paying for enclosed as well as a parking spot. So that's kind of where we're at. And so I wanted to shoot this video, give those of you that are just starting out a little bit of hope, inspiration. And know this, this kind of a setup can easily pull in 10,000 plus a month in revenue. Like that is not unheard of. Using this type of a setup with, without a trailer, without a zero turn, without big bunch of overhead or expenses, you can easily pull in 10,000 in revenue every month using this type of setup. You know, once you get three, four, five trucks, yeah, it's probably better you go get some space or you go get a lot that you can rent. It's going to be cheaper for you. When you're first getting started out, you want to keep those costs, those overhead costs as low as possible and invest money into marketing. We've spent as much money in marketing, under $10,000 as the truck. For some companies getting started, they go out and they spend 20, 30, $40,000 on trucks and equipment, and then they spend two or $3,000 on marketing. That's why they're not successful enough and don't scale as quickly as they'd want. If you want to scale the business quickly, you need to be putting that money into marketing, not equipment and a bunch of depreciating assets like vehicles. So hopefully that helps someone that's just starting out, gives you a little bit of encouragement and I'm sure I'll post videos in the future in terms of how the revenue is, what the expenses are looking like, P and L as well as just, you know, as this location grows. Really getting to see from day one, this is day one what it looks like and literally we launched this location on, on the very day that our state went into lockdown and it became much harder to market our services and get clients. So if we can do it and we can grow the business and scale it like we're doing now, I really, I don't think there's any excuse for anyone out there to not do the same thing. So hopefully these videos are helpful and hopefully as we make more of these videos and this location continues to grow, you can find it inspiring to watch that success and that growth as we grow. Thank you so much. Make sure to comment below and like this video. It really helps me reach more and more other landscapers that could use this content. Thanks so much everyone. Have a good one.