Want Bigger Jobs? Watch This $300K Job Step by Step

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we're going to be walking through a $300,000 landscape job.

This is a massive project that we've been working on for about a year and a half.

And this is actually one of our owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care. And you're going to actually see the real math and the numbers. The real question is, was it worth it?

You constantly have to be one step ahead of all of your guys.

All of that and more coming up.

Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm the GM and co owner of Augusta Delta.

And I'm Matt Bedalla. I am the co owner with Andrew of Augusta Delta.

And I'm Lucas and I'm the future GM of Augusta Delta.

Like I said, a year and a half ago on the front, couldn't even see through these trees to the dyke at all. It was completely overgrown with brambles and blackberries and everything. So we started there and then we moved over to this, which we call the showcase garden. This kind of island garden with the driveway going around it. I think it was around $100,000 in total to get it all all renovated. It was a completely overgrown garden. We didn't do the retaining walls and the pathways. Kind of the structure was there when we got here, but it had been neglected for years and completely overgrown. So this garden over here, completely overgrown with cotone aster brambles, blackberries, random volunteer trees. And we, we gutted it. Lucas was on the mini excavator and the bobcat for months.

And. And then we plant, replanted all of this. And so we've. We kind of lumped this we call the berm because there's a hillside over there with this east garden over here and that those two combined were probably around $75,000 or so. Again, completely gutted. We had to redo the irrigation and then planted everything other than the trees. Obviously we didn't plant those, but the trees were the only things that were left in there. And yes, that was kind of the next phase. And just recently we finished the lawns here. So those are all kind of the finishing touches. They're just growing in. We just did the first mow today on these lawns. Our awesome crew did, I should say.

The labor side of things. Just trying to balance this project with having other jobs on the go.

We had a couple employees leave the company in the spring and we were short staffed. So it's tough. Cause we have other jobs on the schedule that need to be fulfilled and we still need six, seven, eight people.

Out here.

So there were some weeks where we only had two, three people out here and things really slowed down. So that was the tough part is trying to. For me to manage all the other mowing and small projects and stuff that we have going on along with labor out here.

For me.

Yeah, some days it was a little stressful. I mean, you just kind of adapt and overcome.

Yeah, I would say that was one of the bigger challenges. We kind of ended up being about a month past our deadline for finishing things up. And it was really. Because everything gets so busy in spring rush. You know, a couple people leave here or there and Andrew's got, you know, dozens of jobs scheduled. You know, labor leaves. We kind of pulled them from this site because it was like, well, what's, you know, a crew of seven versus.

A crew of four.

And that ended up causing some delays.

But, you know, 100 plus hours of a. During maintenance out here every month. Right. Just mowing is a full day, you know, during the spring, it's a full day for three guys to. To maintain the three properties up here. You know, plus now we've gone from this showcase garden, which is about 6,500 square feet. We're probably at about 50,000 square feet of garden.

Right.

So. And that's a, you know, rough debt, but that's enough work for two gardeners probably three days a week. Once we're out here full time weeding. I mean, you start at one end. By the time they get through with garden beds, you're back to the first one and it's already overgrown with weeds again.

Right.

So it's like it's non stop out here. So that's, that's a really nice part. And, and the client knew, like, hey, I'm increasing my gardens exponentially. I know it's going to cost a lot more money to maintain this. I know we're gonna have to do this. So put the hours in. I wanted to be. He never wants to think about it. He just wants to come in here and go, ooh, ah. And then.

Yeah, that's kind of a nice perk. We've created all this recurring maintenance for. For us, for ourselves. One of our controllers lost power and I found out yesterday. And we have all these new plants and the sun is beating down on them and they're drying out. So we needed to, you know, get the water going kind of in an emergency situation. Yeah. Which we got it figured out. Yeah. It's. Yeah.

It forces you to learn things quickly and learn things that you didn't Think you would have to.

This is kind of our herb culinary garden with a peach tree there. This is one of the gardens that didn't get enough water. So things are looking a little sad, but they'll come back. We've got it. We've got it dialed in now.

This slope used to be a lot more like a lot harsher. So I actually cut this slope down a ton with the excavator and in the process took out basically from the stairs till almost that first riser, that whole part of the wall came out. So we did have to rebuild the whole thing in which we found out that they had built this wall and it was not backfilled with anything. There's no material inside of it. So we repaired it and did it properly. And then down to the end we actually had a water issue and it actually almost wiped out about six or eight feet of the wall. So we had again, same thing, had to rebuild that. And again, there was no material inside.

Of it at all.

Except we did find out recently that there is a nice big beehive in.

The middle of it.

One of the girls got stung there the other day.

Yeah. Top of these were all capped off. So you can see here, these have these like concrete. They're capped, these ones. I think it was Lucas's idea actually to bust them all out and put the thyme in it. And the thyme will grow and kind of like flow out over top of the sides. It's going to look really cool.

How many of these will flow out over time?

Very good.

I'm pretty sure our client pretty sure our client made that same joke when we were walking around with him last week. Yeah.

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Originally, this was just lawn. So the field lawn just extended around here and there's still a bit of tweaking to do. It's a bit messy here, but basically Lucas excavated it all and then we filled it with gravel. We did drainage and, you know, crusher dust for the. For the top. And then we installed this granite border around the whole thing, created these gardens. These first gardens we call the Pollinator garden. So it's got a lot of things that bees like, so it'll be buzzing in the summer and that'll help with our berries. So inside. Literally. So then let's walk in here. So, yeah, this is all from scratch. We've got the. It's kind of a rustic feel to it. So we've got the split rail fence installed and then the planter boxes all have different types of berries. Which berries do we have in these gardens? You remember better than I do.

Plantain berries. There's raspberries, there's blackberries, there's haskap berries. And then we've got these espalier apples.

Strawberries there too.

Area with a fire pit in there. So should be a cool hangout spot. Somewhere between 60 and 80. Yeah. We still have to install irrigation, so that'll. That'll put it up closer to 80, probably. Yeah.

We've also got to. We're going to put some lighting in too, eventually.

Big, potent.

And patio lanterns and.

Yeah, so it's not quite finished, but this is. It's usable. Yeah, it's usable. And then next year, we're probably going to have to put netting over top of the berries. We're not going to worry about that this year because we're kind of past the season. I was probably like 40 hours plus on just the proposal and the budget and the planning and all that. I mean, easily more than that. Our initial plan was back there where there's. Behind the chain link fence there. We were going to put a labyrinth in kind of a third of that whole space. And then we're talking to a drainage guy. This is above our pay grade as far as our experience level as far as drainage goes. So we had a drainage guy come in. He estimated somewhere north of $100,000 just to do the drainage. And. Yeah, so our client decided, you know, let's hold off on that for now. We may still do it.

We're gonna clean out these paddocks, though, and turn this into like a horse riding ring. So I don't know if we'll be.

Really involved in the horse part, but.

We'Re at least gonna get it all cleaned up and put in, you know, hog fuel or wood chips.

So I would say that's one of the hardest things, though. It's just all the unforeseen extra things that come up. And it's like the saving grace for us is that we did have that contingency in the budget and. And maybe a little bit of luck, honestly, like, it could have very easily have spun out of control, I think, and been disaster.

No astronomical, major issues. Everything was just kind of minor little things. They do add up over time, but, you know, luckily we're able to kind of just fix the minor issues as they come up and just carry on. And like I said, a lot of it is you have to fix this small issue before you can carry on to the next big part of the project. Right.

But certainly something with these big projects. Like, we've been dependent on some subcontractors. One of the owners of one of our subcontracting companies had to be in the hospital for a couple weeks, and then his head crew chief hurt his back and is out three weeks. So in the middle of this project, we're waiting on these guys. We ended up calling other subs or doing some of the stuff ourselves and just waiting on things. So there's so many different moving parts and they all kind of have to line up. And if anything goes wrong, then you're delayed on everything that's past it. And, you know, that's one of the reasons why we may not do huge projects in the future. It's so complex, and I think we've delivered pretty well here. But there's always the risk that the client sees what you've done, and they're like, that's not what I expected, or that's not good enough or whatever. And then. Then what do you do? Like, thankfully, that hasn't happened here.

As far as, like, ideas on this project, though, like, yeah, we came up with a ton of cool ideas. And then you kind of look at.

It and it's like, well, how complex.

Is this going to be? Like, you really want to pare down to make it as easy as possible, because we're already going to be a little bit in over our heads doing project of this size. So it kind of came down to, you know, obviously we want to make client happy, present some ideas, but also try to make it as simple as possible for us and the group. So it's kind of that. Trying to find that balance.

And I would say again, we leaned on Cheryl, the designer, a lot to just help, like, with this, you know, with. With these variables with, you know, all these ideas. Like, let's narrow it down. Like, she kind of has a really good eye for things and what works and what will work and. And that that helped a lot. We didn't have to think too hard about, you know, all the different ideas.

Is there any advice that you guys.

Would give.

A crew that have like similar experience level to you that is looking at one of these. Like maybe they have it on the books.

Be wary.

Yeah, I'd say don't do it. I'd say build up to it if.

You'Re going to do it.

Like we kind of jumped in, in full scope.

I would say this is about 10 times bigger than our previously previous biggest project around that. So yeah it was a bit of a, bit of a jump. Make sure your client's amazing. Make sure you put a contingency into your, into your budget.

And, and I don't know, just have good relationships with subs. Don't be afraid to get on the phone and call experts in your, in your local area. Like if you're, you know, for example us here, like we could have tried to do the irrigation install ourselves but then that's a whole nother thing that we're learning that we have base knowledge of. But we just hired an amazing sub and they handled it for us.

Think about how much it's going to cost you to figure out how to do it versus seven calls from with no crew.

So just one second to, to do it right.

So I mean you know like, like Matt said we could have figured out the irrigation. We could have done that. It probably would have cost us twice as much money to do it that way. Right. So.

And twice as much time.

Right. It's our labor time. Like it's, you know, figure out what you can do and what you know versus what you think you can do.

Yeah, I think, I think look at it like a, like a general contractor maybe. You know how people build houses like they're, they're not doing all the actual work. They've got a network of preferred subs that they trust. So I think if you're really going to go into it, you want to build up that, that network so that you can execute through, through them and kind of just focus on your core competencies. So for us like planting and gardens, that's that like we're great at that, we're great at maintenance. You know that's kind of the bulk of it is mostly plants and moving plants around and creating new beds. Like we didn't do of a lot, a lot of stuff that we weren't comfortable with really. No, we're looking forward to cutting out multi day projects as Mike recommended.

Back to simplifying. Now it's going to be nice.

Stressful to be honest, but the finished result is super nice to see and rewarding at the end.