Mike Andes shows how a bad winter quarter can slash a lawn care business's profit margins from 20-30% down to single digits. His company Augusta runs five winter revenue tracks, with Christmas light installation and removal generating $10,000 to $14,000 per location to fill the slow season.
Digging ourselves out of a hole. 25,000 between the two locations right now. So I think it's 10,000 in champagne, 14,000. So basically a break even like late.
April, hopefully. I've seen over the course of hundreds of locations at Augusta and thousands of different businesses and home services that if you take one quarter of their profit and loss statement out of their financials, they're usually running a really good profitable business like 20 to 30%. But then you add in one quarter where they're losing 10 or 15 or 20% of profit and that's when you get to single digit profit margins typically in a lot of home service businesses. Now when Augusta longer we have five different winter tracks and one of them is Christmas lights. And we've gone ham on Christmas lights. We've invested a lot in actually creating augustalights.com just so that our owners are able to solve the problem of Q4 collapse. And it's a basic service. Look, I already got the truck. I'm showing up in the same truck. We got lights. I'm just plugging them in to the bed here along the driveway. I'm going to do the similar thing on the gutters to be able to get ridge lights for Christmas lights. Now what this does is allows the owners inside of Augusta Nation to be able to sell during October, November and December and and then take down the lights during January when otherwise those are typically our slowest months of the year.
