Mike Andes is building a lawn-care business targeting $1M revenue in a year. He's bought four custom vans at $40k each, hired his first technician, and is starting marketing through SEO and YouTube Shorts. No customers yet, but he plans to scale each route to 6-8 technicians, then replicate the model at a second location.
I moved across the country to build a $1 million lawn care business in 1 year, and I gotta do it in the next 6 months, hand it off to John, my general manager, so he can run the business completely without me. Now we run the entire business out of these custom vans. We don't have a shop space or any fancy office. We just do a coworking space to be able to verify our address on Google and have a spot to do interviews. It's week 3, and so far we've picked up 4 vans from the dealer. They're $40,000 each. All 4 vans have ramps installed and they were $5,000 apiece. Only 2 have been wrapped and we just dropped 2 to finally get them wrapped as well. It's been a long process and lots of delays. Next week we got our first technician starting and we still don't have any customers cuz we just turned on our ads. By this time I wanted to be spending like $500+ a day on ads, but there's just not enough search traffic to justify on Google. So we're going a little bit slower than expected since this area has currently been coming out of a drought. We got a storage unit for $85 per month just as a spot to be able to do blade sharpening and have team meetings on a weekly basis in person. Now the short-term strategy is to be able to do as much as I possibly can when it comes to SEO, getting YouTube Shorts, being able to optimize my Google Business Profile, and slowly fill our first route during the offseason, maybe our second one, and have everything ready to go by the spring rush to really grow and accelerate the growth of this location during the time when all our leads come in. Now, the long-term strategy is to be able to fill each route to 6, 8 technicians where they all have a route of their own. They're taking the van home at the end of each day, and at the end of that, have another general manager step in and John go start the second location.
