What I Wish I Knew Starting My Lawn Care Business.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course. Today we are going to be doing more Q and A again. If you would like to contribute to the next episode of Q and A, you need to just text the word landscaping to this number. 360-227-6362. Text the word landscaping that number, you get included inside the group. When I need questions, I just submit, ask you for them and you can text me back. So text that number with the word landscaping and you can join on the next show. While I'm just pulling up my inbox here, make sure that you sign up for Landscape Summit. It's coming up. It's only a month away. I'm really looking forward to it and so just really, really am looking forward to. I'm already creating a lot of the content and getting my notes and all of that put together. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. We're gonna be sending out packages with shirts and hats and all the rest of it st so just make sure you sign up today. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com if you want the recording, get two tickets. If you just wanna come live, one ticket. So make sure you come to that. It's gonna be a lot of really good stuff. All right, jumping into the questions. Here we go. This first one's really long. I'll read the whole thing and then we'll answer it.

Hey Mike, I'm a huge fan of yours and I've learned so much from you since starting my business. I'm coming to a close of my fourth season this year. I have a full time job and make a little over $70,000 a year plus benefits. My wife is a stay at home mom and we have two small kids. I've been teetering on going full time for two seasons now, but I'm afraid to make the jump. I've got the business as big as I can get it right now. Working part time, I'm set to gross around 7 to $80,000 with the business this year. I've had one guy working part time to help me get all my yards done, but he is leaving in January to go back to college. All what advice do you have for someone who is in my shoes that is the sole provider for their family and is on the fence about making the jump to full time? Any advice on finding or choosing health insurance for a family when making the transition the first season? Should I go full time next season and quit my job or should I try to hire Someone on full time to run my route so I can focus on growing the business large enough to support the income needs for my family and then make the jump. Thank you. Thanks for all you do. Josh McMillan, Georgia Lawn and Landscape LLC in Georgia. Cool. All right, so there's quite a few questions packed into here, but let me try to dive into this one. So first of all, making 70 grand a year with benefits at his job and then his business, lawn care business, doing 70 to 80 grand gross revenues. And then first question, so it looks like you have someone working part time with you. They're going back to college though, in January. So what advice do I have for someone like you? Okay, so, so you're making pretty good money at your current job. And this is the part I don't know. Could you live on 40 or do you need 70 to get by? Are you stacking money aside right now or are you like barely scraping by on 70 and you need 70 to survive? That's the biggest question. Because if you can reduce the need for 70, if you're at needing $70,000 to get by, if you can reduce that down to 40 or 50, you could probably make the jump pretty quick. And for everyone listening, that's really what it comes down to. If you can live on little personally in terms of what you take out of the business, you can switch to being full time a lot sooner. But let's assume though that you need 70 grand to get by and replace that income, whether it be mortgage, things like that that you have accumulated. And I know it's even more stressful when your wife is a stay at home mom and you are the sole provider of the family. And my family, when I grew up, that was the way it was. So I know there's definitely stress there and it's very commendable. But it is more financially stressful sometimes. So in terms of that $70,000 per year plus benefits, first question is about what you know. You're on the fence about making the jump to full time. Any advice on finding health insurance? Okay, so for health insurance, two options. One, one, I would look for.

A health plan that is like a co op. So I use Christian Health Ministries, chm. It's really, really great program. It's a lot cheaper than insurance and they basically reimburse you for a lot of your health expenses. They're not gonna cover for like dentist checks, eye checkups, things like that. Which if you need that, I would then recommend getting a high deductible insurance plan with an HSA health Savings account. It's great for taxes as well as it allows you to not have so much in insurance if you're switching from a job with benefits to working on your own. So that would be my 2 cents on that. Secondarily, in terms of the actual business. Now this is the question. If you're going to make the jump, you're really probably going to need to double the size of the business if you're going to take 70 grand home in profits, right? So if you work full time on the business, you could probably, I would imagine, just in terms of capacity, you could probably do about $110,000 in revenue if you worked full time. Only you all day long. That was your only job. You could probably P50 to 60 out of that, honestly, easily, even if you're working by yourself. But ultra efficient, ultra lean, like you'd be working a lot of hours. Now what I would think about doing is could you hire someone full time, do maybe 90 to 100,000 revenue with them working full time, and then you may be helping when they can't make it or whatever like that. But then stash some money aside. Like the biggest thing is if you can stash money aside for like a year, you're going to be set right. If you could stash money aside for a couple years and then make the jump, then you're gonna feel a lot better. And this again, obviously, if you don't have a family, this is different. When you have a family, you can't like, you know, not go without food, like you have to provide. So what I would do is build your Runway. And that is try to reduce how much you need of your $70,000 paycheck. So that way every dollar above, let's say 50 grand, you can live on that extra 20 grand can get socked aside. Put that aside. Then I would be thinking, okay, can I increase the size of my business? Go hire someone in stock, 20, 30,000 a year from that. Also all of a sudden, within a year, you're gonna have 50 to $60,000 set aside as the Runway for your business. And you should be. If you've hired someone full time, already doing 100, 110,000 in annual revenue, then you going full time will double the business. When you switch to going full time in the business, you will probably double it just cause you're focused on it, you'll upsell people and things like that. But in terms of security, if I was you, I would take one year, I would reduce your expenses personally and try to take as much money and put it aside for the business for the following year. I would then go hire someone full time. Keep your job, keep your benefits, but then hire someone full time. That is gonna be really dependable. Put them on P4P which we talk about conference. If you haven't implemented that landscape business course, you probably are a member in there. It's like implement P4P for that person so they aren't being wasteful. You need them to be productive cause they're your only employee and you're not gonna be able to. You're at work. So I would get that one employee. I really truly believe they can do 100,000 revenue if they're efficient and they're solo all the time. And they should be able to make good money doing that too. So I would try to do that. Keep money aside from your personal life and your personal job and then the business try to sock away 20 grand in the next year from that as well. And then go into next year having money set aside for an entire year's almost worth of expenses, the 50 grand and have the ability to know that you're gonna grow very, very quickly once you go full time. So that would be my two cents. Next question. Good question. By the way. I could take an hour on that. Michael from Edenton Lawn Care, Lincoln, Nebraska. How would you recommend charging residential snow removal? I am in Lincoln, Nebraska and the amount of snow frequency is inconsistent. I am a solo operator and I'm still debating whether I should charge a price per push or just charge a monthly or seasonal fee. Thanks. Alright, so it depends if you have inconsistent snow. I would recommend by the push up in Ontario, Nick, one of our franchisees, awesome guy and he does it more of like what you mentioned, a monthly or seasonal fee where people pay for the by the month throughout the winter. But he is much more consistent in the amount of snow that comes. He can basically predict a very tight range of how many times you have to plow someone's driveway. And literally for five or six months that is what he does. So it's a lot more predictable. If you're living in an inconsistent area, I would recommend charging by the push and then having a buffer like say for example 1, you know, 0 to 4 inches is this price and it's, you know, just putting in parentheses or whatever, 50% extra if it's above this buffer, 3 inches, 4 inches, whatever you might have in your area because you don't want to be like it takes a whole lot longer to plow a driveway when there is 20 inches versus 2 inches. So you got to have some sort of a kicker if there is a ton of snow to get dumped on. But then it's just a simple way of billing and selling. The job is a lot simpler too because you're going to have a hard time convincing people to pay you. If it snows once and they're paying you every single month, it's very just hard to convince them. Whereas if you charge by the push, you're covering yourself. And then it's easier to sell too. There's less friction. All right, Diego from California has a question. How are you, Mike? I've been keeping up with your videos with you and Tigran and I thought of this question. If we can all agree that buying used trucks has a far more roi, what would be the difference between purchasing used equipment such as a used zero turn in good condition that you can buy outright for much cheaper? This is not something I would personally do, but what is the difference between the two scenarios? Okay, so this is a good question. This is a good question. Okay, so when it comes to mowers, look, let me just step back. The main reason is because for standardization of your mowers, it affects your ability to train your crew a lot more than the trucks. Like if any of us jump in any truck, we can figure it out literally within about five seconds. Like, okay, wait, shifter, we got a steering wheel. All pretty much straightforward, right?

And you know that's, that's easy. Almost any type of truck, Ford, gmc, whatever. And I know some people prefer different brands, but in general, jumping into any truck, you can drive it with a mower. There's a stand on mower, there's a sit down mower, there's a walk behind mower, there's a sulky, there's different brands that have completely different ways of driving them. Different way where you're standing on the mower, where you're sitting, if you have a bagger, how wide, where the, the weight distribution is. It is very different driving different types of mowers between brands and more so between like stand ons, sit downs, walk behinds, push, all these things, right? So my big thing with buying new is that you can, you got a consistent source of that machine. I go and I go to a dealer. If I come back next year and I want to add another crew with the exact same setup, I know that mower is going to be there. Whereas if I'm always constantly shopping for used mowers, this is the part, people, no one talks about take off, the part about price. Right.

And all that. Just looking at the fact that if I buy a used piece of equipment, what if there's. The closest dealer is three hours drive away. I'm not gonna go buy that same piece of equipment for my second and my third and my fourth setup. I'm gonna want a dealer that's close. And if I get all these hodgepodge of different mowers, it's gonna take a long time to train all of my crew just to drive them all, not make ruts and be comfortable in all these different types of mowers and handling them and troubleshooting the belts and all the rest of it. A truck. Some people would say, well, that's why you should buy a truck new as well, because.

You don't have. You train people in different trucks. But it's different, right? A truck you can drive very, very easily between brands. It's not rocket science. Whereas with equipment and mowers, there's different types of sit down. Like, I've gone to operations where people have six different types of mowers and like, they have different types of brands, they have different sit down, stand on, walk behind, push. Literally the amount of time it would take just to train the crew on all of those pieces of equipment, the different types of belts you need, the different types of blades you need. There's adding so much complexity. Whereas at the end of the day, with a truck, you can step into a truck and drive a truck. Okay, so that's the biggest part that no one really talks about is the training aspect as you scale your business when it comes to used equipment and mowers. Okay. Versus trucks, which I feel are much more universal. Just to hop into. You might say, hey, maintenance and all that, but I'm talking about like operator, like your employee learning how to drive a truck. They can drive one truck. They can pretty much drive any brand of truck. And if it's used or new, doesn't really matter. Like, unless you're going 30 years back. But if you're talking about the past 10 years of a truck, they can drive it immediately. Less training. And what we want to do is make it more like McDonald's, which is they can take someone within a day, they're becoming a profitable fry flipper or burger flipper or whatever we want to make as quickly as possible, get them the profitability in terms of training them in lawn care. So mowers take a lot more time and variability than trucks. The other thing is.

What was the other thing I Was gonna say, oh yeah. The other thing is just the fact that.

With a truck I can get a Carfax and know really, really simply, you know, the history in that vehicle, what that vehicle's been through, damages, things like that. I can't do the same thing on most pieces of equipment. Now this is where I like used equipment. If I have, let's just say for example an Exmark dealer that I use and literally an Exmark comes for sale on Craigslist. It has like 50 or 60 hours and it is half the price of the exact same mower I was gonna buy at the dealer. Yeah, I'm gonna go buy it used because I have a dealer that's close by and it's gonna fit into my fleet alright. It's going to match all my other equipment. That's when I would go buy used. If it was lightly used, wasn't damned, didn't have like 500 hours, 600 hours on it. And I could get a massive discount by getting it used because I know I can get parts, I know I have a great dealer and I know that I'm not gonna have to train my people on new things. I can't overemphasize. As you grow a business, the impact of having a walk behind, then a different type of walk behind and then one with a sulky one without a sulky and then a stand on and then a wider stand on and then a sit down with a three bushel bagger and then another sit down that doesn't have a bagger actually bags on a different side and has different types of blade and then you got. There's so much complexity you're adding to the business as you add those pieces of equipment. And so buying used, I'm totally, I love it. As long as it fits within the standard equipment you're going to use and at the dealer that you're going to buy from if you need to go buy one new. Okay, so that would be the biggest scenario and in terms of why truck versus equipment. A truck is like I said, more universal to train on. But also it's a much, we're talking about like you know, a much bigger purchase. Right. If I'm talking about a mower that's six or $7,000 versus a brand new truck that's 70 or $80,000. It's incredible. Like so for example, if I can get a mower that is $8,000 brand new, if I can get that for $5,000 and it only has 100 hours on it and it fits into my equipment mix. That's an awesome deal. Okay, now it only has like 10% of its life span has been used up. Okay. So it's a great deal. Like let's say it lasts a thousand hours, I know they last longer. Let's say it lasts a thousand. If there's 100 hours on it, there's a really good chance that 10% of its livelihood has been used up and I'm getting like 40% off. Whereas with for a truck I am paying full price, brand new with financing charge and all the rest of it in the case of like what we're talking about with Tigran and.

Immediately I drive that vehicle off the lot, it's worth less, I'm paying on a payments, I have to pay higher insurance premiums because of it as well as the fact that if I go sell that.

It'S like I lose so much money I have a payment and the biggest thing is just the size, right? So I'm talking about 7,000 versus 70,000. And yeah, that's just my opinion. I feel like a mower breaks down more than a truck. A good used truck might break down once every few years if you do good preventative maintenance. Right. Whereas with a mower, belts do break, you run over things, et cetera. And that's when you need to have a dealer that's close by and that, that's when you want to make sure it is either new or it is used and a dealer is close by so that way you can get those parts. So that's kind of my two cents. I'm not against used mowers. I would do it if it would fit into my mix and not be like a one off mower that I got trained all my crew on on a brand new piece of equipment. So yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and stop this one here. We're almost at 20 minutes and I know most of you only last about 10 or 15, so let's go ahead and call it here. I'm gonna go ahead and start with another episode and I'll record that one. But make sure you join Landscape Summit. Go to landscapebusinesscourse. Com Conference. Join today. It's going to be great for you, your team, your managers. We're going to be talking a lot about some of the stuff we even talked today in more depth. I look forward to it and we'll see you then.