Which Makes More Money? Lawn Care or Landscaping...

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course podcast. Today we're talking about landscaping versus lawn care. Is there one that's better? Which one should you start off doing? What are the pros and cons of each? That's what we're talking about today. As always, there's no right or wrong answer here. It's going to come down to how you want to run the business, what size of business you want to build, how quickly you want to build the business. And so really today is about creating a discussion around how is lawn care and landscaping, the services that you offer in your business, going to affect and how is it going to align with the goals you have for the business? All right, so we're talking about the pros and the cons and hopefully you can get something out of it. But make sure you, if you haven't already, text landscaping to 855-575-1267. Text the word landscaping to that number. And tomorrow morning, if you're watching this, when I record is actually gonna be the first time I drop an exclusive text message to that group of people because I'm launching something later in the day, but I'm gonna allow them to get in first cause there's a limited amount of spots. And so again, being part of this text message group will allow you to get some exclusive stuff. I'm gonna be doing some random calls. Already did. Probably seven or eight people this morning. I have responded to answering some questions. So it's directly to me. And to do that you just need to Text Landscaping to 855-575-1267. Alright, so today we're talking about lawn care versus landscaping, which one you should do for your business. And this is especially for the person that hadn't started their landscaping business yet and they're really thinking about what type of services they should offer. Should they focus on more design, build, should they focus more on maintenance? Should they focus more on lawn care versus landscaping? These are the things that you're thinking about and these are the considerations you need to be thinking about and debating about in yourself. And that's what we're talking about today. So first of all, let's talk about landscaping, the pros and the cons. All right, so the pros of landscaping, number one, cool new projects. You get really cool stuff, whether it be landscape lighting, irrigation is fun. Artificial turf. You got walls, you got.

Natural stone boulder walls, you got block walls, you got timber walls, you can do patios, you can do water Features you can do planting, you can do just a ton of stuff. Landscaping is a huge, huge. When I say landscaping, I mean design build. Really like design build, hardscaping, all the project based work, lots of cool stuff. You, you know, I love landscape lighting. Like these things are really fun to install. Really like every time you get a project, it's new, it's exciting, it's different. You get to use your kind of creative juices, get to flowing. So that's a really awesome positive pro about landscaping. Another thing is because of that, you get a really good feeling of accomplishment and pride because you get a before and after picture that's really, really remarkable. You get to create something, you kind of get a take those creative juices, get a mental picture, maybe put together a drawing and then create it in the real world, which is very, very cool. I love doing that. It's definitely a pro of focusing on landscaping. Another thing about, a positive thing about landscaping is you have less customers to please because the projects are bigger. You're usually dealing with maybe two or three customers a week. Even when you scale. If you're doing big projects, maybe it's one customer a week that you're really focusing on. And it's usually easy to please one person in comparison to hundreds and like it is for maintenance or for lawn care. Another positive thing about landscaping is because you have large jobs and lots of revenue, the revenue growth of your business goes up much faster because you can get, you know, if you get five or six really big jobs immediately you're doing over 100,000 in revenue. And it's not that difficult to scale in terms of size of revenue. That being said, there's material cost, equipment cost, other things involved. But in terms of revenue, there's like that top line revenue number. It's easier to grow that because you can go out and sell a few jobs and instantly make a lot of revenue, a lot of top line revenue. So some of the cons now of landscaping is you need larger trucks, larger trailers and more equipment. Again, it's gonna depend on what type of landscaping services you offer. But in general, if you're offering project based work, you're going to need bigger piece of equipment, like a bobcat or skid steer, a track loader, an excavator, if you're gonna start doing moving earth, backfilling walls, things like that, or you're gonna need to rent them. And then you're also going to need to get a bigger trailer to move that piece of equipment and move the debris and move the soil and the gravel and the heavy materials that you're taking to and from jobs. And in order to pool that trailer with said materials or equipment, you're going to need a bigger truck. So the capital expenditure is much, much greater for landscaping because you need bigger equipment, bigger trailers and bigger trucks. All right? So much more capital intensive. You also need space to store that equipment. So unless you live out in the country where you can build a shop or have a bunch of open space, if you live in a neighborhood in the middle of town, you're going to need to get space, rent space to store all this equipment and the extra trucks and the extra trailers and all of those things. And usually another con is your equipment utilization is lower with landscaping because it's less. It's less. Like for example, with mowing, you're using the same mower every single day and the same weed eaters every single day. So the asset utilization ratio is much higher versus landscaping. You might have an excavator, and even if you use it a lot, you might use it 5, 10, 20 hours a week versus with a mower, you might be able to do 30, 40 hours a week. So asset utilization. Another con of landscaping is you need more skilled labor. Because if you're gonna be doing projects that are walls and patios and all those different things I mentioned, irrigation, those are completely separate businesses and services in my mind. And to have someone that's skilled in those areas is going to be very hard to find in this labor economy. And you're going to pay them a lot more money, much more skilled labor. Another con of landscaping is that it's a one time job, It's a one time payment. So you get your customer acquisition cost down, you go out, get the lead, you get a referral, whatever it is, and you get one job, one payment. It's not recurring revenue. All right? Just a one time job. Another con of landscaping is that there's higher liability risk and insurance. Because when you have a piece of equipment that can literally demolish a house or crush a car or make a bunch of damage, like the liability, your cost for insurance goes up. And so there's just a lot more. Sometimes headache, not headache as much as just like the possibility of something going wrong and really affecting a lot of people and making a lot of damages is much greater. When you're using a push mower, it's like less likely that you're going to like smash a house or like smash a fence down or you're not gonna be driving down the Road and like the excavator, fall over. Stuff like crazy stuff like that. The liability, risk and insurance of a landscaping based operation is a little higher. All right, so now what are some of the pros of lawn care? So, lawn care, When I say lawn care, I'm talking like mowing, maybe some fertilization, like really, really basic stuff, mostly to do with maintenance usually. So when we talk about lawn care in general, a pro is that it's cheaper equipment, there's less cost of entry. You don't need much more than a push mower, a weed eater and a blower. Like that's how you can get started. When I got started, 11 years old, we started with 1000 bucks. Weed eater, blower and a push mower. So much less equipment is involved, smaller trucks. You don't even need a trailer if you're in certain parts of the country. And if you do, it's a much smaller trailer than you would if you were landscaping. Another pro is that you can get someone that's relatively low skill level and train them fairly quickly. And, and you don't have to pay someone an extraordinary amount of money for highly skilled labor, like for an irrigation tech or for someone that might have their spray tech license, or for someone that can build walls and operate heavy equipment. Another pro of lawn care is that you can start from your home or garage. You don't really need space to store a ton of equipment if you're just getting started. Recurring revenue is the biggest part about lawn care and maintenance that is a pro is that once you make that sale, you can keep that customer for years to come. And they're paying you every single week. Every single week you come to their property, you can get that recurring revenue. And that makes it very nice because dependable income that you can then forecast and really begin to scale the business from a more predictable standpoint because it's not one time chunks of money like landscaping is. So what are some of the cons of lawn care? It's not as exciting. That's the biggest reason people switch from lawn care to landscaping after several years is people are in the lawn care industry, they're in the mowing side of things. And just like they don't see the fun anymore in mowing lawns every day or going out and doing routes, doing maintenance, pulling weeds, edging, things like that. They'd much rather go for those really cool projects. So it is not as exciting. Lawn care is not as exciting. It can be very mundane work at times, whether it be weeding a Bed for eight hours straight, or mowing a field just back and forth, back and forth. You can literally go mind dead, brain dead. And so in general, it sometimes can be a little bit more laborious, mundane work in comparison to landscaping. Another con is that especially if you're doing residential maintenance and lawn care, it's harder to grow the company as fast as you would if you were doing a bunch of full service landscaping stuff, because those are higher dollar amounts, higher revenue markers. So, for example, I might mow someone's lawn for an entire year and make $1,500 on that customer. Whereas if I have one customer for landscaping, I might do a $10,000 project. So it's gonna take literally 10 years of mowing to equate the same amount of revenue as I got in maybe one week for this landscaping job. And so traditionally, when you're doing residential, especially for mowing, when you first get started, it's much slower growth pace than if you were offering full services or a whole bunch of other irrigation walls, because you can really scale the business in terms of top line much faster with landscaping. So a con is it's harder to grow top line revenue if you're focusing on lawn care, especially at the beginning. Lots of customers to please. Another con, or a negative of lawn care, is that because you have recurring maintenance, which is a great thing, but because of that, you have all these small payments coming in. That means you need a lot of them. So instead of dealing with a few customers a week to do big installs, you're now focusing on hundreds, if not thousands of customers every week that you're getting small chunks of money from, from for the lawn care side of things. Okay, so that could be a big con, because now you need office staff, now you need people to be doing customer service. Now you're getting 1,000 different people that have different preferences or ways they think their lawn should be cut. And you have to either educate them or modify it, or make notes about their property and train your guys to make sure you have standards of. So how you mow all thousand of these properties is the same. And so lots of customers will please. Lots of customer service issues start popping up, lots of callbacks, things like that, because there are so many customers that you start, even if you're just a small operation, you have 100 customers. It's harder to please 100 customers even if you're by yourself, than it is one or two customers a week, because the amount of just the volume of properties that you're touching causes more and more issues. So those are some of the pros and cons. I don't think there's any right or wrong way. I do find this, and that is that a lot of people will start off in lawn care in this industry, and then they tend to get enamored with what landscaping looks like because of the pros that we mentioned. Cool new projects, feeling of accomplishment, less customers to please. They get fed up, you know, with all these mowing people calling them back over little tiny things. They want that bigger revenue growth, and so they get enamored going from lawn care to landscaping. This is my biggest caution. I don't think there's any wrong thing with doing both. I think that's a great strategy. There's no problem with focusing on landscaping. I'm not against landscaping. There's great design build companies out there that do a fantastic job and make very good money and great profit margins. This is what my biggest concern is. People that choose either one and as you listen to this right now, are being enamored by the other. So you're doing landscaping right now, and you're like, oh, lawn care, that's where I need to be. It's better recurring revenue. And I've been having problems. Cash flow, like. Or you're in the lawn care part, and you're like, yeah, I want to do landscaping, because, like you, it's gonna be cool projects. I'm gonna feel that sense of accomplishment. I don't have to deal with thousands of customers anymore. I can just focus on a few a week. I don't have to deal with an office person anymore. And so a lot of times what I find, though, is the problems that you have in your existing business, when you switch services, those problems follow you. So if you're disorganized and don't have your CRM in place and you don't have notes put together on one side, you know, maybe lawn care, when you switch to landscaping, the. Those problems just get magnified. And a lot of times I see people switching from recurring maintenance or lawn care switching to landscaping because it's, like, cool and exciting, and they think it's gonna solve their problems. But really, if you have business problems, they're going to follow you. And when you go from lawn care to landscaping, it's just going to magnify the issues instead of dealing with if you cannot be profitable. This is what I've said before. If you cannot be profitable on a $30 lawn mowing, you will not be profitable on a $30,000 project in fact, instead of losing a couple dollars per mow because you're in inefficient on the mowing, now you're gonna do several thousand dollars on this project, and that's gonna wipe you out. Okay? So I would highly recommend before you try to think that the, you know, shiny before you go, chase the next shiny thing before you go, okay, I'm going from lawn care to landscaping. Cause bigger projects, I love equipment. I love making these really nice designs. Before you do that. And you're tired and sick and tired of Mrs. Jones calling because of there's lawn clippings on her back porch or because someone left a rut like, before, you get too.

Like, grass is greener on this other side syndrome. Before you do that, realize that if you have business problems now on a small level and doing smaller properties and doing smaller ticket items, switching to something bigger is only going to magnify those issues. It's the same thing when people start thinking that they can have a small business with 1, 2, 3 employees and that just by growing the business to 20 employees, it's gonna make things better. It's not if you don't have systems in place. If you don't have a profitable business in place when it's small, getting bigger is not going to solve the issue. All right, so that's the caveat I would add to this whole discussion is that focus on what you're doing now and make that profitable. And then think about trying to scale that profitable model to another service instead of thinking that by switching services, you're somehow going to make it all better. All right, so hopefully that helps you all today. Make sure you text me. Text Landscaping to 855-575-1267. I have a special text I'll be sending out tomorrow morning. The first of many exclusive texts for that group. Thank you so much, everyone. You've been listening to the landscape business course. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great. Nothing else pays.