Mike Andes (founder of Augusta Lawn Care, ~100 locations) explains what home-improvement service business owners should expect across their first four spring seasons. Year 1 focuses on paid advertising and acquiring customers; Year 2 typically brings overwhelming demand and labor shortages; Year 3 requires implementing systems (procedures, managers, pay-for-performance) to handle scale; Year 4 is when many operators begin to realize profit after slowing growth and reducing capital expenditures. The video emphasizes seasonality, marketing timing, and that profitable scaling often requires 3–5 years.
Chapters
Today, I'm going to walk you through your first four spring rushes.
There was Mike Andes here. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have almost 100 locations around North America. Now, if you're in the home improvement business, whether it be lawn care, landscaping, janitorial, construction, decks, fences, whatever it might be, most of us have a seasonality in our business. And spring is when a lot of work comes in, a lot of leads come in. The phone's ringing off the hook. People want to buy your services and your products. So time and time again, I see businesses go through this certain cycle the first four years. And if you listen to my content before you know that, I usually say it takes a good three to five years in the home improvement service businesses to really start to see good profits. And this is going to kind of add some clarity to that and what you can expect if you're trying to start your business or maybe in your first or second year and you're trying to, like, grind through. Let me give you a little bit of perspective. Time and time again, I see that the first spring rush, your first full spring rush, not if you start, for example, if you start your business in July or August, you know your first spring rush is the following spring. All right, your first spring rush is really your biggest concern is going to be just finding new customers. No one knows who you are, and even if you have a good website, you're probably not ranking really well. Now, if you do create a really great website, and lawn carewebdesign.com and homeservicewebdesign.com are great resources to do that. But if you do have a good website, this is the trajectory is going to happen after your first year. Because the first year, most of your leads and your new customers are going to come from paid advertising. They're not going to come from your website because no one knows who you are. You don't have any brand awareness. People are not looking for you actively because they saw your trucks or your vehicles or your marketing material in the past. It's simply like every single time you pay a Google Ad or a Facebook ad or a postcard or a door hanger, that's what brings in the lead. So your first year, your first spring rush is all about capturing market share. It's all about finding new customers. It's about advertising and marketing, and that is your biggest struggle, finding new customers. Now, what happens in second year of spring rush time and time again is you usually get overwhelmed with work. Massive amounts of work comes in because your website has been ranking for a solid, full, complete year. And now you're really starting to get business not just from those ads, not just from paid advertising, direct marketing. Now you're getting ads from branding. People actually have seen you around, they've heard about you, they have a referral, their friends, their family tell them that you should use your services. And you're getting customers calling you, submitting estimate request forms on your website without you having to pay for those leads. And the second year, the second spring rush is typically where labor becomes, becomes a big problem because you can't find enough workers. You've hired 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 people and it's now very, very difficult to just get enough workers in, trained up and efficient enough to produce the work. So your second year almost always is when you see massive growth in a service based business. Assuming again that you have a great website and that you do good work. If you don't do good work, you might have all sorts of sentiment, but it's not going to be positive about you in going into your second spring rush. But if you have those two things, a great website and you've been doing good work the second year, the second spring rush is almost always when I see people overwhelmed with work, they start turning work away. They start literally having to turn off their advertising because the work is just coming in so hot and heavy. Your third year in business, doing a home improvement business is the spring rush now where it's a matter of, okay, I have all this work, but now I've got to create systems, I've got to create procedures, institute something like pay for performance or P4P. You've got to do this now because you're literally running ragged, working 60, 70, 80 hours per week just trying to stay up with the business. And more leads are coming now. You got a growing number of employees and staff and you're like, man, I thought last year I was busy, this is even crazier. And so this point is usually when it really comes down to creating systems, creating procedures, actually having a manager, having a system for quality work, performance, pay, all of these systems start coming together in year three. But it's not until the fourth year where I usually start to see people make profits because they actually start slowing down their growth. And when you slow down growth, you reduce the amount of capital expenditures. Trucks, equipment hiring, marketing, new facilities, all of that gets reduced. And that's why usually, usually in year four, you get past the chaos of years two and three, you start to get kind of into your more of a pattern of like, how to find employees, how to train those employees, how to actually have systems in place to make sure that the work is being done efficiently and profitably. These are all things that you're going to learn. And if you're in the first couple years of growing your small business, especially in the home improvement business, it's extremely difficult. That first year, you're just going to be struggling trying to find customers. You're going to feel like you're spending money on marketing. It's not going anywhere. Time and time again. That second spring rush is when you're overwhelmed with work, typically is when you start really growing. And all that momentum built up for that first year comes out in that second spring rush. Then that third year, you're struggling because you've grown so much now you got to have systems in place, you have procedures, you have P4P pay for performance, and all of this is made possible. These first three years. This massive growth is done because you have a great website and you have a great product that fourth year, typically when I see people start to make really good profits, and sometimes people will stall out at year two or three or even struggle through number one and take a couple extra years. And that's why in years 5, 6, and 7, they become more profitable. But typically, if you've grown in that manner, the fourth year you start become more profitable because you slow down growth. And I've said it before, growth sucks cash. You're growing quickly, and you ever need to buy more trucks and equipment and hiring people, it's going to lead to waste. So growth not only sucks cash, it also creates waste because when you're moving quickly, things get dropped, things happen. So if you're just getting started or you're in your first or second year of business, realize that if you're spinning your wheels, it. It might be because you're in that first year, you're just trying to find customers. You're going to spend a lot more money on customer acquisition, and therefore you're not making much profit. Second year, same thing. You're growing a whole bunch, but there's no money in the bank because you're literally having to spend money on trucks and buying equipment and hiring, and then you're making mistakes because you're still learning things. Year three comes along and all of a sudden you feel like you're working your brains out. There's still not a lot of money in the bank, still not a lot of profit, because, my goodness, I've got to make sure that I manage all these employees and hire a manager and I've got to get someone to do the office work and all of a sudden all this overhead is becoming apparent and it's finally usually in years four and five people slow down growth start to figure out the systems Customer acquisition has become much more systematized because it's leads coming through their website through branding instead of direct marketing Hope that was helpful and if you're in those first few years keep your head down keep working it's worth it in the end and you will absolutely come through on the other side having a more profitable business and one that scales and brings in customers without you having to do marketing all the time. Now when it comes to marketing because you are a seasonal business this video is extremely important it walks you through when to spend the money on your advertising and when you're going to get the best bang for your buck marketing your small business. Check it out here.
