Mike Andes (landscapebusinesscourse.com) presents a walkthrough of a newly purchased estimate vehicle for his Mount Vernon lawn care location. He explains why cars can replace trucks for full-time estimators—mainly lower fuel (≈35 MPG vs ≈15 MPG), insurance, and maintenance costs—describes the vehicle and branding work, and gives cost figures and installation choices.
Hey, everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today we are at the Bellingham location, and I wanted to show you the new estimate vehicle that we just purchased for the Mount Vernon location.
This is Titus. He's my nephew. You want to wave at everyone? Can you wave? Hi. It's Christmas Eve, so he's hanging out with everyone today. But I wanted to show you around and kind of walk you through the reasons why we bought an estimate vehicle. So it actually wasn't my idea. A few years ago, when we opened up the books for the first time to the employees, we had a kind of competition of cutting costs. And one of the things was fuel. One expense line, obviously, on the P and L. And one of our staff members, our team members came with the idea, hey, instead of estimators using trucks, they should use cars. And basically just to save on fuel, because honestly, an estimator does not need to have a big truck. And at the time, I was the estimator, so I wanted to have a nice truck. And so I was driving, actually, that truck over there in the background, you can see P5. Josh wanted me to get a shot of the after the F250. Pretty nice to drive around, but not necessarily needed. When you're doing full time estimates. I don't recommend getting an estimate car. If you are doing some work and some estimates, and you're kind of bouncing back and forth because you can't haul with this. You can't haul materials, you can't haul a trailer, anything like that. But what's great about this is the ability to be able to get into tight spots as well as just a fuel economy. So I'm gonna pick up Titus. Titus, are you friends with Max? Yeah, Max is friends. So this is actually for the Mount Vernon location. This is the first vehicle you can see over there. There's the other two vehicles that we've used for the estimates at the Bellingham location. My personal car, and then what's called C2 or car number two from the past, what they use now for Marcus's estimates. But over here, this is the Mount Vernon location. This is what Tim will be using for him to be able to do estimates in. And again, like, the fuel economy on this is probably 35 miles to the gallon versus a truck like I used to have was probably 15. And so if you're driving all day long doing estimates, doing 10, 15 estimates a day, you're saving substantial amount of money by having the car as well as just maintenance, like the maintenance on this thing is so minimal in terms like the tires, I think are probably $500, $600 to change them all out, versus probably 12 or $1,400 for a truck. So again, just kind of walk you around the back. We put lawn care landscaping on the back. And then on the windshield, the black part, we're able to put our logo. One thing that we really have done recently here, Tyus, you stand next to Max and you're pulling on my sweater strings. One thing we noticed is on the lettering, when you have a fairly light color on another color is they have the black outline. From afar, you can't really tell that there's even a line. It just pops off the color a lot better. And you compare that against, say, my car over here. You want to come over here.
Where you set the green to the yellow. There's not much of a definition. So we try to have the black line just to make sure that like on the new car, it pops off a lot better. You can see here it's even a little harder to see, like lawn care services versus when you look at that one with the black outline, it's just so much more clear and extends out. So again, this is for the Mount Vernon location. I would not recommend you get one of these. Like I said, if you're trying to haul a bunch of material and you need to haul a trailer and you're kind of doing a few jobs and doing estimates and, you know, a few jobs and estimates, like, you're definitely going to want to have a truck in that case. But once you have a full time estimator, whether that be you or someone else that you've hired to be the estimator, Having a car like this is great for just a reduction of fuel costs, insurance costs, as well as just maintenance costs. So hope that was enjoyable for you guys. Just to kind of get a tip for that. Again, you probably won't need this. Your first vehicle, probably your third, fourth, maybe you start thinking about getting a car like this. This whole thing all in, we bought for $5,000. It's a 2012 Ford Focus. It is a four door. I have to make sure that there's room to carry all my nieces and nephews around in, since this is Tim's vehicle down in Mount Vernon. But again, $5,000 all in on this. And it basically saves probably six or seven hundred dollars a month in terms of fuel and maintenance of driving around and everything, as well as just a reduced insurance cost. So all in was five grand paid about $1,000 for the paint job and then $500 for all the decals to be installed. I know that some of our franchisees down south, they can get the painting done for like 4 or 500. Unfortunately, we can't. And then the decals installed are 500. So if you wanted to do them yourself, you could probably get them for like 250, 300. But we get them installed. And the reason for that is because these cuts, yes, we could install these ourselves, but when you start trying to do little stuff like this yourself, even along you can see the seams here don't have anything going over it. They've positioned it all correctly. I'd rather just pay a little bit extra. Get the decals installed by professional where these cuts are just perfect and you don't get moisture in behind and then buckling and rippling and then they eventually open up. So we've had really a lot of luck with our decals. Even when you go over a seam, which there's not too many seams on here, but even like here, you can see where the, where the wheel well kind of flares out. If that's not installed correctly, you're going to get a ripple here. You could even get it where it starts peeling up here. So I'm a big believer in just getting a professional install these. Someone who does this every single day knows exactly how to install them and they'll actually last. And everything is cut really nicely. It all looks really professional. And so all in, you know, with, with the, the car, the paint and the decals. We got a Ford Focus 2012. It has about 95,000 miles and it should last us easily 5 or 10 years without too much maintenance. So hopefully that was an encouragement to you guys. If you do have five, six, seven trucks and you're doing estimates all day, think about getting a cheap car. Doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't need to be, you know, all wheel drive, four wheel drive a big truck, you know, anything like that. Get a cheap vehicle that's going to be low maintenance and will last a long, long time.
I hope you learned something today. Make sure to like this video. Subscribe and we'll see you in the new year.
