Why I Stopped Mowing Residential Lawns…. | RoundUP ep.29

Hey, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Roundup podcast. Today we're talking to Carson Jensen out in Missouri and he's been sharing a really interesting story of how he went. He was an estimator for a large landscaping business. He went out and struck on his own, becoming self employed and he went from mowing residential properties to then maintenance on commercial properties and then has now recently switched to more project based work and installation projects. So really looking forward to seeing the evolution of the business as it grew and what his plans are for the upcoming season. Here's we go.

Let's go.

Can you kind of explain first how you got started in lawn care? I know recently you've moved in Missouri area, but kind of share how you got started with lawn care and what got you into it.

So going through high school, you know, I hated working minimum wage jobs. So I always kind of found some landscape construction type jobs, paid a little bit more and really enjoyed that type of work. So that was kind of where I started out. Back in high school, when I moved out of the house going to college, I found a job doing landscaping and again it paid the bills. It worked well. It worked well with my school schedule. I work a lot of hours during the summer and then less hours during the winter. So really complementary to that schedule and the pay. And my degree is actually in automobile mechanics and tried getting into that and I realized I wanted to be in landscaping still. So continued to work my way up the ladder, landscaping, working for different companies, getting different experience. My first job was high end landscape. Really enjoyed doing that, really enjoyed the quality work that we put in and then started out as labor, moved up to crew lead foreman and then I worked for a landscape company doing.

Doing landscape maintenance mostly. So they did a lot of lawn mowing, commercial mowing, and it wasn't really my forte. I quickly realized I didn't enjoy that. But they brought me on, helped grow their landscape division and really enjoyed doing that. And yeah, so that's kind of where we got started out in the business. Kind of learned the knowledge and I really enjoyed the landscape industry and continue to enjoy working in the industry.

So how many years has it been now since you kind of struck out on your own and what was that process of going from hey, I'm good at landscaping, I enjoy it, I'm working for someone else to hey, now I'm going to go do this myself.

Yeah, so I worked for other companies for about 10 years and then been doing things on my own for about the last three years, 2018, we sold our house and left everything behind, left a good paying job behind, company work, truck, all that stuff and kind of just went off into our own and use that equity from our home to propel the business forward to start the business. And it, you know, I learned a lot in those 10 years working for those companies about the business, the operations, day to day, but I didn't realize, I guess, the cavity of knowledge when it comes to being a business owner. So that was my first couple years was really learning curve as far as learning the business, learning the back end of the finances and did pretty well the first couple years and continue to just grow the business and, and make it a bigger company.

What were some of those hurdles? Just going kind of from being an employee in landscaping to a business owner. Obviously the work itself was you're very familiar with, but the business side, what were those learning hurdles? I know you mentioned the finances, but specifically what was it? Some of those things those first couple years that you had to learn and kind of almost like hurdles to growth, but like you needed to know those things to keep continuing and growing the business.

I would just say it's juggling the different hats you have to wear. It's just, you know, tenfold the hats you have to wear and trying to manage time as far as being on site, doing the work physically as well as in the office, in the back end and making sure bids are taken care of, sent out, invoices are sent out. You know, when my last job I, I had, you know, as an estimator. So I did a lot with the invoicing and the estimating and the, the project management side of things. So that wasn't so much concern. But I think quickly the first three years I, the taxes and everything just kind of got overwhelming in the sense that it was just, I was more than capable, it was just overflowing in my duties, if you will.

And then being that you were at a larger company, you did the project management, you did the estimating. Switching into a smaller business from like a pricing perspective as well as just now your value proposition to the customer being small versus a much larger company prior, what was that shift for you even from an estimator standpoint in terms of pricing and sort of your presentation to the customer, switching from that larger company to a very small. Just getting started.

Yeah. Being new to this area, new to this region, it wasn't just learning a different scale of things, but it was also learning a different region and what will work well in this region. So it was a learning curve. And I, looking back on my records and seeing our bids, you know, a lot of our job for smaller thousand, $2,000 landscape jobs, pretty small, maybe a $5,000 job here and there, but kind of really just had to start from the ground up and just slowly build that. As I grew kind of a reputation in the area as far as the scale of work I could do and the quality of work I could do. And that was really. Quality has always been my really forte. That's something. It's really important to me and. And also learning where to get materials and what pricing was for those as well. So that that helped kind of propel the business in this area and just networking, finding people here. I think one of the biggest things I found here was in the last year, really started finding some good trade partners to work with guys that do things similar to what I do, but different specialized skill sets. And we've been able to refer work to each other and it's really helped all of us grow our businesses and just help serve the community.

Cool. I was going to actually pull up your website here, and it looks really sharp. Did you recently have this made and kind of walk us through the process of getting the brand? Kind of. I'm assuming this first couple of years was learning the business, the business side. As the business began to now grow, what were some of the unlocks that allowed you market, advertise, get more customers as the business now became a little more established?

Yeah, so from the beginning, marketing was really key and important to me. One of the first purchases we bought was an enclosed landscape trailer, which we took my wife's vinyl cutter and cut siding for the side of the trailer, put all the logos on there, and just wanted to have a good representation for our clients and really have some good exposure. So that was kind of our first marketing thing. I've dabbled in a couple different iterations as far as website design. The current iteration, we used wix and we just continued to invest time into that, putting out blog posts, trying to create more SEO, bringing in organic reach out to our customers. So as far as the logo, that was something that I actually just went in, went into paint, put two J& an R together, pulled them together and made our logo. And it still works today. Really, it's really bold. It stands out and kind of represents our brand.

Yeah. Like those first couple of years, as you were kind of learning the business side of things, I think sometimes what I see a lot of owners do, they get started after switching from an employee and they're like, they go into massive growth mode without having systems in place, without knowing those numbers, without having some guidance around, you know, certain customer acquisition costs, marketing, things like that. And then they end up burning themselves out. Because those first couple of years they're learning so much on just the business element, let alone actually acquiring customers and managing people and everything else that comes along with it. Do you feel like it took a couple years to kind of learn the back end stuff and then that allowed you to scale and what has that looked like the past couple years now as you have been more established, whether it be hiring or getting, you know, growing the top line revenue of the business. How has your confidence changed the past couple years?

I would say I've incrementally grown over time. As far as the marketing side of things. It's something I kind of worked on previously, so it's a skill set. I also do YouTube so it's continually trying to, to learn what the SEO and all that stuff, how that stuff works. So I've, in the last five years I've done a lot of research on how to do that. So I feel like I've done that well and, and just always continually adding to that. I would say the website is, is a good placeholder for. It's a qualifier. People search and look in the industry, they're trying to find somebody to do their work for them. They come across the, the website and that kind of sells the job in my opinion. So it's just something that's clean, official and it's probably one of the last things they look at. I try to do Google Ads. It's probably one of my biggest things that bringing people. I send out a lot of marketing emails. Wix has a pretty good platform for sending out marketing emails to past clients that have reached out and done inquiries. So that's something that's been important to just continue to put out blog posts and to just circle those potential clients back around. And whether they come into a project or they send that out to one of their friends or family, hopefully that kind of continues to stay in house. We've also sent out marketing mailers and that's been pretty successful. In the early years I would just print off little flyers on piece of paper and go take them door to door. So door flyers, when you're, you know, smaller and don't have as much.

You know, you don't have better things to do with your time. It's one great way to stir up new business as well.

Hey, Everybody, hope you're enjoying this episode so far. And as Carson just mentioned, having a good website is vital to running your business. If you're looking for a great place to build and run a website without all the hassle, I would highly recommend lawn carewebdesign.com our experts over there build your website, keep the SEO up to date, and we'll even add your custom photos and images. And it's not just a template, it's an actual website made for you for lawn care and landscapers in the industry. So check it out, Lawn care web design. And as Carson brought up, you're probably going to need some marketing material going into the spring rush. Tracking, postcards, flyers, door hangers. We've made over 40 plus designs on lawn care media. You can download these templates, customize them, add your phone numbers and emails to make sure you're growing your route density and gaining new customers in your area. So check it out, lawn caremedia.com but let's get back into it and hear how cool Carson is managing scheduling, maintenance and project work. Enjoy the rest of the episode.

And right now are you focusing more on the project side of things or the maintenance in terms of getting new customers?

So we move into the Midwest, I quickly saw a need for maintenance. So that was one of the biggest things we started in doing, was doing a lot of mowing and maintenance. And we did about 50, 50 mowing maintenance, 50, 50 installation. And in 2019 we actually stopped doing residential mowing. It just wasn't something that I enjoy doing. We had picked up some commercial mowing over the years and continued to service those as well as we had commercial snow clients that we serviced. We don't get a ton of snow in this region, but it was important to kind of keep those commercial clients on for the snow removal. And we just tried to push more and more into landscape install. And then actually this last summer we, we got rid of the commercial mowing. So we found some other guys in the industry that wanted those and picked those up. But we did retain those snow contracts. So because it snows a little bit different this region, we were able to keep those snow contracts without having to have the maintenance as well. I will say one of the downsides to dropping the maintenance is having our enclosed trailer around town. Driving around really brings a lot of attention. It's like a rolling billboard. We don't have a ton of vehicles. We've grown to two trucks now. But in the early, you know, when we first started, we'd have people say we've seen your trucks driving around town and we literally only have one truck and trailer. But just that presence of going door to door and mowing was really nice. And I do kind of regret getting rid of the maintenance for that reason, but it's just not where we kind of have our core business at right now.

Well, just for someone may be thinking the same thing, what were some of the points that led to you making that decision to go from residential to commercial and then also the second step, then going from, you know, mowing it all to now focusing on the project side of things.

Yeah. So residential and commercial.

We with the residential is you're there for such a short period of time, you have so much drive time involved in that. And then the homeowners are really particular on price and so is commercial. But they're more so particular on price with residential customers, especially on mowing. Because, you know, a 50 mo every single week ads would be 200amonth. That's a pretty big utility bill or whatever it is. So it was just wasn't what we enjoyed. And that just looking at our numbers and comparing every time we were on a job site, we would keep track of how long we were there and keep track of how profitable it was. They just weren't as profitable as what we wanted them to be. Including drive time and dispatch and all that. It is pretty low cost. Get invested in that type of thing. You know, a mower trimmer, all that's pretty low cost in comparison with the landscape construction stuff. Moving into the commercial, just more volume, bigger jobs. And they usually brought bigger enhancement type projects weren't as particular. Another thing with residential is sometimes you'll have a particular homeowner that's very particular about how this corner of the yard's cut or how you trim or edge or all that commercial. They just want it to look nice. They don't really care as much. And then moving into landscaping, a lot of that was just profits, but not just profits, but also just satisfaction of work. That's where I enjoy the work the most. I enjoy the challenge that comes from a new job, you know, on a different day, different week, different month. And so that's kind of where we kind of moved that.

What's kind of the ideal, like, I think no, it's been now four, four or five years now. You've been doing this. As you, as you grow the business, you kind of figure out what you want out of the business, what sort of services you want to offer, what type of clients to serve, what is that perfect business size and what does it look like for you? Because I feel like over the last several years you've been kind of honing towards that as you've learned more about yourself as a business owner and things like that. And I think it's important for people to realize it's okay to pivot. It's okay to change something that costs. You know, it comes at the expense of profit because you're changing and buying new equipment or switching things out. But once you get it to a certain place, you enjoy the business more, it is more profitable and you don't get burnt out on it. What, what does that business look like for you? Is it a certain size, is it a certain type of, certain amount of revenue or profit? What does that look like for you?

I would say for me the ideal would be a 3 to 5 crew team where I can kind of step away from the business, have and have an estimator that's able to go out and do sales, have a operations guy that's able to be over top of all the teams and just going out doing work. I've even thought about bringing in, buying a lawn mowing business from someone else and bringing them underneath our wing and kind of letting them run that whole division by themselves. But just bring that under our brand so that we can do that marketing with our logo on that, on those enclosed trailers and get those out there more. I would say up until this point I've really been a solo entrepreneur. I basically own my job now and there's a lot of freedom that comes with that and I really enjoy that. And it's because I enjoy so much of the day to day work. It's hard for me to want to grow the business to a point where I'm not going to touch the work at all. But I think for the future, for the security and safety for my family, building the business to a point where I can step away from the business and the business can self manage. I think it's a really smart strategic thing to do. You know, something were to happen to me tomorrow, it would be really hard to provide an income for my family because you know, 95% of the work is performed by me.

What's sort of your sweet spot when it comes to the projects like I know you mentioned, a lot of them are at 1 to $5,000 range. What is sort of that, you know, ideal s project because obviously you don't have, you know, a crew of 20 guys to install a 300,000 foot, you know, paver Right. Like craziness. What's kind of that ideal size for you? And have you had to say no to some projects? Because it's like hey, that's not in our wheelhouse either from a skill and you know, actual installation side or just manpower and what, how have you kind of made sure you, you only get those type of projects.

So like I said early on we kind of started on those smaller projects. We've slowly moved those projects into that maybe 10 to $20,000 range. You know, upwards of a $50,000 project has been pretty.

Pretty common for the last couple years as we continue to grow and Those bigger projects, $50,000 projects really do stretch our abilities. I have to bring in other subcontractors in order to help support that. We've got another project coming on board this year that's well beyond our ability as far as scale. Probably a hundred to $200,000 job, but the homeowner's self performing a lot of the work. And so we're really kind of just working as if, you know, the homeowner is essentially being another contractor and they're really flexible with us bringing other subcontractors. So it's going to work out to where we can have our sod supplier come in and install the sod instead of having us do that in house. And we're going to be able to specialize on what we can specialize in on this particular job. We're going to do the irrigation. I will say there has been some jobs like we'll have college campuses call us because they Google it sprinklers in our region there's not a lot of sprinkler install companies and they want us to come do it. And I will usually say it's outside of our service radius or it's outside of our ability to perform that type of work. Those larger 3, 4 inch main lines get to be a little bit more complicated and usually the price point too. It's usually a coach or something calling, wanting the job done. They don't really realize what the cost is and they don't really have the funds behind it anyway. So we have had to turn work away. But usually they're not our ideal client. Like you're saying, as far as the smaller jobs go, we do have a minimum. We try to read those out on the phone and usually we found, you know, any job we start out we're about a fifteen hundred dollar minimum. And that's basically for us to show up for a half a day or a day that's going to be our minimum. But yeah, our sweet sauce probably in that 10 to $20,000 range. As far as profitability, as far as getting in and out of the job and just not being overly involved on the job for a long period of time.

Speaking of projects and how far you all book out, I know a lot of times when you start switching to more of a project based model, you do book yourself out far, especially when you have very skilled, high, you know, projects that aren't knock them out kind of tight jobs, whether it's pavers or irrigation, for example. How do you handle booking yourself out far? Especially as you don't have, you know, 20, 30 people working for you or what, what's the process or how do you kind of make sure that you can schedule your schedule, you know, schedule out the calendar, whether it be 3, 4, like how far out do you go and what do you use to kind of keep track of their projects, where you're at in terms of status and making sure that if you are running behind a job, you're letting customers know or do you do that at all?

So what we do is we take a 50% deposit upfront on, on most jobs. If it's a really, really big job, we'll do progress payments throughout it. But we basically ask for a deposit up front. And that gets people on the schedule. And we usually try to tell them at the time of the proposal what our current schedule is. You know, right now we're February, you know, typically end of March, April. Our schedule really starts getting larger by end of April, May. Usually our schedule is six to eight weeks out. And it'll stay that way, you know, until June, July, August, when things start slowing down. And you know, one thing that's nice about having that schedule so far backed up is that allows us, excuse me, that allows us to push the work off into the fall and continue working when people stop thinking about landscaping. So people typically, in my experience, people see landscaping and they want landscaping done basically once school's out, until school goes back in session. And after that point people stop thinking about it and it's not a priority. So we try to get those jobs scheduled out and keep them rolling until fall. And this last year, because the weather was really permissible to that, we actually landscaped right up until Christmas, which is very uncommon in this area. But we were able to keep jobs going. Just, you know, we were very, very busy all through the season.

And how have you handled when there is unexpected delays on those projects and you start to run Behind? Is it just a matter of communicating with the client saying, hey, we're running a week behind or we're going to be a few days behind? How do you kind of make sure that the customers don't drop you in the event that you are behind? Because you know, in eight weeks, for all you know, you lose a customer, a job goes south and all of a sudden you're a week or two backed up. How have you handled that in terms of letting the customer know?

We rarely have cancellations and part of that is if we're backed up, so is everyone else in the area. And so if they waited four weeks and they drop us and sign on with somebody else to wait and then they're back in line for another six to eight weeks or they found a contract that's usually superior to us and it's not going to be as good of a quality job and then they're going to call us later on to fix the work that was done poorly in the first place. So it's not something I've really done anything particular to kind of prevent people from doing that. I've thought about making a, you know, non refundable deposit, you know, of your deposit, certain amounts non refundable, just to try and encourage people to not drop out. We try to be flexible with clients and we try to be understanding of, of their particular needs in a given situation. And up to this point we really haven't had a problem with that whatsoever. That's awesome.

As you head into 2222. Sorry, 2022, what sort of your goals for the business? Is it kind of slow progression over the next several years, getting to that point of three to five crews, having an estimator, someone managing the daily operations? Or are you trying to make a certain, a certain date or year where you're going to kind of make a big jump forward when it comes to the size of the business?

I would say this is the year we're really trying to push into having at least a full crew. Like I said, up until this point, a lot of work's done by myself. I've had part time guys, you know, one or two or maybe three part time guys at a time. But for the most part it's just been me doing the bulk of the work. And so this year we've brought in a guy we're going to, you know, try to grow two, three man crew that we can really support and rely on and feed work. And part of that too is that we've grown the business. We've established our presence in this region to where we're at the point where we're in demand and I can't perform everything that's being brought to us. We've got so many projects coming in just by word of mouth and the presence we've created here that in order to continue to service those clients, I basically have to grow or I have to start telling people, turn them away.

Awesome. Awesome. I really appreciate you coming on Carson. If someone wants to reach out to you specifically, potentially even about how you're kind of transitioned from residential to commercial now projects, where can they reach out to you or contact you on social or anywhere else?

So a great place would be to check out our YouTube channel. It's kind of my side hustle YouTube channel. It's not related to the landscaping business, but Thrifty Garage YouTube channel. We do DIY repairs on there, but I also share a lot of our landscape projects on there, so that'd be a great place to reach out on either Instagram or on YouTube.

Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Carson. You have a great day, brother. Take care. Thanks so much for watching another episode of Roundup. If you enjoyed that episode, make sure to watch this video from last week's Roundup podcast where we talked about measuring properties via satellite. Instead of going to the property and person and having to actually spend all that drive time and visiting the customer and all the rest, you can just do it over the satellite. Check out this video. It's very inspirational as well as educational, and we'll see you on next week's episode of Roundup.