Why Landscapers CAN'T GROW Their Business (or Profits)!

Hey, everyone, Mike Andes here, landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're going to be talking about six different things that distract landscape business owners and keep them from growth and bigger profits in their business. So we're gonna go ahead and go through these things and I'm gonna answer questions here live. So if you're watching right now, go ahead and comment below any questions, and I'll answer them at the end of our discussion. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. We're talking about distractions that hold landscapers back from growth or profits. And the reason I put the profits part in there is because some people are like, hey, I don't want to grow. I don't want to get really big. So I don't need to focus on, you know, I can get bogged down in certain things or I can get more maniacal about certain things because I'm not worried about growth and expanding, and I'm not that way. But if you apply these things that we're talking about today, you will also not only focus. You can don't have to only focus on growth. You can focus on profitability. Right. Number one, I find this so often with landscaping business owners is they start to worry and they start to get distracted by things that they cannot control. Okay? Things in politics, economics, their business, things that they cannot control. You cannot control the weather. So by get distracted, like, oh, my goodness, the weather's so bad. Like, and just get, you can't control. You can't change the weather next weekend. You have a rain delay for the entire week. You can't control that. Things out of your control, you shouldn't spend any of your time on because you can't move the needle. Worrying about them isn't going to change anything. Worrying about the minimum wage, worrying about a software glitch. I see this all the time. When a glitch goes on, someone's CRM or their email campaign, autoresponder, an automation, or their estimate configuration gets messed up. Like, they literally start to, like, like they short out in their brain. Like, oh, like they worry about it so much, they get distracted by it so much, it keeps them from growing the business, keeps them from doing other things in the business that are much more important. And they get so bumm bogged down on this one thing. So, for example, like, service autopilot had a glitch the other day. Is it inconsequential? No, like, it's a, it's a, it's an inconvenience. There's issues with some of the rollout features. But does that mean that I'm going to bog myself down into that and like, oh, my goodness, what am I going to do? And I consume myself with worry and distress and anxiety, and it keeps me from actually focusing on the things that could actually move the business forward. And we're going to talk about this because that's. These things I'm talking about are not inconsequential. They're not like they don't. It's not like they don't matter. There's definitely issues with the labor force and with minimum wage and with all these other things that are happening in your business. But whether or not you decide to be distracted by them is going to be the thing that really unlocks or locks your potential for growth. So if you're trying to grow your business, worrying about things you can't control is a very, very poor use of your time. Okay, so if you're worried about fuel prices, like, oh, my goodness, the fuel, you can't control the fuel prices, all right? You cannot physically change Whether you're paying $3 a gallon, $4 a gallon, or a $50, you can't control that. And so if you can't control it, don't spend time wasting your time on trying to figure things out or trying to get worried or concerned or strategize around things you can't control. All right? There's other things that we're not going to talk about today that you can control. Things like your work ethic, things like your planning, your ability to really focus on honing your craft and improving your abilities. Those are things you can control. You cannot control minimum wage. You cannot control the weather. I've seen it so oftentimes I call people like, oh, it's raining all of next week. I'm just going to, like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to grow because if I hire too many people and it rains, like, you can't control the weather, but you can control to make sure that you govern the flow of your leads. So that way you actually prepare for when it's raining and you try to get jobs that you can do when it's raining or potentially that you make sure that your deferred maintenance on equipment is pushed off for rain days or that you do door hangers on rain days. Having a strategy and planning for these distractions is really what's going to allow you to unlock your ability to not get bogged down by them because they're not inconsequential. Rain delays are not inconsequential. There's absolutely it's going to affect your business, but you getting bogged down and like freaking out about it and like, oh, I can't grow. And like I now what's going to happen, getting anxious about those things that you cannot control is not going to do your business any good. It's going to keep you from growing. It's going to keep you from going out and getting new estimates, new leads, knocking on more doors, getting more customers, getting creative with your upsells. That's what's going to prevent from happening. All right, number two, another distraction I see so oftentimes, and this is not, this one's hard to say it's a bad thing. And that is customer complaints. Now, if you're like me, when you get your first ever complaint from a customer, it literally ruins your day. You get a knot in your stomach and you just feel horrible. And I still remember, I still remember the first time I ever had a complaint of the work that I did. I broke a window. And just literally, not only with the financial implications of that, but also like having a customer that I had for a long, long time and just the disappointment that they had towards me. I was just like, I was just so, like, I just, I felt sick. But what that can do is it can keep you from growth, keep you from strategizing, actually growing your business. Advertising, marketing, taking the next step in your plan for your year because you're so locked up and it just eats you up, like you can't sleep. Now you're worried about it. Now you overreact and now you're getting mad at your employees. Now you go back and you're doing, giving things away to the customer. All of these things that we allowed get distracted from the main driving force of our business, which is our team, our marketing and growing the business and improving our website, improving our systems. Those are the things that move the business forward. You're going to, you just have to come with, come to peace with the fact that you're going to make someone customers unhappy. You're not going to make everybody happy. You're not going to be able to answer every single phone call and make them happy. You're not going to do every single job and everyone be happy. Coming to peace with that is a big step for somebody that wants to grow their business. Because guess what, the biggest and best and most successful companies in the world still disappoint customers. It's still, they still, when they release a new iPhone, guess what? There's gonna be some people that are just. That are, are unhappy with it, that they, they, they're complaining. They wish they had a certain feature. They think that they ripped it off of some other brand. But guess what? That Apple, one of the most profitable, successful companies of our era, still have unhappy, complaining customers. But does that prevent them from releasing the next launch of the iPhone? Does that prevent them from spending money on R and D research and development or M and A mergers and acquisitions and growing the company and expanding into new technologies, new products, new services? Does it keep them from hiring more people? No, it doesn't. And, but yet in our small businesses, we have a customer complaint and immediately go on the defensive. Or like, oh my goodness, like, I can't grow as much. Like, I get worried about, get concerned. Like, what are they going to think about me? What are they going to tell their friends and family about, like, they're connected in the community? What are they, what are they thinking about me right now? I've serviced them for so long. Like, don't lose sleep over that. Lose sleep over the fact that there's people out there that you haven't serviced. There's people out there that you haven't done business with. There's people out there you haven't done an estimate for. Lose sleep over those things. Not the things that customers complain. You're always going to have unhappy people. There's going to be every single day as you grow, you're only going to have more and more unhappy customers, more complaints, more damages of sprinkler heads and broken windows. That's going to happen more and more and more. You have to come to peace with that because if you don't, you're going to allow it to eat you up and keep you from growing the business. You're going to. It's going to keep you from raising your prices because, oh, I guess I have all these complaints and like, I'm not going to be able to, you know, if I raise my prices, everyone leave me. And maybe my service isn't as good as I thought. Like, literally just the thought that if it's eating you up, like a customer service issue, you need to know that that is a good sign that you really care about your customers and that you're worth more per hour because you care enough to lose sleep to actually worry and have concern over. But don't let that paralyze you from making strategic decision in the business that are going to allow you to grow Allow you to raise your prices, allow you to get more profitable. And that's what these are, distractions. What's actually going to move the needle in your business. All right, number three, another thing. We allow distractions to keep our businesses from growing and becoming more profitable. Very, very simply, employee issues. If you look at YouTubers across this. This community, a lot of them got a few employees and then retreated back to being by themselves or maybe having one employee. The reason for that is because as you grow, you're going to have more problems with HR employees, their issues, their personal issues, and their performance issues. All right, we talk about pay for performance, and then there's like, personal issues and performance issues. And there's. That's going to happen as you grow, as you expand, as you hire more people, you're going to have more people problems. PP people problems revolve around personal and performance. We have four P's now. Personal performance, personal problems, like people problems. That's what we're dealing with here. Now, right now there's another company, a little company that you might have heard about, and they actually started out of Seattle. They're kind of, you know, headquartered here. And they also are having people problems right now. And it so happens that they literally employ hundreds of thousands of people. Their name, by the way, this little company is Amazon. And they're having people problems, too. But does that keep them from growing and expanding and building more fulfillment centers and offering better delivery and offering better terms of service to their customers? No. Does it prevent them from growing, expanding, creating shop when they don't have to have cashiers when they go. When you go to the grocery store? No, it doesn't keep them from that. Yet right now they're going through one of their biggest dilemmas with people ever. They're trying. Their employees are trying to unionize. Their big issues with. Literally, there's employees showing up at the CEO's house and rioting and picketing and showing their banners. They want more money. Now that's a people problem. There's an issue with the. With the culture. There's an issue with the employees. But does that keep the business from focusing on its strategic missions? No. That's why we know these brands. Apple, Amazon, you could go right down the list. You, as you grow, as you expand, you're going to have more people. You hire more people, you're going to have more problems. If you get more trucks, more equipment, more overhead. If you get more staff, you're going to have more problems. Both from. They're going to have personal issues, they're going to have family issues, they're going to have relationship issues, they're going to have health issues, they're going to have scheduling issues, they're going to have drive issues, depression. You're going to deal with a plethora of things as you have more people in your business. But you cannot allow employee issues to distract you from where the business is going. It should not distract you from what's actually going to move the business forward. And I'm so passionate about this right now. And the reason I'm making this video is because as we head into spring rush, if you allow these things to distract you as we head in the spring rush, it's going to keep you from the period of time in your business when you need to be focused on growth, you need to be focused on getting new customers when demand in the market is high. And yet so many people are going to be bogged down by all the things we've already talked about, things out of their control. The CRM had a glitch. The weather is raining, you know, the weather is bad. The gas prices are going up, minimum wage is going up. They're going to get complain. Their customers are complaining like they're going to eat them alive. The third one we talked about, employee issues, it's going to make them feel like they can't have employees. It's too much bother, too many issues. If it was too much bother and too many issues to have employees, why would companies that we literally know about their household names have helped society so much and brought cost of goods down so much? Why would they hire hundreds of thousands of people? There's a net positive benefit to bringing more people into your business. It helps grow. It brings new ideas. It brings the ability to grow and expand and create more revenue, new services for your customers. This is a good thing. Don't let their personal and performance issues bog you down. Now, does that mean you just blindly don't just regard them, you don't deal with the issue at hand? No, you got to be a good leader. You got to deal with the issues, you got to deal with the performance issues. Someone not showing up to work on time consistently, you've got to deal with the issues. It's not to say you turn a blind eye to them, it's that you don't allow them to eat you up. And you're now you're thinking about it and now there's a glitch on the software, like, oh my goodness, I can't do estimates and now I'm just going to stay home today. You can't allow those things to eat you up and deter you and distract you from what's actually going to move the business forward. Number four thing that distracts people in their business, equipment issues. All right? So equipment issues could range from maintenance issues to repairs. There's things breaking down in the field, and literally it eats people up to the point where they cannot concentrate on getting work done. They can't concentrate on the things that are actually moving the business forward. They, they, they bring down their ads because, like, oh, I can't. The equipment. Like, I don't know. And you know what? I got to buy equipment now. And I'm like, I don't know if I should buy this piece of equipment or this truck or what about this truck? Should I do gas or should do diesel? Should I do new? Should I do leash? Should I do it used? And literally, the decision, the paralysis by analysis sets in over equipment. And because one of the pieces of equipment breaks down, they're like, oh, I'm gonna have to buy new forever. Like, I can't buy these $10,000 trucks anymore because one truck, one truck broke down and I had to pay $150 to get towed. And they literally allow that equipment issue to paralyze them from growth. Because now they're going and buying a $50,000 truck when they could have bought two or three other used trucks and growed and expanded their business much more. What has not worked for you in the past? Maybe, like, in the past, like, you know what? Facebook ads. Do not work. Website, I build a website. Does not work. I hire employees. Does not work. All the employee issues, I gotta deal with their problems and their personal issues, and they don't work as hard. They don't work as fast as me. Just because something didn't work for you in the past does not mean it's not the right thing to do. And just because what is popular with every other landscaper, especially the ones that have a social media following, does not mean it's the right thing for you and your business. So just because someone else bought a certain piece of equipment, just because someone else brags about never having a customer complaint ever, just because someone else said that their software system never has glitches and it works perfectly every single day, they never have a problem. Just because someone else lives in another place of the country where their weather is perfect year round and they can work year round. There's no slow season, no snow, no. No breakdowns. Everything just hunky dory. Do not allow those things to keep you or distract you from the things that are actually going to move your business forward. All right, number five. Number five. Another thing that distracts landscapers from growing their business is they're constantly thinking and focused on what are the other landscapers doing? What is my competition doing? And they're constantly looking at the equipment as they're driving by. Like, what kind of mowers do they have? Oh, what kind of. Ooh, they got new trucks. Oh, who do they have working for them? Oh, my goodness, they have new uniforms. You're so worried and concerned about the competitors around you, you fail to make good decisions for your business. Like, with the whole, like, classic. No saying, like, that's none of your business. Just focus on your own business. Okay? We should make sure it's. Focus on your bit. No.

Mind your business. All right? When people say, you know, focus on your own business or mind your own business, yes, we should. We should focus on our own business. Stop getting so wrapped up when everyone else around you is doing all of your competition, what they're doing, who they're hiring, what trucks they got, what equipment they have, what new shiny mower they have. Don't get wrapped up in that. Don't get wrapped up in the fact that everyone else is paying hourly around you. Pay for performance is what you know you need to do for your business to remove the strategic. The strat. The strategic goals of your business forward and achieve them and get the culture of your business where you want it to be. You know, you know you need to go to P4P. You know you need to have pay for performance. You know you need that, but you're not doing it because you're looking at all the other competition around you, looking with the other landscapers. Well, they're paying 14 an hour. Well, they allow everyone else to smoke. They allow everyone to do drugs. They allow people to show up late. And because you're so focused on everyone else's business, you fail to manage your own business. Number five, the things that distract landscaping companies is they get focused on other people's business, their competition and what they're doing instead of focusing on their own stuff. Number six. The last thing I want to talk about when it comes to distractions.

Is paralysis by analysis or analyzing. Considering, thinking, pondering. What decision? How much should I raise the prices? What should my base pay be? How? What percentage should I give to them on P4P? What percentage should I give them on profit sharing? Should I Have a general manager. What type of equipment should I buy? What kind of truck? How should I buy the truck? What kind of. Is this a good ad? Should I do postcards or should I do door hangers? What's better? Should I ask people?

Man, maybe I Should I do weekly or bi weekly? Should I charge? Should I do contracts or should I do per cut service? And literally they get so bogged down about thinking and pondering, weighing things out and running reports and trying to figure out the best solution when it's literally. This is a. This on. On landscape business course. The Facebook group, which is right here. No, no, not that one, sorry, the Facebook group. There it is.

On the Facebook group today, someone was asking about raising their price and they asked about what they should do and they're feeling anxious because they're afraid of losing customers. They're afraid of what raising their price and the implications it might have. And this is where I responded back and I kind of thought about a little bit later and that is the greatest antibody for fear of decisions. Is action the greatest way to get rid of fear of your decision? Like, I don't know if I should do it. I'm anxious, I don't know. I'm going to weighing all these things out. I'm nervous about making this decision. Just take action. Do something. Do something. Make the wrong decision, for crying out loud. But don't allow the paralysis of weighing things out and running reports. Like people running reports on price increases. They'll spend two years running reports. If they would just raise their prices blindly two years before, they would have made significant amount more profit over the course of those two years than if they would have waited and just got it just right. Okay, I'm not exactly sure what type of blade sharpener I should get and should I get the 21 inch more, the 30 inch mower? And they'll spend hours, hours looking at reviews. What other people think online where they would have thrown a rock and seen which one they hit and just went with that one. The hours that they spent deliberating, thinking about, running reports, doing the math on all of their equations. They would have been better off just going with something.

Do not allow that ability that, that tendency of ours as our personality of business owners to look at the numbers and just get so analyz analytical. Especially if you're OCD and you know you have tendencies of like getting down in the weeds of things you need to really lock in and be like, I'm just gonna make a decision. Like I'm not gonna Spend three weeks trying to figure out what type of truck I'm gonna buy. I'm gonna go buy one tomorrow. You say, well, what if you make. What if you purchase the wrong one? What if you get a lemon? What if there's a. What if the truck. What if the battery's dead? What if the tires. What if one of them has some. Something on the inside, like, messed up? It doesn't matter. If you spent weeks trying to figure out the right truck and you went and test drove 20 different vehicles and you ran all the numbers and you called different dealers and you went two hours away to test drive one truck and you went to the, oh, what if I did this? And what if. Literally the time you spent on that is gonna be significantly more than the amount of money you save in maintenance down the road if you. If you accidentally buy the wrong truck. Like, for example, we have a New York location that we started for Augusta Lawn Care, and we bought two trucks to get started. General managers over there doing a great job getting things off the ground. Corporately owned location down in the. Down, down the road. In the future, you will see the numbers for this location in New York. Now, we bought one truck and it's been a bit of a lemon. It's had a few issues, but did I allow that? Like, oh, man, we shouldn't have bought the truck. Should we sell it? Maybe next time I'm gonna have to buy one brand new? No, we bought the truck for like, I think 11 or $12,000. And I knew right off the get go, if I have to spend 2 or 3,000 dol. If I have to spend 2 or $3,000, this is still a good deal. Let's go buy it. I'm not going to have it go to the repair shop and then run all the analytics. No, I knew there's something wrong with it. I'm going to set aside $3,000 and let's make a decision. If you're trying to weigh stuff out and you're getting anxious about what decision you're going to make, just take action. Action is the best antibody when it comes to the poison of fear. Because the only thing we should fear is fear itself. That's the poison. The greatest antibody for that poison is action and speed. All right? And again, all the things we just talked about, all the different things that the distractions in your business, all the employee issues and the equipment issues and all those things, the software issues and the weather and the increasing price of labor and raising minimum wage, all of those things are big issues in our business. They are significant. But focusing on them and allowing them to bog you down is going to keep you from growing your business and increasing your profits. All right, last thing, you've got to prepare for these distractions, they're going to happen. All the things I talked about today, everything from a CRM glitch to employees not showing up, to employees having issues in their relationships, to equipment breaking down, to customers being flaming mad at you, all of those things are going to happen. Let's just make peace with it right now. If you're going to grow your business, bad stuff is going to happen to you, bad stuff is going to happen to your equipment, bad stuff is going to happen. Unfair things are going to happen. Things out of the blue. But what can you do today to prepare for those distractions? Because the distraction is only a distraction if it gets you off track of what you need to be focused on. Alright, so if I'm going in this direction, I'm focused on growing my business, I'm focusing on hiring and training better employees, focusing on my marketing strategy, my branding, getting more customers, and all of a sudden something happens. It's only a distraction. Whether or not it happens over here doesn't matter. Whether or not it happens over next to the bookshelf. Whether or not that happens or not doesn't matter. If there's a fly that comes in and blows up and like a, you know, a fireball, whatever it is like, it's only a distraction. If it takes me off of my focus from what I need to be focused on, it's only a distraction. As soon as I do this now, I can be blindsided by something that's much more important and I've taken my attention off the thing I need to be focused on. So these things are not irrelevant. Breaking equipment, unhappy customers, employees that don't show up underperform, have personal issues, those things are going to happen. Don't let them distract you from what's actually going to move your business forward. Focusing on your marketing, focusing your brand, getting more customers, increasing your prices, increasing the value to the customer. Just because someone didn't get their got their Amazon package stolen off their off their front porch doesn't keep Jeff Bezos and the team at Apple from maniacally focusing on delivering better products faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost to the customer. Customer. Because that's what their move, that's what they're focused on, that's what they're driving forces is customer satisfaction, customer obsession. They don't Care. They don't care if one employee hates their guts. They don't care if one customer thinks that prime is just so overpriced. That's just so unfair. I don't have to pay if I go onto ebay. I don't have to pay if I go to Walmart. Why do I have to pay a subscription every single year? Hundreds of dollars to. For Amazon Prime. There's just. I don't use video. I don't use that. Do you really think they care? Do you think that allows them and prevents them from going forward the strategic mission of their company? No. That's why we know about them. That's why they create revolutionary products and great services. And if you want to do the same thing in your business, you cannot allow those things that we just talked about, these distractions to keep you from your focus and moving your business forward. All right, I'm going to go ahead and jump into the questions now. I'm going to turn my banners off, which I've been having fun with recently. Going to turn that off and open up your questions in the comments. I will go through these and.

Answer as many of these that I possibly can. All right, Sutton Lawn and more. Let's go ahead and show this bad boy. Very good. I think I can have this banner up. Give me one second. Everyone still learning this whole process? Brand boom. There it is. Okay, comments, Sutton Lawn and more. How do you guys get a hold of your old customers at the beginning of every season? I've usually just called and confirmed, but as I grow, that process takes a long time. Wonder if it's a better way. Yes, I'd make sure you have your email addresses for all of your customers. I would send them an email and tell them the date that you're starting for mowing service. And if they want, and if you're increasing prices, that's a great place to put your pricing increase. And then assume that the. Oh, cool. Assume that the prices that you've put in there are correct and assume the date that you're starting service. Do not call everybody. That's not going to scale. You cannot call 3,000 people until their lawn is being set up. Their service is starting. You can't. Like you can, but it's going to cost you a lot of money to be super inefficient. Get all of your customers on email so you can send them an email at the beginning of the season. Say we're starting mowing service now on this specific date, for example. And if you're Doing a price increase right below that. You're saying, here are your prices for this season, the upcoming season. You don't need to address it. You don't need a big diatribe. You don't explain yourself about price increases. Just put it right there. Slow rider. Live chat is a game changer. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that. Put a lot of work into this weekend. What do you do when people tip this year? I'm telling my guys just to split it between themselves. Yeah, that we do the same thing, George. Or sorry, Jeff. Just because it's most fair, especially on recurring services at the end of the month, if someone gives $50 on a tip. But there was like eight people there, it would take us so long just to figure out who was there and how to split it up and all the rest of it. So we just put it all into a pot and then split that up just like you do. All right, Sutton debt. That's what I do. Fancy green screen. Yeah. Jackie, I'm a part time guy and have reached a point. It's hard to keep up. I know the work is there. How do I get over the hourly wage I've got used to for day job? I gotta do something. Okay, so what I would recommend is every dollar you can possibly look, everything you can save personally without spending and bringing down your standard of living, moving into a smaller house, selling off your personal cars, whatever it is, the lower you can get that number, the cost of living for you personally, the sooner you're gonna be able to make the jump. Okay, that's just the bottom line. Then what I would be doing is okay, every dollar that I can save, can I put that towards marketing to be able to go get more leads, more customers, build a website, whatever it is, so that you can bring in enough leads so that you're not worried about when you leave your job, you're not gonna have enough work because you already are confident that you already have so many leads. People asking for work, you're booked out a couple weeks. Like you're really already swamped in the evenings on weekends and you're already working 25, 30 hours a week and, or maybe in 20, 25. But you know, if you went full time, you'd immediately get 40 just because your availability would go up and you'd be able to go and do door hangers, knock on doors, upsell your existing customers. And so that would be kind of my two cents. Lower your standard of living to be able to save every penny. It allows you to get into going Full time, sooner and then every dollar you can possibly put into marketing. Doing door hangers on the weekends, doing knocking on doors. Facebook ads, Facebook marketplace, Facebook, local Facebook groups, next doors. Tell everyone about it. Get as many leads as coming as possible. That will give you the confidence to stop your job when you get that many leads coming in. All right, Jeff, how to get over the mental hurdle of knocking on doors? Okay, great question. Okay, so I talked a little bit about this a couple weeks ago about lowering your prices at the very beginning and knocking on doors as a strategy to do so. When you knock on the door, you are not selling anything. There's a lot of times for introverts, very difficult because they're like, oh, man, I'm bothering them. They're gonna be annoyed with me. No, like, be like, okay, Mr. Jones, you walk up the door, you knock. Okay, Someone shows up. All right. Hey, Mr. Jones. My name is Mike, and I'm starting Augusta Lawn Care. I'm the owner here, and I just want to let you know if you need any service ever, just let me know. As we head into the spring season, just give me a call. As you're doing it, you're handing them the door hanger. If they're not home, you put the door hanger on the door, Right? So I'm just gonna go up the door, knock, there's no one there. Put the door hanger on. If someone is home, I'm gonna say, oh, hi, my name is Mike. I started a brand new lawn care company in the local area. If you need anything this upcoming season in your yard, just let me know. I'm your guy. Here you go. Like, if they're 99 of people are just, okay, thank you. Bye. Bye. And they close the door. And maybe 1% of them keep your door hanger, and down the road, call you. But again, one. Another 1% of them is again, actually. Oh, yeah. What service did you offer? Oh, yeah, my lawn care guy, he moved out of town over the. Over the winter. What would you charge me to do my lawn? Oh, yeah. Like, do you do property cleanups? We just had a storm, and all my plants are dead because this polar vortex came through. Could you. Can you guys. Could you do something with that? All of those are, you know, get over the mental hurdle in terms of convince yourself that you're not bothering them. You're not trying to sell them anything. You're not pressuring anything like that. Can we get some likes on the video? All right, so if you're YouTube, if you're on Facebook, hit some likes. Just smash it. And we'll keep moving along here. Do you mean because of COVID I'm not sure what you mean. Sorry, Zachary. Trigger set a goal to buy something with the extra income. And I'm not talking a new truck, something like real estate. Oh, I see what you're saying. Got it. I think you're talking to someone else from previous MO money. MO problems. Let's go. I was getting bogged down.

Good job, Zachary. Very good. I. I did see your messages. Sorry, I didn't get a chance to respond back yet. I would contact service. All part, I think you have your settings correct. I think possibly the signature might be eliminating that, but I'm not sure because we don't use signature blocks on our estimates. But again, you're right. Don't let it bog you down. Don't spend five hours figuring, trying to figure something out and getting so wrapped up. Then you get frustrated. Now you're short with your wife. Now that becomes an issue. Like all of these things compound. Don't allow them to distract you. Can I join this live or is it not? You can join it live. You are live, John. Welcome. Thank you, Kevin. George. I'm trying to figure out how many employees I need to hire. I'm sure there's no set number, but I will definitely have to have 200 mowing crew. But for a landscape crew, I don't know. How should I hire? Thinking three. Okay. It's really up to you. It's depending on the size. So same with maintenance. So if you're doing large maintenance projects, large maintenance jobs, like big commercial, five acre, big zero turns, machines, big trucks, large trailers, you're gonna probably have two, three, four people on that mowing crew. Same thing with landscape jobs. If you're doing cleanups, mulch installs, things like that, two people is usually fine. If you're doing 50, 60, $70,000 big product, you need the manpower. You probably want three, four or five people on that job at any one given time. Right? So the size of the product in my mind is what determines the amount of people that need to be on the property. And the amount of people in the property is going to be determined by how much, how big is the equipment, how big is the truck, you know, all of those things. Right. So it's all tying together. The size of the project is going to determine what type of equipment I need, the size of truck I need, the side of trailer, size of mower that I need, and then that's going to determine how Many people are on my crew. If I'm. If I can do trailer setups, really cheap mowing setup, $15,000 for my truck, all the equipment on it, etc. Yeah, I'm going to want like solo routes. That's why we focus on that. But it's only because the equipment cost is lower.

Let's see. Thank you. Kubota Steel Milwaukee is great equipment. I agree.

Let's see here. Chase bought one. Battery went down four layer went down four days later. No bugs on the road and working slow rider, what is the best way you have found to find employees Right now it's very, very difficult. Again I said this yesterday but with this whole Covid relief package thing going and the unemployment boost, people are going to be making four or five hundred plus dollars per week to sit at home and do nothing. It's gonna be harder than ever. We've never had to do anything more than Craigslist in our local market. We're now having to do Facebook. We're now having to do indeed. Spend some money on those three is my recommendation. Craigslist Indeed. And Facebook. Between those three, usually you get enough deal flow leads or applicants I should say to actually find some good people. Why are you building a new CRM out of the ones you know? Which is the best? Real green service autopilot. We are not currently building a CRM, Liam. Down the road in the future we will be for Augusta Lawn Care. In terms of what's the best, it's going to depend again on the size of your company. If you want a large company with lots of automations and things like that. The ones you mentioned there, real green service Alpha element, those are great options. But you don't need to spend that much money if you're just gonna stay at 5, $10,000 a month. If you have intentions to grow, maybe you invest in them sooner so you don't have to convert all your customers down the road to a new software, which is a pain in the neck. I'm debating on starting my long term, but I don't know where to start. Daniel, please search on my YouTube channel. Watch the videos. Lots of guidance is going to be on there. A couple of them are a couple videos on whether or not you should start at all, whether not long landscaping is good for you at all. How can you work on your personal and business discipline? Ooh, a good question.

So in my opinion, when it comes to discipline, you've got to start with the simple things. So for example, if you have a hard time working out every Single day, force yourself to work out. All right? So like even if it's five minutes, you don't need to like, oh, I'm going to be like do P90X and insanity. I'm going to go get a gym membership and get a personal trainer. You don't need to do that from day one. Okay? When it comes to discipline, focus on little things first. Right? Like so for example, if you've always had a cup of coffee and a cinnamon toast crunch with milk every morning, maybe you change one thing. Instead of using regular milk, use almond milk. Maybe a few months go by, you're kind of, okay, now let's get the cinnamon toast crunch out of the way and let's maybe get some granola. Maybe a few months later after that, let's get changed from granola, let's move to something even healthier. But don't beat yourself up when it comes to discipline because you're not acting or you're not operating or you're not producing at the rate that like someone you're comparing yourself to. A lot of reason people beat themselves up over discipline is they're comparing themselves to all time greats. They're comparing themselves to billionaires, entrepreneurs, social media experts. People have built businesses for a long time, have tons of experience. That's not who you should be be like comparing or judging yourself against focus on the little wins. So for example, if you want to get in better shape and you're 100 pounds overweight, don't think you're gonna go on a massive diet. Go to keto. Get this gym membership. Don't focus on one thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get my heart rate up every single day for five minutes. Pretty simple. You can be pretty disciplined with that. Whether it be some jumping jacks or push ups in the morning, doing some sit ups, whatever it might be, put it, you know, do try to facilitate your discipline. So like, well I'm, I can't go to the gym because it's 45 minutes away. But what can you do? What can you, can you put a chin up bar in your doorway? Can you put a skip rope right on your door handle? So every morning you just pick it up and you just do it. How can you make it easier to be disciplined? Okay, don't make it difficult on yourself. Like if you want to have a clean house, don't get a 5,000 square foot house. Get a smaller, got a small apartment. It's really easy to keep it clean then, right? So try to figure out systems and mechanisms to make discipline easier. Okay. Chase West. Mike, you bring such a different caliber of content. Thanks for pushing me to strive past an owner operator. At what point of capacity do you decide to hire the first person? Try to be maxed to 12, 12 hours, seven days a week, or do it once I'm packed at 40 plus hours solo. It depends on your. On your goals. Chase, it sounds like you want to grow and you want to expand. I would book 40 to 50 hours when you're working a lot and then hire someone, because I can guarantee you if you're working, say, 45 or 50 hours out in the field, you have another 10 or 15 hours in the office doing estimates. And you're actually failing to upsell your customers because you're afraid of getting more work. So what you do is you go hire somebody. Maybe they're working 40 hours now, maybe you're only working 10 out in the field. But now you've got time to actually focus on upsells, focus on talking to your customers and trying to get them to do mulch and color and trimming their bushes and upselling them on leaf removal. That's where the money's at. Okay? So if you're wanting to grow and expand, I highly recommend you get to the point where you're at 40, 50 plus hours and then give that to an employee and focus on the things that are active with the business forward. Now book yourself out a few weeks. All right, so book yourself. This is what I would do. Let's say right now you're working. You're working right now, like 80 hours a week, by the way. So I know you can already hand off 40. So let's assume you're working 60 hours in the field right now and 20 hours in doing estimates. What I would recommend you doing is doing 60 hours. Cut 40 of that out and give it to an employee. Now you're working 20 hours in the field. 20 hours on estimates and marketing and growing the business. Now maybe you can spend a couple, you know, 10, 15 more hours on actually growing the business, upselling customers, focusing on your sending on your estimate emails every single month, actually growing the business. Okay? Now that's all you're only going to do that. You're only going to do that if you want to grow the company. Now, when it comes to growth in this regard, the number one thing that you're probably thinking is, well, what about if I don't have enough money? Like, I'm not confident in my, my cash flow because I have never had an employee. Okay, two things you do. Number one, you need to start thinking about yourself as an employee and run your profit numbers as if you paid yourself as an employee. So if you took the money you earned today and you worked 12 hours, but he took $25 an hour and knocked that off the top, $300, would there be any money left over? Okay, now if I took off my gas and my insurance and my truck payment, would there be any money left over? Too far. Often people are super busy, but they're charging so little because they have no overhead. And then they get employees and they get overhead and they get payroll. Now they're not making any money. Then they retreat back to being at one person, maybe one employee. That's what happens all the time. I could listen every. A lot of YouTubers write to you now to you of that done this. It's the recipe for the disaster. That's number one, is focus on thinking of yourself as an employee and running your numbers if you are hiring someone and determining whether or not you're profitable. Everyone says I'm 95% profit. Yet you work by yourself. You don't have any overhead. You work from out of your house. All of your coins paid off. You've been the same size for 40 years. You don't do any marketing. You have all the same customers. If that's what you want to do, great. But don't rag on. You know, tell someone who's just starting out and growing and trying to expand that they should have 90% profit. Like, that's ridiculous. Okay, the second thing is number two. So the first one is think of yourself as an employee when it comes to running your numbers for profitability. Number two is book yourself out, Chase, as if you're going to have an employee given a certain date. So, for example, let's say it's middle of March and I want to hire somebody. I'm going to pretend as if April 1st I have that employee and I'm going to go find them. I'm going to hire them for that specific date starting in two weeks. And that's going to give me two weeks. It's going to put fire under my belly to go get jobs and book the schedule starting April 1st as if there's two people in the field instead of just one. Give yourself that room. Put that fire underneath you. All of a sudden, you will find the work. You will go out and get the customers. You will knock on doors, you will upsell customers because you know you have a deadline. Okay? And better yet, if you're still afraid, book that date out and force yourself before you go find an employee. Say, okay, I'm going to. I'm going to hire someone April 15, no matter what. Okay. Every big job that I get on the. Get accepted right now. I'm going to try to book them a few weeks out in April, and I'm going to start hiring that person right before that big job. And now I'm going to have a few jobs, and I have a couple weeks booked out, out a month from now, knowing that I'm gonna be able to hire someone and I don't have to worry about keeping them busy. All right? Because some people, the reason they don't hire people is that they're worried they aren't gonna have enough hours for the person.

All right, next question. David.

It was minor. Not even my fault. Yes. First complaints crushed me. It was minor and not even my fault, but definitely disabled me mentally. I told myself, never again why that happened to me. Yeah, like, you know, I'm a big believer that your body, your body really follows your spirit and your spirit follows your soul. What that means is, like, if my soul is messed up, it's gonna mess up my spirit. Okay. And if my spirit is messed up mentally, I'm just not there. It's going to affect your body. Okay, now let's take it a little further. If your body is messed up and you can't function and you can't deal with your employees, you can't deal with customers, you physically can't go do the work, you're depressed, all the rest of it, it's going to affect your business. Okay? So these things all affect themselves. And if you're allowing a customer's complaint to affect you mentally, yeah. It's going to affect you physically. It's going to lock you up. And if that. If you allow that to happen, it's going to affect your business, going to affect your bottom line. Next question. Chase, also, what's your view on Yardbook while still in the field? I think while you're still in the field, it's a good option. Just know that as you scale, you're going to grow out of it. And so some people, if you know you're going to grow big, you might go get a different software package and learn the curves like Zachary. You know, it's very difficult. He was just saying he's learning the curve of service. All but just getting involved, it's not easy. It's a much more complex system. There's 10 times more options on things. Do I feel like all of it's necessary? Not really, honestly. However, it's going to facilitate growth and expansion and automations and customization far beyond what Yardbook would do. Right. So if you're going to go really big in the next two years, maybe you go invest in a bigger package and pay more money if you know you're going to stay smaller. 10, 15,000 revenue yard books can be a great option for you. Can you explain employee incentive program? David in Landscape Summit there is a whole part we talk about the employee incentive program. There's several incentives. There's everything from your P4P. There is pay for performance, there's profit sharing, there's culture, there's, you know, there's so much that goes into incentives. Zachary I don't, honestly, Zachary, I don't really think removing the signature will fix the problem. But when I compare your settings versus what we use, that was the only thing I saw different. Keep in mind too, if you're brand new with the whole client portal thing, if you just sign up for service autopilot, there's potentially something that they had need to set up on their end for you. Just keep that in mind. All right, next question. Drawing off a commercial estimate tomorrow after speaking with the store manager on Saturday.

What should be my, my last pitch? As I hand him the envelope, I would go over the, go over the proposal with them in person instead of saying, hey Mr. Jones, talk to you on Saturday. Here's the estimate. Bye. You know why we do that? Because we're not confident enough in the value that that estimate is going to give. And we're afraid, we are afraid of what they're going to say and saying it's too expensive or they are going to have some sort of rebuttal or some sort of problem with our product and service. That's the reason we don't do that. If you were confident that you were the best value in your market, that your prices were competitive and you're correctly valued, if you believe that, if you believe that your employees were the best in the market, that you trained them as best as you possibly could and you were doing your best work you possibly can and that the price was worth it, you would go over that estimate with them in person and you would get the objections out then and you would address those objections right away. You would not wait for them to call you or email you back or complain about the price and then you go in and try to rescue it. If you were confident you would do it in person when it comes to big contracts. Both resident, both commercial contracts as well as like hardscape installs in person. Going over the estimate proposal, going over the contract, very, very good idea in my opinion. Especially if you're doing. If you're focusing on commercial because you might only have 10 customers, you don't need a thousand of them. Right? Jack, what's a good revenue to labor cost ratio or percentage for mowing routes? I'm shooting for 500 per person. So two men crew a thousand dollars per day. Anything you shoot for here? Yeah. So I would not focus on how much money the crew makes in a day. That's a failing formula because if I'm making $800 per day, for example, for a two man crew, but they're working 14 hours and they're running into overtime and they've stopped at the gas station five times because they're beat up and they're wore out. That is not a good use of my time. Like what you said in the first line is most important a good revenue to labor ratio. You want that under 40%. Okay. If you're running a revenue divided by your labor ratio divided. So for example, let's just run the numbers. Okay, so you said $500 weren't $500 for what the person's making. Let's say for example, we paid them $200. All right, so if we take. Oops, let me do. Here we go. Sorry, this is my notepad. Yes, I know it says octopus at the top. That's because my idea from the video a few days ago came while I was on the phone. But anyways, 200. 200 divided by 500. Look at that. 200 divided by 500 is gonna be 2.5. Or if you do 500 divided by 200, it's 2.5. But that's 40%. That means I paid them $200 in labor. I earned $500 in revenue. Okay. That impute a 40% of my revenue went to the labor. You do not want it to be over that amount. When it starts getting above that, you have either efficiency issues or you're going to have pricing issues. One of the two things, because either A, I'm not making enough on that route, my prices are not high enough, or two, I'm paying the person way too much money because they're inefficient. My route isn't efficient, they're stopping at gas stations. I don't have P4P. I don't have pay for performance. Those are going to be Things that affect those two numbers. And that's the main number you want to focus on. Not how much money they make in a day, not how much money they make on a crew or anything like that. It's a poor number to think about. Who else would you recommend to watch on YouTube? I would watch all. Oh, okay. So let me give two things. One, for the landscape industry, I like watching a lot of them. For entertainment, I like watching a lot of them. For me personally, I watch them to think how a solo operator would work and trying to think about, okay, like, what issues are they having that I can address on my channel? Because I don't have some of those issues, right? I have employees and all the rest of it. So I need to think like them sometimes. And so seeing their issues firsthand, the issues they're having with customers or equipment or decisions, helps me make better content for other landscapers out there that are, that are smaller. Okay. That's why I would watch them. In terms of business related, it really depends, like, where you're at in terms of goals, right? If you're trying to invest, you're going to be looking at like real estate channels, stock channels, and learning about economics. Like, why, why are we not figuring out right now why there's pressure on the labor market and inflation? What does that mean for our industry? These are things you can learn on YouTube, okay? Find the right channels, find the right people. You can learn from the same way that everyone here is watching you. You're learning about landscaping and stuff from me. You can go out and find people that are 10 times better than me, like real estate, investing, HR, like Simon Senate, Great. If you're trying to be a better leader, Simon saying, great, there's tons of people out there, right? So open yourself up. Find those people that you really are. You find an affiliation with you, agree with them on certain principles, and then stick to those people. Stick to them, get their ideas and realize that they're not always right. I'm not always right. I'm gonna be wrong about half the stuff I'm talking about here today. Right? But what you're doing is you say, okay, I kind of. I believe in the trajectory of what Mike's doing. I believe in his philosophies and principles. You might even just agree with me from a principal standpoint and how I live and things like how I run my business, okay? So I'm gonna listen to that person. And then you might listen to someone completely opposite to get a good balance, right? So, for example, I listen sometimes To Gary Vaynerchuk. Right. Sometimes. A lot of times I get a lot of good marketing material. I get a lot of stuff around social media, things like that. Then I also listen to Grant Cardone. Now, they're completely different viewpoints on business and money and all the rest of it. I'm not a huge fan of the way that Grant pitches things. I think he's very salesy, comes across wrong. So I learned from that. Okay. I don't want to be that. I don't like the feeling I get when I'm around that. I want to prevent from doing that. Okay. When I go to a customer, how am I coming across? Am I coming across that way? Or do I need to come across more in terms of producing value for them and then asking for the sale, like Gary might talk about? So I pick and choose because there's other times I need to have more of an affiliation or I need to learn from someone like Grant who's going to push through and like, just address issues and just, like, go all in on things and just, like, has more of a shotgun approach to things. There's certain times you need that weapon. You need that in your repertoire. And so if you're just like, oh, I'm only going to watch this one person, like, this is all I'm like, you're in an echo chamber, right? Every mistake they have, you're going to have. So if you only listen to me, that's the only person you listen to on the Internet, only person you learn from, you're going to make all the same mistakes as me. Okay? The only way you can do better than me is getting other information to supplement that and actually fill the gaps that I have. Because I have gaps. All right? You got to realize that everyone we watch and learn from is going to have gaps. So get that repertoire and then you get to decide what you're going to use, what you're going to take, what you're going to leave. And that's just. I love it. Liam, does Augusta do fertilizer and weed control? How much does it cost to franchise out? I heard the legal fees cost over a million dollars.

Okay, there's a two different questions. So fertilizer and weed control. At our local market, we do organic only just to prevent us from having to go into getting licenses and application applicators, licenses and all the rest of it, insurance, etc. In terms of a franchise, it's. It costs a lot of money to get certain. Franchise does not cost over a million dollars for legal fees. But it is very expensive. Thanks Mike. That's exactly I need to hear. Keep the continent coming. Awesome. Jeffrey. Should I do door hangers during the week and then knock on doors on the weekend for better response rate? Don't think about this. Remember number six, don't analyze, do not try to think about this. Just do it. If you're walking up to a door, knock on it. I don't care if it what time of the day is well, within reason. Come on now. Non stop good points from you Mike. Love this content. Thank you Brother Sean, thanks for speaking the truth rather than all the fluff and bluff you generally see on YouTube. What would you what do you recommend to help out with the mental burnout that happens during this, the busy spring rush season? Okay, great point. Great question. Listen to yesterday's video. Number one from yesterday's video about talking about the spring rush. Number one. Does anyone remember what number one was? Create a plan for your physical and mental well being and health during the during the spring season. So all the things we talked about today, all these distractions, you've got to create a plan on how you're going to address them. How am I going to plan for when things break down? Equipment? How am I going to plan for what am I going to do? What plan is going to be in place when there's a customer issue? What am I going to do when there's an issue with my software? What am I going to do when my, my office person calls out sick? Like what's the plan around these distractions? Because you only get distracted when you get your focus off the thing you need to be focused on. When you allow the distraction to get your focus off of what you're supposed to be focused on, that's when it becomes a distraction. So when it comes to all these things that happen, create a plan. Okay, when there's a distraction over there, I'm not going to look at it. I'm not going to spend all my time. I'm not going to spend a day, I'm going to spend a week concerned about it. I'm going to have a plan in place. So when that distraction happens, I know what to do. My team knows what to do. I have a process already outlined. I already know when I'm going to give free service away to an unhappy customer. I already know my protocol for what happens when I break a sprinkler head. I already know what happens if someone doesn't show up to work and they are unexcused absence. I already know the system, the plan, it's already there. So you can eliminate distractions by having a plan in place to address them. What are you going to do when equipment breaks down? Do you have a backup? Do you have a truck that's cheap, but it'll get guys to their job in the event that one of your trucks break down? These are all things you can think about and create plans around now so that you don't have to have those issues during the spring rush. All right, last question here. Hey, Mike, I'm putting down money for marketing, Google and Facebook. Should I stay in both or should I invest more money in ads in Google and less in Facebook or vice versa? There is no good, better or best. Every single market is different. You need to test it. You need to run both, see what's working. You change the creative. You need to judge too soon. People judge these platforms after spending 100, 200 to $500. When it's nothing, it's nothing to move the needle. You've got to test things out, figure out what works, put money towards the one that's working better. Drive them to a landing page. We see what, where the traffic and the leads are coming from. You need to figure out your customer acquisition costs. You got to realize that if you're marketing now and your grass starts growing in three to four weeks, most heavily, that you're going to be paying a much higher customer acquisition cost now, because people are not looking for your service, they're not looking for a product, the demand in the marketplace is low. One of these days, I'm going to make the supply demand curve for us in the landscaping industry. I've done it before, I've talked about it. But there's also another supply demand curve when it comes to advertising, the customer acquisition cost. Because when demand goes really high and you know, people really, really need your service, the cost of your ads go down, okay? Because there's more people searching. There's more, there's less, there's less, there's more. There's less clicks per amount of people giving out the leads. Like Google, for example. If there's only five clicks, or, sorry, five searches for landscaping in your area, they're going to charge a premium if they're going to give you that click and they're going to put you at the top of that ranking. Now, if there's a hundred people searching for lawn care and landscaping in your market on Google now, there's a hundred clicks, there's more to give, I. E. Their supply goes up. When supply goes up, the cost per click goes down. So as demand is going to go up the next few weeks, your cost for customer acquisition costs will go down, down dramatically. So do not judge yourself. Do not judge your Facebook ads. Don't judge your ads or your marketing. Now, if you're running ads and you're not getting the results you want, because it could be double, it could be twice as good in a couple weeks when demand is actually higher. All right, we got one more question. Brett. Hi, Mike. My plan is to start a company in four years. What should be my top priorities? I prepare to start my company. Thank you for everything, Mike. Okay, well, if you're starting your company in four years, keep everything that you hear with a massive grain of salt, and that is that technology markets, labor markets change dramatically over the course of 1, 2, 3, 4 years. My goodness, we could potentially have a new president in four years. So, like, completely different tax brackets, everything could be different. So don't, don't again, don't allow distractions of analyzing things too soon when. Don't cross the bridge four years in advance. Know that you're going to educate yourself. You're going to absorb, you're going to information. That's the most important thing right now. Content, learning, stay in the cutting edge. Going to conferences, talking to other landscapers, connecting, you know, join landscape businesscourse.com the Facebook group. I should say. Let me get it up for you. Three, two, one. Here it is. Boom. Join the Facebook group. These are things you should be doing right now. You should be focused on these things the next four years so that when you actually do start your business, you're up and running, you're good to go, you understand the market, you understand the industry, and you have a lot more confidence. So thank you so much, everyone. Please, before you leave, before you leave, hit the like button. It's only good. We've been here for an hour. Give me a little like, give me a little like. I appreciate everyone, really appreciate all your support over the past few days. Have a few people send me some really nice emails and things that they've been able to accomplish this past year. And I really appreciate that. It just. This is why I do what I do, to see you guys grow your businesses, make more money, be able to hire employees and treat them right is what I'm all about and why Augusta exists. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great rest of your Sunday.