Why Landscaping isn't a Dead End Job (employee to owner)

Hey everyone, It's Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I'm going to be proving to you that mowing lawns and being a landscaper is not a dead end job. If you take the right mental approach to the way that you do work, you can learn so much and really turn your life around. If you're just getting started and you're an entry level employee or potentially you are an owner, I'd really encourage you sharing this with other entry level workers. They're just getting started. And for most people in the lawn care industry, where we're just getting started with our careers, it's our first couple jobs, maybe out of high school, maybe we're in our 20s or 30s, and it's something that we're kind of trying to do between jobs or after college, and we might try to figure out kind of what we want to do in the next stage of our career. But in my opinion, this is a great place to get started. And today we're going to be hearing from Austin, who is currently working at our local shop and has worked here for almost four years, but is now starting his own business, moving down to Texas to start his own Augusta lawn care franchise. Now he's doing it as part of what we call the 3F program. It's the franchise fee forgiveness program where if anyone works for an Augusta lawn care location for two or more years, they're able to get the $15,000 initial fee completely waived and they're able to start with no initial fee and they can start their own franchise, they can start their own business. But in my mind, the reason that's so important is that over the course of those two years, they're able to learn about business, they're able to learn about P4P, they're able to learn about profit sharing and open book management and learn the numbers for the know what to charge by the hour, be able to look at a job and no budgeted hours and estimate create those estimates for a proposal. And this is really the thesis by which Augusta Lawn Care exists and that is empowering the frontline employees to learn and educate themselves. And it's not so much about coming to work on a job, but coming to work on ourselves as people and as professionals. Learning about business, learning about management, learning, learning about just increasing our financial iq. So whether it be personal finance, whether it be reading and listening to audio books and podcasts, this is something we always are trying to enforce and trying to encourage our team members to do. And really, in my Opinion. Austin is the byproduct of all of that. And he has done so much work on himself as a human being. And I still remember him joining. I want to kind of share a little bit of backstory. And then we actually went out and were able to get him some film of him doing a job and answering some questions, which I have not actually seen, so it'll be interesting to see that. But I wanted to do this intro to kind of share my perspective. Then you can get Austin's perspective as he's about to move. This is his last week of work, and then he's moving down and going to start his own Augusta lawn care franchise. So about four years ago, Austin came to work for us. And he was a young guy at the time, I think I wanna say he was about 18 or 19 years old. And he came to us and we try to work with him and all the rest. And literally about three to four weeks in, we thought we were gonna fire him. And he was texting all the time. He was always on his phone. And we had one of our Josh, who had been with us for a long time, we had him drive with him one day and kinda talk to him like, hey, you can't be on your phone all the time. You gotta stay focused. You know, you're letting down the team and that's not gonna fly. And all the rest of it. Then Liz talked to him at the office and all the rest of it, and he still kind of like he would do okay some days and other days just not that great. And there was one time I actually, I had him come in late in the evening after work, and I said, hey, I'm gonna meet you at the office. And I sat him down, I talked to him, I said, look, man, I'm not going to tell you what you need to change or what you're doing wrong, but right now, you are not performing the way you should. You're underperforming. And if in the next two weeks you don't make a change and you don't support the team and show up to work and support part of what we're doing here, then I'm gonna let you go. And it was tough because I didn't specifically tell him what he needed to do differently. I didn't say, don't be in your phone. I did not say, you need to show up earlier. You need to come and support your team and help them in the morning load their trucks. I didn't go into specifics. And I tell him I'm not going to. I said, I'm just telling you you need to make some really important life decisions and change some things in your life, turn things around. Otherwise, in two weeks, I'm just gonna let you go. And here we are four years later. I'm very proud to say that he did make some hard decisions, change his life, really just everything. Not just work. Like what you do at work is great, but if you can learn skills and change your life and change your education and learning on the job, it trickles down to so many different areas of life. Whether being able to be able to move, get his apartment and his girlfriend, all the rest of it. And now being able to move down and start his own business. And he's partnering up with another one of our employees from the local shop named Tyler. They've known each other, for instance, since they were really young. So together they are starting this location. I could not be more proud of them. And this is now 1, 2. We have about 4 of our employees that have done this. We have another one next year coming up. So quite a few of them that have started, done the 3F program, worked for a couple years, started their own location or been general managers and purchased the location. So very much looking forward to seeing what they do in the future. And again, this video is to be able to inspire the person that's just starting, just starting to mow lawns and you might think that this is a dead end job. I encourage you listen to podcasts, listen to audio books, try to join a company that's going to share the numbers and have open book management and be able to teach you about business and let you see the profit and loss statements, let you see where different expenses are, where the money goes in the business and the good months and the bad months and the cost of insurance and the cost of fuel. These are all the most important things. Like getting 15 versus $18 an hour or a few dollars more per hour is not going to change your life in an entry level position. What is going to change the trajectory of your career is going to be learning hard skills, learning managing people, dealing with customers, selling customers things. These are the skills that are gonna really set you up for the future. And I hope that Austin has garnered some of these skills while working at Augusta and can take those on as he starts his own business. We wish him all the best and I hope this inspires someone that's just out there getting started, maybe discouraged, beat down, working long days and thinking this is a dead end job. It's not it's all about the approach that you take. Make sure you join up with a company that's going to be able to teach you these things. Take those skills and build on top of them. Be disciplined. Show up to work, work your and every single day, plug into something that's positive and going to educate you for you, your future and the rest of your business career.

So my name is Austin Kahn, here with the Augusta truck right now. I started working here at Augusta, I think in 2017. It was like June or July. I was just some little dumb kid still trying to find my way. I was working at the refinery out here in Blaine, Washington, still trying to get my ged. And then I was just on Craigslist one day and saw that they were offering $15 an hour, and me as a kid just wanting to get paid more, went from like 1385 to $15. I was like, sure, why not? I like to be outside. And when I was working at the refinery, basically sat on my butt for 12 hours.

What made me want to start opening up my own franchise kind of was just kind of like on the back burner when Mike started, like, talking about it. And then as we got more serious later on, when I started gaining more knowledge, I brought it up to my buddy who I'm going into business with, and he said, dude, why can't we just do this ourselves? The location I chose was Crowley, Texas, but that's where our house is going to be. But the location is actually Burleson, Texas. It's a suburb of Fort Worth. It's basically in the Dallas area, just down there, known for the landscaping area. There's a lot of people who are serious about their yards. There's a bunch of just landscape companies in that area as well. And I said, why not bring the Augusta Nation down there when we already have about four other locations in the Texas area? So I said, why not take over more? But my goal is to be able to change my family history and being able to set a foundation for myself and my future family and just my family in general. Basically, anybody who's out there that's hungry to just learn and be better in the long run, and you have goals, just go for it. Don't be afraid. Sometimes some of us, myself, we're just afraid to take that next step because we're scared of failure. But that failure is definitely a learning experience to where you can grab onto it and learn from it and go from there.

Hey, everyone, Mike Andes here. Thank you so much for watching the video. If you're just starting your lawn care landscaping business or you want to take it to the next level, Check out the link below. Landscapebusinesscourse.com is going to give you the steps to get your business to $100,000 in monthly revenue. Check it out. We'll see you next. Video.