Will Robot Mowers Put You OUT OF BUSINESS?

What's up, everyone? It's Mike Andes. You're listening to the Landscape business course and today we're talking about robot mowers and I'm hoping you all can hear me a little bit better. I'm going to be doing Q and A after this, but I've been working very hard on getting this set up where now the camera is actually from the dslr. You should be able to hear me good. No longer am I on helium, no longer does it smell sound like I've been, you know, smoking crack or anything like that. So hopefully everything is sounding much better and it looks good and I want to do this these more often and, and be able to address topics and then have live Q and A. So really looking forward to it. We're going to be talking about robot mowers as I'm talking about that. Feel free to leave comments down in the comment section as well as leave any sort of questions for me to get to after that. So I'm going to go over from the perspective of potential, like what could threaten us in the industry from robots? What also are the opportunities for the robots. And I actually feel like this is really important to note that the robots and the robots coming and trying to take us out, the robots are coming to get us. I really think there's a huge opportunity and we're going to go over that. Then we're going to talk about what parts of this industry really could get wiped out by robotized mowers and what's coming down the pike as it gets harder and harder to find good employees. As I have said in the past, this will be the hardest, the hardest year in this industry to get good labors and we are finding that to be so. So first off, I want to give a big shout out while everyone's joining right now, Whether you're in YouTube, Facebook, the group on Facebook, whatever it is. Thank you for joining me tonight here on a Friday evening. I wanted to give a special shout out to Chuck. Chuck is actually one of our general managers out in North Carolina. He's been just crushing it. I felt like I needed to address and kind of give him recognition here live tonight. He is our new general manager out in North Carolina. He's getting his third. So he came in February for training. And so it's been about five weeks, four or five weeks, and he's getting his third employee in his third truck literally this coming week. Just got new shop space. He's just killing it over there. I want to say a big thank you to him. He's been working long, long hours just busting his butt and I really, really appreciate it. He deserves all the credit and a big shout out to Chuck over in North Carolina. All right, so let's and talk about robot mowers. So I, first of all, this is the funny thing. I really don't feel like robot mowers are going to come as a big deal from like Husqvarna or Honda or whatever of these companies are the manufacturers. I actually feel what's going to make robot mowers mainstream is a big company like Amazon, Lowe's or Home Depot coming in and being willing to take this beast on of robot mowers and be willing to take a massive, massive loss for one thing, data. All right, so whether you look at what Google Local services is doing, how Google is now getting involved with home services, whether you look at the way that Lowe's is so integrated with Porch, which is also a home service based kind of business, these are the type of things Home Advisor, these tech companies that have billions of dollars, they could literally put a robot mower on every single lawn in America if they really wanted to. And they could do it all for the sake of data. Data is what pushes these companies valuations to the moon. And trust me, the next frontier for these tech companies is the home. It's no longer going to be just digital. It's going to be how do we actually get in contact with our customer. Whether you look at Amazon prime and Amazon Air where they're trying to like deliver things to the home. Just think about it. What if Amazon, they figured out, okay, you know, what if we have a robot mower in everyone's lawn that is a Prime member, we can actually deliver the package and now conceal the package inside of the mower until the, the, the, the client comes home. When the client comes home, the mower will drive over into the delivery area next to the porch and then set, when they, they come over, scan a barcode, it opens up and there's their package. No longer a security threat wipes out a big issue with mail. Package delivery like that can happen like that. And I don't feel like, you know, Honda, Husqvarna stuff deal. In my opinion, they're not going to have the money, they're not going to have the marketing, they're going to have the brand awareness, they're not going to have the power to be able to actually distribute these to consumer the way that a big company would come in. For example, what if Home Depot comes in and says, okay, we're going to put an orange little mower on every single property here. Oh, and by the way, steel, you're going to make them for us at a third of what you actually are selling them right now. Because we're going to order millions of them. So instead of them costing $1,000, we want you to make them for us for 300. And we're going to put our little Home Depot sticker on there. And we're going to be at Great Data because we're going to know the square footage of the property, we're going to know, we're going to have cameras on this device, we're going to be able to know the all about the house, the patterns of weather, everything that we could potentially sell the customer based upon their home's climate. Like, trust me, that's where the threat is. If you're really worried about robot mowers coming, you need to be worried about Amazon, Google or one of these other massive retailers getting a hold of this and using this as a brand and data play. Okay, so that's the first thing. The next thing is as the cost of the machine goes down, this is when it starts to get really, really interesting for robot mowers, as the cost of the machine. So right now, to get a good robot mower, you're looking at at least, you know, between 1200 to $2000. As that cost comes down, that's when robot mowers have the potential to, to actually take root in the market. And as the cost of that machine goes down, there's going to be an increased pressure on our prices because we are now becoming a commodity. So what technology does is it makes service become a commodity. So whether you look at taxis becoming Uber, whatever technology you want to look at, the service, the actual service becomes commoditized with technology and therefore bring the cost of that commodity down. So if we're mowing and the cost of these machines comes way down, like I'm talking 3, $400, you can get one of these bad boys, put it on your lawn and it's going now all of a sudden, why would someone pay US$200 a month to mow their lawn when for 300 they can get a lawnmower that is silent, that is super user friendly, that mows 24, 7. The lawn always looks good. They don't have to worry about employees coming to their property. They don't have to worry blocking their driveway. It's just seamless and beautiful, all for the low cost of just $300. So as that low, that price of the machine comes down, that's when you're going to get a little more concerned, because it's going to put downward pressure on our prices because now the consumer has a benchmark price that is something that we can't even compete with. Like 301 time, and it'll mow your lawn for years to come. That's pretty tough to compete with. All right, Number three is from the perspective of these manufacturers and things like that, as the security of the device improves, as the user interface improves, as access to the gates improve, when you don't have to put a perimeter line anymore on these robots. So, for example, in my opinion, one of the biggest issues with these robot mowers right now is a lot of them. You have to install an invisible fence along the perimeter of all of the lawn. And just you wait until the GPS technology gets good enough to where it can be within a matter of inches and know where it's at. And you don't have to put a line in the ground. And literally the first time you walk it around the property with your smartphone, you. You've set it on all the corners and it just remembers all those GPS coordinates and does not no longer need a line to be installed because there's people that are making a lot of money right now installing the lines in the ground, on the perimeter. But just wait till the GPS talk technology gets good enough. Just you wait till again, you just get a Google partnership with like a Home Depot and all of a sudden instantly down to the inch it can track on that device, where it's at. That will happen. Okay? So eventually the perimeter lines will not be needed, and that will absolutely be a massive barrier to the robots taking over. All right, so now I'm going to talk about some of the opportunities because I really feel like overall, this is a massive opportunity for us, and that's the robotized mowers. So I feel like, number one, when a robot is like, if I ever. If robots ever took over and I just see robots all over my, you know, market, it would be a massive opportunity because, look, the person that buys a robot mower does not want to mow their lawn. They're lazy, they have too much money, they want more time, whatever it is, they don't want to mow their lawn. So if they don't want to mow their lawn, there's a really good chance they also don't want to weed their beds, trim their bushes, install their mulch. They don't want to pressure wash their driveway, clear out their gutters. They don't want to do any of those things in their lawn or their yard or their landscape. And therefore, every time I would see an orange steel, orange Home Depot, you know, maybe it's an orange Amazon. Whatever. Whatever comes along. Whenever I see that robot mower, the first thing I would be thinking is, that is a potential opportunity for upsells. Because guess what, number two. So number one opportunities when it comes to robot mowers is the fact that if I see them on someone's property, it's like a big waving red signal saying, hey, I'm a customer, like, right here. Hey, I don't want to do lawn care landscaping. Like, come over here. I need your service. Because guess what, number two, Mowing is your lowest margin service. It's a loss leader. If you actually look at the margins of specific things that are done on a property. For example, blowing things off, you edging the lawn, weed whacking, all those things, you know, pulling weeds in the beds. The loss leader, the lowest margin service while you're on the property is the actual mowing itself. You're like, oh, no. Like, I make way more money mowing than I do weed whacking. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because guess what? If someone is going to. Is currently you're charging them $50 per week for their mowing service and includes mo edge and blow. Guess what if I could go to someone's property and charge them $30 instead of 50. But the robot mower did all the mowing, and I did the edging, the bush trimming, the, you know, the line trimming, blowing off the sidewalks and the walkways. Because the thing that is the lowest margin is the mowing. I need a $10,000 mower to go back and forth, and yet I can have a $400 weed whacker and edger literally doing all the other work. A blower, $500 on the backpack blower, blowing things off. I no longer need a big trailer and a massive truck to be pulling all of my equipment if I don't have the mowing. So, again, the mowing is your biggest cost and your lowest margin service. So I'm actually really, really pumped that a robot mower comes along and is able to do the things that the lowest margin, by the way, a robot can edge. A robot has not. Has yet the power to blow things off or think intuitively about what weeds the pool in the beds or trim bushes. Like, we're a Long ways away from a drone coming and shaping a bush. We're a long ways away. So if you're worried about mowing, trust me, this is a massive opportunity because it's literally taking away the thing that's the lowest margin service so that we can send crew there with less of equipment, set up a smaller truck, literally. You could show up in like one of those little Honda or Ford, connect little vans, like little minivans, or even a car. You could show up with a car because all you needed, a weed eater, a blower, you know, some gloves. Because the, the robot is doing the mowing, which is the big, what is usually needed for a truck and for a massive trailer and for the big equipment that's heavy, or all the brakes and the tires and the maintenance and training employees on using those that equipment no longer needed. It's an amazing thing. If I can have the robots mow and I can edge, blow, trim, do all the add on services that are higher margin, that's where the money is going to be made. And guess what? That leaves me number three. Because this is a huge opportunity due to the fact that it solves our labor issue. It's going to be harder and harder to find good employees. I want those employees to be doing higher margin services, I. E. The trimming, the edging, the bush trimming, installing mulch. I don't want them to be sick sitting on a mower, doing what a robot could do much more efficiently for a much lower cost as time goes on and technology gets better. So I actually look at these robots as a huge opportunity because in the past, when we look at mowing service, the actual mowing itself, like on the machine, has been the lost leader. So when you look at loss leaders, what that means is a company is willing to lose money in order to get a customer in the door. So for many of us, mowing, not the actual edging and blowing off and all the other things around mowing, but the actual mowing itself, like going back and forth, is the commodity that we sell the customer for almost no profit in order to get them in the door. So we can sell them on all the other services that we make money on, like bush trimming and weeding and edging and blowing and all the other little things we can sell them. Throughout the year, the fall cleanups, the leaf comes the tree remove all of those things, that's where we make our money. And so at a grocery store, what they do is they have loss leaders. They'll be able to advertise that they sell milk for A$99 a gallon. They're losing money on that milk. They're losing money when they sell eggs for 99 cents a dozen. But they know if they need a loss leader to get people in the door, they're going to pick up five other items on their way to the back of the store where those loss leaders are placed. So the same thing goes for us when it comes to mowing. It's our loss leader. We get them in the door, then we upsell them all these other services that give us a lot more profit margin. I think the same thing is going to be said when it comes to the robots. They'll take care of the loss leader, make it much more efficient for us to be able to actually go take advantage of those higher margin. All right, now who's going to be threatened? Who is going to be negatively affected by the robots coming? Three different groups I could come up with probably more. But here's the three number one, if you're doing mowing only in like large properties, big commercial and you have massive pieces of equipment, the bigger your piece of equipment is and the more expensive your piece of equipment is, the more in my opinion you are at risk for robots taking you over. Because if you're just going back and forth for five hours straight doing fields, if you're just going back and forth doing large, large open pieces of grass, you are at risk because a robot can be, can already do that much more efficiently than you can. Just you wait till technology catches up, just wait until product, the production of these robots get better and more efficient. You are going to get wiped out. If you're only doing mowing and if you're doing big open, large square, you know, miles or acres of lawn mowing only that is very, very risky in my opinion. Especially when we have to pay $20,000 for, you know, one of those, what are they called, bat wing or whatever, batwing mowers, where it's massive like that's expensive to maintain that thing and all the rest of it. If I can put three two thousand dollar mowers on the same piece of land and it be looking good 24, 7, no grass, no loud mowers. Don't have to worry about a labor that doesn't show up, doesn't have to, don't have to worry about fumes and all the rest of it. Guess what? A commercial property is going to go towards robots, it's cheaper. They don't have to worry about timing of day and when the landscapers show up and then they don't do things correctly and they didn't mow this strip and they forgot this and didn't. They mowed it too low. That's all bygone era when it comes to a robot. And so those large open commercial big when you need a massive mower. The bigger the mower, in my opinion, the more at risk you are in terms of the robots coming. Number two for a company that has no service, just low service, there's no customer service. There is no care for the consumer. There's no brand. There's just. You're selling a commodity. If you're doing that even in the residential space, you are at risk when it comes to robots because when you sell a commodity, the only thing that matters is price. That's why, like people track the oil prices. They check the check. They track like the cost of, of wheat and the corn and all the rest of it. It's a commodity. You don't care where it's grown because it's all the same thing. It's all apples to apples. It's the same deal. Well, if you have a high Prof. Or, sorry, a high service business and you actually treat customers right, you have a great brand, you actually answer the phone, you have a great relationship and personalized service to your consumer and your employees care for the property of your customers. And there's actually a connection that can't be replaced with a robot that cannot be replaced. And you don't become a commodity that can be compared like, like the oil prices, like wheat prices, like, okay, that's why people get into price wars in lawn care. It's like, oh, well, Bob down the street, he could do my lawn for $30 per cut. Why are you charging me 45? You've become a commodity. You've got to produce value like we keep talking about over and over and over. You go produce value to where now you're not being able to be compared like a commodity because you're not different. You're different than Bob. I'm sorry, you're not the same. You're different than Bob because you offer better service. You offer trained employees and uniforms and a great website and a great social media and great reviews. Those are all things that add value, that make you not a commodity where you cannot be compared. Apples. Apples. You cannot be compared against someone else's prices because when you actually look at what the services, it's not even comparable. So the second low service companies that are low touch to the consumer very, very worrisome. In my opinion, number three, last threatened area is as the cost of labor goes up or your efficiency goes down. So if you're constantly have to pay your employees more and more and more, it's making robots like more and more making sense from a money standpoint, if it's costing you more and more and more to pay people per hour and there or their efficiency is going down. So in other words, if their product production is going down as a unit measure of time, you're in trouble. So if they're either getting less efficient, stop at gas stations, texting on their phone all day long, busy on Snapchat instead of making money and mowing grass, whatever it might be if they're not efficient, or the cost of their labor goes up per hour. And again, if they're inefficient, the cost per of their labor goes up because you have to pay more to get the same amount of work done because they're inefficient. So if there's inefficiencies in your business, it puts you at further risk of the robots taking over. Okay, so I hope that kind of laid the groundwork. I know I didn't go over everything when it comes to robot mowers. There's a lot to do with the industry cost of manufacturing technology. I know there's a lot of other stuff I'm kind of leaving out right now, but at the end of the day, I feel like robots are a great opportunity for us. Whether they take over and we focus more and more on the other services that are higher margin the upsells or if it's more of a play of us being able to figure out the hardest thing in the world, which is the labor problem. The labor problem this year has been so hard and it's going to get harder. But I also feel this is the, this is the year for this industry and this is the year if you want to grow, this is it. There's more money in the system now. Real estate prices are the highest they've ever been. People have more equity in their homes than ever before. You have more and more people moving from out of the urban areas into the suburban areas. The cost of those areas for the real estate is going up. People are looking at their home as an investment and they want it to take care of it. They're wanting to sell and then they want to get premium price. They're going to get a landscaper to come spend a few thousand dollars putting mulch trimming in the bushes, making it look that Is all opportunity in the right demographics. I truly believe 2021 will be the greatest year for this industry. For the people that can keep and retain great employees, for the people that cannot. You're at risk of the robots taking over. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into the Q and A section here. Let's start off at the top here. Hello, hello. Hello, everybody. All right, let's see here. Hit the like, everyone. Yeah, thank you. Share that comment. Let's go. Hit the like, everyone. Just hit it. Smash it, Annihilate it. All right, let's see here. No robot mower can outstripe or out trim me. All right, what about edging? Yeah, I don't think edging is gonna be. Edging's a long ways away from actually being robotized.

Honestly, there's a lot of technological things. It will be the thing that comes next. But the cost, because the amount of force that's required for it to actually edge correctly and just so many different things in terms of, like, liability, that edger moving, if it's actually a thick metal, things like that. I'll just stick to landscaping. Yeah, that's one. One way to do it. Pair of scissors. It's cutting 24 7. All right. That's why I think landscaping is going to be harder to take over from robots. Yes. In one regard, yes, it's going to definitely be harder to take over from robots. However, it's also going to be a lot harder to find good labors for the landscaping industry compared to lower level, skill level, type of services. It's much harder to find someone that can do it, use an excavator, lay pavers, and build a hardscaping wall than it is for me to get someone that can do a push mower, pull weeds, and use a blower. Right. So as the labor force is going to get harder and harder to find, you are going to have to lower, in my opinion, create systems or lower your level of complexity in your business to be able to get new hires. Now, if you have the same people that have worked for you for 10 years and you have no problem, you have no concern of having to triple your workforce in the next five years. You're probably not going to have an issue like you're going to keep the same people. They're really experienced. You train them, they all know what they're doing. It's super simple. But again, you can simplify your services and be able to train those level, lower level employees. So, for example, I was talking to someone today that does hardscaping and a lot of landscaping. I say, look, you've got to simplify. Take a landscaping, take hardscaping. But how can you simplify those services? How can you package them together so you can train an entry level employee and not have to go pay someone $40 an hour because they know how to use an excavator and a bobcat and they know how to do oil changes on big diesel trucks? Like you do not want that level of service or level of skill to be required for an entry level employee. All right? So I've been researching this industry heavily in the past six months. With the current prices of the rope mowers, I could break even in one season. Would require two to three contract for the service with a hundred clients. You could service them with one employee who would reset the mowers when required and do the trimming and edging. So this is the problem, in my opinion. Okay? So If I get 100 clients and I had to go buy robot mowers for them all, I'm literally looking right now at $150,000. For $150,000, I can go do the marketing, buy the truck and equipment for probably five employees and have 400 employees, 400 clients, otherwise. So this is the problem again, though, as the cost of that, that piece of that robot goes down, it makes more and more and more sense. That's why I'm saying that as that price comes down, we've got to get more and more creative. Zachary, this is absolute business model that is in my mind, I'm actually thinking less. This is what actually gets me more, more excited. There are now mowers and I've tested these out that you program, you program all of your properties into it. And how you do it is basically the first time it's like on a joystick or it's like a Xbox little controller. It comes out of your trailer, you know, you manually back it up and then you basically program it the first time and actually mow the lawn manually with your joystick. And it programs in the, into the machine how and how to mow and everything. But it's a big mower. It does, it just. It's like a 48 inch deck. And so it goes as fast as you would edging. This is really interesting to me because now a one person crew, so one employee can haul this thing along in a trailer and push a button and it starts to mow the property while they edge and blow. And literally, if you take the cost of a labor, say $25 per hour. Once you take into account the fact that there's waste when you have an employee, it's not just time on the job. It's like the drive time, the unload time, the load time, hiring them, training them. All the rest of you take all of that $25 an hour. Now you're looking at $250 a day, a day in savings by having this machine. Yes, right now it costs 50, 60 thousand dollars. But wait till that, that thing is worth only cost $20,000. That becomes very, very interesting to me. In my opinion though, I would rather go get the 400 mowing customers now and then when that technology comes along, use it as a way to bring my prices and my margin, bring my prices down and my margins up and solve the labor problem and be able to scale using that technology. Instead of, instead of trying to go buy a hundred mowers that are robots right now that all cost fifteen hundred dollars, that would be a huge expense. Now you can do that on a leasing program, make it work a little bit more. Then the problem is, okay, what happens in three years when now that equipment is obsolete and I gotta go buy more equipment because in three years, guess what? Robot mowers are going to be a hundred times better. And you're not going to want to be doing lines in the edges. You're not going to be wanting to have to do flaps for the, for the mowers to get in the backyards. There's gonna be such better technology, and in three years, in my opinion, it's gonna be a completely different ballgame. Bring on the robots. Still need the leaf cleanup. I imagine the liability is higher with robot mowers. It really depends. Like, honestly, some insurance. I've seen some insurance policies for them and it seems to be kind of all over the place, honestly, but not huge, because like, think about it. The liability of a mower that's gas powered within a person driving on top of it, and that's pretty risky versus this little thing that's like weighs like 20 pounds. And the razor on there is probably less sharp and less dangerous than the razor I use on my face. Like the thing is just spinning in a circle and it could barely cut your fingernails. But there's definitely liability in the fact of like stealing the machine. I already know they've come a long ways in terms of solving that issue. But anyways, yes, Josiah, I would love to get on the ground floor of robotic mowers. And honestly, I might go to college to be an engineer. And then I can get the insider information on it. Let's go. Serious question. How much caffeine do you drink? I don't drink any caffeine. I don't, I don't like to have. I, I don't like to depend on stuff. So I, I've never been a big fan of coffee because I do get the effects of it and when I drink it I do get wired. But I don't want to be dependent on that source of energy. So I try to, I try not to have any sort of a. I just try to, you know, be healthy and eat healthy and stuff like that. All right. Customer service is key in the fourth industrial revolution. That Salesforce's model. Yes. And Salesforce had a great dip down to $200 a share. I bought in. It's so fantastic. Clean green lawn care. Hey Mike, what's the best email to get a hold of you? If you go to the YouTube video description, there's an email in there. Can a mo blow and bush trimming business scale? My, my customers are constantly asking for lawn treatments but I'm not licensed and I don't really want to get into treatments. You can absolutely scale, mo edge blow, bush trimming and all the rest of it. Yes. In some states treatments getting the applicator's license is absolute pain in the neck. And it's very to scale because all of your employees have to get the same license and it's very difficult and costly and it costs more to hire people with the license and it's hard for them to keep it updated and even pass the test and the list goes on. However, you can get better margins. It's absolutely gonna. I believe that is an industry that's gonna get massively disrupted with technology over the next five to 10 years before mowers before because like think about it. When it comes to treatments, you really don't need much in terms of equipment. Okay. That's the low hanging fruit for. That is the industry that's ripe for disruption when it comes to technology. A mower still requires a lot of force and, and edging and trimming bushes and installing molts. These are all very manual labor type services in my opinion. Treatments, just you wait. That's a high margin. That's where money, that's where technology is going to go first before they try to figure out edging.

What's your timetable on this? When will robots mean a significant player on the commodity businesses don't differentiate on quality branding, etc. Yeah, I really believe in 10 years. So again this is kind of like AI VR. You know, we really haven't seen like, besides like Pokemon Go, you know. Augmented reality has not really been a huge player in our day to day life. I don't think mowers, robot mowers are going to be a big part of our lives and this industry for another five to 10 years before it's like really commonplace, something we're always talking about. Like this is like the second time I've ever mentioned it. Like it's not a big deal for us right now, but just wait for five to ten years. Five to ten years. And again, it could happen in a year. It only takes Amazon moving in and be like, yeah, we're willing to burn $5 billion. We're going to put one of these bad boys on every single lawn of our prime members and we're going to use it as a way to keep our packages safe. And we're gonna for free, free to all prime members just to make sure that they keep buying from us and we're gonna get all the data from them and then we're gonna sell, by the way, we're gonna sell just the way that Google does. We're gonna sell the leads to home service providers because we are going to be able to know the square footage of the lawn. We're gonna know the property. We have cameras on that device. And by the way, we can do it because it's free to our prime members. They're gonna take us up on this. And oh, and by the way, yes, it's going to integrate with our ring system, which is our security camera system. And so now when there's a threat at the house, we actually have a movable device that could do something about it and a device that can move as a camera. I'm telling you folks, that is, that is, that's one deal away. That is one deal away. So that could happen. But honestly, in terms of a timetable, I think five to 10 years when it's actually becoming mainstream and consumers are actually starting to pit us in terms of price against a robot mower.

And thanks for the PPP info. I'm so psyched following us going forward with it. Most profitable week in five years. Josh, that made my day this morning in landscape business course. The Facebook group, I think that was you that commented. You guys just rolled it out. Your team voted on it after the trial period that we talk about landscape businesscourse.com I'm super stoked for you. The most profitable week in five years. That makes me so happy. Like literally I have, I have goosebumps right now. It's just, it's the coolest thing. I really believe it's the way of the future for this industry. And if my name can somehow be a little tiny piece of that moving the needle, I'm super thrilled. So congratulations on all the hard work. I know it's not easy. Think this year will be big for hardships. I think this will be massive for big for hardscape. Hardscaping is going to be amazing this year and everyone's going to look at me and be like, you said hardscaping is not the way of the future, blah blah, blah. No, I like, trust me, hardscaping this year is going to kill it because people have all these, this equity in their homes. So what they're going to do is they're going to go get a home equity line of credit or they're going to get a cash out refinance on their home and they're going to do a $50,000 paver patio. Like there's going to be lots of money in hardscaping this year. But I don't like the boom and bust mentality of the design build system. I want recurring revenue. I want to go forever. I don't want what happened last March or a year from today. I was getting phone calls from almost primarily contractors that were doing projects and design build because all of a sudden their six week backlog of work disappeared within a couple of days. I don't want to deal with that. We had two customers out of over 500 cancel last March 2020 when Covid hit out of all the fear because guess what, the grass kept growing and we had to keep mowing grass. So in my opinion, if you're looking at it from like a stock market standpoint, the high flying growth stocks are like, are like hardscaping. Like there's going to be amazing for the next year, right? They've been amazing. This whole year has been incredible for hardscaping projects. But I'd much rather take the slow and steady. Microsoft pays a little dividend, you know, doesn't grow 500% a year. You know, it doesn't grow like 1,000% and up and down like just very consistent. I that's what I wanted. I want to build a business on that. It just, I get more sleep anyways. Someone will need to service the robots. This is true. Trent, very good point. Again, a lawn service. You could absolutely open up a division that services those robots. I'd rather and I'd also Like, to service the robot and do all their other services. And literally, again, they buy the robot. Great. I'm going to go up to their house and be like, hey, Mr. Jones, I know you don't really like to winterize the thing because it snows. You got to, like, take care of it and, like, pull it all out. Why don't we do this? We'll store it for you. We'll do all your services on a weekly basis. It's going to mow the lawn. We'll do the edging, bush trimming, all the rest of it. Here's your service package price, and we'll take care of it in the winter. We'll tune it up, sharpen up the blades, get it all set up for next spring, make sure it's all, you know, the perimeter is all done correctly. Anything in the lawn, if you've changed it, we'll fix it and adjust it. That will absolutely be an opportunity. Should I put. Should I start putting more effort into installing mulch rather than grass cut? I don't believe that. Again, mulching is very, very, very cyclical in terms of you're gonna have a month in the spring and mostly a month in the fall. And again, you're gonna have booms and busts. I'd rather be going after recurring services, and I'd be trying to convert my mowing customers into winter services. When we slow down. All right, we're gonna keep going here, but please hit the like button. Just. Just give it a little tap. See, I can't come as close to you guys. That's horrible. Just give it a little tap. And I'd really appreciate that as we move forward here. All right, Alex. He doesn't drink caffeine. Hey, Liz. Let's see here. Greenview Services. Mike, enjoying the live streams, recommendations on recruiting and attracting new employees. We're currently contracting through recruitment agency. That's a tough one in recruitment agencies. I have not personally had a lot of experience with them. My opinion of them is it's kind of like a customer from Home Advisor. I don't really own them and take that back. You're saying a recruitment agency? I'm thinking a temp agency. Temp agencies. I'm not a big fan of when it comes to labors because I kind of look at them like HomeAdvisor. They own that person and they're renting them out to me. A recruitment agency. Again, I would rather spend the money that goes towards the recruitment agency on directly finding them myself through channels, like, indeed. Facebook And Craigslist. Those are the three we really play with. Every market's a little bit different between those three. Usually you can get a pretty good source of leads, especially if I have a short. If you have a strong culture where locally the landscapers are kind of being attracted to you because you can pay more through P4P, you have profit sharing, you have open book management, you have a great culture, things like that. What I want to know with all these robots, where we all, where were, where we all these people find jobs? Honestly, this is a big question that people have like, you know, technology in general is like taking out our jobs. I don't think it's an issue because as technology improves and as technology moves on, the type of jobs we're doing are going to be different. For example, let's say 50 years ago if you would have looked at a mower back then and then you would have compared it to what we have today. People were like, oh my goodness, they're going to put us out of our work. Like we're not going to have, we're going to be able to mow because now that we've been doing push mowers and these 60 inch zero turns are going to get five times faster. But guess what? We've moved on. Technology's moved on. Now we get, we're more efficient, you know, we get lawns done faster. But guess what? It didn't put us out of work. We just find new places to get. Now we have an office person behind a computer all day. Now we have someone that's managing the software that uses, is used to track our trucks and do our QuickBooks. So like technology moves on, the labor market moves on. I think it's an absolute failed, horrible concept to think that by taking out labor level positions with technology that we're somehow not going to have jobs.

That's just technology is going to move on with or without you. Like China is going to move ahead without us, with or without us trying to do save our jobs. If we're trying to save our jobs because they're inefficient, then they deserve to get wiped out. And yes, we will fall behind on manufacturing like we have to China. We will fall behind on, on infrastructure like we have to China because they guess what, they don't care about how many jobs they care about most efficient, most cost effective. And that's why they win on those fronts. Dean, you gave me $50. You gave me like 25 on the last one. I appreciate it. I saw what happened on The Facebook group. I'm sorry, I know it's tough right now. Yeah, it looks like you're talking about now. Hey, my only employee quit and I have enough work for three full crews. Obviously I need to reevalue for next year, but what would you do now if you were me?

All right, so I'll be really honest. As much as I love you giving me money, Dean, don't spend 50 on me right now. You go spend that on indeed, Facebook ads, Craigslist, etc. I really appreciate that. I'm not trying to throw you under the bus, but honestly, don't give me money. Don't give anybody money. Go get those employees. That's very important. That is your number one priority right now, whether you be. You should go get. You should go get. You should get. What are they called, Michael? Yard signs. You should put those around your area. You should be putting ads up on Craigslist, Facebook and indeed, you should be telling all of your friends and family. You should be calling people. You should be be putting those yard signs next to Home Depot. You should be putting them on the corners of where people go for like express professionals employment and all these temp agencies. Put them out there. I don't care if you would go and stand out on a busy row with a sign and say how much you're paying per hour, a couple little things and say you're hiring tomorrow. Like, you need to get employees. You do not need to reevaluate your year. You do not need to cut back and say, I'm like, I'm not going to grow. This is a scarcity mindset, Dean. You've set this up entire winter for growth. All right, I'm speaking right to Dean because I know I'm pretty good and he can take this. So you've been, you've been getting your website ready. You got lawn care, web design to make your website. You have got all the trucks and equipment. You have all these leads coming in because of the website probably. And you need to, you need to just realize right now is the time for you to go get employees and you're going to make a couple mistakes. You're going to go out and hire six people and two of them aren't going to work out. Two of them might not show up the next day for work. But right now, your full time job job, the only thing you should be doing is focused on hiring people. That's not easy. That's not that it sounds so like, I just like make this up. It's not easy. We're hiring people right now at like the clip of probably two or three a week at Augusta between the corporate side are. Well, probably more than that. Three, four a week between the corporate side and our corporate locations and the local shop and the command center. So we're hiring a lot of people. Hardest year we've ever had to find people. It's very difficult when you have a 300 per week boost to unemployment, plus whatever state the state is giving them. So they're making four or five hundred bucks a week sitting at home doing nothing. So you've got to go out there and your full time, 247 job right now, Dean, is to go find employees, go over, hire, go. Like, right now, you don't need to spend any money on marketing because leads are pouring in. Like you said, you have tons of work. Don't spend money on marketing your full time lead ads. Everything the same way you looked at last year in terms of, like spending money for customers. You need to go do the same thing for finding hires right now. It should be the thing that you think about, the thing you dream about, the thing you go to bed thinking about. That's the. You got to do it. The reason I'm pushing this so hard right now is because if you don't do it now, the rest of your year's gone. You're gonna. You're gonna contract. You're gonna, oh, I'm gonna go to solo. This is what happens to Everybody. Happens on YouTube all the time. Like, they. They start growing. They get two, three employees, and then they just contract because their employees left. And like, oh, my word, I can't do this. I don't want to have employees anymore. There's so much responsibility. Like, I'm just gonna be solo again. Don't do that, Dean. I know that's not who you are. I know you want something bigger than that. You gotta get. You don't. Do not take a.

Victim mentality and say, oh, my employee left me and now I'm stuck and I gotta go solo. No, this is the time for you to buckle down. Yeah, life is hard. Let's go. Like, let's go get employees. All right, so go do a yard sign. Go hold a sign on the side of the street. Go run ads. No more marketing dollars. You do not spend money on marketing. The website's going to produce natively at zero customer acquisition cost. You need to go focus on hiring and finding people. Call people. Call pastors. Why don't you. Why don't you call pastors call youth organizers, call the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce. Call these people. Like, if you really want to get aggressive. My goodness. Hey, Mike. Just bought my first mower last week and finishing building my bike trailer for the other day. That is so cool. Good for you, man. I love it. No one needs $10 trillion to get started with lawn care. Dean's paying Mike's power bill.

That's awesome. Zachary, there is a company in the Chicago area that has national distribution rights to Skvarna. Can't remember the name. I know you're talking about, Zachary, but they have a financing problem for the mowers. Can't remember the name of the company. I do remember. I've talked to them. So words of wisdom about hiring your friend to help you as your first employee go back. Yesterday I posted a video about when I got. I got sued by one of my first employees. At the beginning there, I talk a little bit about that. Hiring people that you know, people your friends, family, etc. So please click the like button, people. We have over 80 people watching, so please click the like button. I would really appreciate that. It would give me a great feeling as I head into the weekend. It's a $50 question. I should have done more people planning for the spring. Yeah, Dean, guess what? Like, it's gonna happen. You plan. Sometimes you have a great team going in the spring, and then all of a sudden, like, especially when you're three, four, five people, you're vulnerable to one of them leaving, one of them getting sick, and one of them getting a great position from another company, and you're down to nothing. Like it can happen like that. So that's why I always talk about scale being your best offense, because you're really your best defense. Defending your business from vulnerabilities is a great offense. Going and scaling and getting more people creates redundancy.

I appreciate you sharing the knowledge, Dean. I was going to start my lawn care business this year, but I need to have knee surgery. Should I wait till next year or try in the middle of season to start? Phil, that's a good question. If you're going to start it, you need to have a sufficient amount of capital to be able to hire people from day one. So you definitely are going to want to make sure you have, like, at least $20,000 in the bank. In my opinion, if you're going to scale the business, get equipment, hire somebody, because you're not going to be making profit from day one because you're not doing the labor. So you're Going to have overhead. Your margins aren't going to be like 80% as they would if you were doing all the work yourself. Hey Mike, I'm going to into my third season mowing and I'm 15. How should I grow my business? I got my license and only only have maybe two or three clients maybe right now. Kaden, listen, a lot of my videos, I talk a lot about different marketing strategies and things that don't cost a lot of money. We had our best year in 25 years last year. Big year. Yep. And I expect 2021 to be even bigger. Mike, do you know if the robot can cut overgrown grass? Not right now. Again, another disadvantage. But again it's not really built for that. It's built for, for recurring service and just trimming the top off and mowing 24,7. There's definitely robots that are bigger like the one I was talking about. This 48 inch deck, that one could probably take off, you know, six inch grass, something like that. Debris removal charge extra or build it into your shrub trimming price. I would charge it as I would charge it. In your estimate the same like give the customer a set price. But I would have, you know, set prices based upon debris. Right. So how many hours and how much debris you're going to be having on that job? How much money do I need to spend on effective marketing to produce 150k in my opinion, looking for a 10 to 20x multiple on those marketing dollars for the first 12 months. So in your case you'd be looking at spending between, you know, probably 100, you know, between 7 and $15,000 depending on how effective your marketing is. That being said, I've seen, you know, in our market we've had or in our franchise system we've had people have as high as a 30 or 36 multiple on their marketing. We've had people as low as 8. So it depends on your market. Depends the time of year. Your customer acquisition cost is gonna be much, much higher when demand is low. So if you're marketing in the middle of the dead heat of summer for mowing, yeah, it's gonna cost a lot more to get a customer. Same thing in the winter. So expect the spring rush to be the time we were able to invest and absolutely is an opportunity. Carl's Mower and Saw thank you Josh for bringing the video the other day. I think you would like if you, Josh, if you got into the video stream late, watch the whole thing because I talk exactly about that. Think robot, think robots to complement what you offer Premium Service Labor Shortage 110 it is the way of the future. I am not against it at all. Have we, have we been able to track down the guy that has that our new customers talk about that cut their one Corey. I love it. Yeah it's always the guy, the other guy he used to mow it for $5. What is your take on social review I.e video reviews versus written reviews from Google. The thing about video reviews, if you're posting like your website and things like that I feel like they're great. However the customer knows from the very get that you've created those and that you've at least edited them to some extent. Like if you're in front of your customer and you're videoing them they're not gonna say negative things when it's coming from an online source they, they are somewhat objective in terms of the fact that they could post whatever they wanted on there without you being there. So it's definitely just really depends. In my opinion there's good rate social proof with the video. We've done some videos before but in most people who are actually looking for reviews like is this company good? They're looking for objective reviews and when you sit in front of a customer with a camera you're not objective. Craigslist has been dead this year. Two paid job posts and zero responses in one week in Philadelphia. Crazy scarce employment market. Yeah, it's going to be really, really really really hard. Going to get worse and worse as they pump more and more money into the system but again it's going to increase our demand. Right. Because people have money. They have money set aside for these type of projects. What's a good resource for learning how to make good effective Google Ads? YouTube look it up and I think I made a couple videos on it too. What are your thoughts on said company and their business model that they pitch? So it's really interesting because Robin that was a company, they were doing a franchise model that they were. They were using robot mowers and they just recently switched out of the out of the franchise model because guess what, the franchise model is not easy. Everyone thinks you make a bunch of money. It's very difficult. So if you're going after money like they are because they're back venture backed company and they're less mission oriented they're just going after their money which is fine. That's just what companies do if that's the motive. Franchise model is not great and that's what they reset recently found out and they're they're switching away from the franchise model. In my opinion, that's a good business move for them because the franchise model in that type of environment is bad, in my opinion. If we as the service provider are subsidizing the cost of the mower, that's an issue because it's going to basically come to the point where the customer the price as the mower gets cheaper and cheaper, the, the customer's like, well, why wouldn't I just go buy it at the end of the day, the manufacturer, their goal is not to get you to buy the mower because you can give you much more. You get more lawns done with the mower, all right, you're much more efficient. They much. They want to get the price down to where the consumer buys so they can sell millions of these. They don't want to sell a couple thousand of these to, to landscape professionals. They want to sell these to the homeowner. And to do that, they'll get the price down effectively to that point. So when a place like Robin basically is trying to get that price down to where they're leasing them out and then like giving it to the customer, eventually it's going to get cheap enough where the customer just buys the robot themselves. Wouldn't this mean that each property will need two mowers front and backyard? Nope. There's already technology that will get them into the backyard and that will only improve. All right, last one here. Best marketing strategy for first year in lawn care. I have 5K. I would say it would be door hangers. Knocking on doors and actually talking to people and yard signs between those three things. If you're good at talking to people, knock on the door and talk to them. Don't just do the door hanger. You're already at the door. Okay. Brian Connor. So this is our franchisee over in Augusta, Georgia. He is awesome. Brian. I'll answer your question then I'm gonna go. Hey, Mike, I am nearing the last stages that you referenced. For a seven figure business, we should push past 1 million in revenue. I may, I may have gotten the last step backwards. Currently, Jeremy is our. Jeremy is our estimator. He's doing a great job. He also handles a schedule and man maintenance and project employee concerns. I am currently in the office manager role handling submission estimates and emails. Jeremy is definitely my number two and he will continue to fill my role as I outgrow it. Your, your question got cut off, Brian, but I kind of think what you're. You're saying you're asking, should you get an office manager and move into the sales position? So I didn't clarify this perfectly last time. That is that some people, some owners personality is actually more governed towards an office manager and they should go get an estimator and they should flip those two roles. So Brian, in your case, it becomes just about self awareness. Are you the better salesperson or is Jeremy? Because if Jeremy's a better salesperson, he should be in that role and you should be the office person. Okay, so I don't feel like, I feel like the office position estimator. It really depends on the owner's personality. In my opinion, from my experience, 90% of the time, the owner is the better salesperson because that's why we build the business where we built everything on sales and the ability to, you know, get more customers, sell people on working for us, go out, get more clients. And so usually that's why I say the estimator rules the last one you fill. But it could be for you, Brian, if you feel like there's other people that are better than selling, you might be the office manager and fill that position last. How many years does it take for the average lawn care company to gain profitability? I could get there this year, but would also like to expand in equipment to be more efficient as I grow. So it really comes down to how fast you want to scale, right? The faster, you know, speed. Speed creates waste. So if you're going to grow really quickly, you're usually not going to be as profitable as quickly. I could be profitable from day one if I start with little hand shears and I go out and sell. Labor day to door, labor door to door. Now I'm not going to scale that. I'm not never getting a big business. I'm not going to get 20 employees doing that. So definitely if I want to scale and grow, there's going to be a degree of waste and more cost going in. Therefore less margin and profitability comes a little bit later. My hiring has been up and down with this Covid can't find any young, eager employees anymore. All right, you need to have P4P. That's just kind of my two cents, my opinion on that. All right, everyone, thank you so much for joining me having fantastic rest of your weekend. And I want to say thank you to everyone that has purchased the course has been, you know, supporting us lawn care web design. Today Danny was able to create a really cool video. Go ahead and check it out. There's gonna be more of those type of ones that are a little more high production value. We're gonna get some really cool shots. I want to do some stuff where I actually go undercover and, like, go door knocking. I want to actually, down the road, knock on wood, we can actually have time for me to do this. I want to actually go to a place, like, way away and start a lawn care business from scratch and try to build it up to, like, a hundred thousand in monthly revenue within like, a month. I don't know if I can have that much time. Even if I try to do it where I try to get to, like, where I have to hire my first employee and then I let them run with it as a GM or something. I don't know. We're just thinking about trying to make it where it's more creative content and stuff that we can actually, you know, be more entertaining instead of just educational, which I love educational, but sometimes entertaining is great too. So thank you so much, everyone. I really appreciate your time. Have an amazing weekend, and we'll see you on the next video.