Winter is KILLING this $1.1M Lawn Care Business

I really can't afford this right now.

Oh, bro. It's free. It's free. Today we're in Indiana visiting Zach with.

Bayer Lawn and Landscape.

Mistakes are going to happen, but we need to go through. I don't really want any more debt.

The business grew fast, over $1.1 million this year.

Do you feel comfortable with the current cash position? No.

Why are you here?

Until you do the work, and then I'm like, crap, I have to pay my employees.

You know, we had people last year that were angry, but Zach has over.

$200,000 in equipment debt.

How many pieces of broken equipment is allowed?

I was here in the afternoon, and one of the guys goes, I think that tire's blown. And just completely blown.

Okay, if two trucks are down, is that okay? What about one Bad timing?

I mean, I can stick my finger inside the tire.

So last winter, his cash dwindled to just $3,000 in the bank.

We lost money January, February, March. Trying to figure out how to make.

Money there or even just break even.

The real constraint is going to be the leads during the off season.

I don't know if I've ever gotten a lead for any work in the off season.

This is the business turnaround show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 190 locations around the world. I travel the fixing struggling businesses.

This is the thing that unlocks the 3 million.

Oh, that's good.

Our goal is to give Zach a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks.

And I was like, all right, 1, 2, 3. We're gonna knock this out in a week, and we're gonna start selling.

A cup of milk with two scoops of protein powder.

Really blending in there.

Yeah. Look at those geese. They're on their way down south. Zeus, fellas crushing. And he's only 23. Let's go.

I started doing landscaping when I was.

14 with my parents.

Push mower went full time with it in 2022. So this is our fourth year in.

Business, and they grew really fast, but they are spending a lot on marketing. 4% of revenue is not horrible. Like, when you're growing a lot when doing $1.1 million in revenue, that's a lot of money. It's like $45,000 a year. So he's definitely in growth mode.

First year was 292,000. Second year was 460.

Last year was 770.

And this year we'll do about 1.1 million. Biggest hurdle is still the Offseason, it's not even Q4, it's Q1.

Their profits are good for eight months of the year. January, February, March. Last year, they lost money trying to.

Figure out how to make money there.

Or even just break even.

So when you have, like, you know, 160, $170,000 of debt on a $1.1 million business, not a big deal. I'm okay with it. But when you get down to as low as $3,000 in the bank account during the off season, that's killing.

I really want to just grow this one location.

My original goal was to $10 million.

So, you know, how do I get there?

There is debt. There's 256,000 of debt. I'm not super concerned by that. When you're growing by 4 or $500,000 a year like he is, I am a little bit concerned by the fact that we're doing 130,000amonth in revenue, has $60,000 in the bank, and we have an off season where we lose money. So instead of trying to attack the cash flow issue with him, I'm probably going to go right after the off season, because if you don't lose money for any month of the year, you can be a little bit more aggressive on how much cash you have in the bank, because you know, it never goes down. And as long as you never go down.

Dude.

Zach. How's it going, man? What's up, man?

Good to see you.

It's great to see you. My name is Zach Beyer. I own Byerlawn and Landscape. This is our fourth year in business, and we're looking to continue to grow.

I'm Elizabeth.

Good to meet you.

Nice to meet you. This is my mom and my office administrator. Admin. Yes. And this is my wife.

Yes.

So have you been admin from day one?

No.

Oh, no.

He hired me last May, right?

Yeah, May 24th.

Last May.

And so kind of give me a little bit of the background. So I know it was like 2022 you started, right?

Yep. That's when we started. Technically. I've been mowing since I was. College was when Covid hit. I was mowing a ton of lawns and going to school online. I think I probably had like 50 or 60 mowing accounts. Worked for the Colts for a little bit, and I hated every second of it. I decided, let's not do that. Let's try this mowing thing. And that's when I went full time with it and then went to school online. I felt kind of Foolish. When the whole Colts thing didn't work out, if I would have just dropped everything I had going. Last year we did 770, and this year we're on track to do 1.1.

This year was the first year you kind of had a little more breathing.

Room in terms of financially, just like, cash. I don't have to look at the bank account every morning and be like, holy cow. You know, things have just seemed like they flowed much better. This is also the first year I told her that we returned all of our employees from last year through the winter. So everyone came back. Believe it or not, this was the first year I returned everyone from last year. Everyone came back in the spring. We struggled with people showing up on time last year. So one of the bonuses, quarterly bonuses, if you show up on time every day, you get 500 bucks. People show up on time.

Now for the off season, they just go work next door.

Is that right?

Kind of. So we have the guy who owns my shop that we were at, he owns a huge, like, manufacturing trucking company in. Over in Westfield. They offered all my guys jobs last year. Not everyone took him, but that was the option. When we first moved in, we had room for one truck and trailer to park, like, right here. So the owner, a buddy of mine, he took a barn down, and this was just like wood storage. And I asked him, like, can you throw me a bone and please let me park my truck somewhere? And then he slowly let us just move his stuff out. Move his stuff. I move his stuff out. So now we have a little bit. A little bit more space. And he let us put a fuel tank and stuff outside over there. So that's been really, really nice.

Just that one quarter of January, February, March. How can we make sure that's profitable? Because as you've been growing so much, even last year, like 50% almost, that does suck cash. And so if we can just make sure that we don't lose money during those few months, we'll solve a lot of problems. You've heard about the off season. Throughout the episode with Zach, you hear me constantly talking about the off season. That's a period of the year where your leads drop off a cliff and revenue drops dramatically. Now, this is why home services are a terrible business. And I wrote this entire book for five different ways to solve this for any home service business. Now, you can get the book on Amazon, but also if you want a free online course and training that I have, just go to mikeannies.com, get the workshop for free, and Solve the off season once and for all. You've heard about the off season. So what track are you kind of appealing to or thinking about going into? What's sort of your idea during your.

Friday workshop this year in Seattle?

We do not address shutdown mode.

We are not going to concede to the off season. What we will do is we will sell more our current service. We'll do it better. We will upsell, and that's through mowing, sell more of it. Especially in our markets where it still is possible. And even though you might only mow monthly or bi weekly instead of weekly, it's still possible you can sell more and better to the limited amount of demand that's there.

All of the ideas, I was like, I don't think that's gonna work. I don't think that's work until you get to winter services.

Recurring services.

At Cure, we use winter services. The average location revenue for Q4 inside of Augusta Lawn Care, we increased revenue by 36% and we focused on it for three months.

And then you started showing some of the examples of. I don't remember who it was. Selling it with the video. Yeah, like, that's the one. That's the one that I need to do.

As a summary.

Their Q4 in 22 was 93,000. Q4 in 2023 was 962,000. In Q4, they made $373,000, entered the Seven Figure Club, and started their second location. For Caleb, Tracy, and for Jason, give it up. 3, 2, 1.

What I'm struggling with is figuring out how to install that because we have so many people. Fall cleanups, string cleanups. It's like, okay, am I completely replacing those? What is the way that I'm selling it? I know you said that a lot of the times you have, like, stuff in your terms about mowing customers, they automatically transfer over. It's just jumbled in my head. That's. I think that's the answer for me.

Okay.

But I'm open to suggestions or help on that.

Okay, cool. We'll go through each of the 4L's for the 4L framework just to kind of identify some of the opportunities.

Sure.

Then we'll figure out what's the game plan.

The 4L framework shares the full four reasons why every home service business stops growing. It's either because of a lack of liquidity, cash in the bank, a lack of leads, a lack of labor, or.

A lack of leadership from a liquidity perspective. I know last off season with it being so brutal, it Dipped really low. Like, I think it was like 3,000 in the bank during January. Now we're in a much better spot. From your perspective, though, do you feel comfortable with the current cash position? I do. Okay, so you're fine?

Yeah.

I just had my financial review with my CFOs. April through July, we've net like 25% every month. We've been doing everywhere between 115 to 135k a month. And top line, again with a 25%.

Net at the bottom.

I've never had that before. I'm taking home a nice paycheck twice a month. That also has not happened for a long time. We're sitting around 90, which feels good. It is up since the end, which a lot of that. We do a ton of prepays in February. That's not shown in a lot of that stuff. We crew it.

I see that on the. Okay, great. You have most of a good account.

Yeah, it's a cfo.

It's very rare that people will do that on their balance.

The deferred revenue.

Deferred revenue.

So they're great.

I was either a, someone's hiding something, or B, they do exactly what they're doing. That's good.

Okay, so you got.

You get prepayments. How much is in prepayments?

In February this year, we had almost 150,000. I give a 5% discount if they prepay. So there's two neighborhoods we're in where the neighborhood allows the. The homeowners to choose between two companies, us and someone else. So we have a package but no discount. They have to pay by the end.

Of March, and that's all hoa. But they're the individual customers.

Yes, the residential, but it's commercial. But in copilot, we're serving each individual customer.

And are you billing each individual customer? Oh, really interesting. So 150,000 prepays 5% of discounts on some of that. And that hits in February. That's why your cash jumped. Made sense. And then you're putting on your balance sheet that that revenue is deferred.

Yep.

Cool.

Makes sense because right now you're doing like 130, 140,000amonth in revenue.

Yeah. Our peak season is about 130. The consistent from the past, really since the end of May. June has been like between 100 and.

120 in my perspective. Like, I like to have one month of revenue in the bank. The reason I say this because, like, when I was growing fast, I didn't have a month worth of revenue. In the bank. I was like default aggressive, go, go, go. So I don't fault you for that. I don't think it's like a constraint necessarily.

Liquidity, usually I would like to have at least one month of in the bank before I tell someone to expand and grow. And right now they have about $90,000 in the bank, which is good, but it's not that one month threshold. So 120, $130,000 would make me feel more comfortable if we had that much money in the bank before we started to really try to scale the business.

At 90, you're okay as long as you don't go back into the off season and lose 50 or 60. I know you want to grow a big business so like we can default more aggressive and not go for the month worth of revenue in the bank. We just got to make sure we don't lose money for three months.

Sometimes when we go up for turnarounds, people think that we are here to like, you must follow this rule book and this system. It's like, look, if someone is more risk prone and they're okay with being less cash in the bank and that doesn't keep them up at night, great. We can use that to grow the business faster. But then if someone has four kids and a bunch of dependents and they have a house they don't want to lose, they might be a little more conservative and need more cash in the bank before they grow. They do have quite a bit of debt, like $200,000.

It's all mostly equipment debt. Right. From Sheffield.

All of its equipment debt.

Right.

And it's all three or four year terms. Like right now you're paying like 17, 1800 dollars in interest. But how much in payments is like five, four or five grand?

Yeah. One of them, a guidance line that we got last year is maybe 12 months interest only. So that hasn't hit yet. It'll hit in the spring. Got it. So that's why I'm kind of like, I don't really want any more. But yeah, four or five grand is probably accurate.

And what's the interest on that once.

It hits on that? Yeah, no, it's the same. I think it's 7%.

Okay. So right now we're paying out four or five grand a month in debt payments. $1,700 a month about approximately interest. We don't think we need any more interest going next spring.

Exactly.

It's like 6 or 7% interest. It's about 4 or $5,000 a month in payments. And only about $1700 per month in interest on a business doing 150,000amonth in revenue. I'm not super concerned from a labor perspective.

We seem to have a pretty good gig with this person next door or like the landlord. And then also the fact that everyone came back this past spring.

Everyone came back. I actually reached out to that. That guy next door. They don't know if they're gonna offer that again this year. Got it. We'll see. I'm gonna try to have something like that. Ideally I don't. They don't have to go anywhere though. Ideally we fix this and they can stay on staff at least for right some hours a week.

And how many team members are there now?

Eight full time.

Eight full time.

One one part time guy that's been with me for four years and then my mom is 10.

The next constraint in the 400 framework is labor. And right now I don't see that as a current constraint. Why? They have eight employees. They have one owner that's managing them very well. He's able to get them a job during the off season using this current situation with his landlord. A big reason they've had such a great year this year is because all of his crew was able to come back this spring.

And then just for my knowledge, are you trying to get out of this position or like you want to be here?

You know what? My office is my La Z Boy.

Okay.

I love it.

Okay, cool.

That is what worked really well is when I needed this position, she expressed interest in it and I don't have an office somewhere. And I've heard you say this and I've had other mentors tell me it's hard to trust someone working remote that you for a brand new position. I can trust her and she's killed it. So it works out well and it.

Makes him call me. So I actually get to talk to him.

We do get to talk.

I know that he would never call.

Me if it wasn't for work. So this is good. You get paid on your La Z Boy and you get to talk to your son.

This is great.

You hear some people say don't mix business and family, which I understand, bad stuff can happen. But it's great. I love it. And especially like I said, when I needed to hire something like this, who is going to be handling invoicing and handling important stuff like that? I can trust my mom.

I think the next thing that you're going to encounter is like now you need a mid level management. And so when you look at like a sales manager and operations manager and admin manager. And then you really, as the CEO, most of your role right now is sales and operations.

Yep.

You have now a great admin person. You're delegating most of, like phone calls, emails, payroll, all that gets handled. You're still handling two of the hats of the business. You have sales, operations and administration. You have an admin delegated. Great. That's the lowest leverage, then operations and.

Then sales as that moves from $1 million in revenue to $3 million in revenue. The big change that's gonna have to happen is we've gotta actually start delegating a lot of aspects of the business. If you think about the business, sales, getting the work, operations doing the work, and admin as getting paid for the work. Right now he's delegated a lot of the admin work and I'm really happy about that. His mom's doing a great job. But right now he's still juggling all the sales and all the operations.

If I remember correctly, you said you tried hiring an operations person before. How did that go?

I had a guy that actually was my first employee ever. He kind of held the title operations manager last year. He's no longer with us. He left in October, but he was still out in the field. And I did not handle that situation very well. I told him you'd be doing xyz, then we needed more help on the field and then he was in the field. So I learned a lot from that. He was kind of my main guy. And I looked in the future and kind of saw him growing with me. And so that was kind of a. A big shock to me. But I didn't do a good job at actually getting the point across. Like, hey, I see you growing with me. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of communication, leadership stuff. So this past off season, I actually offered my right hand. Guy's name's Chandler, actually offered him the position. I said, I'll pay you 50 grand a year. You will be out of the field unless we need you in the field operations. He turned it down. He enjoys being in the field as a crew leader. And then I turned indeed and interviewed over 50 people. And I had 10 guys that I really liked. And then a mentor of mine, he's about 3, 4 million. He's like, I don't think you can afford this right now. Started looking closer and I'm like, you're right. Like, I don't think I can comfortably. Especially when you saw Our numbers in January, February. It's like, I really can't afford this right now. So I ended up not offering anyone the position, which I think was the right one. I look at his business and I'm like, dude, I'm almost just copying everything he does, you know, and now copying everything Mike does as well it seems. So I tried to focus on getting all of my employees more self reliant. We do a ton of one man crews. I love one man mowing crews. Our crews are just one man, two man max. The nice thing is when we do have a truck down, we just divide two, one man. And they can get almost as much as they can done when they're by themselves. How can I instill leadership? Ownership or leadership, right. Like take accountability of your work. This spring it felt like we had a lot of one off complaints for a customer, but it was the same thing that getting complained about. So I started this and it basically just tracks who's the one not doing their job. And then we, you know how we have damage reports down there for some of the big stuff that's gone wrong. And every Monday we go over that and we have one employee a week gets a gift card. So fast food, the employee of the week thing, accountability board, that was one of my questions for you today is at what point can I afford one? Is it right to go after someone again? To go, hey, you're being an operations manager but you're going to be in the field for 20 hours a week. And like how do you see that working in my size company with my numbers and everything like that?

Number one, solve the off season problem. If you go into next season with instead of three grand, you have 150 grand in your pocket. Totally different. And so that's why it's, it's just the cornerstone to everything. Cause it unlocks the cash flow, unlocks way more confidence. You can be way more aggressive with your cash throughout the second half of the year. If the first half of the year you don't lose money. If it takes us all the way till June to dig out and get to zero, it's just going to be very difficult to make any strategic decision in the second half of the year.

And go aggressive once you get to a million dollars. Like you've never ran a million dollar company before, you know what I mean? So it's just like, okay, how do I do this?

It is a commitment financially for an operations manager. I do think that if you went into next spring and experienced another spring rush, you'd Be forced to. You're gonna be at 1.3, 1.4. You will not be able to manage the crew and do all the estimates.

The fourth constraint in the 4L framework is leadership. And this is the one that Zach's gonna hit next year if he grows anymore.

Even just like training new team members, there'll be so many new team members that like that will be the friction point is if you will not be training them well. And so a lot of times one owner can manage up to eight people very effectively. It's when you start getting 10, 11 and 12, it starts to be very difficult.

It's Easy to handle 6, 7, 8, 9 employees with you as the owner. When you start getting 10, 12, 13, 14 employees, you start losing the ability to be able to manage them effectively. And you need middle management. He's going to need an operations manager to be able to give more of his time back so he can focus on sales and growing the business.

If you look at admin manager, operations manager, you would stay in sales probably still next year.

That's the goal. Yeah.

And then the same thing would happen. You'd eventually get a sales salesperson. Right. And then that's when you're probably a $3 million company. You have you at the top as CEO, sales manager, operations manager, admin manager.

I know, I've heard you say that like eight people is kind of the ideal number to manage. So how do you handle it? Like when you get to 16, you literally have two operations managers and they have like their set people. For my long term vision, how do you handle that?

Yeah, I wouldn't get too hung up on the number like direct reports under your operations, like managers like assistant manager, crew leaders, etc. It's more a function of as you go past that first eight to 15 people, it's going to become more a matter of what's the ratio of admin and salespeople, that is overhead versus people out in the field. That's when I see a big problem when you hit that $3 million marker is you see bloat and all of a sudden you have four people in the office and three people doing sales and 15 people out in the field. It's like, whoa, whoa, we had eight people technicians and one people in the office before. That's like another problem down the road. Most of the time that happens though, if when you hand things off to your operations manager or your sales manager, you don't have sales systems in place because then it is just based upon like, oh, like the Way that you manage is talk to everybody versus like, oh, here's the KPIs, here's the metrics you manage through this report. One way to make that handoff to your operations manager next year much more smooth is creating systems for operations.

He's gonna have to create systems and procedures, metrics and KPIs for the operations manager to know if they're doing a good job and for him to know.

If they're doing a good job.

So what happened in the past doesn't repeat itself again.

From an admin perspective, there's probably a lot of systems being built already. You've handed it off. It has to have systems have to start forming. And she's giving you a lot of grace because it probably wasn't that way when she first first came on.

It's still getting there.

Yeah. It's more difficult to find an operations manager that is willing to step in and create systems for you because they like structure. If they could go create systems on their own, they would go start their own business. And so that's why that unicorn is very difficult to find someone who wants a job but also can step into chaos and create all of the structure really giving them what are the metrics of success for operations? What does the efficiency score need to be for the team? What's the close rate need to be for a salesperson down the road? Sales. So knowing what those metrics are and then what good looks like for them is really important before you get an operations manager.

Over the last four years, I've learned a ton. A lot of struggles with employees and how to correctly manage, but also instill confidence and get people bought into. Into my vision. We're still trying to improve at that.

How I like to break it up when it's like, what are they going to do? Especially when you're growing so quickly. It's simply like sales gets the work, operations does the work, then admin gets paid. In order to get paid, you got email, phone call, drawn payer, all the other stuff. Now the reason I like to think of it like this is when it comes to like, who does what, eventually it's going to look like this. Zach does sales, your ops manager does the work. Does the work includes if someone's calling out, they contact the operations manager. If someone needs time off, they go to the operations manager. It has nothing to do with getting work. Right. This is the thing that unlocks the 3 million.

In my opinion, admin is less valuable to the business than operations and operations less valuable to the business than sales in terms of just difficulty and how much you have to pay someone to replace yourself in the business. So most of the time entrepreneurs, the next logical step to go from 1 million to 3 million is replace yourself at the operations manager level and finding a killer that can manage the team, make your jobs, get done, and manage all the equipment so that you can focus just on sales. By doing that, you're able to scale.

A business to 3 million. Let's think about the off season.

The way I think about it right now, the way I'd like to do it is come up with first of all, the exact list of what we're doing for mowing. We do close to like 13, 14 grand a week. Maybe just under half that is commercial. I can't do the winter services for those commercial clients.

Why not?

They're the 13 acre HOAs. They're all kind of the lowest bidder. I can't stand that stuff. But you know what I'm saying.

Residential and mowing commercial. What's that? Is it 50? 50, what's that?

It's probably 60, 40. Residential commercial.

Right now you're doing around 12 to 13,000amonth in residential mowing.

In total mowing.

So you're looking at like maybe $32,000 a month in residential going. If you retain half of that, it's only 16 grand a month.

Yep. If we go to buy recoit cleanups, then the thought is, well, then do I just say screw commercial? The other nice part about the commercial is that those are the only landscaping customers we can start in March and start billing for.

Then you must have quite a few projects.

We do. And that's why the, the total revenue, like I just was looking at the KPI page and maybe I could even pull it up. I don't know if that's helpful or not. On copilot, it's more than I thought. Like your project revenue trailing 12 months. Like in my head, I only have one crew doing projects. That doesn't feel like that much to me. So like, I don't know if that causes more problems with the winter services or not.

What size projects usually like four or five grand. Is that kind of.

That's the main one. Like at this time of year and in the summer, like, we will probably have a total of maybe eight projects that are like 15 to 18 grand.

You guys do a lot of leaves though, don't you?

We do a good amount of leaves.

And when do those stop? Like December, end of December.

Basically, like right before Christmas.

Got it. Yeah. Okay. Do you get a lot of people that just want a fall cleanup? Like call in, like, wanting a fall cleanup? Yeah, like a good leaf cleanup. Okay. Do you ever get to the point where you don't serve them because you're so far behind on your regular customers?

We just kept pushing them off.

Yeah.

Because, well, the leaves last year, the leaves hung on. We had people last year that were angry because they only wanted one fall cleanup. And we came like the beginning of November and they weren't all off yet. And they were like, no, why are you here?

That's when I started selling. You need two if you want us to. Otherwise we're coming. But yes, we have a good amount of people that signed up just for that.

I'm not too concerned about getting the mowing customers on winter services. I think we can convert and we can talk about that. It's just. It's not a lot of money. I would be very interested during leaf season to really go aggressively selling winter services. But we're going to sell it as we don't just come and do your leaf cleanup. We're going to do your leaf cleanup and then we're going to maintain the property throughout the rest of the winter. So if you're doing leaves in October and November, you do the leaf cleanup as they ask. That's what they think they need. And then you're going to give them an offer they can't refuse to keep it looking good all season long over.

The next six weeks. Buyer lawn and landscape needs to secure their off season. They're going to market to new customers. They're going to market to existing customers. They're going to make sure their existing mowing customers sign up for winter services. They're also going to be able to advertise for a very high demand service, leaf cleanups, and then convert those with a great offer into a recurring service during the winter services.

Can I just push fall cleanup as hard as I can and then as they pour and then explain it, or would you actually sell this as a winter service? My biggest thing is it's going to need explanation because I've said, I try to explain it to you. Try to explain it to my cfo, who's a client of mine. He's like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. When you say, I'll be at your property every two weeks. He's like, you don't to need to, you know, so sell it as a fall cleanup. Is that what you would say in.

Terms of introductory Offer to someone that's never done anything with you before. Running an ad is going to look very much like if you need your.

Leaf cleanups, we're here.

You're doing that when the leaves are falling down. Very high demand. You're going to have very low customer acquisition costs. And then you're going to make an offer like you get free core aeration. You know, you have the core aerator. You're going to take 10 minutes to knock out the coration and then do an eight hour property cleanup. The value is $300 for free to them, for the corporation.

So you get tons of leads for that.

You will recoup the customer acquisition cost on a 5, $600 cleanup of the acquisition from Facebook or Google. And then it's all about the upsell process into winter services. And you're going to be on site at the walkthrough, walking them through it. And now you've done the property, you kind of know how long it's going to take. And this other thing is now when you sell that person into winter services, that moves into mowing.

Yep.

Yeah, right. Because that same price comes right into your mowing season.

The biggest problem we've had is that customers come to us for a spring cleanup in March or April and we're booked out till June. So when he made the argument that when you're doing winter services, you really replace the need for a spring cleanup, that was huge. It's going to solve that problem, not only the winter, but allow us to flow right into the mowing season without needing to do a spring cleanup. Opening ourselves up to do more projects, to do more mulch right off the bat, things like that, if you're already.

Paying that every month, it's already in your budget. It's already in your budget. So you might as well go ahead and just keep doing it.

And to people who have never done mowing with you that are not used to spending on a recurring basis, it's like, oh, another subscription. You just break down the fact that, hey, you just spent $700 with us over the course of the next four months, it's gonna cost you like $500. And we're not gonna have to come twice. We're gonna come five, six, seven, eight times and make sure the property's always looking good.

I can do that.

Yeah, make a graphic or something like that.

You write that down.

House.

What's that, mom? Yeah, that need a six week plan.

Look at me, I'm like the first mom. Make flyer.

Create poster.

Yep.

There we go.

Thank you.

For winter, I'm the advent.

I should be taking those.

So there you go.

To turn around buyer, lawn and landscape and make sure that this offseason isn't like last. They've got to take the next six weeks to make these changes. First off, we've got to sell to new customers. We're going to go out and target people that need leaf cleanup, a high demand service during the fall and sell them that one time service. But then also sell them and do recurring maintenance during the off season. That's how we're going to get that revenue during January, February and March.

Mom's going to create a poster for the winter service upsell. That's going to be for post leaf cleanup upsells. That's going to be for new customers. Now let's think though more specifically about existing. What we're going to offer that. What I would probably do is I would go through your existing customer database. I would segment out the 25 or 30 that you know, need leaf cleanup and make the video slightly different. That video is going to say last year we had a whole bunch of customers need a second one.

Sure.

We're gonna prevent that this year. You're getting last year's fall cleanup on the schedule. But then you're also saying, hey, we want to prevent this from happening again. We made this new thing, it's budget friendly, it keeps our crew busy. And you prevent having to do a second cleanup throughout the off season.

I like the idea of pushing and saying it keeps our crew busy through the holidays because it's Indiana and they're gonna pay the money for those people to work more than they will for themselves.

Totally. It's such a big win for everyone. It's just a matter of explanation, right? It's better for them, they save money. It's better for you. You make money and it's better for your crew. Cause they don't get laid off.

And would you do the same personalized video or would you have one video kind of for these people showing like an example house, this is what we do and send it out to all of them.

It comes down to how much time you have. I'm gonna go the easier route. If you really wanted to go, you would do individual to each customer. That is going to take 150, probably three days, four days of just straight making videos. Your conversion will be higher. But what you could do as to probably get 70, 80% of those people that sign up is making two videos. One is for people with Leaves. And then you're gonna have people without leaves. The people without leaves. This is easy. It's like, hey, we're going from mowing. We go right into winter services.

Here's all the things that you're going to get. This prevents you from needing a spring cleanup.

And you don't get pushed off. Once we hit the spring like we did last year, and you're going to pull up the sheet that you've made and do the price comparison of an average property.

And you just be like, hey, Mr. Jones, last year we had a big problem. We had people doing two, three property cleanups.

We're just trying to do it where we prevent you from having to get a spring cleanup. We go right from mowing into this regular service. We spend the same amount of time on your property. Here are the stuff we're gonna get done, et cetera. That's easy. The people with the leaves, those are the ones you're gonna be like, hey, we're coming up into the fall season. We're gonna. We're booking out for leaves. We're gonna get on the schedule like last year. Price hasn't changed. That said, last year we had a whole bunch of customers have to have a second one because the leaves stayed up. So what we're doing this year is once we do your first one, we're now doing this new service that's much.

More budget friendly to keep the property looking good.

The entire Aussie.

And you still don't have to do spring cleanup.

Yes.

And your property looks good during the Christmas holidays. Our team doesn't have to get laid.

Off during the holidays.

Lean all into that.

I think he has a unique ability to take something that is hard for me to wrap my mind around. It's new to me for him to lay it out in just such clear terms.

It's great.

The other opportunity I think, though, is to try to get this prepay pulled.

Forward more into January.

Yeah. Right. Now, why are they paying in February? Is that just like everything renews in March?

One of my really good mentors here, he's 10 million a year, and I copy a lot of stuff he does.

Yeah.

And he did it in February, so we'll do it February.

There's really no reason.

Okay. And these are all commercial or all.

Residential for the prepays? Yeah, Commercial is no prepay for commercial people.

Got it at all. All residential.

It gets sent to every customer who did recurring services last year. I don't really send out prepaid notices for people who, like, just signed up for mulch. But every like mowing customer, for instance, they get a prepay offer for every single service that we offer offer. So it's also trying to sell them on. Like I've had people this year who didn't know we did aeration. They did mowing last year. They signed up for extra services.

So you're offering 5% off to basically anyone that signed up that was doing mowing last year if they just prepay at the beginning of the year.

Yeah.

What's your close rate right now?

50%.

I would be tempted to say instead of doing a prepaid discount, do a. Our prices are going up. Unless you prepay, then you get your prices locked in.

Oh, that's good.

Have you raised prices recently?

Yeah, we did this past 15%. Everyone, every server.

Okay. Do you want people to prepay?

The reason I started it originally is because when I started my company, I had no money, so I used all of that to go buy trucks.

Yeah, that works.

It didn't work until you do the work. And then I'm like, crap, I have to pay my employees. You know, I learned that the hard way. That's when I had negative bank balances, to be honest with you. I love when people prepay to 150. I was like, okay, calm down.

Right, right.

But people kept coming in. I'm like, I don't want to give away this much in discount. The nice part was half of that was no discounted for that neighborhood specifically that I was talking about.

Right, right. Okay, okay.

So all that to say, I do like when people prepay. I wish I could put a cap on it, but it's not how that works.

Well, you could say the first x amount of people, you could say, hey, this year the offer is the first 15 people or 20 people or whatever, they get it. You could also though, if you ever wanted a price increase, I would tie it to like when you do a price increase based on these factors and your prices are gonna go up 10% unless you prepay for the year, you get your prices locked in.

I was gon do 10% increase regardless.

All right, so then I would just say, hey, across the board, what you're.

Already going to say, this is where.

The prices are going. If you want to lock in your current price and not get an increase, go ahead and do a 12 month prepay. That way you're not giving away 5%, which is like realistically half of your margin. Right now.

Zach is collecting $150,000, almost 10% of his revenue in the first couple months of the year and then earning that.

Revenue throughout the rest of the year.

Although it's really good for cash flow, he's basically going for like $3,000 in the bank to 150,000 doll bank. Because in January he has nothing to do and no money. And then he gets this huge chunk of prepayments.

So I would probably do the 10% and then be like, hey, for the first X amount of people, still put the urgency in there. We are allowing you to go ahead and lock in your prices for this year at the current rate. No increase if you prepay.

Okay, perfect. And then you still would push that up to January though.

It really comes down to the offseason. Like I would say, even the timing of that, I would all hinge on your offseason.

Okay.

If you're off season, you get through every month is a, a slightly positive cash flow and we go into next season 150 grand. Like this is a very different conversation, right? You're not going to want to give up your margin. So I think it's just a matter of like, let's focus first on the off season, all these offers for new customers, existing customers, and then address whether or not we even want to do prepay. And if we do, let's do it in the direction of you're getting a price increase if you don't get this. But if you go in cash flush and you're ready to go next spring, you might say, hey, we're just doing a pricing process increase period, and that's it.

No free.

Yeah, sure, right. Although I love to get money like prepaid. So like if you could tie it in and get an extra 150 grand and then have a very good cash position for your operations manager to step into and you get a couple more trucks, hire a couple more employees, that could very easily jump you to the 2.5 pretty quick. Now, I like prepayments.

The faster I can get my money, the better. However, if you don't have a solid plan in place and you haven't budgeted correctly, this could lead to a huge problem because down the road you run out of money again and you still have yet to deliver on the services you promised. And so be very careful with collecting money up front if you don't have a purpose for it. If you need to get some trucks, great. Get the prepayments, get the trucks to be able to double revenue, awesome move. But if you don't have any place to put the cash and it's just going to sit there and burn a hole in your pocket and you're going to spend on something stupid. Don't get prepayments.

All of that again hinges on your off season.

Okay.

That's where like I haven't spent too much time on it because I do believe fixing this gives you so many options for where you go next spring.

One more question for that. We kind of use the prepayment as like, this is your price for the year and if we don't hear from you, it's automatically accepted even though you don't pay. And at the bottom there, there's the terms that I have all recurring services renew unless noted otherwise. Is that when you would take the opportunity to add this in here? No, people forget about when you don't include that in.

Not at the beginning of the season. Okay. You have to explain winter services, otherwise they get mad and they will cancel.

And I send that text through co pilot, right?

Yeah. Not captivated. Okay.

Oh, do you not have texting through copilot?

Oh, bro, I know.

Are you an enterprise?

Yeah.

Oh, bro, it's free. It's free.

I know it is the thing that I can't get over.

What a different number.

So this is our. Our number on all of our. On all of our trucks. I just need to set this up though, right?

Oh, bro, it's free. We don't even charge for text.

You can send out thousands of text messages upsell customers.

But this is you mainly using this not for communication, just for upsells.

We use it for automations and we use it for text blasts. But like right now, if you send an estimate out or ingest it via.

Email, estimates all go through email. And then I tell them, hey, it went through email.

Look at, look at. Really?

Really? Oh, bro, Bro.

Dude, it's free. Text messages on copilot. Goodness.

Every single estimate that goes out gets sent via text in addition to email at the same time.

Okay. Okay.

Immediately you will increase close ratio by from like 50% to 65 to 70%.

The fact that they haven't been using the text feature inside Copilot means that there's a lot of juice to squeeze in terms of close ratio on new estimates as well as upsells to their existing customers. Now they'll be able to send videos back and forth from the crew to the office, upsell the customer immediately and give them an additional offer. Awesome. Well, I think. I think we're in a good spot.

This is great.

You know, I guess there's what one thing for mom, the poster we got the existing customers making the loom videos for them and we got text messages.

Sometimes when we do the turnaround, it's like, okay, like, hopefully they make some progress. This one is like, we will know in six weeks if he actually is going to do these things because the.

Off season is right around the corner.

I've been thinking about this winter services thing and how exactly do I roll it out? And I was like, all right, 1, 2, 3. We're going to knock this out in a week and we're going to start sell.

Yeah, it was a, it was a huge help to us. And, and yeah, that day was fun. After you guys left us, my mom and I were like, all right, let's get to work. No, we're super, super thankful that you guys were able to, to stop by and help us out. And then the, the six week plan. So the, the big one was getting the kind of the sales pitch together for winter services. So all of our graphics and everything that we were sending out to customers for that obviously got that done.

Then it was kind of funneling our.

Customers into two different that we were trying to sell more for the leaf pickup and then another one that we were selling for saving money on spring cleanups. So got those done. Finally got text messages, signed up on copilot. So that has been awesome.

That's been really helpful.

Just even sending estimates right away through text message, especially with our Christmas lights. We sent out a total for mowing customers winter service emails to 140 people. Out of those 140, we did have a lot more. Right now we have 89 people signed up for winter services. So we did the opt in route. Basically, if they didn't opt in out, they were signed up. But we lost 15 more people after our first event. Basically when we sent them an invoice, they were like, what the heck is this for? And you know, like, hey, well, you missed the email. And then we, you know, refunded them. So we lost 15 people. So anyways, going forward, we have 89.

It's worked really well.

So the way that we've decided to do it was mowing ended the second week of November. Instead of rolling straight into winter services, we were trying to get everyone in a fall cleanup. Winter services didn't really start until this week. And this week, earlier than ever, we had two snow events. So we've already done gone through our winter services list twice. That's just for the residential snow, but it's been a big hit. I would say the people that opted out Opted out quickly and. Or got mad at us and were really upset about it. But on the flip side, the people that are signed up really like it. So we've gotten a lot of feedback from them. There's one guy in particular. Like, the first guy that I called to sell him on, I was kind of iffy, like, is this actually going to work? Are people actually going to find value in this? And the guy went on and on for, like, 10 minutes talking about how much he loved the idea. So that was good. Anyways, I'm really happy about it. The guys are all excited about it. They get some more hours here this month. I know that was the main part. We made a couple other changes that. That Mike talked about in terms of, like, prepayments. You know, if we can solve the cash crunch in the winter, I don't need as many of those. So our plan right now is to move that up. Instead of sending out in February, planning on sending those out in January. And Instead of a 5% discount, we're planning on raising prices and then capping it. You know, the first 20 people to prepaid get last year's price, so. So that's another change we've made. I'm excited for. Overall cash position is phenomenal compared to last year. We just had a CFO meeting yesterday, and we were looking at last year compared to this year. I think going into December last year, we had, like, $20,000 in the bank, and yesterday was at 98, so that's a lot better. And I think winter services will be a huge help keeping that out. It was pretty. It's pretty easy when you have direction, you know, do these six things. Yes, that was super helpful.

That's about it.

All in all, it's been great. Yeah, that was. That was. That was fun. You guys are all awesome, so thank you. Thank you so much.