4 Steps To Make More Mowing Money

Hey everyone, this is Will Kelly with military lawn cuts. And in today's video, if you're under two crews and own a lawn care and landscaping company and are trying to scale, I'm going to be sharing with you some of the big things that break when you're scaling at a very fast rate. So if you're doing less than, let's say probably 30,000 in revenue, this is going to be mainly for you because this is where I see the most growth happen. When you're at that size of scale. Scale, you know, let's talk through it. Obviously you're a go getter. You want to grow your business, you want to make more money, you want to make more cash profit, you want to get there as honestly, quickly as possible. Oftentimes what we do as good entrepreneurs often do is we put our head down and we, and we grind. We grind very, very hard. Now the problem is if you don't do this meticulously and methodically, you're going to break or your systems in your business are going to break. And so chaos isn't bad luck, it's missing systems and it's going to cause a, a extreme amount of stress. So I'm here to hopefully help you avoid a lot of that stress. So let's talk about what actually breaks when you scale at a very quick rate. Also, first off, just just to give you guys a little bit of context, We've built a $1.2 million multi location lawn care business in six years. We grew very, very rapidly. The first three years we went from 125,000 to 365,000, up to 650,000. Those were the first three years in business. Hopefully gives you guys a little bit of context that I've been there, done that just to give confidence in kind of what I'm sharing with you guys. So the first thing that breaks typically when you're growing that quickly is communication. The crews don't know or didn't know jobs get missed or they're done in a wrong way. There's phone calls and texts that constantly get missed. And even when I think back, I still remember being on the phone and you know, There were literally three phone calls that came through in a 15 minute call. I was on the phone with a customer. You're missing phone calls, you're missing texts, you're missing emails or you're delaying getting back to them and it's causing a lot of stress and pain for you. So verbal communication doesn't scale. You are really the bottleneck the middleman for everything. And so that's one of the biggest things that actually breaks. And then part two of this is, if you continue to watch to the end, I'm going to show you how to kind of fix these. So the second thing is going to be scheduling. Why? Because you haven't done the volume that you are now taking on. At first you were maybe doing 5,000, 10,000amonth, and all of a sudden you double and triple that revenue and the scheduling completely collapse. Routes are changing daily. Worse, you're not even getting to the routes. The crews are behind schedule. There's emergency shifting going on, causing frustration for the customer and again creating more stress. Quality control starts to fail. Instead of, you know, hey, we got to make sure we're doing a very good job in every single yard. It's, hey, we got 25 yards on the route today. We got to make sure these get done. So the crew start flying through the properties. You have inconsistent service, callbacks increase, customer complaints rise. And unfortunately, what happens in that type of environment is if you can envision yourself or your business as kind of a bucket and you're pouring all this water in as new sales and new customers sign up, you're trying to get all this work done because you just doubled and tripled the revenue in business because you're growing very, very quickly. But you have a massive hole in the bottom of a bucket that's just leaking water. And that's not a good system. I'd rather, honestly, in that part, you just kind of stay small and plug the bottom of the hole of the bucket so you can actually make profit. The other thing that this does, one of the other big things, and this will be the last point, is hiring exposes weak leadership. I see this all the time, especially with new GMs that we hire. There's high turnover. The team members don't care as much. It feels like the manager is kind of the babysitter, or you as the owner, you're kind of babysitting your team. You got to always be there. And you start to become afraid to hire because of problems that come along with team members. And a lot of this comes back to you as a leader. And you have to develop your leadership. Let's talk about how to fix each one of these. So the first thing, communication breaks. So how do we fix the crews? Didn't know jobs getting done wrong, constant complaints, missed phone calls, and things of that nature. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to start to build written SOPs. We have a saying, if it's not written down and documented, it doesn't exist. It's if everything is sitting up there in your brain, it doesn't exist. It needs to get put down on paper, hung up in the office. Use technology. If you have WhatsApp, different kind of different softwares that you can use to put out the documentation of standard operating procedures of how we mow each lawn, how we do this kind of landscaping job. One source of truth. So if you have a CRM, you could put it there. If you have job notes on each visit, you can also put it there. They have to have clear expectations before the day starts. So that's number one. Get it out of your brain and onto a document or technology of some sort, centrally located that they all have access to. The second thing, when scheduling collapses, routes are behind, crews are behind, customers are frustrated, you're not able to get them done. This is what we need to fix, this is how we fix it. Number one is going to be route density. Can you decrease the territory size that you are offering to lock in consistent schedules that have a good route density? That's number one. Also, can you leave some room for margin in your schedule for buffer time? I see this all the time. I do a lot of coaching. I have the home service scalers community where people can ask me questions. It happens all the time. Most people think hey, one person can mow 10 lawns. If I get two people in a truck, ideally that means 20 lawns and a day. Well, it's not always the case. Also they say okay, five days a week, that's 20 lawns per truck, that's 100 lawns I can do. And what happens is they build their route to really max capacity with no buffer or margin. And the reality is is you cannot do that. There has to be room for error. Why? I'll tell you why. It's going to rain and it's going to be too wet to mow. So you have to move the mows to a different day. If your route is jam packed all week, you don't have the ability to move these routes. And what's going to happen is you're going to working seven days a week. You're going to burn yourself out before you even get traction. The second thing, leave some room during the week for issues. The truck will break down, it will not start, it will have mechanical issues and you need time in the week to get that fix. So don't book your schedule out a full five days week Also team members. When you start to hire team members, they will call off, they will show up late, they'll call out worse, they'll leave and then you're left scrambling trying to get the work done and hiring someone else to get them in here and replace them. Do yourself a favor to minimize the stress. Leave some flexibility in your schedule. If you're tired of guessing your way through this home service stuff, we built a shortcut inside our private school group. We give you access to every SOP document and every blueprint that we've built that took us years to figure out. All you got to do is go down in the link in the description below, join the group and you'll gain access to all of this stuff, including myself to help coach you and grow your your business. Number three is the quality control fails. Inconsistent service callbacks increase, customer complaints arise and they start to cancel. This doesn't make sense because you just start to get on this hamster spinning wheel of you're getting new customers, but quarter of them are leaving out the back door each each year because you're not doing good quality work. How do we fix these quality issues? Number one, the training needs to be dialed in in for both you and your team members. When a new team member gets hired on, how are they being trained? Are you pairing them up with either you who knows exactly how to do each job and can teach them, or a trainer that you want to duplicate the standards and the consistency and the speed that is the person that you want pair with of who you want to be duplicated. Inside of our organization, we select the best team member that's there every day that doesn't get any complaints and that gets the jobs done in a very efficient manner. Why? That's what I want duplicated. I don't want to duplicate the product person that's constantly getting complaints. Training videos, checklists inside the visit notes. Can you leave job notes on those jobs? Can you have the crews upload a before and after photo to ensure quality is maintained? These are all things that set the standard to create true freedom and master the quality control. And the final thing, hiring exposes weak leadership. The reality is you are where you're at today because of your leadership, believe it or not. And so it is important for us to continue to cultivate, to grow and to learn, learn and develop that skill set of being a good leader. What we want to do to fix this is we always hire for character, not skill. I can train anybody to mow a lawn and a tall grass short. I Cannot hire somebody if they don't have a good character of always doing the right thing, making sure that the property is too standard before they leave. I cannot train somebody how to not cut corners if they come in and that's their mindset. It's going to be a world of problems that are going to come your way. Can you create some clear scorecards? Daily expectations Setting simple accountability rhythms for your new team member? Do you have some kind of temperature check after their first day of work or second day of work of how well they're doing? Check in with them, tell them what they're doing well, tell them where you need, where you see that they can improve. These are all things that will help in my GM training. Anytime that we train a new gm, one of the first slides on the most on the tactical slide section is what Most leaders and GMs new GMs fail to do is hold the standard. And I oftentimes see this over and over that new GMs that come in when somebody's late, it's a couple minutes late or maybe they get a couple of complaints that week, they kind of just let it slide. Why? I don't know. I mean, I used to be there too, right? Like I used to be like, ah, you know, I don't want to have that difficult conversation or uncomfortable conversation because I don't like making people uncomfortable. But what I found is if you don't have that conversation now, it's only gets worse. And so do yourself a favor, avoid the stress. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Develop your leadership skill to address a problem when you see it immediately and not just sweep it under the rug because eventually that rug will get turned over and all of those problems will come to life. In order to scale at a very quick rate, you must master these four things. Failing to do that will cause a significant amount of stress for you, your team and your family. Figure out your communication breaks and solve them. Figure out and leave room for margin in your scheduling as you grow in scale. Don't pack the house to the max capacity. Make sure you maintain good quality standards and write people up if they're not conforming. If you need to fire somebody and set an example, do it. You need to set the tone for all of your team what is and isn't acceptable. And the last thing is hiring exposes weak leadership styles. Do not avoid that difficult conversation. It will only hurt you in the future. These are the four things that if you master will make you doubling and tripling your lawn care business. In the beginning much smoother, much faster, and it will allow you to reach your goals even quicker. Thank you guys for watching. 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