Ask Will: Are You Charging Enough For Fertilizer?

All right, everybody. My personal mission is to build and develop people. My goal is to help you guys get to really past $500,000 in annual revenue and really push up to that million-dollar mark, depending on whatever your goals are. I have these questions here. Let me just make sure my screen is shared and we're going to dive into it. I do this every week. If you guys want your questions answered, all you got to do in the description of this video, you can actually submit your questions to me and I will go through them each week. We've got 7 questions today. So let's dive on in. First question is from Caleb from Spruce Lawn Care. So he said, hey, what is your system for overdue invoice follow-up for the admin person? Do you have her call any open invoices every day? So I don't, Caleb. For the, uh, invoices, we actually automate all of that because I don't want her time being spent on customers that kind of ghost us when we do services and they don't want to pay. So we just fully automate that whole process for the first I think like 40 days, all we do is text and emails in regards to that. We only call right before we technically quote unquote send them to collections because again, I don't want her time bogged down. Admin and overhead is not what scales a business, but I do see where it could be frustrating if you're not collecting the money. But most of our jobs that we do are like under probably $300. Most of them are like $60 lawn cuts. $85 treatments, that's not that much. I'd rather just go find another, another paying customer. Next question is from Rudy Dominguez from R&R Outdoor Services. So he said, how to use my profit and loss statement to figure out my hourly lawn cut minimum price? I went down the rabbit hole of this a long time ago with the profit and loss statement. That's going to be very difficult to have to go in and figure that out because you need to know how many hours you worked or your team worked for the entire entirety of the season or month, if you're going to pull it that way. Because we're— most of us are in seasonal businesses, it's going to fluctuate and change so much. What I would do is kind of just peel back and just start from a purely basic standpoint where it's like, okay, how much admin time is it going to take you or your admin person to get this person signed up? Well, for us it's like 10 minutes over the phone and then, um, probably like 5 minutes setting up their information. So that's 15 minutes of admin time. Very cool. Okay, so then it's like, okay, well, what am I paying my admin? You know, Social Security, Medicare, you would add that stuff as well. You know, you, you would, you would get that price and then also the time to drive out to that property. Now what's hard about this is if you're driving out for that one property by itself, you're going to have a lot more drive time. If you can fit it in the route with your other clients, let's say you got, you got another property that's a couple of streets over, like that's not going to take much time at all for the crew to drive over there. You would want to calculate somewhat that drive time if you have properties in that area. And then from there, you know, obviously there, there's, there's other overhead costs like insurance, a ton of like really depending on what your overhead is, you would want to look— I think looking at the P&L is, is smart, but I don't think you'll be able to get an exact minimum price for that just based on the P&L alone. So there's a lot of other multitude of factors in that. What I would recommend is for us, I think our minimum was like $29 in the beginning. I think we've gone up to like $35, but you just have to remember, like, you have a fully outfitted truck with equipment, sometimes 2 guys in the truck, sometimes spray equipment depending on the services you're doing. You're probably looking at— and if you have a trailer, it's probably going to be worth more. I mean, you're looking at $15,000 or $20,000 outfitted fully truck and equipment to drive out to this property. So depending on how long the job is going to take, I definitely would recommend to get a minimum. It is a bit more complicated than just kind of looking at the profit and loss statement. I think that's a good start, but I would just calculate how long it's going to take you to do the admin, how long it's going to take your crews to drive there, and then also factor in some of the admin costs to help cover and pay for those. And you should be good. Tristan from Level Up Lawn Care Services. So have you ever considered a detailed, in-depth walkthrough of how you personally built out your website and SEO? Not just the general ideas, but the how-to, how many in each specific step, and giving examples. I'm a bit hyperfixated on my SEO work. Working before the rush, so it would be gold. Yeah, SEO is very important. That is the number one way that we get customers, and we get a lot of them from the website. Tristan, to tell you the truth, I just used YouTube University about 5, 6 years ago when we started the company, just how to build a Wix website, start off with one page. Just went into that, watched videos of people doing it that give out free content on that. I really built the website myself. Uh, Wix is pretty easy to use. I attribute all of that to literally just watching free YouTube videos. When When it comes to the— if you need like Google Business, Google My Business, uh, assistance, I have a really good in-depth video inside of our Home Service Scalers community that goes really in-depth how to, how to geotag the photos to your location so Google recognizes it better. It'll push you up more in the, in the algorithm. I think that video alone is worth probably like $100, $150, honestly, just that one video in the course because it's so valuable and so many people don't do it. Just YouTube University. I don't really have a how-to, uh, really in-depth course, but you can leverage ChatGPT to have it scan your website and to tell you what needs to be improved. Once you get your page up, I'd recommend doing that and watching YouTube videos because that's how I built mine, and it works really well now. Now I will tell you guys, every year I do have somebody scan it and make it better, but I, I did 95% of the heavy lifting in the beginning. Now I just pay somebody on Fiverr once a year, a specialist, to look at it, pay them a few, few hundred dollars, and then they just, they scan, scan it, make it better, tweak it a little bit, And it's good to go. All right. Next question is from Jose from Prosperous Lawn Care. It's a cool business name, my friend. Says, hey, Will, God bless. For your recurring clients, what systems do you use to maintain commitment and consistency? Do you rely on service agreements, contracts, or something else? So all of our recurring customers is a— it's a verbal agreement. We don't do any signed contracts. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to give us money. And so a simple yes over the phone, we just tell them what the program includes, how often and frequent we come out. And then yeah, all we need is a card on file, we'll get, we'll get them set up. That is, uh, super simple, super easy. And then once we do get them onboarded, uh, we do have an automation inside of our CRM that will send them a policy and fee email. So basically just kind of goes over what we talked about, just to make sure that, you know, 2 weeks from now they're not like, hey, I only signed up for 1 lawn cut. It's like, no, like, this is how our program is, this is how frequently we come out. Just kind of covers all those like basic stuff. That way it covers you on the business side. All right, Evan from Lawn and Order Lawn Care says, I am reaching out wondering if $7 per 1,000 square feet for fertilizer is fair. I'm located in Lima, Ohio. So what I would do, Evan, generally a 50-pound bag is $32. So for every 1,000 square feet, you're gonna spend— oh, okay, hold on, hold on— it's about $1.50 per pound, you know. And it depends on the fertilizer you're getting too. This, this, this might be a little high. I think actually It might have been— might have been $25 most recently. Either way. All right, let's do that. $25. So $50 divided by $25. Okay, so for every 1,000 turf square feet, it's going to be— if I go $50 divided by £4. Okay, that gives us £12.50. And then if we multiply this by— yeah, so it's $2 per one, per pound. So we're putting down about— depends, like most fertilizers are like 3.5 to 4.5 pounds. But so we'll just say 4 pounds. Per thousand. So if we multiply that by $2, that's $8. So in this scenario, brother, yeah dude, like we gotta increase our pricing for sure on that because in this scenario, so like most of our lawns are like maybe like 3,500 square feet. So I'm going to multiply, or I'm going to change it to a decimal. So times 7, yeah dude, that, that's pretty much just covering like— actually hold on, now that I think about that, so $2, you'll probably use maybe like probably a couple dollars in weed treatments depending on how bad the weeds are. So that's $4, and you'd have to make sure that you're covering that $3. So 3 times $3.50. I don't think that's going to cover the labor cost. I think you need to increase your prices, brother. I just, I, I think that's a bit low. I think that's a bit low because the fertilizer itself is going to be $2, and then you're probably going to have at least another $1, $1.50 in like weed treatment depending on the weeds that you're treating. So you're right, already at $3.50. Yeah, so that, that, that's almost half. That's almost half of that is going just towards material. You still have labor in there that is going to cost a decent chunk too. I think you need to go up in pricing. What I would do is just check with your other local companies. Just make sure that you're pricing that properly because there's a lot of material costs in there. You don't want to be underbidding. That would not be good. 5 years ago, I was out in the field every single day, knocking on doors, pushing mowers, and bootstrapping my business from the ground up. Today, I am not in the field and rarely ever in the office. I work on the business and not in it. And that didn't happen by luck. We put the systems in place and now we're handing them over to you. Inside our school community, you will gain access to all of the systems that we've used to allow this to happen. Click the link in the description below. All right, Chris from Landmark Services: should I be offering package services when trying to get my business off the ground? Honestly, personally, I didn't. I think package services is when you're just getting started. Like, like, guys, like, when you're just getting started, there's so much you don't know yet and there's so much like, not to say, like, like, I didn't know either. Like, there's so much— like, like, we need to be like tracking our time on every property and how long the budget hours are going to take. And so to, to package these services together, like, we don't even know how long each job is going to take. So to package this stuff together in like one price or one monthly price, I don't think the most ideal. Otherwise you may either overcharge way too much and not get the customers, or you might undercharge way too much and then you're basically working for super cheap I would cut it up into individual services. And then from those services, we can start to gather our data. Like for example, mowing, we're just going to do mowing. Hey, this is the price, $50 to mow the lawn. Cool. All right. So trimming the bushes. All right. Well, how long is this going to generally take me? Well, if it's going to take me 30 minutes, just a guess. Again, we always shoot for at least $75 to $80 per hour. So we know we're going to have to charge $40 for the, to trim the bushes if it's going to take us about 30 minutes. So that's how I would start to slice this up. But the thing is, is you're not going to have that data when you're going into this to know that it's going to be— take 30 minutes to trim those bushes. You're going to have no idea. You're going to be like, oh man, it's going to be like 10 or 15 minutes. And then you're going to start trimming. It's going to take you 45 minutes to an hour. You're going to be— you're like, that happens all the time. It's so easy to trim the bushes, but the cleanup takes so much time and it's really hard to account for that stuff. So I would actually cut it up into individual services. That way we could start to track the time on those visits and then we can gather the data to figure out that down the road. I'm okay if you want to package the services down the road once we have that data and we know how much each job is going to take. All right. The last question is from Emmanuel, JMC Lawn Care. Okay, we got a couple of questions here. Okay. I am in the process of getting my applicator's license. Do you have any specific recommendations on what material to study before taking the test? I would definitely go through the questions depending on the state that you're doing it. So we're down here in Texas. There's a general like studies book book, it's a white one down here, and it's very thick. It's like 300 pages. At the end of every chapter, they have questions. I would highly recommend to like make flashcards, and like some of those questions are like on the test. Like probably the— for, for me, it was like 10 or 15% of those questions were on the test. So I would definitely do that. If you Google, there might be some practice tests out there. That is something that I tapped into. Some of them are free, and some of them are only like partial tests. To where you only get like 10 or 15 questions, but I would practice on those once you go through the book. That should help you out. Next one is, our first year in business was 2025. I was working a full-time sales job clocking 55 hours a week and just did mowing on the weekends. However, I hired a full-time employee to take care of the customers. I wasn't able to finish— we finished off the year at $150K. Dude, awesome. I'm going full-time into the field this upcoming season along with him, and my goal for this year is $400K. If we work 6 days a week at 12 hours. I believe we can make it happen with us too. What are your thoughts? Okay, my initial thoughts, Emmanuel, is I believe 6 days a week, 12-hour days is not sustainable. I think you will burn yourself out. I think you will also burn out your team member, and I don't believe you'll hit $400K. Just being honest, I don't think that is a sustainable workload 8 to 12 months out of the year. I just, I just don't think that's smart. So I would be a little bit more strategic with that. Like even if you need to hire like a part-time guy to just alleviate some of the hours to where you guys aren't having to work 12-hour days, it's just quality of life, man. One of the biggest things that I learned through, I don't know if it was like a mentor or a book or something, but the one person in your business that cannot get burnt out is you as the owner. If you're getting burnt out, it's going to affect the entire organization. It's going to affect all of your team. It's going to affect everybody underneath you. And so if there's anybody in the organization that cannot get burnt out, it is you. However, you are in the hustle phase. I like the ambition, but just be careful with that. Just don't work too much is what I'm saying. So should I hire a third person? Oh, here we go. Or stick to my two-man plan? I would hire a third person, definitely. Because here's the other thing too, Emmanuel, if you and your team member currently just stick it out and go 6 days a week, 12 hours, like, what happens when you're sick? What happens when the truck breaks down? What happens, you know, if you need a day off? You know, if your spouse or your child needs you for something? Right? Like, there's no margin for error in there. And so we always overhire in the busy season, and we do that intentionally. Even if I gotta call a guy off 1 or 2 days a week, it is what it is. Like, we don't have enough work, you know? But I mean, obviously we're going to try to fill the routes. But yeah, you, you want a little bit of room for, for margin. So our core services consist of the following: mowing, weed control, sod, holiday lighting. Yeah, very good services. So these are going to be your recurring. Sod installation is more kind of one-time, and then the holiday is, is kind of annual. So good stuff, man. Okay, in your experience, do you notice any difference in using instant pricing forms versus having a customer submit a regular quote request? Are the conversion rates drastically different? Okay, as far as the conversion rates go, that's a really good question. I personally haven't sat down and compared the two. However, what I can tell you is overhead and admin inside of a business doesn't make us money. I would rather have more qualified leads than to just have intake forms from like hundreds of people that are just like kind of shopping around. I would rather give them the price up front and just say, look, the lawn cut's going to be $50. And all those tire kickers that are going to waste your time going out to the property, measuring the property, doing all this extra admin work that doesn't actually make the company money, is completely avoidable now because you're literally giving them the instant price on the website. It alleviates and removes a ton of those tire kickers. And then the forms and the people that do accept those instant prices, these are some of the best customers that like when we send an upsell, they just, they just, they're like, yeah, sign me up, do what you got to do. Like to kind of wrap that up, it significantly decreases the admin overhead cost of you having to manage all of those form submissions for people that are like not really interested. They're just kind of shopping around. And then the ones that do submit it, you know, they're, they're locked in and ready to go. I know these are a lot of questions. I understand if you can't answer them all. Main concern is question 2. Thanks, Will. You're welcome, brother. Yeah, Instant Prices is, is great. It's so good. I can't stress that enough. As you scale, I would say like once you get past maybe $250,000, I would definitely look at adding the Instant Price, which you said you're going to try to shoot for $400K this year. So yeah, this would be the year that I would definitely start to look into that to really speed up the process. The faster you can get the price to the customer, the quicker they can sign up, and it's just faster for you, faster for them. And then if they don't want They'll go to the next company. Like, it's, it's totally okay. Yeah, really good questions today, guys. So anybody that is still watching, again, you can submit your form questions in the link below and I will go through them each week. Thank you guys so much for watching and supporting. Hit the like button if you got value. Subscribe if you want to grow past $500,000. We'll see you guys in the next video.