YouTube Q&A (Ask Will) where the host answers viewer questions about starting and scaling a lawn & landscape business. Key advice: LLC formation steps (file with state, get EIN) and pragmatic timing (host waited until having ~20 customers); hiring strategy for major growth includes over-hiring for spring rush, using door-hangers to fill routes, and maintaining field time while ramping sales/marketing; billing options discussed include level-billing and prepaid rounds (weed control) in CoPilot CRM; shop location for government contracts should minimize drive time. The video also includes a brief pitch for a paid community that provides systems and training.
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Good afternoon, everybody. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen so that way you guys can see the questions. For anybody that needs help growing their lawn care business, if you don't know in the description below the video, you can submit questions for me. You guys have access to me 247 and I'll be able to help answer your questions. Let's dive right in. All right, so the first question is from Sean. Mr. Yard Care. This is the year I feel I need to legally register as a business, get an llc, etc. How did you go about registering your business? Any tips to that process? Yeah, so as far as like registering a business, it's very simple. There's a few websites that you can pay 300 to get that set up. It's probably going to be not as extensive as getting a operating agreement, doing all the back end stuff. It's very simple. You can just go on the website, fill out the paperwork to get your LLC created, then you file it with the state, get an ein number, and you're pretty much good to go to start your business business. I always recommend people to start to make money first with your business before actually filing an llc because a lot of times people will do all the administrative work on the back end to try to build a business where, I mean, get it set up, but then they don't follow through with the action and actually get the sales and it doesn't really work. So for us personally, we didn't actually get an LLC created until we had probably like, I don't know, 20 customers at that point where we were making a little bit of money each month. And then we went ahead and got an LLC created. Obviously that's not what a tax accountant or so CPA will tell you, but this is not legal advice. So don't, don't hold me to that. That's how I do. Sean. Next question is from Tristan Lopez. This is Redline Mowing and Trimming llc. He says, I am planning on almost doubling my business going into 2026. We went from 38000 in 2024 to 185000 in 2025. Goal is to hit 350000 in 2026. I will be starting 2026 with zero employees after letting go and losing two. I'm nervous. Jumping in more debt, buying two mowers and starting with a second truck I already have and training three to four guys at the beginning of the season. I have Crew 1 at 60 budget hours per week on recurring services and no Work for crew number two. I work full time at a fire department so I usually only mow two to four days of the week. And I plan to reduce and have two crews of two so I can focus on marketing and sales. How do I make the hiring and training process less stressful when starting from scratch and planning the major growth? Do I need to over hire with 4E? Okay. I'm not quite sure what the EEs mean, Tristan, but what should my main focus be and how much should I be working in the field versus marketing? Okay, cool. So what I would do, Tristan. So what we always do is we over hire in the spring rush of when you will acquire the most recurring customers to give a budgeted hours on the schedule for that first group of two people. So I would actually probably give you the group light to go ahead and hire the extra two people once the grass starts to grow in your area. It's down here, it's March 1st, so we actually start a couple weeks before that get the people in the door and then that way you can really hit the ground running come spring rush and capitalize on the most return on your investment. What I would do is we always like to put them on door hangers for that period of time when you don't have enough actual like physical work to do. I'm willing to bet if you put them on door hangers for five days a week, for four hours a day at least, and have them, you know, put out three to 400 flyers, you will get the work and then eventually after a couple of weeks of doing that, start to fill your schedule with the reoccurring mowing services and then you can get them going to actual work. I would recommend that size that you still be out in the field. Not going to have enough work or admin work to like be out of the field for side. So you may have to do that both at the same time. But I do think your time is spent valuably like in the field producing at that size, one or two trucks and then yeah, I would probably put those couple people on door hangers and then just fill those routes as it, as it grows and expand. Sales and marketing is like really the only thing you need to be focusing on. If you're trying to go from 185 to 350,000, you need to sell like a madman. Calling every penny estimate, constantly doing door hangers in every stop. I would just sell, sell, sell. That's the number one thing.
Five 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.
Question number three is from Adam Sharp Edge Lawn Services. All right, so if I remember correctly, you do prepaid months and use copilot CRM. Right. My question is along the lines, I reached out to tech support for copilot, but they say it's not possible to set up invoices once a month. I believe I got the idea for already paid months from you about three years ago. That's what we are doing. And we send out invoices on the 28th of each month. For the following month, say January 28th, we send a single invoice per customer, charging for the month of February. Have you found a way around this? Yeah, Adam, so for this I think you're probably going to look at level billing inside of co pilot. They have the ability to actually set up a certain amount as long as you're doing reoccurring service. And it's kind of like the same amount every month. I would look into level billing. If you're just doing the invoices, I think there is a way inside of there that you have the CRM charge it on a certain day or after a certain period of time. If you're doing it that way, I would question you on why you want to do monthly billing. Like, if you do the work, you want to get paid as quickly as possible. So that way you can go take that money and go multiply it. Right. So like if you're cutting this customer's house for three or four weeks, the last thing you want to do is wait three weeks later to get paid. Like, the faster you get paid, the better. So that's why we do same day billing. When our crews mark the job complete, they get billed that day and we get the money like the next day in the account. That way we can go take it and ideally go multiply it more. As far as prepays go, we do do prepays. We used to do it for weed control and then we stopped for a period of time and we just brought it back back this year. So we are doing prepaid 4 weed control. How that works is we really just kind of build a customer for those eight rounds and what we're doing is we're front loading all that cash. That way, again, we can go take it and multiply it in the spring rush and try to get as many reoccurring customers as possible. But yeah, I look at level billing inside of. Inside of Co pilot for that one, Adam. All right, last question here. Patrick Mora from Central Texas Landscape Landscape Services says government contracts question about shop location. Okay. I don't really know. Oh, okay. So you're. You're probably looking to get into government contracts and then question about the shop location. Okay. If you're asking Patrick of like, where the shop location should be, if you're doing government contracts, I would just say as close to those locations as possible. Even if that means you have to get like a storage unit outside of, of a military base or a government facility, I would just try to send like, located as close as possible. If you're doing multiple government locations and you probably want to centralize that stuff. But the more time that you're spent driving to and from your shop space is time that you could be spending, getting more customers and making more money. So reducing the amount of drive time will significantly help the profit of your business because that is the number one line item. Most expensive line item on a P and L is not labor. So if you can keep that down with minimal amount of drive time, that would be I. Ideally the best. That is all the questions that we have for this week. So again, number one, if you aren't subscribed to the channel, make sure you guys are subscribed. We give free content out like this all the time. Just trying to bring value to people to help them grow a more successful lawn and landscape business. And if you haven't already, in the description below, there's a link you can submit your questions. It's completely free 247 7. And then once a week, I go through them and try to answer them and help you guys out. All right, everybody, take care. Have a great week and we'll see you on the next video.
