How To Make Over $10K/month Mowing Lawns

So I spoke with you earlier on in the year and what you told me to do was to track my numbers, like track how long I was at each property. The big ones were at like 60 an hour versus we can do two small ones in an hour and that equals to around 90 to 100 an hour. Based on my numbers. I was just going to go up through the small ones.

Either that or on the larger ones, just raise your price up. So that way you're making 90 an hour. If you get stuck in the 0 to like 4 to 500,000, it becomes so physical on the body and we got to get you guys up there like as quickly as possible.

Okay, so question number one was going to be about quarter. Quarter one. Right now my business is set to do $84,000 in gross revenue for this year. First year we did 60, so now we're at 84. The reason we didn't jump higher because we switched to basically all reoccurring services. But quarter one, January, February, we do like almost nothing. So for my quarter one ideas, I was thinking about putting out a test batch of around three to four thousand door hangers of doing, keeping our crew busy doing like gutter cleaning, snow removal, window washing, garage cleanouts, basically junk. And I was thinking about doing monthly window washing program. But it would, I don't really like adding another service, but if I would have to add another service to fix Q1, I would do it. That's kind of my position right now.

Okay, so what is the, what is the goal? So do you have like, is it just you or you have other team members currently or like you said to keep the cruise?

It is, it's kind of a slogan. So it was me and a part time guy this year, but I probably shouldn't have hired him because I think I could have done all the work myself. But it just, I get really busy and then it kind of like tapers off. It's just gonna be me during the winter. So it's gonna be to break even. I will not even break even for, to cover all my personal expenses and to have a little leftover to grow the business. I would just be needing, needing to make around 5k in gross revenue. So I was thinking 4000 door hangers should do that. And then if I needed part time help, I have kind of like someone on the side. He just helps me out when I, when I need him.

Okay. Yeah. So I personally haven't tested a lot of the snow removal, gutter cleaning, junk removal stuff. But anytime that somebody is Looking at really branching out into those services, I would say the biggest thing is to just really do like a test batch and then also just track the data. So it's really, really important that you track the data on these door hangers. Are you collecting how the customer heard about you when they call?

Yeah, so we're mainly, we're, we're about 10% Google and the rest of it we do are door hangers in the spring. That's how we obtain like nine. Okay. 85% of clients comes through the spring through door hangers. Like this season we spent 450 bucks and we got almost current today, almost nine to ten thousand dollars of work from it. So that's how we get most of our customers. I did spend money for a new website. I don't really rely on Google. I rely on we're heavy door hanger. That's how we get most of our clients.

Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah. So David, just be mindful when you're putting these door hangers out in Q1. What, what region are you in? What, what state?

I am in Idaho, Boise area.

Okay. Just be mindful of the seasonality up there when the demand goes down because it's kind of the quote unquote off season with like different services where you have to kind of branch off to just be mindful that the same you, you most likely will not get the same return that you do in the spring when you're doing door hangers just because the demand tapers off a bit. So what we see in our market is generally we have to put out three, if not four, four times the amount of door hangers in order to get the same results back that we would. Similar to spring rush. What's nice is you are very small currently where you don't have employees, where you have to like, like feed their families and stuff like that yet. So the good news is, is you, I, I, I personally, at $84,000 annual revenue, I'll just tell you right now, you should be able to handle all of that workload even doing the door hangers in, in the winter or Q1 completely fine yourself. It will be a lot. You, you will be pretty busy doing the door hangers, but also taking maybe the calls and then like, you know, getting them scheduled and doing emails and stuff. But yeah, you should be able to do that. I would caution you on hiring help to hand those door hangers out until you know the data. You need the data in order to.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah.

I was wanting to do everything my. Myself. And as far as like handing them out, I'm saying best, best case scenario if we get out of. Because our goal is break even. Right now we need a hundred, one hundred jobs at a hundred dollars. So out of 4, 000 door hangers, if I get a hundred jobs at a hundred dollars value, we'll break even and then we're set. And yeah, so I was wanting to do everything myself during the winter, but higher. Okay, that's probably not a good idea to hire in the one. Try it all. Yeah, so I see what you're saying.

Yeah, I. I would. I would. Again, this is kind of the motto I use that, you know, put the team on your back, quote unquote and just, you know, this, this Q1, like you just. You just do it. Yeah, definitely come like spring next year. Like when the grass starts to grow, they like definitely get help. Like you. You're gonna for sure need it. Especially if you want to get above like, you know, 150, 200K. Like you're. You're gonna. You're gonna need. Need some backup to at least help you with door hangers and stuff in the spring, especially when the demand is there. But during the off season when you're kind of scrambling, kind of going outside of the scope doing other things. So yeah, just. Just test it, you know, put two or three k out and. And see what bites. Have you heard of winter services? Are you currently doing winter services?

I have, but we kind of so far for fall cleanups, we're almost busy until the end of December. So it's kind of hard. Like we're really, really profitable on leaf cleanups. So it's very hard to do winter services because it's almost like we need two months. So before I do winter services, I wanted to test this idea. Winter services would have been my last option for me personally because I. I get you spread it out. But we're so profitable in the fall or I am just by myself doing leaf cleanups to where it's. It's kind of hard to take that away.

Okay. Yeah, I like that approach. I like that approach. I. You're definitely thinking through it well, which is good. So if you can even just stack as much cash as possible in this fall time when you are extremely profitable, especially if you don't have any help right now, this is the best, best time to stack cash. That way you can really have that money to deploy next spring. How your help get more reinforcements to do door hangers and things like that. So I like it.

Okay. And then, so that answers kind of my question one, which is, I mean, we don't really have data. So my second question has more data. For lawn mowing. We have a really good return on door hangers. And then we, I, I do instant quote door hangers, but I was kind of thinking of stepping away. This spring we did instant quote door hangers and nothing was biting until like two, three weeks in. So I put aeration, I put like an instant price for aeration on every single one. It was just kind of, it was a little ghettos on the bottom that started going really well. I know, I don't think you use instant quote, but for instant quote, we've gotten some of the clients later on in the season, like summer. And the price we put was 40, but it should have been like a 80 because the backyards were a little different. So I don't know if I should not do instant quote and just say, hey, this is all the services. We do put our three or four core services. For us, mowing is really nice, but in the springtime, aeration is when we kind of stack the cash variation is where we really get.

Yeah. So to me it sounds like your aeration offer on the door hanger did really well. So I would maybe even lean, lean into that more in the door with the spring spring marketing. Personally, we have done instant price door hangers before. I'm not a huge fan of them. They just don't for us, they're not as effective as like I've heard it to be for some other people. We just list our services and be careful with that because you don't want to list every service. Like if you, for example, you might offer seven or 10 services. Honestly, what I would do is I would look at the scope of all the services that you offer and then just do like if you can pull a report at the end of the year and say, okay, 50% of our revenue came from mowing, 30% came from weed control, and 20% came from bush and bed service. Like, I would just like list those on the door hanger for the spring. Like, I wouldn't put insect control, I wouldn't put snow removal, I wouldn't put fall clean leaf cleanup. Like, I wouldn't even do like, that's all waste on the door hanger. That's going to like distract the customer. So in the spring, like the three most biggest revenue producing services is what I would list on that. And then for us we have a QR code where they scan it and then go straight to our website and then they would get an instant price there. So instead of you writing a price on the door hanger, what they do is they go to the website and they just pick small, medium or large for them. And there are times where they, they're a large property but they put small. But once they accept the instant quote, we, we do map out their property and if it's more than like $8 off, we, we text them and say hey, your property was deemed larger than, than what was said. So this, and then we send them an accurate quote. We, we don't, we don't really take them if yeah, that forty dollar difference is big dude, that, I mean you're, you're probably not even making any money on that property at that rate.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's just not worth, if it was like maybe 10 or 15 off, I'd, I, I would tell you, hey, you know, why don't you mow them and service them for like a month or two. Show them that you do good work, show them that you communicate well and then after like maybe a month or two just increase their price to what it should be. But yeah, $40 is a big difference. Hey, real quick. My business partner and I built a private school community for people just like you trying to build their home service based business from the ground up. We managed to build a 7 fig business from the ground up and we're sharing all of the SOPS documents and templates and systems inside of our coaching program. You get access to us. So click the link in the description below. Let's scale this thing together.

Yeah, yeah. No. For the springtime our biggest services are mowing, aeration and kind of bush trimming. Those were the three I wanted to leave heavily on. I'm going to get my license soon. I'm going to go, I'm going to buy the course that you offer for the fertilizer and weed control. Because I did site one this year. Like I got warehouse but I'm not really educated enough to like, I wouldn't be confident in it until everything about the weed control and the fertilizer. So that's one thing I'm going to install this winter. So that kind of leads me into my next question, our mowing rate. So here's the numbers. I want to get to a mowing rate of $90 per hour. Our average yard. It takes me myself when I timed it about 30 minutes and it's about 40 to 45 dollars per lawn. I was thinking, so if I hand out four to 5,000 door hangers in the spring in a very localized area. So just within five miles around me, which is where I do most of my mowing right now anyway, would it be worth for me to take the risk to just put someone in the truck, put them on, pay for performance, and have a MOW 15 yards a day for four days and that would equal 60 yards a week, which I'm 100% sure I get. With the numbers we pull in from door hangers, would it be worth putting someone in the truck or should I hop in the truck first and then hire someone else to do those 60?

Yeah, great question. So I'm going to ask you between the two. I know I have the answer, but I want you to come to the conclusion yourself. Which one is more? Is, is like if you were going to hire somebody to do door hangers, how much would you pay them?

Probably like 18 an hour. 15.

Okay, 15. Okay, we'll, we'll roll with that. I, I think you can fairly get somebody and then maybe you give them some performance, right? Like, hey, if somebody signs up, I'll give you an extra 20 bucks or something. 20, 20 bucks or 25 bucks. Right. If you were gonna hire somebody to mow your lawns, how much would you pay him?

If I ran the numbers, so performance pay, if it would take him average 10 hours, they would be making around 23 an hour.

Perfect. So when you look at those. Perfect, perfect, perfect. So when you look at those two tasks in the business, the mowing is a higher leverage activity. Right? And so what you want to do is, is you, you want to graduate yourself to the next level in business. So that way you can start to delegate those lower level tasks. So in this scenario, and we do this in every level of business, by the way, like we do this up when you become a General Manager, Admin, GM, whatever. Like when you look at the two. So one role you're going to pay 15 to 18, the other one you're going to pay 23. So you should go do the $23 an hour tasks and then delegate the $18 an hour task and then just give them an incentive. For every customer that signs up from the door hanger, I'll give you a 20 or 25 bucks. And that way they don't just throw the stack out in the garbage.

Okay, perfect. I think that answers really all my questions. I didn't really have any more questions. These are just the main two areas I'm focusing in. So yeah, perfect.

So is There. Is there anything else off the top of your head that you might, may need assistance on? Because I've got like maybe five or ten more minutes.

No, not, no, not really. Because next year. Yeah, I mean the biggest problems was the quarter one. If, if I fix those two months, it's, I am basically cruising because we have our marketing dialed in. I have, I think I need to learn a little bit more about Google. I have 54 or 5 star reviews, but I only land around 10, 10, 15 of people through my Google, which my plan is to organically get to the top by using door hangers because we, we have it like a QR code on there and it says five star rated and they, they scan it to check us out.

Have you, David, have you gone through the get out of the field course that I put together through in the home service scalers community yet?

No, no, no, I haven't.

Okay.

So.

Yeah, you got something. Okay.

Oh, sorry. So I spoke with you earlier on in the year and what you told me to do was to track my numbers, like track how long I was at each property. Our average yard were at each property, 30 minutes. The big ones, we lose money. The big ones were at like 60 an hour versus we can do two small ones in an hour and that equals to around 90 to 100 an hour based on my numbers. I was just going to go through the small ones.

Either that or on the larger ones just raise your price up. So that way you're making 90 an hour. Whether the customer is like, oh that's too expensive or not, who cares? Like you're just, they're not gonna, they're not gonna book as much. And the ones that do book, you're gonna get paid well at 90 an hour on those ones. So just, just adjust your pricing. And that's really good that you're tracking that. That's part of the baseline of like building the company. So that's great that you have, you're tracking this data like you're really locked in. You're, you're doing a really good job on that. Yeah, I would raise the price on the larger ones. When would highly recommend going to the classroom section inside the home service scalers. There's a, there's a course that I built. There's five stages of how to get out of the field. In the beginning there's a category called, I think it's called building the foundation. There's a video or two in there specifically around Google, my business and optimizing the SEO and geotagging photos and like really being the number one in your local market. That video alone, dude, you don't even need to go through the whole course. Just go straight to that video will bring tremendous value this off season for you to kind of work on and tweak for your Google my business. I know your goal is to like you said, organically be number one through the door hangers, but dude, go through that and, and it'll make it so much easier. I'm telling you to become number one. And then the last thing I would say too. So maybe you've heard it through my content. You can see the book behind me, the 10x rule. Most people underestimate the amount of effort it takes. So I know the number in your head that you're gonna shoot for next spring is 5,000 door hangers. If you can do a mental exercise and try to expand that further and just be like, what if I 10x'd it? What would I have to do to be able to 10x that? And then all of a sudden your wheels start to spin in your brain and it's like, it's like training for your mind to be like, oh man, like I'll need way more people. Okay, cool. So like if I need more people, then how many people would I need? How many door hangers can somebody do in an hour? And then you start going through these compartments of like how to build that out. And what I'm trying to say is like I don't expect you to do 50,000 door hangers next year, but if you can do maybe 10 or 15 or even try to shoot for 20,000 and just be like, hey man, can I, can I stretch myself a little bit? And maybe like you said that you, you got a part time helper that kind of comes out like maybe you need two of those guys in order to hit 20,000.

Right?

But like, yeah, I would, I would. If you listen to Audible Books, 10x the 10x rule is a fantastic book to listen to. That will help you kind of prep your mind and I think increasing that number, understanding the effort that it's going to take. Because my, my goal for you, which I think is most people inside of the home service scalers is like, get out of the field, right?

Yeah.

And so the faster we can do what we need to do to get there, the less likely everybody is from going out of business. Because if you get stuck in the, in the 0 to like 4 to 500,000 revenue for too long, it becomes so physical on the body and we got to get you guys up there, like, as quickly as possible, you know, versus kind of being conservative, which. And that used to be me. I used to be more kind of conservative. And like, oh, let's. Let's try to at least hit a manageable goal. But if you shoot for the stars and fall short, you still land up there in the galaxy. You know what I'm saying? So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Those, I would say, would be the. The big three things, 10x rule. So more door. More door hangers. Google my business inside of home service scalers. And then outside of that, dude, you're. You'll. You're crushing it. You're. You're doing very, very good. Very good job.

Thank you.

Cool, man.

Okay, I'll let you go. Because I. I don't.

I don't have.

Yeah, I don't have any more questions. I have enough stuff to work on already, so.

Yeah, cool, man. Cool, man. You. You're doing a really, really good job. And then whenever you're ready to. To jump back on a call, just book a call with me through the community and I'll be able to help.

Okay. Sounds good. Thank you.

You're welcome, man. You have a great day.

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