LIVE Q&A - Start & Grow a Mowing Business w/Will Kelly

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Hopefully everybody's having an amazing Wednesday today, and, uh, hopefully you guys can hear me. I switched over the mic, uh, mid-intro, so I think, I think we're good. I think we're good. All right, so I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of update of, uh, myself for, uh, anyone that doesn't know me. My name is Will Kelly, and my wife and I had— have had the privilege— we're down here in Texas— to build a multi-location, um, 7-figure lawn care business. And you know what I'm passionate about doing is helping other people. And so I take my time to come here and help the new people coming in behind us to you know, help lift them up as well. And so, um, if you guys have questions, go ahead and put them in the comments below. We're gonna be doing this for about 45, maybe 50 minutes, so that is the time, uh, that we got allotted here. So let's take a look here. We don't have any questions yet, but this is what it's going to look like when we go through them. We're actually going to pull them up on screen so that way everybody can see what we're talking about. All right, so a little bit of update for you guys that don't know Uh, we have 3 locations. We're gonna peak this year at probably 23, 24 team members. And, um, yeah, we got 1 location in profit mode. Uh, we have 3 general managers that run each location individually. They are each individually separate businesses. And so, um, I've had the privilege of growing through the ranks. I used to mow every single yard in the beginning. I knew every customer by name, and, uh, it was really cool whenever we had about 100 customers. And, um, then we grew. The good Lord blessed us. Uh, he's been continuing to bring us the right people and the right customers. And so, uh, we've been able to grow, and it's the coolest thing ever, uh, being able to pour back into my team and help them grow as well. And a quick announcement for anybody that's been following my channel for a while: Uh, we have officially retired Larissa Kelly from the business. Officially. All right, so at 35 years old, she will never work another day in her life for the man. And, uh, it was a very exciting, uh, moment. In fact, if you look behind me here, I actually presented to her an official certificate of retirement. And so we've been so blessed to, uh, been able to do that. Um, through the business and all the success that we've, we've had. And so, um, what I like to do is try to pay it forward to the next generation of individuals who are hungry, humble, and smart that also want to grow as well. And so that's why I'm here today doing this free live Q&A for you guys. So hopefully it will help you also achieve your, uh, personal and career goals. So without further ado, I think we've got some questions coming in, ladies and gentlemen. So let's go ahead and take a peek at what we're looking at here. All right, so we got Joseph Latio 7804 says, how many years has it taken you to grow your business? And also, how long did it take to get to an established place where you felt comfortable with your business and numbers? All right, so 2 questions here. So let's go ahead and talk about the first. How many years has it taken you to grow your business? So we started in 2019 and we've been growing the business like a wildfire ever since. Uh, this year we'll probably do about $1.6 million, uh, in annual revenue. We have 3 locations, about 23 team members, and we just do simple services— mowing, weed control, bush and bed service. And so, uh, yeah, we've been grinding for about 7 years now. And, um, and then how long did it take to get an established place where you felt comfortable with your business and numbers? Um, I would say probably by year 4 or 5, um, that's when it starts to click where you're like, okay, it's like the same problems and the same issues. And there's, there's, there's generally like 12 to 15 problems that happen throughout the year, uh, like big problems. And then what you'll find is by the 4th or 5th year, you are accustomed to— I, I call it kind of putting the veteran hat on, where you're like, oh, I ran into this problem, this is how we solve it. And then it gets easier, uh, because you know the ebbs and flows and the seasonalities. You start to dial in your marketing, what works, what doesn't, um, figure out customer acquisition costs. That's a big one. And, uh, Yeah. So I'd say probably by, by year 5. Now, as far as a revenue point, like what does that mean for you like revenue-wise? So for us, that was about, I'd say $800,000 to $850,000 annually. And so by that time, you're quite frankly probably an operations manager, general manager, and you're out of the day-to-day like doing the work. A lot, more so just kind of managing. Uh, you may have to go down the field a little bit, but, um, that's when it gets nice and good because, you know, in the beginning, I mean, you're mowing every yard and, you know, it's, it's tough. I mean, I've been there, done that, so I know what it feels like to come back at the end of the day when your two team members called off and you got to pick up everybody's slack and get the routes done because you got to place the mission first. Right, that military mindset that I have. And so, um, yeah, it's brutal, definitely in the beginning. But I believe if you pour your heart, your soul, and every fiber of your body into what you're trying to build, study the craft, reach out to people like me, Mike Andes, Jonathan Patoschnik, the big guys, big players in the game, and pick their brain and understand how they think right? Um, you too can, can allow yourself to have us build something great. So great question, Joseph. Thanks for participating in our live Q&A show today. All right, we got another one from Joseph. Anybody that's watching, go ahead, put the comments, uh, or your question in the comments below. This is an interactive live session, ladies and gentlemen. We got 4 live viewers. Okay. All coming from YouTube, which is good. All right, Joseph said, I'm just around 100 customers now. It's nice to know all the names. Yeah, it is. So yeah, at 100 customers, I mean, you probably do know most of the names. Um, you're like right there on the peak, you know, maybe you got a helper or two, um, on the side. But yeah, I mean, really, I'd be curious to know how many years you've been in business so that way I could maybe help coach you. I guess like, what is your biggest bottleneck, Joseph? Like, what, what's stopping you from getting to the next level, right? Like, that's, that's the question. Joseph also says congratulations. Thank you. Um, I'm just a vessel. I give all the glory to, uh, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who, uh, died for our sins. So, um, yeah, he's made all this happen. I am just a vessel trying to pass on the knowledge to more people. All right, so Speaking of bottlenecks, by the way, um, a really good framework for you guys to kind of think through as we wait for more comments and questions to come through. So we got about 45 minutes here. Make sure you guys put your questions in the comments. All right, so I want you guys as managers, as owners, and being good stewards of the equipment, the trucks, the resources, and the time that you have here on this planet while you're building your business, I want you guys to do a mental exercise here. And what I like to do, I often do this, is if my business 5x'd overnight, what would break? What would be the biggest bottleneck that would hinder us from 5x-ing what we have right now? So let's take Joseph, for example, right? Like you have 100 customers right now. What if all of a sudden the phones were ringing off the hook? Uh, people were signing up left and right. All of a sudden you got 400, 500 clients. Like what, what would break first? Well, you probably need to get more laborers, more help to do the work. Okay. Could you right now, maybe you got 1 or 2 team members, could you get 8 or 10 in the next, you know, 30 to 60 days? Like, could you get that? Uh, do you think you would have the ability to increase your Indeed budget or a job recruiter or Facebook ads if you're recruiting on there? Like, and, and get those people to show up, 8 to 10 of them. For us, we have that ability. So we're like, okay, labor's not the problem. All we do is increase the budget. We can get more people to show up, we can get them through training and rock and roll. All right, cool. So you got all the leads, your business 5x overnight. Now you go, go to laborers. This is the 4L framework by Mike Andes, by the way. Um, then you go to lead, then you go to labor. All right. If you can solve that or fix that or 5x that and still manage, Great. Now we go to liquidity. Okay, do you have enough cash in the bank to go and buy the next truck or two? I mean, if you go— if you go from 100 to 500 clients in 30 to 60 days, I mean, you're gonna need probably 2 or 3 trucks, right? I would think. And so do you have, you know, $20,000 per truck sitting around? Because we buy ours off of Facebook Marketplace, we don't pay retail or lease them. But do you have that, or are you going to lease them? You're going to lease the trucks, right? It's like, what about the equipment? You're going to need more mowers, you're going to need more blowers and weeders, edgers, right? Do you have the cash to sustain that? Now, not only do you need the cash for the equipment, but you also need cash for your laborers because Guess what? It costs a lot of money to train people. It does. You got to kind of slow down to speed up. So ask yourself, do you have the finances in the bank to 5x? If not, hey, maybe we need to raise prices. Maybe we need to, uh, add another service offering to increase our income and stack cash in the bank so we can have this hockey stick growth up. Okay, the next thing, if you're like, hey Will, I got, I got cash in the bank, I got $25,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, I can buy the trucks, I'm good, what's the next step, right? So the next thing would be leadership, and this is where I see a lot of businesses break mentally, emotionally. Can you handle the stress from, from 5x in your business, you go from 100 customers to 500. Guess what? You're going to be getting 1-star reviews. You're going to have complaints from customers because you're not going to be on every single property. So how are you going to handle that? How are you going to build systems? How are you going to do quality control in order to protect your brand that you're building into something great? And so these are the questions that I challenge my leadership team, okay? Just the other day we were on a leadership meeting. By the way, I'm gonna pause here. This is an interactive show, ladies and gentlemen. Go ahead and put your questions in the comments below. They will get answered. Otherwise, if we don't have any questions, hey, I probably don't have a lot for you guys, right? Um, and then we can wrap this up early. But if you guys have questions, put them in the comments below and we will go through them, um, and hopefully help you guys grow. So I did this exercise with my leadership team just a few weeks ago, right? And I asked them, I said, okay guys, let's go through the 4L framework and see what would break if we 10x or 5x the business overnight. So we have two office people, uh, our office staff, they're amazing in the office. And I believe if we 5x our business, ton of more calls, ton more volume of texts and emails, I still believe— now, Grant, they may be working 10-hour days— I think they'll be— they would be able to handle it. And so with that, leads is not a problem for us. We can handle the influx of leads. So then we go to the next L, which is labor. Again, I believe if we just increase our indie budget we could, we could make double or triple the amount of hires right now in order to sustain that 5x growth. I believe that by just increasing that, hiring more people, and then holding, holding the standard. Um, so that's not that big of a deal. All right, then we go to liquidity. How much cash do we have in the bank? We have more than enough cash in the bank to cover 3 to 4 trucks, um, equipment Like, we always keep 1 month of revenue in our bank account for unforeseen circumstances and operational cash. Okay, that gives us a little bit of cushion to be able to sleep well at night and not live on the edge. All right. And so we went through this whole framework and then got to the leadership portion. And I asked these guys, I said, if your team tripped overnight. Would you be able to handle the meetings? Would you be able to handle having hard or difficult conversations with people, letting them go, firing somebody if need be? Um, would you be able to identify top talent, okay, inside of the organization? Would you be able to be emotionally stable and be the calm— the calmest person in the room when everything is freaking burning and you just got a 1-star review and you just had an employee quit and you just had, um, all kinds of problems, right, happening in your business. Would you be that level-headed leader in the room who's calm during the storm? Because if not, guess what? Why would people follow you? Why would people follow you if you weren't the calmest people, person in the room. And I'll prove this to you, okay? This is— I, I'll, I'll explain this to you, right? When you look at the President of the United States, something bad happening in the United States, right? Do you think he comes out at the podium all up in arms and frustrated and flustered and being aggravated at people? No. He does it. He comes out in a professional manner, addresses the problems, explains how we're going to self-course correct, and he is level-headed through all of it. Why? He's our leader. He's our leader as the President of the United States. How, how foolish would it look for him to be flustered or him to be, um, all up in arms when bad things are happening around him and he can't emotionally control himself, right? It's the same thing in our business. If we come out to the team meeting flustered because the one or two team members just called off and we're taking it out on our other team members, that's not a good thing, okay? Not a good thing. I learned that the hard way. So, all right, looks like we got some more questions coming in because this is a live Q&A. We got 6 live viewers right now. I believe we'll peak at like 12:15 maybe today. So make sure you guys put your questions in the comments below and they will get answered. Otherwise, if I don't have any questions, we're gonna probably wrap it on up. But Joseph came back, says, that's kind of where we are at. Too many laborers, so we dropped from about 4 extra hands to 1 to 2 mostly. It was hard to split up into 2 crews where we were at. So a couple things here, Joseph. Number one, I would ask you— so it sounds like you have two trucks— are you on pay for performance or are you still on hourly? When you go from one to two trucks, it is like mandatory. If I'm coaching somebody in a business, like, it is required if you want to build something great and build a business that you actually get out of the truck. You have to pay based on performance. That's number one. So number 2, so you had 4 extra hands, so you got the laborers. So where are the sales, is the question, right? So I would ask you, because sales is the number 1 thing that drives growth, and so how much of your day is spent, Joseph, doing sales, i.e., calling pending estimates, doing drive-by estimates, meeting with customers, doing estimates? Um, while you're on the property doing the work, looking, hey, this guy needs mulch, let me send him an upsell or a text saying, hey, I noticed you need mulch. Uh, putting door hangers up to try and get more customers. Though, that, that's all sales. So what percentage of your day, Joseph, are you spending on doing sales? Because if it's anything less than like 30%, 40%, That is a massive indicator that you need to focus your time on selling. If you want to grow this business and get to 200 and 300 customers, your time— your most valuable asset is your time, and it needs to be spent on the highest lever. I see too many guys get caught up in the wheel-to-wheel, the day-to-day operations of doing the work, my GMs included, and they're not focused on hindsight what actually matters and drives the business forward, which is sales. So, um, yeah, and then maybe at that point you would be able to, uh, keep these guys a little bit more busy instead of having to lay them off. All right, Good Works Lawn Care, I love the name, my friend. All right, what do we see? What do we got here? I'm still growing, getting new clients. I feel I am charging what the yard is worth. They respond to munch, they must be hungry. Just kidding. Do you lower the price just to new clients and experience? Okay, this really depends on where you're at. If you're like under 50 customers, I'm okay with you lowering the price to get volume. Okay, that I do believe that is required in the beginning. Everybody's gonna tell you don't undercut yourself, don't underprice yourself. I believe that's nonsense because you have to gain the confidence of acquiring customers. And if you price yourself outta the market or, or too high, cause you don't have enough leads coming in, you're gonna be like, hey, this doesn't work. So I'm okay if you're under 50 customers lowering the price to get to your capacity, which is, you know, if you're, we're talking small yards, 30-minute yards, that's about 40 to 50 yards per week. That you should be able to do. Okay, now once you get there and you're eyeballs deep in work, okay, now we need to raise some prices, right? And just be okay with, you know, 5 of them leaving, but it's going to open up the schedule for more higher-paying customers. And so, um, biggest thing here though, Good Works, is if you— if you're using a CRM, you need to be making sure that you are tracking your time on every single property. So you pull up to the yard, you shut the truck off. When you turn that key, you start the timer. Okay? If you're not using a CRM, it's time to get one if you wanna build something that is worth something and not just have a job. Um, and then really you should be tracking your time on every single property. And then that way what you can do is gather the data of how long these yards are actually taking you. And then what you would wanna do is, is bill these customers on a per hour rate. So for example, uh, at our Aubrey location, we charge $90 an hour. So we have the data of how many, uh, minutes each of these lawns take. And so we know most of our lawns are 30 minutes. So if we're charging $90 an hour, guess what we're charging for a cut? $45. That's 30 minutes of work. And so that's the biggest thing that you, you need to understand is like, how long are these jobs taking? What's your hourly rate? Good rule of thumb, you need to be above $60 an hour. You got to be making a dollar a minute. If you're not making a dollar a minute, it's— I, I see that this is a big, big shift. Most guys come from the W-2 world, that's me, and, uh, we're like, oh man, I'm gonna charge $40 an hour, make $40. But when you factor in fuel, insurance, tires, oil, like all the wear and tear, your time, okay? Because if you— I mean, you not doing it one day, you're gonna have to pay somebody to do it. So you got to factor in all those things. $60 is a minimum. Like, we got to be charging $60 an hour. But even at $70, it's a bit tight. Like, we, we actually launched our second location at $70, and it was too low. So this year we actually launched our location, uh, at $80 an hour. That's the lowest we are at now. And I mean, we went from 53 customers to 150. Okay, so that was about a 90% customer sign-up rate. We signed up 90 customers at one location in the spring, and we're charging $80 an hour. All right, Good Works, maybe next year rotate, keep the good lawn I want. Maybe next year rotate. Keep the good line I want. Okay, I'm not sure what that means, so we're just going to keep rolling here. All right, Clayton says, Will, I run ramp rack trucks, just one-man crews. We have had 25% more rain, which has led to a lot of Saturday work. Should we stay at 5 to 8 hours a day or 4 tens? Really looking at employee retention. Okay, uh, first question is, why are we only running single-man routes. You have an entire other seat in the truck that you can double the revenue if you put 2 guys in there. So let's just say, for example, again, in our business, like, 1 guy can mow and make $600 for the business. So if you're only— like, ramp racks, dude, those things are like $4K, plus the truck, that's like probably $20K, plus the equipment. I mean, you're looking at a $30K rig setup. And you're only running one guy on that, like, it— I would ask you, Clayton, is that the best asset utilization? And then the answer to that obviously would be no. And so if I were you, I would plug two guys in each truck, and I'd double the routes, I'd double the stops. And, um, you might be able to not have to work Saturdays in that scenario because it's going to take you time to build up to that. Um, the 5 to 8 hour days, uh, or 5 8-hour days or 4 10s. So, um, this really depends on your region. Uh, down here in Texas it's miserably hot in the afternoon. There's no way we're running 4 10s, especially because all of our, uh, mowers are push mowers. So these guys are all walking. There's no way they're, they're working 10 hours when it's 110 degrees outside. It's just not going to happen. Product— production is going to go down. So it really depends on your region. If you're up there in like the northern region where it's cooler, yeah, why don't you, uh, if, if employee retention is a concern, why don't you ask your team? Why don't you ask your employees and get their buy-in so they feel valued and appreciated that you would come— would come to them and say, hey guys, the— this is what I'm looking— I'm trying to like make your work-life balance, uh, good. Would you guys rather work 5/8 or 4/10 and get their feedback and why? Okay, you want to work 4/10, why? Are you under— do you understand you're still gonna have to get the routes done, and if you don't get all that done, you're coming in on Friday, right? So like putting up those parameters as well. Good question. Joseph, my man, you've got a lot of questions today. Good stuff. I'm a co-owner with my cousin. We switch off on sales and site work. However, I'd like to put more time into sales as we end up both needing to be on site sometimes. Okay, why, why are you both required to be on site sometimes? That's number one. I would dig into that. Do you need to build a training process? Do you need to, uh, train your team more, take the time and invest into them so they know what to do while you're not there? Are you on P4P? Is it, is it because they, they're not keeping up with the pace when you're not around? Um, those are things I would kind of dissect. And then the other thing between you and your cousin, that's cool, she has grown a business. I would, um, challenge you guys to see who's better at what. So you guys both have different skill sets, or maybe you have the same skill set, I don't know, but it's very rare that two people have the same exact skill sets. One of you guys is probably going to be better at operations and managing team. One of you may be better at selling and persuading and convincing customers to buy your service. I'd figure out who's better at what, put you guys in those roles, and then just like stay in your lanes. And understand he's got that, he's responsible for that fully, and then I'm responsible for this fully. So if this one fails, we know whose fault it is. If this one does well, we know whose, whose fault it is, right? Okay. I've been running this in summer for neighbor— for our neighbors since we were 12. I'm 20. Nice, dude. 6 years, 8 years. Yeah. Last year we decided to try it out. I was mostly on site while he made extra capital while with a lot Story. It went well, so we registered. Yeah, dude, just— yeah, do, do door hangers around the, uh, the houses that you have and things like that. Um, you should be able to get more customers. Okay, Clayton is probably not the best employee retention, but I have never been able to get 2 guys together to get as much done as 2 one-man crews. Employee retention is the bottleneck in my area. Okay, so, okay. Clayton, because we're kind of dealing with this a little bit at one of our locations here. What I learned— this is the framework that I want to share with you, okay? What I learned, that if you have team members that are coming to you and telling you they're leaving and going to get another job or going to do this or quitting or whatever, often we have to look internal. Oftentimes it's a us problem. And I'm talking to you from experience because I've been there. The first 2 years of our business, all the time, dude, I had a— I had a 360-day turnover. I burned and churned through like 25 people, not exaggeration, if not more, over a course of like a 6-month period. I would hire a guy, they would come in, they would leave. I'd hire a guy, and it was just like, it was me.. And so what I learned is I, I was like, man, it's the market. I'm hiring bad employees. It was me. Okay. It was how I was recruiting. It was the questions that I was asking in the interview. It was yellow and red flags that I was missing that they would say in the interview that caused problems. And it was like, oh, maybe we shouldn't hire somebody like this. Right? Um, it was me not looking at their tenure from previous job employments. So understanding that we have control, more control than we think, we can look at this and say either, hey, this is a labor market, I, I can't fix it, or we can say, hey, look, I'm going to take extreme ownership of this, I'm going to tweak the systems, I'm going to try to get better and just try to get better each and every day. But now if we fast forward, because I've learned and developed and grown as a leader because I've been through the reps, it is very, very rare that somebody leaves an organ— my organization that directly reports to me. In fact, I don't think it's happened in like borderline years, borderline years now. And so often now I'm telling them, you're not a good fit, you're not aligned with our core values, you're not right for what we're doing, you're not hold— you're not, you're not getting enough production done, you're not— you don't have perfect attendance, right? Um, not to say that everybody has per— have to have perfect attendance, but what I'm telling you is in the beginning they were coming to me and saying, no, I'm done, I don't want to work here. And I was like, oh, like, why, right? And I didn't understand. Then I grew as a leader and I was like, oh, okay, I need to look at myself. I need to listen to audiobooks. I need to grow as a leader. I need to listen to How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is a lead— a really good leadership book that I would recommend to you on how to influence and lead people so they want to follow you. And then once they want to follow you, then it starts to shift the gear where them coming to you and saying like, hey, no, I don't want to stay anymore. It's you telling them, no, no, no, you're not going to stay here anymore because of these things: your attendance, your production, your, uh, integrity isn't dialed in, right? And so it starts to shift, and then once, once it shifts, it gets really, really good. All right, it isn't the best asset utilization, however, two one-man crews always get more done than one. Okay. Yeah, I agree, I agree with you, but, but you have to come up with like $30,000 to $35,000. Like, it's not that scalable. It's like, it's like buying a Ferrari that has 6 gears, which I'm not a car guy, and only running it in gear 3. It can run in gear 6. You can get the extra speed, you can get the extra miles, you can You can make more money if you pack the truck more. Okay. So I do agree with you. The production does come down a little bit because there is inevitable waste, but I think you as a leader need to define what winning looks like in your organization and what the expectation should be. So for us, we go off of budget hours, but most people maybe don't. So maybe they go off a number property of yards, right? That's easy for everybody that's new, that's just starting off. Maybe one guy can do 10 yards, okay? Like, that's like a solo guy could do 10 yards, okay? You may not be able to get 20 yards if you have 2 people because there is inevitable waste in there. There's always somebody standing around while the other one finished blow— blowing, right? Like, there's inevitable waste when you put 2 people together, but they should still be able to crank out 18. Like, you're going to lose a little, like maybe 10%, maybe 20% efficiency on that when you put two guys together, but they still should be able to do like 18 or 19 yards. Like, and us as leaders have to hold them accountable while also communicate what the expectation is in the organization. And I think if we do that, you'll find that they'll often rise to the occasion. And we just need to be able to understand that, like like, hey, number one, is it doable? Like, can you and another solid dude do it? Like, if yes, it's like, cool, that's the standard. Like, that's what we're shooting for. And if, and if two guys go out and they only do 12 lawns, like, I'm having a conversation with them. Guys, what the heck happened today? Like, we need to— like, the standard's 18 or 19, 18 to 20 yards. Why are we only doing 12? What happened today, right? And so we really got to dig and make sure that they, um, understand what our expectation is. And it helps if you're on P4P because you can align it as if you're trying to help them. Because if they only do that type of production, they're not making good money on P4P in our system. That's why I always recommend anybody that has more than one truck to go on P4P and to shift over to that. It's so much easier to manage your crews. You don't have to micromanage them anymore. And it all really is like, anybody that's money motivated will work harder you'll get more production out of them. But yeah, dude, running solo, that means every time— like, okay, let me, let me paint this picture to you, Clayton, kind of one last time here. Let's just say that one guy can do 50 yards in a week, okay? That means if you have 100 customers, you need 2 trucks if you're running them solo. That's $70,000 in assets and equipment just to run that route, when theoretically speaking you should be able to, to do 100 customers with one truck and one Ram Ramp Rack. Then you get that $35,000 back that you would have spent on the truck and poured into marketing. And then you pour it into marketing and that gets you up to like $120,000, $125,000. You start getting all these customers and you're like, okay, snap, now we need to get another truck. And you take that revenue that's coming from those other 20, 25 customers buy the other truck because we're already starting to fill that other route. That's normally how we do it. But if you build it the way that you're doing it, dude, you're spending a lot of money on assets and trucks. And so to build, let's say, uh, an $850,000 location, which is what we do with 4 trucks, like, that means you're gonna need 8. That means you're gonna need 8 trucks times 30— I mean, that's like $250K in just trucks. When, when we could do the same volume with half of that. Like, yeah, it's, it's just anytime asset utilization, you really want to think about that stuff. Um, yeah. Now also, we do run solo routes in the winter just because it's not as busy, but in the summer we definitely are running 2-man teams. All right, Joseph. Yeah, I've been thinking it's a good idea to stick to one role. Thank you for the push. The multiple people on site is due to large cleanups needing to fill both trucks with brush. Okay, makes sense. Yeah, totally makes sense. Otherwise you could just bake in the cost of that, of like two dump runs. So when you're billing the customer, you can still have one crew do the dump run, but they just have to do it twice. You just got to make sure that the labor is accounted for in the estimate. Of them running to the dump and back and forth twice. What websites do you normally use for hiring? Uh, we use Indeed. That's like the main one. Um, if we're getting desperate because we're not getting good leads for— or customer— sorry, my brain's— I've been working all day, so, um If you're not getting good applicants, then, uh, what we do is we go on Facebook, we join the local Facebook groups, and then we post a Facebook, uh, job listing on our Facebook page. And then I go in there and I share it manually to all the pages. The other day I shared it to 100 pages. Um, it took me about an hour, but yeah. And then just a picture, like how much they make and all this stuff, uh, that generally will work. And then if I'm really, really desperate, and if like I do that and that in Indeed and the Facebook organic, uh, reposts in the Facebook groups, yeah, we'll run Facebook ads. But I don't like running Facebook ads because it's— they cost a lot. But I'll run them for maybe like a week or two if we really, really need people. All right, Clayton, thank you for your advice. Do you have your hiring process in the school community. I'd like to develop my skill set in that area. Then I'll check out that book. Thanks, brother. Yeah, you're welcome. Um, yeah, How to Win Friends and Influence People. So we just went through that with our leadership team, and we, and we realized, like, collectively, myself included, um, we need to grow as leaders. And so, um, we told them, hey, we're all gonna go through this book together. We're gonna do it in the next 30 days. We have it on Audible. Um, or some, some of them Reddit, but it really helped our leaders kind of develop themselves and like how to lead people the right way. And so, um, that's a start. Uh, for the hiring process, I think so. I think so. We, we, we have it set up through Jotform. I think we do have a video inside of there. Um, but honestly, there's no, there's no contracts or subscriptions on the school community that I have, so I mean, if you wanted to just do one month and grab all the value you can in one month, you could always just cancel after that. Um, there's more than enough value in there for— I think it's like, like $2.99 a month. Uh, there's more than enough value to get you one month of value if you're, if you're trying to go through it all in like one month. Um, maybe you want to do that in the, in the wintertime, fall time, when you have more time to get through all the videos and get your money's worth. But Um, yeah, yeah, that'll help. That'll definitely help. All right, Spencer's Lawn Care in North Carolina, what's up my friend? Really about to start ramping up the fertilization and wondering what you're using the— what you're using the Bray allocation. HomeWork is missing that, as I understand. Okay, I don't really know what this question is. And wondering what you're using the something application. Oh, spray maybe? I don't know. Okay, what we do on HomeWorks is we set up a package where it's a recurring. So we have 8 visits in a year, so we set it up where it pops up every 6 weeks. We just have a recurring package, and then when the applicator goes out and does the treatment, uh, we have it where they have a template and they just paste a dispatch note for the wind speed, areas treated, product use, uh, amounts of gallons and stuff like that. So that way we're tracking that if we ever get stopped by the TDA. All right, we got like 10 more minutes, ladies and gentlemen, 10 more minutes. Make sure you guys get your questions in. The comments below. This is a live Q&A interactive. We're trying— I don't— we're— I'm trying to help you guys out, trying to get back to the community. So I appreciate you guys tuning in. All right, Aaron says, how do you use P4P when you have 2 guys per crew? Do you give the same percentage, or do you give your foreman driver a higher percentage? Okay, this is a great question, my friend. This is very, very important. We want to build a meritocracy where there is no hierarchy. I don't care if a team member comes into our organization, they've been here for 3 years, 3 months, or 3 days. I don't care. To me, it's a level playing field. We give 33% of the revenue And then when they're in a 2-man team, it does get split in half, which sounds bad, but let me explain this to you. It's not actually kind of cutting it in half per se. So we require our team to do 6 budgeted hours per day. They get 33% of that revenue if they have a team member with them. Ideally instead of only doing 10 lawns, they should be able to do twice the amount of work. They have 2 people, they have 2 set of hands, they have 2 set of sets of mowers on the truck. They should inevitably be able to do double the amount of work. So instead of doing 10 lawns, they should be able to do 20, or maybe 18 or 19, right? But again, they would get 33%, and then it would be disperse between both of them. But ideally, they're still doing the same amount whether they go out and do one route with 10 yards by themselves, which is a lot, or they have two people and they go and do 20. It's still the same. Each one is still cranking 10, 10 yards per day. Um, but yeah, ideally it would be split, 33%. If there's two people. John, is there a liquid for your lawn that I do, and it has weeds all over the lawn? I just started my business. Okay, is there a liquid for your lawn? Yeah, there's definitely liquid for your lawn. Um, it has weeds all over the lawn. So there's two different kinds of weeds there. Well, three actually. Um, there is grassy weeds, there's broadleaf weeds, and then there's sedges. So you got to look at what the type of weed is, and then you want to get that type of product that you can spray. Sometimes, like homeowners, you can attach it to a hose, or once you get commercially licensed, uh, you just kind of mix in a backpack or a spray tank, and then you can spray the yard. Okay, Spencer says, sorry, I'm driving. I wonder what you're using to track applications. Yeah, the tracking of applications. Again, we just, uh, we build a template for the guys. We have them put it in their phone notes, and it just has like wind speed, area treated, uh, products used. And then again, we fill out— fill it out kind of for them, and then they just literally like copy and paste it on every yard in the dispatch notes. So if we ever do get stopped by the Texas Department of Agriculture, we can pull up all the records and see exactly what was sprayed and used on every property. Be. The, the TDA does not require you a specific way to track the applications. You could do it on paper if you want. You could, you could print out pieces of paper and have them write in every single one. Um, you do it on an Excel spreadsheet, you could do it on Homeworks in the dispatch note. So that, that's how we do it. There's kind of, uh, quite a few ways to do that. But all right, we're coming up to our last couple questions and we're going to wrap it up. So a liquid that kills weeds and feeds the lawn. Um, those are technically two different products. So one's an herbicide where it kills the yard— uh, not the yard, the weeds. And then, uh, the other one is a— is like a feed, right? So it like maybe gets nitrogen or something like that. Um, there— I feel like there are products out there potentially commercially grade that you can buy that do both. Um, or you can just mix it yourself and do it that way. You can do liquid fertilizer and you could do a liquid weed killer. Uh, you just mix in the same tank yourself, and as long as it doesn't have like a chemical reaction— sometimes like if it gets like super foamy or something, then it's not a good chemical reaction, but I'd say most of the time it's fine. And so, um, yeah, you just test it in a small amount first before massively building that out. All right guys, that wraps it up. Thank you guys so much for watching and tuning in today. Uh, really appreciate you guys. I hope you guys crush it, and, uh, yeah, have a great rest of your Wednesday.