Will Kelly breaks down the 4L framework for scaling lawn care: Leads (under $100k, focus on door-knocking and flyers), Labor ($100k-$250k, hire your first crew), Leverage ($250k-$500k, build systems and processes), and Leadership (over $500k, delegate to managers). His Texas business hit nearly $2 million with 20-25 staff across 3 locations by following this model.
You are losing thousands of dollars every single month because you are chasing the wrong thing. You think you need more leads. You think you need to run more Facebook ads. You think you need more customers. I'm here to tell you that that is a lie. If you want to scale a lawn care and landscaping business from $0 to $500,000, it is not about getting new customers. It is not about getting more leads. It is about discovering and identifying your bottleneck for your business using the 4L framework from Mike Andes. For those of you that don't know, my name is Will Kelly. I am down here in the state of— the great state of Texas. We've built 3 locations run by independent general managers. We're close to 20 to 25 team members and on pace to do just shy of $2 million this year in revenue. Now, when you are small, you think Every problem is a marketing problem. You think if you just had more yards or you had more customers, you would be rich. But the reality is, if you do not know where your bottleneck is in your business, more leads will actually kill your business. I know it's crazy, but it's true. It will create more chaos and your quality will drop. You will miss schedules and it will destroy your reputation before you even get off the ground. You need to to understand how a business actually grows. Growth does not happen in a straight line. It happens by breaking bottlenecks inside of your business. Now, using the 4L framework, it helps us break down your business into 4 distinct stages. The 4 L's stand for leads, labor, leverage, and leadership. At any given moment, your business is stuck in one of these 4 phases. Your entire job as an owner is to figure out which one is holding you back, smash it, and move on to the next business and grow your business. Let's break them down chronologically so you can see exactly where you are stalling out. The first L is leads. This is mainly the 0 to 100,000 phase. In this stage, you have plenty of time, but you have no customers. Your only bottleneck is getting people to know you exist. You solve this with volume. You put out flyers, you knock on doors, you post in local Facebook ad groups, Nextdoor, and you answer the phone on the first ring. You do the work yourself because you have the capacity to in your schedule. But eventually, you do a good job, you get 20, 30, 40, maybe even 50 customers and suddenly you have no more time left in the day. You are working until it's dark. Your phone is ringing while you are on the mower and you are exhausted because you can't even answer all the calls. You have just hit the second L, which is labor. This is the $100,000 phase up to $250,000. Your bottleneck is no longer getting more customers. Your bottleneck is now fulfillment. You literally do not have enough hands to do the work. The mistake most owners make here is they keep trying to sell, they keep pushing the marketing when they cannot even handle the work they have right now. To break the labor bottleneck, you have to make your first hire. You have to bring on a crew member full-time so you can free up your hands. You go from being a solo operator to managing a helper. You add capacity. 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-figure lawn 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. Once you solve labor, you hit The third L, which is leverage. This is the $250,000 to $500,000 phase. This, my friends, is the most dangerous phase in entrepreneurship because you hit what is called the complexity ceiling. You now have a couple of guys working for you. You have a lot of trucks, you have a mountain of equipment, and you have hundreds of customers. Now, the bottleneck here is systems. And most importantly, efficiency. You are paying top dollar for labor, but your guys are standing around, they're losing tools, they're driving back and forth to the job site because your route density is quite frankly not great. Your profit margins are shrinking even though your revenue is growing. You think, man, I was making more money when it was just me. To break the leverage bottleneck, you have to build the standard operating procedures. Mike Andes, my mentor, often refers to this as the wilderness, where you're making more revenue but you're taking home less profit. You see, you have to optimize your routing. I see too many people inside of my coaching group way too far of a drive. You have to put systems in place so the business can run efficiently without you having to micromanage every single task. The final L is leadership. This is where you transition from a manager to a true CEO. This is how you push past $500,000 revenue and head toward 7 figures. Your bottleneck is no longer trucks or mowers. It is finding the right people to run the day-to-day operations so you can focus entirely on higher-level strategy and growth. You must audit your business right now and your time. Look at your calendar. Look at your bank account. If you are stuck under $500,000 in annual revenue, you are misdiagnosing your phase. You are trying to solve a leverage problem with more leads, or you are trying to solve a labor problem by buying more equipment. I want to know exactly where you are stuck right now so that I can help you guys better. Drop a comment below right now and tell me which of the 4 L's are you stuck on: leads, labor, leverage, or leadership. Which is the current bottleneck holding your business back today? Stop trying to fix everything at once. Find the one bottleneck that is choking your cash flow today. Focus 100% of your energy on solving it and watch how fast your business unlocks. Go audit your business, find your bottleneck, and go solve today. Guys, thank you so much for watching the video. If you found value, please hit that like button and make sure you click that subscribe button so you don't miss how to grow a lawn care business from $0 to $500,000 in annual revenue.
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