THIS Is Holding Your Mowing business BACK!

Working harder is not going to get you to your goals. It is required that you work smarter, not harder. I'm going to show you exactly how to do that in this video. So this is for people that are at 1 or 2 team members, 1 or 2 trucks, and you're starting to learn the skill set of delegation. You are responsible and are over a couple of people. So we're talking about capacity right now. I see this a lot. The biggest 2 things where I see most managers need to cultivate their skill set, and they need to learn this new skill of time management and good decision-making. And I believe by the end of this video, I'm going to reframe the way that you think about your trucks, your equipment, and your team in order for you to get to $500,000 as quickly as possible. Last week, I shot a video on the different type of services or tasks that you do in your day every single day. All right, so this is the 6th different tasks that a general manager or an owner is going to have when they are on the journey going up to $500,000. Now, what I want to show you here, this is how much dollar per hour somebody makes, okay? Again, it's just a recap. This is $0. Sharpening blades, doing oil changes, putting a fresh blade on the mower, cleaning the air filters. All important stuff that doesn't make any money for the company. $0. MOWZ, we charge $80 per $40 per hour. If you cut 2 lawns that are 30 minutes, that's 1 full hour of work. You would make $80 for your business, for your department, for your location. Now for the landscapes, there's material costs, delivery fees. So this is anywhere from like $100 to $120, but we'll just say $100, a little bit more of an advanced service. So as we start going down the line, this is where you're going to want to be, is down here in the higher leverage tasks. Because the reality is, is all of us have 24 hours in a day. The ones that focus on the most important things are able to get the most things done. It's not about working harder, it's about working smarter. And I'm going to show you this right now. The weed control, we make $160 an hour. Okay, half of that goes to product costs. Drive-bys, we already came up with the calculation that you should be able to do about 15 to 16 estimates per day. Out of that, about 5 will book because we have about a 35 to 40% close ratio. And then each job is worth about $400. So $400 times 5. $2,000 is what you would make. Now obviously you're not gonna make it immediately, but you're selling the work, you're getting it on the schedule, you're getting the card on file, and you will make $2K once you deliver the services. You're not the one actually delivering it, but you are creating revenue that will be delivered at a later date. Same thing with penny estimate calls. If you sit down and do 1 hour, you just crank 'em out, 20 to 25 calls in 1 hour. Most people don't answer the phone. It's about 2 minutes of voicemail and you just crank it through. You'll get 1 or 2 or 3 that answers. It's your job to be able to sell them over the phone, overcome the objections, introduction and book them. So if you can book one customer in one hour doing that, you will be able to make about $2,000 per hour. If you sat down for 8 straight hours and called 50 to 100 to 150 estimates, you would probably be able to book 3 to 5 customers in a day. I know that because I've literally done it. So if you can sign up 4 customers to 5 customers in a day doing penny estimate calls in the spring rush at $2,000 a pop for recurring work, you're looking at about $10,000. I'm gonna put squigglies. This is just a rough— we'll say $8K to $10K. Okay, so I already went over this in the last video. If you haven't checked it out, go watch it out. But ideally, we want you focused in these areas the most. If you don't have penny estimates to call, or you've already called them 2-3 times that week, then go to drive-bys. Do you have any drive-bys? Pull them up as quickly as possible. Don't wait. The longer you wait, the less likely they are to book. Then once these are done, we're gonna go up to the weed control. Obviously, you guys know you want to be down here. This is where your time is most effective. For the company. I see this time and time again with general managers and entrepreneurs, lawn care business owners, lawn care professionals that are in the space that are grinding, that are growing, that are wanting to achieve both their personal goals and their career goals. They go hand in hand. If you do well and execute at work, at your career, you're probably going to be able to buy the house that you want. You're probably going to be able to buy the new car you want. They go hand in hand. Let's talk about this. Where I see most people fail, there's two things. So let's go through some hypothetical hypothetical scenario here, okay? We're going to go over here. We're going to have Manager A and then we're going to have Manager B. I'm going to show you the difference of what this looks like. And we're going to start with our Manager B first. Okay, Manager B spends most of his time here. He also spends a quarter of his time here. And then when he's available, he does some landscapes and a little bit of weed control. Let's just say in this scenario, we spent— and we're going to go off of budget hours. So 0.5, which You're not going to get budget hours for maintenance, but this is just a scenario example. He spent 4 hours of his day mowing, he spent 1 hour of his day doing landscapes, and then 1 hour doing weed control. Let's just do the math here. So $160, he's gonna make $160 doing that 1 hour weed control, he's gonna make $100 doing landscape, and then he's going to make $320 mowing, and then he's not going to make any money doing blade sharpening. Team member B made $580. Okay, day 1, that's how much he made. And let's say that's his consistent schedule. Day 2, day 3, day 4, so $580, $580, $580. This is just what he's used to, okay? Does a lot of mows, does a little bit of weed control, spends his time doing maintenance, oil changes, stuff like that. Now again, this is spring rush. There's different seasons. So if you're in the very busy season, this is what we're talking about. Manager A leans into the coaching, leans into the training, realizes that he only has 8 to 10 9 hours a day to work, 5 days a week. So, he doesn't want to take a long time to hit his goals. He wants to get to $500,000 as quickly as possible. Go into profit mode, maximize profit. So that way he can buy a house, buy a car, achieve his goals and win, right? Like faster versus having it delayed. There's nothing wrong with going slow and steady. But if we've already done it, we know how to do this stuff. Lean into the coaching, right? As a business owner, we need to be leaning into the coaching. We need to be leaning into this as a manager to realize there's a faster and better way. And the beauty of it is it requires us to change. And most people don't like change because we're human. Let's take a look at this. Manager A watches a lot of YouTube content. Mike Andes, Will Kelly, Jonathan Pitoshnik. Leans into the education side, leans into the coaching, leans into the execution, the adjustments, the tweaking. Wants to get better, right? This is what Manager A looks like. Does 1 hour a week calling pending estimates. Estimates. So we're going to say 1 hour— I'm sorry, 1 hour a day, not 1 hour a week. He intentionally carves out before stepping on a mower, before stepping out to trim a bush, he says, the first thing I'm going to carve out of my schedule at 1:30 every single day, I'm going to get back to the shop and call my pending estimates for 1 hour. All the newest ones. 1 hour there. Okay, the next thing, he's going to spend 2 hours a day going out and doing dryouts. Now again, you're probably not going to do that every single day. You're just going to batch them up on 1 day or a couple days a week. On Tuesdays and then maybe on Thursdays. Those are going to be your estimate days, but for the entire week, it's going to average out 2 hours per day. So you're going to spend 10 hours an entire week doing drive-by estimates, but in this day-by-day scenario, it's going to be averaging 2 hours. He spends the other 2 hours mowing because he knows that this is a higher leverage task than mowing or doing blade sharpening or even doing estimates or landscape jobs. So 2 hours, and then he spends 1 hour landscaping. He spends 0 hours mowing and he spends 0 hours doing blade sharpening. So what is he doing here? He realizes that these tasks he needs to delegate and get off of his plate as quickly as possible so that way he can move up to do the higher leverage tasks. He delegates the blade sharpening, he delegates the mowing, and if he is out there mowing, he's not out there mowing by himself, or he's not able to duplicate himself and train someone else to come up and take his position and spot so it frees up his time to go and focus on other higher leverage tasks to pull more return back for his location. Let's do the math on this. Manager A spends 1 hour doing calling penny estimates. Guess what he's doing in an hour? He's doing 20 to 25 calls. Guess what's gonna happen? He's gonna get good at it. He's gonna do the volume. He's doing this every day. He's gonna get the repetitions. He's gonna learn how to overcome objections. He's gonna do so much volume, it is going to be unreasonable that he's not gonna be good at it. Give him a few weeks, he'll be a professional at it because he'll do so much volume. He's doing it every single day. He's prioritizing this. And what's gonna happen is he's going to sign up one customer every single day because he's getting savvy with calling people for pending estimates. He's gonna book one recurring customer in one hour worth of work sitting down and calling 20 to 25 estimates. One recurring customer in our business is a $2,000 annual value, okay? $2,000. So that's $2,000. Now I understand he's not gonna get all that right now. I understand that. But what he's doing is he's securing the finances, getting the card on file, signing the customer up, reassuring them on the deliverability and how we are a 5-star service lawn care company. And as long as you do good work, you just made $2K doing 1 hour worth of sales. All right, next thing, drive-bys. He's gonna go out and do drive-bys for 2 hours on average average per day. In 2 hours, you should be able to do about, I would say, 6 to— yeah, probably 6 estimates. 6 estimates at a 35% close ratio comes to 2 secured estimates. So out of 6, we should be booking 2. The average price for a landscape job, $400. So $400 times 2 signups, that's $800. So now all of a sudden, we signed up 1 customer in an hour for $2K, we signed up 2 customers for our drive-bys for $800, We have $2,800 now. And then we got to go out and do some weed control. $160 times 2 is $320. And then we have $100 for landscapes. The total revenue that Manager A was able to produce for the company— now again, I know some of this will take time to collect, but it's guaranteed as long as you do good work and don't lose a customer. $3,220 is what this manager was able to produce in one day. And you guys wanna know what differentiates the individuals that come into the organization, they listen to the coaching, they listen to the training, they prioritize and execute, they delegate the lower lever tasks to somebody else that they can start building their duplication career. They come in here and you see what happens. This manager A, he did what manager B's gonna do in one week in one day. He took 5 days, 40 hours worth of hard work. And he transcended that and he reversed that to sales, to weed control, to the higher leverage tasks in the business that produced the most return. It's all a mindset shift. It's a mindset change. You have to be able to release your hand and open up on the things you're doing right now in order to get you to the next level. I will tell you this and I will share this with you guys, and then I'm going to share one last thing at the end of this video. I am listening to a book right now. It's called Good to Great by Jim Collins. They did a study on hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that they dissected to where there's completely no bias, and they looked at statistical factual information to figure out and study what separated good companies from great companies. And one of the biggest things that stood out to me when they were studying these tons and tons of different businesses that went from good to great— because there's only an exceptional few that ever get to the great side. And what they did is they looked at the study and they said it's not about what these companies did that got them to become great. It's what they stopped doing is what separated them to go from good to great. They had to stop doing things that did not have the highest leverage return. They had to stop doing those tasks that weren't moving the business forward in the highest leverage lever that you pull. Even myself right now to get me to the next level, I every single day in doing these small lever things in my business where I pull the lever and I get a little bit of return. If I would just open my hand and release that control, delegate it to somebody else to get my time back to go focus on the thing that when I pull that lever, I get a massive, massive return. It happens at every level in business. And that is what separates the companies that go from good to great, is they stop doing these things that are taking their time away from what's actually the most important thing. There's a really good book out there called The One Thing. Highly recommend listening to it. It'll reshape your brain. To hit this home, $3,220. Now let's say this, this guy, Manager A, does this every single day, 5 days a week. Watch this difference. $3,220 times 5. He's gonna make the company $16,000, or his department. $16,000 in 1 week by doing the higher leverage tasks. Where the other manager who's doing a lot of maintenance and mows and landscapes and get caught up in dispatching and doesn't do their pending estimate calls, doesn't do a lot of drive-bys, pushes the weed control down the road, right? $580 times 5, that's $2,900. You can see the difference here. At the end of the week, one manager was able to produce $16K for his business. The other manager was able to do just shy of $3,000. In one week, the delta is a 5 times over difference. And it's simply due to the priority and time management of what we're working on each day. Shift the mindset, shift the brain, and you will get better results. Last thing that I want to— that I want to explain to you guys. We're going to be talking about decision-making. As a manager, general manager inside of an elite organization, it is your responsibility to think through and problem solve what the best option is for your department and your business. We have flyers and then generally we have one-time property cleanups and then we have trucks. We got a flyer goal. Everybody has a flyer goal. We're trying to get as many customers as possible in the spring rush. If you're like us, a business owner out there trying to grow your location, doing door hangers, cool. We also have one-time jobs. These are constantly booking. Where I see most managers and where I see most GMs or most lawn care business owners get hung up on is they focus on the flyer duty when there's actual work to be done. You are spending money as a manager on insurance, tires, trucks. These are your assets. Each one of these trucks has the capability depending on the services we're doing. In this scenario, we'll just say landscape jobs because that's what we're talking about. So $100, we can do 6— we'll say 6.5 5 budget hours a day in an 8-hour day, and we can put 2 people in that truck. The max revenue that these trucks can pull in are $1,300. If we're doing one-times and we can put 2 people in that truck, that truck will produce your location $1,300. This is a good scenario. But instead, what happens is I see sometimes we get caught up in the door hanger thing, and so we, we're like, hey, we got to get our door hangers out, we got to go do door hangers. So we say, hey, let's just leave the one-time jobs for next week and instead let's go to door hangers. Okay, let's talk about door hangers. You're gonna pay $18 plus Social Security, Medicare, and all that extra stuff. You're gonna probably pay about $23 an hour times, we'll say, 7 hours. That's $161 times 2 people. That's now $322 plus the material cost for the door hangers. We're gonna do 500 a day, which is each, so that's gonna be $1,000. So you're gonna spend maybe, I don't know, like $50 in maybe door hanger stuff. You're looking at like $372. Instead of making $1,300, we're gonna go and spend $372 for the business. In a snapshot view, which one do you guys think makes more sense? Putting the guys out on fire duty and spending $372 in labor and material for the door hangers, or if you have one-time projects that are sitting on Monday the next week, or however you guys structure it in your businesses. We put them on Monday. If you have one-time property cleanups, you can pull up, or weed control jobs, whatever. Like it doesn't have to be landscapes. You could outfit these guys to make $1,300 for your business. If we started at zero, okay, let's just say today's opening day of the business or vocation. Let's see which one makes most sense. Option A puts us backwards $372. I know what you guys are gonna say. Well, Will, you could sign up a recurring customer or two that day and you can get $2,000. $1,000 per annual value. Now, it's not always the case. There are some days that we have door hanger people go out and do door hangers and they don't get a sign-up that day. They just don't. If we're starting at zero today, one decision puts your department or business back $372. Oh, and by the way, you still have to pay taxes on— not taxes, insurance on these trucks that are sitting idle in the lot. Probably not a good idea. If you have one-time property cleanups, weed control jobs, or any kind of mowing service that you can pull up I would not put your crews on flyer duty and leave a truck idle in the lot if you have work you can be doing. The other option puts a positive $1,300 in your pocket. Which one to you guys makes most sense? Put it in the comments below. Option A, $372, or option B? It seems simple when you look at it on a whiteboard, but it's, it's not. I promise. Being an owner, being an entrepreneur, being a general manager inside of a location, I believe is the hardest role in the organization. Okay, it's our job to serve you guys and to help you guys think through the framework and the thought process so you can make better data-driven decisions for your location. So I want you guys to think about this next time you guys put people on fire duty. Can you pull any kind of jobs up to actually make the company and your location money? 9 times out of 10, the answer is yes, you can. You can pull those jobs up, you can pull sprays up, you can pull one-time property cleanups. And so this is always going to be a better option. Now If you go, you look at the next schedule on Monday or next week on Monday and you're like, hey, there aren't any jobs. I can't pull any up. Cool. All right. Now let's tap into our flyer duty. Let's try to maximize how many new customers we can get to continue on to hit our goal. Just think about this stuff. All of this stuff is decision-making processes and time management to focus on the highest leverage task in your business. Hopefully this, this helps you. Make sure you like the video, click the subscribe button if you want to learn how to get to $500,000 in annual revenue and not take 4 years to do it. We'll see you guys in the next video.