Starting (and Fastlaning) a lawn care service business

[Johnny boy]

Update:

I've created an automated sales process and will be relying on it from now on. Here is how it works.

New phone number, when you call or text the number, it gives a greeting and sends you an automated text message to visit our website for a "quicker quote that saves time". That's the number I advertise with. No random calls catching me off-guard at random times.

On the website, it has a simple page that uses social proof and good design to entice the visitor to click a button labeled "get started".

The button opens a popup quiz that segments the visitor based on what they are looking for and then sends them to a form to fill out their information for a "fast and easy quote". The information adds them as a contact in my CRM and sends them to a sales page based on their answers to the quiz, so each customer gets a sales pitch that sells to them differently.

They then get an automated email welcoming them and sending them a link allowing them to schedule a convenient time to schedule a phone call that has their quote and pricing information based on their square footage.

I get an alert that I have a sales call scheduled for a certain time and I take a look at their property on google maps to see what price I'll quote them. The customer is sold to in an efficient manner and I never have to waste time visiting them, remembering to save their info, selling our services to them. Only a 10 minute call on a customer that understands our services and is usually ready to buy. I can do this remotely. And since each customer signs up for a year long contract, I'm generating about $3,000 in revenue to come in over the next year in a quick phone call.

I use automated systems such as "survey slam" for my survey, "Active campaign" for my emailing, and "calend.ly" for my scheduling.

And since we only sell one service, I don't have to listen to their bs about how they want us to only come every other week, or that they just want us to mow and nothing else, or how they want us to clean their gutters too. Nope. We are a professional company and this is what we offer. When it is advertised that way, it seems the customer forgets all about the custom work they wanted and just says "okay, that's worth it".

The entire process is smooth, professional, and makes the customer think "this must be a very high quality company". It follows a similar process as large companies like Trugreen, Lawnstarter, Lawn Love, etc...

I can pay for ads, sit back and focus my energy on better things while automated leads are brought in and sold for me.

 

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[Johnny boy]

For the last couple weeks, I've worked about 4 hours each week while my employee worked. My business brings in enough to pay for expenses, an employee working full time, and all of my personal expenses. In the winter, I will have an extra 3000-3500 each month because I will have the same revenue without an employee or work to do so no gas or other expenses. That is if I do pretty much no work at all. I could just sit on the dock and relax all summer, get a second truck in the winter, sign up lots of customers and have two crews working full time next year and continue not doing the actual work. However, my brain gets weird when I don't work. It just turns off, gets foggy, and I become stupid and unhappy. It's funny that I'll dream about doing nothing like in office space, and then when I can do nothing, I hate it.

So instead of being lazy, I am going to sign up more customers, help my employee work and get done early in the day so I can make more money, get my blood moving each day, get done around 4pm and still get to enjoy the lake. I'll grow, have more money to save up for a rainy day and get to a second truck by this year possibly. If I can get to two trucks working full time, this winter will be quite an experience. It'll be more money than I've made in a year in a couple of months without doing hardly any work. I'll have 2 weeks off, then 8 weeks off just two weeks after that.

As I was writing this, I thought about what I'm going to do this winter and the answer is a rickshaw run . I like making decisions fast like that and I did the same when I decided to climb Mt.Rainier and bungee jumping so this is no different. It'll give me something to work towards and focus on.

another update: just paid for my ticket. I forgot you need a team lol.

 

[Johnny boy]

I've been lurking this forum for a little while, and I think it's more than just motivational. I need ideas too. I read the post on unsexy businesses, and I think lawn care qualifies.

I would consider this gold, however I think the idea proposed in this forum is a little optimistic, but achievable. I find it hard to believe someone with only car sales experience can suddenly jump into another industry, and find success in such a short period of time.

My approach is to spend appx 4k on a truck, appx 2k on a trailer, and 5k on used equipment found at auctions with cash. I won't launch the business until the spring of 2020.

I live in Michigan and wouldn't begin advertising until February. I would spend the next 2 months hanging bandit signs, knocking in doors, and cold calling. I would set up a website with paid ads, but nothing crazy. Possibly place ads on doors? I hear it's all about how effective the ad is itself


I would plan on operating as a sole entrepreneur for the first year to see how this goes. I would plan on getting 50 seasonal customers to keep me extremy busy the first year. 50 customers give, or take.

Hire employees if I'm winning after season 1?

My tips right now are

1. Recurring services only and make a “plan” they can sign up on

2. Contracts for everyone but make it a digital form they fill out and call it “terms and conditions” instead of shoving a 3 page contract in front of them and scaring them away

3. Use QuickBooks for recurring payments it’ll help make sure you have them by the balls because you’ll have their cards, and they won’t be able to ignore an invoice. It’s just automatically taken out.

4. Include cancellation fees in your contracts

5. The simpler the work, the less mistakes employees will make.

6. Get basic equipment like walk behind mowers. Less that can break. Easy to fix. Cheap, so it’s easier to grow to a second crew. Simple for the workers to use. Smaller lawns are more profitable anyways I promise.

7. You’ll feel like it’s impossible to sign anyone up and then boom, the grass starts growing and you get 10 calls every single day. Sign them all up. Don’t miss calls.

8. Craigslist posts and google is everything. Home adviser is good too but watch out for them sending too many leads at once you’ll have to pay for.

9. Your employee policy will be written from your first employees F*cking up in every way imaginable.

10. Your competition is mostly on the autism spectrum so be confident and keep your prices high. They’ve got few better options.

 

[Johnny boy]

Over the past 18 days we have signed up approximately $8,400 a MONTH in additional contracts.

extra 100k revenue worth of contracts for this year, signed up in the last 18 days.

I am not sure where we exactly are with our monthly revenue since there's like 15 people we still need to put into the recurring billing system and will do so on Wednesday evening most likely. But things are looking really good.

It's not without problems, I should be showing up to the jobs earlier in the morning before I give quotes and using that time to train employees. I've been spending too much time in the mornings just 'thinking'. I am usually guilty of that. So I'll be making more of an effort to go train guys in the morning. It's a tough time of year with signing people up, and hiring so many brand new guys, all at once, when it's raining and all the jobs are first time visits for so many people...all the problems happen this time of year.

As with any and all problems, I just tell myself things like

"The billionaires and giant corporations already essentially solved this problem"

"I've seen how poorly things are run at giant successful companies so the bar is low, we can do it"

"Look at how well things have gone with you acting like a complete F*cking retard, all you need to do is be slightly less retarded"

It is important to not look at problems and call it failure and then quit just because of your unrealistic standards. Sometimes it takes a bit of a tough stomach to be OKAY with issues that will always pop up, it just needs to be at a low enough frequency to keep things running sorta smooth. The thoughts pop up like "but HOW am I gonna make sure everyone is doing a GREAT job?!" Bro, billions of people go to Mcdonalds even though 20% of the time they don't even get your order right. There WILL be employees that we hire that absolutely suck, do a terrible job and then lie about it, and makes customers cancel. It's about managing problems, not eliminating them. And as I get older and more responsible, I feel that conservative voice creeping in. I need to remember to balance the two voices. With one telling me to always be thorough and do a great job and expect high quality, and the other telling me to focus purely on speed. Both have a lot of value and the failed entrepreneurs are usually too much of one without the other.

Just hired our 7th employee.

chase, andrew, garrett, griffin, jacob, dawson, and joe.

If I think about someone I signed up 1-2 days ago I literally don't remember them at all. Things are moving quite fast. It's a little nerve racking to put your faith in systems but it's the only way to do it.

 

[Johnny boy]

Thinking of either making a separate thread or maybe a video with a walkthrough of our sales process now.

We use hubspot and some basic flowcharts for an office gal to use that streamlines everything and makes for a pretty kickass system.

There's a few ways to get inbound leads.

1. Through our website form. (auto uploaded as a new contact in our CRM)
2. Calling in. we are using openphone to have a pretty great phone system. Auto-logged calls, all contacts are synced with hubspot but not on a local phone so you can see if any of our 1000 contacts is calling or messaging us without having those contacts on your personal phone.
3. Facebook ads.
4. Thumbtack ads.

That's it, all leads come through a call, our website, a facebook ad or thumbtack ads.

We do not auto-upload facebook leads from our message conversation ads because if it auto-uploads their responses, the answers will be messy. Like when it asks for an address and they say "1200 east main puyallup we want mowing" it makes that their address, so we use fb as its own mini crm for qualifying leads. It works way better.

The Phone system is awesome because there's a "done" folder you can send everything to, so it turns every conversation into a ticket you can "close" and get out of the way. Missed call? Call them back and close it to get it out of the inbox.

We have a second line for support only and it'll be for each location, so a customer can call, text, or send photos and once the help is given or the question is answered or the visit notes are updated we can send it to "done" and it's a completed task. All phone calls are recorded for training and saved on both their hubspot contact and in the app itself, super convenient.

Emails for our support are routed through hubspot so we can see them on the conversations tab and also treat each one of those like a support ticket by sending it to the "done" folder.

Everything has the same goal...
Clear the inbox and move it along.

Our hubspot contact page uses different filters and views to turn it into a kanban board. You have new leads, qualified leads, quotes, unsigned quotes, onboarding, then customers. You move everyone along the line and it's all right there in front of you.

It sounds like a lot but it really isn't, and it'll result in the customer service gal not getting overwhelmed and we will be able to manage all admin, sales and support for multiple locations easily. Plus the office gal will know when she's done with her work since inboxes will be cleared and all support tickets will be in the done folder







For hubspot the office gal just takes all onboarding people and finishes their profiles and adding them to the schedule and stuff, checks off the boxes and it moves them to "customer".

For quotes, she sees which ones were signed up and move them to onboarding. Unsigned ones get followed up with.

For qualified leads, her job is setting appointments with them.

For new leads, she just looks up their property to see if it's viable and sends them to qualified.

Calls can end up in any of the first 3 views. They can be qualified and have quotes scheduled all in a minute so things feel smooth and natural on the customer's end.

This can almost all be done from her phone too. At least the parts that require timely response.

Should be able to have one girl handling a thousand customers easily and tons of new leads without missing anyone.

Super, super, super thin corporate structure.

As we add more locations, we will still handle everything digitally in one central location. Less chance for issues. All customer service, handling leads, contracts and payments, dispatching and scheduling, HR, etc. All will be done by us in the central office so we don't have local managers screwing it up. Their job will be simple and easy, just the way it should be.

And when you do more of the work, you can take home more of the money. So franchises will be in our favor since we will be doing everything. You need to retain control so it's valuable in more than one way to have it all centralized.

 

[Johnny boy]

Charging per visit is dumb.

Look at this. It's a calendar.

Say that you start a lawn care company and you charge a set price for each visit.

"Hello mr.customer your price will be $50 a visit"

"Okay great, let's do it every other week"

"Sound good, we will be there monday".

So you go on the first, then the 15th, and also the 29th.

Are you going to add everything up, send a $150 invoice that you hope gets paid, and do that for every customer who had visits on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of the month? And then send a cheaper invoice for the customers on the 4th and 5th who only got 2 visits?

Are you going to send out 100 of these every single month? Always changing the amounts and who gets sent what?
Or are you just going to be unemployed for the last 3 days of the month?

Why would you do that to yourself?

Take the amount you want to make per visit, multiply it by the amount of visits they will get in a 12-month period, divide the number up by 12, charge that 1 single monthly price for 12 months, collect their billing info, and then put it on recurring automatic payments set to run on the first of every month upfront.

$80 a visit, avg 20 visits per year, $1600 a year, /12= 133/mo. Set it and forget it.

 

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[USN-Ken]

Also, if "bandit signs" (like the yard sign I posted above) are allowed in your community, then remember this hard lesson I learned: people LOVE knocking down your signs, especially if they are stapled to telephone poles (at busy intersections, of course).

So, consider using a tool like this: SignStapler.com so you can hang the signs high on poles, well out of the reach of pedestrians.

NOTE: Its not my company and i am not affiliated with them. Just know that they exist. You can build your own replica, too. I think there are instructions on youtube.

PS Also, most states/counties have traffic studies done every few years. They often post them online. Find the traffic study for your county so you can see which roads have the most average traffic daily so you can place your signs at super busy intersections.

 

[Johnny boy]

Important update:

 

[Johnny boy]

30 days in of zero carbs, 1500 calories a day, nothing but giving quotes and other admin business stuff.

Going hard on ACTUALLY automating our sales/customer service/crm system/dispatching. Going from "works for now" to "perfectly ready to scale nationally".

Will show the guts of it and how it works soon.

I think we could start franchising as soon as next year.

Imagine bringing on a new franchisee and their ONLY job is "train and manage employees, make sure equipment works and the guys have weed killer and other stuff, show up for in person sales appointments" and that's it. We can handle every other single part of the business at scale, even with a hundred locations. That's what we're building right now.

 

[Johnny boy]

I've built our customer portal app. It has one database but has a desktop app and a native mobile app that will be on the app store and google play store soon, so anyone including our old customers will be able to access it and login and manage their account.

We are taking away SMS and email support, and going exclusively to phone calls or our app.

On our website, it conditionally shows you our "sign in" button based on browser width so if you are on a phone it links you to the app store to get our app, if you are on a desktop it links you to our desktop login page.

All users are automatically created when they fill out our signup form. I had to build all of this with api, webhooks, etc.

It supports multiple property accounts so even a user with 30 accounts with us would still easily be able to use our app. When they submit a request it sends their account info through so all they need to manually fill in is the request specific form. When the request form is submitted it automatically gets uploaded and formatted in the proper folder for which location they belong to so our customer service can keep requests organized, photos are uploaded to their request if they included any in their submission.

Our instant quote system works really well too. It's all automated.

Our pricing is formulaic finally. Our office will be able to give many quotes over the phone using our instant quote system. Our in person sales appointments will be able to do it too but can still do it manually if there's no data in the area or something.

Our CRM and all of our systems together are working like clockwork. Once I activate our answering service for the spring, you'll be able to call in 24/7. You'll either get our in house rep, or the answering service if she's not available. Either way you'll be automatically input as a lead. If you do our instant quote online the same thing happens. Our rep's job will be to call all leads and ask if they want an in person quote or an instant quote. Once you fill out the signup form it automatically updates you as a customer in our system.

The goal of everything is a pleasing, easy experience. You can talk to a person right away. You get a call back quickly if you aren't immediately chatting with our rep. You can get an instant quote and complete the signup process right away if you prefer. Services are scheduled, you receive notifications, you can use a nice looking customer portal or call if you prefer. The services are done by our trained employees, not contractors. Payments are automated. A single customer service rep could handle a thousand customers easily. All of this will be handled in our headquarters. We will only need one office to handle the entire country.

We opened up some locations this year with "partners" who are like franchisees. We will be signing official franchise docs soon and making it official, using our new entities and new brand. They will be official franchisees at that point.

The attractive point of our franchise is that the owner manages nothing unless they want to be employed as the manager and receive a salary as well. They can say "I want to open up in portland" and we can do that, they would never have to meet the employees. One of our partners has never met the employees at his location. He has never spoken to them, and they don't know who he is either. Because of that unique setup, instead of taking a franchise fee, or taking a royalty, we are split owners with each location and get a share of profits. We handle everything, it makes for a uniform, standardized, repeatable system and the franchisee doesn't have to focus on all of the annoying parts of running a business.

Again, "make everything easy" is the idea.

We've got about 4 more people who are interested in opening a location up. They are waiting to see the numbers on how we perform with our initial partners.

For the last couple months I've been grinding all of this stuff out from morning to night. It doesn't feel like work, so each day has been around 12+ hours of this stuff 6-7 days a week.

My closest friend moved in to a house across the lake, so we've been lifting at 630am and going to MMA at 6pm and working a lot. I've been in a great rhythm lately, very productive, lots of energy.

I've been creating some systems for how we'll manage a ton of locations when it comes to fleet management, taxes, entities, banking, onboarding franchisees, training managers, etc.

I've never been an organized man. I always said that I was too creative to be organized, but when I realized I would be responsible for handling things at scale, I changed that. You have to put your life in order if you want to grow something. You have to clean everything up and learn how to handle life's maintenance in a new way. I used to just throw papers on my desk, now everything is in a proper folder, important docs are scanned and organized. My calendar is used religiously. I use notion for a lot of stuff. All the way down to things like cleaning your room. Everything has a place. I understand that the gap between where I am now and having national locations and many millions a year in profit is how organized I can become. Lots of cleaning, throwing away, categorizing, drawing things out, etc. It's a constant fight between complexity and simplicity. A new system for something is adding complexity in a way, so it better be as simple as humanly possible to keep it lean.

A great asset is that I like what I do (working ON the business) and I set it up in a way that lets me spend 100% of my time doing that instead of working IN the business. I get up, hit the gym have my coffee, and sit down to work...girlfriend brings me lunch, and I keep working until dinner or MMA, then work until 1am when my eyes get heavy. Then I do it again the next day. It's all just part of a season. It's a good time to be doing this stuff, I won't have to do it twice. There'll be a season where I don't work at all for months, but that is not now.

Down the road I'll show some more detail about our systems and how to create some robust automations and app building.

I owe a big thanks to @ZCP for convincing me earlier this year to take the jump and think differently about how to grow. I owe him some sort of deal for being on my side and seeing potential in this.

 

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[Johnny boy]

How to make an even schedule for employees doing field service work:​

Many of our customers I have never met. I have never seen their yards. Some can take the guys well over an hour. Some can take 10 minutes.

So how do you make sure when you send employees out, the work is fairly split? If you just give your workers "X number of jobs", one crew could get done by 11am and the other crew would be working until 6pm and not finish.

Here's how we do it.

First: a breakdown of our pricing.

We shoot for 15k/mo in revenue per crew which means 15k/mo worth of contracts.

Our schedule is on a two week period until it repeats. Week 1, and week 2. Then we are back doing all the week 1 customers again. Customers that get weekly services are on the schedule on both week 1 and week 2, but that's not relevant to the point.

This means we have 10 days of work until it repeats again. M-F, M-F, repeat.

When we estimate jobs, we take the average estimated visit time, add in the drive time, and multiply the total by 4 (for every other week customers). Here's why.

If we need 15k/mo in contracts per crew, split out over 10 days is 1500/mo worth of customers on a single day. That means we would have to do 10 jobs a day if each customer pays 150/mo. We would have 10 days of this until it repeats, which gets us our 15k/mo per crew.

If the guys can work about 6 hours and 15 minutes in a day (we leave some room for any issues, bad weather, overgrown grass on first visits, etc.) then that's 375 minutes of work+driving in a day. If we do that for 10 days, that's 3750. 3750 times our multiplier of 4x equals our magic 15k/mo number.

That's why we charge $4 for every minute of the total visit time including driving.

This is not billed to the customer as $4 a minute, it's just how we estimate. So they receive a simple monthly price as their quote.

When they sign, that total estimated visit time is kept on record. So for every customer, they have an assigned "time value".

We know a crew is not at capacity because their total time value that's on the schedule for any day is under 375, and their entire schedule is under 3750.

This way, our income is directly related to the scheduled work. It's no longer arbitrary. I can calculate that we can add 3.7 customers onto Tuesday week 1 for example. We aren't full when it feels busy, we are full when each crew is at a 3750 time value, which means it HAS to equal 15k/mo naturally.

Our mapping software shows each time value for each customer under their name.

Tomorrow, one crew has 5 jobs. Another crew has 13 jobs. And it's perfectly fair. (customer info erased for privacy)


That's because the first crew has jobs with time values around 70 for most of them, and the other crew is doing jobs with a time value of like 30 for most of them.

I can download our data from our dispatching system and calculate the average visit time of each customer. I can put their allocated time value in another column. I can make the next column calculate a ratio of their real average visit time to their time value, and conditionally format anything over 1:1 to be highlighted, which would show which jobs are less profitable or being done too slowly for the price quoted.

This is how we keep everything fair, organized, and profitable.

 

[Johnny boy]

Need to invent a word for the exact opposite of synergy, where everyone is more efficient and profitable when working alone.

One guy can go knock out 7 jobs.
Two guys working together can definitely not do 14 as easily.
They might be able to mow twice as fast, but they cannot drive around twice as fast.

Disynergy?

Today being april fools, we are going to call some old collections accounts and tell them they don't owe us any more money and we aren't actually going to sue them and then we are going to tell them april fools and give them their demand letters.

 

[Johnny boy]

Update: currently booked up for more jobs than I can handle. I did a few jobs for practice and ironed out many things between theory and practice.

I learned it takes longer than expected for weeding and long grass, I changed my bidding accordingly.

Meeting a young guy today to hire on as a worker for $12/hr. He’s got 3 years landscaping/lawn care experience.

Will have to trust him for a week before I have the paperwork in place to officially “hire” him and insure him through the business. That shouldn’t put me at risk, just the customers and him. Having experience working somewhere similar helps with me trusting him a bit. I’ll call his previous employment obviously.

He’ll work part time until I’m fully booked. I’ll go with him on my days off and will show him how I want things done.

Still working at the dealership. I’m taking a “lunch break” to go to the interview today.

Will update more as things change

 

[Andrew W]

OK. First off, the most important thing not to do is weeding. Your employees will hate it, you will hate it (it will take forever to do correctly, more money out of your pocket), and lastly, there's no good way to price it aside from hourly work. It is just a really difficult thing to gauge how much work will be necessary to complete it.

The second things that you want to avoid are those overly crazy people who need their lawn "just so." If you come across someone like this, avoid the headache and just politely decline or something. Also insurance comes into play here, if the property is wealthy be sure not to break anything, it's risky man. Up to you though, some people like working until it looks perfect, if your workers are like that, more power to ya!

In general though, the most lucrative part of the business for us was just mowing. We offer a flat rate price at the beginning of the season specific to each customer's yard. Then we have a pay-as-you-go model, each time we cut, they would pay. The project work (weeding, mulching, etc.) are just not worth the time unless you can find some prices from some more established lawncare companies and see how they are doing it. Mowing is easy, weedwhacking is easy, and you can charge whatever you want. So say you charge $50, your people working the same yard at the same time can cut that yard in 1 hour and you'll be out of there quick and and ready for more lawn. You cannot do that with project work and slamming these huge numbers and project price estimates in their faces is a huge turn off unless you can back up your claims for that price.

Keep in mind, mowing is different from all other aspects of landscaping. Landscaping is to make the place look beautiful as the #1 motivator, mowing's motivator is time. People don't have time to mow so they'll pay you. Keep that in mind. Establish trust in your clients, if they ask something early on and they need it done ASAP, get your people there ASAP. You can slack later but the initial relationship needs that fire, if they think you are looking out for them, they will look out for you. GOOD LUCK WITH THIS!

 

[Johnny boy]

Lawn care or any other commoditized service is a great way to build up some savings to do something truly fastlane. It's better than most regular jobs (especially if you're younger).

I’m saving as much money as fast as possible. I just don’t like waiting around at work for customers to wander onto the lot, even if I am the best salesman.

Plus, I’ve never owned an LLC before. Now I have. Just like a couple years ago when I had never built a website before. Now I can build very very good websites in no time.

It’s about implementing ideas, adjusting, and moving quickly. That’s what I’m doing.

This business isn’t truly fast lane but it’s at least on the expressway.

 

[Johnny boy]

Nope, it's definitely in TGRRE , I remember listening to it the other day. I can't remember exactly where he mentions it though.

@MJ DeMarco I think that means this thread should get an upgrade to GOLD, no?

I just got it and looked it up. lol yup. Thanks @MJ DeMarco It's my first time making it into a book.

Although, I gotta say...it's getting to become a first order specialized unit. I have worked 0 hours in the past couple weeks and the only thing I did related to my business was make the schedule for my guys. Takes me like 20 minutes in the morning and then I'm off to go do whatever I want.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Are these push mowers?

Where do you find a riding lawn mower at that price?

I ask because Im replacing my Bronco from Home Depot

Walk behind self propelled honda residential mowers. 21 inch. Bought at Home Depot.

Employees will break stuff and misuse stuff. It is tedious to sharpen blades and change oil. We buy a $400 mower, use it until it breaks in a year, and get another one. We don't even change the oil. It's kinda funny but it makes so much more sense.

It's light and maneuverable

It fits through gates so we can do backyards at small residential properties (the most profitable properties with the fewest complaints)

It shuts off when you let go of it. 0 liability in case the mower's blade break isn't working properly on an expensive mower and a guy gets his fingers chopped off and I get sued for a million dollars.

Each crew has two of them. Easy and cheap to have redundancy so if one breaks we aren't screwed.

We only service small residential properties that take 15 minutes or so to do. That's what allows us a 50% profit margin with only about an hour a month dedicated towards handling billing since all 160 customers are on auto-pay with a card on file in our billing system.

 

[Johnny boy]

if it costs you money, charge for it, whether they know it or not. Pretty simple. Drive time is an example.

When you charge, do it in the way that feels the cheapest but gets you the most money. Monthly payments on autopay is the easiest way to do it, along with not showing any line items. "we are charging you $180 per hour including drive time" sounds f*cked up, but "you get w,x,y and z services for only $127 a month for 12 months, billing is automatic with a card on file" sounds way way better. Handing over a 3 page contract scares everyone but when you have a box that says "I've read terms and conditions" it tends to work about 100x as much and you just tell them the terms in person or over the phone in bullet points.

when paying people, don't complicate it or you'll create more variables for people to negotiate and try to F*ck you over with.

never charge hourly, customers will own your time then. "Your employees took a break at my property, deduct 50% of the billed charges for that visit" stfu karen. It's $x per month regardless, just keep it simple.

If you are having issues with customers and employees pulling shit on you, it's your fault because you were in charge of setting the terms and you made huge mistakes.

 

[ZCP]

Now map it out over 12 months on paper. Look at the cashflow and capital requirements.
When do you have to let people go for the season. How many customers do you need and when.

Then work through your marketing needed to get that number of clients. What is your response rate, conversion rate, etc. How many in's do you need to land a client. Put the system down on paper. It will tell you when to spend, what to spend, etc. to get the client base you need and when you can add a truck.

Actually put it all down in the spreadsheet and 'run' the company on paper for 12 months. Test your assumptions (do a sensitivity analysis for key metrics and assumptions). If still a go, do a test marketing run and 'pull the trigger'!

 

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[El Príncipe]

Update: hiring people feels like a joke after today. 3 people scheduled and 2 of them completely flaked with no message. The 3rd is having car troubles. Feels like trying to meet up with a tinder date...

Feel your frustration mate. Been there. Still am there often (as a manager, as a owner it must be worse even).

I can only advise you to develop some managing skills and mindsets. Humans are not robots. You must be a psychologist. Treating each one as a unique code to be cracked. And develop some keen judgement of character like @minivanman said as well.

This is part of the "problem" you're solving as an entrepreneur. Look at it this way: Creating a human resources system is really a barrier of Entry. If it were easy, anyone and everyone could do it.

 

[Johnny boy]

Just curious if you have a software for this, or if you manually optimize the routes/procedures.

I have 5 sections that shape my service area like a pizza and each area is serviced on a specific day. The properties only a couple of minutes away can be filled in any day to fill empty spots. So that optimizes routes pretty well.

The procedures are on an app called housecall pro. The ipad has it's own apple ID and email so its also the login email to an employee profile on housecall pro, so I can dispatch jobs to the ipad or whichever ipad is in each truck as I add more crews. And I can make the jobs recurring. I can also track the location of the ipad live and look at routes taken and track time on each job to see where there are inefficiencies or maybe the guys are wasting time. Each "job" can have notes and has an auto generated photo of the street view of the property to help identify the right house when arriving. I can include notes from the customer like if they want something done specifically during that visit or to make sure not to do something they don't want done. It's a better way to communicate with the workers when it comes time for that. It also helps having recurring services because workers will become more familiar with the properties and any errors can be corrected.

 

[Johnny boy]

Update:

The winter has gone well. We kept our profits about the same and paid our employees, all while personally having a huge amount of time off. My schedule has hovered right around 20 minutes a day of admin work. I caught covid 2 weeks ago (it was a weak a$$ flu and nothing more, as expected) and it was nice that it did not affect revenue whatsoever. I cannot stress enough the importance of removing yourself from the work getting done. I could break my neck and still run the business. Employees have stayed happy and everything has gone pretty smooth. We always lose some customers in the winter months that we can't replace until spring but it wasn't a problem at all.

Our goal is 200 more customers. We expect 120 days of people signing up between march and July. Goal is 2 signups per day. Fingers crossed, should be an excellent year. Next step is to elect s-corp status because uncle sam is going to really start dick slapping me.

 

[Johnny boy]

Lot's of calls, ad campaigns, scheduling and signing up customers. It's going to be a busy spring if we are to get to 500k/yr revenue and 250k/yr profit but that's our goal for this year. Employees are doing good.

After a few great talks with @ZCP, we need to stress test this model in different areas. If we have ambitions of having multiple locations, we need to test market viability.

We could:

Do soft testing with like 10 grand and run our own ads, give remove quotes for locations in other parts of the country and see how our ad spend is, speak with leads and see if they are behaving similar to the people in our area (similar needs, similar expectations, similar closing ratio) Very quick testing, very simple. We can use that to say "if we did this exact business model in ______, ______, and _____ cities, it would work", then set the stage for having multiple locations next year.

I think we need to be more flexible in how we skin this cat, because it's easy to get caught up in thinking the way you go from 1 to 3 locations will be the same way you go from 3-50 locations. It may not be. I've always thought the franchise model was a bad idea for this because it gives away so much profit for short term growth, but why can't we just use that short term growth as a kickstart for the first period of expansion and then shift soon after?

It's time to map this out and ask "what exactly do we need for this to be huge?" and then ask "well...how do we GET that?" That'll give us a goal, then a plan, then a to-do list.

Time to take the 5 and 10 year goals and say "why not 1-2 years?".

Less imagining, more testing. You do it first, and then you know how to do it afterwards. I knew that when I started the business, so growing it is no different. I was comfortable with things being a shit show the first time I did it. I knew it would get more dialed in as time went on. Our next couple locations should be the same. You don't need to wait for the first kid to turn 18 before you have another. We don't need to be perfect at a full scale in one spot before we plant the seeds in other areas. I have been using the fear of being a mile wide and one inch deep to justify not widening at all until we are at full depth. It doesn't need to be like that, we can do both simultaneously.

I do not want to be 40 thinking back to if I could've saved 10+ years of my life by simply having some F*cking balls and doing what I needed to do the entire time.

Currently writing up different options and different plans. It will probably end up being a combination of a few of them all at once.

Always be reflecting and asking yourself "What am I avoiding?" "What would I do if I was 10x smarter?" "What would a billionaire do if he lost it all and was put in my shoes?" "What am I afraid of?". Those questions have been giving me lots to think about lately. Go spend time around winners because they'll just force the answers out of you, which is exactly what you need.

 

[Johnny boy]

These ideas are coming to be because I’ve been calling all the local law care companies and landscapers to get a complete lawn rehab done, but they either

1. Won’t answer, or
2. Won’t return my voicemails, or
3. Returned my voicemail, said they could do it, and then ghosted me

I’m literally trying to throw money at these companies and NOT one has tried to give me a quote, get me to sign an agreement, or even book an appointment to come look at the property.
NOT ONE.

LOL

You see guys? This is the competition. NON-EX-IST-ANT.

The bar is so low.

Go buy a lawn mower, get customers signed up, put them on recurring payments, hire good employees for $20 an hour, and people will be signing up left and right. I'm skipping like 42 steps but it's not hard.

 

[Johnny boy]

Now that all of our customers are into our mapping software, I can be so much less dumb.

We took a target revenue goal and split up our day assuming a 6 hour workday to give ourselves some room.
360 minutes a day to make 13k per crew.

Watch it in action...

We get a new customer that can go on either monday, tuesday, or wednesday, all the nearby properties are sorta close so it doesn't matter.

But I take the list of customers and sort them by days and download monday, tuesday and wednesday separately.... (this is just for week 1, week 2 is another set of customers)

I click on the "time goal" column and it adds them up.

I can add the customer to the easiest day and make sure the schedule stays equal.

Monday week 1: 1003 minutes (sum is in bottom right corner)



Tuesday week 1: 741 minutes



Wednesday week 1: 972 minutes



Best choice is to put the new customer on tuesday. I had no idea how hard any of these days were, I just had data to help me.

Look at what I found... some next level stupidity on the schedule. I can't believe we were doing this....



This is showing friday's jobs for week 2. Look at those southern 2 properties. Way out of the way. They should be mixed in to a different day, but I had forgotten all about them since we had so many other customers. Now I can adjust things to make sure each crew has properties that are nearby, not too difficult, and everything is more efficient. 80/20 efficient, not perfect, but making huge improvements.

Now that we can group properties easily, we can assign them to crews permanently. Each crew will have a somewhat equal number for the time goals all added up so its fair. Also, we can set those jobs as recurring jobs in our dispatching software so I spend 90% less time doing any scheduling since it's already going to be on there. ALSO, our customer service rep doesn't have to make a note of visit requests to be added later, she can immediately go into the visit notes for the next visit and do it right there. With permanent crews, the guys will get familiar with their customers and will know the properties intimately. "Oh, that's debra, she's sweet and her dog's name is Charles. She doesn't like her grass cut super low so we mow it a notch higher than normal". It'll give customers a personal touch if the same crew does the place each time. Consistency can become a control variable too, so we can see which crews are more profitable, and if a new employee starts on a crew that was previously doing a great job and we see more complaints, we know that it's the employee, not the customers. "Crew 1 customers had a 3% complaint rate so this new crew leader getting a 7% complaint rate with the same customers means something is up". A lot of my job managing my guys is figuring out who's full of shit, the employee or the customer. This'll make it easier to manage that side of things.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Opening 4th location.

We rebranded since our name used to include a geographic location, so now that isn't a problem.

All new entities.

Delaware parent corporation owns everything, including HQ office in Washington. Personal name is not public, office addresses for everything. Doing it the right way.

Everything's uniform. Registered agent service for every company, everything's at the same bank, all locations are individual llcs with own bank account, all location unique expenses charged to the corresponding accounts including things like adwords and fb ads. All corporate expenses that are not location unique are charged to HQ properly. No mixing of bank accounts. Organization is key as we scale up.

Documents for all companies go to our main office. We scan, upload and categorize. Lots to keep track of. VIN #'s, EIN's, account #'s and logins for all state revenue departments, employment offices and portals, etc.

App/customer portal is all done for mobile and desktop.

New phone system is getting ready to switch over.

Will be no more emails or 2 way texting. Only phone calls or using our app.

Instant quoting system is live.

Money likes easy. Easy to find, easy to signup, easy to be an employee and get trained, easy to become franchisee, low capital to start, easy to run since we run it from one central office, easy for us to handle leads with easy crm, etc.

Everybody is lazy. Build things for the average person since on average it's going to be most of the people you encounter. The average customer is like 'X'. The average employee is like 'Y'. The average investor/franchisee is like 'Z'. Make it easy for all three parties to make it easy on you. X="doesn't want to mow their lawn, $99 a month is a good deal for a well branded, convenient, non-subcontracted company to come reliably and do the work" Y="Doesn't want to work super hard, probably will make lots of mistakes unless things are crystal clear and obvious, but will stick around and get the work done if you pay them decently and make the work easy as cake and repeatable. Loves routine". Z="Usually has a business that isn't scalable but they make 1-200k and want to diversify, or they want to make the jump from med-high income employment to self employment but want a safer bet than doing stuff themselves".

When we open a new location, the franchisee gets a truck and trailer that they maintain ownership of, we open up the location llc and holding company for them, we set everything up so all accounts are in one place, all tax registration is handled properly, etc. Then we sign it over to them and they get a company set up the right way without it being different with each individual franchisee. Then as owners of that company we sign our franchise agreements. We split ownership of the individual location llc, and our HQ handles the operations. Customer service, sales, setting appointments, managing leads, dispatching, notes, filtering through resumes, etc. And we don't take any revenue, only a proportional split of profits. If a location is not making a profit we don't deserve a dime, the only purpose of opening up is to make a profit. We put our money where our mouth is. Worst case if a location doesn't work they can sell the truck and trailer since they own it, and they lose a few grand that was spent on ads trying to acquire customers. The holding companies are typically s-corps, so they can open 1, 2 or as many locations as they want, all profits they get go through the s-corp so they can have only one moderate salary getting taxed and take the rest as distributions.

Other franchises run by saying "give us $30,000 upfront and we will let you run your own business with our logo and a couple weeks of training and then we take 10% of your revenue for the privilege". I think that's stupid. I'm sure that we will charge an upfront fee in the future but I don't like the "okay now you go run your own business have fun" model. It doesn't create a uniform system, and it often turns the franchisee into a wage slave. Better to use economies of scale for things like support, sales, dispatching, scheduling, etc. and leave only the necessary in-person operations to a manager employed at the location.

When people partner with you and there's not clearly defined roles, they'll bring "their way" of doing everything and if you try to have a company full of 500 people doing things "their way", expect it to be a giant shit show. So that's why we do so much of the setup ourselves. #1. no more shit show. Uniformity. #2. That's actually an attractive feature to others because they have less to worry about. "What do you need me to do?" "Just read up on our intro docs, here's info and disclosures about us and here's what to expect. Go find a suitable truck and trailer and you'll need probably 10k liquid from cash or a loan for initial ads and payroll. We will set everything else up and then sign it all over to you and let me know if you have questions". It's a lot easier than "okay go start a company, figure out where to register with the state and all of the tax agencies yourself, get the ein and bank accounts, figure out your own CRM and make sure to answer the phone calls, it's your job to do everything, just make sure to pay us our check each month due on the 1st".



Between our new automations, instant quote system and our customer portal I think we'll be able to crank up sales/onboarding. We will need to focus our attention to putting out good ads since we are going to be spending like 50k on facebook ads alone this spring.

 

[Johnny boy]

This is the exact reason why we bought a van separately for each employee.

We tested this and
the efficiency of an employee working alone vs working with two is up to 40% higher.

EXACTLY

2 guys working together: 10 properties or 5 per person

1 guy alone: 7 per person.

7/5 is 40% higher.

If profits were 30%, and for every $10 we were profiting $3. We would be bringing in $14 and spending $7 still.

So you are now profiting $7 instead of $3. That’s a 133% bump to profits.

If your company sells at a 5x multiple. You just increased the value of your company a huge amount. A company making 200k a year that would sell for 1M, is now making 460k and worth 2.3M.

 

[minivanman]

Yeah, I knew you was in for a big surprise.

I laughed to myself for a good 5 minutes when you said, "I’ll go with him on my days off and will show him how I want things done".

You can show him all you want but trust me.... it will never be done the way you show him. Probably not even close. I'll be really honest with you, if having workers was as easy as you made it sound I would start a lawn service tomorrow morning and have 20 customers by tomorrow night.

Been there, done that, ain't goin back. But there is lots of money in the business if you are cut out to deal with those types of workers. Just take it a bit slower and realize that these people you are trying to hire are broke for a reason. Once you hire someone your job will be to be a baby sitter and a counselor. But I'm not knocking the type of people that do this work. If I had to mow for 8 hours a day every day I'd be a bear when I got home and need counseling too. And just remember about background checks.... they do not tell the future.... You will need your gut to see the future. Chalk this up to the 1st step on a long trip of learning. Good luck!

Have you watched any of the videos I talked about? It's not seeming like it. Just so you know... short cuts usually end up being the long way around.

 

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[Veloman]

I just sold my lawn business. Your numbers can vary so much. There is great potential. I could do $600 days myself with a push mower. The key is really good routes and multiple jobs per stop. I did it with all battery equipment. Cue the disbelievers. Its effective for small properties.
I sold because I didn't want to do it anymore and wasn't up for hiring help. Employees are the hardest part. Soo many poor workers out there.
Btw 95% of customers don't want to pay cash. 5% check, the other 90% want cc or online like PayPal.
There are tons of third party companies who can fill up your schedule for you, you just won't get paid as much. Some pay better than others.
Just remember this is probably the industry with the lowest barrier to entry. There is good and bad with that. Ultimately I surprised myself and did better than I imagined.

 

[Johnny boy]

Update: a kid replied to my job ad and said “I will not let you down”. He’s kept in touch. I’ll be working all day Thursday and told him I’ve got $100 waiting for him if he can come work. He’s got experience in landscaping and he needs a job.

I’m checking out a used truck for $2000 tomorrow. Should be decent for what I need. Gotta use my lunch break to go to the bank tomorrow.

Already have the trailer and equipment for a small team. Bought the more expensive stuff used.

On “job” days I do the lawn business from 7pm-9pm after work and on my “off days” I work from 8am-9pm for the lawn business. I’m working 80 hour weeks right now but let’s be honest, you don’t do much work as a car salesman. Still, I’m busy to the point where I often forget to take off my shoes before falling asleep..not good haha.

If the kid follows through on his promise to “not let me down”, I’ll have no problem scheduling more jobs next week. I can spend my off days bidding and looking at jobs in person instead of working my off days. We’ll see...