Starting (and Fastlaning) a lawn care service business

[Johnny boy]

21 and currently selling cars at the moment. I’ve got some money to throw at something. I just bought a used trailer and have some lawn equipment.

Got a pro website, branding, and I have decent copywriting skills for posting ads. Started with craigslist, Google AdWords and I’m on yelp and google maps. I posted just a single craigslist ad and in a couple hours had jobs booked for $200 for a few hours of work. I got 4 of them within a couple hours. I did this to test my market. (I bought the tools and trailer after this btw)

I’ll be hiring on some young guy for a summer job. I’ve got the LLC, business insurance, and I’ll be picking up a cheap truck from an auction (working in car sales helps).

I did a couple jobs myself on my days off, just to see how long it took and if there would be any problems, it was easier than I thought.

Once I hire on the kid, I’ll go with him on my days off from work until I can justify hiring another person.

My goal is to take over the local market with superior branding, smooth and time saving process, reliability and quality, all while being a fair price. Not cheap, just worth it. The first place I showed up to said “wow, you’re the only person out of 5 that responded and actually came...and your name isn’t Jose!” Haha!

I’ve calculated with driving around and dumping out the grass and time for breaks, the crew will be bringing in about 300-600 a day in revenue while costing me 130-260 depending on if I’ve got 2 guys or just 1, including gas. Subtracting other costs like insurance and everything else like expected repairs, I should be bringing in at least 100-300 per day worked per crew. 5 trucks = $1000 profit per day.

I advertise for all sorts of services in order to justify a higher “full service” price and upsell people that just want their lawn mowed. “Hey that concrete looks kinda gross, we offer pressure washing..and have you cleaned your gutters this season?” It REALLY helps having sales experience as I get started in this.

I’m doing this because I’ve got the money and nearly everything can be sold for at least what I paid for it. I can take phone calls and schedule things at first while I sell cars. Most of the day in car sales is doing very little.

The goal is to have multiple trucks, a physical location with an office, and a team for running the business while I’m off somewhere else, checking in every once in a while. I will NOT turn out like the 50 year old losers still selling cars here at the lot.

Anyone else do the same type of thing here? Did you struggle with employees being shitty? Did you struggle with difficulty getting jobs? Any experienced people with advice is helpful.

Not looking for permission or approval..I’m either looking for advice from people who’ve done it already or just giving a couple people something to think about if they’re on the fence about doing something similar.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Dopamine overdose.

Never met these people, never spoke to them, will probably never see their house. Adding 10k in contracts (yearly amount) to our revenue each day, and that’s recurring. All signed up because our nice office lady is making tons of calls, working super long hours making deals happen. She is a blessing.

Automations are kicking a$$. Our app works great. Instant quotes are working great.

Looking forward to when our company mows 1000 lawns a day.

And today I did less work than usual. I hung out with my buddy and we bought a jet ski so he could match mine.

Ads are running, the guys are working, each day we sign more people up and our new base revenue jumps each year. Franchisee sales are coming in. I was worried recession apprehension would stunt our growth. It doesn’t look like it.

LETS GO!

For a couple years I could just smell it, and now it’s knocking on the door. It’s just like the fighters say: you never get tired when you’re winning.

Every once in a while when I have to do the hard work upfront it’s a mini desert of desertion, but I remember that it always ends up being worth it.

I did SO MUCH this winter. Rebranded, started all new entities, new systems, created instant quoting system, created our app myself, did franchising work for the first time, transferred all the customers over, set up lead gen for multiple locations to work seamlessly and stay organized, built tons of automations. Can’t tell you how many 16 hour days I spent in front of a laptop just so we could make this happen.

Just getting started!

 

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[Johnny boy]

Proper incentives to help employee productivity and lessen micromanaging

"Whatever you reward, you get more of. Whatever you punish, you get less of" - me

I can't remember the last time I've ever told an employee they were too slow, or being lazy, or not working enough. Seriously.

Our employees get a set amount of work for the day. They will be paid for an 8 hour workday regardless.

When they're done, they get to go home.

If they screw something up, they have to go back.

The fastest way to go home is to do a good enough job that does not get them called back, and a fast enough job so they can go home.

Think of what you are telling an hourly worker by the way you pay them.

"You will get $18 an hour for every hour you are here, no matter how slow you are. This will continue as long as you are not fired".

This means that in order for them to be fired, you have to monitor them, notice their performance, reprimand them, do it a few more times and then fire them. The cycle continues, always toeing the line between being just good enough to not be fired and slow enough to maximize their income/work done. Any average person would obviously slow down since there is no reward for swiftness. In their mind, only a fool would work fast. It just punishes them because they are doing more work for the same pay. You are always cracking a whip, communicating with the undertone of a threat, and the majority of your communication will be negative. They will hide from you.

Remember, you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. When employees get to go home when they're done but are still paid full time, you reward swiftness and punish laziness. You get more workers getting shit done, and less people dragging their feet.

Our workers are in pairs of two. If one worker does bad work, they both go back. If one worker is slow, they both don't go home early. So now they are monitoring each other. They become the "mean" boss to each other and give each other the motivation to work. One doesn't want the other to slow him down, nor does he want to be the reason his partner can't go home. I have offloaded 90% of the "managing" of the employees to each other. I am the good boss. I am the nice one that's reasonable. They know that when I call, it's usually a compliment or a nice thing. The call backs don't come from me, they come from the customer.

They think the time they get off is a company gift, but they have unwittingly increased their productivity. They think they have gotten a few free hours from me, when they have just earned it by being productive. They have escaped the futility of working hard just to be "rewarded" with more work. "I see you got all the jobs done, here's 4 more to keep you busy until quittin' time". Now they have a reason to work hard. They create games for themselves. They see how fast they can get it all done while not having to come back. "We got done in 5 hours today, it was great". "Nice job guys you're killing it". A fool would say "Idiot, you could have them make you 30% more!". I guarantee you they would not work at that pace on hourly pay unless you were watching them like a hawk and yelling at them.

Human beings are ruled by incentives, use it in your favor. Proper incentives are as much of an asset as a full time manager.

 

[Johnny boy]

It's been a little over a year since I had the idea to get into this business. It'll be one year since registering with the state for my business license on July 5th. So I'll say right about now has been a year since I started. (I'm getting a cake for my business' birthday party for July 5th)

A year ago, I had never started an official business. I had never hired an employee. I had never dealt with taxes aside from getting a return through turbo tax from my regular job. Before I started this business I sold cars for one year. Before that I had played college baseball for a couple years. But one year ago when I started this thing, I was living at home, using pretty much every dollar I had to pay for new equipment or pay for employees to do the work. Sometimes getting phone calls from the bank from a negative allowance, with a phone bill being threatened to be shut off, and nobody calling for work.

But, I've always felt extremely lucky. I've always stumbled upon great lessons early on and made the right mistakes to learn the best lessons from so I don't have to wait until I'm 40 to finally learn them. I may always stretch myself thin and take more risks than any normal person would take, but I know it's helped me more than it's hurt me.

The more I taste, the hungrier I get. I feel like my life is a tuned up car with 400 horsepower and I'm begging for a bottle of nitrous to go faster. My whole life I've always felt I was never where I needed to be. When I was a baseball player, I was just "playing baseball", but never felt like that's who I was. That feeling went with me everywhere and I felt like I was playing a role in whatever I did. Not with this, though. Took me a while to realize that I really was just made to be in business.

I never knew what I really wanted because no goal felt good enough. I wasn't motivated because the end result just didn't excite me. But what I'm doing now and the visions I have for it excite the hell out of me and fire me up.

And I'm so excited because what I'm doing isn't the type of path that creates quick returns and fizzles out, like a music career or a sports career. Be great, make a couple mil, fade away into obscurity... This isn't some quick scheme like throwing some cash into bitcoin. This is a business. A steady, long-term, compounded growth type of business that'll be so much less likely to shrink than other types of income. And damn it's fun.

I like to make decisions that I'll be proud of looking back, and usually that means disregarding fear. I started focusing heavily on making decisions that scared me a few years back and it has paved the way for everything. I'm extremely proud of trusting myself, walking confidently when I couldn't see where I was stepping, not listening to others and only listening to my gut, not losing confidence when there was zero evidence that anything would work, making the hard decisions when I had the opportunity. It just reinforces that nobody's voice will ever matter to me.

When you start out, there's a lot of things that you're afraid of that would "devastate" you. There's a lot of harsh things that are tough to accept. There's a lot of "worst fears" that you find out are completely true and I think growth is about being able to handle them. If I had known that yes, it will take tons of work and yes, I will have to dedicate myself fully towards this and yes, I will have to change everything about myself to accomplish anything...I might not have done it because those were my worst fears. Eventually the dream itself forces you to make a decision and change something, yourself or your goals. And I'll be damned if I ever change my goals. It's like my dreams have killed my old self. I won't let the reverse be true. I'll always try the easy way first because sometimes it works and you find a nice way of doing things, but if I have to, I'll do whatever it takes.

If I could say what I want from life, I want it to be visceral. I hate the mundane and routine. I hate the safe and ordinary. I want to almost die a few times. I want 200mph and I want the windows down as I do it. I want to do all the things others are too chicken shit to do themselves. I remember when I was very young and I told my mom I thought I was either going to be a millionaire or be homeless and nothing in between.

365 days. That's all it's been. I've got nothing but time but I'm not going to waste it. Just like climbing a mountain. One step. Then another and so on. 1 foot at a time. Stop and enjoy the view every once in a while. Take a rest for a bit and then it's right back to the trail.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Update:
2 crews rolling. I have 3 full time employees and some guys I had last year are coming back.

Last month (March) we signed up 22 people which added 4000 a month to our revenue in 12 month contracts (48k/yr)

The combo of having simple, black and white, repeatable systems with some elbow grease has been paying off. Customers NEVER complain and everything is dialed in.

From start to finish the customer experience is great. Great job on the phones, great job scheduling quotes, great sales process, quick and quality services, etc.

All of my employees are much higher quality than what I had before. I’ve become much more discerning in who I let into my company. Culture is very important.

We should hit 24-28k/mo at this rate of signing up customers.

Not too long ago it was getting pretty discouraging. Always remember that things get better, and results will lag behind the work you’re doing. And remember when things are better that they can just as quickly get bad again if you’re lazy. Always have the attitude that you’re broke and desperate. Work hard when you don’t need to or else you’ll eventually need to anyways. Just keep the momentum going.

 

[Johnny boy]

If anyone wants to become an expert in marketing and sales, try to grow a lawn care company in the winter...

That said, contracts are rolling in now and once the schedule is all filled up, I'll hire two guys and add on more workers after that.

Maybe we can get another truck or two this year. This is the year to get as many customers as possible, do a great job and after this year have 50-100 people looking to continue their contract, allowing me to REALLY automate and then scale things for the year after.

12 month contracts are so nice. Recurring payments are so nice. Cancellation fees are so nice. Repetitive work each week is so nice.

Why my competition sucks:

1. They don't realize TERMS are QUANTIFIABLE. They think a $50 job scheduled for biweekly services is the same as a signed contract for biweekly services that cost $50. It IS different. The opportunity for customers to say "I change my mind" takes away a massive amount of revenue and leaves your schedule screwed up.

2. They don't realize the value of repetitive work. Repetitive work means mistakes get fixed by the next week and less mistakes are made. So you can hire cheaper labor because it's simpler work. Bad employees are your fault. If McDonald's and Walmart can hire idiots and make billions, so can you.

3. They don't understand the value perception that happens when you spread payments out to a subscription service that never changes throughout the year. We'll spend 45 minutes at a place and take 37 trips there throughout the year for all of our services. So we are there weekly for most of the year, but we charge only $250 a month. But the grand total is $3000. That's $100 an hour but many customers would shit bricks if we told them that's what we were charging. It's about perception.

4. They think the "fix" to these problems is commercial work, skilled projects, and unique services that are "profitable".

5. They can't automate their business because of the above "fix", and therefore can't scale their business very large.

6. They don't understand marketing. Their community doesn't care about lawn care. They buy lawn care because they don't care about it at all. You're not going to get followers on your instagram page for posting pictures of only lawns. Local businesses need to market like they are the mayor of their town, or the most popular person in their city. I have a podcast show that brings on local influences and businesses, which siphons off the local following these people have onto my page that's more about me than the business. I plan to have a marketing manager for each location to be the face of the company in each city. I don't even think I want each location to have the same name. Local businesses only need to be known locally.

7. They also think the "fix" for having a shitty business is to take on any and all work. The problem is their acquisition of customers. "We can't only do one service because not enough people would sign up". Sounds like a marketing problem, you lazy loser.

8. They buy big machines and trucks. What's the ROI of a fancy truck? Does it help you get more customers because you look "official"? Get your 2018 F150, I'll buy a $4,000 truck with a good engine and dump the rest into facebook ads. We'll see who wins. And good luck trying to accommodate the customers that have walkways and gates that won't fit your mower that costs more than my truck. Also, how are you going to grow your business if you need way more money to expand. You need $50,000 to add another crew. I need like $7000.

9. They don't understand cash flow. My payments come in at the beginning of the month before any work has been done. Plenty of time to pay for things, pay employees, maybe add another crew... you think "the money is in commercial work"??? They slow pay like nobody else.

10. They didn't read TMF .

 

[Johnny boy]

A few days ago I was sitting with my girl on the couch and I said “what’s actually stopping us from being somewhere else right now?”
“Idk, the food in the fridge would go bad if we weren’t here I guess”
The guys have been working for a long time with zero headaches, everything’s been going smooth, the business has been going well, and flights to cabo are $120….



I don’t know how long I’ll stay. I could be here a week or a month. I don’t have to ask and it doesn’t affect how much money I make.

It’s a weird feeling. The last 3 months have all been one big Saturday. Maybe something fun scheduled. Maybe nothing at all. But either way there is nothing I need to do.

It sounds like a cliche but my entire life I was always told I was wrong. The things I said were wrong. The things I thought were wrong. I don’t want to show off. I don’t post on social media. I don’t give a shit. But I know the same people that tried to file down my edges are trying to do the same to you. So I just want to say, keep your edge. Keep being wrong. Keep not listening. Trusting your gut is real. It’s as real as gravity, math, and the sand on this beach.

 

[Johnny boy]

We are moving our CRM to Go High Level and here's how it works.

Here's how leads can come in.

1. FB lead ads
- They see our ad and offer and click on the button
-They enter in some quick info.
-Sends them to a booking page to claim their offer and schedule their quote.
-Filling out the lead form puts them in the crm, and it tracks the ad and campaign that got them so we can feed conversion tracking info back into facebook for proper attribution.

2. Website form
-They search online, see our site, click get started button
-They enter in their info for a quote and it takes them to the booking page to schedule their quote.
-Filling out that form adds them to CRM and says where they came from

3. They call us
-24/7 answering service qualifies them and schedules an in-person quote for them with the right salesperson depending on their area
-That answering service agent inputs their info and doing so adds them to the CRM and it tracks where they came from.

Go High Level contacts all get marked with a new lead tag. Ones that scheduled a quote get a quote scheduled tag. If they just have a new lead tag then it puts them in an automation where it automatically texts them, responds with AI if they chat back, and it tries to get them to schedule a quote using our booking link. It does the same with email. If they don't respond it gives them a cold lead tag after a few days and it only sends them occasional reach outs until they reengage or opt out.

Upon any submission of our website form or our facebook lead form, our outbound sales service (also our inbound service) calls them and schedules a quote with them, which would then mark them as having a quote scheduled in our CRM.

If they schedule a quote it sends them sms and email reminders confirming the appointment, and sends them more info about our company and services to get them excited for the quote.

On the quote, the salesperson meets with them. They have their own company email and the calendar for that account is synced with the booking calendar so new quotes pop up in their phone calendar and if they have other quotes scheduled or times are blocked out it doesn't let quotes get scheduled for that time. On the quote, they give pricing and service information for that property, type it into a form and then it sends it off to the customer to sign, or they can sign them up right there.

When the quote is sent, it marks the customer as "quote sent" and it puts them in a new automation where it has the link to the signup form filled out for their exact quote. It sends them occasional texts and emails with that quote link and tries to convince them to signup and after some time it asks why they didn't signup so we can have perfect follow up, and the AI bot can chat with them. We can also hop in at any time.

When they sign, it marks them as a customer, uploads them into our app, we welcome them, and they are no longer in the lead nurturing system.

We onboard them by picking their visit dates, charging them for the first month, and use our onboarding alert system in our app to alert them of their visit date, and that we'll charge them for the first month.

All of these things are updated within the Go High Level CRM and then we can see which ads and sources brought in leads, quotes, and signups.

When customers call in to our 24/7 line, they can chat with sales and schedule a quote, if they are a current customer they are sent to our customer support line. The agents can lookup the customer using an admin only side of the customer portal app that has our customers in it. They can lookup the customer name in a search bar and their info pops up, which is tied to an automatically updated database so it's never updated manually. They click on the person's name after confirming the address, and there the answering service agent can enter in any visit requests or complaints and they are automatically submitted to our visit notes system so when our office makes the schedule and adds in customer notes, they can do it super fast, and see any requests they have made in the past so we have context.

For things like billing, cancellations, contract info, etc. then the answering service rep attempts a warm transfer to our main office. If they aren't available, the agent schedules a calendly call with the office and the customer calling in, so we can lookup any relevant info and have it ready for the customer.

Here's the customer's perspective:

You see an ad, you click and enter your info, you don't feel like scheduling right now, you click away. You get a text from the company saying hello and thanks for reaching out.

(Or maybe you saw the company on google and called them. They picked up right away and got you scheduled for a quote.)

You get a call within 3 minutes and a nice person asks you when you would like to schedule a quote. You get one scheduled for tomorrow and they answer your questions about the services and how it works.

You get a text and email saying "looking forward to our appointment at 5:30 September 18th". The email contains more info about the services and a nice video from the owner thanking you and letting you know more about the company and services so most of your questions are answered.

You get a reminder text and email before the appointment reminding you when it's coming up.

The salesperson calls you telling you they are on their way. They are in a polo shirt, have a brochure with frequently asked questions and a bunch of info and you keep it so you don't have any confusion and everything is consistent. They give you pricing and you want to think about it with your wife because you're a pansy who can't make BIG decisions by yourself like who mows your lawn. Oh well.

You get a text and email saying "Thank you for meeting with me, here's the quote, just click on this link and if you want to signup, just sign at the bottom of the quote".

You ignore it for a day. You get 1 other quote after calling 7 companies and only 4 answer the phone and only 2 even offer the service you need and one of them doesn't even show up.

You get another text and email the next day saying "tired of the unprofessional companies? Still want top-notch services? Here's that quote we gave you, click here to review and sign up!"

You signup. We thank you, give you some info you'll want to know as a customer including how to login into your awesome app for managing your account. It was automatically created for you when you signed your quote. Ta-da.

Your first visit is scheduled 4 days from now on tuesday.

You have a request to make for your first visit, you can call us and get someone the first ring, and they look you up and get your request in the system, or you use the app and it works great whether on your desktop or computer, so even a grandma can use it that doesn't even have a smartphone.

And this happens with the same smooth experience whether 5 people become leads in a week, or 500 in an hour.

100% answer rate, sales or support.

Get a quote scheduled yourself with our ads, our website, etc. Or do it on a phone call.

Receive relevant communication, instant responses, multichannel, tailored for you, 100% of the time.

Our company is like a manufacturing plant, where each stage is it's own machine operating at a certain capacity. This system is removing the bottleneck of our lead gen, maximizing lead nurturing and follow up, and now our only bottlenecks will be 1. how cheap can we get those initial leads 2. how many salespeople can we have out there giving quotes. 3. how many employees can we hire and train to do the work and 4. how many trucks can we get.

But, at least we are removing the bottleneck between taking someone who's interested and getting them a quote. DIY, calling us, us calling them, or texting. All easy, personalized, instant, and smart.

Remove friction. Make it easy. Make it too easy. 1,2,3.

 

[Johnny boy]

Update: We are growing. Just bought a 2017 Tacoma. I have two trucks and two trailers now. The one crew is me and an employee. I'll be setting aside the simple properties and having my employee take them over in the other truck by himself. I will hire another employee to work with me so I can train him and maintain some quality control for the more picky customers.

Right now, our one crew is at 8,000 a month for 12 month contracts.

I am running facebook ads targeting women aged 25 and up, top 50% of income and living in our service area. I have spent $341 in ads and have signed up a yearly total of $19,000 (1,600/mo) in contracts over the last two weeks . I like that a lot. 40 conversations turned into 10 new customers. I'm assuming an LTV of what we get from only one year to be conservative, when in reality, it's a lot higher. My ROAS is huge right now. Even if they all cancelled after one year, my return on ad spend is over 5,000% and my profit margin is 35% (assuming I pay twice as much in labor since I'm doing some of the work myself).



We have 50 customers on contract in total so far.

My goal for this year is to get to have two crews working full time. That will net me 80k profit (around 180k revenue) this year and I'll be able to fund a 3rd and 4th crew much easier.

I think it's possible if I dump enough money into facebook ads and they can provide an acceptable return from now until July.

I'm just enjoying taking it one step at a time. One more customer. One more employee. One more crew. One more location. One more state. It'll take time but I'm not in a rush.

 

[Johnny boy]

Crm: hubspot

Instant quote software: Lawnbot by workwave (LIFESAVER: We give instant quotes using this and our standard pricing based on square footage and drawing out the property on a map means our service rep gives lightning fast quotes that people can get in minutes instead of showing up next day in person and a salesman having to give quotes all the time)

Lead gen: Primarily Facebook ads and AdWords (thanks to @Andy Black for the consulting call)

Forms: JotForm. Tons of great features.

Automations: make.com (you can use zapier but I prefer Make)
Customers fill out form online, they can get instant quote but regardless they show up first in our crm.

Phone system: RingCentral. High call quality and tons of ways to create rules like having pro phone trees that route to correct extension “press one for sales”, and then forwarding to answering service if sales rep is busy.

Voice actor for phone system: fiverr. So cheap.

Answering service: Voicenation. You can set them up with a web form you create so when customers call they take their info and type it in, automatically gets added into crm.

Customer app: built with Adalo and hosted on our site.

Mapping and scheduling software: Mapline. Makes it super easy to maximize efficiency and keeps scheduler from losing their mind. Total lifesaver.

Dispatching software: Housecall pro.

Billing: auto recurring payments with QuickBooks. They pay taxes for us and handle accounting reporting well.

All roads to us end with you in our hubspot contact list. Our rep doesn’t enter in people manually unless she’s on a call with them when they reached out to our sales extension. That way there’s full accountability, everyone is in the “lead” section of crm.

Hubspot setup: contacts view is setup like kanban board. Lifecycle stages: lead, quote, follow up, customer. All leads get called and are given quotes and lifecycle stage set to quote. All quotes are automatically assigned as follow up if they don’t signup for a day after getting quote. When customers sign their signup form they are automatically changed to customer. The automations with make.com allow this to be possible.

When a customer signs, their contract is automatically created with the form as a feature of JotForm, they get a welcome email, they are automatically added as a user for our lawn care app I built and sent login instructions.

JotForm submissions for signup are setup in a way to be an easy to follow on boarding checklist. Service rep adds them into housecall pro, Mapline (picks a visit date that is max efficiency), and QuickBooks. Those things don’t take long and are done in down time, can easily onboard tons of people quickly so it’s worth it to be done manually to make sure nothing gets missed.

Customers make requests, submit complaints, make inquiries and manage their account on the app or calling us, we don’t communicate over text or email back and forth with customers to make sure nothing ever gets missed. Calling satisfies the boomers and the app satisfies everyone else.

Scheduling takes minimal time, click click done, one person can handle the scheduling for hundreds of customers per day in less than an hour easily.

Rep has admin facing app built with Adalo and can send out bulk notices for anything by checking boxes by customer names in a filterable list by location and pressing a button.

JotForm forms embedded in our app and connecting it to Todoist with an automation means any requests get automatically input into Todoist and organized by location so service rep can take the notes and translate them to what the notes for the visit should be that day in the dispatching software. You don’t want customers rude requests or random messages being fed directly into the notes our employees see so that has to be done manually.

The secret to making this work is a handful of API’s and using url parameters, nothing you can’t learn from YouTube.

Entire system is based around the idea that we want a small amount of people in office handling large amounts of customers with providing seamless experience for customer while controlling the data. One rep should be able to handle a 2m/yr amount of customers easily including all sales, onboarding, scheduling, billing, etc.

Run ads, leads end up in hubspot, we send prefilled JotForm quotes and when they signup we follow onboarding checklist, customer uses app, scheduling and notes are done each day easily, money rolls in and we keep it going.

Central office handles all this. Local locations only have a rented outdoor storage space where employees park and get in the trucks and get to work. One person is a manager to handle in person interviews, training employees (easy), point of contact for workers, make sure equipment is all good, and rare in person sales (also easy). Managers can be shared among multiple locations since their job is so easy and it keeps costs down for individual locations.

We pull dispatching data and track visit time, compare it to pricing in an excel sheet and see who is unprofitable or profitable and adjust plans accordingly.

I’m just trying to do the top-level stuff fast as possible since almost all bottlenecks are removed.

We can get as many trucks as we need.
Workers are easy to come by since we pay well and work is easy.
Office can handle huge amount of customers.
It’s profitable.
Ads can be scaled up.

The only bottleneck is just getting things up quickly. Like the 9 companies I had to form. The business licenses. The contractor license required to run local service ad campaigns on google. The tax registration in multiple states. Dealing with AdWords suspensions and other BS. Gotta keep things simple so we can do it fast. Speed is the game, while still building on rock and not sand, because it needs to work at scale. It’s annoying because even though you can hire people for those things, that’s just another thing to do that would add even more work. Have to do some of this myself. Easy to feel overwhelmed but that’s going to happen if you’re trying to do it this way and move quickly.

But the path forward is so clear and looking optimistic. Now it’s just a race to see how soon we can get there.

 

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[Johnny boy]

I violates the commandment of scale.

If 500 people called me and wanted to sign up, I could quote them online, collect their credit card info, spend 3 hours writing out the schedule for them, run their first payment, use that as a down payment with a private loan to purchase 14 trucks, trailers and equipment, and rent a empty lot to park everything, and I could hire the workers within a couple of weeks using temp agencies, Craigslist, Indeed, etc. And then I have a +1 mil / year business operating at a 40% profit margin. It would not be the easiest couple of weeks but I could do it.

But yes, ebooks scale better. I'll keep that in mind.

 

[Johnny boy]

With rising ad costs I went out to try door to door so we didn’t have to shut off ads in the summer months.

Took no time at all to get a sale.

“Hey just wanted to give a heads up we were taking care of your neighbors lawn down the street, Dave, you know him?

We take care of his lawn and it would only be 99 a month to take care of yours too (small yards in development).

We do all of the mowing, edging, blowing, weed control, trimming shrubs, and fertilizing”

Super good results. Lots of signups.

We can afford to pay like $100-$200 for a signup since they are year long agreements.

So I hired a door to door salesperson who’s got lots of experience.

We will pay them $100 for every signup. I think they’ll be able to get a signup every hour to every two hours.

Maybe it works well, maybe it doesn’t. But I’m not going to sit around and complain that we can only run Facebook ads during the spring.

We will be onboarding agencies to run our ads and hopefully get our cost per signup down for all areas so we can unleash our potential. We can handle so much more than we’re doing right now.

We’ve removed a lot of bottlenecks with getting franchisees. (Can get lots of trucks now)

We’re onboarding an outbound appointment setting service so our ability to call leads is no longer a bottleneck.

Now it’s just a matter of shoving leads through the system and scaling up further.

 

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[Johnny boy]

All customers are on signed contracts for regular services. I work 4-5 hours a day and I'm moved out. Living on Lake steilacoom in Lakewood, WA. Not bad for a 1st place at 22. Here's the dock and patio.



I will add on more customers, save up for an extra month, buy another truck, and hire on workers and use that month to add on customers to my own schedule so I don't do the same thing as last year; sit around and be lazy but feel cool for not working. It was just feeding my ego being only a boss, but it wasn't feeding my bank account or the growth of my business. There are not enough margins at the moment to have workers do everything, pay for me to live, AND grow the business. I need to kickstart it myself a bit more before I can purely manage AND grow it.

It's the mcdonalds of lawn care. Here's your mower, here's your weedwhacker. Go where the ipad in the truck says and do what the ipad says to do at that property. If it says you need to put down "ABC fertilizer" on setting "6", then you do it. I'll pay 15/hr for two people that can each drive if needed. Two people a crew means redundancy. At first the redundancy is just me, but it will work fine having multiple crews with 2 people in each. If there are absences I can offload a job from the light crew to the full crew's schedule.

As I grow, I'll have a secretary scheduling and dealing with customer service, scheduling, data entry, etc. I will eventually hire a manager for a single location and build up another location 15-20 miles away.

My goal is to build a chain out of this business.

 

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[Johnny boy]

We've gotten to the size where I don't remember these people anymore.

When building systems, pretend you have 10-100x more customers than you do, what would you do then? What would you do if the names were just customer ID numbers? How would you operate then? When you can't remember who lives where and who wants what and who requested what, etc.

So we finally started implementing some systems of scale.

When I give quotes, I take better notes so it goes into their customer profile. The notes are turned into tags in their dispatching software, so I can press a button and filter and sort customers that want certain services.

I also exported the recurring payment list into an excel sheet, filtered for unique names against our dispatching software and deleted the unique names meaning that there's only current, paying customers in our dispatching software. I had let every single person we've ever had as a customer since 2018 just sit there and rot and it needed some cleaning up.

Then, I took our per crew monthly revenue goal, did some basic math to figure out how much time each property should take based on their price, given that revenue goal, and assigned a total time goal (driving plus work) for each property in a spreadsheet. For a 13k revenue goal, we figure a biweekly (every other week) customer should be getting 41 minutes of our day (includes driving) if they are paying $150 a month.

I uploaded that to mapline, which is some pretty cool mapping software.

Now, I can see all of the customers on a map, filter different things, and make a schedule for each crew that is dense, and set up to add up to an equal time goal for each day for each crew, which I can put in the dispatching software and the guys will know how long they should be spending at each place. They'll know if so and so's place is worth a 25 minute visit, or an hour.

Did all this with hundreds of customers in a very short period of time.

Our dispatching software lets us set up recurring visits and it repeats as long as we want it to. The problem before was I wasn't sure how well I would build a schedule when we have a shit ton of customers I can't remember many things about. And it would only get worse as we got bigger. So this solves that problem. I can signup a customer, they get put into the system and get recurring visits set up, we can adjust the notes for the future visits today, so they are getting the premium services they requested without me setting reminders, I can assign a time value to them so it fits into a crew's schedule without the crew getting swamped because they got too many expensive, tough customers in an unfair way compared to another crew, and each time they're there, they know about how long a normal visit should take, and we can easily click a button and filter tags for a customer to see a list of who should be getting which services.

That was all just this afternoon after a couple of problems came up with our scheduling system and I saw how it would turn into a shit show if we were much bigger, better to do it now.

It only adds a couple of small steps to our onboarding process but lowers our daily scheduling time and I imagine it's going to cut our complaints in half. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure type of thing.

We've been doing about 7 quotes a day right now. I've got the secretary working double time. We've got our 4th truck on the way. Our goal this year is 50k/mo revenue and to have VERY scalable systems that are very concrete and don't break down when you throw a ton of customers at it.

 

[Johnny boy]

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...

 

[USN-Ken]

There was a dude in a facebook group I belong to and he owned a lawn care business.

He split tested yard signs, testing out 'pitches', then he tracked which sign generated the most calls. That became his control. So, he replicated it and then tested different 'offers', tracked results, replicated the winner and then split tested colors.

Anyway, this culminated in him creating the ideal sign based on all of his split tests.

Once he had the winning combination, he made a bunch of signs --replicas of the winning combination -- and placed them around town.

It resulted in 60 new customers in 4 days.

I'm going to try to upload it in this post so you can see the ultimate, kick-a**, winner of several splits tests, amazing, business generating sign....

PS. He said the phrase "dirt cheap" DID NOT attract low-budget callers. In fact, I am pretty sure he quoted his normal prices to caller s....and almost no one realized -- or cared -- that he was charging MORE than his competitors. So, dont be a scaredy cat ...and at least test it out.

PPS. Yes, Dirt cheap is a pun relating to the dirty business of lawn care. That's clever.

PPPS Yes, the black and yellow color scheme speaks to the subconscious mind as being a legit business.....because people will relate it to the yellow pages.

 

[CPisHere]

Lawncare is a great little business that I think you could probably get to $150k/year revenue, with ~35% net margins only working 15 hours/week 9 months out of the year, but scaling above that is a challenge.

It's a mostly cash business, easy to start, and most of the competition is terrible. It's HIGHLY seasonal though, which makes employee management difficult. The main issue with scaling it are the logistics. Running 5 trucks/crews is NOT easy. Customers want to reschedule, employees calls in sick, etc.

Scaling obviously IS possible since it's been done before, it just isn't as easy as it might seem. If you don't scale, it's still a good source of income for not too much work, it just isn't worth much if you wanted to sell it.

 

[Johnny boy]

Update: victor did not let me down. The guy showed up, worked for 10 hard hours and didn’t complain.

Yes, the guy is a pothead loser, but I’ll be covered against theft or anything like that. Not too worried. He’s got a decent attitude though.

Today, the jobs brought in $525. My costs including every single thing (expected average cost of repairs over time, insurance, payroll, food and water during the jobs, gas, etc) were about $200.

Profit: $325 today. I did 30% of the work. Hiring on someone else I’d expect the productivity to stay the same though and costs to go up to $320 (payroll + rise of insurance). So my expected profit on a crew would be about $200 a day.

The problem: I work 5 days a week. I can only go with him on 2 days of the week. I do not want a worker doing it alone (especially this guy), so I’ll have to hire someone else if I want to bid jobs for more than 2 days of the week. I’ll have to be upfront that it will be only part time work for a couple weeks. The hard part will be finding someone to trust.

I still haven’t gotten a business only truck but that can wait a week. I am currently using an rough old highboy the family has owned for years.

All this and my LLC filing hasn’t even cleared yet. Once it goes through I can take online payments through my business accounts that I’ll set up so my employees won’t be handling cash.

Next steps:

1. Bid jobs for next week on days off
2. Buy a truck
3. Set up online payments/business accounts. Start bookkeeping for taxes.
3. Set up full insurance for equipment, truck/trailer, workers comp..etc
4. Bring on another worker to lead
5. Officially hire employees and set up payroll
6. Bid for days that I can’t be there and have workers take care of it
7. Reevaluate

Lessons so far:

1. Don’t break momentum by taking a day off
2. Fake it until you make it. Pretend to be big, schedule jobs you’re not sure you can even go to...just jump and figure out how to fly on the way down. It usually works out anyways.
3. Be a jack of all trades. I’ve been a graphic designer, a mechanic, a boss, a job estimator, a worker, a marketer, a salesperson...all this week.
4. Experiment with charging high prices (I charged $325 to do a cleanup this afternoon)
5. You have time. You don’t need a lot of sleep or time off.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Update:

Lately we've just been getting work done and will be wrapping things up within the next couple months for the season. Will still be receiving regular payments from customers throughout the winter.

This has been the best year of my life. I've met with tons of people from this forum. I grew my business and maintained contracts that I signed up this spring. I spent many, many afternoons sitting out on a dock in sunny weather looking out over the water thinking about how lucky I am.

This was the year that I have "found" my purpose. It's not "mowing lawns", but I'm born to be a businessman. This shit gets me fired up and I'm addicted to it.

I am looking to scale the business up more since it has gone so well this year. I only need another truck+trailer+set of equipment (more would be even better). I've had to turn away customers and not scale up our marketing because I couldn't comfortably get 2 crews working without worrying about cash flow temporarily.

I would like to put out some feelers to see if anyone is interested in at least pointing me in the right direction to pursue funding options. The business is doing well, we have long term contracts with our customers, we have a dialed in online marketing strategy, and the business operations are surprisingly scalable. I can manage it without even leaving my bed 95% of the time if I choose to. Since the profit margins are relatively large, I am more than comfortable with a relatively high interest rate to attract investors. I have collateral as well if necessary.

Things have been great. I've been having an amazing time growing this thing. I appreciate the support I've gotten on here in just a year, and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you at the summit coming up.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Swamped with customers and we are nearly at capacity for both crews. Sneaking up on 24k/mo revenue soon.

Now it's time to replace the least profitable customers.

Our dispatching software shows me how long the guys spend at each property. Factoring in driving time, materials, time spent at the property, and number of customer requests/complaints will help me decide who to remove from our schedule, and it gives me an idea of which customer types and which property types we should focus in on.

Our biggest sources of new customers have been an exceptionally high ranking on organic google search results, and then ads on thumbtack, craigslist, and facebook. Surprisingly facebook has been worse than last year. The secret isn't one place to advertise, it's about being everywhere. This time of year about 80% of people we gave quotes to have told us something along the lines of "I couldn't even get a call back from the 15 other places I called, you guys not only answered the phone, but a nice lady talked to me and scheduled a quote the same day". So the secret really is just answering the phone in this industry, which is only possible since we have repeatable, easily managed, scalable systems in place. I pay more than a car payment each month for software and systems for our phones, email, dispatching, billing, etc. Get a lot of customers, so you can be pickier and be more profitable, so you can pay your employees well and afford nice systems, so you can advertise and be available when all those customers call.

Growing something with employees is such a ride. I deeply appreciate everyone who helps each and every day with the business. I tell every person within our small company daily that I appreciate everything they're doing and I pay them above average and nearly all decisions I make are with them in mind.

 

[Johnny boy]

Starting a lawn care service company is a big decision and it depends on your interests, skills, and experience. If you have experience and knowledge in lawn care and are passionate about it, then starting your own business can be a great opportunity. According to IBISWorld, the industry revenue for Lawn Care Services in the US is around $9 billion in 2021, and the average revenue per company is around $500,000 to $1 million. So as per my opinion it is a good startup.

Thanks for the most NPC, AI written comment I have ever seen.

 

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[Johnny boy]

what is your winter / fall service? need something to do year round to combat crew turnover.......

Mowing (less frequently)
Leaf raking
Gutter cleaning
Pressure washing
Snow removal
Christmas lights

Good opportunity to upsell or keep customers too. Less difficulty acquiring customers if you sell to them year round.

Plus I can just hire a young guy or two that wants a summer job for the busy months and keep an older guy around to have a job year round.

 

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[Johnny boy]

Update:

21k/mo in revenue. I have 3 employees and I’ll be getting a 4th soon. Everyone’s working well and enjoying their jobs. I pay them 17-20 an hour and full time.

In May we will be trying to get to over 24k a month in revenue, and then replacing the least profitable customers with efficient small properties. We could likely get to 26k a month by summertime and all of our properties being easy with low maintenance easy-going customers.

At 24-26k a month our monthly profit should be anywhere from 12-14k a month. Plus, in the winter revenue stays the same and our expenses plummet, so for 4 months our monthly profit should be like 20k a month or so.

I’m estimating we are pacing a yearly profit of around 180,000 if we can get to our revenue goal which it looks like we might surpass it.

The goal for this year is to now just keep the customers happy and paying each month until next year, and then to double in size again. Next years goal is to get to over 48k a month in revenue, take home around 20-24k a month profit and finally purchase a commercial property for the business and put down some roots.

In other news I got some flying lessons and got to fly around the Puget Sound recently. Definitely worth it!

 

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[Johnny boy]

This year we hit our goals again.

It was a great chance to feel out our new systems, automation, having managers, salespeople giving quotes.

I stopped introducing myself as the owner. No one needs to know I'm the boss, it just creates customer entitlement.

This year was great for seeing which things break down in our new systems. People take shortcuts and it's important to watch their behavior to trim the fat out of any procedures you have.

For example it's tedious to use our CRM and change peoples' lifecycle stages manually.

It's tedious to onboard someone manually into your app database, but letting people do it themselves will create a disaster for having every account match information across systems.

I vividly remember being lazy in school and lazy at work. For anyone that comes into the company to work here, it would be delusional to expect them to have a different attitude and not look for corners to cut. So I build things with that in mind.

I've been using API and automation so things get done automatically as much as possible.

I've noticed if you have 2-way texting for customer support it almost always get's messy. I caught myself yelling at the customer service rep "why didn't you respond to that customer?" and she said "I had to check x first before getting back to them and then I got a sales call and didn't remember to put it in my reminders" and things like that. I want to keep it simple, she needs to be able to handle 10x more customers without breaking a sweat. She can't be relying on memory, her job should allow her to have the memory of a goldfish and still do a great job.

So customer support, requests, complaints, etc. will be handled either through our app we are rolling out soon, or a phone call. No email, no texting. It either get's done all at once on a phone call, or it's in one place as a request made through the app.

Ads will be changing. It will pull the lead into a form that adds them to our CRM for us to call, or they can call us, or they can use our instant quote software that we will be rolling out. No more messaging back and forth and digging through messages.

Our phone system is getting redone. I don't like the current call quality and to use our answering service I had to route it through them first and then send calls to us because the current system didn't have an option for forwarding only calls we missed. I can do that with our new system, plus everything will be on one number. Missed calls through the sales extension will forward to the answering service but not for support.

We will be having another office worker help us with sales next year, and we will likely have 3 or more salespeople helping us with the in person quotes and managing operations day-to-day at our locations.

We are setting a minimum goal of doubling revenue again to 1.2m but I'm going to try to go much harder and get well over that. We are setting up the foundations for a national franchise.

Every week has just been adding some small refinement to the business. I have changed as a person in the process. I remember how disorganized I was and I am moving away from that. The change has reflected itself in my personal life as well. I maintain things better. I'm tidier. I have a coffee table with a hardcover book on it. A low-maintenance and loyal woman is a great teammate for keeping things steady.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

View attachment 48731

Dopamine overdose.

Never met these people, never spoke to them, will probably never see their house. Adding 10k in contracts (yearly amount) to our revenue each day, and that’s recurring. All signed up because our nice office lady is making tons of calls, working super long hours making deals happen. She is a blessing.

Automations are kicking a$$. Our app works great. Instant quotes are working great.

Looking forward to when our company mows 1000 lawns a day.

And today I did less work than usual. I hung out with my buddy and we bought a jet ski so he could match mine.

Ads are running, the guys are working, each day we sign more people up and our new base revenue jumps each year. Franchisee sales are coming in. I was worried recession apprehension would stunt our growth. It doesn’t look like it.

LETS GO!

For a couple years I could just smell it, and now it’s knocking on the door. It’s just like the fighters say: you never get tired when you’re winning.

Every once in a while when I have to do the hard work upfront it’s a mini desert of desertion, but I remember that it always ends up being worth it.

I did SO MUCH this winter. Rebranded, started all new entities, new systems, created instant quoting system, created our app myself, did franchising work for the first time, transferred all the customers over, set up lead gen for multiple locations to work seamlessly and stay organized, built tons of automations. Can’t tell you how many 16 hour days I spent in front of a laptop just so we could make this happen.

Just getting started!

Freaking legendary post. Love the scale, in what some would instantly think has no scale.

 

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[Johnny boy]

We will be adjusting our pay system for employees

Every customer already has a set “visit time” value relative to their monthly payment so we can track how full schedules are.

Right now, workers wages start at 17 and go up to 21 when they’ve done well and have stayed for a while.

If they get all the jobs done, they can head home early.

Guaranteed 40 hours a week of pay + OT, but they may actually only be working 5,6,7 hours a day.

It incentivizes fast efficient work.

But people ask for raises, and it doesn’t give any opportunity for ambitious people to work more and make more money.

The crews are allocated around 360-375 minutes worth of “visit time” value right now.

So here’s what we’re changing.

We are going to have a chart, and let the employees pick which “hourly” wage they want, which comes out to more of a salary like our current system except this lets them pick.

“I want $22/hr”

“Great, okay so it looks like that’s up to 385 minutes of work allocated on the schedule, we can adjust it starting next week! That’s only 20 more minutes a day of ‘visit time’!”

You want more money? You’re in charge. Agree to more work.

It may not be a full schedule some days, other days it will be, but you’re guaranteed the same pay just like before. The only difference is if you’re willing to do a little more or not, that’s how much you’re paid.

Jobs left over you didn’t get done? Those “visit time” values are deducted, no worries. Slightly less money for you.

This will let the people that want to work more get paid more, and work longer days if they want. And it will ensure that nobody is asking for raises without it being explicitly tied to doing more work.

It will end up being roughly the same profit at worst case, and best case we’ll be getting better profits from guys willing to do more, and they’ll be able to take home much better money if they want. We will have options for them to make much more than current wages.

“I want $26/hr”
“Okay we can do that, that’s an extra 40 min a day”
“Sweet”

Going to switch over during the winter. Anyone who wants to leave can leave. Anyone who wants to stay can stay.

 

[Johnny boy]

Sending out a 1m/yr bid tonight

National memorial cemetery 100 acres

Listening to ‘Party in the USA’

LFG boys

 

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[Johnny boy]

5 trucks is 12 to 14 employees.....

14 x 10 x 2 x 52 x 40 / 12 = 48.5 k rev needed per month......

Might want to put together a 12 mo P&L of 'running the company' in excel and test some of these assumptions before getting too far.....

It will help a lot.....

5 trucks is 10 employees. Paying them $12/hr for a month full time is 20,800. I expect a truck of two employees to get $400 worth of work done. Over 5 trucks that’s $2,000 a day. 20 days of that is $40,000 a month.

Each truck drives a max of 20 miles to and from the jobs (assuming I’m sending them to jobs that are nearby, and then a trip to the dump to drop off the lawn clippings for free) then that is 100 miles a day or 2,000 miles a month for 5 trucks. Let’s say gas is 3.50 a gallon and the trucks get 10mpg at worst. That’s 200 gallons and costs me $700 for gas. I think my rough estimate can include the machines too..considering they don’t use THAT much gas. Let’s be safe and round up to $800 a month total in gas.

Insurance on 5 cheap trucks is about 5,000 a year for liability. That’s under $500 a month. Liability for my employees can’t be too much from what I’ve been quoted by liberty mutual. Let’s throw in $1000 a month to be safe. $1,500 on the high side for insurance total.

I’ll have to pay depreciation for the vehicles and machines, unless I buy them for below market value used and keep them in decent condition. I can buy vehicles at auctions. I’ll expect to sell them for the same price I paid.

Repairs should not total more than an average of $200 a month. Even if an engine or two goes out on the trucks, it isn’t too much.

Let’s assume once every two weeks, an employee doesn’t show up and I miss out on one day of work. My revenue decreases by 8%. I’m bringing in 36,xxx a month.

I’ll want to advertise. I’ll spend $200 a month on advertising/branding/uniforms for my employees.

My costs are coming in under 24,000 and my revenue looks to be at 36,000. And that’s assuming only $400 a day of work done. If one truck of employees can hit at least one yard in less than an hour, factoring in breaks and traveling, I’ll assume they can do 7 in a day. Bi-weekly service for lawns should cost roughly $60 a session. That’s $420. If one person cancels a week then we are still over $400 average per day.

All I have to do is monitor my costs within a reasonable range of what’s expected, bid out jobs to be worth at least $60/hour of work for one truck of two employees, and be smart, I should be fine.

Some jobs are much better than a normal cut. For example, I’m going to mow down waist high grass for $200 this Wednesday. A machine I have should get the job done in 2 hours.

I’d only be charging people $120 a month for what I’m assuming in the above scenario. Some people I know well are charged $400 a month for services that only take an hour. Can you imagine the profit margins for that company?? The employees aren’t skilled either. It’s the same thing that I can offer.

To avoid overextending myself, I can sign up customers for long term contracts so I know I’ll have work to do.

It looks like a good business model.

Please tell me if my math was way off...

And of course I’ll be starting with just one truck.

 

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[minivanman]

The key to making more profit is to raise your price. And the key to raising your price is that if no one wants to pay your price, then stay out of that business. That has always been my way of doing business. When I first started in the carpet cleaning business I was charging $.50c a square foot. All the other guys in town were charging $.27c-$.32c a square foot. No one was charging over $.32c a square foot within several states. So basically I made over double the profit when all was said and done. I was a better salesman so I made more money. I went on every bid in person and that was part of how I was able to charge more. When I showed up, played with the kids and the dog while Bob the mower guy was only a virtual person, I charged more and got the job. Does it take more time to bid the job in person? Yes. Is it worth making double or triple the profit? Yes. Might you have to hire someone on commission to bid the jobs? Maybe.....

And to make a longer story as short as possible... the only way I knew what the other carpet cleaners were charging is because the guy I was buying my chemical from asked me what I charged and I told him. He thought I was joking at first. lol I've never went by any 'industry standards' in any business. I've always charged what I need to charge.... who cares what anyone else is charging?

Also, personally, residential is the only way to go. If you even think about commercial jobs, I'm with the guy above.... STAY OUT! Commercial is a bidding war to the bottom. Bigger mowers, big trailers, more fuel and... waiting 30-45-60-90-NEVER... on your money.

 

[million$$$smile]

I also had a lawn maintenance business for several years, so I'm going to throw in my 2 cents.

Yes, you can make a living in the lawn maintenance business, but it isn't as simple as it looks on paper.

Getting customers is not the problem. Anyone that has (a few) teeth and a mower can acquire customers, that is why you see so many 'gyppo' lawn maintenance guys running around. Most of them make a living, but a rarity if they are making a killing.

Biggest problems I ran into was help and the weather.

My business at the time was also in Washington State. Great to be mowing in June, July & August, no problemo. But anyone from the Pacific Northwest realizes that rain is the reason it is alway so green, (if you are west of the Cascades)

#1 Mowing in the 'wet' is a whole different game. If you don't mow in the wet, and you have considerable accounts ie. a schedule, you can get behind rather quickly. If you haven't tried blowing off wet grass from sidewalks yet or cleaning under the mowers from clogged wet grass, it is not what one envisioned lawn maintenance to be. It sometimes DOUBLES the time to mow the lawn and doesn't make employees happy campers, let alone the lawn looking like crap after the cut. That is one of the reasons it wasn't fun anymore. Workers not showing up due to the weather or showing up late or complaining and not having the best attitude. It is part of the job. Weather changes EVERYTHING.
Also, many customers don't like the fact that a lawn maintenance guy is pulling up at 7:30 at night when they are just sitting down to relax in front of the boob tube. with their favorite martini. Running a mower, blower, and weedeater outside isn't the way to make customers happy after 7. And when it rains for several days it backs up any schedule. Just a heads up.

#2. Anybody with an IQ of 30 can mow. The problem is keeping great help when you find it. Anybody worth their salt is going to have to have an incentive to work for someone instead of mowing their own set of lawns. I found it rather hard to keep good honest employees working for me. It can be done, but there is turnover. One of the two needs to be a responsible lead man and pay accordingly. He is taking on more responsibilities, ie. driving, and confirming everything was done correctly and will expect more. And that is if you can keep him. Also, I had the problem of one or two that would bid extra work from the customer on the side without telling me. I had one guy set up several accounts for thatching @ $100-200 a lawn and only found out by walking the lawn after the fact. How many he did, I'll never know, but I'm sure the rental companies recognized him.

Aside from those two issues, and knowing the correct way of mowing, you'll stay as busy as you desire.

BTW, there is usually better money in postage stamp lawns than large ones. I did extremely well in mobile home parks that specialized in retirees. All equipment off the trailer once and 6-8 lawns mowed saves a bunch of windshield time.

Good luck!

 

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