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Fullerton Unfiltered
959. Launching 3 Crews for the First Time Ever: Big Growth, Bigger Lessons
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You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice, completely on filter. Grow your business, grow your life. Now here's your host, Brian Fullerton.
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Hey, what's going on, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. It is your host, Brian Fullerton here hanging with you guys. Good morning. Today I want to talk about an exciting new chapter in Brian's lawn maintenance. Something that we've been working towards and looking forward to for quite a while and that is the launching of multiple crews going on out there to cut that grass and make that cash. I want to go through the conversation about the evolution and the decision to, to do that, what it looks like, because I know a lot of you guys out there are looking to do the exact same thing. I'm looking to follow in the footsteps of a lot of you guys out there, obviously to grow a bigger business, to grow into multiple crews one day, perhaps depending on how big of the piece of the pie that we want in our local market. 2 crews, 5 crews, 10 crews, 25 crews, 50, 100 crews one day. Right? You never know. So it's an exciting conversation. But I'll tell you what, it's not as easy as some people might led you to believe or to make it look out to be. It's definitely a lot of logistics and there's definitely a lot to it. There's a couple things I wrote down here that are some practical things that I wanted to share and just sound board off you guys. And if you guys have any questions, comments, concerns or feedback or thoughts on how to navigate these as well, my gosh, shoot me a DM because I'd love to hear what's working for you guys out there as you guys have multiple crews, multiple setups and a lot of great stuff going on. First things first, before we do a couple big announcements, right, the SOP Bundle content is going to launch live tomorrow. Thursday. Thursday. I might do a separate show for that on Friday. It will be a conversation about why I think you should make the investment for it. But nonetheless, I don't want to make it a huge pitch. Don't worry about Friday's show being a pitch fest. It won't be that. But I do want to let you guys know I'm probably going to be talking a little bit more about that on Friday. Not so much today. I'll just tell you today if you got it. Look forward to seeing that content publish tomorrow morning. 8, 9, 10am Once a weekend now Wake up, flip the switch and hit publish on all the content. I'm telling you what we have been putting on the final touches of this SOP bundle the last couple of days, you know, waiting for the 11th hour. Just like everybody else and anything else in planet Earth, Right? Just kidding. Sort of. And I'll tell you what, even my assistant Nicole, here's, here's one of the best lines she said, oh, gosh, let me pull it up for a quick second. This is how you know, what you're doing is awesome because of the feedback from somebody who's a complete civilian and what she thinks of what this bundle is going to be. She said, this is an exact quote. How about reading an exact quote here? My appreciation for this thing has grown immensely now that we're uploading everything. There's so much they're getting, it's literally insane. I'm gonna f around and start a lawn care business. Bet. All right, so if my assistant, who doesn't really know a thing, you know, necessarily day to day, right. About lawn care, and I don't think that she should or, or needs to, Right. She's in a different completely capacity and career path previously in current and probably in the future. Right. It's not like she's mowing lawns, but if she's looking at this thing and going, holy freaking crap, this is a stellar freaking amount of education information and videos that are coming down the pike that should give you guys who are in the thick of it the practical nod or approval that you might need to make the investment into the SOP bundle. Okay, I'm just gonna say that we filmed dozens and dozens of new videos in the last couple of weeks and the last couple of days. I'll tell you what, how to do a three point turn. How to get, you know, those beautiful laser stripes. Going tip to tip. New overview videos on mowers, trimmers, edgers and blowers. I had that one requested. You know, tons and tons of tons of new content that we filmed the last couple of days. Basics on how to cut, trim, edge and blow. Like, literally reshooting some videos from years past. How to tie down, you know, a lawnmower, you know, basic stuff like that. Introductions to all the pieces of equipment. You know, how to blow off equipment, right? Like, like basic stuff. But these are all dozens of videos that will now be in a video library that you can share with a new hire or continue to go over and review with a team on a rain day. Like, I'm very, very excited about that very Very stoked. I will have a visual list that I'm probably going to read off to you on Friday about what's inside because I think it's good to know other than the hype of this thing is awesome. Like, what the hell do you actually get inside of it? So I will do my best to literally read off every video that's available and every document that's available and then you decide if that's worth the hundreds of hours that I put into this thing and the thousands, tens of thousands of dollars of investment I've made time and money to go and get the education to build these things. Right. It's going to be awesome. So anyway, content goes live on Thursday. Luxury Academy.com store. Get the SOP bundle. It's a thousand bucks. One time. The price will go up long term, but right now it's a thousand bucks. And for any of you guys that are scaling multiple crews and hiring an office admin, like, this is the one for you. So very exciting time. We're very excited about making that launch. My guys are excited. Okay. Like, you know, I know we're like selling it to the John Q. Public, you guys obviously, right. But I'm telling you, like, my guys are excited because all the videos that we're shooting are for Brian's lawn maintenance, obviously, as well. And so it's a combination of what do I want to be expressed in these videos from the owner, but what are the guys to my crew leads? What do they want so when a new hire comes on their team that those people feel equipped and ready to be productive or as productive as possible from day one. And so I'm biased. I think it's awesome. Nicole, who is an outside looking in, she's like, holy freaking cow. They're getting all this for a thousand bucks. I'm like, yeah, because this is like literally insane. I go, yeah, I know. My goal is to make it such an epic resource that folks like the grounds guys or other training indoor franchisee businesses literally look at this and go, that's the most robust training that's ever been put together under one roof in one package for that price point. How many of these can we pick up? So if anybody wants to call up the the grounds guys and order 250 of the bundles and I give to every one of their franchisees for Christmas, maybe we can work out a bulk discount. Right? That's funny right there. And I'll just tell you guys what. I know I'm talking a lot about it and I know you guys are probably like nauseous for every time I continuously bring it up. But I'm just telling you, for those of you guys that are really sincerely looking to grow, it really will be a great resource for you, especially for all the documents in there, for all the problems that you have, the problems that you don't even know you have, and the things that it's going to solve. As you continue to grow and scale, especially as you continue to eclipse past 3, 4, 500 grand in revenue, the business changes it entirely. And I know a lot of you guys are experiencing that and seeing that and going through that right now. All right, let's do this really quick. I want to one talk about that. Number two, just another quick mention. Honorable mention. This is going to be for the Granum tour. It is the Break Records tour. We're going to eight different cities across the country. Random.com or golm.com check out the banner ads that are going to be popping around, flying around. There's a lot of great stuff there. Eight cities I believe over the next six months it's like 7, 800 bucks ticket promo code Brian or Brian's 100 saves 100 bucks. So utilize that. The first one's in Virginia in like 30 days. We've got like 30 seats or something. It's very limited, but we're going to. I think it's a Vonza Lawn care and landscaping. Three plus million dollar business. Neo, I think is the guy or no, wait, no, he's the. The owner. Got to meet him at grow. It's gonna be an awesome time. So hope to see a bunch of you guys in the Virginia, you know, DMV area. It's gonna be a great turnout down there. But go check out the rest of the tour dates and tour spots. Maybe late night as you guys are listening to this or watching this or just happen to be doing some invoices. Late night@golmn.com we hope to see you guys there. One day event with Gamble leading the whole workshop. Day two is a shop tour. Like literally they're going to open up the doors between two and $10 million landscape companies so you guys can get the full breath of what these guys are doing day to day to grow these beautiful businesses. Okay, we're going on tour. I can't wait to see everybody there. So check that out as well. All right, let's do this real quick. Quick pivot. We're going to hear from the rest of today's show. Sponsors, announcements, all that fun jazz and we're going to come on back. I'm going to talk about the exciting new chapter of us launching multiple crews, all the highs, all the lows, all the good, all the bad, and explain to you what we're doing here over at Brands on Maintenance. Hang tight. The Hardscape Academy, folks, we have a blast hosting classes here once a month.
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Go to thehardscapeacademy.com that whole address there to see when our next scheduled trainings are in person.
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A thousand bucks. We feed you great. We have a great time, build great networks with people that are looking to grow their business, adding hardscaping to their repertoire of business.
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Thehardscapeacademy.com all one thing. Go there to check out the dates
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and join us on our next class blast. They're always a blast.
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Our next event at the Hardscape Academy
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is May 15th and 16th.
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Remember to check out the podcast description for great deals from our sponsors who keep this show going. And don't Forget, use the Brian's 10 code to start putting money back in your pocket today.
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All right, gang. Well, hopping back on into it. Super excited about joining with you guys here on Wednesday. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the fully and unfiltered podcast. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's Lon's Lessons Life. And this whole podcast and the YouTube channel is all about helping you guys grow a more successful business so you guys can go out there and crush it. And we're documenting how we're growing and scaling to a million dollar business and beyond. One thing I just want to cover is those tour dates. All right. For LMN, they got Arlington, Virginia in May 28th. Calgary, Alberta. Calgary, I think that's up in Canada. July 16th and July 17th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. We're going to be over there August 20th and 21st. We've got Boston, Massachusetts, September 24th, 25th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I believe that one's at Local Roots, which is going to be awesome. That's October 29th and 30th in Detroit, Michigan. We're going to wrap up Troy Clog, if I'm not mistaken, landscaping November 19th and 20th. All right, so half dozen plus tour dates. If they're in a one of those metro markets and you guys are, you know, four to six hours of a drive or maybe you want to fly, fly into Boston, fly into Pittsburgh, fly into Detroit, I guarantee you it'll be worth it. So go to granum gr a n u m. Go to granum.com or golmn.com and you guys can check all these tour dates out. Hook it up, folks. We'd love to see you there. All right, let's do this really quick. I want to talk about the conversation about multiple crews. This is something that we've been pump fake, false start, ready to go. But, you know, three steps forward, four steps back for about two seasons or so now, we've had enough work definitely for two crews. No doubt about it. Definitely for two crews. For the last year, year and a half, the conversation about deploying two crews was it. We just weren't organized enough yet to do it, and we just are barely, like, getting two crews worth of work ready to go. And so we were in this, like, we had 150%, 170% capacity for one crew. We also had enough to kind of do two crews, but we also needed the extra truck that we had before the Isuzu, because we needed to use that for the dump trailer to do mulch and landscaping a lot through spring and summer. So even if we would have, like, launched with two crews, which we could have, we were a truck short in total capacity to be able to send out two mo crews and then the third rig with a truck and a dump trailer. And again, we had, like, four or five guys. We obviously needed five, six, seven guys to go on out there and keep two teams of two moving. That's four guys, two teams or one team of two for the landscaping crew. So that's six guys total. Right. So we're in this, like, we're ready to go with two or three crews. We're also moving a lot of people and a lot of things around. Right. We're just, like, in this awkward growth, you know, a little bit of heartburn, a little bit of whatever you want to call it, like, tumultuousness of, like, do we expand or not expand into multiple trucks, multiple crews? And I'm sure some of you guys can relate to this. You're like, when's the next right time to buy a 30, 40, $50,000 truck and invest into another 50 to $80,000 mo rig or $100,000 mo rig? What we have found is that we had a super crew. We had four guys on one crew. Now, that's a super crew to us is probably like a regular crew for, you know, Siebert Yellowstone and Atlas and Joy Clog. All right, so I get it. There's levels to this thing. But for us, we were able to do a couple hundred dollars. A couple hundred thousand dollars book of business, of maintenance work with A team of, you know, three, four and at times five guys in one truck and trailer setup. And of course the equipment has evolved too. We went from the four fold door Thunder F250 to extended cab, so the half door, the suicide door F350s because I knew we're going to downshift. The teams of two, broadly speaking. And whole nother conversation about the best optimization for teams of two, teams of three, teams of four, teams of five. I'm studying that like crazy right now. I've had a lot of thoughts, a lot of think tank, a lot of opinions about what works. Some companies are teams of twos, other companies are teams of threes. Some companies are teams of twos and teams of threes. Other companies are teams of twos and teams of five. Whole nother conversation for a whole nother time. But there's a, a real conversation about hey, like do we get two trucks and trailers going out or do we just like try to keep those assets moving longer. Add a mower, now you have two or three mowers or add two or three guys so to the first crew. Because why spend a hundred thousand dollars on equipment, truck and trailer when you can just spend another 10 or 15 grand on a mower and then just add some labor and take a team of two to team of three. A team of three to a team of four. That all works until you do have an excessive amount of windshield time as you continue to do more sites, residential, potentially depending on your route density, but more than likely a lot more windshield time than mow time. And if you're doing a lot of smaller sites like maybe KFCS and small strip malls, same thing, you're going to have a lot more windshield time than mowing production time. I can absolutely see the merit of teams of three, teams of four, teams of five. When you have like you know, two, three, four, five hour long residential or commercial sites, like apartments, HOAs, a hospital system, a large automotive plant where you can keep three, four, five guys busy for three, four, five hours and you have a great big business, a great big book of business and a lot of sites like that. But man, it's like, it's so hyper dynamic. Well, the whole conversation for us was we went from myself and Rob to myself and Rob, plus another guy, then I was a little bit more out of field. So we're kind of like down a guy in labor. So we had to make some more hires. And then we had about a team of three, then we had a team of four. Like I said for about the last 12 or 18 months. And you know, it's funny, in the beginning of the spring you need 20 to 30% more labor because everything's wet, green, lush, growing rain days, etc, and then by fall like things kind of thin out and you're like, well that full time guy, like he could definitely be a part time guy or we need to cut some hours and well, I've got crew leads and right hands and right hands are going to be crew leads and I want to keep those guys on. I also want to keep my crew members busy because eventually they can be right hands and crew leads and I want to give them a career path. But hey, also we're finishing up our mo route every day in September and October by 2, 3 o' clock and there's not a lot of mulch to install that time of year. So what else we do to keep everybody busy? And it's like this, this amalgamation, this cluster of having enough revenue to support the labor, having enough labor to support the revenue. And it's like if you're looking at a teeter totter or a pendulum or a spectrum, right? It's like plus five, plus five, that sounds great. What I've come to find is that usually it's like I'm plus six on work, plus four on labor, then I get some extra labor and I'm like, shoot, I'm plus six on, you know, revenue, but I'm a plus seven on labor and now I have too much labor and not enough revenue. And I think that's just like the forever volley that you're going to have as you expand your business. I don't know you guys. Again, shoot me a DM and let me know what you find. But it's like the age old question that I've answered 100 times and I've had a thousand times asked me is like, do you hire first, then grow or grow and then hire? And the answer is it's pretty much both. Ideally you find the right people and then backfill work. But man, there's times when you get a bunch of work and then you have to backfill people. What I'm not a big fan of exclusively or necessarily, and I'm saying there's always instances or outliers. But what I'm not saying is if you're a 500 grand business to take on a new 500 grand account and do a double on revenue and have to do an instant double on labor, that's tough. If you go from a team of Five guys doing a half a million and now you need 10 guys to do a million because you get this big, massive, you know, FedEx shipping facility and the, the lawn in the snow. It sounds good. I'm not saying you shouldn't go for it. But you know, also at the same time, maybe you flex up in labor, you don't do the best job because you got a lot of newbies. You don't really do the best performance, lawn or snow. You get the account for one year, you end up losing it. Now you got this extra truck, you've got this extra couple of guys, and you got a downsize and down flex. Like that's a real conversation. So it's like all of these what do I do's? And I don't know if this is going to work out. It's just, it's called growth. It's called you can have growth or control. You can't have both. And the more I continue to grow, the more I realize the truth, the merit to that type of statement. Now, it doesn't mean things are chaos and things are out of control. It's just hard to have everything be perfect and everything be exact. Let me give you an example. As we've, you know, deregulated or you know, disseminated from one crew to three, there's been a lot of like growing pains part of this conversation. The first one is practical. It's revenue. We built all of our routes on Monday and had a great hour and a half powwow at the shop. Not like in the 11th hour about building all your routes the, the week you're about to perform them. But we had to butcher the entire book of business. It used to be all these sites, those are clustered on Monday, those are clustered on Tuesday, all the residential over here on Wednesday, all the residential here on Thursday. We had to butcher that entire book of business. And I needed brain power. I needed three or four guys. I needed everybody there. We had a team of six guys, actually seven and myself. And we were all looking at the screen with the laptop up on the screen, which was a dream come true. That's an improvement we've made year over year to have in the shop a big flat panel tv, the HDMI connector adapter from Apple, the HDMI cable to the laptop or whatever. And we're able to project the whole route master route list up on the screen and have everybody throw their brain power as we formulated it all in our numbers Excel sheet. Marge even patched in via Zoom from the Philippines, you know, 13 hours ahead of schedule. It's you know, 3 o' clock in the morning. She's on that for an hour and a half so she can see the team, the team can see her. So I guess as I say, there's like eight or nine of us, which is really crazy. On this entire hour and a half, two hour long zoom call, screen share workshop, conversation about building the routes because we had to butcher a hundred plus clients and disseminate them. Okay, that's a small pocket over there. Who wants those? Who prefers residential, who prefers commercial? Hey, like we need two crews on this big HOA because two guys would be there for a half a day. We need four guys there for two hours so we can get in and out. So two crews both start on that big HOA on Tuesday morning. Right. Like all of this needs brain power. And we did. The guys crushed it. The conversation was fantastic. Once we figured out the numbers and the routes, I was able to say, hey Marge, can you start changing the job schedules? In lmn, she was able to reassign the sites to different crews, reassign and build those different routes out. All built into LMM color coded green, pink and orange for the three different crews going out. It looks absolutely beautiful. Like our element job schedules lit up like a Christmas tree. It's a dream come true. Dream come true. I can't imagine one day having 25 crews that have, you know, four or five or eight sites each or 20 residentials each and this whole like Christmas tree lit up of every color in the rainbow with 25 crews going out there doing, you know, 100 grand of revenue per day or whatever it is, right? Or 50 grand of revenue per day. Like that would be frickin amazing. Well it sounds great until you look at your Christmas tree list of the week snapshot schedule on lmn, the projection for the week, the calendar view for the week and you realize, man, we got a whole book of business on. Green on Monday, Big book of business, green on Tuesday, no green on Wednesday, Whole big day. Book of business on Thursday, orange. Orange is good on Monday, orange is good on Tuesday, orange is good on Wednesday. There is no orange sites on Thursday. Pink on Monday, pink on Tuesday, pink on Wednesday, big book of business, pink on Wednesday, no pink on Thursday. Well the green that's on Thursday for one of the crews, that's the previous last year's residential Thursday route. I'm not going to move 20 residential customers from a Thursday to a different day. So now there's like this Wednesday gap on Crew 1, Crew 2, and Crew 3 have not enough work scheduled for Thursday. And now I look at myself and I go, I need a thousand dollars of revenue that day. Thousand dollars of revenue that day. Thousand dollars of revenue that day. That's $27,000 a season per crew. I need a hundred grand of new work like yesterday. So when I talk about, you know, if you're looking at a pendulum or if you're looking at a. A scale, right, like we're tipping the scales. Are we heavy on labor and not enough revenue? We'll find out. What can I do? Sell. We're going to be selling a lot of work. Pruning mulch, a couple residential mulch jobs. Anything creative to keep guys getting hours. Of course, we'll cut crew members hours for, you know, the newest folks and trim a little bit of labor if we need to. Maybe they'll work 32 hours a week instead of 40 or 30 hours instead of 40. That's always an honest conversation. If you work restaurants, it's called getting cut. You get cut first, get cut early. Stuff happens all the time. We got to manage labor because I'm not just going to blanket, give everybody 40 hours and bleed cash, but alternatively, and I talked about this at length on our team meeting on Monday when we're building these routes, guys, we gotta get creative. If you want to work that day and it's in June, you better get comfortable canvassing commercial sites and start selling snow work. And all the guys are bought in. All the guys are interested. They're like, yep, whatever it takes to get hours done. Go market, go brand, go phone call, call customers, do check ins. By the way, I had one of you guys email me saying the assuming that everything is going great and like, how come customers aren't renewing Spring episode podcast that I did maybe what, three or four weeks ago at this point, was a great listen and a great review. If you guys missed that, one gentleman emailed me yesterday. Like, that was such a great conversation. He said, brian, this exact scenario happened to me. We were taking care of a snowplow customer all winter, thought we were going great. Just went to get the renewal for the spring contract and he aired out a laundry list of things we were not doing right that we didn't even know. We did not, unfortunately, get the spring contract for the maintenance. What a practical, relatable story, Brian. Thanks for being honest and sharing that because it literally was my exact scenario. And I heard your podcast episode on this exact topic about assuming, right, that everything's going great. With your customers during the winter or the summer without checking in with them. So if we're a little over on labor and I can have a couple guys or a couple crew leads, burn up the phone like we've talked about on previous episodes and touch base with 20, 50, 100 customers that day. Hey, how's it going? Anything you need, anything we can fix, anything we can improve. By the way, we noticed the mulch beds. By the way we noticed the shrubs. By the way, we noticed we can do some spring or fall color, right? Like, that's the stuff that we got to do to get more product production and get more revenue on the books to finally shore up, you know, four tens worth of works for three different crews. And so last year, we could have launched with two crews for sure. We were truck short. We finally bought the Isuzu. We're. We're sitting good with bench strength now on equipment, but folks, like, it's a fun conversation, but it's a real practical conversation. If you guys aspire to grow, you're like, holy, is this even worth it? Like, one minute, I've got enough trucks. One minute I don't have enough trucks. One minute we have enough labor. One minute I don't have enough labor. One minute I have enough impacts. The next day I have to go to Home depot and buy two new freaking DeWalt impacts for 550 bucks. Because we need one for the new Isuzu rig, for the mowers, for the changing the blades. We need a new bulldog Jack. We need a new tow rope. We need a new noco charger, jump start battery charger, first aid kit, fire extinguisher, Bulldog Jack. 50 or not 50, but two 5 gallon gas cans. Two 2.2 gallon gas cans. $1,200 in or thousand dollars in trimmer racks and blower racks, $3,000 in hand tools. That's $5,000 in hand tools to outfit a new crew, a new rig. You can't finance that. That's cash money on the barrel head, dude. So it's like the revenue, the labor, the cost, the customers, right? And then I told the guys, like, hey, if anybody calls off that day, that crew has to consolidate into a different crew. And that crew needs to get done early and then start mowing the other route and finishing up those sites. And the next day, we need to finish up that other sites Monday route, and then everybody can start mowing their Tuesday routes because we don't want to get one crew on Wednesdays, you know, by. By Tuesday or Wednesday and the other crew still cutting Monday's work on Wednesday. So it's now this new logistical organization conversation. I also need to be available in different capacities now too, right at 7:30. This is why I want to master the morning rollout. I'm there with my guys, I'm on the phone, I'm on the horn. Rob's as a supervisor position now. Rob, you need to make sure the morning rollout is good. You need to make sure the morning roll in is great. I need to be at the lockers at 5, 5:30 or at least on the phone with everybody as they come back. Do you need anything? Because now we have six mowers that are out there, six guys that are out there, 12 weed whips, 12 edgers, you know, six to eight leaf blowers. There's a lot going on. And so you have to be organized. And so when I have this, this SOP bundle about checklists and SOPs and processes and systems and by the way, if there's a rain day in LMN, how are we now going to move, you know, five or 10 or 15 sites from your Monday route to your Tuesday route to now reorganize your LMN schedule? That's why you need an office admin. So you can just email her and say, hey, anything that completed or anything skipped, please bump to the next day. But before you bump to the next day, we have our Thursdays and Wednesdays left. Bump Thursdays to Fridays, Wednesdays to Thursdays, Tuesdays to Wednesdays, Mondays to Tuesdays. Cascade the whole schedule down. It's a 15 minute fix. It's an admin role, it's an admin job. But if your admin doesn't know how to do that, you have to do that. And if you're busy doing that, while you're also busy changing lawnmower blades and teaching your guys, you know, the right 50 to 1 mix ratio and gas cans. Because you never did, excuse me, because you never did proper training, because you didn't do any proper SOPs and hiring and cover this kind of stuff, you can kind of see how you can scale chaos really quickly. And you can see that if you're not empowering leadership and if you're not empowering with training, regular training, weekly, bi weekly training and covering this stuff, if you're not imploring people to take ownership and leadership, you can see how folks get to 5, 10 crews, 2, 3, 4 million, and the whole machine just seizes up because everything is bottlenecked on that owner and so when I promote the SOP bundle or I promote systems and processes or leanscaper that's coming in Chicago in June, which I can't wait to attend, and you see why I've been so invested in the last 12 to 15 months going to every single thing Mark Bradley and leanscaper and Marty Grunder grow and talking all the big fish out there to learn how to distill down what's working for the biggest companies to bring that back to Brian's Law Maintenance. How not here to scale chaos. I'm not here to scale theory. That's why I think we've also had a pretty successful launch. Excuse me, there's that cough. I feel like that's why we've had a pretty successful launch. Seamless launch of three crews of two going out this spring, knock on wood. Because we've learned best practices, we've learned all of this. All of this. And we still have a lot to learn. But we've learned all of this. Myself and the guys over the last 3, 612 months, we've all been learning and observing and keeping our head on a swivel and painting the dream and painting the picture of what this needs to look like by next spring. We've been talking about this for six to 12 months now. The conversation is everybody's got to get good at mastering the route and then teaching their new guy to be a right hand, their right hand to be a crew lead. So we can continue to promote new crews and new team members and build more crews. Because with more crews there's more supervisors. You got a team of three supervisors, you can have an operations manager, you have a couple operation heads. Now we can have a director of operations and now the revenue for that division is $2.2 million. And because that division is 2.2 and we're doing, you know, 2.1 in snow $4 million business, we can have an in house HR manager, we can have a vice president of this and director of operations. That and we can start growing and scaling a larger outfit. And that's what we hope to do. And everything we hope to accomplish along the way will document and video it and make it available part of that SOP bundle with you guys, right? But I'll tell you, it's. It's not as hard, I'd say, as you think. I don't think it's as easy as you think. I think it comes down to leadership training and being organized. It comes down to the vision, the mission and the core values that you set up for your company. I think it comes down to the financial literacy. Do the numbers work to be able to support those crews? That operation, right, you got to sell enough work to feed the machine and to feed the beast. That's something that we definitely are a little light on. We have to shore that up big time. We have another hundred grand of revenue to sell this year to hit our revenue goal for maintenance. But of course, to keep the guys moving all summer long. That's going to be a challenge. That's something that we do have to get better at. We need to make sure that we're better at skill gap, right? Everybody needs to learn how to cut, trim, edge and blow. You don't have a trimmer guy and a mower guy anymore. Everybody's doing every role when you got a team of two and everybody's got to be trained on everything. Not one guy just fills the gas cans and he knows what it looks like. Or one guy can use Coast Fuel Payer. One guy can use the Gusto app to log in and out for payroll, or one guy can use the crew app. Everybody needs to be cross trained. So an infinite amount of training, right? An infinite amount of training. And then again, all this has to be supported by the office. I spent an hour and a half on the phone today or on a zoom today with Marger Va. You know, we got it from Ninja Va, little shout out for those guys. She sec seven or so months into this whole conversation with us and we spent an hour working on dialing in our calendar and LMN for all the job scheduled, moving the whiteboard around to make sure all the jobs are organized and in a row. And then also teaching her how to do residential charge cards on file. For all the residentials that we completed last week, we did a charge credit file, you know, run through on 35, 40 ish residential customers today together. But then this upcoming Friday, we're going to do it one more time together. And then my goal is to hand that off to her to be able to take care of that admin role of charging cars on file for our residential work. And she asked a great question. She goes, so commercials build at the beginning of the month, residentials charge at the end of the week. I go, you got it? She goes, anything that we have at the end of the month for commercial, we have one site that they're looking to sell their building, so they're going to get an end of month invoice for any of the work that we do. Right? But that's Why I streamlined this because as we go to 100 to 200 to 400 commercial sites, I want 98, 99% of them to all have the same invoicing and payment schedule. And that all comes down to your ICP and the way you're selling and packaging works. That make sense. I was talking to a peer of mine. They have like 400 commercial accounts, and 350 of them all have different terms and different costs and different contract structures and different everything. And I'm like, how do you manage that? He goes, it's a lot. And I'm like, I can't even imagine. Now, granted, they're doing 10 million and we're doing, you know, 1 million, but let's just be honest with you. He even texted me the other day. He said, man, like, because he had a site, he's like, hey, I want to make sure this one's not yours. We're gonna bid on it. I go, nope, thanks for asking, though. And I, you know, I pay in the same mutual respect. But I said, no, we're not doing any. It was apartment complexes and we're not doing any apartment complexes. I said, you know, my icp, that's what we're sticking to. And if you don't know, it's just this, this and this. If you got anything that fits in this, let me know. Not that you guys can't handle it or you, you know, you want to offload anything, but if you do want to give it to us, let us know. I'm here for it. He goes, dude, you're so smart with your icp and I'm really proud of you. He goes, I know it's going to take a lot of work to continue to get more sites like that, more of the same icp, ideal customer profile, but he goes, if you scale that to what you really say, you're going to do 5 million. And they're all the same freaking type of site with all the same payment terms, all the same lawn and snow sales process. He goes, my gosh. Like, we have to sell this customer this way, this patio this way, this backyard, this way, this front landscape, this way, this mojob this way, this other thing, this way. He goes, like, it's hard to hire a salesperson, an estimator, when you got eight different ways to do something. It's a very exciting conversation. I'm charged up. I feel really good. I feel like we're. We're trying to keep it as simple as possible, as streamlined as possible, as lean as possible. I Don't. I'm not professing that we have it all figured out by any means. You know, a year or two years or three years from now, I have to look back on this and go, he had some of it figured out, but what he didn't know was X, Y and Z. And I think that's appropriate for any of us. That's our learning to grow into scale. But again, I'm very excited about the team. I'm very excited about the personal progress I've made as a leader. I'm really excited about the. The progress we made as an organization and adding office help and documenting and really just thinking this whole damn thing through over the last couple of months and years, right? We're probably about 12, 18 months really re engaged into building this thing and really going to the next level. I owe a tremendous amount of that to. To Mark Bradley and the conferences that he's put on in the revenue and sales intensive that we did in March the same time last year. We're only a freaking 13 or 14 months under our belt. Can you believe it? That's. If that's not a testimony to growth, I don't know what is. Okay, we're going to double revenue this year compared to last year, bar none. Done deal. Count it. Are run rate is already there, and I can't wait to see where we go over the next 12, 18, 24, 36 months. It's incredible. So that's what I'll leave you guys today. Just some food for thought. This is just real time, what we're dealing with, where we're at. The guys are doing great. I couldn't be more proud of the team. Hopefully I can report the same conversation back in August when it's the dog days of summer and it's hot. Everybody's getting tired and cranky. We're all like, waiting for snow. Even though, like, two minutes ago we're like, we're freaking done doing snow. You know how it goes. That's just a part of growth. That's just a part of the business. That's just part of summer. We deal with that. You guys deal with that. And it's all good stuff. All right, that's where I'll leave you guys. On today's podcast episode, sincerely, I really want to just leave you guys with. Go check out the SOP bundle. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, you will be so happy and glad that you did scoop that thing up. Not only for the day we launch which is going to be freaking insane. But for all the subsequent uploads, updates, upgrades that we make that bundle for the future, it's going to be fantastic. One thing I'll mention, I'll get more into this on Friday. We changed a lot ofstuff@launchpreneuracademy.com. maybe you guys are new to the industry. You want to go there and check it out. Because we made a huge pivot. The full ball of Wax which was 14.99, it's now 9.99. We gave all of our courses away that are introductory courses. Like five to eight introductory courses. They're all free now. All of them are free. How to start a business, how to mulch, how to clean up, how to aerate in much, much more. All those are free. Not $1 even. They're free. I'm at a different season of my life. I'm not a philanthropist by any means. It's not like I'm not any interested in making any more amount of money. That's, that's hardly from the case. I still got to get the Lambo but I just, I don't know what it is. It's indescribable. I just feel different. Full ball of wax. We cut it by 500 bucks and we gave the first like quarter or third of that whole 60 plus resources on Launchpreneur Academy away for free. It's not because they're not selling. It's not. I. Dude, I don't know. I'll just tell you if you look looking to learn how to start a business or any of the, the top five to eight skill sets that you can start, you know, expanding your services with. I should say all those are free. That's why we dropped the price down by 500 bucks. It feels good. It feels right. Like I just want to get these resources into your guys hands. I'm not a saint. I'm not. There's no ulterior motive. I just, I don't know. God tapped me on the shoulder saying give that crap away for free. It's good. You don't need it anymore. You don't need that money. I'll pay you. I'll get you a comped in a different way. I don't know what it is. But all that's free now@launchpreneuracademy.com I think we've had eight or nine people. I haven't even announced that I think we've had eight or nine people like get the how to start a long care business. For which are all great courses and starter resources for sure all. I think I had like eight or nine people just download it in the last like 48 hours, which is incredible. I'm like, dude, I would have killed for that stuff. I didn't learn any of that until my first decade in the business. And I'm not even kidding. There's like eight or so modules just in the how to start your long care business, how to write equipment right truck, right trailer, how to market, et cetera, et cetera, colors, fonts, a lot of basics. You know, there's probably four to six hours with a content in there. It's awesome. That stuff's all for free, so check that out. If you haven't been to launchpear academy.com I'm not a saint, I'm not a hero. I just feel called to give that stuff away now at this point. Check out launchpreneurcade.com store if you want to check out the SOP bundle. Check out granum.com and check out the tour dates. We hope to see you guys at the shop tours this summer and fall. It's gonna be incredible. Selfishly, like Gamble and I are doing those on tour together. It's going to be incredible. I know one tour already has five, five tickets sold. Another one has a couple of tickets sold like you guys are. They just went online like a week ago. But they are very limited. So if you guys want to go check them out and we hope to see you guys there this summer and fall. All right, folks, that's all I got for you on today's Wednesday show. Love you. We appreciate you. Content goes live on the SOP Bundle Thursday morning. And it's just getting started. That's not the finish. That's just the start. If you got requests for videos, shoot me a text, shoot me a dm, shoot me an email. What do you want to see on that? I will start building that stuff out immediately for you guys because I'm launching with what I think it needs and what my company needs. But if you guys have other thoughts or opinions or things that I can get access to or train or do a video on for you. Give me your thoughts, give me your feedback, give me your five bullet points on that video or that topic and we'll go make that happen the next week or two and continue to build this thing together. Because as I'm building my library, you're building your library. And again, you can take these Documents and videos are all downloadable. They're not going to live At Launcher Academy or Kajabi, they're going to be downloadable so you can take them and put them on your iPad, your photo library, your Dropbox, your Lean docs, and Lana Green. Yes, obviously big thing for Green. Yes. You'll hear me talk about this over the next 90 days. Everything we have, we're going to load it into Greenius and build a road map for these documents for those positions in the company. Right? Crew 1. Crew 2. Right hand 1. Right hand 2. Crew lead 1. Crew lead 2. Financial literacy 1. Financial literacy 2. Leadership 1. Leadership 2. Sales training 1. Sales training 2. Right, more on all of that to come. Dude, I'm telling you, folks, I'm trying to think three to six months ahead. Three to six steps ahead. I know what you guys need. I know what I need. It's an infinite amount of brain power that it takes to do this stuff. And again, some people treat it come like a free feast and some people treat a feast like a crumb. If you got something better, let me know because I would love to not have to do all this. But I'm telling you what, if anybody doesn't have anything like this, I think you're going to be really blessed by what we're putting together here. All right, man. That's all I got. No pitch, no hard sell. I love you. Whether you get it, I love whether you don't, I. I don't care. It's just a great resource. I'm just excited about it. And I like talking about things that I'm excited about, just like you guys. All right, I love you guys. Over now. Good luck on the double cuts. The wet grass, the tall grass, the rain days, the customers chirping and chewing you out, the your price is too high. Your price is too low. Nobody says that. Hey, you didn't get the site. You were hoping to get the site. Honey, we're gonna get this one. You don't get it now you go back to the wife. Hey, we're losers. I'm sorry I can't buy you the new car this year. I've done it all. I've seen it all. Well, I want to say all of it, but most of it, right? Just like a lot of you guys. Welcome to the spring rush. All right, have a great day, guys. Look forward to catching up with you here on the next one.
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Listen to what lawn care pro Joel Adams said after buying the SOP training bundle. Quote, that's the least painful $999 I've ever spent. It would take my team 200 hours to make lesser content. That's five bucks an hour. I don't work for five bucks an hour, so it was a no brainer. Smart move Joel. If you're a lawn care business owner drowning in bottlenecks and burning daylight training your team from scratch, stop reinventing the wheel. The SOP Training Bundle gives you plug and play systems that bring clarity, remove bottlenecks and free you up to grow. Just $999 using the link in the description or by visiting thelantrepreneuracademy.com stop duct taping your business together and be like Joel. Pick up the SOP Training Bundle today.
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Thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast with Bryan Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please consider leaving us a five star review for the show. While the techniques and ideas presented here are designed to help you grow a more successful and profitable business, no one can guarantee these results for you. We want to emphasize that entrepreneurship is not easy and the ideas presented here are just the opinions of Brian Fullerton and his respective guests. No one can guarantee success for you. That being said, we hope the ideas presented here help you and motivate you to go on out there and crush it with your own business.
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Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
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we hope to see you on the next episode.
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This has been a Bryan Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.