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Folks, now is the time to get registered for equip Expo 2026. You can use promo code Brian to save half off your Registration. Come join 30,000 industry peers as we descend onto Louisville, Kentucky for the super bowl of green industry trade shows and expos. There's over a million square feet of exhibit space on the inside where you can see all of your favorite brands and all the equipment that they have the offer. And also 40 acres of outdoor demo where you can test before you invest and you can try before you buy. There's education, there's community, and there's training, all available for you and at no extra cost.
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Come check it all out and we
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hope to see you guys there again. Save 50% with promo code Brian and register today, and we look forward to seeing you guys in Louisville October 20th
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through the 23rd this fall. You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice. Completely unfiltered. Grow your business, grow your life.
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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 and good morning. Well, on today's podcast topic episode, I wanted to address the elephant in the room about fuel surcharges. I know I can't be the only one out there that is feeling it and seeing it. I know. Just about a week ago, one of my crew leads was finishing fueling up one of our setups and he had called me and he said, hey, I can't fill up any more fuel. We're already at the 200 limit. And I'm thinking to myself, $200 limit? Like, what did you just fill up to get to $200 at the gas station? And honest answer was the Isuzu gas tank, the two mowers, and then our transfer tank. But we're talking, I don't know, 40, 50 gallons of fuel, whatever it might be. And he's like, yeah, and there's still room to go. And I'm like, what in the world? So I'm like, okay, just, you know, do you got enough for the day? He said, yeah. I said, okay, I'll make some adjustments in coast pay a little plug for coast pay today, right? And I'll adjust our policy limit so you can get $250 worth of fuel at the pub. Thought about it for a quick second. Didn't really think about it too much more after that. Came on back and I said, you know what? You know, it's the weekend. We'll handle that next week. Well, a day or two later, it's. It's Mother's Day, and we go on out to just go get some flowers at a local nursery or flower shop or whatnot and go to the gas pump. We got the family in the car in tow. We're doing the family deal, got the Expedition and need gas. So I go to the gas pump, and the credit card reader wasn't working at the Palm. Go figure. Probably got skimmed there or something. Just kidding. But went inside, put 80 bucks in the pump, and came on back out. I'm used to like, you know, 80 to 100 bucks. Fills up a truck, right? And come on out, pump the gas, do the deal, racket, driveway. And as I'm pulling out, I go, dude, what the heck just happened? I think I got ghosted on my fuel. Liz is like, what's going on? I'm like, dude, I only got like 60% of a fuel tank filled up like a half a tank. And she's like, what? And then I look out at the sign, you know, that's got the little Chiron, a little ticker, the little led, you know, light up for fuel prices. And it was like 490 for regular. I don't know. I remember seeing 619 for premium. And I know diesel was 6 bucks a gallon. And I went, holy freaking cow, like out of nowhere, right? Last 60 to 90 days fuel is just ridiculously expensive. And so I want to talk about it for a couple of quick minutes here just to give you guys some ideas about, like, maybe what you can do to hedge against it. What I've, you know, had a lot of conversations with a lot of folks about what they're doing about it. Some are passing it along, some are absorbing it, some are pricing it to absorb it. Uh, there's a couple things that I want to just give you some suggestions and some ideas here today to maybe help bridge the gap again, the administration in office, the conservative administration. I'll just say that is my. Is my team. It's my home team. But, man, is Trump messing things up now? I'm willing to pay a little short term pain for long term pleasure if my, my humble opinion, if Iran doesn't get a nuke and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the world's a safer place. Yeah, I guess, sure, I'm willing to pay a little bit more at the pump for, you know, 60, 90 days, maybe six months in. The world's a safer place. That's. That's. That's a role and responsibility you get to play when you're the world's superpower and you get to police the world, like it or not. Now, did I sign up for that? I don't know. You know, I don't know if I signed up for $6 fuel. But regardless of, like, what your opinion is for it, against it, you know, doesn't matter. The reality is it's at the pump. It's Xbox. So you can complain. Politics all day, and the benefit, the risk reward, the investment, the, you know, you know, maybe you don't like the whole situation of what's going on overseas. Dude, that's totally fair. Regardless, you're going to go to work today, and you're going to fill up your pump or fill up your gas at the pump, fill up your tank, whether you're an employee or a business owner. Right? And so regardless of that, what are you going to do about it here and now? That's one thing that I've always tried to explain and implore my friends, family, my kids, my wife, the people around me, like, do what they're doing 600 miles away in Washington, D.C. i get it. But I'm going to make sure that it has no bearing on my business. Right? I mean, the economy, this and that. Like, as a business owner, dude, the wind is like, rarely maybe once, once or twice in your career going to be at your back. Like, if you're in landscaping and design, build. The wind was at your back from 2020 to 2023. Right. Everybody said almost yes to all of your designs, all of your patios, and all of your prices. That's like one or maybe two seasons of that in your life. Okay? You're only going to ride so many upswings like that from 2013 to 2017 for a couple of y'. All. That's why a bunch of folks sold out in 17, 18, 19. You know what I'm saying? So regardless of the circumstances, you got to figure out how to run your business. Employees, politics, financial interest rates. Well, back in the day, you could get trucks for 2, 3%. Yep. And then today, a truck rate is, you know, six and a half, seven. Seven and a half percent. Yep. You got to figure out how to make money in no matter the circumstance, no matter your environment. And if not, dude, just don't be in business for yourself. Like, that's okay, too. I'm not saying that being an entrepreneur is for everyone. All right? So that being said, let's do this really quick. Let's hear from today's show sponsors. We got a couple of great announcements that I want to share with you guys. Thank you in advance for using our code. Everywhere you guys have been going. We do hammer that a lot on our show, our content. Like, folks, this thing costs a lot of money to put together. I know in the world of everybody creating content, you know, seems like everybody does it. And here's one thing I'll say, everybody can do it, everybody does do it. Eventually almost everybody wants to be a content creator and all this stuff and that's fine. And they have a good 3 month, 6 month, 12 month, 2 year run. But eventually they realize, dude, this takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of money. And oh, I'm helping people. Yeah, dude, for sure, me too. But just like your pastor wants to help people. Like, dude, we need finances because the, the money, the, the monetization is what funds the message and the message is the mission. Right. Like it takes money to do this. And so I feel like your pastor here make sure everybody's tithing. I'm going to do a membership check, you know what I mean? Thankfully, we don't have that kind of scrutiny or we just trust you guys, just like your pastor trust you. But I say that jokingly that there's a lot of great stuff going on. I just saw another buddy earlier today. He's looking to sign up with a bookkeeper. I shot him a dm. I'm like, dude, cycle CPA code Brian. They'll save you some money and they'll really help you get your ducks in a row and including, you know, tax help if you need it. You know, lmn, you know, we're going to work on some promotion here with lmn. Hopefully come this late summer into fall about, you know, if you sign up with Element and Green. Yes. Maybe get the SOP bundle part of that right. Like $1,000 value. Okay. Legit. We're trying to do some big pivots like that don't wait, you know, for those kind of things to come on down the pike. You can never time the sales or promotions and all that fun stuff. But that's why we got a Evergreen code for a lot of these folks. That'll save you some money on sign up some money on startup. 10% here, 20% there on the different affiliate partners. So thank you, thank you, thank you. If you're just getting started in business for yourself, I would consider looking at the whole ball of wax. If you've been Doing this thing for three to five years, you're starting to scale, you're starting to grow. You need some office help. I would consider and suggest you guys looking at the SOP bundle. If you guys are running around like doing the whole deal, but you're trying to, you know, stay motivated, stay accountable and you do have a lot of questions day to day. I would encourage you to check out our Link membership. It's 49 bucks a month. I think we knock 10 or 20% off of that if you do the annual. All right. It's an awesome setup. That's our Facebook group. 320 plus people a part of that. Great. Coming four or five new threads per day on their very active group. A lot of great folks. And that comes with a weekly, Weekly live on 9pm on Wednesdays where we all get together and there's between 20 and 50 of us every week. And it's a great time, it's great discussions and in fact, last week or maybe two weeks ago, we had a 35, 40 minute conversation and some of the stuff that I'm going to share with you guys today. All right, so whole bottle of wax, SOP link membership. And then the last thing I'll suggest to you is get your tickets to something coming up this summer and this fall. We got leanscaper coming up here in Chicago. Dan Martel. All right, if you want a free ticket to that event, first one's free. I can get you in mention code. Brian, if you want to sign up with leanscaper, they're doing tremendous things over there. We got a code for that. And outside of that, Equip Expo coming up in October. And then LAL is our conference in November. That's always a banger. We're going to drop tickets mid June and that is going to be coming up down the pike as well. So get your ticket to something this fall. Maybe the Element Break Records Tour Shop Tours, right? They're going to be doing eight or so stops over six months across the US and Canada. Okay. So there's always something here for everybody. Uh, we got a lot of great stuff going on and dude, just plug in, you know, go to the grocery store, take what you need. You don't get everything. But folks, there's always something here for everybody to help you guys move your business forward. And all the stuff that we put out, it's designed to help you grow sincerely. So you guys get the upside. And if you do happen to use our code or support in any way, I just want to say, as always, thank you in advance. It goes right back into supporting the show and we super appreciate that. All right, let's do this really quick. I want to hear from anything else we might have missed, show sponsors and announcements, and then we're going to come talk a little bit more about how to save some money and, and pass some of that cost maybe along to your customers for fuel and to not let margins go to waste. Hang tight.
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Mowing lawns is the easy part. Growing a real lawn care business, that's where most guys get stuck. At the Lawntrepreneur Academy, we hand you the playbooks, pricing tools and SOPs Bryan Fullerton uses to run a high performing crew so that you can stop grinding and start growing Free webinars. Commercial bidding, training and the full SOP bundle are waiting. Head to lawntrepreneuracademy.com or use the link provided in the podcast description and build the lawn care business you actually want.
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All right, gang, well let's come on back here and talk about this topic for four or five quick more minutes. Here's what I'll just say. Fuel is getting more and more expensive, right? Obviously, elephant in the room and hopefully we can turn a tide where in the next 60 to 90 days this stuff comes on down. Here's the reality. Fuel is a silent margin killer in business. There's, there's no doubt about it. In fact, this isn't the first time I've seen fuel over four or five dollars a gallon. I'll remind you for any of you guys that maybe are on the other side of the political aisle and I'm a pretty conservative individual, but I moderately can understand both sides. I've been rich. I've been poor, not rich. Let me rephrase that. I've had a little bit more money and I, I've also been poor. I'm on the spectrum. I'm definitely not rich. You know how you'll know I'm rich? I'll have a Lambo in the garage or I'll have a Beneteau Trawler, Grand Trawler 63 parked out at my lakehouse. All right, like, trust me, that's when you know somebody's rich is when they have a boat. So let's just rephrase that question really quick little 40 and slip there. Definitely not rich. I aspire to get the Lambo, the Torio or a. I've been shopping for a lot of boats lately. Liz has been roasting me. I'm like, I need the 10 year old retirement. Big dream goal Right. And for me, a $2 million boat sounds pretty dope. And some of you guys have boats. And in fact, a lot of you guys live on the east coast, have more access to water and you guys do that stuff all the time. And I'm super jelly. The, the, the reality is that the fuel cost is though a really, it's a silent killer. You know, if, if fuel costs go up about 10 to 20% in cost, it can directly correlate to a 1% loss in margin or profitability, I should say net profit for your business. So for every 50 cents to a dollar that fuel goes up, it can absolutely cut down 1% to 2% of true net profit out of your business. So I remember back just a couple of years ago to finish up that thought gas was $5 30 a gallon for regular under Mr. True International Depressure. Okay? So for anybody that's hating on the current administration or seeing high gas prices or this is ridiculous, I'll just tell you it was $5.30 for regular just two and a half years ago. Let me also take it back to 0708 09. Obama not hating on anybody, not trying to make any political jabs. I'm just stating the obvious. Gas was $4.50 a gallon back then. I got started in my business in 2005, 2006, and I was not even two years into this thing. And folks, you want to talk about not being priced right, I was doing, you know, the 20 mo's and all this stuff. The only thing going for me is that I had a little bit of route density and I was living at home. But folks, my little long care business was, you know, nothing super sustainable. I mean, I was making probably 10, 20, 25, $30,000 a year take home for my business. And the only reason I got lucky with that is I paid off my mower pretty quickly. My brother's Dodge Durango was. I don't know if it was paid for, but you know, I didn't pay his monthly payment on it either. My brother was or my mom was. Maybe I threw him some money for, you know, vehicle rental, if you will, which I doubt back in the day because I didn't have any money, but I had my X Mark Viking and I had my job and my lawn care side hustle on the weekends. First year working at Trugreen. Next year they didn't let me come on back And I paid 5750. It was like 1750, 1750. And then like 2250. I paid that thing off. One month payment. One month payment, skip regular monthly payment. And then I paid the balance off because I just put my money right back into the business. I didn't go buy doodads and stupid stuff and liabilities or the new AP Swatch, you know, knockoff, you know, which I've seen some ridiculous stories on that, by the way, for all you watch aficionados out there. But gas back then, my second year, third year in business, was $4.50 a gallon. Now, adjusted for inflation, they say that the value of the dollar bill is half every 10 years. The value of the dolly bill is halved every 10 years. Okay, so if gas was $4.50 back in 2008 and we're talking 20 years later, well, $9 and then $18 a gallon, okay? So we're talking, all of you guys that want to, you know, hate on Trump, trying to make the world a safer place. And I'm not apologists, and I'm not sticking up for anybody. I. Dude, I couldn't care less. I'm just saying the five or six dollars a gallon you're paying, I was paying between nine and 18 a gallon equivalent 20 years ago, my second year in business. So when I say I've kind of ran the gamut a little bit over 20 years, there's not too much more you're going to get in a cyclical fashion of your lawn and landscape company or just being an. An entrepreneur. I've had Democrat presence. I've had Republicans. I've had. I've had a, you know, natural worldwide phenomenon, disaster, disease. Covid shut me down for six, eight weeks, and we burned 18 GS of cash and, you know, no time with just payroll, basic payroll. I'm not saying we've seen it all, but, dude, like, nothing here as millennials. Like, I saw real the other day as a. As millennials. Breaking news today. World breaking news. Breaking news today. World breaking news. Emergency. World emergency. Breaking news. Emergency. Like, millennials are just tired because, dude, we've seen so freaking much from the 9 11s to the COVIDs to all the different, you know, this going on, that going on, dude, like, we've rarely had the wind to our sails as millennials. Now, I sound like a boomer, but the Boomers and the Gen Xers, that's the generation that. Anyway, so let's get back on to it. Fuel is more expensive. And so I've seen it along the way in different seasons and areas of my business. The first thing that I just wanted to obviously, Address is that there's going to be pros and cons of absorbing the cost and also passing it along. And I just want you to get out of this podcast today that whatever you decide to do is up to you. Your business, your prerogative, your belief system, your value system, your mission, what you're trying to do. If you pass it along, the obviouss are the customer is going to say, hey, you're more expensive. Hey, we're already locked into a seasonal contract. You can't. You can't do that. Or maybe you have a clause or an addendum to your contract that allows you to go up in cost. And that sounds fine and fun until you get reevaluated at a financial meeting, weekly, quarterly, annually with the CFO of the business. And they say, this guy just keeps raising his prices. At best, somebody sticks out their neck free and says, well, yeah, but fuel's twice as much at the pump or, you know, 30%. More rarely, that kind of conversation is going to happen. They're going to say, get rid of this guy. He keeps raising his rates on us, and you lose a 10, 20, $30,000 lawn and snow account. I'm not saying you should eat it. I'm not saying you should pass it on. I'm just. We're going to go through a couple of pros and cons again. If you the. The absorbing it, maybe that's something that you want to do, but you're going to sacrifice 1 or 2 or 3% of true net profit. Right? That might be something that you're willing to make the quote unquote investment on, but maybe you shoot your customers and this is something we're doing. Learned this from Corey Ballard and Leroy Mains. Was on their show the other day. We have a show coming down the pike from the Green Grime, but maybe this is something that you want to absorb, but at least let your customers know, hey, we understand that fuel costs are more expensive. We know a lot of you guys are concerned or nervous about maybe potential rate increases, whether residential or commercial. Right. You can do this in a newsletter or a phone call. We just want to let you know that we're honoring all of our agreements that we signed in January, February, and we will not be raising your rates or prices this summer season unless you want to put, like, an asterisk. And at the bottom, you put a little note that says, as long as gas stays under $6.50 per gallon. I don't know. Do. I don't know. You decide. You. I'm not telling you what I'm doing. I'm just saying those are some things you could do. And the tough part of this conversation, right, and this is the fun part about when you, if you don't have a budget, you're totally cooked. But when you're in lmn, for example, we bid all of our price list for our labor, our materials and especially equipment. There's a cost calculator to running all this piece of equipment. A truck is $19.37 per hour. You know, labor is 54, 24 per hour. Then you had 20 of that. So you have $60.51. When you priced out your equipment list, you had in there a fuel line item, how many gallons per day and how much cost. Most of my stuff is quoted between $354 a gallon. But if you obviously are running, I don't know, 2000 equipment labor, 2000 equipment hours and your gas is bid 50 cents lower per gallon. I don't know the math on that. One grand, ten grand, I'm not a mental math quick guy like that. But you can see exactly how profits can erode in the business, right? But if you have no clue where your gas prices are and no clue what it costs to run your business, you're even more going to be out hosed. You know, in the conversation of your fuel costs and your fuel pricing and, and that's like why you get lmn, that's why you get software. That's why we all scream bloody, you know, until we're blue in the face about getting some type of software that can help you navigate at least some of these conversations. At least you're in the game. At least you're in the ballpark. One or 2% here or there, sure. But at least you're not out 10, 20% in these swings because you're just, you're just guessing, right? So there's pros and cons of, of taking it. There's pros and cons of passing it along. I would just say if you do absorb it like we are, and we're going to do this, is send out a newsletter to all of our customers and at least get some mileage out of it. Talking about fuel prices. How about that for a cinnamon or an idiom or whatever you want to call it, like we're going to get some mileage out of it. So if we're going to take it on the chin, then we're going to tell of our customers, hey, this is why you go with Us. This is why you go with a trusted partner. This is why you go with somebody who's got like legacy and longevity in the industry. And I don't care if you've been in business for three years or seven years, any of you guys can say this because if the average business 80 close up in five years, then in my opinion, you're in the top 20%. And if you're doing it again over the next 10 years, you're in the top, you know, 5 or 1% of businesses that stick around. Hey, you know, use the statistics on your, in, in your, in your advantage. Hey, this is why you partner with a trusted firm like Brian on maintenance, who's been doing this for 20 years. We're here to weather the storms, good, bad or ugly, between salt prices or fuel prices. You know, it's been a tumultuous year of cost due to unprecedented economic and existential situations. Okay, throw this in the chat GPT. Run two or three quick paragraphs together. Doesn't have to be the fanciest, you know, message or newsletter statement in the world, but just let folks know like, we've got your back. Like, if I'm going to take it on the chin, then I'm going to let these folks know that we've got your back and that we're going to stay strong with our partnership agreements with you. Right. This is also another great time. I'll, and I'll really reiterate this one big time. This is something we haven't talked about a lot on the show for the last year or two because I'm a big proponent that if you price it correctly, who really cares. But there's still obviously tremendous merit to route density. Right? I, I know folks, still, it's, it's really honestly alarming and shocking and I'm not here to put anybody down. But I'm telling you, you really need to go back to my YouTube video Route Density. I did it seven or eight years ago. I know I've got a great one on Kalfis's YouTube channel as well. Keith Kelfas, folks, the stuff that we talk about on there, you know, it's been seven, eight, nine years since those videos were released. They're as relevant as ever and that's why they're evergreen in nature. All my content's evergreen in nature. There's a hundred thousand plus views on those video. Reason there's still some of you guys are out there. Maybe you've been in business for only, you know, 12 or 18, 24 months, maybe you never heard the message, so I'll give you that. But you're driving all around Timbuktu. You've got, you know, you're in five different cities on five different days. You know, you're like, I'm going to take clients from here all the way to there. I know people personally that have this going on in their company, and I'm just thinking to myself, bro, what are you doing? And. And it's justified with, I, oh, I've got a day route over there. I've got a half a day's worth of route, or I've got to book a business over there, folks. Any of you guys commercial maybe is a little bit different discussion. It takes, you know, a year or so or two years to. To build a commercial route with, you know, 20, 30 sites. No doubt about it. To keep a crew moving. Residential, though, any of you guys could canvas in a neighborhood, and every canvas, every time you put out a hundred flyers, you will absolutely get one new residential customer. Not even kidding. That's a fact. So for any of you guys that have been thinking about shoring up that one route out of your four days where you're like, dude, I feel like we pay to do this. If you're feeling it, the answer is you're already not making money. That's. God. And that's your gut telling you what you already know. Now, it'd be nicer if you ran a budget through LMN to confirm what you feel like you already know or got to know your Numbers calculator for 99 bucks at LaunchPreneur Academy, you know, which is a phenomenal deal, phenomenal resource to tell you, obviously, again, what you already know. Like, these tools exist for a reason. It's not just to sell you something. These are tools that we use to learn all of the above to become more profitable in our business. 100%. I sold a route off eight years ago. It was a lucrative day. It just didn't meet the ICP that we were looking to get into. It just didn't fit into the core group of where my business was just four days on one side of town, one day over on the other side of town. I also couldn't fill up that site or that route list to have my debt, my. My desired ICP to also carry them over to Snow. So there's a. An instant 20 of my customer base. I could never pitch Snow to, let alone other landscape services because it was just cost prohibitive. It just didn't make sense. It was 20 minutes away, 25 minutes away, right. But it took me about two minutes to realize, dude, we're gonna move to four tens instead of five eights anyway. But number two, I could easily get seven to ten new residentials right where I'm at. And once you do the math on gas prices, downtime, if I broke a belt 25 minutes further, 20 minutes west of where my dealer was, we're talking 45 minutes away. And I remember one time a belt broke in the front yard on one of my mowers. I had to drive an hour there, basically an hour back. I got back, and I'm like, dude, I haven't made money on this route today, let alone probably for the rest of the month, because I didn't have an extra deck belt with me or hydro belt with me. And that's why we say always keep extra deck belts and hydro belts on each truck and trailer. We have three crews going out. All of them have a spare hydro and deck belt for all the mowers. Right? It's. It's. It. You know, it's a real. This is real stuff. Maybe you don't know, but this is. This is how you get better. Well, to go full circle, maybe you want to reevaluate your routes. This is a great time to do it. Maybe it just doesn't make financial sense to go and do that one subdivision where there's three lawns over there. I'm telling you, you can canvas a couple neighborhoods on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and do a lateral and fix this problem in two weeks, literally. And by the way, your other three all bellyaching about adding a charge card on file. One lady's a slow payer, and the other guy's always got dog poop in his backyard. You want to get rid of those people anyway, you know, let's be honest. And now you start the new people off with, hey, if there's any dog waste, It'll be a $10 fee. By the way, we do residential charge card on file, cash out at the end of the week, and we're consistently on Wednesdays, and the other route was on Fridays. And you're always cutting them on Saturday because you always get rained out on a Tuesday. And you just fix, like, three different problems in your business. And you're like, my gosh, like, I. It's the. It's the dog sitting on the rusty nail on the porch analogy where the dude walks by and says, what's up with the dog? Every time I walk by, he. He kind of yelps and he goes, owner says, well, it's because he's sitting on a rusty nail. And he goes, why doesn't he just move? And the guy says, well, it just doesn't bother him enough. Like I'm the guy that's got to come on the podcast and take the hammer underneath the nail so it pokes you in your behind and says, dude, get up off the pot and fix your fricking business. And maybe because gas has been cheaper, artificially lower, or we're in an artificially pro business environment the last three or four years, these kind of issues get glossed over. Maybe you actually have to fix your business. I know even you listening into the show, you're like, dude, I'm Brian Z. Maintenance Jr. I'm, I'm Mark Bradley Jr. Bro, I'm with you. Me too. But it has us constantly evaluating routes and clientele. We have dropped one or two different residentials. We lost three or four. We lost. I dropped one or two because they were in subdivisions where we had two, three, four. And over years, you know, we just dwindle down. You know, things change, people pivot, kids get older and they start, you know, 14 year olds start taking care of the parents lawn as they should, you know, having some chores, in my opinion. And we lost this one where we had two in there. And I'm like, it makes no sense for us to go do the other one. And also because I'm attentive enough to our customer base, it was a customer that was signed up in a weekly. It's a new sub. They pulled all the topsoil out. The lawn's always stressed out and all drought, stress. The lady doesn't water enough. We were doing basically bi weeklies for June forward at best, you know, once every three weeks in September and October. And I'm like, this lawn doesn't make us any money. We're getting 16, 18 cuts out of this thing instead of 27 weeks. We're not selling any landscaping, we're not selling any snow. We're done with it. And it was costing us money to go do that lawn, right? These are things that you have to continuously refine. And to think about one thing, I'll tell you, regardless of whatever you do with all of these surcharges, just make sure that you're having transparent professional communication, right? If you do residential, just be cautious because if you're like, hey, we're going up five bucks for your weekly cut or two dollars for your weekly cut. Just think this stuff through. Are you gonna go back down $2.50 on your weekly MO price when gas goes back to 350 or sub $4 a gallon. If you don't, some customers might have a little bit of heartburn about that, right? There might be some churn. Some folks might not appreciate that. So be careful when you just hear people in Facebook groups or podcasts or whatever saying, we're, we're adding a surcharge, a fuel charge. Sure you, sure you are, dude. If you actually did the math, we're Talking about extra 10 to 15 cents at max, maybe like 8 cents per cost to do that lawn. So I'm all for it. But if you actually do the math and I've done the math, I've done math live with the guys on link last week we all really put our brains together at 40 people masterminding on. This is why you join groups, right? Or this is why you join groups that actually are effective and productive in doing something with their life and trying to grow and figure this stuff out. But the actual cost was like, dude, it wasn't even like 50 cents. It was like 20 cents or something like that. We did the math. I forget, forgive me, but it was nominal. But then you join a Facebook group, I was like, I do do. I do five dollar surcharges, I do ten dollar surcharges. We do mulch for two hundred a yard. If you're not doing two hundred a yard, what are you doing? And I'm like, dude, I'm going to take your entire business and your entire route by charging 89 a yard, still making 20%. You're at $200 a yard thinking you're making 25% and you're probably not making any money because you're using Wheelbarrow still. And that's fine, dude, you can, you can believe whatever you want. That's the fun part about content creation and Facebook groups. There's so much information these days and unfortunately, just because you have the access to go create content doesn't mean there's accuracy with the content you're putting out. They're not, they're not. They're mutually exclusive. Let's just say that. Okay, like, oh, I've got a podcast or I've got a Facebook group, or I've got a face. I've got an Instagram page putting out business tips and advice. How long have you been in business? Three years. Cool. Like what's your gross revenue? 60,000. Okay, cool, man. Awesome. I'm not judging, but I think maybe you Got a little bit more to learn before you start offering a course, a group, a mastermind, and all this other nonsense. And that's why they've got 12 views, a video, and three people in the group. Okay. Like, just be careful. Be a wise consumer of information. Okay? The stuff that I see, I spend so little time on social these days in terms of like just posting, interacting with my group, and then off and my following, quote, unquote, you guys, and then I'm off is because I just get angry at the stuff that I see getting put out. I'm like, that's wrong. That's not accurate. That dude no has no clue what he's talking about. And you just see the same people in three to four years. They're out of the business, they're out of the industry. At most, they're grifting and they're out. It's just absurd. It's just absurd. And I feel bad because there's unfortunately, the ramifications and the, the folks that are in, the innocent bystanders that are the real victims in situations like that. And I, and I do use the word victim because you don't know any better when you're new. And so be careful who you couple your caboose to. So residential, I don't think it's price gouging to add a fuel surcharge. Just be cautious the way you word it to your customers. If you're saying, hey, we're doing a price increase based on some overhead cost, that's fine. If you say, hey, we're doing a $2 fuel surcharge, if I was a residential customer, I better see that knocked off my bill in July or whenever. If you'll go back to, like I said, sub dollar four a gallon. And if you don't price adjust and then the following spring you do your renewals and people don't want to renew, they might feel like you've been taken advantage of, quote, unquote, for the last three or four or five months of the season. And if they feel like that privately, I'm telling you, they've already told 10 people publicly. And that's why you're not getting any new business in that subdivision, because they're not raving fans of you at all. The pool parties, grad parties, dinner parties, and, you know, bar crawls that they've done with that local community advocating or not for your business. You see these like little micro 1%, half percents, 0.01%. That's the, that's the pixie dust that makes you a great business in 10, 20, 30 years. All right, let's see really quick here. I got a couple notes written down. Oh, this is. I asked Chad, I said, just give me some napkin math on fuel costs going up. So I said, Isn't it like 10% in cost is equal equates to like 1%. And bottom line, I remember dirt monkey talking about that for a long time. Chat said, for example, a $1 million landscaping company making 10% profit earns 100 grand a year. If fuel and vehicle costs increase by just 1% of revenue, 10 grand profit drops from 100 grand to 90 grand. That's a 10% reduction in owner profit from what feels like a small fuel increase. A practical example, if gas jumps 50 cents to a dollar more per gallon across a fleet of trucks, mowers, loaders, skid, sears, many companies can see fuel costs rise thousands of dollars per month during peak season. For companies operating on a 5 to 15% net margin, fuel spikes can erase an entire percentage point of profitability if pricing isn't adjusted right. So most contractors don't realize that a 1 or 2% increase in operating expenses can wipe out 10 to 20% of their actual take home profit. So this is another consideration, like for all of you guys that were like diesel or die. And I'm like, that's cool, bro. How much is diesel? $6 a gallon. Cool. Even regular unleaded is still, let's say 489 a gallon. Diesel or die. I'm like, cool. It's just, it just gets exhausting when you combat the Internet, right? Like everybody's every. He's right. But yet I can say you, I always my. One of my lines is you can be right, you can be rich. And this is smug Brian talking. And I've been saying this since 2017. And I'm the outlier and I'm the, and I'm the. Sure, buddy. Awesome. You're right. You should be 24, 27 and get that, that diesel truck. That would be awesome. Well, I haul heavy. What do you mean haul heavy? You pull a dump trailer 21 times a year. That's not somebody who's hauling an excavator or a skid steer 95 times a year. They're relocating and repositioning every three days. Big difference, right? Just because you have a heavy spring rush, you know, why don't you just have site one do a delivery for $75? You know me, $75 can go into $14,000 for a dump trailer. Like a gajillion. All right? And that's statistical proof. A gajillion. Look that one up. All right? But these are, these are the silent killers that I'm talking about. All these little, little, little nuances. A quick thing. The other day, one of my guys jumped out of the truck and we were doing some stuff, and he was, he was loading some tools up, and I cut the truck off and he goes, what are you doing? We're getting out of here. I go, yeah. I said, dude, like, we should do this anyway. But gas is six bucks a gallon. Let's drop. Let's turn off all this extra idling, right? It's just being a little bit more aware, a little bit more cognizant of our, of our surroundings. Right? Again, here. Here's the last thing I'll just say. I think a lot of this comes down to just having more communication and having a better plan with your business right now. You can't really so much. My opinion is to go back and break contracts or modify contracts that you inked in February, March, April. We're not doing that. There's a process in corporate America. Somebody creates a purchase order that gets approved from Finance. Finance approves it for ops or your contact, he's able to help you now connect with AP accounts payable, and you send your invoices over there. And if the account 7600 bucks and you got, you know, seven equal monthly payments of, you know, 1350 for your seven grand, you can't just say on month two or month three, we're going to add a two and a half percent increase for fuel prices or $5 a gallon or what. Whatever math in wizardry you decide to do, you can't go back to that same purchase order and, and change it without paperwork or notifying a half a dozen people up the chain of command. You're like, what's the big deal with that? Well, if you have 50 sites, you're talking about 300 now, new conversations that you're not looking to have, and they're not going to go well. They're going to go from the spectrum of everything south, from gently bad to that guy's done, Not a single person is going to have a new conversation about you. With three to five people that touch that financial conversation per company times 50 companies, 250, 300 conversations, not a single one is going to go equator north. Does that make sense? I think anybody would relate to that. So why have 300 potential new negative conversations stem from you? Not just Absorbing one or two points. Make it up somewhere else. Cut costs is a is the first thing I'll say. Optimize your route density. Make sure you're adjusting margin and price on new customers. Right? Temporary surcharge or just a new market adjustment rate for your weekly MO or your commercial pricing price your new costs right into your budget to go bid the new commercial site. Don't take it off of your budget that you set up and set it and forget it. In January and February with LMN, raise your prices to $4.50 a gallon temporarily. Right? And so now your commercial bids for that contract was seven grand last time or you know, pre this adjustment and now it's 7281 likely the customer is going to go with you regardless. As long as you're having this conversation, you're going to win 1 in 4, 1 and 3 anyway. So just adjust your pricing so you're profitable. Okay? These are just some tips that I'm doing. These are, I know 36 minute, 45 minute podcast here on fuel, but it's a real conversation. And by the way, not just for now, but log this into your company's DNA every seven to ten years you're going to revisit this conversation in this podcast topic. You really will. I've seen it in 08, I've seen it in, you know, 2022, I've seen it in 2025, 26. Right. Like this stuff happens. It's just the world that we live in, you know, it's, it's like the one one of two trillion dollar industries, oil and healthcare I think. Right. It's like this is just stuff you have to pay attention to and don't let it silently eat your margins. That's the biggest thing. Don't pay to go cut somebody's lawn or pay to go do somebody's patio. Right? Don't lose 1 or 2% true net profit because you were fearful or reticent or don't have a an effective strategy to just simply communicate, hey, we have to charge a little bit more for fuel. Look around. Everything that you get an invoice for or receipt for has this conversation going on. Either it's baked into the cost of the good or it is tacked down to the bottom. Our local compost yard, they sent out their pricing list in February, March. They said if fuel goes up past X number we're going to charge this Fuel went up. It wasn't three to four days later they said hey, our previous pricing is, was what it was today, it's this. Here's our revised, revamped version. Like, they knew it was coming. Talk about getting ahead of the curve. Like, they. We. Everybody saw the writing on the wall, right? And so they saw it was coming, and it didn't take them but three weeks to pivot and to provide their updated pricing with the fuel surcharge on the deal. All of you guys that get supplies delivered, you're seeing this. Anybody who goes to certain landscape yards, you're seeing this. So don't just keep taking it, bro. You have to pay it forward to the customer. And that's just what has to happen. All right? It's a simple topic, but it's one where if I can send this message out to a thousand of y' all and y' all can figure out how to, you know, earn back a buck or two per cut, we're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in increased revenue, hopefully keeping your margins where they're at. And so that's the big deal topic to me. I always think, like, the ripple effect. And if a thousand of you tell one friend each, that's 2,000 plus people. We're talking about saving and making millions and millions of dollars. So it is a very, very, very important topic to me. And there's nothing, I think, going on more in the last 30 or 60 days that I can contribute to other than suggesting you get involved with a platform like LMN to know your numbers, then to at least feel like things are more expensive, because they are. And then you can adjust accordingly. But let's make an accurate conversation about that in the future with software of whatever choice or pick that you do. All right, One last thing. Like, I was actually. And this is actually two quick last things. One, I also saw, like, our coast pay. We get a. This isn't a pitch for coast, but hear me. We got our coast pay monthly statement. And I see, like, it's more expensive. And so I reached out to which. Which was practical, and I'm like, is that because of cost or revenue? So I email my bookkeeper, Becky, real time, and I say, hey, can you correlate this? Cross reference this compared to March April last year versus March April this year. So revenue was up like 64%. Fuel costs were like five and a half percent of total revenue. Last year it was three. It was like two and a half percent. So we're spending more on fuel, but it's not proportional to revenue growth. So we're spending more on fuel in general. One of that is because of the cost. And two is because we have more accurate data going into element in cycle CPA with our bookkeeping than ever before. So there's, it's about a wash, but we're still spending a little bit more on fuel in general probably because of the cost. Right. So it's not like we, we've got good data to where I feel comfortable knowing. It's not just we're using twice as much fuel. Revenues up only 64% so not 100. Right. It's not a, it's not a one to one, but because gas is more expensive, it's about bridging the gap. And plus we have probably a little bit of waste somewhere in there that we need to reflect on. And those are those little pulses that I need from my team to help me understand what's going on in our business. So these are like, these are actually fun, intelligent conversations. This is what you get paid to do as a leader of your company and as a business owner. Not installing mulch, not doing mowing, 15, 18, 25 an hour tasks. These are the 250 an hour, the 500, the thousand dollar per hour tasks and decisions. When people hear the interview with Jeff Bezos and he goes, I only expect my executives, AKA making a half million million dollars a year. I only expect my executives to make one or two good decisions per day. Like one or two good decisions per day. Like I make a thousand decisions per day. Yeah. The put the decision executive makes over the fleet of 20,000 people in his division or whatever big companies or 10,000 people or thousand people or 500 people, 50 people. Like these are big financial ramification type decisions. Right. And that's what I'm trying to implore you guys today. Right. Think like an owner, not just somebody who is a technician. All right? That's where I'm going to leave you guys today. I'm super enjoyed having this conversation. I hope you guys enjoy it. Just some food for thought. Figure out a marching order, figure out an idea for you. I'm not here to give you a call to action. I'm not your mom, I'm not your teacher. Right. I'm not your wife. That's a joke by the way. Right? So figure out what you're going to do with this information today. Raise everybody's price by dollar. Just shoot them an email and say we're going up a buck, that's fine with me. If you're like, hey, I'm going to go back into my element account, get my CFO on The line. Get my ops manager on the line. Get my office admin online. We're going to do a little team meeting. Pow wow. See what the heck is going on here. Dude, even better, right? Obviously everybody listening in has different size businesses so you know, do what makes sense for you. All right, that's where I'm going to leave it today guys. We got a bunch of great courses. Contract resources launchpreneuracademy.com Check out the whole ball of wax. We dropped it down $500. It's now 999. Our first six courses are free. How to start a lunar business. How to do mulch, how to do spring cleanups, how to do aeration overseed. Seriously, like they're all free for now. That's awesome. That's why we brought the whole ball of wax down. If you're growing and you're scaling, you're looking to grow multiple crews, add office admin help. SOP bundle 75 plus training videos. We had three or four new videos already that are going to be added to the library just in the first week and a half that we put out that you guys asked for and wanted some made some suggestions on. I love that 50 plus documents that go with it. Job description, job ads, employee handbooks. Folks, there's so much stuff there I can't even corrective action reports if you need to make a write up roadmaps folks. It's awesome. It's incredible. In fact I just recently shared it with my two different insurance agents and one of them says I've insured dozens of landscape companies. I've never seen anybody with a robust E training platform type training resource like this and said I know. And he's sharing that with underwriting to give us the best rates possible because as we intended to grow in revenue, potentially quality control can slip. And when you're explaining to them and underwriting that no more growth doesn't necessarily equate to more risk and exposure because we have proper training in place then we can mitigate some of our insurance costs. So we're making the investment there. So the, the thousand dollar investment that you make in the SOP bundle will save you hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars a year in insurance alone in my opinion. Right. That's why I'm really excited about that. So check out the SOP bundle. If you're looking to grow and scale, if you're looking for some community, if you're looking to make friends, if you're looking to, you know, ask one or a hundred questions a day or a month and join a weekly live stream and get around some great people doing this thing and you're, you know, your attitude is high and then low and slips and falls and you just want some more consistency and you want to be a part of something different. Check out link. It's 49 bucks a month. I promise you it'll be some of the best money to spend getting around a great group of folks that are doing this thing with you. There's a great inner circle, core group of guys that are on almost Every live. There's 20 or 30 of those guys. They're awesome. I would do anything for those guys. They're always on. Just the other day a new member joined and said, hey, like somebody in here offer one on one coaching calls or does anybody have some coaching? I have some questions. And I, I didn't even get to the post in time. I got it towards it to the end of the day where I saw it and there's only eight or 10 people that offered up their cell phone number. Not for paid, just literally to help the dude out. And two or three people that said the same thing that I commented was, hey, dude, that's why link exists. You don't have to pay for a coaching call anymore. Like, dude, just dump your thought on here. Good, bad or ugly, Good, bad or embarrassing, it doesn't matter. And we'll dissect it. We'll help you, dude, like, where do you get a resource like that? That's phenomenal. All right, and last thing is, and you're going to hear this a lot, plug into something this summer. Leanscaper in about three or four weeks in Chicago, Dan Martell is the headliner. That's gonna be awesome. And by the way, let's not negate or mitigate the rest of the awesome people that are going to be there as well. Mark Bradley, his entire entourage and posse. He's already got three or four big dog speakers that get on stage. They have great businesses. The Element Break Records tour. Gamble and I are hitting the road. We're doing seven or eight shop tours this summer. A lot of folks want to see more shop tours. I'm like, dude, it just takes so much to do it. It's so hard to describe. It's such a logistical operation. Elements like, hey, we're going to do shop tours. Do you want to be a part of that? I'm like, we're basically doing the same thing. Gamble ran a $10 million company. He's doing day one workshop. 75 slides in the classroom to help you grow and scale a business for real. He's rolling that out. Day one. Day two is a half day shop tour at the local host company element.com break-records check it out and we're going to be going everywhere. We got one at the end of May in Arlington, Virginia. We've got two I think in July. I think there's another one in August, September. They're all across the US and Canada. There's two in September. I think we end in October, November at Troy Clog in Michigan. So fly or drive to one. You know, make the investment. Thousand bucks dude, but make the investment. Come check this stuff out. Outside of going to maybe equip or maybe to lal, but get involved in something. Come check it out. Come make friends. All right, that's what I'll leave you guys today. Hope you guys enjoyed the show. We love you. We appreciate you. Anything I can do to ever help you guys grow, I'm always here for you and we appreciate you guys listening in. Over and out. Have a great day guys. Look forward to catching up with you here on the next one.
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Mowing lawns is one thing, running a real lawn care business is another. The whole ball of Wet Lox from LaunchPreneur Academy puts every training program, every playbook, every pricing tool Brian Fullerton built right into your hands. Plus you get a full 60 minute one on one coaching call with Brian himself. From your first customer to your first crew, the whole ball of wax is what you need. And it's less than a Grand at only 9.99. Visit launchpreneuracademy.com or tap the link in the show description. Make the decision to go all in with the whole ball of wax only at lawntrepreneur Academy.
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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 Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.