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Before we had AT and T Business Wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a 14 point turn to get back on route. A 14 point turn. An influencer even livestreamed the whole thing. Not good for business. Now with AT&T business Wireless, routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time. And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though.
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AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.
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Hello and welcome to the Green Industry Podcast, your go to guide for building a more profitable and thriving lawn care and landscaping business. Your host, Paul Jamison is the author of five best selling books including Cut that Grass and make that Cash and his latest Level up youp Money, all available on Amazon and Audible. Now get ready for more expert insights and practical strategies strategies to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jameson.
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Well, the sun is out and the grass is probably waking up depending on where you live in the world. And the phones are starting to ring a ding, ding ring off the hook. Well folks, the spring rush can either make your year or break your spirit. Most guys and gals are busy, but my question is, are you profitable? See, we're going to move. Hopefully this year we're going to move from working hard. And I say that in quotations because everyone's bragging on social media how hard they're working. But my question is who is earning their maximum amounts? Meaning who's, who's maximizing their earnings? Maybe that's a smoother way to say it, Mr. Producer. So is what we're going to talk about on today's program. I am Paul Jameson down here in bright and sunny Florida. And the title of today's episode, I think we're going to go with maximizing your profits during the 2020 spring rush. The goal is not to be busy, although you probably should be very busy during the spring rush. But the goal is to be profitable, to really do a good job earning during this incredible season that we call the spring rush. So we're going to dive right into it. I jotted down some notes of how we can be more profitable if you want a lawn care business this spring. So number one, and I learned this from my friend Naylor Taliaferro a long time ago. But route density truly is king. So if you're wasting time during the spring rush, driving 20 minutes between yards, you're losing money. They call that windshield time. And the the five around strategy is if you get one house in a neighborhood, hopefully it's strategic You've, you've targeted. This is the neighborhood I want to work in. The goal is the five around is to try to get the, the, the, the neighbors around that house. So target the five houses immediately around that house. Right there's a house to the left, there's a house to the right, there's a house across the street. Maybe there's a few houses across the street. Maybe there's a house behind those, those literal next door neighbors literal of your property. Try to target them and try to really break into neighborhoods. I live in Florida now, but when I lived in Atlanta, there's a stump grinder. His name's Scotty. And I didn't know how to stump grind. I mean I knew how to do it, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of going to the Home Depot and renting the stump grinder machine and grinding the stump and all the PPE and just it's, it's a, you know, the, the, you can be grinding a stump and if you don't have like the cardboard or not cardboard but like Scotty would always bring these like big wooden pieces that he, he custom made in but, but basically put it around the stump. So I was grinding the stump. If any pieces like flew out, it would hit these big like wooden board things that he made. So it would never like go and hit a house or someone walking by or anything like that. Well anyway, I don't want to go through all that hassle so I would just hire Scotty to grind my stumps. I remember one job we did. He grinded over a hundred stumps. We, we cleared out a gigantic backyard out shout out Tony Rudolph in Lake Oconee actually Great Waters neighborhood. Well, anyway, Scotty was talking to me. I was, I think I was in my second year or later in my first year of business. But anyways, brand new business. And I was in this fancy country club and doing this really nice yard and, and we actually ripped out their front yard and we gave them all new zoysia sod. Front yard, backyard, Zoysia sod stunning property. Stunning. Zoysia just looks fresh. So Scotty's like, man, you're, you're really fortunate to be in this neighborhood. He's like, if I were you. And he, he was bragging to me about how successful he is. Not, not like arrogantly, but he's like, I've, listen, I've been, I'm semi retired. I basically go fishing every day. I just you know, work a day or two doing stumps. But I've been in this industry a long time, kid. He's like, it's impressive that you're in this neighborhood. He's like, don't screw it up. You know, make sure you do a really, really good job. People expect premium in this neighborhood. But he's like, if I were you, kid, he's like, I'd come through that gate every morning at 8am and I'd make, make it a point that we're not going to leave all day long until it's time to, you know, be finished working for the day. And he explained to me, the people in this neighborhood pay more than the people outside these gates. There's about a thousand homes in this neighborhood and they're all, you know, million dollar plus homes. He's like, if I were you, I would, I would only work in this one neighborhood. That's it. He's like, you would make yourself like your personal salary would be six figures just, just off of you. And so I was like, okay, yes, sir. You know, sign me up. And then that was his advice to me. And this was back in either 2011 or 2012. I'd have to really think about when we had that conversation. But I remember the conversation because it planted to me the idea that I would later find out from Naylor that the actual term is called route density. Route density is king. I didn't know all those terms, but I caught the premise, I caught the principle earlier, early on. So when you're looking at the spring rush, your goal is not to be driving all around town. Your goal is to be set up in a targeted area and getting as much work done as you can in that route dense area. Now, secondly is you want to, you want to have kind of some minimums. Like, I'm not going to pull the mower off the trailer for anything less than $55 or whatever your price is. I know a lot of guys, they have a $60 minimum. There's no way we're going to mow edge, trim your blow for under $60. That's just, that's just it. It's a $60 minimum. Even if you got a small yard, still $60 because of all of the fuel costs, labor costs. I mean, we'll do a whole nother podcast here shortly, covering all the cost associated with the lawn care business. But it's much more than you think and way more than your customers realize. That's why when you have a higher price, if the customer is like, wow, that's a lot. Well, it is but in order for us to do the absolute best work, we need to have the best labors. In order to have best labors, we have to pay them. And in order to have fuel in our mowers and our trucks, our batteries in our crest commercial equipment. Right. We need to be able to buy all of that stuff and afford all of that stuff. So, Anyway, yeah, it's $60 minimum or whatever your minimum is. It's. It's hard for me to say on this podcast because people have different sized yards, but my point is, get in a really dense area and make sure you're not doing stuff for dirt cheap. But, but, but have your minimum. And the next, I guess, profitable decision that you can make is the power of the word no. I want you to practice saying it with me on three. I'm going to give a countdown, three to one. And then when I say one, I want you to say it with me. Unless you're, like, in the line at the grocery store and I'm in your ear, you're listening to the podcast, then you don't have to say it. But here we go. So I'm going to say 3, 2, 1. When I get to 1, say the word no. I want you to practice this. Ready? Three, two, one. No. There you go. You don't have to take every job. This is called vetting your customers. I remember when I started my podcast in 2018, one of my first guests was a friend of mine, Caleb Allman, from good old Fairfield County, Ohio. And Caleb talked about vetting customers because he does big jobs, he does hardscaping jobs. And there's. I mean, it's one thing to have a sour apple bad customer. When you're mowing their yard every week for $60 or $80 or $100. That's another thing to be doing a $20,000 backyard job. And your customer is rude and not ideal. And you midway through the job and you realize, okay, they don't like me. I don't like them. What are we doing here? But maybe you've been there, maybe you haven't. You don't want to be there. But that's the power of identifying what you want. This is my ideal customer. They're in this neighborhood. They want weekly mowing edge and trim and blowing. They want their garden beds refreshed at least once a year with mulch or pine straw. They want us to put some flats of flowers, you know, on the sidewalk at the corner there where you walk up to the front door on each side of the Sidewalk. They want us to do their core aeration every year. And this is our ideal customer. And if they need anything like, you know, new sod or specialty landscaping, of course we can take care of that as well. But that's my ideal customer. So when somebody calls me and they're outside of that and they're like, hey, Paul, we really have this big job. We need you. We need a retaining wall, and we need all this stuff and can you come give us a quote? And I'm like, okay, I'm looking at my ideal customer. Nope, you're not my ideal customer. Hey, that sounds like an awesome job. And I'm sorry, Joe, that's outside of our scope of work. I wish you all the best, but, you know, no, no. Or if you have call rail and you have voice assist set up, you can train voice assist with CallRail to actually know your services. And they can vet the Customer for you 24 7. It's pretty cool. Check it out. Voice assist by CallRail. But anyway, if you don't have in writing and in clarity who your ideal customer is, then you don't know who to say no to. Now, it might be the exact opposite. Maybe your ideal customer is you only focus on retaining walls and stone patio pavers, and you only do hardscaping. And Sweet sue calls you and says, hey, can you come mow our grass? And you don't do offering mowing services, and you say, no, we actually only specialize in hardscaping jobs like retaining walls and stone patio pavers. So anyway, I'm not saying there's a right way and the wrong way. I'm saying you need to know what your business model is, who your ideal customer is. So in the spring rush, when there's all kind of demands, you'll know, okay, that's my ideal customer. I'm going to hop on that. Or no, that's not my ideal customer. With grace and kindness, I'm going to tell them no. So we're going to hear a quick word from today's show sponsors. And coming up, I'm going to share with you probably the absolute most important thing you need to know about Spring rush and how to make sure you are as profitable as possible. This spring rush. I'll be sharing that tip. Coming right up.
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Here's Megan Koberly from the Landscaping Bookkeeper.
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The Landscaping Bookkeeper is a company for lawn care businesses under 300k. We like to onboard you under 300k so that we can educate you on your finances. Many bookkeepers love numbers, but we Love the education behind the numbers. So each month we want to organize behind the scenes, but then we want to meet with you monthly to deliver your statement of cash flows, your profit and loss called the income statement, and your balance sheet. And our real goal is to help you to understand how each of those work together so that you can see the health of your business. And not just crunch numbers. It's about actually putting them inside a framework so you know when to purchase and what to do with each of those facets of business.
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Schedule your free 15 minute call today at thelandscapingbookkeeper.com if you want to earn
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more money in your business, it may be as simple as raising your prices. Braden, use our price increase letter and what happens happen?
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Well, we've actually been in business for 32 years now. My dad started it and then he handed the reins over to me. And in 32 years, he never increased the prices ever. And I knew that we had to make a change. So we actually got your price increase letter, increased the price by 20%, and we were doing around a million gross, up that to 1.2, and we had eight cancellations through the entire thing. So we raised our prices through that letter. About 200 grand.
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Say that. Say that one more time.
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$200,000 that was sitting on the table that we weren't getting access to just through a letter. So it helped us out big time.
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So do you think the price increase letter provided an ROI for you?
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Absolutely, yeah. I mean, beyond is probably the best investment we've made in 32 years.
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That is awesome. You can get the price increase letter@thegreenindustrypodcast.com it's a plug and play template. Just put in your information. Insert date here, insert name here. And in the most straightforward, concise way, it explains to your customer why you're raising their price. It made him 200 grand each year and then you're going to raise the price again next year.
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Exactly.
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All right, so we've talked about route density is king. Having a minimum. For example, we're not going to mo edge, trim and blow for anything less than $60 or whatever. Your minimum is what makes sense for your size and scope of work and the power of. No, no, no, no, no, no. To anyone who's not the ideal customer, the ideal property that fits your equipment, your skill set, your route. Hope that makes sense. All right, let's talk the the big money maker here. So how do we maximize our profits during the 2026 spring rush or whatever? Spring rush you're Listening to this. Honestly, this is. This has worked for the last decade, and it's probably going to work for the next decade. This is what I call the Amazon strategy. So you buy something on Amazon and then Amazon starts. I don't say harassing you, but they start marketing to you, right? Well, people who bought this also liked this. Ever get those on Amazon? Right? You're like, oh, well, actually, you know what? I probably could use one of them, right? People who bought this also like this. So what does that mean? In the lawn care world, you don't just mow. So if you mow, and that's your bread and butter, that you have your nice mowers, you have your customers on weekly mowing during the season. Okay, cool. But guess what else they need mulch, right? To all my Georgia peeps and Alabama and Arkansas and all that. What else? They need pine straw. Kind of popular in the Southeastern Conference, right? Sec. They need core aeriations, right? So don't just mow. Do the Amazon strategy. Hey, I know you like mowing. Maybe. I mean, you don't like mowing. We mow for you. But you like your yard looking freshly cut and clean and crisp. And you like coming home from work and you got stripes in your yard and it's cut all fresh and looks awesome. And your neighbors talk about how your yard's so nice. Well, guess what else? Imagine how good these garden beds would be if we got rid of all the weeds and we put down some fresh mulch and we put some fresh pine straw over here in this bed and we cor. Aerated your yard so the. The roots get even stronger and your grass looks even more healthy. And look at, look at the edging over here on this garden bed. We could actually do a, like a really deep edge one time where we come in and we really redefined the edge, the bed edging and make it look all good, right? And then you want to get into the big money, then you start offering fertilization and weed control programs, my friend. That's where the big, big money is. I have so many friends in this phone right here, Mr. Producer. So many contacts I could go through and call them one by one, but they're. They're out. They probably answer hopefully, but. But they, they're out busy right now working. But what are they doing? They're making big money with their pre emergence right now. Pre emergent applications. It's a reoccurring revenue, right? Seven apps a year. Most of these guys do. Or six apps a year applications or Eight applications a year. And they just go back in the spring, right? And they put down the pre emergent and they come back, put down maybe a little bit more pre emergent and some fertilizer. And in the summer they're doing some spot spraying and treating any weeds and they're doing, you know, they got their post emergent, they got, you know, pre emergent. Yeah, like, they got, they got a system, they got a schedule. In this month we do this and this month we do that and they crush it. Because the, the like, if you really learn the skill of what treatment goes when on what kind of turf and what treatment kills certain weeds and, and without killing the grass, I mean, all of that's a science to learn. And it is. I, I took an eight hour class one time about all this and barely scratched the surface. I mean, we, we got out of there and it was like, it was like, this is like fertilization and we control 1018 hours. It was awesome, actually. And because in Georgia, I used to live in Georgia, they had a test you had to pass in order to get your license for pesticides and all that. And so they had a class that was like the final preparation before you take the test just to kind of refresh you from everything you learned in the semester just so you could be in best shape to pass your test. But anyway, if you, if you have the wigger with all to go through all of that and learn all of that and be like a Jason Krill, be like a Jonathan Patosnik or his company, City Turf in Dallas, Texas. I, I believe that they do a lot of fertilization and weed control. But when you're doing those programs, you're, you're out there, let's say you're charging $90 a service and you just go out there and you spray the yard real quick and you're done. You do that seven times a year, but you have a whole, you know, hundreds of customers or thousands of customers anyway, that's big, big, big money. That's reoccurring revenue. And then you go to sell one of those businesses one day. That's big money. Now maybe you say, hey, Paul, that's too much for me. I don't even want to run all those calculations. I don't want all those chemicals in my shop. My wife don't like the way all that stuff smells. She said, me, she said she don't want me to do it because it's full of chemical. I mean, it really is like a lot of stuff. Full chemicals. So, okay, then just stick to mowing edge and trim and blowing. But upsell mulch, pine straw aeriations. So know what add ons that you feel comfortable adding? Because fertilization and weed control is not for everyone. And if you don't know what you're doing and you, you don't have, you're not licensed. And you can go out there and you could, you could like burn someone's whole yard and now you're screwed because you got to replace their whole yard. Your reputation's now in jeopardy. I mean there's, it's high risk, but it also is high reward. Now mowing edge and trim and blow and mulch in redefining the mulch bed and pine straw and aeration. Those I would call them lower risks. Like, doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to mow someone's grass. You just truly want to start with a border around the yard with the. So you're not blowing the grass into the garden bed, but that you're shooting it back into the grass. I would do a border, maybe two, two passes or one around all the borders. So you do like a big perimeter run with that. And then you pick your line. Okay, I'm going to go this way and you pick a really straight line and you just go back and forth so the lines are really straight. And then honestly, what's going to make you the best lawnmower company in the neighborhood is how sharp your blades are. If you have a commercial lawnmower and you have sharp blades, nothing's got anything of a respectable engine in it. It's going to look good. Sharp blades are key to mowing. And then with mulch, I mean, it's kind of eyeballing it, right? You, you, you, you, you make the edge with. You can use a bed redefiner tool or just a shovel straight the straight edge shovel and make that bed nice and redefined. And just put, make sure you fill the, fill the mulch in there nice and thick. Cover, you know, get rid of all the weeds, fill it in nice and nice and thick. If you're gonna shoot glyphosate in the garden beds, make sure it doesn't hit any plants. You'll kill the plants. You have to replace those. So it is a little bit of risk with that. I mean, pine straw's pretty easy once you get in the habit of throwing it down and then at the end kind of blowing the, the edges real fluffy. And using a shovel to make the edge look real fresh. Aeration's pretty simple. As long as you know where all the sprinkler heads are and mark those with little flags beforehand so the aerator doesn't hit the sprinkler head. All that stuff's pretty easy to get into. The tougher stuff is the pre emergence and all that. So but anyway, I bring all of that up. I got off track there to say upsell, upsell, upsell in the spring to your ideal customer. So you want to, you want to draw the line in the sand now and say, okay, here's our business model. And again, this is a, this is just an example. Maybe your business model is completely different, but we're going to specialize in lawn mowing. We're going to specialize in garden bed edging, garden bed cover, mulch or pine straw. We're going to specialize in aerations. And so that's what we're going to say yes to. And then we're going to say no to basically everything else. Or maybe you'll say we're going to do all of that plus I have my license in pre emergent, in fertilization, weed control stuff, pesticide license, we're going to offer that as well. Or maybe that's all you offer is pre emergency, you know, pest, pardon me, fertilization and weed control. And you're gonna, if that's your ideal customers, that's all you do. I have a friend, Felipe, Senor Felipe. He used to do it all. And then he got, he's like, you know what, he's out there cutting down trees, he's out there mowing grass, he's out there flinging mulch. Eventually he's like, you know what, I'm only going to do fertilization and weed control. And that's it. So now his ideal customer and his only customer is somebody who wants his seven application per year program. So if somebody calls and says, hey Felipe, we need this tree cut down in our backyard, hey, I'm sorry, we don't do that anymore. You know, he can refer somebody or you can just say, have a nice day. I mean, you know, don't hang up, have a nice day. But you know, hey, I'm sorry, we don't offer that service anymore. We just specialize in fertilization and we control. Would you like, would you like some fern squirt, baby? I can get you signed up for that. But then anyone outside of that, you say no. So you have to identify. I'm not telling you to be a tree company or be a Fertilizer, waste, fertilization, weed control company or be a lawn mowing company or be a hard escaping company. That's your choice, that's your decision. But once you choose, here's the path I'm going to lead my business into and your ideal customer is written down on paper. Then you have to say no to everything else and you have to know what your upsells are, what your hierarchy is. Okay, we're going to get them in the door with lawn mowing. But then where every customer, our goal is, every single customer is also going to get our profitable service. So you don't need to use the word profitable around them but you're going to, you're going to upsell every single customer. Pine straw mulch, core aerations, every single one of them. And you're aggressive with that marketing to get that low hanging fruit of the upsell. So I hope that this helps. An efficiency tip is make sure you're using a CRM if you're jobber is the one that we recommend. But then you can keep track in jobber of all of your customers information. So it's like okay, we did, when you invoice Randy, we do 15 yards of mulch for Randy every year. So then when it's the next year it's easy to give Randy a quote because you can just look back. Oh yeah, last year we did 15 yards of mulch for Randy. It was a perfect amount. Came out just, just right. He was really happy. Although last year we did it for $90 a yard. We're going to send out a quote. Hey Randy, we're doing our mulch again for a limited time. We're going to be doing it this week or that week. Does one of those weeks work for you? Yes. Okay, cool. Just by the way Randy, our rate per yard of mulch this year is actually $100 per yard of mulch. Since you're getting 15, we're going to waive the delivery fee for you this year. So that should be easy math for somebody who knows math like my friend Dr. Frank. 15 yards times $100 per yard going to be $1500 for your mulch this year. Does that work Randy? And we're going to waive that delivery fee this year because you're, you're getting more 10 yards of mulch. We waived the delivery fee. If you get over 10 yards of mulch or you can maybe make it like 6 yards. If you do over whatever you get, you waive the delivery fee. But so anyway you, then, then then you just look in your CRM, you can just go back and job room like, okay, yeah, last year Mrs. Rosa, she got 13 yards of mulch and then you just go through the the thing and you can see through jobber what you charged all your customers last year for their aeration, for their mulch, how many yards they got, yada, yada yada. And then this year you can adjust the pricing. Your core Asians should be, you should be charging more for those this year, your mulches should be charging more for this year, this year. Your maintenances, you should be charging more for this year and all of that. So alrighty. Thanks for listening to today's program. I hope this has been helpful and we hope to catch you on the next one. Peace.
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Hey, it's Marty, producer of the Green Industry Podcast. This episode is over, but check the episode notes for links to products and services that you heard about during the episode. And thanks for listening.
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