Transcript
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Paul Jamison (0:33)
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 bestselling 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 to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jameson.
Paul Jamison (1:10)
Welcome back to the Green Industry Podcast. I'm Paul Jameson down here in beautiful sunny Florida. Today we're going to talk about core aerations because a lot of y' all are leaving thousands, and I mean thousands of dollars on the table every single spring and fall. Core aeration, it's not just a basic add on service. It is one of the highest margin profit centers that you can run in your lawn care business. And unfortunately, most lawn care business owners, they're not actively educating their clients on upselling aerations. And I can guarantee you your competitives are your competitors are the big boys in your neighborhood, meaning the companies that have been around for years and they got the nice trucks and they got the nice shops and they're been in business for, you know, it seems like eternity. Those guys understand about core aerations. So today I'm going to break down basically the ultimate core aeration masterclass. I'm going to talk about the actual benefits it has for the turf because once you understand that, you can explain it with confidence to your customers. And we're going to talk about the different timing of core aerations because it's very different for my friends in Indiana and than it is down for my friends in Georgia and here in Florida. And there's different times of the year that you want to offer core aeration, but most importantly, how, how do you price core aeration? So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about this today because I believe every lawn mowing business you should be offering core aerations. And honestly, if you're a landscaping business, you should be Offering core aerations as well. I have a buddy, he sold his business, but it was in Atlanta, and all they did was core aerations. That was the business. And they would make absolutely bank incredible profit margins. So if you're new to the program, I'm Paul Jameson. I started my first lawn business a long time ago, back in 2011. I wrote my first book about it. It's called Cut that grass and make that cash. And I learned most of my lessons the hard way. But one lesson that I did learn quickly is that, you know, these companies out there, they were poking holes in the dirt. I'm like, what are, what are they doing? Right? Because I grew up on the golf course, and I would notice when they would core aerate and I would get aggravated. Because when they core aerate and you're putting the ball and there's a bunch of holes on the green, obviously it affects, you know, it affects the ball rolling over the hole. It could, you know, you could put a perfectly straight putt and then the, the ball will bounce, you know, one way or the other because of the coration. So I, I kind of had a negative, you know, emotions towards cor a as a golfer when I was golfing in middle school and high school. But I didn't understand the science behind it. Sorry about that. I didn't understand the science behind it until I had my lawn care business. So let's talk about the science, then we'll talk about the business components of core aeration. So I'll use a golf course as an example. There's a lot of foot traffic, right? Golfers are golfing every day. You can think about soccer fields out there, right? All the little kids or adults, if it's like professional soccer, right? They're out on the football, football field, soccer field, football field. You use a football field as an example as well. But when, when, when there's a bunch of people walking on grass, those lawns get beat down from the foot traffic from the lawnmower, especially commercial lawnmowers that have the big old wheels, you know, big tires. Just imagine the beating that that grass gets when your lawnmower is going over it every single week. And then, you know, it rains a lot. The. The lawn gets. Takes a beating. So a core aeration, it's kind of like a deep tissue massage for the soil, allowing it to breathe. So the core aeration machine, what it does is it pulls plugs. They're usually about three inches. And it, it pulls the, the grass, the thatch, the soil, you know, however, whatever you're going to get going down three inches into the earth, the. The core Asian machine is going to plug that up and out, and that allows water, oxygen and if you put down fertilizer. Fertilizer. To go ahead and reach the root system. And if you've ever studied anything about roots. I was, I was on a walk yesterday and the sidewalk was atrocious. It was cracked, and it looked like Mount Everest. Because what happened? The nearby tree. This is an older neighborhood, but the nearby tree, the root system got so big and so strong underneath the ground that it demolished the sidewalk. And the sidewalk is literally like. It's like you're walking up a hill. It's a flat road. But like the sidewalk goes up and then there's like a big. I mean, I don't know how they don't have like, like safety cones out there or whatever because it's very, very dangerous. But I was paying attention and I was just intrigued by how. How strong the root system of the tree was that it just demolished the concrete on this sidewalk and the homeowner never fixed it, which was, you know, I don't know how all that works, honestly. You know, who fixed the sidewalk when the tree demolishes the thing? But anyway, I say all that to say grass has root systems too, and the stronger you get the root system of the turf, the turf will grow thicker, be more drought resistant, be better. So when you understand this, you can explain this to the customer that, hey, and if they're a golfer, you could be like, you know how the golf courses, they cor. Aerate all the time? Oh, yeah, yeah, I know they do that, right? Or if they're not a golfer, you can just explain. We. We pull two to three inch plugs out of the grass. It's called core aeration. And that allows water, oxygen to get down there. And if you, if you do have your fertilizer license, of course, depending on the time of the year, you could, you could up, you know, explain to them that the fertilizer is going to reach the root zone where it actually matters. That's going to help help your grass. So the better you understand this, the better you're able to sell this. Now, I had a customer one time, he was adamant. He was like, I want you to dethatch my yard. And I was like, I've never done that before. I only do core. I do correlations every single spring. But I've never dethatched either. I need you to we real mode where it cuts it like a Scissor. Really, really short grass. And this guy wanted a dethatching and I was like, I'm gonna charge you a, you know, quite a bit because I gotta actually go rent a dethatching machine. And it's a pain in the butt because after you scrape up all the debris with the power rake or it's called a detacher. But the place I rented it at, I just went to the, I think it was Home Depot actually. Hashtag not sponsored. I just rented a power rake for today. But then you gotta, you gotta clean up all that thatch, which is a pain in the butt. So anyway, I did that one time and all that really does is you just kind of the power rate kind of just scrapes up the thatch and, and then you just rake it all away. And I threw it in big blue tarps and I, and I hauled it all away. But honestly that's not what customers need. Unless you're gonna realmo a lot, you can start to research dethatching. But I, I want to get into that business. I, I, it's, it's a headache to do and it, it doesn't, it does have some benefits. But this, you know, this guy just watched some YouTube videos and he thought he knew everything and, and I, I served him and he paid me. It was, it was, it was a, it was a, you know, profitable day. But what they actually need and I ended up selling them this. And, and you should, I think sell every one of your customers is you need to do core aerations because that, that's going to go past the thatch. It's going to go. So you have, you have your grass right on top and then you have the thatch which is kind of underneath that, the build up underneath that and then you got the soil underneath that and the core is going to, the plug is going to pull all of it getting down to the soil which is going to relieve that underlying compaction. So anyway, my, my tip is corrugation is generally better than dethatching for long term health. And what I like about coreation is after the machine, you know, and I would do, I would rent a machine or if you know, some of the bigger companies buy a core issue machine. When you're done, you're done. Because when you're dethatching you got to go through and dethatch the whole yard and then you, then the party's just started now you got to go and you got to rake up all that dethatch and it can get in your nose. You know, you know, you can breathe it in. It's all, it's just nasty. And then you gotta, you know, we use these gigantic blue tarps and just raked it all into blue tarps and threw in the back of my truck and hauled it off to the top. It was, it was, it was a lot of time. And I don't think customers real. If you're really know your numbers and you're really going to charge what you're worth, it could be astronomical price that you got to offer to offer dethatching. So long story short, I got off a side tangent there. I didn't mean to do that. I apologize. But maybe, maybe someone out there got. You're just about to go sell dethatching jobs and you're like, you know what, Paul? You just saved me a whole bunch of time and headaches. I'm going to do querations instead. That's my tip. There you go. That's my pro tip. All right, let's hear a quick word from today's show sponsor. Then I'm going to get back to my notes. I have notes here of, of how to price corporations. And we got to talk about the timing of this because some of y' all listen up in Minnesota and Michigan and Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania, New York, y' all are on a different schedule of when to corariate than we have down here in Florida and Georgia and Arkansas and Alabama and, you know, Texas and whatnot. So we'll talk about it coming right up. Most jobs go to the first contractor that picks up the phone. But you can't answer the phone when you're on a lawnmower. So here's a solution. It's called voice assist by CallRail. I'm going to show you how it works. I'm going to call a pest control company that uses voice assist. Take a listen. Hi.