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get the premium business subscription of yardbook free for 30 days when you use promo code PayJack Equip Expo 2026 is coming up October 20th through the 23rd in Louisville, Kentucky. If you're serious about growing your business, this is where you need to be. We're talking live equipment demos, the latest technology, and thousands of contractors all in one place, sharing what's actually working right now. And here's the deal. Tickets are normally $120, but right now you can get them for $12.50. When you use promo code PAYCHECK, that's 50% off the already discounted early bird price. But this deal expires May 31, and prices go up after that. So don't wait on this. Lock in your ticket now. Get in the room, and I'll see you there. Use promo code paycheck. The link is in the show notes. And grab your ticket today. Hey, friends, if you're tired of guessing your numbers, if you're tired of wondering if you're actually making money, then you need to be in the room with this. Okay, you need to be in the room with me and a few of my friends here. We're doing profit accelerator live. It's happening June 26th and 27th in Richmond, Virginia. And this is where you go go from I think I'm profitable to knowing your numbers, understanding your pricing and finally building a business that works for you. Now you're going to hear from industry experts. You're going to hear from Naylor Taliaferro, Eric Triplett, the pond digger and myself, John Pajak. And you're going to get real strategies that you could apply immediately and connect with people who are serious about growing. So if you've ever said I just need clarity, this is where you get it. So go to profit accelerator live.com and lock in your spot. Now I got a link in the show notes that you could just go click on that. It'll take you right to the checkout. You could go get your ticket, learn more about it and I hope to see you in Richmond this June. So thanks for listening to all this. I just wanted to say, you know, there is a bigger problem to this, this story. You know, fuel is just one of the pieces. It's a variable. It's been lately, it's been a volatile variable. It goes up and down with very little warning. You know, again, today was a perfect example. It went up A$3 for regular 87 octane fuel. And in where I live, it's still got ethanol in it. This is not premium fuel by any means. Okay. But you know, fuel again is one of the pieces you look at. Labor, labor is up, insurance is up. Forget about it. Like at the beginning of the season, mine jumped up almost 32% with zero changes. I didn't add any. Well, I did add one little thing, but it wasn't enough. I took one piece off, put a new piece on. It shouldn't have really affected it that much. But like my normal liability insurance went up, some of my other insurances went up. We haven't had any accidents or anything like that. Still the same umbrella, all this, all the stuff's like pretty much the same, but it went up 32% with zero changes to the actual policy. Materials are up. You know, if you, you know, if you're not just providing a service that doesn't require materials, you know, you are looking at more fuel related issues. But at the same time, for those of us that have, you know, we're looking at fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, mulch plants, all these things, all of those things are up. This year, everything's up. You know, but the customers, they still, they're still thinking it's pre Covid pricing. I Don't know what is going on. I mean, I know it's the way that our world has changed over the past, say, six years is night and day, you know, with when, especially when it comes to pricing. I never in my wildest dreams would have saw a regular work truck going for $65,000. That's just stripped down, nothing special in it. And that's like the base price. You know, I'm like, what? What? You know, if you want a nice truck, you're going to get, you know, 85,000 to 100K. It's like, what? I don't want to play this game anymore. Come on, let's stop. But anyway, that gap that, you know, our customers see, you know, the gap between reality and perception is getting wider every single year. And let me say this as clearly as I can. Cheap pricing is just delayed bankruptcy. Now, you're. You, you're gonna survive for a while. I guarantee you'll survive. But eventually the math catches up and. And you are going to be on a very slippery slope. Even if you increase your volume, but you're not watching your costs, that if you have a very low margin, trust me, it's going to be a very painful ride. And then when you finally say, I'm done, I want to get off this ride, it's. It's. It's just not fun at all. Okay, so, you know, here's some suggestions, some solutions here, and kind of like my personal stance on things, you know, I looked at it and I asked Joe really quick. I go, hey, you know, how big was that property that you quoted for that 500? And he told me, and I'm like, I'm thinking about it and I'm like, my price in my market, you know, I'd be at 750 for the season. And yeah, you know, trust me, you know, I've messed up before. But it's not about messing up. It's about, you know, about learning. I'm not afraid to tell people it's 7:50 a year. There's a lot of people that come to me and they're like, I'm afraid to show them the full price. I just want to tell them what it is per application, and then they approve the application and then that it seems to smooth things over. It's like, I would rather know what I'm going to be spending a full for the full year. I don't want to guess and go, okay, it's. How much is it per application? Okay, well, that sounds pretty good. Well, how many applications Are you doing? You know, some of the bigger companies, that's what they do. They. They get you at a price, and you're like, oh, that doesn't sound so bad. And they're like, yeah, we come out nine times in a year. And you're like, oh, wait, what? That's kind of crazy. We go out six times a year, and our price might be very similar to the nine. The nine visits. But anyway, let's not get in the weeds here. The thing is, when it comes to pricing, you know, a lot of times you don't. When you raise your prices, there might be a period of time when, you know, you go up there and then you strike out three times, and you're like, oh, I struck out and I gotta quit now. It's not. It's not like that. You basically, you keep stepping up to the plate. You know, you do one property at a time. You know, you get a base hit. Oh, hey, we just added a new property. Okay, cool. And, you know, eventually, you know, you start hitting those singles on a regular basis, and you start feeling it, and, you know, it's like, okay, this neighborhood is. Is supporting this. This is good. And then you start hitting doubles. You know, hey, I got them. And then I got the neighbor across the street. Okay, cool. Excellent. You know, it might not be in the same day, but it's like, hey, the neighbor starts seeing what you're doing, and they're like, I like that. I want that. Let me hook up. All right, Boom. Yeah, we get. Now we got a double and again, you know, triples and things like that. It just keeps going, right? So there's. It's not three strikes, you're out. It's just, hey, you got to find the right people, the right neighborhoods, all the right things, okay? You land the right neighborhoods, the right clients, and everything starts to click. So again, I don't want. I'm. I'm not. This episode is not to rant about anything, okay? But I just want you to. To take some of these things away. I. You know, just like a What to do instead versus, like, hey, you know, I'm just listening here. First. Don't argue with cheap prospects. You know, that's the first thing I never try to justify, you know, oh, $500 sounds too expensive. Well, you know, the old me would have been like, well, we use premium products, and we got really nice people, and they're very knowledgeable. And I stopped doing that. I really stopped doing that. I mean, I could go into detail about how good our products are and how careful we are and all, and how the results we get and everything. But I found that that does not work. Okay. You know, they're looking for the discount and what I say is do not discount your pricing. Instead start stripping away the value, you know, and you know, here's like how the conversation, if, if this were me, you know, theoretically, when somebody would, a customer would say, hey, you know, that seems expensive. I was thinking like 300, you know, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I understand. You know, we could absolutely scale this back to fit a more budget conscious option, you know. You know, our full program is designed to solve your issues that you mentioned before, you know, including the weed control and the ongoing customer care support that we provide. But you know, if you'd prefer, we could move to like a nutrition only plan and that would include your fertilizer applications for the season, but it would not include the weed control or our service callbacks or our, you know, our money back guarantee, all that stuff. And our program would come in at, you know, this program, our nutrition only plan would come in at 3.99. Now the customer has a choice, not a discount. They got a choice. And I'll tell you, I've, it's not a tactic that I've used. I just got fed up with trying to argue about why they, I'm like, look, you can either, you could either use us or you don't. We were a luxury service. I've literally said the same thing to, to some of my customers. And I was like, they're like, yeah, it's getting pretty expensive. I don't know if I could afford it. I'm like, you really don't need this service. This is not life or death. If you're trying to. And I wasn't even doing it to like do any kind of reverse psychology or anything like that. I just said like, you, you probably don't need this service. Then like, there's, you know, other things that are way more important than making sure that your lawn doesn't have weeds in it. So if that's the case, I, I understand. You know, we could, no hard feelings, we'll just, you know, we could stop service, take you off for schedule. That's totally fine. And for some reason I, I, that's how I, something clicked. And the guy was like, yeah, okay, you know what, we're just going to keep going. And I'm like, I didn't even try talking the guy into it. I was actually trying to talk him out of it. But he Stayed with me. And then that's how I learned that the whole argument or the conversation of we use the best products and this and that, that stuff doesn't work. It's like, hey, listen, okay, no problem. This really isn't a service that you actually need. I'll tell you what, we can still provide services for you if you really want them. This is going to be closer to what you, you're expecting to pay, but you're not going to get weed control. You're not going to get this and that, you know, and a lot of times people like, oh, well now if it's only that, that 500 sounds much better. I, you know, we're just using that $500 price as a standard in this episode. But anyway, thing, three things that I want you to do, like immediately, okay, just I want you to recalculate your cost per stop. Like right now, if you're listening to this in the truck, I want you to make an like go. I know we're all busy, it's in the spring, but I want you to go home tonight. I want you to look at like what it actually costs you to run today, okay? If you are realizing and you're running off of pricing that does not reflect your costs. Now just look at like the past two weeks worth of expenses, okay? That's as far back as you really need to go. Yes, I know there's more detail in it, but I'm just talking the day to day things. Just look at the past two weeks. Look at your bank account for the past two weeks. If you could compare that to a year ago, like you look up your financial records from a year ago, the same time frame, okay? Look at where the discrepancies are. Look at your fuel, look at your insurance. Look at all the other things. If they're that much higher and you have not raised prices, I want you to take a look at that. And then if it needs to adjust your pricing to protect your margins, I know that you know, oh man, we just started. I just got all this locked in and people are expecting it. I'm telling you, please, for your benefit, take, do a crash course really quick because it's again, we might be like on the Titanic right now and you might be heading straight for the iceberg. And if you're far enough away from it before we get into like summertime when it might be too late and you already got like months in, you can make a small course correction right now and avoid hitting the iceberg and tearing everything apart. And sinking the ship. All right, so just whatever you do, just take a quick look and adjust your pricing to, you know, protect your margins. And the last thing, stop negotiating with people who don't value your service. If you're constantly getting calls about, you know, and they're going to try to negotiate with you, figure something out that's going to protect you, like change a message, something, you know, so when they're calling you, they're not just like, oh, I thought it was going to be this. It's like we could lawns Starting at 400 per year, I don't know. But just, you know, if they, these people suck time and life out of you, okay? They don't mean to do it and they're not trying to be malicious in any way, but they're just trying to get a good deal because they're, everything around is affecting them too. All of their groceries, their regular bills. I mean, they're people just like us. We just have a business. They're trying to just, you know, work a 9 to 5 and adjust with all these, the, you know, price range, price increases as well. So, you know, don't get, don't get upset with your people. If, if it comes down to it, I'm just trying to course correct you so that you're not going to be like Jack and Rose, freezing in the water, hanging onto a door in the middle of the Atlantic. You know, I know that's a made up story, but you get with the picture here. So anyway, at the end of the day, this, this isn't all just about fuel, but it's about reality. You know, your costs are real, your time is real, your business is real. And if you want to stay in business, your pricing has to be real too. It can't be just some fantasy number that you pluck out of the sky and just, oh, I think it should cost this. So that's what I'm going to be charging. No, no, you have to really dig down into it. Okay? So just remember this. $100 in fuel maybe used to get you 50 gallons, but now it might only get you 20 gallons. Same money, less production, tighter margins. And that gap has to be made up somewhere. And if it's not in your pricing, it has to come out of your pocket. It comes out of your profits. So my challenge to you again this week, stop looking at what you're spending and start looking at what you're getting. You know, track your gallons, break down your cost per trip, and make sure your pricing reflects today's reality and not yesterday's. Because the difference between those two, Well, I mean, that's where profit is either made or it's lost. So I thank you for listening today. As always, God Bless. Keep pushing through and we'll catch you on the next one. Thank you once again for listening. If you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with fellow business owners. Your support means the world to me and helps keep the show going strong. I want to give a special shout out to our friends at Yardbook. Their continued support has been instrumental in bringing this podcast to you week after week. If you haven't checked them out yet, visit yardbook.com and see how they can give you the tools to streamline and manage your lawn care business. Also, don't forget to explore the resources and upcoming events that that I've collected just for you in the show Notes. These are curated to help you stay ahead in your business with the latest tips, tools and networking opportunities. Whether it's a new tool, an insightful article, or an event you don't want to miss, I've got you covered. Until next time, keep pushing through and God bless. Sam.