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Let me ask you a tough question that gets me fired up every time I have to discuss this. What if I told you you may not be undercharging, but you're just not collecting what you've already earned? Or even worse, what if I told you that 10 to 20% of your revenue might be slipping through your fingers every single season and it's not because of bad customers, it's because of your broken system? Let's talk about that today.
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Today's episode is brought to you by Yardbook, the all in one CRM for your lawn care business. And as an excl partner of this podcast, you can get started today and begin simplifying your business and maximizing your profits. Sign up now@yardbook.com the link is in. The show notes Time now for Profits with Paycheck, an essential podcast for you in the green industry who are looking to unlock the full potential of your business. Hosted by John Pajak, your certified financial coach, the show features in depth discussions with successful entrepreneurs, thought leaders and industry experts for providing practical advice and proven strategies on financial planning, operations, marketing and sales. Profits with Paycheck has valuable insights and action steps that you can implement today for creating long term success. Now, here's John Pajak.
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Welcome to Profits with Paycheck, the podcast where we dive into business strategies and financial insights for the green industry. I'm your host, John Pajak and today we're going to be talking about something that does not get enough attention. It's not about pricing, it's not about marketing, but it's about the money you've already earned and never collected. Now, I apologize in advance, I might get a little heated with this one because it frustrates me so much to see hard working men and women working themselves very hard, putting a lot of blood, sweat, tears and years into their craft and then finding out that they are missing out on revenue, on work they've already completed. And a lot of times, yeah, you get screwed by a bad customer, right? But I find it's more with. It's more because of the lack of systems or the lack of a process inside their business that is making, making them not get the money they need. It's ruining their cash flow. So I let me, let me just break this down for you, okay? I want you to think about this. You go out, you do the work, you apply the product, you install something beautiful, something green. You do the mowing, whatever it might be, you deliver the results you get. The lawn looks great. The the property looks beautiful. After you're done. And somewhere between finishing that job and getting paid, something breaks. And it's not always obvious. You know, here's what the data shows. For lawn care and landscape companies, there are about 2 to 5% of revenue that is never collected in our industry. There's another 5 to 15% that's delayed, missed, or at risk. So let's make this real. Let's put some real numbers. Let me, let me give you an example here. If you're running a $300,000 business, you could be losing 6 to 15, 6,000 to $15,000 permanently and another 15,000 to 45,000 just floating in limbo. Now that's up to $60,000 per season just sitting out there. And most guys don't even realize it. And here, this is where, this is the kicker here. This is not about bad customers. And that's what everyone wants to blame. They're like, oh, people just don't pay anymore. Oh, that guy is a prick. He's just a jerk. And you know, he was taking advantage of me. No, that's not it. If that does happen, that usually accounts for that 2 to 5% of revenue, okay? That's the bad eggs. Those are the bad apples that you can expect, okay? If you allow those people to, to be in your service plan, this is where the money actually disappears. You know, let's, let's just say, you know, we, we've got a, you know, whatever the services, you know, you finish the job, you finish the mowing, you finish the application, et cetera, whatever it is, but you never send the invoice. You know, you do an add on service where, you know, it's, maybe it's aeration and overseeding or whatever it might be and you forget to bill it. Your crew does extra work, but it never gets recorded. You know, another big one is, you know, a card on file declines, a credit card declines and nobody follows up on that. You know, you basically, you're sitting there, your truck, your desk, everything. Maybe you're writing notes on paper, you got a notebook, you got sticky notes, whatever they might be, but then they never make it into your system. And my personal favorite thing is I hear people saying this all the time. I'm tired. I'll take care of it tonight. And tonight turns it to never. And this industry is uniquely vulnerable. Think about it, okay? We're good technicians. Nobody ever really taught us how to run business. Okay? So you're out there, you're running routes, you're doing high volume, you're dealing with small ticket Jobs, you're bouncing from property to property and you're tired at the end of the day, you're not sitting behind a desk all day processing the paperwork. Most of us, I'm going to say if you're doing less than 300k a year, more than likely you don't have an admin that's taking care of all this for you. You are still probably wearing that hat. If you, I hope that you're trying to get out of that, that role or maybe that becomes your full time role. It depends on how much you actually want to be out in the field. But regardless, you know, you're not. Again, you're not sitting behind the desk all day. So what ends up happening? You know, the field and the office, they get disconnected. And then what happens? Money starts falling through the cracks. And here's a truth most of you do not want to hear. More than likely you don't have a pricing problem. For some of you, you do have a pricing problem. Okay, I will tell you, I have a lot of experience, you have a lot of problems. You got a domino effect going on here. You got pricing problems, you got marketing, you got collection problems. You have all these other things. Some of you don't. Okay, so forgive me if I'm overshooting here, but I want to say you have a cash flow problem, you have a capture problem. You're doing the work, but you're not capturing the full value of that work. And here's why this matters. Because every dollar you don't collect, you still pay for. You know, you paid for the labor, you paid for the product, you paid for the fuel, you paid for the time for the time on and on and on. And you paid for all that stuff and you got nothing in return. So let me, let me take a quick breath here, you know, because I'm gonna take, I'm gonna keep this really short because this ties directly into what we're talking about today. You know, if you're tired of wondering where your money's going to, if you're tired of chasing payments, if you're tired of guessing whether or not jobs are, were actually built, you need a system that closes that loop. And this where, this is where Yard book comes in. With Yardbook, you can mark jobs complete in real time. You can invoice, you can set it up to where your invoices are gener are automatically generated. You know, you don't have to actually go back and do things you could actually get. There's two ways of doing it. I'M not going to go into all the details about it, but there's ways to make sure that those invoices get generated automatically. You could charge cards on file the same day and you could see exactly who owes you money and how much. You know, there's no more guessing. It's no more. I think we build that it's just a clean, simple system that makes sure you get paid for the work you already did. Now you could use Yardbook for free and if you upgrade, I want you to use promo code paycheck for you could get up the premium version free for 30 days. So I am. You know what, let me go take a quick little breather. I'm gonna go take an ice bath real quick. Just cool down just a little bit. Gotta mellow out. I'm not trying to yell at anybody, but listen to all the cool stuff we got coming up here. There's a couple trips and whatnot. Check that out and I'll be right back.
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Are you mowing lawns, running crews and still wondering where all the money went? You're not alone. Naylor Taliaferro of LCR Media has been there, and that's exactly why he created Profit Accelerator Live. Join Naylor and expert speakers John Pajak and Eric Triplett for two powerful days of hands on workshops designed specifically for lawn care and landscaping business owners in Richmond, Virginia, June 26th and 27th. This isn't a conference where you'll sit in the back and take notes. You'll leave with an actual business plan in hand, knowing exactly what to charge, how to manage your time, and how to attract better customers. Tickets are just $299, but right now you can bring a partner or a fellow business owner free. With our two for one special. Tickets are just $299, but right now you can bring a partner or fellow business owner free.
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Free.
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With our 2 for 1 special, only 75 spots are available and they will fill up fast. Use the link in the show description or go to profitacceleratorlive.com to secure your spot today. Put more money in the bank and more time in your schedule with Profit Accelerator live.
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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 and 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 PAYJACK. 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 payjack. The link is in the show notes and grab your ticket today. Back when I was getting my lawn care business off the ground, I was juggling routes, invoices, and customer notes with paper and prayers. It was chaos until I found Yardbook. Yardbook gave me the structure. It helped me track chemicals, route efficiently, invoice faster, and most importantly, it helped me grow a profitable business. If you're tired of duct taping your systems Together, go to yardbook.com and sign up for free. And if you're ready to go premium, use promo code PAYJACK to get your first 30 days on me. All right, let's get back into it. So how do we actually fix this? Because awareness is one thing, but execution is everything. And here's what I've learned. You know, you don't fix this by trying harder. You fix this by removing the opportunities for mistakes. So here are some things you need to do. One, you need to close the loop immediately. The job is not done when the application or the mowing or whatever is finished. The job is done when you're in Yardbook. You mark it complete, the invoice gets generated, and then it's charged. That's the same day. No exceptions. I know this may not. You know what? I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but I know not everybody. Everybody's business model follows that, and I understand that. But I want to give you the secret sauce that has prevented me from having to send anybody to collections for nearly eight years. You know, because we don't. You know, if you're in a monthly billing schedule, I understand you're not. You're not going to bill. You're going to make sure that the jobs are completed. And then at the end of the month, you could generate an invoice with all the jobs on it and send it to your people. And if you're still waiting for snail mail for checks or cash or whatever it might be, or if you're going to have them pay using the card link. That's a different business model, okay? That is a totally different system. There's. It's coming to my attention that a lot of people are trying to do this, but they're doing it like a combination of old school and new school. They're like turning a. They have like a net 15 on their, on their stuff, but they're charging every week. It's. It doesn't work very well, especially if you have to wait for your client to pay. This is why I highly insist you get cards on file. You might say, oh, that won't work for me. I'm going to tell you right now, put my foot down and it can happen for you. We have a thousand clients. We have nearly a thousand clients right now. Guess how many of them have a card on file? Almost every single one of them. The only people that don't are the ones that prepay for the season. Okay, I'm not trying to be a mean guy right now, but I. It just infuriates me that you, you know, there are people out there that make it so difficult. You don't have to, you know, sit around and wait for checks and stuff to come in through, you know, and don't even start me on the processing fee thing. I'm going to pass the fees on to my client. Stop doing that crap. Just be smart enough to charge enough money so that those processing fees are already included in your, in your, in your pricing. And you get what you want, you get what you deserve, you get what the profit margin that you want. This is not a mystery, people. This is how businesses work. We got to get out of this thing of, well, I'm going to slip a piece of paper underneath their door, and then two weeks later, they're going to put money in a frog next to the mailbox. And that's mine now. And. Yep, stop doing it. Okay? You can be very efficient, very clean. Keep your cash flow going again, you're going to close the loop immediately. Okay, so my are the way that we run our stuff. I know this is gonna, you know, really upset some people and their feelings are gonna get hurt, but that's okay. I need to talk about this. Like, realistically, I can't have kid gloves on for everybody anymore because when I see them going the wrong route and I try to explain to them how to they could improve their business, they get mad at me. Then they start sending me nasty DMs, and it's like, you know, I'm doing it for you. I'm sharing these things with you. Because it's not because, oh, I read it in a book. No, I've been doing it for the past decade. It works. It makes our cash flow amazing. And most companies don't die out because of their, you know, what their business might be worth. Oh, my business is worth, you know, $700,000. My business is worth $10 million. Okay, that's great. But what's your cash flow? Look like you have money in the bank. Can you cover fuel for the week? Anyway, I'm getting off track, off topic here, but again, this one's a. This one's. I get passionate about it, so please forgive me if I'm offending you. I don't mean to offend you. I really don't. I love you. I care about you. I want you to succeed in life and in business. I don't want you to struggle. I want you to avoid the struggle that too many of us have, you know, paved that road with tears and frustration and pain. Okay? It's really. That's. That's. All right. Let's move on. Okay, so you want to close that loop immediately. So mark those jobs complete. You want to get it invoiced, and then you want to make sure it gets charged. That's whatever method that you use. That's when that loop is closed. Okay? We just happen to do it every single day for every single client, for every single job. If you do this on a monthly basis, well, guess what, Your invoicing is going to take 20 to 30 days. You know, however that goes, when you charge it, same thing, you might have, just a bigger, longer cycle. Okay, that loop is just way bigger. Here's the other thing. You need to also tie everything to the job. And what I mean by that. And we do this in Yardbook all the time. You know, let's just say somebody signs up, they're on a program, so our visit will, you know, we use the multi step program. And what that does is we could plan out our whole season right then and there in that one thing. And it's very cool because it generates all the jobs for the year for that client. And let's just say, you know, they have our regular, you know, summer. You know, it's summertime and we have the summer application. And what we could also do is if they have any add on, any upsell or any extra stuff, all that needs to be attached to that job in real time. So it's not hard to do. You know, if. Let's just say you're mowing and, you know, Ms. Herf Nurbler goes, hey, while you're here, is it possible for you to cut this branch out of my way? It's starting to get in the way of my. My garage. And you say, sure, I'll take care of it right now. You go ahead and you prune that thing and you charge, you know, you say, yeah, don't worry, we'll just charge you 20 bucks while we're here, blah, blah, blah. Make sure that it gets attached to the job, okay? Do it in real time. Don't do it later. Because I'll tell you what, later doesn't happen, it will, you know, the cheese will slide right off the cracker. You'll forget about it. And all that cheddar is sitting there laying on the ground. It's going to be unclaimed. It's wasted cheese, baby. You don't want that. You also want to eliminate memory from the process. If your system relies on you remembering something, it is going to fail because you are too busy, your team is too busy, and memory is not a system. How many times do you think about that where he's like, oh, yeah. Oh, man, I totally forgot. I had to, you know, go clean Ms. Herf Nurbler's pond out. And I, I did that. And I told her I would, you know, either I was going to do it or, oh, man, we did it. And I didn't put it on her invoice. Oh, man. You know, she was like, I'm gonna give you $140 just to skim the scum off my pond. Oh, that's $140. You just missed out on Miss. Her friend river was cool, though. But she'll probably. But this is, again, this is leading to that number we were talking before where you got 5 to 15% of money that is delayed, missed, or at risk of never being, you know, collected. And the last thing you, you know, that I want to suggest to you is attack, decline payments immediately. I'm talking, you know, you know, you're not going to be ruthless and mean. You know, we have a very specific way, we have quite a few, like, reminders because when we charge a card on file, let's say it gets declined. Hey, guess what happens to everybody. Money's not in there or the card doesn't work anymore because, you know, Sally lost the damn thing and we had to shut it off and we got new card issued, all those things, right? A declined card is not a leader problem. It's a right now problem. You know, we find out the day of because we go and we charge our cards on file. But for some of you, you might end up, you know, if you're doing like a 30 day, you know, once a month billing, you might find out, oh, man, 30 days went by since, you know, we, we have all this, we go to charge a card and now it's delinquent or it's, you know, the payment got declined because insufficient funds or whatever the, you know, 5 million other reasons could be. You gotta fix that right now, not tomorrow, not later. Just fix it now. You want to have same day communication and when we get a bump saying that, hey, you know what? The card didn't go through, it got declined, we send an email and it's a really nicely worded one saying, hey, you know, we charged your card on file, it got declined today. You know, please take care, you know, take care of this invoice, update your card information. We give them instructions on how to do it. If we, they have any problems, give us a call. We'll be sure to walk them through it. And you know, they'll avoid any, you know, pauses in service. You know, there's a, there's a whole way, I got it written out, okay. But they also get a text on top of that because some people, they very rarely check their email. So if there's a problem, we not only email them, but when, then we also text them in a nicely way saying, hey, here's your link. Make sure you update your card and we'll take care of it for you. You know, and then if you need to make a call, you know, we have payment reminders that we have set up in yardbook where, you know, if they don't pay the day of, we'll, you know, we notify them. We just let them know that, hey, your payment was declined like two, three days later, another one, actually, I think it's two days later another one goes out. If they haven't paid it or haven't, we haven't had communication and literally up until about a week, we only let it go about seven days. There are basically reminders every other day to remind them to pay us. Because I'll tell you what, the longer you wait, the less likely you are to collect. My clients are really great. Most of the time they're embarrassed about it. I try not to make a big deal of it. I said, no problem, we got you. It's just part of our policy now. I want to really challenge you to think about this differently. Most guys focus on like, how do I get more customers? You know, Cause, you know, I'm kind of broke right now. You know, I don't have enough money. But the better question is, how do I Make sure I get paid from the customers I already have. Because I'll tell you what, it's a lot easier to capture lost revenue than it is to go out and earn new revenue. So here's three things I want you to start doing today. Take a look at the past 30 days. Just start small. You know, right now we are towards the end of May. I can't believe we're already towards the end of May. So depending on when your season started, you know, for some of us in the, in the north, you know, maybe we started in April. You know, maybe we're only like 30, 48 days out or something like that. Some of you down south or, you know, on the coast. And you never stopped working here. Down in Florida, it's like, what are you talking about? We don't have an off season. We're just working all the time. We just go, go, go, go, go. Same thing with California. You could work year round, right? But at least just take a look at the past 30 days and look at uninvoiced jobs, look at open balances, and looked at any kind of missed add on that you let fall off your cracker there. You know, you might find money just sitting there right now. I'm telling you, for some of you, this is a normality. This is normal. You're like, oh, yeah, I, you know, $7,000 is just sitting there. I just forgot to invoice it out. Stop doing that. Do a quick audit. I'd love to have your $7,000. I'm sure your family would love to have that $7,000. You know, I know it's probably not all yours, but think about it. You paid for it. If you're working, whether you're solo by yourself or you have a, you know, several crews working with you, that money means something to every single person in your. In your business. You, as the owner, you need to be disciplined. You need to collect that money. And then the second thing I want you to do, okay, we got three things we're doing today. Track your AR weekly. And no, I'm not talking about, you know, little pew, pew, like, no, no, no, no ar. I'm talking your accounts receivable. Check it weekly. Don't wait till the end of the month to figure out whether you've got stuff that's floating around out there that you, you know, the money that's just floating around out there. Check it out. Weekly we did. I tend to do it every. Every Friday. We work Monday through Thursday. Everything gets billed by the time Friday Rolls around. I kind of do it towards the end of the day just because I feel like it and I look at it, I go, yep, we're good. All the payments got processed this week. If there's any ones that didn't, I'm on top of it. I make sure that, you know, they get the notification. And usually, you know, we get paid very quickly. When you let that stew, when you don't look at it, when you're blind to your accounts receivable for any period longer than a week, you're blind and you need visibility, you need clarity here. And three, I want you to build a no job left behind system, okay? Every job must be completed, it must be invoiced, and it must be paid. There's no exceptions here. If they are, you know, if something does slide through and you've got somebody who is, you know, 45 days past due, whatever, I don't know what your net is. Ours is due upon receipt, but, you know, whatever business model you have, okay, Whether it's a daily billing or a monthly billing or if you're one of those weirdos that has weekly bi weekly billing, okay? Yeah, yeah, you heard. I called you a weirdo. Why? Because it's so hard to track all that crap. That's why. I like daily better anyway. But build that system, it's very simple. Just make sure that jobs are marked complete so you're not missing out on revenue that you worked for. Make sure it's invoiced and make sure you get paid. That's. That's it. It's pretty simple. So here's the bottom line. More than likely, I mean, maybe you do, maybe you've got a revenue problem, but more than likely, if you're busy, you're working, you know, you feel successful, but you look at your bank accounts and you go, I'm broke. Like, I got so much money sitting out there floating around, you know, I got 15% of my, my money just floating out there. What, what's going on? Again, you have a collection system problem, you have a cash flow problem. And I'll tell you what, until you fix that, you're gonna keep working harder for money that you may never actually receive. So again, here's your challenge. Go find one job, just one. You don't have to do the 30 day audit, okay? I mean, you kind of have to do this, but at the same time, just find one job in the past 30 days or something. Find the one that you completed but you didn't bill, because I promise you it's there. It's somewhere there. If you don't have a system in place, I can guarantee you're gonna leave me a message saying, hey, dude, I totally forgot I had a $40 job that totally slipped off the plate. You know, slipped in through the cracks. Or it could be something as crazy as like, yeah, man, I got a $9,000 job that we. I thought we build it, but we didn't. And we did that two months ago. And I'm wondering where that money's at. Didn't show up on our P and L, because the fact is we never made an invoice for it, so it never made our payment report or anything like that. Okay, do me a favor. It's not just for me. This is not for me. It's. I don't care. Like, I do care, but at the same time, like, this doesn't affect me at all. But this affects you and your family and your business. So go through this, find that one job that you completed, and never build and get on it, buddy. So, oh, when you find it, okay, when you find that job, ask yourself how many more of these jobs are hiding behind it? Because I guarantee you, if you lost something big, you probably have a lot of tiny ones or a lot of little add on things that you forgot to put on and that, you know, little money here, little money there, that adds up very quick. So until next time, you know, run the numbers. Don't let them run you, okay? 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, 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 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.