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Are you ready to kick back and get inspired? Grab your favorite drink, pop the top and join the side Hustle Squad with Mike Garvey. This podcast is the perfect resource for anyone who's already started their side hustle or is just considering taking the lead. With in depth interviews featuring guests from the green industry and beyond, you'll gain valuable insights and learn what it takes to succeed in running a business while juggling a full time career. From personal stories to practical tips, the Soc side Hustle Squad podcast has everything you need to turn your passion into a thriving business. Now, here's your side Hustle Squad host, Mike Garvey.

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What's going on guys? It's your host, Mike Garvey with the side Hustle Squad podcast coming at you from the Branded Bull Studio here on a Thursday. Getting a lot of work done with coastal fertilization. This week I had some days off, so got to jump back out in the field. Heading back out today, doing some more weed controls. We have a lot of properties that we do along the shore, the Jersey shore. They are all stone yards, front, back and we do the weed control there and I'm doing a lot of those. I do a lot of the stuff over the bridge. Did it last year, doing it a lot this year I'm just getting out there and kind of easing the time crunch on some things. And it's good too. It's been a balance, I mean, over the years. Last year we had three, three technicians at the start of the year, plus me and Larry. And it was a lot, I mean a lot of probably more one more guy than we needed. And this year we have one technician and then I'm going to help supplement as is Larry, which I think is like the secret. We can control the flow of what work gets done. We can, you know, help out. And then we also have Patrick, who's Larry's foreman at Amazing Creations, that can also help out too. So it's like one, one and a half. You know, we build up the second guy between the three of us to, to support Andrew, our, our main guy. It's been good and it's been awesome this week. Getting out there, walking the lawns, it's what I love. It's what I did to start and I love being out there, pop my AirPods in, do my, listen to my podcast, do my thing, listen to my music, bring my dog with me, Grizzly, he's in the truck with me and it's just great. And you know, it's very quiet over there. A lot of people aren't even at their homes. We're not even. We're a couple weeks out from Memorial Day, so it's kind of quiet over there. Get to do my thing and make these properties look good. So that was that. And then yesterday headed up to North Jersey, Northwest Jersey, to support. To meet up with Rob, who is opening our branch up there. And, you know, it got to meet up with him. And then we went and did a couple of lawns together, brought the truck up there, brought everything. And. And it's really cool to be in the beginning stages of. Of something brand new, just like we were eight years ago. And, you know, it's. The same excitement exists when we get a new customer up there when we're not looking to go crazy. We get 20 accounts this year. I'm happy. I'm happy regardless, because we're looking at proof of concep franchising and not franchising, but I mean, owning other locations, really, and kind of. Can we duplicate this? Can we duplicate this in maybe Hudson county or Essex county or Middlesex county, which would be really cool. So right now we're covering Morris Warren, Hunterdon, Morris Warren, Hunterdon and Somerset. And then, you know, we're kind of. And we're definitely spread out. That's no. That's no. No joke. I saw yesterday. But that's okay because what if we. Some really clusters, you know, maybe we're stretching it a little bit 35 minutes from one to. From the main headquarters up there to one. But there's so many homes up there. There's a lot of really big homes and big properties, and there's these developments that we're, you know, targeting. So want to talk about really how I'm starting over kind of in lawn care for this other branch, but I actually, like, know how I built the other one. So it's almost like say you're going back to school, but you already know what you know somewhat. And, you know, I'm going back to freshman year of high school, but I already went through high school and college, and I'm kind of back. That's what it feels like slightly, because I know how to build it, how it's going to go. All my equipment is in place. We're going to build out the truck the same way as we have our other stuff. Everything's in place. The signage, the website, my internal systems, the support team. Jess and Linda's answering the phones. Jess is running the quotes and the scheduling. So a lot of the basic stuff is in place where I was doing that a lot. I was doing everything early on year one through four. So want to talk about, and I'm with some of you that are probably building a business, that are starting a business and just want to hit on some things. How we're just keeping it simple. Hey, let's get 20 accounts. Okay, let's do this. I think a lot of guys try to do too much too quick, offer to a ton of services just to get somebody as a customer. And all of a sudden you end up cutting lawns and then you're doing gutters and like, what are we doing here? You know, just to lock in that customer. I think getting being too complex kills momentum early. It really does. And we're looking at, let's get what you know, have a pretty basic setup. We know what we need. We need a permagreen. We need two backpack sprayers, the battery ones. We need a mist blower for the mosquitoes. So you don't want to get yourself in too much debt financing all this stuff, brand new truck and all this stuff. We're kind of going to use what we have as far as vehicles. And that's what we did early on. And early on we bought a permagreen with maybe only 10 accounts because we're not walking these accounts. Okay. We're time. The time that we needed to get done was in a certain amount of time. So we financed that, that permagreen. So I think avoiding like the debt early and, you know, we were in it early enough to know that we're not taking a paycheck for a while. For a couple years, we were reinvesting in the company and that's what we're doing here. Let's reinvest into marketing. Let's reinvest into growing. And I see, yeah, we're breaking into a new market. Some people are already set up with their people. But I learned yesterday I had a brand new customer signed on with us. They were unhappy with Trugreen. Last year, Trugreen actually showed up to their property. I don't know what happened, if something was off mixing wise or. But there was a lot of dead patches that came up after that application. And then Trudegreen owned it. But they were never really able to get that customer back. They aerated them and everything. But I think we can pick up a lot of stuff from them. That's really what I learned yesterday. And how are we getting these first 10 to 20 customers? We're door knocking. We're. We're targeting specific Neighborhoods with a letter saying coastal fertilization is expanding. My name is Rob. I live in this, you know, right around the corner from you. And it's getting people that want to support local businesses instead of big brands and big shops. So we're targeting specific neighborhoods and talking to people that he already knows. He knows a ton of people in that area. So we're targeting again, the people that we already know with us. A letter. Okay, so say instead of doing big postcard mailings, this is something that you know straight up handwriting. A hundred letters that are handwritten that someone's gonna open with a stamp. Yes, it costs a little bit more money, but it's super target. You get, you get one or two out of the hundred. That's a win. I think we're going to also to start targeting, looking at some Facebook groups. Hopefully there's in that area and really the first customers are about, yes, you want to be profitable, but let's get these first ones. Then let's build off that. Then let's get the neighbor. Then this neighbor gets, you know, this neighbor talks to that friend and that friend talks to this person and the family comes over for something. Oh, wow, your lawn looks sick. Oh, my God. Who does it? Blah, blah, blah. Well, and it goes from there. So it's referrals. So let's take a quick break. We'll come right back. We'll talk about some other things. On the other side of the break about starting a brand new business.