This is absolutely my most favorite video on your channel. Absolutely packed with knowledge. Keep it up Augusta, you guys make sure the rest of us do business RIGHT.
Appreciate you guys taking the time to go through the challenges, the failures, the solutions, the systems that work & don't work. It is all simple, but without the right folks, the right systems, the right teamwork / support, any business that has great value, can fail. We are currently also struggling with many challenges. Key one being a foreman / leader to help support the crew(s) / take steps in positive directions. Always work to be done.
I own a sample window cleaning business. I'm having problems with hiring people. I would love to see you make a video on how to find/hire people. Or even how to find the right people.
Successful businesses just need shameless advertising and aggressive cold calling. If your gut does not feel right saying "I need to speak to the person who makes the contract decisions" or "sir you are 2 months behind on your invoices we will be charging interest and will be going to court if this invoice is not paid in 30 days." Then business is not for you. If you can't squeeze money out of your clients you might as well go work for someone.
Hey Mike. I would like to start a lawn care business and landscaping as a side hustle. My experience comes from my own piece of land, which i clean 2-3 times per year including trees pruning and i just love doing it. In most videos the method of door knock seems to be the most efficient for finding my first customers but since I'm not really a door knocking person is there any advice you could share? Thanks!
Nobody is a door knocking person. Put out the mailers for ur company wait a day or 2 and go knock. Ur money is on the table just need to have a conversation. Or you could prey that mailers will give you enough business.
I'm not going to speak for Mike and I'm assuming he may have some disagreements but also obviously his own point of view but quite frankly, I would recommend taking a very simple and inexpensive route which is to Simply use Facebook to get started. I'll be honest and say that I've been in business with one of my smaller businesses for approximately 10 years now and I have never paid for any advertisement once. One of the businesses is a small electronics repair business which deals with fixing cell phones, tablets, computers, gaming systems, and other electronics but primarily, we just deal with phones and tablets for the most part. There were two other businesses in town and one other person that did it on the side but to my knowledge, I am currently the only one that does it anymore. Covid took care of one of the businesses that had only been in business for about a year and then the other one that actually had the most business closed shop and I think it was just due to the fact that they didn't want to work as hard as they needed to in order to keep it as busy as it was I know that some people think that Facebook is not the way to Market your business but the reality is, Facebook is a great resource and it can be free if you don't want to pay for the advertising and there are ways to do it if you just know how to utilize facebook. There are a few secrets and tips that people don't realize and I'll tell you what they are right now. The reality is, there are various areas that have multiple groups set up for the different garage sale sites or business services sites or other types of groups in a particular area or city or town. In some cases, you may only have one group or three or four groups and in other cases you might have 15 or 30 groups or maybe even more. Out of those groups, there may be only a very small percentage that allow Business Services types of posts or advertising of your business in those groups. The problem is, a lot of people assume that there are only three or four groups in an area when they might actually have 15 or 20 groups and out of those 15 or 20 groups, there might be four or five of them that will allow you to post advertisements for your business in those groups. However, because people are so lazy, they only assume that there are one or two groups so they just post in the one group and they don't get much of a response because they don't realize that they are only hitting 20% of the potential clients that they could reach. Also, unless you pay for the ads, Facebook Marketplace does not allow you to post advertisements in the marketplace. I know that some people do it and I'll admit I have gotten away with it in the past but it is something that they typically don't allow so you have to be careful with that so that you don't get your profile or account suspended. Also, a lot of people just create a Facebook page for their company and they don't realize that they should actually start a Facebook group for their company. Not a group for their employees although you can do that as well but an actual group for the business itself. There are advantages to creating a group for your business as compared to just creating a page and people forget that so, that is another Avenue that you want to consider so that you can try to promote your business as best you can on facebook. Obviously, starting out, you aren't going to have very many people that would be members of your group but it all depends on the area that you're in and how well you can get people to join your group. The biggest thing is, finding out which specific groups allow you to post business posts in them and make sure that you do not post posts and the other groups that do not allow it. That is the one thing that pisses off a group admin more than anything else is when people don't follow the rules. I am actually an admin of approximately 80 different Facebook groups with probably roughly 15 to 20 of them being somewhat busy and probably 30 of them just kind of sitting there being dormant and not really doing anything but that is on purpose. There is nothing that steams me more than people that are posting clothing for sale in my group that is primarily set up for either rentals such as trying to find an apartment or housing for sale or land for sale or I have another group that is primarily for finding jobs or employers looking to hire employees. The problem that happens is people just randomly start clicking on the various groups that they can post in when they are creating their posts and they don't even pay attention to the name of the group and so they just start randomly posting their crap in all of these different groups. I am nice enough that I give a warning to the people that do it but if they have done it twice within the last 90 days, I just ban them from the group because they obviously aren't paying attention and don't care. I know some people are going to disagree with marketing their business on Facebook but honestly, it's a very easy way to Market yourself and probably one of the best ones when you're starting out because you more than likely don't want to overload yourself with work because you can only handle so much and at least you will get a few requests here and there through Facebook depending on how you set up your posts in the various groups. Outside of that, you could obviously try Craigslist if that's still even a thing but I haven't even looked at Craigslist list for probably 3 or 4 years now. You could consider running a small ad in a local Shopper or newspaper and maybe even do some radio ads if you want if they have like a 10 or 15 second bumper ad but since you're starting out, I'm assuming you aren't really going to have a budget for marketing so I'm trying to think of some free ways to get your name out there.
Honestly, the easiest way is just to go and talk to your local neighbors that are close to where your equipment is going to be so you can keep your expenses low. If you live out in the country, obviously that's going to take a little bit of time but you could spend a half a day or a day doing it and you could probably reach enough people to keep you busy at least for a few months. But, if you're looking to get some business in a small town or community, just going to the place that you would like to do business in is going to be your best option. Also, you have to keep in mind that you are going to want to go to an area that can actually afford your services. Going to run down areas that you could tell where people don't keep up their neighborhood, that is probably not necessarily going to be your ideal demographic as they probably can't afford your services anyway. So, you need to sit down and identify who your target audience is and how you want to reach them. If you can, a personal experience is always going to be the best one as people will be able to see your face and talk to you and Associate you with your business which is the best way to start out but obviously that may not potentially be ideal if you aren't somebody that likes to go door-to-door or make Direct contact. However, if you want to start a business, then I suggest that you get over your fear of potentially not wanting to do things because you're going to have to do things that you don't want to do if you want to have a business. It's just the way that it is. If you don't get over your fear of doing certain things, then your business is more than likely not even going to get off the ground. Also, although you didn't bring it up, I would highly recommend sitting down and figuring out if you actually have the capability to do whatever it is that you want to provide for people in the way of services. Although you mentioned that you clean your own land 2 to 3 times a year, it's different when you are doing it for yourself. Also, what are you talking about cleaning? Are you simply mowing a lawn and removing a few shrubs here and there or are you actually getting up and cutting down tree limbs out of tall trees and do you understand how to properly remove them without causing damage to things below like a house or animals or fences or other things? Are you going to consider getting a bond or insurance so that you can make sure that your clients are covered and the event that you do have an accident? I'm not saying that you have to do that but it obviously is something you want to consider. The only problem is, that is an added expense that you have to consider when you were sitting down and budgeting for your overall business costs. You could obviously spend money and have mailers put in the mailboxes of a certain area but that obviously costs money so I don't know if you can afford to do that or not. That is why I highly recommend facebook. But, just know that if you do post something on facebook, assuming you are going to provide your phone number, you need to understand that you might get some more spam because people look for phone numbers in various posts just to spam people. It's one of those things that happens so you better be prepared for it. Although this sounds very odd, I actually explain to all of our potential clients that they need to text us in order to set up appointments or get pricing and quotes or questions answered. We typically do not communicate online and normally don't take phone calls. I know people reading this might think that is the stupidest thing in the world but the reality is, the majority of people have a phone today or they are with somebody that has a phone even if they're screen is broken or something to that effect to where they can't communicate with us with their phone. The problem with communicating online is that it becomes very inefficient because for one thing, again, there are a lot of spam people online so you waste your time responding to spam but then also, you can think that you're going to send a quick message to somebody that starts with one or two messages and then ends up eating up 15 to 20 minutes of your time after about 20 or 30 messages later. It's just not worth it in the majority of cases. So, we request that people text us. This helps us minimize or almost eliminate spam but it also lets us get more qualified clients as the majority of people that contact us end up using our services. I'm not saying it's a 100% closure rate but it's not 50% either. My area only has roughly 17,000 people between the larger City and the smaller town that is separated by a bridge going over the Missouri River and then there are some other smaller communities around the area within an hour or about 90 miles. I suppose with the other communities around the area we probably have a population of between 25,000 and 30,000 people roughly. I could type quite a bit more but I can see that I've already typed quite a bit already. If you have more questions, try to be specific and I will try to help you if I have the time. Otherwise, my best advice would be to just simply take some time and watch some UA-cam videos. Honestly, just about anything you want to know as far as information or research is available on UA-cam if you just know how to search for the content. Whether it's understanding how to properly cut down a tree to how to properly set up your business or something else, virtually anything is on UA-cam if you just look for it.
Comparing May efficiency to June is not apples to apples. 51% sucks, but there is always a bump at that time of year. What was the efficiency in July? 2nd, Lee is your top guy. I assume he didn't stay. What happened when you made an entry level guy manager after the turn around?
Mike, our maintenance route is growing slower than we want. Would you ever advise lowering prices for maintenance clients to grow the route, while simultaneously raising prices on one-time projects?
My guess is that since a business is EITHER in growth mode or profit mode, you wouldn't mix the two. Growth mode = lower pricing and higher close ratio. Although I honestly don't know and guess it could depend on the types and dollar tickets of the projects, but just my 2 cents!
The manager was just not able to keep up with volume of work required to pay for the expenses and make a profit at that location. He would probably succeed in other locations. #growthrequiresmoregrowth
Sounds to me like you expanded too fast when you expanded to Bellingham and you weren’t around enough to be able to tell it was due to bad manager not bad systems
His name was never mentioned. His face was never shown. And I left out multiple GM's names who were top performers to ensure that their anonymity stayed intact. The local team at this location doesnt even know who it is since nothing negative was ever said about the GM internally or publicly.
Is your business struggling? Apply for a turnaround. I fly out in-person. It costs $0. Go to MikeAndes.com/turnaround
Mike did you make a separate LLC for the Christmas lights? Same trucks as lawn care? Lotta questions regarding this transition!
This is absolutely my most favorite video on your channel.
Absolutely packed with knowledge.
Keep it up Augusta, you guys make sure the rest of us do business RIGHT.
Wow, thanks Nathan!
Appreciate you guys taking the time to go through the challenges, the failures, the solutions, the systems that work & don't work. It is all simple, but without the right folks, the right systems, the right teamwork / support, any business that has great value, can fail.
We are currently also struggling with many challenges. Key one being a foreman / leader to help support the crew(s) / take steps in positive directions. Always work to be done.
Ppl going to hate! thankful for your video. Thanks I have started my own landscape Company because of you thanks. Bro love your videos!!
Thanks for watching! 🙏🏼🙇
Funny you mention that. Would drive by the Bellingham location and always wonder why so many trucks were sitting idle
Great video.
Glad you enjoyed it
Well done Mike and team, great experience
Been waiting all week for a video from the GOAT
Clicked instantly. Title had me worried 😂
I own a sample window cleaning business. I'm having problems with hiring people. I would love to see you make a video on how to find/hire people. Or even how to find the right people.
Search from a few weeks ago I posted about hiring playbook ✅
Great video as always Mike. I just started my first business in April doing tree services. Don’t know where I would be without your content. Thanks
Best of luck! Let’s gooo!
Successful businesses just need shameless advertising and aggressive cold calling. If your gut does not feel right saying "I need to speak to the person who makes the contract decisions" or "sir you are 2 months behind on your invoices we will be charging interest and will be going to court if this invoice is not paid in 30 days." Then business is not for you. If you can't squeeze money out of your clients you might as well go work for someone.
Hey Mike. I would like to start a lawn care business and landscaping as a side hustle. My experience comes from my own piece of land, which i clean 2-3 times per year including trees pruning and i just love doing it. In most videos the method of door knock seems to be the most efficient for finding my first customers but since I'm not really a door knocking person is there any advice you could share? Thanks!
Nobody is a door knocking person. Put out the mailers for ur company wait a day or 2 and go knock. Ur money is on the table just need to have a conversation. Or you could prey that mailers will give you enough business.
Join a door to door sales job for like 3 weeks and get ur footing if ur that worried
I'm not going to speak for Mike and I'm assuming he may have some disagreements but also obviously his own point of view but quite frankly, I would recommend taking a very simple and inexpensive route which is to Simply use Facebook to get started.
I'll be honest and say that I've been in business with one of my smaller businesses for approximately 10 years now and I have never paid for any advertisement once. One of the businesses is a small electronics repair business which deals with fixing cell phones, tablets, computers, gaming systems, and other electronics but primarily, we just deal with phones and tablets for the most part. There were two other businesses in town and one other person that did it on the side but to my knowledge, I am currently the only one that does it anymore.
Covid took care of one of the businesses that had only been in business for about a year and then the other one that actually had the most business closed shop and I think it was just due to the fact that they didn't want to work as hard as they needed to in order to keep it as busy as it was
I know that some people think that Facebook is not the way to Market your business but the reality is, Facebook is a great resource and it can be free if you don't want to pay for the advertising and there are ways to do it if you just know how to utilize facebook. There are a few secrets and tips that people don't realize and I'll tell you what they are right now.
The reality is, there are various areas that have multiple groups set up for the different garage sale sites or business services sites or other types of groups in a particular area or city or town. In some cases, you may only have one group or three or four groups and in other cases you might have 15 or 30 groups or maybe even more. Out of those groups, there may be only a very small percentage that allow Business Services types of posts or advertising of your business in those groups. The problem is, a lot of people assume that there are only three or four groups in an area when they might actually have 15 or 20 groups and out of those 15 or 20 groups, there might be four or five of them that will allow you to post advertisements for your business in those groups.
However, because people are so lazy, they only assume that there are one or two groups so they just post in the one group and they don't get much of a response because they don't realize that they are only hitting 20% of the potential clients that they could reach.
Also, unless you pay for the ads, Facebook Marketplace does not allow you to post advertisements in the marketplace. I know that some people do it and I'll admit I have gotten away with it in the past but it is something that they typically don't allow so you have to be careful with that so that you don't get your profile or account suspended.
Also, a lot of people just create a Facebook page for their company and they don't realize that they should actually start a Facebook group for their company. Not a group for their employees although you can do that as well but an actual group for the business itself. There are advantages to creating a group for your business as compared to just creating a page and people forget that so, that is another Avenue that you want to consider so that you can try to promote your business as best you can on facebook.
Obviously, starting out, you aren't going to have very many people that would be members of your group but it all depends on the area that you're in and how well you can get people to join your group. The biggest thing is, finding out which specific groups allow you to post business posts in them and make sure that you do not post posts and the other groups that do not allow it. That is the one thing that pisses off a group admin more than anything else is when people don't follow the rules. I am actually an admin of approximately 80 different Facebook groups with probably roughly 15 to 20 of them being somewhat busy and probably 30 of them just kind of sitting there being dormant and not really doing anything but that is on purpose. There is nothing that steams me more than people that are posting clothing for sale in my group that is primarily set up for either rentals such as trying to find an apartment or housing for sale or land for sale or I have another group that is primarily for finding jobs or employers looking to hire employees. The problem that happens is people just randomly start clicking on the various groups that they can post in when they are creating their posts and they don't even pay attention to the name of the group and so they just start randomly posting their crap in all of these different groups. I am nice enough that I give a warning to the people that do it but if they have done it twice within the last 90 days, I just ban them from the group because they obviously aren't paying attention and don't care.
I know some people are going to disagree with marketing their business on Facebook but honestly, it's a very easy way to Market yourself and probably one of the best ones when you're starting out because you more than likely don't want to overload yourself with work because you can only handle so much and at least you will get a few requests here and there through Facebook depending on how you set up your posts in the various groups.
Outside of that, you could obviously try Craigslist if that's still even a thing but I haven't even looked at Craigslist list for probably 3 or 4 years now. You could consider running a small ad in a local Shopper or newspaper and maybe even do some radio ads if you want if they have like a 10 or 15 second bumper ad but since you're starting out, I'm assuming you aren't really going to have a budget for marketing so I'm trying to think of some free ways to get your name out there.
Honestly, the easiest way is just to go and talk to your local neighbors that are close to where your equipment is going to be so you can keep your expenses low. If you live out in the country, obviously that's going to take a little bit of time but you could spend a half a day or a day doing it and you could probably reach enough people to keep you busy at least for a few months. But, if you're looking to get some business in a small town or community, just going to the place that you would like to do business in is going to be your best option.
Also, you have to keep in mind that you are going to want to go to an area that can actually afford your services. Going to run down areas that you could tell where people don't keep up their neighborhood, that is probably not necessarily going to be your ideal demographic as they probably can't afford your services anyway. So, you need to sit down and identify who your target audience is and how you want to reach them.
If you can, a personal experience is always going to be the best one as people will be able to see your face and talk to you and Associate you with your business which is the best way to start out but obviously that may not potentially be ideal if you aren't somebody that likes to go door-to-door or make Direct contact. However, if you want to start a business, then I suggest that you get over your fear of potentially not wanting to do things because you're going to have to do things that you don't want to do if you want to have a business. It's just the way that it is.
If you don't get over your fear of doing certain things, then your business is more than likely not even going to get off the ground.
Also, although you didn't bring it up, I would highly recommend sitting down and figuring out if you actually have the capability to do whatever it is that you want to provide for people in the way of services. Although you mentioned that you clean your own land 2 to 3 times a year, it's different when you are doing it for yourself. Also, what are you talking about cleaning? Are you simply mowing a lawn and removing a few shrubs here and there or are you actually getting up and cutting down tree limbs out of tall trees and do you understand how to properly remove them without causing damage to things below like a house or animals or fences or other things?
Are you going to consider getting a bond or insurance so that you can make sure that your clients are covered and the event that you do have an accident? I'm not saying that you have to do that but it obviously is something you want to consider. The only problem is, that is an added expense that you have to consider when you were sitting down and budgeting for your overall business costs. You could obviously spend money and have mailers put in the mailboxes of a certain area but that obviously costs money so I don't know if you can afford to do that or not. That is why I highly recommend facebook. But, just know that if you do post something on facebook, assuming you are going to provide your phone number, you need to understand that you might get some more spam because people look for phone numbers in various posts just to spam people. It's one of those things that happens so you better be prepared for it.
Although this sounds very odd, I actually explain to all of our potential clients that they need to text us in order to set up appointments or get pricing and quotes or questions answered. We typically do not communicate online and normally don't take phone calls. I know people reading this might think that is the stupidest thing in the world but the reality is, the majority of people have a phone today or they are with somebody that has a phone even if they're screen is broken or something to that effect to where they can't communicate with us with their phone. The problem with communicating online is that it becomes very inefficient because for one thing, again, there are a lot of spam people online so you waste your time responding to spam but then also, you can think that you're going to send a quick message to somebody that starts with one or two messages and then ends up eating up 15 to 20 minutes of your time after about 20 or 30 messages later. It's just not worth it in the majority of cases. So, we request that people text us. This helps us minimize or almost eliminate spam but it also lets us get more qualified clients as the majority of people that contact us end up using our services. I'm not saying it's a 100% closure rate but it's not 50% either.
My area only has roughly 17,000 people between the larger City and the smaller town that is separated by a bridge going over the Missouri River and then there are some other smaller communities around the area within an hour or about 90 miles. I suppose with the other communities around the area we probably have a population of between 25,000 and 30,000 people roughly.
I could type quite a bit more but I can see that I've already typed quite a bit already. If you have more questions, try to be specific and I will try to help you if I have the time. Otherwise, my best advice would be to just simply take some time and watch some UA-cam videos. Honestly, just about anything you want to know as far as information or research is available on UA-cam if you just know how to search for the content. Whether it's understanding how to properly cut down a tree to how to properly set up your business or something else, virtually anything is on UA-cam if you just look for it.
Lesson 1. Businesses will fail overtime with absentee owners.
Can we get the list of books in the audible account
this series is great never miss a episode i wish i could be on this lol
Comparing May efficiency to June is not apples to apples. 51% sucks, but there is always a bump at that time of year. What was the efficiency in July?
2nd, Lee is your top guy. I assume he didn't stay. What happened when you made an entry level guy manager after the turn around?
Efficiency has steadily gone up and last July was over 90% with every team member wages above base pay and an average near $30/hr
How much Do you Charge TO MOW the YARDS ?
I’m guessing thinks where my parents found my name lol
Mike, our maintenance route is growing slower than we want. Would you ever advise lowering prices for maintenance clients to grow the route, while simultaneously raising prices on one-time projects?
My guess is that since a business is EITHER in growth mode or profit mode, you wouldn't mix the two. Growth mode = lower pricing and higher close ratio. Although I honestly don't know and guess it could depend on the types and dollar tickets of the projects, but just my 2 cents!
@@CopperCreekCuts thanks!
If your making to much profit go ahead
Did the system fail ? Or did the system catch it in time ?
I failed to setup GM for success and ensure sufficient training.
@@MikeAndes
Everything is your fault... As the business owner
17:50 the dude reporting to the owner should have the wherewithal to identify a crappy manager
I have a Solution! It may not be easy but in time it will grow
The manager was just not able to keep up with volume of work required to pay for the expenses and make a profit at that location. He would probably succeed in other locations. #growthrequiresmoregrowth
Sounds to me like you expanded too fast when you expanded to Bellingham and you weren’t around enough to be able to tell it was due to bad manager not bad systems
I need your advice
Was it that 19 year old kid from a couple years back?
First 😫
What you have done to this manager besides firing him isn't cool. you pretty much decimated his character and personal self worth. FU.
His name was never mentioned. His face was never shown. And I left out multiple GM's names who were top performers to ensure that their anonymity stayed intact. The local team at this location doesnt even know who it is since nothing negative was ever said about the GM internally or publicly.
You can't work 80 hours a week
What context do you mean by this?
lol I do it almost every week
80 hours a week is part-time when you're self-employed
I usually only work half day...the first.12 hours ...sun up to sun down...
Lol wut
hehe a bit clickbaity :p
Click bait…. To get more clicks.. unsubscribe..
+1 comment 🙏🏼🙇
I don't see click bait there bud. It was a good video