Live Q&A Firestorm: Kevin Salters + Joey & Megan Coberly Answer Your Toughest Lawn Care Questions at Bootcamp

Behind the scense from a Q+A session during the Lawn Care Hustler's Bootcamp presented by Lawn Care Launch. 🎟️ Equip Expo 👉 Save 50% off Equip Expo Ticket w/ Promo Code PAUL: Register Here https://bit.ly/EQUIPEXPO 📚 Level Up Your Money (New Release) 👉 Get Your Paperback Copy! https://pauljamison.org/book 🎧 Level Up Your Money (Audiobook) 👉 Listen on Audible https://pauljamison.org/audiobook Rehlko Engines - Guiness World Records Attempt https://pauljamison.org/4oUln4C 📲 Connect with Paul - Visit Official Website https://www.thepauljamison.com/ 🛠️ Paul's Recommended Tools & Professionals 📚 The Landscaping Bookkeeper – Know your numbers, stress less: thelandscapingbookkeeper.com https://thelandscapingbookkeeper.com/ 📈 Lawn Care Launch: Click Here https://thelandscapingbookkeeper.com/lawn-care-launch (new program for business owners) 🌐 Footbridge Media – Get a pro lawn care website: footbridgemedia.com https://www.footbridgemedia.com/paul-jamison?ref=pauljamison 💻 Horizon360 – All-in-one contractor business software: gethorizon360.com https://gethorizon360.com/ 📞 CallRail – Track where your leads are coming from: callrail.com https://partners.callrail.com/cc4gs529efdp 📦 Business-Building Resources by Paul Price Increase Letter Template https://www.thepauljamison.com/resource_redirect/landing_pages/2150230978 Contract Templates https://www.thepauljamison.com/resource_redirect/landing_pages/2150230978 📚 Paul's Most Popular Business Books How to Build a Thriving Lawn Care Business: Buy on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D4K835L4 Cut That Grass and Make That Cash: Buy on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08SP7MQ13 Level Up Your Money (New Release): Buy Now https://pauljamison.org/book

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Motive. Growing a landscaping company means more trucks, more trailers and more equipment and more revenue doesn't always mean more profit. Motive gives you one platform to see where your vehicles and equipment are, cut idle time and fuel waste and protect your crews with AI dash cams. Motive customers report 20% annual savings on maintenance and fuel. See what it could do for your business at gomotive.com. Again, that's gomotive.com.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  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 Jameson, is the author of five bestselling books, including Cut That Grass and Make That Cash and his latest, Level Up Your 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.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Welcome to today's program. I hope you are doing well. I'm currently taking the Lawn Care Hustlers Bootcamp presented by the Lawn Care Launch Team. And it's been a lot of fun. There's lawn care business owners from all over the country that are on these calls and I've really been enjoying some of the questions. And we're actually going to have a Q and A coming right up with Kevin Salters, Joey Coberly, Megan Coberly, as they answer questions from the folks on the Zoom call. But before we get into that, I want to give a quick reminder that our friends at Railco are trying to break a Guiness World Record. This will be an official temp. They're going to have about 100 yard football field. That's about six inches tall of grass, maybe weeds, we'll see turf.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  And they are going to use their new 41 horsepower engine. To showcase how strong this new engine is, but in a first ever world record attempt to mow that full field of grass equivalent to the size of a football field. Now where you come in potentially is they are looking for somebody to actually sit on the mower and mow this field. They will come to you, whatever city you live in, whoever wins, the Rellco team, they're going to bring their camera crew, they're going to bring the mower, they're going to, I mean, they're going to like really go all out for this thing because this was their marketing idea

• 2:34Speaker 00

  for their new powerful engine. They're like, hey, we want to show this thing off to the world, this new 41 horsepower engine. How about we go out there and attempt this world record of mowing this field. So anyway, if you would like to be the person that breaks the world record, check today's show notes for Rellco and just fill out the, the brief application there and then they're going to select one lucky winner and it's going to be epic. So I'm really hoping that someone who's a green industry podcast listener wins and you get to be in the Guinness World Records with this official attempt. And trust me, Rellco is very, very, they're going to roll out the red carpet for this. So it'll be a very cool experience for whoever wins. So

• 3:19Speaker 00

  that link will be in today's show notes. All right, let's dive into it. This is a little Q and A action with the Cobra Lees and Kevin Salters. Enjoy.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Anybody else? Quiet. Kind of open it up to even a Q and A. If you guys are interested in asking anything numbers based or whatever, I've seen a lot of them. So throw it at me.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  I got a question for Kevin. Just kind of curious, looking to get into the fertilization side, just curious kind of how like the man hour right there and how you incorporate your material costs into that.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  This one gets really complicated and which I love. And here we could have a side discussion on this. So everything in the fertilization side is based on a per 1,000 square foot price or a per acre price, which an acre is 43,560 feet. So I use per 1,000 and I have a calculator system that I go through and take our labor overhead materials and then we break that down with what Joey just did, but we break that into a per 1,000 square foot price. So it's actually very. Difficult to do on the backside, but once you have that number, it's very easy because you roll up to a property and it's 11,000 square feet. It's 11 times the rate that we've

• 4:34Speaker 04

  calculated out because your materials are going to be a little bit different for each application. So we'll take a blend of that. And then it's very easy bidding. It's fast. This is where a serum system can almost do all the work completely for you. Once you build out, we'll call it your base man hour rate or your per square foot price. Yeah, I did four estimates this morning in less than a quarter cup of coffee before I hit the turf. It's very, very quick. Be more than happy to do a detailed explanation of it. One hour is not enough time or 18 minutes is not enough time, but I can share a screen. A couple of our clients we're working with right now, and we've come up with the exact number that it's going to be because every area is going to be different. Again, not

• 5:18Speaker 04

  only on labor rate, but also material cost and also on your buying volume of your products. And then as you get more and more involved in it, which I take part of, and a lot of people do is the early order piece comes into it. You can make some massive savings on early order. I try to get all mine done by October 31st, which are in and I, some of my nutritional products for next year are going to increase, but all my control products, insect weed, all that stuff, pre-emergent with the early order power that I have and some kickbacks from the company, I'm actually going to pay less next year for the products, same amount of products that I bought this year. It just, there's more and more teasers

• 5:59Speaker 04

  out there and it doesn't make any sense that they're doing this, but got to take that ride while we can.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Jared, on our website, there's a free coaching call. You could snag a 30 minute with him and he'd be happy to show you.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Would love to.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 06

  I have a question for Kevin. Well, because that's exactly what I do for my business. I'm just a fertilizer control company.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  I would say just.

• 6:23Speaker 06

  Well, I'm not mowing. I'm just not getting.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, brother.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  How do you, how do you, with that pre-order program, how do you scale for growth? Like maybe you're estimated that I'm going to grow.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  10%.

• 6:37Speaker 06

  Pre-order that program?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm, I put 10% just because I, this is going to sound horrible in here. I don't want to grow. I'm at my capacity to where I'm comfortable with the revenue coming in. It would have to be a really next level of scalability to me of growing again to what. Managing people compared to just managing my wife and I. Um, so again, that would be another great, quick 30 minute coaching call where we could talk to see where you are in your business financially and where you want to go. And then we can come up with a factor of what you would want to put in for growth because you'd. Some products I don't mind buying additional for and saving on the shelf because the shelf life will be fine for the year after. Like I have a $3,000 bottle of grip control sitting on my shelf that.

• 7:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Okay. I bought it early. It's there in case I needed more applications. It's not going to go bad. It's already built into this year's factor. So it's 3,000. I don't have to spend into it. So yeah, I'd be more than happy to talk those numbers with you as well.

• 7:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I would love to get with that because I gotta do that same thing with, I do a lime application. So I'm buying bulk and then, so I know this never going to go bad.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you how to save money on lime and do it while you're fertilizing and get paid double for the time you're there for once.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  Do it at the same time?

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. One bag.

• 7:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  For the coaching call. Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  I'm going to drop the link for the coaching call in the chat for the, at least two of you who would like to take advantage of that.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  So make that three. I would. Oh, no, Greg, you can't. You do, you do pine straw. I can't talk to you.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  So Chris, just a teaser on that lime part. What I do is I have lime put, so what do we got for time? We got time. Fertilizer, we'll talk about this quickly for educational piece. There's three numbers of a bag of fertilizer.

• 8:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  10, 10, 10, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium potash. Those are percentages of the active ingredient in a bag of 50 pounds. So if we have a 10, 10, 10, 10% of 50 is five. There's 15 pounds of active nutrition in that bag of those three products. The rest is a filler. We have to have that filler or called carrier so that it can be applied effectively to the square footage of the bag that it's going to cover. All my fillers are usable nutrition. That's why I do turf nutrition. I know Paul makes fun of me for saying that, but I don't sell things to people that aren't going to benefit their lawns. So one of the fillers that I do use that's usable is lime. So I can have fertilizer,

• 9:07Speaker 04

  we can all have fertilizer blended with nutrition and lime in if it is lime in your program. I give that to my customers three times in small doses. On my fourth application, I charge them for a nutrition application and a lime application, which is the same cost as a fertilizer to them. So if it's a hundred dollars application, I'm billing them 200, but I've given it to them slowly over three doses and my labor has not changed. So I'm on their property five times and I'm giving them seven applications. My grub control is done the same way. So those are the tricks when, I think it was Nate, we talked earlier about the game of being, or Ryan of being efficient as possible all the time. That's one of the ways that you can be super efficient and be extremely profitable.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  I was lost in the first three seconds of that conversation. And it wasn't the math.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Carriers.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  That's why we have Kevin, man. He can nerd out on this stuff, man. He can just keep going on.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  It's funny because people think we're like real number crunchers over here and like Joe's got a number brain, but Kevin's the number cruncher.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  When fertilizer is all numbers, ratios, it's a lot of math. Megan, you would do just fine in it. Once you understood the vernacular of it and it's, it's just math. It really is all math.

• 10:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 07

  When, when will the, the call be?

• 10:33Speaker 05

  It's, it's not a call. You'll, you'll go to the link. I put it in the chat. If you'll click on that link, you can sign up for a free coaching call with Kevin.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Or in your case, Greg, you swipe your card, you put your number in there and she put the special code on the back.

• 10:50Speaker 07

  I'll use that code, pun, stroll.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  There you go. It gets right in. Yeah, there'll be a calendar and there you can pick your date and 30 minutes and then we'll go through it.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, y'all take advantage of that. I don't know how long we're gonna keep that up.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, we don't plan to do it forever.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  That's why I'm drinking coffee at 18 at night.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  In the grand finale, you'll actually have a better pitch than that free coaching call.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Any other questions?

• 11:22Speaker 04

  I'm waiting for my calendar to get blown up. I look at Greg's booking it right now. I can tell.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  Good, good.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  My emails are blowing up here.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  He's creating another email so he can sign up 15 different ways.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  He's gonna sign up for 27.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Put a mask or a disguise on every time you hop on with your other email. Get unlimited.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Funny.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  I've got a question about leaf cleanup.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  How do you guys normally charge for leaf cleanup? Because that can fluctuate so much between yards based on how many trees you have.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Everyone should unmute and just give an answer.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Let it fly.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  I'd love to hear it. Yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  I copied this off a Keith Calphus video last year and it works for me. We're doing $150 to show up and that covers dump fee. But we do $150 plus $60 per cubic yard of leaves we remove. So every cubic yard that we collect and load on our trailer, 60 bucks.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  So it's 150 plus $60 per cubic yard.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  So David, is that a once and done cleanup? Like is that?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  That's not every two weeks. Like I normally, yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I would normally show up every two weeks and in the heavy leaf drop, you know, show up every week and just be consistent with the cleanup until it's done.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  I got you. Yeah, I mean, we, all of ours are pretty much just one and done. We've been scheduling. But if you're doing that, you know, I would, I would stick with the $60 per cubic yard. I don't know how you'd want to charge me for, you know, for the show up.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, an interesting way of doing it. So far, what I've done is I've just taken my per cut price, whatever it is, and I've added my hourly rate on whenever I go over my allotted time for that yard.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  I got you. Are you removing the leaves or are you just mulching?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Here's Megan Coburn from The Landscaping Bookkeeper.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  The Landscaping Bookkeeper is a company for lawn care businesses under 300K. We like to onboard you under 300K so that we can educate you on your finances. Many bookkeepers love numbers, but we love the education behind the numbers. So each month, we want to organize behind the scenes, but then we want to meet with you monthly to deliver your statement of cash flows, your profit and loss, called the income statement, and your balance sheet. And our real goal is to help you to understand how each of those work together so that you can see the health of your business and not just crunch numbers. It's about actually putting them inside a framework so you know when to purchase and what to do with each of those facets of business.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Schedule your free 15-minute call today at thelandscapingbookkeeper.com.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Some places I mulch in them if I can. Normally I just bag them with a, either a walker mower or a, or a hustler and just dump it to curb. We have curbside dump here, so we don't have to haul it away normally.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Paul, you were asking which state I'm from. I'm from Greenville, North Carolina. So that's where I, where I work. Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  That pricing that I gave you, that's for us, we have the grasshopper equipment and that's for us sucking up everything, loading on our trailer and leaving with it. Okay. When we do. Oftentimes I mulch over, oftentimes I mulch over them and, you know, break it down. And then I have a lot less to haul away. It breaks down a lot better.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Right. Well, we don't do very many of the mulching. When we do that, we've been charging a hundred bucks an hour and it's just me doing it. So, you know, I charge them a hundred bucks an hour, just come drive over the leaves and crush them up, blow out their beds and stuff.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  I'm here in Pennsylvania and I'm like Joel. Um, I have probably ten to fifteen customers that we go by weekly. And clean their leaves up, but they have, uh, their, their, their community has curbside pickup. So I push them to the edge of, uh, push them to the edge of the property, put them in a pile and they take them away. Now for pricing, this is something that I've been just struggling with ever since. And basically for the heavy pickups, I charge them, it's, it's a double, basically the, it's like a double cut.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  So, uh, cause normally I can do a lawn, I can do an acre in about an hour. The, um, with, because I have equipment, I got blowers, I got the push behind blowers. And we're really able to move a lot of stuff. So it's basically they get charged a double cut. Now I just did it this week and it wasn't a full, I mean, I did it. I cleaned their yard up in, in less than an hour. So my numbers are all over the place. I'm not consistent at all. And I'd like, I need to be consistent.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I would say here, here in Florida, I'm in, I'm in Jacksonville, uh, so I'm in Florida. Um, in the community that I'm in, the gay community, everybody just give a, a monthly rate. And so on days, on times like this, you know, this season, bunch of leaves, um, we might not edge or, or weed. Um, but it's, you know, the hour that we do in the summer, so the hour that we do in the fall. Uh, so we just charge in the same rate all year round. Um, that's just something that work, has worked for us here.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Joel, do you, do you ask the question because you feel a little bit like James and that it's always changing on you? And it's variable and random, or do you ask the question because you, you know, you don't like it? Like you don't like.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  No, I, I. I asked the question because I feel like it fluctuates so much. But I started thinking the other day, you know,

• 17:55Speaker 02

  the amount of foliage or the percentage of foliage on a yard never changes, right? The amount of trees that are on a yard never changes. And so I was trying to figure out, you know, is there a, this is kind of where my mind went the other day. Is there a percentage extra, uh, extra that you could do over your hourly rate? Or say you had a per acre price. Over that per acre price.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Where you could say, you know, for the months of whatever leaf cleanup is November and December. Just tack on

• 18:36Speaker 02

  that

• 18:38Speaker 02

  extra percentage to your rate and tell your customer that. Once you have it all dialed in, based on how much foliage is on their property. And then you would have a stable, you would have something stable for them to, uh, you know, latch on to and say, okay, yeah, I understand that there's this amount of trees on my yard. And it's going to cost me about this much to get my leaves cleaned up, you know? And that way you're not, you know, showing up every two weeks and, you know, one visit is $200 and the next visit is $350. And they're wondering, you know, why, why did it cost you $200 this time and $350 this time?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  You know, I'd, I'd like a more standard way of doing it.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  So that's the commercial model, Joel, and it, it does work well in the commercial mindset. And it would be wonderful if you can sell to your clients that that will work. And an example, uh, let's say in Northeast, we do, we typically do 26 to 28 mows a year. We'll have a spring cleanup and then we would include two fall cleanups in that time. So we were either there on average 30 to 32 visits for the season. We would take. The budgeting of those hours, so we would know how many man hours it took to do a spring cleanup, the cost of that, any debris that needed to be hauled away, the mowing each time of all those visits, and then the fall cleanup's the same of that part.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  We would build all those labors up and then we would just divide that over the numbers of service visits. So they would have an equal either service-based price or monthly price in their contract. I think that's what you're trying to get at.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Right. Yes.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  It's very easy to, very easy to do and mathematically in the background come up. And this is when we talk about budgeting systems and man hours and creating that job of total hours, what the revenue is going to bring in and then being the system and being more efficient each time. In the residential market, it's, I'm all for it and I've coached a couple of people to try to get it to where you have standardized pricing either on a monthly or a blended amateurized weekly payment. If you can get your customers to buy on that, it's, it's great. It's an easy cash flow model to follow.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, some, some of those bigger customers that I have, residential customers, you know, the ones that have huge yards with lots of trees, they want to contract price.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Let's do it. I'll help you build it. It's easy.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  I need to call you up someday.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  That's very, it's very easy. It's, that is the commercial model in a nutshell. It's, there's no secret. Just a lot of people don't, they can't handle that, that thought process when it comes to the residential because they, they feel sometimes that maybe you're not there as long as you technically should be for the amount they're paying because they're paying for part of their fall cleanup in the middle of July when it's not really, you're not there for 20 minutes doing a service visit, but in the fall cleanup, they forget that you're there for four hours that visit.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  So if they could look past that, right, and you can communicate that, it's a great model. It's a very consistent for budgeting.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Do you?

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Cash flow.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Okay. Do you ever into just the two months of leaf cleanup? Add on the extra and those like add on the bulk of the price for leaf cleanup in those two months, like November, November and December?

• 22:14Speaker 04

  We would, we would amortize it over the entire season. So they're mulching, they're pruning, their fertilization. If they had every service, whatever service they had, we would take that gross number and then we would divide it out either if they were a monthly pay customer or a weekly pay customer.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Right. Okay. I'll, I'll try to schedule a coaching call with you. I'd be interested to talk to you about that.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. The only downside of that is if you go full bore into this, you're going to be very labor and material heavy in the springtime because you're putting forth edging, you're putting forth mulching, if they're part of that, your spring cleanup and your mowing, and you're still just getting that nominal fee in the springtime. So we would call that Bank of Russo to where we would have to have a nest egg to provide all the additional labor, spring mowing with overtime due to rains and heavy growth periods. And it wouldn't be, we wouldn't start coming out of the red until October. If we came out of the red in September, we knew we were going to have a good year profitability wise, but we, it was a big churn on money, but much larger scale, but you have to have the bank flow to protect

• 23:21Speaker 04

  yourself or that surge in the spring based on the payments that are coming in until they start ramping up because again, you have a lot of expenses going out and labor that goes out with smaller payments coming in at first.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Right. And then you would catch up, you know, from October until February, March when you're, yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Those were, those were our profit months from October on. And like I said, if, if we tickled out of the red in September, we knew without snow, we were going to have, we're going to have a great year.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  And I just want to add to that in at least the Atlanta market. See, when I got started in 2011, one good thing that happened was my buddy Kenny, he had already been in the lawn care industry for 18 years and he was in this neighborhood, which for those of you who live in Atlanta, Alpharetta area, you know, the neighborhood, this neighborhood, it's called Country Club of the South. And it's a very prestigious neighborhood. And once you get into the neighborhood, there's even some bigger houses within the neighborhood that like it's just awesome. So very, very nice home. So I asked him, you know, how do you know what to charge your customers or whatever? And he just explained to me, he's like, oh yeah, this yard over here, that's $900 a month. And I'm like, $900 a month? This was back

• 24:37Speaker 00

  in 2011. I would, I'd work for Kenny as a laborer sometimes just to learn the ropes and I needed money. So I would just ask him questions like that. We would be out there and I'm like, how much you charge this customer Kenny? Like, oh, this is 850 a month or this is 900 a month, like $900 a month. And he explained to me, he's like, yeah, what I do is I just calculate how many flats of flowers they're going to get for the year. Cause we do that twice a year. How many yards of mulch? How many bales of pine straw? And then basically we come 48 times a year for, for the maintenance, 48 out of the 52 weeks a year. So he just adds all that up, divides it by 12 months. And then that's where he comes up with the, you

• 25:19Speaker 00

  know, for that part, I just remember $950 because I remember the property. It was very beautiful home and they would realmo it. So I loved getting to just realmo the, the front yard looked like a golf course. It was, it was spectacular. But anyway, I didn't really know any better. So I just assumed that's how everybody did their billing. They just calculated the properties, everything for the year and divided by 12 months and just charged the customer the same amount every month. And so what I realized afterwards was Kenny was like way ahead of everyone else by doing that model. And he had very high end homes. So these customers, they were used to just having a monthly fixed price for their landscaping and Kenny did such a good job. He just took care of their property year after year. So.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Anyway, I later found out that the way most other companies do it, and I'm not saying this is wrong, but it's just a charge per service. So let's say you charge $85 to go Moedge Trimble Mrs. Smith's property. A lot of other companies, they just go out, they do the service, and then hopefully, shout outs to Horizon 360, the CRM we recommend. Hopefully, they have a CRM, and then boom, you just charge your customer's card on file with the CRM the day that you do the service. So basically, you do the work, that same day you get paid, and it's just one transaction at a time. Now, that can be a little overwhelming if you're servicing Mrs. Smith's property 30 times a year, 32 times a year, warmer

• 26:47Speaker 00

  climates, maybe you're going 48, or all 52 weeks a year. Shout outs to Florida, right? Do you really want to be chart, you know, do you really want to be having 52 different transactions? Like, I would argue that it's more convenient for the customer to just charge a monthly price. So maybe we'll do a different episode in the future, talking about all these different ways that you can bill the customer, because there are several different ways. But I think Kevin brought up a really good point about kind of calculating it all for the year, the pros and cons of that, because there is, there is some risks, and there is some risks involved in that. And so if you're just starting out and you're

• 27:31Speaker 00

  brand new, and you're in year one, I honestly think it's safer to just charge per service your first year, because it's just going to be less risk on your end in so many ways. I have a meeting coming up here, so I don't have time to go into all of those. But when you're more established of a business like Kevin, like my friend Kenny, and hopefully... You know, one day, if you're just brand new now, you know, one day you'll be seven, eight years into this and you'll, you'll, you'll be able to, you'll be able to do that model where you add up all the expenses for the year, all the services for the year, divided by however many months you're going to be there and, and give them a flat price. But

• 28:13Speaker 00

  it's pretty simple, straightforward math. But I will say this, in the lawn care launch program, they have opportunities for you to do coaching calls with Kevin Salters. I really think you should take Kevin up on those opportunities because he's been in this industry for 40 plus years and he has this incredible teacher's heart. Like he really wants to help newer business owners understand this stuff. It makes complex things very simplified. So any chance you get to hop on these calls, whether you do the lawn care bootcamp presented by the lawn care launch team, or you're in the lawn care launch

• 28:55Speaker 00

  with the Cobra Lee's and Kevin and Stephanie, you can, you get office hours and access to Kevin Salters. He's, it's very, very rare to have somebody of his business acumen. I've been, I've been a small business owner since 2011. That's 14, 15 years. Kevin's been in small business in this industry for over 40 years. That's three times longer than me. He's seen it all. And the fact that he's willing to help us, I mean, I'm learning for, I'm hopping on these calls. I'm doing the lawn care bootcamp, even though you could be like, Paul, you've been in business for 14 years. Shouldn't you know all this stuff by now? Well, I feel like I do know most of the stuff they're teaching, but I want

• 29:37Speaker 00

  to just make sure that my business fundamentals are on point, that I'm not, there's, there's no cracks in my foundation. So I'm humbling myself, even though I've been in business for 14 years, to continue to learn from Joey Cobra Lee and Megan Cobra Lee and Kevin Salters and these folks. And if you're just fresh in the business, this is an incredible opportunity.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  To get connected with Kevin Salters and everything they're doing over there at the Lawn Care Launch. So anyway, I'll put the, I'll put the link for what they got going on there because they got so much stuff going on. It's hard for me to keep up with everything, but I just, I got introduced to the Cobra Lees years ago at Jason Creel's event and I hired them to be my bookkeepers and they still are my bookkeepers to this day, but since running their bookkeeping company, they've, they've expanded their service offerings over the years. So now they have programs like they do now with the Lawn Care Launch Bootcamp that I'm in and all kinds of other things going on. So I definitely encourage you to get plugged into that world just to make

• 30:44Speaker 00

  sure your business is properly done, a good, strong foundation and that you understand all the business lingo and strategies and finances and all of that. So anyway, take it or leave it, but Mr. Producer will put it in the show notes if you want more goodness and knowledge from Kevin Salters and the team over there at Lawn Care Launch. Alrighty. Well, thanks for listening to today's program and let me know if you like these Q and As and this kind of, you know, format because, you know, trying something a little new here and your feedback is always welcome. So, thank you.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Marty, producer of the Green Industry Podcast. This episode is over, but check the episode notes for links to products and services that you heard about during the episode. And thanks for listening.