How to Build a Million Dollar Landscaping Business

This episode is with Blake Frischer, owner of Hassle Free Outdoors. We discuss:

• Delivering a perfect product
• Landscape vs maintenance work
• Knowing your numbers and healthy profit margins
• The hardest challenges that come with growth
• Reinvesting in the business
• Making it through the winter slowdown

Learn more about Hassle Free Outdoors: https://www.hassle-freelawns.com/

Presented by TradeGuard: https://www.tradeguardins.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

American building.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

One brick, one beam. Building the American.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Alrighty, I am here with Blake Frischer of Hassle Free Outdoor. Blake, give us sort of the background story on how you got started in the landscaping business. It seems like it's a typical place to begin for a lot of people in the trades. Uh, it's where I started my career, if you will, but walk me through the story of getting into the business and kind of going from where you began to where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah, man. So we're in year seven right now. I have a business partner, actually, Christian, and he was mowing moms in high school. You know, your typical like 14-year-old travel in the neighborhood with a push mower and then kind of leveled up from there, went to truck and trailer, and then kind of and kept growing. And then he went to school uh and he was in school, but it kept growing while he was in school. And he started getting little offers for little construction projects, patios and landscape and walls and stuff like that. And it kind of wasn't his forte. So he reached out to me and brought me on seven years ago, and it was kind of his decision point like, do I just sell my lawns on Facebook Marketplace, or do I make this into a full-blown business? And he and his dad were like, let's just get this thing going and go all the way in. Uh, I was doing landscape construction and tree work at the time, and then kind of hopped in with these guys, became an owner, and and we just kind of grew year over year, probably too fast. But I think that's kind of a common occurrence. And um you mentioned that you had a little landscape business when you were 14. I think it's it's super common, right? Like in the Midwest, it's you either go to work and you you become a lifeguard or you work at whatever you know local restaurant in the summer, uh, or you go around your neighborhood and you find stuff to do. And that's kind of what we did, and we just kind of stuck with it and figured out we were pretty good at it, and so we grew it into and into what it is now.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So this is an in I I had the idea of kind of talking about this, um, but I'm glad it came up now. So you were doing the construction landscaping side, he was focused more on the kind of that bi-weekly, weekly mowing, it sounds like. Yeah, I'm curious where if you could only pick one of those avenues to focus solely on, if it was only mowing or only landscaping, which one would you choose and why?

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Man, that is such a hard question. But I will say, me personally, it's constructions, it's projects, and there's a couple of reasons for that. A, I just find it more interesting. I mean, it's I you know, seeing a project from start to finish and and kind of seeing how good you can get at it. That's really exciting to me. Uh, seeing how excited a customer gets whenever you kind of make their backyard dreams come true. Um, that's a b the margins can be wider, better. You can also lose your butt a lot quicker on construction. Um, so it's kind of a higher risk, higher reward thing, and that is also exciting to a lot of people. Maintenance is steady, you know, it's the same contracted paycheck, no matter what, but your margins are pretty thin because you're you no matter how good you are at mowing grass and putting down chemicals and trimming shrubs, you're always competing with the neighborhood kid, you know, in the summertime. And he doesn't have a$70,000 truck and two men with a salary, he just has a mower, and so it's hard to compete with that.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yeah, I think I mean ultimately the real answer is uh is finding a way to do both because you have the the lawn mowing, which is that recurring weekly revenue, and in terms of sort of my world, it's like that's your your SaaS fee, if you will. And then you have these custom projects. Um, in the lawn mowing, you can kind of put on autopilot with the right systems and staffing, and then you can focus on the higher ticket items. I I kind of figured that's where the the you know the answer would lie, is a little bit of both, but you see it in the industry a lot. There's people who prefer one over the other. So I was I was curious on that. Walk me through how you kind of how you guys went about those first sort of 10 clients, and it sounds like your business partner probably had all of those ready to go, but maybe on your side when you started, what was the process like of getting to that first sort of 10 clients milestone?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yeah, so dude, I would love to say that like we had some sort of plan or idea in our head for those first 10 clients, but it was back then in those first two years, it was like me and two other guys, and I'm driving the truck, I'm picking up the mulch, I'm picking up the pavers, I'm picking up the block and digging the holes. And so it was kind of just like keep your head down and figure it out as they come and and hold on for for dear life at that time. Um, and I think that's it's something that like young entrepreneurs need to understand is like you see me and Christian and in all these other landscape businesses or whatever, name your trade on Instagram, and they've got cool professional pictures and big trucks and heavy equipment and all that stuff. And Christian and I looked at those same accounts and same videos when we were younger, and we're like, you know, we're gonna be that, we're gonna do that. And it is super difficult to get to that level uh without just a little bit of like grind and figure it out as it comes. And so I no plan is perfect. Um, but I would just say, you know, the first two years, expect to just keep your head down and work hard, and it's not going to be perfect, and it's gonna be kind of a zoo every time. But with that said, we whenever you have mowing and you do weekly or bi-weekly mowing and you do chemicals and stuff for people. The nice thing about that, while it is recurring revenue that is constant, it is also your best marketing tool. So if my truck is at your house every day, I'm the first guy, most of the time, that you're gonna call whenever you're like, I need a little retaining wall. I wonder if this guy also does that. Uh, so that was pretty much all of our lead generation for like two years, where the hundred or two or so people that we mowed every week ended up being the people that we did landscape for. And until we got in with some like high-end builders and pool builders and designers and things like that, which is now the main source of our lead generation, it was just the people that saw us every week. Um so yeah, that's kind of how we got those first 10.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Right. And I think the message there is it's like you see, like you said, you see everything online and the glamour of it, and a lot of people want that. And ultimately the answer is just start doing it and just start with that first. Maybe it's a a flyer on the mailbox or a post on on next door. Um, the key is though you just just start and chip away, and consistency over time equals success. I'm curious. So when I was doing it, there were you know, my big driver was on next door. The and I I think that's obviously highly saturated at this point, but I'm curious if there was anything like that when you guys got started where maybe it was an online tool to just get the name out, or was it literally just knocking on doors?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Dude, we we were pretty big on next door or when we were younger for sure. I haven't looked at nextdoor or done any of that in a long time. Even Angie's list for a while, like we would go on there, but it gets really expensive because they charge you for every lead, and sometimes they charge you whether the lead pans out or not. Um, we also did a couple little programs, like whenever, and this kind of ties back into you know how to make a little bit of cash in the winter time to keep the lights on. We would do this like mulch pre-sale. So we would send out a flyer to every MO customer, and we would go door to door to every neighborhood that we mowed in and drop off a flyer. And it would basically be if you pay us for mulch now, we will install it on the date of your choice. So you pay us 50% of the you know, mulch now, and you get a huge discount per yard installed, and you choose when we install it. Um, and that was pretty popular. People were like, Yeah, I'll pay, you know, whatever, 70 bucks a yard as opposed to 100 bucks a yard installed if you know, and pay you now, and then have you guys come do it in May or April. And that was kind of a successful little program for us, and it it helped us get our name up there too.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

I like that. So you've got to this point where, okay, we're all in on the business, you've joined forces. Um, how would you advise somebody who is going from that stage of they've got maybe 30, 50 weekly uh mowing clients, and they want to go to what you have on your side is called the the l'entrepreneur, which I think is a great term because it adds a little bit more of a professionalism uh to this industry because I mean, there's so much money to be made in it, but like we've talked about, a lot of it is the neighborhood kid who's just pushing around his mower. What are the levers? Maybe it's you know, one to three levers that somebody needs to pull to level up to that point of being a true business owner or a l'entrepreneur, as you put it.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah, I would say first, and we talk about this with our guys every week, is our people pay us for a perfect product. So your product has to stand out because the neighborhood kid cannot stripe 48-inch perfect lines every week with perfectly sharp blades. He just can't, it's just not in his forte. He doesn't have$15,000 mowers, he doesn't have the experience, and so that's a perfect product. And it doesn't have to come with a$15,000 mower. But if your if your product isn't setting you apart, then there's no the next two levers or whatever are not gonna matter. So first step, perfect your craft, perfect your product. I would say second step would be, and we talked about this kind of briefly before we got on here, would knowing your numbers. Like with a perfect product comes the ability to charge kind of a premium for that. And you have to, you know, decide what that is and what that looks like with your overhead and what your customer base is willing to pay. But if you have a perfect product, you can charge for it, and they can't argue too much about the price. And if they do, then they may not be your customer. So that third thing is, and we've done this year over year, and it's not because we're too good for people or anything like that. It's just we have to pre-qualify some of our customers, and we've gotten rid of the wrong customers. People that don't use us for a single other service other than just a weekly MO. They complain it's a 10% or 6% increase year over year or whatever. And so, or they're just routed the density is not you know good for our crews, so they got to go way out of the way to get to these people. Uh, those were the kind of things that we started to do to really set ourselves apart.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

That's interesting. I never really consider you hear it, you know, free somewhat frequently, but almost firing your customers when they're not the right ones for you. Uh, that's really interesting because what you think about is okay, let's say you have one bad customer who is always calling in and complaining, um, or they're not willing to do that increase, and there's just a lot of manual work that goes with it. If you lose that customer, but you still you make up for it with a good customer who's paying twice as much, clearly that that value offsets. So it's almost like don't be afraid to get rid of the bad customer if you can replace it with a much better one.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

And you know, it doesn't even have you don't even have to find the next guy to pay double to offset his cost because his cost is gone when he's gone. Because he's taking up so much of your bandwidth and he's calling weekly, he's calling it twice a week, and you're driving to his house to look at something, you know, and it's it's just taking a bunch of time, and your time is valuable. And if that person's costing you more time than they are worth, then it's just time to let someone else take care of them, and that's perfectly okay. You can do it in a professional way, you don't even have to say, Hey, you're a pain in my butt, so I'm I'm cutting you loose. You can just say, Hey, we don't service that area anymore. I apologize, it's been great, you know. Thanks for the business. And they'll find somebody else willing to mow their grass. It's not a big deal, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:24

But a key part of that is in order to be able to do that, you have to have that level of the perfect product. Yeah, um, what are some you mentioned a few of them, and when I'm driving down the road and I see those perfect 45-inch lines, I'm like, God, how do they do that? I mow my yard and it doesn't look like that. What are some of like maybe two to three tips? How do you deliver a perfect product in the landscaping space?

SPEAKER_00 13:49

So, again, Christian, my partner, he runs all the turf stuff, but I will say you don't want me on your mower because that uh you will not get a perfect product. I'm not good at it. My guys are surgical, so it's time, it's a hundred percent just time on that equipment, it's sharp blades, and it's just it's like we're twice a week sharpening because our guys are hitting 30 properties a day, something like that, and that beats those blades down. And I would say you're you start up, go to Harbor Freight, get a bench grinder, watch some YouTube videos, figure out exactly how to keep those blades perfect, and that's gonna give you your best bang for your buck to start. And then, you know, trimming, blowing, all of that, nice neat lines, take that extra couple minutes. It might mean you can't get one less property a day done, but it means the properties you did get done are gonna be willing to take a five, six percent increase the next season, and then bam, you've more than paid for the property you didn't get done at the end of that day with less work.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

So, how do you mention the five to six percent increase? How do you kind of go about knowing what to charge for the product? And obviously, there's confidence in your product when you know when you're increasing it every year, but how do you kind of find the line between, hey, this is too much? Obviously, if you do five to six percent every year after 20 years, that's gonna be quite the expensive lawn. How do you find that balance of what to charge?

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Well, I would love to say that we have all that 100% figured out, but I'd say I think no business has exactly figured that out, at least at our size, right? Uh, and I can speak from the construction aspect on that, because on on as far as like mowing prices, maybe we have Christian on here sometime and he can tell you all about that stuff. But I can tell you that our labor rates have gone up. The markup on my materials have gone up just a little bit. Materials themselves have gone up. I have to charge for equipment now that I didn't own two years ago that we used to, you know, go rent or just do without, and it would take a whole extra day to do it because now we don't, you know, now we own a loader or an excavator or whatever. Um, but as far as like what to charge, the market can dictate that. Your customer can dictate that a little bit based on your success rate on closing these things. But I, you know, there's a guy that I've listened to in the past, he owns uh Lean Scaper, I can't remember his name right now, but he basically was like, if your close rate is over 55 to 60 percent with customers on these big projects, then you're probably a little too cheap. Unless you're just bad in the room, you know. But if you're a good salesperson and you're getting, you know, 55 to 60 percent of people not questioning your pricing, saying rock and roll, go ahead, then it might be time to look at your pricing and say, Am I, you know, leaving money on the table here?

SPEAKER_01 16:46

And again, it's that same thing of maybe someone who's in that situation has the fear of, well, I'm gonna win less jobs if I do that. But if your price is higher, you can afford to have less jobs. So you're doing less work and making the same amount of money. Um, I mean, yeah, pricing is definitely a struggle of where to find it in every single industry. One thing you've mentioned, obviously you're on the construction side. How do you get into that going from landscape or uh, you know, turf to construction? What are sort of the keys you mentioned having contacts with builders, um, you know, pool builders? How do you get into that space where the margins are a lot higher?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Uh, well, you got to try it and you got to fail at it a few times, and then you kind of get some good product out there and people see it, and then they they want you to recreate that at their house. So I think back to like the first patio we did with my guys, and we were so and we we were so cheap and we had no idea what we were doing, and we lost a ton of money on it. I don't even it's it's probably been six years, so I I don't even remember the the the figures on it. Um, but I remember being there for you know way too long and the customer not being happy until the very end after we had put a whole extra week of unpaid time on it, you know. So I would say getting into construction is it takes a willingness to try, unless you've got a guy on staff that kind of knows what he's doing already, which we had a little bit of that. A couple of my guys had some experience. I had some experience, but it was nothing compared to what we have now. And so we just kind of jumped off the cliff and and went and did this patio, lost our butts on it, and and sat down after and said, Hey, what went right, what went wrong on that, and then took that into the next few. Uh we kind of our journey here to do this real big stuff that we've done over the last three years has been kind of interesting because we got in with a freelance landscape designer, we hired him a few times, and then lots of people hire him. And so he would have clients that would say, Hey, I hired you for design. Do you have a landscaper? And we did a few jobs that he designed for us. He saw the finished product on that, brings us back to that perfect product. He said, These guys are pretty good at this. So whenever my clients ask, Is there anybody out there you recommend? He's now comfortable recommending us. So that's a big lead generation for us, and it's all high-end business that we want to be in.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Yeah, I think that is when we're talking about how Turf has the recurring model to it, when you're looking at the construction side, having those sources that are basically a referral or you know, an affiliate, if you will, where you can have maybe 10 to 12 referrals and they bring you the recurring business in the same way that you have the recurring business on the other side. If you have those levers and you have this the system in place, you can kind of have that same sort of outcome on the construction side with the right people in place. So we've talked about knowing your numbers. Touch on that a little bit more. What is the importance? I mean, it seems obvious knowing the difference between your top line and bottom line, but yeah, you know, maybe talk about why so many people forget that um and just how that's been important for you.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Well, I'll I'll just use us as an example. Year over year, we've grown massively from revenue standpoint, like crazy, crazy growth over the last five years. Um and we're in a in a kind of a position that every small business our size gets into, where you're in that like two to five million dollar revenue range, and you can't afford to not have office staff, and you can't afford to have office staff. And so what happens is Christian and I, and this happens to a lot of guys in the trades, is he and I are out in the field every day, or I'm meeting with a customer, or I'm at a lunch, or I'm selling, or I'm dropping a machine off to the guys because you know they're already trailers are full, whatever it is. And then that is that leaves nighttime pretty much for me to come back here and go through all of the spreadsheets and all of the costs of the day and things like that, uh, to figure out exactly what each job is costing us to do. And are we hitting our numbers? And so for years and years it was not a priority, and for years and years we were banging our head against the wall, making watching a lot of money just kind of fall through our hands um until the last two years where we really made it a priority, and especially this year, of knowing what every dollar in this business is attributed to, um and making sure that it does not exceed what we estimated on the project. And if it did, then you know, how do we avoid that on the next one? Or was it in the contract and does it need to be a change order? Things like that.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

That's I mean what This seems like it's a a big issue with the specific place you're at and the scale. Talk about some of the other issues. Like what is the most pressing issue that you guys have at while you're at this pace of sort of that exponential growth?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Labor cost, I would say, is number one. So peak season, we've got 15 to 16 guys on staff. Um, and it's not really like your guys' fault, but at the end of the day, if it's your business, the people that work for your business for the most part are not going to care about your business as much as you do. Doesn't make them bad people, doesn't mean they're taking advantage of you. It just means that they are gonna they gotta go feed their families, so they're gonna clock every hour they can, and they don't really care how productive they are within that hour unless you're out there watching them, which you can't be. So labor is a huge expense, and it's making sure that all of that labor is paid for by a customer. And it that doesn't mean like uh you know, attributing extra hours to some other contract, you know, to try to make up for this loss over here, because you can't do that. You get caught doing that, or you it's just not right, and you're gonna be in all sorts of issues with that. But what that means is making sure that your guys understand milestones per project, per count, per contract that have to be hit within X amount of hours. So it's hey, I bid 40 hours on this project. We need to be here by our, you know, man hour 10. We need to be here by man hour 20, here by 30, and finished by 40. And if all of that happens on budget, then everybody gets to eat a little bit of a pie here. Because you know, we do a little bit of profit sharing on every project, and that seems to help the guys kind of stay on track, especially if when they know what we have attributed going in.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Okay, so let's dive into that a little bit more, the like the specific systems. So it sounds like you go to a job and you're estimating it. First step, and correct me if I'm wrong, and then I'll kind of pass it back to you here. But first step is what is the total scope of the project? And then you go, you know, okay, for the scope, or you know, part A, here's the materials, and here's the expected amount of time. Part B, here's materials, here's expected amount of time, and kind of block that out, and then portraying that onto the team of here's the expectations. Is that kind of the the strategy you go for estimating a bid? And then follow-up question of that is how what systems are you know, is it a technology stack that you have in place? How are you making sure all of this is actually getting done? Because it's easy to say these things, but how do you actually implement it?

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Yeah, so first, yes, that's pretty much correct. Whenever I'm going to look at a project, no matter how big the scope, whether it's a$500,000 project or a$10,000 project, all it boils down to is how many hours are we going to be there and exactly what materials are required to complete the project. And that's the same across the board. So I can either go there by myself and it, you know, let's say it's a$100,000 project. I'm going to go there, I'm going to walk around with the customer. We're going to get a design in place. The design's going to account for every square inch of material that I'm going to need. And then I can bring, you know, my foreman there and I can walk him around and we can look at the design. And I can say, hey, here's my hour estimate. I want your hour estimate. And usually those are about the same. And so then, okay, you've, this foreman who's going to do this job has now agreed to these amount of hours that I'm going to send to the customer. Once the customer agrees to that contract, we show up that day. I've got the work orders, I've got the design. I say, here's how we want to phase it out. I kind of leave it up to the foreman a little bit, but I say, you know, you tell me how do you want to phase this thing out. He tells me. We set those parameters per you know, man hour, and then we check in at the end. And what we do, we use some softwares to keep track of that. We've recently signed with Aspire, which is a management software. Uh, we were using Jobber before that, and it pretty much allows us to, you know, job cost and create estimates and using our man hour cost. It it calculates our overhead, all of that fun stuff. But we also, on top of that, we just use an Excel spreadsheet that we built that's got, you know, everybody's name, how many hours, and it and it's got a column for every single item that we purchase, and we're pretty much just at the end of the day putting in those receipts into that along with everybody's hours to make sure that we're on track.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

And is this something that you guys are doing, or now that you have Office Admin, you've passed on to them? Um, how have you kind of distributed the workload of who's doing what as you've grown?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

No, it's it's still totally Christian and I. And then next year, I would it's a big goal of ours to get full time, just at least one person in the office that does nothing but job cost and answer the phones and do the financials. But right now, yeah, it's we're still in that spot where it's it's us.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Got it. Okay. What is a healthy profit margin for a landscaping business? If you're looking at this and you're saying you've got all this information and you're trying to come up with the price, how do you determine where to set that? What's good, what's bad?

SPEAKER_00 27:30

I think across the board, industry standard would tell you that like your average landscape company is making somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of revenue. Uh, on our projects, are we're typically closer to 35, and we're trying to offset grounds because maintenance has a little bit slimmer, right? At like a 12 to 14. And so that puts us usually right around a 25% PM for the year, something like that. Um yeah, I mean, that's been healthy for us. We haven't really been able to exceed that, and I don't know that you could. Right. Uh, there's little services that are gonna bring you more profit than others, and you can really make those focus on making those, you know, part big parts of your business, like chemicals. Chemicals have the biggest profit margin, but they're also kind of the least fun, least sexy part about what we do, but it's gotta be done.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Anything else in terms of those high profit margin areas to focus on?

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Well, chemicals, snow has a crazy high profit margin, but it's also got a crazy margin of being miserable. Um, construction can have a really great profit margin, and then irrigation, irrigation maintenance and installation is another thing that's a lot of headache, but it's a lot of profit.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Interesting. Okay, so now that you have this profit margin, where are the best places to deploy that? So let's say at the end of the year, you're, I mean, which is right now, you're looking okay, here's the profit we made looking into 2026. How do you determine, you know, are we what are we taking off the table versus what are we putting back into the business? And for what you do put back into the business, where does that money go?

SPEAKER_00 29:16

I can tell you that Christian and I take very little off the table, and we're still there year seven, because we want to see this thing grow, grow, grow. And I see every year I see young guys younger than me or my age, they're buying a boat or a lake house or whatever that they can't afford, and they're putting themselves deep into debt, and they're taking money off the table and spending it out of the business, and their business sputters out and goes away. And so we want to be here for the long haul. And, you know, I'm 31 years old and I just got married last year. We don't have any kids. Christian's a little younger than me, he's unmarried, doesn't have kids. We don't need to be rich right now. We live okay, you know. But we do want this thing to grow and we want it to be something substantial over the next 10 to 15 years, and I think we can pull that off. So that's the first thing. We don't take a lot out. Uh, the way to deploy it, it depends on your business. But like we've talked about the seasonality of this business, you know, from just from pretty much Christmas to the end of February, unless you're pushing snow and or you have like a big wall project or something like that, and the ground's not frozen, you're just watching money go out and not a ton of it's coming in. So you have to have a big old nest egg for the end of the year to pay your overhead. And with that, after three months of watching money just go out and not come in, the most expensive time of year for us is March and April. So we're now buying nursery stock, we're buying, you know, fuel, chemicals, mulch. The guys are all coming in. We're going out and doing, you know, spring cleanups and starting projects and having to service equipment, purchase equipment, all you know, things like that. So on top of that wintertime slowdown, your most expensive season is right after that. So you really have to be mindful because this business can be a cash-eating monster. And if you're not careful, it can get away from you quick.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Hmm. Yeah, it's gotta be. I'm trying to think of another industry that has that sort of unique component to it where it's money-making, money-making, and then it kind of all cuts off with a few sporadic things in between, and then not it doesn't just sort of slowly ease into it. It's it's that the second that's over, it's all going into place. That's it's a tough challenge to have. Um, it is. And I mean, what are some of the ways? Is it really just having that nest egg at the end of the day that that's what kind of keeps it going?

SPEAKER_00 32:03

Um, again, I we're not a perfect business. We struggle in a lot of aspects, but I will say Christian and I have done a pretty good job over the years of really looking at our expenditures and trying to be smart and trying not to make big purchases in the wintertime, unless it's like a tax, you know, necessity or something like that, or it's a piece of equipment that we have to buy uh because we're spending much more on renting it or something like that. But yeah, you just have to kind of lay low and keep your head down in the wintertime and try to keep expenditures low. And that's kind of the only thing that's that's pretty much all there is. There is no secret to making it through the winter. You just gotta hold that hold on to that cash at the end of the year and be smart about it. And that's another reason not to take a bunch out and send yourself to Italy or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

Like I want to exactly okay. So let's talk about the team. Um, how do you go about sort of training the team and building that team up? And walk me through the importance of training and sort of the investment versus the payoff of that.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Yeah, so training is ask any landscape business, us included, what do you train? How do you train? What's your training program? And it's gonna be we hire a guy, when can you start? Great Monday morning, throw him on a crew, and then ask the crew a week later, how's that guy doing? By the way, that's you know, industry standard. Um, and so training is going to be and has been for a little while this year a big focus for us going forward. Because we want our guys, and it it it ties it all ties in. You want your guys to have ownership, you want them to be accountable for every hour, you want them to understand that when they break something, it costs money, and that that hurts the bottom line. Uh, and what better way to do that than to train them up to standard and have them know the ins and outs of this business as well as Christian and I do. And so that's kind of what we've implemented here is our our two. We have two managers now uh underneath us. And we send them to industry training, you know, through Unilock or Paper Supplier, Site One is a is a landscape supplier, and and they bring that stuff back and they kind of teach it to the guys, and then also we share financials with them, we share, you know, job breakdowns at the end of the at the end of the job with them and kind of keep them as educated as we possibly can.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

What does the structure look like for this type of business? There's the owners, the managers, but walk walk me through the organizational structure and how you kind of put that together as you scale.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Yeah, so there's Christian and I, we're the owners, and we have pretty much just been the only managers for like four years. And then we started to try to get away from that because when Christian, we're we're not always reachable. We've gotten to a point where, again, we're either with a customer, we're in the field, something like that. The guys cannot always pick up the phone and get Christian or I. Uh, so we were like, well, we need a couple managers, we need some guys that can drive around, keep the guys accountable, and aren't afraid to, you know, jump them a little bit if they have to. Uh, so we hired one guy, or we, you know, we promoted from within on one of our first manager, and he runs kind of our project side. And all the guys report to him. And underneath him, of those two project crews, each of those crews has a crew leader or a foreman. And then so it's going from me to his name is Israel, the manager, goes to him, and then it goes to Teddy, who is a foreman on crew one, and Axel, who is a foreman on crew two. And and then he they've got their three employees under each crew member or each crew leader. So that's how that breaks down. And it's the same way on maintenance. So we've got a maintenance and irrigation manager underneath Christian, and then of those teams, there, those are two man teams, but one one of those two guys is a crew leader on each of those maintenance crews, the mowing crews. And again, that just kind of helps, even though it's only two guys, but whoever's driving that truck typically is that crew leader, and it it keeps that crew accountable.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Talk about promoting from within a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

Well, some people or some companies are afraid to do this because it is difficult for a guy to go from your peer to your boss, and that can be a kind of a funky transition. I think it's gone pretty well for us. And I think whenever you promote from within and you outline what it takes to be successful and grow in your company, then again, it it just everyone in the company wants some ownership. They all they all take ownership, they all want to be that guy above them, and they want that pay scale, they want that company truck, and they want that title. And if you show them the path to get there, then when they come to you, there's another problem in this industry or problem, another thing in this industry is that every year over year your guys are gonna come to you and they're gonna say, Well, it's been another year. I want I want to raise. And if you have no path for them to climb, and you can't say, Here are the five things you have to do within this company this year to achieve that next level, then you don't really have much of a leg to stand on whenever they come to you and ask you for a raise and you don't think they deserve it. But if you say, here are the five things that I, you know, need from you to become a crew leader or to be an A or a B technician or whatever it is, then and you have done four of them. So as soon as I see that fifth thing start to happen over the next couple of months, come back in. I'll call you back into my office and we'll talk and we'll get you that raise. And so then they have an actual, you know, process to look at on how to how to get paid more than just being there, you know, being a warm body for a year. And you know, I I think that there is something to longevity within a company to get paid more, but there's also you got to bring something to the table.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Absolutely. And it you it also increases retention, right? Especially in an industry where I'd imagine the turnover is is fairly high, having the ability to say, okay, well, you know, you're here now, but here are the five steps to move up. It gives them sort of a light at the end of the tunnel and probably prevents people from saying, okay, well, I'm just gonna go find another job. It creates that sort of career path that they might not have had otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Awesome. So, where where do we go from here? What is the future of Hassle Free look like? Um, obviously the growth has been great, but where do you kind of want to see this going? And what's I guess what's kind of the the near-term goal and what is the ultimate long-term goal?

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Sure. The near-term goal is continue to be getting more dialed in. Um, we want to really, really be just be organized, be a system machine. I want this thing to be able to run. If Christian and I decided to leave for six months, I want this business to be able to run without us. Um now, obviously, that's a lofty goal. And when you're an entrepreneur and you have a small business, what happens is you ultimately become the business. Uh, and you know, it's like my a lot of most of my big customers have my cell phone. They don't even know the office number. They probably don't even know we have an office number. And they're calling me direct. And what I'd love to get to, I'd I I do want to take care of my big customers and I want to talk to them, and I want to take them to, you know, lunch and Chiefs games and whatever it is. But at the end of the day, if they have a question about product or install or timeline, I do want there to be a manager there that can answer that for them because that allows me to go out and sell and to be the face and to bring on more big customers. So that's first immediate goal is is move incrementally closer to being able to step away from the business. Um, and then long term, you know, it's continued steady growth. Again, I don't care if we become a$30 million a year landscape business. I just want to be a 25% profit margin landscape business, and I want everybody to get paid. And I've long said, you know, we've got we've got managers that make great money here. If my guys make more than me, I don't really care. I just they got to take things off my plate if they want to get paid more. So um that's kind of our ultimate goal. I don't know that if we plan to build this thing up massively and sell it, I doubt that's kind of the path. Christian and I have not really talked about a 15-year down the road what we would do. But, you know, I would again, if the business is running itself and we've got managers and general managers that kind of can do a lot of our roles, then I don't see a reason why we would want to get rid of this thing.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

Absolutely. And I mean, just the the ability to have those systems in place, it gives you that freedom of choice where if you have a system, you become 10 times more sellable, if you will, than somebody who is doing everything on paper. And if they walk away, the business isn't going to run. But it also gives you the freedom to say, hey, I'm just gonna step away and the business will continue to run. So it gives you that freedom to take that choice. And then another thing that I've realized at having these conversations, obviously, you're a younger guy and the trades industry is is starting to skew younger, but having these systems and the technology in place and implementing these uh processes into businesses like this can have such a huge impact and differentiator when the guy who's been running it for 50 years is doing everything on paper, and you have an incredibly dialed-in system with great technology in place. It's just another way to differentiate yourself. So love the idea of building out the systems. Blake, where can people find you and who do you want to reach out to? Whether it's you know, people looking for a job, people looking for services, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 42:56

Dude, I mean our website and our Instagram. I think we're Hasslefree Outdoor KC on Instagram, and I think we're hasslefreelawns.com online. Um we love servicing Kansas City. I love the people here, I love you know the projects we get into. We seem to be in a great market. It can be a little saturated, but again, if you set yourself apart, you have a good product, and you know, you don't have to be the cheapest guy, just be the best guy. That's where you'd rather be. And and the best can be totally up to you, you know. It doesn't mean the most expensive materials, it doesn't mean the flashiest projects, but if someone hires you to build a 10 foot retaining wall that's a foot high, you know, and it's gonna be one day of work, it it should be perfect. Just make it as perfect as you can. Take pride in that and take care of your people.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Beautiful. Well, thanks so much, Blake.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Thanks, man.