4 Lessons That Made My Lawn Care Business Insanely Profitable

0:00Starting out, $35 now, to a four different moments that completely changed the way I think. And I expected to lose maybe half my clients. I hardly lost any. At the same time as running a business, the truth was I was not doing either very well. In fact, I was doing them quite poorly. There are certain clients that they're just not worth your time. And the reality that happened changed my mind forever. Welcome to today's episode of the Australian Law and a Garden podcast. My name is Luke and I'll be running a Law and a Garden business for over 12 years. And in that time, I went from a 19-year-old who was running out of the back of his extra doing whatever job he could get overgrown clean-ups, whatever I could do, starting out $35 now, to now where we do everything done by employees, full-team, multiple private schools, all high-end stuff. And I am thinking back today and I want to share some stories to you because reminiscing today, I realized there were four different moments that completely changed the way I think. And these were lessons that someone told me that took on, there were tangible moments

1:01in my business that genuinely changed everything and how we operated. And I want to share them to you because my goal today is that if you can learn these lessons without having to go through what I went through, you're going to have major, major head starts on me. And that's my goal. What I do with this podcast, the heart of it, I like entertaining people, I like recording fun episodes, having a good laugh. But the real goal I have is that I've had a lot of struggle in business, I don't consider myself a business genius, I consider myself somebody who made a lot of mistakes and somehow got through them. And I want to help you avoid those mistakes and for yourself to have some great success in your business. So here are those four stories. Let's start with the first one. In 2016, I was trying to make the Rio Paralympic Games. There's a whole story in that, but here's the synopsis of it. When I was 14, I was diagnosed with a debilitating condition. I had the juvenile version of it then and I lost 30% of the range of movement, permanent bone erosion in my feet, I lost some rotation in my ankles, I saw it in my hip.

2:04And that classified me as the least affected swimmer, and I could out of all the categories that they were. So I would swim against people who were maybe missing a hand or mild cerebral palsy. And I was genuinely an international level swimmer. And I was trying to make the 2016 Paralympic Games at the same time as running a business. And the truth was I was not doing either very well. In fact, I was doing them quite poorly. The long and short of it was that at that time was the toughest season I'd ever been in business. I was waking up at 350 in the morning. I was getting home at night at 10 past eight. And I was not anywhere near making the Paralympic Games. And I was losing money because I had an employee who despite the fact that I was actually quite good at certain things. I was not running systems or I was not doing a lot of things well. And the end result, and this is all you need to know for this story because what happens after it's most important. The end result is I did not make the Paralympic Games. And I came out of that in $27,000 of debt to the ATO. I ended up mutually with that employee. We agreed to move on, part our ways. And I was going

3:10through winter with enough work for two people, which made it quite a busy winter. And I was looking for employees. What happened next is the biggest thing that changed my mind on pricing because I was pretty good at pricing. I was pretty good at quoting, I thought I was quite confident. But the mental shift that happened is crazy because here's the story. I was trying to find employees. I was trying to get people to fill that gap with the employee they used to have. Winter was fast finishing, spring was approaching. I could manage it on my, I was doing 40, 45 hours in winter. I was really struggling. I remember one day I was running behind on work and I ended up having to do 33 site visits in a day. I didn't finish all the jobs, but I drove to 33 locations. I think I did about 25, 26 jobs in a day because I'd been rain and everything had held up. And so I was struggling. I was not able to get through everything on my own. And spring is drawing nearer, nearer. And I've been looking for people, jobs on seek multiple interviews that I could not find someone I had offered jobs to people that hadn't accepted. I had someone start didn't work very well. So spring's fast

4:14approaching and I can't find somebody. And in my head, I was really expensive already. I was already around $100 an hour back then, 2016. This is 10 years ago. And so I had two options, keep persisting trying to find an employee or raise my prices. And so I did the second. And this is where the major shift happened. I thought I was at the top of the pile in terms of alley rate pricing. And I didn't think the market, my clients would accept much of a raise. I thought if I raised my price 20%, I'd probably lose half my clients. But I realized that that season couldn't find an employee. That's what I wanted. So going to spring, going from one month, I visit every four weeks in winter to a visit every two weeks in spring, I raised all my prices across the board for everybody to become in line with my highest earning clients. Which is a very smart move to do. Should have done it earlier. I expected an average. It was an average increase

5:15across the board of 20%. And I expected to lose maybe half my clients. And the reality that happened changed my mind forever because I hardly lost any. And I had this brilliant problem to have in that I still had way too much work. But I was only 20% more. And this shift happened in my mind because I realized that every single time that I had held back my pricing, because the thought of wouldn't be accepted, it was simply just a mental idea that I had between my own ears. It wasn't the reality of what was happening out in the world. And so I realized I had been holding myself back. And by the way, all those financial problems that I had the year before, because the employee were not because the employee, they'll be because of me and my incorrect pricing. But really that incorrect pricing came from a lack of confidence. And the thing that shattered this is this concept right here. Confidence comes when your opportunity exceeds your capacity. When you have 10, 15 jobs that you

6:20have to do when you can only fit in eight. Right. There's 15 requests you can only fit in eight. You become a healthy kind of arrogant. And I'm not talking about somebody who is mean and nasty. I'm just talking about somebody who is very comfortable to say, no, you're not actually good enough for me. You never word it that way. But there are certain clients that they're just not worth your time. And that's when things start going really well in business. And I had for that time, I started my business in 2013. It was I started my business back then. I struggled to get clients early days. Once I started getting cars three years in and I thought I had it worked out and the truth is I was nowhere near what the market was. And my question for you on this first lesson is, are you like I was back then? And you think you're charging high. Remember I said I'm averaging a lot of these jobs around $100 now back then 10 years ago. I thought I was really high, but the market had a lot more. So what I ended up having moving forward, I did find a casual

7:21person to help me out. And that whole season, that whole season from then on, I was really quite flippant with the quotes. I was just throwing out all sorts of I don't want to do a price. And it was being absolutely shocked until eventually the nail was hit in my head long enough. Someone drove at home and eventually I realized that I should not have been surprised. I was completely basing my estimations off pure gut feel. And that is never a good place to be in business. You want actual data to make those decisions. And after a year of that, the next financial year, I did $155,000 doing between 25 and 30 hours a week worth of work adjusted for inflation. I did this before. It's about $198,000 in today's money. And that was the last year that in the year after which I, both years, I was very very similar to those numbers with the last years I ever were and so when you look at that and I did have a little bit of offside help, like I said,

8:22but about 90% of the income was coming from me. And so that is a major shift. Once that happened, I was 24, I think at the time, 23, something like that. And that shift that happened in my mind was purely circumstantial. It wasn't a lesson. It was something that was, I was in essence, forced to do. And that's one of the reasons why I said, I don't think I'm a business genius. I kind of stumbled into this kind of stuff. This is not like I had this grandmaster plan. But here's the opportunity that you have to steal my experience and go hold on a second. How many of the clients that I think couldn't afford a single cent more actually can? How much of my financial problems are simply between my head? That's the very first lesson. Opportunity, when it exceeds your capacity, when you're getting 10 quits, 15 quits more, and you might say, well, practically how do I do that? Keep marketing. Keep putting yourself out there. Keep asking for reviews, asking for references from people. Do that work there. And it will eventually come. Now, here's the very next lesson

9:27though. And I hear you speaking down the camera to me saying, well, if opportunity is what I want, and I want to get a lot of people through the door, the problem is, Luke, I don't feel comfortable putting myself out there. I feel like I'm not very good at my job. And so how can I get confidence if I don't have confidence to start with? It's like this perpetual downhill snowballing effect. But I have an answer for you because I have another story. Around that period of time, I, again, was pretty new in business. I was three years in, maybe into the fourth year. This is around 2017 at the time. I had an admin employee who was fantastic. You know, Google, Facebook, all these other places. There was all these businesses out there, high pages, lots of stuff. So many businesses in my area. And every time I wanted to get a quote, even though I still had the confidence now, because I knew I didn't really care if they accepted it or not, I had way too much

10:28work. I was really curious because I was like, how many of these guys, what's my price like, how many of them are doing pretty good stuff? What am I like compared to the competition? And I used to think back then that it was a really hot race. It was really tight and competitive as market because there were so many people out there. And so I tested it out. The idea I'm going to get to is called why called compared to who? Because a lot of us don't have confidence in ourselves. And I'm going to get to the story in a second, but we don't have confidence in ourselves because we are comparing ourselves to an idea. And the question is, does that idea or that ideal, I should have said, the ideal person that you're comparing yourself to, they really exist? Are your competition really as good as you think they are? Are they really as competent? And so do you lack confidence and do you find yourself shooting yourself down because of an idea you have or is this reality? So were you winning it and we tested it? And I had an admin employee at

11:29the time who had a work phone for us and she had her own phone. So she used that phone. And we had a client. This was a little bit sneaky. I'll be honest, it was sneaky. Judge me if you want. That's okay. We had a client who was never home. They worked away for long periods of time. And we knew that they were not going to be home. And they had a nice big corner front lawn. And so we just sent out a message and to a bunch of people saying, Hey, we've got this job. Could you please quote it pretending that we were that client? We sent out to 10 people. Only two ever came back with quits. Most of them never replied. And we were following up, we were checking on them. And something shifted in my brain that I had had this idea that my competition were really competitive, really quite good. And the reality was that administratively at least, I don't know how their jobs were like, but administratively at least they were very difficult to deal with. We did this again about three or four years later in a completely different area. And it was actually my a family member at the time

12:34who genuinely needed some work done. And I said, Hey, look, can you just let me know by call around a couple of people and see what it's like. You know, they were kind of outside of that area. They were thinking about getting it done. And they did. And their experience was the same. They called about 10 people and most of them did not get back to them and two came through with quits. And when I started realizing that and this is something obviously that was developed over years, we did this test and consistently applied. We realized we were absolutely the best business in the areas that we were serving for administration. And that was because we had a dedicated administration staff member who was working from home and able to answer those calls. That again was a major change in the confidence that I had. So the question I have for you is, are you holding yourself back? Do you lack confidence because you're the type of character that does beat themselves down? That is super critical. That gets a big stick and waxed themselves over the head with it. When

13:35when in reality, if you were to really compare yourself against the people that your clients are also calling them quotes, you're actually smacking them out of the park. You're actually doing a great job. And the answer is there's only one way to find out. And that is to go start making some calls, to go start requesting to go call and see what happens to send messages and see what happens. And some people feel like this is sneaky business practices. I'll leave that up to you. But I think that the reality is is that most of the competitors out there are actually not that good administratively. They're not that good. And you have a major opportunity. And maybe again, some of the beating up that you're doing on yourself, some of this, the self doubt and the lack of confidence is not based in reality. It's just between your head. The third thing that holds people back mentally stops him from becoming unstoppable is the whole quoting process. They have no idea where to start. This is especially a revel a relevant for people who are starting out in the

14:35industry. But also for a lot of you out there, what you've been doing for the longest time is you have been doing this concept that I call vibe quoting. You go to a job, you look at the job, you have a look around and you go, uh, based on my experience, I think that'll be 70 bucks. I think it'll be 250 bucks, whatever the job is. And you see these posts on pages like our lawnmowering contractors, Australia, people send it, hey, how much do you think this is worth? And other people get annoyed at it. I didn't get annoyed at it. Well, I wish I had that resource when I was two years in business, one year in business that would have been very, very helpful. But the question is, the question is asked, I should say, because there is a lack of confidence, and that lack of confidence comes because you're just vibing it. And when you all know what happens, a lot of us don't like quoting when somebody else there, like the client is there, because they see the process you do and they realize that you're kind of just pulling the number out of your backside sometimes. You can't just look around and have a, have a stab at it and go, ah, this looks like a

15:37$90 one. And then they go, why is it 90 bucks? And you don't really have an answer sometimes. And you go, ah, well, it's this and that and everything, but you know they know that you can't just pull the number. You can't, you're making it up, because you've got a little bit of evidence there. You've got a little bit of now's there, but you're kind of making it up. And this, this spec causes people to really lack confidence in their pricing. And their pricing is the second most important thing that you have in business. The number one most important thing in business is that your client's expectation is exceeded by your work, even if just by one, one percent. So your client expects a quality job. You be that, they're happy. That's the first thing you need to do in business. The second thing that's most important is to have pricing that is at least good enough that you can continue doing the business, right? You're not running like I was $27,000 into debt with the ATO. So this second part of business, people go to these

16:42quotes and they have no idea where to start. They have no idea what to think. I had been quite a confident person. And some people, while I'd like me and you rock up to a job and you're absolutely fine. And you just talk it way out of it. You're pretty good at just making up some stuff and you say, yeah, that's $200 job based on these factors. It's kind of you at Groce Creek and you're still kind of making up rubbish. The biggest change happened when we started measuring jobs. We started making a system. This happened straight after that period where I lost that money. When I lost that money, I had my employee quoting for me and I realized that while I decided to give them some very, very basic square meter rates to work with, it was not a very well thought out business plan at all. It was too simplistic. It wasn't working so I started measuring jobs. And over the years, I measured over 10,000 mowing jobs and come up with a formula that we kept secret for the longest time. We put it into an app and we, like I said, we kept that secret and we would give that system to our employees. What happened confidence-wise

17:45went through the roof because the employees would go and measure the job. The app would tell them what the price was and the client would say, yeah, how'd you come with that price? And they go, well, actually, our boss has measured thousands of jobs and this has come out with what the pricing formula should be. End of conversation. No haggling? It's either yes or no. And what you found is so many of the times it was yes because they were really impressed that we had a system like that. Now we kept that secret for the longest time and anyone who's been listening for more than two minutes knows that it's now released as the moquat app. And I, by the way, have been very, very quiet on this because we have some major releases coming out. It's, yeah, it's incredible. What's coming out is awesome, super, super helpful stuff and the accuracy of our quality algorithm is going to be awesome. I've been measuring the speed of lawn mowers with lasers. That's all I'm going to say. And right on mowing's coming out very soon and free trials are coming out very soon. So hold in there. But what idea was you created this app? We made it so people

18:48don't go quote these jobs accurately. Now I'll just be 100% honest with you. I don't really care if you go, I don't want to buy an app for 25 bucks a month. That doesn't bother me at all. Here's my advice to you. Go make a system. Go make some pricing system. If you want to make it yourself and you want to go measure your jobs and find out the way that you do it, go do it. Right. If you go, I can't be bothered doing that. I'm just going to go download the app, download the app. Either way, what I'm saying to you is this, when you have a system like that and you know it's accurate and you know you haven't put it out of your backside, when you go and quote those jobs, you have a steel spine because somebody comes to you and goes, why is it 90 bucks? Well, before you're vibe coding based on eyeballing everything and just guessing, now you have a system, whether it's made by us or it's made by you, my argument would be that what we have data wise in the team and everything is way better, but even if you made it on your own, even if you made a system on

19:49your own, the steel that would put in your spine to go, no, this is how we quote, this is our system. I think I've naced him from Sharp's Hedges and he's over in Brisbane. He does fantastic work, very high end work and very good guy, people loving him comes from the podcast. He has a flat rate for how he does certain hedging jobs and somebody calls on the phone and he will say, hey, this is what the price is and they will go, yes or no, there's no negotiation there and when somebody goes, hey, why is it that? Well, this is what we pro, for everybody, this is our system, this is how we do it. And it's not just like, oh, that person gets this thing, that person that gets this thing, it's not like that, there's a system there. So system ties your quoting process. So when you rock up to the job, you are absolutely prepared. Now, the bonus lesson in this, which is kind of a lesson on its own, which is something we do, which gives immense confidence when quoting, like sky high confidence when quoting, is that every single job that we have, who messages us from

20:56either that's email, Instagram or text message or call anybody, we have a link where we have our pricing public on our website, at least a price range. And by the way, one day, we will have this with a moco app where you can put your settings in and you can have your pricing based on your moco numbers on your website. So people could just put their data in and it'll come up with a range. That's a whole other podcast from that time. But we've been using this system where you can go and put in your average, put in your square mirage for your job and it will come with a range for our services, which is monthly long care packages. That on its own means that we never go to a quote where somebody hasn't first accepted the price range. Confidence, sky high, you know that they can afford the range that you're already giving, you're just going there to nut out the finer details and to make sure that we are a good fit. That sort of process and again, the opportunity

21:58exceeding your capacity, we have great marketing systems now. So we get so many requests through and we do lose quite a few people because they're pricing so high, but it doesn't matter, we pass them on to other contractors where we're helpful with it and we don't need those jobs and so confidence is so high. But again, when you have a system for quoting, especially when you give a ballpark before you ever get to site, your confidence is through the roof. I think some of you right now are listening to this from realising the difference that these kind of strategies can make and this is not just one of those times. By the way, if you're wiping your face, it is very hot tonight. It's very hot and muggy tonight, so I'm sweating and dying a hole here, but you realise that these systems that we're making are not just like, oh, stand in the mirror, look at yourself and say that you're beautiful 10 times in a row. When deep down, you know, you kind of look like a dump truck. You know, like this is, that stuff's not really helping, right? This stuff is genuine. You have way

22:58more opportunity than you could possibly fulfil. Confidence goes up. You've checked your competition and you're fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses and you realise that you're actually better on a couple of things. Confidence goes up. You're quoting, you have a system, you know that when someone haggles, you can just go, hey, this is my system, it is what it is and they go, okay, you know, like your confidence has up and especially when you're getting a ballpark and the final thing, which is the hardest thing, as the most obvious thing, but it should not be ignored and that is to be genuinely good at something in the industry, something of value as well, not like, not being genuinely funny. That would be good in certain circumstances, but is it going to help you sell more online jobs or more hedge reductions or more top dressing services or whatever you say you do? Probably not. What we have honed in specifically for us is these lawn care packages where we take control of everything and we're very good at solving problems that stop your lawn

24:02from thriving. That's what we do. And so when people that come to us, they go, oh, I want a, I want a, I want a business to take care of everything. I don't have to think about it. We're exceptionally good at that. If you want us to do a whole bunch of other services, we're actually not very good at that. We don't do them, right? If you want me to, for example, press your clean your driveway, I have like a cheap, I press your cleaner than I wash the mowers with, that's all I've got. I can't do, I can't help you for that. If you want me to help identify and solve problems with your gutters, I can't do that. That's not for me. There are avenues that your strengths as a person, as an individual, as a business owner, there are opportunities that those strengths aligned with the services that you do, you have the opportunity to do something exceptional. And when you start becoming genuinely good at something, you're confident it does go sky high, because you have this thing, which is best described as proof. There's no other word

25:08for it, but your confidence is not coming from an opinion, it's coming from proof. And what I mean by that is you have done, like we have done dozens and dozens, maybe over a hundred, born turn arounds. No, we've done more than a hundred for sure. You've done huge numbers, I'm just thinking it now, but he's on a huge numbers of something, huge numbers of turning along from average to beautiful huge numbers of fixing whatever irrigation issue or cleaning the driveway or sorting out weeds or whatever it is. You have the proof, hopefully before and after photos, hopefully some kind of video or drone footage or something like that. That proof is undeniable. That's why I use the word proof. And because it's undeniable, it moves away from opinion and argument into a completely different category. And that's where the confidence comes from. These four different strategies. So creating the opportunity that is so high that it's exceeding any capacity you have, that comes from marketing. If you want to learn marketing,

26:13we have a bunch of other podcasts on this. I would specifically recommend the ones with Darren. If you want to be compared to who the best thing to do is to set up some sort of system where talking to people around you, other contractors, how you do that is up to you. The third thing is quoting and the number one thing I would recommend for that is the local app. Obviously we made it. We've put a lot of effort into it. I wouldn't have done that if I didn't believe into it. But even if you don't want to go down that path, make a system yourself. Stop this vibe quoting where you're just going to a job and eyeball it and guessing and praying and hoping and getting the feel in the air and in your soul and hoping that the tingling in your earlobes connects in the right way and then you get the right price. And the final thing is being genuinely good at something. There's a huge amount of work that goes into that. But there's nothing stopping you from doing that. And the final thing that I want to say above everything else is I've been in this game for 12 and a half years. Well, actually, I've been a paid gardener since I was 15 and I'm 32. So that's 17 years when I was on payroll for some sort of

27:17gardening service. It's taking me a lot of time to learn these sorts of lessons. And I guarantee you that you could be way past where I am right now 12 and a half years in business in your business, 12 and a half years from now. You can way exceed this. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. When you hear these sorts of things, a lot of time you get to end these kind of podcasts and you go sounds like 70 hour weeks. Well, it's 8.51 at night. That's when I'm recording this because that's kind of the work that I do. And trust me, I believe that you will not regret investing in these kinds of things because they're not speculative and absolutely proven. And these are the kind of things that separate the good businesses from the bad businesses, even the great businesses from the bad businesses. That's as much motivation as much encouragement as I can give to you, all the best. I'll see you in the next podcast.