112 - Mowing, Marketing, & Managing Franchises with Mike Andes
We sat down with YouTube sensation, business consultant, landscaping legend, and out-of-the-box thinking CEO, Mike Andes, himself. Mike has made a name for himself in the lawn care industry, to say the least. After starting college at age 13 and owning his first business, Augusta Lawn Care, full-time by 18, it was clear he wasn’t going to be an average Joe. Listen to our sit-down interview to hear how Mike has grown ALC into 87 nationwide franchised locations, incentivized his team, and increased employee efficiency by 45%.
Show Notes
00:00 - Intro
02:10 - How Mike Got Started
05:14 - Mike’s First Employee
08:16 - The Growth of Augusta Lawn Care
10:40 - How Mike Handles The Seasonality of Landscaping
13:00 - Mike’s Approach To Marketing
20:00 - How To Raise Prices
23:00 - How Mike Knew He Wanted To Franchise
26:00 - The Value Metric Used To Raise Prices
30:00 - The Software Mike Recommends & Uses
34:00 - So What’s Pay For Performance?
39:50 - How You Calculate Pay For Performance
44:00 - Efficiency With Pay For Performance
53:00 - Outro
Quotable Moments
“Two and a half years ago we started franchising Augusta Lawn Care and now we have 87 locations around North America.” – Mike
“If you have under 100 customers, focus on localized ways [of marketing]: direct mail, Nextdoor, door hangers, and going to very specific neighborhoods.” – Mike
“The best form of investing is taking a small business, getting customer acquisition costs that you can nail down, and then investing into marketing. If you’re trying to grow your business, you need to invest into marketing.” – Mike
“When we raise prices 25%, we usually have about a 97-98% retention rate. A good rule of thumb to remember is to raise your prices by 10% until you lose 20% of customers.” – Mike
“Everything in pricing is tied to budget hours because that’s really the building block to P to P. If they’re not hitting budget hours, pricing isn’t high enough and the rate is too low.” – Mike
“If I was just getting started, I would recommend and use Jobber. If you want something more complicated, I would be going with a larger, publicly-traded company like Service Titan.” – Mike
“Pay for performance in one sentence is - you give a percentage of the labor revenue the employee earns every single day for the business - that’s what their wages are.” – Mike
“At the end of the day, if you’re not accurate on budget hours, it’s going to be a big problem. You’re going to make errors sometimes but our goal is to make 4 out of 5 estimates beat budget hours.” – Mike
“On average, with P4P, we will see at least a 20-30% efficiency increase and as high as a 45% increase.” – Mike
“The worst thing in the world for an A-grade employee is to work with unmotivated, C-grade, employees.” – Mike
Resources
Become an Augusta Lawn Care Franchisee
Check out the P4P Software
Watch Mike Andes on YouTube
Check us out on Youtube
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Countdown
Have questions? Email us!
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