How to Build a $10 Million Lawn Mowing Company -Pricing Plan & Procedure

If you're in residential lawnmowing and maintenance and you want to take your company to the next level, this is the show for you. Our next guest teaches us how to grow your company from wherever you're currently at up to $10 million a year on residentialonly lawnmowing and maintenance. [Music] Literally just got off the phone with Jonathan Patashnik for 50 minutes. I've interviewed him twice now and I have never experienced anything like this before. What I'm talking about is a man that has taken all the myths about how to build a lawn maintenance company, blown them out of the park. This is a guy that has developed in 10 years a $10 million lawn maintenance company. And he tells us how he did it. He tells us the roots of where he started from when he was a kid 14 years ago. The mistakes he made along the way. The myth of focusing on commercial lawn maintenance. And then he goes into how he left that whole field, did nothing in lawn maintenance for years, was successful in other companies, and came back and would never leave it again. He makes more money in lawn maintenance. if he was ever going to start again, he would redo this and he goes over it at length for 50 minutes in the landscape business pro.com podcast with Jonathan Patashnik. Now, I'm going to go over this is the highlight reel, guys and gals out there. This is the meat and potatoes of how you can build a $10 million residentialonly lawn maintenance company. Most people don't think that can be done. He's living proof. He's done it. you can too. There's going to be a ton of information in this video. Let's rock and roll. How do you do it? How do you get that many customers for a $10 million a year business? He has about 5,500 customers. His company specializes in 8 to 12,000 square foot lots. He doesn't like to get above 12,000 square foot lots. That's his sweet spot. That's where he makes the absolute most money. How did he get that many customers? What he does is he calls it neighborhood saturation. So, we're going to go over every aspect of this. So, don't get me wrong, there's a ton of stuff. We're going to go over pricing. We're going to go over saturation. We're going to go over everything that you need to do to create recreate the results that have built his company. Stay tuned. So, let's get started. Neighborhood saturation. The first thing he did when he was beginning was he made the mistake of going into commercial lawn maintenance. How did that work out for him? Not at all. He quickly learned that he wasn't making any money. He might as well have just skipped out and just did what he was doing. That story behind us, he then fired his customers. He fired his clients and he moved into residential high-end. So, he gets his foot in the door in a neighborhood and he does direct mailing and door hangers. And he highly recommends that you do this, but he learned the hard way to do it the right way. There's a good door hanger and a bad door hanger and it's all the difference between profit and loss between having jobs come in the door and having the phone call phone not ring at all. And so be very very very careful when you put your door hangers out there. The next thing that he talks about is optimizing your website which takes longer but you need to do that. Paperclick is a big thing and organic website optimization is another key element to creating that that presence that gets you recognized. And then here's some unique things that he does. No contracts. Can you say that with me? No contracts. He doesn't make anybody sign a contract because it's a bottleneck. It's another thing that he has to have if every year he has 5,500 customers. He has to go out and resign those customers up. Well, guess what? He's got to have one, two, or ten people do that for him. A bottleneck. Plus, when you're on the phone with a customer and you're trying to get them to sign a contract for a year's worth of work and they may be looking at a $3 $3,000 bill, that's a bitter pill to swallow. But if all they got to do is think, I just got to pay them $35 per week, they don't do the math. So, it's easy to sign on the dotted line. It's easy to spend $35 right now than it is to commit to $3,000. It's the same job, same amount of money. He's getting the job signed right away. Plus, he doesn't go out to the job sites. He bids everything right over the phone. He uses Service Autopilot to actually calculate how many square feet a customer has in their lot. If they've got a 100 by 120 lot, that's 12,000 square feet. and he then calculates how long that's going to take him to do it. Now, two calculations he wants to make $40 per hour and he makes sure he's making $40 per hour, but when he bids it, he bids it on a price per square foot. That way, he can just do all the quotes right over the phone. Doesn't have to send a per person out there. Doesn't have You should be asking how can he go out and do jobs without a contract, without a commitment. easy. He gets a credit card. He automatically charges the credit card before he even goes out to the site. He performs the work. And if for some reason calculations were off, he since he doesn't have a contract, he doesn't have a commitment, his company isn't liable to keep doing that job all year long at a loss. He can simply say, "This isn't working out." Or he can raise his price. Or if it's working out, then he doesn't have to change anything. But do you see how that gives him the flexibility to alter his price on a whim? Sign up contracts quickly. It's genius. I love it. Now, 51 minutes of interview time. I'm not going to be able to cover everything, but I do want to leave you with an average price. His business model allows him to price out an 8,000 square foot lot at around $30. That's the highend. And what that boils down to is about 37 cents per hundred square feet. Again, that's the high end, but that's everything. That is the travel time to the site. That is trimming. That is mowing. That's blowing the leaves and grass off the sidewalk. That gives you an idea. He's down in Texas. You have to now take that number into consideration. Be cautious, careful. Don't apply this just like this is the Bible because your area is going to be different. difficult lots, hilly lots. That's a flat eye. That lot, that price is for a flat lot. A hilly lot or a lot that has a lot of trees, a long fence line, more obstructions, less access. He's going to alter his price, and that's what you have to do and modify in your own market. He's got a three-part video series coming out specifically on pricing residential lawn maintenance. I'm going to have I'm going to include it in the show notes. I'm going to ask you to go check it out. This guy is the king of content, content, content, content. You're going to love what he does. I am here to quickly summarize it and I'm going to send you over to our podcast. You've got to check out his interview. If you're in residential lawnmowing and maintenance and you want to take your company to the next level, this is the show for you.