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



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113 - Building A Growth Foundation

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111 - Replacing Yourself