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How to choose a landscaping invoicing app

trevor cocaine you heard me right turned his side hustle into a full-blown business how he did it you're about to find out yes i've grown planet vision into a full-time business making 29 000 a month today we'll find out how trevor was able to build planet vision from a side hustle into a thriving landscaping business we'll find out how he found his first customer how he stands out from his competitors and what he's doing today to scale even further when i started i was broke four day work week is great a lot of people like that this year i've been able to get my work scheduled out a couple months what would this cost what is this and what can you do with it i've been raising my rates a lot the last few years and i'm in the process of doing it again right now my lowest month this year was february at 16 000. big thanks to click please for sponsoring this video let's take this off but as i'm doing that tell us a little bit about your background and why you ended up starting a landscaping company yeah so i went to college got a degree in landscape architecture and graduated into the recession and was having trouble finding full-time work as a landscape designer so started doing this on the side as well as a few other things but this eventually became my full-time thing so you never had prior landscaping experience in any way not really just working at home with the parents in the yard but i did have the skills and a lot of knowledge from college but a lot of it was learned on the job trevor what kind of services do you offer as a company yeah so we're like what i call full service maintenance doing uh mowing string trim the edges weeding breaking the leaves blowing just keeping the place nice but we also dabble in a lot of everything as far as construction installation so plant design installation a lot of mulch jobs one-time cleanup jobs at people's houses pretty much everything i mean but for somebody starting out what would you recommend that they focus on 10 20 services or just one or two that really will get the ball rolling for them yeah well in my experience i tried to do a little everything just to keep the income coming in i think landscape maintenance services are great just for that recurring income and steady steadiness so anything with that routine type of maintenance i think is good and cleanup jobs are easy to come by so that's true it's a great place to start but installation work is kind of a different animal right yeah because you have to probably have more heavy equipment and just more equipment and construction knowledge how to do things properly right we're going to continue on and not hold you from work and i'm going to help you get a lot of weeds around here this is the nitty-gritty of the reality of being a landscaper right uh how many employees do you have right now um so i've got two actually technically won i just lost my crew later last week so i should have a new replacement though on monday so i'll have two guys so you plus two other guys yeah how do you retain people and find good talent in your experience so far so i mean i use indeed to hire people there's a lot of candidates online and to attract them you know you got to be competitive with the wages i don't offer all the same benefits as someone like the big companies but money talks with a lot of people that are applying in this industry so especially now too yeah so that and just providing a good culture here we're kind of laid back but i do we're still very professional and i want my guys to do great work and you know be respectful of everyone they come across so yeah four day work week is great a lot of people like that and they can get off for three days so we do four hours 10 hours a day nice so when you started planetvision can you talk to us what it costs to get going because a lot of our viewers are getting started they want to get into the same industry tell us how we could manage the startup costs yeah so when i started i was broke i probably put just a few hundred dollars into some used tools i used mower and just scrounged together rakes and shovels that sort of thing really didn't cost me a lot of money to get going but as you build you know the expansions grow so what did it cost i mean if you spent is it 300 to get going like yeah i don't know for sure but i would imagine just like 300 bucks wow just the basic tools just basic tools and you use mower wow like 50 bucks for mower in terms of designing landscaping stuff and that won't stop you from working how does that work trevor is it an app you use software as a piece of paper long does it take there's a lot of variations in how to approach landscape design right in my situation i'm looking for small jobs that we can do in a day or two for most of the year because we have all this routine maintenance so a design for me is often just a you know sketch on a piece of paper after i've measured this site and drafted it on some grid paper usually i'll lay over a piece of paper or over that to trace and just kind of come up with ideas send a simple sketch so we're not talking like cat design computer and it's like weeks of preparation i do that as well i try to save those jobs for the winter when we have more time to them and that can take more time for me to design when i have time to get to it working on autocad to develop a whole base plan in the yard and then i'll usually print that out and again trace over it to kind of come up with conceptual ideas and eventually form a nice planting plan and i'll typically do the final plans by hand and color them with marker and stuff [Music] revenue what was it for 21 because that was a challenging year post covert or really in the middle of it yeah well landscaping luckily you know we get to operate outside so we did 200 000 last year you did okay and it's going up this year so the 29 000 that we mentioned in the beginning that's certainly way different this time that wasn't the case last year not the case last year i've been raising my rates a lot the last few years and i'm in the process of doing it again right now a yard like this definitely needs the right equipment we're excited to share with you how quickly can help new and established landscaping business owners get all the necessary equipment that they need to elevate their business simply submit the details on the equipment you need ranging anywhere from five hundred dollars all the way up to twenty thousand dollars and their ai driven system will process your request within 10 seconds no hard credit check will be pulled click list will work with you to help you find the best lease term and monthly payment plan once you secure that monthly payment it doesn't change for the duration of the term click the link in the description below to learn about how quickly's can help elevate and grow your business with ease [Music] what percentage of your business comes from designing it's pretty small so i would say 75 of our work is like routine maintenance and cleanup jobs and the rest is kind of a mix of design and work or repairs or things just like adding mulch to people's beds so really it might be more down to like 15 or something for installation are there any red flags you look for trevor before taking or committing to a particular job yeah and it kind of varies with where you're at in business for me right now we won't take any more maintenance customers unless it's in a prime location like a neighbor or somewhere near one of our routes this year i've been able to get my work scheduled out a couple months so it doesn't make sense to be getting clean up jobs because people want it done now at that point i'll start to look for installation work that will fit in that one or two day window where we can get it done and then move on to maintenance again next week not just so you don't want to take something then have it impact the rest of the other commitments you've made exactly how did you find those first jobs trevor like nobody knows you as a landscaper let's talk about the importance of doing the right thing in the beginning so those first jobs actually came from a friend who had a contracting business him and his dad there were painters doing a lady's house and she said she needed a landscaper they called me up and i came over got the job and then soon after that i was mowing the lawn for the neighbors and that turned into more jobs nearby so that was instrumental kind of word of mouth and after that once i found thumbtack.com that really gave me the belief i could start getting a lot of jobs and build a real business tell me about thumbtack i don't know much about it so thumbtack is a website and it's kind of like the uber for contractors people fill out what they want online and all kinds of different services and it's like angie's livestream yeah so i made my first i built a profile and booked my first job within five or ten minutes wow does it cost anything it does cost money it's a lot more expensive for the leads these days but you know my average leads are somewhere between like 10 to 50 a lead [Music] what's a good month dollar wise what's a bad yeah so my best month so far was last month at 29 000. um my lowest month this year was february at 16 000. not bad how much are you spending on advertising if any probably about 200 bucks a month just to pay for yeah some ads in the church bulletins and you know that's kind of prepaid for i've done a little facebook and google in the past but honestly i can't keep up with the work that's coming at me so i just turned it off that's not well it's good it's kind of like one of those faucets you need more business you turn it on you don't need it you turn it off yeah uh email list do you have any where you just gather all the emails and blast them every month no i don't do that i've done a little bit of that in the past you know it's really easy to service my existing clients i've got you know their emails ready to go i got about 40 recurring maintenance clients i know their emails there in google i could be keeping them in quickbooks with old customers but it's not something that i've prioritized but right i could dig in the into the files and bring them up okay keeping it simple you guys if you're enjoying this we appreciate a quick like thank you so much do you think customers mainly want from a landscaping company or a landscape person like i guess that ties into customer experience and so on what have you learned over the last couple years well they want you to do a good job and be able to manage the landscape without them having to provide a lot of input you know people have busy lives so they want you to know what you're doing and just make the place look good another thing that helps is providing like customer service like a nice back end thing like invoices i use quickbooks to send them an invoice and they can pay right there online so that's nice do you do credit cards on the spot as well i take credit cards bank transfer yeah not on the spot but i'll email it to them so they'll get the invoice in their email gotcha okay [Music] talk tools i've seen many tools we interviewed a couple other landscaping companies they vary a little bit what would this cost what is this and what can you do with it so this is the steel combi motor it can be used with different attachments so this here is your hedge trimmer pull it in pop it out this looks pretty easy you can also put on a string trimmer head lots of different things you can put on here chainsaw for a long pole oh wow okay power broom so this one is the most powerful motor and the steel combi line it's very versatile that's why we like it you know what would it cost oh the cost of this this is like 350 and then the attachments are around like 150. so you can have like what six different varieties of using the same motor or yeah even more just one motor and lots of different attachments to go for it i would recommend this steel's a good brand don't waste your time with you know the junky stuff but that's what i did so you got to start where you can right start where you can that's well said what else do you want to point out in the truck so we saw the leaf blower down there on the ground i started using the uh steel lawnmower are you using this is a it's an electric lawnmower and one of the benefits of it is it's lightweight so it's good in seattle we got a lot of hills and we had to carry it up and downstairs so that's the main reason i really like it it doesn't have like propulsion this one is self-propelled yeah okay so that makes it pretty nice is it a challenge sometimes because when you show up to people's homes and stuff they may not always have an outlet how do you work around that so i've got like four or five batteries that we charge up overnight and then i can bring the charger with me if we need to go to someone's house there's usually an outlet there but not everywhere but you know you just stay on top of it and just kind of manage it and it works out have enough batteries set up we do a lot of small lawns um if you're doing big lawns you're probably not gonna want this right how much would this cross trevor um i believe this is around maybe 500 bucks five six hundred okay what makes planet vision stand out from other competitors similar in size to your company what makes us stand out i think is just being able to provide a lot of different services when it comes to garden maintenance doing full service mowing trimming pruning we specialize you know and care about proper pruning of plants that's a thing a lot of companies don't have knowledge of so they just come out and chop your tree down i've seen that before a lot of times people don't even know what they don't know and you just see mistakes around town and then i think my landscape architecture degree does give me another edge where i can go out and just i can sketch things draw pretty pictures and know a lot about the plants and i can do good design work [Music] we'll fly through blitz with trevor all right uh what motivates you trevor what motivates me is uh i just want to do good work keep the clients happy and keep my employees happy okay how do you stay organized google calendar that helps scheduling everything nice uh scale of one to ten how good of a driver are you trevor uh my employees would probably rate me at a five but i'd say maybe like an eight okay who's your biggest inspiration got to say jesus he's the inspiration for service and leadership and how to treat people nice there you go what place would you want to travel to right now if you could just take off anywhere oh uh let's go heli skiing in alaska or maybe it's south america this time of year dang top notch [Music] yeah what key things do you think a landscaping company whether small or big need to have to continue growing revenue what does it come down to to continue growing the revenue learn how to charge properly that's been what's been best for me i started out not charging enough so we're able to keep raising the rates and one way to be able to do that is to book your calendar out in advance so you're not desperate for work um and then you can start cutting yourself costs start raising your rate yeah if you have that work booked and keeping your expenses low by the way you guys if you want more insights into growing a landscaping company check out our podcast upflip.com forward slash podcast episode five we interviewed the owner of legends lawn care it's awesome [Music] for starting out what would be some tools that i would absolutely need to have to do my first job in terms of landscaping and cleaning yeah you're gonna need a mower i highly recommend a backpack blower i didn't have one at beginning but i think it's definitely something you're gonna want string trimmer and then just an assortment of rakes and shovels different things pruners bloppers shears depending on the type of landscaping you're doing we're a full service and not we don't focus on just mowing or anything we're full-service gardening okay what are we doing here trimming a little bit so yeah it's time to prune the rhododendrons right after they flower that keeps the size down smaller so they don't get too big and allows the flower buds to set over the summer you don't want to cut them off because you want flowers next year okay so this is the best time to do it do you look for anything specific i've always wondered about you know trimming trees in instead of killing and actually giving it more health so it looks like you're just chomping up the bit here yeah i mean there's a a lot to prune here um you know with this it's just floured so these types of rhododendrons they'll basically re-sprout anywhere anywhere you cut it there's a lot of latent buds that will regrow and it's that prime time of year where they do it most of their growth so every plant's a little different but that's that's the deal part of what makes planet vision good is understanding what to do with the plants trevor let's say you wanted to double your revenue you know as soon as possible what would you think needs to change or be added in the business to make that happen yeah from 30 grand a month to 60 grand great question so i've been trying to get my business into two different divisions one maintenance one construction you know basically i need to double my labor so four employees i think could do it and just getting that maintenance kind of out of my hands so i can focus on hiring good people for the construction that's probably has good profit margins on the construction bigger projects yeah it does there is another theory though just focusing on what you're good at that simple maintenance stuff it could be an easier way to scale the business so it's something to consider right if you were to give an advice to somebody starting out very little money no customers what would you recommend they do to get going and find customers knocking on doors calling yeah i did a little knocking on doors you can expect like a one or two percent you know you go to 100 houses you might get one or two not a good not the best return get out there yeah i would encourage check out bark.com it's similar to thumbtack it's a little cheaper kind of like what thumbtack used to be and then yet talking to just people you know friends family neighbors i advertise here with this church and that's been generating some leads for me [Music] when you first got started i know you mentioned earlier how you found your first customers is there anything else that people watching right now can do as entry-level landscapers to find new customers and what's worked for you besides your closed sphere for example get yourself a google business page where people can just start finding you and have that direct to your website put up a contact form on your website where they can enter in their address phone number all that sort of thing and what they want to do having that contact form has really made it a lot easier for people to just type it in i think you lose them if you don't have that right so they can easily reach out to you [Music] i think a lot of people would think man to start a landscaping company i have to rent a big warehouse and stuff let's talk about briefly space that you need to quote unquote however landscaping the company do you need a lot do you lease anything or you do everything out of the bed of this truck um i do lease a garage right now when i first got started though i was hauling up all the tools to my apartment balcony oh wow that didn't last long i negotiated with my landlord to use this old shed on the property it's about 12 by 12 space used to be a coffee stand so i operated out of that for years until this spring we moved into this garage but you can get started with necessarily started with very little yeah i mean it's a little bit of space you know i wouldn't recommend leaving it in the truck unless you got somewhere right truck i just realized that you can't leave this stuff overnight right especially in seattle [Music] what kind of profit margins do you shoot for trevor where are they would you say just on average i know different services yeah um so far our maintenance has been at like 18 but i'm in the process of raising the rates and that should bump it up another 10 percent to around 28. not bad and for installation work i'm usually shooting for like 33 35 sometimes we hit it sometimes we don't right what are the busiest months what are the slowest so for maintenance you know it really kicks off in march and every two weeks we're going to most people's houses from march through november then december it kind of slows down but there's usually a lot of work getting through christmas and new year's and then january february can be kind of slow so i like to have bigger jobs waiting to be installed and that sort of thing okay that was my follow-up question is like what do you do when it's super slow yeah for the 75 percent of your business so how do you adjust and shift so that you don't sit on the couch doing nothing so yeah it's trying to get big landscape design and work if the snow hits and we can't do anything we take care of this campus you know shoveling snow off the sidewalk spreading salt winter's a good time to market for like tree pruning work because you can see what you're doing or just upselling your current clients on things like mulch you know you can put on a sail for mulch or something get it out of the way before the spring rush so that's the type of stuff we've been doing [Music] you want to get off the truck quote unquote right at some point how many employees do you think you need to make that happen at some point yeah i would like to eventually have the business at that point i don't know for sure what i'm thinking like four employees working for me would be the minimum for me to get out of the truck and um work on growing the business and doing more quotes and design where did the four day work week come from because that's what you mentioned a little earlier yeah why do you do that i think it's pretty cool to get a three-day weekend i used to do that at a previous job and i liked having that three-day weekend so i just wanted to provide that for other people because i think people like the time off that and i needed another extra day in the week to be able to do the office work you know outside of being in the field since i'm doing so much in the beginning i think that helps me to get things done i think that's pretty cool [Music] having a degree in landscaping architecture right how has that helped you move and grow and scale the company to this day it's a selling point i think for some customers who want to know that i kind of know what i'm talking about i know a lot about plants and i have the skills to be able to do some design enhancements in their yard having the degree it's not really necessary you can get started without it but for me it's been a helpful thing and gives me some potential to grow the business in different ways what would you say percentage-wise you had to learn on the job versus what the degree has provided you with 10.90 you know i would i learned a lot of it in school i don't know the percentage i would say it's kind of a low percentage as far as garden maintenance goes getting out here and working in the field has really been what's given me a lot of more in-depth knowledge about taking care of plants and soils and that sort of thing that's awesome [Music] can you think of any mistakes that you've made early on and how that taught you a lesson what can you think of that you would do differently with what you know now yeah i was just not charging enough money for a long time because i was ignorant of business financials i didn't know what a profit margin was i was just getting out there trying to survive and thinking you're making money thinking i was making money and yeah just having no idea what i was doing so yeah you're in the right place i think if you're watching this video get educated and understand the numbers right and not be afraid to ask for the right value for the service you offer right yeah yeah believe in yourself ask for what you need what are you struggling with right now as a business owner like covet labor we hear all that everyone we interview biggest thing is like finding good people but besides that any other challenges you're facing the labor issue is a big one and then just managing my own time i work probably 55 to 60 hours a week on average and that's just the daily stuff that you got to get through so just being able to push and get the time to do the extra things that help you to grow your business and push it forward and make progress it takes a lot of determination i think having charging appropriately so you have the capital to do things and invest in what is needed for growth is good yeah [Music] what was your biggest challenge when you got started besides customers the biggest challenge was just being broke not having a lot of money to invest in things yeah and i was working a lot of part-time jobs on the side you know multiple part-time jobs delivering pizza at night so just having the toughness to keep going and getting after it not quite what helped you get through all those trevor those times you know honestly i think i had a good mindset that was developed through the amway business and there's a lot of like self-development personal development and just positive thinking habits that come from that and just a real desire to want to have a stable income and have a little bit of freedom in my life what's one piece of advice you can give those watching right now who want to start a landscaping business whether small or large what would you tell them i would say get connected with other business owners that are in your field they've got a lot of knowledge they've been through a lot of the same things they know your your troubles so you can share good ideas and they can refer you work they've done that for me and even online there's groups you can join that sort of thing so don't be afraid to ask the experts for the advice right yep those who have done it before you well thank you so much it's been a pleasure i know you've got a ton of work to do i will not shake we'll shake it we'll do this because you're holding that big bucket this was fun well that's a wrap with trevor cocaine i love the last name the owner of planetvision i hope you guys really enjoyed it take a second to like subscribe and hit that bell so that you don't miss any of our videos and we've interviewed others in the same industry make sure you check out those videos as well thank you