Career Deep Dive #4: Landscaping Business
How do you make landscaping sexy?
Saturdays are for the... yard work.
My 4 year old walks up to me at 6am and says "daddy time to get up". I get up, look myself in the mirror, he hands me my toothbrush and even he knows that its time to get to work. As I look to my son and contemplate buying one of those cool Rumba robots for the yard (they are dope, check em out) I think to myself "He's probably old enough to do it on his own". But I decide against it, and face the adventure that is a Saturday morning. Its cold, I look over the glorious jungle in which I plan to conquer and as I think "it'll be quick", the dog drops only the freshest of loads in the middle of the lawn, so it begins.
So why in the hell would someone want to do this for a living?
I have no idea.
But I'm hoping to get some answers from Brian today as I talk to him about the questions I would have if I wanted to get into the landscaping biz.
How much you making doing this?
How would you get started if you had to start again?
What's your plan to retire?
The grind, how do you get through it?
You spent how much last year????
He was in his truck on his way to the next job while talking to me, I mean, what a guy!
Without further ado I present to you: Brian Fullerton
Ben: So real quick, How did you get started in the Landscape Business?
Brian: Yeah, long story short, we got started about 16 years ago.
So 2006. And let's see, it's been a wild 16 seasons, man. The good, the bad, the ugly. We've experienced all of it. Basically, we had been cutting grass even before that when we were younger. I was a little 10 year old dude running around cutting grass in my mom's trailer park. Cuttin lawns, making some extra money for subway sandwiches and fireworks back in the day. And basically I ended up working at Little Caesars for a couple of years. I actually enjoyed the job. It wasn't awful. I became a store manager at 19. Actually had some situations that arose and I got fired from that job which was unfortunate. Went back to working at TruGreen for about a year, and then in 2020 summer I decided to go all in with my lawn care business.
So how much money did you need to start? What was your initial investment?
Brian: Our initial investment was a borrowed Dodge Durango from my younger brother, cuz he was at Michigan State College. So I borrowed his Durango because the rule is as a freshman you couldn't have a vehicle on the premise premises you had to use the dorms and have a bike.
So his Dodge's Durango was sitting around and it had actually it didn't even have a hitch. We bought a hitch for it. So I installed the hitch, the little hidden hitch underneath the rear tailgate. That was 200 bucks. And then I bought a little tractor supply trailer for, I don't know, six or 800 bucks back in the day.
The little five by eight little wire mesh one. Everybody has 'em, yeah. So that was my trailer. And then for my mower, I did buy a brand new commercial, Xmark Viking. I think it was a 48 inch walk behind back in the day. So that was $5,300 and then I literally used off the shelf trimmers and blowers and like they were used craftsmen, open box clearance. Like it was that bad. Yeah. So it wasn't, commercial grade, it was just a, little weed whip, a little trimmer, a little blower. I think the tube for the blower was like one inch, like literally the smallest leaf blower you could ever find. So that was my initial investment.
And nowadays you think you would go with the mower, same thing, buying a commercial mower like out of the gate? Or what would you do differently?
Brian: I would say for a lawnmower, I think that if you can afford to buy new and buy something under warranty, I think that's a great way to go. I think whether buying a walk behind a stand on or a sit down, that just depends on your type of properties. And then buying new versus buying used, it just comes down to do you have a little bit more cash and maybe you wanna buy something new that's under warranty.
If you wanna buy something used, even if you have some cash lying around, maybe you wanna buy something used and save some of that cash for labor or mulch or insurance or marketing. But if you are a little bit more mechanically inclined and can fix things, then I would suggest maybe getting something that's 2, 3, 4, 5 years old and you can repair that as you go.
For me personally, I didn't know anything about business. I had so many irons in the fire with marketing and building my routes and learning how to track everything on my computer that I didn't really have time to be wrenching on things nights and weekends as well. So I personally went the new route for the mower.
But I've seen guys with both sides of the coin make it work
Were you a one man show, I imagine? Starting out
Brian: Yeah. We had just myself for the most part, but I'll be honest, my younger brother, when he came back from college probably about two months into the season may or June, , he worked with me part-time for maybe about six weeks. And then the following year I had hired my uncle basically part-time, so he was with me for the next eight or nine months. And we've always had one or two people kind of part-time for a long while.
And then 2020ish, We had a second full-time guy, but we're still a small company, about two or three of us.
Did you take out a whole lot of money when you're starting? Did you put it all back into the business? What are you living off of?
Brian: Yeah. I'll tell you what, my first year I remember us making about $18,500 gross. My second year, I think we made like 26 gross. I think my third year was like 37. My fourth year was like 49. I was so close to hitting that 50,000 mark yeah And, by the way, this is when lawns were $20, $22. Even like the good price lawns were like twenty-five and thirties. Okay. This is 15, 18 years ago. So today's money. Times those numbers by 2.5. Yeah. But it wasn't the most illustrious, I was definitely the low ball dude.
Didn't have the nicest equipment, didn't have the nicest mowers, didn't have the best looking lawns. So it was a a difficult first couple of years, but we poured everything back into the business that we could, no doubt about it. We didn't take out anything for profit really, other than what I needed to live on. But I was living at home, so I didn't really have a ton of bills except for maybe insurance, cell phone, gas, labor, the basics.
But we didn't invest in anything shiny, cool or new. 15, 17 years ago there was no social media. There was no YouTube, so I didn't know what to do next. I didn't know what to buy. I didn't know. The evolution of equipment or my business, I was just guessing.
In those 16 years, have you grown each of those years?
Brian: Yeah, the first five or six years, we definitely continued to grow.
I think the four or five years after that, I was pretty flat with sales. We were doing 70 or 80,000, nothing crazy. A very, small business. Just solo. So we didn't do a lot with snow. We did residential, snow blowing, like driveways. So we would do Two to five, maybe 10 grand in snow. Nothing crazy.
So what happened was I met a, so here's the whole love story, right? Met a girl, found a girl, got engaged, got married, and really quickly I realized, me living off of 40, 50,000 single is not the same as us combining income. Combining debt and then trying to have your own apartment, house insurance, all that mess. My 30, 40K net profit didn't go very far. . Yeah. I our, first year or two of marriage wasn't awful or bad. It just, there it was paycheck to paycheck. It was tight.
We never had more than a thousand dollars in the checking account. It's wild to be honest with you. So I realized I had to own up, I had to man up, I had to fix some things.
It's an interesting series of events, but I saw one or two long YouTube videos. I have no idea how or why they just got promoted to me. My wife wanted to do some YouTube makeup videos. Oh. I, ended up draining the bank account, buying an $800 camera and like microphone video creator kit they call it.
So, she was gonna haul off and do a bunch of makeup videos on YouTube just to maybe make some extra money. She, and I say this with love, but she hauled off and did nothing. It was about March of 2016, I was trading in a new mower and I realized there's no videos on this mower. So I reviewed this lawnmower and it wasn't anything special.
It was just trading in a mower, a little 14 minute walk around of the mower. And somebody had commented on the video "Hey, cool video. Can you review your weed whips or leaf blowers in the background?" And I said, sure. And so one video led to another, which led to one subscriber, which led to two subscribers, which led to five subscribers.
Nothing crazy. No viral videos, no TikTok, millions of views, nothing. Very slow, humble beginnings. But two things happened at the same time. Some parallel paths. One was we were growing the YouTube channel and learning how to run a successful business and just pouring ourselves out there.
And other people were starting to weigh in about some suggestions on how to grow. And then number two, it was kinda like Brian's law Maintenance 2.0 where we wanted to reinvigorate and grow the real lawn care business. Okay. We were buying new mowers, a new truck, a new trailer, all new everything, because everything we had was dilapidated.
Long story short, the last six years has been two parallel paths of us getting our lawn care business and also documenting that on YouTube and it's been wild man. It's been a good five or six years. Honestly, we've made more money these past three years, then the first decade combined.
Oh man, that's awesome! And when I looked you up, you have this Lawntrepreneur academy in which I thought was interesting cause blue collar is generally trade school and you can go wherever. The problem is the money side of things, and I wish I just would've known a lot of the information, much like what you're saying and providing with the Lawntrepreneur Academy. So I just wanted to thank you, man, for coming on here and providing that info for everybody.
Brian: Hey, man I'm, always willing to pour it out there, really pay it forward, right? Because the last five years has really been a mission of, I always say, helping the Brian's law maintenance of 10 to 15 years ago. Man, I had no clue, no idea, no access to anybody, no knowledge. I had no idea what I should have been doing.
I had no idea how to run a business. I was great at cutting grass, trimming, blowing, slinging mulch. I had no idea how to run a real company. And so that's something that's always withheld from you in life. Just nobody teaches you that stuff, right?
Taxes and insurance and how to hire people. Just the nitty gritty so, yeah, it's been a wild five years, man. But I'll tell you what, keeps me going is just all the people that have poured into us. I just want to keep paying it forward to the next guy out there, man. And if, we can do anything to help anybody out there make some extra money or learn how to dial it in a little bit reach out and say, "Hey man, shoot an email, shoot a DM on Instagram. Whatever works"
I think we need more people like yourself to get the word out there and help the trades in general.
Brian: I was just gonna say one, one thing that I just wish was maybe offered to me at 17 or 18 years old was the opportunity to be self-employed.
My exact conversation that got me out of lawn care at 16 was my mom saying, "Hey you need to go get a real job so you can start making real money." So it's a,\ heartbreaking conversation because at 16, I was mowing grass, making 450 bucks a weekend mowing 20-30 trailer park lawns.
And then I went to work at Little Caesars, making $6.74 an hour. After taxes I was making 60 bucks a week! Driving there, slinging pizzas, getting greasy, dirty, nasty and I took a major pay cut and I'm like, what did I just do with my life? But my mom had said, this is what you're supposed to do.
God bless mom. Even then I became a store manager making 30, 40 grand a year. So what? I know guys that can make that in a month with their own business. Now it doesn't mean it's for everybody. I'll say that.
I am not a college guy. I do not like to sit still. I was good with homework or bookwork. But tests and quizzes? No way. Dude, I'm animated. I'm a middle child, that's why I twitch. So I like working with my hands. I like working with people. I like working outdoors. And I'll tell you what, I wouldn't trade the last 16 years for anything and definitely not for working at a w2.
But it's simple and I think a lot of people can do it. So I just wish, somebody would've gave me both sides of that conversation. Like what you're doing here, when I was 18 years old, getting outta high school. Yeah. Which by way man, thanks for having me.
No problem man! So I did wanna ask one that was in my head is how do you, I try to put myself in that position, how do you go five years in a row? It, sounds like you're hitting against the wall and you have no direction. What keeps you moving in those instances? Because like you said, there's no social media, there's nobody telling you, "Hey man, just if you push through in this little gap, you'll probably end up making, I don't know, 200, 300 grand, whatever"
But how did you keep going through those five years? Because it's a grind. It really sounds like it is.
Brian: That's a good question. I don't think anybody's asked me that one. I guess two parts. One, you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. So you could call it big fish in a small pond.
You could say cow looking at a new gate and hey, you can go through that gate and you can go to the other pasture. I, I just didn't know that. I didn't know the pain to grow, or the need to grow wasn't relevant right. Or prevalent. There was no catalyst really for me to grow.
I was content, I was happy. Yeah. And, I think some people mistake being content with seems like it's a negative word sometimes. I'm very counterculture, where if you're making the income that you wanna, and your life is good and you're happy, then I'm happy for you.
I don't think everybody needs to grow 20% year over year. And if you don't, you're a loser. I don't believe in that. I would say I was pretty comfortable. Making 30, 40 grand a year living at home, right or wrong.
Living at home at 25, 26. Yeah I, should have probably matured up a little bit more to have my own place. Have my own house maybe pay off some more bills. I'm not sure really. But so I was performing the best I think I could at the time with what I knew. So I think that's part of it. I, just realized, I think out loud talking to you right now is that when you realize how much more you're capable of doing, it really shines a light on maybe your lack of performance.
So I'm just talking out loud cause when I got on YouTube, I realized, look at all these people making money in this business in this industry. Hey, I can do more too. And it really challenged me to become a better person and then by becoming a better person, I took action to make more money and lo and behold, we made more money. I just, I don't think I had anybody really around me like a running buddy or an accountability partner or motivation to really do anything more.
There's nothing wrong with that either
Brian: I was content, I think the war zone was those first four years from 2016 to 2019 where we paid off a hundred grand of debt from a, from all of our business.
Replaced my wife's income. We were able to bring her to be a stay at home wife, and then eventually a stay at home mom. Paid off all of our personal debt, all of our business debt. Bought some land. We're gonna break ground on a home soon, I think. Oh man. I think those four years, that was a war zone more so than the first 5 years.
That's what its all about right? The growth and the potential! So, what is the most challenging aspect of your business that you face on a daily basis?
Brian: Right now business is a little bit more like, it's in the matrix where we're dodging like it's bullet time. Like you're just going around the bullets cuz you just see 'em coming. We've, minimized a lot of the heartache of the business by either:
A not doing it
B opting out
C hiring it out.
So if a mower goes down, we fix it or, buy something new. If a truck breaks down, we fix it, or we have a second truck. Like right now there's not a lot of glaring challenges even hiring people. We haven't really had to worry too much about that.
However, from 2016 to 2018, I think the biggest thing that I had to fix in my company though, to answer your question, maybe from a different time period was fixing our cash flow. Because we did a lot of the work, and it's not that we weren't good at collecting or that we didn't have customers paid, they just were very loose with how people paid us. I didn't demand it or expect it and so people were very laissez fair with their time.
So, I think most of the issues that we had in our business, it didn't stem from bad people or bad equipment. The core issue was we just didn't have any cash to fix those problems. We had non-existent bookkeeping because we couldn't hire a bookkeeper.
We didn't have the cash because we never had good cash flow from billing and charging our customers. That's why I don't think there's a lot of issues these days. I'd be hard pressed to find anybody who has 20 to 30,000 a month coming in that you couldn't solve nine out of 10 of your problems. But, when your cash flow is 20 grand a month and you're only collecting 8,000, and that's all going to labor, gas, fuel insurance, equipment, labor, all the above, right? All the overhead. That's when things are tumultuous is because we, were invoicing. We didn't have a charge card on file system or a a streamlined way of processing payments.
It was a good old check in the mail, and tell you what, man, the check was never in the mail. We kept waiting.
If I wanted my wife to be a stay-home wife, I couldn't have 8, 10, 20, $30,000 in accounts receivable out there that's not gonna work. You need that money in the bank. One, one to fund your business, but two to fund your bills. So that, I think that was the biggest hurdle that we did overcome was our cash flow and our charge cards on file and our net 30 for commercial and keeping them on a shorter leash. It's not money hungry, it's not greed, it's just a game of hot potato, man.
So I ask everyone this because I think its important for people to see other peoples perspective. What is your, retirement plans look like? Is it just to sell the business when it hits a certain point? Let somebody else take over or 401k?
Brian: Good question. Definitely not 401k. I'm not a fan. We're gonna invest and retire heavily with real estate.
Multiple different channels, multiple different avenues of how we're gonna Work with that from investing into syndications, from having single family, from investing into commercial and apartment complexes as we go. We've been working a 10 year plan to put ourselves in a position to really be able to:
reinvest as much as we can in the business.
2. We have the social media business, which has started to make some income, but it took a lot of time and a lot of money to reinvest in our social media to get it to quote on quote "make some money." I will give you a for instance, like last year in 2021, I invested a quarter million dollars into my social media business.
And this year we're about double that. Wow. So there's a point to where we're reinvesting, we're building the framework and the foundation to grow that company. We multiple six figures, like I said, invested, reinvested a lot. It's insane actually.
But long story short, we'll be investing heavily into real estate over the foreseeable next two decades, three decades, and hopefully beyond. I don't have a succession plan with the company or anything like that. Whether we sell it one day for a couple hundred grand, whether we relocate, whether continue to keep it in the family. I'm not sure on that answer just yet. Yeah, so right now we're just playing it day by day and kinda year by year.
That's perfect. I do the same thing. I don't I don't believe in 401ks, I do real estate. So I'm very much aligned with you.
Brian: I was just gonna say probably an unpopular answer for some people, but frankly I don't know anybody I know that's extremely wealthy, just unless they own the company. That's gonna get wealthy with stocks and bonds and mutual funds and God bless my Dave Ramsey People that are like that . I'm much more of a Robert Kiyosaki type so we're gonna definitely grow our real estate portfolio starting. In about three months, so I can't wait.
If somebody's getting into this, what can expect to make? What can they look forward to make in the business of landscaping?
Brian: Honestly, the sky's the limit. You can make whatever you want.
Most guys, I'm sure, on average, make $40 to $60,000 bucks, which is a fair income for most self-employed people. I can also introduce you to dozens of people that make $80 to $120 grand a year. Dozens of people that make $200,000 a year, and it just goes out from there. That's a kind of a multi-tiered question and multi-tiered answer because the difference between what you make on a salary and then what you have for distributions is gonna be different for everybody.
So at the end of the day, actually pretty much salary. It's in the 30 to 40K mark retained earnings or if I wanted to do distribution, we're sitting at about 75 to 100k a year with the company. You could say, all in all, on a $275,000 grossing business, we will clear About a hundred and I'd say conservatively $110k.
It's always a hard question right? It's always, how much do you believe in yourself? Which is the business, you have to take out enough to support yourself but leave enough to where you could reinvest everything else in.
Brian: That's exactly it. I could make no money and put it all back in the business grow for next year. Other people, say they make a hundred grand a year on 400 grand and they're just sucking all the profit out of the company.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. For us personally, I get a $30,000 year salary. Yeah. And we got about $85,000 in retain earnings for the year just sitting there. Will I distribute them to myself? Are we gonna reinvest? Probably not reinvest. There's nothing really left for me to buy unless I wanna get myself outta trouble.
So more than likely that money is gonna just be left in there and then that again is gonna go to other investments starting in 2023. Can you make a hundred grand a year? A hundred percent. It's not even a question. So I wouldn't really even give percentages of what people can make.
If whatever you wanna make is what you what you put into it is what you'll get out. And that's the point. I've got other people that I've done coaching calls with in their first year. They're doing 800 grand gross and making 150,000 bucks. Yeah, it's all relative.
Awesome man. Once again, thank you so much Brian for agreeing to this, taking time outta your day. I know you're busy so I really appreciate it
Brian: Thanks again for having me. Thanks for highlighting our small little business over here in Michigan, dude.
Brian is an absolute awesome individual who really put it all out there and I hope you enjoyed. If you would like to reach out to him or check out his videos I HIGHLY suggest you do. He shares a lot of insight into his business and just general good pieces of advice to everyone out there.
Facebook: Brians Lawn Maintenance
Youtube: @brianslawnmaintenance
