21 Year Old Running A 5 Million Dollar Lawn Care Company! (Shop Tour and Maintenance Division)

we're here at lucky Landscaping in Florida with Austin he's 21 years old and they're doing $5 million a year in their landscaping company so let's tour the yard and go check out some [Applause] [Music] [Music] properties that shows a well- ran well organized company hey what's going on hope you guys are doing well I'm here with Austin from Lucky Landscaping in Jupiter Florida yes Jupiter Florida what's up dude uh I think I follow like we've been friends on Facebook for like 10 years and this is our first time meeting so what's going on dude nice to meet you finally uh this is this is crazy dude I I really didn't know how incredible your story was you guys are crushing it here yeah so we're a commercial landscape firm here in uh at Jupiter Florida which is a a very nice place if you haven't been here uh we have beautiful beaches amazing restaurants he's also a travel guide no I'm kidding yeah no not really but it's an amazing place to live um you know a big tourist place so we get we're fortunate enough to have you know pretty nice properties that we get to get to work on and you guys are doing about $5 million a year with only 19 accounts technically correct so yeah we're probably going to do over 5 million this year in 2024 um we have about 19 customers which consist of HOAs so in a specific HOA we may have 600 homes uh but 19 customers I guess you could say have you always been doing that like did you used to do like a one-off property like ny's yard or and you just found that hey this is our Niche is HOAs yeah so I think we started you know obviously like everyone else started cutting houses when I was you know 8 or 9 years old in my in my neighborhood and eventually I think when I was 15 or 16 it really started started to take off when I bought my first truck um and we started getting into commercial just little commercial accounts you know a little Condominium Association and eventually we just kind of grew it to you know what it is today which is all commercial HOAs and we've kind of found our niche of we're good at it and we're going to be able to go see some of those right yes we'll check some out and see some guys working that's awesome and so how many trucks and how many guys do you have so we have a total of 16 trucks and about 40 employees right now in the winter time uh we'll probably be pushing 50 or 60 come somewhere and how old are you dude 21 years old this is so wild congratulations I can't wait to hear more about it we're going to walk around uh your shop here and then we're going to go take a look at some some properties all right so I think it'd be fun if we just go around I was asking you a million questions I'm like let's turn on the camera dude we're just going to go around t or something at what point like when did you make a million dollar and what was the turning point cuz I saw you years ago just driving around a little Atlas pulling a trailer in a mower so like how did it go from that to this yeah so I think we uh like I was probably I was in high school I think as a junior and that's when I hit my first million dollars um just selling selling selling uh and then we kind of redefined what our real goal was and who our ideal client was and we kind of backtracked a little bit and then you know regrew from there so uh you know we discovered multi family apartment complexes weren't our Niche we like higher end work people that take pride in the appeal of their property versus just trying to meet a budget on multif family that's wild and so this was your old office you were telling me yeah so at our old facility this was our office uh and you guys were doing millions of dollars out of here oh yeah we we didn't move to this facility probably about 3 million in s so so you don't need a big fancy shop to make a million dollars no this is a 10x 20 we have a window it's drywalled inside and and it worked perfect can we check it out yeah let's check it out that's awesome dude it it I think it's good you know I I feel like everybody has this Vision that you have to have some big fancy barn and Shop yeah so you guys are like d we got a container man yeah so now we use it just for training um our guys come in here in the morning and meet but we had two or three desks in here we had a sales guy office manager and me all working out of here you know pumping 3 million in sales and then so this is you you bought this property a year ago yeah so I bought this property a year ago it's 6 acres and we're getting ready to build a big nursery on it as well this is our key system that we use that keeps track of all of our keys um for our truck so the very cool thing about this is we'll have the truck key on a blue P Peg all the drivers will have a peg with their key on it so the idea is that their personal key that they drove to work is on a red key they plug it they put it in they twist it and they take our truck key so while they have our key we have their key ooh so not only does it hold them accountable to turn our key in every day if we have to move their car at our facility we have their key at all times and that's the reason we do it and What's this called so this is called keeper systems it's a very expensive board but it's mechanical so no subscriptions it's a oneandone cost so yeah there's no power or whatever 16 would put R key back in twist it and they would get that's and then of we have them for out of service if truck correct so if we have the truck key on it you can't get it out interesting that's cool dude yeah I and where do you learn these organization things these are cool just by touring facilities you know I go and check out a lot of other companies and uh you get one or two pieces from every facility and it really starts to build your infrastructure yeah that's awesome you guys have a little guide here yeah what truck does which and then you guys have fuel here on site for the equipment we have all of our own onsite fuel we have diesel we have regular and then we have a mix tank so this tank is 300 gallons we mix our two cycle uh gas about every 10 days we put 250 gallons of regular it's a 5 gallon bucket of two cycle oil so one and done you come you fill your can and that's it nobody's mixing except one guy at our company that's awesome so and then another uh efficiency thing we did we put all the hoses on reel so every tank has a 50ft hose so when our crews get here in the afternoon they're going to they take the hose out they fill all their mowers inside the trailer one's fill in the mowers one's fill in the truck and they Park their truck so that's why we have two regular and then of course one diesel for our so you guys fill up at the end of the day correct so they'll just come in here stop do all that and put it away do that they dump their truck if they have to uh and it's all about efficiencies what's your uh what's your gas station policy then so no we don't allow any gas stations morning afternoon lunchtime no gas stations for our trucks really um we have ice at our shop we have fuel at our shop we have the dump at our shop uh there's no reason to stop at any stores for any reason what about like oh I didn't bring my lunch today honestly it doesn't come up to me anymore so it may go to the production manager but um it does take a lot of enforcing and I think it's hard when you don't do it from the beginning but now that when guys come work for us that's just our policy it is what it is at that point so you guys are are focused on billable time now because you have you've made the Investments here to have everything at the shop and your guys aren't stopping at the gas station for an hour an hour and a half a day exactly that stuff adds up dude oh it it adds up very quickly so you know we allow drivers to come in clock in 15 minutes early make sure their trucks are ready so that way crew members can arrive at 7:00 a.m. and they are out of the shop that's awesome um so we try to have a couple minute roll out and same thing comes in the afternoon we allow the driver and one other guy to fill up dump the truck get it all set for the next day what was that new software thing that you're you're implementing so we actually we just invested in a new system that's going to be installed probably in about 2 weeks called fuel cloud and what it does is every truck has a uh number in the system and every driver has a pin so the driver will be able to go up to the to the to the computer punch in their pin number punch in what truck they're filling up and the software will turn on the pump for that truck so if it's a diesel truck it's going to turn on the diesel pump if it's a gas truck it's going to turn on the gas pump and we can also set a limit in there that they can only fill 25 gallons into that truck so they can't fill the truck and fill their car it's going to clock out on them and then you were saying that for off-road fuel tax by the government people don't know this if you're like just starting in your business when you're going to buy gas at the pump and it's $3 30 cents or whatever the taxes are already built in it's about a dollar a gallon in taxes for road so um this new software is also going to keep track of how much fuel is going into weed whackers edgers blowers mowers if we have diesel going into a chipper into our front end loader it's going to track all that so at the end of the year you can compile a form with the government how many gallons you put into you know off-road Fuel and file it with the state so at diesel you can buy off-road diesel you can't buy off-road gas so that's the reason that you have to file with the government to get that rebate um and making sure your track it is important too because they will audit it if you say all your gas is off-road they're going to know something's up we also have a drum of death fluid as well so we got to put it inside but uh this is deaf for the diesel trucks so we also have a dump here so trucks will dump we'll get you know debris from our Nursery it'll all pile up here uh we have to call a grapple truck to come and Claw it out uh twice a week so they came today that's why it's a mess right now uh this is our shipping container full of storage um I definitely didn't clean it up for you cuz I don't believe in making everything look pretty just for the camera um so you can see it's a little bit of a mess but uh we have extra Roundup extra Irrigation Supplies our water for the guys um extra tools um so yeah it's just all spare equipment I guess and broken stuff that has to go to a mechanic can you show us this barcode thing really fast yeah so we got this barcode um asset tracking system uh that it's called asset tagger we buy the barcodes from them the the software is free so there's no subscription fees on that either and you can scan it on your phone and see exactly what unit it is so um for example you can scan this one and you'll be able to see exactly which unit this is it's going to load and we can see exactly what unit it is serial number where we purchased it from the purchase date and what we paid for it which is a great system uh to know whether you should replace the unit or actually invest the money to fix it so if the unit's 2 years old I wouldn't recommend putting $200 into putting a new power head on it when you could buy a new one for 3 or 400 and get 2E solid out of it yeah cuz most of the time with that you're going to pay you know $150 just for the person to do it the labor right and it also lets you know hey this unit's still under warranty we bought it 3 months ago so it gives you a lot of good data so what's this just equipment not being used yeah nothing pretty here extra pallets from mulch installs uh we got our stump grinder we got a couple of these Ferris blowers they don't work that great for our HOAs unfortunately that are smaller I think for industrial they'd work amazing uh we have a couple Gators we just bought a billy goat leaf vacuum I'm not sure how that's going to work out for us yet um we of course got a dingo um and a Kota front end loader so are you guys mostly mowing tree trimming or what's the majority of the business so I'd say about 50 60% of our our business is maintenance mowing hedge trimming Etc um we're probably about 20% tree trimming uh you know 10 or 20% on enhancement work um so that's pretty much the mix of our business but very heavy on mainten what is this thing used for so we use the Kabota at the shop here you know move material load trucks uh we mostly use it on a job when it's mulching season so we probably do about 5 or 600 pallets of mulch come October so we use this in all of our communities to move the pallets around um pallets of mulch yeah so down here in Florida we are all bagged mulch what so that's wild dude there is no bulk really y pallet forks and move the pallet good to go I mean it see like if you if you're doing large stuff like this I guess that seems kind of convenient but like I just imagine a big scoop we could just scoop a bunch of mulch man yeah so you know from us when we're bidding jobs our production rate's 20 bags an hour per man so if we have 10 guys on a site you know we're getting 200 bags an hour down and that's the ratio cuz of course you have one guy on a machine that's not laying any bags so you have to look at the average but we're about 20 bags a uh a Mana which comes to about a yard and a half an hour I guess if you're doing bulk so we ordered a bunch of material it's all for upcoming jobs just a stockpile um when you're doing bunch of HOA stuff there's always a couple plants that die here or there and rather than trying to send guys to a nursery for you know 10 plants it really the customer ends up paying a lot of money for it so does this get delivered here yeah so this all comes directly from The Growers gets delivered here we pay a much lower cost and buying it local at retail um and it also helps a ton on our efficiencies how much do a bag of mulch cost here so I think we're paying about 220 a bag or so what would that be for per yard do you know so it's 13 1 12 bags so I guess probably about 30 bucks or so you're a smart guy dude you got he's the numbers guy I can tell yeah so yeah we're paying like $25 to $30 depending on the color the difference doesn't make up for bag or not bag it's just what we do well you know what are the trailers that are sitting around here so we've got an extra maintenance trailer we've got a trailer that holds fertilizer um they're kind of just extra so once we get to a job site you'll see we run all box trucks so there's pros and cons obviously one of the cons is if your box truck goes down you're not transporting equipment so we have trailers in case that happens and we'll use a trailer to get our mowers and stuff to a job site can we briefly take a look at the office and then we'll go check out some jobs yeah let's check out the office you got some nice cones here and that they just basically at the end of the day they just gas up and then they have a designated area or it's first come in so they all have a designated spot spot um that'd be correct they gas up they dump they Park their truck and in the morning they go straight out um so we have a very interesting system here we actually uh we were having an issue with painting lines and they were never staying and you couldn't see the lines so we actually came up with this idea that we have a rope on the ground that's pinned in and so the Rope is our line now and there's a couple Stakes throughout it that pins it down and we have them all throughout here and occasionally we'll paint the Rope but it stays rather than the washing all the paint right off the dirt and then the everybody just Parks here so I love our landscape so we've done quite a bit here trial and error we got different rocks different colors um and then of course we've got our ice bin so it goes back to the efficiency thing is uh we don't want people stopping at gas stations so they have no reason to not go to gas stations they're full of ice that's awesome dude how much does one of those things cost probably four or five grand but it pays for itself $2 a bag at 12 Crews well it's that or just your labor savings sitting at a gas station with what so how many people are on a truck so anywhere from typically five or six um but then we have sites where two Crews will go so they'll have 12 guys on site nice this is beautiful dude yeah it came out nice I like the I just I can't imagine living palm tree life it's awesome are these your trucks yeah so I have a work truck and a play truck dang that's a beautiful truck yeah it gets muddy around here too so the only the bad part about having a nice truck and trying to keep Wheels shiny dang dude what year is this that's a 22 that is cool see if you don't have a big shop for the first few years in your business exactly you get to buy nice things hey and I drove a I drove a when I was in high school I drove an F250 lifted truck I thought it was super cool and then finally one day I woke woke up I don't need this truck so I went out I bought a Ford Explorer a $35,000 car and I grew to probably 3 million in the car and then I finally decided I wanted a truck again so I bought a play truck and now of course I have a work truck that's cool what year's the work truck a 20 I bought that used dang dude are these like aftermarket yeah there's a custom uh guy that paint takes them apart and paints them that's beautiful all right this isn't truck show but those are beautiful trucks they don't matter they don't matter but it it's fun to it's a negative on the balance sheet it's at least fun to see man that's cool this is beautiful yeah so I like trial and error a lot of stuff that's how I learned I didn't go to college or school for landscape so uh this is did you go to college at all I didn't just high school so this is my test area here that side I don't do anything on so this side I over fertilize I you know I spray with Fungicide and I'm trying to kill it and it doesn't seem to die so it's Greener though so as Blake says with my numbers truck washing is a 20-minute job which means two people for 10 minutes or three people for 7 minutes and four people isn't needed that's funny so you just have a bunch of like yeah so we have a bunch of signs we're going to put them up soon uh you know but getting the point across you know via a sign is the easiest way where do you get these signs made like I them with your logo and stuff yeah just a local company you know we just make them up online and uh send them off to get printed nice so is this where you work every day yeah so I'm in the office every day uh you know just going over the numbers account management you know production so we do it all right here that's awesome I've seen these on Tik Tok oh yeah I know I haven't hung it up yet though so I'm already a month or two behind but yeah I found it online that's awesome you have uh office staff in here yeah so we have an office manager an account manager um and two production managers so one on maintenance one on tree trimming and you know they'll meet in here occasionally as well we have a nice conference table we can open a set of plans on here nice and wide open nice and you got a little view that's cool dude Yep this is awesome yeah it you know it's wide open uh nothing can finded I guess so it works good for what we need you know we're a small company and uh everybody works together you know I don't like job titles so that's awesome cuz we have like the ones that are are the uh the cable wire cable and it's always dragging or broken so uh dot they don't like that and it's our first red flag to pull you over so now uh this goes on the trailer to the brake cable thing and the the carabin clip goes on the truck and it's never going to touch no matter where you get that just Amazon you get a pack of two I think they were like 30 bucks all right so this is our conference table we're missing a couple chairs but um this is where we display our schedule on LMN which is what we use as well as our truck trackers which is Sam sah and the cool thing with Sam sah is if you look at the green bubbles uh that's weather so there's I guess some uh rain probably coming in and you can also see the traffic uh lines as well so that's wild Sam Sarah yep and you said that they have dash cams yeah so this is all part of a dual facing dash cam forward facing and we can see inside the truck um so it really uh you know from a safety and a risk standpoint that's the reason we have it we don't really check it but you know this becomes interesting when don't tell your guys that though yeah this becomes interesting you know when it's 4:00 in the afternoon and say the exit's closed and you see a straight red line down the highway you can tell your guys so a little piece of traffic here or there you're not going to worry about but if you see a solid line for a big stretch where you know they're traveling you might want to reroute them one way and so does that like is that like a subscription like the dash cams and stuff yeah so I think it's about 40 bucks a month per truck so it is a little costly but uh you know as we got bigger it definitely become became needed it also alerts the drivers in cab of hey uh you're speeding and so it'll talk to them while they're driving or it'll detect their phone and we can also see a whole report on that specific driver of hey they're speeding you know quite a bit and it'll track how much they're speeding or or how much they're on their phone that's awesome and then LMN over here yeah so we have LMN over here bunch of our jobs are all scheduled um the guys will CL in CL out uh and it job cost all of our jobs so we can see in live time you know if we're making money losing money uh and if they're going over our budgeted hours versus you know actuals that's awesome how long have you guys been in here so probably 6 months maybe 8 months in here okay so it's a little little upgrade from our you know shipping container yeah that's awesome what's in here this is just another office room so not much I like all the windows and doors and stuff yeah this is the golf room yeah so I think we're going to move our conference table in here do our TV in here um it's kind of a little bit more private then I guess out in the open and we kind of need some more space out there for desk this is kind of cool they're going to hang that up he's the boss and at 15 he may gross 100,000 this year that's awesome dude yep it was amazing time Sunday paper that's cool I am totally impressed that's wild bro so you know you have full-time office staff in there I think that's the side of business that is very cool you know because to get to that step is Pretty Tough you know it's hard to like get to the point where you can afford people to go out and do the work but then you get to a step of having office staff is because right like very impressive it doesn't generate direct Revenue but it's needed to manage the revenue so you know it's you got to manage it for sure and you got to know your overhead staff account managers you know production managers they're not actually directly generating Revenue but they're managing the people that do generate it what I think is crazy is to hear that you guys aren't like crazy rushed busy in there cuz you only have 19 accounts you only have 19 invoices a week or a month I'm sorry and right it's like it's all about managing problems and if you solve a problem quick it won't be a problem and so that's our biggest thing is it comes back to radius right like we focus on a tight radius now so we can put out all the fires in one day typically and it's not like oh we've we're 3 days behind on you know work orders that people have complained we missed their Bush we didn't do this yeah we solve them quick yeah and and you found that Niche that sounds pretty cool of not having to invoice I mean how many actual houses do you guys mow would you say thousands right yeah probably five or 6,000 actual doors so so imagine invoicing all that you would have a much different life oh yeah it's a whole different aspect of it cuz the the invoicing alone would take I mean a full on you only have a couple staff in there I mean you'd have have to have a big team to do that I me yeah and you'd just have phone calls coming in you you'd have a lot more verse right now about 95% of the homeowners will call the property manager which will then send it to us if it's a complaint for us you know half the time it's like that's not part of their service so we we don't even get it so we kind of have all the property managers working for us profiling the complaints or work orders that come in before they actually get to us can we go check out some properties man yeah let's go I want to see these trucks in action these are our Flagship trucks uh we love the box trucks they work very well for us they're an Isuzu truck this one's actually a Mitsubishi this is the first one we built um we've got under mount fuel tanks on them we've got storage on the other ones and on the other side as well so we have a mix tank as well as a regular tank um the red hose is their mix and the uh black hose is going to be their regular so and then they also they have a key to turn on the pumps so the mix one uh so like you would go from that to a a blower yeah so they're going directly from their mix fuel here and going right to the blower to fill it up huh so um like I said it all goes back to at the shop when we're filling our mix since we preix it all in a large tank they can fill it right into the 15g uh transfer tank on the truck gotcha so works pretty pretty nice and this is a dump so this dumps to the side So This Is How They unload all their trash where do you put it in at uh the other side or yeah the other side has a step on it our whole Fleet is all right um we love efficiencies so we use tws dude all day that's awesome I love them they work amazing uh this machine has 845 hours and look at how good that tire is still these are the tws yes we have the uh the x mark version of those love them the tractus tires it's amaz I mean this is like you wonder about the future of like lawn care and that's the best place to start if you're going to invest in something it's what $6 $700 a tire but like this tire has 850 hours on it we've never had a flat tire and it still probably has another th hours of life so we'll use this machine for 3 years and never replace a set of tires on and you'll probably put those back on like I know Brian's on maintenance he's used the tracce for longer than me and I think he's put like 2,000 hours on it and it looks brand new still I know and it I mean as long as the guys aren't running up and down pavement they'll last a while so who does the wraps and like all the brand like it all seems to everybody shirts and everybody all the signs and all the trucks who does that so I love branding it means everything to us we use a company called coughs around here they do all of our truck wraps they design them they design the themes for everything we do man these are beautiful so they really the trucks come out nice so you said you have like how many people working on one neighborhood so in this neighborhood right now we have three trucks here here's another truck uh coming down the street so dude that's wild bro so like when you guys are you guys are running a neighborhood when you're in there yeah so we're in here today we have a trim crew crew in here we've got two mowing crews in here and I believe this accounts a uh 2-day mow as well so so nobody in this neighborhood mows their own yard correct we do fronts backs we trim all the bushes front yards backyards we do everything in here it's a full service account dude so like you would trim those trees uh the trees will be separate on this one we only do selective trees okay um but on some of our other maintenance accounts we do all their trees Palms Oaks compl Dam dang dude see this is this is a different world than what I'm used to yeah and so you were saying like the advantages of this is you guys come out here focus on the work doing everything and you guys only have to build one person correct so it's one bill how do you know how many houses are in this neighborhood this one I believe is about 450 it's mixed Town Homes vers single family so I think it's about is that your truck too 200 yeah we have a production manager there so we dude this is wild run guys and you know specializing quality so you know we have guys on the blower from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 in this account just sweeping it you know just and you know an eight or nine man mow crew I believe in here and uh a guy starts mowing a guy starts weed whacking a guy starts edging and guys start blowing so what are your hours uh we're typically 7 to 3 or 4ish just depends does that change in the winter and summertime not really okay just depends on the rain you know in the summer yeah we have to adjust a little bit this is wild dude this is so cool I I don't know I'm I'm I'm really mind blown dude yeah OB 21 years old dude I I it's I'm I'm super I'm pumped for you dude this is awesome yeah you know organizations everything you know having the proper racks you know we obviously have green touch uh you know five blowers we had normally have three or four weed whackers three or four edgers um so just tons of equipment and as as you can see either neither truck had a single blower in it right now so so somebody's using a blower yeah they're all blowing mowers are in for the day so um we're all blowing to clean up and get out so this whole neighborhood will be done today uh this one I'm not I think this one's a 2-day moow uh but in the winter time we do switch schedules around as we're mowing every other week so we can typically send two gu two Crews three crews and just bang stuff out in a day do you guys uh trim or Edge your edges we use a metal edger on all of them okay yeah is that just faster you think yeah for us I think had this conversation over the years of let me take my glasses off of cash versus financing things and like I said I've been friends with you on Facebook for like 10 years yeah and then boom you're here and so do you think that financing versus paying cash for things has made you guys blow up faster yeah I mean I would say right in business you have to evaluate what your cash is worth to us when we're growing cash is valuable people don't always pay on time yeah um so to us financing is our way to keep our cash some people will still pay cash and get a line of credit it's a lot harder to do when you're 21 years old so we've always just financed equipment saved our cash to front growth yeah so so you finance trucks and mowers trucks mowers stump grinder chipper we pretty much all of it boarding fuel yeah mixed gas they can fill up the blowers here right from the truck no gas [Music] cans that's awesome so they actually fill up these tanks at the shop and then if they need gas they can fill it right here from the truck all right I'm 30 minutes into editing this and I'm going to cut it off here and we're going to make a part two we're going to go visit the tree trimming crew and let me just tell you it's absolutely insane they've got another crew of 15 20 guys over there uh so look out for part two I hope you guys enjoyed it again I appreciate awesome for letting us ask any questions we could and and tour the facility if you guys enjoyed leave me a like subscribe and I'll be posting part two here in a couple days thanks for watching peace

Channel: B&B Lawn Care

Views: 388,539

Keywords: B&B Lawn Care, lawn care, landscaping, lawn care community, kansas city, missouri, grass, Blake albertson, bblawncarekc, Lawn Care Business, Lucky Landscaping, 21 year old running a 5 million dollar lawn care company, Florida lawn care, jupiter florida

Id: sCZa2ONR6lY

Length: 32min 57sec (1977 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024