The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Most Profitable Local Business Everyone Overlooks ($70K/Month) ⏐ Ep. #196

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Check out my newsletter at TKOPOD.com and join my new community at TKOwners.comI sat down with Alex Boyd to talk about how a personal landscaping problem led him to uncover a wildly underserved niche forestry mulching. We broke down how he used YouTube content, keyword research, and Meta ads to dominate the market, all while running lean with just a few machines. He shares the full playbook for how he turned a $5K investment into a $500K+ service business in just over a year. We also riffed on a brand new idea involving the Green Climber a remote-controlled land-clearing robot that no one’s doing yet.Check out his YouTube channel at Brushworks Services Co and learn more at brushworksco.com____________________________________________________________________If you liked this one and want to learn about more sweaty startup ideas, check out these episodes:Making $23K/Month by Month 2 with a B2B Home Service | HoldCo Bros Discuss. Ep. #140 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2241079/episodes/16750596B2B Stump Grinding. Cash Cow or Dud? HoldCo Bros Discuss. Ep. #037 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2241079/episodes/15389671I Found an Untapped Home Service Business with 75% Net Profit Margins. Ep #075 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2241079/episodes/15881038How Two Teenage Brothers Built a $900k Junk Removal Business with No Money. Ep #054 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2241079/episodes/15603176Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Identifying Market Demand for Brush Clearing03:01 The Journey of Starting a Brush Clearing Business05:50 Keyword Research and Content Marketing Strategies08:59 Leveraging YouTube for Local Service Marketing11:50 Equipment Investment and Financing Options15:07 Ad Targeting and Placement Strategies25:03 Maximizing Video Marketing Strategies30:10 Lead Generation and Conversion Rates35:00 Understanding Pricing and Job Estimates40:45 The Emotional Impact of Land Clearing41:43 Sales Growth and Future Projections45:05 Innovative Equipment and Market Opportunities

I'm like, okay, there's definitely demand for this. And I started looking into the companies, couldn't find any. So I just was like, holy smokes, you know, I definitely kind of stumbled upon this industry. We're like, all right, let's do it. So the first month, it was like $17,000. What's your average job size? It's about $3,100. We've got around $70,000 on the schedule for each month up until October.

You'll do a million next year. The new machinery got 0% financing for 60 months. Somebody's going to kill it with that little machine. You just have somebody who's operating joysticks from standing off to the side. Had you ever used one before? We've never used one. Have you ever done a home service business before? No.

So I was scrolling on Twitter the other day and I find this guy named Alex and he started a brush clearing company in Cincinnati, Ohio and his first month he did almost $18,000 in revenue with 85% net profit margins. Why did he start this? Because he has a marketing background. He can do a little keyword research, nothing more extensive than what I talk about on this podcast all the time. And he learned, holy crap, there is a ton of demand for brush clearing in my area.

And almost no one is fulfilling this demand because he had just bought five acres and he needed brush clearing. So having never started a home service or a local business or a sweaty startup before, he said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to start a brush clearing business because I know there is so much demand for it. And I can charge $2,000 a day. You can get the equipment financed. You can start this for very little.

little money, and there's a ton of markets that have way more demand than supply for brush clearing, forestry mulching, as it's called. We got super tactical about his Facebook ads, what types of ads he's running, how he's using YouTube, which I did not see coming, and how much money he's making today, only 13 months into this business and what his margins are. We held nothing back. You are going to love this. Please share it with a friend, especially someone that might be interested in starting a local service business with very little money and very high margins. Tell me about How you even stumbled upon this industry? So I bought a house and we have five acres.

Four of it was wooded. And I was like, okay, well, I have this nice yard, but I can't even use it. So how do I clear this? And I started looking into it and I couldn't find anybody. The closest person was over 100 miles away. I don't want to docks you, but like what is the population or the size of your city? How far are you from a major metroplex that we might have heard of? Just to give us some bearing.

So I'm about 30 minutes from downtown Cincinnati. Okay. In like a small rural city? It used to be 10 years ago. It was a lot more rural. There's a lot more suburbs out here now. So I'm kind of right on the edge of those suburbs. So there's like a thousand acre farm near me.

And then on the other side, you've got just tons and tons of subdivisions. So I'm kind of right on that edge. It's funny because we're very similar. I live 30 minutes from downtown Dallas. And I'm like right near all the major Dallas suburbs, Plano McKinney and all that. But I'm in like this little rural pocket. Yep. It's the best, isn't it?

You still have property. It's perfect. We have three acres. Not a lot of it is wooded. But I've rented a skid steer about four times. I have no problem finding someone to because I mean, there's eight million people in Dallas and I'm close enough. Right. Right.

But you're in a much different situation from as far as population is concerned. Yeah, Texas is interesting. They're one of the few saturated mulching markets from what I've heard. Interesting. Yeah. So somebody out there must be really promoting it and doing really well with it or a multitude of companies. One of the guys I've met is from Texas and he just traveled up here because there was no competition. Wow.

Okay. So you bought five acres, four of which were wooded. and you need someone to come out and clear it, at least to some extent, you can't find anyone within 100 miles. Yep. So then that got me thinking. I said, well, you know, could I do this? And I started looking into it. I started looking around on my neighbors, and I'm like, everybody needs this.

In Ohio, and I'm not necessarily sure in other states, but in Ohio in particular, especially our area, we have this plant called honeysuckle. I know it's pretty prevalent everywhere, but here in particular, it's really bad. And everybody has this problem. It's overgrowing on them constantly. What happens? If you have any sort of property and you mow, it'll, over time, you know, five years from now, you've lost 15 feet of your property because it just keeps creeping over and over and over. So I just saw that everywhere.

And I'm like, okay, there's definitely demand for this. And I started looking into the companies. Couldn't find any. I found some owner operators that were just promoting a marketplace. They didn't really have like a brand or anything kind of established. And so I started doing keyword research. And I'm kind of learning, you know, off of X that I'm kind of doing like this old school version of keyword research, probably because I did it a lot back in the early 2000 or mid-2000s.

But I just sat down and I said, okay, people don't seem to know what forestry munching is. If I type in forestry mulching, I'm hardly getting any sort of results. I talk to friends, talk to family. They're like, what is forestry mulching? So I just started asking them. I said, okay, let's say you wanted to clear your property. You've got this problem. It's been overgrowing.

You've lost 20 feet. What are you going to search to try and find this? And so people were giving me ideas, you know, clear my woods, get rid of this wild rose, destroy honey cycle. And I just started taking this list into a spreadsheet of all the different terms that people would search for. And then I used a keyword tool typing in those and seeing how many results they're getting. Which tool did you use? I think it was SEM Rush.

It's been about two years since I did it. Unlike AHAFs, they actually have a free trial. Yeah, yeah, that's, yep, yep. I hope it's never paid for those tools. No, never. Yeah, so I just noticed there's this huge search traffic. So I just was like, holy smokes, you know, I definitely kind of kind of stumbled upon this industry. I don't know anything about it and just started looking into the equipment.

And then my business partner, Zach, he was a part of this whole idea process as well. And I was just, you know, all the time like, okay, let's see. This is what the search data is showing. I think we can do this. And then we just kind of were like, all right. all right, let's do it. I know how to run ads. I know marketing.

I think, you know, we can solve this problem that I'm seeing with other companies. And what I mean by that, so I actually reached out to some tree service companies. Because if you're trying to get this done, you would think, okay, maybe I'll just contact the tree service company. And what I found was these guys don't know how to sell this service.

And they also don't have the operators. So you can't take a tree service guy and stick them in these machines. So they've never really pursued this, even though they got asked about it a lot. How to sell it is through content marketing. And that's, I was like, okay, I think that's the answer. That's how we sell this.

And so we went and bought the machine and we didn't have any jobs on the schedule. I kind of cobbled together an ad. I actually used like Bobcats YouTube channel where they had a forest remulching demo to kind of cobbled together my first ad. You borrowed their video? I was like,

phone's five cat i'm using their equipment they're yeah sure right i was like until i at least get my own videos and yeah so i mean we got inundated pretty quickly now when you say content marketing you mean like paid content marketing not necessarily not necessarily so like youtube i consider youtube like content marketing it can be used as content marketing you know people have youtube channels where they're trying to get tons of views and i didn't approach youtube that way i don't really, I don't care at all about the view count. I needed something that, that would support the business and support the service and support the marketing process. So I kind of see YouTube as a content marketing outlet. Yeah. So are you, because to me, content marketing is not the first

thing I think of when I think of a local service business because, you know, the YouTube algorithm will spread your video far and wide, not necessarily to people that live in Cincinnati or thereabouts. So how do you approach that? So I, I actually use local keywords. So when you're putting in your tags, I use the local keywords. I'll do like Cincinnati ForestryMulching as part of my tags on YouTube videos. And the reason is, is because of somebody local is searching that on Google and you know how it shows the video results kind of up there first, it's more likely to show my video to

them. So because it's specifically for my area. So I kind of use AdWords, keywords in a sense, onto my YouTube tags. So is the hope then that someone local to your area who needs your service, they don't know it yet, they're just kind of, they're typing around, they're clicking around, they're looking for content related to it because maybe they want to rent one themselves and do it or something. And then they see you and then they're thinking, yeah, let me just have this guy do it. Not necessarily.

So that's kind of a perk of it is that if somebody's looking for it specifically, we're going to show up. But that's where the meta ads come in. because, you know, I see meta ads a totally different than Google AdWords. Google AdWords is somebody's looking for your service. High intent. You're bidding against other people looking for your service. Meta to me is they're not looking for my service.

I'm going to knock on the door and sell this to them, essentially, right? That's the way I see meta. You're interrupting their flow, you know, when they're scrolling through their timeline. And so we just made, I was like, okay, well, I'll make a cool video. you know, highlight the problem. First show that you're local. Local is the number one because people don't like, you're not going to pay attention to it if you're not local.

If they see, oh, wow, these people are local, oh, dang, this is cool. Look at this thing in slow motion shredding this tree. And then I kind of introduce the service into that ad video. And then when people see that, I want them to say, well, I have this problem. They weren't necessarily looking for me. I just have to show them like,

here's a solution to a problem. probably complain about every spring when the leaves come back on the trees. Yeah. And so that's the way I use meta ads. And then I put the YouTube link on the ad. And then they go to our YouTube channel and they see, okay, look at us comment. Look at this job. Look at this before and after.

These guys are, this machine is crazy. They've never seen this before. And then they are going to call them. And that's what happens. So we essentially reinforce that ad through our YouTube channel. We create family. It's crazy. I would say almost every customer has watched our YouTube channel.

Some of them have watched every video. And they still do. Even the ones we've already served. That's amazing. I'm so glad this conversation took this direction because I didn't know you were going to talking about YouTube or content marketing at all. Yeah, yeah. But this is awesome because I own a tree trimming business.

And that's not even on our radar content market. So I'm actually this winter. I'm going to be doing one for tree service. Okay. Not for my company. I'm going to help out somebody else. else. So you're going to be like kind of an agency to another local tree trimming business to help them. Yeah. Yeah. I only do that kind of stuff if I think it's fun and cool to do. And I think this one,

this is a big tree service company. I think he's like six million a year and his referral only. He does not advertise. Wow. How long has he been around? I want to say doing tree service for eight to 10 years. Okay. So I pulled up your YouTube channel. You've been doing this for a year now. Yeah, so we just crossed our, we're about a year and a month that we've been doing this business. Okay. And you started YouTube on day one, basically. Started on day one, yep, because I knew I needed the, I needed the videos. I like photography. I like videography as a hobby. So I just, I love doing it anyways. I knew people would think this is cool to watch. So I went out and took my cameras and went out and recorded the first job.

I utilize a lot of that footage for the ads. So, yeah, and then I just kind of kept going. I just like doing it, you know. Eventually, you'd have to pay someone to do it, but I just like it. Are you editing it yourself as well? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you're not that good, but the thing is, it's like it doesn't have to be that good.

It just has to show people something. So are you just setting up a phone on a tripod or two phones or two cameras or what does your hardware look like? So I have a camcorder, a 4K camcorder. I've got action cameras. I have a Sony mirrorless camera. I actually just got a, like a pin on camera. It was the Go3S, the Insta 360. So, yeah, I have all kinds of different cameras.

I used to travel the country and go to National Parks and record stuff. This is awesome. Are you able to attribute a specific percentage? of your business to YouTube? And if so, what does it kind of look like, give or take? Directly from YouTube or? Just like the customers that touched YouTube in some way. I would say most. So probably around 80%. Wow. It's not independent of your meta ad strategy. It complements it. Yep. Okay. The YouTube is for the ad strategy. Yeah. That's so interesting. support it. Are your most successful meta ads video? Oh yeah, without a doubt. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Image ads just image ads aren't even worth it. I don't even run image ads. People just scroll right past. If you don't have like the perfect picture that's going to interrupt them scrolling on their feed, then, you know. So videos are videos are much more interesting. You're confining it to a geographical radius and correct? No, no, no, no. So, so, okay, that's, that's an interesting thing. I think a lot of people get wrong about meta ads and agencies get it wrong. A lot of people get this wrong. So I don't confine it necessarily by a radius. I specifically choose zip codes where they're more likely to have large property.

So because if I don't want to blanket an ad to people who won't buy it because then you're spending money to people who won't buy it. And then I target, and I say, okay, well, how do I target people who own land, right? Specifically land. And so in those zip codes, I'll target people who have an interest in tractor supply company or rural king. Oh. And then, yeah. So I'm only bidding on people who are over the age of 35. So they have money. They likely have land. And they're within my range. Yeah, I said radius. I meant geo-fence. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're geofensing your ads. Yes.

You're not trusting Facebook to show it to people in a certain geographical area. You're picking zip codes in this case. Yeah, yeah. I don't trust Facebook's audience algorithm at all. I like to choose it. And you should pick it because there's no sense in advertising to people who wouldn't buy your service. So do you do any paid stuff on YouTube or is it only organic? No, I don't do any.

It's all organic, yeah. Okay. Do you have like a particular cadence that you like to release YouTube videos or is it? No, it's more so if I'm available to do it. Yeah. I may be, you know, I used to say it'd record one out of every five jobs. Now it's maybe one out of every 10. I'm going to be doing a lot more videos because I've stopped ads.

We were booked out too far. It's hard to tell somebody on a quote like, hey, how about October? Yeah. It's the middle of July. So, and I also want to leave that kind of last month of heavy running open for referrals. I want people that we've done work for to be able to refer their friend and then us to be able to put them on the schedule this year. Okay, so back to the research. So there weren't clear search terms for this because it's an obscure service.

Clearly people are searching for it. They're probably just not calling it like the official name. Right. They have no idea what to look right, how to look for it, which gave you an opportunity. So you assembled a bunch of keywords yourself. This probably took a few hours. Then you looked at the search volume relative, a few days. Yeah, yeah.

The search volume relative to other industries and or other markets, correct? Yep. And this was just like screaming at you, like start this business. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's people have this problem. I have, if I have the problem, then other people have it too, you know. So other people have a way worse.

I've learned. Yeah. Have you ever done a home service business before? Like a sweaty startup? No. Okay. That's encouraging. All right.

So let's talk timeline. 13 months ago, you hadn't booked any jobs. You didn't like pre-book stuff and then go rent a skidsteer or buy a skidsteer after you had a jobs book, correct? You bought a skid steer. How much was it? And then what did you do?

So I think it was around $90,000. And that was used with the head. and it was a used head as well. The reason that we didn't rent was because they were Bobcat charges $2,700 a day to rent it. Oh, man. Yeah. So I was like, that's crazy. What they do that.

And a lot of times they only rent to forestry companies. They only rent to other people, like an individual. Because this isn't just an average skidster you need, right? Like I rent a skidster. I love it. It's my favorite Saturday of the month. And it's like $450 for a day. and it just has a bucket.

There's no fancy attachment. It's probably a $25,000 skid steer. Yeah, yeah. So these skids steers, they have to be the large ones. They have to have at least high flow. So hydraulic flow. And they have to have the forestry kit. So the forestry kit is like an additional $15,000 kit.

It's got a fall guard on the top. So if you cut it down a tree, it's not going to smash the cabin. It's got three quarter inch polychreesome. carbonate screens all the way around. So the windshield, the side windows, the debris kit as well. So it keeps debris from going down into the engine. They're pretty much, once you get the forestry kit on these, they're purpose built for this. Yeah. And then you need the head in addition to that. Yeah. So the head is included in the 90,000. I think we paid 15,000 for the used head.

Okay. Just bought a new head and it was 38,000. Holy cow. Yeah, for that. Yeah. And we just bought a new machine too. I think overall we ended up around 129 for the new machine. However, the new machine, totally worth it. We will probably end up paying double on this used machine because this stuff is hard on the equipment. It's definitely hard on the equipment. And having that warranty is very, very important. And Bobcat is very good about their warranty. Pretty much everything they'll fix under warranty. and they'll give you a new machine. So your cost on the machine under a warranty is very, very low. So one of your regrets is buying used.

If you could go back, you would buy new. What do the financing options look like on these, both new and used? The new machine we got zero percent financing for 60 months. What percent down? We had to put $5,000 down on that. That's nothing. Yeah, not a lot. Holy cow.

Yeah, they were doing some big bobcats. sales event. So the financing, it believes through Dousson or somebody who works directly. Ducon owns Bobcat. And then the used machine, we're around 7.8% at the time. So what does your payment look like on both the 90,000 and the 130,000? So the 90,000 around 1,400 a month, 130 around 1900 a month. Man. Okay. So you could pay for that in one job. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's what we want to stay under that. So we want to stay under one job. And, well, at least, you know, the revenue of one job. We just like that number. It makes the payment negligible. Yeah, right. So just one job a month and our overhead is zero, essentially. Yeah. Are you storing this at your house on your property? I was. So we just got a shop space.

So my property, we had to store my barn wasn't big enough, right? They were sitting outside. We didn't want that to affect the machine. They're tearing up my yard too, which I didn't like. So we ended up getting a shop space. We just got the shop last month. Okay. And the shop is, thank you. Appreciate. The shop is 1,500 a month. So, which is, I think it's on the high end, but we got the HVAC because we're going to run winter as well. And how many square feet? It's 2,000 square feet. Oh, that's good. That'd be really good for DFW. Okay, so day one, you've got this $90,000 live. ability. I'm shocked that you can get in this thing for five grand. I know that's a new deal, not a used machine deal, but that's shocking to me. Tyler, my stump grinding friend, he bought a

$60,000, $70,000 stump grinder. I think you had to put 20% down on it. Yeah. So I think a lot of that had to do with, we have a lot of history and businesses. So the lenders really looked at that. Like if you've never started a business, a successful business before, they really don't like that. So they don't like just taking the risk on new guys. But they will. You know, they will, especially if your credit's good. They don't care. Yeah. Yeah. Or your wife's credit's good. Yeah. Or your wife's credit's good. Yeah. Okay. So day one. So day one, I'm just, you know, we get the machine in. We take it to my property to start testing it out, getting used to it. So had you ever used one before? Did you do this on your own property? Had you rented one or was this brand new to you? We've never used one. I love it.

So my business partner is our main operator right now. And he had run some stuff before, not quite like this. Pushed a lawnmower before. Yeah. But he picked it up pretty quick. And I used that opportunity of us testing it to get footage and things. And we also like kind of broke it down, pull all the, because it was a rental. It was in the rental fleet.

So we pulled all the rent stickers off of it, put our branding on it. When we made the decision, I started the ads and then we immediately started getting leads and we basically had a job on the schedule and then two days of getting the same chain. Let's talk tactical about your ads. You talked about your targeting strategy geographically. Buy Zip, more rural Zip codes 35 or older, landowners, tractor supply interests, etc. What about like placement?

Are you video in the Facebook news feed, Instagram news feed, stories, reels, etc. Yeah, so I let pretty much all of everywhere. So my goal is kind of, it's a lead ad, but I want exposure. The more exposure I can get on it, the more placements I can get on it, the more people know about this service. And so that's why, you know, I've never been threatened by another company that's starting up or anything like that because in this industry, we need people advertising. We need these companies because we need it.

We're going to expand the ocean. essentially. Yep. Grow the pie. And I think that's an important distinction because depending on what your strategy is, sometimes I only do like Facebook and Instagram reels. Sometimes I only do Facebook news feed. But for something like this, I can see the value to doing, there's like 23 different ways, places you can put it. Audience Network, the right side of the page, stories, reels, Facebook reels. So I see your logic here because there are only so many people in six zip codes outside of Cincinnati. They're 35 and older that own land. Like, that's a very small market. So you want to look everything everywhere all at once to them. Right. Yep. Okay. All right. So you put it everywhere, videos. What types of videos? Is it just

you talking to the camera? Is it you, you know, in action? It's sort of like a highlight reel kind of video. So it leads off with, you know, the machine kind of munching down this big, monster or this big viny area. And then it cuts to based in Loveland, Ohio. And I've got this drone shot of the big water tower with the with the branding on that everybody knows about some kind of you know local landmark that I use and then it cuts into like a time lapse of us just crushing through all this area and then it's got just where it's like clear land fast you know so it's very eye-catching very interesting quick cut yeah quick cuts I always look at ads where like I don't think it's cool then it's not cool nobody's going to like it right yeah yeah

So that's the way that I didn't. And I'm going to be doing a new one soon. And I'm actually going to be doing it like an old 90s infomercial style. Oh, nice. I'm going to have some dude on a mower that's like, oh, some branch hits him in the face. Yeah. Oh, it's like black and white. Yeah, yeah.

It's like the commercial, the Tupperware commercial where like the woman opens a cabinet and like 8,000 Tupperware. Right, right. Exactly. Except I'm not going to have brush hitting a guy in a face on his lawnmower. Yeah. Because that's the number one complaint we get is like, I can't. mow over there anymore. You know, this keeps hit me in the face.

So I'm going to use that as like an attention grabber, very overly animated. Yeah. Okay. So really like one video ad has been your stalwart. Yeah. I mean, I've run other ones. So I did a fence line one. So particularly people looking to clear fence lines.

We've gotten really into the horse community from that ad. We did the horse community is a very tight-knit community and these people all in land, right? So once you kind of get into that. that community, they start sharing your information. We get a lot of referrals from that. And their number one issue is keeping the stuff off of their fence. They need to be able to walk the horses around the fence. We did that ad.

I tested other ones, but not for very long. Our bread and butter has been the one lead ad. It is time for it to be changed, though. So it'll be changed because it does decay over time. Okay. When you say lead ad, you're keeping them within the meta platform and you're getting their name, phone, email? Yep.

And then do you have automation set up to reach out to them as soon as possible? I wish. So we use House Call Pro. They charge, it's like $350 a month if you want access to their API, which is crazy. Yeah. You have to go with their Max plan. I'm like, I don't need anything else on their Max Plan except this API set. So I haven't set up an automation for it.

I do have, like if somebody fills out our lead form, I do have automation set up to where it'll send us an email, send us a message on Telegram. I am, but yeah, I don't have it with Housecall Pro because of their cost of their API. Yeah. So the first- We can afford it. I just don't, I can't justify it. So you start getting leads like immediately. What does your close rate end up being?

49% right now. Oh, wow. It's very high. You can't quite close half of them. Yeah, I know. I was at 44% for a while. And then I got up to 49 and I'm like, come on. Jeez.

I just got to get that 50, you know. And then what is your cost per lead? So cost per lead, it average $23. Holy cow. And then what's your average job size by revenue? So it's about $3,100. So $46 to convert a $3,100 customer. Yep.

That's why it's infinite. That's outrageous. Basically run into peak market size. That's why, wow. That's why you're booked out. That's why you're in business. Yeah. Yeah.

That is beautiful. Okay. Also, there's a lot of pent up to me. And that is something I think about a lot. Yeah. So the CPL will probably go up over time. Yeah. You're competing with yourself, right?

Right. So someone fills out the form. You give them a call. Is that the process? And try to get over there, quote it in person. Yeah. So I give them a call, try to set up a time to quote in person. I mean, it's pretty easy.

As soon as I call them, they know, you know. Sometimes, though, they fill out the form. They're like, who's this? And they just gave me their information. But yeah, I'll call him and then I set up a time on the schedule to go out and give a quote. Okay. Do you ever try to close over the phone or have you ever been forced to? I have closed over the phone. I don't try to. Yeah. It's it's.

The close rate's not as good. I mean, yeah, yeah. I don't know. To me, it's, we're, it's an expensive service. And people want to put a face to it. So to me, it's just, I don't know, I don't feel comfortable just trying to close over the phone. I have had customers tell me that there's another company that's charging for quotes. They charge $50 and do a quote if they want them to come out or they'll just, you know, hey, what's your property? They'll give them some rough quote off of a satellite image. And even well-intentioned customers, well-intentioned leads that are interested in your service, can't afford it and don't appreciate that.

Okay. So $3,100 average job size. How many hours does that take on average? 31. I mean, that would be about a day and a half. So we have, we typically would do by day, half day, multi-day. 3,100 is average because you get some that are booking for four days, five days, so that's kind of how you run the calculus in your mind. Yeah.

When pricing is by half-day, day, multiple days. Okay. I don't love that, but it's for some reason customers like it. I've tried to switch to quoting by square acre or square quarter acre and doing like brush density, something that's kind of scalable, easier to where if I bring another sales rep in, they're not relying on just experience of looking at it. It's a very hard-minded thing. Even though the pricing came out to be the same customers didn't like it.

My close rate dropped in half for a couple weeks. And I'm not really sure why. I think they kind of like that day service. where, oh, I can just extend it another day if I want them to keep going, you know? Yeah, I feel like it's just when it comes to pricing in any industry, you just want to remove friction and confusion. And if they have to run any math or numbers in their head, which is second nature to you because you own the business in the industry. To them, it's like, if you're there that day, I don't know what I'm paying for that day. If I got to have you come back, what happens if you quote like a full day service, call it $2,500 or whatever?

And it ends up taking like two hours. How long did it take you to learn that? You know, like, all right, this will take us. I'm still learning it. I'm a lot better now, but that does happen. I mean, there's jobs where I quote them a day. It took us three hours. We end up charging them a half day.

Or if it took five hours, then it's within that day scope. So they still pay for a full day. I've been off before by a couple days. So I've been short or long a couple days before because it's a large area. Yeah. And sometimes you don't really know until they start cutting into it what it actually looks like 100 feet back into the woods because a lot of these you can't even walk through them. Yeah.

So you've got your costs on the machine every month. You have your variable cost for gas, which probably isn't much. You've got a budget for repairs. I'm sure you're stocking some away. Yeah, about 15% for repairs. 15% right off the top. Yeah. For repairs.

Other than that, like these margins seem pretty. pretty juicy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they're pretty good, actually. So, yeah, our gross margin is 69.75. Jeez, Louise. Okay. Does that include you putting 15% away for repairs? Yeah. Or no? Okay. Yeah. So if you're not saving for repairs, it's 85%. Yeah. Just gas and travel. Because you're not really paying employees yet. You've got an operating partner and he owns equity in the business, right? Right. We are paying for one. So one employee. Yeah, one.

Okay. So he gets about 300 a day for a full day job. Okay. What's the max diameter of these trees that you're able to mulch? Six to eight inches depends on the species of tree. Jeez, that's pretty big. So it's really hard wood. It'll be on the lower side.

If it's soft like evergreen, it'll be on the higher side. Okay. Now, are you ever having to get out of the skid steer with a chainsaw and take care of business? No. I mean, we've done it before, but we typically would tell the customer if it's too big. They just leave it. Okay. Yeah.

Do you ever get referrals from other tree services or do you refer business to tree services? Yeah. There's a, yeah, it's all the time. We actually kind of worked out and deal with the tree service for a while where they would give us a good commission for referring trees to them. I think I ended up selling him about 80% of his schedule. Wow. But he never paid it.

He never paid. I could tell them the disgust in your voice that it's not been a good experience. So now I don't really refer anybody on tree services. I just kind of tell them like, hey, you know, here's a few good companies. I could refer a tree service every other job. Wow. I come into something, well, they want it gone, but it's 20 inches wide, you know, 20-inch diameter.

Yeah. What about inbound? Are you starting to get more inbound calls and leads? And how has Google Business Profile served you? Even as far as outside of advertising, like organic, our organic has gone up quite a bit. Our organic is now on our web traffic. It was around 36%. Wow.

It's hard. My ex profile kind of just took off. So I'd have to go back and look at the data. It's going to have a weird data point in there. But, yeah, our organic is growing pretty rapidly. And that's another reason I turned off ads because I've only got so much time. and I still have organic leaves coming in. That's encouraging.

A lot of times people count on organic from day one. And you just can't. You've got to go out and find the business. Right. I did not count on organic at all because I knew that Google wasn't really going to service up quite yet. Because the forestry mulching isn't even a service on Angie's list or any of these service sites. So thumbtack and all that, that's not even an option for you. It's not even an option.

Yeah. Okay. It's a smaller industry. It's very neat. niche, right? Yeah, but I think it's bigger than most people realize. Which is why you're doing so well. One reason, right? You're clearly like just doing the business well. Like you're, you seem to be running it well. You have five-star reviews. Yeah. This is you, right? Yep. Okay. It's not, it's not easy to have all five-star reviews in home services. But people ask me all the time. Like, there are thousands of home service niches. And I always say, you know,

look for the supply demand imbalance. In fact, I did a whole hour long YouTube video where I live streamed myself researching an industry. And I say, find something high ticket. You know, something in the thousands of dollars range. Yeah. I'm selling expensive service to wealthy people. Yeah.

Yeah. More recession proof that way I kind of look at it because wealthy people always have money. Yeah. They do. All right. Let's talk about your sales numbers from like month one to 13 to today. What did that look like? And how seasonal is it?

Two questions and one. So the first month, I mean, I pulled up before. It was like $17,000. Second month was a little higher in the 20s. It's been a while since I looked at last year, but we were only running one machine then. So we basically maxed out that one machine around the third month. And then we ran all the way until the end of November.

So that one machine could do about with one person running it. We were doing about $30,000 per month. until the end of November. It varies quite a lot for weather. So this year we got the new machine. We got that middle of May. So we've only been running two machines since then, since middle of May.

Basically, we were getting so bugs, we didn't really have a choice. It was funny when we were looking at it because we were like, oh, my gosh, should we take the risk and get the new machine? We'd have to turn up all advertising. And then now we got it. It's like, oh my God, I can run 10.

Well, what's stopping you? Eight more machines. It takes time to build cash flow, too. So we're brand new. We're investing everything we possibly can back into it. And we'll get another machine. I think we can probably get two machines a year or two machines next year. So two machines can afford to buy two more machines next year.

And then that kind of expands from there. The challenge we have right now is that one, one truck. can move two machines, not at a time, but he's going and drops it off the job site, picks it up and just goes to his job site right now. However, a third machine is just not feasible. You'd have to, you'd have to have him not running equipment at all and just dedicated to moving equipment around. So ideally what we need is to get a larger truck, something that can, and a larger trailer that can haul two machines at once. So that would drastically reduce our costs on on running equipment around and our time investment.

So, which is also. Your first employee, is that the guy running the second machine while your operating partner runs the first? Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then we have a part-time operator that'll help, but it's my business partner's father

in law. He retired as an equipment operator. Oh, that's perfect. So he just steps in every now and again when, you know, he wants some money. We have a little work for him. Right. What do you pay your employee? Is it per hour?

And if so, what? So we're paying him on the day. So we give him to 300 for the full day. Okay. We're kind of treating him at this moment as a subcontractor. Yeah. So that won't be forever, though. So we'll be, I'll end up bringing him on.

I mean, that's 100 grand a year if he worked every business day. Every, yeah. That's not bad, especially considering other like harder. Because he's air conditioned in there, right? Yeah. air condition. Yeah, I mean, if he goes landscaping or something, you'll probably make about the same, if not less. Yeah, I have a much harder. Flipping hard sticks all day, basically. Yeah. Listen in the podcast, music. And how, let's talk about how fun it is. Like, how fun is land

clearing. Like, that is like so enjoyable. Yeah. You know, it's actually surprisingly rewarding, too. There were some things that, you know, we had our very first customers, she took over her parents' property. Her parents passed away. The property had been completely overgrown. And we cleared it all. And she just like, she just started crying. And I was like, I wasn't expected that. She's like, this is what you used to look like when I was a kid, you know? Wow. So like it really brought a lot of memories back for her to see it the way that it used to be. Yeah. So it is cool. It's very rewarding. When she started crying, your mind went from, holy crap. Why am I in this business? I really screwed up to. This is the best business ever. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. I was like, wow, I didn't.

realize it would have that kind of impact on people. But it does. Not most people are like that, but there's definitely some. So what are your monthly sales like today and what do you project them to be? Or is it just based on how many machines you have? So last month we did 54,000. It's been a very, very rainy spring. I think we're like the seventh most, like seventh highest rainfall and recorded history out here right now. So it rains a lot. We, We'll sink into the mud and we won't run. But we're entering into the summer months. So we've got around 70,000 on the schedule for each month up until October.

Holy cow. 70,000 next one. Good for you. You'll do a million next year. Probably, yeah. If we get a pretty normal year, you know, we're projecting there'll be around 500,000 with two machines. Then what's running nine months.

So, however, as we get more known and especially with these horse farms and stuff, these horse farms, they don't care about ruts on their property. So you're talking to be able to run large jobs all winter as well, which is something we didn't do our first year. We just kind of supplemented their time with snow clearing. Yeah. So it doesn't, it doesn't have to be seasonal if you find more horse customers or the right types of customers. Yeah, yeah. Any large farm property, you know, they don't really care about ruts on their property. A lot of them just want to open it up. They're going to bush hog it twice a year. Yeah, any like residential kind of stuff, they, they do typically care.

If they've only got four or five acres, they don't want it torn up. They just want it opened up so it's usable. Yeah. Put eight inch ruts in people's property. That's, you know, problem. Now, when you run like the search traffic numbers and you look at what your Tam, your total addressable market is in your local area, without having to really expand out much to other metroplexes, what do you think the ceiling is for your business or what, like,

What is the total market share for the whole industry in your area? We could probably run about 10 machines. And that's if we took over a majority of the market share within our immediate area. If we started traveling out, we could do more. We don't target commercial. We'd get contacted by commercial, but there's a lot of commercial work out there. It's hard for me to say because it is kind of a lesser known industry, and it is hard to get a lot of this data.

Well, if you're doing $2,000 a day per machine and you're booked five, six days a week, that's $6 million a year at like 70%. Your margin would probably drop a little bit as you hire more people, call it 50. Only 50%. That's a $3 million net profit business in one local market. Like that's outrageous.

Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. And if anyone's listening in Cincinnati, don't even think about it. He's going to crush you. He's just going to worry about it. I want him to start, you know.

Yeah. I want them to, I want to, because it increases the size of the market entirely. It really does. More people who knows about it. It's a educate the customer kind of business. Yep. That's a very like mature insight. I'm not trying to sound patronizing, but it's like the default is to have such like this

limiting mindset. Like Elon said the same thing about electric cars. Like bring on the competitors. I need electric cars to be normalized. You know, that's what's happened, right? Like Tesla, 10, 15 years ago, they never thought they would have been selling. Well, he did, but no one else, none of the analysts thought they'd be selling millions of cars per year because it was so niche. But they wouldn't be if it weren't for all of the other electric automakers out there.

Yeah. What a beautiful business. Is there anything else that you'd like to mention or talk about that we didn't cover that people might find helpful or interesting? So I had this idea. There's a machine that's called the Green Climber. I made an ex post about it. Yeah. And I really want somebody out there because I'm not going to do it quite yet.

I do want somebody to take on this business. So it's basically a remote controlled machine, you know, very low risk. You just have somebody who's essentially just operating joysticks from standing off to the side. It does. To the side, not below it, right? Yeah, yeah, a 45 degree angle away from it. That's the, yeah. But it's relatively affordable.

It's on the expensive side for what you think. think it would be, but it does stuff that we cannot do. So it'll do like steep hillsides, ditch lines. It's perfect for cutting paths. And that's, there's a lot of work out there for that kind of stuff, especially commercial where commercial buildings in particular, they have stuff that grows up into their edges of their parking lots. And they, like, it's the perfect machine for that. I think it could be sold door to door, you know, not like selling a pressure washing service almost. Yeah, I really want somebody to do that. And if they do that, let me know how it is. It's just a really cool thing that I've never seen before. And I don't think anybody does it

in the whole country. Because you're turning down business because it's too angled in places. Yeah, it's too steep for the skids here. So typically what I'll do is they'll offer them the option of the green climber because I can rent it. And it's expensive though. We would charge like 3,000 a day. to run the green car. It's a specialized machine. It costs us. We have to go pick it up. Now, the good thing about it is you can just pull it with a regular truck. It's not like a skidsteer where you need a one-ton truck. And how much does it cost to both rent and buy? Rentals about a thousand a day to rent it. Buying, see, that's a tough one because I've asked for some reason these equipment dealers are very weird about the private, about their pricing.

I've been told $150,000 for a machine and I've been told $7,000. $70,000 for the machine. Yeah. So a huge difference, but it could just be the different machines. I think the smaller ones around the 70, the larger ones around the 150. You know what business this reminds me of? Last summer, I interviewed some teenagers that started a pond cleaning business. And they use expensive equipment to, they go to lakefront homes that have docks that

are just completely surrounded by seaweed and it looks gross and their grandkids can't swim in it. A business that 99% of people didn't know existed, including myself, until I saw these guys on Instagram. Yeah. And they have one expensive piece of machine, but they're able to charge ridiculous amounts to go scoop out and like scrape off the floor of the lake, all the seaweed. And what I love about it is they can, I like calling it fish where you know the fish are, right? Yeah. They're only knocking on doors, sometimes literally of homes that are lakefront and homes that they know that all their neighbors have the same seaweed. And so if they can get one customer, they can get 10. And I see this is very similar of like, hey, I see this ditch. Everyone's got this ditch. It's ugly.

it's going to look kind of worse almost if only one or two people get it done. Oh, it happens all the time. I mean, what happens, you clear somebody is at the property line. And then you make this their neighbors look like a slog, right?

Yeah. And then now the neighbors looks ridiculous. Yeah. Because it's not all just one congruent area anymore. The neighbor just had it clear and it looks so nice. And so then the neighbors, we end up doing the neighbor's property.

The same thing would be true with this machine. It just does smaller stuff. but a majority of the work is in the smaller stuff. That's a very interesting business. I'm sure you could get these financed as well, right? Oh, yeah, definitely can get these financed. There are other companies that make a similar piece of equipment, but primarily these are sold to like city workers or highway workers

where they clear the hillsides on the edges of the highways. And so I think that this company in particular, they really only ever market towards government. But the average person needs this machine as well. And, you know, I quote these jobs. But typically for me, it's it's a larger hillside. If it's small enough, I'm kind of like, I don't even want to, it's something worth me doing like a half day on this because I got to rent it. I got to bring it out.

But there's so many little half day, a couple hour things that can be done with that machine. And you can literally door knock and sell this. So, yeah, you can put flyers up. you know, it's, it's, somebody's going to kill it with that little machine one day. Yeah. It's just that nobody's targeted it. Yeah. That, that is some great insight.

Thank you. Well, Alex, this has been amazing. Where can people find you if you want them to find you? So you can find us on YouTube. It's Brushworks Co on YouTube. Brushworks Co. Okay. Yeah.

We're trying to hit to a thousand subscribers just because it opens up the next level for us. But. Well, when we publish this to YouTube, We'll tag your account and I'm sure we could get you there. Yeah, I appreciate it. And then our website is brushworksco.com. That's a great name. Okay.

All right, please let me know in the comments if I should do more deep dives on sweaty startups, high ticket home services like this. I've done one on stump grinding, junk removal, dumps, dumps, rentals, pond cleaning. I love these industries and I'll do more if there's demand. Please share the Kerner office with a friend and we'll see you next time.