We started this on this lawn about a year and a half ago in Cape Canaveral. Working with the home owner and other local businesses (who I will list below) it has completely turned around for the better. When we started lawn service, it was patchy and only cut at about 2 3/4 inches from the prior lawn service. Now the turf is lush at a healthy 4 1/4 inches. Thank you Bio Green and Green Gloves in Cocoa Beach. Also to the home owner that gave us all the opportunity.
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I received a call a few days ago. A neighbor of a client asked if I had a man named Jeremy on my crew. What they told me actually shocked me and I couldn't be more proud of our team members performance. Jeremy our newest Team Member went above and beyond and it needs to be known. While servicing a lawn in Merritt Island noticed something in a neighbor of a clients driveway. He found cash. Yes! Cash money! The way it was folded it appeared to be dropped by the neighbor while getting out of their car. He knocked on the door and asked if they lost the money. Because of his actions we not only did he help the community but we received a new wonderful client. I commend his actions and Jeremy has been rewarded for it. He is a prime example the the culture Cole Lawn Care is trying to develop. Changing the professionalism of this industry one team member and client at a time. Thank you Jeremy.
Transcript: Hi, neighbors, Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach. How are y'all doing? Three years, three years down, and many more to come. It's been really awesome, and I've learned a lot, and I have a lot of plans, new plans within the next few months. Coronavirus kind of slowing that down a little bit, but I have a lot of plans for the future, and I'm here to just talk about what happened in the past three years, and with customers, business, what I've learned, using what I've learned to lay out a new business plan for the next few years, and this is also kind of a tutorial for small business as well. If somebody's wanting to start a lawn care business, you may pick up on a few things here as well, but I'd like to start off with what I've learned, and one of the biggest things that I've found to be important out of the research that I've done, and taking that research, and implementing it with what I do on a daily basis is the customer experience. Yes, you're going to have quality, you're going to have everything else, but the people that I have met over the past three years, good, bad, in the middle, everything. I've seen it, I've seen a lot, and it's been awesome, and that's what I believe is going to get us through these tough times right now are the great customers that we currently have, and some of the bad seeds that we had to avoid, and you have to do that, so it's been great, and it's created a lot of patience. I've learned to take things one thing at a time, one step at a time, baby steps, as you would say it, and implement things each step at a time, and move along, and it's worked, and the business is growing, month after month, year after year. I think this is going to be the first month where I haven't grown a ton, but that's expected, but I'm still going to hire. I'm still going to move forward, I'm still going to push, and I'm just so excited to see what's coming up next, and, well, actually, I'm going to bring that up. That's another thing that's been hard is to stay motivated, to keep that drive that you first get when you first start, and you're just going on at it. You're doing 100%, 110%, and 130%, and then sometimes you plateau, and you feel like you hit a wall, or a speed bump, or things go wrong, and mowers break down, and weed eaters break down, and you almost have to skip a week, but that's where the great customer experience comes in, because your clients trust you. They know you're going to be there, and some of them went through strides with me where I didn't have a mower for a week when I first started out. It was tough, and I was freaking out, but that's where I learned the patience. You don't have to freak out. A lot of these people will work with you, and I'm really happy they did, and those things happen less, and less, now that the business has grown, become better, and I have more standardization in place to implement. In case something goes wrong, I have this. If this goes wrong, I have this, and it helps a lot. It's been just great, and I've had issues with equipment, clients, team members, but we've pushed through, and pushed through, and pushed through, and it's more a perseverance thing. Persistence beats resistance, because there's a couple times where I did, I've broken down. Like one time I remember, I broke down hard, because everything was going wrong. I had every single day, something extreme went wrong. Losing a customer here, losing a customer there, then I had a breakdown, then the truck broke down, then I had another breakdown, and it was just all at once, but I made it through it, and I'm completely fine, and again, that's where the patience came in. So, and there's a lot of things that I've learned with techniques on how to cut grass. How to buff the grass with the weed eater, and how to make stripes, and make the grass look better for a client that really takes care of their yard. When they get mowing service, spray service, weed service, pest service, they get everything done, and fertilizer, the grass looks really nice, and you learn how to work with the other spray companies to make it its best using sharp blades, so the grass doesn't get infected, and all that stuff. There's so much to learn, and it's been just super exciting, but the different techniques, it's been a lot, and there's still a lot to learn. I learn something probably every single day still, and just when I think I know this, it changes, or something else hits with the grass, with business, with team members, and clients. There's always something different, and it's wild, and that's why I love this. That's why I love this so much, cause yeah, I go out and do the same thing every single day, but there's always something different that happens. I meet a new type of person. Like with this corona virus going on right now, I just put a post on Facebook about it. The one good thing about it is a lot of people are still home now, and I got to see a lot of people. I haven't seen some of these people in two years. Some of them, three years I haven't seen, cause they're always working when I'm mowing, and they came out and said, "Hi," and, of course, staying a six-foot distance, and all that. If you're watching this down the road, you'll understand with the corona virus, if you've heard of it, or read up on it. It's serious, I guess, but I got to see all these people, and that was a good thing out of it, and a lot of good smiles, a lot of happy people through a tough time. It's been great, and learning, learning in business and leadership has been a great experience. I've done so much research on it, and I'm still implementing things, and learning things about business that is making this even more exciting. It’s not like it's bringing me down, or tearing me down, or anything like that. It's becoming more interesting. The more I learn, the more excited I get, and the more opportunities show themselves, and it's just, I see a different future than I saw last year, and then I saw a different future from that time, and it's always changing, and implementing different, it's just, it's amazing, so I'm just super excited. I wanted to make this video, because I'm looking for another three years, and another three years, and another three years, so I'm just really, happy. So, that brings me to what is coming to Cole Lawn Care, and right now, I'm conducting interviews. Tomorrow I’m going to be conducting a lot of interviews. I've had team members come in and out, but I'm looking to bring somebody in for good, and we'll see how that goes. That's going to be a new venture, and whole new things to learn on payroll, and leadership, and taking care of somebody, because they basically become a family member. That's how I consider it, and I can't wait to see what that brings. Who it is, and how they're going to be implemented, and see if this takes off, and goes further, even faster. Even if it goes slow, I don't mind, as long as I keep going up, and they're happy, and the clients are happy, I'm happy. It's just, it's super exciting, and the expansion to this, I do plan on having more trucks, and all that, so hopefully bring this person in, it makes it come a little faster for their helper, and the next truck, and then the next truck, and the office, and office staff. I cannot wait, it's super exciting, and I guess that's another reason I am making these videos, and I'm blogging, is I'm holding myself accountable, because being a business owner is lonely, and it takes a lot of responsibility to get up and do it yourself. You got to make sure you wake up on time. You got to make sure this is done, and that's done, and payroll's done, and invoicing's done, and right now, many of the yards are cut, and the clients are happy, and I'm communicating with them, especially through these tough times. I just send out an email letting them know I'm still cutting, and if they could leave the gates open if they don't want us to touch anything, have the gates open on their scheduled day, so we're in and out, and just congratulations to me, I guess. Three years down, and I feel for any businesses that don't make it through this tough time, but if I were to have any advice for small business owners, or anybody starting out a lawn company, is to be persistent, and don't give up when you think it's tough. I've had many tough times. Do not give up and give a great customer experience. I think that's more important than quality. Now, I do rely on quality, and trust, but I think the trust factor is becoming more important than anything, cause there are going to be days where you just come in, and you got to get in and out. The rain's coming, or something's happening. You may not do the best cut that day. It does happen, I'm not going to lie, and try to say that I've just, we remain as professional as possible, but as long as you're communicating, and dealing with the client, and dealing with your family, which are your team members, I believe that's very important, and the quality comes after that. You find people that know how to do it better than you, or you train them to be better than you, and all the quality, everything, will just fit together, and I look forward to learning more. I look forward to meeting more people, and this week, hopefully, I'll see more clients that I haven't seen in a long time. That'll be great, and it's nice to talk to you. I'm just super excited I've made it three years, and now we, now that I'm bringing people on board, we can keep going, and make it four, and five, six, seven, 10 years, and it's an exciting time, it's a very exciting time. So, if you want to make comments, I will reply, and I will answer any questions. You can always ask me questions about anything. If I don't know, I'll try to find out, so I look forward to seeing y'all out there. All right, thank you, have a good day. Transcript - Hi, neighbors. Jeff Cole, Cole Lawn Care, Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach. How are you all doing? I'm doing an educational video/blog today. I want to help the neighbors out, and this time of year specifically is why I'm making this video/blog. And today's topic is fungus. Rhizoctonia, or easier term is brown patch. This time of year, I've been in the business two and half to three years, and I've noticed the same thing, very specific lawns every year, same exact time. I had to educate myself on this to see what was going on. I knew it was a type of fungus, but I wanted to read more in depth on it so I could help my customers or anybody else out there to eradicate this stuff. It's actually pretty easy to get rid of. It's an easy, quick treatment. You may have to treat it more than once. I also want to show you the causes, how it spreads, how to take care of it. And this will help from other lawns to bring it into ours if you're, you know, just one of the neighbors in our neighborhood here, and you start taking care of it, it'll keep the spreading down. So it typically happens November through May. And it's because the temperature comes below 80 degrees. Water doesn't evaporate. Moisture stays inside the turf and it creates fungus. So, there isn’t much we can do about it. It affects all warm season turf including St. Augustine, which, it spreads even faster in St. Augustine. Causes are watering at night. This means that the water can't be evaporated. You want to water very early in the morning, and throughout the day the water evaporates, the excess water evaporates, and you aren't left with soggy turf to turn into a fungus playground. Too much fertilizer. This fungus feeds off of nitrogen, which is included in a lot of the fertilizers around. So when it comes to spring time, you don't want to fertilize if you have fungus in your yard, or else you'll make it spread. You'll end up killing your grass instead of making it grow super fast. And then erratic variances in temperatures and humidity, which, we're in Florida, so we can't stop that from happening. The only thing we can do is treat it and know what to treat and what to look for. It spreads through anything, people, pets, walking through the yard. When it rains, the water will wash the spores and make it spread even faster. And mowing, mowing can spread it. I'm not sure if it would go from yard to yard, seeing how we mow and we run our equipment so hard. But it'll, it just gets on you and goes to the next bit of grass. And it does spread fast. The way you can identify fungus, and a lot of people will think that it's chinch bugs, so they they treat the grass for pests or they use a pesticide to treat it for chinch bugs, and they see that it's still spreading, so they don't know what's going on. And they might get upset. And you gotta know what you're treating. So here's a picture. I'm going to try to post it here in the video. This is my first one. But if I can, I'll put links and pictures on the website so you can see exactly what it looks like. But you'll start noticing a yellow spot or a brown patch with a yellow, copper ring around it. I'm sure a lot of you have seen that. And then it just spreads, and then you'll start noticing another spot, and it spreads. It goes in a circle or it can be erratic. And it typically has black in the roots. The good thing about this fungus is it doesn't affect roots. So as soon as you treat it and you get it done, your grass should start growing back. The only bad part about that is you have a patch. So any weed seeds that get into that patch of grass, the sun can reach it and then the weeds can start spreading and get out of control. So now you have to fight weeds on top of just fighting fungus. So that's why you want to catch it fast. And, again, don't fertilize if you have fungus. You will make it spread even faster. There are some options, fungicide for, on Amazon there's BioAdvanced. I'll have a link the description. There's Scotts DiseaseEx Lawn Fungicide. That'll work, too. There's a lot more, Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot. You can get, just get a fungicide for your yard. Spray it, spread it, whatever kind of fungicide it is. You just want to take care of it ASAP. And they'll be links and pictures, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate. Comment below. I'll be sure to answer anything as soon as I can. I am quite busy here, so I'll get to this, back to the videos and comments as soon as possible. But any questions, concerns, comment. E-mail jcole@colelawncare.com. Phone number's 321-323-9098, and that'll be on the website as well, so you can look back, and googling anything about fungus and the grass, that helps as well. So I just want to help you neighbors out. You have a great day. Hope you learned something today. I know I did, and that's what matters. Have a great day. BIOAdvanced Fungus Control Scotts Disease EX |
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