Franchise QB

Episode 74: Josh Wise- CEO, Grassroots Turf

• Mike Halpern • Season 1 • Episode 74

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In this episode of the Franchise QB Podcast, host Mike Halpern speaks with Josh Wise, CEO of Grassroots Turf, about his journey in the lawn care industry and the innovative franchising model he has developed. 

They discuss the importance of customer relationships, the growth of the lawn care market, and how Grassroots Turf differentiates itself through technology and service. Josh shares insights on the competitive landscape, the support provided to franchisees, and the financial aspects of starting a Grassroots Turf franchise.

Takeaways

  • Josh Wise founded Grassroots Turf at 22 years old.
  • Grassroots Turf focuses on customer-centric service.
  • The lawn care industry is valued at approximately $106 billion.
  • Grassroots Turf offers an all-inclusive subscription service.
  • Body cameras enhance transparency and trust with customers.
  • Franchisees benefit from a collaborative culture.
  • Training for franchisees is flexible and ongoing.
  • Residential services are the primary focus for new franchisees.
  • Startup costs for a Grassroots Turf franchise range from $200,000 to $250,000.
  • The company is expanding into new markets, including Texas.

https://grassrootsturf.com/franchise/

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Contact me and my team with any questions along the way. www.calendly.com/franchiseguy
Mike Halpern, CAFC
mike@franchiseqb.com

This is the Franchise QB Podcast, where we empower entrepreneurs to win big in franchising. We huddle up weekly to educate our audience about the most successful small business model ever created. Franchise it! Welcome to the Franchise QB podcast. I'm your host, Mike Halpern, a 20-year industry veteran and entrepreneur. My mission is for listeners to achieve their American dreams of creating wealth and independence through franchise ownership. Every week we speak with franchisees, franchisors or vendors that support the industry. Thank you for joining us and let's get started. Joining us in the huddle today is Josh Wise, CEO of Grassroots Turf. Welcome to the show, Josh. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Great to have you here. So you founded Grassroots Turf at the young age of 22 and have spent the last 23 years in the lawn care industry. Then you began franchising the model in 2019. So tell us a little bit about your journey. So it really starts back. My dad was a pharmacist and on his days off when I was 14 years old, he'd drive around and I was cutting grass and that's kind how I first got started in the industry and have been in the industry ever since. I had a Wise lawn and landscape company that I had for a while playing off my last name Wise. And then we transitioned out of lawn maintenance and I started working for a spray business on the sales side. And it just felt like I could do it a lot better in the industry than what I was seeing out there. And so in 2002, I decided to start Grassroots, created the company and then here we are, know, it's the rest is history as they say, and now we're just looking for the future. That's really cool. So when you were younger, you started more of a cutting service and then it kind of evolved into all the services that Grassroots kind of provides today. Yes, that's correct. And there was a point in time where Grassroots was also lawn maintenance. We had a pest control division as well. And then we've kind of just scaled everything back to the spray services and just dialed in on what we do and do best. And, Now it's strictly just the spray side. Yeah. Very cool. Thanks for that context. So tell the audience, is Grassroots Turf? Let's start there. So Grassroots Turf is a fertilization and weed control company. We go out six times a year on our customer's properties and put down the appropriate products to keep the lawn nice, green, weed free, keeping the plant nice and healthy, insects, diseases under control so that you don't have to have any kind of like, know, with the lawn, any problems with that. We also handle tree and shrub care where we're taking care of the ornamentals around the home, protecting them from insects and bugs and diseases that would make the plants look unhealthy and not have good blooms and just not look good. And then we have a mosquito control division as well that we handle mosquito control and make it where you can enjoy your outdoor space without getting chewed up. Yeah, yeah. Trust me, we get a lot of that here in Northern Virginia, a lot of humidity in the summer. One thing that I picked up on is you say that you're striving to revolutionize the lawn care industry by bringing unbeatable service and care to your customers. Nothing about lawns mentioned in there. So why does service and care matter so much to you, That's what I saw missing in the industry is everybody's just a number to a lot of the companies that are out there. And when it comes to a consumer, you work hard for your money. You want to make sure you're getting what you're paying for. And when we found the Grassroots, the focus was to be customer centric, make sure that we are above and beyond doing the little things. Our technicians will refresh the dog's water bowls when they're out at the property. If there's a hose that's drug out on the lawn, we're going to pull the hose up. It's kind of like the white glove approach, if you will, on lawn care. we do a lot of the little things to just try to build relationships with our customers so that if and when there is concerns or weeds popping up. They understand we're going to take care of it and the relationship's going to continue to prosper over time. Yeah, that's really cool. mean, the whole idea of being a really good neighbor and that relationship is meaningful to a lot of people in a world where a lot of that gets lost. So now you have this like great lawn and you also have someone coming out there that you kind of care about and someone that you want to come out there because you know they're going to do a good job and kind of do what it takes to make it right. So let's talk a little bit about- relationships with them. I'm sorry? I saying you build relationships with your customers and you start calling the pets by their names and the kids. so it's a lot more than just show up, spray a lawn and leave. We want to ring the doorbells. We want to get to know our customers. We want to understand what's important to them so we can provide them the best service possible. That's great. So let's take a step back and look at the industry at large. How big is the US lawn care market? So the industry is growing at about a 6%, right? It's funny, different places that you look and search in the industry, you've got landscape, lawn care, some guys throw it all together and say, hey, it's a hundred billion dollar industry, others will segment it out and break out what the spray side is to the landscape side. But it's about about $106 billion in total revenue right now. 5.6 % was what the growth was on it last year and I know there's some recent studies saying they're expecting that to go up a little bit more. So, you have a cheap market, you have good growth, so those things kind of working in tandem to make a good opportunity. So let's talk a little bit about the competitive landscape. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there doing this since there's obviously a lot of work. Yes. Yeah, there definitely is. And some markets are more competitive than others. We are based out of the Atlanta, Georgia market. In Atlanta, there's almost anybody that's a big player in this industry is in this market space because there's so much business here. There could probably be another 30 or 40 companies open up and you still wouldn't. I see new guys all the time in this industry, but it's such a lucrative industry and it doesn't take a whole lot to make a lot of money. So a lot of guys are getting into it and there's still a lot of business out there. In some of the smaller markets, the competition isn't as much, but it's the same token. It kind of goes with the population and with what the size of the market is. it's pretty competitive. Yeah. I I like that. think competition kind of proves the market and proves the concept. Then it becomes, all right, here's something that everyone needs. So how do we compete for market share? And you want owners that obviously have that same mindset. So what kind of sets Grassroots Turf apart from the competition in your view? There's a few things that we do that has kind of separated us in the industry and we've seen a couple of copycats coming along, but we have an all-inclusive program. So our customers are actually set up on a monthly subscription service and credit card goes on file. They don't even have to think about the payment side of things. All they ever experienced after they start service with us is every time we're out, we're servicing the property. There's never a bill left at the door. There's never any invoices for anything. If the technician's on the property, And let's say you have some grubs in your lawn, then he's going to go ahead and put down an insecticide to take care of that. We're not having to call you back, get you on the phone, sell you another service. And in the meantime, these grubs are damaging and tearing up your turf. takes a few days to get it rescheduled. Same thing goes with fire ant control, diseases. mean, everything in the program is all inclusive. And so that really sets us apart from what most of the competition is doing. Another thing that's really, really cool is the body cameras that our technicians wear. Back in 2016, all the ring doorbell cameras everybody was installing, those things would not turn on. Then customers would call and question if we were in the front yard that the ring doorbell camera didn't see them treating the yard. So when you're applying a liquid application and the lawn is in great shape and there's not a lot of weeds, there's really not a lot the customer's going to see other than, my lawn just keeps looking nice. So we put the body cameras on the technicians so that we can have video recorded evidence of every single application that's ever done. We use that for before and after shots. We use it for training for our technicians. Peace of mind for our customers is really, really big for them and they can go online and watch the videos and see what was done. So it's been a really cool feature and it's another one of the huge selling factors when you're looking at Grassroots compared to some of the other companies in the market. Nobody else is going to send you videos of what they did. Yeah. Now I think it's really interesting. You mentioned how when you guys are out there, they're kind of looking at the whole lawn overall. And if they see a problem, they address it. You know, I have a few different vendors that service our lawn and they definitely don't do that. Right? Like there's weeds everywhere, but their job isn't the weeds. So they just move past that. The idea that it's like a one-stop shop. And if they see an issue at the end of the day, you want a beautiful looking lawn. That's the result and how it gets there. It's like, well, Yeah, it matters. want people that come on time and do what they're supposed to do. But it also that body cam things interesting because, you know, when someone's going inside of your home, you tend to care a lot. You know, if they're outside of the home, you care a little bit less because you know, as long as you show up on Friday and do the work, I'm happy. But you guys take it a step further and say, Yeah, we're gonna actually like equip our technicians with this stuff so that you can see what's going on. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's definitely been a game changer for us and our technicians love it. I mean, the first day we put the cameras on them and they went out in the field. One of the guys had a call that afternoon saying that he left the gate open and he's like, go pull the camera footage. I know I should have. And sure enough, what it was was that the homeowner's child got home from middle school at four o'clock. The parents get home at six o'clock from work. Well, the kid had taken the trash cans down to the street and left the gate open. Dog gets out and Grassroots got blamed for it. The body camera. thing is the kid took out the trash. That's a big... Exactly, right? If I don't remind mine, it doesn't happen. So let's talk about kind of where the system is now. You started franchising in 2019. How many franchise owners do you have in the system operating today or how many are kind of signed and launching? So we have a total of 14 owners that are up and running. We have... Two that are looking to sign here soon and come on board this summer. We do not have any that are signed and not open yet. We're usually pretty quick on getting them open once they're signed. It's usually a pretty quick process. And we have a total of 24 units or territories. A couple of our owners started with one and then have come back and bought another one to expand their business. Others bought two at the beginning. So yeah, we've got really good validation with all of our owners and make sure that we have a really good handle on. taking care of their business and helping them out with things. So you're in Georgia, geographically is the concentration in the southeast or do you have owners that are kind of scattered about? Right now we're pretty much southeast and it wasn't really intentional for that, it's just kind of how it happened. The Atlanta market sold out really quickly and then we've kind of gone from Louisiana out through the Carolinas and pretty much every state in between those two down in the southeast, we've got something in it. And then we're Looking to open up in Texas, the two that we've got right now pending are both in Texas. We're trying to get into that market and then we've got a few Northern markets that we're looking at, but we're pretty much wide open on the East coast and central time zone. Okay, cool. And you mentioned, you know, kind of that ownership group. You're still earlier stage. I would say what's the culture like amongst the franchise owners? mean, are they collaborative? Are they competitive? A little bit of both kind of what's the vibe like in the system? Yeah, it's like any good old boy group. You've got different cliques that form and buddies that form and friendships, but they all, we get everyone together every year for an annual conference in January. It's mandatory that everyone is there and they know the dates way in advance so that you're there to be present. It's important to us that all of our franchisees have collaboration or sharing ideas, picking up the phone, bouncing ideas off of each other. We have... A lot of social media platforms we have in a internal software that we use for the communications between everyone. We do monthly zoom meetings every every month with all the guys. And so there there's definitely a lot of collaboration on the competitive side. That is March and April when we get to the spring season. Everybody's numbers are being pushed out every single week and guys are calling other guys, I'm ahead of you. know, so it's, we're all guys. We're all having a lot of fun and having some competition, but it's all in fun. Yeah. It sounds like a healthy competition. And that's great that you encourage everybody to get better by kind of sharing best practices. Cause I feel like franchisors that try to keep that behind closed doors, bad things happen. And when you're like, Hey guys, you know, share best practices, try to be top producers, help each other. That's a good thing to start at the beginning, certainly, so that it conveys as you grow. Tell us a little bit more about the specific services. What revenue streams does a traditional Grassroots terror franchise owner enjoy? The main one is going to be your lawn care program, which is the six applications done over the 12 months with monthly reoccurring payments. Then outside of lawn care, Usually about 50 % of the customers that have either a Bermuda or Zoysia lawn, which is your lawns that are more in the southern regions, they're going to have what's called a liquid aeration. And it's a newer type of doing aerations that we came out with in 2017. There's a new provider that brought some new chemistries to the market. We tested for a year to see how it would work compared to the traditional core aeration. The results were the night and day difference on the side by side picture of a core lawn to a liquid aerated lawn. And now that's transitioned over the last few years. We've got five different products from a couple of different suppliers that we have mixed together and the chemistries of these products together. Just go into the lawn, break up the soil so that you get all these microscopic little holes everywhere and the roots can spread further. You don't have heavy machinery tearing up your invisible dog fence or your irrigation heads or. You got to stay so far away from any kind of hard surfaces. So you're only aerating about 45 % of the lawn anyway. It's only going to loosen the compaction where the holes are. And with liquid aeration, we're able to spray a hundred percent across the lawn and areas where it needs a deeper aeration, you just saturate those areas more. So it's, it's definitely a game changer on that end. And we're starting to see more and more companies switch over to the liquid aeration side because the benefits are there. Yeah. I had an aeration done in the Even though I marked it, they busted one of my sprinkler heads and that was a hassle. I'm sure that happens all the time. So without getting too technical about how the liquid aeration is done, how do you make those holes? Is it lighter equipment that's going over the lawn surface or something else? So it's identical to if we're out on the lawn spraying the yard with a pre-emergent. The application process is going to be identical to a regular treatment. The difference is the chemistry of the products when you have the whole ... There's humic acids and there's folic acids and then there's some other organic natural products. don't want to give away too much, but all these products mixed together, the chemistry of them, it'll go down. And what it does is it's breaking up. Like in Georgia, we've got red clay, so we've got to have stuff to help break that up. There's so many nutrients in the soil that is not available for plants to take up. And by doing this application with these liquid aeration products, that helps to break all that up so the plant can now readily take it up. So there's a lot of benefits to it other than the compaction of the soil. But yeah, it's definitely a- Yeah, that's really cool. I'm looking forward to that coming up where I live, because I'm not a big fan of all those machines. And then all the kind of plugs are all over the place, and my dog drags them all over, and we get dirt in the house for two weeks and the whole thing. I like your way better. So let's talk a little bit about a territory. So a franchise owner likes the model, likes the recurring revenue, likes the different revenue streams you have. How big are these territories once someone joins your franchise model? So the territory size is going to be a minimum of 50,000 single-family homes. We typically are going to try to get the territories up closer to 100,000 single-family homes before we cap one off. We say 50,000 in the FDD just because there are smaller areas where 50 to 60,000 is about what you would have in that area, right? Right. So we want to make sure that we can still go to the smaller markets that are still going to be a good market for us. We would never open one up in a very small territory that doesn't have the right income levels and household values and things of that nature. But typically 100,000 single family homes is going to be that number we try to get to. Gotcha. And does an owner need an office or can this begin as a home-based business? I mean, obviously you have an office, you've been in the business 20 plus years, but when you start, do you need that office space or not? Most of the guys will start with an office space. You need an office space for parking the truck inside, storing your products inside, and just having that security for everything. Some guys have done it from the home office and had a storage shed on their property that they were able to use. We are not going to force our franchisees into a rental agreement if there's other options that we can do that's going to save them money. At the end of the day, everything we can do to drive to their bottom line is just going to make them that much more successful. So that's our focus on. So there is flexibility there. If somebody wanted to get like a flex space with a fenced in lot, that would be an idea. But they don't need like a physical retail presence for the customer to come visit. No. Yeah, it doesn't have to be on like some main street, anything like that. It can be off the beaten path. Nobody's really going to need to know where your office is at because our customers never come to us. I think I might have one customer a year show up out of the 13,000 we manage here. Yeah, because they were lost looking for directions or something. Right. So you talked a little bit about some of the innovation in the space like the body cams, the liquid aeration. Tell us a little bit about the customer solution center that you guys have there and how it benefits. Yeah, definitely. So we started that actually about a year and a half after we were franchising. We were sitting around the table with all of our franchisees at the time and just talking about what can we do to support them better? How can we improve things for them? And the conversation was, can we get corporate answering everybody's calls? So then we put together a plan of how we would do that. And we set everything up so that we would have all calls from all territories route back to our office. And then we have a team here. You know, there's several employees here that have been here for several years, know this lawn care in and out. Different regions, you may change grass types, but it's all still the same. We're taking care of your weeds, keeping your lawn looking nice. we handle all the inbound calls for customer service and sales. On the sales side of things, our franchisees are marketing and advertising to generate the lead flow. Our inside sales team does the measuring of the property with an AI tool that's from a satellite image. Within about a minute we can have the price for your property. And usually within five minutes of the phone call, you've got price, you've got service, and we're getting the credit card and getting you set up. And then if we need to explain anything else or schedule a time to meet, we can do that as well. But now we hand all that in house so that the franchisees can focus on just scheduling the work and making sure everything's being done the right way in the field. Yeah. I mean, that's a really turnkey solution and they just focus on, you know, getting all that client acquisition done and getting all those leads to you guys and then executing. So I like that you take away a lot of the sales process and the estimating. That's really helpful. So tell us a little bit. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, I kind of look at it like as the franchisor, if there's something that I can do better than the franchisees can do on their own and it's going to save them money and drive more to their bottom line, then why would I not do it for everybody? I'm already doing it for our location, so we plug a lot of our franchisees into systems that we have just to make their companies better without them having to have any extra costs or technology fees and all the other fluff that's out there. We treat the franchisees the same way we treat our customers. That's great. That's a really good culture. Talk a little bit about the initial training. You mentioned there's a pretty quick timeline between when someone signs on the dotted line and they become Grassroots franchise owners and when they launch, what's that training program look like? So the training program initially is about four weeks. It's going to be a couple of weeks at our location here in Acworth, Georgia, and then a couple of weeks out at their location when they're getting ramped up and starting. And it really depends on the individual, what their timeframe looks like. Usually we break it up a couple of trips here and a couple of trips out at their location. Some can be done over Zoom calls. So we are very flexible when it comes to the training. We figure out what's going to work best with each individual that's coming on board. And then just make sure that they're getting everything they need to know at the time that they're opening. If we're opening up in the springtime, we're not going to talk about winter weeds while we're trying to get you up and running in the spring. But that's why we have those monthly trainings every single month. Because in this industry, there's always something going on. There's always something to be learning. so we stay in front of our franchisees, constantly educating and training and teaching them. That's great. So can this be scaled? mean, do you find that most of your owners are owner operators that are kind of in the field or they're behind the laptop kind of running their teams? Can you kind of grow this to a multi-territory business? What's that kind of ownership type look like for Grassroots? Yeah, absolutely. It can definitely be scaled. really it's that there's not a limit to what the franchisees can do on territory size. They open up their first one and get it built up for five technicians. that time, once you're around five technicians, somebody's gonna be a service manager running the show for you. You could easily open up another one and continue to do the same thing over and over again. What we have seen across the board with a few of our Zs, we've got four already that have over a million dollar book of business. We've got two more that should cross that this year. So out of 14 franchisees, six of them are over a million in revenue by the end of this year. Four of them are already there now, but we've seen that with the support we have, the customer solution center that we're running here, it really drives a lot more to the bottom line. They've reinvested that money into marketing and advertising and are able to scale faster. A healthy growth is, you know, a truck a year and after three years, you should be pushing a million revenue because once you have three trucks, you're about at that number. Yeah, that's awesome. And it's kind of cool that you can show them a roadmap to getting to a million and then. Obviously it gets easier from there. It's that first million that's the toughest. So let's talk about like the, the kind of the breakdown of business. Is it mostly residential model? Do you do commercial work? What does that look like for a new franchisee? I imagine with a mature location like your corporate unit, you probably do everything, but when a franchisee starts, do we focus on residential and then at some point get into commercial or do we not touch commercial at all? When they first get started we're taking anything that's asking for estimates and wanting to get service so we can get the revenue coming in the door to get the bills paid because the bills are sitting there whether you got customers or not, but residential is predominantly what we go after. That's what we're going to market and advertise to and we typically will market and advertise to the smaller, newer neighborhoods, smaller lot sizes. You make more money on the smaller lawns. You really don't want the big lawns, but you can't say no to them. I mean they happen, but Yeah, we're focusing on smaller residential cookie cutter type homes. Is that like a third of an acre or a quarter acre? Like what's the sweet spot? Yeah, usually about a half acre lot or less is going to be the size lots that we're looking at. And you know, there's some developments where they might be every lots a two acre lot, but they it's mostly all woods. So it just depends. Most of the time you're looking at half acre lots or less. Yeah, cool. So let's talk about the item seven. How much does it cost to launch a Grassroots Turf all in like furniture, fixtures, equipment, like the whole kit and caboodle? So we will dive into item seven and kind of go over what they already have. For instance, we talked earlier about warehouse space to working from home. In our item seven, we show the first couple of months rent deposit, three months of operational expense. We typically earmark about 40,000 for three months of operational expense. We've got about another 40,000 that's for your initial marketing campaign in the springtime. Usually about 20,000 is the down payment for the truck. If you want to pay for it outright, it's at another 100,000 to that. between those three, that's a hundred grand. The franchise fee is $49,500 and about $200k to $250k is the total all-in. And there's just a lot of little stuff with the material, your first round of materials. If you need a technician, if you're gonna hire a tech from day one, add $40,000 for a technician salary to get him up and rolling. But yeah, around that 200, 250,000 is gonna be that number for what they would be looking at to get it up and going. Yeah, that's a really reasonable kind of lower cost entry as it relates to kind of a services business. So that's really cool. Josh, we covered a lot of territory. Anything else you want to add to the mix before we wrap up today? Mike, think we did cover a lot of territory and I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and learn more about Grassroots. I hope that anyone that's listening to podcasts can see that truly I'm enfranchising to help others start a business like what I was able to do 23 years ago and I truly just enjoy helping others start a company and be right alongside helping them out with it. Meanwhile, you know, it is my little baby expanding across the world so hard across our country at least. We haven't started talking UK yet. yet, but soon enough. That's awesome. Well, it's really cool to take your entrepreneurial drive and like, you know, the proof's in the pudding. You've done it. Now you're helping other people replicate that success. So that's really cool. If anyone listening would like to connect with Josh and his team to learn more about becoming a franchise owner with Grassroots Turf, contact me at FranchiseQB.com or on X at@QBFranchiseQB. I'll get you guys connected. Thank you, Josh, so much for taking the time to get in the huddle and discuss Grassroots Turf with us today. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. in your new business. Follow us on Twitter @QBFranchiseQB, and join us every week for a new episode. See you next time. Visit franchiseqb.com to take the next step of your journey towards wealth, independence, and franchise ownership. And remember, when working for the man gets old, you must do something bold. Thank you for listening.