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SimpleGrowth, 600 Fishers Station Drive, Victor, NY (2026)

05/30/2026

I want to tell you about Garrett.

Garrett was a crew leader at Callahan's Lawn Care. Solid guy. Good worker. Under straight hourly — he was reliable, consistent, and completely disengaged from the financial performance of his route.

Then we installed pay for performance.

A few weeks in, Garrett came to me with a number.

He had calculated that stopping at Dunkin Donuts every morning was costing him between $1,200 and $1,500 per year in lost bonus. He had done the math himself. The stop cost about 12 to 15 minutes. Over a full season, factoring in the jobs he could complete in that time and his share of the savings — he had worked it out to the dollar.

Under straight hourly — that morning stop cost him nothing. It was just part of the morning. His pay was the same either way.

Under pay for performance — that stop cost him real money. And he had stopped stopping.

I did not tell Garrett to stop. His crew leader meeting was not about Dunkin Donuts. He figured it out on his own because the incentive structure made it worth figuring out.

That is the culture shift that nobody talks about when they sell you on P4P as a compensation strategy.

The crews start running the route like they own it. Not because you told them to. Because they have a financial reason to.

The people who stay under P4P are your production-minded crew members. The ones who were carrying the people who were just running out the clock under straight hourly. They thrive. And the ones who were coasting — they find somewhere else to go. Without you having to push them out.

That is the culture that P4P builds when the foundation under it is right.

Comment SYSTEM below to see how pay for performance is built inside the Lawn Care Operating System.

— Mike Callahan · SimpleGrowth Systems

05/29/2026

At Callahan's Lawn Care we ran straight hourly for years. And we had good crews. Crews that showed up, worked hard, did quality work.

And they had absolutely no financial reason to care whether the job took 3 hours or 4.

That is not a knock on the crews. It is the structure. Straight hourly creates an equilibrium — the crew does what is expected, gets paid for the time it takes, and goes home. There is no accelerator. There is no engine attached to efficiency.

Pay for performance changes the structure. When a crew can finish a route and go home early without losing a dollar — and actually earn more per hour worked — the entire dynamic shifts. Route running becomes something they own, not something they endure.

But here is what nobody tells you before they sell you on P4P.

It does not create margin. It locks in the margin you already built.

If your pricing is right — P4P accelerates the profit. If your pricing is wrong — P4P accelerates the loss.

So before P4P goes in at any company I work with, we go through the foundation. Direct labor by division — fully loaded, not just payroll. Equipment at true operating cost — not book value. Owner wage at market rate in overhead — not suppressed because the owner is working for free. Billable rate per division — confirmed against actual cost structure. Daily labor bill goal — defined and visible to the crew.

Every one of those numbers has to be right first.

Because here is the truth about pay for performance that experience taught me. The companies that implement it on shaky numbers do not fail slowly. They fail fast. Crews hit their bonuses, management is happy, and then the P&L comes in and the margin erosion was happening at scale, invisibly, for months.

Build the numbers. Then build the P4P model on top of them.

Comment SYSTEM below to see how the financial foundation is built inside the Lawn Care Operating System before pay for performance goes in.

— Mike Callahan · SimpleGrowth Systems

05/28/2026

There are two models of pay for performance in the lawn care and landscape industry. Most owners implement the wrong one — or implement the right one on top of a foundation that was never built.

Here is the difference.

MODEL ONE — Percentage of invoice.
The crew gets paid a percentage of the job total. On paper this sounds fair. On paper it looks like alignment. In practice — if your pricing is wrong, if your production rates are inaccurate, or if your labor burden is not fully loaded — you are splitting a margin that does not actually exist. You are paying people out of profit you have not verified you have.

MODEL TWO — Budgeted hours.
The crew gets a budget of hours to complete each job. If they beat the budget — they share in the time saved. This model is tethered to real production data. It rewards efficiency without requiring you to expose your pricing to your crew. And it is measurable, auditable, and adjustable without changing pay rates.

The foundation that must exist before either model goes in: direct labor by division. Fully loaded burden rate. Owner wage in overhead. Equipment at true operating cost. Billable rate per division. Daily labor bill goal. Breakeven.

Pay for performance locks in the profit you already built. If the foundation is not there — it amplifies the losses.

Comment SYSTEM below to see how the financial foundation is built inside the Lawn Care Operating System before P4P is introduced.

05/26/2026

Before we started tracking job costing at Callahan's Lawn Care -- I had a property I was certain we needed to raise the price on.

84 Lumber. We mowed a small fraction of the hill on a zero turn. The rest had to be w**d whacked by hand. Nobody liked it. It was a pain. I was convinced we were losing money on it every time we showed up.

Then we started tracking.

Our hourly goal at the time was $60 to $65 per billable man hour. On that property -- the one I was sure was a loser -- we were producing over $225 per billable man hour.

That was one of our best accounts on the route.

If I had raised the price on 84 Lumber the way I planned -- I would have sent them out to get a competitive quote. And I would have lost one of the most profitable accounts we had. For no reason. Based on emotion and a gut feeling that was completely wrong.

This is the lesson that changed how I think about price increases forever.

Do not raise prices across the board. Raise prices on the losers. Leave the winners exactly where they are.

Here is how to find them.

Pull your job costing by property. Look at actual billable man hours versus revenue produced. If a property is producing above your hourly goal -- that account is a winner. Do not touch it. Do not give them a reason to call a competitor.

If a property is producing below your hourly breakeven -- that account is costing you money every time you show up. That is the one that needs a price increase. Or a conversation about whether you want to keep it at all.

Two windows for price increases:

The week after July 4th. No competitor is returning estimates quickly. Hard for the client to get a competitive quote. Best time to notify and adjust without losing the account.

November or December. Do not carry unprofitable accounts into next season. Identify the losers now and adjust before you renew them.

When you do raise a price -- give three to four weeks notice. Frame it around what the client gets from staying with you -- quality, reliability, insurance, accountability. Not that your fuel costs went up. They do not care about that. They care what they receive in return for the increase.

Jack Welch restructured the bottom 10 percent of under performers at GE and grew the profitability of the entire company while scaling.

Do the same thing in your lawn care business. Most of us came into this industry as technicians and eventually became entrepreneurs. Michael Ge**er said it best -- most of us are technicians on an entrepreneurial seizure. Let's stop the seizure. Get real with the numbers. And only carry profitable work forward.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you how to pull your winner and loser analysis from your job costing data.

05/25/2026

Pay for performance will not save a broken pricing model. It will destroy it faster.

This is the most dangerous trend I am seeing in the lawn care industry right now.

Owners are hearing about pay for performance -- piece rate, P4P, percentage of invoice -- and implementing it without any of the foundational numbers in place. They are taking percentages from Facebook groups, YouTube videos, and now AI tools like ChatGPT. And they are applying those numbers to businesses where the hourly rate is wrong, the estimates are emotional, and job costing has never been tracked.

Here is what happens.

A company doing solid work -- 18 to 19 percent net profit -- implements P4P at 30 to 31 percent of invoice because someone on the internet said that is the number. Three to four months in, more volume is coming in. Top line revenue is growing. The owner feels like they finally cracked the code.

November comes. The books are reconciled. Net profit has dropped from 18 percent to 9 percent. They did more work. More revenue. Cut their profit in half.

Their actual direct labor and burden was running at 19 to 20 percent of revenue. They gave away 30 to 31 percent on the P4P payout. That 10 to 11 point gap came directly out of the bottom line on every single job.

Here is what has to be in place before P4P:

Your real non-emotional hourly rate and breakeven -- calculated from your numbers, not someone else's.

Production rate based estimating -- by square footage, linear feet, time blocks.

Daily job costing -- budget versus actual on-site and non-billable drive time tracked.
Books reconciled at minimum monthly.

Gross profit by division confirmed and within range before you tie pay to it.

Without these -- P4P is Russian roulette. You are pulling the trigger every payroll cycle. Eventually the chamber is loaded.

And here is what is left when it goes wrong: the ones that stay are two feet in -- heartbeat hoping to cover rent, and have enough at the end of the week for a bottle of booze and a carton of ci******es. That is not the team you were trying to build. And it is all that will be left.

Do the work first. Build the foundation. Then implement P4P on top of numbers that are real.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you what the foundation looks like before P4P goes in.

05/24/2026

Most lawn care companies have their direct costs reasonably close. The thing that is quietly destroying their profit is overhead. And most owners have no idea it is happening.

Here is what we see in 60 to 70 percent of the companies we work with.

Direct costs -- labor, product, equipment -- are within range.

Overhead? Running 30 to 40 percent higher than it should be as a percentage of revenue.

And here is why nobody catches it.

Because all the labor -- direct crew labor, direct labor burden, non-production payroll, non-production payroll burden -- is bundled into one line item in operating expenses. It is not separated. So when you look at the P&L the gross profit looks okay. The numbers look passable. But underneath that single blended labor line is a miscategorization that is skewing everything.

Your direct labor and direct labor burden belongs in your cost of goods sold -- tied to the revenue it produced.

Your non-production payroll -- office staff, CSR, production manager, admin -- and their burden belongs in overhead.

When you mix them -- you are not getting your real gross profit. You are not getting your real overhead as a percentage of revenue. You are throwing darts at a dartboard and getting lucky. And in Russian roulette -- eventually the chamber is loaded.

Here is the only way to fix an overhead problem:

Option one -- cut the overhead to get back within the optimal range.
Option two -- grow revenue with the same efficiencies until the overhead percentage levels out.

Both require knowing the real number first.

Get your books reconciled. Separate your labor correctly by function. And look at your overhead as a percentage of revenue every single month -- not once a year before tax season.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you how to structure this correctly.

05/23/2026

⚠️ If there is money in the bank and you think that means you are charging enough — you are guessing. And guessing has an expiration date.

The Lawn Care Operating System budgeting tool ends the guessing. Here is exactly what it builds — step by step — for your specific business.

STEP 1 — DIRECT LABOR BY DIVISION
Every employee entered by division. Every division tied to the revenue it produces. Mowing is its own division. Holiday lights is its own division. Fert and w**d control is its own division. Each one gets its own labor budget.

STEP 2 — FULLY LOADED LABOR BURDEN
The tool calculates your real cost per man hour — not just the paycheck rate. F**A, Medicare, federal and state unemployment, workers comp by division, medical, PTO, benefits. All in. Average wage of $27.67 per hour becomes $33.59 fully loaded. That is what your crew actually costs per hour on the clock.

STEP 3 — EQUIPMENT COST — THE NUMBER YOUR ACCOUNTANT NEVER TELLS YOU
That truck your accountant had you buy to accelerate depreciation? It is living on your balance sheet. The expense was taken last year. But the real cost to operate it — fuel, oil, tires, maintenance, insurance, replacement — is still happening every single day. The LCOS builds it out and tells you what that truck is actually costing per hour. Not the tax number. The operational reality.

STEP 4 — OVERHEAD RECOVERY WITH MARKET-BASED OWNER WAGE
Fixed costs, non-production staff, and your own fair market wage built in. If you are over a million dollars and not pulling at least $100K in total compensation — it is not in your price. The LCOS puts it there.

STEP 5 — THE NUMBER
When all of the above is entered — the tool produces:

✅ Your cost per man hour — $79.11 in this example
✅ Your required billable rate — $98.89 per man hour
✅ Your daily labor sales goal — $1,582 for a 2-man crew, 8-hour day

That daily number is not a suggestion. It is the minimum your crew must bill to protect everything you just built above.

Full day and profitable day are two completely different things. The LCOS budgeting tool shows you the difference — and gives you the number to close it.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you how to build yours.

05/22/2026

I am going to share something I have never been fully comfortable talking about. Because it was my fault. And it almost put Callahan's Lawn Care out of business.

There was a season where I went through a rough personal patch. The kind that takes your head out of the business even when you are physically there. Without getting into the details -- I stopped looking at the numbers the way we had built the business on. Daily job costing. Weekly crew reviews. Budget versus actual per division. I stopped doing all of it.

Instead I did what most lawn care owners do.

I looked at the bank account.

We had always run with $120,000 to $150,000 in the account during the season. And all season long -- that is what I saw. So things felt fine.

What I could not see just by looking at the balance was that Tammy and Christine in our office were exceptional at collecting. They were getting receivables in before payroll was due. Cash was always coming in ahead of the bills. The account looked healthy. The business was bleeding silently.

November came. Season ended. We sat down with the real numbers.

The business had lost $85,000 in profit that year.

Not revenue. Profit. Gone. And the bank account had hidden it from me all season long because the collections timing artificially inflated the balance.

We survived because we had a strong winter. But I want to be clear -- if we had not, that was a business-ending mistake. A single season of not tracking the numbers nearly erased fifteen years of work.

Here is what daily and weekly job costing would have shown me in real time. The crews missing their hourly targets. The divisions where gross profit was slipping. The estimates that were wrong. The overhead that had crept too high. I would have seen it in April or May and fixed it. Instead I saw it in November when there was nothing left to fix.

The bank account is not your P&L. Collected cash is not profit. And one season of not looking at the real numbers -- just one -- can cost you everything.

Know your numbers. Every week. Every crew. Every division.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you exactly what we track and how often.

05/20/2026

If you did not raise your prices in 2026 -- you already took a pay cut. You just do not know it yet.

Labor is up. Fuel is up significantly. The cost of living has gone up for everyone on your crew. And the cost of good people -- the ones you actually want to hire and keep -- has gone up with it.

Here is what is happening right now across the United States and Canada. Most lawn care companies are flat. Growth is equaling churn. And instead of raising prices to recover new costs, owners are holding prices where they were last year. Or worse -- quietly lowering them to chase work.

Getting more jobs at lower margins when they could have gotten the same exact work at higher profit margins.

Here is the most dangerous part. They are doing it without knowing it. Because they do not know their numbers.

They assume price is the problem. But because the breakeven has never been calculated and pricing is set by emotion, they lower the price anyway.

Here is what is actually true right now:

Your labor costs have gone up -- your price must reflect that.
Your fuel costs have gone up -- your price must reflect that.
Your cost of good hires has gone up -- your price must reflect that.
Last year's numbers are not accurate for 2026 in 99% of markets.
If you are pricing the same as last year -- you are operating at a loss you have not found yet.

The owners who know their numbers are adjusting. The ones who do not are quietly bleeding -- filling schedules with work they are losing money on and calling it a busy season.

Busy is not profitable. Know the difference.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will show you how to calculate your real hourly rate for 2026.

C: Story-Led + SA Q&A - Service Autopilot Users Group
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For the SA users in this group -- I need to ask you something important.

When did you last update your hourly rate and breakeven in Service Autopilot?

If the answer is last year -- or you are not sure -- your pricing matrix in SA is built on numbers that no longer reflect what it actually costs you to operate in 2026. Labor is up. Fuel is up. The cost of good people is up. And in 99% of markets, last year's numbers are not accurate for this year.

Here is what I am seeing on coaching calls right now. SA users who built their pricing matrix 12 to 18 months ago and have not touched it since. Every estimate that system generates is priced off a cost model that is outdated. The schedule looks full. The bank account looks okay. For now.

Here is what needs to happen in SA -- and exactly where to find it.

YOUR HOURLY RATE AND BREAKEVEN IN SA:
Your billable rate per man hour in Service Autopilot is built on your overhead recovery calculation. If your overhead has gone up -- and it has -- your billable rate needs to go up with it. That number flows through every estimate you send. If it is wrong, every estimate is wrong.

THREE THINGS TO UPDATE IN SA RIGHT NOW:

One -- Recalculate your real breakeven from scratch for 2026. Direct labor, direct labor burden, equipment, materials, overhead -- every line. What does it actually cost per man hour to operate this year?

Two -- Update your pricing matrices in SA to reflect the new hourly rate. Every service type. Every division. If your fert and w**d control pricing matrix was built when product costs were 20-30% lower -- it needs to be rebuilt.

Three -- Pull your job costing report in SA by division. If your gross profit percentages are below where they should be -- fertilization around 60% gross profit, mowing in its range -- the pricing needs to move. The report shows you exactly where you are bleeding.

The owners who know their numbers are adjusting in real time. The ones who are not are quietly lowering their margins while filling their schedules and calling it a busy season.

Busy is not profitable. Know the difference -- and let SA show you the data.

Comment BREAKEVEN below and I will walk you through updating your breakeven and pricing matrix inside Service Autopilot for 2026.

SimpleGrowth

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