Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Thu, 26 Dec 2024
Welcome to a new episode of Next Level Pros! Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Josh Bucio and Carter Romero, the founders of Urban Oasis, a thriving landscaping and outdoor construction business based in Texas. In this episode, we dive deep into their entrepreneurial journey, the challenges they've faced, and their ambitious plans for the future. Apply to be on the show: https://forms.gle/hwDijQPFyKCEtHNs8 Highlights: "Paid advertising should be your number one generator for business. Where most business owners get it wrong is they pump the brakes on this once they get too much business” "Mentorship and understanding marketing are key for us." "If we increase the price 10% we're not losing 10% right? Which is perfect, like and, and that's a key thing for anybody to understand, that's watching this or listening to this, is just how valuable an additional dollar is to the business owner versus the customer." "Creating a strong company culture with clear values has been a big focus for us." Timestamps: 00:00 Paid Advertising as a Business Generator 02:20 Urban Oasis - Background and Growth 05:00 Early Days - Hands-on Work and Expansion 09:21 Deciding to Go All-In on the Business 12:06 Current Team Size and Challenges 15:48 5-Year Vision and Growth Plans 21:11 Marketing Quadrants and Strategies 25:00 Importance of Paid Advertising 32:23 Pricing Strategy and Profit Margins 38:46 Scaling Considerations and Overhead 47:39 Integrating Sales and Marketing 57:19 Lessons Learned from Next Level Pros Want me to teach you how to grow your business? Text me! 509-374-7554 Want access to more of my content? Click the link below for all of our latest updates and events! https://linktr.ee/nextlevelpros Want to be a guest on our show? Apply here!https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YlkVBSluEKMTg4gehyUOHYvBratcxHV5rt3kiWTXNC4/viewform?edit_requested=true Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/next-level-pros/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=95980cd4e55a437a YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@NextLevelPros
Chapter 1: What are the key strategies for increasing business revenue?
Paid advertising should be your number one generator for business. Where most business owners get it wrong is they pump the brakes on this once they get too much business. 50 grand a month, does that scare you?
Yeah, I mean, marketing is scary.
Chapter 2: How did Urban Oasis start and grow?
Like, it's based on revenue. I mean, in my brain, it's like, oh, we can handle that very fast. Right, right. But now it's scary, I think. Yeah, and if you're not used to doing it, it should be scary, right? We have two quadrants unexplored. I'm curious to see, like, hey, if paid quadrant two is the highest ROI, we've never nibbled at it.
What does that mean if we actually put a lot of our time and focus into quadrant two? And then back to Daryl's point, it's a domino effect because we pay marketing to get clients, but then those clients are going to do our same concept, which is referrals. So it really is a domino effect. So I am very curious on that.
Everybody, welcome to another episode of Next Level Pros. Today, we have Carter and Josh. They flew in here from Austin. Super excited to be diving in and talking about their business. They're building a pretty sweet business down in Texas. Urban Oasis is the name. It's a landscaping business, correct? Correct. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
So thank you so much for being here with us, too. Very excited to be here. Carter and I just flew in from Austin at a 4 a.m. flight. But yeah, so we Urban Oasis, we actually do design and build. So it started more of a landscaping and we've built it out to do outdoor construction. In general, that's what it's at now.
22%.
So 22 net. So for those that are listening and just understanding the difference, so net is obviously what you take home at the end of the day, considering ad backs, some of it's going into the inventory or whatnot. Gross margins, what's your guess is gross margins right now?
So we're closer to like 58% on gross.
Okay. Yeah. So what I am seeing, I just want to just check you real quick. It looks like I'm seeing a gross margin of about 40%.
So, yeah, 58% cost of goods sold, 42%. Got it, got it.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did they face while growing their team?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Josh and I are originally just friends from middle school, and yeah, it's been a wild ride since then. We connected just through sports and our love for entrepreneurship. We were super good friends in high school, played sports together there, started a mowing company at that point.
We went to college, so I went to UChicago, Josh went to A&M, and then COVID hit, and that brought us back home. So we were basically just sitting at home like, okay, we've got... you know, 24 hours a day of time. And we've got five hours of zoom calls going on a day. We can put it on two X speed and, uh, basically just have the whole day of opportunity.
So at that point, I'm just looking into, uh, I'm just cleaning out a closet at that point. And I come across a bunch of checks from our old mowing clients and I just call them down the list. And I'm like, Oh, Hey man, remember us? We, we did your line when we were in high school. And, uh, You know, I called 22 of them. One of them calls us back and says, yeah, man, I've got a pathway for you.
Chapter 4: What is their five-year vision for Urban Oasis?
So at that point, Josh and I just load up my parents car basically with materials from Home Depot. We don't know about this. And we just basically go and install a pathway based on YouTube education and my parents car. So, yeah, we do that one. They're happy with the final result. We beg them for a Facebook review and say, hey, ma'am. please post this to your friends. We really want to do this.
This is something exciting for our future that we could possibly carry on. they post us. We get one other person to call us. We go out there, we do a killer job. They post us and we go viral. So at this point we get 50 calls in a day. I'm out just doing what we do. I'm like, Oh Josh, this is taking off. And what are you guys doing at this point? Like what kind of jobs?
Uh, this is just pathway work. So basically like installing, like installing just bricks to make a pathway, um, putting down squares of sod in people's backyards, just doing random. And, uh, Yeah. Like I said, we had no background in this. We just wanted to be entrepreneurs and we were excited about it. And yeah, people started demanding new services of us. And somebody says, can you do turf?
We say, yeah. Can you do masonry? OK, sure. And we just start taking on jobs. And like I said, the phone was ringing off the hook. And so we start calling our friends and say, OK, the first thing we need to do right now is get people on the on site to help us. So we had a few of our friends that luckily were in the area that could help us out.
we start driving around and find some contractors that can do stuff. We're asking landscape suppliers, you know, do you have anybody that you can point our direction?
So the first couple of jobs, are you guys doing this on your own?
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Chapter 5: How important is paid advertising for business growth?
Yeah, actually the first couple of years, it was, I mean, I'm saying you guys are physically doing the labor and the first couple of years, man, we did a lot of work. So we were on our hands and knees spreading manure in people's yards with zoom earbuds in getting called on. And I'm telling Josh, Hey dude, please turn off the bulldozer. Like I've got to answer this question. So, uh,
because at that point to clarify we were still in school yeah okay i was in a and f he was in u chicago so while we ramped it up carter mentioned like hey we have so much time in our hands sorry so you guys you guys moved back home because of covid right right so that's right yeah so yeah right so sorry i was off track in the beginning so basically to restart that josh and our friends growing up we went to high school together then we separated for college i went to u chicago josh was at a and m
and COVID hits. And they say, you've got to go do online school now. We don't have a campus anymore. So that's when I moved home. Josh moved home. We're back in Austin. And at that point, I was bored. I was going through the closet, calling the checks on our old mowing clients' checks. And that's when I was asking them, hey, do you have any work for us?
So at that point, yeah, one person called us back. We did that job. Fast forward five years, we had gone through hell and back, building up a team of specialists. And that kind of brings us to where we're at now.
Chapter 6: What pricing strategy do they use for profit margins?
So how many calls did you go through to get that one return?
It was 22 initial calls and I got one guy and that job was $360. And then that spiraled into... That spiraled.
And it was really lucky, honestly, because we just had really good vibes. Just, hey, we do good work. I mean, we're just trying to be outside, really, because everything was indoors and we hate being indoors. So we started doing that and then what really kind of...
universe anything that you can call it luck really brought us into this lady who posted and then that's what went viral is her post and then at that point when we had people calling we're like well maybe this could be a real business but we still at that point didn't know if it was or not until we started actually like doing more jobs starting to see a little bit more money come in we posted on our personal instagram was like hey who from who's here from our high school pretty much so we started getting people up
What caused her post to go viral? She had a lot of followers or just a local person who had local friends that knew you guys?
Yeah, yeah. So we were actually physically working on that job and she respected that we were outside on our hands and knees. She happened to own a remodeling business herself, so I think she knew how to... engineer the perfect review to get a lot of impressions. And she posted on an app called Nextdoor app, which has an element of virality that others may not. And so it's all neighborhood driven.
So if one neighborhood hypes it up, then the next few closer neighborhoods get that post expanded to them. And so it went to 50 something neighborhoods. And in those neighborhoods, that's where the phone started ringing.
That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. Year one, what did you guys close the books at? How much revenue?
So we actually started in summer of 2020. So for those six month period, it was about like. almost 400k for the first six months. And then I guess if you would call that year one, that would be around that much because we only had the last six months of the year. And at what point did you decide, hey, this is a real business and we're going to start working on it?
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Chapter 7: What marketing strategies do they currently utilize?
Very cool. Very cool. So fast forward to, uh, December of 2024 right now. Right. So you guys are pacing going to be doing about six, two, six, 3 million, uh, this year, which is awesome. Fantastic. Nice work on, on building that out. What are, what are the biggest, uh, struggles that you guys are dealing with? How, how big is your team now?
So our team right now, we have about 21 people that work with us. We now have architects, head designers, accountants, finance managers, just a lot of internal kind of back-end team members. And then we work with a lot of contractors and subcontractors. So on a weekly basis, we work with maybe 50 people per week.
Nice. So that's the amount of employees. What are the biggest things that are holding you up now?
I would say from my end, I do a lot of the admin work. One is getting the right kind of people into the team. We actually had maybe two or three hires that we just got into three months ago that we thought were going to be a great fit. But now actually seeing them implemented into the team, they just didn't work out.
So finding the right people that would stay because we wanted them to stay, it was, as I said, it's been pretty challenging.
On my end, I would say it's the custom nature of our projects. It's kind of hard to scale whenever every project is so customized to the client's needs. If you're envisioning a painting, if you can just stamp the same template painting over and over, that's a lot easier to create a lot of paintings than a custom painting every time.
I'm trying to find a way to standardize some of the processes and the projects themselves within Urban Oasis. I think the commercial route is one that we definitely want to pursue. The maintenance route is one that we want to pursue. There's a lot less interpretation within those sides. For sure.
I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can make money in that business, right? And so like really defining who you are, what you say yes to and what you say no to. So what are some things that you guys are currently saying no to that allow you to really focus on who Urban Oasis is?
$350.
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Chapter 8: How do they ensure client satisfaction and communication?
Yeah, we actually talk about this and we have meetings with our team to kind of always go over that and emphasize it. But our biggest, biggest mission for the next five years, we do have like a one, three and five. But for the five year, we want to be in 30 million revenue is where we're targeting and expanding to three states, 10 cities. So that's kind of like our big picture plan. Yeah.
on how to grow that and then who we are in general like we have a ton of really really good reviews on the experience that we provide to the client is a lot different so when we first started and kind of answer the question is contractors in general and I'm talking in Texas because that's kind of where we're at has always been very like of a negative connotation where No one texts you back.
You have to text three people and then only one answers and then they show up late. Our whole, whole entire mission since we started, which is why we really grow, has been our communication is literally on point every time. If we say, hey, our ETA is 1.05 p.m., we show up literally at 1.05 and we're there on time. We text the clients. We're always there. So the whole experience they get from...
one, that communication and two, the team that we actually like are growing are all very similar to us. Like we all have very similar values. Our energies are the same, very clean and presentable as always we try to do. So I feel like clients, especially high end clients, feel really comfortable us being in their house for two months. I mean, these are very wealthy people.
They have their kids there. They feel safer with us in that kind of context. So on the big, big picture, is $30 million in revenue, getting to 10 cities in three states, and then always providing a full design and build experience where the whole time the client knows, hey, these guys got my back. So that's kind of like who we want to portray at all times.
So when you say 10 cities, is that like 10 different locations physically? Yeah. Right. Right. So 10 cities. Yeah. I mean, right now we have Austin and San Antonio and then Dallas is on the works. We actually have a couple of jobs lined up that I'm actually going to go do myself in Dallas just to kind of get the infrastructure kind of set up. But yeah, it's cities right now. So Texas right now.
So question for you. I mean. I love the goal of 30 million or whatnot. Like why so many cities? I mean, at that many cities, it's only 3 million per location.
Right. Yeah. That's kind of a question about market share, right? Like that we've had is do we want to grow three locations to 10 million or is it easier to grow 10 locations to 3 million? In our experience, the climb to 3 million was a lot easier than the climb from 3 million to 6 million. And that's a lot of... a result of partnerships that we have.
Like we'll work with different home builders or design companies or, you know, whatever it may be. And we think that we can establish that group relatively quickly to get to 3 million per location rather than trying to build this out. Because we've talked about it for sure. Like, do we try to build us into the 30 million goal? It's possible, but it's going to be super challenging.
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