The Lawn Care CEO

Send us Fan Mail At the end of a three-day leadership conference, after hours of talk on finance, hiring, culture, and strategy, the CEO stood up and said: “If you only take two things home — install the vision. And follow the rhythm.” Most people get the vision part. Almost nobody gets the rhythm part. In this episode, Dan Ralphs breaks down the exact rhythms — annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly,...

Send us Fan Mail 80% of lawn care businesses never break $200,000. Only 5% ever make it past $800,000. And most of the ones who get stuck aren't there because of their market, their equipment, or their competition. They're stuck because they're solving the wrong problems for the stage they're in — or trying to skip ahead to solutions their business isn't ready for. In this...

Send us Fan Mail Most lawn care owners order chemicals when they need them, build programs on the fly, and wonder why they're always scrambling. The ones building $1 million, $2 million, $3 million fertilization and weed control companies don't do that. They plan in October. In this episode, Dan Ralphs sits down with the CEO of Lawn Care CEO to break down exactly how to build a fertiliza...

Send us Fan Mail Dan walked into a $5 million lawn care company and asked every leader the same question. "What is winning for you?" Most of them couldn't answer it. They knew their tasks. They knew their responsibilities. But they couldn't define the scoreboard — the clear, unambiguous standard that would tell them at the end of the week whether they won or lost. In this episo...

Send us Fan Mail A garage door repairman showed up, fixed the spring, and charged $250. Dan Ralphs paid him — and then told him he should have charged double. Not because Dan wanted to pay more. Because the repairman had no idea how much his customer was actually willing to pay. His ceiling was $1,200. The repairman charged $250 and went home working 60-hour weeks, driving an old truck, and barely...

Send us Fan Mail You don't have a marketing problem. You have a conversion problem. And until you fix it, every dollar you spend on ads is half as effective as it should be. In this episode, Dan Ralphs introduces Jordan Richards — Lawn Care CEO's newest coach and founder of a seven-figure lawn care marketing agency — who breaks down exactly what's standing between your marketing bud...

Send us Fan Mail Four employees showed up to a restaurant on a Saturday night — on their own time, without being asked, without getting paid. They identified a problem with underperforming team members, debated solutions over lunch, built a system, and walked into the office Monday morning to present it to the ops manager. Dylan Warner didn't even know there was a problem. That's Troops...

Send us Fan Mail If someone asked you right now — "Are you a person of integrity?" — you'd probably say yes. Most people do. And most people are wrong. In this episode, Dan Ralphs shares the most important leadership principle he's ever learned — a framework he discovered at a week-long academic leadership conference in Bermuda that fundamentally changed the way he runs his bus...

Send us Fan Mail You worked all year. You stayed busy. You kept the trucks rolling and the crews moving. And at the end of December, you looked at your bank account — and there was nothing there. This is the episode for that guy. Dan Ralphs breaks down the most common — and most preventable — reason lawn care businesses run out of money. Not slow season. Not bad luck. Not the economy. Two things:...

Send us Fan Mail Every company in Kansas City said HOAs were a nightmare. Too many homeowners. Too many opinions. Too much headache for too little money. Justin Simpson heard all of it — and built a $5 million company anyway. In this episode, Justin sits down with Dan Ralphs to break down exactly how he grew Lifestyle Outdoor from zero to $5 million in five years by doing the one thing everyone el...

Send us Fan Mail There's a ceiling that stops almost every lawn care company somewhere between $3 million and $4 million. Most owners blame the market. They blame their team. They blame their leads or their pricing or the economy. Stephanie Hitchins has sat across from hundreds of CEOs at that exact ceiling — and she'll tell you the same thing every time. The ceiling isn't out there...

Send us Fan Mail Dan Ralphs has spent 35 years studying leadership. Coaching businesses. Watching companies scale and stall and scale again. And after all of it, he keeps coming back to one framework — five tiers of leadership modeled after college football — that explains almost everything about why some lawn care companies grow to $10 million and beyond while others get stuck at $1 million and c...

Send us Fan Mail 23% growth. Net profit doubled. $1.5 million in revenue. No advertising budget. Jason James of Turf 212 in Greenville, South Carolina is doing something most lawn care owners think is impossible — scaling fast while keeping the bottom line healthy, and doing it almost entirely on word of mouth and relationships. In this episode, Jason sits down with Dan Ralphs and fractional CEO c...

Send us Fan Mail Right now, someone in your town just typed "lawn care near me" into Google. Three names showed up. Yours wasn't one of them. They picked somebody else. They scheduled. They paid. And that company didn't do anything special to earn it — they just knew how to play a game you haven't learned yet. That's what this episode is about. Dan Ralphs and Sam Gust...

Send us Fan Mail Aaron Suttonfield watched his close rate fall from the low 50s all the way down to 33% — and he knew marketing wasn't going to save him. So he fixed the thing closest to cash first: his sales process. In this episode, Aaron breaks down exactly what he changed to go from 33% to as high as 84.8% close rate at RDS Lawn Care. New team structure, a three-tiered program, a dead-sim...

Send us Fan Mail You can hit $2M in revenue, collect 1,900 five-star reviews, and still be one resignation away from watching it all fall apart. That's not a hypothetical. That's Kyle Flanagan's story. Kyle built Lawn Ace in Augusta, Georgia into a multimillion-dollar fertilization and weed control company. Great brand. Loyal clients. Strong team — until the ops leader who held ever...

Send us Fan Mail Dan skipped church to help a buddy plan a pest control business — and ended up laying out the exact blueprint every lawn care business owner needs to build a scalable, profitable company. In this episode of the Lawn Care CEO Podcast, head coach Dan Ralphs walks you through the four foundational steps every owner needs to nail, whether you're starting a lawn care business from...

Send us Fan Mail There is a reason why some leaders make it look easy but the truth is that it isn’t what is going on in their business but something else.  In this mindset shifting episode, we will show you why everything some lawn care leaders touch seems to turn to gold! 🔗 Follow Us! Facebook Instagram Tiktok Youtube

Send us Fan Mail How do you scale a turf business fast without burning out or guessing your way through it? Will Hall, founder of Hippo Turf Care, shares how he went from 89 clients to nearly 800 in just two years —starting as a side hustle and going all-in with real risk on the table. From branding that actually sticks to handling leads, hiring a VA, and doing “all the things” early on—this episo...

Send us Fan Mail Season 3 starts here. We're telling the full story — how a non-lawn care guy ended up with a lawn care podcast, why it works, and why you should absolutely care.  Plus, it’s a good story. 🔗 Follow Us! Facebook Instagram Tiktok Youtube

Send us Fan Mail We’re excited to welcome our new coach, Sam Gustin, to the Lawn Care CEO team. Sam is a US Army veteran, former Missile Defender of the Year, and the founder of a million-dollar lawn care company, Troops Mowing. In this episode, we talk through his story, how he made the jump from military service to entrepreneurship, and the lessons he picked up while running a fast-growing compa...

Send us Fan Mail Struggling to grow your lawn care business past that plateau? In this episode of the Lawn Care CEO Podcast, we sit down with Jude Salvaggio of Tyler Landscape Maintenance, a small business owner who transformed his company and increased sales by over $100K in just 12 months. Jude shares how he went from $150K to nearly $300K in revenue by narrowing his services, implementing a CRM...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of the Lawn Care CEO Podcast, Dan Ralphs and Aaron Suttenfield sit down with Brian Christensen, CEO of Brian Pest Control. With nearly three decades of experience, Brian explains how early order planning (EOP) has been one of the smartest moves for protecting margins and keeping his company financially strong. He breaks down how EOP can cut material costs by up to...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when AI takes over our podcast? This episode of the Lawn Care CEO Podcast isn’t just Dan talking about AI—it’s AI creating the episode. And it might change how you think about running your lawn care business. We’ve been experimenting with practical ways lawn care business owners can use AI to save time, systemize their companies, and make better decisions. Today, we’r...

Send us Fan Mail If you’re running a $1M lawn care business and want to grow it to $10M , this episode breaks down what actually needs to change to make that leap.  Dan and Miranda talk through the mindset shifts and leadership habits that separate stuck operators from confident CEOs. They explain why focusing only on top-line sales can hold you back, and how shifting your attention to profit and...