EP 629: Zero to $30K: A Young Entrepreneur's Social Media Marketing Success Story

The purpose of this show the purpose of this show is to guide you to realign with habits that get you to live the life you've always dreamed of. This this is the habit based lifestyle podcast with Jesse Jewel. This is the habit based lifestyle where you can access your full potential right now. Finally break free from destructive habits that dream life. If you want it, you can.

Heaven.

This is where you transform your health, mind, business and relationships or do nothing and keep your life the way it is. But if you're ready for change, you're in the right place. This is where you're going to learn how to live a habit based lifestyle. You are tuning in to the habit based lifestyle podcast with your host Jesse. You. This is the habit based lifestyle. Let's go.

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Welcome back to the habit based lifestyle podcast. I'm your host Jesse Yule. Today we got a special guest, Clay Calhoun who is a landscaper in, in South Carolina and and Clay, actually his dad is a chiropractor. That's originally how we met and his dad got great results in our program and actually referred Clay. They have a completely different business. Clay's a landscaper. His dad Ryan is a chiropractor. But nonetheless, Clay, I want to welcome you on the show today for sure.

What's going on man?

Not much. Hey, can you tell the audience a little bit about you and your business and then we'll kind of get, get into a little bit more specific conversation from there?

Yeah, for sure. A little bit about me. My name's Clay. I kind of started this back when I was in high school. Just mom told me to go get a job and got a little. They bought me a push mower and kind of picked up a couple yards and push mode honestly before I could start driving and then just kept push mowing through high school and then kind of slowly started getting trailers and then kind of over the years cup, you know, last couple years has really started to get know, grow as far as that goes. And so now we have like a maintenance division and then we have a hardscape side. You know, we're about a 50% maintenance company and then a 50% install a lot for our maintenance clients also you know, do a couple new constructions as far as that goes. But that's kind of us as a company and kind of where we've came from. Have a great team and we've definitely evolved in our systems trying to improve every day still and get better for sure.

So what's the, you know, what's the name of your landscaping Business?

Yes, Calhoun Landscaping.

So, okay, and what's the main reason you, you started it originally?

Honestly, I mean, the main reason is I love working outside. I enjoy working with my hands and enjoy helping people, for sure. Talking with people and seeing the results. Obviously, just like anything, you know, landscaping, you get to see it more outside with the finished product or, you know, a maintenance, a yard. Looking good as far as that goes.

Nice. What's, what's like your favorite top two favorite things about, you know, owning your own business and having a landscaping business?

I mean, obviously, just like why everybody wants to own a company. You have your own hours. You're, you know, you say you have your own hours, but obviously just like anything, you, obviously some weeks are worse than others. But if we want to get away, go on vacation, me and my wife, we love to travel. Gives us the flexibility to do that. And then probably the other top things is just, you know, putting a team together. For me now, it used to be kind of hiring it, but for me now it's like working with guys and building relationships and then the team coming together. I mean, like, my guys give me advice. They're just as good and, you know, you know, us putting our heads together of like, what's going to be the best solution. And now it's like problem solving to figure it out to make the best result for this client or job or whatever we're doing.

Got it. Tell me a little bit like what it, how old are you?

22.

Okay, so 22 years old. So as a 22 year old man, what is it like to go out to a job and, you know, bid a job with somebody who, you know, might be 40, 50, 60 years old? Is there, is there any issue with that? Or they do they kind of treat you like a normal.

I've never had an issue and honestly, like, very rarely do people ask my age. And that's what, like I talk to a lot of people all the time and it's like, well, I'm young, I don't know what to do. I'm like, dude, I'll be honest with you. Very rarely, like, if I build a relationship with a client, then they kind of figure out my age. But very rarely one do they ask my age too. The biggest thing is just confidence because if you go out there and you start questioning, yeah, this young guy, he doesn't know what he's doing. But even sometimes, like, you just have to educate yourself, get better, be confident. If you're not confident in yourself, then you're not going to Be able to sell jobs, sell people, let alone keep good guys. The biggest thing is confidence. Trust yourself. If you're not confident yourself, then you're never going to be able to. Then they're going to start asking your age. But if you're confident in yourself, they're not going to ask how old you are.

Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool is one, you know, you're 22, but like every time I've been in a conversation with you, man, I don't ever think about, oh, I'm talking to a 22 year old.

Right.

The other side of it is there isn't a lot of entrepreneurs at 22 years old, number one. And then there's not a lot having the success you're having. But like, I think part of it is, is you did start working earlier. So you kind of like, you know, even though you might be 22 in like business years. Yeah, it's kind of like dog years. Right. It's like one business year is equivalent to like seven years of life. So like, you know, you've probably been an entrepreneur for what, like eight years? Seven years.

Eight. Seven years.

So I mean, realistically that makes you like 56 years old. You know, if we're talking about in life experience and, and communication and I think that's what's, you know, cool about, you know, seeing that and then knowing your dad is an entrepreneur, obviously he passed that down to you. So I think that's pretty cool too.

For sure. Yeah, obviously. I mean, you know, seeing from other people who maybe their parents were not entrepreneurs, I definitely would say it's definitely a big role. Obviously. My mom and my dad both kind of business people and then instilling in us like how to communicate and talk with people and showing us that and then maybe not talking bad or there's nothing wrong with it. Some parents who weren't business owners and then some people try to do it, they have like all these questions where like, I didn't even really know that was a question. I was just already taught that. And then like seeing, you know, from what people have the questions when they start up the new business or whatever that may be and how you can do that in helping people out.

So yeah, for sure, man. Well, tell me, tell me a little bit prior to us meeting, like, what were you doing for marketing, marketing your business on kind of a local basis?

I'll be honest with you, I have never ever done marketing. The only thing I will say, like I've done a couple flyers a couple years Ago at my dad's office, I got some work from that. I've done that. Besides that, it would just be like, maybe every once in a while I would do a job and tell a neighbor, like, hey, if you can get me, like, one or two people on this street where I've got some more maintenance accounts, like, I'll cut you a deal. 15 bucks off your maintenance account. If you can get me three of your neighbors, I'd give them a sin of like, you give me three neighbors, not just one, but give me three. That's about the biggest marketing I've done.

Okay.

But besides that, I have never started marketing until right before Christmas with you four, five months ago.

Yeah. So to. Let's talk about, you know, obviously you. You know, I knew your dad, but, like, what. What was the main reason you wanted to do this type of marketing or just add this? Because, you know, a lot of people are. Are reluctant to add social media marketing to their business. But, like, you're, you know, you obviously wanted to give it a try. But, like, what was the main reason why you wanted to do that?

I mean, I've seen a lot of, like, I'm honestly not a big social media person and like, that my biggest fear was like, I want to be a good husband to my wife and I don't want to consume my life with Facebook. That was my biggest fear going into social media. And it still is. Like, that's always in the back of my mind of like, okay, need to step back. Like, this is just like, work. Treat it like work. Let's try to put it up and guilty. I'm still not great at that. I think it can consume our life and whatever that may be. But that was my biggest fear. But I think I knew that, like, I wasn't stupid on it too, is like, I knew that social media works. People use it, like, use it as a tool too. And it obviously can be used for the bad. But. And then seeing that and I knew where the business was, like, we were still growing. We still grew a good bit in 2024, but I wanted to take it to the next level. For us to keep growing the company and for us to keep growing, I knew I had to start marketing because the referrals, like, they. I'll keep getting referrals, and we still do. But to keep growing and getting bigger to the size that we would like to go, you have to market more and kind of, you know, strategic to grow a company.

So, yeah, rolling, like, kind of rolling out this marketing. I know Essentially, in the early days, like, you started with 26 friends.

Yep.

And that was, I think, the lowest I'd ever worked with anybody with was like 150. 156 friends total. So even I was a little nervous at first. I'm like, oh, is this gonna work? But I think, you know, what, what was kind of like that first 30 days, like, because I think a lot of times when people step into a marketing program, they're really looking at, oh, is this really gonna work?

You know?

You know, the first 30 days.

Right, right. No, for sure. And us going into it and like, I knew your was like, kind of like your sales pitch to me was like, it's a winner. Like, I was like, I know I'm slow. I need to be marketing more in like my super slow season to keep my guys busy because I don't want to lose my good guys to keep work in front of us. And you're like, do it while you had the time. Start marketing now. And so then that's kind of what we started doing. And then, you know, in January, like when you don't get jobs, when you're not like, landscapers are supposed to be like taking the time off and just doing their regular maintenance. And it's like, we're growing. We were starting to get. After two weeks, we started, got our first job in person, meeting scheduled, the appointment, and then it was like one lead, two leads, one to two meeting, one to two, you know, meeting with in between one to four people a week. Sometimes it was two, sometimes it was three, four. To create that job. And seeing that, you know, after about took two to three weeks, maybe a little bit longer to start, really starting to get the first meeting scheduled up for it to start working, seeing, okay, this is a lead for us to grow our company.

And you know, let's face it, you know, December and January, people typically aren't thinking about spending money doing stuff with their yard.

Right, right.

So, you know, what, what has been, you know, maybe the top two things you've learned since, like kind of doing this type of marketing and just being able to be on social media, I.

Would say the biggest thing. And that's like what habit based lifestyle is all about. And like, I definitely totally agree with like your program and what you say is like, number one, you have to start with yourself on the habit base, transitioning that over into your company and just being consistent. Because there's no secret to the Facebook, like it. There's no secret to the Facebook algorithm. Like, you can Google it. The biggest thing is learning how to be consistent with it. Because if you're consistent, you're going to get more feed, you're going to get more leads, and people are going to. You're going to be constantly in front of those people. And that's how we generated those jobs, staying in front of those people. And what works is just consistently posting and getting those messages, getting those leads. And that's been the biggest thing for me that I've learned that works.

So since, you know, obviously rolling this out, you started with 26 friends, now you have almost like 5,000. So you've actually grown, like, a pretty big following in about four or five months. What is, you know, what is the clients you're meeting with? Like, are these like your ideal clients? Are they, you know, not your ideal people or, like, what would you say?

95 of the time, they're my ideal clients. Some of them aren't. Mainly more landscape. Some of our maintenance routes are extremely tight, so it's kind of hard to get into our maintenance program. But as far as a landscape project will do anything, normally they're really, really good clients. But, like, the biggest thing with Facebook is like, you know, right away when you message them, like, you know, no judgment, but, you know, if you're going to meet with the person, if they're going to respond back, if they're pretty responsive, somebody's going to say they're a good. Like, if somebody's comfortable enough to give me their address, you know that they're going to be a good lead. Because most people that are, like, questionable or whatever, they already see that they trust you on Facebook or see your content and they're giving you your address. So you know that they're going to be a good lead if they're comfortable. For me, especially for me, it's a little different in other companies, but if they're comfortable enough to give me their address, that's how I know that they're definitely going to be a good lead and they're most likely going to be a sale because they're already trusting me.

Got it. So when they, you know, when you go end up going to their house, do they say anything about, hey, I see your content on social media, or do they feel like they already know you? What's that?

Especially from some older people, they're like, I see you all over my Facebook and I finally just decided to message you. And I'm like, yeah, we just started doing it, you know, started marketing, and they're like, yeah, that's super cool. I love what you're posting on these jobs and kind of giving me some ideas and stuff.

So yeah, that's cool, man. So let's talk about like what this has actually helped you with in terms of results. Can you give kind of the audience an idea of like how much your business has grown in terms of like monthly revenue since adding, you know, this marketing?

Yeah, I mean it's different for every business but like for ours, like you know a project can average anywhere from like a thousand, two thousand, but our average is anywhere from like 3,000 to 10,000. Anything above we don't do a ton of but we do. But you know, we've had, we've definitely had a couple big jobs. I would say it's probably generated, you know, mainly the leads and then obviously per different per client what they want, but it's generated for sure probably an extra 20, 25, 30,000 extra from just Facebook alone of marketing per month that the revenue has added of meeting new clients and obviously, you know, different per job. But it, I would probably say it averages out to that what is added to the company for sure.

Nice. So you're, you've added you know, 25, 30k every month for the last four or five months. What's been your biggest job that you've landed on, you know, doing this?

We landed a pretty decent job just straight from Facebook. That was a referral. It was a set little over 17k. Pretty big like moles, pretty big property, the hard access and it was a fun one and the team did a good job on it.

So that's awesome, man. So what's been, you know, let's say this, what's been your favorite part of learning this type of marketing?

Just seeing like the actual leads and seeing that works. And my favorite part is just seeing that it works and when people ask like hey, are you getting leads? And yes, it's working and then people kind of see the results of what social media can be and the true benefit of what you can build to reach more people to help grow a company. And just seeing the growth, it's probably my favorite part.

So yeah, I mean I think what's cool is, you know, you pretty much were non existent on social media, you know, six months ago and you've been able to turn it into a consistent, you know, 25, 30K a month in revenue. And I think a lot of times people think you have to be some big influencer or you know, like we kind of live in a day and age where you Know, everybody thinks like all influencers are millionaires. And I know a lot of influencers that have, you know, 1000-002000-00500,000 audience and they don't make any money.

Right.

And you know, you started with 26 people and you're making, you know, you've added over six figures in revenue so far this year. So it's, it's pretty cool to see that. And not only that, you're 22 years old. Most 22 year olds aren't hanging out on Facebook.

So, you know, I get some hate my friends for that a little bit, but, you know.

Yeah, but I bet your friends aren't, you know, making that kind of money on. Yeah, for sure, you know, their platform either. So we'll talk about this, man. What's been maybe like an unexpected result you've gotten in the program.

Unexpected result. I definitely did not expect to get as many friends as fast. And then I, you know, I would, I definitely didn't expect as many consistent leads, which I feel like you always have to be adapting, changing to what your content is. But I mean, I definitely didn't expect for it to keep staying and like growing. But there's so many people out there and you always have to remember that somebody's always needing something. There's always somebody else out there that had a bad experience with something and is wanting to do something different. And just seeing so many more projects, you see that people have bad experiences or bad results and they want, are looking for something else.

For sure. Man. Let me ask you this. So like you, you obviously came in here, your dad's a chiropractor. A lot of the people in the group are chiropractors, kind of health professionals. There's not a lot of landscapers in our group. But like, what would you say to that person who's maybe like, hey, does this actually work in my business? What would you say to that person?

I would just say like, I mean it works in any marketing, works in any business, but obviously it's the way that you're doing it. If you're not like the biggest thing that habit based lifestyle is is like consistency. If you're not like consistently doing something or not showing the benefit of the results that you're getting and trying to get people engaged and responding. You know, the two questions I would have is one, are you consistent? Two, are you responsive? Are you a good communicator? If you're not communicating to your people, then obviously why would they want to go with you or come in it's all about communication and that's something that we strive for. Definitely messed up a few times, but my biggest thing is communication. To grow for sure.

That's awesome, man. So I want to go through a couple rapid fire questions.

Yep.

So one, how long you been married?

This August will be two years.

Okay, two years and then two. What it. What would you say your number one business habit is that you do every single day?

My number one business habit is reading my bible. One, just trying to spend my morning routine with God is super important to me to grow my faith. And I feel like for me personally, that's what is super important. Um, and then obviously like working out, but it doesn't happen every single day. But I shoot to at least three to five days a week. The focus on me and that's something you definitely kind of brought back to life with me. And I appreciate it a little bit more than what I kind of slacked off a little bit. And it's like invest in yourself. You're. You're the biggest investment you'll ever do.

That's awesome, man. So what, what is next for you guys as far as like where do you see your company going the next six months? You got AI. You have a lot of these other things like what, what do you really see yourself doing in the next six months in your business?

And the next six months is just keep blowing up the reels. Like AI is going to help generate so many different content schedules and like blowing up like reels, videos, pictures, they work using AI to help generate more content, different flow to help grow the company and marketing hand to grow the company to where we want to go.

Awesome man. Well, hey, thank you so much for being on here. You know, we appreciate you being part of the habit based lifestyle community. Excited, man, to see, you know, what you're going to be doing in the, in the next six months and year. So thanks so much for being on here today.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you.

All right, guys, if you want to be a part of our habit based lifestyle community, you can simply go down in the show notes. You can click the link to the habit based lifestyle and secrets business group where we talk about habits, we talk about marketing, and we talk about how you can begin to integrate AI into your business just like Clay has and so many other people. If you have any questions and you can also reach me@jesse habitbasedlifestyle.com until next episode. Have a great day.

The purpose of this show the purpose of this show is to guide you to realign with habits that get you to live the life. Live the life you've always dreamed of. This is the Habit Based Lifestyle podcast with Jesse Jewel. This is the habit based lifestyle where you can access your phone with the potential right now. Finally break free from destructive habits that dream life. If you want it, you can have it. This is where you transform your health, mind, business and relationships. Or do nothing and keep your life the way it is. But if you're ready for change, you're in the right place. This is where you're gonna learn how to live a habit based lifestyle. You are tuning in to the Habit Based Lifestyle podcast with your host, Jesse Yule. This is. This is the habit based lifestyle. Let's go.