Mike Andes recommends giving customers a one to two hour window for landscape estimates instead of an exact appointment time. Exact times create scheduling conflicts and customer frustration as your business grows. Comcast and Home Depot use windows for the same reason.
Hey everyone, Mike Andes here and today I'm gonna share with you my number one tip. If you're doing lawn care or landscaping estimates. So if for any reason you go to the property and meet with the customer, this is the video for you. So whether you're doing leaf cleanups, mulch installations, bush trimming, or doing hardscaping and paver patios and much larger projects, it's extremely important that you do this and that is give a window of time instead of a specific and exact time when you're doing your estimate scheduling. So when someone calls or they email or they ask in any way, they ask for an estimate. And you know this is a project based job that you're going to have to go to the project, you're going to have to go to the property and actually walk the site, meet the customer, see what their expectations are, make a video, make the estimate notes, all the rest of it. If you're going to have to go and meet them, do not give them an exact time. So do not say, Mr. Jones, I'll be there at 10am tomorrow. Look forward to seeing you there. As your business grows, it's going to become very, very difficult to be able to get to exact time estimates. You want to give yourself at least a one hour window. So instead of saying 10am tomorrow, say hey, I'll be there between 10 and 11am tomorrow when you call a company like Comcast, and I'm by no means saying that we should have customer service like Comcast because they're horrible, but they actually give a four hour window. And it's very common that places like Lowe's or Home Depot, if they're doing deliveries or on site inspections, they're going to give a three or four or sometimes an entire day window window of time that they are able to get access to the property and actually meet you on the property. And so it's very, very common in the service industry and yet we put up ourselves under all this pressure to show up at an exact minute because guess what, if you show up 15 minutes late to a 10 o' clock meeting, you might be waiting there for 15 minutes. If you show up at 10:02, you're technically late. And now technically you should be giving them a call if you are late to that appointment. Whereas when you give yourself a 10 to 11 o' clock window, that one hour window, or potentially maybe even a two hour window, you're now will have the flexibility if you're on a job site, if the previous estimate went long because the person wanted to talk your ear off if you got caught in traffic, if a calamity happened with your employees and they didn't show up. And now you're running behind all of these things. All the avoid you can really avoid all the chaos of rescheduling, calling customers and apologizing and asking them to reschedule or telling them that you're going to be late. All of that can be avoided by simply giving yourself the time, setting yourself up to not fail by giving those exact time. It's going to kill you as you begin to grow as you get 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 estimates. We have locations now doing 20 plus 30 plus estimates every single day. You better make sure you give yourself a window of time otherwise you're going to set up yourself for failure and the customer for unsatisfied service. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com, check it out. Lawncaremedia.com is where you can get some of those estimates by getting some print marketing for your lawn care and landscaping business. I'm Mike Andes, Law See you tomorrow.
