11 Ways to Grow a Service Business So Fast It Feels Illegal

Today I'll share 11 ways to grow a home service business so fast it feels illegal. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 200 locations around the world. I'm also the founder of Homework Software where over $1 million of daily transactions are made for home service businesses. Number one, make your first dollars the hard way to the next hundred thousand. Come easy. Back a couple years ago I was in North Carolina and I documented the first 30 days of of starting a location and none of the flashy marketing work. No every door, direct mail, no Facebook ads, Google Ads, even yard signs. All of them got stolen within 24 hours. What worked? Door hangers and holding a sign next to the road. Literally if holding a sign next to the road is the thing that you'll have to do to grow your business and get more leads and you don't have enough money, you'll have to do it. And everyone wants to get fancy and figure out the next marketing hack instead of just doing the boring work that is required to get your first five or 10 customers. And once I got my first few customers using door hangers, using a sign, literally standing next the road, I would stand up on top of my truck on the hood just to get people's attention and shake the thing. The reason I did that is to get my foot in the door. Once I got a few customers I was able to upsell them more services go from one time projects into recurring jobs. I asked all of them to introduce me to all of their neighbors. I asked for an online review and this is how I began to get momentum in the last couple weeks of the 30 day challenge. Now recently I want to turnaround show and met with Eric Vargas from Vargas Lawn Care and Eric did not want to be in the field. Do you not want to be in the field or do you not have the skill to be in the field? I'm okay with both.

I. I'm pretty sure I don't have the I don't want to be on the field.

Fine. That's awesome. That's all I need to know. In fact he spent his full time day was spent making TikToks and YouTube videos to be able to get more jobs.

The constraints so leads I would be surprised because I do a lot of organic marketing. I like to put myself out there to make the clients feel comfortable. I post on Nextdoor, LinkedIn, Facebook, all social media platforms. Google reviews are at 229 I think or 200 I think 229. That's literally why I got where I'm at. Because I wasn't afraid to put myself out there and show the world that, hey, you know, my name is Eric Vargas, Vargas Lawn Care Services. I like to make you happy.

In my opinion, I was very honest with Eric. I said, look, you're gonna have to put your head down for a year or two and get your hands dirty, Go out in the field and do the work. You're going to have to focus on actually getting jobs done to produce labor revenue. Because you're doing $150,000 in annual revenue, you will generate enough leads to keep yourself busy. You'll stay at 150 to unlock the next level of growth. What you're doing now will not work. The reason I say is because you've done it now for three years. I don't want you to spend another three years doing that thinking you're going to grow this business 800,000 because it won't. Instead of thinking, oh, I've got to keep making tik tok on YouTube, like, make a great business. And then down the road, it'll afford you the life that you want to be able to do other stuff if you want to. But this is the grind phase, right? Like, this is the next three years is like doing some of these things is not things you are comfortable or want to do. But if you do those things, you'll have a wife and a $500,000 business by the time you turn 30. And a lot of times people look at what the big guys do for social media, for marketing, for advertising, and they think, oh, that's what I need to do to get to where they're at. No, the reason they're doing what they're doing today is cause they have much more budget. They have a huge budget for marketing, advertising. And the reason they have that budget is because they got started doing the boring stuff. Holding a sign next to the road, doing door hangers. Take whatever's working and just do more and better of that. Everyone thinks we need the next new flashy marketing tool, the next big ad campaign. What if you just took what's working and like, okay, well, one out of 100 people respond to me on door hangers. Great. How do I make that one out of 90? How do I make that one out of 80? How can I tweak or adjust the design, the pricing, to be able to maximize the value of that ad spend? And so if you only have a little bit of money, you'll have to get creative and thinking that what you are doing is going to somehow be the exact same thing that a 5, 10, $20 million business is also doing. What they're advertising is crazy. Number two, fix your worst quarter before expanding your spring rush and pass the 50% rule. After studying more than 250 home service companies, I found that replacing their worst quarter with the average of their other quarters increased profits by 72%. One company went from making $70,000 per profit to per year to $180,000 of profit per year simply by fixing one quarter where they usually would shut down. They just added one more service that they could do during the winter. One small change, they added that small service and it had a massive impact. And everyone wants to think about how do I grow the business and get more trucks and hire more people? And a lot of us, the easiest time to do that is during the spring rush when leads are pouring in. And as long as you have the supply of labor and trucks and equipment to be able to take on more work, you usually can grow very fast. Everyone wants to do that. But what they don't want to do is solve the off season problem. Because when leads are pouring in and the only thing you really need to do is have the trucks and the employees to be able to capitalize on growth. That's why everyone does that. But the actual thing that sinks many home service businesses is not their best months and it's not their best quarter. It's when times get slow. And that's why I want you to pass the 50% rule. What that means is your worst month needs to make at least 50% of the revenue of your best month. So if your best month was $100,000 in monthly revenue, I don't want your monthly revenue to ever drop below $50,000. Once you have passed the 50% rule, then I give you permission to increase the number of trucks you have, increase the amount of employees you have during your spring rush, and capitalize on growth when demand is high. Number three, build systems before you need them. Because the alternative is building them in a hospital bed. My accident when I was underneath a dump truck and got caught in the pto, the power takeoff, the thing that spins really fast underneath. When that happened, it exposed everything wrong in my business. I was literally facetiming my crew from a hospital bed because no one could run the company without me. That was my fault. I was the bottleneck. Over the next 12 months, I built estimate videos, pricing matrices, and pay for performance that turned a no profit company doing 800, $900,000 in annual revenue was paying me nothing, no profit whatsoever. Within 12 months, that same business paid me in distributions $280,000 and I only worked one to two hours per week. Having these systems in place is crucial to growing the business. It's also crucial that the business survives. Because there's going to be times, whether the family emergencies or health scares or accidents like I had, that you'll be forced to step away from the business. And if right now you're the master juggler keeping everything up, one day the music stops and one day you'll have a reckoning with the fact that you don't have systems. And please don't be like me and wait for it to take a hospital bed to realize you have to turn around the company. This is why I have software like homeworks. To be able to give you the metrics you need to be able to create systems and automations and be able to sell, text blast and do all these things in your business without you having to be there. Because the business requires you to work 12, 14, 16 hours a day, you'll never get the freedom you want from your business. Number four, admin is defense. To grow fast, delegate it as fast as possible, focused on offense. So when we look at the three departments of every home service business, we have sales, operations and admin. Now admin is important, don't get me wrong. And defense wins championships, but it's not going to help you grow the business and get more leads. The sooner I can go from admin to operations and eventually focus most of my time on sales, the faster I will grow my business. At Augusta Lawn Care, we train owners when they're starting out from nothing sometimes. And I've seen some owners within a matter of two or three weeks immediately be generating 60, $70,000 in monthly revenue, having jobs pouring in left and right, while the exact same owner, starting from the exact same training, goes out and takes a year or two to duplicate that same success and have several crews and five or six employees. What's the difference? One of them focused mostly on sales from day one. The other one, the one that took slower, started trying to manipulate and try to think about every little detail of business and where everything was going to be stored inside the storage unit and exactly how the trucks were going to be parked and exactly how we were going to fold the uniforms. And look, I understand organization, but organizing till death do us come like you cannot grow a business through defense. You're going to have to focus on sales. And so the sooner you can Delegate things like answering the phone, doing emails, running payroll, using QuickBooks and categorizing all expenses. Use Home Service CPA, use Home Service web design. Those admin related tasks are not going to make the business grow. I want to delegate admin as fast as possible and get in the field doing operations as much as I possibly can to earn revenue. And I want to grow that revenue in order to the point where I can actually delegate operations and get an operations manager so I can step into full time doing sales. For example, the command center that we built for Augusta Lawn Care, they answer all the phones and do all the admin work for our owners. And the reason we did that is because if I can take admin off the plate of our owners, I know the first thing they can do when they leave for training from training is run ads, do door hangers and start getting more jobs. In other words, get the work, go out and get more sales. Sales is the driving offense for you to grow the business. By building command center, we accelerate their growth of the locations more than anything we've ever done because it allows the owner to focus on operations, doing the work and sales getting more work. Perfectionists in admin is something you're going to have to potentially fight against because you'll stall out before you get above 5, 6, $700,000 in annual revenue. If you're trying to always be a perfectionist, then, well, the phone call's gotta be like this and I gotta make sure all the little emails and I got all my filters. Look, I understand those things are important and they're gonna give you 1, 2, 3% gains, but, but the doubles triples. The ten X's on your business comes from you focusing on sales and delegating all the lower priority tasks. Hey everyone. So this is actually the front of our office and you can see there's really nice signage. Why? So when people come in here, they want to work here, they want to be able to come inside and see what we got going on. And that's what your customers are thinking when it comes to your website. They see the sign out next to the road, they drive into the parking lot and they look for your signage. And your signage is your website. And if it doesn't look professional, they don't even want to walk in the door. I don't care if you have the best prime rib steak in town. If it looks like everything's falling apart, I'm not going inside. And so you have a great service, you have a great business, you offer great services. To your customers. But they'll never walk in that door if your signage doesn't look good. That's why@homeserver, design.com and longcarewebdesign.com the average customer in the first year increases the amount of leads they're getting by 80%. Go check it out today. Sign up for a subscription that you don't have to pay. 5, $10,000 up front. You just get leads starting right away. We'll see you there. Number five. If you lose conviction, you lose the sale. Most home service business owners undercharge because they aren't the target market. You're serving 70 and 80 year olds that have millions of dollars of net worth. You on the hand might be 20 or or 30 years old and just starting your career. Identity determines income. You are not selling a service. You're not even just selling them time. You're selling insurance. You're selling them asset protection. You're selling them public image in front of their neighbors and all of their buddies that are watching them get served when you show up at their property, you're selling them pride of ownership. If they're a first time home buyer, if this is their first big purchase and and their first house, this is a huge sense of pride and you're protecting that. If you think about from that perspective, you're selling insurance, asset protection, those are very valuable products that demand a premium price. But if you're always just trying to think in the mindset of how in the world would they pay $800 that that's crazy. Do you really think if you think they're crazy for paying the price that you know you need to charge that you're ever going to sell, do you think you'll ever do a follow up phone call? And people are afraid to do follow up phone calls or text or email their customers and follow up on estimates in part because they don't actually have the conviction that they're the best service for the customer. If you care about the customer and you have conviction that your solution is the best for their problem, why in the world would you not do a follow up phone call? Why in the world will you not push and ask the hard questions required for them to solve the problem using your service and it either comes from the place of you lack the conviction or you do not have the ability to be able to step into their shoes and realize the true value that you're offering them. Number six, quantity becomes quality if you iterate fast enough. For example, when I started making YouTube videos seven or eight years ago, those tutorials and the videos that I made standing up against a wall in a little whiteboard in my room, they were not great. That was actually filmed right after I had that accident underneath the dump truck. Just a few weeks later, I started my YouTube channel. But thousands, literally thousands of videos later, I've started a little bit better at communication. How to read a teleprompter, how to set up a camera, how to do lighting, how to do an introduction. Over the course of all of those videos, the volume is a cheat code. So when it comes to hiring or interviewing or, or advertising or selling or knocking on doors or doing door hangers, all these skills that you want to have instead of constantly looking for perfection, like, oh, I'm just not good at software, I can't get homeworks, I can't do these things. Instead of thinking that way, just think, I will do it so many times that I will not need luck, I will not need that skill given to me. I will just simply do it. From repetition, quantity becomes quality. And so the quantity of my videos, eventually I got pretty good at making good videos. And if you do enough interviews, eventually you'll get more smooth at asking questions. During the interview process, you'll know what red flags to look for if you knock on enough doors. You'll get used to what to say when someone gets mad at you. You'll get used to what to say if someone says they need to talk to their spouse. If you do enough follow up phone calls, you'll get to know how to hook someone in when, when they're on the edge, on the fence as to whether or not they're gonna choose your service. Quantity becomes quality. Just focus on the number of reps that you put in. Number seven. The problems you ignore become the tax you pay. Owners obsess over flat tires, angry customers, and no shows from their employees. But ignore the one thing that kills the business and that's the off season collapse. No amount of hustle and no matter of 7 day work weeks and 15 hour days can overcome a 3 month cash crater where you're losing money every single month. Fix the root, not the symptom. You're like, oh, I've got to get more leads and figure out ads. Step back for a moment. Do we need to figure out ads or do we need to figure out how to upsell our existing customers during the off season so we don't lose money? Because if I didn't have to spend 40, 50, 60, 70, I spent up to $100,000 of cash burnt during the off season. If I could solve that problem, I could just spend a third of that on ads even if I don't do a great job at it and I would grow significantly more. We ignore the hard conversation with a bad paying customer. We ignore the hard conversation with a low performing employee. And these conversations, these difficult things that we are ignoring, these problems that we're trying to get around, we solve it by just working harder, doing the things we're comfortable. But there's a tax you pay and that tax catches up with you. Physically, it drains you, emotionally, it drains you and eventually you fill your time doing things that are comfortable instead of doing what is necessary. Number eight, don't act big when you are small. A lot of times it's our inclination when we're just getting started to try to appear like we're this massive company. And recently I was on a turnaround with Eric from Vargas Lawn Care and this is really, in my opinion, the risk of social media. My question is, how are we like when you say he goes and works all day, what are you like, tell me like, not like I'm marketing sales, what are you doing?

I go to the gym and then, you know, I'm going to social media. You know, I try to look for local community groups, try to reply, I'm trying to be like the yes, I did one of your videos. Trying to be like that guy for the local community.

In reality, Eric just needed to put his head down and get better at operations and he kept getting distracted with TikTok and making YouTube videos and he really felt like those videos set him apart from the competition. When reality we solve problems for our customers on their property and if we don't do a good job with that, it doesn't matter how many TikTok videos you make and how viral you go, you are not going to get more customers. And he started buying equipment and trucks that were really just made his image look better on these videos. And, and he had two brand new trucks, a whole bunch of new equipment, he had this skid steer he had hardly used and it was like $40,000 worth of debt. And the kick here is he made $150,000 in annual revenue and didn't know how to operate the trimmer, the weed whacker for his lawn care business. And so I had to push really hard, like focus on getting more customers, not getting more trucks and equipment. And if you're trying to act big with the equipment, act big on social media, act big when it comes to the trucks that you're buying, you will go bankrupt because your 50, $60,000 truck is costing you 1,000, $1,500 in just the payment. It's also costing money to insure it, store it, and maintain it. And so all in. Eric would have to almost double the revenue of the business just to pay for the two truck payments and all the equipment that he had purchased. Why? Because he started trying to act big online when he was still small. Nothing against Eric, but he'll have to get back in the field, get his hands dirty, and stop thinking about trying to act big in front of the competition. Cause customers don't care. Ultimately, customers don't care about how many fancy pieces of equipment you have sitting at your shop space. They care about a quality service being done at their property. And so I'm very careful to spend a bunch of money or get a bunch of overhead on trucks and equipment that I don't really use. But it is the trap that many fall into. Because social media is an easy badge, it's an easy win. It's a quick sticker that says, oh yes, they are successful. When in reality, customers, contracts and contacts are the things that make a real business. Number nine before you increase ad spend, increase repetition. Most owners want Google Ads or Facebook ads before they've knocked on 500 doors, before they've asked for 50 reviews, or even before they follow up and then follow up phone calls on 50 estimates. Or when I force owners to grind before spending, their skills actually sharpen. Once you've done 50 or more follow up phone calls, your spend on ads will actually get better. Why? Because your close rate will get better once you've knocked on that many doors, you'll get better at doing in person estimates even if they came that lead from an ad. And so sometimes the best way to get a good return on ad spend when you start running ads on on Facebook or on Google or doing door hangers is simply having the reps prior to dumping fuel on the fire. If you have no fire, if you don't actually have any skill of sales and doing high quality work and serving the customer, pouring more gasoline and getting more leads is not gonna do anything. I think of ad spend and advertising dollars sort of like gasoline. I've gotta have a fire, I've gotta have a spark and if I then pour gasoline, the the fire gets bigger. But many times people just back up the truck and start spending a bunch of money on ads, having no idea where it's going. But first, if they would just focus on honing the skill of sales follow up, actually asking for online reviews, knocking on people's door and talking to their customer. Then when they spend money on ads, they'd see a better return. And that's why many people think that Facebook ads don't work, Google Ads don't work, online marketing is dead or only referrals work. Many times it's because they haven't done the hard work to be able to create systems and processes in their sales system to be able to do follow up phone calls, get to the customer super fast, knock on the door and be presentable and be able to have a high close rate. Number 10 the business grows at the speed you replace yourself when we talk about the copy and paste millionaire in the book I recently released, I talk about the solo operator, the working gm, the the full time GM and the GM plus stages. And they exist because your business only grows when you fire yourself from your current responsibilities. I didn't scale my business until I delegated outcomes. When I look at sales, operations and admin, my goal was to be able to delegate and then replace myself inside the business. Replacement equals acceleration. You only have 24 hours in a day. And so if I'm going to split it up between a few hours of sales, a few hours of operations, a few hours of admin, great. As a solo operator, I'm juggling all those things. But as I begin to grow the business, I want to be moving more and more out of admin into operations, from operations in to sales. As I delegate and systematize lower leverage tasks, I'm able to focus on growing the business. Number 11 last but not least, crisis creates clarity. Now I remember what it was like to be stuck underneath the dump truck and be in a hospital and realize that I did not have a business. I had a really bad paying job, was working 80 hours a weekend. I remember going to Kenya and getting robbed twice. I remember losing our house as a family back in 2008 when we went bankrupt. I remember these things because these are crisis moments. And if you're right, now listen this video and you might be going through a crisis of your own, that might be a divorce. Maybe you lost a house, maybe your business is really, really struggling. But pressure forces discipline. Discipline produces growth. Growth that almost feels illegal, happens when comfort dies. So right now it's a struggle. I understand the inclination that you want to quit, but in these moments of crisis you can have clarity that what you need to get done in the business needs to happen. When I was on that hospital bed and I remember going into the scan and they were scanning my spine to see if I had broken my neck. I remember having very much clarity in terms of what I needed to change in the business. I needed to have pay for performance. I needed to have it where I had estimate videos so I didn't have to be on every single job site I knew. I needed to record videos, desktop videos, of every single admin task in the business so that invoicing and billing and scheduling could still get done. In those moments of crisis, you can have moments of clarity. And if you want my help and you're in a moment of crisis, go to mikeandys.com turnaround I would love to fly out and help you try to get the business out of this moment of crisis and back to a thriving environment.