3 Ways to Keep Your Lawn Care Business BUSY During Winter

Hey, everyone, it's Mike from over@landscapebusinesscourse.com and today I want to share a few things that you should be thinking about as we go into the winter season. So for the lawn care landscaping industry, a lot of us have a lot more time on our hands come winter. So as we go into December and January and February, those are usually the three months that are the slowest season for you as a business owner in the lawn care landscape industry. So what should we be doing during that time? Well, it's the time that you should be doing everything you needed to do throughout the whole year, but we're too busy actually doing the work. So when it comes to March, April, May, and you have the spring rush, then you have fall cleanups and all that, you're so busy doing the work, a lot of times the things that really need to get done within your business are neglected. And when I say really need to get done in your business, I mean, how are you thinking strategically about your business planning and all those things? But let me give you three things you should be really thinking about during the winter season as we come into the slower months of the year. If you have a slower time, if you're not in Florida or California or different areas where they mow year round, if you do have this time, sort of a lull where there's less work out there, these are the things you, you need to be thinking about. Number one, these are going to take some people out of, take them off guard a little bit. The way I present these. Some people would talk about maintaining your equipment or something else. I'm talking about the things that are actually going to move the needle in your business. And so number one, these are in no particular order, but number one is design. And this one takes people off guard because they're like, I'm a lawn care landscaping industry. Why should I be thinking about design of all things? And when I talk about design, I'm talking about your website. What should the website design look like? Is it clean? Is it mobile friendly? Do the colors match your logo? And is there a nice theme throughout all of your content online? When you go from the blog page to the contact page to the home page, is there a consistent theme and design throughout? Colors, fonts, logos, how is it all tying together? And is the experience friendly to a mobile device with where so much of our traffic is moving? Next thing is design of your intro packet. So these are the materials, the literature you're going to give a prospective client at the time of an Estimate the brochure or the binder or the flyer that you give them, that gives them contact information and services and what you're doing and history of your business and client reviews that introduction packet. This is a great time to really design that better, make it better with your logo and the colors and the pictures that you have. You know, go out and get some great pictures and great video for you. This is a great time to put those together and edit them, Put them on Imovie or Final Cut Pro or just something even simple that you can create these videos, the picture, do some photography during this time of year when it's a little bit slower and focus on design, design of that website, design of that introduction packet. Lastly, something I've been working on lately on is the design of your estimate. How is your estimate laid out? Is it simply just a grid with numbers or does it have just fine print or does it have design elements? Does it have colors? Does it have your logo? Does it have some marketing baked into the estimate? Can you bake in a client testimonial video into your estimate? Can you bake in the things that make you different than everyone else? Bake that into the estimate? Can you bake in most client reviews or referrals online? Can you put those things into your estimate and create a beautiful package? As far as colors, I'm obsessed about design. There's a reason why Apple has created such a successful product in flagship product in terms of the iPhone, it's not necessarily a better piece of hardware in a lot of regards. It's the design, it's the beauty of the device, the way they market it with colors and with emotion and all those things around branding. And you gotta start thinking about that way in terms of your landscaping business, your logo, all the things that you are working with as far as design, making sure that your website, your online presence matches the design of your offline presence, making sure that there's a consistent message and experience for the customer is imperative. So number one is design. Number two, second thing you should be thinking about during the winter as you have some time to think and plan and make some improvements. Map out the different the timeline of how your estimating process goes. So everything from how does the lead come in and if that's a phone call, how does that phone call come in? Can we make that process more efficient? Them answering the phone, getting their contact information, getting their billing information, setting up the scheduled appointment for the estimate, that's the process. Then the estimator goes out and then the process of building that relationship happens, and then the process of creating the estimate itself and then sending that via email or print or whatever you do, and the process of follow up, and then the process of closing the deal and then setting them up on the schedule. This is one long estimate process I call our sales process. I guess you could call this. How do you make it more efficient? How do you take time out of the equation? How do you make it where you don't have to go to a customer for mowing service? How do you make it where you can do that estimate from your computer without having to go there? That cuts a piece out of the process, makes it more efficient. So looking at efficiencies from an estimate standpoint and different processes, you know, billing, taking credit cards over, just invoices, like all those things, all trying to find efficiencies in the systems within your business. The second place you want to look for efficiencies is in operations. Looking at the way your mowing crews are set up, the way your landscaping crews are set up, Are you most efficient with one person in the truck or two, or three or four landscaping jobs versus mowing? Look at the efficiencies, the use of labor, the use of product, the use of materials, the use of trucks, These fixed assets that you have in terms of equipment, how do you utilize those and make it more efficient? So one thing we're doing this winter is experimenting with the efficiency of using trucks without trailers for mowing routes. So we cannot. So a lot of people, when they think about not using a trailer for their mowing route, they think, well, that's not too bad in my market, because we don't bag clippings. Well, we do bag clippings and we always have a whole bunch of debris. So it's challenging to have like an enclosed van or an enclosed truck with a big cube box on it. It's hard for us because we gotta store the clippings somewhere. And we have a lot of clippings during the spring and fall. And so how do we do that? Well, what we're going to do, we're going to experiment with having a hitch come off the back of the truck and on that hitch have the mowers, two push mowers on the hitch. So we don't have a trailer just on the hitch. Having a cargo carrier for those mowers, the little ramp that would allow us to keep the clippings inside of the truck. The pickup truck have racks on the side for blowers and weed eaters, et CETERA and then test out this model for, for high density small lawns in concentrated areas and neighborhoods where we can quickly move from small lawn to small lawn and just use push mowers. Don't need zero turns. So it's a specialized kind of market. So this is something we're playing with because we're tired of the inefficiency of taking a trailer downtown and having to try to park two blocks down in order to walk back because there's no parking space for a truck and, and a trailer in a lot of these tight neighborhoods. So again, second thing you're thinking about during the winter is efficiencies. The third thing you want to be thinking about during the winter, and this is why we created the conference in January, is budgeting and planning. So this is a big thing that we're going to be doing during the conference in January. You can check it out on the website. But what we're going to be doing and what you should be doing during the winter is budgeting and planning. Three different areas I want you to look at when it comes to budgeting and planning. Number one, financials. So that's going to be terms of your P and L and what your revenues are going to be next year and what your expenses are going to be and really budgeting your growth. And so looking in terms of how much money am I going to need for marketing, how much money am I going to need for new equipment? How much money am I going to need for acquisition of talent and getting more people on the team? What are those costs going to be? Budget for those and then create a plan around your marketing, Create a plan around your team and your staff. How many people do you need? How many people do you need on each crew for each service and what time of the year are you going to need them in? Do you need them all right away in spring or do you need to spread them out throughout the year? Really planning and budgeting for growth? A lot of people are like, well, I want to go from a million to 5 million in three years. But they don't have any budget for getting there. You got to budget money for that marketing plan and for ramping up the team and for the shop space. You're going to need all those things. Need plans, implications. So how I do my planning of growth is I. And you've seen this a couple years, I think a couple years ago I made a video where I create the I forecast the next year in terms of revenue, in terms of.

How we're going to get there in terms of what are the key performance indicators, what do I need to get, whether it be trucks or equipment or people, what do I need to do in order to get that revenue marker each month? So I mark out each month what the revenue target is and then what key performance indicators, what things do I have to get done in order to achieve that? And then I put a budget over on the side. Like what's our balance sheet going to look like? How much money are we going to have in the bank each one of those months? Are we going to have to. Because there's going to be certain months I might have to invest a bunch of money to make sure that the goal gets done and in order for that goal, and I give that goal in order to achieve that revenue marker. So figure out your revenue markers, then figure out what you got to do in order to get those revenue markers and then take a step back and figure out what's the budget that I need to allocate funds or time or energy to in order to get this goal to happen, which will in turn make this revenue goal a reality. So those are the three things I would be encouraging you to look at during this winter off season. It's time when we get a little bit slower, focus on your design, colors, logos, things like that. It means a lot. Alright, so focus on design number two, focus on efficiencies internally, externally, looking at your marketing, looking at your estimating processes, the billing process, the invoicing processes, the operations processes, the mowing processes and trying to figure out each step of those and figure out where you can cut a minute out, 2 minutes, 3, 3 minutes, 5 minutes. Cutting out time out of the equation is the goal there. Efficiency number three. The third thing you must be doing is budgeting and planning. And if you don't have a grasp on how to do that, I'd love to see you in person at our conference Landscape Summit. Just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. I'd love to see you there. We're going to create your five year marketing plan. We are going to create the budget for 2019 for your business and we're going to figure out exactly how to get you to to the revenue goal that you want. You have to realize that if you want to double your growth next year, there's going to be more things you're going to have to allocate funds towards, there's going to be more cost of growth, that acquisition of talent, it's going to cost you more money, but you can create the plan, make sure it's valid, viable, and that you have the stop markers and the markers along the way to make sure you are staying on pace. So I'd love to see you at the conference. Love to see you in person. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com and we'll see you there.