8 Ways to Get Customers... WHEN YOU HAVE $0

Recently, one of our owners at Augusta Nation was in a really bad spot financially. Their first spring rush been growing. They need more customers to continue growing and they don't have a lot of money. So I went ahead and put together eight different ways that you can get more customers without spending any money on marketing. So if your excuse is I don't have any money, I can't do advertising, I can't run Facebook ads, I can't do an every door direct mail campaign, this video is for you. I'm going to give you eight different ways to get customers for absolute free. So let's go ahead and start off with what I would recommend and that is called the rule of 100. Now the rule of 100 actually came from Alex Hormozi, the very end of his book called $100,000,000 Leads. He just threw it in there basically saying if you don't have money, apply yourself to do one action 100 times a day. Some form of reach out DM, email, phone call, reach out to customers and talk to them 100 times a day. Now for home services, I think if you do this to door knocking or door hangers, this is super effective.

If you can go to 100 different customers houses and knock on their door or put a door hanger on their front door knob, if you do that a hundred times a day, I believe you're going to get customers. And yeah, if you do some door hangers might cost you something, but do this a hundred times and apply yourself. So I'm going to share with you eight different ways to get customers for free. And what I recommend you do is choose one of them and apply yourself to a rule of 100 every single day. I'm going to do this one action 100 times. And I will only judge myself on the input, which is did I do it a hundred times? Not the output of whether or not it actually brought customers, because that you can't control. So let's go ahead and move on. Why is it so important to stay busy when you have the capacity to do the work? I'm willing to be able to discount things by 40, 60% just to keep busy. Because this franchisee specifically I'm talking about was considering getting a side secondary job to be able to fill in the gaps while they were just getting ramped up and say, hey look, although that might be make sense on paper, go get a secondary job. The bottom line is if you're going to go get a job and make $150 or $200 post tax money in a 10 hour, 8, 10 hour shift, you might as well just try to go make 150 or $200 in your business and discount services down to that level. You might as well. The reason for that is because when you're especially solo operator, your variable costs are basically zero. Which means it doesn't cost you any extra to go out and get more work and discount it. Why? Because you already have the equipment, you already have all the fixed assets required to do the work. And the extra variable cost is like literally the cost of fuel. And that's basically it. You don't have any labors so there's no wages that you have to spend. If you get more of these discounted jobs and it's literally the cost of the fuel, that's going to be your variable cost. So if you can make 150, $200 per day. Well, yeah, well I want to sell my cleanups for $500 per day. I understand. But if I can close every single one by discounting it to $200, I'm still better off than going on a secondary job. And the side benefits of doing work in your industry because you actually get customers, you can get other ways of getting payment besides just money. Like a Google review, a referral, the ability to be able to upsell them in other jobs. You want to get on people's property, you want their contact information in your database and you can get quote unquote value from them outside of just cash. And that comes in the form of Google reviews referrals. Ask them if there's someone else in their in their neighborhood or any of their neighbors that could that you could potentially serve them and make money off of them. All right, let's go to these eight different ways that you can get more leads day without spending any money. Number one, post on local Facebook groups. In all of our markets if you just search your city name you you're going to get 10, 15, 20 different local Facebook groups that you can post into. Now don't be scammy on them, but do before and after pictures. Share a picture of you working with a big smile on your face in an area they're going to recognize in your local community. These will crush. I've seen people build businesses have one or two employees built just off the back of posting on local Facebook and next door groups. Secondly, door knocking is it fun and exciting for most people it's not and it's not easy. You get a lot of rejection. But again, if you apply yourself to do This a hundred times a day, I can guarantee you 1 out of 100 people are going to accept the job. 1 out of 100 people are going to need service, and you're going to be at their front door giving them a bid for what you just walked past when you're walking up to the front door. And if we're doing home services, you can see if the house needs painting, if the gutters need cleaning, how big approximate house is for cleaning and the interior and janitorial, how much it would cost to mow the grass or trim the bushes. This is 100% something you can do a hundred times a day and get customers next door hangers. Yes. You have to pay for the actual printing. If you're in lawn care landscaping, lawn caremedia.com There's a whole bunch of door hangers on there. If you're not in lawn care landscaping, go there for some examples or even I've seen some people actually get the designs and then go into Canva or Photoshop and just change them out to their industry. Again, door hangers, super cheap. You're looking at 5 to 10 cents per printed copy. And you can distribute these out again, 100 of these a day, guarantee you're going to start getting some customers. And it's basically free because again, you have more time than you have money. So number four, holding a sign next to the road, like, that's crazy. That's what I did back last year when I started a lawn care business from scratch. And 30 days built it to where we were over $1,500 per day in labor revenue consistently. And how I did that was by basically holding a sign next to the road. Is that fun? Is it exciting? Is it a little embarrassing? Yes. But if you're desperate for work and you don't have a lot of money, you got to get kind of extreme. You don't have money just to sit back and let the Facebook and Google gods dump leads on you from above. You're going to have to get a little scrappy. And in my experience, I would usually get one lead per about 3, 3 hours. Which means if you did this for an entire day, you'd probably get two or three leads. And there'd be days where you might not get none, which might be your first day. And then you get more confident. You know where to stand, you know how to hold the sign, you know how to approach people when they kind of look at you a little bit longer. And all of a sudden you get three or four leads in a Single day. That's very, very possible if you're willing to put in the work and you don't have money. All right, now, how else can you get leads from without having spent any money? Well, go get Google reviews. At least 30 of them, ideally more. And make sure that your Google listing is optimized. Get pictures on there. Make sure your hours of operation are accurate, your services are accurate, your service area is accurate. Make sure you have an address on your Google listing so you show up on Google Maps. It doesn't cost you any more money. It's simply a matter of jumping through the hoops on Google to verify your address. Make sure your logo is on your Google listing. These are all things you can do for free. Doesn't cost you a single penny. And I can guarantee you this one strategy will do more for your business than spending thousands of dollars on search engine optimization or some fancy web design thing. Get Google reviews. Get your listing optimized. I promise you it'll pay massive dividends. Next, call everyone in your contact list. This is why having a CRM is so important. Whether it be Copilot or another software doesn't matter. Keep track of all the contacts in your database. Why? Because if you need more leads, the number one place to get them from is people who've already done service for literally call every single one. Especially if you're small and you're solo, you might only have a couple hundred people. You'd probably call them all in a couple days. And if every single one of them you generate a conversation, you ask if there's any services in their property and you maybe even have an offer like, hey, based upon this time of year, it's a great time to offer X, Y and Z, and I'm willing to do it for 50% off. You would likely fill your schedule pretty quickly just calling your contact database because they've already done work with you. They already know like and trust you. They've already shown that they need services and are willing to pay for it. So go to them first instead of going to a whole bunch of cold leads that don't know who you are from Adam number seven, follow up on old estimates and offer very steep discounts. So especially if the the estimate is 14, 28, 60 days old, give those people a call up. Maybe they forgot about it. Maybe they put on the back burner and just offer massive discounts. Again, back to the point. Is some revenue better than no revenue better than twiddling your thumbs at home and just hoping and praying that the PHONE RINGS do something. Take action. It's not about having the best plan, it's about having the best execution. That's the person that wins. Offer these people big discounts to get on the, on the schedule immediately. All right. Also, what you can do last. And finally go back one year ago, the same month that you're currently in, and see which jobs were accepted inside of your CRM. Go to those customers and try to resell them the same job. For example, property cleanups, gutter cleanouts, pressure washing. If they accepted the job this time last year, there's a good chance that in home services they need a very similar service done now again. And their mind is probably primed to think about it this time of year. Go back to them. Mr. Jones, we did this service for you a year ago. We'd love to do the same thing for you. We love. We're not going to have any sort of price increase whatsoever because you've been a loyal customer. Would you like to get on the schedule, give them a call up, let's do business again. We have more time than we have money, so discount if needed. The whole goal here is you're going to have to have relentless action required. It's going to take a huge amount of action. If you don't have the money to just spend money on ads and bring awareness to you, you're going to have to go out and get awareness. I still remember when, when I started Augusta Lawn Care and I didn't have a lot of money to spend on ads. I didn't have the money to spend on Facebook ads and Google and YouTube and all these things. And honestly, my website wasn't really optimized. But what I did is I used brute force and relentless action to make sure I got one customer per day. And I literally ended up on my calendar. I would literally just put a mark on every day when I got a customer and I would not go to sleep until I got one customer for the day. Whether that be calling people, door knocking, door hangers, Facebook groups, and all the other things I've listed so far, I would just maximize that until I got one customer per day. And that's why in my first spring rush, I went from $30,000 part time per year to $200,000 is because that first spring rush, I didn't have money. I hired someone, I needed some help. But I spent all of my time and attention on taking relentless action toward getting one customer per day using these eight strategies. So if you don't have money, it's no excuse not to stay on the offensive. Take action and grow your business.