Advanced Steps to Growing Your Lawn Care Business - HIGHLIGHTS from Landscape Summit 2019

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast. Today is the last episode before Landscape Summit, which is happening next week. One week from when I'm recording this right now, the summit will be over. So this is really your last chance to join us. We have a few spots left. I think there's like three or four available still to join at the summit. So if you go to the registration page, it's still available for you to listen to. But today I'm going to be sharing with you some clips from last year when we were at the conference. And this quality of the video isn't super great, but at least you'll be able to hear the audio and be able to hear a couple samplings of what we talked about last year, which last year, our big kind of thing subject that we talked about was culture, team hiring, and really that whole HR side of the business. This year at Landscape Summit this coming weekend is gonna really be all about P4P pay for performance. How do you pay your guys based upon how much revenue they bring in instead of by the hour? It's been absolutely revolutionary. These are the two things that have really changed our business, like we talked about last year is the culture side. And we're gonna be hearing this year about all the different changes we made, even on that side in our business. But then secondly is P4P pay for performance and really completely changing the mindset of the owner and really thinking about how do you get your employees to think like owners, but also changing the mindset of the employees and to really begin to start thinking in terms of whatever's best for the business is best for my paycheck. These are the things that we're gonna be talking about, and I think it's gonna be absolutely revolutionary for some of your businesses. It's gonna be so different, though, and it's gonna be so much of a change. Thinking outside the box. Literally, my first keynote is about cognitive tunneling and mental blocks because it's something that is gonna be pretty prevalent, especially if someone's been doing this for a long time or if they have a big business in terms of number of employees. This is not gonna be something that's just like super fast or EAS us about eight months to transition. We have that down now. Now that we've been able to kind of get the systems down for the transition, we have that down to a couple months, but still, it's not an easy process. So really, right from the get go, I'm trying To get people to think differently about their business as we head into Landscape Summit. So I'm going to share some of these clips, but I wanted to make sure that, you know, this is the last opportunity. If you want to book a last minute ticket, this is your time to do it. As long as the registration is up, there are still spots available. Make sure you join.

Today. We're also going to be talking about.

Charging for estimates, Something we started doing this past year that really allowed me to get out of the day to day operations. 100% has really, from a financial perspective, allowed me to do that. And that's really the reason why most owners don't get out of day to day operations. Not because they don't want to, it's not because they don't want the flexibility. It might not even be that they don't have the right people. It's sometimes just the fact that they don't feel they can afford to hire an estimator or hire someone that's going to manage the business from an operational perspective.

And so we're gonna talk about how.

To charge for estimates, what we call an E fee.

We're also gonna talk about three different.

Acquisitions that we've done that have been successful as well as draw from some of the experience. I've probably been involved in about 30 or 40 through landscape business course. But we here locally have done about three acquisitions of landscape and businesses. The first one was doing about 30,000 in revenue when we bought them. The second one was doing about 400,000 in revenue, a little over 400,000 in revenue. And we just recently purchased a company that did 1.6 million in revenue last year.

So we're talking about all three of.

Those acquisitions, how we looked at the purchasing price, how we made the offer, how we negotiated, and what you need to be thinking about if acquisition of another company is something you want to think about. So really looking forward to sharing that with you, really in person, in depth. And Mila answer your questions because I feel like acquisitions is a great way to really scale the business once you have the systems in place. So we try to give you as many systems as possible once there's certain systems in place, especially P4P, you can scale the business better very, very quickly if those systems are rooted into the culture of the company. So really looking forward to talking about that. A couple notes for those of you who are attending a landscape summit next week. Definitely wear your landscaping uniform, wear your shirts, your hats, like this is a great time to network and be able to See other guys from other companies with their uniforms is a great opportunity. You'll probably see some of Augusta Lawn care company, our team being there in their uniforms. So definitely if you're coming to the conference, bring your apparel, bring your hats, all that good stuff if you have.

Uniform or hat or whatever. Another thing is food. On Thursday evening We start at 5 o'. Clock. That's the first keynote. Registration starts at 3pm, but we start the first keynote at 5 o' clock and probably run for at least till 7, 8 o' clock the first night. But on Friday and Saturday, the breakfast and the lunch, we are going to have food provided for you. And I upgraded the food options this year so that way that the breakfast isn't just continental, it's actually a real like, I think Monday's like biscuits and gravy. The other way is like Egg McMuffins or something like that. So really looking forward to being able to network and talk to you all in those break sessions for breakfast and lunch. And so that will be on Friday and Saturday. There'll be breakfast and there will be lunch. On Saturday evening there's going to be an opportunity for 25 of the attendees to actually have dinner with me. And there'll be more details about that at the conference if you're thinking about joining or if you've already joined the conference for this coming weekend. It is a marathon. It's three solid days of really digging into your business, digging into the numbers, digging into things that are hard to talk about. Like this is not a bunch of fluff. We don't do funny videos. We don't have like speakers that are just talking about like random subjects. We are talking very, very deep about your business. This is like a very in depth conversation about what your company needs to be doing and the systems in place. And these are not airy fairy. This is not general to all other industries, just for landscapers. And we use a lot of real examples from what I've done and what I've used with the landscape business course. So last year was great, but this year I'm really looking forward to digging even deeper into the business and really looking at your company from a completely different perspective. And one of the goals that, you know, I talk about, P4P in this conference a lot is because one of the things I wanted you to start thinking about is how do you actually build a business that can run without you? How can you build a business that you could, if you wanted to have three or four or five of them locations and so this is what we're really, you know, we've really tackled and addressed with Augusta Lawn Care, the systems that we've built for that. But at this conference, we'll be talking about how you can implement these systems in your business and do the same thing. Last thing I want to address before we fire off some of these clips is snow. A lot of people, their excuse for not coming to this conference is, oh, I might have a snow event this weekend or there's snow in the forecast.

Like, snow will happen every single year.

Okay, I promise you what's going to happen at this conference will change your business. Like if it snows next weekend, you make 10, 20, $30,000. Like, that's fantastic. But I promise you that if you change your hourly wages over to P4P, you will make far, far more than that and you'll be able to step away from the business much, much sooner and live a much more independent life outside of the business and not be tied so much to it. Like the changes that are at this conference this coming weekend, I am expecting people to completely change their business. Now, that being said, I know going to this conference that there might be 40, 50, 60 landscaping businesses represented. Do I expect them all to actually implement some of these?

No, I don't. No.

I think probably five or ten companies will actually implement P4P, actually see the results and success that it brings. But I hope that that five or ten, that one of them is you. So I really hope that you come is gonna completely change the way you look at your business, the way you think about how to grow your business. Like it's gonna change the way you think. This is not just about changing your business. This is the way you change the way you think and the way you live. So without any further delay though, let's just throw a couple clips from last year's conference Landscape Summit. Again, make sure to sign up landscapebusinesscourse.com click the conference tab. If the registration is still available, it means that there are spots available and rooms available for you. Book it today. I look forward to seeing you next week and I promise you it's worth the last minute ticket. We'll see you there.

As you begin to build value for the customer, that's when you build your price. Do not raise your price because you need more equipment or you want to hire more people or you want a new shop that gives no value to the customer. What does offer value to the customer is clean cut employees that can talk to them about the job, that are experienced and knowledgeable. What isn't important to that customer is that when they call your office, they are talking to the same person, or at least an individual that working in your office and can communicate with the staff out in the field. That's a value. What's a value to them is that when they contacted you, you got their information and had an estimate to them within 24 hours and respected their time. Because they're a wealthy individual whose time is money and they will receive you if you respect their time. That's what's going to bring value to them. What's going to bring value is that your guys come to the job in a company truck and don't show up in their personal vehicles to save you some dollars. They want to see uniforms. They want to be able to talk to everyone on that crew at any point and have a pleasant experience. That is customer experience. That's value. You guys have heard me talk about it. Maybe if you've watched on the video, you've seen this before.

All right? Don't forget this. Ever. When it comes to pricing value, price, as long as value is just minimally higher than price, a transaction occurs when you go buy an iPad. The one question you're asking is, is 799, is it producing at least $800 in value? To me, if your value of that iPad is only $400, you will not buy that iPad. So the problem that we face in our industry is this. In order for the transaction to happen.

This value has to be higher than this price. There's two ways to make a transaction happen. One, raise the value.

Or B, lower the price.

And 90% of us lower price. And that's what gets us jobs. You know why? Because easy to lower price. Yes, we can take 10% off that, Mrs. Jones, and you get the job. What's a lot harder is to create systems, procedures and have people that are to create a valuable experience for that customer that increases this value minimally just a little bit, but enough to make the transaction go through. And this difference right here is the difference of profitability between a successful company and one that's going to go out of business within the next couple years. The company that will build value and be able to thereby charge a higher price will survive the next recession. They're the ones that are getting all the talent when the market is very tight like it is now. They're the ones that are going to put their competitors out of business simply because they are drawing the talent out of the market. They're going to Be the companies that scale when the recession happens instead of falling apart. The customer experience is what you should live, breathe and dream about every single day. If you're not talking about customer experience, I don't like the word customer service.

We use it. I'm not saying don't use it. I don't like the word customer service because it looks backwards. Customer service is when something's gone wrong and you're serving the customer backwards. We have great customer service. What that's telling me is you're good at fixing your mistakes. You're good at giving discounts because you made a mistake. What I like is customer experience because it's looking forward. How are we going to make the experience for this customer amazing? How does Whole Foods lay out all the signage and where the produce goes and where the milk goes and all the different signs that are on each aisle and each shelf and where do they go on those shelves? They figure all that out before you walk in because they know if they can create value there, you'll pay a higher price.

Value dictates your price. And your customer experience looks forward.

They look forward to opening up the Whole Foods store and they're worried about one thing, customer experience. When someone walks in the store, are they going to know exactly where to go? Just like we talked about with your website, when they go to your website, does it save them time? Is it easy to contact you? That is what's going to build value.

It's not happenstance that 14 more people raised their hand because Tony's website, why they had a great customer experience. Customer experience is inbred in every single aspect of your business, from culture to your website to the way you smile, the way you hand do your handshake. Did you notice how anal I was about that interview and the way I positioned myself? Every single aspect of the customer experience and the employee experience must be measured and fanatically obsessed about in order to achieve great results in this industry. Otherwise, you'll be like 90% of this industry that just begins to either plateau or fails when a recession hits. The average lifespan of our industry is less than 10 years. And most of those people that go out of business made negative dollars when they go out of business.

And if you want to become a million dollar company, you better realize that value is the one way you will get there.

Is the culture within this industry. We'd be able to charge a much higher premium and you'd be able to take a 20% profit margin, which would absolutely change not only your business, but your Life. And you have to start getting out of the idea that this business is all about you and your family and what you want out of it. You have a lot of lives that are depending on you. I don't take for granted the fact that I have a bunch of business owners in here that have multiple employees who have multiple children and that the advice I give this weekend might affect them.

And you have to think the same way about your business and your employees. There's a reason why that's the one thing that will keep me up at night is my employees and what they're going through and possibly if a customer is disappointed in us.

This is business, but this is people.

If there's one thing you can take away from this whole conference we talked about this morning, open up your books, get transparent, and win the people back onto your team. The reason so many of us don't get anywhere is because your team is pushing against you and you're pushing against your team. If you get you all channeled in the same direction, the amount that you could perform and the level at which your company could achieve is far beyond your wildest expectations. And that's what's going to get you to the place that we wrote about yesterday morning. Talk about your master plan. And then I asked you, how can you get there in 12 months if you figured out that one piece. People.

Are the driving force of business. Not machines, not real estate, not economies, not dollars and cents. People run this world. They run this. This world of business. And the relationships you make with your customers and your employees will be the extent at which they are built. The durability, the strength in which those relationships are built will determine whether or not you bridge through the next recession.

When we talk about customer experience in our business, we have a thing called customer intelligence CI it's on all the customer profiles that we have. And anytime there's intelligence about a customer, we make sure it's made note of in their profile. I highly encourage you, if you have a CRM, to make sure you have a custom field or create some sort of a field where you can create notes about the customer. Customer intelligence. What this customer intelligence form or field is going to include is things like. Remember this morning when I was talking to. What's your wife's name again? Christian. My bad. When I was talking to Christian, I was interviewing her the same way I take notes mentally about what she is going through in her life. You should do the same thing for your customers. This is what's going to differentiate you from Bill Bob Jr. Landscaping. That Bill, Bob Jr. Landscaping sees Ms. Smith as a five thousand dollar job. You see Ms. Smith as a mother, as someone is now a widow and has grandchildren and has needs within her life because she has a broken hip that has been replaced and she cannot do services within her lawn. And next week, the week after your estimate, she has a hip replacement on the other side. She's going to be immobile for the next several months and trying to get healed back up. That needs to go in customer intelligence. You need to know that she's having surgery in a couple weeks. You know why? Because if you get flowers on her front doorstep when she gets home, you will not lose Mrs. Smith's lawn and her services and whatever services ever come from her property. It doesn't matter if you're five times as much. She will stick with you through recession, still stick with you through bad employees. She'll stick with you through when you mess up. She will stay with you because that one piece of customer intelligence was pasted to her profile and we were able to make an action that made a difference. We are here to do two things for our customers. Improve their life and save them time. We get so bogged down because we think all we do is lawn care and landscaping. You gotta emphasize this to your people and most importantly to your own mind because some of you can't wrap your mind around your dollar figure per hour. You can't wrap your mind around 60 and $80 an hour and thereby you will not be able to sell it. And the reason you can't wrap your mind around that is because you don't think you'll ever be able to charge that. And the reason you think that is because you think you're selling lawn care, landscaping services. Let me tell you what you're actually selling. You're selling time with the grandkids that just visited for the first time in five years. You're selling the time that they would love to get back home and instead of having to mow the lawn, they get to spend that time with their wife. You are selling the time so that they can go travel and go to the Bahamas because now they're retired and have worked hard their entire life and they need that time away. And they're depending on you to make sure they take care of their one asset that's built in value and is going to be their nest egg for the rest of their life, which is going to be their real estate property.

Don't think you just do lawn care and landscaping. You're Selling time. The same thing that Uber sells and Apple sells. Time, convenience, and improving people's lives. That's what we do in this industry.

Save time. That's the one thing you're doing. And don't forget what they're doing when they're saving that time. That's what they're buying. They are not buying straight stripes, clean edges and nice retaining walls. They're buying time with their grandchild, they're buying time at their office job. They're buying time to have their own employees have a off site meeting. And you are the one that has to be on point to make that happen. That's what you're selling.

So many times I talk to other industries like rafting or quadding adventures or like they do like sightseeing. And I'm like, and people will be like, would be so easy to sell and market around something so exciting.

And this is, I said that to someone in my MBA class who had a rafting company. I said, you can create so much amazing content, like people rafting and the excitement and people going over breakers and what they said before and they're afraid and then when they got dumped off the water and do it all dramatic. There's so much marketing gold in rafting. I was like, man, it'd be so easy. This is years ago when I was in my MBA class and I was like, you'd be so easy to market for. And I had to sell lawn care and landscaping services. And he's looked at me and he said, you know what? You know, there's nothing that makes me happier when I come out of my condo complex and the landscapers have mowed the grass and I get that smell.

And I feel like I have peace. And he was dead serious. I have peace and tranquility. And there's something that the rest of that day, it just sets a tone in my life of organization.

And yet we sell that. We, we do straight lines, clean edges, and we build great retaining walls. Stop trying to sell the commodity, sell the feeling. And really what the customer is actually trying to buy. They are not trying to buy lawn care, landscaping services. They're trying to buy time with their family, their loved ones and with their business associates. We talk about in our company a thing called wow wow called the wow Experience.

Most people would call the wow experience something like when a customer comes back and it's so nice and so great and it looks so beautiful and they say, whoa, that's the wow Experience. For us, it's wow. It's an acronym, stands for without words. Without words. Because what I want when a customer gets back is not only did we do the specifications of what that job required, not only did my estimator show up on time, but they actually cared about the hip that was broken last year and the hip replacement that happened in two weeks.

What they're going to buy is that care, that wow factor. They would. Without words. Without them asking me to care about their hip, without words of them complaining or saying even, like, all the negative things about it. All of a sudden, someone gets a postcard. Without words. He just was talking with one of the frontline employees. That information was relayed via customer intelligence to an office member. That office member puts on their profile. We buy a gift card for that individual. It ends up in their mailbox. You can't tell me customer service and customer experience should not be systematized. You must create a system for that system to work.

In the sense of.

Like, if I had a customer that broke their leg.

Do you give your employees that information to the point?

Absolutely. How do you give it to them? Is it on their customer notes? Job notes? So, for example, if we know it happened yesterday and they're going to mow, we might put on there for them. And maybe that means when they see her or him, they make a comment, how was the surgery? Are you doing better? And that customer will be a customer for life based on that one comment. Because they know we care about them as a person. We don't see them as a number. We don't see them as an address, and we don't see them as dollar bills. We see them as a person. New employees, some history on them. Then, too, customer notes will be updated going forward.

Are those notes accessible just through you.

Guys dispatching them, or they can your crew look on their own? Both. So it's on their profile. But if there's something specific, it might be just on the next visit.

For instance.

For instance.

Any more questions? Customer intelligence without words.

All right. Without words also goes into when it comes summer and the grass is not growing anymore because it's so hot. Without words goes to the fact that your employees start to look for things that need to be done. And maybe it's just a branch that was falling on the ground, but without words, without the customer asking, without words, it's taken care of. That creates a wow effect. Without words, the customer did not tell you anything, but you took some sort of pain out of their life. All right. As marketers, we're always chasing the next bright, shiny customer without realizing that the lowest hanging fruit are the prospects that never converted to customers. There's been a bunch of people raise their hand and say I need services. You did an estimate for them, they did not accept and they've never heard from you again. You're flushing money down the toilet. Why in the world would you go out and try to get more attention from Facebook ads or Google AdWords or putting out local print marketing if you have people that have raised their hand and said I need services and you never did work for them. These are the low hanging fruit. And yet we as marketers and business people are going after the next shiny customer when there are a bunch of them sitting in our back pocket getting cold because we haven't made any contact with them.

Your biggest takeaway from this needs to be to stay in contact with old customers. And it's not even customers prospects too. If they've given your information to you via contact form and then they fell off the map. You better stay in contact with those people.

All right.

I like to say it's kind of like the people who like to go deep sea fishing. When they have fish in their bathtub, they go after the fish in the big deep pond and it's all so fun. It costs a lot of money to get out in the deep sea and go after the big massive fish and whatever. But there's a massive amount of expense that goes into it. It's super. A massive deep ocean. You can't even see the prospects. You're just hoping that some fish down there grabs it when they can go home and there's literally fish in the bathtub that they could just pick up and grab. And that's what our customers are. We're going out to the next shiny Great. Awesome. And we're spending a bunch of money to do it. When in our back patio is a bathtub with a bunch of great customers and we just need to reach in and pick them up and give them some attention. Alright? And we allow them to die because we don't feed them time and time again and continue to nourish the relationship. I don't care if they did a $10,000 patio. If they just gave you your contact information on their website or whatever it is, keep those fish alive. All right?

And so the joy that I just had in the past five minutes is pretty phenomenal because I heard from someone here that one of my competitors said that we are very high. What was the word? Aggressive. Aggressive. When it comes to our sales process. I love that. The reason is because I feel I have a moral.

Obligation and duty to make sure that that customer chooses our company because I know we will serve them the best. I know it will be at the price that is correct. And that is actually pretty competitive in our market. And I am letting the customer down if I do not prove to them that we should be doing the work. That's how I look at it. If you can't say that, you're gonna have come at it from a disadvantage point when it comes to selling work. If you cannot confidently say you feel you are letting that person down if they do not accept your work except you as the contractor, then you got to figure out why that is in your business. What be value? Why can you not. You will not be able to sell effectively if you do not believe in your product and your services. That's something I can't really help you with. You got to figure that out internally. But if you can't build value in your own mind as to why a customer would take you over someone else, you got a problem. And once you get to that place, you should believe in it so much and love the customer so much, you feel bad if they choose someone else because you know that other individual is not going to give them the value, the professionalism, the warranty, the quality of work and what you in your business can provide for them. And when I hear aggressive, that's interpreted as a lot of following up. We never sale like we're never salesy. We never pitch, pitch, pitch, we never call them, we never disrupt them. We give them information, information, information. When we follow up with them, we're giving them pricing information. Why it's priced accordingly. The next email is going to be giving them video information about a project we have done recently that is exactly the same as theirs. It's all automated. We are not pushing this on them. It's sequenced to go out three days, four days, seven days after that estimate has been sent. You need to have an automated process for your estimates.

60% of our sales last year were on follow up emails to our estimates. If you are sending emails for your estimates and not following up, you are leaving a massive amount of money on the table. You must have a follow up process. If you feel like you're being salesy or pushy. You need to figure out why you feel that way and make sure you feel you have an obligation to make that customer be your client. What type of timetable do you use.

To follow up that email?

Yep. 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, that 14th day one is basically like, you've probably chosen someone else. Just let us know in the future if there's anything else you need. We never are pushy or salesy. Never. We've never gotten someone to respond in a derogatory way to tell us to stop emailing them. Never one time. That's why when I hear aggressive, it's coming from a competitor, it's not coming from a customer. They'll never call it aggressive. They wouldn't even think we're actually trying to pitch them on anything. It'll simply be information with a link that says to view your estimate again, click here.

And if we're not the right one for them, that's fine. I just happen to believe that we are and I'm going to make sure I impose my will on them until they act otherwise.

Yeah. What if you're like, you emailed, like.

The property manager and they're waiting on commercial? Yep.

This is why you need to have your information. A CRM and a system that is evolving with technology. We're using a system that if they open up that email, it's going to have a different sequence of events after that in comparison to if they do open that email up. And if they respond to us, we can stop that automation process so they don't get automated emails.

And basically every day an office assistant is going to see all the emails that are set to go out. They're going to double check and make sure those customers have not emailed us already to say, no, I don't want this job. Because there is a button on that estimate for them to accept or reject, which will automatically take them out of automation. However, if they've emailed us or called us and that note is on their profile, we don't want to harass them by asking them again. We never do that. Never, ever, ever. I'm much more interested in what they're going to tell their neighbor than getting that sale. And so when I hear aggressive from a competitor, I'm thrilled out of my brains. Means they're on their heels.

Transitions are always pretty challenging.

It's a phasing out. So, for instance, this is a good example. So, you know, they've always seen Mike and they want to talk to Mike and it's got to be Mike, you know, so this guy called this week and he's like, I really need to talk to Mike. You know, he did the estimate and I'm like, well, you've met Ben and he's your project manager. And Ben knows, really at this point more than Mike. He's been there every day and he knows all about it. And unless Ben is not being professional or you feel like you can't communicate with him, Ben is really the best person to help you right now. And he didn't want to cave, you know. And then. And then I said, but absolutely, if there's an issue with communication or something. And then I just explained to him the role. Mike is our estimator, and we have him come and meet you. And if you'd like a work change order and you need an estimate, if Ben doesn't feel he can do it, then we will have Mike come back and do the estimate. So my goal is for him to never go back and never be involved, which is super challenging when he's the only person they've ever talked to.

Yeah.

So when I first started, there were people like, I have to talk to Mike, you know, the little ladies that adore him and all this. And like, well, he's really busy right now and I probably could help you. I don't think so. It needs to be Mike, you know, so you have that and then you have.

And you can't step in and fix that at that point for Ben, for instance, I could have probably tried to help, even though they didn't tell me about it until afterwards, but I probably could have. But it would have ruined his.

Rapport with the customer. But the ability to empower them to do stuff and let him make the mistake and maybe lose a client over it.

Yeah. So even like this morning, it's good with that client now. And I was listening to Grant Cardone and some things he was saying about. So I was just telling Ben, hey, when you go there today, maybe do this and that, let's try to upsell them on this one thing they had asked about now that we won them over again. And so we just try to take it from there. And then if we have questions, hey, it's kind of going south. What do you think we should do? But I don't know that we've ever had Mike step back in.

Yeah, well, one thing on that, because I. I was never working with you guys when Mike was answering phone. It was just Liz. And when charity started answering phones, that. But that was one thing that you guys established is that you guys had my total trust when I was doing anything with you guys. So I didn't care who was answering the phone. I knew if Mike or Liz was okay with it. I don't care. And you guys, guys have done a.

Great job of that.

As I trust your company, I trust your. The culture that you have more than just individual people.

Right.

And people know that Mike is still the man. Mike is in charge. So all of us have to make sure that's still the way it goes. If it's going south, they're like, what they know of Mike and what he built, that all of us are that.

It's only recently, too, that I've actually even put my name as owner of the business. Because I stepped out for the past, like, a year. It's only been since, like, I did stuff locally and I started. Like, there's the recognition that I can bring to the company by being involved personally. So when I speak at a college event, I'm wearing my Augusta uniform, right? Because that's gonna be filmed. I can put it on the Augusta website right below the pricing, which is a letter from me. Right. So I used to. It's actually the opposite. I've stepped in, in terms of the face of the business more in the past three months than in the past year, for sure.

Yeah. So, like, on our business cards, we didn't have Mike Andy's owner, ever. We put Mike Andy's estimator. So it worked great. And. And because he was young, because if they'd be going off about the price, I want you to tell me right now what it would cost. He's like, I really don't know. I'll get the numbers back to the office and they'll let you know. It was always, the office will get back to you. I'll talk to the. The office. They had no idea he was the owner.

You want to use that? Do you use that for your advantage in terms of third party clothes? So it's like the used car sales guy that says, hey, I'll go check with my sales manager. If I can do that deal. He goes inside, goes to the restroom and comes back. Like, he doesn't need to talk to anybody. But I. You can use that to get out of people who want to know your price right away, or, like, give me a ballpark. And you don't want to do that, because you don't. You haven't crunched the numbers yet. You haven't done the measurements. And so what I'll do is I'll say, I don't know the numbers. I just give the hours and materials, and the office is going to give you an exact number instead of a range within 24 hours. Never had anyone ask for a range after I say those words because they Realize my role is to get materials and hours and meet the customer, get a video for the crew, and then the office will figure out the numbers. And now they no longer can debate or question or negotiate with me on price.

But today, I want to talk about why the Internet matters. The Internet will expose flaws. It'll magnify weaknesses and tear down the facades that your competitors are hiding behind. And as we talked about the other day, our industry as a whole is way behind the times. We're not very good at changing. We are far behind technology. We've gotten lax over the past 10 years of really good economic times. And one of the things that the Internet is going to do to our industry is, is expose all of our flaws when everything hits the fan.

And it's already doing it. The companies that have embraced the Internet, have embraced social media, have embraced digital media, they are the ones that are successful right now. They're the ones scaling fast, and they are the ones taking market share from you or anybody else that is not embracing this thing we call the Internet. The Internet has allowed the customer to be in the driver's seat by being more informed and knowledgeable than ever. We talked about last night about having a saturation of content. Content saturation. Every single person that you do business with can Google exactly how to install the wall, lay the pavers, mow the lawn, trim the trees, or fertilize the bushes. They can tell you how to do your job because this thing called the Internet, they are more informed than ever. They are more educated than ever. They have more options than ever. And it's all just a click of a button away. And that can be a huge threat or it can be a huge opportunity, as we talked about last night. Now customers have the power. Used to be 20 years ago, if you didn't like a customer, you would just treat them badly, let them go by the wayside, and maybe they tell their friends and family locally at their next Christmas gathering that you're not a good company to work for. Now, if you do that, there's a very good chance that every person in your city will. Will know about that big issue or problem that you had in your business because of social media. The Internet, whether it be some sort of a board, Craigslist, they can use Facebook, they can use whatever they want, and instantly they have a massive audience that is blaring their message of what you did wrong. And that is what's going to really, I believe, differentiate the landscaping industry is because the people who have got away with so much for so long, the Internet's going to expose them.

I want to explain something between owned media and rented real estate. So if you read the book, I glide through it pretty quickly in a few pages. But I want to explain this concept of owned media. When we talk about owned media, you can think content marketing, inbound marketing, whatever you want to call that. And then we're going to talk about rented real estate, which is things like Facebook ads, Google Ads, etc. And I'll explain. Explain what I'm talking about. So the difference here, and we're going to jump into what those both mean, but the difference between rented real estate and owned media is how long of a perception you have for your business. If you're thinking short term, short term you're going to rent real estate. If you are thinking long term, you're going to own the media that you create and that your business is generating. So now let me explain a little bit about what I mean by rented real estate. So when we talk about owning a house, you pay a bunch of money for that house. The upfront principle, let's say you just buy a house for $300,000. You pay a bunch up front, but if you buy that house outright and you let it sit over time, you're going to just have to pay for your property insurance, or not property insurance, your insurance. You're going to pay for property taxes, maybe some utilities, but the cost per month is a lot less once the house is paid off in comparison to when you're renting. So you might rent that same house for $2,000 a month, but if you pay that $300,000 mortgage off, all of a sudden you can live in that same house for just a few hundred dollars a month. So when we talk about marketing, where that analogy kind of fits in is this. If you own your marketing, if you own the content that you're making, you're going to have an upfront cost to it, but it's going to pay you in perpetuity. It's gonna be very low expense to be able to maintain that. What I mean by that is like, for instance, let's talk about a blog. Write a blog post. That blog post is the top five landscapers in Lima, Ohio. That's where Philip lives. The top five landscapers in Lima, Ohio. And you never mention your own name, but he writes an article about that. He owns that piece of content, which is marketing, content marketing. He owns that content forever. Maybe spend an hour creating that piece of content, maybe put some pictures on that piece of content. But he owns that forever and will get leads from that piece of content in perpetuity forever. He's owning the real estate. Now the alternative to that is running a Facebook ad or a Google AdWord. And you're going to rent the space on somebody's screen from Google, who by the way, owns, they own the real estate. You're renting it and you're gonna pay a price to be on that spot on that screen. Does that make sense? Whether it be Facebook ads, any other term of paid media, I'm talking about anything from newspapers to radio, it does not matter what form of media you are paying for. If you do not own the newspaper, if you do not own the radio station, if you do not own the channel of YouTube or, or you do not own the website that you have that content on, you're renting real estate. Now you're saying, well, should I only own my media? Should I only buy house instead of renting? No. The reason for that is this. It takes a very long time for a house to pay for itself and be more, from a dollar standpoint, more economical than renting. If you pay $300,000 today, it will pay for itself. It's just going to take a long time rented. You get a house immediately, it's cheap, and you get instant gratification. That's the same thing when it comes to media. When we talk about renting media, Facebook ads, Google AdWords, you're gonna get instant leads right away. Alright, so I put a Facebook ad up.

For the club last night. I'm gonna get leads.

Today. All right, I'm gonna get people clicking on that ad today. But what I'm doing is I'm renting space. I have to pay for that space because I do not own Google, I do not own Facebook. The goal for every single company here is to depend more and more on your owned media. I don't care if that's blogs, vlogs, which is video. I don't care if that's podcasts or if it's just articles that you're creating on LinkedIn. Whatever it is, you want to own as much media as possible. It's going to be an upfront expense and maybe not so much in money as time, but it's going to pay you in perpetuity. Once it's on your website, that article is on your website and searching. Maybe it's one lead a week or one click a week, and over the course of 10 weeks you get one lead. But you did nothing for that so over the course of a few months, you get one lead here, one lead there, all of a sudden you get five of those articles and you start getting more leads. You own that media and you never touch it again. And it's constantly creating income for you. Whereas when I stop that Facebook ad, everything stops. I don't get any more leads because I do not own that space. They will go and rent that facility to somebody else. They'll rent it to someone else that's willing to pay more. And by the way, the cost of rent is going up. Once you own a piece of property, it does not matter a whole lot about inflation if you own it outright, because that cost for you is going to stay the same. Does that make sense? Owned media versus rented real estate. All right, so this afternoon especially we're going to be talking a lot about.

Marketing and things, but I want you to keep this concept in mind the entire time. Own media, rented real estate, own media long term, rented real estate, short term. And you say, well, I'm not going to think short term. I'm only doing owned media. Wait a second, you might be years in the making for your website or your articles or your videos to even get anywhere. So you might need to lean on renting now in order to get traffic leads and growth and then use the money for that to create better owned media. Is that clear? Owned media is a long term strategy. Do not think you're going to go out and create a blog, write an article and you're going to have people pounding down your door the next day. You'll be lucky if one or two people read that article in the next 16 months. Like literally, if you've never done it before and you have no search engine optimization, you don't have a great website, you're not ranking high natively on Google already. You're gonna have to use rented real estate, I.e. facebook ads, Google AdWords, newspaper ads, all of those things to drive traffic to your own media. And by the way, the biggest asset you have in own media is your website. If you do not have a website, Facebook ads, Google, it's all gone. That's all absolutely a waste of time. If you have not figured out your website. Everyone talks about their great conversion ratios and click through ratios. If you're clicking and they're going to a site that's pathetic and does not convert, it will do you absolutely no good. And everyone comes to me and they say I'm getting like 10 cents a click. I had 300 clicks yesterday. I, I paid 30 bucks. But I didn't get a single phone call. Yeah, I looked at your website. It looks like a kindergartner made it. There's no contact information. Your business name is different than the one that you had on the Facebook ad, and it doesn't link up to your Facebook page. What are you thinking? You're wasting rented real estate. But what you want to do is use rented real estate to drive traffic to your own media. You want to use rented real estate, I.e. facebook ads, every sort of form of marketing newspaper, to drive traffic to your website, to your blog, to your videos, because that's where you want to have the customer. Now, that being said, when we talk about renters, who here has ever rented a house? Who here has ever rented the house and then bought the house? Anyone here? No. All right. Now, if I am owning a piece of property, I'm trying to sell it and I've been renting it out for couple years, who is going to have the best option to buy my house? If I'm the. If I'm the seller and I'm going to sell my piece of property. I have a renter in here. Bob rents from me at my house. He's done it for two years. I'm willing to go and sell my house now. He has a very good chance of buying my house because he's built up a relationship with me. I know that he pays bills on time. I know probably a little bit of his job, his family. I know he's stable.

He.

He's going to. And he has a really good chance over some Joe Blow that comes in off the street because he's rented from me and create a relationship. Everyone follow me. So far the landlord is Google Facebook ads.

You want to rent from them and create a relationship so that they give you first option.

On native search. Is that clear? If I am renting from Facebook, I'm getting their ads. I'm paying them some money. I'm getting some Google AdWords so that I could show up on the top, not in native but in top. And it's giving me a bunch of traffic to my website, which is increasing my native search. Folks, Google, if you are paying money for their products, they want you to succeed. They are a business. This is not like some like arbitrary thing. They want you to succeed if they are making money. So he needs to pay the piper. He needs to pay me create a relationship so that my own media becomes natively higher in Google. Is that clear? It's okay to rent for a while, Create A relationship with the landlord and then ask for a bargain. Is that clear what I'm trying to say there? You want people on your own media, you want people to get to your website, but you might have to rent for a while. If you're on the second and third page of Google, you gotta be in the top two to three spots on the first page. If you're not there natively, you might need to rent for a while. Tell Google, hey Google, I'm willing to pay you money for search results. And they're like, great, we will take your money, we will give you leads and that will create traffic around the keywords that people are typing in. And you're going to come up higher in the native search. Not because your website's better, because Google wants more money. They know if you are doing good, you will continue to pay them. Is everyone clear on that? Don't think Google is in here to try to make us all succeed and be great people and put us at the top of their ad list. Whoever's giving the money is going to get an advantage. Is that clear? Reduce your fixed expenses. We're not going to go into a deep debate about fixed expenses and variable expenses. Fixed expenses are expenses. I'm just going to be general enough. Fixed expenses are expenses that do not change regardless of whether or not you sell any work this month. They are fixed expenses. I'm going to let you fill in the blank. For some people a variable expense is a fixed and vice versa. But sometimes it might be truck payments. Guess what? If you have a bad month this month and you don't sell anything, that truck payment still has to be paid. Fixed expense. All right. Rent. Sorry, but your landlord that you have a five year lease is not going to let you skip a payment. That's a fixed expense. Doesn't matter if you have 100,000 in revenue or five bucks, it's a fixed expense. Insurance. Whatever it is, that's a fixed expense. In your business that regardless of whether or not you spend or make more sales, you still have to pay that money. Reduce that at all costs. Because that fixed dollar amount, that is the floor at which you have to pass to become profitable. You want that floor as low as possible. Variable expenses are things like labor. The more work you sell, the more labor you have to spend on. It's variable. So that's something that you can adjust and change and move based upon how much work you have. But during recession you want to make sure that you've already put in place where you've Reduced fixed expenses. That's why I get really, really worried when people have these $4,000 a month shop leases. What in the world are you doing?

Right?

Use that cash on hand that you're supposed to be.

For what?

When I say lower fixed expenses, I mean moving a shop, that's different, right? That's smaller or that is cheaper. Right. I mean, try to figure out how your wire insurance.

Sorry, say it again. You're coming with truck. Truck off or pay those things off. Yeah, that's interesting. That's one way to look at it. Yeah. I would be more inclined to sell the truck and with that money buy a used truck. My fixed expense evaporates. Right? You're going to take a loss on it, maybe because you bought it new. Take the loss now when you have money, take the seven, $10,000, go buy a used truck that has now your fixed expenses. Zilch on that. That also, by the way, is gonna be cheaper on insurance and you're not gonna have to have really high premiums because you don't have a loan on it anymore. Right.

What type of property do you operate off of?

Like, what would you say about operating.

Off of a residentially zoned piece of property?

That's risky to do a residential thing because someone could. Your competitors, they want to really be an idiot, they could just report you. So it's risky. I wouldn't. It's gonna be cheaper for us. And if you. In the course in module six, I talk about it, and that is look for a commercial land that's blank and empty. Get a long term lease, like five years and really cheap because just blank land and then you bring in mobile stuff.