Checklist: How to Prepare for the Spring Rush

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the things you must do before the spring rush. Right now it's February. As I'm recording this, we're heading into March. We got April, we got May, and we're right in the middle of things when it comes to this landscape industry. So what can you be doing right now to prepare for those things so you're not caught off guard? These are the five things you must be doing. Number one, have a marketing plan and a marketing budget. Alright, so these are two different things, a marketing plan and a marketing budget. And so your budget is going to determine what your plan looks like and your plan is going to determine what your budget looks like. So they're very co existing documents that you want to put together. What are you gonna spend on which mediums of marketing? So how much are you gonna spend on Google Ads? How much are you gonna spend on door hangers? How much are you gonna spend on every door, direct mail? How much are you gonna spend on postcards or flyers? How much are you gonna spe? Just so many different mediums. Where are you gonna spend your money? Why you spend your money on those things should be in your marketing plan. What's the plan behind spending the money? Not just like, oh, I got a couple thousand dollars, I'm gonna spend a few hundred on this and a few hundred on that. I'm gonna try this. Where are your target demographic? Which neighborhoods are you trying to go after? What's the frequency you're going to hit them on what timing are you gonna hit those? Certain houses, certain neighborhoods on those are things that need to be in the marketing plan. And then the budget needs to basically be saying like, hey, we need to have X amount of dollars for each of these things. And this is the budget that we are going to roll out. Because some people have this massive plan in mind of all the things they're going to do and then they realize that their budget is about 10% of what they need and so they gotta recalculate in the middle of spring rush. And that's not a good time to do it. This is the time to make your plan, figure out which houses, which neighborhood you're going to hit, which mediums you're going to use, the timing of each of the time you're going to actually interact. When are you gonna do the door hangers? When are you gonna have every door direct mail? When are you gonna do a next Door ad, When are you going to do Craigslist ad? When are you gonna do a Facebook ad? When are you going to knock on their door and introduce yourself? These are all things that need to have times as well as budgets. According to each of those actions, when should you do those things? A lot of times you're going to really, it comes down to your budget. Because if you have more budget, you can go sooner in the spring rush and be okay with hitting someone 3, 4, 5 times. If you don't have much budget, you're gonna be trying to aim for right as the grass is growing that week. When everyone, you know, the grass starts growing, you can just tell spring is in the air. That's usually your best bang for your buck. But if you have the extra dollars, you wanna work backwards to hit that person on a second or third or even fourth time. By the time the grass is growing and it's in need of a cut, as soon as they have cut their grass one time, either by themselves or, or using some other service, you dramatically lose the amount of intention they have for hiring a provider. And many times your customer acquisition cost goes much higher. Once they've already mowed their grass 1, 2, 3 times, it's kind of game over. They figured out either what service or if they're going to do it themselves for that entire year. Number two is work your KPIs backward. KPI stands for key performance indicators. So maybe you're like, okay, well, I'm gonna do so much revenue this year. That's my goal in terms of revenue. Okay, let's work our way backwards in terms of KPIs. So if you have a certain revenue marker, certain revenue goal, work your way backwards to the number of customers you're going to need to get to that revenue goal. All right, so you have your revenue goal. How many customers are you going to need to get there? Then the question is, how many employees are you going to need to service that that many customers? Then you go, well, how many trucks do I need to have that many employees which are gonna service these customers, which is gonna produce this revenue? So work your way backwards. A lot of people know what revenue they're shooting for next year, but they haven't done the work to work all the way back to what equipment am I going to need to actually get the work done? All right, so start with your revenue. Then ask yourselves, how many customers am I going to need to actually make this revenue goal a reality? Then how many employees am I going to need to service Those customers, what kind of trucks and equipment am to need to keep those employees busy doing work? Alright, so work yourself backwards. That's how you create a plan. And you can say the same thing for the entire year. Like break it down into months. I really like to do this. Break down your year into 12 months. And then instead of just having your KPIs for the whole year, have your KPIs for every single month. So what's your revenue going to be in January, February, March, April, May, all the way. Adding up to your annual revenue goal in terms of KPI for number of customers. Instead of just saying, Yeah, I want 150 customers this year. Instead of doing that, say, okay, well 150, let's say by October and then 140 and then 120 and then I got 100 and working all the way back to where you're at now. Maybe you're 80 now. So this is how you actually get to where you want to go is work your way backwards. Look at your KPIs, your key performance indicators like revenue number of customers and number of employees and the number of trucks and equipment you have. And then make sure you have a plan to get to that annual goal for those KPIs. Number three is do everything but the work. So as I'm talking to you, I'm talking about the things that you can do before the spring rush, before it's crazy, before the phone is ringing off the hook, before you feel like you're being pulled into a hundred different directions, before you have a bunch of new employees working out in the field messing things up, having callbacks. Before all of that happens, before the spring rush happens. And literally no one in your marketplace can breathe an ounce of air if they're a landscaper because they're so bogged down with work. Before that happens, what can you be doing? You need to be doing everything but the work. Because right now, for most of you, if you're not doing snow removal services, this is the time you kind of get slow. In February, before you get into the March, April spring rush, it is a lot of just like, what do I do? Twiddling my thumbs. This is the time to do everything you possibly can. Besides the work, what does that mean? If you're going to design a website, this is the time to do it. If you're going to design your print, design your print advertising, your door hangers and the postcards and the flyers, this is the time to do it. So if like Augusta Lawn Care later, this Week they're getting an entire campaign for the spring and it's gonna include door hangers and postcards and flyers. And then week after next, they are going to get social media, all of the designs for that made for them. This is the time to be doing those things because you're not gonna have time to be designing those things, ordering them from vistaprint, ordering them online, ordering them from anywhere, your local printer. This is not the time to. This is the time to be doing those things. Cause in the spring is not the time to be doing those things. In the spring, you wanna be doing work, that's the time to actually go generate revenue during this slower season. The lull before the storm is when you really wanna be doing everything but the work so that when the work comes, you can actually focus on the work instead of trying to scramble to find someone to print your door hangers. That's not the time to be doing that. So doing everything that you possibly can now, preparing your social media posts, you can do scheduled posts on Facebook. So you don't have to worry about posting social media throughout the spring. It's already done for you. And you can just plug and play. You just don't have to worry about doing the work now. So make sure you're doing everything but the work in terms of preparing your social media, preparing your print media, preparing your website, getting everything ready in order. So the last two things are really for businesses that wanna scale. They're businesses that are gonna have employees, they're businesses that want to actually grow. And the reason I say this is because some people would otherwise say that, oh, I don't have to worry about number four and five because I'm just a solopreneur. You're probably right. You don't need to wor the next two things if you're gonna run your business by yourself. And the reason I wanted to add these two in, cause originally I just put those first three is because in the past week I've heard two YouTubers talk about how they've had bad experiences with.

Employees and now they're scaling back to kind of be with themselves or they're gonna try it again this year. And so hopefully they're listening and these will kind of help them. And I don't mean to bash them. I'm just saying a lot of people try to do the employee route. They try to get employees and then they have a bad. Something bad happens or they have a bad experience and they kind of scale back to themselves or they kind of continually do the same mistakes time and time again. So what can you do now to prevent those mistakes and scale the business? Number four, what will you delegate to focus more time on sales and hiring? I've talked about it before. The two things that are gonna make your business scale and grow is focusing on sales and hiring, focusing on actually generating revenue, top line revenue and building out your team. Those are the things that are actually gonna make your. And so you've got to figure out now what are the things you're going to delegate to people on your team as your business grows that you are currently doing that don't have to do with hiring or with sales. So for example, if you are answering emails, if you are answering phones, if you are creating and formatting the estimates, those are things that you should not be doing as the owner. This is why we have command center for Augusta lawn care franchisees. It's something that we know is not value add to the growth, long term growth and success of the business. It's tasks that need to be done by somebody else. Those things need to be delegated. They need to be done by an office assistant for someone, someone that's not super experienced, that you can teach that they can do these things for you. And you can focus on the things that actually generate top line revenue. Growth and building the team. Those are the things that are gonna make a business grow. That's a business that is going to get to a million plus in revenue. If you're gonna be okay with running your business by yourself or maybe with a sidekick helper part time, this is not for you. But this time of year you need to have a plan in place. When and what are you going to delegate, to who? So when are you going to delegate, what are you going to delegate and to who are you going to delegate these things that are distracting you from sales and hiring. And the first thing I'd be taking off your plate is phone calls, emails and estimate creation. Those are the things that we took off the plate of the franchisees. We right from the get go in command center because we know those are the things that usually bog down an owner and keep you in the minutiae of the day to day. And therefore you don't go out and get sales. You therefore delay going out getting those new estimates. And it takes you three or four days to get an estimate sent out because you're focusing on the phone calls. And you become reactionary instead of being proactive about the things that actually move the needle, which is sales and hiring. Number five, especially if you're. Again, this is for a larger business, a business wanting to grow, wanting to scale. This year is develop your P4P system. All right? Pay for performance is going to be the way that this industry must move if it's going to adapt, if it's going to retain employees, if it's going to attract great talent, if it's going to retain employees from going to construction or to the oil fields. You've got to create a pay for performance system. And however you make that, that's up to you. But you've got to figure out budgeted hours, you've got to figure out how do you handle damage cases, how do you handle. You gotta run your numbers. This is the time of year to run your numbers. Know your numbers. What percentage of revenue are you giving to your employees? How are you gonna run this system so that you run a very profitable system that you do not have to be always governing over the shoulder, looking over the shoulder of your employees, and it frees them up to make as much money as they possibly can if they're willing to work hard. You've gotta figure out the numbers now. I'm not. You know, the main thing right now is you don't have all this work coming in. You don't have all the jobs happening and calls coming in and estimates you have to do. This is the time to sit behind a computer, spend a couple days, figure out your numbers. Run numbers from the past year, look at specific jobs, run routes, look at how many hours it took, the routes, what your labor burden is, what percentage of your revenue is going towards direct labor, what percentage of it is going towards indirect labor. These are the numbers you have to know if you're gonna create a P4P system that actually works and is going to motivate your people to. To work very hard and act and think like an owner. These are the things you must do. Number one, this is what you must do for this spring rush is, number one, marketing plan and budget. Number two, work your KPIs backwards. Number three, do everything you possibly can besides the work. Number four is ask yourself the question and come up with a plan of what will you delegate to focus more time in sales and hiring? And number five is develop your P4P system and get your numbers down. Those are the things you must do before the spring rush. I'm Mike Andy. You've been listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Until next time, be great. Nothing else pays.