CHUCK IN A TRUCK... their ads... my reaction

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we're going to be looking at some of the ads placed by a Chuck in a Truck.

Last week, I made this video right here about Chuck in a Truck. Now, Chuck in a Truck is the guy that underprices all of us and is willing to do things for half or less of the cost that we could even get the work done for. And typically, uninsured unmarked trucks, everything's done under the table with cash. They don't do anything legally, etc. Now, today we're going to be going through some actual advertisements that were placed in a specific market. All these ads came from one specific. This is not from all over the country. This is just one specific small location. So we're going to blur out some of this information just so that way the person that sent all this to me does not get exposed. So let's go ahead and jump into the first one. Now, this is a flyer as well as something that someone put on a Facebook group that says, hey, contact us. And the pricing is a flat $25 per hour. So for their lionscaping, they're doing gardening services, landscaping, spring and fall cleanup, lawn maintenance, all these services, of course, they're using stock images there, but at the end of the, they're charging a whopping $25 per hour flat rate. Now, at the end of the day, what you need to realize when you're looking at all of these advertisements is that you are looking at a short term or unprofitable business because you cannot scale up a $25 flat hour rate in this economy. You cannot, you can't even get employees if you're paying them legally for $25 an hour. So there's no way you can scale this. The only reason this works is if someone is doing this on the side on the weekend and doing as a side hustle, doing it for cash. And I'm not against that. It's flexible for their schedule. And honestly, it'd be like that they drove Uber or something like that. It's like a side hustle. That's fine. But just realize when you see these ads, don't get mad because they're never going to be able to scale this. It will never work. And if they do try to scale us, either go out of business because it's unprofitable or B, they're going to attract the worst customers that are so price sensitive that they go after a $25 per hour flat rate. Like, that's crazy. All right, let's Go to the next one and let's see here. Spring special. Book a 2022 seasonal lawn care package by April 30th. I like that. Scarcity clothes. And receive a complimentary fertilization, spring cleanup, and hedge trimming. Mercy goodness. They're offering a cut, trim and clean up for $25. Like, it's incredible that you can cut someone's lawn, clean up all their beds, and trim all their bushes for $25. Oh, plus. But, you know, I guess I could say I'm starting at 25. That's not too much of a big deal. But this is the crazy thing. The spring special, a complimentary fertilization that's going to like the average lawn is going to be, let's just say 60 to $80. Okay. And then a spring cleanup. Like the smallest spring cleanups we do are 400 bucks. Right. By the time we just show up. And so let's just say an average like $700. Okay. And then hedge trimming, we usually kind of throw that in with spring cleanup, but let's just say it's like $800 worth of what we would usually charge. They're giving away. Giving away for someone that gets set up in the spring, it's incredible. So book a 2022 seasonal lawn care package. Like at the end of the day, if you mow someone's lawn for fifty dollars, let's say it's 25 and up. So like fifty dollars. Okay. And you mow it, let's just say four times a month. And you do that for eight months. Okay. So that's 32 cuts times $50 is $1,600. So on a sixteen hundred dollar per year value to the customer, you're giving away like $800. You're literally giving away a third of two. If you took the value of what you're giving the customers, it'd be 2,400. You're giving away 800 of that or a third of that for free. That's incredible. And that's assuming that the customer stays with you, by the way, because I guarantee you this person is not going to have a legal structure entity that's going to sue the customer if for some reason they get outside of a contract. They're not going. That's not going to happen. Especially when they have a hotmail email in their ads. Okay, next one. This is on a Facebook post. It looks like me and my friend will cut your lawn in this specific town. $10 all time low for small lawn, $20 and up for bigger lawns. Give me a shout out if you're interested. Okay, first of all, they need to work on their spelling. Now, I'm not gonna hate on them because they might just be young, like the 13, 11, 12, 13 year old. Hey, great. But guess what? When we started mowing lawns, I was 11 years old. That puts that 15 years ago, our cheapest price was 25 bucks. I knew from day one I did not want to be the low price in our, in the competition. I did not want to be that. I knew Even I was 11 years old that like, that was a decision. That was a bad business decision. And if you're young, guess what you can sell. You might not be able to have the most professional, most best truck, best equipment, all the rest of it. But what you can sell is you are young and people think you are cute and they are willing to pay for you because you are saving up for college. That's what I played on when I was 11, 12 and 13 when I went to college when I was 13. So 11, 12 and 13, when I was out selling for lawn care, I sold on one thing and one thing only. I'm a young kid and I'm saving up for college. And guess what? People are willing to pay 30, $40 for their lawns. And apparently this person in 20 who is charging $10. Mercy. Goodness. Next one. Okay, here's this one. A gift certificate. You know, they come up with all these creative solutions. They're giving a 50, 100 and $200 gift certificate, which is incredible because theoretically. Oh, these are in the back. It looks like these are in the back of someone's business card. They got a business card on the back. They literally paste like with glue, a $200, $100 or $50 gift certificate. And if you zoom in here, it says any product service offered by the company in this area, no cash value. But this. If you gave someone a $200 gift certificate, that could literally mean you mowed their lawn for four or five times and then they just canceled. Like, I don't know how you do that in the spring rush when you're already constricted and constrained by labor and you don't have enough work, new workers to get the work done. And yet you're giving this out. Like, I wouldn't mind giving out gift certificates like this in the middle of the dead season and like super, super slow. But the fact that you're giving us out during the spring rush is pretty troubling because this is going to lead to Very, you know, free. I almost said cheap. It's free services, period of time when everyone needs work and you could otherwise fill your schedule with profitable work. That's why I'm not a big fan of giving away free things to get them on the schedule. Because you attract the lowest quality customer. You. You attract the price shopper. You attract the person that cuts out gift certificates and coupons. Because guess what? There's gonna become another competitor, Another truck in a truck's gonna come along and offer a better coupon and a better gift certificate, and instead of $200 gift certificate, it's gonna be $300. And they're gonna be willing to be able to, like, basically rebuild their house for free if they just become a customer like you. You just. What do you give away? Eventually it's like, my goodness, give away the farm. You know, sell my child to you. Like, what else do you want to give just to get them to become a customer? And this isn't legally binding. They're gonna stick with you either. It's just free money. It's like no cash value, but my goodness, it cost you something. Oh. Anyways, next one here. Looks like another Facebook post. Aerating and dethatching service starting at $60 a lawn. PM me for more information. Honestly, that's not so bad. Like, dethatching is very expensive for us because we haul the debris away. Most of us do. So the fact that you would aerate and dethatch for 60 bucks, that's really low. Like, our minimum, I would say. Let me just do the math real quick. So our minimum, our market, we're looking at, like, at least 120 for the aeration. No, it'd be 120. $120 for aeration and like 180 for detaching. But in our market, we got a ton of detached, like, moss, and we have to suck it up and we have to haul it away to the dump, etc. Okay, we got a couple more here. Let's see here. Offering snow removal, $20. Elaine, thanks and have a good day. So $20 per snow removal? Like, I don't even know how you can get a plow to the person's house for 20 bucks, to be perfectly honest. And I know that in some markets In Canada, Midwest, etcetera, there are maybe 20, 30, 40 services to the property. But even at that, just covering your admin costs, let alone your equipment costs, your wages, your labor, your insurance when you're doing snow removal, extremely expensive. $20 a cut or $20 per push for snow on even a residential driveway is a lot because even if it takes you five minutes, you say, well, the math on that's actually not too bad because if you take five minutes, you multiply that by 12, you get them done in an hour. Therefore you're actually making $240 per hour. Right. Assuming that you literally have every single person on a street. Right. So if you did have every single person on the street, you might be able to make good money on $20 a lane, but it's unlikely. Okay, next one offering salting service. Oh, this is the same person offering salting service for $10. A driveway includes salting the walkways, the driveway, with pet friendly salt. Give me a message. Again, I don't even know how you can afford for $10 to pay for the salt, let alone applying it with labor and materials. So last one's $20 for snow blowing and shoveling. Okay, $20. Kind of the same thing. I don't know what the difference between snow blowing and snow removal is, but at the end of the day it's really cheap. Again, don't be intimidated by this. If you're trying to scale a business, this isn't even your competition. This is going to be for the person that's extremely price sensitive and this is going to be for the person that is in their first time getting a service. If someone already has had three or four or five services and they've had to go through a new service provider every single year, that's the customer you want that is willing to pay a premium instead of spending $20 for the snow plowing. And they're willing to pay 40 for the fact that you show up with equipment that works, they show up within 24 hours. Then you show up and you actually like there's a trained person that doesn't plow into their their garage door. These are things that matter. And for the person, the customer that is the premium customer that you want and is willing to pay a premium price. They've gone through three or four of these cheap providers and now they're looking for someone that's professional, they can stick with for a long time. Because annoying as all get out. It is annoying as all get out have to change providers. It's annoying as to have to get new estimates and get new contractors and new bids and then vet them and then they don't work out and they don't show up and you gotta find someone else and you gotta call five other people. Like no one wants to do that. A premium customer that has the money, they do not want to do that. And so if you have to slow down growth to be able to be a little more picky and choosy with your customers, that's fine. Now, if you're trying to grow fast, you need to watch this video here, because I talk about the one thing that you need to care about and it kind of goes in a little bit. Contrary to what I just said, you might actually grow really fast and then afterwards raise your prices and down the road, check this video out right here. Get to 250 thousand dollars in annual revenue by doing that.