DAY 9 of Building a $1M Business in 1 Yr

I moved across the country to build a $1 million lawn care business in 1 year. I'm gonna show you exactly how we're running ads, the reports I get, and all the behind-the-scenes secret sauce that I've never shared before. So Augusta Leads is the department at corporate that runs the ads for owners of Augusta. It's an optional thing. It costs about $500 a month, and it covers all of your Facebook ads and your Google Ads management, your LSA. Also, it doesn't cost any extra percentage. So usually you'll have a management fee and then you'll have some sort of percentage of ad spend. They don't charge that. So I'm gonna introduce you to Matt. He's the one that's running all my ads behind the scenes, him, Dakota, and the Augusta Leads team. He's gonna walk you through the path the first week while we are here on Facebook and on Google.

Hey, it's Matt with the Augusta Leads program. We're gonna be taking a look at Mike's Google and Meta ads performance. Let's dive right in. Hey Mike, hope you're doing well today. I am going over a quick weekly report here for both the Flower Mound and the Southlake territory. So I'm gonna take a look at the campaign data on both Meta Meta Ads and Google Ads. Just a heads up too here, we only launched ads about 3 or so days ago, and so there's not a whole lot of data to report on yet. Diving right in though, we will quickly recap performance here. For the Flower Mound territory, you spent about $454 of ad spend. 5 overall conversions means your cost per conversion is about $91 there. Your overall conversion rate is 3.29%. Conversion rate is conversions divided by clicks, or 5 divided by 152. This is just saying when someone clicks an ad, about 3.29% of the time they contact you. We track 2 types of conversions. A conversion technically is just any desired action. In our case, we're looking for 2 desired actions. One would be, did they submit a web form? That counts as a conversion. That's one of the desired actions we want to track. And 2, did they call? And there's certain requirements around the call. For example, if the call is under 2 minutes long, it does not count as a conversion. Similarly, if certain keywords are present in the transcript, for example, cancellation or vendor or door hanger, that will also automatically disqualify them from counting as a conversion.

If a call is under 2 minutes, we can basically assume that this might have been a service call. This might have been someone asking about a service we don't offer, generally because it takes over 2 minutes to give them a price, get their credit card information, get their address and get everything set up. So it's pretty conservative. Most ad agencies will say like 15 seconds. But I know that someone could call in from an ad and complain in 30 seconds or 40 seconds. And then now you're still saying that this was a lead. So again, this is a very conservative approach. But we say if it's not over 2 minutes, the phone call, it wasn't probably someone we actually sold on the phone. And so we can assume that it's not a lead that we have converted.

So Essentially, we're tracking contacts and specifically more qualified contacts. So this is just saying when someone clicks an ad, about 3.29% of the time it's a qualified contact. Our overall click-through rate is about 1.24%. That is clicks divided by impressions, or 152 divided by 12,214. This is saying when someone sees an ad, about 1.24% of the time they click on the ad. When they click on the ad, about 3.29% of the time it's a qualified contact. That's the best way of putting it.

Ultimately, when it comes to a sales funnel, you're gonna get clicks at the top, people coming into the funnel, but cost per click, who cares? Some percentage of those people that come to your website or click are going to convert into a lead. They're gonna fill out an estimate request form, they're gonna give us a call, they're in some way gonna raise their hand and say, I need service. That's your conversion rate. And so we do a lot of work on the web team to try to optimize our conversion, people that show up on the website that actually submit their information. Now the thing that's unique about Augusta, when you use instant quote forms, is almost everyone that submits a form is a client. So our close rate online is very high. Now if they don't fill out the whole form, we do get the information, we try to measure their property, call them and recover that abandoned cart. But the objective is that they get to the site, they immediately see their price, they fill out their credit card information, and it fires off to us and says this person's ready to go, put them on the schedule.

Now normally we would break down the data by platform here, we don't have a lot of Google data yet. We've only spent about $1.50 on the Google side, so we won't really be going over Google data. Now, we did make a lot of changes to the Google side to help it spend more here over the last day or so. So we will discuss that in a little bit here. But first, we will talk about the Meta ads performance. So Facebook and Instagram, those are the 2 platforms we're running ads on. Spent about $453 in ad spend for overall conversions, means your cost per conversion is $113.25. Definitely a bit on the high side, but I do expect this to come down pretty significantly over the next week or two. There are really 2 factors that I think caused cost per conversion to be higher. First of all, when new campaigns go live, it's pretty common to see performance be a little bit worse as we're just gathering data so we can actually make some changes. So that is a pretty big factor. You know, we've only been live for about 3 days or so. And so I would expect the cost per conversion to be higher at the beginning. The second factor as well is we just launched lawn mowing ads less than 24 hours ago. So most of this data is from lawn treatment ads, and generally lawn treatments have a higher cost per conversion compared to lawn mowing. So I do expect with the launch of lawn mowing that our cost per conversion is going to be coming down as a result, just due to the amount of people looking for that service. There's generally more people looking for mowing than there is for treatments at one particular time. And so I do expect the cost per conversion to come down from that. I want to talk about our Google campaign. A couple of big changes similar to Meta ads. We just launched an ad group for lawn care less than 24 hours ago, so we're still collecting data on this. But before, we were only advertising just for the brand name, fertilization, and treatments. And so with the launch of lawn care, I do expect us to be able to spend a lot more as there's just a lot more search demand for lawn care than there is for treatments. The other really big change that we launched too is the launch of the PMax or Performance Max campaign.

So Matt talks about PMax or Performance Max campaigns. That's basically where Google Ads going to have not only search, it's going to have display, which is images, as well as video, YouTube. And so when you do a PMax campaign, it basically tries to optimize your budget over the course of search, display, and video instead of just search. And we're seeing Google move more this direction because it allows them to spend more money instead of with search. They have to search certain keywords for you to show up, whereas with display and video, they're able to show your ad to more people. Again, you will get more leads, you will get more clicks. The quality might be lower because they didn't have intent to buy like they did with Google Search. But we see a lot right now Google focusing on PMax or Performance Max because of AI kind of jeopardizing the future of what the search results might look like. And they're also bringing LSA, Local Service Ads, into the PMax Performance Max campaigns, which is again their bet that this is like their future. So we've been working with it for a couple of years. I anticipate it to only become a bigger part of Google Ads. As they move LSA into it.

With PMax campaigns, we generally can spend more. So I do expect your amount that you're able to spend go up because of launching the PMax campaign. And so I do think that this will see a pretty big ramp up in the Google ad spend here over the next week or so, just with those 2 changes alone. Within this PMax campaign as well, we copied over a number of negative keywords, specifically some from some other PMax campaigns that just being a little bit proactive and adding them into your account. One really big issue with Performance Max campaigns is showing up for competitor names in the search results page. So someone searching up like City Turf, for example, showing ads for that. We generally avoid bidding on any sort of competitor names as we just find that the quality of the person who clicks on it is usually a lot lower than Someone who's searching up like just general lawn care?

So we use something called UTM parameters. Basically in the URL, we're tracking where this lead came from. We're also— we connect our phone service to our ad tracking so that when someone calls in, we can see how long did they call, where are they from, what's their phone number. And then we're just trying to get as clean data as possible because if we said every single person that gives us a phone call, that's a lead. Well, yeah, our cost per lead is going to look great and people will clap for our $20 or $30 cost per lead. However, the quality of those leads is so low because they accidentally sneezed, clicked call now, and then canceled the call. And if I'm calling that a lead, now all of a sudden I'm getting bad signal and bad reporting back to me saying that I'm getting a lower cost per lead than what I'm really getting. And so a lot of times people are just optimizing for low cost per lead when that really doesn't pay the bills. You need customers. And so I really want to get clean data. And if that means cutting out people that are calling in, if that means people that are clicking on our website when they were already searching Augusta lawn care, or they were searching a competitor, I want as clean data as possible that I want to know when this ad was shown to someone looking for my service, they clicked on my ad, and then they converted into a paying lead.

We have negative keyword lists for competitor names for every location in the Augusta Leads Program. And I took the locations in the DFW area that already had these lists. I just copied them and applied them straight to your account for now. So things like TruGreen, MOWRS, MOW Manager, CityTurf is also in here. These are all being excluded from your campaign now. So just kind of an easy way to jumpstart the PMax campaign and really just provide some guide rails in terms of what sort of searches we want to show up for. On top of this, I also added in the master negative keyword list that every account gets access to in the Augusta leads program in Augusta Nation. So between this master negative keyword list, the competitor negative keyword list that we copied from other DFW areas, as well as just some general negative keywords, I do think that we should— we have a pretty good initial guide rail in place in terms of making sure the PMax campaign doesn't spend on low-quality searches that we don't want. PMax campaigns always show up for more lower-quality searches compared to a search campaign. And so just over time, this negative keyword list is going to get built up more and more and more, and we'll have better and better guide rails for the PMax campaign there. So in terms of performance, we will have a lot more data as of next week. And so we will be able to take a look at a lot more data there next week.

The reason this first week our cost per lead is higher than I would like it to be is because when you first start out, when we run Augusta Leads, We usually start with a pretty broad net and then we see what's hitting, what's working, and then we dial in and spend more budget where we want. We also see what are the keywords that people are clicking on that we might not want to show up for. That could be competitors. That could be things like landscaping because we don't do landscaping. So we got to make sure that's what's called a negative keyword. So over the course of time, even with Google Ads, you can narrow it in even more so when it comes to Facebook because you'll put 20 pieces of creative pictures and video or a certain headline or an offer, and 2 of them spend 90% of your budget because they work. And Facebook is very good, especially with AI now, to make sure that the ones that are working get all the budget. That allows me to spend much more efficiently. So it's almost— it's very common the first 2, 3, 4 weeks is us just honing in what's working, what's not working, and then guiding the budget in the right direction. That's why I'm not concerned about the $90. Like, it's higher than I will. Like, yes, I would prefer it to be in the $30, $40, $50 range, like, which is the average for Augusta. But right now it's higher simply because it's brand new. We don't have that data to look at to be able to really refine it.

In terms of what's coming, what's next, setting up the local service ads campaign, that's not something that's currently live. And so that's going to be a big focus here over the next week or so. There's just some requirements around submitting pictures and getting, and getting business profiles verified. And so once those are completed, we will be able to launch the local service ads campaign as well, which is also going to increase the amount that we could spend on Google. So slowly just ramping up. Ads have only been live for a handful of days, and so ramping up the budgets, ramping up the amount the accounts can spend is pretty important in this initial week or so.

Yeah, like the main reason we need the Google verification for the address is just that we can run LSA, Local Service Ads, on Google, which is instead of paying per click like you do on Google Ads, you pay per lead. Now, in the future, in the next couple of months, they are merging Google Ads and LSA. But for now it is a separate platform and they do require verification of the address. What's interesting is the videos that we make on the vlog that show like the mowers, the equipment, the vans, they will get all of the views. And like this sort of video where we're talking to the backend admin and running ads and Facebook and Google and Performance Max campaigns and tracking, this will get almost no views. But this is the actual stuff that makes the million-dollar business possible. It is not equipment. Anyone could buy equipment. If I wanted, I'd go buy more vans tomorrow. That would not make us get to a million-dollar business. It would just add more assets to the balance sheet. And so the boring parts of business is actually usually where the real wins are at. Things like hiring on Indeed, doing a job ad, running ads on Google, optimizing your Facebook campaigns. That's what actually gets customers. And at the end of the day, you need to get more work and you need to get more technicians. That's how you grow a business. If it doesn't have to do with those 2 things— trucks, equipment, the fancy logo you just made— all of that stuff doesn't actually build a real business. For some people, the only reason they should join Augusta is actually because of Augusta Leads, because you have an ad agency that has no perverse incentive to artificially make you spend more money on ads. And they just want to do a good job so you keep staying on with the service. Honestly, there's people have said like they joined Augusta just for Augusta leads because it's so easy to waste tens of thousands of dollars on ads simply because the ad agency, their only incentive is to like fulfill their year or they just want to keep making you spend more money on ads because they get a percentage like they get a 10 or 15% of whatever you spend, which kind of makes sense because usually you have a higher budget, you do have a little bit more work to do. But I feel like that's a perverse incentive. That's why we removed it from Augusta Leads. We don't have it is because I shouldn't be trying to encourage you to spend more money on ads. I should be optimizing your budget and that should be what you're paying me for. And so that's why we just have a flat monthly fee for Augusta Leads to manage Google and Facebook ads. So there's no perverse incentive for us to have you pay Spend more on ads. I don't want you to spend more on ads. I want you to get more leads. And if we're doing our job, we'll optimize your ad spend. If you spend $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 a month when you're trying to grow quickly, spending an extra $500 a month to make sure it's super efficient is a good deal. But that's why we have it set up that way, and I think everyone should use it. Okay, so the video we submitted the other day for Google verification was declined. So could very possibly be that no longer are coworking spaces in the good graces of Google. That's a possibility. But I also think, if you remember, I fumbled my key when I was scanning in and one of the media team gave me another key. I think that might have held against me. And they said in their response back, I need to show some sort of paperwork. With our address and our business name, so I'm going to do another video. Fortunately, they declined me right away, so I'm just going to keep trying to make it better. I might even go get some like business cards locally. I might print off our business license and put it in the office, but we've got to get verified.

We can't use Google Local Services until then, and it doesn't—it's not a good look when we're not verified on Google and no one can find our Google Business Profile. All right, so I'm going to show them that I'm unlocking this. I'm in the back—

into the front of the van here.

I'm gonna unlock this. It's all the equipment.

That's one part I didn't do the other day is show equipment.

The other day, this is where I messed up because I didn't hold the key over this. Open this up. Gusta. Open this up. I'm showing them an invoice right now. They're pest Pesticide applicator's license. Augusta Lawn Care. Show them our mail. Show them our uniforms. Okay, so if this one doesn't work, the only thing I can think of is like a business card and a business license. I don't have those things here because they're digital. So if this gets declined, I will print those off and try again, and I'll just keep annoying them until they say yes. For everyone asking, we do have to have a pesticide applicator's license. So we got these from the state today, and so we're going to put these at least on the back and then probably on the driver's door as well. We also are going to get these little labels that we put like V1, V2, V3— that's van 1, van 2, van 3, van 4. Fortunately, we got all 4 of the current vans at the same time, and so we will be able to— like, the license plates are all in like I think the last number, like 8, like 5, 6, 7, and 8. But we will get little labels that we put on both sides of the van. So it's always easy to identify like things like keys and which mower belongs on which van, stuff like that. So, all right, we are uploading the business profile verification. This is my second to last shot at it because I do think we can still do a business card and a business license, print those off, bring them here. But I don't know what else to do to prove that we do live here. It might be that Google has changed their verification process around coworking spaces though, and then we're out of luck. But I'd still want the space. We just have to change this to a service area on Google instead of a specific address, which I'd prefer not to do. Okay, so looks like we got some bad reviews on Regus, this location specifically, about the Google verification process. I have a feeling it has to do with the fact that it's very hard to verify other businesses around this because like at the back, it's kind of tucked away in a residential area. There's really not like a— there's nothing across the street. There's nothing back here. It's like a residential area. So a big thing that Google is looking for in the verification video is like other businesses, but there's really none back here. They're all a lot of just like private offices and things. And the reason that people are complaining too is because they do specifically market Google Business Verification on their website. They don't guarantee it, but they do market it. So I'm sure some people feel tilted, but I'm going to keep trying and trying. I'm going to get business cards and business licenses. I'm going to keep doing everything I can. And at the very worst, the next way we escalate this is for now, just get a service area in this for this Google Business Profile. And then I would probably find a commercial location or someone that I can like service their property for free in exchange to verify my business at their address. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Even a customer sometimes, like just a residential house. A residential property will still get somehow passed through the verification process.

Another thing we're sort of testing while we're here in Texas for the challenge with Augusta Leads is, can we spend effectively a really massive budget? We have a couple of locations that do spend pretty heavily, maybe $5,000 or $10,000 a month. But we want to kind of see like, what's the upper limit of what we can spend? if someone wants to scale very quickly. And so that's another reason why for Augusta Leads we wanted to do the project, 'cause I wanna see like what happens if I spend $15,000 or $20,000 a month? Where does the cost per lead start skyrocketing? What size of demographic or population does that start to happen with? 'Cause these aren't necessarily huge areas we're going after. Flower Mound's 117,000, Southlake has like 15,000 people, so they're not huge. So Command Center really just runs a lot of the backend admin. So answering phone calls, emails, text messages, payroll. They run daily P4P or pay for performance reports for the technicians. And overall, it's kind of helping us on the backend as much as possible. The GM is still responsible for all the operations, dealing with the team, equipment, hiring, but they do a lot of backend support. So for example, the 3 technicians or 3 or 4 technicians that we have coming to technician training, They're already all onboarded, and all John had to do is fill out a quick form, goes to Command Center. They then make sure they're inside of ADP, they're inside of Homeworks, they're set up inside the app, all that, all their employee docs get signed digitally. Like, they take care of all that so he can just focus on the team. So very, very helpful.

At the Command Center, we offer Augusta franchise owners an à la carte menu of administrative services. Our team answers phones, calculates P4P through the app connected to HomeWorks, processes payroll, works in QuickBooks, sends estimates, manages email, and a lot more. We have about 50 agents and we support over 200 Augusta locations.

Really, the main reason for Command Center is for locations that are scaling up and getting started, that they don't have to go get a big office space or even worry about training an admin or a VA. It's not necessarily that it's like the cheapest thing, It's that it's completely taken off the plate of the owner so they can focus on getting more customers and getting more technicians, because that's what grows a business. Not figuring out a phone system or figuring out how to do the email or how to run payroll. Those are all tasks we can take off their plate and they just get charged a per-minute rate. So it's not included with the franchise fee. It's a per-minute rate. So I anticipate the first couple of months here not to be spending a lot because we don't have a lot of leads yet. We're not spending a lot of money on marketing. But as time goes on, I expect my, my cost at Command Center to go up. as I'm getting a whole bunch of new customers. Most of the time, all of your complaints and callbacks and calls from customers happen the first 90 days. And so that's why when we're scaling fast, there's more phone calls, there's more issues that happen, there's more billing problems. Command Center can take that all off of the general manager's plate so he can focus on the team and getting more customers. And that's it.

For owners with multiple locations, we also offer the Designated Agent Program, or DAP we call it. We assign 2 agents to handle administrative work across all of an owner's locations.

So DAP is a program we are testing here in Texas. We've been testing it for about 6 months with 4 locations at Augusta. It's called Dedicated Agent Program. And the reason we have it is because as locations Augusta have started to get larger, the average location, you know, they get $1 million, $2 million in revenue. That's where we've seen A start to drop the ball at command center, mostly because like the volume of calls and things happening throughout the day is so high that when you have 80 agents during peak spring rush answering the phone or doing tasks, that can get a little chaotic. So our goal with the dedicated agent program is that anything that happens for a specific location goes to a team of 2 people at command center, and then any overflow— because there's times at a large location you have more than 2 calls at the same time. Any overflow would go to the rest of the team. But when we do this, just by having 2 people at the top that kind of take most of their emails, phone calls, texts, they handle most of their account, they'll end up handling about 90 to 95% of the tasks for that location and just create a more stable experience for that larger operator.

At Mike's Flower Mound location in Texas, Brian is the lead agent. He works closely with Mike's GM, John, and stays in touch with him throughout the day through our Connect Team chat. Brian's going to walk you through how we onboarded John and what our location team does for John throughout the day.

Yeah, I'm Brian. So John actually hasn't managed an Augusta location before, so a lot of the things we've been working with so far have been how to set up estimates inside the HomeWorks, how to, how to get back and forth on texting with the clients, making sure that everybody Everybody here is on board with the programs, the treatment programs that we're running. We just work closely day to day on all the emails that are coming in if there's any questions. Yeah, so basically we're able to get familiarized with the clients because we're the first point of contact. We take all their phone calls, we're managing all their emails, doing all their texts, all their follow-up calls, and just really working closely with them to make sure that everything seamless and try to take as much off his plate as possible.

So throughout the day, the dedicated agents for this location, as well as all the agents at Command Center, we use an app that the general manager is able to talk back and forth with them throughout the day. So something might pop up, a customer complaint, something that might be urgent, they might message, voice or text, the general manager and ask questions or be able to handle things for them. The goal is to take as much off the plate as off the general manager as much as possible. So the minutia of answering emails and texts and running payroll through ADP, like all of that, as much as possible so the general manager can focus on the team, whether it be the general manager or the owner. Like someone needs to be focused on the team and training and making the service better and improving onboarding and hiring more technicians and optimizing things. Them trying to make sure the emails are, are updated or that a new lead just came in. I've got to like send out the quote or I've got to format the estimate, send it out. That's what that is, a lower leverage task and trying to get that off their plate. Whether you're using Command Center, using a VA, you're hiring an office person, those are $20 to $30 an hour tasks. And if you're doing those throughout the day, you're never going to grow a business because the higher leverage task is hiring, doing sales, and those are much more valuable than a $20 or $30 admin task. So the kind of the big update today is that You can see here we are not ready for business. We're not going to rush technician training and we're not going to rush into getting customers. So we've turned the ads pretty much down to zero, which isn't great. I want to grow quickly and fast, but ultimately, sometimes you got to go slow so you can go fast. And I really do not want my first week with the technicians to be like us still figuring out stuff on the trip, the, the van. Like, you see in the back here, we still got to get those little circular, uh, rubber things here. Won't take us long, but like, I don't want that to be the first week where they're trying to figure out, okay, where's everything at? Like, this is our last van that we got to put the racking on, on the sides, and get the hooks. We gotta get the wheel locks installed. I don't want that to be their first week, so we're gonna delay just a little bit, 1 or 2 weeks. And you know, some people had said in the comments, like, why don't you like have the van shipped here? I think this This process of like getting the vans and everything is what a lot of businesses face when you get started. There's hurdles, delays, issues. Like if we just showed up here and all this was all set up and we had it all shipped here and everything was looking beautiful, all of everyone that's watching this or people that might come even a couple of years from now would be like, man, I started my business and there's all these problems and issues and I can't figure this out and this isn't matching up and this is delayed. That's what business is. And so as much as I would have loved to hit the ground really, really hard here late fall I think it's gonna be much more like, let's get established, get our first couple technicians, really dial them in. A couple weeks go by, let's get our ads up and running. Then we can get— put some gas on it. We get a first technician that's full-time, just gas the ads, fill up their schedule. But we're not gonna rush it. And the goal is to get there in a year, meaning I know this late in the fall, most of my growth is gonna happen next spring rush. So I want to get a really good foundation, get 4 vans, 4 technicians, everyone's ready to go, slowly be building up the ads. And then when March, April next year comes, we'll gas it really hard. And so it might be a little bit slow over the next few months. There's not going to be like massive action because it's not going to be the middle of spring rush and the grass will be a little bit dormant. But I think that's really the reality of growing a business is there are delays, there's things that come up that aren't expected. And I'm glad we were able to show that in a way, even though it wasn't expected.