Dealing with Cancellations; Investing in Your Lawn Care Business

All right, so a few of you are hopping on now. If you have a question, let's go ahead and run. Jump right into those. And then if you don't, just go ahead and mute your phone or your device just so that we can all hear each other.

Okay, I've got a question.

Go for it, Christian.

So I'm curious what you guys are doing to take advantage of the situation. Obviously, it's changing. It's fluid, it's day by day, but there's obviously opportunities in here. So, like, on our end right now, I'm literally writing letters to competitors right now, which is like an introduction letter and also saying, if you're thinking of.

Selling the company, give me a call.

Is there anything else that you guys are doing like that right now?

We haven't done anything in terms of trying to buy someone out like that, which that is definitely a great. If you have cash on hand and like, you've actually saved for this time, this is the time to do it. Because people literally can't some. Right now, we're finding two biggest issues, guys. Number one, they have no work coming in. Two, they might have where all their work is based upon projects, and that's what's drying up. And really, three is the biggest issue, and that is employees just don't want to show up right now. And literally, it's leading to people not being make payments on stuff that they've leveraged. And so if you have money like you're talking about, and you're literally writing letters to competitors being like, hey, I'm willing to buy you, this is the time you're going to get stuff, pennies on the dollar, because people are just freaked out of their mind. And so definitely if that we have not done that. We just bought a company out last fall. So, like, we aren't interested in doing that yet. And I feel like most companies feel like they're going to be able to weather this out. And so I'm not necessarily going to get like a bargain on something right now. However, like I said, if you saved up cash, this is the time to use that. Like, if you're writing letters to competitors, kudos to you. Like, that's takes a lot of guts. But in terms of, like, us taking advantage of this time, the thing that I think we got to take advantage of is the fact that people that are on maintenance still have to have services. And so at this time, every other one of our competitors are not marketing, they're not putting door hangers out, they are not doing Google And Facebook ads. And so we're getting some amazing cost per click on Google and Facebook. And so two Facebook products that are relatively new, that have worked really well for us during this whole thing is the Call now button. And as well as the lead form from Facebook. So when they click on it, it pre fills all their information. They aren't required to even go to your website and fill out information. That being said, the quality of those leads are much less because it is an instant. Like literally within two seconds they can request an estimate. So about one third of those estimates are usually garbage. Those contact forms, however, within a matter of seconds they're submitting it. And so we're seeing about like 28 to $38 per lead form being submitted on Facebook right now through that venue. As well as the Call now button, we're seeing like between four and eight dollars per click into that. So. Hey guys, thank you everyone for joining. If you, if you're not asking a question, go ahead and mute your microphone so we can hear everyone. Okay.

Ab, how's it going? I'm on the job.

How'd that malt job go? I over budgeted, but thank God, now I'm already on the second job. I'm killing it. I'm killing it. And you know, speaking to people, random people. Everybody's home, so just speaking to people that are outside. As long as you keep your distance. I did like three estimates today, so. It's awesome. Yeah, really awesome.

Awesome.

Cool. I'm doing this for.

Toby. Jose, Carlos, Amity, welcome. If you guys have questions, go ahead and unmute your microphone. And then if you aren't asking a question live, just make sure you mute it just so the quality for everyone else is good. Cool. Got Seymour hopping on. Welcome, Dom James. If you guys have questions, just gotta unmute your microphone because otherwise I cannot hear you. Welcome. Cool. Yeah, so we've been busy. If you guys have a question, just unmute your microphone. But we've been pretty busy right now. Honestly. We usually this time of year don't have to spend much money in marketing. We stay pretty busy. That being said, right now, with a lot of our projects drying up, we're doubling down on our maintenance big time. So unfortunately a couple of you guys with unmuted microphone, if you got a question, just go ahead and start talking. And then I just don't have all of your pictures on my screen. I can't see everybody on. That's on now.

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Good. Hey Franklin, how you doing?

Pretty good, Pretty Good. How are things in Washington?

We're staying live. We're staying live.

Yeah, I hear you. That's good.

What's up?

Oh, nothing. I just. I clicked on Facebook and saw you on Zoom, and I was literally about to join Zoom for one of my classes now, so here we are.

Very cool. Where are you out of?

I'm out of Columbus, Ohio.

Oh, cool. So you guys had. You guys had lockdown? Yep.

Correct.

Are you still working today then?

We have the central.

We're not working today.

We.

We canceled everything for this week, and we're probably going to be starting up next week. Like, I just came in when you're talking about maintenance, so we're just starting to get all the spring cleanups out of the way and, you know, get. Get everybody taken care of and auto pay and all that kind of stuff so we don't have to have any contact.

Have you guys had any problems, like, with members of the public razzing? Your guys are like, telling you guys to go home or that, like, any customers kind of flipping out on you?

No, we haven't. We usually just keep our head down and we're in and out. We don't really talk with anybody. We've if thing we've had a couple customers request an estimate, and we said we would come out and be at their property, and they're like, no, we don't even want you to come out. And I was like, okay, well, you know, then we'll wait until this quarantine's over. But thankfully, we haven't run across any issues, and it was kind of a stretch on the central employee list, so, knock on wood, nothing yet. How about you guys?

Yeah, so for us, it's been really weird because most of the states, after they've done their lockdown within 48 hours, they've submitted clarifications on our industry. Washington state hasn't. And literally they're making us submit company by company for exemptions. And so basically, all the local guys, we're sticking to maintenance, only we aren't doing projects. We're trying to cut out stuff that's not necessary, but we're trying to keep our guys busy by keeping the influx of maintenance as high as possible. And then like on those exemption sheets, we had to put in, like, all the things we're doing to make sure we are trying to social distancing, disinfecting the trucks, staggering start times, keeping trucks to solo workers, just like the whole laundry list, we have the guys keep their gloves on all day long in the, in the trucks, on at the shop, in the office, the whole time we had to do remote office staff. Like our command center is all working remotely and so a bunch of stuff like that we have to include on that form that we submit. But right now we're allowed to do maintenance and so I'm happy about that.

Toby, you got anything?

Yeah, we're not that big. Hey, we just.

Well, thanks Franklin. Sorry I had. Is that you Amity? Coming in.

Nice to hear from you.

I was wondering is anybody putting any procedures in regards to building thinking about people are now not going to have their jobs like for monthly billing and stuff like that, has any email or anybody has done anything, you know, like to email customers, letting them know, like in my case I have some of my monthly customers that have canceled and because they're customers that we've had for years, I offer them a once a month service just to keep them, you know, hoping they get a job soon. And I don't want to lose them as a customer and I also want them to feel appreciated in times like this.

Yep. Yeah. So this is really interesting because from the landscaping point of view, I feel like this is what's going to happen especially for our maintenance customers. We've had one customer out of 500 that we have locally at our one shop. We've only had one person cancel recurring services. That being said, I feel like when we bill at the end of the month, that's when we're going to have the biggest kickback of people. They all of a sudden see the money coming out and so hey guys, if you're not asking a question, just maybe mute your audio. But that's what I feel like. We're going to have the biggest kickback in terms of recurring maintenance customers actually canceling. And so Jeff, I'm going to mute you there. Cool. So that being said, in terms of people canceling, I think that's the right thing to do. Honestly Amity is if you have a really good customer that you know, within once a month, if you can just service their property, keep it so it doesn't become two feet long, that's definitely the right thing to do in terms for the customer. That being said, you can't do that for everybody. And so I do it on a case by case basis. I wouldn't necessarily come out and tell all your customers you're going to do that because at the end of the day, if you marketed to affluent customers like a couple months of this sort of thing going on is not going to affect them. And so if you're going after the. I think I mentioned this on my last podcast. Like, if you're going after people that are looking for price discounts and looking for, like, buy one, get one free, and your first mowing is free and all that, those promotional type of customers, they are going to be the ones who check out first on you right now. And so you really got to. I think there's a good time to really focus on, like, who are we actually advertising to? Who are we actually trying to go after in terms of our customer? And. And then if this comes up where, hey, they're a good customer and you feel like putting out. At the end of the day, though, they have to get service from somewhere. Like, if they did not get service from you, someone's got to come take care of their property or it's going to become overgrown. And so I would highly recommend you don't put the ship at risk because of a lease. And what I mean by that is, like, if someone is wanting free services and not able to pay, I would not sink your business because of that. At the end of the day, we're going to get through this. But if you've done too much financial damage, you. You're not gonna serve all your other customers that stayed on with you the entire time. And so I would really recommend selectively using that. So, for example, with the gym, we have this big issue right now because everyone's auto pay, everyone's on either credit card or ETF or efts. And so mute you. Cesar, one second.

There you go. Mute, mute.

And so we have with the gym, it's even more difficult because people are actively getting billed every single day. And so what we did is we made a video and basically told people, hey, we're either going to credit these to you in the future, like these weeks that were closed, or you can freeze your account. And that being said, a gym is very different than lawn care and landscaping, because with lawn care, landscape, when you go to a property, it costs you money. With the gym, there's more fixed cost. So the gym model, we have a high fixed cost. Rent, utilities, labor, et cetera. It's all much like either on or off. If you're open, it's fixed cost. And then we, you know, we want to get our revenue to the point where we're making a margin. With landscaping, it's very different. As you get more business, you have much more variable cost. That's mostly your labor, your fuel and your materials. And so the more Late more jobs, the more work you get, typically that your expenses increase with that. So the problem is if you're giving away free services right now you have, you actually are paying money to go to their property. And so it's not like at the gym where someone is really, you know, at a hard time right now. We just give them a free month or two. Like that's simple because it doesn't change our cost structure. There's no extra cost to us to do that. But with Lansky, I'd be very careful to do that only with customers that, you know, you absolutely have to give them that free service in order for them to stay on with you. Is there a specific case though, Amity that like that has come up? Like, is it a lot of people? Like one or two or how has it been?

I'm here in Florida. We are basically still working. Orange county did a lockdown starting tonight. However, we are considered essential business. So I just made letters for all my employees and everybody has their id, so they're able to go out and still mow. We're still doing landscaping too. So we're grateful for that. It's just one or two. We really haven't gotten much of my yearly contracts canceled. But you know, I just thought one of my clients did and I said, you know what, don't worry while you get a job back, we're just going to give you that one one time primo, basically what I did with her. But it's just like you're saying, obviously, most definitely we're not going to do everybody. And not my biweekly clients or, you know, or the ones that just call just when they need us.

Yeah, one thing that I've seen a couple people do that's really interesting, we fortunately have not had to come in with this issue yet. And that is to get people through this time. Make a customer, for example, say they're on a 12 month contract and they're like, hey, we're gonna have to get out of this. We're not can't afford it. This is what I would do in that scenario. I would say, hey, look, we're gonna give you free services for the next month, two months, whatever you want to say. And then we're going to prorate that over the course of the next 10 to 12 months. So for example, if you have a 12 month contract and you're going to give them two months free and it's $300 a month, you're going to take that $600 that you give to them for free and break it up over the next 10 months and have them charge $60 extra per month. So that way you get your revenue, but it gets them through that time and you at least show, hey, we value you, we're understanding that it's a hard time, but you don't take a financial hit on the annual level if possible.

That's definitely a great idea. I really appreciate that one had not gone that far in my thinking.

Yeah, especially if you're on 12 month contracts. That's something that I would do. Because right now, especially if you're on a contract and someone's even signed something, they feel bad even bringing it up because they know they're actually in a contract. However, if you really want to show that you care and things that that's something you can do to hey, look, we're going to take the one or two months, we're going to take that cost and just break it up over the next 10 months. Which for them isn't going to be huge, like $60 a month where they can probably do that. If they're actually in operation and you know, their businesses are running, they have a job. That's something I would think about. I've seen that work pretty well for several of our couple of our franchisees have done it too. Hey Phil, how's it going? You got a question?

Not yet, just listening right now.

Okay. Just maybe mute your microphone.

So with all that being said, as far as you were talking about, you don't really, in this time, you don't really want the customers that are going after free services or looking for price shopping, etc. What is your Facebook or Google Ads advertising strategy? Right now.

We'Re really focusing on the customer that physically cannot do their lawn. In other words, right now if someone is at home, they lost their job, they're going to mow their lawn themselves. But if they have money and they are 65, 70 year old plus and they physically cannot mow their grass, someone has to do it for them. That's who we're going after. And in order to appeal to them, we're making it very clear that they have to have no interaction with us. And so we do. We can do a drive by, we can do a satellite estimate, we can, we don't, we don't require payment via check or cash. It's all done via CRM. And so communicating that in a Facebook post is really valuable. So we gave it yesterday, we posted it on Facebook and Instagram as well as the franchisees it's basically a picture of our.

Mascot and then a mower and then it's yellow background, so it kind of pops with a red title that says no in person appointment needed. And it's just getting people like stop number one and then to recognize it. Like, they don't need to have an appointment with us to get service. They can literally call us within 24 hours, have an email in their inbox. They accept the services, we're there the next day, and they don't have to worry about having that contact with people. And so that's only going to work for people right now that physically cannot do their lawn. And that is like, we tried this a few years ago and it worked decently. And I'm playing with the idea of trying this again. We just haven't had to market that much locally. I'm playing with the idea of toying it. And that is there's a statistic in a study that's been done that one of the leading causes of death for older individuals is them out in their yard doing their. Trying to do their lawn, trying to get the gutters cleaned out, trying to clean their roof off, trying to trim bushes, operating equipment that they're not. They don't have the balance for. And so we, a couple of years ago we sent this email out and we got a huge response. It was more for spring cleanup. But I'm playing with the idea of trying to use that for mowing too, because it's a completely factual statement that they should not be out there if they have artificial limbs, if they have health issues, they should not be outside operating very heavy equipment, operating equipment that they're not familiar with. And so that's really who we're targeting right now. We're not targeting the professional because that professional is most likely at home and most likely capable of doing their own lawn. And if they're in a. If they're either fearful or they've lost their job, they're going to do it themselves. So we're really going after the person that physically cannot do their lawn because of their age and they have the money to be not price sensitive at this time. They're looking for value in terms of fast estimate time, professional website, professional staff. And that's something that we're trying to focus on right now.

So then do you have your settings for your advertising? Everybody targeting 60 plus?

We're doing 45 plus. Just because you just don't know, like Some people are 50 years old and they literally are incapable of mowing their Lawn. So we're doing 45 and up. We've always targeted 45 and up on a couple of our ads where we have pitched that sort of. Of factual or like the study that was done about that, that's when we're targeting more like 55 plus. But in our. In general, with all our ads online, we're target. And when we do every door, direct mail, and we're looking at which neighborhoods we want to hit, we're generally targeting 45 and up.

Okay, that's good. Yeah, that helps. Because I'm using PPC right now. I haven't used Facebook because I just. I haven't been able to be successful with them, but PPC has been good. My phone was ringing off the hook before all this coronavirus took off, and then it slowed down for a while.

You know, we don't know about you.

Guys, but we got snow out here in Spokane yesterday, so it's been slow because it's colder now. But I know as soon as the weather warms up, it's calls are gonna start coming in. I just got an email earlier, so that's good to know about that.

Yeah. If you're doing. If you're doing Google, what I would say is on your first or second headline of your ad, put in no appointment necessary. And then one another one of those headlines do estimates in 24 hours. Because people. That's what people are looking for. That being said, remember when someone's going to Google, they have intent to buy and they're looking for lawn care services, whereas on Facebook, you got to do a creative that's gonna pop enough so they even stop or like a headline is gonna make them stop. And so that's really what I'd be looking at is if you're doing the creative and Facebook hasn't worked for you a lot of times because people aren't even stopping to read what you have to say in terms of having a compelling headline and a creative that's going to pop. And so one thing that's kind of a quick tip for everyone out there is you're doing Facebook stuff and you're doing an ad. Make sure you look. If you haven't seen a color wheel before, just Google color wheel. And you want to try to use opposite spectrums of the color wheel. So, for example, there's a reason why you have a lot of logos that are red and yellow, and that's because they're on opposite sides of the spectrum of the color wheel. And when you have that opposite, it draws a Lot of attention. And so you'll see a lot in advertising and things that people use opposite colors and it makes you stop. It makes you kind of like draws attention to it. So that's just a quick thing. That's why a lot of times we'll do red. Red text on top of yellow background.

Thank you. That helps.

Yep. Welcome, Andy. Hey, what's up? Everyone else hopping on Caesar? Not much. How you doing? Good. You are doing thatching incorporation today?

That was the other day. But I am out working one of my guys, his wife had their baby, so I'm having to fill in a little bit today. Got it. Very cool. You got something you want to share or talk about? I'm just here to observe and listen, honestly. Cool, Cool. All right. Maybe mute your microphone if you don't have a question. That'd be great. Thanks, brother. Okay, how do I do that? Let me see.

Hey, Mike.

You got it. Go ahead, Phil.

So recently, well, I switched over to Lawn Pro this year. I used to use Yardbook, Now I use Lawn Pro. And I'm doing online payments through stripe. And I know there's a processing fee. It's like 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. Now online, or you can choose if you take a hit or the customer takes a hit, or you can choose a flat rate fee. What's your opinion? Should the business takes a hit or should the customer have to pay the fee?

What.

What are you suggesting?

Honestly, this is. This is like my answer. This is pretty standard. That is like, if you ever went into a gas station or, okay, let's take the gas station off the table. Let's do grocery store, restaurant. Basically anywhere that you do transactions with and they did not accept a credit card, you'd be like, what in the world? Like, seriously, I have to pay check or cash. And then like, when was the last time you went into a store or a restaurant? They're like, oh, that's going to charge you more. We're going to charge you more if you use your credit card. And so, like, I would highly recommend, like, the thing is, you want to take away all friction of that sale and that payment, right? So whether it be like, ideally, everyone's on auto pay, and then right behind that is accepting the credit card and having those processing payments. So, like, the. The thing, if you raise Your price by $1 an hour, you're going to cover those fees. And so another thing is too, we are able to sell jobs, especially projects where we require 50% down. It's much easier to get 50% down on a project and get them to commit when you accept the credit card. Because you're like, hey, Mr. Jones, look what we'll do, I know it's 50% down. I know you owe us $2,000 just to get on the schedule. What you can do is charge it to a credit card and then we'll put you on the schedule for 30 days out. That means you got 30 days to pay off your credit card. We're going to, we'll then do the work and then you can pay the final bill and get another 30 days to pay it off again. And so really you can actually advertise that you offer financing simply by having a credit card processing. And I would highly recommend that you don't pass that along. The customer just eat that in your cost. Like if you're charging $50 per man hour right now, if you, if you went to 52, you'd immediately cover all those costs plus more. And so there's always going to be people that pay with check. And so you really only need to equilibrate usually about 1 1/2% of your revenue in terms of what you're going to pay in fees, just depending on what type of market you're in and if you're doing commercial residential projects, et cetera. But I would highly recommend just move your hourly rate up a dollar or two. It's literally not going to hardly change anything in terms of what the customer is. Like your closing ratio isn't going to go down because you charge $2 extra per hour on a 20 hour project. Right. Like that's not going to make or break it. I would just take the professionalism that gets tacked along with your name when you just accept the payment and it just as seamless as possible.

All right, I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for that input.

But I actually like the fact that Lawn Pro and I don't know, I don't know if Yard Book allows it to where they do allow you to have that extra put on there. One thing I like about Yard Book is because it's geared for much smaller operations is it does allow people to leave tips digitally, which a lot of times I my way of convincing people to go to credit cards like, hey, allow people to leave tips and that will cover usually your processing fees. That being said.

A company scales tips is something that's very difficult to keep track of as well as it sometimes seems kind of sleazy to ask people for tips once you've done a service for them. And they're paying a good. I'd rather charge higher premium prices and provide the value and not be like, hey, can I have a tip afterwards? But anyways, those are a couple thoughts I've seen on Lawn Pro as well as Yard Book when you're starting out.

Yeah, it's actually one thing that I like is that people can. I was talking to Joseph. He switched over to Service Autopilot and he has everybody's credit cards on file. I mean, I was talking about it. I'm like, I'm trying to transition everybody to, you know, add their credit cards. I've had like four or five of my customers put their credit cards in, which is nice. I'm starting. But with that said, I still have, you know, people that pay online, but it's cool because they can actually leave a tip. So in reality, I guess it's good both ways.

So.

Yeah, but I'm trying to get.

I think the big thing is like when you get a card on file, the best thing about it is cash flow. That is the day that you want to invoice and the day you want to charge them. You get money in your bank the next day, maybe next day, the day after that. Right. And so like for us, for example, we make an automation service autopilot that as soon as we schedule any mowing job or recurring service at all, it immediately sends them an email. And it's all about how you pitch it to the customer. And if you pitch it as like, hey, we have to have your credit card on file because we want to charge you or whatever, like, whatever you pitch that, that's not going to go over as well. You're not going to get any people signing up for auto pay. If you pitch it like, hey, this new auto pay thing, our customers love it. You don't have to worry about your bill. You'll still get a receipt every month. When we charge your card. You don't have to think about, don't worry about it. Like, if you pitch it from that perspective, we have like 70 to 80% of our people that will use that automation, click on the form, fill out their card information. And what's cool about Service Auto parts, new processor called Clearance is they will actually automatically update the credit cards. So you don't have to worry about people's payments dropping anymore. So it's kind of cool. It costs 30 cents every time that they do it. But that's a deal in terms of pick up the phone and get new card information. It costs to take me way longer so that's kind of a cool thing. They're just a follow up on that. Mickey, Seth, Dom, welcome. Toby. Toby, where you at? You're like a log cabin, man.

That your shop?

This is my house. This is what I do for my office.

What the only way that this has really affected me so far is I lost my childcare. So my wife works Tuesdays and Thursdays and I have to fit all my work into Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So this is my office. Watch my three year old day.

Oh man. Oh man. Yeah, it's been crazy because like it really affected everybody, right? Like, like there's no one that's not being affected by this. And so it's interesting because how fast it came literally like a month ago, none of us were thinking about this. We were thinking about like gearing up for this spring rush. And so I really feel like if this like even this morning. So for example, this morning, the stock market, what happened? The stock market was really important in terms of macroeconomically because they had a record number of unemployment filed cases files like 3.3 or 3.5 million unemployment cases in the US that is like four times bigger than we've ever had in a week in the United States, ever. But the thing is, when those cases were reported, people, the stock market went up. And what that meant for in a lot of ways is that the general public thinks that the market believes that we've hit the bottom in terms of the stock market. So that was kind of a positive sign that I saw. But like, for example, like we had to lay two people off last week in our call center because they're not considered essential and they couldn't work from home. And like I've never had to lay someone off in my entire life. And so it's just kind of different times we're going through. But yeah.

Do you actually think the market's bottomed out?

I'm not going to predict them. I don't like I follow it very closely more or less just to know the macroeconomics of everything. But I'm not a predictor of that sort of thing. I jumped in the one day a couple weeks ago when the stock market crashed like 2,400 points. I jumped in because I knew the next day there was a really good economic report in terms of how many new jobs were added the month before. And I knew it come back up. And so I jumped in for one day, jumped back out and just basically made some money. That was, that was a Thursday and a Friday that I jumped in, but I'm not in right now. It's just too volatile. There's just too much going on. And.

One phrase from the wrong person right now can sink you. And so in my opinion, it could fall maybe 10, 20% more. It really could. And they're just. You could say the opposite, though, especially after this morning. This morning was a good sign, though.

Yeah, it's weird. It was a weird sign.

Yeah.

Go ahead. Yep.

Anything new that you guys and sort of cut you off there? Anything new that you guys are doing related to P4P or that entire, I guess, sector since the conference in January?

Let me think. We haven't changed the system at all. We have our version two coming out here in a couple weeks. But one thing that has been more and more on our mindset spring is damaged cases. And so we haven't changed the system at all. But this is the time when damage cases happen. You have a bunch of new guys out in the field, it's wet, the guys are tired, some of them are sick. Things like that. And so this is when it's horrible. But like, if someone damages. So for example, let me think about the damage cases that I saw in the team meeting. They had. Someone had nicked an RV with the back of a zero turn when they were turning. The other one was they ran over some plants with a skid steer. A project that they were doing.

Things like that. It's lame because literally someone can do really, really well, but then they do a damage case and it wipes out all their performance dollars for the whole pay period. But we really haven't changed anything. But this is the time when it, like, hurts my soul when I see payroll because, like, there'll be three or four of them that will hit base pay simply due to the fact of damages or even just yellow slips, having to go back to jobs because they mess something up. And it's good, though. Like, in one regular way, it's good. Like these new guys, it takes one paycheck where they feel like they busted their butt, did really good, and where they go from $24 an hour down to 18 because they made one mistake. And they begin to realize the importance and the cost of inefficiencies and damages. So that's the biggest thing that P4P has done. They just think about it more, right? Like, so instead of me razzing them all the time, it's like, hey, guys, I don't have to razz them from the point of like, hey, hey, the company lost money. I'm like, guys, you could have made a lot more money on your paycheck. And so that is much more effective. And I'd much rather come from that standpoint. And that's why P4P is so good.

Yeah, makes sense. We're going full P4P this spring, so I'm excited for that.

Cool.

One thing, what I was going to say just in follow up to the stock market question a couple people have asked me about. With the stock market so low, should you invest or should I invest that money into my business? And this is what I say every single time. And that is the reason a small business is so awesome. It's one of the best investment vehicles because let's say we take $10,000 right now and you put it in the stock market and let's say we wait for 12 months, let's say 12 months, and this whole thing comes back, we have a 50% increase, we're back to record stock market in 12 months. That means you're going to go from $10,000 to $15,000. You're going to gain $5,000 for doing nothing. That being said, right now, if you take $10,000 and you go spend it on marketing, you can easily get 100 to $150,000 more in revenue. And if you're running a 20% net profit business, that's 20 to $30,000 net profit on that $10,000 that you spent on marketing. And so this is the reason why small business is the best ROI if it's put into a system. Right. So the reason I'm able to give you those numbers, because I know I'm looking for 10 to 20x of my marketing dollars in annual revenue in the first year. So if I'm spending 10,000, I expect at least 100 to 200,000 extra revenue. And if you're running a 20% margin business, you can run those numbers differently for you. But like, if you're running a 20% net margin, like bottom line profit, end of the day, you should be netting out 100 to 200% ROI, which you're not going to get in the market, even if it comes back really strong and we go back to record. And so this is something that a lot of I'm worried about because a lot of small business owners right now, because the market's so low, they're like, oh, I'm just going to put a bunch of money into the market. But I'm like, no, that money, if you put it in your business right now, not only is you're going to get better roi. You're going to even, you're going to even further roi. Because no one else is spending, spending money in marketing. And the customer's mind is more open to the fact that they don't have five flyers having to do with lawn care in their, in their mailbox. They don't have door hangers every single day. And so I feel like there's a big opportunity and I would hate for someone to go spend 20, 30,000 in the market, make 10 grand, 15 grand over the next year. When they spend that money on marketing, they could get five, six times that in their small business. And at the end of the day, in your own business, you've now built equity. Like we're not even talking about equity, we're just talking about direct dollars and profit. But if you actually are building your business by 150,000 next year, there's a massive amount of equity you've built in the business too. And so that's something I'd keep you thinking about if you do have some spare cash right now. Usually if you have a good business, a small business, a great place to invest.

Toby, I see your 3 year old. Love it. Doing a great job on your babysitting career right now.

Cool. All right, I got a few more minutes and then I gotta hop on.

A call.

If my lawn care doesn't work out.

Awesome. Very cool. Anyone else have one more question? And I got to hop on a phone call here. 230, my 10.

Non lawn care. If nobody jumps in. Were you playing options or what.

When I jumped in the market? Yeah, no, just index. So I didn't doubt just because that was, that was. Yeah, I did the index.

Okay.

All right, well everyone stay safe, stay, stay healthy and hope everyone can kill the spring rush. I think if this is a short term thing, we're going to have a very, very busy summer because all the projects that usually right now you're getting estimates for, we're going to get that come June, July. If it's a longer term thing. People like Christian who are writing letters to their competitors about buying them out are going to be successful. And so definitely if you have cash right now, that's something that to be thinking about end of 2020, once people realize they're not going to make it through winter, especially if you have a three, four month winter and you have cash, come that time there's going to be people going out of business. So even in our local market there's about four companies that are about our size locally. And I heard from all of them, one of them is going out of business. I already know for a fact one of them is jokingly saying they're going to go out of business. And then the other two, they're just going to try. Whether they just say it's going to be a tough year. And so. But if you have the cash come, that's really when I feel you're gonna get bargains, because people are gonna realize they have no money going into winter. So, anyways. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day, and I'll try to do one or two more of these maybe next week. Take care.