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. Right now, we're finding two biggest issues with 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 able to 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 stuffed 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 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 questions, 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 a few more 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, have you guys had locked down? 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 gonna 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 or, 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 centers 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?

Yeah. Nice to hear from you.

Good, good.

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 like they all of a sudden see the money coming out and so. Hey guys, you're not asking a question. Just maybe mute your, 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. Yep, Jeff, I'm 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've 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 customer, I think I mentioned this on my last podcast, if you're going after people 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 gotta. I think there's a good time to really focus on, okay, who are we actually advertising to? Who are we actually trying to go after in terms of our customer? 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 gonna come take care of their property or it's gonna 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 sync 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're not going to 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 paying, everyone's on, on either credit card or ETF or eft. And so you see there, one second.

There you go. Mute, mute. And so we, 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 long term landscaping because with long term 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 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, to do that. But with landscape, 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 a 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 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 bi weekly clients or you know, are 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 going to have to get out of this. Like we're not can't afford it. This is what I would do in that scenario. I would say, hey look, we're going to 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. You. But it gets them through that time and you at least show, hey, we value you, we 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. I 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 these 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. 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.

Good, good.

So, so with all that being said, as far as you're 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, you know, price shopping, etc. What is your Facebook or Google Ads advertising strategy right now if you care to.

Yeah, we're really focusing on the customer that physically cannot do their lawn. In other words, right now, if someone is at home, they've 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 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. 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 two, 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're not, they don't have the balance for. And so we, a couple 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 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 targeting. 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, as 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.

I 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 estimate within 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 text on top of yellow background. Thank you.

That helps.

Yep. Welcome, Andy. Hey, what's up, Caesar? Not much. How you doing? Good. You? You are doing thatching and corporation 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?