Mike Andes explains why lawn care crews shouldn't do free add-on jobs for customers. Set a 30-second limit for quick tasks, then require anything longer to go through an estimate process. A pay-for-performance structure naturally discourages giving away work since unpaid time cuts into crew bonuses.
Next question. Hey Mike, I'm Grayson from North Carolina. How exactly do you go about customers asking employees to do extra tasks such as trimming shrubs, weeding a bed, etc. While they're on a mowing route? Do the employees need to know how to price those on the spot so they don't have to call me about how to charge the customer? Alright, so this is a distinction. When you begin to grow your business, you are going to lose a little bit of that.
Impulsive income that is the customer walks out of their door, is like, hey, can you do this for me? And you're like, yeah, it's 40 bucks. You might lose out on that if you start building your business and having systems. But trust me, that's not scalable, it's not recurring, it's one off. And usually that's where mistakes happen. And so I highly recommend you have a system in place where that when someone asks for something extra outside of obviously 30 seconds, like usually the employees are going to do that, but have a system in place where if it's something extra, they has to be submitted through an estimate process. And if you have P4P, your crew will not just want to just give out freebies to people because it's coming off of their dime because they are not getting any extra performance dollars if they're spending time doing free things. So usually for us, our crew is pretty good about doing little things for the customer to make them happy. They know that they're first. However, if it's going to take them longer, number one, P4P isn't stepping in because we don't have a job set up for them to clock into. And then secondarily they're basically, you know, you're gonna lose those jobs, you're gonna lose those. Hey, can you do this real quick? Yeah. $20, $30. Do not build your business on that. Have where when your employees get a customer to do that, you say no worries, we can take some pictures and we'll get that the office and they'll get an estimate to you in 24 hours or tomorrow or whatever. You do have that system in place and your employees need to know what to say in those situations and you got to train them exactly what to say and follow that specific system.
