Do NOT Compare Yourself to Lawn Care YouTubers... HERE'S WHY!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today we are going to be answering questions. And before we get into the show though, I want to remind everyone of lawn careweb design.com it's a company I started so that lawn care and landscape professionals can create their website without any sort of contract. It's just a monthly set fee. We design your custom website from scratch and, and we work on that with you. It usually takes four to six weeks and so definitely would love to work with you on that. Go to lawncarewebdesign.com for more information. Now, today we are answering questions from the texting platform that I use. And so if you're not on that already, you should join it. It's 855-575-1267. And just text the word landscaping to that number and then you can have direct contact with me. And I read every single one of these. I don't always get a chance to respond, but today, this morning, I knew that I have about the next 35 minutes in my schedule. And so I sent everyone a text message and asked for questions. And so we're going to answer as many as we can. We're not going to get through all of these. I can already see as I just log in here that they're just, oh, my word, a lot and a lot of questions. Mercy, page two. Okay, we're gonna be here. Well, okay, so I'm gonna try to get as many of these in as I can. Mercy. Goodness. But I will absolutely make sure I read these all. And this is the best way to contact me if you're not a franchisee. So again, for that number, text landscaping. Where did I go? Text the word landscaping to five. Sorry, 855575. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into these questions. Looks like there is a bunch and here are more coming in as I'm on the platform. Okay, first one, how do you keep track of customers that already gave you a Google or Facebook review? Are you also using Service Autopilot for this or a spreadsheet? Thank you. Okay, good question. So we use Service Autopilot's automations and for all the franchisees, we just created this new automation that actually asks for surveys from customers after their first service. Ask them one for one every four months. Every single customer, they ask for a survey every four months. Now, if that customer gives a five star review, a five star satisfaction survey, then they are given a chance to post that online on Social media, on Google, on Nextdoor, all those other things, if they give less than five stars, then they are given the ability to leave a comment and then that comment is sent to us and it tells them that we're gonna talk about it at our next team meeting. And we appreciate that. Constructive criticism, et cetera, et cetera. And so what that does is prevent people from posting negative reviews and allowing us to actually the best thing is actually getting negative surveys before the person just randomly cancels. Like that's the most frustrating thing to when a customer just randomly cancels service. And so to prevent that we're trying to always be asking for their satisfaction surveys, getting these in and then if they're five stars, they're gonna get an automatic email that asks for reviews. So in terms of do we keep track of which customers leave positive or negative reviews? We do, we tag their profile. It's all in the automation. It gets tagged whether or not they leave a positive review. However, I'm not going to stop asking for views because they might post on other sites and I'm not gonna ever ask for stop asking for customer surveys because I don't want a rogue crew going out there and doing something crazy. But just because they left the five star review, I assume that everything's fine and dandy. Things change and over time. A lot of times the biggest complaint of customers is that as time goes on that a service declines in its quality. And so I want to catch those and by having those surveys sent out automatically we catch those sooner. Next question. I don't know the names of these people because I just get phone numbers. So by the way, if you text me, don't assume, do not. I do not know your name unless I know your phone number off by heart, which guess what, I only know about three or four phone numbers in the world off by heart so I do not know your name. But this message for example comes from someone with an area code 204. That's all I know. Top three tips to scale faster. It's a really general question in terms of if I actually try to answer it I'd probably say great people, really good marketing and systems so that you do not have to be in the daily operations. Next one, someone from a 515 area code. Best way to limit non billable hours for maintenance and landscape teams beginning and end of day. This is a no brainer. I'm going to give it to you. It's P4P pay for performance. People will not be dittling around your shop before and after work, if. Especially if they're on the clock, if they are not getting paid for it, they'll try to get their trucks cleaned out as quick as possible. And then, that being said, even like today, I know I was in contact with my office manager, sometimes they'll stand here and want to talk, but guess what? They're not on the clock. And so if they want to talk to people, great. That's fantastic. But at least you're not knowing that they're just trying to sit there sapping the clock. They're actually working as hard as they want, as hard as they can. If they want to make the money, and if they want to talk to people before and after work, that's great, that's fine. But. But they should be doing that on their time. And so best ways to limit that is really just gonna be P4P in terms of other methods around that. You could create other stuff, but a lot of times it's gonna be at the detriment of your culture in terms of, like, not having team meetings, staggering start times just so that they don't interact with each other. Like, I like the aspect of interaction and having people together. Like, there's a lot of value to that. Like, this whole coronavirus thing is killing me because we don't get team meetings. And I'm gonna see everyone every single morning. They show up to work and they go straight to their truck. And I don't like that. So I like to have. And even when we were on P4P, I allowed for people to talk in the office and things. I just didn't want them talking out in the outside, in the shop. But if they wanted to come and talk together and like that culture, I liked that, and I was willing to pay some for it because there's a lot of value to that. Okay, next question. Sorry if I'm not answering these super in depth. There's just so many that I want to get through, as many as I possibly can. What does your company use for invoicing, time tracking, and payroll besides service automations? And does your office manager handle the payroll and bookkeeping? Thank you so much, Mike. We use service autopilot for all of those things. In terms of Payroll, we use QuickBooks because it syncs with our accountant, and they do all the stuff we would use gusto at the local office. However, my accountant gives us basically for free, our accounting, our bookkeeping services. And because I pay so much in accounting fees and other stuff with the franchise and things, so they basically do it for us. And so our office, though, sends that payroll report, and that is basically just an accumulation of hours that everyone works every single week, and they determine how much overtime there is and all that. But in terms of actually running payrolls, paying L and I, paying.

Employment, security department, all of that, that is being done by an accountant. However, everything else we do in service, autopilot.

All right, next question.

Okay. Okay, that was a different question. That cool. All right, next one is some tips for starting a lawn care business with zero clients in today's current conditions of the coronavirus. I want to go door to door and pass out flyers, but I think people would get upset about knocking on the door and coming within close proximity of them. Huge fan of the podcast. Thank you, Mike. And that is from Mike in Cleveland, Ohio. He actually put his name on there. Area code 440. All right, so, yeah, so if you're in the coronavirus right now and you have. We're gonna go with this example where you have zero customers, because I answer this differently. If you had an existing database, but if you had zero clients, I would say that as soon as your restrictions are lifted, that's when I would go doing more guerrilla marketing stuff like knocking on doors, et cetera, et cetera, and get ready for that. Like a lot of people, this is what's going to happen. They're taking time off right now, oh, I can't go out and I can't market. And what's going to happen in 30 days when this is all lifted? They're going to be caught with their pants down because they're not going to be ready to go out and actually do the marketing that they were wishing they could have done. So, like, have a plan in place, and it doesn't matter if that plan gets shifted off because your state continues to have restrictions. Have a plan in place for the 30 days after the restrictions are lifted and focus on that. Right now, you. You can't do a whole lot. You might be able to do door hangers if your local market isn't super, super sensitive or there's not a lot of cases. People might not mind door hangers, but knocking on people's doors and talking to them is just not gonna be allowed right now. And so there's a lot of different things you can be doing. A lot of it should be online. In terms of if you have zero clients, I would recommend Facebook groups going on nextdoor, going on Craigslist and just trying to integrate with the community. Do not be salesy. Be. Be professional and if people are talking about landscaping or lawn care on a local Facebook group. When I say local Facebook group, I'm talking about your neighborhood and your city and neighbors coming together and creating these local groups. That's a lot of value in there. And you can be really honest and say, hey, look, I'm just getting started. I don't have any customers and I can't market to anyone right now. If anyone needs lawn care landscaping services in this group, I'd love to be of service and really play off the locality being local on those small groups on Facebook and social media.

Another question. Area code 646. Is there a website that can figure out the square footage of a property so I can get an accurate budget hour? How much to charge? Yes. Google Maps has this lawn pro service, autopilot. They both have it integrated in their software. But yeah, like Google Maps will do the job. Oh, okay. This looks like it's a follow up question, but I don't. When you guys send multiple texts, sometimes I get them jumbled up if I'm getting a ton of texts at the same time. So. Okay, so here's a question. This is a good question from area code 727. How on earth do you charge $80 an hour for mowing? Or how about if I should increase mowing prices? Now I had a big plan and now I'm not sure what to do. Or what about some of your failures? To be honest, listening to you gets me exhausted and discouraged sometimes. Oh, that's not good. Or how do you know if your guys are staying, the workload is too much, if they are slackers or you should raise price? Okay, there's a bunch of questions here. All right, let's address the first one. How on earth do you charge $80 an hour for mowing? Good question. Making sure you're really, really efficient so that way the savings are passed along to the customer. So when we look at our pricing, we are in the middle of the pack in terms of our markets. Usually we're not super expensive and we're not the cheapest. But the reason that we can charge that premium in terms of hourly prices, because we're super efficient. So whether it be trailerless setups, having your racking all done correctly, paying guys P4P, like someone on P4P is going to be moving a lot faster. So I might charge higher per hour, but they're there less time. So the cost of the customer. So efficiencies and cutting out waste in your business is always going to lead to a better outcome for the employees because they can make more money for the business because you're going to be more profitable. And for the customer who's not paying for needless time and waste in your business, they're paying for the product they want. And so becoming more efficient is always the most important thing you can do in your business. And that's how you can charge premium pricing in terms of hourly rates is because you are really efficient and you get more done in one hour.

All right, next question of this person. So this person from area code 727 had that as their first question. Next question was, how about. I think it meant how do I should I increase my prices now? I had a big plan and now I'm not sure what to do. Okay. So, yeah, in the coronavirus, I would not raise your prices. If you raise your prices now, you're gonna have a much higher rate of cancellation. We usually have a cancellation rate between 5 and 10%. When we raise prices based upon using our letter that people in the course, they've seen that based upon the way that you can spin that. But in this environment, I would imagine. I'm just going to guess because I don't actually have numbers on this, because anyone that I've talked to, I recommend not to do this. Raising prices right now is going to be a red flag because anyone that's looking at their budget is going to be looking for things to cut. Right now. People are cut, happy when it comes to their wallet and their budget. So I would not increase prices now. I would wait if not till the fall. It depends really in your market how fast this virus and the economic impact changes. Like if it's fast and everyone has a really late spring rush and all of a sudden the middle of June and July, where everyone's getting rushed with work because now people can go back to work and they can't mow their lawn anymore and they need you to come back if that happens, you. You want to raise your prices when it's really, really busy because it's harder for that person to go out and get another landscaper or a lawn care professional. And it's also cause they're busy too. And because in the time when you're really busy, you're not really too scared about losing a few of your customers that are the least profitable. In the middle of summer, when you're trying to find work in the middle of winter, you don't want to raise prices because they that you need every customer you can get. Whereas during those really busy times when everyone's working overtime, you want to cut out your least efficient and least profitable customers. And so if someone leaves over raising prices, then it's not a big deal. During the coronavirus, I would definitely wait. I would not raise your prices. And you can disagree with me and say whatever. That's just my opinion. Next part of this question, which I want to address because I've never got this before. What about some of your failures? To be honest, listening to you gets me exhausted and discouraged sometimes.

Hey, I've never had this question, okay? So I've had lots of failures. I've talked about those on a couple different podcasts and videos. If you just look up failures or hardships of lawn care, Mike Andes on Google, you'll probably find that video. I talk about, like, five different specific times that, like, I really messed up. I think there was one a few weeks ago. I actually talked about my hardships of getting started and all that. Like, those are good videos. I could talk about that all day. But the part I want to address here is. Cause I never had this. And that is, to be honest, listening to you gets me exhausted and discouraged sometimes. First of all, I probably talk fast. It probably makes you exhausted just trying to listen to me. I'm sorry about that. I do talk really quickly.

In terms of getting you discouraged because you feel that I don't have failures.

Listen to those other failure videos and then maybe you'll feel like, like. Like this is the thing. Whenever you talk about someone that is posting stuff online or digitally and sharing information.

A lot of times people can, like, put them in this, like, ivory box. And like, a lot of times the franchisees come here and they're here for three days and they're training with me, like, oh, like, he's a regular person. And like, this is not like some massive big thing. Like, it's just we're just normal people sharing our lives, trying to help other people on social media and YouTube and things like that. I've had plenty of failures. I've been very, very blessed, very fortunate, very lucky to have great people, a great family, a lot of support. Odds are all stacked for me. And so you should not be discouraged. Everyone has been dealt a different deck of cards in life, and what you do with them is really what you're responsible for. I've been given a lot of really good things. And so I feel very responsible to be able to give back to people and do very well in terms of success and passing that along to others and giving and supporting other people where I can. And so I do as much as I can in that manner. But I expect a lot of myself because I have been given so much. The Bible talks about how to whom much is given, much is required. And I am a big believer in that. I've been given a lot. And so I really feel a big responsibility and duty to give as much as I can, be as successful as I possibly can, work as hard as I can, be the best person I can, be the healthiest person I can like every aspect, and I push myself hard. And.

You should never be discouraged. And even if you were given a good hand and you were given a great family, a great upbringing, and you were great, all the things were for you, and then you messed up and failed, like, you might have gotten something that I don't have, and that is an experience that I didn't have of you. Maybe you went through a bankruptcy. Maybe. I talked to someone on the phone this morning, and they were pretty discouraged because they're 47 years old and they feel like, I think, 45, 47, something like that. And they said their whole life they've wanted to, you know, build businesses and sell them and buy them when they're failing and turn them around. And that's never happened. And they've always feel like they've kind of spun their wheels and now they're, you know, they have nothing to show for it. And the bottom line is you're never too old and you're never too, like, you can always rebound. You can always come back and make something great, whether it be success wise or relationship wise or in your physicality and, like, your health, like, you can always come back. You can always bounce back. Do not be discouraged. And definitely, definitely whatever. You do not allow the successes of other people to get you discouraged. If anything, I hope that my success or what I share here and what I'm trying to build is an encouragement and inspiration and not a discouragement. Or somehow you're comparing yourself. Like, when you start comparing yourself to others, good or bad, you'll lose. You will lose whether you start comparing yourself like, oh, I'm so good, because other people are like, here, you know? And like, this is the reason why I feel like I was able to go through college at such a young age and be okay. I never compared myself to people my age, and I never compared myself to other people that I would go into college with that were twice my age, three times my age, and I never compared that. I was like, I'm going to do the best I can. I'm going to be who I am, and I'm going to focus on that. And if you do that, I think you'll lead to success far more often than not. And the last thing I ever want to do is be on this podcast talking about my successes, the growth of the businesses, and you somehow to feel discouraged because of that. I hope it inspires you, and I hope that I balance it out enough by showing some humanity and showing that we all have failures. We all have times when we really mess up, and those are what make us into the people who we like. The character that I am today is because of the failures. The character that I have today is because of the grind and the hard work and not, like, asking for money from my brother when I was just getting started, and like, borrowing here and using credit cards and finagling things to get started. Like, that was the start of it all. And that's what made me into who I am today. And we're going through this massive virus right now. We're going through this massive economic contraction. This is gonna make people and it's gonna break some people, and that's sad. I feel horrible about that. But it's gonna make some people very, very strong. And it's gonna show some really great leadership characteristics. It's gonna have people take massive opportunities in their industry. And that's what I live for. And I hope that you seeing someone else's success does not discourage you. It should never do that. If that's you, I would take a really close look, and I don't know who this is, but if that's. I would take a really close look at yourself. Because if you see someone else's success and that discourages you, you're never going to be able to play with the bigger players. You're never going to be able to build something really big. Because when you start building something big, you need to be able to work with people that are more successful than you. And if their success discourages you, it's going to be very, very difficult to get ahead. So that's all I want to say on that. It was really long. Sorry, but I've never had that question. So thank you for bringing that up. Whoever that was, this person, Their next question was, how do you know if your guys are saying the workload is too much, if they are slackers or you should raise prices to reduce workload? Okay, so this is a great question, man. I don't know who this is, but they're pulling it out of me today. Okay? So.

I know I'm not gonna get all these questions, but these are good ones. I haven't gotten asked these before. So how do you know if your guys are saying the workload is too much, if they're slackers or you should raise prices to reduce the workload? Okay, so number one, I hate complainers. And at our last team meeting in spring, I specifically told everyone on the team, like, you can do a lot of things, you can make a lot of mistakes, you can break a lot of things, make a lot of damage cases, have callbacks, but if you complain, that is like the chiefest of sins in my book. And so I hate complainers. I'm willing to listen. That's different. It's different when someone is trying to be constructive and help the business grow or help their team members or improve the business versus complaining. So first of all, if they were complaining and they were like, that's one thing, but let's say that they're actually worried about the fact that their workload is too much. And for example, with pay for performance, they get paid based on budget hours. And there are times where there's not enough budget hours, even if they work really, really hard. And so you've got to be sensitive to that. And especially this is when data comes into hand. For example, if you're tracking people's budget hours versus actual hours on mowing jobs every single week, and then there is someone that's complaining about how long it's taking. Well, if you have the data to look and say, look, 80% of the people that go to that job meet the budget hours or beat it. So you, on the other hand, are taking 50% longer. Guess what? That person might be a slacker or a complainer, or they just had a bad day or the weather was bad. So like, there's a lot of different factors that go into it in terms of me looking at pricing and workloads, I'm looking at the data over the course of six to 12 months, and that's what I'm gonna go based upon. That was a long answer to that one question. So whoever that was, good job. You got a lot of time. Let's see how many more of these we can get to. I'm in the process of researching what my first truck set up will be. Do you feel that a half ton truck is sufficient for a trailerless setup? What point do you feel a three quarter ton truck would be necessary? Thanks. Yes, I do think a half ton pickup is sufficient for a trailer setup 100%. I feel that a three quarter ton pickup is required or better if you're gonna haul an enclosed trailer, if you're gonna have a zero turn, and if you're gonna have a dump trailer for.

Cleanups and hauling debris and materials like mulch and gravel and soil. So that's when I would upgrade to at least a three quarter ton.

We are on weekly. Okay, let's see. There's a question. Double. Okay. How do you deal with clients that say we don't need grass, hasn't grown much, but have signed up as weekly lawn care clients? And to make it worse, we show up after two weeks and the grass is a foot high. Every time this happens, I feel like we are more of an on call type of company. I try to make it very clear to the customer that we have either weekly or bi weekly. No on calls help. Mike. Okay, this is a great question. And we do something. So we require weekly service for the springtime because in our market it grows really fast during that time. We made some exceptions during the coronavirus because we knew people were stretching their budget and so we allowed for them to go bi weekly. That being said, whenever someone switches to bi weekly, we tell them if we get to your lawn and it's over 4 inches tall, there's gonna be an upcharge. And that upcharge is gonna be based upon how long that it takes the crew to mow the lawn. And so we do that all the time. If someone goes, tries to switch their schedule up on us, and I would usually say the type of customer that changes their visit schedule, you don't want them as customers and you just say goodbye, bye. But during this coronavirus thing, we have bent the rules for a few people. And again though, we are telling them if it's super overgrown, like a foot tall, and it takes the guys three hours to mow your lawn, you're gonna get charged more. And so a lot of them will actually stick to the, to the weekly price. And the only people that we've even had that problem with is the people who have been grandfathered in or we had to change from bi weekly to weekly years ago. The new customers, they're just, they're that are getting on right now. They just in their con in their estimate says you can only do weekly from these months. And so we stick to that. Also to add, we are on verbal weekly clients. We on verbal weekly agreement, no contracts. Yeah, so I totally get what you're saying. I would definitely have a weekly and A bi weekly price, give that to all of your customers. So that way if they're on weekly, but they switch to bi weekly, you already have the price and they already know that there's a 50, 60, 70, whatever percent increase you want to give on a weekly, bi weekly service. They already know what that price is. And if they are going to go off of bi weekly, you better make sure they know that when you come back there's a massive fee or there is going to be an up charge if it's more than 3, 4 inches, whatever it is in your market. So having that verbiage really clear on your estimate is very important. If you're not doing contracts telling them what your visit schedule requirements are, like if you require weekly during certain months or if you require weekly only, but then if you don't, you need to have some sort of verbiage in there about bi weekly, what that upcharge is going to be and if it's over a certain length that you're going to have an upcharge. That's what I would recommend.

All right, trying to get through more of these.

Okay, what do you think this is error code 417. What do you think about demand for our services when states start to open up? Our historical demand peak for lawn care is in April, but our state, Missouri is supposed to begin opening up in stages in May. This is the first selling season I've went through and we did really well in March before the virus started disrupting everything. I guess I'm just unsure what to expect and how to potentially capitalize on this event. So let's answer the question. That is, what do I think about demand for our services when states start to open up? I believe that if it opens up quickly, you're going to have a massive influx of work because the people who are mowing their lawn now because they're at home, they now are going to work and they need someone to take over as well as people's budgets. Now they start their. The stock market recovers. Let's assume it recovers. Their retirement counts are back. Good. Everything that they've been pent up over the winter wanting to do in their lawn care and their landscaping now can be done. And so I feel like there's going to be a massive influx of work. Late spring rush, if you would. If it opens up quickly, if this takes a long time, I feel like demand is going to be pushed into the fall. And I also believe that people are going to start figuring out how to mow their lawns themselves because they've been at home for so long now they're going to go buy a mower and that's when it will really start affecting us. That being said, you should be going after the customer that's not going to do that. That physically cannot push a lawnmower that is insulated from this environment due to their economic status. And so I would really be focusing on during this time is what is my target market? Who am I advertising to? Am I marketing to someone that physically cannot do the work or B is financially insulated from this type of event in the economy and will not be affected by this. That being said, I do feel like when this all is done that you're gonna actually get a massive influx of work. And I'm really counting that being like a June, July, which will then kind of usually most landscapers, depending on your climate, it slows down a little bit in terms of mowing during the summer months. June, July, August. I feel like that's gonna be different this year because as we recover from the virus, you're gonna get people that want landscaping jobs, cleanups, everything. Instead of doing their spring cleanup, they pushed it off, they stopped, like don't wait, wait on that. And they'll get it done as soon as everything opens up in the summer. Alright, so this one has two questions. It looks like what can be done during the estimating and contracting process to eliminate customers expecting addition to be not outlined in the quote. I have had two customers this year come back and say I thought you would do this or that when the contract clearly outlines the scope of work. Alright, so I would say in that in your estimate you need to say that anything not stated in this estimate is going to be subject to a work change order. And you might even require them do a signature or verbal an acceptance of those work change orders. But I would say in the estimate very specifically that additional charges and work change orders or are required for work that's not stated in this document. If you're going to do that, you need to be very clear what the estimate entails and what you're going to include in that work. Because if you're vague, they're going to have a lot of questions because they want to make sure what they want is covered. Next question. Would you recommend hiring an outside call center to answer the phones and schedule estimates? We are on the edge of being able to afford an office person. Yes, I would. There's two things I would say yes, in general, because there's a lot of other expenses Having to do with an office person, having an office that's heated, that you have bathrooms, that you have a break room, that you have computers, that you have Internet to pay electricity. Like you're not looking at just the wages of somebody. Like if you pay someone $20 an hour to be in the office, it's really costing you 40 plus by the time you rent a building, have all the heating, utilities, blah blah, blah, blah. And then you start getting a coffee machine and then that becomes the place where everyone hangs out and there's waste there. And then that person, if they answer 10 calls in a day, you're paying them for 10 hours or eight hours or whatever. Like if they answer 100, they'll sit there if there's no work to be done. So the nice thing about a call center is you'll pay by the time that the person's on the phone or you'll pay by the amount of work that's coming in. Whereas an office person, you might be struggling to keep them busy or you might put them on part time work in the winter when there's no work to be done. But you just want to keep them. If they're a good employee, you want to retain them and you don't want to lose them because it takes two or three months to get someone else really, really good at selling over the phone and doing what you want and scheduling and all that sort of thing. So I do recommend using call centers. All the franchisees, they use Command Center. And the reason why Command center is great is because they are all trained at Command center on not only the software, but the systems of the business. The problem with most call centers, and this is if you're not a franchisee, this is why you want to vet your call center so much, is because they're serving a bunch of different types of clients in a bunch of different industries on a bunch of different types of software. And they have a very cookie cutter approach. And they aren't as flexible. They don't know, they can't answer questions beyond just like setting up estimates and taking random phone calls. Like you want to be able to serve the customer on the phone as much as possible. And this is something that Command center, we're always pushing the envelope on in the future. We want to be like everything for the franchisees in the office right now. We do the phone calls, we do estimate request forms from online and we do set up estimates. We can also take payments over the phone and things like that because we have access in their CRM we can see their schedule. And so there's a lot of like, if you're going to go get a call center, you really need to make sure they understand your software. Number one, because you don't want to get that messed up. And number two, they need to really understand your business model. For example, if someone calls and asks about weekly versus bi weekly, they need to have an answer for that. And if it's just like, well, let me get back to you, that's useless. And so that's why we train our franchisees to give pricing and on their estimates in a certain way. So that way the command center doesn't need to contact them when a customer calls. We can already be talking to the customer about their estimate and their pricing and weekly versus bi weekly and the treatment prices and the options. We can do all that because there's a system that all the franchisees are following. And that's just not the case with call centers. And so that's my only caveat. But in general I would say yes, they're a great thing.

I think that's it. Okay, next question. Scrolling through here. Area code 716. Hey Mike. I live in New York and offer snow plowing in the winter. I have a few commercial clients that I have locked into a full year contract for lawn care, landscaping and snow plowing. It makes for nice, steady and reliable income. I want to go after more commercial clients, not huge shopping malls. Is there a huge. Is there a way to market more to those clients or is it best to just cold call or visit location and ask if they are accepting bids? Yeah, there's a big game of playing who knows who. If you know someone that knows a property manager, if you know the tenants that live inside of a multifamily residence place, all of those connections are really important and treat your property managers like gold. Their biggest thing is you don't want them to be spending time, they do not want to be going to property. So if you can save them time by taking a picture and letting them know about a tenant that's out of order, like they will love you if you tell them that there's some damage to the siding of their building and you take a picture and send it to them when you're on the property, like they will love you forever. Really nurturing those relationships is what's going to lead to success in commercial, you know, commercial maintenance. So I hope that's helpful to everyone today. I'm going to stop here and start a new video and answer the rest of these questions because this is getting really, really long. So hopefully that helped someone out there today. I'd really appreciate it. If you've watched this whole video and you've gotten something from it, could you hit the like button for me? I really appreciate it. I asked for this one time a few weeks ago and it really, really helped get more views for the video. And some new landscapers have never heard of landscape business course before and they expressed their thanks because they really need some help with the coronavirus stuff and it's really helped their business. And so I want to, I really want to reach as many landscapers as I can. I think most of you know my mission and that is to change the level of professionalism in this industry. And so if you could hit the like button, I'd really appreciate it. Does help get our name out there. Even if you want to hit the dislike button, that's fine too. If you want to comment, that's great. So anyways, thank you so much. I appreciate you guys watching, listening and we'll do part two of this tomorrow.