Do These Steps to Build a 7-Figure Business (Complete Course)

I really like to use the analogy of owning versus renting a house. When it comes to advertising and marketing, there's two different ways to create a brand and get new customers and get attention, awareness in the mind of the consumer. There's two ways. One is to rent it, the other one is to buy it. Now, if I want to go rent a house right now, I could probably do that within a couple days. I could literally have a place to move in within a couple days. It's fast, it's very easy to do, and I can immediately get results. I ie move into a house. When I look at advertising and using a platform like Google or Facebook or someone else's social media platform, I'm basically renting their space. If I put an ad in the newspaper, I'm renting that space. If I put a mailer in the USPS in the mail and send it out via post office, I'm renting the space. I'm basically paying the United States Postal Service to rent the space of the mailbox and I'm renting space all the time, fast. It's easy. I can place an ad tomorrow, get customers the next day, I can go place a Facebook ad, get customers right away. It's fast, it's easy. It's renting though. And the same way that renting a house is easy and fast. The problem with renting a house is I don't build equity. I don't get to ever step back and stop paying rent if I'm renting a house. Whereas if I go buy a house, maybe it's a longer sales process. It might take me 60, 90 days to actually find a house, move in, get a mortgage, the whole nine yards and actually get there. So little bit longer of a delayed gratification. It's a lot more expensive to own a house. But the thing is, as time goes on, eventually they'll come a time where I've paid the house off and I don't even have to anymore pay anybody. I've paid it off. It's all paid off. I look at the same thing when it comes to advertising, and that is if I can own my content, whether it be my website, whether it be media that I create, videos and pictures that I take, if I can own the medium that I create, instead of renting space on Google or renting space on Facebook ads, or renting space on a mailer or in a newspaper or whatever, on a radio billboard, I'm renting space. If I can have it to where I create organic content that I own that. People come to watch from me. That's when I own the house and that's when I really create a really strong brand. Because down the road I won't have to pay for those ads anymore. I don't have to go on the live stream. Give me more, give me more ads, give me more ads. Like you're constantly just at the mercy of Google, at the mercy of Facebook ads. Rate the next cost per click. Like, just give me more, I need more customers. Shoot me up. It's literally how I look at it. It's like the drug addict just like, give me more, give me more. It's like, well, that's the same way it comes in our business. We paying for ads all the time. I'd much rather put the long time effort into creating a brand, creating content that I own. Whether it be videos, whether it be pictures, whether it be a podcast, whether it be medium that I create on my website, whether it be blog posts, whether it be visual, audio, pictures. All of these types of media are a way to create eyeballs to your site, get eyeballs to your platform, get eyeballs to your brand, get eyeballs to your product and services without spending money on rent, without going and paying someone else to get in front of the customer. It takes a longer time, it's more expensive to build up a media arm of your business. But if you can look at your business like a media company, right, you create videos, you create pictures on everything you do, you show behind the scenes, you write blog posts, you're creating engaging content on what the products you're creating and how to use those products and services and educate the customer about your industry. When you do that, you bring customers organically to you and therefore you don't have to keep paying rent. So I really look at the owning versus renting analogy. And if you can get off the treadmill of renting and get on the treadmill of hey, I'm investing, it's going to be costly. It's not cheap to build a brand, to build a personal brand, to build a business brand, to invest in the content that I own myself, I own the media, I own a great website. Like investing in your website is a form of paying off a mortgage. Because guess what, once you build a great website, you don't have to spend a bunch of money. Every single lead, guess what? You put the website up and there's leads coming in every day and there's not, you don't have to pay any more for the leads that you get from that as long as it gets, it has good SEO, good search engine optimization. You pay for that website, fixed costs and you get leads all the time. You don't have to pay per lead. You own that asset. It's an asset that actually produces revenue for you without you constantly paying rent and paying commissions to a third party like Google or Facebook. So what I encourage you to do is think long term, be willing to pay more in the upfront and be willing to not get the injection, the immediate injection of customers that is so easy to go back to because you can just quickly throw some money at Facebook ads, quickly throw some money at Google Ads and get customers tomorrow. So what I would recommend is take the long term approach. Spend at least 50% of your money, 50% of your time, your resources, of your marketing budget towards creating long term owning real estate, owning property, that is digital assets, video, pictures, written blog posts, podcasts, all that do. 50% on that and 50% on like, hey, I do need customers. I need customers today to grow my business. But in the long run, I'm investing heavily into something that's going to be the long term game of where I'll get customers and I can stop paying money and customers will still keep coming. That will never happen with renting. I'll never stop paying for Google Ads and customers still come from Google Ads. It won't happen. I stopped paying rent. I don't get housing anymore. Whereas eventually, one day, in the long term, if I own my real estate, I will eventually pay it off. I won't have to pay for those leads anymore. So own the real estate, own your digital media, own your brand and the video, pictures, audio and blog posts that you can create around your product and service. So in the long run, you can eventually one day step back and get customers for free. Never underestimate the value of good pr. And when it comes to big businesses, they'll pay PR agencies millions and millions of dollars to get press from newspapers and magazines and radio shows and TV shows and all the rest of it. They'll pay massive amounts of money to get a good image or pr, public relationships to the public. So a couple things as a small business, hey, first of all, we're not gonna go hire an agency to manage our pr. We've got to do it ourself. But a couple things I wanted to put on your radar, and that is if you live in a small town that has a really good newspaper, and when I say really good, I just mean that all the old people read it and your target demographic is the older clientele. What you can do is remember that a newspaper is almost starving for stories. So how you can get free PR is basically do the job that a typical editor or potential reporter would have to do. And that's write a really good article. Maybe hire someone@freelancer.com or Upwork or Fiverr and have them write out a good article for you. Include a few really nice pictures about your business, about you started the business, and again, focus on the story. Focus not on, like, we are so great and this is about our products, and this is not a sales pitch. Focus on the fact that you're local, that you have a story behind the company, behind the brand, the mission of what the company's trying to do, what your plans are for the future, how you see the local community playing into that plan and into that future and that vision. And that can be a great way to get free press, free pr, and that is do the job of the reporter so they don't have to do much. I've literally done this multiple times, and that is have a really good article and literally send it to them with a couple title options and a few pictures and be like, hey, if you need a story, here's a great story for you. And most of the time they've covered it because, like, they need stories. They don't want to do a bunch of work. It's like, oh, great, this one's perfect. It's a good story. There's lots of good contacts around our local community. And let's pop it in there. Oh, great, A really nice picture. And for me, that's like, worth thousands of dollars that would otherwise pay for an ad in that same position. And better yet, it's not coming from a marketing and advertising standpoint. It's like free press. And press is usually trusted more than in a commercial or an ad. So if you can get someone to talk about you for free by doing their job for them, that's a great way to get free pr. Another thing that you can do is, especially if you're in that part of your business where you're focused on selling time, like, you have more time than you have money. That's when doing something for the community around your product or service is really, really helpful. For example, I own a gym. If I can go organize a 5k, doesn't cost me a lot of money. I might even get some sponsors to supply some food and drinks and whatever, but it won't cost me a lot of money. It'll cost me a lot of. But I can get a lot of good PR because the local newspaper will show up and a lot of local citizens will show up and people that are in my target market, that are healthy minded will be showing up to this gym, will be showing up to this 5k where I'm going to be advertising my gym. So creating free PR is something that's a skill. People like Richard Branson have built their entire brand. Like him, Virgin, he is Virgin Galactic and Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Mobile and Virgin Banks and all sorts of different Virgin, that was the name of the brand. But what he would do is he'll oftentimes do stunts to get pr. And so whether your stunt is a matter of giving the report of the newspaper article, which only works in a very small newspaper, it's very local or radio station or something like that, very localized or potentially doing something in your community that is helping the community, helping people in need, getting awareness around a certain cause. These are all things that can bring awareness to your brand, to your product. And you can get people interviewing you and that's technically free press. So you're not going to probably get a PR agency or someone to actually do these things for you and introduce you to different reporters and different news outlets. You're going to have to go do the work yourself. And the big things to focus on, as we'll talk about here soon, is you've got to know your story, you've got to nail that story. For me, my story has always been the same. That is, I started mowing lawns when I was 11 years old so I could start college. When I was 13 years old, I thought I was going to become a doctor. At the age of 18 I decided not to become a doctor and scale up my lawn care business. And that's when I started Augusta Lawn Care and fast forward today we now have 70 plus locations and we're franchise around North America. That's my story. Boom. Lots of things in there can be pulled out and questions and people like, oh wow, how'd you go to school at 13? Why did you start mowing lawns when you're living? Why did you change from going to a doctor to becoming a lawn care guy? There's lots of really cool stories in there, but I've nailed down that's my story in a nutshell. You've gotten nailed the same thing. If you want a good PR strategy, why did you start your business? What's the story behind it? What got you into it? Did a family member, a grandma get you involved in this industry, is it something you want to solve a problem that you're really passionate about? Is someone in your family affected by a certain disease or something that potentially led to you then getting into this field or this industry? Those are the type of things that people are going to be picking up on when it comes to pr. And that's what you got to drill in down on. So when I submit my article to a newspaper, I'm not going to say, great lawn care comes to Boston. What I am going to say is, 13 year old college genius, dropped out of medical school to become a lawn care guy. That's going to get headlined, that's going to get people clicking, that's going to get people wanting to put your story in their newspaper, magazine, website, radio, whatever it is. So think about what your story is and think about how you can get free PR by doing the job for the reporter. If you're in a really localized market or two, how can you do something in your community to drive awareness around something, do something good for the community, but also get awareness around your product, your service, because you are the one promoting the event or the thing that you're doing for the community. We've done stuff where for the landscaping thing, we have cleaned up beds for the local community and we had articles written about us and videos made about us and all rest of it because we made sure that, hey, this is what we're doing. We let them, let the media outlets know and then they're able to write stories about that. And again, you got to remember every single day these companies are looking for stories, they got to come with stuff every day. So try to help them do their job and you might be able to get some free press. I sort of alluded this in the part where I talk about renting versus owning real estate and thinking about that in terms of customer awareness and them knowing what your brand is and how do I own the mind, the space in the mind of the customer instead of just renting? How do I own the space in front of their eyeballs instead of just renting it? I also want you to think about an inbound versus outbound strategy. And I think as the world's changed and become more and more transparent because the Internet, I do feel like the goal should be where most of your leads, your most valuable leads come from. Inbound market. And this is when you create content. This is when you create answers to the questions your customers have about your product. This is when you do things where the customer calls you. Now there's A whole bunch of different definitions of inbound versus outbound marketing. I'm not really too concerned. How I think about it is inbound is customers call me, the leads come in to me versus me having to go out and find the leads. Okay? So I would rather spend money on creating content, creating a great website, creating a blog post, but answering all different questions that customers have about my product. Maybe they, for example, lawn care. When should I cut my grass? When should I prune my trees? What type of grass are there in my area? How often should I water my grass? How much should I water my grass? What type of fertilizer should I have in my grass? What are the most common weeds? How can I improve my lawn for $100? How can I improve my lawn for $500? What should I install? Artificial grass or sod? These are all tons of questions. I gotta list off 100 other questions that homeowners would have potentially built their lawn. What are the questions your customer has about your type of industry, your type of product, your of service? You should be writing a blog post about those. You should be making videos about those that should be on your website. You should be owning that content. You're making a great video, a great website, all of these things, creating content to be able to get inbound leads. Alright, so I really want you to start thinking more. How do I create content? How do I create answers to the questions my customers have? How do I create a great website? How do I get free pr? All the things we just talked about, how do I do that to be able to get customers calling me? Instead of me running ads, me doing cold calling, me going out into community and networking, trying to get going out. Okay? This is how I literally think about it. Either leads come in to me or I go out to find them. And this is again, this is like renting. It's fast, it's easy. I just gotta put money towards it. I just need to go out there, I can pick up the phone and call someone and ask them if they want to be a customer, right? Inbound, very hard. I cannot make a customer call me. I cannot make a customer fill out an estimate request form on my website. But what I can do is take a long approach to getting content. When we started Augusta Lawn Care, every single franchise that has ever been sold, we have not ran a single ad. We have never done outbound marketing ever. What we have done is inbound marketing that is created videos, podcasts, books, blog posts, like multiple websites and different types of services and different types of shows all of that was creating content which drove leads to our franchise. And those leads would have costed usually hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars. All the leads that we've gotten, hundreds if not thousands of leads that people have contacted us wanting to join the franchise, those would usually be worth hundreds of thousand dollars if we went out and paid for ads, if we paid a broker to go out and find those leads for franchising. So what do you do? You focus on the long term content now? Again, it's long term. It took years of creating content before we ever created an engine powerful enough to give us enough leads for our inbound marketing strategy. But trust me, when customers come to you and they've looked at, they've looked at your content, they've watched your videos, they've learned about your product and services from your content you created and you were the author of it, when they come to you, the level of knowing, liking and trusting is so great they're going to buy from you. The close ratio is so much greater when the customer is coming to you and giving you their contact information. When they submit their contact request form on your website, it's a whole lot better close ratio than you going out and knocking on doors and talking to people and trying to get their information from them. You're going out versus them coming to you. When a customer comes to you, you're in such a place of authority and power when it comes to pricing, when it comes to your scheduling, because they came knocking on your door, they came to your business and said, hey, I want to do business with you, I want an estimate from you, I want to get on the waiting list to be able to buy that product or that service. That's what you want. You want them coming to you, coming into you. And that's almost always going to be created by you creating content. And a lot of times when we talk about content, it's oh, that means I've got to do a personality, I've got to make videos, I got to get in front of a camera, I've got to get a microphone and a setup and all of this fancy equipment. I don't know if I'm good in front of camera, I don't look pretty, I can't do pictures. No, you gotta number one, answer the questions that your customer has. So if your customer has questions about how to make cookies and you sell a spatula and that's like literally.

You sell thousands of spatulas from your website, you could a go spend money on Amazon ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads and drive traffic outside of your organization to your website to buy. Or you could just create a bunch of really cool how to recipes on making cookies and brownies and whole bunch of different type of baking content. That just so happens that next to it is pictures of people using your spatula. That is the type of thing you're gonna wanna do is create content to drive inbound leads where the customer is coming to you, that's where you're gonna have the highest margin. Cause you don't have to go out and pay an outside source, you don't have to go get leads from somebody else. You don't have to have a sales team to go and do outbound calls and outbound servicing of clients. You don't need that have them come to you. I know there's a thing called inbound sales, there's a thing called outbound sales. But when I think about inbound leads, I think about people coming to me for business and literally saying hey I want your services. Not me going out and like hey do you want my services? Hey do you want to go to my website? Hey do you need my product? They're not gonna buy from me, they're not gonna be my highest value clients, they're not gonna be price insensitive people who come to you. You have that power already in the relationship to charge the prices that you want, schedule them the way that you want and be able to start the relationship, the business relationship on the right foot and that is with you in the driver's seat. I highly recommend you try as much as possible to get here. This is a long term strategy at the beginning. You might go place ads, you might go knock on doors, you might go talk to people and network with people. Do outbound try to from the outside. The long term strategy, the thing you should be investing is how do I create content to get customers where they're coming and knocking on my door for business. Those are the customers I want. Alright, so we're talking about email marketing. For most of us, email marketing is something we've kind of overlooked because it's been, it's kind of like oh, that's old news now it's new age like digital media and marketing on Facebook and social media and things like that. And that's true, but I think it is overlooked. Looked in terms of the power of email as well as everything I'm saying here can also be applied to SMS text messages. So email text messages seen as like old ways of communication. I was like, well I got A DM them and have like a Facebook messenger bot and all this other stuff. That's great. But I really feel like this is the hidden gem of using these older forms of communication to connect with customers that are existing. Okay. So in my mind again this is just my opinions. Email is really good as well as SMS text is really, really good at existing customer relationships. Okay, Existing. The reason for that is because someone typically is going to read all of their text messages and they're gonna at least see their emails. Emails are gonna be a little harder to open up. But people are usually willing to give their email away sooner than their cell phone number and give you permission to actually text them. But either way the is goal, the goal here is to get in front of your customers on a regular basis and keep them warm. So when I say existing, these don't just have to be customers, which we do want to keep them warm, but also we want just communicate with all leads. So anyone that's ever even asked for your business, whether you're a product based business and they've given you your email, given you their email, or if you're a service based business and they've asked for an actual question or a estimate proposal from you and you've submitted that estimate but they never accepted. They're just still a lead. Everyone's always after the next shiny customer when they need to focus on is how do I get existing customers to convert and buy more from me? And they've already proven they've either liked your service and they're a customer currently, or they've at least raised their hand and said hey, I need your services and been a lead at some point in time. So why would I go after new customers when these people have already qualified themselves as either buyers or potential buyers for my product and service going to do is I'm going to try to get their email and or their SMS phone number to be able to communicate on a regular basis. Now this is really important for landscaping, for example, we send this on a monthly basis based upon the climate, based upon the weather and based on what services we are offering that time of year. So for example, in the spring we're going to say hey, if you want mowing service like here's the email for you. And then in the fall we're going to do hey, if you need leaf cleanup, here's the email for you. What I would recommend you do is email or SMS text your customers at least once a month just to keep them warm, just so they remember who you are. Just so when they actually do need your services or it comes up in conversation with their family, they actually remember your name and your brand. And it might be years where they open up. We've seen this many, many times where people will open up all our emails. Every single month for years, every single one, they get an email email, and all of a sudden they click on a button and they get a $15,000 project installation. It's like, what in the world? But we had to keep that customer warm, otherwise that transaction would have never taken place. So you do not want your customers and your old leads to go cold. And to do that, you stay in contact with them at least once a month via email or SMS text. Now, these emails can be funny. They can be more advertorial in terms of actually showing the different products and services you're offering. If you're offering mowing, show pictures of mowing. If you. It could also be more of a newsletter, just showing things behind the scenes at your company and not even be salesy at all. Make sure that your headline is really catchy to get them to open up the email if you're using email. And make sure if you're using SMS text that you get to the point very quickly. Regardless, the whole point of these is to keep the customer relationship warm, keep you on top of mind, as well as be able to pitch services and products that your customer might not know you even offer. Because there's. Before we did one click estimate emails. I'll show you what those are in just a second. But basically that monthly email before we did that, we would have customers literally hiring other landscapers to do work that we did. It's like, hey, why didn't you offer us to do that work? And they're like, oh, I didn't know you, I didn't know you guys did that. So another way with this monthly email is to make sure your customers know what products are new, what services you do offer based upon the time of year that those things are relevant. During middle of winter, you're not going to be pitching bikinis and swimwear. You're going to be pitching sweaters, coats, scarves, hats, et cetera. So keep it relevant. And one thing that I mentioned, there is one click estimate emails. That's what we call our monthly emails that we send our customers at Augusta Lawn Care. Because what it is, every single month, we send an email based upon the service, based on the time of year and what our goal is, the whole goal of the email is when they click a button and what I recommend you do is on these monthly emails, make sure you have one call to action. In other words, you're asking the customer to do one thing. Either click a button, call you, email you back, text you back, ask them to do one thing and one thing only. We've all gotten the emails where you get like 50 different buttons and different products and services. It's basically like a catalog. I want one product and service. Okay, now that might mean that sometimes I do it funny, like I said, sometimes I might do more of an ad. Sometimes I do pictures or video. Sometimes you might use your CRM to basically make just the text and write it in a way that they actually think you wrote them an email. And then they say, hey, I was just driving you by your property the other day and I was just thinking, wondering if you'd like us to do a fall cleanup. Look like you might need some bush trimming. Like people are going to respond that your response rate will jump through the roof when you have that kind of an email with that kind of verbiage. And same thing with text messages. If you use that personal approach occasionally, then you'll get it to work. If you do it every single month, that's not going to work. And that's why typically we're going to use pictures, we're going to go after a service. But sometimes that very personalized approach will work. But again, one call to action with Augusta, our one call to action is click a button. And that button is tied into our CRM that basically tells us, hey, this person clicked on this button that said click here to get a quote within 24 hours. And so we know right away based upon what, what service was pitched, that one call to action was click the button. The one service or product that we are pitching in, the email is also very clear so that when they click on that button, we know what they want. We know they want an estimate for a specific service. So again, emails, SMS texts are not, you know, they're not the way the dodo, Burt. They're relevant. And I think they're a great way to stay in contact with these customers and leads that have already done business with you and you have their contact information. Don't let it go for six months where they never hear from you, that lead goes cold. Keep them warm. Might take years of doing this before finally one day they do click the button or they give you a call, whatever it is you want to make sure it is easy to do. The reason we made it a one click estimate, email they just have to click that button and immediately we know that they want an estimate, we know that they want an estimate proposal. But before that we had them. We would say, hey, reply to this email with the word yes or reply to this email with the word lawn care and we will get an estimate for lawn care. Like we would do that in the past. But again, that was too many strokes. They had to click reply and then type it in and click send. So one button was the best we've got so far. You could have it where it's, hey, one call to action is call or email us back if you have questions or whatever it might be. You could do that, but you want to make it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand and ask for you to do business with them. So we've narrowed it down to a one click estimate email. That's what we call these monthly emails. Click one button and that triggers an automation inside of our CRM that notifies us and then we can see that email what service we offered to them and then get them a proposal for that estimate or potentially set up an appointment if needs be. So again, that one call to action, really staying focused. Keep it concise. Don't try to sell the farm, Sell one thing and most importantly, be consistent with it to keep your customers and your past leads warm inside of your CRM, inside of your ecosystem, so you stay top of mind and your brand is the first thing they think of when it comes to your category. As your business grows out of the stage of infancy, no longer will it be about section 8 and your focus on marketing, it's gonna shift to what we're now going to talk about and that is finding people. Unfortunately, people will probably skip this section a lot of times because they think like, well, hey, I'll figure that part out when it comes to it. But for most small businesses, there's so much demand in the economy and the market for their services and products when they're small that what actually carries them through that first little bit is momentum of demand. But then it becomes the point where now they have to get the right people on the bus and the right people on their team. And that's actually the part where they fail. They fail to manage people, they fail to find, retain a good team. They don't know how to market for good employees, they don't know how to train or retain or onboard those employees, and they don't know any of the steps in between. So I want to talk about the entire hiring process and how you need to think about that. But before we do that, I want to talk about first the psychology of an employee. Because as business owners so many of the times we think in terms of our own paradigm and that is money. And we, we want to build a business and we want to create things and we're willing to take risks and that's for most of us, how we're built and we're wired. At the end of the day, you cannot expect an employee to think like an owner, alright? The ideology, they're going to work as fast as you, as efficiently as you, and take as much care for the business as you is absolutely ideological simply due to the fact they do not have equity and they're not built like you. And if they were and if they thought like an owner, guess what? They would go start their own business. So an employee is typically almost 100% of the time going to be much more risk adverse than an entrepreneur. So you are always going to be looking for build things, break things, build, achieve, make it better, make it grow, make more money. Whereas an employee is going to be less inclined to take the risk required to make the massive gains. But they need that sense of security in a paycheck. So at the end of the day, if you take that into consideration as we talk about the hiring process, it's extremely important to know that, because otherwise you start building your business, building your teams, building your compensation platform, building your benefits program as if you're dealing with a bunch of entrepreneurs like yourself. When in reality, if they were all like you, they'd just go start their own business. So stop treating them that way. You want to think in terms of what's going to make my employees feel more secure, what's going to make them feel like they're taking less risk, there's certain parts of the business you're not going to share with them in terms of the risks you're taking, because it could potentially make them feel uneasy and put in jeopardy their position, their job, and risking this stability and security that they desire in being an entrepreneur. So the question is, how do I make my employees think like owners? Because they don't like risk, they don't want to invest money in the business, they're not willing to sacrifice years of no pay in order to make way more down the road. They don't think like that. Stop trying to convince your employees to think like owners in the sense of equity and ownership and risk of capital. They're not going to think that way. How you can get them to perform like an owner in terms of short term performance is going to be compensating like an owner. So number one is compensation, compensation, and then two is information. And we'll talk more about this later on. But again, I'm just giving you a high level view of their psychology and that is the fact that the reason they are not going to treat the business like you is because they're not compensated like you are. You are compensated. The more work you get done, the more efficient you are. The more money you make in the day, the more money you make. Therefore, that's why you work so hard. The reason, the second reason why you as an owner outperform some of your employees is because you have all the information. You know all about the profit and loss statement. You know much money you're making or losing. You know how much money everything costs. You know how much money you're making every single job and how much customers are worth to you. And so therefore you make quote, unquote great decisions. Yeah, you make better decisions than everyone because you have all the information. So how do we fix this? How do we get employees to think like owners? The bottom line is we've got to create a compensation plan that incentivizes short term work and short term behavior so they can get paid paid on this paycheck. They're not going to be able to wait a year or two years or five years. They do not have equity and risk of capital. But what you can do is build their compensation around. Getting more work done today means more money. They get compensated like an owner if they do great work, if they get more customers, if they do great quality, if they get positive reviews. All of these things should be tied to their compensation package. On the flip side, you also need to give them information. This is what I call open book management over here. Compensation is P4P. So compensation. If I'm going to create a program, I'm going to create pay for performance. I wrote this book specifically about this. You can check it out. P4psoftware.com But P4P stands for Pay for performance. This is the way to get employees to think like owners is they're compensated like an owner is on P4P. They don't have the equity, they do not have the capital risk, but they have the pay for performance. On this paycheck with a floor that allows them to make no less than a certain amount per hour. Therefore reinforcing the psychology of an employee which desires less risk and a secure, stable job with a paycheck on the flip side, information, you need to give them this information in the form of open book management. This is a form of management that basically says, hey, everything is open. There is nothing closed, there's nothing hidden. We're going to show you prices, we're going to show you how much our material costs, we're going to show you how much we spend on insurance and fuel and hiring and all the rest of it. My employees know exactly how much money I make, my salary, et cetera. And the reason for that is because they have all the information that an owner would. If there was an owner or I had a partner in the business and I wanted them to think like an owner, they would know how much money I make, they would know the pricing and where my vendors and everything about it. The reason most owners will not share this information is because, is because they're afraid that their employees are going to go and compete with them. And honestly, they make horrible competitors because they're not owners. They have an employee mindset that's going to be again, not wanting risk or risk of capital. So risk of capital and equity is not something that's gonna be in their cards. I would much rather have the bulk of my employees have all the information and being paid like owners and risk potentially having to compete with one of them one day because they go take all my information. I'd rather have that. Which by the way has never happened. As long as you have a really good business and a moat besides just the information in your business, you can absolutely create a great business. Tesla has all of their patents completely open to the public, which means there's nothing about their information that makes it proprietary. There's nothing that makes it where you can't just go replicate. You could go duplicate the Tesla, you could go duplicate exactly their patent. It's all open, tells you exactly how to do it, but people don't do it. And there is no way to copy it because they built a moat around their business other than just information. So you should not have the fear of open book management. Regardless of whether you are losing money or you are making money hand over fist. This is the way to give the information required for an employee who would otherwise have an adverse reaction to risk. And they do not want to risk any capital. They don't want to wait five years, they want a paycheck tomorrow, next week. In order for them to think like an owner and be as efficient as an owner and make money like an owner would. These are the things in the short term you have to Create this is just a kind of 30,000 foot view. What we're going to now dig very deep on in terms of the whole hiring process and then how you retain your employees using these systems. So when it comes to your hiring process, I find so often the time we spend so much time focusing on our sales process, trying to get customers and we fail to realize that the hiring process is just as important. And actually every step of the sales process mirrors how you should be thinking about your hiring process. So I'm going to walk you through that in just a moment. The same way that we go out and try to find leads to become customers and we try to upsell those customers and make them buy more from us is the same way that we should be thinking about finding employees. We try to find them become applicants, they become employees. But then you're not done. You're trying to sell them again and again and try to encourage them to stay with you and retain them. So I'm going to walk you through every single step. But this is becoming more and more important as we now shift to a labor economy. It's extremely tight, very hard to find people. They don't even show up to application or to interview sometimes. So you're like, man, like I get all these applicants but no one even shows up to my interview. So you know what, this is what happens. Small business owners like, hey, you know what, if someone looks good, I'm just going to tell them to show up. I'm going to maybe ask them a couple questions in my truck. If that works out, let's go start. And you make your process so sloppy that it just is a self fulfilling prophecy of poor performance and poor applicants and poor employees because you've diluted your process to the point to the where there is no process. And it's just a matter of like, well, we'll just take whatever we got. And when you take that same strategy and apply it towards your sales process, it'd be the equivalent of you showing up a job and just be like, hey, it'll cost you about 500 bucks. And we're going to use about, you know, this and we're going to do maybe some of this, we'll use some of this material to take us a few days show up sometime. Like if you do that to a customer, you would not get any customers. So for most small businesses, as they get out of the infant stage of growing the company and they actually start to build a team, the bottleneck, the constraint to growth is not sales. It's not finding more customers, it is how do I actually perform and deliver on the products and services that I'm selling? By finding a good team. So let's walk through the sales process and then I want to mirror that with everything that's going on in your hiring process. Okay, so over here we have sales, your sales process. Over here we have our hiring process. Every single sage of the sales process that you've thought through and you've got detailed notes on and all the rest of it can be applied directly to the hiring process. Okay, so over here we've already talked about marketing, so let's talk about direct marketing. Okay, that's going to be the sales process. Well, in marketing, on the hiring side, we're really going to do the same thing and we're going to put hiring ads out. Might be on Facebook, ads might be on Craigslist, might be on. Indeed. Again, what are we doing? We're spending money on marketing and advertising in order to find. Over here we're trying to find leads, we're trying to find people or prospects. Over here we're trying to find applicants. We need someone to come work for us and we're going to put ads out on these platforms to try to drive those applicants towards our business. So, so over here in sales, what happens is they become a lead. That's the next stage of the sales process. Hopefully your marketing was good. They give you a call, they submit an estimate request form on your website, they email you whatever it is, they become a lead. On the hiring side, again, everything is paralleled. This is when they submit an application. Now the thing is this. We think so much about getting new leads and how that's gonna happen in the lead lead flow and trying to make sure that it's really easy to forms and we submit big websites and everything formatted correctly. But what about your application process? How easy is it for them to use your application, fill it out on a mobile device? Is it user friendly? Does it actually submit with their resume attached? Is it easy to do from a mobile device? Or is it like where they gotta zoom way in and then it's hard and they gotta like enter captions and this is all a process of thinking about an applicant that's coming to your business and going through this process. How do you make it as easy as possible? How do we reduce the friction of someone that becomes going from an applicant to actually becoming an employee? Because you've already thought so much about how do I take a lead and reduce the friction in the sales process to where they become a customer. We've thought about that so much, we talk about marketing and the first eight sections entire course is really just trying to dial in the sales process. When reality as your business starts to grow, this hiring process is the actual constraint and bottleneck to the business. And at the end of the day, in a small business, you always want to identify the next constraint. At the beginning of your business, it will be the sales process. And that's why I said at the beginning, sell, sell, sell. When you're small, it's the only thing that matters. Your close ratio, getting more customers, driving top line revenue, the only thing that matters. But as time goes on, that will become much less important, especially as you begin to achieve branding. Because you've been spending all this money on direct marketing, you get branding, this becomes less and less of an issue. You got this engine of branding spinning off, leads to you all the time. And now you got to focus on your hiring process. So now in the sales process, the next stage is gonna be your sales meeting. Hey, you go meet the customer, go to their house, whatever it might be. You're gonna meet the customer in the hiring process. This is the interview. Okay, so again, we thought so much about how we're going to do the sales to the customer. We're gonna have our business car, we're dress up real sharp and do our hair and make sure we smell good and whatever it is, you have all your tactics of how you're gonna shake their hand and be on their left side and all this other garbage. But yet we, when it comes to our hiring process for the interview, which is the equivalent of their sales process, meeting the customer, we just like haphazardly like, oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that. I double booked it, I rushed home, I got it. Oh, I'll meet you in the truck or I'll meet you at Starbucks. And unorganized, you don't have the resume in front of you. You have no process in place for the thing that's actually the constraint to the business at this stage, which is hiring. So you've got to make this diligent switch from I'm going to do at all costs, sell, sell, sell, to now. I'm going to actually focus on the systems of creating a team that can deliver the product and service on all of these sales that are being generated. So the same way that you focus on, on the presentation, what you look like and make sure everything's dialed in, you have nice stationary and whatever, when you're meeting a customer should be the same kind of, same type of attention to detail in your interview process. Do you have a questionnaire that you're gonna go through? Do you have a clipboard to write notes on? Do you actually take the references? Do you ask them questions that are actually pertinent to what you're doing? Or is it just like random stuff you came up with? Or ask Google, like what are random interview questions? Or you actually ask about their experience, take notes, ask about what they're. When you call reference, you actually are asking detailed questions based upon the answers they gave you in the interview. This should all be part of your system. At Augusta Lawn Care, we have a sheet, 17 questions from top to bottom. In an interview, ask number one, write the answer. Ask number two, write the answer. By the end, you're going to know if they're going to employee or not based upon those questions. But whether or not you've actually focused on the system of hiring and actually focus on the interview enough is the question as to whether or not that will actually become a process instead of just a random thing you do and it's more of a nuisance and you try to double book yourself and randomly hiring people, that is what leads most small businesses to stay small because they can't find anyone. No one's working out, no one works hard. When in reality their hiring process is so flawed at every single stage that they can't perform any of the work that they're selling. They've dialed this in so much and they failed to realize that the hiring process is just as important as a sales process. The next part of the sales process is typically going to be follow up. Okay, and this could be automated follow up via email, text message. You could do phone call, follow up. You could maybe send them a mailer as follow up. Well, for some reason we do that with customers, but at the same exact time, when it comes to applicants that apply for our business, we do an interview and then we just like never follow up with them.

We don't even call them back. We don't nurture these people. After we say, hey, look, you showed up for an interview, great, but did you get my job offer? Did you? Anything happen that is a very big part of getting employees? If they have four offers on the table, it might be a good idea for you to figure out how you're going to nurture those applicants, how you're going to follow up with them after a day, after two days, after five days, etc. Now the job offer is the equivalent job offer.

Is the equivalent of what would typically be a price proposal. Okay, so in the sales process, after the follow up, after talking to the customer, you're going to give a price proposal. Mr. Jones. Could cost you $400 to do X, Y and Z. It's going to cost you X amount.