DOMINATE USING THIS MARKETING PLAN! (Lawn Care Business Training)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. If you don't know who I am, I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 70 locations around North America. And today I'm actually sharing a long, long video. So maybe wait for this one or maybe listen to it while you're mowing lawns or doing some landscaping. It's gonna be a great video, I believe, for all of us to listen to. It's actually recording of a keynote that I made on last year's conference. So every single year in January we have a Landscape Summit. And last year we had to have it virtual because of COVID 19 and the restrictions that were in our state. So we had to have it virtually over zoom. So this is a recording of what we played live that evening, the very first evening of the event.

So this IS Landscape Summit 2021, which.

Is about 10, 11 months ago from the time I'm recording this. And in just a few more weeks though, we are having Landscape Summit 2022. So if you're watching this prior to then, I really recommend you come. It's a great event. And if you like this video that's very long and very educational. If you like it, I guarantee you want to make sure you come to this year'. I'm going to be really leaning into this type of content this coming year. So I think everyone will benefit, right?

From someone who's just getting started and.

Really trying to grow all the way to a larger style business that's doing multiple millions in revenue. I think it's going to be a great event to bring your managers to your spouse to get on the same page. Create a marketing plan for 2022. It's going to be great event, so make sure you come. Just go to Landscape Summit Co. That's Landscape Summit Co. And that will redirect you to the page where you can sign up. It's $299. Every single penny goes into the event.

We don't make any money.

I lose money on this whole thing.

So I really want to make this.

The event that I always wish I had when I started my lawn care business, my landscaping business. And I think it's gonna be awesome. So please go ahead and sign up for that now and without any further delay. Let's go ahead and roll this again. This is the Thursday evening, one of the first keynotes of last year's event that was recorded. It was virtual. This year is in person. It's going to be great. I look forward to seeing you there.

But I wanted to go over your plan for 2021. And I want to go in detail in terms of creating a plan for your marketing, figuring out what your growth is going to be, as well as looking at what small changes in your business can actually dramatically impact your bottom line and your business growth. In the very first talk of the conference this weekend, we talked about levers, the things in your business that you could change and dramatically impact the growth and success of your business. And we're going to prove that through marketing. Looking at some of the things that we are going to show in this file. So if you have not already got this, which this is the same document that we used on Thursday night. So if you still have that download, you can use that. If not, go in the comment section. They'll put it over in the chat and also download a link too. So I'm using Google Docs or sorry, Google Sheets, you can download in Excel. It'll operate the same way. You might be able to use it in numbers on a Mac. But anyways, pretty basic. I'm going to walk you through this. Try not to get ahead of me too much. Even though it is exciting. Try not to get ahead of me just so that way we can stay together here. So the green cells are the stuff that you can, you can move around on this document. Don't touch the red ones. The red ones. If you move those things around, just those, you're gonna mess everything up. Okay, so what I need you to do first of all is really just answer these top three questions. One, what's your lead acquisition cost in 2020?

And if you don't know that, just.

Filter out your new leads and then divide that from your total marketing spend. All right, so if you got 100.

New leads last year, you did 100.

Estimates, then I want you to say you did 100 leads and you spent $2,000 in marketing. Your lead acquisition cost would be $20. So 2,000 divided by 100. All right, so if you don't know.

What that lead acquisition cost number is.

Pause, I guess you can't pause the video. We're live.

But figure that out first.

Come back to this, even if you need to watch what I'm doing and then come back to this later. A lot of what I'm about to do right now, I'd rather you almost watch me. And then, you know, in a couple.

Hours we're doing Q and A and.

We will be done the conference and you can, you know, go through this in more detail and spend a bunch of time but fill these three numbers in, they're very, very important inputs. And anywhere where there's green is basically an input that you need to, you know, put in. So first of all, lead acquisition question, you put that in there.

I need you to put the number.

Of customers at the beginning of 2021, like as of right now, how many customers do you have?

Now this exercise that we're talking, we're.

Going to use here, trust me, there's, I'm sure there's numerical flaws. I'm sure there's someone going to say I have something wrong, it doesn't line up or whatever. Try to just get the concept that I'm trying to get across instead of getting too finicky about the numbers. So just try to get the concepts. But in this sheet and this document here, we're really just addressing recurring revenue. I'm not talking about.

Your install your add ons or your cleanups or you do weeding on top of the mowing. We're just talking about mowing in this regard. Now this could be applied in different areas of the business that are recurring and that's it. But in terms of like one time projects, landscaping stuff, that's add ons, we're not including any of that here. So when we look at the number of customers at the beginning of 2021, I need you to input that number here and then the total cost per cut goes here. Okay.

So this is going to be your average cost per cut. Again is going to depend on your area. You could figure this out if you really knew, you know, from your software, you could figure this number out.

But also just like what's the general.

Cost per cut in your area for a mowing service? Weekly, bi weekly. If you average all of it out, what is the average price?

So then what I need to do.

Is I need you to go through cuts per month and just put in the number of cuts per month in here and where the green is, I'm clicking on here. So for us, for example, we usually start in March, but some of our customers don't. So I put a two and then weekly cuts throughout the year, I put.

One five in there.

Because usually if you're going weekly, there's going to be a time we do do five mo's, five cuts in a month, you know, four, four. And then we usually start slowing down in November, end of November, we usually stop doing mowing. So in December, January, February, we have zero mows.

Now this is the number of new.

Clients that we expect to get all Right. Or we want to get. I should say so. I want 30 new mowing customers in March. I want 40 in April, I want 30 in May, I want 40 in.

June, I want 10 in July, I.

Want 5 in August, I want 3, 30, etc. So you could go ahead and put.

This in and you can see like.

It goes down during July. August, it's really hot. Not so much mowing. During the winter, we don't sell any mowing. Just using this as an example.

So this is going to add everything.

Up again over here in the. Don't touch these numbers here. There's gonna be 33 cuts per year on average at this location. There's going to be 220 new mowing customers that we're targeting for the entire year of 2021. So that's our total new mowing customers. Not landscape hardscape, nothing like it. Just recurring mows. And then from these numbers, if we're just doing mows, again, we're just doing mows. We're not including, you know, the fact that you're going to do other services for these individuals. But if you just look at mowing, this is the new revenue that's brought in based upon constantly adding new customers and, and having this many cuts per month. All right, so the amount that we're bringing in each month is down here on the bottom. New revenue coming in. Okay, you can see it grows, building. It's building, it's building. All right. And then down here during December, because we're looking at 20, 21, we're assuming you don't have any winter services right now. But let's assume that we have a close rate of.

The winter services. It's at 50%. So 50% of our mowing customers, we can convince them to go under winter services. We can. So here, for example, in the equation part cited, 0.5. Basically, that would be my close ratio on winter services. So if you're like, okay, if I just get 20%, well, then I would need to go like this and change that number just like that. All right, Change it to 0.2. You can see my revenue went way down. I'm going to put it back to 0.5. You can see my revenue went back up to here. Okay? So again, don't get too finicky about the numbers. Just get the concepts here that I'm bringing. And this is actually fairly accurate. We use this for the franchisees and for their projections when they come for training.

All right, then, numbers here.

You also need to input these Green ones here is retention as well as your close ratio in 2020. All right, so your close ratio is the number of estimates you got versus the number of customers that you are, the number of estimates that you closed or 1. So I'm going to assume here that 40% is the close ratio for 2020.

And that we retain 0.8% of our customers. Now you might say, well no, I don't lose customers, no one complains, etc.

But trust me, over the course of.

Five years, you know that's 0.8. If you multiply that out, you're going to lose customer due to just them passing away, them moving, etc. They take out their lawn, all that good stuff. So just assume point A is pretty standard retention and if you know that it's different, change it. If you know your attention rate actually is, change it. Otherwise I just use 0.8. That's a pretty good estimation. Now based upon the fact that we have 220 new leads, are 20 to 220 new mowing customers, we're actually going to need 275 because of our retention. Right? We only keep 80% of them. People move, people are unhappy, they complain, they do leave, etc. So that's actually how many customers you're going to need. Again, this is the green tab where you're going to change that close ratio. If it's different based upon all this input, based on the number of customers that we have, based upon the retention rate and our close rate, this is.

The amount of leads we're going to need.

Because leads based upon our close ratio, that's what becomes customers. Based on our retention rate, that's the actual amount of customers we keep. 220. All right, so this is all red, so you don't need to touch these. These are just telling you data points.

The amount of leads you're going to need in 2021.

If you expect to have 220 mowing customers, you will need 687 and a half estimates or leads. All right, now based upon all your inputs up top here, it's going to be able to tell you some really cool information.

It's going to be able to tell you the new revenue in 2021.

This is new revenue. This is not going to be last year. This is not your combined for the whole year. This is new revenue. If I did $500,000 last year with my 400 customers and now when they add 220 more customers for a total.

Of 620 customers at the end of.

2021, that's 400 plus 220, 620. That's going to add in new revenues of $246,875. Now, if you fill in all of.

These green cells correctly, this is going to be modified.

As long as you haven't touched these.

Red cells, this should work fine.

All right, so if you're in crazy numbers right now, you might have messed something up with the red cells. Okay, so, but this is based upon all of the numbers we inputted. The number of cuts, the number of clients we want to pick up each and every single month, our close ratio, our retention rate, the cost per cut. All of that information is going to boil down to the amount of revenue we are going to get. That's new in 2021. So if I did $500,000 last year with this amount of customers, I am now going to do $746,875 total revenue in 2021, because I add 500,000 last year's revenue to this one.

Now, this is my total marketing budget if I want this to happen.

Now let me just be clear. Do I think that $33,000 to bring in $246,000 in revenue is bad? Yes, I think it's bad. I would say if you spent this much money to get this much new revenue, you would be a poor marketer. At Augusta, we shoot between 10 and.

20X multiple in the trailing 12 months.

So I would expect if someone actually spent $33,000 in marketing, I would expect.

Them to be creating a business that.

Has 300 to 600,000 in new revenue based upon that marketing budget in the following 12 months. Just the next 12 months, not beyond. Like because you're going to keep a bunch of your customers, 80% of them are going to be retained in year two and then three, et cetera. But just the following 12 months, I look for 10 to 20x multiple in marketing dollars. So you can see right here that's not being achieved. All right. And so I would say is a poor performing marketing spend.

But using these numbers we inputted, this is how much money you would need to spend in marketing to get this. All right?

And this is the reason I'm doing this is because, number one, to encourage you to spend money on marketing, see that there is absolute value to spending money in marketing, but it's a lot of money. Like $33,000 in this case, if these are your numbers is quite a bit. And this is Taking into account the.

Number of leads we need.

687, 50.

And also taking into account the amount.

Of the cost per lead, the acquisition cost per lead.

Remember the difference between the lead acquisition and the customer acquisition. Customer acquisition takes into account your close ratio, all right? Because lead acquisition is like someone asking for an estimate.

A customer acquisition is how much does.

It cost to actually get a customer. Well, If I have 100% close ratio, my lead acquisition cost is going to.

Be equal to my customer acquisition cost.

And if you're really in the weeds and you're lost right now, don't worry about it.

I'm just trying to get a little more deeper. For some of those that are thinking.

About this now, if my close ratio is 50%, my lead acquisition cost is.

Going to be half of my customer acquisition cost. All right? So again, these red cells will change.

For example, if I go ahead and.

Change my lead acquisition cost, I get.

A better marketing campaign, do something better, whatever. I'm going to change it from $48 for my lead acquisition cost to 30.

What happens? My marketing budget for the same results in revenue. And new customers just dropped by $10,000. All right? That's why we talk about marketing so much, the importance of a lever in your business.

Just by becoming more efficient in our marketing, we will save $10,000 on our marketing budget. And when we did so, we brought it into a much better marketing campaign.

In terms of ROI on our dollars. All right, now, let's keep following through here. Let's assume you're going to put in here your percentage of your profit margin target. All right? So I'm going to put 20%. That's our margin that we want to.

Get.

Profit, total profit margin percentage. You can change this. It's green.

Green cells.

You can change.

So based upon that number, the net profit of doing this marketing campaign. Because all we care about in the day is if I can put a.

Dollar in a marketing, what's my return on it? Well, based upon these numbers that we've given the net profit in 2021, we.

$16,000 based upon this revenue.

All right?

So keep in mind, we are not taking account the fact that we're growing, right?

There's $500,000 in this example that we're using of revenue in the past.

But on the $246,000 of new revenue right here, 16,000 of that is profit. Now, that's really, really lousy. And this is why a lot of.

People get discouraged when it comes to.

Marketing because they say this. I spent $33,000 in marketing.

And at the end of the day, first year went by, I only made 16,000 in profit from that marketing campaign.

But this is the beauty of recurring revenue, is the fact that in 2022, next year, as long as you retain.

80%, this assumes your attrition.

Attrition is the opposite of retention.

All right, so attrition would be that 20% leaves, 80% is the retention, 80% stays.

Okay, so this number right here, again, going into 22, going into 2022, is affected by your retention.

Because if my retention, I keep 90% of my customers, this is going to go up. All right? See, I just.

My profit margins went up. So again, another lever in the business is retention.

I'm going to change it back to 0.8.

But you can see here all of.

These different indicators and these data points are levers in your business to change the net profit.

Now, this is what discourages a lot.

Of people from marketing.

And this is why usually the first two years of a lawn care business are unprofitable, is because this person had to spend $33,000 in marketing to make.

$16,000 in profit in the first year.

But in the second year, that $33,000 no longer needs to be spent.

It's done.

We've spent it, and it now generates $39,000, $500 in profit.

Okay? And so this is the beauty of.

Marketing, spending the money. Even though this is a pathetically ran campaign, if you can have this operational.

Efficiency of 20%, having a margin of 20%, you're not going to profit a whole the first year. You're not even going to make back.

What you put into marketing in the.

First spring, for example. But you are going to make substantial profit in year number two. And if you're growing a business, you're.

Probably going to take a lot of this money and invest it into marketing again.

That's why so oftentimes, the first two years of a longer business are very rough if you're growing quickly. Okay.

Hey, just a quick intermission here in the middle of the video. I hope you're enjoying it so far, but I wanted to make sure that you already, if you haven't already in the past 30, 40 minutes you've been watching this, make sure you go to Landscapesummit Co and sign up for this coming year's event. There's, it's, you know, this, you know, virtual event that we had last year was great, but there's nothing that beats meeting other landscape business owners, meeting them in Person connecting, getting their cell phone number, asking them questions, getting to other people that are in this industry, that are trying to do things that are great, trying to change the level of professionalism in this industry together, trying to improve our margins, help our employees.

That's the type of people that are.

Going to be at Landscape Summit. You'll want to be there, you won't want to miss it. Just go to landscapesummit. Co, sign up yourself, your manager, a spouse, bring some of your employees. It's a great event for team building as well as just staying focused on the goals that you have for 2022 and beyond. Without any further delay, let's keep rolling the keynote.

Now, this is our marketing budget here at the bottom. And this is going to be based upon the number of leads that we need. So we need a total of $687. Sorry, 687 leads. That's corresponding to this number up here. Okay, right there. Now, in order to get these number.

Of leads, we need to get these number of leads every single month. And that is determined by the amount we spend in marketing. So everyone's like, well, how much do I spend? When do I spend money on marketing? Look at these numbers. This is going to tell you where you should be spending your money, when you should be spending money, and how much you should be expecting to pay each month in marketing. So if I'm going to spend $33,000, which is what I need to get 620 customers, which is going to result in $246,875 in extra revenue this year. I'm going to have to spend $4,500 in March, and I have to spend $6,000 in April. This is so important. This is the roadmap you need to follow. The only metric you should be following if you're trying to grow your business.

Is what am I spending in marketing?

Did I meet these goals? Like If I set 4500, did I hit 93 leads?

Because if I didn't, we got a problem, right?

And this is all going to be interdependent. All these inputs that you've given, your retention, your close rate, your cost per cut, your operational profit margin, very important. All of these things are so important in actually drive these numbers and change them dramatically.

So that's my main point in what I want to show you today. But feel free to move these numbers.

Around, play with them.

Do not touch these ones. These are all output numbers.

Only touch the green cells and I.

Would highly encourage you go through, you Know what is your lead acquisition cost? How many customers did you have last year? Very important. What's your average cost per cut when you show up at a lawn?

What's on average?

What are you charging? All right, how many cuts are you getting per month on aver, what's your.

Number of new clients that you want to get in 20?

20? I'm gonna get 50 million customers.

Okay, great.

When are you gonna get them? You get 10 in March, 5 in.

April, 5 in May. When are you gonna get them? Okay, so input the date in the.

Green and you will find this pretty helpful. Again, determining how much money you need to spend in marketing.

If you're not yet convinced that spending.

Marketing dollars in a small business is.

Effective, you gotta watch our very first.

Keynote of the entire weekend. We talked about marketing and we talked.

About the fact that even this horribly ran marketing campaign that you're looking at right now generated a 50% ROI in the first year. 50%. A good index fund might do 8 or 10% a year.

All right? On average, if we look at this.

50%, in the first year, we spent 33,000.

Within the first 12 months, we made $16,000 in profit.

If you think the first two, this is now 56. We're literally doubling our money.

100% ROI on our total marketing budget in two years.

That's amazing. And this is a horribly run ad campaign.

Horrible.

Like the ROI of spending $33,000 and only making 246,000 in extra income from those marketing dollars is actually really bad.

Okay, so now I want to ask your. I want you to ask yourself.

Once you fill this out, play with.

This, feel free to move things around, tweak things.

Now I want to ask, as we leave the conference, as you heard, all.

This stuff, Profit Sharing and P4P and Open Book management, all of these things.

You know, talking about efficiencies and simplifying the business and all of this stuff.

You get so overwhelmed with all the.

Things you need to do when reality is changing. One thing, one of the levers in.

Your business, like we talked about the.

First night, we talked about the levers in your business.

You can adjust and make a massive change in your business.

Look at this sheet. We're going to now use this sheet to show that incremental changes in your business in certain key areas will dramatically.

Change the profitability and economic viability of your business. All right, but this is so important. Excuse me.

A lot of times I hear people.

Say, oh, I want 220 mowing customers. This Year new mowing customers. I want to go from 300 mowing customers or I want to go from 400 mowing customers to 200 to 620 mowing customers. So therefore, I need 220 new ones. Okay, great. How much are you going to spend on marketing?

I don't know.

I just want to get 220.

Okay, well, this is how you figure out your numbers. This is how you actually have a budget going into the year. So you can discipline yourself to spend this much money in marketing and then track your performance against the number of leads you should be collecting. Okay, now what happens when we actually.

Come to Landscape Summit?

We actually start implementing things.

We start improving the levers in our business.

Let's go to 10% improved.

All right, I'm gonna walk you through this.

So we're gonna change the power.

Should really show the power of changing things by 10%.

And this is all stuff you can.

Do without spending any money. No new equipment.

You don't need to go spend more on marketing. None of that.

Okay, so let's go ahead and show you what can happen here.

All right, so Instead of using 48, I'm going to move that down to 4,320.

So 5% or, sorry, 10%.

I'm going to reduce my lead acquisition cost by just 10%, which is literally.

Less than $5 per lead.

All right, so this is not massive. This is literally changing some creative. This is about putting stuff on social media and using digital ads like we talked about instead of using print that you might have used in the past. These are all things we very. You don't have to change a whole lot in your business.

Little changes. All right?

Getting your timing right, getting your picture right, your video, your text title, all of that in your ad can literally go make elite acquisition costs go from 48 to 4300.

And 20.

10% changes here. All right, we're going to change from 50 from $50 per cut.

We're going to.

We're going to raise our prices now.

To $55 per cut.

So 10% increase guarantee you 98% of your customers if you are doing residential, will stick with you.

If you raise your prices by 10%.

Guarantee you 98% or more.

If you do it right, you will not have any issues.

So we raise the average cost per.

Cut from $50 to 55.

Again, we talked about the levers in your business.

Price being one of the biggest ones here is in action. We simply raised it from $50 per cut to 55. All right?

We leave everything else the same here.

All right?

Everything else is exactly the same. We're still trying to get 220 new mowing customers. Everything's the same. But now it's going to change is we are going to reduce our.

Retention now is going to be 90%.

All right?

And really it should be increase by 10% because if I was reducing the attrition and I would be decreasing it.

So anyways, I'm increasing my retention by.

10% from 80% to 90%.

Now this is the number of total.

Customers I need based upon this retention rate.

And now instead of having a close ratio of 40%, I'm going to have.

A close ratio of 50%. Okay.

Again, marginal changes. This could be literally the speed at which you deliver an estimate could take.

It from 40% close ratio to 50% close ratio. Absolutely.

These marginal 10% changes in your business.

Can dramatically increase impact your company.

All right, so 488 is the total number of leads. We will need notice now if we.

Go back to our previous document here.

687 leads is the amount of leads we needed prior to get our goals.

To hit our goals of 220 new mowing customers hit our goals of revenue. And so now we only need 488.

That is 200 less leads. What I want you to take into account here is the fact that.

We'Ll get to this part in a second.

What I want to take into account the fact that doing 200 more leads, something that this document doesn't even take into account is the amount of time and money.

If you're hiring an estimator, if you.

Have an office staff that it takes to go and do 200 estimates, it's a lot of estimates to do. And all of that waste is eliminated by simply making the few changes we have.

Our lead acquisition cost was improved by 10%. Our cost per cut was improved by 10%.

Our retention was improved by 10%.

And our close ratio was improved by 10%. Okay.

All of that led to 200 less estimates, which we're not even going to take into account the fact that the savings of not having to do 200 estimates on the impact of your overhead.

We'Re not even taking that into account here. Okay.

All right, so now let's go down here.

Let's see what the result is. Now recurring revenue, total customers, same. But we only have to spend $21,000 instead of 33,000.

We only have to spend 21,000.

Now this starts to fall in that range of 10 to 20x multiple on.

Marketing dollars Again, $271,000 in new recurring revenue. All right, total marketing budget is only 21,000.

We saved $12,000 by moving these things around. But this is where things get interesting.

All right, we spent way less money.

We spent $12,000 less on marketing to.

Get the same result. But you know, and one thing I haven't even changed here on this, I could change the operational efficiency here by 10%. So from 20 to 22%, let's do that.

So instead of 20%, let me make.

A sell here just to keep everyone on their toes here. And this is going to be.

Increase.

10%.

So instead of 20% profit margin now.

We'Re going to have a 22% profit margin. If we do all of those things.

All little incremental changes in and of themselves. You, you don't need to even spend money. You don't need to spend money.

To.

Improve where you're spending your marketing dollars. The title, the videos. If you're spending it on next door versus door hangers, there's always a better way. How can you improve it?

We talked about this today.

How can you raise your price? It doesn't cost you to raise your price, all right? It doesn't cost you. Retain more customers, have better customer service.

Make sure you follow up with them.

Make sure they're happy. It doesn't cost you any more to send those estimates out in a timely fashion. Have more meat, have more descriptive words on your estimates that you have a higher close ratio. Get to them faster, be more professional.

Doesn't cost any more money. But doing all of those things and.

Finally increasing your profit margin by 10%, all of those things combined, your net profit in the first 12 months is 38,000. Your second year, $53,000. Literally in the matter of two years, you took $21,000 in marketing and you turned it into over $80,000. Literally a 400% return on your investment. And we're only accounting the first two years. In year three, that number just keeps.

Going on and on the ROI that you're going to make on this marketing budget. Okay? So same thing happens here.

All of a sudden I need less leads. I only 488 now. So I need less leads to make up the same amount of customers. Because why my lead acquisition cost is lower. So I just lowered my budget for every single month. I saved a massive amount of money every single month because I got more.

Efficient with my lead acquisition cost. Alright?

And the lead acquisition cost again is directly tied to Your close ratio.

Because I could use my 50% close.

Ratio and know right off the bat.

That my lead acquisition cost times two is going to be my customer acquisition.

Cost, which is actually the thing you want to attract the most. But that's a lagging indicator. Customers is a lagging indicator. Because I don't know how many customers I'm going to have until I know how many leads. That's the initial. How much do I pay per estimate? That's the easiest thing to track. All right, A lot of people track.

Their customer acquisition cost and they're like, my goodness, I'm paying so much for my customer acquisition cost.

And if they look paid attention what their lead acquisition cost was, they'd start to figure out, oh, I have a lot of inefficiencies. I'm not closing enough of these estimates.

That's my problem.

Cause if I just close more of.

My leads, I bring my customer acquisition cost down. All right, so play with these numbers. You know, look at what, what, you.

Know, maybe I can't do renter services. Okay, you're going to have to make that a zero.

Right.

If you only think you're going to get a smaller percentage of this, of.

These customers to convert to winter services, you'll need to add a different number here.

Again, we're assuming 50% close ratio of our mowing customers to recurring revenue in.

The winter, which is our, what we consider winter services.

So add these in here. Again, this might have broken for you. I might have done something wrong for numbers, especially if you get busier in the winter or something, it might not apply to you. But again, for example, if you're mowing.

In December, this is going to probably be negated. You're probably going have the same amount of revenue here.

So just don't get wrapped in the numbers too, too much. I just want you to see the power of changing little things in your business and the dramatic effect it's going to have when it comes to your marketing output.

When you look at what you're going.

To spend this year in marketing, your.

Goal, when you look at your goals and then what you're going to spend in marketing, I promise you, the little levers in your business will dramatically make impacts. Now, I'm sure you have a lot of questions on this document about all.

The things we talk about, lead acquisition.

Costs, cost per cut, like all that stuff.

So we're going to go right into Q and A to wrap up the weekend, but I wanted to send this off with you to end the weekend and that is, I want you to create your marketing budget for 2021. I cannot overemphasize the power of marketing.

And if every, every dollar I had in the first few years of growing my business was spent on marketing, it.

Is absolutely the most crucial thing. If you can scale back your living expenses, if you can cut back your loans or, you know, the expensive equipment that you have and put that money towards marketing, I guarantee, guarantee, hands down.

No questions asked, you will have a better, more profitable business in the years to come. In a year, in two years, and.

In five years, you will absolutely not regret spending every single dollar you had on marketing.

Okay?

If you want to invest into your business, I would rather spend a marketing dollar and get my. You know, people talk about tax returns and what you can get from buying new equipment at the end of the year. Guess what? If you spend money on marketing, it's 100% write off. It's a business expense. I would much rather much, much, much, much rather buy a $20,000 truck and spend $10,000 on marketing, then I would.

Spend, I'd much rather do that than spend $30,000 on a truck.

I guarantee you the ROI from that $10,000 in marketing will dramatically change the.

Result of your business in this upcoming year.

Far more than getting a $30,000 truck.

Over a $20,000 truck.

And it's not even close.

And for some of you, like, well, I'm going to get like a five.

Year debt schedule or whatever, but that.

Debt is going to cost you and.

Every single month that would otherwise be able to be spent on this and maybe it would lead to getting one or two more leads per month. This is all compounding.

All right?

So I hope this is inspirational to you. And if you never create a marketing budget and you've always just started the year like, hey, we want to grow by X amount, we want to grow by 300,000. Okay, well, how many leads are you going to need?

Well, I don't know. How much are you going to spend on marketing? I don't know.

This is what you need. This is what you need to create. You need to spend some time thinking about all of these metrics.

You need to start thinking about when.

You actually mow and when are you going to pick up these new customers? When are you going to get them?

You need to start thinking about, okay, what am I going to cost?

If you have no idea, if you're like you're starting brand new, use 50.

Use 60, whatever it is, use a number that just is going to Be a target.

But then every single month, what you can do is like, okay, how much did I spend? Did I actually get 94 leads? If I didn't, then my lead acquisition.

Cost is probably much higher.

How do you figure out your lead acquisition cost?

You take how much you spent, you.

Divide it by how many leads you got.

That's your lead acquisition cost right there.

All right, so this is the roadmap for every single month this year. So you know, if you're on track to actually get hit the goals you're.

Aspiring to achieve this year.

Well, that's it.

I hope that was helpful.

That was just one keynote out of all of last year's conference. Now, if you want to watch that, last year's virtual conference, the entire recording is available to all the members that sign up for landscapebusinesscourse.com so if you can't make it to this year and you want to watch last year's recordings, it's available for everyone that's a member@landscapebusinesscourse.com so just sign up and you at.

The very, very bottom of the modules.

And you'll see that Landscape Summit 2021's recordings are there. But you really should come in person, meet other landscapers. We're going to have a Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Thursday starts at 4pm so you can literally work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at your.

Place and then literally fly out Wednesday.

Night or Thursday morning. Get here by 4:00pm and we're gonna have a great three days. It's all Thursday evening, all of Friday, all of Saturday, and there's gonna be more than 12 keynotes just like this one that I'm gonna be delivering in person, live, and looking forward to what 2022 is going to have on the horizon in terms of the economy, where the opportunities are gonna be when it comes to marketing and different platforms and what I feel is really important for this industry as we move forward with this labor market. So, really looking forward to this event. Please, please come. You know, if you got to cancel.

Some stuff, if you got to get.

A subcontractor to cover you for snow plowing, look, I know in the middle of January you got snow on your mind. Trust me, even if you missed a stone event and lost a customer to this event will absolutely pay massive dividends for your business in 2022. Again, every single dollar of the $299 per ticket goes to the event. The food, the venue, the speakers, all the stuff that we bring in, my whole team that's there the entire week. It's a lot of work. We lose money on this event, but it's the event I always wish I had when I started my business. And that is just straight business talk. No ads, no pitching, no trade shows and fancy equipment. I just want to know how to grow my business. So if you want last year's recording, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com and sign up as a member.

Go to the very bottom.

You'll see the recordings. But more importantly, if you can make it this coming year in person event, January 13th, 14th and 15th. It's going to be phenomenal and look.

Forward to seeing you there.