Double Your Revenue THIS Spring – 9 Unfair Advantages You’re Missing

The Spring Rush is the super bowl of the home service industry. It lasts just 90 days, but it can make or break our entire year. It can bring in droves of new customers and allow our business to double in size. It can also bring crippling amounts of stress and make us want to quit. This video will give you the complete guide to ensuring you crush the rush and take advantage of new customers pouring in. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 170 locations over around the world and most influencers that are sharing videos started their business 1020 years ago. I get the opportunity to Help start over 50 new locations every single year. This allows me to see what is working now to get new customers and grow quickly. I've worked through 18 spring rushes starting when I was 11 years old pushing a lawnmower to now 29 years old. Today I will unveil nine secrets I've learned so you don't have to repeat the same mistakes I made during the Spring Rush. The first secret is partner. And this is your life partner. This is your significant other, the one that you spend the most time with outside of work. It's very important to be on the same page with this person during the spring rush cause likely you're gonna be working a lot more hours. And if every time you leave work you have to go home to someone that is actively discouraging you and pulling you away from your goals, it is going to be extremely difficult psychologically to keep your head in the game for for three to four months. When you have to work more hours, you're working overtime, weekends, evenings, et cetera. Does that eventually end? Does that eventually have where you're able to delegate and have other people run the business? Yes. Even in the first three, four, five years of starting a business, don't expect there to be any out in terms of spring rush. In terms of working more hours and being available a lot more often to your customers and to your team and to your employees. Having a partner that is on board or with your dedication during the spring rush, very important. If they're actively supporting you instead of pulling you away from your goals during the spring rush, it's going to set up the next eight, nine months for your family when it comes to providing for them. If you can just lock in during the spring rush. This also might lead to needing some expectations set around your availability when it comes to social events, family events and not being available every single evening for another event. Now why do I bring up partner as The Number one Secret When It Comes to Spring Rush I've seen that one of the major reasons home service business owners quit during the spring rush is a massive amount of stress. A lot of this stress actually springs from having bad relationship with their partner, whether it be friction on their goals, family, kids, money, etc. So whether or not you have a partner, a significant other that's on the team that is willing to sacrifice during the spring rush alongside you, is a huge determining factor as to whether or not you will turn the spring rush into a massive win or turn it into ultimate failure where you quit the business. The second secret is plan. The goal is to create a calendar and use six week sprints. There is going to be so many different things that will want to take your time during the spring rush. Everything from equipment failure to customers calling, complaining employees that are calling out in new employees that need to be trained, onboarding, payroll taxes. The list just goes on and on and on. Create a calendar and use six week sprints. The calendar is going to dictate when you start in the morning and what your focus is at certain time blocks throughout the day. If you're out in the field working with a crew of two, three, four employees, the vast majority of your day is probably actually doing the work. That's okay. But when are you going to get an hour to be able to send out estimates? When are you going to be have an hour to be able to run payroll and catch up on email? When are you going to have the hour to be able to do follow up phone calls and do invoicing and billing and routing? Have this all on a calendar. That way as the business grows, you're able to start actually knowing what you need to delegate and furthermore you can stay organized. And this really relates back to secret number one. This is going to help get your partner on board by having this calendar that's set in stone and you try your best to actually stick to it. Now the six week sprints is something I've adopted where every six weeks I'm looking to tackle one to two big problems in the business or new initiatives or something that I know if this one thing could change the business, you have a huge cascading impact across all the other problems I see in the company. Over the course of one year you're going to have eight or nine different six week sprints. And if in each each one of Those you do one or two improvements to the business, I think 15 or 20 meaningful impactful changes that you've made to the company. I guarantee you in one year, the business, if you could implement six week sprints and tackle one to two problems in each sprint, would be massively revolutionized. This is a way to focus on what is actually the biggest domino in the business, the most important thing because there's so much minutiae, there's so many things calling out for your time. Between family and employees and customers and software and payroll and tax, everything's calling out for your attention and your time in the spring rush. So having a calendar keeps you organized. Six week sprints keeps you focused on the initiatives that will actually drive the business forward. The third secret is performance. This is the key performance indicators, or KPIs that I want you to know cold during the spring rush. There are so many numbers you can track inside of a business, but I want you to pare down to just three key numbers that you would know if someone woke you up at 2am in the middle of the night and they shook you on. Okay, what's your close ratio? You know the number. There are so many numbers, but close ratio is a pretty important one to know what percentage of your estimates are getting accepted. That's a number you might want to know. Your efficiency score. How much of your time is actually spent doing the work instead of just driving around or loading up the trucks and doing non revenue producing work? I would immediately know what my paper performance numbers are. These are the metrics that you got to know, but I only want you to pare it down to three. Instead of just having like I got to know all my numbers, just focus on three. And if you don't know which ones to track, watch my videos or my free courses on mycandis.com and they'll show you more numbers that you could track. But I only want you to pare it down to three. So that way you can actually stay focused on doing more operations, spending time with your team and selling more jobs. During the spring rush, we don't want to be spending time on creating dashboards and metrics and spreadsheets. We want to focus on getting more jobs and then doing the work. The fourth secret to crush the rush during the spring is pricing. I believe the vast majority of home servers, business owners that go out of business is simply because they never determined and defined what the finish line was for them to stop growing the business and start raising prices. So what I want you to do before you even get to the spring rush is determine, okay, how many customers will I stop growing at? How many trucks will I stop growing how many employees will I stop growing at? And when I hit those numbers, I'm going to stop growing and instead raise prices. If we're on this constant treadmill of just keep buying more trucks, keep hiring more people, keep getting more customers, we don't actually ever raise our prices and get profitable, because if I can raise my prices by 15%, I could potentially double my profits. But most people never even get to raising their prices because they just keep buying more trucks, hiring more people and getting more equipment. So who gets rich? Equipment manufacturers and marketing companies, because that's what fuels that massive amounts of growth. But if you actually want to make money in your home service business, you determine, when am I going to stop growing, raise my prices and stop getting more customers, stop buying more trucks, and stop buying more equipment. The fifth secret to crushing the spring rush is prioritize. I'm going to prioritize time sensitive and recurring jobs during the spring rush. Because during the spring rush, all the jobs come pouring in all at the same time. One time projects, recurring jobs, time sensitive jobs, time insensitive jobs. Great. I've got all the jobs coming at the same amount of time, three to four months. But I've got to fill up the whole year. So what am I going to do? I'm going to prioritize getting jobs done that can't wait one or two months. For example, with lawn care, I can't tell Mr. Jones, sorry, Mr. Jones, we're really busy. We'll mow your grass in three to four months from now. Can't do that. But if a leave comes in from Mr. Jones and it's a paver patio, My goal is to prioritize recurring and time sensitive jobs. Mowing and then push off big projects or time insensitive jobs that are one time as far out as I possibly can. You can actually discount the job in order to be able to close it in your off season down the road by doing this. I get revenue in my off season by pushing that project out. But I also am able to reserve time to get new customers that are for recurring work. And I personally want to prioritize recurring revenue during the spring rush. The sixth secret is prepare. This is when it comes to training your team, it's so easy, especially once you get above 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 employees, that once you have turnover and people are joining every couple weeks, it's just very easy to just get in this habit of throwing people in a truck and hoping they work out. And I understand the inclination, especially when you just need hands Just get something done. Like, are you just half decent at doing the work? I understand that when you're running so far behind on the spring rush, but right now, as you get ready for the spring rush, it's time to train your team. This is extremely high leverage. I look at three different aspects of the business. Sales, getting the work, operations, doing the work, and then admin, greasing the wheels of the business so that work can get done. There are three different divisions in the business and every single one of them are going to require training for your team. Especially as you grow an organization, have an office staff, and then you might have estimators, and you might have like a operations manager, and then you might have crew leads. These are all people that need training. And having training from you as the owner is very high leverage. Which is what I mean by that is if you do good training, once you have a standard operating procedure, you have a training video. If you can do that one time and 10, 15, 20 people watch it, you just took what otherwise would have taken you 20 hours and now you're doing it in 30 minutes. So in my opinion, preparation around training means I create standard operating procedures and videos for my crew, for my team to be able to watch instead of me, have to do it one by one by one. Because I can guarantee you what happens during the spring rush when you're hiring a bunch of people and a bunch of new leads are pouring in. Usually training suffers. And the reason training suffers is because you do not prepare the training prior, have everything set up in place. So that way, from sales, operations and admin perspective, you're able to train your team. 30 minutes of your time making that video could be otherwise 20 hours of training that would be required if you did it one by one by one. Some things do require in person, one on one training out in the field. But there's other parts of the business that if you could record it, you could create a checklist. You create a standard operating procedure, it would systematize, it would allow you to spend your time on other aspects of the business and still ensure that that training gets done. The only way to do this is prepare prior to the spring rush and create the standard operating procedures and the videos and the training prior to you getting super busy. The seventh secret to crushing the spring rush is profits. To make a business more profitable, we need to ruthlessly delete fixed expenses, especially if you're struggling. Right now. I see so many times where 30, 40% of revenue is being ate up by fixed expenses. What are Fixed expenses. They are the expenses in your business that don't change regardless of revenue. Your rent doesn't change, your loan payments don't change, your insurance doesn't change from month to month depending on your revenue immediately. These are things that are fixed expenses. I want to ruthlessly delete these. I want to focus all my time and energy on getting rid of loan payments and debt because they're going to stay throughout the entire off season. When my revenue is low, that fixed expense is still there. I want to cut as much as possible and if possible, change fixed expenses into variable expenses. For example, instead of hiring a full time on salary office staff member, where you have to have an office building and a massive infrastructure and utilities and Internet and all this stuff, I might just have a virtual assistant or I might have a virtual person working for me to do my office and admin. And I might only hire them for four or five months of the year during the spring rush. Why? Because I do not want fixed expenses. It is eating the lunch. It is eating the profits of so many home service businesses. So if we're going to focus on profits, I want to ruthlessly delete. Not just like kind of like trim. I want to delete. How can I take a $5,000 a month rent payment and just like, okay, what would it be if I just had all the crew take the trucks home? I would be able to say $5,000. That might be a good option to cut out, delete fixed expenses. The eighth secret is performance. I want to align the incentives of the crew and the managers with efficiency and profitability. Efficiency has to do with pay for performance. For my crew on the field, the harder they work, the more money they should make. If they're not stopping at gas stations, if they're not taking 150 smoke breaks, if not lollygagging at the beginning of the day and taking 30 minutes to get outside the shop, I want them to get more money. They deserve it. If they're working harder, they, they deserve more money. And so I want to make sure I pay my employees based upon performance. The same thing is true with my general managers. I want to ensure that if they make the business more profitable, if they're efficient with their time, with their estimates, with their training of the team, that they also make more money. So align incentives. I want my organization to be paid based upon performance. And if you're like, Well, I get P4P or pay for performance. And if you don't go to mikeandys.com P4P it's a free course. You can learn all about it. But also on my second channel called Home Service Millionaire, I had an entire video for almost two hours. Talk about GM compensation, how you find them and how you pay them. Because I want them to be thinking about profits all day long. And so if you're not opening up your books and sharing your numbers with your team, you're not going to be able to give them any sort of incentive based on profitability based upon their performance. Ultimately, what gets measured gets managed. And so if you're not measuring budget hours completed, the performance of the team, how much revenue they're making on a daily basis, what is their labor revenue each day, if you're not measuring that, it will not get managed, it will become inefficient. And so I want the incentives of my team not to be based on how long did you work today? I want it to be based upon how much revenue did I earn the business today. That is why I'm compensating them based upon their performance every single day. The ninth secret is promote. To get ready for the spring rush, we need to test we know what is working. Many times when people do door hangers, for example, they'll do like two or three hundred door hangers. It doesn't work. In my opinion, you need 5,000 door hangers. And I'm going to test the door hangers. I'm going to do the same thing with Facebook ads. I'm going to run different creative, which is pictures and video. I'm going to run different headlines, have different offers. You can't say that a certain channel doesn't work until you actually test it. And when I say test it, I'm going to do it for significant amount of time, usually for an entire spring rush. Before I actually judge the marketing channel, I'm going to also promote my website. I believe that you should invest in the domain that you own as renting space. I am renting the attention of of someone scrolling on Facebook. I am renting the attention of someone opening up their mailbox. Instead of renting, I want to own the domain, the actual website that is driving all of that traffic too. I want to own that. And before you spend a single dollar on any marketing channel, I believe the best money spent is on that website. Because every single day it can be producing leads, it can be producing new customers, it can be validating to your customers why you're so much higher value than and all your competition. It can do that 24, 7, 365 and the moment you turn off your Facebook ads, the moment you stop putting out door hangers, leads will stop. But if you have a great website, every single time someone is searching for your service in your area, you're showing up and leads still keep coming in. The 10th secret is patience. Every single one of the 10 secrets started with a P, and we finish with patience. In my opinion, it takes three spring rushes to really learn the demand curve and in your local area for seasonality and timing when you need to advertise. When do you hire? If you're in a seasonal business and we are based upon many times the weather, like the grass could start growing two or three weeks early. If the sun comes out early, it could be three or four weeks later if it snows late in the winter. These are factors that you only really start to learn when exactly those timeframes are after a few years of the spring rush. So give yourself a little bit of slack. It can be easy to get discouraged when you realize that you should have started a few weeks earlier or. Or that you didn't get enough employees or you underestimated how many leads were going to be pouring in and you have to actually turn off your estimates or turn off your leads and turn away customers. That's very discouraging after going through 18 spring rushes and seeing over 170 locations at Augusta go through this and start from scratch. It takes three spring rushes to really figure out, okay, if I start marketing the second week of February, I start mowing the first week of March. I need to start hiring every three weeks after that. The timing of the spring rush is so important and to really nail it in your market, to know when, when things start to pick up and to be able to forecast the trucks that you'll need, the employees that you'll need, how much space in your shop space you will need. These are things that just take time. So don't be too hard on yourself. Realize that watching videos like this, educating yourself, going to conferences, and talking to other competitors is super valuable. To be able to learn what your spring rush looks like and the timing of when you do everything. However, again, usually you just got to do it. You gotta do it a few times. You're gonna get some bumps and bruises the first few spring rushes, but learn from every single one. Take note of when the leads come pouring in and how many leads you're getting each week throughout the spring rush so that next year you can crush it even more.