Exposed: 11 Secrets the Top 1% of Contractors Use to Stay Rich!

I will share 11 ways to get ahead of 99% of your competition I have owned a lawn care business for 18 years and now I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 170 locations around the world. If you use the 11 tactics I share in this video, you will take market share from your local area and you'll grow your business very, very fast. Less than half a percent of all the businesses that start will get to $10 million in annual revenue. Augusta Lawn Care has over $50 million in revenue and I will show you the exact recipe I used to do it. Number one, Attack during the off season Vast majority of home services have a three to four month window that we call the off season. And during that time most home service businesses go into defensive mode. If you can somehow figure out a way to actually hire employees, get lots of more work coming in, and actually buy trucks and equipment, everyone else, your competition is trying to sell it for pennies on the dollar, you'll have a massive advantage to be able to grow. Now how do you do that? How do you grow when everyone else is contracting? Create season specific offers for season specific services. And so if you are a landscaper and you do lawn care, for example, maybe you plow snow, maybe you install Christmas lights, maybe you trim bushes and other services that don't require the lawn to actually grow, or you'd be digging and doing drainage or irrigation because those things might not be possible during the off season. Can I upsell my customer base that I already have in my database or can I actually go on the offensive? Run Facebook ads, run Google Ads, do door hangers and actually expand? When none of my competition is even running ads, they're in defensive mode. They're on vacation for two or three weeks because it's the middle of the off season and they don't have any jobs coming in. If you can expand and attack during the off season, you will win. Number two is you got to answer the phone if you want to dominate your competition. And you just did this one thing. The vast majority of us could build a million dollar business. Here's what's crazy. Angie and Invoka recently came out with some new data and they said that 80% of lawn care customers accepted the very first estimate they got. Meaning 80% of people simply accepted the first quote that they received in the text message, email or even over the phone. So if I'm able to answer the phone, give pricing and get the job accepted over the phone, I will close. 80% of people that are Looking for service. Recently, I was trying to get orders to movers for a few hours to help with moving my apartment. And it took two days, three voice messages, a text message, and an email for me just to get a quote. And so the number one way to increase your close ratio and take more customers from being leads into actual paying customers is just get them the quote as fast as possible, reduce the time to lead. And the number one way to do that is just answer the phone. Did you know that only 38% of people that will hit your voicemail actually leave a message? That means that 62% of people calling you, if you don't answer the phone, you, you're never going to hear from them. That essentially means that if you just answered every single phone call instead of letting it go to voicemail, you could double the size of your business. In fact, just to step away from home services for a moment, I own an anytime fitness gym and I pay $1,000 per month for just 100 minutes of phone time for someone else to pick up the phone anytime. We miss the phone because sometimes we're cleaning, we might only have one or two people in the gym or training or someone's getting sold. And so if I miss a phone call, I want that phone picked up by somebody. And so there's an outsourced party that will pick up that phone and I'm paying $10 per minute. Like that's insanity. That's $600 an hour. The reason I'm willing to pay $1,000 per month for just 100 minutes of someone else answering my phone is because that could potentially be 15, 20, 30 missed phone calls. And that could potentially lead to 5, 10, 15 new members at the gym, which could lead to 10, 15, $20,000 each, easily that I could be making from that customer. Even if you answer every single phone call for 40 hours of the week, there's 75% of the time where customers still are going to hit voicemail. And during that time, only 38% of people are going to leave a voice message. Answer the phone and you'll set yourself apart from the vast majority of home service businesses. That leads me to the third thing that you can do to separate yourself from 99% of the competition, and that is give prices online. Now, if you're only getting a couple leads a day, being in person is probably the best if you have good skills in terms of sales. But if you're getting 10, 20, 30 leads a day, being in person might not be the best thing for the Business. The bottom line is this. I want to be able to make it easy for people to give me money. The reason I love to do instant pricing on my website is because it cost me exactly $0 in terms of admin. I don't have to have someone answer the phone, I don't have to have someone go drive by the by and go to the customer's property and I don't have to pay for an estimated to go actually talk to the customer. And did you know that on a contact form as soon as you ask for someone's address about 30% of people drop off however with instant pricing because they know they're going to get a quote. It kind of makes sense to them that they need to give their address and that drop off rate goes down to 3.5%. There's one time I spoke to a very high net worth individual and this person could care less about the price. They were very price insensitive but they were looking for someone to come clean their house. The pain of having to leave the office for 30 minutes to go and meet the estimator to just walk to their house and get a quote cost them more in that 30 minutes of lost productivity than the entire year worth of cleaning their house from the janitorial service. So the person that values their time doesn't want to meet five contractors. They don't want to be paying playing Photag with a bunch of other vendors. And so how do you set yourself apart is make it easy for them to give you money, have a form, give your prices, have them accept and better yet get their credit card on file. I know what some people say. They say well my competition is going to see my price prices. All right, let's play that out though. If your prices are lower than them, that means they're probably going to raise their prices. Let's assume that. Well good, because now no one's going to leave your service over someone else being cheaper than you. Cool. Now what if they're higher than me? Well then maybe they'll lower them because they're afraid that you're going to take market share them. Just knowing your prices does them absolutely no good. As long as you have a great website, you have a great brand, trucks, equipment, employees that are professional uniforms and and a value proposition to that customer. They're not going to leave over a few dollars. And if they do because your competition comes along and offers them a better price, you don't want them anyways. I recently saw in a Facebook group someone bashing me about this instant pricing thing and saying that what they did is they came behind their competitors and simply went to their door hangers that had the instant pricing on there and they just looked at it and offered the customer a lower price. If someone is small enough, their business is small enough to do that, they are not a threat to you. Because the biggest businesses in the world give their pricing online very openly because they realize that pricing is not a competitive advantage. They realize that the value proposition to their customer is a thing that no one else can replicate. And so if your competition is copying your pricing, if they're following after what you're doing because you give your prices online or directly on an instant quote door hanger, fantastic. You are ahead of all of them. And if you're copying someone else's pricing and if you're copying someone else's systems, you are inherently following their behavior and they are leading the pack. So give your prices online and make it easy for people to give you money. The best customers to give you money. The fourth thing you can do to separate yourself from 99% of the competition is don't guesstimate. Use budgeted hours. If you have budgeted hours, in other words, the number of hours you believe the job should take, then I can track my efficiency score by comparing what my budget hours to the actual clocked hours are after the job is completed. The you are flying blind if you do not know this metric. What we call the efficiency score is your budgeted hours divided by your clocked hours. Which means if there's eight budget hours on a job and it takes me 10 hours from 7am till 5pm, that would be eight budget hours divided by 10 clocked hours. That's 0.8 or 80% efficiency score. By tracking this number, I'm able to know which of my employees are the most efficient. I'm able to know if my estimating is accurate or not. I'm not guessing as to whether or not I'm going to lose my shirt or or whether or not I'm going to make a bunch of money on a project because I know that I'm accurate on my budgeted hours. I'm also going to have a very educated stance as to which customers I need to raise prices on, which projects and services I always go way over time on, or it's all over the place and I might actually consider cutting that service so I can have more accurate estimating and more predictable profits. If you don't measure estimated or budget hours versus actual hours, you are guessing and guessing is a poor strategy for success. Number five is make more and pay more. If you can get your direct labor cost under 30%, many times that is a golden benchmark that I see for home services to be able to make a lot of money. Now, direct labor is the amount of wages that you have to spend for people to actually do the work in the field. Cost of goods sold, cogs. So that's make more. What? Pay more. Pay more is I can have better wages than my competition. I'll be able to attract the best talent. I want to be able to pay my employees 30% more than my competition. So if they're paying $20 per hour, I want to be able to give my employees at least $26 per hour or 30% more than my competition. So how are you going to do that? How are you going to make more and have very low cost of goods sold in terms of direct labor and also pay more to your employees? How is that possible? I'm going to pay my employees based upon their performance. I'm going to pay them based on how many budgeted hours they complete. Everyone is simply paying employees based on clocked hours. When clocked hours don't make you money, what makes you money is completing budgeted hours, actually completing the work. And so I'm going to pay my employees based upon that. Because like Charlie Munger says, you show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome. They get more money if they just simply do more work. All of a sudden, more work gets done more efficiently. And by doing that, I'm able to pay them more. And if I can pay my employees 30% more than the competition, everyone else in your local market will start to hear they're talking to each other. Your frontline team members are, along with all your competition. And if they're telling them, I'm making 26, 27, $28 an hour and the competition's making 20, and they're sick and tired of working with low performers that simply are sapping the clock. Guess where they'll be applying next time they're looking for a job? If you want a full course on pay for performance, go to mikeannies.comp4p. It's totally free. The sixth thing that you can do to separate yourself from 99% of the competition is upsell. Like your life depends on it. You can afford to pay a lot more for customers via advertising if you use upsells and cross sells. The biggest companies are able to increase the lifetime value of the customer so high to where they're able to afford to spend a lot of money on advertising. Now, the goal is to find as many chances as possible to upsell customers. There are five major ones that I think about. Number one, if you're doing in person quotes and you're meeting the customer, great time to upsell them other services. You're at their property, you can see the all, all the other problems that they might have that you could solve. Another way you could upsell them is during the checkout or estimate acceptance process. So you sent them a quote via text or email and they open up their customer portal on the estimate itself. You can pitch them other services, you can upsell them into better versions of what they're getting or adjacent services that are very close to what they're currently you're currently offering them. Now, another way you can upsell customers after the job is completed, as you're doing the walkthrough through, you're going to be looking out for other areas. You could also solve more of their problems and do other services for them and upsell them and increase the lifetime value of the customer. Another way you can upsell them is when they're really happy with your service. If someone's happy enough to leave you a positive survey and take the time to do that or leave you a positive review online so their friends and family can see that this is an excellent time to activate them into other services and other products that you can sell them. Now, another time that you can upsell customers is milestones. And you can make up these and have excuses for all sorts of different milestones. For example, it's their birthday. Great. You can upsell them into a different service. You have now unlocked this new service years that they've been a customer. You've been with us for a customer for four years. Fantastic. Here's this other service that we're now offering to just you completed 10 services, you. So if they do some sort of recurring maintenance or recurring package after 10 services, that's a milestone. Great. I can upsell them into something else. These are all milestones that you can tap into and offer an additional service to upsell the customer. What's crazy is this inside of Copilot CRM, there's a feature that helps with upsells. Basically from the mobile app. The technician can simply tap on a button and upsell the customer a different service. So if they see a need on the property, it's a couple clicks away. 29% increase in revenue just by turning that feature on. When we looked across the system, which means if the business was just thinking about how do we upsell and increase the value of our customers when we're on their property, we want to be looking for other problems that we can solve just by them thinking and turning the feature on. It increased revenue on average by more than 29%. Now just toggling something on inside of your settings is not going to increase your revenue. But what it proves to me is that the companies that are thinking about increasing and expanding the amount of value that they give to customers and then being able to charge them more because they are constantly selling them more services and upselling them, those are the businesses that are going to win. Now if you go to mikeanny.com workshop, I actually outline 11 ways that you can upsell customers. This includes bundling services, giving priority support, and even offering lifetime warranties. Think of it like insurance. There's 11 ways that you can upsell customers. It's all in that free course. Go to mycandies.com workshop. The seventh way to separate yourself from 99% of the competition is don't get fancy. It's amazing to me how people will be spending tens of thousands of dollars every year on Google Ads and Facebook ads and Thumbtack and Andy's when they don't even have the review base that if customers would go search their name online, they'd be able to see other customers that were had a good experience and be able to have validation to make a purchase. You would unleash a massive amount of demand for your services on Facebook, on Google, get reviews, hound customers. Once you've done a service for them and they're happy, ask them for review, incentivize them to give you a review. Make sure you have automations via text and email that are going to the customer asking for reviews on a consistent basis. One strategy we've used to get a lot of Google reviews and keep out people that might have negative sentiment is simply making an email that says was your service satisfactory? And we click yes. And it's going to go directly to Google. Click no, it's going to go take them to a form where you where they can fill out what information or feedback they have and we can collect that internally without them publicly airing out dirty laundry. Now what we've also found is that people are much more inclined to give a review if you tell them that you're incentivizing the crew that was on their job site. So if they did a job and the customer's happy, I Want to tell that customer, I'm going to give my crew $50 if you just leave a review for that service. The vast majority of customers, if they had a good experience or want the crew to get the bonus so they leave the online review, you'll increase their amount of reviews dramatically. Another thing the vast majority of people don't do is just follow up on estimates. Once you send an estimate to a customer, if it's marked pending and you just never hear back from them again, that is wasted money. You spent time, energy and money to get that quote to them, that proposal, that design, and we need to follow up with them. Text messages, emails, those are great. But also pick up the phone and call them. But when you call them, it's not enough to say, hey, I'm just calling to follow up. I'm just calling to check in, just seeing if you got the quote. Those are weak reasons to call a customer. One reason you could call them to follow up is giving them the last spot available on a route. Let them know, hey, we got one spot available. Give that scarcity and close the deal. You could also call them back and offer a specific day that your crew is available. Hey, Mr. Jones, we're booked out six weeks, but next Thursday we had a spot Kim available. Another reason to follow up with customers is it's your crew's favorite service. They really enjoy installing those paver patios. We'd love to get it on the schedule for them. You could also call customers with a follow up and give them the reason that, hey, we want before and after pictures. We want before and after pictures, that service on our social media, on our website. And so we'd love to get that service on the schedule. You could simply tell them the route and the schedule's filling up and that you want to get them prioritized. And in order to do that, we've got to get you on the schedule today. Another reason that you could give them a follow up phone call is that you're offering a limited time promotion or a freebie. Hey, Mr. Jones, if you accept today for your mowing service, we're actually throwing in the very first core aeration for free. This is again a limited time. If you accept today, I'm going to give you a freebie, a promotion one time. Now, for the smaller operators out there where you're doing all the work yourself, follow up phone calls are killer. Why? Because if you went in person to meet the customer and talk with them and build the rapport and then you follow up with a Phone call, just offer to the customer that you will come do the job yourself. Now, when I was a solo operator and I was doing the work out in the field, I never told the customer that I was the owner. I just told them that I was the estimator. That way, if they ever had question about price, I didn't have to get in a negotiation with them. But what also that really helped with was with estimate follow up phone calls. Because when I called the customer, I could simply say that, hey, Mr. Jones, I know it was really important for you to get this project completed for your daughter's prom party next week. I'm going to do this job myself. So next Tuesday, give me a call back. I want to get this job on the schedule. I'm going to go ahead and slot you in and save your spot. But I'm going to go ahead and do the job myself because I really want to serve you well. That's the type of thing that as a solo operator you can fill your schedule with simply promising the customer you will do it yourself. And you're like, I kind of do all the jobs myself. That's fine. They think you're the estimator. So sell the fact that you're doing the job because you've already built that rapport and that relationship with them. The eighth thing that you can do to separate yourself from 99% of the competition is crush overhead. For me, back in the day, when I first started Augusta Lawn Care, we would lose between 70 and $100,000 of cash in the bank simply because I had too much overhead. I had people on salary, I had insurance, I had rent, I had equipment debt, I had salaried overhead. Wages. People in the office and salespeople. These are fixed expenses. A fixed expense is simply if next month you had half as much revenue, you'd be paying the same amount for them. Like your insurance doesn't go down next month because you sell less jobs. Your rent doesn't go down at your shop space because you get less jobs. Your equipment debt and the loans and the payments that you have doesn't go down every single month. That payment doesn't go down simply because revenue drops. That is a fixed expense, also known as overhead. And overhead can crush many home service businesses, specifically during the off season when revenue does drop down and all of a sudden you're actually losing money every single month now. Also, overhead crushes small businesses because it creates two wildernesses of profit. I see zero to $200,000 in annual revenue as fairly profitable for Most home service businesses. Why? Because the owner is actually doing the physical labor themselves. They're generating revenue. But once you get at one or two or three or four employees and you pass 200,000, between 200,000 and $500,000 in annual revenue, you don't see a lot more profit. Because now you're an overhead expense to the business. You're not generating revenue, you're doing sales estimates, you're answering the phone, you're doing emails, doing follow ups, and you're not actually generating revenue. And so what happens is your profit margins drop. Now I noticed the same exact thing happened at a second time in the business. That's between 800,000 and in annual revenue and $1.5 million in annual revenue. Why is there this wilderness of profitability where you don't make any more profit at 1.2, 1.3 million compared to 800 or 900,000 in annual revenue? The reason is, is because usually you need a second overhead person like an estimator or an office manager or an operations manager, and they're expensive. You're paying 70, 80, $90,000 a year for the second salaried position. That's completely overhead that dramatically impacts your profitability. Now in the workshop on mikeannies.com, we actually calculate what your fixed expenses are every month and we figure out what is your break even in terms of monthly revenue just to be able to cover those fixed expenses. If your revenue ever drops below that break even point, it means that you're losing money. And if you have any month of the year where you lose money because your overhead is too high, it can be very, very risky for the business. The ninth thing that you can do to separate yourself from the competition is stop hiding things from your employees. And if you hide things from them, they will hide things from you. And yes, this is open book management. We share everything, all of the numbers with your team. But let me just play this out for you. This is what really changed my mindset on open book management. Would you work harder for someone that you trusted? If you had a boss and you trusted them, would you work harder for them versus someone he did not trust? I think the vast majority of would say, if I was working for someone that I trusted, I would probably work harder for them. Now let's play it back. How do you ensure that people don't trust you? You hide things from them. How would I make them trust me the most? How would I actually get them to trust me? You'd show them everything. And so if you want trust and you want them to work harder because they trust you. Show them everything. Don't hide stuff. Open up your books. Let them see how much revenue you make per hour. Let them see the actual invoices and the estimates, and understand efficiency score scores and understand what the team is making in terms of pay for performance. And this is how you create a culture of trust and a culture of hard work, simply because no one is hiding things from anyone else. And the reason that so many small business owners think, why in the world can't my employees just work as hard as me? They're not as efficient, and I can do. I can do 15 yards in a day, and they only can do 10. The reason that we think that the reason is because you are an owner. And if you want your employees to think like owners, they need two things. They need the information of an owner, and they need to be compensated like an owner. The compensation part is pay for performance. The harder they work, the more money they make. But the other part is what many people will neglect and is the information that you have. You know all the numbers, you know the pricing, you know the profitability. Share that information with your crew, and all of a sudden they'll begin to work harder just like you. The tenth way to separate yourself from the competition is don't make purchases with your ego. I remember at our shop space when I first got started, I would have as many trucks and trailers all parked out next to the road, and a lot of them I wasn't even using. But I knew that if I parked them all up there, people would think that we were growing. People would think that I'm successful when reality. At the same time, I was hardly making much profit, and it was very tight in terms of the bank balance. The true measure of success is your profit margins, your bank balance, and efficiency. The problem with this is that these are not public measures that you can brag about or share with other people very easily. In order to validate ourselves and appear successful, we usually just look at numbers of trucks and employees. And so we buy more trucks and we hire more people in order to look good in front of other people. And we do that to prove something to others, many of whom doubted us in the past. In my opinion, you should not buy a truck unless it will be used at least four days a week. And so if you're going to use a piece of equipment once a month, like an excavator, if you're going to use a truck for maybe one or two times a month, or one time a week, it's not worth keeping it. Go ahead and rent it until you're using it almost every single day. And you might be breaking down the cost of renting versus buying. And like, it doesn't make sense. If I just use it once or twice a month, it actually breaks even on the expense of the loan payment. Yeah, but what you're not taking into account is that you got to insure it. You've got to maintain it now, because if it breaks, you got to. You got to fix it, and then you've also got to store the thing. And so I've seen people that are spending thousands of dollars every month on storage at their shop space, on a whole bunch of equipment that they use maybe one to two times a month, when if they just rented it all, they could actually have no shop space whatsoever. This is what's called asset utilization. In other words, what percentage of the week are you actually utilizing the assets, the trucks and equipment that you've purchased? And if you're way above capacity, like you have 10 trucks and you can really use just for four or five and get all the work done, I encourage you to sell those trucks, sell the equipment. You want to get rid of all of that extra overhead, all those things that cost to maintain, insure, and store. And by doing that, reduce those fixed expenses to where you can actually make a profit. Buy more trucks and buy more equipment when you need them. Don't make purchases because of your ego. The 11th thing you can do to separate yourself from 99% of the competition is put in the reps. And yes, this seems basic, but reps beget skills, and skills beget success. The only thing separating you from where you're at today and where you want to be is skills. And in order to gain those skills, you will have to put in the reps. Now, when it comes to finding talent, I've always looked at it like this. 101 is culture, 201 is experience. 301 is been there, done that. In other words, entry level. As long as someone does a cultural fit, that's like table stakes. You got to get. Have a good cultural fit, gotta have a good person you can trust, et cetera. Great, they can work for me. That's one on one. Now you're. You're gonna have to pay a little bit more, though, if you want to have someone has experience in the industry, have skills they have. They've already been inside this industry, have experience. That's 201. Now you're gonna have to pay a lot for someone that's 301. Been there, done that. The problems that you have in the business, they've already solved. They've done it themselves in the past. Now if you can't afford to pay someone to acquire talent at that 301 level, it's already done the problems, they've already solved. The problems that you have now, you will need to train your team religiously. This is the reps part. They need reps so that they can gain skills as well. Recently at Augusta Lawn Care, I created a model for how to make video training. Because if you don't have good training videos, you don't have good systems for just training your team. They'll never gain those skills. Here are the 10 steps of how to have a great training video. First, design, have a good slide deck. Really simple. Set up a video camera and software like Loom to be able to quickly go ahead and record your video training. And then when we actually start the video training, have an agenda. Why should people even listen to this? Video training, then your problem, then the solution, then give details of that solution. Then give examples or demonstration or model or case study. And then give them FAQs, frequently asked questions. These are the things that they would potentially already think about in their mind as to why this will not work. Disarm them by just addressing what those problems are and what their frequently asked questions are right in the presentation. And then number nine, give them the next steps like based upon what we have said here, here's how behavior needs to change. And then lastly, number 10, for video training, you got to organize it. Whether you're putting in YouTube or Google Drive or some sort of software system or a folder, you've got to organize that. Video training, why is this important? Why is it important to make video training? Why is it important to have a system like this to create video training? Because I need my team to have skills. And in order to get those skills, I'll have to put in reps on training for them to be able to gain those skills. And those skills is what begets success. Because the only thing that's separating you from where you're at today and where you want to be is skills.