Facebook Live Q&A: What to Do if You Are SHUTDOWN (Lawn Care and Landscaping)

Hey, everybody, Mike Andes here. Gonna do a quick live Friday afternoon.

Wait on some of you to hop on here live. If you have any questions, just post them below.

I got one question I'll go over that was texted in. They couldn't come in live.

This. So while everyone's hopping on, this ice cream is actually a paleo. It's actually paleo. I think it's sweetened with monk fruit. It's almond. Almond milk. It's really good. If you have any questions, just post them below. Just got on here, so wait on a few people to hop in here. But if you have any questions, go and post them below. And if I can answer anything or help out anything in the business, just go ahead and comment below.

Welcome, everybody. Hopping on. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Cool. Go ahead and just post below if you have a question. I'm going to talk real quickly, though, about.

Going. When clients call, how do you wade through them or how do you screen your clients? How do you make sure that they're not just tire kickers? Actually came from Quinn over in Rhode island had this question. He actually texted into me. But if you guys have questions while I'm talking about this, go and post below. I'd rather do live questions. This one was texted in just a few minutes ago, though, from Quinn. And.

Wait, I got to put comments up. There you go. Cool. Yeah. Post your comments below and questions. And so Quinn was asking, like, how do you make sure that people don't aren't just tire kickers? And he said he's been having a whole bunch of landscaping jobs where people come in and they have a big design and it's a big project, and then they just never hear from them. And he feels like he's just wasting the time of his designers as well as his time. And so what can you do to prevent that? And how do you qualify your customers? I think a lot of it has to do with a few different things.

First of all, where are your customers coming from? I think it's really important not all leads are created equal.

Number one, best lead conversion is going to be in person, word of mouth, referral. You're gonna have the highest referral rate or highest closing ratio for them versus someone that comes in from a Facebook lead, that comes in from a form on Facebook and doesn't actually go to your website and fill out your estimate request form. They're gonna have a much lower closing ratio and they're many times gonna be tire kickers. Sometimes they're gonna be people that you do estimates for. And then you just never hear from them. Super random. And so first thing that comes to qualifying customers is like not all customers are created equal and not all leads are created equal. And then second thing is when you get them on the phone are you qualifying them? Are you looking for certain red flags of people that are not going to buy that are getting five or six estimates and you just know that they're just looking for the cheapest price. And so like when people call the command center they have a few different things that they're looking for that they would view red flags. And if someone is a red flag customer, we're actually going to require just up the amount of requirements. We're going to require a card on file, we're going to record prepayment. If they're a project based job, we're going to require, we're going to tell them up front that we have to require.

More money up front in terms of on the down payment. And so that will a lot of times pre qualify people just by adding in more steps and more requirements to getting the jobs actually accepted. Colby said tire kicking is part of the game. Give them ideas of the price and work from there. Yeah, so like if you guys were at conference a couple years ago we talked about informing as much as possible about price on our automations. We put out for service with using service autopilot the second day, the day after they get their estimate.

They get an automation 24 hours afterwards that addresses price and talks about why we price the way we do, how it's standardized and what kind of is the back end expenses like insurance and equipment expenses and labor and all these other things and that's that 24 hours afterwards. So that way people really get to understand what the cost look like. Bobby asks hi Mike, hope you are safe. Good to hear from you Bobby. My question is how do you explain to your clients that your first MoW will cost more than it normally would due to not being able to start until April, start until May 1st. Alright so this is a big question because a lot of times right now people you can't actually mow and so people are expecting like why would you charge more when on our first mow? Because this whole COVID 19 thing you've got to charge what, what it's going to take you in terms of budget hours and so if a recurring customer, a customer has been with you for a long time, if they've got this entire past month for free because no service has been done and now you're going to Come to their property and it's going to be a foot tall and it's going to take you five times as long to mow. You need to charge what it's going to take you in terms of budget hours. You must absolutely must do that. And so how do you do that? You've got to explain it to your customer base. I would do a video to all of your customers explaining like, hey, we haven't been able to mow. Your lawn is going to be overgrown. We're going to be charging either at a certain rate or at a times what you're regular, twice as much as your regular mow. It's in the equivalent of two mows, because we're going to have to mow it three or four times and get all the extra growth. And so I would just be open with your customers and communicate with them. Right now, for us, usually we require weekly service. This time of year, we bend the rules because of all that's going on. We'd rather not lose customers. We're allowing them to go to bi weekly service. We're still charging 50% more per cut, but we are allowing bi weekly service. And it's only like a small percentage of our customers, but usually require weekly. But in terms of how to explain that, Bobby, back to your question. I'd make a video. I'd be very open and honest. People are wanting to support local businesses. They're wanting to support small businesses. And they will understand if they're reasonable, if they're not reasonable, and they're going to, you know, fume over the fact that you haven't mowed it for three or four times, you've skipped three or four modes, and now the first mo is gonna be twice as much. Like you don't want them as a customer anyways.

My ice cream is melting, so. Good question, Bobby. Colby asks people looking for recommendations on Facebook are the worst. Looking for 20 estimates. I agree, Donald. Or sorry, Ronald. Mike, I have some of my commercial accounts telling me they can't pay me right now because of. Because nobody is in the office. Should I implement late fees? I'd get a card on file. All those companies have credit cards. They have corporate cards. Tell them, hey, let's get a credit card on file. We will not charge it until it's 15 days late. And so that way you can pay. You can pay via check. It just got to be in before 15 days or 30 days even. You've got to have that card on file just to secure the account. That's what I would do for people that are having that issue right now that are saying they're not in the office. People can pay via credit card. People can pay via bank transfer or PayPal. Like, there's so many different ways. So I wouldn't use it. Let them use as an excuse. Keith Jordan. Hello. From King George, Virginia. Hello. Travis says, what are some of the things you are doing, you would start to do to make sure that you keep really good employees? In terms of starting, I would honestly. Okay, this is a good one. This is a good one. Here, let me finish this guy. Sorry. I know it's super unprofessional for me to eat this in front of you, but I'm doing this intermittent fasting thing. And so 4 o' clock is my deadline, so I have to finish this off anyways.

In terms of good things. So tomorrow morning, with my team, my lawn care crew, I'm actually having a zoom call. Cause we can't meet. And we're literally gonna be talking about personal finances, the stock market, anything they wanna do with money. The idea came from a few weeks ago when we were working together, a few of them, and they started asking me questions about, like, how to build their credit score and where, you know, what kind of credit cards they should get and bank accounting stuff. And so I was like, hey, this would be a great opportunity, a good cultural moment. And so I think, honestly, if you care, Travis, like, just you asking the question that, like, how do I keep good employees? If you care about your employees and you care about keeping good people having those moments, like, that is what's gonna keep those really good players on the team. So tomorrow morning, 9 o', clock, we're having a zoom meeting. And they've made a bunch of questions this whole week while they've been working about, like, personal finances, stocks. Some of them are interested in owning a franchise, two or three of them. And so they're gonna have questions about financials and things like that. And so we're doing a zoom call. And so I think the biggest thing people are gonna stick around for, culture. So when. Travis, what are some of the things you would do to make sure that you keep really good employees? Retention is all about culture and doing those little things that really matter. Like, the past few days, I've been super busy. The past three weeks.

It'S been crazy. The only reason I've gone into the office three times a week, two or three times a week, is literally just to say hello. I can't give them a hug or shake their Hand or anything, but just to be there and, like, for them to know that I'm around and that if they need something, I'm there. And that's what's going to keep great employees, in my opinion. Phil, I have a. Okay. Phil's Lawn Care says. I have a question. What is your position on customers wanting the company to mow one week and the customer mow the next? Would you still give a bi weekly, 50% premium price? I would. My schedule is going to be what's going to determine of my price. And so.

If someone is wanting me to mow bi weekly, I'm going to mow bi weekly. If they want to mow in between, that's fine. I'm still gonna charge the regular price, and that's completely, you know, I'm not gonna change on that. James Sickles. Hey, can I start? Use my car? Don't know what that means. What? James. Okay, cool. Yeah. So in terms of. If you guys have questions, there's 40 of you guys on here. Just post them below. I'm gonna keep going through these, as many as I can here. But yeah, in terms of, like, if a customer right now with this whole Covid thing, if they're changing to bi weekly, make sure you're charging a premium at least 50%. Like, at least 50%. And if people give you kickback on that, like, it's the way you explain that and the way you should rationalize it in your head is when you go to the store and there's three Pepsi's and they say buy two, get one free. It's not like that third Pepsi was free for Coca Cola. They just are rewarding you for buying more. And so when a customer is doing more services with you, you should be giving them discounts. And that discount comes in the form of weekly services should be costing less than bi weekly. And I don't mean by $5. Okay? Some of you guys that, like, charge, you know, you'll charge $30 for a weekly service, and then you'll charge $35 for BI weekly. Like, don't do that. If you're gonna do charge a premium, charge 50% more to give a really good incentive for people to go to weekly service. Colby asked. I would love to hear more about. Sorry about my blocked up nose, guys. It's all messed up. I would love to hear more about how you implement your no crew leader business practices. I feel like if we have. Oops, sorry, I. Oh, all these questions come in one second, guys. Let me just read this question. From Colby, I would love to hear more about how you implement your no crew leader business practices. I feel like if we had. If we have a crew leader, someone is responsible, and if it's a crew that doesn't have a leader with them, one guy ends up slacking with the you're not my boss attitude. Okay? So first things first. If you. If you have a crew leader simply due to the fact that you want someone to have be accountable as soon as you do that, or even think that you can't hold all of them to that same level of accountability. And so if you're going to have a crew leader and therefore use that person as a scapegoat for everyone underneath them, you're basically telling everyone that, like, hey, you can do whatever you want. As long as your crew leader is there, though, we're going to blame them, we're going to hold them responsible. I want to hold all of my guys responsible for everything that they do. And so the only time we'd ever bend that rule is if someone's getting trained for the first few days, maybe a week, when they're with a trainer. And if they do something, like they break something, a video skid mark, then we're gonna hold that trainer responsible. But in terms of responsibility, you want it to be where every single person in the organization knows that what they do is going to be directly impacting the business, and it's going to directly impact their paycheck. And that comes back to P4P. Right? And so, and if people have the you're not my boss mentality, like, that's messed up. Like, I would fire people over that. Because.

Like, in our, basically in our business, for example, the guy on Saturdays that comes and washes our trucks, he has full license and responsibility and full coverage. And to, like, call people out about them doing stuff in their truck, I don't care if they've been there a long time, how much experience they have. Like, he is new, but he has all of the power and authority to be able to call other people out on what they're not doing. So the you're not my boss attitude is someone that is not wanting to grow, not wanting to improve. And if someone is actively taking their time to show where you can improve and you're not accepting of that, that's not someone I want around. And so, like, at our spring off site team meeting that we do, I told everyone that this year, my big thing was no complaining. Like I said, you can do whatever you want, but if you complain you're out, like strikes, like, you're just gone. And if someone was ever to say, you're not my boss, or like, even have that attitude, like, we fired someone last year who's our most experienced person because they told a brand new employee that they didn't need help in a rude way. They said they didn't need help on a job, and that person was just trying to be helpful. And so that kind of attitude, I just can't deal with it. And honestly, again, this leads back to what I said on the last podcast. Like, until you fire someone because of it, you won't create a standard. So if you want to have a standard and you want to have a team mentality where you can keep every one of your crew accountable, well, then you've got to be able to fire somebody because they have a mentality of, oh, you're not my boss or you're not my team leader, like, that will never work. So firing one person can change that in an instant. Tyler asked, what advice would you give to somebody in their first year as a business owner? I would tell you to be a sponge. Be humble enough to learn from everybody, regardless of how long they've been in the business. I'm willing to listen to someone who's just started their business yesterday, is coming up with great marketing ideas or a fresh perspective. And being a sponge is the best way to get creative with how you can improve your business. And so if you're just starting out, I would listen to books. If you're out in the field, I would listen to audio books. I would learn as much as I possibly can. Simon Godfrey how do we digitally market to the 65 plus comfortably retired market in terms of digitally marketing? You're going to be looking at Facebook and nextdoor for that market that you. You're gonna have different creative and different text for both of those platforms. Nextdoor versus Facebook. But in terms of platforms digitally, they're on Facebook, they're not on Instagram quite yet. Probably in a few years they will be. But right now it's Facebook and it's going to be nextdoor, which right now, nextdoor, we're seeing some really good stuff. Andy Burleson, Job applicants. What are some key things you're looking for besides expertise? It's hard to tell if a person is good or not. Maybe I'm too critical, picky, etc. I'm really, really basing it based upon my. The references. I think I've talked about this before. Like, it's all about what the references say, obviously, the resume, I'll look at it. They don't really care. The in person with me is really, really important. I don't do those in persons anymore for a local shop. But if I, you know, when I was. And if I was doing them, that is a big part of. It's like, are they gonna get along? Like, for example, last week we had a guy come in, super awesome, but he had been in unions his whole life. And you could just tell there was that angst against employers and kind of like, what can I get out of the deal? And I just knew that, I don't know, he wouldn't be like a good fit in terms of just humility and learning from everyone else. And he's used to that very hierarchical system of a union. I have nothing against unions. I think unions are great. But in terms of having that hierarchy, having a union between you and the employer where you can't communicate and if there's problems, you feel like you gotta go tattletale. That sort of mentality that kind of just turned me off. But in terms of, of having a.

Like, like, the references are by far and away the biggest way for us to determine it. If people have worked somewhere and they are raving about their. That employee, there's a really good chance they're gonna be good when they come and work for you. Ronald asks. My commercial accounts tell me they won't use credit cards to pay bills.

I would tell them, hey, then after 30 days there's going to be a charge. And so if people aren't paying you within 30 days, you don't want them. Because if you're billing monthly, especially to commercial accounts, and you're working on the 1st of April, and you bill them at the 30th of April, and you don't see that money until the end of May, you're literally floating that money for 60 days. And that will kill your business. Cash flow is so important. And if you look at cash flow and you say, okay, well, people are taking 60 days to pay, and your revenue is, let's say, $50,000 per month. That means you need $100,000 sitting in the bank just to float your cash flow. Because people taking 60 days to pay and you are outputting 50,000 in revenue, you need two months, you know, 60 days worth of, you know, $100,000 you need to have in the bank. Whereas if you can have faster cash flow, either billing more frequently, having a credit card on file, or people that actually just paid on time and you could go from 100,000 to 50,000. That other $50,000 is a massive amount of money you can unleash towards marketing, hiring, getting more equipment. Like the amount of growth you can have when you have your cash flow dialed in is so much more. Phil's Lawn care Tyler, throw money at ads and marketing. Bobby, what are you putting in your web ads during this time? We have found that our calls and Webley's have dropped off since the shelter in place order. Yeah. So we've had a big drop off. We've had to completely focus on maintenance and mowing because landscaping and hardscaping is not going to be allowed. It's not considered essential services where we're at. So in terms of our ads we are focusing on the fact that we do not require in person estimates. We can do drive bys and that within 24 hours they'll have an estimate in their inbox but they do not have to have any contact with us whatsoever. So advertising contact lists and no meeting, no in person meeting necessary for estimates. That's what I would be using right now. Phil's Tyler, listen to all of Mike's podcast. I listen on Spotify. Free Joe Exotic, cool. Definitely look at Phil's Mike, what's your opinion on late fees? My net term is 15 days. Should I implement a late fee after 15 days or 30 days? So we used to have a late fee.

Honestly there is nothing, no late fee will ever be able to convince a client to pay you faster than frequent follow up and then just really good communication with the customer. And so we used to have late fees, it was like $10 if they were over 30 days. Now we just have automations that are basically annoying them until they pay. And the automation is no, first of all it's like hey, you're late, just let us know. You know, just make sure you get this paid. Next one's like hey, you're overdue. Get a credit card on file by clicking this link. It's an encrypted form. You can fill this out and autopay and like they have like four or five emails in the course of those 30 days. So like they're going to pay and then if they don't we jump on it right away. We just have no, just have no.

You know, no leniency on it and we just really attack it and we just are really honest on our invoices to explain to them that like hey, in order to keep our rates the same every year, in order to keep us ourselves competitive, in order to pay our team. We'd really appreciate if you pay us, paid us, paid us within seven days and by asking for the seven days it means that they need a check right away.

And it means or have a credit card on file. And so if that's a problem for them they, you know, again like if they're not gonna pay you for 60 days, you don't want them as a customer. They are a liability to you. Especially if these are mowing and maintenance where you're doing you know, 15, 20% net margin. Like you can't afford to float someone's money for two months. And so we are not banks and so either charge a late fee to make sure and like charge it. Charging $10 will get people's attention. That being said, we don't charge late fees anymore. That being said, no one, we didn't have a single dollar go to collections last year because we have the automations as well as like we are going to call them, we're going to explain to them why we need to get paid on time. We're going to in the invoice be very nice about the fact that like we need the money to pay our team and if someone falls behind or is late on a payment like we're just going to cut them off. Make it very, very clear that like that is not tolerated. So any more questions guys? Go ahead and post below. But yeah, as a lot of you are right now in shelter in place. I know you guys know my perspective in terms of like staying on, you know, continuing to improve your business at the time and using this as a time to really accelerate and take advantage of cheaper marketing opportunities. Taking advantage of the fact that the labor market is going to free up. So back to like Andy's point, you know, you're gonna have right now you're gonna have managers being laid off. You're going to have people that did landscaping 20 years ago or 10 years ago and we're doing something else. They're all become laid off, they're all getting on unemployment. And if you can offer those people a job right now or you can offer them a start date even, even if it's next month like you're this, you can take opportunity of this, you can really can. And if you're in shelter in place and you can't be working right now. So we got a franchisee up in Ontario, Canada and he cannot work, he physically cannot work. This is what I would be doing if we could not do mowing right now and we were starting mow our mowing season had started, but we weren't allowed to work. This is what I would do. I would basically be advertising like crazy and using the scarcity of a waiting list. So it's called the waiting list close. I don't even know if it's a thing. I call it the waiting list close. That is basically saying that.

We got a waiting list. And for everyone that you can sign up for mowing now, we'll give you an estimate. No contact needed, drive by, estimates are fine. We'll give you an estimate, then we can put you on the schedule, start when all this blows over, we'll get you on the schedule, we'll get started on your services and then use scarcity and the waiting list as a way to make sure they sign up. So basically say, hey look, we got 20 spots available. We're going to get you on the schedule as soon as all of this, this health crisis stuff is over. But you can go ahead and click this button, fill out a form, we'll give you an estimate, get you on the schedule. You should still be selling jobs. If you can't be out working, you can still be submitting estimates because you can drive around, you can go from a satellite, you can look at people's properties, you can still submit estimates. And so you should be selling the jobs, putting them on the schedule. And you should be able to, like, when this is all done, have a full pipeline. Like if we were closed down, if we were closed down, we would literally be having our crew on the phone cold calling everyone inside of our database, getting work, getting them on the schedule for, you know, the hundreds of people that might have mowed one time or we did a cleanup for them. We'd be trying to get them on recurring services. We'd be just trying to fill the pipeline so much that when we are out of this, we are so incredibly filled with work. And so you got to attack right now. Everyone's like, oh, I can't work because of this stay at home thing and I gotta stay at home. Like this is gonna be a wash of a year, bad spring, I'm not, I'm not gonna be able to grow. Like that is such a bad mentality. You should be taking this time to sell. Like it's over the phone. Yes. You're not gonna be able to see people, you're not gonna shake their hand. You can still submit estimates and recurring services are still very hot right now. Alright, so I could talk a long time about that. Ronald Kirk Will there be a Landscape Summit 2021? Absolutely. The website's already up, you can already get signed up. Phil's Lawn Care Mike, do you accept cash or check during this time?

I now require all invoices to be paid online, period. Do we accept cash or checks? We accept any form of payment. No one pays with cash. They can send a check if they want, but if they're late by, you know, even 15 days, we're going to require them to put a credit card on file. And that's all done by automation, like if they start getting overdue or they start getting behind. So our invoices are due upon receipt. So as soon as they get them, they're considered overdue if they're one day. So like literally the day, the next day when they get an automation saying, hey, you need to put a credit card on file. It's like you're overdue on this invoice because you're one day overdue. And that's how we treat it because when people see overdue all over the invoice they start to think about it more instead of saying like, oh, you got 15 days until it's overdue. So like from due upon receipt, our invoices are overdue and that gets people to put their card on file if they are, you know, past a day or two. Christo Gomez I'm selling and closing. Yep, like right now, recurring services are hot.

Yout can still sell, you can absolutely still be doing that even if you're from your house. Like literally you should be pounding your database right now. We have emailed, usually this time of year we send one, maybe two one click estimate emails to our database. We have about 7,000 people in our database. When we send out a one click estimate we are packed with estimates. I cannot overemphasize that at this time is the time to reach out to the customer you've done business with and upsell them, get them on recurring services. If you've done landscaping jobs, call those people, email them. This is absolutely imperative this time when everything is drying up and contracting services. Grass is still growing, trees still need trimming, but you got to make those connections with the customers you've had a relationship with. And we have had tremendous success. We have, we have had more mowing jobs accepted this spring than ever before and that simply due to the fact that we've tripled down on the amount of contact we have with our database. So instead of sending one newsletter a month, we're sending three right now because we're going to try to get them for cleanups. We're going to try to get them for mowing, we're going to try to get them for treatments, and we're trying to get those services set up for after all this blows over. A couple more questions here coming through. Thank you guys for posting those. Kyle asks, is P4Pmore in depth in landscape business course? Yeah, in Landscape business course, there is the recording of the landscape summit. And there that whole theme was P4P, a lot of it explained. I'm going to say it here, but there's a really good chance I'm going to be allowing P4P version 1 of the software that I use at the, at the conference. There's a good chance I'm going to allow that go public and be free for everybody because we got version two coming out for the franchisees, which is like super amazing, has a mobile connection with the device and text the employees what they made every day, stuff like that. So, yes, P4P is more in depth on landscape business course because there's the recording of the landscape summit. Christo Gomez, have you taken other courses? Have I? Yes, I have. As well as books and podcasts and just trying to absorb as much as I can, especially when I'm out. When I was working out in the field, that's what I did for years, just to learn. And in terms of myself, like even two weeks ago, I did a YouTube course, like literally how to make thumbnails better, how to do.