From 15K to 100K Revenue: The Simple Lawn Business Strategy (Q&A)

Steve from Pro Lawn St. Louis. Mike, if I want to get 100,000 in revenue this year we have five most important things to do from just a marketing strategy perspective. Last year just at 10 to 15k and virtually no marketing. Thanks. Yeah so for a hundred thousand in revenue, you know it depends if you have a whole bunch of of cash aside, you can spend one in ads. But before I spent a dollar on ads I would be getting a great looking website. I'm completely biased. I own lawn carewebdesign.com and homeservicewebdesign.com and we build sites and we have hundreds of sites that we are always ongoing that are always being ran. I think right now it's well over 500 and so probably more than that Mercy. But all that to say I'm biased. But I do believe you should put your website first because every dollar you spend on any other foreign market drives traffic to that website will convert better if the site is done correctly. So I just, I'm just appalled when people are spending thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, Google Ads, nextdoor ads, Angie's ads, door hangers, every door direct mail. And yet their site is broken. They have no Google reviews. Their estimate request form is on a different page than their homepage like layer after layer after layer. They're using images that are not optimized, they're slow to pay to load, have widgets stuck in there that slow down the speed time the load time of their of their site. So those are the type of things that I'd be looking at first is your website. Secondly Google reviews, they don't cost you a single penny. So I'd be doing those things and I'd be going to. If you're cash constrained I'd be going to Facebook groups next door groups and promoting your services there. And I would do it in a non pitchy way. So not like hey here's a before and after I would be saying like hey my name is Mike, I am the founder of Blank Lawn Care or whatever and I'm new to the area and I'm just getting started and if you ever need anything, let me know. Very very casual. Reed Brown Outback Irrigation. Can you talk a little bit about script for follow up on estimates ideas for something other than I'm following up on the estimate I sent you. Yeah so the I have a whole, whole list of these. I think there's 12 or 15 of these inside of the workshop. So Mike, Annie.comworkshop you're looking for cure number three where it is sorry cure number two, my apologies. This is part of more and better upselling. And so the, the bottom line is if you're, you can upsell until you're blue in the face but you can also just take the existing estimates you have and do a better job of following up and so and convert more of those in into paying customers. So yeah, since you said call someone on hey, I'm just following up or hey, just calling a few questions. Okay. It's better than nothing. I would rather you do that. Get the reps, awesome. Gain the confidence, fantastic. But if you want to take it to the next level, if you want to really go pro, you would have reasons to call them back. The reason for this, I make this clear in the workshop. The reason for this is if they say no to the, to your promotion that you have for today, I can call them back tomorrow and offer them next Thursday that just came available. And then if they didn't say no to that, I can call them next week and I can let them know that we are giving away coration if they sign up for mowing before the first So I, if I call and ask if they have questions and they say no, we will contact you and we have questions. You are at their mercy of waiting for them to get back to you. So I, I don't like to be in that position. I like to be in the driver's seat of the sales process to make sure we continue moving them towards getting their problem solved. Otherwise they forget about it. They, they don't have reminders, they don't have automation is to remind them of when to contact you. So like I'm going to make sure I solve their problem that I care about them and I believe I'm the best service for them. And if, if you believe you're the best service for them, if you believe you're the best value and you're going to take care of them and you care about them, you're going to follow up and you're going to make sure that you continually follow up until you get an answer from Luis from Turf Green Lawn Care Services. Hey Mike, I'm about to decal one of our trucks. What's more important to put on the truck truck number or website? Both question mark and also wanted to know if you think new clients will get instant quote door hang should email or text picture of the door hanger. So in terms of. Let's just start the last one. In terms of whether you should email or text them in the perfect world they go to a QR code and fill out a form. We found that to be a better conversion. As soon as you start having where they have to go open up their email app, they get distracted. They also spell the email wrong sometimes. Also, sometimes their attachments don't mess up. They get messed up correctly incorrectly with the HIC file, for example, on iOS. So most of the time we've just seen the best is a QR code and it goes. And you fill out the form. If you're going to email it, totally fine. I would usually go email over text for the same reason we tracked this one time. And although I like text people, people a lot of times will mess up the phone number. They will mess and then it goes green. So like they're like, they don't. It's an unknown number to them. So like they put the number incorrectly. So I'm just trying to reduce that friction as much as possible. Also on text, sometimes their image won't load all the way or gets compressed a whole bunch. You can't see stuff. So we've seen that before. It just gets a little weird. So I would probably say like in the perfect world, you know, I would probably get an iOS message, like an actual blue text message from them below that I'd probably email, then text and then ideally though, like, I'm really trying to go for a QR code and filling out a form that's. That's really what I'm trying to get to. Just the least amount of friction as possible and reducing the amount of chance that they are going to mistype my phone number or mistype my email address. And it's crazy. Phone numbers actually get messed up more often than emails. We've seen if the email has a real word. So if your, if your email is like atf136gmail.com they'll mess that up a lot. But if it's like Mike's lawn care gmail.com they usually get that pretty good. Versus phone numbers get mixed up a lot. So I don't know. It's just, it's. There's pros and cons of all of it. I would say, you know, if you're just getting started, do email. In the perfect world, you have a QR code, they fill out a form. In terms of what's more important on the phone, on the truck, honestly, I actually believe the most important is the, is the logo and the name of the business is easily legible because if they're gonna, if they want to go on your website they can quickly search your name, your business and assume you have a decent looking website or decent website, they will be able to find you. And from that website they will find your phone number also very, very quickly. So I'm not super concerned about the number or the website to be honest with you. I am mostly focused on the the brand. Like do they recognize the name of the business so they can search it. It sticks in their head, et cetera. They will not remember a URL. They will not remember, but they will remember a brand or logo or color of a truck. So I'm trying to stick with that. In terms of between the two, I'm usually gonna go with phone number because a more instant form of communication versus the website, it is faster for them to say siri and the name of my business and find the website. So it's rare that someone's gonna type out a URL and do you know.com at the end like they're going to search it on Google is going to pop up hopefully if you have decent SEO and you're gonna roll from there. This is another question, Mike. How do you know it's time to start a new mowing crew? So this goes back to hitting capacity. And when you hit capacity, in other words, you can't do any more mowing jobs without buying more trucks or hiring more people. And so you're at the crossroad of do I go to profit mode and raise prices to reduce the. Reduce the amount of customers I have and make some room for capacity or. Or do I increase capacity by buying more trucks and hiring more people? Getting very clear about how many customers you can serve or how many budget hours you can put on the schedule before you hit capacity is the key wander from Vantage Landscaping. What is the best way to manage sales tax to make sure it gets paid in full and on time. May I mention it to the I may I mention to the IR and the s the best way to manage sales tax and making sure it gets paid in full and on time is likely to set automations inside of copilot to remind yourself to do it every month, every quarter, every year, depending on the size of your business. Typically it's going to be distinguishing whether or not you do it monthly, quarterly or annually. And so I would set reminders. I usually do it on the 5th of the month. I can run all of our stuff for the ones that I am still responsible for. And then eventually you want to hand this off to a bookkeeper. That's the perfect world. And so for Example like with Copilot, we do business in all tons of states, different countries. We have a professional that does sales tax that goes in there and pays sales tax for all the different states and countries and licensing us in different states. It's a big pain in the butt in your state. Similarly, you have different counties, you have different sales taxes for different cities and towns depending on where you're at, whether or not you even need to charge sales tax. The vast majority of us though, you will have to pay B and O tax or business and occupation tax. Regardless if you have sales tax. To think that oh well, it says that we don't have to pay sales tax, I should have zero sales tax. You likely have B, O or business and occupation tax. Some different states call it slightly differently, but it's sometimes usually like point like basically half a percent to 1% depending on your state, depending on your town, depending on your city. It's all very, very different from every single township to, to another. But you likely need should be reporting that somewhere. So if you're not reporting that somewhere, you probably have a problem. How do I get in compliance? Contact the Department of Revenue. It is not worth building your business like crazy for three, four, five years and then all of a sudden getting an audit and owing taxes for the past five years. And that happens all of the time. No one going to talk about on social media because they usually close down their business and attack a different venture. They go on do something else, quote unquote. But it comes down to avoiding sales tax. So if you have sales tax, track it. You can, you, you can see how much you're collecting inside of of Copilot, run a sales tax report. It shows you which city you're in, how much you need to collect for each one and then go run that inside your Department of Revenue's website. So in the perfect world we would have better software at the, at the state level and we could all connect Copilot to our Department of Revenue and like the money would just flow over to them. That'd be cool. But these, almost every state I've ever looked at is such an antiquated old Department of Revenue site. It's so old, some of them are just like abysmal. They're like HTML from 1990s. It looks horrible. Some of them, they're starting to upgrade them slowly now. But all that to say it is almost always a manual process. Like they don't, they don't integrate with stripe or anything fun like that. That would be cool. A little zapier action into your department of revenue for your state. That'd be easy. Good stuff. Cody McLeod from Pro Skate Lawn Care and Landscaping. We have two mowing crews that are full and another landscape crew that has two days of mowing full per week. Okay, we are fully booked. Five weeks of landscaping, some project based landscaping and some flower bed and mulch work. My worry is that we have 15000 fires going out and could potentially fill the third route of mowing. How do you go about scheduling this? We need more room for spring services. Would you ask the clients that already booked a month if they could wait till June or July for their product work based for a 10 discount? My worry is landscaping will die off mid summer and they will be out of work. That's why we want, we were going, we were trying to give them a few days a week of mowing to help with slow times. What would you do in this situation? All right, so it sounds like you're basically booked out solid and now it's like, oh my goodness, we have all these marketing material. However, we need to make room in the schedule and move these projects out into the July August world in order to be able to make room for new customers coming in. So there's two routes. One, if you are in a rush, that is you want to grow very quickly, I would do the latter, which is give the discount, move off the projects and make room for recurring jobs. Because you still have a solid five to eight weeks of really good potential for adding recurring jobs. And this is the go time. You could potentially increase your increase your recurring revenue by 20, 30, 40% if you do that. So if you're in massive growth mode, I would do that. That being said, you're kissing away a big chunk of your profits when you give someone a 10% discount. And so if you're in more slow, I would probably. Okay, instead of doing that, let's just raise prices. We're at capacity. Let's raise prices for this year. Let's get all of the, you know, all of our recurring money, let's raise all of their prices, get way more profit, stack cash for next spring and then be able to really grow next spring. So that's the more conservative route which is you're at capacity. You either A stay in growth mode by moving these projects off and giving discounts or B you go into profit mode, raise prices and create capacity, a little more space there by getting rid of some of these customers that you currently have on the books and raising their prices. So it depends Completely based upon your risk tolerance. If you want to go faster, you're going to do what you're thinking of doing. If you want to go more conservative and more profitable route, you would raise prices to make that capacity instead of giving people discounts. So like Mike Delugas from Attaboy Lawns. Hey Mike, as always, I'm grateful for you. I've been struggling with our rowing routes for the entire time we have been in business. The only good option I found is to manually route all properties and mowing routes are relatively dynamic. This takes significant time once per quarter and touch ups at least once, at least monthly. In between we have to. We have two rigs, I think even two, two. The two is in the number. So we have two rigs that we need to mow full time. It would be a huge advantage to me if I could simply give software the total list and say we want to work four days a week and complete 18 budget hours per day per team. Please split the two between two rigs. Here's a starting and end point. I've tried multiple softwares including Optimal Route years ago and Jobber. None of them have the ability to do this well. I know of none that exist, but I must be missing some. I have played around with some ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini, all having limited success even for a decade just a day route. Does Copilot have this functionality? Does another software have this functionality? As one of our rigs has larger mowers for larger properties and to handle steep hills better, it would also be beneficial if it could take tags into account when scheduling. That way we could lock specific properties onto a certain route if needed, not required, but would be a great bonus. So I don't know of anything that can do this now off the shelf. You could probably jerry rig Chat BGBT to take addresses and do this for you. Honestly, I know a couple people in Zavagusta were doing this the other day. They were exporting their customer list and kind of giving it like hey, take all these addresses, split it between the two different. Like they did all of this and they exported. I think it was like a customer list with addresses and then budget hours for each recurring job so they could do what you're talking about. But the challenging part here. So in my opinion the actual fix for this is master routes and that's where you do this one time and then as customers, Jo, as customers join you put them onto a master route and you don't have to keep optimizing every day. That's the downside of Copilot right now is you have to optimize the routes each day. You can't save the route indefinitely. So this is certainly on our horizon, something we're thinking about in 2025 and before even get to master routes doing more of where you can optimize for, for like an entire week, for example, like kind of what you're thinking more on a weekly basis. So is possible like right now you can look at the dispatch board and I know it's this one. Some people are doing like you take your whole dispatch board for the week, you can take every visit and optimize the whole thing. And then what's it going to do is take your shop and make from there. Start with like Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday and just optimize everything. You can do that now. But it doesn't lock it in. Like it doesn't save the route. And so master routes is really what would probably be the best fix here. Because my, my problem with doing this in ChatGPT is you're going to still have to redo this occasionally. And so yeah, they're just like what you're asking for is so specific and only really you like know for example, if you put one more crew member on one of these routes, all of a sudden you need more than 18 budget hours per day. You got to move things around. And then it's also a matter of like you might want one job even though it's like falls out into 19 budget hours. You might want it on the today's schedule because it's the extra 10 minute drive where they kind of switch towns and you don't want to have to like so you're still, there's still going to be some manual effort there anyways. I see the people that are trying to do this using AI spending just as much time tweaking it as just like honestly optimizing daily. That being said, I do believe master routes will save you a lot of time because you save it once, it stays locked in and then you just add as needed and then maybe twice a year you say okay, where are their imbalances? Because more customers joined a specific route and then you have to kind of move a couple over a different master route, for example, or start a new route. So that is certainly on our horizon and that is terms of optimizing routes making it much more easy to do this on the dispatch board in several different functions in the future. Well, have a fantastic weekend and we'll see you next week. On the mastermind.