Growing Your Landscape Business TOO FAST? How to Fix It!

Hey everybody, it's Mike and today I'm gonna give you a quick tip and this is coming from the Facebook group and we're gonna be taking these questions and answering them in short order here. I'm just sitting here at a bank waiting for it to open. Gotta do a money order. So I want to answer a couple questions. Let's just do one and try to dive a little bit deeper on this question today. This question comes from Kevin Russell. He says how do you avoid growing too fast? Meaning you understand the web SEO generating leads, but how do you create your web presence early on without getting to the point where it works out so well that you have way more leads and phone calls than you could possibly manage with a two man team and you don't have the cash yet to hire people. Alright, so there's the question on Facebook group. Make sure you check out landscape business course on the Facebook group and become part of that today. So for some people this sounds ridiculous or crazy or like a really good dream that they'd have too much, too many leads coming in. But it's an actual thing when you're starting out because you only have so much time in a day and if you're getting a ton of leads, it doesn't really matter because you're trying to actually get the work done. And if you are out in the field it's depending on you performing the work and needing the time to out be doing the work and you don't have time to be running around doing a bunch of leads and if you got them accepted, great. But you don't have any workers to actually get the work done. And so you literally can get in the point where you have too many leads where you're currently at. This is what I would do. It's the same thing I've done with the franchise. So when I first started the franchise we were getting six to eight calls per day that I'd be taking of interested parties, people that were interested in the franchise and it was great, it was cool. But the thing was the close ratio was low again, like I wasn't having the. I didn't have the time to research the territories before the call and research the person. It wasn't as good. So what we did is we made the pre qualification process more difficult. In other words, on your website, instead of making it really easy to get an estimate, you still want it to be easy to find, but what you want to do is pre qualify them. You might ask other questions on your estimate request form, like when Are you ready to start this project?

What's your budget for this project?

What are the two things you're looking for in a great lawn care service, whatever it might be, you can really pre qualify them so that you're not just getting a ton of leads and you'd rather get less leads in this scenario and have a lower closing ratio. Now this is not going to be the method for growth because for growth you want that big lead flow and you're willing to take a lower closing ratio even though those leads might not be completely pre qualified. And you're willing to just get their phone number, name, email address and address and go out and do an estimate. And so in terms of avoiding growing too fast, that's not the question I'm really addressing here because I don't really feel like that's a big problem. My thing is, what I'm trying to address here is when you're getting too many leads and you're trying to get work done out in the field, in order to make sure that the leaves that you do leave the field for and the estimates you do go out and complete are actually closing at a higher rate, I would pre qualify your people much more. That is either over the phone or on your estimate request forms, making sure that you really weed out people that are tire kickers, weed out people that are price shopping, weed out people that are doing five or six different estimates. You want those people that are word of mouth referrals, people that have seen your trucks, people that give specifics on their expert request form or in an email or a phone call to you in terms of what they're looking for. And people that are willing to pay a higher price. You might literally say on the phone, Mr. Jones, we've considered ourselves to be a premium service. We charge more, but we offer X, Y and Z as a way to produce a lot of value for our customers and keep them happy for years to come down the road. And, and that might weed out the price shoppers, the tire kickers, the people are gonna get five estimates from your competitors and go with the lowest estimate.

So the big thing here that Kevin's talking about though is that he doesn't have the cash yet to hire people. And that's really the kicker. And so what I would do in this scenario is two things. Number one, pre qualify your leads more so that you're not leaving the field to go do junk leads, make sure that you're maybe you get 50% less leads, but your closing ratio can go up by 30%. And so I would do that, number one. Number two, I would raise your prices, all right, because if your close ratio is too high and you're closing 70, 80% of your jobs, you need to raise your prices so that you're getting that work, but it's being done profitable even if your close ratio is like 40 or 50%. And so I would highly recommend to do that in that order. Number one, restrict your lead flow by pre qualifying your leads more. If your leads are coming in and now you're starting to close more of them, and because you've cut out the junk, you've cut out the price shoppers, then you're going to move to step two, which is raise your prices. As soon as you start closing 60, 70% of your jobs, you need to start raising your prices. It's a tell tall sign. Unless you're trying to just grow top line revenue. If you're trying to grow more sustainably and more profitably, I would raise your prices and bring that to 40 or 50% close ratio, but with a much better margin on profitability. So hopefully that answered your question, Kevin. I'm going to have more of these quick tips for all of you. Make sure you guys check out landscapebusinesscourse.com and if you're wanting your website built, check out lawn careweb design.com we'll see you next time.