He Was Wasting $3K/Month on Ads... (Unfiltered Turnaround)

I'm concerned with spending $3,000 a month on marketing. If someone, Google is not giving you a cost per lead, they have no idea what they're doing. I can almost guarantee it's a horrible return. Yeah. One thing that might be helpful is like just having where you do start in the field, click from a profitability perspective. But then it's like, okay, say three o' clock afterwards. That's how I do estimates. I do my email. Just some sort of delineation because otherwise the start and stop throughout the day can just make it super inefficient. It's hard to manage the crew. It's hard, like focus stresses me out too totally.

I'm like trying to set this paver and I'm also taking a phone call and like sending out an estimate real quick. And it's just not efficient at all. That's a good idea.

Like, even if it's okay, from 6 till 2, I will be with the crew. I'm 100 operations and then I'll switch to admin and sales. And really that's what you'll have to do at this size. Like until you get to that 400,000 level, you just, you're just not gonna be able to afford the admin for sure. And it just, there's not, there's honestly not enough for them to do. Yeah, a couple estimates a day, a couple calls.

It was like two hours a week.

That she was doing. Got it. Got it. Yeah. No. Cool. All right. And so right now, like my biggest, like where I see the constraint in some regard or like a big not problem, like the fact that we're spending $3,000 a month on the ads for Google and we don't know where that's going. Like, we don't have traceable cost per lead, customer acquisition costs. So like there's no information he's sending you, like clicks, keywords, nothing, like official.

I've never gotten a PDF or anything written in an email.

Okay.

Again, we've done some stuff on like a video call and he shares his screen, but I still don't think I'm seeing an roi. I think we're just like seeing like, this is your ad, this is how many people clicked and this is how many people were input into your CRM jobber.

Yep. So can you see that number? How many came from Google inside there?

Only if we have these video calls, I don't know if I can access it, you know, out of these video calls that happen once a month.

Okay, so how many like leads In a month. Do you usually get. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Pull it up real quick. You know, at least get a ball part. I mean, obviously this is a slope series, but are you still spending like. Like for example, last month, there's still a thousand dollars.

So he's lenient with me. So from end of November to we're starting up next week, that's been. Again. Okay, I wasn't paying anything.

Got it. So nothing. Like he wasn't paying for. It was like zero. So basically probably seven, eight months of the years when he's actually running ads. We're paying a thousand dollars in management fees and then $2,000 a month for ad spend. That's correct. Got it.

That's. That's the plan this year. I think that's what we did last year too. Okay, so Jobber actually just in input a AI or co pilot in here.

Right.

So I can see how like this.

One was three requests in the past 30 days.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Things now. Things are just now speeding up as well. And then a lot of these are calls too. Or that's not input in here, but I get calls too, so.

Got it.

That's not totally accurate.

Makes sense.

How many? Right.

You're good. Go. Go to your quotes real quick. I just want to see how many you're sending on average. And then we could even just search there you go all.

Go ahead and filter this down.

This.

Yeah. And then. Yeah, and go custom range. Let's do April 2024. So just all of April and next.

April 1, like November or December last year?

No, just April.

So go back all the way.

April. All the way back. Cuz that's kind of your. I would assume that's kind of your busy season.

Sorry. Yeah, for sure. So like just April.

Yeah. 46. Wow. That's quite a bit. So you're basically getting like more than one a day at least. Yeah, during the busy season.

And I would bet May is probably our busier. Whoops. Our busier month. Okay.

I could be wrong. That's always what I thought. But 40 seconds. So I'm at the same.

Okay. Okay. So you're getting one. Okay. All right, cool. Yeah, I'm really interested to see like if we can get any sort of other data from him in terms of cost per lead. So like I'm assuming he doesn't have tracking codes on your website to track when an estimate is being requested.

Nothing. That's. No, not at all.

Yeah, so because what we want. What we want to know is like how much are we spending to get one lead.

Right.

And like right now we're spending $3,000 a month in go time. But if we get, say, 50, 50 leads and it's all from Google, like 100% of which I would assume it's like half. But you're saying we get 40 leads on $3,000. We are spending like $80 cost per lead. Right. And then if we close it, say half of those, now we're paying $150 customer acquisition cost. And just knowing that number is important.

Right.

It's not even saying that bad. Like, it's not a horrible number. But I also, I happen to believe that out of those 40, let's just call it 50 leads, maybe 20 of them are actually coming from Google, because other ones that just are coming from your website and Facebook and seeing your. Your. Your truck and referrals and everything else. Okay. And so now if we're paying $300 customer acquisition cost and we're only getting 10 new leads a month from Google, now, this might not be a good way to use our money, because when I look at like last year, we spent $20,000 in marketing, $2,200,000 in revenue. That's like a 10X. Right. But that assumes every single customer came from our ads. But you already had like 150,000 revenue the year before of recurring customers.

You know, like I said, I heard them later in the season too, so. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. I'm concerned with spending $3,000 a month on marketing.

Yeah. Like, okay.

For the return that we're getting.

That's true. I always looked at it like, okay, I want to spend 10% of revenue on marketing, but I never really tracked it.

Right.

And I never cared to choose. Like, that's why I hired out my Google Ads, because I didn't know how to track it. And then I guess I just interested in tracking it.

Yeah.

It's not good. For sure.

Yeah. Especially do you know this person personally or they is actual business?

It's a. It's an actual business. It's like basically one guy that runs it all, though.

Okay.

He's based out of San Diego.

Okay.

He was a. I was a cold lead. He reached out to me on like, Facebook.

Okay.

And then like six months later, I was like, hey, I can't do this. Can you help?

Yeah, yeah. If there. If someone, Google, is not giving you a cost per lead, they have no idea what they're doing because what you want them to do is put a Google tracking code on your thank you page. So when someone Makes an estimate request form. They can actually. Oh, I like that ad. Made that lead.

So he set up basically a duplicate of my website.

Okay.

It's my website with Go at the beginning and I think that's connected to it. And I'm also concerned. I had this thought last year. I wonder if he didn't share those numbers with me because they didn't perform as well as he thought they would.

Yeah.

Because when I was managing them, I could be wrong because I don't track these things very well. But I thought I could have been getting more leads than he was getting me. Yeah, yeah, I was spending less than.

I'm also concerned with the whole sub domain thing because now you're driving traffic to a domain that's not yours. Like. Like that is not your main website. Like, I don't want traffic going to some other subdomain. I want to all go into my main website so that Google's like, oh, there's a bunch of traffic going to this spot.

Plus they can't explain floor elsewhere on the, on the site.

They can't.

Yeah. Well, yeah, no, because it's just Go trust my website's trusttharve.com.

Yeah.

Yes, go trusttharve.com which is not connected to my website at all.

Oh, at all. Yeah, it's just a, like a landing page.

Landing page. Yeah.

Oh, mercy. Yeah.

No, really?

Yeah. So if you spent, if you spent one day on like Google Ads, YouTube.

Yeah.

You would probably outperform him, honestly, just, just by having a Google tracking code that you put on your website and then being able to like, even if he didn't track the leads, just with the fact that you're paying $1,000 a month to him for managing it. Let's just like, okay, let's say you spend $2,000 a month on ads and a thousand dollars on him. If you run the ads, he has to beat you by 50% cost per lead to make it break even on spend paying $1,000 to him. Yeah. So like, I don't know who he is, but like, I would recommend cutting that. Like that's $3,000 in your pocket right now. And I happen to believe even if you turn that off completely, you probably get 70% of your leads still.

So here's the thing too. We locked into a year contract. Oh.

So, okay.

Which was last June, I want to say.

Okay.

So at a bare minimum, I have to finish out till June unless there's some clause that I can get out somehow.

Okay. So that's basically April, May, and June.

Yeah.

And that's gonna be $3,000 a month.

Okay. Okay. Well, I can probably reduce my ad spend, but at a minimum, I have to pay him his fee.

Right. Okay. May then. What I would do then. Cause that's like spring rush. So it's okay. Like, we're gonna kind of bomb for spring rush in terms of our. Like, you are spending a ton of money on ads and getting very little in return. Like, we're shooting for a 10x return or, sorry, a 20x return, as on new revenue. So, for example, if last year we did 200,000. If I spend $20,000 in marketing this year, I would expect a $400,000 increase in revenue, which would be on top of your 200,000. We'd be getting to 600 grand. In the perfect world. Let's just say you had a 10x return. That's $200,000, which means this year you should be doing 400,000 in revenue.

Just 200 base is an additional.

Well, because you've already. You already have that recurring revenue for last year. You already have a base of revenue from, like, recurring customers, et cetera. So, like, I want marketing dollars to be in addition to last year's revenue.

So I would just be careful with that one. I know people, especially reaching out from Facebook, and they are taking advantage of the fact that you just feel inadequate and you don't know the number side of things. But honestly, one day, if you just lock yourself in this room and I'm going to learn Google Ads and you watch eight hours worth of content, you will run better ads than that simply by having a tracking code behind your. Your thank you page. Like, when they submit the form, it literally tracks like, oh, this is how many leads I got for X amount that I've spent.

Yeah. So, yeah, I need better shots at tracking all that. I guess for now, like, until June, I just need to, like, be on it about, like, hey, I need to be getting this roi, you know, to even.

Yep.

For it to be worth it.

So for now, for the next few months, we're just like, hey, we. I would love to be able to see my cost per lead. Yeah, right. And if he can't give that to you, it's a really tell. Tall sign. Or just the fact that he knows that and he knows really bad. Yeah, it's. That could be possible as well. So I would really push for, hey, can I get my cost per lead? And he does not know I know he knows that number because the reason he did that so domain is. Because he knows that every single lead that comes through that domain is a lead from your ads.

Okay.

So does he. Like, when you get a lead from that webpage, does it look any different to you? Instead of copilot or inside of.

So basically, like, it goes from that, then it goes to his CRM and then I think it bounces it to my. To my jobber.

Okay.

So like, there's some Zapier connect that.

Right. Do you see that different? Like, can you differentiate that between like a lead you get?

Yeah, yeah. It's confusing too, because, like, I don't. Yeah. If I go to my request, I have no idea which one of these came from him and which ones of these were just from my website or Facebook or whatever.

Okay. So another thing you could ask him about. You just ask about UTM to say, hey, could you do UTM parameters on these? That's going to allow him. If he knows what he's doing, he'll be able to track these simply by. If they hit that domain, it tags the account. So ask him about UTM parameters and then also ask him about cost per lead. Like, can I just figure out, can you give me my cost per lead? At the very least, can you tag quotes that come from your CRM? Because he sees that.

Okay. Like a customer tag.

Like, at the very least, like, that'll be more of a manual thing, but like, I would imagine from like a tracking code or utm, he could do this automatically, especially if he's using Zapier to pull these in. But you could also just be like, hey, can I just have a list of the ones that are coming to your CRM? You could actually just ask for that.

Okay.

Like, hey, I just want to know which leads are coming from Google. A. Can you give me cost per lead? Which I think he has, but he's.

Not giving it to you.

Or at least say, I like to be able to see which ones are coming through your CRM. So I can compare how many are coming from my other advertising. So I can almost guarantee you it's a horrible return on investment. Yeah. Based upon that, how much you're spending and then like the amount of leads come in. The fact they didn't charge you throughout the winter is nice.

Yeah.

Right. I would say it's probably because he would. He. He probably knows that it's going to cost hundreds of dollars per lead because it's just. There's low demand.

Yeah. There's like nothing coming in.

Yeah. So I would also like to see that Traffic going to your website instead of. And it kind of makes sense as to why you have 75 Google reviews but you're not ranking super high because your traffic's lower than what I would have anticipated because you got 75 Google reviews which in this area is like basically the highest.

Yeah.

So you rank really well on Google listing but the native search is not there.

So in. We rank really well for native search in Chatham, Illinois.

Okay.

Because that was my first target market.

Yeah.

Only last year did I create a landing page for Springfield and keywords for Springfield. Because at first I wanted to stay out of Springfield because I was you know, super small. I just wanted to hit this really tight knit community.

Yeah.

And now that we're expanding I'm like, well I should really get into Springfield more.

So yeah.

Give it like a year or two. And obviously what you're saying would help.

But that should also pull up your website real quick. Did you build this?

I did.

Oh that's very good.

Yeah.

You out here telling me you don't know technology and ads you can totally figure out.

It's just the numbers that I don't understand.

Gotcha. I gotcha.

I love graphics, I love design, I love creativity.

What'd you build this on?

WordPress.

Cool. Yeah. This is really cool. I saw the videos and the other pages too. Like the pricing one, stuff like that. Appreciate it. It's very cool. Okay. And then yeah. So in your header it's sitting chat is like they're setting Springfield right after that.

I should. I haven't changed that yet.

Okay. I would just take out exceeding expectations and just change that to.

You know, landscaping in Chatham and Springfield. Yeah.

Okay.

That'll help.

My fear too was like in like nevermind. I guess what you just said, Nick is what I'm about to say.

Go ahead.

I was gonna say like I was gonna do just Springfield because I wanted to have exceeding expectations there. But it's not needed.

Right.

So I can just do those two. I was afraid of taking Chatham out and then losing my ranking in Chatham.

But yeah. Yeah. I would take out exceeding expectations because it's not helping us rank at all.

That's true.

And people don't get here. We don't get exceeded any of them expectations.

That's right.

Go to the really the top really quick.

The top of the page.

Top of the page. Yeah. So this is the part where I feel I get a little confused because if I take out this right here, I don't know what you do.

Okay.

Right. So like what I like to see, usually when I come to a website is yes, the logo is nice. But basically what we just talked about here, I want to see this here. Like serving Chatham and Springfield, Illinois with lawn care landscaping since X date, for example. Or just saying like number one provider or exceeding expectations of residents in Springfield and Chatham and Zayn lawn care and landscaping. I don't know what this is all about either because like these are, these are sites. Great. I also know that you can just pull these images from Google. So like from a customer's perspective, it doesn't really add a lot. Okay. So I would be doing a couple of things right from the get here from like a conversion perspective.

Yeah.

And it is. Oh, you're good. From a conversion perspective, I would rather instead of having this stuff, I'd have an estimate request form. And so you already, you have the Jobber work request, but super big. Yeah. If you have, you have you used like Jotform or paper form or anything. Yeah, perfect. And you know, Zapier enough probably. Yeah. So perfect. So I would, I would make a small form. I'd be putting it right here.

Okay.

And I'd be saying request a free estimate. I'd probably make even a button up top here. So as someone scrolls down, they're reading about you, they're reading everything. Always a spot to like the call to actions. Really, really clear.

Yeah, that makes sense. So what about this though? Because like all these forms that are these contact forms that are on my page.

Yeah.

These are HTML from Jobber that I was able to plug in Will, if I did some sort of, you know, Jotform or something here, like would that still go, I guess those customer details like at Zapier into Jobber.

Correct. And then secondly, even if it didn't, even if you don't connect to Zapier, it sounds like you know how to do that. But even if you didn't, I'd still recommend doing it separately because it takes you 10 seconds to copy and paste their contact information over. I'm focusing on conversion because the other part of like this is why I have a hard time actually judging this guy with his Google Ads. Because you can get someone to click an ad cause you do a great job at ads. But when it comes to site, if it's not clear as to what they're asking for the conversion, that's the other part that someone should be tracking when it comes to the website. What's the conversion rate? If I get 50 people from an ad, how many of them actually submit an estimate request form, and then how.

Many of them are actually turning into clients.

So, for example, I know as soon as I have a different page, if you click this and it drops them or it takes them to a contact page, immediately, you're losing 30% of people. Yeah, just immediately. Like, 30% of your people are lost by the fact that I can't immediately insert my contact information.

Really?

Yeah. Okay, so we have one goal. Exceeding expectations. Great. They don't care. They clicked on an ad saying lawn care landscaping, and they're like, I have a problem. I want it solved. And when they're coming to the site, the only thing that you have to do is bridge them from I have a problem to we have a solution, and there's an estimate that is needed in between that. Now, I like instant pricing, but even if you don't do that, I would just make it really easy for them to be able to give you their contact number.

I'm down with instant pricing. I just don't know how to.

You actually have it. You have it kind of throughout, sort.

Of like I have it here. I would like there be a way for, like, them to fill out a form. Well, I guess if they input their square footage and stuff. A lot of people don't really know that.

They have no idea.

Yeah. So I don't know.

But what you could do, like. So one thing I. On the pricing thing, I said, no one's gonna read this. This is a lot of information.

It is. Yeah.

I would try to take everything that's in this small text and try to make it one sentence max. So this is really just a lot of information. And if you keep scrolling, if I remember, there's like, there's even more sheets scrolling down. There's four. Yeah. Okay. This is basically ask for question four. It's just a lot of information that is hard to digest for somebody. What I was thinking, though, is what you could do is on your service page, have this information. So, for example, I want lawn care. Then the premium lawn care is there.

Yeah.

And then if I want, like, you know, property clamps. Okay. Seasonal is there too. And then there's like, the landscape that would be on the landscaping page, because otherwise it looks like a whole bunch of random pricing information. And when you're saying starting it, it's not specific enough for people. Like, oh, like, that's what I'm paying.

And it's kind of misleading, too. Yeah, I've noticed that because, like, I had a call the other day. It's like, oh, you charge 100 bucks for mulch install. No, like, that's per yard. Like, that's not really what we charge. And they were not interested.

And even would you want to install one yard of mulch?

Yeah, exactly.

Right. For 100 bucks. Not really. Right. So I. I would. I would probably say the one thing for instant pricing that we still don't touch is projects.

Okay.

Because the range is like.

Yeah, it's all over the place. So many different variants.

Insane. Yeah. Whereas with mowing, I'm willing to take a little bit of variation, knowing I can raise their price in the future. Right. But going back to the homepage, even if you didn't do instant pricing, which I would say, like on Jotform, if you get good at that, you could definitely make it where it, like, shows pictures, like, small, medium, and large. And then what we do is we actually. We do show the square footage ranges.

Okay.

So, like, small, it'll say you have a picture, but It'll be like 3,000 8,000 square feet. Medium be like 8,000 to 12,000 square feet. Large will be like 12,000 square feet plus. But then I have the pictures to make it a little easier for them. You could do that, but literally you would get, like, a 30% bump in conversion if you just nix this. Put this as a small form. You want to cover, like, less than a third of the page where they don't have to scroll any further down.

Yeah.

So even if you wanted to move this thing down, make that form there, nix this and just make. It was like, because they're coming to your site, usually from an ad, or they saw your. They want to submit information as fast as possible. And as soon as you say, hey, you got to click on contact, you got to click on this button over here. We just dropped 30% of people.

Wow. I guess because we get a ton of traffic. A ton for what I would think of on our homepage.

Right.

And then anything else, like, it drops off, and then the time spent on those pages is like, nothing.

Nothing. Yeah, yeah. So what you're trying to do is like, this. This part of your page, it's kind of Google. If you're on the first, like, three spots of Google, you know, you don't get seen. It's the same thing with your website. Okay. Above the fold. Everyone sees it. Like, when they come to the site, they will see this. The likelihood of them seeing the contact page of the pricing page is like, 1%.

Yeah.

So this is why this is the most important, like, real estate of the Entire thing. And we're giving it to these people, really. So, like, that's where it's like, let's just make it really lazy. Like, focus on our cta.

Okay.

So also this, the picture in the background is a random photo of trees. I would just make it like, more personalized to you.

Okay.

Right. Like, you have some really good photos of you and the crew you out in the field. Okay. I think like, even at your size now, leaning into like the. You can like a picture of family like you had is really good.

Yeah. Okay.

This picture, though, if it was like you on a project job with a couple of employees, would do way better conversion than random trees. Also tells me very quickly what you do versus this. Like, again, literally, if you cover up this. I have no idea what this is.

Screen, and you see a tree, supposed to be a bed. There's supposed to be a whole landscape.

Oh, it's just, you can't see because.

On mobile it looks good.

So yeah, I would just like. It's kind of like when. When we make videos, like 90 of our time should be on the first 30 seconds.

Yeah.

Because that's what I know. Everyone's gonna see that. Whereas when your website's like, I want this to be perfect, all this other stuff. Great. I'm doing it mostly for SEO. If someone's digging into my site and wants to do a back end study about me, but most people don't care. I just got to get them to get an estimate request for me to make that as easy as possible.

Okay. So don't worry so much about CTAs. I mean, have CTAs on these pages, but like really just hammer it right here.

Yeah. Like 90% of our time should be spent on above the fold homepage. So I think, you know, here you could have either your phone number. Ah, very good. It's small, but yep. No, you're good. So here could just be contact us or even get a free quote. I would just move this up here, get a free quote. So that way as they scroll down, if they pass this form or if they're on and about pages, there's always a CTA to get a free quote.

Okay.

But then right here, I'd nix these four. One third of the page is gonna be a small form. I'm minimizing how much information I need from them. It's just like services, name, phone number, address, email. That's it.

Okay.

Make it as small as possible. The challenging part with the HTML and Jobber, it takes so much Space.

It does, yeah.

And ideally I push them towards that because it's perfect. It goes into the form, everything's connected. I got way more information, but I just want like base. I just want to get higher conversion.

So you're saying on Jotform, like Jotform has a thing I can put in here and it's smaller.

Yeah. Would you build some WordPress?

WordPress?

They have ones too. It's just a matter of like, I don't even care if it's connected, just something small, something. And if you can't connect with Zapier, if you can't, it doesn't matter because it literally takes you 20 seconds to copy it over. And like if you look at your conversion, like you said, like, there's such a huge drop off if we can just increase that by double. So for example, 1 out of 50 people currently submit an asset request form that get to the site, which is pretty average. If we get to like one more, it's like one out of 25, we double the business. So. And that will do like more for us than spending $3,000 a month.

Right now here I'm sitting, sitting here thinking like my website was like super good.

It's good. No, no, I know, but trust me, I have seen a lot worse. Don't worry about it.

Better functionality wise.

Yeah, it looks good though. Like it's from. There's like two, like three elements. There's like design, there's conversion and there's SEO. Yeah, right. Design wise, you nailed it. Like the fact that you built it super good. Especially on mobile. Actually I really like design on mobile and the conversion part is the part we want to address. Like the whole reason the website exists is to get people to go from interested to a lead. Right. So just a couple things on that one, but overall you built it really well.

Appreciate.

Okay, cool. So that's like the marketing side. Yeah. I think that for now it is a matter of actually, do you have a piece of paper? Could I have a marker also like keep notes for you. So it's a little more organized. Yes.

And then.

Actually, should I have the clipboard? Yeah, super helpful. Let's go. The employee handbook, my man.

That might be sensitive document.

Oh, okay. I won't look into that. Okay. This is the employee handbook. Sweet. Oh, very good.

Last year I really struggled. I shy away a lot from conflict and I try to avoid it as much as possible. And this is almost mainly there just.

To help me have something.

Exactly. Because if someone's late and I'M like, hey, can you stop being late? Like, we really need you here on time. If I have something to actually back that up.

Yeah, it's.

That conversation goes a lot easier for me. So.

Yeah, that's been helpful.

Yeah. Well, I just implemented it this year because last year we had a late problem, you know, with a couple guys. And again, like, I don't like conflicts of like, hey, can we stop doing this? And then they'd be late again, stop doing this. And I'm like, too nice about it, too. So this, it'll definitely help, I think this year having something and they sign off on it and everything.

Okay, cool. And so really going into this year, though, you got one person been with you since last fall, and then two brand new ones starting next week.

Yep, let's go.

And you've already hid them. They're good to go.

Yeah, that's what's underneath that is one of your mics.

Probably me. No.

It says it's red.

That's the same brand that makes drone.

Yeah, we just got them.

They're really nice DJI mics, man.

What kind of job is he going to the day?

Huh?

What. What job is he doing today?

A mulch install.

Okay, nice.

Cleaning out a bunch of bags. Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

How many. How many yards?

Three and a half.

Okay, so nothing crazy. Do you kind of keep him busy and you busy during the winter or just.

No. So during the winter he's laid off?

Oh, he just started back.

He just started this week.

Yesterday. Oh, wow. Okay.

So yeah. Yep.

So during the winter, what's your revenue usually around?

We don't do anything in the winter. Okay. I did shovel driveways this year and I made like a couple grand, but I'm never doing that again. I hated shoveling. So if I'm going to do snow again, which I'm not opposed to, I just want to make sure I have equipment to do, so.

Right, right, right. It's kind of intermittent with snow here though, right?

Yeah, it's a hit or miss. Like, two years ago we didn't get anything. Three years ago we didn't get anything. Four years ago we got hit like we did this year. We had a big storm and everybody was out for three days. But yeah, it's a hit or miss. So if I buy something this year, it's kind of a gamble whether or not it's gonna.

Got it. Okay. All right. So from a leads perspective. So when we look at the 4L framework, it's basically just gonna help us kinda like organize this stuff. So liquidity is the first for first of the Ls. So liquidity, we know like right now the cash crunch is real and so we'll address that part in a second. But from a leads perspective, we know we need to know cost per lead. We are going to increase conversion of the website using the form, using the estimate request form as well as like this part being really focused on like, what does this do? When a customer comes here, they want to know, do they serve my area and do they do my services?

What do we do? How can we help? And then immediately getting their info.

Yeah. The first thing thrive lawn care. Great. I know they do lawn care. The next question I have a customer has is do they serve my area? Yeah, it's like that's why having Chatham and Springfield there is helpful.

That's true.

They're just trying to validate like does this work for me? Right.

I do that a lot. Like I'm looking at H Vac Co. And they're like out of Pleasant Plains or something. But do they serve my area?

Right.

That makes total sense.

Cool. So leads, we got to know our cost per lead for now. We'll talk to the guy with Google, see if you can't give us that information. And if not, just ask for a very manual outlay of like, okay, give me all the leads that come into your CRM. Just so I know just any information I can get. Yep. Okay, great. That's leads. I genuinely believe that after Jun, if you just can him and you spend a thousand dollars on Google Ads yourself, save two grand, you'd probably get more leads, right?

Yeah.

And you can then control lead flow. So when you're crazy booked, you just throttle it back. When you need a little more, you can put more on it. But tracking the cost per lead, putting the tracking code behind here, you will figure that out in two hours. If you can build this, you can put a tracking code behind. And what's also cool, if you did the job form or some sort of form separately, you could always know, like you could just track. Okay, I'm going to send all the traffic to there from Google Ads. You'll know that form equals I have a converting ad. So that's what he's doing with the whole sub domain thing. It's easier to track.

Yeah.

So cool. All right, so from a liquidity perspective right now, what's our labor rate? Like what are you trying to charge out in the field?

80 to 90 an hour. So I try to get. Doesn't always Happen. The mowing side usually is hovering around 80, but again, that depends on things going wrong. The landscaping side is where we started last year. I would charge. Try to charge between 80 and 100, but some days we'd be getting like 50 or 60, and then some days we get 120, and it's just all over the place.

Right.

But. But yeah, my bare minimum that I want to hit is like $80. Now I'd be okay if we hit like, seven.

Okay.

All right.

Do you know what approximately your close ratio is? Like, what percentage of high? Too high?

Yeah, last year it was too high. So it was like, above 50%.

Okay. Like 60. 70%.

It was. Yeah. Around 60.

Okay.

Yeah, I don't think it was above 60, but maybe mid-60s.

Okay.

Low 60s.

Okay. Yeah. Like, my concern right now is that we have a few employees and yourself working. And at the revenue marker, we're currently doing, like. We're not actually hitting 80 to 100. Right. We're significantly lower. But we. We really want to track that. So we know also to be able to track the efficiency of the crew.

Yeah. That's another thing I need to work on this year.

So, like, I know, like, pay for performance is not really in the cards yet because I'm assuming you don't use budget hours for every job, et cetera. It's a little harder to track that in jobber. So what you could do, though, is just track how much do you pay someone per day in wages, and then how much do they earn in revenue per day?

Yeah. How much do I need to be making to certain labeled revenue?

So, for example, if we take. For, like, the labor side, if we just start tracking labor efficiency, and how we're going to track labor efficiency is simply. Is going to be wages paid. So that could be. Let's just call them 20 bucks an hour. That kind of average. So 20 bucks an hour. We had eight hours worth of work. $160 divided by. Okay. What was what we earned for that day? I earned $1,000. What? 180 divided by a thousand. That's 0.18. 18%. Good. We want that number under 40%. Yeah.

So last year, just to give. You probably already maybe have crunched these numbers, but on my p. L. My labor to revenue, if I wasn't in the. So this. Obviously, this doesn't include me, the labor and payroll.

Right.

Yep. I'm just going to set this here recording. Yep. Here, go and put this right here. Sorry. So that way, as you guys are talking, we at least get. So if I wasn't in the equation, if it was just the payroll I paid out, it was like, under 30%, which was, like, great. But I was in the field every day, working 50 hours a week. So, like, if I put myself in that situation, in that equation, as if I was an employee, it jumped up to, like, 43%, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, totally. And what you can do because you have the two trucks is track it by the crew.

Okay.

Because what I would guess is that you are, like, crazy efficient and your other crew is just falling behind a bit. But just knowing what that is and actually having a metric instead of just being like. I kind of feel like they're like. It's also why it's tough to hold people accountable is when you're not tracking the numbers because you don't want. You don't want to, like, throw someone under the bus if they're trying, but you just take them wrong. But when the, like, the numbers don't lie. Like, if one crew is. Is at 60% of revenue going to wages, and the other one's at 25%, that we have a training or an efficiency problem or work ethic problem. Right. And so even if you didn't pay, like, I would say, down the road, you'd want to incentivize this.

Right, Right.

Because, like, we can have.

I was just talking to Brad about this morning.

Okay.

I was like, the more we grow and the more, like, the more money we make by your efficiency. I want you to win from that.

Yeah.

I just don't know how to implement that quite yet. Yeah, the time to do it yet.

Yeah. Like, you know, ultimately, pay for performance is nice for that. I think the simpler model is like, let's just track for now what percentage of labor revenue is going out in wages. And then down the road, you could be like, hey, guys, if you beat 30%, you get some sort of a bonus.

Yeah, for sure.

Right. And so just tracking that would be helpful because, like, right now you can really easily know how long they work today. Multiply that by their hourly rate. Boom, there's their wages. And then look at jobber. Okay. Add up all the jobs they did for the day or the one project. Boom, there's that revenue marker. Now, remember, it's labor revenue. So if they have, like, mulch jobs, you're going to take the materials out, Right?

Yeah.

So even if it's an approximation.

Yeah. Now I think of it, yeah. Our landscaping side probably really sucked last year.

Really?

Yeah. Because a Lot of like, I'd look at our revenue and I wasn't even calculating the materials on it for some of the jobs. Like in my head through the day, I was like, okay, this is how much we made hourly. We pay this much materials. But like looking back on the month, I definitely wasn't.

Yeah.

Doing so.

Okay. So from a labor perspective, the goal is track labor efficiency. Our kind of equation be wages paid that day divided by labor revenue. It's going to take you like a minute, maybe two minutes per employee per day, which is 10 minutes a day. It kind of stinks. But if you do that every day and then over the course of time be able to kind of see like what is the trajectory for each employee, the crew, and then just have better confidence when it comes to budgeting because like right now, like, man, we're spending so much in ads. Want to can this guy so fast?

Whoa. Whoops.

How. What's the likelihood of getting out of the contract?

I don't know. It's hard to. Cuz I'm a pushover.

I know, I know.

I could probably make it happen.

Okay.

I would just feel terrible, I guess. But logistically this doesn't make sense. Yeah, yeah, I could probably make it and I signed a contract. He's a good guy though.

Yeah.

Might be able to make something happen.

I would come from the angle of I can't afford this.

Yeah.

Like right now we are spending way too much of our revenue on it. And I genuinely believe if you spend a thousand, you'd get the same results, if not better. And then the other 2000, like we need it in our pocket. We just don't have the cash. You could just be really straight and honest and like, I don't have one month worth of advertising.

That's what I told them last week. We had our phone call for the year to get things ready and we were supposed to start this week.

Yeah.

I was like, I just don't have the money. I got to re register my truck. So I got to pay my cpa. I don't have the money to do ads right now. And I'm like banking on the fact that we'll have money in two weeks to be able to pay him. What?

Yeah, if we can get out of that contract, that'd be huge.

Okay.

Because it's not just a thousand dollars of basically straight off to him. It's the $2,000 in ads and I don't see any return. I'm just not seeing it.

Yeah, we were doing good actually on our on our Facebook ads. When I was managing those, we had a ton of leads. The problem was a lot of them were low quality leads. Right, but you're good, man.

But yeah, I think that's doable. Then that makes a lot of sense. Like, that would literally be an extra two grand in my pocket at the end of the month.

And that's assuming we still spend a thousand dollars on things that, you know, work. Right. The Facebook ads, for example.

I could be higher.

Right?

And I could be making more money.

And for example, if someone says, hey, I'm gonna a ton of leads from Facebook, but they're low, low quality, like, great, let's just add constraint to the ad. So instead of just saying, like, get free lawn care, which is gonna have tons of leads, but low quality, I'm gonna put something like, hey, minimum starts at $49 or something like that. That's going to immediately guess reduce the amount of leads I get, but increase the quality of them.

Yeah, that's right.

So we're going to get out of the contract. Get out of the Google contract.

The guy's probably really nice, and I.