Helping A New Business Owner get More Leads

Today I'm Talking to over 40 home service business owners that are trying to grow past a million dollars in annual revenue. We're going to be talking about how to switch from one time projects into recurring work. We're going to go upsells and the process of handing off all your admin tasks so you can get off the truck and focus on sales. There's a bunch of questions, a lot of rider downers, a lot of good golden nuggets. So without any further delay, let's jump right in.

Hey, thanks, thanks for doing this, Mike. I really appreciate it. Yeah. So I'm planning for 2026. We did roughly 300k last year and 30% of that was gutter cleaning. I really want, I'm really trying to come up with a way to get my clients on recurring gutter cleaning and then maybe splashing some window cleaning in there eventually. But I want to keep it super simple in order to get, you know, the foundation set for the gutter cleaning and get my, myself comfortable with selling that and getting everybody on a recurring schedule. We had a 60% close rate last year and we, we were charging roughly 145 an hour. I'm looking at maybe trying to bump that up to close to 155, 165 per man hour this year. How would you structure this as a whole?

Yeah. So right now when you're doing your pricing, how are you giving the prices? Are you saying, hey, it's an hourly rate, Are you giving it based upon like the size of the house? How are you doing it?

So then that's kind of what I'm in the middle of right now as well. I've, I've downloaded a CSV file of my client's home address and then the charge that they were given for the gutter cleaning. And I'm trying to simplify and standardize how we're quoting these homes. I want to kind of base it off a square footage at this point in my average price per square foot.

Okay. And if you had to give me a range, what would 80% of the gutter cleanings fall in terms of prices? Like 80%. So cut the bottom 10% the top 10. But like what would the middle 80% be?

I will tell you that our average gutter cleaning last year was 360.

When you said that when you go back when you were giving the prices, were you saying, hey, these are 145 per hour or were you saying package pricing?

So basically I didn't give them an hour hourly Rate. I didn't tell them how long we were going to be on job. I just said hey, it's, it's. Let's just say it's 300 bucks for your gutter cleaning.

Got it. And that was based upon just like asking them a couple questions.

Yeah. And, and I was doing a lot of in person estimates last year, but this year I'm looking to simplify that as well and do a lot of over the phone estimates.

Yeah, yeah. So like I think especially when it comes to gutters, you have not a ton of equipment typically. And so you can get away with really doing like a small, medium and large. So like when we add instant quotes to homeworks later this year, I would highly recommend using it for the service you will crush and you'll be able to charge a higher price because people like in general there are, I'm sure you know this, like when you say $300 to clean up some gutters, some people freak out and they got nuts. Other people like oh that's awesome. Cool. Yeah. When can you on the schedule. And so you get all of the latter with instant quotes and you won't even have to like really like think about raising your prices as much as like just packaging of that better. I would also say, Toby, like a big thing with gutters when it comes to clean outs is the upsells. Do you have kind of other ancillary stuff that you sell?

So that's. Yes, exactly. We are a pressure washing company as well. But I know that everyone needs gutter cleaning and we do exterior window cleaning as well. That's not a necessarily a necessity however, people love that. Right. So really gutter cleaning is our, is our necessary service and then you know, the other service are just kind of as needed.

Yeah. One thing that I see being really successful, I just talked to a company out in New Jersey that they do about 1.5 doing gutters just cleaning. And so what one thing I'd recommend and we pushing them to do is like have basically have a small and large in terms of pricing. So if Your average was360, it's very possible you get most of your customers to fall into like a 199 or a 399. I'm just making that number up. But, but, and then that way you can very quickly over the phone or even on your website be able to qualify them in terms of which one of those they are. But then incentivize your crew on site around all the different upsells that they can do on site, for example, they show up 3199 and they leave that place with $1,000 because they're oh well while we're here, would you like us to do the downspouts? Would you like us to go ahead and do some moss removal treatment? Would you like us to go ahead and do the pressure washing? So like I would really, really bake that in as your entry level service to be able to upsell them five other things.

Awesome. Yeah, because we're on the same page because that's the goal. And I've already created like a pricing sheet for when they do see something on site. It just basically our hourly rate times however long they think it's going to take.

Yep. Yeah, 100%. Like everyone always begs on Augusta because when we come in a new market we go pretty low on price but they fail to realize is like if I make $800 a year from mowing, whoop de do. I'm trying to make $2,000 or $3,000 on higher margin services. I would look at the gutters as an entry level, everyone needs it. And then I'd be trying to give them five other things while you're on site. They like your guys are professional. You give the guys a cut of whatever they sell on site.

So.

So they're super incentivized.

Sounds good Mike. Thank you.

You got it. Michael, you're up.

Hey Mike. Good, good to see you. So I, I am a new business. I started in November. Obviously we get snow in in Regina.

So I'm just trying to prepare marketing

for the spring rush. So I'm just kind of wondering what your thoughts on like basically just can trying to canvas like the entire areas that I'm wanting to service.

I'm getting the truck deckled.

I'm going to get you know those

portable billboard signs that you can get

like graphics on and stuff like that. I'm going to get three of those put out. Planning on doing like 5,000 door hangers and then 100 yard signs and like that's basically the extent I'm trying to do it. Mostly physical instead of digital. I don't really want to screw around

with figuring out Facebook ads at the moment.

I'm just kind of wondering like what your thoughts on that or if you

could add anything to that.

Yeah, the two things is you're basically going to your testing phase and so all these things that you're trying just make sure that you're asking every customer where they're coming from because given the fact that you're doing all these at the same time. It's very difficult to attribute where leads are coming from, so you have to ask customers. And also as an asterisk, keep in mind they might have called because the yard sign, but they saw your trucks 10 times. And so just keep that as an asterisk. But you'll need to know where these leads are coming from because you're running everything at the same time. And then also as a side note, any dollar you spend will become much more effective if your website looks good because they're all going to still go to your website. They see the yard sign, they search you, they see your truck, they search you, they see a door hanger, they're still going to go search you. So just make sure your website, if you do spend a dollar on anything digital, do it on your website first because it'll compound to your print marketing.

Yeah, I still I my website, like

I just built it maybe like three

or four months ago.

So I still need to steadily improve it like with photos and things like that.

That's kind of why I don't want to do digital because I know it's like not up to snuff, but it's good enough for a landing page.

Basically 80% will still go to your. Even from print will still go to your website. Just keep that in mind. So like people don't, don't look at your truck and copy the phone number. They look at your truck, they see the name of the business, and they go search it on Google.

Okay. Obviously I'm just trying to build up

Google reviews and stuff like that.

First snow removal. Is there a world where you can do budgeted hours for snow removal? Or is it kind of like just a thing where you just kind of

got to track it over a few

seasons and then like kind of see

where certain size properties land.

You only get accurate budget hours based upon like either time motion studies or just tracking over the course of time. Most time with snow, the challenging part is your budget hours vary based upon the depth of the snow as well as if it's wet, if it's dry, like wind. Like there's so many, you know, variables. So most people have a pretty general idea of budgeted hours based upon snow depth. But again, every single equipment setup totally will change that. Like whether you have a back blade, a front blade, a V plow, like it just goes. There's so many variables. So the main thing is doing that, getting the rep so that you can actually compare budget hours versus actual hours and then how deep was the snow over the course of time? You'll have a pretty good idea though, based upon that information, how long job should take. Okay. Okay.

Perfect. Is there any way that you could ever do pay for performance on snow

or is it just kind of more

like it's too variable, do you think?

Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I'm actually having a call with Stefano, our DG up in Ontario next week because he wants to do P4P at his place. The reason it's nice with P4P is you can try to get around the whole problem of like keeping people on salary for the entire snow season. Right. Because that just kills your margins. The challenging part though, with P4P is you're incentivizing speed a lot. And so you have to really crack down on quality. Because one damage case with snow could be a $50,000 mistake. If they make a mistake on mowing grass, it's like, okay, we put some seed down. Whoop dee doo. So you gotta be really, really careful with incentivizing speed when it comes to snow. Cause you're putting people's lives at danger and like much bigger damage cases. And so I would just really like. It depends on like your setup, how much equipment you have going on, what kind of properties you're doing, as to whether or not I would even do P4P. So like the one time I've. We used to not do P4P. We don't, we don't do this any. But back in the day when we first started P4P, the one service I didn't do P4P was, was snow plowing. Because we did border patrol facilities. And like, there's no way I'm going to allow my crew to be doing snow plowing around some of that equipment. Trying to go fast. Now that being said, if you have big open commercial, you know, shopping centers, let's go put those bad boys on P4P. I don't really care about them going quicker with, with the equipment. But be very careful with P4P and snow because you, your, your cost of damages is significantly higher.

Okay, excellent.

Thanks, Mike.

Yep. Eddie, you're up. Glad to be here. Just signed up today. Thanks for having me.

Question about whether I should enter growth or profit mode.

I'm at a point.

We just sold 300,000 in sales last year.

A third was profit. I. I feel like I should add another unit to the fleet. I have two currently.

Profit for lawns have been decent landscaping projects. Much more profit from.

So maybe within the 10 to 20% range for lawns, but way more for

landscaping, like I said. But I was also in the field

working, so I was making more because

I was actually on the landscape jobs

more than cutting grass.

We did 160 lawns on average.

We did anywhere between two to four

landscape projects on the side.

I think I have room to raise profits, but I really feel like I

should try and grow some more and add more work. Wonder what you think.

Yeah. So you're under capacity when it comes your assets. Do you do one man or two man crews?

One crew of two and then another crew of two.

But I was also in that. So it'd be a crew of three.

The crew of three would mow two

days a week and landscape three.

Cool. And then you have three trucks. Two. Oh, you have two trucks. Okay, then I apologize. I. I heard three. My apologies. So how do you mind? What, how much cash do you have on hand? 100,000. Okay. Okay. So you want to go in growth mode because right now you're the tail end, the back end of the solo operator size. And you're in the working gm. Like where you have, you're out in the field, you're managing the team, but you're still out in the field working. I want you to get about 500,000. Then we think about profit mode. Right. So if you, if you, if you read the book, like we always get past 500,000 first. Because now, and this is the thing, this is why most people at your size will go focus on projects because you are making twice as much profit, like 30% versus 15 or 10%. Right. The difference is with projects, I don't have them recurring and stacking on top of each other. If, if, when you go into profit mode, you will raise your prices by at least 20% and immediately you take a 10% profit margin job to 30%. And so most people never get to profit mode. So they never think that the recurring work actually pays them anything. And so I would still focus on that recurring revenue because that's the thing that when you hit 500,000, you pull one lever and make 100 grand extra a year. And that's the money that you used for a general manager or someone else to help with management. You can't do that with projects because you're always in the hunt for the next project.

Right.

So I would still like keep doing what you're doing. Just don't lose faith in the recurring side. 160 is good. And I would just say the only reason I would be telling you at 300 to go into profit mode is if you were cash constrained with 100 grand you, you absolutely can get another truck. Couple more employees get past $500,000 this year, go into next spring rush, raise prices by 20% on let's call it 220 to 250 lawns and all of a sudden draw an extra 10 to $15,000 in straight profit to the bottom line.

Love that.

Yeah. So the next step is to get the lawns is to get the more recurring work. I have a competitor across the street

from me who I actually used to

work for going up and he is

pretty big at my market as well.

We're about even I'd say.

And there's another company that's also very

close locally wise who is about triple us. So I'm in a tight spot and

I feel bad trying to compete against he's literally my neighbor.

But do you have any tips on just best way to get a new customer?

Yeah. As much as you like might like your competitors. The bottom line is most of your customers are going to come from an existing service. Everyone always does their advertising as if everyone has never used a service before. When the reality is when I'm let's call it 50 years old and I have a bunch of money I choose to go from me mowing my lawn to someone else mowing my lawn one time and for the next 30 years of my life I'm just trying to choose the best service. Yes. And so I would highly recommend for everyone to market in the way which is going after existing customers of other companies. Now I'm not going to bash them but I am going to speak to all the pain points they're experiencing and in with the custom my my competitor service. Right. So like this is why just having a great product works is because if you make sure that your your trucks are wrapped, the guys are professional, you have automations, you answer the phone every single time. That's the thing that as to why they will leave someone else.

Got it.

Awesome. As long as you might love the competitors. Yeah I know I don't cause they're not on the call. I hate them. You're going to demolish them, you're gonna crush them but ultimately you're just trying to do a better product and then pitch why you're better than everyone else without saying I'm better than everyone else you' to say here's what we do and you know that they can't compete with that. Right. So for example at Augusta we're changing our Website in two weeks. And we're leaning into like two things that no one else can compete with. And that is like we answer our phone every time, guaranteed 247 and we're back by 200 locations nationally. No one can compete with that. And now there's going to be. Some people are turned off by the fact that we're like a national company, but I know that there's a 40% of the market that likes that and they're willing to pay for a national brand that they can trust. They're tired of churning and burning through chucking the trucks. You just got to figure out what your unique selling proposition is in your market with those your competitors can't do and then just blare that on your website because that's the reason people are leaving and that's how you'll get lower customer acquisition costs because it just speaks to their need. Got it. I have one last question for you. Do you think it's time for me

to step back from the workfield?

No. Until you, until you are over 500,000, you got to stay as a working GM. And that is you out in the field producing revenue. The difference between a 350 to $400,000 location that makes money and one that makes, you know, 30% profit and one that makes nothing is whether or not the owner, in your case, I call it working GM is in the field working. Because if you took how much revenue you produced last year, which I'm going to go out and limit, say is over 100,000, if you take that out, the business makes no money. Correct? Right. So focus on growth. Get the business over 500,000. And now you focusing on sales might get to 800,000 or a million. Then we're good. That's when you go into the full time GM mode where you're over 750,000 but you won't be 30% profit tomorrow. You're like, I'm going to go work on sales only. You just wiped out all your profit. Don't split it stand for now. Now you have a significant capital. There's a really good chance that you hit this spring rush. You get one or two more trucks, a few employees, and your run rate is now 60, 70,000amonth. And a lot of it's recurring. Especially if it's a lot of recurring. Then I might give you the green light to go, okay, I'm going to go focus on sales. I'm going for the moon. You have enough capital to do that?

Well, I guess I'll be In another

meeting later on to see if that's the right time. Drew, you're up.

So we did half a million last year. We are a general contracting business specializing in a lot of flat work and concrete work.

Just so I'm clear, Drew, the contracting is at 500,000 to you or is that top line to contractors?

That is. That is net revenue of the business. Yeah. I still have not paid myself, so I'm working GM just like Michael, very similar situation, trying to scale the business. But my question to you is I am really struggling to hire a foreman and someone that can lead these crews and lead these jobs. And you know, I want to buy two trucks, I want to get crews. And something I didn't mention is I work for general contractors doing between 1 million and some doing 20 million a year. So there is no problem with influx of work. You know, obviously they take their 10 to 30% cut, you know, for marketing and collections and escalations and all that stuff. But I guess my question right now is just, I need help hiring. Where do I go for that? Where do you go for that?

First off, in the 4L framework, because leads are quote, unquote, not a problem. Almost always the next problem becomes labor.

Right.

So you have plenty of demand, not enough supply. This just becomes a question. Like the thing that gets you from 500,000 to 3 million is going to be solving that constraint. How do you find great laborers? And when you're going after a foreman that's going to potentially do 500,000 in revenue or manage that much revenue, for example, you can you. You have some spending power. Like, if you don't mind me asking, what's their like salary going to be?

Usually 30 to $40 an hour. I'm willing to pay $40 an hour for someone that can absolutely kill it in the field and not make mistakes.

Yeah. So like we use Spark Hire, but I would highly recommend some sort of video application. Once you're above about 40 bucks an hour, you can, you can recruit people in. So you've been maybe marketing to your local area, but for 40 bucks an hour, people will move. And you're willing to pay $3,000 to relocate someone from anywhere to be able to move them in. So we just did. We just did a national job hiring thing for General Managers. 70,000 was the set the base salary plus incentives. But like 70,000 base. And we got 1700 applications and we use. Then that was indeed. And then we used Spark hire as a way to be able to filter out all those. The 98% of people that we aren't good. And then we took the 2% and then we were able to see everything and then categorize the top 50 for all the owners. And so whether you spark as a little, little pricey but like some sort of video application process, then you can increase the size of your funnel to not just be your local area, but rather your whole state or even three or four states around you. You will get flooded with applications this time of year, like flooded. And then you've got to have a mechanism to weed out 98% of people. Yeah, I mean you have to get

good quality leads and then, you know,

qualifying questions just to make sure that

you know who you're hiring. Yeah. I give you saying, okay, yeah, I'll

look into Spark hire for sure.

Yeah. Their base package is 299amonth. So it's not cheap. We do that. We do the higher one. Like it's worth 499amonth, but we use it like for, we don't allow in person interviews without that video process being done. And so, but even if you got it for a few months while you need to get a couple people, for example, and then you could bail on it. So it might be $600 cost, you know.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That was helpful.

Got it. Leonardo, you're up.

Hey, how are you? So I want to get straight to it. I have a lot of questions to ask, but I'm going to start with one. So my main question is how to charge more because we have a lot of lawns. We do lawn care, so we have a lot of lawns that are priced between 55, 60, 70, and they should be priced between like the 80, 90 to $100 range. But we're kind of scared to charge the clients more because we're, we feel like they're going to leave us.

Do you have any proof that they're going to leave you?

No, we don't have any proof. But I feel like if I tell my dad, hey, like this is my dad's business, you know, I try.

Okay, this, that's what I was looking for. Okay, that makes sense.

So I'm doing all the admin work. So it's only four of us. Me, my dad and two other guys. Those two other guys, my dad doesn't know anything about business. All he knows is the work and he's really, really good at the work. So I'm trying to learn all the, I'm trying to learn a little bit of everything. The admin side the, the actual labor side, you know, I'm trying to learn a little bit of everything, but my question is how to charge more without losing those clients.

Cool. How many, how many recurring customers do you have now, Leonardo?

So right now we're in the off season, so we only have 30 reoccurring. Reoccurring clients. But once the spring season comes back, we should have around 50 to 60.

I'm assuming you're not really. He's not really wanting to grow a bunch. Like, he just wants to make more money.

What do you want is control. Because he told me, like, he doesn't want to have 10, 15, 20 employees because the more employees you have, the harder is to control them. That's just the truth. If you only keep it small, you can still have four employees and still make over 500 grand a year.

Yeah. So he wants to make money. He doesn't want to grow top line revenue to a million or anything like that. Okay, cool. Here's the thing. You're admin, right? You control all email CRM software. Cool. So I'm going to give you permission to raise prices on 10 people. Okay. Because what we need to do is prove to him that people aren't going to leave. Okay. Now one or two of them are going to leave, but you're going to raise prices by a minimum of 15%. Minimum. Okay. Like, you could do this without him knowing. And he will never know because you answer the phones, you do the email, and you control the software.

He knows. He gets all the checks. He does. He has Google Sheets. So since he doesn't really know how to use the computer, I made like a little. Whenever he receives a check, he goes to Google Sheets. He doesn't have to do anything fancy, just clicks on the client's name. Okay. January. Okay, that was 280 bucks.

Get him off of checks. He doesn't need to be doing checks. Why don't you do the checks?

Want to pay online? I've already asked every single one of them and a lot of them are against technology. No, I've done checks my whole life. None of them want to pay that fee. That's the problem.

The fee, that's fine. So two things. One, you can eat the fee. They don't have to pay the fee.

He doesn't want to eat the fee. That's the problem.

Click a button and then they can pay it. Like, the customer can pay it. Like, ultimately, all these problems that he's coming up with, Leonardo, is because you don't have enough customers. If if you could only service, let's call it 60 or 70, and now you had a hundred, he would be begging for customers to leave.

And so we have, so here's the plan. So this summer, right now, since it's four of us, we want to have one lawn care group, okay? That one lawn care group is going to do the 50, 60 yards throughout the week and that's going to keep them busy throughout the week. We also do a lot of landscape installation jobs, sod insulation, irrigation, drainage work, et cetera. So we have two full time crew. We have two full time crews. If I'm there, you know, like we're, we're too focused in the field. Like, you know, we need to step out of the field, get into the sales process, start doing more admin work. Like we're both too focused in the field. That's what I've been trying to tell him and I've been trying to convince him, but I don't feel like, I feel like he doesn't listen to me because of my age, because I'm 19 years old. So because I haven't been able to prove myself, he doesn't like really believe me.

You know, everything I would say from a business perspective, let's put on a shelf for a second, that's the real thing, right? Like you don't have any proof and that's fine. Right. So I would not push, push on your dad, given the fact that he is way more experienced than you know, is way more about the industry. I think you have to come from the place of humility and you're trying to help him. Right? He's not going to change unless there's evidence that doing so makes him more money and takes things off of his plate and gives him more control because that's what he wants.

Exactly. So what I notice is I'll tell him something, for example, I'll say we should raise prices by 15%, for example. He won't listen to me, but if he hears a billionaire or millionaire says it, he's like, yeah, we should raise prices by 15%. And I'm like, I just told you that. Why don't you believe me? You know?

Yeah, like it's very difficult with family because you've made it personal, right? Like, like both of you, right? It's, it's difficult for him to listen to his 19 year old son. It's difficult for you to work underneath your dad that you, you could, you, you see all of his flaws, right? He's not your boss. He's Your dad. And so I would, number one, prioritize the relationship with your father. And that's the number one. If you. If in the meantime, down the road, if you can work for the next couple of years, and he gets more trusting of you and allows you to cash the checks, allows you to be able to take over settings, you just got to be patient, right? It's patience. And then if the only thing that he sees right now to know if. Whether or not price increases are happening is the checks, get yourself as a signer on the bank account and take it off his plate so he doesn't have to worry about it. And then you give him a report at the end of the month or. Or at the end of the week in terms of how much money is coming in, because that's all he really cares about.

I noticed, like, he's been undercharging for a lot of jobs. You know, he's only had all these clients. Like, the only way he's got all these clients are just straight from referrals because he does good work. He's an honest guy. But I noticed, like, a lot of people are, like, are taking advantage, like, $800 for a drainage job that took, like, 10 hours. Like, come on, we're not making any profit.

So you can't fix that one. You can't fix that one, Lardo, because you're not. You don't have recurring revenue on a drainage job. He's going to. As long as he's bidding, he can bid whatever he wants. It's his business.

But the problem is those drainage jobs are coming from our current clients.

You know, I agree with you. Business wise, I agree with you. It's not your business. And he has years of experience. He's not going to listen to you.

Exactly.

So I would. I would maintain rank underneath him and make sure that you serve him and what he's wanting for the business, while at the same time, you might know everything that he's changed. Like, do you really believe people do not have a credit card? Do you really believe people don't have ach? Like, they would have died during COVID Like, they have the payment method. They will put it on file, but they're not going to do it for Chuck and a truck guy who shows up and has an Excel spreadsheet keeping track of payments. And so you getting into the software is going to be the type of thing that proved your clients that having a carbon file is a good thing for them.

I am slowly proving, ever since I used your copilot CRM. Slowly by slowly the clients have been like paying online. You know, like when I. Oh, I joined Copilot just last month but I was using yard book previously and slowly by slowly the customers were adding their ach and card to file. You know. So it's just a matter of time. But I just have the main question is. So this lady who has been helping us with the taxes and the profit and loss statement sheet. So I was just wondering if my dad was getting scammed because she charges in between 1000 to 1500 dollars to do the whole profit and loss statement sheet for the whole year. Is that how much you're supposed to charge for that?

Is she doing book bookkeeping on like a weekly basis?

Like no, we just give her the profit. Like I said, like I don't even know how to get how he got this far. Like the only reason he got this far is because his honesty and he does good work like numbers wise. Like it just doesn't make sense, you know. So she kind of like she, she can manipulate my dad if she wants to. You know, she has the power to do it because my dad doesn't understand the numbers.

So he's getting charged between a thousand fifteen hundred dollars for what? Bookkeeping or.

No, it's just, I don't. It's just straight up the, the profit and loss statement. Like he.

Right. But how. How is she. How is she coming up with the profit and loss statement?

Because we give her the bank statements at the end of the year and

yes, this is where. Yeah. You will need. You would want quickbooks on where you're not just doing at the end of the year. You want to be doing quick.

I'm trying to, I'm going to use. I'm gonna try to organize my dad. I'm trying to do all the finances and you know, I'm still learning. So I'm just trying to find out who's taking advantage of my dad or who isn't. You know, because I'm still learning at the same time. So I don't want people to take advantage of me as well.

Yeah, I would take much more of a. A followers approach in terms of how things are happening with your dad. He's made it so far. He does a great work. I would support him 110 and maintain that relationship. And you're going to be frustrated all along the way because people are taking advantage of him, he's not charging enough, etc. But this isn't your business. You can do everything within your rank but you can't punch above your weight class when it comes to your dad.

So that's what mentioned to you. So I wanted to help my dad, like, at least have control. You create those systems, the standard operating procedures, and once he has that control, I was thinking about joining the Augusta Lawn Care Nation if that was a possibility. I don't know if you have any. There's any already. Any locations in Georgia?

Yeah, all of that's like, down the road. You could always talk to the team and see if it's a fit. For now, though, Leonardo, I think it is. Patience. I know it's like to be at 19, chomping at the bit, trying to make changes, especially when you see your family hurting or people taking advantage of them. You just need to build your skill set. You need years, not months, but years of experience to where you don't even have to question whether a $1500 is good for the piano. You know how to do cookbooks. You say, dad, you don't need to do that. I do it every single week. Here it is. I can do it way more better, like.

But, like, he's like, all right, you do the admin side, I do my work. I do the admin side. I'm like, hey, we need this, this and that. I'm not trying to tell him. Like, I try to find the cheapest solution possible, but every time, he's like, no, we don't need it. I'm paying co pilot out of my own pocket because he doesn't want to pay for it.

Yeah, he knows what it's capable of.

And he's like, oh, that's good, that's good. I'm like, why isn't the business paying for it? He's like, it's too much money. It's not that much.

You can only change someone's mind based upon proof. So I want it to be proof.

He still doesn't believe me. Like, I don't know what to do, to be honest.

But when did you. When did you join co pilot?

I joined last month. And slowly by slowly.

Yeah, here's the difference. Okay? You've done copilot for 30 days. He's been in business for how many. How many years?

For 20 plus years, I've been using Yardbook as well. And he saw what it was capable of.

But he's right. But. But the difference is he has approximately 50 times more experience doing the business without the software than he does with it. Not 50, like 500.

I feel like people telling him the truth because, like, it's just super unorganized. Like, he'll, like, if I'm not there, he'll send out two guys without instructions. He's like, okay, pine straw mulch, blah, blah, blah, and this, that, okay. And then he just leaves them. And then the guys do a bad job because they need kind of like an instruction sheet. Like, you can't expect them to memorize all that.

Like, one thing at a time. One thing at a time. Leonardo, just. You just keep. You stay underneath his direction. You do what he wants. He's the business owner. And then you prove it. Not for a month. I don't. I wouldn't believe you for a Second if a 19 year old told me after a month something was going to save me more money. I've been in business for working with

him since I was 13, 14 years old.

Right, right. But like, you've used the software for a month. He's not going to listen to you.

But I've been using a CRM for over a year, so I know a lot. I know a lot more about the CRM than he does. And I'm not trying to take advantage of him. I'm trying to help him. This is going to solve issues.

I know you have good intentions, but you got to remember that you're trying to change someone's behavior. And if you want what's best for him, you need him to adopt this because he starts to see a pattern without you saying anything. So when customers start coming to him saying, thank you so much for sending my credit card information, he's not going to even tell you he's not going to give you credit. But he's going to, in the back of his mind, register that as a positive thing for the business. And then one day he said, hey, could we get everyone's card on file? And he'll come to you because you have a record of doing what's right for the business without asking or telling him what to do. So just focus on that. Jeffrey, you're up.

Hey, Mike, how's it going? It's George and this is my brother Jeffrey. Jeffrey, nice to meet you. Yeah, we run Evergreen Outdoor Services. We're located over here in Houston, Texas. So I'll make it quick. I have a couple questions. Just kind of what the last person said. Had a lot of experience in our market where, especially in these slower months, they want to do a lot of skips and stuff like that. So I want to stabilize revenue. We're doing about 600k a year. I want to stabilize revenue by doing Subscription based. So kind of wanted to ask what's, what have you seen? What's your experience been with that and what's the most successful way to roll it out?

Yeah. So the first thing you want to be careful of is thinking that by doing subscription you're going to make more money. What it does is it stabilizes your cash flow, which is fine. What market are you in?

Houston, Texas.

So in my opinion I would go after winter services, not subscription. Mostly because when you sell to new customers in your market, is it common that people are pitching a monthly price or is it like a per cut, per service type price?

I would say it's more common per cut. But there is people that offer like a monthly package or a subscription or not really a subscription, like a package, a monthly package and they'll just do like 42 cuts for the year and this.

And are you, are you trying to grow like in terms of revenue right now or like you want to be around that 6 to 800,000?

That's a really good question. I see your videos a lot and stuff. So what I'm trying to do right now is kind of like to stabilize. I read up Alex Hormozy's roadmap as well. So I'm trying to grow, but with like purpose. I'm not just trying to grow like crazy. I want to stabilize this year. So that's kind of my reasoning. Just because being so flexible does create chaos during the middle of the season as well. I mean I just want to stabilize the cash flows, but at the same time time I'm just a little bit scared. Adding friction to the sale in already price sensitive market.

Most of the time when it comes to whether or not you do subscriptions versus per cut, for example, is going to come down to when customers expect it. So if it's common in your market, I give the green light because people are used to comparing you versus the other guys. 119 per month, you're 109, for example. When you start doing package pricing though, and no one knows what you're talking about, you drop your close rate dramatically and you require people to want all four services in the package instead of just the one thing they actually want, which is typically the gateway service, which for us is mowing. I would instead, if you're trying to still grow, it sound like you kind of still want to grow. If you do, I would still keep your pricing. Where your gateway is, is per cut. I would try to. Then after six months or a year, you could potentially be trying to Upsell them, quote, unquote, into a recurring subscription and explain to them why it's better for them. Now, keep in mind this isn't a move your cash crunch to your spring rush because right now you have this cash influx during the spring when there's more services, people are rolling in. When you do a subscription price, you're bringing down the floor of how much you make during the spring rush. And then you're. So you can spread that cash out during the winter. And so I'm much more of the opinion you can make more money, not cash flow, but more better money by just selling a service during the off season. Like winter services in Houston crushes, because you guys don't get like freezing snaps typically. So like there's still wind, there's still stuff falling off the trees. There's. You can still edge, you can still trim bushes. Like, I think winter services be a great option for you. And then you still have that variable revenue that's coming in during the spring that will spike along with the labor cost. That also spikes sometimes when people go to subscription like, yeah, it sells my off season. But then you have a cash crunch in the middle of spring rush when you should be growing, but you don't have enough money because now you're not making as much. You're making 119 on the property when you otherwise would have made 200 back in the day.

Okay, understood. One other question at this stage, would you focus more on pushing harder on sales and marketing or would you build stronger systems in terms of like ops and admin, stuff like that?

The only problem you have right now is your off season. If you fix that, you will have so much more confidence to be able to focus on growth because you're not going to wear in the like right now, in the winter. I can almost guarantee there's either you're either break even or losing money for three to four months, two months.

But yeah, yeah, that's the problem.

You fix that. Everything else, it's completely side issue because if you take those two months and just flip it to where you're making 10 or 15 grand in profit, your business probably doubles in profit. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so just focus on that. Like, like, look, read the off season, book the free version of the courses on my website. Like, if you do that, everything else is like completely will become way easier.

Okay, sounds good. Appreciate.

Yeah, I just don't want any month of the off season to go less than 50% of revenue compared to your best months. And if I had to guess right now it's 25, 30% tops.

Yeah, right now, January, February, we probably, I aim to break even, but I think we lose a couple, a couple grand. But everything else is like, you know, we're five to 15 grand when the growing season or we're going. So gives me enough confidence to go through this through the winter season. But it's just, I'm trying to prevent these skips and all this stuff because it does create chaos. We have. Most of our profit comes from projects, of course, so that's another thing. Just trying to balance the recurring with the, with the projects. But I know there's much other people, so you're good.

The only asterisks I'll put next in Cure three of the book. So cure four is what I just talked about with winter services. Cure three though, sorry, Cure two, my apologies. When it comes to projects, you can absolutely sell warranties and guarantees. So this is how you bake in recurring revenue after a one time project. So you say, hey, I will warranty all these plants, all the irrigation. If anything breaks, we will be here forever. However, you have to sign up for our recurring service. And so you bake in extra value, get them on recurring service and they're locked into it in order to be able to warranty everything you installed. You get like 60% plus of our projects to do this. Assuming that you do things like irrigation, drainage plants, any of those things. People love warranties because they, the last thing they want to think about is it breaking. And you just tie that warranty or that guarantee to you showing up on a regular basis for maintenance.

Okay, got it. Great. Thank you. Thank you.

You got it.

I'm Anthony. Appreciate it. Thanks for going over on time here and, and whatnot. But I got a quick question just about, you know, I don't really need to grow. We've got about just over 900 customers. We're doing about just a little over 500,000 in total revenue. My issue is finding quality employees, man. That's my biggest thing. And right now I'm almost in that, you know, middle area to where I need to be dialed back more to free myself up to go look at sales and to take the phone calls and everything like that. So our biggest thing is just trying to find employees. And I don't even advertise. Like I don't put anything on the trucks. I don't put anything out there online. Like I literally just do referral word to mouth, you know. And that's been our biggest generator of income, you know, so for us it's just, how can we, you know, find that guy that can possibly replace me to make it to where I can actually answer phone calls and do all the things that I need to do on my end where I'm not, you know, constantly just stressed out and stretching myself too thin.

Yeah, it's like right now, are you, are you answering the phones?

Oh, yeah. Okay.

So like I would really look at as like you have sales, operation and admin, right?

Yeah.

Right now you are trying to delegate operations. I want you to delegate admin first.

Okay.

Admin is a lower leverage task and it's easier to replace someone. Answering the phone, doing emails, sending out quotes, responding to customers. That's an easier and cheaper role to fill. But when you replace yourself for an hour of that time, you get an hour back to do operations or sales, which is higher leverage. If you get an admin person, maybe not full time, maybe full time during the spring rush, but like they can be, you know, a couple hours a day after spring rush, for example. But by doing that, you'll get to 750,000. Once you get to 750,000, then you go get an operations manager and that allows you to move into sales.

Right.

So I want you to move. Think about right now. You're juggling all three balls of admin, sales and operations. I want you to delegate everything with admin. Every email routing, scheduling, dispatch, all of that stuff is admin and it can be taught and it's easier to find someone and cheaper to find someone that does that versus operations where they have to have experience. They need to be able to hire, train, do mechanic work, all the rest of it. So I think you have the right idea. But it's a sequence of order, order of operations.

Yeah.

And, and to do admin, it's going to require systems so you can hand it off.

Right? Yeah. Well, that's why we're switching to copilot here actually next week. So we're going to full blown do the whole thing, you know, the most expensive one because I mean, we've been doing things very archaic here. It's just the billing is just kind of a. I don't, I don't want to say nightmare, but it's very old school mailing stuff out and I want to get away from that and I want to get to digitalize everything eventually in the next, you know, two to three years is kind of the term goal. That way you're not dealing with paper stamps, you know, doing the whole thing, you know, it's just, it's just so much labor intensive to do all that. And money, you know, the stamps are now 73 cents, you know, so it's crazy what it costs to send a piece of mail out.

I would just say, like, don't think about trying to delegate operations or getting a stellar crew lead or anything until all of admin is completely delegated. And I don't think it'll take you two or three years. I think within six months you can really focus on using the software and then creating systems for how you do things in email, how you answer the phone, how you send out quotes, how you send work change orders. You're going to create a system for all of those things. Likely a screen recording that you can hand off to someone else to do the admin work. Right. That frees you up, I'm going to guess 20 to 30% of your day to go focus on the team and that's going to be the unlock around hiring.

Yeah.

Because you're going to have more time to do onboarding, interviewing, screening, spend more time with them in the truck because you're not answering your phone and doing all this other admin related things.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I literally sit in my truck for hours, so. Yeah. Okay. Well, I appreciate it, man.

I would focus on that first. And I'd say within a year or two, what's going to happen is you're going to grow the business and then you'll feel pressure again and we'll do the same thing for operations and then you will probably take one of your crew technicians and you'll upgrade them to be an operations manager. So you can focus most of your time on sales. And that gets you past a million.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it runs right now. Like if I'm not, if I take a week out, you know, to do a vacation, it'll still operate okay, but it's just that, you know, that initial spring rush and then that late fall, you know, with that aeration season coming in, you know, because we just strictly do fertilizing, you know, and aerations. We really don't, you know, stray from there at all. It's pretty much our bread and butter really. But yeah, it makes sense on what you're saying for sure. You know, doing the admin first, I definitely appreciate it.

Awesome. You got it. Marina, are you going to be the admin person?

I pre.

I am.

There's. Oh, you are? Yeah, I do the invoicing and payments and answer all, all of those questions.

There's just a Lot of I think

I have moles in my yard. Can you or can you tell me

what this product is that you put

down that I'm like, I don't, I don't know how to answer that. Yeah, so, yeah. So like, are you going to be trying to get yourself out of the business by having an admin person or are you staying as the admin person? I was like, I'm kind of like,

I want to stay the admin person.

I just don't know if I can answer all those phone calls. I mean like, give the answer. But yes, I want to continue to work as an admin person. Cool. So every single time Anthony gets brought into anything to do with admin, we need to create a document around what is being said that becomes a training that you end up handing off to someone else. But you also need to know like why moles are there. It's a question that has an answer. Right. And so you could create a Google Doc around this. You can create a chat in ChatGPT, create a project, you put all information as it comes in and you ask questions live on the phone and it spits out answers based on what you've told it.

Right.

Oh, wow. Okay. Right. So yeah, I would really like, given the fact that both of you are in the business, basically everything Anthony does that is not to do with doing the work or getting work needs to be taken off his plate. And it's a matter of just skill or knowledge. We need to download that from him to you. And if it's still impossible to do that, cut the service. Because there's probably 5 or 10% of your revenue that's coming from services that only he can manage. The admin, those services got to go so that you can systematize. Okay. So, and then he gets a lot of calls of people are like, can you come look at my lawn? We have this brown spots in our, in our yard. Should I be like maybe creating like a list for him? Be like, these people say they have

this in their yard, they want you

to go see it. So then like I'm taking that phone call off of his plate, but he

still has to go out there and,

and look at it and do the footwork. Right. And so now the objective is that when he shows up for his day, he knows which hours of the day he does operations and which hours he does. Sal. So for example, he's going to show up, he's going to get the crew started from seven till two. He knows he's out in the Field with the team training, getting jobs done, moving projects around, whatever from two to five. That's when you're scheduling estimates and potentially just drive by estimates for things like pot spots on a lawn. He does not need to talk to the customer. That gives him the flexibility to get five or six estimates done instead of two or three because it's a drive by estimate instead of an in person estimate. Yeah. Okay, awesome.

Appreciate you.

No more admin. Anthony, I disqualify you from the admin role. I appreciate it. You got Addison. Go ahead. And then we'll come back to Jeremiah.

So my biggest concern is to get a reoccurring revenue set up in the Waco area. It feels like the best selling proposition is speed to lead and a more comprehensive service where the customer doesn't have to think about their property. They just know, okay, I just want you to take care of all this. And we just. It's a monthly fee. There's just a lot of the lower guys are going to show up. They'll work for $30 an hour and they're very happy with that. I don't want to do that. If you had to pick, like I don't have a lot of cash at all. We had a slow start last year, which is fine. And then of course going into winter,

Google service leads has been a saving,

saving grace for us. It's brought in a lot of big projects through the winter. It's kind of helped us out. But if you had to pick another lead generator, websites built, it's, it's not amazing, but it's decent. Would you. Do you feel like the Facebook ads, Google Ads, or is it a mixture of things?

Yeah, so for me it is like if I could dump more money on lsa, I would use it more. But the problem is you're capped by how much you can spend. Like they won't let you spend the whole budget. So that's the only reason I wouldn't just spend every dollar possible with them. Then I go door hangers, then I go Google Ads, then I go Facebook ads, then I go anything crazy like Angie home advice. Sometimes those are worth some random markets. But like, right, I would say for all of those outside of lsa, spend the first dollars on your website. And so if that website is not optimized for conversion, not looking good, not anything like that. Like it needs to be optimized for conversion because we see this all the time. We do one thing at home service web design is an optimized for conversion. That's actually the Truth. Because if, when we get people, on average about one in a 300 people that show up to your site become a lead like as. Like a general. When we see people come in, if we get that to 1 out of 100, just increasing, increasing their conversion rate, they triple their leads.

Right?

And so I would highly recommend before you spend a dollar on ads, spend like every dollar you spend on conversion rate optimization, designing your website and your flow on mobile and making sure, like, it's really easy to get a lead when you're on a mobile device on the home page above the fold. Like, that will outperform any dollar you spend on ads.

Okay, that being said, I don't think I'm in a place to, you know, hire home design or whatever you called it. I don't even know that I really

want to hire someone else.

What do you see as being the, like, what is the biggest inhibitor to the. To conversions? If you had to say one thing,

okay, I'll do one thing and then I'll say, I may. I've made a bunch of videos where I go through websites and pick stuff out. Okay. If you watch a couple of those on the home service millionaire channel, where I do like, okay, site after site after site, you start seeing a pattern. The biggest thing, if I had to say one, is estimate request form above the fold on the homepage. That'll increase your conversion by 30% alone compared to putting it on a Contact Us page or down below in. Right below the fold.

So on our homepage we have a

huge, you know, contact for quote.

It's like one of the first things

they see up top. That's like the number one thing. Watch the videos because there'll be 30 other things I'll go through on those.

Okay, sounds good.

Appreciate it. You got it. Jeremiah, you're up.

Mine's kind of similar to those. So I'm still on my first year of business. I started last April. It's just me. Primarily do pressure washing, exterior cleaning, seal coating, epoxy. I only got two jobs for all the last year, both pressure washing, about 600 bucks. I spent about 1500 bucks on Yelp and door hangers. Both jobs I got were from Yelp, but it was like double the cost in advertising just to get those two. So I just want to know basically,

like my size, where I'm at right

now, what's the most effective advertising that I should be looking at and where to focus that advertising. I do have a website, business, email, business, cell phone.

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend any money on marketing. I would make sure that I am posting on local Facebook groups, my before and afters, not in a salesy way, just introducing yourself. I will make sure that I have at least 30 Google reviews on a verified Google business listing that has an address verified, not just a service area. I'd make sure I'm adding pictures at least once a week to my Google listing and I have everything updated in terms of what services I offer on my Google listing. If you do that alone, if you get over 30 Google reviews, probably just that one thing, you'll get at least two leads a month from that. So that's where I would start. I wouldn't just spend any money on marketing.

Good deal. Thanks Mike.

I appreciate it. Joe Aquinn, you've been waiting patiently. Go for it, brother. Thank you. I just have one quick question just to give a little bit of background. Background. I started the business when I was 14. The first year we did 60,000. Second year, which was last year we did 220. This year we want to hit around 450 to 500. So far we have never done any marketing. Biggest question is we're kind of thinking whether or not to just do a bunch of door hangers or whether or not it's better to do like just do me doing like door to door. Like just actually interacting with customers or potential customers. So either we would just do I would hire a guy, pay him whatever, $20 an hour to go do door hangers and he would do that, you know, 40 hours a week maybe our goal would be to do like 30, 40,000 door hangers. So both of those you can test and see which one's going to convert more. Right. Okay. So like if you start knocking on doors and 1 of 20 people say yes and 101 out of 100 are doing saying yes to door hangers. Knocking on doors works great and and you will have a higher conversion with if you knock on the door. The challenging part is what you just said and that is when you scale this are you wanting to either a train people how to knock on doors and talk to people or train them how to hang up a door hanger. Usually more scalable for the latter and as door hanger. Right. So not to say you can't do door to door and scale it. Like there are companies especially on pest control that do a ton of door to door so you just don't know which one works for you. I would say as long as you are doing the door hangers, knock on the door, you will, you will get more customers assuming that you know how to talk, what to say when they open the door. Right. I'm going to go on a limb and say you probably could have some gift of gab, you know, how to be able to upsell them, talk to them about other stuff, get them engaged, walk around the property. Great. That's a harder skill that you might not be able to translate over to someone else. Versus like your door hangers, put them on the door. Right. So it might be worriers right now to get your first 20, 30, 40. You might, might work great for door knocking. But I would test both so that when you roll it out with and you scale it out with someone else doing the door hangers, you know the general math of how many leads you get per hundred. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Awesome.

So the way our, we have two position field positions, people that, that find the problem and then, and then sell the repair needed and then the repair guys come out, you know, and so sales are handled by that first guy you talk about. You know, when a company gets into that million dollar range, the owner just really needs to be the salesperson. But in my business, I don't need to be the salesperson. What would you recommend? My main duties, because my goal this year is to get into that million dollar range where I can be the branch manager and out of the field. Right now I'm the working gm, you know. And so thinking that one through, just because I hear you talk a lot about sales needs to be the number one thing when you get out of the field. My thoughts were just like making sure customers are happy, developing a team and maintaining strong relationships with our referral partners. I don't know if you've seen other business models operate in this way and would have recommendations.

So just to be clear, you're still in operations, leading the team, etc. But you have a salesperson, is that correct?

No. Someone goes out, finds the leak, they get paid to do a leak detection and then they also sell the repairs. If there's a broken pipe, they're not repairing it, they're going to send a repair guy out. We're going to send a repair guy out to repair it another day and so I don't have to go do sales is what I kind of what I mean. Like they're the leak detectors are also sales people, you know, and then we have the repair guys that go out.

So leak detectors, are those your employees or you're talking about the contractors?

Yeah, no, it's ours.

Yeah.

So technicians and repair technicians.

So the leak technicians, are they technically, would you consider them sales?

It's a small part of their job, you know, I mean they're just, they're just going out, spending a few hours going through the full pool system. Let's say they find a broken pipe on the pool main drain line and then they just provide an estimate saying, you know, hey, if you want this fixed, here's what it costs and we can have a guy come out next Tuesday or whatever, you know, I mean, so it's not really any hardcore sales stuff, but yeah, they're making the sales for repairs.

I think once you scale, what you'd probably end up doing is as the architect of the business is refining these processes. Right. It's like creating a training system so that, hey, when you see the leak, here's how you present it and no longer is it going to be like, here's the cost. It's like we're going to be on a nice iPad and it's going to have a nice, well designed thing that they can fill in the numbers and show it to the customer and they tap on it and it opens up and shows more information. Like I think the architect mode is what you'd be moving into right now. You're still very much in the manager mode and so moving into architect mode, you just step back from the building, think, okay, how is she answering the phone? Okay, it's create a script for it. How can I upsell them on the phone call? How can I prep them or qualify them before the leak. Whatever they call leak detector gets out there and then the leak detector, they have a processing system for the sales and then for finding the next spot on the schedule. Like you basically step back and create systems for all of that. And vicariously you're going to increase sales simply because you're probably going to make that leak detectors close rate go up, the amount that they sell go up, you're going to grease the wheels of upsells. A lot of those things is what I'd be looking at.

Yeah.

Okay.

Awesome. That's my favorite stuff to do. So sounds good to me.

Awesome. You got it. Go ahead for it.

I'm wanting to raise prices this year and potentially put the 3% on people using cards. So I may have two questions. So my first question is, you said that going to ACH would probably be a better way to go if you can get all your customers. It's really hard to talk customers in to giving like your bank account information. Sometimes, number one, would you try to go that route? And then number two, between now and March, when would be a good time to send out, say, hey, we're going to start putting this 3% if you don't go over to ACH or. And this is going to be your price going forward for weekly lawn maintenance.

Are you really, really busy and like, at capacity?

Yeah, unfortunately. Well, so I talked to Lee several times. His thing was maybe try to fill capacity with. Because I got two trucks with one truck, two people running it. And then try to fill capacity with just you maybe doing. Just you going out doing solo. We control and fertilizing. Or if I wanted to raise prices to get rid of customers, I would probably have to get rid of probably 25 to 30 customers. It's just. It's. Yeah, it's. We're kind of in between, but it's. I think it's right now, like, the maintenance for everything that we have is sucking so much cash that it's hard to save money during the year to have cash on hand. It seems like that we spent a lot this year on gas fix and the lawnmowers and stuff. Like, it was just a lot that this year just seemed like everything just wanted to fall apart. So I'm trying to figure out which direction to go.

I would say if you're gonna raise prices at the same time, you also add a credit card fee. Because now you have two degrees of basically against your customers. You need to be at capacity to the point where you need to lose customers, like, so busy that you're like, I need 10% of customers to quit. Otherwise I have to turn off leads. Like, no new customers. Until that point, I would not do it. Mostly because I want you to actually raise the prices enough with no recourse. Meaning, like, I'm doing this no matter what. I have to. I need to lose customers. Until you're at that point, if you raise prices and you told them they have to charge a fee for their credit cards and 20% of people left, you'd feel bad, right?

Yeah.

So I think, though, that once you get hit spring rush, there's a good chance you're going to get to the point where you're working overtime on weekends. You know, the two trucks are maxed out. Great. That's the moment you so say, hey, your new price as of April 1st is going to be this. And by the way, you got to have a credit card ACH on file. It's 3% for the credit card. It's 0%, no fees for ACH.

Would you try to get people to move the ACH without saying, hey, we're going to put this 3% on here. If you don't move to ACH, would you try to move everybody over to ACH or does that really matter to you in the grand scheme of things?

Honestly, the way the design of the payment flow is, if you turn it on, they can see they can get free if they do ach. Right. It's the people that have a car and file. The people that have a car and file that have never checked their invoice. They're the ones that get mad because they don't actually see that. They just have a card file. And now all of a sudden they're getting 3% tacked on. So I would just bake into one email and I'd say I would much more pitch it as like, hey, the three. There's going to be a 3% card fee. If you want to avoid this, just make sure you have an ACH and there'll be no fee whatsoever. Okay, now if you told me that, hey, we are at max capacity even going into spring rush, and we're like up to our eyeballs and work, we can't then. Then, sure. Before the season even starts to say, hey, here's your price for the upcoming season. I would even say new price. Just here's your price for the upcoming season. And by the way, we're charging fees on credit cards. If you want to avoid this, click this button to add your ACH and it'll be zero percent Processing.

Okay, gotcha. How much money do you think it sucks if you hire two people as a W2 employee? How much has that from starting? Like putting two new people in the truck? How much money do you think that actually takes out of the profit once you do that? Like, just kind of like an estimate. Because I haven't really done that yet and my CPA told me it's. It's kind of really not really for one person, but maybe if you had two or three, it may be worth it to put a W2 and actually do the filing and giving them a check every week and stuff like that. But as he says, a lot of work on the back end just for one person.

Well, regardless of what your CPA says, it's illegal to have a 1099 likely. So, yeah, regardless of how much extra work it is, it is. According to the law, they should be paid a W2. It's not super expensive. Usually Quickbooks or Gusto. You're looking at 40 to $60 a month and then maybe $9 per employee or so to just run payroll. But, like, legally, you. You have to have them as a W2. So I don't know what your CPA is doing, but, like, legally they have to be a W2. And then I would say anytime anyone says that having a technician cost you money, we have a bad business model. Having more employees should always make you more money because they should be earning. Let's just call 80 or 100 bucks an hour, and you're paying them 20 or 30 bucks an hour. So the only way you lose money when you add employees, if there's inefficiencies. So if you had employee too soon and now all of a sudden all your crew is twiddling their thumbs, yeah, you lose money. But the whole objective here is to understand how many budget hours every technician should be able to produce and then holding their feet to the fire on that. Like, do you use budget hours inside of of copilot right now?

Yeah, I try to basically, like every week's almost like in the red of of where I'm budgeted hours. But it's just so hard because I'm trying to manage, like, everything. And so, like, everything is so overwhelming. I think we have like 90 recon customers. We have like, landscape. And it's just like, it's so overwhelming to try to do all this at the end of the day.

Okay, you know, okay, so I'm taking back what I've told you. You're going to raise prices immediately as you go into the. As you go into the season. You're going to. You're going to say, hey, everyone, here's your price for the upcoming season. You're not going to say new. Do not use the word new. Here's your prices for the upcoming season. Going forward, 3% is going to be charged for credit cards. If you want to get around this, you can put your bank information file. Use this link. You are not going to say new prices as a price increase or anything like that. You're simply going to say, here's your prices for the 2026 season. And the reason I need you to do that right away is because you are. You're suffocating from cash and you are overwhelmed. I need you to lose some customers going to the spring rush, and I need you, the customers that do stay, for them to double in profit because you're going to raise prices by a minimum of 15%. Okay, minimum, like, ideally more like 20 or 25 like minimum, do not raise a 5%. And this is why I also say you might want to consider just raising it 18% and not doing the credit card fit thing. Okay. So just instead of if you're like, hey, I'll do 15%, great, why not just do 18%? Because literally a dollar extra per cut. And don't worry about the whole convincing people about the ach thing. Just be like, here's your prices for the upcoming season. Boom. And just convince yourself to raise it 3% extra and eat the cost.

Okay, gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, it kind of takes a, a little bit out of what the customer should be doing. It's like you said like two different things that you're raising prices on, but if you just put it in there, maybe it looks a little bit better in the long run. So. Okay, cool.

Yeah, I would definitely do that. Like one or two weeks before going into the spring rush, you're gonna lose more customers than if you wait till what I said prior. But I am based upon what you said about budget hours and you feeling so scattered, we need more breathing room. And so I'm not going to freak out if you lose 10 or 15 customers, but now your profit doubles.

Okay.

Right.

That sounds great. Yeah.

All right. You're the man.

I appreciate it.

Thanks. You got it. Zach, you're up.

Hey, thanks, Mike. Need some help in terms of. Maybe I'm just not thinking about this the right way. I'm looking to make a change on our people who do our marketing. As you know, we spend a good amount on marketing. Last year is about 4% of revenue and mainly, let's see, $46,000, 29 of that was direct ad spend on Facebook and Google.

So what was the rest?

Vast amount. The rest was a mix of basically paying our people to run the ads. It was that we had a website, like a two year website agreement, SEO, best of the rest. So first thing is we are going to take a little bit of step back, not a little bit, a big step back on our direct ad spend and may focus more on our current customers that we have inside Copilot have over a thousand emails in there that we're not tapping into enough, but in terms of our outgoing marketing. I have a proposal in front of me here from a group that does a lot with landscape companies. It's about $50,000 a year, 50, $60,000 a year. But it's going to be a lot more than just Facebook ads. So it's focusing more on content and, you know, kind of just a full circle marketing rather than just one avenue. Is this. Am I spending too much? If we're going to stay around that 4%.

Yeah.

Yes.

What's their actual ad spend going to be out of the 50 grand?

Out of the 50 grand? 12,000. Everything else will include. Sorry, say what?

Yeah, it's nothing like they're making good margin on this. So I would strongly advise against that package. 80% is being wrapped up in management, like almost 80, like 75 plus percent. Right. So anything more than about 30% in management is straight margin for an agency. Things like content. AI is so good at this stuff, especially because they're going to take. Are they using your content or are they using someone else's or they generate it?

No, no. This includes four full days of, of filming and photos with our guys. And there's a bunch of different line items on here, but it would be. They come out, they make our personalized content.

Yeah, like in my opinion. Well, not in my opinion based upon what we do in Augusta, if someone takes an iPhone out of their, out of their pocket and takes a picture of their team, that will get more views on social media than our professional 15 person media team taking photos. And so in my opinion, you beat this. Beats this $50,000 thing by doing two things. One, taking pictures and video yourself for maybe 10 to 15 minutes a week. Like that's all it is required. It's like. Or your crew, you can literally pay your crew five bucks for good photos. We used to do this out back in the day for our team. We had. They would submit photos to team chat and then we would give a hundred dollars away a month to the best photo of the month. And we've got like 20 to 40 photos that were really good out in the field and they outperform professional photos by far, by far. And then the second thing is you go on upwork and you're going to get a professional to do your Facebook or your upwork or your Google Ads and you're going to spend about 500 to $1,000 a month for the best of the best. Not an added upwork. Yeah, upwork you can find freelancers, you're going to pay between 100 to 200 an hour, but they only need to manage your account for about an hour a week. It doesn't take a lot. And so you're going to find like the best of the best Facebook person, the best of the best Google person on there. And then they're going to get the ads up and running. But More importantly, they're going to tell you what they're doing because they're incentivized to work for you. Not this, like, very holistic $50,000 package where you're getting a lot of stuff. It's hard for you to actually measure the performance of the $50,000. And so what I would rather you do is first off, I'd rather give you, give your team five grand over the course of the year for really good picture videos before and afters. You'll have hundreds of photos and I guarantee you they will outperform photography and professional videos. Like, if you look at, look at, look at my content, go through this thing of the stuff that's professional versus the stuff that I just take with, like, my camera, five to ten times more engagement will be on the ones where I just take random photos of myself. It'll perform better. And more importantly, you'll have the extra money to go spend on ad budget. I would rather you spend $24,000 an ad budget that is double and spend maybe 5 or $10,000 on management. And that's what you can do if you use upwork.

Okay. No, thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. You got it. Matthew's up next again.

Hey, a question on, like, how to set things up to where the team is properly incentivized. So right now we do a production pay, but there's like a base, basically, so people know they're going to get at least this much every week. And then if they outperform, you know, their expectations, then they get a bonus. And that could be anywhere from $100 to $600 in a week. But what I'm noticing. All right, so we kind of have three different categories. We keep track of things on. You have your general KPIs, you have this list of daily duties that need to get done. And then obviously no callbacks. Like customer satisfaction. Seems like everybody's performing well, like they're hitting the KPIs, customers are happy. But all the little daily things that need to be done properly, you know, proper reports, proper pictures, filling out an estimate properly, if there's certain items on there that needs a special part, make sure you communicate with me. You know, all these little details seem to get passed over. And I'll remind people, and it still happens. You know, should I. Or is it even legal to attach bonuses to proper performance in the week? You know, I mean, like, like, hey, if you don't successfully complete your list of daily duties, you don't unlock your bonus, is something like that allowed? Or what would you recommend to just have these guys actually doing everything that needs to be done. And I'm not having to remind them in the morning when I'm sitting on the computer reviewing the previous day.

Yeah. It's like, look, if you don't perform these tasks, you do not get anything above your base pay. And you're basically as long as your employee handbook is only stating that they make this amount, which is their base pay, everything else you give them as bonuses is all on you. Like, you got to report it as income and they got to pay taxes on it. But, like, you don't promise them even the job description don't say, like, it's $20 an hour plus X amount per week on bonuses. You can't say that. You say it's X amount as your base and you're able to make more based upon performance. Right. You gotta just be careful to not guarantee or promise that money because it needs to be completely based upon whether or not they perform. And you can just have it where it's like, hey, this is how much you made in a bonus. Great. But there's this one question. It's a yes or no question, and it's a qualifier as to whether or not you even get it. And that's whether or not you did these tasks. And I would only do that in the event where they have to be 99.99 of the time able to do it. Like, just don't make it where, like, if they miss one thing, they lose thousand dollars. Like, then they're gonna think that you're just being, you know, maniacal or just a little crazy on it.

Sure, sure. I mean, outside of that, though, I mean, these guys are performing well and nice, but it just seems like they're like, oh, yeah, I'll get to that before I head home. And then they don't do it and I mess them the next morning. Oh, I'm so sorry. I forgot. But that will happen 12 times in three months. And it's just like, come on, like, I shouldn't have to micromanage you, or am I wrong? Is that just a part of the game? Like, you're just having to, you know, babysit people every once in a while?

Yeah, yeah. I typically like to use a carrot instead of a stick. Right. So the stick is you do not get your bonus if you do not get these things done. Will you get compliance? Yes. Right. So, like, that's where most people go immediately. You can also use the carrot approach, which is, hey, if you do all these things. Your bonus gets increased by 10% automatically. I would do that. Now no one's thinking you're a mean person. They just want to get it done so they can make more money. Same exact thing, by the way. Just. Just incentivize it versus being corrective.

Yeah, I like it. Awesome. Thank you very much.

Got it. All right, Lawn care monster, go ahead.

Quick question about raising the prices again. I have a few subdivisions that. One subdivision, I have about nine customers in there. One subdivision, I have about eight. And it's kind of like the route density. There are different days. One's for Thursday and one's for Friday. Would you recommend raising those prices? Because on those, it's kind of like you make a lot of money there. When you can just drop your truck and just go around and do all those. Would you risk wanting to lose those? I know it sounds like a silly question, but like, those is like, I can do those in an hour and almost do like nine houses all at one time, you know, versus of your

90 clients, how many are of that caliber?

I had to go through and look like some of them. Like, my Monday routes is pretty full. Like, I can. My Monday routes is probably. I can hit that. I really don't have a subdivision. Only subdivisions I have is like the one on Thursdays and ones on Fridays.

As a function of percent. The like, if you had to guess, probably 20% maybe.

So maybe it may be a little high too.

So if you really want, you know, we're talking about 15 customers here, so if you really want to not raise price on them, okay, that's fine. Do I think you should raise across the board because you're stressed, overwhelmed, and feel scattered? Yes. So also your best customers are usually the ones that have more money, are higher value and see the most value service. Everyone thinks like, oh, no, like those are my best customers because I can make more money on them. They're probably your best customers because they accept services, they don't give you any problems. And because the reason they do that is because they see a whole bunch of value in your service. And so I'm much more of the opinion you raise price across the board, especially because your budget hours are all over the place. You know, I've been tracking those accurately. Like I would just look at 90 and raise the prices. But if you're like, I don't know, Great, raise the 65 or 75 that are not those high caliber clients and lose 10 of those. And then when you get hit capacity, then maybe you raise Price on the rest of them.

Okay, but you're a big fan of all the way across the board, no

matter what, make more money.

Okay, gotcha.

You know, old customers in the CRM like as far as you know, we have their contact information like they may be two or three years old. what, what point of time would you say that it would, I mean would you, should you always reach out to those customers and send, you know, emails to try to gain, to get business or whatever? Is there a certain amount of time that you would say that you would kind of remove them from the system?

I keep them in the system until they tell me to remove them. The reason is because it doesn't cost you any more to send an email to them. And even once down the road when we start charging for text, let's say it's three or four cents, we're talking about of 100 of those, it's going to cost you three or four bucks. So let's, of course the question becomes over the next 10 years and you send 100 text messages, will they accept one time? Pretty good chance. A lot of our customers who want to click on our one click custom emails or respond our text, we haven't done service for over 12 months. We did this report. My location is very manual. It was like when people respond to a text message. When was the last time we did service? Most of them haven't done services for 12 plus months. And so the whole objective when you're building and scaling with your contact database is that eventually you don't have to spend any more money on marketing for new leads. But you can only do that if you keep the leads in your database warm. As soon as they go cold, they're not worth anything there. There are times when you sell, when you sell your business, the warmth of those. That contact list is a huge proponent of valuation in my opinion. Because if I can get 5,000 of your contacts and immediately go send them a text Message and get 20 recurring customers and $50,000 worth of one time projects, I could buy your whole business and pay for it within a matter of a couple months. And so I would absolutely keep them in the system unless they asked to be removed.

Okay. And then also I was going to ask, you know, we've never ran any Google Ads. So we're probably sitting around, you know, right around 5, 600,000. We've never ran any Google Ads or anything like that. So you would suggest to start that with upworks.

Well, okay. So you're asking, should you start doing Google Ads is that you're asking?

Well, I mean, we want to. We want to get to, you know, a million plus dollars. I mean, right now it's kind of like the opposite. Like, we have a lot of cash right now.

How many people are in your database right now?

Probably around 1500.

Okay. And are you sending out texts each month?

Well, I did one time and then I got a bunch back. And then it's kind of like, okay, now I'm running around to these properties trying to do an estimate and then not really getting anything approved from it. Maybe one person approves, but everybody says, yeah, I want an estimate. And then you go and, you know, you're wasting time going to the property to ride by it or whatever to give them my estimate, and then they're not really getting accepted.

Okay. Yeah. So to two things. First off, when it comes to the text message, you. You will want to only go after pain because otherwise there's no real reason for them to accept. So, for example, snow. That's why it worked well. Windstorms, works well. Christmas, like you want to have a reason and with urgency and scarcity around the text message. Otherwise it is like, yeah, sure, I'll have an estimate. I don't really need anything done, but sure, go for it. Right. So that, that's one side note I would say around how just to do the text in that fashion. When it comes to advertising. Have you already got a website, Patrick?

Yes.

Okay. And is that optimized, like with conversion and stuff?

Yeah, that's where most of our, you know, clients come from. That and Google, my business.

Cool. How many Google reviews you have now?

Almost 100.

Cool. All right. And have you spent anything on ads at all or not?

Nothing. We've never spent anything on it. I mean, we do like a magazine. Miller, that's like 450 dol per month.

Yeah. So I would start first with your Google Local services Ads. Don't start with Google Ads itself. Lsa. It's called local services Ads. That's going to be your best cost per lead, depending on your market, probably between 20 and 30 bucks per lead. It's really high quality. Gets a recorded phone call or you see the chat. Like, it's really good. So start there. It's not going to be. You're not going to be able to dump a lot of money into it, though. So then I would go to Google Ads. And again, you should not spend more than four or five, maybe $600 a month for someone to manage it. But you have. If you have the cash and you can spend four or five hundred bucks a month on ad spend. It's likely that just doing the LSA and that and spending a little bit of ads will get you to the million dollar marker.

So you would start with LSA and then go move to Google Ads. I mean, would you use upwork to let someone do that? I mean, I really don't know what's going on with the Google Ads, like

so, yep, to be honest, yeah. Going to Upwork and you're going to be able to look at people's accounts of all the reviews that they've done, services. I'm not getting the cheapest person for me personally, if they're over 100 bucks an touch them. I pay people $600 an hour on upwork, but I'm trying to download their information of what they know and I, they're my employee. It's not like a contracting business like Zach was talking about, where they're going to kind of keep everything away from you. And there's like this magic black box of stuff happening. I want to know what's going on. So I require, when I go get someone on upwork, I say, hey, I want a video at least once a month and I want you to show everything in my account via screen recording of what you're doing because I want to know what's happening. That's the difference between getting someone upwork versus an agency. An agency is not going to tell you what they're doing. They're not going to tell you what keywords they're changing. You know, who, what the targeting is changing, what they're tweaking the back end because that's their secret sauce that they want to keep you tied to. Whereas someone on upwork, they're charging you for their time. They don't care.

Right.

Do you do the same thing with SEO? You know, for, for a website?

If, if anyone's charging you more than a couple hundred bucks a month for SEO, they're overcharging you. SEO needs to be tweaked maybe one to three times a year. It is not something that needs to be adjust a lot. Like home service web design, we do it once a quarter. And so I know what the costs are on SEO, it's not big. If someone's saying it's like, oh, we're doing all these keywords and tags like they're blowing up smoke like it's not true. And also with AI, it's very much less and less is going to be emphasized on Keywords and much more around. Are people satisfied when they get to a website? Like the design is going to mean everything. Like in the back in the old days, you could, you could kind of convince Google you're a good site by using keywords and a bunch of tags and all this stuff that's out the window with AI because AI knows if someone gets to your site and actually submits an essay request form, if they actually liked the site and stayed on it for two or three minutes versus seeing it for one second and bouncing off. And so a lot of things in the past around SEO is a lot of it's useless. It's around is the customer satisfied, is the people searching for the website satisfied and actually taking action? And so it's much more a game now with AI of answering questions. Like, you'll see an Augusta site coming out in the next couple weeks. Like having FAQs. Very positive. Will outperform a blog every day of the week, posting images to your Google My business page or Google Listing every single two or three days. Just keeping the content consistently going there with pictures just like you would to Facebook. You should be doing to Google Listing. Those are way bigger levers than like someone moving tags and keywords and hyperlinks on the back end of SEO. They're just taking money from you.

Okay, so with, with the upwork or is, I mean in the Google AdWords, I guess there's a way that you can give, you know, the person on upwork their own login. So you can manage that. Right? And take.

Okay. And they'll walk you through that.

Okay, cool.

And what's cool is on upwork, if they, if they're, if they're malicious, you can leave a bad review for them. So like they want to do a good job. They running it like a business. They want to do a good job. So you leave a good review and so you can go and see hundreds of other people that have done work for them and said if they have done that or not, not so fantastic. We'll see you take care of.