Home Services Are a Bad Business...

If you're like me, playing defense and shutting down during the off season, Sounds horrible. How do I reduce my customer acquisition cost? I'm actually asking what can I do to make sense of a higher customer acquisition cost? Is it possible we're focusing on the wrong things?

All right, thank you all for having me. Oh, yeah, thank you. All right, give me lots of volume because we have, like a solid hour and a half of just solid talking questions. Cool. So for those who are not at lunch, I'll give a quick recap. Just so you know a little bit about me. Who here before today had no idea who I am? Just raise your hand. Hey, fantastic. I'm talking to you. Okay. So I started mowing grass when I was 11 years old up in a little town called Blaine. Washington has like 6,000 people that live there. She lives a couple hours south of us. And so my brother and I started mowing grass. I was 11 years old. I did that because I wanted to go to college. And I wanted to go to college because my family didn't have any money. All throughout time growing up, my dad was a minister. Well, he still is pastor. And, you know, they don't make a lot of money, unfortunately. And we traveled all across the country, especially at the beginning when I was younger and I moved, I think 23 times before I moved out at 18. So we were kind of all over the place. And I kind of figured, hey, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to earn my way out of this by going to College. So at 11 years old, started mowing grass. 13 years old, I started college. To get there, I skipped a couple grades, a couple at home. And, yeah, started college when I was 13 years old. I did that because I didn't really like school, but I knew I needed to get done to become a doctor. Ideally either a spine surgeon or heart surgeon. That's what I was going for. So I was the kid with the skeletons and the muscle groups all in your room. And the posters, that was me watching surgeries. That was my fun thing to do. And then when I was 18 years old, I finished my pre med degree. And before going to get my m. MD I went over to Africa for a couple months. In Kenya, just south of nairobi is kalangari, tigoni. And I volunteer a bunch in hospitals and different clinics, orphanages. And over there, when you say I'm a medical student, they say, fantastic, you are now a doctor. Go. And so it was pretty cool, though, because I was able to do surgeries, birthing I worked a lot in the pediatric burn unit. I would do injections, the whole nine yards. Very, very fun, especially for the kid that nerded out about this stuff like this whole life and came back to the US and was getting ready for my mcat, which is kind of entrance exam four year medical school, and decided after scattering a bunch of doctors over here that I did not want to be in the medical system over here. Mostly because I was seeing way less patients per day. I was tired of the insurance and the bureaucracy, the paperwork side of things. And more importantly, I didn't want to go to school for the next 10 years, go into a whole bunch of debt and then do like the same three to five procedures the rest of my career, especially if you're really going to specialize in surgery. So I decided, hey, I'm going to bail. I was 18, so I said, okay, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to go mow grass because that's all I knew how to do. And so that's when I started Augusta Lawn Care. And so fast forward a few years after that, I was underneath a dump truck at a job site and got sucked up into the PTO from my hoodie. And if you don't know what a PTO is, a power takeoff. It's the thing that operates the dump on the dump truck and you're not going to stop it. And so if you get your hand or your foot or something like that caught in, typically you're losing an appendage or you're going to die. And so I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and kind of getting through that, fortunately, by the grace of God was able to survive that. But in that couple weeks, I realized that my business had no systems, had no procedures. It was built on me working 80, 90 hours a week and not making a whole lot of money. And so I had already gone at night, got my MBA, master's in Business Administration from Western Washington University. So I already knew like how technically to run a business, but I had not implemented in my home service business at all. And so in those two weeks of sitting on a hospital bed, you start to realize where all the cracks in your business are when you suddenly can't be there. And I was literally on the hospital bed videoing my crew, FaceTiming them for the next project and walking them through it. Hey, so yeah, the rock goes over here, this is what you do, et cetera. And so coming to kind of the harsh conclusion that, hey, I did not Have a business, I owned a job. I knew things needed to change. And so I created a lot of systems that today is now part of Augusta Lawn Care. And then I talk about my YouTube channel and the books, et cetera. And by the way, if you're like, is he going to sell something? No, I'm not going to go to mikeandies.com everything is free. All the courses, everything on there is free. MBA for entrepreneurs. I took what I learned in my MBA school side of things, condensed it down to a course. There's like 20 hours of content on there. It'll be helpful. It's free 100%, so please use those resources. The book. If you don't want to buy the book, it's also free on my podcast. Just listen to it. So let's go ahead and get started. I have 500 slides. I just did that as a preamble. So you kind of know what's going on. Five years ago, like he mentioned, we did franchise Augusta Lawn Care. I own a couple of locations myself, but then 170 of them are franchised. So I understand what it's like to be a franchisee because I'm an anytime fitness franchisee. I'm also know it's like to be a franchisor with Augusta Lawn Care. And right now, really, a lot of my time is spent on software. So we do a lot of software stuff with pay for performance CRMs, et cetera. So that's a little bit about me before I go on this massive diatribe. The next hour and a half. Ready to go. All right, Little nodding, head shaking is very helpful. You know, this is going to be an hour and a half of me yakking in front of you. It's so much less painful if I have nods, shakes, hands, woohoos. If you holler and shout, I'll be happy. It'll be great. So if something resonates, just get into it. You know, this can be really boring. And we just hear Mike talk, little guy with a yellow shirt on, like, what in the world are we doing? Or we can just enjoy it. I think it'll be very helpful. I do think it'll help you a lot in your business. And I spent a long time preparing this. So does anyone know Alex Hormozi? Cool. So Alex Hormozi is big influencer when it comes to marketing, business, etc. I went on and traveled to his place in February 2024 out in Las Vegas. Dr. Cash is a guy on the left. He helps Alex write his Books, he's his friend and they have business partners. He's Also my coach, Dr. Cash in the left hand side. So I went out and visited them. I talked to Alex and was talking about Augusta Lawn Care and the franchise and asked, hey, like, so what are we supposed to do here? I want to get to a thousand locations. I think that's what we need to do to change the level of professional in the landscape industry. How do I do it? Say hey, make sure they make a lot more money and ideally make $800,000 per year with $200,000 in annual profits. And if you do that, you will have no problem getting people to join the franchise. Basically saying, ensure the owners make more money and you'll be set. So I asked myself, well, what's the problem that we need to solve in order to make sure that every single franchisee inside of Augusta Lawn Care makes $200,000 in annual profits every single time? Not once off, but, but every single time. So this led to about six weeks early 2024, going through spreadsheets, diving into reports and I looked at all the unit economics for Augusta Lawn Care. So all of our locations, I looked at the entire green industry. So landscaping, lawn care, tree removal, et cetera and then all home services. I have a unique advantage where every single day I see about 5 to 10 different profit and loss statements from across the country of different home services. We do a turnaround show, I go out and I fly out to all sorts of different home services. We've done fencing companies, roofing companies, handyman companies, pool cleaning companies, you name it. And so I see a lot of the PNLs people applying to be on the show so I can go out and hopefully turn their business around. And so I analyze every single one of those does 250 different home service businesses. Now what I recognize that revenue leads and profit drop for three to four months of every year. It might be more for you, but ultimately this seasonality is a thing that really kills every home service business. The average profit increased. When I looked across these 250 businesses, the average profit increased by 72%. If you remove just one quarter from their four quarter analysis, their four quarters report, if you just removed it, just took it right out, their profit percentage increased by 72%. So if they made $50,000 in annual profits, that number jumped almost to $100,000 in profits just by taking out one quarter quarter of the year. So for example, in a lawn care business, this is one actual example. I pulled their numbers, the lead count for Q1, 79, Q2, Spring Rush, 490, Q3, 311, Q4, 200. These are the actual number of leads they were getting for their lawn care business. Now, the revenue very similarly all over the place. Q1 is their winter time. January, February, March. Then you go into spring rush, jumps up. Then throughout the summer, usually collect on that revenue from spring rush. You do big projects. 420,000. That's a big, big quarter. And then slows down during the winter. There's their profit again. Massive negative number in Q1. Now, I looked at the Christmas light company very similarly. We had the number of leads that came in massively spike crazily, you might think October, November, December, obviously towards the Christmas light season. I think they did a little bit of ice and snow removal as well. So there's a little bit of that mixed in there also.

All right, for revenue this Christmas light ice snow removal company, this is their revenue over the course of four quarters in the year. So you can see here, obviously massive increase in revenue in Q4 when they're installing the lights. Profit, you can see these are actual numbers. I stripped out the names of the company. Q1, 10,000. Massive negative in Q2. There's a lot of times you have all sorts of expenses that still need to be paid regardless of whether or not the lights being put up. And so when I look at the lawn care business and I can see here, my quarter one's Profit is negative. Q2 is 50,000, Q3 is 60, 20, etc. I had $70,000 of profit on a $1.1 million business. Now what I want to do is take the worst profit quarter, which in this case is Q1, and replace it with the middle or the median of the other 3/4. So what happens when I remove that 1/4 from the year? Well, if I do that, this would be the median number, 50,000. It's the middle of these three. 20, 50, 60. I take that middle number and I replace it over the Q1 worst quarter of the year. If I do that now, all of a sudden my profit went from $70,000 to 180,000 by simply taking my worst quarter of the year and replacing with the average of the other three quarters in terms of profitability. Same thing. Let's look at the lights and snow business. Same thing. So $50,000 negative. Negative $50,000 in profit is what we made in Q2. I take that quarter out, I replace it. The median of the other three quarters, which in this case is $30,000. And what do we get? We have a doubling of the profit from $80,000 to $160,000 in profit. Now, I call this Q4 collapse. Q4 collapse is when revenue and leads drop for one calendar quarter, killing your profit margin.

When I step back, seeing all what we call Q4 collapse, I like to think of this as a virus. It's a virus that is killing many home service businesses, including the pool fencing industry, lawn care, landscaping, you name it, any home service business, this is affecting it. And I call it seasonitis. So I playfully name this term and I'll use this throughout the entire keynote as to how we are going to cure seasonitis. But the symptoms of seasonitis are this number one revenue drops by 50% or more for any one month of the year compared to your best month. So if you had $100,000 in monthly revenue in your best month, if you ever drop lower than $50,000 in monthly revenue, you have contracted seasonitis. The second way to be able to contract seasonitis in this disease is to have negative cash flow for any month of the year. So if at any point throughout the year, any one month you have a negative cash flow or you lose money, you've contracted a case of seasonitis. In the home service industry, we have come to accept that our revenue and lead flow will be seasonal. We were like, oh, I guess part of it. This is part of the industry. Many home service businesses, especially if your Q1 is when you don't have a lot of leads, takes until summer to break even. I've seen some businesses, July and August and maybe September, they actually break even and actually start to make a profit. And for their business, I realized this is really ultimately what makes home services a lousy industry. And this is why the keynote is mentioned is titled the Way it Is. This is why home service businesses stink, right? Is because of the seasonality. And I'll hopefully convince you of that and then we'll fix it throughout the keynote. Recently I was at another home service conference out in Louisville and there's a whole bunch of keynotes going on and there's a lot of really good information about marketing and hiring and leadership and sales. And those skills are important. It is important to learn those. They're going to help you in your business, you're going to be able to grow, etc. But is it possible we're focusing on the wrong thing? Is it possible that all those things, although they are important in our business, that we hire the right people, that we do great marketing, do great advertising, run Facebook ads, we send email, we have software, we track things. Is that all important? But are we really focusing on the correct thing in the business? We neglect the most obvious gaping hole in our business model, which is Q4 collapse. So why do we do this? Why do we focus on all these little things and the type of truck that we drive and the wheels that are on the car and what color we paint the vehicle and what kind of vehicle it is and how we do our advertising, the brochures and our uniforms and all these other things that are important? How. Why is it that Q4 clubs is the most important problem to solve and yet we replace it with urgent tasks? Every day, customer calls, and they're freaking out at you. They leave a bad review. You get to the shop site or the shop and the truck tires flat. All of a sudden, our entire day is just spent fighting these little fires that are urgent. Customer freaking out on the phone immediately. You're spending all of your time and energy on them instead of focusing on the most important thing, which is Q4 collapse. The objective of today's talk is to recognize seasonitis will make you poor, and then we're going to fix it once and for all. So back to the story with Alex Hormozi. What did I do after talking to Alex in Las Vegas? What did I do after that? And realizing what's the real problem in this industry? I spent eight months creating a plan to cure seasonitis for Augusta Nation. That's what we call Augusta lawn care in 170 locations. So. And it's going to take me 24 months to fully roll that program out. So I'm saying this to mostly say, if you recognize seasonitis in your business and today you get the cures, don't think it's going to just happen overnight. It could take you a couple years to actually solve it. Because remember, seasonitis is what, one revenue declining by more than 50% for any one month of the year or having negative cash flow for any one month of the year, I'm guessing. Is this the computer I'm pointing at? Can I keep pushing? It's not working. Okay, cool. All right. Today I'm going to share that plan that I made with Augusta Lawn Care, and then we're going to create a custom plan for your business to ensure that you can also solve Q4 collapse. Let's firstly define, when is your business actually sick? When does it actually contract? Seasonitis sick is again, when you have revenue drops by more than 50% for any month of the year or you have negative cash flow for any month of the year. There are five ways to cure seasonitis over the next 400 and some odd slides. I'm going to go through these four different ways and then you'll be able to choose which one's going to work best for your business. So throughout we're going to choose one cure or mix and match a couple of them. So there are some of our owners that are using two or three of these different cures to ensure that they do not have seasonitis anymore inside of their business. Now I didn't have time today, but I did have a whole bunch of slides of actually owners that showed showing their numbers of once they institute this, what the first year, second year, third year looked like when it came to implementing these cures. I'm going to show you thing one at the end. The goal today is to make sure that no revenue, not a single month of revenue inside of your business is less than 50% of your best month. I understand there's seasonality, I understand that there'll be times when jobs come in more, etc. But we do not want revenue to drop by more than 50% for any one month of the year. Second goal is to never, ever lose money. If you talk to Warren Buffett, his business partner Charlie Munger, they always said three rules in business, never lose money, never lose money, never lose money. So if we just make sure that we do not lose any money in our business, I can guarantee you the business will be better.

All right, cure number one. If you're taking notes, this is number one, lockdown mode. So who this cure serves, if you want to take a long vacation and time off distraction, free lockdown mode will work well for you. If you run another business or you have a seasonal job like a firefighter or, or a teacher, lockdown mode will also serve you well. Here we're essentially shutting down the business. You have paid off all your trucks and equipment and the business is debt free. In other words, you don't have a lot of fixed expenses. But if you have a bunch of debt, this is not going to work for you. Lastly, if you have year round level billing contracts with all your customers, I know in this room most of you have one time jobs, so you probably don't have a lot of year round contracts. But if you did, you might be able to get away with a lockdown mode. Alright, lockdown mode gets harder the higher your fixed expenses are. We'll come back to the moment. Let me just point out the fact in the Bottom right hand corner. If you ever get lost for a minute, I kind of lose you on some numbers. Come back. This will be telling you which cure we're currently on. Right now we're in cure number one, which is lockdown mode. Now, lockdown mode, if you're going to use this where I'm basically going to shut the business down during the off season, it gets harder the higher your fixed expenses are. Lockdown mode is impossible if your fixed expenses for Q4. And remember, when I say Q4, I do not mean October, November, December. I mean any three months of the year that are your worst performing. Okay? So if your fixed expenses for that quarter are greater than your profits the rest of the year, you cannot do lockdown mode. You're like, I'm just going to shut down for that quarter because it's not very good. Well, great. But if it costs you $10,000 a month to stay open because of fixed expenses and loan payments and rent and insurance and franchise fees, and the rest of the year, you only make $20,000 in profit, we got a problem, right? So for example, from April to December, you make $100,000 in profit. You're considering here, number one, which is lockdown mode. But your monthly fixed expenses are 40,000. Your off season is January through March. This will not work. Reason why? Because three times 40,000, $120,000, you only made $100,000 the rest of the year, you're going to dig a bigger hole in that one Q in Q4 than all the profit of your other three quarters. Make sense? All right.

So monthly break even revenue. Knowing what this number is is very important. This is the amount of money I need to make in order to be able to make sure that I do not lose money. Because remember, we're trying to avoid losing money and thereby avoid seasonitis. If there are months that you make less revenue than your break even point, you lose money and the business contracts. Seasonitis like this is so simple. Trust me, this is all gonna build on top of itself and eventually it'll make a lot of sense. Okay? So your monthly break even is really dictated by all your monthly expenses that don't change regardless of how much revenue you do. This is your fixed expenses. Think rent, insurance, franchise fees, your cost of your software, the cost of anything like loans or leases. You're not gonna call your bank and hey, Mr. Banker, we're gonna be not making as much money here in the off season. So I'd like to just pause my payments for the next few months. Not Happening. Those are fixed expenses. Okay.

Yeah, that's right. All right. The number one concern with lockdown mode if you have employees is, well, what happens if I shut the business down? I thought I wanted to keep someone, you know, busy full time. And so if I let them off, like, how's that going to work? My team is now I'm not going to have any work. Seasonal work demands seasonal labor.

What that means when it comes to seasonal labor is there's a few things you can focus on. If we're going to have revenue be seasonal.

The labor that performs the work that we should be giving to customers will also be seasonal. It should be. So to think that I'm going to keep someone full time, but then my work is going to be part time at some points in the year. You're asking for seasonalities, you're asking to lose money. So when it comes to seasonal labor, what you can do is advertise short term positions. Because again, we are assuming right now we're going to shut down during the off season. So what we can do is advertise short term positions. There are people that want short term positions. We all just assume because we are type A, want to make more money, that everyone wants full time work. That is not true. There are people that need three months. There are people that need nine months. There are people that are gone for two to three months and love to travel for that period of time. And they'd be dying to have a job that they only work six to eight months a year.

H2B program is basically, we're going to fly people from other countries to be able to come in the US and work as a seasonal worker temporarily. But what if instead of thinking about getting the HP program and leaning on the government for basically your labor, which I don't recommend, what if we just thought about land in slightly different ways? Why not hiring from outside of your state or your city? For example, if you live in a high income area, it might cost you $25 or $35 per hour to hire someone versus if from two hours away outside of town, the cost of living is much lower. You might be okay with 18 or $20 per hour. What if you ran ads in that market and then gave them a stipend to come live in your market for a period of time throughout the very busy season.

All right, really the main point here is like, if you're going to have seasonal labor, you're going to lay people off. You're going to have to lay people off in order to Meet the full time employee demand. So how many full time employees do we actually need?

But what if no one comes back to work after I lay them off? Because this is the big fear. It's like, well, if I don't get them full time work and I don't keep them busy during the off season, that means they're not going to come back during the spring rush. That means they're not going to come back when I really need them. Because ultimately we need experienced team members to ensure that we can train the newbies when they come along. So it gets really busy in the spring. For example, I need those people that worked here last year to be here to train the new employees. Valid point. So the labor strategy for cure number one is to have a comeback bonus. We offer $2,000 for our team. If we lay them off during, before the off season, when they come back, they get $2,000. Now some people will do that after say 90 days of being back. Some people do that on a kind of a continuous basis throughout the spring rush. But the goal is we will get that employee to come back and give them a bonus to do so. I can't afford $2,000. Okay, let me convince you otherwise. Let's calculate the cost of replacing that employee. So if they actually don't come back and you've got to replace them with a new employee, what does that actually cost the business? Well, let's look at the cost to find a new employee just from an interview perspective. If your Scheduled interviews are 30 minutes long, half of the people show up, a third of the people that do show up, you give them a job offer. And then half of the people you give a job offer accept. Let's assume this math for a moment. That means six hours you're going to spend per new employee. Now, if you're charging $120 per hour, that's what you value your time at to your customer. If you're charging approximately that to the customer, that would mean it cost you $720 just to find a new employee. Now let's look at the cost of training a new employee. Let's assume you just spent $720 of your time to go find a new person. Let's assume it takes 60 hours worth of training. And I think in this room it's probably double or triple this. But I'm assuming for a simpler service. So 60 hours of training, assume that half of the efficiency. So they only produce like half as efficient as they should be when they're training. They're actually on a job site doing work, but they're like half as efficient because they're brand new. Also, we're going to assume that it reduces the efficiency of the trainer by half as well because there, instead of just them doing their regular job, they now have to train this new person. It's going to slow them down. So we're going to assume that for those 60 hours also is slowing them down. And honestly, if you're looking at frontline team members, half of them aren't going to make it a month. So if we assume all of this, we can assume that 120 hours were spent training a new team member between their inefficiency and the trainer that had to train them. If we're charging $80 per hour to the customer, I know you do linear feet. You usually don't figure out what your labor rate is. However, if you were charging approximately $80 per hour to the customer, which in this industry, you guys are double or triple this sometimes. Assume that's $96,000 it costs to train a new employee. All of a sudden I'm paying over ten grand because I lost somebody to find and train a new employee. All of a sudden that $2,000 comeback bonus doesn't sound so bad.

Now, we talked about this earlier and we talked about more at the lunch break. This is the 4L framework. The 4L framework is basic premise is this. Every single business, if you are growing, goes in this framework. Whether you're a Fortune 500 company or you're just getting started. Your business constrained somewhere on this diagram, 4L's first being liquidity. I have money. I'm going to start a business. What do I do? I go spend on advertising. I got flyers, I get door hangers. I spend money on Facebook ads. Why? Because I need leads. And then when I get a ton of leads, leads are just dumping on me. I get so many customers, eventually I'm going to need more laborers. I need employees to perform on the work that I have now have sold. And then as I get more laborers, I get 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 employees. All of a sudden I need management. I need leaders inside the business. And then once I get those leaders, all of a sudden, they're now straight overhead to the business because they're not performing labor. They're managing. And that's straight overhead. And what happens? My margins, my profit margins dramatically decrease because I now have all these overhead. So what happens? I have a constraint of liquidity. I need to raise my prices. I need to think about Being able to get more money from my customers, continue to grow the business. So if you're growing a business, you are at some point here on this graph. The vast majority of people in this room, based upon the date, feel like they are constrained by leads. But once you get enough leads, labor would then in turn become the bottleneck because you would need more employees to get the work done. Now, the goal when it comes to the 4L framework is to increase the number of times we cycle through this. Because every single time we cycle through this, this is when you go to the next level in business. If you cycle through this, you will likely have gotten a manager. You begin working on another department, another Service. You have 10, 12 employees if you go through this one time. So if you're solo right now, you've taken enough of your time and energy, have the liquidity to start the business, you're probably on the leads constraint. We'll talk more about getting leads down the road, because the vast majority of us think that we have a leads problem, and I think that vast majority of you do not. And I'll tell you why. But the game of whack a mole is exhausting because what happens is every single day, you're constantly trying to. In the 4oh framework, I need leads. Oh, my goodness. Now I have so many leads. Now I got all these labors. Okay, let's see what happens here. The constraint to growing your business constantly is moving from one to the next. In the 4L framework, let's assume we have Q4 collapse. We've contracted seasonitis. We have a bad off season. Well, what happens during the winter? We have no leads. So what happens? A whole bunch of laborers, we have to lay them off. That's a problem. Spring all of a sudden, because we laid everyone off and they all left and got other jobs. Now what? We have no labor, so we have an excess of leads. We have all these leads building up, but no labors. And then because my laborers left last year, I wasn't able to keep them. So when it comes to the summer and the fall, I have no one to actually promote into becoming a leader. And so the business stops growing, you have no money, and the business stops growing. So if you still feel stalled out, it is likely that you have not conquered the next constraint in the 4L framework. And if you have seasonitis, it makes it very, very difficult if every single winter you're losing your employees, leads are dropping off, you're never gonna be able to constantly go to the next stage of growth in the 4L framework. All right. Whoa, whoa. I'm going backwards. What happened? One second. Okay, I got to stay over here. Off seasons will keep you poor. So let's go ahead and fix the off season. If we fix the off season, we'll get steady leads throughout the winter. If we fix the off season during the spring, our laborers will be ready to take on the rush of new leads. And furthermore, if we have spring and fall come around, our leaders are trained and ready to go. Cause they were here last year our all throughout the off season. They conquered the spring rush, and now they're ready to be promoted. Move into management, estimator roles, et cetera. And if you are at the constraint of leads, for example, or if you're at the constraint of labor, thinking about a manager and estimator seems completely foreign to you. And it should. Because the only thing you gotta focus on is solving the current constraint in the 400 framework that you're at. So you can't get to the next level in your business if you run out of cash during the off season because you have negative cash flow. You cannot get to the next level in your business if you have no leads during the off season.

You are absolutely going to lose your best employees and leaders if you have an off season. You have to lay everybody off, okay? You didn't come to this conference. You didn't come today. You didn't join a franchise or become a dealer. For me to tell you to shut down your business for a few months a year, It's a pretty lousy business strategy, okay? In my opinion, cure one that we just talked about for seasonitis is a patch job. All right? It's like wearing a mask during COVID You can still get sick and die.

If you're like me, playing defense and shutting down during the off season. Sounds horrible. If you can keep costs down during the off season and shut the business down for the three or four months, awesome. If you can lay off your entire team and give them all to come back using the comeback bonus, awesome. Great. All power to you. But for me personally, all gas, no brakes. I default aggressive. I do not have an off season, and I never lose money. Cure number one concedes victory to the off season. I basically throw my hands up and say, I can't get leads. I can't keep my employees. I'm just going to shut down for three to four months. It will be very hard to build anything more than a lifestyle business using cure number one. So if you're gonna shut down for three Four, five months out of the year because it's just so hard to get leads. And you're gonna use the strategy I just talked about. It'd be very difficult to build anything more than a lifestyle business. A lifestyle business is where you continually. The business is serving your lifestyle, but you never actually build a business that can live without you.

If you use cure number one, your revenue drops off a cliff for some period of time. If you close down the business, enterprise value or the valuation of your business drops dramatically. It's very difficult to sell a business that for three, four months of the year it's closed down because no one wants to buy that business. It's a horrible business to buy. The off season, in my opinion, is the time to go all in. The goal of the next four cures after now we've covered cure number one, which is lockdown. The goal of the next four cures to cure seasonitis is to step on the gas when your competition is slowing down, is to figure out a way to hire employees when your competition cannot afford it. They're literally laying everyone off and you're hiring them. You're gonna figure out a way to be able to buy equipment when your competition can't afford it. Because everyone's laying people off. Everyone's selling their trucks and equipment because they overspent. They're in debt, they have fixed expenses, they have seasonitis, they have negative cash flow. They're now selling off their trucks and equipment. We gotta figure out a way to advertise when your competition can't afford it, because right now you're spending ads when everything is good and lots of leads are coming in. But if you figure out a way to be able to run ads when your competition is all closed down, they say leads aren't coming. No one wants a pool fence. If you can figure out a way to still run ads when they're not, you'll be able to dominate the market. All right, cure number two, you're writing notes is more and better. So this also comes from Alex Hormozi. He talks about more and better before new. So before I'm gonna focus on something new in the business, I'm gonna focus on doing more and better of what I'm currently doing. Ideally, I wanna use cure number two to fix seasonitis and avoid all the other ones. Number two is the best strategy to solve Q4 collapse. Who this might serve if your leads dip, but your core services are possible year round. Also, if you don't want to start another service or complicate the business. Tier 2 is also very effective. So at Augusta Lawn Care, our core gateway service is mowing. We mow grass. We make tall grass short. For cure number two, selling more mowing services is our solution. I will make this tie this into the full fencing side of things towards the end before we get super crazy, let's review a couple layup wins if you choose Cure two, where we're gonna do more and we're gonna do it better. Layup number one is switching to a level billing or subscription model. I'm not gonna talk a lot about this one because most of you don't have this, but I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on it because I do think you can actually add this to your business model. For many markets, subscription model or level billing does not work if you're doing it year round because none of your competition does it because it adds a lot of friction to the sales. Like I gotta explain how this was like a 12 month agreement and how the payments work. It can be adding friction to the sale also. By the way, if you just take a $3,000 fence and divide it by 12 months across the year and just divide in 12 payments, it doesn't make you any more money. It just spreads out the payments so it doesn't really actually make you any more money. And it can actually accentuate the cash flow problems. If you're starting to give people payments because you have all this labor and all the materials required during the spring rush, but you didn't get all the revenue, then you just spread out all the payments throughout the rest of the year. And that can actually really hurt cash flow. Also this doesn't work for one time jobs. You can't like convince someone, hey, you're going to go on a recurring subscription now for the next every 12 months for this one time job. So layup number two. So these are the things that if you're going to use cure two, I would do these first. That one for most of the people in this room doesn't apply. But layup number two is interesting I think for all of you. And that's selling time insensitive jobs into the off season. If you're super busy and you're getting someone to say that price is a problem for you, for them to be able to accept the job for their pool fence in the middle of, let's call it April. Is that looking busy soon? May. May for you all May super busy. Great. Too expensive. Mr. Jones, I can bring down your price. How am I going to do that, I'm going to schedule that job for five months from now, my off season. So do we actually have a downsell? Hey, we will reduce the price. But you're going to move off into my off season. I'm going to move time insensitive jobs. Putting up a pool fence is not time sensitive. Unless they like it must be done tomorrow. Great. This is the price. That's why it's here. If you're willing to work with me on timing, I'm willing to schedule it a little further.

Time insensitive and recurring jobs get priority during the spring rush. When I say spring rush, think busy season. Okay? For us it's spring. I know for a lot of you it's late spring, but spring rush, I'm focusing on jobs that gotta be done tomorrow and recurring jobs. I know right now a lot of you don't do recurring work. I hope by the end of the day I'll convince you otherwise. Time insensitive jobs and one time jobs get scheduled for the off season. So if you have a massive amount of demand that comes in for your service, a whole bunch of leads, I'm trying to schedule jobs off into the off season as much as possible. And if that means giving different prices based upon when you install, I would recommend it's like surge pricing, the impact of revenue on a calendar year. So if you're scheduling people currently based on a first come, first serve basis, this is what your revenue might look like. I'm just using this as an example. A whole bunch of revenue comes in, it kind of dies off, then a little bit of a bump again goes off during the off season. If you prioritize the recurring and time sensitive jobs, you now are going to reduce the amount of work that's in this year or in this quarter and you'll push jobs off into the off season.

What that does is total revenue does not change. You're scheduling the same amount of jobs. But it's going to lead to better scheduling, which means better asset utilization and employee utilization. Because see, I do not need to, right? I do not need to hire as many people because now I don't go as high during the spring rush. I don't need to buy as many trucks, I don't need as much equipment that I would usually need. If I try to schedule everyone based upon a first come first serve basis, less trucks, employees and equipment is required. Also, the likely of quitting is lower when the roller coaster of revenue is less steep. So if you have months where you're making 50,000amonth in revenue and months where you're making 5,000amonth in revenue, the chances of you quitting, very, very high. You have seasonitis, you've dropped more than 50% in revenue from their top month to another month. But when you have a roller coaster revenue, the likelihood of quitting in this industry is dramatically higher. Let's assume first, because we're talking about cure number two, let's assume that you can't do level billing and you don't get enough time insensitive jobs to fill the off season because you're like, well, everyone wants it done today. Okay, let's assume that. What can we do? Well, that leads us to cure number two, which is more and better accepted jobs. And you'll see why I call it accepted jobs and not leads later on. So more accepted jobs is we're going to advertise. Okay, so we're going to talk about more and we're talking about better. Let's first talk about more accepted jobs. How do we get more accepted jobs? We're going to advertise, like, okay, well, duh. All right, hold with me for a minute. My off season when I first started Augusta lawn care was costing me between 70 and $100,000 every single winter. We would spend nine months of the year making profit. The last quarter of the year, leads dropped off, revenue dropped off, and I would take the 70 or $100,000 in profit I made and burn it. I was trying to keep my crew busy doing stupid stuff. Well, with stupid stuff, we would go pressure wash all of our lawn care customers property for free. We would take cookies, literally their house. We'd bake cookies and take them to their house. We would take them to property manager. We just do all these random networking things. We would organize the shop and then reorganize the organization at the shop just to keep the team busy and full time. Because I felt I had to keep them busy year round. I couldn't lay them off and have them come back with a return to work bonus.

700,000 across the system.

Yeah, 100% seasonitis. I would have been better off spending $500 per day on ads, which over the course of those 90 days would have been $45,000. If those ads. Spending $500 in ads per day could have just got me to break even by getting enough leads to keep my crew busy. I would have been better off just spending $500 per day on ads for 90 solid days and losing 45 grand. If I was able to generate just Enough leads to keep my crew busy and break even on the work.

So we can solve Q4 collapse by advertising more to get more customers. But how much do we need to spend? Well, in order to find this, our goal here is to find how much do I need to spend to solve this problem. If I just told you like, hey, if you spent this much money on advertising, you make just as much money in the off season as you do during the busy season. We need to figure that out. That's going to be your advertising budget. To figure out the advertising budget, we've got to figure out these other three things. First off, we've got to figure out the revenue gap to solve Q4 collapse. So how much more revenue do you need to make so you do not have Q4 collapse and you do not have seasonitis. Remember, seasonitis is you either lose money per month or your revenue drops by more than 50% of your best month. So in your head right now, if you're like, hey, my best month is 80,000. My worst month is 20,000. Well, to not contract season nine, I need to get above 40,000. I need $20,000 and more. $20,000 more revenue per month for three months of the year. Okay, you need to generate $60,000 more revenue during the off season to solve Q4 collapse. Now, the number of additional jobs we need to fill the revenue gap. So if we know the revenue gap, then okay, well, that's cool. How many jobs do I need to make that much revenue? And then I can figure out how much money I need to spend to solve this using advertising. So second part is how many additional jobs except the jobs do I need to fill the revenue gap? So we've identified what our revenue gap is, how much more revenue we need to make during the off season. We divide up our average job value in Q4. Alright, let's assume it's $2,500 for an offense. Okay, so if we had agreed that we had $60,000 in revenue that we need to generate during the off season to solve Q4 collapse. That's $20,000 multiplied by three months. We divide that by $2,500. Anyone going to do the math for me? 60,000 divided by 2,500, it's going to be about 24.

Is it 24. Fantastic. So 24 jobs, you are 24 jobs away. What was it? 2,400 is 25 is 250024 jobs. I think I'm doing the math. Okay, cool. 24 jobs. You need to get 24 jobs that is now the goal we identified. We needed this much revenue and to do that much revenue, on average, I need to get 24 jobs. So just break it down now. We need to figure out how much do I need to spend to get 24 jobs. That really becomes the question.

So then the next question is, what is an achievable customer acquisition cost during the off season? Now, customer acquisition cost is simply the price of getting a new customer if you're gonna go spend it on ads at lunch. We identified that number from the corporate side of things. These are usually for $60, $70 cost per lead. And then we identify that usually it's more like $90 to $100 cost per lead for a franchisee that's running their own ads. Now let's assume you have a 50% close ratio, which means half of your leads turn into customers. Everyone tracking so far, if you pay $100 for a lead and then you close one out of two of them on becoming a customer, what is your customer acquisition cost? $200. $200 would be your customer acquisition cost. So if you don't know what your customer acquisition cost is, go high. The reason I say this, because a lot of you know your customer acquisition cost for your busy season. But when it's slow, people don't need your services. The cost of acquisition will go up because no one's looking for your services. And so even if you need to double it or triple it or 5x it, come up with a number. What are you willing to spend to acquire a customer during the off season? 300, $400. Alright, well, if you answered that's not going to make any sense because it's not worth to pay $400 customer acquisition cost if the average ticket is $200 or sorry, $600. Okay, now I'm not using the numbers right now of fencing. Just follow along with the math here. Okay, so if you said that, I would agree it doesn't make any sense if I'm going to spend $400 on customer acquisition cost and only the average ticket that I sell the customer during the off season is $600. Dumb. Don't do it. You will lose money. But you can afford a higher customer acquisition cost if you have a higher lifetime value. Lifetime revenue is the amount of revenue over the course of a customer's lifespan. In other words, the business with the highest lifetime value can spend the most for the few leads that do come in during the off season. Because we all agree that there are less leads during the off season, but someone's getting them. And in some of your markets, maybe it drops by 80, 90% the amount of leads, but someone's getting those leads. And if I'm able to spend more on the advertising because I'm on the back end, able to make more from the customer, you get the lead. All right. How can we make sense of a higher customer acquisition cost? Instead of asking like, how do I reduce my marketing spend? How do I reduce my customer acquisition cost? I'm actually asking, what can I do to make sense of a higher customer acquisition cost? So I can still run ads during the off season and we increase the lifetime value. In other words, we can make sense of spending more on ads to get a customer if we increase how much money we make on each customer. So we've already agreed that if I have to spend $400 to get a new customer and the lifetime value is $600 because I only sell them one thing bad. However, what happens? Instead of lifetime value of $600, I'm able to increase the lifetime value of that customer to $5100. All of a sudden, doesn't seem so bad. Spend $400 in customer acquisition cost, get $5000 back. I'll do that all day long.

The company that has the largest lifetime value can spend the most on customer acquisition cost and still remain profitable. They will be the ones that take all the market share during the off season. Someone is getting leads. If you got every single lead in your market for pool fencing during the off season, you'd stay busy. Every single one. How do I get every single one I advertise when no one else can afford to do it? How do I afford to do it? I make sure that once I get a customer, I make them so valuable to me, I make far more than my competitors. Everyone is looking to lower your customer acquisition cost when really we're looking for a higher lifetime value so we can afford the higher customer acquiring cost that does come with the off season. If you spend money on ads during the off season, you will spend more on ads to get a customer during the off season compared to your spring rush. Absolutely. But how can I make sense of it? I increase the lifetime value of that customer. You can outspend your competition on ads. If your lifetime value is triple theirs, they'll stop spending on ads because they like man, this doesn't make sense. You keep spending money on ads because you know you can make so much more on the back end of that customer than they can figure out how to triple lifetime Value. Worry less about cutting $10 off your customer acquisition costs. Oh, I'm not going to spend $100 cost per lead. That's crazy. What if I told you you're making five or six or $10,000 off the back of every single customer? All of a sudden that changes that math. So how are we going to do it? Don't worry, we're going to get into it. The question becomes, how do we increase the lifetime value? Is there a way to increase how much money we make from each and every customer? Well, we've talked about so far about more accepted jobs. And how are we going to do that? We're going to advertise. Okay, doesn't sound great because I'm spending way more money on customer acquisition costs. Well, I also need to do better selling better accepted jobs, which is I'm going to upsell the customer. Right. So stick with me. Remember, cure number two is more and better accepted jobs. So my question is, do we have an advertising or customer acquisition problem or do we have an upselling problem? Do we actually have a leads problem or we simply not know how to take the leads that we do get and turn them into very high paying customers over the course of their life?

Upselling, in other words or terminology is upgrade to. If you ever hear someone say, hey, would you like to upgrade to this? They're upselling you. You're trying to sell a customer a better version of their initial product. For example, you can say, I'm buying an F150. Fantastic. Which version do you want? You got everything from an XL version at 36,000 all the way up to a Raptor for twice as much, 70, $80,000. You have different models like we have here, lariat, etc. Upselling basically means that selling a. You're selling a more expensive version of a product that the customer already has or is buying. So if you're buying the F150, it's like, do you want the XL or do you want the lariat? I'm trying to upsell you into the lariat to spend more on the same F150 truck. You can also get upsold into. For example, if you're buying that truck, an extended service plan. So they're gonna sell you the truck. Whichever version, they're gonna try and get you as high as possible. And then they're gonna sell you another extended service plan and try to increase the lifetime value of their customer. Oops, sorry. This is why on every single estimate I recommend you have recommended or optional items. We talked about this at lunch. I think it's absolutely crazy to send a customer one price on a quote. Absolutely crazy. There's got to be so many optional things you can do. Whether it be lights on the fence, cleaning the fence, having landscape lighting, having the ability to have a warranty and make sure that they forever. That's like an extended service plan. Essentially all of these are options to upsell on an estimate. And that's how you take a $2,500 fence and turn it into 5,000 plus $100 a month recurring subscription. We'll get into that throughout the day. If I'm buying a 27 inch TV and the salesperson offers me 48 inch TV or an extended warranty, that's an upsell. You go and buy an airline ticket. What are they trying to do? They're trying to get you to go from basic to Maine and to comfort plus to first class. That's all upselling. They don't stop there. They also have luggage, boarding privileges, seat selection, wi fi, access, snack. These are all upsells. That's why you spend $100 on a spirit Airlines ticket and by the end of it you're paying 500. All these upsells. So again, our customers are price sensitive. I agree with you. Be Spirit Airlines sell them $99 product and then all the upsells up to the lifetime value you really want them at, which is much higher.

Alright, there are 11 options or ways to upgrade and increase lifetime value. You guys ready? You might want to pen. Here we go. Or just take pictures of the screen. I could care less. Number one, sell frequency discounts. So I'm going to give you a whole bunch of them. Some might not apply to you, but choose two or three of these. So instead of weekly, I'm going to sell my cleaning services as an example on a recurring basis. Instead of monthly, I'm going to do it weekly. Let's break down the math. I'm going to give a customer a discount and instead of charging $150 for a one time monthly cleaning visit, I'm going to say hey, I'm going to get $80. If you go to weekly, this increases the annual customer value. So how much I make for them on an annual basis from $1,800, that's 150 times 12 to $4,160. By giving them a discount to increase their recurrence and increase the frequency of that recurrence, ACV or annual customer value. Stick with me, I Know, this is the math. Hold with me for a moment. Annual customer value divided by your annual churn equals your lifetime value. Let's run some math here. So if annual churn is 33%, I know you all don't talk about churn with the customers very much because you don't have any recurring subscription or recurring revenue, which we will change later in today. However, let's assume that you have 33% of churn, which means that 33% of your recurring customers leave every year. That makes the lifetime value of a customer increase from $5,400 to $12,000. You say. How did that come with that number? Well, at first, we were doing $1,800 per year annual customer value because we were charging $150 per month. We have a 33% churn. That's $5,400 is now the lifetime value because I kept them on average for three years. Now, because I'm charging now weekly at $80, I give a massive discount just to increase the frequency of service. $80 per week. I increased the annual customer value of 4,100. I didn't improve my service. I didn't do anything different. Same quality, but now my lifetime value is $12,000.

Who do you think is going to be able to afford to spend more on marketing? The guy that this customer is worth five grand to or the guy who's able to make $12,000 off the exact same customer? Why? They upsold them and gave them a discount to increase the frequency of their recurring service. Oh, snap. Second thing you can do to upgrade or increase the lifetime value customer is to sell supplements. You're like, what are we talking about? Supplements are one of those things that you pop in every single day. You use it all the time. You kind of see a benefit. You don't really know if you do, but you keep buying them. For example, adding lawn care treatments to mowing services. We mow grass at Augusta Lawn Care. We upsell people into weed and feed moss treatments. Make your grass green. Lime treatment, you name it. If you're doing carpet cleaning, I'm just gonna name different industries. Trust me, every single one of these can apply to fencing. Sell odor enhancer for carpet cleaning. Okay. Anyone right off the top because it'd be super fast. Any supplements that you think you could add on to your existing fencing install? Yes. Go.

Removal and putting it back. Okay. All right. It's another supplement. You could do storage. What about lights on top of it for nighttime? Okay, let's keep going. Number Three, you could sell an increased quality of the product. You guys already have this. The standard versus the pro. Alright, you already have this. For example, other industries mulch depth. If I'm installing mulch paint quality, there's some paint that costs like 20 bucks a gallon, others that cost hundreds of dollars per gallon. Quality of the paint. Another way to increase the quality or increase the lifetime value of the customer. Selling tiered service packages. I recommend every single person here do this. Good, better and best should be on every single estimate. You're like, well they're not accepting the $2500. What makes you think they accept the $4000 one? Because I'm going to have an $8000 option on there as well. That includes a lifetime warranty that includes landscape lighting around said fence and offers the ability for them to be able to for me to come back in 90 days and make any changes or fixes whatsoever. I'm just making this up off the top of my head. Good, better and best. If you're doing irrigation for example, I'm gonna install it. That could be one option. That's a good, you know, we wanna install the irrigation. They usually ask for the good thing by the way. They ask for the fence, they ask for the irrigation. I'm gonna also though, hey, I'll install and I will maintain. Which for irrigation you gotta turn it on in the spring. Yeah. Turn it off in the fall, blow out the whole system. That'd be my better model. Hey, you paid this price to install this price to install and maintain. And then I'll give my best option for I not only install it, I not only maintain it, but if it ever breaks, I'll fix it in perpetuity. Good, better, best model. I will pay twice as much to have the best model compared to the good model. And so if you ask yourself how in the world am I going to convince a $2,500 customer that wants just their fence to ever think about getting a five or six thousand dollar install? We've got to come up with packages to increase the value of that customer. They don't want it. You don't know because you've never offered it to them. Number five, sell bundles of services. So for example, in lawn care we do mowing and weeding, ambush trimming. If you get all three together you can get some extra perks. Number six, sell optional services. On every existing quote they ask for a fence. Yeah, but who says they don't also need landscape lighting? And you didn't tell them that. Who said they also don't need Christmas lights. And you didn't tell them about it. Who said they also don't want lights on the top of the fence so they can actually see it when their kids are playing at dusk and they don't impale themselves on one of the posts.

Number seven, a bonus or incentive program for your technicians. If you do have employees and you're not thinking about how to incentivize them to upsell the customer, we have a problem. We have this feature inside Copilot CRM where basically when they're at the job site, they can tap on a couple buttons and immediately send a text or email to the customer, upselling them based upon the needs of the property. So they're there mowing the grass like, oh, weeds in bed. Okay, okay, fantastic. They go tap, tap, tap. They need weeding service. It sends a message to the customer saying, hey, it looks like you need weeding service on your property. Would you like an estimate? And if they accept that estimate, that crew member gets a $50 cash bonus. Incentivize it for your crew every single time they're on someone's property. Every time they're doing install, looking, keeping their eyes alert for ways to be able to upsell. Because they're hearing the contractor say that they're thinking about trying to find landscape lighting. And you missed out on that job. They heard the customer worrying about at night what's going to happen with a black fence. And you missed out on the lighting opportunity. Number eight, sell follow up services. This is usually things that we consider as callbacks or customer service. The customer complaining about the latch, the customer complaining about it not being tight enough or taunt. We consider those customer service callbacks. Why not sell as an upsell? Mr. Jones? We will install this also. We will have a 30, 60 and 90 day inspection and fix and anything that goes wrong with the property and that's an additional $200. This will also reduce the amount of callbacks you do have for the people who really want to go cheap. Because you're already baking this in your pricing, by the way, but you're just not selling it to the customer. So for example, paint touch ups. If I'm painting this room, I will sell you $5,000 to paint the room. I'll tell you, if it's $6,000, I will come back in two weeks, four weeks and eight weeks and do any touch ups whatsoever. Anyone touching on the fingerprints, I got you. Anyone brushing up against the door jambs, I got you. Same thing with AC Tune ups. You can do the exact same thing with fences. Number nine, sell limited time or lifetime warranties. I highly recommend doing this with fence. You have 100 years thinking warranty on the product, warranty, the service. You can do that and have it as an option though to upsell the customer because a huge amount of value.

Number 10, sell personalized recommendations. The fact that we are not going back to these job sites every single year during your slow season and inspecting the work to essentially be giving you the opportunity to upsell them five other services is abhorrent. 21 property inspection. This would be something you create inside your business. When it gets slow, we go back to every single fence and we inspect it on these things and if there's problems, we fix them. And either I'm going to sell them on a recurring service that is a warranty program or I'm going to upsell them into fixing the fence because they didn't buy it at the beginning.

Number 11, sell access or support. For example, hey, if this is a big deal, we'll fix it within 24 hours. We'll give you a text concierge. We'll give you a specific technician. We have one person. They want a specific guy to mow their grass. Fantastic. Their $45 per cut lawn became a $400 visit because they want a certain person at a certain time of the week to come visit their property. Fantastic. I will upsell you a 10x increase of your lifetime value by selling you access or support. So again you say, hey, we will come back within 24 hours if this post falls down. I will be here at 12 midnight if I need to be. I'll fix this.

And sell it. When can you promote upsells to the customer? If you're doing in person meeting for a quote. If you're meeting the customer in person, this is a great opportunity to see every single problem inside of their on their property. What's my time, Bri?

5:13. Okay, we're gonna have to move and groove. Okay. If you're on the customer's property and you're just giving them one quote, shame on us. Look for the five other things you can sell them and if you don't know what those five things are, we'll get to that in the next cure. Number two, during the checkout or estimate acceptance process. If you're using Housecall Pro, using any CRM, you should absolutely be promoting upsells throughout the entire estimate acceptance process. The end of the job walkthrough. Once the customer is now Happy and thrilled with your wonderful property, wonderful fence you've installed. And they're like this is awesome and great. And they push it. This latch is amazing. The best latch I've ever seen. Which by the way, that latch that's coming out is pretty cool. Have to hand it to you. Let's go. Engineers make the world go round. But during that end of job walkthrough, should absolutely be selling them more services. When they're happy with your service, you say, well I don't know when they're happy. Well, why aren't you surveying them? Survey the customer. Ask them what they think about your service. If they're happy with the service, sell them more things.

Number five, make up excuses to sell them more things like their birthday. You've been two years, you've been a customer. It's been five years since we installed your property. Mr. Jones, you now qualify for a free property inspection. We're going to come do enough 21 point inspection on your fence. Make sure to make up some random certification. Name Eric, whatever. You know, we're saving lives. Make it up. Get on their property. Upsell them after 10 services. If you're doing recurrence, positive reviews or surveys. If they leave you a positive survey or positive review on Google, why are we not then just saying, hey, that's a good indication they might be willing to pay me some more money because they were happy with the last interaction I had with them. You've got to figure out what ammunition, what other services you can offer them to sell them. If you don't know what those are, we're going to have to figure that out today. What else can be used to sell more and better or. All right, instant pricing. Number two, we're just trying to take what we currently do and make it, do more of it. Advertise and better upsells. Instant pricing we talked a little bit about during the Q and A. I'm gonna breeze through this pretty quickly. Cause you guys don't have recurring services that you promote a lot. I will say this. Instant pricing works mostly when you are constrained by time, not leads. So if you're only getting one or two leads a week, don't do instant pricing. You should go to the customer's property, spend every single moment and get the lead to accept because your close ratio will likely be higher if you get to them fast enough. That being said, when I'm talking about this, we are doing 20, 30 leads per location per day. When it comes to mowing during our busy season, that's A full time job just driving around people's properties. I don't want that. I'm doing instant pricing. But while I say that, don't throw the baby out with the dishwater because I do believe this is an absolute, an opportunity down the road as you begin to scale that you can could use instant pricing. We use this at Augusta Lawn Care. We sell it for mowing and then we also upsell them into other things. Once they click accept for their 45, $50 mow, I'm going to upsell them to bush trimming, weed services, fall cleanups, etc. Last year, just this one screen made us $2 million at Augusta Lawn Care. Instant pricing. You're like, well what about people that want to meet before buying? Okay, well I thought the same thing. At Anytime Fitness they added instant the ability to be able to sign up online. I was like, that's horrible. Because they're going to compare me against planet Fitness with 10 or 15 bucks a month and I'm 65 and they're bigger than me and they're running all these ads like how in the world are they gonna compete against my price? I'm literally five times more than in my market. Five times the cost per month. Well, when we did this, we allowed customers to give us money by giving. Doing instant sign up online at Anytime Fitness increased our signups by 28%. So yes, some people will want to meet you in the buying process. What am I gonna do on the instant pricing form? I'm gonna give them the option if they want to meet with me. Just click that button, submit the form like normal and I'll come visit you. But I'm going to give them the option to give me money.

Won't customers compare my prices to competitors? Yes, price sensitive customers might do this and you don't want them anyways.

How am I going to pre qualify my customer? If my customer wants instant pricing, it means they value their time. And if they value their time, it usually means they're more wealthy. They have the money to spend. I tell stories on us for days. Let's just move forward. Great. Customers value their time more. Many accept the first estimate they receive 80% to be more exact. Make it easy for these people to give you money. There are people that want to buy a fence so bad, but because you're booked out a week or two and you can't get back to them, or because they need to sell the house and they need something thrown together, they'll go with someone else. And so make it easy for these people that value their time and just want to check out online, make it easy for them to give you money.

Customers stop looking for quotes once they check out. They might fill out two or three or four depending on your market, other competition or competitors and ask for quotes. The person that actually wins the quote is the one that actually gets money from them first and gets them to accept the quote, not just get the quote to them. Remember, the customer did not call you asking and wanting their pain points that I want estimates. It is, I need a fence installed. I have a problem that needs to be solved. Until that's done, you have not served the customer. From a moral standpoint, if you actually care about the customer, you do not consider victory when you get the quote to them. You consider victory when the problem is solved. Customers stop looking once they check out. You might have heard this before. I was told not to talk about price until I build a relationship. Every single day, Amazon sells $7 billion worth of goods and somehow none of you know any of the people you're buying from.

Now at Amazon, there's this thing called a one click checkout. Who's ever seen that on the right hand side Amazon checkout. Now I am sure that an executive said in their meetings that they're thinking about this one click concept which you click this one button and immediately it's going through shipping. You don't have to put in your card information, it just immediately is in your cart, gets checked out and is being sent to you immediately one click. I'm sure some executives say, hey, but this is going to increase misplaced shipments because people accidentally change their shipping address or their payments, they might not go through, there's going to be a bunch of returns. And they were right because I'm sure that happened. By allowing people to immediately check out, yes, they probably had more returns, yes, they probably had misplaced shipments, a lot more. But you know why Amazon did this? Because they had a 70% shopping cart abandonment, which means that 70% of people would put stuff into their cart and then not buy it. And so they said, you know what? Instead of making all that friction of like having to like select my shipping address and select my card information and my billing address, we're just gonna make one button and make it easy for people to give us money.

Now why do most home service businesses not do this instant pricing? They do it because they don't want inaccurate pricing. I, I was like, I don't know what the pricing's gonna be. Alright, this is how I like to Think about it. Pricing accuracy. Every single job you do falls on this graph somewhere. Some jobs you get the accurate price. Some jobs are way too low and you just lose your shirt. Other jobs you actually price too high and you're like, let's go, I just made way too much money on that job.

If you do in person, it's gonna look something like this. You're gonna be pretty accurate, right? Earn the accuracy of price, you're gonna be pretty good. Why? Cause you sold the entire job. All variables of the job were seen. You're pretty accurate on price. Now, OTP is what we call over the phone estimates. You're going to be a little bit less accurate when it comes to pricing over the phone. Why? Because you don't see the gate. You might not see certain aspects. You're just measuring based upon the square footage or the linear feet or you're trying to look at a satellite image from two years ago. It's a brand new development that's difficult. But over the phone you're going to reduce the amount of accuracy you have. Watch what happened here in person.

OTP a little bit less accurate. Watch what happens with instant pricing. So if you do allow someone to check out online, actually buy your services from your website, it is going to lead to less accuracy. I agree. But it's also going to happen is people are going to accept estimates that are way higher than you would have ever given in person. There are lawns that I mow today. Well, I don't like the company mows that are $89 per cut that the estimator knows that if they would have went in person, that would have been a $45 lawn. So yes, the accuracy is much less. Now if you're doing a recurring basis, a model where you can do recurring of customers, what you're going to do is raise all of their prices six months later if you have recurring revenue. Now, most of you do not. So the question is like, well then what happens? The worst case scenario for instant pricing is, is you get to the job site and you have to raise the price and you check up on the job once it's been accepted and they have a deposit down, you go buy the house and you're like, oh, we completely missed the fact that there are steps on the left hand side of the house, for example. Now if you're going to do instant pricing, do not track the number of leads, track the number of accepted jobs. Why? Because close ratio on instant pricing is almost 100%. If you're actually asking for deposit from the checkout page, tire kickers are removed. And if I say, hey, your fence is going to cost 29.99 and there's a better version for $39.99, there's a better version for $49.99. Which one do you want? They say, I want the $29.99. I'm cheap because everyone online is cheap. Okay, great. They got their fence down for $29.99 and you require $200 deposit inside that form before they're allowed to click accept. No one's going to do that if they're just trying to price shop. The only leads you're going to get are the ones that are basically accepting the job. So by the way, when it comes into pricing, there's zero admin time. You don't have to answer the phone, you don't have to take their card information, you don't have to collect their deposit, you don't have to go to their house. There's no admin time whatsoever. And you don't need an estimator to be driving around all the time visiting customers. Eric, did you want to say something?

Oh, okay.

Okay. All right, cool. All right, we got an extension. A hall pass. Let's go.

All right, now for Augusta Longer, we're aiming at 75% of our estimates. And we do big projects, by the way, there are projects that we do that are very large in terms of paver, patios, retaining walls, etc. We're aiming for 75% of estimates to be done instantly from our website without even having to call us over the phone or in person with a customer. All right, Instant pricing equals more and better. How is that possible? Because I'm going to get more accepted jobs by increasing the customer count using ads that I can direct to instant pricing 24 7. If you tell someone on an ad that you're going to give them a price immediately for offense, you will get a much, much better click through rate. Anytime the customer knows they're going to get a price immediately, you'll get a higher click through rate. More people will see that ad. And by the way, that ad is selling 24 7. You don't have to have someone answer the phone. You don't have to go visit them. You can sell jobs at 2am Better. How is this better? Because again, this whole cure of number two is more and better. Better is I'm going to consistently raise prices and upsell to increase their lifetime value. So the goal with this one, with Instant price is get as many people in the door like. But there might be some jobs I lose 2 or $300 on because it was inaccurate. I forgot there were steps or there's some other problem with the job. I agree. But now we're going to have a system in place to upsell that customer into other services, other products. Once we are on the property and we've done a great job and they like our services, and we're going to make that $2,000 job, a $4,000 job, and then we're going to sell them a recurring package. So their lifetime value, that customer is 8, $10,000. Personally, I think everyone here should be selling landscape lighting. Okay, prediction for me, 2010s. If you accepted credit cards and had a website, you basically were. That was really the thing that separated the pros and the amateurs in home services, I believe in 2000s. So we're in the middle of that. Over the phone estimates and instant pricing will separate the pros and the amateurs because the amateurs will not have the software, they will not have the admin, they will not have the technology in terms of their website to be able to sell these jobs instantly. If you can do this and make it easy for people to give you money, you will separate yourself from the competition. And when people are looking online for fencing around a pool, you will show up and you will get more traffic to your site because you're actually giving a price immediately. I believe it's like in the 2000-30s before AI, admin and robotics will really concentrate a lot of our fragmented market around labor. There's my prediction. Now, there are three levels to instant pricing. So hear me out. You might just want to stick with number one. You can give prices or ranges shown on the estimate request. So when they're filling out their form, you can remove all your tire kickers very quickly by just giving ranges of prices right there. Now, again, I'm not a huge fan of this if you don't have a lot of leads, but if you're getting tons of leads, just get everyone qualified by putting the price range on the form.

Now, a little harder way of doing this is to actually give them a price, have them accept it, and then tell them, I will get you on the schedule. And then your next day, you have an accepted estimate and you're giving them a date that you're gonna do the project. Now, the hardest version of this is accept a credit card from the website and I don't know how much power you'll have over this. But you could always use something like Jotform to create these Collect card information, collect the deposit, collect whatever, and then have the job on the schedule ready to go. They've been accepted.

Now on instant pricing from a form, you can make some fine print to cover your butt. Okay? You're like, I'm super concerned. Okay, great. So keep it really short, keep it really simple, and three sentences max. This is what we do for our lawn care. One price subject to adjustment after first services. If the lawn is overgrown, first service will cost $1.50 per minute per man. That's $9 an hour to get property up to standard. That's what we do for mowing. You could absolutely do very similar language when it comes to a pool fence. 100%. And again, I am willing to eat the cost of an underpriced instant price, instant quote. Why? Because I know I will sell them so many more services on the back end after they're a happy customer.

Let's assume it's impossible. You're like, this is not happening. All right, let's assume it's impossible because. Because Eric says, against the franchise agreement. And if you do it, you're gonna die. Cure number two is to sell more and better. One of the best ways to sell more and better is to do follow up on pending estimates and increase your close ratio. This is why I was a little quiet in the last panel. Cause I knew I was talking all about this stuff. Okay? So one of the best ways to sell more and better jobs is to follow up on the stinking estimate.

Increase your close ratio. What's your close ratio? It's the number of accepted estimates divided by the number of sent estimates. How do I find that? Go into your CRM filter in your estimates by a number that were sent and the number that were accepted. That will give you your close ratio. If you sent 100 estimates and 40 of them were accepted, you have a 40% close ratio if your leads drop. So let's track this for a second. Okay? We're focusing on how do we follow up to increase our close ratio. How do I follow up with existing leads that I've sent the estimate out to? And now, like Tinder, everyone's getting ghosted, and we're just like, don't hear from them. All right. If your leads drop by half during the off season, let's run the math on this. But your close ratio goes from 30% to 60%. Say, man, the leads just completely dropped off a cliff. I went from getting two or three Leads a week to now I'm only getting like one or two max. Great. Let's assume that it dropped in half. The number of leads that you get drops in half during the off season. But if your close ratio at the same time goes from 30% to 60%, you will close the same number of jobs. So for example, during a summer month, you got 200 leads, you close 30% of them. You have 60 new customers. Congratulations. During a winter month, you get 100 leads. Half. What are we doing, Eric? Turn up the ads. You only get 100 leads, you close 60% of them. Guess what? You also got a whopping 60 new customers.

So do we have a leads problem or do we have a follow up problem? Three follow up calls. Like I mentioned in the panel, calls increase. When we did a study at Augusta Lawn Care, it increased the close ratio from 38% to 65%. Almost a doubling of the number of jobs that were accepted by simply doing follow up calls. Now that's not the end of the story. I told all of our owners this, like, oh, that's great information. We're going to do follow up calls too. Some people made the three calls and they did not get the same results. So I listened to some of the calls because we record them all in Ringcentral and this is what I was hearing. Hey, I'm calling you, Mr. Jones to see if you just had any question on your estimate. Just calling to follow up. I'm just checking in. This is the type of verbiage we use when we say we are following up or doing a follow up phone call. Very weak.

You got to have reasons to follow up. Because if the customer answers the phone and says, oh yeah, no, we got the estimate, we'll let you know if we have any questions. Guess what? You're not going to be able to follow up again. As when someone asks about like, how often do I keep following up? Like, how often do I do it? I do it until they say no. But I'm not going to give a, hey, I'm calling if you had questions because if they say no, I'm at a dead end. What if I call and say, hey, Mr. Jones, I know it's really important that we get the fence installed. I know you're having the pool party weekend after next. I had a last spot came available next Thursday. I can fit you in if we can go ahead and get that on the schedule today. Otherwise I'm going to get that filled with some other jobs that came in. Okay, that's one Reason? Oh, no, no, no. I'm still thinking about. Great. I'm going to call two days later. Mr. Jones. March 1st. How does that sound? That's the next available spot. I got it for you. These are the reason to follow Cruise favorite service. Mr. Jones, we need pictures for our website because we love this property. Make it up, guys. Come on, get creative. Alright, you want before and after pictures? The route and schedule is filling up. It's just best if you're going in the spring season. You use this like left and right. Hey, we're going to start booking out two, three months from now. So why don't we get you on the schedule next week. I got one more spot available. I forgot to add something on the quote. Mr. Jones, I know you mentioned it's really important that your kids are safe. I'm going to make sure there's a digital line item I'm going to add to the S1. I'm going to send it over to you right now via text because I forgot to add on there that we do have an option for adding lighting on the top of the fence to ensure that even if it's dusk or at night and they're playing soccer, no one's going to get hurt.

Day one or day two. So instead of saying, do you think you want to go? Do you want to accept the estimate? Do you want to put the down payment? No, I'm going to say what works better, March 1st or March 5th. I'm just going to assume they're going to accept the job. Which 1 Is it March 1 or March 5? Was the good or the better the best package you wanted? I was talking at lunch. I think they should name. You guys should name packages Good, better and best. Not that way. Like the best package. Be like the perfect parent, something like that. The perfect parent, that's right. I don't know what the first one is like.

First time. Well, that'd be homeowners. First time parent. I don't know. First child. There you go. All right. First and last. No, I'm just joking. Okay. All right. This is a really, really important one down here. Also the authorized discount one can be very helpful because you have a product base. Say, hey, Mr. Jones, today only we have a promotion. It's 10% off. I can only offer it today and it's coming from our manufacturer. We can offer it today only. If you want to get accepted, I can give 10% off. Okay. This is a really powerful one though. Is a solo operator. Who here is a solo operator? Does the work themselves. Okay. You likely are going and visiting the customer on site. All right. The people that raise their hand if you're a solo operator, usually don't have tons of leads pouring in. You're usually going on site and meeting the customer. Do not tell them you're an owner. Say that you're the estimator. I never ever told someone that I'm the owner. Now when I go and I do the walkthrough at the property and visit the customer, I tell them I'm the estimator. It says on my business card, estimator. And then what I'm going to do when I call them back and a follow up phone call, I'm going to say, Mr. Jones, I know it's important that you get this done before next weekend. I know your daughter's having a birthday party. We want to get this done for you. We're booked out several weeks. It's busy season right now. But I'm going to go ahead and just do it myself. I'm going to clear some stuff on my schedule and I'll just do the job myself. People will accept that so fast because they've already built rapport with you as an estimator and if you said that you're the estimator, they believe they're going to get some project manager down the road. They don't really want that. They built the rapport and the relationship with, with you and they like you. Okay.

Change the. Changing the way that you follow up on estimates will allow you to sell more jobs when leads dry up. So during that off season I can sell more jobs if I'm using these follow up strategies. Go back. Why is it going forward? All right, there we go. Thank you. Can we do better than doing follow ups via phone calls? All right, so when we talk about follow ups, you can send texts, you can send emails, you can call them, but can we do better than that? So in Augusta Lanka, this is what we created and these are the different stages and steps of follow up. Okay, first stage is we send the email and sms. Every single estimate is going to be sent out via text and via email immediately. Now we're going to have follow up phone calls. Okay, that's stage two. Stage three, we're going to email and send them a text message with a personal video. I'm literally going to grab my phone, say, Mr. Jones, this is Mike over at Pool Fence, blah, blah, blah, looking forward to serving your property. I'm going to send a personalized video. I'm going to text it to them and I'm going to email it to them. Fourth stage is do a loom breakdown of the quote who's used loom before, who has no idea what loom is. It's a screen recording software where they're going to see your face and you're going to record your screen. You're going to walk through the estimate and explain all of it to them Again, but I said it in person or it says it right there. But now you're going to explain every single item to them. You're going to be able to have the time to be able to talk about the quality of the product and all the stories that you have. Because now you might have done this quote via instantly like over the website, you might have done this over the phone, but I'm going to follow up with them and become that human person that you've always wanted in the in person estimates. I'm going to do that via loom now how far down I go? This, this is at Augusta. I'm not saying you guys should not do this if you do not have a lot of leads coming in. Would do all four of these for us. What we do is based upon how far we're closed out, how far we're booked out is what we do. So if we're booked out more than four weeks, we just do number one, we send out the email, we send out the estimate via text and we're good to go. If we're only booked out three weeks, we're going to start sending doing follow up phone calls and we keep doing them over and over and over until we get a no second after. If we're only booked out two weeks, we're going to send out an email and an SMS text with a video and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. How to do that and then if we're only booked out a week, in other words, you're literally just trying to fill the next couple days. I'm going to be doing the loom video as well, which means I'm going to do all of these if I'm less than a week booked out. Make sense? When you're fishing in a barrel, that is the spring rush, you do not need bait or a rod. You just grab a fish and it's just like making it like it just. You make hay while the sun shines. And for you guys, it's March, April, May, June. They're just leads pouring in and you're just like this is easy. And you're probably not following up with phone calls. You're probably not sending loom videos, you're probably not saying personalized messages. But during the slow season, we should treat every single lead like it is gold and follow up with great diligence. Here's a tip. Send custom selfie videos to new customers and new leads. This is impossible. You say, oh, I'm too busy to do that. I can't send a video to every single lead. I can't send a personalized video to every single new customer. These are the people that put food on your table. Treat them accordingly. Do this on your way home from work. If you live 10, 15 minutes away from a job site, 10 or 15 minutes away from a shop space or storage facility, you can do this every single day. And that is for every single new lead and new customer, using a personalized selfie video, introducing yourself, saying you're looking forward to doing the job. If they accepted, if they haven't done the job, making sure that you use one of the follow up strategies and talk to them, you sell them.

How in the world could you manage that? So I use Copilot CRM. You can use whatever you want. I'm sure if Housecall Pro doesn't, you can use Zapier or something like that. But I set up for every single one of the services I have and every single day I'm sending out 10, 20 videos. Sometimes this morning, Brian is my witness. I sent probably seven or eight different videos to prospective customers of Augusta Lawn Care that are thinking about joining the franchise. I make a personalized video. I'm looking at their account, I'm looking at their territory, very personalized. I'm saying their name. They know it's not fake. This is not. You can't automate this, okay? And so I still do this. Okay? I just had a conference recently and I asked people who are in this room had ever got a video from me personally that you knew it wasn't automated. And out of 400 people, I'd say 350 stood up to their feet. If you're doing this for every single customer, this is years I've been doing this. But it's going to build a rapport with your customers. And you're like, I'm not going to do instant pricing. It's so impersonal. But you won't send a video to your customers. Like pull a video, pull their camera. It'll take it three to five minutes to record the thing. Send it through Gmail, it automatically compresses the file, it's easy. You can send it to Zapier. So for example, for me, I have a bunch of businesses. Augusta Lawn Care, Lawn Care, Media, Landscape Business course, MBA for entrepreneurs, Landscape Summit, Long Care, Web Design, Home service, Web Design, Home Service, CPA, Copilot, CRM, P4P software. Every single one for new customers. They're gonna get personalized video from me. I do it on Monday, Wednesday and Friday between usually 3 to 6am somewhere in there. All right, how many do I do?

This Morning was like 8 or 9, but usually it stacks up on Mondays to 20. So if we're doing 8 and 20.

No, I'm not doing it for the individual. I'm doing it for software. Not for every individual customer at Lawn Care? No, no, no, no. The individual owners would have to be doing that because each of them are getting 10, 15 leads a day. Yep. Cool. So how does this whole work? This is cure number two, more and better. How does this cure work? We're talking about the five cures for seasonitis. Well, first off, we're going to sell more. How are we going to sell more? We're going to advertise like crazy during the off season. And we know that we're going to have very low profit or even no profit on those jobs because we're spending so much on advertising to get leads when no one wants our job, wants our service. But we're going to sell better by upselling that customer. That is low profit or no profit. We're going to sell other things to them. We're going to sell them landscaping, lighting, we're going to sell them Christmas lights. We're going to sell them the cleaning and the maintenance of the, of the offense. And by doing that, we're going to have a higher lifetime value and make sense of spending more money on ads. That's cure number two. Cure number three, his adjacent service. All right, so let's go ahead and go through tier number three. Who this one's for? If your market has severe weather shifts in the off season. So like you have freezing in your market, who here is like snow? Okay, so it's not, it's mostly in this other markets, but a couple your market, severe weather shifts in the off season, you cannot, you can't sell your primary service during the off season. So if it's actually like we have snow on the ground, we cannot install fences. This would be for you as well. Also cure three might be for you if you do not want to change the name or brand of the business.

So let's recap real quick. We talked about upselling. Upselling is when you someone says I want you to upgrade, they're trying to sell you a better version of initial product. What cross selling is is when you say, hey, you might also like this, right? So let's go back upselling, upselling upgrade to cross selling. You might also like this other thing. I'm trying to sell customers additional products that complement their initial product. For example, we already talked about upselling the F150, but cross selling would be selling them a headache rack, selling them an RV and a trailer with the truck selling them a bumper. This is all cross selling. It has nothing to do with F150. And Ford probably doesn't even make them over cross. Cross selling an adjacent product, a kayak rack on top of the F150. This is cross selling. Instead of trying to sell someone from a 27 inch to a 48 inch, that would be an upsell. I'm cross selling them into the same size monitor but with a game controller and a subscription to Roku, a streaming service. That's what cross selling is. If you go on Expedia and like I'm going to find some airline flights, what's the first thing they're trying to do? They're trying to cross sell you into getting a rental car in a hotel. So basically the idea of cross selling is you, hey, hey, you bought this thing, you might also like this. So you bought the fence. You might also like landscape lighting. You might also like Christmas lighting. You might also fill in the blank. Now what I like to think of is like this. What was it? Pool alarms. What was that thing they were talking about? Covers. Pool covers, another adjacent service. Like it has nothing to do with the fence, but it has everything to with pool, it has everything to a safety. How I like to think of it. Is there an upsell funnel? So for example, I can get my lowest level tiered fence as my service one. And then all these things that like Eric is mentioning could be other services I offer to make them a higher value customer.

Oh, there you go. Cool. I was going to need an example. Not going to do it now. Now off of every single one of the things that he just mentioned, I can cross sell them into other stuff. If you actually had the time and you want to screenshot this, I would recommend play this out in your head. It's like, okay, what's the lowest value thing that people buy from me? And then what if they buy a little bit more? What's this? Okay, they're gonna have full maintenance, they're gonna have all landscape lighting, they have all Christmas lights. They're gonna have everything from a service and that every single one of these I can cross sell them other stuff. Adjacent services don't need large investments in new equipment, trucks or branding. For example, I'm going to use lawn care as just an example. Okay, for us, our gateway services, mowing. Then hopefully we can upsell them a property. Then we can upsell them bed and shrub maintenance, upsell them chemical applications, upsell them filing a full service maintenance contract. We take care of everything on the property. Now here are all the different cross sells adjacent services for each of those different services. For example, if I'm selling someone mowing, I could also pick up the poop in the lawn. I could also get the shovel the driveway during the snow season. I could also top dress and overseed the lawn. So every single one of these services that you offer could also be cross sold into adjacent things. For example, if I'm doing full service maintenance, they're gonna need the roof cleaned up, they're gonna need pest control, they're gonna need their irrigation worked on. These are all other services I can cross sell them into and increase their lifetime value. So what is the impact on the business if you cross sell just one service? Now I'm gonna use Moen as an example. Fill in the blank for all the different things that Eric was just mentioning and all the other things that we've been talking about. All these other options. Let's assume for example of mowing, $50 a cut, weeding services. Here, here's the different prices that we would charge. This is in their annual value. Because we have some recurring nature in our business. So we have $50 per cut 30 times a year. That'd be $1,500 per year. And then I have like a weeding service, $30 per service, 15 times a year, $450 annual value. If I cross sell snow removal to my mowing customers plus one molten stall, I could boost my revenue by 103% because I'd go from $1,500, which was just the mowing to if I go back a little bit, give me a second. If I do $1,500, but then I added a mulch install and I added snow service. If I able to do that, I was able to increase the annual customer value from $1,500 to $3,040 annual customer value. In other words, I was going to double my revenue with zero marketing budget, zero if we are not upselling and cross selling our customers into adjacent services, we are losing out on huge amounts of growth.

The question is, do we have a leads problem? Because everyone thinks they have a leads problem. Everyone across the home service industry, everyone thinks they have a leads problem, but I think we have a cross sell problem. We do not know how to take the $1500 customer and turn them into a $3000 customer. We do not know how to take a $2500 fence and then turn them into a $10,000 lifetime value because we sell them adjacent to services and we upsell them into higher quality products and we offer them lighting and we offer them all sorts of other options that we've already talked about today.

Aura, there are three ways to grow revenue in your business. The first one, the one we obsess over, we love so much onboarding new customers. I want new customers. Everyone wants to onboard new customers. And then, you know, we got to retain customers, right? And it's like, I don't know about retention. Like, we don't really think about our qualities. We don't think about creating a recurring model or cleaning the fence. We don't really think about retaining them. And very, very few of us think about ascending or increasing the lifetime value of that customer. We simply think that everyone that comes to us is going to ask for exactly what they want. And they don't, they don't even know what a life fence is or a pool fence is. You've got to educate them. How am I going to educate them? I'm going to give them all sorts of options to ascend them from the $2,500 fence all the way up to a $10,000 customer. What is the impact on the business if you cross sell one more service? If you sold every one of your pool fences, if you sold them, every single one, a landscaping lighting project, where it's like, hey, this person obviously is spending money on safety. What about when it's dark and the kid needs to go back from the backyard where the pool is back to the front yard? That pathway needs to be lit up. They're interested in safety. That landscaping project will cost you 2, 3, $4,000. You, you could double the lifetime value of that customer by offering just one adjacent service. So I don't want to come across salesy. You know, we don't want to come across salesy. We're local, we're small, we're really interested. All right, here's a mindset shift, okay? Because I thought the same Thing.

Ford's biggest fans do not buy the cheapest XL model.

They upsell into higher models like the Laria and the King Ranch. The die hard Ford guy is not buying the standard like reeling the things in and the vinyl and cloth. No, we got everything electric. Everything's looking good. We've been upsold into a higher version. Furthermore, that'll be an upsell. Remember, we're going up in the versions. That's upsell better version of the same product. Customers also that stay with Ford for life, in other words, they never leave, are not buying cheap model XL model trucks. They are cross selling into light bars, suspension, tires and accessories. Anyone says they're a die hard Ford person, they're doing all of these things. They're getting upsold. Sorry, they're being upsold into a better version and they're being cross sold into a whole bunch of other things that have nothing to do with Ford's trucks.

Customers who stay forever are your biggest fans, give you more money. Say how in the world. That did not make any sense. I just told you. The customers that stay with Ford forever and are the biggest fans are the ones that give Ford the most money. You know why? Because when you get more money from your customers, you're solving more of their problems. By you adding lighting to that fence, you increase the level of security and reduce the liability on their property more. So by adding the lighting on the side of the house, on the pathway from the backyard to the front yard, you, you also get again, solve another problem for them and they will love you more and they're willing to spend more money with you. And yet for some reason, we are going to go advertise to people who have never heard about us and avoid the people that have already given us money.

Get customers to buy other stuff from you. All right, if we were talking about doing a decent service and adding all these and getting more, getting more money from your existing customers, solving more of their problems with we're gonna reduce churn and increase our annual customer value. Say, how am I gonna reduce churn? Again, you guys don't do recurring services. But the reason you reduce churn, when you sell someone more services, it's hard for them to leave. So we know if we sell them mowing, bush trimming and mulch installs and we keep it on a recurring basis like that.

The churn drops by half in comparison if I just sell them mowing. So your customers, your best customers that are willing to spend the money with you that will give you the best reviews give you the most referrals are the ones that that you will convince to spend the most money with you. And if you ask yourself what are the three or four customers that always give you referrals, I can almost guarantee you they're the ones that they spent a considerable amount of money with you and you gave them upsells and you cross sold them into other services. It's not the cheap guy that wanted 40 foot of fence at the lowest price and the standard rate and the lower quality product.

All right, so after I went to Vegas and talked to Alex, I created that cross sell tree that we talked about. And, and I found one adjacent services. One adjacent service that increased demand during our off season and that was snow. Okay, so at Augusta Lawn Care, our cure number three or adjacent service is snow services. Bree, what's my time?

Thanks. Thank you. Instant pricing. We do this now also for snow plowing because that's our adjacent services cure number three. Now here's some ways that you can do cross selling inside of your business. Remember, we are selling an adjacent service has nothing to do with the fence, but it's cross selling bundles. Offering a discounted package that includes multiple related products. For example, bundling a game console with games and accessories. You're bundling things together. So hey, if you buy lighting for your fence maintenance package and Christmas lights, you get a discount. For example, you can bundle things for example, instead of just price discounts do offering priority support incentives if they bundle up services. For example, for us customers that buy mowing and snow service, my adjacent service will get first priority when the snow falls.

For example, you get a free storage and removal of the fence if they also get Christmas lights. Just an idea. Recommended products or add ons recommending products that are relevant based upon what the customer is considering or has purchased. All right, here's a really quick one. If you ever have a slow season in the year, find all your declined estimates from one year ago at this time and just send them the estimate again. We right now are doing this and 10% of customers accept the bid.

It's probably gonna be less because you have a higher ticket, but the reason is because they at one point saw enough pain for them to reach out to you and ask for a quote. And if they did not solve that problem with someone else, they still have enough pain and you can readdress the problem with them. Alright, so recommended add ons. You can partner up with people during your off season. So for example, recommending a product that's sold by a partner company Maybe like, I don't want to do Christmas lights. Great. You're going to go partner up with a Christmas light company. You're going to get an affiliate or commission partner with a snow only for us. We do snow. That's our adjacent service. And you basically become a sales organization for the off season. Because I got to fix seasonitis. I've got to get my revenue high enough. And you're like, I don't want to do that. Okay, partner up with someone that does a service that has a different demand curve than pools. Like what gets busy during your off season. Partner up with them. Seasonal recommending products that are related to the main product but are only needed at certain times of the year. For example, and this is like marketing 101. I'm going to stand this chair just so everyone remembers, like the one time I was able to see him. Okay, so if you send a dollar on marketing and everyone here spends money because you pay your friends fr. If you spend a dollar in marketing, it is insanity that you would not spend $0 on texting and emailing the existing customers in your database and asking for more money. If I give you money and your goal is to make more of it, who do you think has a higher likelihood of giving you money? The person that you never have gotten money from or the person that has just ask me for more money, solve more of my problems. And if I was happy with your service in the past, I. I will probably do business with you. Fantastic. All right, we have season. This is like, this is a screenshot. This is a picture. This is emblazed in my brain. We have season specific offers for season specific services. We are a seasonal business every season of the year. So if you have a seasonal business, that's fine. I've just got to figure out what's that during the off season. Another seasonal business that will complement mine and be an adjacent sale service that will allow me to fix Q4 collapse. We have spring offers for spring services. We have summer offers for summer services. And guess what? On every one of these, I'm going to send it out as a text and email to all of my customers. I'm going to have fall offers for fall services. I'm going to have winter offers for winter services. So for Augusta Lawn Care, I asked everyone that was using Cure three, what if your name was Augusta? Augusta Snow Services. Well, this is how our season looks like. Well, March through October, I'm mowing grass. Well, if your season, if the name of your business was Augusta Snow Services, that's easy for you guys. What if your name was lifesaver Christmas lights. Alright, this would be your go season. For us it is. We are literally going into the snow season. It is not the time to slow down. This is not time to go into the off season. Not time to lay people off. This is go time. Where Augusta Snow Services. Now the question is, do we have a leads problem or do we have an offer problem? We do not know what to offer our customers during the off season and therefore we do not get any new leads. We do not know how to upsell or cross sell our customers. We do not have anything to offer them because we don't think there is anything to offer. When I can promise you something, they spend money during the off season. You're just not giving them an offer that's worth buying. You're going to have to give your team resources to cross sell. Okay. We do sales training with our team at our command center. Whoever's answering your phone, you, you're gonna have to do sales training. Customer service. Sometimes a cross sell opportunity is disguised as a complaint. For example, someone's mowing the grass. Some of the along the edging in the flower bed, we get a whole bunch of clippings. Customer calls, they're freaking out, they're super mad. It's very easy to be like, oh, we're so sorry or do I train my team that this is a cross sell opportunity? Because now we need to get them bed maintenance. The customer simply is telling us they have another problem that we need you to solve. And so if people are complaining about the stinking latch, they're just screaming to you that they want a maintenance plan, product knowledge and sales collateral. Give these to your crew. Make sure they're a technician. Make sure they have business cards. It costs like $8 for 100 of these. Allow them to be able to sell out in the field. Train them to identify the customer needs. Train them with the pricing that they need to be able to actually talk to the customer with an educated point of view about what is right for their property. Use software to be able to do this. I talked about this earlier today, but 29% increase in revenue. If someone just turned this on in copilot and that is that upsell feature I was talking about before, which is the opportunity. When the crew is on the job site, they can tap a button and immediately upsell four or five different services that you give them options for. It's in the text and email. The customer saying, do you want this? Our crew noticed on your property today that you need X, Y and Z service. If you. If you'd like that, let us know. Just by toggling the setting on inside Copilot just toggle. We didn't even check to see if they were using the feature. If they just toggled the feature on, the average revenue was 29% higher. And what that tells me is that even if someone was thinking about upselling, thinking about their culture of their team and giving the option for their crew and their technicians to upsell customers and they were increasing revenue by 29%.

All right, let's do some examples of cross selling communication with your current database. I'm going to steal this from online retail stores because they do a great job. Price drop alert. You guys get this all the time. Alright, Mass. You could do this in your home service business by sending a mass text email the customers. Hey, today only. Price drop alert post purchase. Okay? We get this all the time. You buy a sweater and guess what they're trying to do? They're trying to sell you a T shirt. Okay? Home services automated upon acceptance or on the thank you page after the estimate request form. So once they ask for an estimate request form, it doesn't not just go to thank you, we'll get back to you. Why are we not selling them another service.

Once they accept the quote? Why are we not offering them another one? Make it automated. You can send them a text message. You can send them an email just like this one says. Based upon your recent purchase, we think you'd also like this.

Common combos. I'm buying shoes. All of a sudden they're sending an email for socks and laces. Why? Because they kind of go along with shoes. Optional line items on a quote. If you're doing home services. If they want weeding services, recommend bark mulch. If they ask for Christmas lights, offer them landscape lighting. Just offer them something else that has to do with what they're already buying. Abandoned shopping cart. We get these all the time. Like, hey, you didn't get. You didn't actually buy this. This is literally the equivalent of someone with a pending quote. They literally. It's in their shopping cart. They never pulled the trigger. Okay, here's the crazy thing. A lot of times we think it's price. We just interpret it as all prices being declined based upon all estimates being declined based on price. What if you sold them a $2,500 fence and they wanted a $7,000 fence because they wanted the lighting and they wanted the cleaning package and they wanted the Recurring maintenance and you didn't sell it to them. This happened to me all the time on landscaping jobs. I'd be so confused by the fact that my competitor would go to the job for 20, 30 thousand dollars. And I was thinking the customer wasn't responding back to my $3,000 estimate. When reality I didn't give them what they wanted. They wanted an entire retaining wall and I was giving them edging. You're selling that simple fence because you think they're price sensitive based upon the size of their house or whatever and you don't know they lost one of their loved ones last year but because of a drowning accident and they're willing to pay whatever it takes to be safe for their kids.

Abandoned shopping cart people think they can automate upselling and cross selling. And you can, you can send emails, you can send text messages. A lot of this you can automate. But it's worth the extra effort to customize recommendations for customers. It's crazy. I believe that we are willing to knock on strangers door to get a new job. If you knock on people's house, hey, I saw you have a pool out back. We were going to fetch totally valid. Cool. We're willing to do that. We're willing to pay for billboards to be displayed in front of a bunch of people we don't know. We're willing to pay thousands of dollars to paint our truck, put decals on, try to attract new customers. But we're not willing to do follow up phone calls with customers that have a pending estimate. Boggles my mind. We are not willing to contact existing customers about a promotion, limited time offer. We are not willing to text customers that decline in an estimate. All right. We're literally building this next week into copilot because it's so important to know why. To keep people not accept your estimate. Why not text them? Why not call them, ask them tip, send an imessage. I got all my salespeople an iPhone and I do it for one reason. So when they text it says it has blue instead of green because the customer knows it's not automated.

How is that even possible? Back in 2016, Gary Vaynerchuk said scaling the unscalable is where all the action is. We're scaling the unscalable, literally texting every single customer. And the reason we do this is because a great salesperson can give you a personalized recommendation, a mass message if you do mass messaging. And I guarantee most of you don't. So do that first. But even if you do that it's one thing to say, hey, everyone should buy this versus based upon your property, we think you should buy X, Y and Z. Your response rate to that will be significantly higher, especially if you do it on imessage. All right. If it takes you five minutes to send a personal imessage video to customers, that means that in one hour you can send 12 messages. Everyone tracking the math, five minutes per message, 12 videos per hour. If you close one extra customer because you called 12 pending estimates and that customer was worth $5,000 to you in lifetime gross profit, would it be worth it? That's $5,000 an hour. It is worth it, I promise you. Crazy idea for 2025, what if you spent $0 on marketing? I don't think you should by the way, but crazy idea because I think before you spend a dollar on marketing, we should absolutely be doing the following. What if we only focus on cross selling to existing new and old customers and leads, Even the mad ones, Even the people that are freaking out at you, you can absolutely call them in, keep them in your database, keep them warm. Why would I go after cold traffic? People have never done business with me before. When there are people that have literally paid money to you and are happy with your service and you're not selling them more services. Most of the product pixels if you look on Amazon are filled with upsells and cross sells down here. Instant checkout. What's that? Sell more. Tier number two, Upsell into business version of Prime. We're talking about upsells we're cross selling into a faster version of Prime. We're talking about recurring subscription which we're going to talk about next, which is cure number four. We're trying to get you to subscribe and save. This is the same product Jocko drink frequently bought together. What's that? Bundling similar items to consider. These are all products on the page and Amazon is so good at selling. Why? Because they spend most of their time upselling and cross selling you.

You're trying to do an upsell during a checkout like a laptop. What are they trying to do? Immediately add to your order upselling you into a protection plan. If you're trying to buy some some drawers, what are they trying to do on there? They're trying to upsell you into more drawers and they're trying to also cross sell you into expert assembly. The easiest way to boost revenue is you gotta be careful with this one. Alright? So you gotta be very careful with adjacent service number three. The easiest way to boost revenue are to add services and expand your service area. It's also the least profitable. So you can always grow your revenue very quickly by adding more services and expanding how far you're willing to drive to do services. Also the least profitable way to do it. Be very careful. I would only add an adjacent service if it has an opposite demand curve than my primary service. So I'm only going to offer an adjacent service in addition to my fences if that service that I'm adding has a different demand curve. In other words, I get more leads for that service during my off season of my primary service. Okay. That's why we do snow. Because when there's snow on the ground, there's zero lawn care demand. No one's asking for lawn care. And when that time is, it's very busy for snow. So our adjacent service for Augusta lawn care is snow services. Why? Because demand super high for snow right here. While for lawn care, very, very low. When there's a ton of demand in spring rush for lawn care, guess what? No snow on the ground. That's what adjacent services are. Inverse demand curve. That's when I can operate it. So the question is, how would you promote this adjacent service to your existing database? Like, well, I have now been convinced we're going to do Christmas lights. I have now been convinced we're going to do landscape lighting. I'm now convinced we're going to actually do those pool covers. Great. How are you going to do that without spending a dollar on marketing? You're going to go to your existing database, you're going to send out texts, you're going to send out emails, you're going to knock on people's door, you're going to phone call and you're going to try to upsell and cross sell them into these adjacent services.

All right, we got two more. Here we go. Number four. Recurring maintenance is the fourth cure to seasonitis. Now, when we look at the book value of business, this is your assets minus your liabilities. When it comes to your. If you look at your balance sheet, that's what book value means. Enterprise value is what the market would pay to buy your business. The goal is to increase the difference between the book value and enterprise value of your business. Okay, let's just say you want your business to be worth something. If you're going to sell it, how do you increase your enterprise value? There's a whole bunch of things you can do. But what I really want to focus on is these ones in the green. I'm not going to go over them. But one of the best ways to increase the valuation of your business is to increase your revenue. A bigger business gets a better valuation. If I make a million dollars, I might be valued at $2 million. If I sell my business, if I have $100 million business, you're like, well then it should be worth 200,000, right? Or 200 million. No, it'll probably be worth a billion dollars. I'll get a 10x multiple instead of a 2x multiple simply by generating more revenue. Now, not all revenue affects enterprise value the same. There are three different types of revenue. One is one time revenue. Think paver patios, fence installations. Wow, let's go bathroom remodels, smart home insults. These are things that are going to be done one time. There's reoccurring revenue. These are services that happen again occasionally, but without a set predictable schedule. This is like snow removal, septic tank repair, irrigation repair, anything that was repair. Anything that has to do with emergency, typically reoccurring. Then there is a third type of revenue, and that is recurring revenue. This is offered on an ongoing basis and paid for in regular, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual payments. Things like mowing, bush trimming, janitorial, window cleaning, etc. Now, when we look at the amount of money that you collect up front for one time jobs, you usually make a lot more money. For example, if I'm going to redo Someone's landscaping, $20,000. But if I'm going to do a recurring job recurring revenue and mow their lawn, maybe 40 or 50 bucks. So upfront cash collected very high on one time jobs. That's why everyone likes to just focus on one time jobs, because you can grow faster. But here's what's really weird with enterprise value or the value of the business. If I was to sell it, it's the complete opposite. Recurring revenue has a much better enterprise valuation compared to one time jobs. Because if someone bought your business, there is no guarantee that tomorrow someone's going to want to buy a one time fence install. But if you have 400 customers after 10 years of slowly building up a cleaning service, this is the recurring revenue model. And all of them are paying you 50 bucks a month. All of a sudden that has some real value because there's a recurring revenue. Apple. I mentioned this earlier today. In the past 10 years they have stalled out on iPhone sales. Since 2006, they have hardly sold any more iPhones each year. However, at the same exact time, their stock price has gone from $2022 to $225. A 10x increase in their enterprise value. Why?

Because their growth in the revenue that they've had over the course of the past few years has all been generated by recurring services. Look at this red. The only part that's really growing substantially throughout this period is this dark red. And that is all generated by recurring services. If you look at their recurring revenue or, sorry, their revenue breakdown, this is quarterly from 2016 till last end of last year. This is the iPhone revenue. Not anything major in terms of growth, but what's this Orange Services, Recurring services. Check this out. Services made more revenue than Macs, wearables and all iPad sales at Apple. So over here you got iPhone and then over here you got all services. It made more revenue than all the Apple watches, all the Macs, all the iPads, everything besides the iPhone. This is the recurring revenue model that Apple has added since 2016. ICloud, all of us are paying two bucks a month, $1 a month, $4 a month for that storage. You got app stores, Apple TV, Apple CarPlay, Apple Pay, Apple Care Plus. All of these are recurring subscription models that Apple is added to increase their enterprise value. And if you look at the actual revenue over the course of quarters, look at this. Check this out. This is product revenue. Technically, Apple has a case of seasonitis. They have a seasonal business, but look what's very, very steady. Recurring services.

Technically speaking, Apple has a seasonal business with their products, but stable revenue equals an increase in their enterprise value. And that's what leads to their stock price going up by 10.10x. Back in 2013, you could only buy Microsoft Office as a one time download. In February 2014, Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft and he now allowed them to buy it for $6.99 per month. Today you can still buy it one time, but good luck trying to find it. You can still buy Microsoft Office for $149 today for one time purchase. But good luck trying to find it because they will only promote 699. So what does that mean? Like we talked about, upfront cash collected, they're making $149 that one time purchase. It literally takes a couple years for them to get the amount of revenue from the recurring service years. But why are they promoting that? Because the enterprise value of the recurring revenue is so much greater. And because of that, since they've made this change, their revenue, their stock price, $22 per share. Ten years later, $425 per share share because they focused on recurring revenue. So one time Jobs, you Can downsell large time one time jobs into reoccurring or recurring jobs. Okay, so you guys are really good at selling one time jobs. You guys stink at reoccurring and recurring revenue stink. And for that reason the enterprise value of your business will stay low. For example, someone wants to replace their roof, they can't afford it. Great. I'm going to downsell them into a reoccurring job where I'm going to fix it whenever it leaks. Better yet, I could down sell them into a recurring job where I'm going to do roof checkups to prevent the leaks before they occur. This comes back to cleaning maintenance. Okay, the goal across all of this is to get customers at the lowest customer acquisition cost and then maximize their lifetime value. That's what all this is about. So how will we maximize lifetime value? Well, we're going to sell more and better. That's upselling. That was cure number two. We're going to sell them adjacent stuff. We're going to sell them other things that are adjacent to our services. That's cure number three. And we're going to sell them more often, which is recurring revenue. And that's cure number four.

So why focus on recurring revenue? I think this is like probably the most important part of the whole day. For my talk at least recurring revenue is less volatile. Ups and downs based on big jobs, accepting payments, deposits, cash flow, et cetera. Problems are much less. Why else should we focus on recurring revenue? It's much more resilient during a recession. Everyone here was talking about in 2020, 2021, boom. Why? Bunch of COVID money. Same thing happened. Landscaping. Everyone wanted projects done in their house. Everyone's getting home equity, lines of credit. It's more resilient though during a recession is going to be recurring revenue. This is new vehicle sales or one time jobs in the United States over the course of several years from 1976, 2022 to 2020. All over the place, right? During the 2007-2009 financial crisis, new vehicle sales in the United states plummeted by 42%.

While the aftermarket sector, which includes repairs and maintenance, experienced only a 1% decline. Repairs, reoccurring, they happen more than once, but not on a recurring schedule. Maintenance. Think oil changes changing out your brake pads. That's maintenance. Recurring. So why focus on recurring revenue? Also, it doesn't depend on having an amazing salesperson always present. Because if you have recurring revenue, it doesn't depend on you selling every one time job and being an all star salesperson. So now I'm able to build the business in a way that I could actually sell it and leave the business.

I'm going to use lawn care as an example here. But selling recurring services throughout the off season is useful in all home service industries. It just requires creativity. For example, I'm going to use other home services you guys can figure out for fencing as well. For roofing. I can do quarterly tune ups, repairs and cleaning. I can have a membership for priority after winds or storms. I can clean the solar panels during the off season. I can maintain those exterior cleaning. I have an exterior cleaning business. Great. You can do gutter cleaning during the off season. You can do roof and chimney inspections. You can do window cleaning, caulking and weatherproofing the seals of the windows. If you do pool installs, you can do heater, filter and pump inspections, drain and refill, doing the chemical shock. These are all things we can do during the off season. If you're to a plumber, you're going to drain. You can drain.

Unclog drains. You can insulate pipes. You can do water heater inspections, water filtration checkups, backflow testing, sump pump or septic tune ups. These are recurring services. If you're struggling to think of off season recurring services, this mindset helped me. We are not selling a service and we're not even selling time. All right? We are selling insurance, asset protection and peace of mind. Homeowners with a million dollar house pay on average $5,000 per year for something that they will probably never get anything in return. Their house likely will not burn down or flood in that life that insurance policies term. The cost of prevention or maintenance on home services is far cheaper than repairing it. Okay, so you cleaning the fence, you're like, why would anyone do that? Because it's cheaper for them to do that than for it to break because it's not cleaned correctly. And now you got a $300 repair. Or worse yet, several things happen. You've got to replace the whole fence. So maintenance actually costs the customer less. For example, you can always use this analogy. What's more expensive, a personal trainer or open heart surgery? Do I want to go replace something or repair something at the fence or just have them on a recurring basis where I'm cleaning it, I'm inspecting it, I'm making sure it's safe, it's up to standards. And this is where we created winter services at Augusta Longer. I'm going to skip this one because we don't have time. Give me a second. This is what we do for our winter services and that is to be able to downsell customers from property cleanups in fall and spring into where we come to their property every two weeks throughout the winter and make sure that we actually solve their problems and chip away at it over the course of time. Instead of doing two big cleanups, we just come every two weeks.

Now, one quick thing. If you're thinking about doing a warranty on your fences or a guarantee, keep in mind the average lifetime quote unquote span of a homeowner is 7 to 11 years. So if you offer a lifetime warranty that you will come back and fix it no matter what and then you attach a price tag to that or you attach it to a recurring service like hey, as long as you pay US$99 a month, for example, as long as you have that, we will repair or replace as needed forever. The average homeowner only stays at the property 7 to 11 years. If you know the parks can be good for 100, you should have no worries.

Okay, Same exact thing. If this is your main service, you'd be all in on that during the off season. The recipe to dominate in home services is to advertise when your competitors have nothing to sell. Alright, I talk about this stuff, it was great. You're texting email away from doing that last one. Number five. Okay, so we've talked about locking down your business. Number one cure, second one is doing more and better by advertising more and then selling more and more to your customers. Doing it in a better way, upselling them into a higher lifetime value. Adjacent services, things that are not exactly your service but they're inverse demand curve during your off season. There's other services that's number three, recurring maintenance, getting them on some sort of cleaning plan, repair plan, a warranty package, etc. And last one is a new brand. Now I'm just gonna go ahead and cut it off here and I'm gonna give you where you can go get the fifth one. The fifth one is basically a new brand which for us is Augusta Christmas lights. Okay, this could be Augusta or Augusta, sorry, lifesaver, landscape lighting, you name it. Like you could start another brand that gets busy during your off season. Lightsaber. There you go.

So I'll leave that between you guys and Eric. Now really quick, I'm going to answer questions, I'm going to speed to the end of this real quick. Give me one second, give me one second, one second. Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold. We're almost There. We're almost there. All right. All right, recap. And I'm going to ask you a couple questions before we head out, okay? They're the five different ways to solve Q4 collapse. Hold on. I will show you all these slides in a second. Give me a second. As a recap. Off seasons will keep you poor. Q4 collapse will keep you poor. Seasonitis will keep you poor. I want you to be rich. We do not have an off season. This is why I said on the panel earlier date. Off season is like a curse word. Remove this from your vocabulary. We have a window cleaning season and we have a gutter cleaning season. We have a roof install season and we have a roof maintenance season. We have a mowing season and we have a Christmas light season. We have a pool install season and we have a pool maintenance season. We have a lawn care spraying season and a pest control season. I'll say it for you guys. We have a fence installation season and we have a Christmas light season. We have a fence install season, spring, summer, whatever it might be. And we have a landscape lighting installation season or a pool cover season or fill in the blank. Or we also have a maintenance. Like for example, you might have six months where you guys do tons of installs and the other six months you do all your install, all of your maintenance and all of your tune ups and all of your repairs and you sell that as a warranty on all the ones you install. But then you do all the servicing for the other six months of the year. Or who wants to take down the storage system? Storage is an absolute game changer. Like you could absolutely sell as part of your install the ability for you guys to come back every single season and put it away or store it for them. They don't want to put it in their garage. Again, back to what we talked about earlier. Someone was saying that a lot of their customers only use it once or twice a year when their grandkids come in town, offer the service to take it down and install it back again. $99 is not much. You will do it in 20 minutes or whatever it might take you and they will be thrilled.

Cool. All right, so every single home service we have season specific offers for season specific services. And because I didn't finish number five, to screenshot this, go to this URL. It's a completely free course. It'll go through number five and all the other ones I just went through, all the slides are there and there's a workbook for you to fill out all your numbers to go over the stuff I was talking about, customer acquisition costs and all that stuff. Just please do the workshop. It'll take you three times longer than we took today, but we'll go through all the numbers of what your customer acquisition cost is, how much you need to spend, every single one of the cures, and then you'll be able, from a math perspective, figure out which one's gonna work best for your business. Thank you very much.