How He DOUBLED His Lawn Care Business ► $500K!

Being poor sucks more than working hard.

Is it possible to double the size of your lawn care business in just one year?

It's time to man up or shut up.

Today we're going to be following along with Bryce Claussen from Vanworth, Ohio and that's exactly what he's trying to do.

The road to 40k, that's what we're on. I am exhausted, I'm tired, I'm not having fun.

His goal is by the end of the year he hands off this location to his general manager. But in order to do that he's got to improve his close ratio.

If you're on a business, you gotta step out of your comfort zone at the tela.

Please record your message.

Bryce is going to have to learn how to do estimate follow up phone calls to ensure that he can have that high close ratio and close more jobs.

We have to go with another one.

Yup. Too expensive on that one.

So buckle up and let's see if the trials and tribulations will keep Bryce from doubling the size of his business.

Man, all that stuff is extremely frustrating. I wish Chuck was watching. That was pretty good Chuck. Boom.

Alright, so originally in these videos I wanted to document my journey of trying to go from 20 20k to 40k in my second year with the guest there. Last year, first year, 20k a month, this year trying to do 40k a month. But I'm on a new mission now. It's not the, it's not to double my revenue per month. My new mission now is to declare war against these damn birds. Look at that. Like that literally happened this morning. It is 9:15 in the morning already. Holy crap. So you know I'm not going to focus on hiring and training or marketing is to get these birds to stop crapping on my vehicles. So whatever.

We're trying to get to 40k a month from 20k a month last year, fully transparent. Even our downfalls, like we're about to go over some things that isn't prideful to say. Right. So start off with that. You know, January we were 15th in the whole of Augusta Nation revenue. But that's because not many people have like snow contracts that like we do. So we had a lot of snow money come in Northern Ohio, which is pretty awesome where some people just have winter services. Obviously it dies down a little bit. Maybe they had a layoff, maybe not. Maybe they Christmas lights. 40k a month probably won't keep us at 15 I don't think but maybe I'm wrong. But you know these numbers up here isn't for January. This is actually for February. So we actually like 28,000 January, only 10,000 in February, which is really weird because Northern Ohio, February is usually where we get the most of our snow. Not this year, I guess. And obviously, as you can see, we lost more money than we even made in revenue, which is nothing to brag about. Nothing at all. But we spent eight grand in truck repairs, and then we here recently had to take every single truck back for a whole different problem. So March. Right now our goal is 70%, but right now we're only at 50, which is not good. Okay. My coach, Chuck and Lee, probably gonna be on my butt about that. So not good. I'm gonna do some follow ups right after this video. Maybe I'll get a little clip for you guys on calling and checking in on estimate. Sure. Some people are gon, you know, not like my price, and that's why they didn't accept. So I got to take that on the chin and try to help them see our value here and why they should choose us. But right now we're like 50% right now. Hopefully some follow ups. You know, we close some more. So hopefully Chuck and Lee don't yell at me too bad at my next coaching call. But yeah, just to show you guys our numbers, you know, and where we rank in all of Augusta, we're already starting marketing, Facebook ads, Google Ads, EDM door hangers. Five rounds. But hopefully here, a week or two, we see a huge rise in estimates. Right now I need to get my close ratio up before I have to face Chuck and Lee. So I'm going to do some follow ups. Maybe I'll get some footage of that. Sorry, I missed. Sorry.

The person you were trying to.

Set up and tell him, please record your message. Please try your.

I have a good feeling about this one. This one's it.

We had to go with another one.

Yep. Too expensive on that one.

For more on here.

Kind of new to the follow up process. I don't know if that's good or not.

Okay. All right, well, thanks for your help. Bryce and I will look forward to seeing you all next week.

Boom. Boom. I told you that one felt good. I wish Chuck was watching. That's for you, Chuck. You can't beat that, baby. Embarrassing videos I'll have to watch, but at least I can take notes and learn and realize how bad I stutter over my words. So get better with practice and just doing it more. All right, just finished up follow ups. Called seven estimates. Only two people picked up one accepted, one said they haven't made a decision. The other five, I just resent the estimate in a email, just saying, hey, wanted to reach out, give you a phone call, give me a call back if you have any questions, concerns, all that stuff. But hey, the one, even though I went 1 for 7, that's still one more job and like I'm going to take it. But you got to keep going, got to keep taking rejections, got to keep trying. I'm only going to get better and better the more I do it. Still like uncomfortable, very introverted, so very uncomfortable on the phone. Like I'm uncomfortable doing this. If you're on a business, you got to step out of your comfort zone. So no excuses. I chose to start a business and own a business. So it's time to man up or shut up. It's a win. Got one more job. We did five estimates a day. So we'll follow up with those on the Monday, force them to accept it. If that was possible, I would do that. But see you Monday for some mowing action, baby. Mowing starts next week.

Let's go.

All right, so I'll give you guys a little update on our ramp rack. Maybe this is some humor for a lot of you guys to see what a non mechanic or mechanically inclined person, how much struggles they have when they don't know what the hell they're doing. But yeah, so pretty much two things. Obviously the springs like the whole ramp itself flies up. All right, time to put the mower on.

We've been stretching it for like. Well, it's eight days technically and it still does it. I was talking to one of the other franchisees and we are discussing to move one of these rings. Cuz there's two springs moving one of them, that one's all the way back there, moving it to this, right? And by doing that, this spring on this side will be super loose. Only doing it to one of them and keeping one of them tight. We tried taking one of the springs off and just having one tight spring or whatever and then it was like a workout to get it up each time. It wasn't too bad doing it once or twice or three times, but if you mow 10, 15, 20 yards in a day, you'll get fit, you'll get shredded. Sure, the wife will enjoy it, but we won't, we, we definitely won't enjoy that. I'm sure a lot of you watching this have already thought of 10 solutions, but we haven't. So also we have this to kind of Lift up the back end so it's a smoother drive on. We're tightening these bolts right now. Problem is, deck's hitting this part. We had to add that piece when we went up it. Our deck scraped up here. We added that to lift the back tires up so the deck's more level when it comes on. Little modifications, but as we went down, the deck was now hitting that. So we're going to try to tighten the bolts. Hopefully it's suctioning down. Hopefully the deck, when it goes down, will miss it. So Kobe's down there tightening it up. I know these are, like, adjustable. Some of you may have said half ramp rack like these. There's a lot of different pins in the underneath. A bunch of different pins right there. And. And pins up there. We tried every hole, I promise you. Like two days. We were on this for two days. We. We tried so many different holes. So many. It's just not. It's just not working out, you know, it's just not working out unless the people from ramp rack see exactly what I'm messing up, which is totally possible. So, yeah, that's. That's the goal. That's the plan. If one of you mechanically inclined people want to come work for me, please. There's a job opening. You have to cut some yards and stuff like that. But we'll definitely use you to do stuff like this because I'm just not educated on it. I'm. I'm pretty dumb.

All right, today, so we're going to do instant door hanger. So on top of marketing, on Google, Facebook, mailers, all that stuff, we do door hangers. Door hangers. We try to hit a neighborhood like this where pretty much everyone has pretty much the same size yard. And the goal is to get as many customers in one area for route density as we possibly can.

So these are just instant quotes. Obviously, we have a pricing for weekly and bi weekly. And then below we have notes. Obviously, we're not worried about price right now because we want to maximize as many customers we can get. Obviously, as you said, in the same neighborhoods here. For notes, we have simply call for more services. Obviously, if there's more services that we offer that the customers are more interested in. Just instant quote for mowing. Obviously we can do that for them.

We do the weekly and bi weekly price, and pretty much what the customer does is they just fill out that part right there, they take a picture of it, and they email it to us. Our email at the bottom, and then we'll get them on the Schedule.

Alright, so we're on our way to the post office to drop a off 5,000 flyers right now and then 2,000 tomorrow, you know, 7,000 pretty much does my entire small town. So we're gonna do those right now. We did postcards last week, flyers this week and we'll do another round postcards next week. Just really, you know, spring rush is when people are really looking for our services. So that's when we really want to maximize them for marketing dollars.

One thing we do to help with customer attrition is we send thank you cards. So right here it is and then it has our picture in that blank spot. We write like a little note, maybe something specific, maybe they said something, you know, say something about their dog, say something about the property, you know, something very personal so they know it was, it's not scripted and stuff like that. Like a sentence or two takes 10 seconds to do. We already have the envelopes and the, and the stamps and then we drop them off when we can. Oh, look at that new estimate. Look at that. As I was on this video, got a new estimate right there. It's got an email saying new estimate. So got five estimates now to do today. So that's exciting. So starting to pick stuff up.

Have you guys ever had like people like really root for your downfall, really want to see you fail? It's not very big supporters and really brings you down. Well, I'll show you guys my biggest hater.

Every time I come to this property, he has beef with me for no reason. I'm just out here trying to make a living, trying to make a good wage, feed my family. I don't get it. I don't know why people are like that. Be quite honest. Until next time, little buddy. I'll see you a week from now.

So I just pulled up to an estimate here. They said they need a few acres mowed. I don't know what you want. You want me to mow them? I just.

Had it route me to the place but all I see is corn fields. So I don't know, I don't know what happened there but Google maps led me down the wrong area. So time to investigate where this is at.

And like I mentioned in another video, we do door hangers. We do something called five rounds where you know, to build route density. If we have a customer, we'll do the neighbors on each side of them and then three across the street. And then another thing we do, I do that also when I do estimates. So when I do estimates I will do Their neighbors. I'll do five rounds, right? So as you can see back there, there's a bunch of door hangers and stuff like that. I have some in the truck for Toby and Andrew. As they do jobs, they do that. We have yard signs. So you know, we're trying to hit people from every angle possible, right? We have yard signs, door hangers in their mail, online with Facebook and Google, our trucks, you know, and stuff like that. So we're trying to hit them from all angles. We're definitely doing door hangers. That's a great way to do it. It's a cheap way to do it. You can walk and do instant. You write down, you just quote out whatever you see their bushes need trim. Quote out their bushes. Like quote out their bushes and put it on their. On their door. If they mowing, do it, you know, do whatever they need. I mean, it doesn't matter if they ask, right? If you're already doing one of their customers and they see you or you're there doing an estimate, obviously their neighbors have heard of you and seen of you. That's why they called. There's a good chance that they've talked about you or they're like, hey, Misael, do my lawn. I might call Augusta or stuff like that. So it's just the smart thing to do. Like you got to do it. It's eas. It's not even that time consuming at all because you're already there. So that's definitely a quick tip to get more customers and build route density so that works more profitable. So.

Again, a shipment of a nice mower, that's the 70 inch cub cadet zero turn, but with the steer. So that's pretty awesome. I got to actually demo one of those. I have a great relationship with my dealer. They pretty much let me take any mower off the lot I want to demo. And then also, like when I bring a broken mower, they'll replace it to everyone I want. They'll give me like, options of what they, you know, have, and then I'll take. So if you don't have a relationship like that with your dealer, highly recommend, like, do something. Buy them, don't buy them lunch. Do something to get that relationship. Because they saved my butt so many times they let me cut in line, you know, I'll call them up and say, hey, mowers making this noise or blah, blah, blah, I'm bringing it right now. And he'd be like, listen, I'll get a mechanic on it right away. They're like, Ah, we're gonna have to order a part, or this is going to be an hour or two, and they'll give me a mower, and then when it's convenient to me, I can come back and switch them out. So I try not to abuse that power because, you know, they trust me a lot right now, but.

All right, so we got our mower back. You know, the. The Degnia. Realigned belts, blades, oil. There's some things broken on our chute right here that they fixed up for us, and they're. The battery was cracked, so they replaced that. So we finally got our mower back. This will make property cleanups go a lot faster, a lot quicker. Be able to sweep the yard, blow stuff on landscape bed, sweep the yard, and stuff like that. So happy to get that back. We're currently booked out four weeks for just the three of us, so that's good news. And it's not even spring rush yet, so hopefully I'll have an update on this sometime soon. Just waiting on a couple things to come in. Try to see if that works.

Today's a great day because we finally got a ramp rack complete on our second setup here. What a beautiful creature. I'm going to go out and use this today, make sure, you know, just in case, you know, we did something wrong and something comes off. And much rather me getting thrown off than one of my guys. So I'm going to use it all day today myself. Yeah, she's ready to go. I'm excited. Now we have two flatbed ramp rack setups that we use every day. And then we have a truck right here for our dump trailer. So let's get it today.

All right, Time to mow some yards, baby. Let's go.

All right, so there's Kobe right there. He's finishing up. Yeah. Good day. I did ended up doing 20 estimates today. Spring rush is here. I did 15 yesterday. 35 estimates in two days. It's probably because of this great warm weather that we're having. Hopefully that keeps up. I saw I have some more tomorrow. When I got to work this morning, we only had 13 estimates. And then I saw they keep scheduling or any people kept on. I just kept pulling them days instead of time. You know, we're inching there. You know, we may not do 40k here in April because we're down a guy and we only do so many. There's only three of us. We only do so much work at a time. We have a college student starting in May. Pretty excited about that. But May, May. We should be set up to hit it. I've closed some bigger landscaping jobs. We've gotten a lot more mowing customers. We're back to real Ohio weather next week. 40s Monday, high of 33, chance of snow. Welcome to Ohio. Let's get it though. We're not going to complain. Yeah, I'm pumped. I'm excited.

All right. Just got home, just pulled in the driveway, just put in a nice 11 hours. The estimates are finally rolling in. They're starting to come in hot now. So spring rush is finally here in Ohio. Northern Ohio. It probably helped that it was 70, 80 degrees this week. We're going to be back at it tomorrow. More mowing. Got some more mowing estimates that got accepted. A lot of landscaping ones accepted. Got four thousand dollar job accepted yesterday. Quoting out another four thousand dollar job tomorrow. I had a few questions and they were not today. So we set up a time tomorrow to meet. You know, we don't specialize in huge 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 jobs. I try to not to do anything over 5,000. It's kind of my benchmark. Kind of want to keep it simple, you know, so you know, Kobe, Andrew killed it today. I did my own mow route and you know, it's, it's here. Spring rush is here and I'm, I'm happy and excited, stressed out, tired, about to go take a nice shower, eat some food and go to bed. But I'm excited and you know, I'm excited what we can do this year and I think that we can hit our goals this year and I think we're building a great team. So see you guys tomorrow.

If you enjoyed today's video, check this video out here where we actually go over the real numbers, how much we spend on marketing and the revenue for the first month of other Augusta lawn care locations that I just started last month.