How I Made $4,277 in One Day! ... by Upselling - Ep.69

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. You're listening to Landscape Business Course. You might be listening to the podcast on Facebook or YouTube. Thanks again for listening. Today we are going to be talking about how I made this past week 400, sorry, $4277 in one day and how I did that. But before we get into that, that goodness, let me give you a really quick update and announcement for everyone listening to the podcast. I know if you're probably watching YouTube or Facebook, you've already seen this. But today the course new website launched. So it's been something we've been working on for months now. It's still not 100% done. There's still little tweaks that we're adding. We're adding some new content and some videos in the back end, but as far as it being available is now 100% available. So if you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com, it's going to completely look different. It's going to have a whole lot more stuff that you can watch. You can watch a video there on the front page that explains about the course more. And now basically when you put in landscapebusinesscourse.com it takes you right here, you know, basically kick you over to coursework.landscapebusiness.com which is where we built the new website. And fantastic, really, it's not so much different on the homepage as far as the content of what the course is all about. As much as when you get inside of the course, the layout is 100 times better. The design, the just the account manager, a lot of the back end stuff for the members is so much better. So check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com it'll forward you over to the new site and I really look forward to seeing what you think about it. Great. Now, today we're not talking about the new course as much as we are talking about upselling. That's how I made $4277 in one day last week. And you might say, well, that's great for one day, but can you do it multiple times? Yes, that was one day from upselling that we did last week. And we're going to be doing multiples of that next week even. And so what am I talking about when I'm talking about upselling? So when we talk about upselling, there's so many different functions and different ways in your business that you can upsell. So I'm going to talk about a few macro events and then go micro and really get figure out exactly how this happened. The $4277 in a day. So, first of all, when it comes to upselling, this is where your bread and butter needs to be. And this is really how you need to create the systems of marketing within your business. So many of us get really wrapped up in Facebook ads or Google AdWords or EDM and direct mail and figuring out how to get new customers. But the question is, how do you take your existing customers and how do you double, triple, quadruple the lifetime, the lifetime value of the customer? How do you increase that? And so the lifetime value of a customer is how much they spend with you over the course of their existence with your company as a customer. And so how do you increase that lifetime value? You upsell them. So how do you upsell people? Well, the biggest way I find in the landscaping industry that people fail to upsell in is when they're doing the maintenance on someone's property and they fail to get the landscaping for that same customer. And a lot of times there's miscommunication. It's the company not communicating to the customer that not only can they mow lawns and pull weeds and rake out beds and trim shrubs, but they can also install mulch, and they can do larger tree trimming, and they can clean out their gutters, and they can pressure wash. And not only the small things, but if they want to tear out a piece of their lawn and install some landscaping, they can do that as well. They might even be able to do hardscaping or some retaining walls. I've seen many, many times where landscapers are frustrated because they literally see their competitor come onto their client's property and do a big landscaping installation. That's 15, 20,000. When they themselves could have done the exact same work for that customer, and the customer would have already known, liked, and trusted them. It would have been an easy sale. But because they didn't communicate effectively with their customer, they lost the landscaping portion of the job. But because in the client's mind, they thought that that individual was only maintenance only. That's all they did. They thought only all they did was mowing and the little stuff. So upselling, though, is how do you get a mowing customer? How do you get a mowing customer to also do landscaping with your company? So this is going to come in the form of something we've been talking about a lot recently, and that is like you, your monthly newsletters, you know, come June, July, August, getting really hot. You might want to send emails out about to your existing client base about what type of services you offer for tearing out lawns and installing landscaping like zero scaping. How do you reduce the maintenance of your lawn when they're paying hundreds of dollars every month for watering that lawn? Can you give them landscaping ideas and options and provide a service to them and, and make sure they know that you do those services so that you're not just stuck always mowing. The reason this is important, this is the biggest one I feel, when it comes to upselling, is because with mowing, yes, you get recurring revenue. That's the positive side of having mowing clients. You get recurring revenue every week you mow. And you don't have to. You sell a customer one time, they become a mowing client, and every single week you're getting paid. The problem is that might be like, you know, $40 a week and you might mow their house, let's say 30 times in a year. So over the course of one year, the value of that customer is going to be $1,200, which is great. And you might keep that customer for five years. So let's just do five years here. And so the lifetime value of the customer, or the customer lifetime value, CLV is going to be $6,000. Alright, so if you're listening to this on the podcast right now, you might want to watch the video, see what I'm doing on the board here. So this is a mowing customer. They have recurring revenue. You get $40 per mow and you do 30 mows per year, $1,200 in a year, you have that customer on average of five years. They might sell the house, they might move, I might die, whatever it is, something happens, they get another landscaper or whatever. And so the lifetime value for that person is $6,000. Now let's look at the same customer that is going to upsell this person. All right, so they're not only. They're going to get the $1,200 per year. So the $1,200 per year in mowing, that's in mowing. Okay, so that's in mowing. But now they also say, hey, we can weed your beds and prune your shrubs and we can do a cleanup twice a year in the spring and the fall, trim all the shrubs, clean up the leaves, rake out the beds. So every single year now, we are going to sell this customer a $500 cleanup twice a year. So, so now they got two cleanups. Each are going to be $500. And so now that leads to an increase of a $1,000 per year. All right, now we find out that in year four that, hey, they're wanting to sell the house and they need to get some landscaping done to make it look nicer. They need to install some mulch, they need to install some drainage, because in the winter it gets really muddy in the back. And now all of a sudden, you can sell them a. An $8,000 landscaping project. So now that we're going to get a drainage project or installing some mulch or installing a drain riverbed back to the back of their property. So now we're going $8,000 landscaping job. And on this landscaping job, you're going to make like a 50% profit, because you know your numbers, you have systems and procedures, 50% gross profit margin. And literally just this landscaping project in and of itself is probably going to net you out more money than the 6,000 dol worth of mowing that you got over here in this first case, where you didn't have any landscaping or any upsell at all. Because in order to get the $6,000 for this recurring mower customer over here, you have to visit their property 30 times a year, times five, you have to go to their property 150 times in order to make that $6,000, 150 times, you have to go to their house to make that $6,000. This one landscaping job might get done in a few days, and you can go there maybe five or six times and make $8,000 in gross revenue. So now over here, back with the second example here of someone that's upselling. They have the same amount of Mo's 30 year at $40, but now they've upsold two times a year for a $500 cleanup, netting them out or grossing another thousand dollars in annual revenue. And now in year four, they got an $8,000 landscaping job simply because the client was going to be selling their house in year number five. So now let's do the numbers on the mowing. They're still going to make $6,000, but now they're making an additional thousand dollars per year on the leaf cleanup, the tree trimming, and the bed maintenance that they are now selling this customer. Okay, now they have an $8,000 landscaping project. Now let's assume that they also upsell this person on treatment packages. So they are now going to sell an additional feature, $300 per year of treatment packages, maybe a weed in feed, a core aeration, some thatching, other different things that the grass is needing, and so let's add this all up. We have 6,000 over the course of 5,005 years, they're going to make still $6,000 in mowing, but now they're making an additional 5,000. So let's add this all up. They're going to make 6,000 now they're going to get another $5,000 from this thousand dollars a year. And in cleanup, they're going to get this $8,000 in landscaping and then $300 per year in the treatments. Times that by five, you have $1.5K. So now the total, the total on this individual is 6 plus 5 is 11, plus 8 is 19 $20,500. Sorry, I'm running out of space here is what this customer, too, made for this company because they simply upsold one landscaping project, a couple cleanups a year, and some treatments for the lawn. So this is the beauty of this. The $6,000 of customer number one, they didn't upsell that $6,000. The company might make $1,000 net profit on that, like thousand, maybe two thousand. But over here, they literally have more than tripled the customer lifetime value by upselling them on landscaping treatments and cleanups. We're not even talking about gutters and pressure washing and all the other things that you can still upsell to your clients. So this is the biggest mistake I see landscaping business owners making. They're going out and trying to get more $6,000 customers when they don't realize that the customers they have now, they can upsell and literally triple the. More than triple the value of them. Because by trying to sell them these other services, and this is the crazy thing, this, oops, I'm gonna need a different color here. These services right here, these services are the ones you make net profit on. The upselling packages is where you make the money. It's not so much in the mowing. And you'll see this as you begin to grow. Mowing is like the gateway drug. It's what gets the customer in the door. But then you want to get them on the cleanups and the landscaping and the treatments, and that is where the money is made. So I'm just gonna write that for you there. Treatments there. So this is the biggest thing I see landscaping business owners doing. The cool and great thing to do is try to get more and more recurring mowing customers, because it's new customers, and we're always trying to get new customers, and we're trying to find out what the customer acquisition cost is. And that's all Fine and good. But I would focus more on upselling. Upselling this customer from a $6,000 a year, $6,000 lifetime value to a $20,000 lifetime value. This is where you make your money, upselling. Now let's go really specifically, I'm going to go. So that was macro. Now let's go really micro into how Exactly I made $4277 in a day. And like I said, that's from upselling. And this isn't like an anomaly like this happened. This is, this is something we can repeat because it's recurring. So how do we do this? When I talk about this $4277 a day, I am talking about something that we do within our business to upsell our mowing customers to get them on treatment schedules. So you might be doing a lot of mowing, but your profit margin on mowing isn't great. You know, 20, 30% gross. And then you take out some other overhead stuff. You might be at 15, 20% maybe on your mowing. If you're a one man band, obviously it's less. But if you have a bigger company, lots of employees and things, you know, mowing is a low profit part of the business. You're trying to upsell people. One of the highest profit margin businesses or sectors of our business is treatments. And that's why you see so many companies going in to try to do treatments these days and franchises around treatments is because it's so lucrative. As far as profit margin, you might be at 80% profit margin. For instance, we can buy a bag of say lime for $10 and apply it to someone's lawn. And, and we're looking at 70, 80 bucks that we can make on their lawn, which is, which is incredible profit margins because it might take our person 10, 12 minutes to apply that lime instead of 30, 40 minutes to mow the lawn on a $10,000 piece of equipment like a big zero turn mower. So how do we do this? How do we use upselling to make this kind of money? Because it's not made in the money. The money isn't made in the mowing. The money is made in the upsell sell. Okay, so how do we do this? So when we get a client for mowing, we're going to assume that this customer has some sort of square footage, square footage in their lawn, as far as what the square footage of their lawn is. So we determine what the square footage of their lawn is. From that, we then pipe out a price up to mow Their lawn. So this is their price per mow. And then if you're in the course, you know that we have what we call standardized pricing, and we have a menu of prices, and that all is governed by the square footage of that lawn. So when I get the square footage of a lawn, I also know what I would charge someone to do core aeration. I know I would charge them to do fertilizations. I know what I would charge them to do grub control. I know what we can grub control. I know what we would charge detaching. So, like, there's a whole bunch of different stuff that we get all from this one number, this one number. As soon as I get this number, I can give them a whole bunch of different services. So instead of when someone asks for lawn care service or they ask for mowing, we never, ever do. We just send the cost of the mow. That's where, like, this is. Like I said, this is the gateway drug. This is what gets them in the door. But that's not where the money's made. This is where the money's at for lawn care. So this is specifically we're talking about lawn care here. And so this is not where the money is at. It's right in here. This is also a form of recurring revenue because you can put them on a schedule. So what we do is when we send the person the estimate, we never just send the mowing, only we send options for different types of treatments. You say, well, how do I standardize that? How do I make sure that I don't have a bazillion different types of treatments? And it's like floating all over your calendar. You don't want that. You want it to be where, you know, you have a set schedule and treatment schedule for your clients, and they can pick one. So what we do is we have a basic package.

And then we have a premium package.

And on all mowing estimates, every single one, regardless of whether or not they ask for it, they are going to get the cost for a premium package and a basic package treatment schedule. So the basic package for us, we have like four treatments a year. The premium one has like nine treatments. So the premium will get, like, better, like, more services and then different types. Like thatching is included in premium, but not in basic. Core aeration is done twice in premium, only one time in basic. Grub control is in premium, not in basic. So, like, they get to see what it. What each one includes. And remember all of the pricing for the grub control and the Aeration and the thatching and the fertilizations and the lime and the moss treatment and the, the broadleaf treatment, like all of that is all figured out based upon the square footage or the MOW price. So if you don't do, but don't price by the square footage, you can do it based upon your mowing price. For instance, if your mowing price is $40 per mow, what you should do is figure out a standardized multiple of that number to get what it costs for a basic and a premium package. So I know that for us we have certain numbers and these change all the time because based upon what we're putting in our packages, but I know that for basic, it's something like 10 times that mow price per year. So I know that a basic package is probably going to cost about $400 if their mowing price is 40 bucks. And I know the premium package, it's about 17 times.

The mow price per year. So they're going to be looking at more like $700 something dollars per year. They're only going to pay that when the services are done. And however, I just know that that's how it kind of breaks down. So this multiple effect, how you figure that out is then you figure out, okay, so in my basic package I got, you know, I got weed and feed, I got moss, I got, you know, whatever. You just name these out and here you name them all out too. And then you figure out, okay, for weed and feed, it needs to be 1.5 times my mo price, which is going to be $60, you know, for moss. Okay, moss treatment might be a little bit cheaper. So I can do one time. So now, you know, a moss treatment is going to cost $40 for, for a core aeration. You know, I'm pulling out cores and everything. Let's do two times and it's gonna cost them 80. Then what you're gonna do is basically just charge the client whenever these are done. And it's very simple. You're using a multiple of the MO price, which means the larger the property, the more complex it is, the harder access it is, it is, it's gonna be reflected in their treatment package. So this is very key because what we do, I hope I didn't confuse anyone with the pricing aspect of things, but what this comes down to is upselling. Every single time we send a mowing customer their estimate, we are trying to upsell them the treatments, we're trying to upsell them to their bed maintenance, upsell them to tree trimming. So I promise you, instead of trying to get new customers, look at the customers you currently have and see how you can sell them more. It's called upselling. And you too can make $4277 in one day. Thanks again. Landscape businesscourse.com Check out the new website. Sign up today if you haven't already. I'm Mike Andes, signing.