How Much to Spend on Ads? Starting a Lawn Care Business w/ $30K

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape business course podcast. Today we're going to be answering some questions, I'm going to be giving some answers. But before we jump into today's show, a big thank you today's sponsor which is Jobber. If you haven't already, go to getjobber.com im andys try out their software One of the things that I love so much about Get Jobber is is that the mobile app is super, super simple to use for your crew and it literally mirrors the design of the desktop version. It's very, very simple. It's one of the best softwares I feel for user interface. So if you feel like you're overwhelmed with your software package or if you're jumping into a new software package, I highly recommend Jobber check it out Today, go to getjobber.com im andy's and see how easy it is to save yourself some money. Alright, so before we start with a few questions that came in. I am gonna be leaving out of town for the next week. We're coming up here on Thanksgiving. I'm gonna be gone for a week down in the Caribbean. I'm gonna bring you all along. I'm gonna make lots of content and I'm sure it'll kind of spur some new ideas and creative strategies for you all as well. So over there I'll be making plenty of content. I'm gonna be making mostly making content for the franchisees for training and things. But I will really be thinking a lot about some, some things I've been working over in my mind and things I can share here on landscape business course. One of the things that will be absolutely I'll be working on is finalizing the schedule for Landscape Summit. So all of you have been asking what, what's going to be covered, what's the topics, all of that. I'm gonna give very specific details in terms of what we're gonna be covering each and every day of the conference. So look out for that. It's coming in about a week or two. I'm really looking forward to this landscape summit. I think there's gonna be about twice as many people as last year. We're definitely gonna sell out. So make sure you book your tickets. It's January 16th, 17th and 18th. It's a Thursday, a Friday and a Saturday. And when I'm over in the Caribbean, I'm going to make a video, talk more about that. But trust me, you want to book your tickets now. It's a Fantastic deal. You get your lunch and your breakfast on the Friday and Saturday morning. So really looking forward to that. Gonna have a really special event on Saturday evening and I just really am to it. So make sure you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com just click the conference tab, sign up there and let's go ahead and jump into some of these questions. So I was headed here to the studio. I have about 20 minutes here, so I figured I'd answer some questions. I put it on the landscape business course Facebook group and I have not read these questions. So if there's something I don't know, I'll just let you know that I don't know what's going on. So let's go ahead and just answer some of these. I'll try to answer. I don't think I'll get to all of them, but I'll try to get to most of these here that just came in the past few minutes here. So first one comes from ab. AB says, hey Mike, two questions. What is the best month to pump dollars into marketing for spring cleanups and mowing services? Let's answer that question first. I always say you want about two to three weeks prior to when everyone's lawn is growing and all they can think about is mowing their lawn. You don't want to do it in the middle of it because they have usually that's what everyone else is marketing. That's when everyone else is doing door hangers. That's when everyone else is doing door to door. That's when everyone versus running Facebook ads and Google Ads, do it a few weeks prior. And that's really what branding is all about is let them see your logo, see your work a few times prior to needing your services. So that when they do think about lawn care and landscaping services or they do think about a property cleanup, they've already seen your.

Website, they've already seen your logo, they've seen your ads popping up already. So I recommend two to three weeks before the mowing season starts and a good three to four weeks before for cleanups. So that way you can kind of ease your crew into it. If you have new crew members, a great way to do that is spring cleanups to kind of ease them into things, getting on people's sights and really, you know, jump starting the season on a strong note. Spring cleanups can be done prior to spring mowing. So traditionally, so depending on your weather of course, and you know, every year is a little different, but traditionally you can advertise a little sooner for spring cleanups, use those leaves as a way to convert them into mowing. But also get your guys in the rhythm of things. Get them working. After a long winter, really focus back in on getting work done. So I would say three to four weeks prior to when everyone thinks about mowing in your local market. That's when I would be doing spring cleanups. Two to three weeks before I would start marketing for lawn care. And make sure that by the time everyone's thinking about it, you've already been in the marketplace and showing your ads. So for example, if you get really, really busy April 1st, I would start March 1st with some cleanups. Mid March, I'd really start focusing on lawn care in terms of your advertising dollars. And then that way you can hit April 1st hard cost. Oh, no. Second question from AB as a beginner, does it hurt the business reputation to walk away from hardscape jobs? This is one of the biggest misnomers in our industry, is that saying no to work is a bad thing. It's a very, very good thing. If you say no to hardscaping jobs because you're brand new, it means that when you to something, the client knows that you're not taking on more than what you can handle. They know that you're going to be the best for that service because you said no to a service that you aren't the best at. So just be very honest with them. Like when we don't offer certain services, we say, look, that's not our core competency. It's not something we feel we're the best at. And so we give them a list of references of people we want to take care of the customer. That's the bottom line. And so to do that might mean giving them the names and numbers of our competitors, but it taking care of the customer. And they know that we're gonna do whatever we can to help them. And when we do offer services, they're gonna want to go with us. Cause we are honest about what we did not do. Okay. Now this is different than when you're just starting out and you say yes and you figure things out and you're kind of in that mode of say yes now, commit now and figure it out. But when you start scaling the business, you can't be adding more and more services you don't want to do. Just get started, have a few employees and all of a sudden be doing like massive projects that you've never had any time to train your crew on or be experienced in yourself. And it becoming a Safety hazard and things. So I would say no to those things. And a lot of times, especially on big project like hardscaping things, a client, if they like you enough, they'll do some sort of a workaround. They're like, oh, you know what? I don't really have the. You know, we don't really have the budget anyways for that $20,000 project. Is there some way we can do some softscapes or something else in this area? Maybe some gravel or something like that? So I feel like saying no is one of the best ways to get them to say yes on the services that you do feel competent on and the ones that, you know you have a solid profit margin and you know, you have a solid crew that's trained on those services. So saying no, in my opinion, is one of the best things you can do to create value in the mind of the customer around the services that you do perform well. Next question comes from cost, Josh, for pay by percentage of revenue. When you have to take account for overtime, do you have to take into account their average pay for the previous 30 to ensure they are paid enough? How do you set up pay as a draw plus commission or just changing hourly pay? Really want to implement this. Okay, so I know Josh is coming to the conference in January where we're gonna go really in depth with this. So this is a very deep question on P4P pay for performance. And it's something that we baked into our Excel spreadsheets and software that we'll be showing at conference.

That basically needs to take into account overtime. So overtime is a variable you have to take into account with P4P depending on your state. Again, check with your local state officials, but pretty much every state falls in alignment with this, and that is that you need to pay overtime on a per pay period basis. So if you're weekly, or if you're bi weekly, whatever it is, you do not need to go back 30 days. And how we set it up is a. We change the hourly rate and make sure that it has a minimum. We do not do a draw plus commission. Just that's what we do. Not saying it's right or wrong. I'm not gonna go into deep, deep detail on that, but that's what we do. So at the end of the day, the overtime question can get very complicated from a mathematical standpoint. You'll see when you come to the conference, Josh, that the.

Excel cell where that is calculated is like the line of code and formula for it is like huge. And so I'm not trying to be cryptic here. Like I said before, I'm P4P. I want to share as much as I can, but a lot of it is just a lot of numbers and the theory of it is very simple and everyone can get it and then but like the implementation and the numbers and the calculation side of it gets a little bit complex. Sam Rankin asks best advice to get in with builders and new construction homes for hardscape and landscape jobs. Yeah, so I meet up with, do a lot of the meetups with your local contracting groups. I would meet, you know, if there's a specific one you're going after. And for instance, they're doing residential homes. If they're a smaller contractor and you know they're on site, I would definitely show up on site and I would bring their whole crew, something like donuts in the morning with coffee or you know, bring them sub sandwiches at lunchtime. Like, I promise you they you will get their attention. If you show up on one of their projects with food for their whole crew, that might be five, six guys, but you show up and you're giving them food, I promise you you're gonna get their attention. You're gonna be able to eat with them that whole time that they're gonna ask, obviously ask what you're doing, what kind of services you offer. I promise you, you get your foot in the door for larger builders and bigger commercial type.

Companies that are doing much larger scale project or multiple homes at the same time. You might need to do more of the networking at associations. You might want to support the same event that they are, try to get in with them that way. Dylan Moe I'm just trying to get through as many of these as possible in the next few minutes. Dylan Moe with a startup budget for a lawn care company of $30,000, how much? Whoops.

Sorry about that. Dylan Moe With a startup budget for lawn care landscaping company of $30,000, how much of that would you allocate to marketing? What would some of the breakdown of marketing costs be? For example, online versus offline marketing. All right, so again, I don't know of anything about your market, anything like that, but let me actually give you some numbers because I could very easily say it's going to be depending 90% on your market. And that's true. But let me try to give you some numbers. If you have $30,000, I would highly recommend at least 10,000 of that if you want to make a big splash. If you actually want to start a real business, not just have a bunch of equipment, but have a real business and like have an employee within the next couple months, things like that. I would spend 20,000 of that on equipment, getting started, uniforms, everything else, and 10,000 of that on marketing. All right, 10,000 in marketing is going to get you enough customers to get an employee if you do it right. And in terms of the breakdown between offline and online, I would do a blended strategy where you're doing offline, door hangers, door to door, business cards, hand to hand combat in certain neighborhoods, targeted neighborhoods. And then I would take online and I would target, whether it be Facebook ads, Google Ads, those same demographics and making sure that I'm hitting those people online and offline. And I would start six weeks prior to spring mowing season. Just because no one knows who you are and they're gonna need to see you several times. And with that $10,000, you can do that, especially if you're only targeting 2,3000 homes in a very small market where you know that your target market is at. You can definitely do that. $10,000, in my opinion, should get you $100,000 business the first year, no problem. No problem. No questions. Like that is not astronomical or crazy at all. So that's the breakdown. And that'd be generous. Like if you had $30,000, I want as much as possible going towards marketing. I would be looking at a five to $7,000 truck. I would be looking at minimal equipment, a smaller trailer. I'd be looking at spending money on a website and uniforms. And the smaller the equipment, the better. And then at least 10,000 I'd be spending on marketing. And I guarantee you you'll be able to get to 100 plus thousand in annual revenue that first year. Get your first employee going, et cetera. Mike Krovanick asks, how do you blast through the $300,000 rut? I have an office person, been here for two years. Also, I wasn't full time myself, either one of them. Okay, so this is probably referring back to the $300,000 rut video that I just made.

Last week. And we talked about needing that office person in this case. When I made that video, I was assuming that someone was already full time in the business. It's very rare that someone's part time in the business and making 300,000 in revenue. So kudos to you first on that one, Mike. But that is going to definitely be the thing that gets you past 300,000 is you being full time in the business, working on sales and hiring. And so if you have the Office covered. You're set up for success. You can definitely scale the business, but it's going to require a greater influx of leads and a greater influx of sales. And that's going to be made, that's going to happen by you as the owner, being the estimator, you as the owner, working out on networking, bringing in new leads, bringing new business, growing the business, thinking strategically about the company. And you'll need to be full time to do that.

Keegan, what percentage of revenue would you suggest using to advertise on Tinder? Tinder. That's hilarious. I think this is a joke. Anyways, Keegan asked, what percent of revenue would you suggest using to advertise on Tinder? I've never used Tinder. I have no idea what if there's even an ad product? So I don't know if there's any. I would not imagine that there'd be any good use for your landscaping company to market on Tinder. This could be a typo, possibly.

So, sorry, Keegan, you're gonna have to ask this question a different way. Andy Burleson asks, I'd like to know if you've analyzed the time savings and efficiency of combo trucks versus a typical truck and trailer setup. Yes, we have. And there's a lot of variables in terms of your area, location, number of cars and your highways, things like that, if you're in a metro versus urban, like all that sort of thing.

However, as a rule of thumb, if your average property size is under 5,000 square feet, then a combo truck is going to save you big. More like, it becomes more. Less savings when you start getting bigger properties because you need bigger equipment, and bigger equipment actually has more time savings. But when you have smaller properties, and I'm talking like 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 square feet, having smaller equipment on a smaller truck, without a trailer, without a big piece of equipment is going to be huge amounts of savings on maintenance, on the amount of skill your drivers are required to have, on damages. Fuel efficiency is just a huge amount. But as your. As your property size goes up in general, 5,000 is what we see becomes more of like, okay, maybe you should get a zero turn. Maybe you should get an enclosed trailer when you start getting your average property size over 5,000 square feet. That being said, what we do is we split our properties apart. So the larger properties can be with a zero turn type of setup. Bigger zero turn, bigger truck, trailer, combo. But then like as. As Andy calls a combo truck or what we call a trailer, that setup, we use that for Smaller. Our smaller properties and markets. And so we just used a different route for those smaller properties where that is effective. All right, real quick, couple more manual. What is the best sales process that has worked for you?

There's no one thing, right? This is asking for like a one trick. We just finished franchise training for Augusta Lawn Care franchisees. And one of the things we talk about in the sales process is the life cycle, right? So we talk about the four stages of the customer life cycle for Augusta Lawn Care. And that is the first one where they're a prospect, and that's awareness. You're just trying to get people aware of you. They're not even. They don't. Just advertising, trying to get your name in front of them. The second one is that they become a lead. That is when they raise their hand and say, hey, I need services. They contact you. They put an estimate request form in, they email you, they stop you on the street and ask for a card. They become a lead. Then they become a third stage is that they become a customer. You actually do the work for them, the actual experience of them and receiving services from you. The fourth step is recurring customer. How do you generate more revenue from them? How do you get repeat business? How do you get reviews, all of that. So that's the sales process for Augusta Lawn Care. And what we use is looking at each of those four steps. How do we then take every single one of those steps and create systems within that category? You know, within that last category of recurring revenue, recurring customer. I want to make sure that during that part of the life cycle, we have newsletters, we have an online review system, we have systems for making sure that we get referrals from them, all sorts of things within each and every one of those. That's what makes up the sales system as a whole. All right, so Jose asked another question. How do you use. What do you use to organize all your systems? How do you implement all your training? So we usually organize our systems via video. So like, for the franchisees, they have what's called academy. That's where a lot of the videos are stored. And so that's videos is what we love to do for our systems and our training. So anyways, I hope that helps someone. I hope you can come to Landscape Summit 2020 in January and lots of Q and A. Get to see me in person. I got to see you. And really create friendships that will last a lifetime and hopefully answer some of these questions. Live and being able to see your business, see your numbers, make a P4P system that's customized to your business. I'm really looking forward to it. I hope you sign up. Just go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and I'll see you there. Take care. Have a great day.