How This $1.3M Business Survived a 0% Close Rate

Hello, Home Service Millionaires. This is Mike Andes, and today I'm doing a one-on-one coaching call with a $1.3 million tree service that does all subcontracted labor. And we're going to be talking a ton about upsells, creating a great offer for outbound sales, as well as making sure you have incentives in place for your general manager, your salespeople, and getting more reviews. It's jam-packed, a great operator, and I'm really looking forward to sharing with you this coaching call. Let's go ahead and roll the tape.

We're a tree service company. Um, we do outbound email and SMS to sell packages. Our packages are $2.5K for a half day and $4.8K for a full day. On average, we're doing about 60 jobs a month, and we make $1,500 gross on a half day and $3,000 on a full day. All work is done by 1099 subs, and they're managed by one W-2 field ops manager. We've tested a 20% price increase. It just destroyed our, um, close rate. 1.5% close rate to pretty much zero. We've gotten callbacks down to pretty much, um, 1 in the past 2 weeks. Uh, so like 1 out of 28. And he's— this week we've started having him do upsells, and he's closed 2 upsells out of 14 jobs. Um, so it was a total of $2,250 in additional gross profit, about $1,100 gross profit each. The core aspect of what I'm wanting to accomplish this month and my quarter goal is to keep callbacks at essentially zero, um, get 50% of customers leaving a review, 5-star review, and then add $500 gross profit per job on average. And so we're looking to have about $7,500 a week of extra gross profit coming in, but we probably need to sell around $10,000 Because what I told him is, you know, we'll give you 28% of the gross profit that you're able to bring into the business while you're on site and upsells. But at the end of the month, you know, when we're looking at his scorecard, we want him to be saying, hey, you know, I closed $10K in gross. You know, our callbacks are zero and I got 8 reviews or 7 reviews or 9 reviews this week. And so how would you go about from where we are? Getting to where we want to be.

Yeah. So a few things. I'll start on the offer side and then I'll switch to the operations side. So from the offer perspective, when, when you send out a text or an email, I'm guessing you're scraping— are you scraping data and then sending that out?

We scrape homeowners' data and the motion looks like, hey, can we give you a quote? We saw your trees, saw your property. Can we give you a quote for tree trimming? Yes. Offer bonus. Bonus. Bonus is if they say no.

Okay. So if they say no, don't— I'm not interested. Then you, you have other stuff here.

We'll trim all of your trees. It'd be $2,500. I'm not interested. Uh, insert curb appeal bonus. Um, we'll pressure wash this amount, clean your front windows, put 2 yards of mulch and a couple other things. And then if they still say, hey, no, what about if we add in a fertilization package? And then if they say yes to any of those, then we move them to the next, next step. We put them on the schedule.

What is your response rate? So not like the amount of people that say yes, but like what's your response rate?

So. Our response rate is about 1.5% on text and 0.5% on email. However, depending on the freshness of the email domains, if they're super fresh, it's 0.5%. If they drop, it's 0.1%. And then close rate on text is 1.5%, and then close rate on email is 2.5%. Oh, wow.

That's a low close rate. Wow. Okay. Okay. Interesting. This is a little, little weed. So if you don't know this, don't worry. How many people say no, you make that secondary offer and they're like, oh yeah, actually I will take it if you throw in a yard of mulch and some pressure washing.

So depending on the copy we use, I would say anywhere from 50 to 60% close after we introduce the upsells. I'm sorry, the 3 bonuses.

The bonuses. Okay. Yeah, because what's interesting to me is your real cost is the labor. And so I'm wondering though, if people like, if 60% of people are saying yes, after you introduced the offer of extra bonuses, my question is, it's not a matter of how do we make the 1.5% close more often? It's how do we get the other 98.5% of people to initially even respond to you? And my question is, can we just make the offer better by offering those giveaways or those freebies with the original offer? Because now it's like, We will trim all your trees. We'll also do these other things. Go ahead.

So, uh, I've thought of that and I think that's a great idea. The problem we have right now is we're already at pretty much capacity or close to it. We can do about 16 jobs a week and we're doing 14. So what I'm really trying to do is just tweak the machine and get all the ounces of extra profit out to fund increased capacity. And so that's what I'm kind of doing now.

But since you subcontract, what's the extra cost of growth? Like if you, if you got, if you doubled the amount of responses and accepted jobs, is it a matter of hiring one more W-2 to manage the subs? So what's the constraint, basically?

Yeah, so I'm currently doing the sales now, and so what I was going to use the extra money, the money, the extra $500, is to pull me out of sales and pull my girlfriend out of the office, put someone in sales that can just focus solely on sales, and put someone in office that can focus solely on office. And then they can go out and get, you know, 40 closers a week. And then the office, they can handle, you know, scheduling, reaching out, getting invoices paid, stuff like that on 40. And then also, we'd also need to hire another field operations manager. There's a drastic difference from when we don't have someone out from our company managing the subs compared to when we do.

Okay. How much are you collecting when someone accepts a job? Are you 50%?

Zero.

Okay. Yeah. So this is a cash flow issue because when you have subs, you have very low, like, cost of the jobs getting done. It just— you just have the overhead of a manager, admin, like someone to manage the job, etc., the salesperson. And so you can have a really lean organization. The problem that you're running into is you don't have the cash to fund the growth of your office person and salesperson because you're not collecting any money upfront.

So we actually do. So we pay our subs on a net basis. And so we're able to collect the cash before and then pay the subs from that. And then we also have, um, we have enough operating capital that, you know, if, if, you know, there's a job that takes an extra couple days to pay, it's not going to hurt us anyway. Um, we've tried taking deposits, but since we're doing kind of a direct response sales motion instead of being out in the field, that drastically drops close rates.

So, but, but if that's the case, if you're collecting all the money before you have to pay your subs What's the extra cost associated with growth besides 2 payroll people?

I guess where I'm at is I'd rather get this down really well because I feel that there's more juice to squeeze out of what we're currently doing rather than doing more on something that is not as good as it could be. And so I also don't want it— is right now we'll probably cash flow about $40,000 a month. I'd rather, you know, we hired an operations manager, get away that he pays for himself, um, with, you know, whether he's on site closing more jobs, getting upsells, and then have him do that and then use the extra profit from that, fund the next, um, employees rather than going from 40 to say 25 or 30 and then trying to build back up.

Yeah, but I, I feel like you have a good model. I feel like it's profitable too. Like what percentage are you giving to your subs on average?

So right now our all-in cost per job is around $1,000 and that includes materials as well. And that's averaged out across, you know, the month. So some jobs might not have any materials, some might have $200.

40%. So 40%.

Okay.

And when you say $1,000, I'm guessing that's on the $2,500 job, that's not on the full day. Got it. And so what percentage is for half day? Is that mostly what you sell? That's pretty common.

Majority is half day.

Got it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's usually the salesperson has to say, hey, this is a full day job, and you have to go, got it. Okay.

So The way we find a lot of those is somebody will have a big property and they say, "Hey, I don't see how it's this good of a price. I'm interested." We send someone out, our field operations manager, and he says, "Yeah, this is a full day." They say, "That's what I thought.

I'm cool with that price." Yeah, like, look, we could optimize till the cows come home. I think you have a good enough model though where you have 60% of gross margins, and then let's just say 20% you're going to give away for your manager, for an estimator, et cetera, like a 40% margin business in home services. I don't know, like how much more juice we can squeeze from it. Like you might get to 50 or 60, but why not just go double or triple it? Cause like, I see this as much more constrained by the fact that if you can just get it from 1.5% response rate to 3 or 4%, we double or triple the business. And the absolute return of $40,000 might go down for a couple months down to $25,000 or $30,000. But if we can double or triple the output, that becomes $70,000 or $80,000 a month in free cash flow.

The reason I did that, and I'm kind of already— I don't know how much I could change because I'm already in the motion of this is what we're doing, and I've already aligned the team on like, this is the quarter goal. Okay. But my thinking was, you know, if I can— right now we're doing 40. If we can just get the extra gross profit and get the reviews, we'll go to, uh, 73 a month. So we pretty much doubled. And then from there, then I was going to say like, okay, our model's really tight. I'll scale this to the moon. And that's kind of how I was thinking it. But either way, I've already started, so I can't go back.

I think you could do both too, right? Like, I think you could, because you don't have a very heavy, you know, you don't have to go buy trucks and equipment. So like, you could theoretically push on the offer side and increase your conversion dramatically. Because I genuinely believe that 60% of people, after they respond saying no, if you're able to get 60% of your yeses to come from after that offer, I'm not worried about optimizing that. I'm worried about the other 98% of people that don't even respond to you and trying to get that to 3 or 4% could double the business just by putting those offers up front. And we're talking about probably an extra $50 in materials because you're selling the same half day. It's just a matter of a little bit extra materials thrown in for like mulch, for example, or fertilizer. That's on the offer side. I think from the operations perspective, I think you're definitely directionally correct, getting a W-2 to manage the subs And how is it— how have you found— I know it's only been a couple of weeks, but like, how have you found it around giving him a percentage of gross profit versus the net profit? Has that been a problem or has there been any friction with the operations person and the salesperson?

So I'm the salesperson right now. And so what I've done is I just said, hey, I want to make it so that while you're on site, the stuff that no one else could— was going to close, whatever you close, you get that because I don't want him to care that If we have super high opex or whatever, that's not his concern. So like he closed a tree removal while we were on site and then got the crew and he was like, hey, this is going to take 30 minutes. Let's just do it while we're here. So that was $1,000. So he made $280 from that. And then the company made $720. And then while he was at another job, he was like, hey, I think we're going to need another 2 hours. It's $1,250 if you really wanted to do this other stuff too. They said, that's fine. Then he didn't, he just told the crew, hey, we're going to have to be a little bit longer here, but I'm going to bring you guys lunch. So he made another $1,250 for the company right there. So I found that works well.

And so, um, is it 28% just then on his upsells or is it also on the job as a whole?

So this is where it would be. It would be on— there's like 4 tiers. So his base is $65,000, and then on, uh, upsells, anything he does on site, he gets 28% of that. Um, since ours is kind of direct response, if a customer's like, hey, I'm really interested, but I want someone to come out and walk through the property with me. If he goes out and turns like a half day to a full day, he gets an added bonus on that. If he is on-site and say the neighbor's like, hey, I'd like this work done or this, and he closes another sale, we pay him $140, which is about what our CAC is, or $280 if it's a full day. And so he has 4 ways he can make more money. And then that way he's on target to make $150, which I figured if a guy like him can make $150, You know, as long as I'm, you know, treating him with respect, he's going to want to stay with me forever.

Got it. And in most of the direct response, do you not sell it like as a package they can just buy on your website?

Well, we usually do it like email back and forth, configure, send quote, they sign a proposal.

Okay.

We don't really do it direct to the website.

How much of your traffic comes in, like, or your leads come from website, you think? Very small. It's like mostly direct. Really?

Wow.

So I definitely, I'd definitely be trying to fix that. Just mostly just so like, because like whenever we're relying on direct response, like especially for scraping, there's just a level of risk there when all my leads are coming from that. And I think that your website's good enough to convert. It's just a matter of, um, like ranking, you getting the reviews like you're, you're doing, et cetera. Because it would be nice if we could like 10, 20, 30% of leads start just coming organically from the website. Real quick, before we continue with the episode, I want to introduce you to Home Service Web Design. If you are a home service business owner, and trying to get more leads and drive more traffic to your website with great search engine optimization, you'll definitely want to check it out. Its flat monthly fee will allow you to grow your business, and most of our clients within 12 months double the amount of leads they get from their website.

That's going to be actually in month 2. So I'm sorry, month 2 we're going to hire a salesperson, office person, and then month 3 we're going to add a kind of separate channel so that way we're not single risk. But, but really I wanted to see, you know, how would you go about You know, the idea I had of 50% of customers leaving a 5-star review and getting that on-site, and then also getting that extra gross profit, whether it's raising prices, which I tried, I couldn't hold the 20% price increase, or if it's upsells, or if it's upsells on-site, if it's upsells after they sign the formal quote, how would you go about—

Yeah, I think so. First off, in terms of the reviews, people give reviews usually for the sake of the people doing the work. Whether it be employees or in your case subs, they don't really care about the business or your 5 stars. They care about the team that was there. So we've always found we can double the amount of people giving a review if we just say, hey, by you giving a review, the people, Billy, Bob, and Susie on your site, they get $50 or they get some sort of incentive. And so whether that be your field manager or literally the subs, just be like, hey, can you scan this and give me a review? If you do, I get an extra X, Y, and Z. Whether you give that to your subs or your field manager takes that. But like, you'll get way more reviews on site if you just do that.

You're saying like if you had a card and said, hey, by the way, you know, the owners of the company, they give me a bonus every review I get, you know, I really would appreciate it. Is there any way you could leave me a review? Then they say, yeah, sure. And then they tap the card.

Yep. And you can do the tap or you can even just do the like either laminated or like plastic cards that have the QR code. And that way you can track the QR codes and who, who is getting scanned.

Got it, got it. Okay, I like the QR code idea. So right now we only have Yelp and Facebook. We had a GMB, but it got, um, it got compromised.

Yeah, yeah, it's always crazy.

Um, do you think that's fine enough now to just keep ramping up Yelp reviews?

I would highly recommend Google, um, especially with AI, like they're going to use more and more. Um, I would definitely recommend that you have your phone and email, that you're not, you know, whatever's on that Google Business Profile, don't use that in your— when when you're scraping leads.

Sure, of course not.

But highly, highly recommend that. I would drive all my reviews to that because it's going to start bringing in organic traffic from SEO. And then like AI is like Gemini, for example, it's just scraping reviews even more so than keywords on your website now.

Okay.

So I would, I would make sure you get the reviews and then I would also take the review, put it into AI like ChatGPT or Gemini and say, hey, give me a SEO-friendly response for this customer. And it will then pump out like a nice paragraph for you to respond to the customer. Using tree service, your local area, San Antonio, like these sort of things, because that's what the AI is really looking for.

Cool. So, okay, I got that. Um, now talk— what about adding the gross profit per job? Because that's kind of like, if I can do that this quarter, all the rest of the stuff I can pretty much win on. That's like the big meaty thing.

Is the— is the project manager the only one that can give a price technically? Like, your subs aren't ever talking to the customer, are they?

No, no.

Okay. And is this project manager going to pretty much every job site and just like kind of making sure things are going good?

Yeah. So he'll do the initial walkthrough and the final walkthrough and then also make sure the subs are doing what they're supposed to do. Like, hey, can you trim this branch a little bit more? Stuff like that.

And when he's doing the upsell, is it mostly like, hey, do you want more done today? Or is he trying to sell something like on a recurring or annual basis?

So not annual basis. In the office we say, hey, would you like us to come back next year? What he said, and he has a history of doing this for his father's company, he goes, what I'm looking for is other things that I see that could be done. And then I ask him, hey, do you want this tree removed while we're here? It's cheaper. Hey, I know you wanted this done to this level. It's going to take a little bit more time. Do you want me to do it? It's X amount. Just seeing what he could upsell on right there.

I think for one-time jobs, that would definitely be the move is like selling more of what, like taking out a tree. Like, so for example, for you, it's like tree removal. Definitely selling more today. I think anytime you're trimming or you're doing hazardous, like branches over a house or power poles or anything that's pruning related, I would really incentivize getting them to confirm next year and just be like, hey, you just paid us $2,500, would you like a $1,200 option? As long as you schedule with me now, I can get you on from a year from now. And the reason is because in people's mind, they always think annually when it comes to stuff, even like tree service. It's like, oh, I kind of have to do this every once in a while. And you can just have this script of like, hey, on average, this is going to be need done every 12 to 24 months. If you go ahead and schedule now with same time next year, we can give you a big discount on what you just paid us, which is $2,500, if you just schedule it now.

So we, we can definitely do that. And that's kind of, um, something my girlfriend's wanting to pull out of the office. That way she can focus on, you know, annual retention and just get that flywheel mostly because—

mostly because the customer is most satisfied when they're doing that walkthrough because you just solved the problem for them. Um, and so even if it's a day or two later, if your girlfriend's reaching out afterwards, that's when they've already seen, ah, that tree, I should have had them trim that more. Oh man, there's some debris down on the ground. There's a little bit of buyer's remorse that comes in a couple days later. And so I would just try to make it as close to that peak of customer satisfaction, which is like, you just pay me $2,500. Thank you very much. Would you like this again for $1,200 next year? And that way you can also say like, hey, you lock in priority and scheduling, so you're not waiting and you get this discount if we just go ahead and schedule it now. Got it.

Okay, so then what other ways do you think— so say we close them on a project and it's like tree trimming, and then they got the first bonus, um, we want to get another $500 in profit like on that job. Like, so instead of it being $2,500 they're paying us, it's $3,700 or $3,300, whatever. What other ways besides having the guy on site looking and seeing what they would need, how else would you do that? Or is it just like, hey, really focus on getting that down?

I think, um, there's obviously 40% of people that are saying yes to your original offer. And so I think that's where I'd be trying to go upsell. Cause like the people who say no to $2,500, it's just too big of a number for them. As you add the add-ons, that's when they're like, yes. I think there are people that are saying yes right now, 40% of people, to the original offer that we could go up with. And that's where I'd just be saying, okay, mulch, for example, what is it? What, what are we going to do per yard, for example? And like, hey, are you interested in these other things? Right in that same sequence. Is that already happening when they get the $2,500 offer? Is like, hey, would you like mulch? Would you like pressure washing? Is it kind of go upsell for them then at that point?

So what we would do upsell, because again, we don't know their property specifically, we just, you know, use, uh, satellite imagery and stuff like that for the most part. But it would be something like, um, hey, got it, we, you know, they signed the quote, that way they're down for that. And then, hey, would you like to add on? Most of our customers want this and this. Would you like to add it on since we're there? We can do it for this. That's kind of how I was thinking of doing it. And then if they say yes, boom, we just made our right there. Or if not, you know, have our guy on site say, hey, I saw this, this, and this. Would you like us to do it? And use those two points. I didn't know if that's enough. If we just do that really, really well, that will get us to our goal. Um, and then maybe, you know, if we could raise price by $100, then we only got to take off another $400. Or if there's other ways to hit it.

Yeah. Like, are you calling them on the phone to confirm their quote?

Yes and no. Some people, we send the quote over and then like 10 minutes later it's accepted. Some people will send it over and then when we're following up, hey, I just wanted to make sure you guys are still wanting to get on the schedule. So it really depends.

Okay. I think just nailing that process down, like if you could have someone within, you know, 2 minutes of them, you know, being interested in saying yes, hopping on a phone call, confirming the quote, but then also saying, hey, by the way, while we're there, As long as you do this while we're there, you get 50% off our other services. And then you're naming off pressure washing, mulch, etc. Even if that person— like, I would— you could hire someone very cheap to be like, when that phone rings or you pick it up or within 60 seconds of a lead coming in, I need you to call them. I want you to confirm the quote. And then I want you to ask them if they're interested in these other services and that if they accept it while they do their tree service, they get 50% off. And then that way they don't even have to quote them. They could just be like, hey, would— are you interested in this? If so, we'll send you another quote. Then that person would just hand it off to your girlfriend or whoever's actually in the office to actually give the quote and solidify it. Because the objective is that when you show up, you have a $4,000 job. Not every single time I've got to send my manager there and try to upsell them live because now you're moving mulch in the middle of the afternoon trying to get the job done. It's less operationally easy to manage and schedule if you have a job going from $2,500 to $4,000 sometimes.

Just to get this straight, so we have someone, it's like, hey, we will trim, we insert copy. They say yes, sounds great, I'll go ahead and send you a formal proposal. Send it, call them, hey John, I just wanted to call, call you, walk you through it. Okay, you can hit that little button that says accept. Okay, we're already good on the schedule. By the way, most of our customers get these two things as well. We're already going to be there, usually it's X amount, would you like me to add it on?

It would only be In the perfect world, assuming that they know the pricing, they can confirm all of that. That would be excellent. But if you're like, hey, I can't have that, that level of service for 140 hours a week, I don't mind even if that initial call is just confirm the quote and say, hey, would you like for these other services you get 50% off and then just handing it off to someone who can actually do the quote. But if they can actually do the quote, that would be excellent. That's like what we do here.

So if we, if say I charge $1,600 for the two upsells, I could do that on pretty much every single property and I would have no— because I would pay my contractors more so they would be happy and there would be no issue.

Yep. With subcontracted labor, that's the benefit of it, right? Like you could just really package these pricing in. Hey, it's up to 10 yards of mulch, it's up to, you know, X amount of square footage of pressure washing. Have someone just double check and make sure their property's not 10 acres and be able to offer it and sell it. Like, I'm a fan. I like that a lot.

So what percent of people, like, how would you say like, okay, that, that's part of the upsell is good. Like what percent of people taking that upsell at what price point, what gross profit should we be trying to get?

Yeah, you have a bigger ticket item, right? Um, and so for us, we can get about 60% of people to accept something else, but we're also selling a much lower ticket. I think for you, if you were able to get 25 to 30% of people to get that upsell. That'd be a win. And like, how do we get to $500 is get 1/3 of people to accept $1,500 additional.

You're saying 20, 25%, 1 out of 4 people. If we can hit that on a number that gets us that amount of gross profit, that's a win.

Yeah. And I think too, like how you're scripting that call is very important because I would actually say, hey, let me go and pull up your address. And like, you could even just say like, hey, usually this other service is an additional, let's just call it $1,999. $2,000. If you get it on the same day that you just accepted your $2,499 package, I can get that cut down to $1,000 or $1,500 or whatever it is. And so I would definitely work on the scripting of that follow-up call because you're dealing with a larger ticket item. But if someone just said yes to $2,500, saying yes to another $1,000 or $1,500 is usually a pretty easy sell.

Got it. So, and you think it's important to do that over the phone instead of just sending another Copy message.

I would do both. So I would be, I'd immediately be trying to call them because I need to confirm the quote anyways. Like, because it says you're not collecting payment, right? So like, there's already some human interaction there. So like, you're going to confirm the quote and I'm going to try to do it within 60 to 120 seconds. So that way they're like, oh, thank you. Yeah. Awesome. I'm assuming too, sometimes people submit the quote like, oh no, forget about it. I was just like thinking around. So you can kind of get that off of your office manager's plate. Cause that's like a nuclear bomb in their scheduling.

All right.

So I'm watching the video back and I realized that I didn't really explain the importance of the text message. Uh, right now only about 30 to 40% of your emails are even getting opened up. 98 to 99% of your text messages are getting opened up. That's why inside of HomeWorks, we really rely a lot on text messages and then creating automations around, for example, when a lead comes in, it just sends them a text. When an estimate is closed or accepted. It sends them a text. Using text is the fastest way to be able to get their card information on file, get them a customer portal link, get adjustments. Because if I'm on a phone with someone, is what we do at Augusta even all the time, is we send them a text message to confirm things like an email address. It's like, I can't understand this person, their accent's thick. Send a text message, use HomeWorks, immediately sends out the text, get the information, and use automations as well as your office to make sure you actually get your message through to the customer and hear back from them using two-way text.

Yeah, so the way it works is that, funny enough, you said that we call them verbal accepts. 60% of verbal accepts accept the quote. Some of the other 40% either just like phase out, end up being like a complete wrong data, and they're like, I was just messing with you guys.

That's a high— that's really high. 40% is high. Like, we, we, we require them to accept and stuff, and like maybe 10%, but, but it's also larger ticket. So like, very interesting.

You're saying, uh, the people that give the verbal accepts call those people or after they accept the quote?

Verbal accepts. I'd be on top of verbal accepts as fast as possible because that person you can hire very, you know, remote, very cheap, and it keeps those 40% of people out of the funnel. I also think that you can convert slightly more of them if you're just right behind them with the phone call. And then I think the 60% who are accepting, out of that function, I'm trying to get 20% of those to be able to upsell.

Got it. And then let me just clarify, the 40% they don't ever go to the office. I handle everything until they close. Those 40% just get stuck in the reactivation pipeline.

Yeah. And it could just be like, if they don't pick up the phone call within, you know, as soon as they are booking it, that's when they could go in the, you know, the sequence of text messages. But I think the phone call would quickly screen them out if they're low quality. And it would also offer the highest chance of them doing an upsell because they're in buyer mode. Like they're ready to go. They just, they just said yes to a $2,500 thing. They're ready to solve problems. And if you got a really good offer, high likelihood they're going to close on those next one.

So, um, it should be one offer that we're selling that's just our standardized upsell or cross-sell?

I think so. I, I think like it's like, look, if someone said yes to $2,500, the first thing I'm doing is confirming the lead. Are they legit? Second thing I'm doing is like, oh, by the way, I just noticed you're in our area. We're gonna be in that area doing a mulch job. Like, you'd have your scripting to whoever who is a valid lead that crosses that threshold, and I'm trying to pitch them on that next thing. Got it.

Okay, so they verbal accept, I send a quote, call them, hey, I just sent it, um, go through, get them accept, or if they're not real, get them out. Or I know I have to— they have to talk to their wife, or I have to do objection handling things. Then hit them with the upsell, um, go through that. And then, do you still like the idea of having that guy on site? Because a lot of the things that he's doing are things that we can do with current capacity, and it doesn't— it's just pure just profit.

Yeah, and he's gonna get the review, he's gonna try to upsell after the job to try to get them to go to the annual thing. So I think it's definitely win still having him on the property. I think that we can probably get 30 to 40% of what he's doing by just answering, like doing it on the upfront and preventing bad leads from getting in the funnel, which would double the capacity of your admin and sales team down the road if you just funnel out bad leads.

So the— let me cut— the bad leads never get through. They only go to the office once they— we have a signed contract. And so I usually weed them out, but I just know 40% of people that say, yes, I'm interested. Never end up actually signing.

But there's still time deployed towards trying to follow up, like getting them, right?

Yeah. They say, hey, you know, my, my wife just died, or, you know, now is not the right time. And so then we put them in the reactivation and close them.

Yeah. I'm just trying to look for bandwidth, right? Like, for example, can we double the business with you without having to, like, hire another person? Because we're getting a very low-level skilled employee to do that work for you, even though it's small, it's 40% of people like that back and forth even. You can do higher leverage tasks in the business. I'd rather you focus on scripting and offers and scraping leads than figure out which 40% of leads are good or bad, you know?

So we're going to be able to hit it from 25% to take that upsell that if 25% hit it, that should get us that $500,000. And then on site, we should also hit it. Now, what he's done is the same thing he did when he worked at his father's company and what his father taught him. He would just look around and see gutters, that tree needs to be removed, these could be really nicely pruned, and then he would go to the customer and talk to them. Do you think that's fine for right now, just kind of having like a renegade approach until we can SOP it, or do you think we should have like a standardized—

Yeah, the challenging part with tree is like no tree is the same. It's not like, okay, so you get X amount of like tree diameter. Like it just gets really difficult to standardize. I think I'd standardize the offer and upsell, and then him going in person, he's fully incentivized to sell. Like the incentive kind of cures the lack of systems because the goal is sell the customer more stuff. He has the skill to be able to do that. I think that's fine. I'd just be trying to set up your admin office and scheduling in a better manner by ideally having upsells known prior to you showing up to every single job because it's very hard to schedule that at scale. When he's like, yeah, we show up to jobs, like sometimes we sell a bunch of stuff, sometimes we don't sell anything extra. And it's exactly what we sold. And so from a scheduling perspective, that will become a bottleneck down the road for someone that's not as highly skilled as your girlfriend.

Got it. Okay. Okay. So say something you sell, say, do you think we should have it where there's standards of like, hey, don't sell anything that's going to take more than 2 hours to do? And if so, put it as another job. Most of what he's selling, for instance, like we— I was on site and there was a guy that had a bunch of like new growth on the ground. He was like, I'll pay you all $1,000 to get it. But we, we could have done that. But we didn't. He didn't know he was supposed to upsell. That would have taken 30 more minutes. Things like that. Is that all right to do? Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah, I think like for your project manager you're talking about, right?

Correct.

Yeah. Like I think if he's on site and the subs are willing to go extra, that's the kicker, right? Like if the subs aren't willing to, he's kind of up a creek without a paddle. So I think it's a matter of as long as he's talked to his subs, okay, are you guys willing to work longer today? If so, now he knows his capacity to be able to sell to the customer. So if I was the project manager, I'd first be going to my subs like, hey, You guys are scheduled to be here till 3. Are you willing to work till 6? No, we're not. Okay. Then like he, he's kind of got to go talk to that customer. Like this is a new job. And then I would probably incentivize him somewhat differently if he has to schedule on a different day, just because the extra drag that's going to create for you, the operation, like just scheduling, even getting that sub to come back, little stuff like that. But I'm assuming a lot of his upsells are same day, right?

Yeah. The subs are very. Happy to do that. We haven't had any subs that are like, yeah, I'm not going to do that.

Yeah, I think it's good then. Your incentive is well aligned. It's very hard to systematize and like have package pricing around the upsells. And so I just focus on that because it's easy to package time, right? So that's what your half-day and full-day thing works on the upfront. And then if he's getting there and he's well incentivized to sell them 5 other things, I don't have any problem with that.

So I told you about how we— when we went from price $2,500 to $3,000, we just plummeted. In the past I've tried $2,750 and that the unit economics of that weren't as good. Do you think I should try and do like $2,600 instead of $2,500 and see how that goes? Or is it, hey, I think your energy would be better well spent just perfecting these two things.

Testing is the nice thing about scraping leads and you're basically all outbound is you could test this pretty easily, right? You know, if you go to $2,650, if you go to $2,649, like I'd be very interested in playing with numbers around like, it's, it's 2026. So this is the 2026 offer. It's $2,026. And here's what it includes. July 4th, like doing something around 07, like whatever. So I think you could really play with, with the offer and test it. I'd be really interested in going down. Like, for example, if you really honed in the upsell, well, now we know, okay, if we can get in for $1,500, what happens if I can upsell 80% of them into a $4,000 package.

Oh, I see.

Right. Because right now you're technically doing this, but they have to respond. So technically you are already downselling, which is like, oh, you don't want to pay for $2,500? Okay, I'll offer mulch. Offer— you're just adding value. I'd be very interested to test what happens if you do $1,499. And now instead of 1.5% of people responding, it jumps to 4%. And then of that 4%, you know, you're selling 60, 70, 80% of them into a half day or beyond.

And then you know that you're still making— if our costs are $1,000 and we're charging $4,000, we just brought our cost to 25%. Sweet.

Correct.

That'd be huge. That's $3,000. So then we're really making $6,000 in gross profit per day instead of $3,000. So we double our gross profit per day, double the business without any extra operational—

Wow.

Okay.

But all this comes out of the testing, right? Because I would say to what you said before, like refining it before scaling it, I would definitely refine that. Upsell process right after the call, like that weeding out, because you're going to get more, even more slop in terms of leads when you go downmarket, right? So I'd really refine that process, trying to get the call within 2 minutes, etc. Iron that out so that way when you go downmarket and you dramatically increase the amount of leads that come in, you're not left with like, oh my word, this is a bunch of trash leads. No one accepts the upsell. Like hone in all the upsell, hone in the scripting, figure out who's doing that. And then go back and test, okay, what happens if I do a $1,499 offer? Because if you went from $2,499 to $3,000 and all of a sudden dropped off a cliff, what happens when you go the other way? Does it triple?

And then I see what you're saying. Okay. So based on that, I just— I know we're kind of getting close on time. So this month, just getting more juice, go from $40,000 to $70,000. Next month, I would tweak the pricing with our mulch and stuff a little bit and then hire— get me out of sales, get my office We have an office manager out of that. And then month 3 is scale from there, scale to 20 sales, which would be kind of our capacity of our field operations, and then do a double next quarter. Do you, with that in mind, do you think it's worth testing like now? Like, hey, let's try it at $2,600 this upcoming campaign, or is it like, hey, just do it what works and focus on the upsells?

Well, we know that $3,000 is a nonstarter. We know $2,500 works.

Um, $2,750 doesn't work either.

It doesn't really.

Well, so like, it works, but too far low.

Like, it drops off quite a bit.

Yeah, you just— the number of total gross profit you generate is not as good as it's $2,500.

True. Yes, I think you've— I think you've kind of done enough testing to know you've perfected— I've got a balanced close rate and I've got a balanced how much money I make here. And so I think before I would play with pricing anymore, ironing out the upsell process allows me to go down Knowing that I can get people back up, right? Because I genuinely think like we're trying to optimize this 1% of people. I'm trying to get you— how do you get instead of 99% of people not even responding to you, how do you get that to 98%? That doubles the business. And if we can get them in the door but then have a solid upsell process, we can get them above $3,000 average ticket. And so I would really hone that in before I play with price, because otherwise if you go up or if you go down, like if you say let's try $2,600, well, If it drops off a cliff, we've really anchored the fact that we know $2,500 is the number. Great. My next question is, can we go down? And I'd only go down if we've greased the upsell wheel enough in those first— that right on that initial encounter.

So then what would you recommend is just run the $2,500. We know how many closes, we have the data to forecast on that, and then just focus on crew manager upselling post-job, getting accepted upsell, have that get us to $500 gross per job.

Nail that. And the time that you get from having now delegated to someone else that initial upsell, because like that doesn't— that's not a sales function. That's like follow the script, hone the script in so much. Now you're going to have time to go play with making a different offer that's at the $1,499 level. And then what does that process look like?

What do you think would be like a good script to start with for that initial, you know, phone call? Hey, they accepted the quote. Now we want to sell them on $1,600 package.

Yeah. So first thing is validation. You already know what you're doing when you're calling someone, making sure this is a valid lead. Do they actually want to do this or is this a complete waste of your time? And that's like, that's why when I see your 40%, I'm like, I need that off your plate as fast as possible. It's just such a waste of your time. And so first off would be validate lead. Second would be upsell process. The scripting around that would be very much based upon, hey, we're in your area doing this other thing, by the way. If you do the same schedule, like on the same day, we also do that service. Well, fill in the blank, whether it be pressure washing, mulch install, etc. Like if those are two ones that you always do, I just always say, hey, by the way, that same day just across town, we're doing a mulch install and a pressure washing. So we have our crew out there for that already. If we go ahead and just mix it on the same day, I need 50% off on those services. Does that sound interesting to you? Okay, well, what would it cost? Okay, let me see here. I'm looking at your property. Like you could script this And then, yeah, it's going to be an extra $14.99, and that's down from what we usually charge, which is an additional $19.99, for example.

So we use that one a lot where it's, hey, we're already in the area, that way usually it's this price, but then you're saying you add on that of, hey, you know, the job we're doing nearby is also getting this upsell. That's why we already have our guys out there. If we can do your property while we're already near, we can do it Cheaper. Yep. Is that interesting? How much does it cost? Okay, it would be this price and this is everything that includes— usually it's $19.99. Want me to add that on? Yep.

I'd validate first the lead, then I would lock in. So like, validate lead, lock in. Hey, yeah, we got you for $24.99. I'm going to hand this off to the scheduler. Oh, hey, wait. Like, I'd very much make it like, oh, wait, by the way, I just noticed on our schedule When I pull up the scheduler, I'm handing this off to them. I notice that same day, like, I'd very much make it like a, oh, by the way, instead of like, okay, thank you for accepting this. Now I'm going to get you this other thing. It'd be very much like, hey, by the way, let me see if I can go ahead and get a discount for you and get that on the same day. And then make the, the quote salesperson be on the team of the customer, which is like, let me see if I can get this validated for you. One second. I'm just, I'm just checking with my manager. Okay. Yes. They said we can go ahead and give you $500 off if you get it on that same day.

Got it. So it's, it's okay. And then if they're saying— how much objection handling do you think we should do? Is it like they say no, just move on?

I think if it's an objection, it's like, hey, first, that's why I want to, I want to confirm the $2,499 first. I want that locked in before I start playing with upsells because then you can get— people can sometimes back out on both and I don't want that. I'm like, look, great, we got you confirmed. I'm going to send this to the scheduler. Then I move into the upsell third step, which is, hey, I noticed, by the way, not too far away from where you're doing these other services. I would just very much make sure the upsell is separate from confirming the job, uh, so that you don't risk losing that.

Got it. But I guess what I'm asking is like, they're like, oh, let me think about it. Should we have our guys be like, hey, what's there to think about? Or is it like, hey, no problem, like, just let me know if you're interested. Low pressure ask.

Yeah, I'll send you the quote over just in case. Um, as long as you get accepted within the next 7 days, they can go ahead and tack that on the job. And then you create an automation sequence that follows up on that.

Got it.

Because that, that could go to your office manager, right? The office manager. Hey, I'm just going ahead and putting this on the schedule. I did notice Bobby said that you might be interested in the mulch. Would you like to go and confirm that for the job? Cool.

Okay, that's perfect. So crew manager, he gets that. We, we get that here. That should get us to the $500 gross. And then the main thing the field operations manager needs to say is, hey, I get a little bonus because he does get a bonus for reviews. Is there any way you could leave me one? You know, me and my family really appreciate it. Yeah, 100%.

Those, you know, way more versus like, right, you know, 5-star, no one cares about the business.

And you think 50% is not an unrealistic number? For what, uh, 5-star reviews?

Oh yeah, easy. If he's one-on-one talking to them and just did a walkthrough and he's saying he's getting money if he just leave him a review, yeah, he'll cash in. Okay.

All right, Mike, thank you so much and, uh, congrats on Augusta. I saw y'all doubled this quarter over last.

It was great. Yeah, I appreciate it, man.

Well, have a great rest of your day.

I appreciate you and best of luck to you. You're crushing it, man.