How This $500K Business Ended Up With NOTHING!

I would get called into work because we were short staffed and I had to like cancel a $10,000 job. Dude, I just lost like two months worth of paychecks from this place.

Today we're in Texas visiting TC from home roots landscape.

So like this month we were supposed to do 110,000 projection and we're at 20.

TC made over $500,000 in revenue last year.

There's no one in St. Marcus that has ability to do something like this. Even the company that's like 5x our.

Size right now, but right now has tens of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt and no money in the bank.

Me and my wife have not paid ourselves in like two. Payrolls have been like, skip me. All right, we're 80 bucks short.

That's the challenging part. Like if we're not making $32,000 a month, we're losing money right now in the moment. If I told him just do recurring, he'd probably go bankrupt. We need to double and triple what we did. Otherwise we don't have a business.

I'm always like optimistic.

I guess if everything goes right in the business, we'll make a profit. Not a great strategy. He was forced to take a $50,000 loan just to make it through the winter.

Our mortgage is like four grand a month.

You're robbing your summer and fall profitable season to get through the winter.

Like, please don't make us live under a bridge. But if we had to live under a bridge, we'd be totally fine.

This is the business turnaround show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 175 locations around the world. The challenging part is he has an office person. Big projects aren't coming in.

Our lead flow for projects is like nothing, nothing.

As soon as you get that, you almost have to get to $800,000 in revenue just to afford it. It's always like, we're too expensive. We travel the country fixing struggling businesses. Our goal is to give TCS strategy the business in the next six weeks. How's it going, man?

How you doing, man?

Good to see you, brother.

Good to meet you.

It's a great little spot you got.

Yeah, it's pretty sweet. My name is TC Bliss. I own Home Roots Lawn and Landscape. We're a full service lawn and landscape company that has recurring maintenance, but we also do like full landscape build out construction for new builds and commercial and residential.

That's one truck.

We have a four door truck over there. And then I have a truck that I'm actually selling at the office that was kind of like, it's planning on using, like delivery trucks. So last year we ran three trucks, but the third is never like full capacity.

And this is your estimator truck?

Yeah, I just got this little $4,000 car and a couple hundred bucks in stickers. This was kind of like my office manager and me. And this was like our little office space, which was super efficient because the rent here is like 600 bucks for all of it. Yeah, yeah. Before Heather started, my wife was doing a lot of the calls and stuff. Once we started getting busy and we had more kids, she would basically have to let it go to voicemail and then call them back when they're like napping or something. So it just wasn't great.

So when did you start the business originally?

So in 2020, we started the business. I had been a firefighter for like a year and a half at that point. The firefighter schedule is two days on, four days off. I was literally working like six days a week. So I was doing like 110 hour weeks full time. Both pretty much by the time I looked at hours. So, yeah, it was like 60 hours at the fire department and like pretty much 40 hours to 50 hours here. Yeah, it's a lot. Like most time if we slept, it was fine, but like on the nights where like we happened to run all night, it was like brutal. I would get called into work because we were short staffed and I had to like cancel a $10,000 job. And then the customer get weird and I was like, dude, I just lost like two months worth of paychecks from this place. You know, I had just done a bunch of research on like businesses to start while having the fire department gig because I was really just looking for like a way to make extra income within like a year. We were like at a crew rolling full time while I was at the fire department. Heather's salary for that first year was literally like basically on like a, you know, business line of credit. I want to say we were like 200,000 probably. When I quit, I was thinking only me. And I even bought equipment for only like a one man setup.

If you have a full time office person and an office, just the overhead is immediately so high. You have to grow the business.

I think it was worth it because I was transitioning out of fire department and stressed out of my mind. And then the next year was like 370. But I was hoping we would hit like a quick like double and it just didn't happen. And then now we're at 5:30.

I'm not going to go in there and be like, all right, get rid of your office lady. And like we're scaling this thing back. Unless someone has so much financial pain and their prices is way too low, I don't think that's happening with them. And this year what do you think you're doing? Like 700, what do you think you're going to do?

It's hard to tell me. And our lead flow for projects is like nothing, Nothing. This month we were supposed to do 110,000 projection and we're at 20 last.

Month during the spring rush to make 20,000amonth in revenue. You're losing money and you're in what should be your busiest time. Do you think it's just because like the economy right now?

Met a couple of business owners that have folded in this area and then I know a pool company and they said that they have had zero residential pools in the, in the last four months.

This is sort of the double edged sword of one time projects. When the economy's going really good and everyone wants to spend money like we saw in 2021, 2022 even, everyone's booming. I saw construction companies that did one time projects go from 2 million to 5 million to $10 million in a matter of just a few years. You think we're at what like 200 the first five months of the year?

Yeah. Which is brutal.

One time projects can also go away very quickly. Anything in business that comes fast can leave fast.

We like crushed winter this year and I was like, we broke the system. We landed like a $70,000 project in December. Sometime before that there was like a $50,000 project when we built a pickleball court.

Everyone loves projects because you get huge chunks of revenue. Like a $50,000 pickleball court sounds great until like you build the infrastructure of the business and you have trucks and equipment and debt and office building and enough crew and trucks and everything rolling for a business that's going to do 110,000 in monthly revenue and it turns out to be 20. And that's the challenging part with one time jobs is like there is no guarantee of that revenue coming in.

So it flo winner payrolls and stuff. But then it got to the end and I had to pull like a business line of credit to like pay off the concrete guy at the very end, three months later, you know, and things like that.

Yeah, when you add debt, you add risk and when you Add risk, you decrease the number of options you have when you get in a bad spot to be able to fix the business.

Last year I was doing five to ten bids a week of purely landscaping. And then we closed about two to three of those.

And then last year at peak, we had like what, seven, eight team members?

Had like nine at one point.

You were kind of like hitting that in September and like, okay, next year is gonna be massive. So then they're okay, let's get the loan, just get through the off season.

We had five to 10 bids last week as well, but then none of those people closed.

This one is really just like a big Q4 collapse. Like he increased his overhead dramatically by getting a bunch of debt during the winter and had to get a $50,000 line of working capital. I don't think he's paying himself for quite a bit of the off season.

I haven't looked at our recurring numbers, which is silly in such a long time because that's like project's kind of like my side. And then Heather has just kind of like ran with that side.

I was talking with TC kind of like, hey, like right now the big projects aren't coming in. The recurring side is kind of just. It just been in the background. You've been managing that how, how many recurring mowing customers do you have now? Approximately, I think approximately we have like 54. We don't typically do any type of one time mows. We have been doing some of them since we have been a little slower. My goal is to convert them to a recurring right now. Like from. From a lead flow perspective, like where are those coming from?

We do door hangers and yard signs a little bit, but not as consistently as we should. Obviously when we get in a pinch, I'm like, y' all go do 3,000 door hangers like this week, you know.

So this is why contractors go in and out of business like crazy during a boom cycle. Everyone's rich, everyone has so much money and jobs are pouring in. But when that drops, like where is the revenue?

So we just got $100,000 contract for two apartments here.

The recurring maintenance.

Yeah, and I got a little creative with the contract after talking to a few commercial guys because like Here it's like 46 services is the common. There's no way you're mowing all those. And if we did, like their price for 46 services is my price for like 26. So it's like hard to convince a property manager or even want to convince the property manager to try to make it work. But I changed the wording to where it's like, we're not going to do every service at every visit. And so we're going to see how that goes.

Yeah.

If needed, we'll keep it within these parameters.

And is that. So that helps a little bit during the off season because you're like eight to six, eight to ten grand a.

Month, it's like 8,700, I think something like that. That's gonna be starting in this month, in June.

If we stripped it down just to recurring right now, do you think you're probably in that 30,000amonth range then?

We're probably at 20.

And that includes that new contract maybe.

Yeah, that's probably accurate.

And that isn't enough for us to pay the bills now.

It's like I'm like, twiddling my thumbs and like, normally I'm supposed to be closing.

I think the hard part right now is we've gotta thread the needle of, yes, we need to increase recurring revenue to make the business more sustainable. But also, like, in the short term, we can't be having 20% of revenue expected coming in. Like, we can't even pay the bills. I don't even know how he's making it right now. 20 grand will not pay for this office space. Three trucks. He's already trying to sell one of his trucks. So we'll see what happens. Whoa, this is nice. How often of the time do customers actually come in in person?

The goal was weekly. So, like. Yeah, not like daily or anything. Most time we set them up on like, Thursdays, Fridays, and we'll do like two or three when we're busy.

But this spring is just being kind of more dead.

First two months we had it, we were setting a couple, at least a couple people a week in here and closing pretty much 100% there for the first couple months.

So you want to sit down?

Let's go. Let's go.

The 4L framework shares the four constraints as to why your business will stop growing. It's either a lack of liquidity, a lack of leads, a lack of labors, or a lack of leadership. I actually feel like that's a strength of yours, is like the leadership side.

Oh, thanks.

Probably a lot of it comes from the fire academy and stuff like that. Like, you kind of have a lot of that hardwired in. I feel it's this, unfortunately, getting to 500,000, usually a sales 500,000 and beyond is leadership. Assuming we still have lead, assuming there's.

People that want Your stuff.

Yeah. You know, so like I feel like it's, it's tough because at 500,000 you made all the decisions last year to get to a million, like getting this office space, ramping everything up, getting the working capital and then we just haven't had the lead flow and we don't have the recurring to fall back on. For us, we really shifted towards recurring, but like most of us had 60 to 70% of recurring already. So it was like, okay, we can at least pay the bills and then, then you know, go more aggressive on it. With dc, we're really focusing on liquidity and leads in the floral framework. We'll figure out stuff down the road, but right now we need to focus on actually is keeping the business from growing. And that's leads and that's liquidity. Right now from a liquidity perspective, I know we have the little bit of credit card debt, we have the truck, we have equipment and then we have the working capital loan. The one I'm concerned about is most of the short term stuff. So credit card and the working capital loan. That working capital loan was used in its entirety this past off season. Right.

And it wasn't that long ago. Like February. Yeah.

Is that when you got it? Okay, so that's kind of helpless through the last few months.

Really. Yeah.

The slow spring.

Well, yeah, it's gone now, but yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

So I mean like instantly like 30 of it went away to like contractors.

Oh, because you were wrapping up that big project, so you needed that money.

We did progress payments, but like basically the initial 50% down on that floated us through some slower months. And so I paid for like the initial startup of that job, like all the contractors deposits. But then once we got to the end, I was like, yeah, like 18 short or something.

That 50 grand is gone. Currently cash on hand is still around nothing. Three. Three grand. Nothing?

Yeah, nothing.

We don't have any cash. So when we look at the 400 framework, liquidity or cash in the bank is the number one reason why you will not grow your business. And right now there's literally zero in the bank. Okay, so are the credit cards still around 20 grand or we like 25.

On the credit card and then the last two payrolls have been like close.

All of this summer and fall, his profits are being 8 away at by this working capital loan that chips away at all his revenue. Without liquidity, we can't continue the 4L framework. We cannot grow the business.

Me and my W have not paid ourselves in like six weeks. So like, we're starting to follow behind on, like, personal bills and stuff. No, dude. Yeah. Like, the last two payrolls have been like, okay, skip me. All right, we're 80 bucks short. All right, let's call a couple people. Let's do this. Which. This is a first for us. Like, even when I first quit the fire department, we were tight, but it was never like, you know, how much.

Of the 50 grand is paid off?

Like, 20 already.

Okay.

Yeah.

And that was in, like, three months. They're taking from each transaction.

So basically, all the profit from recurring service. It's only on stuff processed through Stripe. Right.

The recurring revenue, then they hit you.

Yes. It's hard because, like, the project slowed, and then all the profit from Moe's is gone before it ever comes in the door. Like, off of each mo. Literally, when they process, like, $18. 24.

As a business grows, you can keep getting higher credit card limits. He'll be able to get more working capital loans from Jobber because he'll pay this one off by September, October, and so next year, he'll get $100,000. Like, it can be a really an addicting thing. But ultimately, the fix is the.

So the goal this year, I pulled a bigger one to pay the American Express off all the way. Didn't happen because the initial early spring cash flow didn't happen.

If we don't fix Q4, we'll just stay in this cycle of getting more debt every winter. The line of credit will just need to get bigger. The amount of credit cards, the limit will just need to get bigger. And unfortunately, our credit system is built that way. What stinks is we're going to pay that off. Right. By the time we hit Austin's income.

Yes. Which has happened the last two years.

Your wife's perspective on this. Where's she at on this?

Dude, she's better than I am. She's like, we've always been fine before. Like, we'll figure it out. Like, whatever we need to do. Work weekends, whatever. And I'm like, no, we're going to freaking blow up, you know, which is great.

She knows where you're at, and she thinks you'll get through it. Yeah, yeah.

She's always like, nothing's going to blow up. We're fine. Yeah, dude. She's like, please don't make us live under a bridge. But if we had to live under a bridge, like, we'd be totally fine. And I'm like, I appreciate that.

So it is going to take a huge amount of time and. But if she's like supportive and like believing in you, yeah, we got a huge win.

Yeah.

And so I think once you have no personal pay, you start to feel the pain and effect of the business not doing well. That's where it's like, okay, I now feel the pain. Yeah. And like, great thing is she believes in you and is like, hey, if you want to work weekends, evening, let's go, let's make it happen. Because I believe that she probably would rather you grow this business than going in another job.

100% great. She says I'm stupid every time I talk about it.

Fantastic. I like her. I don't even know her name, but I think I like her. Yes. In the perfect world, if he had no debt, I would give him the option of tomorrow. We can just scale back to only doing 25 to 30,000amonth in revenue on high margin recurring revenue. This contract he's gotten recently with 12 month contract. Great. Helps us during the off season, we're good to go. But when you have an office space and an office person and you have debt and you have credit cards, if I told him just do recurring, he'd probably go bankrupt because he wouldn't be able to make any profit after paying that and all the other fixed debt that he has on the business. Fixed expenses, we have, have 1200 here, we have 600 over at the other space.

We have 100 for the parking.

Okay. So six times. Okay, 18, let's call it 1900. So all right, we got 1900 for shop space slash office. Realistically, you need to pull what for the business.

Our mortgage is like four grand a month, which sucks.

Okay, let's just assume seven grand. Probably have another four grand, five grand to cover office wages.

Yeah, there's probably like 3,500 or more grand.

So let's just call it four grand. So essentially we have 11. Let's just call it for the sake of easy numbers, $13,000 in overhead. Does that sound right?

Not counting like insurance and stuff like that.

Correct. Right. So then we have fixed expenses of insurance. We also have the loan payments.

Bobcat's a thousand truck payment. Truck is like 300. Insurance is like 1100. And that's our liability and stuff too. Internet and all that. Probably the 3 to 400, the utilities for this place and both. Yeah, yeah, it's not too bad. Yeah, the loan payments, that's. Yeah, they took like 14 grand in the last, like through two, three months.

The level of pain that he's gone through has massively escalated in the Past six to eight weeks because he went from like, hey, this is not good, but we're coming in the busy season and we will be fine. Two, we are in the busy season. I am making less money now than I was during the off season. And we have a big problem. That's the challenging part. We have, we have, we still have 30 some odd 30 grand on the stripe loan. We still have 25 credit card debt. So like if you actually take this, it's a lot more because we gotta pay the credit card down. We gotta pay. I'm being very conservative when we say, okay, maybe this is 17, let's call it 16 grand. Well, if we're at 50% cost of goods sold, like if we're not making $32,000, we're losing money. And so when we have a spring, obviously it's been rough. Like when it's 20 or 30 grand, that's why we're losing money. And then during the off season we're also losing money. Right.

So this year we didn't like our.

Because you had the big project. Right.

Couple big projects. So.

So it's been saving our bacon. We need to solve the cash crunch and there's no way we can do that with 20 to 30,000amonth in recurring revenue.

No, we can't just switch to a full recurring.

No. Even if you went all in on it, maybe we get it to 40 or 50,000 this year because like we're, we've missed the spring rush. Like if we went all in, but at 40, 50 grand, we'd still be losing money. And so we actually have to kind of watch, I hate split our attention here. And that's like we have new projects and we've got to focus on the recurrings now throughout the off season, they have a massive drop off in the amount of leads that are coming in. And typically in the past couple months that should have been picking up, but last month it dropped off even as bad as, if not worse than during the off season. This massive unexpected drop in leads during what otherwise would be the busiest time of year has left home roots in a really bad and vulnerable position financially. We want recurring long term. We want to keep growing that. I think there's ways we can improve that. But we need these projects to start printing. Okay, so there's two ways we can go here. One is we focus a bunch on improving the sales process for projects because I think there's a lot of meat on that bone. Or we say, okay, we're going to get in the Field we're going to get, do more mowing, we're going to increase more passive lead flow, all driving to the office and she's going to sell people over the phone for mowing and for chemicals and more smaller recurring.

Stuff, which she's great that she does. Knows that that better than I do. As far as how we're doing that.

Currently, it just depends like if you're going recurring, he could cut out the office space, office person, a lot of things. But if you're gonna go project route, I actually think it is relatively cheap to pay $1,200 a month for an office and $3,500 for an office person like that. $4,000, let's call it what 45. Let's call it five grand a month extra cost. If that allows you to sell $100,000 worth of projects a month at 30% margin, I'm okay with it. Now I've turned six grand in expenses or of expenses into $30,000 positive. But if we're only going to sell $20,000 of revenue a month, we cannot afford $6,000 a month in office and wages. And right now that lead flow is what like maybe one or two times a week you're getting that?

What do you think Heather? How many times a week you think we get recurring people like that are.

Accepting or just they're calling in? Just calling in? I'd say about 10. Calling in? Yeah. If we had 10, do you think like two or three of them like say accept? Yeah. What do you see their reason for not accepting? Too high. Will they tell you that? Or they say like I'll call. Oh yeah, they'll tell me, they'll say oh well, the person I had a month ago was charging me 50 bucks less than that. Like it's always like we're, we're too expensive. And when people are coming in now from a lead perspective, where are they usually coming from? Google or referral. My thing I'm gonna go with TC is kind of like, like how do we one make sure that off season we have better lead flow but then also too like right now obviously we've had this big drop off in new construction and one time jobs. How do we focus on the recurring side, Right? Yes. Because if we could get the recurring side up, that would be huge. Yeah, we're getting a lot of people from Google from all the reviews. My sort of struggle right now is when they go to your website. I don't feel like that's an accurate depiction of the current brand There's a lot of opportunities I currently see in their website. Their website's trash. Say how it is. Is that something you built? Is that okay? So you built that pretty good. Honest. Built that yourself.

I redid what the current version is in like a day or like three hours.

You did that in three hours? Yeah, I think that could be improved. He's not. Doesn't wrap his trucks or have decals on there. So like that could also help with get more leads in. But the only reason I want to get so many leads, I want to get so many leads, he needs to raise his price as fast as possible because that's the actual fix to the current pain. But most people won't do that in the face of wanting to grow. Okay, so we spent three days instead of three hours and that site will look ten times better.

Yeah.

The fact that the form is on a different page, it's covered up by something else right now too, by the way. Like that sidebar is covering up the job. Job or form. So on desktop it gets overlapped. On mobile it's decent.

Yeah.

But on desktop I can't see one side of the form. If you actually take out that the. The lawn and landscape and this word, this could be a construction company. And so I want this to speak. This is home roots lawn landscaping. By showing a picture of your truck and your car and next to a form collecting information. Because the only reason I want them on this website is to get their content. I just need contact info. So lead. Then I'm going to set them, you going visiting them. Then I close them here in person. But I do want your like the whole reason they show up to the website. I want them to get an estimate. Yeah, it's honestly like the always the easiest way is like I'm just gonna help them grow really fast. So they're like, oh my word, I have so many customers I gotta raise prices. The challenging part is first off, he doesn't have the money to go wrap his trucks or make a great website. Redesigning the website, it'll improve the number of leads. That's conversion. I think it'll double your conversion. And I know that number almost at least 30% because I know that's the drop off. When we've tested this, we split tested moving from contact page to front of page. You have a 30% increase in leads just by doing that. And also will someone actually raise price or will they go buy another truck, another piece of equipment, stay in growth mode and continue in more debt? I think that's an easy 3x honestly in terms of lead flow. So whether it be on mobile or on desktop, I want them seeing that right at the top, as small as possible. Usually half a page on the left or the right. And then sometimes what you could do is just where you currently have your slogan. Just bring that down and make that a banner. Typically I don't like slogans that are airy fairy and talk about anything besides what I'm doing for the customer. I actually originally didn't like your tagline but and now I like it because like the first people second landscaping thing, the people first landscaping thing, the customer doesn't come to you because they want to solve world hunger or have world peace. They just want their landscaping done. Usually I'm just like, uh, no, they're not coming here for the people. They're coming for landscaping. But it kind of grew on me. I don't need them to see that. The very first thing they see. I don't mind it. I like the branding aspect, but just put it as a banner at full length across the bottom.

I'm interested to see the. If the conversion rate goes up. I've had the form in the past on the front page and it's not currently and our lead flow is lower. So could be, you know, chance or it could be adding to it for sure.

I know you have enough design skills to do this so I can actually put it on there. I rarely have done this make a product book. So you're going to do a binder. You could get it with a spiral on it if you want to make it look more professional. And what you're going to do is take projects you've done in the past or you can take them from your suppliers pictures and you're going to take the three or four type of wall block that you want to install. Because this is the problem. When you put picture on social media, it's like the project that you hated putting and you lost money on.

The client gave you a one star review. They didn't pay you and they like.

Yeah, I want that one.

Sick.

We got it to where once we. We were still doing projects and pavers at one point, like our retaining walls and paver patios. We would install this but we only did one color, one design, one style. That's it. That's all they saw on our social media. So like it was gray, it was middle budget. I can train all of our guys in one day.

One pattern.

Yeah, one pattern. And it looked really good. It was a complex Pattern. But if you learned it, you're good.

Yeah.

And if the guys had like two or three of these, they were solid. Like, I didn't have to go back on the job sites because we only installed this one type of block and this one type of paper.

That's it. Yeah.

And what's cool is you get a product book and you just show like two or three different projects with the same block. Like, oh, yeah, it looks great.

I've been wanting to add more pictures and things like that. And like, like all the job photos are on my phone and so it's always like I have to like scroll back. And it's just like a really time consuming thing. So like getting the people who need the pictures, the picture has always been like a kind of hiccup. So I probably need to clean that up and spend a weekend digging photos out from the last three years. They're like, yeah, do you have a before photo? And I'm like, yeah. And I have to go to the maps setting on my phone and like scroll because it's like from however long ago.

You know, when you go to an in person consult, you're not giving the price in person. You're saying, hey, we'll get back to you. And then I'm assuming within a few days, Heather's putting together, sending that out.

I've been shooting from the hip more in person, in person person since we've been like so slow, so slow.

So you're like, I've been like, hey, I'll be my chocolate. I'll be back in 10 minutes.

I've been like, this is typically like 10 to 15. And they'll be like, they verbally agree on the spot handshake. They're like, we really trust you, really appreciate all the work. We've had two people that were like literally told me their budget. I said, I don't know if I'll be able to make that happen. And then I'll like call and be like, good news. We got everything that you asked for in the budget. And then they're like, sick. We're so excited.

Like, da, da da.

And then no showed their in person consult. That happened twice in one day.

It's rare for home service businesses to have in person office spaces. They can bring customers into and do consultations or sales. And most of the time it's not needed. Especially if you're doing smaller ticket items like mowing or cleaning. Smaller ticket Items being under 500, $1,000 that you can sell from your website or you can Sell over the phone. I would consider instead of even giving a ballpark. Cause ballparks are gonna kill you. A. It'll anchor them. So if you need to go above your top, it's toug. And then secondly is if they. If it's out of their budget, like immediately, they're just not going to show up. They're not going to do anything. Like, I would try to do more like. More like a book a meeting from a meeting. It's called Bamfam. So book a meeting from a meeting is what we do for landscape installs. But they have a unique option here at home roots to be able to actually bring customers into their office space and give a presentation. And this can be helpful for projects that are 30, 40, $50,000 for a customer's property where you actually bring them in and you walk them through some sort of. To the final outcome to be that they're a paying customer and they pay a deposit on the spot. Like, the challenging part is when you look at your close ratio and it's like, okay, Well, I did 10 estimates last week and one or two got back to me. Like, that's where I'm like, okay, we can improve this process. Right. And I think you're doing an excellent job of setting, but you're doing a horrible job of closing. You're excellent in person, and I just want you to be a setter when you meet them in person. Then when you get here, you have the proposal. Everything's dialed in. Because right now the reason I think the closing isn't working is because you're doing this ballpark thing. You're trying to like, feel them out. You're probably moving the price up and down based upon their reaction a little bit.

Yeah.

Maybe also based upon your how far you're booked out. Like, hey, we need this job next week. Okay, I'm just gonna go a little lower. Like, there's too much variability. Because you were. You were the guy building rapport. Now you're kind of close in front of them. Like, I would just separate the two. This can build up a lot of trust in the sales process, but also allow them to increase their close ratio. Instead of just blindly hoping that customers respond back to their estimates once they've sent them. You're going to set up the, like, normal set the time you get, go visit them. I'm assuming there's a pretty good show rate. They're usually there. Yeah, great.

Always. Yeah.

Build the rapport. Do not give away numbers. You're the estimator. Of this business. And that's all they need to know. The only reason you show up at a property is to get them in this office. Because if you told people, hey, you have to show up at our office for an estimate, you would have a very low close. Like people wouldn't want to show up. But if you go meet them, build the rapport, all you're trying to do is sell them on another meet. The reason you do the in person meeting at the property is to get the in person meeting here. If I just say, hey, you know, the office of contact, you will schedule another meeting. I have a huge drop off because now I gotta get them on the phone. Additional step, I've gotta make sure that they account. I just. You're in front of them. And the whole reason that right now you're trying to get some sort of commitment around price. Let's leave that alone. Yeah, let's go after. Let's get commitment for them to show up tomorrow. And it's gonna be harder for them to not show up if, if they said to you in person, face to face, yeah, I'll be there tomorrow at 3:30 when they tell her who they haven't met on the phone or via email. Yeah, we'll be there at 3:30 tomorrow. They might not show up.

The professional guilt. Yeah, because it seems like people appreciate it. You know, it's like, oh, this is everything. He's like, are they even signing this? And it's like, oh, I guess not. I need to work in some more built in, naturally structured guilt.

They only have met you so far. Right. And so I would just book more.

Than 50% of our reviews or have Heather's name 100%. Yeah.

You have this asset, you pay for it. I think everyone that walks in this door, you can close. And then we create a sales system that is okay. We go up, we get the lead. Great. We talk them, build the rapport. We schedule the appointment, make sure. Is there any reason why you can't show up tomorrow at 3:30pm at the office? And so from that initial consult, it's like, hey, great, I got pictures. I'm gonna make a video tomorrow afternoon. Now have the design done. Let's go ahead and book your time to meet me at the office and we'll go over everything. Because I have a feeling like I would use this asset. Whether it be the office or the trucks or the equipment or your team. There are assets to a business. There are positives. And I don't think I mean assets like possessions. I Mean assets in terms like these are a net positive for the business. I look at that as an asset. How can I use that better? How can I use that truck every day? How can I use this office space to sell more customers? How can I use my office and apply admin instead of just being straight overhead and just taking things off my plate, they actually become a sales advocate and growing the business. That's asset utilization. My goal is that when you're at the customer's property, they get a full understanding of what is going to happen in terms of like, oh, like here's a, here's a before and after of another product, another rip out that we did similar to yours. And especially because a lot of yours are like new construction stuff. You can show that like here what it looked like, copy and paste it like, oh yeah, that looks great. That's exactly. And then there's no design work needed because like, oh, you like this. Great.

No need to spend 20 minutes, let's.

Go ahead and book a meeting at the office. I'll have a full design ready to go. And you have like the two or three templates that you're just moving around. So you have a $5,000 package, a $10,000 package and a $20,000 package based upon what, you know, what works in this area. And I want to use that in the sales process.

There's no one in St. Marcus that has like a ability to do something like this. Even, even the company that's like 5x our size right now, that's like our only one above us on Google, they don't have anything like this. They're just in like eight of those warehouse buildings, you know, and they have like a tiny little finish down space. So it's like I feel like it's an asset and it was beneficial the first two months. I just have had a hard time. It's like we made the investment to get in here.

I get it when you don't have any leads coming in and you get one in front of you, you're like, I just gotta get them now. And so I'm gonna give them a range. I want some sort of verbal commitment so then I can go spend my time time actually making the estimate. So I understand that part, but I think we lean into, okay, what's the actual sales process for home? It is for construction jobs. We are going to leverage the asset of this office space and the fact that no one else has that type to compare me to. And so I go out, I'm there to do One thing. Builder form, and get them to book a meeting. From a meeting. Bam, Bam.

Most time, it's like, they come in, like, our logo's up on the screen. It immediately goes to, like, their before picture, then an after picture of the design of what I want to do. And then I'll hand them, like, this little thing here. I just literally slide it like this. It's got satisfaction guaranteed. And then three pages of reviews that I hand them, and then, like, our warranty agreement. And then, like, they're dead.

Okay, folks, this is. This is fun. All right, all right, all right. As a customer, I'm overwhelmed. I think this is, like, if you really try to boil it down, the customer is trying to pay to transform their landscape. And by showing them photos of jobs that you have done in the past that are close to what they are asking for, you are actually proving to them over and over, I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. I don't need to tell you my customers. This is Mr. Jones over in Buda. We did his project here. This was last summer. Here's what the before and after was. Here's the total project cost. All right, next slide. All right, this one looks a little more closer to yours, a little cheaper. You can also anchor these prices. So if you show the price of another project already engaging. Oh, that was 30 grand. Okay. This is not going to be a $15,000 job. Right. So you could use that to your advant. But this is the thing. The customer doesn't want to do that. They don't want to deal with this. They just want their property looking different. Yeah. Like, this is. This really comes down to me writing the books and talking with Dr. Kashi is like, if it does not. Is not needed with words, you remove it. And I genuinely believe that three sentences would cover the 10 or 15 pages of text that he gave me. And most people don't want to read text. They want to solve their landscaping problem. If I was to say, what's your 100% satisfaction guarantee? What would you say?

If I summarize it as basically saying, as long as it's within the scope of work of what you agreed on and what's in your bid, then you know we're gonna do everything to make you happy.

Yeah. So that's what this should say.

Yeah.

Just bigger font picture of you and.

Your family, you will be happy.

Yeah.

Guaranteed.

No, I'm telling you. I'm telling you, it works. It works like. Like, I'll. I'll use software for an example for copilot. Like, I'm like, okay, great. We're gonna make an offer that if you don't grow your business by 10%, we're making more profit profitable in one year. I'll just give you your money back. Make it really, really easy. It's like, hey, if we do what's on here and you're not happy.

Yeah.

The job's not over until this is done. Oh, that makes sense. Okay, so scrap that. That could literally be a one pager with satisfaction guarantee. Picture of you and one sentence. We're not happy until you are.

Picture of me and them Photoshopped together with a thumbs up.

Yeah, like 100%. Yeah, exactly. That's great. That's great. And most people don't want to read text. They want to solve their landscaping problem. And you're giving them homework. They're not necessarily going to get any either of you what you want. They want their landscaping change. You want money, let's just focus on that. Instead of, let's read 10 pages of documents that now you can use as ammunition to tell me that you gotta go. Think about it.

Cause, yeah, there's not been many people that like, close at the spot. They'll like, call like the next day or something. Cause I'm structuring it essentially as take this home.

Yeah, that's the point.

I thought I was being cute and like, affirming by having more forms. It makes so much sense when I'm explaining it to someone else. And like, I have like 10 pieces of paper on the desk that it's like, I need to go home.

Reduce, reduce, reduce. Like, when I'm writing the book, every single sentence, every single word needs to have a purpose. If it doesn't, you cut it. And that will reduce the amount of words you have. We will also increase the likelihood that someone will read it and will actually take action on what they're reading. And the same thing is true with the customer. If I tell them when the job is completed, you will be happy, guaranteed. As it states in our mission, people first lands here. And the reason we have you come in here and the reason you say this is, you know, they haven't gotten to anyone else's office.

Yeah.

The reason we have you come in is because we actually care about you and your property. Like, if I'm walking to some place where I'm kind of anxious and nervous, I want someone to come out and be like, hey, welcome. Thank you. Here's all the steps of the process. So meet me at the car, shake my hand, pat me on the back, Walk me into the office so I don't feel weird walking in this building that I've never been before. And then introducing the person sitting at the desk. And then show them the room. And then look at what's on the wall. Here's our award. Here's a little about me. Make them feel comfortable. Share with them. Be personable and a friend to them. Good chances you'll sell more things to them. That says, that speaks a whole lot better to me than reading this. That is going to be consumed 100% of the time versus three pages of document explaining exactly what that means. I don't want to give them, Whoa, one, two, three pages about my pain. Payment terms. This is confusing. Yeah, look, we require 50% to get on the. On the schedule. Once you're happy with the job, we'll collect the rest of the end.

So where do you put that? Just in, like, one DocuSign on the estimate. Okay.

We have a little section right at the end right here. Right. So you already have a deposit required to begin. So we could scrap the deposit thing here. One more line that says, upon the final walkthrough, the. The remainder is. Is due. So when you do the final walkthrough, you're actually asking for a check. Because right now, the way this looks, I do have to go home.

That makes sense. I'm, like, setting them up with homework instead of just, like, you know, let's move forward.

I have to go home and I have to think about this because I need to read your testimonials. And I actually, as a client, you're giving me all these tools to be able to delay. The challenging part is we as business owners and home services talk about our services all that long. So we know all the ins and outs and the measurements and the lingo and the terminology. And your customers have no idea what you're talking about. They just have a problem that they want fixed. I'm just trying to reduce all of this, like, even this stuff. So payment and scheduling. We already have payment here, right? Warranties and guarantees. We have that. There's a lot of duplication here. I would just try to reduce, reduce, reduce, like, weed growth, you know, how do I just say, like, hey, we are guaranteeing that when we do the walkthrough, you're happy. Make it easy for someone to understand that doesn't have any context about your department and your industry. And if you did that, you'd sell to more people, because most people don't know your lingo, people means three things to us. It means my family, our team, and your property.

Yeah.

And that's what together, we are going to make your landscaping look great. And we're going to go over the details and the price and all that. But I just want you to know, like, people come first here. Yeah, you say that, dude. Who cares about the price while taking your offer?

It works, dude, because people are like, man, we had five other bids, but, man, Heather's been great. You've been great. We just trust you guys to lean.

Into it, get them in this year, and then make them have the decision here. Because as soon as they leave here, they get cold feet. I think price becomes irrelevant once you built that sales process.

Sure. And especially if I'm trying to get them signed in the office, they're not really reading that thing.

You gotta remember that when a customer is coming and visiting you or you're meeting the customer, they also are nervous. They also might have a little bit of anxiety about meeting strangers or walking in a new building or meeting someone they've never talked to before. And so how do we actually just step in the mind of the customer and ease their anxiety, anxiety, ease their stress. And the golden rule, like doing others what you would have them do unto you works really well when it comes to sales. Here's the price, here's what it's going to look like. You already said you liked it. You already looked at the product book. You literally have the product book here and then you have the proposal here. And at the end of this visit, the goal is to have a check. Right. So you could even prep them in your setting appointment. Like, hey, and we are booked out is the spring. We're pretty busy. If you go ahead and bring your checkbook and if you'd like to move forward, we can go ahead and get on the schedule. When? Tomorrow when you're at the office. So you're prepping them for getting started and you don't have to get pricing. It's like, what about a ballpark? Hey, I'm gonna put these numbers together. We put together custom quotes so it's exactly for your property. I don't want to put you off by having a numbers way too high or too low. So let's just meet tomorrow. I want you to meet Heather. She's great in the office. You might talk to her on the phone already. Like, just walk them through this. I think Heather's really strong. She's been with the business for a few years. She knows all the insurance and outs. I also get like a very just good vibe from her that she could sell on the phone. She cares about the business, she cares about the team. She has a lot of inherent knowledge. And so I think that is actually a huge addition or pro to the business and he can leverage that asset better. I think if you're in person and you book the meeting for tomorrow, that will show up.

Okay.

Also when you're in person, a lot of times you're meeting with one of the spouse and you say hey tomorrow, when can you both come in? Because you have both decisions makers.

Cuz they're always a variable.

Dude, you sit them down here, both of them, you're like great. I both decision makers. There's no reason they can't make a decision today.

Yeah, I feel like once I got like one, like yeah, let's do it like on the spot, like hands Heather their money. That will be extremely motivating.

I also think if you have a great picture of you, the truck, the car out here next to the like office in front of the office, like showing you have an actual physical space also has huge credibility. Might be a 50% increase in leads. You're setting up the set right. And then the set, you set up the clothes right. And the clothes you set up Heather to go get the deposit. So that's the sales system redesign. But you do those four things, I think we're in a decent spot. Some people, what I just said here, this will take them a year to do.

That will be done in a week.

If you can do that in a week, we have, we have a shot, but it has to be done in a week. The likelihood of him taking action and being violent with the recommendations is high because he actually has six weeks of not taking a paycheck. We need jobs like on, on the schedule. We need deposits paid today. I believe a TC within a matter of three to six days will actually do most of the things we talked about in the six week plan. Also what is different than most of our turnarounds is they could very well in four weeks have a few really big projects. They close and be in a good spot. If you tonight can do the redesign. If this weekend you need the picture done and the product book done and go print it off and laminate everything and make it look beautiful. Set up the process to make this cleaner. You can do this in one week. In the next few days could sell two or three, three 20, $30,000 projects and we're on the right path. Hopefully that Happens.

It was aggressively getting worse when you guys were here. And so that was like, you know, trying to deal with that stuff. But I would say it's like light at the end of the tunnel now, like, and I'm glad you guys came out. I've still been doing the web design thing cause I'm transferring our website to that platform anyways. So I'm kind of using our website as like the guinea pig to like learn the design on that platform. I'm rebuilding the site completely. I like edit the form and like put a little goofy animation on there. Yeah, we've had good. I think we were converting like 1 in 30 before you guys came. But since the form I think we're at like 1 in 20 something. So it did go up. So that's good. Yeah, it's definitely been. That has actually been super fruitful so far, mainly with mowing. So it's no big project. Like changes that are big. I've been like paying so much attention to like all the like product booklets, like, like the mower dealerships and like at the, the material supply places because they have like a bunch of different brands and they're all just stapled. I always thought they were fancier than that, but it's literally just like a crease and a staple in the crease to make those product books. I was like, oh dude, I'm definitely not gonna spend like 50 bucks a booklet on these. Yes. I've been like shopping that out and like I started to do it. So I kind of just need like a template and I found one like last week. So I've been editing that and, and getting that going. So I did have to pay like 150 bucks for the template, which is stupid, but it's, it's a good template. So swap pictures and change some verbiage and stuff. So I think it'll be worth it. Yeah. But yeah, I'm excited we're getting it going so we'll probably. I'll probably always try to sell the same couple things anyways. Yeah, like pergolas and stuff, especially once I get the product. But I'm just gonna. Most people like the same two designs anyways. Like kind of like Mike was saying, it's like you just show them kind of kind of what looks good and they're like, yeah, that looks good. Most of the time as we're moving forward, I think just more recurring and more contract based stuff. I will say we have had like two meetings and I've been going out to the car, which I thought was a weird idea, but I've been like going out to the car to say hi to the people and it seems to, like, make it more light hearted as opposed to waiting till they come in. We've been doing the book a meeting from a meeting thing, but honestly, it's only been relevant on, like two parts projects. But they're both converting, so they are both going to convert, so that's good. It's been a breath of fresh air at least, just like having revenue back.