How to Create Your 2018 Marketing Plan to Dominate Your Market - Ep.52

Hey, everyone, this is Mike, and you are listening to the landscape business course podcast today. I'm excited because I have a big announcement I want to share with you all. But first of all, thank you all so much for your support. The last few weeks just have been amazing. Lots of people signing up for the course, a lot of really nice emails, and I really do appreciate that. People that have gone through the course this year, even people that have just listened to the podcast this year, this is in the first. You know, 2017 has really been the first year I've done this podcast and really been really involved with the course and a lot of this. This kind of industry, more so than just when I was doing business Bootcamp podcast. So thank you all for your emails. That's the oxygen to which keeps me going, doing what I do. And so thank you very much. Just some really nice emails coming my way after the season's kind of finished, and people that pointed back to a specific episode or thing I said, and it really helped them. And that's really what this is all about for me. If I was trying to make more money, I would not be focusing on landscapers. I'd be focusing on software, tech, or marketing and things like that for other industries. So this is a passion project. This is what I love to do. And so those emails I do appreciate, and I wanted to say thank you. If I don't email you back, it's not because I'm being rude or anything. I just don't get around to it. But I do appreciate it. So thank you very much. With that being said, today's episode really is centered around a big announcement. I have. I've been really busy. Obviously, we're going into our quote unquote slower season. It's kind of crazy because we're booking out right now. Right now is December 6th, I think today is. Yeah, no, December 5th. And we are booking out to January 16th right now for work. So it's supposed to be our slow season, but that's a very good thing. I'm not gonna complain. We're doing a lot of work on our second shop, getting it ready to go and all sorts of stuff around the shop. And then also just work in general has been more than usual as far as winter is concerned. So that's a good thing. Very happy about that. Some of the strategy we have been using for winter work have been working, and I'm very happy about that. One of them, which I'll just drop this in, is we've been doing Facebook ads, but in those Facebook ads, we target the days that we want to fill up during the winter. So for instance, I really wanted to fill the week before Christmas. And this is a couple weeks ago, I wanted to fill that week before Christmas up. So what I did is I basically went on to Facebook and said, hey, we're getting a winter Christmas discount for the week before Christmas. And within three days we filled that whole week up with work. And so giving that 10% discount, but making it, you know, creating some urgency and some sort of a. Not a lack of, but like there was only a short amount of supply. And then what I did is every single time we got a new job, I would go into the Facebook ad, update it and put like an update as far as how many days we had left or how many openings we had left. And I was true to it. Like I wouldn't just make it up. Like we actually did start with a full week open and we basically went right through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And by, you know, a couple days, three days, I think it was the third day was we had filled it up. So I took it down. So that worked really cool, worked really good. That was the first time I used that strategy and it did seem to work really well. So interesting to see if we even need to use it this year again. But you might want to try that in your market as well. But excuse me, I've been really busy. I just got back from Alabama a couple days ago. I was over there for the weekend doing networking with other landscaping business industry leaders and things like that, getting interested in.

Everything in the industry, everything from the software side to the marketing side, to the business owners and how we can help them. This is a long term game for me, trying to really completely change the way this industry is looked at. And so if you listen to me for a long time, you know that the why of my company, Augusta Lawn Care Services, is to revolutionize the level of professionalism in our industry, the landscaping industry, and the way it's perceived. So to do that, it takes a lot of work, takes a lot of knowledge about different aspects of the, of the industry, how it works, how things the interchangeable parts of what makes the landscaping company work and scale up. So a lot for me to learn a lot of people I've been meeting. So like I've already made a several trips this year. We have a couple more coming up in January. After I go to Europe, I go Dallas and I'm gonna be traveling more over the winter just to really a lot of it's networking, getting to know leaders within this industry, people that have been around longer than I have, and trying to glean from them their knowledge and then also take the parts that they know and kind of bring it to a comprehensive, larger scale picture. Because I'm looking at the whole industry, not just one specific part of it, but I'm trying to get to the people that know their niche the best, whether it be from, you know, the marketing side and the website SEO stuff to software and how that's going to be changing, looking at hardware as far as equipment and where that's going, looking at ways of marketing. And so that kind of leads me up into the big announcement that I wanted to share today. And really this whole podcast episode is about and that is I'm announcing a webinar. It's specifically for landscapers, a hundred percent for landscapers. I'll probably announce on business bootcamp, podcast for other service professionals. But this, it's going to be strictly for landscapers. We're going to be talking, I'm just going to kind of read off what some of the things that we will be talking about in that webinar. The name of that webinar is essentially like the subject that we're going to be covering is you're going to create a landscape marketing plan so you can dominate your market in 2018. That is going to be the subject. And in the webinar, I'll read these off, we're going to be determining, we're going to learn about determining the roi, return on investment and lifetime value of customer. We're going to design your specific, your personalized marketing plan for 2018, especially those spring months, you know, February, March, April, those crucial months leading up to the mowing season. We're going to calculate marketing budget and spend for 2018 and then align that with what that plan is going to be as far as spending and the different venues that you can use it on. We're going to look at specific marketing strategies and I'm going to share some of the ones we've been using the past 12 months as far as Facebook referral marketing, how we really doubled down on snail mail and cards and handwritten notes, things like that. This is the big one. There's one big thing I'm actually going to say right now. I want you to come on the webinar and hear what I'm trying to talk about, one big marketing push that we are going to be making in 2018 in our company. And I truly believe it's gonna be Completely. This is what I told my office manager today. It's either gonna be an absolute home run and it's going to drive all of our marketing slash growth next year, or it's just gonna be an absolute flop. And so, and when I say flop, it just won't work. It's not like it's gonna be bad for the company or like put a bad image on the company. It's very, very, I think the direction the company should be going and our industry should be going. I truly believe if this works, that it's going to long term. I'll look back on this, what we're doing next spring and point back to kind of a moment in time when I got an upper edge in our industry as far as how to market, do something a little bit different. Not taking new technology, but using new technology to make an old industry like ours, landscaping, very easy to access. And one of the big barriers for us as landscape business owners is just getting leads during times we need them. And to scale up, you need more business. And how do we get those customers to. In the past we've always talked about calling and emailing. Is there another way we can get them to contact us? I truly believe there is. And I'm gonna make this, I don't wanna sound coy or anything, but I do, I don't wanna give it away. I wanna actually make you join the webinar just to hear this one thing because I truly believe it's going to be massive for us. And if we're going to test it out in February and if it works even slightly, we're going to double down on it and it's going to be good. So definitely want to check out the webinar. Just go, you know what I mean? It really, really simple for you. All you have to do to sign up for this webinar is text. This is actually, I'll give you a hint. This strategy I'm about to give you to sign up for this webinar as part of the, the strategy we're using next spring for getting lawn care and landscaping clients. So this is how you need to sign up for the webinar. It's very, very, very simple. All you have to do is text 44222. So that's the number you need to text. And when that, that's obviously just the number you text. But then in the subject or when you're texting, just put the word landscape business. One word, no space, just landscape business, no space in the Middle east and send that to 44222. Again, pull out your phone right now. SMS text 44222 and type landscape business, no space in between. That will automatically sign you up for the webinar. It'll ask for your email and that's where we will send you. Then the webinar link to get access. The date of the webinar is December 21, right before Christmas. You shouldn't be too busy. Family shouldn't be in quite yet. December 21st, 2017, that's a Thursday. It's gonna be 11 o' clock Pacific Standard Time. So if you're on the east coast, that's gonna be 2pm I look forward to getting you all on there and I think I'll limit it to 50 people, but we'll just see, we'll see what the response is from the other, the other podcast and things like that. But definitely want to jump on there. Pull out your phone right now. I'm waiting for you to pull out the phone. SMS text. You're listening to your phone right now. I know you are. 99% of you are listening to your phone. It's in your pocket or it's sitting on inside of your cup holder. If it's in your cup holder you can pull over because you can't text and drive, at least not here in Washington. And so. But pull out your phone right now. SMS text, the number is 44222 and type one word landscape business. It's going to sign you up for this webinar. I'm going to go over exactly kind of how I think of marketing plans when it comes to our industry. As far as I'm going to basically just tell you what we're doing next year. Our spend on each category, where I'm putting the money, where I'm putting our time, which is more important to me right now as far as value, where I'm putting my time and my interest as far as next year, 2018. Really making a plan in place and expecting the ROI is very, very important if you want to be able to measure your growth and be able to predict what you're going to have to do to get to that level. It's one thing to be like, oh well, we did $200,000 last year. I'm hoping to make $400,000 next year. Well, the question is, what are you doing right now to make sure you get to the 400 level? Are you just depending on the randomness of the market to give you more jobs or bigger jobs? What are you doing now. And so we're going to take actionable steps to get to that place. For instance, we obviously are trying to grow very quickly right now. Within a year of today, we will be signing our first franchisee on. And so that's like, that's kind of exciting. And.

So I gotta be getting out of the field, but we gotta ramp up our two locations to $1.52 million in revenue and get those running in operation without me, on a day to day basis, without me being involved too much on the day operations, the day to day operations so I can focus on the franchisees. And so yeah, a year from the day we're gonna be signing people for franchisees, I haven't talked about it a lot, but we are still going in that direction and we are gonna be signing people come December, January of 2018. Like a year from the day we'll be signing people on to get them started and so they can start launching their companies for the following spring. And I haven't talked about a lot, but I've changed the structure of our franchise agreement and everything. And we're going to be making a flat fee, franchise fee. So what I mean by that is every single other franchise out right now that is in our industry, Landscaping, is charging a royalty fee. They're charging between 7 and 10% all in as far as if you count their royalty fee and their marketing fee and stuff like that, you're looking at 6 to 10%.

Royalty fee. I don't like that structure. And the reason, so I had talked about and we were planning on doing that like everyone else has, but I'm looking at the numbers, I'm like, there's no way that someone can scale a company up very quickly. If and like the goal is to get to that million dollar marker by the third year and make that a hundred thousand dollars a month like we teach in the course. And there's just no way to do it if you're siphoning off 8, 10% of cash flow, like of gross revenue out to a franchisor. There is no way. And so without going in massive amounts of debt and living no life, and that's not what I want franchisees to be doing. I truly believe the franchisees have to be successful. So what we're going to do, we're just gonna make a flat fee. It's gonna be a straight $1,000 a month franchi.

That way I don't penalize people for growing. They'll be trying to get like essentially if you did $20,000 a month in revenue. That thousand dollar royalty fee is basically 5%. I don't want you at that. I want you where you're making 100,000amonth in revenue and that franchise fee comes down to 1%, 1000 bucks a month. So that's the goal. And I don't want to penalize people and charge them more and more royalty fees as they grow. And you look at a lot of these other franchises, whether it be us lawns or whether it grounds guys, those are kind of two major ones in our industry of franchising. And you look at them and if you look at their revenues of their franchisees, there's not too many that are making 3, 4 million dollars a month, I mean sorry, 3 or $4,000, 3 or 4 million dollars a year in annual sales for their landscaping business. And the reason is because they'd be paying through the nose like at $4 million, 10% in royalty fees. You're looking at 400 grand going to a franchisor. And I don't want that to be happening to our franchisees. I want them to be able to grow and locations just like we're doing, have a multi units in their, in their repertoire and be able to grow, like make a real scalable business, have three, four locations in their county. Like that's what I want. And I'd much rather see them succeed than us try to arbitrage a whole bunch of money out of them. Then they can't grow and they can't get to those larger numbers. And so that is the decision that I've come to. Obviously we can still make money on selling uniforms and the logos for the trucks and business cards and stationary and things like that at a cost that the franchisees can't even get at their own personal, you know, local printers. So we'll still make, that's where we'll make our money. Obviously a thousand bucks a month doesn't pay for support and website stuff that we'd be giving people. So I will probably be coming out with more details on that in the spring. A lot of you, there's been like four people from the course that have the course and the podcast that have said they want to franchise. I don't promise anything at this point, but if you are interested, do get in contact with me, those four people and the people have contact me about it. You'll be the same screening process, but you would be obviously on the top of our list. And when we roll out the first five or 10, if anyone is here that wants to be a franchisee, you're going to get a lot of. I'm only saying this, I know it's a year in advance, but if you actually do want to become a franchisee and you want to be close to us, I am looking for a franchisee that is in the county south of our location. So we're in Whatcom County. I'm looking for someone to be in either anacortes or in Mount Vernon in 2019, starting there in the spring. So you'd be signing in a year for your franchisee agreement. I am looking for people there, but like I said, we've had people interested. I'm not hiring on experience. I'm not hiring how much money you have. I'm not hiring any of those things. You have to be a part of our brand. And like, very, very important for me for that. For those first five tenant franchisees that we sign next year to really be ingrained in who we are as a company, what we stand for, that our people are absolute number one asset and nothing else, nothing else gets in the way of that. And so I'm gonna be a little bit. I'd rather grow slower with our franchising and arbitrary. Like. Like forget a little about leave some money on the table than to try to rush it and go really big or try to. And then the franchisees not make their cut and they're struggling and it just is. And then people in the organization that they're running, it just. I want to keep the same, the fabric of our brand the same as far as people and teamwork and our culture. So that's. That's kind of it. If you are interested in that, I would personally be wanting to know about that. So definitely, if you're interested in that, text the same number 44222. But just do Mike Andes, one word. M I K E A N D E S and get your email submitted and we'll put you on the waiting list for that. Like I said, there's about four or five of you already on that and we won't stay in contact. A who if you do get on that list, and I'm not going to be trying to sell you or anything like that, you'll basically just be on a list for probably a good six to eight months before I even reach out to you. But unless you're of course wanting to go close here, that is the one position that I would be interested very much in hearing from you. If you are willing to move or you're currently in Anacortes or Mount Vernon, Washington, definitely would want to hear from you because we'd love that to be our first franchisee that I can really be involved with and make sure that you have all the tools necessary and the access to myself. So anyways, that was a long detour at the end there. But the main reason I wanted to get on this course, I mean, on this webinar or on this podcast. Sorry, so many things going on right now. But the main reason I want to get on the episode today for the podcast was to tell you about the webinar. Go. Just get on your phone, type in landscape business. It's one word, no space landscape business. Send it to 44222 and you're going to get a text back to you just saying to give your email and just give just your email, no other words, because it'll mess up the system. Just your straight email. And that's the link that it'll send you the link for the that's the email address. It'll send you the webinar link to get access to the webinar again. It's December 21st, Thursday at 11 o'. Clock. I can't wait to see you there. I want to share what our 2018 marketing plan is, how we're going to dominate our market, and I hope you can do the same. I'll see you there in the webinar. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening. This is Mike Andes on a landscape business course podcast.