How to DOMINATE the Spring Rush! [ Lawn Care Business]

Hey, everyone. Mike Andes here. Landscapebusinesscourse.com we're going to go ahead and jump into it. Welcome to an awesome Saturday. I'm going to be trying to do these more often. As you can see, we're trying to get a little more creative here. We got my social handles over here. We got landscape businesscourse.com oh, you can't see the little cursor. There you go. So we're trying to get a little more creative here, make it a little bit more enjoyable to watch these and not just listen on the podcast. So we're going to go ahead and jump in the day. I'm going to be going over five things that I really recommend you focus on for before the spring rush. Now, for some of you, you're literally have just started the spring rush. If you're in certain markets, you're already starting to mow. We started to mow last week, but we're going to go ahead and talk about the five things I think you need to do before the spring rush. So if you have a few more weeks, you have time to do the things we're going to talk about today. Right now, I'm not looking at your questions. I'm trying to keep them off of my screen. But I'm going to talk for the next few minutes about these different things that I think you should be doing before the spring rush. And then we're going to jump right into your questions. Now, if you're asking why I have these really cool overlays that I now have created for us all, the reason is, as I mentioned on the video earlier this week, is we are hiring not one, but two more social media folks to be able to produce content for our industry. And so I'm going to be getting on all of these platforms and actually posting consistently instead of this like once in a blue moon, creating a TikTok. So I'm trying to reach a younger demographic. I'm trying to get them ingrained in the business of lawn care and landscaping before they're in their 40s and their 50s and they're struggling with things, trying to give them, you know, some sort of help in that area. So we are hiring two more people. So to cover those costs, I am creating these banners to be able to kind of fund that operation. So let's go ahead, though, and jump into today's topic, which is the five things I think you need to do before the spring rush to get ready again. I know some of you are in the middle of it, but trust Me, it only gets worse, which is a good thing. From here it's only getting busier. You're only getting more and more estimates, more and more phone calls. It's only going to increase in scale and quantity. And so we, what do we need to do now? Like, even if it's this week, weekend that you need to focus on things that you need to do, number one is you have to. This is going to surprise some of you that why it's number one, because I don't talk a whole lot about this, but that is you've got to create a plan for your physical and mental health. As we head into the spring rush. If you're going to be working 12, 14 hour days in the field and then coming home and doing estimates, you need to have a plan, a schedule. You need to know what's going on when it comes to your mental health and your physical fitness. If you don't have a fitness regimen, if you're not waking up at a certain time to be able to get some time in for work workouts, you need to get that stuff scheduled now. If you can get it done now, you don't have to think about it come spring rush. All the things I'm talking about today is really trying to take off things off your calendar, your to do list off of your mental checklist. So that way when it comes to the spring rush, you can actually focus on doing work because getting money and getting more customers because spring rushes. The rush of spring is created by demand, the demand curve increasing as demand goes up. Your cost per click and your customer acquisition costs are going to go down. That's the time to be able to pour money and pour fuel on the fire of marketing and on growth. But if you do not have certain systems in place, like creating a plan for your mental and physical health, you're not going to be able to take advantage of the high demand and the low customer acquisition cost. You're going to like, oh no, I can't spend money on market, I can't hire anybody right now. Like, I'm just so overwhelmed. So create a plan now. All right, when are you going to wake up? When are you going to work out? Are you going to go to the gym? Are you going to do it at home? Do you need to get a program? Do you need to get a trainer? You need to invest in a trainer at a gym or online or get a peloton bike. I don't care what that system is, but you need to have a plan for your physical and your mental health. All right, are there going to be certain times that you require yourself to check out when you come home from work? So that way, mentally you can the unplug, declutter. These are things you've got to create a plan for now because it's going to get crazy. If you've been in this industry for more than just a few years, you know how crazy the spring rush can get. You've got to create that plan for yourself now. Number two. Oh, I should create, I should make these like, there you go, let's go. We'll change it on every new one. So number two is ready, you know, really ready, your price increase now. Alright, so if you're going to do a price increase, I always recommend that you do it in the middle of the spring rush. The reason for that is because you want to do the price increase when it's hard to go out and find supply. All right, so again, we're talking about the supply demand curve. If you don't know what the supply and demand curve is, just search that. Mike Andes and I explain on the whiteboard. But when we talk about the supply and demand curve, as the demand increases for, for our services, the other thing that's also decreasing is the supply, like the amount of landscapers available to get more clients is decreasing. And that's usually why people increase their prices during the spring, so that they can actually not have too much work. And so what I would recommend you do, if you're going to, if you know you need to increase your prices, and I would recommend that probably 95% of landscapers raise their prices. So if you know that's what you want to do, get your price letter, your price increase letter ready, get your email ready, have the list of the customers that you want to raise ready. How, what prices they're going to be raised to ready. Do all of that now. If you need to run reports, if you need to go back and look at clock in and clock out times, if you need to somehow figure out who's underpriced and overpriced, go for it. I talked yesterday about doing these blind price increases sometimes. And that's better than doing nothing at all. Because this is what's going to happen for so many people watching my content is they're going to tell me like when, when they know they need increased prices. Guess what they're going to tell me in June, July, you know what, I'm going to wait until winter so I can have some time so I can run reports Figure out who's going, I'm going to increase prices and I'll do that next year. But that is one of the most fundamental levers of the business. We talked this at conference. Price is one of the biggest levers in your business. And what people, you know, what happens is you get so busy with the spring rush, you don't have time to run reports. You don't have time to send out the letters to the clients. You don't have time to take all the emails and the phone calls that come in after you increase the prices. So what do you do? You do nothing. And then what happens is the spring rush comes, you realize you're, as you already know, you're underpriced, and then you're literally stuck because you don't have the time to go. Make the price letter, the pricing increase letter, send the email out, figure out who you're going to increase the prices, what their prices need to be at. Do that now, I'm literally telling you, do that this weekend. And if you're like, oh, you know what, that's going to take me weeks to do that. You just need to increase prices blindly. Like I talked about yesterday, literally, like, okay, from 0 to 30, I'm going to raise those people all $5 per cut. Okay, from 30 to 40, I'm going to raise them $7 per cut from, you know, or 50, $50 and up. I'm going to raise $10 per cut. I would rather have you do that and talk about speed like we talked about yesterday and get things done than paralysis by analysis and trying to figure out all these reports and all the rest of it. But if that's your character, if that's your, your personality is to have the reports and do all of that stuff, you better make sure you're doing that now because you're not going to have time in the spring rush. All right, so that's number three. Number no, sorry, that was number two. Number three is hire early. This is going to be the hardest thing if you have employees in 2021, is getting employees, attracting good talent. We have seen a dramatic increase in the, in how hard it is to find good employees this year. I can almost guarantee you, if you, if you're paying attention right now, this whole new 1.9 stimulus package coming out of the government that is going to make it very, very difficult to find good employees this year, especially if you're in a market where you're paying 10, $12 an hour. Because if someone works 40, 40 hours in a week, they're going to get $400 or 450. Well, guess what? Right now, if they do nothing and they sit at home playing Xbox, they're making $300 a week on unemployment. So it's going to be very difficult for your entry level laborers this year. So if you're like, oh yeah, we're going to get busy in a few weeks, I'm going to start hiring then. No, you need to start interviewing now. You start putting out ads on Craigslist and Facebook. And indeed, now if you don't, you're going to. This is what's going to happen. You're going to get really, really busy. You're going to need the labors, you're going to need more employees to be able to produce the work. But you're not going to take advantage of the spring rush simply because you don't have the employees. And you're not going to have the employees because you're going to go try to find them when you need them actually out working in the field. And you're not even going to have the time to go interview them and put up ads and manage the applications and call references. So what you're going to do, you're going to hire whoever has a pulse, whatever warm body with two hands can come to work. You're going to hire them and they're going to create infinite problems for you the rest of the season. If you mismanage the spring rush, it will cause you to create poor decisions that will affect the rest of the year. So what you need to do is plan for it. Start putting up your ads now. There's no reason you can't do interviews right now and then give them a job, a good job offer for starting in three to four weeks. We've done that three to four months in advance before and gotten great talent. So the reason is if most good employees have a current job, they're not unemployed. Most really good, you know, grade A employees in this industry, they already have a job. They're not unemployed right now. Therefore, they have to give their two to three weeks notice anyways. So don't think like, oh, I don't really need, I'm not really there yet. I don't have quite enough work. Like said, I.