How to Double Your Lawn Care Business Revenue in 1 Year

Hi, it's Mike over at Landscape Business Course. Got another question and wanted to answer. How to double the size of your business as far as revenue in one year. So if you're doing $200,000 in revenue each year, how do you make that into 400,000 next year? If you're making 5,000amonth, how do you make 10,000amonth next year? So these three things like to do that, you could obviously pour a whole bunch of money into marketing and, and be able to do that. But what are the three things you can do for low to no money to really make that double that massive jump in sales. And so my first year of business when I was out in the field, I did about just under $30,000 in revenue. I was doing it part time. Next year I did just under $200,000 revenue like 190. A year. After that we did 550,000. The year after that, we're just shy of 900,000. So that massive amount of growth, how do you do that and can you do that without spending a bunch of money on marketing? Marketing is a big part of growing your business and it's one way to do it. But how do you do it if you don't have a whole lot of money? So I have three kind of ways that we've used when we are wanting to grow the business and we might not have a lot of cash reserves. One of the ways is referrals. It's the biggest way. And a lot of times I find we're just too afraid as business owners to, to ask for referrals, to ask for online reviews. And when I say referrals, I'm talking also about online reviews, getting those reviews and customer feedback and testimonials from your customer base. And so what we do to do this is obviously you want people to refer their friends and things like that. But we also want to generate that online presence where lots of customer reviews are coming in. So when we have a job that goes well, landscaping especially, we will send out a review link to all of our customers asking for a review with specific links that go right to our Google, Facebook, Angie's List, etc. And so we send that email. It just is a link. It's like augustaloncareservices.com review and we send that link to them. They click on that link and then they have the four links that they can leave their view on based upon if they use Facebook and if they use Angie's list, usually help with all those other companies are so that's one way, number one referrals. That's one way is online, you know, getting those referrals. Google getting those Google reviews is big as far as search engine optimization. So it's going to help you, it's also going to help just people seeing when you post a review on Facebook it notifies all of their friends what that person said and, and that they gave you five stars. So that's kind of a brand awareness and a form of social proof for all of their network on their social media. So you know that's big referrals, customer reviews, all of that. Number two is really focusing on your route density. So when you come to mowing and we all know that efficiency is a big part of a mowing route. And one of the best ways to increase efficiency is having multiple houses at the same time street address so that when you park the truck, you're mowing several houses. So one way to do that and low kind of like this is the low hanging fruit. If you have a client, their neighbors see your truck and they see your work every single week, every couple weeks, they're seeing your guys, they're seeing you, they are seeing the quality of work and they see your trucks every time. If you have your logo all over your truck, this is a big.

You'Re top of mind when it comes to lawn care and landscaping. So marketing them as low hanging fruit. So what you can do is do door hangers or whatever it takes on those neighbors houses to your existing clients. So if you already have 20, 30 mowing customers, you might be able to put the door hanger or a flyer or knock on their door and get 100 or 200 leads just based upon using the four or five houses closest to your existing clients. What that's going to do is number one, that market that you're now advertising to two or 300 people, that's not very many in comparison to you putting out ads on a radio or a newspaper flyer. Even every door direct marketing where you're going to be reaching out thousands of people, you're casting a really big net when there's not many fish. Whereas if you're going after that two or three hundred people, they've seen your trucks, they know about you already, they've probably already gone to your website, they've at least seen you where working on their neighbor which is your client's house. And so I would really target those people. What I'd be doing is on your mowing route put those door hangers on.

The neighbors of Your client's house. That's one way to do it. Another way, and what we're experimenting with right now is sending a $50 gift certificate to those people's house. So the two or 300 people around your 20 or 30 clients. So for us, we, we have about, I think it's 600 people that we're targeting. The one or two neighbors directly closest to our mowing clients, we're sending out like 6 or 700 of these gift cards. And when I say gift cards, I'm not talking like a, just like a paper that they cut out. It's actually gonna be like a credit card style look to it. Plastic. It feels like a real gift card. And it's $50. Not like a $5, a 5% off coupon or something like that. Like $50 on, off their service for our company. And so what that makes, you know, if you send out at the beginning of the year in spring with an advertising for mowing, they've already seen you, they've seen you do the work that you do is great. And you send that $50, like, like I said, don't do a $5, don't do a 10% off. Give them a $50 or $100. Obviously people, $100 gift cards on these nice plastic. We got ours made from a company called Duracard D U R A.

And they look great, they feel real, like a nice, good, hard gift card. And that's what we send out to those warm clients. We'd rather be sending marketing material and marketing to warm leads. People that have seen us in the marketplace, that have been to our website, they know about us already. Instead of trying to cast a massive net and going after a whole bunch of cold leads, whether that be cold calling, sending out massive marketing via mail, whatever it is, that's all cold leads. I'd rather go for those warm leads. And those are the people that are right around your existing clients. It increases density because if you get there, if you get their job, you're already doing client A. Well, if you can get the person next door, all of a sudden, your efficiency, your route density gets much tighter. So that's. The second way is marketing to the neighbors of your existing clients. The third way that you can increase the sales and double the sales in your business over the next 12 months. Double the sales. The third way you can do that is increasing your conversion ratio. This is the biggest one. If you look, if you have a good software system, you'll be able to see what the total dollar amount Is that you estimated versus the total dollar amount that you actually converted to sales. I'm not talking about number of estimates versus that's obviously how you can determine. So for instance, if you do 100 estimates and 50 of them convert, the question I'm asking is, can we take that 50 and move it to 60? We're increasing your conversion ratio by 20%. When we go from 50 out of the 100 to 60 out of the hundred, you say, well no, that's 10%. No, because 50, if you increase that by 10 more clients to the 60, you have a 20% increase in your conversion ratio. And we've done that without having to get new leads, send out more marketing. These are already people that have already gotten in the funnel, in your marketing funnel. They're already leads, they've already got an estimate. We just gotta figure out how to convert them to paying customers. And so this is the absolute fastest way to increase your revenue is to figure out how to increase your conversion ratio. How do you do that? This is when it comes down to your systems and procedures. I'm talking about follow up systems. How do you follow up with an estimate once you've sent it? So when we come to the landscaping job, we come to an estimate, we do the estimate, the estimator sends that information back to the office, the office creates the estimate, we send that email to the customer. What's the follow up process after that? Do you just kind of wait? What do you do you give them phone calls? Do you send emails? So how we do it is right when we send an estimate out from our software system, we then send a regular email from outside of our software system to let them know that we sent the estimate. That way if it goes to their spam blocker that they could be able to go in and find it. So that's our first estimate. Then we follow up with an email that says, hey, if you haven't got the estimate we just sent, check your spam. So that way that we don't come back in a week and they haven't even got the estimate or we get phone calls, you'll get phone calls saying hey, I never got an estimate. And you're like, yeah, I sent it. Well, it might be in their spam folder. So that's why we send that estimate right after the, I mean the email right after the estimate. Then if they see the email and they see the estimate and they don't get back to us, we're going to start a follow up process. If they don't look at the estimate, we might call them and say, you know, have you sent it? Do you have any questions? A great way to follow up is asking if they have questions about it and if they still don't get back to you. And it's just like crickets. There's like, where did they go? All of a sudden they've disappeared. Another way is when you have an opening in your schedule is to offer them a specific date. That's kind of our next order way of following up. Our third way to follow up is come like winter, like we're talking a couple months later. We are then going to offer them a time and a discount. Now the reason we only do the discount in the winter is because we're slower. So we'll say, hey, you get 10% off. We have an opening in this winter months when there's the only time of year you get this discount and we can get you scheduled in here. So this is that. That's a way of trying to increase our conversion ratio. Number one, you're going to increase the ratio of people that need the estimate right away. But it got caught in their spam filter. You never followed up. So they went and found someone else to do the work. You're going to the people that wanted to do the work but didn't have the chance to respond back to you and they just kind of forget. So you're going to catch those people. If you have a follow up process, you're going to catch the people that.

They even might have seen the estimate. They want to do the work, they want to get it scheduled. But if you're not following up with them on what they exactly want in the estimate and what dates work for them, there's a follow up process of the estimate that can really help your conversion ratio. Other systems like estimate speed can really increase your conversion ratios. Professionalism. When I say estimate speed, I'm talking about when someone calls you and asks for an estimate, how long does it take to number one, get all their information and get the estimate set up? How long does it take for the estimator to get to their property? Like are we talking like a week? Or can you do it within 24 hours and beat all of your competitors when they've called four or five other companies to do an estimate? And so that's why when it comes to mowing, we're starting to do mowing estimates over the phone using technology, the mapping technology, so that we can determine square footage, give them a price over the phone, trying to cut out time completely trying to cut time out of the equation. There's really three reasons, like main reasons why people buy. Number one is price. Number two is time or speed. Time, speed. And number three is trust. So when you think about that, you can increase the speed in which you are making that transaction happen. It's incredibly valuable. If all of your competitors are taking 5, 6, 7 days to get the call, go there, make an estimate, and then send an estimate a week later, you can be ahead of the game. We've had estimates where within two hours we have got a call, set up the estimate, made the estimate, visited them in person, made the estimate, set the estimate, got the estimate accepted, and got a 50% down deposit on a large landscaping job. That happens all the time, where we get that done within just a matter of hours. And you can do that and keep increasing prices and keep a premium in price, but because people want to buy based on speed and time, that you can cut out your competition. So that's a great way to increase your conversion ratio. If you can double your conversion ratio from like 20% to 40% just by doing those things, you, you will double your sales next year. So focus on those three things. Those three things are referrals. Whether it be online or in person, people telling each other that so and so did great work. Whether it be online or in person, work on those referrals. Number two is work on the neighbors of the clients you already have to increase route density and efficiency. Number three is increase your conversion ratio by having systems and procedures that make you professional and will get you in front of your customers fast and get the job accepted, get the job done, follow up. And it's a continuous loop, right? Once you convert someone, you make the sale good and then you do the work well. Then it's right back to the top referrals and just a constant evolution. If someone's become a lead, a customer, then they become someone, a referral agent, someone you can look back to and get referrals from. So it's a continuous cycle. And I promise you, if you do those three things without very much money, you, you can really double your sales in just one year.