how to get 100 mowing customers in 100 days!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we're going to be talking about how you can get 100 mowing customers in the next 100 days. So if you're just getting started, this is the right video for you. If you've already started your lawn care business or landscaping business and you're wanting to grow by an additional hundred customers, this is also the video for you. Now, just watching my face talk is very boring. So what am I going to do today? We're going to watch a lawn being cut, because that's what we do as landscapers, and we're going to make a game of this. All right, so what you've got to do today is you've got to guess how many minutes did it take for us to mow this lawn? Watch this whole video. At the end, I'm gonna sprinkle some, you know, hints throughout. At the end, I'll give you an extra one. How long would it take one person? There's two people in this crew, but assuming there was one, how many minutes would it be? So there's two people, and it takes them 10 minutes. You have to comment 20 minutes below. Now, the winner, whoever can get this closest and the fastest, whoever nails it in terms of minutes today, is going to win a free package of all of our door hangers@lawn caremedia.com that's like mowing, hardscaping, landscaping, mulch, aeration, irrigation. We have every single service you can think of, and all of those door hangers, you're able to win the designs for those if you guess today exactly how long it takes to mow this lawn. Now, last week, we had a winner. This is the winner. Nathan Larson. He won last week's video. If you didn't watch that video, check it out here. He guessed 32 minutes. He was correct. He won a full lifetime subscription to landscapebusinesscourse.com worth $599. So he can go there, learn how to grow his business the next for growing up to $100,000 in monthly revenue, it's a fantastic program. He won that, and he did it in the most, the fastest way. So comment below on that and tell me, how many customers did you get in your first 100 business days when you started your company? Without any further delay, let's roll the tape. All right, so this is Blake on the left. We got Ben on the right. Both awesome guys working for the local shop here at the Bellingham, Washington, location for Augusta Lawn Care. Now, we have over 90 locations at Augusta Lawn Care. And I get to see a lot of companies start their lawn care business. And there's some that make get customers with literally within the first month or two. There's others that take a year or two. Today I'm gonna be talking about what the difference is and how you can also get your first hundred customers, how fast you want to grow. Totally up to you. But this is how I would get started and this is how I would get to my first hundred customers on a shoestring budget. You don't need a ton of money for this one. I'm not gonna do Google Ads and Facebook ads. And you'll notice I don't even mention a website until you're after your first hundred mowing customers. So let's jump into it. Your first 10 customers, what would you do with, what should you be doing to get your first 10 customers? Well, in my opinion, you've got to do door knocking. Door knocking is the good old fashioned. Put shoes on and pound pavement. You're gonna go from house to house, you're gonna knock on people's doors and you're say, hey, I'm Mike, I'm starting Mike's lawn care here and if you ever need service, just let me know. And you're literally going to talk to them and ask them if they need service. And if they say no, that's fine, you move on. And you're gonna have door hangers in your hand potentially or something to give them, maybe a business card or something like that, that's fine. But you're just literally going to door knock. And you're going to do it in one neighborhood, maybe 100 or 200 houses, just door knock there, knock on all their doors, talk to them, introduce yourself, give them a little flyer, give them something. At the end of the day, you're just introducing yourself and that is how you will get your first 10 customers. Building personal connection. You're not going to be able to do that if you have 500, 600, 700 customers, because you don't have that personal connection anymore. You don't even know the name of your customers. I don't even know 1/3, not even 2% probably of the customers at Augusta. So therefore it's a matter of those first 10 you're going to have that personal connection with. You're going to door knock, knock, knock knock. Hey Mr. Jones, my name is Mike. I just, just got started with Mike's lawn Care. I would love to service your property, help you out ever you can. And yeah, there's anything I can do for you, let me know. Here's my card. That's literally what you're going to do to get the first 10 customers. Now the next set, the next stage of growth is from 10 customers up to 30. You've got your first 10. You did your door knocking. How are we going to get from 10 to 30? This is where we going to use a print marketing strategy. And all this means is we're going to use print material to be able to get our message out to more people. Because now you got 10 customers. Maybe you're mowing them on the weekend, maybe you're mowing them in the evenings, but we're trying to get to 30. And 30 is almost going to fill your schedule because maybe at this time you're just getting started part time, etc. If you're just getting started. But again, we got from 10 to 30. How are you going to do that? Door hangers and yard signs. So I want you to do two things. I want you to put yard signs in the yard of all your existing 10 customers. I also am going to want you to put door hangers on the neighbors of all of those 10 customers as well. Maybe it's the five customers or the five neighbors around your existing customers. You literally need like 50, 50 door hangers. You literally are going to put five door hangers on the houses, the neighbors next door neighbors of your customers and the three people across the street. Five times 10, that's 50. You're going to do that and you're going to put yard signs in all 10 of your existing customers. That should get you to 30. You're probably going to get an extra 50 or 100 door hangers, maybe even a couple hundred, and just do more door hangers in your neighborhood on the one that you've already knocked on everyone's door. Now you're going to do door hangers and you're going to try to get to 30 customers inside that nice tight area. Just a few neighborhoods you don't need to do across your whole city. Just a few neighborhoods, maybe a mile radius, maybe a few different neighborhoods that you think are really good for your business to get started in. Start there. That's going to get you to 30 customers. All right, so first 10 door knocking. 10 to 30. That next set, that next group is going to be door hangers and yard signs. Because now when people drive by and they all start noticing, oh, there's Mike's lawn care. There's Mike's lawn care. Oh, there's Mike's lawn care. They're looking at all of those yard signs and that's validation that, hey, maybe Mike's lawn care is the person that I should be calling for my lawn care needs. Next step, how do we get to 50 customers? Because now at 30 customers you're pretty busy. Like that's going to be a few days worth of full time work. How are we going to actually do marketing? Because man goodness, I'm starting to get pretty busy. So getting from 30 to 50 customers is a lot of times where people kind of stall out. At this stage is where I really recommend you focus on every door direct mail. Because we don't have the time necessarily now to be doing door hangers and running around. Because we've got 30, 40, 50 customers. We're starting to get full time. Like this is a full time every day getting the work done, depending on the size of your property obviously. But for the most time, if you get 10, 12 lawns done in a day, average property being 50, $60 per cut, that's pretty good. If you're mowing by yourself, that's pretty good. And that's gonna be pretty average. And so you're gonna be basically full time working all day long. You're not gonna have the time now to do door hangers and chase down yard signs and put them up in all your properties. And my goodness, you're starting to get full time. So well, now you need to rely on something that's gonna cost a little bit more money, but now you can afford it because you're gonna have that 30, 40 customers already rolling in income every single month. So what you're going to do is do every door direct mail. If you have no idea what that is, it's eddm. And if you just go to Google, do ED DM and then usps, United States Postal Service. Basically what happens is you can take a bundle like a hundred different postcards or flyers, any sort of print literature, take that into the post office and they're going to deliver it in any given postal route. So what you can do is you can choose like one or two, maybe three postal routes that are right around that neighborhood that you got started in and really start to focus on getting route density. And maybe you're going to spend a few hundred dollars because hey look, the postage is like, let's just say it's 16, 17, 70, 18 cents. Just round up to 20 and then maybe to print off a flyer going to cost you, let's just say $0.05, $0.25 to be able to print these flyers off and get them distributed. Well, that means literally I can do a thousand, a thousand of those for just $250. $250 is going to get me a thousand flyers delivered. What's really cool about that is I can make $250 in probably, you know, maybe half a day. And therefore I'm able to take half a day's worth of work and distribute flyers to a thousand people. That's what's going to get you from 30 customers all the way up to 50. That extra 20. Going from 30 to 50, you're already busy. You can't, you don't have time to go knock on doors and do door hangers and yard signs. You're just trying to get the work done. You're trying to make revenue. And so at this point that's when you start actually deploying things into marketing and spending a little bit more money. Yeah, it's 250 bucks, 300 maybe spend $400. But now you get some real scale. You start to get more customers because you're able to reach more of them and you don't have to put more time into it. You're starting to put money and investing your money into the business. The next stage of growth is 50 to 100. And this is where in my opinion, you should get like a virtual office assistant. Okay? Because up until this point, you know, you've been taking the calls, you've been emails, but now you're too busy. Get a virtual office assistant that can do over the phone estimates where they can measure the property, they can use square footage and give a price over the phone. This is going to allow you to scale very quickly and allow you to stay in the field actually performing work at 70, $80 an hour. Instead of paying someone just or taking your time to answer the phone, do emails, get the estimates and out let someone else do that. Get a virtual office assistant, pay him a couple bucks per minute. It's fine. Your time is better spent doing the work and not being distracted throughout the day. Now if you're getting to past 100 customers, you got a full time employee helping you. Now this is the time to invest in a great website and you don't have to get something really fancy. You know, in fact, like lawn careweb design.com I own that company. I tell people do not use that business. My, my business until you're above in trying to get above 200,000 in annual revenue. To get started, use weebly.com, use squarespace.com like 10, 15, 20 bucks a month. When you really want to take it to the next level, get a custom site that looks really good on mobile and is really fast and responsive and gets great Google rank. Then potentially you can move on to lawn careweb. Design.com Great resource. I believe in 100%, but you don't need that to get started. And if you're getting past 100 customers, get started with something cheap. If you're trying to scale past though 150, 200 customers, way beyond 100, definitely a good thing to get a really great website. It's going to look really good on Google as well as rank high and get lots of leads that way because that's how you really start to scale is getting leads to your website where people find you on Google and you have to spend money on things like print advertising. So whether you're going from 0 to 10, 10 to 30, 30 to 50, or 50 to 100, or you're past 100 at every single stage, you can grow your business. If you're systematic and you're thinking about it from an advertising perspective, putting the money back into the company and scaling it up to get more customers. Now, regardless of what stage you're at, there are definitely resources in the description. There's see the links that are going to help you at every single one of these stages. Landscapebusinesscourse.com Great resource. Lawn caremedia.com Great resources. Get those door hangers, get those flyers, get those postcards. Those are all in the links in the description. Check them out and make sure you comment below. Exactly how long you think that this job took. How many minutes is whoever's closest is going to get all the door hangers on? Lawn caremedia.com all those designs completely free. Ever guesses it first? So here we go. Do it now. Now let's.