How to Get Mowing & Landscaping Clients in the Fall

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. Today we're going to be answering questions that came in on the Facebook group about the fall and what you can do to accelerate your business throughout the next three months. The last quarter of 2019. I apologize if I'm stuffed up, look tired, all of that stuff. I'll get through it. But I wanted to answer some of these questions that came in on the group. If you're not a part of the Landscape Business course Facebook group, make sure you join today. I posted this question this morning, about an hour or so ago, and I wanted to take the first five or six questions that came in. So I'm just gonna take these in order and hopefully it can help you and your business. So DJ Babinow asks, how often would you recommend advertising via social media for fall and wintertime work? Not necessarily paid advertising, but through the sites we currently use. So what I'm guessing you mean by this DJ is like native on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. Like just posting, essentially, not actually doing paid media, not doing Facebook ads, but posting on your Facebook page, for example. And so what I would rec. We don't do enough of that in our existing shop at Augusta. I would say that we don't do it half as much as we probably should. And the reason usually is because we already have so much work. And so really it's dictated, I feel your marketing spend and your marketing activity and your output should be dictated by how much work you are booking out. Cause if you're booked out two months, there's just no reason to be putting before and after pictures everywhere. Like, you should make them, but you shouldn't be like advertising them. You shouldn't. It's not as important. I should say. I would want you to still do that. But if you're like, if you booked out for the entire year, there's no reason to get more leads. And so I would focus more. You say, well, should you just not post all? No, I would focus on building relationships with people instead of trying to get more phone calls. Because if the phone calls that are coming in, you're basically saying, we're too busy, sorry, we can't help you. That's just a really lame customer experience. So I would focus more on educating them or doing other kind of long term branding plays if the short term leads were not needed because you already had so much work. And so this is a balancing act of marketing and branding, you know, going for the right hook and asking for the sale versus just educating the customer, giving them valuable information.

Creating a relationship by showing them behind the scenes. There's a balance there. And in my mind, it's dictated mostly by how much work you have. So in this case, dj, a lot of times in the fall, September, October, depending on most people's climate, it's actually really busy because the grass starts growing. You kind of get a big bump of grass growing again. And then you also get a bunch of fall cleanups, leaf cleanup, storm cleanup, branch cleanup, trimming bushes, property cleanups. All that sort of stuff happens, right? September, October for most climates. And so in general, most landscaping business are pretty busy during the fall, and then it falls off pretty hard in the winter, again, depending on your climate. So when referencing your question, you say how often would you recommend advertising via social media for fall, wintertime work? Not necessarily paid advertising, but through the sites you currently use. So what I would say is.

Post as much as you need to get more work and let that balance between branding and marketing, or branding and asking for the sale be dictated by how much work you have. And so if I would be posting as frequently as you usually do, so that might be twice a week, it might be every single day, whatever it is, I would try to make sure that you are asking for the sale. If you only have a few days of work and you're just trying to create more work for yourself, I would be posting pictures of leaf cleanups before and afters. I would do some cool angles, maybe with blowers, like with leaves blowing up or trimming a bush or whatever it is with your uniform, with your truck in the background. Maybe I'd be doing those sort of things, asking people if they need a cleanup, maybe sharing that in local Facebook groups, on Craigslist, whatever you do, if you're really small, you Craigslist, but Facebook groups and things like that in your local area might be good. And so if I'm in the place, though, where I'm four or five, six weeks booked out or when people are calling, I'm basically saying, hey, I'm too busy. I'm going to take a different approach. Not really change so much the pace in which I'm posting, but in terms of how I am, what kind of content I'm posting, it's going to be more around branding. All right, so it's gonna be more, hey, this is our employee of the month, or this is a job that we did. And here's some videos of it. Like, less of asking for the sale, because I don't really don't want them to call for me, just to tell them that I'm two months booked out and I can't do their cleanup. So that's how I would kind of dictate it. Secondary way to look at that is ask for the sale even when you're booked out now in the fall and book the jobs out for December, January, whenever, you know, you get slow and use that as leverage as a way of creating scarcity for the customers. Look, we're two months booked out. We only have a few more spots available in the winter to get projects done. Give us a call, see if your project can be done in the winter and get on the schedule today before it's too late. And really make that scarcity of, hey, there's this window between fall cleanups and spring cleanups, a few months there that we have do jobs and you can, even though you might be booked out really far now, you can book into that time period by saying, hey, there's this window of time we have available before we're too busy. And so call now to book out two, three months from now and fill up that time slot, those time slots. Kevin Fairburn asked what is the best marketing combination for fall marketing? Facebook ads, door hangers, direct mailers, yard signs, or question mark? So all of these work. Just how much money do you want to spend? My big thing is timing in fall cleanups. Like I've mentioned on the podcast, I think before is you want to be advertising right around that first storm, when all the leaves fall down, when branches start breaking, when the bushes start looking disheveled, when there's drifts of leaves and beds and weeds are starting to grow because the grains now fallen and it's not super dry like the summer. So I think timing is imperative on fall cleanups and fall marketing and in terms of combination for media type, I like combining the two. So if I'm going to do door hangers, I'm going to do Facebook ads around those exact neighborhoods. If I'm using eddm, same thing. I'm going to do EDDM to certain neighborhoods and I'm going to target them with Facebook ads before and after those are sent out. Again, it's all about the timing aspect. So you might do an EDDM to four neighborhoods on a Wednesday, on a Monday and a Tuesday, you run Facebook ads against just their neighborhoods, basically telling them that you're gonna be dropping something off in the mail for them, and then they get the mailer Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you do another Facebook ad that Basically says, hey, did you get what was in the mail? Here was the offer. Click here below and let's get set up. So I think a combination and timing is super important in terms of media. But I would also say that in terms of the best, I would say that the best ROI is going to be your email marketing to your existing customers. Because this is again a time when people start thinking about getting the last projects in before the winter is also the time they start thinking about fall cleanups and all that sort of thing. So if you have a really good database of customers that you've kept warm, like, not like oh hi, I know I haven't emailed you in six months or we haven't even touched based in six months, do you want work done? Like if you stayed in touch with them every month with monthly newsletters, weekly newsletters, however you do it, I think that this time, if you're trying to capitalize on the fall can be a great time to send more frequent emails. So if you're doing monthly, maybe do every two weeks. That's what we do at Augusta is during September, October, we do every two weeks we do emails because it's a great time to upsell people on the high profit margin stuff. Fertilizations, core aerations, batching, stuff like that. Great time to do that for us here. And so we, we kind of sprinkle in a couple extra emails and those are by far the best. So like last week they sent out an aeration automate, like an aeration email where they click a button and it basically triggers the job to be done the next day and they have to click the button on, on the email. And I think they got like 50 plus responses to that and so immediately fills up, you know, a couple schedules for them. So again, I think email marketing is by far the best. When customer demand, that is spring and fall, that's the like if you have a good, a warm database of emails, that's when it's valuable. Like I said, if you haven't emailed these people in a year and you're like, hey, by the way, do you need a fall cleanup? It's not going to work. Your click through ratio won't be as good. So Victor Serrano asks definitely how to market our businesses during the winter. I live in the south, so how to market our businesses during the winter. So again, this is really gonna be dictated by a few things, the size of your business and in terms of how much money you have to go spend on marketing. And so if you're a solo guy, like you're just working out by yourself in the field or you have one employee. This is when you start really getting creative, like offering a bunch of different types of services. It might be, you know, pressure washing or gutter clean out or trimming bushes or leaf. You really start to diversify, doing a bunch of stuff. You might do snow shoveling, you might do plowing snow, whatever it is like you start really diversifying services. And I like is when people only do that during the winter if they're small, and then they focus on their primary bread and butter the rest of the year when they're really busy. Another thing is if you're larger, your business is larger. What I recommend is using these times, like I mentioned before, September, October, the fall cleanup kind of era, when you're already so busy that you're not necessarily trying to get projects because you're trying to do cleanups and immediate work. So listen to my last podcast episode about the four things I would recommend for fall. And one of them is focusing on the immediate needs of the customer, that is the fall cleanups, and then scheduling projects out for the winter. So I might be trying to get projects right now selling projects, but they're gonna be being booked in the winter if I'm super busy right now doing fall cleanups. So the fall cleanups usually are pretty native just from the demand of your clientele, your email database from your local market. And then you can use the projects that are like a week or two week long projects, book those out in the winter. So right now, as I'm talking about this, we're talking like we're at the beginning of October. I would start marketing now for those projects, create scarcity in the winter. As if there's a time period that you can only fill before spring starts and say like, look, we got six spots left. And you know that those six spots are one week projects. Six of them would make six weeks. And you have that six week window of say January 1st to February 15th that you try to fill up with projects because that's your slow time. And so I would use that scarcity, I would use that how many spots you have left and try to sell them now when people are still thinking about projects. Because if you wait until the middle of December when everyone's thinking about Christmas, you're not going to be. It's very difficult to sell paver patios and retaining walls. People aren't thinking about it. It's really hard in the middle of the January when everyone's just spent too much on Christmas and it's too cold outside in their mind to be thinking about landscaping. So try to sell it now when there's demand for it, get their 50% down, like get their job ready to roll, get the materials ready to roll, and then actually perform the work. In the middle of the winter when you're usually slow.

Kevin asks when is the best time to invest in new, different equipment and what dictates that your decision? So a lot of the times people are thinking about this now because you have a bunch of cash and you're like, okay, well for tax sake, I need to spend money on a trailer or a truck or a piece of equipment or bobcat or whatever it is, shop. And so you're like, okay, well I need to spend money so I don't have to pay tax on it. Like I can do a write off before the end of the year. And that's true. And a lot of manufacturers, especially in trailer industry, have big discounts in December because they know people are doing that. They have cash, a bunch of cash, and they want to spend it. This is my biggest worry about that is that people forget how long the winter is. If they have a slowdown, they forget that January and all of February and then it starts raining in March and they can't do a whole lot. And all of a sudden they buy a piece of equipment in December and it sits four months before they even actually get to use it. I would much rather pay a little bit extra for a piece of equipment, but know that it's gonna get paid off.

The worth of the equipment's gonna be paid off. It's gonna pay for itself in a matter of a couple months instead of it getting bought new and then sitting over all of the winter and essentially just taking a big chunk of cash out of your pocket. So this is different. Again, if you're doing this for tax purposes, it's totally different. But if you're doing this just for the sake of there's a good deal, I should buy something. I would highly recommend waiting, keeping your CA high because those dollars would be much better spent in the spring. And the reason I say that is because in general, I see landscapers having a bunch of cash in the fall, Then they get through the winter and then they come to spring. But because they bought a bunch of nice equipment in December, they no longer have the money to go out and spend on marketing, to go spend on training their new employees, to go out to advertise, to find new employees, and they get cash strapped at the time of year when they absolutely need the money the most, which is the winter, I would say the spring rush. And so remember that depending on your climate, winter can be long. And that as you have a bunch of cash now because everyone, you're really busy. This is the reason landscapers fall in this trap right now. They have quite a bit of money because they had a really good season, economy's been good, whatever, really good season. And all of a sudden they're really busy with calls and fall cleanups and works just pouring in. And so their immediate inclination is like, oh, I'll have cash to go out and spend more, buy more equipment, or we're going to be growing like this next year and I'm going to need more equipment. Well, just hold your horses. Like next year is next spring and that's like six months away. So just hold your horses. And if you're doing it for tax reason, that's different because it's a third off of whatever you spend, you get a write off, right? So it's a little bit different there. But if you're just buying it because there's a good deal or manufacturers or dealers have special deals at the end of the year, I would really question whether or not your cash flow is going to be inhibited in the spring when you need that money the most.

This next one's an interesting question. Little bit long. Gregory Hunt asks. I'm in a large military town, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and my biggest issue is client turnover. Families are only here for two years and then leave, which for one, creates an environment where they don't want to invest in quality maintenance of their property. And two, creates an issue of constantly losing customers due to the high rate of them moving. I've had 90 different clients this year, but only maintained 30 at a time due to them moving or being deployed. I was stationed here for nine years, by the way, so I know the area and the mindset of the service members. I'm looking for some outside opinion or strategy that I might not be thinking of. So I could go a bunch of generic things about how to like, help better, make your attention better. But actually you asked for something kind of like what that you might not be thinking of. And this is what I would say you might have already thought about this, but this is what I thought of right off the bat, and that is use your county assessor's office to contact all your customers, and I'm sorry, all your customers. As you get a lead, you get a customer, there's a renter. Oh, sorry. Let me clarify all this. So after Gregory posted this question, I asked him, just for context, are they mostly renters or homeowners? Gregory put good point, should have included that. Mostly renters. Our median age in Jacksonville is 23 years old. So. And then you put a couple graphs there from.

Worldpopulationreview.Com which is a great website, by the way. Anyways, so this is what I would say that's a little bit out of the box. We could do a whole video on retention and how to keep customers and things, but when they physically have to be deployed and their renters, then it changes things up a bit. So what I would do is I would. Every time I get a lead and a customer I would contact, I would go into the Whatcom count. I'd go to the county assessor's office. And the reason I said Whatcom County Assessor's office is because that's what I'm used to in our county is Whatcom. So go in the county assessor's office, figure out the name and address of the homeowner, because all public domain. So if you know it's a renter, they're a lead. They sign up for $25 a week mowing services, contact the homeowner, get their information and make a connection. At least. At least say, hey, Mr. Jones, I know you're renting to Sally Jr. And she's in the military. We're just letting you know we're going to be servicing the property. We really look forward to making sure that your property, the homeowner, stays in the best condition possible and making sure that Sally Jr. Smith, Sally Jr. Stay is comfortable making a connection. At least I would go so far as to also try to get them to make it part of the rent. And so I'd say, hey, look, Mr. Jones, instead of when you have turnover every time at your property.

If there's two or three weeks in between, you don't want the grass getting overgrown. Why don't we charge you $25 per mow and then you just up the rent by an extra 100 bucks a month and you'll be able to ensure that the property is always taken care of, regardless if you have a good tenant, a bad tenant, a tent that's really busy, a tent that work at night, and they can't take care of the lawn, whatever it is, we will make sure the property is always looking good. And here's the prices. And I would. Even if you're just doing Number one, and just making the connection with them that's valuable. So that when the, when the tenant does leave, you immediately contact the homeowner to, hey, just want to see if you want to get on service, get back on service because, you know, the renter's gone. You know, I don't know if you have another tenant if it's going to be vacant for a while, but would you want us to continue service? So at least you make the contact with the homeowner. Secondarily, I'd be pushing them to try to keep it on where you're billing the homeowner instead of the renter so that way you don't have a big turnover. So that was my out of the box strategy that I just thought of right away might help. Last question comes from Joe. Joe asked last time on the podcast, last time on the podcast you mentioned about the call center. Oh, for Augusta. Okay. I'm interested in a franchise. Okay. So, Joe, yeah, the call center is something I'm really excited about for the franchisees. And what we're doing is essentially they have the option that if they miss a phone call, that it'll go to our call center. And our call center will be able to have a dedicated phone line for every single franchisee. They'll go get the phone call, answer it just as if it was your office. And so, and you only have to pay the call center by the minute. So instead of paying someone full time as an office person, you can have us at the call center for Augusta being at your service 247 when your phone rings and you can't get to it because you're on an estimate or out on a job site or maybe you do have office staff, but all their phone lines are busy. Instead of that customer having to wait till the end of the day or next day for you to get back to them, we can answer the phone call, go directly into your service autopilot, make payments, set up appointments for you. We can do customer resolution. If people call about jobs, we can open up the estimate and sell them on it. So our staff is trained just for Augusta lawn care franchisees and just for service autopilot. And so that's really the value of being the franchisee, having the access to the call center and you can turn it on and off at will. So if there's a time of year that you know, like, you're super busy or like there's a big job that's kind of going south and it requires you to be on site, you can just forward your calls and, you know, make it so when calls don't get answered by your phone, they just go directly to our call center. And then we handle everything for you. And then, like I said, you only get charged by the minute. So if they're on, you know, if they're on the phone for three minutes and you're getting charged $1.29 per minute, you get charged $3.90 for that call. And that might have been a $20,000 paver job. It might have been a mowing client that we sold for you over the phone, but you just pay for the time on the phone. And then our office would take, put together a form sent for you, send it to you via text or email. So you know what happened and what was said and done, if you know, if an estimate was set up for the next day or an appointment or if they scheduled a job. And so that's what, that's what the call center is. And we're launching that in November when the first group of franchisees come here. So that's kind of what that's all about. AugustaLawCareServices.com franchise, you get some more information. So, anyways, thank you all so very much. Again, thank you for those that posted the questions on the Facebook group.