How to Sell More Landscape and Lawn Care Jobs (THIS WORKS!)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes here. And today I'm going to talk about four ways you can close more landscaping and lawn care jobs in your business. And I'm going to go from the thing that I would look at first to the thing that I would look at last. So this is in order of importance. If you're trying to grow your business or get it started or you're potentially started your business and you're just not getting enough jobs, the number one thing you want to look at is close ratio. Close ratio is simply this. The number of estimates accepted. Estimates accepted or how many jobs you won divided by total number of estimates given. Total estimates given or sent to the client. So If I have 40 estimates that have been accepted, jobs have been accepted and I did 80 estimates that I gave out to people I did total of total estimates given were 80, that would impute a 50% close ratio. Okay, now I've talked about in the past, what is a good close ratio? What is a bad close ratio in general? 50 to 70% is what I want you to see when someone's trying to grow really fast. And I want to see between 30 and 50% when someone is trying to reap as much profit out of the business as possible and not really interested in hyper growth or trying to grow and scale the business. So that's the close ratio. I have other videos about that, but today I'm going to talk about how do we increase this number? How do we increase the percentage, the close ratio, the close percentage of our estimates? How do I increase this number right here, the number of jobs accepted? So there's four different ways and I'm going to talk about them. The first one is the thing I do first. The second is what I'd look at next because the last one is what people default to first when it's out of order, they default to trying to change the price first. And like, oh, if I'm not closing up jobs, I should definitely lower the price first. That's actually the last thing you should do. So let's go through these one by one. The first thing you want to look at if you're not closing enough jobs or you want to increase your close ratio is better estimate verbiage. So your estimate verbiage is going to be all of the notes that you put on your estimate. So instead of saying install mulch, $500. Well, what type of mulch, how much mulch? Where are you going to install the mulch? In the flower beds, in the backyard, in the front Yard, it include the side yard. Like all of the things that you want to make sure are very, very clear in your estimate notes. The verbiage needs to be very, very clear. Adding to that both in size and in specific. I don't even know the word specificity. Specific. I don't even know whatever. But being specific with your estimate verbiage, extremely important to be able to sell. If I get an estimate proposal from a contractor and I have it online, I want to just be able to click accept proposal because I know exactly what I'm getting. But if your estimate verbiage is too vague, not clear enough, not specific enough, doesn't tell how much yardage of material, doesn't tell the color of mulch, where the mulch is being installed, any of that stuff, then the client doesn't have the confidence just to literally click a button, accept proposal. They don't have that confidence. They're going to call, they're going to ask multiple questions, or they're just going to go with the contractor that gave them a specific estimate that told exactly what's gonna happen in the order in which it was gonna be done, et cetera. So first thing I'd be looking at, do you have enough verbiage on your estimate? The next thing I'd be looking at is speed. So there's twofold to this. One is going to be speed of the appointment. So when they actually call and ask for, hey, I wanna meet someone, I wanna talk about installing some mulch and putting in flower beds in my backyard. The first thing is who gets the appointment first. Set up the appointment and actually get there. The next thing is speed of delivery. So after delivery, after you have actually done the appointment, how fast do you deliver the estimate? Does it take you 24 hours? Does it take you a week? Does it take you two weeks? Or do you do it in the driveway of the client? After talking to them, you literally can get to their appointment within 24 hours. You set up a time, you meet them, and then in the driveway, 10 minutes after you finish meeting with them, you're literally putting in the notes, the verbiage for your estimate, and it's being sent out very, very quickly. That is speed. At the end of the day, speed will win this game in terms of getting to the appointment and then delivering the estimate in a fast manner. A lot of times in this industry, for long care and landscaping, the person who gets the estimate to the client first is the person who will win the job. Okay, so speed, extremely important. I'm always Looking at, if I'm restricting leads and say, for example, it's a Monday and someone call, I only do estimates on that side of the town on Fridays. That means that I'm having like four or five days before my appointment. Then I get there Friday, I do the appointment, do the walkthrough, take some measurements, do a little sketch and then let's say on the following Monday. Now I send the estimate to the client. So this took five days, four or five days to get the appointment to the appointment. And then it took me another three days from Friday to Monday to get the estimate delivered again. That's eight days when this could literally be cut down to like one day. If speed is of the essence and speed is something that you really value and bake into your proposal for your clients, your value proposition. So the third thing that I'd be looking at, and again I'm looking at this one first estimate verbiage, then look at how fast are we getting estimates? How fast do we deliver the estimates? The third thing is follow up and that's gonna be okay, so you sent the estimate. Great. Do you then just basically cross your fingers, hold your breath and hope that they contact you? Do you hope that they just click accept proposal blindly and say hey, get me on the schedule? Do you expect them to email you back? What is the follow up process? So whether that be automations, whether that be a phone call, how are you following up? Because automations are great when you have a ton of leads coming in and you're just overwhelmed with just getting the estimates out. Automations are a great way to follow up. But if you don't have a ton of leads coming in, you should be literally calling people the day after the estimate's done. Like hey Mr. Jones, just making sure you got your estimate. Now if you're using a good CRM, you can probably see if they have seen and opened up the estimate. But you're calling them just to make contact, see if there's any questions, they have any work change orders, any clarifying remarks. And you're trying to sell the job on the phone. So phone call, it's a lost art, but picking up the phone and calling someone and saying, hey, just making sure you got your estimate, wondering if you have any questions, see if we can get you on the schedule next week. That alone will increase your close ratio the amount of jobs that you are selling as a function of a percent of the estimates that you're giving. Okay. Every single time you give an estimate, you're wasting money. If you do not close that job. Okay, so If I do 20 estimates and only close two of them, that's a 10% close ratio. That means that for 18 estimates, I have to drive the client's property, answer the phone, send the estimate, talk to the person, all the rest of it. And I'm literally wasting more money on those 18 than the money I'm going to earn on those two accepted estimates. So if you're having a really, really low close ratio, you almost can never be profitable because the cost incurred by trying to do estimates that you never actually get accepted. The fourth and final way to improve your close ratio and sell more jobs is the one that everyone always jumps to first. And it's usually the last one that I even think about, and that's price. Okay, so if someone had a really low close ratio and they're like, man, I'm just not closing enough jobs. The first thing they'll jump to is price. I got lower my price. Everyone's saying that I'm not charging, I'm charging way too much. They say I'm way too expensive. They're saying that Bob down the road is going to do it for $25. And I said $35, et cetera. Everyone will jump to this first. The thing is this. Most clients will not say, your estimate didn't have enough clarifying remarks. It didn't tell me exactly what type of mulch or color of mulch or yardage of mulch or how the job was going to be performed. They're typically not going to tell you, I didn't accept the estimate because your estimate took. Took eight days to get to me and I had someone else give it to me in three days and I already accepted them. They're typically not going to say that. They're going to say, ah, you were more expensive. Or they'll say, we went with someone else or we got it done already, follow up. They're typically not going to tell you, you know what, I had some questions. You never asked me any sort. You never contacted me to ask if I had questions. And so we got someone else to do it. They're not going to tell you that. What a lot of times they will tell you though, is if it's the fourth one, the price. So everyone always thinks this is the big kicker when they forgot that these three things are usually the silent killers that a client will never comment about. Those kind of like go off your radar. Those evaporate into the like, they asked for an estimate, you talked to them, You Met with this person, you shook their hand, and all of a sudden you don't even hear from them. You got ghosted after the estimate was sent. Simply because these are the three silent killers. This is the one that people will actually talk about and say that you're too expensive. But these three are the ones that actually do a lot of the damage. But price is definitely a way to increase your close ratio. If everything was held constant, your customer service, your value, everything. Typically, if price goes down, close ratio will go up. And the bottom line is if you eventually hit zero, like price was zero, you have 100% close ratio. Everyone should accept. Again, assuming you do a good job, they should accept every single job if your price was zero. So theoretically, our goal is, well, hey, we can just race to zero. And that's what we get into price wars and price competition where everyone's getting cheaper and cheaper. Because if we just keep lowering our price, that's gonna keep pushing up our close ratio. And eventually you hit zero and you have no money and you don't have a business. So the question is, I think the thing I want to impress is do not look at price first. Look at these three things. Now. Is price sometimes something that we will adjust and change? No. Yes. Because at the very beginning of your business, at the very start, when you do not have any employees, lowering your price on a job, on a cleanup, on a mulch installation, on a lawn job, you don't have any wages tied to it, which means you don't have any variable cost, variable, variable cost associated with more work. What that means is the cost of doing one more job if I'm solo is literally the fuel in my gas tank. Because I already paid for my insurance, I already paid for my truck, I paid for my equipment. The only thing that really goes into getting that one more job is my time. There's no more variable expense because I don't have a laborer that is getting paid by the hour to work for me. So when you're so low, this is the place that I'm okay with you being. Think about price. Can I lower my price? Because if I do that, I'm going to increase my close ratio. I'm going to get more, more jobs and I fill my schedule. And then when my schedule is filled, I'm going to have the confidence to keep my prices higher. So I always have said this. At the beginning of your business, when you're first getting started, you're solo, maybe one employee, but usually just solo. I'm OK with keeping your prices low until you fill your schedule, because your time, your hours, your workable hours a day are finite, which means I can only maybe do 40, 50 hours of physical labor as a solo operator to fill my schedule. Once that's filled, you should have a lot more confidence to charge the higher prices because you physically can't do more work and fit it into your schedule. But if you're only doing 10, 15, 20 hours of work a week and you want more, go lower your price. I don't really care what your prices are. Fill your schedule with work because your variable cost is next to nothing. You don't have an employee, so you have a whole bunch of untapped labor from if you're only doing 15 hours of work a week and you have the potential to do 40, you basically have 25 hours of untapped labor that you can use. So if I lower my price, that's fine because I don't have any more cost associated with selling that more. Another 25 hours worth of work. It's basically unused labor, and that's my labor. Eventually I'll fill that, and when I get an employee, I'll start charging the prices that are high enough to actually warrant a profit and pay for that variable cost that when I sell another job, I also have more labor attached to it. So I hope that made sense. But the bottom line is, look at these three things first, then look at price. If you're a solo operator, though, I don't care what your price is, fill your schedule. And then once your schedule is filled, you'll have the confidence to keep raising your prices slowly but surely and increasing profits. Whether you're going to stay so low and you just want to make sure that you're literally just charging a premium price as time goes on, or if you're going to raise the price and then be able to afford an employee. Get momentum when you're at solo operator. Get momentum when you're just getting started. Because now the neighbors and the people across the street and the friends of the client that you're serving, they'll start to hear about you. They'll see your truck rolling around that neighborhood will start to see your truck more often. That's going to get momentum, and you need momentum and leads pouring in if you're ever going to charge a premium price. And that's really what the game is all about. So I hope that was helpful. If things like this are helpful, make sure you come to Landscape Summit. It's going to be this January, January 13th, 14th, and 15th myself. I'm going to be bringing some other speakers are going to be doing a great conference. I'd love to see you there in person, live. And I look forward to seeing you in January. We'll see you there.