How to Stand Out From The Competition - PART 3 (Lawn Care and Landscaping Business)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com. whether you're listening on the podcast or on YouTube or Facebook watching a video, thank you for tuning in again. Today we are wrapping up the third part of this series about how to differentiate yourself from the competition. So if you're trying to differentiate yourself and you have a bunch of people in your market, whether it be landscapers, lawn care, any sort of green industry, tree care, whatever it is, fertilization, pest control, whatever it is, and you have a bunch of competition, a lot of times people get very afraid of competition. For instance, if you're going into a new market, people are saying, well, I don't want to go into that market. It's too competitive. There's too many people playing in that market, too many other lawn care companies or landscaping companies, too many big companies. People will say, in my opinion, competition is just a signal that there is lots of opportunity. So if there's lots of companies and lots of competition, that means there's obviously a market there, there's business to be had. You just have to figure out how to go there and prove to the customer that you're better than all the other options. So I wouldn't be concerned or worried about going to a new market or anything like that, or growth because of competition. I would look at competition and even new people coming in, new competitors coming in into your marketplace, I'd see that as a sign that there's more and more opportunity. Your job as the business owner is to figure out how do you differentiate yourself from all those other competitors so the customers still choose you and they're still willing to pay a premium regardless of, regardless of whether or not someone's going to come in and try to price cut you. So today we're talking, because this is the third part, and we are talking about the three ways you can differentiate yourself after the sale. So we talked about before the sale, we talked about after they've called you and asked for a lead, the estimation process. And then now we're talking about you completed the job, the landscaping job. It could even be your first mowing. Even if you got someone on a recurring mowing job after their first service, what do you do to differentiate yourself from all of your competitors? So there's three different things. Number one is client walkthroughs. This is an absolute must. It's nothing groundbreaking. The problem is, a lot of times, as a company grows and you get more employees, employees necessarily, if they're field workers, they might not want to Go and talk to the client after the job is done. Number one, they're worried that the client is going to ask for something else to be done and they want to go home. The employee does. Number two, they're worried that the client might not be happy. They might actually say something negative about the work that they did. And so they don't want. And a lot of times just the field workers, they just don't want to be in communication with the client. And so we've trained our people that everyone in the organization is. Is liable and is responsible to effectively communicate with the client. It's super important, and it's one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves from the competition. So whether or not their project manager is there or their crew lead, regardless of who is at the job, we have to always have great communication with the client, especially at the client walkthrough. So this is after your first mo. This is after a landscaping job, a cleanup, whatever it is your first interaction and job actually being completed at a job site. You need to do a client walkthrough. At that client walkthrough, you need to train your guys to walk up to the door, and you want the people that did the work to do the client walkthrough because they know what was done, how the trees are trimmed, they know all the answers to the questions the client might have. And now you take that. That employee takes that client around the house, walks through the entire job, make sure everything's good. The number one reason we started doing this was not because of customer service or making people happy or separating ourselves from the competition. It was because callbacks are killer. Having a client call you back because something wasn't pruned right or they wanted something a little bit different. And just a little, even if it's a few minutes. But that callback process is annoying. The office has to deal with it. There's a lot of administrative costs. The client isn't happy because regardless if it's something little, they're not 100% satisfied. They have to make a complaint. And that never feels good. Even if you're a good person, it never feels good to complain. And so you don't want to put the client in that position. You don't want to put your employees or your office staff in that position. I'm always getting these callbacks. So that's why originally we started this policy. You have to do a walkthrough after your job with the client, and the person that did the job has to do that walkthrough. So in that walkthrough, the employee is going to basically walk the entire job, point out what they did, perhaps show some highlights of things they might have used some intuition or teach them about perhaps maintaining that tree or some fertilization that they might need on that shrub that is not doing very well. Or if you've installed a landscape, you can figure out ways to educate them and add value during that client walkthrough and review essentially everything you did for them, make sure everything's good. When they shake the hand of that employee at the end of that client walkthrough, they have essentially said, we're all good to go. I'm ready to be billed. The office knows that they can send that invoice with confidence, knowing it's gonna get paid. There's not gonna be callbacks and a bunch of issues going forward. So TR people do client walkthroughs. And like I said, the reason we started that was from more of an internal financial standpoint, not wanting to get callbacks and all of that. But down the road, we found out clients love it. The reviews, when they come in, people are saying how much they love the client walkthroughs. They love interacting with the guys that actually did the work and not just an office manager or even the estimator. They like to interact with the guys that did the job, even if they're not the best skill that you communication. Maybe they're not extroverted, but there's that connection with them, and it's very powerful. So the client walkthrough is number one. Number two is asking for referrals, but not just asking for referrals like all of your other competitors do. All of your other competitors send an email out a couple weeks later or maybe in the invoice, asking them to tell their friends, or maybe they even are fancy enough to have some sort of referral program. What I suggest you doing is not asking for a referral and right away, but ask for a referral in the form of a handwritten letter. So what we do every single job, at the end of each week, we get a card that is.

All it has, is basically blank inside. On the outside, it's a really nice card, like really nice and thick cardboard card stock. And on the front is a picture of our whole team, and the inside is pretty much blank. At the bottom, it asks for the referrals, and it says if they know of anyone that could use our services, in that letter, we just say, thank you for doing business with us. Our office manager does a handwritten note to them, personalizes it to what the job. Kind of like what we talked about in part number two of sending the handwritten letter for the estimate. You send another handwritten letter for the thank you in that you ask for a referral. And we also have all the guys that were involved in that job, we have them sign that paper, put their autograph. So once a week, we'll have a whole bunch of those lined up on the desk and which people with a sticky note, who needs to sign which paper? And. And if they were on the job site, they sign it. And then we send that to the client. The client then has a few business cards placed in that letter that we ask them to go ahead and refer us if there's anyone that they know that would need our services. So that's number two. Number one is client walkthroughs. Number two is a signed letter, handwritten letter asking for the referral. It's a very. You got to remember, this is one thing people forget about referrals and about word of mouth is when someone gives a word of mouth referral, they're not trying to necessarily help their friend. They're doing it for selfish reasons. They have a good feeling that they made a good decision by making that referral. For instance, if I buy Nikes and I go tell my friends, you know, you go to go buy Nikes, I'm not telling it because I want them to have a better foot experience or, you know, help something with their foot and make them run faster. I'm telling them to go get Nikes because it validates my decision to buy Nikes because I am now correct, I am right in buying them by telling other people that they work and they're good. And I was smart enough to buy Nikes. And so what you have to remember is people want to give referrals, they want to give word of mouth, they want to tell their friends that they made a right decision in hiring your company. So make sure you ask for referrals. It's not selfish if you phrase it correctly. Handwritten letters are a great way to do that. Number three, a third way that you can differentiate your company from the competition after the job is videos and pictures of the jobs. So a lot of times you'll see some people throw up some pictures on their website or on their Facebook page, before and afters and things like that, and that's fine and good. There's two different reasons why you want to have media before and after. Number one, it's really cool for the client to be able to see their job before and after. So when the job is done and they get a video or a picture of the process in which their job was done, if it's a landscaping job for mowing, it's a little bit different. But for landscaping, cleanups, things like that, it's great to have the before and after pictures. Have a video is really great. So what we do at our company is every single month we have a vlog. And if you haven't checked it out, just go to augustalawncareservices.com you can see our videos on there, but then you can subscribe to the YouTube channel and our Facebook page. We post them one time every month. Usually the first week of the month we post for the previous month. And all it is is a compilation of most of our jobs, kind of a few seconds. So clean up. We might do a quick 20 second shot of what it looks like before, 20 second afterwards. And then if it's a big landscaping job, there might be different segments of the job that we come into. A quick 10, 15 seconds, update the job. It's great to see the pattern of how a job is carried out. So potential clients love this. They can go on there, see which type of jobs. So what we do is we title underneath our videos what type of jobs are included in that video. So for instance, if there's a potential client that's like, hey, you know what? I need a tree trimming job. They can go through all the videos, choose the ones that have tree trimming and see our work and not just see our before and afters. This is the beautiful thing about video is see the process of the work being done. So us actually videoing the guys up there trimming the trees and hauling away the debris and chipping it up. And even when stuff gets broken, we show the behind the scenes and how we fixed it. We show the office. They might not even get to ever see the office staff if they're always just communicating via email, handwritten letters and phone calls. So showing that behind the scenes occasionally is a great way to get them on the inside of your company and differentiate yourself from everybody else. And that doesn't have a place where they are transparent. Or showing behind the scenes, showing their office staff, showing the new office members, sorry, the team members as they come on staff. We want to show that we want to highlight our team because they're great and they like being able to be out in front of their customers and things like that. They like that jolt of, you know, when we send an email out because we got a new team member or two, they like that the team member does, but also the client. They end up on the inside of the company. When you start sharing personal information, like every single year, we give an update as far as what the company is doing, what we're up to, what our plans are for the next year, and thank the customers, obviously, for being part of that. But we really make them part of the business. They're not going to leave because they now feel part of our success. They feel invested in our success. And that's what you want to do by having a vlog, a video of what you're doing. Even pictures are fine too. Just show behind the scenes, show your team at work, show what other companies aren't willing to share because they think it's a little more literally your cell phone. You can do these videos. They're not complicated. They don't have to be super professional. And it takes a few minutes every month that when we make these vlogs, show the before, the after and how the job transpires. And you will really. The clients, once they see their jobs on there, they think it's really cool. They'll share it with their friends. And then also what will happen is clients, like I said, that want that sort of service done when they come to your website, when they come to your social media page and they see those videos, they can see exactly how the process is, is carried out and have confidence in you 100%. They are. I promise you, you're gonna have a leg up on all of your competition. When a client can see exactly how the job's gonna be carried out before you even show up at the property, before they even pick up the phone to ask you for an estimate. Cause they're gonna know they're gonna have a mental image. Now, the person picking up the phone at the office, they're gonna have a mental image of what it looks like when the crew's getting ready in the morning to come to their job. And now you brought them on the inside. And so those are the three things I suggest. How to differentiate yourself from the competition after the job is done. Number one, do a client walkthrough. Whether you're a solopreneur and you're doing all the work yourself and you do those walkthroughs, that's fine. But as you grow, make sure your people are trained to do that. Number two is ask for referrals in a handwritten letter. Again, it's similar to what we talked about previously during the estimating process making that personal connection. Number three is have videos and pictures of the jobs for the client that you did the work for, as well as potential clients that are looking for those same services. I promise you it'll pay dividends for your business and it'll pay dividends for word of mouth because people will love you and they won't even think twice about going to your competition. So again, this is Mike Andes. You've been listening and watching landscapebusinesscourse.com podcast and vlog and so thank you so much for joining us on the show. And if you have any questions in the comments below, you can email me also@mikelandscapebusinesscourse.com if you have any questions on how to start or like ramp up your business. Definitely send me an email comment below whether it be Facebook or YouTube. And as always, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com if you want to join the course and get access to all our templates and all the marketing material that I show behind the scenes. Thanks again, Mike. Andy's LandscapeBusinessCourse.com signing off.