How to Start a Lawn Care Business in 2026

If you want to build a $1 million home service business, this is the full playbook. Not motivation, not theory. The actual systems that drive growth when the market tightens. I'm going to walk you through the exact framework I use to grow and fix home service businesses around the country. Here's the reality. You have no business without customers, and customers don't happen by accident. This masterclass will be broken into 3 parts: getting leads, marketing, turning those leads into paying customers, sales, and then hiring people to do the work without you being the bottleneck. That's number 3. First, I'll show you how to reliably generate demand in your market. Then we'll break down how to convert that demand into booked jobs at healthy profit margins. And finally, how to hire technicians and leaders so growth doesn't collapse your business. Let's start with marketing. How can you turn prospects strangers into leads. Let's start the course now. The very first way to get customers is completely free, and that is using your Google Business listing. This is what it looks like when you go and search on Google. These all the top are from Google listings. All of this down here is search engine optimization. That's what really comes into play down here. If you've got a lot of clicks, if you have a great web design, things like that, you can see here, this is our location locally. I see in 3 places and I haven't paid for any of these. I see it right here as the number 1 spot for Google listings. I also see on the map because I'm a physical address, and I also rank well on native search. So when I look at Google listings, there's a few things I want to focus on. Number 1, look at how many reviews we got—492 Google reviews. Now that's been over the course of 10 years. If you're just getting started, you've got to get above 30 as quickly as possible. I literally don't care if you need to do services for free just to get reviews. Get at least 30, and you'll likely usually get on like the first page or 2 of Google just by getting 30 Google reviews. It's completely free. It's not going to cost you anything, but we have 500. That's why we're at the top. Another thing you can do to make sure you rank well on here is have an actual address that's verified by Google. That's a physical address inside of your service area. So even though we're called Augusta Lawn Care of Whatcom County, I have a Bellingham address that has a real mailbox and I'm able to get mail there. Now it's a pain in the butt to get verified on Google listings. When it comes to addresses. Back in the day, we could literally get away with just getting a post office box or a UPS store box. Now they're requiring video evidence being submitted to Google to get an address verified. However, it is worth going through the trouble of getting this verified because you can notice here I probably have 80 to 100 competitors in my market. I'm one of just a few that are actually on the map for Google. Google listings and Google Maps are now the same thing, and they're integrating them a lot. So having an address that's verified on Google Very important to ranking well, not only here, but it will be taken into account when it comes to native search. But if I can be the number one go-to on this map, huge win in terms of being able to get more leads for exactly zero cost. And when it comes to optimizing your Google listing, you're going to want to do several things. First off, make sure you have a bunch of pictures. For example, let's go and open up the actual location here for Augusta Lawn Care. And you can see here, if I go to all the images, every single day we're posting images of all the different work sites that we have, and we're showing our trucks, our trailers, our employees, our uniforms, our branding is being showed inside the images. And we usually do this at least 3 times a week across all of our locations. This is going to be giving more information and data to Google. And guess what they love? They love more data. So give them pictures. Give them also information about your business. So when you're editing your Google listing, there's gonna be all sorts of information about your services, your reviews, any updates you might have, photos you might have, and an overview. This overview is gonna include like what areas of the county do you service? What cities? What services do you offer? If you don't keep this updated, it's going to be really bad because what can happen is customers can actually recommend what services you offer, recommend what service areas you're actually being able to do services in. And you don't want those going to Google. You wanna stay on top of this at least on a monthly basis to make sure that all of your relevant information in terms of services, service areas, your contact information, all of that is updated and relevant. I've seen times where people leave this alone for 6 or 12 months, all of a sudden this will get banned simply because someone changed their address or their phone number doesn't line up correctly, making sure their hours are actually correct. Getting banned on Google Listings is a pain in the butt to get it reactivated. It can sometimes take a month or two and many, many attempts to Google to try to get it reactivated. So check on it every single month to make sure everything's updated and you can continue to print these free leads because this costs you again, absolutely nothing. So another way that you can get customers without spending any money on marketing is Facebook groups. In your local market, in your city, in your town, in your neighborhood. Many Facebook groups exist and it doesn't cost anything to be part of them. And the whole nice thing about Facebook groups is everyone's local. And so immediately you have a lot of trust built up with the community simply because you're verified that you live in that area. And there might be 20 or 30 people inside of a neighborhood group. There might be 500 or 600 in your city's group. There might be 100 parents inside of your high school's— your kids' high school group, whatever it is. Get inside those Facebook groups. It doesn't cost you anything. And because you already have the trust built up of being a local community member, you can pitch your services and do it in a delicate way. You know, don't tell them like right off the rip, I'm trying to do my mowing, my mowing service, like come buy from me, it's $40. Like, don't go that direction. Introduce yourself. I live in such and such a neighborhood. Make it really local because that's what that community, what makes it really different. Remember too, when you're first getting started, we don't need customers paying right off the rip. Instead, they can pay with a review, a referral, or an upsell. I would literally be happy to do services basically for free if I can get a Google review or a Facebook review. Or better yet, just ask them, hey, if you're in this Facebook group, I'm willing to do X, Y, and Z service and then just review your service here on this Facebook group. You might get 20 or 30 other people to see that and 2 or 3 of them need the same service. And all of a sudden you got a great referral. So I can get a review, I can get a referral, or I get an upsell, which means even on those Facebook groups, you might say, hey, I'll trim everyone's bushes for free. And then when you do that, you're like, oh man, I can get them for weeding service, mowing service. They also need some mulch installed and their gutters, they need cleaned out. There's an ability to be able to just take an entry-level gateway service and then upsell other services to customers. So when you're first getting started, Use those— that Facebook group to get things besides money: reviews, referrals, and upsells. There's actually a feature inside of Copilot where when you're at a customer's property, you can really quickly upsell them a whole bunch of different services and send them a text or an email automatically with a tap of a button. If you got a lot of guts, you can do door knocking. Now, door knocking is not for the faint of heart. It's very difficult to walk up to strangers' houses, knock on their door, know that you are interrupting them, and try to sell them your services. But ultimately, you're going to have have the highest amount of response because they cannot not respond to you. Keep in mind, when you're doing door knocking, only about 40-50% of people are actually going to be home. And so I recommend keeping something like a door hanger that you can put on the door if they're not home. And so it's not a waste of time walking up their house, waiting there for 30-60 seconds, looking around, doing nothing. Like, have something to be able to put on the door at the very least. Keep in mind, you're only probably going to be able to get to 15-20 houses per hour, when it comes to actually knocking on the door because you have to wait for them to come answer it. Now, instead of being super salesy and try to sell them on something at the door, you could also just go a little more low-key and just introduce yourself. Hey, it's Mike here. I started Augusta Lawn Care. I do lawn care and landscaping here. If you ever need anything, just want to give you my card. I'd love to be of service to you. That's great. They can close the door. Thank you. Bye. And you're gone. It's not high pressure. Another way you can use door-to-door sales is simply introducing yourself when you have a customer in the local area in their neighborhood. So for example, "Hey, we're just down at Mr. Jones' house down the street doing a property cleanup. You might have seen us driving by the last couple days. Just want to introduce myself. If you ever need a property cleanup like Mr. Jones did, just reach out, let us know." And a lot of times if a customer needs a service, they're just going to be like, "Oh, actually, yeah, like, while you're here, could you give me a quote? Like, what would it charge to do my property?" And so that's a nice easier way to do it. If you want to go high-pressure sales, you can have a price and you can ask for the sale right then and there. Most people that I encounter with, It's just too much social anxiety and I don't blame them. It's very, very difficult. But ultimately it costs you one thing and it's literally the soles on your shoes. Like when people say boots on the ground, when they say, you know, got to do pound pavement, it's walking on these— this pavement right here on the sidewalk and going through the rejection that comes along with door-to-door sales. One way to get more leads without spending any money on marketing is building a referral or an affiliate program. Now, what you're going to want to do is go to other local businesses in your area and try to get customers from them. For example, this is Anytime Fitness. I happen to own this gym. However, you don't need to own the other businesses that you try to build a referral network with. For example, I could offer my members at Anytime Fitness a free lawn mowing over at Augusta Lawn Care. And if you don't own two different businesses, that's fine. Go talk to a plumber or an electrician or a contractor or some other business that's somewhat adjacent to your home service. For example, you might only do bathroom remodels. Well, go talk to the people that install appliances because a lot of the people that are installing new appliances would love to have their bathroom remodeled and you can offer their customers value. And if you offer their customers value, they'll want to actually give something to their customers because it makes them look good. So if you can make it a win-win-win for the customer, for the other vendor, and for you, then we got a winning formula. Now, when it comes to referrals and actually sharing the name of another contractor in a different service— for example, we don't do big construction hardscaping jobs at Augusta Lawn Care. We're not going to focus on paver patios, retaining walls, putting greens, etc. But what I'll do is I'll go give that referral to someone else. Now, here's a secret: if you're gonna get a referral and give it to someone else, don't just tell them, oh yeah, call so-and-so. If you really want to take advantage of it and build goodwill with other contractors that could also give you leads in return, is ask the customer if they would like you to give their information to the other provider. That way I can actually call up someone that I'm referring a paver patio to, like, hey, I got Mr. Jones here, here's his phone number, here's their email, and they're looking for a paver patio. Give them a call. I told them I would give you their information. Now all of a sudden you've given them a really solid lead and they know it came from you. Because if you just tell the customer like, hey, yeah, go contact, you know, Billy Bob Landscaping, he'll take care of your paver patio. Well, they don't know whether or not that lead came from you or from Google or from seeing their trucks. And so if you want the goodwill attached to your brand, make sure that the person that you're referring actually is getting the lead from you. And once you do that, once you build up that good rapport, What goes around comes around. They're going to give you leads back in return. Also, just recently at Augusta Lawn Care, one of our owners had such goodwill with another local landscaper in the area, they decided they were moving out of a certain area of town and they wanted to sell off their business. They didn't even promote it. They just went directly to the Augusta Lawn Care owner and said, hey, let's make a deal. And sure enough, they're able to get a great deal on all their mowing customers because they had a great relationship of referring away the different services that they didn't provide at their location. And so doing that and building that relationship leads to acquisitions. It leads to more leads coming from your competitors, and it leads to other competitors saying good things about you to customers, even if they don't give you a lead. Another way to get customers if you're in a high-traffic area is to hold a sign. Now, it's not fun to hold a sign next to the road in the blazing heat, but it can print customers. I've had before I get 1 to 2 customers per hour that I'm holding a sign in the right spot. So here's a couple of tips. First off, make sure people aren't flying by you at 80 miles an hour, like being next to a really big highway. Not ideal. You actually want to be more like a shopping area or people are coming in and out like the entrance to this mall. Perfect spot. Why? Because if they see my sign, they can pull in right next to me and I can actually get the quote information right away from them. So them driving 10, 15 miles an hour, very good. I have a spot for them to park, and I can have my truck here presented for everyone to see as they drive in and out of the mall. It's a great way to get brand awareness. And then my sign is going to be drawing them to the attention of get a quote, get a quote for mowing, get a quote for property cleanup, whatever service you're trying to offer your customers. Make the sign about getting the quote, and then your truck attracts the attention. And if you really got some nerves and you build you know, up a little gumption, stand up on top of the truck, stand on top of the truck, stand on top of the truck. Do something to get people's attention and then get the sign to drive the awareness for them to come park their vehicle next to you and actually get the quote information. Now, if you don't have the guts to go and knock on people's door and actually talk to them, a way around that is to simply use door hangers. So for a door hanger, I just come up to the property, that right on there and move right on to the next one. Now, there's a few hacks that you can use to make sure you get as many door hangers as possible, because ultimately it's all about the math. So being in a more dense area and neighborhood is going to allow you to hit more like 60, 70, 80, 100+ different addresses per hour. If you're really spread out where you've got to walk 2 or 3 minutes between every single property, you might only get out 15 or 20 door hangers in an entire hour. So the math on that, once you know how many door hangers you got to put out per hour, you can actually run the math on is if you actually hired someone to just do these door hangers themselves. So if you paid someone $20 an hour, then you got maybe these cost like 10 or 15 cents a pop. So maybe $10 in printing costs. Now, if you can get like 1 lead per hour, $20 in labor, $10 in printing costs, $30 cost per lead is fantastic. So it's all about the math. How many door hangers can you put out per hour and how many door hangers do you have to put out in order to get 1 new lead? Once you've figured that math out, you can just completely scale this across your city. Now remember, door hangers are going to be super seasonal, which means they might work today, but next month not work if the demand for that service is no longer there. For example, I did core aeration right here, but I know for a fact that if I do core aeration any time other than early spring or late fall, I'm just not going to get a good return. It's very seasonal. Same thing with direct mail and a lot of other services, because people usually aren't going to want to use your services unless they have actual pain. So if the grass is grass is growing, lawn mowing might be the one they want to think about. But if the grass is dormant, doing door hangers for any sort of lawn mowing is just not going to have a great return. Now, one way that we really like at Augusta Lawn Care to improve the chances of someone actually reaching out over these door hangers is you have the actual prices. We call this the instant quote on the back of the door hanger. So in addition to it having the front that's a little more design friendly, on the back end they can actually Get the instant quote for bush trimming, leaf cleanup, weeds in the beds. If this is a property cleanup one. And then also we put any notes and a total actual dollar amount. In order to do this one for property cleanup specifically, you would have to have a marker or a pen and actually fill this in as you walk up to the front door. So this is going to slow you down, but your response rate is going to be higher. If we look at it from this purely this perspective, as like if we're knocking on the door and talking to people, that's going to be our highest response rate. But we're going to have less deliveries per hour, less contacts per hour, less impressions. And then if we move down a little further, well, if we do instant pricing, it's going to take us a little longer to fill this out on every property as we walk up in terms of our property cleanup or a mowing estimate for their weekly and biweekly price, any notes, etc. It's going to take us a little longer. So we're going to have greater impact, a higher response rate, but also less per hour that we're going to be able to deliver. And then you really want to go to the max. You would not have instant pricing and you just hit every single door as fast as possible. You use a scooter to just go as fast as possible, and that's going to be a lowest response rate, but it's that's where you're gonna have your highest volume, the number of people that you can actually go out and reach. So door hangers, great strategy. We've built massive businesses inside of Augusta Lawn Care just off the back of door hangers. Just keep in mind, you'll wanna test different areas as well because one neighborhood might have no response to door hangers and another area might have, you know, massive response. Keep in mind, when you're hitting every single door with door hangers, you can also get around most no trespassing laws because you're canvassing. You are not soliciting. If you're knocking on doors, that's soliciting. And in a lot of HOAs and neighborhoods, neighborhoods, they're going to have no soliciting allowed. But you can canvas, which is hitting every single door with a door hanger. Yard signs are one way to also get more customers. Now, a couple of things you want to be careful of. First off, they're really easy to steal. And I've put out hundreds of these yard signs before, and all of a sudden the next day I wake up and they're all gone. Also, they can start to look kind of trashy after several weeks and kind of not associate your brand with high quality. So a lot of times people will look at them and associate them with a lower quality service simply because they just start to look bad over time. And most high quality brands aren't putting a ton of yard signs out. However, ultimately I don't care what people think about me. I wanna make more money. And so if I can get more leads, get getting started, let's go. Now when it comes to placement of these yard signs, a couple things you wanna keep in mind. Look how people are stopping right next to these yard signs. That's a great placement cuz when they're stopping they have to look. Next to stop signs, 4-way stops at intersections. Great place to put them. And you can avoid getting removed if you just look for other places where yard signs are at and focus on those areas. Yard signs can also be used for if you do like a community project in an area like this and you maybe installed some plants or mulch, you can install some yard signs. Great way to get some publicity. Also after projects. So once you've done a big job, ask the customer— very rude. Ask the customer, hey, is it okay if I just leave this yard sign in your yard? And it's just like, this project was completed by— and it has your branding. Another way to be able to get those into a customer's property and see the neighbors all see it without it being removed by your competition. All right. So we've already talked a little bit about having a Google listing, but even above that, when you're searching on Google is what we call the Google Guarantee, also known as the Google Local Services program. Google Local Services, if you qualify for the program, you're going to show up right here at the top and have this Google Guarantee. Now, this little checkmark that says Google Guaranteed is telling customers and telling people that use Google, hey, if you use these providers that we've vetted, made sure they're insured, we've done a background check on them. If you actually use them and they don't turn out to be good, there's like $100,000 that they can go after and go after Google for. And so this is very— a lot of awareness goes to this right now, and Google's pushing this a lot. They slowly rolled it out over the course of a couple years in different markets, and I see them gonna push this more and more and more. They start to add images, they start— they started to push it a lot more often because ultimately if they just get a click— so down here, this is Google Ads, and we'll talk more about that later. Down here, they might get $1, $2, $3 per click. Here they might get $15, $20, $25, $30 cost per lead. But here's the thing, the difference between Google Ads down here, which we'll talk about later, and what we're talking about now, which is Google Local Services, is if someone clicks on my ad down here, I pay for a click. But here I pay for a lead. And I would much rather pay for a qualified lead than just a whole bunch of clicks, because clicks don't pay the bills. But if I can get a bunch of leads and then convert them into paying customers, We're off to the races. And so Google's obviously trying to make more money. That's fine. I need to get inside this program. In order to get into the Google Local Services program, you're going to have to do several things. First off, you're going to have to have a background check. You're going to have to have insurance. And you have to prove that you have general liability insurance. You're also, in most states, going to need some sort of certification beyond just a business license, like a contractor's license or a pesticide license. Depending on your industry, it will require a different type of certification. And although it's a pain in the butt to qualify for, it also keeps a lot of competitors away from even being able to be in the program because they're not insured. Their background check, it would exist, but it wouldn't be good. And so ultimately you might only have 3 or 4 competitors that are actually qualified for this program and will allow you to be able to get leads for very cheap. Ultimately, when it comes to the budget on Google Local Services, I would be willing to spend as much as possible because I can get leads for like $15 or $20, which is extremely cheap. However, if you have a lot of competitors in your area that also are trying to be inside the program, Google's got to distribute those leads to other people. Honestly, the worst part about Google Local Services is the fact that I can't pour more gas on the fire, which means if it's working well and I'm getting leads, I can't just put more money and get more leads. There's a finite number of leads and Google has to distribute those between all the people that qualify for the program. And so if I want to double my amount of leads, I can't just double my budget to Google Local Services. Usually they don't even come close to the budget parameters I set out. And I like this one the most though, because when you click on this and if I was to actually click get phone number or call, now what's going to happen is I'm going to get a recorded phone call of this customer talking to my office. And so whether it be Command Center and Max AI talking and getting the lead information or your personal office assistant that's calling and picking up the phone, I'm going to get a recorded phone call of a customer getting service. Now, inside of the program, you're able to actually dispute leads that come in that are not inside your service area or for services that you don't offer. So you're like, well, I do mowing, and then someone called, clicked on here, and they want concrete installation. Like, I don't do concrete. You can dispute it and get your money back. So really, you're only paying Google Local Services $15, $20, whatever it might be. It kind of ranges based upon your industry, but like, let's just say it's $20 or $25. Like, if you're spending that for a very qualified recorded phone call, a lead, that's awesome. You're usually gonna close like 50, 60, 70% of those once you meet them in person versus just having someone click on an ad where you might convert them. Ask for an estimate. Google Local Services, very good. All right, so we've talked about Google Listings where you're going to be able to put up your profile for free. Then we moved on to Google Local Services, which is the very top of the search. Below that is Google Ads where you're going to be able to run ads to customers that search certain keywords, and that's going to drive them to your website. So you're not getting a lead, but you are getting a click. Now, the best thing about about Google Ads is the fact that you're actually going to have customers that have intent to buy, which means they are looking for lawn care, mowing, landscaping, painting, fence building, whatever service you offer. You have certain keywords, which means you're only going to show up if they use a certain service name that you know you're going to be relevant for. So this is what it looks like on the front end. We've talked about Google Listing, Google Local Services, and Google Ads. 3 completely different channels from Google. But then let's look on the back end, what this is going to look like on the back end. This is a real live up-to-date account from Google Ads, and this is what's currently being run from a location at Augusta Lawn Care. And you can see here the amount of impressions, 3,000 people have actually seen this advertisement, okay? In the same 1 month, we had a 5% click-through rate, which means that 5% of the people that saw the ad, it was impressed, it was impression, it was on their page, clicked on it. 21 people converted. Now you're not going to get conversions unless you have a Google tracking code. And what we've done recently at Augusta is make sure everyone has what we call done-for-you ads, where they have the exact instructions to use Google Analytics to be able to make sure you actually know not just when someone clicks, but when they actually have submitted an estimate request form. And I'm going to show you that in a moment. But we have 21 conversions. Let's do the quick math on this and find out what are we, what are we paying per lead, because that's really what I'm trying to focus on. So I'm going to take $899, which was my spend for Google Ads this month. I'm going to divide it by the 21 confirmed estimates that I received, and I'm going to show you how that was done in a second. So that's $42.80 approximately per lead that I am getting from Google Ads. Now if I can convert half of those leads into paying customers, I would have about an $80 customer acquisition cost. Let's break down the math on customer acquisition cost in just a moment. Let's look at the actual website because where we're tracking those conversions is very, very important. Once I put my information in, I actually get an instant price and I actually submit for an actual price from the website. It's only after I click submit on this page that it's actually going to track this as a conversion. Which means I'm actually basically getting a customer if they do these instant price forms from our site. But what's cool is when you are doing a tracking code on Google, I want it to actually take them to a different URL. So when I click that submit button, and I'm not gonna do it 'cause it's a live website, but if I click submit, it's gonna go to a different URL. Like make a thank you page, for example, saying just something like, thank you for submitting your information, our office will get back to you within 24 hours. Something like that is fine. You're going to put your Google tracking code on that page. That way, anytime a user hits that page, we know they've submitted an estimate request form. So you might be wondering, well, I'd like to see some good examples of a website or forms that actually convert well and have tracking set up. So I want to go ahead and show you a couple of resources because we've built over 1,000 home service websites for home service business owners. Let me, let me show you this though. This is on Lawn Care Web Design. .com. And if you go here though and go to the Our Work tab, you can see a lot of the websites we built and just get some really good ideas of how to set up your website, how the form should look, how the conversion should be all set up. And then if you're not in the green industry, just go to homeservicewebdesign.com, same exact thing. Go to the Our Work tab, scroll down here, and you can see all sorts of industries from roofing to home solutions, HVAC. We do all sorts of industries. And these will be a really good starting place for you to be able to get ideas even if you don't actually subscribe to our services and our flat monthly fee that we have for all of the businesses that we serve, just at least go to the Our Work tab and get some ideas for your website. Now let's actually look at what this looks like on a funnel, because all things start and end with a great funnel. So if we look at this and we think of everything at the top of the funnel coming in as a click, this would be like what we just talked about, paying for a click from Google. In this case, it was like $5 per click. All right, so we got like $5 coming in here in order to get one click at the top of this funnel. Now what we call this is our cost per click, or CPC, and we've just found out that it's $5. But as we go in the funnel, not all clicks become paying customers. And so I like to think this is a filter. This is our conversion ratio. All right, what percentage of people that come to our site actually fill out an estimate request form? That's gonna give us our cost per lead. And we've already identified in this example, that's about $40 is our cost per lead. But that's not what we're really needing. We're needing paying customers, people that actually choose our service and actually give us money. So there's another filter. And this is where your close ratio comes into play. Your close ratio is what percentage of leads do you close and turn into actual customers? And that's where your customer acquisition cost comes into play. And in this case, let's just assume that our close ratio was— let's just call it 50%, which means half of the estimates that we send to customers get accepted. If that was the case, that would mean that half of these leads become paying customers, which means my customer acquisition cost would be $80. Not bad if I'm making like $2,000 or $3,000 per year per customer. This is the breakdown of a cost per click cost per lead, and customer acquisition cost. And knowing just the cost per click, not good enough. Someone selling you on low cost per lead, also not good enough. It needs to come down to what am I paying per customer, and being able to track this is super important using Google Analytics. All right, the next way to get more customers for your business comes from Mr. Marky Zuckerberg. We're going to go with that. Now, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, also known as Meta, is the next way to get customers. See, Meta includes Facebook and Instagram, and I could care less. I just want money. I want customers. And so when we look at Facebook, the thing that we got to realize is that unlike Facebook ads where people have intent to buy and they're actually looking for lawn care, landscaping, and your services, Over here we got Facebook where people are simply looking for little pictures of babies and kittens. I can't draw a cat. There you go. That's what they're going to Facebook for. They're coming to Instagram for. And so the challenging part with Facebook and Instagram is that people do not have intent to buy. In fact, you are disrupting them. You are getting in the way of them looking for the things that they're wanting to find. Now, Good books, by the way. All right. Now we look at Facebook. Look, a lot of times people will make videos and they'll pitch their services to customers, et cetera. If you're wondering how to make a piece of content for Facebook, I'm going to give you the actual method to do so. The reason this is important, because unlike Google, we're just doing keywords and it's text-based. When it comes to Facebook, your creative matters. All right. So your creative matters. This is your picture. This is your video. This is your headline. This is the text that you use in your ads for Facebook. Very important. I recommend changing them out every 7 to 14 days because otherwise if people start seeing your same ad 3, 4, or 5 times, you literally start to become white space on this screen. Now, the whole goal is for them to stop scrolling, and if they've seen the same ad 10 times, they're just going to keep scrolling. And that leads me into the framework for the creative, which is first and foremost, we must have a hook. In other words, we need them to stop scrolling. And the number one way to do that for most home service businesses is to call out the customer and be like, hey, homeowners in this area, your service area, or something that's going to call them out, hook them in. And so this is essentially get them to stop scrolling. After the hook, then we're going to have our meet. This is going to be where you can present your offer. You can talk about your services or whatever. And we're going to talk about in just a second how to break up the meat section of your creative for the customer. The last thing is the CTA, call to action. This is where you're going to tell them to click on something, call them to give you— tell them to give you a call. You're going to tell them to fill out a form. You're going to tell them to do something at the very end of your advertising. Now, the meat can be broken down into 3 distinct different issues here. First, we got to show the problem. For example, with mowing, this could— problem could be the fact you don't have time on the weekend to go golfing or spend time with the kids. That's the problem. The solution, usually, almost always, is going to be hire us. We provide those services. We can take that off your plate. That's the solution. And then lastly, we're gonna do a case study. This is where you can show your reviews. This is gonna be where you might show video clips of a customer giving a positive testimonial about your service or sharing a before and after picture, also a version of a case study. So creative, very important. Change it up as much as possible. Have a hook, meat, and call to action. Here's how the meat is broken down, and you can literally do all of this in one image. For example, a before and after picture that has a testimonial text of a customer saying good things about you and the problem they had before and then the solution, all very good. Facebook ads will crush, but they can also be an absolute money suck if you're not actually managing the creative and making sure you're actually tracking if the leads are hitting your page. The same way that Google— we have a Google tracking code— with Facebook, we have what's called a Facebook Pixel. That same piece of code needs to be inserted on your thank you page so when customers ask for a lead, we actually know, we actually know if they came from Facebook. Otherwise, you could be pouring your money down the toilet and Mr. Marky Zuckerberg, whatever his name is, over here making more moolah. Most of the time, if you're out working in the field, the customer is not going to actually walk up to you and ask you for your information in order to be able to do business with you. Rather, they're going to be looking for a truck like this that's wrapped or painted for them to be able to get contact information like your phone number or go to your website, or at least Just know what your brand is. This is like a massive walking billboard wherever you go. This is a way to be able to get customers to be able to buy from you. Now, when it comes to the 3-step process to get a new customer, there's 3 things that have to happen. Number 1, they have to find you, then they have to recognize you, and then they can buy from you. And usually this is the steps that it follows. When you get more and more trucks rolling around, guess what? People are going to find you and be like, oh, Augusta Lawn Care. If I had a white truck, they wouldn't know who was actually doing the lawn. They'd just be like, oh, they're doing great work. That's cool. But now because they actually can find me because I have to have my brand name, we're good. Then they usually go to your website and that's where they need to recognize you. And that's why the truck needs to also be on my website page so I can actually recognize the same truck that I saw in the field, the same brand, Augusta Lawn Care, the uniforms, the guy, the guy that's mowing in yellow shirts. Oh, it's the same. It's the same company. So I got to find, recognize on my website, and then they can buy from you. But they will never buy from you if they don't first find you. And they're never gonna be able to find you if you don't have a truck that's wrapped, decaled, and has contact information on it. Now the pricing on this can vary. Painting a truck can cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 or $4,000 depending on where you're at in the country. It's insane the amount of change that goes from even just one state to the next. Also, to wrap an entire truck, you might be looking at, again, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 to wrap the entire truck. This truck, for example, we painted the front half and then the back half is just the wrap that allowed us to be able to paint the entire front for like $300 or $400. And then the back half being wrapped allowed us to save money. But all in, we're still looking at like $1,200 to get this thing painted and decal. And that's pretty low to a lot of places in the country where it's double or even triple. But I can promise you one thing, this alone will get you so many leads. And as you get more trucks and you grow your business, Having these billboards rolling around town all day long is the number one way to make sure that customers start to see you everywhere. You get one or two of these trucks rolling around in the neighborhood a couple of times a week, and all of a sudden everyone's like, oh man, I just see you all over the place, all over the neighborhood. I go online, I see you on Facebook, I see your website. That's the kind of brand penetration you can get when you get great branding on your truck. Another way to get customers is billboards, vehicles and signage. Now, if you're just getting started, you might not be able to do this. I'm going to show you in a moment what you could do if you don't have much of a budget. But if you're getting shop space, I'm willing to spend a little bit more if I can get a space where when I put up a sign, it's going to show it to hundreds, if not thousands of people every day that drive by. Every single day, thousands of vehicles drive by this shop and see this massive 16 by 8 sign that we put up. It's for our shop space. but also serves as a great way to have advertising. So if you're comparing shop spaces and you're getting your business a little bit bigger, I'm willing to spend a little bit more like $500, $600, $700 more if it's central to my area in terms of my service area, closer to my customers and next to a road or highway that's going to bring me a lot of publicity and therefore a lot of leads. Now let's go check out what the budget version of doing this is. Your business might actually be being ran right now out of a storage facility or even your garage. And you don't have a fancy shop space, one way to still get billboards out, get signage up is something like this. This is actually at a mechanic shop just a couple of miles away from our shop. Again, on the main drag where a lot of people are going to see the sign, it's on the opposite side of the highway compared to our shop, which is down the road. This again allows people to be able to see the sign and it's positioned right here next to an intersection. So when people are stopped They can see directly. It's yellow, it stands out. And really, in order to be able to get this, we pay exactly $0. How? We mow this little part of land right here. And so if you're looking for billboards or signs and you don't have the shop space and you don't have a lot of money, one way is just give away your services in exchange for putting out signage on someone's property. Commercial properties already usually have signs, but even residential customers, if they're in a really good spot, you might be able to negotiate free services in exchange for putting up a sign in their property. Angie's List, Thumbtack, Yelp, and other lead-providing services. They're okay. In some markets, I've seen people build an entire business off the back of these lead generation services, and it's not horrible. But I've also seen people spend 20% and 30% of their total revenue on getting leads from these services. And the thing that I don't like about it is you're basically on this like IV drip from them. And if you was to be cut off, your business would collapse. I want to be able to ideally generate enough direct response marketing for my customers to eventually have a great brand and they come to me without me having to spend more money on ads. We'll talk more about that later. However, when it comes to Angie's List, Thumbtack, and Yelp, if they ever stopped the IV, all of a sudden you've built infrastructure, you have trucks, you have employees, you have office staff, you have all of this overhead expense built around a certain number of leads. Leads coming in. And if those leads were to stop because they changed the algorithm, because they banned your account, because they, they, they stopped giving you leads for whatever reason, you could be in a really, really bad spot. I've seen it sometimes where they change the algorithm and the cost per lead goes from $20 or $30 to $60 or $70. And all of a sudden the business model is unprofitable and you don't want to be at the mercy of some other service. There's also been some murky things around like Yelp reviews, for example, where some of them are not shown if you don't spend money on ads. I just don't like to associate with a company that's going to do that, whether or not they do or not. You can look up and look online, but ultimately I don't like their sales tactics. People calling me all the time trying to convince me to do more and get me on like contracts. Like a lot of these businesses require these long-term agreements to get you leads when in reality, the thing about seasonal businesses is there's time of the season where like you don't have enough capacity to take on more leads. And then other times of year you would rather double down and get more leads because you need more work and you don't have enough jobs in the schedule. And so the seasonality quality of our services, a lot of times I don't like being locked into long-term commitments to buying leads from a provider. And ideally, I'd like to control the flow of leads and I'd like to be doing the direct response marketing so I build my brand instead of renting these leads from someone else that is gonna also give those same leads to other of my competitors. I don't want my mowing customer that I got from Thumbtack to then when they need a mulch install, they're going on Thumbtack again and asking 5 of my competitors or are gonna buy the lead again. I want it to be able to be where people come, I get them initially with lawn mowing or another gateway service, and then I'm able to upsell them all the other services on their property without having to go and compete with all my competition. That's what allows me to be able to do, you know, service that might be a little bit lower margin, get people in the door, and then I could upsell them into other higher margin services like mulch or trimming the bushes or fertilization. And I don't want to be at the risk of Thumbtack, Yelp, or Angie's List trying to go to my competition and get them to get the customer and sell off my lead that I worked so hard for. All right. Another way you can get more customers is through something called Every Door Direct Mail. Now, this is through the United States Postal Service, the most reliable branch of our government. Not really, but this would be a commercial mailbox. But obviously every single residential house has a mailbox. And so when I'm trying to advertise my lawn care business, I want to ask myself, how do I get into every person's mailbox? Yes, I could put a postage stamp on every single person's you know, postcard or flyer, but it's gonna cost me like 50, 60 cents a pop. I don't have to pay that. So the USPS, United States Postal Service, and other services in Australia, Canada, they have similar services where you can do bundles of flyers and postcards and give them to every single door inside of a mail route and end up in every single mailbox. Now these are the flyers, these are the different versions that we have on lawncaremedia.com. You can also do different sizes of postcards just like this one. This one's for snow shoveling. This is for mowing services. These are all available on lawncaremedia.com. Now what's important is that on your design you actually have a stamp that's printed and says local postal customer. This is really important. Some different post offices, the people that work there are super stickler on exactly what that postage stamp must look like. So before you go out and order 10,000 of these, go take one of them to your local postmaster and be like, yo, does this work? Is this going to be okay? Because I've seen people get declined and it's not good. And so you can check these out on LawnCareMedia.com, or at least just go look at them to get some ideas of how you can design your postcard or your flyer. But make sure you have the correct stamp on it. Now, this is going to usually cost you between $0.16 and $0.20 per location or per address that you're inside of a mail route. What's really, really cool about Every Door Direct Mail is you're able to actually see on their software, on their website, exactly how many pieces are going to be in every mail route, as well as the average age and income of everyone that lives inside of that mail route. This allows you to really hone in on like specific neighborhoods, specific parts of town, instead of just canvassing the entire city. In, say, like a newspaper or a billboard, we can't control as much who's seeing the ad. In this case, you actually get to control which addresses you're targeting as well as get to know the information of their ages and whether or not they are residential and commercial and how old they are. These are all really important parts of home services because a lot of us want to go after a wealthier demographic that's a little bit older. And so you can see all the information if you just go USPS EDDM on Google, you'll pull up that tool and you can look in your area and see all of this information for free. Now, when it comes to every door direct mail, there's a few different things I like to keep in mind. I don't— I'm not a huge fan of just canvassing with a bunch of random postcards and flyers. I like to have one of three things. One, have a very specific killer offer. That killer offer could be a massive discount, like 80, 90% off. It could be your first service is free, something that just really gets people's attention. That great offer, good deal. A second thing I've seen work really well with every door direct mail is having a personal letter. So instead of having it super fancy where it's all color like this, actually make it look as if it's a personal letter you're mailing to everybody, and then you can just send it to the entire neighborhood or the entire mail route. The third way that I've seen every door direct mail work really good is if on your flyer or your postcard you have actual pricing. So they, instead of having to ask for a quote, they're just actually calling you to confirm the estimate you've given them. Now, that only works if you're going to target a very specific area where, you know, the generalized price for a certain type of house, for example, in 500-600 houses all the same, like for mowing, for example, it's like, okay, they're all about $50 per cut. Just put the pricing on there and then they call and they confirm the price instead of asking for a price proposal. Most of the strategies we've talked about so far include what I call renting the customer's attention. In other words, every single time I want more customers, I've got to send them another postcard. I've got to put out another door hanger. I've got to put another Facebook ad or a Google ad up. And ultimately, I'm renting the attention of the customer because every— if I stop spending money on advertising, I stop getting leads. There's one way to ensure that you have a steady stream of leads and you get more and more of them as time goes on and you build your brand without having to spend money for every single lead. And that's through your website. And that is the number one way, in my opinion, in the long term to get more customers. If we think about direct response marketing, that's usually what I associate with things like door hangers, flyers, postcards, even ads that you see on Google. You're asking people to take a direct action, fill out a form, give you a call, fill out an instant price form and collect and accept the estimate. These are what we call direct response marketing. But branding is a much longer-term play. And your website, I like to think of as more of a branding play. However, when you think about branding, you think about people getting customers without having to actually spend money on ads. Like Apple didn't, you know, convince me with a very specialized postcard sent to my house to buy this iPhone. I just went to the store and bought it because of the brand of Apple. And so when you're trying to create a brand, having a great website is the number one way to do this as a home service business. I think of it like owning a house versus renting a house. Yes, I can keep renting a house for 30 or 40 years and just keep paying the landlord, or I can pay my mortgage. And yes, it costs something. It's not free to have a website or own a house, but now it's kind of putting money in my own pocket because I don't have to constantly be paying rent. Once I pay off the 30-year term on a mortgage, I own the house. and I can still use it. And so I think of the same thing when it comes to my website. I want to own the customer. I don't want to be renting them from Google, renting them from Facebook, renting them from Thumbtack. I want to actually own the customer. And I believe having a great website with your home service business will allow you to charge $5 to $10 more per hour at least, simply by having a website that shows your brand colors, your uniforms, your trucks, shows that you're insured, separates you from 80 to 90% of your competition. And for everyone who's like, there's so many competitors, it's so price competitive in my market. Well, separate yourself from the other 80 and 90% of people that don't have a website, aren't insured, aren't doing things above board. And if you are, show that on your website. On your website, show your brand, not random pictures off of Google about your home service, but like show your guys, your employees in your trucks doing services at your customer's property. Make sure it's well designed for something like mobile, because a lot of your traffic is going to come from a mobile device. Have your estimate request form above the fold so when customers come to the website and they're looking to get an estimate, they can immediately identify how to contact you to be able to get a quote. They don't have to go to a Contact Us page or scroll way down. Make sure when they first come to the site that it actually says what areas of your city or county you service and what services you offer. Otherwise, the customer's confused as to whether or not you can even help their problem. If you have 5 or 10 employees and they're all working 8 or 10 hours a day and you're able to get $5 or $10 more per hour per one of their hours, having a great website could literally just from a price perspective generate tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue simply because the perceived value of the customer by you having a great website that shows off all of your reviews and shows that you're a reputable company. So even if it didn't produce any new leads, I recommend getting a great website. But also from a lead generation perspective, as your brand grows, as you get more trucks rolling around town, as word of mouth is generated, Now, when people go to your site, they fill out a form, you don't pay any extra money to get that lead. And all of a sudden you're getting leads for pennies compared to having to go buy one every single time you need more customers. When it comes to building your website, I think about the good, better, and best model. There's ways to spend just $50 a month. There's also ways to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your website. All right, you've completed the first stage of the masterclass and we've talked a bunch. About marketing, getting prospects, strangers to become leads. Now you have their contact information. They've come to your website, they've submitted information, but we've still got to convert them from someone who just said, I want service to actually a paying customer. And that's where the second stage of the masterclass comes into play. And that is sales. How do I take those leads and turn them into paying customers? The masterclass on sales and getting more customers starts now. The number one most important thing when it comes to improving your sales in home services is selling yourself. And if that means looking in the mirror and convincing yourself, that's fine. Because ultimately, the reason a lot of times home service business owners can't sell their services is because they are not the target market. So if you sell HVAC services, if you sell landscaping services, you probably would do those services yourself. In other words, you think it's mind-boggling when someone's willing to pay $800 for a property cleanup or spend $1,000 for a tune-up on their heating and air conditioning. And you're right, for you, that would be crazy because you are 40, 50 years old and can do the work yourself. You have the intelligence, you have the skills, you have the equipment, you have the training to do the work yourself, but you're not the target market. And so the very first thing I want you to do when it comes to improving your sales. Sell yourself on the fact that your product and service serves the need for the target audience, not you. And you are not the target audience. You can get on a ladder, you can fix the HVAC, you can handle a 200-pound machine. An 80-year-old can't. And furthermore, they're going to value their time a lot more than you. If they have 3 homes and they travel around the world and they have 4 or 5 years left of life to live, they're probably going to value their weekends a lot more. They're going to be willing to spend a lot more for the extra 2 or 3 hours you save them. And by the way, them getting on a ladder and trying to manhandle that machine could potentially put them in the hospital. You are not the target audience, and in order to be able to sell your services, you'll have to believe in your product and service. You have to believe that you are the best option for the customer. If you don't believe that, then you will shirk away from when they give you some sort of like, oh, it's 'Oh, it's too expensive,' or when they tell you, 'I don't know, I gotta, you know, try out a few other providers, get a few other estimates,' you'll just cave right in because you in your mind have not convinced yourself. You're not sold yourself on the fact that you are the best option for the customer. And if you're like, 'Well, honestly, I don't do a great job,' well then fix the product. Fix that first so you can have the confidence to be able to sell yourself to the customer. You got to remember, we're not selling stripes if we're doing lawn care. You're not selling a couple screws and a couple tightening on an HVAC system if you're doing HVAC. Fill in the blank for your home service. That's not what you're actually selling. What you're selling is insurance. You're, you're working on likely the highest value asset they have in their portfolio. And if they're retired and they have $1 million of net worth racked up in equity in their house, you are taking care of their retirement assets. And it is a form of insurance to make make sure the HVAC system doesn't burn down the house and that the overgrown lawn doesn't lead to a bunch of pests intruding into their house and causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage. So you're selling your insurance, you're selling time, potentially the most valuable commodity that they have if they're older. You're selling time with their family. You're selling time to go out shopping. You're selling time to go on the golf course and do things that they're passionate about. And those things are much more valuable than the stripes in the lawn and the few screws that you turn on the HVAC system. You're also selling pride of ownership. This is potentially, even if they're a working-class family, their most valuable and proud possession that they have because it's their first house and they might be doing a tech job and they're younger, so they don't value time as much, but they have a lot of pride of ownership because this is their house. This is the first one they've ever purchased as a family. You're also selling status because some people in an HOA, for example, in a gated neighborhood, they just want to have their neighbors see you pull up to their house in a nice truck and a nice uniform, and now they become of high status in their local community. So remember, you're not selling the actual thing that you're doing. Stop focusing on the features and focus on the benefits you bring, because they're much higher value. And remember, you are not the target market. All right, let's throw on the jersey, let's head to the client's property to do an actual estimate. Of course, we're gonna be hopping in a decalled vehicle with either vinyl decals or paint, something looks professional, and it's gonna be telling every one of their neighbors that I'm here to do business. Another way to get great sales. But I'm gonna take a couple things with me, one of which is going to be either a folder like this or some sort of cardstock literature. The basic thing is I'm gonna give this to the customer at the end of the estimate, and I don't want it to be easy to throw away. So I don't really like business cards and I don't really like having a really flimsy flyer. I either have cardstock— I've seen some people like wood or metal postcards— or I have this folder where they can actually put inside any sort of information about the actual estimate or print things off about a project. If you have a lot of project notes, these are the type of things you're gonna want to be taking with you. Now, some people will make their work truck an actual office, and they might put in a laptop or an iPad You might even need to bring a measuring wheel or some other device to be able to measure something on the property. Make sure that's all in your vehicle and it's super accessible. You don't want to be hauling things in and out of the office. You don't want to be making your estimate vehicle where when you jump in, you got to get like all these other tools out or super dirty. Try to keep, if at all possible, when you're growing the business, one vehicle dedicated to doing your estimates. You have plenty of literature. You might have a box where you keep it all organized. You have your laptop, you have your iPad, and You can go straight to the estimate from here. All right. So now we showed up at a customer's house. I'm going to approach the house with a smile on my face, with a lot of confidence, because if you just come up and you're like all afraid and nervous, they're going to feel it. When you approach the house, keep everything in your left hand so your right hand is ready to shake. I know it sounds simple, but it's really awkward if you're juggling things around before you give them a handshake. Now, ideally, when you're approaching the house, you already know the scope of work. When someone's collecting lead information from your office, you want to be knowing kind of what they're looking for. So if they're looking for bush trimming, as I'm approaching the house, I'm actually looking what bushes would need to be trimmed. I'm also looking for upsell opportunities like, do they need mulch? Oh, they have some weeds. I'm already looking for upsell opportunities and what the scope of work is based upon what my office has told me. All right. So now that we're approaching the actual doorway, we're going to knock on the door. I'm going to be making sure that I don't stand really close to the door. Back in the day when I first got started, I'd be like this. Like, seriously, if they open this door, they're going to be right in my face. That's awkward. All right. So knock on the door, stand back a little bit, be at an angle too. If you're like confrontational, shoulder to shoulder, that's not what we're looking for. Nice 45-degree angle. Use your left arm being closest to them, not your dominant hand, is also a good move. 45 degrees, step 4 to 6 feet back. And then when they open up the door, they're able to cautiously open it and make sure that they're safe. Remember, sometimes you're speaking to the wife or the female of the house, and they're going to be pretty cautious about opening up the door to a stranger. So you're going to say, hi, thank you. And then we're going to do the handshake with the right hand. The next step is trying to get them outside, especially if your services are on the outside, like lawn care, landscaping is. I actually want them to go show me the thing. I don't want them to be like, yeah, around back, go look at X, Y, and Z. Like the whole point of me being here in person and meeting them is for them to show me. I could have done a drive-by estimate and not met with the customer if all they were going to tell me is just some more requirements of what's going on in the backyard. Keep in mind that the customer doesn't do estimates every single day multiple times. They don't know the next step of the process. So once I shake their hand and I address them, I'm going to tell them we're going to walk the property. I'm going to take a video, I'm going to send it to the office, and within 24 hours we'll get you an estimate quote. Now they know what to expect and they're not like kind of like aimlessly wandering around their property following you. Not knowing what's going to happen. As you're assessing the property and whatever project they need done, try to match their energy. If they're just like really quiet, don't be super loud and boisterous. Agree with them about whatever. I don't care about politics. I don't care about their favorite sports team. I'm going to appear interested because this is all about the customer. I'm trying to make them happy and I'm making sure that I match their energy. If they're super mad, if they're like super into things, I'm going to get that same way. I'm going to match match their energy. Right now, I don't care about being right. I care about serving the customer, and so I'm going to agree with them on basically everything. The reason I'm doing this is because I want to be able to ask the customer the right questions, and the right questions are really a matter of like, what's their budget? And also asking them, have they tried other vendors? Have they tried someone else? Why were they unsatisfied with their last provider? They're not going to answer you those questions if you haven't matched their energy, and if being all loud and boisterous when they're quiet or vice versa. So match their energy, allowing you to ask the right questions and get the responses you need to actually get the quote accepted. All right. Now that we've wrapped up the actual in-person meeting with the customer, we need to wrap things up and take a video of the job. I think of this as a 3-step process: literature, expectations, and video. The first thing I do is give them whatever literature I came prepared with, whether that be a flyer, a business card, a packet like this. I'm going to give that to the customer. I'm going to shake their hand. So that's literature. Then expectations. I'm going to tell the customer what to expect in the next step of the process. And most of the time that's going to be— they're going to email or text message giving their estimate and their pricing details with the scope of work. And then I'm going to take a video. Now, this allows you to be able to get the customer back in the house because the whole goal here is for me to be able to do an estimate video. And I don't want to have the customer over my shoulder following me around the property. So I'm going to give them the literature, set the expectations, and then I'm going to pull out my phone once they've gone inside and start making an estimate video. Now, the estimate video is very important if you want to ever get out of daily operations inside your business. The estimate video is going to be recapping everything you just talked about with the customer. You can use the estimate video later that evening if you're way behind and you need to do your estimate notes. I don't suggest that. Really, the main reason we're doing the video, though, is that you as the estimator don't have to come back to the property. The whole goal is that between the estimate notes that you give the crew and the video, you as the estimator never return to the property. We consider a system failure if the estimator has to come back when the project is actually underway. So when I'm making the estimate video, the first thing is I want to be at wide angle and as far back as possible, and I'm going to do it in landscape mode so we get as much of the surroundings as possible. I'm actually going to start from the very front of the property so they can actually see the address. They see what the property looks like because that's what they're going to see when they drive up to the address. Using their GPS. I don't want to start in the very back corner of the property. Okay, we're going to fix this bush. And they're like, where are we? Like, am I even at the right house? So I've now wrapped up with the customer. I'm now taking my estimate video. I'm in wide angle, I am landscape, and I'm going to step back from the property. I'm not going to be going in. Okay, so we're going to take care of these weeds right here. I'm going to step back. I'm going to be able to show my crew where we're at in the property, and I'll use my finger to point at specific items that are needed being addressed. That way they can actually know where they're at in the property and they actually have some sort of frame of reference. That estimate video can be used by your office to create the estimate, and it can also be used by your crew leader or your crew project manager to be able to get the project done without you being back on site. Also, any details that you want your crew to know but you don't want to put in the estimate notes can also be recorded in the video. Something as simple as just like the customer's hard of hearing could be said to the crew inside the video so they know those details when they come on site. These are the basics. But like, as I was writing this, I was like, I wish I would have known these things back in the day. The biggest advantage of being in person on the customer's property is the fact that I can see the property and I can actually sell them other services that we offer that they didn't actually ask for. These are called upsells, selling more services to the customer. And so whether I'm doing the estimate video or I'm walking the property with the customer, I'm constantly thinking about, oh, I could sell them this, I could sell them that. So even though they got me here for a bush trimming, I'm actually focusing on do they actually need gutters cleaned out? And so the whole goal of doing an upsell is to improve the lifetime value of the customer, not only to actually make more money from them on an annual basis by selling them other services like cleaning out the gutters, but also by solving more problems for the customer. I'm going to reduce the likelihood that they churn or that they leave because I'm constantly solving their problem. And better yet, I'm solving the problems they didn't even know they had because they never might not have ever thought about the gutters. And now I've actually presented the problem and the solution. One of my favorite features inside of HomeWorks is the ability for the crew to be able to upsell customers while they're on the property. And you can have templates for specific services that they're allowed to send a text or an email to the customer just because they see the need for it on the property. So if they're mowing grass and they see the gutters are overfilled, they can just click on the gutters and immediately send a text or email to the customer asking if they'd like a quote for it. This upsell feature alone increases the average HomeWorks member by over 25% in revenue just by using the upsell feature. So go check it out. It's super awesome. So if they're mowing and they see stuff growing and falling out of the gutters, they could simply just with a tap of a button from the mobile app, be able to get an upsell email or text message sent to the customer. That is how you improve the lifetime value of the customer, solve more problems, and keep customers around much longer. All right. So the question is, do you sell to the customer now and actually try to get them a quote, or do you just send the video and the notes back to the office and they send the quote via email or text? Here's the thing. If you're trying to get out 15, 20 estimates a day, it's come probably a lot faster just to take the video, take the notes, and send it to the office. But if you're only getting 1 or 2 estimates a day, it might be worth the extra time, 20 or 30 minutes to actually prepare your notes, get the quote, and then go right back to the customer at their front door and actually sell them the job. So it's really a matter of I know that my close ratio will probably be higher if I sell the job right now to the customer and get a yes or no. I don't have to go through the actual process of like sending the quote because like I'll just get the yes and I'll put it on the schedule. However, keep in mind that if I do that, they'll know that I made the prices in my truck and that they can haggle with me. So if you just really are not comfortable with like haggling on price or objections around price, etc., you might just want to prepare the notes, be more confident in your estimates. There's not a time rush of getting back to the customer as soon as possible because they have a deadline. They need to leave. Just take your time, make the video, take the notes, get your prices together, and send the quote that evening. But if you're trying to maximize your close ratio and close as many jobs as possible, have a Chromebook or have your iPad in your truck. Truck, put together the notes, put together the video, put together the pricing, and go right back and sell the job to the customer. I've seen some people actually have a mobile printer inside of their office truck so that they can actually print the estimate off, go back to the customer and give them the price proposal and close the job on the spot. The last thing I'd say about that is keep in mind, if I've already built the relationship with the customer and then I give them the pricing, guess who they're going to want to haggle with, ask questions to, etc.? Probably me. So sometimes I've seen when people sell in person, they become the bottleneck for the job instead of being able to hand it off to the office. The office will hand it off to the crew manager or to the team leader once the job is actually in progress. Because I've built so much of a rapport with the customer, they know I've done the pricing, they know I put together everything. They might be kind of stuck on me as their only point of contact, which can be a hurdle down the road if you're trying to hand things off and scale the business. One of the easiest ways to be able to increase the sales and increase the number of customers you're getting is simply getting to the customer's property as fast as possible so that you can give them a quote. Now, there's a few ways you can do this. Number one, try to avoid going to the property at all. You can do this using OTP or over-the-phone estimates. And here at Command Center, this is what we answer phones all day long, 24/7, in order to be able to do the estimates over the phone with the customer. And we don't even have to go to the property. In other words, the time to the property is essentially zero because we never have to go. And before the customer even gets off the phone, we give them a price, get their credit card information, and get them on the schedule. Now, if you're not doing that and you actually have to set up in-person estimates, try to set up estimator availability that is as wide as possible. Just by increasing the amount of time that an estimator is able to meet with potential customers will get them to the property faster. For example, If you're only available between 3 PM and 5 PM, that's fine. But what if they work till 6 o'clock every evening? It might be a week or two before they can get off work and actually meet with you. Now, if you only are doing estimates, say, 11 AM till 3 PM Monday and Thursday, that's fine. But what if someone contacts you on a Friday morning? It means they're going to be waiting a few days before you even get to the property. So simply by increasing your estimator availability and the hours in which they're available to be able to go to the customer's property, that will increase your sales. Another thing that we try to think about is ideally we like to do estimates over the phone as fast as possible. The next best option for us is drive-by estimates. The reason we like drive-by estimates is because then we can do it on our own schedule and we don't have to worry about the availability or the schedule of the customer. And so I can get 5, 6, 7 of those pounded out really quickly as an estimator in like the evening. I don't have to wait for the customer. I can go to the property really fast and make the quote. Then the last one— so again, we want OTP is the best, then we go drive-by estimates, and then at the very worst, we meet in person with the customer and have an actual meeting at their property. I usually like to give an hour window at least of time for my, my estimator to be able to have a slot of time that they can show up at some point within that 1 I've seen some places do 2 hours or more to give you more flexibility and allow you to have a bit of a gap. Some estimates will take you 5 minutes and then another customer will talk your ear off for 2 hours. So having some sort of a cushion there to say, hey, I'm not going to show up at 11:00, I'm going to show up, show up at your house between 11:00 AM and 12:00 noon, giving you that at least that 1 hour gives you a little bit of cushion for so many variables that can kind of throw a monkey wrench in your day, especially if you're doing doing field work and estimates, you'll want that cushion to make sure you don't disappoint the customer and you're not running around ragged throughout town trying to figure out how to get to the next estimate on time, or even having to call customers at all to tell them you're late. Just give them a window of time, show up in person, and you'll be inside of the time frame you've promised already. All right, the next thing that's super important is how fast are you able to send the estimate. You've met the customer, you've left their property. But many times the person that gets the client the estimate first in their inbox, whether it be text message or email, is going to win the job. So here's a couple things you can do to make this process faster, because the faster you are, the higher close ratio. Number 1, have an estimate template. Don't have it where every single time you go to an estimate you gotta type up all the notes for that specific job. I want to have whether in Google Docs, whether I have a Notes app on my phone, or in my CRM, all the regular notes that I'm gonna have for any specific type of service. This is going to allow me to be able to copy and paste, and with a matter of a couple seconds or minutes, send out a lengthy proposal to the customer very quickly. Another thing you want to do, if you're not big, get a virtual assistant or someone that can do these estimates really fast and are on call as many hours of the day. If you're larger, this is why you have an office staff. You want these notes being put into a proposal to the customer as fast as possible. And ideally, I'm not making the estimator do that task because they're usually the most skilled and the most costly in terms of their wages. Another thing you can do to get the estimate to the customer faster is have a Chromebook set up or a laptop set up or Microsoft Surface set up in your actual work truck, the one you're doing estimates with. That's gonna allow you to be able to type these up, format them, attach a video without even leaving the driveway. Because the whole goal is to get that estimate to them as fast as possible. Follow-up phone calls. Phone calls. Yes, the phone is considered an antiquated form of technology. You can text people, you can email them, you can create automations to do that for you. But I have yet to see any form of follow-up like phone calls where you actually call somebody and talk to them on the phone that will convert as many of your estimates into being accepted. And so I highly recommend, especially 24 hours after you've talked to the customer, you've met with them, you've given them a price, you send them the quote, Follow up with the phone. Now, when you call them, actually know what you're going to talk about. Have something that you're going to actually go through instead of like, I'm just calling to follow up. That's weak. And the problem is after they say, yeah, I'll get back to you, you have no other ammunition. So what I recommend you do is print off on your desk, print off the 12 different things that you can call customers for and actually have a reason for calling them. Just calling to follow up is weak. Have an actual reason. For example, I have a spot on the schedule. We're offering a promotion. I wanted to offer you a discount. Someone canceled last minute. I wanted to get you slotted in. Like, have reasons as to why you would do a follow-up phone call. Just calling them doesn't help after the first call. The first call you can say, hey, I'm following up. Do you have any questions? Did you want to go over it? Did you— just making sure you actually got the estimate. But after that, I need reasons to call them again and again, and until they give me an answer, until they say yes Yes or no, I'm going to keep calling them on the phone because if they don't, they're just ghosting me. And it's amazing to me how many times I'll go to home service businesses and I'll look through their estimates inside of Copilot and I'll see how many estimates were sent and then how many were accepted. And that's your close ratio. Let's call it 40 or 50%. But then I'll look at and see that like 30 or 40% of people, the status of the estimate is just sent. It was never accepted. It was never denied. It was just ghosted. You did all the work to get the quote to the customer. You sped to their house, you got everything sent to them. You spent all that time, energy, and money talking to them and wining and dining, and then you never even hear back. You're literally getting ghosted and it's costing you thousands of dollars. How do you solve this problem? You follow up relentlessly on the phone until they give you a yes or no. And I don't even care if you say, Mr. Jones, if you don't want my services, that's fine. I just want an answer. I want to know why you wouldn't go forward with the proposal. Having the phone is your best weapon. And when you pick up the phone, have why you're calling them and also pull up their estimate on your CRM. Actually be able to go through the notes with them. Why? As we'll talk about later, this will be used in price negotiation. Because when I'm calling them, I need to be able to see exactly what the scope of work is and be able to adjust it. And the reason most people don't do follow-up phone calls is because they're afraid of that negotiation. So have the scope of work, the estimate proposal pulled up, and also know the date of service that you could put the job on the schedule. You'll be able to use that on your follow-up phone call as a form of scarcity to be able to tell them like, look, we're booked out 4 or 5 weeks, but I do have a spot that came available next Thursday. And you're going to know from your budget hour capacity chart inside of Copilot when the next available time slot you can put them in. Use that to create scarcity. Use that as a way to potentially even give them a discount. Discount on the phone. If you're planning to discount the estimate on that follow-up phone call, great. Just know that going into the call so it doesn't seem like you're kind of waffling with price. That'll come back to bite you, and we'll talk more about price negotiation in just a few minutes. At this stage where you've now sent the estimate to the customer, it's really important to handle work change orders when the customer is requesting you to change the scope of work. Now, this could be because they have a budget problem and you're trying to adjust the price back to fitting within their budget. It can also be just the fact they saw your estimate notes and they changed their mind or they wanted to add more stuff to the project. When it comes to work change orders, here's a few tips I have. Number 1, make it really easy from your client portal to be able to ask the customer what they want to have changed. Inside of Copilot in the client portal, they have 3 buttons: accept, decline, or request changes. If they click the request changes, it opens up a text field where they can now type in exactly what they want changed on the estimate proposal. In my opinion, someone that submitted a request change for an estimate is the number one priority. They're basically saying like, hey, I want to accept this, but I want a few modifications. That person should have much higher priority than a new lead or even a complaint because this customer is about to accept the job. I'm about to add one new customer. So why go running after a potentially cold new customer or potentially someone that's like making a scene and is super mad online when there's literally a customer to replace the bad customer or a customer that's actually going to accept and is very, very warm. So focus on these warm leads. If they're asking for a work change order, do it as fast as possible. Now, one way to reduce the amount of work change orders that you have to provide to customers is take a big project and chunk it down on your estimates. So instead of providing $40,000 install for a new project, break it down into 5 or 6 different line items and do it in a way where the customer can pick and choose which ones they want to accept. Maybe they only have a budget for $30,000, so they can accept 2 or 3 of the line items that are most important to them. And then down the road, complete the rest of the proposal. This will eliminate the need for them asking like, hey, I only want like 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 13, 48, and 97. 6 done, and now you're trying to break up an estimate proposal and doing the pricing is now much more difficult. Just break up the job in logical processes and steps of a larger project and then allow them to accept or deny each one. Keep in mind, if we're gonna do this, you need to treat each line item as if it was only going to be accepted by itself. So if you're going to charge rental fees for an excavator and they're like, oh, I won't charge it again because I'll use it on all the other line items, keep in They might not accept that one line item that you put the excavator rental cost and baked it into the pricing. So keep each line item as if it's going to be its own job. And if the customer accepted only that job, you'd be okay with it. All right, let's talk about now the customer actually getting back to you after you sent them the estimate and proposal and trying to negotiate with you on price. Now it's easy to say never change your prices, never go discount, discounts, never give any sort of money off whatsoever. And I actually don't agree with that. I think I'm willing to negotiate if I'm trying to grow and I need the work, because I need the work more than I need that top dollar profit margin. But if I'm booked out like 6, 8 weeks into the future, I have tons of leads pouring in, yeah, don't discount your prices. But here's one way to look at price negotiation and as whether or not you should be actually discounting your services. I am willing to give a discount if someone else is willing to concede on timing. For example, it's the middle of spring rush, I'm super busy, I'm booked out 5, 6 weeks, and I have leads pouring in, I can't get to the work, I'm super overwhelmed. Someone's like, oh, this isn't gonna work for my budget. Hey, I'm willing to give them a 10% discount if they're willing to do the project in the middle of winter. Hey, it's gonna be like 6 or 7 months, but if you're willing to concede on timing, I'm willing to give you a discount. Why? Because I need as much work in my office season as possible. So if you can take time-insensitive jobs and push them into your off-season from when you're really busy to when you don't have a lot of work coming in, I'd recommend that being a time when I'm okay with discounting. Now if someone also says, hey, it's not inside my budget, things are too expensive, or you know, you're, you're too expensive, or whatever it might be, the other thing that I can do is change the scope of the work. So the thing that really ties this all in together though is like you gotta know their budget. And so whether you're doing follow-up phone calls or customer says, hey, you know, I got to think about it, this is a little too expensive, or whatever, I need to know what their budget is. It's above my budget. Okay, great. What is your budget? Did they give you a number? Then I can work with them because I can either delay the project off into my offseason, or I can change the scope of work to fit inside their budget. For example, if they say their budget is $5,000 and my estimate, my current proposal, is $7,000, that's fine. I will work with them on what is included for their budget, the $5,000. So that's why, again, we were going to have the estimate split up into as many chunks as possible. And maybe I just cut back on how many trees I'm installing, or how many, how many yards of mulch, or I don't include a certain area of the project in order to fit inside their budget. So I'm okay with conceding on price, but I'm only going to concede in they're willing to move it into the offseason, or if they're going to actually cut out things from the job itself and reduce the scope of the work being done. The only other time to discount is if you have massive amounts of excess capacity. So excess capacity is going to be coming in the form of capacity. You have a whole bunch of trucks, you have a whole bunch of employees, you could do way more work than what you're currently doing. That's the only other time I would reduce the price and give them a discount to get the job on the schedule. So if anyone ever tells you that you'll never move on price, realize that if a customer's willing to work with you, or if you're in the position where you need to get jobs on the schedule, that's when I'm willing to discount, assuming I know what their budget is and close the deal, especially if I'm on the phone doing a follow-up phone call and get the deal closed immediately. In my opinion, in order to actually get an estimate that is won, they need to get on the schedule. Schedule. A lot of times we think, oh, they accepted the estimate, I've got the job. Not really, because they could still go get other estimates, they can accept someone else's price proposal, and I need to actually lock them in by getting more skin in the game. If I get a date on the schedule, more skin in the game. If I get a credit card on file, more skin in the game. If I get a deposit on the job, more skin in the game. The more skin in the game, the less likelihood you're gonna have leakage between when they click accept and when you actually do the job. And there is leakage there of them going to other providers and getting another quote. So for example, in order to be able to actually know when you can put them on the schedule, I need to know based upon my budget hours what my capacity is for the week, for the month, and for the day. In other words, how much work can I get done so that way when they accept the estimate, I know exactly how far I'm booked out to and when I can put them on the schedule because I want to get that date to them as fast as possible. So for example, inside of Copilot, when you're scheduling a recurring job, we're going to be focusing on the fact that this is what we call our budget hour capacity chart. And you can see this little green, little blips because we're adding one budget hour on every one of these weeks for a weekly service. Now you can see it goes red when we go above our capacity. In other words, we're going to either have to work overtime or hire someone else during that time. Because we are above the capacity for our current crew. It also tells me that in the next couple of weeks I need to schedule a few more jobs. Otherwise the guys aren't going to have enough hours. So knowing your actual capacity in terms of budget hours for your crew, super important. Now, if we're scheduling a one-time job, for example, you can see here it turns yellow. We're now within 80% of our budget hour capacity and it's notifying, hey, we're good, we can finish these jobs. This is our capacity based on how many employees we have. but we're making sure we don't cross it because like here, over here in week 3, I'm either gonna have to hire someone part-time for the weekend, knock this stuff out, or we're all going to be working a lot of overtime in order to get these jobs completed. The reason knowing your budget hours and your capacity for your crew is important is simply so I know when a job is accepted, I know exactly where I can fit it on the schedule without overburdening my crew. This allows you to go into the future in terms of booking out your schedule by 4, 6, 8, 12 weeks and accurately knowing that you can actually get the work done. This allows you— when a customer clicks accept, you immediately can give them a date of service and lock them in. Now we talked about being able to get them on the schedule as fast as possible and using budget hours to know that. Another way to get more skin in the game so no one drops off or goes to another provider after they click accept and we actually win the job is get a credit card on file inside of Copilot. We have the ability that before someone even clicks accept on the estimate, you can actually have a credit card required to where they have to put this information before accepting a proposal. That way, when you get a notification that says the estimate has been accepted, you already know they have a credit card on file. And if you do services, you can charge them. By the way, this also leads to a whole lot less overdue invoices because you know the credit card's on file before the job is even accepted. Accepted. But even better when it comes to sales is I have more skin in the game, less likelihood of them leaking and going to someone else, even though they've accepted the estimate. The next thing I can do to improve even further the amount of skin they have in the game and ensure that when they accept the estimate, they actually convert into a customer, is having what we call deposit thresholds. At Copilot, I can edit this for every single customer or have it for my entire company. It is essentially when the, the estimate goes over a certain threshold of total value, I'm going to have to require the customer to pay a certain percentage, or I can also change it to dollar amount. So in this case, any estimate over $1,200 in value, I'm going to require a 50% down payment or deposit before the job can even get accepted. Now I have more skin in the game. I got a credit card on file, I got a deposit, so 50% down, and hopefully within 24 hours I can get them a date on the schedule because I know my budget hour capacity. Doing these 3 things will ensure that when you get an estimate accepted, you actually convert them to a customer and they don't find someone else for cheaper. They don't go to someone down the street that knocked on their door, and they don't go with another estimate that suddenly came in a couple hours after yours, and now they're going and switching providers. An underrated way of getting more customers is using what we call instant quote door hangers. Essentially, I'm able to assess the property and able to give an actual price for the service. Now we have door hangers that simply just talk about our services and we're more generic, but I like to be able to give instant pricing when it comes to doing door hangers. That way, when the customer gets the door hanger, they are immediately making a buying decision instead of where I have to hit them 5 or 6 or 7 times for them to actually even recognize my brand. I'm actually putting a buying decision in front of them. So for example, this one's for mulch. It's going to talk about how much mulch, the quantity, any notes, and I'm going to actually put a dollar amount with this instant quote. Now, the thing I like about instant quote door hangers is the fact it's all just a math game. It is simply a matter of how many door hangers can I put out per hour and how many leads do I get per hour? That's it. Thing is, you're not even getting leads. You're getting paying customers because how we set it up is they actually take a photo of this this. They send it to us via email and they're accepting their estimate. So if I'm doing a mold install instant quote door hanger, I put $799, put it on the door, they send a picture back to me. This is an accepted proposal. And so all I need to know is, first off, how many door hangers can I put out per hour? Now, I'm not going to knock on every single door, but if you did, you'd probably increase your close ratio. You'd also do less door hangers per hour. Let's assume I do 100 of these per hour. That would assume I'm in a pretty dense neighborhood. If you have to walk walk 1 or 2 minutes between every single house because you're in a more rural area, you're not going to be able to get 100 out per hour. So I need to know how many of them can I put out per hour? And then if I put out 100 or 1,000, what percentage of them are going to actually respond back with the accepted estimate? Once I know that math, I can determine my customer acquisition cost and then be able to pump money into that system over and over again. Also, I really like door hangers because I can actually target individual neighborhoods and I can use these door hangers If I have a customer that I'm actually servicing their property, I'm going to do the 5 houses, the 3 across the street, and both neighbors. I'm going to hit them up with the door hanger. Now, as you're doing door hangers, there's really 2 ways to be like, put these out. And that is one, I can actually put the real price as I'm walking up to the property, assessing what needs to be done in terms of scope of work. This is going to take a lot more skill of the person that's putting out door hangers because they actually need to know about pricing. That's one way to do it. I really like being able to do a whole bunch of door hangers before I even leave to distribute them and just do small and large properties. That way, all I'm distinguishing when I walk up to this property is, is my left hand, my small ones, and in my right hand, these are my large ones. And is this a small or is this a large property? Is it going to be as accurate? No, but it's going to lead to way more of these being distributed per hour. And the person that's distributing them doesn't have to actually be an estimator. They just have to literally distinguish, is this a small property or is this a large property? And a lot of times if you're doing neighborhoods, a lot of the properties look exactly the same, have the same square footage, and are about the same size. So you can kind of round in terms of pricing. All right. So we talked about doing instant pricing in person when you're at the client's house. But now let's talk about doing instant pricing on your website. A lot of people will shy away from sharing any sort of pricing on their main website because what they think is that customers are then going to be turned away, and without trying their services, they're going to be turned off by the high prices. Here's the thing: the people that do that, you don't want them as customers anyways, and you prevented yourself from going on doing an estimate, meeting the customer, only to be met with the fact that they think it's too expensive. And so if you have a great-looking website, they're going to assume much more value, and they're going to reason the fact that you are going to be a little higher in price, but that's what they're they're paying for. They're paying for a premium service and they expect premium prices. And if you don't want to attract those type of customers, don't have a website in the first place. Don't have logo decal trucks, don't have uniforms. But if you're trying to have a premium price with premium customers, sharing your prices won't scare away premium customers. And so it reduces the tire kickers and the people that are always price shopping. The people are going to complain a bunch about your prices. They're not going to take upsells. Just share prices on your website and get them away from you as fast as possible so you don't waste time on them. The thing I love about instant pricing, especially if you actually allow them to accept an estimate from your website, is it reduces the amount of steps required in the sales process. I don't have to go visit them at their property. I don't have to create the estimate and then send them the pricing and then wait for them to click accept. It is all done immediately and instantly from the website. If you're afraid of sharing your pricing on your website, keep in mind that with the transparency of information now online, people already kind of know the general pricing that they're supposed to be paying for your services. They've already Googled like, how much should it cost to replace X, Y, and Z, or do maintenance on my property? They've already Googled it. So just give them the pricing to be able to share that you're at top of the market or you're in the middle of the market. And if you just want to share an article kind of sharing your pricing for philosophy, great. But most ideally, give them the ability to see your prices and then check out or accept an estimate directly from your website. It saves your admin time and it saves you from going out and spending time on customers that are never going to accept from you anyways. There are 3 really important numbers you want to know when it comes to sales in your organization. That is cost per click, cost per lead, and customer acquisition costs. I like to think of it as a funnel. At the top of the funnel, all of the clicks that come to our website from all of our marketing come in the top of the funnel. And usually it's pretty easy to be able to determine the cost per click. So on Google, if you're running Facebook ads, all sorts of online platforms, I can determine the cost per click to get someone to my website. There is a cost per click associated with that, and usually it's pretty easy to determine how many clicks you get from a paid ad. And Facebook and Google will tell you exactly how much you're spending to get to get a click to your website, but clicks don't pay the bills. They are not customers. I want to know how much do I have to spend to get a paying customer? Well, once I get clicks to my website, I'm then going to have some percentage of those people fill out an estimate request form or call me or send me an email, and those people will become leads. Now what that is called is our conversion rate, and that conversion rate is mostly determined by is your website structured and designed in a way that gets as many people that have clicked to actually submit an estimate request form. So this is super important. I don't want to gloss over it because I see so many home service business owners spending thousands of dollars every month on marketing— Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LSA, yard signs, door hangers, truck wraps, the whole nine yards— and they're driving traffic to a website that doesn't convert well. Just last week at Home Service Web Design, we had a client go from 1 out of 400 clicks became a lead, 1 out of 400 conversion rate. And after we changed their website, 6 weeks later it was 1 out of 50, meaning the same amount of traffic to their site was converting 8 times as many leads to their business. And so it is crazy to spend a single dollar in advertising without making sure that your website is actually converting those clicks and all that traffic you're driving to the page into actual leads. Go check out homeservicewebdesign.com/call. We'll book a call with you directly. It's completely free. With my team and we'll see if your website could be improved on the conversion rate and making sure you get more leads to your business. Now, I don't even care about my conversion rate because that's just going to get me a lead. I'm going to get cost. My cost per lead is now how much do I have to spend on marketing to get enough clicks to get leads? In other words, people submitting estimate request forms, but those don't pay the bills. So some percentage of those people, I need to actually close them. So a lead is, hey, I want an estimate. I'm not gonna be able to close every single one. That's my close ratio, and that is the number of accepted estimates divided by the total number of estimates that were sent to customers. And this is the close ratio, really the thing that you can fix, the thing that you can affect the most in your sales ability. So everything we've talked about this video, most of it will have to improve the close ratio. You showing up on time, you being quick to the estimate, all the things we've talked about are mostly going into improving this close ratio. Here's the deal: if we go ahead and spend $1 per click— so I have to pay Google or Facebook or someone $1 to get one click to my website, great— let's assume that 1 out of 20 is my conversion rate, which means out of 20 people that click on my site, 1 person submits an estimate request form. That could— would then assume that my cost per lead is $20. But then if I have my close ratio What percentage of those estimates actually became paying customers? Let's say my close ratio is 50%. 50% on a $20 cost per lead would assume then that my customer acquisition cost is $40. And knowing that number is very, very important because it tells me how much I need to spend to get one paying customer. And if I know how much I have to spend to get one paying customer, and then I know how much that customer is going to spend with me over the course of the year, 2 years, or their entire lifetime. In other words, their lifetime value or LTV. I'm able to make educated decisions in my business as to when I should invest into marketing. All right. So we talked about the funnel, starting with clicks and moving all the way down into an actual paid customer. But now I want to talk about keeping customers warm because once we get them through this funnel and acquire the customer, now we've actually going to think of it like having a bucket here with all your existing customers inside of it. So assuming someone gets through the filter, they get— can go through conversion ratio, then they get closed, they come out the bottom here and they fall into the bucket of your business. Now the problem is there's going to be some sort of churn. There's going to be some number of customers that fall through the bottom of this bucket through these leaky holes. If you can plug these leaky holes and actually get customers to stay by having great customer service and all the things we've talked about in running a great business, less people will fall out the bottom. However, there is going to be people that churn or leave your business. They're unhappy, you don't do a good job, etc. The goal of keeping customers warm is to be able to get them to come right back to the top of this funnel, reengage them. Even if there's customers that did a one-time project and they're only in your bucket inside your business for a week or two, they're going to fall at the bottom, but they're still inside of your contact database, inside of your CRM, and inside of software like Copilot. CRM, you can mass email or mass text message them and immediately try to reactivate them. And what's crazy is the customer acquisition cost here is exactly zero because I don't have to pay for the click. So if I don't have to pay for the click to come in the back and the top of this funnel, it costs me exactly $0 to acquire the customer, assuming they accept the estimate. So the question is, how do you keep customers warm? First off, don't let customers go 6, 12 months before they ever hear from you again, even if they've done a one one-time project, or if they've left your business and they've churned out, I want to try to reactivate them. How am I going to do that? I'm going to try to sell them other services that my company offers based upon the time of year. For example, in the middle of spring, I'm going to be pitching mowing and lawn care, spring cleanups. During the fall, leaf cleanups and preparing for the winter, et cetera. So these messages that I am sending to the customer via text or email, I'm trying to going to reactivate the customer. Inside Copilot, we have what we call email links, which allows you to set it up where you can pitch a service and say, click here to get an estimate. And they click there, it takes them to a thank you page on your website, any URL. And then you can have an email or text message going to you saying, hey, this customer is looking for this specific service, get them a quote. This allows you to reactivate the customer over and over and over again. And this is going to massively improve the lifetime value of customer, especially your one-time projects, because they usually only stay in the bucket of your business for a couple weeks or while you're doing the project. You've got to reactivate them and get them back to the top. This is what allows a more established brand and a more established business to be super profitable, because they just simply get all their new jobs from reactivation of contacts inside their database. They don't have to keep paying the Google and Facebook gods for more and more clicks. They don't have to keep doing door hangers and all these other things because they just keep reactivating clients they've served in the past. So inside of Copilot, have a mass email strategy and have a mass text strategy where you're constantly keeping those leads warm so they constantly are hearing from you. And I've had it before where I've sent someone an email every single month for a year or two, and all of a sudden they click on a button and they ask for a $20,000 project. Boom. I paid nothing for it besides simply staying in touch with them and keeping those leads warm. They've already put their hand up, said, I need service. They've already paid an invoice and they've already done business with you. They already know, like, and trust you. Reactivate them back to being a paying customer. For the sake of an example, I'm actually going to show you a video from a couple of weeks ago from one of my general managers that sent out a text blast inside of Copilot CRM and got over 50 estimates with within a matter of 1 day. All right. Hello everybody.

This is Corey at Augusta Bellingham. I wanted to let you know in on something that happened today that I think might be valuable to everybody. Let's do a mass one-click text to all of our clients. They kind of just build some lead flow that way. And I sent it out to everybody and within the first 24 hours we got I got over 50 estimate requests. With the help of Command Center, I was able to basically— I could have sent out 31 estimates today. And you know, with a couple of different things that had come in for me, I had a field crew lead that came in. I sent out a total of 29 for today. But I just want to let you guys know that like, I'm like just now done with that. I'm super pumped. And this marketing message has been so successful that it's basically like doubling down. I will tell you one thing is that everybody I did I didn't get to today, I sent a personal text. I just mass texted, hey, it's Corey again. I just wanna let you know, like, I wasn't able to get your estimate done today, but I'm gonna be at your property first thing Monday morning. And what I said is like, I'm gonna have something productive submitted and ready for you by the end of Monday afternoon. Have a great weekend. And within like 3 minutes, I got 10 responses out of like 18 texts. I got 10 responses. Responses that was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for letting me know. Have a great weekend, Corey. It's like, okay, so there might be something in that. So anyway, I wanted to share that with you guys. Hope you all have a great weekend. I'm cooked. I'm so tired. Peace.

All right, you've finished the second stage of the masterclass because we talked about marketing and getting more leads. We talked about sales and converting those leads into paying customers. But when you get a lot of customers, the next thing you need is technicians. You need managers. You need employees, you need a team. And that is the hardest part of scaling a home service business, because anyone can get leads, anyone can get customers and sell jobs, but very few people can actually lead a team to be able to scale past $1 million. So buckle up for the third part of the masterclass. We talk about hiring and bringing on technicians to scale your business past 7 figures. Here we go. The first thing we wanna talk about is team meetings. Now, every single business sort of finds their own cadence and how frequently they want to have team meetings. Just keep in mind, team meetings, you're not producing any revenue. And so especially if you're having pay for performance, the crew wants to get out and actually make money as quickly as possible. So being super organized, being quick with your team meetings, really important. Here's a couple things that have worked well for us. We have team meetings twice a week, usually Mondays and Thursdays. Thursdays. And what we're going to do is start off with yellow slips, which is callbacks from the previous week. We'll talk more about that in the future. But the reason we do it in the morning and we have a standup meeting is because otherwise it can get dragged out really long. Just by standing up, you will cut the time it takes for meetings to go by in half simply because everyone is standing up. Also, for your frontline team members that are on the field, a lot of times they're just tired in the morning. They just finished their coffee. They literally rolled out of bed 20 minutes ago. To have a sit-down meeting, you are going to have much, much longer times spent doing nothing in terms of labor revenue. So try to make it as tight as possible, have an agenda for the meeting so you can quickly get to the items, even if it's only 5 or 10 minutes. One thing that can— a lot of times you can fall into the trap of is being super negative and harping on the same 3 or 4 things. I've been to a lot of team meetings and usually the same 5 or 6 things are said almost every single meeting. Make sure you make sure you clock in and out of the jobs, make sure you get the equipment on your truck so you're not coming back to the shop. It's the same 4 or 5 things. Remember to clock in and out. Like all of these things are said the same way every single time. And if you start to do that at every meeting, it just becomes white noise. So try to mix it up a little bit. Try to change kind of the cadence of your team meetings. Can be helpful. There's a couple of tricks to making that happen. Number 1 is get other people to say stuff instead of you as the owner. When I go to a team meeting and the owner or primary manager is the one doing all of the talking, many times it shows that there is a weakness of communicating between the team members. So for example, instead of you talking about how everyone needs to clock in and out, have someone else that clocked in really, really well give some of their tips and tricks to make sure they don't forget. So the rest of the team is hearing from one of their peers instead of their boss all the time. Another thing is instead of harping on the bad, focus on the good. So the one the one person that did actually fuel up their truck before they got back to the shop, praise them instead of punishing everyone else by keeping them through a longer meeting and talking about how bad they're doing. So instead of always focusing on the punishment, focus on praising what's actually working well. One way to do this and kind of also achieve getting other people to talk is have what we call moments of appreciation. Usually you'll start being the one that actually gives out moments of appreciation at the end of each meeting, but eventually the goal is to get your team members to call up their peers for things that they're doing where they go above and beyond. Maybe it's they really pushed extra long to finish up a project, or they worked crazy hard to get a certain part of the project done that was not fun, like going under the crawl space or underneath the deck. They just went above and beyond, or they help someone else at the end of the day clean out their truck. These types of moments of appreciation is a way to fortify the positive behavior instead of always being negative. And trust me, it's easy to fall in that trap because it usually is the same 4 or 5 things that the crew does that just really drives you up the wall and it just feels like you're saying the exact same thing over and over. So try to get them to talk as much as possible instead of you always being the one that's doling out the criticisms. Another aspect of creating a strong culture in your business is having what we call the yellow slip system. And yes, it is a yellow. And if you fold this up 3 times, it becomes a slip. We just cut them up. And on this is where we record our callbacks. Now, if you're first getting started, almost every single negative review, customer complaint, or callback to a job site, you're going to react and you're going to go and you're going to freak out. You're probably not going to sleep well and you're going to get a pit in the bottom of your stomach. As time goes on and you scale the business, if you constantly are the one taking the brunt of all of that negativity, and customer callbacks and complaints, you will not be able to grow the business and actually focus on the thing that will help grow the business, hiring and marketing. And so if we're not able to do that, we will not grow the business. I need my team to be accountable for their wins, where we pay them based upon performance, but also their losses when they make mistakes, when they forget to do something on a customer's property, when they don't do a walkthrough, when they damage something on a customer's property. That is all institution of a yellow slip system. So what we do is one of these would be cut out. See if I can't do this really fast. Nope, pretty close to this. And what would happen is at the end of the day on the whiteboard, these would be the yellow slips that would be put on the board. When they're coming back to put their keys at the end of the day, they're going to see yellow slips, and the first thing you're going to do is like, is my name on it? Because on here it says team member responsible. And so if their name is attached to that, it is now their responsibility to go back to the customer's house and fix this mistake. Now on pay for performance, they don't like having having to go back to a customer's house where there's no more revenue being generated because they're not making any more money. But furthermore, the manager or the office isn't going to be the one going back to the job site and fixing all their mistakes. And if you feel like you're a glorified babysitter where all day long you just have all these mistakes and callbacks pouring in and you're jumping from one job site and apologizing to this customer and running over here and trying to fix this mistake, if that's what you're currently doing, you're not going to be able to grow the business. Furthermore, the crew will never be accountable accountable for their mistakes because they know you're just going to come behind them and clean things up. And so if you want someone to actually take accountability for their job, make sure that when there's losses, when they don't do a good job, they're the ones that go back. So how this works is there'd be a yellow slip. They get back at the end of the day when they're hanging up their keys, they see it and they know within 24 hours this needs to be addressed. So the next day they're going to be going back to this customer's house and it says the complaint. What the resolution is, is what they've got to determine when they go back for the customer's property. Party, whether it be I left a skid mark on the lawn or I forgot the backyard if I'm mowing, whatever the mistake was is going to be written down by the office or the manager, but they're not going to fix it. It's up to the frontline team member that was responsible and at the job site last. So even if it was something that was a mistake over the course of several visits, whoever was there last is responsible and they're going to see that and then they have to resolve it within 24 hours. Then what's going to happen is it's going to be given back to the general the general manager's gonna do a couple things. Number one, they're gonna put it inside of the user's profile. We keep track of these yellow slips over the course of time. In the event that we do have to fire someone due to lack of performance, we have a clear record of all the callbacks that were associated with their account. Secondly is that yellow slip stays over here because then it's gonna be taken up at the next team meeting and we're gonna go over all of these yellow slips. So at those morning standup meetings, we're gonna have each team member collect the ones that they're responsible for, and then they went back to the customer's house and resolved. And now they're going to share with the rest of their team exactly what they did wrong and what they did to fix it. The hope is that this prevents you as a general manager or owner from always having to bring down the negativity and the criticisms and you guys should have done this better and this was bad. And so-and-so, like, now they're going to have to take ownership of it. And for some team members, the social pressure of having to talk about their mistake in front of the rest of the team is actually worse than on paper. Pay for performance where they go back for this job and they're not making a lot of money. It is actually the pressure of internally people like, I don't want to be the guy who's ever always making mistakes and everyone knows does a lousy job, is always getting callbacks. That social pressure is what we want to create inside the company. So you're not the only one being the one that fixes mistakes, is bearing the brunt of negativity and complaints from customers. Have accountability within the company by having frontline teamers that make mistakes have to take care of it and then tell the rest of the team exactly what went wrong. Also, if you have a recurring base of revenue, for example, like mowing or maintenance of any sort, we're going back to a customer's property. The yellow slips are your ticket. They are your recipe to fixing churn. Churn is simply the number of customers on a recurring service that are leaving every week, every month, every year. And for a lot of home services, 50%, 60%, 70% of your customers that are on recurring service customers churn out every year. They leave over yellow slips. And so if you want to fix churn, if you want to make it where customers don't ever want to leave and they love your service, fix your yellow slips. And so if you're constantly seeing 5, 6 yellow slips around the same exact thing, weeding or people forgetting the backyard or whatever that specific problem constantly is happening, fix those and you'll fix the churn problem and you'll be able to increase the lifetime value of all your recurring customers. One last thing when it comes to yellow slips, and that is if you're going to have them being presented at a team meeting, try not to make it a big negative. Because especially like when it's wet and it's— everyone's tired and the days have been long and everyone's working crazy hard, if they come back and there's 10 yellow slips here every single day, it can get super demoralizing. So try to pitch it to your team as, hey, the reason we do the yellow slips, the reason we have you talk about it with the rest of the team, is so it prevents the rest of the team from making the the exact same mistake. Try to keep it positive, otherwise it can feel like more of like a beating. You're giving everyone a spanking every single time you give them a yellow slip. Another thing that's been really helpful for us to keep really good team members is just off-site meetings. We've already talked about having on-site meetings a couple times a week in the mornings at your shop, but but this is actually Bob's Burger and Brew where we've done a lot of our offsite team meetings and there's a separate little room in the back. We're able to have privacy. And at these team meetings, there's a few things you want to do. Number one, just make it a nice time where you can kind of appreciate everything that the team's done for you. A lot of times a really nice dinner can go a long way just to saying thank you to everyone. And then usually I'll spend 15 to 20 minutes and just go over where the business is at. We usually do two offsite meetings per year, one in the spring and then one towards the end of the fall. Now for us, we do at the beginning of spring when we have all the new hires have joined. And so the goal is like looking forward to the upcoming year, what the goals, the projection of the business, what's going to be new on the upcoming horizon for the team members, and getting those new hires kind of integrated in the culture and really speaking about why Augusta exists and our goals for the company. And then in the fall, we also have another offsite meeting. Again, offsite is simply like just away away from your shop in a nice spot. And yeah, you're going to spend some money on it. You're probably going to spend $30, $40 per person. But trust me, the return is huge. In the fall, what we're going to do is do another offsite meeting and we're going to look back. We're going to look at, okay, did we hit our goals? What were the profits? We're going to look over the profit and loss statement. We're going to see what could we have improved? What are we going to do next year that's different to make sure that next year is better than this past year? And we're also going to look forward to the winter and say, okay, what, what is going to be in the future? Like, do some people need to get laid Are some people going to get some part-time jobs? Or do we slow down? Do we want to actually like accelerate into the winter? And also, I usually do my offsite meeting in the fall about 5 to 6 weeks before the end of the season. That way it's like, hey, it's end of the season, but like, let's not let off the gas. Like, let's go full board, let's do upsells, let's really try to finish the year strong. And that's usually when I position my second offsite meeting. But a place like this is great. Look for a spot. Ideally, we can get a separate room. I don't think you need a conference center. I don't think you need to do catering. I've tried those in the past. They get a little expensive and it's also more headache just to manage the event. Whereas at a restaurant, a back room is all you need, somewhere you can close the door and talk business. Now, don't get all motivated and revelated for an hour and a half about your business. They don't care as much as you about the numbers. They don't care as much as you about where the business is going. They get short, to the point, and most of all, make it about them and what it's going to do for the company, but more importantly, their paycheck, their future, their compensation, their benefits. Make it all about them. That's why you have the offsite meeting, is to get them motivated and keep them on the team. One of the biggest changes to our culture and our ability to be able to hire better team members came when we started to use pay for performance instead of paying people just by the hour. To break down P4P very simply, pay for performance, the harder you work, the more money you make, and essentially you get a percentage of all the labor revenue that you earn for the business. So if you make a lot more money for the company, you get paid more. The traditional hourly model where you pay someone by their time makes no real sense for the employee or for the employer. Think about it. If someone's getting paid by the hour, the longer the job takes, the more money they make. Yet if the job takes longer and you're getting a fixed dollar amount per job, say for example, it's $50 per cut for a lawn mowing service, the longer that it takes the employee to do the job, they'll make more money if they're getting paid by the hour. And yet at the same time, if they go faster, the employer, the boss, they'll make more money if they go faster. And that's why there's this constant tension of the employer trying to— everyone needs to go faster and you start implementing rules and regulations and tracking people's trucks and you have video cams on everyone's dashes. Like, it's crazy because the employee is incentivized to do something completely opposite of what makes the business money. Instead, just like get everyone going in the same direction, which is like, we want the jobs to be done as efficiently as possible and as quickly as possible. And in order to make sure that people don't do bad quality, that's why we have the yellow slip system. That's going to make sure that if they're going so fast and they're making damage cases and breaking things, it's going to come off of their paycheck and the rest of their team team, the rest of their crew won't even want to work with them if they're not pulling their weight, if they're slow, if they're lazy, and if they're breaking things. Pay for performance is a way to be able to get all the team members thinking like owners, which is I want to get the jobs done as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, without a bunch of waste throughout the day. Most of your labor is being wasted on drive time, people stopping at gas stations, loading up in the morning, unloading in the evening, all of the garbage that happens besides actually producing revenue for the business. And so create an incentive that the harder they work, the more money they make. This serves as a great quality assurance inside the business because now team members are looking at other people's work and if it's not up to standard, they're going to let you know because it takes them longer to fix the problem. So like quality assurance, I don't have someone driving around doing quality assurance. The team internally is the quality assurance, but also from a quality assurance perspective in the past, and you're probably used to it now, if you pay by the hour, you fire someone and all of a sudden all of a sudden all the stories come out about how they did bad jobs here and they slacked off here and they took 58 smoke breaks and would take a 3-hour snooze every day. All of a sudden those come out. Whereas when you pay by performance and now the crew that's working together, they actually all are sharing the labor revenue for the day, they're going to smoke that sort of behavior out as fast as possible. They're not going to want to work with that person because it affects their paycheck. And if they're making a bunch of damage cases and it's affecting the profitability stability of the business, everyone will be against that person and those people will get removed from the organization very quickly. If you're tired of losing employees that are great and they're leaving for a dollar or $2 more per hour to your competition, institute pay for performance. Give them the chance to be able to remove the ceiling from their pay and make more money. P4P is going to repel your lowest performers. They're not going to want to work for you, and it's going to attract and keep around your top performers that can make $5, $10, $15 more per hour simply doing the work because they are so good at it and they won't leave to someone else. It's not fair. It's honestly not fair that someone making $15 an hour is slacking off, doesn't care about the job, doesn't go the extra mile, does not put in any effort whatsoever, and they're getting paid $15 an hour. And then someone right next to them in the same truck doing the same work gets paid $18 an hour, but does 90% of the work, is hustling all day long, is constantly trying to look for ways to reduce their drive time and how many stops they have in the day. And they literally getting paid $3 more per hour. Pay for performance would allow that person that's kicking butt and working hard to make substantially more money. And furthermore, they'd probably make up for all the lost work of getting rid of that $15 per hour person. One of the best ways I've found to be able to retain great team members, have a great culture, is using open book management. Essentially, where you're going to share all the numbers of the business with your team. Here's the thing. If you want people to work hard for you, it's probably a good thing that they like you. If they don't like you, they're probably going to constantly be planning for the downfall of your business. They're going to drive your trucks really hard. They're going to not care what your trucks or equipment— they're not going to care about your customers. They're going to constantly just be trying to look for ways to waste your money and bring the downfall of the business. Siphoning off gas from equipment and trucks, that happens when someone doesn't like you. Well, what's the number one way for someone to not like you is for you to hide things from them and not share information with them. And so if you're not going to share the information of your estimates and how much your hourly rate is and how much things cost in the business, they're not going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, they're not going to like you. In my opinion, it's the best thing to just share all the numbers with the team. And that can be a scary proposition. Ultimately, they're usually going to find these things out regardless. For example, they'll see an invoice laying out on the desk when they get back to the office, or they'll talk to a customer and the customer will have printed off the estimate and then you're going over with the crew members. So these things happen. And if you're hiding things from them and then they find out about them later, it's not going to lead to trust. And if you don't have any trust, they're not going to like you. And if they don't like you, they're going to start planning your downfall. Open book management can be scary if you are making a lot of money. Or if you're not making any money at all and you're actually losing money. So let me look at both angles. First off, if we're making a ton of money and you're like, well, I don't want to share how much money the business is making because we're making a lot of cash and I don't really work there very often. I know what the feeling is like. I remember when I first stopped working at the Bellingham shop, my very first Augusta Lawn Care location, and at the time we were making more money than we ever had before. And yet I was only working at the office for maybe an hour a week. A week. And now I don't work. I don't go to the office at all. And so it can be intimidating almost to have open book management where they see you're making all this money and all this profit and they're making, you know, $20, $30 an hour. Now here's the thing. When you're making a lot of money, give profit sharing. So when there is a lot of profit in the business, have a profit sharing program that they get a piece of the pie so that you can still share the numbers. And by sharing the numbers, they still want the business to do well and increase the bottom line because they get a piece of the action. On the On the flip side, if you're not making any money or you're losing money, it's still a good idea to share the numbers with the team because you can kind of get the underdog mentality and rallying the team around the fact that like, we've got to make these changes and we've got to make these cuts and we've got to improve the bottom line or else we are going to be in a bad spot. And that can usually get like the entire team rallying around, kind of coming out from the ashes and really trying to turn the business around. This is the thing. Most team members are going to look for proof and evidence of you making money hand over fist on their dollar, on their dime, on their time. And so you getting a couple more trucks that are, you know, new, they're thinking, oh my word, the boss is making all this money. In your mind, you're like, there's no way for us to be able to get all this work done this week unless we have a couple extra trucks. I'm going to go get debt. I'm going to really extend myself here to be able to get these trucks so we can deliver on the promises to customers. But to your employees, if you don't share the numbers, they just assume because you got 2 new trucks that you're making money hand over fist. So if you're not making money hand over fist, prove it. Just share the numbers with them. Now, a lot of times when you open up the books for your team, they're not going to want to see a profit and loss statement or Excel spreadsheet. They don't like math. They don't like numbers. And all of it just seems like a bunch of Chinese to them. So what we did when we first opened up the books was to make it really, really simple is we took all of the revenues of the business, which at the time was about $1.1 million, and we took $1 bills. This is real money. Money for every $10,000. So it was 110 $1 bills that we brought to the team meeting. And then we went and started going through the actual profit and loss statement. I just started going through line by line. So trucks and equipment, okay, $50,000. Bobby, okay. Fuel, $40,000. Okay, well, because $10,000 is for every $1, I'm gonna give 4 $1 bills to Bob. Okay. And I would just go through every single line Of course, when I got to wages, it was all of a sudden like, okay, half the stack of cash, there's wages. And so everyone got a different line item on the profit and loss statement. At the very end, there wasn't a lot left over. I said, hey, this is the profit and this is how we grow the business. From this is how we actually are able to afford raises, more benefits, etc. And I want to be able to do more of that. But what we need to figure out is how to get more of this money from all of these different line items on our profit and loss statement, these expenses, back into the profit pile. And so everyone had their specific line item on the expense side of things. And the very next team meeting, they had to come back to the team meeting with an idea of how to reduce the expenses in that category. So for example, the person with wages, they would come up with ideas like, hey, instead of having us all wash the trucks at the end of each day, we should have a high schooler come in the evening or on the weekend and do that for us because they're not going to be on overtime and they're less skilled. Good idea. There's a whole bunch of ideas. The trucks and equipment, people, they had ideas of like, hey, we should have a rag and a spray bottle in every single truck that we wipe down at the end of each day, and then we don't have to actually clean out the truck ever because it's just wiped out at the end of every single day. Then what we did is every single person put forward their idea to save money, and we voted on which was the best idea. We implemented like 4 or 5 things, everything from how to sharpen the blades faster, how to do oil changes faster. Like, they came up with all these ideas. We voted on the best one. It ended up being the estimator, which was me at the time, should not be driving a truck. Instead, they should be driving a car to have better fuel economy. And from that day on, I was relegated to a Honda Civic. But then what I did is, because everyone voted on that one, I took all $110 bills and gave it to that person that brought that idea forward. By doing that and having the actual tangible cash, it just made it a little bit more real world for all of them instead of having a big chart of numbers. As I recommend, if you're going to open up up your books, if you're going to show the numbers, try to make it meaningful with a demonstration like that. Or at the very least, make sure your profit and loss statement fits on one page. Don't have like a 5-page, everything categorized in like 50,000 different expense items. Make it really simple so that you could literally show them a pie graph. Here's our revenue. Okay, this much was wages, this much was equipment, this much was insurance, this much was fuel. Just cover the basics. They can understand and see the math of how the business is operating. And a lot of them will start to be like, oh my word, we pay $50,000 in fuel, maybe $30,000 here just for insurance on the trucks. They start to actually understand where the money's going instead of thinking, oh, I work for $20 an hour and the boss makes $100 per hour and I'm getting ripped off. That's not how it works. Most of us are really making 10 to 20% profit margin. Prove it to them. And furthermore, by them understanding these numbers on open book management, it'll improve their skills and to get them to the next level of their career so they can take those skills and make more money. And a final note, share everything. Don't try to hide one single aspect. So for example, some people like, I don't want them to know my hourly rate. Why? Like, just show everything in the business. And if you're trying to hide something, yes, it will be exposed. Well, in that case, you probably shouldn't do open book management. In that case, you don't get all the benefits that come with having trust and people actions at your organization, understanding why the business is doing what it's doing. One thing that really helped our business as we grew past 5 to 10 employees was anonymous peer reviews, where essentially they're able to share with everyone that they work with what they're really good at and then also what they can improve at. And this is a really basic way of doing it, but you can literally just put all the names of your employees and like, what are they amazing at? At and what could they improve at. You give one of these to all of your team, they fill it out, and then you can just compile all of these to create slips for each person, their name, and then just compile everything that people said they're amazing at and everything they said that they could improve at. I would recommend jumbling up the answers so there's not like any rhyme or reason to it, but super, super valuable information. Think about it, who else can you go to that people that want to see you win, they're not criticizing you in the way that they want to make you look bad, they want you to do well, but They're willing to give you constructive feedback and constructive criticisms. Most of us don't even get that from our family. And so the ability to be able to get that from team members and do it in a really constructive manner is important. And so one way that I would make sure it was constructive and really foster this mentality of like, let's actually give criticisms instead of just a bunch of flowery words, is I would read off my personal negative things and what I could improve at from the year previous. And it really helped. And I'd be like, okay guys, so like, look, I understand it's a little weird to talk about other people. I explain the positive benefits of it and like how when you get your feedback, you're going to really want to know what people thought. So spend some time on this. But then I would say, hey, look, the whole goal here is to get better. And the only way to get better is we'll get feedback from others. And who else better to get feedback from? The people you work with every day. I'd say, okay, here's all the things that were written about me last year that I can improve at. And I just read them all off publicly. That would kind of disarm everyone and then make it realize everyone and realize that like getting that feedback was super valuable. And a lot of times if I read last year's, they would actually see things that I had changed in the business from the year previous because of that feedback. This will normalize the criticisms aspect of the peer reviews and make sure that when they, they get the negative feedback, they'll also be more receptive to it, to actually making changes. Another really cool thing about peer reviews is that all of the team members will share things that you are thinking and wish you could say, but you can't say as the employer. We would have people say something like, hey, this person stinks all the time, they need to wash their uniform and shower more often. Hallelujah, someone said it and I didn't have to make it awkward as the employer. So they'll be able to give feedback like that that you want to say but you can't say, and hopefully it leads to positive change. Another thing I found super helpful when it comes to building a great team culture is profit sharing. Now, when it comes to profit sharing, a lot of people say, well, I'm not going to share the profits because I built the business, I took the risk, and none of my employees deserve any of the profits that the business is now making. I get where you're coming from, trust me, I do. However, I happen to believe that if you give a piece of the action, a piece of the pie to your team members, that they they will look to improve the business even when you're not there. And a lot of times when you're growing the business and it's become profitable and now you might be trying to get out of daily operations, you need to make sure that when you leave, there are still people looking out for the best interest of the business and the bottom line and looking out for waste and areas of improvement and improving sales. So I have a couple of different ways of doing profit sharing. One is for the team. Now, the team typically is making most of their compensation based upon pay for performance. They make a percentage of the labor revenue that they earn, and that's where most of their pay is going to come from. However, I also want to incentivize team members that stay on with us a long time, team members that show up on time, that don't call out and are loyal to the business. And so what I do is I give 10% of profits on a quarterly basis to my team members out in the field. They have to earn this. They have to be there for the entire quarter. So like, let's just say it's January, February, March is Q1. They have to be there for the whole quarter in order to be eligible for the program. They can't just join the last week of the quarter and then get a couple thousand dollars in profit sharing. That's not how it works. 10% is going to go to them. They have to be there the whole quarter. And then how I do it is they lose half of their profit sharing if they're late one time or if they call out one time. Like, so last minute, they're like, oh, I'm sick today. And it's like 10 minutes before they're supposed to show up. That's a call out. So they lose half of their profit sharing for the quarter. If they do it again, they lose the other half. So it basically gives you two times before you lose all your profit sharing. And yes, there have been times where someone's been late like a minute or two and unfortunately they lose half their profit sharing. Again, what that does is create the standard that you show up on time and if you do, you just need to show up on time and not call out and you'll literally get a big check at the end of each quarter for profit sharing. So that's the team out in the field. Now, the thing with a manager is the fact that they aren't going to have pay for performance. A manager isn't producing revenue out in the field as often. They also have to be doing non-revenue-producing tasks like sales and admin, equipment maintenance. And so this manager, I'm going to give a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to profit sharing, anywhere from 5% to 35% of all my profits are going to go to my general manager. The reason I do this is because I know that if I'm not there and I'm not making any decisions in the business in terms of buying decisions, hiring decisions, firing decisions, if I'm not making those decisions, I need someone else that is guarding the profit, the bottom line and a large chunk of their profit, of their paycheck comes from the bottom line, the profits. And so you're like, well, how does it determine by 5% to 35%? This actually comes from the fact of when did they first start joining the business? If they'd start to join the business when it first got started and there's not a lot of revenue, not a lot of profits, I'm going to give them a much higher percentage of profits because it's going to take a while, like a year or 2 years before they really actually start to see the fruit of their labor. So if they're willing to hold their breath, if they're willing to actually stay on with me and take a little more risk with the business, I'm willing to give them up to 35% of all the profits. That's more than a third of all the profits on top of the regular salary and any other commissions I might give around sales. If I've already started growing the business, it's already super profitable, I might only give them 5 or 10% of profit sharing because the business is already profitable. It's already gone through a lot of the pains of growth, and it's profitable from day one. It's already producing steady profits right out the gate. Their first quarter of being a general manager, there's already profits being shared. If they join earlier, I'm going to give them a bigger piece in terms of percentage, but it might take them a while to actually realize those massive gains because the first year or two of starting a new location isn't super profitable. Now, the thing you want to be careful of when it comes to managers' incentives and bonus structures is making make sure you don't give them what I call perverse incentives, which essentially don't give them an incentive that if they actually hit the incentive, it'll ruin the culture of the business and ruin the profitability of the company. For example, if I just said, hey, you're not getting a percentage of the profits, instead I'm just going to give you a percentage of the revenue. I want to be like 2 or 3% of the top line revenue. Well, guess what's going to grow? I incentivize growth. I incentivize more revenue, but it's perverse. In other words, if they just increase revenue, I as the owner I'm not going to make any more profit. Also, to get that extra revenue and grow top line, what they might do is underbid jobs just to get more jobs closed. And that comes at the cost of the team making more money on pay for performance and having accurately bid jobs. So I don't want to give perverse incentive. I want to incentivize the thing that I actually care about, which as an owner that's not there, as an absentee owner, I only care about the bottom line and I want to give a big chunk of it to my general manager. When it comes to building a great team and a great culture, the number one thing that actually sets that standard is not fun to talk about, and that's firing. No one enjoys firing. It's, it's never fun. It's always a lot of tension inside the team, potentially even you emotionally. It's just, it's just It's just pathetic. It's bad for everybody. However, it's extremely important you as a leader take it very seriously as to who you fire and when to fire. Firing is ultimately the thing that will create the standards inside your business. You can tell everyone to show up on time. You can tell everyone to work hard. You can tell them they have to wear a uniform. But until you actually fire someone because they're not abiding by those rules, it is simply a suggestion. So until you fire someone over it, it's just a suggestion. If you want to make it a standard, you'll have to fire someone over it. It. One of the things that at Augusta Lawn Care we, you know, really believed in is having where you don't talk negatively about people and you don't have drama going on. I remember the very first time when we hired someone who had a ton of experience and they actually allowed us to get into paver patios, retaining walls, excavation, because they had a lot of experience and they're older. They had probably about 20 years of management of like a crew and all sorts of hardscaping projects. It was great. They trained our team. I still remember the first day that I made that change and Lee was the estimator and having to sort of give direction to the crews. And that included this individual that had a lot of experience and felt entitled to be able to tell everyone else what to do. And he did not take it well. He kept giving an attitude as to why he should be the boss and that Lee should not be the one that was sort of leading the team. And although he didn't say it directly, it was kind of baked into the way his attitude and then some comments he kept underhandedly saying, like, you don't need to tell me that, like, I know that. And like, You don't need to be telling me what to do. Immediately I fired him. And the reason for that was because I was not going to have the decision of leadership, of that being passed off to Lee, being undermined by the person that was the most experienced having some sort of grudge or wanting some sort of positions at the company. And so if you're going to set a standard that like, that's not the way we're going to operate, you're going to have to fire up based upon it. It's not going to be fun. But if you don't want people, you know, if you want them to stay stop showing up 15, 20 minutes late, fire someone over it, and then the team meeting be like, oh, the reason Bobby got fired is because he kept showing up late. Now all of a sudden it is the standard to show up on time. Most states are what's called at-will, which means you can fire someone for no reason whatsoever and you don't have to give them a reason to let them go. In most scenarios, it's honestly better just to fire that way instead of giving a reason. Otherwise, the person can contrive all sorts of craziness and potentially sue you. The very first person I fired literally made up a story about getting hurt on the job and then sued me for a lot of money. And then I settled with them outside of court. It left a really bad taste in my mouth, but it taught me the lesson that if you're going to fire someone, you don't need to give them a reason. Because if you make up a reason, they'll use it against you and they'll say it's discrimination. They just go off the rails. So sometimes it's just the best to not give a reason. And if you're going to give a reason, make sure that that whatever that reason is was in the employee handbook that was signed. So if you have your rules and regulations inside your employee handbook and they sign on that, then you can fire based upon the fact that they didn't uphold that standard. But if you're going to fire someone just because they're not really a good fit or they're not really pulling their weight or they're not doing a good job or you don't like them or something like that, make sure you just fire them and you don't say anything as to why. Which stinks. Pfft. Don't like it. As with all relationships, communication is super important if you're going to have a strong team culture. I recommend using an app kind of like WhatsApp. Some people use iMessage, but the problem is then you could potentially have someone use an Android phone and it's a different experience for them. I really recommend using WhatsApp. It allows you to share voice notes, photos, videos, and it compresses the file size of videos really fast. We use it a lot for estimate videos where when the estimator goes to the property, they're gonna take a video of everything to do on the job site and then put it on WhatsApp. That way, when the job actually comes around to getting done, the crew has exactly what's supposed to be done, and the estimator doesn't have to go back to the property to show them through the project. So we use it for estimate videos. but we use it for a lot of other things. And we have group chats for the entire team, and we have chats for, say, the sales side of things, then the office and admin, the equipment, the guys who work on the equipment. They'll have their own WhatsApp chat or WhatsApp group. Highly recommend WhatsApp. Some people will use Slack as well. The main objective is to communicate throughout the entire day. There's a few periods in time when you want to communicate. Number 1, at the beginning of a day when everyone knows it's going to be brutal weather, a lot of times communicating with the team and motivating them is a great option throughout the day. It's almost like a safety thing to be able to know where everyone's at and within one message know immediately everyone communicating, especially if someone goes down, someone gets in an accident, someone gets hurt. These are important reasons to have great communication flowing within the organization. At the end of the day, typically what we will do is we will send a picture of our dispatch board and we'll be able to actually see, okay, here's all the crew members for the next day, here's what truck, which trailer they're using, and who you're working with. Once that sent out to our crew on our WhatsApp group for our entire team. They then know that the dispatcher has finished all the jobs for the following day and they can actually look at their Copilot app and see exactly what's on their schedule or their route for the following day. All throughout the day, right from the beginning of the day throughout the day when you're tracking them. Yes, you can track them and their trucks on Copilot. You can keep track of their trucks with a truck tracker, but the ability to be able to keep them all communicating together is really important. It's also really good for morale when times are tough, like when it's raining, when it's super hot. The ability for them to share pictures, the ability to share some memes, some funny stuff, keep everyone motivated and like keep morale high is super important. Any culture where people are— there is no group chat, I see an immediate reduction in just overall team camaraderie. And then there starts to become fractions and divisions within the company of the people who are communicating. And usually those Those are the people you don't want communicating. They're the ones that are sharing all the negative things and how brutal the day is, how bad everything is. You want to be able to kind of monitor as well as, you know, add to the communication in a positive light and make sure that everyone is moving in the right direction throughout the entire day, from the beginning all the way to the end when you send them dispatch videos and estimate videos. All right. Let's talk about actually getting applicants to show up for interviews. These are people that want to work for you. Where do you find them? And then how do you get them from random Joe Blow to in your office doing an in-person interview? Now, first off, you want to make sure on your website you have a really good careers page, a place where they can apply, a place where you can show employee testimonials. And we literally have dozens of videos of employees working in Augusta. They're just talking about their experience. That's going to separate you from everyone else that has absolutely nothing on their website when it comes to careers. Also have a place on your website ideally where they can apply, but also see things about your culture, a day in the life of. Yes, you're going to hire someone to come in for a video for a day or two. You're going to pay them some money, but I promise you any dollar you spend towards Indeed or Facebook or any job posting, you're going to have much better return if when they get to your website it shows off everything everything about your culture, about your employees, about your team. Now, after they've applied from your website or potentially a website like Indeed where they submit their resume directly to you and they apply there, I need to communicate with them quickly. I really recommend using whatever platform you possibly can. I would email them, I would contact them through Indeed. I would also then text them. I would call them as fast as possible. The same way that you're trying to jump on the phone when a customer calls, we should immediately If we're looking for hires and an application comes in, we should immediately be jumping on the phone, texting them, emailing them, and messaging them through Indeed. You're like, well, what if they get overwhelmed? Well, then they might actually show up for an interview. And in a really tough labor market, we need to be as fast as possible jumping on these applicants when they're applying. So I'm going to be touching them at all potential aspects of communication—text, phone, email, and through Indeed. I'm also going to have a a process that's going to keep them warm up into the time when they actually show up for the interview. Because my goal is to get them to the interview, not just like to set up the interview, because you might only have 10 or 20% of people actually end up showing up even once they've applied. Like, well, I think they want the job, so they'll show up. Not true. They have a bunch of other applications they sent out too, and they might just get distracted and forget about the appointment they set up with you. And so I'm going to have a sequence of of text messages, phone calls, and emails that go out to this potential applicant and keep them warm. I'm going to tell them about our Audible program. I'm going to call, tell them about their career progression and the way that they can move up inside the organization. I'm going to tell them about pay for performance. I'm going to send them a link over to the video in the careers tab of our website where they can watch videos about a day in the life and hear from other employees. I'm going to spread that out just like I would be warming up a client to accept an estimate, I'm going to warm up an employee so that by the time they show up for the interview, they already know about pay for performance. They already know about our profit sharing program. They already know about Audible and all the team meetings and what we do for safety and a day in the life. This is what makes you different than everyone else they're applying for is having this sequence to make sure they actually show up for the interview and they're excited for it. All right. So the 2.0 version here that I wanted to add is if you're getting 50, 60 applicants from Indeed or any other platforms and you're overwhelmed with the amount of applications coming in, I don't want you spending days trying to do interviews or setting up interviews where people don't show up. And so to avoid that, we want to make sure that we are using a video to be able to screen out bad applicants before we even ask them for an interview. So instead of having 50 or 60 applicants, I might only get 5 or 6 to actually complete a video interview, and then those 5 or 6 Then I ask them for an in-person interview. So at Augusta Lawn Care, we recently made a huge investment to get every single one of our owners a subscription to a platform called Spark Hire. And Spark Hire costs $499 a month, and we cover it for all the owners to be able to use Spark Hire because we know how much time is wasted when you're setting up the interviews for applicants that don't even show up, or, you know, within 5 minutes of talking to them, you don't want to hire them and you waste 20 minutes It's just kind of trying to be polite. And so to avoid that, use a video system. And even if it's not Spark Hire, because it's pretty expensive, you could use a Google Drive link or some other way of getting a question in front of them and then ask them to submit a video back to you. It's going to weed out 80 to 90% of people that are applying to every single job under the sun and the people that aren't really invested in your brand or trying to get to work for you. Speed ultimately wins. The faster you get back to an individual, an applicant, the better chance they're going to actually show up for an interview. Once you've got an application, you do not have a hire. You simply need to now follow up the same way you would on an estimate to make sure they convert into someone that in person you can actually conduct the interview. Where do we actually go to find these applicants? The number one place right now in terms of job boards is Indeed. It's the number one place, and that will change probably over the next few years. Things come and go. There used to be Monster, used to be able to pay used to be able to post on Craigslist and get good applicants. You used to be able to post on Facebook jobs and be able to get good applicants. Right now, Indeed is really the, the big boy. Now, the problem I have with Indeed is they don't allow for a lot of videos and pictures and creative. It's mostly text-driven. And so I need to be able to have links that will go to my careers tab, that will go to my YouTube page and share more creative ways of highlighting my company and separating me from the pack. So Indeed is just someone you gotta pay And yes, you're going to pay a daily rate usually, or you're going to pay a per fee for each applicant that comes in. I've seen a blend. I don't necessarily have one that works or doesn't. Just know that if you're not responding back to applicants and you're not denying them, you could potentially be paying more. Now, one thing that can work, and this is actually an example from our Facebook group inside of Augusta Nation, and that is one of the owners did this, and that is you simply make a Facebook post, but then you boost that post to your local area for the age demographic you're targeting. So if you're like, well, I'm wanting to target between people between 20 and 40 years old, you can target that demographic in your local area and then just make a regular post as if it was a job ad and then boost it to those individuals. This is him over on the right-hand side over the course of several hours, just getting tons of applications. And he was driving all the traffic from the Facebook boosted post over to his careers page page inside of Augusta Lawn Care where people were just submitting applications. Those applications are of the highest value because they've seen our testimonial videos, they've seen the day in the life, they've seen what pay for performance is instead of just randomly someone on Indeed even submitting 20 applications to any labor position that they can possibly see. Now even once they've applied and you got the application, as I've said, speed to get them in the door for an interview is very important. I recommend having a template that you copy and paste just like this one we have for Augusta. Send this text to an applicant when you want to set up an interview. Boom. You would copy and paste this. It has links to why Augusta Lawn Care exists. Send this text to an applicant when you have decided to hire them. These are the type of templates you want to create throughout the entire hiring process. So you're not always typing these up. You're usually busy and that's why things fall through the cracks. And that's why we don't have a system for hiring or getting people to an interview is because we simply don't have the time to type out these messages. We We all don't. So copy and paste from a template exactly what you want to say at every single stage in order to be able to get them to the interview. Once you've got an applicant to an interview, the game is not over. We still need to interview them correctly and make sure they're a good candidate for your business. So the interview process is very important. Now, if you're just getting started, it can be intimidating to have to interview people to work for you if you've never done it before. What I recommend is printing off an actual process and system for your hiring questions. Literally what we have at Augusta is 17 questions that you're going to ask one right after the other. For example, what do you know about Augusta Lawn Care? Number 2, have you checked us out online? And I'm going to go through 17 questions. And the reason it makes it a little bit easier if you have the questions printed off is when you're asking the questions, they know that you're simply reading off the paper and they just assume like, well, this is part of the process. I will just answer the questions. And if you get nervous or you start to forget what you're supposed to talk about next, you just go to the next question. So having great interview questions that are pre-planned, I would recommend doing this for your first few hundred interviews. Until you've done a few hundred, it's very difficult just to have someone walk in, you're a complete stranger, they're nervous, you're nervous, and trying to strike up a dialogue that's actually going to lead a good business decision when it comes to hiring or not a new applicant. So first off, have great interview questions, have a system around that. So we have a little hiring and onboarding process, like before the interview, during the interview, here's the questions, here's the things we're going to observe. These are the type of things that once they leave, I'm actually going to kind of grade them on. Like for example, did they have fidgety body language? Did they have eye contact? Did they have good questions for you? These are things to actually have in writing so that when once you've finished an interview, you can accurately judge them the same way every time. Because guess what? You're going to have good days, you're going to have bad days, and you don't want that to affect your interviewing decision or whether or not you hire them. So get the questions, print it off, make a system out of it. Next thing is don't sit behind a desk. Honestly, a lot of people, they're just super nervous coming for an interview, and you sitting behind a desk, you're hiding half of your body, and it puts you in a weird power dynamic. I've found it's usually helpful to just pull your chair around and sit like at a 45-degree angle from them. I'm not going to do knee to knee. All right, mister, let's talk. Like shoulder to shoulder against them. You're immediately confrontational. Give them a 45. Give me a 45. Open things up and make it a little more conversational. Why? It's easy to break eye contact and look away for a second and then address them and then look back at your paper instead of it being so confrontational where you're shoulder to shoulder. Or worse yet, there's a desk between you creating separation already to where you can't see half of their body language and they can't see the other half of yours. So keep it nice and relaxed, allow them to breathe, and realize that people get really nervous. Before I do an interview, the first thing I'm trying to do is getting them to relax. Some people don't interview well not because they're bad applicants, not because they don't have the experience, not because they wouldn't be a good hire, but simply they don't answer questions well when they're stressed out or when they're nervous. Sometimes it's helpful to walk them around the office real quick, give them a quick joke, you know, give them some water, get them to chill out a little bit is a lot of times the way to break down some of those stress barriers and their nerves and actually get to know them as to whether or not they'll be a good fit for your culture. When it comes to reference checks, I would love to have reference checks after every single interview, and I actually do ask for them in the interview process because it can tell a lot as to whether or not someone someone's actually a good fit is who are they giving for references? And what do they say when I tell them that, like, hey, yes, your last manager, fantastic. What are they gonna say about your performance when I call them? It's not if I call them, but when I call them, starts to like, their brain starts turning. And now all of a sudden you hear, oh, actually I got fired in the last— it wasn't a layoff or whatever it might be. But furthermore, when it comes to actually doing reference checks, I would love to do them. And in the past, my best hires have usually been when I do call 2 or 3 give the references. That being said, if you're in a really tough labor market, there are times that a really good candidate will have 4 or 5 job offers within 24 hours, and I don't have the time to wait around collecting reference checks. So a lot of times if I have a really good candidate in front of me and I really think they're going to be a good fit based upon our interview questions, everything just nailing it, there's a good chance they're going to have a job offer by the end of the day. And a lot of times, just like your leads out in the field, when it comes to The person that gets the estimate to them first wins. And in this case, they might go leave and go for another job simply because someone else offered them the job first. If someone's really good in front of you, I don't mind you locking them down right away, offering the job and trying to get commitment. That gets them to stop going to more interviews and sending out more resumes. And all of a sudden you lose a really good candidate simply because you didn't have the systems in place to actually pull the trigger. And you don't have sometimes 3, 4, 5 days to hear back from all these references. Checks. And yes, that's the more methodical way of doing it, but for laborers out in the field, especially entry-level laborers, that is in a really tough labor market, sometimes they will have— a good candidate will get 3 to 4 job offers in one day. And if you're not the one that's first, you don't even got a shot. One of the things I think is really important when it comes to culture and having a great great team is I expect the leader of the organization, whether it be a general manager or the owner, to be the first one to show up and the last one to leave. Now, I understand there's gonna be one-off times where a project goes super late and you're just not able to stick around to the very end. Before I lock this door, I don't want anyone else still on the field if at all possible. What I did when I was actually in daily operations is I would make sure I— if I had any admin work, paperwork, follow-up phone calls, any sort of office stuff, I just push it all to the end of the day to make sure that when the crew got back, I was here. And I expect the same thing of my general managers. The reason for that is because if you have a crew that works till 8 o'clock at night and they know they're 2, 3 hours after everyone has left the shop and they get back here, they— a lot of disillusionment can happen. Like, they're tired, they're stressed, it's been a long day, and to come back to no one being here can be pretty tough. And so just from a cultural perspective, from a morale perspective, I want to be the one that when they drive at 8 o'clock, I'm helping them unload their truck, getting their equipment off, making sure that they are positively reinforced for going the extra mile that day. Now, in the event that you do need to leave early from the shop, or you have a family gathering to go to or something like that, I really recommend having a communication channel with your entire team and you tell everyone publicly what you're doing. Otherwise, they're just gonna assume that you're always chilling out on the beach. And for all they know, you could be going home and doing your follow-up calls, or like on your route to go take someone to the hospital, you're trying to finish up, you know, collecting invoices. They don't know, though. So if they don't see you ever, they're going to assume the worst. So I like to be there in the morning when they first get started. I'm making sure they're getting their keys. I'm giving them high fives and water. I'm making sure they're set up for their day for success. When they get back, I'm making sure there's positivity. I'm making sure I'm trying to help them if they're late after getting the project finished. That is one of the biggest things I've seen in great leaders when it comes to general managers and owners, where their team actually has buy-in and the morale of the team is high despite having long days, projects that go over budgeted hours. It happens all the time, but being there when they show up in the morning and being there when they get back to the shop in the evening is a huge morale boost for the crew. Okay, so let's assume that you got a new team member, they're hired, they got their first day on the job scheduled, and you're rocking and rolling. The first day is super important. I recommend that being an orientation day for the employee, even if it's only a half day. I'm not a huge fan of like, here's your uniform, there's the truck, hop in, good luck. That sort of preparation and commitment to the employee is what you can expect in return. Like, if you're not going to trust them, if you're not going to commit to them, if you're not going to train and invest into them, why in the world would they do that to you and your business? On the first day, what I like to do is actually sit down with the new team member and go over their orientation orientation packet. In the orientation packet, we have a few-page document. In fact, this one is 4 pages long, but it's going to go over like what they actually want to know, the things that usually take a couple of weeks for them to figure out. For example, the franchise fee forgiveness program. It's a big program, but we boil it down to one paragraph. Pay for performance, one paragraph. What are yellow slips? One paragraph. But more importantly, things like what does late mean? Because in their last job, being on time, as long as you figure it out like somewhere within an hour a certain time frame, they were okay. Well, let me read you what being late means at Augusta Lawn Care. Being late means 1 minute. If start time is 7:30 and you show up at 7:31 AM, you are considered late. All right, so like defining that might be important. Team meetings, when are they? How to ask for time off? How does paid time off work? What about the healthcare benefits? Is there any work in the winter? These are questions that usually kind of get shared between the crew members on their first couple couple days on the job. But if you can just iron these things out, it'll make them feel much more established and have a foundation at the company instead of having to like pick up on all this stuff over the course of a few weeks. Uniform policy, other ways to make money, how to get promoted, how to make more money, how to get ahead in your career, the profit sharing program. These are like the things that they need to understand right from the get-go. And there's a signature for them as well as a signature for their manager. And that— if that's you, that's fine. But ultimately, I need them to understand this because even though they signed their employee handbook, that employee handbook is like 25 or 30 pages long and covers just about everything under the sun. I need them to actually read and understand these 4 pages, and I'm going to read over it line by line, word by word. And yes, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes and ask any questions they might have to me, and I can get those answered. I'm going to sign off on it and put it in their employee profile. I'm also going to go over the training checklist. At Augusta, we've made this nice checklist that is going to be A little bit, you know, looks really nice and it goes over, hey, day 1 through 3, you are line trimming, edging, and blowing. Day 4 and 5, you can do hand weeding and push mowing. Day 6 and 8, day 9 to 10, etc. I'm not going to throw them in the truck and be like, go figure everything out. Even if they're just mowing grass, I don't want them backing up the trucks day 1. I don't want them on a zero-turn on day 1, and I don't want the trainer having to train them on everything in day 1. I want them to get efficient and profitable on one task, line trimming, edging, and blowing. That's all I want them to do for the first 3 days. And this walks through the different ramifications and expectations of every single aspect of their job of those first 2 weeks. 10 days of working days, that's 2 weeks. We expect all of our team to be trained up and be able to do all the tasks within 2 weeks. If it's going to take way longer than 2 weeks, either A, the services are too complicated, or B, they don't have the skills or the desire to be able to learn skills to do the job correctly. And then we're gonna have a trainer assigned to every single trainee, and they're going to actually rank them either as productive, needs improvement, or not productive on every single one of the tasks that they're supposed to learn in those first 2 weeks. This is going to be filled out every single day by their trainer. And then we give a bonus to the trainer, assuming this gets filled out every single day, the first 10 days of them working with us. In other words, the first 2 weeks. So this sort of training process and this sort of training system, right from not only when you first got their application, but then once they got hired, actually having an onboarding day, an onboarding system for them. I would used to take out every single employee their first day of work out for lunch. Too many employees do that now. However, having some sort of orientation is really, really important. And then secondly, what's their first week or two going to look like in terms of training and then having a way for them to be able to know whether or not they're meeting requirements And if they're not, you should have a standard as to what happens if they don't hit requirements after 2 weeks. Do they go on a performance improvement plan? Do they get a grace period of a week? Do they get fired immediately? Like if they're not going to be able to learn the skills, there's no reason to keep the business going through unproductive labor and people making mistakes if they're constantly not able to do the skills required to do the job by themselves. And so having a system in place is what's going to keep the culture high. It's going to allow for new trainees to feel welcome, have orientation to the culture, and then be able to be successful inside of the team. One of the best ways to be able to retain your best talent, the employees that go above and beyond, that are always kicking butt, is having an upward trajectory for their career and actually having a place for them to move into, whether it be to go from a field worker to a team leader. To an estimator or a general manager, having that sort of upward mobility can actually allow you to get someone for a lot cheaper that otherwise wouldn't work for you, or potentially someone has a lot more experience, but they're willing to start at your level because they know that they can grow with the company. In my opinion, one of the biggest reasons to grow your business, whether it be multiple locations or just in terms of revenue, is to be able to create positions that your best talent can move into. Otherwise, you'll lose them. If you have a great worker that's out in the field, if you don't create other positions, if you don't create other services, if you don't create opportunities for them to become a team leader or an estimator and learn sales or learn management, if you don't create those opportunities, they're going to move on to someplace else. The entire reason I actually went from Augusta Lawn Care being one location to then franchising and having 150 locations is I realized that I had a couple of really, really good team members that if I didn't grow and expand and push their limits, they were just going to leave on to something else that was more challenging. And so creating that upward mobility inside your company is super important. It's obviously important to be a great talent magnet and attract attract great people. But if you can become a talent developer and cultivate what is currently there and make it better, you'll start to be known as an employer that people want to work for, as not a place just to start their career, but also be able to grow it and get to the next level of their career. That is like the foundational perspective for my field crew members that I employ is like, look, you don't want to be mowing grass forever. And I'll say that I don't want you working for 10 years pushing a lawnmower. I want you to be able to take those skills. I want you to learn pay for performance. I want you to learn about open book management. I want you to come to optional meetings that we have for the team where we explain business, we explain credit, we explain credit scores and loans and how to get your first car and how do you get your first mortgage. These are the type of skills that we try to teach our team members because we want them to move on. I don't want them to be entry level forever. And if they— if you actually want that for them and you actually want them to get the next stage of their career, that might mean leaving your place of work and being happy for them because you ultimately didn't have the position for them to move into. And so either A, you're going to grow your business so they can grow with you or realize that if they grow their skills, they might have to leave your organization simply because they need to be able to make more money, gain more skills, want to have a bigger challenge. And it's important, in my opinion, to be happy for the person that does have to move on to something else that is better for them, because the rest of your team is watching to see if you actually mean it when you say you want to see them get to the next stage of their career. At Augusta Lawn Care, we specifically have something called the 3F program, franchise fee forgiveness. And it's essentially where if someone works at an Augusta Lawn Care location for 2 years, they'll actually be able to join the franchise for free. So it saves them like $25,000. And that's cool. What that allows people to be able to do is hire frontline team members or managers that otherwise would never work for them because they're overqualified or they need more money but they're doing it for the upward mobility, the chance to learn and grow on someone else's dime and then go start their own franchise by themselves and own their own business. And you might not have that, but creating some sort of chain, some sort of ladder they can grow their career is super important. And if you don't have the intention of growing the business really big and creating those more management-type positions or other opportunities for them, you can also give them something simple like an Audible program or books and incentivize and create a program around them learning and educating themselves, which ultimately will get them to a place where they can make more money. One of the most impactful ways to be able to improve your culture and be able to retain great employees is to have one-on-one meetings, especially if you have less than 15 or 20 people. You as a manager and the owner being to spend time, even 15 to 30 minutes with your crew can be the difference between them leaving for another job or staying with you for much, much longer. And the overall cohesiveness of the culture will be much, much greater. What I recommend during the one-on-one meetings is stay focused on what can be better for them. You know, what parts of their job they like, what parts do they prefer not doing, or could be improved, what things they think could be improved in the business. Who do they like working with? and then really focusing on them and their future and their career. So giving them critical feedback about like, hey, here's the things you can do to be able to make more money. Here's the things you can do to be able to get a promotion. These are the type of things that focusing on them and them only on a one-on-one meeting is super valuable. If you got like 30 or 40 people, it can be very difficult to do one-on-ones. And I've had managers have like 60 to 70 one-on-ones that they have to do each month, and that can be tough. I usually recommend having a one-on-one meeting between the manager and the frontline team member at least once a month. If you were going into a business that was failing and the culture was really, really bad, the first thing I would be recommending is doing one-on-one meetings, getting a pulse on where every team member's at, creating a benchmark of like what is good supposed to look like. And as, as you do them each month, you're able to look back and see the goals that were set in the previous one-on-one and see if those were met. You can also tie incentives objectives to around it. It's like, hey, what do you want to improve before our next one-on-one meeting? These are the areas of improvement. All right, let's see if we actually made progress towards that goal. Congratulations on completing the 3-part masterclass to grow your home service business. Now that you know how to get more leads using marketing, convert them to customers using sales tactics, and then hire employees, I want you to watch this next course so you can make sure that you get those leads during the off-season, because anyone can get leads leads when the spring rush is happening and everyone's beating down your door to try to become a customer. But very few people can actually grow their home service business during the off-season. Watch this 3-hour course on how exactly to get leads, get more sales, and hire more people when the rest of your competition is sleeping.