Podcast episode by Mike Andes (founder of Augusta Lawn Care and Copilot CRM) giving three tactical strategies for local home-service businesses to outperform competitors. The three core recommendations are: (1) keep advertising when competitors throttle or turn off leads during the spring rush; (2) hire during competitors' layoffs by offering off‑season services to retain year-round work; and (3) dominate the spring rush by smoothing demand—prioritizing time‑sensitive recurring work and shifting time‑insensitive projects into the off‑season. The advice is seasonality- and timing-focused and targeted at small/medium local home‑service providers.
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care and copilot CRM. Today on the home service Millionaire channel, we're talking about how you can whip your competition and beat them, annihilate them, put them in the grave. Now, we don't want to hurt anybody, but ultimately we all have a little bit of a competitive streak. We want to be able to win. And so today I'm going to talk about three things that I've learned really definitively differentiate who is the winners and who is the losers, who when it comes to home services in their local market. And so if you do these three things, I can promise you that you will beat your competition because the vast majority of home service business owners don't do these three things. And they all come down to timing. And I truly believe because we have earn a seasonal business, all of us in home services businesses, there's a seasonality to our what we do and our leads that come in. Timing is everything. I really believe that most people quit the home service industry because of timing. They failed to time the spring rush. They failed to time their cash flow during the off season. They failed to time when their demand curve spikes and being able to even that out. And that's what we talk a lot about on this channel. But these three things, if you figure them out, you'll be able to dominate your competition. The first one is to advertise when everyone else turns their leads off during the spring rush, we're all getting overwhelmed with leads, more jobs, more customers than we can handle. And the vast majority of your competition will turn off their leads. In other words, they won't service the customer or in some way they will throttle their leads. That might mean taking longer time to get to them, less availability of their estimators, the amount of time it takes to get back to the customer once they've asked for the estimate. But they're still throttling their leads. It might take them instead of a day or two to get the estimate back. And taking an entire week or two weeks to get back to customers. This is all due to the fact of mismanaging the spring rush. If you're able to actually plan and anticipate the amount of demand and then of leads that are going to come into your business, you can ensure that you're able to still take new customers when the rest of your competitors can't get to them for five, six weeks or can't take them at all or isn't even showing up to estimates because they're so Overworked and, and too busy and they can't find labors. All right, so the whole goal is to be able to advertise when everyone else isn't even taking work. Because if you're not taking work, it's a really good chance you're not advertising and you're not actually going out and spending money on Google and spending money on Facebook and doing every door, direct mail and door hangers. And so often the times I see business owners in home services doing a lot of advertising at the beginning of spring rush, but by the middle of spring rush, they're so overworked and overwhelmed with new leads and their, their employees are walking off the job and they don't have enough labors for the amount of work that's coming in and they stop turning, doing any sort of marketing. All advertising gets turned off. And if you're able to advertise in the middle of spring rush, your customer acquisition cost will be at an all time low and all of your competition won't even be taking on any jobs, which means your customer will be much more price insensitive and cause they can't even get another vendor to show up and do the work. So the ability to be able to advertise when everyone else in your competitor, in your local area or competitors are, have turned off their leads, are throttling leads or not taking any new customers, if you're able to do that because you planned well for the spring rush, you're going to dominate. The second thing is to hire when everyone else is laying people off. If all of your competition is laying people off for three, four, five months out of the year, if you can figure out a service or way to upsell your existing customers in during those months and then be able to hire those team members, you will take massive amounts of market share. Because a lot of times the hardest thing about growing your home service business is finding labors. And so if they're literally being put on, you know they're being laid off, that's the perfect time to be able to go capture that labor. And you can only do it if you're able to stay busy throughout the off season. So if you're doing, for example, mowing, can I offer service in the off season like winter services, bush trimming, Can I figure out gutter cleanouts? Can I do window cleaning? Can I do Christmas lights? Can I do snow plowing? What other service can I do during the off season so that I actually have two seasons instead of the off season and spring rush, I Have during the spring rush and during the majority of the year I do this service, let's just call it mowing. But then for the other three months of the season, I do Christmas lights. Now all of a sudden just think about if you had to focus just on Christmas lights now it would be considered the off season. That'd be go time. That'd be the time like market holiday hire, expand, upsell new customers. And that would be the objective is to be able to go on the offensive. The rest of your competition is going on the defense, get them on their heels, that's the time to strike. And if you're going to have a great football team, you need great offense and you need great defense. And the best thing is when you're, when the defense is worn out and tired, that's when you want to go all in. And if you can hire when everyone else is playing defense and trying to like limit their overhead and not spend a lot of money and they're laying everyone off during the winter, you'll be able to capitalize massively on growth. The third thing can you to whip your competition, grow your home service business is make sure that you're able to dominate the spring rush. Because ultimately the goal is how can we serve as many customers as possible in the year. However, we don't have this steady stream of leads that come in. Instead there's going to be this massive spike during spring rush and then it usually dies off and, and goes down until during the off season. We might not have very much at all. In fact, we might have 10 times as many more leads coming in during the spring rush compared to our slowest months of the year. The goal is how do we take that demand curve, absorb them all. Because again, we're trying to plan for spring rush, be able to take all the leads, never get to the point where we're throttling our leads, but be able to the work getting done actually be more spread out. When a customer, when they ask for an estimate does not even mean that the work needs to get done tomorrow. And so I really recommend being able to even out your demand curve by making sure you do not adopt the strategy of first come, first serve when it comes to estimates. Whoever asks for the estimate first is not necessarily the person who gets the job done first. And the way to be able to even out your demand curve and be able to crush the the spring rush and then be able to make revenue for the rest of your off season is move one time projects and projects that are not recurring revenue, move those to the off season. And usually those are time insensitive jobs. You're able to schedule off a massive project in two or three months. But I can't necessarily during the spring rush, I want to really focus and I want to prioritize the jobs that are recurring and time sensitive, which means I can't push them off two or three months. Now, all customers are going to think that their job is time sensitive, but think about the service. What services am I going to offer that are time sensitive during the spring rush? And then for every other lead that comes in, I'm going to give them a price, but I'm going to confirm the job down the road during my off season. If you do that, you'll be able to push project revenue into the off season while being able to capitalize and maximize this amount of recurring revenue that you capture during the time when all the leads are pouring in. And then that will allow you to be able to pay for your overhead and all the other expenses during the off season when leads slow down. If you do those five things I can get or say three things you do those three things, I can guarantee you will whip your competition because more than 90% of home service businesses that I see don't do all three of those.
