I Told A Home Service Owner To "Get Out of Snow Business!"

Hello, Home Service Millionaires. It's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care and HomeWorks, and today I'm talking to a group of entrepreneurs and there's some really good questions. The first one being a $3 to $4 million lawn care landscaping business that also does snow but only makes up a small portion of their revenue. So I'm going to be walking them through why getting rid of snow services might actually make sense for their business and being able to focus on their strengths instead of deploying all their energy, all their concern, and increased liability on the part of the business they hate, which is snow. Let's go and jump into this Q&A session with new members from HomeWorks.

I'm Lindsay. Husband and I own Southern Touch Lawn and Landscapes in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We do $3 to $4 million. Like, we did over, over $3, not quite at $4, but growing constantly. We've been in business for 15 years. My question is not necessarily like a growth question. Mine is more of an operational question. I think our weakest link in our business is snow removal. In Kentucky this last year, we had a crazy winter, lots of ice. Was wondering if in your book or any of your resources you had suggestions on optimizing that, um, that area of business.

The snow specifically?

Yeah, it's just a lot different than like, you know, we do everything on like routine maintenance. We do, we utilize the level billing. Everything is on a yearly contract. We have residential, commercial, all of that. But it seems like every time we have, you know, a big huge snow event, excuse my language, it's always a shit show of getting people where they need to be. And me as our office manager, I'm kind of in charge of developing those systems for us, and it is the one thing that is most frustrating for me, for our customers, and was wondering if anybody had any good resources, if you guys have any, could offer any advice on that.

Yeah, like ultimately, especially your scale, the biggest question is what percentage of the, of, you know, $3 to $4 million is snow?

I would say 2%, honestly, because in Kentucky you just never know what you're going to get. Um, it's not something, you know, I know in, in northern places, like, it's, it's built into the contract and you get snow regardless of whether you're doing the service or not. Um, in Kentucky, I mean, we could get dustings some year, or some years, you know, we could have enough snow for 20 inches through the season. So it's kind of one of those pay-as-you-go kind of situations. But when it happens, it's always crazy, you know? And there's like, how do you keep enough salt on hand? How do you know how to predict that? How do you have enough plows on the ground? You know, like this year we operated 20 plows on the ground. We have over 100 customers, they all have different trigger points. Some are commercial, some are medical. We got to be there within 30 minutes. And it's a lot to manage when it's not something that we do regularly. And so I think just having more knowledge about how other people operate and how they dispatch and how they structure the service would be super beneficial for us.

Lindsay, here's how you solve it. You cut it.

Really?

It's, it's just a small percentage of your revenue and it's taking up so much of your mental space. Yes. Compared to just focusing on the thing you're really good at. Like, we can focus all day long on 2% of this revenue. Let's say it's a big year and you make 5%. If you took all that mental bandwidth— and by the way, your insurance is probably double because you have this service. You're not making money on it. It looks profitable on paper, and that's what— that's the logic you're telling yourself. But the mental space that's taking up the amount of training it takes for all these crew members that you have to like bulk hire them and then like train them all up brand new because they haven't done it before, as well as the fact that your insurance is likely double because of it. So cut it. Like ultimately, if you're trying to create a business, like when we create systems in a business, it's standardized and simplified. Snow is the exact opposite of that. Unless you live in a market where it snows 20, 30 times a year, specifically in Louisville. We haven't— we even own it there. Like, we know this market pretty decent, like You could have 30 inches of snow and you could have nothing and nothing.

Yeah.

And that's the worst business to be in. It's seasonal to down to the day and the week. Like, I don't want that business. And if you would have said 30% of revenue, I would have started giving you several resources. And here's how to make it more efficient. Here's some dispatch stuff. And 2% of revenue, if you just took all your mental space that you've been thinking about it and causing a pain in the butt and just thought about all the things you guys do really good at, obviously at $3 or $4 million, and you just put more time and energy towards that and serving those customers well, you'd grow more and you'd make a whole lot more money. And you live less, have less stress.

Okay. You ain't got to tell me twice. I'm always— I was like, oh, I never want to do this again. Don't do it.

Don't do it at 2% of revenue, Lindsay. Like, the only thing I would say is I would only keep snow if it's hinging 30% of your revenue because customers are requiring you to do the snow contract, right?

Like big commercial factories, those kinds of things where you're getting, you know, $100,000 contracts a year. It would be beneficial to keep that.

And I would asterisk that by saying I would look at how much direct revenue I get, how much impacted revenue do I get. And it likely still makes sense because it's going to affect, I'm going to guess, 10 to 15% of revenue that you just still sub it out.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we do for our plows. Like our plow operators are subs and we sub that out. But still from a—

you have plows, you have the plows, right?

No. Well, we do have a couple on hand, but no, they provide the plow. So it is like essentially just operations, like me dispatching this to them and making sure that my salt crew, because my crews are our salt and our shovels. So our people within the business are the ones who do the salt and the shovel service, but then we contract the plows out. So being able to— That sounds horrible. Yeah, it was a pretty big time—

Lizzy, it's 2% of revenue.

It's 2% of revenue. It was a nightmare.

Okay. Like, look, you know how much bandwidth you unlock when you take stuff off your plate? When you have a $4 million business, you, you, you would increase revenue by 20% of the core part of the business if you didn't have to think about 2% of the revenue. This is the easiest one in the world.

Yeah.

And by the way, you resent when it snows every single time.

Yes. Hate it.

Yeah. Hate it.

Yeah.

Hate it.

Hate it. When you can have a snowfall and like, we're not working for the next few days. I'm going to go focus on marketing my website.

Yes.

Training my team, creating systems. And then you grow by a million in revenue, focus on the right thing. Do you need the recording of this for your husband?

I know, I really do.

I'll send it to you.

Yeah, I'll be like, hey, watch this clip.

Yeah, exactly right. No, like when we had snow, we had, we had the Border Patrol, which was like the most lucrative contract in our market because they have zero tolerance policy. They have a whole bunch of stations all along the Washington-Canadian border where we're at, and they would pay us no matter what, like 3x what we would usually charge. Didn't care. And it was great money. And I was tired of working 24/7. And I realized that no one else is going to do that, meaning I will have to do this forever. And so when we franchised, I just realized, oh, we're going to cut the surface and then I could actually hand it off to someone, pay them $80,000 to $100,000 a year and they run the whole business. But I would never be able to do that if I had this non-standardized, non-simplified part of the business, which was snow.

I like it. I like this option. Thank you.

Cool. You got it. All right, Chad, you're up.

Yeah, Chad Allen, Green Team Contracting. We're in a small town, rural Nova Scotia in Canada. Did just under $600,000 in revenue last year. Our goal for this year is between $1 to $1.2 million. So we're big into hardscaping, maintenance, and, and snow removal is a huge part of our business too. So where our struggle is right now, where my struggle is, is I'm at that weird point in my business where I've heard you mention many times where I'm the one wearing all the hats in in the business, and I'm not quite at the size yet where I can hire, you know, that full-time office staff to kind of get me out of the office and, uh, focusing more on, you know, quoting, estimating, sales, uh, even though I do still do all that stuff. But I'm, I'm just constantly running around in circles trying to juggle everything. Um, we got your software last year And I still, you know, we kind of got it, I'd say, probably a little too late in the season where I didn't have the time to sit down and go through all the training and quite figure out how to implement it all. And, and then this year we got whacked with like their craziest winter ever with snow removal. It was probably the worst winter we've had in 10 years. And so I still haven't really had the time to go through a lot of the training. And, uh, I guess, yeah, my biggest thing right now is like, what do you recommend? What do you suggest for someone in my position in terms of like trying to get your software nailed down and get all the systems and processes implemented and, you know, get myself out of the office and focusing on more high-productive things?

So it sounds like you know what to do because I talk about hiring admin at your size. Why aren't you doing— why aren't you doing that?

Well, I'm in the process right now of trying to find the right person. Um, I just felt last year we just didn't quite have enough money in the bank to hire that person. Uh, but now I am looking for that person and I'm, I guess I'm trying to determine too, do I hire someone A, that already has experience doing, you know, industry type admin work, or do I hire someone who's like really got no experience but is really eager? I got this one girl, she's really eager and willing to learn and like excited and good, good personality. And she's willing to start at, you know, a lower wage and and she's very trainable. So it's like, not quite sure which path to take there.

Yeah, like I would reframe this as I— from I can't afford it to by having this as an investment for you to double the business. Like you don't get to 1.2 without— when you still doing all the admin work, it's impossible. And so I would ask yourself, is this, you know, is it $4 or $5 an hour, for example, going to be the decision— deciding factor as to whether or not we double the business. Because like, that's what we're talking about. Like, the grand scheme is we double the business. And so from a cash perspective, if you can't, quote, afford it, it is more a matter of pricing. Because as we grow, we should be able to make enough margin to make sure that someone's admin cost of, let's call it, $40,000 or $50,000 a year is covered. And so the easiest way to make sense of it, Chad, is by you not doing the admin tasks, you could literally just go out and do the work. And so you pay someone like her, let's just call it $25, $30 an hour, and you go make $80 to $100 an hour. Yeah. And so, so I think in the immediacy you will grow the business and you will make more money if you hired someone to do tasks that you're currently doing that you can get replaced for $20 or $30 an hour and you go make $80 to $100 an hour. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally makes sense. And so, so what do you think? Like, should I be trying to find someone who has some experience or should, should I be focused or like spend a bit more time and do some training with someone with less experience?

Yeah, like if you have, if you have low amounts of systems in the business, it is nice to have someone with experience. It simply comes down to what kind of time are you going to invest into training this person? It'll be less if they have industry experience. It'll be a lot, it'll be a lot more expensive potentially, you know, $4 or $5 more an hour. I would also say you could literally sit down with ChatGPT and you could record a lot of the things that you want to talk about and just say, hey, create job descriptions, create daily checklists, create weekly checklists. And A lot of that could be, you know, AI is brilliant for this sort of thing. And then when it comes to all the things in the office, you're going to use Loom or screen recording and just record every single function of what you do in admin. So there's like a 20, 30 different videos that you create inside of a folder that they can just search and watch and follow along with you as you're doing the billing or doing the dispatching or doing the invoicing, etc. But like the reason software is important, and that would be like, this is the kicker, by having the software, you can actually do that. If you don't have the software, it's going to be a stitchwork of all this other stuff that they got to learn and becomes so much more difficult to get them onboarded. And most people will never onboard an admin because it takes them so long to get ramped up and useful. And so they just never, they never actually get an admin person.

Makes sense. Makes sense. Okay. And, and, and just in terms of like, what's the fastest route here in terms of learning the software? Like, is it, is it me going through it? Is it me hiring someone and putting them through the bootcamp and, and the training or—

and have you already hit spring rush or you got another couple weeks?

We're like, it's just firing up right now.

Yeah, like, could this younger gal start right away?

She could start within a couple weeks. She'd have to give 2 weeks notice to her current employer.

Yeah, like, I would, I would just— hey, part of her job description is the first— within the first couple weeks you got to get everything moved into Homeworks. And I would, for you, still know how it operates in the next couple weeks while she's giving her 2 weeks. I would be watching all the academy videos so you just know what she's talking about so she doesn't become the bottleneck for everything in terms of information. And then ideally you create the videos specific to your method. So like in, in HomeWorks Academy, they, they have dispatching, invoicing, estimates, whatever. But like you're going to have your way of wanting them to do it specifically around things like email, like how to do an email, like how to filter through the email in the morning. Here's your daily checklist. Here's how to do every single one of these things. Um, I would just make sure you have like a solid plan for your admin. A lot of times people are just like, all right, sit down here, If that phone rings, you pick it up, and if the emails fill up, you go answer them. Versus being like, here's your checklist, start at the top when you walk in the door, and then here's the reactive tasks that are going to be coming throughout the day, like answering the phone. I'm going to be calling you. A customer's going to be mad. Address these things. These are the most important things. These are the things you got to get done throughout the day. I would start there. The more systems you can have for her, the better when she gets— comes in 2 weeks. So ideally, You know the software. If you want to make it part of her job to move you in and like get it all set up, that's fine. But I would at least have an idea of how to use it because otherwise it just becomes a weak point for the business if she ever left.

Sounds good.

Yeah. And from a cash perspective, it's tight. Then what you can do is you hit capacity to the point is like, hey, I can't get any more jobs or customers without getting more trucks or hire more people. Once you hit capacity, you raise prices and the delta, the difference that you make in profit is paying her wages. So from a cash perspective, you need to convince yourself that you can afford it, go into profit mode, and literally as you go into spring rush, you can make up for any customers that leave within a matter of 3 or 4 weeks. And so I would just sometimes use profit mode as an excuse to go spend more money on the thing that unlocks a double in the business.

Sure. My accounts receivable would tell me that we have the cash available for it, but the bank account would tell me a different story.

So, uh, it's like a chicken and egg game, right? Because by having the admin, your accounts receivable should be lower. You have more cash in the bank.

It's true. Yeah.

So one thing you can do if you have a really bad cash receivable and you're getting an admin person is tie their incentives for the first 30 days to how much they collect. So let's just say, for example, you have $60,000 owed. Well, how much is it, Chad? $80,000. Woo! Okay. So like, like, hey, we know anything above 1% of revenue from the last year is unacceptable. So like $6,000, anything above that, not good. I'm willing to give you a percentage of everything you collect in your first 30 days. And if you, if you have to give her $1,000 in the first month, but she collects $70,000 for you, you won't be crying, right? That's right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's good, man. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah, you got it. Just bake into your 30, 60, and 90-day. The 30-day could be like receivables. 60-day could be integrated directly in the software. Day 90 could be like, hey, these are the 5 extra additional tasks I need to take off my plate by like the end of the third month. Cool.

Sounds good.

All right, we have to stop the video here because like Chad, if you have a whole bunch of overdue invoices that customers aren't paying you for, we aren't a bank. And if you're not charging interest, you're basically giving an interest-free loan to your customers if there's an overdue invoice that they're not paying and you're not going after it. And so I highly recommend setting automations to ensure this never happens. Now, inside of HomeWorks, we actually have it where we can require a card on file for them to even accept an estimate. It also builds in automatically the deposit thresholds to make sure I'm collecting payment for the deposit before they even accept an estimate. But most importantly, having that card on file, I can have the option inside of HomeWorks to charge extra fees if they're overdue. I can charge them the fees for their credit card processing. And most importantly, I can send texts and email reminders to make sure this never happens. So go check it out, home.works. And you can start for free up to 50 customers, but you can't have $80 grand sitting in accounts receivable. Crazy. Back to the video. Pierce, you're up, brother.

We do, uh, mostly small projects, trying to get more recurring. Last year we did $725K, and this year I don't— I, you know, I'd be happy with anything between that and $1 million, just like trying to get the profit margin. This is going to be like a profit year. And what's stopping me? I don't really know. Like, so our mowing season starts next week. I've done 12,000 EDDM flyers. We're halfway through 5,000 door hangers. I got Google Ads and Facebook Ads. I'm just kind of going all in on this one and trying to see where it lands because we'd like to get, you know, 40 to 50 mowing clients. We have added 10 so far. Um, and which brings us to about 20. And, uh, yeah, I mean, my prices are kind of like, they're not the highest in town, so, uh, but they're, they're not low. And I think that might be why I'm getting not too many conversions from the advertising right now. Lots of leads, but a lot of them ghost. And the other thing I'm thinking is maybe because it's early in the season, like maybe some of the better clients will come later when they actually need the service versus now. And yeah, I raised my rates to $120 per budgeted hour. We just started doing P4P, so they'll be getting like $40 per budgeted hour, which here is kind of necessary to get good talent. And yeah, the one thing I could say is we got really good operations and I don't really need to be there. So I'm just focused on sales and I got a part-time office staff now who I'm training.

Cool. What can I help with? Is it mostly just like How do you maximize the spring rush? I don't know.

Yeah. What do you, you know, other than advertising and speed to lead and stuff.

Yeah. Like when we, when you think about sales, operations, admin, the fact that now you have admin coverage, you have great operations, you being in the sales role should be able to get the business to $1.5 million, $1.2 million easily. And so, okay, so I like the instinct is like, hey, we're going to kind of go balls to the wall with advertising and growth because that's— you have time. Right? And so I would say I would really look at your sales process in terms of speed to lead. How can we improve that? Because now you have the time. I know it makes it challenging with the way you have the island set up there. Secondly, I'd be really, really lasered on your automations and your estimate follow-ups with phone calls. Like, are you calling customers the next day after an estimate's been sent?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, so, and when you do that, what's like, What percentage of people are picking up? What's the reception to the phone calls? What's that look like right now?

Yeah, I'd say there's a decent amount of ghosting and stuff going on, but it's to be expected when we've raised our rates significantly. But I just try to just be really helpful and have the best customer service. So I guess that's not going to go with everybody, right? And yeah, we definitely been getting more leads here. So it's kind of like you said, we could do 1.2 million. I'm just trying to see where things land because lots of leads right now, but depending how many actually convert would mean getting a truck and hiring 2 employees, you know.

True. Yes. Like in profit mode, you could very well do, you know, $900,000, $1 million and be very profitable. So like, I'm not saying— I don't think you need to get to $1.2. I'm just saying you have the capacity now that you have an admin person, right? Whereas in the past you didn't have that and you were juggling everything. I would try to reframe this notion that because you raise prices, people are ghosting you. Okay. Because you are, you are making the assumption that higher prices mean that people ghost you. Higher prices mean you have a lower close ratio. Yes, but that will compound dramatically if your mindset is they aren't contacting me or they are ghosting me because of my high prices. That is a huge assumption and we do not know that. And so I would be— I would first sell yourself like I— here's, here's the the deal, you don't believe you're worth $120. You did it because you know that's the right thing for the business. But like, you still cringe a little bit at your pricing.

Yeah, that's true.

And the reason I know that is because you will, you will accept ghosted customers as it was a price objection whenever you feel like price is too high.

Yeah.

And so I need you to sell yourself first on the value of your service because there's no way in the world you're picking up the phone or pushing the second, third, fifth, eighth time. We just— I just saw an estimate down the other day closed on the 12th follow-up, a $5,000 job. 12th follow-up, 4 phone calls and 8 texts and emails, and they accepted the job.

Wow. Yeah.

And so that's true. But the reason is because that owner truly believes they're the best option for that customer. And they pushed, they kept calling, they kept texting, they kept emailing. And so whatever you got to do to convince yourself of that, whether that be looking at Chuckin' a Truck around you, looking at your website versus everyone else and realizing like, oh, it's a very big difference. Look at your reviews versus everyone else's reviews, realizing that what you sell is not just saving them time. It is peace of mind, is insurance of their asset, is all these other things around status in their neighborhood, pride of ownership. That's what you're selling. And so to you, Pierce, to you, it's expensive. And that's evidenced by the fact that you don't have the conviction to pick up the phone, Push, ask again, text them again. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say you might call them once, but you're not calling them the next day. And I also venture to believe that when you give them a call and I only say this because I love you, just want to see you win. I would venture to say when you're calling them, you're saying, hey, did you get the quote? Do you have questions? Yeah, yeah. I want you being, hey, this is Pierce. I got a spot available next Thursday. I'm sorry, I hit your voicemail. I know it's really important you get this on the schedule, so I'm going to reserve next Thursday for you. I'll give you a call back tomorrow to confirm that. If you get them on the phone, they're like, I've gotta think about it. I've gotta talk about my spouse. Great. I will still reserve the spot. I know it's valuable to you. I'll call you back tomorrow. You stay in control. You don't ever say, hey, if you have questions, call me back. You don't say, did you get it? Yep, we got it. And we'll call you back when we want to. Now you're outta the driver's seat. So inside the book, I have like a list of 20 things of like follow-up phone calls, and they're all designed to, if they say no, I still can call them back tomorrow. And offer something else.

Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, I did try to order that book, but it never shipped. I'm going to try again though.

What?

The Copy and Paste Millionaire book?

Yeah, it never shipped.

Amazon?

I don't know. Yeah.

Man, they got to figure stuff out for the Canada Post, man. What's up with that? I know.

Yeah, I'll try it again. Yeah, it's—

you can also, also if you go on, if you go on to Mike AI, just like mikeandes.com/ai, if you go there, you could just ask like, hey, give me the 12. Here, we should just do it right now. This will be fun. Give me 10 ways to do a follow-up phone call, not weak, like, did you get the quote? All right. So it says here, you got, you've got a last spot available on the route. Propose a specific date that opened up. Tell them that the crew loves that service. The schedule's filling up and you want to prioritize them. Oh, it's reading it to me. Mercy.

Ah.

Could you hear that in your— no, no, you couldn't hear that. If you click this button up here, you can hear me talk. It's like, say the words. It's crazy.

Oh, it's in your voice.

Yeah, it's in my voice. Yeah, it's crazy. I trained, trained the agent on my voice. So anyways, go check that out. It'll give you different ways. And then what a lot of times we will do is the team will just take the estimate, paste it in here, then ask which one to use. And so you could just literally be like, hey, Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good call. Yeah, thank you for that. And yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like, I just need to be the sales master now. Like, the master of sales.

Yep.

And, uh, so I want to, like, record my calls and find some kind of AI that will give me feedback too. Yeah.

Yep. If you record, if you record it on your phone, by the way, on the, the, uh, uh, the recordings app, like the voice notes, it creates a transcript. Copy that, put it in the Mike AI and say, hey, this is transcript from my last phone call. Analyze it and tell me what I could have done better.

All right, I'll try it out. Thank you, Jamie.

You got it. Jamie, you're up next.

Hi, um, so I've got a company in the UK, Gray's Lawn Mowing Services. I've been running since 2020. Um, I'm 18 myself at the moment. I found it really difficult over the past 3 years to find good employees. I managed last year to get a really good employee from March till July, but he then stormed out on a job and he was trying to sort of go behind my back and take work from me. Um, so that was sort of stopped straight away as soon as we found out. And I tried again this month to employ someone else beginning of the mowing season, um, but it's really difficult to get someone that is able to do the work because it's so demanding. But getting someone to do the work how I want it done so that the quality stays the same, the customers are still happy with everything, but still having that time management. And the last gentleman I had, um, was a really good hard worker But it was really struggling to keep on top of the schedule. We've got sort of 25 to 30 lawns that need to get done every day. On average, we're at a property for between 10 to 15 minutes. So we're not at a property for long because a lot of our properties are very small over here. And we might have sort of 10 or 12 in a very small tight area. So our route density is really good, but it's just trying to get the employees now to basically take that work off of me so I can then focus on more of the project-based, the lawn care-based work, and then to carry on growing business. In terms of customer bases, we've got quite a good customer basis. We're about 130 lawns a week, and then our second week is a little bit slower, but that's purely because of sort of everything that's going on in the UK at the moment, of prices going up and people are a little bit more conscious of that. Um, so yeah, but at the moment everything's sort of going good in terms of cash flow. Last year we did £90,000 this year we're predicted to be at a quarter of a million, uh, as long as we can get the employees to be able to continue growing, basically. Um, but it's just trying to get that.

Yeah, so we don't— we do not yet have a system for training. And so when you look at how you do work and then how your employees do work, if there's a difference, we need to break it down to what are the measurable actions that are the difference. Not, not like work ethic quality. These are bundled terms that like no one can work with. And so what I would do, Jamie, is like, hey, I'll ask you the question. What is the difference between one of the employees you've hired that just are not great versus what you do? Like, what is the difference? Like faster and more efficient? Like what are the actual things?

Efficiency, language with customers, and just overall sort of behavior.

Professionalism kind of thing? Yeah. So professionalism, these words are bundled. But there you can break them down. So what does it mean to be professional to a customer? Well, if a customer is within 50 feet of you— oh, sorry, 10 meters, for example.

Yeah.

You stop your equipment and you say hello. That's one thing. Second, you never swear at a customer. Like, these are the, these are the actionable things I can, I can have as a checklist. And again, this is what AI is great for. You can just say exactly what I'm saying here, which is like, hey, I have a problem with telling people measurable things that they need to do in the job. And I wonder why they're not as efficient, don't work as good, they have low quality, and they're not professional. Can you give me actionable things that someone can do that are not bundled terms? Like, this is what AI is great at. It's the best thing ever. Create a checklist. Like, so then that way you know how to train. So when you're doing training, it's like, oh, okay, did you do these things? Oh, that customer came within 10 meters of you and you did not turn off your, your blower. That's against viol— that, that's harder to— it is harder to then say someone is professional versus they do these actions. Yeah. So when it comes to efficiency, same thing. It's like, okay, what is the difference between inefficient employee and an efficient employee? Well, this one shows up with a lunch. They don't stop 10 times for a smoke break. They fuel up at the end of the day. Those are the type of things I would try to do. So it's actionable things they can do versus the bundled term.

Yeah. So we've already started doing all that. So they get 15-minute lunch break in the morning. And what we do with that inside of Copilot is, or HomeWorks now, we basically say, look, these are the nearest places with toilets, so you can go to the toilet if you need to on that break. We don't want you driving 10 miles down the road just because you prefer going to that place. This is, we sort of line it through their schedule. So you'll go 10 lawns, right? On the way to the next property, you stop here, you have your 15-minute break. Then you carry on your schedule. That way they're not stopping in between jobs and we can then know exactly where they're stopping, where they're going throughout the day. What we've also found is with this year is in Copilot, the visit notes we've put down what equipment they need to use because we run 3 different types of mowers to get it through really narrow gates because we don't have big gates like everywhere else. So some mowers we can put a Toro TimeMaster, which is like a 30-inch mower, That's what we primarily use. But a lot of the lawns, sometimes on some routes you have to use a little battery mower just because it doesn't fit through anywhere. So we found that instead of an employee trying to walk over to the job going, ah, I've got the wrong equipment, I need to put that back. So it's in the notes, this is what you've got to do, this is where you've got to park, this is the lawn you've got to do. We've got all photos of everything in there, but it's trying to get them to be as quick and being sort of fast on your feet sort of thing. You get out the truck, you get the job done, you get straight back in, you get onto your next job. Whereas what I've been finding is they've gone, oh, I'll dawdle out, get the equipment out, I'll then do the job, I might stuff on my phone for 5 minutes. He's trying to stop all of that.

So this is, this is an incentive issue, right?

Yeah.

It sounds like you've actually done a great job of training, but there's no reason as to why they should move faster.

Yeah.

And so this is where pay for performance is so important, because everything you have mentioned is right for you to make more money. They make more money the longer the job takes. You want the job to go faster. And so alignment of your incentives with theirs is the objective here. It sounds to me like you've done everything possible to tell them where it's best to park, tell them where it's best to go to the bathroom breaks, get lunch, which mowers to use, which equipment. Great. Why do they care? What's in it for them?

Yeah.

And so if you can take all this training Like, so like if you have a training problem, that's usually where there is like a lack of skill. Sounds like that doesn't exist. And they have the information required. They don't have the incentive because everything you've mentioned allows the job to be more efficient, which makes you more money, but does them no good. In fact, they make less money the faster the job takes.

Yeah.

And so it's deciding, figuring out how to align incentives, whether it be profit sharing, pay for performance. I like pay for performance that's close to them. Like every day they know how much they're making. Per hour and they're making— how much they're making on P4P. And they know that faster I work, the more efficient I make, more money.

Yeah. So I've got the Paper Performance book actually. I need to start going through that. I've been going through the Copy and Paste Millionaire book at the moment. So yeah, I mean, like off-season-wise, we haven't got a massive issue with that because we don't have the snow so much. We have more ice. So I'm going into gritting this coming winter. I tried it last winter. But it didn't take off so much. So we're going to do it a little bit differently and we're going to offer winter services to our mowing customers so they can pay fortnightly still, or their once-a-month price, and we'll come to the property for the amount of time that's on the mowing schedule so that we're still getting that constant sort of income coming in. So that's sort of an incentive to the employee that it's not seasonal, because a lot of the mowing companies in the UK, that seasonal work, you sort of start in March, finish in September, and that's it.

It.

Um, so we're offering 12-month contracts, um, so that they know they've got a job sort of secure for the whole year, which is a huge benefit.

The challenging part doesn't change today's behavior. This is what we found with profit sharing. It doesn't actually change their behavior because it's too far away. Even quarterly— like, annual, one thing, right? Like, they're happy they're getting seasonal work, great. Like, year-round work, awesome. Especially in the UK when you have actual contracts like that, I understand. The, the challenging part is once they get the job You might, you, that's a recruiting tool. But once they're in the job and you've given them a year's contract, I need them to change behavior of move faster, get the job done faster. And then that's when I want to align the incentives around pay for performance. And this is why even quarterly profit sharing won't usually actually change their behavior today. What will change the behavior today is, hey, you can make $200 a day or you can make $400 a day. Which one do you want? Yeah. To make $400, I'm now giving you all the tools and the resources and the training and the checklist to make sure you can get your job done more efficiently. And now the type of mower they use in the backyard actually means something to them because it means they make more money.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even down to our sort of— because we can't— we don't have pickups, we have vans over here a lot more.

Yeah.

So we've got a small van and a trailer, and we've even gone down to the point of measuring the trailer exactly where the equipment can go to get it out as quick as possible. Um, and everything's all key locked in.

In all of this, Jamie, just ask yourself this one question: what's in it for them? Because if there's nothing in it for them, they will not do it.

You have all the best systems, the best checklist, and the best SOPs in the world, but no one will follow it if it's not in their best Yeah, now the only issue I can think of at the moment with that is our sort of minimum wage, uh, in the area we are is £13 an hour. That's your living sort of wage. Um, we haven't been able to put prices up on our— any of sort of our work this year, um, because we put our price up twice last year from £35 an hour to £50 and up to £60. This year we've had to charge VAT because we hit that £90,000 threshold. So the VAT now increases any job 20%. So when we did that from the 1st of March, a lot of customers did leave, but we've gained more than what's left. But we can't put our prices up anymore because then it's like 20% has already gone on top of a £20 lawn. So £20 is now gone up to £24. If we add our price up anymore, they're looking at £30 for 5 minutes.

What's your close rate?

At the moment it's about sort of 80%.

Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, I don't care about VAT, I don't care about taxes, I don't care about any of this stuff. If you have an 80% close rate, you have room to move your prices up. Yeah. And so I understand that you can't make sense of spending $30, £30 for 5 minutes, but 80% of your customers can.

Yeah.

I, so I implore you, take everything I've said and just discount it and raise your prices. It's the biggest lever. If you do that, you will then now be able to pass the 25% rule. Even you can do it now at £60 an hour that you're charging and £13 as the base, as a living wage, you can do £15 an hour as base pay. $60 and you pass the 25% rule and you're fine. I would also say you could still raise your prices. And the reason, Jamie, I ran into this too, like we are able-bodied young guys. You can do the work. You're— the people you're selling to have way less time than you and more money. That's your customer.

Yeah.

So they're going to value it differently. 5 minutes to them is not 5 minutes to you. To them, that 5-minute job would take half an afternoon and they don't have a lot of time left.

Yeah. So I mean, our, sort of when we're mowing. So that's our sort of hourly rate, which is what I sort of take care of, that sort of side of the business. Our mowing rate is about £80 an hour, which is about sort of $100 an hour, uh, for one or two people.

Does that include one or two?

That's, that's just one person for that route. We don't have two people in the vehicle. It doesn't make efficiency at all. You'll have one person sort of standing around whilst everyone finishes because our lawns are sort of 2 meters by 2 meters. Yeah, sort of postage stamps. But that's hence why we can get in and out of property so quickly. And that's why we can fit so much on the schedule. And we can do a minimum of £500 a day. That's sort of our minimum paying wages, still making profit. But most of the time we're at that £600, £700. That's including the VAT. So it's still about £500 profit a day.

Let's go. Jamie, you got to raise prices and you got to do PVP. You will be able to pay your guys way more because they will be 30% faster if they're just incentivized correctly.

Yeah.

On their work.

Yeah.

So you got to do it. Brilliant. You will crush it. You will crush it. You have great margins. Like, honestly, for UK, you have great margins. I know UK guys enough. You're doing really good. Just, just trust me. You can raise prices at 80% close rate. Guarantee it. And I don't care about the economy. I don't care about any of that. If 80% of people are saying yes to your quote, you need to raise prices.

Yeah.

And secondly is with that increased margin, you will be able to have higher base pays than your competition and have pay for performance. It's like figure out pay for performance at all costs because you will unlock 25 to 30% more efficiency from your crew immediately.

Yeah. Okay, perfect. Thank you.

You got it, man. I'm proud of you. UK is tough sometimes. Hey everyone, inside of the book Copy and Paste Millionaire, I talk about the P4P system being so instrumental to be able to have the business run without you, where your employees are paid based on how hard they're working. If this is something you're interested in, within a matter of a a minute per employee per day, you can pay your employees based on how hard they work and not based on how many hours they worked. So go check it out, pppsoftware.com. The first 30 days are completely free so you can make sure it's working for your business. Set up a call with Lael, our support system here, to be able to make sure it's implemented in your business. Correct. Sean, you're up. Go ahead.

Uh, let's start with Angie's List. I belong to it. I'm paying a lot, $8.75 a month. Yeah, yeah, that's— but I got 3/4 of my business, and I just started the business last year, and 3/4 of my business has come from that, um, either directly from Angie's List or referrals. Actually, more referrals now than Angie's List. I really am not happy with Angie's List because they have now started doing opportunity leads where you're paying on top of that monthly payment. I feel like I'm getting ripped off.

And so Angie's— Angie's is great because you can pay someone and get leads tomorrow, and they're actually usually pretty decent leads. The challenging part is the worst thing that can happen is you begin to grow because now you start building infrastructure and dependency on their lead flow. And so the reason that website is always the most important thing is because that cost does not go up per lead. So when you get 100 leads or 10 leads, you pay the same amount. I don't want you to be paying the $800+ per lead. So as you scale, you like— I see this all the time, people spending $1,500, $2,000, $3,000 a month to a company like Andy's, Thumbtack, etc. And it's because they built the infrastructure. They have an office space, they have an office person, they have an estimator, and they need to keep enough leads coming in just to keep their crew busy. Specifically, if you don't have recurring work or you have not built a backend out to upsell a customer, the one time I'm okay with something like Thumbtack or a per pay-per-lead service like Angie's is if you have developed a system to be able to upsell a customer and keep them in your ecosystem after they originally come in. And so there are some of our locations—

well, that's what—

go ahead, go ahead.

No, that's what I'm doing, uh, and, and it's all recurring work. It's all, uh, snow removal was actually really good with Angie's List, and it was— I was doing contracts. Um, I guess where I'm at is I'm just tired of paying the $8.75 a month, and now that they're making you pay for opportunity leads on on top of that, it just seems like, you know, and I don't know if I actually need it anymore with, with HomeWorks Web Design and, uh, you know, just a referral program too that's really working out.

So the thing is, right now, if it has built 3/4 of your business, right, off of— I would not cut it. What I would do is start replacing it, and then you'll eventually come to the point where like, okay, now it's 50%, 40%, 25%. Okay, cut the thing, because now you know, you have the confidence that when you deploy that $1,000 towards some other opportunity vehicle, you have a higher output.

And so I'm locked in till August. So I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to run it out till August. By that time, I'll hit capacity, raise prices like you said, and go from there.

And by then too, you'll, you'll be in the cadence of sending out monthly emails and text blasts to where, you know, when you're slow, you go out and get 20 estimates, right? You send out a text, you have a seasonal offer that you have for every single month. And doing that gives you the confidence to get off this like IV drip that is costing a lot. And trust me, that just gets more and more addictive the bigger the business gets. Mm-hmm. So I went to a business last year that did about $1.5 million in revenue, and about $700,000 of it came from Angie's and Thumbtack. And it was a very painful process to decouple all of that because he was paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month in these lead, lead costs. And it took a couple of years to fix. So The worst thing that can happen is you scale where it's still 75% of your leads are coming from that. I want you to just slowly decouple. You got to August at least. My hope is that by then maybe 15 or 20% of the leads are coming from them. And yes, it's a, it's a lost cost for the next few months, but like, but we basically have this, you know, 6 months to figure out how do I upsell customers? How do I— by then your, your website should have 30 to 50 reviews, leads should be coming in, and then it's like, okay, the opportunity is now gone.

Yeah, no, I, I think that's kind of where I'm leaning towards. I mean, between joining Copilot and, and, uh, you know, leaving Jobber, getting a better website with, uh, Lawn Care Web Design, and joining Copilot, I just see it kind of moving in that direction. And a lot of my, you know, a lot of my business is referrals now too. So just doing a good job and, and, uh, getting that built up I think will help.

Thank you. You got it. All right, Corbin, you're up.

How's it going? We started in 2020. Uh, as a side hustle, uh, we started taking it seriously in 2024. Last year, 2025, we did just over $100,000 in revenue with 20% profit. Uh, my question is going forward, it's me and one other guy in the field. My wife helps me with some admin and I have somebody helping me put out door hangers right now. Uh, my question is on hiring, um, who, what position should I look to hire and at what point? Our goal for this year is to get between $200,000, $250,000.

Okay. What's your hourly rate right now, Corbin?

For the two of us, me and the one guy in the field, we're at $92 an hour.

So I need that higher, like significantly, before you start thinking about hiring, because at $45, $46 per man per hour, if you go hire anyone in your labor market, assuming even they're really efficient, over 50% of their revenue will be just going to direct labor. It's too high. And so like right now in your market, what do you have to pay someone on base pay to get them just to come work for you if you're paying hourly?

If I was paying hourly, $20, probably $20 an hour.

Yeah. So at $20 an hour, and then let's assume that they're 75% efficient, that would mean that's $25 an hour cost to you plus taxes. It's going to be $30 an hour. You're making $45, $46 an hour, meaning 60 to 70% of the money they make will go to their wages. I need that number under $40. And so what I would personally do is hit capacity with you and this other guy. Sounds like, you know, you got door hangers, like you're going to be growing a bunch. I think you can hit your goal of revenue this year without hiring anybody. And I would, I would just really try to do this of you want— I call it the 25% rule, and that is what you got to pay your employees being less than 25% of what you charge the customer. So your current rate, that would be like $12 an hour. We know we can't find someone, right? And so 25% of $46, it's right around that $12, $13 an hour. So like I would rather you hit capacity with you and your current guy. You might be there now or very close. Raise prices to existing customers and to new customers. And that might, that might mean this year you don't actually hire anyone. You just get to the point where you can actually afford hiring. Because the last thing I want you to do right now, Corbin, is hire at your current rates. You will, you will not have 20% margin if you do that. You will have negative very quickly if you start scaling that model. And so I would personally be— that would be my target. Hit the 25% rule, which is 25% or less is what I pay on hourly compared to what I charge the customer. Which in your case, if you got to pay $20 an hour, means you got to charge $80 an hour. And I know to you right now it seems crazy because you're paying, you're, you're charging $92 for 2 people, but like it is possible. And did you— go ahead.

Yeah, go ahead. Oh, right now we're, we're pretty fast. You know, we got like 90% efficiency score. So that's why it's working with the 2 of us. But I can definitely see going forward we're going to have to— we're going to have to bump that up.

You will be the most efficient crew you will ever have in the existence of your business. And so if that number is also going to go down, we even have bigger problems, right? What percentage of your current estimates are getting accepted? Like, what's your close rate?

We're about 60%.

Okay. And do you have any automated text and email follow-up right now?

So we just signed up with HomeWorks and I've never done any software before, so it's a big change to us.

Okay. Yeah. So, okay, good, good, good. So what I want, I would love to see here's, here's like the 1, 2, and 3. Number 1, get automations ASAP. The power pack is already inside of there. You can push a couple buttons and it's good to go with stuff I've made. I would highly recommend text and email follow-up, especially in the first 10 days, basically daily until they follow, until they mark as accepted or mark as declined. Second thing is follow-up phone calls. And inside that power pack, the automations will just email and text you when to do them. I would recommend doing it one at 24 hours, one at 3 days minimum. Third is by doing that, your, your close rate will 100% go from 60% to 80%. As soon as you pass 70%, I want you to raise prices on existing customers and new customers. So there's the 1, 2, 3. If you do that, it might mean you have to do that again later this year when you hit capacity. But if you did 2 price increases, you're probably going to get around to that $80 an hour marker. And that gives— that gives you the green light to go go back into growth mode, but now you'll do it. You'll do it much more profitably because right now the reason that you are at 20% margin is because you're out in the field working. If we take that away, like, we know we're not making money. And so I can't— we can't scale the current model. But you can if you get your price— if you get your close rate high enough to where you raise prices and then you're still going to be at 60%. Like, the only thing to think about right now is text automations, email automations, follow-up phone calls, and raise your close rate. Doing that will give you the confidence to raise prices. Raising prices will then make it feasible to scale by making at least $80 per hour per man.

Got it. Got it. So second question is, we, uh, I tried to convert everybody from biweekly, all the existing clients, from biweekly to weekly for scheduling sake and to raise prices on them that way. Um, and when I did it, I raised prices about 15% on everybody, and then it was about 75% for the weekly was the other option. Uh, I had, I think, 2 clients convert. What would your suggestion be? Should I try that again? Should I make the gap wider? Should I forget about that for the time being? What would you suggest?

I think I'd forget about it for now because the biggest lever is getting to capacity and raising prices. Like, are you right now overwhelmed with work, Corbin? So as you take on— could you take on just operations? You and the other guy working, could you take on 10 or 15 more customers?

Yeah, we could.

Cool. So I need you to determine exactly how many customers And when you hit that number, you know you're raising prices. That's capacity, right? And I could go into budget hours, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say, because you haven't done software, you don't know budget hours on every job. And so I just need you to know, okay, theoretically I have 70 customers. I, if I get 85, we're at capacity. Great. That's when we're raising prices. And when you do that, I want you to raise prices by more than 15%. You're very low right now. Very low. Which market are you in, Corbin?

We're in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Oh, okay. Yeah, like you can go higher. Um, so yeah, he started at $60,000. He's up to $85,000. So like you can definitely go higher. Um, it'll come down to your confidence of the lead flow and that goes back to the estimate follow-up automations, follow-up phone calls. I will also say if you want to have more confidence and juice this faster, you make sure your website's dialed in so that way you're also getting more leads in addition to having a higher close rate.

Got it. Yeah, the website's been up a little less than a year. It's from this company you may know called Lawn Care Web Design. They're pretty good.

Yeah. So like I would say, I would just say your follow-up is probably the area of biggest weakness. And if you solve that, you'll get so much more work. And then by getting all that work, you'll be like, you'll hit capacity faster. By hitting capacity, you'll raise prices. And by raising prices, you'll have the confidence to actually scale profitable.

Got it. Sounds good. Thanks, Mike.

You're the man.

You're the man. Thank you, brother. Chris, you're up.

I'm a staining company in Kansas City. Uh, so my first question was about our offseason. Um, so about 2, 3 months out of the year, I'd say probably from November to January, um, pretty slow, pretty dead. People aren't really thinking about it. For the past, I guess, 2 years— this is our 4th year— we've just been doing selling more, like pre-booking, I guess, into the next season, which has kind of kept us, you know, just afloat with our, our overhead. Like this last year, I mean, we did a lot of pre-selling. But we were asked, like, I'd say a handful of times if we do hardwood floors, which we don't, we, we do deck mainly just decks and fences. So I've been curious on would that be something like you would add? I obviously know it's like a new service or, and like, you know, new equipment would be, you know, included in that. So like, that'd be kind of my trade-off there, but I don't know if it's like, if you think that's worth adding or not.

Yeah. So have you, have you taken the off-season workshop, Chris? Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. All right. So, you know, then that like, I would rather us first off do more and better, like you've kind of been doing already. Third would be adjacent service. And then the very last is like starting a brand, right? The fifth one. And so I think an adjacent service could very well be hardwood. The question becomes, do you need to train your guys a lot more or have to buy a whole bunch more equipment in order to offer that service?

Not really training as much because we do sanding for decks. So it's just similar, similar process. It's just a different type of sander. So just basically new equipment on my end.

Yeah, I'm, I'm a big fan of this. I've seen this happen. A couple flooring companies have done this. And I've seen deck builders do it, hardwood. And what's nice, then you say, hey, look, anytime throughout the year, if someone contacts us, we're only doing flooring for these months. And whenever someone contacts about decks, we're only doing it during these months. And ultimately to solve the offseason, many times people will use More and Better and they'll just be like, hey, we need to contract things or get like level billing. Great. You saw it from a cash perspective. You don't solve it from an accrual perspective. And in the perfect world, we solve the offseason not only from a cash perspective, but also we earn revenue throughout those months.

Right.

Because otherwise you're just paying, you're just robbing from Peter to pay Paul by stealing from your spring and your summer profits to make up for your winter. And so I'd be a huge fan of it. What I would probably do, Chris, is like, if you get people that have asked for it, do 5 of them and just see how it goes. Or even better yet, you start marketing those services going into your offseason. So then you have a book of business like you already have 10, 15, 20 jobs on the schedule for that first month. That would be the big win. And I would save up this year while you're able to do outdoor services. I would set aside capital to be able to market during the last month of your busy season so that your first month of your slow season, you fill up. That would be like the big goal for the year, in my opinion. And if that means running money on some ads, I would also say texting all of your existing customers late in your season, all the people in your database, and making them an offer that's really, really solid to fill that first month would also be a great option. Just send them a text blast.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah, that was because like last year we added, uh, pre-staining, like, so basically going after fence contractors, um, which is a slower start, but it seemed like the same demand curve, um, as our season. So like we get really busy obviously during the spring and summer, and that kind of— we picked up with that with pre-staining too. Um, so like I just felt like getting indoors a little bit would help out with the offseason.

Yeah, 100%. Like, are you going to brand it the same as your current company?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Just because, I mean, our brand is Staining Grains. I mean, it's not really changing anything. That's great.

Yeah. Like, if I was you, I would get the website done right away so that way you start ranking so that by the time you need the leads, you're already ranking well on Google. So I would get the service pages done now, change any pictures you need. If you want to add some video, I would also say You basically need two versions of your website. You're not going to actually have two websites. You're gonna have two versions, meaning when it hits November, December, you're going to say, okay, these are the pictures. I'm swapping them out. This is the main headline, swapping it out. Cause you know, no one's staining their fence in the middle of January. We should just be focused on pictures, videos, and headlines of the website should talk about the hardwood staining and et cetera. Okay.

[Speaker:MIKE_ANDES] So I just got one more question about like hiring. My goal for this year was just to be in profit mode, not really to hire anybody or bring on another truck, but we are super busy and I haven't even ran ads yet. I assume that's just from like referrals and word of mouth and all that stuff. And then I did a lot of text blasts just for recurring work. But so I hired one guy. And I mean, it's a little slow to start, but I'm also again running around trying to juggle estimates and do the work. So would you still recommend just keep, you know, keeping, keep going with, you know, without hire or buying another truck? Or, you know, would you still buy another truck, you know, just like maybe like $4,000 or $5,000 and then that way they can go do the work and, while I, you know, do estimates and stuff.

Yeah, it all comes down to your capital position. If you don't have a lot of money and cash set aside or low enough cash to where you feel uncomfortable, you're going to hit capacity and raise prices. If you get to capacity and now you just hired one person, you essentially probably raise your capacity by 70-80%. I want you to know what that budget hour or revenue amount is. That what is capacity? Because capacity for you in the past was basically you being super busy. Now we need a number. And this is why we have budget hours on every single visit, every single to-do, every single meeting inside HomeWorks. And you see on the calendar and the dispatch board for every single week, because it is the determining factor as to whether or not we hire someone. Just because we're busy doesn't mean you hire. We hit capacity and then we have the question of, do I go raise capacity by raising— by hiring people, or I go into profit mode and raise prices? Now, there is a hybrid of this, Chris, which is you hit capacity you raise prices and by raising prices afford the ability to go buy that other truck. So for example, let's just say you have to finance the thing as $800 a month. Just throw a number out there, $800 a month, this truck. Let's just say $1,000 with insurance, storage, whatever, $1,000 a month. If you're able to get recurring revenue and by you raising prices, you draw $4,000 at the bottom line, you can actually go into profit mode to afford the ability to increase your capacity. I.e., buy another truck, hire another person. Okay.

Yeah. Like we raised prices, I guess, recently, but like our close rate's pretty high still. So I said this year it's at 80— no, 76.

Yeah. You raise your prices again.

Yeah.

Right. So you're over 70%. We raise prices no matter what because like, and if you're going into profit mode, I would raise it to the point where it's 30 to 50%. Okay. If you're, if you're between 50 and 70%, I can see you growth mode. 30 to 50%, I consider that profit mode. Above 70%, raise prices immediately because you'll just draw straight money to the bottom line with very little impact.

Okay.

Which, I mean, that's, I guess that's kind of where I've had the problem because last year was different. Like we raised prices towards the end of the year and we're at 40% ending the year. So like it was the same prices, but now we're at 76% with the same pricing. So I just assume like I just keep raising them.

Yep. There, there is no rules as to how, how much money you can make on a job. The ultimate determining factor as to whether or not you are quote to expenses is whether or not people say no to your estimates. And when 77-odd percent is saying yes, I don't care what the, what the competitors charge. I don't care what customers say. You're underpriced.

Gotcha.

Okay. That's a great place to be because if you— yeah, for sure. Everything you sell, like, oh, we're closing 25% of people. We got to look at our sales process. There's way more things we got to fix. But when you're closing 70% plus, the fastest lever in the business is raise your prices by at least 20% and you will probably double your profits overnight. And then that doubling of profits allows you to go buy the truck, hire another person, extend capacity, and now you scale profitably.

Right.

I gotcha.

Okay, appreciate it. Thank you. Crushing it. Great job. If you struggle with having an offseason in your business and your revenue dropping a lot for 3 or 4 months out of the year, like a lot of home service businesses, I created a special workshop. It's completely free. You can scan the QR code here or just go to MikeAndes.com/workshop. And it's 3 to 4 hours of content where you'll be able to figure out the 5 solutions to make sure that the winter or your offseason doesn't tank your business. Tim, go ahead.

I am the owner of Lawn Fox Lawn Care. We do about, uh, last year we did $80,000 in revenue. Um, this year I'd like to do $300,000. Um, so currently the way that I get customers is local service ads, Nextdoor, and, um, like door hangers. And so I want to scale door hangers because I feel like, you know, I have like local services. I, by the end of the season, I basically had them set to max because they worked pretty well. Um, so I'm trying to figure out door hangers. I already got the, um, pack on Lawn Care Media, so I'm using those designs this year. I'm excited about that, but I'm wondering how to figure out what neighborhoods to put them out in.

How many, how many door hangers are you going to put out, Tim?

Um, first order I placed was for about 5,000. I'm hoping that would get me around 50 recurring customers, which would be, I think, pretty solid base for recurring this year.

Yeah, if you get 1 customer every 100, you're crushing it because you're basically then your customer acquisition costs probably about $40 by the time you have labor and cost of printing. If you're able to hit that, that's phenomenal. In terms of where to go, in terms of neighborhood, you just have to test it, right? Like we've seen sometimes with door hangers, it doesn't work in the really fancy areas and like kind of like the middle upper class, it crushes on. It also has a lot to do with your— because your biggest cost in door hangers is delivery. And so it's the time it takes to deliver. And so a lot of times you will actually be okay with a, you know, 1 out of 150 versus 101 out of 100, 1 out of 80 in terms of conversion. But now you can do 3 times as many houses because it's a tight neighborhood. So the way that the neighborhoods are laid out is also super important. And so I would just test it. I'd be like, hey, here's my 3 different markets. I'd probably do it based upon either value of the homes, so wealth, or I would do it based upon density of the homes together. And then figuring out like, is this— is just be careful to compare 1 out of 80 versus 1 out of 50, 1 out of 150 and be like, oh, the 1 out of 80 is better. Unless in that market we can deliver 3 times as much per hour because they're all really close homes. So I would be really looking at the actual customer acquisition cost of what's that cost to deliver, what's it cost to print, not just the conversion rate of like 1 out of 100. Okay.

Can I ask one more thing then?

Yeah, go ahead.

What—

we're still relatively small, so I'm wondering like how big of a service area should I be going after? Like I've heard like 5 miles, but as small as possible. Okay.

As small as possible. Because if you— let's just say you have 5,000 door hangers and you do that or two different door— two different door hangers or even the same door hanger over the course of 3 or 4 weeks in the same market, 2,500 homes. If you can get all your customers, all 50 of them in that area, you will be in those neighborhoods almost every single day of the week. And so by boiling filling the puddle, we have direct response marketing, i.e., door hangers. But then because we get density, you get brand awareness because now people are seeing your trucks every day. And so like when we were in Blaine, like my first location, there's like 6,000 people that live there and I only went after 1,000 homes. By doing that, I was able to like hit them all the time. At the time, every door direct mail did better, but door hangers, yard signs. But more importantly is once I turned off the ads, I kept getting leads because they saw my trucks every day. And when we had 2 or 3 trucks, they're like, oh my word, you guys have like 20, 30 trucks. I see every single day in my neighborhood. And it's simply due to the fact that we are only servicing about a 1-mile radius of 1,000 homes. So it's not really the size, the radius. It's more a function of as small as you possibly can get 50 customers. I want them there. If you could get them on one street, I'd prefer that because then everyone in that, on that street is going to see you every single day. And then the brand awareness eventually starts bringing in leads without you spending money on advertising. And by going really wide, like, okay, we're going to, we're going to put this across a million people. Well, you might get 50 customers. Take out route density and the inefficiencies of that for a second. You no longer will get the brand awareness that is associated with people seeing you every single day. And that's your trucks and your employees, assuming they're wrapped and look professional.

Thank you.

You got it. Will, you're up.

Sorry, it was muted there. I'm Will Petty, Petty Landscaping out of North Carolina. Uh, we did $160,000 last year. My question would be on the commercial side. Almost, almost all of that was commercial. Um, the hang-up I'm having this year is getting in the door with commercial, you know, because we do things like Sheetz and Frito-Lay and stuff like that, but those were all they fell in my lap. It wasn't— I didn't have to spend a lot to advertise. I knew somebody who knew somebody, etc. But getting into any more of that is such a challenge because it's impossible to get anyone on the phone. They'll send you to an email which will never get read, etc. So I wonder if you could share some kind of insight on how to get in the door more with commercial companies and properties and whatnot.

Yeah, usually commercial is going to be much like the other ones that fell in your lap. It's going to be about who you know. And so a lot of times property management, this is why you usually have to have kind of an area developer. When a big company goes into a commercial, they don't like— they don't necessarily have salespeople. They have relationship builders. They have managers that like service the area, account managers, because really what you're doing is just building relationships a lot of times with property managers. And so when we— when we went into commercial back in the day, I literally made cookies for all of the property managers in my local market, and I went and hand-delivered them introduced myself and said, hey, if you ever need anything, let me know. And 2 or 3 of them were like, oh yeah, by the way, we have this big contract coming up for bid and the contractors dropped out of it. Would you like to bid on it? So you're just trying to create the relationships and that takes a long time. But usually property managers hold the keys to all the commercial bids.

Yeah, understood. Makes sense.

Assignment is making cookies. Let's go. All right, you got it. And again, like a lot of it too is just like them seeing the repetition of you being in the office. So for example, a lot of times when people go in new markets for commercial, it's like, okay, we're going to have 5 touchpoints over the course of a year and we're going to do a Christmas thing or do a Thanksgiving thing or do a July 4th thing, and we're going to just constantly go in their office and say, hey, it's Mike from Augusta, here you go. And like not even asking for the sale, just so that way I'm top of mind. When there's something does go for bid, they ask me.

Yeah, excellent.

Thank you very much.

Yeah. And if you want to go more pushy with it, call leasing agents of areas that are usually like new development, for example, like commercial strip malls, whatever, just call the leasing agent, pretend like you're interested as in like you're going to get an office and then you find out who the property manager is.

Yeah, I've actually done a little bit of that, so we'll keep pushing that.

Good stuff. Cassia, go ahead and unmute yourself.

Could you like take us through maybe what your hiring process is? It's something that I'm just now going through and I'd love to get your take on that.

How many are you trying to hire right now, Cassia?

Uh, looking at hiring 2 more electricians.

Got it. So with electricians, you have a higher skill level, usually lower volume of candidates. And so when you put an application or like a job offer out now on Indeed, say for example, how many applications do you usually get within, say, a weekend?

Uh, I had about half a dozen.

Okay. And is that pretty common, or like, have you had more or less in the past when you put up, or is this the first time hiring?

This is kind of our first time hiring. We've only been in business for like 30 days or so. So we're, we're trying to grow and we're trying to do it pretty quickly.

Cool.

So it doesn't sound like you're, you have tons of leads coming in. When I say leads, I mean in terms of applicants. If you had more, I would probably say we should put some video filtering in place. And typically that becomes more of a problem when you have a lower level skill. And so if I was you, I'd be really focused on what differentiates you from the other 10 electrical other electrician companies are also hiring, whether it be wages, benefits, flexibility. That's kind of usually going to be the thing that someone with a lot of skill and options is going to look at. So for example, for lawn care, landscaping, we will get 60 applicants over a weekend. I'm going to then be trying to filter it down to 4 or 5 using video applications. So this is where we're going to say, hey, thank you for applying. You can for everyone else listening, Indeed has automations. You can go into Indeed and say, hey, when someone applies, I want you to send them this. That this message can include a link to a video application and where you say, hey, tell me about where you've worked, tell me your experience, etc., etc. Keep in mind, you might have 3 to 10% of people actually do that, like actually take that step. I will say this though, with higher skill, we see that number being higher, the percentage, because they're not applying to 20 places. They might apply to 2 or 3 electrical services in your local market because they're local and they're not going after 30 general labor and entry-level positions. I would say, Cassia, if, if you are having a problem with getting people to show up to interviews, you're getting overwhelmed with the amount of applicants, then I would put a video layer in. Like, for us, we are requiring a video before any in-person interview whatsoever. I will say though, with only 6 people coming in over a weekend, you probably are going to narrow that down to 2 or 3 you want to talk to, and you're just going to have the interview. And so then I would be much more looking at the interview process and your onboarding process instead of just talent attraction. Because for, for most, if you're getting so many applicants, it actually becomes, how do I weed out the noise? That becomes the actual constraint. For you, it's likely going to be, how do I make sure that my interview process is dialed in so I can offer them a job quickly? Because if they're a really good electrician, they're going to go get other offers. Pretty quickly. And so I would be leaning on things like, what are the 17 questions I'm going to ask during an interview? Oh, and then like, I never look at their references on their resume. I'm trying to figure out where they worked, who they worked with, and then they think, hey, what's their name? Okay, what would you know if I call— when I call so-and-so, what will they say about your performance? And so I think the interview would probably be the hinge point, the part that I would be trying to improve. And if you talk to ChatGPT, and just run through, hey, this is my area, I'm just learning how to do this. This is for electricians. Can you give me a list of 15 questions I should be asking that are compliant for this state? And it'll give you a really good list of questions to get started in the interview process, because most time when you're hiring your first people, the reason you make hiring mistakes is because you don't know how to conduct yourself in the interview process and you're just as nervous as they are. And so you just get a lot of mixed signals, right? Okay, is that helpful? Is there a follow-up on that, Kasia?

Uh, no, I think I'm gonna take your, your tip about using the ChatGPT prompt. Um, that's kind of what we're looking at right now, is just like how to weed out some of these applicants.

Yeah, if weeding out is the issue, then I would, I would definitely go the way of video. If, if you have only a few applicants that will show up to an interview, that's when I think the questions getting that generated for you is going to be more ideal. I would say though, if you ran an— if you put an ad up on Indeed and you got 40 applications for electricians, and I will say this too, go ahead and make your area wider. I think I see everyone just doing their Indeed ads in their local area when if you just do your state, a lot of people for— especially for higher skilled positions like electrician, they'll move an hour or two like if they need to to get a good job they really want. Or they are looking to move to your area. Usually cost of living, if you're in a lower cost of living area compared to a big city, they're, they're, they're trying to move there. They're just not seeing your Indeed ad because you're targeting your local area. So personally, like, we run wider Indeed ads, like targeting a larger area. So I get tons of applications and then I put my video filter in place. And to do that, I'm just going to go into Indeed, set up an automation that when they apply, send them this message, and then in that message you could have a link to a Google Drive folder— or sorry, a Google Drive— a Google, uh, form. And in that Google Form you ask for a video. Okay. So I've made other videos on like what that should entail exactly, but, um, that would be like the cheapest, fastest way to— we use Spark Hire, which is like a video software specifically for this, and it uses AI to like synthesize the best applicants. You don't really have to do that. You can usually get a Google Forms to work just fine. Okay.

I guess I do kind of have like one follow-up, um, if that's okay. Do you have any like third-party companies that you guys are using to like vet these employees before they're onboarded or anything like that?

We don't. Like, again, I would only be looking for that layer of filtration if you had so many applicants. Like if you told me, hey, I got 100 applications, then you can start putting more filters in. I'm concerned with even putting the video application. If you had 6 on a weekend, you might get one person. That submits a video.

I just meant like, but like right before they're onboarded, like for background checks or for like job verification, like as a third party, as opposed to like calling the company, which obviously can do.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. Check is a really good one. It's probably the biggest, um, for, for, uh, background checks. Um, probably the fastest too. They're just the kind of the big player right now. So Check, I would recommend them. There's, there's other ones that are good for specifics or specific industries. But job verification for me is much more of a matter of like, can I call your previous boss? Or like, maybe not the one you're working for now, but like the one that you used to have. Like, can I— do you have a certificate for something like electrician? Like, those are the more tangible things. I'm personally looking at more input-based questions on the interview. So output would be something like certification, years of experience, where did you work? I'm looking for like, Hey, who in the electrical space are you following on Instagram? You know, what books or recent education did you take about electrician? Like in our industry, if I have good inputs, I don't really care about the outputs because the outputs can be faked. Anyone can go to school and get a certificate as long as you paid the stinking, you know, technical college. Like, so same thing with years of experience. Years of experience, cool. Like, who knows how bad of a job that company was doing, right? And so I'm, I'm usually especially the higher up in the company we go, I'm thinking about input-based questions around, you know, what was a recent time you had a project and you figured it out on YouTube? Because you don't want to be the bottleneck for any time someone needs to figure something out. When was the last— what was the last book, podcast, or, uh, YouTube video you watched about our industry? These are the type of things that they're not expecting, and I can tell so much as to whether or not they're going to be improving in their role. Versus asking me for every single bit of improvement that they need. Oh, that's awesome.

Thank you. Yeah, that's perfect.

Perfect. Tom, you're up. Well, I was going to make it short and sweet, I guess, but pretty much I'd like to know, what do you recommend between postcards or door hangers? Yeah, right now, every door direct mail is not on a great spin, I'll be honest. So like last year, I just, just pulled the numbers yesterday. Augusta spent like $2.3 million on print marketing, almost very little of that was every door direct mail, like postcards, flyers, anything like that. Is every door direct mail what you're thinking of when you say postcards?

Yes. We used actually in the past Postcard Mania and we used— we did a couple of rounds with them, but our return rate wasn't that great.

Yeah, I've done— we're kind of seeing across the board right now is like every door direct mail just hasn't done super well. The bottom line is like sending out a text might cost me a couple of cents. Sending a postcard, by the time I print it and then pay for the ship, like pay for this, the postage, you'll get $0.30, $0.40. So unless they can get me a 10 times better return and response rate, it's not really worth it.

All right.

Well, that's it.

Thank you.

You got it. Hope you have a fantastic weekend into the spring rush. Let's do this thing. Appreciate you all tremendously. And we'll talk soon. Take care.