Live Caller - Email Marketing for Existing Customers - EP.65

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're.

Listening to the Landscape Business course podcast.

This is an audio edition only.

This won't be available for video on YouTube or Facebook. So exclusively for all of you podcast listeners out there today, we are going.

To be having a live call.

I haven't done one of these for.

A while, wanted to bring it back.

I haven't been able to record a lot of the ones I've been doing.

Just because I'm on the road throughout.

The day, things like that.

But wanted to jump right back into it today and do this live call with gentleman by the name of Clayton. Clayton has ran his business for a while. However, he is not really doing it with employees and things like that yet. So he's really wanting to scale it up this year and he's going to figure out how he can generate enough business to do so. This episode is like a lot of.

Marketing, but really something I've been thinking.

About a lot recently and you've heard me mention several episodes ago, is really about marketing to your warm leads, your existing customers, your customer database, really mining that, sending out email newsletters and really following up with them. So it's gonna be interesting episode for everyone today. Less about things like Facebook ads, getting new customers, mailers, flyers. I'm really, really digging this new philosophy of mining your existing customers and doubling their lifetime value. So this one's gonna be interesting.

It's gonna help you possibly with your.

Email campaigns to your existing customer database, your email client list, and really being able to make sure value out of them as well as give them the most value in the form of educational content.

So let's go ahead.

Without any further delay, let's jump in. But before one quick announcement, before I jump in, and a couple of you.

Have heard about this.

Those of you.

That are on Pro plus and in the membership site with me, but I haven't made this public yet and that is this summer. This summer I'm going to be doing a drawing for three different businesses. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come out to your location for two days. It's gonna be a drawing. So all members that have signed up from now, you know, from, you know, when I do the drawing back. So all members of the landscapebusinesscourse.com will be entered to win. Basically two days where I come to your location, I pay for everything and I bring my camera guy and basically film the whole thing. And I'm gonna create like mini TV episodes of three different landscaping Companies in three different places around the country. I'm gonna come in for two days with one of my camera crew, and we are going to shoot about, you know, for two days. Like, we're gonna do all the work for you as far as the filming side of things. But then, you know, I'll pay for the airfare and getting us there and.

Our food and everything. All you have to do is be.

A landscape business course member. You'll be entered to win. And so if you're a landscape business course member, you're already gonna get entered in, so don't worry about that. But if you aren't a member of the course and you. You want to enter in to get that, there's gonna be three of three people, different parts of the country. I want to mix it up, but it's just gonna be a drawing. So I'll do the drawing on camera so everyone will be able to see. It's all totally fair. But I will do that drawing in probably June, July, and then we'll set it up sometime in August, I'm guessing. And to apply to enter into that, you gotta be a landscape business course member. And then I'll have you fill out a form that will basically, it'll help us determine where you're at as far.

As revenue and things like that, see.

If you're a good fit for it, and then we'll do a drawing. So if you are not landscape business course member, I highly recommend you do so again. The new website is gonna be coming out in about a month or two max. I'm really pushing for a month, four more weeks. As far as the content, it's basically done. It's just all the design pictures making the website look a little nicer. So that's what we're working on right now. And it's gonna be much, much better than existing site. And it'll allow me to put more content on instead of just trying to fix bugs all the time. So I'm really looking forward to that. And so without any further delay, let's.

Jump right into the episode.

This is Clayton Fiera.

Here we go.

How do you spell. Is it real? R, E, A L?

He said.

No, it's Green. Green way.

Oh. Oh, gotcha.

That's right.

I had actually already seen that a couple weeks ago. All right, Here you go.

Propertycare.com.

Very cool. All right. Yeah. So tell me a little about the company, how you started and stuff like that.

Well.

I mean, business since 2009.

Okay.

And I started. I started this business Actually, we bought some accounts and I had a partner. I used to be a painter. And I was sick of it and I just kind of, you know, I want to try something new. And I asked a friend of mine about landscaping because he used to do landscaping. And he said it's, you know, it's a pretty good business and it's steady income and every day just something different. So I said, you know, I'm going to give it a try. So I sold my painting business and I had this other friend, used to do landscaping with some other company, and I asked him to join with me. And I didn't know anything about landscaping, didn't even know what WIC was. So. Yeah. And then he had some experience, so we bought, you know, I financed everything and I came up with the money and he came up with the experience.

You know, long story short, we bought 30 accounts and we end up, like, separating like a year later. Things didn't work out and, you know, ended up losing most of the accounts. And I, you know, I try to climb up by myself, you know, try to pick up some more accounts here and there. I end up with like, fan accounts from the. The lunch, what we bought together. And right now, you know, like nine years forward, I have probably like, you know, 70 accounts.

Cool.

Yeah, but I'm, you know, I really don't do a lot of marketing. I know a lot of stuff. I would say that I have, especially the year 2017. I have like, information overload.

Yeah.

If you know what that means.

Yeah.

I know a lot of stuff on my mind, a lot of stuff in my brain, but I don't put it to action. You know what I mean? So I do some here and there, but I'm a member of, you know, Dirt Monkey University. I don't know if you're familiar with.

Yep.

Yeah. So I. I follow a lot of stuff from, you know, a lawn care millionaire, Jonathan Potashnik.

Yeah.

A lot of these videos. You know, I'm a member of, you know, this guy called Josh Latimer.

Okay. Yep, yep.

Yeah. So he's. He owns a dungeon company. I'm a member of that, too.

Okay.

And. But lately, you know, that's how I started. And then from last year on, I decided to, you know, you know what? This is something, you know, I'm wasting time over here because I'm a real estate agent, too. Okay. So. So, you know, I was just kind of doing real estate and doing this here. Never. I never took it for, you know, like, for seriously like you did in Three years, you. You know, you end up like a million dollar company. Yeah, so I never did that. You know what I mean? I. I thought, you know, I. I really never thought. I really never took it so seriously, so. But now, you know, things changed a little bit and, you know, and found you on, I think. I don't know if it was Facebook or YouTube.

So. Yeah, that's, you know, I'm here now.

So are you. So are you basically. Are you. Are you wanting to go full time basically with it and not do the real estate anymore? Or are you still wanting to kind of do a hybrid version of the two?

No, actually I'm a real estate agent, but I'm not active.

Gotcha.

That one. You know, I mean, you tell me, because that's. That. I think that's a pretty good niche because I have a lot of information because I can go inside the MLS and I can collect a lot of information. You know, like, you know, just sold homes, like six months old homes, and, you know, all the areas that I want, I can like data mine, all that stuff and then, you know, pieces of. Maybe it's the same gym, you know what I mean? Since, you know, like Hopper. How do you call Hyper. Hyper Target. Yeah, that area. You know what I mean? So I have a lot of ideas, but I think what I'm mostly. I'm poor is to. My business is systems. I don't know how to, you know, how to put together a plan to like, you know, like employees or marketing systems, referral programs and all that stuff.

Right. Do you have employees right now, Clayton?

I do have a couple guys that help me out, but they are not in the books right now.

Yeah. Okay. And then as far as your plans for 2018, do you think you're gonna, like, grow like 10% or like 50% or what are you kind of gauging right now?

Well, Mike, you know, that's the thing, you know, I mean, I really, like, last year I was just looking at my numbers. You know, that's one. One other thing that I wanted to understand. So I don't know if you could help me with that, but the number, Helping with the numbers. Well, I'm just. I'm just gonna get to your question. But, you know, like the numbers that, you know, like how to calculate customer acquisition costs, all those, you know, I was. I watch a lot of this stuff. Really a big fan, to be honest with you. And. Yeah, so I'm trying to grow at least, you know, at least 15% this year, because last year I did close to 300,000 with probably, like 70 clients.

Okay, so that tells me you probably do quite a bit of landscaping. Is that right? Like, a lot of, like, installs, masonry, hardscaping stuff.

Yeah, we do a lot of that stuff. We do masonry work. As a matter of fact, I don't even know how to lay a brick on top of the other. I just kind of help, you know, sub it out, everything. So I just got the job. Let's say the stonewall that you just see in the picture there. I don't know if you're on my website, but you send a picture. Let's say it's a $10,000 job. I take a guy there, my mason guy. Oh, I can do this for, you know, like 5,000. So I'll pay him $5,000 and I get, you know, you know, the rest is. It's just kind of, you know, if you could say, profit.

Right, right.

So I'll say, you know, auto goes up, I would say $270,000 for the year. I would net probably around 30% of that.

Okay. All right. Yeah, like, that's one way really, to. To run a lawn care business. If you don't want to get into employees is just get into a lot of subcontracting stuff of larger jobs. The problem is, is that you lose the brand equity with the client because they just see the other guy out there working, and you're probably not going to get a lot of referrals necessarily. To you, it would be like, oh, we did this great masonry job, and then they'd refer the mason that actually did it usually.

Go ahead.

Actually, actually, Mike, these guys, they. They actually, they're like. You can call them freelancers.

Gotcha. Yeah.

Right term.

Yep.

But I know a lot of nations that they. They don't. They don't have companies or they don't own a business. You know what I mean? So I know they're really good in what they do. So I pay him by the hour, and of course I'm there. I'm the guy who's, you know, bringing them the team. I'm the guy talking to the client. That's my name, you know, so that's actually, I'm kind of branding, you know, the trucks that they drive. I tend to put my magnetic sign on it just to make sure that it's my name that goes along with the job for sure.

Okay, yeah, that's. That's good then. Like right now, do you have any sort of email marketing campaign to existing customers and, like, Ones that you've done in the past, like a database.

No, I don't have, I don't have it. I mean I, I do.

I just send it out like as, as I said like last year, that's what I took it seriously. I mean I never sent postcards, I never sent flyers. I never did like knock on doors and you know, mark marketing. Because last year as, you know what, I better take this thing seriously. And you know, like this year I already spent like emails to all my customers saying, you know, like.

Welcome them to the new year and then saying that we're going to start the sprinkling up in such and such day and important, you know, time to do aeration and other stuff. And I kind of send it, you know, I want to do everything.

From, start a fresh start this year. So I already sent from past, past, you know, past years. No, I haven't, I haven't done it.

Yeah, like, like I think I would imagine you have a few hundred emails probably that you can tap into at least. And, and like what I tried doing, like I don't know when your season starts, but like we just finished ours where we, we actually create our, our monthly newsletters for the entire year up front. Because you kind of already know, you know which months you're going to be promoting certain types of people, products and services, what type of months you can give value to them as far as even the do it yourself people as far as teaching them about different common lawn issues or things like that. And so we create our newsletters at the beginning of the year so that way when we get busy, they're already ready to go. And each month is obviously an automatic.

Thing that goes automatically every other month or something like that.

We send ours out every month. I wouldn't say it's automatic, but once we've created them, it only takes us like a minute to send it out to, you know, our thousands of, you know, people that we have on our database. But like the main thing is that you make them because that takes us a good, you know, probably a couple hours that, you know, the office gets together and just makes, you know, an email. But what we do is we make them for the entire year because you already know that, you know, in September, October, the leaves start falling and that's gonna be a fall cleanup email. You know, come, you know, winter, there's certain things that you can be promoting. We have one that goes out this month that is like really just more educational, teaching them about like the three or four most common type of weeds in our area. And then at the very bottom just kind of says, hey, we have, you know, a basic package and a premium package for treatments and then pitch them the sale. But really it's more of an educational piece. And so the reason I'm saying that is because really instead of spending, focusing too much on spending money on marketing, I'd be looking at how can you tap into the people that you have now and double your sales? Like literally we can double our sale. Like if we're slow, for instance, we just need to email our people one time and we'll book ourselves out for a week or two. And so that's really powerful because then you can really make sure you can hire an employee and keep them busy all the time, knowing that you can always email your people and get jobs literally instantly.

Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. I think the same way, you know what I mean? Because I'm really good communicator with the clients. I'm really on top of things, you know. But last year, just, just for an example, like last year I had this guy, which I call, you know, it's a full year program when I give him a package, like you know what we can, it's like 32 cuts a year. You have sprinkle not falcon up mulch. So I put all, everything together and like, I don't know, I don't even know if I'm doing right, but I put everything together and just to kind of divide it like, you know, I give them options of 12 months payments. I give them option 8 month payment and 4 month payment.

Yeah.

So majority goes for 12 month payments, but that includes everything. And then I, you know, I kind of tell them up front that, you know, but you know, just, just, just a reminder because you're not going to be in your property around, you know, December, January, February, but you still gonna pay us, right? And they are pretty understandable. So I would like to have, you know, all my customers to be on that full year program.

Right.

You know what I mean? But when you mentioned like email marketing, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't have the. Know how, you know what I mean? Like, that's why I need the coach to tell me, Clayton, this month you're gonna send this that month you're gonna send that or you know what I mean? So, so I know what you told me. Like I know that I have to do that, but I just don't know like copywise. Do you have that on your course or no.

So that's something probably on the new website we're developing, like, a thing for the emails where people can basically copy, paste in. The thing is, it's really all about your market. So, like, I know it's easy to say you don't know how to do the copy and stuff, but I think you know enough where you could. Okay, you know, during January, even if you just look at your invoices for the past year and look at your invoice and say, okay, what are we mostly doing in January? It's probably cleanups, random trimming jobs, you know, branches falling down, stuff like that. Okay, just make note of that. Then what are we doing in February? What's happening in March? Okay, big thing happening in March or April, whenever you start mowing is obviously you're starting to mow. So how do we make that transition easy for the customer? And so literally every single month. And then if there's holes, for instance, like if, you know in the middle of the year, you don't know exactly what to say, do an educational piece, do a video, like a customer testimonials. So if you go to our website, right now we have on the front page is our most recent video, which is basically just four customers that we had. The guys go over to their house, sit them down with a camera and ask them how their job went, what happened, how they liked, you know, our company, and then that's the video. That's the content for a month of this year. And so I wouldn't overthink it too much. I would just say, okay, what are the services? Maybe six or seven out of the 12 months of the year are more like promotional, like you're actually trying to ask for a sale. Whereas the other four or five might be just educational. Teaching them about why aeration and thatching are important, teaching them why mulch is important, teaching them how to trim even their own plants. Like, the bottom line is people probably won't do it themselves. They'll probably just call you and say the reason you're educating them is not necessarily for them to do it themselves as much as for them to realize that you are the authority and you know what you're doing and you're the expert. And then you'll be amazed how many people email you back saying, thanks for the great information. Can you do this on my property? And then you go out and do an estimate, obviously. So I wouldn't overthink it too much, Clinton. I would look at your last year's invoices. And see, okay, when are we getting the biggest hardscaping jobs? Obviously it's probably in the summer. Maybe that's when you show pictures of jobs you're currently doing or a couple videos, show them like a breakdown of a cost of. They might think that installing a paver patio is gonna cost them 20 grand. But if you can show a couple before and after picture and say this project only costed 4,500, you might literally get two or three people just to call you over that. So I wouldn't overthink it too much. Just look at your invoices. See when the biggest months were for certain type of ticket items, make those emails and then fill everything else in around like customer testimonial videos before and after pictures and then also just educational stuff about the different services that you do.

Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah.

Because I really think like if you have 70 clients, if you have 70 clients and you're doing 300 grand, that's why I knew right away you're doing hardscaping is. Cause it's not. You have a high ticket item per client because you're doing more landscaping jobs. Right. So.

I believe your goal should be like this year is making sure that you can hire someone and have dependable work. And the best way to take out the low ebbs of work in our industry is having a really good connection with your customers via email so that you can literally on demand get work. Like, like, you know, when you send out an email to, you know, 2,000 people, for instance, you know, 50 of them are gonna email you back and 10 of them are gonna convert to some sort of job and that's gonna literally fill your schedule for, you know, seven or 10 days. And that's powerful because then you have the confidence to go get that employee and know that they're not gonna be twiddling their thumbs, you know, a month out of the year.

Yeah, absolutely agree. And do you think like the current customers that I have, I had a plan today go, you know, every property like, you know, like every other week just to kind of walk up the property and point, you know, point the, whatever it needs to be done in the property and just kind of email them or send the postcards or maybe take a picture. And at Tim gym they have this option, we can take a picture of the, of the house and then just kind of point it out. Oh, we have to do this, we have to do that. It's going to cost this, it's going to cost that. So you think that's A good idea.

Yeah. Like, I would only do that in the winter because it's pretty time intensive as far as just going to every single person's property. What I would, I would say is.

If you want to do that in.

Spring or in a busy season, one of your emails can be telling all your existing clients that they are getting an exclusive offer for only existing clients, that they get a free property analysis. And basically that's an estimate. But what you're going to do is basically I would create a checklist of things that you look over on every person's property.

Gutters, roof on the moss, moss on.

The roof, if they need pressure washing, if they need, if their trees are trimmed away from their house, make a checklist. And then they feel like when you come to the property, you're doing a property inspection or you're doing a free property analysis. Don't make it like an estimate or anything like that. Just make it an analysis, figure out what they need and then make an estimate based upon that. And then that way if you send out the email, the people that ask you for that free analysis, they are basically telling you that they want the work done. Whereas if you do just kind of do what I call blind estimates, go there in the winter and just kind of see what's going on in their property, your closing ratio is much, much lower. And so it takes a lot of time, which is fine during the winter, but during, like spring and fall, if you want to do that, I would prefer that you would send an email out offering free property inspections and then set up estimates with people that reply.

Gotcha.

Like, the checklist is pretty powerful. When they see that you have kind of thought out, like, what I would do is on your checklist, have, okay, outdoor things that you check, you know, structural things that you check, tree things, lawn, like break into like four different categories and then basically make it a checklist. Is there thatch, you know, check mark or you know, yes or no, Is there weeds growing?

Yes or no.

And then like for structural, are the trees touching the gutters or, or the siding of the house? And then what you can do is at the end of that checklist you can explain to them, okay, you need to trim your trees off of your house and your windows. You don't want rodents getting into the gutters, your gutters are overflowing, all those different things and it's value to them because otherwise they would have to get on the ladder themselves and check their own gutters or they'd have to.

Take a look at the lawn and maybe dig down and see if there's some thatch or see if there's some grubs. So you can make it where it's an actual service that you're giving a value to them and. But then also make it where you're making that contact much more frequent. And you'll find when you do that, people don't realize that you offer all those other services. They have a pressure washing guy doing their pressure washing. They have a guy trimming the trees off the house. Cause they don't know you do tree work. They don't know you do gutters. So if you can make that property analysis, you can get a lot of upsell work. I think that's really what you got to focus on because that's what's going to be able to keep an employee busy. And, and that's what I'd be focusing on for you this year is how do you get a full time employee? Because when you commit to that it gets amazing how much more work comes your way because then it frees you up to focus more on the client side, getting more sales, focusing on creating marketing pieces. And then it really makes you accountable to keep work, keep the flow of work, the funnel full of new work. Because you gotta keep someone busy.

Right, Gotcha. And then do you ever send letters to your customers like as reminders, like sprinkling up, polking up letter, end of year letter, beginning of year reminder or something like that. And for the clients, let's say for example, the clients that I only do mowing, you know, if you want to upsell, you have like some kind of a list that they can check whatever they want. Let's say, oh, we offer this, this, we offer, you know, fertilization, we offer a tree removal, we offer that. And then there's a space where they can check, you know, please check the ones you would like to be serviced this year or something like that.

Yeah, so we, we stick to email pretty after they are like on our email list. The reason for that is because we have, you know, thousands of people. So if we were sending them all mailers every single month, it'd get really expensive. So email seems to do pretty good for that. We do mailers as far as like hard in the mail, mostly on the pre sale. So basically we send them an intro packet with a hardcover folder with stuff about our company. We send them a thank you handwritten thank you letter. If they're doing a big landscaping job. Right after the landscaping job, all the land, the Guys that were on that job sign a card and send it to them in the mail. So that's all pretty male intensive. But once they are kind of like an existing client, they really do go on the email list. So we really do make that email list. I mean the emails that we send as, as just not as like we try not to make them generic like spam mail because we, we would prefer obviously that we could send them all mail pieces but just get really expensive. And so, so that's why we stick to the email for the monthly stuff. But up front, that's when we do more of the, the mailers info stuff, flyers, pictures, all that stuff is in the mail. Handwritten cards. But after the sale in general, we stick to email pretty closely. And what's nice about it too is it's easier to track. So for instance, I can send only our lawn mowing customers a certain email with a click of a button. I can send only people that have ever had landscaping services. I can send just them an email about mowing. And so it's just so much more fast, so much faster and than having to print them all out, post them, put them in envelopes, have the addresses written or printed or something on them like stamps, really expensive, time consuming. Whereas I can literally within a few minutes I could right now determine, okay, everyone that did fertilization last year, I want to try to upsell them to mowing and then send just them an email. So that's much more powerful with the email part of things. I know that you could obviously do the same thing, export out an address list and then make letters for them all. But that gets really time consuming when you're smaller. That might work though. So if you have, you know, 30, 40 mailers that you want to send out each month to certain types of people, that might work. But we've kind of evolved because now when we're sending out a monthly list, it's thousands. So like it would be, I'd have to hire someone part time just to do all our mail work. Right, right. So I would say yes and no. Like I would say yes to get clients on board mailers. Mailing can be important as far as getting them as a client. But once they know like and trust you, emails are usually enough if they're written correctly and if they're like, they're engaging and not just like standard and blah and like all promotional, then any, there's some video content, there's some funny stuff in there. Like we try to mix it up a lot. We Try to show pictures of like behind the scenes or like our new employees and try to mix it up, do some funny stuff in there to keep them so that when they see an email, they actually read it. Like, our open rates are pretty good. They're like 40%. And so that's pretty good for mailers emailing. And so the reason is because we try to mix it up. We try to make it funny, our titles, we just try to make it interesting. Right. And so I would say after the sale, email is usually better as you get bigger, but mailers work too. It's just really a cost function.

Okay. And I have another question for you regarding.

Hyper Target new clients, which is, you know, I think it's a low cost tool because I'm just kind of, I just want to send the letters to these new customers, like welcome to the neighborhood and congratulations, your new home and stuff like that. I mean, do you think that's a good idea?

So do you have a list of like new homeowners or are you talking about like sending like nine pieces of mail the same address?

No, actually, you know, let's say I go inside my MLS and I have a list of homes. Let's say I want a home, you know, I want a house anywhere from 400,000 to 3 million sold within, you know, like a specific town that I currently serve. Let's say Richfield, Connecticut. Sold homes for the past three months on the price range of 400 to, you know, whatever. A million dollars. Yeah, so they were giving that, that list with the property, you know, everything, the property address and you know, how much the house was sold for. All the pictures are there, you know, let's say, you know, like 30 houses. So within, you know, this price range, within this, you know, within this town. So I can put together a ladder, welcome to the neighborhood, and maybe put a business card in there and just kind of, you know, test the water and see how it goes.

Yeah, I think that'd be great.

And honestly, come spring, what you could do is do that for everyone that's bought a house over the winter because they aren't thinking about mowing until come spring. So you could literally, you could literally have a few hundred. And that, that's, that's a fantastic idea. That the bottom line when it comes to marketing Clayton is like, you just got to kind of play with like, try a bunch of different things and see what clicks. Like that could be the, your unique advantage that you have the MLS and that you have those tools and resources. And so then once you test it out. You like, okay, say you sent out two or 300 over the past three months of people that have bought the house locally. And you send those out and you get a hundred calls and fifty of them become some sort of client. And maybe twenty of them mowing clients, the rest that are like cleanups, that is a huge win. And I think then what you do is you double down on it. Like you said, every two, three weeks. You'd go on there, figure out who's buying, get as close to them as possible by the time right after they buy the house. Because if they buy in spring and it's a month later after they bought the house, they've already figured out who's mowing the lawn. So you want to figure out your unique advantage and what marketing works for you. The thing that is hard set and true is staying up with your customers. That's the emails, that's staying in touch with your existing customers. They're warm leads. They know like and trust you. The sales cycle is literally like a quarter of the time as much as trying to sell a new customer. So like, that is hard set. You gotta do that. But then as far as finding new customers, just go, could test a bunch of different things and then find what you're really good at. And I have a feeling that what you just mentioned is probably gonna be the thing that sets you apart and kind of gives you an advantage. And I just double down on whatever that is that works for you.

Yeah. And one thing I want to fix that too is not, you know, this website is just outdated. You know, see the pictures there? It's just kind of old. Never, I never had any. You know, I never mess around with this.

Yeah.

This stuff. You know, I would just, I mean, if you have any recommendations to just kind of revamp this website, that would be great if you have anyone. You know what I mean?

So I think honestly your website isn't really too terrible. Honestly, Clayton, like, I think it's enough to get, you know, to the next level you want. Like I'd say, you know, if you were in a couple years, it might be something you want to address, like making a little more tech, you know, picture centric or video centric. But like, I think as far as if someone was considering doing business with Greenway Property Care and they went to your website, I think it'd be enough for them like to check the box of. Okay, yes, they're professional. So like, I wouldn't worry even about that too much. I think right now the Big thing for your growth is how do you get, how do you keep one or two guys busy full time year round to do that because you want to hire people like that's. You don't want to be out doing the work all the time. So how do you figure that out? And to do that I think it's going to be how do you consistently stay in contact with your existing customers and literally double the lifetime value that they offer by staying in touch with them. And then two is finding a way to onboard new clients that gives you a unique advantage. And I have a feeling what you mentioned is probably going to be the thing that sets you apart.

Yeah, well, I have that feeling too. But.

I spend it like hundred around the town that I live and I got, I got one customer out of that.

Right.

This works. So I never sent anything back. So I wasn't, I was just testing the water, just kind of had some. I don't know if you know this guy probably don't because you like years in business. And this guy, I think it's called Sean something, he created the lawn ladder.

Lawn ladder.

The lawn ladder.

Okay.

Yeah, It's a bunch of simple ladders. I used to follow him and I don't think he's in business anymore. But he's got all the sample letters, like 27, you know, how to do everything on lawn care and everything calculated by the minute and you know, stuff like that. So they had, he has these samples of letters that you can send out to, you know, neighborhoods and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I, you know, use one of these samples and I send it out, you know, I mean it was like 10%, you know, the return response. I only sent it hundred and got one. Yeah, the response.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. Like I think like even for like the course, like when I give people sample like templates and stuff, the bottom line is like it's a good starting point. But at the end of the day every single market is so different as far as what they're gonna respond to what type of services. But yeah, like that's something definitely we're looking at as far as giving people templates for their emails for like 12 months out of the year just so they can kind of copy paste at least, you know, edit it and have an idea of, you know, what works for their market. For instance, some people do pine straw, some people do mulch. You know, sometimes some people don't do any snow plowing, some people do. So like it just, it's you got to figure out what works for you. But. No, that's good. That's good.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's stay. Let's stay in touch, Clayton. I gotta go. But, like, if you want to touch base with me maybe like, mid year, and I can. I can take a look at the website or, like, see where you're at. I think by mid year, you'll be kind of like in that area of, like, you'll need. Be needing one, you know, an employee full time. But I know it can be like information overload if you're. Especially if you're, like, you're getting all the information from so many different sources, which is fine. I think it's a good thing to kind of get a variety of different, you know, ways of looking at it. I would just say, like, double down on one or two things in the spring. And I think the biggest thing is, number one, try to stay in touch with your existing customers. Send them out those emails or mailers or however you want to do that to try to, like, every month, stay in touch with them. And then two, I think is probably going to be that. That you go to those mls, figure out who's moving into town, and send the mailers directly. And if you can, make that as target as possible. Like you said, welcome the neighborhood, show some pictures of the work you've done, show them cleanups, educate them on what types of. Like, if they're moving the area, for instance, they don't know what. When to mow their lawn or what type of treatments or what type of weeds they need to be looking out for. And so you can educate them and then I think that can be a home run.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna give that a try. I think that's gonna be.

Really good for us this year. You know, let's hope for the best.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Clayton, for, you know, finally. I'm glad we got able to connect and then. But we'll stay in touch.

Yeah. Thank you so much for your time and my good luck with Augusta Lawn Care and to your. To your business. What is it called? Landscape business course and the podcast.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Clayton. You have a good one.

Thank you.

All right, we'll see you. All right, bye. Bye.

Bye.