Marketing 101 for Lawn Care Businesses... Q&A with Mike Andes

Hey everyone, Mike Andes here. We are going to do some live Q A today. It's going to be a good one. And we're also going to be announcing the winners of round one of Mo Madness. So throughout the next, let's say 10 to 15 minutes, you can still submit your bracket. You can go to mikeandy.com vote and submit your bracket. Let's go ahead and start with some Q A. But throughout the next few minutes, make sure you submit your vote because this is going to determine round number one of Mo Madness. If you don't know what Mo Madness is, let me refresh your memory. So let me go ahead and share you my screen here and hop over to this bad boy. So this is. If you go to mikeannies.comvote you're going to see this page here and this, as it says here, voting for the round number one ends today. We're going to do this live today. So this is the brackets for round number one. Okay? So as you can see ends day. This is round number one and everyone needs to vote on who is going to win. Which one you believe is the better YouTuber because we're determined the YouTuber lawn care YouTuber of the year. And the winner of this is going to get a full film day with the team. So I send my media team out and the entire day will film them basically, basically do kind of, we do a zero term. We'll give them all the footage and pictures and stuff for their website or $2,000 cash. And then as we had last week, whichever of you get closest on your bracket the most accurate on your bracket will also get either $2,000 or a full day of the marketing team heading out there and giving you great content. So head over to mikeendy.com vote submit your bracket. Just down here at the bottom, you basically determine which one's going to win and it's great. So I'm gonna go ahead and answer some questions and we'll come back to this because I'm gonna actually show you where the standings are at for round number one. Let's go ahead and hop into some Q and A. So thanks everyone for hopping on here. Thadia, welcome. Greenscapes, Ohio. Mo Madness is awesome. Yes. Let's go. Cool. So there's any questions, feel free to comment. I'll do comments today. I'm not gonna do the call in show so feel free to just comment if you have specific questions. Yes, this is Brad. Brad, wave. Hey everybody. I know some of you have probably done call with Brad he's the one that on P4P software.com you can book a call with him if you have questions about P4P and implementation. Let's go ahead and show these brackets. So if we head on over to. This is currently the brackets for Mo Madness. So if you have not yet submit your vote because this is what it's going towards right here. So currently there's 444 responses. We can see right now that Stanley Dirt Monkey is blowing away the Lawn Care Nut. So we're going to need some serious help if you think that the Lawn Care Nut should be winning this match. We have quite a few blowout winners here. Like Lawn care juggernaut has 76% of the vote over Copper Creek cuts. So you know we're gonna need some serious Steph Curry action here for the in the the fourth quarter if there's any chance of Brad coming back. So I don't know if someone can ping Brad but he needs to do something because we got to win this round here. And Long Care Juggernaut posted about it the other day has 339 votes. His 105 votes. So we go down here a little bit more. Looks like Top Notch Lawn Care is taking the lead right now in round one over Owl Blades. So we need some Owl Blades fans hop in here, make a little more even. We're having some blowout winners in this round. Number one. I have to say it's gonna be interesting when we go to the Elite eight to see who is gonna top that one as well. Okay, this one. Whoa. Ryan Knorr is crushing Brian's Lawn Care. Brian's Lawn Care Lawn Mains. You really need to post about this, get some followers in here because we got a bit of a slaughter fest here happening in round number one of mo madness. So again if you haven't go to mikeanny.com vote. Is he getting paid for that performance?

So let's see here. We got.

Okay, so Keith Kalpis is losing out to Blades of Grass again. We have 334 votes for Blades of Grass lawn care to Keith's 110. Another blowout victory here unless we have some late votes here. You know I don't like to say that this is a landslide victory because you know what happens when we count ballots and landslide victories anyways here. Here we got Spen Spencer Lawn Care. Whoa. Lawn Care Life is crushing. Whoa. We have 399 votes to Spencer Lawn Cares 45. How is that even possible? Okay, well we have another Landslide victory looks like happy match number six. I do not know why the media team has this red and blue. I have to say we politically were not correct in this but it looks like we have some serious landslide wins here. But we are late in the fourth quarter. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is Tigran versus SV Mowing. SV Mowing has 425 votes to Tyran's 19. Mercy goodness. This is what you call a blue wave mercy.

Okay, last match here is Florida turf pros versus it's his turf. It's his turf has 74% of the vote. That's actually really shocking. He hasn't put a whole lot of con. Oh, I guess he's been doing a lot of those mowing videos recently. But Florida turf pros, man. Come on, Jonathan, let's get out there and get some votes. So we will refresh this in a few minutes, see if there's. You can still submit your votes. And again the winners of these brackets are going to get either $2,000 cash or they are going to get, you're going to get the full media package with our team to come out and do videos and pictures for your team. So we'll come back to that in just a second, see if your vote has been added to that. Definitely check that out. Go to mikeannies.comvote let's go ahead and submit some questions and dig into this. Green splatter asks. Hi Mike, sent 2,000 postcards for every door direct mail to the post office yesterday. Haven't got any calls yet. So I'm guessing hoping they haven't sent them yet. Yeah. Typically on the bundles that you give to the post office you can determine which day, which date I should say they are going to be putting those out. So typically I like to have them all done the same day or spread them out over the course of a few days because really about the climate. So if you have really bad weather, honestly they can like half the return of your investment when it comes to every door direct mail. And yeah, they're very much hit and miss. I've seen some locations in some places get a literally a 1% response rate and then other people get like a point zero 1% response rate which is basically like one person responding out of 2000. So the nice thing about print is it can have a long tail. People can potentially respond to you in a week or two after they have put their your postcard up on the fridge. But typically the bulk of your leads are going to happen the 72 hours after your Every door direct mail is delivered. So I would be watching your. Your forecast massively. Because at least in our climate, if it's a sunny day in March, our return on the Every door direct mail campaign will be significantly higher than if it's a rainy, wet, cold day. How do you advertise next door? Do you pay per month or like Facebook ads? Yeah, it's basically by the neighborhood and you can do it based upon each month. It's usually a certain amount per neighborhood between like a 70 cents and a few bucks depending on the size of the neighborhood that you can market in. And it's usually by the month that you pay for that. I would not recommend sponsorships, but local deals are good. Hey, Mike, I'm only 14 years old and I own my own lawn care business and always listen to your videos while I cut my properties for you. Have any advice for me? Yeah, I would say lean into the fact that you're 14 years old and realize that that's your USP unique selling proposition. And realize that in five years it will not be your unique selling proposition anymore. So just lean into it. The first, you know, next five years you're still gonna be cute and people will hire you for that. And just lean into it. Don't try to be the the next professional million dollar company. I went door knocking with door hangers. Let's go. Adrian, how do you get W2 started? What are some good options for W2? Thank you for everything. Check out gusto.com bootcamp. It's a promo link of mine, but you get the first three months for free. And you get all of your W2 employees set up inside of there and run payroll. QuickBooks is another option. It's a little bit more complicated, but if you're using QuickBooks already for your bookkeeping, I'd recommend QuickBooks. But if you're. If you're not, use Gusto. It's much more simple to get things set up. And like I said, use gusto.combootcamp. and that's my link. That's my, my promo link. And you'll get for the first three months for free. And it's really simple to set them up like it walks you step by step, which state are you in? You put their Social Security numbers in. You put everything in there and it runs payroll for you. And at the end of the year, we'll submit W2s to the employees automatically. Does door to door with business cards still work? I have time, but not sure if it still works. I'm not A huge fan of door business cards. If you're doing doing door to door, I'd rather knock on the door, say hello to the person if they're not home, have a door hanger that I put on the doorknob and then if they do answer the door, I'm still giving the door hanger. And, and if you don't have them, lawn caremedia.com has some good templates that you can get where you actually put the dollar amount of the lawn service or treatments or property cleanups or mulch. So that way if they're not home, if you're standing there waiting for them to come to the door, you can literally put the prices in real quick. And then when they get the door hanger, all they have to do is send a picture of that door hanger to your email and it already has all information required to get them on the schedule. So if you might as well, you're already at the property, give them an estimate.

I had one call. The lady said her lawn guy cut her one acre lot for 35. Yeah, you gotta love it. Hey Mike, thanks for commenting back to me the other day. Since then I've gotten and landed four estimates that are over $500 per project. Still planning on sending more every door direct mail out next month. Great job, James. What insurance should I get first? Definitely you're going to want your auto insurance so your trucks are covered and then also your general liability insurance. That's definitely the place you want to start. As you grow, you might go into other things in terms of protecting like cyber security. We have a whole bunch of other stuff now too as you get bigger. But definitely start with those two. And, and typically remember that general liability will cover a lot of different things. Typically there's like 10 or 12 different categories. Usually they'll cover like errors and omissions, damage, property liability, things like that. It can be covered. Mike, we are in a small town. Some of your conduct does not apply well here, but love it anyways. Keep it up.

Okay? I actually really like small towns. By the way, our very first location started in Blaine. You can look it up. Blaine, Washington. I think it has like six or seven thousand people that live there. And I really like small towns. You get much better brand penetration. You can spend much less money on marketing in order to still achieve brand awareness. So I really like small towns. I'm telling you, you can build a million dollar business in a 5,6000$5 to 6000 person town if you just focus on your marketing that way. I'M switched to being tax and S Corp. Would putting myself on payroll through Gusta be a good idea? When you're an S corp, you have to give yourself a payroll of some sort as a W2 employee. Because you want an S Corp, you do have to pay yourself a reasonable salary and be a W2 to some extent. So talk to your accountant, your CPA, and they should be able to kind of walk you through what that amount should be and how to, how to run that. What do you think of Google Ads? I think Google Ads are good. I like them for two reasons. One, I like traffic to my site and you can get usually really good cost per click driving leads to your site just traffic, I mean clicks. So if you're obsolete in terms of your website like it's brand new, you might actually have great SEO. But if there's no traffic, Google will penalize you. This is why when you go and search like for lawn care that the top spots are usually going to be like HomeAdvisor, lawn starter, Angie's List, because they're spending so much money on marketing and driving so much traffic to their site that they have a lot of domain authority. And we see this like a Gusta lawn care. Now that we have so many locations, our sites will rank faster now simply because the main URL, the domain, has authority. There's so much traffic driving to it, Google automatically gives it a boost in the ranking. So if you're brand new your website, I would do Google Ads sometimes just to drive traffic to the site because then Google will see more people there and start to make more and more connections between the keywords and what your site is, it needs to index it. But then also Google Ads about six months ago really had a really good moment there where we were getting incredible cost per click for Google. It's come back up as I expected. We talked about at conference. I I say it was gonna be short term and they've come back. But still, still a great ad product in my mind it will be as long as the, the big players aren't super focused on it. And when we had the supply chain shortage and so many big companies started cutting their marketing budgets, Google and Facebook were some of the first places they started cutting their budget on. And so it makes for a good opportunity to get in for lower cost per click. I'm trying to get a certain company to print me some flyers and they said five, four to five days. But it's almost been almost two weeks before the postcards are printed. Do you think I should just swap over to something.

I'm guessing you're asking if you just switch to another service. I would say look, most people, most printing companies are behind right now.

Transportation, shipping, everything like logistics wise is behind. So I wouldn't jump ship quite yet. Please call them. I was, I was the one where you said the $20 guy will fill up his schedule. I'm mid level price, definitely not premium yet. But I'm wondering if every door direct meal is old fashioned enough is not attracting the right people. Yeah, this is why I'm a big believer of testing things in your market because I've seen it time and time again where every door, every door, direct mail will flop in one market and the exact same flyer, exact same postcard two neighborhoods over or two counties over will just do incredibly well. And so this is why you got to test things. This is why I like small markets by the way because you can test more for a cheaper cost. And so I would just recommend don't put all your eggs in one basket. Like, you know, some people watch like a video from 10, 15 years ago of people on YouTube and they talk about flyers or they talk about door hangers. And I'm not against flyers and door hangers but realize that that's not the only marketing strategy and in some markets that might do well and other markets might flop. So I'd much rather someone do a five, five different methods, you know, next door, Google, Facebook, every door direct mail, door hangers and door knocking and then see what works. Don't spend all your marketing dollars on one avenue because if it bombs then you don't have any dry powder.

Best way to market a small town. I have a video coming out this tomorrow. Tomorrow is a video coming out. It's actually an interview I did with a young gentleman that owns a lawn care business and specifically talking about the strategy for small, small towns and small neighborhoods using the door hangers. What, what if you underestimate the yard? Would it be better to have command center do the phone estimates? I wouldn't say so. If you're already at the property, you're probably gonna be the most accurate. Even though command center, this is one of our franchisees on Fenton, but I would still say if you're at the property, you personally, then I would just focus on giving the number. If you're having one of your employees or a bunch of employees that have no idea about lawn care, just distribute door hangers. I would probably push them towards calling command center where they're going to be able to do the estimate over the phone and sell the job without you have to go back still. But if you're there, you might as well give the number because then it saves the time of you having to do the estimate over the phone. How well do you find the vehicle lettering to work to get calls? Just got my trailer lettered up for the season. It's one of those things. Branding is very, very hard to measure. It's not so much about the direct response marketing of someone seeing the truck and give me a call. It's a matter of them seeing the truck and because of the lettering and the branding, them remembering and maybe next year after they see me 20 times in a neighborhood, then they call. But usually they're not going to call because of my truck. They're going to call because they got a postcard or they got, they saw a Facebook ad, they saw a Google Ad. But it's because of the constant touches that I've made over the course of time, which is 20 or 30 times I'm seeing the truck, they actually know the brand and therefore that buying transaction and that decision is expedited because they've seen the truck so many times. So I look at trucks more of a branding play than a direct response marketing type play. I am making a leap from me in a truck with two people having another truck going. What's the most important systems to take the steps? And do you have any tips for making this transition? Yeah, this is when you need pay for performance. So check out p4psoftware.com, look at the training videos, they're free. Because as soon as you don't, if you, as soon as you have unmanaged labor, I. E. You do not have eyes on the employee all day long, there is going to be waste. So the sooner you can cap that and manage that, the better. And the second thing I would say is I'm not a big fan of micromanaging in terms of always knowing they're asking where they're at, driving up and checking on them, quote unquote, like seeing if they're working or not. I'm not a huge fan of that. That's why P4P is so important.

And that way they're self motivated to make more money. And if they're not, then yeah, that's up to them. But I'd say P4P is extremely important at this stage. And take the person that's been with you longer, that person goes out solo and in a truck and then you keep the other more less experienced person with you in the truck. So that way you don't have the two of them going out together. And potentially now you have an issue with you know, a very, very weak performer not knowing understanding how things work. I would recommend you being the kind of quote unquote trainer. The first two to three weeks have that weaker individual that's less experienced with you. Have the person that's been with you for a while go out and do the work by themselves or two people or whoever's experience go out into that other truck first. What do you think about Lawnstarter? I'm not a huge fan of lead sites. In the short term they're good. There's actually a class action lawsuit against Tome Advisors. I forget another company lead source because of this issue. They just providing not fraudulent leads but there's leads that aren't really people that actually intend to actually submit their information for that service, etc. But yet they're charging contractors. I look at it as like renting versus buying. You're renting this lead from Monster, you're renting that lead from HomeAdvisor. You don't actually own them because next week Home Advisor or Angie's List or whatever's gonna be try to sell them to a different contractor for another lead because they're at the end of the day there's. They're incentivized to get more leads to sell to contractors. They're not in the business of keeping that customer with you long term. When you create a Google business page, you make a standard or plus page. I was, I saw your comment today and I don't know exactly what you're talking about if you're talking about Google. Google doesn't exist anymore.

But the standard page will work just fine.

I just increased prices by 25%. Let's go. Hey Mike, does your program include what exactly are the numbers to know? I keep hearing know your numbers. Just don't know exactly what the numbers I need. Yeah. So like, you know, I would recommend. Here, I'll show you real quick. This is, you know a common, common issue is not knowing your numbers. What numbers do I need to know? Obviously in your CRM it should have some decent reports for you to be able to know certain things. But this is kind of why we create P4P software. To be able to know the most important part of your business in terms of numbers is efficiency. Because the biggest thing at the end of the day we're selling is labor. That's really all we're selling. And so let me see here. Let me show you my screen. This screen is. Is in development. So if it looks a little bit funky, it is because we are still working on this. By the way, mikeandies.com vote. You should do it. But let me show you this page here. Stick with me for a second.

Stop screen. Okay, here we go. Share screen. So this is the back end of P4P software. And this is what you're going to kind of see once you become a member@p4psoftware.com so this ranks our employees and shows what they're making their effective hourly rate for, how much their labor revenue clocked hour and ranks them. They can see this top part, kind of give that competitive edge and a little bit of competitive juices flowing. But then these are the type of numbers you need to know. And these numbers are off because we have a whole bunch of training new employees at this location getting trained. But you can see all sorts of metrics in terms of how efficiency is moving month to date, year, month over month, et cetera. You can see this number is like 6 or $7 lower than usual, mostly due to the fact that there's a whole bunch of new people getting trained this week. But yeah, so this is the kind of numbers that I feel is most important. And then what we're working on right now is some more reports in terms of seeing these numbers over time. So you see projects that are in status or in progress. You see month to date over time. So like, hey, if this is starting to become, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70 overtime hours, probably time to hire someone. So these are the type of numbers I look at the most efficiency scores. Because at the end of the day, all we doing in this industry and in every home service industry is we are selling labor. That's all we're doing. And so you got to make sure that that variable cost of labor is as efficient as possible. Everything.