Marketing Your Lawn Care Business During the Summer PART 2

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. You're listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com this is part two of a Q and A session that we are using from the texting platform. And so make sure you watch part 1. Join the texting platform so I can answer your questions. But let's go ahead and jump right into some of these questions from landscape business owners. Just like you, they're trying to grow their business. First question is, here we go. I have two workers and each week I'm having to pay two to three hours of overtime. So I haven't made the switch to P4P. I have a full time job and they do 95% of the physical work, mostly mowing. I want to grow. How do I smoothly get more work and more employees and have everything balance out? I may go full time next spring to help grow. Alright, so if you have two workers and they're starting to work full time, let's say two to three hours a week, that's only about five or six hours a week of overtime and I'd rather have that. Then you have to get another truck and another employee. That being said, if you are confident in your growth and you have a little bit of cash cushion, I would go out and get the truck, I would go get another employee and I'd roll and know that okay, now if I take those 90 hours and I have a third person now, all of a sudden I only have like 30, 32 hours per week for my employees. That's going to put some fire underneath you to go out and get more work and, and I think someone in your situation can do that. That being said, I would not hire that third person if you didn't plan on growing because now you're gonna reduce the hours so much so and you're gonna increase your overhead. And so I really am a big fan of like during the busy time it's okay to pay some overtime. It really is. Because you don't wanna over hire and therefore, oh okay, everyone's not getting paid overtime. But then when it slows down a little bit now you're losing good workers because they don't have enough hours and they're only making 25, 30 hours a week. So that's what I would recommend is be okay with paying a little bit of overtime. Now if it's like 10 hours every week of overtime, you need to go hire somebody. Definitely. But that'd be my $0.02 on that next one. Actually I'm gonna make a video here pretty soon on a model that kind of talks about this in terms of having the switch from two to three employees is bigger than some people think. Because a lot of times it means you need to get another truck. Cause you can get two employees in one truck. As soon as you get a third employee, you double your overhead in terms of insurance for your vehicles, fuel for your vehicles, and buying another truck, which is cash. So just something to think about. I've been mulling that over recently. A lot of times people get hung up there. Next question. Hi, Mike. I got an SBA loan for $120,000. How much do you think should I keep for working capital to run the business, and how much should I spend on marketing? Okay, good question. I'm assuming this is a new business.

Okay, so run the business. How much should I spend on marketing? Okay, so if you had $120,000 to start your business, that's a significant amount of money. Make sure you're not spending on squandering it. Because a lot of times when you have that much money to get started, you start spending money in dumb places like billboards or print media that doesn't do anything for you. And so when franchisees come on board, I want them to have like 50 grand. That's a really good number. When they start getting, like over 90 or 100, I start being like, look, do not go. Just throw money at the situation. Be still, be really thrifty, and make sure those dollars are working for you. All right? If I had $120,000, I would spend.

I'd keep at least 20 grand in working capital. I would spend as much as I possibly can on advertising. So if you got like, say, two trucks, equipment, couple employees, I'd spend the rest on marketing. And you're not gonna be able to spend that all right away. You might spend it over the course of the first year, but if you spend 50,000 of that on marketing in the first year, you're going to be doing. You should be able to do 500 to 800,000 at least in revenue in the first year. If that money's spent correctly. That's a lot of marketing dollars. Everyone in your local area should know who you are through Facebook and Google and all the rest of it. You should be ranking number one on Google. You. You should get us to make your website for you. The 120 grand is gonna be a massive influx of business if you spend that ad money correctly. So, yeah, that's my two cents on that one. You should become a franchisee. Actually, that's what you should do, make sure you're not spending your money incorrectly on the advertising. Next one Fleet Tracking solutions. Do you use them at Augusta to better monitor your daily KPIs, or do you only go off of Service AutoPilot's Drive Time vs. Time on site or when doing pay for performance? Thanks, Brandon from Priority One Lawn Care in Novi, Michigan. All right, we do not look at drive time when it comes to P4P. We only look at budgeted hours. So that's all we care about. We do not look at drive time on Service Autopilot. We do not require guys to click the drive time button. If you're using Surface Autpot, you know what I'm talking about. We disabled that. It's useless for us and P4P because we're giving them a percentage of revenue that they complete. So it really doesn't matter how long they drive, how long they go to the bathroom, how long they eat. It just depends how much money they made for the business. They get a percentage of that. That's all that changes. So we don't use the fleet tracking for P4P. If you're not using P4P, use the tracking to make sure guys aren't slacking off and spending 20 minutes in between every single mowing job. If you are using P4P, we only use the fleet tracking to make sure that we we can see all the trucks throughout the day and know who's closest to who in terms of if someone needs help or something broke and they need a replacement part or something like that. Next question. The phone hasn't been ringing as much this past two weeks.

What do we keep pushing sales? How do we keep pushing sales during the summer months? All right, so this is very important. One click estimates. Literally an hour ago, we at Augusta Lawn Care created a one click estimate for all of our existing customers. Where they get an email, they click a button and it's going to request an estimate for projects. And as you come into this slower season, if your season gets slower in the summer and it dries up, then this is when you need to email and you might not have one click estimates with automations. That's fine. Send emails out to all of your customers with newsletters asking if they need any projects done. Staying in consistent communication throughout the entire year is when you can really cash in on that. When you need the work, when you do slow down. So for example, the Bellingham shop, they do not need any new business right now. They're not marketing and they're just getting tons and tons of work and any more work is not a good thing because they're growing almost not too fast. They're just growing very, very fast. And getting the amount of people that they need to sustain that growth is the hardest part. So for them they have not been having this problem of slowdown during the summer at all. However, if you are having that, this is when it's very important that you stayed in communication with your database and not let your leads go cold, not let your customers hear from you only when you invoice them. You should have a mid month newsletter, email, article, something, pictures, videos, whatever you're creating just to stay in contact with them so that when they do need projects done in, you have your top of mind for them having a really good subject for that email to get them to open it up, et cetera. That's what I would recommend. And you should be pushing things that are actually active right now. If you're mostly mowing and it's really, really hot and everything is completely dead, don't go out and advertise mowing, advertise tearing out the lawn and installing mulch or pine straw or some gravel or whatever it might be. So make sure you're specific to your climate and your region and the time of year. Mike, can you talk about incorporating S Corp C Corp llc? Honestly, this is way overblown in terms of importance is a tax issue in my opinion.

And yes, having an S Corp, things like that does change your tax liabilities, changes the way you're paid as an owner, changes your liability structure from an insurance standpoint. And that being said, it's still overblown. I still think you should need to talk to your accountant, figure out the best tax strategy for you and go with that. Personally, I think as you get bigger, like when you doing over, you know, 600, 700,000, definitely an S Corp starts to become more favorable because you can pay yourself as an employee, there's different tax benefits, etc. An LLC is cheaper in terms of you don't have to. You can just do a schedule C on your tax return, your personal tax return. You don't have to have a separate tax return for the corporation, which you know is an extra cost in terms of paying an accountant, you know, $1,000, $1,500 a year to do those. So again, talk to your accountant, they'll give you the rundown if they're good in terms of what's the best for your situation, how to talk clients out of requesting bi Weekly mowing. A couple different things you can do here. One is give only a weekly price and 80% of people just go with that. And then when they bring up biweekly, then address it one by one, knowing that half of them will not bring it up. Or you give a weekly and a bi weekly price and you give parameters of which months they can only do weekly, knowing that that's usually the time when the grass is growing really fast. You're getting a lot of customers and they get set up on weekly and then they never change. But in terms of customers mid year switching from weekly to biweekly, the best thing to do is make sure you're charging a premium for the biweekly. When you give the pricing for their mowing, you're giving them a weekly and a bi weekly price so that if they ever switch, then you're getting an up charge for the bi weekly price. All right, next question. If I spend marketing dollars later in the season, like around now, can I expect to get more work and possibly grow my company?

Or is marketing done only at the beginning of the season? And if expansion can be done later in the season, can you talk a little bit about how you guys expand and market later in the season? Thanks for your time and take care. And Kevin M. All right, so yeah, the good question. Your marketing dollars are gonna have the best impact during the spring. Typically not only impact in terms of cost per click and just that demand's higher, but also due to the fact that if you get a mowing customer recurring service in the beginning of the year and you keep them all year long, their ROI in the first annual calendar year is better. Like if I get someone on mowing and they're paying me $150 a month and I can get them from 10 months out of the year at the beginning of the year, it means I made $1,500. Now if I get them in September, I might only make 3 or 400. And if it cost me $100 to get the customer and I'm running a 25% profit margin, all of a sudden I didn't make any money on that customer that year. If you consistently are able to keep them recurring into the next year and not drop a lot of people, you're okay. But best ROI in the calendar year, obviously this spring you're getting your best bang for your buck now. Now if you're growing and scaling, what you gotta do is market the services and the things that are relevant in the time of year that you're trying to grow. So for example, do not be trying to do mowing right now. Do projects, do zero scaping, do installs of material, whatever it is, weeding services, bush trimming treatments like get creative. If you're gonna try to grow, get them into your database and then when mowing season comes around, you upsell them on those one click estimates during the season that it relevant. So for example, when we go through mowing season, our one click estimates about mowing and mowing and mowing and then it switches like treatments and then mulch installations and then projects in the middle of the year and it switches into like fall cleanups. Like it's, you gotta be marketing according to the best demand at your time in your market. And so for example, one of our franchisees in Ontario and we're all sending like one click estimates out for mowing and he's still under snow so he has to wait to send that out at least like I think a month and a half or two months before it thawed out and he was busy mowing. And so you've got to spend your marketing dollars on and really look at it like this. It's not so much about the type of projects you're getting, it's about getting leads into your database and you're gonna be most effective marketing the services that are most relevant during that time. Get them into your database and know that down the road you'll consistently be able to keep selling to them. During times when the grass is growing, you'll send them a mowing estimate. So in the middle of the year maybe you spend the money on something else so that like for example, zero scaping or removing sod and installing mulch, whatever it might be, you pitch them those things so they get into your database, you do a one time project for them or whatever, but then they also get an email the next spring about mowing and they get set up for servers then so market to the highest demand service given the time frame that you're talking about. All right, couple more questions here. Nick Delsbeck from Augusta Cordova, Tennessee. How equitable were you with spreading around the mix of bush trimming, cleanups, mowing and landscaping among your crews? I assume the strategy evolves as the number of crews grows. Factors to consider, density of a route versus how much duplication of equipment per crew. Density means you have mowers or trimmers idle on one crew for the sake of density. Or is it less density with better utilization of equipment? Better. I suppose the strategy evolves from when you were two to three crews versus how Liz does it now? FYI, we run two, sometimes three crews right now. All right, so in terms of spreading around the mix of different services among our crews, I think most people know that we do that at Augusta Lawn Care at our local shops because we're trying to keep the employees. Most people will not mow lawns for years on end. There's a special group of people that love that. They'll do it till the day they die. And they love their job of just mow, mow, mow, mow the same properties all the time. But most people, they want to do some other stuff, like even if it's once or twice a week to do a cleanup or a mulch installation or bush trimming or something. Do I know that we are less profitable because of that? Yes. It's something that we give up in the form of profitability to retain our employees and to make sure that we're not spending money on burning employees like churn of employees. There is an absolute counterweight there. And everyone's like, oh, it's much more easy to track the inefficiencies of having to train all your people, having them to go from different jobs, et cetera. But what's not easy to calculate is the cost of losing employees, good employees that would otherwise have stayed with you, but because you stuck with them like you are the treatment crew and you're only doing treatments when all they ever wanted to do was learn how to drive a zero turn. And so we definitely know there is inefficiencies. Yes. As we grow, Nick is nailing us on the head. As you grow, there's going to be natural tendencies to keep certain people in projects. There's going to be natural tendency for some people who prefer the mowing to stay with mowing. Some people who can't handle the stress of a project management, they're going to stick with smaller projects or with mowing. These are things that just tendency, like Nick is saying, happens as the business scales. So as you have 15, 20 employees, you're going to have natural kind of specialties or areas that people we know do better at, and we make sure we try to lean towards those. Good question. All right, last question, and then we'll call it a day. If I spend marketing dollars later in the season, like around now, can I expect to get more work and possibly grow my company? Or. Or is marketing done only at the beginning of the season? And if expansion can be done later in the season, can you talk a little about how you guys expand and market later in the season. Thanks for your time, man, and take care, Kevin. All right, so yeah, this is, we've already talked about exactly this question. And the bottom line is when you're growing and scaling, if you gotta buy assets, that's when it becomes difficult. Like if you gotta build a bigger shop in the middle of September because you're growing, I'd wait if you're gonna have a slow winter. Same thing with buying trucks. I'd rather buy trucks in the spring, get them busy, get new employees, get them trained up, and then use them all year instead of getting them in the middle of July and August. That being said, if you're not spending money on marketing and you're still getting tons of leads, just feed the beast. If you wanna keep growing, feed the beast, keep buying trucks, getting more employees, et cetera. And so we see a wide range of this right now, this time of year across our franchisees. Some people like, they have so many leads coming in, they're struggling just to get back in touch with people and accept estimates and get them on the schedule. Then you got like our local shop where they're not marketing very much and they're getting a lot of leads. And it's more of a personnel and assets like just trying to get the right amount of people and trucks on board and moving our shop around. You saw my video a couple of weeks ago or last week about how we're trying to organize things that, you know, really sustain the growth and that's the bottleneck. Right? Then you got other people who are not getting enough leads in. And again, spend your marketing dollars on the thing that has the highest demand. Get them into your funnel. Stay busy, even if it's one time projects, knowing that down the road you can upsell them if you stay consistent on those marketing emails, staying in touch with those customers. Do not let your customer database go cold. That's my two cents. So that's it for today. Again, if you have not joined the texting platform, you need to text the word landscaping. Don't to 855-575-1267. Text the word landscaping to that number and then you'll have the opportunity to leave questions for me on the next episode. Thank you all so very much. Again, check out landscapebusinesscourse.com for the course lawncarewebdesign.com for us to build your website. Thank you so much and we'll see you next time.