Mike Andes Answers YOUR Questions for 1 Hour and 10 Minutes!

I love the idea of putting prices on our website for mowing and plowing, but the size ranges on lawns and driveways is huge. In my area, for instance, our smallest lawn is 2000 square feet and our largest is 200,000. Driveways range from 42ft long to 1500ft long. We have a complicated formula for pricing snow plowing and we compare similar lawns to get the timing correct for mowing prices. Mowing pricing is exasperated further by the train. In our area, for example, 20,000 square feet from one customer takes 0.45 hours, another takes 0.97 hours. So we couldn't price by size accurately. Is there a solution I'm missing other than drive by estimates? We can do satellite most of the time as we know the area very well, but it's not instant pricing like you were suggesting. All right, so a couple things. They first say that doing over the phone estimates is a huge step up from doing drive by estimates. Drive by estimates are a huge step up from doing in person estimates where you talk to every customer for an hour. So you're already significantly down the path in terms of systemization and optimization. So don't beat yourself up too much if you're not going to take it all the way to instant pricing. I will say this. Yes, your smallest is 2,000 and your largest is 200,000. But where are 80% of your customers? I would happen to believe that 80% of your customers are between 5,000 and let's call it 40,000 or 50,000. And so my question is could I do pricing to them but then have an option for anyone else that's outside of those ranges to be able to get a pricing in person to be able to save myself 80% of my time and that's when we like our.

Small, medium and large.

I'm not going after the edge cases that are like super large because it's a small percentage of my customers and I just have it where like I will do an in person estimate for them. And so I'm trying to capture 80% of my customers and not have to go to them at all, not have to pay for an admin to answer the phone. Like if you can just reduce the the drive time of drive by estimates and your time going out and doing the estimate, but also not need an admin person to be reactive on the phone call and then sitting around waiting for a phone to ring all day and it doesn't cost you a single penny more to have the instant pricing.

We have a win.

We have A win on our hand, boys and girls. So I understand this pricing variability, but if I can, if I can get on the property, the very worst thing that happens is that you change the price, right? So play it out right. Like what's the worst thing that happens? The first mow or the first plow? You get it wrong your first visit. We are going to charge by the minute anyways. So we're going to take our time to get it up to standards. For example, if it's mowing, we're in edge. We're going to double cut if we have to. We're going to do everything possible to get it dialed in. If the pricing that we have given is way off, like there's hills and mountains and cars parked in the middle of the lawn or some crazy area that we, they were completely wrong on in terms of selecting their price, then we will change the price that happens to 1% less than 1% of the lawns that we do at Augusta Lawn Care. But again, we attack the 80% and the other 20%. Like when it says, hey, if your lawn doesn't look like any of these street pictures, click here and people that have massive properties or commercial projects or something crazy, they'll click on that one. So just realize, be okay with the, the fact that the very worst you change the price, the very best is that you they select $79 and you're like, man, I would have charged 59 for this. And you rock and roll. And then also if you're in growth mode and you're willing to not have as much profit for a little bit, do it for three or four or five months, grow to capacity, raise prices on that customer and bring them up to where they should be at and then we all make more money. Alejandro Magia and Haida Lawn Care. Hey Mike, I have two marketing questions. Here in Plano, Texas, I opened up 90 clients last year at peak to this March, around 70. Okay. We dropped 10,000 door hangers this week and have only gained four clients from it. I believe it's because there are instant quote door hangers with a seven day call to action and the grass is still brown, but we'll be green up by the end of March and beginning growing around April, we have left 40,000 door hangers ready. Ready we have. Should I just wait till April to drop them? For every 1000 door hangers, I expect 3 million clients last year within the same week of drop and this was during mid to late spring till mid summer. I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how to roll out marketing this spring and when to know how to dump everything you got. Last year, me and friends dropped around 17,000 door hangers and gained 80 mowing customers. So I thought I had a good grasp. But this was a good learning mistake for the future. This was the first time I I was ready with quick for quick and early marketing since last year. I began closer to April. I believe I mistook beginning of spring for spring rush. What are your thoughts on that? What makes good branding piece and your thoughts on dumping up that a month before a call to action piece. Okay, here we go. So this revolves around timing. I will first and foremost say that timing your spring rush gets better with time. What I mean is like using seeing more and more spring rushes gets you better and better equipped to be able to time spring rush better. What I mean with that is you'll have to anticipate the demand of spring rush in order to accurately be able to know how many people to hire, how many trucks to have, how much equipment to have, and how much marketing you're going to be spending doing that once or twice. You do not know your demand curve because it's going to change based upon the weather. And so even if you have an indoor service, it's still dramatically impacted by the weather because that's what people start to think about it. So for example, the weather gets better and janitorial goes up, goes up for spring cleaning. So indoors. And so I will say that instead of trying to drop everything in one.

Week, what I would.

Because you're basically, you're gambling. What I would do is I would take 40,000 door hangers. I do that over the course of eight weeks. And then I would figure out my demand curve. Because if you tracked over the course of eight weeks and he did 5,000 door hangers per week, now all of a sudden you have eight weeks where you'd actually be able to see how many customers you got and what peak demand or peak of spring rush is. Now to your point when customers when the grass starts growing, for example, or when demand starts, most people jump too soon if you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost. So if you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost, you don't actually start marketing when pain begins. You market when there's peak pain, when the demand is highest, that is not when the grass starts growing, that is three, four, five weeks into spring when the grass is now overgrown and people have the highest form of pain and the highest demand for your services. They have the highest pain if they don't accept your, your estimate. So we can see like the, the time to accept an estimate, assuming you don't do it over the phone or do it instantly. If you don't and you're just sending it via email and text, it takes you significantly longer to get a response. When the customer's not in pain, when their grass is not overgrown, when their trees are not falling like on their house, they have less pain and therefore they will take longer to accept. And so I will also say if you're going to do door hangers a week, two weeks into the spring, when half the people, their lawn isn't overgrown, just kind of starting to grow, you might want to extend the seven day window to more like 14 or 21 days. That being said, we do consistently see people that even with door hangers will, will submit a picture. 14:21, I saw one the other day, 28 days later. So you might want to change your expiration date. If, if this is a big problem for you. If you're trying to, if you're trying to preload the spring rush and knowing very well that, hey, you might be three or four weeks early, you're going to have a lower customer acquisition cost. Sorry, you're going to have a higher customer acquisition cost because your conversion rate is going lower. However, you could kind of help that by saying, hey, this, this, this door hanger is valid for three weeks, it's valid for four weeks. Knowing that people might keep the door hanger and then contact you during peak pain. Really good question. All I will say that is this. I have done a spring rush for eight. This is my 18th spring rush. Every single spring rush. I have been heavily involved in the lawn care landscaping industry. It is only now that I can, with confidence know, okay, this is when I market, this is when I advertise, this is when I start hiring people. And it took probably five years to know that because it always shifts. Two, three, sometimes. Like if you have, in our market, like we could have, we could have been mowing like hardcore right now. And we also a couple years ago had snow like a week ago. So like you got to be able to adjust and know when that happens and then even know when it comes down. Like if you're doing door hangers too late into the spring rush. Now everyone's been set up, they've experienced peak pain, but most of them found a provider. And now the only people you're going to start getting from door hangers are the people that are unsatisfied with their current provider. I will also say the vast majority of people I see doing marketing are, are going after the wrong customer. Right at the beginning of spring, you have a higher percentage of people that are for the very first time setting up service. I'm just going to use lawn care for an example. Any home service, whether it be cleaning, clean a pool, cleaning a carpet, cleaning anything, or mowing lawn. Let's be mowing lawn, for example. It's not like someone wakes up when they're 75 years old after having not mowed their grass since they were 60 years old, and wakes up and realizes that they're saving time by not mowing their grass and going, they can go play golf. So you spending money on marketing about getting your weekend back is not going to be appealing to them after the very first time they decided to not mow the grass themselves. And so realize that the vast majority of our customers, assuming you're on some sort of recurring service, assuming that you're targeting a especially an older demographic, even if the economy starts to shift, they're not going to wake up and decide to clean out their gutters. So to market to them as if they're saving time, although that is a value proposition that we have as a service business, is that we do save our customers time. But that being the value proposition, thinking that you're going to get new customers, that way, you are going after a demographic. It's very small, because once that person makes a decision for someone else to mow their grass and they call around lawn care providers when they're 60 years old, you're marketing them the same way for the next 15 years. They're 75 now, they haven't mowed their grass in 15 years. They're not even thinking about the possibility of them doing it instead of playing golf. And so the vast majority of customers will not come from people that decided to not mow their grass, that decided to not clean out their pool, that decided to not trim the bushes themselves. The vast majority of your customers are going to come from people that have used other providers and they didn't show up. They have used other providers that were not professional. They used other providers that didn't have cards on file. They were tired of someone not showing up. These are the type of pain points you should actually speak to when it comes to marketing. Because the vast majority of people, now that they have their Lawn Mowed For 15 years, the only reason they'll switch is not because they decided to pick it up and do it themselves. Now they're physically incapable of it. It's a fact that they are tired of someone not showing up, being unprofessional, et cetera. So speak to that in your marketing. I will also say that at the beginning of spring rush is the really only period of time I see you getting the type of customer that's for the very first time ever deciding to use a service after the spring rush. Six, eight, 12 weeks in, people have solved this pain point. Unless like they have not cleaned their house in three years. Unless they have not mowed their lawn the entire past year and now it's overgrown, it's a jungle. Unless that's the case, they have used another service. So market to those pain points and not to the pain points of a new customer. All right, first our next one up, Nathan and Kyle Hart from Hart and Sons Landscape. We recently took on two clients that are slightly out of our service area. They are larger contracts and we decided to charge extra for drive time. Do you recommend that we give extra budget hours for the crew that has to make that longer drive or would that be confusing for them as it gives them an inaccurate amount of time the job should be completed. This also applies to multi jobs as well. Normally we add drive time to pick up the mulch since it's often so busy at the time and makes takes up to an hour sometimes. Mercy. It may be misleading to the crew because they think they have more time than they actually do. If we don't add budget hours and the crew's efficiency score for that day is always lower and they don't get a bonus. Okay, so yeah, so if you're doing pay for performance, your budget hours need to be accurate. Now if you're not doing budget, if you're not doing pay for performance, this really does not matter. You're charging a customer an amount, you're paying the crew by the hour. No one cares. Now that you'd have a whole different argument as to whether or not it's efficient for them to be driving this far or going an hour away from mulch, et cetera. But when it comes to pay for performance, we do need to take into account the drive time. Now, do I pay them for drive time? No. But if I'm going to make them drive an hour away but only do budget hours for the three hour job they're going to be at, they will never be able to make P4P and above base pay. So you'll have to bake it in. This is why small service areas, you don't have to think about this. Stuff like if I'm, if I'm not, if I'm driving more than just a few minutes from house to house, we have a big problem. And so if you're going to randomly take two customers way away. Yes, I'm going to inflate the budget hours if I'm on paid for performance to make sure my crew could get above base pay. Because the last thing you want is they know there's no way in the world they're gonna be able make base pay. Not because the budget hours are accurate, but because the drive time's so long, they're just burning time and they'll get mad at you. So what's nice about pay for performance? It keeps you honest. It prevents you from doing bad business behaviors like getting a random couple customers way outside your service area because your crew will get mad at you because they'll start figuring out they don't make any money if you're doing services that far away. So if you're going to, I would beef up the budget hours for them. Blaze from Bellamies. Can we please have a new visit created prompt and zapier added? Thank you. You can do this in. If you go to the chat, you can do a feature request.

And yeah, I'm guessing there's a new visit. I think there's a new. There's several other. I. Yes, I see what you're saying. Okay, so visit would be like an actual, you know, a job. So feel free to submit this as a trigger and in the.

Feature request, Montes Williams from Ace Project, what are your other steps to set up a client for recurring visits, not just one time visits. So if you are setting up a job like you would for a one time job, there's simply just a toggle to make it a recurring job. Now I will say this after seeing a lot of accounts inside of Copilot, the vast majority of people are not using off seasons. And I personally think that's crazy. Here's why. With an off season, the reason we did this is if you are setting up recurring services and you have an off season at all. Now some people say, well, I don't have an off season, I stop, I start mowing. I'm just gonna use mowing for an example. We do monthly visits during the winter and then we do weekly during the rest of the season. Great. If I was you, I would set up two recurring visits. One for the winter season, one for the rest of the season. One would be weekly, the other would be monthly and it'll have an off season that correlates with each of those different timing and schedules. But for the vast majority of people, that actually will stop for three, four, five months of the year. When you set up the recurring service, I'm going to tick the boxes as indefinite visits. If you check that, it means you will never have to set up that service again. And if you set up the off season, it'll just automatically pause that recurring service for that off season. Okay? Now if you tried this like a year ago and it was buggy, just know that's been fixed now. Okay? So when we first launch off seasons, there was trouble. When you would change the off season, it would not reflect and actually add hundreds of visits like it should. For example, we have like 3, 4, 500 mowing visits scheduled. All of a sudden you realize it's October. Like, man, it's warm. I need to extend my mowing season by two weeks. Okay, what you're going to do is you're going to go to the off season and now instead of having to add 300 visits one by one by one, you're going to just change the off season from November 1st to November 15th. And when you do that, it's going to add any appropriate visits for that recurring service for the next two weeks if the timing is appropriate. And so I don't see a lot of people using this, it will save you dozens of hours. The larger you get, the more it would say it'll save you in terms of starting or stopping service at the end of the season and starting it up back in the at the beginning of the season again. Also the reason it's so important, because I see so many people when they start service up again, they forget several customers until it's four or five weeks into the season and they're like, oh my word, the customer usually freaks out. And it's like, why haven't you been showing up on my property? And you're like, I totally forgot. And the reason is because you're starting restarting everyone's recurring service. So to answer your question more directly, Montez, when you're setting up your visit just it says this is a one time job or recurring. Click on recurring, set the schedule you would like. And then I personally recommend, unless they've told you to stop at a certain time, make it an indefinite visit in the future and set your off season. And it'll just pause that service for that period of time. Next question from John Wiggins from Power Safe Power Washing. Quick backstory is I've been running my Pressure washing business by myself for three plus years now. I made some huge decisions recently. I'm very close to my family and recently added my brother on as a part owner with me barely holding the majority share. I've also added my sister on as almost equal parts owner. Okay, interesting. The question is not if this is a good idea. I know it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm extremely close to them and have a ton of trust as well. I didn't do this because it was a smart business move, but instead that is something I want to do as a family. My siblings are definitely type A and we would like to grow as quickly as possible. We are all willing and able to take very little if not no money out of the business. My question is, do you have any advice for me when navigating this complicated situation to not only maximize our growth but also keep all parties on the same page and avoid complications. Okay, this great question. So in about probably five or six weeks there is a turnaround video that's coming out that'll talk a lot about this because there's a three person partnership. One person in kind of an ugly way had to leave and it was really bad. It really put them through the ring and the business was doing I think 4, 3, $400,000 last year. They're trying on page like 600,000 this year. But it really put them in a bad spot where it's where like they couldn't do any marketing last year because.

They'Re so far behind.

Once this part time part owner bailed mid season. And so as much as right now, you all trust each other. Um, there can be kamikazes that come in through life. For example, one of them could have a tough breakup for example. And if they're married to that person and all of a sudden they're going through a divorce court, they're going to try to get 50% of the equity that that person holds in your business. And that could potentially lead to liquidity event where you're like I have we, we have to sell this business to be able to give this person, get them out of the business or you have to take a massive loan to buy them out. So as much as you might have really good relationship with in the siblings, there are other impacts, health for example, that could cause us to change. Now do I think this is a bad idea? I'm not going to give my opinion on that. What I would say is prepare for it not to be this way forever. Unlike marriage, it is not till death do us part most business relationships, and I don't mean like 50% like marriages, but rather more like 99% of people that start in business together will eventually not be in business together. That's just the facts. Like, there are very few Charlie Mungers and Warren Buffetts that literally until the day they die, are in business together and just keep going together. It is very, very rare. Most of the time you're in business for someone for 5, 10, 15 years. These are partnerships, these are not marriages. And so what I would recommend is like some people spend literally 10 seconds getting a business relationship and they think that's crazy. If you went and got married, if you're giving someone equity in a business, you are giving them a huge chunk of your, like a huge amount of investment together. You're spending more time with this person than probably your spouse. And yet we just do it so flippantly. And so I would recommend creating, quote, unquote. I'm gonna say this mostly for the effect a prenup for your partnership because it's not a matter of if you will separate, is a matter of when. And so just. It's not a bad thing. It's a matter of saying, like, eventually life is gonna happen. One of us is gonna want to move on. One of us is not gonna wanna be here eight, ten hours a day. When that happens, what's going to happen? Are we going to. Are we going to have to buy someone out? Are we going to take it? So, for example, I like the idea of having value, having three independent valuations, taking the average of it and then being like, hey, if you, if you are wanting out and you're wanting to be bought out, there's a discount rate applied. So for example, just say a business is doing 500,000 annual revenue. Say, hey, when we dissolve this relationship, we're going to have three independent valuators or we're going to come up with a valuation mechanism now based upon profitability or revenue, for example. But we're going to determine that now either three independent valuations or evaluation mechanism based upon profit or revenue. Now, great, I went out. Okay, I'm out. Like, I want to move. I'm done with this business.

Great.

Valuations coming at $150,000. Now, I personally like that if I'm trying to get out, there's a discount rate applied that might be 40, 50%. So the valuation of the business is no longer 150,000 I'm wanting out, which means it puts pressure on the business tax to buy me out. And the other partner, which I'm going to agree prior to getting in this partnership, that there's going to be a discount rate applied of 40%. So now the business is only worth 80 or $85,000. And then if I own 50%, great to buy you. It's going to cost 40 grand. Doing all of that now makes it to where everyone knows what's happening. There's never bad hard feelings. The business is not put in jeopardy. You're never wondering as to why someone should or should not be doing more in the business. So just think about every possible thing that could go wrong for the business. What happens if someone has a life event? What if someone wants to move? What if someone wants to get out of the business? What if someone only can work three or four hours a day because they have a physical issue or they have a family problem? What happens if someone needs an extended period away because of pregnancy or because they get injured? These are the type of things that need to be thought out. Now, how do you come up with all these questions? Go to ChatGPT, be like, hey, this is the business. Here's what we're kind of doing. Revenue. Ask me every single question that could possibly go wrong so we can figure out exactly how every single case would be handled. And it'll give you like 20 to 50 questions that you all need to figure out. Like, what happens if someone gets divorced? What happens if someone wants to buy more equity? What happens if one person's working 16 hours a day and someone else is working three hours a day? How does that impact profit sharing? How does that impact equity? These are so. There's so many variables. And if you just go to it blindly, it's not a problem until you're making money. Like, no one really cares about holding equity or profit sharing in a business that doesn't make money. As soon as it starts making money, it means a lot of money. And that's when confrontation happens. So right now there's no confrontation because, like, everyone's like, I don't want money for the business. That will change. For everyone that says that eventually that will change. And so instead of just blindly going into this, let's think about, okay, well, when that changes, how are we going to handle it? So that way when it happens, we don't have to ruin our personal relationship. That is my 2 cents. I have a whole lot more coming out that in a turnaround show that's coming up because they were the, they were the result of this sort of collapse happening.

Next question.

Is from Morgan Latimer from Augusta Lawn Care of Jacksonville. Will archiving affect KPI data? I would like to archive estimates so I do not know this for certain so I do apologize Morgan Feel free to reach out to ATC and they can probably test this for you very quickly just by like archiving one seeing if it changes in the KPIs. Personally I don't usually archive estimates mostly because I don't know if it actually even impacts us, but it might say archived as a status when the customer goes and looks at it and I don't want them being like oh I can't, I can't accept it. Now down the road there might be like we could have estimates that automatically get archived based on like expiration date but for now we don't have that. But I do not know this for certain so reach out to Air Traffic Control Morgan in the support and they can certainly see if if that is the case and whether or not it impacts your close ratio and other KPIs. I I would venture to believe that it does not in terms of like changing things like close ratio on your KPI cockpit. Mike Delucas from Attaboy Lawns Hey Mike, I'm trying out a new very small marketing agency because the large one we were using just kept pushing me off and wouldn't help us get our CAC down. The cost just kept climbing and climbing. It seemed like we just got lost in the massive system no matter how many times I brought the issue up. The new guy is sending all paid leads to a landing page as a way to keep customers from getting lost on the main site. I do see this as a possible issue however I am wondering if there is some perverse incentive, lack of education or other motive. Maybe I'm wrong. This is the correct way it should be done. I need a little insight on this matter as I am currently of the opinion that my paid ads will help me build a long term SEO and I would rather have them go to the main site. Thanks for everything Mike Delugas okay, great, great question. Really good question. Okay, so here's here's the stakes. You're driving traffic to your main website which will help in part your SEO because you're driving a whole bunch of traffic to.

Starts to rank better for certain keywords, et cetera. Very cool. Now also kind of depends if this person is driving traffic to a completely different domain. I kind of have a problem with that because then I have no domain authority whatsoever. If they're doing it's like A different page. So for example, like if it's like attaboy lawns.com and instead of that it's going to like attaboylawns.com estimate, then I'm okay with it because at least you're getting domain authority. That's fine.

And I'm assuming they're probably hiding it from search engines, so less people get to it by just Google search, but rather you can't find in the search engine. It has to be direct traffic. Now, the advantage for them having this is really easy to track. You could theoretically get away with not even have to put a Google tracking code behind this one. Because you know, any lead that comes from this landing page is from the Google Ads because you hit it from any sort of. It's disconnected from the website, it's disconnected from Google search. So basically any lead that comes in from this landing page, you know it came from them. The reason this is important is because if you just ran traffic to your main site, even if you have a Google tracking code or you have a Facebook pixel, for example, there are times that because of privacy inside the browser, that tracking code never gets hit. And so what will happen sometimes is, and this is why companies like Hiros exist, is they do tracking simply due to the fact that Facebook pixels and Google tracking codes sometimes don't actually get hit. And there's a argument for 20 to 50% of your of your leads are not actually hitting those tracking codes. And therefore it makes it look like your customer acquisition cost or cost per lead is much higher because you don't have correct tracking in place. So that is sometimes why having a separate landing page is nice, is because it allows you to know with certainty that if I am hiding this page from my website and I'm hiding it from SEO or Google, if I'm hiding it and people can't get to this, I use every single lead that comes through this landing page is going to be a valid lead from that ad campaign. And I can have a very accurate way of measuring my cost per lead.

So yeah, there's a trade off here. It's either A, better, easier tracking or B, I get, I lose out on a little bit of SEO traffic to my website, ranking for my domain, et cetera. And that does mean something over the course of time, right? So I know this because even at Augusta, like we've gone from where sites take two to three months to rank on the first page, Google to literally two to three days in most of our smaller markets. And the reason is because that domain augustongo.com has authority because so much traffic has been to it over the course of years. So I don't think in the short term that's going to affect you Mike. But I think long, long term I would be careful if I was driving like 80% of my traffic to these paid sources that are not my main site. Because then when it makes it hap. What the problem with this they own, they own that landing page. I'm assuming it's a different domain. It's a completely separate thing. If that's the case they own it. Which now they kind of have you handcuffed. And that's what most agencies like to do. Nothing against them, they're trying to do a good business model. But what they but what you want to be careful of is all of your traffic flowing through another source and you're basically handcuffed. And you know if you turn that off that all of your leads are gone. And now because you haven't built up the SEO and the traffic to your main site like if you turn that off it's literally 50, 60, 70% of your leads are now gone. They know they kind of have you and I don't think that's they're being malicious. This is business practice and it's like I want to give you good reporting and that's. I'm actually, I'm a fan of them because they just blindly send traffic to your website. I don't really trust them. So it's better than. But just be careful with having golds and handcuffs because they could build up a lot of your lead flow as you grow the business on top of that lead flow. And then you know, okay, we had a hundred leads last month and 80 of them came from their site. I don't want to be paying 3, 4 grand a month to them. But I kind of got it because now I've built this whole business on the infrastructure in the back end of having that much that many leads to replace churn Kevin Lupar from Lawn Domination. Hey Mike. This season we are doubling our mowing and fertilizing accounts. I just hired two full time employees and two and have two part time employees in case someone doesn't show up having issues trying to figure out budget hours and copa. Currently when adding the jobs to schedule I add how much time it takes to guys to complete the job. Each employee should be 8 to 10 hours a day of work minus drive time. If they each work 8 hours in the 10 hour day they should. Should I book 16 budget hours each day or leave each day to 8 hours for them. I want to make sure I'm not overbooking. It was way easier last year with one employee. Okay, this is a great question. So I will say first that the Field Force app that the customer advisory board has been looking at and getting really good feedback on is going to be much simpler design for field workers. Right now the current has a lot of functionality, but it's web based. It doesn't work for an offline and it. The design is not optimized for just like doing jobs. There's all this other stuff that you're able to do. We are not like getting away with the current one. But we will add the option for Field Force app which will allow your crew members to be much more simplified and the design of even budget hours will be much better in terms of them just viewing it. I will say this though, Kevin, that is do not think of budget hours as how many people, how long it takes the crew to do the job. Think about how long it takes one person to do the job. The software will automatically know that if there's two people on a job and there's four budget hours that there should be, it should take two hours for them to get the job done. All right, so think of always in terms of one person on this job site, how long will it take? And if there's two people, great, it'll half it. And if there's three people in the job, it'll take it by a third. Like cut it into thirds. So always think of budget hours. How long would it take for one person to do the job? And if you're like, well, it has to be done with four people.

Great.

How long will it take four people? It's gonna take 10 hours for this crew to do this project.

Great.

And there's four people, 40 budget hours. Right. So. And that was what I would. I'd be entering into co pilot to get accurate tracking, especially if you're connected to PVP software because then everything will come across actually how much they're getting paid correctly. Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and snow plowing. Congratulations, happy couple. May your marriage be filled with love, joy and God's blessings as you embark on this new chapter together. May your love for each other, like the love of Christ for the church, be everlasting. Thank you very much. Okay, what should an operations manager position look like for 400 to 500,000? A business that has never filled that role other than the owner. What are the most effective ways to get Someone up for success in that position and set clear expectations, spell out and which of those expectations be okay. So I would need a little bit more information this Jeremy, because I don't know if you are what your pricing looks like because usually at 400, $500,000, I would say you can't afford an operations manager. However, if you grew the business of 300,000 was like 150 customers and then you raised prices aggressively and you're like top of the market, you can actually make money doing this. So usually you don't need a full time operations manager. Now what I would say in terms of this role at 4 to 500,000 is this does not require a full time overhead position. The reason I say that is because to get a really, really good operation manager, especially if you want this person to run the business without you, they need to have incentive to be able to make good money and let's just call it $80,000 on a $400,000 business, that's 20%. And so it's very difficult to have a 20% overhead if that person doesn't generate any revenue. So Personally, the number one thing I'm looking at is completing 30 budget hours of work every single week. So if they have zero estimates and zero in person training and interviews, then I expect 30 budget hours of work in the week and I go down one hour for every in person estimate and for every in person training or interview that they have to do for hiring the team. So sales and the other aspects of hiring. Now the reason I do that is because I know that on the other side of the coin, I am trying to do what, Reduce the amount of in person estimates with instant pricing over the phone estimates so I can drive that number down, make them more efficient. Like the number one reason I do instant pricing is to keep my general manager from being out doing, driving around, making no money and actually burning money instead generating revenue in the business. But the only way to make sure this happens is keep them accountable to budget hours of how much work is expected of them. So we expect 30 budget hours of work in this size of business. And then if you, hey, you got five in person estimates this week. Great. 25 budget hours expected. Oh, you have to do two interviews and you did half a day of training. Great, we're gonna bring that down to 20 budget hours for this week is what now is expected. Instead of just being like, yeah, like I filled my day with follow ups and I did some estimates, I did some training and you actually boil it down, they actually did like 10 estimates the whole week. They hired one person and they did.

A little bit of training.

It's like, well, how do I measure this? Use budgeted hours and then have a metric that every single week we're going to sit down and say, hey, how many budget hours you complete? We start at 30 budget hours, which is like a 40 hour work week. If they were just working out in the field, but then, hey, yes, you are expected to still do sales in person, assets, you're expected to lead the team and hire them, et cetera. It's all part of the job. I bake in 25% for things like team meetings and getting the shop set up in the morning, et cetera. That's why it's 30 by J hours, not 40. So, yeah, that's our expectations. I need at that size of business, they have to be producing revenue. That's a. That is the difference between what we say in our training for Augusta is like the difference between a profitable location at 500,000 and a very unprofitable location at 500,000 is what percentage of the time of the quote, unquote, GM or operations manager is spent in the field. Because you can get a location that's 500,000 in revenue. And the general manager works their tail off 30 budget hours out in the field every single week. They do, you know, an estimate, one or two a day at the end of the day, and they interview people a couple of times throughout the spring rush. But operations are smooth and you can take that location and the General Manager produce $100,000 in revenue for the business in addition to doing everything in terms of task wise, easily. If you're charging, if you're charging $100 per hour, that is literally a thousand budget hours per year. So if you take, you know, rewind the clock that, that's 20 budget hours per week. If you charge $100 per hour and you have a 20 budget hours of work on the schedule for your general manager, they will produce a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. They will pay for their wages. The difference between that and then someone else that runs a very unprofitable business at the same exact size is simply the delta between the person that makes a hundred thousand out in the field. That's your profit margin, essentially, and the person who makes nothing because they're straight overhead and they dink around in their truck all day long, or maybe they don't. Maybe they hustle and work hard. But you have really bad route density. You have projects that go way over Budget hours all the time. You're doing services that are not simplified or standardized. You have no software. This is the difference between a very profitable, you know, 15 to 25% profit margin net business from a $500,000 level and the business that loses 10% loses $50,000 a year at the same exact size. Robbie from Weed Whackers Lawn Care how we handle instant quote when it comes in, we set up an estimate for weekly and biweekly service and accept whichever one they choose and then attach a picture of instant quote to their file. If a customer opts for a service change, like switching from weekly service at $50 to a BI weekly service of $75, we can offer proof to support our pricing decisions. However, how do you handle if they call and accept the price over the phone? We have follow up phone calls and emails but sometimes we don't get the picture. We don't send a text because they not able to send a picture by text. In copilot we have lost customers in past because you're saying cool. So this is what I would do. First off, I would have them submit if possible, you know the QR code. Instead of sending a picture to email, I would, I would have a QR code on your door hanger. That's what we're talking about, right? Door hangers. Yeah. So if you instant pricing from. Oh I see this. Instant pricing. One second, give me one second. Oh, so you're saying people are on your website and they call you. It's very rare that happens when people see the instant pricing on the website and they don't finish the form. So maybe you're talking about door hangers. If you're talking about door hangers, I recommend a QR code going to a form that they fill out because once they're on the form we rarely see them not fill it out. So all that to say, all that to say we still send an estimate to the customer once they accepted instant pricing. That way it's inside their customer profile as well. As we say, hey, just so you know, it's accepted, we mark it accepted and we send it to them. We do this so that way they see that they accepted weekly and bi weekly at those prices. Also we personally, I'm not saying this is what everyone should do is what we do. We put the weekly and bi weekly price in the description of a line item and put it in one line item. So when they accept mowing they're also accepting the other price. I don't want them to choose between Weekly and bi weekly. I assume weekly unless they specifically tell me otherwise. But if they accept mowing, it's gonna be set up for weekly and we put it in our description. Hey, between March and May you are required to be on weekly. I know I get like 90% of my mowing customers during that time anyways. And very few of them switch to bi weekly. But if they do, but if they do, they have accepted a line that literally says weekly and bi weekly prices. They switch to bi weekly. I have it accepted on the estimate what the pricing should be. So we still do this for instant pricing and that is customer accepts a bid, we're still going to send them the estimate. It's that way. It's in their profile. They've seen it. We have record that they've seen it with the email hook I do recommend. Next up is from Thorsten from Anytime Lawn Care Services. This is my first year in the lawn care business and I was wondering what your onboarding for new customers looks like. Do you have them sign anything or accept a term of service agreement? Please walk me through your whole onboarding process for new customers. So I'm not going to spend time, especially for lawn care, trying to get someone to agree you to terms of service or sign a long contract or even get a signature.

The reason?

Because I'm adding friction to a process that is just too much of a pain in the butt. And so yeah, adding friction hurts sales. And so if you're trying to optimize for profitability, you add friction. You make, for example, you would add every single person to get a card on file. That will reduce your close ratio somewhat. Slightly. But it'll reduce it somewhat. If you require 100% deposit on all projects over $10, it'll also reduce your close ratio. If you also require prepayment on all services that are going to be offered this this coming month, you will also reduce your ratio. If you require a 12 month contract with a signature, you will also reduce your close ratio. These things that will help your cash flow, these things will help you be more profitable, these things will help a lot of things. In terms of season, the question is which are you trying to optimize for?

Are you trying to optimize for growth or profit?

So if you're in growth mode, which sounds like you're in your first year of business, I'm going to reduce those filters, I'm going to reduce the friction. Get as many people in the door and then when you hit capacity like I like the size of business now let's make it profitable. That's what I'm going to start adding in these other layers. I'm going to do price increases. I'm going to require a, I might do a $50 consulting call.

Charge to do the estimate. That will reduce your estimates like 80 or 90%. So if you're tired of tire kickers, you'll implement that. But you won't do it if you're trying to grow. But if you're like, I don't want any more of these estimates and I only want to do them if I'm going to close every single job.

Great.

Add $100 design consulting fee that gets applied to the estimate and all of a sudden your estimates will drop by like 80 or 90%, but they'll be like 100% close ratio. So you'd be much more in profit mode doing that activity. So adding friction to the sales process in any way, shape or form will reduce your close ratio, but ultimately reduce increases your profits and your cash flow and reduces your seasonality. So it's a trade off. And most of the time I recommend if you're first getting started, get as many customers, do a great job. And that way when you raise price and you add friction, they don't want to leave. Jonathan from Amory Amory Lawn Care number one, I was wondering if you've come across this issue before. I don't have a physical location for my business and my business and my Google business profile was immediately suspended after submitting my verification video. I've gone through all the guideline, submitted multiple appeals with tons of evidence and even asked informed forms. But I keep getting the same response about a quality guideline issue with no clear explanation. Okay, so you can just do a service area and you'll get around this. You're verifying an address, that's when you have to do the video. So you could just do service area now, do I recommend that? No, I would rather you have an actual address. So I would do my best to get to a commercial spot. I, I know some people do, they'll rent offices. Like what's it called? Give me a second. It's gonna come co working offices. You can rent them for like 100 bucks a month. Get an address that you can send mail to and verify then. And I would put, put up my little sign. I would park my truck in front of the thing and to prove the video in the video. Sounds like to me right now you don't have a physical location, but you're trying to verify an address. So yeah, you're probably not gonna get through.

So co working space, rent some space out that actually is has an address with a mailbox, et cetera. Put your sign out in the window. Better yet, put it inside the ground, drive by or put your trucks out there, park your trailers. You could do that. Otherwise if you just wanted to get the account set up. I would just do no physical location. I would do service areas only. It does hurt your SEO a little bit because you don't show up on the map as often and it doesn't. Your Google listing is affected a little bit at this point. I'm not sure how it's wrong or how to fix it. Do you have any insight or advice what I should do next? I really appreciate any guidance. Number two, I started my business back in January as a Singer single member LLC and at the time there was no Augusta franchisees in my area. However, I recently noticed an Augusta website has launched for my area and I'm wondering how I can effectively compete with them. Any advice or strategies would be greatly appreciated. If this is the reason Augusta exists, it's not because we try to beat people, is because this is why Augusta Nation exists is this question and that is you're going to need to create a great website. You're going to be professional, you're going to answer your phone, you're going to be continue to use the software like you're doing and you will compete just fine. There's so much work out there. It's such a small percentage of the residential lawn care market that we actually tackle. Like it's tiny even at 50 some odd million in revenue. Like it's so tiny compared to the billions of dollars that it's in this industry. So like there's no problem with the market. It's a matter of when you see this happen. This is exactly the thoughts I want you to think because you will need to think these thoughts. Okay. If I'm going to be effectively there.

How do I do it?

Okay, well their pricing is instant. Okay, great. They offer pay for performance. Okay. I need to figure out that system so I can attract good talent. I need to have a great website. I need to use software. It's not because I'm trying to beat anyone. I'm trying to beat the person that is not willing to change those systems in their business. The person that doesn't want to pay their employees, a PvP, that doesn't want to do open book management, that doesn't care about their employees and treats them like trash, that doesn't have wrapped trucks or uniforms or professional staff or insurance like that is who I'm trying to attack. So just the fact you answer this question, there will be plenty of work for you and you will crush it and I hope you succeed. So just continue onto the content, implement systems, do what's best for the customer, treat the customer right and you will do fantastically.

If a customer responds for estimate by saying that they are thinking about it and let us know what does the follow up process look like? Do you still let the automations run every day risking that it might annoy them? Yeah, so how I'm going to do it is I'm going to have the automations of text and email going out especially in the first few days and again when we follow up we can ask like do you have questions? Did you get it? Or we can be more pointed and this is where the part where usually follow up phone calls are going to be stronger and that is offering a specific date saying hey, the route is filling up on that specific day, giving them a specific discount that is kind of a ticking time bomb. It's one day some sort of scarcity. We only have so many spots left. Urgency. No, you know, today we have this one offer and 10% off or your first MO free or whatever. And so yes you can annoy them but what's annoying to them is when they tell you this part right here which is they are thinking about it and they will let us know. I never want to give them the opportunity to give me that information. So if I'm doing a follow up phone call I'm not saying hey do you have any questions? Because then the response is no I don't. If I do I'll reach out to you. I'm never going to say you know, do you have, you know, did you get it? Because if they see yes, I got it, I'm thinking about it, I'll get back to you. I never want them in the driver's seat of follow up and so I would rather you do some follow up. You will have some, you will have a non zero increase to your close ratio if you just simply call the customer like do you have questions? Did you get it? Like there will be an increase but the far far greater like 2.0 version of follow up is actually calling with scarcity urgency and offer a reason why you're calling. Because if you call them and say hey Mr. Jones, we have a spa available next Monday, I'd really like to get you on the schedule because we'd really like to get that water feature completed for you so we can get pictures on our website. We really need that done. If we can go on schedule today, I'll give you 10 off. That looks very different because if they say no. No, I think that's fine. I, I don't think we want to move forward. That kind of pushes them to like, basically say no. And I'd rather them say no than nothing at all or that they're thinking about and then just ghost me. And so I'm trying to call for a reason. A reason, a date, a time. I'm going to reserve their spot and then call up. So if they, if they actually said this, like, hey, I'm gonna think about it. Okay, great. Fantastic. I'm gonna go ahead and reserve your spot for next Monday because I know it's important to get this done and we're booked out like six weeks. So I want to make sure that you can get it done. Let's go ahead and put. I'll reserve your spot and I'll call you tomorrow. And then that way you can think about it. Talk to your spouse, you know, compare quotes, whatever they've said, and then I will call you back. I want to be on my time, not their time. I know that seems pushy, but you are going to control the dialogue of the sale. And the objective is that I can. I have the ability to call them back without annoying them because I that I told them that was gonna happen and they asked for time to think about it.

Great.

Let's give you time to think about it. I'll call you back on this day and until then, I'll go ahead and reserve the spot for you. Sam Gustin from Troops Mowing on your last mastermind, you mentioned that when Instant Price accepted, you'll still create the estimate within copilot Mandy, Mark is accepted and send that accepted estimate over to the customer. We don't send it to the customer. We just mark as accepted. However, this would drastically inflate the close ratio. Can you provide more insight into this? So any, any estimate that is instant pricing is. This is what conference I said track, not track the number of accepted jobs, not the number of, of leads. Because your close ratio on instant pricing is effectively 100%. And yes, it would inflate your close ratio in your metrics because you're creating and accepting them. We don't, just to be clear, we.

Don'T send it to the customer.

We do mark them as accepted though, so that it triggers automations that are required once a customer has been set up. So but yes, this is instant pricing will inflate your close ratio 100% because most people will not submit the form if they don't like the price. So there's a whole debate like we've talked about in the past, like do you collect the information and then give the pricing and risk a 30% drop off of them not even seeing the pricing because that happens or do I let them see the pricing and then if they don't like it, they don't click submit. So there's, there's that debate. It will continue forever. And if you're, or doing it where they see the pricing when they click submit, you're essentially going to have 100 close ratio. Yes, it will skew your, your close ratio higher. And that's why I just track number of jobs accepted in terms of comparison. All right, question for Mike. What are your annual revenue expectations for a gm? Ran location, first year, second year, third year, et cetera. For example, at the end of their season a GM didn't hit a revenue goal, 500,000 for example, would you fire? I wouldn't fire them.

Because most of the time when they don't hit the hit the target of sales and revenue growth, it's actually, it's a personnel problem. They're usually a good operational gm but they, they stink at sales. And so usually it's actually you made the wrong hire. And so I talked all about this at conference. I have a video on this on the Home Service Millionaire channel. But I would say if someone did not aggressively target 500,000 the first few years that a, you might not have given enough advertising dollars first thing. Secondly, you might have hired the wrong person that has operational skills and would lead a great team at 7, 800,000 annual revenue. But it does not want to do follow up calls, does not want to knock on people's doors, does not want to cold call. Then I would, I would say that, you know, it falls on us as owners to hire the right person and make sure they're set up for success, including a solid marketing budget. So in terms of hitting their revenue goals, like I would be much more rather focused on like if their close ratio is 20% then we have a big problem because if, if their close ratio is 70, 80% and I haven't given them the resources for marketing to get enough leads to hit certain revenue targets, then they're kind of at a big disadvantage. And so I'm going to be tracking things much more around their close ratio. Their efficiency, like are they complete enough budget hours in the field? If not, do you have enough in person estimates? Because if you have a whole bunch of estimates, they shouldn't be in the field. And if they're not in the field and they have a high close ratio with a lot of estimates, we should be growing very fast. And I should be able to pour money on marketing and growing because I have 70, 80% close ratio. And so I would not fire them. I would probably either A need to retrain them or B figure out a way to be able to make sales without them. Assuming they're really good at operational gm, they're really good at team meetings, training. Interviewing that is a very, very valuable skill set. So I probably wouldn't throw this person aside unless they also stunk operations. But what I'd probably have to do is take a little bit more shouldering of the responsibility around sales. Whether it be instant pricing, whether it be over the phone pricing, whether it be more marketing budget. As long as they can have a high enough close ratio, then I don't really look to them, you know, as a problem. I, I just didn't give them the resources or the skills or the training. Kyle from pristine lawns and snow. Oh, to give your. I, I think this is, it was asking for numbers. Do I have annual revenue expectations? I have revenue. I don't have expectations as much as incentives. So like when they hit 20,000amonth in revenue, they get more 40,000amonth in revenue, 60,000, 80,000 and a hundred thousand in annual in monthly revenue. If they hit those targets, they get more money. If you're in growth mode and you're trying to grow fast and you could do, some people do as a commission like a percentage of the sales to incentivize that. So yeah, I'm much more, I'm much more thinking like if you're not producing revenue, I completely budget hours. You should be doing estimates. And if those estimates, you have a lot of estimates, great. You shouldn't be, you won't have budget hours. But then your close ratio better be high. And if those things are all true, then the business will grow. Like if I have a ton of estimates, like 30 plus a week of in person, plus everything being done instantly and over the phone, I should be growing very quickly. If my close ratio is 70, 80% and I'm in growth mode. So if I'm not equipping them correctly though, because my prices are way too high, I'm not giving them marketing dollars. I don't, I Haven't given them the training on how to do follow up phone calls or door knocking or door hangers then then I would take responsibility for that. Kyle. Pristine lawns and snow. How do I know when where to open a second location? Should I be opening one in every city or is it only cities that are a 30 minute drive away? The most conservative route to opening a second location in my opinion is you get one location to where there's six to eight employees that a person can manage relatively easily. You don't need multiple overhead people. So usually again I'd give ranges of revenue because it's easier for people to understand. And that's like that 7,800,000 annual revenue marker that's in been in profit mode. You raise prices three, four times. That's like the ideal candidate. And I'm having an operational GM that can run that first one. I'm going to start in a second location now. The question is where do I open it? I'm usually going to be looking at the next town over where I get a lot of leads and I'm turning people away. So if you're turning a lot of people away, like maybe 10, 15% of your leads are you know, out of your service area. I'm looking, okay, where do those usually come from? That's a good place to start. Also you could advertise in that area for one season and just see what the response is. Build up your, your, your customer base of a recurring route to basically fill the general manager schedule from day one. So if you get 30, 40 recurring customers for example in that area. Now when I start a quote second location, I'm already covering the fixed expenses of like a shop space and the general manager from day one. That's the most conservative way of doing it. Is it the fastest way? No, because you'll burn an extra year sampling the market and then you know, sending a crew over there into that area, probably driving 30 minutes, not great, not good for efficiency, probably giving them a higher percentage on paper performance just so they can get over there and make money. So not good, not great. It'll take you longer but it's the more conservative route if you're not, if you don't have plenty of cash. Val Silva from Silva's Landscaping company. Over the last few years you've discussed instant pricing on a website in order to expedite the sales process. I've been trying, I've been doing research to see what would like look like so we could have an idea how to implement this strategy. Can you show some examples of what this would look like on an actual website. I've been on Augusta websites and haven't been able to find this. Thanks. Yeah, so we specifically at Augusta do make sure that we before we actually show the pricing, you have to fill in some information. We do this specifically just to reduce the amount of people that are just trying to test it out. So once you fill in the information, then you'll see the pricing. We don't capture the information until you actually click submit. But just FYI, secondly, I would say watch the workshop. So mikeannies.com workshop I go into depth. You don't need to go all the way to the extent of collecting card information right away. There's three different layers I talk about. The first is just give a range of price on your quote. Like literally just like, okay, if we're doing a mowing job, it's usually going to cost you between 50 to 80 bucks. You could do that. That alone will weed out a lot of tire kickers. They're expecting $20. That's the range. The next thing would be to be able to give pictures of the size of properties small, medium and large and let them select that. That would be the second option. Now, the third option that I'm not a huge fan of is actually like having them where they have to measure their property or it does AI to scan the square footage. I am not against those. There are plenty of other plugins that do this. The plugins sometimes slow down your site. So then now your SEO is getting affected. It takes more time from the customer if they have to actually measure the property and drop pins if their cell service is low. The actual scanning of the property automatically might also take five or 10 seconds, which leads to a massive drop off in conversion. So there's a lot of pros and cons of doing the third way. And the fourth way really is you. You get the price and their credit card information. They're locked and loaded and good to go. So those are the different levels. I would not try to go for the fourth one right away. I would start with the first one. So again, go to the workshop. I walk through the different types. How to set this up. You can absolutely do this inside Jotform and then connect it via Zapier to Copilot if you would like to. That would be my recommendation. And down the road, when we do more customizable forms inside of Copilot, this is something that we would make sure can be can be done on your site. But there's a lot of. Because you're actually taking, you know, the goal will be able to take card information. There's a lot of PCI compliance and security stuff around that bill from P&J's grounds keeping. Hi Mike. When I give pricing to new residential customers for grass cutting, they say the price is too high. When I raise the prices for my current customers to have, they have no problems paying. I started with prices above the average market pricing when I first started business. Not sure if I should be lowering the prices for new customers because I have no. I have to lower the pricing for my current customers. Okay, great. So first off, your existing customers are not going to your site looking at your pricing. Once they're locked in, they're happy with your service. No one's doing that. I have yet to actually hear this happening because we use this quite often and everyone thinks that this is like you'll see on social media. People say horrible things about the way we do this at Augusta.

The bottom line is this when you.

Think about from a risk perspective from a customer, they're comparing you against a bunch of other contractors, all of which they have no trust in because everyone to them is the same. They cut grass until that changes with like a more of a national brand and the brand awareness that this is going to be the same. So if you think about it from this perspective, the customer's risk is high for all options. And so the only way to usually stand out or the easiest way I should say to stand out is pricing now the way that your workflow in terms of your estimate, the speed at which you get estimate to them, the professionalism you have if you show up to the estimate. Your professionalism on the phone is also value. So let me be very clear. You can absolutely sell a premium product. However, there's a higher likelihood at all times if you are cheaper that you will close more deals. The question is do I want to have a 30 to 40% close ratio and have a premium price or don't want to have a 70, 80% close? Twice as many deals with a slightly lower price? In my opinion, assuming you have enough cash, getting them in the door at the lower price is fine as long as there is an absolute time when you raise prices on those customers. In my opinion, that's when you hit capacity. Defining what capacity is so you actually do raise prices is important because the vast majority of people go with the strategy of let me go low at the beginning and raise their prices down the road and guess what happens? They never raise their prices. And so as long as you have a very clear strategy and I talk about capacity based growth all the time. The reason I do is because I want to get people in the door. I want to prove to them that I'm better than everyone else. I'm going to prove them that I answer my phone. I want to prove them I have a professional service. I want to prove to them if something goes wrong, I take care of it right away. I want to prove to them I have a professional team, uniforms, trucks, et cetera. They can be proud of our crew when they show up at their property and their, their neighbors are wowed. Once I've proven that for 3, 612 months I can raise prices. And they are very price insensitive because they don't want to switch and take the risk of go getting going and getting five other contractors of which the four they contacted last time never even got back to them or never showed up or the quote took three weeks to get back to them. So they will usually want to stick around. And if you do a good job and you have a great product and you have a good customer that you're actually marketing to, the price insensity sensitivity of them goes up as I do a great job and they, they do not want the risk of switching services. And so I'm a big fan of this. However, the reason I don't talk about it too much is because most people just continually keep growing their business on these lower profit margins services and customers and never actually raise their prices and therefore go bankrupt. And you can have a growing business that is profitable, go bankrupt and that happens all the time. And so I'd be very careful with the strategy. But assuming you've listened. Watch the workshop again. Mikeanz.com workshop it's completely free. Watch the workshop. It walks through capacity based growth. But you have to determine, I should say in my opinion, I believe that you should determine a time in which you're going to raise prices. I do it based upon capacity, how many budget hours I can complete. And I'm not going to keep buying trucks and equipment to extend my capacity. I'm going to set my capacity a certain limit. I hit it and I will raise prices. So I don't believe you'll need to raise your lower. You do not need a lower prices to existing customers so you can get new customers. It's not the case. No one checks the pricing once they are a customer and they're happy. And it is very common to have introductory pricing. So don't think that this one are scammy, it's not fishy. It's the same thing that many other businesses use and that is the reason they use, they employ this especially like, I'll just use an example, like introductory offers for like cell phone providers. The reason that they do that is because to all of us, to the vast majority of us, cell servers, cell services are the same. And so what you do is you get them on a lower price, you prove the value, you prove that your network works well, that they do great customer service. And guess what, when you raise prices, usually people stick around. And so this is an introductory offer to be able to reduce the risk associated with a commodity. And so unless you are flying drones, someone's house and letting off robots and it's silent and it's done in the middle of the night, we don't have a very differentiated actual end product. What we actually differentiate ourselves in terms of value is the way we deliver the service. So what I want to do is I wanted to reduce the risk associated with the cost so that the customer tries my service. I proved them that I'm better than anyone else. And then when I raise price, they're happy to pay it because they don't want to switch to an inferior service. Now, if you don't have a good product, you don't have a good service, you don't take care of customers, you don't answer your phone, then you will have a massive problem with this strategy. And this is why I don't talk about it a lot, because most people in this industry do not have a great website, they do not have great service, they do not have great customer service, they don't answer their phone, they take forever to get back to customers. And because of that, when they raise prices, they will lose a lot of people. And so just be careful with that. Caleb Barzep from Spruce Lawn Care. We implemented some pricing at the beginning of March and our close ratio has been 21%. Is this normal? I feel like this could be hurting our company. Okay, so first off, I would say you probably jumped all the way to the later stages of instant pricing. Also your close ratio, I'm assuming you're getting, you're collecting the information prior to them seeing the price. Because if you're collect, the reason you're seeing 21% is because you're getting a lead and then they're seeing the price and then they're bailing. The reason I know that is because if you were showing the price beforehand, you'd have A quote unquote 100% close ratio of the instant pricing forms. And so. And then you'd be able to triage the whole like are they actually converting? That'd be a different problem. But the fact that you have a close ratio tells me that you're taking their information. They have to click a button, it goes to a different page to see the pricing. When you do that, you're gonna have a huge drop off right there because people just don't trust. So I would just be careful with this again, this is why I recommend slowly going into instant pricing. The way that you roll it out is important. The way that the screens are laid out isn't. But the way the fields are is very important because now when you're starting to talk about price like you're going to have a lot more people are more sensitive to stuff especially if you start asking for their card information. So be careful with that too. So I don't, I can't see your site. Let me see if I can just randomly look this up and find it real quick. One second. First off, free estimate 60 seconds. Like it first, let's first check if you're in our service area. This year I would take out like this year even. It's fine. Okay. So again, I don't know where you're tracking that percentage. I don't know where you're, where you're tracking that. But see this next button that's required, that's capturing the, the, the contact information which is fine, but you're going to get a lot of people not even clicking on this. So I don't know where your 21 close ratio is coming from. I'm guessing it's like if I fill in this information. All right, I'm not going to go through this stuff. If I fill in this information. Let me do copy that won't let me. Okay, yeah. Okay. So see how they have to give this information just to see the pricing. They know that when they click next there's gonna be a big drop off here. Now I don't know where you're tracking this in terms of like I'm guessing it's the people that submit this and then the people that accept on the next page. But generally speaking, if you're advertising get your price in 60 seconds, you want to actually give it to them immediately. People do feel a little bit caught off guard. We've just seen the conversion. Either A, it's the drop off here where they don't submit their information or B, they don't even submit their information simply due to the fact that they.

They'Re like, where's the pricing? Right? So it says click next to access pricing. But again it feels very like hey, you said I was going to get 60 seconds. Now I got to give you my information. I'd just be a little bit careful of that. You're going to drop off of people like me. They're like, I don't want to my information in without knowing the price first. And whenever they click on something that's when you're capturing the data. And most people are pretty privy to this. So I'm not opposed to what you're doing now. I would just. Here, give me one second. Let me try to see. I don't even want to fill this out now because I know that I'm going to be in your system and you're going to have all my data.

Right.

So like it's just a, it's just a bit of a catch 22 here. Give me one second, let me figure this out.

Let me try to play with this.

Okay. I'm going to just make some stuff up. Give me one second. Sorry. I just want to offer as much value here as possible. One second. How'd you hear about us? Okay, so then I go next. Okay, then I see pictures. Yeah. So I'm guessing. Yeah, yeah.

These pictures are tough.

Okay. You gotta scroll to see all the images too.

And then. Oh, I see you have a drop down. Yeah. The design of this is where it's struggling.

Right.

So like ideally I'll just be like click on these pictures in the perfect world.

Also like just even the layout of the images is a little bit confusing. It almost looks like the same house with those arches. Sorry, I'm just looking here. So by requiring this drop down, I don't want view photos again is. But like these, these, these houses kind of look the same honestly. Mostly because the arch, that arch right there, people are going to think it's literally the same house just from a different angle. So I would get like either 3D generated or like AI generated ones, for example. That is a little more simple. People look at the house too much so they would literally think that these three houses are very similar. Also there's a lot of space. See this like scroll down. This scroll down alone will reduce your close ratio a lot. I want it to be where it's all right here when they get here, it's like 1, 2, 3, small, medium, large. Click on the one that looks like yours. Let's go.

So it's all optimization of your design. Again, like, I'm just, I'm biased this because I, I see the numbers in the back and like changing the size of these pictures and putting it small, medium, large, left to right will dramatically change compared to where I have to scroll down to the next page. And these are all large images. So if, if you're really concerned about a low close ratio, I would back up your design a little bit instead of trying to go for this exact pricing like you are and slowly start adding things and testing it. So yeah, like, again, this is why when I talk about the workshop, I say start with the ranges and move forward slowly because you don't want it to go to this. And now if you've had a big drop in close ratio, that's, that's not good. So, yeah, also you're gonna get a lot of tire kickers when you say instant pricing. So you're getting a lot more people. I would assume you're getting a lot more leads the way you have the setup because you're getting all the people sending submitting contact information to see the pricing and then they're dropping off. But you'll get a lot more tire because simply by saying you get instant pricing. So I like to say you get instant pricing, but then let them see the prices before I click the information. I'll have more people see the prices. There will be some people that are shocked because it's so high. There'll be other people that are shocked it's so low and they'll accept. So anyways, that's just based upon like a lot of testing on the design of these forms, design of the pictures, etc. I think you might have gone a little bit too quickly, Caleb. If I was you, I would go back to just like, hey, on your, on your estimate request form, here's approximately a cost for mowing. That way you get rid of the people that are super cheap and the people that are, you know, thinking that this is great pricing, they you have a higher close ratio then. So also just the way you have this form set up where you're collecting information prior to them seeing the pricing, you're have a lower close ratio but a way more number of leads. So there's pros and cons to both. Okay, let's see here what else we got. Okay, we answered that question. All right, a couple more. Number 11, Jeremy from Klein Lawn Care and Snowplowing. What should be some main focuses of an owner to get the most out of the spring rush. Really understanding what Your capacity is. And then being able to know that when you hit capacity, either raising prices or you're buying another truck and or a piece of equipment or hiring someone and that those are not, they should be guesses, it's like, well, we're kind of feeling busy, so I'm going to hire someone. No, it's like, how many budget hours do I have on the schedule? Like if you're not using the calendar view of copilot that shows the budget hours for recurring jobs, the budget hours for one time projects, and your total number of budget hours and you're not using your budget hour capacity chart to be able to know, okay, am I above capacity? Am I below capacity? Well, if I hire one more person, I increase my capacity by 30 budget hours a week. Now all of a sudden the calendar will adjust. So if you're not using that highly recommend. The vast majority of people oscillate in the spring rush from not having enough work to being booked out six weeks and an employee leaving all of a sudden because they're not tracking their capacity. Like how many employees do I actually need to complete the work that's on the schedule? And if I was to grow by x amount of customers and it was to increase the number of budget hours, when would I need trucks and when would I need equipment? These are things that can be simply done by math. And so I would highly recommend use the budget hour little toggle on the calendar. See your budget hours for recurring visits, see your budget hours for one time jobs, be able to know what your total budget hours, which now includes in person estimates and meetings, et cetera, to dos that have an associated budget hour time. You can be very specific in terms like are we overbooked? And if you saw last week you had 120 budget hours, this week you had 130 budget hours. Now next week is 140 budget hours. There's a very good chance you're gonna need to hire someone pretty soon. So, you know, can you help you avoid getting overbooked? Last question from Steve from pro Lawn in St. Louis. Just signed up for COPA. I have no customers. One of my best next steps for getting the most customers this year. Honestly, I would recommend watching the free content on my website and it talks all about marketing. So mikeannies.com there's landscape business course on there, there's MBA for entrepreneurs on there, there's business turnaround on there, There is the workshop on there. There's just a ton of resources. It's all free. Go check that out. You'll have plenty, plenty of ideas on how to grow the business from scratch. All right, everyone. I hope you all have a fantastic day again. Thank you very much for all the feedback and the surveys. Hope you have a fantastic day. We'll stay in touch.

Take care.