Q&A FACEBOOK LIVE - Marketing, Hiring, and Extras

Hey everybody. Hope you're having a great afternoon. I wanted to hop on here for a few minutes and do a live video. If you have any questions, just comment below. If there's anything I can help you with. I'm just here at the office for today. Pretty kind of rare for me to be here on a Saturday evening, but I wanted to shoot a quick video and if you have any questions, by all means, feel free to ask below. And I'd love to help you in any way possible. I'm just here at the shop. It's actually a beautiful day here. While everyone's hopping on. If you have questions, just go ahead and answer or ask them below. But this is our shop out here.

And just wrapping things up here. No one's here right now, but most of the trucks are here. We're in the process of getting a bunch of the trucks painted. So some of them aren't here right now, but some of the trucks and the trailers are over there. Kind of see in the background the dump trucks? They're on the back. We have more of the trucks that go in the back. They're the ones with the trailers in the back. Stay hooked up over the weekend. So if you have any questions, just go ahead and comment below. I'll answer any questions you might have today. And here I'll show you one thing next. Next week after next, the next webinar that we're doing for Proplus. I'm doing like a really in depth video of the shop. Kind of doing a tour of like everything from our security system to the different things we use even for the front gate here to monitor people coming in and out. You can see here behind me. This is our solar panels. See if I can show you this. These are our solar panels. So that's what's powering this entire place. Because we're completely off grid, which is kind of crazy because that's a state highway right there that our shop is on. However, it was going to cost like $80,000 to connect to that power source. So we decided to do solar. We have solar and.

Yeah. So any more, any questions you have for me, just go ahead and post below about marketing, hiring, anything to do with this spring rush. Any sort of equipment, things you're going through right now, that's our right before we walk out of the door. That's what we get to see each day. Talent wins games, teamwork wins championships.

Let me know if there's anything I can help you with in terms of your business, your landscaping as we start the new year out. What can I do for you guys? Anything at all.

Just post below.

Oh, someone the other day commented after one of those live videos I did that I really liked Max. And yes, I do. If you look here, I think in the office, I have like four of them. There's one, two. There's actually two over there too, on laptops. Then I got this one for that office assistant, this one for that office assistant. And then in the other office building, which is over there, inside that building, there's another two as well. Logan, how did you expand so quickly? So, Logan, to be perfectly honest, it's because I put all the money back into the business. And the reason I could do that is because I don't have a family, I don't have dependents, and I live very small. I don't use a lot of money. I drive a company vehicle, and so I just pour all the money back into the business. I know that some people cannot do that because they have a family, they have obligations, they have student loans, they have debt, mortgage, stuff like that. And so I don't think that I do not believe that everyone can build their business as fast as I have. I. But I think that your level of wanting to grow the business should correlate with the level of sacrifice. You're willing to put the money back in the business and live small. And so I still don't take a paycheck from the company, but that's why we are growing at 40, 50% every year. And.

Within five years of starting the business, we'll be on a run rate of over $150,000 in a month of revenue. So at least every month. So I'm thinking this year will be more like a $200,000 run rate. But anyways, that aside, how did I expand so quickly putting the money back into business? And in order to do that, I had to live small. So living in a little tiny apartment, driving a company vehicle. Any more questions? See what else I can show you around here. A lot of this is just for Proplus, because just I don't really like to show the guys names and everything. But this is. We haven't done our team photo for the past year or so, year and a half. But this up here is. That's year one. That was when I was by myself. And that's when. If you look in that photo, that is that uniform right there. That's what the caddies at Augusta national wear. And so that was like. At first was my kind of like, marketing thing was to have the caddy uniforms. But those white uniforms do not last long because as soon as I hired people, they would not have been able to handle it. They would have hated me. That was year number two and that's where you can see Liz is up there and Josh. So if you were at the conference and things, you saw Liz and Josh, they're still with us today. And then Andrew's actually part of our insurance agent. He's one of our insurance people now. This is year number three, so grew a little bit more. This is year number four and we haven't gotten a picture for the last year and a half or so. But we'll get a couple more pictures up there pretty soon showing the whole team. But that's here in the office. All right. Shane asked, if you had to do something different in your company, what would it be? Oh, I know I would have focused on either lawn care or landscaping instead of trying to do both right from the get go.

To simplify the business. Now that we've been doing both for so long and we have the scale to do, it makes sense. But starting out is, if I could start all over again, I would have focused just on lawn care and mowing or on project based work and landscaping just to simplify and keep the business very systematized.

Logan asks, how old are you? Excuse me? I'm in the same boat as far as no dependence. 23 years old. So, Logan, I am also 23 years old and I am located in Bellingham, Washington. Brian, Shane, what's up, brother? I just did an interview. If you guys haven't checked it out already. Top notch lawn care from YouTube. Brian and I did an interview together a week and a half ago. I flew down there just for a few hours and we were able to have an interview. So if you haven't checked out that interview, go check that out. If you like that interview, hit the heart button right now. I know a lot of people really enjoyed that and for. I know I neglect a lot of those, the guys, gals that are just starting their businesses. And so it's really refreshing, I think for a lot of you to get some insight from someone that's starting from the beginning again and is in that sort of small phase still. And so I think that was really, really great interview. Check that out. Thank you. Brian, I'm so glad you're on here. Super cool.

Shane. Very good. I think that that will help a lot of people out, including myself. Word up. This motivates me a ton also. Watch that interview. Yeah. Interview's great. Any more questions guys I can help you with? I got about 10 more minutes before I gotta head out of here. We're selling this dump truck. Let me show you this. Actually, I never show equipment or trucks or anything like that on the videos very much at all. Because I just don't like. I don't like that to be the focus. I think business is the most important part of running a business. It's not your equipment. However, I do show you this truck because it's about to be. Bye bye. And that is. So this dump truck here, it has served us well, but it is going to be sold. It has this plow right in the front here. And so it has plowed many a times. And it is a 1997, so it's a little bit older, but it only has 80,000 miles on it. 80,000 miles. And it's a five yard dump truck.

You see, it has a plow pretty nice. But we are selling it. The reason, because it's manual. And so about a third of our guys can't drive manual. It makes it hard for scheduling. So we're selling that dump truck. But my name is Mike Andes. John Seeger. Arthur. I do irrigation. Should I stick to irrigation for now? I'm new in the business. I would stick with irrigation. If that's what you started with and you're really good at it. You can charge a premium for that. You can charge a lot more per hour. And you can just focus on that one thing and become the expert at that and charge a lot more. I would suggest doing that. And then eventually, as you grow and scale, you'll need to add more services or grow in market. Like what markets you're serving in order to grow and expand. If that's what you want to do. Maybe that's not. Maybe you want to just charge 200 bucks an hour to do irrigation because you're the best in the world at it. But if you're wanting to expand and grow, you'll either have to add services or expand your demographic reach.

Benito. What's up, Mike? You're my inspiration because I have my small business too. Thanks, bro. Any more questions, guys? Anything else I can help you with? Do you also offer power washing? So we do power washing and other services during the winter. Man, I'm just up and down today. I'm gonna go show you guys our pro labor services truck. So pro labor services is the handyman services that we do also. It's part of Augusta lawn Care Corporation. So it's one Entity. Sorry, I'm just going through the offices. But this is the other sector of our business, the other division right here. So you can go and check this out. I hope you can see that it's prolaborservices.com this is one of the trucks and what we do, we have this cover on the back and I'll be doing a more in depth video with the Pro plus members. But inside of that truck has like all the tools inside the back cover and everything. It's all organized inside and that's the handyman services side of the business. So yes, we do do hand pressure washing to answer your question. And we focus on it mostly during the winter when landscaping slows down in order to keep the whole crew busy year round. So that's why we launched Pro Labor Services and it's gone really well. Just trying to keep the guys busy during the winter and so we can provide year round work. Logan, so you recommend focusing on one subject first, Correct. I'm trying to get more into landscaping and out of mowing for now. What do you recommend? Logan? I would wait until you feel like you really maxed out on the lawn care, get that down really well until you can make it profitable. And then I would go to landscaping. I'm not saying that's what I did. That was one of the earlier questions in this live video is what I would have done differently and I would have waited a little bit longer to go into landscaping and perfected lawn care before I went into landscaping. I think it's landscaping hardscaping is kind of the appealing sexy part of our industry. And so a lot of people jump in too early and realize that they didn't get their systems and the foundation in lawn care, which is actually easier to do and easier to systematize because landscaping and project based work is very, very hard to systematize. Very hard to train people. And so if you haven't been able to do it for lawn care, you're gonna fall flat on your face. I'd wait a little bit longer on lawn care if I was to do it all over again.

How do you come up with a business name? Having a hard time coming with one. Honestly, John, if you're having a hard time coming with one, make one up and just get started. Don't let that affect it too much. However, I would come up with something. If you had, you know, trying to have a, you know, if you're having a creative block, I would try to figure out something that you stand behind that you represent and that you want to get behind. So for me, like I was a big time golfer, so Augusta is actually the reason we have a golf ball for our logo is because it has to do with Augusta national, which is all about golf. And so our packages can be like par, birdie, eagle, things like that. So that's kind of cool. So kind of the golf theme is what we use and our tagline is your personal greenskeeper.

In terms of business name though, I just pick one and go for it. Having a hard time. Do you market it separately in terms of prolifera services? I think that's what you're asking about. Russell and Michelle.

That is prolabor service and we do market differently. And the reason I did that is twofold. Number one, so that there's no liability between two different companies between Lawn Care Landscaping and the pro labor services. And then the other reason why I did it separately is so that if I ever wanted to sell one part of the business I have ever wanted to sell, Pro labor services, I could do it separate from Augusta Lawn Care.

Best Marketing tools. Thanks Bug Dog. Aaron, are you still offering if we reserve our spot for the 2000?

Unfortunately, Aaron, I'm not doing that anymore. I don't have any more of the workbooks and things. They've all been. People have bought those all. So no. But if you want to sign up for the conference, definitely just check that out. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. It's 299. It includes your meals for breakfast and lunch each day. And it's absolutely going to be amazing this year. Last year was great. This year's gonna be amazing. Last year we had about 50, 60 people and this year I'm hoping for about 150. And we're going to take buses and do tours of Augusta and we're gonna have some pretty cool landscaping games that we're gonna do like where we build walls together and stuff. It's gonna be a lot of fun. So if you're listening to this, definitely, definitely. You wanna check out landscapebusinesscourse.com conference or just go to the conference tab on the main website.

I, I can't wait to see you there. He's super cool. Best marketing tools Tim Ackerman.

Tim so for marketing tools, I would say best ones, it really comes down to how much money you have. If you have money but not a lot of time, Facebook ads and Google is something obviously I'm a big believer in. And then if you have not much money but a lot of time Knocking on doors, cold calling, getting out in the community, telling every single person you possibly know about your services, that's always free just takes a lot of time and persistence. And so it really depends on how much money you have in terms of what marketing tools you're gonna use. That being said, we are currently testing several things that are not online, including door hangers, which I haven't done in three or four years. I'm testing it out again because this whole marketing game changes so often. So I tested it back about three, four years ago when I was first starting out. I'm doing it again to see get more numbers and more data. I'm test out door hangers. Right now. I'm testing out. We're painting our trucks a different color. And there's one other thing we're doing right now. Oh, and for Facebook ads, I'm doing a special type of videos where I update the videos, like a story every three to four days. And it's been working really, really well. But I'm getting more data and things like that and just getting the numbers. And so it's hard to do the numbers for the painting of the trucks because it's hard to measure leads and things like that. But for Facebook ads and the door hangers, I'll definitely be getting numbers for that. Do you use the Facebook ad boost? I do not do the Facebook ad boost because it's just a little bit more hard to target exactly the way I want, and it's a little bit harder to.

I don't use it as much. The only reason I would do a Facebook ad boost is for awareness and engagement within my local community. So, for instance, I did boost a post that I wrote an open letter of thanks to our crew during this big snowstorm we just had, and they were out plowing for like three days solid. And I wrote an open letter thanking, basically just thanking my team. And I boosted that to my local market just so that they would engage with it. I think it got like 80 or 90 likes and a bunch of shares. And so the guys like that and they enjoy that, the crew and the team. So that's really what that's. In terms of sharing, in terms of boosting, that's really all I use it. Usually I just use Facebook ads. Logan Carnath, are you the sole owner of Augusta? Yeah, 100%. And we actually. I actually just finished a video for the Pro plus members about partnerships because two days ago on Thursday night, we had. We had what we call a hot seat in the Pro plus group. Which is where we have one of the members come, we talk about their business. So on Thursday night, we talked to Josh and Ezra, who are making a partnership, and they're going to be a business that's doing over $2 million in revenue.

I just finished a video for the Pro plus group clarifying my stance on partnerships for when you're starting a business and whether or not that's a good thing versus if it's down the road in your business, whether or not a partnership might be a good thing. So I am the sole owner, though, right now, to answer your question. Logan. Tim. I get a lot of likes on my Facebook post, but not too many leads. Yeah. So Facebook, again, it all depends on your timing. It all depends on your timing, your repetition, your offer, your creative. There's a lot of different variables. And so there's no magic bullet to your Facebook ads. You gotta test these. You gotta test them out. And so it took me probably three years to really figure out Facebook ads. So don't feel bad if you don't get it right off the bat. Just keep testing things, figure out what works, figure out what doesn't work, and realize it's going to change. Like, what worked two years ago on Facebook for me does not work anymore. What works now has been working great. It probably won't work in a year or two. So you probably heard the bit of the speech I talked about at conference about change and constantly adapting to change in marketing and hiring and the labor market and technology and all these things.

But there's no magic bullet. And so, Kevin, to answer your question, what's the best marketing tool you use? There is no magic bullet. There is no best, because every single market's going to be different. So some people tell me that, hey, Facebook does not work. And that might be true in their market. There might be. If they're in a college town, Facebook might not be the place for them to be at.

And so many different factors. If you're in a certain environment, certain community, newspaper might be great. Radio might be great.

Knocking on doors might be totally acceptable in some areas, and that might be the best thing you should be doing. Door hangers might be totally acceptable in some areas. That's what you should be doing. There is no best marketing tool. And I get this question every single day, at least 10 times. And if you've asked me this question on email, you know you're never gonna get a response because I just get it so often. And it's one of those questions. I say the same thing. Every time. Test, test, test. Realize you're gonna have to invest money and you wanna figure out your numbers now so that when times get hard and when the economy starts to dip, you know where to spend the few dollars that you have to make sure that you get through that time.

C.J. harper. Nothing's better than hitting the doors. Yep. Getting started. CJ that's what we did as well. As you grow and expand, it's less scalable to reach as many people as you need. So, like the other day we did, you know, over the past couple weeks, we've had between 20. I personally, because one of our estimators was gone, so I had to step back into estimating for a day. I did 18 estimates in one day. That was just me. Just me as the 1 estimator. I have a second estimator. And then a couple weeks ago, they did. I think it was 45 estimates in one day. I didn't do any. That was just my two estimators. So when you hit that sort of level, it's hard to go door to door, to be perfectly honest. You need something that scales a little bit more, like Facebook or print or whatever you're doing. And, and so.

Yes, knocking on doors is great. That's what I did getting started. But as you scale and grow, you do need something to scale and grow with you. In terms of your marketing, typically.

How do you scale big millionaire homes? It's all about your branding. It's all about the positioning. It's all about focusing on them. Because you're not gonna go appeal to a millionaire, but then also be going and trying to be miss Smith down the street who's living on Social Security. And it's going to be hard for your brand to adapt to both of those people. And so if you're going to want to go after the millionaire, you're going to be very. Your people are going to be professional and be trained. They're going to have to be educated, they're going to have to be refined. You're going to be able to charge a lot more, but you're going to pay your people more. Because the millionaire is not going to want someone smoking. They're not going to want someone to have the music going, and they're not going to want lazy like all those things. But then Mrs. Jones or Ms. Smith or whatever that's living on Social Security down the street, she just wants her lawn cut. She does not care. So it's very hard to create a brand that's going to be the Best provider for both of those people. And so if you're wanting to go after millionaires and that's all you want to do, focus on the brand and the services, the brand, the team and the messaging that's going to attract a millionaire. Dave Haislip. Dave, thank you so much. I appreciate your kind words and I hear you on the partner. So Dave is part of our Pro plus membership. Super great guy I think. Dave, in a couple months I'm gonna have you on the hot seat and I want to try to get you up here too. I know you had, I think it was you had asked about the turf and things like that. I want to get you up here in June, July. You're not too far away. It's a gated community C.J. yeah. So if it's a gated community C.J. it's very similar to our market where we have a bunch of our millionaires. They're in gated communities as well. They're in villages and places with security. We cannot get in there with door hangers, we cannot knock on their doors. And so in order to reach those people we are going to have to do it online or we're going to do word of mouth and so working on those things is important. Google reviews, if there's any like great marketing advice I could give you, like everyone's wanting the one tip, get Google reviews doesn't cost a lot of money. One of the best things you can do for your business online doesn't cost you anything. So if I guess there's like the magic bullet of marketing, like the one thing I would say it's like the best bang for your buck is I would say is just get Google reviews. It'll change your business for sure. Hey Mark. Thanks Dave. Hopefully that answer your question she Dave but yeah, if it's a gated community typically the CC and RS are not going to allow for you to put door hangers and they're not going to even allow you to solicit. And as far as yard signs CJ Yeah we do that on all our project based work. Even when we're inside of a gated community we will put up the signs while we're doing a project work for like a week or two or whenever. So. Alright, I'll answer one more question. Any more question? Actually two more questions. Two more questions. How do I put my bid in on a business? Pete, Pete, watch the video. I think you mean in terms like commercial work. If you're talking about commercial work there's a video I just made a couple weeks ago about how to talk to property managers and get in with them in order for them to. In order to start getting into commercial work. If that's what you're talking about. That's what I would recommend. The video I made. And if you're asking about bidding on a business, like, are you talking. So clarify this with me, Pete. Are you asking how to put a bid on a landscaping business? Like, you want to buy a business? If that's the case, let me know and I'll answer your question. Couple recommendations on books to read. Other than zero turn, of course. Thanks, Kevin. Book recommendations? Yes, I'm going to give you book recommendations.

Let me think. So I'm just trying to think because I have my phone in my hand right now, and that's gonna show me the books that actually have been listened to. But recently, I've been actually going back through some of the books that we have. So, as most of you know from the conference, you know that we have an audible account for our entire team.