Q&A: Tips to GROW Your Lawn Care Business During Recession

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. They're going to be taking questions and answers from the Facebook group. And so I posted this question about an hour ago, just asking if there's anything I could help anyone with. I know there's a bunch of questions. I don't know if we'll get to all of them, but we'll try to put a dent in these today. Before we get into the show today, a big thank you to everyone that has been joining Lawn care web design, longcarewebdesign.com it's where you can get your website built. We build it for you. It's a monthly subscription 3.99 contract. You can cancel anytime. We believe that much in it. So check it out today if that's of interest to you. So let's go ahead and jump right into the questions. Again, these are coming from the Landscape Business Course Facebook group. If you haven't joined that, make sure you do that. Lots of good discussions there. So let's go ahead and jump in. I know right now we are in the coronavirus kind of epidemic and break outbreak. And so I haven't read any of these questions, but I'm sure quite a few of them are about that just because of what we're all going through. But I haven't actually read through any of these questions, so let's just go ahead and jump in. But I know I'm looking at the first one and I can already see the word coronavirus, so it's probably a lot about that. But we'll answer as many of these as we possibly can. Carlos Rodriguez asks, what are you guys going over with your guys to make sure you guys are talking, taking all the preventative measures possible during this time of the coronavirus. So I'm sure we'll probably get into it. Throughout these questions about the fact that most states are probably going to make landscaping services essential services, we've seen a breakage from that in a couple countries as well as a couple states that are limiting certain things. We'll get into that probably in a little bit. But in terms of preventative measures, we are trying to keep the guys in solo trucks, if possible, so that if two guys are together, they're not breathing each other's air all day. There's obviously a limiting factor of how many trucks you can have to do that. We have more guys than we do have trucks, but we're trying to do that. Some people have said that, well, you should have the Same truck with the same guy all the time. Right now the thing is, at night, if the virus is in the vehicle, it dies off after a few hours. So if you are not at your office for 16, 17 hours and the truck is just sitting there in the cold, there's really no chance of that virus staying there. And then it has to be airborne. It has to be from another human, based upon what we're hearing right now. And so having the same truck is not necessarily going to help someone, but having separate trucks does help. So we're trying to do that. We possibly will be making our team meetings different to where we would not have people, everyone together. We would have a recorded video for the team meetings as well as we're doing staggered start times, there's less people coming in and out of the office in the mornings.

Jose Samaj asks, during these hard times, should I offer discounted prices to people or should I stick to my higher rate prices for lawn maintenance? This is a good question. I think it's gonna depend on if you're just starting out. If you're just starting out right now, I would recommend discounting a little bit in order to get the business and get volume of customers and then raise the prices down the road. If you're an established business right now, you can go on the offensive right now and you can use your same pricing. And lawn maintenance is still a place where people have to get services. They have to get things done because they can push off a patio, they can push off overtaining wall, but they can't push off the fact that their grass is a foot tall. And if their biggest asset is their home, it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They can't let that go to waste. And so the reason that we're going to be considered essential services in most states is because of the fact that if overgrown house becomes overgrown, they're there's pests. It's not good for public health, it's not good for the health of the residents. And so that's why we are considered essential. But in terms of discounting prices, if you're just getting started, and when I say just getting started or really small and you're willing to scale right now during these times, if you're small and you have, let's say under 50 customers, I would say this might be a time you discount and then track your budgeted hours, track the amount of time you're spending on these jobs, track how much money you're making on them, and then raise the price of the year later with a really good letter like, like we've talked about before in terms of making that price increase and explain it to the customer. Our retention rate is very, very high, over 90% for raising prices when we need to. And so if you're just getting started, I would lower prices marginally, not like 30 or 40%, 10, 15% maybe in order to get the jobs and then raise them next year if you need to. After tracking them for a whole year, which you might find out couple of these jobs, you, you able to find out ways to do them faster. And now you don't need to raise the price next year. Gerardo Hernandez asked Mike, have you had a lot of clients switch to a cheaper competitor in your local area for mowing services? No, we have not. To my recollection we haven't had any mowing services canceled. Let me just think that I know of I'm not the day to day operations our local shop but I do know that we have had some cleanups canceled and some bigger projects pushed off a little bit. But mowing services have not been touched yet. If this economic thing gets worse, I do think we're gonna have some. But at this point we are every day adding to our client list. Literally the day that Washington state shut down the gyms and all the restaurants, we started a new corporate location. And so I, you know, this obviously is a horrible situation for everyone involved, business owners, health, everything. But if that location can grow this year and become successful, there's no excuse to anyone why they can't start a business and scale it up. And so we're really tracking every penny we spend on that location because we're going to use it as a direct implementation of a template for the franchisees to be able to say look, we built this during one of the hardest economic times, use this blueprint. And so that's what we're tracking, every little thing. Because we are starting a business like I just talked about discounting when you're just starting out. We're doing that to get volume of business. Once we hit 50 customers, we' flip it and start being able to charge more for the increase in overhead of having employees. So some of the things we're thinking about in terms of us seeing that locally for mowing services, we have not seen that.

Dom Landscaper Moore Don Moore asks. They are saying we're deemed essential services. Is this true? I don't want to have the team go out and we get fined. So this is a state by state basis. I am trying My very best to stay on top of every single state. It's almost impossible for me personally to do this, do that, because everything in every single state is changing minute by minute. I am trying to keep a pulse on literally every single state in the United States as well as Canada because we have some franchisees up there. And so based on what I'm seeing right now, almost every state is considering landscaping services and essential service. Some states are very vague in how they present that. So Massachusetts, I was just in contact with Jeff Bromley, who's a franchisee over in Sandwich, Massachusetts and they have the stay at home thing that got placed on them and it's very vague what they put in there in the bill in terms of what's allowed and what's not allowed. Basically it was saying like if you maintain property and for the sanitation and well being of the residents, so that would technically classify. Whereas like LA county, their bill is very specific and says landscaping services is allowed. So I'm seeing it all over the board, but mostly you can, you can assume that you're going to be considered essential services in the United States and Canada. That being said, every single state is different. And as this thing gets worse, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm keeping a pulse on every single day. As of like this evening, I know our state. 5:30, I'll be tuning in, the governor speaking. I'm trying to do that for all the different states and I'm trying to keep a pulse on it all. But based on what I'm seeing right now, most of us will fall under essential services.

Brandon Wesley May, what does marketing look like right now? This is usually the time of year, spring, when I pick up the most business. I don't want to waste money on a heavier marketing campaign if people are feeling cautious about spending money on services like lawn maintenance. I live in Augusta, Georgia where maintenance is a big deal. But over the last few weeks it seems like I've been getting less requests for estimates. What are you guys doing, if anything for marketing? Okay, so I'd recommend watching my last video. It said, how do you grow a business during the recession? It's actually me out in my car driving, doing estimates for training and explaining this whole thing about what we're doing in terms of marketing. So I'm not going to share specific numbers because that's just for the franchisees. But we have seen a definite shift in certain ways marketing. Customer acquisition cost is trending right now in terms of online offline, edm, eddm, Things like that. And so this is definitely a time you need. I've said it for years now, go out and market test different channels. Because if you don't have that data, when you come to a time like this, you don't know what's doing good and you don't know it's doing bad. You don't know what if $50 customer acquisition cost is good or bad. You don't know if $150 customer acquisition cost is good or bad. You don't know if $500 is good or bad. You just don't have any metrics. And so this is the time you need to go out and you need to test. Literally, if I was you, I would spend $1,000 on three different channels and literally track where to ask them all, where they know the customers, where they came from. If you have a tracking thing like it's coming through Facebook or it's coming through Google, you can track clicks, you can track calls, things like that, but see which one's working, see what the customer acquisition cost is on all of those and see what the customer acquisition cost of the lead is, and then see what the conversion ratio to actually become a client is important because you might get a bunch of leads from one source of marketing, one channel of marketing, but they might have a lower closing ratio because of the quality of the leads aren't as good. So, yes, there's been a massive shift. We are moving a lot of our resources away from what we traditionally have used towards different channels because of the customer acquisition cost fluctuations. And so at this time, you need to be testing if you haven't done in the past. I've said it for years, but, like, if you gotta test different channels to know those customer acquisition costs, know where you should be putting your money. And that's the only way that you can now, in this time, gauge where you're at, where you should allocate funds. Okay, so we are doing a lot of marketing. We're testing a bunch of different channels. And now after last week when we did a lot of testing, now we're allocating a lot of funds, doubling down on the things that worked. Matt Davies, how do you get your existing customers to be okay with you sending your employees to cut lawns, et cetera, rather than it just being you that turns up? Customers have got used to me turning up. However, we are scaling quickly, and I need to step away from doing every single lawn. I like to know how you transitioned in the early days. All right, so in the early days. How I transitioned is getting an office person. That's almost always the biggest unlock here is because no longer is the communication flowing through you. And so therefore, you can use the third party close as an estimator by saying that the office is going to send the estimate and that the office dictates the price and the office will be the one that would dictate if there's a discount. So using the third party close, as well as the fact that when the customer contacts the office, it's not you. And so if someone calls from your postcard that you sent out and you enter the phone and you set up the appointment and you come and you visit them at the job and then you come the first mo and you're there again. Guess what they have. Your brand is you. You are the business. Your personality is the business. What we want is the brand to be what the association with the customer, that's the strong bind we want to have. We want the customer to be a fan and a customer of the brand, not of any person or employee. So regardless of who's on the property, regardless of who answers their phone call, as long as they're part of our Augusta team, that's what we want our customer to be thinking about. That's why command center is so great, is because there's multiple people at command center, so they don't get tied to any one person. Then the estimator comes out and they perform the estimate and it seems very natural for them. They then hand it off to a project manager or to the mowing crew. And so number one thing is have office staff. If you can't afford an office staff person, I would just make sure that you set standards so that in your CRM you have really good notes on all of your properties. So you can send anyone that is experienced with your business, at least send them to a property that they might not have seen before. But if you have good enough notes in your CRM, they should be able to perform the work up the satisfaction level of the customer. And so there's definitely a breakage here. If you've been in this for a long time and you switch, you switch from like where you're answering all the phone calls, you're the one on all the jobs, and you switch to now employees starting to take these roles over it, you're going to lose a few people. Just like expect that. If you're going to make that transition smoother, make sure you have really good notes in your CRM in order for your employees to Be able to pick up where you left off and not because you have a lot of information in your head. If it's just in your head and it's not in your CRM, it doesn't exist. So make sure it's in the CRM so that when you get employees, you're setting them up for success so that they can actually perform the work satisfactorily. Otherwise they have no idea what's going on. Because only you know that you should only go in the left gate instead of the right gate of the house. And you should only weed the left portion of the hillside and not the right side. Like they don't know that. So set them up for success. Get everything in your head. On every single property might be five or six line items that you got to print out or you got to type out for them. On their CRM they can see their mobile app or however you print your work orders out so they can see those things. That is super important. It's hard mental shift, but it's absolutely necessary. And then the biggest thing is going to be hiring office person that all communication is flowing through. And the office then dictates who's going to the property. Either the estimator in this case probably you, or whether it be the employee, the person actually doing the work. So that's. That's the two takeaways. I would have. Sam answered that question and said has. Has this have had the same issue. Mike answered on a video podcast. Hard to go from selling you to selling the brand. Yep, exactly.

And the reason for that that's so important is because if you make a business where they depend on you for communication or doing the services all the time, being the one that they are always their point of contact, you can never sell the business. You can never hand the business off. You can never have the business run without you ever that. Guess what, that's a job. It's not worth anything on the resale market. And these are the people who are gonna get hit when what we're going through right now is happening. Economic collapse and things are starting to tighten up without systems in place, without people that to operate the systems and you will fail. And so we're gonna start seeing that. And unfortunately it's not. I have absolutely no pride or joy in this happening. There's gonna get a lot of our competition get whacked out in the next year. Tijuana Gold asks, hey Mike, over here in New Zealand. Oh man. Over here in New Zealand we are going into a lockdown. For at least four weeks and we aren't classed as an essential business over here. Just wondering what things you would work on this time when we can't leave our house. I'm moving cities and starting again. So what would you recommend I focus on? Cheers, Mike. Yeah, so this is what's happening. So I've had a few conversations with people overseas, in other states, people that might be closed down, not just because they're not considered essential, but because they have a lot of really sick employees as well as people who are just afraid and they can't, literally can't get their employees to come to work. So this is what I would do at this time. So I'm going to actually, like right now. I haven't actually done this yet. What would I do if we cannot go to work tomorrow because for some reason we're not class essential or there's an actual lockdown, like nobody's allowed to leave their house. What would I do? This is the time to work on systems. This is the time, like landscape business course, all the videos, all the podcasts, if you're a member of the course, go through them again. Go through the templates. Watch all of Landscape Summit 2020. All the videos are on the course. The very bottom tempo, very bottom of the modules page, very bottom one. That's like 20 hours worth of content you can learn from. Start developing your P4P system. Start developing, making sure your CRM notes are good on every single property. Start looking at your time variance on budget hours across the past year. Start figuring out who you need to raise prices on. Start figuring out your. Figure out your numbers. This is the time to be focusing on those things, creating systems around those things. If you haven't make the website now, right, and you can't go out maybe and shake the hands of your customers, but they have phones, they have like, literally the Internet is about to crash in the eu, they literally have asked Netflix and Amazon to reduce their bit rate, their bandwidth, because there's so many people on the Internet right now. Guess what? You need to be on the Internet right now. This is where people are moving to. This is why small retailers are gonna get absolutely thrashed. And Amazon is going to dominate. Walmart's gonna dominate. Amazon's hiring 100,000 people. What is it? People are going online. You've gotta be online. So, like, maybe this is the time you can use lawn care, web design, set it up. It's not a big initial feast. Like, you're not gonna waste a bunch of your cash flow Right now you're going to be able to get started in the next four to six weeks. Get set up. Like I don't care if you don't, don't lose lawn care, web design, use whatever you want, like use GoDaddy or whatever you need to set up. I don't care about using us. Just get online. And so this would be the things that I would be thinking about if I couldn't come into work tomorrow. And that was.

Those things weren't set up. Systems, procedures, pricing strategies, work on your designs for your marketing. Think about the fact that if you're all of your landscaping market, your competition cannot work. What's going to happen when they are a lot of work, there's going to be a massive amount of work to be done. How are you going to, you're going to need more people. Like I would be hiring people during that time, even if you have to do video interviews, because I'd be hiring more people knowing that when that, when that ends and you're allowed to go out and work, there's gonna be so much work to do, it's gonna be incredible. And so the people that in this time if they cannot work, need to be preparing for a massive rush. Like if you think spring rush is bad, just wait until all this stuff ends. The economic stuff start coming up, the virus goes away, the quarantine stuff goes away. Just wait for everyone to start really start getting services, wanting projects, et cetera. Be ready for that. Ronald Kirk asks, how do you get customers to pay? The excuse I'm hearing is due to the coronavirus. We are holding onto our money. My bills, I still have to pay. All right, so this is what I would recommend. And this is unfortunately a result of going after the wrong clientele by having a higher price and a premium service. Having website, having uniforms, having good trucks, having employees that can speak English and are trained to communicate with the customer and are professional and don't smoke and all these things. By having that level of value and be able to charge a premium price, you are going to be getting customers that are insulated from these type of events. Not completely insulated, but if you're going after a customer that has money and is affluent, they are usually going to be able to ride out these waves and they're going to be the type of person that cannot do the services themselves. They physically cannot do it or their time is better spent on their business or, or whatever. They work on making more money than mowing the lawn. And so this comes down to what is your client. Who is your client? Who is your target audience? Who is your avatar that you're trying to target? If you're going after 30 to 40 year olds, working professionals that are looking for bargains and looking for cheap prices, those are the people who are going to mow their lawn right now because they're laid off. If you're going after 70 and 80 year olds that are affluent that you are going to have a huge amount of value for, you're going to have multiple people in the office to be able to great communication with them. You have automation set up, you're going to have great employees, you're going to have uniforms, your brand online, really, really good social media is going to be on point and you're able to charge a higher price to market to those people. They're the people who will get through this just fine without interruption of services. In terms of how do you get customers to pay, right now is the time to focus on that different echelon of clientele. And they're no greater or better people than the ones that are going to be more budget conscious. But those are the people you want. You can't just go after them though. You're going to have to change the way you do business. You have to have people in the office, you're going to have to have the value of a website and all these other things. And so that's easy for me to say because that would be a fix that you could have started a year or two ago trying to change your client base. But in terms of now, how do you get your customers to pay and keep them on board?

This is gonna come down to individuals, their businesses, how big their businesses are. If you're solo right now and this is happening to you again, you've probably been targeting the wrong customers. But what I would do right now, I would reduce prices to keep them. Like what can we do, Mr. Jones, to keep you on the schedule? Can we switch to bi weekly instead of weekly? And whatever you need to do to keep those customers is what I would be doing and making sure that they pay and making sure that you accept credit cards so they can put it on credit card and carry a balance for a few months if they need to on their credit card. These are things I'd be thinking about if these are the clientele that you've targeted. And now they are really already budget strapped after just a few weeks. DYLAN MO and so like a lot of the things that we're seeing right now is a result of people not doing the things we talked about for years, not having a good marketing plan, focusing or relying 100% on word of mouth, relying on promotions to get business instead of adding value to their company. There's a variety of things that we're gonna see become issues now with the economics because the great economic times hide a lot of these issues and now they're being exposed.

Kevin asks what steps are good to take. Oh, sorry. Dylan asks. Book recommendations for those new to the business would be great. Let me see. I just finished a couple books that I thought were pretty good. Let me just look at them. Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman. I've listened to this probably four times now. I'm halfway through it. I haven't had much time to listen to it since like a week ago. But that's a really good one, especially this time as we're going through this. Sam Walton's Made in America book is really, really good. I really like that one as well. So those are a couple for you that I'm reading currently. Not necessarily the best or anything like that, just one that I'm reading currently. I really enjoyed the Sam Walton book. Let me get back to the Facebook group. Okay, couple more questions here. Kevin, what steps are good to take now for when this COVID 19 virus storm passes? 100%. This is what we need to be doing now and staying relevant in the mind of customer now by staying with your foot on the pedal, staying on the offensive, getting door hangers, doing emails to your existing customers, upselling people right now, being aggressive right now and on the offense is what's going to happen. Maybe you don't. You grow massively during the exchange, during the time of the COVID 19 outbreak and all that's going on and everyone being quarantined. But what's going to happen is you're gonna become much, your brand awareness is gonna become much higher than the mind of the customer. If you've hit them with an email and you've done a door hanger and you've done something in the postcard and they've seen you on Facebook and you're posting all the time, you're making videos and you're offering help and all these sort of things, guess what? When the time comes when they can't afford services, they're gonna come to the people that during this time when everyone else was contracting, they were out in the marketplace showing off their name. They were the ones doing advertising when no one else was. And those are going to be the people who pop Afterwards and those are going to be the people that need to figure out marketing now and then hiring when times get. Because it's going to get crazy busy when this passes, whether it be 2 months, 5 months, 6 months. When it passes, it's going to get crazy because you're going to have a lot of unemployed people, ie, a looser market in the labor market, you're gonna be able to get some really good people. And so you've gotta have a strategy for hiring. But right now it's marketing down the road. Once this ends, if you've been marketing really good, you're gonna get so much business if you're able to weather the storm and you have the cash reserves. And then you're gonna need to focus on your hiring strategies to get great people on your team, train them up efficiently and get them out in the workplace.

Andy replied, good one. We were rocking and rolling full steam ahead. Leads and estimates coming in every day to now. Nothing pretty much stopped completely. Thankfully. We already have a lot of recurring, regular recurring work and I've only had one job and one estimate cancel so far. Here's hoping for the best. Yeah, so Andy is saying exactly what the premise is here. Recurring work is not going to stop as fast. Your projects incoming leads are going to slow down. But again, this is the time for awareness. This is the time to stay in the marketplace because no one else is doing it. Your customer acquisition costs are lower, your clicks are going to be. Your cost per click is going to be lower. These are the things that you can do right now. You can do campaigns around social distancing and being able to do estimates by drive by instead of in person. These are things you can be doing, staying relevant in the mind of the customer so that when this ends that you are top of mind, you're the one they're gonna call first. And this is an opportunity. Like I hate saying that. I hate saying take advantage, I hate saying taking opportunity because this is a horrible thing that's happening in our world right now. But from a business standpoint, there are gonna be people make a bunch of money and their brands and their business are gonna take off in 2021. And it will because how they handled 2020 and that they stayed on the offensive in the marketing department and they really buckled down their website. They did social media every single day. They got creative with it, they started sharing it and posted. They got their website set up and where it's all connected with their social media. These are the things you got to be doing, getting Reviews. And so during this time when we're locked down, two, three months, whatever it is, this is the time to focus on marketing, staying relevant, awareness. Like we're unleashing cash reserves right now because I know that this is the time to do it because it's going to pay massive dividends down the road. All right. And I'm already seeing it with even the franchisees. It's been a week since everything's really got tight that I'm recording this from. And I'm already seeing new leads from franchisees, people that want to become franchisees who are used to be corporate executives, used to be management level positions because those people are getting laid off. So, like we don't have it as bad as everyone else. Let's first establish that in this industry, landscapers do not have it as bad as a lot of other industries. Dentists, restaurants, gyms. Like, I have a gym, it's closed. We are burning cash like crazy. And so a lot of other industries have it much worse than us right now. And, and so we need to really focus on this opportunity for our businesses to grow. We need to stay safe, we need to stay healthy, number one. But this is an opportunity to grow. Last question here and then we'll wrap it up for today. Andy Bolton asks, would an information ad campaign on Facebook letting customers know we're open during the crisis, how we can do estimates without face to face meetings and so on be a good plan? Yes, Andy, it would make sure that you. There's certain guidelines. Look on Google and on Facebook there's certain ad guidelines that you don't want your ad to get blocked based upon how you use certain verbiage around the. I'm glad they're doing this because there's a lot of scams rolling around right now. But just be aware of that. So hopefully that helps. I know a lot of this information is very isolated to what we're going through right now. If you're watching this in three years, you're like, what in the world is the coronavirus? That's not relevant. This is something that's gonna happen in your lifetime. If you're watching this in five years, it's gonna happen the next 10 years of your business journey. The past week has been the most stressful time in my business career, hands down. Just a massive amount of communication every single hour. And literally as I'm reading this, an employee texts me and I know he's saying something about what the governor just said in Washington state. So, like we're changing minute by minute, I'm looking at all the states. I haven't got back to a lot of you that have text me back or emailed me that aren't part of the franchisee group. I'm trying to focus on them. It's been really stressful. My gym closed down. A lot of local businesses are just completely going bust. The local mall, the strip mall that we have the studio In, I'd say 10, 30, 20% of them are gonna go out of business. They're all closed right now, but they won't be able to survive this. And so this is definitely. We've never seen anything like this. This is definitely the thing that we've been preparing for. We've talked about having the systems, having the people in place, having the marketing, having your website, having the professionalism, having the value so you can charge the higher prices, having that correct customer base that you're going after. These are the things we've been talking about, and this is what is going to separate the people that have not done those things, and the people who have are going to do much, much better in the next 12 months. So hopefully some of these things help and if you haven't implemented them, please, I beg you to start doing them today. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Mike Annis on the Landscape Business Course podcast.