SECRETS to skyrocket your leads!

Another super important aspect when you're starting your business is your phone system. This is Command center behind me, where thousands of phone calls are answered every single day. And the reason we make that a priority at Augusta Lawn Care is because I know that many times the very first person that answers the phone and gets the estimate to the customer will win the job. And so if I can just answer the phone, I'm gonna be ahead of so many of my competitors that are maybe answering their phone one or two hours a day between jobs. Things go to voicemail, or if they do answer their phone, they're out in the middle of a job site and everything's super loud around them, and it sounds super unprofessional. But choosing the right phone system for your small business is super important. Here at Command center, we use AI to be able to answer the phone 24 7, but we also have live agents to be able to handle the things that what we call Max AI it's the name of our mascot. If he can't answer the phone call and actually help the customer, and then it's gonna go to a live agent. If that call does get forward to a live agent, we use Ringcentral. Now, Ringcentral is gonna be a little more costly, but it's definitely gonna be helping the business that's gonna scale up to have a lot more locations and a lot more staff inside of the command center or your office. Here at Command center, during our peak season, we have over 70 people that need to be inside of Ringcentral and being able to utilize it. If you're only having one or two people, I recommend something like grasshopper or. Or other VoIP v o I P just stands for Voice Over Internet protocol. Those sort of softwares will be helpful in order to be able to make sure you have rules around when voicemails are what happens when a voicemail goes out, as well as directing calls. If you want to delineate between sales and something like customer service calls, and make sure that it might go to your cell phone during certain hours or to an office manager other hours, having that VoIP service will allow you to be able to have everything on a single app instead of having to give your personal cell phone number to all of your customers. Now, it might not be necessarily a bad idea to get a second cell phone. And then that way you have your personal cell phone and then another phone that rings only if it's a business call. This way you can kind of make sure that when you go home or you're on the weekend or the evenings, you turn one phone off. I do believe though it's really important from day one to not be giving away your personal cell phone to customers. It will haunt you in the future if you grow the business. Cause all your original customers will have your number one. When it comes to getting new leads, having a great website is super important. Back in the day, most of your leads or your new customers would come from people giving you a call on the phone. They would see your truck, they would see your uniforms, maybe an ad in the newspaper or the yellow pages and they'd give you a phone call. Now the majority of our estimates come from our website. On that website there's multiple ways to be able to get a lead. They could click on the phone number and call your office. But guess what they're not going to do if you don't have a great website is find the phone number. So a lot of times now, even in order to get a phone call, you have a great website. So they could call you. They could submit an estimate request form, which is the bulk of estimates we get now at Augusta Lawn Care come from an estimate request form. A customer could also do web chat with you directly from the website. This is usually only beneficial if you actually have an office staff that's sitting at a computer that most of the day where a customer can actually directly message with your office staff from your website itself. And it just takes a lot more monitoring of the website in order to make that happen. These are all ways that your website can bring you in more leads. But if no one can find your website on Google, which is the predominant search engine of our time, you're not still, it's still not helpful. You have a best website in the world, but if no one finds it, we have a problem. I believe there's a three step process to be able to convert a great lead. Number one, they've got to be able to find you. Usually this is going to be from your trucks, your uniform ads that you run. The second thing they got to do is recognize you. This is usually when they come to your website and this is the ability for them to be like, oh yeah, the truck I saw out mowing someone else's lawn. I called or I went to their website and there's that same truck, there's that same brand. The ability for them to find, recognize and then buy from your website. Super important. This is why on your website I recommend that you don't just have bland Google images of random yards and random beds and Random houses. Use your branding, use your uniforms, your trucks. Those are the things that make you different. If it's an image or a video that any of your competitors could just plaster on their website, like, there's nothing unique or different about it. So if someone's going to see your ad on Facebook or, or see a door hanger or a flyer or see your truck drive down the road, they found you. But make sure that when they come to your website, they actually recognize the brand that they're actually buying from. And what makes you different is your colors and your logo and your name, not just the random piece of grass or trees that look like it could be any of your competitors. So the very first thing when someone shows up at your website is they're asking themselves like, okay, do they even service my area? So make sure you have a city name, zip codes, things that make it very easy for people to understand what, whether or not you even service their property from a geographical standpoint. Then they're like, okay, well great, they service my county, my city name, etc. Now do they provide the services that I need? That's the next thing that you're going to want to make very clear. Lawn care and landscaping, lawn care and property maintenance, mowing services. Whatever you actually provide to customers, make it super clear right when they come to the homepage. So they're not guessing. I've seen it times where I've gone to the websites. I have to scroll to the bottom or click on a contact page just to figure out areas of the county or city they service. And that's the very first thing customers are thinking about. Now when I come to a page again, I've got to make sure I get found. Because remember, I've got found, then I get recognized, then I purchase. So in order to just get found, I need to have a website that gets ranked well on Google. In order to do that, I need Google reviews. I have seen websites that don't have a great design, haven't been around for years, don't, don't have multiple locations, which really helps promote the algorithm for Google because it gives you domain authority. I've seen sites that don't have those Things. They're only one or two months old, but because they have 50, 100 Google reviews, they start to rank well on Google listings. They start to rank well natively, and that's all free. I need to be on Google listings. I need to make sure that I have a lot of pictures and all the details of my business or on my Google Listing page. I also need to make sure that the website that I've built actually loads fast. This is actually becoming much more prevalent and important when it comes to ranking on Google. Back in the day, you could just type a whole bunch of keywords on a page, put it behind an image, and all of a sudden Google would rank you higher and show you to more customers. Now that sort of behavior is looked on heavily down by Google and what they're really looking at is things like your web design, does it look good, does it load quickly? Or are all your images like 5 megabytes in size and they take forever to load. And on mobile devices, people have to like pinch way in. You gotta make sure that when 50, 60, 70% of your traffic is coming from mobile devices, that your website actually is designed differently for a mobile device compared to a desktop or a laptop. So when the customer first comes to your site, they want to know, will they service me in my area? What services do they offer and will that suffice? The problem that I have and third is like, all right, now I want to actually ask for an estimate. Make it easy for people to give you money. Like, make it easy for them to submit their information for an estimate proposal. Ideally we would actually allow the customer to be able to purchase our services from our website. But even if you don't do that, make it easy for them, at least give you their phone number and their name and their address. You don't need a long 20 field estimate request form where you're asking for everything, including their shoe size and their Social Security number. Just get the relevant information. You need to be able to provide an estimate. If you make that form too long, people are going to drop off and not fill in all their information. You just need enough to get the process started. And one of the best things you can do to make sure you get more estimate request forms is just put the SM request form above the fold. What that means is when a customer comes to your website, they see the smart request form without having to scroll down any further on the website. That way they, they come to the site looking, I want to know what the price is for this service. Great. I really want to break down the three different ways that you can build a website. The first is like good, better and best good is that you have any website. I'm talking like, it's basically like your online business card. It has your contact information and tells people what you do. If you, you can build that for literally like 50 bucks a month or less on Weebly Squarespace and a host of other platforms like WordPress, you can just build your site yourself. You're going to be paying less than 50 bucks a month to host the website and have a generic design. Now, if you want to take it to the next level, so go from good to better, then you're usually going to be paying 3 to $10,000 for a professional web design firm to actually build the website for you. So it looks really good. They're going to look at your logo, they're going to look at the shapes and the colors and the fonts and really make it look very cohesive, especially the ones. What really takes you from good to better is when the mobile version of your website looks really good. And that's what they're going to help you do. It's a little bit more expensive, but it is definitely going to take you to the next level. And when it comes to your website, this is the thing. Instead of choking over the money that you're spending a website design, realize that when customers come through to your business, they're coming through your website and they're going to get a value perception. They're going to be asking themselves, okay, is this a premium service or is this like a cheap service? Is this someone like on Craigslist, someone I can haggle with, someone I can ask for a cheaper price, someone I can not pay forever because they're never going to come after me. These are the type of things that your website conveys. And if you have a premium website, there's a good chance you're going to be able to charge a premium price. If you can charge just 5 or $10 more per hour on your labor, you will make up for in double, triple, quadruple the amount of money you spend on a good web design. And so good, build it yourself. $50 a month better. Probably going to spend 3 to $10,000 for someone else to build it for you. Now, the best version of websites being built for you is lawn care web design, where we're going to actually have it on a subscription model. The reason I think it's really important for this is because immediately, instead of spending ten grand on a new website, you're going to get it built really professionally for 500 bucks a month. Furthermore, it's going to be on an ongoing basis. So we're constantly updating your SEO, your search engine optimization, and as well as any updates you might have. So, for example, you might be doing a promotion for fall cleanups. We can put a new banner, we can Change the pictures out in the winter when you're offering other services versus in the spring when you're doing mowing. So instead of having a one time design build and paying a big chunk of money and having a static website, you can actually have constant upgrades and changes to your SEO and your design. Why is that important? Because Google is always changing their algorithm of where they're ranking different websites. To be able to build one thing and expect it to perform well 3, 4, 5 years from now is crazy. Because in 3, 4, 5 years from Now, Google's completely change the way they do search engine optimization. In other words, when they in one or two seconds glance at all millions of websites, they've got to determine which ones are the ones they're going to rank first for viewers. And if we're not adapting constantly changing the web design to actually match the needs of Google, we're going to fall lower in the rankings. And so whether you have a $50 per month budget, you're paying an upfront 10, 5, $10,000 for initial build, or you're doing a subscription model, being online is the place to be able to get most of your leads. All right, that's all I got for today. If you want to learn how to make more money and get more customers, click this video here. It'll be great and we'll see you in the next one.