Should You FORCE Clients to be on a Weekly Mowing Schedule?

Sam.

Hey, everyone, Mike andes here@landscapebusinesscourse.com I'm at command center here today, a little bit later here at the office. But I wanted to go over today whether or not you should have bi weekly lawn care service as part of what you do for your lawn care business. I'm talking to all of you commercial guys out there, residential, doing the work out in the field. Maybe you're a solo operator, maybe you have a large company and, and you're asking yourself, should I even offer biweekly service? When I say biweekly, I mean every other week. So every two weeks you're coming and mowing a property, maybe 10 days. This is the first thing I'll. I'll say, do not try to do all of them. Do not try to do weekly, bi Weekly, monthly, every 10 days. I've seen some people have these weird schedules, like every 16 and 18 days. Like it doesn't even make sense. You can't keep your schedules for each day set up correctly. It's very difficult to run a schedule or a route efficiently that way. But I'm going to go through six, six different things that you need to consider if you're going to have biweekly service. I'm going to say why you should, or possibly why you should not do bi weekly mowing service. All right, number one is you need to make sure, make sure that you charge at least 50% more for biweekly service. Now, right now, if you are doing biweekly service and you're charging 5, 6, $10 more per cut, I can guarantee you that you are leaving margin on the table and you are incentivizing people to have biweekly service by only charging a few dollars more per cut if they go to biweekly versus weekly. I made this mistake when I first got started. I would start off, I think my minimum when I first got started was $28 per cut. And then my biweekly price was 32. So literally someone could have a 38 for weekly and a 32 for biweekly. Literally $4 more, which is like what, like a 12% increase or something like that for going from weekly to bi weekly. One day I woke up to the fact that people are willing to pay 50% more for biweekly. And that when I charged 50% more for biweekly and actually manned up and just realized that that's what I need to do for my sake of profitability, all of a sudden people started wanting weekly service a lot more. And so it incentivized people to actually do what I wanted them to do instead of giving them a perverse incentive, which is like, hey, for $3 more per cut, I'll only come twice a week or twice a month and I will cut the grass when it's twice as tall and I'll spend twice as long mowing the grass. I'll have to double pass it off the edge more. I'll have to blow more off the sidewalks. All of those things take you more time. And most customers are fine with the excuse or like with the, the recognition that hey, it's going to take me longer to mow your grass if I come twice a month instead of four or five times a month because the grass is longer, I'm going to have to double pass or I'm going to have to bag it a lot more. It's going to be clumping, it's not going to look as good. It's unhealthy for the lawn. There's a who plethora of reasons you can give to a customer. But in the day you should charge at least 50% more for that BI weekly service, not $5. I see this all of the time. $40 per weekly, $45 for BI weekly. I can guarantee you're going to have most of your customers going to buy weekly. If you want to incentivize by our weekly service where you get more cuts, the reason you want weekly services is because you're going to get 35 cuts instead of 17 cuts. And if you look at the lifetime value of the customer, let's say it's $40 per cut and we're able to get 30 cuts in for the year, that's $1,200, $40 per cut, 30 cuts for the year, that's $1200. Now if I charge, let's say $35 and I only go to that person's house, let's say 15 times, I, I literally am going to almost cut my lifetime, the value of that customer in half for that year. So you definitely want people to be weekly. It's better for the lawn, it's better for your crews. They can be more accurate on their budget hours and you can get more visits in for and it's more consistent. You don't have weeks where you're really busy. And then the next week it's like, oh, well, a bunch of our bi weekly people are on this week. So you definitely want weekly. But to incentivize that, you need to charge at least 50% more per cut. When you are doing biweekly number two, you really need to share your weekly and the biweekly prices upfront with the customer. We're big believers of this here at Augusta. When we give a mowing estimate to a client, we give them their weekly and their biweekly mowing price. If you only give them their weekly mowing price and they accept, now you're all happy. Get a warm fuzzy feeling you got a new customer. But then what happens is when the grass goes a little bit dormant in the middle of summer or they want to go to bi weekly service for the sake of finances, now you're stuck trying to resell them on bi weekly service or the cost increased. Or for most of us, especially if you're trying to grow and you're kind of just starting new, you're like, oh, well, I don't want to raise the price. I don't want to lose a customer. So I'm just going to honor the same prices that I did for weekly. I'm going to do the same for bi weekly. That's crazy. Do not do that. How you can avoid this and still get them to go to weekly service is give them the weekly versus the bi weekly price up front. When you give, when they ask for the estimate at the very beginning, go ahead and give them the weekly and the bi weekly price. Just by doing that, you're going to get more people because now weekly looks cheaper. All right, this is the classic, you know what many, many companies have done in terms of marketing, they have a premium product that benchmarks the price and then they have a cheaper product that actually becomes the most popular product. Okay, so for example, you take the most expensive iPhone. The iPhone. Well, now it's the 12. But like if you have a 12 Pro, right, for example, that's not their best selling iPhone, it's the one right below that. Because the one, the highest priced product anchors it anchors where the pricing is going to be, and then people accept the 1 lower. When it comes to weekly versus bi weekly service, if you show your bi weekly price as say $60 per cut, and then you show your weekly price for only $40, it anchors the price point at a higher. And now the $40 looks like the cheaper option and they feel like they're getting a good deal. All right, but you need to share on your estimate upfront. I recommend sharing bi weekly and weekly. Not so much for this, the sales part and getting the weekly. It's mostly due to the fact that if they ever change their Schedule and they want to go to bi weekly. That I can just say, all right, no problem. I already had your price here. It was on the original estimate. Here it is, and it's good to go. And guess what they'll remember when they want to switch to bi weekly or they want to switch their schedule that price. And they'll be more inclined to stay with their weekly schedule. All right, you don't want any surprises. You don't have to resell a client on an upcharge. When they want to change, they want to go change their schedule from weekly to bi weekly. The grass isn't growing very much. It's either winter or the summer, whatever your market, you know, entails. And here you are when they lead you less, asking for more money. Not a good time. This is not a good time to lose customers. When someone's switching usually from weekly to bi weekly, you do not want to lose customers at this point. So having another hurdle, another speed bump to go over that is trying to convince them that you're now going to charge them 50% more is very difficult. You're going to lose customers if they're like, hey, our grass isn't growing very much. We're going to switch from weekly to bi weekly, if that's okay. And in your mind, like, oh, man, I'm gonna have to charge the same price. You know what Mike said I got charged 50% more. Okay, well, Mr. Jones, instead of $40, if you go to BI Weekly, it's gonna be $60 now. And you know what they're gonna say, you know what, let's go and just pause our service for now. It's not growing very much. How about I just give you a call when we need service next time? That's what's gonna happen. So what you wanna do is upfront is explain your expectations. Explain, make it where there is absolutely no confusion, there's no surprises when they want to switch to bi weekly. Show it in your original estimate. Weekly and bi weekly. All right, number three, we're going through six different things that you need to consider when it comes to offering bi weekly or only weekly service in your mowing company. Number three is sell weekly as a discount. These little verbiage things are a big deal when it comes to growing your lawn care business, okay. And selling more jobs, increasing your close ratio, and getting more people on weekly than bi weekly service. What I would recommend you do is sell weekly as a discount. Do not sell bi weekly as a more expensive or an upcharge. All right, it's all the way that you sell it. So for example, you could actually say, you know what, Mr. Jones, if someone like ballparks, you know, is on the phone and talking about their estimate. Yeah, the cost per cut, $60 for the BI weekly service. Yes. But you know what, we're actually offering a discount if you go to weekly. Provides us more work, helps us with our schedule. We can actually discount that down 33% from $60 down to $40. Would you like to go ahead and take that discounted rate like sell the weekly service as a discount. Don't try to explain the bi weekly service as being more expensive. Instead of telling the customer, oh, here's why bi weekly service is more expensive. Sell them on the fact of why weekly service is cheaper or discounted compared to biweekly number four, the fourth reason as a. But you, for your biweekly clients, you want to know, you want them to know, and this is a way to convince them to go to weekly. You want them to know like, hey, Mr. Jones, I'm, you know, we can absolutely move you over to buy weekly service, but if you do that and we show up to your property, it's really overgrown because we're going in the spring season, it can grow a lot. If it's over x amount of inches we had, do we do have an upcharge, Right. So if you say, you know what, if it's over 4 inches and we show up at your property and you're on bi weekly service, we do have to charge you more just because we usually have to mow the lawn like literally twice. And so there is going to be an upcharge in addition to the bi weekly price if you're on the biweekly and it's, and it's really, really long. Right. So for example, in our market we require people to be weekly during the spring rush. So that way we don't have unexpected schedule changes. And we know that's one of the grass grows like crazy. And we don't want to be showing up to a property even though we're getting 50% more, even though on a $40 mo we're getting $60. But if our, if we talk to the property, two weeks can literally mean 12 inches of growth and it's going to literally take five to six times as long to mow that lawn. So even for our bi weekly customers, a way again we try to sell them on weekly is like, look, we can do, we can do bi weekly service, but if we show up to your property and it's over X amount of inches tall. We there is an upcharge, and a lot of times, like, you know what, let's just go ahead and go with the cheaper option, which is the weekly price. Okay? All right. Number four, biweekly is a great drop sale. So if you haven't figured this out already, we at Augusta, we do offer biweekly service, but we try to get them on weekly. But this is the thing about having in your estimate that biweekly price along with the weekly price is the fact that a bi weekly mo is a great drop sale. Okay? So this is what a drop sale means. If I'm trying to sell you a $2,000 Peloton bike, okay? And this is the best of the best, you need to exercise, you're trying to lose weight. I'm trying to sell you this $2,000 Peloton bike. Now, I could focus all my time and energy and trying to convince you why it's worth $2,000. But if you physically cannot afford it, if you have all sorts of price objections, what I can do, like we talked about before, is use the peloton bike as my anchor price and then offer something that's cheaper. So, for example, if someone is calling you and saying, hey, I need to cancel my loan service, I can't afford it. I just, you know what, we're just going to figure something else out. We just, we can't afford it. Lost my job, whatever it might be, it's a great drop sale. Instead of saying, okay, well, give us a call back when you want us to start up service. Or, oh, you know, okay, well, can we discount? Like, instead of doing any of that, what you can do is this. All right, Mr. Jones, right now I see you're on a $40 per cut price on weekly service. Why don't we switch you over to biweekly? It's $60 for biweekly. But now your monthly bill is technically going to go from, what would it be, 160 down to 120. So at least you'd have some savings there. It'd save you about, you know, 20% or so. Would you want to go ahead and do that? So sometimes going from weekly to bi weekly, because it saves the customer per month or for their budget, it can actually really be a great drop sale. When it comes to trying to get a customer and retain a custom that's about to leave because of financial hardship, they've lost their job, they can't afford it, whatever it might be, or even if they're just trying to tighten up their budget. They're like, you know what, Is there any way you can give me a cheaper price? Like, and they're kind of like trying to grind you on price. All right, Mr. Jones, you know what? Why don't we give you the. On the, on the bi weekly option. It's going to save you a little bit more per month. And we only come twice a month, every couple weeks instead of every week. The lawn won't look as perfect, but you can save some money. So again, offering biweekly is a great drop sale. Okay? Which means, again, instead of trying to sell that peloton bike, I realized, you know what? You can't afford a $2,000 bike. You keep coming to me with price objections. Okay, why don't I show you this Nordic track bike that's $800. Really good chance it looks cheaper to you, is going to fit inside your budget. And because your only price objection was price, I just offered you a solution. So if a customer comes to you on the phone is like, hey, I've got a cancel because of price, I can't afford it, whatever it might be, you get the solution, which is, hey, I can save you money every single month of your budget. I'm going to save you 50, 60, $70 per month. Let's go to biweekly service. So it's a great drop sale. All right. Sixth and final reason why you want to, you know, think about offering biweekly service. And that is it really depends on where you're at in your business. When it comes to simplification, weekly service is absolutely the best for scheduling. To create that consistent schedule. It's absolutely the easiest and simplest in terms of just making sure you, when you show up to properties, you don't have massive overgrowth and therefore going way over budget hours because the grass is so long. So absolutely it depends on where you're at in your business. Because if you're just getting started, you should offer biweekly service now. You should not charge $5 more for biweekly versus weekly. You should absolutely charge 50% more. Like we talked about. However, I would offer biweekly just to get the customers because the price sensitive customers, I can, I can still get them with biweekly. The custom that is, you know, only had biweekly forever with their old provider. I can still serve them. I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to get more customers. I'm not picky about who I have now. As my company grows and expands, I have lots of crews. And now I'm starting to focus on streamlining this business so I don't have to work there every single day and the schedule is more consistent. I might want to start thinking about simplification instead of thinking about just getting more growth, more customers. And in that scenario, I might not offer biweekly. So those are the six things you need to consider when it comes to whether or not you're gonna have biweekly service or if you're just going to have weekly only. Alright, so I hope that made sense. I'm gonna go ahead and jump into the comment section. Feel free to leave a comment and I'll go ahead and try to answer as many of these as I can tonight here at the command center for Augusta. So let's go ahead and put my banner down and did you guys like that video clip? That was cool. And I'm going to play it really quick at 7 seconds long. Here it goes.

All right, so junior, thanks so much. I love you guys. But bi weekly is a nightmare and clients are terrible. Yeah. So it's definitely again, where are you at in your business? That's a big decision in terms of whether or not you offer it?

I do bi weekly. Hey, Mike, I think you should. Almost every market require weekly mowing. You know what your market's lawn demands or is it just. Or if they're just being cheap. That's absolutely true. The bottom line is 50% more. I'm already at someone's property if I'm going to charge them $40. Now you say, well, that means it's going to be way overgrown, et cetera. You might be, you're right on during the spring rush, but during the summer, if they're on bi weekly, you are making a lot of money because the grass might not be growing, they're dormant. But because they're on bi weekly, there's no other option to make it more extended. Like we don't let them go monthly or bi monthly or whatever it might be. And so they'll stay at bi weekly throughout the season when it's actually not growing very much. And your profit margins on those jobs are extremely high. And so I'm not saying I'm for against. I'm just trying to give these things for you to be able to kind of think about what is good for you or what if you are in a neighborhood. This is from Jeff. What if you're in a neighborhood where you already have a couple weekly stops? Yeah, absolutely right. Again, this is the problem. If you have a Bunch of weekly stops. And then you have a biweekly. You know, it definitely helps because you're already coming to that no matter what. Right. What you want to be careful of is what if you lose those weekly customers, you know, one or two customers in that neighborhood, and now you're traveling out bi weekly to appropriate maybe five or ten minutes away from your regular route. That's where I would start being careful. And that's why you really got to decide whether you're going to offer biweekly or not. And that's why you need to charge the 50% premium. 50% premium. Let's be very clear about that. That means that if a customer would usually, you know, it's $40, that's $60, that's 50% more. Like that means I only need to get 10 bi weekly cuts done in a day versus 15 now during the middle of spring rush. That's going to be tough. Grass is growing a lot hot, taller. I got to take a lot longer. Usually that's where complaints come from. By the way, again, these are. I'm not for again, I'm just trying to offer pros and cons. A lot of complaints come from biweekly services because it's easier to miss edging. It's easier to leave clippings. It's. You got more to blow off the edging. Usually you're taking more off the edges. It's easier to leave ruts or leave marks on the lawn because the grass was so long you had to go over it three times. Okay, so definitely all pros and cons to think about. I actually charge all the same. People just seem to expect it where I'm from. Just. I thought the same thing. I always thought, like, man, even $5 more per cut, like, I would do 50 and 55. Like, it was crazy. And literally when I changed 50% more, I've never made no one bad in an eye. It was crazy. And, and it made sense to people in terms of just pricing like 50 more. You could always just say that if people ever asked, it was just standard across the board. It does take longer. Z, you're right. My minimum is 55, so I'm going to charge $100 per cut. Yeah, hey, like Junior, hey, if you're like apprehensive about bi weekly, you don't know if you want to offer just charge double. You'd be like, look, the grass grows at the same rate. I got to take the same amount off. I'm going to charge double. But at the end of the day, it's just an option for the customer. At the end of the day, most customers in their right mind are not going to choose a double. Uh, what you said there is pretty hilarious actually. If you actually run the math. Bi weekly requires double cutting or bagging, and twice the time for trimming and edging, trying to eliminate the season. Great job. Again, you're in that phase where you're trying to simplify the business. So again, everything in this discussion comes down to where you at in your business. And for most decisions in lawn care and landscaping, whether it be equipment, if you buy new or used trucks, if you lease trucks, if you have shop space, if you have storage, all of these different decisions that we make in our business always, always hinge on where you're at in your business, what your goals are, how big is your company. And that's why just going online just like asking people what they do and what is best is really wrong. Because if they're in a different place in their business or they have different goals than you, it's completely different. Right. So Mike, obviously you're trying to simplify and you probably have a size of business where you're not trying to grow really, really fast and get every customer you possibly can a face to face chat. And I can usually talk to clients into weekly cuts. Absolutely. And when you have the pricing of the 50 drop sale and when you have the, the pricing to be able to, you know, show them that, hey, like it's literally 33% less than the bi weekly price. Again, just a great way to sell them into weekly. Again, most of what we're doing with, when it comes to offering bi weekly is really just trying to convince them to go to weekly. All right. I think I might, I might have to give it, give a discount to do it weekly. Because almost everyone does bi weekly or even every three weeks. Yeah, that's the way you want to pitch it though, Josiah, regardless of whether or not it's normal in your area or not. Like if everyone in your areas used to bi weekly or every three weeks, yeah, I would always pitch it as, okay, weekly is a discount. But even if my market was consistently weekly and only feel some people went by weekly, like a small percentage, and I was trying to get them to go to weekly, I would still pitch the weekly as a discount. Right. So always your verbiage, like instead of pitching bi weekly as an upcharge or more expensive. Again, just what you said, Josiah. Pitch your weekly service as a discounted option. Quote a price for Weekly. And they say come every other week. Yes, Mike, this is so true. People will say, hey, how much does it cost to mow my lawn? And you're thinking weekly, and you think, oh, $30 and it's okay, great. Can you do that? Can you come twice a month and do that? And you're like, oh, sick. Bi weekly again. That's why you want to include it on the estimate with both options, in my opinion. Or clarify with with the customer. Would you want for weekly or bi weekly? But you're exactly right. There are some smart bait and switch customers out there. Mike, following up with my question from last jiffy last night, Tori, can you go ahead and put it in here? Again, I vaguely remember, but just clarify and refresh my memory. All right, thank you, everyone. I just charge 20% more for biweekly and make sure it is written in the original quote. Sean, that's a great start. I really think you can charge 50% if you want. Again, if you want to convince people to go to weekly, you can charge 50%. I was in your same shoes believing that 5 and $10 more per cut was going to be like a big differentiator for customers. When I changed the 50%, there was never like a big mass exodus. Literally, I changed everyone who was on bi weekly. I raised their prices to the 50% increase and like literally hardly lost anyone because they were used to that schedule, they didn't want to go to weekly and people to stay with it. So I really encourage you, if you're going to do bi weekly, like we said in number one tonight, charge 50% more per cut.

All right.

See here, questions are pouring in. Give me one second. I got to scroll up. Should you also show a bagging versus discharge price similar situation. So usually in most markets, it's either it's standard, either you're gonna bag and it's just assumed, or you're gonna not bag. Now, if a customer says otherwise. So, for example, in our market, we just assume we're gonna bag clippings unless they tell us, Right? And if they tell us, there might, especially on big properties, there's gonna be a little bit of a discount because we don't have to haul the clippings away. But definitely, if you have a market where it's like 50, 50, some people discharge, some people beg, then you might want to have literally a price for bagging the clippings and a price for not bagging the clippings. Or you have an option on your estimate, they can accept discharging or Bagging clippings at a separate line item, maybe $5 per cut or whatever it might be and then just give them the option. But for most of us, we kind of know what the standard is in our area. I would stick with that unless otherwise stated by the customer. Or another thing is if you are used of doing a bagging and someone says, oh man, I want to get the price down, like is there any way I can get the discount or anything? You know what, is there any way could we just discharge on your property? Right. So again, using those different price levels is so important. There's a reason why, there's a reason why when iPhone hit iPhone4, they stopped just making model numbers. They started making the se, they started making the Pro. They started doing the Pro plus. Was it the Pro plus, the big big one like the mini. They started making different options because when a customer has two to three or four options, it makes the highest price. Like they use. Like most customers take out the top price, take out the bottom price and they deal with stuff in the middle because it's in our mind like, oh, I don't want to pay the most expensive, I don't want to pay the most, but I'll pay in the middle. Right. So a lot of, a lot of this is just pricing psychology. Can you touch on every 10 day service or vacation milling, I. E. Mowing for just two to three visits or one off mowing Mike. Again, it depends on where you're at in your business. I did a lot of this when I was first getting started, but I highly recommend, especially as you develop company, don't get one off like one or two mo's. It just doesn't make any money at the end of the day. By the time you include your admin time, billing time, estimator time, you're showing up at a property that potentially might be overgrown. Otherwise you're going to check on it. Like I wouldn't recommend doing that. We do one time mows or like initial visits once a property gets overgrown. But we charge a lot of money for those. Like a lot of money because we want to get worth our time and recoup that overhead of just setting up the visit and all the rest of taking the call. There's a lot of other stuff you might not think about until you start growing. When you're first getting started, you're answering the phone, you're like, oh yeah, Mr. Jones, I know exactly where you live. We can mow that while you're gone in Honolulu Lou, for three weeks we can mow those three weeks only. But 10 day service, in my opinion is an absolute scheduling nightmare. I don't know how people do it because what if you have a long weekend and the 10th day falls on Friday? Well, now are you going to do a day early or. And do nine days or are you going to wait 13 days all the way till next Monday? Like there's a lot of different things in my mind that could go wrong with 10 day scheduling. So we've always avoided it.

All right, next question. Put 35 lawn signs out at. Oh, someone stole our lawn signs. So I did lawn sign video a couple weeks ago and we went ahead and did these great. These yard signs. You know what, if you guys stick with me, I can actually show you what the yard sign look like. Give me one second here. I'm going to actually go. This is the back end. I'll share my screen. Just a second. This is the back end of the franchise where they are able to order print materials directly from our designs. I'm going to show you the door hanger. We put these big ones out like 3ft by 2ft, big ones. And they all got stolen. All but one got stolen in one night. The very first night. Couldn't believe it. And we were actually doing it for hiring people. So I'm just pulling up the design here real quick.

I think I can show this to you. Here we go. And you can try all you want to get to this website, but you have to have a login for the franchise. So. But let me share my screen here. Give me one second. I'm learning here. I'm learning. Where's my screen? I share this. What happens? Ah, share screen. Beautiful. Share screen. Share screen. Application window. Here we go, Here we go. Here we go. Okay, so I need to close this one out. Here we go. Look at that. Share. Okay, so this is what we were sharing by, by the way, is the back end for Augusta Lawn care franchisees. So you can't like get these or anything, but this is, this is what it looked like. Let me just kind of show you here real quick. Next. So we have a front and a back. One side just says now hiring. The other side actually has a dollar amount. Because a lot of times that's what gathers people's attention. What's cool is the franchisees, instead of having to design this themselves, they can just change the hourly rate right here. So if they. In your market, it was like, oh, it's 18 to 22. That's kind of like on average because of P4P pay for performance. You can just change it right here. Go next and just print it right off here. This is like from Vistaprint. We create like a special thing for the franchisees. We can order directly through them. They get free shipping on orders over $50 and. And they give us about 30% discount. At least that's what they say. I think it's more around 25. But anyways, that's what we put yard signs out. Right. So there's the front, here's the back. What kind of looks like big ones. Big here, stop this. There we go. Let me go back to here. So like big ones, like 2ft by 3ft. Big ones. We put six of them out and then the first night they all got stolen. So the man. I'm glad you put them at 3am I hope they're still around because people in our market supposedly didn't like our hiring signs.

Thank you, Jeff. You're Welcome. Finding every 10 days a scheduling nightmare. Do you have any Augusta's in northern Idaho or Ohio? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any. But we do have one just south of Columbus. Southeast Columbus. All right. Bi weekly price is more than weekly and we use it as a drop selling point for weekly instead of bi weekly. Keeps our guys making P4P bonuses and our machines out of super long grass. Yeah, both great points. Maintenance is higher when the grass is taller and it's harder to be more accurate on budgeted hours and therefore beat. Beat budget hours for your employees if they're on P4P. So two great points there. And here's why bi weekly is a bit of a pain. Again, if you. If you give them 50 more though sometimes it makes it worth it.

Top peak. Hey, Mike, this is my first year. I am. I'm in Iowa. I have no clients yet. I have 3000 door hangers and have $500 for next door and. Or Facebook. What do you think? I would knock on doors. Go back. Go back. A few days ago I made a video about when you should lower your prices. I forget the exact name of the title, but just go back. A few days ago I made a video specifically about this. You don't have a lot of money to spend on marketing. You have time though. I would not just do door hangers. I would knock on the doors before putting the door hanger on. I'd introduce myself and just let them know that you're around and that you are willing to do service. You know, this coming spring only made four Facebook Ads, but each time I've gotten jobs off of them. Hey, Nick from Cordova, what are your thoughts on allowing weekly for front yards and bi weekly for back? I'm against. This is a scheduling nightmare. Customers don't understand. Employees are going to get messed up. They're going to like, they're going to like, oh, this person. We mow their front and backyard. They're going to hop out of truck and they're going to start mowing. And little did they know, you had put a note on there. It said weekly is only for the front yard. Bi weekly is only for the backyard. Like that will absolutely get messed up. At some point. You will eventually make the customer unhappy. You will get your employees unhappy with you too, because they will get confused because they're just like, if you want them in grind mode, you got to make it as simple as possible when it comes to the job notes to make sure they don't get confused. All right, we're going to keep going here with Q and A. But I really appreciate if everyone dropped a like on this video. There's 86 of us. It's 7:50pm Pacific Standard Time. That means that there's people watching, like Nick here from Cordova, that it's 11 o' clock your time. You guys are solid. All right, so L and L lawn service. Next question here. I'm in Kansas City, Montana or Missouri, and I'm trying to go all weekly from here on out. Oh, it's very cool. I actually just talked to someone just outside of Kansas City about joining Augusta. The man. I don't know the man. I just don't know how to word Facebook ads. Okay. Anything is better than nothing. I just got a mowing client doing a Facebook ad for $5 a day for four days. So that's, you know, look at it like this. It has a $20 customer acquisition cost. Probably should keep doing more of that. Right. By the end of the day, one customer in four days, as you grow, becomes insignificant. Right. And so don't think that if you spent $20.

Yeah, you spent $20 and got a customer, that if you spend 500 or 100, you're gonna get. Gonna get five. That's not, that's not how it works, unfortunately. Just because the bidding process of how Facebook and Google and things work when it comes to ads. Thank you for the different point of view. I don't see this elsewhere. Thank you. I appreciate it. Sean, if you could share it with someone, I'd really appreciate that too. 10 day service is horrible. 10 day service is almost impossible. Well, there's a long question. If it gets hot and dry during summer, do you automatically scale back the weeklies to biweekly? Okay, let's answer that question. No, we don't. Only if the customer asks. As of now we are doing. We are using the confirmation via text with jobber and leave it up to the client. Oh no, you never want to do this. Never leave it to the customer to skip in terms of like asking them. We don't let the employees make this decision either. We you definitely. This is the one reason, the one reason why I do not make an automation for text or email that tells the customer on the way to their property. Because you're going to get people like oh you know what, it doesn't need it today. I do not want that happening the day of service. There's 90 of us on here. Let's go. Give me a little thumbs up, a little bit of love and I'll keep reading this question. As of now, we are using the confirmation via text with jobber and leave it up to client if they want us to skip a week. And finding most are not skipping but those that do will the will the morning of service and sometimes doesn't relate it yet. This is the problem. We don't allow people to cancel within 24 hours. We don't guarantee that we're going to be able to skip their job if they're within the same day they're trying to cancel. Okay, I highly recommend that you try to stay away from that. And that's the one reason why I don't have an automation that says we are on our way to your property. That's easy to make. We can do that. But I don't want to remind the customer every single time. Especially during the seasons when like that's like oh you know what, you know what, let's go. Bye week. Let's skip this week. You know what? I don't really think I need it. Oh you know what? My, my son is in town from college. He'll mow the lawn for the rest of summer. Like you do not want to do that. Do you have affiliate discounts or sponsorships with any printing or apparel companies for non franchisees? No, I don't. Sorry brother.

You can buy lawn signs to put out at stop signs. Very cool. Let's go.

Someone always steals my yard signs here in Blue Strings, Montana. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do a stakeout. Let's go. I get a 40 discount through Vistaprint through their pro account. Very cool. I'm in suburbs of Cleveland. Weird landscaping marketing here. How is foot per square for pavers? We do not charge by the square foot for pavers. Simply do. The fact that when you're on pay for performance, you cannot use that because you need to be accurate on your budget hours and footage. 200 square foot paver patio right up against the curb in the front lawn is going to take about half the amount of time as a.

Same amount of square foot. 200 square feet in the backyard lawn where I have to excavate 12 inches and put a layer of 3 inches of drain rock because there's bad drainage in the backyard. So charging by the square foot and pavers, in my opinion on P4P is very, very difficult. You've got to be accurate on your budget hours. Well, we're almost at 100. No one to get off the stream. We got to get to 100. We got to get to 100. We're at 95 right now. Hey, Mike, first time I've been available for a live liking as always. Finally caught one. Sorry. How much can you charge per square foot for pavers? Again? Really depends on your market. Really depends on your efficiency. Remember your, your dollar per hour that you earn for a job comes down mostly the efficiency of your crew. Because if I look, I can charge $80 per hour for a job and it can take me 10 hours. Guess what? It's going to cost $800. Now I have a really inefficient crew. Really inefficient. And I'm cheaper though. I'm cheaper and I charge $40. But if it takes me twice as long to do the job, it really doesn't move the needle. Right. So when it comes to efficiency, if you become more efficient, you're making more per hour. Right. So that's why we don't use that for people For a smaller town. Do you have any opinion or experience on building relationships with chamber of commerce personnel and or mayors? This is mostly only affect if you're focused on commercial, you're focused on going after property managers. If you're doing residential, based upon my experience, small town chamber of commerce is a lot of insurance agents and realtors trying to find work and bankers like they are interested in only getting their lunch hour together and like there's not a lot of work. Oh, we hit 101. Yes. Let's go. The day has been good. We have made it. Okay. So I've traditionally not seen a whole lot of results when it comes to chamber of commerce just because A lot of people are. There are B2B business to business sales. Again, if you're doing commercial work, if you're trying to get into property management companies, great place to get started. When it comes to residential, I haven't seen a huge return on that. But again, I'm looking at ROI on time too. Like rot return on time. I got spent three hours wining, dining, you know, talking about the weather, talking about their dogs. I'm not interested in spending that three hours. It'd be much better for me to go knock on doors than to be sitting there just listening to people pitch me about whatever they're doing.

James, it's just in the chat section. If you just go in the chat section, you can leave me a question. Hey Mike, your last video about spring checklist was fire. Thank you, Abraham. Appreciate it.

James, it's linked to. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna keep going here. Well, we got a lot of questions. One second here. I'm gonna try to pound through these here. Okay. You recommended getting Nike uniforms such as golf collection for business logo. Not really like that dry wick technology. Like that dry wick material. A lot of times around thorns and things will get the threads will get taken out and then you get the big snags. So we don't really like to use that technology even though it's better in the heat, honestly. But the problem is that it's simply get snagged in an hour market. We're along blackberries a lot BlackBerry bushes and those snags look, look bad LNL. I dropped it like, thank you. There's 100 people and I have 17 likes. We need to improve the ratio. I'm telling you, like our closed ratio on the like to view subscriber count is very low. We need to improve this. All it takes is a little tap. All right. Bammer444. Hey Mike, not sure if this was asked yet, but what's max percentage? I should lower the weekly price from the bi weekly price to help book more weeklies on estimates that have customers that really want a bi weekly. Okay. So you can run the math both ways. So it's all how you look at it in terms of numbers. So you could say I do a 50% increase on price for biweekly. That is I go from $40 to $60 when I go from weekly to biweekly. Or you could say, okay, you're at biweekly, I'm gonna give you a 33% discount or a third discount, go from 60 to 40 and that's how you would convince them to switch to bi weekly. So if you have a. If you have a CRM, you can literally filter out the customers who are on bi weekly, send them an email and tell them we are now offering 33% off your mowing service. If you switch to bi week. Switch to weekly service. Give us contact. Hit this button. Let's go. Get them on weekly. Who decides what questions go through? James, I'm right here. I am reading your question. I decide who gets through on these questions. And if yours is not popping up, change platforms. We're doing this to Facebook, the Facebook group, and to the YouTube channel. What is the most effective way to pick up more clients, in your opinion? Perf tech. Watch more videos of mine. They will give you lots of ideas. How do I give you a tip through YouTube? Just want to show my appreciation. You should be able to click the little super chat button. It should be a little, like a little money button in the bottom, right. I always love money. Like, if you give me some money, I give you love. So thank you, Annex. I appreciate it, though. At least it's always the thought that counts. Sergio, how many lawns can you cut per day on weekly service compared to bi weekly? That's a tough one. Again, it's gonna depend on your route density a lot. So if you have a very dense route, you're gonna get a lot more cuts in if you're weekly. If you're doing big, big properties, you're staying there no matter what. Probably you may get two lawn instead of three, so. Oh, I got $10. Thank you. I think that's Skyler. Isn't that his name? I'll have to see it when I get to it. Sergio, in terms of that number there, it's very difficult. Like when people ask how many lawns you get done in a day? That's the wrong question. It's horrible question. There's so many variables that go into that. It's like when people say, what should my profit percentage be like? There's so many variables that go into that. Comparing yourself and benchmarking yourself against what other people give you on those numbers is crazy. Crazy. All right. How. How would you charge then? Mike, watch the video from the beginning. Jesus. Hit the. Hit the dollar button and super chat. Let's go. Thank you. James, what do you think? Charging $120 for two guys, one hour of full service and 137.50 for two guys, 1.25 full service and. Oh, this is too much, man. It's Too much. It's too much. It was too complicated. Like how are you going to explain this to your employees on P2P? How are you going to explain this to your office people when they're trying to explain prices? Like it's impossible. You're going to, you got to make math simple if you want your employees to actually understand. Same thing with profit chains, things open book management and P4P. If you want to use those systems and share numbers, you've got to make them simple. That way your office staff can sell weekly versus bi week on the phone because they understand the numbers. I would very much focus not on the two man crew thing. Focus on your, your rate per man hour.

Best way to get new clients. We've talked about that before. Okay, I gotta go faster. There's too many of these coming in. What systems do you use to get your leads, their routes? Your leads, their routes. We use a service autopilot. There's a lot of other CRMs out there. I'm not saying service all parts the best by no means. Again, depends on your, your business. If you're, if you're bigger, you know, lawn care, there's, there's lots of different, you know, more higher priced options have automations and all the rest of you're just getting started. Lawn pro, jobber, yard book, all great. How is Felix doing? New York? Felix is doing good. He is recovering and doing very, very well from his surgery. How do you compete with landscapers who pick up their employees at Home Depot? Probably aren't paying them legally. They have much less overhead. All right, so this is the thing. You're not in competition with these people because you're only in competition with someone if you're competing over the same customer. Just because they're in the same industry does not mean they're competing with you. It's like saying, okay, I build skyscrapers and I'm competing with the guy that builds mobile homes. Yes, we're both in construction, we're in the same industry, but we are completely different worlds of value. Because I'm building $100 million buildings that are very complicated, very complex and take a lot of knowledge. And he's building something that he can scrape together people from Home Depot. So what I would focus on, instead of trying to beat them on price, instead of trying to beat them on the numbers, which you will never do because there's always someone that can do it cheaper. Always. There's always someone that's willing to go cheaper, do less value to the customer, not have A website not have good trucks, not have decals in their truck, not be insured, pay their employees under the table, run bad equipment, runs unsafe work conditions. There's always someone willing to go cheaper. What you've got to focus on is value. We've talked about this a hundred times, but if I can ingrain this into you, everything would be worth it. A transaction takes place when value is slightly higher than price. All right? If value is slightly higher than price, this is like a balance. If value is slightly higher than price, transaction takes place in the mind of the customer, the perceived value. Now, if the value is lower than the price, transaction does not take place. Customer is not willing to part with their money for said product or service. Now, there's two ways to make a transaction take place. Either one, lower the price and immediately your value is higher or focus on raising the value. Okay? That's why Lawn care web design exists. Building a great website is so, so fundamental to standing out from all the guys who are picking people up from Home Depot, are paying them under the table and have all those other things, and they are in a race to the bottom. Okay. By the way, for the two people who signed up for lawn care web design yesterday, thank you very much. I appreciate the support. I need it right now because we just hired two more people for media to be able to give more content out for all of you. And I appreciate your support. But James, stop trying to compete on price. It's a, it's a failing formula. Someone gave me 50. $50.

That must be. That's crazy. Thank you, whoever that was. Annex, I appreciate it. I'll see it as I scroll down, but thank you so much.

But, yeah, if I could get one thing in this industry, like the goal of what I could try to say that could change one thing and ingrain one piece of knowledge in them, it would be the value versus price, the equilibrium, the equilibration of that. That system. Right? So if I can increase the value, I. E. I can answer my phone sooner, I can have automations, I can take credit cards on file, I can have uniformed employees, I can have a great website, I can have good social media, I have good pictures and video on my social media, I have good reviews. All of that is raising the value and therefore you're able to raise price. So a big mistake people do as they grow their business is they're raising value without raising price. They get a website, they get uniforms, they hire good employees, they train them really well, they really care for the customer and have high Service, they answer the phone calls on the weekend, they do all sorts of things to raise value, but they never raise their price. These are the good people in this industry that go out of business. The good people that care about their customers, care about their employees, are providing the best service in their community and they go out of business. You've got to have price just slightly below value. Because guess what? If value is way up here, values up here, guess what? The transaction happens. I close 100% of my jobs. But guess what? This between this and that, between my price down here in value, this in between here is inefficiencies. That's inefficient right there. That is a model that does not work with capitalism. Whenever there's inefficiency like this. Because either the business is going to going to fail because they don't have enough profit margin or they're basically never going to make money. So this right here needs to change. You need to bring price up. You need to raise your prices as your business grows and you add more value to the customer. But do not think that you can just raise prices. Guess what? Now the equilibration is out of order. All right? The transaction will not happen. You'll have a 10 to 20% close ratio. Again, adding value can come in the form of adding more verbiage on your estimates. It can be getting estimates back to the customer sooner. It can be having a more professional website, your estimates being formatted correctly. There's so many things that go into adding value to the customer and that's what I want to drill into this industry over time. Okay. Do you do full service agreements, mowing and gardening? We do. We mostly just want contracts for commercial, but we do do it for full service residential like you mentioned.

All right, I'm gonna keep going here, Mike, what you get if it, if you take your landscape course and complete it. There's not any sort of certification or anything necessarily. Jesus. I do add to that ongoing. So if you buy, you don't have to buy. It's not like an annual thing. So like we added P4P the whole module in the fall. We didn't charge the existing members anymore. So the price will go up over time as we add more and more content, add more software, things like that. Javan. Hey Mike, what's your thoughts on buying used mowers? I know you are for used truck, but didn't know what your thoughts about used equipment, zero turns, push motors, et cetera. I'm not a fan, you know, you know? Yes, Mike, the guy who talks about Tiger and getting big trucks is. And says about debt and all the rest of it. No, when it comes to equipment, I want to have my equipment working and I want to make sure it's brand new. That's just me. Now, if there was a mower that had 100 hours or less, maybe I might fiddle with that in my mind. But in my experience, I'd rather buy it new, have a warranty. And it's one of those things. Like, for example, a truck might break down. If you get a good truck, it shouldn't break down maybe once every five years. Like, if you do good maintenance and things. But a mower that's been abused or like the spindles are off or something's been a finagle with the electric, like the wires, literally, you could have a breakdown every week, right? And that just costs a lot in terms of, you know, inefficiencies. The first house, I hung a door hanger on, the guy threw it and went back inside. So I hate doing this. Oh, man, you got to get over that. That fear of failure and that fear that you're intruding on their space and make you're annoying them and things. You got to get over that. It's very difficult when you're introverted. I was talking to one of our franchisees, and I'm so proud of him for going out and getting started, because he's very much introverted. But I promise you, getting over that in business and then doing door hangers will translate to so many more things down the road, whether it be hiring, firing, whether it be things in your community, being able to give back to your church and things like that. Like you're going to be put in positions where you got to get out of yourself, your personality, what you feel comfortable doing, and go out and do something uncomfortable. Even if you got no sales from those door hangers, if your personality, if you can get some confidence from doing something that's out of your comfort zone, that'd be a massive win. Just in a macro element of life, business in general, what material are your uniforms? What's your opinions on polos? Yeah, like polos, you might get some kickback from guys in the field, right? It just depends on your market. For example, down in Texas, Abraham was on here. Price to Liz. They wear long sleeve all the time. They wear hats. They wear the things around the next victim, the dead heat all the time. In our market, we don't get that crazy heat. So our guys, when it gets hotter, they Take more off. Right. Like they're going down to their T shirts and they go the opposite way. Right. We're just not as smart up here when it comes to heat, I think. Skyler, thank you for the $10. I appreciate that. Let's go, Mike. There's no money in bi weekly. All right, let's see here. One second. I'm scrolling up. Whoa. $99. 10 people giving me money. Mike, if we take your landscape course. Oh, no, I already did this one.

Hey, don't post the same question a bunch of times. It ruins where I'm at. I might have skipped somebody. Okay, here we go. I saw one of your trucks at Site 1 off Fairfield Road on Friday. I don't know where you're at. Roz. Gaming. They're all over now. There's 38 locations going into year two with about 30 regular mowing customers returning from last year. Majority are bi weekly. We have a goal of getting to 100 by the end of year. Current MOW rate is $80 per hour and our operation.

Costs about 33, $31 per hour. What should we focus on to get more customers and up our mo rate, mo hourly rate? I would really try to focus on trying to get some. We have 105 people in here. Thank you, guys. Guys are staying on late. There's people here. It's all. It's past 11 o'. Clock. You should probably be in bed right now. But here we are talking about mowing and hourly rates. I love it. Okay, so I would really try to focus on highlighting your weekly mowing service and then upselling your existing mowing customers. So I would really focus on trying to get those bi weekly people to go to weekly because you're going to immediately increase the value per year of those customers by 30, 40%. Then I would take it a step further and try to get. Get focused on upselling them. Upsell them. Bark mulch and trimming bushes and leaf cleanup. And make sure you have a very good connection with them via email. Whatever method you use to make sure you're constantly upselling them because you can easily, easily double the revenue you make in a business without getting more customers. Easy. Change that from biweekly to weekly and try to upsell customers more based upon the. The time of year, the climate, what's happening in the weather, and what services are going to work well with those. All right, let's see here. Hit the thumbs up, guys. Thank you. Rich off music New look Lawnscape is a dope name. I saw you. Sorry I'm skipping accidentally. Sorry guys. Huge fan of the channel, your podcast. Glad. Awesome. Skyler, thank you so much. I appreciate the $.99 eliminated BI weekly and raised prices 5% this year. Almost all clients approved and locked the year. I don't know why I say it. Everyone that's raised prices says it. And yet people are still afraid to raise prices. And that is that you don't lose a lot of customers if you have a high value. And this is what's happening, okay? This is what needs to lock into people's minds if you're raising prices. A lot of times it means your value is up here and you need to raise prices and it's going to get you to here. You're not going to lose customers until you cross where price is too high and it's above value. So what you need to do is make sure you don't have inefficiencies by having price down here, value here. Raise your prices, the transaction will still go. That's why people don't cancel. It means that you have an excess of value in compared to price. That's inefficient. Capitalism doesn't work. You will lose market share. You will lose out to lower bidding competition if you're not efficient with this model. And that means you got to get prices close to value but slightly under it. That's when the transaction takes place. And that's why most people will not cancel when you raise prices because you produced enough value. You have a great website, of course, Created by Lawn CareWeb Design.com you have great employees and uniforms and a great truck and you have a software that makes everything efficient for them and they can keep a credit card file. That's all value. Close the gap between where you have your prices right now and your value. And it's just amazing to me that everyone that raises their prices and raves about how great it is for them and yet and I talk about how it is too and you might lose a couple customers which by the way are usually the ones you want to get rid of anyways. They're usually your bi weekly customers anyways. They're the ones who complain about and give callbacks anyways. Get rid of them no matter what. Like I just don't get why people don't raise their prices. Especially if you've been doing the same price like two or three or four years. 18 years old, did $90,000 gross last year, but probably netted zero because I reinvented everything.

Okay, Xavier. Hey Mike. Any chance you can read the video on building your own alley rate. Is this the correct format? Overhead plus employee cost plus equipment plus taxes. Yeah, that's a pretty good formula that you have right there. You get pretty close on that.

In terms of overhead. Some people would consider things like equipment costs as overhead, but just depends on how you look at it. But yeah, I know that video. I know which one you're talking about. It has a lot of views compared to a lot of my other videos and it is a little bit old, a little outdated. I could probably make it a little bit better. Ideas for algorithms for total property square footage pricing for the office to measure and quote with an in person property. Visit. So Google Earth has some free software, but most CRMs that are half decent now have an integration with Maps Pro to be able to do this integrated into the software. So that way it's saved, the square footage is saved to their profile. So I know Lompro, service, Autopilot, lots of different softwares. Now Jobber has it integrated into their shop. Does Jobber. I don't know if jobbers, I'm not 100% sure on that one. But most good softwares are going to have it where they allow that to Japan inside their software annex. Thank you for $50. I really appreciate that. And you didn't even ask a question, so I really appreciate that. All right. Hey Mike, I'm Massachusetts. I started last year with four clients and I up and I am up with 26. It's that go for a first year, good for a first year or not? By the way, I love your channel. I haven't subscribed yet, but you need to subscribe. If you subscribe right now, I will tell you what you need to do. All right? Three, two, one. Subscribe. Thank you. Okay, so now that you subscribe, this is what you need to do. You need to go back, need to watch a video I talked about. Just type in growth Mike and he's on the thumbnail. It's like a blue marker going up and I'm like in front of it. The reason I'm telling you to watch that is cause I walked through my, my first five, six years in business. And you'll notice the very first year I probably did less clients than you. I think I had about 28 clients. So like just realize that just because you feel like you only had 26, whether that's good or bad, like I don't know, maybe your clients are a million dollars a piece in revenue. Like so again, numbers like this are so so bizarre that we think these are things we can compare in this industry. Because if you have 26 customers and they're all commercial and you have 50,000 plus per contract, you're running a multi million dollar business. Well now if it's 26 customers and they're all BI weekly and they're $20 per cut, you know, probably not that great. But again, who's to say you did well, good or bad? Like what are you comparing yourself to? Even if you watch that video? Don't compare yourself to what I did. I'd only say compare myself just to give yourself hope. And that is that you can start small. You don't have to be massive from day one. Thank you Annex. I appreciate it. I will get dinner. I'm just happy Mike is getting it because of all the value he provides. Thanks Skyler. Mike, I'm just starting out more of a down the line thing. I want to make sure I'm charging at least average, if not above. I don't want to undercut the market. I just feel like most do. Thanks James. This is going to be determined by your close ratio. Okay? So for the hundred of you are still on here, let's hit the like button. And then I'm gonna speed through the rest of these videos because I got three more minutes and I gotta gotta bounce out of here. But in terms of charging, if you're just getting started and you don't want to be underpriced, your close ratio is going to be determined of if you're high priced or low priced. All right, so if you're only closing 10% of your estimates, you probably are high priced. That being said, before you even lower your prices, I would take a look at are you producing enough value? Are you getting estimates to people within two weeks or two days? If it's two weeks, you're going to lose more customers. So close ratio though is definitely the first thing I would look at whether or not you are in the market in terms of price. Mike is easier for lcm. I love lcm. Long Care Millionaire. Long term. Great. I love him. All right, well there's a lot of questions I haven't get to. Okay, I'm going to try to speed. Okay, here we go here. How are the new 30 inch mowers are working out? Good. There's definitely little things that break a little more often because we use them so much. But because of that we standardize and we can train everyone how to fix them. Hit the like button, folks. Man, don't worry. Today I was passing them out and two old men were interested might call when they need some help. Lupe. Thanks Mike, for the advice and motivation. I invoice monthly. How do you transition to per visit, per service or weekly invoicing?

I could definitely give you feedback on that. I have never done it though.

I would say if you want to do that again, convince the customer that's in their best interest. The reason I don't do it and we don't do it here at Augusta is because I want to make sure that my open ratio is a lot higher on my sales emails. And by adding in a weekly invoice or even a per service invoice, it bogs their email balance. So that way when I do send a sales email, they are less likely to open it up because they get already four or five emails from me a week, a month. So if you can handle it from a cash flow perspective, I'd rather build them once a a month. So that way when I send them an email in the middle of the month with a sales invoice or sales letter, they actually read it. Open up the email. If they're getting so many emails for me for invoices, they're less likely to open them because like all of you, you don't open up invoices that you already see in the headline. You know what it is, right? So if they already see, you know, Augusta Lawn Care. Oh yeah, that's my weekly invoice. Augusta Longcare, that's my weekly. They might miss my sales letter. I don't want that. I want them to open it. Click the one click email button. Go to town.

Where is the second Augusta location in North Carolina going to be? We can't tell secrets like that. Abraham Moscaro, you're in El Paso. We have the Corpus location. Oh yeah, that's in. Yeah, exactly. Ryan, could an Augusta franchise go from brand new to 500K? Yeah, it could. But again, it all depends on your marketing. Again, you're looking at your correlation between growth and marketing is directly correlated. It's parallel. So if you're spending a lot of marketing, you have money to go get the truck. Like you're going to 500,000 sales in one season. You're going to need significant amounts of marketing. You need a couple trucks at least you're going to need a couple employees from day one. So you need the experience and the marketing dollars to really push that growth from day one. I have $0 in debt in my business and currently have a residential mower. But it's just not cutting it anymore. Do you go into debt or save up for a new mower? Roz? I would go and sell sales fixes, things like this. Go sell yourself a couple big cleanups for spring cleanups and go buy yourself 1000 or $1200 commercial mower. I don't think you need to go into debt for that. Go sell. Right? Don't think about this too much. Go sell and then have the money to go buy the mower. We talked about this throughout. Raising my prices last season was the best thing I did for my business.

Thank you, Nick. Nick. Hi, Mike. What is the best way to gain residential clients? We talked about this before. Before your video the other day on operation cost on mowers was good. Thank you, Daryl. It's not about how many clients you got. It's about. It's about what is your gross revenue? Even further than that. East Tennessee Lawn Care. It's about what's your net revenue. Let's go. What's the profits? What is your proudest accomplishment? Ooh, Ryan, that's a good question.

I'll have to get back to you on that. I don't, I don't really think about it. I think like in the micro, I think about. Right. So like recently, a big. Something I'm really proud about is one of our local employees going from entry level employee to own his own franchise down in Marysville. Nick. You can watch a video of Nick. Just type in Nick Reed and then upflip, UPF L I P. And he's. They're documenting his journey as he grows his business. But he started working for Augusta. He had come from a ski lodge working minimum wage, came here, was able to grow, you know, in just his mindset, business acumen, lived in his van, saved up money, and now is a franchisee at Augusta. That was like super cool. Same thing with my brother. Being able to allow him to be a GM and now purchasing that location, become a franchisee. Like, those are pretty cool. But my proudest. I haven't really thought about that. I'd have to get back to you on that one. Hey, Mike. Mowing typically starts back up in April 15th in our market. How many days a week should you be? Should we start putting out our budget into Facebook and Google Ads? As soon as you can afford. Right. Because if you can afford it, you want to do it as soon as possible. Start branding so people start thinking about you when they actually need service. Okay, I'm a little bit longer here just to get these questions done. So the sooner you can, the better if you can afford it. Now just keep in mind, like I talked about yesterday, your customer acquisition cost is going to be higher now than it is going to be in a month from now. All right? So the sooner you start your customer acquisition cost be higher, you're going to get less clicks, less people are searching your keywords.

What's the best way to connect with property managers to try and gain more commercial accounts? I would go to this is the one time go to, you know, chamber of commerce meetings, give them plates of cookies at their office. Somehow they like you more. How long does it take to implement P4P? As you may already know, my hourly to put on budget hours. David. It's one of those things like if you have everything in place, it's a matter of just doing it. So like in landscape businesscourse.com go to the P4P part and then watch the videos about implementation because the three steps and those three steps usually take about a month because you're run two pay periods where your employees can only make higher of either hourly or P4P. And so that would I would say a month really. If you have everything ready to go, you know your numbers on the back and you've tested everything you need a month. But again, knowing your numbers and all that sometimes takes people sometime if you're not getting towed know when giving an estimate or being questioned about the price. Are you a 2 low when you buying an existing company, what are the first steps to begin assimilating to your systems and culture? Very, very difficult. Just assume when you buy a company, you're going to lose all the employees. Have a great 21 summer, fellas. Mike, Keep it up, brother. You're helping. Thank you. It's not about how many clients you have. We talked about that. Is a debris loader a good investment if you have a multiple if you have multiple leaf cleanups in a day, it comes down to how many times in a year are you going to use it. If you're only going to use it for a month in the leaf season, you better make sure that you do not buy a piece of equipment if you're going to use it every single day on landscaping jobs or maybe 150 times throughout the year. Definitely something you might want to think about.

Study the current systems they had in place and make sure you know them in and out. Anything you don't understand makes changes value. Thank you. Good night. From Spokane. Phil Small engine. All right, last question. Bucks Landscaping, if you are always wish you had one, invest in one. If it saves time, it will save money. But make sure you will have enough sales that will finance you benefit the investment. There you go. Awesome. All right, guys, thank you so much. It's been a late one, but I appreciate all the support for everyone that's joined. Landscapebusinesscourse.com Lawn Care Web Design special thank you to all of you. In the next couple weeks, we're gonna be able to get a couple more people on creating much better content. I'm really looking for the end of this week. End of this week is a really cool video coming out. I'm really looking forward to. It's very creative, and Danny spent a lot of time the past few weeks working on it, and I look forward to sharing that with all of you. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a good night.