SLASHING PRICES 🔻 | $300k Business in 30 Days (27)
YouTube vlog episode documenting Mike Andes and Sam’s 30-day effort to build a $300,000 lawn care location in Augusta. The hosts cover setup logistics (rentals, missing trailer, equipment, crew start), tactical pricing decisions (how lowering price raises close ratio and when to raise price for profit mode), use of scarcity/discount windows, and specific job estimates and margins for concrete customer jobs.
Chapters
I'm traveling 3,000 miles across the country to build a $300,000 lawn care business.
In just 30 days.
This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general.
Manager and go back home. I'm starting with no employees, no equipment, and no customers. To prove that systems build great businesses.
I got a three day rental in.
One of the pickup trucks I canceled.
You.
Really?
You were supposed to pick it up at 12 o' unless you just now put in a reservation.
No, I told them five o'.
Clock.
But my text message, you're right to say 12.
It said 12 o'.
Clock.
No, we canceled that reservation. What was the phone number you put on there?
Augusta Long Hair has changed our design. We are now orange and green and white.
At least for the next couple days.
See, and somehow I wasn't allowed to hold my board. They call that soliciting?
No soliciting on the property.
Oh, okay.
They somehow.
Very lousy, this. Pulled these things up. Arizona.
Little did you know, I lived there for two years.
We got a backup cam there too.
Look at. Very fancy.
Probably the nicest truck I've ever drove.
In my life.
Sam.
All right, so a lot of people asked about what happened to the trailer. Okay, so we just pulled to the.
Back of the storage.
And we don't have a trailer. I'm beginning to wonder if someone stole it.
The reason I didn't recognize it the other day is because it had this on there. And I didn't even know we had it. But Terence was very resourceful and found.
It in this box that I didn't.
Know it was here.
So when I looked at it the.
Other day, I didn't know this was ours. But sure enough, this is our trailer. And he parked it here because he used his brain. Something I still am trying to work on. But thanks to Terrance, we have a safe trailer.
All this debris, though, needs to go to the dump.
But the dump doesn't open until 7am tomorrow.
I'm gonna get here super early tomorrow.
Get this to the dump before the crew gets here.
Okay.
Name one thing more frustrating than lining up the ball. Just perfectly getting out of the truck and then the truck rolling it about one inch. And now you're off center.
Also need to say thank you for all the people in the comments. They gave me a thousand different ways.
Of fixing the trailer doors in the back. I will try some of them, I promise.
Oh, we had a wonderful comment today. Wonderful comment in the YouTube Wonderland. And it said, mike, it is very unfair that you are spending money on trucks and fixing your equipment when in reality someone starting their business doesn't have any money. And I already explained that's early in the challenge and that is, look, if.
I would have just started with no.
Money, we wouldn't have been able to hire gm. There would have been no drama, it.
Would have been very boring and all.
You would have seen is me out mowing grass in the field.
And there's other channels that do a very good job of that.
Brian Von Mains, Keith Kaufis, Spencer Longcare. There's great, great creator youtubers now. My response to this comment was, Shaquille o' Neal never apologized for being taller and bigger and stronger than everyone else in the NBA.
So you know what?
Use what you, baby. That's what we're doing. I don't have this the size of.
Secure Neil, but I can buy another truck.
I can rip this.
Oh, this is kind of cheap.
U haul truck for 250 next four days.
I only need it for three days.
But for 19 extra.
Why like an extra day? Just throw it in.
Home sweet home, baby.
All right, everybody. Since no one listens to me when I'm on a whiteboard, I figured drawing out in the middle of the street.
With a piece of chalk might help.
So we're gonna explain close ratio, alright? V stands for value. P stands for price. We're gonna see what happens when we lower price and what happens to our close ratio. In this example, if my price is, let's just say about $1,200, I would essentially close everyone that has a value greater than that price. So when value is greater than price.
The transaction takes place.
So if I charge $1,200 for this job, I would get four out of these eight jobs, I would have a 50% close ratio.
But you know what?
I'm not happy with 50%. I need to close a couple more jobs. So what am I going to do? I'm going to lower price from $1,200 all the way down to $1,000. And this becomes P2.
No pun intended.
All right, so what happens when I lower the price from P1 to P2? My price goes from $1,200 down to 1,000. And now because value number five, V5 and value number six, this customer, they also see enough value that is greater than the price. And therefore now I have a close ratio of 75% because out of the eight customers have a greater value than the price I'm charging So what am I doing today? I lowered price. Do I like doing that?
No.
But I need to increase my close ratio at least for this coming week and get this down to $1,000 and get V5 and V6. Now this is what we do when our locations are in growth mode because we want to close 60, 70 plus percent of our jobs. But when they go into profit mode.
What are we going to do?
We're actually going to raise prices and that's probably gonna put us somewhere around here.
And if we do this, not only.
Do I look like an idiot, but our price goes up, say 13, $1400. And now I'm only gonna close these three customers. These are the customers that we all want. They're price insensitive. They don't care about the price, they just want the job done. And that's when your high profit margin work gets done.
See ya.
We really appreciate all the people watching the vlog every single day. So we're gonna make a special discount just for the next 24 hours from the time this video drops. Use the coupon code vlogsquad1word. And on lawncaremedia.com, which design are we giving away? Coreoration Flyer.
Get it now.
Core Aeration. The flyer that you can use for every door, direct mail and sell more jobs this coming fall. Go to lawncaremedia.com find that design and use vlog Squad.
Okay, so the job you're looking at right now is actually a secondary project to a job that we did in the front yard of this customer's property a couple weeks ago. So remember those big chunks, those big nuggets of bark mulch? Well, they had that in the front yard. Now they want that in the backyard as well as a property cleanup. Originally this price for this job was $1061. I offered 15% discount if they would get the job done within a two day window, June 26 and June 27. If they didn't pick that exact date, the discount would not apply. So now I'm making just over $900 in revenue for the job. Not a big project, not super profitable, but should be able to knock this out one day minus about $200 in material costs. We first talked about scarcity in terms of availability. We can also generate scarcity using discounts. But I highly recommend you only give the discount on certain days. So that way there's some level of urgency to buy right away instead of thinking that they can wait two weeks and then accept the job at that time for the discount.
All Right. So I'm putting together the estimate for this customer. I got my front yard property clean up. This is the one we got from the door hanger. 299. So four budget hours, $299. That one's gonna be a bit of a stretch. It'll probably take four and a half hours I think. But it's all really accessible from the road so should be pretty quick backyard cleanup. There's just a lot of debris back there, a lot of grass, pretty thick in the beds. So six budget hours times six by 70. There's your $420 for that. And promoting weekly and biweekly prices. Again, that's from the door hanger. They've already told us they want to accept the weekly price, but we want to make sure it's in writing. Get this accepted on the schedule. Then we also have the front yard bed edging. Now I'm not super like excited about this one, so I bid it pretty.
High, but 16 budget hours and then.
Charge $700 for about 124 pavers or little block edging that we're going to need for this. And so when we put this all together, some me building the estimate here in Copilot. All right, I'm going to move ahead and submit a couple photos and attach them to this estimate for the customer. These are going to be photos of the edgers as well as what they look like installed. So that way on the estimate I can actually reference them and they'll be able to see them attached to with the quote. Let's go ahead and save this, update the estimate. I have all my automations ready to go for this one. Let's go ahead and send this via email first. And you can see here I have this formatted already. This is the link to the quote and everything is looking very good. Also I'm going to attach those images to the email directly. Let's go ahead. Oh, the PDF as well is going to be attached to this email. Go ahead and send this off. I'm now also going to send it via text message. So just go from here, go to the text message button here and send it from here as well. This link will also go directly to the quote. In other news, we got a new site for landscape business course. Very, very snazzy as well as MBA for entrepreneurs. Check it out.
