SPECIAL STRATEGY EPISODE - Dominate 2018! - Ep.58

Hey everyone, it's Mike and you're listening to landscape businesscourse.com podcast. Today I have a very special episode you've probably already seen. It's super, super long. It's over two hours long. And the reason for that is because it's the live webinar recording that we had just a couple weeks ago on how to have a strategy for 2018 to dominate your market. This is the audio recording. If you are a course member, you there is the live video webinar, complete recording in the course underneath the tips. So if you go into your units and then you go down to the bottom of the bonus unit that says bonus tips with Mike, the bottom of that, you'll see the live video. So that way you'll be able to see all of the templates that I am showing you today and then remember those templates that I show you in the webinar. So again, this is the core members in the course modules, this video, the recording of today, the audio that you're hearing there is the video format of this and then also the templates that I show throughout this webinar you're able to actually download. And so you can use this for like introduction packets and the business cards and the different marketing templates that we use. So check that out if you're in the course. If not, as always, you should sign up for it. Landscapebusinesscourse.com But I did want to share at least the audio with you guys. There's some groundbreaking stuff in there. And already just in the past week or so since the webinar, several course members, as well as people that were just on the live webinar have already emailed me and said that they've started to implement some of these things. They're really looking forward to 2018 and there's already results being made. So definitely you want to listen to this whole thing. I'm going to be gone for the next week. I'm checking out, going to Europe, so you're not going to hear from me a whole lot. But if you haven't already, you definitely, absolutely want to go to YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to our channel. On YouTube, I'm putting a blank whole bunch of videos on there. It's a little bit more informal. It's not stuff I necessarily might put on the podcast, but it's tips and tricks that I am learning and I grab and go with that. And same thing with Facebook. On our Facebook page, we're on Instagram as well. Landscape business course. But you Want to check out those places? I'm putting the videos of even the podcasts on there now. So subscribe to YouTube, check out the Facebook page, like it, and you can see what I put on there. But today I want you to sit back, I want you to take this one in, listen to it a couple times, maybe take notes again. This is just the audio form of the webinar. So you're not gonna see all the chat room that we talk about on this webinar. You're not gonna see the questions highlighted, you're not gonna see necessarily the things that I'm showing on camera like our introduction packet and the introduction cards that we write out. So at least you have an idea though of the information that I talk about here. Everything about text, to quote, call to quote, giving estimates over the phone, how to take time out of the equation, how to create a marketing plan for 2018. So if you were on the webinar, this is a great refresher. If you're in the course, definitely wanna watch the video. And then also you'll hear me refer again and again to the workbook that I had people in the webinar fill out. If you're in the course, go to your downloadable documents or just right underneath the recorded video for the webinar, I'm gonna have a PDF for you guys to download. Print that out. And that is the workbook that you can use to create the strategy for 2018 for your marketing and for your revenue. So without any further delay here, it's a two hour thing, you know, splice it up, whatever. Next few days I'm not gonna be putting a whole lot of content out going to Europe for a while. So definitely want to listen to this one, take notes and implement this stuff in the coming year. If you're not a course member, I highly recommend you getting the video edition of this, getting the workbook and obviously just listening to all the modules. So to do that, just landscapebusinesscourse.com without any further delay. Here we go.

Okay, we're gonna get started here. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. If you are just joining on, Nathan's been up all night plowing as well. So I'm not gonna look at the chat too much right now. I'm gonna come back to it several times throughout the throughout the webinar and check in and ask if you have any questions on the material we've been covering in the past few minutes. So I'm gonna bounce out of the chat room just for a second. Feel free to say whatever you guys want. Just, I just bounce out of it so I don't get distracted. But we are going to go ahead and get started and I have kind of some of the stuff that I want to go over. And then like I said, we'll stop several times throughout. If you have questions on what we're talking about, write them down and then come back to that chat box and we will share as a class kind of what's going on. So before we get started, I know a lot of you already know who I am. Some of you are already in the course@landscapebusinesscourse.com so you know a lot about my story, kind of all about, you know, the podcast, things that I'm doing with Augusta Lawn Care Services and things like that. But I want to give you like a two second overview for the people that are new, haven't heard about me. And there's probably about 5% of you that don't even do landscaping. You're here because you're in the service business industry. So let me give a short, short, you know, Cliff Notes version of my story with lawn care landscaping and what we're up to right now. So essentially I started almost four years ago now with Augusta Long Care Services. That's my, my shirt and that's the, a lot of the material I'll be showing you today is stuff from our company. And so Augusta Lawn Care Services is the name it was basically inspired by. I played golf a lot. So Augusta is where they play gusta, play the Masters for golf, pga and Augusta national is the name of that golf course. So that's in Georgia. And so I named it Augusta Longer Services. We have a golf theme. And so as you can see on our logo, that's our logo right there. It's kind of a golf course kind of theme. And so started the, started the company, started part time the first year and was working as a personal trainer at the time I dropped out of, you know, I was going to go to medical school, was signed up, ready to go for that, decided last minute to stop that and essentially start Augusta Lawn Care Services and started my MBA in the evening classes and was able to work on the company during the day. So that first couple years I was still kind of in school. I was working a little bit part time still to, you know, pay the bills. And so that first year we did about 28 to 30 thousand dollars in revenue. And second year I got serious about it, went started doing it for full time, still in school doing my MBA and we did just under $200,000 in revenue. The year after that, we did 550,000. This year we'll do just, just under 900,000. I'd like to get over 9,000. If it snows a couple more times, we might get over 900,000 in revenue this year. Next year we're shooting for 1.3. We just started our second location and so I'm really hoping we do more like 1.5 next year. And so that's gonna be a lot of fun. And we're looking in 2018 to start the franchising process of franchise Augusta Lawn Care Services. The model that Augusta Long, if you're in the course, you know this. The model is not to create a 10 million dollar company with 50 employees. It's to have a high profit margin business with that needs about 10 people to run it and does about 1 to 2 million dollars in revenue. So we're trying to create that model. That's the model that Augusta Lawn Care Services follows and that's the model that the franchisee would be following. We are higher premium prices. We charge more. We are not in any sort of price wars with anyone in our comp. In our area, we are the premium provider for lawn care and landscaping services. And so that's what we're focusing on. I'm not trying to build a high top line revenue business with low margins. I'm trying to build a business that's sustainable, that can grow without me, that it doesn't need me there and that can have multiple locations with one franchisee, one owner. And so that's what we're working on. And that's kind of where Augusta Longer service is at right now. I'm gonna bop out of here trying to sign. Okay. Sorry guys. Some people having issues signing in. Ryan, I'm trying to sign in my laptop so I have a webcam and mic. Right now I'm just on my PC. Ryan, you should be fine. Welcome to the webinar. But you should be fine without having a video. As long as you see me, you're good. You shouldn't even need a microphone. All right, so let's go ahead and get jumped and jump right into this again. If you don't have this already printed off, you're going to need it throughout the webinar and we will go ahead and get started. So I want to kind of go over some specific things with marketing. We're using a lot, like I said, of stuff from my company, stuff that we're using and so when I refer to Augusta Lanka Services or my company, it's just something that we can learn from here on the webinar. So there's kind of several things, really, four things that we're focusing on in 2018, and obviously this whole webinar, like I said, I wanted to give you all a plan that you can follow coming into 2018 with your business and that you can for your marketing, for how you're going to strategize your growth and your plan for 2018 and really taking over your market. So I'm going to share what we're doing, and then we're going to work on your plan using this. So. So that's why you need that printed out or have a digital copy of it. But I'm going to talk about what we're doing and then I'm going to tell you why we're doing it, some of the new things that we're doing, and then we're going to jump right into making your plan for 2018.

So there's really four things that we're focusing on that more than more than last year. There's these four things that we're really focusing on as far as Marketing in 2018. Number one thing that we're doing is really focusing on referral marketing. I know that's really a generic term, but if you've heard me talk on the podcast before, you heard me talk about warm leads versus cold leads. And warm leads are people that have seen you before, they've been on your website before, maybe their friends or their family have. Usually they've heard about you, they've seen your trucks and things like that. They're a warm lead. They already know about you. Trying to market to them is going to have the highest return on investment roi. It's going to have the highest lifetime value of those customers, and it's going to have the highest conversion ratio. Because those people don't need to be educated as much about, about you, your company, what you provide, what services you offer, the quality of your work, et cetera, because they've already warm leads. They already know those things. So what we're focusing on is referral marketing. But I kind of use that term loosely because. Because really, referral marketing, I'm just talking about to marketing, to warm leads. And so there's several things that we're doing. One of them is this little guy right here, and it's a gift card strategy. And so what we're going to be doing is we're trying to market to the people that are directly next to our existing customers. So exactly, essentially what I did is I took a map and I said, okay, where are all our mowing customers right now and our landscaping customers? And I said, okay, the people around them, the two, three, four houses directly around those addresses, let's market to them. The reason for that is because they've seen our quality of work. They've seen our trucks every week if we're mowing, they've seen our guys. That quality of our work, our people, our professionalism, they're warm leads. And so I want to market to them. I really believe that not all leads are created equal. And that's why it's so important to track where leads come from and then track what their lifetime value is. What type of services do they order on. On, on average, for instance, people that come from Facebook ads, do they, are they low profit margin kind of services? Do they come in for one time little cleanups or are they going to be the type of person that gets on a mowing sched and you get them for years on end? Are they the type of people that attract big landscaping jobs and it's a one time, 30, $40,000 job? You want to track all of those things, the lifetime value of that customer, where the lead comes from, and then how long do they on average stay with you? Because I truly believe that not all leads are created equal. Some leads are worth more than others based upon where they come from. And I can't blanketly tell you that Facebook ads or Google AdWords or print marketing has better lifetime value or, or better profit margin services that come from those that, that form that media of marketing. I can't tell you that. But what I can tell you is that if you track it over the course of a couple of years, you'll get really good data as far as what type of marketing is best used for certain type of services and what type of marketing converts the best type of clients. Because not all marketing is created equal. Not all leads are created equal because not all leads convert the same way. So we can get to a couple of questions on that in a second. And again, if you have questions, write them down. And then just in a few minutes, every five, ten minutes, we'll check in with the chat box and answer your questions. But what we're doing this year is we are sending. One of the things we're doing is sending this gift card. Hopefully you all can see that. I'll get it nice and close for you. We are sending that gift card to those three to four addresses that are next to our mowing customer. So what it says is basically it's a gift card. It's a gift card for only services.

For new customers. And so it's $50. As you can see there. It's not like a $5 gift card or a 10% off. I really true believe that people get addicted to discounts, but they don't get addicted to free. What I mean by that is if you're constantly discounting your work at 10, 20, 30% off or having big sales and it's always a discount, people will get addicted to that and wait for the discount. But if you give things away for free or you give gift cards, people don't expect that to be all the time. So you can hook them with something free, get them in, and then not worry about someone that's constantly wanting a discount Every single service or product. So the reason we did this is twofold. Number one, they're a warm lead. That's the most important thing. Number two, this isn't five bucks. This is $50. Keep in mind, that's basically like one mow. So people are okay with saying, start mowing with us and get one free mowing, but yet they won't give a 50 like some people really, really are. They judge me because it's 50 bucks. Like that's quite a bit of money. But if you really look at the grand scheme of things, the cost of customer acquisition, $50 is not very much. And it's actual value, it's not like a $5 gift card or 5% off. Right? This is real value. They can, excuse me, come in, use this for spring cleanup. They can use this for a tree trim and they can use this for fertilization. I'm not going to tell them they have to get something more. They can just literally use this for one time fertilizer if that's what they want. But it's going to be marketing. The people that are warm in with this gift card, they're going to get a nice handwritten letter saying, hey, you know, we are actually, I have the other card that we use. I should have brought that. The card that we're using for these, we will put them in there and we'll say, hey, like we are already, Mark, doing services for your neighbor. We'd love to do services for you if at all possible. And then we go from there. That's in this one. Then we follow up with them with a marketing strategy. As far as postcards, other eddm, every Door, direct marketing, print mail to get those people. We really are focusing on that because as far as paid marketing that we're doing this year, that's one of the main things we're doing, is focusing on those warm leads. And the reason for that is because you're going to get route density. Because if I have one person that I'm mowing and. But I can mark the three people around them and that truck, that mowing truck, that crew stops one time and then can mow four properties instead of just the one that's increasing a lot. That's where you really start to make money, is when you can park the truck and do multiple properties, or park the truck and do larger properties, however it works. But especially when it comes to residential mowing, the more times you can get route density where the more there's less and less drive time and more and more work time, because you get paid when you work, you don't get paid when you're driving. The guys are out there. It's a big cost for you to be having them drive around. From maintenance, truck costs, fuel, insurance, wages. It just, you know, massive amounts of money goes out when people are driving. So we're really focusing on that. Route density is really our focus. We're doing this gift card, and this gift card isn't. Isn't paper. It's very. It's like a credit card. So it's. It's actually like physically, like, like pretty nice. It's a nice plastic. We ordered this off of a company called Jira Card, and it just says new customers can redeem this card for $50 off landscaping or mowing services. So they can't use at our retail facility. They have to be using this for services. So that is one of the things that we're doing this year. That's number one. If there's any questions on that, hit them up. So, Ryan, click the link broken.

We're in YouTube. All right, we're going to jump right back into number two, then. All right, again, if there's any questions, after I do these four things, we'll address any questions. Number two thing that we're really focusing on this year, and this one's. This is the bulk of what I'm going to be talking about today as far as what we're doing next year. And that is what I call the call to quote strategy. So in, you know, whether it be when I'm doing consulting or the course, whatever it is, we. I have specific strategies for certain things. You know, we have the Gift card strategy, you know, referrals, warm lead strategy and what is the sequence for sending stuff to them? This is the call to quote strategy. It's something that I think is really important for us to start getting. We gotta wrap our heads around technology and how it's taking over. So I really think people buy, people buy things for three reasons. Number one, they buy it for price. Number two, they buy it for speed. And number three, they buy it for trust. Okay, so Amazon has really perfected price and speed because that, you know, the two day shipping is, was revolutionary. They really work on getting price down, stuff like that, Walmart, they focus on price. But like if you're thinking about trust, that third one you're going to go to like someone local, someone you know, like and, or like that you have a referral from. And so we've got the trust that part put down pretty good with our, you know, whether it be referrals or the marketing piece, the branding that we do, the quality and communication, professionalism, that's all good. We need to start focusing on a lot of us as landscape business owners on speed and price. Price is one thing. I'm not going to play with price, I'm not going to try to become the lowest price in our market. I want to stay a premium price, but I can affect is speed. And so when I talk about speed I'm talking about how not how fast you mow someone's lawn, but how fast do you get estimates out to people, how fast do you get their invoices out to them, how fast do you take a lead, set up an estimate, get that estimate completed, written out, sent back to them, them accepted jobs set up and scheduled like that, we want to take that and just take time out of the equation. When someone's coming to your business and they're trying in their mind to determine whether or not they are going to buy from you. One of the components is time. They have cost and.

The mental strain of trying to work with a contractor. There's all a part of the equation and a big part of that though is time, the time it's going to take them to do the work with you. And so I want to take time out of the equation. I want it to be about my, obviously my price, most people are somewhat considering that, but more about my quality and the value that I am offering. And so I try to price completely out of the equation. I mean not price time, try to take time out of the equation. So what I'm trying to do this year and what we're trying to focus on is try to take that time out equation by when someone calls, they can get an estimate over the phone. This isn't new or revolutionary or anything like that. There are several companies that do this, mostly larger companies. And what I'm doing is trying to focus on how can bring this to the everyday landscaper. Someone that's only doing 10, 20 grand a month can make this a reality. So what we do essentially I'm going to kind of go over the whole strategy as far as the call to quote and it's also text to quote. So that's the two different things that we're doing. This is the biggest part of what we're doing next year. What we're focusing on is the call to quote strategy and the text to quote strategy. And so the call to quote strategy, essentially you can call our office, you can within five minutes, maximum of five minutes, you can be set up on a mowing schedule and have a price be set up on schedule and know the next date that they're coming out to serve you. How we do that is essentially using our software that basically we're using our gps. We have now a price rate matrix for square footage. We take that that square footage price, we put it into our system, it pumps out the numbers that need to be for weekly and bi weekly and one time mo prices and then we can give it over the phone close. Get a credit card number on file to automatically charge them, put them on autopay and it's all gold, good to go. So that's the first thing is you know, our call to quote strategy. The big thing because what most people do is they go send an estimator out, you go out and you send an estimate out there and you look at the property, it may take you 20, 30 minutes because you got to drive there, talk to the person, walk around their lawn, when really within two seconds of being there, you already know the price for mowing. And see some people are like, well it's not personable. Or another one is I don't get to see their property. It's amazing. If you take time out of the equation, it really puts the onus on professionalism. They're wowed kind of by the fact that you're able to do that. Sometimes you have to explain like how we're actually doing it using GPS and using square footage price. And yes, it takes some work. It takes creating a matrix of what you're currently charging on for dollars versus square footage. So essentially you do have to go for right now, to convert from doing estimates to doing over the phone, you essentially got to take an Excel spreadsheet, put your price versus square footage, find a linear path, and then along that path, create a standardized price for each category of a square footage. So for instance, for us, it's like anything under 3000 square feet is a certain price. From 3000 to 4000 is a different price. From 4000 to 5000, different price. From 5000 to 8000 is a different price. And it kind of goes up, right? Like obviously there's a conduit to scale this or as the, as the lawn gets bigger, they do get a better price per square foot. So that one's. We can go deeper into that if you want to know how to do that square footage thing and figure that out. But essentially that was what we're doing with the call, the call, the quote strategy. The next thing that we're doing is really kind of totally new. I've never heard of anyone doing it. And we're really going to be testing out hard. And then obviously I give it all, you know, the, you guys will hear about this stuff. And that is the call, not the call to quote, but the text to quote strategy. Now what people can do is essentially how you, most of you signed up for this webinar is you texted 442221 word and essentially got you signed up for this webinar. Now what we're going to be doing is we are going to be having, where people can text one word to us and it'll get them set up on a sequence to get them set up on mowing. We will never have to talk to them, we will never have to call them even. We can get everything set up now over texting. And so what we're trying to do is make this as convenient as possible for people. It's an easy way to market, whether be on your website if you use radio, or if you're putting on your business cards or if you are putting on your trucks. That's what we're doing. We're gonna have a massive sign. Well, massive. It's 8ft by 5ft out next to the busy road that our second shop is on. It's gonna be average saying, all it says is, I should have brought a picture of it. But all it says is, want a free estimate. Question mark. Text landscaping or Lawn Care to 44222. That's all it says. Now all they have to do is text the word lawn care or landscaping and it's going to put them in a sequence. If they text lawn care, this is what it's going to do. So I'm actually going to take you through the entire example of this text quote strategy. And like I said, this is just the, you know, the second thing that we're doing for next year. We're going to get through more. So if this doesn't relate to you, you don't think you can do this. We're going to get to more stuff, I promise. But this text to quote strategy is, I think, going to be a game changer. So all they have to do, they're going to see it on our trucks, they're going to see a sign that they want to estimate. All they need to do is text this number. So I'm going to text right now. I'm going to text 44222. And all I'm going to do is I'm going to type in one word. I'm going to send a text with lawn care, one word. As you guys know who signed up, you have to do no space in between. So all it says right now is lawn care. I'll see if I can show that to you. I'm just texting one word, lawn care. I'm gonna go ahead and send that. And right now the office is actually getting a lead. So they just got a lead. I just got a text back from. It's all automated, but the office has already got a lead. Right now they're probably trying to figure out what's going on because it's me. But this is what it comes back to me as. It says, hello, please reply with a text containing only your email address so we can send your lawn care estimate asap. Thank you, Augusta Lawn Care Services. Now, what I do is I put my email address in. It's going to send the lead now to the office. The office, because they were texting us. See, this is the thing a lot of people do. They get a contact from email and they try to call the client. I really try to. If you're really fast on the quote, if you're fast on the estimate, if you get the email in, they're on their email, respond back with email. If they're calling you obviously use a phone. If they leave a message via voicemail, don't email them back. You know, call them back. So I really want to keep them on their cell phone and because so instant, as soon as they send that, they're getting that text back. As soon as they put their email in, we're Getting a lead notification. As soon as we get their information, this is what we do. We pull up this other app. So we don't use our cell phones for texting. We use this other app called Text Free. It gives us a local number that we can text from and then I can essentially text them using the number that they just gave us from that lead, that lead that came in through the email. So the email sends to us immediately. We have their cell phone and their email address. That email address we can always market to them later on down the road. So even if they don't get back to us or they don't accept, we can always send marketing mails down, down the road. That, that cell phone. On the summer cell phone number though, I am going to pick up. I am going to use our, our app whether. No, I'm not going to the office manager, the office assistant, they are going to have their iPad there that they have at the office. They're going to use that. They're going to be in contact. They're going to be right away asking to get them set up for a lawn care schedule or for a landscaping estimate. So if you type one word landscaping, it does a different sequence. It has a different wording to it. Now I'm going to show you what the word tracks are for our office assistants when they get these leads. So I'm going to go ahead and pull this up. I'm going to share you my screen with you in just a second. I'll get to some questions, but I want to share with you the word tracks that I have right now for our office.

So in here, these are some of the. This is a little bit old. We've been working on this past few days. It's a seven page document. These are some of the things that the office is going to go through. I'm going to go down to the very number five down here, which is text estimate protocol for lawn care. We've changed a touch in the past 24 hours, some of the verbiage, but essentially you can see here we receive a lead coming in from LeadPages. I don't know if you can see my cursor or not, but then we open up the text free app, which is the name of the app we're using. And then we text them this. They essentially just copy and paste this. In this part here, it says hello, this is office assistant name from Augusta Lawn Care. If you text your name and physical address, I can create a mowing estimate for you. I can use our satellite GPS technology and get pricing to you in just a few minutes. So then all they have to do is respond back with their address and we're good to go. We can create a mowing estimate using our price matrix because we can use the gps, get on the address, get the square footage, use our price to make and just a couple minutes going to create them a mowing estimate. We then text them back with that mowing estimate for weekly and bi weekly prices. So it's going to say client name. Here are the costs for mowing and edging your property. Weekly, bi weekly prices. We service your neighborhood on X and Y day. So with your approval I can get your first service on the schedule. Just let me know if you prefer weekly or bi weekly. Let me explain every week service. I will then email you your confirmation email. So the reason we did this and kind of made this a little bit of a longer text is I wanted this to be the close. I didn't want to like present. I didn't want to send this as one text. And then they ask questions about this, you know, about the, you know, when do we service. And then I gotta like figure out if they went weekly or bi weekly and then close. Right. So we did in this one text. They're getting a lot of information. They might have some more questions that fine, but I'm going right for the close over the text. I don't want it to be a long back and forth. I want to be quick. They are texting us. We are trying to take time out of the equation. So the office assistant, if the estimate is accepted, if they're like, yep, great, that's good. Over text. Again, like this is all via text. The office manager. So essentially this is all from. For the office assistant, we made this word check for our office assistants. So if it's accepted, if the estimate is accepted, they're going to notify their manager, the office manager of the client's name, mowing frequency, schedule and any specific job notes. Things like make sure the dates are locked because the dogs or other things that the client might have mentioned via text. They're gonna notify the office manager. The office manager is gonna get that schedule that on the schedule, their recurring visits. The office manager is gonna send them a welcome email with upsell to the treatment package. This is all automated, that treatment package using our standardizing pricing sheet. Like if you're in the course, you know what that is all about. Using that pricing sheet, they just can quickly make that treatment package for either four times a year or nine times a year treatment package. And that way the person can quickly click on there and get set up for treatments. The office assistant is also going to then follow up with this other stuff. And so I'm going to get into this in just a second, but the office assistant is going to send an intro packet, I'll show you that in just a second. And a handwritten thank you letter which I will also show you in just a second and I'll show you. That's part of our, another one of our marketing strategies in 2018 if ignored. So if for instance, they send the estimate via text, it's ignored, we never hear back from them or, or they say no, that's too much money or I'm just going to have my son do it or whatever. If it's rejected, they're going to send a thank you in the mail handwritten and an introduction packet. If they, I mean sorry, if they're rejected or undecided. If they are rejected, they would stop here and we just kind of stop at sending the thank you letter. And then they would obviously go into the email sequence of leads that we send to people for fall cleanups and things like that. However, if they are just undecided, they never get back to us. Or they say I got to talk to my wife, contact my husband or whatever. Then we're going to create a follow up to do to ask them if they got their estimate and offer a date in that to try to close them again. And we'll do that via text since that's the via the medium that they contacted us via. And then we'll create a follow up to do for an email in 72 hours if they still got back to us. So there's other things in here we can get into if you have questions about it. But same thing, whoops, sorry with landscaping. Very similar setting up that estimate with the estimator. But yeah. So if you have any questions before we go into number three, number four, what we're doing next year, if you have any questions on the call to quote.

Hit it up in the chat room right now. We've been about 30 minutes. So do ask me a question if you have any questions. Whoops. My webcam. There it is. Hi. So go ahead and ask a question in the text box if you want to get a drink of water. We're going to be about 30 seconds if we don't have any questions and we'll move on to number three and four and keep motoring along here.

I got to get some Water. But any questions on the call to quote the text to quote or our gift card strategy, let me know right now because I don't want to backtrack too much when we get further down in the. In the webinar. So Michael asked, will this be posted online later? Own people that are registered will be able to get this.

This video. And so you'll get that replay in about five hours. The audio I am recording also. So parts of that you could also get to from the podcast. I'll cut out some of this, like, this stuff. I'm not going to share on the podcast. The text to quote stuff simply because, number one, we haven't completely proven it yet. I think it's gonna be like Nathan says, revolutionary. I think it's a game changer. No one else does this in our market and I don't know of anyone else because this is the thing. You can put this all over your. Your, your stuff. You can put it on your, your. On the back of your. Of your business card. Have the two lines text, four text those two words to 44222 and you're good. You know, you can put it on signage. You can put on your trucks, your trailers. The back of your trailer is a massive sign. You can put that on there. So here's a couple questions. How and when do you hand out the gift cards? So let me go ahead and I'm going to broadcast the ones that I'm talking about here. So you can. Now, you should be able to see if you're in the chat room now which question I am talking about. So Chance asks, how and when do you hand out the gift cards? So I wouldn't hand these out. I would hand these out to only warm leads. So either you're going to send them in the mail to people that are close to your existing clients, like we're doing, or to people that you know are warm leads. That's what I would be using this for. Obviously, if you want to giveaways and things like that, it's kind of cool. It's a really nice gift card they can come in and use. So that's who I would be giving that to. Chance, Nate asks, what's the software for Call to quote and text to quote. Okay, so Nate, we use leadpages. Leadpages is not cheap. There are other options out there. We usually pages in part because I also use it for the course, obviously. So, like what you guys texted a lot of you to sign up for. This was also for 4,222. You get a sermon on what's called the digits. You pay a monthly subscription fee. It's a little bit expensive. There's other options out there. I would just search around on Google. There's a whole bunch of them. I'm sure some of them you pay by how many people actually use it. Some of it are more like subscriptions, like leadpages. I use it a ton for webinars for the franchisees have started to use it. The ones that are interested in that, they text. I think Mike Andy's one word to 4422 and they get information from us and I contact them about franchising in next year. I use it for consulting stuff. If people want to do calls with the podcast of my sponsors, sponsors have started to use it. So I use it a lot. So I use LeadPages. That's what I do. LeadPages.net is what I use. Nate, James, what happens if you get to the property for the first time in the trainer turf? Ah, this is, this is the question. This is the question.

Yes. So James Ryan, yourself. All right, so this is the thing.

This is what it comes down to training your people. So our office assistants are taking all these calls tomorrow, Friday and Saturday of this week. We are spending two entire days, two entire days paying all our people in the office and training them on just that seven page document. The different scenarios that they're going to get as far as calls, the exact word tracks of how to handle those calls, what, when, now, the reason that comes into play, James and Nate or Ryan, about James, your question about what happens if you get to the property for the first time and the train or turf length is not what you expected. Okay, so there's. This is when you got to empower your people. We got to train them very well to be listening to the client for indications of things like really high turf. If the person.

Said, usually you can over the phone, if you're doing this sort of thing, the persons are saying to him like, I haven't mowed it in ages or it's really long. Then we have a certain sequence. And if you, I don't know if you saw in that quote, word, quote thing there's asterisks, the word tracks. I'm sorry, there was some asterisks and it has to do with length of the lawn. If you hear things like this is what we're teaching our people. If you hear things like I haven't mowed my lawn a long time, it's very long. We just moved in and have, we haven't got our mower. There's certain things you can listen for and know if the turf length is gonna be long. The next thing is you talked about the terrain. So a lot of times we know the terrain because our people are local. However, you're getting a GPS version that's above right. So you can't see ditches, you can't see things like that. So you're also listening for the customers. This is what you got to train your people. And this is the hard part. And this is why so many people don't go to the call the tech, the call or text quote strategy is they think about this part and that is if there are ditches or if there's gates, the gates you can see they you but it's the same thing. You got to listen for it. If they start mentioning their dogs and wanting, making sure they emphasize so much that they need. You need the gates closed. What we've done is we've allowed our people to go up one bracket of price or down one bracket of price. So essentially just by listening, if the, if the, if the, if the square footage for instance, is exactly square and they know it's. It's basically park and mo mo back and forth and so hedge around the edges and it's just one square. No, nothing like, no, no, a lot of edging trees, obstacles, etc. Then they're allowed to go down one price notch. Excuse me, they're allowed to go to one price notch. So instead of charging for a 2 to 3,000 square foot lawn, they're going to charge for a 1500 square foot to a 2000 square foot lawn. They can go down one category. Now they can go up one category. If they hear things like there's gates, there's dogs.

They ask, they need a key to get in the back gate. There's other whole list of things that they're listening for. A big thing is someone that has a ditch will a lot of times they make sure the guys get the ditch. Because we'll ask them once we've closed, once we've closed, we'll ask them, is there specific job notes you want to have on your visit? And they say things like ditches, they mention ditches. Or if they mentioned a lot of trees that we can't see, maybe, or whatever it is. We're just listening. We're listening. And keep in mind they know that you haven't seen the property. So if it's way out of like it's if it's. If you're. If you estimate it and it's like a tenth of what it should be, because for some reason there's like mountains in their yard or something, or there's a bunch of cars parked on the grass, and the GPS map version, you just saw empty yard.

Then they would. Then you would just ask for a higher price. And if they're not going to be reasonable and understand why the price needs to change, that's not the type of client you want anyways. So the type of client that you're gonna get with the phone call and I mean the phone to quote and the text to quote strategy, that's the type of person you want. The person that is worried about time, they're trying to save time. They're on their phone. They're. They're tech savvy. They're gonna give you a credit card to keep on file. Those are the type of clients you want because they're also gonna. Guess what. They're gonna text you when they want to leaf cleanup. They're gonna text you when they want a tree moved or trimmed. Like, it's just the type of client you want. It goes back to why. Why all leads are not created equal is the fact that someone that is using their phone like that and texting us and wanting to set up an estimate quickly and it's scheduled is the type of client we want. So hopefully that helped. Chris, ask, where did you have the gift cards made? It's from a company called Duracard. D U R A C A R D dot com, I believe, but just type in Duracard. But there's lots of other companies that make gift cards. There's probably companies that make them cheaper than what we got. But my main thing is to make them nice, make them like a real tangible gift card. Like plastic. No, cheap paper. Not a gift certificate that's handwritten. Like, make it look pretty professional. It's decent. It's not great. We'll get better. Promise. But that's that. I can see the video and iPad. Any quick thoughts? Use phone for video and iPad for chat. Sorry, Matt. Yeah, you'll want to be on desktop if at all possible. Vladimir, once they agree to service, how do you deal with payment? So we. We have two different things. If they're over the phone, we will take their credit card information and set them up for auto pay. If they are here, I'll broadcast this message. If they are via texting, we're not going to ask them for their credit card information. Just for safety and for their privacy. We aren't going to ask them for that, but we are going to do is in the confirmation email send them a link to their customer profile where they can put their card information in if they want or they can give us a call at the office and set up their card information there as well. Randy asks, you also have to be careful if the photo from the GPS is far out of date as if as it may have added more square footage or added a gate within the past few months that some equipment did not fit through. Just a few things I ran into. Yes, Randy, you are correct. If you are working with old three, four year old GPS things, I'd say 10 to 15% of our estimates. We're still going to have to send an estimator out to because of that. Especially if you're working in the area with lots of new developments. Okay, last question here and we'll move on. Vladimir, do you need them to sign something for auto pay you actually send them? We send them a thing that is goes through bluepay and they have to enter in their own information. Otherwise over the phone we take their card information and encrypt. It's all encrypted in their profile so they can see that, they can see in their customer profile and they can enter that information in and it's all encrypted in front of them. So that's how we do that. We get around that. So I'm helping out of the, out of the chat box here chat room and I am going to jump right into number three thing that we're doing next year and we can go back all your questions at Q and A. We'll get to all of them if you have more.

Number three. So is this good for, is this helping anybody? Is this like I know for some of you that's kind of not going to work next year. You're like, that's, I'm not there yet. I totally understand. But this is, I want people to start thinking ahead of the game. Like we're starting to think about robot mowers. We're starting to think, I think those things are a little bit out. I think they're five, 10 years from actually taking place. But we're starting to think about drones for estimates and like how do we use technology to take number one time and number two price out of the equation. And so I'm hoping this is helping some of you guys if at very least just to think ahead of the game, ahead of where you're at right now. So here we go. Number three, strategy, marketing strategy that we are using next year is, you know, everyone talks about the labor problem, not finding good people. And that's a massive part of growing a business, is finding the right people. Especially in our industry, it's labor intensive and just tough to find good people that want to work hard, that show up on time. So one of the things we're going to be doing this year is really focusing hardcore on. Sorry, I just got distracted because I saw. Reducing customer friction. Nathan, that's the key right there. You want to take all friction out of a sale. All friction. And we'll get into more of that in just a second. But number three is what we're gonna be doing is we're trying to. We're trying to focus on really hiring people that are already cut out for the type of work we do. I think a lot of times landscaping business owners are marketing for people in the wrong spots. And some of you are like, well, why this is about marketing? Why are we talking about hiring? Because I truly believe to get good people, it's just like getting good clients. There's certain places to get the right people. There's certain places. Sorry, there's certain places you want to advertise to get the right type of clients. There's certain places you want to advertise to get the right type of people on your team. And so what we're going to be doing is we're trying to going after military and people in the reserves. So these are young guys, 24, 25 years old, coming out of the military. They might have already got a college degree. They already know about loyalty, work ethic. They've gone through, whether it be Navy or army, whatever it is. And they're coming out, they're trying to find work, they're trying to find a place of identity. Our culture fits a lot with the things that they have been through for the past four or five years. And it's a culture that rewards a lot of the things that they have been working on for the past four or five years. And so the leadership skills that they've been developing, all of those things, we can use those. So the reason I went so hardcore in this is my main man out in the field now, and he is in the reserve. He still is. And it's a little bit tough dealing with their scheduling. They got to go once a month to drill, and then once a year they go for like three or four weeks for training. And so it's a little Bit difficult as far as scheduling, but it's totally worth it. And so we're really focusing on that. We have a Navy base about 30, 40 minutes from where our shop to. Well, our second shop is like, maybe 20 minutes away. Our first shop is maybe like 45 minutes away from a Navy base where a lot of these guys are coming out. They are coming out of the military, they're going into the reserves, or they're in some sort of transition period. And so what we're gonna do, we're gonna do Facebook targeted marketing in that vicinity or right around that. That. That army base. And then we're also gonna be marketing in our area and targeting people in the reserves in the military. And you can do that all through Facebook ads. And so that's our strategy for finding people next year. We'll see if it works. Last year, we're still doing the career fair thing like I have in the course. And so I'm just talking about the leads to funnel toward that career fair. We're doing two career fairs actually, this year, just because there's so many people interested. And so we got one in, I think it's the second week of February and one in the third or fourth week of February, just because there's a lot of people and we want to be able to mingle with them. So get a really good idea. Because this year, one thing I haven't really talked about on the podcast is I'm taking myself out of the application interviewing process a lot. I'll still be there at every single one. But my office manager and my project manager, they will be in all the interviews. A lot of my guys will be at the career fair. They will be expected to mingle with all the new applicants and kind of get a feel of who they like, who they think would work with the culture. That's all I care about. And so in those interviews with the office manager and the project manager myself, we'll be obviously doing regular interview stuff after the career fair. But, I mean, I'm getting my guys involved a whole lot more in the application process. So that's. That's, you know, the career fair is still a massive part of it. And if you haven't, you know, seen the video in the course or if you haven't heard the podcast on what we did. Essentially, a career fair is all the applicants or people that you usually get from Craigslist or Facebook or your email list or however you're getting leads in for new hires. In getting applicants, you then funnel them towards a Night, a career night, where you get them together, give food, you get your guys there, mingle together. You talk about the pros, why your company is the best thing in the world, and you talk about the cons. You know, you're out working in the cold, you're out in the rain. You try to give them the sad story, the bad story. So you weed out the people that are gonna leave anyways. You tell them that, hey, this isn't just, you know, you're not gonna see results if you're just looking for a summer job. And I tell them, like, I know a lot of business owners, I can get you a summer job if that's what you're looking for. But this isn't the place where you' to succeed. If that's all you're looking for, you will get a job. But the way our compensation is set up is like, the longer you're with us, it actually becomes a really good paying job with benefits and more pay. And we built it that way because we want people to stay with us. And so if you just are here for a summer job, you're never going to get up that ramp and you're not going to see the benefits of that. And so in that career fair, we talk about our history, the company history, you know, different positions, I introduce our guys, some of them will be talking, we have food, like just a lot of fun. And then also it's very, very clear, it's incredible. Career fair. You will almost know who you want to hire just after that career fair. Whether it's one night, two nights, we're doing two this year. But like, if there's 10, 20 people that show up, you will know the three or four that you, you want to hire almost. And then what you do is then you, you interview, you have them all sign up for interview schedules the day or two after and, and you weed through them. So anyways, kind of got off track there. But number three, our third marketing tactic in 2018 is marketing to the right people that we want on our team. Because if we're going to be growing at the rate we want to be growing, and we need to get, you know, four people in February, probably more in a couple more March. It just, you know, it depends obviously on how many sales we're doing, but we definitely need four more people. And so to find those people, you got to have a good inflow of leads. The more leads, the more greater pool of people you can get that are high quality, the better people you can get into your, into Your team. So that's our third thing is that Facebook targeting to military around the military facility there as well as targeting people in the reserves in the military that are between ages 20 to 30 in our local area. And they're going to like our compensation plan too because it integrates well with someone that wants to be have a family. Because we're integrating, you know, medical benefits and life insurance and other things like that into the program as they, as they grow with the company and there's definitely a place for them to grow into and that's appealing to a lot of people that want to start a family. They know there's a place they know they can grow with, they can grow with the company. So that's number three. Number four is our snail mail follow up strategy. So I got some examples here of some of the stuff we do. And so our snail mail is in. So some people would say, well how is that a marketing strategy? I really think it's overlooked. People getting mail emails, they will quickly glance through it and they're getting so many. There's lots of spam, obviously there's spam in the mail as well. So what you can do though is stand out with handwritten things, things that are customized for them and not just make it like every door, direct mail or a piece that goes out to. We have, we have had where we, we send out 400 pieces of mail that is actually not really specific for each person. But people will respond back to us thinking that like we specifically made that, that letter for them. And so what you want to do when it comes to this snail mail, what makes it, the people that actually succeed using it for the people that won't are the ones that make the mail pieces like the creative is the variable of success as Gary Vaynerchuk says, because you've got to make sure it is personalized and it's not going to be thrown away with all the other junk mail they're getting. So our follow up strategy, our snail mail follow up strategy is, is initiated by the office staff as soon as a lead comes in. So whether it be they're calling in so and they do a call to quote strategy for mowing or they call in for an estimate.

And they get set up for a landscaper, landscape estimator to come out to their property. Whether it's that or whether like whatever it is, as soon as a lead comes in they are going into our snail mail funnel. So the first thing I'm just going to go through here in sequence. So it's initiated right away. The first thing they're going to get is this little guy right here. So there's two different people that would send this piece of mail and that is number one, the office assistant. If it's coming in via text, email or phone call, the only reason they wouldn't be sending this piece of mail out themselves, office assistant is if they set up an estimate for like a grading job or a big tree trimming job and an estimator has to go out and meet the client. Then the estimator is the one that would make this piece of mail. So this piece of mail is very simple. We put in a five by nine letter inside of here, sorry, letter envelope. Inside of here is really very, very simple. You got a thank you letter. It's just here, sorry, just opens up like that and it's completely blank. Okay. So there's nothing fancy about this. Very cheap. You can get these on Amazon with the letters, envelopes and everything. And then we made this high quality, very nice gloss picture of one of some of our team from last year. That was when we were working on other shop and we got together in front of the office and just took a quick picture. We gotta get this updated with everyone in there, but it looks nice. Everyone was in their uniform, decently clean, so it worked out good. So that goes in there and just says, you know, thank you for doing for your business. In this letter. In this letter is handwritten. We do not print these off. So if the office assistant got a text, a phone call for mowing estimate, set them up wherever, set them up or didn't like if they got a lead at all, they're writing this in, they're going to say their name and then they're going to say we look forward to doing business with you. We can't wait to service you and your property. And then they're going. The key part here is individualizing it, listening for things in the conversation you have with them or the estimator in their conversation when they're at their property. What can you put in here that makes it personalized? So that last sentence in here has got to say something that makes it personal to them. Things like if they just moved in the area, welcome them to the area, welcome to our county, welcome to the city, whatever. If they heard something like their, if you heard like their grandchild just had a great award and that's all they were talking about. The estimate are on the phone or they mention it or they're maybe they're going to San Diego in a week. And they're really looking forward to it. You can hear all that stuff over the phone and during an estimate if you just listen and keep track of it. And so in that last thing, we call it customer intelligence. We keep track of that stuff in their profile so that we can, you know, as you've heard me talk about before, wow them. And we can wow them if we have customer intelligence kept in their profile. But that last sentence on this piece of mail is going to be something personalized to them. You know, hope, you know, hope you have a great time in San Diego. You know, I'm so happy that, you know, the dog got a surgery and is doing better because you saw the dog and they mentioned it and like, whatever it is, make it personal, okay? Now, what's powerful about this piece of mail is if we send it to people, even if. And there's a business card in there, too, sorry, from the estimator or the office assistant, whoever is sending that piece of mail puts their business card in there and they sign it their name. But the reason that that piece of mail is so powerful is because we use something called the assumption close. The assumption close is we assume the close is done and they're going to do business with us. Because we send these to everyone.

Even if they don't accept our service, even if they are thinking about it, we still send this to them and we say thank you for their. Thank you for your business. The reason we do that is we're assuming they're going to accept the bid. We are assuming they're going to do business with us. And it's powerful. And so we don't ask them. We don't say, we hope we can do business with you or anything like that. We're looking forward to doing business with you. We're looking forward to serving you. We already are thanking them. Like the. That fact front of this thing says thank you. We're already assuming that they're doing business with us. And so, you know, we put little stickers on the outside of the envelope that say thank you. Nice gold ones that match this. And so.

That'S the assumption close. That's the first piece of mail that someone's going to get using the assumptive close technique. The next thing we're going to send, and I'm going to get some questions in just a second. The next thing we send, if you're in the. In the. In the. In the course you've seen this before. I'm going to stand back up so you can see this. This is the introduction packet. It's much bigger. It's 8 and a half by 11 and it's nice cardboard.

You know, folder here has our contact info on the back for the main office and email and web address has our logo. Very nice and clean. We're going to be doing making a little bit cooler next year, design wise. But inside it's very professional. We have some of the most important things we need to be telling people here. We got services offered. Hopefully you guys can hear me, okay. We got services offered. We go through all the things that we do. Hopefully you can see that I need update pictures and things like that. But we will get there. We got our most recent client reviews that we update every month or two. So these are in depth ones, the ones that people have said specific things that are more meaningful than just they do a great job, like really cool stuff. And they say specifically we put in there. So this is just a really easy folder. We got this off of VistaPrint, the folder part. And then we get these printed off just locally, but has a nice, you know, two flaps here. You can put papers in behind. And then this is a cutout for the. Your business card down here. So this can come, can come out, this little business card here. Over on this side we have about our company. So I tell the story of how I was mowing lawns from the time I was 11 to go to college and things like that. And then where we're at today with our two locations and what our plans are for the future. I got frequently asked questions in here and that's going to say everything about billing, to our policy on contracts, to what type of standards we hold for our employees, how they will receive their invoices. Just questions that you lot of times would hold up an estimate. We try to address those right away. And so what's going to happen if someone accepts? They're going to get this, they're going to get this in the mail. They're going to get like this lumpy mail. It's like, this is pretty cool. It's a package. It gets delivered to their door. That's kind of cool. It's a couple bucks, like couple bucks for this, couple bucks for the printing, couple bucks for postage. Easily will double your conversion ratio of people that accept your estimates. Definitely worth it. Remember, this is the thing. People are like, well, I wouldn't pay $10 for someone that put in a lead, okay, but you're gonna go spend a thousand on a mailer to a bunch of people that don't know you have never asked for a lead, have never been to your website, have never called you, have never texted you. Like, the people you're sending this to ask for an estimate. They are potential buyers. They are not cold leads. They're not even warm leads. They're hot leads. You've got to be. You got to be pouring money into this stuff. You say, well, this isn't marketing. This is like follow up stuff. Or this is like customer service or quality or branding. No, this is marketing because you haven't. We send these to the people who haven't closed. Like, this is the introduction packet, but we send these to people who don't even have any accepted the bid or haven't even made up their mind. But this will tip them over because no one else is doing this. And especially if we're mailing it to them, they're getting lumpy mail, which we'll get into in a second. There's more to come though. So they get the introduction packet. We. And so let me just look, I'm just making sure I got all this stuff here. And then after the job. So let's say we do the work for them now, assuming that they don't do the work with us. They're going to end up on our mailing list. They're going to end up on our email list that we send out for spring and fall cleanups. And that's a whole nother webinar. How to send those emails like that is important stuff that generates massive amounts of revenue. We can send emails out and fill up our schedule for two weeks. And so that's super powerful when you need to start filling up your crew with work in the winter and things like that. If you have a good creative email. Creative email that is going out to your lead list of thousands of people as your business grows. Like you can fill your schedule up so quickly with the right offer. An email that looks personable isn't on a mailing list like mailchimp. Like there's this powerful. Anyways, if they do accept our job, we got these print off at Shutterfly. This is a nice card stock, by the way. This isn't like cheap paper. All of these things are nice quality. Like even the fly. Even these pieces of paper inside the introduction packet. This is not just regular paper. That's nice shiny, not cardstock, but just underneath that, this is really thick cardstock cardboard kind of stuff. It's from Shutterfly and it just has a picture. It's very small. But it has a picture of our. Not very small, it's four by eight, has a picture of our team again on the front. But it's actually on the card it says, thank you, we appreciate your business. Inside it says, so this is also a referral thing, strategy for us. We are sending these people we've done work for. They obviously like our quality work. They like stuff we do. Says know of anyone that could use our services. Here are a couple business cards. We love referrals. Sets at the bottom, but right here is all empty because we're going to do a handwritten note again and personalize things and wow people with the way that we do customer service. So we're going to follow up with them, obviously trying to get referrals with a couple of business cards in here. We're going to make a note, something specific about their job that they liked or something that happened. And then everyone that was on the job is going to sign this piece of paper or this card. Sorry, they are going to sign their signature on here. And so if it's, you know, five people on the job, the office puts these out on the, on the desk in the morning at once a week. And then people that were on those jobs just quickly sign them and we send this back to the customer. Has some nice things about them. Referral strategy and the signatures of all the people that they met at their property. So that's, that's the mail strategy. So that's, that's the last thing that we do for as far as the snail mail strategy is during Thanksgiving. I should have brought one of those too. We have another card that we sent. It's a little bit bigger. It really kind of is like those letters that you get once a year from your friends and family that kind of give an update on everyone in the family. We kind of do the same thing. We tell them what the business has done in the past year, what the growth is, people that have come on, interesting stories that happen to our people. We make a nice card, like a bigger one, and it has what we're doing, what we're up to, and then we thank them really, really genuinely for doing business with us and that it's really all about them. Without them, all, the success wouldn't be possible. And we bring them to the inside our company, share the things with them, whether it be numbers or whether it be, you know, telling them what we're doing next year. We try to do that in that Thanksgiving card. I like Thanksgiving because they're not quite yet overloaded. For Christmas at Christmas then we would. The one thing that we do, another thing is we do for the mail is we send lumpy mail. And that is high value actual like whether it be a sweater or a hat or a coat with our logo or even just a gift gift package to high value clients. So these are not just your mowing clients that you do $20 a week. These are people that you've done 30, $40,000 landsc jobs or contractors or property managers that are giving you 50 plus thousand dollars a year in revenue in business. You would send them some sort of gift package or something that's actually a really good value and try to really create that relationship more with them. So those are the four things that I wanted to talk about. I've been an hour and that's kind of the meat of what we want to talk about because we're now we're going to go through this stuff and this is probably the most important part is your strategy. We'll talk about my strategy, what we're doing, but now let's go through yours. Before we do that, if you have any questions, any questions on what we just talked about Facebook targeting for your people and getting people in general and then the snail mail follow up stuff, all this stuff I've been showing you, any questions on this stuff that we just talked about? We'll get to general Q and a in just a second. But is there any general questions on this stuff that I've showed you in the past few minutes? We'll jump those questions. Get a some water and get a pen because you're gonna need it when we start filling this bad boy out. So get this out, get some water. And if you have any questions on what we just covered, let's go ahead and put those in the chat room.

But if you do have it, make sure you send these bad boys out. I would get these bad boys out. Don't send these anywhere. Just get them right now. If you have it right now, this is what you want to be using. I'll use this as an example. And if you don't have this and you want to fill it out later, go in your email that you've just gotten in the past couple hours and it will have a link to print this off. So John says we send packets like that too, but only to new clients. Good suggestion, John. Yeah, we made the transition to going from everyone that got were new customers that really that's where the term introduction packet came from. But then.

I was like, why don't we do that to the people that are warm leads already. They've already asked for an estimate. Like they're, there's like you could spend $10, 15, $20 on new leads, but if you can double the conversion ratio, it's a hands down the best marketing strategy as far as the best bang for your buck once people call you. I'm amazed how much people will spend on marketing to new people. New people have never heard about them and yet they won't spend, you know, some money on some printing some card stock or giving a gift card to leads that are coming in. So James asked, what is your marketing budget for all this? So we're getting to that. In just a second. We're going to be going through this bad boy, getting your budget for all of this.

And talking about too, that really, if you don't have a budget at all, a lot of the stuff you can get done, if you don't have money, you have time. And if you don't have time, then you gotta have to pay for it. And so if you're doing things like mailers and things like that, obviously you have money. You don't have the time to go knock on door to door. You don't have the time to go out and network or go talk to business owners or go talk to property managers because we're going to get into this stuff in just a second. But we'll get into all about your budget for your marketing here on this piece of paper. So let me take a drink of water. If there's no more questions, we will jump right into the packet and get started here on your plan and goals and budget for 2018.

All right, here we go.

Okay, so pull this bad boy out. So we're gonna go ahead and fill in page number one of your workbook.

So on the top there you have what is your gross revenue target for 2016? If you can just, if you want to just randomly throw a number in there, if you already thought about this, go ahead and put it in right there.

This is the part that most people don't do is that is they figure out, okay, well, I know what my number is. But then they start, they don't ever think about what's to get to that number. What do you have to do every single month? Let's break it down. Some people go like from the month to the week to the day to the hour and what they got to be making. But I want you to at least go down to the monthly level and you know your market, you know when the swings are, you know, when you make more money, when you don't make as much money. And so you need to figure out what numbers you're going to be hitting each month. So in May, you know, if you're ahead of schedule to reach this number at the end of the year, or if you're not, if you're lagging and you pick up some slack. So you need to know this for every single month. And then obviously this number should, if you add up all of these monthly revenues, it should be equaling that annual revenue that we have up top there. Another thing I suggest is doing a three year projection. So this is for next year, this is for 2018. I'd highly recommend you do them for 2019 and 2020, those annual revenues, not the monthly thing, but just that annual number of what you are going to be trying to hit. Now this is the part that like anyone can just make up a number for next year. That's easy. This is the thing you got to do. And that's got to, you got to get KPIs, you got to get the key performance indicators, the things you got to do to get that number. It's easy to be like, oh, well, last year we did 400 grand and the year before that we did 200,000. So I'm guessing we'll go to 600,000 because we'll have the same growth. It's easy to just like pull numbers out of the air. But how are you gonna get from 400 to 600,000? What's gonna happen? Are you gonna spend money on new equipment or marketing? Are you gonna find new people or you going into a new marketplace or offer new services, you get new equipment. Like what happens? Because it didn't just, the business didn't just show up on your doorstep. It's not like you just double your business just because you gotta figure out every single month. This is what you gotta do. After this webinar, you got to go to every single month and do the KPIs on each month's revenue. Like, okay, we got in in April, we got $120,000 projected and I sure hope we beat these numbers. But 120,000 in May, it's 160,000 in the month. How are we gonna go from 120 to 160? What's gonna, like that's 40 grand. Like, that's, that's a big difference. What's gonna happen? I know that my KPIs. I haven't written my KPIs in here. But I know when we're hiring people, when certain equipment we're planning to buy, when the other shop, the second shop is gonna be kicking the high gear. So I know that these numbers we should like, we better. We better beat these numbers at 1.3. We should be more at 1.5. But like, every single month, you should have two to three KPIs. You know, in January. What's happened in January? Are you snow plowing? Are you gonna focus on tree trimming in February? Are you hiring people when every single week in the, in the spring you should have KPIs. Not every month in the spring. February, March, April, whatever it is around, you're going into that spring season. Every single week, you should have KPIs. So I know that, you know, the second and third week, second and fourth week of February, we're having our career fairs, two different ones. I know that which date we're opening the second shops, the second shop. I know which day we are highlighting certain services to increase business in February. I know the KPIs of every single week during the spring. During the, you know, the rest of the year a month. KPIs for each month is fine. You know, in August, what are we doing in August? Why, you know, our mowing basically goes to nothing. How are we still staying at 140? We're gonna go after zero scaping and we're gonna go after taking lawns out instead of putting them in because it's so hot. And so that's how we're gonna. You gotta get the KPIs that you got to know. How are these numbers gonna happen? Okay, so that's the first thing. And what I want everyone to be filling that out right now. But while you're doing that, I want to put something up here to kind of get an estimate of where everyone's at. If you're in the. And put this up start poll. So if you're in the chat box, you will see a poll that just popped up. It's gonna ask what your annual revenue projection. What's that number that you put right here? I put 1.3. What's the number that you put in there? There's no shame here. Just. And you're not public as far as who. Who says what, by the way, on all these polls that I'm gonna be popping up, where's your number at? And this will give me a little bit of feedback to you when we go into Q and A at the end of the Webinar to where I should be putting giving you guys information.

What is your Target revenue for 2018? Is it under a hundred thousand? Is it between 100,000 and 250,000? Is it between a quarter and half a million? Half a million. A million. Are you over that million dollar marker? Put me in this. Put all your answers in here. Take the this poll real quick. It should be popping up for you. And then we're gonna get into marketing budget. Same thing here in just a second. But I want to see your poll here. So right now it looks like a lot of you are between that $100,000 and $250,000 marker. About 40% of you. And so what that means is a lot of you gets going down now, quite a few people, 250 to 500,000. I think you all should be able to see these results as soon as I click end poll. So I'll click end poll here about two minutes, you'll be able to see this. What's going on right now that I'm watching these charts. But 38% of you are in that hundred to $250,000 marker. That means you have maybe one employee a little bit part timers. You know, 15 to 20% of you are between that 500,000, a million dollar marker. When you have solid employees that are there that you need to now you're really starting to focus on growing a team. So annual revenue projections for 2018, put those in here on the poll if you're in the chat box. And now let's go on to marketing. So again, bottom part of page number one. I'm going to go ahead and end the poll here in 10 seconds. But let's go to the marketing budget. And this is also another time when your spring months should be broken down into weekly. So when you because the spring is where the best bang for your buck is for marketing dollars. And so you want to make sure that your KPIs, your key performance indicators. What you're doing is very, very clear. During the spring months, I'm going to go ahead and end number the poll for number one. So you can go ahead and you can, you should be able to see now what those poll numbers are for everyone. That's on the webinar right now. You can see a lot of us are really still we have, you know, one employee, maybe two part timers. And so we're really trying to get everyone to that million dollar marker. But let's go to here now I'm gonna put another poll up in Just a second. And that is gonna reset this bad boy. Let's go ahead and ask everyone this next question, which is the bottom of your page. You should be down here. Now, what is your budget for 2018? Now, the thing that. This is the thing a budget for marketing is an absolute joke. Okay? So marketing budget is absolute joke. So if you want to wait for just a second before you fill that in, let me say something. Yeah, it's fine. Okay. So if you want to fill in the poll, it just popped up in your sheet. I'm seeing everyone's, you know, numbers coming in. However, a marketing budget is an absolute joke. And the reason for that is, why would you ever. Why would you ever stop spending money on something that is working is beyond me? You say, well, I'm just making. Like, I go to conferences or I talk to people, and they're like, I just have more business than I could ever afford. I don't want to spend any money on marketing. Or I put money into marketing, and it didn't work. Or.

I can only spend a thousand dollars on print marketing. I'm not gonna spend $2,000. It worked great, but I'm not gonna ever spend that much money anymore. If it worked great, why wouldn't you just keep using it? There's really no point in having a budget. It's more about what. How much money are you willing to spend to test out different mediums, figure out which one works, and then just go all in on it? That's what you have to do. So.

In consideration of this bad boy down here at the bottom, what's your market, your budget? So 80% of you are under $10,000. 80% of you are going to be spending under $10,000 on your marketing budget. That's totally cool. The thing is, where's that $10,000 going to be spent? You got to be figuring out, okay, what months of the year should I be spending that money on? I personally, in our business, we spend. We don't spend a whole lot of marketing. Like, as far as Facebook ads, Google AdWords, print marketing, those things we don't spend a whole lot. Like in campaigns, we are focusing more on gift cards, introduction packets. So this is a form of marketing, like I said before, but as far as formal campaigns online and things like that, we don't do a whole lot. But if you're gonna do them, do them when you're gonna get the best bang for your buck in the spring. And then if you have employees, you want to do it late fall to keep People busy during the winter. Okay, so. And you gotta work on your creative. You gotta work on.

The creative of the piece, whether it be postcard or. Or 8 by half by 11. Or if you're doing it on. On Facebook ads, what's the picture say? What does the text say? What does the video say? What's the conversion? Where's the URL going? Like, that's all stuff you gotta figure out. However, where you spend that money is a big indicator of whether or not that money is going to return anything. Okay, so that is down here. And you want to do the same thing. If you're going to spend $2,000 in March because it's right before the mowing season, what's that creative going to be? What venue, what medium are you going to use? So I'm going to go ahead and in 10 seconds bring down this poll of what is your marketing budget in 2018. I'm getting some of this poll information. So at the Q and A, I have a good sense of where everyone is at. So we're going to go ahead and turn the page and I'll end that in just a second, that poll. But up here, now you're going to be talking about what are the three mediums of advertising you plan to use? Which months will you employ them? Okay, so now this might be Facebook ads, this might be Google AdWords. It might be a print marketing campaign. Whatever it is, what are the three mediums you're going to use and what months are you going to use them in? So for us, for our company, we are going to be doing the Facebook strategy for getting those new employees. I'm going to be spending that money in late January because I want them to come to February's career fairs. Okay. Our other strategy that we talked about was the referral marketing. This bad boy right here, I'm going to be sending in March already. Once though the grass has started to grow and people need services, this is when I'm sending the $50 gift card. We were. The call to quote strategy is something that we will spend a little bit of money on in the spring. We will spend a little bit of money on the call to quote call and quote strategy in the spring because we will getting initiated. We might do a little bit of promotion online, but most, most of that cost will be wrapped up in putting signs on trucks as well as signage up on next to the highway that we have our second shop at. So that, that'll be a little bit expense too. So what. Remember, if you go back to these right here you got three strategies. What are the three strategies? Your you are venues for 1, 2 and 3 and then what are the strategies you're gonna use for each? Alright so for us we're using Facebook on number one. On the strategy for number one we're gonna be targeting for employees to try to get them to our career fair. And the strategy for number two we are using the gift card strategy. That's number two. I guess you might call that gift card or referral strategy. What is the strategy? Or sorry, so up here you'd put gift card or you'd put, you know, whatever you're doing there, referrals. Number two, the strategy for number two is sending the gift cards. It is trying to get our route density tighter. It is setting them up on a three piece mailer campaign to follow up with them after they get the gift card to market to those warm leads. The third medium that we're going to be using is the call to quote strategy. And all the call to quote and the text to quote strategy. That's the strategy. How are we going to do that? What's the strategy? We're putting on our trucks or putting on signage and we are training our office staff, excuse me, to make sure that they know how to do that. The snail mail follow up strategy. We are going to be spending that money throughout the year. So if you look back here on our annual, you know, map here, we're going to be sending out introduction packets throughout the year. It's going to correspond basically with how many estimates we're getting that during that month. So we're going to figure out what our printing costs are throughout the month because of introduction packets and pictures and all the other things we send. So those, that's how you would fill in this top part right here. So now I'm gonna put another poll up. We'll get some question, just a second but I want to put one more poll up. And as you can see most of us are spending under $10,000 in a marketing budget. And remember I'm surprised no one put zero there because you can do that. You don't have to spend money. And we're gonna get to in just a second how you don't need to spend money and you can still increase revenues. So I want to know what is your marketing strategy for 2018? I'm throwing up a poll right now. What is your number one marketing strategy for 2018? And this will be important for Q and A again because I will know what some of you are Thinking and what I can give some more information on as far as our success. So go ahead and fill that in. We're on page two now and we are going to talk about two of what I think is two of the most important. Excuse me, two of the most important questions business owners need to ask themselves right here at the bottom of page two. So go ahead and fill that poll. I'll leave that up for about 15, 20 seconds. But I hope you're filling this in right now. Number one, what are two things you could do to immediately increase sales by 25% without any advertising dollars? What are the two things you could do to increase sales without spending any money whatsoever? Okay, these are things like referrals. You could literally go out and knock on every single one of your customers door and ask for referrals. It doesn't take a single penny. Takes time, but it doesn't take any money. What can you do to make more sales? Increase sales by 25%. You're making 500 grand right now. How can you make 625 next year without spending a single dollar on your marketing? Okay, next thing is online reviews. When was the last time you asked for online reviews? You don't need to go out and try to coerce or do things against the law. Like you go talk to your customers, talk to them about their Christmas and you have time right now, go talk to them and ask them what they, you know, what they're doing, blah, blah, chat it up. You might get some sales out of it because they need some trimming done, but you're also going to ask them for an online review. That's something that you can do, doesn't cause a single penny and it generates money. It does generate money. It's really a form of SEO and working on your website, but you don't have to pay for it if you ask for Google Reviews, Facebook reviews, etc. Another thing you do is work on your SEO, work on creating website articles that will drive backlinks to your, to your website, that will increase your search engine optimization and will drive you up in the Google search. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna end this poll here in 10 seconds. If you haven't already, go ahead and click that. It looks like a lot of you are depending on the direct mail or the print. And I don't say depending in a negative or condescending way. It just is that you got to figure out what works and what doesn't. You gotta. Yeah, it's what's the reason people like online marketing so much is you can split, test and figure out very easily what works and what people are clicking on. Direct mail is a little bit tricky. You gotta make sure it's a trigger that people, you know what is working though, whether it be some sort of offer or something that, where, you know, people are using certain mediums of your print marketing to know which one is working, you gotta track all things marketing. You gotta know where the people are coming from. Every single lead, you gotta know where they're coming from. I'm going to end that poll. You can go ahead and see now those numbers of. You can see 69% of people are using direct mail or print as a number one marketing strategy in 2018. Now, the second most important question, in my opinion that business owners need to be asking themselves is what can you do to increase efficiency? What are two things you could do immediately to increase efficiency and profit margins by 10% without cutting employee wages or spending any money? Okay, so you're like, well, I can just cut costs. I'll just. Instead of 10 bucks an hour, they're all getting 9 bucks an hour. I just made 10% extra without doing that, without, without any more money. As far as cash, what are two things you can do immediately to increase efficiency? Not go buy a new mower or buy new trucks. That's more efficient. Not buy the newest and greatest technology because it's more fast. What can you do without spending money and without advertising or without cutting expenses. As far as your employees are concerned, how can you increase efficiency? That's impossible. Here are a few examples I'd consistently be asking yourself and your team, how do you save five minutes on your MO routes? It's incredible how many things your team will come up with if they bought into your culture company and they want you to succeed in there. They know that their success is aligned with the company success. They will. It's amazing how many suggestions you'll get on how to save five minutes on a mowing route. Everything from cutting out fuel ups, for instance, we cut. We tracked this one this year, this past year. We have a guy come in once a week on Saturdays when most the trucks are still in the bay. And he comes and fuels all the trucks. He cleans all the trucks, like does everything to the trucks, all the maintenance, because it's not worth the guys stopping throughout the week. Every single couple days because a crew of two or three on a truck, they stop at a gas station, they spend 20 minutes because they're eating, going to the bathroom, fueling up, blah blah blah on their phone. That 20 minutes times three is an hour. That's an hour of lost time. When I can have one guy go on a Saturday, he can pick up the truck, go fuel it up and in 10 minutes he's back. So that was 10 minutes. 10 minutes of man time versus 60 minutes. And so looking at ways to efficiently reduce time for your guys, reducing your load up and unload time, this comes down to a lot of like organization of your shop. When someone, when a, when a guy is loading up his truck, does he have to stop at five different places around your yard to pick things up or is it already there? Is it organized when he comes to the job site? As far as, okay, for instance us, we have, we have a big shipping container where we store hand tools on the wall on pegboard sprayers and fertilizer organized on shelves and things like that. Then you got the green shade, we have a green metal like shop thing and that has all the hand tools as far as rake, shovels and all that good stuff. Then we got steel weed eater heads and trimmer heads and all of that stuff that's all hanging up on the other side of the wall. It's all organized. They basically have to make two stops in the morning, pick up. If they're doing hand tools and landscaping stuff, it's one of the boxes. The other one is for landscaping and I mean, sorry, lawn care stuff, fertilizers, et cetera. So it's very, very organized and it's all about like literally just the shop organization. The things they use the most are right next to the door. The things like backup equipment is at the very back because you only use it once or twice a year. So you got to figure out like literally 40ft that we save and then walking, that's time. These are ways you can increase your margins by saving cost without making your employees pay for it, without trying to spend a whole bunch of money on getting new equipment. The brightest newest thing in landscape magazine of as far as trucks and things like that.

How can I fishing that money by saving time? And how do I increase my route density? That makes it more cutting out those costs. Important questions I think you could ever ask yourself. What can you do? What are the two things you could do? Immediate.

It would kill if they did not come up with these two things. I somehow think they'd get creative enough to figure it out. I truly believe if you think hard, spend an hour thinking about these and strategizing about these two questions could change your business and it won't cost you anything. Alright, so we're gonna jump into something else. If you have a question right now, everything we just talked about right now, let me know. But we're gonna go ahead and write into being anti fragile in your company. So in about 20 minutes, 15 minutes or so, like 10, 15 minutes. 10 minutes. Let's do 10 minutes. 10 minutes, we'll get to Q and A. So if you have other random questions, we will get right into those. But for the next 10 minutes, I want to talk about antifragile. Creating your, making your business anti fragile. And number two, getting you out of day to day operations for your business and the steps to do that. And it's all in the workbook, if you have that right here. So let me take a drink. We'll get right into antifragile.

Alright, so on the next page is page number three of your workbook. Name two areas of your business that is fragile. So if you listen to the podcast, you already know what fragile means. Essentially, a fragile business can be wiped out easily by something that happens that is not foreseen. An economic collapse happens. A company that is fragile will collapse. The business owner dies or gets hurt, injured, something like that, they are fragile. If their company then gets wiped out because that person gets got hurt or had to get injured. A company that is fragile will not succeed long term because eventually an economy will collapse, someone will get hurt, something happens in your market, a tsunami happens. What are those things, those events that can occur that could wipe your company out and then protect yourself against the downside. So just as an example, what is Augusta, what is our company doing in 2018 to become more antifragile? So we have four things we're working on. Number one is financial. How do we make a company more anti fragile From a financial standpoint, what happened 2008, 2007 to a lot of landscapers, they were over leveraged, had a whole bunch of loans and they got wiped out because they couldn't pay those loans off. When the bank came and draw their line of credit and said, hey, you got to pay us that. They did not have the money, they not have the cash. They were over leveraged. So what are we gonna do in 2018? We're gonna pay off all our loans. We don't have very many loans. They're almost all 0% equipment loans. We're going to pay them all off because if something goes, if you know, the economy goes to hell in a handbasket in 2019, I want to have cash and I will have no expenses of other expenses on there like to go out to loans. I want to have money in the bank that I can expand in the marketplace when everyone else is contracting. Number two is a people fragility or area that you can become fragile in your business. And that is we want to remove people bottlenecks and dependencies. I don't want anyone to be so important or the business to rely on people so much that if they, if something ever happens and if they got hit by a bus, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, the company stops or is hindered or fails. So what we're doing is we're removing bottlenecks. We are creating a very level leadership model as far as it's like basically me, my middle managers as far as the field and the office and then office assistants and people out in the field. So it's very. There's not a lot of layers there because I want people in the field to basically be able to step in for an off a crew manager if something would happen to that crew manager. So that is another way that we are becoming antifragile. Number three, we're getting life insurance policies on key people like your crew managers, your office managers. The reason for that is number one, you can separate the beneficiaries out so it's a benefit for their family. But then also we get money. If something did ever happen, you know, and some people don't like talking about this stuff, but it's just part of life like it happens. And so be prepared, don't be anti fragile. If you die, is the business going to stop if you're, if your number one employee dies like or gets, you know, something happens, God forbid, like if it happens, is the company get wiped out? Are you going to be put out by, you know, put behind a year or two because you don't have that person, that role isn't filled so well, you say, well why, why have the insurance policy? Well, because if I can get a hundred grand I can go out and pay overpay someone that has all the skills and experience and so that the business isn't effective for a year to trying to get caught up on filling that position. So I would go out hire someone for you know, double what they might be needing but they have all the experience, they can overcompensate and have all the skills that are required. So that's number three, we get life insurance, life insurance policies on our key people. Number four, marketing, diversification. We do not focus on one channel only. So Although you heard me say test, test, test, test all the different mediums of Facebook, Google, AdWords, you know, YouTube vlog, SEO, figure out all the channels of marketing and then go all in on one. That's true after you've tested them all out. And the reason for that is because what I find is someone will go so deep on one, forget about everything else and then Facebook changes their algorithm or the cost of Facebook ads triples and all of a sudden their customer acquisition cost is too far up. Google changed their algorithm on SEO and all of a sudden they're obsolete. They went from the first ranking down to the third page like so don't put all your eggs in one basket. But on the other hand, when you find something that works, go all in on it. But continue to test and play around with the other marketing methods because you don't want to be fragile if one of those methods that you're depending on gets knocked out. Okay, I hope that's clear. Whether it be website SEO, your email strategies, mail strategies, whatever it is, stay relevant in the other areas and knowledgeable so that if something does come come about, you're not anti, you aren't fragile on that. You aren't depending so much on that one thing. So let's go ahead and fill in page number three. Fill in number one. Name two areas that your business is fragile. It should say is not if, sorry, name two areas that your business is fragile. And in 2018, what steps I've mentioned the ones that we are doing, what steps will you take to become anti fragile? So you got to know this stuff, you've got to know how you're protecting your company long term. This is the difference between people that are thinking long term and short term. Whether they're thinking about anti fragile are not short term thinkers. Last thing we want to talk about and then we're going to Q and A and that is how do you get out of day to day responsibilities and operations? Look at your, look at your handbook. Let's fill this out together. What is one responsibility you should hand off in 2018? So you as a business owner, what can you hand off that is required right now? Day to day operations, how can you hand that off? What is the one responsibility you need to hand off? So for me this past year it was estimating I need to hand that off. Okay, number two, I'm gonna work through this quickly so we can get Q and A. Who will take on that responsibility and why are they able to. So who in your organization, which employee is going to pick up that responsibility from number one. So for me, when I said last year, I was like, hey, one responsibility I could hand off, I need a handoff is estimating. So I said, number two, okay, my project manager is going to take that responsibility. And the reason I wanted him to is because I knew he had the people skills as well as the leadership skills for our guys, the people skills for the customer, the leadership skills for our crew. He could take the job. Number three, how we, this is key. How will you prepare that person, how we prepare or train them to take that responsibility? So we're still in the training process. He won't be on his own 100% for probably five more months. He's still checking with me as far as estimating and figuring out for the big landscaping jobs. 30, 30, $40,000 landscaping jobs. He's still checking in with me. We're training him on creating the sketches, creating the follow up. You know, these little, these little mailers, how to fill that out correctly for those big jobs, how to follow up with them and get the sales. That's number three. How will you prepare or train them to take on that responsibility? This is now for you as the business owner. Number four, what is the business activity or action or responsibility that stimulates growth in your business? This should be easy. What is the one thing that stimulates growth in your business? What thing that you do in your business generates growth? I have a really good idea for you. It's probably something to do with sales, something with marketing or dealing with customers. One of those three things probably. And a lot of times if you're focusing on sales, that's the driving force of business. Now, I could be wrong. There's company out there that the more the owner gets involved in management because that's their style, that's what they're good at. The more they focus on management, the better the company does. And then they go out and hire someone to do sales. But for most of us as small business owners in this category, what is the activity or action or responsibility you should be taking on? You should be taking on sales, you should be taking on marketing, you should be focusing on growth of the company. Number five, how will you focus more on number four, that thing? So how will you focus more on that action or activity in 2018 and become better at it? And this is gonna lead us in the last part of today's webinar. So how will you focus on that thing? If it's sales, how are you gonna focus on that? What are you gonna Cut out of your schedule, basically. And how are you gonna get better at that thing this coming year? How are you going to get better if it's marketing, if it's sales, if it's customer service that you know you need to focus on in 2018, how are you going to get better at it? That's the last question of the workbook. So that's it for as far as a lot of the what I wanted to teach today. There's one thing I want to share with you guys that's coming up and then we're gonna go right to Q and A. So if you have questions, get them ready. I'm gonna jump into the chat box in just a minute. Before we do though, I want to share with you guys something that we've been doing I haven't talked about on the webinar. I mean, sorry, the podcast and it's already started. It's been going for like probably six months. But I wanted to share something with you guys.

And you might hear me talk about it in the new year sometime on the podcast. It's called Pro plus.

And so I'm gonna go ahead and pull screen share a couple slides with you guys. This will take two seconds and we'll jump right into Q and A. So this new thing is called.

Pro plus is a members group. It is more access. I'm actually going to go. You know what I'm going to do? Actually I'm going to jump to slide number two. Sorry guys, let me go down because I want to show why did you know talk about why I started ProPlus. So number one is there's just a huge amount of people on the on the course. Now, the course that cost 247 that you get from landscapebusinesscourse.com if you haven't got it, you should really get it. However, that doesn't get direct access to me. And so direct access to me is webinars and calls one on ones with me. A lot of people have been asking a lot for that stuff and I'm sorry if you're one of those people, I just can't get to everybody. So the reason is because I've had this Pro plus thing where they do have access to me and they do pay for it. So it's not become greedy. It's because when I'm doing this stuff, I have to be paying people in my organization to be taking the things I would usually be doing. So I do have to make it economically right for me to be spending hours every single day on calls and webinars with Pro plus members. However, so that being said, people that want direct access to me, that's why I started Proplus in that Pro plus group. It's a dedicated group of lawn care business owners. And it's not like you get some stuff from forums, but on lawnsite.com and things. But a lot of times, as you know, there's like leeches on there. People are just looking for someone to complain or to share their 2 cents. That has not been successful. So anyways, that's that. I also started because I wanted to give tactical and specific advice and strategies to grow your business, be held accountable to your goals. And so like once a year we'll be doing a goal thing with, we do a goal thing with the Pro plus. Like if you joined, you would also be able to do that once a year we do the goal thing where we go through the goals. And then I held everyone accountable. And they're one on the one calls as well as in the Facebook group, the private Facebook group that we have there. And then you get a one group, one on one. You get answers from the group as well as one call with me. So I'll go back to page one because this makes more sense. Sorry. So what does Pro plus members group include? This is the last slide. And then we'll get right into Q and A so you get those ready. It's a one monthly live webinar. It's a marketing strategy lecture. So we'll take one strategy every single month and go very hardcore, deep, deep into it. So I mentioned a couple of them today, like the text to call, the gift card strategy and the mail strategy. We'll take one every single month as a group and go very, very deep on it. Walk you through the entire process. And it will be like tactical do xyz. It will not be theoretical. It will not just be like a teaching about marketing. And then each of those webinars will also. We have a Q and A session. The monthly we are doing another webinar. So there's two live webinars. The second one we do, we put one of the members on a hot seat. And basically what we do is I talk with that person before the webinar. We get all of their information as far as numbers, marketing, what they're doing, their website. And then as a group on the live webinar, I essentially interview them. We go through their numbers, we look for ways to improve, we look for holes in their financials, we look for website, how they can improve. How can they improve the SEO? We can look at their cost of number of what their hourly rate is. We did that on the last one was really good. His hourly was too low. And we're figuring out how we can get that higher. We figured out a whole bunch of stuff by looking at financials and then having them live to ask questions, answer questions from the group. And really you get like 30 people that are objectively looking at your business and Google's critique it highly, highly valuable. We do once of those a month as well. So there's two live webinars. There's also you get access to a small private group of people on Facebook. Currently it's about 30 members. That's what I'm keeping it at for now. You got one annual call with me on that phone call. We go through several things. Number one is accountability. I'm holding the goals that we set up in December. So end of December, at the end of each year we do all our goals for the next year. Kind of like what we're doing today, but a little more in depth. And so then I call you specifically, I'm looking at your goals and I'm making sure you're accountable to those. I help you do planning. So those one on one calls are scheduled throughout the whole year. And then also advising like if you have any questions specifically with your business. All 100% confidential. Those are not recorded or shared. It's 100% just you and I. And then also what we just started doing, we had to kick two people out of the Pro plus members because they were too close to other members in their market. So we just gave it to the person who had signed up first. We will no longer allow people within the same county or same proximity to be both on the members plus group. The reason for that is because. Because if you're in the hot seat, you don't want to be thinking about your competitors knowing information. And also it's so that you can get more access things like the text to quote option and more information on that sort of stuff and not have competitors doing the exact same thing or copycatting you. So I'm going through this Fast. There's a $5,000 cash money back guarantee if you do this for a year and you don't make $5,000 extra in your business. And you apply the strategy that we talk about each webinar each every single month and you get in the hot seat and you apply everything that's said. If you can prove that you applied those things and it did not work and you didn't make $5,000. Essentially a 500% return on the thousand dollar annual membership. If you, if you don't, if you can prove that you did everything and it did not work, I will personally give you $5,000 cash because I just 100% know it'll work. I know that it'll double and triple people's businesses because it has already. We've only done it six months and the people are already in it are like we only have dropped the two and I think two other people have left just for whatever reasons. And so people are staying in. The reason that this is down here, the expected wait time is because I'm not opening it up for more than 30 people right now. It's staying at 30 for now. Maybe one day we'll go to 50. But right now if you do want to get on Pro plus you will not get in. So I want to make this very clear because I know people are going to email me and try to get and things like that and people have, however, it's only, I'm keeping it small and only as people leave will we put new people in. Right now if you go to 50, maybe next year then some more people would get in. But right now you're probably going to be waiting several months before you get in. So if you do want to get on the waiting list, just text like it says on the screen there, Pro plus to 44222 and then when a spot comes available I'll let you know. Like right now it will not be, you cannot get in before February or March next year. Like that'd be the earliest.

And so yeah, so that's basically it. I haven't talked about this because what I've been doing is when people ask me a lot for the one on one stuff and they want more access to me, I have just been saying, okay, hey, you can get into the Pro plus, it's this month and you know this much per month or you pay the 999 for the whole year and then that's how the 30 people we've got have, has accumulated. And it's a tight group of people. I would love for this one day to be where we can.

Do an A conference together. If we ever got to the 50 members, I'd probably hate say you know, once a year for you know, in January, our slow season, if we all get together somewhere. So that's going to happen, this will go up. So essentially I want to keep this low and then this will eventually start going up. So the cost right now is 129per month. If you go month to month or it's 999 for one year membership. If you text us to me, I'm not going to be emailing you anything. You're just going to get on the wait list. So if you are texting that to me right now, as I see a couple people already have, as in getting the leads in. Like if you text, if you text this, you will not get in. All right. It's not like I'm saying this because I'm trying to like make scarcity. It's just not. You're not going to get in for a while. February, March, you might be getting in and maybe middle of next year, I might increase it to 50 people. So, so that's that. That's enough said about Proplus. If you have questions, let me know. But right now, really, it's full. I'm not really trying to get more people, but if you want to be on the waiting list, text that number. And I'm guessing by February, March, the people, like, based upon what's going on right now, some of the people from today's will probably be able to get in like by spring of next year. So I'm going to turn my screen, share.

Answers. Here we go. I'm jumping in the chat box. If you have your questions, go ahead and ask me those. I am going to throw up one more poll and that poll is going to be this question. What is your number one hurdle for growing your company in 2018? Gonna throw that up there. Yeah. So several of you have already texted the pro plus one word to 44222. Again, let me be very clear. It is not. You are not going to get an email back from me or anything like that. It's just your waiting list. And I'm guessing by February, March, you'll get in. Like I said, you're not getting in right away. You will not have access to next month's webinar. You cannot get in early. You cannot pay more to get in. It's just the way it is. So Q and A. Here we go. I'm jumping into the chat room. Thank you everyone for answering the poll as it's already turning out 56% jumping now. Finding good people seems to be a big hurdle for everyone. Then the next one is getting more sales and leads.

Getting people is important. So I'm gonna end this poll in 10 seconds and we're jumping into Q and A. Okay, how we are currently doing lease option buying property in town we love. Okay, questions are already coming in. Good. Get your questions ready. I am going to be here for at least until you have all your questions answered. So finding good people. Here we go. We're going to end this poll now. You can see the quest, the answers to that. Oops, sorry, people are still submitting. Sorry if I locked you out there. But you can see finding good people is a massive part a hurdle of 2018. Those 17% of you that said the other I want to know what those things are in the Q and A. What can I help you with and or at least share my experiences of what we've done with our business. So.

Excuse me.

Jessica asked a question. I'm going to go ahead and broadcast this. Hi. We are currently doing a lease with an option to buy on a property. We'll be able to have a retail location here. However, we don't have much money saved up to get equipment and material needed. Should we go into debt for it or hold off on to do the retail location? Let me think, let me see here. We are currently doing a lease with an option to buy on a property in our town. We will be able to have a retail. Okay, so Jessica, I don't know if you're in the in the course or not, but module number six of Denscource.com.

Module six talks about this. You've probably already listened to that based upon your question. So where 2019 I would hold off until. Because the service out of business is always going to be we're money maker. So don't abandon that to start the retail. You start the retail when you have enough money so that you can, you can attract more leads to the retail side which would then complement the server side where there's a money. That's where the money's at. Okay, to be very clear, services. And some people got confused about this on the course because we do retail like delivery of materials and things. But it's literally, it's literally like 15% of our company's revenue. 15 to 20%. 20%. It'll be a little bit more like 23% probably next year because the second shop. But like that's the small part of revenue compared to the service side and the service side where all the margins at and that's where the growth is at too. So don't make yourself, don't jeopardize the service side of your business and not have any money for marketing or hiring people or getting new equipment because you Went out and bought expensive land or spent a whole. Because you can spend hundreds of thousand dollars on an office nice retail location building up a shop like you can get really, really expensive. For our franchising model that we're using for Augusta, we are essentially making work for under 100 grand. You have your whole shop set up and includes an office. Includes grading the entire location the blocks for your materials. Like so we kind of got down to the science. I wouldn't be spending anything close to that. If you're just starting out as far as just testing the retail. Don't jeopardize bottom line, Jessica. Don't jeopardize your service I your business or the money's at in order to make the retail side. So if you are doing a lease to buy, that's awesome. Just keep in mind you don't want to jeopardize the service I business by focusing too much on the retail. Hopefully. Hopefully. I answered your question on the course. Do you still buy Lawn Pro for students? Nate? So this is a recent development. The past couple months we stopped selling are giving away Long Pro for the course students. So the difference between kind of Nate was asking is like the course versus Pro plus. So the course you get static information that I update, you know, as it comes in. But it's not like live webinars calls with me. There's no group right now for Facebook. And so that stuff is static. Like the six modules, all the the documents that we use. And I just put up a new one which by the way, if you're in the course, you need to make sure you check out the new document I just put up there. It's a 32 page manual for your employees that is compliant with the law and it allows you to change your states for things like sexual harassment, things like for how to. It's an employee manual essentially that you can give to your people. They'll know all your policies procedures is completely compliant. So in Lawn. So essentially no, we don't give Lawn Pro anymore. Away with the course. Excuse me. You got the six modules of videos. You get all the audio content that I record at seminars that I'm going to. For instance, in January we are sending a RLR managers to a seminar. We're going to record that audio. It goes on the course. New documentation like the employee handbook, the safety manual that we uploaded, all of that stuff still gets put on the course. But you don't get the live stuff with me. You don't get the calls with me and you don't get the hot seat, the member stuff, that's all pro plus stuff that right now the 30 people are getting. So that was for you, Nate James. I chose, Here we go. I chose other. I chose other for our biggest hurdle. And the biggest hurdle is finding the right customers. We are working on greater route density and marketing to those clients. Yeah. So you know, there's one thing, you know a lot of people put like sales as your biggest hurdle. Then there's the second question is finding the right sales. Right. And that comes back to what are you using for marketing? And all these are not created equal. Some leads are going to come and they're more valuable, they're going to stay with you longer, they're going to have all the add on services, they're going to have two cleanups a year, they're going to have multi flowers, they're going to have you trim their trees, they're going to refer you all their friends like those are the customers you want. And the more you do marketing and the more that you track what marketing brings in which clients and then tracking those clients over the course of their lifetime with your company, the more you do that, the more clean data you have as far as finding which clients are right and then what marketing method brings in those right clients. So that one, it takes a couple years. It takes a lot of experimentation. Experimentation. I am fortunate, I have to say to one's extent because I have all the course members to get data from. So I like a lot of the stuff like I've kind of heard about and I tested out myself and I have a lot of data from them. As far as what's working, what's not, what type of clients are coming in from Facebook ads, which ones? Like Facebook ads right now is still good. But I just know in about two years I'm gonna be saying, time to get off guys. It's too expensive because bigger companies are like, you go through your Facebook feed, you see your Facebook feed, you're starting to see bigger companies in there now they're gonna start eating up the ad space and they're gonna increase the price just like it happened with Google AdWords. And so the more that happens, eventually I'm gonna tell course numbers, it's too expensive. Not all markets, like every single market is different. Right? But eventually finding the right customers will eventually become more expensive on certain platforms. And that's why I'm looking at text, text to quote, right. Like I don't have to pay anything extra besides a sign on my out on my shop Or a sign on my, on my trucks and my trailers and a sign, you know, on the back of a business card. And so like I don't have to pay anything extra for that. It's a method of marketing that I think is going to be huge and it's a worth the gamble because I'm not spending, you know, thousands of dollars on some marketing campaign. It's going to be, it's going to be boom or bust. But if it booms, I'm all in on it. And it's, I'd rather be ahead of the curve than behind it. Any more questions? We've been almost two hours, man. You guys are who I was long winded. Sorry about that. Sorry. I got faster those things.

I hope someone got something for 2018.

And can, can really implement it. As far as, you know, planning. I spend one day every single year.

The entire day is spent on planning. So next week I have a day set aside and all I will be doing is goals planning for 2018. That's all I will do the entire day. I get very, very specific. And we do the same thing with everyone on Pro Plus. It's like, okay, we got figure out goals for the company. I do it personally also for personal life and things like that. But you gotta go really, really deep and on what the goal is gonna, how it's gonna happen, when it's gonna happen, why you want it to happen, how it aligns with your, your, your long term vision of the company, of your personal life, your, your personal ambition. And so if those things all align and you get really focused on that day like so I spend that, you know, solid. I spent at least seven, eight hours just going through 2000, the next year and getting goals, timelines, how it's going to happen. So I break it into like business, personal online business versus you know, Augusta lawn care services and all the different things that we do. So that's kind of where what I do as far as that chance. When you do text to quote using gps, do you include the entire property square footage or just the landscape? So text to quote you can use the whole. So determine essentially almost. There's tons of companies that do this stuff by the way that do where you can drop pins from aerial footage and find square footage. So almost all of them allows you to do positive square footage and then negative. So we do the whole property dropping pins and dropping pins for the whole property and then we'll do a negative drop pins for like the house and the driveway. So we just get the lawns lawn, square footage. And if there's a ton of trees and it's all covered, we have to send an estimator. But so you know your market, we know that certain neighborhoods we have to send an estimater because there's so many trees. It's just not going to be accurate. And we don't want to be asking the person like, do you have a big yak yard? How many square foot do you think it is? Like we want to be doing that. So we make sure that we definitely make it very simple for them. It if we right away see from an aerial shot that's covered with trees, we will send an estimator out. But your question was, do you include the entire property? We do not do the entire property. And that's what some companies are using right now is Zillow. You can go on there and see the customer's whole property square footage. Really easy. You can use the walk, the county assessor's site as well to find square footage of properties like county acres, things like that. But the thing is, it's including the whole property. Not. You might have a tiny little bit of lawn if they did a whole bunch of beds or have a big driveway or a big house. Right. So that's why I would definitely not use the whole property size. I would definitely make sure you get a software that you can drop pins from aerial footage and see the grass. It's pretty simple. So, any more questions? Questions, questions, questions? It's almost one o'. Clock. You guys have been great. I think there's still 26 of you in here. So if you guys have any questions. I don't really have anything else as far as that I need to go into right now. Obviously, like last month's webinar for the Proplus, we did the big thing was the text, text to text to quote option. So we went deep and showed how to drop the pins, how to make your rate matrix in Excel and things like that. But I just don't have the time on here, so. All right, we got. Very cool. So I didn't implement this. Found out earlier that my brother Alex. That is so funny. Vladimir. Vladimir. So Vladimir, here we go. Vladimir, this is so. Thanks so much. Excited to implement this. So truck site, by the way, is where we bought one of our dump trucks earlier this year. We bought another dump truck. Sorry, Vladimir, we didn't buy it from truck site. We just bought it like a month ago from locally. But they, they do good job. They get city trucks and they can send you to Chuck. Check out Chuck. Site has dump trucks. Vladimir, I talked to you on the phone. I don't think you remember, but when it came here, the PTO thing wasn't working and so we called you. Anyways, Seth, next year I'll be hiring my first full time employee. This year there'll be no way to keep them busy through the winter. How can I keep one or two guys busy in the off season? Do you drop your guys to 30 hours a week or do you pay them salary? So we only guarantee hours in their employee contract from March to November. However, they know that my number one goal is to keep them busy as much as they want. So for March, November, a lot of times they're getting a lot of overtime and they're working like crazy and they want time off. So what we do is we, we kind of have as a first come, first serve slash, whoever has the most tenured employee, they kind of get dibs on when they get their two weeks of vacation during the winter. And so they schedule that stuff out usually at the beginning, before winter even starts. And then they, they, so they're taking vacation anyways, right? They want to get some vacation for Christmas. Like we're coming up to. Most of them will be gone for Christmas and for New Year's and things like that. So I give them some time off. But for two or three guys, this is when it comes to be very important that you keep your leads even if they don't accept your estimates. Like the reason that we send these introduction packets to people that do regular, that don't even accept our leads or accept our estimates is because we want to create that relationship still with them. So that when we email them twice a year for spring cleanups and fall cleanups or maybe snow removal or maybe a treatment schedule, packages in the spring that they actually know and like us and they still remember us even if they didn't accept our estimate. So Seth, how do you keep people busy in the winter? Number one, it's very, very hard until you do get some commercial. Number one. And two, you get enough customers. When we have, when we send an email out to thousands of people, it's pretty simple to fill up our schedule. We weren't like that. You know, even, even, even last year it wasn't like that. Now it's just we got to the scale now where you have so many leads and so many people. That's why like the retail side is even so powerful too. You get all the customer information from those people that are buying products. And you can pitch them services in the winter. And that's why you heard me say. That's why you heard me say my budget is heavy in the way in the spring to get customers to get them for the whole year on mowing and things like that. And then it's heavy late fall, early winter to get book out My winter, for instance, right now we are booking out into February. So that's really, really good. I'm really happy about that. And so my guys then know that they can have a solid job throughout the whole year. And you will get better people if you can not promise, but at least know that you can keep them busy throughout the winter because it's very easy for them to go get a construction job or another job during that wintertime and they might not come back. So some people will offer incentives like two $3,000 package bonus when they come if you come back in the spring. I would rather just keep them busy throughout the whole year. And so we do several things. We obviously market the biggest thing in marketing that your existing customers for cleanup stuff, tree trimming, things like that. The whole reason we got into tree work like trippers and things was purely because we wanted to keep guys busy in the winter. And we can do tree work in the winter. So that would be one thing. So do you drop your guys to 30 or pay them? So I do not pay salary. They are all an hourly wage and they usually are only getting the 30. About 30 to 40 hour. 30 to 40 hours during the winter instead of like 40 to 50 like they would during season. And usually they're totally okay with that because they get so many hours otherwise. Jamie. Whoops. Jamie.

Which software do you recommend now? We are a smaller company. I've heard you say it was. It was other softwares that are better than. Than the Pro. I think you meant Lawn Pro. So Long Pro is what I do recommend for people that are small and that is what I use as an illustration on the course. I stopped giving away Lawn Pro on the course because so many people wanted to use their own software packages and they didn't want the course to be part of. I mean the Long Pro package to be part of the course. So that's why I stopped giving it away. And what do I recommend now? Right now I recommend Lompro if you're under 500 grand a year in revenue. And if you're over that, I recommend Service Autopilot Service Auto more expensive. But if you're doing over $500,000, you can afford the incremental efficiencies that they offer because you have the scale. Just don't go spend several hundred dollars a month on Service Autopilot. If you're doing $200,000 revenue, it is not worth it. Lawn Pro does 90% of what service Autopilot does. Maybe not as fast, maybe not as well, but I promise you that 2 to $300 that you could be spending on a marketing or something else or hiring someone else is much much going to get you much more money in return than spending that when you're small. If you're over $500,000 right now, I recommend Service Autopilot and I and I know both the people who run those companies and they're both great people. Jamie, which software do you recommend? Ryan, thanks. I appreciate your advice and I look forward to more webinars with you. Cool. Ryan, you may hope got in the Pro plus Nick I had a. I had a call and just jump what's her. I had a call and just jumped back in when you said use an area calculator and I used daftlogic.com then click area calculator to be able to drop pins on a Google app and get area. I don't know if that's a question or if you're just telling everyone. So I'm guessing you found a place where you can drop those pins and find area. That's great. Lots of sites online. You will have to pay for some of them. Lawn Pro, by the way, does have this feature, FYI. So if you're using Lawn Pro you can use the calculator.

You can use the calculator and.

Get the square footage and then put a custom field in their profile and lock that number in there. Just FYI. It's all part of it Chance. Lawn Pro is awesome. Been using it for a few years. Yeah. So if you are on Lawn Pro you recognize that it's it is free. Nick. Nick. I have something to do with that. So I did. I was down with the owner of Lawn Pro. It's just a small little company. It's not like service with a massive amount of employees and stuff. And so Lawn Pro I convinced them to make a freemium option where you can get in there and do a lot of stuff for free and then people only pay if it's.

If they want the premium stuff like routing and things like that. So if you don't have any software right now, definitely go sign up for a free thing along Pro. I'd highly recommend that.

Because they do have the mapping feature. I think you might have to pay for the mapping feature or they're gonna make. When I talk to them, like, that's one of the things. Restrictions, the mapping feature. You'll have to pay, but try it out for free if you don't have anything. Definitely. Jessica, when do you. Your career fair? Okay, when do you do your career fairs? What do you look for in a potential employee that being in a group setting can show you? Verse an interview? Okay, so number one, Jessica, the reason I do career fairs is my time is. And that is I don't have the time to interview 50 people. I don't. My people don't. I don't want to draw my people, my managers, in for interviews for 50 people. It's just a lot of time. So that's the number one thing. Saves us the time there. Group setting. I can get a real good feel if they're a team player. Last year, we did our first career fair. I knew who I was gonna hire right from there. I went into all my. I promise, I went into all of my interviews objectively. But those were the people that came out and we did hire. You can just tell a lot about people. You can weed out a lot of people by. Instead of just. Because this is what happens right now. People send resumes. You get them on an interview, you waste a bunch of time if they're not a good employee or someone that works out. Whereas at a career fair, I can weed out a bunch of people by showing the pros and cons telling them, who won't work with this company? Well, who isn't gonna be successful showing the cons as far as working outside, things like that. I can show the downside and kick out all those people out. Tell them, hey, you're gonna get a drug test, you're gonna get a background check. Scare them a little bit so they don't apply for an interview or sign up for an interview. And so that's basically saving time for us is the biggest thing, the reason why I do that as far as the career fair. And I truly believe that the more time you invest with a person beforehand, the better their onboarding process will be. So we have a. You know, we have. They got to put the application on website, which I can do a whole other thing on what the application look like. We just change it now. No longer is this massive application with a whole bunch of things of fields they have to install. Now. It's basically, I just need their contact information, and I give them a paragraph and say, tell me about yourself. What's your experiences, why are you going to be good for this job? And then I can tell a lot about that person, how they respond to that question. And so I just kind of give them an open. If you want to check out what ours looks like, just go to augustaloncareservices.comcareers or just go to our careers page right from our homepage and you'll be able to see, you'll be able to see what our application looks like. That application comes to our office, our office that invites them to a career fair. From the career fair they can, if they want to sign up for an interview. And then at that interview, I my two managers, at least two of them are with me at an interview, that interview goes to a second one and that's when they make hiring. So it's a pretty good process. Once they get on board, then they got another process of onboarding training for, you know, intensive for two months, two weeks, and then over the course of six months, I get fully trained. So it's a long onboarding process. A lot of time and money is invested into them before they even start really producing. But I think what you invest into someone else you put into them, they're going to get back to you many times back. So that's just a huge, great investment that you got to do. But yeah, basically it's saving me time and it's also showing them that we're a legit business. We don't just throw people into things. Matt, do your crews use tablets in your trucks to track time, routes, etc. Part of our us owning our hiring people, one of the requirements, they have to have a smartphone that will work with our software basically just needs to be an Android or an Apple. And we require that as far as part of being an employee, the reason for that is because if you start throwing tablets in the trucks, if they die, they're not plugged in, they're not charged, they're broken, they're left, they're taken home. Like, it's just so hard to track. And it's tough because legal stuff, as far as if they're doing something crazy on a company phone versus a company tablet versus their own phone, that gets a little bit hairy. So that's. We do not have tablets for them from the business, but we do have backup tablets if they're far out their phone and we also require them to have their own smartphone. You're hosting a career fair or part of one at a local school or somewhere. So sorry, Seth, I didn't make myself clear. We host the career fair and it's only for our company. So they have to. First of all, we drive all the leads. So whether it be from Facebook or Craigslist or wherever from. From word of mouth, we tell everybody to go and apply on our website. That website then funnels them to the career fair. Some people won't even show up because they aren't committed. They're sending their application out to everybody. Right. I don't want those kind of people. I want people that actually read about our company and know us a little bit. So get as many leads that I can up top in the funnel. They have to fill out the application. Our website people that come and come through that funnel, then they got to come to the career fair. They get to that funnel, then they got to go to interviewing. So it's a lot of things to weed all the people out, but I'd much rather scale slower because I can't find the right people then to hire the wrong people. It's just. That's just me. Some people would do it otherwise, but I don't think I'm a pro at it. I. We messed up on two, three, take two or three people. We have three people that we have had to fire and that haven't worked out. And so it's not a perfect process. But I guarantee you, if people came to our company versus any of our competitors on local market, they know there's a difference in our culture 100%. And part of the career fair and the onboarding process is definitely part of that.

Any more questions? Any more questions? Is there no more questions? All right, thanks. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna get out of here in about 30 seconds. If you know, questions, if you have no question, drop it here. And I am gonna stick around because I think there is still. There's still 20 of you in here, so. Oh, here we got one. I struggle.

A struggle I have is getting clients to buy all the services that are necessary for a great lawn. I've tried to deal with this by offering all inclusive type service. Many people are turned off of that. How do you deal with that? So I would not try to be pitching it to them as much as. So you see, this is how you phrase this, Vladimir, is you struggle to get clients to buy.

I would present the value, the value that you offer and let them come to you. Once you have a client that is a mowing client, that's kind of the. The gateway drug to all your other services. Right. But don't Force the other service, don't force the treatment packages and the trimmings and the cleanups. Like don't force those things, let them come to you, but stay in touch with them. Stay in touch with the email, stay in touch with the before and afters of your treatment packages over the course of one year and show that to everyone else. All your other mowing clients, let them come to you and you'll be in a powerful position as far as price. And also make sure your prices are standardized for your mowing and for your treatment packages. And then also obviously for like trimming and things, you need to have standardizing pricing menu for your hourly rate, things like that. However, for treatment packages, have a standardized price based upon the mow. So if you've been in the course, you know that if you have a mowing price, you should be able to determine someone's.

Package of services as far as treatments, aeration, correlation, thatching, fertilization, weed control. You should be able to figure out all of that based upon that one mowing price because all based on square footage. So once you have that square footage, you can do a lot of damage. So that's why like when we sell someone on mowing in our introduction email, we can right away have a price for their packages, like without much work at all. Because it's all automated and we have a price for mowing, it's automated based upon square footage. Like when you have square footage, you get mowing. Once you get mowing, you get treatment schedule. Once you have treatment. I mean treatment price, we have treatment price, you can sell a package. And so the money part I wouldn't worry about. It's standardized, but I would definitely deliver value, value, value. And then just remind your existing clients, your mowing clients, of the other services you offer that are higher profit margin for you. That's what I would do.

Good stuff. Anyone else? Any more questions? So 2019 of you, thanks. I'll be getting course. Cool. Yeah, if you guys want to get the course, it's 247 flat fee. You get the six modules, all the documents, and then I always am adding documents and audio from conferences that's there eventually once. This is something I think I said on the podcast actually once we franchise, I'll have to take the course away for new members, but everyone will still stay on. So some people were worried about that when I had said refer to that. All course members once we franchise will keep this, keep everything. But I'll have to shut off new members just because with Franchising Obviously, franchisees don't want to buy into a system where they can go and get all the documents that we're creating. So can I ask a question about my area? Yeah, you can. Sure. Whatever you want, Nate. So, yeah. So as far as the course, go for it. It's 247. It'll get you set up right away. We. We did a bunch of updates to make it faster, but it seemed like it made some issues with safari and stuff, so. So it seems like everything's ironed out. It's all through. All the payments done through stripe, and that was the integration that we were trying to work on to make it faster for the payment and stuff. But, yeah, the course, landscapebusinesscourse.com it'll take you to coursework.landscapebusiness.com and that's where you can buy the course.

All right. Any more questions? I'll take up to two more questions. How's that sound? So, Nate, I think you have a question. If there's another one, ask it now or forever hold your pen. Peace. So, again, if you guys want to join proplus, I know I have my email here several. But seven or eight of you have joined. Like I said, you're not getting in. But if you want to get on the waiting list, text, text pro plus one word to 44222. Nate, we have 90% rena and 90% people use rotary. You have any ideas on getting people to go real? Oh, man. So we avoid real in our area because only about 5, 3 to 5% of people use it. And I don't like the maintenance. I do not know that market enough to be very educated. As far as an answer for you, Nate, I'm sorry. I would try to find someone. Yeah. Stay away from real maintenance. Nightmare. That's why we stayed away from it, honestly. And so it's just harder to scale, and so we didn't do it. And I don't want to throw another piece of equipment on our trucks to accommodate the 5% of people. And, Nate, yes, you're 100% right. It looks amazing, but it's just not scalable. We have to say no to a lot of things because I have to ask the question, can I scale this across the country when we. Excuse me. When we make franchisees? And so I ask that question a lot. Is it scalable? Ask yourself that question even in your business by itself, if it can't scale, if buying a $3,000 wheel mower and it's gonna cause a ton of maintenance. And training all your people. Just don't do it. Excuse me, don't do it. But if you have 90% of people use, needing that service, go. Yeah, go for it. You're not gonna be able to make a business on 10% unless you absolutely dominate the market. So that's really. It's a tough one if I'm not actually there. Haven't seen the kind of mowers that you deal you getting dealt as well as your market and see actually how much that is. So we got one more question. If anyone else wants to hop in and ask their question, let me know. Still 2019 of you on here, so. All right, so I'm gonna clock out now. Unless there's one more question, I'm gonna stay around. But thank you, thank you. Thank you everyone for coming on today. It was a lot of fun. Over two hours. I will try to put some of this on the webinar. I mean on the podcast at the very least for all the course numbers. I will put this audio whole thing on there for the course members and you will get a replay of this whole video in about five hours. This fellow you will definitely want to look at. Keep it in your drawer, refer back to it. I would love to see these pop up in my inbox in about five years when people have dominated this thing and have made their companies big. That's what I love about what we do@landscapebusinesscourse.com look, looking forward to the podcast. We actually have a new logo that's gonna be coming out. It's gonna make the podcast audience jump. I just know it because right now our logo for podcast is really lame. No one would ever click on it. It looks kind of dumb. So working on that. And thank you all. Thank you all for your attention and listening today. Hanging out with me for so long. And again, if you do want to go to Proplus, I already have an email that came in from someone on the webinar saying, can I please get in? I'm willing to pay more. Blah, blah, blah. Sorry. No, it's. It's a wait list. If you're gonna get on the Pro plus way, it's a wait list right now. I might go to 50 people next summer or late fall, but right now, if you get on the wait list, maybe by spring. So thank you all so much for being here. Until next time, guys. Be great because nothing else pays. This is Mike Andy's and listen to the landscape business course. Not the podcast, the live webinar. Thanks again, guys.

Sam.