starting your business with $0 (pounding pavement!)

So you're starting your business, you're like, man, I don't have any money, I don't have any money to spend on marketing. How do I get my business started? Well, at the end of the day, it comes down to one thing, and that is if you don't have money to spend on marketing and getting your business off the ground, you're gonna have to put in the time. You either have money or you have time. If you are a broke college student, if you just your brand new first business, you probably have more time than you do have money. So at this stage in the business, you've gotta be willing to put in the work and put boots on the ground. You know, I call pound pavement and typically this is going to come in the form of cold calling, either A, on the phone or B, actually knocking on doors, walking up and down the streets that you are trying to get work in and actually just knocking on doors. Now the reason so many people fear knocking on the door or they fear giving cold calls is simply due to the fact they look back to the last time someone else knocked on the door or someone else gave them a cold call and they feel like it was a nuisance and it was really just inconvenience in their day. It was interruption, they didn't like it. So if you're knocking on someone's door, make sure it's not a sales pitch, make sure it's more of an introduction. And then you're giving them a hook as to how you can be of service to them. But you're not trying to sell them anything, you're not trying to give them a price, but you are walking up to the door already knowing the prices for the given services you can offer. And then secondarily, if you're going over the phone, you just do it in a really, really nice way in terms of saying that you're going to be in their neighborhood tomorrow and you're wondering if you can give them an estimate. So all of this is what I did when I first got started. And in fact I did so many cold calls and I don't, I don't recommend this anymore. And I don't even know if it was good back then, honestly. But we actually would cold call people out of the white pages. Literally, I would go through the white pages and call people randomly and just say, hey, going to be in your area. And this is the thing. You know their address, you know their phone number based on the white pages. So I just go through there like, hey, Mr. Jones, I just noticed that you're living in Bellingham there. And we're going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow and I was wondering if you'd like us to give an estimate. We're doing some work on the, on that neighborhood, in that neighborhood. And we'd love to give you an estimate to see if we can help you in your property. So that didn't work great. But you know what did work is when I put my sister doing the white, white pages phone call. So we literally. I would literally pay my sister, I would pay her like very low wage to give everyone a call. And then if she actually confirmed an appointment, she would get an extra bonus. And they worked relatively well. It worked a lot better with my sister on the phone than it did me, I'll tell you that. So a young, they listened to a young girl a lot better than they did a guy on the phone. And literally it was just an introduction. And so if you're doing cold calling, you're just getting started, you don't have much money. Focus more on introduction with a hook. Now, first of all, you've got to be professional. If you're in person, professional uniform, and do your hair right, smell okay, stuff like that. If you're on the phone and you're doing a complete cold call, literally out of the white pages, we're doing cold calling. If you're going to do that, make sure it's an introduction. And it's nothing about selling. You're not trying to sell them anything. It's like, hey, Mr. Jones, I'm Mike. I just got started my lawn care business. I'm in the area. Tomorrow we're going to be doing some work on some of your neighbor's properties. Just wondering if you'd have any work for us to do. And if so, I can drop by tomorrow and give you a price. That's not salesy. It's not pressuring. It's not. Doesn't even seem like a, you know, a promotional call that they usually get from like random companies that are in India. Like, it seems very personalized and local. Especially if you can say that you're a local owned business and they can get that vibe. So let's go ahead and jump into some questions. This is a call in show today, but I wanted to kind of preface it all by saying if you don't have money and you have time, you can absolutely get started. It's just going to take more boots on the ground. It is absolutely going to take more work and you're going to have to get over the preconceived ideas and notions of knocking on doors and quote, unquote, interrupting people. And if you get over it, if you really believe this is the bottom line when it comes to sales, if you really do believe that your product and service is the best option for the customer, no longer is it a matter of you interrupting them, getting in their way, wasting their time. It's more a matter of it is my responsibility to make sure that they choose me. I'm going to do whatever is required. I'm going to spend money on ads, I'm going to knock on their door, I'm going to give them a call in the middle of the day and I'm going to make sure that they make the right decision. Because I so much believe in my product and service. If you actually do believe that much that it is the best product, the best service for that customer is your obligation to make sure that you do whatever is required in the sales process, follow up, sales, persuasion, knock on their door, whatever it is, to make sure they make the decision to choose you. Because you really do believe, you're confident in knowing that none of the other competition is going to be able to do what you do for that customer. If you believe that, you'll sell from a place of conviction instead of scarcity. And that is the way to close a lot of deals. First caller is in the room. It is from Jerome, Idaho. I think it's Wendy. Go ahead.

Hey, go ahead. How you, how you doing?

Yeah, like right now, do you have a full time job that you're working at it?

Yeah, like I would say, yeah, like at this point, you know, like $3,000 isn't going to be super meaningful in terms of making a marketing campaign. Like if you're servicing, you know, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people, you could literally spend $3,000 and no one would call you. Like it's that easy. Like you send one mailer out, you spend a little bit on Facebook and Google. Like literally you could get nothing out of that. So what I would really focus on more is how do you spend your time on like the weekends, the evenings, knocking on doors, potentially even cold calling. But more importantly, I have a video come out later this week. And that is like the first step when you have nothing is making sure you post to your social and tell every friend, family member and ask them for work. And even if it's like, hey, could you please post this if you don't have work so that way I can get the word out I would not discount that. What are you trying to sell? What product and service?

Yeah. So, you know, in about a month, you're going to be coming up on your busiest time there in Idaho. So, like, I would really just focus on those couple weeks, those three to four weeks where demand is going to be the highest, grass is going to start growing. I would just. What are the neighborhoods that you want to target? And just literally knock on every single person's door and then if they don't answer, have a door hanger that you can have the price for mowing on it. Right. So again, on lawn care media, we have these, but you can just rip off the design if you really want to, or you can buy it. And literally, as you're going up the door, if they're not home, and even if they are, you're going to write the price down and you're either going to give it to them or put it on their. On their doorknob. I think that would be a great way to get started because right now you have time at $3,000. I wouldn't be spending money on Facebook. I wouldn't be spending money on any of those things. I would set up a Facebook account, I would set up a Google, my business account, I would set up a nextdoor account, but I definitely wouldn't be spending money on ads on those platforms. With $3,000.

You won't even need it. Right. Honestly, like, $3,000 is not going to be something where I say, go do digital media. Digital media. You need repetition in front. Go ahead.

Yeah, I would, I would. In a very centralized area, I would literally look for the 500 to 1,000 homes that you're wanting to target. And then in that case, you can hit them all for like 200, $250, maybe 300, depending on what you're printing. And then you could do it a few times. Right. So you still need that repetition because you're brand new, you don't have any brands. You need that penetration with multiple frequency. However, that's going to be cheaper if you're going after, say, 500 homes. So if you go into every door direct mail and you say, hey, these are the two neighborhoods, that would work because that would work within your strategy. But I would then align those door hangers, or, sorry, those, the mailers with the same time that you're doing door hangers and the same time that you're knocking on doors and the same time that you put out yard signs around that neighborhood so you can just really penetrate deep and that 1,000, $2,000 you spend will go way further in that narrow, narrow market than if you try to go to boil the ocean in your entire area.

Yeah, like, again, it comes down to, do you have the time? Right? Like, if you have no customers and you're trying to get started, let's just step back and say, okay, you might think that what neighborhoods are the best for your mowing services, but if you start, you throw up Google and you start doing mailers inside that area, and all of a sudden you're getting calls a whole bunch from the other side of the city or like five miles away, that potentially might be where you actually want to target. So I wouldn't say no to them at the very beginning, but realize that you're going to fill your schedule potentially with even maybe 15, 20 customers, and then have to start cutting them out or ones that are far away from whatever target area you now started to get a little more dense in and really start to focus, because you're going to run out of time because you have the other job, Right. And then at that point, you don't want to be doing unprofitable work. So at the very beginning, like, I'm talking about the first five to 10 customers, potentially, I would say yes. And then just. Just to make sure that you're not going after the wrong market. And I've seen that happen before. This is my neighborhood. I'm going to spend all this money on just. And they're getting, like, refusing all these calls a mile, two, three miles away. It's like, look, be a little bit flexible at the beginning and realize that you might be wrong on what the best neighborhood is and realize that you might have to pivot. So I would say yes for now, unless it's like, you know, five, ten miles away, but I would say yes for now and then realize that every marketing dollar, every time that you spend on marketing in the form of door knocking or door hangers is going to be spent on a given because your goal is penetration and route density.

You got it, brother. Take care. Have a good one.

All right, so if you have a call, feel free to give a call here at the bottom of the show. It has the number. It is 361-733-3333. Give me a call. As usual, everyone's slow to get on the calls, and then they all stack up at the end. I got to cancel everyone off. So if you do have a question, feel free to call in. I go through some of these real quick. Hey, Mike. I just started out and sometimes I have trouble estimating mowing jobs. Takes me longer than most right now. Any suggestions for time acre for 40 inch mower? Yeah. Then this really depends on your route density. Right. If you're in a really rural area, your prices are going to be more. Because you have more drive time. It's usually going to be, it sounds like, you know, if you're doing time per acre, you're probably in a more rural area. If you're, if anyone starts talking about like, hey, how much do you charge per acre? Usually we're talking about rule. And so in that case, you're probably going to actually be visiting the property in person. But you can do it by square footage if you want to do it over the phone. Something like that. But. All right, next question here. But yeah, in terms of like time with a 48 inch mower, it really is so varied based upon so many different variables. So it's a little bit hard to give you a straight answer on that one. All right, next question is from Red Deer, Alberta. I do believe Red Deer. Go ahead.

Good. How you doing?

You know, given where we're at right now, I feel like most people are kind of over the pandemic and being super concerned about that. Like we, we did door knocking and door hangers right through like the middle of March, 2020, et cetera. We just made sure we stood way far back and we would have a mask, that the person felt really cautious, we'd pop it over our mouth. But I think at this point, people are over it and if they aren't, again, just do that same thing. And that's step, know, step further back and, you know, have a mask available. But especially because you're outside at that point if you're door knocking. But were you. Was your question more about door, like door hangers?

Oh, really? That's not good. Really? One second. Can't hear the caller. Oh, no. How is that possible? Give me one second here. Oh, mercy. That's not good at all. Thanks for letting me know.

All right, let's try this.

That is no good.

All right, let's see here. Okay, back down. We cannot hear the callers. All right, I don't know if that's any better. Let's see if.

Usb. Try this. See, I can hear you just fine. My board says it can hear you just fine. Oh, this is it. No.

I love it. Okay, let's see here. Okay. Yeah, right. Okay, can everyone confirm whether or not you can still hear the callers or not? Because on My end, it's just fine. But apparently no one else can hear me, which is horrible.

I cannot hear the callers. Okay, can I get confirmation that is still the case? Because if not, I do not know why that's doing that.

We cannot hear the callers.

No, you still can't hear them. What in the world? Okay, that's horrible.

Okay, well, while I'm trying to fix this, feel free to ask a quick question. I'll summarize it for everyone listening.

Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I think. I think you're probably fine to go out, but, you know, we did it right in the middle of March, 2020, like, literally. And we had the cops call on us one time, and it was just a matter like, look, we're standing far back. Like, someone called the cops and then they called me and like, hey, just making sure you're, you know, not, you know, getting inside anyone's house or anything like that. And so they were fine with it once we explained. But yeah, hope that helped a little bit. I got to figure out what's going on with this stupid thing.

Okay, thanks, brother. Take care. All right, bye. Bye. All right, so we have royally failed on this morning's livestream. I have no idea why it's doing this. It's saying that it's exporting. Oh, you know what, let's try. If I'm hearing them here, that's just. That's just fine. So why isn't.

That is so weird. Okay, well, let's go ahead and abandon the call in show and just answer questions in the live stream. That sounds like a better plan. Okay. Boom. No call in show today. I do apologize. Solid facade. Okay, so no call in show. We're going to go ahead and turn that off and just answer questions in the live chat. Okay, how do we edit the door hangers? If you go on to lawn caremedia.com you can download the template in Photoshop, PNG, et cetera. If you just want to add the phone number, then you can just drag it directly into vistaprint and add the phone number. But if you are trying to actually.

Move pictures and change colors, you'll need to download the Photoshop file, which is in there as well. Longermedia.com I'm starting from the bottom. Sorry, guys. Hi, Mike. Starting a new, longer business here already achieved 42 customers. Another lawn care business selling 45 customers in $350,000 and up subdivisions for $15,000. What do you suggest? Okay, so you have 42 customers. Another business is selling customers 45 of them for $15,000. So your customer acquisition cost would assume to be $333. Let's assume that you keep like 70, 80% of them. So let's just say that your customer acquisition cost assumed in this sale is gonna be $400. It's not horrible. But keep that in mind. And that's what you're going to use to be able to negotiate is tell the potential seller like hey look right now if I do the math on 45 customers, paying you 15 grand for them is going to cost me 330 bucks. My customer acquisition cost last year was 120. I'm willing to pay a double. So I'm willing to pay 240. Like that's how you negotiate for these small deals, especially when you already have 42 customers. So I know it seems like 45 is a lot because you're going to double your business. But keep in mind, like ask yourself if you spent $15,000 on marketing, would you get more than 45 customers? And again we're assuming they all come across, it's likely that, that you're going to get more than 45 customers. If you went out and spent $15,000 on marketing, the only reason you would do an acquisition in this case is to be able to have an immediate bump in sales. You don't wouldn't have to worry about getting, you know, getting the estimates sent out, doing all the ad campaigns, et cetera. So sorry that the call in show didn't work. I apologize. But I am going to go ahead and just answer questions in here. How does lawn care bookkeeper work? Feel free to go lawn carebookkeeper.com There's a video on there explaining how everything works. You can do your payroll as well as all your QuickBooks categorization for your reports. What CRM would you recommend for a 15 year old wanting to grow a lawn care business? Yard book or jobber? I'd start with yard book. If you're 15 years old and just doing a few lawns just because it's cheaper. I found if you live on a busy road, micro. If you live on a busy road, make you a billboard of your own and put it on, put it up with business name and number. This is if your county and state allows you to. That's what I do. And magnet for the truck. Yeah. So at least the sign. If you have a, if you do have a busy road next to your place of residence or where you park your trucks, having a billboard is a great option. It's a great way to get your name out there. And if you own the land, you don't have to worry about as much with getting that permission. The thing that to be concerned about like here he's talking about is the permitting of that. Again, I'm much more in the camp of ask for forgiveness instead of permission. And so typically if you just put a sign up, people are not going to bother you. But people mostly are concerned about is if you're lighting that sign, making sure that it's not pointing towards the road even. And if you're close to an airport, it's not pointing, it's not too bright if it's pointing up. Things like that is usually what is the most mostly they're looking at when it comes to permitting.

Okay, sorry about the audio. I'm going through these questions. A lot of them are about audio. I apologize. Hi Mike, I'm from the UK and I'm just starting out mowing. How many leaflets would you suggest I deliver to begin with? I have just organized a drop of 16,000. That's a lot.

You said you're just starting out. So I'm a little bit afraid of doing 16,000 print because you have not yet figured out your timing or your frequency. And so I would much rather go after 2000 or 3000 addresses and hit them 5, 6, 7, 8 times. So that way if you're slightly off in your presentation, you can change it. If you're slightly off in your timing, you can change it. I'm somewhat alarmed by doing that much marketing when you're just getting started because you don't know what timing is exactly. And so I would definitely recommend making sure you have a higher frequency and that way too you can change and modify your, your media pictures on that etc instead of, you know, you do it one time and all of a sudden it's just gone like it's, it's. You don't have a chance to get that back. I'm just getting started. Was wondering, I think I already answered this question. Do you suggest four guys and laying eight pallets of sod in a few hours or two guys and it taking a whole day? I would totally recommend the two guys for a day. I am obviously somewhat.

Biased in this opinion because that's what we do at Augusta. But it's going to be the least amount of waste. You have four guys doing sod, guess what's going to happen. Three guys are going to. Three guys are going to hop out of the truck and they're going to wait for that truck to back up into the driveway for five minutes while they are getting the, the, the trailer back in the driveway. Those three people are wasting time. What's going to happen when they're doing a walkthrough? Four guys are going to follow the customer around and they are going to just follow the customer doing a walkthrough. Why do I need that? And so if you're going to have a smaller crew size, typically your waste is less. And so especially if it's a one day, I would try, I would personally rather have a full day of work for two guys because at the end of the day too, are you really going to go get another job for the four guys to go to? Right. Versus just the two guys that work a whole day. You kind of block that off on your calendar and you're good to go. And so yeah, typically that's what I would do. Is March the best month to put flyers out before spring rush? Thanks Mike. Again, frequency is important. I would usually recommend two weeks before the grass starts growing to be starting your frequency and then going until about four weeks after spring rush has started. That's typically going to be your highest value customers along with your highest demand for the services. Right. The reason I say highest value customers is because someone that is waiting until middle of June to get their lawn mode for the first time is not going to be your ideal customer. They're going to have, it's going to be overgrown. They're not going to be the type of person that takes care of their property, etc. He like, I just started out and sometimes I have trouble. Oh, and I already did this one. Okay, we're going back to the bottom. Here we go.

See here. Just saying. Let's see here. Troops mowing. Here we go. How do you feel about electric mowers? Just type in electric mowers. My candy. They have a couple of videos on that. Hey Mike, Sam with troops mowing might be a no brainer answer, but I know that a lot of business owners talk having systems in place. Can you break down what a system looks like in depth? I made a video on this specifically. Basically what a system's going to do is alleviate a bottleneck and a constraint inside the business. Because you can't personally do that. As the business grows, you need a system to do it for you. And so I've made other videos about this. It's in the course quite a bit about looking for the constraint in the business, the business, the bottleneck. And then I look at it it's kind of like you put in a culvert, right? If you have a ditch, you have all this water running down the ditch. And in order to get past a driveway, you need a culvert. The system is the culvert to get past the bottleneck, which is you and limited resources, time and people. That's what you need is a culvert, a system to get you through that bottleneck. So look for the bottlenecks first, identify it and then just ask yourself, what can I put in place to get this pressure, this water, this. The business moving along through this pressure point without having to spend more time, money or resources. How's the gym going? The gym is going very, very good. We're back to pre Covid levels and I'm selling it to one of the trainers. So that should be good because I paid it off so the cash will be useful. Just saying thanks for your tireless effort in putting content out. Would like to hear an update soon on the real estate portfolio. Keep up the worker. Yeah, I will try to make an update on the real estate soon. We're actually going to be turning one of the units into an Airbnb just to improve cash flow even more at one of the properties. What is my first step in franchising my lawn care business? You need. You need an fdd. I made a video on this on my second channel about how to do franchising. I would just say unless you know a very clear path to 100 locations, don't try. It's. It's a lot. I want to start my long career business. Have. But, but have money to. To a truck. What would you do but don't. I'm assuming you say you don't have money for a truck. I would say potentially to rent a truck if needs to be on the weekend and book your schedule out for like 5, 14, 16 hours on Saturdays and Sundays and then go rent the A U haul truck, one of the pickups. And yeah, you're gonna spend like a hundred dollars a weekend, but that's going to be okay if you've sold two or three thousand dollars worth of work on that weekend.

What kind of content do you believe is missing in the lawn care section on YouTube? I'm trying to provide it. So does $422,000 seem like a reasonable revenue go with four to five guys? Yep, absolutely. Between 80, $120,000 per man is typical. Depending on the services, it can be higher if you're doing custom installs or fertilization. Have you Ever taken on highway ditch mowing? No, never have. Never will, more than likely. What's the requirement to buying lawns off a company? I always get nervous because I don't think customers would stay if there is a law anywhere at all or anything. I have 20 customers myself. I'm looking to get a little bigger. I know a few guys selling lawns. That's why I ask. Still a little new to it at all. Feel like they may be trying to dump bad lawns on me also, you know. Yeah. So I made a video about this, specifically about how to do acquisitions of smaller numbers of customers. So definitely check that video out about acquisitions. However, in terms of the law and customers do not have to stay with you, it's very, very infrequent that the law is going to protect you from a customer leaving. There's a lot of consumer protections around this. And so even though someone might have a contract and then you buy them out, there's a lot of ways that a customer can get out. Honestly, if you really go deep into the law, it's not too hard for them to get out of it. And so again, that's why I'm going to look more at the value of the contacts and the contracts. I'm going to take a lot with a grain of salt because I got to assume a certain attrition rate. I have to assume that some people are going to drop off. So again, watch the videos I made about that in the past.

I have a dealer who sells and services X marks and write Stand on Mars. Which do you recommend? Flip a coin. Might be wrong channel of yours. Is it logical to sell a truck with 200000 miles and go down one truck expecting not even 1500 back or using it to its full potential? With prices currently, I would use it to its full potential, honestly, right now. Because if you sell that truck for 1500 bucks, assuming that your insurance is like 2 or $300 a month, right? So like if you're not burning cash and you're actually utilizing the truck, I would be trying to SAP every life out of your trucks right now as possible. If you can hopefully get past in the next year or two, that'd be ideal. Now that being said, if you have a decent used vehicle, you might be able to sell it right now and then put it towards a nicer vehicle because the prices of the market are so extremely high for used vehicles. So it's a give and take, right? Like you're not going to get fifteen hundred dollars for that truck in A couple years more than likely. However, if you can get 500, it means you spend a thousand dollars to keep a truck for two years if it's still in running condition. Assuming it doesn't give you a bunch of problems. All those other, you know, astro asterisks next to it. But I would definitely be trying to SAP it for all it's worth. Right now we aren't buying any trucks. We haven't bought trucks for two plus years at our local shop. We actually sold one of our trucks for more than twice as much as I bought it for about five years four years ago. Nuts. It's crazy. So how many 150 meter square lawns could a good bloke cut in a day? 152. Okay. Meters. Mercy meters is nine square feet approximately. No, three with yeah, nine to nine by 1:50. So yeah, it's very small lawns. You're looking at like 2000 square foot lawns. You could easily do 2025 easily in a day if you have good route density. How do you feel about the real estate market going to 2022? I think it's going to lag a little bit because rent prices are lagging the cost. So I feel like equity is going to go down a little bit just because of the interest rates have skyrocketed. Like mortgage rates have skyrocketed. Right now we're up like, like literally a full percent in a lot of places when it comes to mortgage rates which is typically indicative of a 10 decrease in equity just because buying power is decreased. However, rents are still going up because rents lag selling homes. And so that's gonna be really interesting. And so I'm holding on to my real estate simply because we're still raising the prices of rent every single month. Like we just. There's a unit next to me here. It's literally we're doubling the rent from. We did some renovations, we made it look nice, we did a lot of stuff inside but we're doubling the rent. It's crazy. So I'm not going to let go of that because I'm going to get taxed out to wazoo if I sell on capital gains. So in terms of the real estate market though, I do think there's going to be a slowing down definitely of this massive rampant increase in price. But that's going to be offset somewhat by the fact that inflation is still happening. Lumber is still high, labor is still high, steel is still high. And so it's going to somewhat buoy the prices because those Costs. Those input costs are still going to be high, so I actually feel it's not going to crash because of that. Inflation is going to keep it somewhat propped up because the cost to build will still remain so high. I'm looking to help my father, business owner, set systems in place to allow him to slowly step back from juggling everything. Starting the P for book. P for P book this week. Thanks, Mike. Awesome. Good for you. That's awesome, Carlos. Mike, my daughters and I started a business in Galveston County, Texas. What lawnmower do you recommend?

Lawnmower, Sorry, I do not know if you're recommend trying to look for a lawn care service. There's a few lawn care locations called Augusta Lawn here you might want to look at. Congrats on the new building. It's exciting to watch Augusta grow. Keep up the hard work. Try to get a little more sleep. Yeah, I know I'm a little bit tired. Last night was brutal. I do have a video though coming out next week about why I do that with my sleep schedule and explain that a little bit more in depth. What percentage of Augusta profit does Liz receive?

I'm going to keep that private because it's not my personal finances. If I want to pay employees base of $14, but my budget hours per person for that day, I could Pay, let's say $120. Would this be a form of for P4P in an eight hour day, if they finish in six hours, no issues, they keep 1 20. Yeah, this is very similar to P4P. It's essentially what P4P is. P4P builds the system so that you can scale it so if you have 20 crews, you're not out there trying to like run the numbers on a spreadsheet. It just keeps track of all of that as well as the fact that if they get it done in six hours, the question is, did they not have any issues? That's the key. And then if they do have issues, what are the repercussions of that? So that needs to be clearly defined and that's what PVP system does. Hey, Mike, I'm switching to PvP. Do you recommend share, for example, 80% of the labor revenue? No, no, no. Don't share 80% of labor revenue. No, no, no. You need to read the book. Read the book or go to p4psoftware.com training. Don't give 80% of the labor revenue to the employee, first and foremost. Secondly, it is a percentage of only the labor revenue. It is not a percentage of the revenue in total so again you read the book or go to go pppsoftware.com training. It's all free videos on there. Explains everything. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, there's guys around my area who say customers have to stay with you for one year. Then it's up to the customers after that. Now you can put that in the contract that you're buying from the from the seller but most customers are not going to honor that. What are you going to do? Take them over to court over a $30 mo like your legal fees will be 10 times more than what you'd make in them in a year. So do you have a quick tip on how to optimize estimate routes so they are closer? Yes. Schedule them as jobs and then route them and optimize in the same way that you would a job. Hey Mike, I'm having a hard time getting new customers. What you recommend? Watch the first few minutes of this video. I talk about that. Super excited for the day to go into the office. That's hilarious. Bull Bike Club. I have three years of experience in going out my own. How would you market you have three years of experience. I definitely would recommend listening the first few minutes of this video about pounding the pavement. You have more time than you do money right now. And so if you're at a current position where you are working full time or you have another job, spend the weekends, spend the evenings knocking on doors, talking to people online, going to next door channels and talk to people in your neighborhood. Ask for work there and really focus on booking your schedule out right now. That would be the best way to to be able to make sure you have a parachute kind of a Runway to then quit your job and you have three, four weeks booked out and you can go start full time. So if that's what you're looking to do, I would definitely recommend boots on the ground. What do you think the average return is per piece of print marketing you put out? For example, if you put 5,000 door hangers, how many calls do you think that would make? That would be just a ballpark. Yeah, like it's anywhere from. I've seen it as low as 0.1%, like one in a thousand and I've seen as good as 2%. So that's a big range. I know I literally just gave you a 20x multiple from 0.1 to 2% but that's what it is. And it's going to depend a lot on timing. It's going to depend a lot on your creative. But the biggest thing when it comes to service based businesses, especially home improvement is going to be timing because everyone is usually thinking about your product or service at a very wind, very narrow window of time. And so the timing of when that piece of mail actually hits their door is gonna be extremely important.

Mike, should I test P4P in the middle of spring rush? You can. I would test it now. And if it's working then you just know that they're gonna make a really good in summer. But yeah, that's why we have the free month. First month is free@pvpsoftware.com is because I want you to test it out for two pay periods, which is one month. So definitely test it out. Do you guys have a lawn care in Pennsylvania? We do. I understand it is hard to gauge. Thank you. Yeah. Cool. All right, we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up. I apologize again that the call and show did not work. I have no idea why this wonderful piece of hardware that I purchased did not work today. I heard the caller, but you did not. I do apologize for that, but hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. We have a really cool episode this morning that came out for roundup interview that I had with a business owner that went from lawn care into landscaping and then commercial and he talked about why made those transitions. So definitely check that video out. And I really appreciate all of you being here. Take care.