Still Waiting 3 Days to Quote? Your Customers Are Buying Elsewhere

74% of businesses that get an estimate from a home service business accept the first quote they receive within 60 seconds. I am calling the customer. They're not talking to anyone else. The cheapest way to double your close ratio. If it's a matter of increasing your storage limits or increasing how fast you respond to someone, it's a no brainer, right? So like whether it be $20 extra on Google so I can get the images to the customer code. Okay, great. If it is a matter of hiring someone and the only job they have is to pick up the phone, pick the minute. Like within 60 seconds of a lead hitting you, you are calling the customer. You know how much value that added to the value equation? Time of delay just sunk to nothing. Meanwhile, they're waiting for three days for one of your competitors to guess what. They can't say you're expensive because if you don't have enough quote, they can't say those words. So if you want to beat out the competition and not have people say you're too expensive, beat out the competition in terms of time to the consumer. Like when you're getting one to three leads a day, folks, I highly recommend this should be notifications. This should be dinging your pocket. This should be you stopping whatever you're doing and calling that person immediately. And then the moment when you send the quote, the minute you click send, you're calling them, hey, I just sent it over. Let's go through it together. Get this folks. Hear this. 74,4% of businesses that get an estimate from a home service business accept the first quote they receive. So speed to lead. The reason that's like, oh, I know it's important. It's about the value equation. You reduce the time of delay. And so if they're going to take three days to get a quote from someone else, but in the first day you called them within a minute of them pushing a submit form. And then 10 minutes later you sent them a quote and called them again and gave them the price and made sure all questions were answered. You went over objections and sold the job and got a deposit. They're not talking to anyone else and you know they don't have anyone to say that you're too expensive. What are you comparing that to? So I think if I was, if I was in this room and I was getting 1, 2, 3 leads a day, if I was getting less than 5 leads a day, this is what I'd be doing. All right? I would be 60 second shot clock. Within 60 seconds I am calling the customer. Why am I calling them? I am simply saying, I got your information. I want to confirm a couple things. Like there's always a few things you might need to ask about their backyard. I'm assuming, right, the form comes in. Yes, you can sometimes do it via just Google, but is there usually a few clarifying questions? Is it this or it's this? Usually a few clarifying questions. So they just click submit, they're on your website, call them immediately. So again, when it comes to constraints in the 4L framework, I'm always trying to reduce time. So for example, if your constraint was finding laborers, I do the same thing with indeed, they click apply to work for me and they're immediately getting a phone call because I'm setting up notifications to ding me and like ring on my phone. And immediately I will call them because if they just went through apply, apply, apply, apply, apply, and they hit mine, I'm going to call them right away and get them for an interview right away. Can you come over to the office now if that's your constraint? So if your constraint is leads, you're only getting 3, 4, 5 a day text. When they come in, you're going to call them within 60 seconds. All right? You're going to make some clarifying things, et cetera, and then you can ask them, hey, would you like to go ahead and get that all set up right now or would you like me to send you a text message and I'll give you a call when it's done? They might just be ready to go. Oh, well, that's pretty amazing. I just call like submit a six. Let's just do it now. Great. Will go through the whole close process. Okay, what if they don't accept? I'm going to set up an in person meeting. That's a little expensive. You know what, Mr. Jones, a lot of people say that. And once I get in person and show you the real quality of this product and just what this brand can do for you, almost everyone that has said no to me has always said yes. So why don't we set up an appointment tomorrow also if they say yes, great, you booked the job and let's rock and roll. And then if they're like, oh yeah, I'm busy right now, I appreciate it, but I'm literally in the bathroom, just submitted the form. Can you just text it to me? He said, no problem, I'll get back to you right away. You do your thing. Ten minutes later. Hey, Mr. Jones, we got that bid and the exact same process that shows that you are adding value to the equation because you're reducing the time of delay. So as much as I know people will say price, it is never price is. Your value is too low. Because as long as value is higher than price, the transaction will still go through. You can talk to the HR department and the CEO of the company and see what time limit you can answer on. 8 o'. Clock, there it is. Anything before 8 o', clock, immediately after 8 o', clock next morning. There you go. Maybe the CEO will take those calls. Yeah, it's that Filipino voice inside of you there, Eric. Anything is on its side of the world. Cool. All right, we have 60 second lead shot clock. That means the moment you get that, if in your inbox it doesn't say the next minute you called them, we have their system failure. So if that means ringing, if that means having somebody that you hire and say, I will pay you $100 a day, but every time that phone rings or a lead comes in, you answer it immediately. Every time. I don't care if it is two in the morning, you answer that phone call. There are people that we do this for our gym because the same way people will just buy as long as we can get them on the phone. And so we just have a backup. I pay them $6aminute to answer the phone. $6aminute. You know what's crazy is 50% of people that call, I can close them right on the phone. So if I miss a call, I'm actually losing about $400. And usually those calls are two to three minutes. So like, if you did the math on what it's actually costing you to not call someone within 60 seconds, you do that in a heartbeat, right? If you can get an answering service to get calls that you can't get to, if you can hire someone to get those leads and just contact the customer, that alone will increase your close ratio. I like it. I really like it. If you're getting like 10 or 20 or 30 estimates a day, if you're getting one to three, we can take a few minutes and call people. All right, so 60 second shot clock. And then when we send a quote. So sent quote. We're always, always, always sending that text and email. There's never a world in which you send one because a text message, if it is a landline, will not go through. And there are many times that people are on do not disturb list etc that they can get blocked from those. So you might not get it. Get them an email. Email's Only going to answer. Open up about 30 to 40% of the time. So I do need the text too, but send them both. You got it in the form, right? You already have it in the form? Yeah. Send them both to send quote. Always text an email, and then I'm gonna call again within 60 seconds. Most of the time, if you do this, the customer has not received the quote yet. It'll take it longer than one minute to get inside their inbox. And so you usually have a minute or two just to talk to them. And that's great. Okay. Because you're like, hey, Mr. Jones, I just sent you over the quote. Open up your email. We'll go through it right now. And they're like, let me see here. I don't see it in here yet. Okay, well, why? It's coming over. I just wanted to say thank you. Talk to about the brand. You have a captive audience about 60 seconds. Why? The value of the brand. You're pumping in all sorts of extra value here. Okay. By the way, we have a spot available next Thursday. I'd love to get you on it. Let's go over the quote and we'll get you set up. Okay. So this is like basic 101, but you will increase your close ratio. If you're at 40%, you'll go to 50% just by doing these two things. Easy. Like, easy money. And whenever you increase close ratio, you're inherently reducing your customer acquisition costs, which makes it easier to get more leads. So we'll talk more about that later. The what? Warm, gushy brand. Yeah. Yeah. I would bake that into how did you hear about us? So, hey, how did you hear about us? Did you hear about us from X, Y and Z? And you throw that in and then they say, oh, no, I didn't. I heard it from Billy Bob, but I just slid in a promo. Exactly right. Did you hear exactly what you just said? That. And also, if there's local things in their area that just happened and you have the news, you literally say, hey, was it because of this? And they're like, you just put all sorts of great value in there. Exactly. Yeah. 100%. That's literally our line that we used once we got into the franchise. 500 or whatever. Did you see us in the rankings or did you hear us on YouTube? What? The rankings thing. And then you guys have the opportunity to tell them about everything that Lifesaver does. Cool. And they'll only ask you if they see value in that. Instead of it coming across promotional, it's just simply like, where do you hear about us? And that's a great slot, that 60 seconds when the email is still somewhere in the universe. Getting to them. You can ask them that right there. All right, this is the 60 second shot clock. But what we got to go back to is the follow up process. So now we've done both of these things. We called the person immediately. We got the lead, we called them when they got the quote. Most of the time that's going to go to voicemail. So what are we going to have to do? We're going to have to have an estimate follow up process. Now this process is going to be called the 10 days. I want everyone to write out day one through 10. I'm not going to write all 10. Maybe I will. Day four, day five, six, seven, eight, nine. All right, so all of this is going to be automated, but not all of this will be automated. I will explain. So we need to go to the process of following up with the customer once they have ghosted us. 80% of quotes at Augusta Lawn Care are accepted within the first three days. So if it goes cold past three days, the likelihood of them closing is extremely low. Okay, so if you're waiting till day 7, 8, 9, 10, 2 weeks to call somebody and follow up on the quote, you're not getting any. That's why you don't think follow up works. It's because in the first three days of your quote being sent to the customer is for Augusta. I can only report on us 80% of customers within the first three days of getting the quote. Okay, so I am going to. On day one, I'm going to call, I'm going to text, I'm going to email. Like that's going to be too much. No, no, no. 30 to 40% of people will get this. Almost all of them will get this. 99% and about 50% will answer your phone call. So most people will get your text message. But between the other two forms of communication, you might hit them one more time. Okay. Oh, you're harassing them. I am. Until you say yes or no, I am harassing you. And if someone's like, man, you're calling me a lot, it's like, yeah, I believe in this product. I think it's a really good thing for you and your family to. To invest in day two. What are we doing? All right, I'll let. I won't make you call them again. We'll do a text. They're running a call. We're going to email Say, well, how you said this is automated. What does that mean? These calls are emails to you telling you what to do. Okay. Because you're not going to automate the call. What you're going to do in your automations, I'm assuming you can do this, is email yourself the information about the customer, their phone number, etc. You don't need to go into the CRM to give them a phone call. You're going to get an email that says, Today is day one of follow up from Mr. Jones. Here's a link to his estimate, here's his phone number, here's his address. Boom, I'm calling them. So that email goes to you or text message. Either way, call or text or email or text reminding you to call the customer via phone. Okay? And now this should occur for every single day of 10 days. It's on day 10, we mark this as closed. I close out the estimate, it is done. The likely of someone accepting 10 days after is low. Now, will I allow someone to accept an estimate? Because yes, there are times that randomly someone will answer me in 28 days later and accept the estimate. Yes. But if they do that, I have not done my job in the first 10 days. If you do this for 10 days, no one's accepting this in four weeks from now. Right now, before I close this out, one of my last phone calls is going to look along the lines of something like, hey, Mr. Hey Mr. Jones, tomorrow the bid expires. I do need an answer on this today, so I will text you and please respond asap. It is telling them it is expiring. This thing is done, this is over. You need to make a decision and if you don't hear from them, it's closed. But I have not done my job. I have not heard from them at some point throughout this period. Now this shouldn't even be happening. Let's all be honest. If we're doing in person quotes, this shouldn't be happening. We should be leaving with a yes or no from the job site, from the customer's house. And to say that we allow customers to think about it means we have either A, not prepped them for the meeting or B, we have not sat in an uncomfortable place and answered all their questions and objections. Prepping for the meeting could potentially mean making sure their spouse is always there because if that is their excuse, they're using against you to think about it. Smoke it out. Hey. We require all decision makers are there. We do this in order to make sure we go through our protocol. Of showing you how this is going to actually apply to your property. To make sure your safety of the pool is at its highest point. Make it up. You need both decision makers there. So when it comes to any marketing funnel, the objective is that we get paying customers as the bottom of the funnel. But what we can do is we can track the cost per click, and that's how much I'm going to have to pay to get someone to click into the top of the funnel, Come to my website, et cetera. Usually pretty easy to track your cost per click. Facebook, Google, et cetera. And this is just at the top of the funnel. So clicks come into my website. They're now aware of who I am. I can usually approximate that pretty easily. I'm just gonna call it $1 now. I don't really care about clicks to my site. I need paying customers. I do not really care about clicks. So some percentage of those people are going to convert from a click into a lead. This would be our cost per lead. Now what percent convert is my conversion ratio. So over here I have my conversion ratio. Conversion ratio. And let's just say that's like 1 out of 50. So if I have a $1 cost per click and 1 out of 50 convert, that is become a lead by calling me, saying, sending me an email, filling out an SM request form or some way, shape or form, what's my cost per lead? 50 bucks. But again, I can't pay my bills with leads. I want paying customers. So the next thing is there's another filter. This is the filter of conversion. This filter though, is our close rate. That's what percentage of my leads do I actually close? Let's assume for a moment, just for the sake of math, that's 50%. In other words, 50% of the people that ask for a quote, I end up getting them sold. What would my, over here, customer acquisition cost be? Hundred dollars. Are you aware that. All right, paid social media ads. So Facebook, Instagram, all that. Okay, cool. And what is that a range? Is that like a flat fee? Monthly plus. So how does that work? So what's the fee? And then the budget is just whatever. And what's the fee per month? Got it. So around 1100 11. $1200 for management fees. Okay, all right, good to know. So I would roll that cost into my customer acquisition cost, by the way, any sort of management. So if this is 100 and you're like, well, I get 30 in the month, I would take my $1,200 of management fee and bake that in to my customer acquisition cost. So an extra 10 bucks or whatever it is. $100. So cool. This is important. I don't care about clicks, I don't care about leads. I only care about my customer acquisition cost. The reason is, is because if I know my customer acquisition cost and I know this other number called my lifetime value of a customer, I then have a machine to make money with. If we don't know those two numbers, we are flying blind. Because if I know how much my customer acquisition cost is, which is how much do I have to spend to get someone through my marketing funnel. Once they're down here, I have another funnel and that is the lifespan of that customer in my business. Now if I'm only going to sell them one fence and that's $3,000, then the lifetime value of that customer would be $3,000. Now if I could spend. Michael, if I could spend $100, customer acquisition cost, hypothetical. And every single day of the week get a customer that gives me $3,000 in lifetime value. Good deal. All right. Now would I be willing to spend $600 or $700 customer acquisition costs to get $3,000 lifetime value? Maybe not. I don't really like spending 30 or 40% of my total revenue that a customer is going to give me on advertising and getting the customer. Here's what's crazy. Let's do this. Let's say you stink at getting follow up to the customer. You stink at getting back to them, getting them in a fast manner. You don't answer your phone within 60 seconds. You don't follow up with text and email. Who knows where they ghost you all the time. All right, let's just take this close rate down to let's call it like 14%. If you run the math on this, with the exact same cost per lead, this customer acquisition cost is going to go to about $300. This is why I mentioned earlier when I said increasing your close ratio decreases your customer acquisition cost. Because watch what happens if I take my close ratio. I had close 80%. Now all of a sudden, my customer acquisition cost is something around 60 bucks. Something right around that. So the difference between someone who paid $300 per customer and someone else who paid 20% of that is simply their close ratio. So who do you think is going to be able to spend more liquidity and get more leads? It's the person that has a lower customer acquisition cost. But why do they have that? They have the higher close ratio. Alright, so this is why again, the follow up process, getting to the customer fast. Increasing the close ratio now allows you to make sense of spending more money on the business. And the only reason we care about that is because we've made. Whoa, sorry, cough drop. Because I've made this machine called Lifesaver, that if I put $100 in, I'll get a $3,000 out. That is the whole aspect of business. I don't care what this is called. This is just business. And we are adding value to be able to extract this money from the customer. Any business is simply this funnel. I acquire a customer for a certain dollar amount, and I get, over the course of their lifetime, a certain dollar amount from them. This is a money machine. And if I know these numbers, I can keep pumping money in the top, knowing what this number will be on the other side. So we've gone over the impact of close rate, our close ratio on our customer acquisition cost. That's the top of this funnel. What I have to spend to get a customer into my business. If I look at this like a machine, it's money in and money out. It's the only two numbers I need to know is how much money do I have to put in for what return. So we talked about how customer acquisition cost comes in play, and we're going to talk about how to make an ad that will decrease your customer acquisition cost. Let's talk about lifetime value, because this is the lowest hanging fruit. Because if you could, theoretically, instead of this person giving you $3,000, if the value of this customer was instead $8,000, would you be willing to pay a lot more for customer acquisition cost? Yes, because you nearly tripled the lifetime value. And so this is what we talk about. Things like upselling lights, upselling pool covers, upselling, the swim lessons, and the baby proofing. All of that is an effort to increase your lifetime value, because if you increase this number, this machine gets more efficient. By the way, if you ever were to sell your business, the major thing that will determine your valuation is how good of a machine you have built is determined by how much money do I put in. And when I put that in, what do I get on the other side? Okay. This is why private equity firms, when they go into a business, grow so fast. It's because they just like, okay, great, we're willing to spend a lot more money. Yep, we're willing to take on $8,000 customer. Great, we'll spend a thousand dollars and we'll just completely take out the market because no one else will be willing to spend that, and we know that we can make $8,000 on that and we're okay with that. So by increasing our lifetime value, upselling the customer, selling them more products, selling more stuff, and then decreasing my customer acquisition cost. Cause I know what I'm doing when it comes to marketing, I'm able to create a more efficient business machine. By creating a more efficient business machine, I am able to increase my cash flow. So I don't have negative cash flow like we talked about earlier. I'm able to expand because now I have liquidity available to keep pumping money into this. Cause a fast growing business simply does. This takes free cash flow, dumps it into customer acquisition costs, and this cycle is keeps going and going as they grow the business until they hit a constraint in the 4L framework. So right now you're like, man, I'm just not getting enough leads. Okay, well then maybe we got, we gotta focus on how do we get more people in the top of clicking. We need more people up top here. Maybe I got leads, but I only got like a 20, 25% close ratio. Okay, well maybe that's the constraint. And as that lead flows down through the marketing funnel, and now they're a customer, I've got to figure out how do I improve the value of that customer. Because right now, if you're paying $300 for a new customer, let's just make that number up. Like that's crazy on a $2,500 fence. I don't want to do that. I agree with you. But if that same customer was worth $10,000, you would spend that all day long. And so instead of trying to always squeeze our customer acquisition cost and figure out how little we can spend on marketing, what we want to focus on is how can I improve the lifetime value of the customer so much to the extent that I would be crazy not to put money here instead of the stock market. Because right now on this horrible number, I'm getting an 8x ROAS return on ad spend. Okay? If I can get an 8x on my money, why in the world would I go get an 8%? That's 0.08 for 0.08 compared to 8.8x percent of my money in the stock market. Okay? This is the investment vehicle of your business. And if you start looking at your business much more like a machine, which is money in, money out. That's all I care about. You treat your business very differently. The trucks, the equipment, the training, the skills, your employees, all of that is just the systems that make up the machine that make these numbers possible. And that's it. There's all the operations, all the admin, all the stuff that's gotta get done. But all we really care about is money and money out. There's your machine. Make sense? Very cool. All right, now none of you do none of you run ads right now, like on your own? No one. Okay. I would have to assess the current ads then. But hopefully this is helpful nonetheless. And maybe that's fine. That's cool. Because even if you have someone else running your ads, you how you like. Does anyone here make videos for social media at all? Okay. All right. Okay, cool. All right. Let me take it in a different direction and we'll come back to one another thing. All right, I'm gonna go over something I have never shared with anyone else. Give me one second. Okay. If I can find it, there it is. Okay. No one. No, Brian has not seen this. No one has seen this. This is going to be in my next book probably. Okay. We have different types of where leads come from. We have intent based, we have interruptive. And I would also say if you don't run your own ads, I think you are crazy not to understand how they work. I think it's absolute insanity for you as a business owner to relegate this number to somebody else and not know at least how to measure their performance. I think it's crazy. Absolutely insane. So if you're just like paying someone blindly for marketing and you have no idea what they're doing, you have no idea what the customer acquisition cost is, you have no idea what the cost per click is, that should be a massive red flag. Cause you literally have relegated the most important number in your business, which is money in. You can determine money out. And I would agree that is something we can all control and we should gas it for all it's worth and get more lights customers and upsell them, et cetera. But if we do not know at least how to measure the performance of someone running our ads, we are flying blind. Because if that number just goes down and you don't know why, what are you gonna do about it? What if your leads just fall off a cliff and you're just paying someone to do it. I highly recommend understanding how these ad platforms work. How did I do that? Go into YouTube and search how to make a Facebook ad, search how to make a YouTube ad, search how Google Ads work and understand it to some extent. You don't need to go run the ads, but understanding how to do it is very Important. So when they give you a spreadsheet that has like customer acquisition costs and cost of acquisition and all these numbers, you actually understand somewhat of how that report is supposed to look. All right, highly recommend. When it comes to leads, intent based though, this is going to be something like a Google. People are going to Google and they're searching for a certain specific thing. Does anyone here know what your most common keywords are for search for pool fencing? Is it just pool fence? Great. Pool fence. They're looking for your product, they have intent to buy another way. Most recently it's starting to come up is LLMs, large language models. Think AI people going on there. Like how do I get a fence around? Like I need to show up there. This is where I can get leads intent based. They are looking to buy a pool fence. I should be getting in front of them. This is usually your highest converting leads because they're looking for your product. They're coming to Google looking for a pool fence. We should be closing them. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. You asked Google Siri? I tried all. They all say, yeah, I do it with my friends. Hey, Google, that's honestly a great thing to be able to say, hey, you know, don't trust us ads. Yeah. So if you're doing an in house estimate, they have like a Google home or Alexa. Yeah. Whatever that is. There are people you can pay like 400 bucks usually to get it validated, but it is a pain in the butt, especially if you're trying to validate an address delete. Brutal, man. Yeah, Google validation. Someone's been searching the wrong product. Cool. All right. Another intent based thing that we can focus on is Google but also Google reviews. So again, back to your Google listing. If you have an address verify on Google Google listing, you will rank higher versus if you just do service area, it's harder to validate your Google address. But if you have an address, a physical address that you can verify on your Google listing, you will show up on, you'll rank better than if you just do service area. But that's not seen by the way. It is. Yep. So sometimes maybe you're not comfortable with your house or maybe sometimes houses don't get validated because you have to submit a video of it being validated. So for Augusta, we actually encourage people to like literally go to an office space, give them some money to put their your sign in their window and have a mailbox there, pay them 100 bucks a month or do their lawn for free. But I need to verify an address in My market in your territory name very crucial. The reason is because it used to be Google my business. That doesn't mean anything. It's just Google listing and it's just part of Google Maps. So if you show up on the map and in your market someone is searching pool fence and the name of your business is pool fence and your territory name, the likelihood of you showing up on the map is very high. And if you can show up in those rankings, it's free. This is intent based market maps paying for anything. Exactly. Yeah. Neither. That's a whole other topic. But getting those reviews is very important. If you have in your market, if someone else is doing pool fencing in your market, you need more Google reviews than them, period. Full stop every day of the week. If you need to incentivize your crew, if you need to incentivize your customer, if you need to do anything possible to get more reviews than your competitor, that one thing alone will drive more leads for you than anything. If you're not showing up right at the top of Google, it's simply because usually your listing is not being optimized. Go through your listing, make sure that it's not adding services randomly. Make sure your address is information, your phone number is correct, et cetera. Check, do it on a regular basis. We recommend people do it on a monthly basis to go check your Google listing, make sure everything's updated, make sure it's not randomly closed because someone clicked that it's closed and someone else verified it. You can literally get your competition shut down. Doing this is a couple people saying that this business is closed and Google market and flag as closed. So if you're the business owner, probably a good idea to make sure you go check it once a month to make sure stupid stuff isn't like that is not happening. Yeah, one of our, a few of our competitors locally at my Augusta location just constantly tell Google that we don't mow grass. So like we constantly just going in there like no. Yes, we are a longer provider. It says it in our name. But they'll just go in there like oh, they don't do this. They don't do this. And just trying to get Google messed up. No, I don't but I have my suspicions. Okay. So interruptive. This is what we most the time think of when it comes to ads. And these are the ones that you actually didn't mean to see. You didn't go to Facebook hoping you'd see a pool fence ad besides Eric. But you do go to Facebook to see the cute picture of your grandkid and a cute puppy, et cetera. But I'm interrupting them with an ad to see pool fencing, other types of interruptive type things could be door hangers or door to door. Does everyone here do door hangers? For the nine houses around their current the properties they're serving eight. Okay, cool. So highly recommend you are interrupting them. That's why there's regulation around it because you are interrupting people. There's regulation on door to door. There's regulation around Facebook ads because you are interrupting people. Can you guys customize that door hanger or is that not allowed? Okay, what's on that door hanger? Cool. And then just your number and stuff. Cool. One thing you might want to think about is put a QR code on that and schedule to directly to either CRM or calendly or whatever. Set up an appointment for your free in home consultation. Scan this QR code and we'll give you the recommendations to make your pool safer. Something like that. X amount of people died in this county last year due to drowning, et cetera. We recently did next door neighbor. If you'd like a free home in house consultation, we'd love to do that with one of our experts. Scan this QR code, set it up. Awesome. That's interruptive. But again yet nonetheless it is effective. Alright, this is passive. Next one. This is organic social media like on your social media pages. This is like Facebook groups that you're not paying to be part of. This is your trucks or your vehicle wraps, et cetera. These are like the three generalized way of getting a lead. Either they're trying to find me, they're not trying to find me, I interrupt them. Or. Or it's passive. They're just driving around town. They see my trucks or they see my truck at their neighbor's house and therefore they give me a call. Okay, very good. We laid that groundwork in order to be able to go to the last part. So deposits. Okay. Cash flow. Let's first be very clear when it comes to cash flow. We want money to come in as fast as possible and we want money to leave as slow as possible. Okay. There are billion dollar company is built on one thing. Collecting money fast and giving it away slow. And their whole business model is keep the money long enough to do something with it and then give it away. That's a bank. Take money as fast as possible, give it away to other people much slower. Okay. This is why big Companies, commercial contracts, etc. Are like we'll do you 90 day terms, net 90. Because they know that if they can pay slower and collect faster, they make more money. Right? So somehow though, in small business, we're like, yeah, we will do the whole job. We will cover all of the supplies, we will cover all of the labor, and you don't pay us anything. That stinks. You know what? That call is a horrible business model. Here's why. Okay? This is breakeven. When you sell a job, okay? And you got to go get the materials. Now, assuming you bought the materials like months ago. So here's what's crazy with your guys business model. Not crazy in a bad way, just like crazy in general. You'll see what I mean in a second is you guys start negative on every single job because you've pre purchased the materials. Which, by the way, is a good idea because you get a big discount on your cost of goods sold. Not saying that's bad. What I'm saying is every single job you start, you are starting with negative cash flow. Oh, it is? Yeah. Oh, but don't. If they order pre order, they get a big discount. Oh, okay. Oh, is it right before. Got it. Okay, well then, okay, then let's not use that example. Okay, Good to know. I thought everyone was buying in advance and taking the discounts. I heard that one in January or February and I was like, oh, everyone should be buying. Got it. Okay, Right, Okay. So let's assume that we don't do that because that does complicate, but we'll stick with zero. So we start off the job. We have zero costs in the job. We sell the job. Okay, first off, there is customer acquisition cost. We are in the red on this customer. $100, $200, whatever it is, we are in the red. We are losing money to get this customer. We sell them the job. What's the next thing we do? Go buy the materials. Now we're really in the red. Then we go do the job. What do we have to do? Direct labor. We have to drive out there. We have to do all this stuff in the red even more. Okay? And then we hope and pray that a few weeks later we get paid and we make a profit. This stinks. You know why? Cause this is a hole in your pocket. And from the time that they accept the job to the time you get paid could be five, six weeks. So for five or six weeks, you're gonna have negative cash flow on that product. You're gonna be negative cash flow. And what that means is, as you grow the business, this gets bigger and Bigger and bigger, more and more jobs stacking on top of each other. And they keep adding up to where you have this massive, what you call a line of credit. And that line of credit is there to bridge the gap between this and this. And yeah, yeah, this is the gap you are trying to solve when it comes to, like, by the time he has to order it from China, get it here, pay for, etc. And then you all buy it seven months later. This is his thing that he has to solve with a line of credit. Okay? Now there's a better way to do it, all right? And that is collect money beforehand. So the day I, I sell the job, I'm immediately getting 50% of that job deposit money down in order to get on the schedule. You, I collect 50% minimum, then I go get the materials, then I pay for the direct labor, and then I get paid. But I never go negative. This is why I collect money up front is very, very important. This business can run with much less cash in the bank because you never go negative on any project. And as you begin to grow, you will not need more working capital because you never go negative. And it's all because we're not collecting a deposit. You've been screwed twice, Is that what you said? Yeah. And we're not even accounting the fact that it might actually stop right here because they never pay you. The reason we don't accept deposits. Here's the reason why. You're afraid they're going to say no. And you're afraid that if they say no, you won't be able to fill your schedule. Here's why I know that to be the case. Because if you had so many leads pouring in, you did not know what to do. You would be charging a deposit. So you would flush out anyone that's not committed and you have just committed customers. And that's when I would then say, in the 4L framework, you have a leads constraint. If you got more leads, you would be much more picky about your deposit because you just need skin in the game. This is why the deposit thing works so well, is because once they have skin the game, you're not questioning it, because all of you are doing right now is questioning whether or not this job is actually going to happen until you set foot on property, once they have 50% down, the skin of the game. And you can actually, like, you have the money to go buy the stuff, etc. But this is a game you will lose at every single time there's a business. We just went To a couple of weeks ago on the YouTube channel. You can look it up. Roofing company they did. They're on track for 3 million. But last year they had 1.6 million. But they had $279,000 in receivables. And so the business was bankrupt. Like essentially no money in the bank. But very profitable. Like you have a fast growing profitable business that goes bankrupt because of this problem. The bad money model make sense. So require deposit. You will not see anyone that it would be a good customer cancel from of that. Like if they're really committed, they're doing this. If they've seen the value, it's like okay look, my car outside's worth 20 grand. If you gotta give me 50% of $10. So $5 today, $5 tomorrow, you're like great, let's do it. It's great. Value always comes down to the value equation. Crazy. Stat at copilot. When we track all this, when someone is given the option to accept an estimate and we just have a button that says pay in full, 15% of people will just click it and pay the whole estimate up front without any verbiage whatsoever pushing them. Because they're just like I don't want to deal with this afterwards. I know this company is good. I've been. I have plenty of proof that they are going to do a good job. Pay the whole thing up front 15% without doing anything like telling them they need to 15% will just go from amount balance do too painful. Now here's the, here's another thing. Here's what I would also say. Hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone. Is use this as a downsell. We need to hook them in so we get their attention. We then have the meat of the, of the video which is going to be here's the problem, here's the solution. And either I'm going to offer you something or give you a case study. So for example, when you're talking about their next door neighbor, that's the case study. And then my call to action. What do I want them to do? Do I want them to call? Do I want them to click? Do I want them to go somewhere? Do I scan a QR code? That's my call to action. I'll give you an example from regards to lawn care and then we'll work on this a little bit later together. Hook. Attention homeowners in Whatcom County. Are you tired of mowing your lawn every single weekend and letting your golf handicap continue to go up? Don't do that anymore. Call Augusta Lawn Care today and get your price immediately. Get 10% off your first MoW when you sign up today. Click the link below for an immediate quote. That's the general flow. So you're like, I don't know how to make a video. I don't know how to make a social media post. It's actually going to convert. This is how to do it. You got to hook them in. You can use, like I mentioned, demographics. So attention, something homeowners. You could also say something along the lines of a hook, like, so how X amount of people died in Whatcom county last year because of drowning in a pool. That gets people's attention. I'm hooked. I'm all in. I think you all would crush on social media because you're selling an emotional product. Very difficult for us to do with lawn care. We sell time, but it's not very emotional. Most people are not emotionally attached to their lawn. And so the fact that you all can use hooks around people dying, I know it sounds horrible, but that's ultimately why you do this product, is to save lives. So lean into it. Good, great. Let's refine it. Okay, so first off, I would never say schedule a meeting. I would say schedule in house, free consultation. Right. And so that you can make your pool more safe. I would. That'd be the first thing. Next thing is another hook to make this more personalized because like, if you say, hey, this is the number one leading cause, is it the second or first number one leading cause of children under five in the United States? Great, that's the whole country. I want to hook them in by telling them, oh, this adds for me by saying, X amount of kids died in your state or better yet, city last year. Now they know, oh, this is made for me. Right? So very good, very good workshop of that though. I'm trying to hook them in. I just need them to stop scrolling. It's my only objective is to get them to stop scrolling. And then once I do that, I present the problem, I present the solution. I give them either an offer or case study and then I tell them what to do. I highly recommend everyone here create more content on your social. Here's why. If you make 10 videos and one of them takes off randomly on social media, you know, you do, you run ads against it. Because 1 out of 10, one of 20 videos that you make, if you follow the structure and you post this on your social media account, one of them is going to do way more views and shares and comments than Any of the other ones. When you're making your regular posts on your social media, you can still follow this framework. You're not going to be as high energy. You have captions and all that sort of thing. But when you're doing a video in the backyard of someone who just installed their fence, instead of being like, hey, this is Mike over at Lifesaver and we just installed this fence for so and so here. Like, instead of doing that, it's going to be like, hey, by the way, did you know you're gonna start with a hook? Get them invested in this video. That's why so and so installed this fence back here. So their 4 year old over here is no longer gonna run that, that pool over there and die. Maybe a little more tactful. All right, that guy right there is gonna die. But you're following the same exact sequence hook. I'm trying to hook them in. Here's the problem. Little junior over there could jump into the water. We have the solution. Here's the fence. By the way, you can get a free consultation. You can have some other offer, for example, like a free lesson. Like the whole training around the pool lessons could be wrapped up into this offer. For example, the case study if you're in someone's backyard after doing a property is that they just did it. If you're doing a door hangers, their neighbor just did it. I would also, I would get an A frame. If I was in this industry. I would put it out on the road and have an arrow that says something along the lines of pool fence being installed. Something along the lines of like safety improvement and being like hazard letters that they. What's that? A frame? Yeah, just like, just like you can just pull out. It's like usually like 4ft by 3ft and they just, it's like an A frame. One of those. I put it behind my, my truck or van, whatever you're all using. I know the van is there. But if you get people that are driving to see the hazard and they look at it and then they look at your, at your van and they attribute like safety, like, oh, they really care about their kids. Right? You want that emotion. No one's going to tell you to put that sign away because it's bringing, it's elevating them their status. Your customer's not going like, hey, put that away. I don't want you to tell me everyone, I'm a great parent. They're like, oh, they're very good. Now Mr. Jones down the street will see how great of a mom I am to my children. That's all I got for today. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate you being here.