Struggling With Profit? Watch This Before You Quit

No, we need to make more money. All of it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I've been doing. None of it matters. None of it's making a difference. We haven't paid ourselves in two weeks. I don't know what to do. Oh, they hit 1.2 million. Like they can't be that far in the red. Well, sound familiar? Yeah. For most home service business owners, this is what it feels like every single day. The cash comes in and it disappears. Insurance, fuel, wages, rent. You're working your butt off and you're still broke. I'm going to show you the five fixes for this problem. Whether you're just getting started or you're doing six figures in revenue. If there's not enough money in the bank, here's how to fix it.

Simple and standardized. By doing that, I'm able to build the business to leave. There's a great book called Built to Sell. I like to think of it more as like built to leave. In other words, I want to build the business in a way where I could leave and it would still continue to operate. There are many unprofitable businesses, especially in home services. Their unprofitability is masked by the fact that the owner is working 12, 14 hour days and they don't look that bad, mostly because someone is working crazy amounts of hours to make sure all the balls of the business get juggled. So the question is, how do I actually fix this? Well, you create systems. Well, how do I create systems? You want to be able to focus on things that are simple and standardized instead of complex and custom. So the opposite of simple is complex, it's complicated. And the opposite of standard and standardized is custom. And it's. What's so funny to me is that in home services we've glorified custom. There are very few custom home builders that have scaled across the country. Why? Because very difficult to grow and scale. It's very difficult to be able to grow that business in a way with systems. And it doesn't mean though that you can't build big projects and have big jobs. For example, there are home builders like Lennar and Dr. Horton that have built billion dollar enterprises and have thousands of houses being built. But what did they do? They standardized everything. So just because like, well, if I have to do just simple services, I don't want to create systems. In my business you can create systems for very, very difficult projects like building an entire house with the plumbing and the heating and the air conditioning and the, and the roofing. All of that can be standardized. By doing this, they create systems and those systems run the business. Not an entrepreneur or a manager working 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. And if you're in that position, you might have to simplify your services. You might have to simplify the way you answer the phones, simplify the way you do estimates, simplify the way you do billing. You might have to standardize the materials that you're using, standardize the way that your estimators address the customer, standardize your follow up process. So by simplifying and standardizing, we create systems in the business and those systems run the business business and allow the business owner to build the company away that it runs without them. If you got a lot of guts, you can do door knocking. Now, door knocking is not for the faint heart. It's very difficult to walk up to strangers, houses knock on their door, know that you are interrupting them and try to sell them your services. But ultimately you're going to have the highest amount of response because they cannot not respond to you. Keep in mind, when you're doing door knocking, only about 40, 50% of people are actually going to be home. And so I recommend keeping something like a door hanger that you can put on the door if they're not home. And so it's waste of time walking their house, waiting there for 30, 60 seconds, looking around, doing nothing. Like have something to be able to put on the door. At the very least, keep in mind you're only probably going to be able to get to 15, 20 houses per hour when it comes to actually knocking on the door because you have to wait for them to come answer it. Now instead of being super salesy and try to sell them on something at the door, you could also just go a little more low key and just introduce yourself. Hey, it's Mike here. I started Augusta Lawn Care, do lawn care and landscaping the year. If you ever need anything, just want to give you my card. I'd love to be of service to you. That's great. They can close the door. Thank you. Buy and you're gone. It's not high pressure. Another way you can use door to door sales is simply introducing yourself when you have a customer in the local area in their neighborhood. So for example, hey, we're just down at Mr. Jones house down the street doing a property cleanup. You might have seen us driving by the last couple days. Just want to introduce myself. If you ever need a property cleanup like Mr. Jones did, just reach out, let us know. And a lot of times, if customer needs a service, they're just gonna be like, oh actually, yeah, like why are you here? Could you give me a quote? Like, what would it charge to do my property? And so that's a nice easier way to do it. If you want to go high pressure sales, you can have a price and you can ask for the sale right then and there. Most people that I encounter with, it's just too much social anxiety and I don't blame them. It's very, very difficult. But ultimately it costs you one thing. And literally the soles on your shoes. Like when people say boots on the ground, they say, you know, got to do pound pavement. It's walking on these, this pavement right here on this sidewalk and going through the rejection that comes along with door to door sales. Now there's a few hacks that you can use to make sure you get as many door hangers as possible. Because ultimately it's all about the math. So being in a more dense area and neighborhood is going to allow you to hit more like 60, 70, 80, 100 plus different addresses per hour. If you're really spread out where you've got to walk two or three minutes between every single property, you might only get out 15 or 20 door hangers in an entire hour. So the math on that, once you know how many door hangers you got to put out per hour, you can actually run the math on is if you actually hired someone to just do these door hangers themselves. So if you paid someone $20 an hour, then you got maybe these cost like 10 or 15 cents a pop. So maybe a 10 to $10 in printing costs. Now if you get like one lead per hour, $20 in labor, $10 in printing cost, $30 cost per lead is fantastic. So it's all about the math. How many door hangers can you put out per hour and how many door hangers you have to put out in order to get one new lead. Once you've figured that math out, you can completely scale this across your city. Now remember, door hangers are going to be super seasonal, which means they might work today, but next month not work if the demand for that service is no longer there. For example, I did core aeration right here, but I know for a fact that if I do corporation any time other than early spring or late fall, I'm just not going to get a good return. It's very seasonal. Same thing with direct mail and a lot of other services. Because people usually aren't going to want to use your services unless they have actual pain. So if the grass is growing, lawn mowing might be the one they want to think about. But if the grass is dormant, doing door hangers for any sort of lawn mowing is just not going to have a great return. Now, one way that we really like at Augusta lawn care to improve the chances of someone actually reaching out over these door hangers is you have the actual prices. We call this the instant quote on the back of the door hanger. So in addition to it having the front that's a little more design friendly on the back end, they can actually get the instant quote for bush trimming, leaf cleanup, weeds in the beds, if this is a property cleanup one. And then also we put any notes and a total actual dollar amount in order to do this one. For property cleanup specifically, you would have to have a marker or a pen and actually fill this in as you walk up to the front door. So this is going to slow you down, but your response rate is going to be higher. If we look at it from this purely this perspective is like if we're knocking on the door and talking to people, that's going to be our highest response rate, but we're going to have less deliveries per hour, less contacts per hour, less impressions. And then if we move down a little, well, if we do instant pricing, it's going to take us a little longer to fill this out on every property as we walk up in terms of a property cleanup or a mowing estimate for their weekly and biweekly price, any notes, etc. It's gonna take us a little longer. So we're going to have greater impact, higher response rate, but also less per hour that we're going to be able to deliver. And then you really want to go to the max. You would not have instant pricing. And you just hit every single door as fast as possible. You use a scooter to just go as fast as possible. And that's going to be a lowest response rate, but it's you're going to have your highest volum the number of people that you can actually go out and reach. So door hangers, great strategy. We've built massive businesses inside of Augusta lawn care just off the back of door hangers. Just keep in mind you'll want to test different areas as well, because one neighborhood might have no response door hangers, Another area might have, you know, massive response. Keep in mind, when you're hitting every single door with door hangers, you can also get around most no, no trespassing laws because you're Canvassing, you are not soliciting. If you're knocking on doors, that's soliciting. And in a lot of HOAs and neighborhoods, they're going to have no soliciting allowed. But you can canvas, which is hitting every single door with a door hanger. I believe the vast majority of home service business owners that go out of business is simply because they never determined and defined what the finish line was for them to stop growing the business and start raising prices. So what I want you to do before you even get to the spring rush is determine, okay, how many customers will I stop growing at, how many trucks will I stop growing at, how many employees will I stop growing at? And when I hit those numbers, I'm going to stop growing and instead raise prices. If we're on constant treadmill of just keep buying more trucks, keep hiring more people, keep getting more customers, we don't actually ever raise our prices and get profitable because if I can raise my prices by 15%, I could potentially double my profits. But most people never even get to raising their prices because they just keep buying more trucks, hiring more people and getting more equipment. So who gets rich? Equipment manufacturers and marketing companies, because that's what fuels that massive amounts of growth. But if you actually want to make money in your home service business, you determine, when am I going to stop growing and raise my prices and stop getting more customers, stop buying more trucks and stop buying more equipment. The fifth secret to crushing the spring rush is prioritize. I'm going to prioritize time sensitive and recurring jobs during the spring rush. Because during the spring rush, all the jobs come pouring in all at the same time. One time projects, recurring jobs, time sensitive jobs, time insensitive jobs. Great. I've got all the jobs coming at the same amount of time, three to four months. But I've got to fill up the whole year. So what am I going to do? I'm going to prioritize getting jobs done that can't wait one or two months. For example, with lawn care, I can't tell Mr. Jones, sorry, Mr. Jones, we're really busy. We'll mow your grass in three to four months from now. Can't do that. But if a lead comes in from Mr. Jones and it's a paver patio. My goal is to prioritize recurring and time sensitive jobs. Mowing and then push off big projects or time insensitive jobs that are one time as far out as I possibly can. You can actually discount the job in order to be able to close it in your off season down the road by doing this, I get revenue in my off season by pushing that project out. But I also am able to reserve time to get new customers that are for recurring work. And I personally want to prioritize recurring revenue during the spring rush Performance. This is the key performance indicators or KPIs that I want you to know. Cold during the spring rush. There are so many numbers you can track inside of a business, but I want you to pare down to just three key numbers that you would know if someone woke you up at 2am in the middle of the night and they shook you. Okay, what's your close ratio? You know the number. There are so many numbers, but close ratio is a pretty important one to know what percentage of your estimates are getting accepted. That's the number. You might want to know your efficiency score. How much of your time is actually spent doing the work instead of just driving around or loading up the trucks and doing non revenue producing. I would immediately know what my paper performance numbers are. These are the metrics that you got to know, but I only want you to pare it down to three. Instead of just having like I got to know all my numbers, just focus on three. And if you don't know which ones to track, watch my videos or my free courses on mycandies.com and they'll show you more numbers that you could track. But I only want you to pare it down to three. So that way you can actually stay focused on doing more operations, spending time with your team and selling more jobs. During the spring rush, we don't want to be spending time on creating dashboards and metrics and spreadsheets. We want to focus on getting more jobs and then doing the work. It's extremely tempting when you're first getting started and you have 5, 10, 15 customers to just kinda keep track of everything in your head or even use your cell phone like the Reminders app or your calendar to keep track of everything. A CRM or customer relationship management tool is a lot more than just a calendar or to do list. It's going to keep track of everything of your business. It's an extremely important piece of software that's going to differentiate you from all the competition. The number one differentiator between chuck and a truck and people that go really really low on price and really bring down the professionalism in our industry versus the people that charge a premium price, have profit margins, employees, logoed trucks, insured and bonded, et cetera. The difference. If I could group it up Very quickly is the professionals have a CRM and a software service behind them. The truck in a truck. Solo operators usually do not. The vast majority of solo operators do not have a CRM. And if you are planning to stay as a solo operator, I know that you can charge 5 or $10 more per hour for your labor simply by having a CRM. Why? Because it makes you look way more professional. You can send reminders to customers, automated follow ups via text or email. There's so much you can do inside a CRM beyond just the calendar and the to do. When we say CRM, customer relationship management, it really is trying to manage the relationship with the customer. Every single call. Putting the call notes inside of there. Inside of copilot you can make it where you put call notes and then have a reminder set. In three or four days you do a follow up and it goes back and reminds you to follow up with the customer. Keeping track of all the payments, invoices, the jobs that you've done, and making sure that job notes are on every single visit. When you're a solo operator, it's tempting to do this in your head or in your phone or just think about it and store it somewhere on a sheet of paper or something like a notebook. I've seen this be the CRM for many home service businesses. The reason that doesn't work is because it only works as long as you are doing the jobs. For example, only you, no Ms. Sally wants all the flower beds cut down with a weed whacker instead of pulled by hand. Only you know that the Mr. Jones doesn't like his beds edged. He only likes them to have a trimmer on them. He likes no stick edger, just the weed whip. These are the type of things that you know, but you've got to put them inside of the database. You've got to put them inside of your CRM. If you don't, you will become the bottleneck to your business because you have all this knowledge that's only tied to you. And as soon as you get hit by a bus or you get injured or something happens in your family and you can't do the work itself, literally the business will dissolve completely. Most small businesses in home services, including lawn care, dissolve. They go bankrupt or they sell off for pennies on the dollar due to one thing and that is an injury. Some sort of something with their health, family, something puts them off track. And because they had no information inside of a software system and it was all in their head, the business is essentially worth nothing. Even if you're a solo operator, having all of that information inside of a CRM is your best insurance policy against something happening to you and preventing you from being able to work for a week or two. And all of a sudden the business is completely gone. For the sake of your family that you're providing for, for the sake of the people that you might want to employ down the road, keep a CRM. Keep detailed notes. Make sure that every invoice, every single estimate is documented. You can keep track of your close ratio simply by marking estimates as won or lost. There's so much you can do inside of a CRM. I recommend copilotcrm.com, you can go there and, and see all the different features, including things like keeping track of your budgeted hours. The ability with one tap from the mobile app to be able to upsell customers via text message or an email is super powerful. Just one of those jobs will pay for the entire month subscription to a software program. I know it's a little bit daunting to spend a couple hundred bucks on a CRM package per month when you're first getting started. One job, one job per month that you do is going to pay for that software program. And I can guarantee you that if you email or text message a estimate to customers and it looks professional and clean and they can go to a client portal and see all their information, you will absolutely close more jobs. You will absolutely make more money. In fact, at copilotcrm.com, we have a guarantee that we'll grow your business by at least 10% in revenue or 10% profit in the next 12 months. If we don't, we'll just give you all your money back. Because I'm so confident. This one thing alone differentiates the unprofessional in this industry compared to those that actually scale the business past $100,000 in annual revenue and make it very profitable. What's your turnaround story? Because whether or not you're telling a story on a stage or in front of your family, in 10 and 15 years from now, the actions you're taking today, the meal prep that he made, the hours he put in the gym, all the pain and agony he went through that is now affecting, if you don't mind now, his wife. I talked to her. Is it okay if I say she's now lost £55 in the last few months.

Your turnaround story is going to impact someone else's life.

Don't be selfish. You might not just turn around your business or your personal life or your health for yourself, it might be for the person next to you. And the pain that I went through this year, if it's anything, if it's anything, is for all of you to see that even when you see someone that you might aspire to be like or you think they're successful, they have a turnaround story of their own. And all the fancy pictures and everything that's going well and all the big highlights and the money and the revenue and the growth that people will see on social media, the untold turnaround story is not being told.

And I say all of this for this weekend. When you talk to people, when you're eating with them, I don't care about their age, I don't care about their color, I don't care about their size. I don't care about the revenue that they're doing their business. Realize that every person that you talk to is going through a turnaround story of their own.

And where you'll be at in five or ten years from now is going to be determined by the actions you take after this weekend.