the only marketing tactic you need to build a $1M business

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America. But today I'm talking about the one thing you need to know about marketing that most people don't talk about because they're trying to sell you something. But if you know this one thing and you stay focused on this one metric when it comes to marketing, it'll completely change your small business.

And I know what it did for me, and I know it done for a lot of other small business owners once they start focusing on this one thing. When it comes to a small business, every single dollar you spend on marketing needs to be spent efficiently. And so what happens? A lot of us get buy into this theory that I've got to track. Okay, what leads are coming from Facebook, what leads are coming from Google, what leads are coming from the newspaper, what leads are coming from the door hangers that I put out? Regardless of what industry you're in, it is a good thing to try to maximize the bang for your buck. Get more leads, more customers for your marketing dollars. I understand that, but the thing that we focus on too much is tracking and metrics and getting the code snippets and the analytics behind where the leads came from, when what we should be focusing on is just two things, and that is simply customer acquisition cost. I'm gonna do this on a graph and demand. That is literally the only two things you need to know. If you're a small business and you're spending less than several thousand dollars per month in ad spend, if you're spending a bunch of money on advertising, hundreds of thousands of dollars, then it's worth spending a lot of time and energy and money getting analytics, doing funnels, having multiple websites created to have them all be all funneled correctly. And you're hearing this from a web design company. I have lawncarewebdesign.com and homeservicewebdesign.com comm I know for a fact that if someone is trying to sell you on the idea that you as a small business owner that does a couple hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue and spends a few hundred dollars a month in ad spend is going to somehow need multiple websites and different funnels and lead pages and a whole bunch of they're trying to sell you something or they're trying to make it sound so complicated that they need to sell you their marketing services. That's just the honest truth. At the end of the day, for most small businesses doing under a million dollars in annual revenue and spending less than several thousand dollars per month in ad spend and advertising budget. These are the two things you need to know. And what you need to do is you need to figure out when. What part of the year is your customer acquisition cost and demand Varying demand and customer acquisition costs are inverse. They have an inverse relationship, meaning that if demand goes up, your customer acquisition cost will go down. Let me explain, and let me show you why this leads to some of the biggest issues in seasonal and small businesses. So when we look at demand, I'm gonna take lawn care and landscaping for an example, but this applies to any small business that has any seasonality whatsoever. And if you're like, oh, no, I'm a retailer. I don't have any seasonality. Okay, most of your sales are probably happening the last quarter of the year. That is when demand is going up. So every single business, regardless of what industry, has some level of season, seasonality, or demand fluctuates. So let's use lawn care and landscaping for an example, though. If I look at the course of a year, January, in the middle of the year, I got June and July, and at the end of the year, I got December. This is the course of the year, every single month, as I go throughout the year. And when I start out, my demand is very low. In the wintertime, most people don't need my services. It's not super popular. But as we get into spring, it takes off. This is what we call in our industry the spring rush. It is extremely busy for several months. It kind of slows down for July, August, as it gets really hot. Then we kind of have a resurgence for the fall season. And then it really kind of comes right back down during December in terms of demand. So this is demand right here. Demand. Now, what I want you to know is that demand.

Has an inverse relationship to customer acquisition cost. What I mean by that is when I look at. Let me actually erase this real quick. When I look at the customer acquisition cost, the cost to acquire one customer, how much do I have to pay in advertising to get one new customer? It's completely opposite to this line graph. So when my customer acquisition cost is extremely, extremely high, that's when my demand is really, really low. So demand low. That means I'm gonna have to spend a lot of money in order to get a customer, because no one needs my services. There is no demand. So what happens, though, as time goes on here? Well, all of a sudden, now my customer acquisition cost. This is my customer acquisition cost. This down here, what we just did Here is demand. Okay, demand.

So customer acquisition cost. I should have really, you know, what I should have done is I should have just done this differently. Sorry. All right, so for lawn care and landscaping, customer acquisition cost very high. Because I'm in the winter, no one needs my services, Demand is low. But what happens in the spring rush is everyone needs my services, and therefore my customer acquisition cost is low. Then as the summer goes on, kind of the cost of my acquisition is going to go up because people don't need my services as much. My demand is going down, but then it actually comes back down again. During the fall season, people need leaf cleanup, et cetera. But then what's going to happen as the winter happens? My customer acquisition costs are going to go way up simply because my demand is extremely low for my product and service. So why is this so important? Because honestly, the only thing I think that really matters is when are you marketing? Because why would I want to do marketing when I have very high customer acquisition cost? For the lawn care and landscaping industry, this is the bane of people's existence, is the fact that they spend money on advertising because they're slow. So they spend all of their marketing dollars in the wintertime when they don't have enough work to keep their crew busy, that's when they spend all their marketing. But the problem is, that's when the worst customer acquisition cost is. Because guess what? If they could just spend their money all their marketing budget during these periods of time when the customer acquisition cost is the lowest, that's when they would get the biggest bang for their buck. And so I believe that timing is the most important part of small business marketing and advertising. Realizing when is demand high and customer acquisition cost low in my industry? Now, this is the problem. This is the problem for every single industry.

Guess what happens during what we call the spring rush in lawn care and landscaping, everybody needs service. Demand is extremely high. But the biggest problem is the fact that we don't have enough workers. We don't have enough trucks, we don't have enough employees and infrastructure and equipment. So what do we do? We stop marketing. We get some employees, Everything's going good. We're still spending money on marketing. But what happens at the time when our customer acquisition cost is the lowest, the best bang for our buck in marketing is happening? We turn our ads off because we're so busy. So what I would encourage you to do is anticipate when demand is high in your industry. Anticipate that during that time is when customer acquisition cost is gonna be the lowest. That's when you can buy customers for pennies on the dollar. That's when I can buy a customer for, let's say down here, maybe a $20 customer acquisition cost, also known as CAC, where up here, my CAC might literally equal $120. I'm getting six customers for the price of one. If I just spend that marketing dollars during the season and the timing when demand is high and that customer acquisition cost is the lowest. So what can you do? How does this help you prepare for the times when demand is high, customer acquisition cost is low, and allocate your budget, your marketing budget towards those times when you can take that advantage and then make sure that the constraints that are going to limit you from spending marketing dollars and getting more customers is removed or at least prohibited by having, for example, in this case, landscaping and lawn care. You're gonna need to have a bunch of employees ready to go. This is why I'm pushing right now, people to hire up for the spring rush. Because there's gonna be a massive demand like we've never seen before in America for landscaping and lawn care services. And this is in a lot of industries. That's why inflation is happening. People are spending money, massive levels of demand. Whether or not you're able to actually spend your marketing dollars during the best time of the year to do it depends on whether you remove the constraint of labor that will be the constraint in this industry regardless of what business you're in. If you're running a small business, stop taking time and energy and spending money on someone web designer making funnels and how to do my analytics and making sure my code is all aligned and tracking everything that will be much less accurate. When you're doing tens of thousands of dollars, then you actually have a collective sample of data that actually draw results from. But this, for a small business will do dramatically more results. And that is figuring out when is demand high and making sure that that's when I spend my money on marketing is during the period of time when demand is high, my customer acquisition cost is low. I'm Mike Andes. If you want more information, go to mikeandies.com, check out P4P software.com or this new book that I wrote that I feel is gonna be the key to unlocking the ability to hire employees, going into a spring rush, and being able to take advantage of the massive opportunity that's coming up this year. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you.