The SECRET To Massive Lawn Care Business GROWTH: Dominate Your Market!

Today we're going to be talking about a concept that I truly believe will completely change your lawn care business and change the way you look at your numbers. If you hear me out today, this will absolutely change your relationship with the growth of your business and looking about constraints and to that growth and how you can dominate your market. I'm Mike Andes, I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care. We have 50 plus locations around North America and on one of the monthly coaching calls with our franchisees, just today I started describing this concept and I wanted to put it in more of a numerical standpoint on the whiteboard today and show you something that I truly believe will change the way you look at how big your business can become and realize that there's actually an artificial number, a number that's in place that you will never pass without making certain changes in the numbers and risk. Because at the end of the day, I don't care about numbers, don't care about your feelings, they don't care about your thoughts, your opinions. They are simply going to be completely objective to what is happening in the business. And that's what we're talking about today, is numbers. So let's use this example. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by the fact that you can have infinite scale. Infinite scale means you can keep growing and growing and growing and growing. I'm going to talk about how you can achieve that and the thing that limits most lawn care and landscaping businesses from ever achieving infinite scale. So in this example we have 1, 2, 3, all the way through seven years. And we're going to just assume this is a mowing, lawn mowing company. But this could be projects, this could be really any service based business. We're going to have 20 new customers. The total number of new customers is right here. And then we're going to have a lost number of customers because guess what? You're going to have attrition. Attrition is the number of customers that you lose every year. Because if you're doing lawn care, landscaping, for example, you're going to have customers move out of town, they're going to sell their house, they're going to pass away, whatever it might be. That is your number of attrition. They call, they cancel because they're unhappy. And we're going to assume a 20% attrition rate, very common kind of number in our industry, just because people do move and most people live in their house for five years. So if they're moving at that rate, just that alone you're going to get 20% attrition. But all things balanced out, 20% attrition means that out of those 20 new customers going to lose four of them just because of natural attrition. They're unhappy, they move, they pass away, whatever it might be. I'm going to lose four of them. So in year number one, I'm going to have 20 new customers. That little green number, I don't know if you can see, that's the total increase year over year. So obviously I went from zero to 20, but because I lost four, now next year when I gain 20 more, I'm going to lose four of those. So instead of 40, it's going to be 36. So I had a net increase of 16 more new customers. Cause I lost four of them. I gained 20 more, and I keep growing. Year number three comes along, I have 49 customers. Why? Well, I added 20, but I lost seven because I lost 20% of 36. All right, so we keep moving along. And as you can see, I'm getting the same amount of new customers every single year. Same number of new customers. 20. I'm getting new customers all the time. That's fantastic. But I'm losing due to attrition, a percentage of those customers. And what you can see is as time goes on, that number number gets higher and higher because my total number of customers get higher. So at the end of the day, when I get over here and I'm at 73 customers, well, I'm losing 20% of those, or 15 of them are gonna leave me. So even though I gained 20 new customers, the net result is that I only add five more the following year due to the fact that my attrition rate is here. So when you chart this out on a graph, you can see here, the number of lost customers kind of goes like this, as you can see here. 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, et cetera. As well as the fact that the number of total customers jumps really fast at the beginning. These are the exciting years of business, right? Years one, two years, growing like crazy. You literally almost doubled year over year growth. Like, let's go. But then all of a sudden it starts to plateau and you're just like, so confused because I'm getting 20 new customers. I'm getting about the same amount of customers I did year one, but I'm hardly even growing. I've only got like five new customers in the past year. Where. Whereas the first year I got 20 more customers, I went up by 20. The bottom line is you have attrition and you're losing customers. And so what ends up happening is there's actually an artificial top to this business. If I continue to run this business model going forward, there's gonna come a time where I actually cannot get any more customers due to the fact that my attrition. So the top is, is when attrition equals the number of new clients. So when this number as lost is going up like this. See, the problem is this. I've got the number of is fixed right here. The number of new clients is fixed. And eventually, eventually the number of lost customers and the number of new customers I'm getting every single year will meet. That's the top. And so this is a very exciting period of time because at this point, I'm not losing very many customers. I'm gaining a whole bunch of customers. And this difference here is where I am gaining up top, right? So you can literally, from a mathematical equation standpoint, I know this is getting a little bit deeper. You can literally take the delta between how many lost customers and how many I gained. So the difference between, let's say, 7 and 20, this would be 13 more customers. Boom. I then add that to there. There's my 13. That's gonna be equivalent to the delta between these numbers. So between 40, or, sorry, 36 and 49, there's the difference right there. 13, the same thing here. Well, over time, this number gets smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually it actually meets. Where's that number gonna be? If you're doing the math, you're gonna realize that this company is gonna top out at 100 customers. Why? Because at 100 customers, if they're losing 20% of them to attrition, that means they're gonna lose 20 customers that same year. When they lose 20 customers, they're also gonna be gaining 20 customers, which means what's gonna happen? They're gonna top out at 100 customers forever losing 20 and gaining 20 new customers every single year. So the artificial top to this business is 100 customers. So you ask, well, how can I break out of this? I'm realizing I'm in this plateau phase. I'm starting to realize I'm not gaining as many customers as I used to. And even though I'm getting more sales and I'm getting more new customers, it doesn't seem like I'm actually gaining total number of customers very much. This happens a lot of times in your three to five. There's two things you can do. Number one is you can reduce your Attrition, that is, have better customer service, make sure that you get referrals, make sure that you are not damaging the property of the client that they don't cancel. You can do that by reducing attrition rate, reducing that from 20 to, say, 10%, for example. You could do that. Or because, for example, just by taking this to 10% attrition, ie, I only lose one out of 10 customers every year, I would raise that top to 200. Why? Because if my attrition is 10% and my number of customers is 200, that's gonna be when I get 20 new customers. One year, I lose 20, and therefore that would be my top 200 customers. So the more important thing, though, that you can do that's a little more controllable than reducing your attrition. Cause most of us care about our customers. And unless you have like 50, 60, 70% attrition because you just do a horrible job, there comes a point where people are going to leave, they're going to move, they're going to move out of state, they're going to move houses, et cetera. So the next thing that you can control, though, is number of new customers right here, okay? And the reason this model fails is because this person never improves the number of new customers or inbound or incoming new customers. And so what you can do is get advertisements. You can do door hangers, you can do print mail, you can do Google Ads or Facebook ads and all the rest of it. But in my opinion, the thing that you want to do here is create a methodology to get more leads without spending more money. Because the problem that everyone gets into is they get really, really frustrated right around in this window of time. Cause now they're starting to see a plateauing in the number of total customers. They get really, really discouraged. So you know what they do? They listen to some of my podcasts and they're like, I'm gonna go get a bunch of marketing, I'm gonna go spend a bunch on ads and Google Ads and Facebook and let's go. But you know what happens? They now spend all of their profits just trying to increase this number right here. And they do for a period of time until they don't have any more profit. And they can't keep pumping money into this system. So the goal in all of this is how do I continue to get more new customers without having to spend more money on advertising? Because if I can do that, if I can infinitely move this number higher and this number can actually keep going up, the number of new leads, the number of people calling me, the number of new clients coming to my business. I can scale infinitely, But I can't do that if I'm always spending a bunch of money on advertising. I can't do do that if every single lead that comes in the door, I have to pay 50, 60, $70. I have to pay $20 to Angie's List. I have to pay $50 to here. I can't keep doing that. It's not going to infinitely scale. Infinitely scale means I can do it forever. And it still works. Of course. I gotta drop a marker. Let's go. So how do I achieve infinite scale? This is what the symbol infinite means. You keep going and going and going, and the momentum of it just keeps going. There is no stop to it. It's infinite. How can you do that? You can make sure that you're getting new leads without spending more money. When you can get the number of new leads scaling indirectly or untied from the amount of money that you're spending on ads. Cause this is a failing formula. Number of leads going up means number of dollars spent on marketing going up. That's a failing formula formula. Because I'm gonna eventually run out of cash. I'm not gonna have the money and the profit and the cash to keep pumping into marketing. What you want to do is you want the number of leads to scale higher simply because your brand is becoming more known in your local market and you have great SEO. So this is what you want to be looking like. You're spending the same amount on your website. You're spending the same amount every single month on your website. This is why we created lawncarewebdesign.com where. Where it's 3.99 every single month. Cause in my mind, it's like, look, get established what I'm gonna pay every single month for my SEO for my website. And then as I get better ranking, as I get scale, as I get more reviews, I'm gonna constantly get more and more and more customers without spending any more money on advertising. And I was talking to one of our franchisees. Cause he was wondering why in the past it was like six or eight months and just getting some like 20, 30 leads a month. And all of a sudden now it's like 40, 50, 60. And it's just growing and growing. What's happening is he's starting to hit this curve going upwards. And this number that he used to be kind of steadily going on, 20, 30, is now starting to take off. But he's not spending any more money on marketing. That is how you infinitely scale and dominate your market is when you're now ranking on Google, not spending money on ads, and you're getting more and more leads as you increase your reviews. As people start seeing more of your trucks, they're seeing your site more and more on Google because you're ranking well, but yet you're not spending any more per lead. And the faster you can do this, the faster you can get away from this being the case, the faster you can get away from more advertising dollars equals more leads. That's a failing formula. You wanna make sure you can infinitely scale, which is I'm not spending spending any more money on marketing. But the number of leads coming in is getting more and more and more with time. Because if that number stays stagnant, if you've been staying stagnant and having the same number of new customers every year, eventually attrition will catch up with you, you will stagnate and you will stop growing. Now if you want to stop growing and raise your prices, raising your prices is actually a way of inflating or increasing your attrition because you're going to lose some customers. You're gonna have less new customers coming in by raising your price. But if you want that, if you don't mind not growing, that's okay. You can increase your prices out here, maybe bring up your attrition, cause people leave, maybe bring in, you have a less closing ratio, so you bring in less new customers. But it's fine if you're just trying to harvest the business, you're trying to get as much profit out as possible. But if you're trying to grow and you're trying to scale and you're maybe stuck at 100 customers, like why can't I get past 100? I want to get 200 or 300 and have a few more crews, provide some more jobs. My local community, I want to have a team and I just feel like I can't get there. There's a very good chance you've hit this plateau where your attrition, the number of customers that you lose every year has now equaled the number of new customers you get every year. And you're simply churning customers over. It's unprofitable and at the end of the day it will keep you from growing. You've got to figure out, how can I get my customer acquisition costs to stay level? That is a great website that's ranking very well. Well, as my business grows and awareness grows and I get reviews on Google and I get Facebook reviews, and people start referring me that can infinitely scale. And when that happens, this number keeps going up, the number of new customers every year. And you can actually grow top line revenue and top line number of customers total over time, infinitely. I hope that made sense a little bit deeper, but I hope it adds some context. If you want more help on how to grow your lawn care landscaping business, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com lawncaremedia.com if you want to get more customers. Or number three, build a website, lawncarewebdesign.com, we can do exactly this for you. It takes five, six months usually. But as you hit that scaling that tipping point, and as the number of leads come in, starts to really, really take off, that's where you can get infinite returns. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you tomorrow.