These 2 Things Will Get You MORE Customers Than You Can Handle

In this video I'm going to talk about how you can get more customers than you can handle this coming season. And so it really just boils down to two things. Doing what no one else is willing to do. All your competition, everyone, all the chucks in a truck, all the big players in your market, as long as you are able to do what none of them are willing to do, that is your moat, that is your unique selling proposition. Now this breaks down into two major components. The first part is doing what no one else is willing to do. In terms of work ethic. That is kind of like scaling the unscaling. For example, you might have some big players in your market, 10, 15, 20 million dollar companies, and you're just getting started. Like how in the world can I compete with them or do anything that's better than them? Well, you can have a personal contact with the customer, you can text them, you can make sure that you knock on the door and you talk to them after every single service. These are things that the big guys will never be able to do. And you'll scale the unscalable by doing what they cannot. Like physically. A $10 million company cannot contact the owner, cannot contact every single customer after every single service. They cannot have that personalized attention. They not have a follow up phone call where after every single estimate the owner calls and connects with the customer and asks if there's any questions, if there's any clarification, the ability to know the schedule, offer a discount if need be, overcome objections and get the job on the schedule and solve the problem for the customer. They can't do that. You know, in my market there's a whole bunch of chucks and trucks. Well, what can they not do? Well, they're not licensed, they're not insured, they don't hire employees above table and W2. And so what happens is that leads to inconsistent results. It leads to them not showing up on time. It means that they show up to things late. That means that every single season customers are tired of constantly having to go find a new provider. Because Chuck in a truck doesn't show up on time or reliably because he doesn't have employees. And so sometimes having employees is actually doing what none of your competition in a Chuck in a truck market can actually do. And that is show up reliably, have automations, use software, have credit cards on file, answer the stinking phone. That one thing alone in and of itself is in part in home services. The only thing that's required to do what no one else is doing to be able to be successful. The number one thing when it comes to doing what none of your competition is willing to do is simply work ethic. At Augusta Lawn Care, I have seen owners that deliver tens of thousands, tens of thousands, not hundreds, not thousands, tens of thousands of door hangers over the course of the few months inside of the spring rush. And then people wonder, why are they successful? Why are they able to go into a market and immediately get to 4, $500,000 in annual recurring revenue in the first year? It's because they did what no one else is willing to do. Everyone else is like, well, I'm gonna run Google Ads or I'm gonna do Facebook ads and those are fine, those can absolute. But someone puts on their boots and says, no, I'm going to go out and I'm going to deliver miles and miles and miles every single day. Tens of thousands of steps every single day towards simply putting out door hangers. Because I know it works and I know I can scale it and I might not have $50,000 of a budget to spend on marketing, but I know I have time and I can walk from door to door and put out door hangers. There are people that if you're just getting started, you're like, well, I don't really have a lot of money, I don't have connections, I don't have a family that has a bunch of entrepreneurs in it. I don't have people that have experience in this market or in this industry. Use what you do have and exploit. You might, if you're young and you don't have a family, if you don't have dependents, you have this incredible gift of time that you can spend on the business. That someone that might be married or has dependents and kids, they might not have the time to be able to spend like you do on the business. And so take advantage of that. Use what you have to be able to expand and grow the business. And if it's time, if it's the fact that you do have connections, if it's the fact that you do have people that have experience or maybe your family's in the industry, use it for all it's worth. Don't be ashamed of the advantages that that have been given to you and the cards that you've been dealt. Now that's the first way is do what no one else is willing to do in terms of work ethic and just exploitation and working 12, 14, 16 hour days, weekends, holidays, and every single hour in between. And Doing what everyone else is telling you not to do because it's unreasonable. That's the first way to be able to get more customers than anyone else your market and get so many customers, you start running into a whole lot of other constraints of growth besides getting more leads. Now, the second thing that you can do to be able to make sure you have so many leads, you're not gonna be able to stay up with it this coming spring is to simply increase value to the customer by reducing their risk. Everyone always thinks about price. And all customers aren't accepting my jobs because I'm too expensive or because of the competition or because of the season or because of the time of year, or because whatever. In reality, there's risk associated with. Every single time a customer asks you to be their vendor, you say, well, no, there's not risk. Like what kind of risks are there? It's just the fact that they might be more expensive. They might choose my more expensive quote compared to my competition. Now, there's a lot of other risks, and if you know what the risks are, you can actually use these to sell more jobs. The risk to a very high value client is that they look bad in front of their neighbors. Why? Because you show up in a truck that's not wrapped, it's not decal, it's dirty, it's rusty, there's oil being spilled all behind it. Your employees aren't uniformed. They don't communicate well with your neighbors. These are risks that your clients, your best clients, your highest value clients, are actually thinking about because they care more about what they look like in front of their neighbors and in front of the other members of the golf club. They're doing all of these services to simply look good in front of other people and not looking good in front of their friends or their acquaintances or the people at the golf club. That's a risk to them. Another risk they have is that they book service with you and give you your credit card and then you never show up. That's a real risk. And so how do I mitigate? How do I reduce the risk of people that are wanting to do business with me? Well, first off, I would make sure that I have a secure way of putting the card on file. I wouldn't be like, hey, Mr. Jones, yeah, we do credit cards. If you just want to write that down, stick that note underneath the front mat, then we'll put that credit card information inside of our client portal. We can just charge you automatically. That sounds a little fishy. I would much rather as a Customer be able to go into a secure client portal using something like Stripe that is like I've seen it before, it looks recognizable. I've seen this payment platform before and I know that someone's not going to be racking up the bill on my credit card because I don't know who you are. There's a real risk to giving a stranger your credit card information, your ACH and bank information. There are other risks that you're not even thinking about because we as vendors, as providers, as contractors simply think about the work and oh, they have this problem. I will, they will give me 800 doll and I will solve the problem for them. A lot of people ask me how we scale Augusta Lawn care to over 200 locations around the world. And one of the big reasons was our website. Now if you don't have a website, you'll never be able to have premium pricing or have a premium service in your market. If you want to go to homeservicewebdesign.com call, my team will spend 15 minutes with you making sure your website is dialed in so you can get more customers. But there are a whole bunch of other risks associated. And one of the biggest reasons home service business owners can really scale in a lot of markets is the risk of you just showing up on time. The risk of you no showing them on an estimate. This is a big reason why instant quotes on our website or over the phone estimates is so important is because it immediately reduces and eliminates the risk of people not showing up for estimates. Because most of our customers have been burned by contractors that set up appointments or just don't show up on time for an estimate or an in person meeting that they scheduled over the phone. Or maybe they text the customer and say, yeah, I'll be there at 4 o'. Clock. All of a sudden it's 6pm and no one showed up. And so the customer has gotten burned many, many times on in person estimates or setting up an appointment and no one's showing up. That's a risk. And to them it's a big risk because the value of their time for our highest value clients is extremely high. If they have a high paying job, a big business, if they're a wealthy customer and multiple houses and a large net worth, having hours of a day that is wasted waiting for a contractor to show up at your house and give you a price is crazy. And so how do we reduce or eliminate that risk? Well, go to your website, instant quote form is there. You see the price, you check out, you Put your card on file and it's done. Eliminate the risk or call immediately, give them the price over the phone, get their card information on file, locked and loaded, get you on the schedule. Let's go. Reducing risk. Always ask yourself what is it that my competitors aren't doing that I am willing to do in order to reduce the risk and therefore increase the value to my highest value clients. The reason I talk about this is because a lot of times people are so caught up in what got them to 300, 400, $500,000 in revenue that they fail to get the unlock of what gives them 2 million, 3 million 5, $10 million in revenue. And the difference is this, what gets you to 200,000, $300,000 in annual revenue as a contractor is being the guy that can contact all your customers. You do a great job, you're very hands on with every single customer. You know them by name, you care a lot about them. That can to 300,000 you and maybe one person working alongside you that can start getting off the ground. But that's not going to be the skill that allows you to go from 300,000 to $3 million in annual revenue. And so many home service business owners are kept small, solo operator, maybe one employee, 100, 200, $300,000 in annual revenue because they think if I keep just doing what originally got me to this place, it's somehow going to get me to the next level and get a seven figure business or a $3 million business or whatever size of business that they want. When reality you'll have to create systems that scale and part of that will be taking what you've done in the past that was unscalable. And how do I scale it? Well, I'm going to need automations, I'm going to need use text messages, I'm going to do mass communication, I'm going to have upsells, I've got to use an app, I've got to use a customer portal to be able to get that credit card information. I'm going to have to make sure I have technology on my website where I give prices right away. I'm going to have to make sure that I have AI or an answering service answering my phone 24 7. So like all right, here's the thing. When it comes to answering the phone, the vast majority of people who answer the phone get the estimate. So why would it not be our first preoccupation before we run ads, before we go get more trucks and more equipment, before we hire more people why would we not? First, just make sure that every single phone call gets answered. Because if you're answering the phone or I answer the call, whenever it rings, I answer, okay, that's 40 hours out of 168 hours in the week. And here's a fun fact. When a call goes to voicemail, only 37% of people actually leave a voicemail. And it's actually lower than that percentage for new clients that are thinking about doing service with your, with your company. Why? Because when they hit the voicemail, there's immediate. This idea like, oh, they don't answer the phone immediately increases the risk that you aren't going to show up for estimates. You're going to be unprofessional, you're not going to have timely communication, you're not going to send estimates using software via text. They immediately have risk. Therefore, the value of your services dropped. And you wonder why your close rate is low. You say, well, no, I always get back to my voicemails within 24 hours. Great, but 37% of people hit that voice message, actually leave a voice message. Only 37%. Now, we ran tests and you can get that to 70, 80% if you use AI. Awesome. Double the percentage of people that actually convert into a lead once they know that I don't pick up the phone. Well, okay, let's go crazy. How can we get to that? To 100%? Maybe you have an answering service, maybe you pay them a couple bucks per minute, but whenever you miss a phone call, it gets answered. These are now systems in place that allow you to be able to scale the business instead of relying on doing what you cannot scale. And that will get you so far, work ethic and being able to do what no one else is willing to do in the form of more hours, more dedication, more blood, sweat and tears will get you to 5000-006000-00700,000. But to make a million dollar business, you're going to have to rely on how do I reduce the risk to the customer? And as you grow, one of the biggest things you can do to reduce the risk to your customers and therefore increase the value is show up on time, have a brand they see on the trucks, they see on the uniforms, they go to your website, it looks like a real company that reduces the risk. When you show reviews, when you show your Google reviews and you show all of your before and after photos, and you show your crew as pictures on your website and you're proud of your team and your trucks and your brand and it's very visible and it's easily seen on a mobile device. It's not like I need some massive, you know, software degree to navigate your website. It's very simple to be able to submit my information because I just want to quote this is how you have you build a business that you will never need to ask for more customers because the customers that you get will be so loyal to you, your churn will be basically zero on recurring services and they'll keep buying you over and over again and buying more other products and services that you offer. So when you want to upsell them, when you offer another service, when you say, hey Mr. Jones, we've been mowing your lawn and we realized you probably need some mulch and salt, they're going to say yes. And you've reduced the risk because you've done great service in the past. You've showed up reliably, you've texted when needed, you automatically charge their card at the end of the month. You never overcharged them, never made compromise their billing information. You were honest and you always were looking at the service their property and say, oh, we think you need some molten salt. So what do we do? We send you a video, we send you a text message and you say yes, you don't need to take an hour to meet with us. We reduce the risk and make sure that we're serving the customer by saving them time. We are serving the customer and reducing risk. So many times a lot of people think that we need to somehow do something that is different than all of our competition, when most of the time it is just guaranteeing the results that we have told the customer. We have made a promise and many of our competition and the reason that Home Services gets a bad name is because a lot of us, a lot of contractors don't do great work. How do you stand out? How do you actually use that to your advantage? Well, if half of your market is doing poor quality work, they're not doing a great job. They don't take care of the customer, they don't have good trucks, they don't have good employees, they're doing illegal things, they don't have a great website. Okay, how do I make sure that I can use that to my advantage? Well, it's very simple. Instead of trying to do something new or different, I am simply going to focus on guaranteeing the results to the customer. Because if a lot of people in your market aren't doing a good quality job, the biggest problem, the risk to the customer is that the work is not done. Well, why not guarantee it? Why not have a premium product that instead of just offering your service, you guarantee the result? Because the customer is not after a specific problem to be solved as much as the result of that problem being solved. Well, the customer doesn't really care whether you come to their lawn and spray or put down fertilizer. They don't care about that. Like, you're like, oh, no, they're paying me $100 and I do these treatments. Or they don't care about the treatments. They don't care about aeration and holes in the lawn. They care about the grass being green in front of all of their friends, family, and the people that show up at their house as guests. That's the result they're looking for. Instead of saying, well, I'm just going to be great at doing the treatments. I'm just going to know everything there is about it. I'm going to have everything nailed down and be so trained. I'm going to have the best equipment, have the best trucks. That's all fine and good, but why not guarantee the result, the thing that the customer is actually looking for? Guarantee that the grass will be green or you will come back for free. For example, at Augusta Lawn Care recently, we asked, okay, what's the biggest reason people don't join Augusta? Well, the biggest reason is because if they're starting from zero, they don't know if they're gonna have enough customers. And we can tell them, hey, here's our average cost per lead. Here's our average customer acquisition cost. Here's usually what we think people need to spend in marketing to be able to get to 100 or 200 or 300 customers. We can say that. However, we just recently launched something that we're gonna be launching later in 2026, where we actually guarantee them at least 100 recurring customers like no one else is guaranteeing. When you join a franchise, you're going to get 100 recurring customers guaranteed. If you pay this, you will get this. And if you don't get this, we will keep running ads on your behalf at our expense until you hit that. And so when it comes to your service business, ask yourself, what can I do that no one else is willing to do that would guarantee the result of what my customer is looking for? The problem that they're trying to solve, the pain point that they're trying to solve. How can I guarantee I am the person that can do that? Because none of your competition will do that same thing when it comes to homeworks. The software, no other CRM I don't care about jobber, service, autopilot, service titan, no other software depend, no matter how much you pay them is going to guarantee you you'll grow your revenue by 10% or your profit by 10%. No one's going to do it. And so when we, when we started thinking about what makes us different than all the other home service CRMs that are out there, because there's a lot of out there and they have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital and private equity behind them so they can afford way bigger budgets for marketing, for engineering, like a lot more. So what makes us actually different is we guarantee you will grow your business by 10% in revenue or 10% in profit guaranteed. And if not, we'll give you the money back of your first year. And so that's like thousands of dollars, like $5,000 that if some I would have to give back to someone if they don't grow their revenue by 10% or their profit by 10%, no one else will do that. And when you give guarantees to solve the problems for your customers that they have, that's when you're able to stand out. That can actually be your unique selling proposition or your usp. And your USP right now might be, well, I'm young. Well great, lean into it. Like use what you've been dealt with. And when I was 16, 17, 11, 12, when I was really young, I just leaned the heck. I was a cute kid saving up for college and that's what people hired me for. As you grow out of that, you're going to find what's your next unique selling proposition. It could be your website is great that your truck is wrapped, that you have great uniforms. These are all unique selling propositions. But the best one of it all, the secret the unlock is doing what none of your other competition can even do. No other franchise will guarantee that someone will get customers. That's why we do it. And no other franchise will allow people to come with a money back guarantee that says if you come to training, don't want to join, after that we will give you your money back. Oh and by the way, if you ever want to leave, there's no penalties whatsoever and you can take your customers. Okay? That's what no other franchise will do. When it comes to software, I'm just using examples for my business. When it comes to comes comes to homeworks, I am willing to do no other CRM, let alone I don't even know other softwares. That will give a year back after using their software. If you don't grow Your revenue by 10% or your profit, because that's the whole point of software is it should make you more profitable or it should help you grow your business. And then it's my job to make sure that I get people to that reliably. 99.999% of the time is what we're currently at. I can get someone to grow their revenue by 10% or their profit by 10%. And you're like, well, I'm not really sure if I can actually get someone's lawn to always be greener. I'm not sure that I can always make sure that their house is heated or cooled. I can't guarantee it. Well, then improve the product, improve the service until the point where you can guarantee it. Because once you hit that point, the product and service is so good, if you're consistently doing it 99.99% of the time, you're able to get that result for the customer. That's how you stand out from the competition. That's how you get people to referee. That's how you're able to beat all of your competition. Because word of mouth travels. Referrals start to happen because customers are obsessed with a company that can guarantee the results, reduce their risk and increase the value, and no one else is doing that in your market.