these 6 steps will EXPLODE your lawn business! [spring rush]

Hey, everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America. And today I'm talking about what you need to do in order to get ready for the spring rush. If you're in the lawn care and landscaping industry and you've been doing it for more than a couple years, you know that from the time of usually March till June is absolute go time. If you want to grow your business, if you want to take it to the next level, you've got to make sure you have your ducks in a row. So I'm going to give you the checklist, the things you must be focused on, the. The things that must be completed over the next four to six weeks as we get ready for it. Because right now I'm seeing a lot of landscape business owners on vacation doing nothing. Just wait until the sun starts to shine, the grass starts to grow, and that's not the time to be putting your feet up. That was December, that was the holidays. But now it is time to put pedals in the metal and start getting ready for the spring rush. I'm gonna give you the checklist of the things that need to be done. Number one is you've got to hire up. We talked a lot about this at Landscape Summit and that is over hiring, getting too many employees and doing that. Now we say, well, why would I go hire someone right now when I don't have any work? What you're going to do is you're going to go do a bunch of interviews. You're going to get a lot of applicants. You're going to do advertising on Deed and Craigslist and ZipRecruiter and Facebook and whatever else you use. Get applications now. Do interviews now, because you have time to actually spend time doing interviews instead of in the spring rush was like, yeah, just meet me at the job and we'll hop in the truck and do an interview. Like, now you have the time. This is, is the time to sit down, actually make sure you get good applicants and be able to hire them on the spot because you had 20, 30 minutes to talk to them, not three or four. Checking their pulse and just making sure they can work for you in the middle of spring rush. So take the time now to be deliberate about your hiring process and getting the right people on the team. This also means that you're going to over hire. And what I mean by that is hire an extra 15 to 20% of your labor force than what you anticipate or think you're going to need, especially if you're wanting to grow. But keep in mind because right now there are so many options for employees to be able to go get other jobs. Expect a higher churn than usual. So you need to be ready for that by over hiring and having too many employees on the team at the beginning, knowing very well that the very worst they're going to get 35 or 36 hours instead of 40. But the very best, if one or two of them leave, you're just fine because you have enough employees hired. The second thing you must do before the spring rush, and that is have your website dialed in. Lawn CareWebDesign.com is a great place to get started. And the bottom line is you need to make sure you have things edited and changed and custom for the spring rush. Do not be showing fall cleanups in the middle of spring. Do not show videos and pictures of you hanging Christmas lights as we head into Spring Rush. Make those changes, make those edits, create new banners. This is why at Lawn Care Web Design we have unlimited changes as part of our program for the flat monthly fee. Because I want people to change the banner, change the pictures, change the background video based upon the time of year and as we head into the spring rush, this is the time of over the next couple months to get it ready. Make sure you have the services highlighted that you're going to want to be offering as we head into the busiest time of the year. The third thing on your checklist is get a marketing plan and have a budget in place. All right, so whether you're going to do door hangers and flyers and postcards, check out lawncaremedia.com if you want resources for those. But even if you're gonna spend money on Google or Facebook or whatever platform, make sure that you have a budget in place and know exactly what time inside of the spring rush you're going to be deploying those ads. And if you're gonna do, use lawncaremedia.com and then print off door hangers or flyers or postcards or yard signs. Get them printed now. Everything is behind when it comes to delivery and shipping right now. So order it now so that it can be here and it's ready to go before the spring rush. If you're gonna spend money on any ad platform, make sure you know how much you're spending and when you're gonna be running those ads throughout the spring rush. Because when spring rush starts, we're all so crazy busy, the last thing you're gonna have time to do Is sit down with a whiteboard, sit down with a paper and pen, sit down at your computer and actually figure out what your budget is, what what you're spending and when. The fourth thing you're going to do is create a schedule for the spring rush. When it comes to the amount of work that you can take on. What I mean by that is you can already expect that you're going to have a lot of lawn care, a lot of mowing, a lot of treatments when the spring rush comes. So what can we do to alleviate the massive peak in demand for those services? Well, we can schedule projects away from the spring rush. So if you're going to get a paver patio or you need a retaining wall, and those are leads are going to come in the middle of spring rush, don't try to service them within a week or two, book those jobs out further. So book the calendar out three, four weeks, maybe even a couple months down the road once you know the spring rush and all this massive amount of leads and people calling and wanting services, once that has diminished and you've serviced the clients that need the work done right away, Spring cleanups, mowing, those things can't wait. You've got to sign the person up and do service within a week or two, otherwise you'll lose the customer. So allow those big projects that can be scheduled down the road, make sure you schedule them down the road and take care of the immediate need of mowing and spring cleanups that cannot wait for months on end. The fifth thing you're going to be doing is focusing on your admin and office work. Now, this might mean hiring somebody in an office. This might be potentially getting a virtual assistant. But at the end of the day, this is the time if you're going to switch software or you're going to implement systems in your business. You, you need to train your admin, you need to train your office workers or even your virtual assistants, how to use your software and what changes you're making in pricing or potentially any systems in the business. So if you're going to estimates over the phone or you're going to change your CRM software, any sort of changes in software or backend office, your phone system, anything like that should be done now. Get that done out of the way. Get the kinks out, literally. At command center for Augusta Lawn Care, for the past couple of weeks, they've been testing and measuring hundreds and hundreds of properties, doing tons and tons of training, which costs a lot of money, but I'd rather them do it now and get the efficiencies down now. So when spring rush comes, we're ready to take the hit. The sixth and final thing that you must do before the spring rush is implement P4P. That stands for pay for performance. What people forget is that it takes usually four to five weeks to actually implement P4P if you've never done it before, because you actually have to track your numbers. And we walk you how to do this, how to exactly do this on p4psoftware.com training. And you can watch the training for completely free. So we walk you through that. But you need to be able to have those four to five weeks to implement the system now. I already know what's going to happen in the middle of spring rush. We're going to get barraged with a bunch of owners that are, oh, my goodness, I can't find employees. My existing employees are leaving. I can't afford, I'm losing money, I can't afford the wages, and McDonald's down the street is paying more and what am I going to do? But the problem is we're already in the middle of spring rush. They're already so busy, they're going to end up just capitulating and just raising their wages across the board and just giving up all their profit for this year simply because they didn't prepare and implement pay for performance now so that as your employees work harder and are more efficient, they make more money. I've never been asked for a single raise since we implemented P4P. Why? Because if someone's more experienced, more skilled, and a great worker, they're going to make more money as they become more skilled on P4P. Not a single person has ever asked for a raise inside of P4P in the field. Workers at Augusta Lawn care because of P4P. Do that now so you don't have all the hurdles and all of the struggle with employees come the spring rush when you're so busy with work and the last thing you can do is have employees walk of the job or be unhappy because of their pay. Make sure you've implemented pay for performance now where they get a percentage of the labor revenue that they earn for the business every single day and they get a report and they can see exactly how much they're making. So make sure you don't sit back on your laurels. Don't wait for spring to come to you. Have a plan in place, execute that plan and make sure all six of these things have been done in the next couple, couple months. I wish you all the best in this spring rush, and I look forward to having a massive year for you and your lawn care business.