this ONE thing will get your business to $250K

The reason this is so important is people forget there's this thing called a.

Today I'm going to share with you the only thing you really need to know. When you're trying to build a home improvement business, a landscaping company, a lawn care business, there's really just one number you need to track and one thing you need to stay focused on. All the other stuff is fun. It's interesting what type of equipment you should buy, what type of truck you should buy, how you should do marketing, how you should do your website. All those things might be important, but there's really only one thing that is going to help you grow a big business. And yes, and profitability is important. And building a profitable business at the end of the day is why we are in business. However, if you want to scale up, if you're trying to grow the business to the point where making it profitable is actually interesting. Because at the end of the day, I could run a really efficient, profitable business and have a 50% net profit margins of only doing a hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue. I'm just not interested in working my brains out and perfecting a model that I make $50,000 in net profit at the very best case. Once it's efficient, I'd rather spend a few years spe scaling the business up very quickly and then focusing on making it profitable in years 4, 5 and 6 of my business journey and making a actual real impact on my bottom line in terms of volume. And so I would rather spend three to five years scaling up very quickly and then after five years, then focus on how do I cut out waste, how do I make it really efficient, how do I get a leadership team in place? How do I make it run without me? How do I improve my net profit margins? But first, how, how do I get the growth? How do I scale up? There's really just one thing you need to focus on. You don't need to buy my course@landscapebusinesscourse.com, you don't need to buy any YouTubers course or you know, I have all sorts of products and things I sell. Like, I'm honest about that. I don't try to hide it. The link's in the description. I think it helps some people. But there's really only one thing you need to do if you're trying to grow, especially if you're at 50, 60,000 revenue per year and you're like, man, I just love to get, you know, five, six, seven employees. And I'd like to over the next few years, invest back in the business, grow my top line revenue. There's really just one thing you need to know. It's close ratio. It's the percent of jobs that you sell as a function of how many jobs you offer, how many estimates you give out, what percentage of the estimates, proposals, the quotes that you give are accepted by customers. The reason this is so important is people forget there's this thing called attrition, especially in recurring based work like mowing, for example. I do a lot of mowing services and we have a lot of recurring work. But what people fail to realize is that you have a usually around a 20% attrition rate on services. This is people moving away, people passing away, people selling their house, whatever it might be. And this is going to happen. But this is what's so interesting, is what people fail to realize. Some people think, well, if I go from a 30% close ratio, if I close 30% of my jobs, then you know, I'm gonna grow a little bit this year because I'm gonna lose 20% of my customers. But if I close 30% of my jobs and I have a reliable stream of leads coming in and people know who I am in the community, and I close some jobs, I'll grow a little bit. And the delta there, if you run the math with me on this, you can have a 20% attrition, but if you close 30% of your jobs, theoretically you have a 10% delta there, right? And so you could say, hey, I'm gonna grow. As long as I get enough leads, I'm going to be able to continue to grow my business relatively slowly. And what's really cool though, if I move my close ratio from 30% of my estimates that I get people calling, asking for an estimate proposal, if I can close 30% of those, what happens to my business when I close 60% of those? You say, well, that's great, you could double the scale. The speed at which you're growing can double because you're going from 30% close ratio to 60% close ratio. And that's the easy math. Yes. But I want you to peel back the onion because if you actually look at it, if you take away your 20% attrition, which is going to happen regardless, and now you have that delta of 30% that you were closing. That percentage, you had a 10% delta, 10% difference between your attrition, 20% and 30% that you were closing on your estimates, 30% of estimates you were actually getting accepted. But now if I take this new close ratio of 60%, 60% of all the estimates and the leads that I get, I close them, I win that job. Now, the delta between my attrition and my close ratio is 40% because it's 60% close ratio, minus 20% attrition means I have a 40% delta. 40% is 4x, 4x the growth that I'm going to see if I have a 30% close ratio. This is what unlocks massive growth. This is why a lot of companies will get to a certain size and they'll stalemate there. They'll just kind of stay stagnant, they won't grow, they'll plateau there in terms of revenue is because attrition starts to meet their close ratio. And the amount of jobs they're closing every single day is literally just enough to keep them at the same number of customers year after year after year. And so you ask yourself, how do I break that? Yes, I could go marketing and get more leads and I could spend more money to get the leads and still close at 30% or I'm gonna go close at 60%. And of course, the big question is, well, how do you close? Go from 30% close ratio to 60% close ratio. There's a lot of things you can do. Three that I want to focus on. Number one, your processes. What's your system like? Do you show up in a professional truck? Do you have a professional uniform? Do you have a presentable way of walking the customer through a process instead of just showing up and like, oh, yeah, it's going to cost $4,000 and just randomly coming up with something? Or do you have a process? Do you send it over digitally? Do they have a record? Can they sign off on it? Can they put their credit card on file? Those are all parts of the system. The second part is, in terms of creating the value to go from 30% to 60%, is you need to believe in the product that you're selling. You need to believe that you are the best solution and the best choice for the customer. If you don't believe that it's going to come across in the way that you're selling. If you don't have the conviction to sell someone their level of conviction that they want another estimate, that they want a cheaper price, they need to talk to their spouse and whatever other excuse they're going to come up with is that level of conviction is going to overshadow your level of conviction. And if you really, truly believe that you are the best choice, it is your obligation to make sure. That the customer chooses you when it comes to that standpoint. Then when the customer comes back with some sort of, you know, smoke and mirrors excuses to why they can't make a decision or they need more time or they're getting other estimates are a little bit too pricey, they're going to talk to their spouse. That's when you, because you have conviction that you're the best option and you don't want this customer to walk away because you feel in your heart that it would be a detrimental thing for them. When you believe that, that's when you stick your head out. You say, Look, Mr. Jones, I would love to do business with you and whatever we can do to make that happen, I want to prove to you that I am the best opportunity, the best person for this job and I will not let you down. Like that level of conviction when you look that person in the eye and when you say that directly to them. After following up on an estimate proposal is going to close you more jobs, it's going to again increase your closing ratio. The number of estimates that are accepted as a function of your total number of estimates. You say, well, how do I get my close ratio? Just take the number of total estimates that were accepted and divide that by how many estimates you sent out in a given period of time, like a month or a week or even a day. Now the third thing you can do to increase your close ratio, and this is the part where it's a self fulfilling prophecy, and that is by increasing your close ratio and getting more jobs, you're going to get better leads, say, well, how in the world does that work? Well, this is what happens because you start closing more jobs, you actually start getting out in the community more people, start seeing your truck more. You're now in neighborhoods that you want to be doing other services in. And now other community members, other neighbors are starting to see you, your truck, you doing your work. And as long as your truck is branded well, as long as you look professional and approachable, people are going to walk up to you, they're going to ask you to do work on their property and you're not going to have to go spend money on marketing. These are the best leads. The ones that walk up to you and say, hey, I saw you work on Mr. Jones property. I would love to get that same thing done on my property. That's the highest quality lead. Because that person is going to be willing to pay a premium price and they're willing to pay up because guess what, they're not getting other estimates. They're not going to go get five estimate proposals off HomeAdvisor and Angie's List and submit three different bid proposals. They're not going to do that. They're coming to you because they saw the work that you did just down the street. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy of higher close ratio, getting more work, people seeing you more in the community, people coming and walking up and asking you for your card, getting another estimate. That's a self fulfilling prophecy of. Now those people have a higher close ratio because they're not going and asking for four other bids. They're not comparing against three other people. And they are the highest quality clients. They're the ones that are willing to pay a premium price for a premium product and service. So at the end of the day, there's a lot of things you can talk about in any business lawn care landscape. We talk about the blades, we can talk about the type of, type of weed whacker you use and what type of truck you use. That's all fine and good. But if you're trying to grow those first few years and try to scale up, the only thing that matters is your close ratio. I don't care if you have four or five estimates in the month, or you have 50, 60 or 70 estimates in the month, or if you have four or 500 estimates in a month. The only thing that's gonna really determine how fast your rate of growth is going to be your close ratio. It's an exponential change on your rate of growth because of attrition. Anything above that is literally exponential growth as you increase your close ratio. So I want you to strip away all the things that are slowing you down and why your business isn't growing. And maybe it's the marketing, maybe it's my website, all those things might be true. But just focus on the one thing you can control. And I don't care if it's four estimates, I'm gonna close all of them. I'm going to close three out of four. Maybe that 75% close ratio right there. Focus on the close ratio, focus on that momentum. Because again, that self fulfilling prophecy of you getting out in the neighborhood that you want more services done and more customers in, it's going to be that self fulfilling prophecy of them seeing you asking for more estimates. You have a high close ratio, you get them now all of a sudden people have seen you all week long because you've done four different people on their same street. It is an incredible journey of growth. In my experience, it is the one determining factor that gets someone from 0 to 250,000 300,000 per year in revenue and above. After that, then you can focus on efficiencies and hiring and all the systems and processes and marketing and making sure my postcards are right and my door hangers are right. That's all fine and good, but focus on your close ratio first. It's the thing that will move the business forward the most. Now, if you're wondering what is marketing when it comes to marketing, what should you be spending your money on and when should you be spending your money? Check this video out here. It's the one thing you need to know when it comes to marketing, the one thing that actually moves the needle. And it's extremely simple.