This Pricing Mistake is Costing Lawn Care Businesses THOUSANDS (Mike Andes Q&A)

I love the idea of putting prices on our website for mowing and plowing, but the size ranges on lawns and driveways is huge. In my area, for instance, our smallest lawn is 2000 square feet and our largest is 200,000. Driveways range from 42ft long to 1500ft long. We have a complicated formula for pricing snow plowing and we compare similar lawns to get the timing correct for mowing prices. Mowing pricing is exasperated further by the terrain. In our area, for example, 20,000 square feet from one customer takes 0.45 hours, another takes 0.97 hours. So we couldn't price by size accurately. Is there a solution I'm missing other than drive by estimates? We can do satellite most of the time as we know the area very well, but it's not instant pricing like you were suggesting. All right, so a couple things. They first say that doing over the phone estimates is a huge step up from doing drive by estimates. Drive by estimates are a huge step up from doing in person estimates where you talk to every customer for an hour. So you're already significantly down the path in terms of systemization and optimization. So don't beat yourself up too much if you're not going to take it all the way to instant pricing. I will say this. Yes, your smallest is 2,000 and your largest is 200,000. But where are 80% of your customers? I would happen to believe that 80% of your customers are between 5,000 and let's call it 40,000 or 50,000. And so my question is, could I do pricing to them but then have an option for anyone else that's outside of those ranges to be able to get a pricing in person to be able to save myself 80% of my time and that's when we like our small, medium and large. I'm not going after the edge cases that are like super large because it's a small percentage of my customers and I just have it where like I will do an in person estimate for them. And so I'm trying to capture 80% of my customers and not have to go to them at all, not have to pay for an admin to answer the phone. Like if you can just reduce the drive time of drive by estimates and your time going out and doing the estimate, but also not need an admin person be reactive on the phone call and then sitting around waiting for a phone to ring all day and it doesn't cost you a single penny more to have the instant pricing. We have a win. We have a win. On our hand, boys and girls. So I understand this pricing variability, but if I can, if I can get on the property, the very worst thing that happens is that you change the price, right? So play it out right. Like what's the worst thing that happens? The first mow or the first plow? You get it wrong your first visit. We are going to charge by the minute anyways. So we're going to take our time to get it up to standards. For example, if it's mowing, we're in edge. We're going to double cut if we have to. We're going to do everything possible to get it dialed in. If the pricing that we have given is way off, like there's hills and mountains and cars parked in the middle of the lawn or some crazy area that we, they were completely wrong on in terms of selecting their price, then we will change the price that happens to 1% less than 1% of the lawns that we do at Augusta Lawn Care. But again, we attack the 80% and the other 20%. Like when it says, hey, if your lawn doesn't look like any of these street pictures, click here. And people that have massive properties or commercial projects or something crazy, they'll click on that one. So just realize, be okay with the fact that the very worst is you change the price. The very best is that they select $79. You're like, man, I want to charge 59 for this. And you rock and roll. And then also if you're in growth mode and you're willing to not have as much profit for a little bit, do it for three or four or five months, grow to capacity, raise prices on that customer and bring them up to where they should be at and then we all make more money. Alejandro Magia and Haida Lawn Care. Hey Mike, I have two marketing questions. Here in Plano, Texas, I opened up 90 clients last year at peak to this March, around 70. Okay. We dropped 10,000 door hangers this week and have only gained four clients from it. I believe it's because there are instant quote door hangers with a seven day call to action and the grass is still brown, but we'll be green up by the end of March and beginning growing around April, we have left 40,000 door hangers ready. Ready we have. Should I just wait till April to drop them? For every 1000 door hangers, I expect 3 million clients last year within the same week of drop and this was during mid to late spring till midsummer. I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how to roll out Marketing this spring and when to know how to dump everything you got. Last year, me and friends dropped around 17,000 door hangers and gained 80 mowing customers. So I thought I had a good grasp. But this was a good learning mistake for the future. This was the first time I I was ready with quick for quick and early marketing since last year. I began closer to April. I believe I mistook beginning of spring for spring rush. What are your thoughts on that? What makes good branding piece and your thoughts on dumping up that a month before a call to action piece. Okay, here we go. So this revolves around timing. I will first and foremost say that timing your spring rush gets better with time. What I mean is like you singing, seeing more and more spring rushes gets you better and better equipped to be able to time spring rush better. What I mean with that is you'll have to anticipate the demand of spring rush in order to accurately be able to know how many people to hire, how many trucks to have, how much equipment to have and how much marketing you're going to be spending doing that once or twice. You do not know your demand curve because it's going to change based upon the weather. And so even if you have an indoor service, it's still dramatically impacted by the weather because that's what people start to think about it. So for example, the weather gets better and janitorial goes up, goes up for spring cleaning. So indoors. And so I will say that instead of trying to drop everything in one week, what I would. Because you're basically, you're gambling. What I would do is I would take 40,000 door hangers, I'd do that over the course of eight weeks. And then I would figure out my demand curve. Because if you tracked over the course of eight weeks and you did 5,000 door hangers per week, now all of a sudden you have eight weeks where you'd actually be able to see how many customers you got and what peak demand or peak of spring rush is. Now, to your point when customers when the grass starts growing, for example, or when demand starts, most people jump too soon. If you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost, so you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost, you don't actually start marketing when pain begins. You market when there's peak pain, when the demand is highest, that is not when the grass starts growing, that is three, four, five weeks into spring when the grass is now overgrown and people have the highest form of pain and the highest demand for your services, they have the highest pain. If they don't accept Your, your estimate. So we can see like the, the time to accept an estimate, assuming you don't do it over the phone or do it instantly. If you don't and you're just sending it via email and text, it takes you significantly longer to get a response. When the customer's not in pain, when their grass is not overgrown, when their trees are not falling like on their house, they have less pain and therefore they will take longer to accept. And so I will also say if you're going to do door hangers a week, two weeks into the spring, when half the people, their lawn isn't overgrown, just kind of starting to grow, you, you might want to extend the seven day window to more like 14 or 21 days. That being said, we do consistently see people that even with door hangers, we'll submit a picture. 14:21, I saw one the other day, 28 days later. So you might want to change your expiration date if this is a big problem for you. If you're trying to preload the spring rush and knowing very well that, hey, you might be three or four weeks early, you're going to have a lower customer acquisition cost. Sorry, you're going to have a higher customer acquisition cost because your conversion rate is going to be lower. However, you could kind of help that by saying, hey, this, this, this door hanger is valid for three weeks, it's valid for four weeks. Knowing that people might keep the door hanger and then contact you during peak pain. Really good question. All I will say is this. I have done a spring rush for. This is my 18th spring rush. Every single spring rush. I have been heavily involved in the lawn care, landscaping industry. It is only now that I can with confidence know, okay, this is when I market, this is when I advertise, this is when I start hiring people. And it took probably five years to know that because it always shifts two, three, four weeks sometimes. Like if you have, in our market, like we could have, we could have been mowing like hardcore right now. And we also a couple years ago had snow like a week ago. So like you gotta be able to adjust and know when that happens and then even know when it comes down. Like if you're doing door hangers too late into the spring rush, now all of a sudden everyone's been set up, they've experienced peak pain, but most of them found a provider. And now the only people you're going to start getting from door hangers are the people that are unsatisfied with their current provider. I will also Say the vast majority of people I see doing marketing are going after the wrong customer right at the beginning of spring, you have a higher percentage of people that are for the very first time, setting up service. I'm just going to use lawn care for an example. Any home service, whether it be cleaning, clean a pool, cleaning a carpet, cleaning anything, or mowing lawn. Let's use mowing lawn, for example. It's not like someone wakes up when they're 75 years old after having not mowed their grass since they were 60 years old, and wakes up and realizes that they're saving time by not mowing their grass and going, they can go play golf. So you spending money on marketing about getting your weekend back is not going to be appealing to them after the very first time they decided to not mow the grass themselves. And so realize that the vast majority of our customers, assuming you're on some sort of recurring service, assuming that you're targeting a especially an older demographic, even if the economy starts to shift, they're not going to wake up and decide to clean out their gutters. So to market to them as if they're saving time, although that is a value proposition that we have as a service business, is that we do save our customers time. But that being the value proposition, thinking that you're going to get new customers, that way, you are going after a demographic. It's very small, because once that person makes a decision for someone else to mow their grass, and they call around lawn care providers when they're 60 years old, you're marketing them the same way for the next 15 years. They're 75 now. They haven't mowed their grass in 15 years. They're not even thinking about the possibility of them doing it instead of playing golf. And so the vast majority of customers will not come from people that decided to not mow their grass, that decided to not clean out their pool, that decided to not trim the bushes themselves. The vast majority of your customers are going to come from people that have used other providers and they didn't show up. They have used other providers that were not professional. They used other providers that didn't have cards on file. They were tired of someone not showing up. These are the type of pain points you should actually speak to when it comes to marketing. Because the vast majority of people, now that they have their Lawn Mowed For 15 years, the only reason they'll switch is not because they decided to pick it up and do it themselves now they're physically incapable of it. It's a fact that they are tired of someone not showing up, being unprofessional, et cetera. So speak to that in your marketing. I will also say that at the beginning of spring rush is the really only period of time I see you getting the type of customer that's for the very first time ever deciding to use a service after the spring rush. Six, eight, 12 weeks in, people have solved this pain point. Unless like they have not cleaned their house in three years. Unless they have not mowed their lawn the entire past year and now it's overgrown. It's a jungle. Unless that's the case, they have used another service. So market to those pain points and not to the pain points of a new customer. All right, first, our next one up, Nathan and Kyle Hart from Hart and Sons Landscape. We recently took on two clients that are slightly out of our service area, but they are larger contracts and we decided to charge extra for drive time. Do you recommend that we give extra budget hours for the crew that has to make that longer drive or would that be confusing for them as it gives them an inaccurate amount of time the job should be completed. This also applies to mulch jobs as well. Normally we add drive time to pick up the mulch since it's often so busy at the time and makes takes up to an hour sometimes Mercy, it may be as misleading to the crew because they think they have more time than they actually do. If we don't add budget hours and the crew's efficiency core for that day is always lower and they don't get a bonus. Okay, so yeah, so if you're doing pay for performance, your budget hours need to be accurate. Now if you're not doing budget, if you're not doing pay for performance, this really does not matter. You're charging a customer an amount, you're paying the crew by the hour. No one cares. Now that you'd have a whole different argument as to whether or not it's efficient for them to be driving this far or going an hour away from mulch, et cetera. But when it comes to pay for performance, we do need to take into account the drive time. Now, do I pay them for drive time? No. But if I'm going to make them drive an hour away, but only do budget hours for the three hour job they're going to be at, they will never be able to make P4P above base pay. So you'll have to bake it in. This is why small service areas, you don't have to think about this stuff like If I'm, if I'm not, if I'm driving more than just a few minutes from house to house, we have a big problem. And so if you're going to randomly take two customers way away. Yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna inflate the budget hours if I'm on paper performance to make sure my crew could get above base pay. Because the last thing you want is they know there's no way in the world they're gonna be able make base pay. Not because the budget hours are, are accurate, but because the drive time's so long, they're just burning time and they'll get mad at you. So what's nice about pay for performance? It keeps you honest. It prevents you from doing bad business behaviors like getting a random couple customers way outside your service area because your crew will be mad at you. Because they'll know. They'll start figuring out they don't make any money if you're doing services that far away. So if you're going to, I would beef up the budget hours for them. Blaze from Bellamies. Can we please have a new visit created prompt and zapier added? Thank you. You can do this in. If you go to the chat, you can do a feature request.

And yeah, I'm guessing there's a new visit. I think there's a new. There's several other. I. Yes, I see what you're saying. Okay, so visit would be like an actual, you know, a job. So feel free to submit this as a trigger and in the.

Feature request, Montez Williams from Ace Project, what are your other steps to set up a client for recurring visits, not just one time visits. So if you are setting up a job like you would for a one time job, there's simply just a toggle to make it a recurring job. Now I will say this. After seeing a lot of accounts inside of Copilot, the vast majority of people are not using off seasons. And I personally think that's crazy. Here's why. With an off season, the reason we did this is if you are setting up recurring services and you have an off season at all. Now some people say, well, I don't have an off season, I start mowing. I'm just gonna use mowing for an example. We do monthly visits during the winter and then we do weekly during the rest of the season. Great. If I was you, I would set up two recurring visits. One for the winter season, one for the rest of the season. One would be weekly, the other would be monthly, and I'll have an off season that correlates with each of those different timing and schedules. But for the vast majority of people, that actually will stop for three, four, five months of the year. When you set up the recurring service, I'm going to tick the boxes as indefinite visits. If you check that, it means you will never have to set up that service again. And if you set up the off season, it'll just automatically pause that recurring service for that off season. Okay? Now if you tried this like a year ago and it was buggy, just know that's been fixed now. Okay? So when we first launch off seasons, there was trouble. When you would change the off season, it would not reflect and actually add hundreds of visits like it should. For example, we have like 3, 4, 500 mowing visits scheduled. All of a sudden you realize it's October. Like, man, it's warm. I need to extend my mowing season by two weeks. Okay, what you're going to do is you're going to go to the off season and now instead of having to add 300 visits one by one by one, you're going to just change the off season from November 1st to November 15th. And when you do that, it's going to add any appropriate visits for that recurring service for the next two weeks if the timing is appropriate. And so I don't see a lot of people using this, it will save you dozens of hours. The larger you get, the more it would say it'll save you in terms of starting or stopping service at the end of the season and starting it up back in the at the beginning of the season again. Also the reason it's so important, because I see so many people when they start service up again, they forget several customers until it's four or five weeks into the season and they're like, oh my word. The customer usually freaks out and is like, why haven't you been showing up at my property? And you're like, I totally forgot. And the reason is because you're, you're starting restarting everyone's recurring service. So to answer your question more directly, Montes, when you're sending a visit, just it says this is a one time job or recurring. Click on recurring. Set the schedule you would like. And then I personally recommend, unless they've told you to stop at a certain time, make it an indefinite visit in the future and set your off season. And it'll just pause that service for that period of time. Next question from John Wiggins from Power Safe Power Washing. Quick backstory is I've Been running my pressure washing business by myself for three plus years now. I made some huge decisions recently. I'm very close to my family and recently added my brother on as a part owner with me barely holding the majority share. I've also added my sister on as almost equal parts owner. Okay, interesting. The question is not if this is a good idea. I know it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm extremely close to them and have a ton of trust as well. I didn't do this because it was a smart business move, but instead that is something I want to do as a family. My siblings are definitely type A and we would like to grow as quickly as possible. We are all willing and able to take very little if not no money out of the business. My question is, do you have any advice for me when navigating this complicated situation to not only maximize our growth but also keep all parties on the same page and avoid complications? Okay, this great question. So in about probably five or six weeks there is a turnaround video that's coming out that'll talk a lot about this. Because there was a three person partnership. One person in kind of an ugly way had to leave and it was really bad. It really put them through the ringer and the business was doing I think 4, 3, $400,000 last year. They're trying on page like 600,000 this year. But it really put them in a bad spot where it's where like they couldn't do any marketing last year because they're so far behind. Once this part time part owner bailed mid season. And so as much as right now, you all trust each other. There can be kamikazes that come in through life. For example, one of them could have a tough breakup, for example. And if they're married to that person and all of a sudden they're going through a divorce court, they're going to try to get 50% of the equity that that person holds in your business. And that could potentially lead to liquidity event where you're like I have we, we have to sell this business to be able to get this person, get them out of the business or you have to take a massive loan to buy them out. So as much as you might have really good relationship with in the siblings, there are other impacts, health for example, that could cause this to change. Now do I think this is a bad idea? I'm not going to give my opinion on that. What I would say is prepare for it not to be this way forever. Unlike marriage, it is not till Death do us part. Most business relationships, and I don't mean like 50% like marriages, but rather more like 99% of people that start in business together will eventually not be in business together. That's just the facts. Like there are very few Charlie Mungers and Warren Buffetts that literally until the day they die are business together and just keep going together. It is very, very rare. Most of the time you're in business for someone for 5, 10, 15 years. These are partnerships, these are not marriages. And so what I would recommend is like some people spend literally 10 seconds getting a business relationship and they think that's crazy. If you went and got married, if you're giving someone equity in business, you are giving them a huge chunk of your, like a huge amount of investment together. You're spending more time with this person than probably your spouse. And yet we just do it so flippantly. And so I would recommend creating quote unquote, and I say this mostly for the effect a prenup for your partnership because it's not a matter of if you will separate, is a matter of when. And so just isn't a bad thing. It's a matter of saying like, eventually life is going to happen. One of us is going to want to move on. One of us is not going to want to be here eight, ten hours a day. When that happens, what's going to happen? Are we going to, are we going to have to buy someone out? Are we going to take it? So, for example, I like the idea of having value, having three independent valuations, taking the average of it and then being like, hey, if you, if you are wanting out and you're wanting to be bought out, there's a discount rate applied. So for example, just say the business is doing 500,000 in revenue. Say, hey, when we dissolve this relationship, we're going to have three independent valuators or we're going to come with a valuation mechanism now based upon profitability or revenue, for example. But we're going to determine that now either three independent valuations or evaluation mechanism based on profit or revenue. Now great, I went out. Okay, I'm out. Like I want to move. I'm done with this business. Great. Valuations coming at $150,000. Now. I personally like that if I'm trying to get out, there's a discount rate applied that might be 40, 50%. So the valuation business is no longer 150,000 I'm wanting out, which means it puts pressure on the business tax to buy me out. And the other partner, which I'm going to agree prior to getting in this partnership, that there's going to be a discount rate applied of 40%. So now the business is only worth 80 or $85,000. And then if I own 50%, great to buy. Yells going to cost 40 grand. Doing all of that now makes it to where everyone knows what's happening. There's never bad hard feelings. The business is not put in jeopardy. You're never wondering as to why someone should or should not be doing more in the business. So just think about every possible thing that could go wrong for the business. What happens if someone has a life event? What if someone wants to move? What if someone wants to get out of the business? What if someone only can work three or four hours a day because they have a physical issue or they have a family problem? What happens if someone needs an extended period away because of pregnancy or because they get injured? These are the type of things that need to be thought out. Now, how do you come up with all these questions? Go to ChatGPT, be like, hey, this is the business. Here's what we're kind of doing. Revenue. Ask me every single question that could possibly go wrong so we can figure out exactly how every single case would be handled. And it'll give you, like, 20 to 50 questions that you all need to figure out, like, what happens if someone gets divorced? What happens if someone wants to buy more equity? What happens if one person's working 16 hours a day and someone else is working three hours a day? How does that impact profit sharing? How does that impact equity? Equity? These are so. There's so many variables. And if you just go to it blindly, it's not a problem until you're making money. Like, no one really cares about holding equity or profit sharing in a business that doesn't make money. As soon as it starts making money, it means a lot. And that's when confrontation happens. So right now there's no confrontation because, like, everyone's like, I don't want money for the business, that will change. For everyone that says that, eventually that will change. And so instead of just blindly going into this, let's think about, okay, well, when that changes, how are we going to handle it? So that way when it happens, we don't have to ruin our personal relationship. That is my 2 cents. I have a whole lot more coming out in a turnaround show that's coming up because they were the result of this sort of collapse happening. Next question is from Morgan Latimer from Augusta Lawn Care of Jacksonville. Will archiving affect KPI data? I would like to archive estimates. So I do not know this for certain, so I do apologize. Morgan, feel free to reach out to ATC and they can probably test this for you very quickly just by like archiving one, seeing if it changes in the KPIs. Personally, I don't usually archive estimates, mostly because I don't know if it actually even impacts us, but it might say archived as a status when the customer goes and looks at it and I don't want them being like, oh, I can't, I can't accept it. Now down the road there might be like we could have estimates that automatically get archived based on like expiration date, but for now we don't have that. But I do not know this for certain. So reach out to air traffic control Morgan in the support and they can certainly see if, if that is the case and whether or not it impacts your close ratio and other KPIs. I. I would venture to believe that it does not in terms of like changing things like close ratio on your KPI cockpit. Mike Delugas from Attaboy Lawns. Hey Mike, I'm trying out a new very small marketing agency because the large one we were using just kept pushing me off and wouldn't help us get our CAC down. The cost just kept climbing and climbing. It seemed like we just got lost in the massive system. No matter how many times I brought the issue up, the new guy is sending.