This Secret Will Double the Size and Profits of Your Lawn Care Business!

Hey everyone, Mike Andes here. And today I'm going to be talking about five reasons why your existing customer is so much more important and more valuable to your business than finding a new customer. Because everyone likes to talk about marketing, everyone loves to talk about advertising. And the reason actually this is 8.1 is because 8.1 is the module of the MBA for entrepreneurs course. Link in the description that we're just starting over the next couple months and it's all about creating a marketing machine. But the very first lesson that I'm making, 8.1 is focusing on existing customers and how to mine those relationships for more sales. So today I'm gonna talk about why the five reasons why you should focus on your existing customers, making them happy, retaining those customers instead of always focusing on the next shiny thing. Because guess what, we as entrepreneurs, we love the next shiny thing. We love the next service in our lawn care business. We're gonna do not just mowing, we're gonna do treatments and then we're gonna do bush trimming and then we're gonna do patios, then we're retaining walls, then we're gonna do this and that and we like the next shiny thing. And the same thing goes for customers. It's like, oh well, this customer's my great big commercial job. Oh man, this is a great customer. They're in my perfect ideal area. Oh, this customer's fantastic. You're always going for the next customer. What are you always doing? You're always spending money on ads and customer acquisition cost. Alright, and what do they think about? Is it a better return on my investment? Spend money on ad, then get the next shiny customer, the new customer, the next one, or focus on the established current or existing customers that I have. I'm gonna tell you the five reasons why I think you should focus on the existing customers that you do have and why it will lead to much more profits in your long term business. Number one is it costs much, much less to acquire or to retain a customer than it does to acquire a customer. So if you're wondering, well, this customer, they've kind of been a pain in the butt and they want $50 back on this invoice. But I'm not going to do it. But they're a good customer. You know what, they're a good customer. I like them, they've been with us for five years. But they asked for $50 back on that thousand dollar project and I just don't know if I'm going to do it. Well, this is the thing. If $50 is really the make or break on this job considering. Let's assume that they're a good customer, they've been a great customer for a long time and you're coughing over 50 bucks. The fact of the matter is you should probably give them $50 because to go get customer acquisition cost, CAC, that's what CAC stands for, you might have to pay, let's just say 150 bucks. You're going to either go spend $150 on a brand new customer that you have no trust with, you've never done work for no report whatsoever, or you can save an existing customer's relationship for $50. Alright? You should always be focusing on that because it costs so much more typically in acquisition in comparison to retention. Alright, so what you want to look at is we got acquisition over here, acquisition and then over here we got retention.

And you got to ask yourself what's it going to cost to acquire a new customer? What's it going to cost to retain an unhappy customer? You'd rather retain a customer. And that leads me to number two. Second reason why you should focus on existing customers is because long time customers trust you and thus will spend more money than new customers. Because guess what, if Mr. Joe that I have done services for five years for, if I see that his gutters are blocked and I need work and I don't have much work on my schedule, I can give him a price and he'll almost accept immediately. He'll also want me to do his bush trimming and his pulling the weeds and potentially pressure washing if that's something that I want to do. Or putting the mulch twice a year and doing leaf cleanup and all the other add on services, the upsells that actually give a lot more profit to me than just the mowing and the lifetime value, the annual value of that customer might be 3 or $4,000 in comparison to only 5 or 600 if I just mow their lawn on a bi weekly basis. I would much rather keep a long time customer that is willing to spend more with me because they trust me. The bottom line is the reason Mr. Joe has me do his bushes and the molt and the weeding and the leaves and the lawn is because he trusts me in comparison to customer that I just acquired and they just clicked on a Facebook ad or Google Ad or whatever it might be. Or maybe I gave them a door hanger, maybe I sent them a mailer. Great, fantastic. But they might not trust me enough to just be able to be like oh yeah, just do everything on my property. They might say, hey, you know what, let's just start with a lawn. Then we'll see how you do. Then we'll maybe let you pull the weeds. Then maybe we'll let you pull trim the bushes. Then maybe we'll let you do the bush trimming. All of those things take time to develop that relationship. And so therefore an existing customer will spend more money with you typically than and a brand new customer. Alright, number three, the third reason why you should focus on existing customers instead of just new customers is that happy customers, behind every happy customer is five more potential customers that I could get for absolutely no customer acquisition cost. So if I can keep a customer happy, they're gonna tell their friends, their family, their colleagues, and lead to even more sales and more potential clients with zero customer acquisition costs. Because they're just gonna do word of mouth. They're gonna refer me to their friends, their family, their colleagues, and that' cost me nothing. So I'd much rather make sure I'm focusing on keeping these customers happy, retaining them. If there's a yellow stuff, if there's a damage case, if there is a callback, I'm going jumping right on it. I'm going to give money back. I'm going to give a free MO if I have to. Because I'd much rather give a free mo for $30 and them feel that they've been heard and.

The wrong was made right than have to go spend 150 on trying to find a new customer.

I think people are always trying to find the new customer when they're trying to get ads and all that. Have you emailed your customers? Have you stayed in touch with them? Are you sending them marketing material? Are you trying to upsell them? Because if you aren't, you're going after something much more expensive. That's customer acquisition number four. It takes less time to process orders for an existing customer, an established customer, because they're already in your customer database, they're already in your system and they know how the process works. For example, if I'm mowing Mr. Joe's lawn and I see that he needs mulch in his beds, I simply just send him an email with a price quote already. Takes me maybe two minutes and he accepts it, he pushes the button and it's on schedule, versus if someone calls and says, hey, do you do mulch? Okay, great, okay, do I need it red? Is it brown? What size is it? Can you meet me? Can you come meet me at my property? I Need to talk to you at least for five hours about what type of mulch I want and how thick I'm going to have it and where want it. Okay, great. Then you go out there and you meet the customer and you gotta put the prices together and you gotta send it to their email. Oh, the email was wrong. Oh man, they gave me the wrong email address. They put a P instead of a Q in their name. And like that process of time to take to actually process the order, that time is so much more costly for a new customer in comparison to an existing one that's already in your system already your database. They call you like, oh yeah, Mr. Joe, great. Oh, you want to ask me? Great, okay, I'll get that to you tomorrow after I do the lawn, I'll send it over to you. Like it takes two seconds. Or potentially you don't even need the call because you're at Mr. Joe's property and you give him the estimate. You just see that he needs it. You can upsell him. So selling to Mr. Joe is going to be much more valuable than going out and trying to find a new customer because that new customer is going to want an estimate. I'm going to have to set them up in my CRM. They're not going to understand how the estimate process works. They're not going to understand how the invoice, like do you guys invoice every day or every week or every. Can I use my credit card? Like Mr. Joe already has his credit card on file. I don't have to worry about figuring out payment terms with him and telling him how it's going to work. Alright, number five, Fifth reason why existing customer is worth more than a new customer is that current customers buy without discounts. They're not expecting a buy one, get one free or start with mowing service and get spring cleanup for free. They're not expecting that. And they're willing to pay more for your products and services because they know like and trust you. As soon as you can get someone to know.

Like and trust you, they will pay you more money.

The person that just saw you on Craigslist, Google, Facebook, saw you in their post office box with a postcard. They do not know like or trust you. They might know about you a little bit now because you've gotten in front of them enough. They're aware of you, they know you maybe a little bit, they've seen your truck around town, but they don't like you because they never had the opportunity to actually do business with you. And certainly don't trust you because you don't have a long term relationship with them. You haven't done service on their property every single week. There's no trust. So I would much rather sell to the person that knows, likes and trusts me. And they're going to do so without asking for a discount. They're not going to be like, oh, so you want mulch? Well, can we do it for 500 instead of 600? Mr. Joe is basically either going to accept or reject my estimate for mulch and he's not going to ask for discounts. And if your customer, existing customers are always asking for discounts, you're training them wrong. You've trained them to ask for discounts. But typically new customers are more inclined to ask for discounts and freebies versus current customers. They're much more about the fact that you're already there. It's convenience. You're selling to them convenient. And that is that you have eyes on the property. You can upsell them, you see what the need is on their property. So I encourage you, instead of looking for the next shiny thing, the next customer, next advertising, next marketing tactic, are you farming and harvesting your existing customers enough, taking care of them, trying to retain them, make them happy as possible, getting on top of customer service complaints, making sure that you actually are trying to upsell them, keeping eyeballs on the property, seeing opportunities to upsell the customer, that's the most valuable thing. It's gonna be the highest profit. Cause at the end of the day, I could have the same services, same cost for two different jobs. But for one, if I have a customer acquisition cost, that could literally take out, if I have a 15% profit margin on a $1000 job, $1000 job for a new customer, $1000 job for Mr. Joe, who has done business with me for a long time, immediately this job is unprofitable because I have to pay $150 just to get the customer. And that 15% profit on that job just got ate up. So focus on your existing customers, make sure you're upselling them, making sure you're servicing them. Because customer service will always win the long game if you're thinking about the customer all the time. If you're interested in this sort of thing, two things I want you to do. Number one, check out the link below for mbaforantrepreneurscourse.com it's $419 and I think there is already a few hundred lectures that I have in there. We're on module 8 out of 13 module 8's gonna be all about marketing. And the second thing I want you to do, check out the link below for Landscape Summit Conference coming up in January 2022. It's Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so you don't have to miss the whole week of work. You know, if you're worried about plowing or whatever, I can guarantee you guarantee you coming to this conference will change your business. And those three days will absolutely be worth it. If you do miss a big snowfall, if you do miss a big job, guess what? Your customers, they will survive. And your employees, guess what? They'll price their they'll probably surprise you and they'll be just fine. And if you haven't built systems in place to make sure that your employees are fine without you being there, you should definitely be at the conference. We are having this conference in person. It's going to be live. We are not going to live stream it, but anyone that buys a ticket will get a recording of it afterwards. We do not want to do it live because the technology side of doing a live event is much more difficult. We want to record it, cut it up and make sure it's pretty and then we'll send it to everyone that has bought a ticket after the event is over. It's going to be amazing. Do not miss it. January is in January 2022inforno Washington Check out the link below. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference we'll see you there.