Tips EVERY Landscaper MUST KNOW - How to GROW Your Lawn Care Business!

Name one five star Michelin restaurant. Name two of them if you can. Okay, now name three fast food restaurants. I can name ten. Right. The reason is because those companies simplified their services, right? They say, oh, we're only going to build the taco this way, we're only going to build the burger this way. Here's the systems, here's the procedures and we can do it. We can have a 15 year old make the burger. So the goal in scaling a business in our opinion is simplification of services and simplification of this, the products and the materials that you're using.

Good morning everyone. Welcome to day two of training here at the franchisee training weekend. So this morning I'm going to try to get a couple highlights here for you guys of some of the stuff we're training here for the franchisees this morning we're going over the sales process, like the customer life cycle. So each stage from like lead all the way to customer to recurring customer and then we are going to talk about P4P pay for performance. So show you a little bit of that. And then we're going to, we hop on the bus and we head down to command center as well as the Bellingham shop for a tour. So today, unfortunately at the Bellingham shop all the trucks are out but we should get some cool footage and hopefully get a little bit of feeling of what it's like to be a franchisee for here for training. So come along for the ride.

At all times. Basics. 1, 2. Staying left foot forward and then turn it Golden.

Perfect. All right, one, two, three. One last one. Perfect. You're all set.

Chipper little smile.

This is just mostly when it comes to advertising because we are just trying to prospect, we're trying to get new people in the door just to be aware of who we are when it comes to Google Ads. Specifically, I really recommend that you spend on this. Really Almost like you're just kind of like paying the piper, honestly, because you're just trying to at the end of the day get Google rankings. If you use Google Suite, if you use Google Ads, Google local services, they push you on ranking. So it makes sense if they, if you're using their products and you're a customer of theirs, they want you to do better so they spend more with them. So when it comes to Google Ads, I'm not a huge fan of them in terms of cost per click or just customer acquisition costs from Google Ads. I'm not however, and it's not like it's horrible, there's definitely still valid to it, but you're paying a lot more. Now. It used to be that we pay a dollar or two dollars per click. Now we're paying four to six dollars per click on Google. Not a bad thing. But honestly, we still use it simply because we want people to see us on Google. We want, more importantly, Google to see that we use their products and use and give us points for their ranking. So especially at the beginning, I don't mind spending some money on Google Ads, literally just to pay the piper, get traffic coming through there and. And they start pushing more rankings. When people come to Google and they're looking at Google Ads, they have intent to buy, they're searching for lawn care landscaping. And there's a lot of power to that, because when a click comes from Google, it's better than Facebook, where we're just like interrupting them on their feed and hoping that they need lawn care. Right? So with Google, they have intent to buy, and they're searching for lawn care landscaping, and therefore I have a better chance of selling them. Typically, the lead is hotter. Like, I can target someone 45 and up all day long, but if I can't target them by income or if they're a homeowner, renters very rarely use our services, and people that are in the bottom 50% of the income brackets typically don't use our services. So you're wasting a big chunk of your money just by doing 45 and up only. So we've done in the past, like, where we will do a Facebook ad to just the women 45 and up, and we'll stay tired of nagging your husband mowing the lawn. And then we'll run the exact same ad against the men and stay tired of your wife nagging about mowing the lawn and. And just target the men then. Right? So just changing the words slightly. The goal with the targeting in general, especially on Facebook, is that when they see the ad, they're like, oh, like, this is for me. Like, we had a guy in Louisiana, he could not get anything digital. He was spending money on Facebook and Google. Just nothing was working. To, hey, go try three hours knocking on doors. And he got like five estimates. And then yesterday he contacted me, said he got three estimates in an hour and a half. If someone has a low budget, door knocking is great. It's. It's literally the best way to get in front of someone, prove that you're professional. And then it's not like a sales process. It's a matter of just introducing yourself. And if they're not home putting the door hanger on. When you. Especially when you first get your first 10, 15, 20 mowing customers. I would do this especially in the spring. And that is you finish the lawn and you take five door hangers. Neighbor, neighbor, three across the street. Again, the reason for that is just trying to get route density right. So we're trying to get where when we park our truck, we were doing two or three lawns. We're not parking our truck and driving 10 minutes and then driving five minutes and driving eight minutes. That's what windshield time kills. Mowing. This is the tool I used to look at each of your markets and look at every single neighborhood because there's a whole bunch of census data that they use. They pull for this. You're seeing mail route by mail routes. The purple at the top though, what you're going to see is all the metrics and the data on that one mail route. Assume that they're going to use us from day one. Right. So when they call and ask for an estimate from command center, it's not like if you accept the estimate, what's gonna happen is Alex is gonna come, he'll give you an estimate, we'll send you the exact quote within 24 hours and then we'll get you on the schedule. We're just assuming the sale. Don't make the sale. Like the decisions are big deal. It's not like always would be talking about the other side of the sale and then they'll just walk right into it. Right. So make it easy for them. And when I say assume the sale, what that means is when I am as the estimator at the property. Cause again they're a lead. I'm of them. I have this in my hand, I'm doing the estimate. They don't know. They usually haven't. Don't know the process of how an estimate rolls. Right. So you got to kind of like walk them through the process. So. Hey, hey, Mr. Jones. I'm here for your estimate. Let's go and walk the property. Show me what you want. Then I'm going to take a video for the office and then they'll get that estimate to you tomorrow. Okay, great. So they walk you around getting our wrapping up and this is usually how it ends. Okay, great. So I'm going to give you this. Here you go, some information, the company, whatever. I'm going to go ahead and walk around the property, take a video for the crew for when they show up and. And then the office is going to email you an estimate within 24 hours. Right? So that's really how you got to wrap things up and then you're out of there.

Let's go to your books, to the two page document. Here it is, pay for performance. 33% of labor revenue goes to the team. From a simple standpoint, you can explain P4P in two sentences. From a complication standpoint, this is why people don't implement P4P, because this stuff will come up. Like all the stuff on the back page will come up, right? So this is the stuff that we go over with them once they've been hired. And even when we go over with them on their first day of work, they don't really understand it. What we tell them is like, look, trust the process and after the first paycheck, we'll sit down with you and go over it with you. That's what starts to make sense for them. Version 3 of P4P coming out next few weeks is going to get where they every day get a report showing how much money they earned. That's when it's going to really start to click for them. Because they'll see one day when they make 50 and then the next make 400. And they'll ask themselves, did I work harder today? Yeah, I did. Oh, I didn't make a yellow sub. Great mental note. Don't do that again. Right? So the goal is to try to get that to a daily kind of reporting standpoint. But at the end of the day, yes, this seems complicated, but trust me, if I just said, hey, 33% of the labor revenue you get, that is P4P. You get a percentage of the revenue you bring to the business. That's it. That is P4P at the end of the day. But there has to be all these other checks and balances because what happens if I just speed through jobs and mess them up? We have to address that. What happens if I'm sharpening the blades for the company? How does that get dressed. What happens if I'm training someone? What happens if I'm really experienced and one guy's doing.

Bricks to me and I'm laying them and I know I've got experience that does have to still be addressed, right? So it seems a little bit complicated, but trust me, at the end of the day it's, you get a percentage of the labor revenue that you make for the business. And there's a few kind of rules to make it fair.

Hey, it's Mike here. Thank you for watching our videos, but trust me, this video is great.