We Got Threatened by a Competitor... POSING as a Government Employee!

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It's Mike Andes here. Landscapebusinesscourse.com Today I'm going to be doing some voiceover while we watch Ben here at Augusta Lawn Care mow some lawns. And I want to talk about several things that actually came from our texting group. And if you haven't joined the texting group, just go down in the description below, text the word landscaping to that phone number and then we do Special Q&As and offers to that group. So check that out. Today I want to talk about something that actually happened at one of our corporately owned Augusta Lawn Care locations. So we have corporately owned and then we have several. So we have mostly franchisees. We have a few corporately owned locations for Augusta Lawn Care and one of them is in North Carolina. And something that happened a couple weeks ago, it was very funny and I'm sure some of you have had had the same experience. And some random Joe Blow, that is a competitor of ours rolled up on our crew and pretended like he was from the Department of Ecology, Department of like, you know, it was either Department of Ecology or the Department of Agriculture and basically faked that. He was the supervisor and he was the person that was supposed to give out fines for people that were applying pesticides without a license. He just pretended like he was that person and like gave his name and all this other random stuff. Turns out the general manager there, Chuck, calls the department and sure enough, there is no one by that name that has ever worked for that department. So a few things I want to take away from that. Number one, make sure you check with your state and see what you do need license for when it comes to pesticides, fertilizers, chemical applications and secondarily, don't be an idiot. Don't talk to competitors like that. Like, seriously, we're going to have such a bad rap in this industry. We can't talk to each other. Like we can't even. We're tattling on each other like this. You're stupid. Don't do that. It's not good for business. What goes around comes around. That person potentially maybe one day will steal one of their employees. So like goes around comes around. Be nice to people. The next thing is I want to go online reviews. The Bellingham location, the first location for Augusta Lawn Care now gets about 10 to 12 reviews a month. But we don't ever ask for a single review. Let me explain how our review process goes. So when we leave a client's property every two months, they're going to get an email asking for a survey. That survey is completely internal. It doesn't show online, it's not online review at all. But that survey is basically one out of five stars. One to five stars I should say. Now if it's a four star or less survey survey, their feedback comes back to the office and that's it, that's where it stops. If it's a five star view and only if it's a five star review or should I say survey, then we send them an email, say, hey, we appreciate the survey and the feedback. If you can leave us an online review using these links for Google, Facebook, nextdoor, et cetera, we'd really appreciate it. And so what that does is automate the process of asking for the review and making it part of the sales like the client lifecycle. I expect them to give me a good review if they give me a five star survey. But what that does is keep out anyone that is putting a one star survey and a whole long laundry list of things they didn't like about us that'll come to us internally and we can immediately deal with it because that survey was sent right when we left the client's property. Very efficient to be able to get back. And that's the best way to make sure you extinguish an unhappy customer. And their problems is quickly and efficiently get back to the property. And so they always love the fact that we can turn our most hateful surveys, one star surveys, into raving reviews simply by getting back to the client's property immediately, turning the truck around, going right back and fixing the problem. A lot of people have asked about our trucks, if we paint them or if we put decals, we paint our trucks and then we put the decals on top. In our market to do a truck wrap, to wrap the entire thing in vinyl is going to cost around $4,000. We can paint the entire truck for $1,000 and put the decals on, printed and applied for about 400 to $500. So all in is about $1,500 for us to paint our trucks here locally and paint and put the decals on. In some markets it might actually be cheaper to put decals on. So I'm not like married to one or the other. I do like the fact that with painting every three, four years, we can just simply repaint it, it looks brand new again and we're good to go. I, I don't like the fact that if I put three or four thousand dollars into a wrap and it gets dinged and dented and starts to wrinkle and some water gets in behind and it sort of looks really crummy. I got to do the whole thing again. So I like the fact that we can just paint the whole thing and it looks very, very good. We go to Mako, there's Econo paint. There's a lot of other places you can go that can get a very cheap paint job. We don't need it fancy, we don't need door jambs painted, we don't need any special enamel. Cheap is all we need. We know that we're gonna be working on dirt and gravel and it's going to get dinged up, it's gonna get scratched. But we want this looking as good as we possibly can. Last thing here I wanna talk about, I'm gonna dive into some questions Here is the 3S system. It's a specific service system. 3S, what that stands for is basically when you're going driving around town, you're doing services around your neighborhood. What I recommend doing is getting door hangers with space specific services that are offered on each of them. So one for sod installs, one for leaf cleanup, one for patio installs, one for lawn care, for example, one for fertilizer. And then as you're driving down the street and you see a client's property is in need of mowing a lawn because it's overgrown, go put that specific service on their door. If you're driving by and you see that their lawn is full of weeds and it's in a nice neighborhood and everyone else is taking care of their lawn, you might already have a lot of fertilization clients and we control clients in that neighborhood. You can go put a door hanger for fertilization, for fertilization or chemical treatment on their door. Specific service. The most, the best targeting. Because you're only going to put that advertisement on the client's properties who are already in your target market, already inside of your route. And that's how you create route density. And that is how you can get customers for low customer acquisition costs. Because you know their need just by looking at their property. You know they need a leaf clamp, you know that they need mulch installation. Like if you're doing a mulch installation, why aren't you putting a mulch installation door hanger on the five or ten houses around that client's property and trying to upsell all of their neighbors? Because they just saw you work there for the past day or two and they liked your work and it looks Amazing. Why not upsell them? Check the link out below where you get to all the print marketing materials for your company for all those specific services and we can provide those templates. Someone asked in the texting group. And again, you can join the texting group by texting the word landscaping to the phone number down in the description. One of those really interesting Someone asked how do I get a male, how do I get male employees to take me seriously as a female owner? In my mind, what's really important to do here is to take away a lot of the whole gender equation, take that off the table and think of it more as how do I get them to respect me as an owner, Whether it be age, whether it be gender, whether it be your height, how fat you are doesn't really matter. Stop taking all those things into consideration and just think about, okay, if I'm the employer, what do I need to be a better leader? What do I need to do? What work do I need to do on myself that they are going to respect me? How can I change my approach and the way that I maybe need to correct certain behaviors and take all those other things out of the equation? If you do that a lot of times, whether it be man, woman, female, male, tall, short, fat, whatever race, they're going to respect that and stand up for yourself as an employer, stand up for yourself as a human being and don't worry about all those other things. This is also when it comes to age. When I first got started, I never hired someone that was younger than me for the first three or four years in business that takes a little bit of like taking that off your plate in your mind. Hiring a 40 and 50 year old when you're 17, 18 years old can seem weird if you think about it. Don't think about it. Think about, hey, I'm trying to be the best employee I possibly can be. I do a lot of hard work on myself to become better and expect the same from my employees.

Someone else was asking about selling their business and I would really recommend if you are thinking about selling your business, check out the YouTube video I made about acquisitions and selling your long term business. Just type in Mike Andy's acquisitions and it was a great video. I really recommend it. I'm Mike Andes@landscapebusinesscourse.com we'll see you in the next video.