Mike Andes runs a lawn-care business that charges customers for high-ticket treatment packages like $500 services before any work happens. Weekly mowing only nets $10-$15 profit, so he uses upsells built into the order form to recover his $50-$100 ad spend upfront and fund the next customer without needing outside capital.
this has been our huge focus over the past 12 months is how do we cover the customer acquisition cost as fast as possible? We can't just sell them a service like mowing where I mow the lawn for $50 a week. I make, let's just call it $10 or $15 in net profit. Well, that could very well take me 5, 10 cuts to recoup the cost of just acquiring the customer and the advertising. That's an inefficient way to scale. And so the reason we've leaned a lot into treatments and this upsell technology baked into the single form is because my objective is that by the time I pay, let's just call it $50 or $100 for a customer, I'm able to make that money back within a matter of a couple weeks. And I can't do that usually with a small recurring service that might take a couple months to recoup the customer acquisition cost. That leads to bad cash flow, very hard to scale without a lot of capital injection. And so our objective has been how do we take that one customer, sell them a $500 treatment package, and be able to charge their card tomorrow before we've ever even offered any services, recoup the customer acquisition cost, and get the money to be able to go buy the next customer.
