A short marketing podcast by Mike Andes advising lawn care and landscaping businesses to position their services as a way for customers to buy back time. Andes argues that the primary reason customers hire professionals is to save time—especially affluent older clients—and recommends anticipating needs, automating communication, and proactively fixing issues to avoid forcing customers to spend time following up.
Chapters
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, landscape business course. And today I am going to be talking about something that I feel we forget a lot of times in the lawn care and landscaping industry, and that is really, what are we selling? And especially when it comes to your marketing, this is very important. But even just in general, like, why do we exist as lawn care and landscaping professionals? And a lot of times we can get wrapped up in the fact that we create beautiful things, that, that we have good equipment, that we even have a great team, but really, why do customers even use our services? And this is really important to know when you're trying to advertise or you're trying to get new clients is how do you actually talk to their pain points? How do you actually talk to the desire they have and why they would ever actually reach out for our services in their lawn, for their trees, for. For their landscaping. Why would they do that? And the number one reason, and there's other reasons why there's other, smaller reasons, but the biggest reason why people use a professional lawn care and landscaping service is they want more time. Regardless of what industry you look at, if you can save the customer time, you're going to be in good business, you're going to grow, you're going to expand. Whether it be Uber, whether it be drive throughs, whether. Whether it be technology that's taking the movie industry, the hotel industry over, regardless of what company is being born, many of them on the cusp of technology is really built around the service of providing time for the consumer. And the reason for that is because in our age, especially as people have more money, they are more affluent, and they are in the demographic that we try to target, and that is affluent baby boomers and older clientele, they are very keenly aware of the fact that they don't have much time left. And regardless of how much money they might have, they cannot buy more time. Now, there's one caveat to that, and that is if you use your money to alleviate other things that take your time away, and that's what we do in this industry, yes, they can mow their lawn and spend two hours a week doing that, or they could buy time, and they could spend money and give you $100 to do that for them so that they can take those two hours and spend it with their family, with their grandkids, sailing on their boat, doing whatever they want. And while I'm recording this, I have to break away from the action because there's literally a snake. I'm gonna catch it. Here on the camera. Oh, it's running away. I don't know if you can see that guy. Look at that. Anyways, can't make this stuff up.
But back to what we were talking about. And that is when you're advertising, when you're trying to get new customers, remember the reason they're interested in your services is because they want to save time. Now you say, well, no, they want it to look good. When I get complaints, they're always complaining that the stripes aren't straight or that the edging wasn't done correctly. And what they're really complaining about is the fact that they had to address it and they had to take time out of their day that they were paying you to take something off of their plate and take, you know, they were literally paying you to buy time. And then you now are making them call you back and take time out of their day to complain or ask something to be changed or you broke something. And so the constant question you ask, whether it be customer service, marketing, sales, hiring, is what can we do to make sure that time is given to the customer? And you do that by expecting what they're going to want to, to have before they actually ask for it. Using automations, using email, using communication from your office, using email to actually before they even anticipate or even want to contact you or they want to complain. For example, you might make a mistake, you might make a skid mark on the lawn. Now you do not mean to do that, you want to fix that. But instead of waiting for the customer to complain for you to come back and put seed and some soil down you, you can save them time by getting some seed, getting some soil, putting it down and then anticipating their communication, anticipating the pain point and addressing it with them so they don't have to take any time out of their day to then address it with you. So constantly, whether it be customer service or sales, you need to be asking yourself the question, how can I save time for my customer and provide more value to them? Yes, they want a nice looking lawn, yes, they want a great looking landscape. But the bottom line is that they are trying to buy time. And as you begin to really target that affluent older clientele, they are very keenly aware that time is running out. And regardless of how much money they have, time continues to run out. And so that's really what your marketing plan needs to be. And in order to retain and keep your customers, you need to make sure they are not spending time to follow up with you. Spending time on making sure you're showing up to their property on time, spending their time to ask when your guys are going to be there, spending time on asking why supplies are dumped in the middle of their drive driveway instead of off to the side. Like these are all things you need to anticipate what the pain points of the customer are so they do not have to spend their time trying to track you down, trying to follow up with you, trying to correct your mistakes, or trying to give you payment. Make all those things easier so that they can have time and you will stay in business for a very, very long time.
