Why You Should Share Your Lawn Care/Landscaping Prices?

What I would be looking for if I was you is one thing. Just take one thing away from the entire conference.

Cool. All right. So I still feel it's very necessary for search and optimization. I feel the thing that we really need to start focusing on, though, when it comes to blogs is price transparency. Use this blog as a way to create a very meaningful connection with your customer. You are delusional to think that price is not playing into the equation. When a customer is talking to you now, you're all like, what in the world? You just said price doesn't matter. Price is completely irrelevant. But when I'm talking about that, I'm meaning that price compared to value is. Is irrelevant. There is a number that they cannot go past if they have a budget. There's a number. I don't care how much value you offer, they can't go above that number. There's just people that are going to be there. So what you need to do is realize that price is a factor in the buying decision. And so what you need to do is confront it, because everyone else is trying to shy away from the fact that people have budgets and limited funds. So you need to give information. I don't know how many times we'll say this at this conference. You need to give your customer information. And if a big part of that decision in the buying process is price, you better be the one willing to share your prices.

What about, like, you know, like some companies like Belgard, they're coming out with small kits.

Yeah.

And we're able to hold.

Can you hold the thought one second? Josh, can you come on my computer, pull up our website real quick? I'm just gonna show ours. Go for it.

And so we're able now with these small kits.

The small.

Oh, well, we can do it in X amount of hours. And it's always going to be the same price to install that kit, which is around paving stone patio.

Right.

Would you recommend for us to put a flat price and a picture on the website for that?

If you can, yes. I'm going to show you what we do on ours, because a lot of what we do, like pavers, can be done per unit basis. $10 a square foot, $15 a square foot. But you have to realize there's variables. Right. And. And that's why no one shares their prices. Well, I can't sell them $15 a square foot, because what if this. We'll tell the customer that, say, hey, we're $15 a square foot. But by the way, that can go up to as high as $30 per square foot. If we're on a cliffside and we need to do a bunch of excavation and we're on a bunch of sheetrock, that's on. So it's just about giving them information, though, because if they think it's $5 a square foot, you're going to waste your time going and doing the estimate, making a design, then having them be like, I was expecting it to be a third of the price. And you're like, this isn't even. This is a waste of my time. So I'm tired of having a lower close ratio. So I want to make sure that that customer comes to me knowing that that wall is going to be 10 to 20 grand at least that range. Because if they're thinking 2000, we got a problem and I'm never going to sell them. So this is our homepage. Go to pricing. Well, hold the phone. I might as well just say it now. So when you go to a software. So who knows what SaaS means? Software as a service, SAS. So software as a service companies are things like QuickBooks, any sort of software you use, timesheets, any software that you use and you pay for it, it's giving you a service that's called a SaaS product. When you go to any of their websites, there is a tab called called pricing. And that is the tab that everyone presses first because they want to know what's this going to cost me before I dig into it and get a bunch of information. And your customers are thinking the same thing. They're thinking, can I even afford this retaining wall before I invest all the time in talking to this estimator guy, figuring out the color of my pavers and how I'm going to build this wall. And you're like, oh man, I got to talk to him and figure it out. And they're just like, I don't even know if I want to do this because I have no idea of what this is going to cost me. Right? So weed all those people out by just being up front and be like, look, this is our prices, so go to pricing. So this our pricing one. Click that one. The top one. So our pricing is a blog post. It's the number one searched page or viewed page on our entire website. This page right here, it's just a bunch of text. It's super lame. Scroll down. It's a letter for me. And answering two questions that a customer would usually have. Why is it so expensive? And is the owner trying to get rich off me? Everyone here has had that question. You're making a killing on this. So and so is going to do it for five grand and you're at 20.

And you're going to explain why you cost more. I'm going to explain the value and I'm going to tell them that we're not going to be the right person, the right company. For you maybe. And literally if you read this, you will think I'm pushing customers away. And I am. I'm pushing the wrong ones away that I'm going to waste a bunch of time on.

So feel free to read this on your own time. Go up to the top and click let's go. Pricing.

So how much does mowing a lawn cost? This is our second most viewed page on our entire website. We give our rate matrix right there. If anyone wants to copy it, go for it, I don't care. It's just numbers.

This is our square footage per lawn, what weekly service is going to cost and what biweekly service is going to cost. There's Max, our mascot on his mowing machine. And then you're like, well I can't do that because there's so many variables. Just tell the customer what the variables are. It's going to depend on the shape. Is it perfectly rectangular or is it odd shaped with flower beds and obstacles scattered throughout? What's the access like? Is there small gates in the backyard and can we take a big mower zero turn and just knock it out or are we going to have to do 21incher all the way through your half acre backyard because you have a gate on the side? Clippings disposal. Are we going to dump all of those clippings on site if it's a two acre property or do you want us to haul them away? Because if we going to haul them away, it's going to fill an entire truck. So these are all the questions because they're going to read this, they're like, okay, well my shape is perfectly rectangular, my axis is pretty decent. I'm going to have them haul the clippings away. Then they can look at this and be like, OK, well I know I'm at 4,500 square feet, but they might go up a little bit on me since I'm going to have my clippings taken away and I don't care what they think their number is going to be. Our rate matrix will tell them what it's going to be. Once the office pipes it through these variables, I don't have to determine that they can see that from a map. If there's a back gate, if there's a fence, is it round, is it circular? Is there long driveway? Is there good access? It's very quick, like 10 seconds. They can determine what the variables are going to move. But I can give the customer all the information in the world and show to the customer. This is the problem. Everyone is concerned about the customer that has contacted you and then you show pricing information like this. What they're not worried about is the customer that has not contacted you and they've contacted everyone else because they have no idea what the price is. And they're just trying to. Just trying to get a number. Who's heard that? Just trying to get a number. I have no idea what it's going to cost. Just kind of wondering. I'm going to take out the wondering. If you think you're going to get your lawnmower for 10 bucks, don't give me a call and waste my time.

And don't think it's going to cost $200 either because it happens too. Oh, I worry it's only $50 a week. You're like, oh man, I could have done that. No, I'm just joking. But like, you got to share this information. I feel like blogs. So let's go to the paver or retaining wall. These are the third and fourth most viewed pages on our website.

There's maps building a wall. All right, so scroll down. I talk about two different types of block. I do not go into a bunch of different typ. The customer does not care. They are going to see the two different types of walls we build. That's all we do. We do two different types of walls. Maybe some natural stone that's a little bit different. But like in terms of block walls. Oh, sorry. I do have natural walls on here now. But basically I give them a description of Look. These are two scenarios. 150 foot wall with 4ft high. A 50 foot wall, 3 foot high. Literally. These are the ranges that I give them. Massive ranges. That's for all the variables. So then you scroll down.

So yeah, did we just do legacy block or Allen block? The reason I want to do this is I want them to see the difference in cost between using legacy versus Allan block. So when they come to me and say I can't afford Alan block. No problem. You know how many times I have gotten a job on retaining wall when I'm bidding against another competitor that has Allen block in their estimate or when the customer could care less if it's Allan Block. And I'm able to sell them on something like legacy block and cut out a third of the price.

They didn't get information, they just assumed they wanted. Alan Block. When I know the customer does not need a structurally integral wall because it's holding soil, it's not holding a driveway or their house, they can get away with something cheaper. So you got to educate the customer and then they will come to you and be like, hey, I saw on your website this happens. I saw on your website the legacy block is way cheaper than the Allen block. Can you explain why? I'm like, well, it's already in there, but I'll explain it. And they'll be like, great, that fits in my budget. The 8,000 to 11,000, that fits in my budget. I can do that. All right, I have something to work with now. Who here asks their clients before going to the estimate, do you have a budget for this job?

You should get in the habit of that more. We're still working on this. We have not perfected this. It's something that is very important for your estimators, especially as you become out of the field or not being the estimator, you as the owner, if that customer does not have an idea of a budget, you should be pointing them to a website like this. It should be your website.

All right, so if they say, oh yeah, I want to build a wall, I want to do a patio. And like, great. Have you established a budget for this project? Well, no, I just kind of wanted to get an idea. Okay, great. I'm going to send you over a couple links here in a couple minutes and it's going to actually give you a couple ranges so you have an idea of what it's going to cost. And then once you've read those, give me a call back and we'll set it up tomorrow with Bob at 4pm.

We go meet with them first consultation and say, do you have a budget? Because they'll get out there and say they shoot for the moon, you know, automatically. Yeah, well here, you know, what's your budget?

And then we move from there. Yeah, yeah. So it really comes down to.

What'S your lead stream like? Right. Like if you're getting so many leads, like we get so many leads, we're not doing a good job enough and we've had to automate our follow up process. If you're getting one retaining wall a week, then yeah, I just go visit them. Right. And then because you're going to have a little bit better close ratio but when we get five a day, I'm trying to weed out four of them to get to the one. Right? And so that's part of the equation. The other part is they're going to be coming to me when they book that appointment. You know, they have the money. You know, they know what it's going to cost. And there's not like that, like, fingers crossed. I hope they thought they're going to work out, you know, they have the money. They will not set that appointment up. But you guys would be amazed at how these homeowners think a wall should cost 1,000 bucks. And you're like, listen, it's not even going to cover the blocks, let alone the sand and the gravel and the geogrid and the labor and all the equipment. You gotta explain that stuff to them. Right? So thank you, Josh. You just go back to Canva. Thanks. Yo, do you have a recommended ratio within a landscape business for projects versus maintenance? No. Every single market's different. Yeah, there's markets I've gone to and said you should not touch landscaping with a 10 foot pole. I've gone into others like Isaac's on zero turn season one. You need to differentiate yourself from everyone else by going into small project based work. Every market's different. The small project based work is where the profit's at. If I could rewrite my story, I would be the property. Augusta Property Cleanups. Yep. It's super systematic. We print money on those things. I can consistently produce an exact dollar amount. I can get my budgeted hours within 3 to 5% and be accurate. Whereas a big wall could range anywhere from 10 to 30% above or below based upon so many different variables. Right. And so that's when work change, orders come into place and all that. But all of a sudden, you're managing that job a whole lot. Whereas a leaf cleanup, a property trimming, raking out, like that's just money in the bank. Just. You got to do the auxiliary services used to get that, right? Yeah.