working for free made me a millionaire

Before we even get started talking about equipment and trucks and all the exciting things about starting a lawn care business, it's important that we actually fill our schedule and remember that customers are what make a business. You get all the trucks and equipment in the world, but if you don't get customers, you do not have a business. When someone comes to buy a business in a lawn care business, they're buying two things, contacts and contracts. All the other stuff you can buy anywhere else, you can buy that truck just about anywhere in the world. I can't buy customers and contacts. That that's what the real business intellectual property and the value, that's where it's really at. So what are we going to do first? Before we talk about anything else, we're going to talk about getting customers. And you say, well, how do I get customers? And if I don't have money, how do I get customers? If there's people that are way cheaper than me, you're going to get customers regardless of price? Yes, regardless of price. I don't care if you've got to go do services for free. You're going to fill your schedule. Because once you fill your schedule, we can raise prices down the road. But right now we've got to get jobs. And I literally don't care if you do them for free. Why? Because there's other ways that people can pay for your services besides just transacting with money. Let's go through these. First off, we can ask for a referral. In other words, If I do Mr. Jones house over there for free, his first lawn mowing service, or a bush trimming, or I pull some weeds or do a fertilization for him, I just simply afterwards ask him, hey, what about Ms. Sally over there? Or what about Mr. Junior over there? I do you know your neighbors, do they need any services? And he might be able to introduce me literally in person, walk me over their house and introduce me to someone else that also needs those services. So the first way he could pay me, even if the actual service I provided for them was free, he could give me someone next door as a referral. Another thing is I want to be able to get at least 30 Google reviews as fast as possible. Because if I can get good Google reviews, I'll be able to rank well on Google and people find my website and I won't have to pay any money in marketing because they'll just rank better on Google and people find it me when they type in my keywords like lawn care, landscaping. In my area, this is what it looks like when you go and search on Google. These all the top are from Google listings. You can see here. This is our location locally. And I see in three places and I haven't paid for any of these. I see it right here as the number one spot for Google listings. I also see on the map because I have a physical address and I also rank well on native search. There's a few things I want to focus on. Number one, look at how many reviews we got. 492 Google reviews. Now that's been over the course of 10 years. Get at least 30 and you'll likely usually get the first page or two of Google just by getting 30 Google reviews. It's completely free. It's not gonna cost you anything. Now you can't pay people to give reviews, but what you can do is do a great job, do it for absolutely nothing. And they're gonna feel obligated to give you a great review. And if you do that 20 or 30 times, all of a sudden you're starting to rank well on Google. And people that are searching for lawn care and landscaping in your area and actually start to find you. And those people are the ones that you charge. Those are the people that actually will give you money for your services. But when you're first getting started, just go get busy. And guess what, that person driving by, they saw my truck. And so even if I'm doing services for free in this neighborhood, people are seeing my truck, they're looking over and they're seeing my uniform. They're seeing me doing a great job and great service for a customer, to me as a customer, to them as their neighbor. And so I'm able to get now more jobs in this neighborhood simply because I have my truck out in the community. Most of the time, if you're out working in the field, the customer's not going to actually watch up to you and ask you for your information in order to be able to do business with you. Rather, they're going to be looking for a truck like this that's wrapped or painted for them to be able to get contact information like your phone number or go to your website or at least just know what your brand is. This is like a massive walking billboard wherever you go. That's why I want you to jump right in and get working. Get the truck rolling, get it in neighborhoods, get it in the community, have the neighborhood see you often working in their area. And guess who they're going to call when they have lawn care and landscaping services and Guess what? You're going to charge those customers to actually pay you for your services. Now, the third way that you can actually get someone to pay you without giving you any money is for an upsell. And an upsell is essentially this. I'm going to give you something for free, but I'm going to notice five other things on your property that I could do for you, and I'm going to upsell them to you. I'm going to try to get you to buy more of the service I just gave you or other services that are kind of adjacent or similar to them. There's actually a feature inside of copilot where when you're at a customer's property, you can really quickly upsell them a whole bunch of different services and send them a text or an email automatically with a tap of a button. For example, I might say, you need bush trimming. I know it's gonna take me an hour. I'll do that for free. Say, oh, no, you can't grow a business on free. No, I'm gonna get the bushes for free. I'm gonna ask you for a review, and then I'm gonna tell you that you have five other services on your property that I can do for you, and I'm gonna charge you for those. I'm gonna charge you for the fertilizer and the weed and feed. I'm gonna charge you for an extra mulch install. I might get you on a 7, $800 mulch install because of one hour of free that I did on the bush trimming to get you hooked. And so the goal in offering free services to grab customers to hook them in. And nothing hooks people in more than free. If they can get free services, they are then going to reciprocate by giving you a referral or review. Or you get the opportunity to upsell them on all the other services they do on their property. Because guess what? If the services aren't done on the bushes, there's a really good chance they also won't be done on the mulch or the beds or the weed and feed that needs to be on the lawn. These are all other services you can offer and make a customer that is, yes, they're free, and you gave $100 worth of value added them, and you could turn that into a customer that pays you 1,000, $2,000 a year on recurring services. When I'm giving services away for free, I'm typically looking for things that don't cost me a lot of money but can provide a lot of value to the customer. Things like free core aeration, a free inspection in their irrigation system, or a one time bush trimming or something like that. Something that's low ticket. But I get my foot in the door because once I got them as a contact inside of my database instead of a CRM like copilot, I can upsell them over and and over and over again and turn what was a free customer into a lifelong customer over the course of the next several years. All right, that's all I got for today. If you want to learn how to make more money and get more customers, click this video here. It'll be great and we'll see you on the next video.