Mike Andes discusses franchise opportunities, lawn-care CRM software, and marketing tactics for the industry. He recommends Service Autopilot over LMN, highlights Facebook lead-forms and door-hangers as effective marketing, and suggests targeting a 20% net profit margin for a $1M business.
Hey everyone. Welcome to another live Facebook session here. Before we get into questions, because everyone's just still hopping online, a couple quick announcements. First of all, I'm at the office here. It is a little past 8pm on a Friday evening. A couple quick announcements before everyone is hopping on Facebook. Sorry. Franchise training is going to be June 4th, 5th and 6th. That's our next one. So we've had to shove them off the past couple months because coronavirus. If you're interested in becoming a franchisee, go to GustAlongerServices.com franchise. You're going to book a zoom call with me so I can see a face to face and we can talk about see if it's a good fit for you or not. But the bigger announcement is that we're actually doing discovery days. So June 20th is our next Discovery Day and you can come here for a day. We're going to do a tour of this location where we've been in operation for a long time. We're going to go down to our Mount Vernon location. We're going to go to Command center, going to show you the training facility for the franchisees. And so if you're interested in becoming a franchisee but you'd rather come see and check things out first, that's always an option. So if you have questions about that, let me know. But right now I am at the office. Everything is pretty much wrapped up for the week. Everyone's back besides a few trucks. Oh, that's a trailer. They're in the back. Never mind. So anyways, I'm here gonna answer some questions. I already got some questions on the texting platform. Go ahead and answer those. But if you guys got questions, there's 15 or 16 of you guys already on here. Just post below and I'll get to those. But before we get to those, let me answer some of the questions that are popping in on the text messaging app. So I'm just gonna go through these again. If you guys have questions, post below. If you want to see anything outside, I can try to. It's almost dark though.
Questions I haven't answered. Okay, first off, LMN or Service Autopilot, if those were the only two softwares available and you were starting out, which one would you go with and why? That's a very tough question. There's positives and negatives to both of those software programs. I would say Service Autopilot, but I would make a caveat and say that it's all about keeping it simple on both of those platforms. Honestly, they're very, very complex programs. They're built for companies that are multi million dollar companies and that have massive amounts of massive amounts of project managers, office people, etc. So it's all about simplification. It's easy to get lost in those software packages, especially when you're starting out. Next one is, hey Mike, what is your strongest and most effective source of marketing that is not from word of mouth? Would love to see you discuss this if you haven't already. Definitely could use the help. Thank you. We've been using these things called lead forms on Facebook ads and really, really crushing it. But also the team has been putting these out this past week during the coronavirus whole thing. It says the grass is growing and we are mowing. We are essential services and we are stronger together on the other side. In the light of the current health crisis, we are doing mowing estimates without in person appointments. We will be, we will drive by your property and email you an estimate within 24 hours. Give us a call today for a free mowing quote. So those are the door hangers the guys are putting out. This is next to our keyboard where they get the keys in the morning. So that's what we're doing right now. We're seeing a lot of traction down in Mount Vernon, which is our new location, new corporately owned location. We're seeing a lot of really good traction right now on Facebook, lead forms and doing some cool stuff there. Okay, next question. What is a good profit margin to have overall? I've said this before and it's just very much of a general term. It's going to depend a lot on your service, is how many employees you have, your overhead structure, if you have a shop, etc. However, a good margin I would say is what you want to shoot for, is 20% net profit margin. And that's assuming a million dollar business. If you're smaller than a million dollars in revenue, you can do a lot higher margin because you don't have a lot of overhead. You don't need office people, you don't have a lot of employees. You do work yourself, you're out in the field. That inflates those numbers. So when I say 20% net profit margin, I'm talking about a million dollar business. Plus if you're doing less than that, you should be higher than that in terms of take home pay and.
