You’re Spending on Ads… But Where Are the Customers?

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 175 locations around the world. The fun, sexy part about the home service industry is getting more customers. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So if you're wondering about every door, direct mail, print marketing, advertising on Facebook, advertising on Google, this is the one for you. It's a marathon video. There's a whole bunch of questions, a whole bunch of different topics. And so if you hit a topic that you don't seem is super relevant to you, just skip forward in the chapters below and watch the whole thing. Here we go.

So I'm trying to get consistent leads, and it's been super cold out for pressure washing and window cleaning. And I do dryer events also, so I've been pushing that pretty heavily. But I'm trying to figure out where I can just consistently get leads. I'm doing community Facebook groups. I'm posting every day, next door, door to door, every day. And I've tried yard signs and door hangers. So I'm just trying to make sure. But I'm. I'm getting like a job a day and usually something small. Um, just trying to figure out how to get more leads pretty consistently.

I'm assuming the leads kind of come pouring in during the spring rush then. Is that right? If you.

I haven't got to experience the spring rush yet. We moved up here during winter, so we're just trying to. Basically any of the warm days we're going out, trying to push pressure washing and everything like that. But dryer event, I've been pushing that on, like social media and everything like that.

Yeah. So like, kind of like back to what I said before, like, I'd be looking for a different service than pressure washing. Where do you live? Avery?

Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Okay. Yeah. So you're going to deal with stretches of weeks where you can't pressure wash. Right. So if you can figure out a complimentary service to do during those times, that would be ideal. Or you just like kind of close down during the winter and, you know, shut down for it. But I would be trying to find a complimentary service as an inverse demand curve from recurrent service. Or secondly, I'd be figuring out, okay, can I spend. Just spend more money and find the few customers that do need this service during the winter? Right, gotcha.

So, like Google Ads.

Well, figuring out what your customer acquisition cost is like, step one. Because usually your customer acquisition cost during the winter is probably like five, five to ten times more than the spring, which you can make sense of if you take a customer and sell them five things and then you have a really good long tail lifetime value of the customer. And so it just depends on like what is your customer acquisition cost, knowing what that is during the spring, knowing what is during the winter. And if you can make sense of advertising and getting more customers in the winter, even at a higher customer acquisition cost, if you can make sense of that because you have a great lifetime value, you can take huge market share because then you can spend a bunch of money, basically fill your schedule knowing that in the long term you'll be able to keep upselling that customer. So this is where I'd be leaning heavily on like do we do mass email? Do we do mass text through copilot to keep customers warm? Sell them five things that are three every year and that's how you take $1,000 customer and turn them into a $4,000 customer. Now all of a sudden you can afford to spend more on customer acquisition costs if needs be during the winter. Gotcha.

Makes sense.

You got it, man. Hey Mike, I have two marketing questions. Here in Plano, Texas, I opened up 90 clients last year at peak to this March around 70. Okay. We dropped 10,000 door hangers this week and have only gained four clients from it. I believe it's because there are instant quote door hangers with a seven day call to action and the grass is still brown but will be green up by the end of March and beginning growing around April. We have left 40,000 door hangers ready. Ready. We have. Should I just wait till April to drop them? For every 1,000 door hairs, I expect 3 million clients last year within the same week of drop and this was during mid to late spring till mid summer. I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how to roll out marketing this spring and when to know how to dump everything you got. Last year me and friends dropped around 17,000 door hangers and gained 80 mowing customers. So I thought I had a good grasp, but this was a good learning mistake for the future. This was the first time I I was ready with quick for quick and early marketing. Since last year I began closer to April. I believe I mistook beginning of spring for spring rush with what are your thoughts on that? What makes good branding piece and your thoughts on dumping up that a month before a call to action piece. Okay, here we go. So this revolves around timing. I will first and foremost say that timing your spring rush gets better with time What I mean is like you singing, seeing more and more spring rushes gets you better and better equipped to be able to time spring rush better. What I mean with that is you'll have to anticipate the demand of spring rush in order to accurately be able to know how many people to hire, how many trucks to have, how much equipment to have, and how much marketing you're going to be spending doing that once or twice. You do not know your demand curve because it's going to change based upon the weather. And so even if you have an indoor service, it's still dramatically impacted by the weather because that's what people start to think about it. So, for example, the weather gets better and janitorial goes up, goes up for spring cleaning. So indoors. And so I will say that instead of trying to drop everything in one week, what I would. Because you're basically, you're gambling. What I would do is I would take 40,000 door hangers, I do that over the course of eight weeks, and then I would figure out my demand curve. Because if you tracked over the course of eight weeks and you did 5,000 door hangers per week, now all of a sudden you have eight weeks where you'd actually be able to see how many customers you got and what peak demand or peak of spring rush is. Now, to your point, when customers, when the grass starts growing, for example, or when demand starts, most people jump too soon if you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost. So if you're targeting lowest customer acquisition cost, you don't actually start marketing when pain begins. You market when there's peak pain, when the demand is highest, that is not when the grass starts growing, that is three, four, five weeks into spring when the grass is now overgrown and people have the highest form of pain and the highest demand for your services, they have the highest pain if they don't accept your, your estimate. So we can see like the time to accept an estimate, assuming you don't do it over the phone or do it instantly. If you don't and you're just sending it via email and text, it takes you significantly longer to get a response. When the customer's not in pain, when their grass is not overgrown, when their trees are not falling on their house, they have less pain and therefore they will take longer to accept. And so I will also say, if you're going to do door hangers a week, two weeks into the spring, when half the people, their lawn isn't overgrown, just kind of starting to grow, you might want to extend the seven day window to more like 14 or 21 days. That being said, we do consistently see people that even with door hangers, will. Will submit a picture. 14:21. I saw one the other day, 28 days later. So you might want to change your expiration date if, if this is a big problem for you. If you're trying to, if you're trying to preload the spring rush and knowing very well that, hey, you might be three or four weeks early, you're going to have a lower customer acquisition cost. Sorry, you're going to have a higher customer acquisition cost because your conversion rate is going to be lower. However, you could kind of help that by saying, hey, this, this, this door is valid for three weeks. It's valid for four weeks. Knowing that people might keep the door hanger and then contact you during peak pain. Really good question. All I will say is this. I have done a spring rush for. This is my 18th spring rush. Every single spring rush. I have been heavily involved in the lawn care, landscaping industry. It is only now that I can, with confidence, know, okay, this is when I market, this is when I advertise. This is when I start hiring people. And it took probably five years to know that because it always shifts two, three, four weeks sometimes. Like, if you have. In our market, like, we could have, we could have been mowing, like, hardcore right now. And we also, a couple of years ago had snow like a week ago. So like, you gotta be able to adjust and know when that happens and then even know when it comes down. Like, if you're doing door hangers too late into the spring rush. Now, everyone's been set up. They've experienced peak pain, but most of them found a provider. And now the only people you're gonna start getting from door hangers are the people that are unsatisfied with their current provider. I will also say the vast majority of people I see doing marketing are going after the wrong customer. Right at the beginning of spring, you have a higher percentage of people that are for the very first time setting up service. I'm just gonna use lawn care for an example, but any home service, whether it be cleaning, cleaning a pool, cleaning a carpet, cleaning anything, or mowing lawn. Let's be using mowing lawn, for example. It's not like someone wakes up when they're 75 years old after having not mowed their grass since they were 60 years old, and wakes up and realizes that they're saving time by not mowing their grass and going, they can go play golf. So you spending money on Marketing about getting your weekend back is not going to be appealing to them after the very first time they decided to not mow the grass themselves. And so realize that the vast majority of our customers, assuming you're on some sort of recurring service, assuming that you're targeting a especially an older demographic, even if the economy starts to shift, they're not going to wake up and decide to clean out their gutters. So to market to them as if they're saving time, although that is a value proposition that we have as a service business, is that we do save our customers time, but that being the value proposition, thinking that you're going to get new customers, that way you are going after a demographic. It's very small because once that person makes a decision for someone else to mow their grass and they call around lawn care providers when they're 60 years old, you're marketing them the same way for the next 15 years. They're 75 now. They haven't mowed their grass in 15 years. They're not even thinking about the possibility of them doing it instead of playing golf. And so the vast majority of customers will not come from people that decided to not mow their grass, that decided to not clean out their pool, that decided to not trim the bushes themselves. The vast majority of your customers are going to come from people that have used other providers and they didn't show up. They have used other providers that were not professional. They used other providers that didn't have cards on file. They were tired of someone not showing up. These are the type of pain points you should actually speak to when it comes to marketing. Because the vast majority of people, now that they've had their long road for 15 years, the only reason they'll switch is not because they decided to pick it up and do it themselves. Now they're physically incapable of it. It's a fact that they are tired of someone not showing up, being unprofessional, et cetera. So speak to that in your marketing. I will also say that at the beginning of spring rush is the really only period of time I see you getting the type of customer that's for the very first time ever deciding to use a service after the spring rush, six, eight, 12 weeks in, people have solved this pain point. Unless, like they have not cleaned their house in three years, unless they have not mowed their lawn the entire past year, and then now it's overgrown, it's a jungle. Unless that's the case, they have used another service. So market to those pain points and not to the pain points of a new customer. Hey Mike, I'm trying out a new very small marketing agency because the large one we were using just kept pushing me off and wouldn't help us get our CAC down. The cost just kept climbing and climbing. It seemed like we just got lost in the massive system. No matter how many times I brought the issue up, the new guy is sending all paid leads to a landing page as a way to keep customers from getting lost on the main site. I do see this as a possible issue. However I am wondering if there is some perverse incentive, lack of education or other motive. Maybe I'm wrong, this is the correct way it should be done. I need a little insight on this matter as I am currently of the opinion that my paid ads will help me build a long term SEO and I would rather have them go to the main site. Thanks for everything Mike Deluxe okay, great question. Really good question. Okay, so here's the stakes. You're driving traffic to your main website, which will help in part your SEO because you're driving a whole bunch of traffic to.

Starts to rank better for certain keywords, etc. Very cool. Now also kind of depends if this person is driving traffic to a completely different domain. I kind of have a problem with that because then I have no domain authority whatsoever if they're doing it to like a different page. So for example, like if it's like attaboy lawns.com and instead of that it's going like attaboylawns.com estimate, then I'm okay with it because at least you're getting domain authority. That's fine.

And I'm assuming they're probably hiding it from search engines so less people get to it by just Google search, but rather you can't find in the search engine, it has to be direct traffic. Now the advantage for them having this is really easy to track. You could theoretically get away with not even have to put a Google tracking code behind this one because you know any lead that comes from this landing page is from the Google Ads because you hit it from any sort of it's disconnected from the website, it's disconnected from Google search. So basically any lead that comes in from this landing page, you know it came from them. The reason this is important is because if you just ran traffic to your main site, even if you have a Google tracking code or you have a Facebook Pixel, for example, there are times that because of privacy inside the browser, that tracking code never gets hit. And so what will happen sometimes is and this is why like companies like Hiros exist, is they do tracking simply due to the fact that Facebook pixels and Google tracking codes sometimes don't actually get hit. And there's an argument for 20 to 50% of your of your leads are not actually hitting those tracking codes. And therefore it makes it look like your customer acquisition cost or cost per lead is much higher because you don't have correct tracking in place. That is sometimes why having a separate landing page is nice, is because it allows you to know with certainty that if I am hiding this page from my website and I'm hiding it from SEO or Google, if I'm hiding it and people can't get to this, I use every single lead that comes through this landing page is going to be a valid lead from that ad campaign and I can have a very accurate way of measuring my cost per lead. So yeah, this is a trade off here. It's either A, better, easier tracking or B, I lose out on a little bit of SEO traffic to my website ranking for my domain, et cetera. And that does mean something over the course of time, right? So I know this because even at Augusta, like we've gone from where sites take two to three months to rank on the first page of Google to literally two to three days in most of our smaller markets. And the reason is because that domain, augustalongo.com has authority because so much traffic has been to it over the course of years. So I don't think the short term is going to affect you, Mike, but I think long, long term, I would be careful if I was driving like 80% of my traffic to these paid sources that are not my main site because then when it makes it, the problem with this, they own, they own that landing page. I'm assuming it's a different domain, it's a completely separate thing. If that's the case, they own it, which now they kind of have you handcuffed. And that's what most agencies like to do. Nothing against them, they're trying to do a good business model. But what they, but what you want to be careful of is all of your traffic flowing through another source and you're basically handcuffed. And you know if you turn that off, that all of your leads are gone. And now because you haven't built up the SEO and the traffic to your main site, like if you turn that off, it's literally 50, 60, 70% of your leads are now gone. They know they kind of have you. And I don't think that's they're being malicious. This is just business practice. And it's like I want to give you good reporting and that's. I'm actually, I'm a fan of them because they just blindly send traffic to your website. I don't really trust them. So it's better than. But just be careful with having golds and handcuffs because they could build up a lot of your lead flow as you grow the business on top of that lead flow. And then you know, okay, we had 100 leads last month and 80 of them came from their site. I don't want to be paying 3, 4 grand a month to them. But I kind of got it because now I've built this whole business on the infrastructure in the back end of having that that many leads to replace Churn Annmarie Lawn Care number one. I was wondering if you've come across this issue before. I don't have a physical location for my business and my business and my Google business profile was immediately suspended after submitting my verification video. I've gone through all the guidelines, submitted multiple appeal with tons of evidence and even asked in forums. But I keep getting the same response about a quality guideline issue with no clear explanation. Okay, so you can just do a service area and you'll get around this. You're verifying an address. That's when you have to do the video. So you could just do service area now. Do I recommend that? No, I would rather you have an actual address. So I would do my best to get to a commercial spot. I know some people do. They'll rent offices. Like what's it called? Give me a second. It's gonna come co working offices. You can rent them for like 100 bucks a month. Get an address that you can send mail to and verify then. And I would put put up my little sign. I would park my truck in front of the thing and to prove the video in the video. Sounds like to me right now you don't have a physical location but you're trying to verify an address. So yeah, you're probably not gonna get through. So co working space, rent some space out that actually is has an address with a mailbox. Etc. Put your sign out in the window. Better yet, put it inside the ground, drive by or put your trucks out there, park your trailers. You could do that. Otherwise if you just wanted to get the account set up, I would just do no physical location. I would do service areas only. It does hurt your SEO a little bit because you don't show up on the map as often and it doesn't Google listing is affected a little bit.

Hey Mike, I've been doing the landscape business course for a while and that's like the best like advice I've ever had.

I was just wondering what your best form of marketing would be to get myself out there. Like I, we, we've been part time, I've been just doing this part time for a couple of years. And this year I was like, you know what, why not just jump ahead and scale it? And definitely did scale it, but not where I want to be. What's the best form of like getting my name out there?

Everything. Everything. Like is a function of posting on Facebook about it is a function of making a better website, is a function of doing door hangers is a function of telling the person that is your waiter and your waitress and your hairdresser and your accountant about you. Like, it is a function of like brute force. And so I was talking to someone yesterday, they actually have a really interesting like beef jerky company and they're like, oh, I need an investor and I need to like scale this thing up and do a big marketing campaign. I'm like, no, you have 70 stores, you're going to get an RV, you can talk to 10 a day and you're closing eight out of 10 stores. You're going to go in an RV, you're going a three month vacation going from store to store to store and come back with 500 stores. And so this is a function of brute force, especially if you don't have thousands of dollars to spend on ads. But I would be looking at first, if you're going to spend a dollar on marketing, make sure you're at your website is set up correctly. Right. And so I'd be looking there first because every dollar I spend on marketing can get significantly more effective if I just have a great website that converts. So I declare first and then I would just go brute force and as door hangers, yard signs, whatever you gotta do.

Okay. Right. We have all the equipment. I have like, I have enough work for myself but not like I have right now because it's the spring and it's, it's heavy and I have enough work for another guy. But once I only have probably 25 long accounts and it's not enough for me to keep him on, but I want to keep him on because he wants to work for a while and he's good and I hate to let him go because, because I want to scale it eventually and he's good, he's reliable. Enough where I can let him run a crew or something if I wanted to. But yeah, like it was part time and now I'm doing like we're set for a hundred thousand in revenue, whereas like the previous years it was like 30, 40 grand. And I definitely brought it up, but not where I want to be. Don't have marketing either.

So, yeah, it's a function of time. Right. And so like, I would also recommend, like, if you like the landscape business course, go do the workshop. Mikeandies.com workshop. It's free. It walks through like all different parts of like not just having the seasonality of spring rush, but how to actually capitalize on that in the rest of the year. So I'd highly recommend that. But like, I think you're from a marketing perspective and a leads perspective. If leads is your current constraint. If like I don't have enough leads, then there's a function of, okay, how do we get leads? Let's make a great website. That's my storefront. And then I'm going to drive traffic to it in the form of door hangers, yard signs, Facebook ads, Google Ads, and the list goes on.

Yeah, the Facebook and the. I definitely have put out like a couple thousand door hangers this year and still I'm only booked like two, three weeks out. And it's like, I don't. I want to be booked out till June. That's what I want to do.

Yeah, I'd be like, what's your website right now, Noah?

It's gorgolandmanagement.com. it's actually someone made it for me as a gift for like my birthday.

What's the name of it? I'm going to look it up. What is it?

Gorgo land management.

Gorgo landmanagement.com.

Yep.

Gorgo G O R G O. Yep. Land Management.

Yeah.

Oh, here we go. Okay. Yeah. I would be looking at this first, like, so if I here, I'll share my screen. So you can drive all the traffic in the world, but the site doesn't convert. We've wasted money. Okay, so like this picture doesn't scream to me anything about you, your business, your brand, your logo. I don't see anything about your trucks. Your logo.

We actually just created a new logo today, actually a little more.

Yeah. So like I would lean into that. I would redesign the site to be able to collect information right now, Google form, like that button, not going to convert. I would have a S request form above the fold to the right hand side of the screen. One third of the screen and it would be four to six lines. I would not go to a Google form. Like, your conversion list is not going to do well. You know, making sure your Google listing is optimized with more than 30 reviews, it links to this site. These are the type of things, like, it's just time.

Gotcha. All right, I appreciate that. And now one more thing I got. I keep getting these calls about, for, for the website to make it like show up as number one. Is that actually a thing I should look into? Making it like, like once I get the website fixed and neat and orderly, getting it to show up sooner than.

Searching and optimization, you know, it's just a function of like, let's get, let's. I'd focus on number one, which is make the site better. So yeah, go to, go to YouTube. I, I've done, I've done this before where I do like 50 websites and I go through one by one and say, you should change this, you should change that. If you watch one of those videos, you will get the top 10 things that you like. Okay, I need to change the picture. I need to put the uh, the estimate request form above the fold. It needs to be on the right hand side. Like, I need to have my phone number. I need, like, you'll get the top 10. You can do those yourself. Those will be low hanging fruit. And then if down the road you want to do SEO stuff, there's a bazillion people and their mom that'll want to sell you that.

Okay. All right, sounds good. Um, another thing. Should, do you think I should let this guy off or should I keep him on and hopefully the business grows because I'm not profiting. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm staying afloat revenue wise. But profit's not there because I, not. I don't have two jobs booked a day. I have a job booked a day and then maybe one day a week I won't have a job.

Yeah. So this, this just comes down to like, if you're going to be default aggressive, I would be talking to every one of your 25 customers the next 24 hours and trying to upsell them into a project of some sort. Because if five of them accept, all of a sudden you're booked on extra two weeks, you can keep him busy. That buys you two weeks to go fix the website. Like in those two weeks, I'm going to start calling people I'm going to contact. Like, you have 25 customers, you probably have 50 to 100 contacts in your Database, I'd be going to every single one of them. But I think it's just like, if you're conservative, like, in terms of you don't want to spend money, you're very concerned about, you know, your current finances, then I would let him go. I would be working crazy amounts of hours, like, 12 to 14 hours a day in the field. I'd go home at night. I would work on the website, I would work on posting on social media.

Okay.

All right, sounds good. I appreciate it.

So my first question would be, what is the response rate you guys typically see on the eddm? Yeah, like, it's very, very seasonal, right? Like, the thing with every door direct mail is you could send it out this week and get like a 0.1% response rate, and you send it out in four or five weeks once the lawn is completely overgrown and get like a.0, 3.4% response rate. So it can triple, like, pretty easily, just even the day that it's delivered, like, if it's just nicer weather. So I'm not a huge fan of every door direct mill. The only way I usually do it is if I can't do door hangers or door knocking. And I really want after a very specific neighborhood, that's, like, the only reason I would do it. It's usually a pretty expensive alternative to doing door hangers where I can do an instant price on it. And if I was doing every door direct mail, I would make sure there's an instant pricing functionality in it to get a higher response rate because the response rate is just too low. It is like I am seeing across the board, like, 0.1, maybe 0.3. It's just not great. You're already in the hand of a whole bunch of junk mail, and you got to do such a crazy offer to get out of that, versus, like, a door hanger. There's nothing else on that door typically. So I have a little bit more exclusivity in terms of their attention and they're not hovering over the garbage can already. So we see a better response rate on door hangers. As long as you can make the math work on, in terms of, like, delivery, we're good. But from a delivery perspective, if I can't get the door because of hoas, gated communities, et cetera, then I would go every door direct mail. But we're seeing pretty low response rates. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Marketers ruin everything. So I think marketers have. This whole EDDM thing has become so popular now. Everyone's kind of ruining it but door hangers will eventually be ruined too. So you know, currently I'm seeing mostly the better numbers on the door hanger side. If a customer responds for estimate by saying that they are thinking about it and let us know what does the follow up process look like do you still let the automations run every day risking that it might annoy them? Yeah, so how I'm going to do it is I'm going to have the automations of text and email going out especially in the first few days and again when we follow up we can ask like do you have questions? Did you get it? Or we can be more pointed and this is where the part where usually follow up phone calls are going to be stronger and that is offering a specific date saying hey the route is filling up on that specific day, giving them a specific discount. That is kind of a ticking time bomb. It's one day some sort of scarcity. We only have so many spots left. Urgency. No, you know, today we have this one offer and 10% off your first MO free or whatever. And so yes you can annoy them but what's annoying to them is when they tell you this part right here which is they are thinking about it and they will let us know. I never want to give them the opportunity to give me that information. So if I'm doing a follow up phone call I'm not saying hey, do you have any questions? Because then the response is no I don't. If I do I'll reach out to you. I'm never going to say you know, do you have, you know, did you get it? Because if they do, yes I got it, I'm thinking about it and I'll get back to you. I never want them in the driver's seat of follow up and so I would rather you do some follow up. You will have some, you will have a non zero increase to your close ratio if you just simply call the customer and like do you have questions? Did you get it? Like there will be an increase but the far far greater like 2.0 version of follow up is actually calling with scarcity urgency and offer a reason why you're calling because if you call them and say hey Mr. Jones, we have a spa available next Monday, I'd really like to get you on the schedule because we'd really like to get that water feature completely free so we can get pictures on our website. We really need that done. If we can go on schedule today I'll give you 10% off. That looks very different because if they say no, no, I think that's fine.

I don't think we want to move forward. That kind of pushes them to like basically say no. And I'd rather them say no than nothing at all or that they're thinking about and they just ghost me. And so I'm trying to call for a reason, A reason, a date, a time. I'm going to reserve their spot and then call up. So if they actually said this like, hey, I'm going to think about it. Great, fantastic. I'm gonna go ahead and reserve your spot for next Monday because I know it's important to get this done and we're booked out like six weeks, so I wanna make sure that you can get it done. Let's go ahead and put, I'll reserve your spot and I'll call you tomorrow and then that way you can think about it, talk to your spouse, you know, compare quotes, whatever they've said and then I will call you back. I wanna be on my time, not their time. I know that seems pushy, but you are going to control the dialogue of the sale. And the objective is that I can, I have the ability to call them back without annoying them because I that I told them that was gonna happen and they asked for time to think about it. Great, let's give you time to think about it. I'll call you back on this day and until then I'll go ahead and reserve the spot for you.

One quick question. I recently just started, you know, trying to grow the lawn care up and whatever else not. But main way I've been getting my clients is through door knocking. But I've already kind of saved up enough money to kind of invest into bigger, more marketing methods. So I just wanted to ask like, what would you recommend right now at this time? What should I do?

Like I would. I personally don't think you spend a dollar on marketing until you have a great website. The reason is because all of your marketing is driving people to your website. And so if your conversion on that website's 1 out of 50 people because stinks, the best use of your money is to make sure that conversion goes from, from 1 to 50 to 1 to 10. Because now every dollar I spend on marketing after that I'll have a five times return just by having a better website. So you know, I would really look at your website first and then from there it's like, okay, well do I try some Facebook ads? Do I try Google Ads? There's a litany of other options out there. Door hangers do I hire someone to go do door hangers? Like if knocking on doors is working, it's simply a math game of how many doors do I have to knock on to get more customers. And so maybe you eventually just scale that. Like there's people inside of Augusta Nation that are doing like tens of thousands of door hangers this, this, this spring rush and they've simply ran the math and they okay, I know if I do X amount of doors, I'll get X amount of customers. And so I'm just gonna go copy and paste this across the whole thing. Hold my whole, my whole town. So don't, don't think that spending more money means you have to do Facebook ads or Google Ads or YouTube or anything like that. I would. First off, nail your website, spend every dollar you have on that first, then figure out marketing and then realize that doing door hangers or knocking on doors is not necessarily a bad way to do marketing. It's just not online. And so if it's working for you, just keep doing it, Just scale it.

And one more question for you really quickly. How do I propose a contract to a client? Like, you know, I'm young so I, it's a lot that I don't know. There's a lot of other guys in here. Anybody else or you. How do I propose a contract to somebody?

So when you say propose contract, you say you're trying to get them on 12 month agreements instead of like a per cut price. That's a yes, sir. And is that something that's become a big problem in terms of selling more jobs for you or not?

No sir, it's just I can, I've kind of already had a few clients in line and, and I've already cut them a few times and they keep looking forward to me cutting them. And well, I don't want to just do it every, every cut price. You know, I want to get a contract, put them on a contract. I just don't know how or how do I propose that to them.

Yeah. So like the question is, do you even need a contract? Right. Because if you're trying to grow the business, adding in a contract on something like mowing services is going to add friction to the sales process. And so unless your market, everyone has contracts and like it's very, very normal. I would say if you're trying to grow and get more customers, don't require contract. And you say, well, what about like the, you know, the fact that like they might not be here next week? Well, what do you think if you have a contract, are you going to take them to court over $200 a month. Right. And so like I would really think through the process of what's the value of that contract actually doing. And what it usually does is scare away customers because they're like well I don't want to sign a 12 month agreement. I only here for eight months. Do you not want that customer? Right. So I, I, I would. Unless your market Elijah, everyone has 12 month agreements and that's all they, they're confused by per cut pricing. I would leave it as is scale it up and then the only reason to switch over 12 month agreements is because you wouldn't have better cash flow. Now the thing is this is, right now we're not worried about cash flow in a small business. We want to grow the business and then down the road you can always switch 12 month contracts once you're not in gross mode and you're not trying to get more and more customers. Okay, I'm okay with 300 customers. Great. Now I'm going to require contracts and If I lose 20 or 30 because they don't like that, who cares? But if you right now as you're trying to grow institute, you must have a contract. It might take you three times as long to get to 300 customers because there's so many people that don't want to sign contracts. It also adds friction because you got to get a signature, you've got to walk them through 12 pages of terms and conditions like I'm just one of my grass cut dude. We just, I just want to give you money. Right. So don't make it hard for people to give you money, make it easy. And I think that would serve you well.

One issue we had with single ops was actually deliverability quite a bit like 95%. Is that pretty industry standard for CRMs or are you trying to get it up to more like 99 or like where, where do things stand in that regard?

Yeah, so a big reason why the 5% doesn't get delivered is the way that they're designed. So if you go into the, the help articles, I actually wrote a whole article about this and that is like 10 reasons why your email is not getting delivered. The first one's really the basic part of like just setting up your DNS records correctly inside of your domain, hosting wherever you're getting email and we walk you through how to do that. That's a big one. But the other parts are things like for example, the first email they're getting, if it has a bunch of links and a bunch of pictures. There's a very good chance, regardless of how good are, you know, deliverability is their, their email. Like this is an email that has a whole bunch of links, a whole bunch of pictures, a whole bunch of videos and attachments. And we've never got an email from this person. It's likely going to go to their spam or spam detected folder. And so that number, yeah, we're always trying to get it higher. But Honestly anything of 90, 93 is usually considered decent. The thing that I like to do though Max, is like we always on the, on the text messaging side, our first, you know, email is usually going to be for an estimate, we're sending it all via text. We're doing a text and email, text and email. My goal is always for them to open up the emails because once they open up one or two emails, they'll get through. It's that first one or two. Especially since February 2024. So February 2024 is when a whole bunch of new stuff got enacted around email filtering and deliverability. And it started off with like Outlook and Yahoo and Gmail got it. And so it's just gotten harder and harder to get through. It's going to be a constant battle. But the number one thing you can do is reduce the amount of links, text links, pictures, video and attachments. And so we've purposely actually stripped out a lot of that extra fluff in our transactional emails, which is estimates, invoices. And then we go heavier on the marketing side when it comes to.

To marketing stuff. So emails that are blasted, I might have pictures and videos in them, for example. What we actually did to help with this Max, is we actually have two completely different servers for marketing messages versus transactional emails. This is the big thing that we did and we need to make sure that every single email and invoice is opened up, like every single one. So that deliverability is probably 98%. If I had to guess, the marketing ones are going to be lower. We use a completely different server. And how we distinguish this Max, is when, so when you send an email, if it's one person, we know this is transactional email. So automations, invoices and estimates. If you're sending out a mass message to 3,000 people, that's when we now are going to know this is a marketing message and we send it through a completely different email. So if you actually look at it kind of like the, the from email address that we use, one of them is like copilot, mailpilot.com or whatever. There's a different one for the marketing ones versus the transactional. So that's why like that's one of the improvements we've made. But also just like spam detection, people will get in and if you're saying like dollar signs in a title, it just crushes your, your email deliverability. And ultimately what was happening before, like when you were in it last year, people were doing that with marketing but then it affected the transactional emails. And so now we've completely separate like the completely different services like Send Grid versus Mailgun. So completely different services.

That's great. Yeah, that's good to know. And that, that's, that's very cool. It makes a lot of sense. And so you think. But after if you send like a real bare bones email as your first message, the likelihood of then if you want to include some, you know, like a video link to a YouTube video you did or something in future emails, making that first one highly deliverable makes a difference.

100%. I would really index on anything transactional being minimalized and then anything that is more marketing heavy. I kind of go a little bit more free flow with it knowing that, you know, maybe 92, 93 get through. But I want to have a video, I want to present about my bark mulch installs or whatever. But I'm seeing people right now across the system just drip out everything of emails so they can get 100 deliverability. Like I know I can sell someone if I get in front of them. If they don't get the email, I have a problem. And so I'm very pro this right now. And that is like strip out anything that has like widgets, anything that has a bunch of columns, anything that has a whole bunch of links. Any sort of tracking of those links will immediately get flagged. So I have an article about it. It's pretty lengthy inside the help articles that kind of walk you through overall design stuff.

Okay. Do you think having the company logo on the signature is still okay? Like just a small company embedded logo?

Yeah. Yeah. How I kind of explain that in that there's no right and wrong or like will this get through a will not. It's like what level of design am I willing to give up for deliverability? Right. So for me, I still want my logo because I want it to be associated with my brand. And so I'm willing to take a slight little hit, maybe 10, you know, a few percentage of if I'm scoring myself out of 100. I'm going to take a little bit of hit to get my logo on there and some videos, some emails. I'm going to take a larger hit by like a embedded video but I know it's coming at the cost of deliverability.

Hey Mike, had a quick question for you regarding the video messages to clients imessage, correct?

Okay.

Yep. So I'm wondering if there's a logistically easier way or easy way to do it. If you have call it three or four CSRs in the office and all of your pricing is over the phone, you don't have any designated salesperson. Do you just have a floating iPhone that just stays in the office that they do all the video messages from that Like I guess the logistic part breaks down in my brain when someone responds to that but it doesn't go to like the customer card or the client portal to respond in one central location for all the CSRs.

Yeah. So first off, how many estimates per day? I know you're in a large location, call it 15.

Okay.

So in that case if you're doing under 25 or 30 estimates it's I would probably have one cell phone and I would have one person. It's their job, it's plugged into a certain computer. It's like every day at the end of the day you're going to go through this email address and all the automations flow to that email address and they're going to knock out those videos. I will also say if you're starting to do thousands like so at command center we have several videos that we inside the office will send with every single estimate and then we change them up every so often because we're not going to make a new one for every single estimate. That being said, if you're doing follow up that's when I'm using the imessage and it's going to be saying their name, their ads and I'll talk about their estimate. And so if there's 15 or less a day I would be doing them probably myself because I believe I could do that in 30 to 40 minutes tops.

Okay.

Again it's just if you're in the business I would probably put this on my salesperson. The estimator always has the best close ratio when it comes to follow up because they've met the customer. If you're doing in person estimates, if it's over the phone follow ups stuff then your office staff is typically the best because they can say hey I know yesterday you got instant pricing form over our Website. I just wanted to follow up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay.

So on that, if you so say we have 2,500 clients and we want to do an upsell to a. Sorry, a cross sell of a service that we don't do.

Yep.

Would you still use that imessage function to film all 2500 videos on that and send it out per client?

So imessage is very difficult to scale if you're doing bulk messaging. Right. Because you are gonna have to do one at a time. So I'm usually going to use a mass text feature for that and so that is the best converting. Now if you did imessage you would increase close ratio, but we're also going to spend an entire day or two or three for 2,500. That being said, if you send out for three days wages for someone, let's.

Just call it $400. Yeah.

What if that increases your cost, your conversion from 1% to 2% on thousands of customers, it starts to actually make sense. But that being said, I would probably go mass unless you were very desperate for work and the only thing for the person to do as a CSR would be like, all right, when there's nothing to do, the bottom of your checklist is you're sending out messages to customers and based upon the month, here's the upsell or cross sell that we're.

Going to be pitching. So we have a high volume of lead gen, majority of our leads coming from meta being $5. So with that being said, we have lead submit, native metaphor gathering their info. Would you recommend automating the process by directing leads immediately to our instant pricing page or continuing to convert leads over the phone with obviously the goal of.

Optimizing what's your close rate right now on those leads.

So we do all over the phone right now it's like 25%.

Have you ever tested just sending them to a form with instant pricing?

I have. Not just because we can't track it if we connect it to the meta but we can automate it by.

So I would do two different ad sets, the one that you're doing now and then I would take the exact same creative and I'd throw it behind a Facebook pixel that's going to the form and then you'd still be able to track and I would put that pixel on the thank you page so you know when they actually submitted the quote. And I would be tracking what my cost per lead is. But keep in mind the cost per lead will be higher on the Facebook pixel. So don't track cost per.

Per lead.

Track your customer acquisition cost because I have a belief that you will close 90, 80% of the second one. Ideally I would actually make it a checkout process. The way they actually, you have products like from Stripe and then just take the code and they actually buy the product.

So someone who dabbled with the opt out program just sit out for window services? No, for just random services as in irrigation or not core irration, stuff like that. So I plan on proposing that to clients in the beginning of the season. Like, hey, just so you're aware, we are going to be. You do have an opt out option now.

Do they accept that estimate already? It needs to be on the estimate.

Yeah.

So even for us, I make sure in my estimate I'm saying, hey, this is a 12 month service. When you're accepting mowing, you're expecting 12 month service because you want to be careful. If you're just going to assume it, it needs to be somewhere in writing. That'd just be like an asterisk, but go ahead.

So what we did is we just shot out a blast text messages just saying like, hey, this is a service that's coming in two weeks. If you'd like to opt out, just text, no thank you. I'm thinking about doing the same. Just giving them a notice of like, hey, this is coming up, but at that time we'll shoot you a text.

Is the price the same as your other service?

No, it's more.

Yeah, I would really recommend more communication. You could actually get in trouble for this because they haven't assumed like the reason winter services works. And I would actually say if you're within 20 to 40%, I would actually make it the same price to make, to reduce friction of this upsell. So I would, I would first off, see, can I round numbers enough to get where I can keep the same price between they're currently getting and what I'm trying to upsell them into. And then I would make sure that's in writing when they accept the original proposal that it is going to happen.

So even, even if, like, if they didn't respond, we made sure to make a. Is that still like wicked? Because like we, we call them and we're like, yeah.

Did it work here?

Before we get into this, did this work?

Oh, absolutely.

Okay.

We only saw like 10% of no thank yous. Okay. So we would call, we'd either say, they would say, okay, thank you.

And like, all right.

And then we would call like, hey, Just so you know, we're on the. You're on the schedule for next Wednesday for aeration.

Okay.

Okay, thanks.

Okay.

It works fantastically. What can I help with? Question wise?

Should I do that in the beginning of the season or just leave it as how I do it?

If it's converting at 9%, keep doing whatever you're doing.

Okay, yeah.

100. Yeah, there is no constraint in that.

Next caller from 31 3. Welcome the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hi, Mike, how are you? Thank you so much for the landscape business course coming out for free tomorrow. Can't wait to watch all those videos and everything and watching every video you probably ever uploaded. I just had a few questions. So I got a pretty expensive, like, marketing plan coming up for the spring. I'm doing. I have like 10,000 flyers I want to pass out. I was wondering, like, how long does it usually take to pass those out if I have like a electric scooter and everything? I know it sounds dumb, but I thought you were doing that too. Like, how long can I estimate to pass all those out?

Yeah, it really depends on the, the neighborhood. Because if you have a cookie cutter neighborhood, you could easily get 100 plus out per hour. Now if you're, if you're not doing the electric scooter, if you're walking slower, et cetera, you might be more on that 50 to 60 per hour. And they have longer driveways, et cetera, but easily you can do over a hundred per hour, especially if you're walking quickly, you're using an electric scooter. Like all those things add up. And ultimately when it comes to door hangers, assuming you're not, assuming you're canvassing, just putting them out instead of knocking on the door and actually talking to people, you can dramatically increase your, your results by simply increasing the speed at which you put them out and so optimizing where you put them in your bag, how many you're holding. If you have like instant pricing ones, I'm going to have like two different prices. I'm not going to write a new one for every single job because I can just get so much more out if they're just two prices only, like small and large. And so I would say somewhere between the realm of 50 to 150, depending on the centrality, like how localized all of the properties are and then also just your setup in terms of speed, how you have everything packaged, etc.

I wanted to figure out how much I need to spend in marketing to hit my revenue goal next year. Like how do I figure this number out?

Okay. What would you make in revenue in 2024?

300,000.

Cool. And what's your target for 20? 25.

Double that.

So 600.

Okay. And.

If you don't mind me asking, how much cash on hand do you have?

50,000.

Okay, cool. Do you know what your customer acquisition cost is? Or that's kind of like you would guess, but you don't actually really know. Yeah.

So last time I checked, it was 35.

Okay. And is that during spring rush? Is that a blended average across the year or is that for a specific service?

I don't remember what it was in the spring. I, I think it was more expensive in the spring, but I checked, I think last time.

Would you spend in marketing? Would you, would you spend in marketing this year, like total?

It was about, it was between like 10 and 11,000.

Okay. And what was your revenue in 2023?

Yeah, it was 180,000.

Cool. So 180,000. And then this year we did 300,000. Is that correct?

That's right, yeah.

Cool. So we can do this. This becomes a math problem. So we increase revenue by $120,000 in revenue. You spent $11,000 in marketing. Assuming you do not get any better at marketing, you will need to spend about. You get. You're getting about 11x on your marketing spend, which means if you spend a dollar, you're getting about $11 back. So what that means if you're trying to grow by $300,000, you will have to spend approximately $30,000 in marketing. Now, do I think you need to spend $30,000 in marketing in order to hit go from 300,000 to 600,000? No, I don't. I also think that your, your customer acquiring cost is, is higher than that 35 marker. Because if you spent $11,000 on marketing and you had a 35 customer acquisition cost, you would have had 315 new customers. Right. And so unless you have really, really low, low pricing, I doubt that's the case. So I would probably, if I was first, if I was you, Caleb, I would probably look, okay, how many new customers did I get? And then I would actually figure out what is my customer acquisition cost. And you could probably work that way. But assuming you did no better in marketing, you just, you don't change anything and you don't take any sort of courses or watch the content, et cetera. I think you would probably need $30,000 to do that.

When do you recommend I do like Evergard direct mail marketing campaigns Because I have a limited amount of money and I don't want to blow through it all extremely quick. But I also don't want to wait too long and get not very good results. So what do you recommend?

What service are you going to be highlighting in the every door direct mail?

Well, it's multiple, it's mowing, hedge trimming like most installs, but I guess I'm more focused on mowing. But that's not really like the highlighted thing. It's just like I have bullet points of like four different services.

Okay. So first off, I would try to reconsider that if. Have you already got the like door hangers? Like are the every door, like have you already printed everything off?

Yeah, I have.

Okay, so let's not talk about that. I was going to talk more about the fact that like going more targeted and like highlighting an offer is, is probably going to be better than just a generic like here's all the services we offer. However, let's. We've crossed that bridge already. So now the question is when do we put them out? And so like, so let's just say instead of me, do you mind telling me how much money you're going to spend on marketing this spring rush?

Yeah, so I don't really have a very specific specific number as of now, but probably around like 2,000.

Okay. So in my opinion, $2,000 is not going to be best spent on every door direct mail because you're probably going to be able to print and distribute somewhere in the neighborhood of like 7 to 10,000 pieces of mail. By the time you do every door direct mail, I think you're going to have a better shot of spending that $2,000 doing individual doors like door knocking and door hangers and then Google Ads and Google local services. Because if you spend five to ten bucks per day on Google Ads, you'll probably get a lead or two a day just depending. Like it's very, very broad. You might get a lead or two a day depending on how you know how the. Let's just call it a couple a week even. I think that's going to do better than your every door direct mail. The problem I have with every door direct mail is a one shot thing and you don't have enough money to test this a bunch. Like you don't have the money to test like two weeks before the spring rush when spring rush starts two weeks after. Like if you're going to do one shot with every door direct mail, you want to be in like the middle of spring Rush because you don't have the money to be like, okay, I'm going to warm people up, I'm going to hit them five or six times. You just don't have the money for it. So I would, I would say I'd be going after something that takes more of your time and less of your money, which is going to come in the form of probably more one on one, like door hangers or knocking on doors where it's going to be like boots on the ground. Because I'm going to assume you don't have a massive crew and you have tons of work. So if you don't, you have more time than you do money. So just do the things that take more time. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, so you recommend doing it like mid to late April probably, if you're.

Going to do it. Yes, I would. Because you need to be like the middle of spring rush if you're gonna like kind of a one shot, let's hope everything works. Bet everything on that. Or maybe even one or like, you know, split up and do two or three mailings. You want to be in the middle of spring rush, that's where you have the best bang for your buck. If you had more money, like if you would have said, hey, I have ten grand, then I would have said, okay, let's do a couple. Like a little premature, but we're warming up that audience. But if I was you, I would do door knocking and I would use that postcard or flyer, whatever you printed off as basically the literature to give to a customer when you knock on their door. And I think you would go a lot further in terms of number of leads, distributing five to 10,000 pieces of mail, door knocking and giving it to the customer than you would if you just mailed them all out. Cross your fingers and hope that that day that it was delivered, the weather was good, the grass was growing and people were thinking about the service.

So any advice when it comes to marketing? Right now we are drying up a little bit on lease. So we are doing right now 20k in revenue, 12k in profit. We have four people, so two people working full time, one distributing door hangers and me as a reserve. Right now our website is getting in leads. Right now we got 5 leads for just about 12 bucks CPO. Then Google services kicked in quite nicely with about 18 bucks per lead. But everything else, when it comes to active marketing like EDDM and all of that, it's just going down the toilet basically. So right now we are paying it about 90 bucks per lead. And right now we are totally stuck because. Excuse me, because right now we are booked out for next three to four weeks. I don't know, like in Germany most of the people wanted to have it on a semi recurring services. So basically like boosh and hedge trimming like once or twice a year. And about 10% of them want to have it in a recurring like monthly basis. Right now we got 35.86% of all the budgeted hours for two people, Preln 20. They come from monthly services right now.

Got it.

So I need a little bit of advice. We did in the beginning of the year we did a big mistake and try to boil the ocean in Cologne. And we went back and tried eddm like with door hangers, which is working quite finely again. Our third guy is distributing door hangers like all day long. It is working though. We have a CPO of about 70 bucks with that including as wage. So right now we basically say we got a small area of about like 2 miles and our aim is to get a door hanger distributed on every house like at least once or twice a month.

Roger that.

Let me give you advice on that.

Let me, let me confirm a few numbers. First off, you're making 20,000 per month in revenue for employees, $12,000 profit. Are those employees part time right now?

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

And then for good, my best mysterious performance on full time, including me and the other two on part time.

Roger that. All right, so for Google you said right now you're paying. Was it 18 or $80 customer acquisition or cost per lead?

Eddm. Yeah. And Google, sorry, Google Ad was by far the worst. We got CPL of 400, which is abnormally high. Facebook we did try last year, ended up at 90 CPL, so we dropped that one as well. We didn't even try that. And yeah, normally in the last year we got about 60 box CPL for EDDM, but it's just going down the wall right now.

Cool. So that's cost per lead. So right now we got door hangers at $70 including the person that's delivering them though. $70.

Correct. And we got a. Correct. And we got a 60% close ratio.

Got it. So your customer acquisition cost on power hangers is something like $120. $130.

Exactly. And if you include all those people that are still like asking us if we do like paper patio, which we don't offer, we just do super simple services just knowing all services in total, we end up at a card of 140.

Okay.

And then, and our minimum is 240.

What is your kind of just give me a ballpark of average annual value. Like if someone signs up for 200 per month, is that pretty normal? That would be a $2,400 annual value. What's kind of the average?

Just below, just below 1,000 and we got a attrition rate of about 28%.

Got it.

Okay, so we already offer like.

Yeah, you're good. So so basically we take your annual value of $1,000, we divide that by 0.28. We're gonna get about, approximately an annual or a lifetime value LTV of approximately $3200. Alright so right now the current math of buying a customer for $140 in order to make 30 $200 of revenue and then right now you are running according to your numbers, a 60% profit margin because you had $12,000 profit on $20,000 in revenue. So if we can, if we can assume, let's, even as we scale, let's just say 40% is going to be our actual take home off of that. If we can run that, that's looking at around, I think it's like twelve hundred dollars of profit. Which means right now you can put into the, the machine of your business $140 and over the course of the next few years make $1200 in profit. So I don't think that's necessarily bad and if you can pump money into that mechanism, it will still work.

Okay. Okay. So maybe I'm just like trying to get my overthink in that case because I mean like I'm again from Germany and I'm trying to like replicate even though I know it's different from America to Germany with I probably dare to say that we are one of the most expensive Ghana right now with an effective hourly rate of 114 bucks per hour.

Like half, half your revenue is profit right now. So I think, I think you have the margin to keep spending at $140 customer acquisition cost. If you lowered your prices you would probably have a lower customer acquisition cost because your close ratio will go up. However, I don't want you to do that because I want you to maintain that kind of margin so that we can make $1,200 in profit after putting $140 into the machine. That ladies and gentlemen, is why you start a business. And so I think that's actually a good return. A lot of us will get tripped up over spending 70, 80$100 cost per lead. And if you actually run the math on a profitable business, it still makes sense.