Are You WASTING Your Money During The Spring Rush?

Discipline during the spring rush isn't just about showing up to the job site on time. It's about taking extreme ownership over the data and the marketing dollars you are spending. If there's one thing that I know, just starting your business or growing your location, every dollar you spend counts. You don't have endless amount of money to just be rolling down the window and throwing out $100 bills. That's essentially what you're doing when you're not tracking the data. I fell into this trap for the 2 to 3 years in business, I just blindly spent money on marketing dollars and I had no idea how or where these customers were coming from. In today's video, I'm going to show you exactly the steps that we've used to build 3 locations and build a $1.6 million lawn care operation all by the end of this video. So, make sure you watch all the way to the end. So, I'm going to show you exactly how we do this. There's something called customer acquisition costs. We are going to marketing tracking. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different ways a customer has found out about us. For us, what we have found, the 10 most effective ways, both free and paid marketing strategies to get customers, especially during the spring rush when things matter the most. Now what we need, what we're going to track is our recurring customer base. The reason is because I wanna build a business that is built on recurring processes. And customers. I don't want to have to have my GMs go out and sell all the time every year. I want them to build a location that is 80 to 90% recurring. So after the new year starts, we already have 80 to 90% of already sales locked in the books because we have recurring customers. So that's what we're tracking here. So these numbers are real data based on our main location in here in Aubrey, Texas. We track this every single week. So we're gonna track how many customers signed up that are from recurring, and then we're also going to track the cost, the total cost we spent. Now after that, the last thing we're going to track is the customer acquisition cost. And here's why. It doesn't make sense if you only have, let's say, $1,000 to spend. If you took $500 and put it towards, let's say, Facebook ads, and after 3 weeks goes by, you don't get a single customer signup that's recurring on Facebook ads, why would you want to keep spending $500 more on that option? You're just going to waste money. So why, as good business owners and leaders and managers inside of our organization and departments and locations, why are we not taking the time each week to track these numbers based on where this money is going? And if we realize that one marketing avenue is working better than the other, we need to stop the one that's not working and pour it into the one that is working. So let's take a look at this. So the total cost that we've spent on Google this year has been $166. I'm just gonna go down the line here. Local service ads, we've spent $412. Company truck, spent $3,650 to get the wrap on. $0 in referrals. Now referrals is going to be, uh, customer signups. So if somebody refers somebody, we'll give them a free moat. So I don't have anybody yet. Facebook is going to be just, uh, local Facebook ads that we don't pay for. We're inside of community Facebook Facebook groups. We're just posting, we're tagging our website when somebody says, I need lawn services. Facebook ads, this is going to be actual paid marketing. So we are running active Facebook ads. We've got 188 different variations of Facebook ads running at the moment right now. We're going to spend about $5,000 by the end of the season to Facebook ads. Door hangers, we spent $6,341. This includes the labor, this includes the door hangers. We are on a $100,000 door hanger push right now in a 6-week window. Okay, we hired a full team of 8 people to go out and do door hangers. We're hitting the ground running because after 5 years, I know that stuff works because of this data. Had I not known that, I wouldn't have been able to make this good decision, right? EDDM— we're not doing EDDM this year. Tried it last year, didn't really work. Yard stakes is those little signs that we put inside of the customer's property anytime we do a treatment. So not only is it a heads up for the customer, hey, we've been here, we serviced your yard, but it's also a marketing strategy as Well, we don't get very many from there. Unknown is like they don't give a reason, they put other. That doesn't really help us. The total money that we've spent this year is $12,247.25. This is how much money we've already spent at Aubrey for marketing. Then what we need to do is on our good CRM, we're going to track how these customers are hearing about us. So Google, we got 12 customers. Local service ads, we got 8. We got 6. 6 from the company truck. For referrals, we got 2. Facebook, we got 2. Paid ads for Facebook, we got 2. And then for door hangers, we've gotten 17. Like I said, door hangers work. EDDM, we've gotten 0. Yard stake, we've gotten 2. Unknown, we've got 3. Okay, so that gives us a total of 54 recurring customers. What I like to figure out is what is our customer acquisition cost. Now, before we go into the individual customer acquisition cost, let's figure out what our total customer acquisition cost is. Because if you don't know how much money it costs you to acquire a customer, you don't know the numbers to the game. You don't know how to play the game. You don't know how to grow a business. Like, you're essentially driving a truck down a pitch-dark road with no headlights. That's basically what you're doing. Imagine if you were playing the Super Bowl, right? And they just, they took the scoreboard off, off the wall. That's essentially what's going on when you don't know the numbers to your own department or location. What we need to do is figure figure out, okay, if we spent $12,247 and we acquired 54 customers, what is our customer acquisition cost? You take this number, you divide it by 54, or it might be the other way around, but it gives us a total customer acquisition cost of $226.80. That is how much we have to spend to acquire a customer. We have to pay $226 to acquire a customer. Very good data there. Now we can figure out how much ad spend we need to push out in order to acquire so many customers. Okay? If we want to get 100 new customers this year, guess what we need to do? Spend $24,000 in marketing. That would get us to 100 more customers. If your goal is to get 25 more customers, as long as you know your customer acquisition cost, you can figure out and calculate and make a good educated guess on how much money you need to spend on your marketing to acquire your customer to grow the business to hit your goals. The next step is Cool. We figured out our customer acquisition costs, but are there marketing strategies that are better than others? So the next question is, well, should I cut out some of these? Should I cut out EDDM? Should I cut out Facebook ads? Should I not wrap my truck? Who knows, right? We don't know. This is where the actual individual customer acquisition costs per marketing strategy actually matters. You don't want to waste money. Do you? I mean, please tell me right now in the comments if you guys want to lose money, because I don't. I don't like doing that. I failed to do this a lot when we were first growing the business. I did not track this data. Now we track it every single week. All right, let's take it a step further here. Out of these 10, what are the best ones? Like, I get this question asked all the time of like, hey Will, where should I spend my money to get customers? That's the question. Now before I get into the numbers and I show you all the data, I want you to put in the comments what you think is the best, or I should say the lowest, the lowest customer acquisition cost, even though I kind of gave you all already the data a bit. Give me two answers. What do you think the best marketing strategy is? And what do you think the worst is? Now let's go in and actually run some numbers to see which one is actually the best and which one is the worst that we should probably cut out. All right. First one, you take the amount you spent, divide it by the recurring customers you signed up, and that will give you your customer acquisition cost for that strategy. Google, Guess what? Cost us $13.89 to acquire a customer. Woo! I love the sound of that. You can build a business on that. The next one, local service ads. So this is also a Google product that puts you number 1 on the ranking Google search that you have to pay for. Cost us $51.58. Okay, company truck, $608.33. Next one is zero, next one is zero, 'cause we didn't get any customers from those. Facebook ads, we're spending $504. $3.37. And then the next one is going to be $3.73. Door hangers. We got our customer acquisition cost now. So, let's take a look at this. What is the best customer acquisition cost? Google. Google's number 1. No ifs, ands, buts about it. We've gotten 12 customers organically on our website. $13.89. You just can't beat it. That is why we always recommend to get a website for anybody that's wanting to grow to $500,000 in annual revenue. Revenue at their location. Now the worst one, the number 10 spot, is going to be the company truck. Mind you, this $3,650 is prorated down to an annual value, so we will still continue to get signups for the next 9 months of the year. So 6 is not going to be the only amount of customers we get. I, I would guess we'll probably get another maybe 6 more at least for the rest of the season. So realistically, this is probably going to drop down like maybe 300. I don't actually think that one is going to be the worst. I Facebook ads is the next worst. So like, we'll say, I guess we'll give it number 9. Why? Well, this is, this is active. We spent $1,000 in the last few weeks to only acquire 2 customers. So we're spending $504. Now we're getting more leads, by the way, which we're going to cultivate and we're going to upsell them down the road. Also, mind you, this is only recurring customers. So this does not include the one-time signups. This does not include the one-time property cleanups that we're also selling. So some of these numbers, I'm running these very conservatively, but generally speaking, a lot— like, most of these CACs are lower than what they're actually showing because we're not including the one-time property cleanups. So we're actually recouping more money back. So these are higher than what they actually are, but really what I only care about is the recurring customers. I want to sell the customer once and I want to go to their property 32 times a year. That's a business I'm excited about. I don't really care about— you sell the customer one time for mulch, you go and do it, and then the revenue dries up until you upsell them again the following year. I want to sell them one time on mowing and weed control and get them on the service for that for 40 more visits when you include the 8, 8-round treatments. That's how you build a real business. This is basically an example of what you should be doing every single week. The last principle that I want to share with you guys— if you guys are getting value from this, can you just hit the like button? I mean, it just helps the algorithm. I know this one's not going to do well, but This is very important. One of the things that I learned early on in life in my business career is that the good Lord will bless those who are good stewards of the resources, the employees, the trucks and the equipment and the customers that they have. Failure to track this data, failure to take care of your team, failure to take care of your equipment and do the necessary oil changes, failure to be a good steward of the things that you— that God has given you will result— he will not continue to give you more. He will not continue to bless you with more customers. He will not continue to bless you with more resources, more team members. If you fail to manage what you have today, right now, if you don't manage that right or that well, why would he give you more? Why would he give you more? And so it is our duty as leaders who don't take days off, who are always on stage, always have people looking up to us, whether it's customers or new team members, whatever, it is our responsibility to make sure that we are taking care and tracking these numbers diligently and being good stewards of the money we are spending in our marketing strategies and not just blindly spending money not knowing where it's going, picking up mud, throwing at the wall and just seeing what sticks. That's basically what you're doing. I'm here to serve you. I'm here to help you. In order to get more, you have to be good stewards of what you have right now. And so please track these numbers each week. It will help you. It will help your department. It'll help your location. It'll help your team. And I promise, with good stewardship will come greater success. Thank you guys for watching. Hit the subscribe button if you want to make it to $500,000 in annual revenue.