Before You Pay For Ads, Learn These Marketing Tips!

You don't need a single dollar in your bank account for marketing. What you need is customers. That's it. And most of you watching this are stuck right now because you're building everything except that. If you're sitting there right now with a mower in the garage, business cards you never printed, and a business name you can't decide on, this one's for you because I did the exact same thing you're about to do, except I skipped all of that and just went and got customers first. I'm Will Kelly. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Military Lawn Cuts. We run 3 locations across North Dallas-Fort Worth, close to 25 team members, and we are one of the fastest growing lawn care companies in the state of Texas. We're not stopping at 3 locations either. Our goal is to build 10+ locations across the North DFW area. And I'm about to walk you through what we didn't read in a book. We did it on our own street with our own hands before we had a dollar of outside money. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to get your first paying customers this week without spending a single dollar, and then exactly when and how to start layering in paid marketing so you can go from $0 to $100,000 without wasting money that you don't even have yet. Most people think starting a lawn care business means getting your LLC filed, getting insurance lined up, picking a logo, building a website, maybe running Facebook ads to look legit. They think the business has to exist first before the customers show up. That's completely backwards. The truth is customers don't care about your LLC. They care if you'll show up and do good work for a fair price. You can build the paperwork around the money. You cannot build the money around the paperwork. Sales fixes everything. No sales fixes nothing. No matter how professional your logo looks, let me tell you exactly how we started, because it is not complicated, and I want you to see how simple this actually is. I had a printer at my house, nothing fancy. I printed off 30 sheets of paper, put Lawn Care at the top, and listed 5 services we were going to offer, which included mowing, bush trimming, de-weeding flower beds, plant installation, and mulch. That's it. Then I walked out my front door and went door to door on my own block. I ring every doorbell around. I introduced myself. I told them my personal story. I just got out of the military and I was starting a lawn care business. I said, hey, if you need anything, here's a flyer, just let me know. That was the whole pitch. It wasn't a hard sell. It wasn't a script. It was just getting my name out there and letting people know that we existed. And I was ready to work. That's step 1 of the framework, and I want you to actually do this, not just watch me on YouTube talk about it. Print something out today, right now, when this video ends. That is your homework. Before you watch another Will Kelly YouTube video, go put 30 door hangers on the closest neighbors that you want to mow. It doesn't have to be perfect. List your services Clearly walk your own street first because those are the easiest doors in the world to knock. You already live there. You're not a stranger. You're a neighbor. You could literally walk to that customer's house. Even if you don't have a truck, you don't have the equipment. As long as you have a mower at your house, you can start this. Introduce yourself, hand them something, and then move to the next door. 30 flyers on your own block is a real business Action. 30 hours deciding on a logo is not the second step. Once you've worked your own street, expand the radius without spending money. Facebook community groups are a great way. Nextdoor— every neighborhood has one, and people in those groups are literally asking for lawn care recommendations. Post that you're local. Share your personal story. What's unique about you? What's your unique selling proposition. Let them know you're available and you're ready to help. It's completely free. This costs you nothing but a few minutes of your time and a willingness to put yourself out there. And honestly, guys, in the beginning, that's what you have is time. If you're like me, okay, I'm assuming you're like me. I didn't have a lot of money starting off. I had hustle, I had heart, and I had drive. 5 years ago, I was out in the field every single day, knocking on doors, pushing mowers, and bootstrapping my business from the ground up. Today I am not in the field and rarely ever in the office. I work on the business and not in it. And that didn't happen by luck. We put the systems in place and now we're handing them over to you. Inside our school community, you will gain access to all of the systems that we've used to allow this to happen. Click the link in the description below. Step 3, and this is the one that people skip because it doesn't feel like marketing. Every single conversation you have is a sales conversation. At the gas station, at your kid's baseball game, church, someone asks what you do, you tell them and you make it easy for them to remember you. You're not selling a service in that moment. You're selling them knowing you exist and what you do. The more people who know your name and know what service you do, the bigger your pipeline gets without you spending a single dollar on ads. The fourth biggest step here is every contact you make go somewhere. Save the number, put them in your phone with their address or their street name so you remember who they are. This is your list. Ideally, if you could set up a CRM, do that. This is the beginning of your database, and most guys starting out never write anything down. Everything's up here, so they forget who they talk to and they let warm leads get cold. Please guys, don't do that. Capture it every single time. The fifth step, and this is where paid marketing finally enters the picture— notice it's not first. Once you've got cash flow moving, once real jobs are coming in from the recurring customers and the hustle you've been doing, then you layer in paid marketing, not before. Paid ads, whether that's Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Ads, are a tool to scale past your personal network once your personal network is tapped out. Using paid marketing before you have revenue means you are gambling money that you don't have on customers you haven't proved you can convert yet. Using it after you've already proven you can sell and deliver means you're just pouring gasoline on fire that's already burning. Hustle first. Paid marketing is the accelerant down the road. That is the entire path from 0 to 100,000. Print something, walk your own street, get in the community groups, talk to everybody, write it down, then scale with paid once the hustle has already proven that the business works. I want you to drop a comment right now. Tell me how many doors you're willing to knock this week. Not someday, this week. Put a real number in the comments because writing it down in public is the first commitment most of you have never made. Here's what I want you to walk away with. You are the ceiling to how big your operation gets. Not your logo, not your LLC paperwork, not whether your flyer looks professional or not. You. The hustle you're willing to put in right now at this stage with zero customers is the same hustle that gets you to $100,000. It doesn't get easier later, it just gets bigger. So if you've been waiting on that perfect setup before you start selling, or to get all your ducks in a row and make sure that everything's perfect, it's the exact reason you're never going to start. If you have to wait till everything is perfect in your life, that's the exact reason it'll never work out. Because if you have to wait till everything aligns and everything's perfect and everything is exactly how it's supposed to be, what happens down the road when you get 6 months into it or a year into it and it gets hard and your team leaves, or, you know, you got customers giving you 1-star reviews and you're having a bad day and everything is all of a sudden crashing and burning. If you can't handle it now and you have to wait till everything's perfect, what makes you think that you're going to be able to navigate through those storms and those problems when they come down the road? Right? Doesn't make sense. So print 30 flyers today. Walk your street. Go get your first customer this week. And if you already have customers, double and triple down on how you acquire those. I would ask you this. For anybody that's watching, hey Will, I already got 5 or 10 customers. Cool, how'd you get them? Put it in the comments right now. Let me know how you got them. Double and triple down on how you got those. Was it through door hanger? Was it through door knocking? Was it on Nextdoor? Facebook ads? Cool, post more in there. Post 3 times this week instead of once. Go and get more customers, guys, and build and fulfill your dreams. Thank you guys so much for watching. My name is Will Kelly. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you want to grow a more successful owning business.