How To Get More MOWING Jobs In The Summer!

You don't have a leads problem this summer. You have a follow-up problem. Every single year, right around the same time, spring rush ends and the phones go quiet. And the second that happens, guys panic. They say, my leads are drying up. I'm not growing right now. Business feels dead. They think the well ran dry and it didn't. That well is still full. sitting right there in your CRM, your notes app, wherever you're tracking customers. Maybe that's you right now, scrolling backwards through name after name from March and April, watching nothing new come in, wondering if the whole thing is slowing down for good. That's not a knock on you if that's where your head's at right now. In fact, I personally was there, especially in my first season or 2, in the lawn care industry. Nobody ever sits you down and teaches you this side of the business or side hustle. What actually happened is way simpler than you think, and honestly, it's a lot more encouraging because it means this is completely within your control. I'm Will Kelly, the CEO and co-founder of Military Lawn Cuts. We run 3 locations across North Dallas, the Fort Worth market down here in Texas, closing in on close to 25 team members. And we are one of the fastest growing lawn care companies in the region. And we're not stopping at just 3. We are building towards 10 locations. And every single system I'm handing you in this video, we already tested and ran it inside of our own company on our own trucks, and with our own team literally this summer. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to stop playing defense during the slow stretch and start playing offense instead. I'm going to give you the exact system, and I'm going to show you real numbers from one of our own locations where one single change in wording took a text campaign from from getting 3 estimates out of 3,000 texts sent to people to 26 estimates with only 400 people texted. It was the same offer, basically the same list size per person reached, wildly different result. And once you see why, you won't be able to unsee it. Here's what almost every operator believes when leads slow down in the summer. They believe demand disappeared, that the customers don't need this service anymore, or they already have a lawn care company. Which— these are all valid stories that we can tell ourselves inside of our brain. They believe that everybody who wanted lawn care already got it handled back in March and April, and now there's nothing left to sell. That feels true when your phone stops ringing, but I am here to tell you that it is not true. And I bet good money, it isn't true for you either. Take a second and think through it with me. How many people did you quote back in the spring who never became a customer? How many current customers do you have on the books today who you've never once offered anything to besides regular mowing services? That right there is the real opportunity. It was never about a lack of leads. It's about putting the leads and customers you already have back to work. So let's build a system that fixes that piece by piece. The first piece, and this is the foundation everything else sits on, if you are not already capturing lead information such as name, phone number, and email every single time somebody reaches out to you for a quote, that is step one. And none of the rest of this work will works without it. If your website doesn't have a form intake collecting that information right now, go build one today. This is the minimum bar. I don't care if you're running a side hustle on a spreadsheet or a full-off CRM. You need somewhere that every single lead lands the moment they reach out to you. I see a lot of this occur with these guys that are getting just started in the industry, and Look, I've been there too. Call comes in, we're scrambling, grabbing our sticky notes, going ahead and putting their— writing their name down, their phone number and their address. And then what happens to the sticky note? You throw it away. You call them, you text them, they don't answer, they ghost you. This information is so valuable, guys. So valuable. We can't let that stuff slide out. We have to be good stewards of the resources that we've been given in the information. So think about why that matters. So somebody calls you back in the spring rush, you quote them over the phone, they say the typical, well, let me think about it, or talk to my spouse, which we get a lot of— that literally is the last conversation that you ever have with them. If their name and number never makes it anywhere besides your call log, that person is gone. Not because they weren't interested, because you had no way to reach back out once the season shifted. Multiply that by every single customer or quote you gave this spring that didn't turn into a booked job or recurring customer, and that's your hidden list. That's revenue sitting untouched, and it's the exact list you're about to put to work. Because if you don't have their information, they don't exist to you anymore once that first phone call ends. And that means every single upsell, every reactivation, every piece of revenue we're about to talk about is completely completely unavailable to you. The second piece, once you've got that list building— now again, in your first year, guys, our newer locations, they only have like 100 or 200 or 300 leads in the database. But these are all the people that have ever contacted or reached out. That's still a list. When you compound this over months and years of doing this, all of a sudden you're going to wake up 3 years from now and have a list of like 3 1,000 people, but you have to start somewhere. Even if you only have 50 or 100 people on your list right now that reached out to you this spring, that's something we can work with. You've got that list building. You need one offer a month, not a menu. Every month you pick one seasonal upsell and you push it to your list. Ask yourself this question: what is the biggest pain point for customers right now? And a temperature check on that is think about the last 5 or 10 calls that you got. What are people asking about? Are they needing their bushes trimmed? Are they wanting mulch? Are they wanting edging border created? Do they want plants installed? Out of the last 10 people, do you see a trend? What do they keep asking about? That's going to be your monthly upsell that we want to lean into. It will rotate based on the season. And here's the part most guys skip: you test it and you actually pay attention to what happens. We just updated our own monthly upsell calendar based on exactly that. You see, one of our general managers, his name's Daniel, at our Aubrey location— phenomenal, phenomenal team member. He's an awesome general manager, absolutely crushes it. He tested a mulch push during the peak of summer last month. It didn't perform. Doesn't mean mulch is a bad offer, and it didn't mean Daniel did anything wrong. We didn't know the data. We couldn't guide him on what works and what doesn't. It simply means that summer isn't the season for it. What we learned is that bush and bed work is what actually converts during the main growing months after the initial spring rush. That's the whole game. You send an offer, you reflect and track what lands and what doesn't, and you build a calendar around what actually works instead of guessing every single month. That's how you get better. That's how you implement systems inside of your side hustle that you're going to turn into a long-term business where you can actually make good money for you and your family. That's how every single one of our locations gets better, by testing, not by assuming. Hey, real quick, my business partner and I built a private school community for people just like you trying to build their home service-based business from the ground up. We managed to build a 7-figure lawn business from the ground up, and we're sharing all of the SOPs, documents and templates and systems inside of our coaching program. You get access to us. So click the link in the description below. Let's scale this thing together. Third piece, and this is the one that actually moves the needle more than anything else on this list. The call to action, not the offer, not the price, not even the timing. How easy you make it for somebody to say yes is what matters. Let me show you exactly what I mean, because we tested both sides of this in the same market. One of our locations sent a text to about 3,000 people. The offer was a cleanup and the response required 2 steps. We simply put on the text, reply yes if you'd like a free quote and then tell us if you wanted front, back, or full property for the cleanup. 2 steps is what we were asking the customers to give back to us. Out of 3,000 leads that were texted, we got 3 estimates. That's not a bad list. That's not a bad offer. Cleanups are something almost every one of those homeowners could use right now in the season. So ask yourself, if the offer was good and the list was big, what actually broke down? What we ruled it as was the ask itself. It was the execution. Same market, different campaign. We sent a bush and bed offer to roughly 400 people, exactly what we did with that list of 3,000 that we only got 3 estimates for. We did the exact same thing, and this time there was exactly one call to action. Want a free quote? Simply reply Yes, that's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Just reply to this text, three letters yes, and we will get you an estimate. Nothing to think through. One word gets them a quote. We're making it easy for customers to get an estimate. That single change going from a two-step response down to a one-word reply took that campaign from three estimates out of three thousand to twenty. 6 estimates out of only 400 leads. Same market, same type of customer. The only thing that changed was how much work we made the customer do to say yes. That's the lesson underneath all of this. People aren't lazy because they're bad customers or bad leads. People are busy, and if you make them think or make them choose between options or make them fill out extra information just to get a free quote, most of them will simply do nothing instead. Silence isn't rejection. Silence is friction. Every single upsell you send from here forward should have exactly one call to action. Call now. Reply yes. Text the word mulch. Pick one path and make that path require almost no effort at all. One more thing on execution, and this one's easy to overlook: send it in a text first, not an email. You see, text messages get opened almost every single time, usually within minutes. Email sits in an inbox and gets ignored for days, filled with all the other junk spam that people get in their inbox. When there's real money on the line, and you have to hit and grow your business, you're trying to drive an actual response. The text is what does the work. Save email for the stuff that's just informational— appointment reminders, receipts, things like that. When you're asking somebody to say yes to a quote, put it in front of them where they're already looking, which is their phone. The last thing that I want to mention on this piece is timing matters. Whenever we've sent Sent out an upsell text to thousands of leads, 'cause we have a lot of data over the years. We've been doing this for 7 years. We find that on Mondays, that is literally the worst time to send an upsell. Why? Well, I mean, think about it. Are you busy on Mondays in your business or at your job? Probably. Are you busier on Monday than you are on Wednesday or Thursday during the week? You're probably on your phone more by Wednesday and Thursday. So if you're sending a mass text out and people are more likely to be on their phones on Wednesday or Thursday, 'cause they're really busy during the start of the week, at work catching up on all the priorities for the week. You're going to get a better response by sending it on a Wednesday or a Thursday. We statistically have run this data because we do a lot of these. Any time we send an upsell out on Mondays, they flop. We get like 30% of the estimate booked on the schedule than we would if we would have sent it on a Wednesday or Thursday. So that's a little quick tip for you guys. Don't send it out on Monday. Do it on Wednesday or Thursday and you'll find a much better response. So here's what I want you to actually do with this. Go pull up the last upsell text or email that you sent to your list. And count how many steps you ask that customer to jump through in order for them to get a quote. If it's more than one, that's your leak. That's where your responses are dying, right there in the friction, not in a lack of demand. I want you to drop something in the comments for me before you go. Tell me exactly what your current call to action looks like on your upsell messages right now. Word 4-word, if you can remember it. I want you to see how many of you are already down to one clean ask and help point out an easy tweak for anybody else in the comments who could tighten theirs up so we can help us all grow as a better green industry community. Here's what I told you at the top of this video. By the end of this video, you'd know exactly how to stop playing defense during the slow stretch and start going on offense instead. That's the whole system. Capture every lead with real contact information inside of a CRM from the very first conversation. Run one seasonal offer every single month. Test it, critique it, build upon it, and build out a calendar of what actually converts and is working instead of what you assume you will convert. And above everything else, strip your call to action down to One simple ask that takes the customer 5 seconds to respond to. That's the difference between 3 estimates out of 3,000 leads and 26 estimates booked out of only a 400 batch of leads. Same team, same market, same season. The only thing that has changed was how easy we made it for the customer to say yes. Guys, thank you so much for watching. My name is Will Kelly. Make sure you're subscribe to the channel if you want to turn your side hustle into a better, more successful lawn and landscape business to support you and your family. Thank you guys so much, and we'll see you in the next video.