[Live Q&A] - Crush the Spring Rush with 110 NEW Customers!

Good morning everybody! It is a beautiful day down here in Texas. We are in Aubrey, Texas. That is where our home base is for our business. And I hope you guys are having an all amazing spring rush thus far. We're down here in Texas, we're about halfway through our spring rush, so Figured I'd do a quick live Q&A. We're going to be together here for about an hour. This is a live session. So if you guys have questions, please, I beg you, put it in the, in the comments so that way you can get your questions answered. I don't do these every month. I used to, but obviously scaling 3 locations takes a lot of time, energy, and effort and laser focus. So I'm here, I'm available. Put your comments or questions in the comments and, uh, they will be answered today. So we've got the next 60 minutes to help you guys grow your location, department, business, whatever it is. I'm here to serve you guys and I'm so blessed for the opportunity to be able to really help you guys grow and scale your business. So before we get into the Q&As, So, uh, Walter here actually says good morning. Good morning, my friend. Glad to see you. Hope you're having a great, awesome spring rush. I've got a couple quick topics that I want to kind of share with you. Uh, the first thing, let me go ahead and share my screen because we had somebody submit a question. So I want to address this and get this answered. For those of you that don't know, I do have in all of my YouTube videos, I do have the ability— or you guys do have the ability to ask me any question 24/7, 7 days a week. If you go down to the link below on all of my YouTube videos, you can actually submit a question. And so this is a question that was submitted. We only had one over the last week. It's completely free. So feel free to tap into that as well if you guys need assistance. So let's go through it now. Um, I think his name is Nathan, otherwise it may be misspelled, Nathan. Uh, he's from Trim La Faye Lawn Care Services, and his question for me is, hello, I was wondering what your admin capacity typically looks like. My goal is to scale my current location to about $750,000. In revenue with about 85% recurring services, then open a second location and grow that to the same level. Do you think one admin could realistically support two locations at roughly $750K each, or is there a better way you recommend structuring it? Okay. This is a really good question. All right. So let's see here. Theoretically speaking, Nathan, I do believe that one office, one really good office person that you pay decently well, can support a $1.5 million operation. I think that's what $750,000 times 2 is. Hold on, let me just check my math real quick here. Times 2. Yeah. 1.5 million. I do believe that's possible. However, you will need to be dialed in with your systems and your processes, leveraging AI, leveraging Zapier. Your systems need to be, like, dialed in to where there is almost, almost no waste in their day. They're gonna be working very hard. You're gonna need instant pricing on your website. Like, you have to build out the structure to support that. I do believe it's possible. I do believe it's possible to have one office person at $1.5 million. That would keep your overhead extremely low. I think what the problem is is the journey to get there. And what happens is you're not gonna have all of that overnight. And so when you're spending a lot of money to grow, you want to capitalize on the sales, on the leads that are incoming. So if you're not answering the phone and you're missing phone calls, what's going to happen is these customers are going to go to the next lawn company. So I think it'll be very hard to have just one on the journey to $1.5 million, but I do believe once you achieve $1.5 million, Flip to profit mode, just maximize profit, maximize, maximize efficiency, build systems and processes. I do believe you actually can run a $1.5 million operation with one office person. The only concern I have with that is you have literally all your eggs in one basket for key man risk. And so if that office person ever left, what you're left with is the whole operation falling apart because the, I mean, that's a massive, a massive risk of putting all of your leverage in one person that's running the admin backend, that if they left, that would cause a lot of problems for you. So that's a lot of key man risk for one person. Maybe getting some people cross-trained or having a part-time helper would help, but Yeah, I do believe it's possible. As far as the admin capacity to be— look, typically looks like at a $750,000 operation, yeah, I mean, you could definitely have one office person. Um, we do. They're pretty busy in the spring rush, especially with all the marketing. Definitely busy in the summer, and then fall it kind of slows down, and then the winter I would just maybe try to cut back some of the hours. I don't really love doing the salary route. I did before, but I would recommend just like an hourly thing or some kind of maybe performance pay on the office side to really help them make more money during the spring rush. But then understanding that come the wintertime when the hours go down and the demand goes down, unfortunately so does pay. And so you don't have to keep dishing out a salary into the months of December, January, and February where you're not making a ton of money. But, um, yeah, I think you're thinking about it right. 85 recurring services, it sounds like you're building a business to last. And so you're doing a really good job. You're on the right path. 2 locations is a, is a very big achievement, my friend. So thank you for the question. Anybody else that wants to ask questions that's watching this later, you can, uh, ask that on the forum here. So let's jump back over to our live session. All right, we got 8 live viewers. Let's see. We got any comments here? Okay, so let me drop this back off here. Okay, so Walter says Saturday full of discovery calls right now, will be in and out from the live. Cool, man, that's awesome. Discovery calls are always good. Um, Matt Treehand 2009 says hi. Appreciate you guys watching, tuning in. If you guys want your questions, um, answered, definitely put them in the comments below. And yes, I am listening to you, my friend. We are putting the comments up on the live screen to be answered, so make sure you guys are asking the questions. All right, the other thing— looks like we don't have any questions yet, so what we're gonna— I'm also gonna share with you guys to bring you guys some value here. I'm gonna share with you guys the customer acquisition cost of all the marketing routes that we are doing in the spring right now. So just so everybody knows, to give you a little bit of context here, we have a— we have obtained over 110 recurring customers this spring thus far, which is amazing. We're super blessed, we're super grateful. We have a great team, we have a really big marketing push that we are pushing right now. So we're actually trying to The goal is to do 100,000 door hangers this spring, and we've already done 40,000. We're about halfway through the spring, so we're a little bit behind where we're trying to go, but nonetheless, our team is absolutely crushing it, and we've been able to achieve 110 recurring new mowing and weed control customers, which is amazing for our business. I'm going to show you guys exactly how we are doing that with the exact marketing strategies. But before we get into that, we got more— we got some questions coming in here. This is good stuff. Okay, Spencer's Lawn Care in North— down in North Carolina. Fun fact, I actually was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina for almost 6 years down in the Army, so I am very familiar with North Carolina. This is— good morning everyone, went out of town and woke up this AM to 6 approved quotes. Busy AM. Let's go, let's go. Yeah, 6 approved quotes is great. We're all in the thick of it right now, guys. All right, when did you start this channel? I started this channel, I think, like 3 or 4 years ago. And what's funny about this is I started it off to just bring value to people. I like helping people. I think that's the most fulfilling thing ever is to help people and not expect anything back in return. And so I actually started doing wholesaling way back when. And so if you go back to my really first few videos on the channel, you'll see me like cold calling homeowners and property owners to try to buy their property. And so, yeah, it's kind of, kind of interesting. But yeah, I've gone really full time on the channel where we're posting consistently. I would say for the last like 2 years, which we just hit 14,000 subscribers, which is amazing. Everybody who's watching should go subscribe right now. We're trying to hit 15K. Be part of that. All right, Peter says, how much do you charge for an average lot that is 5,000 to 6,000 square foot? I'm gonna assume you're asking about mowing, I would think, which is most what most people are are referring to. A 5,000 to 6,000 square footage, it really depends. So just so you know, we charge at our new locations, we charge $75 an hour. At our locations that have been established, we charge $90 an hour for mowing. So I would almost reverse the question to you, Peter, and say, how long does it take you with your equipment to mow 5,000 to 6,000 square feet? If it's 30 minutes, well, at $90 an hour that would be about a $45 cut. So, you know, you definitely want to be making more than $60 an hour if you have actually like team members and stuff like that. You're probably going to need to be closer to $70, $80, $90, right? Um, but I think, yeah, personally for us it ranges anywhere probably from like $45 to $52, I think, or $55, uh, is what we charge for a 5,000 to 6,000 turf square footage. And that would be weekly mowing. Okay, because we, we mow weekly during the summer. All right, we got another question from Spencer's Lawn Care. Last year we started the season at 44 clients. I'm at 109. Dude, whatever you're doing, man, it's working. Double down, triple down, keep doing it. He's at 109 as of this morning, and we haven't even really started yet. Boom. Mic drop, let's go. You're crushing it, dude. Whatever you're doing, try to 10x it. That's the mindset, just like the book behind us. It'll— you'll reap the rewards. All right, says, with the help and insights gleaned on this channel. Yeah, man, I really appreciate that. Again, I'm always here trying to help and serve you guys and really just bring value to you guys. You know, I had a lot of people in the beginning that helped me start and they didn't have to. And so just trying to turn, turn around, reach my hand back, back out and lift, lift more people up with me. So, all right, I want to show you guys our customer acquisition costs across all 3 of our locations and how we've gotten 110 customers across the board. So let's take a look. Okay. So first off, just so you guys know, this is the exact Excel spreadsheet that we use to track our data. And this is up to date. So first off, we've got Aubrey, we have Salina, and then we have Little Elm. Now, if you guys aren't doing this for your location, department, or business, please, you guys need to know your numbers, okay? If you're not doing this, take this weekend, take 3 to 4 hours on a Saturday and learn your numbers and know your business so you know what's working and what's not working. Okay, also disclaimer for anybody that watches us, we don't offer just mowing by itself. Our customer acquisition costs will be higher than other people. We do not accept just mowing by itself because we are a military company. We strive for exceptional quality services, and our customer base is on the top higher end. So we're willing and able to spend more money to acquire a customer than most regular lawn companies, okay, that are just accepting anybody that just wants mowing. We don't do that. We're different than most lawn people, okay? So keep that in mind. Our customer acquisition costs will be probably higher than yours, okay? But we're able to spend that much because all of our customers have a higher annual value of what we're able to get from them because they're on both the mowing and the weed control service where we come out 8 times per year. Also, because we have those better clients, they're way more prone to accept upsells, mulch installations, bush trimming, de-weeding, flower bed services, insect control. So we're able to upsell them these additional other services because they don't just want the cheapest price. So that's why we're able to spend more. Also, disclaimer, this Excel spreadsheet is only for the recurring customers that we've acquired. This does not calculate the one-time property cleanups, which again are really profitable. We make probably $400 to $500 per cleanup on average. So this is not calculating those. So our customer acquisition cost is probably even lower than these. But, um, let's dive into it before I lose anybody here. All right, so first column here— well, actually, let's start over here. All right, so the first column, we've got Google, we have local service ads, so this is paid. Google is organic, this is just the website. We have our company truck that has our wrap on it. We have customer referrals, so if a customer refers us to a neighbor, they will get a free cut— their, uh, their next cut free. We have Facebook, which this is more organic. So this is getting inside of just community pages for free, neighborhood groups, things like that. And then we have our paid advertising. So right now we're running 12 different ads with like 15 different variations on that. So let me see what that would be. 12 times 15. So we have 180 different Facebook ads being run right now, and we've had those being run for the last 4 weeks because we are in the spring rush. And then we have door hangers. So this is our real big push for 100,000 door hangers. And then we have EDDM, which is every door direct mail. We're actually not doing that this year. We tested this last year. It didn't have that great of a return, so we're not actually going to do that this year. Then we have yard stakes. These are the little, uh, signs that we put inside of our weed control customers' yards when we're finished treating. So we put one in the front and the backyard to signify that their lawn has been treated. Also, it's got a brand on it, it's part of marketing. And, uh, so sometimes we get customers from those little yard signs. And then we of course have our unknown. So every location has that basis, right? These are all the, the, the ways that we are for our marketing to our customers. So let's go down here now on the next column. So what we do is we go inside of our CRM every single time a customer signs up. You have to ask how they heard about you. If you're not tracking this data, you're not building a business that you can actually run data and analytics on. Like you're blindly driving a vehicle down the road if you're not asking them, how did they hear about us? Every single signup. We need to know how they heard about us, whether they're calling you on the phone or whether they're filling out a form on your website. You must have a question that says, how did you hear about us? Before you give them the price, you need that information in order to build a real business. Okay? So these are all of the recurring customers that we've acquired. So we've gotten 10 from Google at Aubrey, we've gotten 6 off of local service ads, we've gotten 5 from people seeing our truck, none from customer referrals, 1 from organic Facebook groups, 2 from Facebook lead, uh, ads, 13 from door hangers, 0 from EDDM, 1 from a yard sign, and then 2 we do not know. Okay, so now we have a total of 40 customers that we have acquired at our main location this spring. Now the next phase, once you figure out this of where these customers are coming from. Then we need to know the cost. Okay? Now how do we get the cost? So the cost, so for the Google, since this is really organic, all I did was calculate my time. I spend about 1 week every year, like a full week optimizing, tweaking, adding another Facebook page or a website page. I spent about a week. So I take my average pay, which is like $40, $45 an hour, 40-hour work week. And then I also take the, uh, Wix subscription. They have a monthly subscription that we have to pay for. I, I calculate that over, um, 12 months. I divide it by 3 because all 3 locations, uh, share the same expense. And then that's how I got $166. All right. Local service ads, same thing. We have 1 account, we pay for all 3 locations, and then we just divide it by 3. So that's the number. So far that we've spent. I think we spent like $600 or $700. If you divide it by 3, that's what it is. Uh, company truck. So our wraps last 5 years. And so what we did, every truck wrap I think is like $3,500. And so what we did is we just took how many trucks that are at each location, we, um, like prorated that out over 5 years because each wrap should last 5 years. And then we Uh, got this cost down to like a yearly thing. Like, how much are we gonna spend from this wrap this year? And so that's how we got that. Uh, we did not pay out any customer, uh, referrals. This is completely organic. This is just us tagging our website when people say, I need lawn care. And then Facebook ads, we spent about like $1,500. So again, we divide that by 3 across each location. And so, uh, that's the total cost. Door hangers. So this is the labor that we're paying. So we hired pretty much a whole team of like 6 to 8 people that are going out and doing door hangers from us because we have a really big door hanger push we're doing this year. And so we had to calculate how many door hangers can they do an hour, how much are we paying them on base pay, and then plus their bonuses if somebody signs up, plus the material cost for the door hangers. And we come to a number of $4,776 is what we've put out. Now again, we need to be tracking all this. Like, how do we track this? Well, we need to— every time a door hanger guy goes out, they send our manager what routes and neighborhoods they hit every day and how many door hangers they put out. We have to know the numbers in order to run a business. You have to know, you have to have data in order to drive. You need to have data to make data-driven decisions. Otherwise, you're driving a semi-truck down a dark road at night with no headlights on. You could hit a deer, you could go off the road on a backcountry road that's winding. Like, that, that's what you're doing right now if you don't know these numbers in your business, okay? That's why I'm sharing this with you guys, so you guys can learn how to actually calculate a customer acquisition cost. And so Um, let me just make sure you guys— okay, cool. I'm just trying to make sure you guys can still see my screen here before I lose anybody. All right, we're gonna take a tactical pause. I'm gonna take a tactical pause. All right, never mind, we're not gonna take a tactical pause. I do see comments coming in here, so we're good on that. Uh, we will come back to questions here in a second. All right, EDDM— we're not spending any money on EDDM this year. Yard stakes— so this is just simply the material cost for the stakes and the signs. We put 2 in each property on every treatment. This signifies which areas got treated on the lawn. And then unfortunately we have 2 that signed up that we don't know where they came from, right? Okay. So now that we have the total cost of how much we spent at this location for these types of marketing approaches, then we need to figure out our customer acquisition costs. Now, why do we need to know this, guys? Why do we need to know the customer acquisition cost? Well, if you have a super high customer acquisition cost, you don't want to keep spending money towards that. You're just going to burn money, right? Like if you only have $1,000 to spend on marketing and your customer acquisition cost is like $600 to acquire one customer, Why would you want to keep spending money on that revenue or that, or that approach when you only have so much money to spend in marketing? Instead, you would want to take that $400 remaining, remaining budget and push it towards whatever's working. So what I failed to do in the first few years of my business is I would get all the way spring through Spring Rush and then calculate the customer acquisition costs on all of the marketing strategies. But that's inefficient. It's not effective. Like, the spring rush is already over. You already spent all the money. I mean, cool, we could see what worked and what didn't for next year, but like, I wouldn't— I wasn't able to make adjustments while we're going through spring rush. So this should really be done every week, guys. Like, literally every single week you're going through the spring rush, take an hour on a Saturday, go into your CRM, Pull the sources of where your customers are signing up from. How much did you spend on that strategy? And then divide what you spent, divided up by how many customers you got. That gives us your customer acquisition cost, right? So let me show you. If we spent $166 on organic Google search, which is just the subscription for a Wix account and my time for a week over the whole year, and you divide that by 10, because we acquired 10 customers, guess what? It costs us $16.66 to acquire a customer. There is no other marketing strategy that's going to get you that, that cheap of dollars. This is why the website is so important. SEO is so important, guys. All right, so the next thing, local service ads. So again, we spent $229 over the last few weeks, 3 weeks and we acquired 6 customers from it. That's $38.18 to acquire one customer. If I could pour gasoline and increase the budget on the local service ads, guys, guess what we're doing? I'm cranking that up. I want to, I want to pour fire on that. Like, I can 10x this, right? This is cheap. Okay, so that's kind of what you got to do is go down line by line. All right. So our average, and then, and then you can get your average. So basically what we did is we added all of the money we've spent. So we spent $9,982 this spring at Aubrey, and we acquired 40 customers. So what do we do, guys? We take our total ad spend, $9,982.27, and we divide it by 40. Which is how many customers we got, gives us our customer acquisition cost, which is $249. Now again, I know some of you guys are watching this and you're like, man, my customer acquisition cost is $75 or $150. We have higher annual value per customer, plus this does not include any one-time jobs. So that is why we have a $249 customer acquisition cost. I'm only calculating the recurring customers here. That's really what I care about most because that's how you really build a business. Is off of recurring customers. You sell the customer one time and you show up to their property for 3 years for 32 visits every year. Like, that is how you build a real sustainable business, and that's how you hand off your role to somebody else. If they have to constantly sell one-time jobs to make money for the business, you don't really have a business, you just have like a sales job. Right? I'm trying to build a real business that can run without me, that I could plug someone else in there, offer them a really good incentive, a really good pay, take care of their family, feed their family at a premium price while building a long-term sustainable business, right? Highly recommend you guys figure out what your customer acquisition cost is, and hopefully that helps. All right, let's jump over. We got some questions here. We got some live viewers. It's Saturday, sun is shining, there's not a cloud in the sky down here in Texas. If I could flip the camera around here, I would show you guys. All right, where did we leave off here? Um, okay, we already saw that one. Okay, all right, we got some questions here. So the question is, where do we buy bandit signs? Um, honestly, if you just go to Google, type in bandit signs, I think Probably banditides.com. I don't know, um, there's probably quite a few, quite a few, uh, websites out there that you can, you can buy that off of. Um, I think cheap— I used to, we used to order maybe Cheap Science, cheapscience.com. So sorry guys, I had to discipline my dog here. All right, next question. Is from MBS. All right, let's take a look here. So I have my first client, but I haven't mowed quite yet. Will soon. However, the yard is in a neighborhood, and I might consider knocking doors nearby and saying I'm in the area. Should I knock them? Dude, absolutely. Even if you don't sign up these customers, you are learning an extremely valuable skill set of sales and cold calling and knocking on the doors. Like, Get the volume in, learn what to say, learn how to smile, learn how to approach and be friendly and use the customer's name and try to overcome an objection like of like, oh no, I already have a lawn care company. It's like, okay, well, can I, can I compete on price? Would that be fair? Like, would that be okay? Dude, that is the most valuable skill set is sales and selling. This was a foreign concept to me and I didn't understand like how to, how to like sell. And I would always, I would always hear people being like, yeah, learn a skill set of sales. Like, it's the number one thing as an entrepreneur and a business owner, and even like a manager, to like scale something big, right? Like, you have to sell. And really, when you strip all of it down in the most simplistic form, when you sell something to someone, that's really all it is— you having the ability to sell a product or service to somebody for money. That is sales. If you learn how to do that and you learn how to get good at that, you can do anything. Like, seriously, that is the one skill set they don't teach in school. They don't, they don't teach in high school, uh, not when I was going through at least. But yeah, I would totally do that. Maybe get some door hangers too. You could, you could do like 8, 8-round door hangers so that way if they don't answer the door, you could put a door hanger there. I think that'd be good. All right. Spencer's Lawn Care says absolutely knock if allowed. Some places are not soliciting friendly. Canvassing is going door to door and leaving a business card, flyer, door hanger. But yes, you should go knock or drop stuff off. Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. It's a very, very valuable skill set to learn. All right. Tristan Lopez, Redline Mowing and Trimming LLC of Stillwater, Oklahoma. As I scale from one crew to two, how do I manage training when both of my crews are brand new and require training without falling behind on work? Okay, good question. All right, so I think this is, um, a bit of a preparation, uh, falling short a bit of preparation. So what I mean by that Tristan, is what you want to try to avoid is, is onboarding like 3 or 4 people all at once. So what we do in the spring rush is we kind of stagger start times. So we'll have like 1 or 2 people start and see— we have a much larger operation, so we have multiple trainers. But basically you want to try to stagger when they're starting. So instead of having 2 guys start on the same week, have 1 start the week prior and then the other guy starts the week after. That way you have the time if you are the trainer, which at one truck you should be the trainer because you want to duplicate you as an owner. You would want to duplicate your quality and your attention to detail in that first guy first before going on to the next guy and putting him out in a truck. So I would just stagger the start times, um, if you don't have that luxury now. So use this as a learning point for next time. Um, what you could do is, um, honestly, I would just get them trained up on one piece of equipment. Like, if you just gotta crank— like, we've been there before, you gotta crank out 40, 50 lawns, like, in a couple of days, and you've only got, like, so many guys— just train them up on one piece of equipment. Maybe it's the mower or whatever's easiest. Like, maybe it's the weed eater, maybe it's the edger or blower, right? Like, just train them up on one piece of equipment and just let them run with it. Like, that's all you're gonna do for the next 3 days is edge and blow, right? The easiest task. And then you mow and weed eat. And so like, it's not going to be the fastest, but at least you can count on him to do good work, do good quality. You're not going to lose customers, you're not going to fall too far behind. And then it takes those 1 or 2 tasks off of your plate so that way you can actually get the routes done. And then once you get through that week, then you start to shift over to like, all right, now let's train you on the other pieces of equipment. Good questions, guys. Very good questions. All right, Nathan Duke, how many admins do you have for all 3 of your locations? 2. We have 2 right now, 2 full-time, and then one's going to drop down to part-time here soon. Um, yeah, Stephen, my man Stephen. All right, Stephen says, didn't you— didn't know you were Live, man. Saw late notification. Welcome to the show, brother. We are live. We got another 20 minutes, maybe. Get your questions in. Okay, Harplock— I'm not going to try to pronounce that— Chattanooga says, what's up, man? I love yours and Mike Andy's content. Dude, appreciate the love, appreciate the support. Everybody that's watching, like, subscribe, It helps the channel. We're just trying to help people. That's all it is. All right, I'm not going to try to pronounce this name because I'm going to butcher it, but 9637: if a lead texts you about getting their lawn mowed, do you do the whole sales process through text or you try to call them instead? What's your process? All right, really depends on where we're at in the spring rush. Depends on the volume. It depends on the situation, right? Jam-packed, slam-packed, phones are ringing off the hook, we can't answer all the phones. I'm just texting them, okay? I'm just texting them. Lead comes in, hey, these are the services we offer, which one— you know, this is why we're different than most lawn care companies, this is what we focus on, exceptional quality. These are services we offer, which ones would you like a quote for? Like, that's, that's just it in one text. I'm just going to send that, send that to them. Now, a little bit slower, phones aren't ringing off the hook, we've got a little bit more time in the office, um, or in our day. Yeah, I'm definitely speed to lead. I'm picking up the phone as quickly as possible, calling them. Hey, we just saw that you, uh, fill out a submission form. Just want to give you a call, see how we can help and serve you and provide you with great quality lawn care services. Right? Um, so it just depends, but I don't like— if you have the time, definitely call them. You're, you're gonna close more sales over the phone instead of, instead of via text. Wow. There are no more other questions. This is gonna be a very quick live session, guys. All right, we got another question coming through. Ask them if you got them. Uh, I got about 20 more minutes, but if there's no questions, we're going to wrap it up early. All right, silly question, but how do you weed whack against a painted wood fence house? Many times I see a line where the weed whacker has hit. Great question. Okay, if this is the wall and you're weed eating and it's a very sensitive material, i.e., wood, fence, house siding, whatever, like not concrete, not rock, something that's sensitive that will break. If this is the head of the weed eater and the whip spins this way when you come up to that siding— so again, you want to, you want to weed eat a couple inches above the, the base of the grass, right? So your weed eater is going to be kind of up here this side of the weed eater needs to be angled down to where it's almost at the grass, and then this side needs to get open up. Does that make sense? So in a perfect world, if it was concrete, you would just have the whip come this way and then it would weed eat straight across. But because it's a sensitive material, we don't want to break it or cause damage. So what we need to do is angle our weed eater head down so that way the whip is hitting at the base where the material and the grass hit, but you're not, but you're not dropping the whole weed eater down because then you're just going to scalp. You're going to scalp the edges and it's going to look horrible. The mower is going to mow at 2 inches and the edges are going to be scalped by the weed eater. We don't want to do that. So all you're going to do is angle your weed eater to where the whip is cutting at a very diagonal to where at the, at the pure base of the material, it is that kind of scalping it, but you're doing it intentionally because you don't want to damage the wood or the material. But very— but, but right after that, it's, it's angling back up so that way, that way the grass is still thick over here as it kind of angles up. I don't know if that kind of makes sense, but we have training videos on my face or on YouTube Um, in fact, a lot of the Shorts— you should check out the Shorts that I have— uh, we, we took like 15 of those really easily tactical tips and tricks and like put them into one link. And then whenever we hire a new person, we say, go watch these TikTok YouTube Shorts that are 30 seconds long. It'll teach you all the tips and tricks on how to not cause damage, how to do good quality, how to not leave Mohawks in the lawn, you know, all that. All that basic kind of stuff. But check out my YouTube Shorts, that like 2 years back. I've got a lot of stuff in there. You can cherry-pick the good ones and then put them in some kind of training document or email template in your phone or, or note section where it's like, hey, these are the 5 links that I want you to watch before I put you behind a mower, right? And that's part of the, the onboarding and the training process that we do is we do orientation We do video training and then we do hands-on. Like, there's no other lawn company around that is doing this diligent of training, and that's why we're so confident in our product and our service, uh, over the phones to sell to customers and stuff. But yeah, definitely check that out. Hopefully that made sense. You're welcome, brother. All right, uh, what leadership habits separate stable, scalable companies from chaotic ones? Okay, it's a good question. I like leadership. Leadership is good. What leadership habits? So years ago, when I first started as my— as an entrepreneurial career, I joined a mentorship group that was really built around mentorship. And coaching. And what it was, it was through Amway. It was an Amway type of thing, but it wasn't so much about selling the products, it was about developing yourself and growing as a leader. And the most invaluable skill set that I learned going through that, and I did it for like, I think a year, was every single day we had habits daily habits that we would go through and we would submit our— like, okay, let me shift this back because I'm jumping too quick. Every single day we would have to read a book for like maybe 1 or 2 pages, or maybe 5 to 10 minutes of reading. Like, like that was a daily habit we had to incorporate in our growth. Like, that, that's the whole mentorship thing is like, hey, we want to grow, we want to get better, we want to be around sharp people. We always— we, we want to always get better, right? Personal growth. That, that's like the whole trajectory of like the whole group that I was in. And so every single day we had to read and at least get a nugget to where you like learn something, or you had to read for like 5 to 10 minutes or read 1 or 2 pages, right? Like just read until you get 1 nugget. And it could be like in your first sentence, like you read a sentence in a book and you're like, oh, I learned something new. That's your nugget. You're done. That's all you got to do. Okay, second thing is listening to an audiobook or an Audible of, again, same thing, of learning, of growing, of expanding your mindset. And so again, you didn't have to put a time frame on it, but you had to learn one thing. You had to learn one new thing through an audiobook, Audible thing, or, and, and reading. And then what you would do is whatever you learned, you would submit it to your coach so that way, you know, they knew that you were growing and stuff like that. And so, um, I would say that leadership habit right there is what I think separates stable and scalable companies from chaotic ones, is because you will never outgrow the level of your leadership. Oftentimes people graduate college and they never open a book ever again. Us as leaders in the industry and growers and doers and builders are constantly learning, are constantly educating ourselves, are constantly trying to learn something new every single day. And when you do that, all of a sudden, every single day you get a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. And then like years go by and everybody's like, wow, look at how far that dude went, and they're an overnight success. But it's like They just instilled these habits of growing themselves every single day and falling in love with the process of becoming the best human being, of the best Tristan Lopez that you absolutely can, right? So that, that's what I see. The chaotic ones are the ones that don't do that. They don't adapt, they don't grow, they don't learn, they don't take risk. A lot of that also comes with that as well. Good question, man. I like that kind of stuff. All right, we got another one here. What safety features to look for in a mower? I'm not big on equipment. I think you can make money in with anything, any, any kind of mower. Um, so I don't get too much into the details on like the type of brand of mower. But safety features, I don't know if this falls under the safety feature, but so our Toro 21-inch push mowers, the deck does not have a chute that shoots grass out that goes and flies into beds and stuff. So we can mow really closely to flower beds and it doesn't shoot the grass clippings like in the beds. Um, I would probably look into that maybe if you're looking at mowers or like maybe getting some kind of feature addition to where you can like control where the grass clippings are being shot. Um, to keep that in mind. Um, what safety features? Yeah, I, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not big on, on like— I mean, obviously I'm big on safety, but like I'm not the best person to probably ask this because I don't research a ton of mowers. I just pick one that works well and focus on sales and hiring, which is really the two things that will actually grow a business. All right, next question. Pronounces like Kyle. Okay, Kyle. Wow, that's interesting. Kyle, welcome to the show, brother. All right, I thought people didn't like when they want to text you just to check the pricing and you want to call and close it on the phone. Um, yeah, like I said, it just depends on the volume. Like, if we're— it depends on this, on the scenario. So like, if again we're jam-packed, slam-packed in the office, like, um, our office manager, one of our office managers last week spent 12 and a half hours on the phone, and he does not always have the ability to pick the phone up and call the next lead that comes in. And so depending on the volume, uh, they may not have that luxury to get to, to pitch them over the phone and try to close them. So instead, what's faster, it's speed to lead. Whoever can get to them the fastest and solve their problem the quickest generally is the one that gains the sale. So if that means that you have to send them a text and email quote, sometimes that's what is required. Um, proof of that is if you go to our website, you can see we have instant pricing on our website. So there are, there are, many, many customers that sign up that we don't ever talk to on the phone. They go to our website, they see a price, they sign up. And we have probably many that bounce too, right? But yes, Kyle, in a perfect world, if you have the time, yes, pick the phone up and call them all day. But the last couple weeks, when you're in the heat of spring rush, maybe you don't, you don't have that luxury to call. So I do agree with you though. Call them first. If you don't have that luxury, then, then text them. Okay, Tristan Lopez says, I have 60 hours for one crew. Okay, and since they're new, they are around 56% efficiency. When should they be expected to meet the budget hours? I work at a fire department, so I can't be there every day. Um, so what we like to do, Tristan, is we like to do scorecards with our new team members every single day for their first, first week. Um, obviously if you're a fire— uh, thank you for your service, by the way— uh, if you're a firefighter, sometimes you don't always have that luxury. But even if you can just, hey, text me how many budget hours, uh, or, or I mean, you could pull the report on your, on your own time and just send them the update. Or if you're using P4P, you can send it to them as well. But we always like to sit down with the crews for their first week. It's, it's the most imperative time because this is when they're most moldable and they're most, uh, like you can really coach them well, and the most receptive. When they— after they've worked a few weeks, they've gotten kind of in a routine, sometimes it's harder to change behavior. And so, um, but generally 50-60%. There's so many variables on this, right? Like, uh, drive time radius, um are the budget hours actually 100% accurate, or are they built off of the owner who's like super, super efficient, been doing this for years, right? Like, and so you want the average of what that— what the crews do, not, not necessarily what the owner is, right? Because nobody's going to work as hard as the owner. So it's like the budget hours need to make sure that they're dialed in. So the 50-60% is, is a baseline, but, um, I think there's more to the story. I would probably need more context on that. But 60 budget hours, ideally that's 30 per person. They should be able to do that in 5 days. So, um, I would say within maybe a week, week and a half, they should be at— our crews are above 70% after a week and a half to 2 weeks. Like, after 2 weeks, we got to be above 70%. If we're not above 70%, this is not rocket science, we're not building rockets here, we're mowing lawns, and we need to pick the pace up and we need to be quicker and efficient. Is what we, is what we tell our guys. My beautiful, gorgeous, amazing, loving, supportive number one fan wife loves me, and I love you too, Larissa. So thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge. Thank you for joining the journey of building Military Lawn Cuts and really impacting people and being the biggest supporter. Seriously, I I'm so blessed, I'm so grateful, and, uh, you are amazing. So thanks for tuning in. All right, Dominic, good morning. Will, how many leads are you getting through LSA where people just want a quote without giving contact, the address info? I don't give out unless I get basic info. Um, How many leads? So we don't really, I haven't pulled the number on leads. I don't really care too much about the leads per se. What I care more about is how much we're spending and how many customers we're signing up. That's customer acquisition cost, right? We just talked about this earlier on. So I'm not too, too, I don't care too much about like the lead number. So I don't exactly know. I mean, I could pull the report right now, but I don't, I don't really take the time much to do that because it's, to me, not that important. But the question is, so it sounds like you have customer or contacts that are wanting a price, but they don't want to give you contact and address information. I would do— I mean, this is it for us. The way that we handle this is like, look, in order to get you a price, I need to follow the process and this is how our system is built out. And so I need your name, I need your address, I need to map the property. I need your email to send the estimate to. Like, I'm not able to just give you a price, so either provide me with the, with the information I need, or I just can't give you a price. The other thing, Dominic, is I think it might be, um, if you're the one answering the phone, it might be your, uh, your presentation. It might be the process, right? So I just recently trained a new sales office person in our office. And the— this is the reality of it. If you're like us and you've been in the game for a while, you have done 1,000 of these calls, okay? And maybe not 1,000, you've done 100 of these calls, whatever. Like, you have— you've done volume, right? So you, Dominic, should know exactly how these calls should go. So when the customer calls, hey, I need a price for mowing, Like, you need to be able to take the, take the bull from the horns and steer this conversation on exactly how it's supposed to go and not get off track, right? So, all right, hey, thanks for calling us, Dominic. I really appreciate that. Um, I could definitely, uh, get your pricing. In fact, that's what's— that's, that's our specialty. That's what we do. We do a lot of it, right? Selling them over the phone. I'm reassuring them of them calling you, of like, hey, 'You called the right company. We specialize in mowing. We got over 500 customers that are on our recurring program. Now, as far as pricing goes, I can get you a price. I just need a little bit of information from you first, and then I can go ahead and get you pricing. Is that okay?' Right? And asking permission at the beginning to get information from them— they're not going to be like, 'Well, no, I just want the price.' It's like, like, you're the one that's steering the conversation and say, 'Hey, This is what we specialize in. You called the right company. I can definitely get you a price, but first I need some information from you to get, to get that to you. Is that, is that okay? And then you're asking permission from the customer to give you information, and then you say, cool, all right. They say yeah, right, because they're going to want a price. Cool, all right. What's your first name? What's your last name? What's your email? Which phone number? How'd you hear about us? Right, and then you jump into it. Cool. What's your service address? I need to map out your You know, they might be like, well, why do you need my service address? Well, because we got to map out your turf square footage, brother, on the satellite. So I need that in order to get you some pricing, right? You may have a little bit of kickback on that, but I think if you, if you tee it up the right way, you should be good. All right, Tristan Lopez, at what point does being obsessed with my business shift into being compulsive, and how do you actually separate the two in real life so you're not stressing or spending too much time on it? I'm probably not a good, good person to ask on this because I'm all in or I'm all out. There's no, there's no moderation. There's no, there's no, there's no moderation for me. So I'm either like all in. I mean, look at me right now, it's Saturday. I just worked, I worked a 12-hour shift yesterday and I'm doing a live call about lawn care on a Saturday. Like I'm all in, right? And so I think most people look at that as a bad thing. I disagree. I think that you have drive, I think you have passion, and I think that God is doing something that's bigger than yourself, and he's giving you the energy and he's giving you that drive to push forward when everybody else would not, would not want to take, take that on or work as hard, right? Like, I think so. I wouldn't look at that as a bad thing, um, Now, if you have a wife and a family and you have other family obligations, I do think that that is important to not let the business overrule that. Because at the end of the day, if you build a $10 million business but you don't have your family with you, it's— that to me isn't successful. Like, that's not success, right? And so a true being successful to me and having real wealth is hitting all 5 categories of life, which is like financially independent and free, like where you don't have to necessarily work a job or like you have the ability to kind of come and go on your time and your decision. Spiritually, having faith and relationship with God. Exercising your body and stretching your body every single day. I work out 6 times, uh, a week, and I don't like go in the gym for 2 hours. Like, I just work out for 20-30 minutes, exercise, stretch the body a little bit. Um, exercising the mind, audiobooks, reading. Like, get— we just talked about this earlier, like getting more knowledge. Like, like, you know, um, yeah, I forget the fifth one, but So to me, that is true success and true wealth is when you, when you focus on those things. So, um, yeah, I don't know if that really helped, but hopefully, hopefully it did. All right. Kyle said, how do you go, how do you do front? How do you do pricing to schedule directly on the website? Do you use a specific tool for that? Uh, yeah, we, uh, we use a, we use a software called Jotform. And then what we do is we build it on the backend, uh, for conditional logic. So based on how they, uh, so, so we, we built it on Jotform and then we took the Jotform and plugged that submission form into our website, which we use Wix. And then, um, there's actually two forms. There's an initial form and then once they fill that form out, it goes to a backend Jotform tool. So it actually takes them away from the website and then it's all built on conditional logic depending on if they click small, medium, or large property. Then it'll show the pricing, and then at the bottom they can basically accept an instant price. But, um, yeah, it took a while to build. All right, can you do graffiti on abandoned buildings? No, that is illegal. Are you planning to open more locations? Yes, right now we are at 3. What we're doing is we're going to probably take a tactical pause for the next 12 to 24 months and build the systems properly. We don't want to scale too, too quickly. We want to get our 3 locations up to, to where we have a really good foundation. And then, and then ideally the goal would be to open probably 2 or 3 more after that. All right, Nathan, what forms of payment do you accept? I'm going to start to crank these out here, guys, because we're getting close to the end. What forms of payments do you accept? Because I have a client that is worried to put the card on file and just wants to do e-transfer. So we tell customers that it is required as far as billing goes to add a card on file. And, um, yeah, so card on file. If they're complaining about the fees, then we can do an ACH, but those are the only two options. I'm not chasing money. I've done it before. I don't want cash, I don't want check. If they don't want to pay that, we're not the right fit for them. Do you accept PayPal? No, I don't accept PayPal. Started Facebook ads, notice in my area a lot of people bypassing my instant quote form, sending direct email or call and say they found us on Facebook. Maybe they aren't used to instant pricing. Ever had this issue? Okay, let me think about this. Notice in my area a lot of people are bypassing my Instant quote form, sending direct email. Okay. So Steven, what you're going to want to do if they're sending you a direct email or call and say they found us on Facebook, okay. If they're sending you like messages on Facebook, you can set up an auto response that says, um, fastest way to get a quote is go on our website, get instant price. Here's the link. And then it's just, it's an auto message. So that way when they email or message you, it just auto messages them. You don't even have to respond. You just give 'em an auto response driving them to your website to fill out an instant price. And then if they call, you could, yeah, as far as that goes, I mean, sometimes they just prefer calling instead of filling out a Facebook form. So yeah, you just may have to answer those ones or have some kind of AI thing that again, if like for us, if we miss If let's say all of our office people are on the phone and a call comes in and we can't answer it, it'll send them to our AI thing and then it'll say, are you a new or used or existing user? And then if they say new, 'cause Spring Rush, there's a lot of new customers, so most people are gonna say new. It says, great, the fastest way to get a quote is to go to our website and get an instant price. Can I send you the text now? And then they'll say yes. And then, then they, it literally texts them a, a link to the website and then they can just fill out the instant price there. So just building systems around that to again just drive people where you want them to go is the goal. I appreciate the answer. You're welcome, my friend. Thanks for the question. Thank you for everything. You're welcome. Thanks for everything, mate. You're welcome. Uh, man, a lot of thanks. Yeah, thank you guys for tuning in here. This is going to be, I think, potentially the last one here. My father lost his hand because of a lawnmower. There were no safety features, so the blade just cut. Open his arm. Oh wow, dude, I'm extremely sorry to hear that. Um, wow. Yeah, I'm extremely sorry. Um, yeah, that's not good, man. Yeah, I would definitely do training around safety. So like, as you grow your department, your business, like Monday team meetings, maybe once a month, like do some— like, because this is a big thing that would— that impacts his life, right? Like, and we would not— you don't want to have that happen again to somebody, right? Or you. So I would definitely incorporate some training around that and safety of like, guys, when we're operating the mowers, like, even like sometimes I get a little nervous when the team puts feet next to the deck of like the blade when the mower is going. I'm like, guys, move your toes back, you know. Um, so definitely doing some training around that I think will, will maybe hopefully help avoid that. But I'm really sorry to hear that. All right, this is gonna be the last question. What's your thoughts on hiring a company or VA to do the sales onboarding on the phone for a $200,000 business? Is it too early? If so, at what year revenue would you recommend? I do think at $200,000, hiring somebody to do sales and onboarding is a bit early. I think you as the owner are the one that sells the most. And so as hard as it may be for you to answer the phone The easiest thing that you should do is outsource your mowing. Like, like, this is how I think about it. Mowing is the most basic service. That's the first thing that needs to get off your plate. It's the most bottom of the barrel, lowest value. I mean, outside of like maintenance or sharpening the blades, that doesn't make any money. Mowing is like the lowest lever in your business that you need to get rid of the fastest. This. So you need to hire somebody else that can run the mow route. Like, you just need someone else to run the mow route for you, or that can do most of the lawns where you only step in a couple days a week or something and help out. And so your time at $200,000 should be spent when you are mowing, training someone else to mow, so that way that they can focus on mowing and you can focus on answering the call and selling because you're going to be the best at it. To hire a VA, uh, we actually looked into that this year. We did many interviews. In fact, we hired a VA. You're gonna do better, I promise. Um, there's a lot that goes into that, so I would say you be the one to do the sales. But, um, yeah. All right guys, that's it. That's a wrap. No more questions. Thank you guys so much for watching. Make sure you guys are subscribed to the channel. Like the video. Thank you so much. Hope you guys all crush it in the spring rush. Thanks for tuning in on your Saturday and have a great, amazing rest of your day.