[LIVE Q&A] - Spring Rush Get More Leads w/Will Kelly

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, depending on when you are watching this right now. We are live down here from the great state of Texas. My name is Will Kelly. We're doing a live Q&A mastermind to answer all of your guys's questions. This is the second week in a row. This is a huge blessing. My time is very valuable and I don't get uh, enough of it to really give back to the community. And so, um, I'm so blessed to be able to take the back-to-back weekends to do a live Q&A for you guys, going through the spring rush right now, answering your questions. We're talking about how to get more leads, how to grow your lawn business, your department, your general manager, um, role, whatever it is. I'm here to help and serve you guys. So Make sure you guys are putting your questions in the comments. We already got some coming in. So Fernandec says, hey everyone, welcome my friend, welcome to the live Q&A show. We are glad to have you here. And, uh, obviously, of course, my comments that it's time. We got 1 hour, okay, 1 solid hour, 60 minutes to answer all your guys's questions. And, uh, we've already got them starting to come through here. So I do have a little bit of a couple teaching points, mindset stuff that we're going to kind of talk about that I've been learning. And, um, as we kind of go back and forth between questions and kind of some bringing you, bringing you guys some just good value, you know what I'm saying? So without further ado, let's jump into it. We got Vernandack1 says, we go all in on door hangers this year. I love it. So are we. Statistically, we get 1 lead per 480 door hangers. Right now it's 1 lead per 750, but it'll probably go down in the next months, I suppose. So that's great that you know the data. It's good that you're tracking this. Uh, you definitely should be tracking this. Um, depending on your services, Vernandek, I would recommend to— it's, it's good to kind of track like leads, but honestly, um, what's more important is signups. So, you know, you can do a marketing tactic or strategy, whether that be door hangers, Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever, right? You're going to spend money on paid advertising to acquire a customer. I would, instead of looking at the number of leads you're getting, I would look at the number of signed up customers at the end of the day? Like, how many are putting a card on file, paying you money for services? That would be an acquired customer, because that's going to give you far more better data analytically to be able to figure out how many are actually converting. Because you can get a lot of leads from these resources, but if they're not converting and they're not paying you money, uh, getting leads really doesn't matter. Um, honestly. So I would, instead of tracking so much the leads, I would definitely track the customer, uh, signup. But depending on where you are, that's probably good. Sounds like you know your market, so it should come down as you kind of keep, keep doing those. All right, so he also said, in worst case, what should we do if door hanger ratio goes from 480 to over 750? Annual profit per customer is 2 80 bucks and 5 hours times 100 door hangers per hour times 23 bucks an hour, it's $115. Okay, it's a great question. So, um, honestly, Vernandek, it really depends on how much— hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly— it really depends on how much money you have in the bank for marketing. Okay, so for example, um, at our newer locations, we spend more money to acquire a customer Uh, generally in the $300 to $350 range is what we pay to acquire a customer. Now, for most people, that's pretty high, okay? It's pretty high. And for me, it's a bit high too. However, when we're breaking into a new market or we're growing our location, people don't know about us yet, so it's going to take more money to get our name out there, our word out there, and for people to know about you and your services. So it's not uncommon to have a higher close ratio or a customer acquisition cost in the beginning. And as long as you have the funds to fund that growth, um, yeah, I, I— a lot of people get hung up on the numbers. I think if you're— as long as you're signing up customers left and right, it's going to expand and grow because they're going to see your trucks more in the neighborhood. You're going to get more customers. Their neighbors are going to see you. Do 5-round door hangers as you start to sign more up. And so, um, but I do think it's important to understand your numbers, and it sounds like you, you definitely are. So that's what I would look at is customer acquisition cost, not the number necessarily of the leads you're getting. All right, per lead time, 65% close ratio. Okay, dude, 65% is a phenomenal close ratio. Uh, CAC should be $177. All right, so if your CAC's $177 and you make $280 annual profit. Dude, do it. Do that all day. You should 5-10x that, just like the book behind me. Find out how to put more, more door hanger people out. I would hire a part-time team of full-time door hangers to do it, like maybe a seasonal temporary job, uh, for the next 4 to 6 weeks. Just go all in on those door hangers. Sounds like they're working. All right, we already got that one. Okay, do you recommend doing monthly statistics via Excel for every region, and what's the door hangers to lead ratio for every region? Um, region. Okay, I think you're referring to our locations, and I guess let me just share my screen with you here. So, um, we do track it. Based on each location. So we have Aubrey here, um, door hangers. So we're paying $3.73 to acquire a customer. But also notice we've signed up 17 recurring customers. Now also, again, if you guys haven't tuned into last week's live Q&A, this, this does not include one-time property cleanups. So this customer acquisition cost of $3.73 for us is actually lower Okay, it's probably more like maybe $280, $275, $280 is, is my shoot from the hip guess, uh, but I always like to run the numbers very conservatively. But if you look at all of our marketing strategies, the door hanger is the one that's producing the best. So even though it's a little bit of a higher customer acquisition cost, I know it's working and I can pour more fuel on the fire to get that going. But then, like, for example We also have Little Elm down here where again we're tracking the door hangers as well. Now they're paying a little bit higher premium for these door hangers, um, which I don't love, but again they work. So 7— you know, we've spent $10,000 and that, that includes labor, door hanger material, and bonuses for signups. So we've signed up 17 customers. I know it works. And in a growing location, really the only thing that matters is to get to really $40K a month so we can actually start to make money. And I'm willing to burn money at the beginning to get it up. So it really depends on how much money you have in the bank, if you can afford— if you can afford to burn some of that. I say burn in a nice way, where you're just getting your name out there, you're getting in front of the customers, you're getting the door hangers out so that way you can get some customers in the door. Once you get the customers in the door, then they can tell your neighbors, then your trucks are more in their neighborhoods. Um, you get, you get momentum, you get traction, and more people can see and hear about you. Walter says, hey Will, what's up dude? 2 weeks in a row tuning in. Appreciate you spending your Saturday morning with me. Um, and hopefully I can bring some great value to you guys. All right, Danny, I'm not going to try to pronounce the rest of that because I'll butcher it, uh, says, hello Will, right now I'm 2 weeks in and I've handed out 1,000 door hangers. I'm up to 7 recurring clients now, but they're all from Nextdoor and Facebook. Do you think I should run ads on Facebook and Instagram? Okay, a couple things here, Danny. So 1,000 door hangers is not a— is like, like, we need to, we need to probably 5x that at a minimum to get data, right? You can do 1,000 door hangers and sometimes not get a single customer. Sometimes it happens. And then you do another batch of 2 or 3— sorry. Then you do another batch of 2 or 3,000 in a different neighborhood, and all of a sudden you sign up 4 or 5 customers. So I think we need to increase the volume of door hangers we're doing. That's number one, to get a better test batch. Um, however you're getting those 7 recurring customers, dude, my guess, since you're not running Facebook ads already, is you're probably just posting in free Facebook neighborhood pages. Just keep doing that like every week. Once a week in 5 to 10 Facebook groups. It's free. Take a picture of yourself in front of the truck, in front of your mower, introduce yourself, give a 2-sentence spiel on why they should sign up with you, and reach out if they need any lawn services, right? So whatever you did to get those 7, just try to double and triple down on that. You could try running Facebook ads. Why not do all three? Like, why limit yourself to only one or two of these options? So I would try to do 5,000 door hangers. I would double whatever you're doing on the— to get the 7 recurring, which my guess is Facebook neighborhood group pages. You're just posting in there. And then the last one is running Facebook ads. Yeah, dude, put 3 to 5 ads up. Change the titles, change the, um, the subjects on them, and see, see how they work. Put it, put it up 10 to 20 bucks a day and let them run. See, see what kind of return you get. All right, Walter says, I have 2 teens after school that pass out 80 to 100 door hangers per hour on scooters right now. Not too many calls, but hopefully we'll pick up. Okay, one thing that I'm going to teach you guys real quick that we kind of have dropped the ball on. Because just so you guys know, we're doing 100,000 door hangers this year, and, um, we're learning a lot. Okay, so we hired a full team of 8 people to go and do door hangers. Okay, I'm gonna give you guys this secret sauce right now. All right, anybody that is hiring people to do door hangers, you need to track them very diligently. All right, now if you guys are like me and my GMs, we don't always have the time to go back and babysit every single team member and double-check their work. Okay, so there's a, there's a nice awesome app called MapMyWalk, okay, um, that you should have every single, uh, one of your team members download. I'll show you the logo, what it looks like right now. So this is what it looks like. It's MapMyWalk, uh, it's a free app, and it basically— it's more of like a workout app but what it does is it actually tracks down to the exact route that your people are walking. And so you can actually see when they go up to the house. So like, let's say if like this is the street, you can see them when they go up to the house. So that way, you know, for example, they can't just get in the car and just drive the route and say, yeah, I put out the door hangers, right? Not— you know, most people are honest, right? Some people aren't. And when you're, when you're hiring a lot of people to help you build your business, you don't have time to babysit or double-check every single person. So MapMyWalk, it's a free app. Definitely have them download it and use it. And then the process in the system that you would do is at the end of every single day, they need to screenshot the route that they walked on the app. It will track it, and then they need to send a screenshot over before 5 PM and put the— and tell you the number of door hangers they put out. That is how you accurately track to make sure your people are going out and putting these door hangers out, because we're spending a lot of money and we're realizing that not all these door hangers are going out. The numbers aren't adding up. Okay, data does not lie. And so that's one of the hard lessons we learned this spring, especially with all the volume we're doing. But, um, Yeah, definitely will help you guys if you guys are paying people. So I'm sorry, I don't even think I answered the question here. Um, yeah, so that, that'll help, Walter, once you have them actually accurately track. Not to say that they're lying, not to say that they're not doing their— what you're telling them to do. It just holds everybody accountable. And also the way that we pitch it and sell it to our team is like, this is how you get your bonuses, because like when the customer signs up and you get your sign-on bonus from the door hanger. Like, this is how we're going to track how you're getting your bonuses. That way they don't think like you're just going to micromanage them all day. All right, sorry, I meant for every suburb. Should we track the best ROI suburb here in Cologne, Germany? We got several smaller settlements around the main city, not driving more than 20 minutes. If you're not driving more than 20 minutes, that's, that's honestly like one service area, my friend. So I would just wrap that all into one, uh, customer acquisition, uh, review. So again, similar to, to what this would look like, uh, we'll use our Aubrey location for example. So you would just break it down the different marketing tactics here and then, um, you know, how many recurring customers signed up, how much money did you spend on that campaign, and then you break it down into a customer acquisition cost. And then at the end of the day, you just take the total recurring customer signups, which we have had 54 at Aubrey, and then you would take this total marketing spend divided by this, and that gives you your customer acquisition costs. With that small of an area, I don't believe that you need to track it down into regions or suburbs. Ryan Poe, my man, why aren't we using local service ads in Aubrey? Uh, so we are, we are, let me show you here. So local service ads, we've gotten 8 signups. Um, so the customer acquisition cost on this is $51.58. We've spent $412 and we've signed up 8 people off of local service ads. Very, very good marketing avenue, paid marketing avenue. Like, if I could, if I could triple this somehow, I would. But unfortunately it really is based on demand, on customers going to Google and searching. So I can only just increase the budget, and I can promise you the budget is very, very high. I set it at $1,000 a week and we're not even spending that much. All right, what else we got? Sam, my man, looking great, brother. Love what you're doing for the community. Dude, I love what you're doing for the community. Anybody that needs help growing and scaling a business, Sam is the man, by the way. He's the wizard on systems. He's a wizard on, uh, really the whole back end and building out a business that runs without you. And he's now a coach. So literally probably one of the best coaches in the industry is Sam. Is the man. Sam is the man. So thanks for tuning in, my friend. I think we got a hotkey for mute for all this coughing. Yeah, that's funny. You're funny, Ryan. Or I should say Paul. I know you by Paul, my friend. All right, Tris Tram 0073. The hardest thing for me honestly right now is waking up early. I know it's a different question, but how do you train yourself to wake up early? So I actually struggled with this, uh, way back in the day when I was doing other entrepreneurial ventures. Um, I think there's two things that really come to mind of what gets me out of the bed in the morning. Um, the first thing is going to be like the drive and the core passion of like what I'm doing. So I believe that I am put here on a planet for a reason, and that God has a purpose for my life. And so I believe he's using me through our company to impact and help people in the community, create more jobs for people, and really just serve people, right, in, in the, in the highest manner. And so, um, that's number one. That's what gets me out of bed. In fact, I always tell my team, I say, look, like, I— we're at a place in the business and with the income that I receive that I could honestly plug somebody in and do my job and like put a manager in that spot and go sit on a beach for 6 months. Like, seriously, I, I could do that and I would be financially independent. I'd be financially at peace. And so I don't say that to brag, and I don't say that to boast or, you know, to put me on this high pedestal and say, look at me. I, I I say that because I, I come in every morning, I show up because I want to be here. I want to grow, I want to do better, I want to get better each day. I want to build and, and lift people up with me and help them create financial peace for their families and to become a better version of themselves. And so that's what drives me to get me out of bed. That's number one. And then the second thing I would say is I— it Tris, Tris Tram, if you don't have people that report to you yet and you're the only one doing this, um, I think the minute you get a team member that reports to you, there's just this psychological shift in your brain that like happens where it's like there's people counting on you and they're looking up to you and you are the lid to the organization. So you need to be, as a leader, the first one in and the last one out. And so the second you start to have employees that report to you or that are inside of your business, even if it's just one or a part-time person, like, you have to level up. You have to be that leader that shows up early, that stays late, that serves their team to the highest level. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to retain people long term. Nobody's going to want to follow you. Nobody's going to want to buy into your vision or your goals or whatever you're trying to do. And so that's just the core principle. And I think once I got my first employee, I was like, oh snap, okay, I gotta level up, I gotta, I gotta do better because I have somebody who's counting on me to help feed their family, right? So that, that's what kind of gets me going or gets me up. Or before that though, dude, I'm with you. I freaking struggled when I didn't find my purpose or have team members that reported to me. I, I'm— I was in the same boat, man. I was asking the same thing, the same question to my mentor years ago, dude, how do you get out of bed? And he's like, dude, just get out of bed and just embrace the suck and get to it. And I'm like, yeah, it's not that easy, brother. All right, Walter says we are using the app and having them screenshot the areas they do. Perfect, man. Yeah, that'll hold people truly accountable. Um, the only thing that I would say, Walter, I don't know— okay, I have two teens that pass out $80 to $100 per hour on scooters right now, not too many calls. Yeah, so we have a minimum of 500 a day for our team that are doing it, uh, full-time. So they need to do 500 a day, that's 2,500 a week. So I don't know what kind of volume expectations that you set with them, but definitely put like a minimum, like we need to have a minimum of this many going out each day, um, otherwise they'll not maybe do as many as you want them to. Okay, uh, where are we at here? Sorry, losing track. All right, what's your take on that? Many of our competitors say they do 24/7 phone answering and they really don't. We were the first. It is crazy how many copy us, but the mailbox goes on every time we call. Um, I'm sorry, I'm a little confused. What's your take on that? Many of our competitors say they do 24/7 phone answering and they really don't. All right, that's not good because they're being dishonest and they're lying. So probably not good business principles. We were the first, so it sounds like, okay, you do answer the phone 24/7. It's crazy how many copy us, but the mailbox goes on every time we call. So maybe do you have like some kind of AI thing set up where you can't answer the phone 24/7, but it's more of like, um, like a mailbox intake thing? Um, yeah, I, I don't, I don't quite know what that question is for that, man. I apologize. Okay, Walter, have you done Valpak? They said they can get us in gated communities. I am not familiar with Valpak. I do not know what that is. I don't know if that's an app or what. But that's good, good stuff. All right, we're caught up on questions. So anybody that is watching, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the comments below. What I want to share with you guys that I'm learning— so I'm listening to a book right now, it's called Good to Great by Jim Collins. Let me take this comment down real quick. Okay, so I'm listening to this book, it's called Good to Great by Jim Collins. If you guys haven't heard, read, or listened to it, highly recommend. I'm only on like probably chapter 2, but, um, I wanted to share this insight with you because I'm sharing the same messages to my leaders inside the organization. And so I've had the privilege of kind of graduating these different stages of business, right? I'm super blessed. I've had great mentors in my life. I've had the urge and desire to grow myself so that way I can develop myself as a leader grow through the ranks, right? And so in the beginning, I was the one out there like literally mowing every lawn. I knew every customer mostly by name. I knew every property. And then eventually I started to do landscape jobs, and then from there I started to— I got licensed into weed control, so I moved up there. And eventually we started to hire a couple part-time people, and all of a sudden we got to the point where instead of only having like 50 or 100 customers that I literally knew every property, all of a sudden we're at like 250 and 300, where I'm like, sometimes I drive down the road and I'm like, oh, I didn't even know we had that guy as a customer, right? Like, because the organization has grown so much with me developing as a leader and being blessed and, you know, the right people coming to us. And so, um, I guess what I'm trying to say is, is like, as I've grown I've had to shift my mindset at every stage in business. So when I was out there doing the work every day, then all of a sudden I became a manager, right? Because now I have 3 or 4 people underneath me that report to me. All of a sudden my mindset has to shift from like working extremely hard for 10 to 12 hours a day to, okay, now I need to be the first one in, be the, be the last one out, and like actually develop my leadership skills, my communication skills, how to have difficult conversations when somebody's late or tardy or is not holding the quality of standard that I need them to be, right? So at each stage in business, you constantly have to, um, delegate. You have to shape or shift the mindset. And so in this book, Good to Great, right, They, they basically did a study of thousands and thousands of companies, and what Jim Collins did is he brought a full team in and dissected these companies that were— that went from good, like the average, to like exceptional quality, like beyond great. So what they did is they studied why do these companies never make it to become great. Right? And so one of the most interesting, biggest nuggets that I pulled out of the first, like, chapter was it wasn't so much what the— what these great companies were doing that separated them from just being average or just good. What was more impactful is what they stopped doing is what they cut out, is what they looked at, what was on their plate, the tasks, the actions. And they said, to get to become great, we have to stop doing these things. That was more impactful from separating these good companies to becoming great. That was one of the biggest things. And when I look at my managers that are growing through the ranks and I look at team members or entrepreneurs of lawn business professionals that are growing, you, you get your first couple jobs and maybe, you know, you're, you're trimming the trees yourself, but now you get an employee or two, right? And all of a sudden, what you were doing 4 weeks ago, 8 weeks ago, there are things in your day that you have to stop doing in order to get to the next level. And even me, like right now, what— there are things that I do on a day-to-day basis that is not going to get us to the next level, that I have to stop doing. And at every level in business, you have to shed the waste. You have to shed those lower leverage activities that don't produce that much return. One of the biggest other things one of my mentors mentioned to me is like, it's okay— like, there's a thousand fires that go on in an entrepreneurial day, or if you're a general manager at our location, trust me, there's a thousand fires going on at once. You're juggling a lot of things, right? Let the small fires burn. Who cares? Don't get your time sucked up into something that is not going to produce a great amount of return for your time. Let it burn. Who cares? It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to get done, or someone else can do it. You need to be focused on the top 1 or 2 most impactful, highest leverage tasks at every stage in the business, and you have to really take a step back from your day-to-day to clear your head, get your mindset right, and have clear thinking to figure out like what is that one or two most important things that— if you have 50 things on your list, ask yourself this. You have 50 tasks on your list on Monday. If you could only get one of those things done and the other 49 tasks do not get done, and you only get one thing done on that list of 50, what is the most important task? That's what you need to be focused on on Monday morning at 8 AM. That task. Everything else can wait. Everything else gets pushed to the side. Everything else is secondary. Let the small fires burn and focus on the highest leverage task. And, and oftentimes, I'm telling you, I've done this multiple times at multiple stages of business. I have to do this when I'm out in the field doing production. I have to do this when I become a manager. I have to do this when I become an architect. And I have to do this as I become a CEO, right? Every— the, the approach is all the same in business. The levels just change. The levels get harder, they get difficult, they get more difficult, just like you're playing a video game. Right? Back in the day, I used to play Zombies Call of Duty, right? The first 5 levels are easy. You do the same thing. You get the right guns, you get in the same corner, like camping corner, you take them out. Eventually you can't keep doing that exact thing, so you got to focus a bigger, a better way and get better upgrades. But you're basically doing the same thing. You, you have to find a rhythm and you have to focus on the most important thing so that way you can graduate that stage and get to the next level. In business. Hopefully that helped. Hopefully that helped. I don't know if that helped, but all right, now I lost where I'm at here. Okay, so we got some questions. Um, I think we left off on this one. Yeah, we were talking about Valpak. All right, let's go, let's get in on the questions. All right, if you guys have questions, put them in the comments below. We got about 27 more minutes and we're gonna try to get through all these questions. Now is your time. Okay, sorry for the weird question. We got an answering service and we answer every call. Next week we will try an AI agent to see how it'll perform and what customers think of it. Oh, okay, that makes sense. So yeah, that's good, dude. Um, I've done both. We've, we've had real people answer the phone. They're— I just call them a glorified, uh, voice receptionist, voicemail receptionist, because really all they're doing is taking the name, the phone number, email address, and what services, and then we're following up with them. But what I would tell you is more people are going to hang up the second they realize it's an AI agent. So if you get— can get one that sounds really similar to a human, that's probably going to be a little bit better. I know some people get weird about that where they're like, well, you got to tell the customer that this is an AI agent. Okay, you could do that too, but Oftentimes if they realize it's an AI agent, you're going to have about 30 to 40% of people that just automatically hang up. But again, you know, it's— I think both are a lot better than not answering the phone, right, on the weekends and after hours. So you're definitely thinking about it in the right, in the right way. All right, what's your process for accounting? I have Copilot but run my P&L through QuickBooks. How is that workflow set up? Okay, it's set up exactly how you're doing it. So we run our CRM through Copilot, which is now called HomeWorks. Um, we don't do any account tracking inside of Copilot outside of jobs and getting the work done. And then on QuickBooks, we have that linked to our credit and debit cards, so it tracks every transaction that we, that we do in and out of, in and out of the bank account. And then we have an accountant that goes in every month and does the line items and let— and then sends us a P&L on where the money's going. A few months ago, I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and I struggled to physically keep up with the work. I got 5 employees to delegate work to, but most of the admin stuff is automated. Any advice? Wow, first off, I'm really sorry to hear that you got diagnosed with that. I can't imagine how that feels. I struggle to physically keep up with the work. Yeah, man, if, if that's the case, then I would definitely shift to more of the admin side of the business and because of how less physical it is. So you have 5 team members to delegate work to, but most of the admin stuff is automated. Any advice? So yes, I do have some advice. I would focus your time on selling. Oftentimes people think that admin is a defensive measure, which it definitely is. It greases the wheels on the back end to make sure that people are getting paid, customers are getting notified, etc., etc. Routes are being dispatched. But every single time you get somebody on the phone, can we put— can we give them a meaningful upsell while we have them on the phone? And all you're saying is they called you for this service on this shelf, and while you have them on the phone, just so you know, on this shelf you called today about bush trimming, but over here I've got mowing service, right? So you're starting to take your role and shift it from more of a defensive measure to more of an offensive measure. Um, I would be working with the, with the 5 crew members and saying, hey guys, are we sending personal upsells out, like, on the properties? Um, you sending monthly upsells out to all of your leads of the biggest pain point that, that month, right? So your, your, your mindset is admin, but your, your focus should be sales, okay? And if you have a lot of the admin automated, then great, you have more time to do sales. Um, maybe doing drive-bys since it's not as physical. Like, you do have to go out to the property, maybe do a quick walk, walk around. Uh, we call— we, we do drive-bys. We call them drive-bys. We don't actually meet with the customer. We just tell them, hey, we're going to swing by, quote your bushes, de-weeding, mulch, do a quick 5-minute walkthrough. Like, you could do that as well, um, since it's not as physical. But those are some things that you should be focused on. And on the admin side, how do you increase sales? That's the question. What things can you do today to drive more revenue to the business? And that might be working through your 5 crew members and being like, hey guys, you need to like text me if you notice the bushes are long. Or, you know, on Copilot we have the ability to send upsells, but All right, Walter says, we started doing weed control this year mid-FeB and have 45 customers to spray. Our goal is to do 100 this year, but I'm shifting the goal to 250. Is that too aggressive? Um, depends on the seat, it depends on where you're located. I forget, I forget where you're located, but I think you're like located near or like in our region, like southern area, Walter, if I'm not mistaken. Um, what I've found with weed control is you will get majority of the weed treatment signups like early, early spring when the grass is still kind of dormant and then you can see the weeds in our region. And then definitely like early spring rush where the grass is like starting to wake up. Once you— once we hit like May, May time frame where the grass is like now fully out of dormancy, it's growing, we don't get as many weed control signups. So really, the weed control signup window, I would say, is like right before the mowing season starts and like right at the beginning of the mowing season. That's when you want to triple down, quadruple down, run Facebook ads, door hangers, email your leads, hey, we're running a promotion for weed control if you sign up today, right? You get 50% off first weed treatment, whatever you need to do to get the maximum signups. Um, I do think $250 may be a bit aggressive, but it also depends on the, um, how much money you got to spend, um, how, what, what marketing strategies you're, you're pushing, and then where you are in the season. If you're, if your grass is already like fully growing, it may be a little bit difficult. Um, but also, dude, I would tap into your, your already recurring mowing customers. Like, if you just started to do mowing this year, I would, I would reach out to your existing mowing customers and give them a special. Hey, we're going to give you 50% off your first weed treatment if you sign up today. Um, yeah, I would do that. All right, Lucas says, hey Will, we're, we were at about $250,000 end of last year and I'm in that same position learning how to manage. I got— I have 2 GMs that are right there, so I know, I know how you're feeling. How do you figure out what you should be doing and what your people should be doing? Okay, okay, I just shot a video about this. I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you exactly which video you should go watch, and this will answer literally everything. Okay, so it's gonna be, it's gonna be, it's gonna be this one right here. This is the one. This is it right here. Make $500,000 without mowing. This is going to be the video you're going to watch if you're at $250,000. This will give you the right mindset shift of what you should and should not be working on. That video will go far more in depth, but basically what I just talked about earlier in this video— you have to stop doing some things and you need to get that stuff off of your plate in order to get to $500,000. It's just required. And you have to relinquish control and, uh, and give that up. And so this— I'm gonna give you guys a quick rundown of what it— of what entrepreneurship looks like, okay? In like a minute and a half nutshell, okay? First off, if you're like me, we all work a job and we're like, we hate this, uh, I like having freedom, I don't want to be told what to do. Then we go and start our business and literally for the first year you're in business, uh, it's amazing because you have full control of your schedule, you have full control of the customers you service, you have full control of the services you offer, and it's great. This is what you wanted, right? Entrepreneurship, freedom. You didn't want to be told what to do. Then all of a sudden you grow your business good enough because you're a good entrepreneur and you focus on the right things, and all of a sudden now you have 2 or 3 team members on your team. And then what happens at that point is you just had all control of the business but now you have to give it up to team members that are going to take those spots and roles. And so all of a sudden, it's a weird mindset shift where you had no control at a job, then you had full control as your first year in entrepreneurship, and then now you have team members that are going to start to take things off of your plate that you have to relinquish control. And so it's this weird mindset cycle shift that happens that you have to start to delegate and and open your hand and release that stuff. And most of the time that I see managers and entrepreneurs is they, is a, is a grasp onto these things because it's comfortable and that's just what they're used to and that's what they know. And they don't like change because we're human beings. And you have to open up your hand and get that stuff off of your plate to give you mental clarity and understanding that someone else is going to take care of it, and you can focus on other stuff and more important stuff over here. And that's, that's the cycle that happens for the rest, for all the rest of the levels in business. And it's, it's a constant cycle that you're going to have to continually have to have that feedback loop. So, um, yeah, go watch that video. Highly recommend it if you haven't seen it already. All right, peasy peasy one. All right, I just want to say thank you guys for spending your Saturday with me. We got about 10 to 15 people that are watching, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to serve you guys, hopefully at the highest level. All right, peasy says, I started my business in 2020. Giving out great deals on spring cleanups, and I learned people will use you to clean up years of leaves and sticks and call you after 3 years, expect the same price. Yep, exactly. So, um, that's why we don't give a ton of discounts. Um, when you start giving discounts to customers, they just expect that. So, um, you know, we, we always target the higher premium customers. And so they're, they're less price sensitive. They don't just want the cheapest price, they want quality, and they want to give their time back. They don't want to have to call multiple people to try to get the cheapest price. Valerie Philip: I found you by accident, but I see strongly applies to choice in my household that no one seems to care about. Thanks for the reminder. I found you by accident, but I see strongly applies to choice in my household that no one seems to care about. Okay, not sure what that means, but if it brought you value, my friend, that's what I'm here for. How do you deal with those customers? We don't. That's the fact. And here's how we don't. Customers call us, they say, hey, we want a one-time mow. Sorry, we don't offer that. And then they're going to say, okay, well then, uh, what's the recurring price for mowing services? And then we say, well Good question. We do offer recurring mowing services. However, with us being a military company, we are a little bit different than most lawn companies in the fact that we focus on exceptional quality service. Again, so I'm building it in their brain that we are the top-tier company, and the way that we found to do that is through both our mowing and weed control services. So much so that we don't even offer just mowing by itself. All of the 580 mowing customers we have on our routes are also on our weed control service. And so right off the rip, we're positioning ourselves as we're not the dirt cheap company, we're not cheap, we focus on quality. If that's what you want, I'd love to serve you. If not, we're not going to be the best fit. And so we just make that very clear up front, like, and then we say, hey, look, do you have weeds in the yard that need to be treated, or are you just strictly looking for the mowing services? And if they say we're just strictly looking for the mowing services, hey, no worries at all. We're just not going to be the best fit for you. We don't take on mow-only clients. So all of our clients already have our weed control service. So these are the ones that are going to very easily be upsold to mulch, bush trimming, insect control program, de-weeding of the flower beds, because they don't care about money. They care about their time and they care about quality work. So that's how we deal with those, just right off the bat. How many of the $100K door hangers have already gone out? Oh, just shy of 62,000, Parker. Just shy of 62,000. And our goal is to get them all done in the next 2 and a half weeks. April 16th is the deadline, or what we're shooting for. I'm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's right, I knew you were near us. Things are still somewhat dormant. Yeah, yeah. So dude, you're, you're still in the weed control window, man. I would push that hard. I would push that hard. You could— you should easily have 100 by the— like in the next month or two, like easily 100 more, right? If with good execution. All right, question about the accounting again. I guess my discrepancies came when my Copilot invoices are, let's say, $70, but I end up getting paid $75 through Stripe. How are those differences found on y'all's end? Okay, so when your accountant or you run, um, or pay sales tax you need to go off of, uh, what Stripe collects, not Copilot, because there are additional fees in there. Also on QuickBooks, when you look at the P&Ls, so we pay our bonuses out based on what hits the QuickBooks, because for your QuickBooks account, that doesn't— like on Copilot, you could have, let's say you made $10,000 a month. That month. Just because you made and collected $10,000 that month on Copilot, it doesn't mean that's what's in your bank account because there's sales tax in there. So you have to account for the 8.25% sales tax in our region, um, that doesn't hit the QuickBooks account, right? Or that— I mean, it does, but it's not calculated as income. It's, it's going to go to the tax man. So, um, your income statement on your QuickBooks will be less than what it is in HomeWorks. Hopefully that helped. We are doing email, text blasts with specials, door hangers, Google search ads. I need to turn on Google Sponsored Ads. Yeah, yeah. And then for sure the door hangers, I would, I would turn that, turn that up more, whatever you're doing. Um, but yeah, dude, as long as you're tracking it like depth, like every single week, every single week Yeah, you guys can see my screen. Every single week you should be doing this, every week, to see what is working. So when you sit here and you look at this column, you say, okay, a lot are coming from Google, a lot are coming from Google Ads or local service ads, a lot are coming from door hangers. Like, this is our biggest factors. Like, why would I want to spend more money on Facebook ads? I don't, I don't want to spend more on Facebook. We only have got 2 customers over the last 4 weeks. Like if it's not really working, or we need to change the ads, we need to change the titles, we need to change something up because whatever it's doing, it's not that effective. I would focus on what's working and double down on those ones. Those are going to give you the greatest return. And I failed to track that my first few years, so don't feel bad if you guys aren't tracking those, but it definitely helps. All right, we're coming up towards the end, guys. Get your questions in. We're down to the last 5-10 minutes here. I appreciate it, Will. Hopefully we'll be contacting you for coaching soon. Yeah, so right now I'm not doing coaching. Um, Sam is doing coaching, uh, if you guys want to reach out to him if you guys need it ASAP. Um, I am gonna look at turning on a one-time paid coaching session down the road. Not right now, not in the next probably month or two. But maybe come summer or fall I am going to look at that for anybody that is wanting that one-on-one coaching. But of course you guys should be taking advantage of this Q&A. Um, I had— we have a school community that'll be much more cost effective. Like, join that, there's a ton of value in there. Um, all of my YouTube videos are free. Like, start there, guys. Like, watch all that stuff. You'll probably get like 75% of what we're going to probably go over in the coaching. But I do understand some people need that one-on-one, like tactical, do this, don't do that, right, um, to get them to the next level. And so, uh, but right now, yeah, we're not doing, uh, I'm not doing coaching, but we'll in the future. How do you target higher-end customers? We are in the Houston area. How do you target higher-end customers? Having a good— having a really good website, having really good quality, uh, customer referrals is the number one marketing strategy. It's free if you just deliver exceptional quality services. Um, just don't sign up to cheap customers. Um, but like, you guys gotta understand, like, when you're just getting started, just take the cheap customers. You just need money. Right? And so what happens— this is the whole cycle, okay? You start off, you have no customers, you have no money. All you need is work. So just take anybody, even one-time mows, just take them. And then when you fill your one truck to capacity, that's when you raise prices. That's when you cut out the one-time mows. That's when you stop doing bi-weekly cuts and shift to weekly. And you're going to lose some customers. but then refill that back up to capacity, and you will have a much easier business. You'll have less people complaining about price and the smallest simple things. I'm telling you, the cheaper customers are the ones that complain, complain the most. Seriously, just being honest. Okay, Valerie says, typo correction, you don't really have to read it out loud if you don't want to. I wasn't able to edit. Sorry, I'm confused. Um, I'm confused. How do you notify your recurring customers when your services are about to begin on their properties? Is it in your contracts? We don't do contracts. I don't want to make a barrier to entry. I want to make it as easy as possible. Just give me your Visa card, give me your credit card today, and I can get you on schedule. It's that easy. There's no contract. There's verbal contracts. There's, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that. Um, and then in the estimate, it kind of structures what we're going to be doing, what we're not going to be doing. But, um, yeah, we don't do contracts. And then as far as recurring customers, so on a new signup, we do text them and say, hey, your normal mow day will be on this day. And then for weed control, we always notify 24 to 48 hours in advance. We don't text and email our mowing customers just because we're there so frequently. Alrighty, we got these last few questions, guys. We're gonna crank these out. 5 more minutes. How's your Little Elm location doing? My guys keep sending me pictures of your trucks. That's awesome, man. Um, dude, Ricky is crushing it. He's the GM, general manager down there. He is absolutely crushing it. In fact, he's, he's putting, putting a run for, for the money on our second location. Okay, because they're tight, they're neck and neck, and the second location has been open one, one year longer. So he's already at 123 customers. They started out this year at like 65. So he had 65 customers, he grew it to 123, and we're still signing customers up every single day. Uh, we are super blessed to have a great general manager over there that's executing extremely well. He is absolutely crushing it. And, um, yeah, there's no doubt in my mind he's going to be at $500K here in probably the next 12 months, 12 to 18 months, and then it's profit mode from there on out. So that's the goal. I'll be hiring my first helper. By the way, man, I did not know that you— maybe you told me this before, but, uh, that's cool. I didn't know you were, you were literally in our market over here. So, um, Eggdog Tim: I'll be hiring my first helper employee. He's helped me on landscape jobs before but never on mowing. What would be your best suggestion for starting him with training and such? Okay, um, the training process that I always like to use is I'm going to show you what right looks like. So when you bring him out to a landscape job, you know, he's just going to be in the passenger seat. You're going to show him exactly, hey, we got to read the notes. You're going to get out, you can show them how to start the hedge trimmer. Um, you're gonna trim the first 5 bushes and you're gonna say, look, this is what I'm doing. I shake the bush that way it gets all the stragglers, and then I re— I re-trim it again. Like, you're just very tactical, hands-on, and he's just literally going to stand there and watch. It's awkward, it's weird, but you need to show him what right looks like because your goal is to duplicate yourself so you don't have to be there. And then, um, once he sees what right looks like, then you hand him over the hedge trimmer, have him start it, have him trim the next 3 to 4 bushes, and then you're coaching him. Hey, you need more, you need more wrist rotation, you need more, uh, you're going too low, you need to, you're, you're cutting down to the sticks, you can't, you can't do that on these ones, you know. You got to coach them. Then you're gonna, you're gonna walk, walk his hands through and coach him a little bit. And then after that Um, you're gonna, uh, yeah, pretty much once you feel confident on that, then you're gonna let him do a few bushes where you're not, you know, gonna watch over his shoulder. And then, um, from there you're gonna go back and spot check him. How did it look? And then after that, he's good to go. And then you get your time back to go focus on other stuff. This is my first year tracking all the sources. Google is our best source, and we have a 29.3% close ratio on weed control right now and overall Streams of leads. Yeah, so the thing is, is if it's, uh, organic Google, unfortunately we can't like pour gasoline on that because you just can't. So unless it's local service ads, you can increase the budget, but even that, it's just based on demand. So, um, I would look at what your second or third best source is that's paid, and whatever one is cheaper, I would focus on that one. That's working. All right, peasy. Who makes your contracts and what are some helpful stimulations to make sure you get paid? Uh, we don't do contracts, we just verbally accept estimates over the phone or we send it to them. And then stimulations to make sure we get paid, um, I think you're referring to like rules. Uh, so The second the card declines, we pause their account. We don't want to give them another single service if they're not going to pay the last service. So we have auto billing on, so the second the crews mark the job complete, it auto bills the customer. And then, um, our manager will come in the next morning and then any cards that didn't go through, they will go in and pause their account. And then, uh, we have tags set up where it'll tag them day 1 of billing non-paid, and then day 7, day 14, day 30, day 45. And at every level of those, it gets more and more direct, and like, you better pay or we're gonna go to— are you gonna go to collections? Uh, the first one is just, just a friendly, hey, your card didn't go through. Uh, second one is going to be, there's going to be a late fee. Third one is like, late fee got applied, which is a $25 late fee. And then, um, that's kind of how we handle those. Augusta Como, what's up, man? PZ says, I don't do contracts either. I thought I was doing the wrong thing. Thanks. No, yeah, you're doing it, you're doing it right, man. Um, yeah, you want to get— you want to make it as easy as possible to people to give you money and sign up for services. So why would you want to wait to get a signed contract? It just doesn't make too much sense. How far apart would you own two locations? How far apart? Well, um, I would like them as close as possible, if possible, because as a regional manager, you're gonna have to show up— when you have a regional manager, you have to show up to their location at some point, right? Like, you can't just leave them to fend for the wolves by themselves, right? Like, once a week, once every other week, you need to be present there or have a regional manager show up to make sure things are operating correctly. Um, so our mile radius is about 7 to 8 miles per location. So if you could have one that's like 7 to 8 miles and then one that's like right next to it, um, and then we just separate it by zip codes, makes it easier. Green Goat Lawn Care rules: I wasn't kidding when I said I buy your mow-only leads. We are literally neighbors. Okay. Interesting. Um, you should email me. Um, yeah, you should email me, man. Uh, email me at media@militarylawncuts.com and then, um, let me know your Carmobile. Um, we could probably just add you as a reference for the only accounts. Um, and then just, just let me know what service area that you service, if you come all the way up to Aubrey, Salina, But for sure, let alone we can add you to our reference list so that way, because we always like to be helpful on the phone too. Like, if, if they are a quote-unquote cheaper customer that just wants the mow, um, recurring mowing services, yeah, we want to be helpful too. Like, if we can give them a good reference, and it seems like you're a really good reference because you're in here learning about lawn care and trying to get better, so I'd love to send our potential customer to a good reputable company. So, uh, email me your stuff and we can add you to the reference list. Tips for employees that are hard on equipment and trucks, not breaking anything specific but just overall. What I would do is you can build an incentive program of a bonus. So what you would want to do is add up all of the damages in repairs over the last, let's say, quarter, half year, 12 months, like whatever you want to do. Let's just say it was $5,000 in repairs— blowers, mowers, whatever, right? Over the course of 12 months. What I would say is, hey guys, if we can keep our repair costs under $2,000 for the year of, of silly, like, avoidable damages, right? Like, I'm talking like you— somebody walked by the fence and it ripped off the strap of the backpack blower. Like, how did that happen? Like, like, some, something happened here. You didn't just walk by the gate and it just ripped the whole back. Like, like, clearly this wasn't strapped in properly or something, you know what I mean? Like, clear unavoidable, like like negligible damage, okay? If we can keep those kind of situations under $2K, I'd be like, hey guys, let's— I'll give you guys a $1,000 bonus that we'll split between everybody if we can keep that down. And then what that would do is hold the team, because you want to, you want to build a bonus around the team. Otherwise what you'll find is, Augusta, Como, that basically you'll have like 5 people, and what you'll find is most of the time it's just like one person that's damaging all this stuff. And so if the other 4 people are doing what they're supposed to and taking care of the equipment, but it's that one guy that damages it, when you make a bonus structure that includes all 5 of them, either A, all 5 of them hit it, or if all 5 of them don't, the other 4 is going to hold them accountable behind closed doors without you there to make sure that, that, that he's not damaging stuff like, like in a silly way. All right, 3 more questions, and these are all from Augusta Como, and then we're wrapping it up because we're 2 minutes over, 3 minutes over. I'm in Columbia, Missouri. It's about 100,000 population, maybe 8,000 to 10,000 serviceable homes. Okay, okay, good to know. Good data. Uh, it's about 100 population. The closest territories are St. Louis, 1.5 hours away. Kansas City 2 hours away. Columbia just isn't big enough to scale past $800K. We're at $500K. Okay, so then yeah, you're going to probably have to open the second location a little farther. Plus I want to get into the bigger markets, don't know how to manage that from that far away. So a lot of this is going to be just KPIs, um, so you're not going to have the luxury to show up there maybe every day or week, uh, you'd probably definitely want to show up at least maybe couple times a month maybe, um, with that kind of far of a drive. But, um, what you would want to do is you would probably plug in a general manager at that location, and then you would build really clear KPIs weekly that you would check in. So we've gotten it down so well with our KPIs that our regional manager could literally be in another state and see the numbers on the Excel spreadsheet, and she would be able to tell you whether they're doing their job well or not. Clearly based on the KPIs because we have it so dialed in. And, uh, a lot of that takes time, but having clear KPIs— a few to mention would be close ratio, efficiency score, yellow slip count. Like, these things need to be tracked weekly, and then you need to set parameters of what, like, what it looks like if it's like green is good, like one or less slip is good. Um, if you get 3 or 4 slips, that's like yellow, like, hey, this is caution, like, what are we doing here? And then like 5 or more is like, this is a problem, this is red. So you would have an Excel spreadsheet, you would have parameters on like what is acceptable. You need to tell them what is acceptable. Same thing with the close ratio— this is unacceptable, this is acceptable, this is amazing. So based on their close ratio, things like that, but you would just build build that out. So hopefully that helps. Um, and then if once you dial that in, you wouldn't— you're not going to get it right the first week or month, but over time you just tweak it, get it better and better, and then you'll get it dialed in. And you can basically manage a manager from 2 hours away, and you, you really wouldn't have to even maybe show up to the shop. And then you just do everything over StreamYard like we're doing here, um, where you jump in, you go over the numbers, you see, hey, is there any obstacles that you had this week? How can I help you? And you just get that stuff done. But guys, thank you so much for tuning in on this Saturday for the live Q&A mastermind. Hopefully this helped you guys. Um, appreciate everybody joining. We have had a lot of really good people in here. Uh, Sam, my buddy Paul, go way back. Hope you guys are crushing it. Uh, Augusta Nation's in here, Walter's in here, and, uh, just a lot of really good people. So I hope you guys are all crushing it. Um, yeah, don't know when I'll do this again, but, um, I hope you guys all have an amazing Saturday. And I'm just trying to bring good value on the content side, so make sure you guys are subscribed to the channel because I post twice a week to try and bring value to you guys. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.