The Ultimate Spring Rush Guide!

What if I told you that half of your customers are actually losing you money? In this video, I'm going to show you where most people mess up when it comes to spring rush marketing. If you miss this window, it is super detrimental to your business and the revenue that you will do that year. So it's imperative that we get this one thing right. So in today's video, we're talking about the spring rush. When it comes to spring rush, you have— most of you guys in the lawn care industry, you have your mows, you have you have your weed control, and then you have your one-time projects. So this could be, you know, planting, bush trimming, mulch, something along those lines. All right, so I'm going to show you the impact of each one of these has on your focus. First off, we have time-sensitive, and then we have annual value. And there's one more that we're going to talk about here at the end. So make sure you watch all the way to the end, otherwise you're gonna miss this column. Put a nice question mark here because this is, this is the biggest thing. This is the dictator. First thing we want to talk about are the 3 different services that we offer and the approach. Now, where I see most people get hung up is spring rush hits, everybody wants their landscaping done, their projects, their mowing, their mulch, and we get caught up in certain services, myself included. When I first started, I got hung up on this, and I want to create some kind of framework or mindset that you can actually look at the services that you offer, the time sensitivity for each specific service, service and also the annual value so you know exactly what customer you should be targeting so it's not actually losing you money. The first thing is going to be mows. So the first question is, what is the time sensitivity on this service? So I want you to ask yourself, when a customer calls your company or your location and says, hey, I need mowing services, how quickly do you have to get that turned around and go out and mow the lawn? Can you tell the customer, hey, I'll be there in 3 weeks to mow the lawn? Probably not. They need their lawn cut like today, if not this week. Think about this. If the grass is growing and is moments away from being overgrown, a lot of our customers are in HOAs, like they're going to get an HOA fine when they're calling for this service. Really, the turnaround on this is, I would say, 72 hours. Now, this doesn't mean like how quickly you get the estimate. This is, hey, within 72 hours, max a week, we should be able to get you on the schedule, get out there, and cut that first service, okay? So 72-hour turnaround. If we were to tell our customers over the phone, hey, Susie, we're not gonna be able to get out there for 2 weeks, they're gonna hang up the phone and call the next lawn care company. So we have 72 hours to get out there for this mow service. So that is the time sensitivity of this service. Now let's just keep going down the line here. We offer weed control services. Where we come out, 8 treatments, we do fertilizers, pre-emergents, things like that. Again, ask yourself, if you are doing treatments, ask yourself this question. When a customer calls and says, hey, I have weeds in my yard that need to be sprayed, how much time do we have until we can get them on the schedule where they actually will sign up because it's an adequate amount of time for us to solve their problem? Most of the time, max week to a week and a half, right? If somebody's calling and says, hey, I got weeds in my yard, I need them treated, hey, we'll be able to get out there within the next week, week and a half max, 99% of the time customer's gonna book with us as long as we can meet that timeframe sensitivity window. If I was like, hey, you know, we're 4 weeks booked out, we can get you on the schedule here in about a month, they're gonna be like, click, I'm going to the next company. So that's a time sensitivity on these services. So this is 1 week, I'd say, to a week and a half for the weed control. Now let's talk about the one-time projects. So for us, we do bush trimming, we de-weed, flower beds. We hand pull the grass and weeds in the beds, and then we also install mulch. Those are the 3 main flower bed services that we offer. With this service, when a customer calls in, most of the time I would say for us— and ask again, ask yourself in your service, your business, your location, for the services for one-time projects— if I told a customer it's going to take me 4 weeks or 3 weeks to get there, are they going to say sign me up, or they're going to say, hey, that's okay, I'm going to call the next person then, right? Like, where is that window? That's what we're trying to identify. For the time sensitivity. For us, I would say a week and a half to 2 weeks. Okay, that's about the range. Anything more than that, if I told a customer, hey, we're booked out 3 weeks, they're probably going to be like, well, I need my service now, right? So I'm going to call the next company. But most of the time, if we say, hey, we can get out there within a week and a half to 2 weeks max, which I normally on the phone say week to 2 weeks, but you can see the time sensitivity window. Mowing being the most sensitive, we need to get out there ASAP. Weed control being the second priority, and third can take, take longest. Okay, great. So now we have our time sensitivity for each service, but that's not it. Okay, and that's where most people fail. So let's get— let's keep moving forward. Let's ask ourselves, what is the annual value for these services? We're thinking about it today. All right, we're looking at targeting an upsell to all of our customers. That's when we send a text and an email out and say, hey, we're offering this service, did you want a quote? And we're trying to decipher, do we want to do mows? Do we want to do weed control? Do we want to do one-time property cleanups? Right, that's what we're trying to figure out. Well, let's look get the annual value for each of these customers. So I'm going to have to use my calculator here. All right. So our average mow price is about— I would say like $48. So $48 times 32 visits per year comes to $1,536. But we're just going to round it to whole numbers. So this is going to be a $1,500 annual value per the customer for the most. Now for the weed control service, our average price is probably like $76 a treatment. We come out 8 times a year, that gets us $608. So we'll just call it $600 for an annual value for this service. So just so everybody knows, this is 32 visits, this is 8 visits. Now the last one, the one-time property cleanups. So generally speaking, this service, is about a $350 job. Some go a little bit higher, like $400 or $500. Some are only like $199. But our average ticket price for the one-time property bush bed and mulch installation service is $350. This is what most people do. This actually costs them money in the spring rush. Most people, if you look at a line item estimate, when we send out our estimates, we actually have the mow price here on the estimate and then the weed control. So generally speaking, if you have a $76 weed treatment, you have a $48 mow. What is that? 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. That's like a $120 roughly estimate that's getting sent out to the customer. Now, all of our GMs call their pending estimates multiple times a day. They carve out an hour each day to call the pending estimates. And what happens is when they go in there, they see that a mow and weed control estimate is only $120, but they also have a flower bed quote in here for $350 for the estimate. Total. And so in their minds, and you as well that's watching, we all got caught up in this, myself included, and that's why I'm sharing this with you, is we look at the estimate and we go, oh my goodness, I can make triple the money here on the one-time property cleanup. Let's, let's focus on that in the spring rush, right? You can make more money. Wrong. In the short term, you do make more money, but in the long run, it doesn't. And here's why. When you look at the annual value of the customer. It's better for you to call your mowing and weed control estimates for— take 15 minutes, sign up a customer, and you literally can make $2,000 in 1 year with 15 minutes' work of calling pending estimates. There is no other task in your business that you get that return from. So when we're trying to figure out, hey, what upsell should we send this week? Right? Springtime is the most crucial, important gold rush window where I see most people, they focus on the one-time property cleanups to get that quick cash, right? It's more money in the short term, but the ones that focus on the recurring services, the mowing, the weed control, the insect control, any kind of recurring service you sell the customer one time, you're there for multiple visits, are the ones that win. I'm going to take it a step further. I'm going to share with you guys the last secret part of this video. For you guys that are watching, thank you so much. Make sure you subscribe to the channel. It helps the algorithm, helps grow the channel, helps us reach more people. Please hit the subscribe button. So the last thing we want to talk about, I'm going to sell it to you why, why we do it this way. Let's talk about budgeted hours. So anybody that doesn't do budgeted hours, this is generally what the estimated time of the job is going to take. Most of the time for the mows, it's 30 minutes. Most of the time for one-time project cleanups, it's like 5 to 6 hours, right? Let's go through just like we did. We did time sensitivity, we did annual value. Well, let's also do budgeted hours. So most of the time, I just told you guys, 0.5, which if you convert that to minutes is 30 minutes. It's about 30 minutes per lawn, but we get to go there 32 visits out of the year. Let's go to the next one. So same thing, weed control. It's about a 30-minute stop every single time, but that's broken up into 8 visits over the course of 12 months. So you get to go there 8 times for 30 minutes. Now let's look at the one-time property cleanup. So the one-time property cleanup, most of the time, we'll just say that this one's gonna be about a 5 budget hour job. Let's talk about these 3. The one-time property cleanup, great work. Like, you are able to keep one guy busy for most of his day. In an 8-hour day, 5 hours of work. Ideally, we wanna shoot for 6. That's pretty good. He goes out, he installs the mulch, he does a great job, gets a 5-star review from the customer. Awesome. But then what? What about tomorrow? What about next week? You as the VM have to now continue to go out and sell. You sold a one-time project that the crew went out and did and then now we have to go out and do it again. And again and again and again and again. You're constantly stuck in this loop of having to consistently sell all the time to keep your crews busy. To where the mows and the weed control, you sell the customer one time over the phone. How we're going to do a good job and show up and make sure their lawn is nice and pretty. And all of a sudden for your crews over the course of 12 months, it now starts to create consistency. It creates consistency for your crews that are showing up each day and each week because they need hours. It creates more consistency for the estimator or the general manager because they're not having to go out and sell their brains out to get one-time property cleanups because they have a now consistent schedule of 30, 40, 50 mows that we know 3 months from now we're still going to be mowing. And we're most likely going to have those same customers as long as we do a good job, right? And so, we have more more consistency with our scheduling, our routes, our crews. So don't get hung up, guys, on trying to get the one-time property cleanups in the spring rush. Okay, please. I fell into this trap so much. The one-time property cleanups are icing on the cake. You can fit them in on rain days when it's too wet to mow. That's when we should be doing that stuff. We should be focusing on obtaining and attracting and marketing to the mowing and the weed control services. So when we send out upsells, we're targeting mowing customers, we're targeting weed control customers. All right, the last thing I want to get across here to show you guys. So we're going to show you what a $500,000 business looks like with recurring and a $500,000 business all made up of one times. In this scenario, we have two different locations. One focuses heavily on recurring, One focuses on one time. Through the entire year, both have done $500,000 in revenue. This was all mainly mows and let's say weed control. This one was mainly projects. This is the annual revenue that both did. Now at the end of the year, Christmas comes along, which is amazing. The new year comes, okay, January 1st. On January 1st, my question to you guys, and I want you to put it in the comments right now. Here, we'll do this. So Business A, and then this is Business B. So after January 1st, this is not hard, how much revenue is Business A gonna do for the next year? After January 1st, the next year, how much revenue are they gonna do? They did $500,000 the previous year, mainly those, mainly we control. How much revenue is Business A going to do? Put it in the comments right now. All right, so the second thing is Business B. This is the one that was mainly made up of one-time projects. You get to the end of the year, new year comes in. What revenue is this business starting off with? How much revenue are they projected to do right now, January 1st, in the new year? Put in the comments below. I'm going to show you the answer to this. So Business A, after the new year, is projected to do $500,000. That business owner or that manager wakes up the next day after Christmas and already has a $500,000 business. Doesn't have to sell any— anything more. Just has to retain his customers, do good work. The second one, Wakes up with $0 because it's all one-time projects. So this guy has to go out and sell another $500,000 worth of a business. Whereas this manager more so has to maintain and do quality to retain all of these customers. Doesn't have to sell, doesn't have to spend 40 hours a week selling one-time projects to get back to $500,000. He's already there because of the recurring revenue. You sell the customer one time, and you're there for multiple visits. That is what we're trying to build. That is what you should be trying to build. It's less roller coaster of emotion of like, oh my goodness, spring rush. I booked all these one-time projects, right? That's cool. Fit them in on the rain days. The other like 4 days, I'm working my pending estimates and I'm focusing on my recurring customers. Those are the ones that you saw with the annual value. You get way more, way more back from selling them one time and being there for multiple visits. It's easier for your crews, it's easier for routing, and it's easier for your business. Build something that's more sustainable, that's more manageable, to where you don't have to— it doesn't have to rely on you going out and selling all the time. Focus on recurring. Don't get caught up in the one-time projects. Hit the like button. Thank you so much. Make sure you guys are subscribed to the channel. You guys are not going to want to miss the content I'm putting out. Thanks so much. See you guys next time. LA.