Hi everyone. I am Andrew, co-founder of Service Autopilot Academy, the official coaching group for service professionals, lawn care, HVAC, cleaning services and everything in between. We help entrepreneurs take their businesses over a million dollars a year and beyond. I also have a marketing agency that focuses on service businesses as well.

One of the things that we came across today when I was speaking to one of our new client who we built one of our high converting websites for to help them generate leads online, is that after we built the website, we have start thinking about, well how are going to get people to the website. We have to have to get them to the website via offline methods, everything from our truck branding to lawn signs to door hangers to direct mail; all of those offline tactics and of course online. PPC, SEO, Facebook ads … all of that good stuff.

When the conversation turned to marketing efforts after we built the website, the gentleman commented to me, “I don’t need to do anything marketing wise with you guys. I’ve already got a company that has me ranking in the number one position.” I say, “I wasn’t aware of that. We just built a website for you. They certainly haven’t optimized it. What exactly did you buy? Do you know what you purchased from this company?” The gentleman said, “Yeah, I got a call out of the blue from some guy who guaranteed me the number one ranking within Google.” Immediately I knew exactly what he purchased because this is a common tactic. A lot of small business owners get calls from time to time from individuals saying that they work with Google or that they can guarantee the number one ranking within Google, which is not true.

What the gentleman purchased … he was actually purchasing ads, Google AdWords ads. Google AdWords ads show up at the top and at the side of any Google search results page. This is a search I did for lawn care in Tulsa. The gentleman thinks that he has the number one ranking in Google. The thing that he’s not aware of, and this is a really critical consideration. It’s also one of the reasons why we don’t do one shot marketing. We don’t offer one shot, a la carte marketing. We only do marketing programs, complete programs for our clients. What he’s missing out on and what he wasn’t aware of is that when all you’re doing is Google ads, if you’re showing up in these areas and these areas over here, you can only potentially get 15% or less of the visits to this keyword, to lawn care Tulsa. All of the other clicks on this page, 85% of them, are going to these area here. They are going to the first page of the search results and they are going to the local listing area here as well.

So if all you’re doing is running some ads, the maximum number of click you could possibly get from that search is 15% of the total searches on lawn care Tulsa, which is not much. 15% of the people who visit this page and do this search, they’re clicking on this ad, this ad, this ad, this ad, this ad, this ad, this ad, this ad. They’re clicking on one of those ads, 15% of those people. So by only taking up a one step marketing approach, by only implementing one tactic, you’re missing out on a whole lot of opportunity. That is something that a lot of business owners need to be aware of, especially as service professionals, lawn care companies, HVAC. These companies typically don’t go far enough and it’s mainly because the business owners don’t know exactly what they need to be doing. Let’s break this page down a little bit so I can show you some of the key areas.

The first thing we need to understand as business owners is that our consumers, the people that would hire us to do business with us, they’re searching for service providers like us in several different ways. Not everybody searches the same way. Some will go directly to Thumbtack. Maybe some will go to Home Advisor, some to Angie’s List. A few might go there. Others will go to Yelp or they might go to Yellow Pages, or any of these other number of services. Others might click on a banner ad that they saw within Facebook or on a third party website that you might be advertising. The largest majority, they’re going to be going directly to Google or Yahoo and searching, typing in their city name and the service they are searching for. That’s typically what people … that’s predominately how people search.

If we break down this page, look at all of the different places that we need to be showing up because it might not be completely obvious to you. If we’re running an ad, which we recommend that you do, you have an opportunity to get a little bit of traffic. But consumers are getting wiser and wiser and they know that these areas are ads. The number of potential leads that you can generate just from these ad areas is going down, and that’s going to continue to decline over time as consumers get smarter. As consumers get smarter, different marketing tactics, different marketing strategies, need to shift overtime.

This second area that we need to be aware of is what we call the Google local area. This area right here is completely separate from how you would show up in this area down here in the search results, and over here in the ads. These require that you set up a special business page and there’s probably about 100 other factors that play into how well you show up within this area. If you don’t have an address within Tulsa, there’s no way that this business could show up in this area. If you don’t have high quality reviews, if you don’t have many reviews, then it is even less likely that you will ever show up in this area. So there are a lot of different factors that you need to consider when you’re trying to have an all encompassing marketing strategy.

The other area that we need to be aware of is this area down here. This is what we call organic search results. This is an area that we can rank our clients in very well via using search engine optimization and other tactics like that. The other thing we need to look down here is what else do we see. We see Thumbtack. We see Better Business Bureau. We see some of these other directory sites. There’s Angie’s List. We need to be aware of the different places that we need to list our businesses as well. Just looking at this page, there’s multiple marketing tactics that need to be involved so we an have the maximum exposure to your market.

We need to be appearing within ads, Google ads. We need to have a percentage of our marketing budget going to that. We need to have a well thought out strategy to get us to rank really well within this local area. Very, very important. That means we need a review strategy, which is what we teach in Service Autopilot Academy. We have the best review strategy out there on the market, hands down. It took the first lawn care company ever to be 100 5-star Google reviews. It’s fantastic. We also need a strong searching job optimization strategy. We need a properly optimized website so that we are ranking up here very well for that particular service; lawn care Tulsa, in this particular case.

What else do we need to be aware of? We need to also have our business listed and have reviews on local listing sites, such as Yelp, such as City Search, such as Manta. All of those different sites, they also have our opportunity to rank within here if you get reviews. If you maintain them, if you have a strategy for doing that, there’s a very good chance that those pages could show up here within the search results as well.

When all that we’re doing is implementing one marketing tactic, Google AdWords, we’re missing out on all this different opportunity down here on the rest of the page. When we implement a marketing program for our clients, we never just do one thing. We don’t offer any a la carte services. We offer a full marketing program. That generally includes 5 different marketing tactics. It includes a local listings, which gets you ranking well within this area. It includes a strategy to get reviews, which is very, very critical for you to rank well within this are and get clicks. It also includes an [inaudible 00:09:23] program that gets your website showing up really strong in this area. It also includes, like I mentioned, a local listing program which also lists you in the most important local sites: Yelp, Manta, City Search … all of those different sites that have the opportunity to rank within this area as well.

I want you guys to think bigger. Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes and really think about how your market if finding service providers like you. That’s the first step. Once we understand that, we need to really think through all of the potential opportunities where we can show up and make our business visible to them.

The other thing we need to consider is that this is just one search term. This is just one key phrase, lawn care Tulsa. But for your business, whether you’re HVAC, or cleaning services, you’re probably going to have over 5000 different key phrases that could potentially bring you clients. So if you are just doing one thing, you’re missing out on a whole lot of opportunity. You need to think bigger. You need to think bigger. That’s just kind of a breakdown of the page. I would love to hear some feedback from you guys. Please comment and reply to the video. Ask me any questions. I’d be happy to answer them for you. If you would like more information about our coaching group, you can visit Service Autopilot Academy for all the information on how we help businesses explode their profits, get more fun out of life and their business. Make it happen.

As you may have noticed we’ve had a lot going on over the past 4 months.
We did a two day business growth and marketing conference in Dallas in partnership with Service Autopilot, that sold out in less than a week
launched Academy our coaching and training group in partnership with Lawn Care Millionaire which now has 90+ handpicked members all working together to transform their businesses and their lives.

During all this, Lawn Care Marketing Expert has continued our explosive growth as the leader in marketing lawn care and landscaping companies.
And during all this ive continued to pursure My favorite hobby… crossfit.
I love it. I’ve been a jogger since 13.. Average about 20-25 miles a week. But immediately gave that up when I discovered crossfit.
Most of you have heard of crossfit, it is essentially a pretty hardcore group training. And I dedicated myself to it, very aggressively, as I tend to do, going without fail 5 times a week.
Well unfortuantely, Immediately after the conference in November, at crossfit I blew out my back.
Herniated two disks training…
Basically the padding between two vertabrae was being pinched which caused the most excrusiating muscle spasms and nerve pain all the way down to my toes.
Most painful thing ever.
So For the past three months, I wasn’t able to sit down without extreme pain.
Wasn’t Able to fly, swim, do much of anything except stand in one place or lay on my back.
Even then I needed painkillers.
I couldn’t sit down without extreme pain, cant think straight with painkillers, cant even stand up at my standing desk for more than 15 minutes without discomfort?
So It got me thinking, if this happened to me 10 years ago, I would have gone out of business.
Why? Because tens years ago, I didn’t delegate everything I needed to. I didn’t have a supporting team. I was trying to do everything myself.
Now think about that, What would happen to your business?
Would Clients get invoiced?
Would employees get paid?
Would sales and marketing still happen?
Leads be generated?
Would work get done? Does your team have a set process they go through every day? Do they have guidelines and know what to do and how to adapt if it rains or they damage a property.
What if a client complains? Would the complaint get ignored without you?
The key to building a scaleable business is build processes in your business that your staff is trained on. That happen correctly without your oversight. AND having the right team members in place to support your vision.
If your business stops generating revenue when you arent involved – then you don’t yet have a scalable business.
You must start Focusing on putting the systems in place to eliminate you being the bottle neck. Don’t wait until you hit the bottle neck. Do it before.
Besides hiring the right people, this is one of the biggest challenges members of our academy coaching program face and we have been helping them through it over the past few months.
So I want you to start thinking about this this week.
Exercise:
Grab a sheet of paper Create a two column list
In the left hand column – write down all of the things you do that would not happen if you were out of commission and unable to work for three months
Now in the right hand column write down the solution that will prevent this problem from ever happening.
Many of these solutions are going to be systems, processes and training you need to start creating and implementing in your business today.
You will always want at least one other staff member trained on all critical processes at all times.
And the end goal is ultimately delegating all of the tasks you don’t like to do or are good at to an operations manager or staff member that is properly trained to carry it out.

Once you have your list, eliminate any unnecessary tasks you are doing and Create standard operating procedures around the most critical such as billing, customer service and sales

document them, record training videos and delegate.

The quicker you systemize your business and the quicker that you implement systems for everything you do. The faster you will be able to scale and employees will simply become manpower to fill the areas of need.

This will ensure the business doesn’t fall down when you do…

The lawn care software you choose to run your business can have a significant impact how quickly you close leads and how easy it is to log and track your lawn care advertising programs.

Watch the video to find our why your website and lawn maintenance software should integrate with each other.

Hi everyone, Andrew here. I just want to talk really quickly about two critical features that I think that you should look for when you’re choosing your lawn care software. That’s billing and the ability to integrate your software with your website.

Let’s talk really quick about billing. I strongly recommend that you automatically bill your lawn care clients on a recurring basis. You only accept credit cards and you automatically charge their card before service each week when you’re about to perform it. I see too many companies wasting time and energy chasing down customers to get paid for work that they completed months ago. Personally, that’s ridiculous to me. I wouldn’t take on any client who’s not going to pay me before we perform the work. I have to pay employees just like you do.

Consumers that refuse to give you a credit card or consumers that don’t want to pay you on time, they’re just bad customers. We need to either set them straight, meaning we accept recurring payments, or we need to make a decision whether or not we want to keep them as clients. However, there’s different cases for different businesses. Certain other business and certain other services that you provide, those won’t be billable on a recurring basis.  I understand that.

Your lawn care software should also have the ability to accept payments online. Consumers do like to go online, pay their bills and it’s much easier for them than to send you a check in the mail. Lawn care software, you should be able to pay your bills online and that billing should show up in the software. It should show up in their account, in the software, and you should know that they’ve gotten a payment and their account should update in the software automatically.

The next feature is all of your leads.  All of your contacts from your customers.  Whether it’s a phone call.  Whether it’s an email through your website.  Whether it’s an estimate request.  That needs to be logged. I talk about this quite a bit. Information is power. The more you know about your business, the more you know about what’s going on in your business, the smarter decisions you can make. The more powerful a business owner you can be. Information is your friend. So that means we need to log and we need to log religiously.

We need to log when we are getting service requests.  When we are getting phone calls from clients. We need to log when we are getting emails from clients. We need to log when we are getting estimate requests. That can be much more simplified when your lawn care software can be integrated with your website.

For instance Service Autopilot, which we recommend, we’re obviously one of their partners. Their software integrates directly with your website. The reason that’s important is because it’s going to really help you make sure you don’t drop the ball. How quickly you respond to estimates is going to have a great impact on whether or not you close that sale. If your waiting 24-hours to respond to an estimate request, versus somebody waiting 10 minutes and immediately calling the prospect who requested an estimate, you’re going to have a much greater chance to close that client if it took you 10 minutes. So we want a system that makes it easier. With Service Autopilot, one of the reasons we like that is because we can integrate your website directly with that software. That means as soon as you get an estimate request through your website, it goes immediately into Service Autopilot system and then Service Autopilot can notify you via your mobile device or via email, whatever you want, to respond to this estimate request.

Generally what we see are our larger clients who have full-time office staff, is the office manager will be in the office and they’ll have Service Autopilot up on a couple of different screens sometimes.  One of our clients uses four different computer monitors with different Service Autopilot screens setup and Google Maps and all the tools that they use to estimate projects. We recommend that you treat your estimates as a priority. With Service Autopilot it makes it a lot easier.

As soon as you get an estimate request, you’ll have office staff that is just sitting in your office that can respond to those estimate requests immediately. I recommend you pick up the phone and you call that person as soon as that estimate request comes in and you try and close that sale over the phone. You don’t just send them an estimate via email and leave it be, you sell. You pick up the phone, you call the person who requested the estimate, build a relationship with them, build rapport with them, and sell them on your service. That’s going to be much more effective than sending them an estimate that’s going to be higher than all the other companies that they have requested estimates from.  If you’re the higher priced vendor in your market, you absolutely got to get on that phone and sell.  You got to tell them why they need to pay more to choose you.  So lawn care software can make this a little bit easier.

The other reason this is important is because when the estimate request comes into Service Autopilot it’s an actionable item.  You have to either cancel it or you have to take action on it and note in there that you’ve taken action on it.  So it’s logged.  It makes your logging much, much easier.  Whereas the alternative would be putting just the generic form on your website and that form generates an email and that email goes to your ‘In Box’ which can then get buried under all the other email you have to respond to.  So that is not as conducive to being super quick to reply to those estimates.  That’s really important.  You have to be responsive.  You have to reply quickly.

Alternatively, if you don’t have software that integrates with your website, you are going to be relying on a pen and pad or an Excel spreadsheet.  I’ve got to tell you, dealing with all the lawn care companies I’ve been dealing with for so many years, is that if you don’t have system in place, if you’re leaving it up to your phone staff who’s busy.  If you’re leaving it up to yourself whose trying to field calls in the field.  You’re not going to be religiously logging estimate requests with a pen and pad in the field and you’re not going to be documenting them in an Excel spreadsheet.  The more systems that you can put in place that automate this stuff and make things easier, the better information you’re going to have and ultimately the better decisions you are going to be able to make.

The next part is contact request.  We also integrate our client’s contact forms with this Service Autopilot software.  This is important for a similar reason.  We don’t want to ignore any client emails.  We want our clients to feel important because they are important.  That means that we’re responsive, that we’re doing our absolute best to satisfy their needs, to respond to them and give them exactly what they want in a high level of service.  What typically happens if you don’t have software that integrates with your website, is that the contact request form on your website is generally just going to go to your email ‘In Box’.  Again, what usually happens is it gets buried underneath a bunch of other emails.  So that makes it easy for you to accidentally overlook it or not respond to that client quickly.

When you integrate your software with your website, that contact form can go immediately into the Service Autopilot.  That shows up as an item on the control panel, on the main screen, and then you have to take action on it, otherwise it’s just going to stay there on the list.  So it makes it much easier to be much more responsive to your client’s needs, which is very important.  We don’t want to overlook our client requests, we want to give them great service.  Clients are much happier when we reply to them, when we answer our phones, when we are available to serve their needs.

I really recommend that you make sure that these features are part of whatever lawn care software you use.  Obviously we are biased.  We are partnered with Service Autopilot so we recommend them.

That’s my two cents.  If you have any questions, please reply to this video and I would be happy to answer any other questions that you have.  In the meantime, if you would like us to integrate your website with this Service Autopilot software, please visit lawncaremarketingexpert.com and request a one-on-one strategy session with me personally.  We will go over all of your marketing and come up with a game plan that’s right for your business.  Make it happen.

I want to share a really quick tip with you about how to nurture client relationships and I’m going to share this with you but you have to keep it a secret because if you don’t,  you’re going to get me in trouble.

Let me show you something that I do and this is how I nurture one of my most important relationships.  Take a look at this.

This here is a Google Calendar and here within Google Calendar, I have a special calendar set up over here.  This calendar here is dedicated to my wife, Helen, so this is her calendar. 

Something that I do to be a better husband is … I get really caught up in my business.  I get really caught up in growing the business and sometimes I forget to do things.  Sometimes I forget to give her attention that she deserves as an awesome woman.

What I’ve done is I’ve created a special calendar for her here within Google that remind me to do different things throughout the week and some of them are seemingly minor but they’re actually very important.  For instance, this one here says to send Helen a text message about something special.  How is your day going?  How’s your day?

This one here, and these are recurring events within Google, this one’s here reminding me to take her to lunch.  This one down here is reminding me to send her another text message in the middle of the day, to ask her how she is doing at her job.  She has a career of her own.

This one here is reminding me to buy her a gift, buy her something special, maybe it’s flowers, maybe it’s a note card, maybe it’s some chocolates, maybe it’s something.  I do that once a month.  This one up here is just a reminder to send Helen a special note, leave her a note on the bed.  Let her know that she’s important.  She doesn’t know that I do this but it’s a very important part of having a positive relationship.

The reason I bring this up is because this is how we need to treat our clients as well.  Our client relationship is very much like a marriage.  If we don’t nurture it or if we don’t give them the attention they deserve, that relationship will sour very quickly.  The saying goes, “A happy wife is a happy life” and it’s very true.

I really recommend that you systematize the nurturing of your client relationships. It means put a process in place.  If you have a staff, make it their duty to call your clients once a month and check in.  Maybe it means sending them a personal, handwritten note card.  Maybe it means sending them a gift occasionally for no reason in particular other than that they are clients and that you appreciate them.  We need to look at our nurturing of our client relationships this way.  We need to create a process out of it.  We need to make sure it gets on the calendar so it gets done.

Our clients are important.  Our spouses, our partners, they’re important.  We need to make sure that this stuff happens and when it happens, we have much more positive relationships and we have happier businesses and happy lives.

Lawn care client relationships are really like a marriage. And a happy wife means a happy life.
Systematize the building of your client relationships. Maybe that is a phone call, note or thank you gift. Put it on the calendar and make someone responsible to get it done. We are all busy… but we cant let these important things get forgotten.

So, that’s my quick tip today  and again, this is our secret.  Don’t share this with anyone because she’ll probably be really upset that I put this on a calendar to remind me to send her text messages.

Majority of lawn care companies simply are not charging enough for their services. Being in a position to raise lawn mowing prices without losing your customers – starts with having a good relationship with your clients. Communicating with them and explain the situation. They really don’t care about a $5-10 increase in price. They spend that much at Starbucks everyday. But they will care if your don’t give them a reason why.

I want to talk to you about something that is really common in our industry. That’s lawn care companies not charging enough for their services. This is a really common thing. The reason that it happens is, number one, I think most lawn care companies don’t know how much they need to be charging to make a  healthy profit to keep their business running and growing. So number one, they don’t really know their numbers, so they don’t know how much they should be charging per cut. Then they don’t know their margins.

The second thing is, they are trying to compete with low quality competitors. They’re doing that because they’re marketing and their marketing message doesn’t support the reasons why they need to be charging more in their market. Those are the two main things that I see that lawn care business owners should address.

Let’s talk about how you can raise your prices as a lawn care business owner. You have a number of clients and you need to raise your prices across the board. What is the best way to go about doing that? Like many things in lawn care business, it starts with communication. It starts with being able to communicate openly with your clients, having a positive relationship. You need to be able to explain the situation and give them reasons why you need to charge more. Because clients, they ultimately do not give a shit about a five or ten dollar increase in price a week. That’s typically, probably, what we’re going to be talking about when it comes to recurring lawn maintenance services.

Put it in perspective. Your clients are going to Starbuck’s every other day. They’re spending five dollars for a cappuccino. They’re spending ten dollars, they’re spending more than that. It’s not the money. Don’t get caught up on the dollar amount of the increase. That’s not what they’re objecting to. They’re objecting to a price increase for no reason. When you’re going to raise your prices, you have to put it in perspective that a client can understand. If you’re going to say, “We need to raise our prices ten bucks,” “We need to raise our prices five bucks,” and that’s all you say, yeah, you’re going to get push back. You’re going to get people that cancel service. You’re going to get people that call your competitor and leave you.

If you open the lines of communications, if you address the clients about the reasons why you need to raise the pricing, what they’re going to get, how you perform services, how you continue to provide service at an acceptable high standard, how you pay for insurance, all of the things that you have to handle as a business owner. Fuel costs, equipment, all of those things that you have to handle, whether it’s Obamacare, anything else, explain the situation to your customers. They have jobs. They know, they understand that situations change. They know that they can’t possibly be paying the same amount for lawn care that they were paying five years ago. Talk to them on that level. They’re logical if you give them a reason why. Don’t just say, “Just because.”

That’s what I see a lot of lawn care companies do. They want to raise their prices and their response to their customers about why they’re going to raise their responses is essentially just saying, “Just because.” Just because. Of course the customer is going to push back. You have to give them a reason why. You have to explain the situation and put some thought into it.

The other thing I see is lawn care business owners that don’t raise their prices and take it out on their customers. They treat their customers poorly, or they don’t respond to their phone calls because they’re bitter because they’re only making five dollars an hour on that particular client project. It’s not your client’s fault. It’s your fault. You decide who becomes a client. You decide how much your clients are going to pay you. The client does not. So if you’ve accepted a project and you feel you’re not getting paid enough for the project, do not take it out on the client. The client is going to pay what you convince them they need to pay. It’s not their fault that you accepted a project for too little money.

Again, this comes back to communication. You need to be able to have these conversations with your customers, and you need to be able to explain why you deserve to be paid more than Joe Schmoe down the street, cutting lawns for twenty-five bucks. He’s not your competition if you can communicate with your client and explain why you deserve to be paid more than the guy making twenty-five bucks.

Again, this always goes back to really knowing your numbers. You have to know your margins. You need to be paying attention to what your profit margin is on any particular job. Software will make this a lot easier for you to do. Having your employees track their time on a per project basis will give you much, much better information and tell you exactly how much profit you’re making on a particular job, or if you’re losing money on a job. Or if you’re not even running a healthy profit margin. You have to know your numbers youand u have to track this stuff so you can make the best decisions possible.

If you’re not tracking, if you don’t know your numbers, it’s going to be very difficult for you to scale to a million plus. If you look at the big players in the industry, if you look at the big boys that sold their businesses for twenty–five million, that are doing over ten million a year, they know how much each project is making them in profit. They’re watching their margins. They know that they need to be between this percent and this percent, for that to be a good client. That starts with tracking. I really encourage you to do that.

One final point, you do need to test your pricing increases before you roll them out. Don’t just send an email to your entire client base and say, “Hey, we’re raising our prices five bucks this year. Fuel costs have gone up.” That’s not going to work. You’re going to get push back, you’re going to get clients that are going to leave you. I would strongly recommend that if you’re going to role out a price increase, you test it on a small percentage of customers first, starting with the customers that you know have the lowers per project profit margin.

Again, this comes back to knowing your numbers. Start your price increase with the customers that are paying the least amount and benefiting you the less to keep. When you do that, don’t just send them an email. Call them, go visit them face to face. Have a conversation with them. Don’t sent them an email. Because ultimately, you’re going to be selling them. When you raise a price, when you raise your prices, you’re ultimately- it’s a sales call. You’re selling them on why they need to pay more.

You can sell much better face to face than you can over the phone. You can sell much better over the phone than you can via an email. Pick up the phone, call them, be friends with them. Explain the situation. You know? They’re not trying to put you out of business. Open those lines of communication.

Having a really successful business, it comes down to really nurturing those client relationships. Communicate with them on a regular basis. If you’re communicating with your clients on a regular basis, conversations about raising your prices are going to be much easier. It’s also going to be much easier to up-sell them into additional services. I’ve said this many times before in other videos, but you should make it your goal to reach out to your clients at least once a month. Have a personal conversation with them. If it’s not you, somebody on your staff, call them, check in. It’s going to make all of these things much more easier.

That’s my advice. I encourage you, look at your pricing, look at your per project profit and analyze where you need to be increasing your prices. Because I guarantee everybody out there has at least a handful of clients that aren’t as profitable as they should be. That’s your opportunity to squeeze a little bit more profit out of the work that you’re already doing. Go make it happen. Thanks.

If you have ever browsed any of the lawn care forums on the internet you have surely witnessed a rather depressing sight… Business owner after business owner bellyaching about how life is so unfair. They just lost another job to the guy down the street who undercut their prices yet again. Boo hoo.

Well, it’s easy to blame our competitors for another job lost but we would be much better served if we looked at how we can change the situation. Because guess what, those cheapo competitors are never going away. That means we must step up, accept it and deal with it.

I am willing to bet, the number one problem for these bellyachers is not the competitor down the street or the price shopping consumer. It is their marketing that is the problem. It does a lousy job defining exactly why a consumer should pay more to use them in the first place.

Instead they offer ever cheaper prices in an attempt to lure the customer in.

But guess what? Consumers don’t REALLY care about a $10 difference in price. They spend that much at Starbucks every day.

They simply don’t know WHY they should they spend more on lawn care service because we aren’t giving them a reason.

So can we blame them? Would YOU pay more, if all of your choices appeared to be the same?

But that is exactly what is happening every day, one lawn company after the next, all looking the same, all sounding the same, all acting the same and in the consumers mind, appearing to be the same.

The problem is, when you look the same, sound the same and act the same as everyone else, the only remaining difference a consumer can see is your price.

So initially, to the uneducated consumer, Joe Bob down the street just working to get beer money for the weekend doesn’t appear to be any different than the licensed and insured company running 10 crews charging a fair price. They might have a nice logo… but at the end of the day they are just cutting grass. Right?

No!

Fortunately, there is hope.

There is one question we can ask ourselves, that gets to the very core of what marketing is all about… This question should define your company and what you stand for as an organization. The question is…

Why should someone buy from you instead of everyone else in your market?

The better your answer is to this question, the higher prices you can charge and the easier it will be to close sales.

The secret to not competing on price is getting really good at answering this question.

Now the answer to this question, it comes in the form of how you look, what you say and what you do.

That is everything that is visible to a potential customer before they purchase from you. This “marketing message” defines your company and directly affects a consumer’s decision to buy from you instead of the lazy half price guy that only shows up when he isn’t hung over.

That means your website, truck branding, online advertisements, the text on your direct mail pieces, how you sell and even how your crews act on the job in public view define the why.

If the reasons why someone should buy from you aren’t evident in how you look, sound and act – then you must do a better job communicating this in your marketing message or continue to get undercut at every turn.

As business owners we must define exactly why we are the best choice a consumer can make.

If we don’t know why, then our potential customers certainly don’t know either and they will continue to choose the cheaper commodity service provider.

It’s up to us to educate the consumer on how they should make their decision.

It’s up to us to show them how we are different than our competitors.

It’s up to us to show them how they will get more than they pay for when they choose us at a higher price.

Do you show up when you say you will? Do you always answer the phone? Do you proactively monitor their property for trouble spots? Do you guarantee your work? Does your maintenance program include refreshing the mulch for free? Do you call the client when there is a rain delay? Do you have 23 point onsite checklist your crew goes through before they ever leave the property? Does it include closing the gate to make sure the dog doesn’t get out?

Are these things being communicated in your marketing? If not, they should be. Because they are a whole heck of a lot more important to consumers than one ten dollar bill.

Marketing at its core, is really all about highlighting these differences between us and them (our competitors). It’s in these differences that we can really distinguish ourselves as the leader in our markets and charge premium prices with healthy profit margins.

Your marketing message: how you look, what you say and what you do must define these differences.

So, WHY should someone buy from YOU versus anyone else in your market?

The better your answer… the bigger your profits.

I want to give you a brand new 2014 Apple Macbook Air laptop…

Every year I am swamped with calls from lawn care business owners that talk a good game.

They tell me how “serious” they are about building a real business THIS YEAR… a business that their friends and family don’t laugh at… but instead look to with admiration…

And yet, 12 months later, I get the same call from the same business owner who is still in the same place they were last year because all they do is talk about it…

They never got off their ass and actually did something about it.

I can’t stand that.

But sadly this is the norm.

So, if 2014 is the year, you stop talking and start DOING.

I want to reward you with a brand new Apple Macbook Air…

The rewards will go to the business owners that have experienced the greatest growth in their business by implementing our marketing strategies or even the things you have learned in my videos and podcasts.

I am going to be looking for creative execution and REAL growth… That means you $250,000 a year business owners have just as much of a chance to win as our $10,000,000 a year clients.

To enter you must upload a video to YouTube and email us the link to the video.

The video must contain:

1. The specific strategy or program you implemented or learned from us.
2. The specific way you applied it or put your own unique twist on it.
3. The specific result you got in new clients and/or projected lifetime revenue.

I am super excited about this. And I really hope it motivates you to take action and get results!

Now get to it!

Every 3 months, I dedicate a weekend to get out of town and get away from everything and everyone, lock myself in a hotel and  turn of the phone and reflect on my goals for the past 3 months – what I accomplished and where I have fallen short, the next 3 months steps and brainstorm how I can get my clients even greater results.

So today, I am here alone on beautiful St Maarten today (the dutch side) and when I was having a coffee this morning I realized what I want to do for you this yearÉ

This year, I want to give you a brand new top of the line Apple MacBook Air.

In a minute, I will tell you how to get but first let me tell you why I’m doing this…

I want to give back to my awesome clients and supporters that are responsible for our successÉ if it wasn’t for you I would not be where I am today. No question about it.

So thank you for investing your time and trust in me. I don’t take it for granted.

I do this because I love marketing, I love helping others grow their businesses and I love inspiring and being inspired by other successful entrepreneurs.

Now as you know, the difference between the wantreprenuers (who dream of a million dollar business) and those cant be stopped entrepreneurs (who do whatever it takes to get there) Ð is consistently taking action Ð of executing day after day Ð one foot in front of the other.

When they see a good idea, they implement it immediately. They don’t just sit around and talk about it. One day, someday, I will get to it.

I hate that!

So this year I want to reward the doers. The action takers, the entrepreneurs that cannot be stopped. The business owners, who when they hear a good idea – they get off their ass and immediately go and make it happen.

I want to reward you. Your success inspires me.

You success keeps me up at night contemplating how I can help you get even greater results.

So here is what I am going to do.

I am going to give out 3 prizes this year and one great big grand prize in November.

And any one who knows me, know that I am a bit of a tech geek so I don’t give shitty prizes. You are gonna love em.

In fact at the end of the year. I am going to be giving one great big grand prize and that is a brand new top of the line Apple MacBook Air.

Im going to buy you the newest most bad ass, top of the line new model of the year.

Heck, I don’t even have one!

That’s a one thousand five hundred dollar fully loaded computer –  on me!

So, to get this reward, You don’t even have to be in my coaching program, be a client or ever pay me a dime,

You simply need to be a doer that gets results.

So here is what you have to do.

The rewards will go to the business owners that have experienced the greatest growth in their business by implementing our marketing strategies or even the things you have learned in my videos and podcasts.

I want all of you creative entrepreneurs to really shine here.

What did you change or implement in your business and what results did you get?

So to enter you must upload a video to youtube and email us the link to the video.

To enter you must upload a video to YouTube and email us the link to the video.

The video must contain:

1. The specific strategy or program you implemented or learned from us.
2. The specific way you applied it or put your own unique twist on it.
3. The specific result you got in new clients and/or projected lifetime revenue.

I am super excited about this. And I really hope it motivates you to take action and get results!

Now get to it!

There is always room to innovate, even when consumers see your product or service as a commodity.

Often times, there is even room for a high end premium priced product or service in the same market…

If you aren’t offering a high end premium priced product or service to your market, you may be leaving money on the table.

Today’s video is a little bit different than previous episodes… Oh and it features Rihanna and Jay Z?

Today we need to talk about a very serious topic…

Something near and dear to my heart… and that is… SOOOOOOOOCKS!

Yes that’s right… Stance Socks… this sock company was Cofounded by the CEO of Skullcandy who you may have heard of… they make earbuds and consumer audio products.

And the reason we are talking about them, is because these socks have defined a new higher end category in the sock market…

I cant believe I just said sock market…. But bare with me…

15 bucks 1 pair instead of 20 pairs of boring white socks at your friendly neighborhood target.

So… why are they so expensive… well they are unique because of their Crazy designs, very comfortable and well-built. They last a long time… most of all… there are styles for everyone…
Maybe you’re a patriot
Maybe your Rastafarian
Maybe you love punk
Maybe you’re a middle aged man that still hangs onto his teenage skate board punk rock years
Whatever the case, There is a pair that captures your personality.
Many of their socks match while not matching…

This is a pair… this is another pair…

So why am I talking about socks…

Well, it illustrates… that there is always room to innovate even in seemingly boring industries.
This the first brand to make freaky socks a thing.
Previously you have companies all white, all brown, black blue, maybe some argyle.
Yet now one had gone this far yet… and know several companies have since started copying them…
Look at your product offering. Look at the services your offer.
How can innovate in your market? What can you do differently?

They have real Personality… how can you bring  personality into your business?
It is so powerful when consumers can connect with your company and what you sell. Apple is great at this too.
Jay z is Raping about the brand on the radio.
You have Rihanna wearing them half naked in a magazine.
consumers love companies and products that have personality, that are unique, that are fun and easy to do business with.

As a service provider they are still hiring you and your people at the end of the day not your logo.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get on video like I do to promote your brand, but it many many cases I recommend that you do. The personality of your team can come through the market in other ways as well.
In How you communicate with your market.
In Your marketing message – Your imagery and your text express your attitude and personality.

And finally… what High end offering can you sell to your market?
Always have premium priced offering. not just one plan or product that serves everyone.

in many cases 3 levels of service work well.

So, If your offering lawn treatments. Do just have one plan? If you do, you should Have multiple levels with different service At different price points.

If your offering lawn care maintenance have a premium maintence package that includes refreshing the mulch, seasonal installs of plants. Something more that just cutting. What premium priced packaged offering will your market be interested in.

If you apply the 80-20 rule to your service or product offering there is always a percentage of your customer base that will purchase a premium priced offering.
Determine what yours is and offer it to the market.

Get to it.

Its come up twice on coaching calls I’ve had with lawn care businesses this week.

How should a lawn business properly configure their phones, so they have the greatest flexibility as they grow in the the future?

First – Approach everything you do in your business with the goal to create a solid foundation for the multi-million dollar lawn care company you are working to build.

That means doing several things right from the beginning, Lets just talk about one for now.

That is setting up your phone correctly.

1. Don’t use your cell phone number as your business line. In fact, I would not give this number out to clients for the simple fact that they will call it if you give it to them.
2. Purchase an easy to remember number such as 555-mow-lawn or something consumer can see on your truck or marketing piece for a split second and remember. A google search will turn up many companies that can do this.
3. Use a virtual phone service to handle call routing and overflow. I recommend Google Voice if your deadbroke (its free) or Ring Central if you want a more robust solution with more control such as forwarding to a receptionist or your cellphone in the field.
a. Paid solutions such as Ring Central have more features such as automatically forwarding calls to a different number after a specific number of rings.
b. Where as Google voice is limited to manually switching call forwarding.

Doing this right from the beginning will eliminate wasted time and money from having to redo marketing pieces and avoid changing phone numbers in the future.

For many lawn care businesses their entire social media marketing strategy consists of posting a few photos of their work and maybe some random tidbits, here and there…

The painful truth…  that most social media marketers won’t tell you is that less than 10% of your posts are ever going to be seen! And 97% of your followers will never visit your lawn care business’s Facebook page again once they like it!

Unless you…

The Number One Facebook Marketing Myth You Need to Know is that there is no cost associated with marketing your business on Facebook. And just by posting you will reach all of your followers.

That is simply not the case.

You have to invest time AND money.

The fact that most social media companies don’t tell you is that Less than 10% of your posts are ever going to be seen. 97% of your followers will never visit your Facebook business page again once they like it.

Facebook is an advertising platform you have to pay to play.

These are the facts. And most likely no one selling you an expensive social media plan has ever bothered to mention them to you.

There are two ways to get your post seen…

Boosting posts (essentially turning them into ads that stay visible at the top of the newsfeed or in the sidebar) or posting stories that get more engagement then everyone else in your followers newsfeed.

By engagment, I mean; more likes, comments and shares.

Facebooks’ EdgeRank algorithm rewards the more popular posts by keeping them in the top of your followers news fee longer. They also continue to tweak it, deciding just how many of your posts get buried vs rise to the top.

It important that you understand this, because the common myth is you can just post and have a successful strategy. When the opposite is true… If you just post without posting compelling content that your followers don’t like, comment on or share, then you are probably wasting time.

And this is why the majority of companies out there spending money and time on social media, do not have a positive ROI to show for it.

And If you arent generating a return on your social media budget. It’s a vanity program.

So to overcome your posts not being seen by your followers you can do too things:
1. Promote your posts. “PAY”
2. Spend MORE TIME (which is money) creating compelling content that engages your followers.

For many smaller businesses you will probably be doing a combination of both.

Paying to get posts in front of your followers and developing excellent content your followers like share comment on.

Now get to it!

It matters what specifically is being done for Search Engine Optimization. Every single company does things differently. If they do the wrong things, then there is a very real chance you will never have any significant rank.

It depends.

What specific keyphrase are you trying to rank for? A local service you provide?
A product you sell nationally?

So competition for the phrase matters.
Are there a lot of companies competing to rank for that phrase?
If there are it is going to take longer to slowly build enough links to outrank them.

if you are trying to rank on a national or global scale with lots of companies competing for that one phrase, for a general product search “motorcycles” for example, it very well might not be practical to target that specific phrase as the investment might not be justifiable. You may want to look at targeting more specific less competitive related phrases and consider implementing additional strategies such as content marketing, PPC and social to bring leads to your site.

Google also considers how long your site has been online. The newer the site the longer it takes to rank, which is why I always recommend companies get something up on their domain as quickly as possible.

next, it also matters what specifically is being done for seo. Every single company does things differently. If they do the wrong things, then there is a very real chance you will never rank.

Most just do the easy stuff. Change some title tags and add a meta description. Others modify the underlying site code, internal linking structure, sitemaps and more. We go through a checklist of over 500 items that we modify for our clients sites. I don’t know any company that goes to that extreme. So a lot is riding on whether or not your seo company knows what it is doing. Sadly, most seo companies are just website designers that call themselves seo companies, cant get results and ultimately have no business offering seo.

In local search markets with little competition you can sometimes do just on page optimization and have that one page rank well for one keyword. however, seo strategy should never be about just ranking for one individual keyphrase.

Outside what is on your website. 75-80% of how you rank is in who is linking to you and how are they linking to you. And it is this key area that most SEO companies fall short on.

Additional factors are how many social likes and shares do your pages get and is new content being added to your site on a regular basis? This will add additional pages to your site and increase your rankability within Google.

With proper execution and lots of hard work, good results can be achieved.

There are many unscrupulous SEO companies out there that will guarantee that they can get you front page positioning within a week or two. That should raise a big red flag with you. They are intentionally misleading you into believing PPC is SEO, paid ads that appear at the top of google have nothing to do with SEO and bring in less leads than top ranking optimized webpages. It is however an excellent supplement to a strong SEO program.

So to recap. Unfotunately, everything depends on the keyphrase you choose to target, the company you chose to perform the SEO and the size of your seo budget. The larger the budget the more man hours they can dedicate to getting your site to rank, the quicker it happens. If you are targetting lawn care toronto and you only have a $600 budget its obviously going to take twice as long to hit number one than if you have a $1200 budget. It is really that simple.

We have never come across any market where top rankings could not be achieved with our proper Search engine optimization techniques.

Need help with optimizing your custom lawn care website for you market. Give us a call at 786.309.7898.