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welcome back to Callahan’s Corner if you have some questions we have some live right here on Facebook um came coming out of the gate here uh
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beginning of the week wanted to bring Dylan on with me here to actually talk about this pre-submitted question
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um and said hey Mike what are the tactics and strategies we should be employing in our service business particularly this gentleman’s lawn care
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business as we’re going to the end of the season when we’ve got two and a half to three months left
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um Dylan obviously um has great industry experience believe it or not if you haven’t met Dylan Dylan
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was actually one of the first simple growth clients in about the first uh running a very very successful company
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up in Sudbury Ontario so I want to bring Dylan in for some insight of what we need to be doing at the end of the year
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push um Dylan if people haven’t met you before if you don’t mind just spending a few minutes kind of giving you a little
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background on uh maximum lawn care and kind of how you cut your teeth in the lawn care Edition then we’re going to jump into this pre-submitted question
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um but man the timing of this this question was absolutely perfect in my opinion yeah yeah it’s a good time to
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think about it whether or not you’re just in the lawn care industry and your season’s kind of wrapping up or if you’re in the snow removal industry
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you’re probably in the thick of it right now um so that’s kind of where a good portion of my experience lies uh is in
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the snow removal industry itself uh Northern Ontario we got our fair share of snow that’s for sure but from about
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2011 to 2019 I had a lawn care and snow removal Business Like Mike said
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and ended up growing it uh about 100 year over year for the last three years
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after we were pretty sizable size already and that uh really explosive growth kind
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of caught the eye of my biggest competitor in town and uh in 2019 at the
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age of maybe 28 or 29 my business got Acquired and uh started to help other
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businesses through simple growth after that so that’s as you say how I cut my teeth in the lawn care industry awesome
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appreciate that intro I know a lot of a lot of folks here own lawn care companies and while they’re maybe at a
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half million 250 or made that plunge the seven figures and Beyond uh one of the things at least in my business in the
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early years for sure uh so we really got things dialed in is is we would go into the end of August beginning of September
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somewhere in that range and the tendency Dylan really is to let your foot off the gas pedal of the business we’re at least
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in my opinion that uh one of the critical mistakes we made in my business when we actually let off the accelerator
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in the business near August September beginning of October is financially that business has recovered 99 of the fixed
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General administrative costs the overhead to be recovered had been recovered so any additional piece of
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sales that we could actually go in and build going into Q4 in the later part of
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Q3 literally had a net bottom line profit so really if you’re looking at your your business right now uh some
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areas of the country extremely wet some areas extremely dry where it looks like straw out there not grass and all parts
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in between it’s been a really really Dynamic year this year across the U.S and Canada for seasonality and weather
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so given the stress of all the chaos with the weather and the hiring firing
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the labor situation I think the tendency at least for most business owners including myself in the early days was man I survived another season we made
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some money let’s just get ready for the snow removal season or going bi-weekly every three weeks depending on our Market
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and leave it where it is um but what I can tell you is record-breaking years in my opinion have
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been made and lost in the last two to three months of the season so uh Dylan I know you brought together a um a couple
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slides you maybe you want we’re going to look at and kind of break down some things that you should be doing in your business not to hit hit the pause button
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to actually go out and actually uh double down and create those bottom line profits but if you’re just joining us we
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had a question submitted um and the gentleman wanted to know what should I be doing to finish the
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year for Success um and what we’re trying to do is really go in and uh line that in Dylan I can
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pull the screen up there in a minute for you right now it looks oh perfect I’ll grab it for in a second but right now
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um the thing is that you don’t want to pause and this gentleman’s question I believe his name is Mark uh the question
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he really asked is like what do we do what are the Tactical things I can do um not just Theory but I want to show
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you some tactical things that you can do in your business starting today to drive bottom line profits and set yourself up
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for success and the other thing that isn’t is a a beneficial effect that I’m
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seeing Dylan especially in my company is when we have this end of the year push
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it is going to actually create better employee retention because in effect when you start to let off that gas pedal
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the hours start to shift um not in a good way so your employees aren’t getting 35 40 hours a week of
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their overtime um and there appears to be a lack of work and maybe a lack of success in the
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business um so what you’re doing is almost like really creating a really negative bad taste in your employee’s mouth at the
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end because hey if they’re not going uh to work all winter and they’re going unemployment or they’re going to every two to three week schedule tools we need
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to Double Down The Profit in the company and the ability for them to work and actually have a good positive view of
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your company as far as a cash flow and pay pay before we get into the season I don’t know if that makes sense Dylan but
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that that’s something that it’s not just an adverse effective profit that I’m seeing but it could be an adverse effect of your staff uh in the office and
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literally in the field for sure no it is a good point I mean literally just having a fast growing or
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significantly growing company in general actually does attract
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not only good employees but just more interest than employees in general I mean we would have people that would
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come and they’d say oh we saw your trucks around like we see them everywhere and we ended up people just walk in the door and ask for a job all
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the time I don’t think that’s happening if you’re at a company that’s declining and um
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you know kind of seen as a diminishing no not at all I’m going to pop myself on and off here real quick Dylan just so I
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can get this sentence so people can see the larger view here so I’ll be back on a second on the video yep no worries
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all right and I can do the same thing for you and we should be good to go hold on one second
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magic of Facebook live I don’t know if that’s better but it’s there so we can at least kind of see it so I can zoom in
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a little bit too um so many people might have actually seen this slide before and this is like
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our automation system whether you’re doing it automated or manual really it doesn’t matter as long as it gets done
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um yes we are we obviously recommend automations but it’s not absolutely mandatory
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um some of the big things I see some of the lawn care guys specifically like if you only do summer Services uh sometimes
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these guys are the biggest culprits of like oh my season’s ending I’m going to have a slow season or an off season
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coming up I’m going to just literally ride into the sunset and not do anything towards the end of the season except for
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the services that I’ve already sold in my opinion that is a huge mistake the
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big even if you just do weed control fertilization as an example the big franchise is the weed man the True Green
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do you really think that come September 1st that they’re a sales team and their
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offices are just kind of sitting there twiddling their thumbs doing nothing no obviously is the answer
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this fall season is probably their Peak sale season and I’m not talking about selling new Services I’m also talking
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about just renewing their current customers so anybody who’s just waiting for the
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spring rush to hit to have their Peak sale season you are potentially just
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speaking to kind of like the bottom of the barrel customers all the good customers are probably renewed already
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and locked into a contract with some of these larger firms so just to kind of further your point Mike you do need to
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have your foot on the gas pedal in these fall months in order to take those great
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customers from a company that like TruGreen that they might not even be happy with potentially
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so you go to get to them while um while they’re going as hard and a couple of the key things that I’ll just kind of
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mention at a high level and then we can dive into it is if you are not doing and we’ve we’ve kind of talked about this
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many times but if you are not doing estimate follow-up right now on any of your new quotes whether that’s renewals or actual estimates you need to be doing
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that and you need to have a regimented system for it I see people let their
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foot off the gas when it comes to estimate follow-up as well right now where they’ll they might have had a
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great process in the spring when they were really gung-ho about it but now they just do not care and they will send
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out an estimate and just if if the customer wants it they’ll get back to me when as you know Mike that’s just not
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the case I think there’s some stats out there that say 80 of all sales are made after five touch points yeah and that’s
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that’s great points I want to Circle back to you let’s see what’s up to Josh Owens great Point obviously Dylan had there so what’s up Josh appreciate you
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joining us on the live stream here uh but to kind of circle back to that that the big companies the companies are being successful they’re making they’re
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making their season in the fall uh the big winners not even the franchise is like the true greens and in those
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um but there’s there’s one company particular in my area one step that was just dominating the fertilization Market they were doing the same exact thing so
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it’s not just the national Brands but the dominating local Brands such as Garrett Matthews uh Matthews tree and
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passed down to Shreveport Louisiana one of our Mastermind is simple growth coaches as well well um he’s doing these
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same exact things so it’s not just something that we’re talking about the companies that we’re working the coaches that are on our team uh in their
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businesses right now are actually doing the stuff they’re not preaching it so they’re huge huge bottom line profits
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and I think one of the things that we see a lot in the lawn care industry and I want to touch on that estimated follow-up or we call it 20 days to close
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but it’s really the secret sauce is going out of five or more communication points over different communication
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channels so the big ones you’re going to be looking at whether automated or manual is going to be phone call text
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message and email and the key there A lot of times if people are kind of going in and Dylan uh
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you’ve probably heard the terminology but used to drive me nuts you know we can’t compete with low ball competition
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the low ballers are winning it it’s impossible to comp compete in here um some of the things that I saw like in
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my local market a couple guys thought I was a low baller we were we actually sold the company we were charging as
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much if not more than some of the companies the company that bought us out in certain areas but that perception of
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the low baller kicking your tail around the place and not being able to compete what if that low baller really isn’t a
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low baller they’re actually priced more than you in the market but they’re showing up consistently each and every
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time on these estimates five or more times so before you start blaming the low baller and there’s trust me there’s
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some low ballers out there I will call you out by person but you know my Mark and I know who you are but anyways we we
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may not be the low baller but it may be these companies that you may think are a little while are consistently showing up
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five or more times and if you’re not following up five or more times you’re losing 80 percent of the sales of your
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Market to the guy or girl down the street so that may be the problem but when we automate this system the key if
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you’re doing this yourself is make it personalized but automated we want to build in some scarcity and some urgency
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so scarcity in the beginning is hey our spots are filling up quick for the season here let me know if you want me to save your spot and at the end right
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around 20 to 21 days do I have permission to close out your estimate um because basically the consumer is not
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going to want to go through that estimating process again um so scarcity urgency see
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um that will be in there and really don’t make those those emails the text messages look automated uh literally
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make them look personal like a real person sent it because you trust me as you’re scrolling through Facebook your eyes for sure know what an ad looks like
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uh same idea when they’re looking at email or text messaging um obviously not the phone call but
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they’re going to look at that and it’s going to feel um automated so we need to make it look personal feel personal and that’s going
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to convert better and the final thing Dylan here I want to talk about about this process is a lot of folks are like
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well I don’t have time to send a make a phone call to follow up these or I just don’t want to talk to the potential client which is crazy in my mind but if
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you don’t we can go in or you can go in and create a system with a ringless voicemail bomb
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and this is where we create personalization through automation so literally the it rings the cell phone on file looks like a missed call
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automatically it’s a pre-recorded message hey it’s Mike from Callahan’s lawn care so sorry I missed you found up
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the estimate I dropped off a day ago if you have any questions call me back at this number otherwise feel free to
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accept the online as we sent you now I don’t know any lawn care company around outside of the people using our
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automations right now that are using a ringless voicemail bomb to follow up an estimate with a personalized but automated message and when the
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automation’s set up correctly it literally can be one day after you dropped it off but those are the keys to
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success um where if you’re not doing those things that’s time to start doubling down folks in this fall season this
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could be big big bottom line profits that transition to next year’s big big bottom line profits and you’re going to
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start taking those people off the market yeah and there just needs to be a little bit of aggressiveness with it right I
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I’ve heard from companies oh yeah we’re doing our renewals and uh yeah we’ve got a good portion of them renewed but no no
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real urgency to it like implementing a system like this where even on renewals for example if you’re a fertilization
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company you’ve sent out your prepaid letters for next year I mean you should be following up on those aggressively as
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well don’t wait for those to be in the spring when you’re already busy with all your spring work get those done now so
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in the spring you can just talk to new leads all of your current and past leads have already been spoken to and signed
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up or not signed up but you’ve reached a conclusion with them how much easier is your spring Rush
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going to be if all your clients are already taken care of scheduled you know you’ve got payment for them everything
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yeah and as you’re doing that Dylan you’re forecasting right we’re hoping you’re forecasting at least so our last masterminds event uh in Nashville where
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we actually started to Workshop some of this client acquisition and renewal process on the wall
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um it would be very insightful as a kpi or key performance indicator to go okay
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if I need to sell 250 new lawn mowing clients
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um to grow and hit my goal the numbers we aren’t looking at as a business owner traditionally is number one was my
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attrition or my cancellation so if you’re losing 10 or 15 of your client base every year you’ve got to add that
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on top of the 250 to hit your goal or at least get that to stay the same size and
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then once again we have that attrition and non-renewal sign up static numbers
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so now when we’re hiring those a players on our team they have a scorecard they
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know where where they’re at and they know what winning looks like and they know if they’re winning or losing so we can create accountability through key
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performance indicators to drive those data but if you’re not tracking and hopefully renewing all those up before
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the spring season you know what’s really up against it otherwise it’s really it’s crazy I mean I’m at 1.5 million this
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year and I want to hit 2 million and we’re going to hit that and you don’t track anything but then when November
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December rolls around the next month next year you’re like huh yeah we we did a little over 1.5 we never hit 2 million
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but the reason why you didn’t hit is you’re not tracking on a weekly monthly basis with accountability and Clarity
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and letting your team know who’s winning and losing um so not only for the clarity and tracking but what Dylan’s saying is like
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you really need to get this done and up front so you know what is actually ahead of you for the next year to actually hit
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those goals um and then we get a Cadence to track it because this saying you’re going to do it is not enough as we all know yeah and
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I guess one last point on this it gets exponentially worse if you’re not following up on your leads if you’re
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also paying for your liens so if these are just like organic leads that are coming in and and you know whatever
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still bad not to follow up with them but if you’re using like a marketing agency and you’re still not following up on all
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your leads then you’re literally just throwing money down the down the drain so
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I I think we’ve we’ve hit on that one probably enough another major thing that you should be doing in season I.E right
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now um is obtaining reviews from your customer you are going to get a lot better
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response rate and that’s kind of what’s handled if you have any of our automations through the five-star review
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Automation and cancellation risk report uh kind of a little combined package
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there but if you send out this email let’s say you finish in September with your last application maybe October you wait till
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December or January to send out an email to all your customers and say hey how did we do leave us a review you know
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we’re trying to get reviews in preparation for our spring Rush I mean if I’m your customer I’m probably
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not responding to that it it’s been so long since the hopefully good service
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happened that I have no I feel no attachment to it versus if you’re
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sending it out right now if you just put down your last application or you’re doing your lawn mowing whatever that
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might be send out the survey request while it’s fresh whether you’re sending it up manually or through an Automation
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and let’s not only try to Foster more five-star reviews but also Mike I know
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you spoke about attrition rate you also need to see which customers are potentially a Flight Risk if you haven’t
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done this at least a couple times this year I highly highly recommend doing it even though sometimes the answers can be
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a little scary and they might expose some things that you never really wanted to hear about your company at least
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you’re going to know and you can focus on some of these customers who might be a little pissed off at you for whatever
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reason rather than doing see some guys that have multiple people doing quality
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control they have guys and trucks going around checking every single property I say have you surveyed any of your
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customers to see if those customers are really happy with you or not so happy and they say well no I haven’t done it
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well if you survey your customers and figure out which customers are actually truly not happy wouldn’t it be better to
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focus some of that attention and some of that labor towards the customers that truly aren’t happy and you actually go knock on the door and spend a little bit
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of time with each of those customers I can almost guarantee you that expending that little bit of Labor is going to go
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a hundred times farther than you know just doing blanket quality control for customers who might be really happy with
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you does that make sense makes complete sense at the end of this year Dylan I I might even uh we have a few minutes I
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might pull up the the scorecard that was actually developed by one of our coaches Garrett Matthews but it really attracts
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all these stats um it is something we use with a lot of our coaching clients as well but it really it’s dialing into
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all the parts of like what you’re talking about so in the beginning how many leads to clients conversion ratio
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what are the annual sales and how are we projecting where are we going and then literally you nailed it customer
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satisfaction through attrition we track that and then what we’re able to do is track some other things as far as
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indirect and direct costs versus labor and office staff not exactly what you’re talking about there but it kind of all
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comes together in one picture when you’ve done this and you start pushing the gas or pulling the levers on one or
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two of these things the sheet actually shows you how big of a company you can actually grow so we’ve got a few minutes at the end I’ll pull that up because
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it’s really interesting like if you just literally went through just and grab this one customer satisfaction piece I
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can show you how you can go from about 750 000 in sales as the biggest you’ll ever get by just cutting that down to 20
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to 25 which I still think is the high side you could have a 1.5 to 1.7 million
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dollar Company by doing nothing but literally sending the survey out and attacking the quality and customer service issues such a big win and like
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literally you can almost double the size your business just by that one little piece yeah um and we always talk about sales being like the sexiest part
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um don’t get me wrong I love sales we need sales it grows it but really where the money is
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um if you have a larger company is literally churn reduction or cancer
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reduction and then when you do that and you add the sales on top of it that’s how you build it’s an award-winning
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company but you don’t want to forget about this survey and quality piece because that once you get them in the
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door we don’t want them have a leave in just as quick as we’re pumping new ones in so it’s a nice balance of bottom to
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top of line funnel yeah and ultimately um getting back to the review front you
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just you want people to leave a review shortly after they’re happy with your service so just even if you’re sending
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out an email manually right now just get it out shortly after your last service is performed at a bare minimum ideally
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once a month or once a quarter and I think you’ll see the amount of public
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reviews on Google or Facebook that you get be astronomically higher than if you wait a month or two after your season
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ends and then you send it out yeah and that’s in the way we we tackle it if you’re building this yourself this is how I would recommend it but through
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that social review we’re using an MPS score it’s a net promoter score that’s one to ten uh nine nine and ten is a
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promoter and it goes a neutral and detractor uh but what we segmented is basically the ability to look Anonymous
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when they they give you this review or feedback but actually it goes into your CRM such as like service autopilot you
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can see all your promoters neutrals and detractors and you can go in and those neutrals are going to be easiest people
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to get in to be promoters usually it’s just something really stupid like hey they’re not blowing off the patio once
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every month when they’re cutting the lawn four or five times a week or a month so like literally just a quick little tweak you fix it and then you
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follow up on it you brought them up but those are going to be big big bottom line effects to your social reviews on
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like Facebook Yelp Google as well as your retention so you could take maybe a three year retention on
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average for clients and compound that out to maybe five years but if your client’s worth two thousand dollars a
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year on average you’ve added another four thousand dollars worth of Revenue um by literally just doing one simple
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process here you know no that’s a great Point um so the next thing would be focusing
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on crew upsells and when I say corrupt cells I don’t mean having your crew go knock on the door and try to sell
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services for you what I mean is have them be your eyes and ears out in the field if you have five lawn mowing crews
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out these guys are out on the properties every week or every two weeks they should be noticing as long as they’re
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trained by you they should be noticing other upsell opportunities while they’re out there on the property so especially
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with like a five crew company or even one or two Crews if you’re cutting 20 25
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Lawns a day let’s say times five days a week that should that’s a lot of properties that you’ve
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stepped foot on that you should be able to recognize an opportunity at at least
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maybe 10 of those properties so I would kind of challenge you if you have even one crew has that crew produced 10
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opportunities for you this week if they haven’t there’s probably something there that could be nurtured a little bit
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where you could train your Crews to better detect some of these issues such as uh
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bushes that need to be trimmed a little bit or mulch beds that could use some replenishment flowers that are just
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totally dead and need to be replaced there’s numerous activities um you know Lawns that are looking a
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little thin that could maybe benefit from aeration overseed that was probably the most simple and successful kind of
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crew upsell that we ran at my company where every lawn could be improved upon so really almost every lawn could use an
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aeration and overseeding did everyone 100 need it maybe not but most of them could use it so we actually had a system
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set up where some of these responses based on our crews detecting some of
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these issues would actually go to the clients now I don’t recommend that for everybody you have to really trust your Crews but it was really interesting we
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would actually have some clients call us and say hey I saw the recommendation that I that I need an aeration and an
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overseeding what’s the cost for that as long as the price was reasonable they would basically say sign me up when can
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you do that so they were actually calling in and almost closing the deal themselves by seeing the survey response and you know
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inquiring in our office awesome so it looks like as we’re scrolling to the right of that uh form
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there Dylan it looks like we we’ve got uh potentially the last piece there uh is is actually the same thing as upsells
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and it’s if I’m looking at a company a lot of times I’m looking at uh a couple different upsells the first of which is
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usually a one-time service to reoccurring so if we sign up for a spring cleanup or a fall cleanup and
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they haven’t had a reoccurring service we’re going to automatically go out and re uh re-up those um can you imagine speaking about just
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the normal upsell process so traditionally we recommend five to eight upsells throughout the uh the selling
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feeder um they’re traditionally based around the pain point of that season um how do you recommend doing that to
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really put that foot down and with our upsells uh that we’re seeing is about 60 to 80 estimate requests in the first 24
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to 48 hours so man that influx there can can be a massive massive
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um bottom line profit whether it’s holiday lights or aeration and overseeing big profits but this is where this is where
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the big companies are making a difference here at the end yeah and that’s really what kicked off my snow sail season back when I had
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these automations was literally in August no one was expecting it no one in my market was selling residential snow
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that early but like I think it was August 10th was our first snow removal upsell uh point of contact and through
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this automation it would literally go to everybody in our database who didn’t
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have that service currently so clients that didn’t have that service and leads who didn’t have any service with us so
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that was all done completely automated I didn’t have to filter anything and what would happen is it was basically a
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one-click upsell so we weren’t sending people to a landing page where they had to type in a bunch of information and do
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all this stuff we already had a lot of their information so when we sent out this upsell to them they literally just
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needed to click one hyperlink or button in the actual email or text message itself and we were
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alerted that you know Mrs Jones wanted a quote for our main service was called tractor snow blowing so instantly we
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would pick up the phone because we knew that that customer was either probably had their phone in their hand or was on
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their computer and we would call them we’d get them a live quote for it and 50 of the time we’d be taking our credit
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card right there and processing the payment so that’s kind of an overview of how the upsell campaigns actually work
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um does that make sense Mike yeah it makes complete sense and honestly as we’re looking at this here
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um and basically we’re diving in to that process um we’re really looking at six steps in
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a business here and the first of which that we’re always looking at is Step One is to actually buy some time back and
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organize your time and that’s where we should be working on the business not in it as Michael Gerber says we recommend
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up to four hours a week so that’s where we’re gonna get really strategic and where we start building out the systems
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and processes to do just exactly what Dylan’s Dylan’s talking about um and we’re going to go out and nail
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each one of those parts of the business as we’re going a little bit forward here uh the next thing we want to do is
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actually get our financial house in order the business finances and make sure the personal finances are in order to the fact that they’re not robbing for
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the business now step three is where it gets interesting we want to build a simple business so as we’re building
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this simple business you probably want to take this up to at least 1.5 million or so maybe a little bit higher but a
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core group of services so as Dylan’s talking about these upsells and the follow-up estimates we’re going to look
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at a select group of services so in Dylan’s example we’ve got mowing fertilization maybe perimeter Pest and
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for the winter snow removal but we’ve got different Services now that we can continue to offer and upsell across
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these simple services so for fertix there depending on licensing they can do perimeter pests they can do mosquito
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control they can do fire ant control grub control aeration and overseeing but we’re looking at services that can cross
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out the same visit to the same client so we can start to double and triple that business now the thing we don’t talk a
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lot about it step three is really if I’m diving in as a business owner and expert is we’re to create a simple business
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with simple offerings that can be run without the business owner but this is where we really go in and we organize the business
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we delegate and the last part is to automate so we need to figure out a manual process and
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be able to delegate it somebody and eventually be able to automate it so that’s kind of the key part there next thing is step four is we’re going to go
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in and hire key players to handle this growth number five is our marketing acquisition so actually to go out and
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get new clients but we’re talking about here with the exception the estimate upsell is actually expanding on your
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order your current client base because near the end of the year we’re not going to go out and get a whole bunch of new clients unless they’re probably in your
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software your CRM customer relationship management software so we’re going to work that database that leads clients
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and cancel clients through this process Dylan’s talking about and then the sixth and final step is leadership so that
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million Mark and Beyond we need to actually become the leader we need to be to get to 1.5 and 2 million because I will tell you right now 99 of the people
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including myself the leader we are at 750 or a million is not the leader we need to be at two five or ten million up
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and above but those are kind of the six steps but Dylan’s really diving in is we’ve gotten to step three hopefully we’ve created this simple business how
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do we use these systems to organize delegate and then eventually automate
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Dylan off that makes sense but like huge huge huge value just brought today breaking in the estimate follow-up the
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client survey basically for customer satisfaction reducing the cancellation and then upselling empowering the crews
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and upselling through the seasonality yeah no that that all makes sense and I
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I would just highlight like if I’m going to focus on any of these um especially if you’re like I’ve done
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some of these already and you know which one should I really really try I’m already doing estimate follow-up let’s
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say I would really say that the thing that’ll probably pay you the most dividends in the long run is actually
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training your cruise and setting up a system that’ll recognize upsells in the
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field I mean from a percentage of closed proposals we would almost cause about 75 percent
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of the upsells that the crews notice because the customer already knows likes trusts you hopefully anyways
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um so when you call I always use the the kind of adage of if you have like a furnace or an AC repair person at your
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house and they make make a recommendation let’s say you’re out they give you a call hey you got to replace this
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nine times out of ten you’re not going and getting another quote for it you’re saying if it needs it just do it um you
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know I trust you you’re already there and that’s the same thing with this crew up so and then if you can automate the
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the process even better but even if you’re doing it manually I think that’s the one that could pay hundreds and
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hundreds of thousands of dollars of dividends and it’s probably the one that is most likely people are not currently
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doing yeah and I don’t want to muddy the waters here but I think I can over provide here um just a little bit I’m gonna share my
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screen here Dylan if it if it’s okay with you but ought to put put some some preface to what I’m going to show here
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real quick and to pull everything together what Dylan’s doing um we just had five actually six companies now from our scale group our
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sub million dollar Consulting Group um that have now used the automated process they’ve gone through the six steps
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they’ve gotten through at least four or five of those steps uh we just talked about and they started out at half a
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million to three quarters a million and they blast in the last six or seven uh months with a certified seven figure
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coach working with them on a monthly basis but there’s certain metrics we’re tracking to break a million Beyond where
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I’m going with this is if you’re interested feel free to to go to the website
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www.sgscall.com where you can actually meet with myself Dylan or one of our seven figure coaches and for up to an
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hour we’ll give you a free analysis with basically this PDF showing you what’s the next area that you need to focus on
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the double down on your business and it kind of give you an idea of what that potentially could look like here
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is this little guy in the bottom here uh but it’s hard to see right here but in the first upper part here what this is
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and I got to give credit where credit’s due one of our seven figure coaches Garrett Matthews uh came up with this
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amazing scorecard and this score card uh literally is is what they use with the scale coaching uh groups with the
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one-on-one but in this right here the first part I’ve got highlighted up top uh lists all the months and what it does
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is it goes from 2022 to 2023 uh this is an older version for 21 to 2022 but
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basically it’s a rolling 12 and it shows you your sales difference year after year and based on the end of the year
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projections here at the bottom you can actually see your actual um budgeted on a rolling 12 so that’s
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the way we’d approach that but now we’ve got an idea on those monthly sales and what’s going to drive those monthly
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sales is all the things that Dylan just talked about um so on the bottom here I’m going to skip
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the the uh payroll percentages but we look at our client attrition rates so we’re also
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looking this as a rolling 12 so the customer satisfaction that Dylan was talking about we’re pumping in the
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actual cancellations per month and what we’ve got in this fictitious example here is a yearly attrition is 42 percent
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now we’ve seen this as high as 40 with some clients um that you’re just Bleeding Out customers as quick as they come in the
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top but this is a tool that can track that and when you automate that process with the follow-up uh what should
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happens always happens without you or manager somebody in the office being babysat to do it um and then the final thing here is
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Dylan talked about 20 days to close that’s our automated estimate follow-up so on a monthly basis these coaches are
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meeting with these lawn care business owners traditionally submillion but some Beyond a million
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and we’re tracking how many leads how many became a client and the closing ratio and then the yearly difference on
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that rolling 12 from year to year and what their total ad spend is how much are they spending to acquire clients and
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what’s the average cost per lead and then the average cost per client so we’re doing is tracking that close ratio
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so what we’re finding is a massive increase that close ratio when they take
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the automated system that Dylan talked about hitting five or more times on multiple Communication channel so the
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idea is now we put these things into Play We track them we set a goal we create accountability for the business
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owner now the last thing that I recommend looking at before we take a look at just a minor tweak how you can
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go from three quarters a million dollar company almost to 1.5 1.6 which is tweaking one little number is the
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overall percentage of payroll so what is your cost of goods sold for
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direct and indirect labor so your direct labor is the labor in the field indirect is your your office staff or like your
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uh virtual assistant answering the calls now a little gray area there but basically that would be your fixed cost in the office and there’s an industry
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percentages that we want to look at as our cost of goods sold compared to revenue and whether you design build or
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maintenance or fertilization we control these are going to be some averages on a rolling 12 we want to be able to track
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so if you’re within these guidelines you’re okay if not it’s a red flag hey your indirect or your direct cost as a
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percentage of Revenue is off how do we dive in and create the accountability and now that we’ve got this all flushed
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out in this automated system we say okay we want to grow our business so on the
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left here is the actuals up top and let’s see if I can blow this up just a little bit more but this is this is
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honestly this is what these companies are breaking two three to ten million dollars they’re doing
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we’re trying to expose this this Cadence of Data Tracking before we get there and
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that combined with the automated systems that Dylan is showing you allows you that time to grow and scale that
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business but the actual is here is this person’s getting 165 new clients a year on average their attrition rate
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cancellation rates 42 extremely high but not crazy high to some of the companies we’ve seen when we actually track it
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their yearly value for a client is 18 1800 or 1 853 so they’re they’re sealing
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here the biggest they can get is 726 000 now if nothing changes and we add
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another 165 clients here and we drop that cancellation rate down
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to about 20 to 22 percent of where we would probably want to see that on the highest side
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um and these are just minor tweaks we actually had one of our coaching clients that just graduated to the masterminds group that actually had a cancellation
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rate or attrition rate probably close to a little over 40 percent uh but it was just this minor tweet that literally
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allowed him to take his gross ceiling and Jack that up but right now the biggest this company can grow is 726 000
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by just taking that cancellation rate down to 20 through the automated system
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that Dylan’s talking about they now have gone in and given themselves the ability
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to grow to a 1.5 million dollar company so literally almost double actually more
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than double by just literally having one systemated automated process in place and the gentleman I’m talking about uh
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in the masterminds group not just him but several have done this but the one I’m thinking about specifically uh 99 of
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the churn reduction or cancellation was literally through that one simple automated process us that Dylan talked
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about through the MPS to social review so cutting that down from 42 ballpark to 20 he literally had the ability to
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double the size of his business without literally spending any extra money or attention but putting one automated
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system in place so um if you’re not tracking these numbers you’re wondering what are all these numbers that I should be tracking
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um of a quick review of what is the the year the month over month rolling 12
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uh sales goals I should be looking at payroll as a percentage a direct to indirect costs cancellation rates
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clean client account client conversion client cost lead lead count and closing
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count and then finally how would you look at that with your actuals and then if I just change one or two things what
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happens but if we’d cut that cancellation down to 20 and let’s just say each client’s worth eighteen hundred
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dollars and through a simple upsell process we can make each client worth twenty two hundred dollars we went from
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a 726 000 company to 1.8 million by just
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literally adding an extra three to four hundred dollars a year per client on their certain upsell process
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um we traditionally see a go up a lot more at least 50 percent so those are the things that if you’re interested uh
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feel free to hit us up at SGS call.com Dylan myself a one of the seven
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figure business experts will give you a free analysis take a look at where your business is now where you want to go and
38:27
give you a free report of what you need to concentrate on um and if you’re interested we can show
38:32
you what we can do for you otherwise we’re going to give you the road map to actually go out and do what you need to do uh really not a sales pitch we’ve got
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hundreds of businesses have gone through this and half to three quarters um really
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didn’t buy anything but we gave him these executables and lo and behold three to six months later they came back
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to Dylan and said hey what else you got for me um I want to purchase something because the couple things you gave me free on
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the analysis have moved the lever so much in that business um that I trust you I know yeah I like
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it and and I’m not going to try to reinvent the wheel a second time because it worked really well the first time so if you’re looking to see what your
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business needs to do how you can double down on your profits for the end of the season and set yourself up set for
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Success next year really focus on New Growth um and hopefully go in and add 25 to 30
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percent or maybe 50 to your client lifetime value in that example I showed you we went from 750 000 all the way up
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to just under 2 million as a glass growth ceiling just by pulling two minor little levers um and Dylan hit on about
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four or five that you can pull so Dylan I appreciate you joining me here any questions comments or closing thoughts I
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know you’ve got a compressed schedule here uh near the top of the hour that you gotta hop on a call but I want to thank you for coming on and just
39:42
dropping a knowledge Bob and it’s kind of cool because yourself owned a business for a simple real client you sold your business you’re coming to work
39:48
with us to help you know really help business owners take their life back from the business understand this stuff we’ve got Josh Virginia Chad Derek
39:56
several others that all are in the same boat as you they’ve worked for us as a client and then sold the business and
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have come back and actually started working with us so um I’ll let you close it up Josh Owens
40:07
this is great stuff thanks guys Josh thanks for hanging in there dude if you haven’t talked to us yet sgscall.com get
40:14
a free analysis we’re not selling you anything um the value will be there Dylan closing
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thoughts brother yeah that was great uh I guess closing thought would be I know people are
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probably tired a little run down from the season probably the heat of the summer um but yeah just push the last quarter
40:32
and I think you’ll be uh pretty pretty happy come January could agree more entrepreneurship
40:37
especially Lawn Care entrepreneurship very very lonely place you’re not an island you’re not alone we’ve been there
40:42
we still are there with you hey if you need a part-time therapy session sgscall.com at least know where you’re
40:48
at hop on the virtual therapist couch Dylan or one of the seven figure experts will walk to where you’re at where you
40:53
want to be and we’ll give you the next step with some clarity because we’ve been there we get it and we still live it so Callahan’s corner you ask
41:00
questions you Ransom here live on Facebook Dylan will be joining us for some more installment until the next few months uh getting perspective
41:07
um just outside of myself to help answer these live submitted questions feel free to drop any comments or questions down below that uh you want myself Dylan or
41:14
the team of almost 20 plus people now on the simple growth team many have owned
41:19
seven-figure plus lawn care and snow level businesses we’ll see you on the next call hands live