How do I Expand my Lawn Care Business? #1

the next one that I want to talk to you about is its how to right-size your equipment for your business Oh beautiful Josh on the line Josh what's the name of your landscaping company no Josh you email me you said you had two or three questions and I may have two or three answers so let's see what we've got going on what are we going to be talking about today that's a great question every area is different so what you're finding in Iowa may not work in Minnesota and for the people that are watching in the videos if they're in North Carolina Florida Texas there's going to be each area seems to have its own unique personality when it comes to marketing I put out a video on the different methods of marketing and I got responses all over the board where and for me personally I love homeadvisor I absolutely love it and a lot of guys hate it but I was in with homeadvisor way back when they were I don't service magic maybe they're called service man I don't even know what the name of them are now it's either service magic or homeadvisor I don't remember which it is right now I paid between eighteen and fifty dollars per lead and they have a refund policy so if I get a bad lead I know the short steps I can go on my keyboard and I can hit three buttons and I cut and paste the the lead number and I can get a refund on that lead now they may have changed the policy but a lot of guys out there or jumping up and down saying it doesn't work they suck and that may be true for your area especially for lawn care because the the price per lead for lawn care now for landscaping it's great because I paid like I said between eighteen and fifty dollars and I'll get it between an eighteen and a $50,000 lead for landscaping where you're paying ten to fifteen dollars for a lawn care lead and that may end up being a thousand dollars over the course of a summer or five hundred dollars over the course of a summer my personal marketing plan is home advisor serves men whatever it is there's another company out there that does the same thing they're more local and I use them just for demolition leads I also advertise on Angie's List I pay Angie's List a bucket full of money to optimize my listing and I'm one of the top 20 contractors within my certain area or whatever now Angie's List is changing that around for lawn maintenance I go with the free these freebies are Craigslist I'll refresh an ad on a daily basis with Craigslist and I find that also helps with search engine optimization it's a weird weird thing Josh but search engine optimization and Craigslist go almost hand-in-hand that's so powerful where if you just type in lawn maintenance I've had people that have absolutely no websites come up on Google's number-one page because they put so many craigslist ads out that they've literally flooded the area for certain markets and it's great Facebook is another opportunity for you to do you can do both paid advertising you can do free advertising and you can refine this is the beauty but if you do Facebook ads and you want to limit it to a geographical area you can actually refine the parameters to make sure you're not hitting people that live in condominiums or townhome you can hit single single-family home owners with a medial income over whatever whatever the parameters they give you so there is and I've never done Facebook advertising but I've talked to enough people that have done it and have had a high rate of success to say that it's worth time for you guys out there to check into it flyers as well Josh make sure your flyer it up and do a little research on flyers simpler the better it doesn't have to be fancy it doesn't have to be high-gloss it doesn't have to be a lot of these things that a lot of people are putting out there in fact I've interviewed people specifically on this topic more than what Jonathan patashnik the lawn care millionaire I talked at length with him in fact he made a three flyer video on it and what I found was that the simpler the better great geek to freak chisholm he has a video where he just did better he had a high rate of return and I had an opportunity to go to a mastermind conference in Chicago sit in a room full of companies that were all they dwarfed me there was one guy that did 50 million dollars a year in business many of them did 1520 million dollars a year in business and what they found what their flyer design was the rate of return was much higher with a simple letter just a simple letter this as easy as that so there's there's some good marketing tips for you for sure I'm used Craigslist a little bit not a place for it being free I think I've gotten quite a few jobs out of it actually you've used what I'm gonna miss that I'm sorry Josh Franklin honestly for it being free how could it not besides a few minutes of your time just copy and paste create your Craigslist ad on a word template or whatever and then highlight the whole thing copy and paste that maybe you have two three four different types of Craigslist ATS they're not all word of the same have different pictures put them in there but then you can always just refresh the Craigslist ad and you can also refresh it and put new ones in there as well so they're all a little different that'll help you with your search engine optimization and create a Facebook page for your business as well that's a freebie that's like having a website you know but not quite as well you know not quite as official and the next one that I want to talk to you about is how to right-size your equipment for your business Oh beautiful question what are you thinking I think I've had too much equipment remember and you know now I'm thinking so when you say right sighs immediately I start thinking landscaping hardscaping excavating demolition are you more down the lines of lawn maintenance or do you want to go from lawn maintenance into those categories we did a little bit of laundry obviously a regular basis but for sure we do different projects weekly and only hardscaping jobs right well probably more for you know obviously a lawn care setup and then you know what's a good landscaping setup you know criticize a certain business okay that's that's great that's what I wanted to make sure that I was on the right path with my answer for hardscaping landscaping those sort of things if I was going to start all over again the first big piece of equipment I would buy would be a skid loader skid loader has enough different attachments that it can be universally you can begin a set of Forks on it of course you'll have a bucket you can also get a backhoe attachment I don't know how well that'd work on a skid loader I've never personally used one my next piece of equipment would be a mini excavator okay not a big not not the big 18,000 pound 36,000 or 40,000 pound excavators unless unless I had a contract with a home builder to start digging basements for him then I would go into that least the minimum eighteen thousand pound excavator up to a thirty-six thousand pound excavator when you get over 36,000 pounds you're getting more into the larger commercial sites for excavators and you want to be a little careful because a lot of times they use the same power plant they just put a bigger frame around it so the machine feels like a bigger machine but it doesn't have any more power to actually get you around and you really you really need a good balance of a power-to-weight ratio in an excavator because I'll tell you straight up that boom when you're digging you're gonna get yourself in some hairy situations I've done it my operators have done it and there's a lot of times I did it this summer there's a lot of times when you need every ounce of power that machine needs to get yourself out of there and if you've got a weak machine you have less likely to get him out of there safely and securely but to get back very specifically if we're gonna be looking at a bobcat I wouldn't go with your absolute largest or your absolute smallest they make mid-size machines that function just fine and what you want to look at is a midsize machine and you also want to look at how the boom arms come up if they come straight up you're gonna have a difficult time loading dump trucks but if they come up and move out over the machine then you're gonna be able to get over the top of a dump truck so if a dump truck sitting there the Bobcat comes up and the boom arms moves straight up you gotta crawl right up there and a lot of times you dump the dirt right on your own head but if that arms will move up and as they move it moving up they move forward it allows you to get the dirt away from me to dump inside that dump truck I would not go with one of those walk-behind units Josh they're just too small to in effect too inefficient for getting into larger hardscaping projects you can easily rent that stuff and this is where I'm going with this and if you don't know the exact make and model of the equipment that you want to choose you have an idea rent it rent it try it out [Music]