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Welcome to Charged up, the podcast where the cutting edge meets cutting grass. We're diving deep into the electrification and automation revolution, transforming lawn care from the ground up. Whether you're a weekend warrior, a green tech enthusiast, or a landscaping pro, we're here to keep you powered up with the latest in robotic mowers, battery breakthroughs, and the smart tech reshaping your backyard and beyond. Your host, Tim Allard, has over over 15 years in the industry and has been charged up about the electric revolution for years. So plug in, power up, and let's get charged up.

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Hello. Thank you for joining me here on the Charged up podcast. This is your host, Tim Allard. Today is just a solo episode, and it probably won't be a very long one, but one of the things I've really been thinking about lately is efficiencies. You know, we're in the winter season. Things are kind of slow. People are kind of just trying to get things set up as we enter into spring. And up here, looking at the temperatures, we're actually going to see some pretty close to 60s next week, which is pretty impressive. Only being in March, it's kind of nice. I think we're gonna see that snow go away and things are gonna start happening, and we're. We're gonna start to kind of get that. That urge to get out there and start getting things done after. Seems like a long winter. Of course, I think they all seem long. But with that said, I've been sitting here, I've been thinking about a lot of things. Of course, I got a lot of plates spinning, as many of, you know, running multiple businesses and doing different things. But one of the things that really time and again just comes, you know, flooding in, is the lack of efficiencies and whether that is systems, processes, people. I think some of the struggles that we deal with, and many of you probably do, especially those of you that are not, you know, that have employees or that are depending on other people to do what you do. And so it's, you know, where does that. Where does that change? I was talking to my brother yesterday, and he's like, do you think if we had more of us that we just get frustrated with ourselves? You know, and that's really a good question. I mean, it's so we try so hard to put these things in place and go back to, you know, and I've told this to some of you guys that are probably listening. When you're running a solopreneur business, you're out there, the customer's dealing Directly with you, you almost raise the bar too high because then that becomes their expectation. So when you grow to a point where you're trying to get out of the field more, grow the business, and it's not you, maybe you're running one crew and you got a new guy that's running a second crew, we set the bar so high that the expectation. Because then you hear, well, we really liked it when you were here. They don't do it like you did. It's so hard to teach and to get people to understand how crucial certain pieces are, you know, like answering the phone. My goodness. And, and I'm guilty as well, because when you're not near the phone. But what systems can you put in place? I have a retail store that we, that we do screen printing and embroidery. And so my big pet peeve is if I'm sitting here at my desk, I don't necessarily have a phone. It's a landline. We're actually switching to mobiles, which will be great. But when I hear that phone ringing down the hall, I'm like, is anybody going to answer it? And it rings a second time, it rings a third time, it rings and I'm like, oh, my goodness, this is lost opportunity. Because I don't think people understand that if I pick up the phone, you know, whatever, I Google something or look, see, you know, hey, you know, this is what I'm looking for, you know, for that, for this instance. So, hey, I need to get some shirts done, you know, and I Google, you know, T shirt store. Boom. You know, I pick up the phone and I call. Oh, nobody answers. Well, let's just go to the next one. So how many lost opportunities do we have? We have that in the green industry as well. You know, somebody's just move to the area, they're looking for somebody to come cut their grass or, you know, just any industry, any service industry, it doesn't matter if it's screen printing, doesn't matter if it's lawn care, doesn't matter if it's construction, doesn't matter if it's pressure washing, gutter clean, you name it. Any service industry, business, if you have somebody that just moved to town or their old guy went out of business or they're, you know, something happened, we pick up the phone and we call a number. And if that person doesn't answer, or nobody, you know, we don't get a voicemail, we don't get anything, whatever it is, or the voicemail, you know, messages, the, the greeting is, you know, lackluster hey, you've reached Joe's. Leave a message. You know, like, what can we do to make sure we're not losing leads? You know, obviously, like I said, we've just, I just picked up two mobile phones. We're getting rid of the landlines here at the shop. What's going to happen there is if the first one doesn't answer the shop phone, the second one will kick over to me, which will be my phone. I can answer it. At least I can answer it. And there will be a live person on the end of the phone that says, hi, you know, how can I help you? Even if all I can do to help them is take a message, at least now they let they know, hey, I talked to a live person. They took my message. Somebody will get back to you. You said an expectation, you, you at least caught the ball. Whether you run with it is up to you. But now you, you at least caught the ball. And, and it's not like, you know, Joe, customer is ready to throw the ball and he throws it and nobody's there to catch it. Well, he's just going to throw it to the next business service provider that he sees. And so I think these are things that really, you know, like, I sit here on a daily basis and, and same with the other businesses, though. You miss a call or somebody emails you, we have to have systems in place. You know, lawn care business, perfect example. You know, you're out, you're mowing, you're cutting grass, you don't want to stop and answer the phone. You're in the middle of the, the work day, like you're trying to get stuff done. What if it's not, you know, what if it's not an important call now you just shut your mower off, did whatever answered the phone. So what can we put in place? You know, is it AI, Is it, I don't know, you paying Susie or somebody? Like, hey, can you just answer my phones during the day? You know, maybe it's your mom, maybe it's your grandma, who knows? You know, I called the paving company several years ago and I think the lady that answered the phone was probably like 80 or 90 years old. It was the guy's mother, but she was retired, she was just at home. Like, why not use that opportunity to one, give somebody something to do? Because, you know, probably at that age she was looking for something to do. But then there's a live person on the end of the phone. So that's, that's kind of my rant. On that you gotta answer the phones. You know, ideally they say three calls, I'm gonna set these ones up here so that after the fourth ring, if nobody picks up, it forwards to me. At least that way the calls aren't being missed. But then there's the other side of it. There's lead generation. There's email that like, are people responding to emails? If I get an online inquiry, are they getting, you know, somebody getting back to them in a timely fashion? We have all these systems out there that we can have set in place and whether it's, I mean, you have to have follow up, but even if you don't have all of the pieces in place, at least have something, you know, so even if it's an email response, hey, we're not available right now. Thanks for reaching out. And then put a timeline. Somebody will be back to you in X. You know, if you think you can check your emails every four hours, then, then put that in there. Doesn't matter. Put something. As long as there's something to set an expectation because then they know they're going to move on. If there's no expectation, you know, if they, if they message you and you say somebody will be back in touch with you in three to four hours, well, they're watching that. Oh, well, shoot. It's been, it's been four hours. Nobody's getting back to me. And they might try to call you again or reach out to you again, but chances are they're going to move on and they're going to move on to the next guy down the street. And there's always somebody new. Probably the only business that out of the three that I am involved in that I don't see a huge cycle of people coming in and going out is the construction side. Because you actually have to have some knowledge. I mean, you don't have to. There are people that fake it out there, but they don't usually last long. There's a low barrier of entry in landscaping and lawn care. And I, and I should say lawn care because there's too many people. I've always tried to steer clear of using the word landscaping. We're not landscapers. I don't know how I couldn't tell you what half the plants are out there. So I'm not going to say I'm a landscaper. We do lawn and landscape maintenance. Do we have people that we work with or that work for us that do the other things? Yes. And so knowing what you're doing, but there's so many people there's, there's a low barrier of entry. Low barrier of entry, sorry. To getting into lawn care. And so every year you see new people do it. I've seen since I got into the T shirt business that, you know, it seems like there's, there's people that pop up or that I've, you know, hey, you know, who does your stuff? Oh, well, there's this lady, you know, she's the lunch lady at school, but she has this little side hustle and so we just give the business to her. So like she's going to wherever Walmart picking up her Hanes T shirts and she goes home and screen prints them and she's selling them for less than me because she doesn't have overhead, you know, so these, these are all struggles. I just, I don't even know why this just been eating at me. And this is kind of why I wanted to talk about this today, is just kind of getting that out there. As, as we head into spring, like we're checking these boxes, are we making sure. What, what is our plan going into spring when it gets busy? Who's answering the phone? Somebody answering the phone is answering. The phone is in. Do you have it set up in a fashion that I guess figuring out, you know, these are things to think about. Do we have somebody answering the phones? Do we have a backup? You know, is that phone. Even if your voicemail said, hey, look, you know, we're out in the field right now, we're really busy. Best way to get hold of us is if you could send us an email or text or anything. Like, give them something. Not like, hey, this is, you know, Bill's Landscaping. We're not available right now. Please leave us a message like, no, I would rather. Because I know that when I'm trying to get hold of somebody, like, for me, if I'm out in the field, if somebody texts me, I'm probably going to get to them faster because I will screen my calls. If I'm on the mower, I'm not going to stop the mower every single time that the phone rings. And so if they were to send me a text, I can read the text. If it's important, I can get back to them immediately. I can, I can call them back, say, hey, you know, sorry, but if it's not important, I can text them back and say, hey, I'm busy right now. I'll give you a call back in an hour, something. I mean, with the technology we have, most of us don't have landlines. Most of us have cell phones. We're carrying our work phones with us. Now, the other side of that piece is we, we do all have cell phones. The other piece that I was going to say is that, and I know it's a pain in the butt, I mean, we don't want to carry multiple phones. But as a, as a small business owner, I will say one of the things that I've learn to try to not do unless I really, really like you, is to give out my cell phone number to a customer. Don't, don't put your personal cell phone number on the side of your truck. Don't use your personal cell phone number because eventually if you are trying to grow one, when people have your cell phone number, you don't have business hours. You are available 24 7, because anytime there's an issue, they will call you. It doesn't matter if it's on the weekend. It doesn't matter if it's 7 o' clock at night and they just got home and you know, well, my lawn wasn't mowed today. They're going to call you. If you want to have business hours, quote, unquote, get a separate phone or a separate line or something to separate your, yourself from your business because as you grow, you are going to want to do that. So that is my advice to you. I never did that in the past. I mean, years ago it was like everybody had my cell phone. They'd call me anytime. Then when you're out with the family, you know, your, your spouse is looking at you funny because, you know, you're answering calls all the time, but you don't always know who it is. So, I mean, we've always had a habit of answering the phone or the phone rings, answer it, and then all of a sudden, you know, you're on the phone for 20 minutes or. I know with this other business, the amount of like marketing and spam calls that I get is just ridiculous. You know, I thought about going the AI or virtual assistant side of things with this, but then I'm like, I'm going to pay somebody to answer a bunch of junk calls all day long. I mean, If I get 50 phone calls, probably half of those are junk. Just people trying to market stuff or, you know, trying to sell you something or just things you don't care about. I mean, even this morning I went through and I had a couple voicemails from Yelp because they want to, you know, tell me how I can advertise through Yelp. And so there's just so much stuff nowadays. And so my advice, one, figure out a plan, somebody to answer that phone or, or at least have a good voicemail that gives them another step. Hey, I'm busy right now, but if you could text me this number or hey, I'm, you know, probably tied up right now, but if you can email me and then when, when will I get back to them? I'll get back to you within X. You know, or, or even if I hate to say this, I really do, I would, I wouldn't want to say 24 hour. I feel like that's so long in, in this world, you know, the Amazon world that we live in now, where everybody wants everything now. So I kind of feel like that, you know, having a message that says we'll get back to you within, you know, 24 to 48 or whatever, I think that's, that's bad. Yes. Does it create a place where you may have to be a little more descriptive? Because obviously if somebody, somebody reaches out to you on a Friday at 7 o' clock at night or 5 o' clock at night or whatever on a Friday, chances are you're not going to get back to them till Monday. Especially if you're running a business or you know, something that, that you want. Set hours, you're going to leave the office and you'll be back in Monday morning. But then the other piece of that is set a time that you return phone calls, whether it's you sit down first thing in the morning and you return phone calls, whether it's, you know, maybe twice a day, you return phone calls in the morning when you get in that you missed from the evening before and you return phone calls before you head home in the afternoon and you leave the office. You know, pick a couple times a day that you can just check messages. We just get bombarded so much. So many emails, so many things, you know, so many things we've signed up for. My inbox is so cluttered with, with junk and some of it's good, you know, some of it's stuff I want to read. It's not necessarily stuff I want to know, unsubscribe to, but it's not something I have time to look at every single day. So declutter, you know, it's just, I don't know, I'm kind of going on a tangent this week. I've been absent for the last couple weeks. Kids were on vacation, so I didn't do any, any recording. But we will have some good stuff coming up. I Hope you enjoyed those last episodes with Company Cam. We're gonna, we're gonna get some other guests on from some other organizations. I'm not gonna say who because I got a few of them that I'm working on. But you know, it's gonna be back to the grind this year. I, I think some of my friends that listen to this, that, that I interact with regularly, you probably won't see as much of me this year. I think this year is, is a, is a year that we're gonna kind of hunker down. There's not going to be as much traveling. I, I do hope to still make it to equip this year. I do still hope that I'm going to make it down to Kentucky and, and be able to participate in, in all of those week long festivities with stuff going on. You know, I want to make sure I make the LCR media summit. I'm sure Nail is doing that again couple days before, you know, the Monday and Tuesday before equip. So I most likely will be there. But I don't see me making very many other things. We're just, there's too much stuff going on here for me this year. Trying to get, you know, making some changes with all of my businesses, you know, trying to grow the print shop, kind of dialing back the landscaping business and focusing on residential getting out of the hoa. We've pretty much gotten out of plowing. I haven't had to plow any snow this year. Praise God for that one. Thank you. My brother's done a little bit. We've had a couple of subs that have helped, but those will all pretty much go away within the next month or two once snow season's done. We're. I'm done. We're done. So Snow is gone. HOAs are going to start to disappear and we're going to concentrate more on single family home. And realistically, and I don't think I've mentioned it on this podcast, but you know, we may, we may end up doing some other podcasting, so stay tuned. But because I'm really looking at it possibly, you know, getting into some of the other industries, but we are launching sort of a new division of our construction business this year and that's going to be Champlain Valley Deck Works. We love building decks and porches. They've worked out really well for us in the past. So we've sort of launched a sub brand going into the season, hoping that we can really stack our calendar with a lot of, a lot of that type of work. So because it's sort of a, I want to say it's a growth year. I mean, I hope it's a growth year, but it's a transition year. Lots of transitions going on. Lots, lots of changes, you know, vehicle changes, building changes, equipment changes. Just so many things that we're, we're trying to implement this year. And that's really kind of our focus. So I'm going to still try to stay pretty hard at getting content out there. Mostly right now I've just been focusing on the podcast. I haven't had a lot of time to work on social media because I have so many other things going on. I mean, I go home at night, I leave the office at 5, 6, 4, whatever, and then I get home, if there's nothing going on, I sit at my, you know, my dining room table and continue to do work. And so trying to get new systems up and up and running and working on marketing and stuff, just the work day is not long enough. So. But at the same time, you need to get away. You need to rest a little bit. And I did that last week with my kids. You know, we went and did some tubing and some skating and just kind of hung out with the kids for, for a few days, bowling and just did some fun stuff. I kind of put work on pause, put everything on pause and. Because I know we're getting ready to get into a very busy season with everything going on here. So I was like, you know what? Just going to take the opportunity to get away. I suggest any of you that haven't done that, do that before it gets busy. If you have a wife, if you have kids, block off some time. Just, you know, I did a little bit of work, but very little work for a few days. You know, answered a few emails, did a couple things here and there, but tried to keep it pretty low key. So I apologize if one of you that are listening tried to get a hold of me and I didn't respond. I know you, Mr. Producer, if you're listening to this episode, you did reach out to me and ask me if I had anything to send you. And I said, yeah, I'm going to try, but it didn't happen. You know, me and the kids had some late nights and, and it's okay. I mean, my, you know, we're pushing out more episodes than we did last year and we're, our goal is to be a solid one a week. Haven't quite hit that mark, but we'll get there. We definitely will. Get there. And I think as we get closer into the season, that'll even be more attainable. It's. I feel like it's kind of hard to talk, you know, talk grass and talk lawn care when we're in the middle of winter. You know, there's not. Not a lot going on, so it's really hard to. To get your mind wrapped around some of that. But I know this time of year we're all thinking about it. You know, I'm looking out my window now. There is snow on the ground, but it's supposed to be high 40s today. And like I said, it's. It's going to creep up to almost 60 next week. There's going to be some rain. All of this snow is going to be gone. Will we get some more? Maybe. But I think what little we get probably won't stick around very long. So I think we're gonna start feeling the. Feeling the buzz. Everything's gonna start churning and we're gonna get those nice days when we go out. It's like, man, you know, let's start doing some yard work. Let's. Let's get things ready. Ready to rock. And so I thank you for listening. I definitely appreciate you listeners, everybody that does listen. Share, like, follow. I do appreciate you. I. I look forward to hopefully seeing some of you this year at equip. I do intend on getting there. Not sure how it's going to work out. I do have a wedding the Saturday before in North Carolina that I'm going to. My. One of my sons is getting married and so I'll be down there for that. Not sure. I haven't figured out the details of whether I'm just gonna hop a plane and head from Charlotte to Kentucky or drive or what I'm gonna do and if my whole family's going down for the wedding, what that's gonna look like. But. But as we get closer, I'll figure that out. But definitely going to be back on pod row. Is my intention to be on pod row down there this year a little more prepared. I'll have some swag with me, so come and. Come and grab some. I'll send some stuff down. Probably just mail it down would be my guess. That way I don't have to check it. But it's good being on here. These. I kind of cleared my head. Now I just got to go do something with it. But, you know, those are things. Food for thought, guys. Think about that. Think about where you can make adjustments, whether it's with your online your website, your online portal of, you know, taking quotes and estimates and inquiries and. But yes, each and every one of you is appreciated. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for the next episode. I'm pretty certain I'll have a guest on the next one, just have to confirm that. But enjoy your week. Get out there, start getting those wheels turning for spring. And good luck this year. I hope we all have a prosperous year and a half. Everything we're doing. This is your host, Tim Aller. This is the Charged Up Podcast. Thank you for listening. Like share, follow, let everybody know about this and if you want to hop on an episode, just shoot me a message. I'm on Facebook. You can hit me at Tim charged up podcast.com and we'll get you on. Have a blessed day.