Brian Fullerton (0:00)

Foreign.

Brian Fullerton (0:05)

You're now listening to the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. Straightforward, no nonsense business advice, completely on filtered. Grow your business, grow your life. Now here's your host, Brian Fullerton.

Brian Fullerton (0:22)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Hope you guys are doing well. Welcome back to another episode of the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. It is your host Brian Fullerton here hanging with you guys today and and good morning and same thing to all of you guys watching live on YouTube. Well, I wanted to spend about 10 minutes here today talking about a topic that I think is very relevant to all of us and that is spring renewals estimates, everything that is going out the door. I wanted to give you guys three tips really quick here before we all run out the door and hit submit on all those estimate renewals. So if you haven't done it just yet, you're in luck. Might be able to take away a couple of tips here today if you already sent them. No big deal. Uh, just continue to massage your sales and estimating process as you go into the spring, summer and fall season and beyond. Right. Uh, what I want to do for just a couple of minutes is give you guys three takeaways for this video. Talking about renewals, number one, talking about having pricing packages for your customers, number two, talking about having a la carte services listed outside of that. And really, number three, kind of a game changing mindset, talking about revenue per hour and making sure that we're making profit for the estimates that we're sending out. So all things being said, if you guys are new here, the channel is all about helping you guys grow a more successful business so you guys can go out there and crush it. We're on a quest to grow a million dollar plus business. And so if you guys are new here, maybe consider subscribing because it's all long here all the time over here on the brands all maintenance YouTube channel and the Fullerton Unfiltered podcast. So let's jump into this really quick. The first thing I wanted to talk about is we're going into the spring estimate and renewal season and in fact real time, we're sending all of ours out this week. We've got about three or four hundred grand worth of work that we are sending out for renewals and of course we can do another video for another time talking about multi year contracts and 12 out of 12 month contracts for us in Michigan. We do seven month lawn, five month snow. We do have some options to do a multi year deal, but usually those are for customers that have been with us for a while, and we have a pretty good handle on those sites and not really going to focus on that too much on today's video. But again, maybe we can revisit that in the future. What I did want to talk about was with our estimates and renewals that we're coming up against is so much, not so much even our legacy customers, but our new customers is when we're talking about putting our estimates together, let's make sure that we are pricing our packages with the most effective pricing strategy and service strategy that the customer is actually looking for. Let me give you, for instance, as we go to take on our renewals, for the most part, a lot of folks just want to renew with what they had last year, and you might be able to upsell a little bit more along the way. Maybe they wanted more weed pulling, Maybe they wanted more pruning. Maybe they wanted more freshening up of the mulch beds. Like, that's all fine. What I have been encouraging a lot of folks to do, and something that I've learned from Mark Bradley leanscaper, a bunch of other great folks out there in the marketplace is to come to the customer with the most basic core, you know, type package that they would need to handle all the concerns they have for the property. But don't be bidding anything extra until they ask for it. Or if they really need it, we can always bolt it on later. And let me give you just a really simple, practical example. If we are looking at a customer and, you know, I bet it, you guys bid it, and we come in at 10,000 bucks, and then all of a sudden, the big guy in town gets it, and. And we're like, man, like, was his pricing that much better? Like, what the heck is going on? And then three months later, you see them doing the pruning, the mulch, all this other mess, and you're like, there's what's going on here? There's no way. Well, what happened is the big guy in town and the biggest companies nationally go for the core package. So they'll do the 28 weeks of mowing or 34 weeks of mowing or whatever you guys have. Then they'll add maybe a spring and fall cleanup, and like, usually that's about it. Maybe three rounds of fertilizer if they're lucky. And, you know, they're going to come in with that quote at 6,000 bucks or whatever it is, right? And then we all come in because we care, because we know what the property is actually going to Take, we're trying to do a good job. We come in with, you know, 28 weeks of mowing, spring and fall cleanups, one or two prunings, five rounds of fer, irrigation startup and blowout, of course, the mulch, you know, part of the core spring contract. And we come in at, you know, 10,000 or 11,000 bucks and we don't get it, and we don't get it year over year over year over year. And we're like, what? What the heck is going on around here? Well, quick little tip. We talk about this in our commercial bidding made simple training program. No pitch, just saying, talk about this and much, much more for an hour plus. Part of a recording in there is that that is the game, how the game is played. A lot of these guys come in and it's not so much they lowball, they just price and package different. And again, for the life of all of us, that, you know, mean well, kids care. We're the medium sized businesses, we're the local businesses that want to get the work. We come in not so much more expensive in terms of the service that we're offering. It's just the packages that we're presenting. And again, if you're somebody in the driver's seat at some of these companies facilities, strip mall business owners, right, and they're looking at package A is 6,000 bucks. Middle package is from another vendor, 8,500. And then we come in at, you know, 10,000. Who are they going to go with every time? The $6,000 guy or the $8,500 guy? And reality is that as you guys all imagine, and I know this, is that by the time the season's done, they're going to, as the plant manager, facility manager, business owner, entrepreneur, say, hey, like, the shrubs are looking a little rough, the mulch is looking a little bit rough. We need some more weed pulling around here, right? And then they're going to bolt back on all those additional services probably at a higher rate for those smaller, for the larger companies for that smaller contract total. And it's going to meet or exceed what they would have spent with us anyway. All right? And so I'm not telling you guys what to do or how to bid or anything necessarily. What I'm telling you that we've done is we've thinned it out. We've given our customers two different options. And this is package one, this is package two. Not gold, platinum, silver, diamond, like that's too much. But I would just say, hey, here's our Core, like, rock bottom maintenance contract. Make tall grass short, keep the weeds down, you know, get the leaves. And then we've decided to say, hey, if you want a little bit more, you can, you know, maybe we bid those 28 weeks, spring and fall, three rounds of fer. Etc, etc, right? And so we've given our customers options, choice, right? They're still in the driver's seat, and it's kind of like the two option clothes, right? Like, no matter which one they pick, we win, they win, right? They get great service and we get a contract, whether it's six grand or eight grand, you know, whatever. But number one is the way we're presenting those packages. Okay? Number two, if you do want to add those additional services, instead of having, you know, five different estimates and five different times, we touch point all that mess. So that we found a lot of success in lately is telling our clients, hey, here's the core contract, the 28 weeks of mowing, the spring and fall cleanups, three rounds of fert. And then we can say an element. You can toggle between per season and per billing or per season and per visit, if I'm not mistaken. And you can say, hey, weeding, it's 55 bucks an hour, or pruning, it's $1,200 to take care of the front shrubs and landscape. If you want the mulch job, it's, you know, $2,700 or whatever your numbers come to. But that's listed in the additional services, right? And so that way the core contract's still 6,500 bucks. And again, we let them decide what do they want to do in terms of the weeding, the extra fert, the whatever I just said, the mulch, the irrigation startup and blowout. All right? And that's how you go and start being competitive with a lot of these companies that are just coming in at rock bottom. And again, their man hour rates, I've come to discover, aren't overly different than what I offer. What you guys offer. A lot of the time they're just packaging it, pricing it differently. Now there is a whole other conversation for another time about the man hour rate. Some of these guys really do come in at 40, 50, 60 bucks a man hour. We are not as lean as we can be in terms of. Well, let me rephrase that. We are pretty lean. It's just I don't have a million labor hours and a million equipment hours to divide my overhead into to get my man rate down. We're still in the mid-60s ourselves. And I know a lot of the biggest guys are, you know, 40, 45, $50 an hour. Trust me, I hear it. It's ridiculous. Sometimes you wonder if they're even making money Again, another little inside baseball. A lot of the times are discounting the mowing to 1 to 5% margin to come back, fill with those companies and, and chop them out at the knees at 25 to 30% on the auxiliary services versus somebody like myself who's a little bit more maybe, oh, this is probably a broad statement, a little bit more honest and ethical. I would just imagine, right? If you're bidding a quote, 20%, 20%, 20%, 20% the whole way down for your business. But these are the games that we play. So welcome to the world of entrepreneurship. You can complain or you can just understand how the game is played and adjust accordingly. So, number one, make sure you understand and present the best packages. Give your customers one or two options, even on the inquiry, when they're reaching out on the website on your submission form and they're saying, hey, we need service before you just start throwing up on them with a quote, say, hey, what do you need? Exactly? And if they don't know which, oftentimes they don't. Somebody got thrown into that role or that responsibility, you can say, hey, here's our core contract, and here's our core services. It's 28-113-115-1143, 14, what do you want? And they'll say, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, no. And then again, if you want to list the additional services, which is tip 2 after the core contract, you can say, hey, feel free to let me know if you want to opt in on any of this. Do you want to pay for these a la carte, or do you want me to include them in that core contract? But at least they're in the driver's seat and they're deciding what they want to sign up for. All right, so number one, let's make sure that we're doing our packages correctly. Number two, the extra services and billing, make it available for them, but let them choose. And number three, and I'll tell you guys, this is more of a business owner conversation, is let's make sure that we're doing the best that we can. Now, again, no pitch for Element here. I'm just saying this is the reality of it. If, you know, you know, once I put my estimate and quote together in Element, there's another tab called the analysis tab, and I'm able to look at what is my revenue per hour, what is my gross margin, you know, my gross profit on the job, obviously in the estimate I get to see my net profit. And if I can give you guys a tip that I heard from the most recent leanscaper, you know, you're going to hear them a lot more on our channel and on the podcast the LeanScaper event in Arizona from Mark Bradley. He said we don't sell revenue, we sell profit. Now I know that might be like a shock to some folks out there in a dirty word, but the reality is we're in business to make money. And if you can go under the analysis tab and looking at all your services that you're pricing and you should be able to dial in your estimates, dial in your pricing and dial in your gross and net profit based on the analysis tab of what you're trying to generate revenue per hour and of course what you're hopefully trying to make net profit. And in element, there's like this whole great screen, there's five or six different parts there that give you data points about how that job is actually going to go so you can track your man hours, you know, estimated versus actual gross profit, like I said, and much, much more. And so one quick thing I want to share with you guys is that not all revenue is created equal. I heard that again lately from another leanscaper webinar. Not all revenue is created equal. 10 grand account with 10% true net or 10 grand account with a 20% true net are wildly different in the scope of maybe not so much work, but in terms of scope of us making money as a company with that job. All right, and so as you guys go on out there, if you don't have the know your numbers calculator, like it's 99 bucks. I'm not here to give a pitch on it if you can't afford it. I said in a previous video not too long ago, email me, we'll hook you up with it. It's 99 bucks. It helps you come up with your man hour rate so you know what to charge and how to recover your overhead. Maybe if you're using a yard book, a jobber, or some simple point of sale software for your business for some of you guys that are using, you know, synced up or Element or something more robust, you do know these numbers. So make sure that you're dialing it in under your analysis tabs so you know what you're actually making revenue per hour and gross profit on these jobs before you Start to submit those estimates. Okay. We have to put our business owner hat on. And don't just be so excited about submitting bids. If you're bringing your man hour revenue per hour below, you know, 90 or so, it's going to be very hard for you to make some gross profit and and net profit. All right. And so that's what I'm doing. That's what we're looking at. We just renewed about three or four hundred grand of estimates. Like I said, they're all getting sent over this week. We're very excited about that. I've got some more great tips I'm going to be sharing with you guys along the way about how to expand the difference between your gross and net profit while staying lean while not adding a single piece of equipment or labor hour to your business. I've got some other great ideas and tips that I want to share with you guys as we continue to make more great videos and podcasts for you. I. All right, well, that's where I'm going to leave you guys here today. I appreciate you guys listening in and watching in. If you guys are watching on YouTube, big thumbs up. Leave some comments down below. If these are some helpful tips for you guys and if you have some of your own, I'd love to hear what's working for you guys. Check out all things lawntrenewacademy.com if you guys want to learn how to grow a more successful lawn and landscaping business. All of our tools and resources are there for what we use for brands on maintenance to grow. You guys have access to it for a shoestring budget, which is pretty cool. And that's where we're going to leave you guys here, here today. All right, over now, friends, you have a great day. We look forward to catching up with all of you here on the next one. Hey, what's up guys? Brian here and I've got something brand new to help you level up your lawn and landscaping business. If you guys have ever struggled to figure out how to bid commercial work, like really bid it with confidence, then you got to check out our brand new commercial bidding program, now available@launchpreneuracademy.com inside you'll get our know your numbers calculator, a full snow takeoff and bid, a lawn takeoff and bid, and even see a live webinar replay where we walk you through the mindset about how to be successful with commercial bidding and how to crack the code to finally get your proposals accepted. Not only we get access to the webinar, the two takeoffs and how we actually price and bid Inside element, of course, the webinar replay. You'll also get access to one takeoff with yours truly. I'm going to help you bid, quote and price these sites that you guys have. So if you're in a residential mowing business kind of a setup and maybe get your first commercial bid across your desk and you don't know what to do, we're going to give you one free takeoff, we're going to price it together and I'm going to share my notes with you and we're going to email exchange back and forth to make sure that you get get that commercial bid. Check it all out today guys. Stop guessing and stop leaving money on the table and start winning these big jobs. Check it out today at launchtrenderacademy.com under the store section with the commercial bidding program and let's grow that business big together. Bid is good for one takeoff, lawn or snow attentive price takeoff capped at $75. More expensive takeoffs will require a supplementary invoice. These takeoffs and estimates are designed for commercial sites 1 to 5 acres in size for lawn mowing or snow removal.