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Ever pull your hearing protection out halfway through the day because it's uncomfortable? Yeah, I've done it too. That's exactly how guys end up damaging their hearing over time. This spring, protect it with isotunes built for the noise of mowers, blowers and heavy equipment. Right now, get 20% off site wide through March 15th. Use code Brian's20 at checkout.
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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.
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Hey, what's going on, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast. It is your host, Brian Fullerton here hanging with you guys and good morning and to all of you guys that are watching on YouTube, hey, just want to say welcome to the YouTube channel. It's all about helping you guys grow a more successful business so you guys can go out there and crush it. We do that with daily vlogs, how tos, reviews, and so much more. So if you guys are new here, maybe consider hitting subscribing if you want. All things long here on your feed. Now what I wanted to do on today's video is to keep it tight and Talk for about five or 10 minutes about the commercial bidding process. And something to help you guys understand along the way with your commercial bidding process is how the game is actually played. Now we have a training program@launchrunneracademy.com called the Commercial Bidding Made Simple Training course. And I have an hour long dissertation on this exact topic. But as I've come to talk to dozens and hundreds of friends and peers in the industry, I want to just give this portion at least a good tease to help you guys get your feet wet part of your commercial bidding process and help empower you guys to earn more commercial bids this upcoming spring. Now again, the resource is a couple hundred bucks at LaunchPreneur Academy and we go through the whole kit and caboodle. So there is more to this whole conversation. But what I want to do for a couple of quick minutes is help you guys understand the lay of the lamb about what you're actually doing when you're coming to your commercial bids and maybe answer some of those questions or dispel some of those myths about why you're not earning those commercial bids that you're proposing. Now here's the macro of where I'm at in my business and how we came to this whole conversation realization and some of the tips that I'm Going to share with you guys today if you zoom out and take it back. Over my career, we're pretty much a residential lawn care firm. And a couple of years ago I decided to get more into commercial work. No, only for the reason of higher revenue per ticket for lawn or snow and potentially higher upside, gross profit and net profit when it came to snow and salt services. We've always loved cutting grass, will always be a grass cutting business and division part of Brian's Law Maintenance. But really simply we wanted to grow top line and grow bottom line. And I saw the best two ways to do it potentially were with commercial. Instead of getting one new residential customer, that's a per ticket average of $1,000 for a contract. And for the lawn care maintenance, we could get a commercial site that was a 6, 10, 20, 30, 50, $100,000 account, maybe 50 lawn, 50 snow. And if I was going to, you know, set my horizons on a much larger revenue business, no brainer, pretty obvious it was a lot easier to do it with bigger ticket sales with commercial. Now that's a lot there. There's a lot to do, a lot to perform, a lot to flex up with equipment and talent to be able to do said sites. So a whole nother conversation on another time. But what that really did for me over the last two years is really helped me to want to make a move to the commercial game. And as we took residential thought process about bidding, quoting, estimating, producing the work, getting the job done into the commercial game, into the commercial market, I'll be completely candid and transparent with you guys. We got crushed at the time. I had a couple of commercial sites like 8 or 9, and I thought I was, you know, God's gift to the green industry probably like so many of you and I, I thought, hey, we'll ace this. How different can it be with bidding residential for commercial? Well, the truth is it's considerably different. And if you take residential thought process or sales tactics and pricing strategies into commercial, more than likely you're going to get crushed. And I had that self realization as we decided to make a strong pivot into commercial work this same time last year. And through my commercial bidding process, we had the estimates, we had the quotes, we had the leads, but we actually went like oh and 10, almost 0 and 12 on our commercial bidding estimating process for a couple of different reasons. One was our sales strategy, another one was our pricing strategy. But really it came down to our package and how we were actually presenting the quotes to our customers. And I'm Going to break that down for you guys for a couple of quick minutes here today. What has changed for us and what has transformed for us is now, once we were humbled and I sat myself at the feet of a lot of great leaders and folks in the industry, folks that you guys know, like Mark Bradley, Sam Gamble, Pat Murray, and Ken Die of local roots. We did a shop tour with them a couple years ago, and I said, hey, what the heck is going on in my business? What the heck is going on with the commercial bidding process? They gave me a couple breadcrumbs, but a lot of this I still had to distill and figure it out along the way for myself. But we were able to go back and revisit everything that I've just shared about with you guys over the last 12 or so months and really distill it down and dial it in. And that breakthrough did come about six to eight weeks later last year in April, May, we're able to refine our commercial bidding process, our pricing, our packages, and boy, oh, boy, have we grown big time since then with new commercial sites. We've picked up about 15 to 20 new commercial sites over the last 12 months. Some of those lawns, a lot of them snow. And again, we're looking to double our commercial maintenance this year as well. And so we have a very aggressive growth curve, a very aggressive growth projection. And to be able to do that, we have to have the rubber meet the road and not only bid, quote and estimate commercial work, but land it as well. All right, so we want to gain some more traction on this conversation. Let me give you guys the lay of the land and share what I really want to spill the beans about. And hopefully this can help you guys out with understanding how the commercial bidding game is made and how it's done. And I will make some pretty bold and drastic statements probably over the next couple of minutes, because in all transparency, it does kind of frustrate with me with how the biggest players tackle commercial bidding and how the little guys, myself and below, and again, we're a small fish, are bidding against these guys and how the game is actually playing and how it plays out. And unfortunately, it's one of those scenarios where if you don't know what you don't know, you're just going to continue to get chopped at the knees, get blindsided, and you're going to be empathetic, apathetic, distraught and depressed probably through your commercial bidding process if you're trying to aggressively grow, because you won't be able to earn those bids in quotes and estimates and really land the plane. And again, that was my life story. And it took about a 10 week nosedive, deep dive, if you will, and how to unlock the key to our future commercial business growth. Let's take it from the top. Let's say you have a quote that comes in through your submission form or a hot lead, whatever you want to call it. You got a reco and, uh, you're really excited about this commercial bid. And what most of us do is we, you know, get all excited. We're very excited about human beings. I don't know about you, but I know I am. And I'm like, oh, like we have a live one. Somebody wants to earn a, a bid from, you know, Brian's Law Maintenance. And boy, they're going to be highly blessed if they go with us. Well, for sure. So what we do is John fills out the submission form. He says he wants some commercial maintenance at his, you know, manufacturing facility down the road in an industrial drive or tech park or strip mall or a restaurant around town or whatever you guys got going on. And we say, hey, like, we're, we're your guy. We're ready to rock and roll. We're using Element because we're fancy just like your boy. We know that our pricing is like rock and roll. It's solid, or at least we believe we do. It depends on how granular you've really gotten that platform over the last year or two. You really have to dial in your pricing, your production rates, et cetera, et cetera. But let's just, you know, say all things are equal. And so that bid comes in, you say, john, like we're your guy. Whether you're talking via phone or email, you're saying all the right stuff. And he's like, yeah, let's do it. Get us that quote. And you slide this first quote across his desk for $14,000. And he does not call you back, he does not email you back. And you're telling your wife, hey, honey, that new Ford Explorer, get ready to go finance that thing like we are. We're ready to move. We're going to get the new house this year, you're getting the new car. We got this big commercial bid coming in. 14 grand for lawn. Honey, imagine the snow work. Like I'm your white knight in shining armor. You've never, you know, made a wrong decision in your life marrying somebody like me. You're painting the dream. Okay, I'm being a little exaggerated here, but you get the picture. And then what happens? Absolutely nothing. You don't get a phone call back, you don't get an email back, and you wonder what happened and they just fell into the black hole. You call a couple of times, you email a couple of times, and nothing really ever came about it. And you're like, what the heck happened? And then fast forward 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, we go out there, we start mowing lawns, and we see another company, a competitor that has that job. And we go, oh, well, those guys, I didn't want the work anyway. And we start making these excuses and justifying things. Or we say, oh, well, that guy's pricing is the lowball bid guy in town. I mean, after all, just look at him. And it doesn't matter if he's got new trucks like Brightview. If he's got old crappy trucks and you want to, you know, use your used equipment and you have some cash in the bank instead. You don't like new trucks, that's fine too. But whatever it is, we justify it away. The reality is that it's probably not because that guy has better or worse pricing necessarily. I'm going to use some inside baseball. They might have more effective pricing. But what I've come to find and realize through this discovery process is that typically it's a lot less on the price and more so how the package was presented and delivered to that client and to that contact. Let's play this out instead. Option number two, or scenario number two. John says, we want to quote. And instead of getting all excited, which you can still be excited behind the scenes, you play it cool Hand Luke and you say, hey, John, sounds fantastic. Hey John, what are you looking for? And John says, well, we want to get the grounds taken care of. I was tasked with this at the company. The owner put me in charge of it, or I'm a vice president or I'm an executive or whatever, or the. The office manager and they've tasked me to take care of this. You say, fantastic, let me get a quote to you and I'll send it over to you, et cetera, et cetera. Hey John, what are you looking for, by the way? And he goes, well, we want like the grass looking green, we want it to be weed free and, you know, just, you know, take care of the lawn. And again, in scenario number two, what do we do? Well, we submit him a quote based on some of the loose conversation that we've heard. And so we bid the mowing, we bid the fertilization for five rounds, and you Know the, the weed control and the broadleaf control. And again, we slide over a quote, you know, in theory, for 12,000 bucks and we're ready to rock and roll. And John's going to go with us. All right, let's. Before we talk about the results of what's going to happen with option two, let me give you a better scenario and an ideal scenario with option three or scenario number three. John emails you and we say, john super excited about getting a quote. What are you looking for? And he says, well, we're looking for this, this, this and this. And you say, okay, okay, okay, sounds great. And then you say, hey, John, super, I hear you. Thank you so much for the information. And we have a sales process and we have a sales program and we have an ICP for what we're attracting. So we know what we're going to be typically offering for certain sized sites, certain type of sites. And we have our core program that we're going to partner with John on to make sure that he's getting exactly what he's looking for. And we say something like this to John, Hey, John, super hear what you're saying. This is awesome. I think we're on the same wavelength. Really excited about this. Hey, just for clarity sakes, I want to quantify what you're actually looking for on that site. I know you said the mowing and you want it to be weed free. Here's our standard program. Now again, whether you email this or phone call this doesn't matter. You can just simply say, john, for the most part, our commercial sites that we take care of, we have a pretty typical program that we put folks through. And maybe not use the word typical, but catch what I'm saying here. You say, hey, we do 28 weekly mows, spring and fall cleanup, five rounds of fertilizer, 14 visits to spray weeds or pull weeds in the beds, islands, cracks and parking lot to keep the place looking nice and not disheveled. We have an irrigation start out startup, an irrigation blowout, an annual prune and cutback, and then we have a mulch installation. John, most of the folks that go with us, they go with the core program of 28 weekly cuts or 34 cuts in your market, whatever it is, spring and fall cleanup, and we're going to go with the 14 bed weeding or bed spraying. John, from that list, is there anything that you would like to add or subtract so I can make sure I get you the most accurate estimate possible? Now let's go back to scenario A, the Very first example, scenario one, we just said, hey, John's looking for a quote, let's send him everything. And it turned out to be $14,000. Well, John, through this discovery conversation again via phone call or via email, says, hey, actually, great question. And again, now let's not assume anything. John has a beautiful 4, 3 subdivision home that's a half a million dollars. He's got the wife, the kids, 2.2 kids and a golden retriever. And he's got the dream life. But John only really knows I cut my lawn weeklies on Saturdays. We live in a subdivision, so not a lot of trees, right? If you know, you know. And he has a national fertilizer company that does five or seven rounds of fertilizer. And he says, well, yeah, just, just do what I do it at my house, whether he's an enthusiast or not. And we're assuming that because he's in this roller position and calling on us, that John has the lay of the land about what that site actually needs. Right? And all too often we assume too much out of folks or we don't assume enough out of folks. And there's a couple of big like ahas and takeaways here that I hope you guys are catching up and catching on to through this discovery conversation and more listening and better listening, we can say, hey, John, out of this program that I just described, the 14, 11 and 14 and then the a la carte services, are there any of those that you'd like to add on to be part of the core program or any of them that you'd like me to at least bid a la carte for you to add at a later time. And that is the difference right there, folks. Because if he says, no, no, no, we just want to keep the lawn looking good and have it weed free in the beds and parking lot. And yes, we do want to take the leaves picked up and cleaned up and keep the place looking kempt. What we can now bid is the 28 weeks of mowing, a cleanup for the spring, a cleanup for the fall, and those 14 bi weekly bed visits. And now, what does the core contract cost? $6,200. $6,200. Now imagine this. You're the vice president and you're about to submit this bid, or you're an office manager, you're about to take these bids to your boss for a quick 20 minute review on a Monday. The world's burning down. They've got big decisions. Cutting grass is important, but they don't super care. And the Guy that's going to be submitting the final bids to his boss. What do you think he's going to do with the high quote? He's going to say we got one for six, one for nine and one for 14. Well, don't even worry about the 14 guy. We're not affording that. We don't want to do any of that. Give me the six guy and give me the nine guy. And it doesn't really matter where they pick from there because you already lost it being the original scenario, one 14 grand guy. Now instead, you come in as the $6,000 guy with the core program to take care of the sites. And this is something that a lot of great folks are teaching and sharing about exclusively. Or specifically, I should say, like Mark Bradley with the leanscaper folks. This is where I'm picking up a lot of this. Got to give credit where credit is due. This is refined not only our lawn operations, but our snow operations with the packages that we're offering. If you guys have been listening to the podcast, you know that we've completely changed that sales and pricing and package offering for snow, by the way, which has led to 100% growth in our snow business over the last four and a half months. Not too bad. Okay? Not just because salt was more expensive. We're talking about real customer growth and real revenue growth. We haven't even touched our salt prices yet. Little inside baseball. How cool is that? So I know that this stuff works and I can share with you with absolute belief that I know it can help you guys. Let's go back to the lawn care example. Now that you're in there for that $6,000 contract, now you have the opportunity to go upsell the rest of the work and potentially even at a higher margin or higher revenue per hour than you were originally going to quote it. Part of that same initial contract. And here's the inside baseball. That initial quote for the core services pretty much is what we're offering here locally is going to be the baseline. Six thousand bucks divided over to seven equal monthly payments. And it's, you know, whatever, $890 a month, whatever it is. Then you give them the a la carte visit price. At least in lmn, you can toggle back and forth and you can say, hey, the mulch is 2100 bucks. The pruning is 1325, the irrigation is 325 for the startup, 385 for the blowout. You know, it's a decent sized site. Whatever, whatever, whatever. And by the time they go with all of it, yes, they'll be at that $14,000 mark. The problem is that we never listen or package or price good enough to just meet them with where they're at immediately and to get in there to actually earn the first work, the first relationship and that first right to have that new business with them. Does that make sense? And this is the aha moments that I've had. It's not so much the pricing, because I have bid against all the biggest competitors in town. And guess what, my man, hour rate, believe it or not, is dialed in plus or minus about $5 from all my local peers because a lot of them, my competitors, share some of their numbers with me. But I also get their contracts back across my table because I've been able to ask some of the property managers that I'm bidding against, hey, what was the quote and contract last year? Hey, let me see some of those numbers. And I know that they're using lmn. I know they're using Attentive. And so your boy is, is doing his best to deconstruct this thing and work it backwards because nobody gave me the roadmap until this same time last year with Mark Bradley at a Nashville leanscaper Quarterly intensive talking about developing your sales machine and your revenue machine. How cool is that? So here's a long story short. You're not necessarily losing quotes because you're more expensive. You're not necessarily losing quotes because of any other reason. And it's not because you don't care. In fact, the irony is like we care more. And than probably the other guy that they're going to get a bid with. Most of the time you're going to be losing a bid because you're not packaging your services and the pricing competitively in an effective way. That's going to at least get you in the door. Yes, of course, once you can upsell that work, you're able to sell it at a 50, 60 plus percent gross profit and a 20 or 30% net profit. But you're never going to get the opportunity to do that until you get that first initial relationship going. Now here's the fun part. Second year, you might be able to evolve the conversation to say, hey, that mulch job, that pruning job, et cetera, et cetera. Do you want us to just bid that separate again or obviously you guys are going to probably want the mulch done and the pruning done year over year. Now, now that you know you have a good price and you trust us. Do you want us to just bake that into the core contract? For sure. And now your base contract went from 6 grand to 11 grand. Now you're aligning them in the budget for the company, and now you get POS approved with no issue because you're at 11, 12,000 bucks. They know you, they like you, they trust you, and they know that you have their best interests in mind. Does that make sense? And so a commercial, it's going to be a one, two, three year game plan, but you have to start in at a low base monthly to start earning that work. And that's why I was getting beat out. That's why a lot of you guys are getting beat out. And it's not from any other real reason other than the packaging, for the most part, that we're presenting to these customers. All right, so that's what I want to leave you guys with today when you submit that quote back to John. And John says, man, this is fantastic. 6,000 bucks. By the way, can you do the mulch? You know, hey, our vice president is coming through. The owner's coming through next week. This place has to get cleaned up. You say, I can get your quote, but, you know, it's thick of the season. It's probably not going to be the cheapest thing, you know, compared to our spring race. He goes, I don't care. Blank check. Just get it done. Like, that's when your ears go up and you go, huh? Time to start making some money. And. And let's make sure that we're taking care of those customers. Because when the vice president's coming through or a corporate visit from overseas or corporate office from Atlanta is coming up, you bet they're going to start dropping the money on the pruning, the mulch, the landscaping, et cetera, et cetera. All right, so, folks, that's just a little bit of inside baseball. I hope this was helpful. I hope this was insightful. I call these black holes or drop off points. You're like, what's going on with the bids? What's going on with the quotes? What's going on with the estimates? Why am I not earning this work? I promise you, it's probably not exclusively because of pricing. Pricing might have some of the conversation, but it's probably about 10 or 20% of it. Packaging and how you're actually presenting these services is going to be 75 to 80% of it. least that's been the case for me. And in the example that I'm sharing with you, guys today. All right. And by the way, like I said earlier, this is not just lawn, this is how you're coupling it with snow. All right. And so all that being said, I'd love to get your guys thoughts, love to hear your feedback. Leave me some comments down below. Does any of this resonate or relate to what you guys are going through right now? I really hope that you watch a video like this and it sets you free and you're able to now start massaging those initial quotes and estimates to be able to make them more palatable to those customers that are receiving them, get in the door and then backsell and upsell the rest. And I really think that if you take this machine, you value, stream, map it. You have a great sales process. You have the marketing and the branding and of course the production to get the work done and the reviews that prove it. You can really start turning on not only a revenue and sales machine, but a production machine that can take your business to new heights and really help you to start hitting those bigger revenue goals that all of you guys are looking to accomplish in 2026. All right, that's what I got for you guys. Today's podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, leave me one down below and I'll be reading those real time. Guys, thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Fully 10 Unfiltered Podcast. Thanks for watching. Thank you guys so much for watching on YouTube and we'll catch up with you guys here on the next one.
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Tired of chasing new customers? Good news. You don't have to figure it all out alone. Postcard marketing is a simple, powerful way to grow your business and reach people who actually want your services. At Launchpreneur Academy, we've created postcard templates that are easy to use. Just add your logo, contact info and message. We've got you covered with seasonal themes and service specific designs for patio, sod, irrigation and so much more. Need printing and mailing help? That's where Postcard Mania comes in. Brian's Go to printer. They make it easy. They'll handle the whole process and give you special pricing plus design help just for being a part of the lawntrepreneur community. You can even track your results with QR codes and call tracking. Skip the guesswork and visit launchpreneuracademy.com to grab your postcards and then head over to Postcard Mania using the link provided in the show description. Remember to mention Brian to get your deal and let's get the phone ringing again with the right kind of leads.
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Thanks for taking the time to listen to the Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast with Bryan Fullerton. We hope you enjoyed this production. If so, please consider leaving us a five star review for the show. While the techniques and ideas presented here are designed to help you grow a more successful and profitable business, no one can guarantee these results for you. We want to emphasize that entrepreneurship is not easy and and the ideas presented here are just the opinions of Brian Fullerton and his respective guests. No one can guarantee success for you. That being said, we hope the ideas presented here help you and motivate you to go on out there and crush it with your own business.
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Fullerton Unfiltered Podcast thanks for listening and
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we hope to see you on the next episode.
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This has been a Brian Fullerton and Mr. Producer Production.