Very easy answer(s) here: #1. Answer the phone. Call 10 mowing businesses in your area and let us know how many answer the phone or call you back. If it's anything like Omaha or Fort Worth that number will be 0. #2. Customer service. Lots of lawn care guys don't speak English very well and have 0 customer service skills. #3. Continually show up. You don't even have to be on time.... you don't even have to show up on the correct day.... just show up!
This is so true in so many areas and so many services.
The big companies don't give a fu** because it's ran by a bunch of minimum wage employees that hate their jobs.
The small companies are mainly ran by workers with poor manners and communication skills, not business savvy entrepreneurs. So it's very hard to find a company with amazing customer service, and someone that is on point with everything they do. Replying back to customers, handling service complaints, and maintaining consistency in your services.
How do you dominate the service industry?
In the beginning, you will not get that many jobs, so you don't have to worry about not having the time to do it all. This is the most crucial part, you have to solve the problems/issues well, and give your customer an amazing experience. You have the free time to treat everyone special, so do it and they will sing praises about you to everyone because 0.1% of the companies out there genuinely care about the customer. 99.9% of the companies don't care about the customer, they only care about getting paid. After mastering your craft and getting some good jobs under your belt though, you'll get some buzz about your company and you will start getting more and more calls. This is you differentiating yourself from the competition and you will see it pay off in your phone starting to blow up all day.
This is where the 12+ hour days come in to play. In the beginning, you will work from 8 am until it's dark out and you can't work anymore, and all while working, you have a blue tooth headset with 2 portable chargers and you're answering the phone and talking to customers. Have the customers text/email you their contact info and pictures of the job so you can provide quotes. Never let your phone go below 30%.
Get a calendar notification app and put everything down on your calendar so nobody gets forgotten about. Every single thing that you plan on doing even 1 hour in the future. I can't stress how important this is, my calendar is always full of 1000 little things, and I never forget about ANYONE'S problem that they called me about because I have my phone reminding me and I don't dismiss anything until after it's done. If I am about to do it, I snooze it 30 minutes until it's done.
When you get home every night after working, put all the jobs you picked up on email and send it out to the clients that you will be out there between X times... Invoice out all the jobs that you did that day... Check your ads and make the tweaks that you want to make (holy crap it's midnight already, I gotta go to sleep). Rinse and repeat until you are so busy you need to hire your first employee...
Go out with him for the first few months until he doesn't need you anymore, then go directly behind his work without telling him to make sure he is performing the same level of service you would be performing.
Then start playing the manager role where your employee/employees are doing the work and you are just giving great customer service. You are still differentiating yourself from the competition by providing the customers with great communication and managing your employees to where any issues they have are quickly solved. This is where you can start experiencing some freedom because all that you need to run your business is your phone/laptop. You can be in Vegas, on the beach, or wherever and answering phone calls and managing employees.
One thing that really kills your time, but is a smart move to make is having your employees send you pictures of all the jobs they do and you send them over to the customer with the invoice. It takes up some time, but I can't tell you how much it saves you on managing because you see the completed job so you don't have to worry if the employee is showing up and doing the work or not. Install GPS trackers in your vehicles as well and you can check on your phone where the employees are at any time.
Eventually you have enough employees and cashflow to where you can hire a manager to take over your management role, and now you're one of the big companies, but you can still differentiate yourself from other big companies on procedures that you implement with management making sure everyone is doing their job properly and still providing an amazing service for your customers. I have a lawn service company that is a massive company, but they are amazing with how they run their operation, and I will never go to a different company. They charge premium prices, but I don't care because I know I'm getting high caliber work and service.
