00:00 – Breaking the Myths of Residential Snow
00:00
Ted Glaser
The myth in residential are that there's no money to be made, that it is wildly unprofitable, that it is so hard to manage. It's an impossible thing to manage and keep up with client expectations and things like that. You're hearing that from a bunch of guys who are in the commercial space. So they don't deal with residential app volume anyways. But there is a whole world of residential snow between technology and equipment that's come out that has changed the ability to create a business model in residential that is quite profitable and very scalable.
00:31
Jack Jostes
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Landscaper's Guide. Today I'm here with Ted Glazer from Summit Lawns in Lincoln, Nebraska. We're going to talk about business models and how you really see this as the key thing to lead your company with. Is that right?
00:44
Ted Glaser
That's absolutely right.
00:45
Jack Jostes
And before we press record, you said it's Glazer like a glazed donut.
00:49
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
00:49
Jack Jostes
Because you've. You've said that before to people.
00:52
Ted Glaser
I have that one in my back pocket, ready to go.
00:53
Jack Jostes
I like that. Yeah, that's good. And were just talking about Lincoln and. And you said that it's a great place to live but a bad place to visit.
01:02
Ted Glaser
Yeah, the. The joke was always, lincoln is a terrible place to visit, but a great place to live.
01:06
Jack Jostes
Are you from there?
01:07
Ted Glaser
I am. I'm Lincoln born and raised. So I. Ignorance is bliss. I don't know any better. But no, the joke is around, you know, there's not beaches or mountains or things like that, but Lincoln has actually been rated, like, the. In the top 10 happiest cities in the United States, like. Like time and time again. It's just a very nice city. Everyone is very friendly. The community is great.
01:29 – Life and Business in Lincoln, Nebraska
01:29
Jack Jostes
Yeah. I've spent many nights there because I live in. I'm from Chicago originally, and we typically go home and visit Chicago and then spend the night in Lincoln because my wife's college roommate lives there. And so I've been there and I've enjoyed visiting Lincoln, actually. And I went during this cool street festival.
01:49
Ted Glaser
Okay.
01:49
Jack Jostes
And it was in July. Do you know which one I'm talking about?
01:52
Ted Glaser
Tell me a little bit about it.
01:53
Jack Jostes
Well, there's this, like, downtown Lincoln area where there's this, like, really big. I think it was like a brick walkway. And they had a band and they had food tents, and then there were a bunch of other restaurants.
02:05
Ted Glaser
Was it like a farmer's market?
02:07
Jack Jostes
No, it seemed bigger than a farmer's market.
02:09
Ted Glaser
Okay. We have a really large farmer's market downtown in full transparency. I have no idea what event that was, but there's so much stuff going on downtown all the time in that area. And that little cobblestone area, it's really cool. Neat spot to just cross great restaurants and bars down there.
02:24
Jack Jostes
Well, you spoke here, we're at the com symposium right now and you were on the panel for Breaking the Myths of Residential Snow. Because there's a myth that residential snow is terrible and a lot of people only like commercial. But you and one of my clients, Tori Shlanda from betterview Landscaping, dispelled some of those myths. Didn't want to get into the myths too much, but more just kind of preface why you're here and why we're talking. And one of the things you said to me that was interesting was you have 4,000 lawn clients. So what kind of is it lawn mowing, lawn fertilization, is it all of the above or what? What do they buy from you?
03:01 – Summit Lawns: 4,000 Clients and Five Profit Centers
03:01
Ted Glaser
Yeah, and I'll back up just real quick on the residential myth because we can talk on that a little bit. The myth in residential are that there's no money to be made, that it is wildly unprofitable, that it is so hard to manage, it's an impossible thing to manage and keep up with client expectations and things like that. And the argument is you're hearing that from a bunch of guys who are in the commercial space. So they don't deal with residential at volume anyways. So there it's just an unfamiliar thing. And when you're at an event like com, things like this, predominantly you're talking about commercial snow. But there is a whole world of residential snow between technology and equipment that's come out that has changed the ability to create a business model in residential that is quite profitable and very scalable.
03:44
Ted Glaser
So it's very interesting in that regard. Now when it comes to our lawn care company and just Summit Lawns as a whole, we actually don't have a huge snow business compared to a lot of the companies here. I mean, I think Snow makes up 10% of our revenue. Depends on the year we're in a market where it can snow. The last five years we've had all time records of low snowfall. Just it's been a crazy stretch of five years with not a lot of snow. But our lawn care company, we have 4,000 clients across all services between we have five main profit centers, service line. So mowing, fertilization, weed control, we call it detail, but it's like enhancements. We don't, we don't do any design build. So they're not, our enhancements are really just like mulch and bush trimming. It's like bed work.
04:27
Ted Glaser
They're not, they're not installing anything. And then holiday lighting and snow removal. Okay, so those are kind of the, our suite of services, so to speak.
04:36
Jack Jostes
And so the way that you feel you're able to have those five different profit centers which are totally complementary, is by having a business model that's similar between all of them, Is that right?
04:47
Ted Glaser
Yes.
04:47
Jack Jostes
And so what do you mean by that?
04:49 – The Chick-fil-A Business Model for Lawn Care
04:49
Ted Glaser
Yeah, So I often describe us as the Chick Fil A of lawn care. And what I mean by that is Chick Fil A is not a five star restaurant. They're not a Michelin restaurant, they are a fast food restaurant, but they're nice fast food. So if you look at the Chick Fil A menu, well, first, if you look in their kitchen, there is no super highly specialized chef in that restaurant. And they're not dependent on super highly specialized, insanely trained staff. If you look at their menu, there are nine to 10 ingredients that make up maybe 14 menu items. But it's really, there's chicken in wraps, sandwiches, nuggets, or a salad, and then either spicy or not spicy. And that's kind of it. So it's a very simple business offering.
05:34
Ted Glaser
But you look at a Chick Fil A, you look at the drive through and you could have a line of cars going all the way out to the street. Yet somehow that line moves fast. It's very efficient getting through that line. Everyone you come in contact with is wildly friendly, they're very polite. And the product that you get, it's like a really high quality chicken sandwich, but it's just a chicken sandwich. Like again, this is just fast food. And so as we relate that to our industry and what we do is we have taken the most simple services that we can and we are doing all of basically the most simple services we possibly could.
06:09
Ted Glaser
But even when you take like something that has complexity, like fertilization, weed control, we simplified that down in as many ways as we possibly could so that we can create a business that is very scalable, very frictionless, very fast across all fronts. Whether you're talking about sales and onboarding, or onboarding new clients, hiring, training, onboarding new staff, cross selling and upselling to your existing client base amongst your other services. Everything, everything that we do operates in a very similar fashion. So it's just very frictionless. Was the Word I used earlier, it just runs smooth at volume and it's very easy to just pile on more work and keep going.
06:51
Jack Jostes
So what are some of the things maybe over the. How long have you been in business?
06:54
Ted Glaser
Summit Lawns has been Summit Lawns for. I would say this is year 12.
06:58
Jack Jostes
Okay, great. So are there things that maybe you had in your business model that you found over complicated it that you removed?
07:07 – The “Summer of Diamonds”: Losing Half the Team & Rebuilding
07:07
Ted Glaser
Yes. The business that we have today is wildly different than it was probably six or seven years ago. I graduated college in 2013 and was on a mad dash to the glorious $1 million number that everyone is so insisted on getting to. And through that journey, I was selling anything to anyone, anywhere. And I built this monstrosity of a business. There was no culture. If you had any experience, you had a job at Seven Lawns. And in 2017, 2018, 2017 timeframe, were doing a lot of commercial work. I had a lot of staff that was very unhappy. And this is the whole story, I won't tell the whole thing, but I lost 50% of my staff in a matter of about a month.
07:49
Jack Jostes
What happened?
07:50
Ted Glaser
Culture. Morale was very bad. It was a really rainy spring. Guys working really long hours. It was hard to keep up. The grass was growing like crazy. We were doing a lot of commercial mowing at that time. We didn't really have a good training plan.
08:01
Jack Jostes
So how many people worked there at that time?
08:03
Ted Glaser
At that time? Now I say 50% because it's not like were a huge business, but it was still a massive impact. So I think I had 15 employees and I lost about seven of them.
08:10
Jack Jostes
Okay. Wow.
08:10
Ted Glaser
Yep.
08:11
Ted Glaser
A number of things were going on through this time period. Good guys were frustrated in leaving. Bad guys, bad attitudes, like they don't quit, they wait to get fired. So they stuck around and through all this stuff. During the same time period, were having major cash flow issues. I had an office manager who was embezzling from me at the time. There came a day where I pulled up to a 20 building apartment complex by myself, unloaded a mower because I had to go out and help mo because were down so many guys. And I just started bawling, just crazy, crying my eyes out, mowing this massive property on my own. And I was like, something has to change about this. And so over.
08:48
Ted Glaser
The one part I didn't leave out was payroll was due on Friday and this is a Wednesday and there's $2,000 in the bank and if we didn't get like some big checks in the mail, you know, in the next two days, I was just gonna have a mutiny. So there's an embezzlement situation going on during all this as well. There's just a lot going on. So during this time, I call that the. The summer of ass diamonds. Because if you took a piece of coal and shoved it up my butt, I could have produced a diamond from, like, the stress and the pressure intensity for sure. So it was just wildly stressful, crazy time.
09:21
Jack Jostes
That's where diamonds come from.
09:22
Ted Glaser
That's where diamonds come from.
09:23
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
09:23
Jack Jostes
They come from Lincoln, actually.
09:24
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
09:25
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
09:26
Ted Glaser
So what came out of that is I started to ask myself, what is what. Where are all the hardships in this business? Like, why is everything so difficult? Difficult? And through the remainder of that year, we started to simplify down. And I realized, okay, on the residential side of things, we can hire a new guy. And all he has to learn how to do is push MO versus having to learn how to use large zero turn equipment. He can learn how to manage the job site appropriately because his trainer is only 30ft away from him versus in a home association or an office or apartment complex. He might be a mile away from the guy trying to train him in because they both have to go do their own responsibility. So training became easier.
10:01
Ted Glaser
Then we realized, I can buy smaller, cheaper trucks with smaller, cheaper mowers. Then it realized, well, we don't even have to pull a trailer, so I can reduce that cost. Then we decided, okay, the sales process is very different in commercial. You have this whole courtship, the song and dance of like, I'm going to make a relationship, build a relationship with a property manager. And it might take three weeks to go land this account. And next year I'm back on the chopping block again for budget reasons. There's a whole thing with that in residential. We realized I can measure a property from satellite and have a conversation over the phone, and in five minutes, sell this job. And if we're going to do that, well, let's charge credit cards.
10:40 – Solving Training, Cash Flow, and Sales with Residential Focus
10:40
Ted Glaser
So if we're going to charge a card, I'm going to mow your lawn on Monday, charge your card on Tuesday. Now I have instant cash flow. Now I'm not working for a month, sending the bill at the end of the month, and then waiting another 30, 60 days to get paid. So we started solving cash flow issues. We solved training and onboarding issues. We solved how fast and easy it is to sign up new clients. And now you don't have to have a special account manager or the owner going and selling you can have a CSR trained in the office and in a matter of days with a couple sales scripts can sell your services. I already said the cash flow thing, you know, by going credit card. There are all these different things.
11:12
Ted Glaser
And it all started from how do I hire guys more easily? Like, what is it? What are the easiest services I can train a new staff on? That's where it derived from. And then we stumbled upon all these other things that were able to change. And it ended up being we had a wildly different company than anyone else in our market. We stopped pursuing commercial. We got out of it completely. We went to the residential side. There was no significant. There's only one major company in our market servicing that. And they were very archaic, very old. And so we brought a little technology, a little youthful energy to it. And in six years went from being a company in our market to being by far the largest company in Lincoln, Nebraska. And it just happened just very quickly.
11:51
Ted Glaser
And it was all from just making an intentional shift about our business model. And it was just. It's been a wild journey.
11:56 – Finding Mentors and Peer Groups to Scale Faster
11:56
Jack Jostes
What were some of the books that you read or maybe some of the mentors you talked with during that Summer of Diamonds?
12:02
Ted Glaser
Yeah, so a few things there. Around the same time period, I got involved in like the service autopilot ecosystem. Back during the time in this era, they were putting on conferences and I started to make friends in that world. I was joining Facebook groups. I was too small at that time to use traction and eos, that was just not something that were doing. So in full transparency at that point in time, it wasn't coming from books, it was coming from peer to peer. Things like that.
12:32
Jack Jostes
That's amazing.
12:34
Ted Glaser
So what's been greatest for my journey, it wasn't even that I had a direct message mentor or that I had a specific book that solved everything. It was that I started talking to other people and I learned something from a guy in North Carolina and I brought that back and injected my company and a guy in Louisiana and a guy in Salt Lake City. And I am no genius. I'm a curator of everyone else's good ideas. I'm an idiot. But everyone I just learned so many good things from.
12:59
Jack Jostes
Was it going to in person events or was it like even just Facebook groups and stuff?
13:03
Ted Glaser
It was everything. It was in person events, it was Facebook groups. It was being intentional about being vulnerable and saying like, hey, here are the things that we're struggling with right now. But also being action minded, saying, having a mindset that we can make changes and we can do things. And I think a lot of people get fearful and they say, well, hey, Jack, that's great for you in your market that you can do that, but that won't work in mine. And that is a limiting belief that will hold you down forever.
13:26
Jack Jostes
Oh, yeah, I deal with that a lot. My clients are special. Hey, that might work in Lincoln, Nebraska, but I'm insert whatever market, whoever's listening is in. Everyone thinks their market and their customers are special and they're not.
13:41
Ted Glaser
Or it's great that worked out because, you know, your weather is this way or your clients buy that way. And I'm not going to say that there's not a reality to that. Lincoln is a very modest city. We are not a high income town. And it's very. There's not a lot of keeping up with the Joneses mentality. So people don't spend their money on outwardly tasting things like lawn care. Which is actually why our business model made sense for us.
14:02
Ted Glaser
Okay.
14:04
Ted Glaser
Very few people in the market are going to spend, you know, 50,000, $100,000 in their backyard. And you go to somewhere in like, you know, Virginia and the D.C. area, some other wealthier climates areas, and that's a common story that you have these landscapers doing really big, extravagant jobs. That opportunity doesn't exist in my market, at least not at scale to Ted.
14:26
Jack Jostes
Now that you've weathered the summer storm and your years past it, what are some of the things when you're now on the mentor side and you're talking with other people who are in the thick of it that you're seeing coming up? What are some of the, maybe the mistakes that you see?
14:41 – Common Mistakes Sub-$1M Landscaping Companies Make
14:41
Ted Glaser
Yeah, I think it's really easy right now to say, oh, you should say no to all the things out there and only say yes to what fits your business model perfectly. But when you're getting started, you kind of just got to get revenue in the door. So I understand that. But once you get to a certain point, you know, a couple hundred thousand, if we're talking to like, you know, the sub $1 million guy, I think that it becomes very hard to scale past that. Mostly because it's really hard to build a team when you have so many unique, different specialty things like, well, for that client we do it this way, but for that client we do it that way. So if you can't standardize things, it makes it very hard to start building the team.
15:19
Ted Glaser
It also makes it hard to hold people accountable and have conversations about what needs to be done when the expectation is roller coaster all the time. So I think that's a big mistake that I see a lot of people making not having an understanding of some core critical financial metrics I think are incredibly important. Their cogs percentage I would say understanding client acquisition cost and how to do marketing spend. I cannot express enough how when you are under 5 million it probably makes way more sense 98% of the time to outsource your marketing to an agency and have them manage that for you versus trying to do it yourself when.
16:02
Jack Jostes
You'Re under 5 million is what you said.
16:05
Ted Glaser
I think when you're under five for sure.
16:07
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
16:08
Ted Glaser
Like almost 100% of the time. That's not an in house job in my opinion. That's not an in house job, that's an outsourced job.
16:14 – Why Outsourcing Marketing Beats DIY Under $5M
16:14
Jack Jostes
Yeah.
16:15
Ted Glaser
Like the job of the agency is to drive leads. The job of the company is to convert those leads.
16:19
Jack Jostes
I agree.
16:19
Ted Glaser
So we should be 100% focused on selling and converting but not like we don't need to be the experts in SEO and building the website and managing our Google Ad campaigns and all that like that can be easily outsourced. And to employ someone with that skill set is going to cost double what it costs to just hire an agency.
16:37
Jack Jostes
Way more than double.
16:38
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
16:38
Jack Jostes
Yeah. And then that person probably doesn't even have all of the stuff skills. No. To do all the different things to make it all fit together.
16:45
Ted Glaser
Correct. Yeah. So the beauty of working with and I for the record, I'm not even a Rambling Jackson client. But I. But I'm a huge. But I'm a big believer in using your service and like services of companies like yours. I. I just can't express enough how when you're doing it yourself, like when you pay an agency, your monthly payment is covering a massive array of skill sets that agency probably has four or five specialists within that company so that you get a specialty from each one. And if you try to hire that yourself, you're going to get a person who's half assed in a little bit of everything.
17:15
Jack Jostes
Have you ever thought about coming and doing sales at Ramblin Jackson?
17:20
Ted Glaser
No, but maybe there's a future in my path.
17:24
Jack Jostes
Yeah, there could be. You never know. No, you're right. The time it would take to personally learn all those skills. There are a couple things though. I say when you're under a million that I would do first. And so I recently did a podcast on this and one of them is to claim your own Google Business profile.
17:42
Ted Glaser
Oh, yeah.
17:42
Jack Jostes
So this is google.com business. You can all claim that today. Whether you're like, you haven't even started your company or you're. You'd be amazed how this is like, you're like, oh, yeah, that's obvious. A lot of guys haven't done it.
17:54
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
17:54
Jack Jostes
Where they don't know the login. They're like, buddy, who's no longer their buddy and is holding it hostage, has it.
18:00
Ted Glaser
And that's a.
18:01
Jack Jostes
So I'm like, you log into it and add me or whoever's doing your marketing as a manager. That's how I set it up. And then what do you think about door hangers? And can you even do those in Lincoln? It's sometimes a state law thing. Can you door hangers?
18:16 – Using Door Hangers & Google Reviews to Dominate Locally
18:16
Ted Glaser
Yes. I will tell you, we use door hangers for our existing clients to drive Google reviews. We have a whole strategy with that and we have over 1,000 Google reviews. We are the.
18:26
Jack Jostes
I love that you said that because Google reviews. Sorry.
18:30
Ted Glaser
That's where were going to go.
18:31
Jack Jostes
That was where I'm going next. Is. Is. And then get Google reviews.
18:35
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
18:35
Jack Jostes
So if I were just starting out, I'd focus on getting. If you could be. If you were. I think you were about to say we're the most reviewed in the state of Nebraska. Okay. Oh, in the whole state.
18:44
Ted Glaser
Entire state.
18:45
Jack Jostes
Cool.
18:45
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
18:46
Ted Glaser
As of last week, that was. That's been a goal for two years. And we just crossed over it last week.
18:50
Jack Jostes
Yeah. I'm the most reviewed marketing agency focusing on landscaping by it like threefold. We're also the most reviewed marketing agency of any kind in the state of Colorado. And so that actually has a huge recruiting impact.
19:03
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
19:04
Jack Jostes
Do you find a recruiting impact?
19:05
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
19:06
Ted Glaser
So I will say on the recruiting front, we have made some pretty intentional social plays with social media content. And this is actually something I talked about just in. In the Q and A portion of our session yesterday was of course, there is the social media brand awareness play for clients. A lot of people don't make their purchasing decisions about their lawn care services on Facebook or Instagram. But if you have a lot of content out there that's engaging, I say it's like a billboard. It's a billboard that they drive by every day as they're scrolling through their phone. And then one day when they actually need the services that you sell, they're going to google, type in lawn care, Lincoln, Nebraska. Then they see your gmb, they see all the Google reviews.
19:52 – Social Media as a Recruiting Magnet for Landscape Companies
19:52
Ted Glaser
So they Already trust, there's social trust built in because like, oh, I recognize that company, I've seen that one. And I see the Google reviews, then they go to the site. And if you have a really well built site, you, you've built this funnel that now starts to bring them in. Well, but the social media play, it's great for that, for clients. But I think what people are missing is by having a lot of Google reviews and then having a lot of really good social media content, it's very captivating and a huge opportunity for staffing and recruiting because you look, if you do your content right, you look like a fun, engaging place to work. And if you are someone looking for a job who's between the ages of 20 and 30, like you're gonna look them up online.
20:32
Ted Glaser
And if it looks like a super boring place that's dusty and, you know, whatever. Yeah.
20:36
Jack Jostes
And has negative reviews.
20:38
Ted Glaser
Has negative reviews or just very few reviews.
20:40
Jack Jostes
Right.
20:40
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
20:41
Ted Glaser
No one wants to be embarrassed of the place that they work at. So, like, we have been super intentional about, number one, making it cool to work there. We create cool gear. I mean, we have, we pump out new swag every year that's trendy and modern. Whatever, whatever is like cool. And clothing that's.
20:56
Jack Jostes
I like this quarter zip.
20:58
Ted Glaser
Yeah, it's quarter zips. It's the hats, like your rope hats, because those are cool right now. Long sleeve tees, pocket tees, you know, that type of stuff. Do something that does it and get it. Stuff that fits well. But these are all that's off, you know, aside from social. But these are all things that help with recruiting so much is like, don't make your guys look like a dork.
21:16
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
21:17
Ted Glaser
You know what I mean? Or feel, or feel like they look like a dork in whatever they're wearing.
21:20 – How Social Media Impacts AI Search Rankings (Bing + ChatGPT)
21:20
Jack Jostes
The other thing that's changing is that ChatGPT. And so a lot of people are looking on ChatGPT now for everything and that comes from Bing. So are people looking on Bing directly? No, but ChatGPT pulls from Bing and social media influences how you rank on Bing. So social media has recently become even more outside of just social media, but in the whole search world, expanding to AI search. Social media impacts your ranking in Bing, which impacts how you show up in ChatGPT.
21:58
Ted Glaser
I actually did not know that. That's really interesting. And we, for the first time ever, throwing three weeks ago, we just started doing Bing paid search. I mean, and we've been like Google everything for years. So we Bring in, you know, 2500 to 3000 leads per year. And we're just getting into Bing now.
22:14
Jack Jostes
How's it going?
22:16
Ted Glaser
We just started, so I don't even have data to know. Yeah, I mean, that's. I'm going to find out during my next.
22:23
Jack Jostes
Let me know. I mean, I think you're going to need to run it for several months at least. It's also June, so we've kind of gone past the peak season.
22:32
Ted Glaser
Yep.
22:33
Jack Jostes
So I don't know. I keep in touch with me on that.
22:35
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
22:36
Jack Jostes
So. So it's not even necessarily that they're looking on Bing. It's that they're looking on places that pull data from Bing.
22:43
Ted Glaser
Yeah, I was going to add to that. Just saying, like, Bing was always like the stepchild to Google.
22:48
Jack Jostes
Yes.
22:48
Ted Glaser
And it was like it just never got that much attention or value. And I did not know that Chat GBT is pulling a lot of. A lot or all of its results from being. But the fact is being in places that.
23:00
Jack Jostes
Well, here. Do you want to do something fun right now? I'm gonna pull up Chat GPT. I use the voice function on here. I own a home in Lincoln, Nebraska. How. How big would my yard be?
23:10
Ted Glaser
Are you asking this from the homeowner perspective?
23:12
Jack Jostes
Yeah, the homeowner perspective.
23:13
Ted Glaser
Would the homeowner be like, hey, who should I hire for lawn care? How would they ask that question?
23:18
Jack Jostes
So this is. This is where maybe they wouldn't even know. So, like, I own a home in Lincoln, Nebraska. So I'm recording this. Help me find somebody who can do my lawn mowing and fertilization. Which companies would you recommend? So you kind of get longer conversational.
23:35
Ted Glaser
Yeah, I was gonna say a homeowner probably doesn't know their square footage.
23:38
Jack Jostes
Yeah, they probably don't. So I. I'm searching. Searching the Web.
23:41
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
23:41
Jack Jostes
Okay, so it's searching the web. And then here are some highly recommended lawn. So there's yard works.
23:48
Ted Glaser
Oh, look at that. We're fourth down.
23:49
Jack Jostes
You're fourth down. Nice work.
23:51
Ted Glaser
No, that's terrible. We should be number one. Well, so this is. This is a great opportunity to find.
23:56
Jack Jostes
So. So. And look, now they're telling us extras and highlights. So for you, it says high customer satisfaction. So how do you think they know that?
24:04
Ted Glaser
From reviews?
24:05
Jack Jostes
Yes.
24:05
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
24:06
Jack Jostes
Right. So reviews are impacting AI search.
24:10
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
24:10
Ted Glaser
What's fascinating about this is we're ranked number one on an SEO, like organically and on Google reviews. And then we're fourth on here. So this. So. And the next Thing is, I have a friend who's very much in to the AI marketing space.
24:23
Jack Jostes
Yeah.
24:24
Ted Glaser
And two years ago he was saying like, you know, here are all the things you want to do to rank well through ChatGPT. And I was like, yeah, yeah, okay, whatever. And this has started to shift really quickly. So I'm now I'm sitting here thinking like, what in the world is going on that we're ranking number four on ChatGPT, which is again, what a great opportunity to go find out, dig into this and see what do we need to do?
24:46
Jack Jostes
Well, so you could just straight up ask ChatGPT how to improve it and it'll likely be like, well, one of the top things I do is look at your Bing places. Also, one of the things that's different about ChatGPT is one, it was very personalized. So it said I did not reference any internal Rambling Jackson documents. So I'm in a paid ChatGPT account. And so it's going to remember all the things that I give it. So this is where traditional SEO, like we could do rank tracking and being like, hey, here's where you rank for the most part on for this query. The location of the person searching impacts that a lot.
25:31
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
25:32
Jack Jostes
You know, so there's all these things and their browser history, are they logged into a JP Gmail account? Have they clicked on the website all of their previous. Are they using a Google Chrome browser and what have they clicked on? So it's personalized in that way. I'm seeing search evolve in a even more personalized direction based on like Facebook or Meta is trying to get you to use Meta AI and it's trying to remember everything about you. And Apple's trying to get you to use its thing and so is Microsoft and Copilot and all the. And now Google's like, hey, we've got AI mode. And like, what does Google have? They've got Gmail, the most used email and the most used browser. So I think, I guess what I'm saying is I wouldn't worry too much about being number four in my personal result.
26:25
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
26:26
Jack Jostes
Because it's kind of a thing that you can't totally.
26:31
Ted Glaser
It's so personalized across every platform. Yeah, I totally hear what you're saying.
26:35
Jack Jostes
So I don't want you to leave and be pissed at your marketing people that you're number four Chat GPT.
26:40
Ted Glaser
And for the record, I mean, and I'm sure you appreciate hearing this, there are certain things that like, you know, Google can change an algorithm and then, oh, the rankings have changed for a couple days or for whatever. But like, you can't hold your marketing agency responsible for every little thing all over the entire Internet. Yeah, but I was just fascinated. I was like, I wonder why those people ranked higher than us. So that was just what was fascinating.
27:04
Jack Jostes
So you might look at their Bing presence. And so then this is where like Bing optimization is actually important. Even though hardly anyone's using Bing directly at one time.
27:19
Ted Glaser
But again, this is just one AI platform.
27:21
Jack Jostes
This is just one of them. And then there's Grok and there's perplexity and there's so many of them. And so it is changing. But also like when I study them, like they're kind of looking at basic SEO signals, like, can they crawl your website? Because they're kind of extracting things out of your website and then they're validating through reviews. So in some ways has it like it has changed, but it. Yeah, I don't know. It hasn't changed.
27:48
Ted Glaser
I've heard that there. And this could be incorrect. You'd probably know better than I would if there is. The way that the content is on your site is more, I don't know what we're to use more enticing to AI versus like Google's traditional, like spiders that would crawl your page or whatever. But I don't know. I don't know if this has anything to do with like the content on the side of the way it's structured or if that's completely relevant to how you rank in an AI search.
28:15
Jack Jostes
So the, your site, a lot of the basics of like making your site crawlable are still important. And then there's how you structure the data from a development. So it's called structured data. There's schema.
28:29
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
28:29
Jack Jostes
Have you heard of schema?
28:30
Ted Glaser
I have.
28:30
Jack Jostes
So schema is like this way of formatting the code on your website and that becomes even more important. So that is a little more on the technical SEO side, which is why.
28:41
Ted Glaser
You hire an agency to do this for you and don't try to figure this out on your own.
28:45
Jack Jostes
I agree. In many ways, people who have built up their SEO, those things are going to give them a huge advantage in AI search. I'm just continually looking at the website as this hub, this source of information from which information is extracted. It's pulled out into AI. It's pulled out into Google's AI overview. And then one of the things that I'm looking into is like building AI agents for landscape companies. So once we have this source of information, you can train an AI agent to like, how much does lawn mowing.
29:24
Ted Glaser
Cost is an AI can? And help me understand this better because this is something I don't have a lot of education on yet. Is an AI agent like a custom GPT? It's like you train it with like maybe 100 or 200 answers to questions and then it kind of just takes it for. From there.
29:38
Ted Glaser
Yes.
29:39
Ted Glaser
How do you. So it's, it's a. I guess I understand custom GPT. So an agent is just like a, a group of answers to questions and then it's now trained on how to have a conversation with someone around most of those things.
29:55 – Building AI Agents and The Future of Client Communication
29:55
Jack Jostes
Yes, it's exactly like that. So it's like building a custom GPT that you feed it information. And so that's why when your website is the source of that information, it helps you show up on Google, it helps you show up in a GPT, it helps you show up in a AI search. And then also it allows you to build your own AI agent to answer frequently asked questions. And then the kind of, the better it's structured and written and the more that agent can just figure it out.
30:32
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
30:32
Ted Glaser
So here's a question. I don't know what you know about this. What do you know about like AI an like phone calls now? Like having not an a, not an AI agent, like as a chat bot on the site, but actually like the voice you're having the conversation with. I have zero experience with this. I've never engaged with one. Like, well, not like a modern one. You have the old ones where you speak to. You speak to the bank and it takes six seconds to even understand what you just said. It's super annoying.
30:59
Jack Jostes
It's become great. I would say so. So I don't know when this episode's going to come out. Right now we're recording it in June 2025. And I'd say that it's gone from like, man, that was awful. Speak to a human. Speak to. I think it's gonna like, representative. I have had some conversations with them. One was at a, I think a Hilton hotel. And I called to. And I was partly just testing it and I was like, hey, do you have any kettlebells in the weight room? That's kind of a specific weird question. And they were, they. It said something like, you know, I'm not sure, but can you help me understand why you're asking?
31:36
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
31:37
Jack Jostes
And I was like, well, I was like, whoa. And because now it's learning about why people like it. Partly it was self training itself.
31:44
Ted Glaser
What is the delay from when you say what you want to its response back? Because it used to be this weird delay. And so what is the delay and what is the vocal tone? Does it sound robotic? Does it sound.
31:54
Jack Jostes
I think that they're increasing and many of these tools, that's kind of the next thing that I'm wanting to do for my clients is to build these. Because a lot of landscape companies, especially if you're sub 1 million, the owner is out doing a lot.
32:08
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
32:08
Jack Jostes
And the owner misses the phone call that he paid his agency a lot of money to generate and now that person moves on to the next company on Google or whatever. And instead if it was like, hey, this is Ted's robot assistant. Ted's out mowing lawns right now. But I can answer basic questions like how can I help you?
32:29
Ted Glaser
So here's a question. Does it admit who it is at the beginning?
32:32
Jack Jostes
It can or it doesn't have to.
32:34
Ted Glaser
I was going to say on the one hand you almost don't want it to because it's just going to frustrate people because they're going to assume it's not going to be good. But on the other hand, if it's incapable of answering things perfectly, they're just gonna think it's an incompetent employee. So like, what is the move here? Does it introduce like. So we have answering service which by the way, okay, another mistake that sub 1 million companies do. They don't pick up the phone. You have to pick up the phone. You spend all this effort to get people to call you and don't pick it up while you're on the mower. If you don't have someone in the office, you can pick it up, shut the machine off, take the call, don't be shouting over your machine.
33:06
Ted Glaser
But yeah, that's a whole, that's a whole thing. But we don't let anything go to voicemail. So if our office does not catch a call after three rings, it goes to answering service who answers on our behalf. So as a client, you will never end at the dead end of a voicemail. You will always speak to a human. But that answering service says this is the answering service for Summit because I don't want their ability or inability to solve a problem on the spot be projected onto us. So they admit that's probably not the right word to use. But they, they open the call saying, hey, this answering server for Summit lawns. How can I help you? Whatever. I don't know if that's a good move, like, for an AI agent or not.
33:48
Ted Glaser
Like, how do you build the best client experience out of that?
33:50 – Why Answering Every Call Wins in Lawn Care
33:50
Jack Jostes
I think we're going to see this evolve really quickly, and I think people are going to become accustomed to talking with AI.
33:58
Ted Glaser
I think you're right.
33:59
Jack Jostes
And that. I don't know.
34:01
Ted Glaser
You know, we'll find out soon enough.
34:03
Jack Jostes
Yeah, I'm planning to with mine.
34:06
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
34:06
Jack Jostes
I'm rolling out a bunch of other tech changes right now, but the next thing I want to do, because I analyzed, I use a call service to answer my phone calls, and we found it was like one actual client of ours calls a month to our main line. Because once people work with us, they have usually our direct line, our cell phone. We also use Zoom Phone. But my whole business is different from yours. I think what you're doing makes perfect sense.
34:31
Ted Glaser
Yeah. We run totally different companies.
34:32
Jack Jostes
Very different. I would absolutely go with what you're doing. You need to answer the phone. People are calling for lawn service.
34:39
Ted Glaser
Well, if they don't. If I don't pick up, they're just going to call the next one.
34:42
Jack Jostes
Whereas for me, a lot of people find out about us online and they book a call on our website and it's kind of funneled that way. And people are like, great, I'm going to schedule a call with my marketing people. So I don't actually get many legitimate phone calls, and that's why I get an enormous volume of people trying to sell me software.
35:00
Ted Glaser
Yes. Yes.
35:00
Jack Jostes
Freaking software. People are calling to sell a software. And so I'm just going to have them talk to a robot.
35:06
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
35:07
Ted Glaser
Which makes a lot of sense in your. In your situation. It makes a ton of sense. And by the way, bringing this back to business model, if I was selling big, extravagant landscape projects, there's going to be a relationship there. It's not that we don't have a relationship with our clients, but it's very transactional. So if they don't sign up with me, they're going to just call the next one and sign up with them. Because hiring a lawn care company like Mowing or FERC is like a to do list item. It's just a checklist item. I got to hire a company now. It's done for the year. But if I was going to hire someone to build a backyard or be my marketing agency, I'm going to be.
35:39
Ted Glaser
Oh, yeah, I will leave a message because I'm Going to wait for you to call me back because we're about to engage in a long term.
35:44
Jack Jostes
Yeah.
35:44
Ted Glaser
Very intense, like very intimate relationship. And it's not, again, it's not that we don't have relationships with our clients because we do, but it's different. So the way that we handle our phone calls makes total sense. Just the differences between you and I in that regard.
35:59
Jack Jostes
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
36:01
Ted Glaser
You're much more like a project based landscape company.
36:04
Jack Jostes
Oh, for sure.
36:05
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
36:05
Jack Jostes
Yeah. It's a very high relationship touch. A lot of it scheduled and a lot of people like I do text and call with them.
36:13
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
36:14
Ted Glaser
And which is a great personal experience.
36:17
Jack Jostes
I try and run it in a very personal way.
36:20
Ted Glaser
That's awesome.
36:20
Jack Jostes
Yeah. I, but I also, I don't have anywhere near 4,000 customers. Right. So I'm running. It's. It's different.
36:28
Ted Glaser
It's just different.
36:29
Jack Jostes
And I think what you do is great.
36:32
Ted Glaser
It works. Yeah. For us. It works for us. And by the way we do it works for us. Not the only way to do it.
36:38
Jack Jostes
I also have a colleague in my agency, Mastermind, who has 4,000 website customers and they're spending a tenth of what my custom clients do. And his is not a high relationship touch thing at all. But also his customers are not expecting that.
36:56
Ted Glaser
Yeah. It's. They're probably buying a very simple service.
36:58
Jack Jostes
They're not specialized in landscape or in anything. They just like small business websites.
37:03
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
37:04
Jack Jostes
And like.
37:05
Ted Glaser
And I bet they have a standardized simplified service offering and it's very easy to onboard get up and running. But yeah, it's not super high in depth. It's a very simple.
37:14
Jack Jostes
And that's great. He loves it.
37:16
Ted Glaser
I'm.
37:16
Jack Jostes
I love what I do.
37:17
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
37:18
Jack Jostes
So to each his own.
37:19
Ted Glaser
To each his own.
37:19
Jack Jostes
Well, hey, anyways, you shared a lot of great nuggets. You shared that mentors and people helped you along the way. If people are listening and they're like, wow, Ted was. I'd love to ask Ted a question. Would that be okay if they. How can we get in touch with you?
37:35
Ted Glaser
Yeah, best way. I would say LinkedIn is a great one. Honestly, if you follow us on Instagram or Facebook, you can follow me on Instagram and DM me at. Mr. Ted.
37:46
Jack Jostes
Mr. Ted.
37:47
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
37:47
Ted Glaser
That's really nice.
37:48
Jack Jostes
That's pretty good.
37:48
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
37:48
Ted Glaser
And what's funny about that is I've never actually given out my personal. Instagram is like, hey, professionally reach out to me. But I was like, you know what, It's a place that everyone wants to connect though. And I think that's who I am. That's what's going on in my personal life.
37:58
Jack Jostes
Yeah, that's cool.
37:58
Ted Glaser
Y.
37:59
Ted Glaser
Add me on Facebook. Whatever. Email me Ted. Summit lawns.com whatever. Your preferred platform.
38:05 – Domain Names, Branding, and SEO Strategy in Landscaping
38:05
Jack Jostes
You own summitlawns.com? Dude, good job. How did you get that? Because there are many companies, no offense, but I'm sure you're aware there are other people who have Summit Lawns in their name.
38:15
Ted Glaser
We are not the only Summit Lawns.
38:17
Jack Jostes
You are not the only Summit Lawns in the United States.
38:18
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
38:19
Jack Jostes
And to get summitlawns.com is like, that's pretty clutch.
38:23
Ted Glaser
Well, so here's what's funny about that. When we, and I know we're at the wrap up here, so just. Yeah, right at the end here. It's a podcast at the time. Well, and this is. You'll confirm this in SEO. When we launched the website in 2012, summitlauns.com was not available and I didn't have the budget to try and buy it actually, it was already owned. So we did summitlawnslinkin.com that was our core foundational address on accident. That ended up being a massively powerful lever to our ranking right away. And then over the last 10 years it's. It kind of lost its importance. And then recently having your territory name and your URL is actually very impactful again. Is that right?
39:01
Jack Jostes
It is, yeah. Well, so here's one of the reasons why it's so powerful. All of the like. So I'm going to give you a link from my website, landscapersguide.com and it's going to mention your brand name, Summit Lawns. So you have the word lawns in your name, which is good. When text. This is a little geeky. So if it's too geeky, let me know. I'm trying to explain it. So when there's text that has a link in it's called anchor text. And so when your business name has keywords in it and then that adds link juice, if you will, to this. And then when the domain name itself has the keywords in it's like a double whammy.
39:44
Ted Glaser
Yeah, yeah.
39:45
Jack Jostes
So basically everywhere that's mentioning your website is gonna have your keyword Summit Lawns. And then the Lincoln thing. Yeah, that's pretty good.
39:55
Ted Glaser
At the time it was really impactful. So we actually didn't even buy summitllons.com till like a year or two ago. But yeah, it's really hard to tell that to people over the phone and spelled. It was a super long.
40:06
Jack Jostes
Oh, yeah, it's very long. So I have what's called the barf test.
40:08
Ted Glaser
What's that?
40:09
Jack Jostes
That's if you say your business name or web address and it makes you barf a little bit. It's a problem.
40:15
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
40:15
Jack Jostes
So to. There's like this balancing act between branding and SEO stuff, and I always actually tip it in the brand direction.
40:23
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
40:24
Jack Jostes
Because if you got vehicles driving around and it said summitlawnslinkinnebraska.com it's like, wow, that looks ugly. You know what I mean? And like saying, just go to summitlawnslincolnnebraska.com it's like, I don't know, it kind of makes me barf a little bit.
40:41
Ted Glaser
Yeah.
40:41
Ted Glaser
A totally separate conversation we could have would be on branding and on vehicles. You don't need to have your website or your phone number at all, just your name, because they're just going to Google you anyway ways. And that's wasted, in my opinion. It's wasted space on valuable real estate. But that's a whole other conversation.
40:53
Jack Jostes
Okay, so this is one reason I may disagree with you is because there may be another Summit Lawns that shows up.
41:02
Ted Glaser
That's fair.
41:03
Jack Jostes
Because depending on where they are and sometimes your phone is set to Dallas, Texas, and you get. And you get like weird local results from somewhere else. Like, I have a number of clients who have a couple common name, American landscape, Best cut, Perfect cutting edge, cut above, you know.
41:23
Ted Glaser
Yeah, right.
41:24
Jack Jostes
There's. There's a million of these. And they often get confused with different companies. Another really common one in Colorado and I think even Nebraska is Aspen. Yeah, you know, Aspen Plumbing, Aspen, whatever.
41:39
Ted Glaser
Who's to say Summit's probably not. I mean, you go up to Summit county, it's Summit everything up there.
41:42
Jack Jostes
Yeah. So. So that's the only reason that I would actually put.
41:46
Ted Glaser
That's interesting. Okay. I like. I like a different.
41:47
Jack Jostes
But I agree with you. They're going to Google you, and if they're in Lincoln, they're likely gonna see it. But there's also a chance that makes sense that they don't.
41:55
Ted Glaser
Yeah, I get that.
41:57
Jack Jostes
So.
41:57
Ted Glaser
Well, sorry, man. I took us on a weird wrapping up and.
42:01
Jack Jostes
Well, that happens on this show when it's good. So it's been fun.
42:06
Ted Glaser
Hey, I appreciate you having me on. It's been really good to get to know you here.
42:10
Jack Jostes
Yeah. You too, Ted. Thank you. It's been fun.
42:12
Ted Glaser
Thanks, Jack.
42:14
Jack Jostes
Like today's video and subscribe to our YouTube channel to get upcoming videos to help you grow your snow and landscape company. My name is Jack Jostes, and check out my free resources in the show notes and click the next video to grow your business.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode + see the transcript: https://landscapersguide.com/podcast/
Get your free beef jerky sample: https://landscapersguide.com/toolbox
See upcoming live and virtual events: https://landscapersguide.com/events
Connect with Ted:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedglaser/
- Summit Lawns: https://www.summitlawnslincoln.com
- Instagram: @mrtedman