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00:00 – What’s New At Ramblin Jackson
00:00
Jack Jostes
I can just voice into directly into the email app what I want it to say and it's like refines it. This has made a world of difference in closing jobs. For every position at Ramblin Jackson, we go through a 90 day onboarding period. The 90 days to become a Landscape marketing guide. Today I'd like to share with you some updates on some really cool projects we've been working on at Ramblin Jackson and some of my current favorite AI tools that are helping me as a CEO, as a business owner that I know would really help you run your snow and landscape company. My name is Jack justice and welcome to the Landscaper's Guide podcast where we share sales, marketing and leadership inspiration to help you grow your snow and landscape company.
00:49 – Jack’s Third Book And The Team Book Club
00:49
Jack Jostes
And a lot of what we do for our clients for you guys are things that I'm personally doing in my own business running Ramblin Jackson. And so we've got a lot of really cool things that we've been working on and I thought that it would be cool to share just a solo podcast with you guys to give you an update. So one of the updates is that I'm nearly done with my third book. It's the Landscaper's Guide to Direct Response Sales and Marketing. How to get found online by qualified leads and turn them into hell yes customers. We're in the final stages of like getting the print copies here. It's going to be a hard copy book and it's so close.
01:31
Jack Jostes
There's just little details that we're refining and I can't commit to a D because what I'm learning is that a hardcover book, it adds like an extra week every time I try to get a proof. So it's like two weeks. We make a little adjustment. It takes two weeks to get it done, but we're close. And the Ramblin Jackson team has had a book club. So we've been reading this book over the last six weeks and different team members have been leading book clubs focused on you. The whole nature of these book club conversations is how can we better serve our snow and landscape clients. And it's been a launching pad for a lot of conversations about how do we do things. What's changed?
02:16 – A New Digital Marketing Audit
02:16
Jack Jostes
The book has a lot of content about getting found in AI and leveraging email marketing and social media and what's new. So it's a very innovative time right now. I'm really enjoying it. It's such an exciting time to be running a digital marketing agency. It seems like every day new things Come out new. In some ways, it's a lot to keep track of, but ultimately I'm grateful to get to do it. And part of how we serve clients at Ramblin Jackson is the book. I collaborate with different people on the team. Like today I met with our SEO strategist, Kevin. Kevin read the SEO content while I was writing it, gave me some feedback, and then he led a book club conversation on it. And then that's informing our new audit. So we're just, this week we're rolling out a new audit.
03:04 – Turning The Book Into An Implementation Course
03:04
Jack Jostes
We're testing it on a couple of our wildfront to your clients and I'm excited to roll that out to our clients because the audit helps you helps landscape companies see where are you at, what's changing in the digital marketing space and how do you stack up against your competition? This is part of the way that we then design our marketing plans to get work done for you. Not every, not everyone who reads my book or listens to the podcast is a fit for hiring Ramblin Jackson, but that doesn't mean I don't want to help them. So I'm creating a course and the course is essentially the, you know, implementation guide of the book. So it's the direct response sales and marketing playbook and it has a full workbook that comes with it. So I'm, I'm recording and producing an online course.
03:57
Jack Jostes
It has modules that you go through to help you establish your foundational four. It helps you get your Google business profile totally dialed in. It's pretty tactical. The whole book and the course is full of things that are meant for you to implement. And, and the course has fill in the blank worksheets that help you. Some of this is like management consulting. Like, who is this? Who is the person responsible for owning your sales process at your landscape company? What's the weakest link in your sales process? Getting clear on that and managing your team around that one thing could generate millions of dollars of revenue. And the course is full of ways to systematize your marketing. And I'm feeling really good about it. We also have a new position called the Director of Delivery.
04:51 – Scaling Delivery And 90-Day Onboarding
04:51
Jack Jostes
And for every position at Ramblin Jackson, we go through a 90 day onboarding period. The 90 days to become a landscape, that marketing Guide, or the 90 days to become our lead WordPress security developer, or the 90 days to become the director of delivery. So this person hasn't gone through those full 90 days. So I don't want to share who it is yet, but it's going well, and we're onboarding this new position, and there's a lot of technology involved and quality control, and we're really scaling up Ramblin Jackson and heading into another focus over the next several years of growth. And the book and the audit and the course and this new delivery focused role are all part of that. For the last six or seven years, I've had an executive assistant who later then became in an operations position.
05:53 – Rethinking Operations And Business Systems
05:53
Jack Jostes
And that person has graduated from Ramblin Jackson, really excited for her, onto great things. And it also meant that there was a lot of work to do myself that I needed to think like, okay, does it make sense to hire an assistant again or somebody in an operations capacity? And I decided that I want to do the work. So I'm doing a lot of operations work. And when this happens, when there's change at Ramblin Jackson, I'm always like, all right, what is the most efficient way to do this currently with the current tools available, and how have we been doing things? And do I want to do it that way? And I often end up finding ways to improve how we do things. So we used to have a peo. It's kind of complicated, but were are.
06:41
Jack Jostes
We were part of this bigger network and we had employee benefits through there. And theoretically they were good at payroll software, benefits, but in actuality, it was. They were not very good at any of those things. And then they got acquired, and then they got acquired again, and it was really disruptive to things here. So I have decoupled all of those things, and I'm onboarding Gusto is my payroll software. And I bought our benefits through a broker that I work directly with, and I'm working with a fractional HR person, and I have a different bookkeeper. And like, I've kind of isolated all these things so I can maintain the quality. So if one of them gets acquired, it's not disrupting the whole thing, or if one of them goes out of business or isn't doing a good job, I can replace those.
07:36 – Why AI Matters For A Busy Business Owner
07:36
Jack Jostes
So that's going well. And I feel like I have a really good handle on benefits and, oh, man, all the taxes. There's employment tax, and then in many states I need to do a nexus corporate income tax, and then in some of them, also a personal income tax. So just keeping organized on all of this has been a moving target over the last several years. And I've had people helping me, but I've got it really dialed into how I want it exactly. And it feels manageable partly because what I wanted to share with you is some of the cool AI tools that I'm using. So, you know, one of them is simply managing my email. I don't, I don't know about you. I get a lot of email. I get a lot of email.
08:24
Jack Jostes
And as a business owner, you have to wear a lot of hats. Sometimes I'm wearing like a CFO hat. I'm thinking about cash flow projections and hiring budgets and profit and loss and, you know, different resource allocation. And then sometimes it's more like day to day invoicing, like having a pulse on that or switching gears into benefits and HR or, you know, some of the things I love to do are things like marketing, like making the podcast or designing new products. And then there's all the internal operations, the employees that I work with and what do they need? And then there's the external relationships, key vendors, partners. I'm in various state and national landscape associations. I'm a public speaker. I host the podcast. So there's a lot of, like, different things going on.
09:26 – Superhuman For Faster Email Management
09:26
Jack Jostes
And what I found has worked really well for me over the last several months is I got this tool called Superhuman dialed in. So Superhuman manages my emails and it has split inboxes. So all those different things, like I have a really dialed in finance split inbox. And so when I'm thinking like, all right, I'm going to work on finance stuff, I can just go boom, boom through those emails. And Superhuman has these amazing keyboard shortcuts and also a mobile app where like you just press with two fingers and it opens up all of the options for those keyboard shortcuts. So it was a bit to learn initially, but now that I know those shortcuts, I can execute my email in about a fourth time that I could have in the past.
10:17
Jack Jostes
And while having somebody previously assist me in this was helpful at that time, I ultimately still needed to read and respond and file away certain things. And so this is actually more efficient than what I was doing having an assistant. And the other thing that Superhuman does is it will automatically draft a response for you to your email. As an example, one time we got an email from somebody and they're like, hey, how much does it cost to work with Ramblin Jackson? And you know, when can we meet? And I have all. I have answered those questions throughout my career via email. And I have certain pages on my website, like ramblinjackson.com pricing. If you're curious about working with us, check it out. We Build pricing guides just like that for our clients. And we have online scheduling.
11:16
Jack Jostes
So my email drafted the most perfect email response to this person. It was like, hey, you know, we'd love to help you with your website design and development. And, you know, you can read about our investment ranges on our pricing page. Here's the link. And when you're ready, here is a. A link to our online scheduling page. And I've copied our director of client strategy, Robert, on this email. And I, like, open this. And I'm like, damn, yeah, that's it. And I clicked send, and it sounded like me because it was based on having analyzed my writing style over the years. Another time I was out with my kids and were staying at a cabin. We were doing something fun, and I remembered that I needed to do something for, like, this benefits thing.
12:09
Jack Jostes
And I'm like, hey, guys, sorry, I'm going to need to. I thought it was going to take me like 25 minutes, guys, I need to pop back on the laptop and respond to this thing. It's going to take me 25 minutes. But instead, Superhuman drafted this email. And I kid you not, I read it for one minute. I'm like, I have no changes Send. And so that's been amazing. The other thing that I really like about Superhuman is I like to work from my phone. I travel a fair amount personally, and for work, I'm out and about. Sometimes I get antsy and I want to go, I don't know, work. I might walk somewhere and work from a park or something. And it has this amazing AI assistant where I can just voice directly into the email app what I want it to say.
13:06 – Using Claude To Automate Recurring Work
13:06
Jack Jostes
And it's like, refines it. And maybe I make a couple edits, but a lot of times it just nails it. It punctuates things perfectly in the way that I want. And I click send. So I shared this with one of my clients who is using it and really liking it. So I hope you like that. Some of the other things that I'm using is Claude. And I'm just amazed by all the different softwares that I can connect Claude to and all the different reports and things and, you know, even basic stuff. Like we. We have a weekly beef jerky club, Ramblin Jackson. So Ramblers, those are the employees here, can nominate each other or themselves. I nominated myself today, guys, for not upholding a core value. One of my. One of the core values was craftsmanship in life and work, especially on Fridays.
14:11
Jack Jostes
And unfortunately, I was heading out of town, I forgot to Close the loop is what we call it with the team about something I could communicated with a client that left them in the dark when the client emailed them and I was out of town. So I nominated myself. But mostly it's positive praise, people nominating other people for doing good things, nominating the core values. And then this needs to be commute organized and put into the company document. And now I just have a Claude skill that runs, you know, on. On Mondays for me, and it crawls the spreadsheet where all those nominations go. It formats it for me. And instead of having to copy and format and all this stuff from a spreadsheet, I just copy and take. I spend less than one minute just going, yep, that's it. Thank you. Very good.
15:09 – Why Jack Uses Gemini For Search And Planning
15:09
Jack Jostes
I've really started enjoying Gemini. So typically, when it comes to needing to search for information, I found I like Gemini best. I think it's better than chat at this time. I think it's better than Claude. I know there are other tools, but Gemini, I mean, Google, we've got over 20 years of search, and Gemini just accesses it so quickly and in such an incredible way. So one of the ways that I use it is for my travel plans, for my itineraries. Like when I book a flight, I have Gemini create my calendar invite automatically with the flight details and it blocks it out so I know that I've got that flight in the calendar.
15:56
Jack Jostes
And some of the things I love doing in general, including when I travel, I enjoy smoking cigars, I enjoy working out with kettlebells, and I enjoy going to shooting ranges. I enjoy all those things. So sometimes I have this prompt when I'm planning and it'll find me gyms that have kettlebells and saunas, I love doing that. If I can use a kettlebell workout, go in the sauna afterwards, go to a cigar lounge, all on the same trip, that is pretty cool. And Gemini is like, hey, based on your location where this Airbnb that you're staying at here is a perfect recommendation of places. Here's how far it is from everything. Here's the Google rating. And I'm like, great. In under a minute, it can plan all of those things for me. So those are some of the tools that I've been using personally.
16:52 – Client Mastermind, Innovation, And What’s Next
16:52
Jack Jostes
And I'm curious what you're using and want to let you know that we have a mastermind for our clients. So if you're listening to this or watching and you're one of our wild frontier clients, I meet with my clients every month and we Talk about this stuff, what's going on in life, how are you getting your work done? What are your AI tools? What are your challenges? And some of my clients forget that we have that or they haven't come to it yet. So you should check it out. And you know, ultimately guys, it's an exciting time. We're innovating, we're building, we're refining. We've been in business 17 years. We have over 400 reviews and I wanted to read one of them to you because this is really inspiring to me.
17:38 – How Better Sales Systems Help Close More Jobs
17:38
Jack Jostes
You know, we get the privilege of working with landscape companies, with, you know, family owned companies and they trust us for a lot and it's rewarding when it works really well. So this is a review Tina d' Ambrosio from ATD Landscaping. And she said, overall, we've been very happy with all of our contacts. We're about realizing the approach we decided to take will take time to see results. We've been pleased with Ramblin Jackson. Super grateful that we're like, hey, Tina, you're in a competitive market, it's going to take time. It might take years depending on how many reviews you get. And so she's 36 months in and she's seeing amazing results. We got to work with Tina on her sales process and she said this has made a world of difference in closing jobs. Highly recommend working with Ramblin Jackson.
18:38 – What The New Book Will Help You Implement
18:38
Jack Jostes
Everyone is professional and loads of experience. So shared that in our company, it's soon to be Slack. That's the other thing that we're changing. I like using the software called Voxer, but the team is like, hey, we gotta switch to Slack. But basically our internal chat and everyone loves that. So this book is full of ideas about generating leads for your landscape company, about refining your sales process, about how to, how to present. Don't just send your proposals for big deals. It gets into the whole thing from generating leads to selling to them, to how to handle leads that like go dark and don't respond to you. How to do social media. So I can't wait to send you one of these and it's coming really soon. So if you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast and email newsletter at landscapersguide.com/podcast.
19:42
Jack Jostes
I send out an email each week with our podcast and then I'll also be sending out announcements for when the book is ready, for the course and for our upcoming events. So thanks for listening today. Have a great day. My name is Jack justice and I look forward to talking with you next week on the Landscaper's Guide.