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00:00 β Why Consistency Pays Off
00:00 β Jack Jostes
Consistency pays off if you'll wait long enough. This has to be genuine. You have to be genuine. The sales process starts when you answer the phone.
00:10 β Aaron Wolfe
Hey, I'm Aaron Wolfe from Wickenburg Landscape. I'm thrilled to be the winner of.
00:14 β Jack Jostes
The.
00:14 β Aaron Wolfe
2026 Landscape Leader.
00:16 β Jack Jostes
Of the Year contest.
00:17 β Aaron Wolfe
By Ramblin.
00:18 β Jack Jostes
Jackson. Woohoo. Watch my presentation to learn how being punctual every time, consistent in social media and delivering promises.
00:27 β Meet Aaron Wolfe And Wickenburg Landscape
00:27 β Aaron Wolfe
Helped me grow a multi million dollar landscape company more than Morning everybody. My name is Aaron Wolf and I'm the second generation owner of our family's company Wickenburg Landscape. 45 Years. We just passed 45 years so we're pretty excited about that. One of the things I'm really proud of is my wife Janice. She's my right hand person. I wouldn't be able to do any of this without her and our two sons and our daughter. And the fun part about it is that they all grew up in the company but not just they didn't work here because we wanted them to. In a lot of ways we've tried to kick our kids out of the company and they really do a lot of stuff. So our daughter runs our office, runs all of our social media and things like that.
01:11 β Growing From $1 Million To $3.8 Million
01:11 β Aaron Wolfe
Nathaniel, our oldest son actually carries a lot of the licensing for the company on the weed and feed side of the company. And Ethan is the youngest certified paver installer in North American history at 16. I don't even believe anybody's ever done anything under 18, so it's pretty cool to see them in the company. They've also been part instrumental, part as the last five years because we've grown from basically $1 million to 3.8 million. And this year we've kind of hit some ceilings that we're trying to overcome. We're having to restructure the company because our plan is to take it north of 10 million. So that's one of the goals that we have. A little bit more about me I've been a advanced level and a level one instruct paver instructor for 14 years. I used to travel all over the country.
02:05 β Aaron Wolfe
Teaching and certifying people on concrete pavers is one of my passions in life. I also served as the ICPI Southwest Chapter president for two years. So that was a lot of fun. And then even locally in our own town I served on our Parks and recreation commission for 16 years with the last 10 of them being as the chairman. So we've won more than 30 state and national awards for our work and expertise. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of background on stuff about us. But today, what I wanted to talk about is one thing, and that one thing is consistency. And what makes all that matter. Consistency takes time. Without time, there's no consistency.
02:53 β How Consistency Builds Customer Trust
02:53 β Aaron Wolfe
See, we can be perfect one time, but if we're not continually being perfect, if we're not continually striving for that perfection, we're never going to build consistency. But one of the things I want to point out is consistency builds trust. Trust builds relationships, but relationships build successful businesses. So very early on in my life, my dad taught me, don't go out and just have customers. Build relationships with those customers. Because as we build relationships, it's not if. It's when we're going to mess up. If we have a relationship with somebody, they're going to allow us the opportunity to fix it. So one of those things is that it literally just happened this last week. We had a customer call our office, irate. I had you guys do my landscape. I loved you guys. Everything was great.
03:52 β Owning Mistakes And Repairing Relationships
03:52 β Aaron Wolfe
I called you guys to clean up before I came home, and you guys blew me off. You didn't get back to me. I'm going to be home in three days, and my house is a mess. And I owned it, 100% my problem. And so I told him, don't worry. I said I would love the opportunity to fix this. And he's like, oh, okay. And I said, let me come and take care of everything for free. It's my problem. I want to fix it. And because I had that relationship with him, he allowed me the opportunity to fix it. Now, I don't know if we're going to do more stuff, but historically, customers over time build our company. And so what I need to do is maintain those relationships, and I can't let those go. So I lost a little bit of money today.
04:41 β Aaron Wolfe
I fixed the relationship, and were actually able to find some other things. I got paid a little bit for it, but the idea was that I wanted to build the relationship, and we're going to mess up. Our team is going to mess up, but we need to fix it and own it. One of the things is that consistency, without consistency in Arizona, you're not going to have a landscape in Arizona. It is hot. 110 Plus 115 sometimes. And if we don't have consistency in a simple thing called irrigation, it doesn't matter. So consistency keeps us healthy. Landscaping. Inconsistent irrigation at best will give us stunted plants or they'll kill stuff. So think about that as we're in the landscape and irrigation industry. Consistency in irrigation is going to lend us those relationships. Consistency.
05:40 β Why Punctuality Starts With Leadership
05:40 β Aaron Wolfe
And everything that we do is going to end up allowing those things to flourish. And how we do that. So how do we end up walking into those things? Well, they actually drive all of our core values. And we're going to talk about a couple of those things. The three main things that I wanted to talk about in consistency today. The first one being punctual and delivering every time. The hard part for me is that a lot of the people that I know now, even my adult children, they don't remember me 15, 20, 30 years ago when I never showed up to anything on time. If I was within 30 minutes and I thought it was okay if I just called, it was normal for me to, hey, can I come tomorrow? I overbooked myself. There always was an emergency in my life.
06:32 β Aaron Wolfe
Being punctual wasn't important. Delivering every time wasn't important. And what ended up changing that is two and a half years ago, we started working with Ramblin Jackson. And it was interesting because I say I've learned more about business working with them than I've ever gotten from them in terms of results. I mean, they deliver phenomenal results for us. But from our first meeting, the promise was we're going to be at every meeting and we're going to deliver on every schedule. And if we don't, we're going to give you beef jerky. All of a sudden, I now had to be on time to every meeting. That's going to be hard. And so we strive to be on time for all those things. And so then we started, and we're not perfect. We miss those kind of things.
07:19 β Aaron Wolfe
But the new Aaron, if we're a minute or two late, we end up crediting back something. We're going to end up giving our customers cookies or brownies. And those are the things that we own it. And it's not just, I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it anymore for us. So what we end up doing is we make it our own. And that's gotta start with me. And I didn't go out and announce that I didn't go out one day and just say, hey, everybody, we're gonna all be on time now. It started with me making a conscious decision. And when I did that, it then started trickling into all of the company. And after six months, it started affecting everything we did. So the second part is going to be in social media.
08:02 β Moving Beyond Inconsistent Social Posting
08:02 β Aaron Wolfe
The way we used to do social media was we Would do a post. Oh, we need to post. We need somebody, we need extra help, we need a new employee, we need somebody else. And that's all it was to us. It was just something to just, oh, social media is where everything is going to go. Oh, we should be on social media. We should do something on social media. And what we would do is we would post once a month, once every week, you know, and it got to the b. We do it when we have time. And it really wasn't important. It wasn't something that we made a conscious decision to do every time. And so how did that end up changing? Well, it actually changed working with Robert. And this goes back over a year ago. We ended up doing.
08:48 β How Landscape Chef Events Built Relationships
08:48 β Aaron Wolfe
We have a landscape chef series and that's where we open up our outdoor kitchen at our house. And every month we allow customers they can sign up online through our website and they get free admission. And then we'll have up to 16 people come to our house and we will teach them how to cook on our outdoor kitchen. And we thought it was a great idea. But 18 months ago, when we got ready to start this, or 16 months ago, Robert's like, how long are you going to do this if nobody shows up? And I'm like, well, if no one shows up, why would I do it for more than a couple months? And he made a really cool point. He said, if you don't make a commitment long term.
09:33 β Aaron Wolfe
And he wanted us to do those all the way through 2026 if nobody showed up. And see, the thing is that when we make consistent or consistency our project and we make that important into us, it changes how we approach it. Well, now all of a sudden, I'm not doing this for one or two or three months. I'm doing this for 18 months, and I'm not going to judge it until the end of 18 months. And I put all my effort into it and we started going and going, and pretty soon we end up getting 8, 10, 12 people at these events. I can't tell you how much we've sold from these events. I'm going to say at least 500, 600, $700,000. It's not because we sell them. It's because we're consistently helping our customers. So now where are we at current?
10:24 β Answering Customer Questions Through Video
10:24 β Aaron Wolfe
And we end up promoting a process that Marcus Sheridan has made famous. They ask, you answer, what are our customers asking for? What are the, you know, the different team, the people that are answering the phone, the questions that come in on the portal, all Those things. What are people asking? That's what we do videos about. And so now we've posted hundreds of videos and we don't post. Customers don't care about our yard. Customers don't care about Wickenburg landscape. We stop posting anything about Wickenburg landscape. We don't say, look at what a great job we did, or look at this. All we do is we promote the customer and it's all about the customer. And so what we started doing is we've been doing videos every single day now for 10 months.
11:13 β When Consistent Video Marketing Started Paying Off
11:13 β Aaron Wolfe
And then we started doing weekly Facebook lives every Tuesday at 10 o'. Clock. And then what we ended up doing is now we're expanding that into live on four different platforms. And so what ended up happening? Here's the interesting story. Consistency pays off if you'll wait long enough. What happened? And it was discouraging. For six months, we're pouring in all this effort and nothing is happening. Literally nothing. No engagement, very little, you know, likes. Just it was a couple hundred views here and there. And then all of a sudden the seventh month came along and the doors just blew off. Now we're getting two, three, four customers a week, literally a week calling us and saying they're happy with their landscaper, they're happy with what's going on in their yard.
12:03 β Aaron Wolfe
And what they want to do is they realize after watching our videos, their landscaper doesn't know what they're doing. They didn't know what was available. And now what they're able to do is they're able to see hiring us makes a much better decision. And so what's happened is we actually had a customer two or three weeks ago, and what he did is they found us on Google. They watched 100 of our videos. They wanted to start using us as their landscape around their new house. And then they went to their builder and then they said, hey, who do you recommend? And they said, wickenburg Landscape. So they found us and built the relationship on social media. And the referral just confirmed what they were doing. So the third thing that we're doing is how do we deliver on promises?
12:52 β Delivering On Promises Throughout The Sales Process
12:52 β Aaron Wolfe
In the past, we never honored deadlines, we just apologized for them. And apologies, everybody's got them. We. But when you don't apologize for those things and you deliver, you become different. And one of the things that Ramblin Jackson taught us a lot was the sales process starts when you answer the phone and you call back exactly when you say you are. Builds trust. You deliver when you say you're gonna do builds trust. You show up when you're supposed to builds trust. You start the job when you're supposed to builds trust. You meet deadlines, you build trust. And that trust built over time is how we end up Consistency to do that. So the one thing I want to look at is the key takeaways from today are this has to be genuine. You have to be genuine.
13:39 β Aaron Wolfe
If this isn't you and you want it to be you, it was. It was not me. And I had to decide I wanted to change. And if I want to change, then I need to be the person to do it. I can't make my team be on time, and Aaron's late for all the meetings. I can't tell my team to make sure that they deliver everything to them, to all their. All the customers, and then I don't deliver to them. We have to do that. We have to live our core values. And so in that, I had to decide I wanted to be that. And so I literally started that. And at first I didn't say much. I just started doing it. And then after a while, I built Steam. And now that's what I end up doing.
14:22 β Living Core Values With Your Team
14:22 β Aaron Wolfe
So what we end up doing is how do we live those core values in our lives? You do these things consistently, even when it hurts. You gotta live by your core values. And so one of our core values is family first. And you can't live family first and not help somebody that's hurting. And that's part of the team. And one of the guys that was part of our team, his wife got breast cancer. He's on payroll or he's on. Well, whatever. Yeah, I forget what they call it, you know. Pardon me. No, he wasn't. He was on contract. We basically made the same amount of money every month whether he worked or didn't work. It was on salary. There you go. He's on salary.
15:08 β Aaron Wolfe
And as he ends up going on salary, he didn't work for half of a year and a half dealing with all this different stuff. And we continued to pay him. It's our core value, consistently helping him as he did that. And I didn't realize it until later, but all of our team realized what I did, and they all saw it. We have Wiza guys, those Wiza guys that work for us with family first. I couldn't imagine somebody coming and me going somewhere and working for literally nine months without seeing my family. So what do I do? I insist that they go home for Christmas. And not only do I insist that they go home for Christmas, I actually pay for their airfare to go home on Christmas because it's important for me to spend time with my family.
15:57 β Aaron Wolfe
It's important for my guys to spend time with their family. So we have to be genuine. And this is not just something that we start. We have to do this all the time because consistency is what breeds those relationships. So it's not just relationships with customers, it's relationships with our team. So in conclusion, consistency can become a lifestyle if we want it to. It can become a lifestyle that helps us win not only in life, but in business. Thanks a lot everybody.
16:28 β Jack Jostes
Part of the Landscape Leader of the Year event includes donating to the winners nonprofit or charity of choice and we are thrilled to donate to the Yeshua International Ministries. We also ended up deciding to donate to the second place winner, Scott Benson from Benson Landscape and Design who is he's supporting Youth Brain Tumor fundraising. So we're going to support both of those causes. And hey, if you want to be like Aaron and Scott, you've got to get your sales and marketing dialed in. And Ramblin Jackson would love to help you schedule a 15 minute marketing brainstorm.
17:03 β Jack Jostes
Call with us and we'll help you figure out who your Hell yes customer is and what marketing you should focus on to increase your business schedule online with the link in the show notes at landscapersguide.com/brainstorm I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Landscaper's Guide.