If you want to automate some of your lawn and landscape sales process, watch this video. If you don't, you could be working 70, 80, 90, 100 hours a week with everything revolving around you, which will not only burn you out, it could cost you key relationships. And in this interview, unfortunately, my guest says that that lack of work-life balance contributed to a divorce. But the good news is he walked away from that experience inspired to learn how to control his business, how to use technology to automate. And he now runs Simple Growth Solutions, a company that helps lawn and landscape companies automate their sales and customer service. And in today's interview, we go into great detail on easy ways that you can get started with automation. My name's Jack Jostes and welcome to the Landscapers Guide to Modern Sales and Marketing podcast. This show is all about helping you increase your profit and enjoy a better lifestyle at your landscaping company.
And having a lifestyle is part of the reason you went into business for yourself, but too many business owners, myself included, get stuck in the weeds of running the business day to day, and it can really cost you your soul, relationships and profit. And what I love about this interview is that Mike shares a story about a dad who is a landscaper, who finally got to go to his kid's football games after he learned to automate key parts of his business. We're going to break it down and make it really easy in this interview. So check it out to learn how you can automate parts of your sales and customer service at your landscaping company.
Interview with Mike Callahan
Jack Jostes:
Welcome everyone. Today we're interviewing Mike Callahan. Mike runs Simple Growth, which is a company that helps landscapers and different companies with automation. And today we're going to talk about some of the things that you might be doing manually, you or somebody on your team is doing it each and every time, repetitive tasks and how you can automate those things to really free up time in your life. So Mike, thanks so much for coming today.
Mike Callahan:
Jack, thanks for having me. Really excited to hop on here, love what you're doing here with the podcast and everything else you're doing in your world. So great to sit down with like minded individuals and talk about business. So I'm an open book, so fire away, and I'm happy to dive in and lift the hood of what we've been doing in the last 25 years in my lawn and landscape business, which ended up actually getting acquired unintentionally, due to the automations that we had built in the system to grow and scale.
Jack Jostes:
Well, that's awesome. So tell us a little bit about that. You and I met a couple of weeks ago, a mutual client introduced us. I'm really to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about your background in the lawn and landscape industry and how did you sell your company?
Mike Callahan:
Yeah, absolutely. The background was literally, probably like most of us, started pushing a lawnmower around the neighborhood when I was 15, 16 years old, parents were big in the work ethic, said, "Hey, you got to pay for car insurance if you want to get your license." So I went around and knocked on doors. Obviously wasn't looking to make a career out of lawn care, it was just literally to get some cash to pay for the car insurance. Long story short, ended up scaling that business through five years of college, had two or three crews out during college. And I had to take the decision, the fork in the road, do I go to the corporate route with my buddies, or did I actually take the entrepreneur route? And at that point, obviously you know where we went.
Mike Callahan:
We went the entrepreneurial route, but I was making more money while full-time in college, then I actually would have my corporate gigs. So I was like, "Well, this makes sense." But one of the biggest mistakes that I made in the business and why we got into automations, why I'm really so passionate about it is we actually, well, I actually built a business around me as a single point of failure. So if I wanted to leave for a day or heaven forbid, a week at a time, the business would have literally crumbled. So entrepreneurial classes in school, all the people that you've met in your local market, everybody had built this business that revolves around them, it's a single point of failure. So obviously that's what I did because that's what it looked like most successful people did. So fast forward a few years, after that ended up marrying a high school sweetheart, been with her 13, 14 years, and believe it or not, on Valentine's day, she came home back from a work trip and literally said, "Mike, I'm done. Your business runs your life." And as you can imagine, I hit rock bottom.
Mike Callahan:
So searched the internet and said, "Hey, how do you get your life back from your business?" Because I had basically a gut check moment, either I had to fix this business that I'd been living in, or I got to get rid of it. So we found just literally by sheer luck one night on the internet, an automations platform. And I bought into the idea of that Tim Ferriss four-hour workweek, that whole idea. So I bought the automation platform, with no technology background at all, one night, went to bed, woke up the next morning and was like, "You're probably not going to be running that lawn care business from the beaches of Thailand and Bali." So we dug in, we spent thousands in hours, I invested a little over $150,000 in going out and learning from the best automation.
Mike Callahan:
So whether it was email marketing or text marketing, you name it, we went out throughout the US, Canada, even met with a guy from Brazil. No intentions of ever reselling it, but it was literally my journey to get my life back from my business. And I went from a hundred hours a week, literally seven days a week, to five to 10 hours a week, to literally an absentee owner at 30 days at a pop. And that's really what happened. And then the business, literally, if people have seen me on social media, we're pretty invested in social media, giving back, I want to help people. That's my personal mission, I help people take their life back from the business. So there was a international company that saw a bunch of these YouTube and Facebook videos and they actually had called me and said, "Hey, what do you want for this business?" "Well, it's not for sale."
Mike Callahan:
Actually at first I hung up with a guy because I thought it was my buddy Garrett Matthews out of Shreveport, Louisiana, but the guy called back, I'm like, "Oh, I'm really sorry." But eventually they kept coming back and I said, "Well, you guys buy service businesses. Why don't you take a look at what we do at Simple Growth, and maybe we can provide services to your other service businesses. We're not for sale." But once they really saw what we're probably going to be talking about here in the next 45, 50 minutes, they came back and eventually the old saying, if the price is right, it is for sale. And the evaluation, without getting to the details, was significant higher than I would ever get in the upstate New York market. So I ended up focusing on my true passion of helping people automate their businesses and literally take their life back from the business.
What Aspects Of A Lawn & Landscape Business Should Be Automated?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I love that and that's one of the reasons that you supposedly go into business, is so that way you don't have to work for somebody else, but then you end up working a hundred hours a week for yourself and you can get trapped in your business and you can't take time off, or it can impact your family and your relationships. So thanks for sharing that. I'm sorry to hear that happened and I know that it inspired you to what you're doing now and you're really helping people. So for lawn and landscape companies that are listening, what are things that people, you see businesses that are doing themselves, either personally, or they have somebody on their staff doing repetitively that they could automate? Let's just come up with some common things that should be automated.
Mike Callahan:
And Jack, I think maybe the easiest way of looking at it is we focused on a process called life cycle marketing. So the whole idea with automation is you don't want to eat the whole elephant. You want to take the biggest pain points and automate it first. So my automation journey, if you want, I can share what I would recommend as far as best practice, because there's a lot to what you can automate. And I can give you a snapshot of what it took seven or eight years to automate. We were on the leading edge or at least the cutting edge of automations, lawn care companies are just starting to automate now. This is something we did eight or nine years ago, but basically the idea was that we wanted to look at the customer life cycle and literally start from lead acquisition, all the way through and be able to have a personalized but automated conversation.
Mike Callahan:
So usually the biggest thing that we see is sales. Sales is the biggest issue that we want to look at. So literally from your website, you should have a website request form that's going to segment the person based on what they're interested in. So we can have that automated, but personal conversation. We should have an intake form for the office to be able to plug in certain information and track the sales source. And then in addition, I think the biggest shift right now is conversational marketing. So on-demand buying, so a bot on your website that can do automated pricing and act as customer service, because just like your Amazon, your Netflix, Uber, especially with COVID now, that acceleration of on-demand buying is there. So we're basically taking that lead in and we're going to segment them to what service they're interested in.
Mike Callahan:
And then the first thing that we do is we automatically send out a thing called a lead letter. Those are the five or six reasons why our business is different, why they should work with us and not our competitors, but the idea is we're differentiating ourselves. And very similar, one of the guests you had earlier, Jack, was Marcus Sheridan from, They Ask, You Answer. So Marcus was over at River, Pools and Spas using a product called, I believe, HubSpot. And we were over on a product this time called Infusionsoft. But Marcus is, They Ask, You Answer, we're doing very similar things, a different industry. We didn't know each other until we met at a few conferences we were speaking at, but a lot of very similarities. But we were talking about all the things that are negatively viewed as contracts.
Mike Callahan:
We actually just in the lead letter, we talked about it upfront and then we created short term education, specific to the service. So if someone was a lawnmowing prospect, we would go out and talk to them and educate them how to be a lawnmowing professional. So what they should be doing as a professional, proper mowing height, how to sharpen the blades, how to balance the blades. And we talked about all the commonly asked questions. Do I need to be home to have the lawn mowed? Are you going to close the gate behind us? I'm worried about the kids and the dog running out of the backyard if I don't check it after you leave. And then the idea was when we got really busy in the spring especially, we would never follow up on these estimates. So we created a process that we call 20 days to close, but we would go out, literally follow up on each and every estimate automated for 20 days.
Mike Callahan:
And the key to success when you do this is being able to do it across omni-channel marketing or different ways of communication. So automated email, automated text, and yes, phone calls. So we do it in like a task or to do assigned to someone in the office, but "Hey, call Mrs. Smith. It's been three days since we dropped off the estimate." This is what to say. If she says the price is too high, this is how we overcome that price objection. And the most important part in my mind was if she becomes a client, do this in the software, if she doesn't become a client, do this. And if she says, "I'm not sure, I'm price shopping you guys," do this. So what we're doing is taking the pressure of what the owner normally would have to do, or the manager would have to manage and we're creating an automated system leveraged by the power of the software.
Mike Callahan:
Now people may be, "Listen, Jack, Mike, I don't have time to make phone calls. I'm only a solo entrepreneur." And that's great. I mean, I loved my time in the field and I get that, and depending where you're going, maybe a 30 or 40 person organization is not where you want to go. But this is also, hold the business owner accountable, maybe you don't have time to make those phone calls. So we also recommend tying into a thing called a ringless voicemail bomb, hits the cell phone on file without ringing and it looks like a missed call, but it's not a robo call, it's literally in my instance, "Hey, it's Mike from Callahan's Lawncare. So sorry, I missed you. I wanted to leave you this voicemail following up on the estimate we dropped off three days ago."
Mike Callahan:
And the timing of it is ideal because it's automated, so it looks personal. Yeah. And you're nervous and jerky, and you're like, "If you have any questions, call us back at this number. If not, feel free to sign up online with the online estimate." So we've automated that whole entire process. Now Jack, I'm sure you're well aware that 80% statistically of all the sales are followed up five or more times. I know for sure, as a business owner in the service industry, before I automated, you were lucky if you're getting one follow-up let alone five. So a lot of people are like, "Yo, I'm getting crushed by this low baller down the street. He's giving around these $20 cuts." In essence, what you normally find is, it does happen, but normally what it is is the guy or girl down the street, literally isn't low balling you. They're just showing up consistently five or more times across multiple channels, such as email, phone call and text and they're getting 80% of the average of the sales that you're not getting because you're just not showing up consistently.
How To Get Started With Automation
Jack Jostes:
Right. That followup piece is key. If I could get my clients to do two things, it would be, one, qualify before they go out and meet with people and then two, follow up. So many people get lost in, "Oh, I sent you an estimate. So I'm done selling to you," and people forget, or they didn't get it. So I love the system and I love the ringless voicemail bomb. For the people listening who haven't done any of this, this might sound overwhelming, life cycles, all these different things. How do you get started? If you're currently doing all of this stuff personally, what are some of the things that you'd have somebody who's listening do to figure out how to get started with this?
Mike Callahan:
Just literally grabbing the biggest pain point. So if your biggest pain point is following up an estimate, you create an automated process to follow up in the essence. Whatever the biggest pain point is, that's where you start and then you go to the next one. But you're just little digestible chunks and that's the key.
Jack Jostes:
And so sales was the first thing you said that you would automate. What are some other things? Because I did a workshop last week on sales process and I brought a guest onto the virtual stage, if you will. And their sales process was great, but where they were really falling short, was communicating with their clients once they were a customer. Now this was a tree service company and they're booked out. Here in Colorado we had some big storms end of the year, we're still cleaning them up and a lot of good tree care companies are booked out. So they'll book a job, two, three, four plus weeks out, and then their client forgets and isn't remembering when that service is happening. They're getting anxious. Are there ways that we can automate some of that appointment follow-up confirmation, "Hey, we came and did some work." Talk to me about customer service.
Mike Callahan:
Absolutely. This is uncanny because we haven't even really discussed what we were talking about beforehand. So this literally lines into the next spot I was actually going. And the other thing is before we get to that, for a quick 30 seconds is, the key when you're doing this is automations are great, but it sounds really obvious at this point, Jack, but if it looks automated, it doesn't work as well as if it looks personal. So on the estimate follow-up and some of the reminders I'm going to show you, is we actually made it look like it came from a person. So on the bottom of our email two days after we estimate, it would literally say, "Hey, just checking in to see if I can reserve you a spot on our schedule for this upcoming season. If you have any questions, let me know. Have a great Monday."
What Can You Do To Make Your Automation Appear Personalized?
Mike Callahan:
It would merge the day that weekend, secret sauce in the bottom was, it looked like it was sent from my iPhone. And it had some intentional auto correct typos in there honestly, it drives my current wife crazy. "What are you doing?" I'm like, "People don't want an automated thing with your logo plastered across it," but if it looks like it's from you or somebody in your office, that's great.
Jack Jostes:
I love that. And just today, I'm pulling it up right now, I saw somebody that I work with, one of my business coaches, Wayne Herring, posted on LinkedIn, a photo of a handwritten note with a drawing that was sent to him. And there's a company called punkpost.co that will send a handwritten note with a drawing in the mail and you can automate that, you could automate the address of where it's sent. So there's ways. And I want to talk to you about direct mail later because we were geeking out on that, on our personal call. So back to the customer service thing. So you're making it appear personal, sometimes even sent from my iPad or from my iPhone or whatever. What else?
Mike Callahan:
Well, that lead letter we're talking about, they're actually just like we did the ringless voicemail bomb, there's a company that we actually tie our automations into. We actually have basically what appears to be a hand addressed envelope for the lead letter. So if you're doing a big construction job or tree job or design build, timing there usually is a little bit longer, so you're not closing them over the phone live. So that's part of the things we had actually automated, so it looks like there's a hand addressed envelope with the lead letter in it, so it's that personal connection.
Jack Jostes:
So it's an actual print letter that's mailed to them?
Mike Callahan:
Yep. So I didn't want to totally geek out, but yeah, I mean, we do direct mailing that's automated and it looks personal. It's the same idea as that product you're talking about. But once they become a client, now communication needs to really ramp up. So what we've done automated and all this happens without ever having to do anything, is we send out a welcome email. So it acclimates them what to expect when they're working with you and it sets the tone and if you need a credit card on file, we also would recommend putting in a PCI compliant credit card form to get that card on file. So we're automating all these repetitive things that if you need a card on file before service, it's automated. And then we go out and do a 30, 60, and 90 day followup.
Mike Callahan:
So you need, if you're doing this yourself, really what you need to do is build some logic in the automation to make it personal. So if the first service they sign up for is a reoccurring service, we follow up 30, 60, 90, cause that's the biggest churn or cancellation time. But if they send it for spring cleanup and that's the first thing they sign up for, you don't want to follow up 30, 60, and 90 days, you're going to look like an idiot. Literally, it's a one-time service, you follow up once. Then we go out and nurture them through happy holidays, all the major holidays, we talk about the holiday, wish them happy holiday. And we'd also recommend going out and doing monthly newsletters to educate them what they should be doing in their yard or home the month in advance. So maybe in the winter season, we're going into ornamental pruning, we're talking about tree companies. What's the proper time of the cuts, how to cut.
Mike Callahan:
And then a real soft one-liner at the bottom like, "Hey, by the way, if you need some help, we're here to help." So it's education with a soft upsell. Now, once the service is actually dispatched, that is what we call be there and been there. It's a bit of a tongue twister, Jack, but basically what it is, it's automated text or email that goes out and reminds them when their job has been dispatched and when the crews going to be there. And then at the end, based on, depending on the software it's set up on or what you're using, if they're using a mobile device, clocking out, the automation can also text or email the client, letting them know that the crew has left.
Mike Callahan:
So one of the companies we've worked with for automations actually cleaned my house. So to see it on the consumer end is really cool. So when Angelica actually comes to clean the house, I know she's scheduled on this Wednesday. When she leaves the house, I'll actually get a text message saying, "Hey, she's done, that door is locked." And some of the automation platforms actually let the technician, through their mobile app, take a picture of the locked door and you actually get that in the automated communication. So if a fence gate was a big thing for a client, you could have a picture of the locked fence gate every time your crew leaves.
What Tools and Softwares Should You Use?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I love that. We were talking about commercial landscape maintenance with a group last week and they were saying that they're going and visiting clients and they're doing work, but their clients don't really know how often they're coming. They don't know what they're doing. And then that creates some doubt of, "Well, what am I paying for? What are you doing?" And I love this idea of automating some of these account management updates, can really help with client retention. So this all sounds great. Talk to us about some of the softwares that you're seeing, that you work with, that you recommend, how are you doing all of this?
Mike Callahan:
Yeah. So the main platform we started out was originally Infusionsoft. So basically it's a CRM, a customer relationship management software, does strictly automations and their idea is they're the hub of automations. And you can go through Zapier, different APIs that allow two different softwares to talk and you have like the main hub and there's different spokes on it. Eventually we were using a product called Service Autopilot to do our scheduling, billing, job costing, everything in there and then we sync that with QuickBooks. But when Service Autopilot built their automations internally, it made sense for us to bring it all under one roof. And the reason why we did that is it avoided multiple system chaos. So no matter how good the sync is, the API is, if you've got five or six different softwares talking to each other, the data is going to get funky in certain points and we didn't want to have miscommunication.
Mike Callahan:
Now, Infusionsoft is great, HubSpot, Active Campaign, there's a whole bunch of them, but what we found with benefit of Service Autopilot, it was all under one roof and it could trigger off native status as like, the job has been dispatched, the job has been completed. So we're certified partners with Infusionsoft, we're certified advisors with Service Autopilot. Now those are the two main ones, but Infusionsoft has Zapier integration. So that could go into any service platform that you guys are using, or girls are using, in the lawn care or design build world. If it has an open API or Zapier connection, you can build these yourselves based on countless different automation platforms. But those are the two big ones that we actively work with.
Jack Jostes:
Have you worked much with like Jobber or LMN or ServiceTitan? Talk to me about some of those and pros, cons of-
Mike Callahan:
All great platforms. And I think that the biggest thing that's platform independent that I would recommend without mentioning names of software, is the first software I had was great, it was instrumental, but as you get to that 750 million marker, depending where you want to go, you're going to start hitting some glass ceilings of the actual platform. It's just not scalable. So when I talk to people, if they're looking at Jobber or ServiceTitan, ServiceMonster, Service Autopilot, the List Boss, LMN, the list goes on and on and on, Real Green. Where are you at now? Where do you want to go? And does that software have the capability to scale with you? Is it more of an enterprise software like Aspire?
Mike Callahan:
But I think honestly that's the conversation you got to have with you and your team if you have one, of, where are we at? Where do we need to go? Because the biggest pain point I see when I bring people in to some of these softwares and reset up the software for them, is that once you get to a certain size, shifting a software program is not a walk in the park. I mean, it can be done and if you don't want to do it yourself, there's people out there to do it for you. But it's not a small undertaking and there's a lot of data entry-
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I'm doing it right now. We're actually switching from HubSpot Marketing to ActiveCampaign here at Ramblin Jackson. But I am keeping HubSpot sales CRM, because I really like that. And yeah, it's a lot of work. It's not something that you want to have to do ever.
Mike Callahan:
So where I'm going is this, before you make that jump, make sure where you're jumping is scalable to where you want to go because you don't want to do it again. But yes, we have definitely worked with Jobber, ServiceTitan, ServiceMonster. I mean, pretty LMN a little bit, but I mean, most of the major platforms we have worked with and they're all great, they all have their pros and cons. But it's really what you want to go and is it industry or vertical specific? Are you more heavy design build or heavy maintenance? Are more enterprise like going into maybe Inspire? But those are all the things you got to have in the back of your mind where you're going.
Making These Updates Could Significantly Change Your Life
Jack Jostes:
Tell me a story about a client that comes to mind, who was maybe where you were at 15 years ago, or whenever, you burned out and you realize you were working a hundred hours a week. You were telling me about somebody who went to their kid's sports game or something, for the first time?
Mike Callahan:
Absolutely. So, I mean, yes, services we provide, we do make money obviously, but honestly, I think the thing that really drives me as my niche right now, to help business owners get their life back from the business, or avoid the pitfalls that I had in my personal life. And I guess one of the things Jack, that we were talking about pre-interview here, was that we had a gentleman call me, he said, "Hey, Mike, I really want to thank you. I went and saw my kid's football game last night." I was like, "Oh, Joe, that's great." And I'm thinking, "Okay, that's odd." I'm like, "Well, can you tell me a little bit more?" And the guy seemed pretty emotional, he goes, "No, Mike, you don't understand. I've never seen my kid's football game." And I believe it was his senior year of high school.
Mike Callahan:
And he goes, "What the automations that you guys built for me did is it gave me the ability to actually see my kid's game and not have to be on my cell phone, not running around, putting out fires." And he goes, "I actually could get out of work and get it done because it started to buy the time back." And that to me is the biggest thing. And I'm definitely an open book and I am not on a pedestal preaching because trust me, I've made most of the mistakes and had to figure it out or just got lucky enough to get it right. So my biggest thing is going out, just hiring somebody like Jack here, I'm going out and finding the people who've done this before me, and I'm not reinventing the wheel.
Mike Callahan:
So when I built Simple Growth, I hired a personal coach that had basically worked in Infusionsoft, active campaign and now he's at another company. He was one of the top software as service partner channel guys. And Corey has been instrumental in letting me know, once you've scaled the business to a million Jack, and I'm sure you've seen this, they say it's easier to scale a million, two million and beyond and well beyond it. And I will say it is, but each little nuance, when you see it, you've been there like, "Okay, now I know what this looks like." And is it a people person? Is it a system process? Is it a culture problem? And you start to see that. So scaling Simple Growth, we scaled exceptionally fast in the last two or three years, but people problems are people problems, but I still had broken that million marker well beyond, but I knew from the first time around, I needed to find somebody who had done it in this industry. And just the little instrumental tweaks that that coach can give you, it's enlightening.
Mike Callahan:
And this gentleman with this football game, I was like, "Hey man, I have been there, I've lived this. I'm in those trenches, the wounds are still fresh." These are the things you need to do if this is your biggest pain point in your business and there's three areas of the business. So it's sales, employee systems and things. I like to call, repetitive tasks. And those are going to be your three main hurdles that can be automated to break that million marker and beyond. And if you're beyond a million and you haven't automated, that's where it really pulls some time back, and really helps you.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I love that story of the guy going to his kid's football game for the first time. And it reminds me, on this podcast, we actually interviewed one of my clients, Jake Harris, who was paying for all kinds of home advisor, Google ads, Facebook ads, all kinds of paid advertising, but his marketing wasn't really solid and we worked with him on that. And he dialed in his sales process and he literally shaved off 40 hours a week from his workweek because of the investment in technology and sales process and people and now he coaches his kids football team. And it's so amazing that technology and the right systems can have that impact and give you that freedom back and make running your business enjoyable. It can also, in your case, make your business sellable. Which business would you rather buy? Landscaper Larry, who 90% of his business comes from word of mouth to Larry and Larry does everything or Landscaper Sherry and Sherry has automated systems, diverse marketing channels coming in. Talk to us a little bit about how your automation can actually help build a sellable business asset.
Mike Callahan:
Yeah, so obviously the big evaluation's going to be on reoccurring revenue, not just one-time revenue. So the last part of the sales automation that you led into perfectly, is now that we've got them in, we welcome and wowed them basically, we want to upsell. So what we're going to do is potentially sell our gateway services. So something we could sell quickly over the phone on Google Earth and measuring that out, is your lawnmowing, your fertilizing, but this can be for design build, any lawn care landscape company. But the idea is that once we have that initial service, it makes sense to go out and upsell. So maybe if you're doing fertilization, you want to do perimeter paths, mosquito control, deer control, whatever that is, but how many services can we do while we're already there? So we're going to go out and upsell those services, the automation's going to segment you as if you have ... maybe you're a lawnmowing customer, but you don't have fertilization weed control.
Mike Callahan:
So you don't have an estimate in play right now. You don't have one on awaiting list to go out and you've just signed up, but it's not scheduled. So there's there's logic you would build into it, but now I can have a personal conversation. So you're not like the guy who started the automation, he email blasts everybody on his list and says, "Hey, if you haven't signed up for fertilization, we're running a special. Oh, by the way, if you've signed up already, just ignore this." So what have you done? You've told your customer that you don't care about them, you have no idea where they're at in your playbook and you potentially given new people a discount and not them. So I'm on a couple of these email lists, I get them every month and I just cringe when I see them, but I need to see it just to remind myself that that is not the right thing to do.
Mike Callahan:
Trust me, in the early days, we did this. So that's where the play is. But now what we're seeing is, so we'll email, text message, the addition of ringless voicemail bombs around each upsell, and it's seasonal. So as we're going into spring season, about a month to a month and a half before that season ramps up that pain point, the conversation is the early adopters overlaps to the pain point of the weeds popping up. But we're seeing results on these upsells are literally 60 to 80 estimate requests in four to five hours. I mean, it's insane.
Mike Callahan:
We just had a guy this fall that did $82,000 of aeration and overseeding to people he hadn't done it to in the past. So what he's doing in that example, is he's double or tripling the client lifetime value or revenue and that's where that evaluation can really go up. So I don't know if that really answers the question completely, but that is we're going out and just continuing to upsell those services. And that makes it scalable and it doesn't revolve around the business owner. So the day I signed for that business, I never went back.
Jack Jostes:
I love that. I love that. So one of the things that we talked about before we did this interview, was one of our mutual favorite authors is Dan Kennedy. And Dan Kennedy, what you're describing, I think he calls it the marketing triangle, which is sending the right message to the right market with the right media. And the media piece could be direct mail, it could be a phone call, it could be a voicemail, text, email, whatever. But what's, I think, even more important in that is the right message to the right market. And so the right market being, I don't just have one list of customers, I have my customer list segmented into clients who have done a patio, clients who have done lawn care, clients who have done this.
Jack Jostes:
And then I exclude them when I send out my email marketing, so that way I'm not blowing the deal, sending the wrong message to the wrong market. And I really believe that that's the key here and that's where we started the interview is with the whole life cycle of where are they in their journey with you, which specific services have they bought. And once you have that, you can build these amazing automated email sequences. Or spring is right around the corner, depending on when we launch this. So Mike, spring cleanups, "Hey Mike, you're not on our calendar for spring cleanups, click here to get on the calendar." So I love it.
Mike Callahan:
Yeah. It's instrumental. And when it gets busy in the spring, you don't have time, you don't remember, but now March 1st or whenever that is supposed to hit, it just hits and goes. And it's just consistent, it's not relying what's in your head and you reminding your office staff, "Okay, next week we got to do our spring cleanup upsell." It just happens and it's consistent and it allows you to have that personal, but automated conversation. And I think that's the key and you don't sound like a sleazy sales person, and we're using different copies. So like that Dan Kennedy, that long copy text, the sales text. So that may be one of them, but then I'm going to do another one where it's short and to the point. And then another one, I may link to a video.
Mike Callahan:
How does your consumer consume information in that? So you don't want to just be stuck to one way, but you want to be able to have a variety of things. And most people, let's be honest, don't want to talk to us on the phone, but SMS or text messaging, that's huge. Depending on the rules of Facebook, right now there's a 24 hour window with messenger. So you can't basically do commercial sales through messenger after 24 hour window period. It was about this time last year when they did that, which I think is actually a good, but most marketers hated it. But you don't want to become a slimy salesperson, you actually want to provide value and let that come out. So like I said, different channels, but when people are coming through a bot or Facebook messenger, if that's their preferred communication channel, have it in the first 24 hours. If they want to buy over it, that's great. I'll sell stuff right over the bot.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I love that. Well, Mike, hey, it's been a real pleasure. We've learned a ton from you today. Tell us again, what is Simple Growth, where can we learn more and get in touch with you?
Mike Callahan:
Yeah, absolutely. Easiest way to reaching out is the website. It's Simple Growth Systems, with an S, .com. It goes over everything we do. There's a ton of free resources, I've probably got five or 600 videos. And just literally, if you're going to build this stuff yourself, check it out. We literally lift the hood and just I'm in the mindset of abundance, probably like yourself, Jack, I'm going to tell you how to do it. If you need some help, we're here. But it's not for everybody, some people want to do it themselves, so we just go out and do it. But it's Simple Growth Systems, with an S, .com. And if you want to test it, give a dry run of the bots and conversational marketing on the bottom right hand side, you can actually go in and throw your address in and get a live fictitious price and see what on-demand buying looks like. And it's not just for maintenance service, it's hardscapes and all different services in there, but people are adapting to this and the early adapters are winning the game right now.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I love that. And like you said earlier, even you, pretty savvy guy who has figured all of this out, you hired a coach and you worked with somebody to get results faster. And I think that's really the value that you're talking about. And a lot of these things have been done before, there are a lot of lawn and landscape companies that have similar repetitive tasks, and I know you guys have a lot of those templates and systems already built out. So everyone check out Mike's website, simplegrowthsystems.com. And Mike, it's been a real pleasure having you here and hope to talk to you again soon.
Mike Callahan:
Thanks Jack. I appreciate you having me. Look forward to it.