Do you have a clearly defined Hell Yes customer? You better, because it is the key to a thriving organization fueled by sales and marketing that's aligned with operations. You've probably heard me talk about a Hell Yes customer a million times on this podcast and throughout my book. But what about a Hell No customer? I believe having a clearly defined Hell No customer, what you don't want, is just as important. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you some footage from my How to Get the Owner Out of Sales Workshop, where two guests in the audience made a surprising strategic partnership as a result of getting clear on what they don't want.
Hey, everyone, Jack Jostes here and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide. This podcast is all about helping you grow your snow and landscape company through sales, marketing, and leadership. One of my favorite things about working in this industry is going to and also hosting events, because it creates an opportunity for people to build relationships. What you're about to see is some footage from my last workshop, where one of my clients, Mark, who runs a snow and landscape company in the Milwaukee area, creates a referral relationship with Peggy, who's actually in the Milwaukee area too, but looking to get out of hardscaping. So check it out, how going through this exercise together created this new relationship for them.
And I'd love to see you at one of my upcoming events. So check out landscapersguide.com/events in the show notes to see our upcoming events. I hope to see you there. And now, let's see how getting clear on your Hell No customer created a referral partnership for two audience members.
Jack Jostes:
So, I'm wondering if you'd like to volunteer and we'll work through your Hell Yes customer.
Loriena Harrington:
Sure. I'll volunteer.
Jack Jostes:
Could you tell us a little bit about your business? What's the business name and where are you in the world?
Beautiful Blooms Landscape
Loriena Harrington:
Yeah, I'm Loriena Harrington. I am the owner of Beautiful Blooms Landscape and we're located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And we serve an affluent client base. Our ideal client is residential high-end or intricate, complex landscapes that require the knowledge and expertise of a horticulturalist. We're not a company that's interested in anything to do with colored mulch or turning things into spheres and weird shapes on a landscape. So residential landscapes have a lot of perennials. And I have seen a difference in performance of those perennials where there's colored mulch. And I've also seen the dye running through the profile of the soil. So I don't think it's a very good thing for the environment. That's my opinion and based on what I've seen and I think it looks hideous in a residential setting.
Jack Jostes:
Cool. Well, thanks for sharing. What was the name of the company again?
Loriena Harrington:
Beautiful Blooms Landscape.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Beautiful Blooms Landscape. Singular? Landscape?
Loriena Harrington:
Correct.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. And then where are you actually located? Are you in Milwaukee or are you in one of the burbs?
Loriena Harrington:
Our office is located in a town called Menomonee Falls.
Jack Jostes:
For the Hell Yes customer, you already gave us some of this, what are the services that are a yes? I'm going to use red just to emphasize colored mulch, because this is a no, right?
Loriena Harrington:
Correct.
Jack Jostes:
What else is a no for you? You said spheres. I heard the word spheres.
Loriena Harrington:
Yeah.
Jack Jostes:
What else?
Loriena Harrington:
One-time service.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Does that include a one-time construction project?
Loriena Harrington:
Absolutely.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Oh, interesting. So if I wanted you to design and build my patio in my backyard-
Loriena Harrington:
We don't do that.
Jack Jostes:
You wouldn't do that.
Loriena Harrington:
We're a horticultural service company. No hardscaping.
Jack Jostes:
Oh, okay, so you don't do any hardscape. Got it. Okay, so then do you work with other landscapers who do construction?
Loriena Harrington:
Yes. I will happily refer them to handpicked, highly-reputable landscape design build companies in my area.
Surprising Strategic Partnership
Jack Jostes:
Okay, cool. Do you know Mark, by chance? Do you know Mark? Have you guys met?
Loriena Harrington:
Mark?
Jack Jostes:
Mark DuBois from Quality Care?
Loriena Harrington:
I have not.
Mark:
Well, I'd love to talk with you, because we are exiting out of exactly what you want.
Loriena Harrington:
Perfect. Let's talk.
Mark:
And I want your hardscapes. We'll talk.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Okay. So did either of you get $47 of value so far in the workshop?
Loriena Harrington:
Apparently, we just got some referral networking.
Jack Jostes:
I think so. I think so. We'll see. I love seeing that happen, though. This happens at my workshops all the time, actually. I did one on snow and ice management and somebody was there from Canada and somebody else had a referral, because it was in an area they didn't service and they ended up working together. So I love seeing that. So Mark's in Grafton and he's in your neck of the woods, so you all should chat.
Okay. So great. So see what kind of opportunity just came out of saying no? So you're putting this out there and Mark's literally raising his hand, "Hi, I can help." Now, it's probable that there's going to be some overlap between you two over here maybe. But is there also opportunity? Yeah, I have a client who moved into the market of one of my clients. And I was like, "Wow, what do I do? I just introduced them. And now they're referring to each other and even subcontracting to each other." So there's a lot of opportunities that come out of getting clear on this. So what is a yes for you? You said horticultural services?
Loriena Harrington:
A full-season landscape management program.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Does that include mowing?
Loriena Harrington:
Yes, but not mowing only. I'm full-lawn services, restoration services, mowing lawn fertilization, disease management.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. What about tree care?
Loriena Harrington:
Yes. We have a full-blown plant healthcare and soon-to-be-certified arborist on staff.
Jack Jostes:
Do you do tree removal?
Loriena Harrington:
That we subcontract, also to a preferred contractor.
Jack Jostes:
Do you do landscape installation? So if I had a hardscape, would you do plantings and...
Loriena Harrington:
We would do small planting jobs, but not large, elaborate ones. We don't create new planting spaces. A color program, so the seasonal color, mosquito and tick control.
Jack Jostes:
What about snow? I'm guessing you don't do snow.
Loriena Harrington:
We don't touch snow.
Jack Jostes:
There's this wild and crazy guy from Grafton who loves snow removal. He has all these wheel loaders. He's ready. He is ready to just come on in. Okay, so service area, which areas in Milwaukee? So you're in Menomonee Falls. What else?
Loriena Harrington:
Our main service area is about 76th Street, is our one boundary. And then we'll go west, all the way out to what's called Lake Country in Oconomowoc.
Jack Jostes:
That's a pretty big service area.
Loriena Harrington:
It's really wide east-west, but it's very short north-south. So we follow the corridor of I-94 and Highway 16.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. And what would a Hell Yes customer, who's a full-season landscape management, they're getting mowing, lawn care, restoration, tree trimming, plant healthcare, seasonal color, mosquito and tick, how much would they spend in a year?
Loriena Harrington:
Between 30 and $50,000.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. And how many years would they stay a client?
Loriena Harrington:
Since we have really targeted this audience, it's been about five years. So five plus at this point.
Example Of A Hell No Customer
Jack Jostes:
Excellent. Okay, and then who would be a Hell No for you? So you already mentioned if they're not in this service area. And then what would be a like, maybe we would come and still talk to you if you had a budget that was at least... Is it 30? Is that the bare minimum? Or what's the ?
Loriena Harrington:
No, no, no, no. You asked what the value of somebody subscribing to all of those services is, that puts someone at 30 to 50. But I would say 7,000 is our minimal.
Jack Jostes:
Okay, so 7,000 minimum. Okay. So what we've done here is if you have this on a single piece of paper, you could have a really productive networking conversation with Mark. You guys could hop on Zoom. You could meet at Miss Katie's Diner. Mark and I went there. Have you ever been there?
Loriena Harrington:
I know it's downtown Milwaukee, right?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. Really good. We went there. But like I said, this is revolutionary technology, because Mark would be like, "Cool. Got it." Here's where you work. I have clients in this area. You do this. And they need to have at least $7,000. So when he's talking to somebody in this area... It's Loriena, right?
Loriena Harrington:
Loriena.
Jack Jostes:
Oh, Loriena. Okay, thank you. All right. So it's, "Hey, I have a colleague Loriena. She can help you with this." "Oh, well, how much does Loriena usually charge?" "Her projects, some of them get up to $50,000 a year. I think she'd need to come and meet with you. I don't know. I know that she has around a $7,000 minimum." "Oh, okay. That's about what we were expecting." Or, "$7,000 for full-season landscape management? I just need somebody to mow my lawn once a year for $50." "Great. Loriena is probably not a good fit." So this is this revolutionary technology to get you out of sales. Someone else needs to know this. They need to own this and it can be, "Wow. So where does this go? What do we do with this?" It could be many, many places.
And what I mean by that is you should have a page for each of these on your website. And on each page, it should make it really clear, currently accepting full-season landscape management clients, which means we're going to provide all of these different services. You could have a pricing page that could explain these pricing brackets. We're going to talk about bracketing in a little bit. You should have a $7,000 minimum. I'm going to show you some examples of landscape client websites that I've built, where on the contact page, we have them select a budget. And your lowest option would be $7,000. Now, we're all in the industry and like, hey, that makes sense for what you're describing. You're going to have some pretty skilled, probably hard people to find who can do all of this horticultural care. Some people call this fine gardening. Would you call this fine gardening?
Loriena Harrington:
Yeah.
Jack Jostes:
So another keyword for you is fine gardening. So finding people who can do fine gardening full time is hard. So you're going to need to charge a premium to offer this, but you're targeting a pretty high-end clientele. So this question, this little check box on the contact page, especially if we have a little link to the pricing page so people understand how much this all costs, that is what will help disqualify people from even contacting you. So again, the goal here is to talk with qualified people, which means we need to disqualify some of them to then talk to the qualified people. To me, a qualified lead is somebody who needs my services. They're in my service area. And they're at least in my budget ballpark.
Do they need to know the exact price before they talk to me? No. You're always going to need to talk to them and scope it out and there are options and things to remove. But they at least need to know and be in the ballpark. So this is how it can save you a lot of time. So Loriena, thanks for playing. And congratulations, meeting a new referral partner, Mark. I know Mark. I work with Mark. He's cool. Mark recently rode horses for the first time. If you haven't seen it on our podcast, Erin, if you could put that one in the chat, that was a good one.
Audio:
Today's hat sponsor is Tex-Scapes Nursery and Landscape down in Ennis, Texas. We were fortunate enough to work withTex-Scapes on their rebranding. They had acquired a nursery. They had their landscape company. They needed to figure out their name. So we helped them create a new business name, dial in their SEO, their website, and their branding. And I'm super grateful to Casey for giving me this awesome camo hat. It has the logo we designed on it. And I'm out in the forest right now, sighting in my bow for archery season. Thank you, Casey, for trusting us and for giving me this cool hat. How cool is this? I don't think we have any other of our client logos on a camo hat. Thank you.
And hey, if you run a multimillion-dollar landscape company and you've been around for maybe 10 or 15 years, and you have questions around updating your brand or your business name, or you've made acquisitions or mergers, we'd love to talk to you. So just reach out to us for a 15-minute call at landscapersguide.com/brainstorm and we'll help you figure out how to solve that puzzle of branding and SEO, all those different things.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. So do you have something like this typed up currently, Loriena?
Loriena Harrington:
It's not typed up formally, but we know it. We talk about it within our office.
Jack Jostes:
Good, great. So next, we're going to talk about what do we do with this? So thanks for playing.
Loriena Harrington:
You're welcome.
The Importance Of Identifying Your Hell Yes Customer
Jack Jostes:
We will send you a gift of some kind. And let's talk more about how to get more of the Hell Yes customers. For those of you who are watching, maybe if you don't have that list yet, that would be the first starting point and takeaway is to get really clear. And I think it takes years to figure this out. It's often years of doing the work, looking at your numbers, realizing, "Oh, wow, we actually don't like this service that we do. We're discontinuing it." Mark is getting ready to close. Mark, what are you looking to offload?
Mark:
We've been going around and around on unloading the majority of our residential maintenance. As we grow our commercial maintenance, snow and our higher-end clients, all the Costcos in the area and stuff like that, it's just conflicting schedules. So we either got to almost start another residential division that's going to manage that or we're going to pick a lane and focus. So those are the discussions that we're having.
Jack Jostes:
Excellent. And a commission to the marketing guy that connected you two, right?
Mark:
Something like that.
Jack Jostes:
Once we're clear on our Hell Yes customer, we need to really empathize with them. We need to get into their heart and into their pains. So what are the pains that this person has? How big of a property would this person have, Loriena?
Loriena Harrington:
It's usually at least a half an acre. I mean, there are some really intense, small landscapes that can garner a seven to ten-thousand dollar annual service contract. Generally though, they're in the suburbs. Lake properties are very common for us now, as we're targeting our ideal client or our Hell Yes client. And the size of the property along with the complexity of the garden space is really where it comes together. Up to five acres.
Jack Jostes:
Okay, up to five.
Loriena Harrington:
Yeah. I think beyond five acres, we're just looking at increased square footage of lawn space or prairie area. It's not really expanding the intense garden space at that point. I mean, it is, but it's minimal.
Jack Jostes:
Well, so what kind of problems would I have with my landscape if I had a five-acre property on a lakefront? How is my current provider dropping the ball? Or am I doing the work myself currently? What's going on?
Loriena Harrington:
They're almost not ever doing the work themselves. Sometimes, I guess, we are the first landscape contractor. So they had been doing it themselves, but it's overwhelming either because of age, schedule or the expansiveness of their landscape. Pain points that we hear most common are communication. The landscape company that they previously have worked with just doesn't have the infrastructure in place to handle good communication. And follow through, kind of linked together with communication. Labor shortage right now. I would say the follow through and communication though are the biggest pain points.
Jack Jostes:
What else?
Loriena Harrington:
Knowledge, they complain about quality. So the horror story of them coming home and what the landscaper thought were weeds are ripped out, but it was really young plants, or something along those lines. So unqualified. In a more intricate landscape, you really have to know your plant material. Identifying those diseases when they're just starting, rather than when you have to cut the tree down, because it died.
Jack Jostes:
That's great. So I started earlier in my talk and I told a horror story of a client who was spending $6,000 a month. And you can do the same thing here. So once you have your Hell Yes customer and you're aware of pains that they have, you can tell people stories on the phone. I feel like, "$7,000!" I would say, "Yeah, how much are you paying your current people?" "Well, 2,000." "Then why are we talking?" "Well, they pulled the plants out that they thought were weeds, but they weren't." And "Oh, okay. Well, typically people hire us because their current people aren't communicating with them. They're not following through on what they said they were going to do, because they're not staffed to do it. And they're ruining plants, because they lack the horticultural knowledge that many fine landscapes have. Which of those is a problem for you?" "Oh my, God, all three!"
Now, we're getting into differences. And then tell me about your staff. Do you have people who can communicate that know plants?
Loriena Harrington:
We do. Our team is qualified, educated, formally and informally, job experience. But we also have a system, a backbone to our operations, a computer technology system that allows us to easily communicate live documents between client and worker or between client and office.
Jack Jostes:
Great. And are these mainly second homes for these people? Or are they their primary residence, usually?
Loriena Harrington:
Almost all are primary. Some are secondary. A Hell No would be any rental property. It has to be their primary or the lake home, the up north cabin.
Jack Jostes:
Got it. So on your contact page, you could write, "This property is my primary residence, my lake house, my investment property." And we build forms that disqualify people. So it could stop them from filling it out. "Thanks so much. At this time, we're not taking on clients who have rental properties. We recommend Bob's Landscape Management," whatever, maybe you get a referral to Bob. Okay, so what we've just done is we've created your Hell Yes. Customer. Well, we've clarified, rather. You already have an idea of who this is.
Audio:
Often in business, it feels weird saying no to people or turning away business when you have a staff, and payroll, and other things that keep you up at night. But what happens when you start getting really clear on who is your Hell Yes customer is, who do you serve, and how can you dial in your marketing to attract them, and dial in your sales to attract that customer and serve them, it creates scalability and freedom. And ultimately, it serves the customer. Telling the customer, "No, we don't do hardscapes, but Mark does. And he does a great job," will serve them better than trying to take on everything when we're not staffed for it or we don't want it. So in order to do that though, you've got to have an abundance of qualified leads coming in.
And that's what the Tree of Good Fortune is all about. So I'd love to meet you at one of our upcoming events to tell you more about that. So check out landscapersguide.com/events to see us at the NALP ELEVATE Show. We're booth number 1128. We've got our Landscaper Summit on October 6th, which is cool, because it's a virtual event where you can bring your whole team if you want, or members of your leadership team during business hours and still be home on time for dinner while getting a ton of value for sales, marketing, and leadership all on October 6th. And we've got other events. We're going to do two a month for the rest of the year, because it's fall and wintertime. It's time to start working on your business. Get ready for springtime.
So check out landscapersguide.com/events. Subscribe there so you get invited. And I look forward to seeing you there. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking to you next week on the Landscaper's Guide.