What's up everybody! Welcome to the first episode of my brand new podcast and YouTube series, The Landscaper's Guide To Modern Sales And Marketing. I'm your host, Jack Jostes and in this show I help lawn and landscape contractors Get FOUND Online by the right customers so you can increase your profit and enjoy a better lifestyle as a result of your business. In this first episode, I'm going to share with you my number one sales tip to get this whole show started, the story of the first sale that I made when I was THREE years old and how that actually shaped my whole life, and how you can win a sales coaching session with me in Colorado. All expenses paid. I'm going to fly you out here. We're going to have a full day of sales coaching for you and your business, so check out today's episode and let's get started.
I'm Jack Jostes and many of you know that I'm the author of the Amazon Best-Selling book, Get FOUND Online: The Local Business Owner's Guide To Digital Marketing, and the CEO at Ramblin Jackson, which is a digital marketing agency that helps landscaping companies throughout the United States with their branding, website design, and SEO. As part of that, having worked with over 700 companies over the last 10 years, a big part of what we do is help people learn to sell to internet leads because selling to leads from the internet is different from selling to word of mouth leads. That's what this show is all about is helping you really dial in your sales and marketing so you can grow your company. The impact that we will have together through this show, if you implement what you're going to learn, is you're going to sell more, you're going to become a better leader of your company, and you're going to have a bigger impact in your community, potentially creating more or better jobs for people.
Ultimately the outcome of this is more people enjoying nature. What you do is so important. From water conservation, to planting pollinators, to designing cool backyards for people to spend time together, that's all very meaningful. I'm really excited to share what I've learned about sales and marketing over the years. This show is going to come out weekly. I'm going to produce it as a video on YouTube, it's going to be shared on my website, landscapersguide.com, and it's going to be published to all the different podcast platforms: iTunes, Spotify… pretty much every place that's going to have a podcast, it's going to have it. I'm excited about that because a lot of my clients, a lot of people that I work with, they drive a lot. You guys drive a lot. Whether it's doing snow clearing or you're driving to a job site, or you're driving to your office to meet your crews in the morning.
I wanted to produce this in a way that you can listen to it while you're on the go and learn the information that way. I love podcasts and I've learned so much, through the podcasts that I subscribe to. I'm excited to now release this show in an audio format. Make sure that you subscribe at landscapersguide.com/podcast where I'll be sending out an email every Friday with a link to the podcast, which includes the show notes, links to things, and I plan to include a transcript with every post for a number of reasons. One, it has SEO benefit from a marketing standpoint and also for people who might be hearing impaired. You can still read the transcript and get the information that way, or maybe you hate the way I look and sound. No worries. You could read it. I have somebody who told me that they're like, Jack, I can't stand watching your videos, but I like reading the transcript. I'm like, right on, and that person's a client. Weird. Anyways, however you want to consume it, video, podcast, in writing, you can get all of that at landscapersguide.com/podcast.
Alright, let's dive into my first sales tip to kick off this whole series, and it is largely about mindset:
It's largely about you believing that you can do it.
I want to give you permission to be great. What I mean by that is I work with all different kinds of people who are really growing incredible companies. I'm going to feature them on this podcast. You're going to hear people who are making well north of six figure incomes that are running, some of them, multimillion dollar companies that are hiring the best people in their community that are doing work that they're really proud of. You might think, "I can't do that. I'm not good enough at doing that. I'm just a landscaper." Well, that's a bunch of bull because what you do is really important. You have a big impact on the environment, in your community, and there's always so much to learn.
What I've found in business is the first part is really seeing yourself in a new light. One of our core values at Ramblin Jackson is Grow Or Die. Part of Grow Or Die is taking that next step to do something that maybe makes you uncomfortable but it pushes you out of your element and pushes you to that next step. In order to do that, you've got to believe you can do it. So I want to give you permission to be great. I want to give you permission to make more money than you ever thought possible, and what do you do with that? I don't care. You could donate it, you could put it in your pocket, you could buy cheeseburgers for your family this weekend. I don't really care, but money is a good thing and I want you to make more of it and believe that you can.
Next I want to share with you a story of the first sale that I made when I was only three years old and how it changed, really my whole worldview, when I was about three years old. I was still wearing diapers and I don't know, my parents were home, but I snuck out of the house. I snuck past my brother and sister and I literally went door to door knocking to see if my neighbors would change my diaper. And no one was home at the first house. Second neighbor said no. And the third neighbor was this wonderful old woman named Kay Macmillan who welcomed me in and she had this beautiful ornate house with these cool rugs and these hardwood floors. And she was a nurse. She was a retired nurse. She was in her eighties at this time. And she changed me into a cloth diaper with a safety pin.
We became best buds like that. Instantly when we met, we just became great friends and growing up I would help Kay in her yard. I would mow her lawn. She had this old rickety, rusty push lawn mower with the blades. Before you could use it, you had to pick up all the sticks and branches, of which there were many, because she had these big beautiful Oak trees and she had these little bird callers. We would call birds and things and we'd put all the sticks and the grass clippings and leaves in a compost pile. She composted everything from eggshell cartons to paper towels to all of her vegetable rinds. I really learned to enjoy nature from that experience. We made apple sauce from our neighbor, Mrs. Jenkins, she had these beautiful apple trees that we would go and pick apples from. We would make all kinds of food.
I learned gardening with my mom too as a kid and would help her. When I was nine or ten, I started mowing my neighbor's lawns and doing snow removal with our gas powered snow blower. I remember when it would snow in school, I would look outside, and this was in Chicago where it really snows a lot, and I would just see money, you know?
There was something about that experience of getting paid cash and smelling like gasoline that became part of my soul and made me a capitalist.
I love small business and I'm so excited to work with you guys to to work on this, on the sales and marketing of your landscape company. In high school I worked at a plant nursery and garden center, Pesche's Plant Nursery. I have an interview with them that I'm going to share in later episodes, but that experience with Kay taught me a lot about sales because it led me ultimately to love music. We would play music on her piano and music is ultimately how I got started in what I'm doing today. I recorded the theme song for this show. I hope you dig it.
Music was what led me to start a band and learn digital marketing, getting everything on MySpace and Facebook, and I don't know that I would have turned out the same way had I not met Kay and the sales lesson there was: Ask and you shall receive. Right? If I never asked her to help me or knocked on her door, we never would have. I never would have sold her on. Changing my diaper and she never would have become what eventually was like my grandmother figure to me. And that's really what sales is all about. When you, when you are good at something and you can help people, you owe it to the world to be effective at selling because that's how you're going to spread your message.
You're going to help more people. And as a landscape company, you're going to have a bigger impact in your environment. And now in your business, what are the things that you're holding back from asking people? Are you holding back from asking your clients to pay you to come and meet with them? We're going to talk in later episodes about how to charge for the first appointment and how that can free up a lot of space for you to take on more of the right customers and weed out the bad ones. Are you afraid to say no? Part of saying yes means saying no to something else. So think about that. Where in your business could you ask where you're feeling like you should, but you're holding back, ask for it, ask for that upgrade. Ask for the full year contract. Ask and you shall receive.
One of the things that I love helping landscape companies do is totally dial in their sales process. Typically, the owner of the company is really great at sales, but they're bogged down doing it and you know what doesn't work? Being slow. No one likes to buy from landscapers who are slow, unresponsive, they're late, all these different things. The only way that you can really get out of doing that yourself is to create a sales process. Then you can start to create a script for the first phone call. You can create video content that you send to people before the first meeting so they know that they're going to be prepared to talk to you about budget and what the range of budget might be. When you dial in a process, you can then manage your team and it'll create freedom for you. It'll create scalability. And I'd like to help one of you in person for a full day in Colorado, dial in your sales process.
At the end of it I'm going to help you produce some videos that you can send to your clients. I'm going to shoot them for you, edit them for you and help you put them on your website. So I'm only awarding this to one person and I'm to announce the winner on April 17th so here's how you can enter to win.
What you need to do is before April 17th enter at landscapersguide.com/podcast just go to landscapersguide.com/podcast and enter your name and email. You'll join my list and you'll start getting the weekly updates for the show. I will send you the instructions of how to win this contest. So I look forward to seeing you enter and hopefully working with you one on one live in Colorado, all expenses paid. I'm going to fly you out here, put you in a cool hotel, we'll eat steak and then we'll spend a full day on your sales.
Thanks so much for listening to the first episode of The Landscaper's Guide To Modern Sales And Marketing. My name is Jack Jostes, and I look forward to talking with you every week.