Powerful Tools To Streamline Your Business & Grow Revenue Part 1

As this spring season gets rolling, you may find yourself reflecting on some of the systems you have in place. Or thinking about the systems that don’t exist yet, but need to. During this time of reflection, you may be asking yourself the following questions:

- Do I have a system for getting in touch with customers to see if they will be working with me again this year?
- Do I know what services they want?
- Can I accurately project my revenue for the upcoming season?

If you are reading these questions and don’t know where to start in answering them, don’t worry, that's what we are going to address in this post!

I used to be disorganized and a bit frantic when it came to advertising and taking on different services. I was always behind and playing catch up. I would advertise for spring cleans-ups with yard signs, door hangers, and postcards, but by the time my materials came in, it would be time to advertise for the next thing, so I constantly felt behind.

Another issue I was having was not knowing what to expect for revenue for the coming year. I would predict $100,000 in revenue, but it would only turn out to be $80,000 because I overestimated the add-ons my customers would ask for. The opposite would happen as well. I would be fully prepared to take on forty aeration jobs, but then I would get eighty requests.

My schedule was a mess, and I had no way of knowing what work was ahead of me until I implemented this system. I began sending out Lawn Agreement Forms well in advance of the upcoming season. This form allowed me to be able to collect customer information and their desired services for the upcoming year. The top portion of the form is for the customer to enter their information so that we could ensure their name, mailing address, email address and other information was up to date in our CRM. Side note: If you’re looking for a great CRM check out Yardbook, that’s what we use and it is an amazing tool and best of all, it’s FREE. The second portion of the Lawn Agreement Form is where the customer selects the services they would like for the season. We chose to send out these forms through good old-fashioned snail mail, and we include an addressed envelope for customers to send back their responses.

This has been a great system and has really worked for us. It allows us to plan out our entire season in advance. We know exactly how many mulch jobs, cleans-ups, aeration and so on, to fit into our schedule.

Keep in mind, this is not a contract. It is simply a way for us to get a pulse on what our customers are looking for in the upcoming season. When it comes to my residential clients we offer a-la-carte services, so we do not have seasonal contracts.

The final step to this process is a confirmation phone call. Once we received the Lawn Agreement Forms back we’d call up our customers to confirm their selection of services. The reason we do this is it gives us a chance to upsell. Of course, we are not trying to be the “Wolf of Wall Street,” we are just inquiring to see if perhaps an aeration or a clean-up might be something they were interested in or had questions about. It is completely your choice on how you proceed once you receive the agreement form back from the customer, but that is one way you could increase your revenue.

The important thing here is that you are gathering information from your customers that allows you to plan out your season and predict your potential revenue.

If you are in need of your own Lawn Agreement Form check out Lawntrepreneur Academy. There, you can gain access to this resource for FREE. This is a downloadable, editable, plug and play resource that you can tailor to your business and offerings. If you head to Lawntrepreneur Academy’s home page and scroll down to the bottom, you will find where you can enter your email and you will receive it immediately. Having systems in place is key to growing your business. So if you found this spring to be a bit chaotic when it came to organizing your customers and services, the Lawn Agreement Form may be a great next step to putting a system in place.

Stay tuned for Thursday’s Blog Post where I will reveal the other document I send out to customers with the Lawn Agreement Form. Here’s a hint…inflation causes prices to increase, so yours should too.