Ezra McCarthy
Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Today we are talking to none other than Jonathan Pototschnik, the founder of Service Autopilot and also the owner of CitiTurf there in Plano, Texas, a multi-million dollar business there. Jonathan, of course, didn’t start out that way. He started small but grew his business to a large business. Now he’s teaching others how to grow their service-based business. So today we’re going to be sharing some real life stories, tips and practical ways to help your business grow.
Jonathan, they’re glad you made time today. You have maybe a little bit of a familiar story, but obviously it changes on the way. You started mowing lawns at 15, then during college you kind of stopped. Then in 2005, you started there in North Dallas, CitiTurf. Now it’s grown to, you mentioned it before, over 10 plus million dollars, large business. So would you take us back? What drew you to lawn care? And then why did you quit and then come back?
Jonathan Pototschnik
Absolutely happy to do this.
Yeah, so early on when I was 14, what drew me to it was I wanted to make money so I could buy my own car. So we, my brother and I paid for our own stuff as we were growing up. And so I just wanted to make money. It was a, uh, this is crazy. It was a Mazda B 2200 pickup truck. This was a, like a 1990s truck.
Ezra McCarthy
What was that car just real quick? Is that one of those low slung ones or not low slung but
Jonathan Pototschnik
My truck was a, what was considered a low rider at the time. It was like a sporty version of it. Yeah. It’s absolutely crazy. I had it for a couple of years and sold it. And then the whole low rider thing died. And so I got out at the right time. But yeah, I think that’s something most people probably don’t know about me. I, it was a, and it had like a big old 15 inch.
bass speakers in a box behind the seat and speakers you could pull out and set on top of the cab. So if you were at a party, you know, it could play the music. Yeah, that’s, that’s something people don’t know about me, but yeah, it was this white two door pickup truck that was lowered and it wasn’t crazy looking. It was like super clean. Yeah, that was my first truck and I sold that and I, long as no, no, didn’t. It was super clean. It was white and black, just like super clean sporty. And I sold that and went to a Miata and then another truck that was the truck I mowed lawns with. So that was kind of me.
Ezra McCarthy
As long as you didn’t have an airbag.
Jonathan Pototschnik
That’s my early car situation. Anyway, those were my first cars and I wanted to, as a young kid, I was motivated to make money so I could have those cars. That’s how I got into the business and I did really good through high school, made a bunch of money, saved a ton of money and my allergies just killed me. They were so bad. I’d be sneezing all the time. So I hated the business for that reason. They kind of developed as I was getting older doing so many lawns. And that’s the biggest reason I didn’t want to keep doing it.
At the same time, I was also, I wanted to be in tech. So I went to college to get a degree in computer information systems. So I wanted to be in technology. I didn’t want to be mowing lawns. And so that’s how, between the allergies. I got out of mowing earlier than I would have because it was making so much money for me. And I ended up taking a job when I was 19 or 20 at a software company. I think I just turned 20, took a job at a software company while I was going to college.
Ezra McCarthy
Now for those listening that may not know he started service autopilot and you know Jonathan I’ve heard a lot of interviews about you starting that and I think it’s really interesting But I haven’t heard many that talking about your time at CitiTurf and you’re growing that yeah So a lot of people listening in they’ve got a lot of landscape business They’re trying to grow it Yeah, and they hear you you built all these things and they maybe think at how in the world So you launched CitiTurf? What was your initial vision for the business?
Was it to grow this multi-million dollar business or were you just, “I got to get something to pay the bills?” Because I know I’ve heard you talk on other podcasts and you’ve mentioned you had a cleaning business for a time. You’ve had before your successful service autopilot, you had a failed, I think it was like a truck routing business. So all kinds of things.
Jonathan Pototschnik
Software Company.
Ezra McCarthy
Some of them worked. Some of them unfortunately didn’t. So what was your vision going in? Did you imagine it growing to where it is today?
Jonathan Pototschnik
I don’t know that I imagined it growing to where it is today. I don’t think I had, I didn’t have the end goal in mind, but I wanted a bigger business. So by the time I had done, got involved in CitiTurf, I had done some other businesses, like for example, that software company that we started that as you alluded to, we ended up closing it down after several years and a lot of money for at least a lot of money for us. And then I ended up being partners with some guys that started a commercial cleaning company. So I had done that for a while.
So by that time I was starting to think bigger about wanting bigger stuff. So when I was involved in CitiTurf, I was already thinking I wanted something bigger, but my initial vision was just to get the business to a thousand customers doing a, I don’t remember exactly how I thought about it, but that would have been a couple million dollar business. It wouldn’t have been that big. And that’s really what my goal was.
I wanted it to keep going after that, but I didn’t really know what was possible. Frankly, I never wanted to be back in the lawn care business. That was a hundred percent accidental. That was a, I was involved in the cleaning business and my business partner in that business wanted to start, get into the lawn care business. I didn’t want to. They were always starting other things. I had no interest in being in it. And pretty much as soon as we ended up in the lawn care business together. They didn’t care about the business and had nothing to do with it. was all me.
So that’s how I got back into it. So there’s an element where I had, I didn’t have a big vision for the business in the sense that I wasn’t thinking about it. wasn’t something I ever wanted to do again. I wanted to be in technology and I was generally content doing the cleaning thing with them. It was a side thing I was doing with them. It wasn’t my full-time thing, but software at that time, I was doing tons of tech consulting, like programming consulting. And so that’s what I wanted to keep doing. I just want, and I wanted to be in the software business with the product.
I tell you that to simply say, I didn’t have this big vision for the lawn care business, but if I was going to be in it, I wanted it to turn big. I just didn’t know what was possible.
Ezra McCarthy
Did you initially start CityTurf with those other people as business partners?
Jonathan Pototschnik
It was a different business. It was called, yeah, we did it under a different name. And then when they had no interest in it, the story gets kind of confusing. So I don’t ever bother telling it, but the gist of it is we had this other business together. They didn’t want anything to do with it. They had nothing to do with it. It was all me. And so we sort of just let that business wind down and then CitiTurf was a separate thing. ⁓ Okay. Yeah. So they were technically two different businesses.
Ezra McCarthy
That makes sense.
So even hearing that someone hearing you said you didn’t have a big vision, some may be hearing 1000 customers even if they’re residential customers would be thinking that’s a big vision.
Jonathan Pototschnik
Yeah, yeah, I understand that. To me, was a, it was kind of like a one, it was a, that wouldn’t have been a more than a one and a half to $2 million business because at the time we were pretty much just doing mowing and bush trimming would have been the two big services that client might’ve, and we were only focused on small residential properties. So, that client might’ve been worth 1500 bucks to us a year, that kind of a thing, a thousand times 1500 or 1800. That’s what the business would have done in gross revenue. I guess to me, that didn’t seem like a big business because our cleaning business was many, many, many, many times that size. I didn’t see it as a big business. I didn’t see it as a big goal. I just saw it as the first goal.
Ezra McCarthy
How did you go into this stretch in your business to even get to that 1000 mark? Obviously you blew way past that, but how did you set it up? Because here you’re talking to me today, your business is functioning independent of you and it sounds like it’s been that way for several years. And most people, they just.
Jonathan Pototschnik
A lot of years. Since at least 2012.
Ezra McCarthy
Wow. Most people hear that, they’ve got a $500,000 business and they feel like they can’t leave their phone at home for an hour because the business might fall apart, not literally. But I’m just saying people get so absorbed in the business. So how did you structure it so that you could have time and obviously in the end financial freedom, then how would you tell someone who’s maybe in that boat, they’re struggling, they say, I want to have a business that it’s not dependent on me. How can someone structure that?
Jonathan Pototschnik
Well, for me, I can tell you how it worked for me. I’m a person that likes to drive forward sales and marketing and the vision of the business, the growth side of the business. And I like the other parts of the business, but I don’t love running the daily operations. I can do it, but I’m not even the best person to be doing it. So back then I discovered that if I was paired up with somebody who was a really good operational person, that made for a great team.
If you wanted to boil it down to the most simple answer, the key to CityTurf specifically was to find the right person that could help run the business at an operational level. And even fast forward to Service Autopilot, which was right from the early, early days, we hired a fellow by the name of Brian, who was the COO of that business. And so to me, and for me, the unlock is to partner up, whether it be a partner you give equity to, or it be a team member who is in my case, very strong operationally so they can run that part of the business.
I tend to think that a really good COO in a business, Chief Operating Officer, basically a person over operations is the single most important person inside an organization. In fact, I tend to think they have a harder job than the CEO. I think it’s the hardest, most important role. And so that’s the first role I think about when I’m building a company and that’s, if you want to again pick one thing that made it possible to get there, that’s what it was.
Ezra McCarthy
So at what revenue level, and I know this, people can’t take this and say, okay, this is it, but at what revenue level did you bring that team member on? Because so many people, they just get, they get caught up in the minutiae and even just the way you’re talking about it, some of them are, it’s probably just going right over our heads. And did you get some of this learning from the tech sector when you were in that, or where did you even come up starting to think like this?
Jonathan Pototschnik
That’s a great question. I don’t know. I would actually think I stumbled into it actually and kind of discovered it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s true because over the years I’ve read a lot and I’ve talked to a lot of people. So who knows where it came from. It could have been something that I stumbled into and then I learned that that part, that role is really important and the thinking got reinforced. I couldn’t really say. I got very lucky.
So when we were in the cleaning business, there were a number of us that were partners and my observation was that the partners really had a tremendous amount of core responsibility on them, whether it be the operations or the selling or whatever the case might be. And there was not a really strong secondary level where the owners could be free of the business. And so I didn’t want to do things that way in future businesses. So that was already something I’m thinking about in my twenties and that cleaning company taught me a lot of things that I didn’t want in a business.
It was a great business, but it taught me a lot of things like I wanted a big client list, highly diversified. I wanted to use only US legal documented team members. I wanted to build a leadership team that could run the business so I don’t have to answer the phone at one o’clock in the morning because cleaning was a nighttime business. So there are these things I learned in my 20s, later in my 20s that I then applied to these other businesses. And so right from the beginning in CitiTurf, I never did the work. I think one day, maybe two, I rode on a mower. That’s the extent of all the work I’ve ever done in the field.
And so, I wasn’t rich. I mean, we were, I just, I mean, I had money, but it was kind of locked up in an apartment building I had and a few other areas. It wasn’t as though I was like, and I have a family and kids at this point. So it’s not like I could just throw tons of money at this thing, but I just lived frugally and carefully said the most important thing is to not be doing the work because it’s too slow. And so from the beginning, I never did the work except when I had to fire this guy.
I did another video recently where I was talking about this guy. had long hair. He looked like he was from a rock band. He had long hair. He’d walk around smoking everywhere, wearing a shirt. ⁓ I inherited him as this employee in this long hair business. When I fired him, I had to do the work for a couple of days until I found a replacement. That’s the only time I ever did work in the business. That was the way I was thinking. And then in the case of CitiTurf, from the beginning, I knew I needed to get an operational person as fast as I can to manage the, of the things that were going on.
Some of that was motivated out of I was forced to because the thing that I think this is an important point to make. There’s an element where there’s things maybe I knew I should do or I thought I should do based on reading, but I might not have done them except that I was so busy. I was forced to do them. And my example here would be at the time that CitiTurf was created, I was still partnering in the cleaning company.
I was doing tech consulting all the time. That was actually my main revenue source. Then I had CityTurf and then later we ended up doing a software company in the health space. So at one point I had four things. Like they were, I was starting to wind stuff down, but I had four things. I was consumed. And so there was this element where I was forced to make decisions and they turned out to be a blessing. For example, I was forced to find early, like really early when CityTurf is 200,000 bucks. I have no idea what the revenue was, but really small, an operational person. to help me run operations. That was one of the most important decisions that was made inside that business.
While I might not have known exactly what to do in a couple of cases, I was forced to do these things. And in hindsight, you look back, like, ⁓ those are massive unlocks that anything I ever do in the future, I’ll do it again that way, which then translated to service autopilot. One of the very first hires we made was a guy who could run the whole operations of the business. He joined us basically not being too proud to do other things. And so while the business was tiny, he would do phone support. He would onboard people. And then he became the guy that ran the whole operations of the business. The point there is I just learned that that is for me and for most people, one of the single most hires, most important hires.
Ezra McCarthy
That’s so good. You know, this goes back to before we started recording, we’re talking about probably one of my favorite books, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel. Great book. Go read it twice. It’s really good.
Jonathan Pototschnik
Yeah, Dan.
Yeah, and the thing I’ll say, and I was telling you this because I know Dan, you know, a lot of people write stuff. This is just to kind of reinforce this idea that it’s a book worth reading. A lot of people talk a big game. Most people don’t actually do everything they talk about. I’ve been around Dan a lot. I think Dan lives what he talks. And that’s something important to know whenever you’re consuming someone’s information. So I say kudos to Dan and it’s a book worth reading simply because he actually follows it and lives it.
Ezra McCarthy
And it’s very, very helpful. Yeah. Because I don’t know where I heard this analogy. This isn’t original to me, but really good to insert here, which I think you did a good job of. You think I’m not big into sports or I like playing, but I digress. Anyway, football. Yeah.
Jonathan Pototschnik
That’s how I am. I play, I’m great, watch them, don’t care. I like to be part of it, not observe it.
Ezra McCarthy
Agreed. The thing in football, if a team or one of the team members gets injured, the coach doesn’t run out there and most of them don’t look like they’d make it too far on the field anyway. They don’t run out there on the field and take a linebacker spot. They send out if they have a second string, et cetera. And I may be using the wrong terminology in a business. As the owner so many times. Something goes out. And instead of being there for a couple of days like you did with that team member, we just live in the field now.
What are some practical steps, Jonathan, you would say, say someone’s there at the half a million mark, four to $500,000 and they find themselves getting drawn back time and time and time again, and they’re not being able to step back. I probably wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t think you would either go start three other businesses. So you’re so busy as to what helped you, but how could they, while keeping focused, try to back away from the field to help work on their business rather than in it as Emeth talks about in another great book.
Jonathan Pototschnik
It’s not a novel idea, but it’s a simple analysis of where is your time going. For example, 20 hours of my week are being spent on doing design, build type work, designing the landscape, selling the deal, managing the project. 10 % of my time is being spent on helping install a hardscape because I don’t have enough stone people. 15 hours of my week are helping out the maintenance crew, whatever the case is, it’s that sort of analysis and saying where’s the biggest consumption of my time because that big, use it, let’s say it’s 20 hours on the maintenance crew.
Well, that’s the easiest thing to go find somebody to take that chunk of time off your plate. And so if you identify that as the biggest time suck in your life, then you become somewhat maniacal about solving for that problem. It’s kind of 80-20 thinking like what is the most important thing I could be doing right now if I could free up 20 hours, that changes everything.
You then spend all your free moments. And I understand you don’t have many free moments and you have to just let a lot of things not get done that you still got to get their voices out. You got to do the work, but there’s all these other little initiatives you want to move forward. Like you want to do a new marketing campaign. You want to install new software in your business. You want to do all these other little things, but those aren’t the most important things. The most important thing is getting 20 hours off your plate because then that gives you leverage. You’d have a new 20 hours a week to go do the software system. The next marketing campaign, you kind of say, what is the biggest defender right now and you solve for that one thing and you work that one thing until it’s done as best you can.
And again, I’m realistic, fires happen, problems happen. You got to go deal with those. That’s the challenge of that phase of the business. But every moment you can, you’re trying to find that person to take that 20 hours off your plate. And that’s, it’s a very, very painful, difficult time. And you’ll read a book like Dan’s about buying back your time. And you will frankly be able to apply almost none of it to your life because there’s no magic where you can just suddenly do all the things he’s recommending.
It’s impossible. So you have to chunk the problem down and say, back to what I said, where’s my biggest defender? Let’s deal with that. I got a little more time back. What’s the next biggest defender? I’ll deal with that. And you got to work on the problem like that. And then one day out into the future, you have outsourced to other people you’ve hired so many activities in your business that you can start applying more and more of things. I talk about like where you get really focused on marketing initiatives or you can apply more of what Dan talks about in his books. But it takes a little time to get there and you’ve just got to work the plan. Did that answer your question?
Ezra McCarthy
It’s really good. I’d like to pivot a little bit here talking to different people with helping people with marketing websites. I remember we were helping this one business actually down there in Houston. He had, oh man, well two businesses he had split it off. Neither of them, they were, I say small, they were both probably like maybe $250,000. Maybe not even both of them combined that. And it was so funny because I was talking to him and he’s like, yeah. And he had a great name, a decent small business.
And he’s like, yeah, we went, we tried to go into franchising, but it didn’t work. And I didn’t say anything, but I’m like, okay, he’s got two very small businesses that are kind he’s split off, makes zero sense to me. You in your Dallas market, you didn’t allow yourself even to cover all of the Metro, but you allowed yourself to stay focused. Would you speak to that? Why did you choose a single avatar from what I understand your residential, small, and then would you speak to that? Cause sometimes it’s really easy, especially we see this and we think people are making a killing in landscaping or all these things. Perhaps instead of focusing, we can get so spread out. Do you think that was a big factor in you succeeding with your business? Did that help you grow? And if so, what would you recommend to someone else?
Jonathan Pototschnik
It’s one of the most important reasons we grew. Now we didn’t start out that way, actually. I learned this lesson. Probably the company that’s taught me this lesson the most was actually CityTurf. And then I’ve applied it as best I can through the rest of my life. so, rewinding a bit, I was kind of telling you that I used to be part of this cleaning business, then the CityTurf was going. And then I had this, I was part of this software business that I was brought in on.
They’d raised a bunch of money, gave us ownership and a bunch of money to help them build out the tech. was in the healthcare space. And then I was getting out of the tech consulting at the same time. I had all these things going and Service AutoPilot was an idea that was coming. The reason I tell you about that is I have two little boys, I’m married, I have to travel for work. I am just working too many hours. It’s not going to lead to a great long-term life. And so I had to make some pretty hard decisions then and my decision was I’m going to get this, my life down to just CitiTurf, which I’m not actually taking home any money from that business yet. And I’m going to do this thing called service autopilot.
It’s the thing I want to do. And I literally got out of everything else, which was very difficult. And I picked the two things that weren’t actually making me any money. Service autopilot didn’t even exist yet. And CitiTurf was not paying me a dollar.
Ezra McCarthy
What does your wife say?
Jonathan Pototschnik
She’s gone along with this ride the whole time. She’s like, she’s just, it’s, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur. It’s really important you marry the right person that can go on that trip with you. Especially if you want to be, do as many things as I’ve done and be as aggressive as I, and I’ve kind of been aggressive in ways I haven’t been aggressive. I’ve been kind of conservative, but it’s just, I don’t know.
I haven’t taken giant risks, but I guess to a lot of people I’ve taken them, but compared to some of my friends, I haven’t taken giant risks. They’ve been very calculated. And so I just, she was cool with it. Like we had the savings, she believed it would work out. She didn’t really work, worried about it and it worked out and she was willing to live frugally.
We stayed in the house that we bought when we were 22 for way longer than we thought we’d stay in there. And she was cool with it. And we were careful with the cars we were driving. So she played the game and it obviously paid off very well, but yeah, she went with it. So she, that point, really wanted me to get my, she wasn’t pleased with the amount of time I was working and my lack of being present. You know, my MO was if, if they were going to go to the beach, they would drive.
She’d load up the boys in the Toyota Sequoia back then, load them up in the Toyota Sequoia. They drive to the beach. I’d fly in and spend some number of days with them, probably be on my phone a bit. Then I’d get on a plane, fly home. And at some point they drive home. That’s like, and she didn’t love that. There’s a lot of stuff like that. Or one time we did a trip in Florida and it was a combination of a work trip as well as a going to Disneyland and all that stuff. So she was very much ready for me to tone this thing down. She probably liked the idea of just two things. I don’t remember now, it’s been a while, but it was a difficult time for us. I was working too much. So she was on board with it, but I just don’t remember her to be too terribly worried about the money. She trusted it would work out.
So I rewound to say that that so greatly improved my life. was still really hard because CitiTurf Service Alpine was very hard. It was a very hard business, but that so improved my life to just be working on two things that was kind of a reinforcement of this belief that there should be a focus. When I started CitiTurf, I didn’t know better. I looked around and the thing you have to remember is we started out in commercials. And so in commercials to sell the contracts, you’re doing irrigation, fertilization, weed control. So I’m doing everything. We were in landscape, we were in maintenance, we were everything. So I started out completely wrong.
And I despised the business. I never wanted to be back in the lawn care business. Now I’m in it and I hate the business because I’m doing it all wrong. And so the other lesson I learned is as I would get rid of things, for example, we got rid of landscape. Then I got rid of it, I think I got rid of irrigation. I can’t remember how it then eventually got rid of sod. I can’t remember how at all the order of operations. Every time I got rid of something, it got better.
So you get it, it got reinforced. And then in terms of you were talking earlier about the Dallas market, it just made intuitive sense to me that where do you make money? You make money by billing time. Where do you not make money? You make, don’t make money by not billing time, but paying an employee. So let’s minimize the amount of time we’re paying. That just seems so logical to me. like, we should just stay in a tight market.
And I liked marketing. was like, well, I can stay in a tight market and I can go get the people I want as clients. That was never really a big thought. It just seemed like this is the only way you would do a business. You stay small. So there were, and I guess I had also had experience in commercials where the commercial accounts just kept spreading out a little bit more. And it was kind of a pain in the butt to go provide great customer service to them. Cause I’m driving across town. So that probably also led me to think I shouldn’t spread out my market. The tight markets are better. I would also say another lesson was when we were in the cleaning business, we were in 22 States. It’s freaking, it sounds awesome to say, we’re in 22 states. It sounds like a great business. It was a great business.
It sounds cool, but it sucks because it means you’re on airplanes. I didn’t want any of that stuff. I just wanted a really tight, really well run business that we would spread out in time. Those were some of the ways that I ended up there. And it just, I will just kind of wrap this and you can ask me a question. Every time I’ve made a decision in my life to cut something. And I think about this in my personal life as well. Like every time I eliminate something from my life, everything gets better. It goes faster. I have less stuff on my brain, everything’s easier, you feel more relaxed. Like just, it’s all better. And so it’s been reinforced for me so many times, I apply that to everything.
One more thing, I just like, for example, I had a dinner last night with a great friend. He’s for like five hours, we were having dinner and we were very much talking about this. In fact, he asked me like, what is your advice to me for 2026? Like what is my goal? One word, simplify. He has got multiple businesses, very successful businesses, big businesses but he’s got a million moving parts and it destroys profit. The simplification is how you go faster and it’s how you make more profit.
Ezra McCarthy
For those listening in, would you tell them to focus first on that core thing before you even think about expanding it all and just make it absolutely the best? Or how would you describe or recommend to someone as they’re starting out, or maybe they’re at a decent size now and they’re trying to grow and they say, well, what if I tack on this service or that?
How would you recommend them structuring? Because I believe now you do several services to a single property, but obviously, we’re talking about simplification. How does that play into it and how does that still fit within your framework?
Jonathan Pototschnik
I still feel, I think if Philip were on here, Philip runs the company, I think if you were talking to both of us, we would both say to you, we still do too many things at CityTurf. And some of that, I’ll answer your question, but just to kind of talk through this, because if people know me or look at the service list, they’ll say, well, he’s saying one thing, but doing a different thing. And so there’s this, we would tell you that we’re doing too many things, but we’ve sort of ended up doing too many things. So let me take a step back. We did too many things.
Then we cut a lot of the things and we’re predominantly driving. We’re a $10 million company doing mowing and bed and bush work and fertilization. Fertilization we control is a tiny bit of a piece of the business. We are a mowing company at the end of the day and a very profitable one back.
It was a great business, really, really good business. And so we’ve added these other services, which have been imperative because we are slowly diversified, buying away from those other lines like mowing. It’s a deteriorating business for a variety of reasons. It’s still good. It’s just, there’s some challenges with it. And so that necessitated adding other services to what I would call reinvent the revenue of our business. If you look at us today, we are number one, a fertilization weed control company. That is our biggest driver of revenue. And we want pest control and arbor care to be the next two biggest drivers of revenue in the business. So they’re not yet, but that’s where we’re heading.
It’s required adding these additional services to reinvent the revenue of the business. And we’ve recently just got into, we’re testing Christmas lights, not that we don’t want to be in Christmas lights, but it’s in the Texas market. There’s a lot of seasonality that people may not understand. We have a lot of seasonality. have three really December, January, February are cold months, especially January, February. And these days, we get in snow that we used to never get when I was a kid.
And so you have to find ways to, and many will understand this, but to keep your team members busy and help. Because a lot of companies eat their profits over their down months. And so you want to eat as little profit as you can. So it’s added necessary complexity to the business, but we don’t love it. I just want to tell you how we arrived at where we’re at as a business, because I do offer a lot of service, but also keep in mind we’re very close to being a $20 million business. So we’re bigger.
We can handle the additional services. The things I would say is what I’ve learned, not what I did. It’s what I’ve learned by actually doing this is if I could go back and do it all over again, I would only offer, I would not just do one service. Typically, it depends what your service offering is and it depends on your market. But for me, I would normally not just do one service, but I would only do a couple services. The reason I would only do a couple is because you only have to train your people on a couple things. You only have to hire certain people. It’s just less complexity to have lots of people doing different things.
Using lots of equipment they need to be trained on. And then having managers that can understand and manage all these different services and understand how to price them and sell them. You just eliminate all that complexity. So your brain can just be very focused on, okay, this is where CitiTurf really grew. Here’s an example. We only serve homeowners that have a 12,000 gross lot square foot house or smaller. Only in these areas, we only use small mowers, they’re 21 inches. Toro self-propelled mowers. That’s all we use.
We don’t ride on equipment, stand on equipment. And then my avatar is a stay at home mom or maybe a two family income, but they probably got two kids. They’re making X amount of money. They’re 30 to 55 years old. They live in a $450,000 house. That’s my avatar. When you get that clear, then you have absolute clarity on what to say to them from a marketing standpoint, how to get to them. Like what kind of methods do you use to get in front of them? You have just this clarity where that you’re only thinking about one person, this type of client, there’s no thinking about my commercial client, how do I sell to this commercial property or these types of commercial properties? How do I sell to this type of residential? How do I sell to this different type of residential? You’re only thinking about one thing. That one thing leads to speed.
You’re only training on one thing. You’re only hiring one kind of person. And so in hindsight, if I could do it all over again, based on what I’ve learned and what we kind of stumbled into as we were trying to fix and make the CitiTurf business better, I would have just a couple services and they would be services that could, where I could at least with those services get my business to a seven figure business, a million bucks. And the reason I like a couple is because one of your challenges is, for example, if you only sell, let’s say pest control and you’re only charging 99 bucks a quarter just to make up an example, that’s a $400 client. The cost of acquisition to get that client, might cost you a hundred.
Sometimes it’ll cost you 30 bucks. Sometimes it’ll cost you a hundred bucks. If you really want to be aggressive, it could cost you 200 bucks. Like think about what a door knocking company, they’re paying hundreds of dollars to acquire clients. Well, if your client’s only worth $400, that is a year and it’s costing you upwards of 200 plus dollars to acquire them. That’s a very expensive business to grow and it will grow very, very slow.
So if you offer multiple services, and so now I can take the value of a client from, in my example, 400 by adding, say, another service. Now I can make a client worth a thousand, that gives me a lot more money to go acquire clients with, to spend on marketing. And so I love a business that could be focused on one thing, but for most people, it makes sense to offer a few things so that the client value is worth more money to the business. That’s how I think about it. Tight, the tightest service area you can get, the fewest number of services you can offer for as long as you can, and then at some point you might bump up against a wall where you either need to add a little more service area or you need to add another service. And that comes down to the market that you’re serving.
Ezra McCarthy
How did you and when did you begin to get a clear picture of this customer avatar? You mentioned at the beginning you were doing commercial and then obviously you’re doing residential now. When did that shift come and then if someone’s sitting down thinking, wow, I have no idea who I serve, I just hope that people call and then I try to close the sale. How did you find your right avatar and then how would you recommend someone finding theirs?
Jonathan Pototschnik
I found the avatar by kind of like I told you a story that I got out of everything that was making me money and just did CitiTurf and service autopilot. was kind of the same thing. It was looking at the market and just kind of thinking through it, looking at some data and making a bet that I think this is the right market. So I kind of made a big bet.
Pivot away from commercial, which was a good business, pivot away from big residential and go to the small residential. It was sort of like running the numbers in a spreadsheet made me think, I think this has potential. And then also to be fair, there was a company in my market back then that was doing a ton of small residential that I thought looked like these guys were doing it right. And they gave me some inspiration that I should maybe look at that. That’s where I got some inspiration looking at their business thinking, huh, they’re doing this well. I could do this too. This might be an interesting market. And so it was a combination of things that led me to it.
And then to figure it out, I very specifically was thinking about where’s the money, not like who are the people that live in the multimillion dollar homes, not the like, not who are the wealthiest people, but who has the money to spend? I think that’s always the top line question when you’re identifying a market is like who has, as they say, it’s like this burning desire, burning need for the thing you’re selling. They have tremendous pain and they need what you’re selling and, and the and is very important, they have the money to actually solve that problem. There’s a lot of people in the world that have lots of problems and lots of pain, but they don’t have any way to solve them because they don’t have money. So early on I understood this concept.
So I was saying where could we offer these services where people, they’ll be in high demand and the people can afford them. And so that kind of guides you to the areas you want to serve. And then the way I started to understand the market was literally to start selling to them. And I was the guy that had all the conversations on the phone and on the door. You have enough conversations with people, you start to learn. And then I also remember parking my trucks in the neighborhood sometimes and just observing. You’re just like, just literally watching that what happens in that neighborhood, the vendors that come and go, the moms that walk their kids to school in the morning, the kids playing outside. It’s like, just gives you a feel for the market where you can kind of get an insight into the life they’re living.
That helps you write a copy. It helps you understand the market. All of that together helped me formulate, okay, this is who I want to go after. So I’m going to quit doing this kind of work. I’m going to quit doing this kind of work. And we got it narrowed down to just that very specific type of client that we ended up going after.
Ezra McCarthy
That wraps up part one of our conversation with Jonathan Pototshnik. I’m sure you got a lot of value from that. And what we’re doing today is we’re actually breaking this conversation up into two parts. I know sometimes if it’s too long, it can be just maybe a little daunting to all listen to at once. so follow back up with us here on the next podcast for part two. Jonathan is going to share some more great value. We sure appreciate you listening in and we’ll catch on the next one.
