Ezra McCarthy
hello and welcome back to the lawn care success blueprint. today we have a game changer in the contracting world joining us. levy, the mastermind behind the 7 power contractor system. if you’re a business owner looking to scale efficiently, build systems that are reliable, and finally get your life back from the daily grind, then this episode is sure to be a help for you. al has spent decades helping contractors streamline their operations.
hire better and take control of their business. and personally, after hearing him, tommy melo, i love tommy’s podcast. and after hearing tommy mention al just about every episode, thought, and then i was doing some research, i thought we got to have al on. so al, great to have you.
Al Levi
thank you so much for letting me have the opportunity and for the listeners out there, just so you know, everything i’m gonna say applies to you in the lawn care business. don’t tune out and think, well, this guy doesn’t understand our business. i do.
Ezra McCarthy
al, you’re not just a consultant. sometimes, you know, we hear business coach or consultant and we think someone who doesn’t relate, doesn’t understand the contracting world, but you actually were a contractor for, believe, over 25 years. so would you tell the listener kind of where you got started and why even now you’re helping people and what experience do you have? yeah.
Al Levi
my origin story really kind of comes back to our company was started out of my grandfather’s gas station in 1936. and my dad and my uncle were next up. when they got home from world war two, they got busy growing what was in fuel oil. fuel oil heating in the northeast is kind of like if you’re not familiar with this, like what propane heating is. same idea. and by the time my brothers and i showed up in the late 70s, early 80s, my two older brothers and i, we took the reins from there. and then as we went along, we expanded into
plumbing, gas heating, air conditioning. and finally, the last one was electrical. but we were able to expand into these other segments because of the work we had done. we had mastered our first trade and what we were doing, which freed us up and gave us the secret recipe to be able to replicate and grow, which what we did is we had one main hub shop and three satellites on long island. and even though it’s 115 miles tip to tip, it’s really new york traffic.
and so if you hope to expand and grow your company or ever run a satellite, you have zero chance without systematic ways of doing it.
Ezra McCarthy
you know, i didn’t realize you were right there in long island. my wife is actually from long island, but that’s maybe an aside. you mentioned before we got on there that some of the challenges you faced that maybe highlighted the need for sops, which is standard operating procedures and manuals. and you mentioned you guys were having a bunch of insurance claims and maybe even some lawsuits. what you could tell us kind of what pain point drove you to the importance of manuals? because maybe i’m sure a lot of people, hear manuals and they fall asleep.
yes. but they are important.
Al Levi
let me back up through the whole thing here is most kids raised in a family business. my brothers and i were at work by the time we were eight and we also did residential, commercial, and industrial. so i understand how those three segments work as well. yeah, we were 70 to 80 people when i was there back in the 90s, what we had grown up to. and if you as owners are listening and going, well, if my company was only bigger, it all work. let me help you out. no.
and no, it won’t. it’ll be more gasoline to a fire. and i can tell you that in test too, it was just craziness. the good news is we made money most times, but it was by accident a lot. but where it was draining was, you know, going out and running calls in very fancy homes. we started the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. that’s the nature of the environment where we were. and so if you made a mistake like you did a plumbing call and you didn’t check that there was a water leak and everything was working, and it started to bring down a ceiling or turn a chandelier into a water fountain, that’s a problem. now imagine all these guys out there working and how much more gasoline is going on a fire. so these callbacks were killing us and the insurance claims were killing us.
but here’s the big thing. i didn’t wake up and want to be operations and staffing and the rest of it. i was really good at sales and marketing. that was really my great strength. problem was my team was really great at blowing up all my efforts. and so i had to stop and go fix it so that they wouldn’t be doing that, so that we could then scale up and scale up in a sane way. and i know i just wanted to stop for a second because i know these terms get flipped a lot. sop, standard operating procedures, and operating manuals are really two different things.
sops or standard operating procedures, in the absence of nothing is great, but basically they’re checklists. so think of it as post-it notes on this white wall that i’m on. and in the absence of no checklists or procedures, sops win. but if you keep on doing it, it ends up being a ransom note because there’s no connection to anything. operating manuals really start with the right org chart or the box org chart. it’s not the fancy titles to inflate your ego—ceo, cfo, cio, cto, the whole thing. this is really what are the boxes and the reporting order that it takes to run your company, whether there’s a service wing or maintenance wing or a big job install wing. there has to be this thing so that people know where they are, where can they go in your company if you’re offering a career like we did,
and then who is really their boss, because one of the things they hated are employees. and we were a new york city union shop.
Ezra McCarthy
man. yeah.
Al Levi
you think whatever your life is tough, try that. so really what they hated was that they thought they did a good job and you guys out there doing the lawn and whatever else. and then as i show up on the job and go, well, that’s not how we want to cut. that’s not what we do around the rose bushes. that’s not how we fertilize. and you go, based on what? the way you fell out of bed today or am i supposed to read your mind? and that was really the problem that was really edging all of us closer to the decision that
let’s stop what we’re doing. let’s get organized. and the first part of that is the box org chart. once you have that, great, i’m in a box. what does that mean? if you have operating manuals and think of it as a playbook. so if you play football or any sports, you know, there’s a playbook. it’s not trying to cover 100% of what goes on. it’s trying to cover the 80% that goes on all the time. the 20% weird is not what sabotages you. trust me.
it’s that you can’t do the 80% over and over and over again. you can’t train new willing people how to do your work, your way, to handle the 80%. that’s what gets in the way. and that’s what we learned to master. once we had the org charts and the manuals, then we also created the associated training to help take you up that company ladder. and we stumbled on a book years ago called employer of choice. it probably was in the mid to late 90s. and that book left me with
if i could offer a career, not a job, i win. so when you’re talking about techs or, you know, your technicians or whatever you call your specialists out there that go out and actually do the work, because that’s where the money is, what is your ability to create willing apprentices with no skills into willing techs with great skills? i have done that. yes, i was plumbing, heating, cooling, electric. but before again, you tune out. in my programs, there’s lawn scapers. i worked
with a condo builder. i—trust me—i never built a condo. kitchen cabinetry and like you mentioned, tommy mello, who’s grown a garage door empire across the country. all of these trades, they’re more alike than they’re not, which is why people come into the program, understand the box org chart, the depth chart and the flow of communication. and then how do i cover that bingo board? that’s what the manuals are all about.
Ezra McCarthy
so i want to make sure to help people understand here because some of this i’m learning as you’re talking. at what level would you recommend someone getting some of these? because even how you described sops versus a manual, at what point would you recommend someone even start to think about some of this stuff?
Al Levi
it is a great question, as well. get to ask that all. the only thing i can tell you is i worked with the great ellen rohr, who’s a financial genius, and she also helped tommy and so many people that i worked with. we would drive to jobs or head to the airport. i was the one driving. she would be the one in the passenger seat. as i’m driving, she says to me, she goes, al, when’s the best time to plant an oak tree? and i go, i’m from new york city. i don’t know from oak trees. so why don’t you just tell me? so she goes, ten years ago and today.
because you’re going to wish in ten years from now that you had planted it today. so the answer for this going back is there is never a wrong time to get the org charts, the manuals, and all these other things, even if it’s you. and here’s what i tell people when i offer my free 30s to any contractor is that when you see this org chart, you’re thinking, well, when i get big, i’ll have all of that. no.
the day you woke up and you had an entrepreneurial seizure and thought, gee, i’ll open my own business, how much fun will that be? you created all of those boxes, my friends. the problem is your name is in all those boxes and you don’t realize all these boxes because you’re just trained yourself. i answer the phone, i’m a csr. i hang up the phone, i’m a dispatcher. i go run the job, i’m a tech. i do the install work. you’re running around through all the boxes and not really doing so. no one
can come to your company and help move your name down the depth chart the way you’re running the company today. so the sooner you do it, the better it is, in my opinion. it’s at work right now at companies from 1 million to 250 million in all different trades.
Ezra McCarthy
how did this help your business? on your website you talk about you retired a little bit early. so obviously, can you tell the listener how getting these manuals, some of these things inside the business that you owned helped you get out of the field and grow a real business?
Al Levi
yeah, that coupled with the staffing that we were able to do—take apprentices to junior tech, junior tech to senior tech, field supervisors—and then build these folks. because training became the centerpiece of our company. we realized for years and years, we do what all of you listeners are doing. if we do any training, where do we do it? on the job. which means you’re coming to my house today to learn how to do your job. that’s a problem. it’s extraordinarily hit and miss. even in companies that go, where would i do it? i go, i built for a commercial roofer.
he goes, where am i supposed to do this training in the middle of winter? i go, inside this barn. we’re going to lay out how to build and they’re going to have to learn how to get up and down off the roof, how these different things work. and we trained them up from zero skills to 100% skills right there and then. so it’s always doable. but if you don’t have manuals first and you don’t have the org charts, just putting up a training center, a hands-on training center is not going to make the difference you think it is.
Ezra McCarthy
so after you implemented this manual, all these systems, training in your business, did you see that your customers could tell a difference?
Al Levi
yeah. and that’s a great point because again, back to my marketing mindset, sales and marketing, i was very lucky. i had a great friend, an industry friend, and he said to me, he goes, al, what you say about how great you are is semi-interesting to me. what i really want to know is what ezra has to say who lives in my area, who has a similar lawn and trees and bushes. all of my marketing and all of my sales—because sales and marketing to me are two sides of a
if you can’t sell to one person, you can’t sell to a hundred, a thousand, or a million. so sales is always one of the first big things that you need to do. and the words we know in sales, if you’re any good at sales, is not the words you speak. it’s the ones that leave the lips of the person that you’re talking to, the customer. because when they’re talking, they’re buying. well, the same thing applies to here. getting great testimonials really helped us take off in the market, especially as we added other trades. nobody wants to be the guinea pig.
you want to know who else has used you and says you’re that great. and if you want to dig into testimonials, because we hear about marketing, i tell everyone that there are three types of testimonials you’re after. and the three types of testimonials is the people that are standing in front of their lawn, bushes, trees, whatever you’re taking care of, saying how great the service, the tree service, the trimming service, the lawn cutting, whatever that you do is so great, they’d never think of using anyone else.
so they’re bragging on the product and service. the other one would be really bragging on you—whenever i call they always answer their phone, when everybody comes out they’re really neat and clean. i don’t have to go clean up the yard after they leave because they’ve left a mess for me to take care of. i never think of anyone else. and the third one i call the home run is they’re bragging on a product and service and they’re bragging about how great you are. and it’s all about when you do a video—and today video is the strongest because not only in social media but anywhere you would do your
marketing and advertising, you want to be able to have a customer testimonial because that’s the tacky stuff that gets in people’s brains. and then by the way, don’t forget, have a call to action. you can do everything great and have no call to action. so it was a great, what am i supposed to do now? testimonials are very, very strong and that had made a huge difference in our marketing sales, especially as we started to bolt on other businesses into our stuff that we did.
Ezra McCarthy
this is something that i’m really passionate about and i’d love to get your opinion on it. i’ve never heard it broken down into the two aspects, the service and the people, and i couldn’t agree more. but what have you seen now, obviously you work with all kinds of businesses, who is doing the best job and then how are they getting those and then how are they using them, the reviews?
Al Levi
so
the testimonials—and again, video becomes very strong. that’s not that you wouldn’t use it if you do direct oversized direct mail postcards, which by the way have always worked. they never stopped working. you just don’t know how to do it the right way, which is you make this big giant piece, spend tons of money on it, you send it out to everyone once, and then you say, well, that didn’t work. of course not. because direct mail doesn’t work like that. if you think about it, you as a homeowner—don’t be a
owner of the lawn care business—when you open your mail, what’s at your feet? a garbage can. by the time you get to the third of this oversized postcard, you go, what is this? and so mailing it three times over six weeks. but the big stickiness again is a picture, a testimonial from a customer bragging on how good you are, and a great headline that gets me to read. there’s very good structure to running those campaigns. so getting back to video testimonials, social media, as you know, has become
really a great avenue. it’s not about selling, but it’s about what you’ve done for customers and, you know, bringing this story alive. and video testimonials is how they deploy a lot of that. they also use it on their website. so as people are visiting your website before they call you, there’s a success gallery or whatever you want to call it where they see other videos and preferably places where they’re in these towns that you work so that they know, yeah, yeah, i see somebody else in my town is also
i’m in scottsdale is seeing the same thing. and that is what has helped all across the different trades that i’ve worked in get higher tickets, better sales, but really what i call about in marketing. marketing boils down to what i call marketing power. think of a bathtub. your job is to fill it with the right amount of calls from the right customer at the right time. here’s the tricky part. if you’re any good, you overflow that tub, which means there are way more calls in those three categories
than you can handle, which i agree is stressful, but here’s what it does. because if you can do that, you get to decide where you work, how much you get paid, and then who you won’t work for. but also it creates the energy for you to do the second most important thing, which is create this pipeline of your own technicians who know how to work your way. and that’s really the way these two things work hand in hand. testimonials are a very big part of that. did i cover that
what you were looking for?
Ezra McCarthy
yeah, that’s really good. one thing i want to dive into because personally, i’ve actually used postcards—not for my business, but i’m a pastor and i’ve used them for my church—and they’re. ok. that’s good to know because.
Al Levi
oversized.
got to be oversized because—and i’m sorry for cutting you off—but think about it, you’re going through the mail. if it’s not oversized and very colorful, it’s not going to get your attention.
Ezra McCarthy
so what’s oversized? give me some specifics.
Al Levi
you know, i don’t know if i have a card here now, but…
Ezra McCarthy
are you thinking like a piece of paper size?
Al Levi
no, it’s a card that’s typically about that big if i had to put a size to it. yeah, they’re seven by ten or something, but whatever the mailing size is. and you’re going to mail that three times. and it’s just, you know, a really good front cover with a great tag, question mark, or a headline. it goes back to when people actually read newspapers. it still goes to the same thing, which is if you don’t have a great headline, nobody’s going to read anything that you do. you just wasted your money. so what’s a really great headline?
Ezra McCarthy
okay.
Al Levi
as for if i could show you how to make twice as much money in half as much time, you want to know? and so if i could teach you how to lose 50 pounds in two weeks and never feel hungry, would you like to know?
Ezra McCarthy
see, here’s my thing. that almost sounds so good, it sounds spammy. so how can we do it?
Al Levi
great headline is like.
you don’t want to make it spam. it has to be onto what you do. but you do have to kind of step out a little bit. as a pastor, you know, feeling alone, feeling as there’s nobody else besides you. are you looking for an answer? and if they are, well, then they’ll read on, correct?
Ezra McCarthy
yeah.
yeah, now you’re making me want to do it. and tell the listener why would you do it three times? why would you not say, hey, i can take that budget and instead of sending it to 1,000 people three times, they might be thinking i want to get it out to 3,000 households. yeah. can you explain why is it better to do it three times?
Al Levi
we call it laser focused direct mail. you first—what you need is that testimonial from a customer that’s loving you in that area. and you say, you know what? this isn’t the only place where they have trees that are not deeply rooted, that are a problem, that really need trimming, or that, you know, there’s bad irrigation. the house was built years ago and we could come in and take care of those things for them. so, you know, if i had a mailing list—which is much easier today to go online and do—500 or 1,000 is a good test case.
i’d mail to them three times because again, when you’re going through your mail, you’re throwing around. it’s the third time you touch it in six weeks. so every two weeks, you’re mailing the same piece. don’t make it a moving target. and you look at it, that’s when you get the traction. if you make one great piece that’s going to do everything—and that’s part of the problem too—is that people use direct mail to try to sell people everything. it is not a replacement of a—it’s not a sales brochure. all i’m trying to do is break into your headspace.
so when something comes up or you’re satisfied with whatever you have or you’re already looking for somebody, you’re going to think about the seven power contractor lawn system.
Ezra McCarthy
this is so interesting. here’s one question i have. you mentioned put a review on there and maybe i’m just jaded. when i see a text review, unless it’s like a google review, i don’t believe it. cause they could have been sitting in their basement in their underwear typing that up. like.
Al Levi
it’s
a picture of me, me and my wife. we’re at least 50% of the picture. i know you guys love the lawn, but people who are looking at it are looking at these people. do they look like they’re real? they have their name and where they live. that’s really what it is—not the street address. so it’s alan, natalie, levi, scottsdale, arizona. and then i’m just bragging on is, you know, we could never get this stuff to grow in the south side of our house.
they sent an expert on and now we have the most lush lawn there is.
Ezra McCarthy
isn’t so interesting. i’m learning here and enjoying this. there’s several things in your seven powers that you talk about. one of those is operating power. can you explain to the listener what is that? yeah. how is this helpful?
Al Levi
operating power is kind of what we touched on already, which is it starts with the organizational chart, the boxes it takes to run your company, and then the manuals, playbooks that can cover all of those boxes so that as you’re working—and it’s very true, by the way—when you see all these boxes, people go, well, i don’t have all those people. there are companies that are 10 million where they don’t have a person for a box. it is very common that people have their name in multiple boxes. as you grow,
you earn the right to move down. so in my own case, i was the second of 25 techs going out the door to run a call. at the end, with all the training i did, i was the 25th person out.
Ezra McCarthy
so that goes into the second one with staffing. you know, something i’ve learned is businesses can change and a lot of service-based businesses are very similar. what it ends up boiling down to is marketing and people. you mentioned staffing power. how did this help you get out of the field and grow the business and how can it help others?
Al Levi
once we realized the holes and dangers of relying on the job training, which we didn’t like to say out loud—we used to call it otjt—it was a secret for ourselves, but it was so spotty, so awful. how could you hold anybody accountable? and then, you know, we were busy, so we would talk to you. ezra, here’s what i want you to do. six months later, am i supposed to come down the hallway and go, ezra, that’s not how i wanted the job done? he goes, well, that’s how i think i heard it. there’s two bad ways to run your company, by the way, for those who are listening here.
trying to talk your way. how can you hold anybody accountable to what you think you said and what they think they heard? the answer is you can’t. and the second one is put memos all over the wall. just basically you shouting at them in one-way communication. operating manuals is totally different. how you get them rolled out, how you get them edited, how you get them in place and how do you keep them in the culture and why they care is because they want to know how to do the work, get
off my back, and how do you move me up here so i can make more money and do more things. and that’s how you get retention. the staffing is really five steps: always recruiting, always hiring, always orienting, always training, always retaining. five steps.
Ezra McCarthy
how do you recommend once they get this in place for them to follow up? because you just mentioned memos on the wall and just verbally. what is the follow-up process to make sure once you’ve done that training that they’re actually following it?
Al Levi
yeah, you
do have to get out and do ride-alongs. ride-alongs in every business is vital. and i don’t mean meet people at the job. your job is to climb in someone’s truck with them and make a friend today and talk about the work and what’s going on and then talk about the process we’re following. because if you have operating manuals already and they know what they’re going to do, you can say, so as we’re going to a maintenance call, what are we going to be doing and what order today? just kind of get it that way.
then it’s also time to go, you know, what kind of things bug you? where do you find the obstacles? things that i’m not aware of. but the way that manuals really get traction with your org charts, it’s again, tweaked, rolled out. and instead of falling off the cliff, there’s very specific meetings they come to every week where they stand up and they read one to two pages aloud after it’s been rolled out because the words they listen to are the words that fall out of their mouth. and i learned this lesson in a very interesting way.
my oldest daughter was a teenager and i’m talking to her and while i’m talking to her, she’s moving her hand indicating that i’m talking, but she’s not listening. and the only way that we know anything has been conveyed is when they talk. in a sales call, who has to talk? you or the customer? and the answer is always the customer. that’s the only way we know we’ve conveyed and when they’re talking, they’re buying. so the same thing applies here. these are very specific meetings and this is their chance to get their fingerprints on these manuals. they’re not set in stone,
but they’re not rewritten every time. they’re tweaked as we discover a better, cheaper, faster thing that we all agree on. that’s how these manuals stay a living document, which is what they’re supposed to be. the manuals are then the foundation for doing the second thing, the staffing program, because you need this base and they get unpacked into your hands-on training center that’s designed to mirror what’s in the manuals. and the bridge between the two is training curriculum where you become better trainers yourself.
don’t send them out to a toro school or i don’t know whichever lawn fertilizer school. it’s all good, but it’s very hit and miss. and more times than not, those classes—the problem with sending people out to training, which we discovered years ago—is that there are two types of trainers in general. there’s trainers who really, really know their stuff. the bad news is they’re so boring, you’ll be asleep. so unless you’re not in trained sleep mode, useless.
and then you have very charismatic, you know, engaging people. but heaven forbid you ask them a question of any substance, pretty clear that they don’t know what they’re talking about. so you are really responsible for 80% of that training that goes on so that they do again understand between the manuals and the hands-on training center and that right here they get trained up and what we call released. and released means you know how to put down the fertilizer. you know how to trim these bushes. you know how…
everything i’m checking off from the manual. got it? so when i get in the field and the job is not like that, it’s no longer a training issue, is it? it is now a compliance issue to which we use the four steps of corrective action.
Ezra McCarthy
this is really good. and some people may be hearing this and they’re saying, okay, they may be hearing always hiring. they may be hearing marketing. they may be hearing sending postcards out three times, getting reviews. and they may be saying, how can i afford all this? and another one of the powers included in the seven powers is financial power—going from basically it’s friday payroll time, oh no, to planning ahead. so how would you describe this as part of the system?
Al Levi
i’ll back up to one of the guys you mentioned, tommy mello, who—the garage door. before i started to work with him, i couldn’t even name a garage door company. and he just told me what he was going to do. and the bad news for him is he was 15 million and losing money. and so the payroll thing that you said was like really at home. my first thing was to stop losing money for him. and then we made a lot of money. and while we’re in the midst of this, he says to me, we’re going to be a hundred million dollar company. and by that time i go, i said, no doubt.
but this hundred million company is not going to be chaotic now that we have systems and we’re not relying on people to be the hero to rescue everything. which—they literally had a full-time person to try to fix the mistakes they were making every day. that’s the job of one person, yeah.
Ezra McCarthy
you mean mistakes that the techs are making they just run around? yeah.
Al Levi
fixing that or making unhappy customers happy. i said, listen, that’s fine for defense. how about we play offense? and offense is doing the system right and minimizing the chances of a callback or a mistake or unhappy customers right here and there. that really is what makes a big difference in all of this. no matter what you do, no matter what work you do, that really makes a big, big difference. as to where do you get the money from is a great question.
i don’t do financial power—that was ellen. but basically what she taught me way back—we were friends since the 90s—is that you have to learn how to budget. because i will give you an example. we used to buy a motor for $30, used to pay the guy 30 bucks. we sold it for 100 and we go, well, that’s $60 for us. and then we found out, wait a second, that didn’t take into account insurance, trucks, material, office itself. it’s just a million expenses.
and that’s where the general ledger or all the chart of accounts things are. all of that comes in. the way i explain it to people is not a replacement for doing a real budget—please, please, please listen—but in the book, i talk about the three-column budget, which is: add up all the expense that you had last year and then make every adjustment. fuel for the vehicles has gone up, or equipment’s going up for different reasons, or whatever—the insurance is going up. that’s the middle column. and what are you going to do in the middle column differently,
whether it’s buying organizational chart, the manuals, things like that, staffing programs, whatever you’re going to do to make yourself in a new place. you add those two columns up and all you do is get to break even. so the third column is what gross profit do you desire? it’s gross sales and gross profit. people were always—contractors who paid me six figures to come in and work with them—they’re always asking me, you know, you want to take a look at the financials? and i go, not really. i want to ask you two questions. what’s your gross sales and gross profit? not one or the other.
those are the only two numbers i care about. here’s why. because if they’re not on those two lines, they’re never going to show up anywhere else. gross sales and gross profit. and then, yes, you dial down to the rest of it. if you have never done a budget, these books are still really helpful to understand the concepts behind it. her name is ellen rohr. it’s r-o-h-r. ellenrohr.com. or you can go to amazon. the first book to read is where did the money go? because she too was a contractor. and at one point,
they were doing all this work and losing their shirt. and it wasn’t until they learned how to do budgeting. where did the money go? it’s really all about that. and it starts in the most plain english way you could do it. it’s got all the financial terms explained. it’s not like—remember you talked about like operating manuals? well, the same thing would be financials. it is not that way at all. it is a great primer for you, even if you’re going to work with somebody else to help you build a budget. great. accountants are not…
Ezra McCarthy
yeah.
Al Levi
generally good at this. accountants are really good at financial accounting, which is good and important for the following reasons: helps to keep you out of jail, helps you pay the taxes that you need to pay so we don’t get penalties and things of that nature. but it’s really backward-looking. real world accounting is what budgeting is—what ellen talks about and others of her disciples now. this budgeting is where—think of baking a pie. if you don’t put all the ingredients in, it’s never going to come out right on the back end.
you have to figure all of these costs and expenses and arrive at the right selling price. so when you go to do these jobs, whether it’s maintenance or service or full-out install work, that’s a big job. otherwise, you’re just going to do a lot of work for exercise and not for money.
Ezra McCarthy
so you mentioned two books. wrote that down. the one was where did the money go? was there a second? i hear you say?
Al Levi
second book to read after you read the first is how much should i charge?
Ezra
okay. same author. definitely. i’m going to check those out myself. that’s very good. now marketing. i know we touched on a little bit, but do you have any tips for someone? i guess, you know, it’s probably the same in electrical, plumbing. everyone always said it’s so competitive. so what do you tell people who say, hey, how do we stand out? the market’s saturated. i feel like there’s another plumbing company, another lawn care company on every corner. what do i do?
Al Levi
again, i’m from long island, new york, and i realized back in the dark old days of yellow pages, i had 2,000 competitors when i woke up. it’s because we served from the foot of new york city and brooklyn all the way out on long island. it’s a long service area. and the fuel oil business was considered a commodity business. my whole job was to build it into a niche. so that was branding, customer testimonials, and what we did differently. and also, again, the manuals and the training.
those all became sales advantages. in marketing, if you want to move—and i know you do, or you should do—is move from the perception in a customer’s eye that everyone cuts lawns the same way, everyone does lawn care the same way or whatever. you and i both know that’s not true. they don’t. try being them for a minute. so one of the things that i taught my customers on their website and everywhere else they can do it is “10 reasons to choose us.” so i’m going to go with what i did and what i taught a lot of guys.
after they work with me: it doesn’t matter who we send to your home, we all pretty much follow the same system. we have one-of-a-kind operating manuals that we train on every week to make sure we do it right and minimize your having a problem. and when we come back, if there is, we’re going to get it right. also, we’re not coming to your home to learn our job. we have a state-of-the-art training center where we practice everything that we need to do so that we are experts at this and we can do things that other companies can’t touch.
we also provide the industry’s best leading warranty because of all the things we do here in our own place. we know that when we get out to your home, no one’s going to be able to warranty it better because they can’t do the work the way we do. and we just roll down that list. and then, of course, backing it up with testimonials like we talked about are really the big things. marketing is a system. i already talked about the bathtub—the right amount of calls, right customer, right time. what i didn’t talk about is your ability to handle,
answer the call in real time and maximize that call. so think of a drain on your bathtub. and if your csrs stink, the drain is wide open. so you can blame your marketing company or anybody else you want, but it’s on you because you can’t answer that right. good csrs are like happy hostesses in a restaurant with their voice. don’t sound like they interrupted the day. they’re enthusiastic. they listen to the customer. they’re empathetic and they get the call booked.
and they explain how we work and who’s coming and why they should be excited about that. marketing in a system way is a plan in writing. if marketing is off the top of your head, you’re just blowing your budget. you’re wasting your money. so marketing is a plan. what is the goal of what you want to be? if you’re a million dollars a year in sales right now and you want to be two million next year, great. that is the marketing goal. now you have to reverse engineer that, which means how many techs would that mean?
how many calls will that mean? and make it very, very specific. and then drilling down into the marketing budget is the first item of the three main ones. think of marketing budget as putting fuel in your gas tank. you’re only going to get so far with only so much fuel. so rule of thumb—take it as a rule of thumb—you’re not really aggressive until you reach 10% of sales in your marketing budget. now you have to be clear what is and is not a marketing expense. and what i mean by that—great-looking trucks
that are rolling billboards with great graphic designs on them, eye-catching—is that a truck expense or a marketing expense? and it really depends on how you do it. but if it is like i think of it, a marketing expense, it will always be a marketing expense and you have to accommodate that in your marketing budget. the next thing is marketing allocation, which means there are three main drivers—three main drivers that are going to get you the growth sales and growth profit.
that does not mean it’s the only three ways you go to market, but it gets the lion’s share of your time, energy, and money. with me, here’s the third one that almost everyone misses, including me years ago. we’re busy, busy, busy. we’re not paying attention and all of a sudden the phone goes dead. and we pick up the phone literally and go, is this working? yeah, it’s too late. you actually have to populate your marketing calendar backwards through the year. so when do you need the testimonials? when do you need to have the direct mail postcards on the shelf?
when do you have the radio campaign so that it’s being driven through the year based on the marketing calendar?
Ezra McCarthy
i really like what you said about having it written down. i’ve talked to people—people we help with marketing—and i’ll talk to them at the end of the year and i’ll say, hey, you know, what did you do last year? what are you looking to do this year? and i know how many times i’ve talked to people and they said, you know, this is where we were last year. and it’s literally the same as the year before. i said, okay, what are you looking to do this year? and they say a bigger number. and i’m thinking to myself, okay, you didn’t grow last year. and then i talked to some people and they’re like, hey, we’re going to do this x amount more, basically doubling. and i’m like, okay, what are you going to do for marketing?
and they’re like, well, we’re gonna do word of mouth. and i’m like, okay, word of mouth is important, it’s good, but you can’t rely on it.
Al Levi
word of mouth is great. referrals, great. you need a system for referrals.
Ezra McCarthy
yup,
and if you don’t have it written down, allocating money and time toward it, you’re gonna be just like you said, you’re gonna be busy and then dead.
Al Levi
part of it is having a plate of spaghetti thrown against the wall and figuring out what sticks. it’s not really a great approach. and you have to be measuring this stuff or otherwise at the end. so i had customers—and the reason i was thinking about the story you brought up, talking to customers—and when i was talking about marketing, i go, so what have you done that’s really worked well? and these partners look at each other and they go, there’s a town carnival that we give out free ice cream cones and we get tons of great leads from it. i go, that’s fantastic. how’s it going now?
and they look at each other and they begin to laugh. and i go, what’s so funny? because, you know, we forgot to do it this year. and that’s because it’s not—you follow what i’m saying? if it’s not in the program, and including what trade shows would you do as an example, where your ideal customer goes to, we can’t do every show or home show. and i want to have a big impact at that booth. i want to be, you know, i want to make sure i stand out. that takes planning. i need branded items there. i need to have people that are
trained to maximize that opportunity. scripts that we follow. these are all the things you have to do if you really want to maximize these things. you just can’t fall out of bed and go, gee, you know what? let’s just send some postcards out. let’s see what happens.
Ezra McCarthy
this is so helpful and a good reminder. this kind of ties into sales and if maybe someone listening is saying, well, marketing and sales aren’t the same thing—not quite. but how would you say to reward the right people with the right things to motivate your employees? and then if you have a sales team, your sales team as well?
Al Levi
i’m
going to just back up one second. someone once asked me this question. she goes, al, what comes first? sales or marketing? and i said, without any hesitation, sales. she goes, well, if you’re not good at marketing, you know, the phone doesn’t ring. you’re going out of business. i said, if you can’t sell to one person and you don’t know how that person ticks and that target audience or multiple target audiences, you’re just going to blow money all over the place and you would be out of business anyway. they’re really two sides of a coin. they’re on opposite sides. but the better you are at sales,
the better you can be at marketing. and the better you’re at marketing, you’ll start to get better at sales as well. once you know what resonates with those customers, that’s really what the marketing approach is about and making sure that you’re hitting home to get better stuff. but moving on to sales, it’s the same thing. when i get to a customer, i have a sales system. and sales systems, in my opinion, three steps, five steps, seven steps, ten steps—any more than ten steps, the thought that they’ll all do this
the way you want is really just nonsensical. how do i come to the door? what do i talk to the customer about? what questions do i ask? because again, it’s not what i’m going to say, it’s what i’m getting them to say to me. so my questions have to be open-ended, which get them talking. how long has this been a problem? what have you tried before? you know, the same kind of tools that you do. that really starts to do sales. and then your ability to do something for them, to look at something, to measure something up, to scope it out,
identify problems—reason i’m here today. while i was here, i noticed a couple of other things about some brown spots here and there. is that something you’d want us to also look at? that really builds great sales momentum as you walk through this process. and the five steps that i use are really those steps. i started for big-ticket salespeople. once i realized it was really good, i actually just turned it over to the techs, because it’s really the same system. and then ultimately they need what i call
an evidence manual or a brag book, which basically is who says so other than you? and that’s a picture show on your tablet—here’s other customers that i’ve done this for, here’s people that have testified that what we do is different than others, or showing them the chemical. has to be a little bit of a dog and pony show to a certain extent after i have established that this is something they need or want.
Ezra McCarthy
this is so helpful. you have what you call the signature operating manual systems that help contractors kind of streamline that manual as you described. can you walk us through how you implement that and then how it helps them?
Al Levi
yeah, so it’s in a learning management system—lms for short. and basically when you purchase this program, you go through—there’s 23 video lessons where i’m taking you through the steps. because you mentioned about there’s what to put in, what to leave out, how to avoid the pitfalls like caps. do not, don’t—you’re yelling at me the whole manual. i can understand that in your writing. if you have kids and you raise kids on “no, no, no,” they stop hearing you. so it has to be used very sparingly.
there’s a lot of tips and tricks in these 23 video lessons and a sequence that’s also married to a 57-page pdf workbook that you print out, which puts you on my hip as you climb this mountain. because it isn’t just words on a page. today, it’s really words on a digital device if you work on a tablet, because on tablets, they get it delivered to them digitally. and the people in the office are working on their laptops that get that as well. then it’s again, like we said, about how to tweak it, how to get it rolled out, how to get buy-in,
how to keep it in the culture is the meetings. and that’s what’s in al’s vault—is how to run these meetings that you need: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. it looks like a lot of meetings, but not everyone attends. and it’s a very specific agenda. it isn’t like we just sit in there and wing it.
Ezra McCarthy
this is great. this has been really helpful. so for a small business owner feeling overwhelmed, where should they start? so they say, this has been great. how can i learn more about this system and kind of what you have?
Al Levi
i would say two things. you can go to the number7powercontractor.com. if you’re interested in the products, click on that page. you’ll see that there’s the signature operating manual system, the staffing program. you don’t buy the staffing program until you’ve done the manuals. there’s a lot of great information. and i know this always feels awkward to say because it’s my information, but trust me, you’re not a guinea pig on anything. i have 26 full-time years of my own company—that does not account for all the time i spent driving trucks and doing work
from 8 to 22. but then it also comes into, you know, the 25 years of being out here and writing for magazines and doing these blogs and podcasts. there’s a lot of information there as well. and that is all free to you. my book is a very thin book. i wrote it purposely called the seven power contractor. it’s 125 pages. i am not a fast reader. i’m dyslexic, just like a lot of you probably are. it’s meant to be read in two to four hours.
and then use the yellow highlighter. if you’re not a book person or an ebook person, there is an audible version as well. number seven power contractor, which you can find on amazon or it is also on the product page as well. that’s my best advice.
Ezra McCarthy
is really good. i can actually go read that myself. well, thank you. this has been super helpful. thanks for an incredible conversation, al. we sure appreciate your time. it’s valuable. if you’ve gotten resources and help from this podcast, be sure to go check out—i’ll put a link in the show notes to al’s website and be sure to check out that book the seven power contractor book. i’ll be looking at it myself and i’d encourage you to take something from this episode and start implementing it. and if you got value, be sure to share this with someone and leave a rating or review. this will help
other lawn and landscape businesses help find us and we’ll catch you on the next one.
