Episode 7

Ezra McCarthy

Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Success Blueprint. Today I have with me Martin and Sean from CutScape down in Baton Rouge. We’re going to be talking to them. So great to have you guys with us Martin and Sean.

Martin Maley

Great to be with you.

Ezra McCarthy

Doing great, Martin. Now we’ve actually known you guys for a little while here. Would you mind telling us about what CutScape is, where you guys are kind of at and where you’re looking to go and kind of just a brief synopsis?

Martin Maley

Okay. So we are CutScape LLC located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Down South in the good old America. And, so basically who we are, what we are. Lawn and landscape company trying to scale, trying to grow, into something we can be proud of. We’ve definitely come a long way from where we started.

And we want to continue the evolution and grow and improve and create something that either impacts people around us, impacts the industry around us, setting standards, just trying to evolve ourselves and evolve the company and evolve people around us and our environment.

Ezra McCarthy

So just to give people an idea about, would you be comfortable giving a ballpark of what you kind of did last year?

Martin Maley

Yeah, we’ve been, before we got with Green Frog, we were plateaued at 250,000 to 300,000 for years. I mean, we’ve been doing that for years. And so we just got to the point where our attrition rate got to the same level that our onboarding rate was. And so we just plateaued. I mean, we couldn’t onboard as many customers as we were losing, or we couldn’t onboard more customers than we were losing.

And so we realized that we needed to increase lead fluff. And so just an early plug for Green Frog Web Design.

Ezra McCarthy

Don’t worry, this isn’t a sales pitch on here, but we’ll delve into some other questions here. So, Martin, I’m just curious, what is the worst name you’ve ever seen a lawn care company named?

Martin Maley

Okay, so off the top of my head I had Cheap Cuts and then Dank Lawnz with a Z.

Ezra McCarthy

And you’ve literally seen those?

Martin Maley

Yeah, definitely seen Dank Lawnz on Instagram. I don’t know if that’s a meme page or if that’s like an actual company, but if it wasn’t an actual company before the meme page was created, some high schoolers riding around with a push mower in the back of his squatted Tahoe advertising as Dank Lawnz.

Ezra McCarthy

No comment there. If you were to get, yeah, if you could go back in time, you’ve been, how long have you been in this business? Several years, right? You had mentioned, when did you start CutScape?

Martin Maley

Too long. 2012 is when we started doing work not professionally. While we were those guys in high school riding around pulling a single axle trailer, that’s when we started was 2012 and just grew from there.

Ezra McCarthy

So you’ve been in this for right at 13 years. So if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of ridiculous business advice, what would it be?

Martin Maley

Okay, so this is fast forwarding and to like fast forwarding from the high school years to multiple employees and having competent people working for us trained up. They know what to do. The piece of advice to me at that time would be to stay home, let the crews crew, let them do their thing. They know what to do. 

And that I don’t have to be on the tools to grow that I don’t have to be outperforming work to and micromanaging things for the operation to grow or at least generate revenue.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s so good. People get caught on the mower and then they think no one can do it like I can and then they can’t grow. But I just gotta ask, Sean’s there with you today, is he one of those competent employees?

Martin Maley

Yes, he definitely is competent and he is confident in the social media stuff in emerging markets as far as like AI. And so he’s pushing me to stay excited about being up to date on social media, especially with AI, especially with all of that. And so yeah, he’s definitely competent.

Ezra McCarthy

I can’t resist that.

Martin Maley

In a skillset that I didn’t like, that I know about, I went to, I graduated college with a degree in business and marketing. Like I went to school for that, but some of those principles will always be the same no matter what the platform is, but the medium changes. And so that’s cool to see as that is, is changing.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, very good. So just curious, know, when you started, ⁓ the one question you asked me, which I thought when our podcast made me think of it is now, our prices have changed. But when you started, I gave you the layout of what we offered and you said, I don’t even think you really even asked much about the others. You just said, Hey, I want to buy the most expensive one. Now this isn’t a plug, but what I’m trying to say is your pricing psychology, the more I thought about this, and I was telling you before we started. People may not realize it, but that kind of attitude gets you a lot better service. 

And there’s a really good quote that I’ve been thinking on lately. I didn’t come up with it, but they said, do we buy like we want to be bought from? And when we go to buy a service or a product and you try to haggle, people may think, oh, I’m getting the best price. But they don’t realize is, we all have those customers that when we give them the price and they say, well, what about this? You’re not going to get the best service because that’s not how it works. But if we buy like we want to get bought from, we’re going to get the best service. So that’s something I thought of. And you just had an experience with a customer. You don’t have to say her name, but we had discussed it. Do you have any thoughts on buying like we want to be bought from?

Martin Maley

All right. Well, before we go to the negative side, I’ll follow up with what you’re talking about as far as like, why I asked for the best package or why I asked for your top service. And my thought process has always been, if we pay what people feel like they’re worth, if we pay what they say they value themselves at, they will go to work for us full speed, full throttle, full engagement.

And so I knew that we were starting with zero reviews, no website. We had been in the game for years. And we needed you to go to work for us, setting all that stuff up and helping us create what you created for us cause we were starting from scratch. And I knew that we were going to be, like we had 35,000 pictures in our camera roll that we had to sort through to get photos that were good enough for you. So I knew that we were going to be not the easiest customer to get onboarded and all that. So I wanted to make sure the value exchange from us to you was definitely there to get the best result as quickly as possible.

Ezra McCarthy

And you know, it’s so interesting. You actually referred one of your friends, Michael, and, to be honest, he was the same. Well, he didn’t take her highest package, but, um, his attitude of buying and, you know, he sent over his logo and I think he’d be fine with me saying this. Oh my, it was so terrible. It was literally like just text on an ugly color background. And at first I texted him and I was like, is this your logo?

Ezra McCarthy

Like, what? He’s like, yeah, I paid $50 to a local guy and I texted back and I said, you paid way too much. 

Martin Maley

No doubt.

Ezra McCarthy

And you know, and you know, we normally charge, we normally have, it’s a decent cost because normally there’s quite a bit of going back and forth to build one. But because, well, one, he was your friend and his buying attitude. We threw that in at no extra cost and we got him one.

And it goes back to, how are we buying from recently? I had a customer and I won’t say his name, but he came and he’s like, Hey, well, basically he was wanting a complete redesign and he had not paid for that. I said, Hey, we have unlimited edits, but you’re asking for something that’s not included in the scope of work. And he was, he, he did not have your buying attitude. 

And in all reality, we basically did the same thing for you, but I was glad to do it. And this is, I’m just saying like, how do we buy from us businesses? And this is the fact how it changes how I buy, because like, if we’re always going, trying to look for the discount, always trying to get cut down, we may think we’re getting a deal, but we may not realize. So, and I’m just curious, a customer story, do you mind sharing what recently happened with the individual?

Martin Maley

Definitely. So how deep do you want to get off into that?

Ezra McCarthy

Well, we could spend half an hour, but let’s just give an overview because I think this is really helpful and enticing.

Martin Maley

Okay, perfect. So the five minute overview is going back to, we got a quote request, I would say that was November of 24. So this lead does a quote request through the website, which she found thanks to Green Frog Web Design creating our website. And we rank very highly in our area, in our map pack. And so she did the process. She went to the website, filled out the quote request form.

And we did our process. went on site, we did a quote visit and we saw that she needed her lawn cut and she needed leaves removed and the edges cut back in. Normal stuff, upcharged things, things that we do for the initial cut because it takes longer on site. I mean, we’re talking to the lawn guys. We all know that the initial cut is going to take longer because we have to clean everything up. So we charge for that.

So we submit the quote reflecting all of that breakdown. We need to do the leaf removal. We need to cut in the bad edges. We’re just a stick edger, nothing crazy. And same thing with the edges along the concrete sidewalk driveway. And she immediately does a change order request through Jobber  and says to remove the upcharges for leaf removal and remove the bad edge cut and remove the cutting in edges of the grass. 

And so, that was the first quote request she did. And so, we told them like, look, if you decide that you want all of that, we’ll, we’ll circle back to you. We’ll get it done, but we can’t provide a service to you that is to our quality,  without doing those things. That’s not to our standard. We apologize. 

So anyways, that was, that was the first one. Then, a month ago, she does another quote request for the landscape. Same thing. We get the quote request. We do the, the, our process. We go on site, we measure everything, document and CompanyCam sends a detailed quote to her for a landscape cleanup, mulch. All of the measurements are in the quote.

So we convert the areas into cubic yards or two foot, two square foot bags. All of that stuff is in the quote. we did it at one inch depth. So that’s the lowest that will go for coverage. We also included the dump fee. In the dump fee line item, we put that it covers labor time, fuel, and the actual dump fee at the dump. 

So the husband gets on. He initiates a change order through Jobber or this time and sends a very long detailed email saying, please remove the dump fee from the quote. Open parentheses, this is a cost of doing business you should know this, closed parentheses. So that was the first thing he started off with. So I dismissed it immediately, but I read the rest of it. And then he said, do reduce the bag count from 75 to 60, open parentheses. It’s been done with less before close parentheses. And then there was a few other things. 

And so anyways, when we immediately get those, um, responses back, we identify that it’s going to be a customer that is not worth the trouble. We know that we have not been on site yet other than to do a quote request. And we’re already on the wrong foot. There’s already complaints. There’s already unrealistic things being said from them to us. 

So we can assume we’ve all been in this situation where the customer’s never going to be satisfied. They’re going to hold some small thing over our heads in order to get more work out of us to get paid. Something is going to happen. And now that’s all an assumption. It’s based on past results, you know, we’ve all been in those situations before.

Anyways. So where we went wrong was we did not respond to that email. We did not respond to the change order. We just, let we left them on red. And so that was a month ago between a month ago and one week ago, the wife messaged us through Jobber three or four times saying, Hey, checking on the updated quote. Checking on the status of the updated quote. Well, there was no updated quote. We were not going to take off an essential cost of doing business. would de-scope the project. Now we’ve definitely, if we had the mulch depth at two inches, which would be double the quantity of the mulch. If they wanted to reduce down to one inch depth, we would de-scope the project, reduce the amount of materials required. and send that updated quote. 

We de-scope projects and quotes all the time. We’ve gone this, like we’ve got to this point on other quotes where the only change order is, we’ll just take off this one bad or just take off this one little thing. So it’s less work and then we’re good to go to get it in their budget. That’s perfect. Awesome. Same profit margin. It’s less work for less revenue, less time on site for less revenue. 

And so we do that all the time. We didn’t for them and we didn’t where again where we messed up was we didn’t communicate back to them. So now going forward, we have the policy set that if a customer is being unreasonable in the quoting stage that we will. If they do not want to work with us as far as just go with the V scope, then we tell them we appreciate the opportunity to quote their project. 

We are not the contractor for them and send them to a friend-petitor and tell them, look, everybody’s got their person in their town that they would love to send difficult clients to. That’s what we’re gonna do. So the biggest take..

Ezra McCarthy

We won’t ask you the name.

Martin Maley

Yeah, you know, we’ll keep that on the low. 

So the biggest takeaway there is, acknowledge the customer or the lead. Ignoring crazy away will not get crazy to go away. We’ve all been there. We have to acknowledge it. We have to give them somewhere else to go to and thank you for them. Thank them for their time because, yeah. So we didn’t do that. In result, fast forward all the way to the end of the story is she sends an email last Thursday, completely unhinged email at 10 a.m. last Thursday. And that was our last opportunity to respond. We didn’t.

So at 2 p.m. that afternoon, she does a one star Google review. Our first ever review other than a five star review and completely unhinged. So luckily as soon as it came through a screenshot, it sent it to Ezra, said first one star review. How do we proceed? And then you took over from there.

Ezra McCarthy

And it’s so good. A couple of things I want to notice is one thing I want to highlight is the different buying patterns. If this lady unnamed would have been an easy to work with customer and would have said, “Hey, our budgets load too much”, I’m sure you would have worked with her. If you had worked with her for a year, they’ve been a great customer. And they said, “Hey, can we work with you here?”, I’m sure you probably would have done it even if you wouldn’t have made as much. But the difference is she comes in, obviously a Karen coming in.

And when you showed me that email and when I read it, I was just like, what? Where they said, this is a cost of doing business. Now we had a discussion and I disagree slightly with how you categorize it. Not that I disagree with including that in your cost of goods. I would recommend, which we mentioned, but I’m just saying for the audience, I would recommend including that in your cost because obviously that’s part of your cost of goods sold, your COG, but obviously.

I, what I’ve seen is when you break it out and itemize it to the customer, they’re less likely to take it. Even if it’s the same amount, for an example I’ve given, I worked for an old farmer. I think I told you. And in college, I did a project for him and this was an older gentleman and I gave him a, and this was long time ago at $13 an hour. And he about choked. He’s like, what $13 an hour? And now that’s not very much, but to him it was. Well, I did another project for him and I told him $90. It took me three hours. You do the math. made over $30 an hour and he was fine with it.

So some of it’s a psychology thing, but what I really like to mention is going forward, acknowledging it and referring away because one of the main complaints I see as I look, I look at one of the main things I do when I work with a business is I look at their website, look at their Google business profile. One of the main reasons I see for low or one star reviews is a lack of communication. 

So even if, as soon as you get those first emails or maybe you talk to someone and they’re like, “Hey, my, my yard’s an acre. Can you do it for under 50 bucks?” And you realize, Whoa, okay. This one goes to that unnamed company that is right beside us. Communicating back to them and just letting you know, you know, we may not be the best fit for you, definitely helps. I remember one time this lady called about a project and I didn’t do that service.

I said, “Hey, I’m sorry, I don’t do that service”. And I was just friendly with her and she was so tickled pink that I had just taken the call and been friendly that she left. I didn’t ask her to, but she left me a review. She was like, wow, I just called this person, this business. They were super kind to talk to. They don’t do that service. So like just that friendly approach, you never know how it can help you. 

Moving into another lane here, Technology. Martin, what have you seen for technology? How has this changed how you have operated over the past few years? Obviously you’ve been in business. What have you put in place over the past couple of years and then how has it helped your business?

Martin Maley

Okay, so as far as technology in general goes. It has, so we put down for, I don’t want to get technology and software confused unless you’re down to combine them together.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s what I’m meaning.

Martin Maley

Okay. So technology from, you want to go with how, what we’re using to start and then where we’re at now, or how do you want to break it down?

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah. You throw out a couple names. I’ve actually personally never used CompanyCam. I’ve heard a couple things. I know you use Jobber, I’m a fan of that. When did you put these things in place? How did it affect your business? And has it been a benefit?

Martin Maley

Okay, so as far as as far as CompanyCam goes we read or the transition first we started with Jobber. So first we were tracking everything through spreadsheets, just like most guys I feel like most of us can relate, the pen and paper than the spreadsheet. Then we got, we went into the CRM. We used Jobber for years and so that was a major step for us as far as..

Ezra McCarthy

When did you start with Jobber?

Martin Maley

That’s a good question. I would say, I’m assuming three years ago, maybe four, for sure three.

Ezra McCarthy

So you were using spreadsheets and you were already doing up to 250 and you were doing all of that on spreadsheets?

Martin Maley

Yep. So..

Ezra McCarthy

How many jobs did you miss because of mistakes?

Martin Maley

How many upcharges did we miss? How many additional services did we miss? How many times did I forget to make sure that something that happened on the first of the month got transcribed and passed all the way down, on the 31st of the month, or maybe the 15th when I finally got around invoicing. No telling how many thousands and thousands of dollars was not billed because of just it didn’t get recorded. It didn’t get transferred from a mental thought to or a pen and paper thought to the final invoice. 

So yeah, that’s the big like what our big jump for us was switching from spreadsheets to the, to a CRM. And that was actually one of my notes. Somewhere down in the questions, I put one of the things like to me would be, if I was talking to previous me, like go back into the future and tell myself, give myself some advice. It would be “your spreadsheets aren’t that cool and they’re not as efficient as you think they are”. You know, they’re dialed and we get it. Like you’re good at spreadsheet, but yeah, it could be like you’re leaving a lot on the table. And so definitely. So technology, far as Jobber goes, that’s been awesome.

And then as we’ve evolved and more people are involved in the organization, especially from the admin perspective and the quoting and foreman perspective, communicating with CompanyCam and Jobber has been awesome. Our workflows seamlessly transition back and forth between Jobber and CompanyCam on the design build side.

That way everything is documented. It’s all tied together. It’s an integration. They’re both connected. And so CompanyCam is legit. And we, it makes it very easy to communicate to customers visually. We can, all those pictures that we take on the site assessment get plugged into the quote. Jobber just updated their, their profile. I mean, the way that the quote like out. what’s it called? Like the format. 

So now in the Jobber PDF, when they print it, they can see the pictures we attached to it. And then the final step is on the social media and the website side, we are just trained to have before and after pictures. We do them, it automatically creates before and after pictures with CompanyCam. And so it just makes all of the content capture streamlined and standardized. So we have definitely loved all of that.

Ezra McCarthy

So just curious, you mentioned with your team, do you just communicate through text? Do you use like Slack or some sort of software there?

Martin Maley

To as far as like?

Ezra McCarthy

Job updates or like team-wide communications?

Martin Maley

Okay. So most of that is just group text because we don’t have enough, we don’t have any team members to need that level of separation. And honestly, I just don’t have any experience with Slack. That might be one thing that we’re missing and one thing we implement soon. But right now, it’s group text. So when the foreman or the crews see something in the field, they have a group text for that crew. And so if they identify an upsell, in the field, they take a picture of it, tell us the customer, and they send it back to admin, and then we take over from there trying to upsell that as a service.

Ezra McCarthy

Have you trained your team members to do that, to have the initiative? Because literally what they’re doing is by doing that, they’re giving themselves kind of more work. So like, how have you shown them like, this is a way to help the business to help you?

Martin Maley

So we don’t have an incentive structure for them yet. So that’s the biggest piece that we’re missing is an incentive for identifying that work and sending it to us so that we can sell it. So other than they’re motivated to work, they want more hours. And so they know if they look for more work, they have more hours, more jobs to work on.

Ezra McCarthy

So Martin, have you found that your these software and tools that you’re implementing, you find your customers like them? Do you find that like they see, while you’re different than other companies or do you think it’s kind of just expected in our day?

Martin Maley

So I’ll answer the first question. As far as like feedback that we’ve got from customers, we actually just had a new customer we onboarded about a month ago. And so our process, it’s short answer and it’s good. Like good feedback specific to the notifications, specific to communication. And so, our process is set up to where as soon as we get the quote request, obviously they get the automated reply notifying that we got the request and then we make contact with them as soon as possible. And so that’s human to human interaction. And then after that, it’s a lot of messaging back and forth. Once we have. If we have any questions, we’ll message them directly through Jobber.

That way everybody is read in at the same time. So if there’s any version of like Slack that we use, it would be the Jobber messaging because everyone is read in at the same time when we get messages and we’re not a big enough company yet to where that’s overwhelming or annoying. We’re going to get there at some point. And so, that is like, that’s communicating back and forth, is good that way. 

And so specific to the feedback Ms. Kay was giving us was the whole time we did the job, we met with her in person and then she went on a ski trip. So she was in Colorado when she got the quote from us to her for her spring landscape cleanup. And so in the quote, she was able to see the pictures. She was able to see the work areas that we were talking about. And she was able to see the line items, read everything in the scope of work and approve the quote from Colorado, she was able to pay the deposit and the way our quote template is set up in Jobber to approve a quote, you have to pay the 50 % deposit. 

She approves it, pays the deposit, one clicks like checking out an Amazon cart, one click buy, good to go. And then when she approves it, we message her once we get it on the schedule and it’s on the schedule. She gets a notification same day and then a status update once we’re done.

And then once we’re done, send the before and after pictures from CompanyCam and send the invoice. So her assessment of all of that was that she loved the communication. She loved the status updates. She loved that she was read in on the whole process while she’s out of state. She knows that we’re handling it and we’re not just saying we’re doing things. We’re showing those before and after pictures. We are.

And some of that is manual work that we’re doing as far as like we’re initiating some communication and some of it is just leveraging Jobber automations. So in summary, it’s been awesome as far as communicating with customers. That’s one of our core values is to set the standard for communication and customer service in the service industry.

And we can’t do that if we’re not, everybody puts on their resume. Yeah, I’m a good communicator, but what are you doing to communicate better? You know, and what, do you communicate?

Ezra McCarthy

That’s so good. You know, can you do all this stuff manually without a CRM? And you know, in my opinion, I do recommend Jobber, but there’s a lot of other ones. You know, you could go service autopilot, you go LMN, you could go copilot. Like you could do a lot of these things, but you need something because just as mentioned, people more and more are going to expect convenience. Like if someone came to service me and they don’t take card or they don’t take online payment, like I don’t want to write a check. 

Actually, the only place I write checks is actually at my church because they don’t have that, but, literally.

Martin Maley

That’s alright.

Ezra McCarthy

And half the time, I don’t even take my wallet with me. I’m like, I wonder where I left it cause I just use my phone. And it’s just so much more convenient and more and more. It’s going to be easier. And yes, there is a, and in my business now there’s a three to 4 % credit card fee. Yes. But for the convenience for you and your time.

You even think about your man hour rate, you should be doing anywhere from, hopefully it’s, well, and it’s something that maybe you can work on, but you know, 80 to $100 per man hour. You just think about the time you’re wasting charging, invoicing customers. If you could just streamline that and take that time, that three to 4 % it’s just going to be well, well paid for. So curious Martin, what do you find keeps customers coming back? Do you have strategies that you try to keep them around to reduce churn?

Martin Maley

To reduce churn. So in general, we try to reduce churn by performing the work that we said we were going to perform. Doing, not exceeding expectations, not trying to wow a customer, not trying to be 200% one week and then 50% the next week. Just be consistent, do what we say we’re gonna do. 

And when we say we’re going to show up, we show up. Just really just executing, you know, performing. We talk, we have it in the questions a little bit later, but if we make a mistake, we own it and we address it and we do our best to make it right in order to preserve the long lasting relationship.

Instead, even if it’s a loss upfront, even if whatever we need to replace is more expensive than a month’s worth of cuts at that account. I mean, it’s still, we look at holistic, the long-term value, the long-term customer value. And so I actually don’t know what our churn rate is. I would hope it is below industry standard because we’ve got a lot of legacy customers that, when I started out cutting, was maintaining their properties and now I haven’t been to those property, been on site performing work in years. So, yeah I would hope, I don’t know, but I would hope our churn rate is low. Lower than industry standard. We can talk about that on the next podcast.

Ezra McCarthy

So what do you find that follow-up plays in not only getting customers but keeping customers?

Martin Maley

Follow up as far as when they communicate to us or

Ezra McCarthy

Customer communication in general, I know that that’s something that you try to do a good job of, and sounds like you do.

Martin Maley

Yeah, now that we have somebody answering the phone, handling customer communication, and they’re getting responded to in real time, even if Miss Angela doesn’t have the perfect response or the perfect answer, any communication is better than none. Even if it’s just to say, I hear you, I’ve got it, I made a note of it, as soon as Martin’s back in the office, I’ll get an answer for you, and then we actually follow up on that.

I mean, it has improved all of that drastically. And then as far as invoicing, like the same time every month, it’s the end of the month, every month, it’s like clockwork when before when it was me doing it, I mean, it could be the end of the month or it could be halfway through next month, or we might let them stack up for two months and then send two months at one time. so, yeah, so that inconsistency was very unprofessional, but

Ezra McCarthy

Your cash flow.

Martin Maley

Yeah. We’ve all been there. Well, and as far as the cashflow perspective, our company has always been divided almost in half between design, build and maintenance. And so we were, we would cashflow with the design build side, any like any lag we had in payment on the lawn maintenance side. And so we have that constant cashflow coming in on design, build, and the law maintenance is just turning out recurring work.

So it was a priority until it was, and then we would send all the invoices and because of the Jobber instant payment, we’re getting paid instantly. So anyways, all of that, it’s definitely a lot better now. The biggest thing is more consistent. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be consistent.

Ezra McCarthy

Or in a lighthearted note, Martin, have you ever had a customer ask you for something so dumb or so silly that you thought they were joking? 

Martin Maley

Yeah, so we’re gonna keep it clean, PC. We’re gonna keep it PG. Yeah, so last week, maybe two weeks ago, picked up a new customer, new contract and residential. And she has a dog that has a doggy door for the backyard. And so she wanted Seth and the crew, the foreman that’s managing that account to meet the dog before they cut the backyard. That way. I don’t remember what the dog’s name is. We should have something like that in our CRM, but I’ll make sure that gets done today. 

We’ll call him Odie. It’s so she wanted Seth and the crew to meet Odie for the first cut, that way that Odie knew it was okay for him to come out and interact with the crew when the crew was there or that he was okay for him to not come outside that it was just Seth and the boys doing their thing.

So she didn’t want him to get stressed. I should have saved the text. The text was pretty hilarious because she was like she was serious about it and she was like no we had to do this before the first cut. I’m good with waiting two weeks for the initial cut just so Odie can meet Seth and the crew.

Ezra McCarthy

One way to get that customer’s heart, bring dog treats and pet the dog for real. And she’d be a customer for life.

Martin Maley

No doubt. We’ve like, speaking of the dog stuff, we’ve gotten customers before from crews not picking up dog toys and just like mulching over them and stuff like that. Like truth be told, we just lost an account last week because they constantly had baseballs and stuff like that in the yard.

And a lot of torpedo grass in the South where we’re from and the grass would grow so thick that even when we did our rounds and picked them up every once in a while, we would miss a baseball or tennis ball. And so they fired us because they came out of the blue. They were like, look, we’re tired of it. This is it. Y’all mulched enough of our balls. So, you know, if we were now, again, we put another policy and procedure last week. That way, if the crew does something like that. If they hit one, if they hit something, notify us. We would rather it come from them and we’re going to replace it. We’re going to get them a bag of balls, tennis balls, baseball, whatever. Just as a gesture to them saying, look, we apologize. We broke your balls. So we have a new ball bag for you. Here you go. So.

Ezra McCarthy

And also educating the customer will come into that if they consistently left five or 10 tennis balls out there, then you can say like, Hey, the first time maybe get them that and then say, you know, we’re doing our best here. We’re trying to catch it. There is this tall grass, you know, we were trying to do our best, but would you please make sure that on this day of the week or however you structure it, that those are removed because even letting them know like, Hey, we’re doing our best. We’re trying to pick it up, but it’s difficult.

Obviously it sounds like this customer is already out the door, obviously I’m sure all these are good ways to learn and serve better.

Martin Maley

I love that. And you bring up a good point with that. Like us giving them like we’re reading them in on a problem that we identified. We are giving like replacing the damage we did and we’re going to follow up with an ask to them, just like you said. And Michael, who we were talking about earlier, since you might would go, he has in his Jobber notification that goes out every morning when a customer is on the schedule. 

Please pick up any toys, stuff like that you have in the yard will be on site today. And so I’ve yet to put that into our text prompt, but we’re going to do the same thing because it’s just an easy reminder to customer. yeah. You know, let me go pick up, let me go do the rounds.

Ezra McCarthy

It can kill your man hour rate if at five out 10 or 20 properties you’re having to spend five, 10 minutes. I mean, that could be two or three more properties. And if you explain to the customer like, hey, you know, this kind of, or it depends on your relationship, but yeah, keeping it clear to the customer. So what have you found is the best strategy to upsell to customers without them feeling like you’re trying to be pushy?

Martin Maley

So as far as the Jobber message goes, this is our first diving into retargeting, not retargeting, but upselling. So like I was saying earlier, Jobber message goes out. If a customer is on schedule, so Martin’s account is on schedule for today. They get, I would get a notification to my phone from Jobber at 8 a.m. saying, hey Martin, just a heads up, CutScape has you on schedule for today.

And then we added for this year, we added in that message, it says, reply yes to initiate a quote request for spring landscape cleanup, whatever service we want to highlight. We have that prompt in there. So the customer will message back. Yes. And then we, that initiates us to do the follow-up process and initiate a quote request.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s really interesting. How much response have you seen to that? And what made you think of that? I’ve never heard of that.

Martin Maley

Okay, so while you and I have been talking about trying to retarget or upsell to existing customers using MailChimp. And so what I was trying to do is utilize the process that we already had in place. It’s automatic, it’s going to all of our customers already. 

And so just basically, I don’t know what the initial thought was, but I knew that the mission was we want to try to upsell these customers and I don’t want to have to send text to all these customers and we don’t have MailChimp. So what do we have available to us and how can we use it? And yeah, dude, it’s been awesome. I actually just had feedback from a customer last week that it was a spring landscape cleanup that we sold because of that Jobber message.

He responded yes and Miss Angela messaged him, told him to schedule a phone call with him. Let’s talk about scope of work, timeline, budget, all that. so we sold the job just because of that. And that way we don’t have to go out and look for work. We always want to have the crews looking for upsells and things, but it’s just on autopilot. It’s just another thing on autopilot working for us.

Ezra McCarthy

So just curious specifics, you mentioned that one. Have you seen others in your customer base respond to that as well?

Martin Maley

Yep. Yep. We’ve as I mean, literally the, so I initiated that two, three, four months ago and the night. So I did it on, I made the text from prompt Sunday that Monday we got, we sold a job. That that Monday, the next day cause there’s a customer that wanted some work and it’s like, here’s an easy way for me to initiate, you know. How do I get them how do I get on their schedule? How? Because that’s a common question. How do I get y’all to do this? Boom, we lay it out. Reply, yes, that’s all I have to do.

Ezra McCarthy

It’s so good because two comments here, one, text messages are open so quickly. Now the way you’re doing it is you’re not annoying them. Like they want to know that you’re coming today. So that’s not annoying. And you’re just adding to that. I’m sure obviously you’re going to change it to the seasonal. And then two, you don’t have, obviously we want to get new customers. We want new people coming in, but your CAC or customer acquisition cost, or what I’ve seen in our industry, even for the service, you’re looking at a mint like 40 to a hundred dollars plus for your CAC is what I’m seeing. 

So literally you’re saving that on your CAC, customer acquisition cost, your sales process is going to be a lot easier and you’re serving your customers ‘cause some of these people, I’m sure there are, or you will, no doubt, maybe your team members didn’t even know they wanted that service. And so this is super helpful. If anyone’s using that, whatever software you’re using, if you can get those text reminders and add that, and especially like I know last year you started getting into Christmas lights, talking about higher margin service.

Obviously you’ve got labor, but that is such a good service. How have you kind of introduced those higher margin services into your business to help, especially in the off seasons?

Martin Maley

Okay. So social media and website are the biggest things we, we’re not communicating to our customer,  like our current customer base, anything other than the automated notification. So all of the  awareness that we’re bringing to new services is social media driving leads to the website,  driving awareness.

Ezra McCarthy

What product offering have you found has the best profit margins?

Martin Maley

I don’t know. We were talking about that before the episode. We’ll have to talk about for the next podcast, customer acquisition cost, profitable. Like what’s the most profitable, because I can assume, but I don’t want to assume out loud for the whole world to hear. And then what was the other thing we were just talking about? I don’t know. Something else. Customer acquisition cost, most profitable services. And then I’ll think of the other thing. Talk some hard numbers.

Ezra McCarthy

Sure.

Martin Maley

some data points.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s good. So real quick, our last question here, and then we’ll close it out. If you had to swap jobs with someone, and the listener may not know, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to say your dad being a lawyer. But if you’re going to swap jobs with someone outside of the lawn care industry, which job would you pick?

Martin Maley

So, my immediate like as soon as I read this question, my immediate response was what was it? Yeah, prompt engineer for ChatGPT for any large language model, anything like that, like get inside of the inner workings of the algorithm and just understand.

Ezra McCarthy

You know, that’s like, sounds like one of those jobs where you’re like a mattress tester.

Martin Maley

Yeah, well that, I don’t know. I don’t know how that could. In my mind, it’s like upload me into what’s the blue pill red pill movie? Oh goodness, everybody’s gonna be so mad that I forgot. Anyways, the word they’re like uploaded into the thing.

Ezra McCarthy

That was profound, Martin. That was profound.

Martin Maley

The matrix. Thank you, Sean, the matrix. Everybody is gonna be very mad that I didn’t know the matrix. Anyways, so my idea is, is not upload me into the matrix, but just be a prompt engineer, see how they’re thinking about it, see what they’re working on as far as what they see coming in the future and how to improve their processes. 

And yeah, so, cause that’s the future, but human interaction is gonna be key. As AI gets better, as technology gets better, the sale, the closing of the selling contracts, the closing deals, the making the sale, in my opinion, will come down to the human on human interaction to close the deal. We can use software to make it all more efficient, to get more hot leads, to weed out more people that aren’t in our customer base or our avatar. But we have to get on the phone, get on a FaceTime, get in person, make the sale person to person, human to human.

Ezra McCarthy

Relationships are so important and it will only get more. So I use AI. I use it every day, not everything, but it’s very useful. But there’s so many times you start to get a feel for it and it reuses the same words. And I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten an email or you read it and it just like, okay, just, this is not real. And I’m not saying don’t use it and check your grammar, etcetera. Use it, but there’s something to be said for a real relationship because people buy from people. They don’t buy from companies or they do and a brand, but relationships are so important. Well, oops, sorry, one last thought.

Martin Maley

I do have a tangible. No, you’re going to have a tangible major win from us. I feel like might be a good value exchange as far as ChatGPT. For the past, I mean, I’ve been hearing about it for years that we need to have our policies and procedures are manual, like start working on that now instead of waiting until it’s down the road and we have to re-culture, reprogram. All right. So we’ve been, we call it the pink sheet. CutScape has the pink sheet manual.

And that’s all of our policies, procedures, all of that. And so we’ve been working on that for the past year and a half. We uploaded that into a project and ChatGPT that project is the pink sheet project. And so that document is uploaded to that project and ChatGPT. And now we can go into the pink sheet folder and ask it, part of the pink sheet. How should I respond to this customer? We can screenshot a text and email that a customer sent to us and upload that into the chat GPT folder and it will give us the response not based on anybody else other than our either past responses, our policies, our procedures. So that has been the last two weeks we’ve really discovered how powerful that is and it is pretty legit.

Ezra McCarthy

That’s a good point. You know, maybe there’s sometimes I get my grammar wrong, but like, if you are, know, you’re really bad with grammar, put it in there and just say, fix my grammar only. Like it’s simple, useful, like, and now you’re going to see one of my errors sometime and say, Oh, why didn’t you do it? It’ll happen, but I do my best. There’s just, there’s so many tools.

Martin Maley

Yeah. And it takes the, somebody comes at us upset because we did something upset, something happened. It takes the emotion out of it and it just boils it down to address the problem, agree. We’re looking for a solution. We’re motivated to make it right. And it just, it takes the emotion out of it. And then if we need to touch it up, it can, but I mean, it’s just powerful. It’s awesome.

Ezra McCarthy

Oh, good Martin. Just closing out, if someone wanted to reach out to you, where’s the best place they could find you?

Martin Maley

cutscape225.com if you want to request a quote, but if you’re not in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, then you can follow us on social media.

So Sean said that our Instagram is CutScape LLC, and that’s singular scape, not scapes. And then CutScape LLC on Facebook.

Ezra McCarthy

Sounds great, Martin. This was great fun. Thank you for being here, Mark and Sean, and we’ll talk to you on the next one.

Martin Maley

Sounds good, thank you.