Counting the Calls Your Landscaping Business Never Got

I once spent forty minutes on the phone teaching a landscaper how to ask his customers for Google reviews.

He heard the whole thing out, politely, without interrupting me once. Then he mentioned he had four hundred and eleven of them, and asked whether I wanted the number of the fellow who does his gutters.

I had counted his entire trade the month before that call and I still opened my mouth first.

94.8% of the landscaping businesses I checked hold at least one Google review, 13 of 47, and nothing else this trade does lands it any higher.

2,609 landscaping businesses went into that sample across 24 markets, and 1,887 turned out to have a website I could open and put through the checks.

The hard part is behind you

Asking is the worst job in small business. I run a company that has to ask people for money, so I’m not sneering at you from a comfortable distance here.

You’ve just finished. The customer is pleased, or at least she isn’t unhappy, and you’re standing on her drive with a rake in your hand and dirt on your knees. Now go and ask her for a favor.

When did you last do it? And how many jobs went by last week where you meant to and the moment slid past you?

The average landscaping business I opened holds 50 reviews sitting at 4.6 stars. Every one of them began with a tired person deciding to say something awkward out loud in a driveway.

Nobody can buy what you’ve built there. Not with a rebuild, not with an ad budget, not from me.

Which is why the quiet phone bothers me so much when it turns up on a call.

Thursday, six in the evening

She’s standing in her driveway looking at the strip along the fence that has been bothering her since April.

She types lawn care and her town into her phone, and your listing comes up with the stars sitting right underneath the name. She reads four reviews. The one she believes is the one about a retaining wall on the corner of her own street, because she walks past that wall with the dog.

Lawn care, by the way. Not grounds maintenance, which a landscaper drove forty minutes across town to argue with me about.

She’s sold. Before she has met you, before she knows your rates, before she has any idea whether you’re pleasant to deal with, she has decided you’re the one she’s calling.

Then she taps through to your website, and everything you did in every driveway for eleven years comes down to what happens in the next ninety seconds.

Assuming the tap lands anywhere useful. I once spent half an hour telling a client his listing pointed at a page that no longer loaded, and he took it better than I deserved.

What she wants there

She doesn’t want to talk to you yet.

She wants to leave her name somewhere you’ll find it, put the phone face down, get back to the pasta, and hear from you tomorrow when she isn’t holding a colander.

A contact form does that one job and nothing else at all. Her name, her street, one line about the back fence, and a button that sends it while the pasta water is still going, with no decision required about whether you’re the sort of company that minds being bothered at dinner.

What does your own homepage hand her at that moment? A telephone number and nothing else, is my guess, because that’s what I meet on most of the ones I open.

29.6% of landscaping homepages carry one, 23 of 47 and a shade above the 28% I find on small business homepages generally, so nobody can call your trade lazy about it. Most of you are still asking a stranger to dial, though.

And some of them do dial. At six in the evening you’re on a mower with the phone in the truck, so she gets the voicemail, and she leaves a message the first time.

She doesn’t leave one the second time.

Now count her

That’s one customer. One driveway, one hedge, one account that would have renewed every spring for as long as you both kept at it.

Lose one of those a week between April and September and you have lost more work than any rebuild I could sell you would have brought in, and you will never once know it happened.

There’s no ledger anywhere in your business for the woman who came, looked and left. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t leave a bad review, because you never did anything to her. She hires the outfit whose website let her type.

The losses you know about announce themselves, which is why you can tell me to the dollar what a broken mower deck cost you last season and nothing whatsoever about what your homepage costs you.

How many did you lose last month? You can’t answer that and neither can I, and the not knowing is the expensive part of it.

The owners I meet handle this by assuming the reviews are doing the work, since the reviews are the part they can see. Then July arrives softer than it should be and everybody blames the weather, or the economy, or the outfit undercutting everyone with the yellow trailer.

Go and check my number

You don’t have to take any of that from me. My report ends in a tool with two dropdowns on it, and setting the trade one to Landscapers while leaving the city dropdown alone lays out each check with the count of sites underneath it, reviews included. Pull it up while you have five minutes, then open your own homepage on the same phone, which is the harder of the two jobs and the only one of them that changes anything.

Look at it the way she does. Thumb only, standing up, mildly impatient, already sold.

Good design, for a woman standing like that, mostly means getting out of her way.

Can she reach you without leaving that page? That’s the entire test, and it takes about nine seconds to fail.

A website can pass every box I tick and still lose her there. I signed one off on that sort of pass once, and the owner lost a season to it.

The promise, and it’s a small one

Most of the landscaping websites I build aren’t rescues. They’re a good business with a listing that took a decade of asking, pointing at a page that was never asked to do anything.

So which would you rather spend a week on, the habit that took you eleven years to build or the form that takes an afternoon?

Put a form on the first screen of your homepage this week. I’ll promise you one thing and nothing bigger than it.

The next woman who reads your reviews at eight at night will be able to leave you her street and the words back fence without deciding whether you mind being called after dinner. She types eleven words instead of closing the tab, and tomorrow morning you have a name.

Send me the address if you want me to look first, and I’ll tell you exactly what she meets and how long it takes her to meet it.

You already did the part I can’t do for you. She was always coming. All you have to be is reachable when she gets there.