Graham McGregor: The lawnmower marketing lesson

There is always a way to get better results with less effort - if you look for it. Photo / Getty Images

I was mowing my lawn this week and it reminded me of a great marketing lesson I learned about a year ago.

I was doing some research on service franchises to see if I could help these businesses improve what they were doing.

And as part of my research I spent a day mowing lawns with a person who owned a very successful lawn mowing franchise.

Now I like to mow my own lawn rather than hire someone to mow it for me. (It gives me time to think and I always enjoy the look of a well mowed lawn.)

I've been mowing my own lawn for close to 40 years so I thought I knew everything there was to know. Boy was I wrong!

I started my day at 8am with my lawn mowing person and quickly learned that you mow forwards with your lawnmower most of the time and you very rarely pull your lawn mower backwards.

And everything you do is designed to make you efficient (so you can mow as many lawns as possible) and effective (so all your lawns look great for your customers.)

I finished my training day at 4pm and in that time I mowed 16 lawns. (Something I would have thought impossible to do before this day.)

I was amazed at how much I had learned so when I got home I mowed my own lawn as well. I did this in half the normal time and it looked great.

So I ended up mowing 17 lawns for the day. My big lesson from my lawn mowing experience is I thought I knew it all.

However I was reminded that no matter how much you know there is always a way to do things better and get better results.

It's exactly the same in marketing. You might think you know a lot of things. (And you probably do.)

However there is always a way to get better results with less effort if you look for it.

Here are two examples:

Example 1: I was consulting with a business coach recently who does a lot of work with tradespeople.

He told me that one thing that many tradespeople don't enjoy doing is quoting on potential new work.

So he shows his tradie clients how to get paid $300 to $600 for every single quote they give whether or not they actually get their quotes accepted.

His system takes around 3 hours to learn and is amazingly effective when put into action. Best of all it helps the tradies that use his paid quoting system to attract better quality clients who appreciate the value of an excellent tradesperson doing their work.

This is definitely a 'better way with less effort' for tradespeople to do quotes.

Example 2: I was consulting with a business consultant who is an email efficiency expert. He's been in his field for 11 years and has worked out that for most organisations it costs each staff member between $20,000 and $50,000 to handle their emails each year.

He trains people how to be a lot more effective and efficient with how they use email. The average clients he works with will free up between 5 and 10 hours of productive time every week for each person he trains.

And for many of these clients he will show them how to take 25% of the time they save and use it for revenue enhancement for their organisation.

The end result is that this will generate at least $50,000 in new revenues per person for many of the organisations he works with.

This is definitely a better way with less effort to use email.

Remember that if you look for a way to do your marketing that produces better results with less effort you will usually find it.

"When you get older, you learn certain life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, 'Hey, I've got a new lease on this thing. So let's go.'" - Robert Redford

Action Step:

What can you do this week to get better marketing results with less effort?

Graham McGregor is a Marketing Advisor and helps businesses who offer an expensive service to quickly attract ideal new clients. You can download his brand new 106 page marketing guide ‘The Expensive Service Marketing Solution’ at no charge.