Carter Romero
Appearances
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Right. Yeah. That's kind of a question about market share, right? Like that we've had is do we want to grow three locations to 10 million or is it easier to grow 10 locations to 3 million? In our experience, the climb to 3 million was a lot easier than the climb from 3 million to 6 million. And that's a lot of... a result of partnerships that we have.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Like we'll work with different home builders or design companies or, you know, whatever it may be. And we think that we can establish that group relatively quickly to get to 3 million per location rather than trying to build this out. Because we've talked about it for sure. Like, do we try to build us into the 30 million goal? It's possible, but it's going to be super challenging.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So that's kind of the logic there. We are open-minded though to deviating from that. You know, we're brand new in San Antonio. We're starting Dallas here pretty soon. And so as we take root in those areas, we're just going to... So what do you view as the negatives of doing this strategy of going to 10 locations? Definitely the hiring and training is going to be a super tricky one.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
I think establishing a reputation is easier said than done. A lot of these partners are nationwide, and so we are...
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
banking on that a lot for this strategy so hopefully our reputation kind of progresses with us in these locations and these relationships do stand but definitely something that's going to be tricky yeah it seems like your your customer is like a one-time customer most of the time yeah yeah we have i think we calculated roughly maybe about five to ten percent of the clients come back for phase twos but since we are a full design and build
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
It's word of mouth right now. Yes, we're going to launch a marketing team. But we've started it. They're just kind of compiling data on what the best marketing sources are going to be. But we're actually going to allocate a budget starting January. And what percentage are residential versus commercial projects?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Maybe 10% or 15%. So not huge. No, not huge. We try to diversify. We don't want anyone taking a big chunk of that.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
And then referrals, what percentage is coming from referrals? Probably 40%, maybe not necessarily from referrals. I would say the 40% is just our online presence in general, people going to the websites, people telling their friends, our Google reviews, whatever it is.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Josh and I are originally just friends from middle school, and yeah, it's been a wild ride since then. We connected just through sports and our love for entrepreneurship. We were super good friends in high school, played sports together there, started a mowing company at that point.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Oh, for sure. And me and John like to have those conversations too. Like, oh yeah, we're flying out here for a podcast. This is awesome. Or like whatever conversations we have that have to do with entrepreneurial benchmarks. And I think this is one of those maybe like, oh yeah, we have a huge team. We've hired so many people this year. This is awesome.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
And it's more of just like scratching this itch as entrepreneurs that we've always had. But I think we could definitely hone that in and check that box while also doing super meaningful targets. Like if we switch it to revenue instead of a number of locations, I think that would do the same thing. Right, right.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
We went to college, so I went to UChicago, Josh went to A&M, and then COVID hit, and that brought us back home. So we were basically just sitting at home like, okay, we've got... you know, 24 hours a day of time. And we've got five hours of zoom calls going on a day. We can put it on two X speed and, uh, basically just have the whole day of opportunity.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So at that point, I'm just looking into, uh, I'm just cleaning out a closet at that point. And I come across a bunch of checks from our old mowing clients and I just call them down the list. And I'm like, Oh, Hey man, remember us? We, we did your line when we were in high school. And, uh, You know, I called 22 of them. One of them calls us back and says, yeah, man, I've got a pathway for you.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
in landscaping it's like these guys specialize in doing x right yeah and that's something that i think we've had a bit of a challenge uh discovering about ourselves because as we uh start projects one thing leads to another and eventually someone's asking if we can build their house it's like we gotta draw the line somewhere yeah and i think where that line is is outdoor living spaces so we want to be a one-stop shop because there are a lot of people that pay for convenience in this world uh
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
You know, you want to be able to go to a restaurant and order your whole plate from one restaurant. You don't want to, you know, a la carte from different places. So we're kind of that for outdoor living spaces. We're not going to, we don't have any plans to do any of the major construction stuff, but there's not really any limits to outdoor living space projects.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So to Josh's point, like these huge seven figure jobs in the pipeline, we'll take them because they're all just turnkey outdoor living spaces.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Right. Cool.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So at that point, Josh and I just load up my parents car basically with materials from Home Depot. We don't know about this. And we just basically go and install a pathway based on YouTube education and my parents car. So, yeah, we do that one. They're happy with the final result. We beg them for a Facebook review and say, hey, ma'am. please post this to your friends. We really want to do this.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
This is something exciting for our future that we could possibly carry on. they post us. We get one other person to call us. We go out there, we do a killer job. They post us and we go viral. So at this point we get 50 calls in a day. I'm out just doing what we do. I'm like, Oh Josh, this is taking off. And what are you guys doing at this point? Like what kind of jobs?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Is that right? We're doing some experiments with it. I don't think we're getting much result. It's more teeing us up for January when we have a real budget. Right. Yeah, less than $1,000 a month right now for sure.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Uh, this is just pathway work. So basically like installing, like installing just bricks to make a pathway, um, putting down squares of sod in people's backyards, just doing random. And, uh, Yeah. Like I said, we had no background in this. We just wanted to be entrepreneurs and we were excited about it. And yeah, people started demanding new services of us. And somebody says, can you do turf?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
We say, yeah. Can you do masonry? OK, sure. And we just start taking on jobs. And like I said, the phone was ringing off the hook. And so we start calling our friends and say, OK, the first thing we need to do right now is get people on the on site to help us. So we had a few of our friends that luckily were in the area that could help us out.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
we start driving around and find some contractors that can do stuff. We're asking landscape suppliers, you know, do you have anybody that you can point our direction?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
No, I agree with that. Yeah, because we're trying to create this bell curve of revenue to profitability, right? Like, okay, when we have too little revenue, we're not going to make any money. When we have just right, we're going to make a lot of money. And when we have too much revenue, we're overutilized and we don't make money again. Yeah.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So assigning revenue targets to that profitability level is going to help us set the right numbers of revenue going into the next year and maximize that. But to the pricing question, yeah, we have also experimented with raising some prices here and there just in small samples just to see how it impacts conversions. Generally, it's unaffected. So, yeah, conversions kind of stay the same with that.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So it's something that we might look into, especially because right now we're kind of sorry.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Right. Definitely not proportionally. So if we increase price 10 percent, we're not losing 10 percent. Right, which is perfect.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Yeah, actually the first couple of years, it was, I mean, I'm saying you guys are physically doing the labor and the first couple of years, man, we did a lot of work. So we were on our hands and knees spreading manure in people's yards with zoom earbuds in getting called on. And I'm telling Josh, Hey dude, please turn off the bulldozer. Like I've got to answer this question. So, uh,
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Totally, totally. So yeah, super excited to continue implementing that and maybe make it our standard. I mean, especially because we find ourselves or we perceive ourselves to be high value landscaping company that's offering a lot more than the market average, yet we're priced similar to the market average.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So it's to us kind of justifying, we just need to become comfortable telling customers, look, we're more expensive, but it's because we have these offerings that others don't.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
because at that point to clarify we were still in school yeah okay i was in a and f he was in u chicago so while we ramped it up carter mentioned like hey we have so much time in our hands sorry so you guys you guys moved back home because of covid right right so that's right yeah so yeah right so sorry i was off track in the beginning so basically to restart that josh and our friends growing up we went to high school together then we separated for college i went to u chicago josh was at a and m
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah, I'm kind of on the same vibe as Josh there. I want to see how far we can take Austin based on this conversation and create a good infrastructure that we can just kind of copy and paste. So maybe bringing Austin to 10 to 15 million and kind of reevaluating the structure. Is this sustainable? Is this working really well in Austin?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Okay, let's take these exact same positions and hire them into different cities and build that city now to 10 or 15 million. Or whatever it may be, $10 million, $30 million, whatever the market allows.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
thinking uh elon now being all the now all the people leaving california and the texas oh yeah that was huge definitely in 2021 that was everything it was like i think yeah half of our business came from from californians coming into texas literally yeah so what what i'm hearing you guys say so i have listed on here i so really like reevaluating the map of what it what it looks like to get to 30 million like
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
and COVID hits. And they say, you've got to go do online school now. We don't have a campus anymore. So that's when I moved home. Josh moved home. We're back in Austin. And at that point, I was bored. I was going through the closet, calling the checks on our old mowing clients' checks. And that's when I was asking them, hey, do you have any work for us?
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So at that point, yeah, one person called us back. We did that job. Fast forward five years, we had gone through hell and back, building up a team of specialists. And that kind of brings us to where we're at now.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
It was 22 initial calls and I got one guy and that job was $360. And then that spiraled into... That spiraled.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Yeah, yeah. So we were actually physically working on that job and she respected that we were outside on our hands and knees. She happened to own a remodeling business herself, so I think she knew how to... engineer the perfect review to get a lot of impressions. And she posted on an app called Nextdoor app, which has an element of virality that others may not. And so it's all neighborhood driven.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So if one neighborhood hypes it up, then the next few closer neighborhoods get that post expanded to them. And so it went to 50 something neighborhoods. And in those neighborhoods, that's where the phone started ringing.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
that was probably our highest margins honestly at that point it kind of yeah over time we grew into a business but yeah at that point we're doing everything and then we would just kind of get people out there to help us actually do the jobs yeah i will say it wasn't an efficient process like we didn't have the best suppliers at that point we didn't know how to sell jobs correctly and so there were elements of underbidding or undercharging or overcharging in that time so it was all over the place it was super unpredictable and say like that first
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Three years, we had no idea how much we were really making until the P&Ls came out.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
On my end, I would say it's the custom nature of our projects. It's kind of hard to scale whenever every project is so customized to the client's needs. If you're envisioning a painting, if you can just stamp the same template painting over and over, that's a lot easier to create a lot of paintings than a custom painting every time.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
I'm trying to find a way to standardize some of the processes and the projects themselves within Urban Oasis. I think the commercial route is one that we definitely want to pursue. The maintenance route is one that we want to pursue. There's a lot less interpretation within those sides. For sure.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
Yeah, no more of those.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
It's dynamic. We kind of adjust it just on a quarterly basis or so. But yeah, right now it's about $10,000. Last year, our average project cost was around 26K and we're trying to get over 100K into next year. A lot of that is word of mouth, like we discussed earlier. Like, you know, if you do a really big project, they're going to tell friends that are in that similar niche and same goes opposite.
Next Level Pros
#133: Increasing 30% year over year with no marketing? Will it still work?
So once we start taking on more larger projects, we think that it's going to be easier to stay in that niche for sure.