WARNING: I will be rambling on in this blog post!!!

Why I Fired My Marketing Agency and You Should Too

Why I Hired Marketers

As my business got busier, I got spread thin. But I wanted to keep growing but couldn't afford to hire on office staff to help me. So I decided to outsource my marketing and accounting. Funny enough, these were my 2 strengths as my schooling was both for Accounting and Marketing. My focus was Accounting but I earned a Business Marketing degree along the way. I thought these 2 areas though would have the biggest impact on my company and I should let experts handle it. As you'll read about though, that didn't go well for my marketing. My accountant though was great, so here is a shout out to Carla and Joe at Cycle CPA.

Early On

About 5 years into running my landscaping company, I started to realize I needed some help with marketing. So I started doing my research looking through Google and Facebook groups that were for landscape company owners. This is where I found a guy who came recommended by multiple people in the group for doing good work. I reached out to him and he seemed to know his stuff. He essentially would do all things marketing for my company including building a new website, SEO, paid ads management, printing, graphic design, and even answering my phones. The best part was, or so I thought, he was cheap. For $200 per month Brandon would do all of this for me and with him doing so much surely my business would grow.

I used him for over a year, mostly because he was cheap and we became friends, and he occasionally got me some phone calls. But none of them ever panned out. Brandon's problem was he was a dog chasing 10 squirrels. He would be set on one marketing idea, think of a new one, and drop the current idea completely to focus on the new one 110%. His ideas were always great but his execution was limited. I got what I paid for essentially but it came to an end when he claimed he got hired to run marketing for the 2020 Trump Campaign for the State of Illinois. He disappeared even though he kept drafting his money. He would occasionally send me a message assuring me they were still working on my marketing and he has big things planned for Spring. Spring came and went and there was nothing delivered, so I cancelled the auto draft with my bank and moved on.

Next Marketer

The next marketer also came recommended from several people in various Facebook groups. His name was Joe and his approach was much more targeted. He would run paid ads that drove customers to a simple landing page which prompted them to call me. The best part was he paid for the ads and I only paid per phone call. I figured this would avoid the possibility of me wasting money on ads that did not perform. So we talked about my ideal customer, my service area, what services I offered, etc. He began to run ads and the phone actually started ringing after a couple weeks.

The issue was the people calling were not in my service area, wanted services I didn't offer, and were definitely not the ideal customer for me. Joe told me to give it some time and he would make some adjustments. Unfortunately things never got better so after 3 or 4 months, I fired him and moved on again.

And Next...

Next up was another guy who came highly recommended in Facebook groups. He charged me $3,000 per month and he would run ads. I had to pay an extra $1000+ per month for the ad spend on top of his $3,000. But he offered a guarantee that if he didn't get me at least 30 phone calls from valid leads in the first 3 months, he would refund the monthly retainers he collected. That was enticing because then I was protected from poor results again and he (Jeremy) was motivated to actually perform.

At the end of the 3 months, Jeremy had failed to meet his guarantee, by far. I believe I had received maybe 20 phone calls in the time but none fit my Ideal Customer Profile. So I requested my refund and was told by Jeremy that he could not provide it because he had been scammed and lost all of his money. He promised to provide the refund as soon as he recovered the money or made back enough to do so. I never got that refund.

No More Facebook Recommendations

After firing Jeremy, I received a timely phone call from Townsqaure Media. They sold me on the idea of focusing on SEO and charged $1500 per month. No guarantees, no refund, etc. but at this point I was desperate to grow my company so I signed a 6 month contract. They told me the first 3 months not to expect much as SEO takes time, and I knew that going in. But after the 3 month period I still wasn't seeing results. I called in and spoke to my Account Manager and she told me she would get with the SEO team. I never heard back and never got results. At the end of the 6 months, I called in, cancelled, and demanded to see proof of what they had done during that 6 months. They told me you can't see SEO but they had done what they should do. I requested a refund for the lack of results and their response was to sue them. Townsquare Media turned out to be a large marketing company backed by multi-million dollar companies so that was a fight I didn't want.

Back to the Facebook Groups

The last landscaper, who has a unique name and a large presence in the industry so I will change his name to John, came extremely recommended in many groups. Whenever someone asked a marketing related question, it seemed a dozen people would tag him in the post comments. I started off by hiring John for some one off projects like a new logo and t shirt design and they went pretty good. I ended up ordering the t shirts through John who outsourced the printing to a print shop. When the shirts came about 1/2 of them had issues. The print screening didn't line up and caused gaps between the colors. John called the printer and requested they redo 1/2 of them and they refused. So John stepped up and paid for the 1/2 to be redone out of his pocket. That got him a lot of goodwill with me so I hired him to do my marketing. Like Brandon, he would do an array of marketing functions like build a new website, perform SEO, run paid ads, and do graphic design. I signed a 6 month contract with them for $1500 per month and quickly started having issues. John had a staff of 2 with him and then also used several freelancers across the world for other parts. Rather than assigning me an Account Manager to be my point of contact, I was expected to communicate with every employee he had through Slack. It quickly became confusing so I requested we switch to Facebook Messenger. That helped a little but I was getting bombarded with 2-6 messages a day from his team requesting me to do something for them. I just simply couldn't keep up with their requests and still run my company. At the end of the 6 months, I requested a partial refund and was told by John that the reason my marketing failed was me. He stated my lack of communication caused them not to be able to do their job effectively so there would be no refund. This was the point where I swore off marketing agencies, marketing gurus, and marketing experts. There had to be a better way.

The Better Way

The idea of LandscapAI was born, a marketing solution that allowed landscapers to fire their marketing guy (or gal) and do it themselves effectively. But I know the average landscaper didn't know how to do marketing and I didn't want to be another marketing guy trying to do it for them. So I built out LandscapAI, a software platform that leverages AI to help landscapers do their own marketing. You don't need any marketing training, experience, or education to effectively use it. Let the AI do the repetitive tasks and we will teach you the strategy so you can execute it yourself. After hiring 6 marketing companies (I only spoke of 5 in here, the other one only lasted a few weeks) and paying them over $100,000 to get bad leads and no new customers, I can confidently say that no landscaper needs to hire a marketing company again thanks to LandscapAI.