Jacob Neffendorf: Everybody knows what a dozer is. Everybody knows what an excavator is, but a video of a forestry mulcher zipping through a tree is just amazing. 

Austin Gray: Welcome back to another episode of the OWNR Ops podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray. In this episode, I have Jacob Nendo from Rise Online Advertising AKA Land Clearing Growth. If you're a land clearing company, you've likely heard of Jacob because he is dominating the land clearing industry for marketing. Right now, he has over a hundred clients and he is running great ads and doing great social media management for land clearing companies. We recently started working with him and I wanted to dive in with him on the specifics of what he is seeing working across his client profile. In regards to Facebook ads.

Jacob Neffendorf: We got a 350 acres Solar farm clearing job off of a Facebook ad. Last month I got a guy in Louisiana, got a $425,000 interstate right of way clearing job from a Facebook ad. That's because the beauty on Facebook is you can show them what you're capable of and what you're doing.

Austin Gray: If you are curious about how to go find your ideal customers and get more profitable jobs, stick around for this episode. 'cause Jacob and I are going to go deep on Facebook ads. So we get the myth all the time. Man, I tried boosting posts, it didn't work for me. It's like boosting posts is an absolute waste of money. You may as well just go pull a hundred dollars out of the bank account and then flush it straight down your toilet. You may get some likes, but you're not gonna get profitable jobs. 

Alright, we got Jacob from land clearing growth. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes sir. 

Austin Gray: Rise online ads. Land clearing growth. We were just talking about like why rise, why land clearing growth. You started out running four different service based businesses, something like that. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. Caught the entrepreneurial bug and Yes. Lots of shiny objects. 

Austin Gray: Oh, the shiny object syndrome. Don't we all have it? Yes, dude. I feel like I'm going through it right now too. It's like it never goes away. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. They talk about that loop of uninformed optimism, and then you have informed pessimism and then you go back. You either push through or you go back to uninformed optimism when you see something else. And you, I know I could grow that to seven figures. I could grow that to seven figures, but it's why don't we focus on growing this to eight, nine figures.

Austin Gray: Yeah. Yeah. So you started out running, were you running for a power washing guy in the beginning? Did I see some stuff on YouTube? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes, I, did and still own a pressure washing company. 

Austin Gray: You still own a pressure washing business? I didn't know that. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. Yeah. I don't do anything except get the jobs, but, or get the leads really, I should say.

Austin Gray: So do you run ads for that or is that yes. Google. Okay.

Jacob Neffendorf:  And I probably shouldn't, I probably should sell that business, but it does pretty well. Profit margins are pretty good. We have employees, but I also give myself the excuse that I do a lot of advertising testing over there when I want test, like something totally new that I don't wanna, test on a client. I'll test it over there. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay. Can you share what that business is called, or do you wanna keep that private? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. It's New Braunfels Pressure Washing 

Austin Gray: Okay. All right. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Good keyword selections there. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, so I actually just did a, post about this and yeah, it was just like, pick your city, pick your service area, pick your service. Because I think like a lot of people will reach out and they'll be like, Hey, I'm really struggling. How'd you come up with the name bearclaw? And I'm like Bearclaw is the, like the local's name of a local mountain. So I didn't really think too much about it because it was like, in my mind we were gonna do land clearing Bear Claw. There was like a, one of my first attachment purchases was a grapple bucket. I'm like, okay. There's so many things that make sense. I didn't think about it much, I just picked it and then I chose it. But I see so many people being like, how did you come up with the name? Spending weeks and weeks on trying to make a decision. So I did a post about it the other day, just pick your service area, plus your service. And oh, by the way, that will actually work really well with Google's algorithm for SEO. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. Exactly. Yeah it paid off in the long run for that one for sure. But yeah I basically started that business for a lot of different reasons, personal reasons, and I always wanted to have a business from the time I was a kid. But I also, at the time, my dad didn't really have an income and I was like, I know I could do this, and then I could pull him in and help get him some income. And it was supposed to just be literally like a side hustle and then it turned into a full blown business, which was really cool. But in that I'm always learning, trying to grow and I was like, we need to learn how to market better.

Austin Gray:  I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. In both businesses, I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit Go dot get jobber.com/owner ops O-W-N-R-O-P-S.

Jacob Neffendorf: And my first ever like marketing campaign, it was during COVID and I was like, Hey, I'll come clean any playground in New Braunfels for free. To make sure that it was safe and clean and I was just gonna bleach the whole thing and rinse it off. And we ended up cleaning like 50 playgrounds, but we got so much like hometown hero publicity from that that we really did really well from that. But from there I was like, yeah, I like this marketing stuff. Let me learn some more about it. So I took some courses and then that's when I realized, hey, I could probably do this for other people. So I started learning like what an agency was. At that time I didn't even know what that was, but I started seeing of course, ads for it and stuff.

And I just, yeah, I started Rise and was like, how, who can I possibly do this for? And I was like I'll try to do it for other people like me, service based businesses. And that's when I met the first Linkler guy. 

Austin Gray: Nice. Nice. And you were telling me about that before we went live. Yes. What does he still do today? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, so he owns a land clearing company in central Texas. Mostly does forestry mulching. He runs about five Barcos and a dozer, skid skidsteer. Couple others, smaller pieces of equipment, but the barcos are the bread and butter. 

Austin Gray: But you were telling me before one Facebook ads don't work at all for land clearing companies. That's the title of this, right? 

Jacob Neffendorf: That's what everybody tells me Facebook ads don't work. 

Austin Gray: But you have data to support otherwise, just a little bit. 

Jacob Neffendorf:Yes, just a little bit. We only spend just a little bit, we only spend a couple hundred thousand dollars a month on 'em, but yeah, they don't work.

Austin Gray: All right. But let's be real. Facebook ads work whenever you dial 'em in, yes. Yep. Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, yep. Absolutely. And they can be very profitable. And contrary to popular belief, big serious jobs can come from there as well.

Austin Gray: Like what is what are some of your top performing campaigns get just on an average month for a number of leads? 

Jacob Neffendorf: So our top guys who are spending more than the average person is spending meaning like a hundred to $150 a day, and maybe even beyond. They're getting a hundred leads a month on average for years.

Austin Gray: It's crazy. And about how many jobs are they closing out of those a hundred leads? Jacob Neffendorf: So the bigger guy who's running the bigger machines and can only justify the bigger jobs, his close rate's closer to 10 to 12%. But that's 'cause he's just cherry picking the big jobs that the machines don't have to move as much. On the flip side, we have a dude in Michigan who is running five skid steers and a couple mini Xs, and their close rate's 40% plus. So they're closing a ton of, smaller turnaround jobs. And when I say leads, I meant to say that earlier. This isn't like somebody clicking on a Messenger campaign and being like, tell me more about your service. This is somebody who's putting in their actual name, email, phone number, location of where their property is, what they want done there, and then how many acres it's. 

Austin Gray: When you say close rate what are you running your percentages off of? Total number of 10 to 12%. Of what? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Leads. 

Austin Gray: Of total leads. So not of estimates sent, correct.

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, that, that's a great distinguishing point. 'cause yeah, if you did a close rate of actual estimates, the number would be way higher. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Got it. Got it. So out of total number of leads, let's just say he's getting a hundred leads a month. He's closing. Let's just for rough number sake, 10% of those, so he's getting 10 people and he is running these big machines, right?

Jacob Neffendorf: All over the state. 

Austin Gray: What is the average ticket size for the larger. Stuff. 

Jacob Neffendorf: The average definitely gets weird, but usually the two to three week jobs is what he's shooting for and he's charging 3,500 a day, so right there and then, and plus mobilization. But he's had jobs this year where the machines have been there for so many months, so doing the math 3,500 a day, let's just say 10 days, I guess so, yeah. Yeah. Probably 30, 40,000 I would imagine. Now we know logistically you may not be able to complete and get paid on 10 jobs in one month, so that's where, on the bigger jobs, it gets funny on the ROI it's more extended out. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. But even if he's spending a hundred bucks a day, like we're talking 3K a month in ad spend, yeah. And this is where I think I've been a little frustrated when people reach out and they're like, Hey, I tried Facebook ads and it just doesn't work. Or, 'cause that's how we've built our business. Of course we went and did SEO and Google business, which I think every business should do, but if you hire the pro from the beginning, like that should be working for you in the background. Yeah. For me as the owner and operator I think you can, and you would probably, you probably have some feedback on this, right? It's like whenever you bring on a new client, it's up to whether or not the owner is willing to go out there and actually film the content that works for Facebook ads as to whether or not it's gonna be successful or not. Yeah. Do you have any feedback on that? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes, that's a great statement. I will just make the distinguishment that you can successfully run ads with just some before and after pictures, or just a picture of a machine, and you will get results, but you won't get the results that really make it worth it, in my opinion. And then when people talk about, tire kickers and people who aren't serious and people who can't afford it, those are the types of ads you generally see there. Because you're not calling out your ideal client. You're not telling them exactly what you do and why you're trustworthy and where you do it and what you're not giving them an i an idea of what the scope of a project you do is worth and what it looks like. But when you mix all of those things in, then your ideal people, we gotta. 350 acres solar farm clearing job off of a Facebook ad last month. That's awesome. Yeah. I got a guy in Louisiana, got a $425,000 interstate right of way clearing job from a Facebook ad. And that's because the beauty on Facebook is you can show them what you're capable of and what you're doing. And that is, that's really the key. 

Austin Gray: For sure. So another thing that I don't think a lot of people talk about is everybody's so concerned with cost per lead and how many leads did I get and like how many jobs did I book? But when you're running a Facebook ad, you're doing general brand awareness as well. A lot of people are seeing your brand, even if they're not filling out your form. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. Yep. So that way when they are ready, then they're going to remember. You marketing rule of sevens, I've talked about this a lot, that generally somebody needs to have been served your advertisement seven times before they'll take an action. But the key to that is they need to see an advertisement seven times. So if they see you once or twice, and then now that they've interacted or watched your ad, they're gonna start seeing others. And if they see the others on that seventh time, there's a good chance that they may take the next step with them. So you want to have that omnipresence approach where you're always showing up and you're showing up consistently. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, for sure. So I'm curious to hear, go back to your story about like whenever you jumped into this, what was the aha moment for, oh, this is why I should focus on land clearing and not power washing.

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, absolutely. From an agency perspective. Land clearing is a better option. I didn't really necessarily think about this back then, but it's higher ticket, right? Like you have to get a land clearing company, less jobs for it to be a return on investment versus a pressure washing company. And they can be bad at sales and still get a pretty good return versus pressure washing. You have to be really good at sales. But basically we took this gentleman's company and doubled his revenue in one year from where he was. And so I thought, wow, what a good result. What if there was more guys like him who were really good at their work, had really capable machines, but just people don't know they exist and what they're capable of? And so I put the feelers out there and yes, there are definitely many more like himself. And so that was the. The moment that I said, yeah, we're gonna go, we're gonna go all in on land clearing. 

Austin Gray: So you bring up an interesting point. It's a high ticket service. Some pushback that that I've seen from, like finance bros on X is it's, you've got like heavy asset, like it costs a lot. Those machines are a lot. There's no recurring revenue. Everybody's all in on HVAC businesses electrician businesses, plumbing businesses, things like that. I think there's a really big opportunity right now and a gap for these higher ticket service businesses that, yeah, maybe there is not a recurring aspect to the business, but what you're proving is that you can put a paid acquisition funnel that is. Very profitable to a business and predictably go get clients. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes, a hundred percent. Yeah. And I can say that with almost five years now, obviously you have to change, adapt, and grow. You can't just turn something on and it leave it. Another huge misconception with these Facebook ads, it's oh, why do I have to keep paying if, you just turn these on and let 'em go because you can't just leave 'em. They're not going to be the same forever. But to your point, yeah, I mean it's not necessarily recurring, but it can very well if you get the right clients, be reoccurring. A lot of these big ranches budget for a certain amount of hunting prep work to be done every single year. Land developers are constantly buying land, splitting it up and needing trails, cut, fence row cut right of way clearing can definitely be recurring because they need to keep those right of ways clear. I know of really big businesses, which is against what I do, but that have 10 12 dedicated big wheeled forestry mulcher that no one's ever heard of the company. They just stay on the right of way for years. And so there's definitely ways if you do it right, where you can get some return work as you'd say. But in my experience, you don't even necessarily need that if you have a predictable flow of inbound. 

Austin Gray: So there are multiple different business models even within land clearing, correct? And I think we can even, we can jump into the fire mitigation piece, which is what we do at Bearclaw. It's technically we're using land clearing machines, but like we do all wildfire mitigation work and it's completely different than what you guys do down in Texas or what they're doing in the Midwest. Or even the Southeast, for example. And then within those business models, there are different types of machines and different models. What's your favorite model? What do you love running ads for. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Forestry mulching, it's the quickest, the easiest for the customer. Usually the most profitable, depending on a few variables, and you can. With a mid-level machine, you can show up and mulch up somebody's pile that they would've had to pay to have hauled off or dangerously had to burn. You can just mulch that up for them all the way up to, you could have a machine on someone's ranch for three months and make tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And people love it. Everybody knows what a dozer is. Everybody knows what an excavator is, but a video of a forestry mulcher zipping through a tree is just amazing. People love it. It's profitable. And it has a pretty wide range of service offerings in my experience. 

Austin Gray: Your top clients, how do they price their services by the day or by the job?Jacob Neffendorf: Most people. Have a day rate. I push people to price the job because that's how you can get the most profit in my experience. But there are some savvy clients out there who want to know a day rate. I think it's good for you as a business owner to know that, but I prefer to price the job. 

Austin Gray: I hear of a lot of people using the day rate. I personally don't like it at all. 

Jacob Neffendorf: No, it doesn't give you any room for profit if you want to add it in.

Austin Gray: How many people across the US now that you're running ads for? 

Jacob Neffendorf: As of this week? 125. 125. 

Austin Gray: So once again, Facebook ads don't work for land clearing. But you have the data to support that. It does.

Jacob Neffendorf:  Absolutely. Yeah. Where were we? I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna lose that point. We talked about day rate job. Yeah. And being able to put profit in there somewhere. That's where we were at, I think. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. So I was trying to get your perspective on what do you see across the board? People are doing day rate or by the job now here's the intricacies. If you go by the job, like you gotta be, you gotta be good at estimating and you gotta be great at estimating if you want to actually win some of that profit and. I think once you have experience under your belt, and once you know your business inside and out, you can go to a job and you can be like, I know for a fact we can knock this out in three days. If something were to go wrong, then we're knocking it out in four. So I'm bidding that job for four plus mobilization and then it comes down to efficiencies. And somebody posted this, they like, oh, I think it was Brock, the septic guy. He was asking about this. I was like, dude, if you went out that far ahead, like that's the goal as an operator, right?

Like you should be rewarded for running a very efficient machine if everybody else is quoting a job at four days, right? Or if a day rate guy was gonna come in and do it at four days and you quoted it four days and you finish in two, you should absolutely be rewarded as a business owner and as an operator for that. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yep. That's called winning.

Austin Gray:  Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com.

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. And guess what? It would go way further if you felt bad about that for whatever reason. If you bid it for four, finished in two, but then the client doesn't know the difference and you say, Hey, we actually finished earlier than I thought we would. And then you only bid 'em for three, it's easier to bring that down versus if you bid it for two days and it took you four and now you gotta have a conversation with them about, Hey this took two days longer. You're gonna have to pay me more. It'd be easier to overshoot it and draw back. But I think if you go into the conversation initially, and this goes for all sales with a honest vanguard, they call it like, Hey, I'm just letting you know I'm gonna be completely honest with you. I want you to be completely honest with me.

If you disagree with something or if I disagree with something, we're going to just go ahead and agree to talk about it. And if you build that trust right out the gate before they ever pay you or agree to pay you, then when something comes up later down the road, it's easier to have those conversations.

‍Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely. About what percentage of your clients do you see doing day rate versus by the job? 

Jacob Neffendorf: I'd say about half. I don't have the exact number, but I look at most guys' conversations every day and there is a ton of guys that I see putting their day rate even in a text message, which is another thing I would probably push against unless the client just says they can't talk on the phone. I would always try to do 'em in person Plan B on the phone plan C. Texting 'cause you want to get them the information. Don't withhold it for days if they just refuse to talk on the phone. But definitely it's always better in person if not on the phone. Worst case, text it. But yeah, there, there's definitely a lot of 'em sending out their day rate. And I, I would compare that, like think about other contractors, like if somebody's gonna remodel your house or build you a custom home, they're not gonna tell you their hourly rate or their day rate. It wouldn't make any sense. 'cause then they can't build in profit.

Austin Gray: So let's talk sales process. You said get in person on site visit. Second is over the phone, third is over text. Yep. What is your process that you coach your clients on? Hey, I'm gonna send you a hundred leads this month. 

Jacob Neffendorf: We're gonna use our system to make sure that the client gets some type of communication immediately because we know that getting to a lead within 60 seconds increases the chance of the sale closing by 391%, which is a Harvard Business Study statistic. And 75% of, actually 78% of buyers will use the company who gives them the most information to make a purchasing decision first. So that's where I say obviously, in person is best phone's. Next text is third. Just 'cause text is last doesn't mean it's not important. If you can't get them in person and you can't get them on the phone, you still wanna make sure you get them the information.

So the automation text goes out and then. We expect them to call the lead as fast as possible. 60 seconds is the standard, five minutes is the max. Anything outside of that, then we're gonna be giving them feedback Hey, you have to do this. And that's just the dig digital age we're in. People get interested and then they get distracted. You have to get to them quickly. And we have found that it takes an average of 6.78 times to get in true contact with the customer. Obviously you're gonna have better scenarios than that, but we have to remember that people are busy and they have lives just like us. They work, they have things come up.

Just because they ghost you for two or three days doesn't mean they're not actually interested or they're just ghosting you. They just may have stuff going on and they deserve to be contacted. So don't give up on that. And then from there. We want you to qualify 'em. This is the weird spot where we've had guys be over ambitious and they're like, what's your address? Okay, I'll be there in an hour. And then they call me complaining that they drove two hours and it wasn't a qualified person. And I'm like you have to qualify a little bit on the phone, make sure they're in your service area. Make sure they have some semblance of a budget, right? Like you, you shouldn't have to give your price over the phone, but you should give a price range over the phone.

Figure out is this a hundred acre job or is this a backyard brush pile? You may not wanna drive two hours for a backyard brush pile but if it's worth doing a site visit, then you wanna do a site visit as fast as possible. 48 hours. Getting an estimate to them is what I like. I like that timeframe. 72 hours. From the actual lead coming in. Beyond that, you start to lose momentum, lose interest. If you go in person, I would give the number in person. And if you can't give that, then you need to systematize your estimates somehow. And I'm saying you show up and give the number right away. Like I just talked to a dude in California who knew it was a bigger property. It was like a 70 acre property. So he took his dirt bike. Some guys take their side by sides, four wheelers, whatever. But he drove around that property with his dirt bike, got the full scope of the work, and then came back and gave the guy the estimate and won it.

And that's a problem I hear a lot of times from homeowners where, or property owners, some guy comes out, gives them, an in-person look around and they say, oh, I'll send you the estimate. And then the customer has to follow up to get the estimate because they got lost in the sauce or they got busy or whatever. And to me that's horrible If the customer has to follow up to get the estimate from you, something's broken there. So give the estimate right away. And if you can't, then you need to fix your system a little bit. So from there, making sure we follow up. If they don't close right away, obviously we could have a whole conversation on sales itself, but you need to try to close 'em right away.

And if they don't, the thing is book a meeting from a meeting, so you need to have it on the schedule when the next time you're talking to them is, and you're gonna want to try to follow up 3, 5, 7, 3 days, five days, seven days. And then I usually move to once a week after that and we both know you can use the CRM to automate that for yourself. I just actually had this the other day where I followed up with somebody that I hadn't heard from in two weeks, and turns out he tried to send me an invoice and it got denied in processing somewhere, like some bank to bank transfer got denied and if I wouldn't have followed up with him, I wouldn't have gotten paid.

It's it seems so simple, but there's lots of money sitting out there that we just need to follow up on. So that was a long version to your answer. Sorry man. 

Austin Gray: There's so many things that we can dive into right now if you are running a business. I do encourage you and Les O'Hara, if you're listening to this I hired him as a coach last year and he, first time we ever jumped on a call, he's open up your QuickBooks. He's what's your ar? So I'm like. And he is stop the meeting right now. Go collect. Because it's like the easiest money if you've sent an invoice. Yeah. That is the easiest money to go get into your business bank account or theoretically should be the closest to getting to your bank account.

And yeah, I've just taken that as like a rule and a principle. I coin Mondays as Money Mondays, so every single Monday I'm looking at, I go through like a whole checklist here, payroll, cashflow forecasting but accounts receivable is one of that. Yeah. And what are our outstanding invoices right now and who do I need to pick up the phone and call? And guys, millennials, gen Z I don't know why people don't want to pick up the phone and call. If you just pick up the phone and call and it doesn't even have to be that demanding. Hey, it's awesome with Bear Claw. How are you? Good. Hey, I was just calling to check in on that invoice I sent last week.

Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, things got busy. No problem. I'm gonna resend that to you right now and then if you use something like jobber, like you can just two clicks. Text, send the invoice, stay on the phone with them. Yeah. Okay. I just sent it to you. Did you get that? And then just be silent, right? Yep. Because then they're like subconsciously, oh, I should open it. So then you just make 'em open it on the phone. They are that much like more likely to pay the invoice. Yeah. I do want to talk jump into, so you covered so many different things there. Yeah. And I do wanna encourage list listeners on that right now.

Go check your accounts receivable if you have outstanding Go collect. That's like the first challenge right here. Secondly, I do wanna dive into the system piece of it because I've been getting a lot of questions lately on. Hey, I thought you used jobber, like you're talking about go high level now, and I do want to differentiate between the two. And I'll open it up to you first to talk through why go high level or a system for sales and marketing is important, go high level.

Jacob Neffendorf: For sure. Yeah, if you're not tracking, I don't remember the exact quote, but basically what you measure, you improve, I think is the quote. And if you don't know your numbers, then you don't know what to improve or what to move on. If you don't know your close rate, if you don't know your estimate rate, if you don't know your. Reoccurring, like what your lifetime value of a client. That's one thing that's huge to do is look at the past years and what client and or what type of client spends the most with you. And you have a huge opportunity to increase your profit if you can hone your business into the top 10% of your clients or type of clients. And that I think you have, been a good example of that, of you could be doing this broad land clearing scope or fire mitigation's the thing that's what I'm going for.

And we think of land clearing as a niche, but there's a lot that goes on in that. And the guys who really find what they're the best at. Are the ones who do really well. And you mentioned a septic guy earlier. I know a gentleman who has an excavation company and his name is Paramount Excavating, but he does septic installs and he can churn out so many septic installs a month. And that's his bread and butter. That's what all of his pictures are, that's what all his testimonials are, and his profit margins are great. And he was talking to me and saying oh, should I consider, and I'm like, no, just do more like you can do 10 of these a month and you have 40% profit margins. Why can't you do 20? That's the question you should be asking. 

Austin Gray: And I fall into this guys, and like for those of you who've been following my journey, like I chose Bear Claw Land Services to be general in the beginning. And it really just came down to this like as long as I'm being a hundred percent transparent with you guys, it's like I had a gut feeling that fire mitigation was a niche that needed a solution, but I also didn't have the data to support that. So in my mind I'm like I'll go buy this skid steer and I'm just gonna be open to wherever the market takes me. Even though I was pushing on fire mitigation in those early days of starting a business, you don't have a job lined up every single day. There is so much uncertainty and if you guys are just starting like the ups and downs of starting the business and the questioning of am I doing the right thing or is what I'm doing going to work is so real? And if some of you are in the early phase of starting right now, I just encourage you to keep pushing through.

If I could go back and tell myself to start over again, I would've called my business Bear Claw Fire Mitigation and I would just go all in on fire mitigation and just focus on perfecting the one thing. And to Jacob's point. Building great systems around that so that business could scale. That's what I would tell myself. If I go back three years from now, Brock, the guy who's been on the podcast who does the septic was really good at that as well. He was a general contractor doing so many different things. Then he went general excavation and he was like, no, I'm gonna niche down even more. Yeah. And he went just septics.

And the guy posts all of his content, he spends all of his marketing budget, built all of his systems, specifically on installing septics. He has gone so far as to be like, no, we're not even pumping anymore. All we do is install. And they have become the go-to septic installer in their area. And I don't know if you've listened to any of those episodes, but they turned out like 2.3 with a three man crew Yep. In one year. That's amazing. That's as impressive as it gets. 

Jacob Neffendorf:  Yeah. No, that's a hundred percent that, that's amazing. Yeah. 'cause I've mostly seen more like just 1 million for a one crew. Yeah. 2 million with one crew is pretty, that's pretty awesome. 

Austin Gray: But it's because he has done exactly what you were saying there just do more of the one thing. And I feel like I'm in this phase of business right now where I'm like, what's the thing we're gonna perfect here? And fire mitigation for me is it Right? That's what we need to be spending all our dollars on marketing wise. 

Jacob Neffendorf: It's not only better for you, and this is something I've been trying to figure out, like the best way to say. And I've tried it in my copy as well. It's not just the best for your business, it's also better for your clients because you are getting better at the one thing. And so like on our end, us going all in on land clearing companies makes us better at helping land clearing companies. If you do nothing but septic installs versus if you do excavation, septic drainage, pumping maintenance, you're not going to be as good as if that's all you do. And so it's better for you, but it's also better for your clients. And to your point of the just starting out, it would be faster for you to pick one thing, fail, pick one thing, fail, pick one thing, and succeed than to try to do all of these things and take forever to figure out which one works best. So it is still always better to try one thing at a time if that makes sense. 

Austin Gray: When you were starting out and when you were defining that, and guys, I'm asking this because like I'm in this phase of business right now where it's if we wanna scale something, we really have to lean into one service, right? I have personally, like I think my ADD shows inside of my business, right? We can do this, we can do that. Like this guy's really good at that. And yes, we can make money at all of it, but if we actually truly want to grow one thing, the more successful business owners I've talked to, especially on the podcast, have done just that. They pick the one thing and they go all in on it. Whenever you were choosing early on land clearing, Facebook ads generating leads specifically for land clearing business owners. What was that like before you had the, because right now it's easy for you to say 125 clients. It obviously works. Yeah.

But in those early days, what was the decision making process like? Was there ever maybe I should go back to power washing. Maybe I should jump back and forth. 

Jacob Neffendorf: No I had some pretty good certainty, but it was just based on the success, right? Like I tried to help a realtor and we got some good results. I tried to help pressure washing guys. We got some decent results. I tried to help roofing company and got some good results. But then I did this land clearing company and we doubled his revenue in a year. And so for me it was like, that was the thing that I tried and was hyper successful. And it was like, how could I ignore this?

Austin Gray: Okay. So we've covered sales process. We've covered some basic metrics. What is the average daily rate? People charging in land clearing across the country for one skid-steer and one guy?

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. If it's a skidsteer, anybody decent is shooting for $2,000 a day. You'll have some guys who try to be more competitive if their market's lower and they'll try for 17 50, 1800. Then you'll have guys with a high flow dedicated machine maybe getting like 2250 I've seen in central Texas 2,500 for a an A SV with a high flow head and stuff. But. Then if you jump up to a CMI or Fecon has that crazy dedicated mulcher, you maybe jump up to the 3000 a day.

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Jacob Neffendorf:  And then once you get up to the Tiger Cats and the barcodes or multiple machines, then you're in that four to five, you can hit four to 5,000 a day. 

Austin Gray: How many operators do you see doing two machine crews, two machine, two man crews versus hey, I'm sending one guy and one machine on these jobs?

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. I'd say first, yeah, we, I have a couple good case studies of guys who are one machine, one, one operator, and their margins are really good. I'd say we probably have 25, 30 of those. And they. Their margins are good. They do anywhere between two and $300,000 a year. They have to have a good operator or you're the owner and you take care of your machine. 'cause that's the biggest bottleneck there is. You could be running hot and heavy doing good jobs on the books and then your machine breaks down and everything stalls. And so I think there's a huge bottleneck there. And then you cap yourself on how much you can charge versus these guys that could show up with a CMI a Skid steer and a mini X and they can knock out $10,000 worth of work in one day. And so all, like, all of our testimonials where guys are, what they're really proud of is that they were able to add more machines, become more efficient, and make more money after working with us because they had the demand. And so we've seen people be super successful with the one machine, one operator. But if you ever want to get past that, then multiple machines is definitely the way to go.

Austin Gray: I think your answer was more related to a solo owner operator versus adding machines. Correct. Okay. I'm asking like, all if, take your best Operators who actually own a business with machines and team members, employees. Oh, okay. So are they deploying jobs at the residential level? Or excuse me, are they deploying crews to residential jobs with only one machine, or are they seeing increases in efficiency by pairing up two machines and two operators and doing, residential jobs with multiple machines on one site versus one machine and one operator on one site? 

Jacob Neffendorf: That's a good question. My mind goes to a lot of places 'cause there's some variables there. If we're talking about mulching, yes. I definitely send one dude out there and if you have enough lead flow to where you can be running multiple machines, I would split 'em up. But I know plenty of guys who prefer to get paid faster and so they roll up with the low boy, the gooseneck and roll out all the machines, come in and get a week's worth of work done in one day and then get paid. And so I think that's more of a preference thing, but also scope of work. Is it a job that can be done in a week? Why not bring all the machines over there and get it done in two days? Versus these mulching jobs where they have three months of work to be done. Yeah. Drop a machine off and an operator with a service truck and a fuel trailer and just let him work for three months, and then while that job's going on, since you're gonna get paid from that way down the road, have the other machines operating over here, cash flow jobs so that you can keep your bank account steady. 

Austin Gray: Got it. What markets are you seeing that are wide open for land clearing in the us? In my opinion, any market's wide open because you can come in and do a better job. And we have lots of wonderful clients. But every single one of 'em could do better. We have some guys that are amazing top-notch and take all of our recommendations, but you can almost always come in and do better. So I would say my first answer is any market but the west, you've seen my client map. The west from US is wide open. But I think you have to position yourself like we have a client in Montana and he basically scoops up all the work because he has the right content out there. He has the right message, has the right relationships with the grant associations.

He has all the right machines that he needs. The cut to length methods, stuff that can laser cut these logs and take all the limbs off in two seconds. So the west, if you can position yourself is massively open. And then, yeah, from there, I mean I think if you can master sales and marketing and just systematize that to the max. You could really just destroy any market, honestly. So one thing I love about you is your integrity. And I even remember the first time I talked to you, you were like, yeah, we only take on people in markets where we don't have other clients. And that's just out of respect for the current clients you have. And that's because you can get results. And so I do appreciate that. So unfortunately for you guys Colorado's already locked down and but if you're anywhere else in the west, it's wide open and we can talk land clearing for fire mitigation maybe on another one. I want to keep it high level here for land clearing specific.

'cause I think there's still some topics that are worth covering. Yeah, maybe more Facebook ads. Actually. We keep talking about all of it for sure. So let's dive into Facebook ads and I'll take a quick break. I'll prompt some people who are watching this. What questions do you have specifically on land clearing and Facebook ads? I will start the question of, Hey Jacob. I've got a land clearing business in some way, shape or form. Obviously I have land clearing for fire mitigation, but I'm speaking for somebody in the southeast, someone in the Midwest, someone in the south. I've got a land clearing business doing forestry mulching. How do I run Facebook ads? And then listeners, while Jacob's starting, please add any questions in the comments that you have here. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Absolutely. So one big thing is you want to have a Facebook ad account. Facebook makes this a little confusing 'cause you could run ads from your Facebook page in the ad center. Which is not the same as running ads from the ads manager. It again, super confusing, but there is a huge difference and you have a lot more tools at your disposal. But the key elements are going to be the video that you make. You can generate work off of a before and after picture, but you could get 10 x or more bang for your buck with a video. I call it talking head style of you talking to the camera, pointing out your ideal client. So if you're. Forestry mulching, residential lots, or if you're doing full clearing for commercial development or you wanna do hunting trails, whatever, like your ideal job is on your ideal client. Hey, central Texas land owners that have more than 10 plus acres, we can save you time and money thanks to our large machines that are very efficient at mulching your property without having to haul off or burn.

We would love to learn more about your property. Click down below or click on this ad and I have a quick form that you can tell me more about your project and we can come take a look and see what we can get done for you. That kind of ad is going to be a killer, especially if you're standing outside near a machine. Or you're standing on a property that has been cleared or mulched. And then I touched on it there, but a lead form. We found that lead forms work really well. And then you don't have to have the burden of website and links and privacy policies and all that stuff. It's just they click on it, they stay right there in Facebook. The form just pops up in front of 'em. It can even autofill their contact info. And then what I always ask is, what's the location? What's the size of the property? And then gimme a brief description of what you're trying to have done. That ad right there, target it to your area. Killer

Austin Gray: Sounds so simple. It is. It really is. So as far as like the setup goes, a lot of people always ask this Hey, what do I do right now in 2025 for targeting? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah I'm gonna be diamond out a crazy secret here that I probably shouldn't, but Facebook is really pushing demographic and interest targeting away. And this year with all of our clients, we've been testing this to prove the theory. And we basically test one ad set with zero targeting besides location, and we've seen massive results. But the key to this is you have to allow Facebook to read your copy and listen to your video and the copy, meaning the words on the ad, has to be very descriptive of who your ideal client is. And Facebook's algorithm, Facebook's AI will find the right people more often and more accurately than targeting, and you will get leads. For a better cost when you do it that way. It sounds crazy, but that we have millions of data points to support this  

Austin Gray: Now, break that down once again. And tell me what I need to say to optimize for the AI that is reading the algorithm. What do I, as the operator need to say on the ad? 

Jacob Neffendorf: For sure. So just to be a little more descriptive, basically in the past you would want to choose interests like hunting, trophy hunting, hunting lanes or agriculture land owner, all this stuff. You'd wanna have all these interests in behavior, targetings and only target people over 25 years old and all this stuff. Now Facebook is really over the last few years they've been taking away how specific you can get with that, but now they're favoring. More of the actual creative in the words in the ad versus the targeting. And so we found that when you have a good ad and you pull away the targeting, you get way better results. Way better results. But what you want to say in the ad, like the first call out needs to be who they are and where they are. So like for you, like we're talking about Summit County, right? So it's like Summit County Landowners, that's how you would want to start it. And if you wanna target multiple counties, usually the better way is to have multiple ads that target each one because it's hard to list out the counties or say and surrounding areas.

It just gets a little vague. And then you're not giving Facebook's AI as much wiggle room to learn. So you want that to be in the actual words, but you also want it to be in the video. So in the video it's hey, if you own land in Summit County. And then talk about who you are, what you do, and why you love the opportunity to help them out. Not car salesman come down to get your free estimate. It's yeah, everybody says that. It's Hey, I would love the opportunity to learn more about your property and see what we can do to open it up or increase the value or make it a more defensible space. Make it safer, get it ready for hunting. Whatever is hyper specific to what the outcome that person actually wants.  

Austin Gray: t's all pain and emotion driven, right? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. Big time. Yeah. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Hey, so one thing that you're really good at on camera, as I've been watching some of your YouTube videos. I feel and some of the people watching this will probably agree with this. Like when I go on podcasts, like sometimes I go into straight car or salesman mode. Like I get excited, I get emotion, I get very internet markety sort of thing. But like you're very low key. And some feedback you gave me yesterday on my ad, and I would even be down to do this if you have access to this shared iCloud album, I uploaded the Summit County and the Eagle County targeting last night. The one feedback that you gave me why don't you tell people the feedback that you gave me and feel free to just blast me online. I won't take anything personal. I'm all about taking constructive feedback to get better and Jacob knows that about me at this point. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Absolutely. Yeah. So the feedback I gave is feedback I've gotten myself and I've had to coach myself on as well is what some people call the millennial pause. So it's kind like we look at the camera and we. So, Or when you're in the middle of talking, it's like, and that's what, and it's like just this, a weird little pause where we're trying to be disciplined and look at the camera and think about what we wanna say next, but we don't wanna say um, and so we kind of just make this little long pause and on short form video it's, it's killer. And the, the generations are starting to notice it, but you kinda have to coach yourself out of it. 

Austin Gray: Your sister, how old's your sister? She's millennial or gen? Gen Z. 18. She's 18. Yeah. Okay. So she's yeah, you gives you the best. That's hilarious. So what else would you coach people up about being on camera?

Jacob Neffendorf: If you're gonna try to follow a script, which we provide all of our clients with a script you have to get used to staring at the camera and just doing one line at a time. A lot of people will try to memorize the whole script, and then they just send me a bunch of bloopers, which are really funny. But basically just don't even try to memorize it. You're gonna waste too much time and you're gonna get frustrated. It's like you have your script pulled up here.  You look at the camera and you're like, you have one line. Okay, I wanna talk about price guide, training and planning. So pricing guides, training and planning. I do a little weight and I look at the next line and it's like.  budget review and update. And then when I go to edit it, which you anyone can edit it super easily on the phone, you can. And there's actually softwares that do it for you. You can edit that little pause between the lines out and as long as you looked at the camera for half a millisecond before and after, it will look like there was never a pause there.

That's a huge tip. And then sunglasses is a hack if you're outside. 'cause then you don't really have to worry about where your eyes are. But then just trying to be as natural as possible. Like people can tell when you're trying to be a little too scripted. So you already told me that you took the scripts and tweaked it to your natural language and the way people, want to hear things, which is totally perfect, right? So you wanna be talking about something the way you actually would. And you would actually talk about, because I've tried this before where I tried to have a script made and try to read it and it's brutal because it's not stuff that I would normally say or how I would normally say it versus like last night I made a video and it was something I really was passionate about and knew a lot about.

It's if you talk about what you actually know about, you're not gonna feel weird and you're not gonna feel fake 'cause it's something you actually know about that you could talk about for hours. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. Where is the balance though, of think there has to be a, there has to be a balance of getting. The specific information that one your customers need to hear, but two, that the algorithm needs to show it to your ideal customers. And I think that's the balance I try to fight, right? Like whenever you send scripts over to me, I'm like, okay, sweet. I know all about that. And I could likely go, I could likely go on a three minute rant about that piece. So one thing I've been trying recently and Christian Ruff from Uncommon Elite, whenever I went out to his event challenged me with this, he's Hey, intro three bullet points, conclusion. 

Jacob Neffendorf: That's what I was just about to say. You the balance is you talk about the meat in the middle and you script heavily the hook and the CTA. And that's that 'cause that's what grabs 'em. And then that's what makes 'em take the action. And then in between you can talk about all your cool stuff that you know how to talk about.

Austin Gray: Yeah. And that piece of advice, 'cause I actually, as much as I love the podcast, as much as I love doing one-on-one conversations, and I shared this at the Uncommon Elite event, Kristen challenged us, he gave us some, I don't remember the exact challenge, but there was a group of 15, maybe 20 people there. And throughout the weekend it was, Hey, here's your, I remember what it was. Give us a five minute speech on something you know about. And that's all he gave us. When I speak in front of people, in person, I get really nervous. And I shared that with the group and it was really cool 'cause a bunch of people gave feedback on it.

And Christian said, look, this is gonna help you moving forward. Anytime you speak in front of people, anytime you're delivering any sort of message, be clear and concise. Do exactly what you just said. You're referring to what he was referring to as the intro, as the hook. Script the hook so that you get the straight, the information straight across. Have three main bullet points, kind of riff on those three bullet points, and then summarize the three main bullet points with a CTA. Yep. Can you define CTA for people who don't know what that means? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, it actually stands for call to action. But basically what do you want them to do next? So like for my ads I want them to go to our landing page and learn more about us. 'cause I don't want to, I couldn't talk to every single person who was interested in our ads and not everybody interested in our ads is necessarily qualified or ready. So I want them to learn more about us and get more perspective on where they're at in their business before versus for a land clearing company. What you want them to do next is tell you more about their project so that you can prioritize them on the list of opportunities you have on who you're going to pursue next. To answer his question, yes, a person talking cannot be beat. Right now we're seeing 10 to $15 cost per lead versus 30 to $40 cost per lead for anything besides talking to the camera a hundred percent.

Austin Gray: So I believe that this question is showing for the live stream. If for whatever reason it's not, are you seeing better CTR, which means click through rate. And I'd like you to define that in a second, Jacob. But are you seeing better CTR with a person talking to the camera or voiceover footage? Maybe I missed you talking about that. And so this was my specific question to you yesterday. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes, a hundred percent. Yeah. Click through rate is basically like the rate of people seeing the ad versus actually clicking on it and taking that next step that you want. So basically. The ratio of people who just went past it versus people who interacted with it. So if you, they're different Google versus Facebook, but overall it's similar. 

Austin Gray: Interesting. Okay. So for Facebook, if your ad was shown a hundred times, the click through rate would be how many people clicked on the percentage? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. It comes out as a percentage, yeah. So it would be how many people actually interacted with it versus didn't

‍Austin Gray: By interacted,  is that defined as an actual click on the ad or is that defined as a stop, like while they're scrolling for X amount of 

Jacob Neffendorf: no. Yeah, that would actually be like clicking on it, like touching, opening, opening it up. 

Austin Gray: So if your ad was shown a hundred times and 10 people clicked on it, your click through rate would be10%. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. To keep it simple. Yes. That Facebook measures so many things like eye movement. 

Austin Gray: And Did you sit on it for over a second? Did you watch the video?

Jacob Neffendorf:  Between three to 30 seconds, there's nine seconds. There's a ton of variables and values there, but yeah, to keep it nice and simple, yes. 

Austin Gray: As a media buyer, what do you look at on click through rate? What do you like to see and what's a good click through rate?

Jacob Neffendorf:  To be honest, I do not pay attention too closely to this unless I'm really trying to see, is this video better than this video? But in our industry, like it's honestly pretty challenging. To get someone to make this video. So we don't usually have a whole lot of different variables to test on their videos besides like the hook. And so I'm more so looking at frequency, which means how, like, how often people are seeing it. So frequency above two is what I'm looking for. It starts to get down to one or maybe even lower. Usually then the ad is fatiguing is what we call it. But as long as, as long as the click through rate's anywhere in that, one to five, one to 5% is fine. Below 1% I may be a little worried about it. But you gotta think like Facebook is gonna be sharing this. Like we want to usually an audience of like 750,000 to a million to run an ad on Facebook. And that you're probably gonna show this too. Tens of thousand people a day, and especially initially, so 1% thousand people clicking on it.

If after 10,000 people see it, it's good. But there's a lot of variables there. But I, to be honest, I, but through rate is more of a down the road optimization type metric for me to look at. But if somebody's getting $10 leads and the leads are legit people who want these services and own land, I'm not even gonna be thinking about looking at CTR yet.

Austin Gray: I appreciate you sharing that. And the most important thing is, are you getting leads that are converting to jobs? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. 

Austin Gray: I guess I should rephrase it. Are you booking jobs from these leads? That's the most important thing. And what size are those jobs and how much did you spend? If we spent 3000 this month on ads and you booked one $35,000 job, I don't know, Bodhi, are you still on here? Bodhi tells me all the time he is I love working with land clearing and excavation guys. 'cause like you book one job and it pays for the SEO fee service. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The ROI, or I guess the, technically the ROAS, the return on ad spend that I'm looking for is usually 10 x and above. Once you're optimized, not like a week in, you're 60, 90 days in I would love to see that our average return on investment from money spent with us and ad spend is seven x and anybody who does over 10 x is just better at sales. They're not getting better results from us. 

Austin Gray: Okay, cool.

‍Jacob Neffendorf: I was just telling Austin about a gentleman who executed this on the weekend of his launch and we launched on a Friday and he had 17 leads by Tuesday morning, and now he has 40 leads for the month of July. And he started like the second week of July or something. So it's two weeks. He's got 40 leads and he spent a couple hundred dollars. And if you have a horrible close rate,  he could have landed the worst case scenario if he landed one or two jobs off of that with $400 spent wild return. So basically the thing is there, don't overthink it. 

Austin Gray: That's such a good word right there. And I even felt like I was slow this week getting you guys content. Where I'm at right now, like I am challenging myself to focus because it's so easy to get distracted. And you have focused specifically on land clearing. Once you cut all the rest of the noise, how much easier was it to grow your business?

Jacob Neffendorf: I don't wanna say easy, but definitely simpler. And again, it benefits you and your customer. I got better for my clients because I focused on that only. And so I have more data, more testing, more results across the board because I was doing it more, figuring out what worked more and learning more and more about how to better serve that customer.

Austin Gray: Let's talk platform focus. You are running ads on Facebook, but I also see you creating some YouTube content, which is great. 'cause like your YouTube content is so hyper targeted. That is just good stuff for land clearing operators. You're not gonna get millions of views on that video. But the views you do get are so hyper targeted. Let's talk a little bit about YouTube if you're open to it. 'cause I do have thoughts on my YouTube strategy as well. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I will just say the benefit of that is I have hundreds of views, right? Very low, but have gotten like 20 clients from those YouTube ads. And I've even had guys say they knew they weren't ready to work with me. Followed what we talked about in the YouTube videos, landed jobs, and now had capital and experience and then wanted to work with me. You could translate that over to any industry. You're just building trust and value and that's going to come full circle.

Austin Gray: I think what it comes down to is that even if you give people everything, like for me, right? Like you could teach me how to go run this stuff and you could probably coach me up in a week on, hey, here, go operate this. But like I just, I don't have the time to be managing this, right? I'm paying you because you're the expert. I would rather you and your team sit and look at the data and tell me what we need to do. And so it's really interesting whenever you go down the YouTube rabbit hole, 'cause it's almost like you can give away all the sauce and help people actually go implement themselves. And then when they get to a certain level, it's yeah, I'll happily pay you your fee to manage this for me so that I can focus on becoming the expert at the service that I'm delivering. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Exactly. And I think that's one thing that contractors blue collar industry in general could be better at, especially land clearing guys, is a lot of people don't want to talk about certain things of their business, especially pricing or how they charge or what things cost. They don't necessarily want to talk about that for whatever reason, but when you do, it's not like somebody's gonna go out there and start a business now or do it themselves, but you're building trust and authority and then your right clients are going to see that and want to hire you because of that, because you're more open and honest and they can fully understand the service without you having to come to their house and high level people, the type of clients you want, they're going to appreciate that. 

Austin Gray: What do you see as the biggest opportunity in that very specialized content on YouTube for contractors? You already mentioned price, pricing. You wanna dive deep.

Jacob Neffendorf: Yeah. Everybody's scared to talk about pricing for whatever reason. And you're losing trust with your clients. If you are afraid to give out. And that doesn't mean you have to put, that's another reason why I don't think you should price by day rate or hourly, but you don't have to put that out there. But you need to have ranges. And we actually have a super cool tool that we've built for this called the price guide estimator that we have specialized for land clearing now. But you can allow your clients to. Go through this like little assessment survey and then get an estimate, range, estimate, not quote, estimate range at the end of it, based on their inputs. So then it's not you telling them the price. They've, it's the kiosk at Taco Bell you put all this stuff in there and then it's a hundred dollars for Taco Bell, and you're like, what the heck? But you chose those things so then you can go back and be like, okay, I don't need the cinnamon sticks, I don't need the large drink, I don't need the burrito.

And so it's the same thing oh, I want my land cleared. And then you get an estimate and it's a hundred thousand dollars and you're like, oh, crap. Like I, I can't spend that. Nope. Sorry. Have a good day. Versus you build this out on your own on the website and you're like, I have a hundred acres. I wanna get some stuff clear. Okay, here's the estimate range, 75 to a hundred thousand. And you're like, oh, okay. I can't afford that. But look, I have an edit button. Okay. What if I just get like 10 acres clear? Oh, that's $10,000. Yeah, I could do that. Boom. But we found that you, when you have pricing on your website, you get 300% increase in leads.

Because 75% of people in 2025 prefer a self-service option to get through 80% of the sales process. This is the same reason why car dealerships have prices on the website for the cars. And anytime you see like the call for price, you probably scroll right past, ah, I don't care. I wanna know the price. And so this is huge and if you are willing to share price and talk about pro. Talk about how you get to your price and why it's important costs. You can avoid a lot of, you're gonna get more leads, you're gonna build more trust with your audience, but then you can avoid objections at the end and having to explain yourself and why you cost more than the dude with a skid steer charge in a thousand dollars a day, who has no insurance, and it's gonna come in and mess up your property. You don't have to explain that later because you explained it all on the front end. That was a rant. Sorry. 

Austin Gray: Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is a heavily searched term correct call. 

Jacob Neffendorf: We target on all Google ad campaigns cost to clear land. Yeah. Heavily search term. I remember some of that from my initial SEO research. Alright. Yeah. And 90% of land clear websites do not have costs. They do not have pricing. They do not have frequently asked questions about their pricing. And you're losing people because of that. 

Austin Gray: Cool, cool. Let's talk offline. 'cause I would love to I would love to just pay you guys to, to help me with that on the website to get that on there. I know we're not doing SEO with you guys 'cause I told you bodie's on here. Bodie does all of our SEO they do a great job. Yeah, y'all are ranking well. But yeah, I would love to get your feedback there and what we need to do to optimize for that. Jacob, is there any other, anything else that you'd like to share with the listeners here? Before we wrap this up, Jacob, anything else you wanna add? I'm just gonna plug my video I posted last night. That is just very informative, not very entertaining, but I believe the, a lot of people, one of our frequently asked questions is, how much should we spend on ads?

‍Jacob Neffendorf: And I reframed the question as, how much can you spend? Meaning you need to know how much you can spend, what you can get out of it, and how you can how you can increase that, right? So if getting bottlenecks outta the way, like I put a dollar in, I get four out. What's stopping me from putting 10 in and getting 40 out. Is it my capacity to do jobs? Is it my sales ability? Is it my money? And 'cause who wouldn't we're in this business to, to get money, right? We all, we obviously have other goals, freedom, we legacy family, stuff like that. But it all sort of ties back to revenue. And so what a lot of guys do is they think about the ad spend as a budget, when you should think about it as an investment. And you can only think about it as an investment. If,  you put in a dollar to get five out. That's it. It's a long one. And I go very into detail on numbers and then real accounts that are spending more than the average person spends. And then I point out and show that we practice what we preach. I'm not gonna tell you to spend thousands on the ads and not do it myself. For our company, we spend between 25 and $30,000 a month on ads ourself.

And I'm constantly asking myself, what's stopping me from being able to spend more and just reframing my mindset. Like when I've gone to some of these conferences and I think, oh, I'm spending a lot on ads and I meet people that are spending a million a month on ads.  There is so much more out there. We just have to figure out what's stopping us. And that's in my opinion, that's the business owner. I should be thinking about every day is what is my constraint right now from being able to grow, put all the other stuff aside, focus on that thing, get it outta the way and just know there's gonna be another one. And that's the game. 

Austin Gray: You've remind me you went to acquisition.com Hormozi's event, and did you do one-on-one session with him? 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes. Yep. 

Austin Gray: And so a lot of this is driven by what you learned there? 

Jacob Neffendorf: A hundred percent, yeah. And that's another thing, practicing what I preach, like he puts out free content that is valuable. That's what I'm trying to do. And then he has a paid service for those people who get to the point who are ready for that. And I do the same thing for my audience. I try, obviously I don't do it as good as him, but then. When people are ready and they come to me, I don't go to them, they come to me. Then I ask for money in exchange for my service. And I also give people money in exchange for their service. And so I paid him a ton of money to tell me what I needed to do and I took that advice and by taking that advice, I've made more money. And so I try to do the same thing for my people. You pay me money to tell you how to make more money and when you act on it, you do.

Austin Gray: Love it. Price range estimation was a golden nugget. Thank you Jacob. Yeah, thanks for chiming in. Yes, sir. Absolutely. We'll have to do these more often, Jacob. Yeah, if we can talk a lot, and especially as we jump into the fire mitigation thing, it'll be really interesting. Yeah. There's a whole opportunity here in the west. So if you are in the Western United States, that's what we've been doing here at Bearclaw. We run ads to the res at the residential level for land clearing, for fire mitigation. It's a different game. I posted something to X yesterday and even one of my friends, Ty, was like. He's the stump guy on x he was asking, you guys are doing trees now. It's I guess I haven't shared enough about the journey, but like our model is completely different than what they do in Midwest or the south or the southeast. So we have one of those bandit track chippers. If any of you guys have any questions about fire mitigation, 'cause we do see a big opportunity here in the west. My goal here is to dominate Colorado. And if any of you or in any other states, I would love to help you out. So reach out on X if you have any questions about the actual fire mitigation model.

'cause it's different than what you guys do with just Skidsteers or the big barrow mulcher. We leverage many excavators with grapples track chippers, and then we have our skid steer with a forestry mulcher. But. I think a lot of people think in their mind the forestry mulcher does the bulk of the work. But in all reality, it's less than 10% of the work on our jobs. So happy to do a different session specifically on fire mitigation, if that's interesting to you guys. Also Jacob would love to do more of these specific to actually running ads and the paid acquisition funnel, the sales and marketing side of getting clients in the door for all land clearing businesses throughout the US. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: Cool. Let's go cook breakfast for the kids and you have a good rest of your day. Jacob, thanks for joining. 

Jacob Neffendorf: Yes, sir. Thank you. It's awesome. 

Austin Gray: All right.

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