Beyond the mower: How data-driven marketing scales your lawn care business

Marcus Piazzisi: VIRRL system essentially goes in and says, I wanna stop spending money on Thumbtack, and I want to move that to a channel that's performing high. Maybe Yelp is the best channel. It's the lowest cost per lead. It has the highest conversion rate. We very quickly see the landscape and say, I'm gonna make this adjustment.

Marcus Piazzisi: Now, we don't just do that one time either. That evaluation process is happening on a daily, weekly basis, and so we're constantly looking at where are the channels that have the lease competition in this particular month. Which channels have the best leads in this particular month? And by the way, it does change.

Marcus Piazzisi: Every one of them changes their algorithm. Everyone is making updates, they're doing different markets separately. So there's so many pieces of information that are changing. There's so many like processes are changing that in our opinion, if you are not able to adapt quickly, you are not gonna get the return.

Paul Jamison: Today on the program, we're gonna talk all about marketing. I have with me the CEO of VIRRL. He is an organ duck, I believe, and

Marcus Piazzisi: yes,

Paul Jamison: his name is Marcus, Piazzisi How did I do on the last name?

Marcus Piazzisi: Pretty good. Marcus Piazzisi for all that care. Yes, it's it's a tough last name for sure.

Paul Jamison: I'm a big Cleveland Browns fan and our backup quarterback's Dylan Gabriel from the Oregon Ducks.

Paul Jamison: Is he a good pick or is he gonna work out for us?

Marcus Piazzisi: The Oregon guys, they've been probably a mixed bag in the NFL, right? You got a couple guys that have done pretty well. I guess we'll see. I Oregon's fast. They got a lot of good talent, good coaching up there, so it. Sometimes translates to the NFL, but I think the guys are bigger and there's just no margin for error.

Marcus Piazzisi: I'm not like a, I played baseball, so I'm not like a football analyst by any means. So I'll I'll leave that to you guys to figure out.

Paul Jamison: Okay. You played baseball at Oregon Ducks?

Marcus Piazzisi: I did, yeah. I played center field.

Paul Jamison: Wow. I've seen their football stadium. It looks just absolutely beautiful. Just like the land

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah.

Paul Jamison: And everything, the geography around that campus.

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah. It's gorgeous there. It if you haven't been, you should go. 'cause Phil Knight just puts up another building. Every, I feel like every couple years they have, they just redid the stadium. I think they're. Redoing their indoor football practice facility as well, but they already, I think, put 200 million into a new football training center right next to the stadium.

Marcus Piazzisi: So it, it looks like this, it's like an architectural showcase at the University of Oregon. It's pretty incredible.

Paul Jamison: Yeah. They are, their uniforms are always the best for sure. How did you get from center field on a division one college baseball team to being the CEO of VIRRL? What led you out of graduating and ultimately launching a business?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah baseball obviously didn't work out. I got hurt towards the end of the year and I didn't have a great senior year, I moved back home and started serving at Chili's actually. And then took a risk on a marketing company out here in Scottsdale. I'd moved back to California.

Marcus Piazzisi: That's where I'm from. And it was just a $12 an hour, essentially social media posting job. I, that was when Facebook ads were fairly new and so I got, I got really entrenched there. I just gave it my all and started working my way up at that business. And I got the opportunity to run the Facebook advertising division for that company.

Marcus Piazzisi: And so it started out as a very small, like skunk work project and we built it into really quickly, like a million dollar business. And that was where I first cut my teeth on. Building something within an organization, but it's when you're the GM or kind of the owner of it, you, it's very similar to starting a new company, even just outside of that.

Marcus Piazzisi: So I got to create all the process, create, what is the product? What's pricing, what's the value? How do they get results out of these Facebook ads? So you are forced to ask all these questions and run the business as if it's your own. That really helped essentially live training on how am I gonna build this thing in the future.

Marcus Piazzisi: Long story short after that, it was really successful. I was there for five, six years, and then I took a job at a more traditional marketing agency. And they focused on big $200,000 websites at the time. Big brand, big Vision. They worked with some blue chip companies that you've heard of.

Marcus Piazzisi: And what they wanted was they wanted subscription revenue and more consistent revenue on the books because those websites and big projects didn't come. Often. So my task was essentially building a product that these companies could use on a monthly basis that would bring more consistency to the organization.

Marcus Piazzisi: So I built that. I started that, I got to break even about six months in, and they, the company just thought it wasn't gonna work out, and I was very confused about that. So I actually got. I actually got let go from that company and they were nice. They were, they offered me a severance and I said, I don't want the severance.

Marcus Piazzisi: I would like my business that I started building. So that essentially started VIRRL. I registered my company. A day later I built my own website and it was a very crazy, hectic time. I put all the ad budget on my personal credit card and that's essentially just kept going month after month.

Paul Jamison: Was that in California or Arizona?

Marcus Piazzisi: That was in Arizona actually. So I moved after baseball. I went to California for like maybe a year. I moved back in with my parents. I got my, I graduated, so I had nowhere really to go and I was just figuring out my life after what does a life without baseball looked like? And that was very, that was a tough time for sure.

Marcus Piazzisi: But then, yeah, I moved out to Arizona quickly after that and started that career.

Paul Jamison: Okay. And then what year did you officially launch VIRRL?

Marcus Piazzisi: VIRRL was launched in 2018.

Paul Jamison: Okay,

Marcus Piazzisi: so we'll be been

Paul Jamison: for a while.

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, we'll be seven years old. Actually, we just hit seven years this month pretty wild ride.

Paul Jamison: Congratulations. I'm curious, you've been in this industry for so long now. What are the biggest challenges for a landscaping business? A lawn care business, a fertilizer weed control business in their lead generation? What's the challenges or hurdles and obstacles that you're noticing are being made out there?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, I think from the marketing perspective, I think right now there's a lot of fancy buzzwords and fancy technologies and fan. Everyone just basically strapped AI on the end of their name and they're now intelligent. I think that what we see is they get. Distracted by a lot of those tools and they don't really work on the fundamentals.

Marcus Piazzisi: So for example, I could get you a hundred leads today, but if you don't answer the phone you have, A CSR that is having a bad day every day, and they're not cordial on the phone, they're not asking the right questions, they're not qualifying a weed. So you're essentially paying all of this money.

Marcus Piazzisi: For all of this activity and at the most critical segment in actually closing that particular deal down you're falling way short. So I think that's one. I think the other is just the nature of where technology is. In social media. There's so many different channels to go out and invest your cash on.

Marcus Piazzisi: Like a Yelp, a Thumbtack and Angie's List, they all have. Different ways in which they deliver you leads. And if you're not super informed about how all those ad algorithms work the type of bid allocation or how things are bid on within their system, you could end up spending a lot of money you without a lot of result.

Marcus Piazzisi: And then there's also. Angie, for example, I think sends when you submit a lead, I think, to four other competing businesses, thumbtack has the option to have a one-to-one, or the customer picks. Yelp is a form fill that's through their request, a quote that goes to another few businesses.

Marcus Piazzisi: So there's all these different nuances within the channel. So it's really hard for a business owner or a marketing director internally of those businesses to really make sense of all of that and normalize all of that data. So that it's judged fairly. And that's one thing that VIRRL does is we have this lead cloud that kind of normalizes all that out.

Marcus Piazzisi: But even just being able to see with a high degree of certainty where your ad dollars are going and the returns that you're getting, I think a lot of businesses really struggle with that's probably the two biggest things as far as like the ad space is concerned right now that I guess you'd call trending.

Marcus Piazzisi: Issues and they're constantly changing too. Yelp updates their, product every three months. Thumbtack, same thing. So how do you even keep up with all of this is I think, really the challenge.

Paul Jamison: You guys are known for performance driven marketing and really tracking data and that's how I got connected you guys from Simone and they're very impressed with how much you pay attention to data.

Paul Jamison: Rather just willy-nilly spending marketing money 'cause that advertising money can get devoured really quickly by everybody you just mentioned. So what performance data are you tracking and why?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, so we're tracking really the, all the lead information and chronological lead information I think is really important because if you.

Marcus Piazzisi: I think it's somewhere around eight. It takes eight touchpoints for someone to make a decision about something. And what I mean by that is they can Google you. That's one touchpoint. They go to your website, that's two touchpoint. They visit your Yelp page and check out your reviews. That's three touchpoint.

Marcus Piazzisi: So what we're finding is because there's so much information available and so many sites and ways to get it, that. People are often using five of your marketing sources before they're essentially converting. So we're tracking that whole journey to the extent that we have it. We also have indexed every single conversation from the history of VIRRL.

Marcus Piazzisi: So how are people asking for a specific landscape job or lawn care job? What words are they using? What's the best way to respond to those people? From a high degree of certainty because a thousand other people did it this way and it actually yields 5% better conversion. So we're tracking all of that.

Marcus Piazzisi: We're tracking every ad change that's made across those channels. And the biggest part isn't necessarily 'cause imagine if you just laid all the data flat and you knew exactly what to do. The biggest thing that VIRRL does is we're able to adjust that ad budget in real time before you've wasted all that allocation.

Marcus Piazzisi: So we call it flex budget at VIRRL. And what that basically means is if I have an indication, let's just say hypothetically, Thumbtack. This particular week wasn't performing. And how do I know that? Because we're directly integrated with Thumbtack. I see all the lead volume. I see all the calls. I see the budget going into it.

Marcus Piazzisi: So I have this very good sense of what Thumbtack is doing in this exact week, all the way down to this exact hour. And what we say is look, all right, we know that. Let's just say in this hypothetical situation, Thumbtack is the actual problem. I think most agencies really aren't set up to pivot that budget to the appropriate channels and they can't do it in real time.

Marcus Piazzisi: The next day, essentially. So VIRRL system essentially goes in and says. I wanna stop spending money on Thumbtack, and I wanna move that to a channel that's performing high. Maybe in this particular market, maybe Yelp is the best channel. It's the lowest cost per lead. It has the highest conversion rate.

Marcus Piazzisi: And so we very quickly see the landscape and say, I'm gonna make this adjustment. Now, we don't just do that one time either. That evaluation process is happening on a daily, weekly basis, and so we're constantly looking at. Where are the channels that have the least competition in this particular month?

Marcus Piazzisi: Which channels have the best leads in this particular month? And by the way, it does change. Every one of them changes their algorithm. Everyone is making updates, they're doing different markets separately. So for example, you can have a rollout in California and maybe not in Arizona. So how do you, there's so many pieces of.

Marcus Piazzisi: Information that are changing. There's so many, like processes are changing that in our opinion, if you are not able to adapt quickly, you are not gonna get the return. And I think that's really the whole entire name of the game in our space now. It's like, how can you find out very quick and how fast can you fix it?

Paul Jamison: So good. Can you share how call tracking tools and analytics like CallRail is a game changer for marketing?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, I think that CallRail specifically, we like, we've used CallRail since really the beginning it VIRRL. They don't just give us the call data. They give us a lot of the tags within the website.

Marcus Piazzisi: So we can put scripts on the site to get the specific keyword that they searched to get to the website or make the call. And they do a really just nice job of providing API data. We have all the transcripts indexed within our system, and that's how I can get like that linear view of, how would I respond to a landscape lead versus how I'd respond to a plumbing lead.

Marcus Piazzisi: It just works to, it's easy. And I think that for, just from the business perspective. Take CallRail out of it. If you're not tracking your calls and you're not like listening to your team, actually have these conversations with your potential prospects and customers that you are really not understanding your customer on a deep enough level.

Marcus Piazzisi: And I think you're losing out on coaching opportunities. You're losing out on the. Hey, 10 of these guys did this exact same thing and it worked out better. You should do the same. I think that CallRail just provides a really easy way to index and go back and have that data to improve overall, just like their customer experience.

Marcus Piazzisi: From the time that people come in to the time that, they've performed the service.

Paul Jamison: I'm curious, how many employees do you have over at VIRRL?

Marcus Piazzisi: We we hover around 25 to 30, 25 or full-time. We have a few contractors that we work with based on kind of the needs, but we've. We haven't really increased headcount too much because we're, our technology's filling a lot of the gaps, but a lot of the guys that we have here have been here for a long time.

Marcus Piazzisi: And so yeah, we have around 25, 30 ish. Give or take,

Paul Jamison: I grew up playing baseball, so I think as a center fielder. On most teams, shortstop and center fielders seem to be naturally leaders of the team. And now you're leading a team of 25 or more pe people depending on how you're counting. So I'm curious what leadership tips you can share with us in the lawn care landscaping industry because it's so hard to build a team.

Paul Jamison: 'cause nobody really wants to go out and mow grass or, I'm not sure how it is in Arizona, but I here in Florida,

Marcus Piazzisi: it's pretty hot.

Paul Jamison: It's really hard to motivate. A human being to go work out here in the Florida heat.

Marcus Piazzisi: So

Paul Jamison: what have you seen on all those teams you've played on and everything you're learning as a leader of your business as a CEO?

Paul Jamison: What have you learned about leadership throughout the years and how do you build a good team in business? Yeah, I think that's great. That's a loaded question. I think, ultimately what it comes down to is. Are are you the calm in the storm? Are you the, can you, do you understand your business a from all of those different levels, right?

Marcus Piazzisi: So are, do you put yourself in that scenario where a guy wants to go cut the lawn in a hundred degrees? Have you put yourself in that scenario? Like, how would you. How would you create that job so that it would be more attractive? So is it a money thing? Is it a vehicle thing? Like maybe they would mow the lawn if you had great vehicles with great AC and they got, good amount of break time.

Marcus Piazzisi: So I think really putting yourselves in your team's shoes, not from a superficial standpoint. 'cause I think. The tendency is, you get big companies and the big CEO is oh, I really feel bad for you, or, oh, I understand your problem. And they really don't. I think if you take the time to really understand each person's role and what motivates them, I think that goes a long way.

Marcus Piazzisi: And I think the uncomfortable piece too, and I've had to deal with this 'cause I'm. I'm a doer by nature, so I have to feel like I've typed the keys and I've made the spreadsheets to feel productive. And I think leadership, one of the hardest things is just understanding that you cannot do it all and you have to trust your team to get all of the work done.

Marcus Piazzisi: If you're gonna scale, I maybe could. Run VIRRL at a million dollars a year, $2 million a year if I did every little piece, right? But now VIRRL is a $25 million organization. I have to, I don't have the option to do all the work. I have to rely on my people. And I think the other piece is just trust and consistency, right?

Marcus Piazzisi: I think when your team genuinely feels that you care about them and you want to see them succeed, that. They go out and they conquer the world for you, and they come back and they are happy and fulfilled in their job. And I guess the last thing I'll say is you are gonna make mistakes and you're not gonna make every decision perfect as the leader.

Marcus Piazzisi: I I use the thumb here like I am, I've made a lot of mistakes in business and because I've made those mistakes VIRRL as successful as it is. And so I. As an owner, you can tend to ruminate on a, what the team is gonna think about this decision like B, am I making the right decision? And you might tend to analyze that decision way too much versus just make the decision and see what happens and, with your best information and best foot forward.

Marcus Piazzisi: And I think that, in, in my experience, like some of that has handicapped me as I grow the business. It's like I could have just made this decision, it would've worked out. And versus. Kicking myself or making a huge mountain out of a molehill. Often. So I think just having good resolve and trusting your gut is also something that, that I would advise.

Paul Jamison: And Marcus, you mentioned you've made many big mistakes, but you've learned from them in business. Do you mind sharing one of those mistakes and then actually the le the valuable lesson you learned from that mistake and how you're different leader today because of it?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of more of a tactical example is like in the beginning of VIRRL, we didn't really have a ton of organization around billing or like a clear process around when VIRRL was gonna extend credit and to who.

Marcus Piazzisi: And what I mean by credit is not like a financing product. It's like a net 30 invoice or how is VIRRL gonna get paid for the marketing that we do? Back in the day, VIRRL was not as big. Cashflow was something that we monitored very closely. And we had a number of clients that either went bankrupt.

Marcus Piazzisi: We didn't really know what to do with that. We had some clients that didn't, for whatever reason, like their cards declined. It took long to get paid. And so I think what we learned just as a team from some of that stuff is a, we vet our clients a little bit better than we did before.

Marcus Piazzisi: I think companies tend to want to accept every single client, and obviously to grow you more or less have to be a little bit more lenient with that selection process, but we now view. Our clients is more of a partnership and like a right fit 'cause VIRRL is, we're not the cheap, we're not the most expensive, but we're also not the cheapest.

Marcus Piazzisi: And because we know that our products work and that they have value, but at the beginning of VIRRL, we were I won't say desperate, but like when you're growing a startup you'll do a lot of projects and you'll work with a lot of people that you wouldn't normally work with. And so I think that over time bio's just been finding other, like similar businesses that have the same values that we do and do business how we do.

Marcus Piazzisi: And that's been, a huge benefit to us really in the long game. 'cause we don't have any of those, I guess call them billing issues anymore. So just one tactical example of stuff like that. And I guess I'll give you like the kind of intangible one is the people are the most important piece of your business.

Marcus Piazzisi: And I think that. Understanding and addressing and making really clear goals with all of your leaders and the people that report to them. I think the more numbers you have, even if you need to like change the goal or reevaluate the goal every quarter, I think that having, even if the most basic goal of Hey, you need to grow.

Marcus Piazzisi: The business by 20 x accounts or 20 accounts, for example, just having the number and having the accountability to the number. It seems really simple, but it's, it gives both sides breathing room to where as a leader, you're not micromanaging them every day. Hey, did you get to the 20? What number are we at?

Marcus Piazzisi: It gives me a record of. What they're doing, and it gives them clear guidance on, on their goals. Whereas before, in a startup, I'll admit, a lot of people wore a lot of different hats. And I think that ultimately hurts the company long term because you can never, it's harder to find the answer to the problem when there's not clear guidelines and rails on who is doing what, who's responsible for what.

Paul Jamison: We have a couple, two minutes left. Can I, do you have time for one more question?

Marcus Piazzisi: Sure. Yeah.

Paul Jamison: Okay. If you started a lawn care business today, how would you market the lawn care business as we're, on the tail end of 2025 going into 2026? What's the core marketing drivers that you would do for, mo you're mowing grass you're putting in mulch basic, lawn care business.

Paul Jamison: How would you market that in today's day and age?

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah. So if I was starting from scratch I'm just buying my first truck type of deal, I actually would. So your website needs to just be clean. It just needs to be simple. But you need an easy way for them to submit a lead, an easy way for them to find information out about you.

Marcus Piazzisi: It doesn't need to be like a Mona Lisa website when you're starting. It just needs to be, choose clarity over bells and whistles and website animations, I think just good pictures of lawns you've worked on and the work that you've done and a very clean process on your site is a good starting place as far as all the lead channels because money would be essentially tight at a startup phase, I would actually lean towards all of the channels that allow you to pay cost per lead.

Marcus Piazzisi: And what I mean by that is. If I do Google AdWords, I can spend $10,000 and not get one lead because I'm buying clicks to a website. I would recommend, especially starting out companies like Thumbtack Angie, even Yelp, they're a little bit like Google from the standpoint of there's not a guaranteed lead per se.

Marcus Piazzisi: You're not like paying, I'll pay a hundred dollars for this. Exact lead, but their algorithm and their system generates pretty good leads when you put money on. So I focus on, alright, I have to have a lead, so how much is that lead gonna cost me? And I'm not gonna get charged on like a Thumbtack or an Angie unless they produce a lead or at least an opportunity for a lead versus me spending, $10,000 on Google and hoping my website converts them.

Marcus Piazzisi: LSA is also another good channel. It's, I'm not sure it's super efficient for landscape. We've seen some like budget fulfillment issues with that particular industry. But again, you're not being penalized because if you put $500 on Google LSA and they don't convert you a lead, you still have $500 on Google, LSA, you have not lost your money.

Marcus Piazzisi: So I'd probably start there. And then as far as like systems and getting organized within your own company? I'd probably choose a CRM like a ServiceTitan. They are, I'm not sure their exact pricing anymore. I'd say they're probably in the middle of the road as far as cost for a startup business.

Marcus Piazzisi: But you need something like. Don't tell me that you're gonna manage your business on an Excel sheet. I think that we've had clients start that way. We've convinced them to get CRMs and they're all the better for it and their revenue goes up and they have people that can now log in and they have an actual like basic system.

Marcus Piazzisi: But you'd be amazed on how many people start their business on an Excel sheet manually copying lead information from Thumbtack, typing it into Excel. Some guy's calling it. In this day and age, like the customer just demands a way better experience and you're not gonna be able to provide that with an Excel sheet.

Marcus Piazzisi: So whatever it costs, you need a CRM. And the earlier that you start and really make it a part of your process, the less headache it's gonna be for you towards the end. And then the last thing I'll say is your customer is first. Like you're starting out. It's a brand new business. You need every single customer.

Marcus Piazzisi: To rave about you, you need every single customer to only call you and to call you and make you make it worth their while to call you back for all of their needs. And so you are gonna work your ass off in the beginning and you should expect to, lawn care business like you should expect to leave every house perfect.

Marcus Piazzisi: And really reinforce that with any employees that you may hire. 'Cause word of mouth is gonna be, all these lead channels I mentioned, word of mouth is the least expensive and the best lead that you can ever get. So if you're not nurturing your customers and having that white glove experience every single time, I think you're gonna struggle.

Paul Jamison: Very well said, Marcus. I appreciate your time today and thanks again to Simone from Call Real. She's been hyping you up for months. Tell me great on the podcast. I appreciate the insights that you shared today. And thank you. It's nice meeting you. I sent you an invite on LinkedIn so hopefully we can connect.

Paul Jamison: Oh,

Marcus Piazzisi: great.

Paul Jamison: Cool. You have a great day in Arizona and I appreciate your time, Marcus.

Marcus Piazzisi: Yeah, thanks so much man. I appreciate it. Enjoyed it.

Paul Jamison: Alright. Nice meeting you. Have a good one.

Marcus Piazzisi: You too. Take care.

Paul Jamison: Bye.