One winter, doing the postmortem on the previous mowing season, I added up every expense tied to running the lawn business — gas, insurance, office costs, advertising, all of it — and divided it across the number of jobs we’d done.
It cost roughly eight dollars just to pull up to a property. Before a single blade of grass got cut. Before any labor went into the job at all.
That number changed how I think about pricing permanently. If it costs nearly ten dollars just to show up, the price has to clear that bar, cover labor, cover the rest of overhead, and still leave something resembling a livable wage. Miss that math and you can be fully booked, working constantly, and still quietly losing money until the bank account tells you the truth at the end of the season.
Someone once told me — I genuinely don’t remember who, but it stuck — that unless you know your numbers, you don’t know your business. That’s the whole idea behind this post.
The metric everyone chases and almost nobody should
Follower count feels good to watch climb. It’s validating. It feels like proof the content is landing and the business is becoming a real presence.
It’s also, on its own, close to meaningless.
There was a stretch of years when local businesses bought their way to ten or twenty thousand followers, partly for vanity and partly because crossing certain thresholds used to unlock platform features smaller accounts didn’t get. To a casual observer those accounts look successful. To anyone who actually understands the numbers, a post with twenty thousand followers and twelve likes gives the whole thing away — that’s not a real, engaged audience, that’s a graveyard of bot accounts existing to inflate a number.
The real cost isn’t even the wasted money. It’s what happens when a potential customer notices part of your presence is fake. Once that doubt creeps in, they start wondering what else might not be real, and that’s expensive in a business built entirely on trust.
A real comparison from my own two businesses
Here’s a data point that surprised me when I actually looked at it honestly. I’ve put real, sustained effort into growing the follower base for one of my businesses, and it’s paid off — real engagement, real local presence, real business that traces back to that work. My other business has fewer than a thousand followers, because I simply haven’t put the same energy into growing it.
And yet that smaller account has generated new customer inquiries that came directly from people who found and engaged with its content.
If follower count were actually the metric that mattered, that shouldn’t happen. But it does, because the people following and engaging with the smaller account are real, local, and genuinely interested — not a number padded by bots that will never need what you sell. A thousand real local followers outperforms ten thousand purchased ones, every time it actually counts.
The only question that matters
For a service business covering a defined area, the real test of whether your marketing is working comes down to something almost embarrassingly simple: is the phone ringing? Are emails coming in?
That’s the metric underneath every other metric. Impressions, reach, engagement rate, follower growth — all of it exists to help diagnose why the phone is or isn’t ringing. None of it is the actual goal.
One of the more consistently effective things I spend money on, across both businesses, is a modest monthly budget on hyperlocal advertising targeted at the specific neighborhoods I want more work in. I’ve also run broader social media ad campaigns that generated plenty of clicks and a respectable bump in followers — and produced far fewer actual paying clients than the smaller, hyperlocal spend, year after year. That comparison alone tells you something about where limited marketing dollars should actually go.
When the goal isn’t an immediate phone call
Not every business gets an instant-need search the way lawn care does. Some products and services live in the back of someone’s mind — relevant, but not urgent — until a specific moment makes them suddenly relevant. In that situation, the marketing goal isn’t an immediate call. It’s making sure that when someone finally does search, your business is positioned to be found.
That’s where consistent local search visibility earns its keep. National competitors are usually fighting over major metro search terms and not bothering with the smaller towns and bedroom communities surrounding them. A modest, consistent investment in local search presence can turn those searches into real prospects without a single dollar spent trying to outbid a company with a national ad budget.
The five-minute check that beats a dashboard
If I only had five minutes a week to check on marketing performance, I wouldn’t spend it staring at analytics. I’d spend it thanking a new customer and asking how they found us.
That one question, asked genuinely, tells you more than any dashboard. People are almost always happy to answer it, and the information — Nextdoor, a Google search, a neighbor’s recommendation, a specific post they remembered — is data you can’t get any other way. Compare that to scrolling through impression counts that tell you how many people technically saw something with no way to connect that to an actual outcome.
Find where your real customers actually are. Connect with them in ways that are specific and local. Measure whether the phone rings. Everything else is noise dressed up as data.
This is one idea from Chapter 22 of Constitutional Marketing — there are twenty-two more like it, built around the fifteen minutes you’ve already got. Read more about the book →