Hello! Welcome to the AGM Community! Better known as Artificial Grass Marketing Skool! So much has changed in just 1 year! WOW. The goal of this community is to provide an open-sourced environment that helps Artificial Grass Business Owners & Operators with Educational Content, Operational Support and Digital Marketing Strategies. Here is what you need to know when Posting Comments or Creating a Post This content will continue to grow and evolve over time. >>> About The Content in the Classroom that is Locked <<< The idea here is that we all help each other out and contribute as one big community. Right now the focus is on Marketing because that is my skill. Over time this will change as we add more content. However, we have Gamified this community. To access locked content, your Avatar needs to earn points. To earn points, folks need to like your Posts or Comments. The more that happens, the more points you earn. 1 Like is = to 1 Point. Each point you earn moves your Avatar to Level Up. This incentivizes Members to contribute quality content that the community likes and comments on, earning your Avatar more points. Each time you receive likes and comments, you will notice the number change on your Avatar. Take a look at my Avatar image below, notice the number? Everyone starts at Level 1. To unlock more content all you need to do is post, get likes and or comment to earn points and gain access to locked content. In order to kick things off, please comment below introducing yourself. Also, when you see someone new join, give them a like and welcome them. Its the easiest way to earn points right out of the gate! Let us know: 1. Your name (Company if you feel like it) 2. How long have you been involved with artificial grass? 3. What content do you want to see in the AGM Community?

Hi I'm Troy. Along with Tim Fullerton, my business partner, we own and operate 2 Brands inside the turf industry based in Northern California. The first business, Heavenly Greens, is a 22 year old 100% installation company. At its peak we managed 17 different, 3-4 man installation crews including vehicles and equipment, we also manage 15 sales reps and over 70 employee's. Back in 2015, I started our retail brand Artificial Turf Express, which we run out of the same building. Both Tim and myself started as Sales Reps for Heavenly Greens back in 2006, a little over a decade later, in 2018, we had the opportunity to buy the business from its Founder, Dan Theis. Today, these businesses have generated over $300MM in sales. If there is one thing that running these kinds of numbers has taught us, it's that you absolutely need to have a system in place to manage all the moving parts. We manage each of these businesses with a digital marketing stack, or multiple platforms integrated into one big operating system. The Heavenly Greens marketing stack consists of; JivoChat (for live chat into our own 4-member Call Center) > Invoca (call tracking and recording) > Hubspot (content and marketing automation) > Salesforce (CRM, sales management, production & installation scheduling) while Artificial Turf Express uses the CRM/Marketing AGM App and Square for our Point of Sale system. Without a system, its nearly impossible to manage the business efficiently. I know this first hand, because that's how I used to feel before I understood how all this stuff works. Inside the Free Course AGM's Guide to Digital Marketing, located inside the Classroom Tab above, we will show you the systems and content strategies we’ve successfully deployed to drive leads, educate prospects and to ultimately create more qualified buyers for Heavenly Greens.

The biggest shift I've seen most small business owners have to adapt to, is moving off the spreadsheet, whiteboard or yellow pad and to finally accept the fact that they need to create a marketing system. Another major issue I see is committing what I call “Random Acts of Marketing”, which means they turn on and off their marketing in sporadic rhythms. They turn it on, get leads and then stop. I understand and there are lots of reasons for this. Seasonality of their business, production capabilities or company bandwidth. Here's the truth, the single most powerful action a local business owner can take is committing to advertising all year long. Why? Because when you leverage paid advertising your reaching tire kickers, researchers and potential buyers that may not be ready for an appointment, but could ready to enter at the Top, Middle or Bottom of your marketing funnels. When you develop a monthly content publishing cycle you can actually fortify and create an active growing list of prospects you will nurture into buyers using marketing automation. You can also answer many of the questions that the non-committed “tire kickers” (the group of non-buyers just doing research) and give them opportunities to actively engage in your content. Once we understand the dynamics of this, we found that we could still market in the slow months, when sales actually fell off and still benefit from the folks in “research mode” who would search out our solutions and then opt-in to our content offers which gave us a way to stay connected with them. Over time I began to see the true value of developing “Marketing Systems” rather than looking at my marketing as just paying for and buying leads. A prospect, custom branded to Heavenly Greens, thru our content was much more than a lead. Properly nurtured, a high percentage of these folks would eventually become buyers.