1-1 business coaching from a millionaire

My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we do over $50 million a year mowing grass. Today we're doing a turnaround for Justin from local fountain experts that has a very specialized service fixing fountains. It's very hard to find employees and he's having a hard time being able to grow the business without him having to do all the work himself. Let's see if we can simplify the services, make it more profitable and actually allow him to grow. Because you're getting leads literally from the entire country. Let's go. So I kind of already got a little bit of the synopsis and 104,000 revenue last year. Looks like you got a couple part time employees, you got the wife and four kiddos. Let's go. And so, yeah, maybe kind of, let's just jump right into it. Kind of what I can help with and we'll go from there.

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is, and everyone kind of told me this, that you kind of get to a point with a business where it's like, it's easy, easy, easy, easy in the sense of like, you're not. Your time isn't 1,000% taken. It's only, you know, 100% taken. But we've kind of hit the one year mark and I feel good about what we did in the first year. We worked really hard. We kind of. I hit the ground running with, you know, doing door to door as much as possible. It's kind of different for me because not everybody's got a fountain, but so we did pretty well. You know, month one, we were able to do $4,000 in jobs in the first month of the business existing before there was even a website or anything. So I was happy about that and we did good. But I'm kind of trying to figure out what's the next. The next things I need to be focusing on going forward into year two.

Obviously, like, because I have a wife and kids, you know, I left the job, a perfectly good paying job to do this on my own. I was doing the same thing just for somebody else, and I left to go do it myself. And it's like I have no choice but to make it successful so I can provide for my family. And my long term goal with it is just to never touch a fountain ever again. That's kind of my, my long term goal. I love it, but it's just kind of like, that's the thing, like get to a point where I don't have to be the one being Destroyed in the Florida sun every single day. But yeah, so that's, that's kind of where we're at. So it's just trying to figure out what I need to be focusing on to make, make the goal for the next year and continue to grow the business. Make it so that the guys I have working for me can become full time, you know, all that kind of fun stuff, you know.

Okay, cool. And so right now, out of the revenue that you're making, let's just call it, let's call it 100 grand or so. What percentage of that is installs versus like maintenance and repairs.

So.

I can tell you the.

If I can find where I saved it.

So maintenance we're doing about. As of right now we're doing. I can't find where I saved it. But we have about. As of right now we have about $37,000 in maintenance on our books for a year. If you calculate the repetitive. Because it's not always the same frequency. Every fountain is kind of different, but so we have about $37,000 in maintenance that we should earn if we got no other accounts obviously between now and a year from now. That's how much we can get in a year right now as far as installs like right now. And it's not on the books because we haven't invoiced it yet. But we have a $34,000 project that we are probably 90% complete with a completed. It's a custom fountain build for.

For a new house build that these ladies are building. It's already built and everything to finish some last minute.

So we do big installs like that. So that's a big number. But it's only one time if that makes sense. Hard to like gauge the frequency of that. But we have.

So one time I was looking at it, I have like reoccurring customers are my highest revenue source right now. And that's not necessarily the maintenance. But we, a lot of our maintenance accountants break all the time. Doesn't matter what you do, they're just going to break all the time. So it's a great reoccurring. We're always fixing something and we have like a couple large accounts that you know, pretty much every month we're fixing something. We've got a big one downtown that's we're about to start a $20,000 paint job on to re. Waterproof it, which is awesome. It's kind of like. But it's like a one time project. But it's a reoccurring customer, if that makes sense.

So, yeah, I would say, like, from what I remember, and of course, I can't find where I saved it, the number one.

Source of income right now is projects, not maintenance.

I think right now we've done.

We've done.

And I really wish I could find it.

Is it safe to say you probably think about 60% of revenue comes from installs, 40% or so from maintenance. And then maintenance kind of pays the bills, though, because it's recurring.

Yeah, yeah, it does. Although actually. Well, I would say that, like our projects, like our. Our repairs. It depends on if you're considering repairs, the reoccurring revenue. If you are, then, yes, I would say that is true. If you're. If you're putting that in the project category, then projects definitely are our majority on that because we did. We did, I want to say about 30,000 in maintenance last year, in the past year, but we invoiced $104,000, so. Got it. It's. It's obviously. But if you're considering the customers that we're going back for, then. Then, yeah, that would be reoccurring revenue on that.

And then what's the kind of, like, rough percentage of. If you install a fountain, I'm assuming the vast majority of people then sign up for some sort of recurring maintenance?

I would. It's about 50%. About 50% of people that we do like. And people don't reach out to us for maintenance because nobody ever considers maintenance a thing until I tell them it's a thing. Usually they reach out because their fountain is either filled with, you know, a thick layer of algae and gunk and nastiness or. Or something's broken and they need it repaired. And then usually I tell them, hey, the best way to prevent this from happening again or, you know, whatever it is, you know, is maintenance. And we'll try to sell it, but we have about a 50% success rate on that, about a 90% on the commercial accounts, which are the really big money makers. Like our. We have our biggest one. We invoice somewhere around $600 a month to them. They're downtown. It's a big public one here in this. In Jacksonville, downtown. And so that's like a big one for us. But, yeah, the. The. Yeah, no, that's it. Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought. You're good.

And then. Okay, that makes sense. And so right now, where's most of your leads come from? I know you said you started with door to door. What's where's most of these coming just from like organically on your website and social media or kind of. Where do most leads?

Paid ads. Paid ads. We, we went right off the bat. My, my, My dad actually, as his kind of way of helping the business get started, he's been paying for a service to do it all for us. So we really, it hasn't come out of the business books yet, which has been a huge blessing. But he's, he's paid for them to make us a whole new website to get everything going. SEO and paid ads. And right now the SEO is doing so good that. And nobody does what I do. So we literally get calls from all over the country. In Canada, they obviously can't service, but SEO is doing really paid ads outside of our region. But I literally got four leads from outside of my state just yesterday. Wow. Which is awesome. It's really cool to see. It's annoying having it in my inbox because I'm like, I can't help you. But it's great because nobody does what we do. And we have only one real competitor in the entire nation. And they are in my same city and I used to work for them. But we're, we're so paid ads are our number one. They bring in. I want to say it's like, it's like 70% of our, our leads that converted are from the website. It's expensive cost per lead. Like we're, it's about like a hundred dollars per lead essentially. But I'm closing. I want to say it's like 70% of them. Sorry, that's not true. 60% of them. We're closing on our, on our overall, our leads. Mailers have been our second best. Most of our customers are in gated neighborhoods, so door to door is really challenging. And even if you get in those neighborhoods, they don't want you knocking on their door. So usually we'll just drive. Once we get in the neighborhood, we'll drive around, write down their addresses and then just start. Put them on a mail list and start sending them mailers. So basically my philosophy has kind of been if I have leads coming in from Google and it's keeping me busy, then that's what I focus on. But if I have any open time, then I switch to focusing on mailers because that's my number two. And then if I run out this time or things to do with that, then I go back to door to door. But I've really only had to do door to door, like total of two times in The. In the past year.

Okay, very cool. Yeah. So I pull up your website.

Your.

This right here.

Okay, one second. Local fountain expert.

That's the website.

Then I was just wondering how much are they gonna. Going to spend. Make you spend after he's done paying for it.

So we're, it's, it's expensive. I don't remember the exact number. I want to say that we're doing about 1500 towards in our ad spend.

Right now. And.

It'S, I think another 1500 for the continued SEO work that they're doing, which is pretty expensive. They've done a great job. I definitely would have had to do it myself if it wasn't for my dad offering to pay for it. And he hasn't given me it. He hasn't said that he's gonna stop it soon. So. And I asked him just the other day and he, he was like, he's like, no, we're, he's like, well, we'll follow it because they started in October. So he said when we get to the end of the first year, we'll look at all the data, make sure that it's paying for itself, which it really hasn't yet, if I had to guess. But if it's going to pay for itself, then he'll, he'll switch it over to the business.

Okay. All right, cool. Yeah, like, it doesn't matter. Like if you're paying three grand. Well, I guess 1500, but even, let's just call it three grand. If we're paying 30% of revenue going to any sort of advertising, half of that being ad spend, half of being website stuff, that's, that's going to be a tough pill to swallow. Even if you scale, like, it just gets, it gets really difficult. But like, one thing I would say is like, on the website, I don't know how much influence you can help, like, giving you know what to do. Like, there's no mention of your service area. And so I'm not surprised that you're getting leads from literally all over the country because there's literally no mention besides down here at the bottom, your service area.

Way at the bottom. Yeah.

Like I would say, like the first thing I would be doing right here, like outdoor fountain installation and repair in Jacksonville, Florida, or wherever you're servicing.

Yeah.

Or maybe up in the header up here or something. Because that would prevent all the leads randomly coming in, right? Yeah. And so if it's a frustration, that's something you could probably do to fix it pretty quickly. Because really the only Other way is to look at the area code of the phone number, and a lot of people just won't do it because you rank really well for local. Like, that word will rank really well. Like local expert will crush, basically.

It's why I chose the name. Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay. And then. So I think the thing I'm. I'm a little bit afraid of is that you don't have control of your lead source. Right. And, like, if we had to pay for it, it would become instantly unprofitable. Because if we're paying, you know, three grand a month off, if we have to end up paying for that and we're making a hundred grand, like, that's 30%. Even if we can grow 150,000, if we're paying, you know, even still, like, what is it, 15 or 20% of revenue out to that, that's going to be pretty significant.

So have you gone any. Like, more like B2B stuff, like contacting other people that install fountains, like landscapers, and trying to go in that route.

So I've. I've done a little bit. It's one of the things on my list of things that I want to pursue more.

I've done a couple where I've had landscaper reach out, saying, hey, like, we just had one. Then this past month, they call me. They say, hey, we're in a pinch, an emergency. We agreed to build this custom fountain for these people, and we have no idea what we're doing. Please help. And I try just for the relationship build. I went out of my way to try to go out there and help them, and it was a weird one, and it was not what I would have done ideally, but them and their customer agreed on this design. So I kind of just put it together for them. But, yeah, so I did that. And I talk to. Every time I drive by somebody who's doing landscaping or some other work somewhere in a neighborhood or a business, I always go and I say hi, and I always introduce myself, give my business card as much as possible.

But I haven't done any direct, you know, conversations. We do have one person that I work with. He actually makes, like, tiered concrete fountains in the area. And he and I have talked a lot, and I've done business for him, and he's done business for me. He's just not fantastic at any communicating. He's. He's definitely gonna cap himself just because he. Like, I have literally probably $5,000 worth of estimates that I'm waiting on answer from him for, and he Is literally hasn't responded to me in a week. So it's, it's like, you know, but that's it. But it's on my list to pursue more. I should say.

Yeah, like, I think that's where I'd be going. Like more B2B stuff. Because going after consumers with paid ads is extremely expensive when it's in a market like this. From what I have seen the same thing with like very detailed hardscapers. I've seen the same thing happen where the cost per lead gets so prohibitive that you have to charge an astronomical amount of money to make, make sense of buying leads from consumers. But if you go to the people who are doing all the work, it might be beneficial. And what I would recommend, if I went to the landscapers, I'd be saying, hey, look, I wouldn't even approach you, like, hey, I'm your fountain guy. I'd be approaching it, hey, I install fountains. Do you do landscaping? Because I would love for you to come do the landscaping around the fountains that I build. And then if you have that approach, everyone's going to want to do business with you because they're coming from the perspective of like, oh, he's going to bring work to me. And there might be jobs where you actually do sub out or you just ask a landscaper to come plant trees or whatever, but really it's a matter of like getting your name in there on their radar is going to come a whole lot more like much faster if you come from the approach of I'm looking for a landscaper to do landscaping around the, the, the fountains that I build. Right?

Yeah.

Because every single day they're doing landscaping and if you can get in with them and the landscape architects, then you can just crush. And so even like landscape architects, do you usually do the design yourself or do you get a design from an architect?

It depends. We have a lot of like pre built fountains that we install. So there's not really a design. They kind of just pick it out and then we bring it and put it in for them.

The one, the big one that we're working on, they actually had a design when they were doing it's a custom built home, you know, huge house. You know, when they had part of their design, they said, hey, we want a fountain in the back courtyard. And they had their, their guys put it in their rendering. So they just sent me a rendering and I matched that. So it really depends. I don't have like that part down to a science yet of how like what's the best way to do that yet.

Yeah, I think it really comes down to what you want to build. Like if you want to build much more of like a custom build, very high end, you know, fountain company, I would really go B2B. I'd be going to architects. Like so there's a guy in California that I know that does this specifically and his pawns like they start $100,000. And yeah, you know, every celebrity will fly him all over the country just to get him his opinion on stuff. And he said the way he build is literally go to every single architect within 100 miles and be like, hey, I, I can install. You know, you bring the, you bring your landscape architect designs to me and I'll make it happen. And so I would really go the B2B route. If you're trying to installations, the, the recurring side comes after the repair. Either after the repair or after the install. Yeah, right. Because then they actually know things break and they're like. Or they built a rapport with you on the, in the install and they're like, you have to educate them on the process of maintenance. But going after maintenance on fountains is tough because people like you say don't reach out until something's broken.

No. Yeah, they don't know.

And so like if I was building a website, I'd be building around installs and repairs because the maintenance part people don't even think about. And when you're doing the repair or you're doing the install, you then figure out maintenance on that side of things and try to sell that recurring package. But I would really go B2B and I would really try to go after like I'd go on LinkedIn and I'd just scrub every single landscape designer and leverage every single landscape architect. I would then also search like in Jacksonville there's a big, big hardscaping and lawn care landscaping companies. I'd get a hundred of them and I just doing again those people, I'd be going more like, hey, would you be willing to do the landscaping on my fountains? If they say yes, you're like, fantastic, I'm going to keep you if you ever need a fountains on your designs. I know a lot of people don't install those themselves. I'm happy to be your guy, just let me know. That would be like an easy way in. But on like the architects that do the, the massive builds, it definitely be worth building that relationship with them. And LinkedIn is a great source if they actually have like high end firms that do the designs because, man, I've seen some fountain guys, like, to your point, there's just not a lot of them. And like, the ones that know what they're doing, people literally are willing to pay whatever because there's no one else to do it.

Yeah, yeah. And that's one thing, like, I've gotten from your videos recently is just with, like, charging more. Because our first year, I realized I just wasn't charging enough. And I raised my prices. I had cash helpers, and I was adding, you know, 25 profit on what I was paying them, and I just started charging per hour, the same as what I charge for me per hour. And my acceptance ratio didn't change at all, like, just a little bit. But, yeah, people will pay. If they want it, they'll pay for it. It's just really. They want it. That's just really. It comes down to you. Yeah.

Like on a $500 repair or something like that. Like, it's so difficult to pay customer acquisition costs and then make sense of that. And so I just went full into installations, building those relationships, and then every single person that.