$1.4M Landscaping Business Hits ROCK BOTTOM

Where's the money? We're really scratching our heads at this point. Like, why is it not coming in?

Knowing that you can rely on that person, building confidence, and over time it becomes more of a personal relationship.

But he's just the least professional dude I've ever met.

Today we're in Washington visiting Dylan with Urban Roots Landscaping.

Right now he's that very hybrid position.

I'm working 10 to 15 hours a day. What's going on here?

Now I'm interrupting the gym 4 times and now the gym's annoyed that he's just jumping there and doing himself. That's not happening.

You say something like that, like, that's what you're getting now. Wow, congratulations.

With a 7.5% profit margin in our main location, that's not something I'm super proud of.

Now, if Dylan looks familiar, several years ago we interviewed him when he hit $200,000 in annual revenue. You can't keep doing what you're doing from where you're currently at. You can't double in size. A couple years ago, we met back up with Dylan when he was doing about $800,000 in annual revenue.

This last year and a half or so, off in terms of the family dynamic.

I think even if you looked at it like that, it's like, hey, if we just kept doing what we're doing, we're gonna get to a million.

What kills me is when my daughter comes up to me and says, "Daddy, why are you so busy?" Now today, doing $1.4 million in revenue. Offering to have you guys back is just because it's been so valuable, for sure.

He hasn't solidified his general managers yet at his first two locations. He's going through a divorce.

I am struggling, probably a little bit depressed.

So I don't think it's a good time to be starting a third location. One of the number one reasons why like Augusta location's closed down is divorce. The problem is the trajectory of this business is really bad.

I guess entrepreneurship for everybody, the clear answer is no.

We got too much going on, we got too much to fix.

This is the business Turnaround Show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care and HomeWorks software. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. These are all very small tweaks. Very small.

Somebody just comes in, is like, hey, here's this thing that's going to solve a bunch of your problems that you had no clue existed. It's a relief.

In order for that to work, it has to be clean. Our goal is to give Dylan a strategy to turn around the company in the next 6 weeks. Dylan Moye finishing his 5th year in business, currently operating 2 locations. Second location is in year 2. He's exploring potential for a 3rd location expansion.

Good morning, guys. How's everybody feeling? Good, good.

My name is Dylan Moye. I'm the owner of Urban Roots Landscaping. Grew this, uh, this location to about $1 million in revenue, and now it's a big milestone for me to know that I've handed the reins off to Michael. We have enough systems in place to where Michael is able to pretty much handle this location on his own.

Reminder, 5 o'clock, uh, especially when we're running behind on the route like this, this week. I know a lot of it's equipment related and that kind of thing, but keep working. If we can get one more house done and it pushes us a little bit past, that's totally fine. When we're behind, we don't want to be leaving early, uh, if we're not completely finished, right?

The second location last year did $320,000 in its first year. Awesome.

Now our big learning curve is just, um, how do we start to grow, uh, duplicate what we've done here? Not, not just duplicate it, but improve on it as well. But at the same time, work with someone overseas who's in a VA office position for us. I'm finding that every stage is, um, challenging in its own way.

This is the main location, which still did $1 million in revenue, but 7% margin. And so that used to be over 20%. When I was with him like a year and a half or 2 years ago, that was over 20%.

Uh, and I was kind of starting to do the math and I was like, yeah, I know what we're aiming for profit-wise. And I was like, we— why did we fall so short to begin with?

Uh, but again, with a 7.5% profit margin in our main location, that's not something I'm super proud of.

That's a dip, you know? And it just felt like we did all these other things to try to avoid that. We tried to make up for that admin bloat and it just— it didn't work.

Yeah, it's tough when he's going through a divorce because you could be building this thing and then it's just gonna get ripped to shreds. In court, and it's like very much a possibility. Even the fact that his general manager is concerned about it shows that like it's affecting the business.

So as you know, I'm going through a separation, so Federal Way Shop is operating out of my ex's house right now.

The goal was to get Federal Way up to 8 guys running kind of, but now it's kind of up in the air because we just don't know what's going on with the finances and how things are going to be impacted by Dylan's separation there.

That'll also affect my ability to grow the company at either a faster or slower rate.

Unfortunately, the personal Equipment issues always become business issues, and that's, I think, what we're actually gonna face. So I'm definitely putting the brakes on third location. I can tell you right up front, brakes hardcore. If your first location, when you start a second location, drops from, I think it was like 20% margin down to 7% margin because you're distracted with a second location, don't go start a third one. Fix the problems.

Other notes today, when we have equipment issues, A, make sure that we report it, but if it's something that we can fix on the spot, please let us know. I know we've had that issue with T4. Ash, did you still need to get out for trailer training? Yeah, is there not a spare on this?

Chains are low, you got 'em crossed. That's right. You can't do much of, I mean you can. Yeah, I mean, it's not gonna hit the ground. Yeah, it should be fine.

Connect the spare before you guys leave just in case.

And then when you're driving, always keep the windows down just in case, you know, you wanna always be able to hear what's going on with the truck and trailer, so. But yeah, should be good to go.

Just make sure you guys hook up that spare to the outside before you head out. Did Federal Way take both our spares? I think Federal Way took them because they were on the side of the building. Alright, let me make sure everything's signed out properly.

I never want to start another location until the first one is stabilized with a GM in place. And I think this is the part, the thing that he did is he jumped in this next location before that first GM was solidified. Because when we were there, he was still in the daily operations all the time. It was nowhere close to being stabilized without him being there.

Who is this now? Another truck coming back in. There's normally not this much activity. In the morning. They've had to jump this truck like 3 or 4 times. This is the newest truck we've gotten. And when they got it, the trailer, it wasn't ready for a trailer. It wasn't ready for certain things. And I've gotten it all ready.

And then, well, come to find out, that piece that I chopped off that's now on the ground someplace was missing a part.

So I had to go and replace it. 2 hours between the lawn mower going out and them actually finishing for the day. Yeah, that is a day killer right there.

Is this your first solo route or? Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool.

One of the blowers yesterday It won't let you control the throttle.

It stays all the way up once you turn it on.

Okay, so what I want you to do with stuff like that, just do a quick little video, like a 30-second video displaying what's wrong, send it to the broken equipment group. That way on shop work day we can just go through and knock that kind of stuff out. So, okay, yeah, it's all good. I think we need to go a little bit over more the, the how the guys need to report to us shop time because they're going to end up missing out on pay if they can't. Oh yeah. So, I mean, you can't rely on your memory the whole time to be reporting little repairs that they're doing.

So I'm gonna guess he doesn't have a lot of debt because that's always how he's been, very conservative financially. The problem is the trajectory of this business is really bad. You've gone from 20% margin down to 7% margin, and you're not really growing. He's taking his eye off the ball with the second location, thinking about third location, and more importantly, the personal stuff. And so I just— I need to get through the personal stuff. And keep, maintain the business. Keep his general manager. I also would imagine that first GM dropped out in part because Dylan took his eye off the ball and stopped managing him well because of all the personal drama. So the personal drama always becomes business drama, unfortunately.

Party has arrived.

How's it going, man?

Good to see ya.

Good to see you, brother. This is the shop. You moved that, it used to be this way.

Yeah, we just had to reorganize a little bit, make some more space.

Okay. First off, do we know when the divorce is going to be done?

So tentatively, the end of the year.

Yeah, because that's kind of the cloud over our head in a way, right?

Yes, exactly. The goal would just be I'm— she's off the business. I mean, I do all the operations and she has the house she's in. I'm in the rental that I've moved into now. So we're hoping for a relatively clean split that way. And when we kind of balance everything out between the equity on the houses, it just kind of comes out to where I need to slide her more money to her. So. The dust hasn't settled in terms of like, you know, division of assets, things like that. So we'll see how that plays out in the future.

As long as we make this clean as possible, that's probably the most— the best thing to optimize for this year.

Yeah.

Like, as much as I want to be like, 30 location and like GM stuff, it's like we just need to make sure that that doesn't become like a huge problem for the business.

Yeah.

And as long as that just can be clean and that's one part, and then the whole other aspect of just trying to focus on the business while you're going through is like a whole nother Yeah, department. I'm just trying to prevent the worst case, which is that comes 2 years, gets messy, and then there's equity stuff and valuation. Like, you don't want to go there.

Yeah.

So as clean as we can possibly make that, the better. But I know it's tough.

Yeah, I was struggling, probably a little bit depressed, but at the same time you just become stronger from it. So it's kind of like if we have to slow down growth for a year or 2, it is what it is. I'll build back up.

From your perspective right now, Why did this location go from 25% profit to 7%?

I don't know. Maybe part inflation. I know we're a bit bloated with admin overhead, I think, because to be honest, there's kind of like a little bit of writing on the wall with performance with our old GM.

It sounds though, and this is what I think the pressure, I think, on you is, you're probably going to lose Charlie if he doesn't have more on him.

Charlie ultimately ended up leaving late August, early September.

Potentially looking to start my own location. That's kind of what I was doing before I even came here, just doing my own jobs and everything. But, um, I don't know what the future holds for us, so hopefully, uh, Dylan can grow more the company and see if there's more, more opportunity for me to grow here. So it's not just completing the jobs, but like taking care of all the equipment, the trucks and everything, because that's kind of where all the money starts, starts to leak out of the bucket, right? It's like when you start losing some hand tools and and a bunch of little things like that.

Charlie left, and I think the last quarter ended up being a lot more profitable than it should have been because of that.

So I was kind of like trying to plan ahead. I'm like, all right, so how can I get Michael to slide into GM position? So we got someone from the Philippines, the VA, to hopefully take as much off of his plate as possible so he can slide into sales and estimates and everything. So, but there's an overlap. We had AJ, which is a guy from the Philippines, Charlie, myself, and Michael all as admin..

It's very tempting to take admin and start delegating it to people on the other side of the country, other side of the world, or to AI, and forgetting that there's other costs associated with admin if you start delegating it too soon.

I was doing a lot of all the roles. GM salary, office manager salary, plus a VA for a quarter of the year, essentially. It's a big chunk of money.

If you don't have systems in place, if you don't have the right software, if you don't have the right training and processes, when you delegate it to a VA in the Philippines, you don't have systems in place, it's gonna mean you just rechecking their work every single day. And now you end up just checking their work instead of doing the work yourself. So be very careful about taking low-cost opportunities to cut down expenses when it comes to admin. I would rather actually spend more on my admin and prevent me from having to micromanage them or double-check all their work. Got it. So it was like you, the office manager, AJ also kind of doing office-related things.

It was more like AJ was, wasn't really having much of an impact at that point. We're just training, getting him in the emails. I mean, it was a few months of just like, you know, when you hire someone new, it's— I don't want to say it's a burden, but it's the, the training burden is there.

The biggest challenge I think with it is that he had no industry experience when he got here. He had never known anything about seed, sod, grass, ordering material. Just, he's learning a totally new industry. When I took over the office, it was like I trained all winter. To take over the office. AJ very much was like trained on the job.

The bigger story there is like us learning how to train someone overseas, not so much of like AJ's ability to do the job.

So now what's the structure look like? So do we still have the two locations?

Yeah. Yeah. So the other location is based out of my ex's house right now. So the two-car garage over there. So since the last time I talked to Mike, we did start the second location and I was trying to keep expenses low for the second location. And that's why I was running it out of our our house over there on the just a little 2-car garage we have. So we just finished our first year for Federal Way location, and this is our— we're now in our 6th year for this Tacoma location. So we have 5 guys in the field we're booking for right now. Last year I think we're between 3 to 4 guys, so we're slowly growing over there. By wintertime I definitely want to be out of that spot, closer up north, more towards Federal Way.

And so are you the GM at this one location or both?

Yes, so I GM here. I also do a lot of the office stuff for the second location. So I'm getting my hands in a little bit of everything.

Is there a GM there right now or not?

I'm the GM for the other location. I'm doing all the sales. So Michael and I kind of tag team this location a little bit. I would describe my role as more of what a true GM looks like because I have delegated P4P time cards. I'm glad to never do those again, hopefully. So he does the Federal Way and Tacoma time cards. And that was one of the conversations I wanted to have with you is like some of the challenges we're having with what to delegate. P4P seems to be kind of the hardest because Michael can see all the moving parts. He knows all the crew members. He knows the nuances of like they did shop work here and we got to do all that. So to me, that seems almost like an impossible task to, to delegate to someone overseas, right? We've been reluctant to delegate P4P. So Michael kind of takes on P4P for both locations. Michael's probably 30% office, 70% GM. I would love him to be more like a full GM and then get as much on AJ's plate or another office person's plate. Now I know we're talking about like, hey, do we go into a third location? I kind of imagine that evolving to be— I want my general managers to not have to be super computer savvy and super office savvy. I want them to be able to sell and run a crew, right? But right now he's that very hybrid position, so he's really stretched right now.

I'm doing essentially 95% of the old GM's job plus 30% of my old job. I'm doing 125% of a job. What's going on here?

And he's doing a good job with it, but it's just like not everyone's going to have the 4 or whatever years of experience he has under his belt seeing the systems. He's kind of like very efficient, more than most GMs could be, I think.

Right now I'm working 10 to 15 hours a day. I'm in there about 30% of the office work still. And at first it made sense, like, oh yeah, he doesn't know how to do that and I've been doing it for years. That's fine. And then we hit spring rush and I was like, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be.

So where do you see the constraint? Like, why is the business where it's at now and what do you want it to change? We did like $1.3, $1.4 last year between the two locations. This year, assuming this location stays at $1 million, that one's probably going to grow to $600,000, $550,000, maybe $550,000. Right. And so, so what's, what's the thing you're kind of trying to solve for right now?

How to overcome our attrition rate on the route. How to get to that capacity that we're looking for and raise prices. And our close rate's sitting at roughly 35%.

So like, and that was blended across everything.

Yeah, I think blended across everything. It's pretty close between the maintenance and the one-time projects.

How much of revenue right now is like one-off projects versus the recurring stuff?

About 50/50 right now.

That's one of the questions I had for you too, because like I know I know you talk a lot about getting to capacity, raising prices, and kind of doing all that. And that's what we've wanted to do. And for us, our capacity, we wanted it to be at 3 maintenance trucks and then 1 project truck. To me, that's the sweet spot, like 75% maintenance recurring revenue. We just like stalled out on our maintenance clients. It's like we got to 2 trucks and our attrition rate is just like the churn. We can't keep up with it. So just staying at 2 trucks, and that was pretty much all last year. We're kind of tracking for that this year. So it's like we're reluctant to raise prices on maintenance clients because we haven't reached that 3 truck capacity, and it's like, we don't want to lose a bunch of clients and then go down to like 1.75 trucks or something. So that's just my reluctance is to, to go too much into the profit mode before we build it out.

As I see it, when I look at the business as a whole, there's the cloud that we need to get it through the year, which is like get through the divorce without tearing the business apart. The 4L framework shares the 4 reasons why every home service business stops growing. Either a lack of liquidity, cash in the bank, a lack of leads, a lack of labor, or a lack of leadership. Whether that's a check we gotta write, if we need to go into some debt, I know you're extremely conservative financially, so like, I trust you 100% on that part, if you have to take some debt on, but we just don't wanna mess everything up. And the hardest part is gonna be just honestly keeping your head in the game for the next 12 months. That's like going to be the hardest part. And so I think as long as for us to know like, hey, there's gonna be weeks where you don't wanna be here, and there's gonna be days you're like super fired up, It's just going to be that way. One of the number one reasons why like Augusta locations closed down is divorce. And it's not necessarily when it starts, it's the year of back and forth and ups and downs. Eventually it's like, ah, forget this. No, no.

Yeah.

And so I just want to prevent that at all costs.

Yeah.

And so I would say if you run up against that wall, back up and just play defense.

Okay.

That is, we don't need to keep growing. We don't need to get a 70% close rate. Back up for a minute and just get through this year. Even if we have a flat revenue year, I don't think it's a bad thing to take this year and just make sure that is optimized for instead of like, we're going to grow. Like, I'm not going to come in here here and you're like, all right, second location to $800,000, like throw in the profit. We're not doing that.

I was reviewing my notes from Mike's book, the Copy and Paste Millionaire, and he's kind of talking about the benchmarks before starting a new location. And one of them was like, hey, let's make sure your first location or your main location is solid and secure. And that's part of the reason why we reached out, was because we only hit like 7.5% profits last year for this location, which is kind of like the hub, right? It's like this should be the copy and paste for all the other locations. So I don't want to keep copying and pasting if it's not you know, solid.

Trying to open a third location when we're not as profitable as we want to be here just kind of makes me like, mm, we're jumping the gun a little. Maybe we got too much going on. We got too much to fix. You can't copy and paste something that isn't working.

At the end of the day, Dylan has his first location doing $1 million in revenue. If we can just optimize it and make it 20, 25% profitable, that's a great model that he can copy and paste. And the principles that Dylan has used over the past year to start a second location is everything we talk about in the Copy and Paste Millionaire book. If you'd like me to send a copy of the Copy and Paste Millionaire book to you, go down the description and click the link. From a profitability perspective, we're fine. Yeah, like it's not 911 status. We don't— we're not like in the hole cash-wise.

Okay.

And so we just need to protect what we got this year and then think about expansion next year. I think there's a lot of ways to optimize things though. And so when I look at the admin side, the first thing I'm thinking about is like the reason it's hard to go into profit mode is because you have so— you only have 50% of revenue is recurring. There's not really a problem with liquidity until that divorce is cleaned up. I can't say that for sure, but right now there's not a problem. The biggest problem I see in Urban Roots Landscaping is the fact that their leads are coming for a whole bunch of one-time projects and they're booking up their spring rush with a bunch of one-time jobs instead of focusing on recurring revenue. That they can build out their maintenance and be able to have a much more sustainable profit margin throughout the rest of the year.

The big goals for me, I guess, as we continue to talk, is like how to redefine the role— roles between Michael and AJ, get as much onto another office person's plate and off the GM plate, and just build out my maintenance route. Like, for 2 years now, I've been like, man, if I can get like 3 maintenance trucks and raise prices Literally recurring revenue is everything. That's what I'm learning. It simplifies things. Less in-person estimates, less moving parts, less dump trailers. My life is 100 times better if I can get that third truck, raise prices, and then go to profit mode. But we have just stalled out.

Yeah, like you always have churn. So what's happened is you have grown just organically from new leads coming in, and then you've hit this point of like now new customers equate churning customers and you always plateau. Yeah. And so that's when sometimes like being able to gas it on ads is helpful because the only way to do it is either increase new number of customers or decrease the amount of customers leaving. If there's customers leaving because of bad quality, then trickles down to the GM is spending time on admin tasks instead of operations. When we look at sales, operations, and admin, the lowest leverage task being admin, Michael's spending so much time doing those things and rechecking the work that his VA is doing on the admin side, he's failing on the operation side. When a GM starts spending so much time on admin, what actually ends up falling apart is the training, the team, there's churn now, you don't have time for one-on-ones. Like, have you done one-on-ones with— do you do one-on-ones with them much or not?

We tried to.

Okay.

We really, we set up calendar events to do initial 2, 4, and 6 week reviews.

That's—

and then we found that Oh, we're in spring rush. I've got 6 new guys. I'm just going to have to do reviews as needed. If you're doing okay, you're not getting one.

One-on-ones, we see about a 20-30% increase in efficiency. Just Command Center, because we track every second. So it's really easy for us to see it when they do a one-on-one. We just say there's immediate tick up in efficiency and simply because they're brought back into like, why am I here? What can I do to improve? Where, where are areas of weakness? Where is a strength? I've given feedback to my managers. My manager's given feedback to me. Like, I'm on track. I'm a— let's go. They in turn start to work more efficiently. They help the guys that are just getting started. They're better trainers. Like, it just trickles down. But it stems from a GM doing admin tasks. Most of his time should be focused with his team in operations, doing the work. That is making sure they have everything they need for equipment, training, recruiting, hiring, and most importantly, doing one-on-one meetings. Those one-on-ones is the fundamental foundation to be able to have high quality control make sure the team is trained up and make sure that we don't have callbacks and yellow slips and a whole bunch of negative reviews. And that all comes back down to operations. And right now he's getting distracted with admin. A lot of this, these are downstream effects though, of like the biggest, for example, if you're having these projects being scheduled like this during the spring rush, it causes like now everyone's working overtime. One person drops out and we're like all scrambling. If that same thing happens in August when there's not like the grass isn't growing, projects are like, you just fly through projects. They're so efficient. That's where you make so much money. And so I think a lot of this just comes down to scheduling and like being like, we're not scheduling these projects at all during these months. And it's hard to say, cause like we statistically do not have enough budget hours for our crew.

Yes. That's my big fear. I've always known in the back of my head, like I should block some of this time off, but I'm like, we're only 3 weeks booked out. If I cut off these projects, we're literally not going to have work for the guys. But again, I haven't pumped money into marketing and gotten the right kind of leads.

And even, even, even if you didn't put money in marketing, just focus attention on it, allowing you to get back to the customers faster, like drive-bys instead of being 24 hours are now done within an hour. Like, yeah, this starts to happen when just we're focused on it, right? The crew starts to be more efficient. Your churn goes down because they're not making dumb mistakes because they were trained correctly on just mowing, not doing a paver patio for 3 weeks. They're demoralized on it. So a lot of it just trickled down. I know it's like very small tweaks, but something like having the quotes for mowing off your plate 100%. If someone freaks out and they want to meet with you in person and it's on your website, you don't want to lose a customer.

Yeah.

AJ can also use this over the phone. He can just literally measure the property using the dots, give them the price. You never have to touch it. Realistically, I don't want to even go on the offensive this year. I really want to play defense.

Yeah.

And allow you to be able to get your feet underneath you. And I think some of these are just like 5% and 10% cuts and little tweaks that would allow, especially you, to be a great general manager. Right now, I just want to fine-tune 5%, 10%, 15% efficiencies to make the business more profitable. I'm not trying to think about third location. I'm not thinking about how to grow to $2 million this year. Just make the business more defensible. And you make a business more defensible by increasing the profit margin. And increasing from 7% profit to 20% margin again. For the P4P part, like, I know that will be a tough one for AG to handle. Like, you just got to keep asking yourself, like, how could we just not have to do this manually? Whether it be putting things on the schedule, like, P4P is always a visit, they clock in and out. So we have, like, if it's zero budget hours, P4P team knows, use clock time. If it's budget hours, use budget hours. So if it says sharpen blades and it has 0.4 budget hours and 0.6 clock hours, we're using 0.4. That's the budget hours. That's what's been assigned. If it says zero budget hours and it says 0.6, we're gonna use 0.6. Okay, because now the general manager has made the decision that just pay them whatever it takes them in terms of time.

I end up kind of writing estimates at 9:30 because I had some major thing that took up a big chunk of my day and I just hadn't been able to write things. And then you sit there like, oh, Oh man, I just had to write 6 estimates after I got home from work. Knowing that we have a plan to train AJ a little better and take over some of this stuff, it's a relief.

So I'm sure I could probably— I need to go into, um, Service Autopilot and adjust things. I think everything is based on budget hours now, but I need to figure out the clocked hours for the shop work.

So the shop work, I've kind of already put on their list roughly how long it should take them. So each individual task does say next to it, like, how it should, like, uh, dump runs say like 1.5 budget hours per truck. Yeah, we did, you know, just right there in the list, but it's not a separate event. So are you doing—

just make the, the client, like, just put like shop, shop, whatever, put that as the address, and then we make this the client.

Okay.

So should it be like every task adds up to one amount of budgeted hours, or should we be breaking that up? Each task is an event.

Uh, if they're always done together, just keep it in one.

Okay.

But if you're like, hey, sometimes I only have them do this one part, I just do it separate.

Okay.

So are you saying like shop space being 1.5, but there's like 5 things inside of that?

Yeah.

So it's like, it adds up to, I think like 7 or 8 budgeted hours, you know, sharpen blades is like, 1 hour total because we've got like 8 mowers. They've got things like bring any broken equipment to Liquid Hardware down the street here. Dump runs is like per truck time. So we know because we are driving like 45 minutes.

Yeah, we use budget hours for those just like we would a customer.

So we just, just make the whole thing.

Yep.

That way AJ just runs the report the same way every single time.

What's an example of clocked hours then, would you say?

For— hey, Hey, it's the winter. Can you clean out the shop space here? Do X, like this laundry list of things.

So the extra stuff.

Just clock your time.

Regular.

Yeah, it's not regular.

Okay.

The regular parts is where you couldn't budget hours and you really, they can be way more efficient.

When I started, Dylan was a guy mowing lawns out of his garage. Found his ad on Indeed. I don't know if he would necessarily say this, but I think I interviewed him more than he interviewed me. I was taking notes. Notes, and I was like, all right, I think this guy might actually be able to build something.

When you have that second person, second-in-command person, if you have the right one that can give you the confidence, it's like full steam ahead, right? Michael's been extremely hardworking, uh, reliable. When that dude is sick, like, he's dispatching from his couch at home. Like, I just know I can count on him, and that's like kind of the prerequisite right there.

We want to make sure that there's nothing else to reassign before you guys get out of here. That way we don't have so much overflow. All right. If it can be prevented, let's go ahead and prevent it. Just put in the longer day.

All right, let's get it.

All right, guys, go.

Yeah, let's go. It's cool to see Michael's— Michael evolved from in the crew with just one truck, him and I, and then all the way to kind of being the office manager and then general manager and all that stuff. So that part's rewarding for sure.

And then finally, Google Ads agency. So like you could look on Upwork. You don't necessarily need an agency, so you can go to Upwork Get someone that's $80 an hour, $100 an hour. They spend a couple hours a week on your account.

Okay.

And then you say, hey, I'm gonna pause it for these months. We're not doing ads right now. That's fine. You don't need to go get an agent for $10,000. Yeah, yeah. You might pay someone $100 or $200 an hour, but they only need to work in your account a couple hours a week. Yeah. Realistically in Google.

Okay.

I'm gonna put agency/upwork. Look, if we're talking about spending $20,000 or $30,000 a year in ads and maybe $4,000 or $5,000 a year on management of those ads, Why would I have a million-dollar business owner, $1.4 million business owner, trying to figure out Google Ads? Pay someone else to do it. So many times when you've come from nothing, you start scrimping and saving every single penny, and that costs you growth in the business because you're constantly trying to save every dollar instead of just giving that dollar to someone else and then making you $10.

I haven't done a lot of research on what's, what's to be expected for that price point, you know. So when someone's like, yeah, for 3 months I can create some Facebook ads and it's $10,000, you're like, That seems high, but is it? You know, so it's good to hear. I think it was Upwork, was it, where Mike suggested. So I'm going to check that out, see if I can find a freelance guy to help me out.

And him getting an agency or freelancer to unlock Google Ads where you can get paid acquisition and be able to get the recurring customers he needs is going to be the big unlock for Urban Roots in the future.

I'll definitely try to look to partner with somebody that helps take it over, but also can kind of keep me in the loop so I'm not totally in the dark on things. So you think we should start in the direction of trying to delegate P4P to AJ then? Just get those systems in place and slowly kind of train them up on that because that's, that's kind of a time suck and that requires us getting into good habits about getting the crew into good habits. Correct. And, and yeah, that's the harder part.

It's pretty interesting because we've been able to see Dylan when he first got started as a solo operator, then as he began to figure out management at $800,000, $900,000 in revenue and now at $1.4 million. He's learning this next skill. And I like to think of it as you do the work as a solo operator, then you have to teach other people and be a great manager. That's the next skill that has to be learned.

If we're struggling with yellow slips in the field, it's really trickle down, right? So like, I know I'm very fortunate for my hardworking crew. As much as we try to improve, I always think it starts with me first.

And the part that Dylan is learning right now is the leadership part. That's the third element of how do I actually lead the organization and lead other managers? People like Michael to be able to be successful as a teacher, to be able to not have to do the work, not have to teach the work, but lead the team and the entire organization.

I guess entrepreneurship for everybody, the clear answer is no. There's a lot of stresses with business. I'm probably more stressed with a business. There's a lot of uncertainty there, but I think it's just kind of how you're wired on and what you thrive off of, you know. Like, for me, I really get excited about growing a team, and there's always something new to learn and grow and figure out. And I do like the idea of some of that pressure is good, knowing that how much effort I put in into growing a team and, and teaching and training people, it starts to pay off over time.

Getting ADs to do it is not difficult. Yeah, there's a few things I can, I can help you with on, on like how to make that happen.

It's the—

in order for that to work, it has to be clean. Okay, so for example, we only send the GM one message with, here are the 4 questions we have about yesterday's route, let us know what's up. They send us a quick voice note back. It's not like when I'm doing it throughout the day and now I'm interrupting the GM 4 times and now the GM's annoyed that he's just jumping there and do it himself. That's not happening. He gets the daily report, crew gets daily report.

Seeing how many inefficiencies that there have been to this point actually makes me feel like my job is going to become so much more manageable. It's going to be a huge relief to see all this implemented and get things where they should be.

Another thing too, like the AJ can do to help with the whole aspect of like right now you are thinking in terms of like, oh, we need more mowing customers. I also think we can sell their existing mowing customers more other recurring services. And if they sign up on Instant Mowing Quote, they can have the option to choose upsells and you can, you can customize that. But more importantly, when someone just accepts their mowing quote, I want to call them right away. And so for us, we call it like a thoughtful upsell, which is like for AJ, we made it really simple because we also have remote. So it's like, hey, if it's a mowing job, I want you selling them treatments. And if it's a— if they got cleanup, I want you to sell them bush trimming, like on an ongoing basis. If they got that, like, you got to make it really simple. Like, if they bought this, sell them this. Right now their close rate is 35%. Usually if someone's trying to grow their business, I'm trying to shoot for like 60%, 70% close rate. That gives me also the inclination that I can then raise prices down the road. At 35%, usually you would say, hey, we're at the top of the market. We can't raise prices without really collapsing the demand for our services. But before we come to that conclusion and think we can't raise prices, and we're at the top of the market and everyone else is really cheap. I want to look at the sales process because a lot of us will look at our close rate, but we won't look at is the fact that it's taking a day or 2 days to get the quote to the customer. If we could just answer the phone, give them a quote and put their card on file and put them on the schedule, we could potentially plug leaks that are currently in the sales process and be able to get our close rate back up. Does AJ do well at answering new sales calls or is he good at customer service stuff?

Everything goes to him. Him first. Then I typically don't answer if a Grasshopper call has come through to me. I use that more as like, okay, I know he's busy right now, I know he missed that call, I might have to like make sure he's been on top of all of these. But usually if I'm getting on the phone, it's like, I got a message from AJ that there's some customer service problem that's like just above him right now. It's not something he has the resources to handle, or it's like clarification about an estimate. It's, it's usually something like that. Um, but most of my phone calls that I get through the day are just like little crew problems. They don't know what to do or where to take something, or they've got like a question about a note. Um, that's like the most common thing we're getting right now is like, hey, what does this note mean? Which obviously means they need to be written differently, but that's a lot of it.

Anything related to the estimate itself, we don't have him get into the estimates. It's like, hey, we wrote it, we're going to answer. So like if you look at our WhatsApp group, so we're trying to figure out little systems and then this is where he'll tag us and say, hey, these are all the accepted estimates. I need you to audit the schedule that I put together. So it's just a lot of this going throughout the day and just trying to do this, answer crew phone calls. And then, and then write estimates.

So two things. One, we try to stay inside the CRM. So like it serves off— but he could make those into to-dos. That way you can set up automations around them and they show up on your dispatch board.

That would probably make things a lot easier. Honestly, I'm like digging through that group trying to—

and you don't know why. Because you guys don't know who you're just literally looking for your tag.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

And so it's pictures, some of those emails, some of the scheduling, it's all over the place. So what you could do make different types of to-dos. It's like there's a scheduling one, there's like urgent ones. Like we knew if you see urgent, you scroll that one, you open it up right away.

There are some things, even the technology piece that we just like, wait, Service Autopilot does that? You know, we thought we both knew Service Autopilot really well. And then we're finding like, oh, there's actually a whole other thing that we don't use ever that we could be making our lives way easier.

If you use a CRM, I don't care if it's HomeWorks or Service Autopilot Service Autopilot or any CRM, make sure you take a couple days and really fully understand all the features and the capabilities. Otherwise you're going to miss out on automations or little systems that could save you a ton of time, just like Dylan has done. And he's been inside of that software for years. Well, this is probably like the lightest 6-week plan ever.

Okay.

But the thing is, I think you're not like far off. You're just like these little tweaks. So first thing is Instant Mowing quote. Since you already have Long Career Web Design, just reach out to Tori. But you'll want to tweak it. Like, if you guys play with it for an hour, you'll get it exactly the way you want. That's the first thing.

I think the most excited I am is probably the instant quote on the website, um, and maybe getting connected with someone who will, um, help out with Google Ads.

Second thing, our goal in the next 6 weeks is to get P4P tickets handled by AJ, and that's going to probably require the same way we're talking about. Like, right now you have information all over the place, like WhatsApp You have it in, in SA. You also have like calls between team members and you. You have pictures, like it's all over the place. I always want it all in your CRM.

Not having to do P4P for 2 locations every day. Running P4P for 13 guys is a little bit time-consuming when those same guys are calling you with questions about their jobs, and it's just a lot of admin that I'm doing. That I'm not gonna have to do anymore.

This one, I know the P4P one's hard, but it's probably gonna give you 20% of your day back.

Oh yeah.

And I think that this kind of leads me into like the time blocking part for AJ. AJ should not be like, like, so if the phone rings, he needs to be on it. Like there's no reason that you should be answering a phone call or if the phone even ringing. It's like you drop everything when the phone call rings, but when the phone's not ringing, step number one, What do you do next? And if that's done, what do I do next? And so some prioritization for him would be helpful. But like, he needs to know that during certain times of the day is when he contacts you. Outside of that, it's like, unless it's a 911 status, you don't reach out.

Least excited is probably going to be trying to figure out how to delegate P4P to someone overseas. But it's a task that I think we could take on.

So not first come, first serve next spring. This is not necessarily going to be anything you change the next 6 weeks, but next next spring, we're going to look at April and May and say no projects. Meaning in March, you're trying to upsell all your database on getting their property cleanups done and saying, hey, we're going to be booked out into June. Get your March cleanup, spring cleanup done now. So you pull all that demand forward. But then when a call comes in the middle of April, we're starting to book out in June.

I mean, that first video we ever did, I was literally like with the company for like a few weeks or something before Dylan was like, hey, Hey, we're gonna do this video, are you cool with that? I was like, yeah, sure, let's go for it. But it's always a good experience. I think we definitely got the most out of this one. Can't wait for my days to get a little lighter on the admin, man.

The objective is that by that time, and when you feel like, I don't know if we're gonna be able to fill a schedule, we have got the next one, Google Ads person up and running, when you say, hey, I wanna gas it. Yeah. Let's put a couple grand in a month. Month, and if we can get $50, $60, $70 a lead even, and we can convert most of those, and they're all being dumped in instant mowing quote, and you're not overwhelmed with projects that are taking 3 weeks that no one wants to do and you're losing money on, like, that's where you can get that third truck. And then the last one is to do is an essay. I know it seems small, but this, this is a constant theme I keep seeing of like, basically he can annoy any of you, but annoys both of you at the exact same time.

Yeah.

And so you are all, all three of you are kind of doing like the same job. So if an email comes in that he can't respond to, three of you have been brought into the equation, which one person can respond back.

It's almost like the more we can keep each other separate, the better. Yes.

And that's why I would just stay with two doing to-dos and essay.

Yeah.

These are all very small tweaks. Very small.

So, so far we have not completed everything, but we've made progress on most of the to-do items that we came up with, Mike. So one of the things that we talked about was learning and teaching myself how to run Google Ads. And, you know, what we came up with was maybe hiring it out because it's been a few years now. I've been telling myself I'm going to teach, teach, teach myself. So at this point, I've just got to be realistic. So I'm hiring it out. I did connect with a gentleman on Upwork like Mike suggested. We are very close to launching those ads right now. We're also at the same time working with Lawn Care Web Design to go ahead and get some landing pages set up on the back end so we can track those ads a little bit better. So Barcat, the gentleman from Upwork. He's been working really diligently and quickly as well to try to get those up and running. He said he's really close. We're just waiting on those landing pages. And then I know we talked to Mike a little bit about being able to offer more upsell opportunities. That's something that my office manager Michael and I haven't discussed a ton since the meeting with, with Mike Andes. But another thing that we were looking at doing was getting our website all set up with the instantmowingquote.com tool that, that he built, that Mike Andes built out. And we have actually gotten that on the website.

I think the landing pages just came through today, right? Those, we just got the link so we can send those to, to the Google, our Google expert there.

But we actually did get one instant quote that was start to finish. It was because we hadn't had the Google ads set up yet. It was an organic type of thing. Someone landed on our website. Filled out the form, accepted the estimate. So that was exciting to see that we didn't need to like take the call, collect information, send an estimator out. I mean, it's— I'm really excited about the idea of once we can start driving more traffic to our website, we'll actually start to see the time savings there. Another, another task that Mike Andes suggested we do is try to delegate a bit more to AJ, who is our, our office coordinator. And Michael and I, we had kind of this mental hangup Can we even delegate the task of P4P? Because we had the luxury of Michael in the office helping out with a bunch of office work, and he saw the comings and goings of our crew every day. So naturally it just made it a little bit easier for him to fill out the time cards for P4P and run that whole system. And our fear was, man, how can we make this work remotely? So we just jumped right in. Mike Andes gave us kind of the confidence that, yes, it can be done. And then just the big thing for us was making sure our crew members were accurately clocking into our CRM. So that was part of it too, was we were guilty of not really enforcing the clocking in and out for the day, clocking into the jobs. But I don't know, Michael, would you say we're probably about 95% of the way there with the crew really being better about remembering things?

Oh yeah, the crew's definitely about there. They're fully aware that AJ has taken over. Things have definitely gotten a lot better on that front. And that said, AJ is about 99% there. I think I'm basically just watching him run it in the morning to make sure he's good to go. So he's, he's going to be let loose to just do it and start asking questions here?

Yeah, yeah. So again, we've, we've really started and I would say we're about 90, 95% of the way there with delegating the P4P to AJ. We've got the instant quote on our website now. We're super close to launching our Google Ads. So right on the cusp of some exciting stuff. So now once we start freeing up some of that time and again, I feel like we're really close to that. Michael's going to be able to do some of those one-on-one performance reviews with our crew members. We can start creating training videos and other SOPs around operations that we've been kind of lacking in the past.

We're like 90% of the way through with just about everything on the list. Nothing's fully complete in exactly how we want it, but we're definitely seeing progress.