10,000 Subscriber Special Q&A MARATHON!

Foreign.

We're live. We're live. Let's go. Welcome, everyone. Mike. And he's here. Today we are doing a 10,000 subscriber special Q and A. So if you have any questions, go ahead and post those. And.

We'Re doing this for a long time. So next few hours I'm going to try to be live. There's not a chance in the world I can do that without staying connected. So you'll kind of probably hear me respond to a few people. You might even see me record some stuff elsewhere. So yeah, we'll just kind of go for the next few hours. As long as questions are coming in, I'll stay on and kind of celebrate our 10,000 Subscriber Special. So thank you everyone for making that happen. And I know I had promised that we'd have a Q and A marathon, so I wanted to make sure I held up my end of the bargain. And I'm sure over the next couple hours, if we do stay on that long, if we have enough questions.

That I will probably answering a few people make me some comments, but feel free to ask me pretty much anything. They was a cool day in the stock market. Made some purchases because a bit of a dip in the morning. That was fun.

So if you have questions, really anything like, I know usually I talk about lawn care, landscaping, and I'm totally fine with doing more of that. There's other stuff you want to talk about, by all means, let me know and we'll spend hopefully next couple hours here hanging out with all of you. I know a few people have been asking the last few days kind of what I've been buying in the stock market. So I guess I'll go over that while there are some questions coming in. So feel free to comment. Anything and everything. So recently.

I have been buying up a few companies like Enphase. I think it's really good energy play, especially with the new administration coming in. They palantir dived 13%. I had sold out of them like a week ago. Fortunately we'd have to two weeks ago because they went up to like $40 and then they just dove to because of dilution and so I bought some in them. I bought back into mimecast. I. I sold out of Mimecast like a month ago and then they recently had a hack on their system and it's not good for a security company to have a hack on their system. So I ended up buying some more of them. I bought today. What did I buy today? I bought a little bit of Tesla I'm not a huge proponent of Tesla in terms of like, I feel like they're fully valued now, but I did buy a little bit nibbling in on them. They're less. They make up less than 3% of my portfolio.

But other than that, today I did sell a little bit of Salesforce. I bought a bunch of sale force at 215 and when they did the acquisition of Slack, they dove down. I bought quite a bit of them. I released some of that today. So yeah, that was kind of a fun day in the stock market. Having a dip there around. It was around 9, 9 o' clock my time. 9 11, 9 10. Somewhere in there if able to buy a little bit. So anyways, that was the stock market for today. Let's talk about lawn care, landscaping business. Anything else that you guys want to. I do have some messages coming in on my phone that we can talk about in just a second. All right. Son asks, I have a question. Is it good to market with a marketing agency or market yourself with basic marketing methods? I'm a big fan of controlling some stuff that's very important to you in your business. That's like really the, the key drivers. If advertising, which I feel is, is a big, big part of your success, I don't want to outsource that. Obviously if it's super technical and take a lot of your time to figure it out, then by all means you want to do that to save yourself time and be able to focus on what's going to actually move the business forward. However, for a lot of people, figure out YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Google Ads, these are things that if you sent six or eight hours on YouTube, figuring out you would be well equipped to be able to run your own ads and not pay an agency $0.50 out of every dollar just for the administrative elements of that ad campaign. And you actually put more money towards the actual marketing itself. So for all 20 of you, hit the like button. Let's get this thing going. Come on, let's go. All right. So Skag, should I buy two trucks, one with a ramp rack and one with a dump dog? It's really up to you. I don't really like having a dump bed. Oh, thanks. All those likes. Thank you. I don't really like having a dump bed. Honestly, in a truck it puts a lot of issues. A lot of times I've seen issues with suspension, the frame of the vehicle. Basically, if you look at it from a material standpoint, you're using the truck and the chassis and the engine and all that to transport heavy, heavy stuff like gravel and mulch and all the rest of it. I'd much rather have a dump trailer that doesn't have an engine and as many moving parts on it and is bent is literally built just to dump things and transport things. That's just my, my two 90 cents. In terms of two trucks. Your, your thought though is right. Like when we start a corporately owned store, we do one truck that is for a ramp rack for mowing and one truck that is for a dump, dump trailer. And so one truck is like fully for mowing right from the get. One truck is fully set for, for landscapes cleanups, things like that. So that's a great setup. Andres, what would you Recommend For a 16 year old starting a landscape company in South Texas? Well, right now in South Texas, I sure hope you're not buried in snow and you have power. But in terms of South Texas specifically, where there's not a lot of grass, what you really gotta do is get creative in terms of how you're gonna create recurring services because you're not gonna be as much mowing, you're gonna be doing things like weeding and weed prevention and trimming bushes. And like how you can get creative to that's recurring is really, really important. Best advice for second year in going full time this season. If you're going full time this season, buckle up. That's usually a big step when someone goes full time. It's a big step in terms of amount of revenue, the business growing. And then when you get your first, you know, your first full time employee, another big step. And so these are all steps and then the next big step is really you getting out of the field again. The business had a lot of room to grow when you do that. What's your thoughts on crypto? Meticulous gardens Crypto, Wow. So I did invest in crypto. When it dipped down about 30, I sold out around 40.

I don't understand it. I don't really understand crypto. So I'm not going to stand here and say that I know what the blockchain, how it works exactly and everything like that. I do believe it's definitely in the future. It's a great hedgehog. But honestly it's. There's nothing that is supporting it. There's no fundamentals. It could very easily go, in my opinion down to five or six thousand dollars. Do I think it's going to? Probably not. It could go down to 20, it could go up to 100,000. But like what? Like there's no justifying. Like, just because Elon Musk text the word doge does not mean that any asset value goes up 40%. And so I don't like the fundamentals of it. I don't like the hype around it. Anything that's hyped, I run a mile away from, like, some of my favorite stocks that I'm in. When it get. They start getting hyped, I jump because I get very scared when I. When there's hype. And if people bought into bitcoin or not Bitcoin GameStop at 300 and they're like, oh, my word, I went up to 450. Well, yeah, now you're down to what, 40, whatever it is today, 50. So I, I shorted it once, it went to 450. Are you kidding me? Like, my goodness. But yeah, in terms of hype, crypto is, is right up there with hype. Honestly, like, again, if Elon Musk can type one word into his Twitter and make an asset value up by 40%, I'm sorry, that is a hyped asset. There's no rhyme or reason to that. And I'm not going to invest my last dollars in that. I might have some fun in or if I really believe in that asset class, whether it be stock or a crypto. But I'm definitely not like, putting my investing dollars into that at all. All right, Dean King, how would you sell service. How would you sell or service your plow accounts and get enough people? I think you mean employees or how you sell or service your plow account. So we only do commercial in our local market. We do have several franchisees that have a lot of snow and they do it year round or like they use six months out of the year they're plowing and they're really good at residential, uh, and they just have to figure out how their setup is very important. And when it comes to plowing and snow, plowing and snow equipment, that's like the one time I say do not buy used, buy new, expend good money. Because the last thing you want to do in the middle of a snowstorm is have like a plow stop working. I've had it happen. It's horrible. Yeah. Some crazy stories you could tell about our first couple years in snow environmental services. Hey, from New Zealand, mate. I'm deciding on my first push mower residential properties, whether to go for a bigger one with a mulcher or just a standard one that would be easier to move around. Discussion. Yes, I would start with the smaller one, probably. But honestly, like, don't get bogged down on your first push mower. If you're, if you're planning to grow a bigger business, you know you're not going to make or break your business based on what type of mower you buy. Honestly, especially if just a push mower, like, you're not going to make or break yourself. So just, it's all about action. Like, take action. I was talking one of the franchisees a couple of weeks ago about this. Like, it's more about taking action and swinging than it is trying to get on base. Like, everyone looks at baseball players and if they can get on base like 30% of the time, like, batting average of.300, like, they do really well. And yet we as entrepreneurs are always so conserved. Like, oh, no, I got everything perfect and I've got to make sure I got the right mower and the right blower and I got my truck set up correctly and all. Look at the other day. Those things are not going to make or break you. I'd rather just keep swinging. Like, keep trying. Making decisions, taking action, and realizing that sometimes you're going to fail and you're going to mess up and you want to make sure that you protect your downside, that you're not going to, like, spend your last dollars on that first mower. That is a bad, bad purchase. Like a bad purchase on a 21 inch mower or push mower is not going to make or break your business in the grand scheme of things. And just, it's more about speed of execution. Right? Like, just saying yes and going. And that's the way I make decisions with Augusta and with a lot of our different businesses is like, look, we're going to have a talk about this in five minutes. We're making a decision. And that we're not going to spend a week. We're going to think about it. We're going to talk to everyone. We're going to, we're going to address it. We're going to make a decision. We're going to go all in on it. And we might be wrong occasionally, but if I can swing 10 times and get on base six or seven times, I would be an all American, like, incredible athlete when it comes to baseball. So I think it's all about swings. And, and like, the people who hit the most home runs, they strike out the most. So I swing for the fences. I make very clear decisions on swinging and not just watching the balls go by. Like, oh, man, that's why everyone like, oh, I could have done this and I could have done that. Like just swing and if you hit, you hit 1 out of 10 out of the park, you'll still be like really successful. So.

The nice thing about business. All right, Mrs. Ms. London, what would you advise a longer company that's struggling to make net profit over 30%? So it really depends on the size of your business. If your net profit 30% and you're running a 4 million dollar business, you should be really, really happy. If you're running a business that is doing 100,000 in gross revenue and your net profits under 30. Yeah, like that's definitely. There's an issue there because at that small of a business, you should be running well over 50% margin because you don't have many expenses. So I would be talking if someone, my advice to someone like you, Ms. Ms. London or someone that you're mentioning hypothetically would be look at your overhead. Where are you spending money? Do you have shop space? Do you have loans? Do you have debt? This is why I fight so hard against this mentality that we need new equipment and then you go into debt is because this is what leads to a really a higher monthly costs and leads to a lower net margin on small companies. And that's not what's needed in a small business when you're that, that small. Ninja Pirate. This is my first year and I'm very nervous. Ninja, you got this, stick around, watch some of the content, do things right. Don't be nervous, just swing, just go like sorry, I'm a little bit under the weather. I was under the weather all last week. Getting through it right now, it's been brutal.

But anyways.

My first year, I'm very interested. Yeah. Ninja Pirate. Like I just can't overemphasize enough. And I hope that like in 10 years when people look back at like all the content I've made and they can go back to when like I was still out in the field, that they can be like, he kept saying yes and, and like there were some things that didn't work out. There's some things that he messed up on. There's some things he, he swung and like killed it and crushed it. And that's what we're knowing he's known for. But there'll be other things like just don't fail. They fail to exist in 10 years. Like Tito Cups, the Ketosis cups that we created a year ago, Covid completely shut down the kitchens and all the rest of it, the, all the expos we had set up to go sell it, but it was all shut down. Like, that was a loss. I swung. I swung hard, went all in on it. We got some national contracts up front, big purchase orders, and then nothing. Right. Like, Covid hit and wiped out all of our sales prospects, all of food buyers getting new products. Like, it just wiped it out. And so. But again, I'm not going to let that thing hinder me from swinging hard again. Right? And whether that be, like, Augusta, whether that be software that we're trying to develop, like, I'm going to go all in on it. I'm going to mess up sometimes. Like, last night, I had to admit the franchisees, like, I really messed up on delivering the software that we've been expecting the past month. We were behind. And, like, you mess up, right? And so is that hard? Like, has it been really brutal for me the past week? Yeah. Like, I hate disappointing people and I hate messing up. And, you know, ketosis, because I have pleasure or joy in messing up and losing money, but it's all about swings. And if you swing hard and you know that you're 100% into it and, like, I know that I gave everything I can for the software and continue to do so. Like, I can't be too hard on myself. And I got to realize that net that's going to lead to good things down the road. And so I just encourage you, like, if you're nervous it's your first year, just go start. Like, I was talking with Danny, our new. Our new camera guy, the other day, and I was talking about a show I want to do. I just don't know if I'll ever have the time. And that is. Excuse me. And that is, I want to go put, like.

Glasses. Camera on. Like, put glasses on with a camera in the middle. And, like, start in the middle of nowhere. Start a lawn care business. And I'd have to take at least a few weeks to do it, and I'd probably hand it off to a general manager once I got it established. But to prove that, like, you don't need a bunch of money, you don't need a bunch of trucks, you don't even need, like, the brand of Augusta. And you can get started, you can grind and you can hustle and you can knock on doors. And if I could wear that camera, you could see me actually having to talk to people and persuade them to allow me to do service in their property for half the price that I would otherwise charge. Like, I would love to be able to make that video and just show that is possible. If you're willing to grind, you're willing to say yes, you're willing to put in the work, you're willing to knock on doors, you're willing to pound the pavement. And that's the beautiful thing about lawn care. There's nothing complicated, there's nothing complex. You don't have to go to school, you don't to get an education, you have to have a bunch of money. You don't have a bunch of experience. You can get started with very little if you're willing to put in the work. And that's why I love this industry so much. The people that are attracted are the people who are willing to grind and hustle and work. They're not educated as much. Usually they don't have as much money. They don't come from really posh backgrounds. We're here to work. That's why we use this industry to get ahead in life. Start our businesses, start investing, start hiring, getting experience. That's the beautiful thing about this industry. And so I just, you know, I, I really want to do that one day. I want to like spend like a week where I just am putting a random place where I'm not close to anyone. I'm giving like, you know, a truck and a thousand bucks or leaving less like 500 and. Or even less like I just need a rake. Give me a rake and a blower. Like that would be fun. Drop me in the middle of nowhere, a rake and a blower and just like I gotta start and I think I could do it. Like give me a couple weeks. I think I can have my first employee. Anyways. Anyway, Colin, thanks everyone. Keep posting your questions. I will get to them all. What does the P stand for on your trucks? P stands for pickup. Colin. So we have P for pickup. We have ET for enclosed trailer. DT for dump trailer. D is for dump truck. So I know it's a lot of E sounding words. It kind of is confusing sometimes hitting the 2. What are your thoughts on nextdoor? Desperate landscapes and lawn care. Yeah, so my thoughts on nextdoor are that the local deals. Sorry, I get some water. I'm going to be talking for a long time. You should be able to hear me. Still though, my thoughts are nextdoor is. Is great for impressions. The amount of impressions that you get per dollar is incredible. On nextdoor, especially for local deals, there's two different ad products. They have one's local deals. The other one is sponsorships. It's called the sponsorships. Something is new and you basically sponsor like a neighborhood and they kind of sell it because they, they say, hey, there's only so many sponsors in a neighborhood, which is great and all, but the, the sponsorships part we have not seen perform very well. I think they're going to improve it, but recently they reduced the cost of local deals by 30%, which made it even a better deal for us. So we're going all in on nextdoor. I like it a lot.

Hitting the 250,000 plateau. Any advice for sustaining this year, working towards the next level? Matt. So to get past 250, usually what you're going to need is a part time office person. And so I'd recommend trying to find that person. And if you're like, well, financially I can't afford it, then you need to raise your prices in order to be able to afford that person, because that's going to be the thing that gets you the next level, is getting an office person that can take a lot of the minutia. The emails, the phone calls, sending things. All that stuff needs to be taken off your plate so you can focus on growing the business through marketing and through growing your team. So. All right, now there's 46 people in here. Hit the like button. There's only 18 likes. Hit that thing up. All right, while you're doing that, let me pull up. I gotta, I gotta stay on top of this because if we're gonna be here for a couple hours, I do have to answer some questions. One of our Frenches, he just asked me a question. One second here. He's talking about the SBA 7A versus the micro loan. Okay. And then I just respond to him real quick and I'll actually explain what, what the SBA loan stuff is, so why it's so important. Give me one second here.

Hey, Mike. Yeah? That's awesome. Like, if. Honestly, I haven't been hearing any banks getting back to SBA applicants that fast. So if they can do a turnaround in a month or less and push it through, I think that's awesome. I don't know if that, if that's for both the 7A and the micro loan, but that'd be fantastic. Especially with a 7A that had some flexibility in terms of like, you know, 50 or 60K. So congrats on that. Any projection help or business plan stuff, let me know, and I can definitely help. I'm pretty familiar with it.

All right.

Sorry. I got general manager. General managers. Give me a call. All right, now give me a call. He left me a Voice note. Give me one second. Sorry. You're going to have to kind of bear with me occasionally for the next couple hours. Hey, Mike. Hey. Just want to touch base real quick. Just spoke to a customer. Oh, that's going to have to be for later. Can't get. Listen about customer intelligence. All right, back to questions. That was our. Sorry, that was our general manager over in North Carolina. And then I was talking to one of our franchisees in South Dakota and they are applying for an SBA loan, which again, for anyone out there getting their business started, the sba right now, sba Small Business Administration is literally trying to give money away. If you're in the MBA online course, that section was just uploaded and that is all about the SBA process and all that good stuff. But the 7A loan is kind of the most standard. Excuse me, sorry. And right now they're trying to give money away. So like, I would really recommend with the rates as low as they are, if you are trying to grow, expand the company and you need access to capital, if you're just getting started, I would recommend it. Even if you're high, if you're doing a lot of your cash flowing, if you know how to, you know, your numbers and everything like that. And like this is. I'm not. Again, I hate debt. I hate debt. Okay, you guys know me about this. But when it comes to the amount of money that they're willing to give away on a 2730 year term at these incredibly low interest rates, I have enough confidence that I can produce more than 5 and 6% a year in returns on the money they give me. And so it's incredible. And it's the only thing that I feel, I feel like they're trying to stimulate the economy, right? And they're trying to create jobs and all the rest of it. So if you need a debt, if you need debt right now, I would consider the sba. Again, I hate debt. And if your business is going down and you're losing money and you don't have a profitable model and you have over complicated systems and you have a bunch of payments on all of your vehicles and like you're struggling, don't go into debt more. You're probably just going to compound your issues by having more money. You need to figure out your business model. But if you're growing and you're really profitable, I would consider it. The interest rates are just looking too pretty right now. Okay, questions, questions, questions. Let's get back to these.

Okay.

Have you considered using vans rather than A pickup truck for long care. Yes, we have. I'm still interested in it. The problem is in our market, locally, we have to bag the clippings. And also with a pickup, I can do a cleanup and throw branches in the back of the truck. I can haul a trailer, I can use it for a ramp rack. The pickup truck's a little more versatile in terms of debris for cleanups, branch cleanups, leaf cleanups, things like that. So that's why I traditionally default to that. However, I like the idea of vans with lawn care. I really do. Especially if you don't have bag clippings, obviously. But like even like wet, like water getting inside, like clippings. I don't know.

Yeah. But I think it's super slick, super cool looking. Okay. Have you considered company is making $120,000 a year and I want to rev it up with Facebook ads. What would you recommend the first year spend should be and what's the right realistic number that can be targeted in your opinion? So, Elias, in terms of real realism, I would be looking at 10 to 20x multiple on your marketing dollars over the next 12 months. Right. So if you spent 5,000 in marketing, you should be expecting 50 to 100,000 in new revenue, new revenue from that marketing dollars over the next 12 months. If you're getting recurring work that's going to build on itself each year, and that's the power of, you know, recurring work is having it build on itself each year. As long as you have a good retention rate, you're not losing customers all the time. How many applications did you get the first time you hired someone? How difficult was it to find your first employee? It's always hard to find your first employee because you have, sorry, you don't have any brand awareness, you don't have much of a database, you don't have much of a social media following. So like, first employee is always difficult. And that's why a lot of times I always say like the first few employees, I'm okay with somebody getting like a family friend, people they know from church, whatever it might be. It's great because you trust them, they know you and like you're not having to go up against the biggest thing and that is like you're a new business. It's very hard to get that first employee, like as a stranger, literally. Sorry, Chuck, the guy I was just talking with, you know, he's just getting started. It's very difficult to find your first employee in a place where you're new to. You don't have a lot of brand equity. People haven't seen your trucks all over the place, so they don't have as much confidence starting to work for you, et cetera. So in terms of how many applications we get, it vary depend on our market. But like I would say, that's the one time getting someone you know or is related to you is okay because you trust them a lot. And that's the main ingredient for their first few employees.

All right, action steps. To go from 150k per year to 10 million with no debt, you need to be highly profitable. You invest every single piece of profit back into growth and not overhead. Ninja pirate. Congrats. The 10k. Well, 10,000k. Now that. That would be cool. Jimmy Lassard. We were in. We were in interior and exterior window cleaning and gutter cleaning when Covid hit. We went to exterior window cleaning and gutter cleaning only. Should we bring back interior window cleaning in 2021? Window cleaning is something we haven't done. Take that back. Take that back. I had Augusta Cleaning Services back in the day, way back. And I did it as a way to try to stay busy in the winter. What I found out is I can't charge my hourly rate in doing cleaning as I can mowing lawns. That being said, window cleaning is something that people are willing to pay for because it's a little more technically difficult and it does take more skill and it's more dangerous. However, finding people to clean windows and not leave streaks or little smudges and things like that is harder than teaching someone how to mow a lawn based on my experience. So we haven't done a whole lot. I don't have enough experience to be able to kind of give you a lot of info on the interior window cleaning thing, But I have done windows myself from Augusta Cleaning Services, but it's a very different skill set, and the margins are just very, very different. You're selling more labor than you are equipment and things like that. All right, Colton King, Would you advise someone trying to go full time solo. It's my first year. To slightly drop your prices to get the sales need to switch to full time? Yes. Okay. The one time. The one time I'm okay with people dramatically reducing prices. I'm going to make a video about this. I have it on Danny list for us to make a video on this. The one time when you're solo, when you're first getting started, you should absolutely reduce your prices. You should absolutely sell people regardless. You need momentum. You need the work. You need to fill the schedule. And if you're definitely trying to in that zone of like being part time but then wanting to go full time, I would highly recommend using price as a way to sell the jobs. Literally letting people, you know, calling them like, hey, I saw you got the estimate yesterday. What do we need? Like what? You know, did you get it? Yeah, yeah, I did. It's a little too much, too expensive. Okay. You know, Mr. Jones, I want to earn your business. What, what price does that need to be in order for us to do business together? Like if you do that and someone says, hey, yeah, I need like a hundred dollars off of this 500 cleanup. Like do it, get the job, get it on the schedule. Am I going to tell you that when you have 10 or 15 employees, more overhead, a lower net profit margin? No, I'm not going to tell you to do that. But when you're first getting started, when you're solo and you're trying to get to full time, do it. Book yourself, get some width, some depth, I should say, on your schedule. Highly recommend doing that. Undercover Billionaire Lawn Care Edition. Love that. Is Mike using questions from the chat or questions he already has? Jeff I'm using them in the chat. I'm just a little behind.

Sorry. Let's see here. Can you, let's see here. Can you explain how you do P4P? Like more in depth and not just a general idea? Jeff I could, but like it take a long time. So it's in the course and I don't, I don't like to like everyone thinks I'm trying to sell the course. But the bottom line is no one's going to watch a six hour video where I explain everything, go through the two page document, all the rest of it. So at conference we talked about it. It's on landscapebusinesscourse.com very more in detail in the weeds of things.

Teresa, any suggestions on retraining employees? Teresa we do retraining to some extent. Like I think next week they're going to be training everyone before the spring rush again. And so it's just constantly making like what we found really helpful is kind of having one person in the, in the company that's kind of designated as the pro in a certain area. So for example, we have one guy is really good horticulture and trees and bushes. So he trains everyone on the trimming side of things.

And he's great for that. And then we kind of have someone else who's like really into push mowers and like the mechanical side of how they work. And like for us, the 30x mowers is what we use on all our mowing routes. And they figured out like little ways to make them work better, how to fix them really quickly in the fields. Like they will train everybody on that element. So that's kind of what we've seen work as we've grown in terms of retraining. When you're smaller, it's really a little more hand to hand combat, like you going out for a day with the crew member. If you have three or four employees or less. I'd go out with your crew once in a while and just make sure everyone's quality is up to your standards.

Kevin Fairburn, Hiring, Hiring. Just do hiring ads on Craigslist, Facebook, indeed, Google and point them all your careers page on your website. Yeah, so this is a good question, Kevin. This kind of goes back to yesterday we talked about on the video about hiring, where I talked about your hiring process as your filter. And one of the ways to filter people out is to make them go to your website and submit an application. Because let's just be honest, most laborers are going through Craigslist. They're going through, indeed, they're going through these other job boards. They're literally checking off a hundred different jobs and clicking submit application. Right. And so you, you traditionally, I don't want to be in that category of getting people who are literally just applying for another 50 jobs. I'd rather be getting people that have looked us up or they've seen our trucks or they saw our ad, went to our website and then watched a bunch of information like, I'll show you. Can I share my screen on this thing? I don't think I can.

Use of zoom. Yeah, I can't. Sorry. I was going to show you our screen, but like augustalongcarservice.com you know, Wacom, slash Careers, for example, that's our local office. They have a careers page. You go there, you submit your application. There's some videos on there. The goal is to try to weed people out, right? I'm trying to weed out the people that are literally trying to apply for 100 other jobs. And when you, when you ask for an interview, you don't even hear anything back a lot of times. Or they get you confused with another company altogether. You know, storage. A storage company. Oh yeah, you were a storage company. They get confused because they literally applied for 100 and they just hope, you know, just throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and hope something sticks. Right? We try to weed them out again, that's another filter by sending them to your website and making them apply there. But again, if you're not getting any leads, you might just allow them to do that and then you're kind of the filter manually going through a lot more applications and their resumes and all the rest of it. So for us, we have the ad as really just, you know, pointing the direction to our website. They fill out an application and submit a resume on our site. All right. Hey Mike, this is from Travis.

Thank you all. Thank you for all you do for our community. Do you require money down before you schedule landscaping work? Anything over $3,000 total project cost, we require 50% down.

Next question.

Kevin Fairburn. Nothing. Ramp rack rocks. Nothing. Ramp rock. That's like a tongue twister. Nothing. Ramp rack rocks. Say that 10 times. Mercy. Matt Sargent. Thanks, Mike. I've been working on the part time office person. I'm closing on another 200,000 in sales. Should I consider a full time office person? And software suggestions would be great. Okay, so in terms of 200,000 sales, should I consider. Yeah, like a full time office person in my mind, usually around 500,000. You need someone full time. Even beyond that, honestly, you can get to like 7,800,000 without needing a full time office person because they're expensive. If they're really good, they're probably going to cost you at least 50 grand a year. And that's a big chunk of overhead. That's straight overhead. And so you better make sure if you're hiring someone at 4 or 500,000 that you know that by having them on board you're going to be able to get to a million because like you need to have.

Overhead recovery. And if you're spending 50 grand of your 300,000 that you're making in revenue, 5. 50 grand of that, that's a sixth. That's what like 18% is going to out the door for overhead. You might as well kiss. Like if you had a 40% margin business, you just cut out 18%. That's half your profit gone in overhead for an office person. So you better be very confident that having that office person having that overhead is going to lead to lots of growth.

In terms of software suggestions. I talked about that before. Ms. London. We got the SB loan and it really helped the new spring season preparation to add another mower. We've already started to pay down on it. Congratulations, Mike. And the team never ever hire a friend. Yeah, like you know, lawn one. You know, I would traditionally say that as well as you grow, when you're first getting started, if you really trust that person and you know they're a hard worker and you've known them for a long time, like sometimes you can do really well with them when there's only one. Like you and them working in a truck. Right.

Obviously though, like, as you grow, you know, now where I'm at now, like only one person, my company is related to me. Whereas like the very beginning, the first three people were all related to me. But again, it's because I need the trust up front. And then over time, those people kind of start to leave because there's less of a personal connection as the company gets bigger and it becomes more about the team and the culture than just like individual relationships.

Okay.

A long one. Hey man, how are you?

Congratulations, man. You're my business hero. If anyone deserves this, it's you. Thank you, Dylan. Andrew Peterson Cost of employees Cost of employees Workers compensation Insurance cost. What are your thoughts? Thanks. Hey Andrew. So through QuickBooks Online.

You can get pretty good decent rates on workers comp. We found the reason I only bring that right now is because we are. We just had to recently get that for our corporately owned stores that are in other states and I don't know anyone locally. So we just kind of went with what was on QuickBooks Online for our payroll and they have great suggestions in terms of getting good rates on workers comp. You can actually get it right through their system. It's super easy. I go for, I default for simple and as like me not having to worry about things. I'm happy to pay a little bit more. Like when we got insurance. Like I don't pitch insurance. I don't work for insurance companies or anything. But my goodness, Progressive.com allows you to get general liability and auto insurance so fast. It was fantastic. So I got insurance for all the trucks, all of the general liability for three locations in three different states in an hour and a half. Okay, so that's a total of nine policies because two trucks at every location and then a general liability policy for each one in three different states. Got it in less than an hour and a half, probably about an hour. All like paid for it. I got it bound, got all the paperwork, got insurance card in like an hour, maybe an hour and a half on a flight from California to Washington state, 30,000ft in the air. It was fantastic. So I would default to that even if I paid a little bit more. I don't want to go into insurance agents. I have to talk to people and, you know, send documentation back and forth and all the other hoopla. I just want simple. And so when it comes to workers compensation, I found that really a good resource on QuickBooks, their resource. Okay, congrats, Mike. You guys still under snow on the west side? We. We did have snow Sunday. We plowed Sunday locally. They did. And then Monday a little bit. Is today Monday? No day's Tuesday. It's. The streets are all good and good. We don't have any more snow on the streets, really. It's just on the grass a few inches. Not as bad as, like, Texas and stuff, though. All right.

Jeffrey. Hi, Mike. The course is great. Got it about a couple months ago and has helped great with implementation. Mike, can. Can you unlock the templates for handbook? Okay. Okay. Anthony Ingram, I think I emailed you this morning. I did email you this morning. I left you a voice note. If you're in the course and you're having trouble downloading documents and templates, you need to download the document and then either have your Excel or then upload it into Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets. Because the documents that we have in the course, I can't unlock them for editing because everyone could then edit them and it would change the document. So what you gotta do is download the document and then either edit it in Excel or then upload it into your own Google Drive where you can edit it with Google Sheets. Hope that makes sense. But like, all the templates and the documents and all the rest of. I can't do that. I can't make everyone allow everyone to edit them. It would be hectic. Can you give us an update on what results you're seeing advertising on YouTube and what you're doing? Brent? I could, but I have to kill you. No, I will come out with that later this year. Right now I am holding it pretty close to the franchisees and the stuff that we are testing out still. I want to have more testing and data before I make it public. My stance on YouTube and what, you know, best practices are, I don't think it's like going to change dramatically the next few months. So, like, don't worry, it's not like a ticking time bomb. But there are definitely some best practices we've seen working and based upon so far. Next. It's similar to nextdoor in terms of the amount of impressions you can get for. The cost is very high, but there's some differences. It's not going to be as great a tool for direct sales, things like that. So we'll talk more about in the future. Definitely, Brent, once we have a lot more data. I have, you know, all the corporately owned locations, running them for the next, you know, six months, stuff like that. Ultimate Land Care, that lawn goat. Jeff George, what should I be doing today if I do not do plowing? If you're snowed in and you have no snow plowing, you should definitely be working on your business. You should be making sure you set up all of your mowing route for the rest of the year. You should be making sure that your treatment packages are all set up for the rest of the year. You should be doing equipment maintenance, all that good stuff.

I am working towards my goal of becoming the Gusta franchisee in Delaware and I can't wait to be able to join the team within the next year or so. Cool. Jeff George, usually they think they can slack because you're a friend. Yeah, Jeff, that are. Sorry. Lawn 1 yet that is a problem. But again, if you know, know the person really well and I don't mean just like friends, I mean like, you know, they work hard, they bust their butt. They work, they work hard, they come to work early. Like you know them that way, that's when I have more confidence to hire a friend. Right. I'm not just gonna hire them because they know me. Like that is no grounds for a good hire.

Hi Mike, thanks for the great videos. I'm going into my second year solo part time.

Have around 25 customers been using Honda HRX217. Wanting to upgrade to a 30 inch mower would be a tour where the Toro Time Master would be. Okay, cat, Toro Time Masters are great. Even if you went from an HRX217 to a Honda commercial mower, that'd be nice. But yeah, Time Masters are great. Like honestly guys, like I don't care about the mowers. Like you could give me a, you could give me a 72 inch mowers. Like that's it. And we make it work. We make it work. As long as you have good marketing of a great team, you can make things work. The semantics is what everyone gets wrapped up on. That's like what type of truck you're having, what type of equipment you have. Do you have a 130 steel trimmer or do you have a 111? Like guess what? Those are like very marginal differences. Even if you went against some of the stuff that I talked about, like you get a brand new truck and you got set your whole mowing set up with an enclosed trailer and big Mowers like you had $100,000 set up. Guess what? You can make that business work if you have good marketing, good team, great profit margin, great systems in terms of P4P. Like a lot of the semantics of equipment doesn't really matter if you do good business practices. Now do I think going into debt for $100,000 setup if most of your lawns are 5,000, 6,000 square feet? No, I don't think that's a good idea. But.

Here. Hi, Mike. Okay, reading 12 week year right now. Oh yeah, cool. I love that book. Do you plan your goals out annually or every 12 weeks and break everything down on a week by week basis? Okay, Dylan, so full disclosure, I used to do that. I had little boards over there that I would have each week laminated on. The problem was so much stuff is in flux with me.

Like what? I think in three months something's gonna look like. Even three months in a road is so different than what it's gonna look like. It's ridiculous. And so I don't necessarily do that anymore, but I think about every single day, every single hour, every single minute in terms of efficiency. So my problem is not like not getting things done. I know that, like, that's my strength. So. But it's something that is great if you have, if you have a problem with like, like I said, taking action. If you have a problem with procrastination, definitely the 12 week year is a great. You basically trying to cram in what you would be done in 12 months you could try to get done in 12 weeks. And I love the concept. For me, on a broader level, what I try to think about is like, I try to push myself. Like, okay, so we have a, we have, we have a plan. I want to get to 500 franchisees, okay? Like realistic. It's going to take me 10 years. Okay? And I'm like, okay, well why, like, what if like a gun was put to my head? What would I have to do to do it in two years? And is it possible? Probably not. No, it's not. But it starts unlocking thought processes. Like, okay, well if I had to, this is what I would do. Like, I'd have to take bigger risks here. I'd have to make this connection with this person. I would have to create more content. I have to hire a video guy. Like, that's why last year we hired a video guy. I'm like, okay, so do I want to have the overhead expense of having video equipment and a studio and a full time person that Is like not cheap and like equipment, all the rest of it, do I want that? No. But when I start looking at the goals that we have and then asking myself, okay, so it's going to take five years. What would I have to do to make that happen in 2? 1. And whether or not you do it in 1 or 2 is irrelevant. The thing is, it forced you to start making decisions and thinking in ways and when you come up with creative solutions that will bring that time frame down. Right? So it might not take me one or two, but it's not gonna take me five. It might take me three or four. I just saved a lot of time by having a different whole mindset process change, right? So, you know, people sometimes get mad when someone like me comes along. I was like, okay, so yeah, that deadline that we said was like in a year. Well, what about next week? Like, what about next week? And like, no, it's impossible. It's like, no, it's not about whether it's impossible, it's possible or not. It's about the fact. By saying that and thinking, okay, if it had to be done next week, like if someone put a gun to your head, I think about this all the time. If someone put a gun to your head, could you, what would you have to do to get it done next week? If you have to get it done next week, what would you do differently? Well, I'd have to put money in here, invest in this. I'd have to get this to different type of equipment. Like, if I'm trying to scale my lawn care business really fast, I might have to like, okay, I have to cut out some services, I'm going to have to buy some more of this. I'm going to have to move my shop, I'm going to have to cut out.

Residential mowing customers that are 20 miles away from me. Like, those are things you have to do and you only can make those decisions if you start thinking in terms of speed and start thinking, like, okay, yeah, it could take me a year, but what if I did it in a month? And so that that idea, Dylan, that 12 week years, that concept of taking a 12 months, smashing that into 12 weeks. Is there a term limit for franchisees? What if someone becomes a franchisee and eventually wants to stop? What is the strategy? If there is no compete, there is a no compete clause. Okay, so there, the term for Frankie is 10 years. If someone wants out, they can leave. Ideally, they're able to sell the franchise and they're able to get a big roi if they didn't and they just wanted to leave and you know, it's only been a few months and they're in, it's not really worth anything. I would probably just send a general manager and keep the location running.

Yeah. Matt Sargent, thanks for your advice to this platform. I will be contacting you for a one on one. Oh my goodness. I don't know, I get kind of scared. One on ones take a lot of time. I'm at a point that the business is building at a fast pace and I respect your advice. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it. Congratulations. Thank you. How and why versus what? Thank you, Daryl. Or the Time Master really isn't a good choice. Used in a commercial setting. The commercial version is much better. Yeah. Full disclosure, I've never used Time Master based on what I've heard. Actually that is the residential model, so probably don't do that. Good call. Should use a commercial mower even if it's a smaller one. It's traditionally better. But the idea of a 30 inch tine master, I like that idea. Just the 30 inch is great. If you're going to use push mowers for your setups, what is the cheapest. Full disclosure. When I talk about push mowers, we use that locally at two corporately owned locations. But for two out of the three new ones we're starting, we are having stand ons in the trucks. Okay. Because they have larger square footages. So keep in mind your business model needs to be flexible based upon the size of your properties, your, your market, etc.

Okay. What are you guys talking to Mike for? Go out and hustle. Hey, hey, hey. Pinellas Premium office. Now, now, now. We only do this once in a while. You can, you can. Hey, if you have, if you have YouTube Premium, which by the way is a very good investment, you get YouTube Premium. The nice thing about it is you can be listening to a YouTube video, but the screen be off and just be listening. So, Canela, don't rain on our party here, man. Like we only have 10,000 subscribers once a while. I'll only do this for a couple hours again when we have like a hundred thousand subscribers. So wait for Skag 30. Yeah, good point. Audi Skeg is coming out with a 30 inch mower. I have seen some of their stuff on this. I have not used one. Full disclosure. What's that water bottle drinking of? My sister gave this to me for a Christmas present. She got it off of Amazon. Oprah. I don't even.

I don't know. It's Cool though. I like it a lot. I use it like all the time. It has all like my times of the day to make sure I'm drinking enough water. I like it.

All right, questions. So glad I tuned in. I'll be talking to you tomorrow. Checking into the small business loans. Now, Mike, I think we all want you to grow a beard. No, no, no, no, don't. You don't want me to grow a beard. So when I got hurt, when I went underneath the dump truck and got hurt, I got scars. Like, here's one I can show you. I can hardly see it, actually. It used to be worse. It's much, much better now. I don't get like where it gets all hot now this where all the scars are at. But I kind of have scars here. Kind of go under here and a little bit across my chest. And when I got underneath the dump truck and got strangled, like here, see this spot here? There's like no hair growing there. That was a scar. Used a scar down here, but since there's no hair, you can't really tell. And then kind of over here too, this scar, there was a scar and so no hair grows in those spots. So if I grew a beard, it'd be patchy and it would have two round areas where there'd be no hair. It would not be fun. You would. You do not want to see me with a beard. I promise you that. Does anyone sign up for mowing in winter? I've had no luck with people so far. Is it just me or just bad timing? People don't usually sign up for mowing in winter. Yes, we do get a few occasionally people who like move into a new house. Like they want to get set up their go getters and like into planning and everything. Yes, we have those occasionally. But it's more, much more likely that. Excuse me, sorry. It's much more likely that people are only going to think about it like most human beings when there's a problem, and that is when the grass is growing. And so that's why most of your marketing dollars will be best spent during the spring rush. And if you're going to spend $10,000 this coming year on marketing, I'd spend at least half of it in the quarter that is spring rush for you. At least at least half of it in that quarter. Okay. Does anyone sign up with my. Hey, Mike, do you ever plan to cancel your online consultations? Alex? Probably yes. I'll let you. I'll give a heads up before I do, but like, it just. I Don't have the time. And like, I know it's, it's expensive and I'm not regard. And some people say, oh, raise the price. But like, I don't want to come across stupid anyways.

I'd rather just be able to answer questions here honestly when I get time. Hey Mike, this is John.

From the Netherlands. Lean management and agile thinking seems cultural bound. Could you elaborate on your battles with these concepts and growing your business? Ooh, wow. This is a great question. All right.

Yeah. So lean management, agile thinking. There's some great videos on this on YouTube. This is one part of like getting my MBA that was probably helpful is thinking about manufacturing and then taking those concepts and bringing them into the labor market. When we talk about service based businesses and running your business lean and like when you talk about lean manufacturing, it's all over. Like it's super popular. Trying to cut out waste, trying to make things where you don't touch them multiple times in a process. But the same thing can be said for a service based business, for a small business, all of those concepts apply. And so lean management trying to cut out layers of bureaucracy or different layers of hierarchy is very important in my mind. And so like today for example, I was at a team meeting and I didn't know, it was like, I didn't run the team meeting, I was just there. But they needed middle level managers, need to communicate with the team. And so I as the owner did not need to run that meeting. Like a lean management model means that whoever needs to step up and lead in that moment is going to do so because the ball is in their court, not and not push it off to someone else and say, that's not my job. Right. And so lean management, lean thinking, constant improvement, all of that is just so, so important. And you could talk, I could talk a lot about that. So make sure you push the like button if you've been. If you're new here, I appreciate you all hopping on. This is the 10,000 Subscriber Special Edition marathon of Q A and we're gonna keep going here for at least another hour because we hit 10,000. So like we deserve this. That's fun. Let's see here. Let me just check in. Hey, someone just scheduled a introduction call for the franchise. Who is this? Shay? I won't say their last name. Cool, that'll be fun.

Let's see here. I just gotta make sure everyone's okay. That's fine. That can wait till tomorrow. Okay.

Cool. Sorry. When I'm going this long on Q And a. I kind of just gotta check in occasionally. All right. Does anyone. Let's see here.

I wish I could use all push mowers. My properties are from one acre to ten acres. Yeah, Daryl, so you obviously not going to use push mowers. It would price you out of the. Out of competition Joker. What is the cheapest way to market besides word of mouth and Google my business when so low. Thank you Mike for taking the time to help us. It'd be door hangers. It would be actually when you're doing the door hangers, knock on the door and talk to people. I cannot overemphasize the fact that if you go from knock from door hanging to knocking on said door before putting door hanger on, your close ratio will dramatically increase. Okay. So I highly recommend that if you can get the gumption and the nerve to do so. A couple days ago I posted a video. On Saturday I post a long video. All my longest videos get the least amount of views. But they probably have the best content like the short four or five minute clips. Like they're funny or they're little informative tips that are very shallow usually. And that's fine. That's good for some people. That's what they want. The hour long videos. If you're new to the channel, I would highly recommend you watch long YouTube videos of mine. The one that I did like a year or two ago, more than that ago, a few years ago on acquisitions, lawn care acquisitions and improving the valuation of your, of your company. If you're trying to sell like that is one of, in my mind one of my best videos ever. But no one watches it. It only has like 14 or 1500 views. But the long YouTube videos are good. So last Saturday I made one specifically with a young man and we talked about door knocking and all of that good stuff. So I would really recommend watching that one. In terms of if you're solo and you're trying to get more jobs, that would be my thing is like yes, you can put a door hanger on, but if you can also then knock on that door, talk to the person, say hey Mr. Jones, like I saw the maple tree out front. Like do you want an estimate for me to take care of that for you? Like that relationship building. Then we'll ascribe your face with the brand. Even if it's down the road. When they need service, they will contact you a lot more. Especially if you strike up conversations, stuff like that. And then you can use that closed tactic we talked about earlier where you Actually do lower price. When you're trying to book jobs, what type of numbers do you look at in your business to keep it successful? I'm learning bookkeeping for the business and wondering if you have any tips for a beginner. I do.

Let me get some water.

I've been relatively sick the past week. Been fun.

It's been brutal because we've been in crunch time for this software that has been keeping me up all the time. And I was a miserable failure at getting that rolled out. And so been a little bit under the weather. Okay, what was the next question? Oh, yeah, the question was a good one. I forgot. Oh, yeah. What type of numbers do you look at? Okay, so here's the number you gotta look at. Okay? This is the one number every lawn care professional needs to know. Okay? What percentage of your revenue goes to labor? All right? Everyone can talk about how profitable they are, but if that number is too high in a lawn care business, you will not be able to run a profitable operation, and you will not have enough profit to grow the business, and you will not have a profit. Take money home. So the next question, everyone is like, okay, well, what. What's the red flag? Okay, well, if you're running 50% or more, I can guarantee you.

To. One of two things is happening. One, either having very inefficient labors, they are taking breaks, they are driving way too long in between jobs. There's an inefficient route, whatever it might be. Or two, is you underpriced all your jobs, you're not charging enough per hour. Okay? So the. The. The biggest number, the biggest number we in the lawn care landscaping business need to focus on is what percentage your labor revenue or of your revenue total revenue is going towards labor. Okay? And then you can further break that down in terms of field labor versus overhead labor, like an estimator, an office manager, etc. Okay? So my goal is to be able to have P4P, which is pay for performance, basically standardize that percentage. Sorry. So that doesn't change. Because if you have a really good job that goes really fast, you know, that percentage is going to. Percentage of your revenue goes down. That is going towards labor. If a really, really bad job, you might be at 70% of that job's cost is going towards labor. That's bad. You want. That's a variable cost. You want to standardize this number. That's why we have P4P. The same percentage of revenue goes to the employees, no matter what. And then in terms of overhead Recovery for your office people, estimator, etc. That should be in the form of an estimate fee. And for all the people that say, I'm a con person for charging e fees, they're usually solo because they don't have overhead. They don't know what it's like to have overhead and have an office person. All the rest of it where you do need to recover that cost. All right, so the biggest number everyone here needs to know is what percentage of labor of what percentage of revenue is going towards your field labor. That is the number one thing I'd be tracking. And if there's. If that's too high, if it's over 40%, like. Like, you really got to take a look at either your pricing or efficiencies. Okay. P4P will definitely help with efficiencies. And then your pricing is something you've got to figure out. You've got to know that you are having a good margin.

All right, what is. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We got a lot of questions. One second here. What is your take on clip flyers? What's flyers? I don't know what clip flyers are. Sorry. Handing out flyers newspaper style. Would it be worth it?

I assume the return wouldn't be as good as putting them on the doors, but it would be a lot more efficient. I think. You mean, like, clip flyers, like, clipping it on maybe. I. I don't know. Like, I know some people have taken flyers and they kind of stick them halfway through the door. I think that's a little bit of intrusive, like, on people's privacy, like actually sticking something through their door. But some of you have done it. I wouldn't say it's, like, better than a door hanger. I would ideally, like I said, knock on the door, try to make a connection. If you can't, then put the door hanger if they're not home or something.

Oh, Copper Creek. Say, brother. Regarding your comments on substance and videos, I am living proof that entertainment will always be teaching. So I have to sneak education inside of skits. That is. That is a good. That is a great comment, Brad. You're awesome, Brad. I think people forget, like, this is not a slam. This is actually a real positive thing. Your channel is actually comedy. It's incredible. Like, it's. That's not to say, like, it's a bad thing. I don't want to. Some people think I'm trying to devalue some of the channel. I said that your comedy is on point. It's incredible.

Yeah, it's Great. And you stay in character so. Well, Will you be doing any more of the zero turn video series? I have watched all of them like 5 times lol. I need more. Yes, we will be. We are saving up money from the core sales right now to be able to do some several more of those. Send Danny out myself, go do some Zero Turn series this coming summer and I'm hoping, fingers crossed, in April we'll be doing two. Yeah, looking forward to that. And I'll say it again. Oh, this is from Copper Creek. Congrats on 10K. That is a very difficult milestone to reach. Thank you, brother. Alex, how involved are you with Nick and his franchise in Marysville? We do our monthly coaching call. So I had a coaching call with him on.

Last Tuesday or Wednesday. I think that was our first coaching call because he came here in February for training. Wait, no, he came here in December. Yeah, he came in December in training January, had his first coaching call with me and then the other one last week. In terms of how involved am I? Like, he's his own owner, he's his own franchise, he owns everything himself, etc. From a solo operator to where you are today, which transition in growth was the hardest thoughts on debt during these those key growth phases? Okay, good question. Hardest part, honestly, is from like 100,000 to 200,000 in revenue.

The reason is because you're still in the field working and that's a lot of physical work. But then you're also starting to get traction to the point where you're doing a lot of estimates, a lot of phone calls, a lot of talking to people. There's more moving parts than because now you're trying to get first employee. So there's a lot of stuff you're trying to learn. That's a very hard phase. In terms of debt.

I don't like debt. I would say debt is only really useful to grow faster and basically like, for example, when it comes to equipment or trucks and you do need a finance, I'd be okay with it if you're going to use the cash to be able to go do marketing. So, for example, if you had $50,000 and you're like, I got $50,000, I'm going to spend $50,000 on equipment and get started. Or I'm going to spend $25,000 on equipment and then get a $25,000 loan for the rest of the equipment, but I'm going to spend the other leftover $25,000 in cash. I'm going to spend it on Marketing. And I promise you the second scenario where you do get some debt and you do go spend that money that you had in cash on marketing, that business will grow much, much faster. Okay? So when it comes to speed of growth, debt is absolutely a catalyst. Again, though, not all growth is good. Because if you're not running a profitable operation and you have a high percentage of your revenue going out the door to labor because you're inefficient, you have bad pricing, by growing your business, you're digging yourself a bigger hole. Okay? There's certain things you can do to make sure that doesn't happen, like standardize your labor rate. Standardize the percentage of revenue that goes to employees so that way there's not ups and downs and bad days and good days and all that sort of thing. Okay? If you had 1 second, 1 second, one second.

Your long form videos are gold. If you were to have. If you were to have for rules of success for anyone starting a business, what would they be? My four rules are compressing time frames. Scale the business, investing 90% of what I can, and being the best. Those are good rules. I would say, along with that, wait, he's out of here. More obviously, I wouldn't invest all the money consistently in the business. But what are your four rules of success? If you had to pick four rules, you're going to be a little bit different. I had to do four rules of success. Number one would be.

Don'T compare yourself to other people. Number one, absolutely 110%. Some people, when I say that, they always are thinking about, oh, like, I shouldn't compare myself to people who are bigger than me. And that's true. But you also shouldn't compare yourself to people who have you are lower than you because it will keep you from achieving your full potential. Because, like, oh, well, I'm doing so good because I'm better than so and so. Like, that keeps you from your potential. That keeps you from unlocking what you're truly capable of. It keeps you from being able to impact more people because you're constantly looking. So comparative up or down the chain of command or the levels of success is really, really toxic and really, really bad in my opinion. Second thing key of success would be stay physically fit. Healthy body, healthy mind.

Physically and spiritually stay fit. That would be like my number two rule of success, my number three rule of success is keep swinging. And that goes right back to what we talked about earlier. And that is like, the ability to make fast decisions is better than making perfect decisions, right Fast decisions and execution is more important than making the perfect call every single time. Like I'd rather get 8 out of 10.

On my batting average than 1 out of 2, right? Like I only swung twice, but you know, I only missed once, thank goodness. But if I swung more, I swing more often, maybe I'd miss. Yes, I'll miss more, but I'll get more done. And so those are probably my three. There's my three rules of success. I don't even remember what they were, but they sounded good. Okay.

What is your diet and exercise routine? Alex Ropez.

Okay, diet, intermittent fasting. I love this. I currently try to eat between 12 noon and 8pm I had to do this because I've been doing it for. Doing it for a couple months. I feel amazing. I've cut about 5 pounds of fat, which I didn't have like a lot. I know that, I'm not saying that, but like I did have a little bit and I feel very, very good. I feel like my metabolism has picked up.

In terms of diet. I try to stick to like paleo, but the one thing that's like I, I divulge on is tortilla chips because I love it with salsa and guacamole. But like I don't have any inclination to eat like pizza, pop, you know, potato chips, like that stuff. I have no desire. Like I, I'm not attempted by it whatsoever. I used to really like ice cream, but like I haven't ate ice cream for years and I used to have it every day because I liked it in terms of the like diet, exercise. I try to compact workouts so 20 to 25 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes on like a weekend. But like I don't like doing long workouts. I get kind of bored. I do it and not because I enjoy it. It's not like, yes, I can't wait to work out, but I do like the feeling of the endorphins rushing. I like to be able to feel like it really does help my metabolism and lets me burn off calories a lot easier. So yeah, one second here, everyone. Just got to stay in touch with everybody, make sure everything is doing good. Command center, very good. Thank you. Yes. Cool. For everyone who missed out this morning, stock market was pretty cool. Made some purchasing. Been selling off the past week or so. I'm sorry, A week ago I was selling, but now I'm kind of trickling back in. Okay. Do you track time it takes to complete each job every time? If so, how? Yes, we do. We use service autopilot to basically track each job start and stop. Hey Mike, this is Anthony Ingram. He might I'm at 165k and have 105 clients. Services are mowing, hedge trimming, molten pine straw install had a part time helper. What is your best advice to double sales for this year? Double sales for this year. I would really concentrate on taking your 105 clients to about 120 or 130 but making every single one of them worth $2000 a year instead of $1500 a year. Because right now you're averaging $1500 per client. Try to get that above 2000.

That's going to be in the form of like doing one click estimate emails like which is like a monthly email newsletter asking to, you know, trying to upsell them on the service that is most needed given that month. It's going to be incentivizing your crew to get upsells. Give them a $10 gift card if someone accepts an estimate that they initiate stuff like that.

I was talking to someone yesterday, they had like 300 clients but they only had like 300,000 revenue. And they're asking me like how you can get more clients. I'm like no, no, no, you don't need to go. We're about getting more clients. You need to start thinking about how can I make a thousand dollars per annual per year value for each client. Go to 2000 and I'll double your business without growing the number of clients at all. And guess what? It's a whole lot harder to get a new client from a bunch of cold leads people out in the universe than it is to get your warm clients. People who are existing already used your service getting them to buy again. It's much easier to do the latter. So do not let your leads go cold. Keep them warm, keep them engaged. Very important. Cool. All right, if you guys have hopped on here new, make sure you hit the like button. It's always a requirement on the channel when we're doing these long, these long Q&As. Just smash it, give it a little Pokemon and we'll keep going here for another hour or so with the questions. So thank you all for chiming in. 10,000 subscribers, very excited. Really want to get to like 30 or 40,000 would be kind of my goal this year. We got Danny who has replaced Josh to Josh got married. He's moving to Kentucky. I'm going to be going there for his wedding, which is me. Very strange because Josh, if you've met him, he's like 6, 5, 6, 4. I don't know. He's really tall. And then all the people in the wedding are six and above. Like six foot and above. Like, tall, tall. Like six, three, six, four, six, five, six, six. I'm going to be there. Five, four, and a half. Let's go. I really believe that I should probably be more like the ring bear instead of a groomsman, just because the height differential is going to look crazy. But anyways, so, yeah, with Danny on board, I really look forward to this year growing in terms of our subscriber count and just trying to get more of an audience to kind of get the message out of what we're trying to do with this industry. Raising the level of professionalism when a rising tide floats all boats, right? And I really believe if we can improve this whole industry that we can charge higher prices, we can find better employees. And that's. That's really what my goal is.

Starting out. We did that. Okay. Starting out. Lawn care and pest control business in South Florida seems to be a saturated market. I want to stand out with simple, lucrative outdoor pest control services. What do you think? I think that's a great idea. South Florida is a hot, hot market. Do not be afraid of saturation.

A market that has a lot of different. Different companies that are competitors proves to you that there's a lot of work to be done. Your job is to make sure you differentiate yourself from all of them enough to carve out a piece of the pie. But South Florida, my goodness, is super hot right now in terms of their market. We have two franchises down there. We have. I was talking to someone yesterday in Florida, too. I'm like, look, man, getting new customers is not going to be your issue. Your issue is going to be fine. To get employees that want to work in the hot summer heat of Florida and getting systems in place and getting everything set up, it's not going to be finding more new work. And for a lot of us in markets like we talked about, conference, where the housing market has gone through the roof and people are looking at their house as their investment and they're willing to. You know, I really feel like 2021 is gonna be an incredible year for this industry. Key point for everyone that can keep their team on staff, keep them engaged, and them not go searching elsewhere for work. Because everyone wants to become a stock trader right now and go ride the next wave of GameStop, baby. Going to become a billionaire on Gamestop and Bitcoin and Doge. Go Doge. So, you know, with that mentality you know, kind of sweeping across millennials and kind of our workforce. That's going to be honestly something we have to combat here in 2021. All right, next question here. From a franchisee's point of view, how hands on is Augusta with their marketing? Do you literally do it for them or are you passing on what works and they do it? The latter, Brent. So we have always created tutorials on a stretch. We've always created tutorials for them about, like, how to create their ads. But as of March 1st, we're actually creating specific ads for every platform every two weeks that they can just copy and paste. So we've always created tutorials, we've created them content like we post their social media and stuff like that. But going forward, we're going to make it even more involved where they can. Where they actually just can copy and paste ads every couple of weeks, getting new ones. So hope that Answer question.

Let's see here. Meticulous gardens. What percentage are you aiming for in terms of franchises versus corporate locations? I'm not really aiming for anything Meticulous Gardens in terms of percentage on that. Like, I want to make it accessible to people. Like, I really want that. There's a couple reasons why I do the corporate locations. One is because from my point of view, like, when I have money, I believe that Augusta is going to be my highest ROI compared to, like, if I went and put the money in real estate or in the stock market, like, I truly believe that my ROI is me best starting another location. So that's why I would do it. Partly. Another reason in terms of why we're doing it, though, is to test out the systems and give people the opportunity to become franchisee that otherwise couldn't. All of our general managers want to own their own locations, whether that be the one they start with us as a court as a general manager, or.

They work two years as a general manager, they become part of the 3F program where they don't have to pay an initial franchise fee and then they can go start their own. So it's allowing people that could otherwise probably not get started have that opportunity. So.

Zachary should have done this congruently on Clubhouse. That is a good point, Zachary. You know what? I agree. I agree, Zachary. So why don't we just do this? No one shows up when I do these impromptu meetings on Clubhouse. Let me just start a room on Clubhouse, and we are officially open. Let's go. All right. Clubhouse is live. Look at that. Thank you, Zachary. That's such a good idea. All right, there's no one there, but if someone's on clubhouse, they can now hear me. So there you have it. Okay.

Landscapes of America we sold in last month. We had a revenue of 1.6 and didn't realize the amount of work it was to sell it. Opposed to when we sold our first company that only did 400k.

Yep. The bigger the business, the harder it is to usually find a buyer, because you're usually requiring that person to have a lot of stuff skills, unless you really, really dumb things down inside that. That business. And that's why we talk about. Like in that video I did a couple years ago. Acquisitions is. That's why it's so important to simplify your business as you scale it. Because when you want to sell it, if you ever want to sell it, or if you want to find a manager to manage said location so you can go retire and be on a beach for the rest of your life. Regardless, the goal is that.

It'S so simple that either someone's managing it or you sell it. And you're able to sell it because someone else is able to actually take on that level of management, and they don't need a ton of skill or experience in the industry. That's when the valuation metric becomes plausible, is when it's more of an investment vehicle. Okay, one second here. I'm getting a message from command center. Oh, fun. Variable sales tax rates in the Redmond territory. Nice. Yes. 10.2. Yes. Okay, so quick tip. I know I've said this before. If you have sales tax in your area on lawn care, landscaping services, and you serve, like, a bunch of different areas, like, even inside of a small territory, you could have like five or six different sales tax rates. Just go with the highest one, especially if they're somewhat close, or go in the middle if you really wanted to. But like, for example, this is from command center because Redmond, they have sales tax rates, like, all over the place. The highest one is 10.2%. Welcome to Washington State. So, yeah, we're just gonna go with the highest one. Highest one, default mercy, 10% in our market, it's like 8.9. Still kind of a lot. Okay, questions, questions, questions. I have a. Well, one second.

Okay, how do you choose next few locations for Augusta Lawn Care.

For corporately owned? There's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it because a lot of it has to do. I want it to be kind of random because I want to be able to figure out different markets. So I'll. I'll. Kind of look at different markets. Like, okay, I want to, like, really focus on a really tiny town. I might start one there. I might go then to a larger area. Like, hey, it's more metropolitan. It's gonna be push mower only. That model, I want. I want to test that. So that's kind of how I look at it. Lawnscapes of America. I have Krispy Kreme doughnuts and wash it down with a large Dunkin Donuts coffee every morning. Breakfast of champions. I don't know if I support that diet regime, but. Sounds good. Dunkin Donuts. Wash it down. All right. We sold. Okay. We. Hello, Mike. This year will be my first year in the lawn care business. So my question to you is, how may clients. How many clients should I take on? Just typically mow, trim, edge, and blow. You gotta figure out that yourself in terms of what you can handle. And also, if you're gonna hire someone, if you're gonna have multiple trucks, if you can take the stress of having 100 mowing customers and two months, or if you can't handle that and you need to grow a little bit slower, just get one a week the next year.

Questions? Questions? We have to collect sales tax here in Pennsylvania, or is that. Yeah, Pennsylvania. Yeah. When? When? Tell our. What in the world. We have to collect sales tax here in Pennsylvania. When? Tell our new customers we hear the last guy didn't charge us, we collect it. Not charge. Yeah, that's good. Okay, I see you're saying lawnscapes, you collect sales tax, you don't charge the sales tax because you're really just collecting it. And then you gotta give it to the government. And if someone says, well, this last guy didn't charge sales tax, that's your opportunity to say, well, well, Mr. Jones, based upon the Department of Revenue, here is the link to state that they should be. Which basically means they are not licensed or they are doing that illegally. And if they're a good customer, they'll value that you actually do things correctly. And if they don't want no sales tax, then you probably don't want them.

Okay.

How would you judge whether a SEO and website guy is working? Well, this is very difficult because, honestly, you. A lot of SEO cannot be seen on the ui, which is the user interface. A lot of it is in the background. A lot of it is little tiny things that are not seen by someone actually on your website. What I would say is.

Asking them, like, what they're doing on a consistent basis. So, for example, like a best of lawn care Lawn care web design. Every two months we go through all the websites and look at all the background stuff. We make changes every single time. But 90% of those changes are not seen by the user. They're not seen by that person scrolling through Google. What we're doing is we're looking at the newest versions of Google, seeing what they've changed in their algorithm, what sort of trends we're seeing in terms of what they're rewarding. So for example, like, accessibility is a big thing with Google right now. I wish I could share my screen. Actually, you know what, I'll pull it up on my phone and show you what I'm talking about. Accessibility is becoming a big thing right now.

And you've seen it. If you have lawn care web design, you've seen us add this in the past six months or so to your site.

Because it's not so much about having the accessibility on your site and being worried about people who can't read. But like on. This is Augusta Lawn Care's webpage here, see if you can see this. Bring my face closer.

You kind of see it. But here in the bottom here, this little button here is the accessibility where we allow people to like, increase the size of the text. And there you go, highlight things, contrast, all that sort of thing that is being rewarded by Google right now quite a bit. And so you'll see all lawn care web design websites have this. And this is the stuff that we pick up on every.

Every couple months we go through. And they were looking what Google's ranking. And that's one of the things right now that we've seen. And the reason is because they're trying to obviously on their end be able to market. They're doing these things for people who are, you know, deaf people that are even blind, like be able to have text to diction, stuff like that. So I think it's pretty cool. But SEO, in terms of like, whether or not you have a good SEO person, they just ask them, like, hey, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing to make my website rank better? What did you do to determine what cities we should put our names in? Stuff like that. So tips on getting over a bad day.

For me, I like to work out and pray.

And think about how good I have it comparatively against other people. Yesterday was a horrible day. Horrible day yesterday. A lot of different angles. But the worst one from a business standpoint was the fact that I did not deliver my. On my promise to the franchisees about our software launch. I Hated that. And I've been working very hard on it, but I felt very bad about it. I still feel bad about it. I'm still working hard on it because I'm behind on it. And tips on getting over it, man. I know I'm trying to do my very best, and I know I'm giving everything I have to try to make it work. And sometimes I'm going to mess up and I just got to keep going. But in terms of when you're having a really bad day and, like, something really bad does happen, I think it's a lot of times good to keep it in context and perspective against, like, people who really do have it bad, right? So for me, like, I know I've talked about a lot. Like, for me, I default back to when I was in Africa with the kids at the orphanage and, like, the clinic and things. Like, if I can just default back that literally for just a few minutes, okay, Just kind of remember what it was like there. But remember walking down the hallways of the hospital? Remember, like, seeing the kids when we gave them bubbles, Hearing some of their stories of, like, their parents abusing them, throwing them in the fires, throwing them off of a train. Like, all those stories, I just think about this for a few minutes. It kind of resets me. Like, hey, look, it's not that big a deal if, like, this contract fell through or, like, so and so didn't follow up on what they said they were going to do or they're behind on a project. So that helps me kind of calibrate things. Not to say I don't have bad days. They're like, my goodness, they happen more often the more stuff goes on. But it's about bounce back, right? Because if you don't have that ability to bounce back, you are going to have more and more bad days as you have more and more responsibility because you have more and more things happening, and you have therefore, a greater chance that something's going to go wrong. And so if you let something, one thing, get you down, as your business grows, you can just count on the fact that you're not going to have any good days, because as the business grows, you're just going to have more consistent times where things go bad. And if that, if you allow that thing to make your day go bad, you're going to lead to a lot of bad days in a row. So you really got to get in the habit of, like, bouncing back from things and just being super, super resilient to bad news. People disappointing you, firing people People letting you down, losing money, like, it's just going to kind of get. Not immune to it. It's never easy, but, like, just got it. You got to realize that you've got to get back up in the batter, bounce, right? I'm going to get up because I got a stretch. But also if I'm in the batter's box, like, and if I swing and I strike out, like, the last thing you should do is just like, go. Like, go feel defeated or like, go chill out for a weekend. The next thing you need to do that you should get in the bat, back into the batter's box, inside of the batting cage, and just keep swinging right and getting in the habit and just like developing that mental rhythm and that physical memory of your muscles to continue getting back into rhythm. And so same thing with business. Like, just get right back into it. Like, if I. If I really do feel like I made a bad decision or I made like a stupid move or I made a mistake or like something bad happens, the next thing I do is like, okay, what can I do right now that's going to be like a win? What can I do right now that if, like I called someone or made a. You know, for me, it's like helping people a lot of times. Like, what would just like, immediately overwhelm that, like, just take me completely in a different direction and kind of supersede that negativity. So that was a bit of a tangent. Okay, Mike, you've applied simplification in lawn care business. How would simplification look like in the hardscaping business? Yeah, so for hardscaping, you should simplify what type of products you install. So instead of having 50 different type of pavers and handing people a Belgard, you know, pamphlet when they are interested in law in pavers, I would recommend that you. You have two different types of pavers. You installed two different colors, two different designs, and that's it. So that would be how I would simplify, because if you do that, then your labors are gonna be much more efficient. You're gonna be able to. You're not gonna have any waste of materials because when you have leftovers, you'll know you use it within the next few weeks because you use the same products all the time. Easier sale process, faster sales process.

Because they're not a whole bunch of options. You have to go meet them at the supplier and then like go over different colors and show them pictures of this one, like this website and all reduce all that, reduce the friction and don't let them make up their mind over the course like weeks. When you go to a really fancy restaurant, you get like three or four different entrees, five or six different entrees. Maybe you go to like Denny's or applebee's. You like 100 different menu items. There's a reason why when there's fewer menu items, we perceive in our mind it's going to be a higher value, higher quality. And that's what you want for your lawn care landscape business. You can do the same thing for hardscaping. All right, read. Thanks Mike. With 5k just starting out for marketing, what where would be dollars best used other than door hangers to grow quickly? Thank you again for all your content. God bless. I would do like some signs, I would do yard signs. I would do some. I would do Facebook groups, Facebook groups in your local area. I would do nextdoor and just connect with as many people as possible on local groups and things like that online. That's another cheap way to do things. Thanks, Mike. For a two man crew, what do you think is a good weekly work percentage with mowing versus landscaping? Mowing is nice because it's steady and pays the bills. But obviously landscaping is a higher hourly rate.

The last Paramount really sold on. You know, your hourly rate for mowing can be just as high if not higher than landscaping. It's really going come down to the fact that yes, a landscaping job, you have less drive time, less waste. Traditionally you're gonna make more money in terms of dollars there. But you gotta ask yourself if you have a whole bunch of materials and you have bigger equipment on those projects and you have higher skilled labor on a big project, do you actually make more money? That's the question. How did you come up with the name Augusta? Because I used to play a ton of golf. Augusta national is where they play the Masters and it looks incredible. Their lawns are well kept.

Andy Chavez, please help me grow. I have a father son business. 50 customers mostly buy with me many extras. I have 5k to spend next weeks on market. I talked about that already. Can you talk a little more about Reset? I think that is such an awesome project you're working on and will definitely help a lot of people. Cool. Thanks Jeffrey. Yeah, Reset is going to be coming up here next few weeks. You're going to see a video about that. I'll probably show you guys inside the new facility. Oops, sorry. This is my laundry basket. Sorry.

The. Yeah, Reset's gonna be coming up here in the next several weeks. Hopefully sign the Lease here pretty soon. Tonight I'm actually going to be going over the designs from the architect with Charity, who is the manager for reset. And yeah, looking forward to that. Can be a little expensive, but I, I agree. Like, it's just something I. I have to do. Almost like I feel very inclined to do it and I think it's gonna help a lot of people. I really do believe that.

Would. Would love to duplicate the Mount Vernon location. Thanks, Turo. Or Honda for business startup Toro. Cheaper Honda, more reliable, easier to find. A mechanic, has parts and knows how to work on them. Price of Honda in Australia, seventeen hundred dollars. Price of a Toro is 8, 800. Again, I don't think that's actually gonna move the needle a whole lot in terms of difference to your business. Oh, sorry. Clubhouse is active and I literally just dropped my phone. Zachary has a question. Zachary and I have you talk in just a second. But in terms of Toro versus Honda, 800 versus $1700, I don't think it's going to make or break your business long term. In the short term, spending, if you only have two grand, I would rather you spend the $800 for the toro, even if it's cheaper, but then spend $1,000 on marketing, which is actually grow the business. Right. So it just depends on how much money you have. But if you had like five or ten grand, I wouldn't worry between the difference between 800 and 700. Like, again, swing. Just choose one. Just go make a decision. All right. Zachary is in Clubhouse, which if you guys haven't ever checked it out, you should make sure you're on Clubhouse. Zachary is on here. I'm going to go allow him to raise his hand. Well, he did raise his hand. I'm going to allow him to talk. And I apologize, Zachary, for dropping my phone on this desk here. You probably blew out your eardrums. But let me go ahead and allow you to turn your mic on and then you can go ahead and ask your question. What's up? Hey, so I've been like, analyzing your Augusta IG page. Who are you targeting with your Instagram post? Because to me is what I'm seeing is these beautiful pictures. So looks like you're targeting potential. Potential customers. And then I'm seeing these motivational posts about your culture. So to me, it seems like you're target getting possible new hires. And then are you also branding for the franchisees? That make sense? Yeah, totally. I'm starting at the method behind your it. Cool. So in terms of like our local markets, social Media strategy. It is definitely different because we do have so many different types of kind of targets that we're going after, right? We're trying to like, like Zach was saying, go after new customers, trying to get it, go after getting new hires, we're trying to get new franchisees, etc. And so in terms of my opinions on social media, I do not believe that a customer goes to social media and looks at people's pictures to figure out who's going to mow their lawn. I don't believe that. I feel like what happens is they go to social media to verify that you are a professional company. So they might see your trucks go by. See, I don't feel like it's usually the first place they see you unless it's an ad. They're not just scrolling through Facebook looking for lawn care companies, right? They might see an ad and they go to your page, but it's rare that someone's looking on. They're like, oh, I need a lawn care person. And they're looking at everyone's pages. And if they are, they're validating that you exist, that you're present, that you're consistently posting and you're professional.

And not like, oh, do they do good work? Because everyone can post good pictures. And like, let's be honest, a lot of landscapers post pictures that are, they look so good, you, you really doubt whether or not they did it, right? Because anyone could take a picture off of Google Images, this great lawn with great straight line and beautiful mower and all the rest of it. And honestly, I would rather someone show a little bit more.

Like home feel homemade than be so corporate looking. It makes it look sterile, right? Because for most of us, we want to have that approach of still being small and hometown and locally owned and operated. And when we try to take stock images or like drone footage of these like crazy massive estates or basically kind of making it very clear to our customer that like, we don't do their lawn like their. Most of our customers. Lawns are not going to have two acres of stripes back and forth, forth. They're not going to have, you know, this massive house with a pool and all the rest of it, right? So when it comes to our marketing strategy around social, it is much more about engagement, right? So I'm a big believer that the social page should be more about engaging with the consumer than it should be about trying to sell them, right? So I have to ask myself, okay, is someone going to be engaged with a new lawn picture every single day? They're not, right. They're not going to like and comment on or share or just even show up in their feed every single day. Us posting a picture of just mowing lawns. They're not, it's not going to be engaging for them. And so the goal with our social is to engage with them so that when we do run ads or that when we do do a selling post that actually shows up in their feed. Because what too many of us are doing is we're trying to sell on every post, therefore we're not engaging with the consumer. Therefore, when Facebook has to determine whether or not your post shows up, it won't because it's not been engaging up. And Facebook's like, oh, like this, this post or Instagram or whatever, this post, this creator doesn't usually create very engaging content because at the end of the day, you might have a thousand friends. Facebook has to figure out who to put at the top of your.

Scrolling on Facebook, like to put at the top of your wall or whatever. Like when you're scrolling through your pictures and what's on your feed, it has to, it has to decide what's on top. Not all thousand people you follow or your friends do you see, you might only see 30 or 40 or 50. Facebook's algorithm is the thing that has to determine which ones pop up first on your feed. And it makes that determination by giving you the content that is most engaging across, across the whole platform. And so my goal is to engage with the consumer more for them to actually view. Click on the, the. The image, read the quote, do something with the quote, share it, look at it like it, whatever. Because they're consistently doing that, they will begin to see it more. They'll see my post more often. And so for us yet, like, you are right, Zachary. We kind of have a very split approach on who we're targeting.

But that being said, we're also trying to make it very clear we're different than everyone else. Right. And so I feel like every landscaper around us especially, they have the mowing, they have the before and after pictures. They have all that stuff, which by the way, could be any picture online. There's nothing inside of there that speaks as them. Like, we really try hard to get our, our crew members or our trucks in there to actually prove like, this is ours. Like, yes, these might not be the perfect pictures. A lot of times these are guys. These are from the guys out in the field, their picture, their phones. These aren't like professionally usually pictures, but it does Scream authentic. And especially as your business grows, you kind of want that so that people don't begin to tune you out because they think that you're this big corporation that has a very sterile approach to connection, connecting with your audience.

See here. Next question here is what kinds of things do you have your office staff do when things are a bit slow? Lots of different things. You can have them follow up on estimates, you can have them work on collections, you can have them do something that takes more manual in terms of advertising, like going through and contacting people that haven't had a spring cleanup in two years, but they had it like five years before, more every single year. Now they randomly have it like contacting them directly, things like that, you know, manual hand to hand combat. That's what I would say. Going back into estimates, going back and trying to upsell people, things like that.

Hello, Mike, what would you recommend? Would you recommend on asking real estate realtors for future yard work?

Yeah, I think you'll get some of those realtors into your database so they can constantly see your face and then they'll think about you when they're in your crunch and they need a job done before like a listing or an open house, something like that.

I appreciate what you have been doing here. Keep it up. Oh no brands guys. He doesn't care. I don't know what that means. Thanks. I did, I did go with the Toro. Already ordered it and come with two year warranty, so no brainer. Good job, Jake. G' day from Australia. Mike, you're awesome. I'm going to bed. Almost 12 o'. Clock. Keep up the good work. Don't doubt. Swing. Yeah. Can we give Mike an emoji bomb? That's hilarious. Let's go. How did you start and get traction on YouTube? Well, I only have 10,000 subscribers, so I'm probably not the best person to talk about that, honestly. Because if people have done a lot better on YouTube than me. But honestly, I just tried to create content I really cared about, was passionate about.

And was okay with talking about for free. So I like talked for years on podcasts and YouTube before. Like making money of any sort. If you start for the money, usually you kind of burn out. I have a thousand dollars spend on marketing. What would you recommend spending on? I think I talked about this before. Door hangers and talking to people in person. All right, Emmanuel, what tips do you have on bidding a 70 house HOA subdivision? How much should I charge per house? And since they are all together, would you do, would you do Count a price since they are all together or would you discount a price?

Again, you should be looking at how many budget hours is it going to take. Break it down like what services they want and then ask yourself how long is it going to take to mow the lawn? How long is it taking to blow off all the sidewalks? How long is it going to take to weed all the beds? Add up all those budget hours, multiply it by your hourly rate and maybe discount your hourly rated a little bit. But that's about as all out, all the discount I would be doing. What's the best way to stand out? Best way to stand out is do things differently and be yourself. People want, they want to see people be themselves. That's why I don't really care about when people say negative things about me like I'm just going to be me. It's going to repel some people and it's going to be other people are going to love it. Right? And if you're yourself and you're authentic, you don't have to fake anything and you just be who you are and you have nothing to hide and you have nothing to apologize for and people are attracted to that. People love that. People like, like seeing people who don't have to front all the time, just being honest when they make mistakes and things like that. So pay per click your thoughts? Yeah, pay per click. Again, not all clicks are created equal. Right. So like a 30 cent click on a Facebook ad is gonna be a whole lot cheaper but definitely not as valuable as a click on a Google Ad that someone has literally searched for landscaping and I'm popped up first. That's gonna be a lot more valuable than a click on a Facebook ad where they sneeze and accidentally clicked on a button on their, on their, on their Facebook feed. Right. So I'm, I finished all the questions, but I still have time. We are in this marathon together, gentlemen and ladies. And so if you have more questions, go ahead and post. If you have question about other random stuff, feel free to ask to this kind of good opportunity for that as we have our 10,000 subscriber Q& A marathon. I'm going to go ahead and leave the clubhouse room. Thanks Zachary for hopping on there. Cool.

Any other questions? I thought there was something I was going to share today.

Oh, I could share this actually real quick. More questions popping. And check this out. This is part of the this on my Facebook and Instagram.

Story the other day. But this is where I do the teaching for a lot of the mba Online MBA for entrepreneurs. Online course right here. So lights on, aren't on and stuff. But this is the one we were just doing. I was talking about the difference between gross profit and net profit and how, like, you take your sales and your revenue minus your cogs, which is your cost of goods sold. And COG stands for cost of goods sold. That's gonna include, like, your labor, subcontractors, cost of materials, all that good stuff. So that's a big one, big chunk in this industry, especially with hardscaping. Then you got your gross profit. Gross profit is not net profit. There's a lot of different things in between that. So if you take your gross profit and then you actually subtract out your operating expenditure, operating expenses, then you get your operating profits. Your OPEX or operating expenses is like sales, marketing, administrative, your office, things like that. That's why I always say, like, this overhead here is what kills a lot of people because they spend a whole bunch on an office and a building and all the rest of it. They spend a bunch on office people and an estimator and general manager and all the rest of it. Then you get your operating profits. That's your earnings before interest and taxes. But it's also known a lot of times as ebitda. That's earnings before interest, taxes and amortization. I said appreciation of my story. I was very mad at myself. But earnings before interest, taxes and amortization, and this is a lot of times what's used in the stock market and things like people will say, you know, what's your ebitda? However, still, EBITDA isn't necessarily your true net profit, because all of this over here is just your operating activities. So all these opex, cogs, your operating profits, that's all operating activities. They're still financing activities when it comes to your actual balance sheet and your finances and things. So in the financing activities part, you got interest, expense or, like, the cost to borrow money. This is going to be like, in the form of either interest rates or it's going to be like basis points in terms of fees for borrowing money. And so if you take your operating profits or your EBITDA and take out now your interest expense, then you have profits before taxes, but still you got income tax after that before you actually hit your net profit. Okay? So at the end of the day, net profit is definitely not gross profit. I think people get this confused a lot of times. Like, I make like 80% profit. I'm like, okay, is it net profit or gross profit? And honestly, you could have a good ebitda, but if you have a really bad debt situation and financing situation, you could still have negative cash flow in terms of net profit. So there's a little bit of a tidbit from the MBA online course. That one will be up in two days. There's like eight more videos I have to put up there for this past week. Okay, questions and answers. Here we go. What made you. What made you go corporate? I don't know what that means. Sorry. Hello, Mike, question. If. If I choose three main services per se, and I get calls for other services.

Yeah. So basically, Cesar, be really clear in your marketing to only attract those leads for the services that you want. But then when you get other leads, keep in mind that a lot of times when people, for example, when they ask for tree services, they're also usually like, renovating their lawn or their. Their landscaping, Right? So you might say, hey, like, I don't do tree services, but we're going to try to set up an appointment with that person because there's a really good chance that they need other services that we can do. Right. And so when you go to a property and there's a whole bunch of services and some of them you don't do, and you tell the customer like, hey, we're not the best at that. Here's who we'd recommend. And you literally give them people's names and develops a lot of trust with them because they realize that you're not going to, like, lie to them or like, tell them that you can do something that you can't. And what you do say you can do, you're very good at. So I would. That's what I would say. But make sure your advertising, your website, etc. Is not pointing in the direction of all those other different services that you don't even want to offer. Okay, see here.

How much does an employee make an hour for you, roughly? If they have their own truck set up solo, how much they make an hour for their wages? I think our average at the local shop somewhere between like 20 to 23 dollars an hour is very average. But, like, there's some that are consistently above that. But, like, I would say the average is probably 22, $23 an hour that they make on P4P. Kurt, tips on approaching property managers for commercial clients. Yeah, you got to be willing to kind of run through brick walls, do things that other people wouldn't do. And when you do that and you get that allegiance, they'll just give you work without bidding you out or anything like that, but that those relationships take time. And in terms of, like, how to get in with them, it's a lot of talking, just like, you know, trying to get in with them, emailing, cold calling, walking to people's, you know, offices, property management offices, giving them cookies, like, doing whatever. Whatever you got to do. Jarl Anthony, congrats on 10K, you and everything. Augusta are very inspiring to see. What questions do you ask to qualify clients? A good one is if they just ask them straight up. Like, especially if you do hardscaping or big projects.

That'S usually the one people are most worried about qualifying clients for. Usually a good thing to ask them is, don't worry, I'm just gonna fill up my water bottle. A good thing to ask them is, have you established a budget for this project, Mr. Jones? And if they say no, that could be a really good sign that you their tire kicker. Or they just have no idea what that budget's going to look like. And they could be way too high or way too low and therefore reduce your close ratio. So what you might say is like, hey, well, I'm going to send you a document that kind of shows some of the work we've done, shows some of the jobs that we have completed and the prices for those, and just want to make sure we're on the same page. And once you create a budget or kind of what you think you're willing to spend on this project, then I'd love to meet with you and go over the project. Right? So especially if you're in hardscaping, I think asking them if they've established a budget or if they have a cost of the product in mind, that's a great place to start in terms of trying to qualify them because they say $10,000 and they're asking for a complete landscape overhaul. Paver, patio, trimming all their trees, replacing a hedge. Like, you can immediately, like, look like we really. You. You. You're calling this the wrong time here, folks. But if they are more realistic, okay, it's a $40,000 project. They can probably make something work. And you have a scope of cost to kind of work with inside, then you are traditionally more inclined to close that person.

When do you plan. One second here. When. When do you plan to open franchise locations in the uk at least two years from now. Going into Canada was hard enough. My goodness. Green Empire Lawn Care. How do I get a franchise at Augusta for free? You have to work at an Augusta location for two years in the field. If you do that, then you can, you can get around the initial fee. How do you collect money, card, cash, check, monthly contract, every week. And what would you recommend to a new business? We collect mostly through credit card, but we don't require it. We just try to position it on the email to make it sound like it's really in their best interest. And 89 of people sign up, do it, doing it with their cards on file. And we bill every month. We do that mostly due to the fact that we do not want month weekly emails going to the client. Simply due to the fact that once a month we are sending that invoice. Once a month we are sending a sales letter or sale one click estimate email, I should say. And so I don't want to dilute the open ratio for those sales emails by having a whole bunch of emails all the time with like invoices. Right. Invoice everyone. If I had four invoices going out every single month or five on some months, the chance of them opening up a sales email in the middle of the month is less likely. That's lower cost open ratio and I don't want that. So sorry to get some more water.

All right, congrats on 10K Dave's Lawn Vlogs. What's your thoughts on websites like Squarespace or someone starting out? Yeah, Squarespace is good. Wix weebly all great places to get started. You're not usually going to rank super high for a year or two, just depending on your market, how big it is traditionally. But it's definitely a great place to start. It's better than nothing. Absolutely. 110%.

What is your goal for perman hour profit? What do you charge and what do you make on one solo employee? Oh, I see. What is your goal for permanent profit? Got it. So we are usually, you know, in terms of labor rates, we're trying to, we're taking a percentage of that revenue and giving it the employee. Right. So you can do the math, right. Like if, if 30. If I'm trying to get 20, you know, on average, 20, 21, $22 per hour to the employee, you know, we're trying to shoot for three times that in profit for the company. Right. So that's kind of the breakdown there. So, you know, if I can make, you know, $40 in profit per. Per hour, that'd be great. Be really, really good. If I could consistently make that all the time. And we're usually a little bit under that, just depending on the rate, what rate we're charging. Hey, Mike. I run a painting business. During my summers at university last summer, I did $226,000 in revenue with $76 in profit, not including paying myself. This summer, I am in truck. $400,00 revenue. Very cool. With 140k profit, I was planning to start landscaping after school because I'm interested in recurring services. Thoughts on switching industries? Yeah, like, painting is definitely one off jobs, right? And it's going to really follow the housing market, which I think you're going to be in a really good spot for the next few years with interest rates as low as they are. But you're smart to start thinking about recurring services. And I would definitely think that's a good move for you. I would. I. If I was you, I would keep doing the painting thing because you're. You're good at it. You've got solid revenues. You know you're gonna be good at this this year. But then just every single painting customer, you should be trying to sell them on mowing, like, and then just try to slowly pick up more customers and develop the recurring revenue. And then maybe one day you make more on mowing than you do painting and then you switch full time. But until then, just keep doing what you're doing. Like, I think people sometimes swing from one thing to the next thing too quickly before developing a solid foundational pillar or business that kind of like pays for everything. And so that's what I would do. Cool. Thanks so much, everyone. This is 10,000 Subscriber Q& A marathon. We're gonna keep going here, but make sure you hit the like button. If you haven't already got a little thumb thing out right there. Click it. Very good. All right, so let's keep going here. I think he meant doing being a corporation. Do you have a welcome card? One second. Or gift for new clients when they sign up for weekly mowing for the season? We don't. We do, though, after they become a new customer.

After their first job, they get a welcome or a card and we all sign it. So at our shop, we had a whole bunch of cards that will end up being on the front desk. And everyone just signs them if they see them laying there, and then we send those out. What's the deal with Tigrin? I don't know. Something wrong with him. Justin Curry. Is making jobs as simple as possible a priority? If so, why? And how do you measure it? In my opinion, yes, it is absolutely a priority to simplify the jobs and simplify every aspect of the business. I'm just obsessed with simplification.

The reason is because if you can simplify things, it's easier to systematize things. Everyone thinks those things are the same thing. It's not. You've got us. If you're going to make systematization easier, you've got to simplify. Okay? So simplify your services, simplify your processes, Simplify the designs that you have for your projects. Simplify your mowing setup, Simplify your truck, Simplify your equipment. Like, simplify. It's very important.

Why did you pick the color yellow for your shirts and trucks? Was there a reason behind that or just to be seen? A lot of it was just to be seen, honestly, and just have a consistent brand across trucks. You know, uniforms. A lot of our social media had a lot of yellow in it. Every yellow is everywhere. Paint colors, everything's yellow. It's just. It's just kind of a theme. How do you think of someone. What do you think of someone buying somebody's mowing route? And how much would you pay for a client of their Weekly service is $50. Emmanuel, you should go check out this video I made, like, a couple years ago. I talked about acquisitions and then also selling your business, like, a couple hours long. It's a webinar I record. It's completely free on YouTube. And like I said before earlier, I think it's one of my best videos ever. I think you should watch it, Carter. Hup. If you aren't a good salesman, do you think it's a good idea to go door to door? Not. Probably not. If you're not a good salesperson, probably not a good idea to do that. Probably want to stay behind a screen. But I would really be pushing myself and training myself to try to be a good salesperson because I do feel it's really important when you're first getting started. And if you need to put yourself in an uncomfortable position, might be a good idea to go door to door. It's going to definitely put you out of your comfort zone. What's your church's name? How do you mind? Could you. Elizabeth Steffi. Could you explain a little bit about your beliefs? Yeah. So I believe in the Bible. I believe that God sent a prophet in this day, just like, you know, Elijah or something like that from the Bible. And I pray a lot. It's something that I really believe in, and it's kind of like my anchor, kind of everything that I do. But yeah, like, the Bible is, in my opinion, like, the ultimate. And. Yeah. How do you guys get employees? We do a Lot of ads like Craigslist, Facebook. Indeed. The goal is to try to basically drive them to the website where they fill out an application and submit their resume. Is it bad to pass the transaction fee from QuickBooks on to the client if you give them the option to pay by check to avoid the transaction fee? I'm not a big fan of this. Like raise your prices by a couple dollars an hour. It'll cover this. This like when you go to any other places business, it's not like you like, okay, if you go to like the grocery store, they're like, oh, if you pay with credit cards and it costs more, like I would just eat the cost if I was you. Just reduce the friction of the sale. Best entry level hardscaping job.

If you do hardscaping, you know, pavers are a great place to start.

But you might want to start with mowing and then try to like build the that side of the branch or that. That those services inside of that new company that work for Mike. What was. Oh, which by the way, I think in like the next day or two, we're gonna be launching a video I recorded yesterday. It was freezing cold in the snow and I made a video for all of your teams to watch your team meeting. And I talk about the meaning of what we do.

The meaning of what we do in this industry and why we do what we do and why it's so important in terms of saving our customers time. And I encourage your employees in this team meeting to really plug into podcasts, audiobooks and stuff like that. So it's going to be posting the next couple of days. I'd encourage you to have you watch it with your team at a team meeting. It's going to be coming out in the next couple days.

Hey Mike, what's your daily schedule when you were going from zero to 100,000.

Then a hundred thousand to 500,000. Your daily routine, I'm sure changed a bit day to day. But a guy like you, I'm sure is disciplined. Yeah, you like, you have to be from 0 to 100. You're definitely just working a lot throughout the day. When I was at that stage, even to 100 to 500,000, I was going to school at the night, at night. Right. Getting my mba. So I would work all day long out in the field. Then I would go and go to Classroom 6 to 10pm and then do projects with my classmates until like easy one and then come back home. And so it was just like just a boot camp of business. Whether it be Working the field, listening to podcasts and audiobooks or if it be actually going to school. But in terms of my daily routine, like now, it's about all I'm here really for, supporting the team, right? Like they, they can run operations, daily operations just fine. My goal is to make sure that they are given the resources, they're given the, the power to make decisions and move the ball down the court. So that's kind of like my role, My role is just like greasing the engine, making sure they have everything they need. And then my biggest, my biggest thing now is, you know, helping the franchisees when they need things. So like the one with the SBA thing, like I'm always in contact with them when they need a hand with something.

Emmanuel, if I'm making 150k with 2 employees, how much should my company be net profiting? 150,000 in revenue if you and 2 employees are working is actually pretty low. Just being honest. You should be profiting on 150k. Like I would like you to be able to profit at least 60 grand on that. At least 60 or 70 grand net profit like you taking home. And so two employees, maybe there's part time or something. In that case that'd be fine. But they're two full timers and you working. There's only $50,000 in revenue per person working in the field. And that's a little scary. You want that to be significantly higher. And that's a number you should be probably tracking as you grow. And making sure that number isn't going down too much means that you're having inherent inefficiencies as your company grows. Hey, Mike, we're going to year two and need new uniforms this year. Since we're still a new company, should we have our services and number on the back of our shirt or just our mascot and a motto? Good question. Keep in mind, people don't see very, very much on someone's shirt. I've seen some people have like this like all their services listed on their shirt and things. It's like, look, people are not going to see this from like 50ft away. And when it comes to mowing your crew crews out in the field, most people seeing them are like 50 to 100ft away. So like ours, we just have a gusta, like just massive on the front. Augusta Lawn Care. Right. Because that's in my mind, they see the yellow and they see like one word. That's all I got. Like, people are not going to be seeing your guys who by the way are moving around, scrunched up, have jackets on sometimes, whatever. They're not gonna be like seeing like oh yeah, the service. Oh, phone number. Yeah. Okay, what's that number again? Like that's not gonna happen very often. I'd rather that information be on the truck so that they are really interested in going to your website or phoning you or seeing what services you offer. The truck is going to stay there in one spot and it's going to be bigger on the truck versus their shirt. So just kind of my opinion.

See here how do you pull a lawn care service together while working a full time job? You've got to have good office support otherwise you got to have really good profit sharing to make sure you guys are held accountable as well as P4P out field.

What type of advice? Like I, I've said this before, I can't imagine running a lawn care business without P4P. Like I can't even fathom having to think like because it's been several years now, it's like I can't imagine going back to it without going hourly. And I say this to people all the time and tell people don't, you know, but like I can't even fathom like how you could run a business now in this labor economy without having P4P. Where I'm worried about are they working? Where I'm worried about why are they on their phones, why are they stopping at gas stations, are they working as hard as they can, why are they driving the longer route to the job? Like I don't think about any of that stuff because I know they're making a percentage of the revenue and therefore if they want to slack off they're going to make less money. So like, like I can't even fathom it's hard, it's not easy to switch over to P4P. Like switching everything to budget hours and like the whole concept as an owner changes and like you got to train your employees, you're going to lose some employees because you know they've been doing it that way for their whole life. But like I can't even imagine running without P4P. And it's not because like I talk a lot about P4P and because like I teach it and things like I. Yeah, anyways, what advice would you give someone that is scared to leave his full time landscape job to start his own landscape business? I do the math, Juan. Like if you're making $20 an hour at your job and you know, after taxes that's $15 an hour. So you times that by 40, that's $600 in a week. And then if you can go get a cleanup and get that done in a day and get $500, like, the math on that makes a lot of sense. You know, don't be disenchanted. Like, the grass is always green on the other side. Realize that now you've got to go earn every single job. It's not being given to you every day. But if you're confident you can go get. Get a cleanup every single day and make a few hundred bucks, that math starts becoming really good. So do the math. That's what I would say. Juan, how many cleanups do you need every single week to break even on your paycheck? Then it's like, okay, well, how many doors I need to knock on to get that many cleanups? For example, what's Your thoughts on HomeAdvisor? It's a pay for lead system. Green empire. Yeah, I've talked about this before. I kind of feel like it's like, kind of like renting versus owning a house. You're kind of renting the client. You don't own that. You don't own the client. Home Advisor does. They're gonna continually ask them if they want leads or they won't work on other different services that you otherwise would probably be able to provide the customer. And so I don't like that. I want to own the customer's information, I want to own the customer's database and then my database, etc. And I don't want them their information being sold. Dating while being an owner, it's very difficult. You don't have a lot of time, so you got to just figure out what your priorities are and lock in. If there's someone that you're dating, I'd say you'd probably need to do a really good job time slotting and making sure you have dedicated to them certain hours of the day. Ebola, po. Okay, that's weird. I heard you hate Jewish people. Is this true? No, it's not true. That's stupid. You can't say stuff like that, man. I'm gonna have to remove you.

Hey. Hey. Okay. Hey, Mike, what's your thought on setting up an instant lawn quoting bot and running Facebook ads to sell mine? Looks to on it. Looking to automate this part of our estimating. Yeah, I like it when you're on P4P. It's very, very difficult. I think it is the way of the future, but honestly, there's Too many variables.

Whether it be a lot of these lawn. These bots are using lot square footage. But if you have an acre lot, you could have an acre of lawn or you can literally have a tiny little yard. And so.

That'S not going to be accurate for the customer. And then when it comes to P4P, if you're not accurate, your crews are gonna be unhappy. If you, if they show up and there's two feet of lawn, then they're going to be like, this is not a 20 minute job, it's like a four hour job. And then you might say, well, I'll just put verbiage in my estimates that says this is a random estimate and it could change when we get there. Well then what's going to happen is you're going to have a crew sitting there out in front of the lawn and they're like, hey, this is going to take us four hours now. You've got to go call the customer, make all the changes, do all this stuff manually anyways. They've now wasted time to go out of the route. They probably wasted 10 or 15 minutes driving, sitting there, waiting, contacting you, all the rest of it. I'd rather just send an estimated there, charge an E fee and try to get one off. Jobs like mulch trimming, other things that we can upsell them on.

Okay. Hey Mike, Big ups, big ups on where you are now. Congrats. I have a lot of questions, but I'll keep it simple. I'm 22 years old and we're for my father who has an established business and I love landscaping. We do a little bit of everything. We do the occasional hardscape job with skid steers. Excavators. We own a skid steer. Should we invest? But we do not own an excavator. Should we invest in a mini excavator if we only use it three to six times a year? No. If you use something three to six times a year, rent it. There's no question on that. If you use it three to six times a year, you should rent it. Now, if you think that by buying it you're going to start using it 40 times a year, then maybe, you know, then it's something to talk about. But definitely rent if you're only using it three to six times a year. Congratulations, Mike. To be honest, I'm surprised you haven't reached over 100,000 subscribers. Keep up the good work, Dean King. Where did you get Max design? I'm having a hard time finding someone to design Ah, Dean, Dean, Dean. If I told you I have to kill you, I can't tell you that.

Oh man. Jerome Harden. Hey Mike, I'm a small company. I'm trying to find different ways of marketing. I'm going, I'm doing door hangers, web logo on truck and you review. Should I use an SEO company or do the work myself? I think the first thing I would recommend someone does hire out is website design and SEO. Just because most of us are, that's not our forte. Especially if you've done one of wix, you've done one in weebly and like it's just not getting what you want. That's when I would go hired out. Right. If your business is doing like 4 or 5, 600,000 revenue, it should be a no brainer that the first place you put your marketing dollars isn't creating a really good website. It's going to be the best ROI compared to like you know, even Facebook ads or something like that. Like, like long care web Design is what $400 a month? That's 4,000, $4,800 a year. I do feel like that's going to be your best dollar spent if you're doing a substantial amount. Like if you're talking like a brand new business like you either are going to need to grow really fast to make sure that $5,000 is worth it or you're going to wait until you've grown to at least 3, 4 or 500,000 to make that worth your while. Until then just make a wix, make a weebly, something like that. If you're just getting started, the only way I would go hire someone like web design and for us to do your site is if you know you're gonna grow very quickly and make up for that money and that's your goal and you have the money to do that.

Hey Mike, I'm a small company. Oh, he did that. Do you keep customers cards on file so you can charge straight after each service? If the customer is comfortable with that? We don't Jake. I talked about a little bit early in the chat. We just do it monthly. What are your thoughts on doing books and tax stuff first year? Any advice on what you would have done differently or learned as soon as possible. Keep track of finances. If you are just getting started, honestly TurboTax is great. You can get a consult with them where you talk to an actual CPA and.

You can talk directly to a CPA. Pay like 50 or 60 bucks. Brad, he works at our local shop. He's a CPA. In the winter he answers questions on TurboTax as a CPA. And so it's actually a really great place for people who are just getting started out. Can't afford a, you know, CPA firm and things like that because they're expensive. Like when you start getting a big CPA firm. Hey Mike, sorry for my previous comments. My friends are are over and being annoying.

Okay, I got the bro. Sorry hide user. Can't talk about those things, my friend on this channel. Hey Mike, quick question. Your opinion. Is having a business partner on a partnership basis a good idea at all? I'm not a big fan of partnerships. When it comes to business, I'd say 20% of them work out really great and that's the one we all hear about. But the other 80% rarely work out very well. This is my opinion. And especially if you're the go getter type A and you want to like move the business forward, that other person is going to be an anchor. They won't want to move as quickly and things like that. Okay, a couple more, then I'm gonna hop out of here. Hey Mike, this is Austin. Had a question about P4P. What percentage would you normally use? We usually use around like between 28 and 35 or 40, like just depending. Every market's a little different. Hey Mike, we have a budget of 5k for marketing initially March to April rule for year two. We have a basic website, Facebook page and Yelp page. How should we spend the 5k initially and the 20 we are going to put into marketing every week? Yeah, I'd split up between like, you know, Facebook, nextdoor, Google, etc and see what's working and then dump more on that. Okay, cool. All right, I'm gonna call it good there everyone. We did a little over two hours. I just want to say a big thank you to everyone. 10,000 subscribers, big milestone. I really appreciate it. Appreciate all of your support. Everyone that's bought the course, lawn care, web design, Augusta Nation, the franchisees. I just really support everyone. I really appreciate your support and so hopefully something was said. It was helpful in the past two and a half hours almost. But I look forward to doing one of these at 100,000 subscribers. Let's go. We'll get there eventually shooting for 30 to 40k this year. So anyways, take care everyone. Have a great rest of your evening and stay tuned for that video next couple days. About that is actually me speaking for you at a team meeting and so you can play that for your whole team at your next meeting together. Thanks so much, everyone. Bye.