10 Brutally Honest Truths That Give You an UNFAIR Advantage in Life

Here are 10 brutally honest truths that give you an unfair advantage in life. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 200 locations around the world and make over $50 million a year mowing grass. Also, I'm the founder of Homework Software, where over a million dollars of daily transactions are made for home service businesses. Number one, the best customer cares more about their time than your price. 70% accept the first quote they receive. It is so easy as home service business owners that many times are able bodied and skewed towards a younger age to think that the time that we're saving customers is not worth the price that we are charging. And so I know what it's like to think so much about the price because you're like, how in the world would someone pay me $800 to trim their bushes? It's only going to take me half a day. The thing that we fail to realize is that they care less about the price and more about how much time you're costing them. And everyone's like, well, no, I give free estimates. No, you don't give free estimates. It costs the customer time, it costs them effort. Whether they have to meet you in person, whether they have to go to your website, fill out a form where they have to call you, email you, like, these are all things that are an actual cost to the customer. And we think we give free estimates. Well, it's not free for you as the business owner because you have to go meet the customer. You have an admin person answering the phone. You have to do a 3D design, you have to put together the quote. It's not free for you, but it's also not free for your customer. And for a high net worth, very high value customer, their time is worth far more than what they will pay you on an invoice. So if you give them their time back, they will reward you handsomely. There was a very successful business owner. I was talking to him and his wife and I was having dinner with them and they were talking about trying to find a housemaid and a house service to take care of their laundry as well as clean their house. What she said struck me and has changed my mindset on pricing forever. Because these people I was talking to, this couple was a ideal customer for any home service business, any contractor. She said the time it would take for the me to drive 20 minutes from my office to my house, walk them through my house for 20 to 30 minutes, and then drive back to the office. Those couple hours that I wasted cost me more than an entire year of their services. And so if that's true, a premium customer of that nature, do you think they really care whether you charge $80 an hour versus $90 an hour? They don't. They just want you to honor their time. That is extremely valuable. And, and so your highest, most premium customers value their time. So instead of getting so worried about nickels and dimes and trying to reduce costs and trying to be the lowest bid in your market, just focus on giving them their time back and not doing the service. That's table stakes. Giving them their time back is. I answer the phone every single time. I get quotes over the phone. I am able to do the estimate without them having to visit me at the property. I get cards on file, I have automations, I use software. These are things that allow me to give the time of my customer back to them. And your most premium customer is that is what they value, not the dollars and cents on the estimate. Number two, before you quit, get off the growth treadmill, raise prices 20%. Don't buy more trucks, don't hire more people and wait one year. This grow at all cost. Ego inflating race to buy more trucks and grow top line revenue kills many businesses. Recently I wanted a turnaround show to a company called J and L Landscaping and they're doing $1.7 million in annual revenue. And my recommendation was actually that they just raise prices and go back to like six or eight employees instead of 15 or 20. I would scale back to the fact that if you as one person can manage maybe six to eight people solid, raise your prices, be super high end on the market, be able to pay people well. Probably there's probably eight good team members there out of the 12 or 14 that he currently has working for him. He could probably keep six to eight of them, make them super profitable, whether it be on maintenance and recurring stuff. And then you don't need a salesperson like that immediately. Having a salesperson like that's a huge amount of overhead. Like I can almost guarantee you in three months that salesperson won't be there because he can't even train them correctly. Because I believed that that business could do 200 to $250,000 in profit per year on a million dollars in annual revenue where they were scraping by, hardly able to make payroll and struggling on a bunch of credit cards. They had more credit card debt when I was there than cash in the bank doing $1.7 million. We got a Ventrac loan, we got a US bank loan, we got truck loan, we've got another truck loan, we got two more other truck loans, we got a mini excavator, we got a Honda Civic loan, we got a cash flow manager, US bank loan, whopping $332,758,000. With $52,000 worth of credit card debt in the bank right now, cash total, including savings and checking, $50,000. Why? Because at $1.7 million, they need an operations manager, an estimator, someone in the office. Whereas if he could just scale back to six, seven employees, he, the owner, would be able to manage all of them himself. And they would be the best employees because they were having a bunch of drama and issues with their team at the time. And so if you could just cut out all the low performers, use the top six, eight employees as technicians out in the field, increase prices by 20 or 30%, do a million dollars in revenue without middle management, and be very profitable. But the problem is that we've all been sold this bill of goods, that if you grow revenue, you grow the number of employees, you grow how many trucks you have, that somehow that is a better business. When reality, the reason you got into business was for freedom. It was freedom of time, freedom of finances. But in this example, this turnaround show, he had 10 kids, or he had nine kids and one was on the way when I showed up and he couldn't spend any time with him and his wife was burnt out. That's not why you got into entrepreneurship. That's not why you left the steady 9 to 5 to go start your own business. It was for freedom. But we get into it for freedom and then we get on this treadmill. It's like, you know, I come to the gym and I, you know, they sell me a membership and I want to get in shape and then they put me on this treadmill and they lock me and chain me to it. This is no way to live life as an entrepreneur. And that is, yes, it will take time to grow the business, put in your hours, grind and hustle. But if you never get off of that treadmill and you've been doing it for 10, 15, the company I went to, J and L Lansing, he did it for almost 20 years and still working till 7, 8, 9 o' clock every night, employees leaving all the time, drama, no profit, that's not the way to run the business. But it's caused by this treadmill of growth that we feel like we can't get off of. And as when we have money, I Go buy more trucks. I get more equipment. When I want to grow and it's really busy in the middle of spring, I hire more people versus just being like, no, no, when I hit capacity, when I need more trucks, when I need more employees, I'm not going to buy more trucks, I'm not going to hire more people. I am going to raise my prices and reduce my close rate so I don't have as many customers. And if you did this and just waited one year, everyone hates on me for saying don't grow. They think that I am trying to somehow tell my competition to not grow their business. When in reality, if you raise prices, did not hire people, and did not buy more trucks for one year, you would wake up with a pretty good business. So before you quit and throw in the towel and say, this industry is not good, I can't make any profit, I'm going to move on to another industry, a different service, a, a completely different market. This is a horrible market. The economy's horrible. Before you do all of those things and you throw in the towel, just do this one thing. Raise your prices by at least 15%, ideally 20%. Don't buy more trucks, don't hire more people and wait one year. Instead of trying to get as many people as possible into your team photo, instead of trying to line up all the trucks and trailers along the shop space so everyone driving by sees how successful you are, just focus on stacking cash. Because cash allows you the oxygen to be able to continue surviving the business and keeps you from quitting when you fall down. Number three, many entrepreneurs never build a million dollar business because they are in a rush to build a $10 million business. Now, I learned this the hard way, and that is, speed without fundamentals isn't ambition, it's sabotage. So if you're just growing without any sort of structure, without any sort of restraint or systems in the business, eventually the building collapses. And so when you put up a high rise building, they put up the initial structure, but they put scaffolding around it and start to create the systems and reinforce and add all of the other components of the building by putting scaffolding around it and that scaffolding is removed, it's like, well, it's such a waste. You build the scaffolding and then you remove it just a matter of a couple months later. But the scaffolding is required to be able to reinforce the initial structure. So if you just kept building the initial structure, like, oh, we're just doing beams and we're just Gonna go higher and higher. Eventually it collapses. And so the vast majority of us get so much in a rush to build the tall building. We never build a foundation, we never reinforce. We never build any sort of constraints. We never build any systems that allow the business to weather the storms that are inevitably going to come. With bad customers, with bad employees, with hard jobs, with seasonality, with bad weather. These things happen. But because I'm trying to grow as fast as possible, I end up toppling over and never even getting to $1 million in annual revenue. And so I see so many people burn out. 7, $800,000 annual revenue. 6, 7, 8, 9 employees. They burn out there because they're trying as fast as possible to get to 10 million. So they go into debt, they hire too many people. They hire the wrong people. They don't fire the people when they know they should. And because they're in a rush to get 10 million, they never even build a million dollar business. Now, this reminds me of a turnaround that I went on to Paxton from HP Landscaping. When we got there, he was buying trucks. Brand new F3 50s on credit cards, 50, $60,000 trucks on credit cards.

For instance, that new truck I put all on a credit card. Cause I'm like interest free.

Interest free for like a year.

Interest free for like 30 days, basically. Because I swept it onto Amex and I was like, I have 30 days to pay off this $30,000 truck. That's easy. And made it happen. I've never had like a late payment. You know, I don't even pay minimums. I always pay my credit cards in full. But like, my guys, when I told them I did that, they were like, that wasn't smart.

I'm like, all the points. Paxton went from like $300,000 with like one employee to 1.2 to $1.3 million in annual revenue in a matter of just a few months. And it went for like one employee, like 12 or 13 employees. And when we showed up, you could.

Tell, to put that in perspective, in December, it was only me and two other guys as me and Jared and the blue shirt over there. And then Luke, who's in the skid.

Steer in December 2023 or 2024. Really?

Yeah. And then this, at our peak, we had 15 employees in March. We've probably fired 25 this season. You know, it's been just crazy turnover.

So a lot of that churn in the first few months of this year. Then.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

With the spring rush, it was like everybody come On. And then we were like, whoa, you know, you can't drive a truck.

Yeah.

Or like you don't even know how to turn a mower on, you know.

There was so much chaos when we showed up at the, at the shop space. No one knew what to do. It was like a bunch of people were just hired and a bunch of trucks were just purchased, but there was no systems. And this was the result of growing so quickly. He didn't have a million dollar successful business because he was trying to get to $10 million. And when you looked at his social media, they had like flipped a skid, skid steer. They had recently done a violation with way too much weight on their trailer. And they were doing pools and huge projects that just a year ago, they had no skill, no equipment, no labor. And so again, I believe that Paxton had a huge skill of sales. But because he tried to rush operations and just scale super fast from one employee to 12 in a few months, from 300,000 annual revenue to over 1.2 million in annual revenue in just a matter of few months, not knowing his numbers, he was completely on the admin side, completely at loss.

What we do here is active jobs, and then what we do here is leads. It's all in Java as well. But it helps me to have a.

Visual of it so far, like right now in terms of. Because I don't, I don't have a P and L or like balance sheet like that. Do you have those created?

I have.

Or is it just getting it organized right now? Doesn't really know his numbers because I asked him like four times for his documents. His sales grew very fast, but his operations didn't catch up. His team was ineffective. Their equipment was all over the place. They had OSHA violations to the moon with like machetes being slashed right next to people's legs and chainsaws with no chaps and no ear protection and chain like it was. It was crazy. And then the admin side was even worse because sales got way ahead of where he was at with the business. And so you might have the ambition or the goal of building a $10 million business, but as I grow, I'll have to build sales and get the jobs. And that's what Paxton did. But then he needs to take time, put the scaffolding, make training and operations for your team to be successful. And then you've also got to do the same thing in admin, like know your numbers and use software. And these were the things that he was struggling with. And he ended up Actually scaling all back to very few number of employees and doing mostly subcontracting because the scale at which he had grown sales was way ahead of operations and admin. And so if you want to build a $10 million business, that's fine, but you'll have to do it in segments. And it'll look much more like a step up of a ladder instead of just a straight rocket to the moon. And so if you're going on this rocket, just realize it's going to suck cash, you're going to make lots of mistakes, and it's likely extremely stressful. Versus okay, I'm going to grow to three or four hundred thousand. I'm now going to get a couple employees. I'm going to figure out operations. I'm going to get better onboarding, better training, better employee systems. Okay, I'm also going to know my numbers, get a bookkeeper, run payroll professionally, ask actually know what my close rate is and other numbers are on my overdue invoices. Okay, now I'm ready. I feel confident. Let's grow. All right, now I'll go to 6 or 700,000. I'll get a couple more employees. I'll get one more truck. This sort of systematic growth is the thing that allows you to build the foundation that is required to build a $10 million business. But if right from day one you're just growing to the moon, you might very well grow yourself into utter collapse. Okay, so I have a secret. It's just for everyone watching this video. On February 17th, we're officially changing the name of Copilot CRM to Homeworks. So get ready because something big is about to happen. Number four, being average is contagious. Don't be shocked when your goals catch it. And if you need me to lower my goals to feel comfortable, we're not friends. Now this is different than the typical business advice that I would give. I truly believe that being yourself is allows for consistency and you will never have to pretend in front of anyone. If I'm around people that they are requiring me to reduce my goals and the level of success that I want to see and the standards that I hold myself to, I'm not friends with them. And if you actually believe that the five people around you that you spend the most time with, that what they do and their standards become your standards and their level of success becomes your standard of success and you are the average of the five people next to you. If you actually believe that you, you'd really start to audit whether or not you Want to be around the people you're currently spending most of your time with. And most people, by definition are average. They have average goals, they make average income, they put average levels of effort, they have average bodies, they have average diets. And therefore they live an average life. And so if you're expecting and wanting and desiring to have something better and different than that, you will have to change the people that you're around and that will be uncomfortable conversations and likely you will be called names and you'll be considered proud or whatever. But don't treat them negatively. They just have different goals than you. I had to realize that people were not less than me. It wasn't the fact that I was better, nothing. It was simply that their goals were different. Their goal was to be average. Their goal was to take as much vacation as possible. Their goal was just to make it by and for me. My goals were different. And. And so it wasn't that I was better or that they were somehow better. Work, life, balance. It was my goals were different. Just be careful. If you start hanging around other people that are average, don't expect anything different than average because it is contagious and it will wear off on you. One thing that I have written down in my phone that I refer to often is a quick statement that I always think about. Average erodes greatness. It's like a cliffside. It erodes over the course of time because wave after wave after wave and nothing instant. It's not like a landslide, but there's an erosion that happens when you're around people that are average, people that are just trying to work as little as possible to not get fired. If you hang around them long enough, you will be the exact same way. Not immediately, but it's the average eroding away at what otherwise could be great. And so if you want to hold yourself to a different standard, if you want to have great levels of success or great levels of whatever you're trying to achieve in life, just realize you'll have to separate yourself from everyone else that's average because to them you will be a threat. Number five, how to beat 99% of the competition in home services. Have a great website, answer your phone, get to leads fast, ensure customers are satisfied before you leave, and get an online review. Very basic. So we all try to make everything super complicated and we avoid the simple. These are the simple things you got to do in home services to actually win jobs. More than 99% of the competition does not have a great website, does not answer Their phone. They take days to get back to customers instead of immediately or within a matter of minutes. And make sure your customers are satisfied when you leave. You are a home service, so serve well. And then when you're done, make sure they tell their friends and family using an online review and get referrals. If you just do those few things, you will be ahead of so many home services and so many people will be like, well, I do all those things, but they miss one of them. So, for example, you can have all of those things, but if you don't answer your phone, just realize that voicemail gets 37% of people to leave a voicemail. Like people calling wanting to give you business, 37% of them leave a voicemail. So answer your phone to get that to 100%. And that's the fastest way to double or triple the amount of leads is just answer your phone. You say, oh no, I do all of those things. I answer my phone, I get back to customers immediately. Customers are so satisfied, they leave online reviews. I have great reviews on, but you don't have a good website. And when people come to your website, it looks horrible. On a mobile device, they have to pinch in. And the buttons way over here. The estimate request forms on a different page, the contact forms all comboulated, there's 20 fields. In order to be able to fill out a simple contact form, you gotta have all of these components, but they're really basic. Have a great website, answer your phone, get to leads as fast as possible, ensure customers are satisfied. Before you leave the job, do a walkthrough and then ask for an online review so they can share the good news with friends and family. Number six. You wouldn't pay top dollar for a great sandwich if the storefront was dingy and had black mold. Your customers won't pay top dollar for a great service. If your truck is a rust bucket and your website looks like Windows 95. In my opinion, you wrap your company vehicle first because that's the sign. If I think about the sub sandwich shop, the first thing I'm doing is I'm driving down the road and I see a sign. That sign needs to look good. It needs to be well lit. It can't be like falling over cracked, all the vinyls messed up. I can't really read it. It's kind of all murky and dirty. The sign needs to look good. In home services, you don't have a physical retail space. What you do have is a truck. And that is the sign. That's what people See, as they're driving around, they see your truck. That's like the sign to the sub shop. The next thing after I see the sign to the sub shop is I pull into the parking lot. And when I get into the parking lot, the first thing I'm doing is like, okay, well, where is what was on that sign? Where's the storefront? This is the equivalent when it comes to home services. People seeing your truck and they go to your website. So in my opinion, I'm going to spend every dollar possible on my sign. First my truck. So if you're limited on funds, wrap your truck. Make sure that truck looks good. Don't let me rust a rust bucket. It doesn't need to be new. I didn't say that. It used to be clean. Clean the truck. It can be used 5, 10, 15 years old. That's fine. I didn't have a truck that was newer than 10 years. For the first 10 years of my business, I used used vehicles, but I kept them clean. And I made sure they were wrapped and I made sure that they were painted. And making that your signage is the first step to get them to pull into the parking lot. And then I need a great website. So after I get my trucks wrapped, the signage, I now need my storefront to look good. That's my website. I'm going to invest every marketing dollar in my website first. First in my trucks and then in my website, and then I will think about advertising. This is what happens in home services all the time. It's the equivalent of the sub shop having a phenomenal sub sandwich. But no one knows about it because the sign's falling apart out next to the road. It's not well lit. And then when people, if they do pull in, they look at the storefront like, oh, my word, there's like mold and everything's cracking and there's a bunch of cobwebs, and my goodness, it looks like there's a leak dropping. No one enters in to see your great product or service because they don't know about it. You. The signs scared them away. The storefront scared them away. And in home services, that your truck and your website, and if those things don't look good, you are losing a huge amount of customers regardless of whether or not your service is good. This reminds me of a story of Matt Courtney from Courtney's Landscaping. And he had a great service, he had great trucks. He had some really nice trucks for a snowplowing service, but he had no website. And so you really need all elements of the sign, the truck, you need, the storefront, the website in order to be able to then deliver on a great service. And if you need all three, like if you don't have a good service, trust me, no one's gonna tell you refer, you're not gonna get good reviews, you will fail. But if no one knows about your great service and your great sub sandwich and the signage and the storefront does not convey that premium product, you'll never get leads. And so I'm gonna first invest in my trucks, making them look good as possible, wrapping them, putting paint on them. They'll cost you a couple thousand dollars to make a 10 year old truck look brand new if you just detailed the thing and you put some paint and decals on it. And then I'm gonna spend every dollar. Next, I only have a few thousand dollars. Great. HomeServiceWebDesign.com we do a subscription for this exact reason. It's a monthly subscription so that you don't have a $10,000 bill.

Upfront website launch again, thank you guys. You guys built that, launched I think a month ago and we're already getting leads on that. We're on the first page of Google already. You know, we're getting an opportunity to do four or five estimates a day, get started.

Because if you do that and then assuming the third part, you have a great service, you'll be unstoppable. Number seven. Most home service entrepreneurs fear the off season. The rich ones prepare for it. The top 1% profit from it. Seasonal businesses are horrible is a feature, not a bug, of home services. The weather changes. People don't need their lawn mowed when there's snow on the ground. But if you can figure out the off season, you'll be able to advertise when your competition can't. You'll be able to hire people when your competition can't. You'll be able to go on the offense while your competition is shrinking and while your competition is going broke. During the off season, you'll be able to grow. But it all comes down to whether or not you figure the off season out. And for some people, the spring is their off season. For some people, the fall is their off season. But regardless, the vast majority of home services, if you can just take your worst quarter and make it an average of your other quarters, you double your profit. So the only objective, the main focus that we should be thinking about is how do I generate revenue during my off season? How do I generate leads? How do I make sure that at least 50% of my best month revenue is, comes in during my off season. This reminds me of New Ground Lawn Care out in Tennessee. We went there for a turnaround and we spoke about his off season and we talked about adding winter services to his mowing customers. But again, we have to commit to the solution in order for it to work. Then the six week plan is we've got to focus on the off season and selling winter services. Now to do that, we have 110 customers. So selling winter services and in the next six weeks is literally the time to sell them winter services. It's not the week before you stop mowing. And so he agreed that like, hey, revenue drops off a cliff, I have to lay off all my employees. I'm not able to grow this business because I have three or four months where I have no work after the leaves in November, December, January, February, March, no work. And so he agreed I should try to sell my mowing customers on this idea that I continue to come to their property every two weeks throughout the off season and I charge them the same price as they're mowing. But I'm gonna do bush trimming, I'm going to rake the leaves, I'm gonna edge the lawn, I'm gonna blow off the walkways, I'm gonna check the gutters and the downspouts, make sure there's no blockages. I'm gonna do all these other things for you. So you usually mow till the end of October into November kind of thing?

We have some into November, yeah. But for the most part, October is kind of whenever it's pretty much died down.

So by the end of September, so by end, end of September, we've got to pitch all the customers on winter services.

Okay.

The goal here is to be able to get at least 50% of them to convert to winter services. And that's going to look like biweekly service at the same price. We, we spend the same amount of time on your property, but we're not doing mowing, we're doing picking up branches, blowing off your property, edging the lawn, checking the gutters like you can throw the gutter thing into winter services to provide value. We make it very clear then we spend the same amount of time on your property that we would for mowing. And we go through these services and we spend this. And once we're done, we're done. But the problem was he didn't sell it appropriately. He didn't fully commit. And I see this all the time when people try to sell a maintenance package during their off season is they don't fully commit and explain it to the customers. Instead, they were confused and a lot of them canceled their service in the middle of the off season simply because he did not explain in depth exactly what they were getting. And so when you commit to solving your off season, realize that it'll take educating the customer to take services when otherwise they would usually not. It requires showing the price comparison of a fall cleanup and a spring cleanup versus winter services, the cost of doing treatments corporation versus another package that you annualize for the whole year. These are the ways you can get creative to solve the off season. But if you're going to be average and you're going to just go along with the flow, you will have, like most home service businesses, one quarter that you're unprofitable and you lose money. And doing so will keep your business from growing. Number eight Zuck doesn't need your money. $0 ad spend until you follow up on every estimate and hit all contacts with email and SMS. Upsell. My managers don't get $1 in marketing budget till they do this. I am boggled. My mind is boggled by the fact that we so quickly do door hangers, yard signs, we do Google Ads, we do Facebook ads. And then it's like, wait a second. First off, have we followed up on the estimates we've already sent to customers? These are people that like literally have already asked for a quote. You've given them a price. You probably went to their property and spent time, energy and money to get them a design. Get them a quote. They contacted your office. You, you've already expended resources on these customers. They've already raised their hand and said I want to quote. And yet we won't even follow up with them. There was one time I went to a Turnaround show and 30% of the estimates they send out had not even been opened up. Not like just set pending. And they, you know, just didn't know these people hadn't even opened up the email because you can see in the email tracking that they hadn't even opened up the email. 30%. So of course, why would I not be surprised when their close rate was like 25% because a whole bunch of people aren't even seeing the quote. There was another time I went to Zach from Breyers Lawn Care. He's already using homeworks formerly known as Copilot CRM. But he wasn't texting or emailing all of his customers to upsell them. So before I Spend money on ads. I'm gonna do two things. First off, I'm gonna make sure that I follow up on every single estimate that has been sent religiously. I'm gonna text them, I'm gonna email, I'm gonna call them. And then the part that I talk about with Zach is why would we not text customers and email customers that are in our database? He had thousands of people in his database that he's already done service for in the past, or at least they've asked for a quote, but he has their contact information. These people have in the past at least asked for a quote, meaning they have a desire and a need for the service and they know they need something. So why would I not contact them first before going to cold traffic? What boggles my mind is, is that we will go spend money on Facebook and Google to people who have never done business with us, never raise their hand and ask for service. And yet we will. We will completely ignore the people we literally sent a quote to and we need to follow up with or at least the people inside of homeworks that we can text and email. And it doesn't cost us anything. And so just last week, I sent out one text to all the customers at my location for Augusta Lawn Care. Within 24 hours of of getting that message, we had 18 accepted jobs, 52 estimates, $7,000 worth of work sold. In addition to all the recurring work that was also sold, that's from one text message that went out from homeworks. Why would I go spend thousands of dollars on ads and spend Google and Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need your money. So first do the things that are free, like following up with a phone on the estimates that have already been sent out and then sending out texts and. And emails cost pennies. It costs a software subscription that I pay once every month. And I can send tens of thousands of messages to customers that I've already done business with. I already have their card information on file. How much more likely are they to say I need service than the thousands of people that you're targeting with your online ads? Number nine, the grow at all cost Ego inflating race to buy more trucks and grow top line revenue kills many businesses. A profitable, fast growing business can go broke. Cash flow is king. I remember trying to line up all my trucks and all my trailers along this one road. It was called Lincoln Road in Blaine, Washington for my first location got started. I remember one day driving out and realizing that only half the trucks and half the trailers were actually being used and all my employees were working that day. And I realized it was my ego that was just constantly buying more trucks, hiring more people and growing my top line revenues. What looked like to everyone else the vanity metrics of success would be inflated. But the killer part was I knew my bank balance. I knew the profitability. I knew that I couldn't afford raises, I knew I couldn't afford any benefits. I knew that the team members that I had, I would not be able to afford them to be able to make more money, grow inside the organization, or move up inside the company because I didn't have any money. And so the faster you can get past and put aside your ego, because we all have it, but the faster you can put that aside and just focus on growing a profitable business, the sooner you'll be able to break free from 80 hour work weeks that are suffocating you, your family and your life. Ultimately, I'm looking at cash flow because I can have a profitable, fast growing business. On paper, my profit and loss statement looks great. But especially if you're using accrual accounting, which means you see the money on your profit and loss statement when you earn it, not when you actually collect it, you could be going bankrupt very quickly. What a profit and loss statement doesn't show is debt. What a profit and loss statement doesn't show is accounts receivable and accounts payable. In other words, I have a whole bunch of customers owing me money, but they haven't actually paid. These are things that can be solved if I just slow down and create systems. So have a deposit threshold where any estimate over a certain dollar amount they have to pay a deposit. Require cards on file so that when the job is done, I charge them immediately. Have it where once invoices are overdue by a certain amount of time, automatic fees are charged. This is all a couple settings inside of homeworks, formerly known as copilot CRM. A couple settings, a couple minutes spent doing these few things. Sending your deposit threshold, checking a box that says card require cards in order for estimates to get accepted, and then just having a fee that gets charged if after 30, 60, 90 days overdue. These little things make cash flow better. Number 10 marriages succeed 50% of the time. Failure costs half your assets. Yet people spend more time choosing a university than a spouse. Okay, think about it for a second. If I was like, okay, you're gonna spend every day of your life with one person. By the way, they're gonna control half of everything you own. Oh, and by the way, 50% of the time, this doesn't work out. If I told you those things, you would choose wisely. And so I was raised and many of my friends and family put pressure on me to get married quickly. And almost all of my friends were married by 20, 21, 22. And I have nothing against that. And I wish them all the best. And I think that people get married young, sometimes grow up together, and that's fantastic. But I would choose wisely, simply based upon the math that if you fail, it'll do more damage to your business than just about any marketing campaign. Any PR issue, any sort of employee goes wrong. If 50% of the business gets cut out tomorrow, you usually have to shut the thing down unless you have tons of cash. It's very difficult to split a small business if you have a 50% failure rate. You would really take your time and weigh out whether or not you want to spend the rest of your life with this person and put that kind of equity into the partnership. Speaking from experience, that kind of freaked me out. Well, as I was growing the business and gaining assets, I was like, that's freaky. Every single time you make progress faster, there's a certain level of risk. If I was trying to minimize my risk, I would probably not fly in a plane. Cause the risk is higher than if I just walked. And if I get in a car, it is also increased to my risk, but it allows me to go faster than walking. And so I also believe that the risk can be worth the reward. And so there is a risk associated with marriage and the fact that a lot of them fail and end up in divorce. And a lot of people, their whole business goes under because of that divorce, those are risks. But having the right vehicle, a plane, a car allows me to get to the destination faster and more reliably than walking. And so I actually believe that marriage is a huge catalyst for your growth financially, personally, and, and can be a huge contribution to just your overall happiness and freedom in life. But choose wisely because so many people rush into it. They're rushed by other people, they're pressured by other people, and they make a decision in a very temporary decision that has long term consequences.