10 Years of Brutally Honest Business Advice in 43 Minutes

Ten years ago, I dropped out of medical school to start a lawn care business. And now fast forward to the day we have over 150 locations around the world, do over $50 million in annual revenue, and today I'm going to be sharing the lessons that I learned over the past 10 years that I really wish I would have learned back then. I would have saved me years of time, millions of dollars, and I hope that over the next several minutes I can share those with you so you don't have to make the same mistakes that I made. The very first thing is that as I grew the business, I realized I had to move up the value stack and up the skill stack that is required to grow a business. At the very beginning, the skill that is required is to be a crazy hard worker. And this is the lowest level, though, of scalability and leverage that you have is simply your time and your sweat. And when you're getting started, this is potentially all you have because you don't have a lot of skill and you don't have the capital to actually use as levers in the business. The only thing you do have is time, but it also has the least returns. And that's why it's so demoralizing at the beginning of your success and the beginning of your business journey is that you don't have a lot of evidence of success due to the fact that you're using the least levered type of skill. And that is just labor. I'm really skilled, but if you're actually doing the work, it's just you, it's just one person. As you begin to go up the value stack, though, and you begin to go up the amount of skills that you're, you're starting to. As you grow the business, you start to go from having the skill of labor, or it's just you, to having the skill of management. And now you have multiple labors underneath you, and they're at that first level, that first, first rung of the ladder, but you are managing their labor. And so instead of having just yourself doing the work for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, you now have 5, 10, 15 other people that you're managing, and they're doing labor. But the skill that you really have to hone in is really management. And the reason I'm talking about these different levels of skill and levels of value is, is the fact that if I would've known this, I would've realized that there's a big shift that has to happen. There's a shift that has to Go from when I'm the labor, I am doing the work and my day is optimized around how do I make sure that I produce the labor at the most efficient amount possible? And that will get you through making 2, $300,000 in annual revenue just being awesome labor. Maybe you have a sidekick to help you out, but like you just have to work crazy ridiculous amounts of hours and you have to be like laser, like focused on getting YouTube videos and books and podcasts about how just to do the actual work better. That alone will be enough skills to get you past that level. But if you're going to upgrade your skills and go up the value stack and actually pull the lever of being able to duplicate yourself, instead of just you doing the work, you actually have other people doing the work. And the skill that is required now for you to achieve is management. So you'll still have to improve your skills, but instead of listening to books about the actual work that you're doing, you'll just simply have to change it to books that are going to help you learn how to manage. Because if you can now learn how to manage, instead of just you working, you have all these other individuals doing labor underneath you. And so Instead of just 10, 12 hours a day of productivity, you can actually produce 50, 100 plus plus hours every single day simply by managing other people that are putting in eight to 10 hours a day of their own labor. But that's not the first, that's not the only step because you, you will have to manage the business. And this is usually going to be able to carry you almost a million dollars in annual revenue. And if you want to stop at 1 to 2 million dollars in annual revenue, typically you can just stay as a great manager because you just need to be a person that people want to work for. You want to be able to make it a safe place where people can feel like they can achieve, they can make good money, give them performance based pay, give them good benefits, like, you could absolutely be a great manager and run a 1, $2 million business. But if you're going to keep growing quickly and you're going to grow past a million dollars, usually you have to upgrade your skill set again to being that of a builder. So I like to think of it like labor manager and architect. And these are the three skills. I wish I would have known this because I stayed in manager mode way too long, because the manager has to actually manage the labors. And if you fail to make the step from being a manager to being a builder or an architect, usually you start to micromanage. And if you start to grow a business past 10, 15 employees, typically you now need another person to help manage the business, whether it be an office manager or an operations manager. And if you are still stuck in the manager mindset and the manager skill and that lever, it's better than being one person working on the field because now you have maybe 10 or 15 employees. But if you're going to keep growing past that 10 to 15 employee level, usually you need to focus now on the skill of being an architect, a builder, and then you step back and you stop micromanaging, you delegate to mid level managers. And that is a different skill because when you're building the business now you're thinking about acquisition, you're thinking about upgrading your talent in terms of your general managers, you're thinking about different level types of management inside your business in terms of operations, admin and sales. And you're trying to figure out like how to create systems and procedures to take someone that's entry level and upgrade their talent to be able to fill in these mid level manager roles that you've now created because you have over 15 plus employees. And so if I would have known that, I probably would have not got some people mad at me that were my mid level managers because I was stuck in manager mode. And so I thought I needed to know everything about the business. I thought I needed to manage every single email, every single phone call, and if one customer got mad because of any of my crew, I was the one that had to therefore jump into the the arena and work at the size that I was at. And as you go from manager into a builder, you have to realize that the coach stays on the sidelines even when the team is getting beat up. As much as they might want to step on the field and even if they are capable, they still need to stay on the sidelines. They need to be able to lead from the sidelines and not step on and lead by example. Because that kind of worked when you were a laborer. Definitely worked when you're a laborer and even when you're a manager, leading by example is usually looked on as like super admirable and your team will like it. But as you begin to grow the business, for you to go back into the field or go back into leadership by showing how it's done and you know, just getting in there and getting your hands dirty can be super detrimental because your team's like, what are you doing? Like you, you empowered us to do this. Job, you've put management in place, let us do our job. And so you actually have to step back away from the building and the management of the labor and step back again, architect, and actually start to diagnose and start to think about the systems and the procedures and the angles and look at the geometry of building the building from afar. And if I would have known that, I would've negated the pain that came with having to deal with mid level managers, that I was just stepping on their toes all the time. When they are super capable, I should just let them figure things out and let make, let them make mistakes because then they would also figure out the solutions to those mistakes. And that was the big transfer of labor to manager to architect, that if I would have known that, I would have saved myself a lot of headache. And speaking of headache, you're going to have a lot of headaches when you're first getting started. Like, one thing that's really helped me in a phrase that I've come up recently is dig, build, bury. And this comes back to the fact that I believe the first three to five years in business is like building the foundation to a house or building a foundation to a skyscraper. When you go to a skyscraper, everyone looks up and admires the glass and the cement and all of the windows and everything that's above the ground. What they don't see is the foundation. Nobody walks up to a skyscraper, looks down and admires the foundation. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the foundation isn't even visible. And so when we're building our business, the first thing you're doing is usually not going to be super glamorous. It's not going to be seen by a lot of people. In fact, you're digging down the foundation, you're going below the dirt and then you're going to build, use it. Concrete. You're putting rebar, you're drilling very deep. It's expensive. It can take a lot of time to get permitting just to get this process started. And so many people in business literally quit when they're 50ft. They're dug down their foundation, they're putting in all the pillars and they're putting in all the rebar and pouring concrete and they just quit. And the reason is because it's demoralizing. The fact that you're putting all this work and effort and it actually seems like you're making negative progress. You're going down. And if someone like was illiterate and they came like, what are you doing? Down the hole. You're supposed to be building up this massive building. Like, aren't you supposed to be building a skyscraper? And that's what your friends and family do. Like, wait, it's been a year and you're still working like six days a week, seven days a week. You're working overnight again. Like, they are simply looking down at you in the foundation of the business that you've started in the foundation of the building you're trying to create. And they're looking down and saying, I have no evidence of success. And they're right. You have no evidence of success because you've only been digging down. But this is the thing. If you don't build the foundation and you just started building a building and immediately started hiring people and buying trucks and buying equipment and getting customers, guess what? Eventually that business would fail. And those first three, five years of doing the boring work that no one wants to do and is absolutely not glamorous, and you're never getting pats on the back back or rounds of applause. You're not getting awards in your local community. No one thinks you're the awesome entrepreneur, especially if you're doing it bootstrapped. You don't have a lot of capital at the beginning. You're not scaling super fast. You don't have any evidence of success. You have nothing to point to when people come and say, aren't you building a building? And point to them and say, yes, I'm making progress. Because you're down in the dirt and you're below the ground and you're actually feel like you're going negative. You might have debts, you might literally be. Be unprofitable. Things are going bad, customers are mad, employees are leaving, and you're literally down in the dirt. And down there you're working like crazy. You're building. It's not just like, dig and build, it's like, dig, build, and then you bury it. And when I think about burying it, those emotions when you're going through those first few years are so bad and so brutal and so horrible, you don't even want to think about it. And so once you've even got past those first few years, you almost put it aside for your brain because it is so painful to remember back to the moments when you were down in the dirt, when you were down below the ground, when you're trying to build this business and that you have absolutely no track record, absolutely no evidence of success, and you bury it like a foundation is buried. You don't see it and in 20 years from now, in 10 years from now, when you've built the skyscraper of your success and everyone comes and points at it, and everyone comes to it as in a tourist attraction, and admires all of the success that you've had, no one, no one but you will remember and be able to.

Think back to the moment of the foundation. No one will see it. It'll be buried. And a lot of us, that's the way we cope with it. And I don't blame anyone that doesn't want to think back to when they first started their business. The first few years are absolutely torturous and painful. And there are times like no sleep and you. You are stuck in this mode of like, there is nothing else I can do, and there's nothing else I would be able to make money doing. And I have put so much on the line, and I've made promises to my family, I made promises to my employees, and I have staked everything I have on making this work, and I have absolutely no idea if it's going to happen. And if I actually had to be betting odds, if I went to Vegas, I'd be betting on my failure, not my success. Because I simply look up from the foundation I'm building and I literally look, think about a year ago or two years ago and when I had a job and I actually looked back to those times and it was above where I'm currently at, because I'm digging down into the dirt.

Dig. You do all of this work to build a foundation and do so much grueling, painful work, only to then beget success and bury that work and literally try to put out of your mind the first three to five years that it was so painful. And you don't take pictures, you don't take video, and you're not making videos online of how painful it is because it sticks.

There's nothing more painful than pouring all of your time, energy, attention, goals and dreams into something and literally feeling like you're going to be burying it. And that's what a foundation is. And this is what was required in order to be able to build that massive sky skyscraper, to build the massive building that everyone wants to have, that everyone wants to achieve. But it's. No one's willing to actually start digging and actually take three to five years where they actually go down. They make less money, they. They work more hours. Most people aren't willing to do that.

I think I realized that as I grew the businesses, I was focused on all the wrong stuff. I was working Hard, crazy amounts of hours. Like to date, I don't work as many hours now as I did in my first few years of business because I was doing everything and it was painful. But I was focused on the wrong stuff. Because if I'm actually going to grow a business, there's only one thing that grows a business and that is more revenue. Sales. And if you're not focused on sales or hiring as you grow your business, it's a distraction. And I was focused on equipment. I was focused on all the wrong things. Getting a shop space, getting new decals, getting new trucks. This was not the thing that actually grew the business. If you strip away the actual assets of a business, there's one thing remaining and that is customers. Customers and contracts is what a business consists of. The trucks, the equipment, the office building is all interchangeable parts that could be sold tomorrow to any other business and used. It's the customers and the contracts that actually make up the business. And I was focused on all the wrong stuff. I was spending all of my time and energy thinking about my trucks, thinking about my equipment, and thinking about how I was going to make the business look better. When in reality, if it doesn't rhyme with sales and hiring, you want to cut it, get rid of it, or delegate it. And that leads me to the next thing that I had to learn. That is the fact that 80% someone else operating at 80% is my 100%. And instead of trying to expect people to do my hundred percent, I had to realize that their 80% was the equivalent of me doing 100%. Why? Not because they did a better job, not because they had less customer complaints, not because they did a flawless job. That was actually the opposite. The quality of the work dropped when I stopped being a laborer. The quality of the work stopped when I stopped being in day to day operations. But I had to realize that when I delegated that to someone else and and they weren't going to work 24,7 that the quality was going to drop. But I was okay with at least 80% of it of my quality standard. And as soon as someone could do 80% of my job, I wanted to delegate it. Because that's what allowed me to focus on sales and hiring. And so instead of focusing on all the wrong things in your business as you begin to scale, simply ask yourself if someone could do what is not rhyme with sales and hiring. Anything else. You could literally list off 50 things. Anything else that's not sales and hiring. If you're trying to grow a business should be delegated. When someone else can do 80% as good a job as you, what that means is if someone's going to do 80% a job as you, they are going to make errors. There are going to be customer complaints. There are going to be times you look at the work they did and say, it could have been better. And you're right, because you're a hundred percent. And your hundred percent will always be 100% in your mind. The fact of the matter is, if you give someone the right systems and they're a great team player and you begin to actually trust them, the fact is they're 80% will probably become 85%. You give it a little more time and you give them resources to actually improve, and you give them the ability to be able to educate and improve their systems inside of their department, all of a sudden they're 85 becomes 90% and. And then 95%. And guess what? All of a sudden, they're spending their entire day doing the task that you were doing one of 20 other tasks. And so even if they're at 80 or 90% because their entire day is focused on that one task, you have 30 other things that you're trying to do, and you're 100% on one of those 30 tasks equals 3% divided about all the things that you're trying to focus on. You take all of your time and all of your. I'm 100%, I'm 100. Like, you know, if I'm doing one of those sports games, you know, a video game is like, I'm 100 out of 100 on speed, agility, strength, power, whatever. Well, if you have 30 things in your day, different tasks that you're responsible for, different departments, different things that you have to get done, well, now all of a sudden you have to take that 100 and divided by 30. So if someone else is willing and able to be able to do at 70, 80, 90% of my capacity and put all their energy into one thing, do I really believe that they're going to answer the phone better than me? Absolutely. Eventually they'll figure that out because I will delegate it to them, and they'll spend 100% of their time and attention on that one task. And guess what that did. It reduced my task from 30 down to 29, and I'm going to do it another 27 times to be able to focus on two things, sales and hiring. And the reason I didn't grow from zero to $50 million a whole lot faster than 10 years is because of one thing. I got focused on the wrong stuff. I got focused on a whole lot of other things besides sales and hiring. So why? Why hiring? Because if I can hire great people and I can give them the autonomy to be able to succeed and I trust them, I give them resources, and I don't micromanage them. I don't have to micromanage them because I've hired them correctly and I trained them correctly. And if I can do that, I'll be able to keep growing and scaling the business and then simply hiring great people to do 80 to 90% of the job I would do if I was focused on that role exclusively. But guess what? I'm not going to focus on that role exclusively. I'm going to keep focusing on sales and hiring. So that means that you're going to have bad quality. No, it's not. It's mean. I'm going to hire great managers that are going to be focused 100% of their day on quality, 100% of their day on the tasks of admin, 100% of the day on equipment, 100% of the day on the task of HR, instead of me trying to do all of it, I will delegate and they'll do 80 to 90% of what I would do if I was in that role. But I'll be thrilled because it'll give me the ability to focus on the only two things that actually grow a business, and that is sales and hiring. By focusing on the wrong thing. I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years doing things that if I could have just delegated to somebody else, I would have got the progress that I had so much faster.

One thing I learned is when it came to simple, like everyone talking about systems, especially when it comes to delegations, like, you got to systematize, you got to systematize. And it like halfway through the past 10 years, probably year five, it dawned on me, like, what is a system really? A system is this. I have inputs with a predictable outcome, which means if A goes through this system, B will come out on the other side. It's a system. It is a predictable outcome based upon certain inputs. And so I have to ask myself, okay, how do I make systems in my business? Everyone wants to know, how do you make systems? Because we realize based on what we've already talked about, we need those systems to be able to delegate. We need those systems to be able to scale up the business. And everyone's talked about systems, and it dawned on me that systems can be really simplified pretty Easily, like systems equals simplification and standardization. So if I can just simplify things and I can standardize them, it will make the systems easier. Everyone's like, I gotta create this really complex, like, I got flow charts and I need to do like a Kan bond system. And I'm going to have this, you know, certain type, type of like to do list. Great, those are good. I love checklists, I love all of those things. But it's a whole lot easier to systematize something that is simple and standard. What that means is let's just talk about simplification because we're talking about systems, but in order. Like, I just found that if I want to create a system, I just need to think about how do I simplify it and how do I standardize it. So what is simplification? Simplification is taking out anything that is extraneous, which means I'm going to zero in and focus. Like I'm focusing a camera on one specific area, which means I'm gonna cut out everything else around it. So I'm gonna simplify, I'm gonna simplify my services, I'm gonna simplify the way I answer the phone. I'm gonna simplify all of these things to make it easier to be able to create a system. So instead of trying to create a system around something complex, it's the opposite of simple. I'm going to try to break everything down. I'm going to cut things out of the business to make it simple. When I first got started, and what got me from zero to a million dollars in revenue was the exact opposite of this. It was complexity. It was. We did tree chipping, we did putting greens, we did everything you could possibly think of. Paver, patios, retaining walls, excavation. We had three skid steers and track loaders for grading and leveling and drainage. We did everything, everything, everything you could possibly think of got me from zero to a million. And doing that and having complexity would have prevented me from creating systems because I wasn't simplifying the business. And so I needed systems. So what I have to do, I had to reduce. I had to simplify the complexity in the business by cutting out certain services. The second part of creating systems that I found really simple, really I should say necessary, was standardization. Which means we do things the same way every single time. So I simplify things and then I standardize them. Standard is we do it the same way every time. When you answer the phone, you do it this way. When you answer, when you filter out emails, you do it this way. When you respond to customers about a certain quote or certain service, this is exactly how it's done every single time. And one way to really think about this.

And really helped us so much as we begin to scale up Augusta Lawn Care is like, okay, if we had a thousand locations, what would this look like? As soon as you ask yourself, okay, well, if there's a thousand locations, that would mean that we can't offer these services, because we can offer for one location. But not across the whole country. Definitely not across the whole world. There's no way. This is not gonna. This is going to work in different time zone or different climate zones. So that does not work. And so if you start ask, asking yourself, at the size of business I want to build, regardless of what that is, if you're at a hundred thousand right now and you're like, I want to build a $500,000 business, okay, at a $500,000 business, is the current systems you're using going to work? If the answer to that is no, do two things. Simplify and then standardize. Should say, well, does that mean I can't do complex or hard services or things that are more difficult? No, that's not what it means. You can do very complex projects and just standardize them. So, like, you might give up a little bit on the simplicity part. Like, I want to be more complex. I want to do bigger projects. I want to do harder things. Great. You can still standardize those. You can still say, we're not going to install any One of these 10,000 different variations of pavers or. Or blocks. We're going to focus on these three because we know those three will cover 80 to 90% of the population, and our customers will be just happy with those three. And by standardizing, we know that we'll be able to systematize the business better. I don't really care about simplification. I don't care about standardization. It usually is very painful for your internal team and for your customers because you're cutting out services, you're cutting out customers, and you've got to create way more like processes and procedures. Internally, it's painful. And at Augusta, for us, it's painful for our owners and our franchisees because it's very difficult for us to be like, no, we can't do these things for you. You must do these certain ways. And we can't improvise and we can't modify the system, because if I don't make it simple and I don't standardize It. It will be impossible to create a system. And if it's impossible to create a system, it means I can never have predictable outcomes, because that's what a system is. And if you can't have predictable outcomes, you will constantly be tripping over yourself and being very frustrated. And so if you want to reduce frustration, create systems to have predictable outcomes. And if you want predictable outcomes, you'll need to simplify and standardize things. And if you're going to do that, it's going to require a lot of pain, because all parties do not want to have constraints, whether it be employees, whether it be customers, whether it be managers. They don't want constraints. Humans don't want constraints. It's like putting a dog in a cage. They don't want to be in there. So what you'll need to do is you'll need to understand and you'll need to get everyone on the same page as to why these constraints are best for all parties, why it's best for the customer. Why? Because simplification and standardization will lead to a more predictable outcome, and that's better for the customer because they don't have infrequent, what's it called, frequent times, where things get dropped and there's callbacks and there's issues and there's problems and there's customer complaints that will happen. Less likely if you just simplify and you standardize. And that's never easy. Whenever you cut services from a customer, they will not be happy. I still remember the very first time I had to simplify my business and I was cut out. Artificial turf and putting greens. And we had a $30,000 project. We had. We just got the 50, 50 down deposit on, and I had to give back $15,000. So we couldn't even just figure it out. I probably could have. It would have taken a massive amount of time. It would have thrown my managers on the bus. Because the one person, again, this isn't. This is not a system. One person. This is not standardization. One person knew how to install this type of putting green. And so when that person left, guess what? I was forced to give money back to a customer. And they weren't happy about it. We had gone through the whole sales process. I had been in there in person, walked them through everything. They had come to the shop and seen all the different types of putting greens and the turf, and it was all laid out and it was drawn up, and we had multiple meetings. $30,000 project, going to knock this bad boy out. Putting green out in open field. So it's really easy access. Let's go. They were not happy. Anytime you cut a service out from a customer, they will not be happy. Anytime you put constraints on a customer, I employee or a manager, they will not be happy. But it is required to have a predictable outcome. And a predictable outcome is what produces a large scaled up business. The reason that you buy an iPhone is because you kind of expect what you're going to get. They're not in. They're not all over the place. There's not like random changes in the iPhone. If you buy an iPhone from a place in New York, it's going to look the exact same. It's going to feel the exact same way. It's going to look the exact same way. It's going to operate the exact same way. 1 as the 1 in Seattle. How did that happen? They said, oh, oh, you want to have squared off edges. Yeah, that's not happening. Oh, you would have a. You would have a hot pink color. That is a copper. No, that's not happening. You're. We're literally building these four different types of models and that's it. And if you don't like it, you can go fly a kite. And that makes people mad. That makes their manufacturers mad. That makes employees mad. Like, I want some variety here. That makes their customers mad, that want a certain type of color or a certain type of metal. But they have determined that having a system and having standardization and simplification ultimately leads to the best result for all parties in the long term. In the short term, no one's happy. All right. Another thing I had to learn was that I am always the bottleneck. And this became super clear to me around year four when I got in an accident and almost lost my life because I was the bottleneck in the business. And if you don't know, I was the estimator at the time. That was sort of my role. And I went out to a job to deliver the cobble rocks for a project, and I was the bottleneck. And I needed to show the crew the job because I had done the estimate like three or four weeks before. It was in a vill in a community called Birch Bay Village. You can look it up in Washington state and gated community. Pull in a little bit off to the right. Let's go. The plan was to dump the material in the dump truck and then go back to the shop and do estimates the rest of the day. And it was, you know, in and out. Let's go. We got three, three crew Members that were on site, and I remember all of them. And the dump truck was a 1990 L7000 old truck. And it was a massive bed on the thing, like, could literally carry 12 to 14 yards of material, no problem. We will probably put way too much material in it quite often anyways. Had like 3 yards of cobble rock, which is a large smell smooth rock they were gonna install. My plan was to dump it, deliver it to the site, show them the project, and then drive back to the shop. And the rest they do estimates. Well.

I got underneath the dump truck because the pto, the power takeoff line, that cable was broken inside the. Inside the cabin. And it was broken because it was just an actual. Like, it was no electronics. It was an actual physical cable that went down underneath the truck and engaged the power takeoff, which activates the big power to actually dump the bed. Well, that cable had broken, so I went underneath the dump truck and tried to turn it on. Well, tried. I'd been doing it for like a week. We'd done it several times already. So I went underneath, engaged the pito, turns on, and as I'm coming back out, my hoodie gets caught in the pto. Now, if you don't know what PTO is, look up online PTO accidents and you'll get plenty of videos about people losing their limbs, dying, getting thrashed around and whipped around inside of a pto. And so in a split second, all my shirt, my hoodie, everything got cinched around my neck, pinned me up against the bottom of the dump truck. And I was looking out underneath the dump truck, and I still remember thinking, like, oh, like, this is how it's going to end. That's just all that came through my head. I wasn't, like, freaking out. I barely comprehended what was going on. But then it clicked. Like, oh, okay, I see what's happened here. I'm dead. There's no chance. This is how it's gonna end. And just like that, dropped out, immediately split around my neck, and I dropped out of the pto. My shoulder got caught up against the gearbox to prevent me from flipping around. It tightened up so much that all of a sudden just ripped. And there was no seam. Like it was a hoodie and a shirt and completely shredded. Still getting whipped around in the pto and I fell out. Crazy stuff. I went to the hospital that day and that evening from the hospital room, was FaceTiming my crew via video on their next project and walking them through the job. Why? Because I didn't have systems. Why I Was the bottleneck in the business. Everything came back to me. I did the sales, I walked, I did operations, the crew out in the field. And fortunately, I had recently hired my aunt Liz, who's still with me today, and she's now coo. At the time was the office person just getting started. Fortunately she was, you know, amazing and was able to like run the admin side. But like, I was still micromanaging and like fully operating in the bottleneck for all the operations, all of the sales, doing all of the estimates, going to job sites, delivering material, making sure crews are moved around, talking to customers, all the rest of it. And I was doing that video because I didn't have a system for walking them through the job. And later on, that was a bottleneck that I realized had to be replaced with a system called estimate videos, where when I was at the actual property doing the estimate, I would make a video, attach it to the job, and then if it was three or four weeks later, the crew would simply watch the video and see the estimate notes. And I would not need to be on the job site because I had already had them where they were like staggering start times just so I could walk them through projects. I had like a 7:00am crew, a 7:30 crew, an 8:00 clock crew, 8:30 crew. And it was simply so that I could go to all the different projects and walk them through and get their day started. Having a simple system create a predictable outcome, that they had a video with their estimate notes every single day when they showed up at a project. And I didn't have to spend the first three hours of my day driving around to projects. That all came at the realization of sitting in a hospital bed realizing I was the bottleneck to my business that had no systems. I was the system. You'd be like, I don't have systems and procedures. You do. You are the system and you are the bottleneck by which everything has to be done. And if you got hit by a bus, the business would die. And when I literally basically got hit by a bus, my business almost died. And I came to realization. I had no systems. And I was the bottleneck for everything inside the business. And I hope that, like this video, like my content prevents someone from building their business in a way that they are the bottleneck to everything. And if they actually did get caught underneath the bus or bus or a truck, or they had a workplace accident or had a divorce or they got injured or something happened in their life, People go through mental trauma. They go through. They have a Kid stuff happens, their family, they got an emergency. And if it takes away from the business for a few weeks, like most small businesses, the owner operator is removed from daily operations for three or four weeks, it would die. It would die. There's been multiple locations inside of Augusta Nation that we've stepped in and helped run their location during those moments. From command center's perspective, we can kind of run from afar and help the crew get through. But without that, most owners, their business would just die because they're the bottleneck and they have no systems. And so the sooner you can get away from you being the bottleneck, the better. And that's why I believe you should scale up your business. Everyone online, like you shouldn't not, you shouldn't tell everyone they need to build a million dollar business. I agree with you. There are people that should never build a million dollar business because they psychologically, psychologically would break. And for them to be self aware enough to realize that is awesome that they'd rather just have one or two employees and live that life. But I will tell you this, that you are the bottleneck and you are the system that's running the entire business. And once you get bigger and once you grow and scale and you allow some things to fall through the cracks because you delegated, because you let other people do the job and they're not 100% you and you let those things happen, you scale the business to enough size where you can actually afford to delegate things to people so if you get hit by a bus, they don't all lose their jobs. And be a good steward of what you actually have, if you actually believe in that part of that is like look out for the people that you're hiring, like, and look up for your family that if you're the breadwinner, if you're the one providing there's actual systems in place besides you and that if you were stuck underneath the dump truck, God forbid, like I was and put up to be able to not be able to work for a couple weeks that the business wouldn't die. I'm very thankful that I had someone like Liz and had great, great employees. But most, most businesses in that moment would have died. And it was at that moment I, I started making content. You can go way back when I started landscapebusinesscourse.com and you can see the lacerations of my neck. And for like weeks it still is oozing and everything. I don't know why, because like, I don't know if this stuff got compressed so Much, but I thought I had broke my neck. So they take me to the hospital, then all the scans and everything, and I still have some scars. You can see some of them here on my arm. But then it kind of. Kind of go along here. Like, it's not fun. That is, whenever I think about delegation, whenever I think about taking things back myself, I literally just look at these. These are the only ones I'm gonna show because, like, the other ones are too graphic.

That's not fun. And for a long time, these are really, really painful to touch because they went really deep. And this is. This is where the gearbox dug into my arm, right into there and punctured the bicep. Not fun. That's what not having systems did. Because if they would have had a video, I wouldn't have been on that job site. And if they would have had a video and I wasn't spending three hours a day doing project walkthroughs with my crew, I would have probably fixed the stinking PTO cable.

The last thing I want to share something. I thought I would have known this 10 years ago. I built the business much better, much faster, much less pain is.

All along the way, I was doing the right thing. I just wasn't doing enough of it. Alex Ramosi talks a lot about this. An example was that he was putting out, like, 300 flyers, said it wasn't working. Went to his mentors, like, it's not working. He's like, oh, well, we do like 3000 as a test group. And so I realized that, like, the ads you're running, they're working. You're getting customers for 40, $50 customer acquisition cost, it's working. You're just not doing enough of it. And I say you. And the fact that I did that for so long, I never would go all in when something was working. I built my business on the back of Facebook ads when there was a massive arbitrage and I was only spending like five to six hundred bucks a month. And now people would die, die for the customer acquisition cost I was getting back then. And now we have way more sophistication and better tracking and all the rest of it. And I still can't even come close to getting customers for basically pennies that we did back when we first got started. I just didn't do enough of it. I was doing the right thing. Most people weren't. Mark on advertising on Facebook. Ten years ago, I did. I had it. I was doing the right thing. I just didn't do enough of it. And so many people, including myself, will do door hangers, we'll do yard signs and we say that, hey, it worked pretty good. We just don't go all in. Like, if something is working, just plow all of your time and energy into it and be willing to be able to like, look, for the next six months, I'm dedicating myself to this. Why? Because by doing it for the next six months, I'm going to save myself six years of pain otherwise. And the returns on that six months, if you just dedicate yourself to it and just go all in and just go fully committed to that one thing can be huge. And for most people, that foundational stage when it is so painful is actually the moment they go should go all in. You go all in and commit. Instead of trying to run a part time business, instead of trying to run their business on the side, still doing their 9 to 5, just going all in and focusing 100% of their attention on the opportunity in front of them is the thing that differentiates the successful from the person that started and never finished and failed and quit. And trying to run your business as a side hustle, trying to do your marketing halfway, trying to go try to do part time estimates and working on the field, then you're juggling this with the kids, then you're trying to do this with the, the, the youth group and then you're trying to do this over here. You're splitting your attention to so many different areas. You're doing the right thing in the business, but you're not doing enough of it. And if, if that's what you want, if you want to live your life in that way, fantastic. But realize that what you're doing is not wrong and you are judging yourself based upon giving halfway effort and halfway strength and you're diverting your time and attention and strength and energy towards other things, whether it be a different job, whether it be five different businesses, a thing you're doing online, you're trying to write a book, you're trying to make content, you're trying to help with the church, you're trying to help with the mission, you're trying to help do this and that and the family and you're doing the right thing in the business and you're judging yourself and saying you're not entrepreneur and that you're a failure and you're beating yourself up with the fact that you can't run this business and you can't scale it up in reality. If you just focused on it and you did more of what you're currently doing in the business, you'd be successful. If I could have known that back then.

My goodness, a lot of pain would have been avoided.