$1000 WASTED | $300k Business in 30 Days (9)

I'm traveling 3,000 miles across the country to build a $300,000 lawn care business in just 30 days. This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general manager and go back home. I'm starting with no employees, no equipment, and no customers to prove that systems build great businesses.

Today is day nine, and we are getting about two to three jobs a.

Day right now doing door hangers from Jonathan. I also now have Terrence on and.

He'S gonna be full time doing door.

Hangers next few days as well, while he's also looking for a house for his family.

Now we are scrapping the whole idea of trying to get a whole bunch of mowing customers.

We've tried it for a week. We literally only have a few mowing customers. We've gotta focus on property cleanups and.

Small projects to fill the schedule. And then next spring rush, once our brand is established, the website's rolling, getting lots of leads and more brand awareness, and then we'll focus on mowing and recurring customers.

Right now at $25 an hour. And when we're doing door hangers, you're not going to be really making P4P, because P4P is you make a percentage of the labor, right? So but from the manager side of you, you can kind of see. Oh, you can't see anything right now, but you can see, I can see that you clocked in, but then down the road you see like efficiency scores, which projects are in process. This is all about just the punch in, punch out, though. This is not the CRM which is co pilot, but this is like where the guys punch in. And then if, for example, you get home tonight, like 8 o', clock, oh man, I totally forgot to clock out. You can leave a note for the manager. Okay, okay, Right. And then what happens is as soon as you punch in, I get a time card here and I can see punch in time when you punch out. And then if you make me notes, they'll show up. And then down the road, I'll show you how. Like at the end of the day, we would calculate PvP.

We are at gmc.

Why are we at gmc?

Because we have two sets of keys for this truck, and one of them randomly doesn't work. You put in the ignition just says security alert. So it's probably not been programmed correctly, albeit we already spent $200 getting the.

Key cut from the dealership.

They didn't program it correctly. Gotta take it back get it fixed.

What did both of them start it?

Okay, this is really weird.

Like, I'm dumb, but not that dumb.

Because when I got there, it worked. And the reason it probably worked is because this key is programmed correctly, was in the ignition. And when you put the other one in, it turns on. It's called simple programming, I've learned. And the year this truck was made, which I think is 2017. 2018, that was the year where they stopped doing that. So some of them are in it, and some of them are out of simple programming, which means you take a key that is programmed correctly, but then put in one that is incorrectly programmed, but correctly cut, it'll turn on. But I still don't understand why yesterday I was left stranded with a key that did not work. And so I sure hope that doesn't.

Randomly happen again because it happened three.

Times earlier this week. But then I get here, you know.

How stupid you feel?

And it just.

It works right away.

So dumb.

Like, ultimately, when we start hiring, we're going to be paying 18 an hour. But then they have the opportunity to make above that if they're efficient, right? And then you'll start seeing. So one question.

Is it. Is it whatever outweighs the other on a.

On a per pay period basis? So every single day, we're tracking base pay plus overtime. So like, let's say you did eight hours. Okay, great. You're getting, say, $20 an hour. It's $160. That's base pay. Let's just say there's no overtime for this week. But in that day, you make $600 for the business. Right? That $600, you make 1/3 of it.

Okay, so 33%.

200 bucks, right? So you made $200 on P4P, made 160 on base pay. So technically, you made $40 on performance dollars.

Okay?

Now, the thing is, every single day, we track that, and at the end of the pay period, we compare the two and take the higher. Okay, okay, okay. The reason we say that is because we don't take the higher of every single day. The reason you don't do that is because you get unemployed. That goes out and just crush it. The thousand dollars in a day and the next day and the day after is fixing all the mistakes that he made. And now it's like, well, am I going to pay them 160? Or let's just call it 350 because they crushed it. But in the next three days, they literally make no revenue because they're fixing their Mistakes from going so fast. Yeah. So it's kind of that balance. And that's why we, over the course of the pay period, take the higher of the two.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

So P4P gets recorded day by day.

Yep.

The base pay gets reported day by day.

Exactly.

And so out of the two weeks, whichever performed the highest, that's what they get.

Exactly. Okay.

For older two.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

And then on their paycheck, essentially it is they get their base pay like $18 times how many hours they worked. And then if they made any performance dollars, it's just tacked on as much. Okay.

As performance.

Okay. Exactly.

So that's kind of the basic version of it.

And then there's so many as you start thinking all these scenarios. Okay, so like, what happens if someone makes a mistake and someone else fixes their mistake? Right. There's those sort of things. Right.

So we'll come into those and then we'll.

We'll go over those. For example, what happens if I got a new guy with me and slowing me down? Great. We have a trainer bonus.

Okay.

So if you're training someone else, we give you $4 more per hour.

Okay.

Right. So on your base pay, a great dude.

Good question.

No, just P4P. Okay. Now, if you ever wanted to lock it in onto their base pay as well, like where it's guaranteed, you can do that. Okay. We typically only put it on the P4P because then incentivizes the trainer to keep them moving pretty quickly. Right. Because they really only realize that extra bonus per hour if they actually were pretty effic.

All right, so everyone always asks me.

About the numbers, and at the very.

End of the challenge, I'll break down.

All the math and everything, but we've.

Essentially spent about a thousand dollars doing marketing, really going after mowing services. And that was good.

And all because that's typically what we do. We spend most of our money on.

Marketing for recurring services.

And then the projects are what we.

Get during the slow season and when.

We send out emails to our customers, like marketing emails. However, after spending $1,000 and getting two.

Two customers, we have to change the strategy. And the problem is right now, now.

That we're switching to door hangers, which.

Has been working great, by the way. We've gotten five jobs in the past two days on this.

Great. Fantastic.

The problem is this, they focus kind of on mowing, and you can get these on long care media. But the problem is that the only things that are getting accepted is projects. That is Property cleanups and multi jobs.

So what did I do last night?

I rush ordered it should be here by the end of the week.

And that is a whole bunch of.

These instant quote door handers just for property cleanups and mulch jobs. That way we can focus on what's actually selling. And I told the general manager, Terrence.

We'Re really just getting started, to be perfectly honest. And that's why, like, this week, we just want to sell. Just want to sell, sell, sell. And the goal is just to put as much in here. My kind of goal is like, if next week we can get like 20.

Budget hours on schedule.

Right now we have 10. 20 would be great the next week if we got to like, 35 or 40. If we were able to. The next we get to 50 to 60, we'd probably actually hit our goal for the challenge. Like I talked about yesterday, I'm not, like, so worried about the challenge. I more or less just want to, like, find the systems for you. So, you know, okay, if I go out and do door hangers for two hours, I'm gonna get a lead, and if I do that for four hours, I'll get two leads and I'll be able to close a job every day. Okay, well, then great. That. That means that if we don't have work on the schedule, we know exactly what to do, right? And I told Terence, I said, look.

This, the rest of this year, we.

Might be lucky to get the 30, 40 mowing customers, like, one route.

If we're lucky, they'll just trickle in.

A couple a week.

But what we really need to go after right now to pay the bills.

Is property cleanups and mulch installations because they're selling.

What about.

You can use those too?

Yeah, absolutely. If you're actually meeting them and talking to them, et cetera, you could give.

Them this and be like, hey, I'll.

Go ahead and get. Then it's just a matter. You need their information, right?

So you could even get like, I've.

Just been using my reminders app, my phone or my notes app. Just type in their phone number, email address.

But I can put it in copilot as well, right?

Oh, yeah, you're right.

You could.

I can just.

Genius. Yeah, I totally forgot you have that access. You should be able. There go customers.

And then I would. So customer's name.

We're gonna flip these. But yeah, first name and last name will pre populate this for you. So if you start typing here.

That's a good question. We do commercial.

We will do It.

Yes, we will absolutely do it. I know you have experience there, and if you're confident, I'm fine with it. Okay. It really, like, I build the locations around the general manager, so how big you want the business to be, whether. When you want to switch to profit mode, because obviously that affects your paycheck a lot. So I'm okay whenever that is for you. If you're like, I want to get three employees kind of where I'm kind of 50% in the field, 50% out, and that's a good spot that you feel comfortable, then we'll switch it to profit mode. If you're like, I want to grow it, like, Connor, he wants to go to, like, 800,000.

That'd be great.

Like, we'll do two more months. You don't have to be in profit mode, and you can just keep growing. So he's got another. He's got his fourth truck, and he's going to really scale it up.

Another thing that I've learned about these door hangers is that the close ratio is super high. If someone sends us a picture of the door hanger with the price, we convert basically every single one. Now, that sample size right now is only like, five or six, but we basically have closed every single one where they've reached out to us because of the door hangers. Whereas the leads that we got from, like, Google and Facebook and all the rest of it may be 40, 50% close ratio right now. So that's something I've also learned. Okay. So the golden question is, are we gonna hit our goal of hitting a $300,000 business and making $1,500 per day? This Augusta lawn care location needs to be making $1,500 per day before I can hand it off to a general manager and go back home by the end of this month. Well, honestly, I don't know. Like, there's a shot. There's a chance, but we're 10 days in almost. We're nine days in. So we're like, 30% of the way through the challenge. And next week on the schedule, we have a few thousand dollars worth of work. But ultimately, the goal that I really have for this challenge is to show what it really feels like to start a business. And for a lot of people, starting a new business is after a big life change. Like, they moved across the country, and they don't know everything about the market. I don't know anything about these type of grasses that are here or these type of bushes, but I've got to Figure it out. I don't know what works in terms of Google or Facebook or. And it's a horrible time to start the business in the middle of the season. But starting a business usually doesn't come at a good time in life. It's usually when you gotta grind and hustle and figure things out, and you gotta look on YouTube and figure things out, and you've gotta test different types of marketing strategies to see what's gonna work for your location.

But don't you think that I'm not trying to hit fifteen hundred dollars a day, baby? Challenge accepted. Well, I got a whopping 20 or 25 door hangers out before I got a call and had to act quickly. See, at Copilot, we started out with just four or five developers, really nice and simple, and the goal was always to fix bugs within 24 to 48 hours. And even when we added features and things like if there's a bug, we can squash it quick, because most bugs are pretty simple to fix, honestly. However, now that we have a lot more people on the team, we had to add more structure. We have a testing server. We have what's called uat, where the features go before they get pushed into development. All very good. Makes the product much more stable and reduces downtime. However, it also slows down our fixes, and I do not like that. And so we're trying to figure out a better deployment process. And this is, again, just part of growing a business. When you go from three or four people in a team to 15 or 20, things have to change and things break, and you gotta adapt and change and grow, and you gotta deal with people's feelings and opinions and people not getting along. And that's just part of business. And some people wonder why I didn't start the challenge with like $1,000 or $500, and they think that's the way to do it, instead of me spending 20, $30,000 to get this location off the ground. And the reason I did not do that is because in a month, if you only have $500.

I didn't. I didn't die. I promise. The reason I didn't do that is because in one month, you just see me doing some lawns and some landscaping jobs, maybe my first five or 10 customers, and that's fine and good, but I'm not the best at doing lawns. I'm not the best at doing landscape jobs. And there's really good videos on YouTube that are much better than me. I gotta turn. Okay, here we go, folks. Alright. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. However, by having the money injected into the business and doing marketing and me spending time on doing door hangers and all the rest of it, yes, it takes more money. However, you're able to see a whole lot more in this challenge than just doing a few jobs. And yes, I could talk about it at the whiteboard and say the exact same thing, but I do feel there's value to seeing someone actually go through the same struggles that you're going to go through if you're getting started or that you have gone through if you've already gone down this road.

This quote that I love so much.

It'S not about doing what you love, but learning to love what it takes. And ultimately, this whole challenge is simply showing what it takes and the grind it takes to get the biz off the ground.

Going for an evening ride. Talked to Chuck for quite a bit a while ago, so I only have about 15 minutes to run. Right now I'm hopping on to a CC unfiltered podcast. Make sure you subscribe Lee Park. And then after that, I talked to Liz. So all the executive team meetings, knock them out right now.

Let's go.

North Carolina Update Lawn site Drama and Apple Vision Pro. Oh, yeah. Okay, cool.

All right, let's go.

That's what I got for today.