12 Trends, Social Circles & Private Equity

It started actually getting worse, even though the technology kept getting better, like latency was getting better, adoption of the tech was getting better, everything was better, and the customer satisfaction was going down.

The people with all the money win because they can go get all the robots, and you and I, we can't get 3,000 robots.

What I built for hundreds of thousands, if not million dollars, is probably $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month.

My bet is that you still got years to build. These outdoor services companies, if we're talking about that, and really most of the trades, you still got years where you can get these really good valuations.

Number 10 spot went from $88 million to $461 million in that time frame. Looking at 2025 versus 2005, again, the consolidation of all this revenue in these bigger companies.

That is the future of home services. We will be wearing these glasses in a massive way in the future, and it will majorly change our businesses.

All right, welcome to another, another episode. And today we are going to be jumping right into a cold open. And on this episode, I'm gonna be asking Jonathan to either buy the stock or short it. So if you don't know the stock market, shorting it means I think it's going down, it's not gonna work out. And so I'm gonna do is I'm going to give you a trend, Jonathan, and you have to tell me if you'd buy the trend or if you'd short it. Over the next 5 years. So, you know, we're not a betting man, we don't do that. Yeah, but if you were, you know, in the, in the next life of JP, if he was a betting man, would we buy the stock or we short? I'm going to give you 12 trends and I just want to know, would you buy it?

So I think they're going to keep going, or I think they're going to fall apart?

Exactly. And some of them are bets and we kind of go all over the place. So first one up is AI is answering every inbound call for home service companies.

How far out?

5 years. Oh yeah, by the way, this is 5 years, so 2031.

Every single call?

Every single call.

I short it.

Okay, number 2, we mix— we're gonna mix up some of the themes here. Tiffany owns a humanoid robot.

Hmm, I've asked her this, uh, definitely.

I feel like, I feel like you have insider information though, given the fact that you're married to her.

So, well, so Tiffany is okay with it. I've asked this very specific because I was trying to get a feel for this. Like, really? You're going to let the thing like stand in our bedroom while we're sleeping looking at us? So, but I don't believe they're going to happen. So short it. Not in 5 years. Not in our house.

Okay. Okay. And she was okay with it. She'd be okay with it.

I could not believe it. I really thought I was going to get like, no.

She must really hate the dishes or something. I do the dishes. You are the humanoid robot.

I need, I want the robot.

Okay. All right. Number 3, private equity buying $1 million lawn care and plumbing companies. Like broadly, they're trying to buy $1 million companies.

Oh, so they're coming down market to buy more and more of them. I'm long.

Okay. All right. Number 4, a $25 per hour minimum wage is becoming normal for entry-level labor.

Is it a true minimum wage or the market forces it?

True minimum wage.

Federally. I'm still shorting that in 5 years across the— not in— not everywhere, but if you're gonna say the whole US, I'm shorting it.

Okay. Number 5: a Fortune 500 company replaces its CEO with an agent.

Nah, shorting it 5 years.

Okay. Number 6: uh, the Ferrari Luce, the famous electric car, gets a second version or upgrade. I just want to say— I just want to say I just want to say that they are booked out with orders all the way through 2027.

Is that what they're saying?

Yeah, that's what they're saying. I also don't know if they're making 10 this year, right?

And it releases in 2027. I promise you when Ferrari starts— so interestingly, I've gotten 3 emails from 3 different Ferrari dealerships this last week because I'm in the Ferrari system because I've owned Ferraris for like 12 years now. And so, or more. And so all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm getting a bunch of emails. They're trying to sell. Um, I am, uh, well, they run on 5-year cycles usually. I'm— tell me the question again. I think it's a— yeah, it'll get a new refresh in 5 years. I'm long that. I, I don't know which way to answer it, but you'll get a refresh.

Okay, here's the follow-up question. Will it be higher or lower in price than their current sticker price, the second version?

Depends how much the Chinese market will pay for it, because that's got to be who they're going after, right? I'm gonna go Ferrari never comes down in price. Hmm. But, you know, they may start to recover some of their CapEx they've invested to build electric. So maybe there's an argument where they do come down a little bit in price, which is not something they normally do. I may take that trade.

Okay. All right. Number 7: a recession marked by declining home prices and a 20% drop in stocks in the next 5 years.

A long net trade.

Okay. Number 8: Prices are transparent on the website with AI agents having cards on file to check out.

Okay, I'm long. Number— not everywhere, but a lot of it. A ton of it.

Yeah. Okay. Number 9: home service companies using door hangers and door knocking more than they are now.

I'm long. Okay, number— the smart ones.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Number 10: NVIDIA valuation is lower than it is today.

Moo golly. In 5 years.

I was gonna do Tesla, but then you'd probably get some hate comments, and it probably won't even be Tesla by then. It'll be SpaceX.

Yeah, well, that's gonna be fascinating to see what happens there. Oh man, NVIDIA, short, less than it is today.

Really? Okay.

All right. No, no, no, no, you're asking if it's less.

Oh yeah, I'm asking.

Yeah, I should just give— ah man, I don't— this is hard to know how it plays out because I think, uh, I think we could have some tech breakthroughs by then that brings— that we get more competition. But I also think the market on AI is just going to grow. I'm going to, I'm going to predict not lower.

Okay.

All right. Yeah.

All right.

Number 11.

Tough. All right. B2C or business to consumer blue collar businesses getting better valuations than B2C. So business to consumer software. I'll say it again. Cause I know it's a little tough. So B—

go ahead. This is the SaaS trade.

Yeah, so B2C blue-collar businesses getting better valuations than B2C software.

Oh, B2C software. Oh, correct. Oh, like, uh, so not business-to-business soft— not, not what we do, correct?

No, like a workout app, something like that.

Oh, well, yeah, that's the challenge here. This is where the nuance matters. Like, the small stuff, screwed. The stuff that could become a feature, it's like the really big stuff, like a A Spotify still does great. I don't think you recreate, you can't recreate Spotify with AI. You can recreate the tech, but you can't recreate all the deals. So that's where the nuance is. But if we're talking the typical app on your phone, typical small software thing, no, I think home services is the better, better bet.

All right. Number 12, last and final. There's going to be a million robo taxis in operation.

In 5 years?

Let's say USA.

There you go. You know how many we have now?

Not a lot. Yeah.

Man, that's a tough one. That's like the NVIDIA one for me. A million. A million. Dang, that's a lot. Yeah. This is my least confident answer. I'll take it, but I, that feels like gambling.

We would never do this. Never in another world. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. All right, let's kick it off. What you've been working on this past week. For everyone that might just be listening on the podcast, JP does have a background of a tropical, uh, beach behind him. And so I don't want to ask what you're working on, but you can just say what you've been up to, uh, to kick us off.

Yeah, yeah, I actually haven't. I, on the way here on the airplane, I finished my marketing calendar revisions that are editing that I talked about last week, but I haven't done any work since I've been here. So I'm not working on anything. I'm, I'm, I'm on vacation.

Let's go. Well, we've been working on not fun stuff. We had our first large-scale malware attack, um, at HomeWorks.

Yeah, malware.

Okay, so we went through GitHub. So one of our contractors that worked on, uh, our mobile app, it got infected on them and then it spread like crazy on GitHub. It actually affected GitHub's code base, um, and it was being, is being spread through there. It was really bad.

So, so it's been a lot of I didn't— I'm really curious about this. So did it hit a lot of companies?

Is that— yeah. Okay.

Did that— was there ransom involved, or was it more of just like, you got to go clean it, everything up?

I haven't followed up with the other companies. We were able to get ahead of it. So on Saturday afternoon, we got wind of it, and then we changed every— so we locked the system down. All APIs we changed. We actually changed our repository in GitHub. Um, but the biggest thing that the last 3 days have been a struggle is like getting the email and text backup because the backlog Um, but we just as of this morning like caught back up. Um, but that was, yeah, it was, it was the first big one and it was, it was hefty, like working a lot of hours.

So, wow. Do you know what the goal of it was?

Not yet. No, I'm going to circle back with, uh, Dan. He's our CTO and just see like what happened to everyone else. But when we saw it, it was just like immediately everything was, everyone was on board, just locking. We changed out every API key, you know, Stripe PayPal, every little thing. So, man, fortunately nothing bad happened, but that's good to hear, man.

This, that was even in SA days, and it's like another level now, or it's going to become another level, I believe. That was always the single biggest, that in this database, like the system going down or some kind of an attack was always our biggest threat. We had full-time security at that only worked on security at SA. I mean, that's because we were getting attacked all the time. It's like, that's the crappiest thing about software. Back to my argument, is really everybody going to build their own software and protect themselves? This is going to get bad, I think.

Yeah, yeah, because it's like with a CRM specifically, you have customer data, and if you have even, let's just say, your smaller business with 20,000 contacts, like, that's valuable to a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. So when you have, like, if they can get into the whole CRM, like, that's millions. So anyways, yeah, that was, that's what we've been working with, and I was, I had it in my docket. Okay, I was like, I can't talk about this if we're still going through it, but as of this morning Everything's back up to speed.

Wow, okay, glad to hear that. That's, that's, uh, scary stuff.

Yeah, cool. Well, let's jump right into the docket. Um, we pulled these mostly from questions from the viewers, so as always, if you all have questions down in the comments, JP and myself usually respond, and so feel free to put those down in the comments. But the first one is very strategic, mostly for home services businesses that are trying to market and grow their business. First one is what marketing tactics are working now? Which ones are hot right now? And specifically kind of looking at door hangers versus every door direct mail. I know it's a moving target. In 2 years this could be antiquated information because things move so quickly. But I think a snapshot right now in terms of what are you seeing working? I know at Citytrip Jonathan, you've been working a lot with the marketing. What are you seeing working now? And then I'll, I'll kick it off on our side.

You know, I, I totally I misread this question when you dropped in the docket. I heard it as what's hot right now. So, but you're saying what's working the best right now.

What's the difference? Hot, like what's hot? Like, oh, I see you're saying hot is like trendy. Yeah. Yeah.

Like what's everybody talking about? What's everybody doing? No, no, that's cool. I can answer. I can answer either way. So what's working right now in trying to get my head around what I wanted to spend my time on working on the City Turf business, cuz it's a multi-year project for me to really get us to where I want to go from a marketing standpoint. And I'm still, I consider it's taking a lot longer than I thought. So I still think of it as very early days, but I've been having conversations with other individuals that are running really large companies, maybe outside of home service or not home services, but outside of say green industry. They could be in other trades. And I will say that what they're all talking about is, I mean, they, they, they put number one for them. LSA ads, like LSA. That's the thing that, that they— everybody's— everybody says LSA, reviews, fast response. This is the thing that's most important. To a lesser degree, Google Ads, but they're still doing a lot with Google Ads. But when you talk to a lot— I mean, and I'm talking about talking to people that are doing over $100 million in revenue, not tons of them, but some, and, and then a variety of a number of people that are doing under that number. That's what I see a ton. So they're focused on LSA, SEO, nothing new, nothing like that hasn't been around for a long time. So I wouldn't say I talk to anybody and think, wow, super sophisticated, very exciting. Like they're doing some really cool stuff. And from my standpoint, the way I'm thinking about it is like, if I'm in 3 years getting most of my revenue from any paid ads, I have totally not done what I'm trying to pull off. I wanna shift— I, I, SEO in my mind's not going away. You combine it with AEO, GEO, whatever. Those are just the AI terms for getting found in the LLMs or recommended. But I want more of our clients in the future coming from other tactics like the old guerrilla marketing, the offline marketing, go get the client. In fact, I just released a video on Fiver50 yesterday on this, or it'd be a week for from now, or a week in the past if you're watching this now. I, I want more of my clients coming from, uh, the LLMs, more of my clients coming from social, more of my clients coming from referrals. I do— if, if I look at my business and most of my clients are coming from paid ads with Google, we haven't pulled off what I wanna pull off. So what I'm seeing the market doing is not really some big new, like, wow, this is the, thing that we didn't know about a year ago. Um, so I'm, I'm kind of feel like I'm trying to run in a different direction in the longer term.

Why is that? Is that just the dependency on that channel? Is it the fact that you're kind of chained to a paid, paid, uh, channel at all?

So it's not that I won't spend the money there. It's more like I'll spend the money everywhere. I just want more of my revenue, uh, revenue to come from other places. I, it's probably 3 things. One, I don't like the dependency. I'm, I'm kind of concerned about things usually tend to work out, but I'm a little concerned about where this LLM recommendation stuff goes. I'm really concerned about it. I don't know what that looks like. And, you know, there are signs that maybe like, for example, in LSA, it used to be that Google would. There were, you could really dominate LSA. And then it seemed like they started doing more round robin and giving more people an opportunity. So maybe they do that in the LLM models, but I'm not con— I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. So anytime there are question marks, I just don't want to hope for the best. So there's an element where I want to build a lead funnel or a flow of leads that are not dependent on Google or OpenAI or any of them. There's, that's part 1. Part 2, I think with these other strategies, I can hold a strong CAC number. I, I don't think the CAC numbers tend to be that great on, on Google Ads. Like LSA is better, but true Google Ads, I, I don't, maybe you have great, uh, great numbers, but like from a face running paid Facebook or running paid Google Ads, it's not cheap. So I think I could potentially beat that over the long term with a strong brand. Doing other creative marketing approaches that are very targeted. Don't know. I got to prove this out. But I had great success with these things in the early days of CityTurf. And then I went on to do Service Autopilot, and that stuff all stopped happening. We didn't— I didn't have people in place. We were too small to keep that stuff running. So there's protect myself from the companies, the big companies, like, and then the other ones, can I bring down my CAC? And then the third one is I just want more control and more lead flow. Like there's only so much traffic I can buy on Google, especially of my best clients. So if I want to go build the very best business, I have to go get the very best clients and I don't want to have to wait for them to hopefully find me on Google or hopefully they, I get recommended through ChatGPT. So I want to go get them. So that's my logic on this.

Yeah, I 100% agree. Even your video talking about a lot about upselling and like greasing that, the gears of how we recoup the customer acquisition costs early on. And I think it's one of the only reasons to ever offer an additional or an adjacent service is to be able to recoup that money so I can spend more on marketing. Because if you're gonna spend like $120, $130 per customer, you can't be mowing their lawn for $40 every week. Like, yeah, and especially if you have bad churn. And so I 100% agree. And I think for us, we've seen Facebook ads work really well when we're driving them to instant quotes, uh, because it is a more immediate buyer we've seen, and they can pre-populate their information if they're going through Facebook forms. You're having a low, lower quality lead though. So if you're going out and driving to estimates or your sales process is not streamlined, you're going to waste a ton of time going after what is probably a 10 to 15% close rate. And so if you drive it to instant quotes though, where it weeds out non-buyers, you can, we can gas it a lot more. Whereas that's been our trouble with like LSA or Google is it's hard to scale. If I want to go get 100 customers this month, I might not get 100 people clicking in my local town for that. Yeah. And so we've seen it much more as like if you're driving traffic to an instant quote form where people, people can buy, the question becomes, are that, is that the same type of person that's going to buy other services? And is that the same person that is going to, you know, they're tech friendly, yes, they usually put a card on file, but are they going to want 2 or 3 other of my other services, upgrading my treatment packages? And so what type of buyer comes from these different channels is also super important. And that's what we've seen. And when it comes to Google, like, if I can't get the customer for under $60 or $70, the math is tough. But if you have that higher LTV, lifetime value, or even annual customer value, that's when we can start to make sense of the math. Yeah.

Yeah. This is, as you said, this is the crux of the problem in running a one or two service businesses. You can't necessarily outspend the competition. Like you couldn't outspend me if I'm spending to my ability, um, because I got multiple services and then you don't have as much to upsell the customer, which is where a lot of profit is, but. We'll talk about this later. It's one of my predictions for the future. I think you can do this micro brand thing in the future and cross-sell across companies you own. But this is the big, that's the only real negative in my mind to a, a few service offering.

Yeah. In terms of, in terms of the print stuff, what are you seeing working right now? Like we see door hangers working really well as for gateway services. Um, but then really having to grease the gears of the upsells. Like as soon as it's scheduled, we're calling them, we're trying to book them onto something else. Uh, door hangers. Is something that I can scale because I can just like keep hitting the house. I can have teams go out, I can track them. Um, what are you seeing working on like the postcards? I know that's one thing I've— I know you've stuck with for a long time and made work.

Actually, we haven't— we— I haven't brought back postcards yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we haven't— we haven't used postcards, uh, since 2011. Oh wow. Yeah, yeah, it's been a long time. Yeah, so this is why I'm so excited about the City Turf business is we basically have hardly done any marketing in the last very, very long time. It's all been some email marketing upsells. It's been some mediocre SEO. It's been some basic LSA. So I got back involved and I'm bringing all that stuff back. So I don't have data yet on postcards, but I have incredible confidence from my past conversations and then just still understanding the market And so I, in the future, on when we're having the show, I'll be able to give better data on the postcards and how they're working. But I'm positive it's going to work. I mean, I'm just— it's working for other people, and it, it didn't stop working. It's, it's continued to work. And I think we're shifting back to a place where the mailbox for years has been emptying out. There's less and less mail in the mailbox. And so I think that favors the a positive outcome on postcards again.

To take your angle on the question, what do you see as hot? Is it still LSA, or do you see people spending money in areas that are potentially not even the best use of their money?

I, I, I— everybody I talk to is just, it's all digital. I don't see people at all shifting back to these offline marketing techniques. So off— this is a bit of my prediction that people will start shifting back to some of this, but I don't see it happening in any meaningful way. And so it's all digital. It's all, it's all the typical stuff. Everybody I talk to is all doing the same stuff, even the really big guys. The difference is the big guys are way fast. They're using technology to respond really, really fast, or they're using data to understand when to be running ads of what type with what kind of messaging. So they're just more sophisticated, but they're using all the same tools. There's no— that I can't find. I've been looking for this like wow moment of like, oh, you guys are doing this, that is really clever, this is what we're going to do. I have yet to see it.

I think in general it's a— everyone look, that's probably where this question originally came from, is like, just tell me what's working right now. And I think it is, first off, a moving target. Secondly, extremely dependent on your market, depending on what type of customer you're selling, dep— depending on what service you're selling. Like, we just talked to on turnaround here out in Louisiana. And their website, you can hardly tell what, what they're trying to sell, let alone who they're selling it to. But it's like they are selling to probably 3 people in this entire city. And that is DR Horton, the massive builders that are coming to track housing. And I'm like, you guys get to your— your logo is a house. Yeah, don't do residential. And so I think being clear, who are you trying to sell to, leads to How do you sell to them? And so if I'm selling to someone that is a commercial client doing door hangers, this is what they're proposing. Like, we heard you talk about door hangers, we're going to do door hangers. I'm like, no, no, no, you're going after 3 people in this city. Yeah. Um, just go through. So yeah, 100%. So I think it's, it's so dependent on who are you selling, where are you selling, and what service are you selling.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I think most of us just want to be told, go do this thing. But the reality is, and the, you know, I guess maybe why we do this type of show here is you've got to have a broad understanding of what's available to you and then how it really works. Like, again, the video that I alluded to a moment ago that I— when you're watching this, will have been posted a week ago. It's, it's about the paid tactics that you could use. But I start the whole thing with this idea that you have to first figure out your messaging. So first you figure out your audience, like you said, Mike, then you figure out your messaging. Otherwise, you could throw any tactic you want at the greatest thing out there, like, let's just say the single best converting thing is in fact LSA. Let's say that's it. But if you get the messaging wrong when they land on your website or when they call you and you're talking to them on the phone, it doesn't matter. It won't work for you. And you'll wonder, well, why is it working for this other group? It didn't work for me. Maybe it's just the messaging. And so it's like, this is why it's really hard to just be perfectly prescriptive here because there's so many other things involved. In addition to just the tactic, like what, what the thing is you do to get them.

Yeah, it's like when people say Facebook ads don't work, for example, and I go to their website and it's like, well, once they get to your site, there's no way they're converting. Your, your form is 20 fields long on a separate page, not on your front page. Like you don't even know if I'm servicing your area. And so it's the execution that actually leads to the results, not just the tactic of like, oh, use this. Platform or this channel. And so, okay, this was a little bit outside of the business scope, but the next question is, when someone is outgrowing their friend group, whether it be financially or mentally, what should they do? And so I know you've had mentors, you've had coaches, groups that you've been a part of, and even now being part of a really, really elite group. But for someone that is outgrowing it, they're growing their business, they're trying to get ahead. What would they do if they feel like they're the friends around them, either financially or mentally, they're kind of outgrowing them?

Yeah, the, the things that came to, 3 things came to mind for me that have been important for Tiffany and I. So one is the groups, even for Tiffany. So not that she was involved in the groups, but we've been, I've been in multiple bu— types of business groups over the years and none of, actually only once I was in Dan Martell's group for, from in 2018 and '19. And so I, uh, that was a software-only group and there were only 10 of us in the group. And so other than that, I've never been in an industry-specific group, which I'm a fan of. I just have a really hard time finding them that I like. And so, but I've been in these more generic, higher-level groups over the years. And so while that's been a thing I've done, Tiffany's been able to meet people in that group and we've developed friendships. Like, even the group I used to run, which was Academy, we have a lot of friends to this day that we don't— it has nothing to do with business anymore. We're just friends with them. And Tiffany's friends with their wives. Well, a lot of people. And so the group element has been really valuable to us because you tend to— you end up finding people like you. And then from my wife Tiffany's standpoint, she meets other girls, women that are going, like, they, they don't, may not be involved in the business whatsoever, but they're going on that journey because their husband's going on it and they're dealing with the stuff that a wife deals with being married to an entrepreneur. It's a very different life or, you know, very different financial situation, both good and bad at times. And so they've, she has met a lot of people that would understand her and what she's been through over the years, or she's, you know, past all the challenges at this point as a wife, married to an entrepreneur, but those individuals who are our friends might still be going through it. So it's good for them. You know, like you find your people. So that's one. I think the groups have been awesome. We've really made a ton of friends that way. The other stuff that's been good is getting involved. So I'm, I'm introverted, but I'm also extroverted when I get into a business situation. Like you put me in my world, the stuff I like, I'm extroverted. Otherwise, I'm a little more introverted. Tiffany is introvert. More, and she'll come alive, you know, at an event, but she's more introverted. But so she's even pushed herself to do the next one, and that is just get involved in stuff, like whether it be at the gym. She's met a lot of people. She used to do competitive weightlifting and stuff like that back in the day. So she met a lot of people at the gym. She got into that when she was 30. And so, uh, through fitness, she met people. Or, um, now she's playing mahjong, a Chinese game. It's some Chinese game. I don't even know. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. So she's, so she's playing with her friends and they've met other people. I, it's, I actually have no, I couldn't possibly explain it to you. I just know it takes about 3 hours for them to play this game. And so anyway, so, you know, it's just an example where she meets people. So like, what are the things you're into? Are you into, you know, my case, I'd be into mountain biking or snowboarding or racing or something like that. You meet people in those environments. So what are the little things you could go do to get involved? And then this one has actually been amazing. So our neighborhoods, the neighborhoods we've lived in. So we bought our first house when we were 22. I got married at 21. We bought a house when we were 22. And then our next neighborhood we lived in, we've, we are still friends with those people to this day. And then the neighborhood I live in now, almost, I've been there 7 years. Almost everybody in that neighborhood owns companies. And we, I mean, I'm on a trip. I'm in the Dominican Republic right now with our neighbors across the street. We'll be in Cabo with some other neighbors. That's really, really been valuable. So, I would, like, where you live matters. I'll tell a quick story around this one. So I used to have, and I might have talked about this in an old Lawn Care Millionaire video. So in the early days of City Turf, like beginning, I had this map behind me at my desk. There's a big wall map I had made of our market. And every time I, and so back then I was selling everything. So whenever I would, talked to a lead, I'd put a, uh, it didn't close them, I put a red pin in the map. Every time I closed them, I'd put a green pin in the map. So I could spin around my chair and I could see where we were getting all of our clients, what was working the best. And it just showed me so much. The other thing is, half the time I'd be on the phone, sitting there, I'd kind of be spun around looking at my map while I'm talking to this person. I'm like, oh, they're over in this neighborhood. They're, that's where they are, you know, looking at the map. Well, that's how we figured out where we were going to buy our second house. So I bought my second house based on where I liked all the people we were talking to. It was a, yeah, it was an affluent neighborhood. I'm like, these people are great. They pay their bill on time. They're friendly. They don't call us on Thursday about a party on Friday. Like they're just down to earth and they, and they're successful. That's how we bought that house. And then we made friends with a ton of people. So we were very thoughtful about it. So that was, that's really how we found our friend group over the years. It's been those three things.

That's super cool. Oh yeah, for myself, like, when I thought about this question, I— it's funny, a couple years ago I was asked, like, who are the two people you— you— I think I might have shared this with you, uh, two people that you want to, like, spend time with or talk to. And it was Dr. Kashi and you. And so one of the things that, um, good company. One of the things that I, I, I, I would say to someone that is in this situation when they're trying to out— they felt like they've outgrown their friend group is grow a big enough business and gain skills to where you can actually offer value to other people. And even though they might be ahead of you, but that you have a skill that is valuable or is, is rare that they want to either learn from you or there's something that they can take from you as well. So you can contribute, like, if you have so much value, you can contribute. Um, another one was kind of in relation to was like looking for ways to build up the people you want to be around. And so like, whether it be supporting what they're doing or contributing to their community or their group, or their, even if it's like something like a course or whatever it might be, if you want to be around that group, sometimes just contributing to it is a way of almost paying the entrance fee to get around in those circles. I think a lot of people are afraid to do that. They feel like it is, it's a little humbling, like, hey, I am the student. And like taking on that hat. But, uh, that's been helpful for me. Uh, another one was, uh, for someone that can't even afford to do that, uh, going even a little lower is like realizing that inverse comparisons are actually really helpful. And that is, I see this happening, whether it be in a family or in my, my friend group, and I don't want to be that.

Oh, that's good.

I'm going to take actions that are opposite of what they're doing in order to avoid the outcome that they have and being really clear, like, this is the life I want to have. And if someone's going to give me their opinion or tell me what I should do, or they're going to perpetrate their ideas on me, I got to ask myself, do I want the life they're living? And if not, invert and do the opposite. Um, the last thing I want to hide, again, think about someone who may be just getting started, doesn't have the resources, uh, doesn't have a lot of skills is like nowadays with like online communities being so possible and like learning from Mentors without having to meet them, without having to be in a, without paying a dollar, you can listen to like the best minds. If you just open yourself up to books, podcasts, things like that. I think that's where I would start. But as you kind of move up that chain is like realizing that having skills that other people find valuable and be able to contribute to what they're doing opens a lot of doors.

I would agree with that. Yeah. You, and you raised a good point there. So I, I've mentioned a lot Dan Kennedy. I was highly influenced by Dan Kennedy. He just, he introduced me to a bunch of guys I did actually get to know. And, um, but the way I talk about it sometimes, like what I just said, he introduced me to, I never met Dan Kennedy. I shook his hand maybe one time or something, you know, like I didn't, I didn't know him, but being in that environment in his world, I met a bunch of other guys that were ridiculously successful and I've, you know, maybe become friends with them or one of them, a guy named Janek Silver. I used to be in a group with him. And so, you know, in his group back in the day, way back in the day. And so I met, came into his world because of Dan Kennedy. So just kind of building on your point, um, like how can you even get in this vicinity of these individuals where it's like, well, right now I can't really afford to be part of this world or this group, but you get in this world, you start to learn, and eventually one day you'll, you'll probably get to know people in that world or maybe even be able to afford to be in, in the group.

And then it can take time, like, For example, if someone's listening to this and they're like, oh, I wanna meet, I'll just make up a name, someone like Alex Hormozi, it's like, there's probably no way you're gonna offer value to where he's like, hey, I need to take this person out for dinner. But you can build a big business in your local area to where you go meet an HVAC company or a different industry or maybe the mayor or like a big realtor. You start taking things from them, making your business even bigger, then you start to dominate your market, then you start to do some private equity deals. Okay, that's something that maybe Alex, someone down the road might find some value talking to you. Building something of value before ever thinking that someone that is leagues ahead of you is going to spend any time with you whatsoever.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good advice.

All right. Let's move on to the next one.

By the way, yeah, we are moving quick. I mean, like, if you're watching me do this, I apologize because I should not have sat outside. I'm just like, I apologize to everybody that's watching. He's like, yeah, it felt good at first and I could get decent lighting. Instead of sitting in a dark room. But oh my gosh, I made a mistake.

So hey, hey, in the last episode they said our hot takes need to be hotter. Hotter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be a little sharper. Some people pushing back on my flat earth conspiracies, saying I need to take more political stances. All right, so you're gonna love the comments from last week.

We'll work our way up to that. I have thought, I have thought with our opening, so like now we're in this trend, this thing about the openings. Like where I do one and then you do one of like, man, what is this going to look like in about 9 months? We keep trying to, we keep trying to set, step this up. I'm going to be coming to these things like nervous, like, oh great, what am I about to have to answer?

Hey, I, I've— so inspired by the All In Pod, they had talked about how they built their docket. Okay, I, on the weekend, I created this whole website that, uh, it takes all of our transcripts, it takes all the recent news, and like injects it all together to determine like topics for me and then listens to like read off articles. And then I create a 20-minute thing of like interesting stuff that's happening in our industry right now. I listen to it. It's pretty cool. I'll send you the link. Okay.

And are you thinking that we could use this for our docket in the future or what do you think?

I don't know. Honestly, I think us coming up with the ideas is the best. But what I can do is I take like our docket, for example, the days I put it in there, like my thoughts, and then I tell it, hey, do deep research and give me articles or stats or things that are happening right now.

Okay.

And it's been pretty cool. I like listening. So like I can just, I built a little like audio player. You can just play and then like 2x speed it, stuff like that.

Okay, cool.

All right. But, you know, we can always mix a little politics, you know, the really hard, you know, hard-hitting questions. That's what everyone wants to know.

So we'll see where we end up.

All right, um, I want to talk about failures.

Ah, yeah, okay.

I want to talk about this mostly because I think a lot of people, they'll hear yourself or myself talking, and a lot of times it is, it is all good. And I think for a lot of people, they forget one little asterisk, and that you've been in business for probably 30+ years.

Yeah, I started when I was 14. So yeah, so yeah.

And so for the person that's in that 4 or 5 year, I feel for them because they're going through a time and it feels like where you're at, where I'm at, is so far away. And so I want to ask this question as like, what bet or big business investment did you make? And it was a big fail. Detail the bet, what went wrong, and what you would do differently next time, and also what did you learn? I know there's kind of a bunch of questions in there, but if you have specific stories, and feel free to make it more of a story, not just like, "Here's what I learned." What happened? What was the thing that you actually betted on? Because I think a lot of business owners, they do make a bet on a service or a new market or a new industry or even starting the business, and they become wrong, and then they beat themselves up over it so many times. A lot of times it's because you and I might mention it here and there, but it's not— we don't make a whole video about it. We don't mention it frequently. Like, every single one of our intros is the size of business we built, not all our failures. And so feel free to go tee that one up.

Yeah. Okay. So this was a great question, and I have 3 for you, but I'm gonna let you pick whichever one you want, or 2, I don't care. Okay. So 2 of them are business failures. So my very first software company, when I was 23. And then another one was a million dollars raised for a healthcare software company from my consulting clients where they brought me into the deal. That's the second failure. And then the third one, um, is, uh, I think the Service Autopilot V3 concept was a complete and utter failure.

And I can— Oh, you think this is going to be— you think this is going to be a race? Of course I want to hear V3. Everyone wants to hear about V3.

I think V3 is more interesting for you and less interesting for everybody else except for those that maybe felt it. It's a pretty quick one. So what would you— what do you— where do you want me to go?

Okay. I just want to hear about V3 because I tried to take— I listed all mine off and I took the two most recent ones. So more recent, the better. I like more recent.

Okay. So this one's actually pretty quick. So if I need to do another one, let me know. So Service Autopilot V3, uh, there was a learning that came from it. The failure happened in my mind because we sold the business. I mean, that's the short of it, but we also saw the clues of maybe making a mistake right after we sold the business. So here's the idea. So Service Autopilot, we started the company at, call it, very beginning of 2010. Like we were talking about in 2019, we'd done a little bit of work on it at the very, very end of 2019, but we really went all in building. So The system, starting in 2010, actually had a major change in interface in 2012, uh, end of 2012. And then there was, but after that it was pretty much the interface. Okay. And so, and then up until about 2014, I was very involved in what got into the system and the design. And I was very much on the phone doing all the sales calls or most of them into 2014. And so I was very close to the system. After that, the business just started going. I was busy doing so many things. I was in meetings, but I was less involved. And I think that a little bit hurt the business in the sense that, um, I should have been more involved in— I was very involved, but I, I, I just wasn't quite as involved in what the interface was looking like and how, like, is it right for the client? I was also now so removed from CityTurf because I was consumed by Service Autopilot. So now I'm not even living in the real world of City Turf anymore because I'm not like, Phillip will tell me what we need or don't need, but I'm also hearing it from 90 other companies of different sizes. Everybody's got a different opinion. And so it just, it got to a place where I, the simplest way to say it is I wasn't involved and I think it was a little negative for us. So, you know, you arrive at this place where you're like, man, this system is really advanced, But my goodness, uh, if you've been using it for a long time, you love it. But if you're new to it, you're, you're intimidated. Like you're just flat out intimidated. How do I get started? So John and I were at this place where we really need to build a new interface and we need to rethink it. So we really started thinking about what the major design principles are of building a new interface and, you know, what was the latest and greatest. The other thing that we needed to solve for is we needed an API that was like after automations. The API was the next critical thing that had to get into Service Autopilot. And so in rebuilding parts of the system and the interface, it enabled us to also do this API that wasn't so much of a thing back in 2010 when we were like— it existed, but it wasn't a thing like they are today. And so our idea was that we were going to create these screens where you could flip back and forth between what we called version 2 and version 3 of Service Autopilot. And the problem is that we didn't expect to sell the company. And this was a huge financial investment, like, because what ended up happening, I don't remember how many engineers we had, but let's just make up a number and say we had 18 engineers. I don't know what the number is. It wasn't actually 18 developers, but you'd have your testers and you have your, your people that manage everything. But you, it almost would've been like we would've carved out 9 of them. I'm just using this as an example to work on the new interface, new backend stuff, and we would've car— kept 9 on the system. So massive investment, both financially and a massive investment in terms of slowing down the functionality coming into the system for the existing and new members. And, um, and then the problem was we sold the business and when we sold the business, when COVID happened. And we were kind of forced to lay off 11% of our team, which most of them were engineers and customer service. It just completely derailed that project. And then, and so what happened is the vision that we had created for V3 never got executed. So what you saw was for, from V3 was not what we were creating. It just, it never, it never came to pass. So that was not John and I's vision that like half the of the designs that are in the system. I wasn't even involved in those things. So that's the setup. But the learning lesson is this. If, uh, and this is why I wasn't sure if it'd really be interesting to everybody else. If I was doing it all over again, I would not have tried to do it. I would have just built a whole new software system from the ground up and flipped them. If you look at somebody like, uh, and a lot of people don't do this. Like, if you look at Salesforce, Salesforce is a very, very slow progression of technology. It still looks very old. In my opinion, like, it still looks older than a lot of the newer technologies. They very, very slowly iterate on their, um, when they have a winning product, they either slow, really slowly iterate, iterate, and they sort of rely on, uh, deep penetration of the market, brand recognition, and they continue to win. And then there are other companies that have a smaller footprint. I'll use somebody like 37signals. If you look at how they do their stuff, They build a new system each time. So like Basecamp 3 is a new system or whatever, you know, like so. And that John and I, again, I don't know if this was that interesting to people. Our big conclusion was if we were doing it all over again, we would have just started over. We might have kept the business layer. We would have just built a new system. Everybody could stay on V2 and then someday you can start coming up on V3 and someday we'd only sell V3. We didn't— we thought about that idea, but the nightmare of supporting two code bases But the problem is you end up with two code bases to a degree anyway, with different interfaces. And so that was a huge money mistake. And had we known that we were selling the business, we would have never done it because we didn't set up the buyer very well. They would have had to stay exactly on our plan and been committed to investing that kind of money. And when somebody buys your company, whether it's a software company or another type of company, they need to make as much profit as they can to pay for the deal. Like, they may not have the same time horizon. Or they're going to come in and they got people above them and they have to hit their numbers. Like, hey, we could be allocating $1.5 million or $2 million a year to this new thing you guys are working on. We could take that $2 million, put it into sales. That's what they're going to do. And so that was the, the two failures. One, it wasn't a good setup for somebody acquiring us. I wish if we had known, I would have never done that because it puts the new buyer in a position that there's no way they're going to continue it. And then two, we would have approached it completely different based on what we learned. We thought we had this clever idea. We thought it'd be better for the client. You could just switch between screens. But I'll tell you, like, as we got into the system, there was some stuff you just could not let the clients— tickets, which are absolute utter, in my opinion, disaster now compared to even what they used to be. And, uh, you could— we couldn't let people switch between it. Wasn't even possible. I don't know if that was interesting, but that, that was my big learning. Yeah. I thought it might be interesting for you.

Yeah. No.

Um, not to mention, here's the other thing I've learned, like, like we, we lived in two worlds in ServiceNow. Some people utterly love, love the system. So like love the screens and the, like tons of information compressed into one screen. It's like super. So if you're a power user, they felt it was very fast. As soon as you move to progressive exposure or progressive design and you, you hide things and things show up when you need them, which is what V3 was trying to move to, the old power users like, this is slower. You just added two clicks. They hate it. But the new users from onboarding got it faster. Then, and so it's like, now you're living in two worlds and you can't win. And so there was never going to be a moment where 5,000 of our old— now we'll go, I'll go use 4,000. There would be never going to be a moment that 4,000 of our old users were going to go to Mary in the office who doesn't want change. And she's going to be like, yeah, let's move to V3. She's always going to want to stay on V2. So someday you were going to have to kill that thing. So a little background.

Yeah, no, there's been many times where I have weighed out the pros and cons and I always refer in my mind back to V2 versus V3 and like the confusion for our office. And it was just like, okay, we can't do it that way. We get, we just got to swap everyone over, deal with some collateral damage. Cause like, to your point, you're, do we try to make everyone happy by having both or having a toggle or do you just like, it's new and 10% of you are going to hate me for the next 2 months. And there's no right or wrong. It's just a matter of like, what shade of bad do you want? Uh, because you're going to, you think it's an upgrade and maybe a new member, but then you're throwing your existing members under the bus or they feel that way.

And one of the reasons why I would have been tempted to build the new system is because going back to 2010, I mean, tech is nothing like, it's like not even the same thing. You know, I've said it before. There's no Stripe. Back then. You had to build everything from scratch. It just— the way you hosted was like, if you moved to Azure, you code around the Azure hosting system. We were running on Rackspace. Everything's different. And so there were also these underlying things. It's like, okay, well, we could put a new interface on it, make it look good, or we should just rebuild some of this stuff. And the reason why the two-system idea, which is a nightmare, and I might have gone down that road and then we'd be having this conversation, be like, that's the dumbest idea I've ever come up with. But, um, the reason for it is because you need to buy yourself a bunch of time to add functionality to that. There's no way. And so you could bring in— I could bring smaller companies onto that platform and only let them start there, and the platform would grow with the companies. And that, that was a little bit of the idea why I would have done it that way.

Very interesting. All right. So I got, I got 2 failures. I tried to— I had 8. I took the most recent 2.

Maybe we'll do this again sometime. Yeah, because I think it's a great topic. To your point, people see where somebody is at on social media, where we're at today, and they feel like they're failing. Yeah. Like if you could have come along for the ride. Yeah.

We just couldn't afford the camera back when we were failing. We didn't want the camera on at that point.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay. So first one is about 2023 and that's when I saw ChatGPT come out, what AI was gonna do, and I jumped on too early to the phone being answered by AI. And I actually don't think I made a huge mistake. In the technology and what we did, we invested a lot into it. I did a really poor job of rolling out at Augusta, and it was right around that time we ended up forming the franchise advisory council and just changing the way we rolled stuff out. I was very much like, move fast and break things. And at that point, as we crossed like 90, 100, 110 locations, I needed to change my way of leadership. And so it's essentially like, hey, next Wednesday we're swapping over, all phone calls are being answered by AI. And if they have trouble, they get handed off to a human agent. And I just rolled it out really poorly. It's just like a lack of experience on my part. And it was like a big revolt from Augusta and understandably, cause I just rolled it out poorly. And so I don't, I do not regret the investment in learning the technology. Cause I feel like I have a very foundational understanding of like where the hiccups are, even just learning a ton about phonetics and how the AI understands the words and puts them together. And when should we text the client for an email address or an address? When should we clarify, how should we handle when it's getting confused. I under— I learned a lot, but the output and what our owners wanted was not that. And it's especially, it started, it started actually getting worse, even though the technology getting better, like latency was getting better, adoption of the tech was getting better, everything was better and the customer satisfaction was going down. And a lot of it was because AI started to become this thing where as soon as you knew something was AI, I'm against it. And so that's what really tripped my, like, okay, we have to change and had to swap back is because customer satisfaction score was going down as we were making the technology better and I was investing more into it. And so it just became very clear that maybe this technology is, it is the future, but it is not now. And trying to force it down the throats of the owners or the customers for that matter was a mistake on my part. And so I really regret how I rolled it out.

So are you long-short on AI answering all your phone calls in 5 years?

Oh, very long.

Very long. You think 100% of calls?

I think so. Yeah. The, the, the, I think, I think there'll be a backup of, of humans. Um, but it'll take, oh, 5 years. Ugh.

Snap. Yeah. This is a hard question because 100%, 5 years, that's where I got stuck. Yeah, but I could see a lot.

I mean, the thing is, here's the thing, it's the capabilities are there. It's does the customer want that?

100%. We talked about this before. Listening to call recordings is painful.

No, totally. Yeah. And the thing is, if you don't tell them that it is AI and then they find out later, they feel tricked. Then you're like throwing all your existing customers under the bus. And so is it capable? I actually think it's like way more capable. Even when we started, compared to now, it's like way better. But the customer satisfaction is lower now than back then because the overall kind of trend against AI is there. And so, um, yeah, that was just my lack of leadership skills at that point, I think, and how I rolled it out.

So you would have made the investment again because of all the learnings you got from it?

Will any of the—

you said you didn't. Okay, so not regretting it, doing it again. Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't do it again, but Given that you did it, you're, you've learned this stuff and it's always worth it.

Yeah. I probably took, I probably took all of our profits that year and invested it into learning and like we built our own mod, like we built crazy stuff that now literally off the shelf for $2,000 a month, I could probably get it.

And I probably would never use the tech stack at this point.

Like it's so— Oh no, we swapped. Yeah. We, as soon as like once, uh, ChatGPT-4 came out and then Gemini started getting better last year, it was like, we just need to swap over. Um, Yeah, there's no reason to have engineers doing a phone system when there's open models that are just like— now off the shelf, what I built for hundreds of thousands, if not million dollars, yeah, is probably $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month.

Yeah, that you wouldn't do it again. That's, that's a lot.

Yeah, but I do think the people— yeah, yeah, like I think the people buying off the shelf right now, it's like it works or it doesn't, the customer happy or not, like versus like I really have been able to, I, I feel like I'm probably one of the best just because we had to get in with the engineers. Like, why did that word not work? Why does that, like, what happens? The, the latency, how should the latency, like the, the intermediate, like it's so interesting. Even if they knew it was AI versus if they didn't, we had a better call completion rate if they didn't know it was AI and customer satisfaction was higher. It was just the fact that 5% of them found out it was AI and then they felt tricked. You'd lose the customer. And that was like, so like, it was, yeah, lots of learnings.

Well, all those learnings too will, will be valuable to you because you're doing homework. Like, you, you'll apply them, I'm sure, in terms of how you think about rolling out to your client, how you message your client. So there's a lot that will come of this, not just for Augusta.

Yeah. Well, that leaves me my second most more recent one. Okay. So that, that's when we started Copilot CRM. Which is funny because I think I talked to you like 6 months before we started it. And, um, yeah, we scaled too fast. We allowed too many people in the system. If I could do it over again, I probably would have allowed maybe 100 to 500 people in. And then I probably would have done what you just said and built a separate platform using everything I learned. And it's funny because I've always had this debate even with Dan, our CTO, and been like, hey, he's much more the opinion you want customers to be able to get the feedback. You don't want to go build this thing.

Oh, I think that's wise. Yeah.

The challenging part is like when it was scaling so fast, getting that much, everything just kept breaking. At the same time, it's like, well, I need to be able to pay the bills, so I can't like turn people away. And so I don't know the fix, but I know that I let too many people in too soon and I should have got it to a much more modern architecture with React and Next.js, having the API all set up. But again, I don't know, maybe we wouldn't be here if I would have done that and waited an extra year or something like that. But I scaled it too fast. I should have put the brakes on it. I could see what was happening. Like people were just pouring in and I let them all down. And so it was actually a really, probably in hindsight, the most damaging thing was probably to my personal brand because now like I'm talking about things, how to help your business. They join and then I hurt their business. And so, um, I'd still say like the personal brand is still recovering from that.

Oh really? You, you feel that?

Yeah. Cause it was so bad, like back in 2023, like, you know, with stuff hitting Stripe API or texts and emails going out unhindered, like yeah, we didn't have any sort of security. Like what happened this past weekend would've destroyed us back then with, with an actual attack happening. Yeah. And so, um, you know, just had to eat a lot of humble hapai and realize like it's gonna take probably another year or two of execution to hopefully mend some of those bridges. Because it was— it's bad, bad for people's businesses.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's my two mistakes and what we learned. Uh, nothing's easy. Yeah, so this one's going back to the beginning. Um, if you had $500,000 in cash, okay, and you have a bunch of free time, all right, so we're not going— we don't need to be doing vacation so often, we're not interested, you know, racing the cars, okay, lots of free time, what new business would you buy or build, and it can be in the trades, but you can't leverage your existing business in any way. And it can't be software or coaching or education in the trades. And the kind of kicker that we put on this was think like an investor. So $500,000 in cash. JP, what would you be doing now? Pets. Pets? Oh, I did not see that coming. Okay.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think that, you know, if you were—

Wait, do you have a pet?

I have two dogs, two bulldogs.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, I didn't see any pets at your house. Yeah.

I got a French bulldog and an English bulldog. Okay. And so, um, and it's not really something that I've thought about long-term and I like my, I like dogs, I like animals, but I like my dogs specifically. Um, you know, it's like, don't, and so it's not like this big passion around pets, but, and if I were to, like really get ready to deploy the capital and say, okay, what am I doing for the next decade? Would I really do this? I don't know, but I will tell you, I have thought about this quite a bit. I really like the pet trade because man, people will spend. I actually, when's this the, so the, when this video comes out one day earlier, this actually wasn't timed. One day earlier, I have a pet-related video coming out.

Really? Oh, let's go. Yeah.

But it's not, it's not the same as, it has nothing to do with what I'm about to say. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, but it proves my, it's just like complete coincidence. Like, and so it just, it makes my point. My belief is that people will spend more money on their animals than they will, like they'll do stuff for their animals that they won't do for themselves. Yeah. And, and maybe they, some people even love their animals more than their family. Like, like the animal is a big deal in a lot of, and so it's kind of like plumbing to me. For a lot of people. If your plumbing system breaks, you're fixing it. If something happens with your animals, you're paying up. So when I talk about the pet trade, I'm not talking about like e-commerce or retail. I'm talking about the veterinarian side. I'm talking about dog grooming. I'm talking about insurance on your pets. Um, maybe training, definitely boarding. I really like those. So I would, and I think I would test my microbrand concept where if I was doing this, I'd have a different brand for vet, grooming, boarding. I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe not for all of those, not maybe not 3 separate ones there, but maybe 2. And then I would be cross-selling across the microbrand, across the brands.

But when Petsmart's going bankrupt, we'll make sure we line you up for some secondary.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah.

So I really think there's a lot of opportunity there and I think there's good margin.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I didn't go that creative because you said that we could be inside the trades. I was like, look, I'm only good at a few things here.

It's a trade. I think it's a trade.

Okay. Oh yeah. Boarding. Yeah.

Okay. We have a dog groomer comes to our house every week. We have forever. And she takes care— no, not every week. Once a month. She takes care of our dogs. And I think we pay her like $280. I don't know what we pay her. Yeah. And, um, I don't know if she's not there that long. She's making a lot. She's making $140 an hour.

And the vet part is like, that would be a lot that, you know, you gotta get veterinarians involved. That'd be a big operation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

$500,000. What are you starting with though?

Like, I'll start with a smaller, like pet grooming or something like that. And I'll build into this thing. Like my brain always thinks bigger. Like, so I'll just start. Get my beachhead and then I'm going to build my thing with all these. That's what I meant. Yeah. You can't get in the vet business for $500,000 unless you, but I actually think you, I think you could pull it off if you had the knowledge. I think you could find small, like one, like really small vet and you could partner with them and take an equity stake. Like, I think there are ways even with half a million bucks, you could get into the veterinarian business, but you'd be partnering up with somebody already has a business and you'd help them grow it. I think there's just tons of opportunity here.

Yeah, I'm not—

what are yours?

So I can't really do that one. I stuck to what I know.

I'm not a lawn mowing guy. I'm not a weed guy. I don't care about those things. Like, I've done a lot of it, but like, I like business. Like, all of our friends, they ask me questions about lawn care.

It's like, I don't know.

I just own the business.

100%. Okay, so mine's not as creative then. Mine is I would start a location from scratch.

Okay.

Just a lawn care business.

Sorry.

And I would, I would try to scale it to $1 million. I only have $500 grand, so I try to scale it to $1 million in one year and just document the entire process, kind of like a daily vlog. Basically, I did kind of this version and I did 30 days, but I only got it to like the first 30, 40 customers and like booked out 6 weeks. It was just like getting it off the ground. It was like door hangers and doing a lot of Boots on the ground marketing. I would run this more like an investor, scale it quickly and do it for 6 to 12 months. And I would do it, the vlogs, I could build my personal brand back because that's the part that I really want for the long term.

So I love that. Um, so the goal is a million. How much? I'm just a little curious on this one. So how much would you think you'd need to spend to hit a million in a year?

I think under, I think under $300 grand. Okay. Assuming I bought stuff with cash, like if you bought, like in terms of getting it kicked off, because I just reinvest all the dollars back in. Yeah. And yeah, assuming I would buy it with cash, I just start with like 2 trucks, and then just fill them as fast as possible. I'd be spending a lot on marketing. Like I would probably spend $100 grand on marketing.

And you can't use Augusta Wright, like that was the whole idea. We had to do something different. So you're using a brand new name, brand new everything.

Yes, something.

Yeah, anything. Who is your first— outside of the team member doing the work, who's your first hires other than the team members?

Oh, the top, the very top person.

The person that's gonna—

yeah, 100%. Yeah, overpay. Yeah, uh, I'd be looking for someone with 20+ years experience, 6 figures, and they would hire the team, they would get all the equipment, and I would have to like I would probably put like a restraint for the vlog sake of like, I can only work so many hours per week on the business. And to show that like, hey, this is a, a business. This is not me going out and mowing the grass.

That's cool. And, and you're, what are you doing exactly? Are you doing the sales?

Just sales.

Or you're just, yep. Okay. So sales, even though you're an investor, yep. You're still doing some of the work. You're not outsourcing every single thing. Yep.

That'd be the goal. Okay, because the goal would be to build like a big channel or like some sort of following that I could dump into something down the road.

Um, would this be a new brand or is it any— yes, you're not going to use one of your existing channels, you're going to start a new channel.

Exactly right.

That's cool.

That'd be kind of fun just because, just because like the attention, like even like with 5 for 50, like you might not necessarily know what you're going to do with that attention down the road, but having the audience to be able to deploy that Um, attention towards something, whether even if it's philanthropic.

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. It'd be kind of interesting.

Yeah. Okay. All right. We got a couple more questions on the docket. Next one is trillions in wealth transfers coming, demographic risks, and how this will change customer type, how they buy, what they care about. So this is the baby boomers. They're getting older. They are handing this money down to their family, their kids. Uh, and so what happens? How do they buy? Does this change who we're actually going after with marketing, uh, as this begins to happen, the wealth transfer?

I don't know if we'll notice that we're going after somebody different per se, um, because I think it'll just happen over time. I say I don't know if you'll notice this big thing. The bet I would make on this one is that the trades aren't about to diminish in any way. These Younger people have grown up not doing any of this stuff. They're, I just don't, they're not, they're not about to start buying lawn mowers and they're more, I think they're more likely to pay for services than even, you know, a typical person today. So I think it continues to be a positive trend for the trades. In my mind, the only thing that's going to kill or hurt the trades is utter financial disaster. Where people just don't have money and we're in a, in like in a disastrous place as a society. Otherwise, as long as we can still accumulate debt and spend money and do all the crazy stuff we already do as a country, I think trades hold up really well and get stronger. I think there will probably— I don't see anything changing in the way— my bet would be that you still have a lot of affluence and you have a lot of people that just don't have a lot of— there's still a big divide. And so, you know, as they call that the K-shaped economy, I think that holds and that's exactly how it continues to play out. And it might get worse, frankly. I don't know how we're going to right that ship unless we have socialism. Not saying we should. That's not what I mean by right that ship. But, you know, I just don't see that changing otherwise. I think that obviously it's back to what we talk about a lot here. The bet is tech. This is my argument. The future is tech. You need more tech in your business, but also the way you interact with the client. This client is going to buy through tech. This client's gonna buy and message and communicate in different ways. They're gonna be more willing to talk to AI on the phone. Like, all— they're gonna— so that's gonna be one of the— so back to my argument, as I said, like, if you're not embracing this stuff, at some point, you're even alienating the future buyer. Because they grew up on Snapchat and they grew up using Snapchat to message. They may not even have grown up texting. They were using Snapchat as an example. Like they, they grew up getting their information off YouTube. Like they watch TV on YouTube. Like that, those behaviors I think will persist and those behaviors will then impact the channels that we use to market to them and how we talk to them, how we sell them. The instant pricing, 100%, that's the trend. Like that's how they're gonna wanna buy. They don't wanna talk to anybody. That's I don't see any of that changing. Research differently. I kind of gave the example, not that it'll be YouTube, it might be a little YouTube, but they're going to research and get the answers differently. I think it's going to be AI models and still model, you know, stuff like YouTube. What else? To me, it's all tech because even this is not quite the same thing, but when I think about where you allocate capital just from an investing standpoint, I think that they're going to be more open to, and I'll just use this as an example, like the future is more investing in collectibles. Again, doesn't apply to our business, but it's going to make a point. More investing in crypto, more gambling, more gambling on the markets. That's like what they're doing now. So I suspect that's going to continue and it's just all tech. It's all tech related. Like they're buying more crypto than they're buying gold. It's a, it's so that kind of a shift, just so that's probably my single biggest bet. It's all around everything you can, everything tech related.

Those are the, when we see City Turf accepting Bitcoin, then we'll know you really, you really made the turn. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think it's just more of what's already happening. Yeah. I think that time will become more and more valuable. It's funny. You, you mentioned socialism. Sam Altman came out the other day saying that the way to solve everything was to tax the robots. So if you have a robot, you gotta pay more taxes. Um, okay, crazy. Some of the stuff that comes out of his mouth and all these guys, all of them, crazy, insane. Oh man. We'll see. Yeah. I think people will have this generation that's coming up having these AI tools. They'll trust what it says more.

Yeah.

And there won't be as much of this thought process. I should push against it because it's new. It just, it's part of their life. They grew up with it. It answered all their questions in high school and they're ready to adopt it. And it leans into what we talked about last week in terms of like the importance of brand so that when the LLM says use this company and they will just do it and they're more likely to let their agent just go check out that you're showing up there. And so I think the trust in the AI and the ability to let it handle payments, handle tasks around their house, That's, that's going to be the trend that I think if you're— again, we got— we'll get beat up over this from last week's, but it's like the ship has sailed and you got to get on it. And any ideological thing that keeps you from adopting this technology, like, is going to hurt you in the future. And, um, yeah, and as they have the money, they make the decision purchasing. It's just going to solidify what they trust, and they trust the AI. Like, What we talked about last week around business advice and like questioning it, they just trust it. Like I've seen younger people use AI and they just go down this trail with it of like never questioning it. It's just like, we just accept what it's saying. And you can say all the negative things about that in the world, but it's just gonna keep happening.

If you bet against it, you're just gonna lose. I, I just, I, I don't know. It seems so, it doesn't even seem controversial to me because it seems so obvious. That this is what's going to happen. And as you said, I mean, we're never, we're not going back. And it's like, well, like, was it last week we showed the chart of the 10 companies back from 2010 to, to where we are today? I mean, just like every trend is pointing to more of this stuff. So, um, I don't think there's, it's not like there's some big, like, how do you action this? It's not as though today there's like some big change you need to make. You need to just be constantly iterating, like, okay. You've got a website. What are we doing now around instant pricing, putting your pricing online, like the stuff you've talked about, Mike, around starting to think about how do I get found? You could look up AEO and GEO as acronyms for what stuff you do to your website so that you get found, mentioned in the LLMs. So that's a process of iteration. It's not a process of tomorrow we wake up and change everything. Said this before too, it's that you just start iterating. As you started thinking about adopting more technology in your business to run your business, that's iteration. As you start to think about, well, how do I message with my clients? Okay. We haven't been doing texting. I need to bring texting in. Oh, we haven't been responding to Facebook messaging because I don't wanna watch 4 channels. Oh, I need to. Like, that, it's just this iteration thing that starts now versus this dramatic change that has to happen now. And so if you're iterating, It's not— in my mind, it's not going to be terribly painful. It's, uh, but if you wait and you ignore it and you hope it's going to go away, that's where it's going to be really painful.

I agree. All right, well, we're going to close out today with a prediction. All right, so we're going to talk specifically about home services and what is it going to look like in 2035, so about 9, 10 years from now. What lasts? What changes? And can a few companies dominate specific trades like Amazon does with e-commerce? So if you look at e-commerce, a huge chunk of it, Amazon gets the revenue. Is that going to happen in home services? Or are we going to stay much more like it is now, which is very segmented, fragmented? There's hundreds of thousands of players, very few of them control more than 1% in home services. Where do you see that going?

2035. Yeah. So I, I made a list of some different ones and I, I know you've probably got some as well. So maybe this one would be kind of interesting to, for me at least, it'd be interesting to ping pong on this one. Like, so I'll give my opinion, but I'd be curious your reaction to the opinion. We might end up with some of the same ones, but like, so starting with this question specifically, I remember years ago on stage at Surface Autopilot when I was talking about this idea that robotic mowers are coming. In that world, robotic mowers, I do see a small number of incredibly capitalized businesses dominating very significantly. So this is maybe, maybe it's not like Amazon-level domination, but it's that directionally, it's that kind of a concept. And my argument was that when we change from OpEx, which means you're like, you're just the expenses on your P&L to CapEx, which are the investments you make, the capital investments, So when we, when we move from I'm paying 3,000 individuals to perform a service like mow a lawn, clean a house, kill bugs versus I'm paying, I'm paying the one-time or periodic expense to acquire 3,000 robots. The people with all the money win because they can go get all the robots and you and I, we can't get 3,000 robots. Theoretically. And I don't believe we can because I'll give my example. I was involved in the robotic mower space for a while and Mike Andes was looking at making a very, very multi, big multi-millions of dollars investment to get into that space. And there were several reasons, but one of the single biggest reasons I decided not to bet on it was I don't believe that the typical owner can get the credit. To finance the robots, so they can never build a meaningful business. And that favors the private equity guys and the Amazons of the world, like the people that can go get the debt for 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 robots. And so that CapEx concept where who has the money takes market share, and it's also easier to manage, hypothetically, robots than it's going to be to manage 3,000, 10,000, 20,000 human beings. In trucks. And so that, uh, that favors again, the big company. So when we move to a world that is truly robots, I think there will be lots of big companies and little guys will get killed. That's, I may be wrong, but that's what I think. Like we, we love the vision that Elon's going to lease us all a robot for $300 a month and we're all going to buy a robot and he's going to be, you know, walking behind our mower. I just don't buy it. I just, it doesn't make it, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like maybe, but especially the timelines make no sense to me. So that, so now to be real specific on 2035, I am massively short. I will short, I will put $5 million. That's too much. I want to put a real, I want to put a real number to it and like make my point.

This is the part where the editors clip this one part and put it at the very beginning of the episode.

I'm only willing to go with $1 million, but I want to go $5 million because I feel like or more, but I just don't believe in 2035 we are going to have a robot mowing lawns, like a humanoid. And I do not believe they're going to be cleaning our house. I, I, I really want to make that bet. I don't believe it. So I'm very short that for a whole lot of reasons. Uh, but I do 100% believe it's coming someday. The other, the other bet, I just, the thing that doesn't make sense to me completely is why would we even need a humanoid robot to mow? Like, I still think we can do an in-between version of a robot that is like mower-based, but better than just the little RoboMower. Like, so I think, why would I, I also don't buy that it's all going to be humanoid robots. I think we're going to have, like, I think we're going to prove robotics with, with humanoids, but I think that, and you see this in manufacturing industrial, it's not really going to be humanoid, it's going to be purpose-built robot. And so, um, when we think about the trades, I just don't, I just, I'm just not sold. And so I think the day that there are Amazon-type companies dominating is a long ways away. Whatever. I don't know how long that is, but I don't, I don't believe it's 2035. Where would you fall on this?

Yeah. So I agree with one part of you, disagree with another. So I agree it's going to become a financing game.

Yep.

And this is the whole reason why I'm trying to scale Augusta is that when The technology is there. I can step in with the financing for them. Um, and that's why we would do the IPO. And then the second thing, as I agree on that point, the part I disagree with somewhat is that the little guy gets squeezed out. I kind of feel like it's going to be the middle operator because the person that's just working solo, that is $100,000 a year. I feel like there'll always be a place because it's such a low barrier of entry. And if they got displaced from their other job, for whatever reason, they can go to something like a cleaning, a mowing service, etc. And they'll just always be a ton of truckin' trucks. But the middle part, like that $200,000 to $3 million business, gets squeezed. That's sort of my prediction on that one.

So my prediction by 2035 is that the middle gets squeezed. I have that on my list here somewhere, uh, but not when the robots happen. So I, that's, I want to talk to this though. This is really interesting. Why does the little guy hold up when robots are released? Like what's happening? Is it like, is it because he can go get himself or herself to robots and, and the homeowner still wants to deal with a person, not Amazon?

I think in 10 years, they still, there'll still be a big chunk of people that would rather have that person and it can be Billy down the street that has 20 customers. That person I think will be just fine because there'll be plenty of customers that don't want the robot or—

Oh, he's willing to do it for cheap. You're going to be physically— okay, hold on, rewind. Did you— do you think by 2035 we'll have a humanoid mowing a lawn? Will you smoke? No.

Okay. I think, I think robots will have the technological ability, but to your point, the financing will not make sense unless it's done at scale.

Okay. But okay, so your argument is when that technology exists in a really great form where it's as good or better than a human, you still think a lot of people just prefer a human, and so the little guys will still have plenty of opportunity, correct, getting out there themselves doing the work, and even, even undercutting the robots.

Because at that point, the CapEx will still be so much more than OpEx if it's a smaller operator that's buying only, say, 10, 20 robots. Uh, I still think it's gonna be so expensive that there's still gonna be Chuck in a truck that go mow someone's lawn for $20. They're okay making $200 in a day and calling it.

So when I did, and I wish I could remember the numbers now. So when I did the math, thinking about CapEx and all that on robotic mowers for small properties, I could never make the math work for small properties unless you get to a swarm concept where it's the pull up, drop them all off, and swarm. So it was still cheaper to use human labor. Where I'm going with this is, so if a, if you, if your CapEx on a humanoid robot was $30,000.

A specialized robot. Specialized robot. Are you going with humanoid?

It doesn't matter. Are they staying on? This is where, so this is what I was trying to get at. Are they staying on the property or are they doing multiple? Because that's very different math. If they're going to all the different properties, I do think that's going to be cheaper than a human doing the work.

Yeah, I think it's when we only have 20 or 30 customers and I'm okay with making 60, 70 grand a year. I don't need the robot because that's all the customers I need to survive, and I can still undercut the big company that does have all the robots, all the infrastructure, all the costs associated with their robotic fleet. And so I think like the very, very small guy will still operate. Like, I don't think Chuck in a Truck's going away anytime soon.

So you don't think the— you don't think that the companies mowing using robots will bring down pricing? You think it'll stay where roughly where it's at in 10 years?

I, I think it'll stay basically where it's at. It'll be a matter of, do you— do I swap from OpEx to CapEx?

So in 10 years, I am not worried about the little guy. It's— it's— I'm so— I— in this conversation, I'm talking when the robots are legit, like they could be everywhere.

Take it. Got it. Okay, I hear you.

Yeah. So where do you stand on that one? Because, well, let me ask you this, like, what's your theory on what will happen with robotic taxi? So if 10% of the cost is the car and we drive 98% out, which is labor, won't those rides get cheaper? That's, so that's my bet. Like when there's legit robots everywhere, the CapEx is going to legitimately bring down the cost structure and therefore the little guy can't compete anymore. But not until the ro— just like ridesharing, the human can't compete driving the car. It would be a premium service because— this is my theory— it'll be a premium service because you don't want a robot driver. And so you're paying 5 times more for your ride and you're okay with that. That's what I'm wondering when there's—

yeah, like, I think if you take the, the market dynamics like private equity, venture capital stepping in, it would skew it. However, in a bigger business, I have overhead. And so even if I have a great marketer, I have a mechanic, I have a command center answering calls 24/7, I have a whole more infrastructure. Even if let's say that's 20% or 30% of my costs, there's still a Chuck in a Truck guy that can do it for the fuel and his, you know, self-driving vehicle. Um, I think it's gonna be a long time before we can compete on price against that, unless to my point, like venture capital steps in and is willing to lose money to wipe them all out. But I— that cost is so low. Like, there are people that are willing to do stuff so cheap, I don't even know if I could cover the overhead associated with running a business because their prices are that low.

Yeah, there's so many variables here. What does the world look like? They may need the jobs desperately too.

And so there is unemployment so high that people are willing to go out and do it, undercut everyone else.

The other side of this bet though, going back to what we were talking about earlier, future generation, they get a bunch of money. Would they rather have a human or a robot?

Yeah, it's tough to say. I don't know. Like right now, no one would want the robot.

I'm not even slightly worried about now. I'm like, I guess in my timeline, I'm trying to figure out what would I say? Is this 15 years, 20 years? I don't— 20 years feels safer to me that like you really have the humanoid thing. I just think it's so overblown how fast— I don't think it's overblown in a warehouse or industrial or even starting to get into medical. I, I, Even that's a little debatable, but like, um, I just struggle with this idea that we're going to have this stuff in a decade. I just cannot get my head around it in, in the real world, walking around on the street.

Yeah. Okay, so, uh, any other predictions? We talked a lot there about kind of the middle getting squeezed. Any other predictions for 2035 specifically?

I think private equity is going to continue to buy up these companies. Because it's the safer bet because AI is so unpredictable and what it's going to do to software companies and so many other industries to disrupt them. And so I think two things come from this. One, I think private equity, the good ones are more sophisticated. It's going to drive up marketing costs from like a Google Ads and stuff. Again, part of my concept here, it's like, like, I think the, the digital side gets more expensive because they're going to have more budget. They're going to spend more money. And so I want to mitigate some of that risk and I want to go out using other, uh, other strategies, other channels to get the client. So I think marketing costs get more expensive.

I just want to, I want to interject, if anyone would have bought based on what you said just a couple of weeks ago about software being undervalued, undervalued, they would be doing very well in the past couple of weeks in the stock market. All these companies coming back pretty strong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's overreaction. Yeah. Um, and then the other thing we've kind of talked about this before, I think what's going to happen is all of our margins, if you're adopting technology and doing what we're talking about, you have this opportunity, your margins are going to get bigger. And then the longer term, I think they're going to compress back down. It always happens. So it feels like a super easy prediction right there. Um, how do you, how do you feel about those two?

Yeah, those are good. I actually kind of went down the trail of, uh, kind of I actually got some evidence or like some, some data around this whole idea of the middle getting squeezed. And so like, I looked at the Landscape 100, so we got on the Landscape 100 in, uh, this past year. And what's interesting, so I had a few takeaways cause I, I went through the whole document. First off, like just getting on the Landscape 100 used to be, it was like 20, uh, I think it was like $22 million you have to make a year.. And now it's like $80-something or sorry, like $60 million. It's like 3x in the past 10 years. So I looked at 2025 and I looked at, uh, 2005, um, and compared those 20 years and like, what's going to happen next? And so for example, like the number 10 spot went from $88 million to $461 million, uh, in that timeframe. So looking at 2025 versus 2005, again, the consolidation of all this revenue. In these bigger companies. And even this year, for the first time ever, the Landscape 100, they actually divided it out based upon private equity backed versus non-private equity backed.

Oh, oh, okay.

Like, we were 64th overall, but then 32nd, um, uh, when it came to non-private equity backed, which basically tells you 50% of the top 100 companies are private equity backed. And so to your point, just to back up what you're saying there, private equity moving into the industry seeing the consolidation, because like the average business in the Landscape 100 more than like did a 5.2x more revenue over the course of the last 20 years. And so did the average landscaping business make 5.2 times more revenue? No. So there's— there is consolidation happening, there is private equity moving into the industry and the trades in general. And so I would 100% agree with both of those assessments.

And it strikes me that's gonna hold up. There's other trades like HVAC as a, as a common example, pest control that are further down the road of roll-ups. Like there's a lot more that's already happened in those space spaces. And we've had roll-ups forever in the green industry. It's not a new thing, but on the residential side, this is a big difference what's happening right now. So I, I think it's still early is my opinion. The only thing that, the things that I would think about that could blow up valuations would be, of course, economic type things. But if we keep doing a bunch of roll-ups and then eventually some of the really big roll-ups try to exit again and they can't get good valuations, that will hurt all the valuations down the food chain. Or if we have a massive down stock market that stays down for a while, that will hurt all of our valuations in a very, very massive way. And so, um, those could be two things that derail it, but my theory is that's still out in the future. My, my, my theory is the, like, for example, If you talk about those risks, the one where the future valuations of private equity exiting a second time, I just think there's a lot more time for this trade to play out before those really big exits happen that might discourage the market if it's going to happen. So I think we got time there. And then on the stock market, I think we're going to have at some point some pretty big drawdowns, but I think we're in such a macro growth event from a technology standpoint. Where just everything's getting reinvented right now. I think the trend is still up on the market in the longer term. So I think that is important for valuations to hold up. So my bet is that we're still— you still got years to build these outdoor services companies if we're talking about that. And really most of the trades, you still got years where you can get these really good valuations. And predicting any further than that, I have no idea.

How do you think, uh, from a marketing perspective, we today, we kind of started off like what's hot, what's working well in 10 years. Do you think it'll be where we have basically one or two places we're spending the money, like with these LLMs, Google, etc.? Or to your point, is it like, you know, yin when everyone else is yang and we go more back to the postcards, the door hangers, knocking on doors and going that approach? And is that buyer going to be the same person that wants a robot, wants to interact with AI, wants to put a card on file?

Technology changes fast, but the problem is always technology adoption because humans don't change fast. And so if I was making the bet in 10 years, I think we will have new tools and new ways of buying, but generally the human will still be the same and they'll still be receptive to the door knocking or the direct mail or all the old ways. It, it'll just be that the percentages change of what works. We'll be like, more of our leads will be coming from an LLM model, but I'm not even sure what the LLM future looks like. I, I, I think there's this, Like, do— so for those that aren't familiar, I don't know, this is my prediction, but it's a thought exercise. Like, so there's these tools, like, there's a— if you want to do text messaging, there's a really long-term popular tool called Twilio. So Twilio is like a utility where a software product can integrate to Twilio, and Twilio will send and receive your message and pass it to your software product. Or there's a product like SendGrid that will do your email. Or Mailgun, it'll do your email. There's all these, like, you, you as a user of technology, you don't know about these tools, but behind the scenes, they've made everything easier. When we started Service Autopilot, there was, we had to build all our own email technology. There was no Mailgun or stuff like that. Late in SendGrid, later we adopted that technology. And so that technology sort of obfuscated away, sort of hidden from your view. It's a utility in a sense. And like, like your phone or your electricity. You don't think about those companies that much, but then there's this layer built over top of them, like a Service Autopilot or HomeWorks or another software product uses some of that technology. You just know Service Autopilot or HomeWorks or whatever software. You don't know Twilio and SendGrid and Mailgun. Okay. So could we be going to a world where from an OpenAI, Anthropic, scenario, they still are a big deal and we still do a lot of our work inside them, but to a degree, they're even obfuscated away. They become utilities. I don't know that I would make that bet, but I would, I, I'm not convinced that we interact with them in quite the same way in the future as we do today. My theory is that lots of stuff gets built in front of them. And so you're still interacting with technology and the technology, like these guys, like Like these guys, while they're really slow to adopt the Apple iPhone, like they're so slow to adopt the AI technology. They're not an AI company. They haven't bought an AI company yet, but they're in a prime position just to make a really big deal with Anthropic or somebody else. And so there comes a day where we're just talking on our, our AirPods that have a video camera in them. And we're not even going to Anthropic anymore., or it's my other belief, like you don't get rid of a HomeWorks. You don't get rid of a Service Autopilot if they do their job right. You know, if they get better, you still live in those soft, those software solutions and all your AI stuff is happening in those solutions and you don't necessarily have to go to Anthropic. Could that be where it goes? And so, um, this is where it gets hard to predict, like where people will really be making their buying decisions. I don't know if I went off on the off a little bit there, but that's kind of, this is where these predictions get so difficult. So I don't know what the human's going to be doing exactly. I'm not sold that we're all going to just live in Anthropic or Claude. I think, I think where those tools are really, really big right now and they're only going to get bigger, but we may not spend all of our time in them. We may be using more specialized tools. Like the idea that Figma, the design tool, completely goes away. I don't buy that. I think designers might still be doing a lot of their design in a Figma and it just gets more powerful using Claude or OpenAI. Does that, did that make sense or did I go too far off in the weeds there?

No, it's really good. Do you, do you take, taking that as a foundation, do you anticipate then the same, to the same token that I use my agent to buy a service without actually looking into the brand it's buying from? And looking at like my agent as the deciding factor of who it buys from, like, hey, I need mowing. Great. I just go tell my agent it does it. And do you think that the customer ever trusts the AI enough to actually let them make that buying decision?

Oh, I do. In time, for sure. I'm convinced they're gonna, they're gonna run. I just am convinced. Like, I think the same doubts that people had about the internet and how good it's going to be and how much You're like, oh, it's this same, like, again, I'm not a big crypto guy, but like the, the, it took a lot. People didn't trust anything Bitcoin or whatever crypto you want to, but the market has become progressively more confident in it. Internet, you know, can I trust this website? People have become more and more confident in the websites of the internet. I think the same thing happens here. Like, it's not a great analogy, but it's like we just slowly, as something has been around longer and longer. And we have good experiences using it. Our friends talk about it and they have good experience using it. We all just get comfortable with it. It becomes normal. Like people, I do think people, they kind of move slow when it comes to change, but they also accept change too. They get used to things pretty fast. They may still be slow to adopt things, but they get comfortable with it. So, uh, that would be my bet. I like, I just, this idea that it's going to look like it is today in 10 years just doesn't make any sense to me. We've never seen it work that way ever. In previous technologies. So I think, you know, I think the early theories on these AI models where we are going to have a winner-take-all market, I don't think we're seeing that at all because they just keep bouncing back and forth. Like, and as fast as— and I think the companies like the OpenRouters of the world and these different solutions have created the equivalent of a, you know, this router concept where like, okay, this system is smart enough to understand what problem you're solving. And so it's like, okay, we're going to get Claude to solve this one. Oh, we're going to use an open source model to solve this one. You're not going to have any token cost there. We're going to use this old AI model from OpenAI to solve this one. And those tokens are really cheap. I think that's where we're going. And so if that's where, if people could save, if you could bring your token costs down 75% using a model like that, then you're not, that just right there in my mind proves you won't exclusively live in Anthropic, at least not the more sophisticated people. You're going to live in some offuscated away interface that is deciding where you should go.

Yeah, and I, I 100% agree about the iPhone. Like, it is in a prime spot to basically be the layer that immediately makes almost all of that irrelevant by just saying, hey, we will determine where we go with the model, and I don't— we don't care who it is, but we will serve the customer. Um, I 100% agree. It'll be really interesting to see what they do here. Yeah, too.

And it's— I gotta Another prediction that I've had for a long time that's continued to be wrong, but I'm holding to it someday in the future. I, I just am such a believer in the augmented reality technology. So everybody's tried it. And I talked about this years ago and I thought it was going to happen faster. Microsoft with the Halo Lens, or I forget what the name of it was, they were doing some really cool stuff like way back and it just didn't go anywhere. And, you know, Oculus has done, they're more, um, Uh, what are they? It's not AR. Virtual. They're more virtual than AR. Yeah. But they're, and now you're seeing Meta and you're seeing other people work on the glasses. I'm sure that Apple, they iterate slowly. Their, their, their VR is going to become AR. You could just see this coming, but it makes all the sense in the world for the trades. The idea that I could just have an arborist or a fert guy or a home peskin control guy wearing a pair of glasses and he's 23 years old with limited experience and I, and we can literally be working with him at the office while he's wearing these glasses. Like, how is that not the future? And if— so that's an example again of an obfuscated away layer where his glasses are interacting with AI models, both from an audio and a visual standpoint. He's not actually in ChatGPT. He's not actually in any of the models. He's just wearing his glasses. And behind the scenes, he's getting his inputs. Like, I really think the, the other future is, like, it's just, it's constantly taking picture. Like, somebody will get the video, but it's constantly taking video, pictures of your surroundings, and it's uploading it to these models, and you're getting constant feedback. And then eventually, it'll just be feeding video to these models. So that's a bit, that's a prediction I hold hardcore on. That is the future of home services. We will be wearing these glasses in a massive way in the future, and it will majorly change our business.

Businesses. Yeah, just until Charlie's up at the top of a palm tree and his glasses fall off. He's like, there's no, what do I do now?

I don't know how to get down.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Cool. Do you have, do you have any non-financial advice for the people before we head out?

Non-financial advice. You know, why do I always get caught off guard on this? Okay, I'm going to start being prepared on this one. A little bit of what we said earlier, we were talking about the AI and I, I had made mention, I know we've talked about this before. I can't encourage you enough to record all your phone calls and then listen to them. Record them for two reasons. One, record them because they're how you're gonna train your AI models in the future to understand your company. But also listening to them, it is just so unbelievably telling, both from a improving customer service standpoint, but also from the standpoint that you learn so much about how to write your marketing copy. You hear what people are worried about, frustrated about, what they need. The way they say things, and that informs how you write your copy. So I get really serious about recording and listening to your calls.

Awesome. Um, I, I was also not ready for non-financial advice.

You brought it up.

I know I did. I did. I didn't. So, uh, this is actually my non-financial advice.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have you had these before?

Oh yeah, we've, we've, uh, got a lot of them. Yeah. Have you tried the other ones that are more like a candy bar?

Like the puffy ones? Yeah. They're mid.

Do you like them? Okay, you can try them. We, the first time we got them, which was like right after they released, we thought, man, these things are amazing. I don't, they're less protein. Um, I still kind of worry on all this stuff. Like what are the chemicals in this stuff?

Yeah.

So I still try to eat as much whole food as I can, but the David bars are exactly the bar we use. The only bar we buy these days.

But the, the second one though, for me it was, I couldn't eat it at the desk, on my desk because it was crumbling all over the place.

Oh, wait, the, The new—

the second version. Yeah, like the bronze-looking ones. Have you had like the— because this is gold. The bronze-looking ones though have like a puffy— yeah, almost like marshmallowy.

Yes. Okay, so those are the ones, the first batch that we got. I don't know exactly. They came with some of the bars we bought, and then we bought some more. They were really good. They were like soft and they weren't flaky, and they were like eating a Three Musketeers type bar. Yeah, that's how I'd put it, you know. Then the next batches we've got, they haven't held up.

Both—

there's something different. So those chemicals, maybe so, maybe they had to get some chemicals out of it or something. It's like, I don't know, I don't know.

I heard— I was listening to a podcast with the founder. He's a cool dude, very smart, um, but definitely more of a scientist instead of like a marketer type. Okay, uh, but it— there's a lot of science behind. I did go down the rabbit hole of like seeing how they engineer the protein.

But they've been, you know, and those are good, you know, they're in there, 150 calories. That's crazy. But you know, they're about their lawsuit around those 150 calories.

I, I know of it, didn't really dive deep.

I don't know much detail on it, but they're being sued around— it may be absolutely nothing, but there's a fairly— and I assume it hadn't been settled— but a fairly large lawsuit that their 150 calories is being calculated incorrectly. Well, I'll go—

I'll believe it. I'll just keep going with it because it gives me more calories for the day.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, he They, they have to be killing it. They have to be doing really good. And what was the bar he had before? It was in the CrossFit gyms.

It was the one with RX. RX.

Yeah, I mean, that guy, that was the marketing, so good.

Like, yeah, it's also one of those things where you see it sometimes, you're like, oh, like, I should do off-the-wall stuff, and then it doesn't work. Yeah, but like, the off-the-wall stuff, like, just the ingredient list being the marketing, like, so in hindsight, it's brilliant, but it's also like it immediately causes someone like myself to be like, oh, I should do like things off the wall. And you try like, it just flops. I'm sure there's 100 versions of that same bar that didn't work out before. But it is interesting, especially given this. It looks like a some sort of like luxury looking thing.

Yeah, man. Yeah, I— they're just doing so good.

Cool. Awesome. That's the podcast.

Thank you.

All right, thank you everyone. Comment below and we'll see you next week.

See you next week. Bye.