14 Ways to get SO rich you question the meaning of making money

Today I'll share with you 14 ways to get so rich. You question the meaning of making money. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Homeworks, a software that processes over a million dollars per day for home service businesses. I'm also the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 200 locations around the world. Number one, you get rich the moment you stop doing what feels productive and start doing what actually compounds. Now, I got caught in a PTO of a dump truck. That's the power takeoff. That's the thing that spins underneath my hoodie. Got caught. We're on a work site, and underneath the dump truck, turning on the PTO manually, my hoodie got caught. That put me in the hospital. And I started to realize that I didn't have a business. I had a really lousy job that I was working 60 to 80 hours a week doing out in the field, let alone all the admin and other work I was doing. That led me to realize that I needed to create systems in my business. And so for the next year, I turned around my business. I actually created systems and procedures and standard operating procedures. And in that year, I went from doing about 900,000 to a million dollars in annual revenue and making no profit to over $280,000 in distributions the next year and went from working 60 to 80 hours a week in the field to less than one hour per week. Now, that led to then the turnarounds that I do around the country, and then over 100 business turnarounds for home service businesses around the US and Canada. And it's also led to 200 locations for Augusta Lawn Care. What feels productive is you doing more work, doing what you feel comfortable doing. What actually forced me to step away from doing the work and figure out systems was I had to get in an accident. And the reason I do all the work and the turnarounds and the software is to help other people not have to get underneath the dump truck or get in a hospital bed. To realize that creating systems and gives you the freedom to be able to step away from the business and doing what feels productive and feels comfortable and doing what you've always done is the exact thing that will keep you from the goals you want to achieve. Number two, money shows up when you delegate the lowest leverage tasks, not when you work harder. I think of every home service business as sales, getting the work, operations, doing the work, an admin, getting paid for the work. And I believe that you actually want to delegate that from the lowest to highest leverage task. In other words, admin, answering the phone, doing email, lowest leverage tasks, you can get that done by someone for 20$30 an hour operations. I can go make 80, $100 per hour. Why would I spend time doing a phone call or an email where I could pay someone 20 to 30 bucks an hour to do it when I could just go do more operations, higher leverage task and make 80 to $100 per hour? The same is true as you begin to grow the business. I delegated admin and I start to delegate operations. And instead of being out in the field doing the work, If I have 8, 10, 15, 20 employees, a higher leverage task is for me to focus on sales, getting more work. And so as you grow the business, we're trying to constantly delegate the lowest leverage task. The goal is to see the value that every task you do in a day provide to the business. And the ones that are lowest, delegating the other people, thereby allowing you to focus on higher leverage tasks that will actually get the business to the next level. Now, I want to be very careful because when I say this, everyone's like, oh, I'm going to delegate everything immediately. It's like, no, no, no, no. You do not need to focus on sales. You have one employee and yourself. You should still be focused mostly on operations. But to grow the business, you'll start slowly indexing. This is not a matter of tomorrow. I'm hiring someone to be my operations manager. I'm not stepping foot in the field again. No. It might be that 20% of your time is spent on sales. And as you continue to grow 30%, 40%, 50%, you're constantly moving towards higher leverage tasks. I look at delegation somewhat like a stair step. There's going to be periods of time where you don't delegate anything and you just do more of what you're currently doing. Doing more hours at the task that you already know how to do and have a proven track record for being successful at is usually where you actually make the most profits and. But then you make the step up in growth to the next stage of business. When you delegate, take a task you've been doing off your plate and give it to someone else. Number three, riches are created by math long before it shows up in your bank account. I am always looking at sales, operations and admin and what I'm asking myself is, what is the cost to get the work? Think of that like your customer acquisition cost. What do I have to spend to get more jobs? Cost of sales. Then look at my operations. What does it cost to do the work. This is where I'm usually measuring my efficiency score. How much does it cost per hour to pay my employees? I'm always looking at these costs and then I'm looking at my cost to get paid for the work admin. So I'm looking for the cost of sales, the cost of operations and the cost of admin. I've got to keep these things in check. And this is where math is important. Knowing your numbers in sales, customer acquisition costs, knowing your numbers in operations, your efficiency score, your cost per hour of labor, knowing your cost to get paid and have someone answer the phone, how fast they pick up the phone. All of these metrics is just knowing your numbers. So the money that you want to attain to have is simply created a long time before. When you create very boring systems for how you are going to measure every aspect of of the business. The hard part is determining what are the important metrics in the business. Because when I say customer acquisition cost, that's just one metric. There's close rate, there's the time to lead, there's other metrics. But knowing your key 3, 4, maybe 5 metrics in each of those departments, sales, operations and admin is very, very important. Number four, the quickest way to get rich is to stop leaking money into in admin and sales. In home services, a lot of times we get fancy, meaning we do everything besides the thing that makes us money. What makes us money is doing the work. Ultimately your customer is paying for you to get the job done. That's operations. But a lot of times we get distracted with the new flashy thing in sales. The next advertising campaign, next Facebook ads, campaign, next door, hangers, QR code, We get distracted. We also get distracted with all these other things in admin, like a big fancy shop space and fancy computers and a really cool space for our team to have team meetings. That's bloat. Ultimately, what the customer is paying for is operations. Too many people try to get off of the truck way too soon. They have one or two employees and they're like, I'm going to go full time into sales, I'm going to go full time into the office. You don't have the capital and you don't have the cash to be able to focus on admin and sales when the only thing you should be focused on is doing the actual work. And because we have put on a pedestal and glorified getting off of the truck, not being in the field, this leads to us focusing too much of our time and Attention on sales and admin instead of operations. And because of that we starve the business of profits when we have two, three, four employees and never scale beyond that Thinking man, we made more money when we're a solo operator. Yes, because when you start hiring employees, you immediately jumped out of the field to thinking that you were getting the business to the next level. And that's what you're supposed to do, is work on the business instead of in the business. But ultimately you starved the business of cash. Admin bloat, having sales leakage. When you should be following up, you're doing other things. So if the quickest way to get rich is stop the leaks when it comes to admin and sales, I'm simply going to say, okay, well where's the sales process? Can I plug all the leaks? Well, maybe I can get to the estimate faster. Maybe I can do follow up phone calls or text messages or automate some of these aspects. Maybe I can send a text and instead of just an email cause the open rate is two times as high. These are the little things that I'm tweaking to make sure I don't have a whole bunch of leaks in the sales process. Same thing is true on admin. What is your admin person doing when There was only 15 calls yesterday and for a total time on the phone of 40 minutes? What happened to the other 7 hours and 20 minutes? That's my question. This is admin bloat. This is sales leakage and it's killing your business. Number five, if you can't buy back your time, you'll never buy your freedom. I've already talked about the fact that I want to move from admin to operations to sales as I grow the business to $3 million in annual revenue. Now inside this book, I actually break down every size of business and I talk about exactly where your time should be spent as you grow the company. I'm going to first focus on mostly doing the work out in the field on the truck with my crew. Then as the business grows, I will start focusing more and more on sales. But then I'll eventually get to the point where I'm going to have a sales manager, an operations manager and an admin manager. And that allows me to build a business that is $3 million in annual revenue. We call it the GM plus model. When I'm at that size. What I'm now going to start doing is delegating outcomes and using the numbers and using metrics if I want to buy back my time. I mean going to hire a sales manager. I'm going to hire an operations manager. I'm going to hire an office manager so the business can run without me and I'm not in daily operations. But in order for that to happen, I need to have metrics of success for my sales manager, my operations manager, for my admin manager to know whether or not they're winning in their individual department. Numbers of success of close rate, numbers of success for your efficiency score, numbers of success for how quickly you answer the phone and how quickly you get invoices paid. I'm just questioning the meaning of money because I have so many new leads and making so much money from my new website from home service web design. That's right, the average customer that joins home service web design or lawn care web design increases the amount of leads they get by 80% within the first year. So go check it out today. You also book a call with our team for free and get 15 minutes of consultation and about your website and how you can improve it by going to homeservicewebdesign.com call. We'll see you there. Number six the life changing money appears only after you get boringly consistent this is what people don't talk about when it comes to money. It's not about the next shiny fancy truck. It's not about the Instagram post that gets a bunch of likes because of your brand new piece of equipment. Those things might be popular on social media, but what actually builds a profitable business, what builds riches, which builds wealth, is daily estimates done consistently, speed to lead weekly checking your finances, making sure of systems in place when something breaks in the business, when something goes wrong, like a job goes way south, actually stepping back and figuring out systems to prevent that from happening in the future. This boring consistency is not popular on social media. That's also why there are many billionaires that you don't even know about. Because the fancy shiny things that do well on Instagram and do well on social media aren't the things that actually build great businesses. Number seven, raise your standards or raise your stress. Those are the only two options. In other words, if you don't hold the standard, you cannot wonder why you're stressed out of your mind because there's no guiding principles for the business. And, and if you have a bunch of team members, firing is what sets the standard. I have failed personally. If I have to fire someone, say oh, they didn't show up on time, they no, no, I failed because during the interview process I should have picked up on the Fact that that was a weakness of theirs during the onboarding I should have had better expectations and set expectations for showing up on time and what good look like for metrics inside of their department. I realized very early on that that until I fired someone it was simply a suggestion. So if I said show up at 6:30 and people kept showing at 6:35, 6:40, 6:45. Well now showing up at 6:30 was a suggestion. When I fired someone because they showed up at 6:32 and they were supposed to be at 6:30. Although that seems super harsh now, all of a sudden everyone understood the standard is 6:30 is on time. And instead of pointing fingers at the economy or the labor market or the new generation, the take ownership of the fact that it's because you hired the wrong person. I had to take ownership of the fact that I didn't have a system for applicants like we talk about in the copy and paste millionaire. I didn't have a system for screening applicants using video before the interview process or having a two week training period where they knew exactly what they were going to be learning every single day. Those are systems that I had to learn to prevent me from having to state the fact that I was a failure. When you fire someone, I as the manager, I as a leader failed. Now just because I failed does not mean I'm a loser, does not mean I can't lead people, does not mean I can't learn that skill. I've got to move on. Just because I failed does not mean I quit. But when it comes to firing, you've got to cut out the cancer for the good of the entire organism. It is not fun to sever an arm because it has a cancer that is spreading throughout the body. It's painful, it's. It hurts. No one enjoys it. But as the leader, is your responsibility to cut and sever that part of the organism away from the rest of the team to prevent that cancer from spreading. Number eight, the richer you get, the more ruthlessly you must protect your time. I think about time as three different segments. You have labor time, manager time and architect time. And I am constantly trying to think as I grow the business, how do I move more in the direction of architecture? Because once you get a business that's doing 3 million, 4 million $5 million in annual revenue, most of your time is not being a labor like doing the work. It's not manager, it's not managing people that do the work. It's actually being the architect. Now if you look at a job site and Someone's a big construction job. The architect is not swinging the hammer. The architect is not managing the person swinging the hammer. The architect is outside of the building, observing, looking at the blueprints, making adjustments, looking for areas of weakness, weakness, areas of stress, things that need to be adjusted. That's what an architect does. They step out of the business and they work quote on the business. One thing you want to be careful of is stepping out in the architect mode way too soon. If you have one or two employees, you're going to be mostly labor and a little bit of manager time. And maybe an hour on the weekend, you spend a little bit of architect time. The whole goal here as you protect your time, is to avoid reactive loops. I, I see this most common when people are growing to a million dollars in annual revenue, when they get reactive loops with admin, their least profitable, least leveraged task, like answering the phone. They're looking at their phone like 50 times throughout the day and it's breaking them from the thing that they should be doing. It's operations, doing the work. And then if they start doing sales and they start growing the business at 700,000, 800,000 start growing, they're doing sales. They're still like answering the phone, they're still answering email. They're being very reactive. I want to delegate admin tasks that are reactive as fast as possible. Get a virtual assistant, get someone to be able to answer the phone when it rings so it's not ringing in your pocket and not distracting you 15, 20 times a day. When you should be focused on higher leverage things, you must ruthlessly protect your time. Number nine, you don't need a million dollar idea, you need a million dollar schedule. I actually wanted to show you inside of this book. I show you the time blocking that I use and at every size of business to give you an idea of where should I be spending my time as I grow the company. When I'm a much larger size, I'm going to be looking much more like this. You can see mostly architect time, a little bit of manager time. That's a big business. But if I'm a smaller company, if I'm a solo operator, most of my day is actually going to be spent in labor time. But I'm going to time block. So for example, you might work from 7am till 3pm as a laborer and then from 3pm to 5pm you do sales, you do admin, you do other tasks in the business. But by blocking my sales, operations and admin, or breaking it up based upon my labor manager and architect time, it gives me the ability to know, oh, this is a sales task. I will do that from 3 to 5pm during that block of time. Right now, I need to focus on being a great labor because that's what the time block says. By doing this, it prevents the switching costs going from, oh, I'm doing an estimate, then I'm out in the field working, then I'm answering the phone, then I'm doing an email, then I'm responding to a review. And you're going through all these different tasks, and the switching costs is killing your productivity. Number 10. Wealth comes from saying no to almost everything that isn't aligned with your systems. So when you look at your business and you've created systems, the hardest thing to do is say no, no, no to customers that ask for jobs that you could potentially do. You could make more money. You could do the extra work for the bad customer that you know is going to be a problem. You could do the extra services that, you know, I'm the only one that knows how to do that. So I'll show up on the job site and just make sure the crew gets the job done right. Yes, you could do that. But saying no to those things, reducing the amount of services that you do, reducing those odd jobs that keep getting thrown in, that's what allows you to be able to scale. And that's where real wealth is built. The people that make the most money are the ones that do a few things really well. If you're gonna be a jack of all trades, you're gonna stay solo forever or constantly be on the hamster wheel of running around materials, running around equipment from job to job, and being scattered throughout your entire day. And we all know business owners like that. Building real wealth is saying no to the wrong employees, saying no to the wrong services, saying no to the wrong customers. And those might be the best customers, the best services, the most profitable employees, the most profitable types of services you can do for somebody else. But for you, focusing and pruning your attention down to the few core things you're going to do really well is where real wealth is built. Number 11, if you don't control your emotions, the the market will control your decisions. I've always lived by this phrase and talked about higher lows and lower highs. Ultimately, the only way to lose in business is to quit. And so if I can just prevent going way low and quitting and throwing in the towel, the likelihood of success is much higher. For businesses that have been around for 20 and 30 years simply because they've stopped giving up. They never gave up. They never threw in the towel. And so the goal here is to take ownership. It's very easy when you have a customer that complains online, says something bad about you, an employee gets mad and says horrible things about you to other team members and creates a mutiny and says all horrible things about you. It's very easy to let your emotions get in the way. If you do that, then the market, the tide, will push and pull you wherever it goes. So you'll get reactive. You'll get reactive to those online reviews. You'll get reactive to the employee that says something negative to you or says something damaging. You'll get reactive to when leads come up and you're just completely overwhelmed with work. And then a few weeks later, you can't hardly get any leads. The phone's not ringing. You get reactive when there's weather delays and there's rain. You get reactive when a customer says that you're too expensive. This emotional reaction is a cause of not having systems in place that you can rely on. Being able to be in a community of other people that can give you the confidence that, no, what you're doing is correct. That although your emotions are telling you to run, although your emotions are telling you to get mad, although your emotions are telling you to lower your prices, don't do that. And that's why, regardless if you join, like an Augusta franchise or Facebook community or local network, the goal is to be able to not give in to your emotions when you feel the tide of what you feel would be easier for you to do. Most of the times, the thing that feels easiest to do is the wrong decision. It's easier to lower your prices. It's easier to let your employees do whatever they want and not have a standard. It's easier to just say yes to everybody inside of the business. Every service, every single type of project. You say yes to everything. That's the easier thing. It's also the wrong decision. You must control your emotions. Number 12, your body will quit before your business does unless you build a business that that doesn't rely on your body. Most people that watch my content are solo operators. Why? Because we all had to start there. And then as you grow, the business, people get weeded out, and that's fine. Especially in home services, it is a relatively low barrier to entry. So there's a lot of people getting started, and a lot of people realize that they can make 50, 60, 70% profit margins if they stay Solo. And then as they grow and they get employees, they realize two things. One, they have margin compression, they make less profit because now they have more expenses with employees. And two, they realize they do not have the skill of leadership. So what they do is they go back to being solo and they live in this mentality that I can do it better myself, I have pride of my work and I'm not going to try to scale up, I'm not trying to grow. And I agree with a lot of those things until 10, 15, 20 years of work out in the field puts a toll on their body and something happens to, to where they can't do the work. And that is when I step in and say, hey, look, there are four stages of growth, four leadership hats that we talk about inside the book. The first one is solo operator. But the reason I want you to progress past that into the working gm, the full time GM or the GM plus model is so that when your body gives out, your business doesn't go away. The people that you've hired, the customers that you serve, all of them are let down in if you can't get the work done simply because your body gave out. And eventually for all of us, if time was to continue, that would happen. We've gotta create systems, people, processes in place that the business can run when you're not there. I know what it's like to have a health scare. And I got caught in an accident with underneath the dump truck in the PTO and for two weeks trying to recover, could not do the work. And I realized me working more hours out in the field was not going to solve this problem. And more, more importantly, I would be a bad steward of what I was leading and what I was in charge of if I would allow something like one accident to put every person I employed out of work, to put every single customer that relied on my services having to go find another vendor. Your health is fragile. Don't let that make your business fragile. Number 13. Money multiplies when you build systems, not when you play hero. Now I'm talking to myself and every other entrepreneur that likely has the complex and gets a lot of pride out of being busy. I work a lot of hours too. I know what it's like to put 60, 70, 80, 90 hours per week into the work that we do. But as you begin to grow, it's not more hours and being the hero and having the answer to everything in the business that actually gets you to the next level that will prevent you from growing the business. If everyone has to come back to you to get the answer. You will not scale. If every estimate from sales has to go through you has to get approved from you, questions from the salesperson comes to you, that's a bottleneck. That's a problem. You're playing hero. Operations of every big project, when it goes wrong, you step in, you fix the problem. You're playing hero. When every customer complains, a phone call goes bad, bad email, bad. Review comes in on the admin side, if you step in, you're playing hero. And although we don't want to admit it because I've been here too, it's ultimately a complex that we have of being busy and being felt like we are needed inside the organization. But I promise you, being able to build systems where other people are able to grow, learn, and get to the next stage of their career is far more rewarding than the ego that comes along with having the answer to everyone's problems. By having this mentality of creating systems and then allowing other people to grow up inside the organization. This is what I talk about in the Copy and paste Millionaire, where we have a 21 stage of success for our technicians to become general managers, general managers to become owners. How? Building systems so the owner is not the hero. Not everything relies on the owner answering all the questions. So how do you do this? You start being the architect of the business as your business starts growing past a million dollars. I'm not being the laborer. I'm not going to be the manager. I'm going to be the architect. And the architect builds the systems for the manager to follow. And the manager builds the systems for the technician. The labor to get the work done, automate your workflows, create processes and create systems. Number 14. The richest people I know don't chase money. They chase leverage. They get more output for the same input. You're like, well, that's a very fancy word. Leverage. Okay, I put $10 in, I get $100 out. That's a 10x leverage. If I can put $10 in and get $1,000 out, that's 100x leverage. So how do I increase leverage? Here's a couple really good examples. If you do really good work, there's a good chance that some people will give you referrals. That's a pretty good form of leverage. If I get three good jobs, I might get four or five other jobs from referrals. Awesome. But what if I did those same three jobs, but I asked all of them for an online review? Those three jobs could turn into 15 or 20 other jobs that come in from getting the online review. In this case, asking for the online review via an automated process leads to massive amounts of leverage. Same input. I still got the same three jobs, but now the output was I got 30 jobs instead of four or five. Okay, that was reviews. Well, software, when you have automations, automated billing, when you can automate your invoicing and take huge amounts of time of admin and just focus on higher level tasks, that is a huge amount of leverage. When you can send out mass texts inside of homeworks and get leads on demand. Like my location last week within 24 hours got 18 accepted jobs completely free. Sent out a text message to all their contacts. Same number of contacts, way more upsells how using software to increase leverage. You know, same location could have 5,000 contacts. This one has software, sends a message to everyone and immediately gets 18 jobs. They got 18 jobs from doing nothing. That's leverage compared to not being able to use software to send a NAS text or mass email. Yesterday I was looking on Instagram and someone was bragging about how they still did all of their quotes by hand. They wrote them out by hand. I said, that's fantastic. And they were talking about the pride of ownership and how software and AI is taking things over. But what happens when you hurt your hand? What happens when you can't do the work yourself? What happens to the people that you're responsible for to provide the whether it be jobs or literally food on the table for your family? That's why I'm such a huge fan of creating systems and making leverage to where a click of a button last week within 24 hours created 18 new jobs. That's how you use homeworks. That's how you software to create leverage. Another way you can create leverage is you do a job, you got a review, great. But what about the people that saw my truck while I was at the job? Oh, I want to create a brand new. How can I create a brand? I can actually make sure that my website looks really good and converts more people when they show up at the website. The whole objective of having a website is to convert clicks into leads. If one out of a hundred people that come up to your website go from a click to a lead, that's a 1% conversion. You know the fastest way to triple the size of your business, go from a 1% conversion to a 3% conversion. So it might be a good idea. Same number of clicks. I still got 100 clicks, but I went from one lead to three leads. That's why we have home service web design. To be able to build your website in a way that optimizes for conversion, because it's the same number of clicks. But because I have a great website, because I have a great design, because it looks good on mobile, because it has great SEO, search and optimization, because it ranks well on Google, all of these things allow it to get the same input, but way more output. In other words, more leads. Increasing leverage allows you to increase profits.