15 Wake Up Calls Most Contractors Ignore

Most home service business owners think wake-up calls come as bankruptcy or burnout. They don't. They show up quietly, one habit at a time, until something finally breaks. In this video, I'm walking through 15 wake-up calls most contractors ignore. Real moments that signal your business and your life are drifting off track. I learned this the hard way when an accident forced everything to stop. Making changes allowed me to grow Augusta Lawn Care to over $60 million in annual revenue. What you are about to hear will feel uncomfortable if you are in it right now. Missed milestones, health warnings, employees quitting, revenue growing while peace disappears. This is not a list to scare you. It's a list to help you catch the warning signs before life forces you to. Let's get into it. Number 1, when your significant other feels abandoned. There are many times I hear from business owners where they have the talk from their significant other, their spouse. It's always a wake-up call because it's the people that you are doing all the work for. And the reason why you put so much effort into the business many times is to spend more time with them. And especially if your partner or your spouse, their love language is quality time, they can feel abandoned and you're pouring so much time and energy into the business and making more money. And we can convince ourselves many times that we're doing it for them. But many times they don't want the more money. They don't want the bigger house. They just want time with you. And this is actually a major reason for many businesses closing down. Either divorce or some sort of relationship strain is a huge contributing factor to many small businesses that close down. And if you are married, you have a 50% partner in the business, even if they don't work with you. Because if that relationship goes to waste and falls apart and you end up in a divorce court, the business almost always gets completely shredded, whether it be an attorney or the courts pulling the thing apart until finally, either from distraction or actually forced to sell the business. This is not where we want to end up. And the wake-up call for many of us as spouses is when your partner says, "Hey, I don't feel like this is working." The talk of feeling abandoned and left alone. Instead of you nurturing their relationship, you're nurturing the business and your employees and your management team and your customers. And you're so concerned about that, working 12, 14, 16 hours a day, you lose on the entire reason why you started the business. And that, for many of us, is the people we love. Number 2, junk food becomes a daily habit for convenience. Now, I don't say this to kind of say that I'm better than anyone else. I started eating healthy because I had tons of acne and scarring on my face. It started when I was about 11 or 12 years old and slowly kind of disappeared when I was like 18, 19, 20 years old. Now, I went to college when I was really young. I went through all of my adolescence in college with so much acne and pimples and scarring on my face. And I know what it's like to have that social pressure. And the reason I actually make it a habit now to avoid junk food is because so early on, I remember if I had potato chips, I've had pizza, if I had soda, if I had anything sugary or processed, I would just immediately break out. So it kind of forced my habits to get away from junk food. But for many, I see as we get busier in our company and we are doing estimates and we're scaling the business, we start to look at food much less of a fuel source and just really looking for convenience. And a lot of times the things with the highest amount of calories and the easiest access is junk food. You can stop at any gas station just about anywhere and pick up a Monster, pick up potato chips, cookies, etc. You can't stop at the local, local corner store and convenience store and get anything healthy like fresh carrots or fresh produce or good quality meat. It's not going to happen. And so because you start working so many hours, it starts to become an afterthought in terms of healthy eating. Now what this causes, the ups and downs of your blood sugar throughout the day, throughout the week, makes it almost impossible to regulate your emotions. Because when you are sleeping very little, you're stressed out, you're trying to build a business, there's already enough emotions going up and down, let alone having your blood sugar caused from high fructose corn syrup, sodas, energy drinks, hundreds if not thousands of milligrams of caffeine going through your body. These are things that cause for the body to not be able to operate in its ideal conditions and be able to make balanced decisions. And when there is stress and cortisol pumping through your body, if you also have sugar going up and down, if you're also getting tired because you can't regulate aspects of your cellular biology, like we're going to make mistakes in the business simply because of a poor choice of food. This is a wake-up call. If you're constantly stopping, whenever you get gas, you're going inside the convenience store, getting 3 energy drinks, a bag of potato chips, cookies, and a hot dog. We have to change this. Otherwise down the road, it'll end in a crash. Number 3, life in the truck replaces exercise. Many times as we grow the business, we move from doing the work to managing all the team. And that usually comes in the form of driving around a lot of in-person estimates with our customers, meeting vendors, going to the store, pick up materials. When I was out in the field, I was tracking my, my steps and I've done this for, years, and I would get 20,000 to 25,000 steps a day when I was out in the field doing the work. Very quickly, when I started doing sales and being full-time in the truck, I would get maybe 2,000 to 4,000 steps a day because I was driving from crew site, from crew to crew, from job site to job site, meeting customers. But I didn't actually walk a lot of steps. I would like walk up to the door, talk to the customer, walk back to my truck, walk to Home Depot, go inside. Like, there was not a lot of steps and definitely was no weight-bearing exercise. As you begin to grow the business and less and less of your time is spent doing the work, which for most home services is physical in and of itself. And you don't necessarily need to go out and exercise after spending 10 hours out in the field lifting weight and doing hard manual labor. You honestly can't many times, you're so exhausted. But when you get replaced with doing the work and now you are actually selling the work, you're managing, you're doing hiring, a lot of your time is spent in the truck or maybe walking inside of a store or to a customer's house. And when that happens, again, we start putting on weight. And all of a sudden you're 20, 30, 40 pounds heavier. And right now, that might not seem like a big deal. But as you begin to age and as you start growing the business, these are the little, little drains, the 1%, 2%, 3% less efficient, 4% because you're more tired now, 5% 'cause now you're groggy. Now you get home and it starts affecting the relationship. It starts affecting your romantic relationship simply because you start putting on weight and doing these things these little tiny habits that has now started to accumulate. And it all started with just the fact that now you don't get enough steps. So get yourself a band like this. This is $50 or $60 off of Amazon. It tracks my sleep and my steps. That's basically it. I don't need a fancy Apple Watch or something that's going to be dinging or give me my messages or maps or anything like that. I just need to track my steps and my sleep. By ensuring that I get enough sleep and I get exercise at least on a daily basis, I'm able to make sure that I'm the right type of leader that can make the decisions of the business with a clear thought process and without getting distracted by simply my body falling apart. The fourth wake-up call is when you have no time to think alone in silence. As you begin to grow the business, you start going from physical stress when you're out in the field to then having financial stress because you hire employees and your profit margin drops and you have a bunch of overhead. As the company grows, even as it becomes financially profitable and successful, you have psychological stress. And the reason you have psychological stress is because the business of size, where you have enough customers, enough employees, where every single day something bad is happening, and this can absolutely tap into the stress that goes through your body and where you're constantly feeling like you need to be engaging and constantly listening for the noise of a ding or message or the next push notification. And you are optimizing always for efficiency. The problem that this creates is you start filling every single minute of every single day. Instead of realizing that as the business grows, not only can you turn down the volume of stress, but also the best decisions are made when you can put all those things in silence and just think clearly. And it's a very difficult transition to make when you go from the harder you work out in the field and the more hours you put in, the more money you make. Then you start getting your first few employees and the more time you spend with them, the more hands-on you are with them, the more you communicate with them, the more you train them, the more you're talking to customers, the more successful you are. And then as the business grows, specifically past 7 figures, now what is actually rewarded is you spending less time responding to people, less time constantly being in every single firefighting mode in the business, and actually turning the phone off, reducing the notifications, turning off all notifications on your phone so it never rings, it's never dinging, and having time to think. Because now the highest leverage thing that you can do in the business is making a good decision. And it is rare that you're going to make good solid decisions for the business when there's so much noise constantly filling your day. Put your phone on silent. Don't allow dings and bells and all these notifications coming in. It's keeping you from the couple minutes between jobs, the 3 or 4 minutes in the shower when sometimes the best ideas come. And at that size of business, $1 million, $2 million, $5 million, $10 million, the decisions are the highest leverage thing you can do. Now, the fifth trap is addictions that quietly damage relationships. Many times we talk about addiction, we think about hardcore drugs or like crazy things. Most of the times, that's not what it is for business owners. It's just a crutch for all the stress we're going through. And so we get addicted to alcohol on the weekend or smoking, or maybe it's recreational drugs. But these things in and of themselves, someone might not feel as bad. But once you gain an addiction for this substance, the problem is it just is a crutch that you constantly lean on when you're stressful. And so many times someone works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, super stressed. And so on Saturday and Sunday, they waste it on their addictions. Now, don't get me wrong, there should absolutely be times when we unplug, we have hobbies, and we do things that release stress. But be careful that those things are not controlling you instead of you controlling them. And the minute you feel that you are addicted to something and it has control over you, realize that becomes a chink in the armor that down the road, as more stress increases, many times that's where we start to see failure in the business. And for something that started so small and insignificant becomes a huge problem in the business simply because it was used as a crutch instead of solving things in the business that are causing the stress and using the Band-Aid of an addiction that eventually leads to hemorrhaging. Number 6, an accident or health scare forces everything to stop. Now, I know this very, very clearly because when I had started the business, grew very quick, And we were doing like $700,000-$800,000 annual revenue. But I got in an accident and got my hoodie caught in the PTO of a dump truck. Ended up for about a couple of weeks not being able to work, going to the hospital, being on the hospital bed, videoing, FaceTiming my crew just to walk them through the next job. And I remember very distinctly getting off of that FaceTime call and thinking like, Michael, seriously, you, you went to school to get your MBA and you learned about all the best business tactics and going to business school and from really smart people and you can't figure out How do you make sure that the business can run without you for one day while you're in a hospital? It was a big wake-up call for me, and it forced me to stop. Because many times we as Type A people will just keep barreling through and pushing and grinding and hustling. And don't get me wrong, most people lack that trait. But eventually, as the business grows, you actually need to step back and realize that if I keep pushing at a certain level, I will burn out. The only way to lose in business is quitting. And if quitting means I'm burning out and I physically can't get out of my bed. It physically means I am so broken mentally that I don't want to even go out and work with my team. That is quitting. I will have to stop. The business will collapse. And so to prevent that, sometimes I would rather operate 90% or 95% instead of constantly redlining at 100% all the time, because that's not sustainable. When I look at some of the most common reasons for business closures, not as a matter of like the business failing because of bad pricing or the numbers not making sense or not being profitable, but just they quit. It is relationships and it is mental health. And I was talking to Jonathan Patoschnik just last week, and he was talking about a really key hire that he's been trying to make in the business over the past several months. And he said there was 2 or 3 candidates that were very solid and actually got started, but they all started burning out with mental health issues. And so how do we prevent this from occurring? How do we actually get, whether it be a therapist or a pastor or a spouse or someone that cares about us, to be able to put plans in place and put thresholds that when we hit certain levels of stress, when we hit certain levels of not being able to sleep or not being able to exercise or having panic attacks, we have to have a release valve and we have to have the plan in place that when those things happen, there's a protocol that's followed so we don't destroy the business instead of having a burnout or a mental health crisis, force the business to break down, force us to be like I was in a hospital bed and realize the business literally can't run without me. Take it to the hypothetical extreme and ask yourself today if you got in an accident, if God forbid something happened to your family or yourself from a mental health perspective, which is literally chemicals in the brain. And so all the fortitude and strength that you have in your head or in your body right now could all be gone in a moment with a simple chemical imbalance inside of your mind? If that could happen, I want to make sure that as a good steward of my business, I've made sure that there are systems in place that it can operate without me, that I can step away from the business for a few days or a week or two and be able to recover and come back stronger for my team. Do you have an existing lawn care or landscaping business? Have you ever thought about joining Augusta Lawn Care as a franchisee? I understand, maybe not. But hear me out. If you come to training for the entire week and learn all of our systems, our playbook for success, and the stages of wealth that an owner goes through, and if you're not willing at the end of that week of training to swim through shark-infested waters to stay inside of Augusta Nation, I will give you your initial franchise fee back 100%, no strings attached. Click the link below. See if joining Augusta Lawn Care is the right fit for you. Number 7, a key employee quits. And operations freeze. I remember my very first employee that ever hired at Augusta Lawn Care. He was phenomenal. He did the work of literally 2 to 3 people. And I was so blessed to have him because it's the only way we were able to grow very quickly in the first couple of years. However, I quickly realized that not everyone was like my first employee. Some people worked half as fast, that some people stopped multiple times throughout the day, that some people, didn't care about the business as much as he did. I was really fortunate and spoiled by that first employee. The problem was once I had like 3 employees, I realized he was amazing. But then once I lost him, all of a sudden productivity dropped like crazy. And if you are one employee leaving away from being out of business, the business is super unstable. There's too much key man risk. And that could be you. It could be your spouse in the office. It could be your manager. It could be the person that's leading the team out in the field. If that's the current case of the business, where one key employee quitting and everything freezes, we have to create redundancies. And if that means cutting away some services or some aspects of the business, just to make sure that it's not any one part of the business depending on one person, we must do that. For example, if your operations manager is the only one that knows how to operate a piece of equipment, if they're the only person that knows how to do a certain type of service because they're the only one certified, These are key areas of the business that if they left, you're toast. I had the same thing happen when I had someone certified to do artificial turf and putting greens, and when they left on good terms, but like I had to give $30,000 back to one customer and $25,000 back to another customer because those are just deposits on jobs that I knew we would not fulfill on at a high standard. I just gave them the deposit back. They weren't happy and I lost $55,000. Over the fact that I allowed the business to grow having a key person that once they left, we couldn't even do the service. How can you prevent this? Just don't allow it to happen. And if it's happening, cut it out now when everything is good, they're not leaving, and create systems in place for redundancy or remove the service completely to make sure that the business is antifragile. Number 8, you miss a major family milestone for a job that's gone wrong. Recently, at the Augusta Nation owner conference, one of the owners, Ryan, he spoke on stage about how he was distinctly at his 8-year-old's birthday and realizing in the moment that like he was there in his body, but definitely checked out in his mind. Thinking about work, thinking about money, thinking about the jobs that were going wrong, thinking about everything that was happening in the business. The reason you started the business and the reason you work so hard Many times is for the people that you love. And so when those people are having major occasions, the last thing we want to be doing is just thinking about the input that is supposed to be giving us the output of time, freedom, and resources to be able to spend time with the people that we love. It's the reason we got into business. And I understand the first 5, 10 years of business can be a grind. And then you'll have to switch to realize Hey, that was the foundation and it was required to dig, build and bury that foundation. But now it's time to step back from the building. It's time to not be out in the dirt, out digging, hustling, grinding. It's actually a time to step back and realize the reason we built the foundation, the reason I spent 5 years grinding and hustling and for myself, like living in the closet of an office was to be able to step away and was to be able to give back and was to be able to be able to give those who are less fortunate. And if we get so caught up in success and making more money and growing the business that we lose the remembrance of the reason we started the building in the first place, we have miserably failed. Regardless of what a P&L says, regardless of how much money you have in a bank account and regardless of how many followers you have on social media, we have failed if we don't go back to the roots as to why we started digging the foundation and we constantly are in the building, grow, grow, grow, grow, and we never step back and realize We are— we started the foundation and we're building this building to enjoy the benefit of the house, of the structure. And that can come in 5 years, 10 years. And for most people, they don't even get there. But once you've become successful and once you got to the place where you don't need to be out in the field working every day, realize the ability to step back and enjoy the fruits of your labor is the entire reason we started the business in the first place. Number 9, one slow month creates real fear. All of us depend on more leads coming into the business. But if all of a sudden all your lead flow dries up, this can absolutely scare many home service business owners because you've been going for years and leads just keep coming. Phone calls keep— they keep— the phone keeps ringing and leads keep coming through the website and people keep messaging you on Facebook and people keep messaging you on Nextdoor. And all of a sudden that stops. Talk about a wake-up call. And you realize that the agency that you hired or, you know, you just— I was depending on word of mouth. Well, word of mouth all of a sudden stops. And now what? You don't control your lead flow. And so I love word of mouth. I love referrals. I absolutely— but I can't control it. It can be turned off in a moment. I'm one Facebook post away from being banned and all of a sudden I don't get any leads. This is what happened in COVID-19 in January and February 2020, when all of a sudden people that were booked out 6 and 12 months of projects all of a sudden were getting asked for refunds and were physically not able to work in their state because they were not deemed essential. Talk about panic. One month for something like maybe 4 to 6 weeks tops wiped out their backlog, wiped out their cash reserves, and many people threw in the towel, especially big project work where all of that stuff went to hell in a handbasket in a matter of one week. Now it all came roaring back if they could get through 2 or 3 months of pain. But that one month for many people was too much. And it was a wake-up call for many that they had to get into recurring revenue that was much more stable instead of just massive one-time projects. Because a 12, 6-month backlog for many businesses that contacted me during that month immediately evaporated. And so this is a wake-up call. And so all of these things I mentioned, they're not negative things. They're the wake-up call to prevent a massive accident that could put you out of business. That could put your relationship on the rocks. These are things that are avoidable problems if we were able to recognize the early onset and the early warning signs prior to them occurring. Number 10, the business cannot run without you for a week. If you go for like a family emergency or you need to go for a funeral for someone that's close to you and everything falls apart, I know what that's like. I know what it's like to have a mutiny. I know what it's like to return back and all of a sudden every single employee wants more money, is mad at each other. There's bad reviews coming in from customers. I know what that's like. And it's an early warning signal that we have to solve issues in the business. There are sales, getting the work, operations, doing the work, and there's admin, getting paid for the work. And if you're going away for a week and you're a smaller business, many times you can kind of put on ice sales. Like, hey, we're just not going to do any more estimates. Okay, cool. And maybe even admin, like you can just put on your voicemail, hey, I'm not going to be in town this week. I'll get back to you next week. You can kind of get away with putting admin on the ice. But many times when you leave, it's operations where things fall through the cracks. It is bad reviews, employees showing up late. Now there's, they're infighting between employees. They weren't trained correctly. Now they're doing things wrong. There's callbacks, there's damage cases. Someone's threatening to sue you all of a sudden. Everything goes to hell in a handbasket when it comes to operations when you leave. That's just a warning sign that we need to solve the problems around operations. That's why operations is many times the hardest thing to actually create systems for, 'cause you've gotta train people, you've gotta onboard people, you gotta make sure there's systems around one-on-one meetings and team meetings and having peer feedback and making sure that we have a process in place for making sure there's work order changes on projects that don't require the owner getting involved every time. And there's videos and pictures attached inside of the CRM so we actually know what's going on without talking to the owner. If the business can't run without you, for a week, this is an early warning sign that you're one emergency away and life happens. You're one sickness away and you don't want to be caught with your pants down. Change the business now and create systems. What does that mean? Systems. Simplify and standardize everything. Simplify means easy. Make it really easy for people to be able to come clock in and start their day for the— Everything's on their app and they're rocking and rolling, not printing off sheets and where did that one go and where's the map? What's the route for? No, like simplify it. And then standardize. That's the same way every single time. So when we do mulch, we do it like this. When we trim bushes, we do it like this. It's trained, it's standardized, and we don't have all the variety of whether or not it's raining, we do it this way. Whether it's Wednesday, whether I feel like it, we do it the same way every single time. Simplify and standardize, create systems and allow the business to run when you're not there. Number 11, your body hurts in ways it never used to. This is a big wake-up call, especially for solo operators that have been brute-forcing their way to make sure they're profitable. As a solo operator, you can easily make $100,000 to $150,000 in profit over the course of 5, 10, 15 years, just building the business, having very low overhead. It's like the cost of your fuel, your insurance, you're probably parking at your garage, at your house. It's very cheap. But one day you wake up and all of a sudden that back is sore. All of a sudden, you wake up for a spring rush and you're like, "Man, I used to be able to bounce back the day after, but now I'm 45 or 50 years old and age catches up." And you realize you can't just brute force a bad schedule. You can't just, "If I misschedule things, I'll just work Saturday. And if I can't get it finished Saturday, I'll finish on Sunday. And if I can't get the job done, I'll just work later in the evening on Tuesday evening." Like, eventually these things catch up with you. And especially when you're in your 20s and your 30s, Most of the times, bad systems are band-aided with just brute force, more labor. And eventually that catches up with your body. And I cannot tell you how many 50 and 60-year-old business owners I've had discussions with. And I've just been, look, I'm going to say some hard things, but it's because I love you. And I don't want in 5 years for you to wake up to the fact that you can't do the work that you're doing every single day. It's physically impossible. And the little stretch or the little tear that in the past you would have bounced back from after 24 hours can last a week and it can become worse. And all of a sudden, the livelihood of your family is put at risk. This is why I'm such a believer in creating systems and having software and creating sales, operations, and admin systems in the business, because I need the business to get work, do work, and get paid for the work without you being there. So that way, when you get older, you don't have to sell the business for pennies on the dollar. So that when you do get older, you don't have to wake up one day not be able to get out of bed and have to contact all of your customers and lose half of them, you can't do the service. And so instead of just like blindly, "Oh, I'm not going to even think about that." I understand that if you're 40, 45, 50 years old, you don't even want to think about where that's going and what's going to potentially happen and the risk of you waking up one day and not being able to physically do the work. But let this be the wake-up call that says, "Look, that is inevitable." It is inevitable one day you will not want to be 40 feet up on a ladder. So right now, create the systems and the procedures to be able to train someone who is younger than you and is hungry and eager to do the work. So that you can get off of the truck. The 12th wake-up call is a customer dispute threatens your reputation overnight. Now I know what it's like to get your first few negative online reviews. It's like a gut punch. I still remember exactly where I was driving when I got my very first, like, callback ever. I had gone the first year to being a solo operator, not a single time I got called back. I got my first employee and sure enough, within about 2 months, we got our first just bad review. Just an email. They weren't even being mean. But, you know, I had played baseball with the son of the customer and she was not happy and it was not good. And I remember we broke her window because I don't know, we probably were doing weed whacking around the gravel area and shot a piece of gravel through her window. So $3,000 to fix these French doors for the entryway of her house. Brutal. I remember the gut punch, not having the money, knowing this is going to be a— This is not going to be cheap. What's worse is a public Facebook post, because that was at least just an email, like customer complaining. But when it goes to public, now you get really nervous. I still remember when there was one project when we gave the estimate to knock down all the weeds around their house. Now around their house, there was like 6 to 8 feet of gravel around their entire house between their house and the fence, just gravel all the way around. But they let it get overgrown for probably 6 or 12 months. And there was a lot of just really thin pieces of grass that were like 12 to 24 inches. And we made it very clear in the estimate, we're going to knock the grass down and then we're going to spray it. And I think it was like for a few hundred bucks. It was really clear. It was like, use weed whackers, knock down below 3 inches and spray. It would literally take 2 to 3 days if we're going to pull all these weeds by hand, like all these individual little strands of grass. Sure enough, the customer posts all these photos of dead grass all about yay tall all around her house. And we were like, what in the world? And she's posting about how we're doing all sorts of like not only just price gouging, but she went like discrimination and all these crazy things. Like, what in the world? Turns out she's like a local influencer and there's hundreds of people posting on and commenting on her post locally. I'm like, what in the world are we going to do? My $300 bid would have to be $3,000 if we were going to handpick every single weed. And furthermore, by pulling out these little individual strands, I knew that all like half of the weeds Their roots would be stuck in the grass and would just come in the ground underneath the gravel and just pop right back up. It's not like it is dirt where I can just like till the whole thing up. It's gravel. So I was like, look, ma'am, we are planning, like, we knock the thing down, we spray it so it actually kills the roots. And within a matter of a couple of weeks, you will not see these weeds. They're just going to shrivel up and die. That is what ended up happening. And she did end up taking the post down once exactly that thing happened. But there was a bunch of back and forth and we got so many negative reviews. People bombarded our Yelp with negative stuff. It was crazy. And I remember how powerless I felt in that, in that situation. But it was a wake-up call. Things like estimate notes got to be dialed in. Videos of exactly what we're going to do have to be shareable with the customer, not just for the crew, but the ability to share with the customer. But I know what it's like, especially when you don't have like an attorney and then someone threatens legal action. It's a gut punch. Take these as warning signs. Take these as wake-up calls that I've got to create better systems. I've got to simplify. I've got to make sure that there are videos and pictures and the estimate notes are dialed in and there is a clear path using the software of exactly everything, what was said, what was promised and what was delivered on. And I'm going to make sure I have a card on file so I can actually charge them next time. Okay, so this whole fiasco with this customer could have been completely solved. That's what makes me so mad about it. It's a solvable problem. And that was to have an estimate video. And that's why inside of HomeWorks, inside the Field Force mobile app, we've made it where you can attach a video over 12 minutes long directly inside the Field Force mobile app. And then it's seen very easily on the customer portal inside of the CRM for the office and the admin, as well as inside the mobile app. And it's all stored natively on the app. You don't have to use Google Drive or WhatsApp links or YouTube links. This allows you to communicate directly with the customer. It allows you to keep a paper trail, video trail, of exactly what was accepted. And so this sort of massive fiasco is completely avoidable just by having estimate videos. We didn't have HomeWorks 4 or 5 years ago when this happened, But if I did, I would've saved myself a lot of reputational risk and damage that was done to my local business simply due to the fact that I never got on video while I was telling the customer I was going to do. So go check it out. HomeWorks, the Field Force mobile app, super useful. The 13th wake-up call is when a competitor with worse work but better systems passes you. I remember when we had a paver job, it was about a $13,000, very small paver job, but we had done work for this customer in the past. But I didn't know that they had a deadline coming up and they had to get the job done. Now, I knew this customer was price insensitive and I was like, okay, we've done work for them in the past. I can wait a few days to get the quote to them. Well, sure enough, I lost the job to some other competitor that was more expensive but was able to get the job done sooner. Honestly, probably about the same amount of time when we would have got the job done, but they got the quote back to them within a matter of 3 hours and I probably took about 3 to 4 days. So I lost not only the $13,000 job, I lost out on this customer that had already given us a ton of work, probably about $40,000 worth of work on their property. And that was the day I woke up to the fact that someone that did less quality work than me was winning my jobs because they had better systems. And you could argue the fact that they maybe just weren't busy because they were not as good of a contractor. I was crazy busy. However, better systems means saving the customer time. Better systems mean giving the customer what they value. And in this case, they valued speed. And so it is a wake-up call when people that you know, you can outcompete with them on price, you can outcompete with them on the quality of the service, the care for the customer, but they still beat you. Why? They have systems. Systems and processes that are repeatable and they constantly are able to just consistently deliver on those promises. You're like, Well, I'm going to be the fine dining 5-star restaurant that every single dish is custom. Or are you going to be the McDonald's that every single time the burger looks the same regardless of if you're in Japan, China, or the US? The burger looks the same. And everyone rags on that because, like, fast food and McDonald's is so bad. Okay, look, one of them has billions of dollars. The other one struggles with one location. And so if you want to be able to build a business that runs without you, if you want to have processes and systems that can actually beat All the people that are so into the craft of doing this, sir. Oh my, quality is the best. I have the best work ever. You could very well beat that competitor if you just have systems and processes, because that's what happened to me. I did better work, I had a better price, and still someone beat me because they had better systems to get the estimate to the customer faster. The 14th wake-up call is when you cannot take a real vacation without checking your phone constantly. As you grow the business, you have been rewarded for this in the past, which is constantly staying busy. Packing every single minute, jamming it full of productivity. And you get addicted to this feeling of being useful. And this is why many times I actually see owners become the bottleneck of their business is they love the feeling of being needed because they have the answer for every single aspect of the business since they grew it from zero. And this is many times the thing that limits you to go from $1 million to $3 million, because at $3 million, there's going to be things you don't know how to do that need to get done, and you'll have to rely on people systems and other talent inside the organization to get those things done, not yourself. And if you get to go on a vacation, you're constantly looking at your phone all the time. It's like, whoa, whoa, we're here with our family. You started the business so you can spend time with your family, and now financially you can actually do it. And here you are looking at your phone constantly. I'm amazed at people that become successful and then they live addicted to this thing right here. It's like it is their taskmaster. It's like, oh, I want to— I don't want to have a boss. And so I'm going to do this entrepreneurship thing and leave my 9 to 5. And then this becomes your boss. This becomes the thing that tells you what to do 24/7. And look, you're looking at the worst of the worst here. And I had to really break this habit when I got married because like, this can't be my boss 24/7. This I will control. I will turn off the notifications. I'll have times where it does not ring. I'll make sure that only certain people can get through to me because I'm not addicted to this thing. And furthermore, When I take time off, when I go on a vacation, it's not going to rule my life. And if that's happening, use this as an early warning signal that we don't yet have systems in the business. Because if you have to be so important and your answers and you solving every problem in the business is so important, the business is not yet in a place to run without you. And if it can't run without you, it's not going to be a great asset to keep yourself. And many times you will become a servant to the business instead of the business serving you. Number 15, you hit a revenue goal and feel nothing. This happened a couple of years ago when I went out to Tennessee for a turnaround at Attaboy Lawn Care. And the day I showed up was in mid-December. They hit $1 million year-to-date revenue for the first time ever. The year prior, they had done like $800,000. The day I showed up, literally the day, they crossed $1 million. Now, most of the time when a business owner hits 7 figures for the first time in a year, It's kind of a good reason to take the family out for dinner, be excited, have a little company party. There was no emotion whatsoever. It is not embarrassing. The fact that you have built a million-dollar business, like the fact that we just passed that for the first time and that we have no celebration in terms of like, you did something right, hit the revenue goal and you don't feel anything. It's like most of us, if you rewind 5 or 10 years ago and if you told yourself back then that you were going to make the revenue and profit even that you make today, You'd probably be like, "No way, that's crazy." I still remember thinking if I could just make 7 figures, $1 million in annual revenue, like everything would be set. I would probably just go and serve over in Africa with the orphans that I had met. I was like, if I can just get to $1 million, everything's off. Like, I can just go do that. Because when I was 18 years old, right before I started Augusta, I went to Africa and Kenya and was able to do a bunch of work in and around Nairobi at orphanages and clinics. I thought when I come back, if I can just build a million-dollar business, I'm out. Like, I will get a manager. I don't need to make a lot of money, but I'll go over and just spend a ton of time with them. And then you get to $1 million and, oh, I'm going to go to $5 million. Oh, I'm going to go to $10 million. Oh, I'm going to go to $100 million. All of a sudden, this revenue goal keeps moving. And so give yourself permission to, first off, feel excitement. It's okay to feel excited when you hit a milestone. And furthermore, when you hit that goal, if it's actually causing a bunch of anxiety because the bigger the business, the bigger the problems, that in and of itself is a problem. This should be an early warning sign that the business doesn't have systems in place. There's not things that as the business grows, you should actually get economies of scale. The business should actually make more profit. You should be able to afford better stuff for your crew and therefore make it easier to train them. You have better hiring practices. You get better quality talent. You should be able to afford better managers. If those things aren't happening as you grow and you're hitting all these revenue goals that you had always dreamed of having and there's no excitement, There's no celebration. We've done something terribly wrong in building the business. So now, as you have any of these warning signs and they're popping up, do the hard work. I implore you, do the hard work. I didn't try to solve your problems in this video. These are early warning signs that something needs to be done. Action needs to be taken. I'm happy to help you. MikeAndes.com/Turnaround. I'll fly out to your place and try to help you turn around the business. Read a book, listen to a podcast, watch a course. Go talk to one of your competitors and try to learn from them. But ultimately realize that this early warning signal is just an indication that if you don't change anything, you will lead to a crash. Now, if these resonated with you, watch this video here where I visit a business after a business owner had actually tried to take his own life and he got the help he needed and turned the business around. I think it'll be super helpful for you.