18 months left

Welcome to Mike Andy show. It's been a while. I was away for 30 days on a challenge, starting a business from scratch. If you haven't seen it, check out the main channel. But today I want to talk about the fact that I only have 18 months left. We're halfway through 2023. And I said three and a half years ago that within five years, it would become painfully obvious that Augusta Lawn Care has a unique advantage that is unreplicatable. And So I have 18 more months to make that happen. And today I want to talk about kind of my plan to do that. Now, some people, first off, I do these, like, random times of the day. This is like right when I woke up. And so, yes, there's moisturizer. And so you're literally getting a glare from the lights. It's great. But I wanted to talk about what my plan is over the next 18 months, because not so much about my strategy, because that's really inconsequential. What I want to make a point about here is you need to figure out what makes you tick in terms of goals and what pushes you. Some people telling other individuals about what their. Their goals are, they feel like they jinx themselves, or they feel like if they tell other people, it holds them too accountable and it puts too much pressure on them, and then they can't perform, and they'd rather just, you know, keep all of that energy inside. That's fine. That's great for me. I thrive on pressure and pressure on myself. And so pressure on myself to succeed, pressure on myself to become better, pressure myself to improve. And so when I put my goals out there and I kind of make those statements, if it's a lot of pressure on me to deliver, and I know that's what pushes me to achieve more, work harder, push through long nights, increase my risk tolerance, spend more money on the businesses and not on my personal life, because I've put these things out there. So this is just, again, a replicate of that. And that is me giving the next 18 months of what we're going to be doing to make sure that by the time I hit five years, someone can look at Augusta Lawn Care and starting their own business and be like, it is impossible to create what they've done at Augusta Lawn Care. And it makes. It's painfully obvious that I should just join. And so. And I don't do these to brag or anything. This is simply a way for me to put out there in the public what my goals are. And then it holds me extremely Accountable. And when, you know, like the other night, It's Friday night, 12 midnight, I'm on a call with our AI team out in the UK and going over, you know, reviewing calls from our AI robot. That's not fun, that's not exciting, that's not what most 27 year olds want to be doing on their Friday night. But this sort of pressure I put on myself by putting this out there is what allows me to do that and be super thrilled and enjoy every single step of it. And so I enjoy the process of building. I enjoy the process of creating something. And it's been from when I was a kid, I always enjoyed building things up, like roller coaster, tycoon, mall tycoon. All those like computer games that I played were simply just the tycoon games, which was like building something up, making it profitable. Monopoly, tycoon, like all of those was simply a way for me to build things up and sell them and create something of value. And I always loved that. And so when I talk about, you know, this quote unquote pain that, you know and doing things that are stressful or putting pressure on myself is like, I love that. That is what makes me thrive and go. And if I lost that, I would lose a lot of meaning and purpose in my life. And so let me be very clear, this is not like I'm putting myself through anything. This is what I love to do. And if you put me on vacation for a week, within one or two days I'd be wanting to jump back in and do that to some extent. And so some people would call that painful or torturous or whatever, but they probably aren't built that way. But when it comes to the next year and a half, what I'm planning to do is there's really three things that we are working on that will become clearer and clearer over the next year and a half as to how it gives us such a moat. At Augusta Lawn Care one is the AI robot that we have been developing for, my goodness, six months now, eight months. This was for the beginning of the year. So yeah, eight months with command center. And that's going to allow us. We already, as of right now, are answering phone calls 24 7. There will never be a missed call during hours, after hours, on the weekends or on the holidays. There will never be a missed call. Now, right now it's relatively rudimentary of what that AI can do. It can mostly take incoming calls and just take contact information, lead requests, and then based upon like 70 different scenarios. Now, of where that call goes, there's over 300 scenarios that a call could go when someone calls in. And so we're only, like, scratching about a third of them right now. And that's mostly incoming leads. Phase two, we will be working on the rest of this year, and that is figuring out how to do more customer service tasks and dealing with complaints, et cetera. Phase three, what I'm really excited, I'll talk about in a second, and that is integrating with Copilot, because once we can do that, the AI will be able to take payments, it'll be able to tell customers when they're on the schedule, It'll be able to skip visits, It'll be able to accept estimates, It'll be able to go through estimates and read them to the customers. That's all. Phase three, that's coming in probably a year or two years down the road because we're going to be working on this a ton. And the reason these type of technologies are important to me is because inflation is. Technology is deflationary, which means it drives the cost of everything down. And the reason these are so important is because I need Command center to become cheaper, while at the same time, the wages that I have to spend for Command center to operate are going up, like, dramatically. All of us know wages are going up. The same thing is true inside office workers. And so in order for us to stay up with that and not drive the cost of Command center through the roof and double it to, like, industry norms in terms of cost, we have to have technology. And so the AI has to be there. The Copilot CRM, the second part has to be developed more. And so again, the next six months, like, we're playing catch up. I've been pretty clear about that. But then next year, we'll start doing things that no one else is doing in terms of automated scheduling and several other things that we're using from the AI to be able to do. However, the AI calling that we use at Command center will never work at any other company besides Augusta because we've. It takes so much tailoring to how we operate. It's incredible. And so for everyone that's like, oh, like, you're like, plug this AI bot into every phone and like, it'll just, like, do all of your customer service. That is absolute garbage. You're going to have to hire extremely talented dev workers for at least the next three to five years before this becomes super commonplace. They will become plugins and features that you can buy, I believe, for things like restaurants or retail stores that will be much cheaper in the next 12 to 24 months. But for actually customization to a service based business based upon your service set, how you collect data, asking specific follow up questions, being able to tap into your CRM and be able to do certain things, that's going to be reserved only for Augusta because it costs us so much money to tailor it. And I don't believe it's gonna, I believe it's gonna be another five to 10 years before the average small business owner is a service based business doing a million dollars or less in revenue is gonna have any possible chance of tapping into that technology. And so our goal is by the time that comes, we've developed the software so much to where it's inter. It's, it's able to communicate with copilot, it's able to hire an onboard employees. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff we want to do down the road. But over the next year and a half, the goal is build it up to the, where it can handle way more call scenarios at command center and not just be a lead gatherer, but also actually start to disseminate information, tell people when they're on the schedule, resolve disputes, put things on the schedule like to DOS automatically based upon a conversation. For example, like someone complains, okay, we can create a yellow slip inside the CRM and assign it to the person that was last on the job. That can be done with AI. That's going to be what we're working on over the next year and a half. That'll cost us a lot of money. And so how we're handling this is the cost of development. Like once you develop the software, not a lot of cost. Like I'd say it's, you know, 20% the cost to maintain it, but it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. So in order to be able to achieve that, the only reason we are able to do this is because we have so many incoming calls and the volume from Augusta that I'm able to, okay, look, going to charge you the same amount per minute as a on AI as we would a regular phone operator. And that's going to allow us to be able to continue spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the technology. Because you just hire two really good AI devs that are like in the highest degree of demand right now. Like they know AI and they know how to interpolate with voice. It's extremely expensive. And so to hire just two or three of those people, let alone have multiple teams and across the country or across the world. Now it's extremely expensive. So that's how we're handling that. I believe that will drive down the cost, keep the cost of Command center very, very cheap and reduce the call times as it begins to be able to handle tasks that would otherwise take 15 seconds to navigate to secondary touches to ask the franchisee something. We'll be able to do it immediately now with AI once we're able to communicate with Copilot CRM. So number one, we've got to develop the AI for the phone calls. Much, much better, keeping the cost down for Command Center. And then that parlays into when Copilot is able to interpolate with the AI and be able to do a lot more with it. That's two is like Copilot CRM has to be done more. I look at Copilot as the highway network. We need to be able to branch off into all these different technologies. But it'll bring it all together back to Copilot. And so the third part of the technology that we're building is P4P pay for performance. If you don't know idea what that is, P4P software.com you can go there and get free training and stuff, but basically it's paying your employees a percentage of labor revenue instead of an hourly wage. And so we've used this.

System for years. It's only been the past year and a half that we've made the software public basically so that we can sell it because the Gustin lawn care franchise you get for free. And so that way we can keep the cost down of constantly developing the software. And so with P4P software, my goal is to hopefully solve the labor problem over the next few years with Augusta Lawn Care because the AI is able to take over a lot more as time goes on from a command center. And we have other strategies we're working on which I'm not going to talk about. As we get less and less, more and more, the AI and the technology can take over. That time from Command center needs to be allocated towards solving the biggest issue for our franchisees, which is labor and finding employees. So we have a lot of plans for that. But they'll be able to actually get fine applicants, hire vet and literally set them up onboard them inside payroll. And then employees are just showing up to franchisees pre vetted and ready to work. I think that's going to happen in a couple of years. But P4P software is going to be once they are onboarded and once they Are trained up. It's going to be a live interface that interacts with copilot. So now there'll be a live dashboard on their phone of exactly how much they're making in live time. They're going to see a live leaderboard of all their team members, how much they're making as the day goes forward, and they're going to be able to see a graph before their day starts of exactly how much money they're going to make and going to show all their little jobs, if they're doing like a mowing route, for example, all their little jobs broken up and show exactly how much money they can make. And then they're going to show progress towards that goal. And so before the day even starts, they're like, oh, man, I can make $248 a day, man. Let's see if I can't do this in seven hours and I'll make x amount per hour. Like, they'll be able to do that math in their head and they'll be able to see the actual damage that yellow slip does when it like brings it down on the graph. All very visual. So we have a lot of plans for P4P software. I believe it's going to be the thing that really makes P4P stick and make sense to employees Because a lot of it is just getting buy in from them. Them understanding it. The visualization of it in live time is going to be super important. So when they click complete on copilot, they go to P4P and boom, they just made $24. The next one complete. Oh, there's another 16. And they keep going. It becomes a game of how quickly can I do this? And it's going to be much more of a speedometer. And then it's like, hey, how fast? How efficient can I be? And of course they would see the damage that yellow slips and poor quality do. But that would be the goal is to be able to take all three of these technologies, have them all speaking together. And I do believe we can achieve that in the next year and a half to be able to hit the goal of five years. So that's my plan. I'm putting it out there. Whether or not you do this type of thing to your friends, family, et cetera, I understand there's pressure that is created when you do this. I thrive on it. It is what makes me drive and. And go. Why I still live very on very, very small means I don't buy expensive, flashy things. Because when I look at those flashy expensive things. I see that as a detriment to the goals that I've put out. And the stress that I'm under is solved by taking that money that would otherwise be spent on those fun things or exciting, flashy things and put towards actually deploying energy and resources towards these goals. So that's my plan, and we'll see if it happens.