⁠19 Years of HARD Business Truths in 41 Minutes

In this video, I will share 19 years of brutally honest business advice. I started mowing grass when I was 11 years old. Now I am 30 years old. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 200 locations around the world. I'm also the founder of Homework Software, where over a million dollars of daily transactions are made for home service businesses. Number one, excruciating hard work is required for five to 10 years, but that skill won't get you to 3 million. So I've always thought of my career in 10 year swings. And when you think about your career in 10 year swings, it allows you to get past the ups and the downs and the really low moments when you want to give up because you've just resigned. The fact that this is going to take me an entire decade and if you're 20 or 30 and you're in a rush, you realize that hey, if this doesn't work out and I apply 10 full years to this, I can always have 5 or 6 other swings after that. Bottom line is if you spend a full 10 years to any industry really trying to hone your craft, you're probably going to be better than 99.9% of other people that give up along the way. Now, when I first started Augusta Lawn care, I worked 80 to 90 hours a week doing estimates during the day and paperwork at night. But Augusta still wasn't profitable. It wasn't a hustle problem, it it was a systems problem that I couldn't outwork. And so going from zero to a million dollars in annual revenue, usually this comes down to your ability to sell. And this is why some people can grow very quickly to seven figures. After that though, just more work doesn't make sense because there's so many budget hours on the schedule, there's so many jobs that have to get done. You just putting in more time working on the evening, working on the weekend, on holidays isn't actually enough to filled the holes of the business. And so as I passed a million dollars, I started realizing I needed leadership skills. I need to know my numbers, I need to make sure I actually had systems and processes in place. Because if I was off by 10% or 20%, I couldn't just work a couple hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I had an entire day or week worth of work. If I miscalculated things slightly, this is remind me of a turnaround from Casey from Epic Lawn and Pest. And he really had to develop himself as a leader because he went from making about $300,000 in annual revenue and they needed an acquisition of another company that was doing over a million dollars.

Called on a z sprayer. And I was like, oh, I met him. I called on this. Okay, I'm gonna make a deal. Okay, cool. We could use it because we got the other spray truck. And I was like, I'm tired of walking. I'll take it. Thanks. A week later, dude calls, goes, hey, Casey, you interested in taking over this company? I was like, like, what are you talking about? I was just like, what? So we had a sit down. He goes, I'm going through a nasty divorce. Do you want to take over? I was like, how? Okay, how do you do all that?

And so when we went to do the turnaround, he was doing like $1.2 million in annual revenue. Tripling your business through an acquisition overnight can be very difficult because your whole identity as a business owner has to change. When he was doing 300, $400,000 in annual revenue, it was him and his wife out in the field cranking, getting work done.

Well, what I do is I pay bills, I make sure the guys have money. I do the banking, I do taxes, I do payroll, I do bids. Kind of help Maria. Maria does all of the scheduling now.

His identity had to shift from a technician into an owner and a leader of 15, 20 employees. And he was really, really struggling.

I must be a little tired, babe. I'm going to let them know. Larry's not showing.

So they got to work together. Who did Xavier go with? Is he still here?

No, I think he went with the.

Boys, Nate and Jim.

How?

Well, maybe not. I don't know. Maybe he is here.

I don't know.

It looks like he's not here.

He didn't know any of his numbers. Now just getting the work done wasn't enough. When you have one or two employees doing three or four hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue, you're making up so much of the actual labor revenue yourself that you can kind of hide not knowing your numbers. A job or two go south, who cares? You just put in more time on the weekend. But as the business scales, you will not be able to outwork a broken business model.

So, alf, that's a third party. I was talking about through the Walmart thing. They, they owe us right now. It's been a struggle. That's the, the cash flow is the hardest part. Those guys owe us over 90 some thousand right now.

There you have it. Casey said the first location at $175,000 in year one, which come to find.

Out, isn't the case way more than 175. Yes, we had almost 400.

Knowing your numbers and making sure you're profitable in every job and making sure that if you do make mistakes, you're able to calculate why that happened and adjust that in the future is very important. That's the difference between hitting a million and. And getting to $3 million in annual revenue. Number two, a real entrepreneur builds a business that can survive their absence. Most owners only discover this through crisis. And that was what happened to me. I got in an accident in the pto, the power takeoff of one of the dump trucks, when we were about 8 to $900,000 in annual revenue. And I was still running around doing estimates then driving materials to job sites, bringing equipment. I was all over the place. I was in sales, I was in operations, and I was also helping my admin person in the office. What's exposed is when I got an accident and was in the hospital and in repair for a couple weeks and couldn't do the work, it really showed the truth. It exposed that my company had to stall operations until I got better. And so I was literally on the hospital bed facetiming my crew, walking them through the next project because I didn't have systems in place that would run without me being there. And everyone laughs at me for making. Talking about systems and putting software like homeworks into your business if this happens to you. And I know that feeling is extremely debilitating, and it's extremely stressful to know that if you're not in the business every day, the business will stop. And that's what happened almost for two weeks. And if I would have had a family or children or dependents at the time, I. I probably would have gone bankrupt. Fortunately, I was able to cobble things together and get back in the field and fix the business over the course of the next 12 months and fix the systems that failed when I wasn't there. And so one of the systems was so I wouldn't have to be video calling someone on a hospital bed. Is every single time I go to a job site as the estimator, I'm gonna make a video. I'm gonna attach it to the Fieldforce mobile app from Homeworks. It's gonna compress that file and keep that video attached to that property or to that visit. That way, when the crew shows up, they don't have to contact me. I don't have to be on the job site, but rather they can just Watch the video and get the job done. These type of systems allow for the business to operate when the business owner is not there. Number three, your profit and loss statement is hiding skeletons in the closet. Your P and L and revenue earned report, also known as accrual accounting, is hiding the reason you have no money in the bank. A fast growing, profitable business can go bankrupt because of this problem. And there's a lot of times I go on a turnaround show and I get a P and L that shows profit and they're very confused. The owner's like, why am I not making any money? Why is it hard to make payroll? And yet on my profit and loss statement, it says I have $150,000 in profit. The bottom line, the profit and loss statement doesn't show the true story. It hides the skeletons in the closet. And in order to really see the health of a business, I, I need to see the balance sheet. So we go back to the story of Casey from Epic Lawn and Pests. On his P and L that I received prior to showing up, it looked profitable. The business looked profitable on paper, like 8 or 10% profit. But on a $1.2 million annual revenue business, not so horrible when you grew so quickly. But what really the skeletons in the closet was shown on the balance sheet. And if you show just accrual, I. E. When I earn the money, it shows up on my profit and loss statement. That can hide the fact that you're not actually collecting any money on the cash side.

What was the email they said yesterday? That we're on schedule.

No, he said he was going to try and put us on the schedule for payout. Yeah.

So just because I complete the job and I earn the revenue does not mean I actually collected the revenue from the customer and it ended up in my bank account. And this is what was happening to you, Casey. The profit and loss statement, the accrual accounting method that was given to me based upon how much revenue we earned looked very different than how much money was in the bank. There was almost no cash in the bank account. They had over $150,000 of overdue invoices that was owed from a third party logistics company that was the contractor to Walmart and they did all their street sweeping, all their landscaping and a whole bunch of outdoor maintenance. How much do we have in total receivables, like owed to us now? I know we have the one big, like 100 grand, but how much total?

Like 240,000.

Yeah, slow pay, buddy.

That's what I'm saying it wasn't just Alf is the one who owes the most.

It's like half of that almost.

Right. And then there's other properties that owe 10,000. There's one that owes.

And are those all over 30 days overdue?

Well, see, and then it comes back that. So one owes 11,000, but that's a 90 day payout.

But you can't have $150,000 tied up with one customer. That was just one customer. Over $200,000 of overdue invoices across just a few customers. And that was all hidden because on the accrual, on the earned revenue, they look like they were doing fine.

I've seen the hardest part is the money flow. It's easy to go make the money. Sure, yeah, we'll go. We'll go do it. But it's receiving it.

I've actually got to collect that money in. In order to ever see it in my bank account. So Casey had over $200,000 in overdue invoices, 150,000 of which was to this contractor for Walmart. And then he also had a payday loan with over 40% interest. There's like 70 or $80,000 of this payday loan that he took just to make payroll.

I mean, our business loan that we got was only enough to actually get caught up.

Okay, how much was that?

85,000.

85,000. And that was SBA or bank loan or what was that?

SBA.

What's the monthly payment on the 85?

27 a week?

2,700. Oh, this isn't an SBA loan then.

No, I told her not to do it.

Oh, she did it anyway.

Where'd you get that 85 from?

We personally don't qualify for bank loans because we don't have a credit score of that to qualify for that amount to cover. So I had to go through one that I found on a payment process.

Yeah.

Okay.

In addition to the fact that it over $300,000 of debt that he was paying to the previous owner that had moved out of state. Why was he paying them? Because he bought that business. And it looks like a great deal, man. This business is doing over $1 million in revenue. We're going to buy it for like $300,000. We're going to get all this equipment. Looks like a slam dunk deal. Until once he got the business, he realized that all the accounts were losing money, customers were not paying, and. And all the equipment was broken down. And so all of a sudden, what looked like $1 million opportunity became a $300,000 liability on his balance sheet. And so the profit and loss statement that you're running based upon earned revenue inside of your software, you also got to look at what's the actual amount of cash in the bank account. This is cash flow. How quickly do I collect on the money from customers once I send them an invoice? I'm not willing to wait 30, 60, 90 days to get paid on an invoice. Otherwise I'm just giving an interest free loan to my customer. Inside homeworks. If someone's overdue, I'm charging the fees automatically because I am not a bank and I'm not going to give an interest free loan. I've got to make sure my cash flow stays intact. Otherwise a profitable, fast growing business like Casey's can go bankrupt. This morning I was on a leadership call on a live webinar and from the team at Service Autopilot talking about their product from 2025 and what they're doing in 2026. And so happens they're still working on the mobile app that they promised to us eight years ago at SA4. And ultimately their leadership is why I decided to start Copilot. There's no vision of the future. There's no talk of the members. There was no live Q and A. The members weren't even involved. And so this is why I'm so passionate about having Copilot soon to be homeworks really being the forefront of software for home service businesses. Because once private equity gets into these companies, they simply raise prices, cut support and cut product development. And it's obvious. And so if you are considering joining Copilot, I highly recommend this be the perfect time of year to do it and join a software where we really care about you growing your business. We have onboarding calls, calls throughout the year to make sure you're hitting your goals and growing your business. Go check out copilot CRM.com today. We'll see you there. Number four, most home service businesses don't have a leads and advertising problem. They have a sales and speed problem. I go to turnarounds and almost every single time the owner thinks that they need to get more leads in order to be able to grow the business. Makes sense. I get more leads, I grow the business. But in reality, if you think about it like this, marketing is getting leads in the top of the funnel. But your sales process is the funnel that takes those leads and phone calls, emails, estimate request forms and channels them into a paying customer. Here's what's crazy. Over 70% of homeowners they hire the very first estimate they receive. So the best thing you can do as a solo operator or building a business is make sure your real advantage is responding fast to customers, responding fast to them when they request the estimate and then getting the quote to them in a very quick manner. Whether I am visiting them in person, I'm trying to get to their property within 24 hours, or whether is over the phone and I'm trying to give the pricing there and collect their card information, or if I'm using instant quotes from my website to give them the pricing, get the job accepted and the card on file. Regardless, I am trying to shrink the amount of time it takes to go from customers saying I have a problem to me offering the solution and collecting their payment speed. And that sales process is the thing we really want to focus on. I see time and time again where people think they need more leads at the top of that funnel. But in reality 70, 80% of those leads are somehow trickling out. They are leaking out of that sales process. Meanwhile they're like oh no, I have a 50% close rate. I have a 70% close rate. I close 90% of jobs. When reality that close rate only measures the the amount of estimates sent versus the estimates that are accepted. What it doesn't include is all the leakage around that. The amount of people that you never even got the quote to, the amount of people that accepted the estimate, but because you had taken so long, they found someone else by the time you actually got them on the schedule. It doesn't take into account the other parts of the sales process like getting a car on file or collecting deposit. I'm wanting to plug all those little holes and just doing that, the 2%, 5%, 10% improvements in my sales process means I could take the same number of leads coming in but double the amount of paying customers at the bottom of that sales funnel. Everyone thinks they need more leads when reality it's because we're lazy and we haven't fixed the sales process. Number five, seasonality is a feature, not a bug. Exploit it. Most home service businesses are seasonal. I analyzed over 250 home service businesses and revealed that bad quarters weren't caused by weather. They were caused by how the business was structured. If I just replaced the worst quarter with the middle of the other 3/4, the median, it doubled the profits in most cases. Think about that for a moment. If you take your four quarters, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, take those and rank them Based upon profitability. If you were just to take your last your worst performing quarter and replace it with your second performing quarter, in most cases you would double your profits. The advantage of being able to figure out your off season is so valuable because when your competition is playing defense is exactly when you want to play offense. And so if you can figure out how to cross sell, upsell your existing customers during the off season, offer a service that none of your competition is offering you. It unlocks a huge growth opportunity. Because when your competition is getting rid of their employees and laying them off, you can be hiring them. When they're turning off their ads, you're turning ads on, which allows you to be able to get lower customer acquisition cost. And when they're selling off equipment because they're not using the equipment, the trucks and they're trying to get rid of equipment they're not using, you can pick it up for pennies on the dollar. When your competition is on defense, you go on the offense. And for most home service businesses, they go on the defense during the off season. Off seasons kill home services do whatever you must to ensure you do not have an off season. Number six Reactive tasks Kill more home service businesses than the economy, competition or politics. The real cost of phone calls throughout the day for most home service businesses would boggle your mind. The emails that are dinging on your phone, you're switching from sales, then you're doing admin, then you're out in the field doing the. This constant switching cost is killing your business and it doesn't show up on a profit and loss statement. There's not a expense line item for switching costs, but in reality it is killing your day, your productivity, your efficiency and the amount of money you can earn, especially if you're in the field performing work. I think about every home service business being categorized as three different departments. Sales getting the work, operations doing the work, and admin getting paid for the work. All three functions are very important, but they are not the most important as you begin to grow the business. When I'm out in the field doing operations, doing the work, I don't want to be distracted with, well, I've got some estimates and all of a sudden got phone calls and emails. Oh, I've got to run payroll. Oh, Mr. Jones just called me back from a follow up phone call. Now I'm doing sales. Now I got to switch back to installing these pavers doing operations. This constant switching from sales to admin, admin to operations, operations to sales, sales back to operation. This constant switching throughout your day is crushing your business and it doesn't show up on a profit loss statement. But every single time you switch, you are reducing your efficiency. The same thing is true if you have a crew out on a route. You wonder why in the world does a two man crew take so much? They're not as efficient as a one man crew. Like a one man crew gets 10 jobs done. You, you would think that a two man crew would get 20 jobs done, but they don't. They get 16, maybe 17 jobs done. Why? Well, it's because they have more stops, they have more switching costs and every time you have a job on a route, there is getting in the truck, out of the truck, it's someone on their phone for a couple minutes. It's people finishing at the exact same moment as each other. Doesn't happen often. And so the same thing is true with you as a business owner. When you're switching from sales to admin, admin to operations, back and forth from thing to thing, your phone is dinging. Then a call comes in, you're distracted, you're going from follow up phone calls to doing the work. You're pouring down sweat and then someone calls the complaint. If you're switching from thing to thing to thing, you've got to get your attention back on the highest leverage task. I want to be able to get those things that are taking my time and are making me reactive off my plate as soon as possible. Things that make me reactive are things that pull me away from the thing I'm trying to focus on. If my main focus should be operations because I'm a solo operator, I don't want my phone ringing. I want to get someone to answer the phone for me. If my main objective as a million dollar business is to get more sales, I don't want someone to be pulling back an operation to fix a flat tire. That those sort of tasks make me reactive, they make me jumping back into lower leverage tasks in the business. As I grow the business, my ability to keep myself from those lower leverage tasks and keep me from being reactive allows me stay in control of my calendar and focus on the highest priority things. And as I move up the business chain, I'm going to start delegating admin. As I grow the business further, I'll delegate operations and doing the work. And then as I begin to grow, I'm going to only focus on sales and eventually even hire an estimator so I can delegate the sales. Position number seven, you can out hustle your workload, but you can't out hustle bad math. As a solo operator, bad pricing can be masked by hard work. And I know it's like to be there working crazy amounts of hours, but it's really because you're only charging 40, 50 bucks an hour. As you grow and you have to pay employees, you have to pay for insurance and you really have to find your true profitability and know your numbers. So in the past, I just make up for it with volume and harder work. And I understand you've got to put in the time, you've got to put your head down and work ethic is certainly important. But as you move from work ethic being your highest leverage task to leadership and be able to lead your team, you cannot outwork a poorly planned schedule. Once you have employees, they're not going to want to work seven days a week because you misquoted a job. You got to make sure your budget hours and your schedule is accurate. In the past, you just made up for the inaccuracy of estimates by working harder on the weekends. You just made up for poor pricing by making sure you worked in the evenings on the holidays to catch up. But as you grow the business, knowing your numbers, knowing your schedule and how many budget hours you can actually get accomplished is very, very important. Number eight, fix your storefront before marketing your sandwiches. This really shows the importance of your website. I think of your trucks, your vehicles out that are wrapped, they've painted, they look great as the signage. And if you're going to a store or you're going to a gym or any sort of physical retail space, the first thing you're doing when you're driving down the road is you're looking for the sign. And that sign points you to go inside the parking lot and find the storefront. So when it comes to your business in home services, people are driving around, they're seeing your trucks, those are your signs. And it points them to go to your storefront, which is your website. Most of us don't have a physical office or shop space that people are walking into every single day making the decision to purchase. But what they are doing is they're seeing your truck and, and they're looking you up online. And so your storefront is your website. In my opinion, you've got to make sure that you have the expectation of premium from the time they see your sign time they see your storefront. And everyone is so worried about marketing their services, how great their products are. This is the equivalent of having a sub sandwich shop and having the Most incredible sub sandwiches. And the sign out next the road, remember, that's your trucks look great. People pull into the parking lot, and then they see your storefront. But this sandwich shop, the front is like the signage is falling down. The facade is all moldy. The lights aren't working correctly. It's dingy. There's a bunch of cobwebs. That storefront, I'm not gonna walk into that as a customer thinking that I'm gonna get a great sub sandwich. In fact, I might just leave, because that storefront does not scream to me premium. And I don't care how good their sandwiches are inside. They have the best ingredients, the best chefs. They take so much care for their product. I will not even walk in the door if I don't think that storefront conveys the value that I am trying to have. After seeing their signage, their signage look great. And so many home service businesses have the same thing. They're talking about how great their products are and their services and how well their employees are trained and everything is dialed in. But customers see your trucks, like, wow, great truck. Then they go online and see your storefront, and they don't even want to enter the door. And people wonder why customers, why they always say I'm overpriced because there's mismatched expectations. They're expecting a premium product because that's what you talked about. They're expecting this based upon the fact they saw your trucks, your uniforms out in the field. But when they go online, when they see the storefront to your business, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I can't even see the contact information. I don't see any reviews. I don't see any pictures of their truck or their uniforms that I saw out in the field. In my opinion, when it comes to a home service business, I need to sign my truck to scream premium. I need them to then go to my storefront, pull into the parking lot. My website, that's what they're seeing. This is premium as well. And ideally, I see the same truck and the same uniform, and the same branding that I saw on the truck is now on the website. It's right there. A picture, a video showing me exactly what I saw before. So if you're wondering why customers keep asking for discounts, it's likely that your storefront is screaming cheap and ultra discount. If you want customers to stop asking for discounts, you. You'll have to have that storefront. That website have a premium look, and that's why we created homeservice web design.com you go check out all the work that we do. Get some ideas of what your website could look like. Number nine, don't be near sighted. Money isn't the only form of payment when you start out. A couple of years ago, I went to North Carolina and started a location over the course of 30 days. And the first couple of weeks was tough. We were trying to get Google Ads and Facebook ads. We're doing every door direct mail. Nothing was really clicking. But when you're first starting out, instead of trying to think about getting cash from customers, they can pay you in other forms, such as a Google review. They can refer you to their neighbors and you can upsell them other stuff. And so about halfway through that challenge, two weeks in, I started doing lower prices to get my foot in the door or even doing free services for things like property cleanups. Why? Because once I got my foot in the door and on the customer's property, I would sell them mowing service on a recurring basis. I would sell them bush trimming, I would ask them to introduce me to their neighbors, and I would ask for a Google review. If you're just getting started, there are intangible ways of payment that produce a long term value and a lot more value than the initial revenue you could have. So I see solo operators and people trying to grow their business being stuck on the fact that, oh no, I have a minimum of $500. I have a minimum charge. It's like, whoa, whoa. Why not just get your foot in the door and then sell them? Three other things that would allow you to make $5,000 instead of 500 by getting your foot in the door, getting an online review, getting referrals for all of their neighbors, and being able to upsell them other services. You could take the nearsightedness of a $500 ticket and turn that customer into $5,000 of lifetime value. Number 10, send emails and texts to upsell existing customers before going after cold traffic. Fix your website before spending $1 on ads in that order. Upsell website ads. I've seen it time and time again where owners are paying a bunch of money on Facebook ads or Google Ads or doing something to drive traffic. They have all these signs pointing people to their storefront. Their storefront stinks. It doesn't convert, it doesn't have good page load speed, it doesn't rank well on Google. People have to zoom in on a mobile device just to see the button or it's hard to find the estimate request form. These are the Type of little things that people wonder why Facebook ads don't work. Let's say Google Ads don't work. No. You're driving a whole bunch of traffic to a website that doesn't convert. But before I even run ads and before I even fix my website, I'm going to make sure I do the things that are free and from homeworks for free. You can send emails and text messages to your customers, and I'm going to ask them for other services that I offer and if I can serve them more. So if I'm offering them mowing and I'm already doing that service for them, I'm going to also let them know that I can do property cleanups, I can do winter services, I can do snow plowing, I can do Christmas lights. And I'm going to position those texts and, and those emails across the entire year to make sure that I'm not paying Google and Facebook for leads that I could otherwise just get for free from my existing customers. So before I spend money on ads, I'm spending money on my website and optimizing as much as possible. And before I spend money on my website, I'm upselling my existing customers using text, email, and even phone calls if you're small enough to make sure I get more leads from the customers to that already know, like and trust me, number 11. A business that feeds your ego will starve your family. Early on, when I started Augusta Lawn Care, I was trying to build the appearance of a legitimate company. Whole bunch of trucks, a nice office space like an acre with a couple skid steers and more dump trucks and a tree chipper, all this stuff. I built this really nice space out next to the road with a putting green, a huge sign. It was the appearance of looking good, the equipment, but the numbers didn't back it up. I built something that looked impressive but didn't make any money. This reminds me of Casey from Epic Lawns. We've already mentioned him. He was wanting to start another location, even though the current location that he was at being about 1.1, 1.2 million in revenue, was losing tons of money. And they had huge problems on their balance sheet. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to some of it had 40% interest. And he had huge amounts of money owed to him from customers that weren't paying him.

The factor, too, is the fact that Alf is so far behind, and since.

We'Ve moved over to Epic and combined, we don't get payments. And then, you know, and then it's like maybe Once every three to six months. This year, I think they've only made two.

And yet he was still thinking about, how do I grow, how do I expand?

We've doubled.

Yeah, but the worst thing, honestly, right now, Casey, that could happen, is you double the business again. You'll lose twice as much money.

All right?

The only way out is that we collect on the overdues and then we use that money to then change the business model. And change a business model means not doing 1.2 or 2 million or 4 million and definitely not going to Boise.

My biggest thing is I want to go tri state. I want to. My hometown is Boise, Idaho. I want to branch out because there's eight Walmarts over there.

How do I go to a new shiny service? He was like, oh, well, if we do street sweeping, we can get these street sweepers. And so what did that end up happening? He actually ended up having a street sweeper paid to him instead of his invoices that was owed from a contractor. So he had this big, massive parking lot, and they're like, hey, we owe you a bunch of money. Why don't we just pay you with a street sweeper? He's like, oh, that's a good idea. I could do street sweeping. All of a sudden, we're taking payment for invoices with street sweepers. And he was constantly thinking about growth and the next expansion and moving into new markets because that made him feel good. And all the optics of the business looked like epic. Lawns was crushing it. It was epic. But internally, the financial statements showed a different story. The more we can shed the appearance of looking good and having all the trappings of success, like a big fancy truck or a bunch of equipment, or that shop picture with all your crew standing out there, the bunch of equipment. That's not what I get excited about. I didn't get excited by a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, a money in the bank, cash flow from the business, and more importantly, the freedom that that allows the business owner to have the ability to be able to pay employees for their performance. Bonuses, profit sharing, have benefits like health insurance. These are things that I get much more excited about because that's what builds a real business. Not equipment, not trucks. Those are hunks of metal required as tools to make income and solve problems for our customers. Feeding your ego will absolutely to starving your business and your family. Number 12. Being busy is the most dangerous form of procrastination. Owners stay in the field a lot of times because it makes them feel productive. And if you got started in home services, a lot of times it's because you are good at doing the work, the operations, but being busy keeps you from taking the business to the next level. And a lot of us, when we look at admin, operations and sales, most of us don't like doing admin. So it's pretty easy for me to tell you, hey, go delegate. Someone answering the phone, doing email, doing Payroll, running your QuickBooks, get home service, CPA to run that stuff for you, great. Most of us don't have a problem with that. It's usually when people start getting 700, 800,000, $900,000 in annual revenue and they start needing to move from operations, doing the work to just focusing on sales, getting off of the truck and, and just focusing on sales. The challenging part is like, well man, now I just drive around, I don't feel like I get a lot done. I don't get to talk to customers and see the actual work getting done. And we have this identity crisis. And because we've always felt so good doing the work, but being busy and you filling in for your crew when someone drops out, you going to the end of the day and wrapping up a project to make sure it gets done right, these are very dangerous ways of procrastination, keeping you from doing the things like sales, follow up phone calls, building systems in the business that will allow the business to go to the next level. But we fill our time with operations and doing the work to avoid the harder discussions, the harder conversations, and the harder systems building required to take the business to the next level. Number 13. For many, a turnaround in their business requires pain. You won't change your systems until staying the same hurts more than fixing them. And I see this all the time on the turnaround show, but I see it mostly in my own personal life. When I had that accident underneath a dump truck and almost got killed, it wasn't my business model that made me implement pay for performance or making estimate videos and having pricing matrices and using budgeted hours. It was lying in a hospital realizing my business would collapse without me. That pain forced discipline. And I see this over and over with turnarounds. Until someone comes to an absolute crisis, they don't make changes. And so I hope that by you watching videos like this, you realize that your potential is so much greater when you're where you're currently at and you don't need to hit rock bottom. And if you are hitting rock bottom, realize that's a perfect point to jump off from the Story of Casey from Epic Lawns. This cash crunch was meaning he couldn't afford payroll. And this forced him to confront his low performing employees, customers that didn't pay, and the seller of the bad deal that he got for the business acquisition. They have good attorneys, they know what they're doing. Oh, right here.

Is this what you're trying to look for? So, like the promise to pay?

Okay, so you're paying. Okay, so you're actually paying $7,000 a month. These were the things that he really needed to focus on. These are the actual root problems inside the business. Low performance from employees, customers not paying, and this person that sold him a business that was completely trash. Those were the things he needed to confront. And the turnaround of Epic Lawns started when he realized that he couldn't stay the same any longer. And so the pain that you're feeling and the cash crunch and the anxiety and the stress, use that as the pivotal moment to say, I need a turnaround, I need help. I have a clear path in my head about how we can go up, but I'm the bottleneck and I need help. And I'm asking for your help. Whether it's getting help from someone else or just being honest with yourself and realizing there are two or three or four things you know you must do in the business, but you've been pushing them aside for so long. Use that stress the same way I used being on a hospital bed and almost having my life taken as a springboard to change the business for good. Number 14, you don't rise to your goals, you fail to your systems. I always think of this like rock climbing. When you're going up a mountain on a rock face, you'll have rope and then you also have these securing anchors that you'll put into certain joints, parts of the rock where you'll be able to, if you fell, you would fall back down and hit that anchor. You put those anchors in every, let's say 10 to 30ft. And when you put those anchors into the rock, you have to pause, reset, you have to create systems. You have to take some time. You can't keep growing and keep going up and up and up the mountain. And I see so often the times that people have massive goals and those goals drive them to keep growing the business. But it's okay to stop occasionally. It's okay to go into profit mode, raise your prices, create systems and then use those systems and that infrastructure to then grow sustainably to the next level. Because if something bad does happen, I don't want you falling to the very bottom of the mountain. I want you to fall back down 10 to 30ft, where you put your last system, your last anchor in. And so instead of having cataclysmic quits and failures to the business, you might lose a season, you might lose an employee, you might lose a customer, but you've created systems in place that you fall back to and then you can keep growing from there. Remember, you fail to your systems and so keep installing systems. And if that means you need to grow a little bit slower, if that means you need to take this year and not buy more trucks, not hire more people and just raise your prices, that's okay. Number 15, comparing yourself to other businesses is a fatal mistake. Whether it's influencers, people on Instagram, or your competition, what they say might be good advice for them and it might work for them, but the problem is that they're doing 5 million in revenue and you're doing 500,000. You are not the same size. This is why in the copy and paste millionaire book, I actually break into four different sections the size of business. Because what I do in sales, operations and admin is very different at every size of business. Comparing yourself to people that are ahead of you or behind you and at different size of business can lead to making fatal mistakes. Thinking all the time that this is good advice and it's not that they're trying to be facetious, it's not that they're trying to ruin your business by giving you this advice. It's just that that advice works for their size of business. What works for them won't work for you if you're at different sizes of business. So why waste time comparing and thinking about your competition instead of just fixing the mistakes, fixing the problems, and creating systems in your own business. Number 16, your breakthrough will come from solving the problem you've been avoiding the longest. This reminds me of a story of Devin from Creekside Cuts, a lawn care company that we visited to do a turnaround. And he was right. At that point where he was starting to become profitable, he was thinking about franchising the business. And he was constantly saying that his whole motive in franchising was to help his team and allow them to become general managers and own their own business.

He, additionally to talking about systems, wants to start franchising, has already started the process process of franchising his business. He does not have a second location, he has this one location. But he wants to start franchising not as an opportunity to scale the organization, but to create a career path for his employees, like to go from technician to owner.

But he was actually afraid of saying what he really wanted, which was to make more money. If you were like, hey, we just want to make as much money as possible, I'd like just cut them off, because it is where all of your debt is at and it's probably losing money. I think, though, everything that you're saying can be accomplished. I just would strongly recommend. And the thing is this. The reason I hardly ever push so hard against it is because people think that if I say that, that's because I don't want competition in the franchise world, and that's not true. I don't want, you go to think of the pain that it would be to go to the franchising. And his family had raised him in a way, to think that being poor was good. It was admirable not to have money. It was admirable to struggle and scrape and claw throughout life. And for many of us, whether it be the way we were raised or the way we've thought in the past, if we would address that and solve that problem, the thing that we've been avoiding for so long, it would allow the business to break through and get to the next level. And so for Devin, it was a matter of just confronting the fact that, like, hey, it's okay for me to say that I want to make more money, and it's okay for me to do that and then give a piece of that action to my team and allow them to be able to get to the next stage of their career. But Devin first had to come to grips with the fact that he wanted to make more money, and that was okay. And being poor was. There was nothing admirable about being poor. For me, the hard thing that I was not trying to confront for so long was stepping out of the field and trusting the systems and the people that I had hired. When I finally embraced that discomfort, the admin pricing, delegation, those things I was trying to avoid for so long, creating systems I unlocked profit scale and eventually allowed me to grow Augusta Lawn care to over 200 locations around the world. That problem owners are avoiding could be fixing the off season. It could be having a hard conversation with a poisonous employee that, you know, you got to get rid of or have that hard conversation with. It could be about software that you think in your mind is a block that, oh, I'm not good at software, and. And you need to switch to homeworks. You need to be able to have these systems in your business. These things, once dealt with, are the things that unlock the next stage of growth.