2021 Landscape Summit Cancelled?

Everyone, Mike Andes here at Landscape Business Course. Today, I'm gonna have you kind of come along for a bit of a half day vlog, I guess we're gonna go to the Bellingham shop, have our Wednesday morning midweek meeting with the team and go over the financials from last month. So we look at the P and L. And so you've already seen that if you want really in more detail, there's a video I did a couple weeks ago going through the profit and loss statement and explaining that a little bit more. And then after that, Josh and I are gonna go and look for a new conference venue. Yester we had the Franchise Roundtable, so all the owners of the franchise get on a zoom call together. But right before that, literally right before that, Holiday Inn, our venue called and basically said, hey, we can't cater any food and we are reducing capacity for next six months at our hotel. Well, they're not going to be able to keep all of us at their hotel because they're reducing their capacity, which stinks. Is a great venue. However, I think it's going to be a good thing. We are going to hopefully get to a place that is a lot bigger and is going to be able to still be within a couple minutes of that facility. So stick with us here for the ride. We'll have the meeting, then we're gonna go check out this new venue, see if it's something that we can afford because it'll be expensive and see if it'd be a better fit for us for Landscape Summit, which is definitely sign up for in the link below. Landscapebusinesscourse.com conference come for three days. We're talking about profit sharing, P4P, open book management and developing a good culture. So let's go ahead and go to this meeting with the team and then we'll go and tour the facility. All right, so this is September, last month.

Just printing this off. So in terms of comparing this to say, August of last. Last August.

You'Ll see the biggest difference is the payroll. It was like significantly more than the month before. That's because we had three pay periods in the month. And so usually we have two. Obviously we pay bi weekly.

But on a month like September, you might randomly get three sometimes. So that's why that's 80,000 there.

Save the seat for you.

But also there was less overtime, so it wasn't actually as bad as I thought. I thought I anticipated 90,000 for payroll, honestly. But because we had less overtime in August or September, sorry. We were able to Keep that down. Let's go from the top. Advertising, marketing. We did start spending some money in advertising marketing, doing some Facebook ads, things like that. Towards the middle of September we all of a sudden got very, very fast. Everyone was extremely efficient and I think in part due to the fact we had no one getting trained. Everyone had been here for a while, everyone could be solo. And so we started knocking our waiting our backlog pretty fast. And so we were down to like two days booked out there for a little bit. So we turned on some ads. Facebook nextdoor sent out some emails to get back to like a week booked out. So that was a little bit of advertising expense there. Credit card processing, same old same old. That's usually about a 3% of a transaction. So if you extrapolate that number out by 30, you're around $100,000 and you can tell it that's about how much was used with credit cards versus checks coming in. So like Brandon takes the checks every day, signs them, puts them all together and then I just take them drop them at the bank. That is you can just do the math. Is probably about $70,000 worth of the revenue and then the other hundred is from the credit card processing employee. Other that's things like uniforms.

You know, buying uniforms. Anything else we do, just giving money to the employees I don' think we bought. This might be something else. I haven't obviously not pulling up on here but that's probably not even uniforms.

That could have been birthdays. We had birthdays and people coming and going.

Got it.

Okay.

Fuel expense. That's. That was it Brad who came up with the idea about going to a different gas station. That was brilliant. Thank you. Sometimes like a dollar more per gallon but yeah, that's good. It's lower honestly than leaving last year when we had less trucks or more trucks or last year we had less trucks but more fuel expense due to the fact that the fuel cost this year are significantly lower because oil prices are so low. But usually we're spending around 3,500 just because the oil prices are low right now. Where are we at here? Office and software. I don't know what that's all for service autopilot. We pay about 600amonth. 600amonth we pay for service autopilot. It's an arm and a leg. But obviously we all have different account. Every single employee has a different account that's 19 bucks a month. And then you got the automations and all that they all tack on. So it's pretty expensive. Maybe One day as a franchise, once the franchise is a certain size, we'll be able to build our own so we don't have to spend that money. That's just very expensive to build. So that's down the road, Obviously, payroll there. That's three pay periods, like I said. Usually we run around $30,000 per pay period every other week.

And then with the third one, I was expecting 90. It was at 80 because we just had like no overtime. Some people were getting off early. We have few of the employees have started to take Mondays and when Tuesday, a couple days off a week. So kind of reduced it a little bit for that month. There's a refund in there that I actually feel. I actually went back and looked. I don't think it's actual refund.

It was somebody who. We had to refund their 50% because the city came in and said they couldn't do their project.

Nice. Yeah.

So we paid her back for refund quality.

You know, it's funny. So when I did this. When I did this publicly, I hadn't like. I don't look at the P and L before I view it publicly. So, like, as I'm going through, I'm like, I've never seen that before ever in my life. I'm like, so unhappy. I was just like that rip off.

We tried, we tried.

Okay, we did everything we could to keep her on the schedule, but I guess someone had complained to the city that she shouldn't be doing this massive project and everything. So the city got involved and she was like, well, now I have to get permits and maybe next spring I'll do it. Welcome. Yeah.

I don't even talk to them now. All right, Rent, utilities, and shop expenses. That's the usual around the. Around here in terms of Internet, toilet garbage. Rent here is 1,000 bucks a month. We have another two years of that. In a year we'll be seriously considering buying a place. I have my eye on a few different places, but right now, commercial land is through the roof. Expensive. Couple ideas, though, including buying a church and trying to turn it into an office. We'll figure that out eventually. Taxes, It's a big chunk. Obviously, that includes payroll taxes.

So, for example, when you look at the payroll expenses, that's not necessarily. That's what goes to you guys. So you know how in your check you see all the deductions and things like that. That includes what you're guys getting. The. The other part there is payroll taxes, L and I. All the other stuff that comes out as well, as sales tax. All right, Tools, supplies and materials. That's pretty straightforward. 13,000. So that's about.

8% of gross revenue. And that's just in tools and supplies. And that's usually because you hardscaping jobs. So all your mulch, gravel, stuff like that. Truck and equipment expense was a little bit higher this month because we had some significant repairs as well as we did buy one piece of equipment. I want to say it was a mower. There was one piece of equipment. Well, we bought a whole other rack set. That's what it was. Yep. Yeah, it was like 1200 bucks. Yeah. So. Okay, cool. So that one's expected and then we already know in October we're going to have expensive on that because we had to change the transmission on one of the trucks. So that was a big expense, but it was worth it because it'll still last a long time, I think so. Cool. Any questions based upon this?

Super exciting. No. For the quarter, though, I was really happy. So this rounded off the third quarter. So Q3 is July, August and September. It was our best quarter ever in terms of margin profit, like every number. And so we had 24.5% profit. I don't expect us to be able to do that year round. I wish we could, but usually we average out around 20, so. But it was definitely a great quarter. And so, yeah. Appreciate everyone's work. Any other questions about this, about other finance stuff? I know a couple people over at Command center, like, looking at houses and all the rest of it, so I've been yapping over there occasionally. By the way, this is Michelle Ben. She's from Command Center. She answers our phone calls and all the rest of it. I told them they could come on over, so. Cool. Any other questions, though?

Okay. So last night I was about to go to sleep, and then I found this wonderful company that I wanted to, like, look at their financial report. It took me all night, but it was so much fun. I don't usually do that and I don't usually, like, look at companies that are, like, really, really small. It's a stat, like a very speculative company. But it was interesting. Hyliion. Oh, lawn care company. No, no, no, no. Just on the stock market. You can't look at someone's financials easily. No, I thought someone got in touch with you and asked. Oh, no, no. I was like, you spent all night on that? No, no, no. It was fun, though, just looking at.

Their 10k and stuff.

But anyways, Michelle, you have a question? Yeah, but I can't think about phrasing it, I guess, investing money. Like, what's the best way to invest it? Like, obviously I can't go buy a house right now, per se, but. Cause you're talking about, I listened to that rich dad, poor dad book or rich over dad, poor dad. Yeah. And he was talking about, like, investing and stuff, and I just don't know where. And then Josh always talks about investing.

In things that are gonna grow you.

Yeah. Not.

Yeah. Like, you know, I think the thing too, even when I was relixing a book yesterday, something to keep in mind is, like, sometimes the books are written by people that are, like, way down the road from us. And so, for example, I'm reading this book from Netflix from the founder of Netflix, and I truly believe half that book is not relevant to small businesses. So for me to step in and be like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna implement this. Cause like, Netflix Guy said it, I'm gonna do it necessarily isn't the right thing. So, for example, like, Guy Kawasaki, Guy, who wrote that book, if you read another one of his books, he'll be like, oh, you should be investing in gold right now. Or he'll say, you need to invest in this. I'm like, okay, that's fine. But you are like, leagues ahead of where I'm at from an investing standpoint. And they'll talk about their 50 unit apartment complex. Like, I can't afford that. Right. So for me, like, I think the first investment for everyone should be in themselves in terms of educating, whether that be a $10 audiobook or whether it be, you know, spending some money on a course or whatever. It is. Like, I feel like that's the best roi. Like, if I'm gonna try to double my money, I can turn my $10 audiobook, learn something and turn that into like, thousand x. Right? Just by learning something, saving money in a certain area, whatever. And I think the secondary thing is, like, figure out, you know, like, Josh has probably been talking about assets that are appreciating, right? Things that are going up in value. And so, you know, we've talked about here before in terms of, like, most of what we use and buy is depreciating. It goes down in value. Like this computer. It was a thousand dollars. It lasts me five years. So it's costing me $200 a year. It's going down in value. Whereas if I could buy $1,000 stock and in five years it's worth $2,000, it went up 20% every year on average. Right? So thinking about things that go up in value, I think is the most important. And people get wrapped up, whether it be stock, which is easy to get into because you can tap a few buttons on your phone, they get wrapped up in like, oh, it's down today. It's up today. Because no, look, it's an appreciating asset. If you believe in the company over time, you need to just leave the money there. And then usually what I suggest is if you're gonna say build in the stock market, putting money in, and then one day you use that money for a real estate deal, which is like a bigger jump, like you said, like, get. You can't. It took me years to afford my first house. Right. And just kind of putting money away, Putting money away. And then you have enough and you can go get a down payment. So, yeah. And I think as soon as you can become an owner of real estate instead of a renter, it is good. And even if that's, you know, ideally you can house hack it. So you get like a duplex or you live in one house. Being single, you can live in one room or it's the suite part and then rent out the house part. Right. Stuff like that is kind of the way that I feel is really a good place to start. So. Cool. Any other deep, profound questions for this morning? Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone. Feel free to keep those if you want. You can share them. I don't care. They're online now, so it's not like I'm riding anything.

Cool.

Hey, everyone. So change of plans. This looks like it's going to be the place where we have the conference. We're still obviously looking around some other places, but this is probably where it's going to be. Because it's so big, the max capacity is usually 1372. So because of that and with the percentages of COVID we should be able to fill at least 200 in here. And so we're definitely going to book that out. We're already well over half of that. So this is probably where it's going to be at. We'll have a stage, whole bunch of chairs, lots of social distancing. Got a whole kitchen in the back. We got several rooms in the back that we can do the franchisee seminars and breakout sessions, things like that. So this is kind of it. It's probably a lot bigger in person than it is on the camera, but just lots of space for us to be able to still have the event and spread out still. So looking forward to it. Five Years ago. But I know you all have improved. Oh, no. Ten years ago almost.

Yeah. Things change. Let me run and turn the lights on.

Really?

Oh, let me turn on both sides. It's kind of a. There's light switches here for all the fancy.

Usually there's a stage over on this side.

Okay.

We just had a cat show with the one. The one event we were allowed to have in the last cat show because it was an agricultural event.

Oh my goodness.

So anyways, there's usually a stage here if you need it, or you could put it anywhere.

And how big is that stage?

Let me think.

It's pretty big, right?

Yeah, it's 20. There's four squares. So.

20 by eight, I think. Or 20 by 12.

Okay. Okay.

And there's pictures of you online. Pictures. There's two screens. There's one on that side, one on this side. They're automatic wireless. They're run by. You just log into your computer and they work.

Okay.

Wireless microphones. Podium.

Sorry, there's one screen there. One screen.

No, one screen there and one screen there.

Oh, okay.

The one over there is.

And how do you like if, say for example, if we wanted to get 200 in here. Do you all have chairs?

We do. We have 300 chairs and I'll kind of show you. Are you. Are you thinking, do you do stadium like what. What exactly areas is.

Ideally we do classroom style.

Okay.

But if you don't have the desks, we just probably have to do chairs only.

Well, we have tables though. We have.

46 foot tables.

Okay.

43 round tables.

Oh, right, right, right. Okay. And then in terms of food, would we allow. Would be used. I'll give you that. I'll show you that.

Are you having speakers?

Yeah, we have several speakers from us. It's all. It sounds like a landscaping conference.

So we have plenty of room. Plenty of six footers you can use. Some you can use.

However. You just kind of depends on how you want it.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we might work. Okay. Oh, that's the stage.

So there's 20 and they're four feet.

By four feet, basically. Got it.

I believe we do eight.

And then.

Would you recommend that be where the state is at then?

Usually that's where it's at. It's either usually there or there. We have done it in the middle just. And then people are around. But if you're going to use the screens, it's just that's kind of the focal point when everybody walks in.

Yeah.

If you're doing bottled water and such, they usually do it along this wall here or along over there. So down here is more bathrooms. There's restrooms in there.

Okay. And is there secondary rooms in the back there? Yeah.

So this would be the main room. So if you have someone like that needs speakers, like a green room type of situation.

Perfect. Sashi, Employers here.

In here, like I said, it has a private bathroom.

Nice.

It does lock. So if you're here for several days, you can lock that room and put stuff in it.

Cool.

Kitchen.

This is the part I'm going to get video for charity.

The only thing we don't have is oven.

That's what she said. She's cooked here before.

She said if she's been here before. We do have a warming oven now. We just got that last year.

Okay.

So you can bring food in on platters and keep them hot.

Okay.

That's a portable bar. And I'm assuming you're not.

Oh, no, we would probably.

They don't. I don't want to get everybody liquored up for your coffee.

Thank you. So.

But there's two refrigerators.

Okay.

And this one can be plugged in. This one's usually the beverage one.

Okay.

And a freezer.

Okay.

And then we do also have the two side rooms.

This is perfect, actually. So. So, like, on the Wednesday, we just have our franchisees. So there'll be, like 40 people. Okay. And then it's the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the 200.

Okay.

But I think we could honestly use one of these for the franchisees.

Oh, yeah. For 40 people?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is that allowed or are they kind of. They're the whole building kind of thing.

I don't know. I mean, you still are supposed to have the spacing.

Right. Right.

And who knows by January what it's going to be? So you still have to have six feet, you know, around each table.

Even if we just did both rooms for the first day.

Oh, yeah. You could easily get that many people in.

Okay, cool. The av. So, like, the audio visual is my biggest concern, honestly. Obviously. We have the two screens. That's fine. That screens up there. And then if we wanted to plug, like, our own audio system into that. Can we. You can, like, I know you have this.

So that runs the two screens. That runs the Sonos. I'll show you our audio video room. We do have wireless microphones. I have three.

We have had people bring in, but they've brought in their own speakers.

Right.

From what we have.

Got it.

This is our audio video room.

Oh, right. I remember using all this.

So we do have two handhelds, one lapel, and I have access to. To another lapel. I just haven't had them. I need them to come in and wire it for me, make sure I can get it.

Okay, cool.

This is your owl, your amp.

Okay, guys, it would have to come through here. I think we brought in our own board and tapped into.

If you brought in other spe. If. Then you probably tapped into something.

Got it.

I mean, if. It's been a while. We did upgrade this.

Yeah. Way better than it used to be.

Say it was. We upgraded two years ago.

Okay, cool. So if we wanted to go ahead and book it, are they requiring deposits right now, or is it just like. How's it working with all what's going on? Because they don't.

I could block in your dates for you.

Yeah.

And we could kind of play it by ear.

Okay. And then have, like, a date where, like, hey. Yeah.

Like, if. If it looks like it's gonna happen by, you know, mid December. And right now you are allowed. Right now I am allowed to have training, so.

Okay, cool.

Up to 200 people. So you are good on that.

So they really loud 1300 in here usually. That's insane.

The biggest I think I've personally had in here is about 7:50 for a funeral.

Wow. So, okay, so I think we could do the classroom style with the. The amount of tables you have. You have 44. We need, like, four or five people per. We just do stripes. How do you find it with the pillars?

Is that you do have to kind of set around. I mean, once you get set up, you just want to really be vigilant of.

Each pillar. They are. They look nice, but they are kind of a pain.

Yeah.

But you can definitely do it. Like I said, I had 700 in here.

Yeah.

We have one big fundraiser normally every year, and they have. They. Last year, I want to say, she had, like, 750 seated.

Oh, wow.

And she made it work, so.

Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Yeah. Like, if I get the pricing for that and everything kind of get that. I would. I would assume we'd probably just get from Wednesday all the way through, like we talked about.

Right.

Even though we. The first day we'd have this. Because that's fine. The other folks in the team can be setting up the chairs, setting up the stage.

Oh, and those are the chairs there, I guess.

Oh, those are nice. Perfect.

So.

And there's 300 of those.

380.

Wow. Okay, perfect. Okay, awesome. Well, I'll make a video for my caterer lady as well, as my AV guy, because they both need to know what their kind of differences are here. And then let's go ahead and just put it on the calendar. Okay. And then just let me know what date I need the deposit.

Flight.

Sure. And whatever that is, I'm totally fine with. So. Yeah. Yeah, I think it'll be good.

If you want a video, then I'll go pull up my. And then just come into my office and then we'll get that worked up and then.

Cool.

And then we'll be good.

We'll do. Thanks so much.

Oh, yeah, no problem.

All right, so that's basically a wrap for today. Hopefully. The team meeting was kind of inspiring for you all to share your numbers. We're going to be talking a lot more about open book management at this year's conference and we're actually practicing with each other on how to share your numbers with your team. And that open book management leads into the culture aspect of things and also profit sharing program, things like that. So we're talking all about that conference, which kind of leads us into our second meeting of today, which was going viewing the new venue. As you saw, it was nice and big. Give us lots of space. There is going to be a cap at 200 people though, so make sure you sign up. We're already over halfway of the spots being filled and we will absolutely hit that number. So going down below in the link, you click the link, it's landscapebusinesscourse.com conference. I'm going to update the information on there. There is a hotel directly across the street from the event center and then the one that's most of you have already booked at Holiday Inn is literally five minutes away. And we're going to make sure that you can get transportation from the hotel to the event center with buses if you don't have a rental car. So we'll make sure that's all set up correctly and that you get someone a ride over. So it's not ideal. Ideally we have the hotel and the event center all together in one building like we have in the past. But I honestly think it'll be better. This one's way bigger. We got the kitchen. We're going to have much better food because we're going to bring our own caterers in. And so I'm really looking forward to it. So make sure you come sign up. If you were worried about social distancing, you've now seen the video, how much space we're going to have. So it'll definitely be a lot safer, I think, too. So. So. Really looking forward to it. Make sure you sign up. We'll see in January.