3 Bank Accounts in the Red... QUITTING Lawn Care

I'm gonna get nasty texts and hear what an awful human being I am.

You are one phone call away from being out of business.

I have no money. I probably haven't taken a paycheck in the last six years.

Three bank balances are negative. You're not making payments on debt.

Something happens and I spend 75% of the time in the field and all of a sudden it's August and I'm like, hey, we're out of work. I'm doing everything. I do sales, I do operations. Me and Brandon's the only one on payroll. Everyone else wants cash and I want it now. Can't find really any good employees.

None of the Americans want to work. You know, I don't know. I don't know if it's everywhere or just. We always have bad luck. I don't know.

Do you have an employee that you're like, oh, we totally trust them to be on a job site all day long.

Debbie, my ex wife, the guys cannot stand her.

That might be why, though. You had eight people join and within a week they all left.

She's been fired like three times. But we always bring her back because we're like, oh, shit, we need a driver. Only two of my employees can drive. So we have to pick them up, drop them off. I mean, it's crazy.

He's been doing this for eight years. I don't know if he has the actual intestinal fortitude to actually change the way he's running the business. There's a good reason to be able to say that he should actually just close down. If that's negative, you can't think clearly. But this is not the close down show. This is the turnaround show. So we're gonna figure out a way, but it's gonna require complete gutting of the business. It's gonna restructure the company. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn care with over 170 locations around the world. And I travel around the country fixing struggling businesses. Today we're in Salem, Ohio, with Matt from Courtney's Lawn and Landscape. Matt is in debt. His brother's been stealing from him and he's running behind on his personal mortgage and car loans. Our goal is to give Matt a strategy that within the next six weeks, he can turn around his business and get it back on track.

How's it going, Matt?

Hey, how's it going, buddy?

Good to see you. You're here all night?

Yeah, Since. Since about 9 o' clock yesterday. Saturday morning, we got about an inch and a half.

I'll be out here most of the morning finishing everything up. About 24, a little over 24 hours.

Then we got 2 inches of rain Saturday.

Oh, that's what they were telling us at the airport. And then it kind of like all froze over.

I mean, it's been like this since, I don't know, probably end of November a little bit. January we were out, I want to say, 24 days straight doing some type of snow or soldings.

I think I had four hours of sleep in five days. So this 24 hours is nothing. I'm gonna stay up till like 10 o' clock tonight.

You want to show me around a little?

Yeah, absolutely.

So what do you have to pay for this place per month? Is it 1100?

1100.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So this is just cold storage, but all this is ours. And actually we store our salt in here.

Oh, nice.

There was 25 ton here starting Saturday morning.

Really? So they come in here and they able to deliver it. And then you just.

We have to dump it out there because we can't get semis in. And we carry it in with a loader.

Okay. So is there another shop space?

Yeah. Oh, wow.

Let's go.

Yeah, this is the small part that is not mine.

Wow.

Yeah, there's nothing in it.

Oh, dude, that's clean. Let's go. So will you eventually have this space.

Or this kind of course. Oh, really? Yeah. And this is ours.

So mostly the larger stand ons then, I'm assuming for those larger properties.

Yeah.

And then you use that for like the salt.

That's actually the owner of the building.

Okay.

And they charge us 200amonth to use it.

Okay, cool, cool. So you use that most like the salt material. Do you guys use the walkers?

Yeah, we actually just bought that. An auction. We picked it up for cheap.

Okay, cool.

But we actually had one and it got stolen from here? No, it was actually a gated community. It was in a bit of a dump trailer. We lost a dump trailer.

They took the whole dump trailer.

All of it? Yeah. Our insurance went crazy after the theft, which makes no sense. We went from paying like 850amonth to 2,400amonth.

I saw that it seemed kind of high. I thought maybe it was because of the snow plowing, but it just jumped after theft. Did you make a claim for that then?

Yeah, got it. Yeah.

Okay. So insurance is up for around 2,500 bucks a month now. Yeah, got it. Okay.

All right.

So. But there's not a ton of Credit card? Are you kind of just paying those off?

I have no credit.

Okay. No credit cards.

I just got bad credit, so I got like a $300 credit card. So.

But it's mostly then just running through cash. We have the debt on the trucks, the trailer, and then just like, it's money in, money out from the bank accounts.

Yeah.

You can't have your entire bank account statements being ATM withdraws. Like, we got to keep track of things better. That's why, like, I look at the P and L and I can't trust any of it because it's not actually being tracked correctly. All the ATM withdraws, the cash withdraws are causing it to be inaccurate. Whether he's paying people with cash, whether he's paying personal expenses out, out of the business account. If the numbers aren't true, like, it's like going to the doctor and like, the heart rate machine's messed up. Or like the scales, like, just add £300 to everyone. It's not going to be, like, super accurate in terms of the debt. Like, we have the two truck payments, and then how much do we owe on both of those?

Still probably around 75, 80.

Between the two of them.

Yeah. Then there's another one, too.

So there's three trucks. Three trucks.

We have four trucks, but one's paid off.

Okay.

And then the third one we just got last year, it was kind of a necessity for snow because we. We had so much snow that came with the plow.

I'm assuming that with. Between the three trucks is probably a hundred thousand on debt for the trucks. Those three.

Easy.

Okay. Easy. Okay. Oh, because the new.

Right.

So it's probably 120.

It's probably 150.

Okay. So that third truck's the nicest one for snow. And then payments on those per month Right now for just the trucks, what are we looking at?

3400.

3400 between the three trucks. I'm assuming that third truck is like 1500 at most.

Actually, the silver 350 is 14, and the new one's 13 because of a better interest rate. And then the 150 out there is like 750.

Okay. All right, so three or four grand a month for payments on the truck debt outside of that. Now, what is that looking like?

I got a dump trailer. It's like a rent to own.

Okay.

So it's like 650amonth. But I was just tapped out on credit, couldn't get a loan, needed it because ours got stolen. And that was on payment. Too. So basically, the insurance paid it off.

All right. And from your perspective right now, like, it's been a few years where you kind of been? Like, I looked through all the bank statements. Like, it's. It's been zero. A lot.

Yeah.

So where are you at? Like, is this a matter of, like. So I don't know if you watched the video from last week. There's Aaron, we've been with. And I don't think, regardless of what I tell him, he'll just always run the business the same way. And he's just kind of come used to it. It's like, where are you at? What do you want the business to do? And what do you see as the problem right now? What are you working on? Does it seem hopeless? Or is it just like, hey, I just gotta get through X, Y, and Z or pay these. Where are you at in your mind?

I mean, it seems hopeless. Cause it's always that way. I think a lot of it, it comes from the bottlenecking, like me.

Lack of good employees. I don't know.

The people around here just don't want to work. I don't know. I don't know if it's everywhere or just. We always have bad luck. I don't know.

This is how we used to schedule, okay, 95 budget hours. Yeah. Most of our sites are big, like their summer prunes. Like 165 man hours. Got it. Okay. So the last three years, the same things happen by May 1st. I had them booked, two crews booked out till Labor Day.

Okay.

But then something happens, and I spend 75% of the time in the field. And all of a sudden it's August, and I'm like, hey, we're out of work. Then I spent about three weeks and books back out till Thanksgiving. Then leaves come, and it's like we've never seen a leaf fall in our life. So I'm back in the field 100% of the time.

When you're going back in the field, is it mostly jumping back in with the landscape crew?

Actually, no. The mowing.

Mowing side. And that right now is just one massive contract.

We do have one massive contract, but some days they only have one stop, but it's like a 35 hour MO. Got it.

So most commercial? Yeah. Is it 100% commercial?

We have probably a dozen residential. Like, to me, the mowing. If I could get rid of it, I would. I mean, to be honest, if they complained about anything, it was our mowing. Like, to be competitive here in this market, like, we we would have to set our mowing at like 2% net profit just to get contracts. Because I hear you talk about 80, 90 bucks an hour. We are on the high side at 45. I mean, very high. I got one regional.

That is at 35 bucks an hour. Everyone we've bid on, we've been 45% higher than them.

And that's at like 40, 45 bucks an hour. And that's, that's the commercial side.

They're residential too.

Got it. Okay, on the project side, when you're doing bids, what are you kind of shooting for on there?

About 60.

Okay. All right. And then you win quite a few of those, like 60% or so. You think you're winning.

Yeah.

Okay, but.

And I don't know, because we mark up with us too, like. Cause I know, because we are looking at like, I think P for P would help us. I mean, I know we're the low side, but we're so inefficient, like, and I think we can make mowing more efficient. But like, okay, that, that big property with the 95 hours, that's the big mow. When we first started, there was three of us mowing, and I was on the crew. We averaged 23 man hours of visit for two years. Now it's three people, 12 hours. And I, and I go, well, did the property grow? Like, I mean, did they add more houses? No, they're just inefficient.

And so right now, when it comes to managing the crew, how are you tracking that? Is it, you know, you or your nephew, the ones that are kind of just on site that are trying to maintain their efficiency?

I don't really go out with them because what we used to do is two people mow and one guy string trims. And they would always just do what they wanted. So I actually went out and said, okay, this week all you're doing is walking behind me, because I'll show you how to do it. You know, follow me. And they would follow me. And the next week I'd go and say, okay, now I'm going to follow you. They do it right. And I wouldn't go the next week. I'd show up like two weeks later and they're just doing whatever they want. Like, what are you doing? No, I just thought it'd be quicker. I'm like, you're two sections behind. It's obviously not. Why are you doing this?

Yeah.

And they just go, haha.

Yeah. The difficult part with pay for performance is likely the fact that those Jobs are so low bid. I don't even know if, like, even if you have 50% of revenue, if you'd be able to make their wages. Because if you're 40, 45 bucks an hour price, 60 to 70% of your revenue just going to wages on those jobs. But if we able to get the crew to be twice as efficient, all of a sudden we would be making 70, $80 an hour. But the price of the customer would be the same. That's why when people start bringing hourly rates, I'm like, well, it all comes down to the efficiency of your crew. That's the part I'm. I zero in on is like that project is being. Is a huge chunk of our revenue. I don't think we're making any money on it. And I think it's taking a lot of your time. And I know it's, it's the safe thing because it's paying the bills in terms of the vault, the size of, of the, of the contract. But like, I think it's taking away from the more profitable work, the project stuff and you know, the salt and etc.

Do we just get rid of the big contract? Because a lot of our other mowing. Because I just ran a number street copilot and a lot of them are 50, 60, when I look at, okay, we average this many hours.

If you can make $60 an hour, I would probably say maybe we can keep them. Right. And then just be a matter of.

Because that you only really need two people to mow three days a week. Realistic, basically.

Right. Could you do one person mowing and have them full time?

Some of those properties, pretty big.

I mean, you know, just be demoralizing.

Yeah, you're there all day.

Right. You know, but who would do that right now? Like, do you have an employee that you're like, oh, we totally trust them and they'll be on a job site all day long.

So Debbie, my ex wife, okay. She knows my quality because she could never do this like I taught her. So she knows exactly what I want.

Right.

The work ethic's not there.

Got it. Oh, it's not there?

No, it's not.

And is she leading the maintenance crew?

Yeah. Okay, that's, that's part of the problem.

Why is she still around?

Because she can drive and she's here every day. She's been fired like three times.

Okay.

But we always bring her back because we're like, okay, we need to drive her. We need. She is here. But it's like, you know, Brandon was All frustrated because she was supposed to be opening plow. And he's like, man, I might as well just be here myself. But she'll be like, oh, you know, my hernia popped out. I gotta sit in the truck. And she'll sit in the truck on that big property for, like, two hours. And I think a lot of the guys were afraid to, like, if they thought she was lazy or wasn't doing what she's supposed to. They were afraid to approach me because I was gonna be mad, and I was like, I want you to tell me. Like, you know, but I would try to tell them, like, look, the only reason she's here is she can drive. She's here every day, and she knows the properties. If you want her gone, learn to drive, learn the properties. Like, I mean, just. I can make it very simple, you know?

So is the only reason we're keeping her right now is that she can drive the maintenance career. Okay, and what is she. She gets paid cash.

Yeah.

And around the same amount, 25 bucks an hour.

She's, like, 16.

Okay.

She's cheap.

Okay.

Okay.

So. Because from my perspective, I see a team member that is. Is demoralizing the rest of the crew. No one wants to work with her, so it's preventing you from keeping any good labor. They're not productive in terms of making us money. And yes, they're cheap, but cheap, like, a good employee can do five times the amount of revenue as, like, a pathetic employee that sits in the truck all day.

It was bad businesses on my part, you know? But, you know, you live and you learn.

It just seems to me it's like, okay, if we can pay $25 an hour, I feel like we should be able to find drivers in this market. I looked online, like, of, like, what people are paying, I feel like it's enough to get a driver. Because, like, right now you can find a good amount of employees, like, in 20, 21, 22. That was very common. Get 30 applicants. A couple of them show up, you.

Hire them, and that's the last time. To be honest, we really tried. Yeah. Because we went to the Guatemalans, and it was like, hey, they're here every day. And if you say, hey, I need two more guys for tomorrow. Guess what? There's two more guys. And I did nothing.

And we're still using that labor force right now. Right. Got it.

None of the Americans want to work, you know, every day, no call, no show. Them guys. They showed up every day, bust their.

Ass, you know, so they just kind of Put up, I would assume, with your ex.

Yeah.

So if you're telling me outside of her just driving, there's nothing else that's, like, why she needs to be here?

No.

Okay. And she's been fired multiple times.

Yeah.

Okay, well, this is like. Like, okay, it's very obvious to me. But why? Why is it. Why is she still here?

Because we can't refine anybody. Like, I started this business and was doing that, going through a divorce, like, it was crazy. Like, smiling. I love chaos. Right.

What I want to do. Matt don't like the idea, though. I want to get them an H2B program. I mean, them guys always work. They have to work. Most of them come over. They can drive. I mean, that'd eliminate all of our problem. The no call, no shows we get every day. So before I came here, I worked for a big company. I mean, we had probably 80, 100 of them that came every summer. And, I mean, it helped out.

Could you sub out the mowing?

I don't know.

I feel like you might want to think about that because, like, especially if. Because if, you know, you're kind of like the higher bidder. What if we went to these other people? Like, hey, I'm going to sub out the mowing portion of these contracts. Like, would your current. The person holding the contract be okay with that, you think?

I don't know that the big one would be. But most of the other ones, because we sell about our fertilizer. We used to have, like, a $40,000 fertilizer contract. A national company come in at half our price. So we lost it, and I was rid of my machine. We only had, like, $12,000 worth of fertilizer. A machine's 18 grand. It doesn't make sense to spend 18 to make 12. No. So my buddy. And we make 25% off him.

Yeah. Can we do that for the mowing? Because, like, if people are willing to do things for 30 bucks an hour, great. You do that. And then now you just take the extra cut to make sure you ensure quality control. So you're still going to go through site visits, making sure everything is good. You're going to do the site visits when you're doing the pruning and all the other upsells that you're making good money on. Because if your blended average of net is 13 and mowing is at 2, it means you're making, like 20 plus on the upsells. So let's just focus on that stuff and where we make money and then sub out the stuff ever. If everyone else wants to do 30 an hour to be on job sites, let them have it. Let's not fight that battle. And then you can do the snow and you can do the upsells and you can do the, the maintenance. The other stuff that's maintenance related but you can make good money on. But then we cut all this equipment. We got all the mowers, we can all these employees that we really like. You're not making money on that. And so if you feel like, hey, we got it, we kind of got to do it just to keep the contract. Can we sub it out? Can we make 30, 40 grand in net like basically in your pocket to manage that contract?

The subcontractor kind of scares me. If I can find the right one, you know, I'd love to just go to one person and say, you know, here you go. So that way you're not managing seven different subcontractors. But I don't know if that's possible. But I have a few people in mind already, like, you know, to do it. And hopefully they take it on.

My thought is, and like, correct me if I'm not seeing something and that is like, would it just be better if it was you and your nephew doing the high profit margin work that you, you wouldn't be chasing your tail with all these guys.

You know, I mean, he's a good worker. I think he cares about the company. So yeah, I think he'll be a good fit in it. But I think if you give him that rope of hey, this is your baby, make it go, I think he'll, he'll take that ownership.

Because right now I feel like the stress part is coming from managing five, six employees that are. They hand drive here. You have to pick them up. Like, you'll just never be efficient because you're factoring drive time. You're not factoring in you getting here an extra 30 minutes early, getting everything ready, then going and picking them all up from their houses. We'll never be able to be efficient doing that. And then they are basically in control of everything. You have no ability to swap them in and out. There's no ability like, oh, we'll find more people because they basically have you by the balls. And then that's a very, like, you just feel out of control as soon as you say that someone's being taken advantage of. They are the victim. And I hate to put them in the victim's perspective here. As a business owner and a leader, you can't do that because, say, if he's just being taken advantage of, that means we should throw up his hands, he should give up, he should quit, and he is a victim to the circumstances around him. Whereas we're going to come in here and be like, no, we're going to take control of that situation. And regardless whether you're a victim or not and someone else is taking advantage of you, like, you've got to know your numbers.

At some point, every single business starts to stop growing. Whether you're a Fortune 500 company and you're super big or you're just getting started, there's only four real reasons why your business stops growing. And I call it the 4L framework. It's either because of liquidity, leads, labor, or leadership. And when you first get your business started, you need liquidity, you need cash, and you turn that liquidity into leads. How? By advertising. And then once you get a bunch of leads, you get a bunch of customers. What do you need? Labor. Because we're in the home service industry, we actually go do the work. And once you get a bunch of labors, you need leadership to be able to run the business and be able to run it when you're not even there. I think you've probably heard me talk about this before. We have the 4L framework, right? So up top, we have liquidity. And I think right now, this is probably the most urgent. When it looks. When we look at just like, their negative bank balances, and, like, that's also where a lot of the stress is coming from. And a lot of times when I see someone making bad decisions, it's like I go back to their bank account and say, if that's negative, you can't think clearly.

And, like, I remember when I had to borrow money from my brother, like, to make payroll and stuff. Like, you're not thinking. You miss all the opportunities, and you just get zero in on one little thing, usually because you can't help but, like, get super frustrated and, like, nervous. When it comes to the 4L framework, liquidity or cash in the bank is the biggest problem that Matt actually has in the business. We are literally negative bank balances across three different accounts.

Yeah. Sucks because we get big paydays, and it's like, oh, we got 40 grand in a bank, and then that's Friday, and then Monday, you're like, we're overdrawing $1,000.

We still owe bills.

You've been in that position so long, like, if you can trust me on a couple of things, I think we can Turn it around. But like it is, it's going to, it's going to restructure the company. It's not a function of like, oh, we need to raise prices by 5 or 10%. Like when we look at three years of basically negative bank balances, it is a restructuring. And so if you can trust me and take action on a couple of things, I do think it's salvageable to fix that. We got to make sure that we're focusing on high margin services. And right now I don't want to be competing for 35, $40 per hour mowing jobs. Instead focus on the 60, 70, $80 per hour jobs that we can get for projects like landscaping jobs as well as snow and ice. My thought is like, can we cut the maintenance and by doing that, reduce the size of the business to just the profitable services? Because what's unique, honestly, Matt, is I actually don't think you have a huge debt problem because you have all on assets right now. And that's what I was looking for is like, do you have a whole bunch of uncollateralized debt? And you don't, you don't have a bunch of lines of credit, you don't have a bunch of credit cards you have on assets, the trucks. And so my thought is why not get rid of all this unprofitable work that's currently. We're not making any money on it. 40, $45 an hour, you're never making money on it. And it's not like it's being done super efficiently. Like if you, if you have 40 to $45 an hour, you have to be so focused on efficiency. It's insane to make any margin like we don't allow in San Augusta under 60 because it's just so hard to make any money, money under 40 if that's not happening. Like where literally every little thing is measured, everything is just absolutely dialed and you can't make money on it as much as it feels like it's paying the bills because it's just simply 40, 50% of revenue. If we cut that out, can we get rid of a truck or two, get rid of a payment or two and then just focus on the high margin services. And like I'm, I'm mostly concerned about the fact that like through the war of attrition, you end up just throwing in the towel because it's, it's like it's demoralizing to work with those type of people and have the bank balance is where they're at. That's Just like, I just look at. I feel your stress. Like, that's so painful. You've got to know your numbers, and you've got to be able to figure this out. And the only way to do that is to be able to completely overhaul the business from the top to the bottom. Like, I don't know if it's. If it's possible. That's why I feel like this. We'll have to, like, gut the business. Like, the way the contracts are set up, the way the employees are paid, the way the admin is done, I think everything has to change. And if he doesn't do it in the next six to eight weeks, I think he'll actually burn out physically and mentally before the business even. Well, I would say run out of cash, but it's already ran out of cash. It's been running out of cash. He's paying thousands of dollars in overdraft fees every month, and there's only so long the business can do that. When I come into a turnaround like this, I'm like, is this person willing to be able to tear the band aid off and just, like, be violent with taking action? Because that's the only way to turn this around. It's not going to be like, let's improve the margin on this big contract or, like, let's marginally change. It's like we have to restructure things. I don't know if he has the actual, like, intestinal fortitude to actually change the way he's running the business.

If you know anything about me, I'll try. Let's go. I like the challenge. Yeah.

We've got to get rid of a lot of these fixed assets. We don't need all these trucks. We don't need all this equipment. And we want to focus on these few services where we're making the most money. Gone are the days where we're gonna do jobs that are for 2% profit margin. When we look at liquidity, like cash in the bank right now, if we had to break down the current, like, fixed expenses, we have about. We have the four trucks, actually, I.

Think I sent it to you guys. It's right around 20.

That's assuming we have the debt on the trucks. We have yours and Brandon's salary, that was like seven grand, if I remember correctly. So we have rent, we have insurance, etc. On $20,000 a month. Assuming that I was also paying your salary out of that. That. That is the. The fixed expenses. That means we basically make around 250 to $300,000 a year. I think we can do that with just you and Brandon. If you're doing projects and you're doing salting and snow, and then I think that we can make a margin on the rest of it, like 10 or 15 or 20% by subbing it out, but then get rid of it. Like, so, for example, the mowers right now, are those all paid off? Yeah, those are all paid off. Okay. So I think we sell off everything required to mow a lawn. If there's competition out here willing to do for 30, 35 bucks an hour, we do not want that work. Like, let them have it. We will never make money on that. So we liquidate. We sell off everything to do with mowing and maintenance. That frees up almost all of your workforce. You can let go, right? You're gonna let go of your ex. Like, we know this is. This is not like, a matter of, like, oh, it might work out. Like, we know it doesn't work out. Like, we fired herself several times. She's probably preventing good employees from staying. She's getting Brandon frustrated. Like, the dynamic with the family there is not going to work either. So, like, we got to get rid of her in order. If we let her go, we got to let go of the maintenance. So let's do it. Like, get rid of mowing. If you have that mower, like those right mowers, and you're mowing grass for 40, 45, you're not making any money. Just because the cost of that thing is 10 to 12 bucks an hour, plus your. Your labor of 25, you're not making any money. So instead of us trying to, like, constantly just. Just try to, like, generate revenue? And then they just go out the door, get rid of it. Then just becomes a matter of, can we get a subcontractor that will do the work? And if you made 10 margin, 15 margin, we should be thrilled. That's going to be, like, literally $30,000 a year for you. Just checking on the sites.

I think he'll be for it.

We can't get anybody to mow grass. So that's what I'd like to do. Just go strictly hardscaping or something. Snow removal, I mean, which. That kind of still sucks. We don't have anybody to drive. I mean, I prefer it. It'd be a lot easier.

I think everybody's gonna be really easy. Like, I really. I really did. I thought, Mike's gonna be like, we're gonna landscape, and we're gonna go out and put 7,000 door hangers on and.

Go mowing.

First step is like, if we do that and we cut out all the maintenance, what. How many trucks do we actually need? Because I don't, I don't think we're gonna have to have $20,000 a month once we cut these things out.

Right.

You need this truck for salt, Salting and snow. So we got one truck here and the brand new one and the brand new one, and then we got one paid off and then the third one. And so if we sold those off, like, how much do you owe on the one that has the third truck right now?

28.

How much is it worth?

Probably 22. I mean, because I was over on it.

Okay, you are a little bit. Okay, that's fine. So we would. We eat. Let's just call it 8K. By the time we. We just need to get rid of fixed expenses because I think this 20,000, we can get down to about 12 to 15. Therefore making a business that is 250,300 profitable. And so if we able to get down to two trucks, it's going to be two solid trucks that, you know, work well. We sell off the, the fourth truck that is paid off. That's money in our pocket. How much do you think that's worth? Maybe five grand. Six.

Oh, I blue booked it like 75.

Perfect. You sell that and you sell the third truck, pays off the third trucks. How much is that loan currently costing you every month?

775.

So that's, let's call it a thousand. Okay. And then right now we have all the mowers. If we sell those mowers, some of those are nice.

Three grand, four grand a piece maybe.

Okay, so then we're maybe we're gonna get like 10 grand. Let's just call it 10. 12 grand. Like liquidated. So like money in the bank. Give us a little bit of breathing, because right now we have no breathing room. We need a little bit of money bank so we can sleep. That's gonna come in the form of the mowers. I just call it 15 grand that we liquidate all the mowing stuff.

Okay.

Mowers, trailer, hand tools. Gonna keep the hand tools anyways for improvements and cleanups. But we get 15 grand in the bank. So from a liquidity perspective, we sell off assets, we get rid of two trucks. Now we're down to just two trucks that we own that are good. Maintenance is going to go down, insurance is going to go down. Like what are you paying for auto insurance right now?

I just Renewed it.

Thousand a month.

19,000 a year. A year.

Okay. So about 1500. So that's going to be. That's not going to drop out like 800amonth.

Yeah.

So now we've reduced this already down 1000, now down to 18k, just between the insurance and letting two of the trucks go. And then it's also like there's other costs of like maintenance, storage, all these other things. We just cut those all out. And so now the goal is we need to make $22,000 per month in revenue to pay your salary and be profitable. And I think that's very possible. Between you and Brandon, you're going to do ice, snow and landscaping. Okay. So liquidity, we're selling stuff off. We got to get down our expenses. I think if we do that, we can make money, 22 grand a month on projects, leads. Right now you're spending money on Angie's List. It's literally outranking your website. Like if you look, type in your name, Angie's comes at first, which means everyone that searches your name, you're paying Angie's for now. The second step of the 4L framework is leads. Usually we take money, we go spend it on advertising to generate more leads and we need leads to grow the business. But right now most of the leads are coming from Angie's List and we're paying for every single one. And a lot of them are very price sensitive customers that are price shopping with a whole bunch of other of our competitors. So what are we going to do? We're going to build our own website from a leads perspective. Right now I can't access your website. Like the SSL is messed up. I can't even go on there. So one of the things that most alarm is most alarming is that he's paying for ads. And yet his website, you can't even open it up right now. There's no ssl. So basically the HTTPs at the beginning is crossed out. And I couldn't even get to the website because my computer was like, there's something insecure here. Do not go here problem. While at the same time his Angie listing is actually ranking above his website because he's spending a bunch of money every single month on getting leads from Angie.

Always depended on existing maintenance, customers and Angie's. There is some junk on there, but we've had pretty good luck. Like we've landed a few 30,000 other jobs off of it.

And so you're driving traffic to a rented source that is Angie. And every single time that A customer goes there that you're going to pay for them and meanwhile, he has zero Google reviews. There's no Google reviews. If we can just focus on those two things. Like, it sounds like someone's building the website right now. Oh, we are. When did you just start? A few weeks ago.

Two or three weeks ago? Yeah.

Awesome. Okay.

So it'll be like spring.

I was literally gonna bring that up as an idea. Okay, cool. So here's the thing. Let me talk to the team. I want to give that to you for free for six months. Okay? Now all I ask is that you get at least 30 Google reviews on Google. Right now you have zero. Right now it's not connected to the website. And right now we're spending 10, $15,000 a year, sometimes more when you're growing on Angie's List and other ads. And so we're driving literally all of our traffic to our rented source and paying for every single one that comes in. That lead is rented because Angie will go sell that lead to someone else tomorrow for another service. Anyone that can give you a review. We need 30 plus. If we do that and the website gets up by spring rush, you'll have enough leads coming in to where this is not a problem. And what I'm going to do, if you're okay with this, talk to Tori and go over the site with them and make sure that it's focused on landscaping and snow and ice. Because I want leads coming in for high margin services. I could care less about mowing. So right now we've got to focus on generating leads from our website where we can get quality customers from our website that looks really good and they're less price sensitive. And furthermore, we stop paying Angie's List thousands of dollars every single month to bring us trash leads.

Now I'm paying, I think three or four hundred dollars a month and I got like two leads. You know what I mean? Like, it's like a hard pill to swallow.

If Matt can just get 30 Google reviews on that listing and then drive traffic to his website and get quality leads, this will completely change the business. If there are people in this market, because I don't have this problem in our market. No one's doing lawns for 30, $35 an hour. It's a license and insur doing it. I am not even in competition with them. Like these are type of people that if the customer wants them on their property, they're not competing with it.

Because we used to, I kind of think I got rid of most of them. But I used to get calls all the time, like, hey, can you give us a price? Like, I got 50 minimum. Oh, that's too much. Can't you match what I'm paying? I'm like, we're not Walmart. And I'm like, what are you paying? They're like 20 bucks. I'm like, why are you calling me? Well, we're not happy. Like, well, if we do it for 20 bucks, you're not gonna be happy either. Yeah, stay with them.

Yeah, yeah. So like, let's not even go after that work because right now we're losing our shirt. And more importantly, all of your time and attention is being spent on something that doesn't make you money. I just want that time and attention put on something else. And it's going to be going after these leads that will come in from the website for landscaping projects that you'll make money on. And so these are low hanging fruit that if you could just solve that one problem, that is not having to pay for every single lead through Angie, but actually just comes through his website because he has great Google reviews, has a great looking website. Just that alone would save him thousands of dollars.

But you're saying still do the spring cleanups and the pruning.

Yeah, and we make money on that. And so if Brandon can have like one person with him that's really strong and even if, right for now, it's one of the people that you currently have, just take your best one and he's gonna go help Brandon. He literally has worked on a Brandon, get rid of your ex so that Brandon's happy. Because we need to preserve Brandon at all costs. If he leaves, we are in a really bad spot. And so I would have a conversation like, hey, I'm gonna get rid of her. I want to make sure this is. We're gonna build this around you and me. You're going to run the landscape maintenance, you're going to run the landscape. And like the upsells, et cetera. I'm going to manage these contracts in terms of the subcontractors and I'm going to go sell more projects for us. Now, when it comes to the 40 framework labor, the third step is something that we need. Once we generate a bunch of leads because we get a bunch of customers, we got to actually do the work. But right now, Matt is using illegal laborers. He's using people they don't have a driver's license. The quality of our labor is very, very poor. We need people that can show up to work in their own vehicle, drive to customer's property, and then do the work efficiently and profitably. And right now, that's not happening. We don't have any training for our labor. We don't have any sort of accountability for that labor. And for that reason, the culture is extremely poor. We've got to change that. Otherwise we'll get a whole bunch of leads and no laborers to actually do the work profitably. Okay, cool. That kind of leads us into labor. We talked about this already.

For now, you and Brandon, we build the whole team around that. Brandon, Think of him as your operations manager. The goal, as we scale, we rebuild, probably likely in 2020, late, late 2025 and 2026. Because right now, restructuring is going to take you six months. Getting these subcontractors in place for the mowing, really redoing these contracts, getting rid of people in the organization, selling off the truck, selling off the mowers, that's going to take you some time. Now, the difference between six months and six weeks is how violent you get with it. And I just recommend just like, pull everything out, like, literally before spring rush. If you can do this, this step. This is the difference between you, like, getting back on your feet in early 2026 versus literally in eight weeks. Being like, this is a new business. I feel good about it. And so I would recommend be violent with it. Get rid of people. Cut trucks. Like, you can sell trucks quickly. Like, just get rid of them. If you take a little of loss, who cares? We know we're going to get rid of one payment. We're getting rid of two trucks, half of your insurance. From an auto perspective, get rid of maintenance. All this equipment sucks time in terms of maintenance, etc. Just get rid of it all labor. We're going to cut all your lowest performers. You're going to keep one person that would be Brandon's helper. And ideally, once we get back on our feet and the business is restructured, we find employees that are legit, that can drive here. They have a license. And the new policy at Courtney's Lawn Landscape is you come here with a driver's license and a phone. But we need to pull out all the detractors that were currently. When those people are coming in, like, if I can't work here, I just. I'm out, out. I'm seeing people that are lazy. I'm being people sitting in the truck. I'm seeing a whole bunch of waste on a job site, and I'm hustling. Forget that I'm out That's what's keeping the good people away right now. No one good wants to work here. The reason I say that is because you have someone like Brandon wanting to leave. So we know we need to get rid of those people down the road. So I'm thinking like after restructuring, you have one. Like, is there one of the employees that you're like, I think they'd be good if they were just working with Brand. Brandon.

Yeah, Juan. So he could probably. He would probably. I could probably get him on payroll. Okay, this is. This is what we. This is how we are.

So then this is. This is what you do. So from a labor perspective, we're gonna sit down with Brandon and this other gentleman and we're gonna explain what the business is going to look like. You're going to be very clear that within six months, everyone working here is going to have a driver's license and a phone. And if that means that he goes and figures that out over the next six months, if that means he already has a license and you just don't know about it, if that means he needs to go clean up something and pay some fines so he can get his license back, he's got time to do that. And that you would make it very clear that if and when he gets back on payroll, if he's able to in those six months, you'll. You'll cover the difference. You'll make sure he's covered. Because it sounds to me like he would be a really good team member if he was just with Brandon. Yeah, but with all these other people and your ex around, like, everyone's morale just comes down. Everyone just goes to the lowest common denominator. And that's what's happening, right? Everyone's like, what can I do? Just to not get fired. And right now, because you're handicapped by not being able to find good people, they just run the roost. From a labor perspective, we're going to sit down, we're going to have a meeting with Brandon and him. Here's what the business is doing. I'm going to. I'm serious. I'm getting rid of the trucks. They won't believe you until you sell trucks and you get let. You get subs on those mowing jobs and you let go of your ex. So I know that will be a bloody conversation around the ex thing. I understand there's family stuff, but like, we know she is the one keeping the good employees from staying. We gotta get rid of her. And you already know that. You fired her three times.

I'm gonna get nasty texts and hear what a awful human being I am and how my business is gonna fail and karma's gonna. And they're gonna be books of text messages. I'm already aware of this because it happens.

So the reason you kept her, though, is because you've been handcuffed at these projects, these, these contracts. The reason I'm actually wanting those contracts gone is because you'll get rid of her and you won't feel like you need her anymore. So we, then we can get loosed of her. Now we actually open up the culture to good employees staying. All right. The reason the labor part, having legal employees is important is because you are. You are one phone call away or one inspection away from being out of business. It's an existential threat. And so there's certain things inside of business that if you don't like, for example, you don't pay your sales tax, you don't pay your payroll tax. You are. You are putting at risk the fact that you could be shut down tomorrow. And so we need to remove that. That is the thing that even if you were profitable, let alone if we, even if we had liquidity in the bank, if you're doing that sort of activity. We are, we are. We will not be able to sleep well at night. And so, like, when we look at, like, can you just run a business that's profitable and you sleep well at night? We need to make sure we have legal employees and we're paying payroll taxes, et cetera. So that's labor. That's a hard conversation with exes. That's a hard conversation with the current employees. That's a hard conversation with Brandon, the one employee. And I sit down right here. I'm going to go over exactly how this business is going to be branded. Here's what this business. Here's what Courtney's lawn landscape looks like by June 2025. Here's what's gonna look like, and here's all the things that we gotta get done in order to make that happen. We're selling off trucks. We're getting rid of the mowing. I'm gonna find subcontractors. I'm gonna go get three bids on it next week. I've already set these appointments up. Here's what's happening. And so then the last part is leadership. Now, the last step from the 4L framework is that we've got to have great leadership. And I believe right now that between Brandon and Matt, they can run this business. 250 to $300,000 in annual revenue. And that's going to be that hard conversation with all those parties, and that's going to mostly rely on you. And I believe that by having those conversations, someone like Brandon is going to thrive.

I think just getting that, you know, communication. And I think it's a. I don't want to say it's a trust thing, because I think we trust each other. It's just to know, okay, this is, this is yours, this is mine. You know, this is what we got to work together or it's not going to work.

But this is going to take some hard conversations. And this is where Matt's got to step up as the leader of the business, because he hasn't been the leader. He's been relegating this to team members that will tell him what to do. Do poor quality work and not hold the cultural standards that he wants to have in his business. Someone like him, like, oh, this is a legit business. We're going to actually run this correctly. We're not going to run this based upon us being handcuffed to employees that are pulling the culture down. So he's gonna jump in. I believe Brandon will step up once he sees the leader come back out inside of you. Because right now you have relegated all sort of leadership to basically team members that have no business being here. And you stepping up and taking authority and firing those people, letting them go and saying, we're gonna change things around here, you'll gain his respect back and he'll be all in.

Yeah. I'm 46, so, you know, my ultimate goal was in 10 years. Like, I grew up on a farm, so had a job since I was 8. I don't want to work till I'm 70, late 50s. I want to have all my bills paid, be able to sell the company or give it to somebody I don't like. Most of my blood family and my son don't want nothing to do with it. So he's kind of, you know, there's something there for him, but I've never had that conversation.

And by him being all in, he'll manage his one person really, really well and make those projects super profitable for you. And the only way, the only way we keep good employees around here is if the leader inside of you comes back out, because right now it's not there. These are hard conversations with Brandon, his existing team, and with his ex wife. And that's not going to be easy.

We get along better now than when we're married, obviously, but you know, and you care about someone as a person, but at the same time, I got to look out for me.

You've relegated all that leadership to other people. And so by taking ownership of the business and, like, doing the hard work of, like, selling the equipment, selling the trucks, getting rid of employees, that's the leader coming back out inside. And you take ownership of the business, right now, it's running you. You run the business, not the business run you. And right now, it's running you. And so we are not gonna let employees that we know shouldn't be here be around and deteriorate the culture. We're not gonna take jobs that we know we can't make money on. We're gonna do the work that comes in. We're not gonna be subject to, like, Angie's list for every single lead and paying them. We're ownership of it. Like, you're taking back the business if you can have these hard conversations. We complete the 4L framework by having a great leader inside of the business. And when you complete the 4L framework, you get the business to the next level, and that will be the next stage. He'll have to get more liquidity, get more cash, and continue to grow the business and get more leads and more labors. And that will come only after we fix the liquidity problem, because right now, there's no money in the bank.

Like, I never heard of Mike or. Or Augusta nothing. I started watching all these videos, and I'm like, he's watching these turnarounds. You're like, oh, we're doing that, man. That's my story. Then you listen to the next one. You're like, huh? Then you listen to the next one. You're like, huh. Oh, boy.

It's been running you for the past. You've been very reactive, and I know what it's like to be there. Like, I'm not pointing fingers. It took me five years to figure this out until, like, literally, underneath the dump truck almost died because of it. So. So I know it's like, you can absolutely turn it around. It will just be a matter of this can take. This can take six years for some people, like, to actually get rid of the people, have the conversation, sell the trucks. Or you can do this in six weeks, and you have spring rush in six to eight weeks.

So it's possible. I totally believe it's possible.

So.

Hey, Mike. Hey. Just want to do a quick follow up since the turnaround. I can't thank you enough for all that you've done. It's Just amazing. Around here, we got all the mowing subbed out, fertilizer subbed out. We're just concentrating on landscape. And since you've been here, you know, sold to trucks that we're mowing, sold trailers that were mowing, sold to mowers. And just focus on the landscaping, the hydro seeding, the patios, the pavers. The website launch again. Thank you, guys. You guys built that. Launched, I think, a month ago, and we're already getting leads on that. We're on the first page of Google already. You know, we're getting an opportunity to do four or five estimates a day. You know, I'm telling customers every. You know, you'll have your estimate in 24 hours. And following through with that, we also use some of the forms through co pilot. So, like, if it's a simple project like spring cleanup, edge mulch, taking forms with them, filling it out there, getting a down payment, and then coming back here and entering co everything into co pilot. And we did end up. Ended up getting, like, 25 Google reviews. Yeah, I just reached out to everybody, like, just all night long. Just. I had, like, 20 of them in, like, three days. Had the conversation with the ex about a week ago, so she's no longer here.

She said it's a huge mistake. And Mike don't know. He's talking about mowing was all the money. And, like, I broke it down. I'm like, we would lose $40,000 a year if we mo. So I don't understand why you need to charge so much, but everybody else can do it cheap. And I'm like, well, one, we're inefficient. Two, you know, we have more overhead than a company that does $30 million. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they can afford to be there. We can't. Brandon really got on board when he started to see, like, I was actually following through with this stuff, you know. The next morning, like, I woke up and I thought about it. I'm like, yeah, we're doing it. We're all in. And I told him and what the plans were and everything, and he was, you know, him hauling around. And like, two days later, I'm like, like, find me an employee. Find me subs. I said, we're getting rid of it all. And like, four days later, it was all gone. And he was like, holy, you're doing it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, so he. He's all in. He's on board the landscape crew, they're already booked out 26 weeks. So you know, it's. It's mid April, early April, I think. So we're already, you know, looking at adding another crew because the work's coming in, and it's just crazy. And it wouldn't have been possible, you know, without your advice. You know, we would have been wrapped up in the mowing, hiring too many people and still charging too less. You know, where there's money in the bank, bills are, you know, getting caught up, paid up. So, you know, just continuing to go the right direction. Excited to see what the whole year brings and what the future brings with the new structure. And again, can't thank you enough for your time and your effort and your advice and your, you know, God's blessing to this industry. Thanks.