$500K Per Year Lawn Care Business 100% REMOTE! (Coaching Call)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Yandes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 170 locations around the world. Today, I'm doing a coaching call with a business owner that has about a $500,000 lawn care business. He does it completely remotely.

It's not running on all cylinders because it doesn't have a captain, and we're kind of missing that stuff.

And so we're going to be talking today of whether or not he should focus on just the lawn care, but also talk about having a position for an operations manager, how to compensate them, as well as their office manager. How do you actually get someone to be a leader when. When it comes to the office, sales, et cetera? You take someone who's operationally sound, really, really good, maintaining, optimizing, and then you tell them, okay, we're going to grow the business. It just throws a monkey wrench in their brain, and they don't like it. It's a really good coaching call. I recommend watching this one a couple times because there's so much we jump into about compensating your managers, finding great leaders, and how to do this all remotely. Just.

Just.

I'm. I'm kind of brought up to speed. We have Quiet Lawn, and then we have Neon. Are we rebranding Quiet Lawn over to Neon to incorporate the pest control, or are we keeping them separate?

Well, probably. What? A bit. Well, right now, we're. We moved over to rebrand the Neon to do the treatment side, so that'll be fertilization. We control and pest control, and I honestly don't know what I'm gonna do with Quiet Line Mike. I want to keep it separate to possibly sell it if I can make it valuable enough in the next couple years or just keep them separate. But for now, we're trying to, you know, head towards the. The treatment side of the business.

Awesome.

So that. That's the current goal. But. But yeah, so now it's kind of a mix. It's kind of a mess because we've got, you know, Quiet Lawn at the same shop doing mowing. And then, you know, we got Neon. So I don't know, I might do. I might offer mowing and do everything under Neon because it doesn't pigeonhole me to use electric mowers. Like, I'll still use the handheld stuff, but if I want to get a gas stander, I'm not really taking. Tied to, you know, tied to what we're using. Cool. But okay, so an operations manager. We. We have a guy that already, that does been doing pest control for 10 years and he's treated lawns for that. And he's, he's worked for us for over a year.

What do you look for when you screen somebody for an operations manager? Like how, how, how deep do you go? Do you do like Colby tests and stuff like that or what? What are you looking for?

Yeah, like the main thing I'm looking for is what type of operations manager are they and what, what is their objective? Because a lot of times people will say they want an operations manager when reality they want a general manager to run the entire business operationally but also do sales. And so I think clarity first on like what is his role? Is it just operations or is he actually going to be doing estimates, doing follow up calls? What's sort of his actual role going to look like?

Mostly the operations because you know, we have a, I guess kind of a similar setup but we have Ibrahim and a team that does Sal, you know, they close all the sales, they do the customer service. Most of our estimates are especially for that stuff. We don't do any on site estimates, it's all online. So it mostly just be the operation, the day to day operations at the shop, you know, managing the employees, you know, making sure the work gets done, holding people accountable, you know, making sure equipment's taken care of, stuff like that.

Yeah, so I think an operations manager is the right move, especially if the business is not growing fast. Um, even, even if they're just focused on, on operations. I find if the business is growing super fast, they really, it's a different role than someone who is maintaining or optimizing the current business. And so just realize that like sometimes I've lost managers when I stopped like they were grow, grow, grow, grow. And then okay, let's make it profit, let's raise prices. We're not going to hire more people, we're not going to get more trucks, we're just going to raise prices and make this more profitable. I would sometimes lose them because they like that growth and like the hunt and then vice versa. Sometimes if you take someone who's operationally sound, really, really good at maintenance, maintaining, optimizing, and then you tell them okay, we're going to grow the business, we need to hire more people, it just throws a monkey wrench in their brain and they don't like it. So I think getting clarity on like what they would like to do, like what their goals are is super important. If they like them more of the maintain and optimize or if they like the grow and expand part.

Okay, okay, perfect, perfect. And I think where we are, you know, kind of transitioning, you know, I want to, I want growth, but not super rapid growth. You know, it nice be nice to start you one to $200,000 a year more, you know, a little bit more than that. You know, start getting that growth now that we've kind of, you know, spent some time figuring out what we want to do and you know, getting that down and. Okay, so perfect. What would that be? Their roles and responsibilities. What knowing that person. Like what, what would you expect that person to do if they're there with 1, 2, 3 employees?

Yeah, like, I would take every single action of the day and I'd group into three things. One is getting the work. The second one is doing the work. The third one is greasing. Greasing years. So basically sales, operations and admin. It sounds like sales and admin. You're basically handling for this person. So it's like, what are the actual tasks that are. Operations are typically things that need a person in. In person because you already have made things outsourced in terms of admin and sales. So like, it's like, what are those tasks? Anything that requires a person in person and make sure that the work gets done. So whether it be site visits, whether that be quality control, whether that be team meetings, whether it be interviews in person for new hires, those. That's the checkl list. And I just group every single like function of the day into those three categories. And everything in operations is what do I need to do to get the work done? Like, if all sales stopped, the phone never rang for customer service, what would be have to get done just to get work that's currently in the schedule completed?

Okay. Okay, perfect.

Okay. Pay. How do you structure pay and incentives for an operations manager like that? Like what, what's. What kind of base pay are you kind of seeing in our, you know, kind of in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida? What are you, how are you, you know, incentivizing them, you know, percentage of revenue, percentage of profit. What are you, how are you?

Yeah, you know, like Charlie Munger always said, like, you know, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Right. And so this is the same thing here. It's like, if you want to grow the business, you'll want to do it based upon more revenue, close ratio and those metrics. If you're willing to optimize for profit, we're going to do it very differently. And so ultimately there's really three ways to do it. And one is based upon the P and L. The other one is based upon the balance sheet. So on the P and L there's two ways to incentivize someone, either top line or bottom line. So top line is going to be, you're going to be wanting growth, you want to expand the business and you just simply either give them a commission or bands of bonuses that get unlocked based upon monthly revenue. So for example, on my locations it's like, hey, you're getting a base pay and you're going to get profit sharing. But we know that's down the road because we're growing and growth sucks cash. So what we're going to do is going to get an incentive based upon top line revenue. If you get over 20,000amonth, immediate bonus unlocked. If you go over 30,000, 40, just dollar amounts that go over to them. Some.

You'Re right, you're about to say what I was about to say. Some people will just do a straight percentage like 3, 4, 5, 6% of top line revenue. And then I would make sure you have a conversion cycle and hey, that's for the first two years and then it converts into profit sharing. Now profit sharing comes in two forms. One bottom line on a P and L or secondary would be based on the balance sheet in terms of owner's distributions. And so when you look at the bottom line P and L, the reason there's a difference here is because if you have any sort of debt, it's not going to show up on the P and L in terms of anything besides interest expense. So you could have a business leveraged and look very profitable in the P and L. But there's no money in the bank account because the actual principal pay down is not being accounted for in the P and L. You just see interest expense, especially with zero percent interest. People like oh, zero percent, great, your P is going to look really good, your balance sheet is going to look horrible and you're going have any bank money in the bank. And so I would be very careful with determining do you give profit sharing based upon the P and L or do you give distributions, a percentage of distributions and cash in the bank. I really like the second one, especially if you're going to be remote as an app and tea owner. So the second, the first one's pretty simple and that is like a bottom line profits end of the quarter you're getting a percentage of that. I would only give any sort of profit sharing if the business is more stable. It's not growing quickly, there's going to be predictable profits 4/4 out of a year. If it's only profitable for two quarters because you're growing so much in spring rush, et cetera, profit sharing starts to become like nebulous and they, they don't trust you because there's not, there's nothing to share. And then I would, I would make the distinction between bottom line profit on p&l vs distributable cash on a balance sheet based upon whether or not you have debt. And so if you have debt, it's, it's a conversation to have with them like hey look, our bottom line, P and L is going to look really good, but really I'm having to make all these, these payments for all the equipment, etc. To get started. And so the third way is my, my most ideal and that is the, the distributable cash. And that's essentially at the end of the quarter. Anything above a certain threshold of cash we are distributing and you're getting a percentage of it. And the distributions go to the owner, as would owner distributions typically. But a percentage of those owner distributions go back to the manager. And so I like it for the fact that it incentivizes the ultimate thing that you want down the road, which is you're able to take money out of the business.

Good. Can, can we get specific with our situation and actually can you help me come up with an actual number for this person? You know, because we're, we're like half a million right now. You know, we got rid of a lot of mowing last year, kind of stayed about the same, added some pest control and stuff. But debt wise we have, you know, we do have debt. I got a 200000 SBA loan that's at 3, I think 3.75 and you know, a thousand, basically a thousand dollars a month. And then I have a Tesla that I just bought for, you know, my use. So that's about 43,000. So that's kind of our debt situation. We don't have any other debt but you know, it's significant amount. But how would you, you know, structure this? You know, what, what would you be thinking base pay for this person? You know, they're going to be spending probably 80% of their time in the field. You know, he's our full, he's our full time technician. And then I would, was thinking the rest, you know, the, to doing inspections, you know, making sure we have supplies at the shop. But I like to, you know, we, we waste a lot. I'd like to, you know, we break a lot. You know, the guys were breaking all kinds of stuff last year. I'd like to find some kind of way to incentivize him to keep costs down and have guys take care of stuff. But how would you specifically pay this person and structure it?

Yeah, like, I think simplicity around the incentive is important. When you start getting the weeds of like, okay, we're going to start tracking damage cases. Well, ultimately that just ties like really what you're saying is I didn't make enough profit. Like, I want to see more money coming to me. So just incentivize the actual end result because all of that other stuff trickles down into the final result of more distributable cash for you as the owner. And so like at 500,000, this is a working GM. That's what we call them. This is where I wanted them to spend as much time in the field as possible. So I would be tracking this every single week. And that is how many budget hours worth of work do they complete every single week? And I want that to start at 30 budget hours a week. And because 30 budget hours, assuming a 75% efficiency is going to be 40 clock hours full time. So for my working GMs, that's around that $500,000 marker, up to 800,000. I'm expecting you to complete 30 budget hours of work in the field. Unless you have in person estimates, I'm going to take an hour away for each one of those or interviews with team members. I'm going to take an hour away for that. And so let's just say for us we have in person estimates. Let's say there's for you, it's just like a few like site visits, something like that. Let's say there's three. And then let's say that they had to interview two people that week. Well, that's gonna be 30 minus five. I expect 25 budget hours worth of work to be completed in that week. Because what you need to do is operationalize your expectations of them doing work in the field.

Okay.

Because if you just say, hey, I want you to work in the field and you also need to do all these other tasks, what will happen is they will do all these other tasks and be very inefficient and the actual work getting done will not happen.

Okay.

And so you want to operationally, on a weekly basis, you're going to have that meet in your meeting with them and you're tracking. Okay. We're going to track the efficiency of the business. But also these are the expectations. 30 budget hours, completed work a week. And then we subtract out for any in person visits with customers or interviews with employees. And you could also do something around training, if they're training them. And then, then we have an established benchmark of how much work we expect to get done. And then it's pretty easy to be able to pay off their salary with amount of work that they get completed, actually doing work in the field.

Okay.

You know, we're pretty good at calculating budgeted hours for mowing. You know, it's a little bit more simple. It's much found it much more complicated with fertilization and weed control to calculate and like pest control to calculate budget hours of you. Do you have much of that with your businesses or do you have a better formula to kind of, you know.

Ultimately figuring out budget hours for mowing is simply, I'm going to take how much revenue I'm making, divide that by my labor rate that I'm targeting and, and you know, come up with budget hours. The same thing is true with, with weed control, et cetera and pest control. It's just a function of, there is going to be inherent product cost baked into that price and it's going to be a lower percentage that I'm going to give you giving the employee because there's product costs, higher customer acquisition cost, lower lifetime value typically compared to something where I'm going every single week and it's 50, $60 per. And um, you might give 30% of labor revenue on a, on a mowing route to the customer or to an employee on P4P, you might only give 10 to 15% on a recurring, you know, pest control or spraying application. And so I would just, yes, it's going to be like there's more variability, et cetera, but you can come up with the number and it's like, okay, if someone is going to complete six budget hours of mowing an eight hour clock day, how many. If I just do. You can just look back in time like okay, the last three months and I look at every single person and see how long they were taking the route and calculate approximately the budget hours and come up with a rate per hour which is going to be much higher than you're mowing. That's what I would be doing. It's like that hourly rate is probably looking. If your mowing is $100 an hour, your, your application could be 150, could be 200 per hour that you're going to. Okay. Backtrack the dollar amount to a budgeted hour because ultimately you're still selling time.

Sure, sure.

Okay, perfect.

Now. Okay. Yeah, and I think we have that as far as our rate for that and stuff. Okay.

To answer your question more directly, Michael, I think, I think the base pay you got to be at least at 60 grand a year. Even in our area, it's actually mandated now it's government. As of January 1, you can't pay less than 58, 000 on salary for this kind of position. So I think it's 58, 600 or something. So usually 60 is what you're gonna need to get someone even interested if they had any experience because they want like some sort of foundational guarantee and then incentives on that. The business, you want to usually get that to where if the business final cylinders, they grow this thing, it's way more profitable. That should be able to get to 100k, assuming they hit all these benchmarks. So that's why it's like, okay, I'm going to bake in some revenue incentives based upon growth. I'm going to then more long term bake in distributable cash incentives. And for me, Michael, if I'm remote and I'm never having to work in the business, I'm willing to give up 50% of distributable cash. But that means me never being there. And so I work my way down from 50 down to 5% based upon my involvement. So if you're showing up every day, that might be like 15%. Right? If you're showing up every week, maybe it's 20%. But if you literally are involved in hiring, buying decisions, they handle everything, that number can flex up. And so this allows you to actually bake into their compensation model. Hey, as you take more off my plate, I don't have to be there as often. And you're hitting these KPIs, your percentage additional cash goes to the point where you are literally making every dollar I make out of the business, you're getting 50 cents of it.

Okay. Okay, good. And that, that calculating that distributable cash is just looking at the balance sheet every quarter.

And so what we do. And you can adjust this like you just need to set what the threshold is for distributed cash. What I mean by that is over what dollar amount do we actually consider cash in the bank distributable? For example, what we do is we say, hey, over the past quarter, the past three months, what's the average monthly revenue. Let's say it's 40,000, 50,000 and 60,000 revenue per month. Well, the average would be 50,000. At the end of that quarter. I am going to take anything over $50,000 in the bank and consider that distributable cash. Let's say there's $70,000 in the bank. Well now there's $20,000 of distributable cash. Let's say I'm giving 1/3 of that to the general manager, one third of distributed cash. That person's going to make $6,333 or whatever it is and that's going to be their distribute cash, their bonus and then you're going to make the 14.

Okay. Okay, now that makes sense. That's a. It's a lot better, A lot better way to do it with actual cash. I like that. Okay, so we set up if you.

Do, you know, monthly billing because you are getting paid late for services you're doing. So doesn't that get complicated?

A bit, yeah. Great, great, great one, Abraham. So what we do is we do the 5th of the month. So for example, instead of doing January 1st through April 1st, we do January 5th through April 5th. So that way if you do monthly billing and you bill on the last day of the month or the first day of the month, you'll get all that money into the cycle.

Okay.

No, I think that's good. And I mean this would be based on actual, I mean we just like we do Ibrahima, we did the actual revenue generated not you know, non accounts receivable or not, not based on the monthly amount. But what we actually work, we actually did. But that would be. Yeah, that would set it off a little bit because you know we've, we put Everybody on a 12 month contract for every service.

Yeah, like what is I kind of recommend, Michael, if you're trying to, hey, I want to grow, but I want to incentivize this person long term is you simply say, hey, I'm going to give you two incentives. One of them is going to be valid for 36 months and the other one is the main objective as I came for the next 36 months. If you hit these revenue markers per you get an immediate bonus or you get a commission off the top, some sort of revenue incentive because you want them to grow, you need them to grow the business. But then also from day one, any distributable cash of this percentage you will be able to get. When I take a dollar out, you get 15 cents whatever it might be. But that start to go up as you take things off of my plate because the eventual goal is that you take distributions and do nothing in the business. And so we don't want the incentives around revenue to eclipse the incentives around distributions, though, to be very careful. Because if you just incentivize revenue so much, they'll just always want to grow the business and they'll never actually be any distributable cash.

No, that's good. And I mean, I'm not, I'm not involved in all in the business now.

So this, you know, I'm involved very little.

One thing to keep in mind too, Michael, when you do distributable cash, you will need to basically open up the books to them very openly because they'll need to know that there's debt payments coming out because otherwise they're going look at their piano like I'm, I'm way more profitable. But in reality, you know, you're probably going to have 2000, $24,000 a month or $24,000 a year difference simply because there's debt payments coming out. And that's going to be the difference between your profit on your P&L versus distributable cash. So you'll have to open up the books of them if you do open based upon distributable cash.

Okay, so talk me about this 58,000. It was what, 38 or 39,000. This just got raised to 58,000. If you got a full time manager.

Yep, if they're on salary. Yep, if they're on salary.

So the guy we have now, you know, is. He makes probably what, 40, 45. Ibrahim, I would guess he's our technician, but we only, you know, it's. So he makes 40 or 45 right.

Now you could keep on hourly then you could keep them an hourly. That's fine. It's just if you switch him to salary because what they're wanting, they don't want people to do is have a $30,000 salary and working 50 hours a week. Right. Because people are taking advantage of it. So they're raising this to basically keep people from going into salary. So you could keep this person hourly and still do all these same incentives. It's not a bad move.

Would you, I mean, would you just keep him like a P4P hourly employee for like 30 or saying he's got to do a minimum of 30 hours in that and then say the other 10 hours is some kind of hourly base pay?

Yeah.

And then do the. And then do the cash incentive on top of that.

Yep. I, I think it'd be good. I would probably, honestly, if I was you, Michael, I would probably just say, hey, you get an hourly rate. Because this is the challenging part with an operations manager, even when they're out doing work in the field, they're gonna have to be contacting other people. They're gonna have to contact the office. They're gonna touch with Abraham. So, like, I would, I would just make it, hey, you make X amount per hour flat. Plus you have to, you have to get the 30 budget hours a week done. So you're gonna bake in P4P into the fact that, you know, these, this work has to get completed.

Okay. No, that's better. Yeah. Because I mean, yeah, I mean, that would just be, I mean, well, you know, right now, like, we're only doing a half a million, but we do it with two FTEs, like less than two employees. Like he's by himself right now. We did that with two people last year. So because we've spread the workout and we've got good Christmas light business and you know, we're moving towards the higher margin stuff. So it's not like he's managing three or four guys. But I would like to get to that. But yeah, yeah, definitely to jump from, you know, 40, 45,000 to 80 or 100 is a huge jump.

So, yeah, I'd keep on hourly. I would make sure he's pro. I'd probably be like $25 an hour. That's going to get around 50. So there's no downside for him. And by getting that $25 an hour, we expect these gets to 30 budget hours of work done a week, minusing out any in person visits or training and interviews. And then you just know you kind of baked P4P into that by expecting the 30 budget hours. And if they're not hitting that benchma, potentially get a lower rate. It's like, hey, if you're not getting above 30 budget hours for three weeks straight, you go down just to make sure that there's incentive for them to actually hit that, that benchmark. And then it keeps it simple. It's like, hey, you're getting paid per hour. You're expected to do this amount of work and all these other tasks. And when you're doing these other tasks, you're getting paid this $25 an hour.

Okay. And what would, what percentage would you probably do top line for that to incentivize some growth?

I would be looking at your, your capacity limits for the business. So for example, what's like your best month last year in revenue?

Probably.

Yeah. November and October of the Christmas light revenue we got plus the prepays. I don't know if that counts as revenue because it distribute throughout the whole year. But yeah, I would say October and November.

And is that around 50, 60,000 Abraham?

Yeah, we got around 80k in November and around 60k I think in, in October.

So what you could do Michael, you say hey, okay, we know based upon our fixed expenses and keeping this one person busy, we probably need to make about $25,000 a month to break even anything other than just do layers above that. Okay. If you hit 40, if you hit 50, if you hit 60, if you hit 70, if you 80, there's just dollars amount at the end of the quarter or at end of the month. We're just going to give you as as a bonus. So they're just incentivized to grow that like keep going, get it to 100.

Instead of like doing like a 2% revenue or something like that. Or two.

Either one, either one works. Right. It's just a matter of like do you want them to. Actually this is the reason I like the the tiers is because if they're at 58000 I want them to make sure they go get the extra job done on the 31st because I want them to like be incentivized to do get to that next 60. So I also don't want to give them 2% of let's just say I'm only doing 25,000 that month. I don't want to give them a percentage when I'm not making any money. So I like to have like a zero point. A zero point and it goes above and I would make the zero point your break even.

Ah, that's a good. I said that. So. Yep. So the break even the percent even if I did a percentage above breaking. But you said the tears. Yeah, that. Yep, doing tears. I like that.

So like when I'm, when I'm trying to grow like I generally know that if I'm having a general manager and they got like a storage unit and a maybe a ploy and a truck or two. If I don't make less, if I don't make more than 20,000amonth in revenue, I'm going to lose money. So I just dart their revenue incentives based on 20,000amonth in revenue and up.

Okay. Okay, now that's perfect. Okay, so break on even on that and Then do the. Obviously do the cash. The cash on hand or set on the triple cash attributable cash bonus as well on quarterly.

And you guys be honest. I'm like, hey, at the beginning, there's not going to distribute cash. We're growing the business. We're going to have to buy another truck. We're going to be doing lot of advertising. But the goal is to move towards us over time. And you can make it really juicy for them to know. Like, the eventual goal is that you take money out of the business. And the reason I like this, Michael, is you want them excited for you to take money out of the business. Like, that is your whole goal. You don't want to be there, so you want things taking off of your plate. So I incentivize the percentage of distributable cash based on my involvement. And then I am going to. I want them to be like, hey, please take a couple thousand dollars out of the bank. You want that?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Oh, that's perfect. That'll incentivize them to keep costs down and not break stuff and buy a bunch of stuff we don't need. Okay, exactly. Okay, perfect. Let me get back to my question.

Or get debt on equipment and then it doesn't show on the P L. Because that's what I see all the time with GMs that are based upon just the bottom line. Profit on a P L is. Then you'll get a 0% interest and never actually see any impact to their. Their profit sharing and getting all this equipment.

So sure. Okay, perfect. So second, second person, second thing we're working on is an office manager, a virtual office manager. What? We have a good person in mind too. She's in Columbia. Columbia, South America. But what do you look for in that type of person to somebody? Because Abraham and I, we're working on other stuff. I have, you know, a couple other businesses, but neither one of us are a good leader or good at holding people accountable or getting stuff done. I'd say we're probably operating at 50% efficiency with everything we do, because there's just no, no leadership in the field. There's no, you know, we don't, you know, that kind of everybody does their own thing. What, what. You know, that's kind of the challenge we have. We need somebody here that's going to be a leader, and we need somebody, I think, with the office manager role. What. What are you looking for in that person? Like when.

Well, I think the thing to be careful of is, you know, Obviously them being overseas, it's going to be cheaper. It's also going to take more your time to manage and train them. Right. And there's going to be turnover in that role as well. And so like I think, you know, at 500,000, you definitely want to be growing to $800,000 marker in order to be able to just afford a operations manager, afford this office person. And then your time, even though it won't show up on the P and L, is at a cost to the business to train this person, manage them, et cetera, yours and Ibrahim. So I would be, I would be hesitant to think that they're going to have any sort of leadership skills. I think that's your operations manager, like in terms of in, in person with the team, as you grow the business, they're going to be the leader. That's, that's the person you're compensating heavily for. You have a lot more incentives around the overall business. I think when it look, when you look at office manager or even just office person, I'm going to be, I'm going to be looking at more the inputs. So like whether it be close ratio, whether the amount of the upsell, whether to be like what are the things that they actually can do to change the business? Because they're going to be less able to change the efficiency of the crew, they're going to be less able to be able to do a lot of aspects that actually are going to show up in the bottom line. But what they can do is increase close ratio. They can upsell customers from. So they're not a thousand dollars a year, they're $2,000. So like I would be incentivizing all the things that they can actually do to meaningfully change the business if possible.

Okay, so how would I guess specifically so you knowing how we kind of operate and that they, you know, they kind of handle, you know, all the admin side and the sales side.

You know, we're obviously, you know, it's going to obviously change by the, the country. But you know, what, what, you know, if we're paying say maybe a thousand fifteen hundred dollar base salary, what would you, how else would you incentivize those, them for those things? Would it be revenue? Would it be like you said, close ratio, stuff like that. But how, how else would you incentivize that person to do the right activities?

Yeah, like the challenging part is at 500,000, even if you pay someone, you know, $18,000 a year, you know, is it just the base 18,000. Right. It's still a enough revenue and well, I'm actually most concerned about your time managing them. I think it becomes all of a sudden goes from three and a half to four percent of revenue going to this person to very quickly 10% because your time in managing and training them and then your operations manager dealing with them every single day. So like they will either you know, grease the like again, admin is greasing the gears and so what again in those categories of sales, operations, admin, it's greasing the gears, running payroll, checking the email, doing voicemail, answering the phone, all these other things. And so how do we actually measure that is usually going to come a function of actually what is their percentage of the revenue in the business that they are taking. And so I would, I would make it much more like if you have one person doing all these things, which I think it's 500 000, you don't even need a full time person doing this. But like let's assume the business grows 800000 that you're putting more on their plate. I think that it'd be much more around like incentivizing their efficiency is what like you could literally give them a flat rev. A percentage of revenue. Like if you say hey, we're gonna be 3% of, of all, all the revenue. So at 3% of you know, 500000 that's 1500, 15, $15,000 a year. Right. You could give them a flat percentage. And then as the revenue grows and then it's like hey, you must complete all of these tasks and if it takes you four hours in a day, that's fine, but you've got to do all of these things in order to earn this 3% or 4% or whatever you're giving them. But the inherent cost, that will not be tracked. This is the part I'm very cautious around when it comes to remote is your time managing them. It's never calculated. It doesn't show up in the P and L. I'm only spending like 4 or 5% of revenue on my, my virtual staff. But then they're spending three hours a day managing them and your time is far more valuable. And so now all of a sudden you have an owner not producing revenue, you have a virtual person and you have an operations manager. And that on a $500,000 business will never be profitable. And so that's, that's part to be careful of. I would say though, if they're managing all office and all admin and they have full control of a lot of like the admin functions of the business. And you're also expecting them to create SOPs so that if they ever bailed, it's all documented for someone else to pick up. If that's their role, I would probably give them a percentage of revenue. And then as a, like a base that can't go low. So for example, we say, hey, you can't make less than a thousand dollars a month, but you're going to make 3% of all revenue. And you know that that's going to look around 50. You could just say like last year we made $500,000. That'd be $15,000. But in exchange for that, we expect all of these things to be done every single day, all of these things done every week, and all these things done every month. If these are not done, you will not get that incentive above your base pay.

Okay. And just to give you some more info so that, you know, they do handle platinum, but they also handle, we offer, you know, the virtual support to a handful of other lawn care businesses. That's kind of another little business that we're growing. So there's a team of what, five or six. I mean, a lot of them are part time. We got like a graphic designer, we've got a customer service person. We've got, you know, some different little roles there. But I don't know if that, you know, but part of their role would be just managing those people and holding them accountable, trying to figure out how we would, you know, how we would structure that since they're all virtual and.

Yeah, so it sounds like they're going to be managing things outside of just this one, like your business. They're going to be managing the people. So then it's a function of like, I, I would just be looking at this department, right. I wouldn't even look at the business like the $500,000 business because like you're actually managing other businesses. You basically, you said this command center over the past five or 10 years. And so I would be looking at that as a department. So all the revenue coming to that command center, all the, all the time that you would bill to your business, you'd be billing them like you would a regular business. The manager should be getting a piece of that. Nothing to do with your business because again, they can't control operations, they can't control the efficiency. They don't even really control the lead flow because they're not spending. They don't make decisions on marketing. And So I would treat your command center as.

The incentives around that. So based on revenue, same thing. Based on revenue, based on profitability, I'd be giving them incentives. If you're expecting to manage the, the agents that are serving other businesses as well as your own.

Okay, okay.

And I treat your business just like every. So my locations, for example, they get treated the exact same as all the other locations and they pay money to command center, same exact way. And then the, the leadership there gets incentivized based on that.

Okay. And we set it up like that. So and you know, still Quiet lines by far the main, you know, main contributor to that. But you know, so they probably, you know, primarily be running, you know, the day. Like you said, we're just basically, you know, selling our services to Quiet Lawn and the other lawn care, you know, other companies that we're working for.

Okay, so that makes sense. How do you, I, I, I like, you know, obviously basing it on revenue or basically, you know, we, we do like sales commissions if they close the sale or something like that. But how do you, what, what reverse incentives do you have to keep them from just selling and you know, not selling, overselling the services, you know, kind of your true green kind of stuff where they're just selling the moon and just get a commission and then we're not able to live up to those expectations with a customer. How do you kind of keep, keep them from just chasing revenue?

Yeah, like the bottom line is, especially if you're serving other businesses, if you don't do enough job, they'll leave. And so if you ultimately lose customers, I. E. Other businesses that you are serving and it's this virtual service.

They will, they should be making less money. And because so if, if they're doing that and they're chasing the commission.

No question the businesses that are paying you, is that a flat monthly fee or is that based upon a sale? Are they giving you commission?

Yep, both as a play plus commission, you know.

Got it. So like.

Then your incentives are relatively aligned. If they're giving you a commission based upon a sale, it simply comes down to like their satisfaction. So I would probably incentivizing your manager based on the satisfaction of the people you're serving, including your operations manager at Neon or Quiet Lawn. Like I would be like, hey, you're going to get a survey and you're also going to get metrics and those metrics of satisfaction to the people we serve from the quote unquote, command center is also going to play into your incentives. So I would make it say it's revenue, it's profitability. But both of those are levered on something like a CSAT score, customer satisfaction.

And so you could, you could do that because then if that number goes down, it's likely they're being less satisfied because, you know, either A, they're not closing enough or B, they, they go so hard for the sale, they're doing bad customer service. So you want your manager to have a more holistic incentive package if you just do it based upon sales, which is more like your frontline agents, which is fine, I'm okay with that. But if you lose out on the quality aspect, which the manager needs to be holding training and customer service and doing reps and doing coaching calls with each rep, et cetera, they need to be incentivized on customer SA satisfaction. And so for us, it's like if franchisees are leaving and they're not using our services command center, that's like a demerit. Like we, we did something wrong. And so we, we are surveying like, how can we improve? How can we make this better? What is what satisfaction? What's. Which departments are you happy with? Which services inside a command center are you happy with? Because that is the true indicator from a manager's perspective of the success of the, of the department.

Okay, Ibram, do you have specifics as far as more, you know.

No, I don't. I just wanted to. One question I wanted to ask is like you said the operations operational manager and then you have the office manager.

How does the communication kind of. Or who's above who in. In your case? Who's, who's above in the hierarchy in your case?

It just depends how you want to set it up. Like, I think that if you look at sales, operations and admin right now, really your virtual team is doing operation or sales and admin, you probably going. It's probably going to look like you have an, an office manager, you have an operations manager and then you're above them and they both report to you. Now the thing is they're going to have to communicate on a daily basis quite consistently. So either A, you have one of them slightly above the other, probably your operations manager because they have boots on the ground. And you're also incentivizing the base upon distributable cash. They'd probably be the ones that I would, I would look to as the person to make calls for the business. The reason is also because your office manager, you're incentivizing the base fund something totally different, which is the. Like the command center, like the. All these other entities using the services, they should be focused on making a really good command center as an office person, whereas the operations manager should be making all the business decisions for Quiet Lawn. That would be my recommendation. Like, that way, your incentives are. They're aligned, like, hey, over here, command center. I want to serve Quiet Lawn as best as I possibly can because my incentives are aligned with them being satisfied. Over here, I'm making business decisions from an operations manager perspective on distributable cash. Right. If you start incentivizing or saying, like, even that the office manager has any in, like, in the sway of what the operations manager does now, the operations manage, like, well, why should they care about what my. My business is doing? They have no incentive based upon what I'm incentivizing, which is distributable cash. And so I would keep them separate. I would let the operations manager be kind of like the final say on things.

Okay. Okay. Perfect. All right. So.

That was kind of a challenge, Mike, you know, getting. You know, it's kind of a challenge, you know, especially not having leadership. For me in the field, you know, it's getting. There's a lot of communication that doesn't happen between, you know, the. The guys didn't get a lot of information because it's hard to get that and have someone that gets that information from, you know, Ibrahim and the guys over there to the. To the team. What kind of stuff do you have in place to keep that communication between, you know, keep everybody on the same page with your virtual remote command center and then boots on the ground. I know you do meetings every morning, but is. Is there other systems you have in place to keep everybody on the same page as far as what we're doing? What's.

Yeah. So, like, I think from your perspective, or Abraham, or whoever's kind of whoever these people are reporting to your operations manager and your office manager. Who are they reporting to? You, Abraham? What's that structure? Look above them.

Yeah, everyone reports to me. Right now you're looking to set up the operations manager role this year to kind of separate that.

Yeah. So I would probably be having a weekly operations manager and Abraham conversation. This is going to be a scorecard. It's going to look based upon, like, hey, operations is budget hours. How many estimates have been sent out, what your close ratio is, revenues, profits, like the. Just on a weekly cadence, especially around the budget hours, because we want them to be in the field as much as possible.

That'd be like the kind of month or, sorry, weekly cadence. Then the monthly cadence is more financial. Right. So that's when we're going to actually look at profits and the actual dollars and cents, how much cash is in the bank. That's gonna be much more like marketing strategy, hiring, et cetera. The weekly ones are very operational. I just want to stay focused on are they being efficient. These are 10 to 15 minute meetings. I'm having a one page scorecard that they have to fill out prior to that meeting. It's a scheduled time every single week, usually Monday morning. And then the, the monthly one is like, okay, let's look at the P L from last month. Let's look at. Is there what we're looking like in terms of distributable cash? What are we going to spend on marketing? What are we at in terms of capacity? Could we get 10 more customers without having to buy another truck? Could we, Is everyone only working 30 hours a week? And we could, we could put some more on their plate. That's that more of a monthly basis. And then the quarterly one is very easy because like everyone wants to know, how much money did I make last last quarter? And we're looking at distributable cash, we're looking at the revenue increases, et cetera. And so I just like to have that, that weekly, monthly and then quarterly kind of cadence for those reports. And I would do the exact same thing with your office, right? It's like, okay, how many, how many, what percent? What was our close ratio on the phone? What was our CSAT rating from our, our customers, including quiet lawn? What was our satisfaction scores? That would just be like a regular cadence. And then also looking at what percentage of time the reps are actually on the phone doing billable time for the same way we look about efficiency score in the field, I want to know the efficiency score in the office. It's going to be much lower than guys out in the field because they're not going to be on properties for 20, 30 minutes at a time. It's usually going to be between 30 and 60% efficiency score for someone in the office because they're switching tasks every minute or two. So there's much less time that is actually spent that's billable.

Mike, if you want to continue, I'm getting a call about our alarm. Getting.

Yeah, I don't know if Tony. Sorry, Mike. We're getting our alarm at the shop. Don't know if somebody's.

You could take your time.

You're good a Security alignment shop. Okay, so other staff, you know, like we have different roles like in the, the office. You know, like we have graphic designers or a graphic designer. We have, you know, somebody that does Facebook marketing ads. Like how do you incentivize the maybe a customer support. I mean I guess they would be doing some sales too, so they would get commissions. But how do you incentivize the people that are, aren't directly in sales? Maybe they're doing graphic design for social media posts or they're doing, you know, place in our Facebook ads. How, how would you kind of incentivize those people or do you have those roles?

Yeah, first off, I would say like for the command center side of things, what's the total revenue per year? Are we talking like 200,000? Are we talking a million? Like what's the size and scope of this? There's all revenue.

We just so small. I think Last year around 65k.

Okay, 65k for the whole year. So I would get laser like focused on one service because by doing everything for someone, you're just not going to be able to create metrics around paying and compensating people. Because like it's not a full time job to do posting. They're also having to answer the phone, they're also having to run payroll. They're doing all these things. It's impossible to incentivize them. And that's the reason why most office and admin people are just paid hourly flat. And you can't really incentivize because like, well if I give people a percentage or some sort of commission around close ratio, well then really it's whoever takes the phone call is going to get more money versus like I also need them to also do these other tasks. Whereas if I have a commission based upon close ratio or upsells, for example, I can then say okay, you're on the phone all day long. Your incentive is based upon these things versus right now. It's very difficult to create an incentive around like posting or like number of impressions. Like these are just very nebulous things because if they just put a weird wacky picture, it will get more impressions, it will get more shares, it will get more likes. But is that really good for the brand in the long term? And so I would be really inclined at that size of a command center to be like we're going to do one thing and we're going to do it well because by doing that you'll increase your CSAT scores for that service. And so what I would personally do if I was you. Because what we just recently did with our owners is we literally surveyed them like, hey, if we look at only offer for you probably two things or three things, which is the most valuable of the services we offer to you and cut everything else because if you got really good at those things, the customer satisfaction would go way up because you spent all your time on training your crew or your team around that. And you'd be able to create incentives for your team based upon metrics that they do all day long versus very sporadically going around and trying to figure stuff out.

Makes sense.

Yep.

Like if you look at this and by the way, you would, you possibly might not even need a survey them you could literally look at other 65,000. Was 50,000 of it this one thing? If so we should probably just, just do that and cut out this whole like social media management and all these other things that we're doing. Because like right now you're considering admin is like one big bucket. But there's probably email management, payroll, answering the pH. Like there's a party of 50 things inside of that. And so breaking all of that down like, because as you scale like it's extremely difficult to operationalize and that's the struggle we've had. We have like 20 some odd departments. It's like, okay, we send a survey out and we then we looked at like all like what are people actually using? And they literally matched perfectly the people wanted on the survey and then versus what are they actually using? What they're voting with their dollars every month.

So what were those things?

It's phone calls, it's sending out estimates and it's communication on a daily basis. And so you know, there's other, you know, five of the 20 something tasks we're going to come out because like there's such a small percentage that even want it on a survey. And two, from a revenue perspective, they're voting every month with their dollars. They don't want the service as much as these other ones. So instead of trying to focus on like this small thing, I'm going to take the big one that's working and it's going to get super, super good and increase their customer satisfaction scores. Because I'll be able to spend all my time training my team on that.

Sure, sure. No, that's good. Mike, what other advice do you, can you. Do you have or is there any. I mean, is there. Yeah. What other advice can you give us or you know.

Yeah, I think, I think based upon like Knowing a little about your background, Mike, and your guys's relationship too. Like, I would really encourage specialization. You have a lot of things in the fire and they're all doing little chunks of revenue. And I think if you took your top two or three, if you say, okay, out of all these ventures, whether it be the command center, quiet lawn, other things that we're doing, neon, okay, these are all little things. If I just focus on one or two of them, would I actually double the size of those and then completely outshadow all these little things that we're doing? Like $65,000 is what you made in three weeks in October. It's like, is it worth all this time and energy doing this thing for 65 grand? And if your answer is like, well, it's more of a long term play. Okay, great. Get really good at two or three things. That is currently making you 50,000 of that 65 and triple that. Because you get actually exceptional at it. It's very difficult. Exceptional at 50 different things.

Yeah.

And, and the difference between building a million dollar business and a $50,000 or $100,000 business is you getting exceptional at it. It's very difficult. Exceptional at 50 things. Yeah. So I, I would really take this at several layers. One, the broad like Mike Michael Reed Ventures. And then I would look zero in on each of these ventures. Okay, are we offering 30 services that should really be five that we could get really good at. And because of that the customer satisfaction goes up and then everyone talks about it. We're not, we're at that size. We are not get, we're not good enough at doing everything for people to talk about and refer you to other people. No one's banging down the door because you're not good enough. Like if we just. The brass taxi, we're not good enough. And this is what we have to say. Like the reason people don't use these services because we're not good enough at them. So instead of trying to like beat ourselves up and put people into way more training and diversify and get more management, we're just simply going to cut things out so we can focus on the things they like.

Sure. Yeah. I think, you know, I do need to, you know, I have a lot of, you know, coals or irons in the fire. I've got, you know, the, the kickboxing school too that I teach at at night, which is, I'd say that's more a passion thing. Like, I mean that's helped me get real refocused. I've lost like £25. It's like helped me like get a. I don't know. That's good for my spirit. I know it's not. I know it's a distraction and it takes away from. It is growing. I mean it's, it's like a hundred thousand dollars but I mean it's still tiny, but it's growing. But.

It does take. It has taken attention away from quiet lawn and neon to do that. But I think I just got burned out really burnout with quiet line of neon these last few years. And I've, you know, just kind of put my head in the sand and kind of hid away and you know, now I need to. And had to deal with some other personal stuff and you know, other stuff going on, health issues and you know, family stuff and like that. But you know, I know I need to be a lot more involved because you know, I have, you know, it has been good to be able to, you know, have a business that runs without me because I, you know, I haven't had to go in the field in a couple years. But you know, it's just, it's just, it's not running on all cylinders because it doesn't have a captain and you know, we're kind of missing that stuff. So I do need to figure out how I can get re motivated to, you know, love that business again and, and you know, put some time into it because I know if I did, you know, we could really.

Make some good gains.

Yeah, like I would, I would say Michael is, you know, my struggle as, as with most entrepreneurs is like you want the next thing because it is so fun to get started. Like zero to a hundred thousand and anything is just so much fun. Yeah. New entity, you're reaching out, new customers, new service offering. It's new systems you have to put in place, new websites, new entities. It's fun. What I would try to pivot your attention towards and your passion for is instead of of of new stuff is just like optimize what you currently have. Because if you take any of these businesses, any one of them, like flip a coin on them and you just focused all your time and energy on it and it made it like exceptional because it's. They're probably 8 out of 10 services. Like so what I mean is like if I had to. To.

Survey all of your customers from all your different entities, they're probably like, man, Michael's a great guy, Abraham's great. They do a good job. Probably get 8 out of 10. 10. But the difference between 8 out of 10 and 9 and a half out of 10 is a 10x difference in the size of that business.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like you, you do a million dollars worth of kickboxing. If you were the best in your state.

Yeah.

You would, you would triple the size of the, the quiet lawn. If you were the best lawn care service and you're super efficient and you're charged the highest price and you had a great operations manager and you focused all of your time and energy on getting that person and training them up and, and making sure they're in the systems and quantifying their KPIs. Like, and so I would really try to divert your attention from like I need to break new things when I get distracted. Like, because you're gonna get distracted, you're gonna want to do other stuff. Okay, I'm just go. I'm going to take all that time and attention I put towards new stuff and just do better at what I'm currently doing and making it from that 8 to the 9.5 because it is a 10x lever on the size of that business. When you go from 8 out of 10. Because everyone's 8 out of 10. Any operator where like there's a small business is usually 8 out of 10 compared to like a big, big massive corporation that has a thousand employees. No one knows anyone's name. They, people get forget stuff all the time. They're like a 6 out of 10. They get the job done. No one knows anything. They forget stuff. Like you're an 8 out of 10. But the difference between 8 out of 10 and 9 and a half out of 10 is literally a 10x of the business. And so you are not going to be nine and a half out of ten on all these different things. I just like which two of these. If, if. Because this is the other thing. By having the two combined, like for example, the remote thing, the 65,000 with the quiet lawn, 50,000. If that 560,000 DOL makes up 70% of the revenue of all these entities, I would cut everything else out. Knowing that those two things together can make a 1.52 million dollar business.

Sure.

And then the question is like, will the kickboxing become that? And I say, hey look, you can do kickboxing. It just might not be a business. It might be thinking you're passionate about you love, it's really good for your health. But we don't need to make a business around it.

Sure.

Yeah. And by taking away those complexities, Ibrahim and his team are Able to way better at training around a smaller vertical and get really good at it. It, whether it be upselling lawn services, upselling them into pest control, like these are things that if you spread them too thin, they're just not going to exceptional at it.

Sure. No, I agree. Yeah, that's. That's a big challenge. Yeah. You know, brought on by me. We're doing way too many things and it's way too complicated.

Oh, anything else I can help with, Abraham?

Do you have anything else?

Yeah, we have one more question about H2B workers. Do you have any experience with hiring H2B workers for lawn care, lawn mowing, stuff like that?

For my personal businesses, no. But for a lot of people I've talked to, yes. I think that your operations manager would need to have some experience working with this kind of program if you're going to use it. A lot of times, once you actually do go through the legal process, et cetera, you house them, et cetera, the costs are not as different as you might think. What you're getting usually is a worker that's very motivated, they're going to show up, they're going to work, hustle, etc. Etc. And so if you go through a third party, you're many times paying 28:30 an hour, to be honest, once you pay them and the person and all the fees associated with it. And you're also risking the fact that they might not show up in the spring because they can just cut visas very quickly. So like in 2016, a lot of businesses got like, oh, the number of visas just cut in half and people just didn't show up. And so then they had to sub everything out. So it's basically having a little bit less control. But as long as that operations manager, for example, could speak Spanish, finish is able to interact with them, has some experience with that. That might be doable. But keep in mind, if you only have two employees, for example, and an operations person and two of them are hdb, that could be your entire workforce gone. That could be also if there's contention between those two and your operations manager because they don't get along, could also just, you know, be really, really bad. So it's just a risk, but it's also usually a more dependable seasonal, you know, labor source. I think what's nice though is with like the Christmas lights that you guys are adding, you're adding in, you know, revenue outside of your current season. So you're going to probably start needing people year round anyways, or closer to It. And so the HGB program might not actually work well.

Well, and that's the challenge, Mike, is we've tried the year round thing and we, you know, we try to add other services because our season is really short here in South Carolina because just where we are geographically and the type of grass we have like our mowing seasons, it really sucks. I wouldn't, it's, I mean, I mean you're lucky to get 20, 25 cuts a year, even weekly, if we offered weekly. But.

So we've added the Christmas lights and other stuff. But we all, even though we keep people in the off season, we always end up keeping them through the, you know, they either leave at the end of the Christmas light season because even if they're getting paid or they like wait until the spring and then they leave and you paid them all winter for nothing, you know, to sit around. So that's the challenge we keep getting is it's hard to keep people mowing more than a year. Like we keep our technician, a spray technician, they, they stay for, you know, multiple years, but the mowing person, like they'll last like one season and then that's it. Like, I don't know the answer to that.

Yeah, like you could definitely do say, hey, we, for two, three months of the year, you're not going to get work. You know, return to work bonus. If you work the spring rush, you get $2,000 or something. Some sort of return to work bonus. I would say if you can keep people for an entire year on average, that's not bad. So it's a matter of how do we make the business model in a way that those people are still profitable and you don't keep them year round. So when you're hiring, it's like you set the expectation you're going to be off for three months. Months. During those months, it's also the, you know, retail is like they can get a job anywhere, you know, November, December, January, everyone's hiring, Amazon, et cetera. And so set that up for the expectation at the beginning though. So that way there's not surprises. You don't feel bad. You don't keep them on out of just like feeling bad. And then they, like you said, they leave in March or April.

Sure, sure. No, that's a challenge. And you know, we can keep them through January. You know, we can keep them March to January, but it's just getting them back or, you know, they leave during that time because it's slow and they get bored and they start looking for stuff Even if we're giving them busy hours at the shop. And also it's just such a complicated business model because they're doing so many different things. They got to teach them how to do mulch and landscaping. I got to teach them how to trim shrubs. Got to teach them how to mow. Gotta teach them how to do Christmas lights. Got to teach them. It's just, that's kind of why I'm moving towards pest control and fertilization, weight control because it's year round services here and it's very simple. And it's not like you said, it's just, just a very complex business model. Which is why, you know, I think I'll eventually move towards like either phasing that stuff out or selling it off separately. But I mean, we can do it and that's what we're doing. We're just grinding it every year. But it's always a pain in the butt because we go through one or two guys and it's like it ends up like our least profitable service. Mowing ends up like running the show. And like in the middle of summer, like we're having to take Tony away from spraying, which is profitable, very profitable to like go mow and fill in. And it's the, you know, most equipment that breaks down and most expensive equipment. And like, it's just, I don't know, it's just a frustrating for somebody who's not wanting to be involved in the, in all that.

But yeah, you'll see. Mike, tomorrow actually we're releasing a course and it's basically all the off season stuff. There's gonna be five different ways to solve it. You might actually be one of the few that I would recommend lockdown mode for, which is the first version of the five. And you'll see in the course I'm like, hey, most people should not use version one. But the reason you might act, it might actually work for you is because your fixed cost, you literally have probably $2,000 a month of payments every month. And I bet you're probably burning more than $2,000 a month just trying to keep people busy during the off season. So you might actually just go into lockdown mode, which is like, hey, for two or three months, we just don't do anything.

Yeah.

So keep an eye on that tomorrow because there's like five different routes to solve the off season. And you might be one of the few that I would actually recommend lockdown mode for because your fixed expenses, like you literally probably have $1,000 in the SBA maybe another thousand dollars in the Tesla and then like some other fix you don't have like a shop, expensive shop space. All the people that are working over overseas are going to be able to do other services for other companies. I would probably try to get other companies that are really busy during the off season, like snow for example. Because if you could do services for them, you keep your virtual crew busy doing something and then you can let your in person crew that sucks money typically just let them off for three months. So they'll come up tomorrow on mykins.com it's free and that would actually be a really helpful thing I think just to fix that, that problem.

Yeah, that would be awesome. No, that's good. Yeah, yeah. And I keep these guys doing, they do Christmas lights and we do really well with the companies that we help them start offering a Christmas light. So.

So okay. Yeah, I think that'd be good because that'd be less complicated. But like I said it's, it's always like a grind to find somebody. The next season should, if I need to hire them in like March, should I, you start recruiting in January or when do you.

Yeah, like there's some people that like the thing is we always think that people want full time but there's very, there's a good chance there's people have like a, a three or four month window. They just need a job and it's hard to in their mind like I can't find anyone that wants to hire for three months when you're like man that's perfect. I just need a March, April, May, during spring rush. Same thing with like there are people that want two or three months off in the year. But if you set that expectation in the, the job documents there are people that like they want that three month, they're going to go back home, they're going to go overseas, they maybe their family's out overseas. Like so there are people out there. It's just a matter of, of putting the interviews out there, like putting the application being very clear what the expectations are. And so a lot of like our owners, they'll be like hey, if you come back after the off season and work two months you get $2,000 bonus. Right. So it's like I'm incentivizing them to come back, train up my new team in the spring rush and that's our return to work bonus. So yeah, like the course will go over all of this and it'll be really helpful I think like this, this one problem, I think Is. Is a. Is important.

Okay. No, that's awesome. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, that helps a lot. Because that is a big challenge and it's frustrating. Are you. We tried the push more model and we did it for like a year or two, but it just beat the hell out of people because it's the Southeast and it's just so hot down here. It's like such a different kind of heat, you know, it's really profitable and it's really simple, easy to train people. I love it. But do you have any successful models in the South, Southeast or the south that are still running, like, push model, push push mower models? Like, we went back to small zero turns because it just, it sounds like.

To me like the constraint in this business as it was, was, is finding people because they. You burn through them. But the thing is, if it's really profitable, it's really simple and you can train people quickly. Maybe you build a business based upon them only working three to six months with you. Right. Like, there's nothing wrong with a business that is really profitable, really simple services and has a temporary workforce. So, like, I think people, like, if the constraint of the business was we're not making money because we have to keep training people all the time, that becomes a real problem.

Problem.

But I don't think there's a problem with the business that is very profitable, very simple. You're never there. It runs by itself. It has low capital expenditures because you're using push mowers. And then you just, you actually, you were in the business of training new, new people because you know that every two to three months, you're gonna have to train someone new. But the thing is, within one day, you can get them profitable.

Well, that's good because I mean, our moan is not bad. Like, we run one man cruise in a Toyota Prius and that you do 7, 800 a day.

Yeah, I've seen your numbers. Like, I know it's a good model. It's like, instead of saying, oh man, we've got to change the whole business model because we can't keep workers for more than three to six months. Just build the whole model around keeping employees for three to six months.

Okay.

If that's a real problem. If it's a real problem, you say okay. Based upon your.

Tenor, your base pay goes up.

Okay. Are you seeing successful models with the push mower in the south or like in the south, like in the high.

Heat, like Florida, it's gonna be really tough. You're gonna have to incentivize people more. But my, my, my thing is this. Everyone's like, why you gotta change the model? Because now instead of a Prius, you're gonna get F250, you're gonna do a big trailer, you're gonna get bigger mowers. And all of a sudden you, you've got to make $50,000 a month to break even versus 15 or 20.

Well, now we just pull a little six 4x6 trailer with a Prius and you know, have a zero turn on it. But you know, the zero. Like I said, like, I can train everybody to, you know, edge and blow and string tram and like a week and push mow in like a day. But that zero turn might take them two or three months to get comfortable where they're not damaging property or. And they're not able to use it in a lot of conditions if it's raining, like, it's just, it just complicates everything and then having to pull a trailer. But it'd be nice to do the push model model. And we did it and it was, you know, very simple. But it just, you know, we just had those issues where it just beat the hell out of people. And it's just a miserable job. But we're paying them, you know, paid them good. But it's just a miserable.

The constraint just becomes how do you. The comes to how do we find, train, and retain employees? It's no longer like the model of the business works. So I would build your incentive program on retention. So you're probably having a sliding scale of base pay so they can make more in base guaranteed as they stay longer. That's going to be helpful with retention. Even if their P4P is going to be way higher. Like, well, they're guaranteed is going up as they just stay with me and. Because if the constraint is retention, then just incentivizing retention.

Are you, are you push mowers? Are you using. I know it doesn't matter, but the, the light. Are you using just the. The residential Toro 30 inch. Is that what you recommend if we go back to that model? Because I'll probably use a gas mower and Brandon or Neon to not pigeonhole us to, to an electric mower. Is that what you guys are using? Are you.

It just depends. Like, I think if you're using the Prius, it makes sense to use a lighter model. Every year you just get a new residential mower that are way cheaper. If so they hit something, it never breaks because it's so light. They can pick stuff up and put it in the back of the Prius. Like it's, it's super basic. So I think that model, especially with the Prius makes sense because it's, you know, way, way less the, the, the. The weight of it is so much lower. Yeah. So. And then they're used of it too, with the, the current battery. They're used to the lighter mowers. Okay.

Yeah. And we have, we built, we like fabricated little carriers on the back where they could just drive it up onto the like a, almost like a wheelchair carrier or cargo carrier on the back of the Prius. But. Okay, so yeah, I might, we might revisit that Abraham and go back to that model. Because it didn't really get us. I mean it got us people that would stay, you know, for the full season, but it didn't really get us people that were staying multiple years with mowing. Like, I know it's going to beat the hell out of them. It's going to be a young man's kind of thing. But, you know, we could be greatly simplify the mowing because it's just such a hassle to have to fix property.

If you, if you do, if you put a few thousand dollars more towards your team, would they stay because they're making literally 5 to $10 more per hour or go a completely different route? Because now when you get bigger trucks and bigger equipment and bigger trailers, you're going to need shop space. You're. You're again, your overhead is going to go up. You're going to have way more maintenance. You're probably going to need more mechanic. And like there's, it's just, it's a different business model. And so you have a business model that works, it's profitable. Then we just find the next constraint. And I think it's more of the employee side side.

Yeah, yeah. And like I said, the money didn't matter. You know, like here like people working for like the big like commercial outfits are making 12, 13 bucks an hour. Like good pay for a long care company. 16 to 18. Our guys are making 25 or 30. And they'd stay one season.

You know, one season's not bad. I don't think that's, that's a bad. I would build the business model around like, hey, if we can keep one season, let's go. If they stay in another season, I give them more base pay. Like I would just really, really. Especially one season's not bad. Not for that. For that. Yeah, you're right.

If we can go to that model and HDB Visa morale, I think that'd be. I think we could make a very attractive mowing business, although it's going to be a lot more complicated than the other stuff I'm trying to get into. I think that's. I think there's definitely an opportunity there, like you said.

Yeah. It's also the biggest chunk of your revenue now. It's. If you focused on it, you don't probably solve the constraint that's there. Instead of spending your time on all these other things, you actually just solve the constraint and unlock right growth.

Mike, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it.

My pleasure. Good to see you, Abraham. Good to see you, Mike. You guys have a good one.