600 Pound Gorilla, The Price Is Right, Doubling Down

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about starting, maintaining and growing your small business. Today is business as usual with another variety of topics. But it all boils down to business decision making and the outcomes of those decisions. First off, some of the largest lawn care companies are actually consolidating what does this mean for industry growth and competition? Next up, a clip from one of Mike's live callers asking, what's the right price to charge for your service? Finally, Mike is doubling down on the Augusta model. But how is Augusta going to shift in the near future? As always, you can get the video versions of these interviews and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. But let's get started and talk about the 600 pound gorilla that's standing over the lawn care industry.

What if I told you that the same company that owns Brightview also owns the Grounds Guys and US Lawns? This is the 600 pound gorilla in this industry that is spending billions of dollars to merge and acquire companies and make a behemoth into landsc. For the past couple years I've talked about how the lawn care and landscaping industry is ready for innovation and how massive companies are going to conglomerate and are going to consolidate in this industry to bring in massive billion dollar players. And most of us know the likes of brightview that does commercial maintenance, snow plowing, hardscaping and just about everything when it comes to commercial lawn care. But what if I told you that there's a company behind brightview that doesn't just own them, but also many other brands inside of this industry? The company behind all of this, KKR. Now KKR is a publicly traded company worth over $40 billion. They've been as high as almost $80 billion in the high of 2021. And they are a consolidation of a whole bunch of different companies. You can go to their website and scroll through their portfolio and see just about every sector they have their fingerprints on everything from energy to healthcare to technology and software and yes, even the lawn care landscaping industry. Now several years ago they actually bought and acquired brickman for 1.6 billion and through their strategic acquisition they merged with Valleycrest to create what we now know as Brightview. For a behemoth that is over $2 billion in annual revenue. Now for context, that only makes up about 2% of the total market share of lawn care landscaping and the total revenue that's produced across the country. But remember the other 98% is literally constituted of over 600,000 different providers. Everything from truck and a truck all the way to larger providers do multiple millions in revenue. Now what's interesting is there's other brand that are part of these acquisitions that you might not know is actually owned by this private equity firm. Now Valleycrest is actually the owner of US Lawns. US Lawns is also a player in the landscaping industry when it comes to commercial maintenance and they actually do franchising. So some would say they're in direct competition for Augusta. I don't really think so because we don't really focus on that large commercial work. We focus more on residential and that's not their focus. That being said, US Lawns since the acquisition really has not gained any more locations and has hovered right around 225 locations for the past five to 10 years. Now in 2021, KKR also acquired Neighborly Brands. Neighborly includes a whole bunch of different home improvement franchises that include everything from electricity to Roto Rooters and yes, the grounds guys for lawn care landscaping. Now they also have been kind of topped out around that 210 to 220 location mark for the past several years. Now the reason I'm talking about this today is I believe this is a trend that's going to continue over the next decade. And that is in these boring businesses, these indust that have been asleep for decades, you're seeing massive amounts of money being moved in and mergers and acquisitions to create the leaders in these categories. Because honestly, even a big player like KKR has less than 5% of the market share when it comes to the total addressable market and the revenue that is inside of lawn care and landscaping. As the stock market begins to get interested in our industry, you're seeing massive amounts of money being poured into these type of mergers and acquisitions to create these 600 pound gorillas that begin to dictate the market. Now we're not just seeing this when it to the actual landscaping businesses, we are also seeing this when it comes to software in these industries. Every single home improvement industry has some sort of CRM, some sort of software that's been really transformed over the past 10 years and it's moved to cloud based CRM solutions. But even as we speak and over the past few years there's been a massive consolidation as these, a lot of these companies have begin to merge and a lot of companies that are CRMs are being purchased by payment processors because the real value is now being seen that billions of dollars are being processed process through these CRMs. And instead of charging a lot for their subscriptions, they're instead going to take a 1% or a half a percent off of every transaction through the form of owning the payment processor. The reason I'm not concerned with this type of movement in our market is the fact that typically when I look at private equity or money moving into these type of acquisitions and bring a bunch of companies together, I'm seeing several different trends. The first is that they're doing it for a strategic buyout. Later down the road. All they're trying to do is package together a group of companies and sell it off. And now you're seeing subsidiaries of subsidiaries of subsidiaries of subsidiaries simply being packaged together and trying to be sold to another company. When this happens, typically leadership falls off and innovation dies. It is at that point that the company and the brand and what its impact is going to have on the industry begins to wane. I've seen this in software, I've seen this in the franchise level, I've seen this in many different business levels in the home improvement industry as dumb money, that is people just looking for a extra 10% of their money every year starts to move into the market. If these massive mergers and acquisitions and these holding companies are not concerned about their next round or the next sale of that packaged item, that packaged business, they're more concerned about their next quarter, what's going to look like on the stock market and what Wall street thinks about their numbers instead of what the consumer thinks and where the industry is going over the next couple decades, not the next couple of weeks, months, or a year. What I find so often with these massive companies that are formed is that it's actually just a piece of a massive bundle of businesses. So if you look at kkr, for example, you look through their portfolio, it's literally hundreds of businesses. Everything from Artlist that does music to 1, 800 contacts to an aviation company, it's literally all over the place. And they do this to bundle up all of these different businesses and then offer as a package in the form of a publicly traded stock. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but what happens is it begins to just become a very small piece of a portfolio. And a lot of times the reason these businesses, these boring businesses like lawn care, landscaping, are bought into from these portfolio companies, in my opinion, is because they are cash cows. They generate a very good amount of income and profit and balances out the portfolio, allowing more speculative, high tech, high growth parts of the portfolio to be balanced out a Boring lawn care, landscaping business that pumps out 20% profit margin on $1 billion is very, very valuable. However, it's not going to offer a lot of enterprise value. What I mean by that is that 200 million dol net profit might only have a 3 or 4x on the enterprise value. That business might only be worth 800 or 900 million on $200 million worth of profit. And I'm just using this as example. These portfolio companies then take that $200 million of profit from a boring business and invest into high tech, high growth software type businesses that have a higher, much higher valuation mechanism when it comes to their business model. For example, a company is in software or energy or some high tech type of firm, if they have $200 million in profit is probably going to be worth 10, 20 or $30 billion instead of just 800 million. This is why so often when I see these publicly traded funds get involved in an industry like landscaping and lawn care, I really just see them try to extract as much profit out of the business as possible. They're not interested really in growth. They're not really interested in innovation or improving the product, whether that be a software CRM or whether that be for their franchisees, whatever it might be, because they're not interested in that. They're just interested in taking as much profit as possible and balancing out their.

Portfolio for Wall Street.

We live in a world where conglomerates dominate almost every industry. That means you have to fight tooth and nail to ensure your small businesses success. You can get a leg up on the competition by taking part in Mike Andy's MBA for Entrepreneurs. Whether you're starting, growing or saving your company, the MBA for Entrepreneurs teaches the principles and fundamentals of small business ownership. With over 350 plus in depth lectures and bonus livestreams, you'll have lifetime access from anywhere through the teachable app. You can read all about our course@mikeandies.com education. Next up, an excellent question from one of Mike's live how to find the right price to charge for your services. The answer might be more simple than you think.

Now we always talk about raising prices and we're in a big inflationary environment. But today I'm going to talk about how you actually need to lower your price, get a bunch of customers, use that momentum and then jack up your prices. This is a call from last Saturday. It's a great question that was on the call in show. I think you'll learn a lot. Here we go.

So I'm in my second or Third year of business, we've been doing well. I've invested a lot into branding, advertising, all at the back end. Now we're kind of pushing growth. But the issue that I'm hitting, man, is, and I kind of have an idea of what you might say to this, but the issue is here in easily South Carolina, there's a max population of maybe 40,000 people. And I think 20,000 of those people are landscapers.

Just mow each other's lawn.

Seriously. So literally, man, I mean, it's, it's. I've counted on like when spring hit a four mile drive, you can count 15 to 20 guys with a truck and a mower in the back. And like I said, there is a differentiation with, you know, I have full branded vinyl wrap trucks, professional equipment and everything. But. And I'll see what you have to say about that. But my point is, you know, two years ago when I was doing my research on pricing for lawn and landscape, and my questions will be separated between lawn and landscape projects, but starting with lawn, I saw where you charge $100 an hour, which I was like, wow, that's incredible, man. So I ran with that, and here I have not been able to close near as good of rates as you guys are at a hundred. Not saying that I can't. I think my question is, should I stick to that? Because that's really where I would like to be, man. And I would genuinely just be discouraged if I have to go down 30, 40% just to get jobs. Should I move outside of Easley and extend my route and be willing to drive a little further?

What do you think, man?

No, don't do that. Everyone always thinks a different market will solve the problem. It's. It's not the case. All right, so this is the thing. How much do you pay on average to your employees per hour?

It's solo owner, operator right now, man.

Okay, so let me rephrase it, all right? If you had to hire somebody, what would you be charging per hour as, like entry level, very basic services like mowing, pushing a lawnmower.

For this market, probably 15 to 17.

Okay, let's just go with 15 per hour per employer. So let's go 15. And if we divide that by 100, you're at 15%. All right, my. In my opinion, like what, Your hourly rate to the customer is going to be dictated by the cost of living in your local area. So in our area, let's just say we charge 80 to $100 per hour. Right?

But I also have to pay a.

Minimum of $18 just to get someone in the door and interested. Right. So the cost of living is different. And so I typically don't want what I have to pay an employee per hour to be more than 25% of what I charge the customer. So what that means is you could theoretically go all the way down to 80 per hour and be giving your guys 20 and still make that math work. You could also go down to 70 and still pay your employees 17 an hour. So using that math. So I think you're just realizing your market. That's why hourly rates and hear what other people charge has, like, not indicative of what you should be charging. Because cost of living here is nuts. It's like you need to be a millionaire to own a house here. Right. So it's. That would be what I would say in terms of pricing. Don't think it's an area thing because, like, I started in Blaine, Washington, they had like 5,000 people living there. We grew above a million dollars in revenue before ever moving outside of Blaine. And so.

Right, right. And that's of course because of volume. Right? Volume cut.

Yeah.

And, well, at the time, we were actually doing a lot of projects. We didn't have half as much recurring revenue as we do now. What was driving it was project based work. A lot of big jobs. But also, keep in mind, when it seemed like you see landscapers all the time, it is absolutely like the recency bias. It's like if you go buy a Honda Civic and then all of a sudden you see every single civic or like people in the H Vac community.

They say the same thing.

Like, man, we see H Vac guys all the time. Then you talk to like, window cleaner guys. Oh, man, we see window cleaning guys all. So it is somewhat like, hey, we're biased as landscapers, we're gonna notice every single landscaper. But yeah, I think you definitely have room to move your price down because you need to focus on closing the jobs. And then as your momentum picks up, you get a place like, we just talked to Jeff. We're raising your prices. Doesn't move the needle. Like, doesn't hurt you at all because you have so much momentum behind you. So right now I just care about you closing the deals. And if you think. If you know that price is the issue, bring your price down. I don't care if you charge 60 per hour. Just get so many jobs in the schedule where now you're like, I have to raise prices. Like, there's so much demand for my services. Again, Supply and demand. You just raise your prices.

Right. To pack the schedule full and then raise prices once it's a necessity.

You got it.

Good deal. Okay, so my second question, I guess would be as far as landscape project, kind of. Kind of the same thing, I guess, actually. But I guess it's understood that projects are different. And this is what I will say, and you can hurt my feelings if this is the case. But. But my background is horticultural science. All I've ever done is plant science, selective pruning, plant design, things like that is on the side. I'm doing lawn maintenance, of course, for the steady tech, and I'm trying to transfer mainly to maintenance because of the reliability and scheduling, which I'm sure you understand. I know you understand because you taught me how to understand it. But as far as projects can. Can I demand a higher price? Because I know that the quality and asset of me knowing more is there compared. And I can say this Confidently, compared to 60, 70% of the entry level guys that have done it.

Yeah.

Like theoretically, you're around here anyway, able to offer more value to the customer by having more knowledge. Right. And that should come across in the way that you present your estimate proposal. The way you meet with customers, you need to make sure you highlight those things. That being said, price is not dictated by value as much as the market. The market determines whether or not they value that skill. So don't think from the get like, oh, I should charge more because of the skill I have. Allow you to go out in the marketplace, get so much work that you're like, oh, I can keep raising my prices. Oh, I still have six works. Oh, I'm six months booked out with projects. Raise my price again. Allow the market to determine what they value, because value dictates price, but what determines value is the market. And so some people just don't care whether or not you have a horticultural degree. Right. But there's going to be other customers that do, and they're willing to pay way more if you're able to come talk to them about the, you know, the plant structure and the root structure and the fertilizers and all, how it all interacts. Hey, they're like, my goodness, that guy's the guy we want to use. And I don't care if he's 20% higher. So allow the market. Just focus on building that momentum at the initial.

Okay, so the end. And speaking to that, do you think. And I'm okay with this because I'm to the point now where I can take care of myself with the maintenance and jobs I have. Do you think if I demand that higher price, which I do have people committing to, it's a much smaller amount, It's a much smaller close ratio. But I have found those customers. Do you think I should just grow the business much slower while collecting clients that are willing to pay at a much higher value? Which honestly encourages me to get more jobs? Because slaving in this heat and humidity and everything, I'm more than happy to make more money on less jobs. Do you think I should just commit to that or lower it to again, get more volume? And the second piece of that question that I'll tie in is I'm doing basically 85 to 100 an hour, which I mentioned that I am closing jobs on. But depending on the job, sometimes I would just base it on $500 to $600 profit on a full day's job. Is that acceptable or does that sound ridiculous?

Again, like, what's your goals? Are you trying to grow the business? Are you trying to just make it profitable? Like what? Like do you need an income right now? Are you trying to like grow and expand? Like, do you want to have 10 crews? Like, what's your goal?

Long, long term current? Right now I'm, I'm okay with being solo. It is in the plan to get volume cut and then expand the crews to grow much larger. But currently growth is important. But I would say that me making an actual profit at the moment is more important and if I could somehow intertwine both at a healthy rate, that would make the most sense.

Yeah, so I would. If you're trying to do both, like you're trying to grow and be profitable, what I would recommend is a short term increase momentum, get lots of jobs on the schedule, giving you the confidence to raise prices to remake better margins and, and then get. It'll get your name out there, you'll get more reviews. Like, it'll get the momentum going. People do not believe me, this momentum thing. But if you can get, book yourself out more than a month or two with projects and you got a bunch of mowing coming in, you will have the confidence to raise your price. You will become more profitable by doing that. So I would do short term. I don't care if you go from 85, 100 year solo, so you don't have a lot of overhead, you don't have a lot of fixed cost. Yeah, so I would go out, I'd go to 60 or 70. Book yourself out and you're like, man, I'M booked out like a month. Like, how far are you booked out right now? You kind of go job, job.

No, man, no. I have room for it for sure.

Yeah. So I would book yourself up for four weeks. When you hit four weeks, that's the moment you start raising prices. And every single time you get more than four weeks, just keep raising prices per hour that you're charging for projects. Keep the mowing prices where you want them to be at because it's harder to change those. You can't change them every couple weeks. But with projects, if you're booking out products because you're horticulturist and you're super good at what you've done, like, I would just be like, okay, I'm gonna start 60 until I'm four weeks out. Boom, 60. All right, now let's go ahead and do 70. Oh my goodness. Now I'm six weeks booked out. Let's get 80. Then you'll move back up into a point where now you have tons of backlog. You have now you're charging what you're worth. And then after say a month or two, you'll hit the point where you're actually doing work on the jobs that you bid at 80 into 100, and that's when you'll have the profit to go hire somebody.

Okay, okay. And then last small question, and I'll let you go, man. This could be fairly quick as far as advertising and actual growth. I've been trying to teach myself on Google Ads and Facebook. Does that sound like the right route or should I be looking at a place? I've done yard signs, we're working on flyers. Where do you think I should? I would get the most bang for my buck. As far as advertisement.

Honestly, right now I wouldn't even worry about advertising as much as closing. More of higher percentage of the jobs. The leads that are coming in, like, if you're at 40%, get to 80% right now, get momentum. Because right now, especially with project based work, when you're small like you are, you don't have a massive website, you don't have a bunch of trucks rolling around, you're going to depend on so and so that you did a $10,000 job for saying you're the best thing since sliced bread and are worth paying an extra 20% more, they're gonna tell their four neighbors, that's what you want to focus on right now. And so I would really go right.

Well, the thing I was gonna say. Well, the thing is, is I don't I could use the lead to fill up. To fill up. So if I were. If I. Which I do, because right now I would actually have gaps in the schedule. Which way would you say to go to get more leads in? And then I could even cut it off once I'm to the point where it's not manageable on my own.

Yeah. Like, I would be looking at all the ways to do it at a lowest cost. Right. So I'd be, I'd be taking every single customer you've ever done work for. I'd be emailing them and trying to upsell them. I'd be going to all of their four to five neighbors. So like we're talking about now, hundreds of people that you can. They're your contacts, they're your leads going out to them. And then I'd be going on next door and Facebook, local groups. I'd be like, those are all the free, simple, like just boots on the ground. Because right now I'd rather you spend time instead of money because you don't have work booked out forever. When you're booked out four or five weeks, then you go on Amazon, Google and Facebook and you start pumping leads in from a digital source. But right now you have time. So I'd be focusing on those things that are going to cost less but have better returns, which is going to be. I'd go talk to every. I'd email and call every single one of your past customers. I would then contact via knocking on door and door hanger to every customer around those people's houses.

Okay, good deal, Mike. I appreciate your time, man. Thank you.

Take care.

The price you're able to charge for your services can heavily depend on what people think of your business. A huge factor in your brand image is your online presence. That means your website. We can build easy to use lawn care websites under our monthly everything's included web subscription. Your new lawn care website will work on all devices and be specifically tuned to attract local customers. We also include SEO services so that your website can be properly listed in search engines and grow online. If you need the perfect site for your lawn care business, head over to lawncarewebdesign.com so you can see what our offers are. One last segment for you today. Mike doubles down on the Augusta business model, but looks into the future on how Augusta might adapt and attract new investment.

It's not clickbait. I am spending almost a million dollars over the next several years doing exactly what I'm about to outline in this video franchise.

Franchise. Franchise Franchise, franchise.

Over the past several years, we franchised Augusta Lawn Care and Now have almost 100 locations around North America. However, I've also dabbled in real estate as a way to be able to have the debt required to continue scaling up Augusta. Scaling up a franchise, extremely expensive from a legal standpoint, from an accounting standpoint, there's a lot of red tape and registration and licensing that goes into every single state that we open up at. So I've always looked at real estate.

In the past as the way for.

Me to protect equity and then be able to tap into that equity when I need it in the form of debt for Augusta as we grow. Now, though, as I start to look forward over the next several years, I'm determined to really take a different angle at how we look at Augusta Lawn Care. And that is, I don't want to just attract people just getting started in lawn care, landscaping and newbies. I also want to attract the investor type that is looking at Augusta Lawn Care and comparison, comparing it to every other franchise that is simply a use and a return on capital. So when someone wants to buy a McDonald's franchise, for example, that franchise might do two, three million dollars in annual revenue, but they're going to have to invest 1 million, 2 million dollars just to get that thing off the ground. Now, that 1 to $2 million might end up becoming 2 or $300,000 in annual profit. The typical franchisee for a McDonald's location is not just buying one location. And furthermore, they're not actually being an owner operator. They're not going to be there actually making milkshakes. They're not going to be the one actually. Flipp Burgers, they're looking at simply as an investment tool for their money. And when they look at the stock market, they look at real estate. But when they look at business, they say, hey, I can make 15, 20% return on my money versus the stock market or real estate, where I might make 10 or 5% return on my money, or if I go into bonds, 2 or 3%. So business is a great investment vehicle. And that's why a lot of times people will use franchises as a way to protect their wealth, using a system that's already tried and true and has a lot of metrics behind it. This is why the likes of Shaquille o' Neal owns hundreds of franchises in terms of five guys and other restaurants and other concepts, simply because they believe in the product, they believe in the model, but more importantly, they believe in the numbers and the return on their investment it's very common for a profession that has a lot of cash flow and income, like athletes, doctors, lawyers, et cetera, to want to invest in franchises because the return on their capital is so much better than investing in the stock market. Now, if a franchise has a proven model that is successful 80, 90% of the time compared to an independent business in the same industry that has 40 or 50% success rate, that is why most smart money, or money that is being deployed from an investor goes towards franchises. The majority of franchises that are started are actually not started by independent operators. They're owned by companies that own 20, 50, 100 different locations of that specific franchise. Now, don't worry, I'm gonna get to how I'm spending a million dollars on what I'm talking about in just a moment. But let me explain this. The reason a sophisticated investor would rather buy into a franchise compared to their own independent model is because of a track record. And they can see the numbers, the success rate, and what their return on capital is going to be. So, for example, If I spend $2 million buying McDonald's franchise and I get $200,000 in profit, that would be a 10% return on my money year over year. Now, a smart investor is probably going to leverage 1.5 of that, put $500,000 down, and therefore get a 40% return on their capital on an annual basis. So what I'm trying to do with Augusta Lawn Care is start getting it prepared for that type of investor. Now, before you jump in and say, well, you're losing the heart by having these larger companies or investors that buy 10 locations at a time, let me just back out and just say one second. That is, last year, we literally started the solo operator model, where someone could get started and not have any employees. They literally get started for $8,000. It's very, very cheap. However, I'm also wanting to be able to bring in a sophisticated investor that's strictly looking at the numbers. Now, we are by no means ready for that at Augusta Lawn Care right now. We're not ready for that growth, and we don't have a proven record where someone with a million dollars wants to come in and start 10 locations. However, my goal is over the next few years, to prove that that model will work, and that's where the $1 million comes into play. So what I'm doing over the next few years is spending almost a million dollars to make this a reality, and that is prove that owning 10 locations is a great business model and a great vehicle for this type of sophisticated investor. Over the next six months, my plan is to hire one of my general managers and promote them into becoming a regional manager. Now, the one that's going to be doing this, he's actually been a general manager for about a year and a half, has tripled the revenue at his location, and he's going to be the manager to all of my general managers. As I begin to get more corporately owned or locations that I own, My goal is to prove that spending a million dollars on 10 Augusta Lawn Care locations will have a better return than spending that same $1 million on buying a Taco Bell or any other franchise opportunity. This is going to lead to massive growth for Augusta Lawn Care locations and will actually lead to the hockey stick kind of growth that we expect in a few years leading up to that. We're really only appealing to owner operators. People are just getting started and that have under a couple million dollars in annual revenue. That's fine and that's good. And I want that to always be an opportunity for people to get started in Augusta Lawn Care. But I also want to prove that it's an investment vehicle, and that can be scaled to the point where If I have $50,000 and I want to invest it, it would be better spending that on another location in comparison to trying to invest in the stock market or real estate or in cryptocurrency. The beautiful thing about investing in a business is that you have control over it. Of course, you don't have control over macroeconomic events like labor markets and the economic shifts and recessions, but you do have a whole lot more control over your small business than you would over a public market, a stock exchange, or potentially an entire brokerage that might go bankrupt. So, yeah, that's my plan. Over the next few years, I'm going to spend a million dollars. Right now, I have four locations. I'm going to ramp that up to 10 locations, and my general manager being promoted to regional manager, is going to manage those locations for me. You would consider me at that point, a passive investor, because although I'm putting the money up, I'm not actually actively engaged in the daily operations of each of those locations. They'll do all the hiring, the marketing, the firing hr, et cetera, and then they'll be managed by my regional manager. I love real estate. I love the stock market. I love investing in those vehicles. But honestly, I'm not interested in a 4 or a 5 cap or even an 8 or 10% return on my money in the stock market. When I could do 20, 30% return over the course of several years as I get a small business established and becoming very profitable. My goal goal over the next five years is to prove that this model not only works for one location, Augusta Lawn Care, but it absolutely works for 5, 10 and beyond. Unfortunately, because of franchise regulations, I am somewhat restricted in terms of how much I can share publicly with what these locations make. But my goal is that starting next year, I will show them as a portfolio of the locations that I own at the end of each year. So you can kind of track as we add the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh location. You can see the revenues, the profitability and kind of see where the investment in this portfolio of 10 locations is going. And I don't plan to stop at 10 locations. I really believe in the model, the systems that we're building and the infrastructure that we're building now that I'm pouring so much money into and losing a lot of money is building the foundation that's required to actually scale and actually allow people to buy 10, 20 locations at a single time. And that's where I believe the brand and the power of the brand will really become evident. To be honest, when I see a founder not actively purchasing and owning their own locations inside of a franchise system, I become suspect. Why would you invest in other investment vehicles if you're not investing in the vehicle you've already created? I truly believe that my personal assets, my personal wealth and income is better spent on Augusta Lawn Care than in another investment vehicle like the real estate or the stock market. The challenging thing in the lawn care landscaping business is that from day one you don't have tons of business. If you open up a McDonald's or Taco Bell the next day, literally you're having a ton of business. There's a lot of brand awareness and immediately you have cut customers. Lawn care landscaping usually takes at least two to three years before you really see a profitability spike because there's a lot of ramp up in terms of getting customers one by one. And it's not like from day one you have maximum capacity because you have to constantly be hiring, getting more equipment and upgrading your fleet. I'm very much looking forward to having this new position in terms of regional manager and trying to scale this over the course of next several years. And I look forward to sharing that.

Information with you all.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. We have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at Mike Andy YouTube channel that will be right up your alley. Anyways, that's all we have for you today. And see you next time.