Lee Park spent four years turning a chaotic landscaping shop into a systems-driven operation. By removing the owner from daily work, introducing performance pay, and training young staff, the Augusta location hit $1.6M in projected revenue with 25% profit margins.
Questions this video answers
$1.6 million
25% or higher
2017 (years one and two were 2017)
Third year at Augusta (year 3)
Scheduling, billing, payroll, taking emails and phone calls, and balancing QuickBooks (per the transcript)
Chapters
Foreign.
Hey, my name is Lee, and I am the franchise business consultant here at Augusta Lawn Care. And today, what we want to do for you guys is share a little bit of our story and more specifically, my story and the last four years of working at Augusta, watching it grow, and being a part of something amazing.
All right, so we go back to 2017 years one and two, my first year and second year here at Augusta, and basically, if it fell under the umbrella of landscaping, we did it. If it was digging in the dirt, if it was excavating, if it was pavers, if it was walls, if it was mowing, you name it, we did it. There wasn't a lot of systems. We had a lot of turnover. We definitely had a lot of strife within the crews. You know, experienced guys wanting more pay, inexperienced guys wanting more experience so they could get paid more. And no real true systems set up to support the owner, set up to support our office staff. Liz. And what we found out quickly in years one and two, at least my first years here at Augusta was that Mike was the bottleneck for everything as it is. For you and a lot of you business owners out there, you are the bottleneck. The analogy that Mike likes to use is that the is like an octopus, and they have a head where they are the center of everything in our business, and every arm that goes out is attached to them, and only they can handle the issues that are attached to that arm. And we realized that very quickly, three, four years ago that we were not going to expand, be profitable, or allow others to grow and learn new things, get new experience, and have future opportunities here at Augusta unless we figured out how to delegate and how to create a systems that centered business.
So my third year at Augusta is when I became the estimator. And that's when we really started to hone down on creating systems and creating a profitable business that would be easy for all of our employees to be a part of and to grow in. So we started to actually turn away work. We weren't accepting any job under the sun. We weren't just deciding, oh, this is a big ticket item with lots of money involved, we can do this. We said we need to harp down on the systems, and we need to create this business to be profitable and run very simply without the owner involved. And that was the biggest part about my third year here at Augusta is when Mike trained me to be the estimator and Liz was our office manager. He stepped out of day to day operations. He was only around for our team meetings once or Twice a week. And really he was only involved in marketing and then making sure our P and L was profitable. And that was one of the biggest transitions we had to make, was to get Mike, the owner, out of the day to day operations so that the business would become passive for him, creating more money and he could focus on creating the franchise and creating systems for all of us at Augusta Nation to better our businesses and ultimately build a culture where we can allow our employees to develop and grow and start their own businesses one day.
Another major transition we made in my third year here at Augusta was switching over to pay for performance. So if you've watched Mike's content, you fully are aware that that's what we do here at Augusta Nation. And all of our locations are a part of that system. And we saw a huge rise and employee morale being paid for their performance when they beat budgeted hours on a job, when they were high, performing on mowing routes, you name it, the morale boost was huge as well. As we noticed that employees were sticking around longer. That created employees with more experience, that were more orientated to our systems the way that we like to do business here at Augusta, and ultimately creating a tighter workforce and team. That allowed Mike once again to step out of day to day operations, removing all the problems from his plate and allowing us to solve and work on them for him when he was out creating other systems and doing everything else that he needed to do for Augusta.
So now we come to last year, my fourth year, the start of my fourth year with Augusta, and basically we were a well oiled machine. The goal was to fully get Mike and Liz, the office manager, then fully out of day to day operations. We did not want them any more involved in the business. We wanted the business, local shop for Augusta to be run by just myself, an office manager and our estimator, Marcus. And we achieved that goal, got them fully out of the picture, and then became the debate of how much do we give over to Command Center. Now, if you know Augusta, you know that we have the command center for all our franchisees. They take emails, phone calls, they do payroll, they balance your QuickBooks. So many different options. You can definitely learn more about that. And we had to debate whether we wanted to give that up. And ultimately we had to think back to, we didn't want to create another bottleneck. We didn't want another octopus, another owner, another manager who had everything coming back to them. So we gave up as much as we could to Command Center. We essentially turned the local Augusta shop to a full Service location. Now command center handles all of our scheduling, all of our billing, you name it. All those things I listed before, they handle now. We didn't think that was originally possible, but it has become possible. The more we've simplified our services and the more we have made this become a systems run location.
So over my last four years here at Augusta and to this date, we have created a business that is solely run on simplified services and systems. And that's something that we want to share with you, with the whole landscape, community, with all of Augusta Nation. The local shop here, Augusta of Bellingham, is going to do 1.6 million in revenue this year and it's going to be a 25% or higher profitability. And that's all because of the systems we followed. Getting the owner out of day to day operations, handing as much as we can over to our command center to take our calls, to do all the other things I've listed in the video that allows our new office manager and our new estimator, mind you, a 21 year old and a 20 year old will be running this location all by themselves going forward. Mike will be fully out of the picture, Liz will be fully out of the picture, I will be fully out of the picture. Because we've created a business that can run on the systems and it's not all run by one manager, one owner. That's an octopus where everything comes back to them. We've learned how to delegate and create systems that allow you to have freedom to do anything else other than working in your business. You can work on your business.
Ultimately, what I've learned in the last four years here at Augusta is that you can have a profitable business that's run on systems that doesn't have to have the owner in the picture every single day. If that's something that interests you, if that's something that you want to be a part of, you could see in your future. And you want to consider joining Augusta Nation, book a call with me today. You can do that if you just go to augustalawncareservices.com franchise. You'll see a little overlay there and you can book a call with me anytime. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to talk more about this with you.
