a BIGGER business is NOT better!
In this video, Mike Andes argues that the common “grow at all costs” mentality is a primary cause of failure for home‑service businesses. He explains that relentless scaling creates chaos—new customers unfamiliar with processes and new employees still learning the ropes—leading to burnout, cash‑flow strain, and loss of love for the business. Andes proposes an alternative “stair‑step” approach: devote the first six months of the year exclusively to growth (lead generation, hiring, ramp‑up) and then switch the second half of the year to profit‑focused optimization (pricing, routes, upsells, equipment, shop organization, retraining, cutting unprofitable customers). By concentrating growth when customer‑acquisition costs are lowest and pausing expansion during the slower months, owners can reduce stress, improve margins, and sustain long‑term viability. The video outlines concrete actions for the optimization phase—re‑pricing, route efficiency, service bundling, employee incentives, equipment upgrades, and eliminating problematic accounts—while emphasizing the importance of aligning business size with personal capacity and mental‑health considerations. Andes ends with a call to action for viewers to publicly commit to specific optimization steps for the second half of the year.
Chapters
So many home service businesses go out of business because a lot of us are building our business the wrong way. Let me explain. I think that the vast majority of home service businesses have this notion that we keep growing our business every single week, every single month. We never let off the gas and we just keep scaling to infinity. Now, I've talked about in the past what I think from a mental health perspective and from a personal capacity perspective, this is a flawed concept and why most people should figure out what their capacities are and build the business that allows them to stay in the game and not quit. For some people, that means being solo operator because having any employees completely makes them stressed out of their mind. For some people, that's a 4, 5, 6 crew business that does $800,000, $1 million in annual revenue. And they're able to live comfortably. They're able to go away for a weekend, on a trip with their family, and nothing falls apart. That's the size of business they should build. But I've never talked about the alternative to this idea of grow at all costs. Because a lot of times when I talk about figuring out what your personal capacity is, figuring out what size of business serves you and your family and your goals, and then reverse engineering that and building the business to that size, a lot of people, what they hear is, he doesn't want me to grow, he doesn't want me to continue taking market share. And for some reason they think that like I'm worried about them as competition and I'm trying to keep them from growing. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I believe that you can continue to grow your business, but there's an alternative way that I want to share in this video that will prevent burnout will be more profitable and will keep your head in the game as you begin to grow. Because growth creates chaos, and that's why so many of us want to quit. That's why you can have a fast-growing, profitable business go out of business, not just from cash flow problems— that's a big reason— but also just because the entrepreneur loses the desire to continue showing up to every single day because the chaos that ensues as you add more trucks add more employees, create more systems, hire mid-level managers, have customer— more and more customers, more and more projects. As that happens, it is not always just cash or cash flow that causes the business to die. It's that the entrepreneur, the founder, loses their love for the business. They fall out of love with the business. And a lot of times, I believe that this new alternative way of growing allow you to continue growing, but allows you to do so in a way where you stop resenting the business, hating the business, or thinking that something's wrong with you as the leader, you as the entrepreneur, or your industry. And because of that, that's why a lot of times people will hop from one industry to the next, whether it be inside home services, then they'll jump to e-commerce, then jump to real estate, then I should do some coaching, then I should do content, and then I should, like, they just hop from one thing to the other. And a lot of times I believe it's because we're building the business wrong. And I'm not saying you need to stop growing. I'm saying how we grow should change. So let me explain this kind of alternative way to growing your business. Instead of constantly having ads on, constantly hiring, buying more trucks, taking every dollar you have and putting it back into the business. Instead of that, I want to propose an alternative way of growing. And I've seen this work a lot at locations inside of Augusta Lawn Care, and that's where the first half of the year we optimize for growth, and the second half of the year we optimize for profit. And so as we head into the second half of the year, it's very easy to be like, okay, well, we got through spring rush, all the leads came in, we were able to grow, and now we can kind of let off the gas. And to some extent, that's true because the amount of leads that come in is lower. You're not hiring as many employees, new employees. You're not training up new admin staff and moving your shop space because you need more trucks. Like, you're not getting more equipment. There's less than bad things happening in the field because your crew has been with you for a longer period of time. And so what I propose is if you're in a stage of growth in your business at a macro level, for example, last year you did $300,000. This year you're on pace for $600,000. Next year you anticipate to hit a million dollars in annual revenue. That's awesome. Instead of just constantly growing and trying to make this linear path of grow, grow, grow, grow, I would like to think that for many of us, if we took the first 6 months of the year and just focused on growth, marketing, hiring, acquiring more talent, training people up, just getting people ramped up in terms of internally operations and focusing, doubling down on all sales efforts to get more customers in the first half of the year. And then in the second half of the year, we optimized the business. So there's like a stair-step analogy, which is like instead of growing the business straight, I'm going to stair-step it. And so I'm going to focus intensely for the first 6 months of the year on growth. I'm going to focus all my time and attention. If it doesn't have to do with growth, I'm not thinking about it. I'm not thinking about doing equipment maintenance. I'm not thinking of getting a new shop space or getting a new office. I'm not thinking about rebranding the trucks or the website. None of that. I'm only thinking about what do I need to do to increase demand, get more leads, and increase supply, get more employees. That's the only thing I think about in the first 6 months of the year. But what a lot of people fail to do is switch from growth mode and think more about profit and optimization of what they built in the first half of the year. And because of that, that's what leads to burnout. This constant treadmill. And at a macro level, I think that's true for just the overall size of the business, that you don't need to be $1 million, then $2 million, then $5 million. For a lot of people, they would run themselves into the ground. Or they have to be self-aware enough to realize they don't have the skill to do so at that speed so quickly. That's a whole different topic for a different day. And I've talked about that before. I'm talking about, can I put more money in my pocket if I use the stair-step approach instead of just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow? Here's why. When people adopt this mentality that you got to keep growing and growing and growing and growing, is they start spending money on advertising when they shouldn't be. Your customer acquisition cost is likely half or a third during your busiest time of the year compared to your off-season or when it slows down. Ideally, I wanna be spending that money on growth during the period of time when my customer acquisition cost is the lowest. And so what I see a lot of people do is 'cause they're in this constant growth mode, even as they go into June, July, they've been buying more trucks, they have excess capacity, they have plenty of employees they just brought on, and like, oh, I've gotta get more jobs, so what do I do? I keep marketing. And I keep spending more money on advertising. I keep expanding even into September, October, November, December, and all of a sudden I have no profit. I have still a very new team. And a lot of times the reason why the second half of your year can be optimized for profitability is because the two things that create the chaos of growth are less. What are the two things that create chaos as you're growing? Well, first off, getting new customers. Every time you get a new customer, they're not familiar with your billing processes. They're not familiar with your customer portal. They're not familiar with how you do things on the property. You know, they're not familiar with your systems, your automations, your procedures, how you do business. And so that causes more callbacks, that causes more phone calls, emails, text messages, communication from the customer simply because they're new. Most of your customer complaints, your callbacks, communication that they have with the office is in the first 90 days of them being a customer. And so if you're getting a whole bunch of those new people coming in, guess what's going to happen? There's going to be chaos. You're going to have more callbacks, more damage cases, all those things. The second part about growth that creates chaos is you have new employees. Guess when most employees either churn, cause issues inside the business, do damage cases, have a lot of call, callbacks. That mostly happens in the first 90 days because they also don't know about your processes and your systems, and they haven't really fully adopted the training yet. They're still trying to figure things out. They make mistakes. And if we can avoid that by not doing that for half of the year, I think that mentally most of us would stay checked in longer because we know, okay, we're gonna get through 3, 4, 5, 6 months of growth. But then once my team is solid, I've had them all for a few months, I'm not gonna keep adding new employees. I'm not gonna constantly be going out and trying to find new customers. I know that adds stress to the business. I know that creates chaos. I know that makes me want to quit because I am constantly under the stress of new employees trying to figure things out and new customers trying to figure out our processes, our systems, and I've gotta weed through 1 out of 10 of them that are crazy. And I don't even want them as a customer. And they're causing all sorts of problems for me and for my team. And so this alternative way of growth, because I've talked about limiting the overall size of your business to ensure it's serving you and serving the needs of you, your family, and why you even started this. I've talked about that. But what I haven't talked a lot about is there's this alternative way to staying in growth mode, which is simply looking at it as the first 6 months of the year, I'm going to grow the second half of the year. We're all just starting now is we're going to optimize the business. Now, I might go get some more customers. I'm not going to turn off my lead flow. I'm going to take on more customers, but I'm not going to be focused on growth. I'm not going to be focused on spending more money on ads, figure out new ad campaigns, buying more trucks. I'm just going to take what I have and optimize it because a really good technician that's been with you for 4 or 5 months They start becoming really profitable after 2, 3, 4 months. And now I'm going to focus on optimizing it. I'm going to ensure that I do retraining to make them more efficient. I'm at Command Center here and like mid-year we start doing retraining. How do we focus on making upsells even better? How do we focus on how we answer the phone and make it just a little bit better? A lot of times during high growth periods in your business, optimization goes to wayside because the chaos that's ensuing with new customers, new employees, constant growth. And so the only way to really ever be able to keep your head screwed on straight and be able to optimize the business is to slow down on growth and not focus on it exclusively. I'm not saying again that you can't hire, you can't go out and get more customers, but I'm going to focus on optimizing my pricing. I'm going to focus on optimizing my route. I'm going to focus on optimizing my services. I'm focused on optimization in the second half of the year. So the first half of the year is growth. Grow at all costs. I'm only focused on growing my demand, getting more leads. I'm focused on getting more supply. That's my employees. That's how I grow my business. But the second half of the year, I take those same ingredients and I optimize them. So I'm trying to take the customers that I got in the first half of the year. I'm trying to upsell them. I'm trying to increase their annual customer value. I'm trying to sell them a second service. I'm trying to sell them services that will keep my crew busy during the off-season. And I'm doing it now. I'm doing it in July. I'm doing it in August. I'm trying to upsell them into that recurring package during the winter. But I'm doing it now because this is optimization. I'm not focused on getting new customers. I'm taking my existing customers and trying to make more value from them. I'm trying to take my existing crew and make them more efficient, retraining them, getting them to do ride-alongs with the most efficient crew members. Doing a day where all we do is we focus on safety, or we focus on how to talk to the customer to get an upsell so that you can get a bonus as an employee and the business can make more money instead of spending that same money, that bonus, on Facebook or Google Ads or whatever ad platform that you're spending money on. And so I love this idea of continuing to grow a business but spending the first half on growth. And by doing that, it eliminates Everything else, all the maintenance things we're doing, cleaning up the shop space, optimizing everything inside this shop and where it's gonna be organized and labeled, that doesn't happen in the first half of the year. We only focus on getting more customers and getting more employees, supply and demand. That's the only thing we focus on. But I highly recommend if you're feeling and experiencing periods of burnout, no money in the bank, there's no profit. Consider this new approach to growing the business and then just plan for it every year. This makes having the finish line a little bit more palatable when you feel like giving up during the spring rush, when leads are pouring in, chaos is all over the place. Instead of feeling like this is never going to end, just like in this constant treadmill, if you want to grow your business macro over the course of year to year to year, You're going to have chaos. But if I can now isolate it to— it's going to be for the first half of the year because I know as soon as I hit July, I am raising prices. I'm going to cut out the services that I know are creating a whole lot of problems for my team. I'm going to cut the customers that I know we're not making money on or causing my team problems. Every single week we go to the property, they're calling the office every single week when we're done their service. Just get rid of them. Optimize the business. And I feel like a lot of us would fall a lot more in love with our business if we just optimized it for half of the, of the year. And so as we go into the second half of the year, I encourage you, take a look at everything you've done this spring. You compare it to last spring rush and you've probably grown 30, 40, 50, 100% year over year growth. Awesome. Now I want you to take it and I want you to optimize it. You can optimize your routes and make sure that there's less drive time. You can optimize your equipment setup. Because some stuff was breaking all spring, but you just like threw it in the truck and like, we gotta get the jobs done. That was the only focus was get the jobs done. All these new leads, we gotta service the customer as fast as possible. It's like drinking from a fire hose, but we've gotta slow the fire hose down long enough to ask ourselves a question. Are we drinking from the right hydrant? Are we just constantly going to be in this treadmill of trying to drink and drink from this hydrant versus just being like, hey, wait a second, let me step back from the hydrant and ask myself, should I even be drinking from this? Should I even have this customer? Should I even be doing all this extra repairs and maintenance on these old trucks? Should I optimize it? Should I go from 8 trucks down to 6 trucks but get newer trucks so that I don't have all this downtime? Should I optimize whether or not I have instant quotes on my website? Should I optimize whether or not I answer my phone more often? I get an answering service. These are all things that you can do in the second half of the year that are super valuable and super important. To making more money and keeping your head in the game. And those are the two things that make most home service businesses quit. They run out of money or they just get exhausted with the feature of growth, which is chaos as you get more customers and you get more employees. So I encourage you, use this stair-step method. And in the comments below, I want you to commit to everyone else publicly what you're going to do in the second half of the year to optimize your business? Pricing, routes, scheduling, equipment, employees, training. There's so many aspects. What are you going to do to optimize your business so you can make more money and fall back in love with your business?
