Ai Calls are DESTROYING my Business - Episode 039

Ladies and gentlemen, we have yet another episode of C suite unfiltered, episode 39. AI calls are destroying my business. The topics covered involve bad ideas. AI calls upset franchisees, and lastly, Lee calls out some complainers. It's difficult for most people in the home service industry to find someone they can trust to give them crucial advice on growing their business. That's why our goal at Landscape Summit is to bring together business owners who have been killing in every stage of growth of. Of their business. They're going to give you insights and connections that are going to last a lifetime. So we want to see you at the OMNI Hotel on October 16th and 17th in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more information online@mikeandes.com summit.

Welcome back to the pod. How are we doing today?

Fantastic.

You know, dude, we're excited.

We're now recording these on, what, Wednesdays?

Wednesday mornings? Yeah.

Yeah. Because now we're at the studio. You come to the command center for a meeting with Command center on Wednesdays. So he's knocking it out.

My standing appointment, as I like to call it. That's what I tell franchisees. I'm like, hey, if you have any issues, like, bring it to me. I have a standing appointment on Wednesdays, and I will bring it to the team. We're excited, though, because tomorrow we get to give out. Well, you. It's your business, but you get to give out bonus checks tomorrow.

Stimmy checks, bro.

Stimmy checks. So profit sharing checks for the Bellingham shop. We're going to give those out, and we're going to do the big fake checks. The big, big, big ones.

Yeah. Jumbo checks. Let's go.

That'll be exciting. What it's looking like for full eligible employees is going to be like 1200 bucks. Something like.

So, yeah, we've had, I think, higher before. Like, 17.

I think we did 16 was the highest we ever had.

But we're kind of like, you know, Bellingham had to go through its bumps and bruises in the spring, and it's kind of on. It's still on its turnaround. So I'm hoping next year. My hope was that this year we get 2,000. I know, but, you know, if we get, you know, 1200 now, 1500 next quarter, maybe. Hopefully.

Yeah.

And then, you know, hopefully next quarter or next year, do things right in spring and then be okay.

Yeah, it'll be good. I'm excited. I love. I love giving out bonuses. It's fun. I like getting bonuses. Also fun. So last episode you talked about this New concept that Triple lc, llc. Right. And you talked about what impacts your business leads, labor, leadership and capital. And you're hoping for a fourth L. So we do have a couple comments. Did you, did you see the.

I did see them. Shout out to Brian Connor. He came up with. Or at least maybe it was Jeremy underneath his, his username because he used a gust. I'm probably, I'm pretty sure it's Brian. He said liquidity. And I had thought of that one way back when, but I had originally thought, like, well, there's loans and like, that's not technically liquid. But I'm like, you know what? It works. So shout out to Brian. I'm going to use liquidity now. It's a 4L process.

Yeah. So we had liquidity. Another one that I liked was Lincoln's. And I respond, I said Lincoln's to Benjamin's.

Yeah, Benjamin.

That's what we want to get there, right, people? Get the ulysses, right, the 50 bill. We don't get those much, you know. So someone said, one of our friends from across the pond said, pounds. Pounds.

Oh, like lvs?

Well, no, no, no. Like the, like, pounds. Like British pounds.

How's it an L?

I don't know. That's just what they said.

But lbs would work. I think that's what they meant.

So there, that's, that's the pound symbol.

Oh, it kind of looks like an L. Oh.

I guess that maybe that's what they're.

Going for, the aesthetic obs, you know? What, like pounds? Okay.

No, no, no.

But like the aesthetic of the Euro thing looking pound thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then my buddy who's marketing, he, he said, for branding, you call it CL3. That's kind of cool.

CL3.

So if you do capital leads, labor, leadership. CL3, that's clean.

The C. CL3 framework, it rolls off the tongue nicely. It's different than 4L.

It's a little bit. Yeah. But I, I, he said from a branding perspective.

C3, L3.

CL3.

It's like we're going after the, Those energy drinks.

Yeah.

Hey, I've said that. We should do that.

We should do nitro.

We should do a product line, man. I'm just saying.

Marcus had a great idea once. He was like, what if we, Marcus.

Had a great idea once? Yeah.

Well, yeah, one, One time. Marcus, if you're listening, you've had one good idea, and it was this, and it wasn't even that good. No. He said, what if we did, like, we gave customers grass clippings. But it was like those power green smoothies. So it's like that mushy lawn in a smoothie.

He's like, forget having to recycle these things and take them to the dump. We're just gonna smooth them up, blend them up in the truck, and they give it back to the customer. Like, yeah, you got five gallons of juice today, dude.

But, like, actually get them, like one of those super fucking food smoothies.

That's fun.

Like a spinach smoothie. You like spinach smoothies? I was like, that's kind of funny branding. You put a little max on it. Like, here's your grass clippings.

It sounds like a Marcus idea.

It's healthy. Yeah.

No. $400. If that's a $202,000 per year client recurring, that means you basically have to work the entire year to pay off the smoothie blender. I like that. But I do like the idea of having this giant smoothie in the back of your truck. Instead of doing grass clippings, you dump the clippings in, you get a bucket at the bottom, and, you know, you put the clippings all blended up in a juice on the porch at the customer at the end of the. I think that there's some legs to that.

Why? Because then they could use it for.

Like, fertilizer or drinking.

Hey, people eat spinach and lettuce and celery, and these are all just.

What's that? Yeah. Well, yeah, like, Robex and, like, other ones. They have freshness. Okay. Yeah. That's weird telling you, dude, never done it.

Is this grass? And a plastic sheet, like, oh, we'll call it spirulina. It's grass, dude. Like, if you just say, hey, that's rye. You know, we're some rye grass and some blue fescue, but the problem is fertilizers and other things that come on the lawn and deposits.

Hey, we're all natural. We're all natural. At least at the Bellingham location.

Yeah, I know. But you don't know what's coming into your lawn. That's fair, Nick. There's pets that come along and do their deposits.

Rain runoff. Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

Oil spills.

These are just some ideas.

All right?

We're just spitballing today.

Poisoning our clients. Everyone's just dying.

Yeah. Okay.

The first form of attrition, or you.

Toss it to other landscapers. Okay, well, here's a green smoothie. Makes them sick. There you go. Take out your competition.

Oh, man.

Can't get traced back to you.

Okay.

Okay, I do. Do you do that? Do you ever. Do you ever, like, just give landscapers, like, energy drinks and stuff? You used to, right?

I used to. When I was out in the field.

Like, back in the day. Yeah. I. I do it every once in a while. Like, if I'm driving, even in my personal truck, like, I'll just. If I see crew working, like, I'll just stop at a gas station and grab some drinks and toss it to him. So, like, one time I was driving home, it was late. There was a crew working. I stopped at the gas station. They were mowing the gas station. So I was like, I'll just go and grab a couple of Gatorades. Like, appreciate you guys working hard.

Let's go. So, yeah, I had to be careful because, like, if the owner's doing it, then people think you're trying to take their team members off.

Yeah.

So. Which, you know, sometimes I didn't mind that, but I wasn't trying to do that, so.

Yeah. And I've even done it, like, when I'm not in Augusta gear.

Yeah.

But then sometimes I do in Augusta gear, and I'm just like, hey, I know you guys are working hard. Have a Gatorade. It's not like a sales pitch. It's just, I know you're working hard, and I do it for the same for our guys. Like, sometimes I'll do estimates, and then I'll just figure out. I'm like, oh, I know guys in the neighborhood. Like, I'll find them.

So it is a hack. If you are needing employees, it is a good thing to do.

It's an employee hack as well as a morale hack for your existing team.

Personally, I would only do it when I knew we had enough team members and I didn't need to hire anyone. Then I felt like, okay, I have no ill will whatsoever. I could be possible. Now I'll go give these. These. There's nothing they can get back in return.

Yeah, there's this. There's this gas station I go to on a pretty regular basis. And one day, the guy kind of, you know, he knows my face, doesn't know my name type of situation. And he asked me, he was like, do you like working there? I was like, yeah, you want a job? I just, like, instantly offered him a job. I was like, hey, every time I come in here, you're working, so I know you're consistent employee. So you show up. You show up to work. You want to work for me?

Can't even see your legs behind this camera.

Counter.

But you know, as long as those are intact, we're good.

Yeah.

Sweet. Well, we wanted to touch on something a little bit more internal to Augusta. Now. Have you, you have you made any public videos about this at length?

Not really, no. Because like, it's still. It's something I've been working on for a long time and I would rather the performance of the franchise kind of be the thing that talks about it more.

But you've teased it and I feel like a conference. Anyone that's come to your conference or doing your paid content, they know they get a little bit of a sneak peek of the long term vision of Augusta and the support you're planning to give franchisees. So we have integrated a feature at Augusta called Max, who is our mascot and he is AI artificial intelligence answering phone calls. So do you want to give the brief description of how that got started and why it got started at Augusta?

Um, yeah. So the reason why Max is important for answering phone calls. So basically he answers phone calls for Command center both during office hours and then can distribute it to the right department as well as take lead information after hours and like set up estimates and all the rest of it. So down the road that the capabilities of Mac will be significantly higher once he's connected to Copilot. So I'm hoping by next spring we can start connecting him and start giving simple tasks. Like he'll be able to look at the schedule and know when to schedule the estimate instead of just taking their information. He'll be able to give pricing and sell jobs and take credit card information and cancel services and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Ultimately why Max needs to exist is because the cost of command center is 80 to 90% labor. And so labor is going up extremely fast in terms of cost. And so like when we started Command center just, you know, less than three and a half, four years ago.

We were paying $14 per hour as base pay. Well now base pay locally is well over 20. So we knew we had to do two things. One, lean on technology and two, figure out virtual. So last year we worked with virtual and we really over indexed on virtual and we had to kind of bring more in house. But we figured out learn a lot. This year we've been much more strategic about moving into virtual. So that's been helpful. But it hasn't erased the fact that our wages internally and locally have gone up like 50% or more. And that's in addition in those years, adding in health benefits, doubling the PTO like, and it's not like our workforce is becoming more consistent. And so our hope is that we can keep raising the wages to the point where we are in a different level of market and that's just governed by profitability. And so either A, we raise prices ginormously in order to be able to retain that profitability, be able to pay the team members what we need. Because like locally we have to handle more sensitive information. Things like QuickBooks, bank accounts, credit card information, employee data, running payroll, Social Security numbers, that's all got to be local, virtual can handle more basic tasks. But ultimately the real cost is the local team. And those are your best, best, best performers.

Yeah. Let me interject right there real quick, just so it's clarity for the listener, is you said raise prices. So for the franchise model we obviously have the flat monthly fee. That's for all your kind of back end support of your website, your Google pages, your marketing materials, P4P coaching calls, things of that nature. However, when you're saying raise prices not on that monthly fee, it is on the per minute fee for the command center staff, correct?

Yeah. So it averages out to a dollar a minute at Command center, which is, you know, depending on who you're looking at, 30 to 50% cheaper than just about anyone else that does this. But we can only do that by having these efficiencies and following the same systems. Right. That's why there's certain, certain franchisees we've had to like put on timeout kind of thing. Like hey, you can't use Command Center. It's not because we don't like you, it's just because we have to use the same systems in order for this to actually be, you know, where we can make this sustainable because we are so much cheaper than everyone else. Like if you look at Call Boss, if you look at Ruby, if you look at what's it called? Jill, Jill's Receptionist or Jill's, Jill's Office. Jill's Office. You're looking at literally double our prices. Yep. And it's not like they have anything different. They have the same, same stuff. They have calls coming in, they have clerical work to do and a lot of them actually charge by the hour instead of by the minute.

And it's sometimes based on package pricing.

Right.

Like based on subscription level and that sort of thing. So when you really get into the weeds, because I've done some of the research, some of those plans can get really expensive.

$3. You can get as high as $3 per minute. If you're trying to do it per minute. And then some of them will say, okay, we'll do you three hours. But there's a block, well that's three, three out of 24 hours in a day they're gonna service your account, which also means if they take 30 minutes, you're still paying for three hours. So the hourly thing is a little bit tricky for some people to understand. We do it by the minute. So anyways, in order to have those low prices, like I've always said, like Augusta right now our goal is professionalism, communication and really focusing on better quality service and better communication. Down the road though, when you really, if you wanna take out a market, you do those two things and you compete on price. And the only way we can compete on price is taking out the two biggest to a long care business. And that is the cost of labor of pushing them over and getting the actual work done, which is robotic, which is 10 to 20 years away in my opinion. And overhead. And so so instead of having to spend 12, 13, 14% on office rent, utilities, Internet, etc. I'd rather that be more like 6, 7, 8%. Well now all of a sudden you've created 7, 8 percentage points of either A margin or B price flexibility to be able to take out the market. It's like everyone wants to go say hey, just, just take it virtual.

That are not in Washington state in the office because way cheaper. It's true. However, it's way more. Management training takes longer, quality control is significantly more, managing them is significantly more. So really the cost is slightly lower, but it's not.

As cheap as you might think. What is nice about it is less sensitive to inflation. Because if I have the entire world as my base for employment, if there is inflation in the US like I can go to a different spot if there's inflation this like if Washington state like it has gone so crazy expensive, I can go to a different state. That's great. But what's, what's further, even better is technology because technology is deflationary, which means over time it goes down in cost. And so the cost per gigabyte, the cost per milliamp hour always goes down, traditionally has always gone down in cost. And so the objective of MAX is to be able to take it away from human labor and turn it into compute power. And so MAX over the past year we've been working on, in the past few months it's been integrated into command center and there's definitely been some hiccups. I kind of misstep on some of the rollout. But overall the objective is that we can keep the price per minute of Command center as low as possible. And that will eventually become the differentiator for Augusta because like right now we know if you have a 30, 50, 60% close ratio, a lot of those people can't. Not accepting is because we are a higher priced product, that's great. But when you can have a high decent margin but have competitive, if not lower than competition on pricing, and now they can't compete with you because they don't have that technology, both from the robotics standpoint and their overhead is twice as much as you in the office, then you win. And so that's the 10 to 20 year game plan of Augusta is generally doing that.

Yeah. And it reminds me, and I don't want to tease this too much, but it reminds me of a graph I saw that's like people want it fast, cheap or quality and that you can't always have all three of those. And it sounds like you're trying to keep the same quality by having the computing power of Max fast because it's 24 7. Right. Max will always answer the phone. It's AI. As long as the, the network's on. Right. As long as the servers are on, it will answer the phone. And then you're saving on price.

Cheap.

Right. You can do it cheaper than having in house staff, than having, you know, virtual staff even. It's going to be cheaper, long run initial investment, way more expensive, I'm assuming.

Yeah. Like it's a huge amount of cost up front.

Yeah.

Right now like for me, the challenging part, like everyone like you know, listening to the podcast, even to like me talking about how stressed I'm like, ultimately I had three massive tech projects we were running at the same time. We still are. And that is like AI in terms of phone recognition. Like, like figuring out voice models and all the rest of it. Copilot and P4P, like that was just the software side. So like yeah, that's why it was kind of like blowing my brain. But like this is the thing.

When it comes to AI and listening, like the verbal side and all the rest of it, it's important that.

There'S going to be an initial upfront cost. Very expensive.

Right.

We've taken it on from the franchisees in order so that it is not a long term play for them. They can immediately see the benefits of saving 5, 10% at Command Center. But the long tail version in 5, 10 years is that that price that we're paying today is still the same, right. And everyone else in this industry, their cost of labor has doubled or tripled, and now they are like, oh, we should figure out AI and we're three, four, five years ahead of them. Now the part that I was literally forgot about there for a second is something I talked about with the. The Franchise Advisory Council. And I said, I understand right now that with all the AI stuff and robots answering the phone, people have an inclination to push that away customers. Right. And I agree with that. And that's what we've been facing with the rollout. Right? And figuring out how we do this in the best way. How do we allow customers to talk to real agents? Because we still have, you know, 70% of customers still talk to a real agent based upon their first sentence that comes out of their mouth when they talk to max. But 10 years ago in this industry, it was actually like the new thing to get credit cards on file. That was the new thing. It was hard. There was a lot of resistance. Now, like, it's very common. Everyone kind of like basically says, you should do it. It's commonplace for the industry. You know, people are shocked if you don't take credit cards.

Easy access to processors, easy to set up an account, like.

So the question is, who won in this industry in the past 10 years? And is the people that adopted that technology first and were okay with all the initial taking the heat from their customers, but figured it out and then went on to another technology that has allowed them to win in the marketplace? And I'll talk a little bit as conference, but most of that has been around capital, right? People going public, acquisitions, mergers, that's what they've moved on to. But they figured out credit cards very quickly. And meanwhile, you got people just now like, okay, I'm going to start requiring a credit card on file and stuff like that. My thought process, and I know this to be the truth, and that is in five to 10 years, the same will be true for voice recognition and answering the phone. Our entire industry will start to do it. And there'll be all this talk about like, oh, some customers don't like it. Some people say they won't do be my customer if I have a robot answer. The same way that credit cards happened 10 years ago, 100% the same way. I still remember when I started nine years ago, there were people, I will not give you my credit card. And that was like 30, 40% of customers. They would not.

Yeah.

Now it's maybe 1% tops. The same thing will be true for AI. The same thing will be true for the phone being answered by a robot. Because ultimately if my robot can answer your, your, your question in half the amount of time as a real person and it can do it 24, 7 with 100% accuracy. Accuracy, you will want that as a customer more than someone that has a pulse on the other end of the phone call. Because I, when I call as a customer, will start to value less and less the human connection and more and more getting my stuff done and moving on to the next task I have on my calendar. And time will become more and more and more valuable as inflation happens because our cost per unit of time will increase. And so if I'm getting paid $20 an hour now, right now, in 10 years, 20 years, if I'm getting paid 30, 40, 50, $60 an hour now, me saving three minutes, I'm not talking to a human, is worth significantly more. And so in my opinion, in five to ten years this will start becoming commonplace. I expect in three to five years this will be like on lawn care web, on Facebook groups, like on lawn care Millionaires. And like, it'll start popping up. Oh man, there's this thing, I could have this, it's, it's pretty expensive. Don't know. It'll start popping up in three to five years, it'll start becoming more like people like the new innovators are starting to dive in. In 10 years, it'll be standard when you call a restaurant, when you call a service based business, there'll be a robot on the other side doing scheduling, taking billing, doing all of that for you. Why in the world, when you go to a restaurant, is the hostess having to answer the phone that can totally be automated with a plug in into something like OpenTable. And so this will absolutely happen. The question is, in 10 years, are we figuring this out or have we moved on to robotics, which is the next technology? Right, Right. And so in my opinion, we can over the next five to 10 years, keep the cost of command center where it's at, using technology and virtual. And in right now, same cost, in five to 10 years, everyone else's cost has gone up. Ours is no longer that cost, it's the same. And furthermore, it's gotten better. Right. Labor is in five or ten years not gonna be better. Guarantee it.

Yeah.

In five or ten years, my technology will be infinitely more, more capable with all the data that's been inputted into it and it'll be able to operate so much faster than a human. Like when someone gives their name, you have to search that in the copilot. In copilot or like in any CRM. When that's when, when that phone call is integrated, RingCentral and RingCentral immediately is already picking up their account information and able to know their billing history and all this other stuff immediately. Things can be done with compute power versus a brain and a keyboard and people typing and all the training that goes into training that person and when they leave, you have to replace them and all the onboarding and all this other garbage that we have to go through and there's nothing against those people because those people will move on and do more things. Like our unemployment rate is the lowest it's ever been and yet technology is taking over the world and going to take our jobs over. We will have no problem finding more jobs. And what those jobs will become at Command center is we will hire for our franchisees. We will be able to do tasks for them that currently is taking their time so they can't spend time with their team and getting work done and actually producing revenue. We'll be able to do those things for them because the higher level people at Command center will be able to take those tasks due to the fact that the lower level tasks will be handled by virtual or being handled by technology. And so that's what I'm passionate about. And I do believe in 10 years it will be commonplace, but we will have moved on to robotics and trying to figure that very, very hard thing to crush and everyone else will be just like jumping on the bandwagon and they'll be getting very entry level robots that are not good, whereas we will have in that time just crushed in terms of having so much data max will be like incredible. And it's not easy. The adoption part and like getting franchisees to acknowledge it, Getting franchisees to buy into the fact that like, hey, we have to fix certain things. This is a new technology and we are figuring it out. But it's a very long play.

Yeah. You're passionate about it. I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell.

I better be. Like, the amount of time I've spent on it is to all you painters.

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I Like, the amount of time I've spent on it is painful.

Yeah.

And I like to poke. Yeah. So. But I also understand that, like in the immediacy franchisees, they want the customer serve well, 100%. There is more resistance to a robot, especially once they find out it is a robot, if they stump it with a question or something like that. And we try to fix all these things. If someone says, hey, I want to talk to a person immediately, we can get them to command center based on the first sentence out of someone's mouth. We can direct whether or not this is going to be a robot call. Because we can, we can service them or if this is going to be a command center call. Right. And we just. Great, let me go ahead and forward that over to command center. There are people that don't even know we have Max.

It's like a receptionist.

It's like a receptionist, like, great, let me get you to the billing department. Let me get you to the QuickBooks department. Like, right. So.

I don't know where I was going with that. What are they saying? Oh, adoption. So, yeah, I understand that. And like, that's why we've allowed the franchisees to opt out. And that's where I made my mistake, is I should have made it from day one. You could opt in or opt out of Max at the top and be like, hey. Because there are some people like, hey, I'm willing to pay the extra 30, 40% to have a human being. And I understand that, like right now that there are people are going to want that. My expectation is in 10 years, it'll be three times the cost. Right. It'll be three times more expensive to have someone physically answering the phone than someone like a robot answering. And so that becomes very easy to make that decision potentially, because now we're talking about thousands of dollars a month. Well, right now, if it's only a few hundred dollars, I understand why you just rather have the virtual someone, an.

Actual agent, a live agent.

I get it. And so I made the miscalculation in pushing everyone into it and just making it, you know, mandatory. Whereas I should have. I should have made it more of an opt in, opt out process. But. But still not 90%. More than 90% of the franchise is still having Max take all their calls, et cetera. 100% of the franchisees have Max taking their calls after hours. The big debate and the part that I messed up on is when we move from after hours to all hours.

Right.

Is not allowing the opt out. And so I Made that clear with them. And now it's a little smoother for them to take that action if they want.

Yeah. So you rolled this out two, three months ago just for after hours?

Yeah, In June we started, we started rolling it out July. It was across the entire system having after hours. Max would come on, collect information because this is the thing we would, we, we would miss hundreds of calls because ultimately we were open for like 12 hours a day. Right. That's only half the amount of hours. And we're gonna open Sunday. So literally 60% of hours in the week were not covered by command center.

And reduced staff on Saturdays, right?

Exactly.

Slightly reduced.

We still take the calls though.

Yeah, we still take the calls, but there's not as many people in the office.

But ultimately, even though we were open like 78, 80 hours a week, we are still, that's only like half the amount of hours in the week. So there were still like 15, 20% of calls still being missed overall. Well out of those 15 or 20%, that's hundreds. Right. People when they hit a voicemail on the weekend do not leave a voicemail. A vast majority of them know almost 70% of people when they hit, sorry, we're not available, we're not open right now, calls, whatever, leave us a voicemail. 70% don't. That's the missed opportunity we want to tap into. Because now they don't click until when they call it 12pm or 12 midnight on a Saturday evening or Sunday evening, they get someone answering the phone, having all the information, collecting all of their information and being able to like fully get what we need for an estimate to be completed. And so that was nothing but upside because now that 30% of voicemails that would get responded to a day later now all of a sudden became 80. 90% of the calls were answered, information collected. And then we were able to process them and the customer from their perspective, they don't need to go keep asking people for estimates. They asked you for an estimate. I got all your information. We're going to estimate to you within next couple days. As soon as that's been done, they don't keep going on to the next person. And the vast majority of business in our industry and service based businesses goes to the first person who gives someone an estimate and get the customer to stop calling other people. Because I've done it before. And lo, literally less than 20% of people in this industry pick up the phone.

Yeah. Some of your old videos, you would, you would just cold call businesses and rarely get an answer.

Totally. And like some of them in their voicemail boxes set up, most of them do not pick up the phone. They just expect the voicemail and then they will respond to the voicemail again. It makes it more sense. It's on their schedule. They don't have to be as reactive throughout the day. I get it. You don't have the time or money for an office person because you're a little smaller. Totally fine.

Yep.

The problem with that is you are missing out on 70% of leads. Yeah. And you are. You don't even know about it. And it's what I'm going to talk about a little bit conferencing. You don't even know. Like my close ratio is 60%. Wait, that's the people that you talk to?

Yeah.

You didn't talk to 30% of people that were not willing to leave you a voicemail and they went on to the next provider. Like I would do if I was trying to find someone. I would not leave you a voice message. I would move on to the next person and get someone on the phone. You got my information. You're going to ask me in a couple of days. Fantastic. And I'm done. Because I don't want to keep doing that. And so if I can get a Robot to that 24 7, there was nothing but upside during outside of hours. Where it got controversial is bringing that during in hours. And I completely see that. And I underestimated the impact that I would have and so I apologize. The franchisees, we now have it where they can opt out and about 10% have and I'm totally fine with that. And I think down the road it'll just be a cost thing. It'll be like, look, if it's gonna cost me two, three times more to have a real agent versus technology that has stayed consistent in terms of pricing for 5 or 10 years and is not going up in value in cost. That might make more and more sense as time goes. And in that, like in that thing, in a year, the capabilities of Max will double or triple and it'll start be able to give pricing, it'll be able to start taking credit card information. It'll start doing so much more once connected with Copilot that it'll make it more obvious not only is it the cost per minute that will be significantly cheaper, but it will be the time of that call will be 50 to 60% less than a human operator. And so you're literally talking about a three to four times like discount on having the machine versus a human, which at this point is only maybe 10 to 30%. And it doesn't make a sense as much to have that drawback of some customers don't like it. Right.

So you had, so you had the initial rollout. Then eventually it went to full time Max answering the phones. He was the first line of defense, if you will. All hours of the day, he was answering phones. Even if we had staff at command center, that obviously did upset a few franchisees. Maybe there are a few calls where they had customers that were upset or confused Max, or they confused Max.

Max got confused or said something stupid or didn't understand them and asked them again. Right. And those are, those are like the initial just technology side.

Right.

That I don't think was what franchisees were concerned about. They were concerned more about the fact that I changed a lot of stuff very quickly without their like, input. And so I basically, I was in the airport.

Is that the feedback you got? I might interject more here because I wanted to kind of do the deeper dive.

My feedback that I received was it was not so much the technology. They all very much believe that that's the reason they joined Augusta is like they want to be on the edge of what's happening in the industry and be technologically advanced. They understand, they bought into that vision. What they were concerned about from what I got in terms of all that I was going through and I spent like in my entire flight, five hours just going, responding back and just trying to get pulse on stuff. So anyways, my, my, my gathering was, it wasn't so much the technology, what we were doing. I had made that part clear. What I hadn't made clear is the fact that like I, I was going to change everything without notifying them or giving them an opt in and opt out. So what I told them is, hey, going forward, if there's a definitive change in Augusta, I require everyone to do. And it's like non negotiable. For example, down the road software that we're going to use. It's like, hey, there's a certain non negotiable point that we have to, you have to be using this technology and we're going to give you a year, year plus advance and we're going to talk about it, have schedules and have training and like do a rolled out, a gradual rollout, et cetera, that's better. Or if I'm gonna do something fast and I'm like, this is great, let's do it. And I put it up, it will be an opt in and opt out basis, it will not be required. And so based on the responses I got, that was reassuring to them. Okay, if this is gonna happen in the future, I will know about it in a very long advance if it's required and like a mandated thing. But if it's not like this max thing, it should be more opt in, opt out. And then maybe I do a mix of both. It's like, hey, look, you can opt in and opt out, but in a year from now or six months, there's a hard cut off. Right. And we have to get everyone on the same system. But that's what I learned. I don't want the franchisees to feel out of control. I, as a franchisee at any time fitness know what it's like to just have stuff crammed down your throat. Like, they just randomly doubled our, our marketing fee the other day. That doesn't feel good. Yeah, right. There was no discourse. It wasn't, hey, it's coming up. This is what's going to go for. It's like, oh, it's doubling as of next month. And that kind of stunk. I don't think their marketing dollars are spent well. Right, right. So I would have liked to have like a discourse like, hey, can you give me a heads up so I can budget for this? Can you show me a little bit more information about where this extra $600 a month is going and all this sort of thing? And so I just want to make sure that they weren't feeling like they could just be their business is going great and all of a sudden there's a rug pull or big change. It should be more where if it's mandated, it's a long, long term horizon. And if it's going to be done quickly, it's more of an opt in, opt out basis.

Okay, well, let me play corporate devil's advocate and you can, you can play the role of, you know, you love your franchisees, you respect your franchisees, so you're going to defend them. I think everything you just said is a limiting belief. Why do you feel you need control over something that's going to benefit your business long term? Also, you've entered into a contract.

That's the point. Stop right there. That. Stop it. We're on the second part. So it's the long term part. I can think long term because tomorrow I don't need capital to pay payroll.

Right.

And so if I lose a customer as a smaller operator tomorrow, that I need to pay payroll this week, I am going to be agitated. So I'm in a different. At a different level. And that's who most of who opted out is, the smaller operators, because they need every customer. They are tight, they are growing quickly. They don't have the money to go spend on marketing dollars. And then, you know, a percentage, any percentage of those leads be turned off by Max.

But wouldn't the. Once again, like devil's advocate, wouldn't the math work out that it's better for Max to be answering the phone for them all the time in the long term versus one or two losing one or two customers because they're frustrated by Max?

Yeah, well, that's why, like, there's only upside for after hours. Everyone is still doing after hours, right? Because there's only. There's only positives. It literally, like, the numbers are so on my side, I'm not getting any of an option. It's like so much better for the customer. It has improved lead count incredibly. It's during those office hours where I understand right now, with Max still learning, educating himself, that the customer experience for some people is diminished and is not. It is not worth the extra 10 to 30% savings of command center having Max. And so we just need to give that option. And so we have told them, hey, look down the road, the cost of having opted out of Max during office hours will cost you more because we're gonna. It's gonna require us to staff up for the peaks of, you know, you. You have an hour, there's only 20 calls, the next hour, there's 200. We have to. We have to staff up at the 200 level. Whereas if we have Max in place, we get to average all this out. And our. Our workload comes way less in terms of the number of people that we have to have our threshold at command center. And so if they opt out, it should be just simply, hey, look, it costs us way more to service you. You're gonna pay more. And if you're willing to pay less and have. Have Max, it helps us a lot. So if we win, you win. And if it's gonna cost us more, it costs you more. And that makes a lot of sense to me. That was brought up by the franchisees, like, hey, there are some people that are willing to pay more. And I think right now, you know, the 10, 30% is not worth the pain that they're experiencing. But it's just a matter of time what will. And my goal is to make it as simple for them to switch over when they see that time being you know, fit, and I understand where you're coming from. And in the long term, 100%, I'm on board with this, and I think all of them are too.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is that some people can't afford the long term, and that's. That's. That's normal. That's fine. And so, like, if Anytime Fitness came to me and said, hey, you're marketing, you know, national marketing, that you go spend to us, instead of it being, you know, they from 600, 1200, not 1200, it's 12,000. I'd be like, okay, so what are you doing? They're like, well, now we're gonna be able to put billboards across the entire country. We believe that your amount of people that know about any business will double or triple. Your leads will quintuple because of X, Y, and Z. I'm like, that's great. But let's just say that I just started my gym. I just got through Covid. I don't have a lot of cash. I'm just trying to get, like, the next person the door. I'm thrilled that in three or four years, I'm gonna have a four times X gym, but if I can't make payroll and pay my rent this month, I'm out. And that $12,000 gonna cost me a lot. And so that's where. That's where I believe a lot of them are coming from. And I. I didn't. I did. I didn't see the magnitude of that for the smaller operators. And the people who are a little bit tighter are growing quickly, and every lead does count for them. And, you know, you live in there.

Yeah. I honestly want to keep playing devil's advocate.

Go ahead.

So did they fully opt out of Command center as a whole or just max?

So that was originally where my head was at when, like, there was pushback. I was like, okay, great. This is Command Center. This is the services we offer. If you want to be in it, you can. If you don't like, that's fine.

Yep.

The bottom line is a lot of people join for Command Center. They join for the fact that they can grow their business and not have to worry about incoming calls, voicemails, emails, and all the other minutia. SM request forms, chats on the. On the thing, running payroll, all that stuff. They. They joined Augusta for that. So take away. That is like, well, then why do I need Augusta?

Yeah.

Right. And so my goal in. In having is accommodate as many people as possible without changing the system. And so what we were able to do is like, look, all of our agents know how to answer the phone. Whether the phone is answering before or after Max talked to somebody is irrelevant to them. They can do anything so the system doesn't change. I can make this very simple to say inside the systems and then just be honest with the franchisees that hey, like this cost us more money and down the road this will cost you more money because we have to align these things for the people that are willing to take, you know, that percentage of their customers being unhappy, but they're willing to be way cheaper than having operators answering every single call. And again, 70% more calls that come in a command center are still getting tossed to an agent. It's the other 30% that Maxim can take to completion. And once that's connected with copilot and they can do things like scheduling estimates, take giving pricing, taking card information, it just becomes like. Like in a year alone it'll just be like orders of magnitude better with Max. And I cannot same. I know for a fact it will not be the same can be true for a labor. It just won't. It'll be harder to find laborers. It'd be harder to train them. They want more stuff. Like even today they're passing this new law in Washington. It's going to cost at least 2 or 3% more for us to employ anybody. So like that's not going away.

Yeah.

Technology, it's going down.

Yeah.

Right. And I can make it cheaper and cheaper as time goes on, Especially the gust of scales. Right. Right now I've promised like, hey, we can keep it the same. There's a chance that if we actually scale the next five years to locations, I can actually bring the cost per minute down at command center. We're not anywhere close to that now if anyone's listening. But because there's still a lot of development costs. But if we scale enough, that's a. That's an actual possibility. I have zero percent chance that ever happening with labor.

Right.

Or rent or utilities. All of which is a double in the past five or 10 years.

Yeah. So anyways, so the franchisees that opted out of Max didn't necessarily opt out of command center. So then I have. I have a question.

Let me say this. Sorry. Let me say this one thing is this same resistance that we're experiencing with Augusta now will also happen when robotics come totally. The difference is hopefully I've learned a thing or two about leadership and how we should roll these things out. But in order for Augusta to stay at the forefront. There is going to be a little bit of pressure and we talk about this with the franchisees. It's like the very first thing I say, like, my promise to them is like, there's going to be times you will be uncomfortable by the changes I'm making. But, like, we have to make up for the 20 year tech debt that this industry has and that's not going to be easy. But hopefully in 10, 15 years when we start playing around with robotics and I'm like, okay, this technology is good enough. We can plug this into Copilot. Now Max can actually talk to the robots out on people's lawns and tell them to stop mowing. And like, there's a lot of stuff that's really cool when that's happening. There will be friction and there will be pain. Hopefully I'll be better at things like this that we figure out with Max and how to roll this out the franchisees so it doesn't affect their operations as much as it had. So sorry, you were.

You're good. No, no, no. Your defense is great. I love it. I'm gonna ask you a very pointed question though.

Okay.

Does Max make more mistakes than a human agent? Have we looked at that data?

It's tough to. It's tough to measure because the. Really.

Because I think, I think it's an honest question.

Yeah, right.

If people are saying, well, I don't want Max because it's messing things up. Okay, great, well, how much does he mess up compared to a human agent?

He does make mistakes like a human agent would. The thing is, with a human agent, someone makes mistakes. You train them and hope to God that they fix things in their brain. They make the connection like, oh, when this happens, I do X. Yeah. Beautiful thing about Max, he makes a mistake, I have it recorded. I tell him, do not say that next time, say this. And then zeros and ones somehow match up and next time, 100% of time, he'll nail it. So that's why, like, I know the cost goes down and the technology and the accuracy only goes up. I like that train better. Yeah, I like that train better than this. Only goes up in cost. And I don't see ever really improving significantly in terms of accuracy. And obviously we have to improve training all the things that's what we really worked on the past year. But there's going to be a level of mistaken error because they're humans. They don't run on zeros and ones. They get tired, they have emotional problems, there's medication involved. There's family stuff and relationships and all this other drama. Max doesn't have that. And so whether or not it's more or less now, I would probably say it's about similar. The reason I can't give you a definitive on that is because really, you can only measure certain of these things once there's been a complaint said. Right. So I'd say it's about similar. I'm simply looking at the train and the direction and the trajectory of both of these. You know, human capital and human labor versus where Max is going. And I like the train better on Max.

Yeah.

But. Yeah, you're right. I know what your point is. Humans make mistakes, too. Yes. The Max makes a mistake. Here's the thing. A customer doesn't care about the mistake when they're first starting. What they care about is they have a impulsive reaction. I do not like this robot. Right. And I'd say it's 20% of people don't like talking to robots, at least. Right. Maybe even more. 30 or 40%. There is also a percentage of people that will get someone on the phone and they do not want to talk to that person. Yeah, like, but that's way less. I'd say it's like 2 or 3% of people like this have something random with someone. They don't want to talk to them.

So that differentiate that differential, though, of like 2, 3% unhappy with. With human versus 20, 30% unhappy with robot that just gets smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on until it will be preferred. The same way that people prefer to put their card on file.

Yeah.

And I just want to be on that train.

Yeah. All right, My last and final question. If you don't want me to beat a dead horse, I don't have to. But it's just. It's an interesting topic. And I like to probe when there's, you know, controversy, if you will, and it's not controversy, like you said. I think all the feedback we've gotten from franchisees and I've gotten feedback on coaching calls. It's very valid and it's appreciated. We want that open dialogue. But I have a final question. Like you said, it's perfect. You were talking about the gap, right, between people that will never want to talk to a human versus people that never want to talk to a robot, that gap is closing. So wouldn't we say if we know that gap is closing, if our industry is trending in that direction, wouldn't we want to service those customers first? Right. The people that are comfortable with talking to robots that are comfortable with AI that want automations. Because I like to say, and I've said this on sales calls before, is the best Augusta customers are the ones that know a yellow truck and a yellow shirt is going to show up every single day or every day, every same day of the week, weeks on end, all summer long. Right. Those are the best customers. We never get to know their name beyond their customer profile. We never talk to them, their credit cards on file. They know the yellow truck and shirt. They show up, they get the job done, they pay their bill. Right. So wouldn't you say, shouldn't we be pushing into that clientele more?

Man, so many thoughts. Okay, so.

I would say that is true. So this is the first thing. One, if I would have done what I did in August and I would have done that in April, I do believe there would have been a different reception. Here's why. Because during spring rush, when the vast majority of Augusta is limiting their leads because they're just, they're just overwhelmed with work. If me adding a layer of like, hey, some people will not like this. Who cares if I'm so overwhelmed with leads I'm turning them off. Who cares what you do at the top? Right. Save me money. And I only can service these customers anyways in August, it's different. The vast majority of Augusta is looking for more work. You don't have weeks of backlog and they're not pouring in new leads. So by me adding any friction, it's gonna be. It is going to add a more of a speed bump there. So mistake on my end just in terms of timing, I just was not willing to wait all the way until next spring. But more importantly is if you have a hundred customers that you're mowing, maybe you don't care about the 10 or 15 that don't like talking to Max because you're like, hey, it costs me less money. I make more profit. If you want to leave, go for it. Talk to other 10 people. Oh, by the way, you can't get a hold of them because they don't answer their phone.

Right?

Right. The thing is, if you have 10 customers and you just started in the past year, or 12 customers who got started last week, you want every single one. One of those customers calls you and says, I'm not using your service because I had to talk to Max, or I'm not using your service because he messed up and I had to tell him my name twice.

Right.

If that customer.

Was going to be putting food on your table this week for your family, you look at it differently.

I agree.

Right. And furthermore.

I don't remember what I was gonna say, but it was a good thought. I just had like, a lot of thoughts while you're talking about that.

Yeah.

So continue with your.

No, that's it. That was like the last question. Right. Because there's an old business adage too. It's like, serve the 80%. Like 20% of your customers will cause problems. They won't be a good fit for you, whatever it may be. So, like, serve the 80%. So if we're swinging to more of 80% of people want automations, they want robotics, like, just get it done. I just want to pay to have my lawn mowed. I don't want to talk to anyone. I want it to look green and I want it to look nice and clean on the edges. Blow off my driveway.

And I would say that, like right now, for example, the, the, the curve of technology adoption for like credit cards is that way, where it's like, hey, look, if you don't want to put a car on file, go take a hike. Ten years ago, you could not have done that because if you would have done that, it would have limited growth and affected your business.

Yeah.

Now it's like a decision that maybe 1 or 2% people aren't gonna, like, that's with AI is going to come down. And I do believe right now maybe that's 15, 20, 30% of people that would be like, I don't like that. That will come down to zero percent eventually because that's all that a phone will be. And so I truly believe, like, the phone becomes just robots talking to robots. Right. Your AI agent that puts your calendar together. Talk to my robot.

Yep.

It is not a transaction between humans. And that will become commonplace. The same way credit cards are very commonplace today. And so.

Yeah, like, I see what your point is. You want to serve those customers. But honestly, if, let's say one out of five don't like it, my customers, that would take my, my customer acquisition cost from $100 to $120. Right. And again, max, outside of hours only upside. I only get the leads. They only see the positives. But during those hours, I see their point. And if it affects their livelihood, they're going to change and react differently. It's different from a customer perspective to a franchisee perspective because if you don't like your lawn being done a certain way and I lose you, whatever. It's your lawn at stake for the Franchisees, I can't just like, oh, like, oh, 10% of them don't like it. Who cares about them? And I'm only gonna serve the other 90% that want to be on this train. I'm just kicking 10 people, 10% of people under the bus in terms of their livelihood. It's not their lawn we're talking about. And so I take the responsibility of the franchise level much differently than I do customers. And that's why I don't look at the franchisees as customers. Because, like, yes, we make money and we have to run a business and be efficient, but like, if I mess something up, I am not messing up someone's lawn. I am messing up their livelihood and what they have probably planned years for doing and have in years in the future intention to grow with. And so I play those very differently. And so when you say, hey, I only want these 80% of customers, great. But I can't do that with the franchisees. I'll never do that with the franchisees. And I think if I treat them that way, the business side will get taken care of. But I understand your point, cuz that's what we talk about with customers. Like, hey, look, I don't want that customer. Just, just leave them alone. Yeah.

I think my final thought on this is I don't see the difference if I were a franchisee, and I know I'm not. So, you know, hold that against me if you want. If you're listening, totally fine. I'm not in the same position as you, but I don't think you believe all of this.

You're just playing devil's advocate.

Yeah. But I'm gonna tell you what I actually believe. I don't see a difference between Max and Command Center.

Yeah.

As a live agent. So I think if you opt out of Max, you opt out of Command Center. I'm unfiltered. It makes no sense to me. You can't convince me because you are giving power to someone else to make decisions for you. However, the context of size of business makes sense. But if you, if your back is against the wall and every lead matters, then you should be taking every single call. Like, why, why even have Command center at that point? Like, if you need that much control, if you are pennies away from failing, you should control your own destiny and have no one else supporting you. That's just my opinion.

People aren't gonna like you after this episode.

That's fine.

I don't care. That's why you've, you've put Me in a position to be a franchise business coach, which is sometimes uncomfortable. And I have to tell people when they're wrong. I had a franchise call coaching call yesterday and I was like, why aren't you thinking about it this way? Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing that? And they were like, I, I don't know. And I'm like, well, start doing it right. It's uncomfortable. But that's just my opinion. I don't see a difference between Max and Command Center Live agents.

Yeah, that will become more clear to the vast majority of people.

And I don't have any insider information. I don't want people to think like, well, Lee sees the behind the scene. I'm a command center three, four hours a week. Otherwise I'm at other locations. I'm on calls with franchises across the country. So I don't have any insider information. That's my honest take as someone who also oversees one of your locations and uses Max and Command center more than any other franchisee. Our command center bill last month was $8,000. We use it way more than any other franchisee. So I know how valuable the service is. And that's just my honest opinion. My unfiltered opinion.

Yeah, I think it'll become more clear in time that that is the right decision. But you know, I just think a little bit differently in terms of the fact is like when I was addressing because obviously I got your opinion, I got Lee's and Liz, et cetera.

He always called Chuck Lee. Oh, sorry on this for some reason.

Chuck, Liz and yourself. And like Chuck obviously has the pulse on like all my locations and he hears stuff from GMs and they have complaints and things like that about whatever topic is happening inside the, inside the franchise. So no, I do have and like this impacts my bottom line and like my businesses and what people don't realize is like my revenues from my seven locations or whatever it is, like those are significant. Like I can't just like if I got a little wiped out, like I'd be in a bad spot because like I got three of those are like very, very profitable. 30 plus percent last month. Like I need those so I can't put those in jeopardy. But I'm okay with going from 38% profitability to 20 to you know, 35% profitability in exchange for a long term benefit. But if I'm at 3% profitability, I'm not willing to go to 0% profitability. Same change, right?

Yep.

And so you know, it Impacts me a lot. That's why like I got all of your guys opinion and ultimately I came down to for me, like we do not change the systems of Augusta or of Command center in order to accommodate the 10% or less that want it differently. And in my opinion, if it doesn't change the system and it doesn't make anything more difficult for us, that it should be one, optional and two, if it does create more cost for us at Command center, they should just have to pay more and it's the decision that they make and that would just seem like the most fair thing. And that was brought up by the Franchise Advisory Council and like that makes sense. So I just rolled with that.

Yeah, that's fair. I get that. I totally get that. I think an example for me is this spring I had to help turn around one of your locations and for the franchisees they're going to get the full picture. Well, when that location was struggling, when our back was against the wall, whatever you want to describe it as I said I'm taking over scheduling, I'm taking over hiring and firing, right? Command center was pre screening applicants, someone else was actually doing the hiring and firing, someone else was doing the scheduling. And I was like, these two things will be massive indicators of if we can get our back off the wall and be profitable again. And I think it's the same if you're on a small scale business. It's taking your calls, right? You're not hiring and firing. Your scheduling is pretty straightforward if you're a solo operator or one or two employees. But like take the calls if you're that if the business is struggling that aggressively, like just take all your your calls.

If you looked at for franchisees listening or people thinking about guests or anyone trying to grow a business, anytime you delegate, you have to be okay with a lower level of efficiency, right? A lower level of quality. And that is why most people don't scale their business. Because they expect everyone to be 100% of what they are. And guess what? That's never going to happen. And so people call massive companies like Apple or Amazon or whatever, like man, that person wasn't great on the 20th rung of the hierarchy. And there's been layers and layers and layers and obviously training and development, you try to prevent that from happening. However.

If someone's just getting started and every call matters, every single invoice matters, every single applicant matters, they don't want Command center screen out there, their hires, etc. They should take their own stuff, they should do it themselves because you are going to be the 100% that you're looking for. The thing is, would you rather have a business that runs at 80% efficiency, 80% quality, 80% good, and you never have to look at it right. Versus and you being able to scale that and multiply it and keep going and going? Well, no, it's not 35% profitable, but it's 20% profitable. I'd rather have the 20% profitable. And if I never have to show up, I never have to answer a call. And the whole goal of Command center is for the whole system to be able to have the opportunity to do that. And that is scale. Not have to be involved in the business. And in doing so, you are giving up control, quality and efficiency. But if you build the business to the certain point where it can afford that incremental lowering of efficiency and profitability, etc. You can go do whatever you want. And business runs by itself and it's worth infinitely more in terms of valuation because it now runs without you as the business owner. And so that's why Command center exists, is to give them give franchise the ability to actually do that and build a business that is extremely profitable and then flip it. Okay, great. I'm gonna go to a second one. This one's going to go from 30% profitability to 20% and I'm okay with that because I'm going to go build this other thing. I don't even have to worry about this now because Command center got payroll, they're hiring people, they are doing all my invoicing and scheduling, all this other stuff, I don't have to worry about it. And for a lot of people, that role is held up in the brain of one person. For almost every business in lawn care home services under a million, it's held up in one person's brain. And a lot of times that person is related to, to the owner. Yeah, if you ever. That's why people don't sell their businesses. That's why there's no value in the business. Because if that owner gets knocked out, guess what else goes? All the office, all the admin, all the person who goes. The gate codes and the passwords of the computer and where files are stored and all the other stuff used prices were raised last year and all this other garbage. That's why businesses don't sell. That's why they're not worth anything. And that's why ultimately, what's the time I got to be going soon. And that's ultimately there is.

People built something is not worth anything. They get to retirement. Like I'm gonna sell my business that I've worked 20 years on and like that's worth like a couple hundred grand, which is basically the cost of your equipment. Why? Well, because when you leave, there's no one to do sales. When you leave, your wife is going with you and she answers all the phones. Right. And by the time I take out your cost of hiring someone like you and hiring an all star that's worked 20 years in the office like your wife, I'm not making any profit. Therefore, your business is worth the assets and that's it. And by the way, you can never create two of them because guess what? You can't create two of you.

Yeah.

And so the whole objective of Command center is to allow people to scale. And the whole objective of MAX is to allow command center to scale.

Exactly.

And ultimately, yes, there will be less efficiency than a hundred percent you. And if everything is so important, you should handle every single aspect in your business. But just know that when you start handing things off to anybody, whether it be from labor office, admin, whatever, there's going to be things that fall through the cracks. They're not going to as great a job as you, they're going to miss the edging, they're going to forget to blow off the pack porch that you never did. I never had a complaint. Three years. I believe you. You're 100%. Yeah, but the person you hire next will not be 100% and the person they hire will probably be less than them. And that's just the way that, you know, growth of a business goes. And so the micromanager, myself and every other operator hates that. But that is how it works. Right? And you can either stay small and stay involved in every single call and estimate and business decision of your company, or you can decide that you're going to delegate and that you might delegate into a machine in the future. Like a robot. A robot on the phone, a robot on the mower, whatever it is, ultimately you are giving up control. And if you're not okay with that, you're probably not going to grow your business.

Yeah, that's fair. It's beautiful.

Are we doing financial advice? We had something, I forgot what it was.

Yeah, I know. You got to run. I had one thought because I did make a couple of notes during a couple of your monologues. One of them was notes you in the framework of 10 year swings. So last 10 years you said credit cards on file. That was a Big thing in our industry. The next 10 years you're predicting it's AI integration, answering phone calls. Correct.

And technology.

And then after that it's robotics technology. That'd be the next 10 year swing. Would you say pre two credit cards on file would be Internet CRM, software integration. That would have been that 10 year swing. Probably like paper routing, scheduling, picking up checks on the weekend.

You're probably looking at like adoption of CRMs.

Yep.

QuickBooks, things like that. From 2012, 2015 till now, you're probably looking at credit card adoption. And then over the next 10 years it will become the cost of admin being so high that people will have to turn to the phones and AI to figure out things both in software and like talking on the phone. And then I believe that will lead into the hardware which is the robotics. And that's what I've always said. It's like everyone was going robots, robots, robots. Like a year and a half, two years ago I said it'll be software that gets solved and then the hardware will come. The hardware is useless without the software. And that's why like we started Copilot. It is the highway by which we can do so much in the industry when it gets to robotics because we'll control all the software from pay for performance to Copilot and other stuff that we want to do. I just want to vertically integrate all of it so we can control all of it. So when robotics come along is like hello Robotics, I have something to talk to 24 7. I have a command center that can operate when you get in a, in a bind. We can start controlling with a human. And I have the technology in terms of software to tell you what to do, when to do it and track everything that you're doing. And that is when everyone be like, oh snap, there's someone that has 30% market share. That will happen in 20 years.

That's fair. Not financial advice.

Go ahead.

My non financial advice is do one on ones with your employees. Yeah, so we've probably said this before. I know at the conference we talk about it, but yeah, current manager of one of your locations is doing one on ones and I've been in this kind of eavesdropping and they've been phenomenal. He's, he's asking really good questions, connecting with the employees. Ask them like where they see themselves at the company in the future. Not just where do you see yourself in five years? Hey, for the, for the foreseeable future you're not leaving the company. So where do you see yourself next year, six months, like, where do you want to be in the company? So have one on ones. You'll be surprised by some sometimes what your employees say their goals are inside the company as well as even outside the company. One guy, you know, said like he wants to write novels and I was like, that's cool. I would have never known. So he's excited about being an author and it's like, that's cool. He's passionate about that. So have one on ones. Encourage your employees.

Cool. In the same vein because I was kind of racking my brain. Non financial advice is get coach, get a coach. So I've mentioned before, I've always wanted to get one. I finally got one.

I was going to ask about it, but I was maybe going to save.

It for next week. Yeah, it's, you know, we can talk more about me next week. But that person does not want to be mentioned. They are of course pretty high up there and extremely expensive. So I don't like talking about that so much. I told the franchisees what it costs and stuff, but.

You know, we'll see. Like, I just, I've never had that and I don't know anyone personally. Like, I know people online that, you know, are really successful, but I don't know personally anyone I can talk to that is like at this level. And so I'm interested to see what it does. If anything, it's therapy for me.

Yeah.

Business perspective and so it'll be really interesting. So I think everyone should have a coach. I don't care what athlete you talk to. They still have a coach. The best of the best still have a coach. And you know, people like Russell Wilson have to be put in their place when they like they wanted to try to be a coach when they're a player. And that has problems. So it happened last year and now I was like, oh, you don't get your own office and like your whole team. You are a player underneath a coach.

Yep.

And you know, Sean Payton comes down and lays down the law because you, if you're going to be playing a player, you need to have a good coach.

Yep.

And trying to mix that dynamic is weird.

Yeah.

And so I'm a big fan of it. I think it also helped me be a better coach and then hopefully pass that to the franchisees and to yourself and Chuck and just, you know, improve.

That's all. I love it. I love it.

Cool.

Well, like, and subscribe.

Let's go.

If you're a follower or friend of Mike, it's likely that you're connected to the lawn care industry or the home service industry. We've created a second channel for those of you with direct questions. So it's only right that we named it how to Start a Lawn Care Company. This channel is essentially an archive of questions and answers, including everything you need to know to start a successful lawn care company. Thank you, everybody, for watching today's episode, and we hope to see you next time.