All of my Employees WALKED OUT

Today we're gonna be learning from Logan Albers, who's a franchisee at Augusta Lawn Care and at the age of 21, just started his second location.

You made this mistake. Figure it out.

He's handing it off to a general manager and trying to scale up his second location.

He's got a lot on his plate considering that he's never done it before.

He's gotta make sure he balances out hiring and firing.

You can't tell me you haven't thought about what would happen if we fire.

Our lowest performer and becoming a leader and that something at 21 years old is not necessarily always eas.

Morning, I get a call from Russell and he's in the er.

Get ready for a wild ride as we join Logan out in Columbus, Nebraska.

This will be fun. I'm Logan Albers from Columbus, Nebraska. Out of my senior year, I had no idea what my numbers were. I had no idea what anything was. Nothing. I fired three employees and then I had an entire landscaping crew walk off the job. That was the year I bought a mini skid loader for like 40 grand. Obviously didn't really know what I was doing. The person that I hired to be my manager told me about my candies and Augusta Lawn Care and everything in between. I really started to understand that, okay, this isn't about just doing as many lawns as possible and doing $500,000 a year and spending $500,000 a year. It's about making profit. That November, I paid my $15,000 franchise fee and joined Augusta Lawn Care.

Shannon started up with me this morning. It was 10 minutes early. We went through onboarding. Probably went through it a little quicker than I would have liked. We are now at a church project. This is a 20 hour project and I want to get this done today. I will not. Well, that was short lived. Got a call from Shannon about an hour ago and he says, hey, my allergies are acting up. I need to go home and get my allergy medicine. I get having allergies, but what I don't understand is not preparing for the fact that you have allergies. If you know you have allergies, why the hell would you leave your allergy medicine at home?

What?

So I guess I'm going back to this project to try to make progress by myself again. We're back to square one. They wanted a good old fashioned spring cleanup. So they want all the bushes trimmed down, they want all the grasses cut, the little cut, everything cut. Can't say I recommend this at home, but this is one of the most convenient parts of the ramp rack back that right up to the dump trailer. Load up all the bags we got of debris for the day and we got a full trailer. Jason's rolling out here. Might be a good time to show off the Columbus shop. Obviously. It's our little office as well. V rides, backpack, blowers, edgers, trimmers up along the back wall, keep them out of the way. Ladders, hedge trimmer, chainsaw, some extra blowers, gas cans and stuff over here. Manuals, routes on the wall as well as profit and loss and KPI sheets. We've got Gavin grabbing keys. Keep the keys right up here as well as all of our tools mounted up on the wall. We just try to keep this place as compact as we possibly can and store as much as we've got. It's only a little concept building so we make our best out of it.

I just finished watching Mike's new video starring Chuck fot and Connor Hutchinson. You know, it really got me hyped, got me pumped up. There's no reason we shouldn't be having a full crew worth of guys out there every sing. I just got 1,000 of these. Friday is our day off. So that's what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to see if I can get.

I forget his name. I'm going to see if I can get my employee to join me on Friday. We're going to go hammer out some door hangers. So write these all up tonight. Have a full day of mowing. Tomorrow we're going to hit the five, the seven, the nine rounds out of all these properties.

Update that route density a lot. So let's get after it.

We got our team meeting going on. Brandon, Jason gray, Gavin Merritt. Just kind of hanging out, having a good meal. We just chatted about P4P about growth for the year. Enjoy these team meetings.

Here's what we got for them. The weekly, the bi weekly price. So we're doing $39. We're doing $59 mo edge, trim and blow on here. We've got like an eighth of mine, mine done. I want to get all of these done tonight. So this will be fun.

All right. Just finished our lunch break. Ren aerator from sunbelt. Now we've got this property to knock out today. Got three in total we're gonna do. So this is number one of three. That looks like fun, doesn't it? Think we can get it out? Yeah, I think we get it out too. Here we go.

About 5:30 we're just walking through some neighborhoods. Got me my instant quote door hangers. All right, so we just finished up mowing this property right here. Probably about a fifty dollar mow and the customer came out and what happened, Russell, what did the customer do? Handed me 40 bucks, said, here's a 20 for each of you. Hell yeah. Customer gave $40 tip on like a $50 mo. So that's awesome. Very nice. Going into the weekend, Russell, city's got beer money. So I like to hear that. Like to hear.

Enjoy Frisbee golfing. I try to go once a night. If I can't, if I have time, usually it turns into about every other night. But my point is have something that you like to do that's not always work.

This morning I get a call from Russell and he's in the ER over something which really screws up the plan here. And obviously I wanted to get fixed up better and take care of the situation. But I plan for us to be able to put in all of our river, rock and mulch into our project here and it's not going to be able to happen today. If you guys have ever wondered what it's like dealing with employees goes like this. I'm an old man now, gonna spend about three hours putting some mulch in. I gotta make it to the dump before they close at noon. And then I'm bringing back the dump trailer back to Columbus because I've been borrowing it for two weeks and they're getting mad at me because they want it back. Brandon, manager in Columbus, has been trying real hard, real hard to get our new guys trained up. We've got three guys who have no experience. He's got a lot on his plate considering that he's never done it before. Things are falling behind. I saw the KPI sheet. There was an employee that had under a 25% efficiency score for the week. That's awful. That's terrible. That means he did like 10 budgeted hours or less in a 40 hour period.

Foreign.

It'S going. I mean, we're making money, we're trying to. At least they're not to a point where we can send these guys out on mowing routes every day without incident. We're still in this training period. We're doing the best we can, but it takes a little bit of time and a little bit of that struggle to get to a point where we're where we want to be. I was looking through some Google reviews today making sure we replied to them all at the bottom there. He says Mike, Andy should keep an eye on this guy. Sky is the limit for Logan and his crew. Attach some pictures for it. Got it. God damn right I can't. You better keep an eye on this.

Well, got to Grand Island. How about that quick follow up to my video. Russell text me at like 10:30 at night saying, hey, I'm out of town. My trucks broke down, I'm stuck. I might not be able to work tomorrow. You kidding me? You have 70 hours of work on the schedule and I can't even have a reliable employee to show up.

Last night. Boom. All of these instant quote door hangers written up, 39.59 ready to go out today. Well, they would be, but I decided last night that I wasn't going to keep Russell on. I don't think that having missed three days in the last two weeks, that there's just no way I can do anything with somebody like that. It's just not gonna happen. But he solved that problem for me. He texted me this morning. He said, hey, I don't think my body can handle landscaping. And I said, okay, perfect. So down to down. Back to myself again. 70 budgeted hours of work on the schedule this week, man. Like 30 the following week at least.

I really like talking to Chuck, the regional manager, and he talked about everything. Chuck will set you on the right track no matter what, no matter where you are in your headspace. Chuck will put you on that right path. He'll say, you know what you're doing, why are you thinking about it? Go do it. That's. Sometimes you need that. Sometimes you need that. I make decisions a lot, but sometimes I get stuck on one. Where do I go from here? Or I'm so stressed out because I work 12 hours in the field and I'm like, don't know where to go with this one. Chuck's like, yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. Why are you thinking about it? That's cool. Sometimes you need that. A lot of times you need that.

This is like one of the biggest residential properties we've ever done. So watch me mow it.

Starting yesterday, I hired a full time general manager for Grand Island. So now there's a manager Brandon in Columbus and a manager Chris in Grand Island. The biggest reason for this decision is twofold, in my opinion. My goal is to sell as many jobs as possible and fill up their schedule as effectively as quickly and as easily as possible so we can continue to grow both locations.

The second reason is for manager development and going into next year, year, I need to work with Brandon a lot on what it takes to run a location, how to be a manager and what numbers to look at things like that. So I want to work with Brandon on that stuff. I really want to get us to 60, $70,000 months here in Columbus. We're also hiring a team member in Columbus on Monday. That's going to be our sixth guy in Columbus, I think. And maybe we end up letting go a team member here or there. But I want to make sure we're going to be able to run a really efficient operation this year and suck as much profit out of these locations as we can.

Drew's taking off for grand island here. The wave drew off as he goes on about a good day.

Oops. This guy's now leaking some water out from the well. It's like I tapped it with the mower. Idiots. Of course, of course I had to do that.

Check this out. This truck is plum full of bags and debris from this property cleanup. Look at this. Don't tell the dot though.

20 foot trailer, absolutely covered in branches. Looks like somebody's taking the back roads back to the shop.

It's 9 o' clock and I'm just now getting home. Hired my employee today, Miguel. Miguel started with me a little early. We did onboarding this morning. We went out, we did a 15 budgeted hour project. This was probably one of the worst property cleanups I've ever done in my entire life. We didn't get back to the shop until 8pm and not only did he not complain about it, he didn't care. I want people like that on my team. We're running a little competition between all of our team members right now. She doesn't know she's going to us. And if you give us a five star review, mention our names. Logan, Miguel. We're gonna get a. We're gonna get a bonus for the team. Five star review, both of her names mentioned. So I could give Miguel 50 bucks. Definitely. It's a good thing to get on your first day. It'll be really good to be able to show him all the profit that we made yesterday.

Tomorrow morning.

I think I need to get a new light. Sorry. If you're epileptic.

Who needs a jack to change your blades when you got a. Got a ramp rack. I got the front brakes changed on this truck here. Was definitely due for some blades or for some plates for some brakes. Everything should be squared away, ready for us to get going.

That's how it's done. Right now neither locations making any money. Grand island is making money. I shouldn't say that. Columbus is not making money. Any money. Columbus is breaking even. Where we're at is Brandon's kind of reaching a peak for what he's able to do on his own. And that's great because that means that, well, we know where we're stuck. About 105 budgeted hours per week. We cannot move past that in Columbus right now. If we do that all year long, we won't be around next year.

Now, if you'd like to meet Logan in person, you can do that by going to mikeannies.comsummit and signing up for Landscape Summit. That's coming up in October 2023. The two day event is going to be happening right before Equip Expo so you can come for Landscape Summit and then go directly into Equip Expo in October. It's happening downtown Louisville at the Omni Hotel and there's gonna be some incredible speakers and you will not want to miss this event. Now you'll be able to meet people like Logan as well as hundreds of other landscapers and lawn care professionals from around the country that are all eager to grow their business. We don't have a whole bunch of equipment and flashy things to show, but we are focused on our numbers, business, marketing and taking our business to the next level in 2024. You don't want to miss it, go to mikeandies.comsummit.