Amazon Sales Tactics, Margin Compression, Warning All Small Business Owners

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Mike Andes Podcast. Glad to have you back. If you've tuned in before, if this is your first time here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about starting, maintaining and growing your small business. We have some excellent content for you today, starting with how to step up your selling game with some strategies straight out of Amazon's playbook. Next, for all you lawn care business owners, if you aren't charging at least $60 an hour for your services, you might want to raise your prices before it's too late. Finally, what the 10 years are going to look like for small businesses. It's rough waters ahead, but you can weather it out if you can cut the fat out of your business. As always, you can find all these segments in video form over on the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. Let's get things going with tactics you can copy from Amazon to blow up your business.

Today we're going to actually look at Amazon and diagnose everything that they do to sell tons of product and how you can use it in your small business to sell more products and services to your customers. Let's go ahead and jump in. We're going to look at stand up desk here on Amazon. It's a beautiful thing. The first thing I want you to take note of is this little thing called a limited time deal. All right? It's the first thing your eye goes to. Once you search here for a stand up desk on Amazon, a great option for you and your business is to do things that are limited time deals. There's a certain amount of scarcity when, my goodness, it's 54% off. That's crazy. Now I don't recommend doing that when you're really busy and you have a whole bunch of work coming in and jobs are flying off the shelves, as it were. However, 54% off will absolutely grab customer's attention. And you can do this if you have excess inventory or services that you don't really want to provide and you get rid of inventory. This is a great option. 54% off. Why does this work? Cause a limited time, it creates scarcity and it allows me to discount and get the customer in the door. The next thing is if we scroll down is a bestseller. Another little icon here, Amazon's choice, like who wouldn't trust Amazon? They're the most reputable company in the world. I don't know about that, but it's the best seller. It's Amazon's choice. Like who wouldn't trust Amazon? It's a joke. Alright, so what are we looking at here, we're looking at for things that are grabbing the customer's attention and more importantly, recommendations. If you are a professional in whatever industry. Well, I don't care if you're mowing grass, trimming bushes, or you are putting on roofs or building fences. You are an expert. And if you recommend certain things, customers are going to listen. So do you give your recommendations in a professional manner where people are like, I should probably listen to the guy who mows lawns every single day for the past 20 years. He might know a thing or two about what type of treatments I do on my lawn. So what should I do as the provider? I should have recommendations and packages that I recommend for their type of soil, their type of grass. These are all things you can do in the home improvement industry. You can learn from people that probably spend billions of dollars trying to figure this stuff out and getting all these little buttons just right and just emulate exactly what they're doing. So recommendations, what you recommend as the professional is a great way to sell more product. Okay, so let's just go ahead and click on this first one right here. And the first thing I'm looking at is the fact they have 4,490 ratings and 178 answered questions. And I can literally scrol all the way to the bottom here and I can actually start to read their responses to customers. And this is exactly what people are doing when it comes to your Google reviews, your Facebook reviews, any sort of online reviews is a great opportunity for you to respond. Literally 4%, probably hundreds of people have given this thing a one star review. And your response to how negative feedback comes to your business is extremely important. Cause if when I'm looking here, guess what I'm like, okay, 74% of our positive, all these five star, oh, guess what I'm gonna read? I'm gonna read the one that says do not. It's a one star and it's the 4%. And so what you gotta look at is like, okay, first and foremost, ratings and reviews allow those things to happen. Try to facilitate those. And the negative ones are the first one customers are going to read. So make sure you respond really well and answer the questions that your customer has about your product and service. Have a blog, have a newsletter, have something that educates them in the follow up process to a quote once you give it to them, educate them about the process of the sale and educate them about how things are going to work. This is all part of answering questions and building that feedback to sell More product. Okay, we're done with standing desks. Cause Covid is over and we have moved back into the office. So we're moving on to leather jackets. All right, so now we're looking for leather jackets here on Amazon. Great. Looks fantastic. Oh, my goodness. Coupons. Look at this. Save $10 with a coupon. Oh, my goodness. This is fantastic. So coupons actually still work. All right. Again, you'll notice that not every single product on Amazon has a coupon or a bestseller or an Amazon's Choice. It's maybe 1 out of 10 to 15 different products that they're gonna actually stick a label on with a coupon or some so of a discount. So I don't recommend you discount all the time and be the lowest cost provider, but you can absolutely, 1 out of 10, 1 out of 15 times, offer some sort of promotion to get customers in the door, into your database, into your CRM, so you can actually continue to sell them again and again and again. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and open up a leather jacket. Of course it has to be yellow. Of course it's a leather jacket. It's a beautiful thing. $55. What a steal of a deal. I'm saving. 21% is 80300 ratings. It's a beautiful thing. Cause it's yellow. It's of course. Now, the thing I want you to notice here is the fact that you have urgency. Look at this. Free delivery is gonna be coming this Sunday. Now, only if I order within the next five to 18 minutes. Now, it's going to be free no matter what. I can promise you that. However, if I order within the next five hours, that is the only time they can guarantee that the free delivery is gonna come next Sunday. So this is the deal. This creates urgency when it says order within a certain amount of days. This is gonna be free shipping tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Guarantee you I have prime. However, if I want to get this deal on Sunday, I've got to order within the next five hours. And this is a way to get customers to make a decision. And this is what you wanna do in all of your sales processes. Have a time when your estimates cancel. The estimates go bad. They are null and void after 30 days, seven days, whatever. It is a way for you to follow up with the customer and say, hey, Mr. Jones, I sent you this proposal. It's going to be goodbye, bye, bye in seven days. Do you want to accept? It's just a way to create urgency on the product and Service. Is this leather jacket gonna have free shipping tomorrow? Yes, but if I don't order it within the next five hours, it's not gonna be here Sunday. And so I better buy it quick. So these are ways of creating urgency. And you can do this by making sure your proposals, your estimates, your offers have some sort of limited time or time that they expire. Now, you'll notice that this beautiful yellow jacket, of course it needs to be in size small, because I don't know if you've got this picture yet, but I need small and it's in stock. Okay, that's fantastic. Now, what you'll notice sometimes here on Amazon, it'll say like three left order soon, one remaining, last one in stock. What is that doing? It's also again, creating scarcity and urgency to buy the product. Because guess what, if I wait one more hour or wait two more days, I might not be able to buy it. And it might not be a small and it might be a medium, it might be too big and I might have to send it back. And so this again creates urgency and scarcity, which allows your customer to make a buying decision. People need pressure deadlines, and they need to have accountability to make decisions. So either you as a salesperson are going to walk them through that process or you need to have systems like expiring estimates. Limited time offers, a date at which they no longer get a discount. Like, I'm fine with discounting. If you need to put jobs on the schedule, you say, hey, I'll give you 10% off. But it has to be done next Thursday. It cannot be like, oh, just indefinitely. 10% off. Oh, yeah. And the other thing you want, the other estimate, that's gonna be 20% off. Oh, and then guess what? They're gonna expect 20% off when you're really, really busy and you can't afford to have a discount. So don't get in the habit of discounting. But you can use discounting as a way to create scarcity and close the deal. Alright, we're gonna look at some more of these tactics that Amazon is using, but you can rip off in your small business by looking at something very sexy. Toilet cleaner. Alright, These toilet tab cleaner things, I love these. Now, all the plumbers out there that are saying this is bad for porcelain, it's gonna ruin all the internal components of your toilet. Okay? You might be right. I have had one toilet go down in the gym and it possibly could because we're using these toilet cleaner tablets. However, when you throw these bad boys in the back of a toilet, it makes the water go blue and clean and people love it. So I've used these and this is what's really cool. Look at this. Another thing that you can do in your small business is having bulk discounts. So if someone orders one, great. If they order two, cool. But if they order three, they get 20% off. If they order 10, they get another 15% off. These are ways of doing bulk or packages that allow people to get price discounts. This could be where you package your services together in order to give them a better price. If someone is price sensitive, it's not necessarily that they need something cheaper. It might just mean that they wanna see better value. So what do you do? You create more of them. You offer more. Hey, mister, I know you thought that one trimming was too much per year for $200. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna sell you three for 500. So you actually sell more services, you get more revenue, but you just package it together and you create more of the same thing for a better value to the customer. Some customers will love it and they will buy. Now, another thing I want you to take note of is the fact that they do subscriptions. Look at this recurring delivery right here. How can you have recurring products and services? Oh, man. I think someone talks about recurring services quite often. Yeah, Amazon pushes this massively. And that is they're gonna give you. If you get a recurring delivery, you commit to getting this product every single week, every single month. Because recurring services, recurring products and recurring revenue is the name of the game. And Amazon knows that. So when it comes to your business, how can you make some sort of recurring revenue stream that is going to incentivize customers to buy every single week, every single month, or every single year, instead of once off one time? This is a great opportunity to get them on a subscription. I don't care if you're in E commerce, I don't care if you're selling products online. If you're selling retail, how can you package and sell them on a subscription a recurring basis? This is the name of the game and it allows you to make recurring dependable income for your small business. Now, the last thing that Amazon does that I think is genius. There's a whole bunch of them, I'm sure. But this is another one that I like to think about, and that is bundling of services I kind of alluded to already. But down here, frequently bought together. Of course it's frequently bought together because we have an algorithm and we know exactly what you buy. We know exactly what you breathe, eat, sleep, and what you say. I was about to say in your sleep, but that'd be kind of freaky. But it's probably true because Alexa's listening. And so here we got frequently bought together. These are things that are packaged together, different services and products. Now you gotta ask yourself in your small business, what products and services could you bundle together? Could you bundle bush trimming with lawn care? Could you bundle lawn care with treatments? Could you bundle treatments with mulch installation? Could you bundle mulch installation with weeding services? These are all things that you can package. And if someone wants one service on like home improvement, they probably need a bunch of other services. If they're the type of person that doesn't mow their lawn and hires you, there's probably a good chance they also need someone to trim their bushes and clean out their gutters and do their pressure washing and all these other services. So the question is, how can you bundle these things together and say, hey, by the way, Mr. Jones, we mow your lawn. I wonder if you'd be interested in a bed maintenance package or potentially a bush trimming or property cleanup or a leaf cleanup package. These are all ways of doing this, frequently bought together. Hey, Mr. Jones, most of our clients that do lawn care also enjoy our leaf cleanup packages. Would that be of interest to you? These are awesome ways. Doesn't cost you any more. It doesn't cost Amazon anymore to put in here all these other things. What are the. We got refills, we got a toilet cleaning system, disposable toilet cleaning system from Clorox. Like, I'm not gonna buy this. And most of your customers won't either. But when you're trying to upsell, that's what these are, upsells. When try to upsell a customer, it not cost you anything incrementally more to just throw an extra item on the estimate, give them another option, try to sell them in another product line or different service. So these are all things that you can use from Amazon to increase your small business. I don't care if it's services, I don't care if it's lawn care, bush trimming, I don't care if it's fences, I don't care if it's contractor cleaning, gyms, whatever it is, this works. And this is why Amazon has been successful. These type of sales tactics is what makes them successful. And I promise you, if you institute them in your small business, you'll be more successful too.

As a small business, if you're offering a service, you should always have a selling technique in your back pocket for any situation. Developing a sense of how to take charge of a sale can take years to master. If you're just getting started with your lawn care business and want a comprehensive guide for reaching success, Landscape Business Course is up your alley. Landscape Business Course is a step by step resource showing you how to grow your monthly revenue to over 100,000 in just three years, including 30 plus lectures. A ton of bonus content to dive into even more, you'll get recorded lectures of the Landscape Summit from 2020 and 2021 featuring industry experts and cutting edge ideas to help you blow past your competition. You can find out more at Landscape Business Course.

Alright, let's talk about margin compression. What can you do when your margins start to get thin and your back is against a wall? You need to hit that $60 an hour mark. And here's how to do it.

I did a poll on YouTube and asked what your hourly rate is that you charge customers and 58% of people charge less than $60 per hour. And I'm very, very concerned. I know a lot of you have heard me talk about the recession and everything coming up and how difficult it's going to be as business owners. And the margin compression has already started, just crushing businesses. Literally. Last month we spent $3,000 more at one of our locations. This location, I own it, it did 55,000 in revenue. It's just getting started. They literally paid three to $4,000 more in fuel than we would have. It was just six or seven months ago and the gas prices weren't as high. It's crazy. Margin compression is a real thing. What margin compression is is basically because the variable cost and fixed costs of your business keep going up. Your margins, your profits just get squeezed and squeezed and sque at the same time that you need to pay more to your employees, you need to pay more for fuel is the same exact time where there's no money left because you have margin compression. And what really got me annoyed, what got me kind of down, was the fact that I believe the people charging less than $60 per hour in the service industry and in home improvement, it's gonna be rough. And so I implore you, I beg you, to do whatever you need to do to raise your prices past $60 per hour. If you actually look at $60 per hour that you're charging the customer and then you take out what you're gonna have to pay for an employee, even if you pay them 15 an hour. By the time you pay taxes and all the rest that goes into having an employee, you're looking at least $20 an hour. And getting someone for $15 an hour right now is very, very difficult. And so if you take that and then you take things like gas, insurance, rent, all the other parts of running your business, all of a sudden you're going to be running on 3, 4 and 5% margins. And I don't believe that's going to be sustainable throughout a recession. If you start to lose big contracts, if you have a few employees leave, like, it's going to be a very difficult time. I beg you while there's still time to please RA and if you're like, well, if I raise my prices, I'm going to lose all my customers. Here's the thing, focus on value. A transaction will go through as long as value is higher than price. Now I need you to raise price. But if you raise it too fast and too soon, guess what? The transaction doesn't take place, you're going to lose customers. You're not going to be able to close jobs. So what do you want to do? Focus right now on increasing price. But in order to do that, you've got to raise value. You've got to determine now is the time to make changes in your business and actually spend more money on things like branding, more money on uniforms, more money on training, more money on having an office person answer the phone, more money on your website. These are things that offer value to the customer and are going to allow you to increase your prices. You say, well, you know, I can't afford to have someone answer my phone. It's very expensive. I can't have an answering service. I understand that you say, well, I can't have a website created by me like created by someone. Like, I can't do that. It's expensive. I understand that. But think about it like this. If you have, let's just say 150 hours every single month that are being worked by your team, if you can improve that by $10 per hour from $60 to $70, that literally just brought in $1,500 of straight bottom line profit to your business just by increasing their hourly by $10 per hour. Now if you have five employees, you times 1500 by five, that's $7500 that you just created in sheer profit by raising your price $10 per hour. That $7,500 is what you're going to use to invest in your branding and Your uniforms and your professionalism and training your employees and making sure you have a great website and paying your taxes so that you can be a licensed and professional business. Like these are the things that matter to customers that are going to be the most price insensitive customers. The ones that be able to stick with you through the next recession is going to be the customer that wants a licensed professional, want someone to be answering the phone and is willing to pay the price for it. I implore you. I'm already seeing companies going out of business left and right and a lot of them are in that 40, $50 per hour range. And I beg you to get above $60 per hour. It's gonna be required if you have any employees, it's gonna be required if you're even solo operator, to stay up with the cost of inflation and fuel going up and trucks and tires and brakes are astronomical. I just paid 6,000, almost $6,000 the other day because one truck needed brakes and suspension. It's crazy. And I paid $7,000 the day before for a new engine. It's nuts. If you're gonna stay up with all of this and you're gonna stay in business, you've got to raise your prices. And when people are scared by other companies that have talked about, oh, I raised my prices and I lost all my customers or I couldn't close any deals. The reason that happened is because they raised price without improving the value to the customer. I guarantee you. And yes, you're like, it's a plug, Mike. You're trying to plug your products. You're trying to plug your products. Yeah, I believe in them 110%. Lawn CareWebDesign.com is 400 bucks a month. HomeServicesWebDesign.com for companies outside the lawn care industry, it's $399 a month. I can guarantee you it'll allow you to raise your price by at least $5 per hour just by the value it adds to your customer. The fact that they can see your reviews and see your pictures and see a great looking website and have a logo and oh, it loads well on their mobile device. Oh, and by the way, you're gonna get leads for that money too. Not just the fact that you increase the value in that equation. This is the time you've gotta invest in your business and actually do things that are actually counterintuitive. And that is spend money. I don't have the money. Spend money on the things that are gonna allow you to raise the value and the perceived value of the customer so that you are able to increase price and the transaction still takes place. You keep the customer. And some people right now are really concerned, like I can't raise price because my crew is making all these mistakes and I'm getting all these callbacks and yellow slips and people are making mistakes and customers are saying that my quality is going down. Yeah, quality is going down in the entire service industry. If you go to a restaurant right now, it takes longer. People are messing up. They make mistakes on the order. If you go to a break shop, they're always trying to train someone new and someone's messing up with the cash register. You go to a fast food restaurant, it's slower than usual. Why? Because entry level service positions are such massive demand and such churn right now. People are leaving their jobs and they're moving around and you know, there's massive changes, migration of employees and everyone's still kind of high on this stimulus money that came last year and we got this child tax credit thing and we still got good cash and you know, unemployment is super, super low. So people are just bouncing around from job to job. And so because of all this transition and churn in these entry level positions. Yeah, the quality of people's service has gone down. And that's no reason not to raise your price. If you're months booked out, you should absolutely still raise your price. I know. It's so hard when a customer says, oh man, seems like your quality has been going down and it used to be so much better. Now things are not the same way. You don't edge just the way you used to. Yeah, you got a whole bunch of new employees. You can't hold onto them. They're constantly leaving and churning out. And you just got a whole bunch of new people that don't have any experience. Like that's going to happen. But guess what? If they drop you and they drop your service, guess what they're going to do? They're going to go to a competitor that's having the exact same issue. So if you have massive demand, you need to raise your price. Do not allow mistakes. Callbacks, unhappy customer. The person who ratted you out yesterday and said that the quality of your job has really deteriorated over the past six months. Of course it has. It has in so many service industries. Because we can't keep employees. It's extremely hard to find them and let alone keep them. And so, yeah, the service has deteriorated, but it doesn't take away from the fact that it cost me 10 times as much to fill up my fuel and it cost me 10 times as much to do anything because of inflation and my margins are getting compressed to nothing. And if I'm booked out two months, you gotta raise your price.

So please, I'm begging you. If 58% of people are under $60 per hour, I believe that the majority of people who go out of business over the next couple years are going to be out of that 58%. So please do what you need to do today to improve the value equation. Get it higher so you are able to raise prices. You get the price inelastic customers that actually care about licensing and insurance and having a CRM instead of just putting cash underneath the front mat. These are things that matter. I'm begging you, please do it now.

If you can raise your services value to match, you'll be able to charge $60 an hour and up with no problems or customer loss. Part of reaching that value is making sure your employees are doing the best to match your business's goals. What's the easiest way to keep your employees motivated? Pay them based on their performance. P4P enables your business to maximize efficiency and keep your employees motivated like no other system. You can pay your employees the smart way with our new P4P software featuring up to date efficiency scores, real time project tracking and individual employee metrics on a day to day basis. You can learn more today@p4psoftware.com okay, we're down to our last segment and this one is a warning to every small business owner out there. Mike discusses what the next 10 years are going to look like and most importantly, how you're going to survive it.

Literally this morning there's a survey of small business owners in America and there's a 48 year low of sentiment. People are freaked out. Small business owners are having a very hard time finding employees getting funding and we're struggling. Let me talk to you about what I see currently happening in the small business world. I'm in home improvement, lawn care, landscaping, but all sorts of contractors are. I've talked to and seen these consistent themes throughout the economy. And I want to talk about today what you can do to prepare both if you're an employee and an employer. So first and foremost, if you're an employer, realize that the game is going to be played in a couple ways this year, in the next couple years. I believe I've gone on record saying that the next couple years are going to be some of the hardest years that small business owners have ever had. I Also feel like the next 10 years, though, is going to be a great boom and a great opportunity for the people who get through the next couple years. But the next couple years are gonna be absolutely brutal. As interest rates go up, people are gonna be less inclined to spend money. They're gonna start to be more frugal on their spending, especially as they see their stock market gains evaporate, their crypto gains evaporate, and soon the real estate market will soften and they'll see the equity in their home start to plummet, and you'll even see foreclosures start to tick up. Right now we are seeing the foreclosures going up, we're seeing a number of houses on the market go up. We are seeing repossessions of things like cars, used vehicles, people that have overextended themselves and are now in debt far too much. Overextended themselves. As we go into a high interest rate environment, this is all a recipe for disaster. How do you prepare for this? As a small business owner, first and foremost, you gotta realize that the game is going to be won by the person that's able to fill their positions. In terms of jobs, 51% of small business owners reported that they could not fill some job position in their small business. Literally 51%, like more than half of small businesses in America have jobs. They have positions ready to go, they have work services and products that need to be fulfilled, and they cannot find anybody to do the work. So who's gonna win this game in the next couple years? Who's gonna get through it? Is gonna be the ones who wins the next decade. If you can just survive this inflationary time, if you can survive some of the lowest unemployment numbers we've had in decades, if you can survive all of that, you're going to be able to thrive in an environment where you're very, very lean. If you're gonna survive the next couple years, you've gotta lean down, you've gotta get rid of debt, you've gotta be focused on margins, you gotta be able to increase your prices. And this is the thing that kills me some people right now, and maybe I'm guilty of the same thing. And that is saying, well, just raise your prices. Like, that's just the way to fix inflation. Just fix, you know, just raise your prices. Well, this is the problem for small businesses that have started in the past 12 months or just got started recently. The trouble is the reason you can raise prices if you create a sticky product or service. In other words, you have customers that are not going to leave you when you raise prices because they've got to know like and trust you. They know you do a great job. They're not going to leave you over a $5, $10 price increase, 10%, 15%. They know there's inflation. However, if you haven't built up that relationship, you haven't done service with someone for six months, 12 months a year, two years, three years. If you haven't done that, they're more inclined that when you raise prices, they go shopping. And as the consumer becomes more price sensitive, they will go shopping and they'll go get other bids. They'll go try to get you priced you lower. And that is very difficult when you're smaller because you don't have that sticky service you haven't been around for a long time. You don't have that brand awareness that allows you to raise prices in an inflationary environment and be just fine. Based upon what I'm seeing right now, small businesses that have been around for five, 10 years, they are the ones that are able to have pricing power. They're the ones that have built brands in their local community. They're not having to spend a bunch of money on marketing. Right now. They're taking that money and able to deploy it into covering the extra cost of fuel going, doubling the extra cost of wages going up, the cost of taxes and everything going up in terms of materials like in the landscaping and lawn care industry. It's not just fuel. Everything is affected by fuel because now it's a matter of transportation, of equipment. Well, now the used truck prices are like doubling. It's crazy. I used to, back in the day before 2020, I never spent more than $9,000 on a pickup truck and usually it was like 5 or 6,000 or less. And now you can't get a rust bucket for five or six thousand dollars and you have to spend 15 grand just to get a half decent truck. And so literally a doubling, a tripling of those type of expenses. And furthermore, it's not just the trucks and equipment, it's the fertilizers, the seed, it's every single supply that has to be transported in is double, triple the price it was even just a couple years ago. And, and for some people it's like oh, just raise the price. Well, you can't double prices and especially you can't if you just got started and for many people watching this, if you've started your business in the past 12, 24 months, this is hurting you the most. So what should you be doing now? Number one, focus on those services in your business that are the highest margin that you're able to take a little bit of margin compression. You're not gonna be able to survive in this environment and grow your business without some margin compression. Margin compression is, Instead of getting 25% profit this year, maybe you get 22%, maybe you get 21%, maybe you get 18% because you're able to kind of take and absorb some of those extra costs of fuel and all the things going up in price because you have that baked in margin. However, if you're growing your business and you've been pumping every single dollar back into your company in order to grow, hire, expand, market, advertise, et cetera. You don't have a lot of cash, you don't have a lot of room to absorb the extra burden of inflation that we are currently going through. You can't just like, oh, I'll just raise my wages so I can get more employees. Like, you can't do that. If you're just getting started, it will literally go, you'll go bankrupt. You don't have the room to get more capital. And right now it's very difficult. If you look at the survey that came out, I'll link it down in the description below. It's very difficult to find capital right now for many small businesses because as interest rates go up, banks are also trying to make sure that they are, are subject to high risk loans. So a small business in the past 12, 24 months got started. Do you think they want to touch that right now? Not a chance. Especially with inflation and interest rates going higher and higher, they don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. So number one, you've got to focus on the services in your business that are high margin. The things that right now you might be doing that are really low margin, you might want to cut them out or not focus on them as much, focus on those services. They're able to get a good healthy 15, 20% minimum profit margin on. And I don't mean like gross profit because everyone's like, well I get like 80, 90% profit margin. Like no, no, I mean gross like in your pocket. If you can get 20, 25, 30% profit margins net, net net in your pocket, those are the type of services you want to focus on. If you've been doing services in the past for say 3, 4, 5% or maybe even at a loss just to get in the door, those are the type of things that are Going to eat your lunch right now and it's just going to be really, really hard to make it the next couple years. So focus on those high margin services. Number two, you've got to focus on your team. The people that will win the game in the next couple years and survive this whole craziness that we're going through are the people that can actually hold onto their employees. And this is going to mean doing things that you, maybe in the past you would have been like, hey, look, if you don't want to show up to work, just leave. Well, now you might actually work with them through their personal issues. Now you might actually give them more support outside of work. Maybe you let them have a more flexible schedule. Maybe you try to reduce overtime. Maybe if they're asking for more overtime, you give them over time, even if, even if it costs you more money. These are the type of things that now you might actually have to do. And you have to change your way of thinking when it comes to management, running your business, employing people so you can retain and attract good talent. Those are the two things that you gotta focus on right now. Increasing your margin and focusing on the margins that actually bring in more revenue and focusing on that revenue that actually brings in higher margin as well as keeping those employees, because that's who's going to win the game. When half of American small business businesses literally are saying they cannot find employees and they cannot keep employees and they have positions that they cannot fill, the people who are going to win are the ones that are able to keep the employees. Now finally, if you are an employee, you got to ask yourself, is the business I'm currently with going to be able to withstand a recession? Now, no one likes to hear this, but honestly, you've got to ask yourself, do I trust the owner, the manager, the person that I'm working for, do they have a track record of, of being able to stay in business? Because you do not want to lose your job right now. Losing your job is not an issue, right? Literally you can go get 10 other jobs tomorrow. It's not a big problem. If you're a good performer, there's jobs all over the place. But you do not want to be in the position where in a year or a year and a half, if we're going to a recession and unemployment goes back up to 6, 7, 8%, which typically happens in a recession. If that happens, you do not want to be caught in a position where your company goes out of business simply because your owner is not heeding these early warning signs of cutting the fat. I would actually be looking at an owner right now. If I was an employee that was trying to cut out the fat, cut out the extra waste in the business, extra breaks, the extra snacks, people that were slacking off, I'd be really, I'd be all over that as an employee. I'd be like, that's who I need to be around. That's where job security is going to come. Because as margin compression happens, as it gets harder and harder to make money and be profitable and inflation continues to go rampant, like, you better be making sure you're the company that they know how to make a margin, they know how to make a profit. And if you don't, probably not the most job secure thing you're ever gonna do.

Well, there you have it. If you can cut away the fat on your services that aren't making 15 to 25% gross revenue, you'll be in great shape for the next 10 years. For more advice and lessons, you can head over to the Mike Andy's YouTube channel where all these segments come from. That's all we have for now. This has been the Mike Andy's podcast. Thank you so much for listening.