AUGUSTA NATION 2026 CONFERENCE

We got the stage with the hedges, and then you can see literally the back of my head right there, because the projector, but that's where secondary screens are, so people in the back can see the stage a little bit better. That is, like, the sound booth situation. This time tomorrow, this area is going to be filled with Augusta owners.

So we're headed to the restaurant. The restaurant is at the hotel where we're having the conference, and we rent the entire thing out. We did the same thing, like, three years ago. It gets very loud, but Stephen will mic me up and hopefully catch some of the things that are going on. But mostly tonight is just meeting. Try to shake everyone's hand, talk to every single person, and hopefully remember most of their names. That's really the objective. The values that we have is something that we can really use to our bands this weekend, and just know that everyone we're talking to is on our team, and so I really lean into that. If you're new to Augusta Nation, talk to the people you see on stage. Talk to the people that have five other people around them. Please take advantage of it. Talk to each other. Schools out by themselves. Just strengthen each of us to be able to get through 2026 stronger, give us the ability to learn. So often times we have pride gets in the way of us being able to actually achieve, to be able to learn from others that are below us, above us.

Is that it? Yep. Today is officially day two of conference. I'm currently walking into the hotel where it's being hosted. Last night was super good. It was just like us spending good quality time with the owners. And there's a bunch of different speakers today. Mike only speaks, like, I think once today and then once tomorrow, and then the rest is just like either other Augusta owners or the leadership team.

Very glad that you on here. Thank you all. Liz, I believe we have some announcements, some housekeeping, if you will.

Yes, I only have one, and that is who's wearing their name tag?

Not me.

Oh, so disappointed. It is so embarrassing to come up to somebody that you shouldn't know in Augusta Nation, and they don't have a name tag on. So if you could wear a name tag, we would appreciate it.

Yep.

And the only. Only one for me is please respect the speakers. All the speakers here are inside Augusta Station.

So let's just all gather together and pretend we love each other. Really close and tight. And I have somebody special that's gonna come home, help you get organized for your picture. Let's hear from Max. Max.

Everything I'M saying in the past 20 minutes is showing you what we did in 2025. Show me that we did it. And now I'll tell you what we're doing in 2020. Good morning, everybody. It's day two. Three is today day three.

Technically.

Today's technically day three because the first day of dinner, day two of the keynotes in the conference part, it was early morning. We had a workout at the hotel, little boot camp situation. And then we had. We went to Anytime Fitness. I just wanted to show you Banda's name tag. This is the best person at the entire conference right here. Oh, there's Banza, there's me. Okay, go. We actually. What do we announce? New website Augusta leads where we do the all the ads, Facebook and Google for the owners. We announced new website with new instant quote forms. We're diving big time onto treatments and upgrading.

A few vlogs ago we were talking about a certain hire.

Oh yeah, Matt.

And so he goes hand in hand.

That's crushing it. So last night we announced August leeds program for 50 locations. We will probably fill it all up today. Probably. We'll see 35 people signed up last night. So I think the other 15 will get filled in today. That allows us to be able to then start wait listing and scaling up the team. But we want to make sure it's locked in for this spring. Last year, what else we announced oh roster for general managers. We did 1700 applications across the entire country for general managers. Narrowed it down to 220 or something. Video applications narrowed down to 55 top performers in the entire country.

So how does that work? Like you send out the like application for GMs for like an owner in Knoxville or an owner.

We did a national campaign and just basically said, hey, we'll relocate you and give you $3,000 to relocate. Like to move. Move.

No way.

See, the more you know and there's more. Oh, this will come out later. All right. And then today there's more coming out because we, we did the roster. We also made the copy and paste training system which is next level like 2.0 version of the book. But for augustination, whole training system, planning, budgeting, expansion calls. It's very good. 30, 60, 90 day things with the general manager and the owners for when they're doing multiple locations.

You'll get to hear before the Augusta owners do. But not really because it comes out.

It comes after like, you know, and then later this year we're guaranteeing 100 new customers. When you start a new location. If you use the Gusto leads program guaranteeing, which means if you don't get 100 recurring customers from the ads that we run, we will keep paying for the ads until you get 100. All right. And now today, we're announcing more things. We're announcing that the initial franchise fee to lock in a territory is going up to $35,000 for newbies, but for existing owners, it's being locked at $20,000.

To really lose their minds about the reserving.

Yeah. And they get to reserve a territory for a year at the lower cost. So really focusing on existing owners and getting them to be able to have the copy and paste model with four, five, six locations and a regional manager in place, we're really locking in on that. That is the model, and that's our unique selling proposition.

And a great conference so far. Yeah, it has been there. I love everyone there, you know?

Yeah. I'm not.

I've talked to a fraction of everyone there, but I love them all.

Oh.

Because they're like. It's like, so. What's the word? It's just so awesome to see a community like a destination. Like, they all just bind together and like, they're all in the same way. They're on the path, you know, and it's very motivating. It's awesome. Big fan.

Day three is starting in 3, 2, 1. Challenge. Both in my skill set and also just get exposed to some different people. So I went through this part of my career from just helping people fix it, managing a team. Managing a team.

That helped.

I jumped between.

Look where you are now. That tells me you angel. You ain't built the same as everybody else. You ain't like the same as everybody else. You are more than you ever been today than you were to vault yesterday.

Hello.

Check, check.

Sweet.

Thank you.

What time is it?

It's time for awards.

Time for the award. All right, so we wanted to make a sales award. The sales award would be all. It should be gross revenue year over year. Sales should be profit margins because you get. Some of you can sell really high margin jobs. Some of you can do volume. Well, I know one thing that's true about sales, volume negates luck. And that's what this award is for. The first time ever, we are doing the Augusta 1K club. And this is for individual locations that have done more than 1,000 estimates in one calendar year. Now, if you have multiple locations and you might have totaled more than 1,000. This is not for you. I'm sorry. This is one location. One salesperson or team of salespeople doing 1000 estimates. So please welcome the first ever 1K club to the stage. To the stage. Pro more profitable models.

Oh, my word.

It's code.

It's hypebeast.

Yeah, it's hilarious.

That's from Stages to Grow. That's a quote from you.

That's you. I got you. I got you. They did not need to start their fourth location and they technically should have just taken a three. One more. One more year. Probably, probably got to about that 3 million dollar marker. Been very profitable. But grime starts locations for one reason and that's his team. And flew his general managers to move up inside the seven stages of technicians and get somewhere watching Mike over the years. That's where I get this from.

I believed in him.

I watched everything he does with his team. Liz And I wanted to be like him so bad, and I'm sure a lot of us do. He's a great person to look up to and I had no clue this was even a thing. I didn't know that was an award. I don't get surprised. Hi, vlog. We just finished awards. Yep. And owner of the year won two tickets to the Muster from Jocko, as well as hotel and accommodations. And then we gave out nine other awards to owners and we had a big chitty chat with each one. It was great.

Two or no? Yeah, two owners got two awards and then the rest were individual. Right.

So I guess seven awards. Yeah, it was great. Very good time.

Fantastic.

Now we have one more talk from Jason Murphy, who was 3.1 million revenue.

Oh, that's Jason Murphy right there in the glasses.

And then I have one more keynote and then we're done.

And then we're done.

And the keynote is about Road to a Thousand locations. And we have some announcements in there, exciting announcements.

Wait, wait, wait. You want to be in the vlog? Let's show your jersey fit. Check. You want to explain your outfit?

Yeah, show us your socks. Nice to see your socks, Max. Let's go.

They're really itchy. Itchy. Well, folks, that concludes conference. It ended yesterday and it was so good. That was my second conference ever, but my first only Augusta conference since last year's was public and it was awesome. It's hard to explain the feeling, but like, even though I said it before, even though I don't like, know all the owners personally, I know most their faces, but not a lot of their names. And I've been able to talk to maybe like 20 to 30 of them, but just like Being in the room and seeing all of them, you just, like, can't help but love them in a way. But anyways, it was a huge pleasure to get to talk to the ones that I did get to talk to and get to know them a little bit better. And it's so awesome to just see them pour out their love and support on Mike, which obviously I love seeing that, you know, I like. I immediately like people who love Mike. So, anyways, our team did amazing, and Mike crushed it. I love banna shout out to Brian Connor, who. He's probably not watching this, but who sent us with some sinless sweets.

That's right.

I unfortunately, am on a strict meal plan right now, but I have them stowed away in the back of our freezer until I am no longer on meal plan. And that will be my little cheat.

And out of solidarity, I'm keeping mine also in the freezer.

Right.

Even though I could have shout out.

To Morgan Lattimore, who had. Who gave an incredible speech. He's a motivational speaker, and you could absolutely tell if you are in that room. He did so good, man. But he said he watched the vlog. Everyone else, Okay, I could literally name off almost every single person who said they watch the vlog because it means so much to me. Whenever you guys say that you watch it, like, it just means a lot. I genuinely make these for fun and honestly, for us just to kind of, like, look back on. It's cool because, like, we started the vlog channel the week after we got back from our honeymoon. So, like, the first week of March, we're approaching a year of putting these vlogs out. And it's so fun to go back and watch and just, like, reminisce on things that we kind of forgot about, honestly, like trips we've taken and things we've done. So, anyways, I make it because I think it's fun, but it's also so fun to be able to share it with you guys and to know that to actually meet the people who watch it is super duper cool. So if you see me in person and you watch the vlogs, please, please tell me, because that actually means the world to me. You gotta tell the vlog about your little snack situation.

Peanut butter. Oh, this is an old, old situation. I've had peanut butter and honey from the day I was born.

I have to say, I think I took 1, like, 16 grams of peanut butter out of that whole thing. But he's. He's done a really good job of Cleaning it out himself. That's right.

Gotta feel the muscles.

That's right. Carb load, fat load, all the macro load, you know. Now that conference is over, what's your next big focus?

Ah, big focus. Well, we got to launch everything we talked about at conference. No, the Augusta Leaves program went really well. We got 50 locations. That was what we were capping it at.

Yeah. Already hit the limit. Like, just, what, two days after announcing it, which is awesome.

So launching that, making sure it goes really well, and then starting to work on the workshops for the book launch. So they're happening in a couple weeks. We're starting in.

So now, I guess it's just a matter of following through with the promises that's been made in the past couple months.

And then the launch of the Homeworks brand, which happens. You hear it here first, folks. February 17th, my birthday. The same day as service Autopilot.

Wow.

Okay, so they own training. There's a new owner from Tennessee, I.

Think, that was there.

And he was at conference. And at conference, during the team workout in the morning that we did, he was wearing these socks that are called finger socks, where they have the little toe situation that's insane. And supposedly it helps a lot with moisture wicking in between your toes to prevent, like, blisters and things.

Oh, yeah.

So he swore by him. And so I'm like, oh, that's so cool. So he bought me, like, five different pairs. Actually, there's two. Four. There's three here.

What?

Three, Two here. There's a bunch.

Although it's a little chilly. Thankfully, it is a beautiful sunny day here in Washington, which we need because it was so rainy last week. But today, I have quite a few errands to run. I'm picking up four different gift cards for four different people at four different locations, along with some returns, Amazon returns that I have to make. So let's go ahead and knock all that out. Honestly, shocked at the amount of parking spots that are open right now at Costco. Usually this place is swamped. Hi. I was wondering if it was possible to get a gift card here. Gift card one out of the four acquired.

Hi.

Good. How are you? I would like to get a gift card. Gift card number two is for a massage. Can I please get a gift card?

Yeah.

How much do you want on it for three out of four? I'm just looking to get a gift card. Fourth and final gift card acquired. Okay, I'm officially done running errands after a very busy morning. It is currently 12:30 and which means it is time for my third meal of the day. I have five small meals spaced out throughout the day. It was actually check ins. So every Wednesday is check ins with my coach. I do it once a week. I basically just like send photos, log my schedule, scale, weight and just like answer a pretty long question there. Not gonna lie. But just so she can kind of get a gauge for where we are progress, progress wise. The form in this morning and I'm waiting for a response back from her. So it's always a gamble like she might either up my cardio, drop my calories, which she hasn't done yet. Like ever since we started, she's left my, my meal plan the same. So it's like any week now I'm expecting a drop in food. But we'll see. She hasn't so far. Last week she left my everything alone. She left my step count, cardio and meal plan alone. So we'll see what happens this week especially because the progress I feel like has slowed down just a tiny little bit. But anyways, let me go ahead and prepare my plate of dog food. I'm giving you guys a little bit of an update on the next turn on that we're going on. So our next turn on dates are February 8th to 12th and our first applicant is locked in. I'm actually super excited to go see them. They're a great couple and they really, they really, really want us to come out there. So I'm looking forward to that one. The second one though, we're struggling. We're on the struggle bus with the second one. Not gonna lie, we had two potential applicants. One of them completely ghosted us. The other one, we thought we had lockdown, but something came up and we're not able to go out there anymore, unfortunately. So now we're scrambling to get a second one. And like we're trying to say mostly in like California, Texas, Florida, Florida area just because, you know, we don't want to be out there in the snow for February. In March maybe we'll start going a little bit further north. But we just want like the southern, the like deep south states right now. That's our little dilemma. So we might have one potential person in Texas to fill in the gap that we need because we're just doing two turnarounds per trip this time. And I emailed him, I have not heard back. So we're gonna shoot him a little text. Hopefully he answers and we can get him on this call. Because today is January 21st, which means we have about a little over two weeks, two and a half weeks until we need to go out there and I need to start booking stuff like yesterday. But we need to lock down a second applicant before we can do that. So we're in a bit of a pickle. So if you live in Texas and Florida or California, we probably have it figured out by the time you're seeing this video. But send in an application for the turnaround. Here's a link for that. Okay. Apply please. Thanks.

Alright, so today is officially the first all hands meeting for the company being Homeworks. So there's about 30. I don't get an exact number. I think there's like 35 people on the team now. 34. 34 folks that will be there today. For all hands made at Homeworks, we have a ton of stuff coming out officially. Like I mentioned, February 7th is when we are swapping from Copa to Homeworks and like basically going from blue to orange. So the front end site, huge amounts of changes, like the marketing site, the backend stuff is mostly small design changes, but it's a huge effort on the team side. There's a bunch of things that we are kind of doing in the back end to allow for the rest of this year. A lot of design changes and little improvements to be happening. And so today it's an all hands meeting and just talking to the team about what's coming down the pipe. And then kind of also looking back at 2025 and all the improvements we made, the company grew by 57%. 57, 59. 57% I think it was in terms of revenue. So that's awesome. But we're shooting for almost 100% growth this year. And so to make that happen, getting everyone aligned on the same page and everything, firing in all cylinders will be very helpful. And I really felt like we hit that in the past like three to six months at Homeworks. Getting everyone in the right seat, on the right place, on the bus and just in the groove, working together. And so now having a full year doing that in 2026 should be super awesome. So I'm looking forward to it. I like meetings, especially meetings that have like purpose and an agenda and organization. I actually like meetings. So looking forward to it. Cool. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate it. I just want to mostly say thank you to everyone. I think especially early last year in 2024 I was a little bit more involved on the day to day with engineering and designing specifically. But I know all of you are working hard every day and I rarely get to see Some of you. So I just want to say big thank you. You all are doing what I cannot do, but is required to be able to have the impact I want to have. And so I really do appreciate you all supporting that vision. I think it's really important to kind of just stay focused on like why we're doing all this. Like, I think CHURN is an important number. You know, net revenue retention is a cool acronym. ARR, mrr, arpu, number of members. We track all this stuff all the time. But I really think all those things improving are just a byproduct of hitting the goal for the business. And the goal of the business is not to move those numbers. It's not why we started the company. It's not really my whole mission. It is to actually do what we say and that is help these business owners grow without breaking. I see every single day the downstream effects of what happens when they grow and they break. And unfortunately, in the social media world, we have all been programmed to grow and buy more trucks and get more equipment and hire more people. And this causes so many people to mentally break, physically break, financially break. And the downstream effects on the relationships, their marriage, their family, their children is huge. When we talk about the mission of trying to help small business owners, specifically home services, grow without breaking, it is so much more than a mission statement. It's actually the reason why all of those metrics that we just talked about are just indicators or a scoreboard as to whether or not we're doing that well. Alright, so wrapping up the day here at work. The all hands meeting went fantastic and now I am recording some shorts. So we are trying this on the Home Service Millionaire channel. I can do my handy dandy setup here, microphone right to here. And then this is how this is working. I have the teleprompter and these are prompts. I'm like, oh, this is a decent hook. Things that I've said in the past, most of these come from my book and then I just riff on it for like 30, 60 seconds, maybe two minutes. But I'm recording a whole bunch of them because we're trying to do a new thing or a Home Service Millionaire channel. I post twice a day with shorts with just talking headphone stuff. So less edited. It's not super high, tons of editing that goes into it. However, we have seen like more than a doubling of views on the Home Service Millionaire channel and it gets them into the funnel. And Home Service Millionaire is very much like in depth in the weeds content. So by having a Talking head. It's not drama gets them in and then it's actual content that they enjoy. So so far it's been working. We're doing two shorts a day. It doesn't take me a long time. So what I'm doing is I'm creating a system for it and then I'll eventually hand it off to the team. So getting pretty in the weeds with the media team the past couple weeks and will for the next couple months just refining processes and systems. This is the type of thing that if I can spend some time on it, spend a few weeks refining it, dialing the system, and then hand it off to them, they can make it better. So that is the goal. All right, this is dinner. What is it called? Calz Alone.

Calzone.

Calzone. Got spinach, pepperoni, bacon, a bunch of cheeses, almond flour, certified keto. It is so good. I like eating things off of the plate, I. E. Wood or what's the cast iron. So we had it right off the cutting board. It's so good. It's incredible. That is amazing cook. So in case you're wondering why in my do not losing his last five pounds to his goal, it's because Ben making me good food like this every day. Very good.

We don't need to talk about the fact that I'm in the same shirt I was yesterday. Don't need to talk about it. But I'm about to hop on the call with the applicant that I'm hoping we can like lock in so I can start booking stuff. We're supposed to leave in like two weeks. And prices for tickets and things are probably like super expensive. You know, the upside to flying in a major cities because if he accepts or if like this call works out, then we'll be flying into Dallas and then we'll also be going to Tampa. The upside to flying into big cities like that is like, we get directs out of Seattle, so they're usually a little bit cheaper. And we're taking only three of us instead of like a team of five this time. So the trip itself is going to be a lot cheaper. I'm going to get on this call and have some questions for him, you know, explain what the whole process looks like and hopefully this works out.

Brianna, can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you, Will. How are you doing? I'm good.

Good.

How are you? I'm fantastic. I'm so excited. You have no idea how much of a godsend like can you application is. Because we've been wanting. Yes, we've Been wanting to fill up the second spot for our next turnaround trip. I'm excited. I hope you're excited for this.

So this is a little out of my comfort zone.

But you know what, There's a lot.

Of cool things happening in our business. There's definitely some struggles as well.

Just wrapped up that call and to be honest, that's definitely one of the more unique businesses that have reached out to us. A little backstory. They don't have any W2 employees, but they the business made. The business is projecting to make like 1.2 to 1.5 million this year. It's a construction business out in Texas and the owner Strictly has 1099 employees that he subcontracts out. It's definitely an interesting situation. There's some things that need to be confirmed and worked out before we can give this an immediate yes. Waiting on a response from the head of the video team to see if we should go through with this. But yeah, very unique situation. You know when it's 7pm and you're gonna be catching a red eye, you need some caffeine. So Michael's weapon of choice is a sugar free golden eagle.

That's right.

And that is not in my meal plan. So we're doing in a Lonnie bad discipline. But our layover is in New York and right now they're all freaking out on the east coast about a potential snowstorm. So fingers crossed that our flight doesn't get canceled, even delayed, which, you know, we kind of got to expect delays at this point. But just hopefully it doesn't get canceled. So far, our first flight into New York is like, fine. I'm just happy that we're going to go see some sunshine. So let's do it. Travel here is making an appearance, folks. First of all, probably the quickest we've ever gotten through security. It was like there's hardly anybody here. He got a haircut. It looks so good.

My fresh cut.

Anyways, whenever you're like kind of on a strict meal plan and you don't want to be off of it whenever you're traveling, the hack is to freeze your food solid and you put it in a Ziploc bag and pray they don't take it away at customs. But I'm probably gonna have to eat this before we cross over into truck center because they probably will take it away. Hopefully this does not defrost until like 10 hours from now. I think I need a lot. I need it to last like eight to 10 hours. We'll keep you posted on the status.

Of that but guess what guys we got. We get alkaline water so we gotta fly really fast, right?

I don't even know what the difference is higher numbers PH.

Makes you happier. See, that's what the H says answer so peace is power.

Happiness Be happy. Just now do you feel happy?

Oh yeah. Did you try some?

What are the chances? You think we're able to get out of New York despite this?

Like most flights are cancelled oh yeah.

Look they got there Almost every single flight is cancelled where's ours? Do you see it? Our social is on time and we supposed more than like an hour but like is it just cuz they haven't updated it?

We have two very different philosop.

I'm trying to stay positive. Trying to stay positive but also he's the realist here cuz I don't know.

We'll see I think we have a shot what's crazy is we get off the plane in all of jfk the one gate that we got off on is the one we're getting on and they have an active plane so if anyone's getting out of here, it's the plane that just got here and it's nice and toasty, you know what I'm saying?

Coming down. Check out that snow we have about an hour to see what happens.