Be an Augusta General Manager, How to Fire, Why You Need to Charge $100 per Hour

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about starting, maintaining, and growing your small business. This is a bit of a special episode. We've opened up applications for general manager positions for Augusta all across North America. Our first segment is all about why it's a great idea to become a GM at Augusta, what qualities we'd love to see in our candidates, and so much more. So if this sounds interesting to you or something that you might want to be a part of in the future, send in your application. The link is in in the show notes. After that, we'll go into how firing an employee can be emotionally taxing and how you can get through it while keeping your cool. Finally, if you own a lawn care business and you're not charging at least $100 per hour, it might just be time to push your luck. As always, you can find the video version of this podcast over on the Mike Andes YouTube channel. But let's jump right into it and see what Mike has to say about becoming a general manager for Augusta.

We are headed to the Bellingham shop for the Thursday morning meeting. Now, the Bellingham shop has never gone above $200,000 in monthly revenue. We've gotten really, really close many, many times. And we were actually one time, $199,950. Like, we were $50 away from being at $200,000 in monthly revenue. I would really love for Marcus to be able to hit 200,000 before he moves down to start his own.

So it really just comes down to whether or not we hire more people and use that to be able to pull jobs forward and get the work done. This morning, though, is the morning meeting. We are going to over the July 2022 financials for the location. And we're also this morning talking about starting your own business. Start making money, even if it's on the side, without an employer and having something that you can do independently of a boss. And the reason for that is because first and foremost, even if it's something small, like 500 bucks a month or a thousand bucks a month, on the side, you start having multiple streams of income. And everyone always thinks multiple streams of income, like, oh, I gotta have real estate and I have multiple businesses. I'm gonna have, like, these stocks and.

All the rest of it.

Look, if you had a job that you're working, you know, every single day at, and then you have something on the side that you do and Then maybe you start doing something online. You can have just a couple, few little small, 500 bucks a month, 600 bucks a month. That makes a massive difference. This is the one day that I show up to the Bellingham shop and I do a 7:30am Optional meeting that people don't have to come to, but they can come to. They want to talk about, invest, business, their career, et cetera. It's completely optional. Whatever it is, photography, doing something, some other skill that you can do on freelancer.com or craigslist or whatever. And you know, all of a sudden that's a thousand bucks a month. That thousand dollars, throw it into some sort of investment, a couple years later, you have 25 grand. That's enough to go buy a house. Regardless of whether or not you want to do that full time and be a business owner really doesn't matter. But starting a second stream, a third stream, doing something on the side, like, for example, every little thing you look at, you can make a business out of it. And then we have the regular 7:50 meeting with the entire team. It's really hard when I do break a fe, like, hey, how do we get the exact same board for this fence? It's tough to get the same thing. And they all have certain stains on them and things of that nature. But you were able to go to a hardware store, you got those panels, you got a nail and some hammers. You got it fixed pretty much right away for them. So that was pretty quick. You got it fixed. So I really appreciate that.

All right, so this morning, I've already had several meetings. We had one with Marcus, then with Lee, then with command center, then with the media team. You might not notice, but it's a media team. We gotta be really clear. I have to be really them what's included and what's not. Like, what do we not show in the vlogs? And then what do we show? Because I actually don't know, vet the vlog very much. We have yet to cut anything out where I'm like, hey, don't post this, or like, take this out. So they have to have like a really good pulse on, like, what I want in the vlogs and is allowed to be shown versus things that, like, cannot be said names, things like that. So, so far, so good. And now I'm headed down to Mount Vernon to do some interviews as well as check in on the progress of the property, which is wrapping up today. And then we got to figure out installation of some electrical and a septic tank. So that'll be a lot of.

By the way, if you are interested in becoming a general manager for Augusta Lawn Care, you can apply using the link in the description. It's going to be at the very top of the description. If you're thinking about becoming a general manager. Now, this might not mean that you're necessarily a general manager for one of my locations. It could mean for anybody in Augusta Nation. So what I've done in the past when I ask for GMs is we put together a roster and then we give it to all of our franchisees so they're trying to start their second or third location, or I'm starting starting one of my locations. We tap into that, see who on there is the most qualified and potentially might be in the market close to where we're wanting to start another location. Now, what's really cool about being a general manager, whether it be from one of my locations or one of the other owners in Augusta Nation, is you get the exact same training and you come to training just as if you were becoming an owner. So it's a really great way to get started. Even if it's something you're going to do for two, three or four years and then go start your own location, it's a great place to get started. I know specifically right now there's actually a couple locations looking for a general manager. Definitely apply. I know in Tennessee, in Washington State, in Texas, there's already a few people looking for general managers in Augusta Nation. So definitely, if you're interested, if you have experience leading and managing people, definitely apply down below. And the salaries and all the rest of it, it's gonna vary based upon your location. But typically a GM that I have is gonna run the location as if they were an owner. Do all the employing, all the hiring, all the buying decisions, and they're gonna get a salary plus a good cut of any profits that they make from that location. I really see being a GM as a really started without the risk. Maybe you don't have 40, 50, $60,000 to get your own location started and off the ground, but it's a great place to like get your feet wet, learn about management, learn about the systems that we talk about at Augusta Nation and whether you start your own Augusta Lawn Care location or another business, it's just a great place to get started. The biggest requirement is being able to lead and manage other people. If you like following systems and procedures and you like living by the book, this is going to be a great opportunity for you. So the best GMs are the ones that follow the systems religiously and they're as good at execut. It's not about creativity and coming up with new things like here's the systems here, how they work, here's your budget, go execute. If that sounds of interest to you, definitely look at the link below.

So I just finished an interview here down here at the Mount Vernon location. We got ourselves a winner. Probably gonna offer him a job. Looking forward to it. He actually worked down in Alaska for the fisheries, so we'll offer him a position. One of the things I love about Augusta is our daily masterminds that we have with franchisees. And I go over Q and A, we talk about investing and all the rest of it. Now what's really interesting at Augusta Lawn care, we have seven stages of wealth in Augusta Nation. The first one is literally building your business to $500,000 in annual revenue. The seventh stage is literally investing in other asset classes like real estate, the stock market, etc. And learning that game. And my goal is to really help them through all seven of those stages, not just the first one, just growing a business and getting it off the ground, but all the way to where they're actually divesting into other asset classes. Now, a really good question came this morning and that was why does it seem like sometimes the advice you give is actually completely opposite? Their analogy was, well, in the Bible, God doesn't change his mind. He doesn't like, tell them different things. He's consistent about what he wants done, the rules, the regulations, right, etc. And I said, look, it's very important to know the context of a business when it comes to advice. Because for example, I would tell Someone that's under 500,000 revenue to only focus on close ratio. That's the only thing that matters. Whereas someone who has a million dollar business and is thinking about multiple locations or potentially trying to not be renting anymore but buy the real estate, have a rental property house, hack it, get an Airbnb, cover the entire mortgage of that property, have an asset that's going up in value and not have to basically have rent free for their shop space. It's a win, win, win when it comes to business and investing and growing their net worth. And so why does it seem like it's so different? It's all about context of what the size of the business is. So if I'm telling someone to focus on their team and focus on leadership and management, they're probably a larger business. If I'm telling them only focus on and investing money into markets. The only thing that matters probably in the first stages of their business getting that first step of wealth in Augustination is 500,000 in annual revenue. And so I was thinking after the mastermind about their analogy when it came to the Bible, because they said, hey, things do not change throughout the Bible. And here's the deal. You could theoretically say that God changed his mind because in the Old Testament he required the shedding of blood and killing goats and doves and, and cows every single time he came to church. It was like kill the calf because you gotta have an atonement for your sin. Blood has to cover your sins. And that did not change. However, you could say that God changed his mind because in the New Testament he didn't require that anymore. He didn't require goats to be killed and sheep to be killed. And you'll bring your sheep and get it killed and get blood on your hands. He didn't require that anymore. And it's not to say that he changed his mind. He still required an atonement for sin. He still required blood, but it had changed from blood of bulls and goats to his own son. And so this is the thing when it comes to your business is what I'm saying. Whether you're listening to myself or anyone else that's giving advice about business, you have to remember the context of the business. Size. It's very, very important. What goes for a small company. Getting started is not the same advice for the person that's growing a large company. It's not to say that that is contrary or different or opposing each other. It's a different stage of building a successful business. At certain stages, you need to focus on certain things a lot more than other times.

It is time for a public service announcement. Last month, July 2022, the media team, we did $67,000 in revenue. All right, now our expenses were $66,400. We made a whopping $660 in total profit for the entire month. Now, I do that on purpose. I run the media side of the business. Very much so. In terms of the more money we make, the more money we spend and making the content better and hiring more people, etc. And we're making more tools available like lawn care. Businessforsale.com it's gonna be another tool for the industry. And so I spent all the money. However, we gotta pay the bills. And yeah, I don't want to have a bunch of sponsors and people saying what I can and Cannot say, because some people would literally take what I just talked about with the Bible. Like, we don't want to have our content associated with that type of content. We want to have our product associated with that. You can't say that. And guess what? I'm not gonna bend. Some sponsor wants me to talk about on my vlog. So in order to do that, we're gonna have to make some pay for the bill moments. Paying for the bills means that instead of me pitching things, I don't like to pitch it. Really. I like if you see value in it. If it's gonna help your business, I want you to buy it. I really believe that all the products I make are gonna help you, but I don't want to pitch them. So what we're going to do is Stephen, with his magicking, magic editing abilities, is going to put a little ding, and then he's going to link up Whenever I mention P4P software or landscapebusinesscourse do or any of those other things. And that way, it's not a pitch. And yet we still pay the bills, and those are the cows, and they seem happy. And we're just rolling up on the Mount Vernon location. It's looking good. Okay, so here's the problem. I do not have a key for this house. I don't have any of the keys. Liz has the keys. However, I'm supposed to be here today to let the guy that's supposed to set up the Internet, he's supposed to come inside the house and set up the Internet. I do not have a key. I don't know if I'm gonna have to break a window or what, but I think everything is locked. Should be locked.

Oh, man.

I do not want to drive 45 minutes back to command center just to get a key. This is ridiculous. We're gonna check all these windows and see if they're unlocked. I literally thought about crawling through the dog door, but the problem is this just goes in the mudroom, and then this is locked. Stupid, man. All right, what's going on back here? We are contacting. I'm actually just in my car on my laptop, and because interviewed that guy, and I want to go ahead and hire him. What's really cool is I can just go to what we call our dashboard and fill up this form. And then command center takes over from there. They're going to make sure they get a DocuSign, sign all of their payroll documents, get them set up in QuickBooks, set up inside the CRM and make sure everything is ready to roll. So that way, Monday, they are already logged into their app and everything. So there's another docusign with all the employment documents. It's really, really simple. I don't even know how to do it all, but I just filled the form. They take care of it all. Boom. And just like that, your information has been submitted. Two to three business days are required for full onboarding to be completed. Let's go. Gotta write out the final inv9500. And then I just send a picture of that to command center, and they take care of the cookbooks. Let's go. As you might have figured out, I don't like really having paper. So receipts like this, I take a picture, I send it to command center, and then I scrunch it up. Bye.

Bye.

Okay, so can't find a key. Nothing is unlocked. Can't break any of the windows. So I had to call and reschedule the Internet. No Internet for another week. But it's not a big problem. We don't have any renters, and we aren't moving until next week anyways for the shop, so it's okay. So this is the end result. We got our driveway 15ft wide, comes in all the way through here. It's been compacted and comes all the way back to this base back here where we're gonna park all the trucks, the trailers. This is gonna be the future home of Augusta Lawn, Care of Mount Vernon. Got the rental property over there. And next week, gonna be installing a fence as well as a tiny house for Airbnb. We should be able to make about seven to $8,000 per month in revenue using the property. And the mortgage is 3,000, including taxes and insurance and all that fun stuff, which insurance is a little bit more expensive here because I don't know if you can see, but there's an actual levee over there to the river. And we are in a flood zone, so flood zone insurance, not a good combo. But that house we should be able to rent out for at least $3,000. And then we should be able to get $3,000 a month on the Airbnb rental per month. And then this is probably worth at least a thousand dollars in terms of just shop space being able to dump here. And we're gonna get a nice fence in here for privacy. It's gonna look great. And that's a really cool tree, by the way. Well, we better drive on it, make sure it's actually safe, you know, test the waters. Gravel's done next week. That fence will come in. So we won't actually be able to do this little loop that I'm about to do. This is where the tiny house will be. This is where all of the trucks, trailers, etc will be. I'm just hoping I don't get stuck because although this is compacted, it's still relatively thick, loose gravel.

Let's go.

I'm just in communication with the electrician because at the light, turn right onto East Division Street. Interrupting me. I'm just in communication with the electrician because on the tiny house, I'm thinking about putting a hot tub in the back area. I think literally it'll increase the value per night bike. In half a mile, turn left onto North Laventra Road. I think it'll increase the value of that Airbnb by like 40 to $50 a night. So if we can get like a three, $4,000 hot tub, small one, it's like one, but. But because of that, we got to increase the amperage of the wire from probably 50 to, like an 80amp wire and panel. So got to get that done.

All right. Everyone seemed to really like the estimates that we did yesterday. We did a few of them. You can watch yesterday's vlog, but it's actually for a property management company we do a whole bunch of work for. Sounds like the backyard has not been cut. So this looks a duplex. Oh, wow, look at this. Completely overgrown. I think it's vacant. This whole area needs to be knocked down. Oh, yeah, look, this is completely overgrown. It seems like they are kind of trying to do it as cheaply as possible. Am I at the wrong house? Oh, no, this is. Oh, it's like a four plex. It's all connected here. See, it's in the background. We got some mowers. So it looks like the front yard was mowed. We didn't do it. Someone's living in there. There's ac. Okay, this is the wrong place. But he looks at the front yard. Looks really good. Said the backyard is what it needed. Oh, I see they're on the patio area. They want this cleaned up. Completely overgrown. Let's look in the backyard. It's kind of a weird. Oh, yeah, this is what they're talking about. Check this out. Okay, so we're gonna need a weed whack. All this.

Yeah.

Trees literally touching this house. But we're not doing this building. We're just doing this one. Okay, well, I gotta get back to that gate. Okay, let's see what's back here. Mercy okay, yeah, it's overgrown.

All right.

So, yeah, it's a vacant. Vacant house. Property management needs this cleaned up. Now, that's one way to do weed. Barry. Just put an actual tarp. Sharp mercy. Okay, so this is not very big at all, but you gotta knock all this down. Okay? It's pretty straightforward. I don't even need to make a video for the crew. This is very straightforward. Yeah, this will be easy. Gotta give him a price for cleaning this up, mowing all this and in the front yard.

Yeah. So all this needs to be done too. Okay?

Now, at this specific location, we are in what we call profit mode. We're not trying to grow as much. And so to do that, one of the things that we do to switch to profitability mode is we actually cut out in person estimates. We don't ever meet with a person and actually discuss their project. Now, if you do this, you're going to inhibit growth because there are people who need to go over projects with you and visit with you in person as an estimator. We don't do that, though. It's only drive by estimates, which means we come whenever we want. And I can do 15, 20 of these estimates in a day, no problem. Whereas if I'm meeting with people and having scheduled appointments, I might be able to do, say, 10 of those in a day, but definitely not 20. And so it makes you much more efficient as an estimate estimator. And literally, you get twice as many estimates done, allowing you to be out in the field still working. If you're a general manager, an owner that's at, you know, 4 or 5, 600,000 in annual revenue. So this next estimate is literally like half a mile from here. And I can knock out these all day long and be flexible with my schedule as an owner, if I'm still kind of in the field and managing the crew without having to have scheduled appointments that tie you up throughout the day, and you feel like you're running around with chicken, like a chicken without a head. Okay? So these properties, you got to be careful on these ones because they want a property cleanup, and then they're selling the house. You got to be careful because you could do all this work and then they move out of town, and guess what? You're not getting paid. I'm going to require prepayment. They have to pay before the job even gets started because you got to pull out all these weeds. Look at this. This is, like, crazy overgrown. All these flower beds got to get cleaned up. So the goal here is they're going to sell this house, we're going to do a cleanup and then mow it until it sells. Well, if it sells in a week, because we make it look beautiful, I want to make sure that invoice is paid prior to getting this work done. Very overgrown and mature weeds. Like this is literally like a lawn inside of bed. These weeds, you know, have been knocked down but would have otherwise been 3ft tall. We got to make sure this is paid for prior to even touching this property. You got to be very careful of houses that are going on the market or for sale, because if that person has no tie to the property in terms of the deed and they sign the deed over to someone else, guess what? You're not going to be able to put any sort of claim on that house. And that's leverage that you're going to want to use. If a client is not paying you, and that is you can put a contractor's lien on the property. Again, if the owners just moved away and signed things over, you now have no leverage whatsoever. It was a good day. I still have a couple more meetings. Lawn CareWeb design.com We're rolling out a few things and working on some stuff. So have a meeting with them and then I have an hour where I'm gonna work on my email because then after that, 7pm I have Lee coming over and we're gonna do an interview. So make sure you check that out. It's coming out this weekend and it should be interesting.

So if you liked what you heard and you think you might be a great fit, look for that link in the description down below. We'd love to have you be a part of Augusta Nation. Keeping repeating customers takes excellent customer service and a great reputation. Getting customers in the first place, that's a whole different ball game. Luckily for you, we at Lawn Care Web Design build easy to use lawn care websites for a flat monthly rate. Your new lawn care website will work on all devices and will be specifically tuned to attract local customers. We handle every aspect of your website for a fraction of the cost of other web design services and outperform the SEO of your competitors constantly. If you need the perfect site for your lawn care business, head over to lawncarewebdesign.com to see what our team can build for you. Next up, firing an employee is never easy, but there's ways to make it a bit easier.

Find out how. Now, today we had to fire two people down at the Mount Vernon location, and I find absolutely no joy whatsoever when firing People, I hate it. There's nothing inside of me that finds any sort of pleasure or pride or joy in firing people. It always kind of stings. And so if you're having fire people or let people go, that is normal. Probably means you're a good person, you have feelings. It always makes you feel sick when people leave. They always go sour, say really hurtful and horrible things. And you just have to realize that why you're doing what you're doing and keep moving forward. And yeah, it's still not fun though. Takes you a couple hours to kind of like get over it.

In today's episode of Mike Minutes Mastermind with Augustination, we talked about comparing different types of loan products and how you can buy down your interest rate using discount points on your mortgage. So that's what we learned about today. Last night I recorded three brand new lectures for landscapebusinesscourse.com. so if you're a current member there, make sure you check those out. And if you're not a member, what are you doing?

Everyone watches those videos that I made where I took away a $600 bonus because someone was 15 seconds late, which is a true story. And you can watch that video, but it doesn't take away from the fact that when you fire somebody that it is still emotional. And especially when that happens, they lash out at you. And it's very difficult, difficult time to keep yourself in check from lashing out at them and saying everything you want to say and going right back at them with emotion. So finding someone that's emotional with more emotion usually just lead to a bunch of unnecessary drama. And I definitely don't want to be on this emotional roller coaster in my business. So making the decision is never easy, especially when they're great workers, when they work really hard and when they show up to work and when they're on the team that they do a great job. But ultimately you have to look at the whole picture, the whole business, the whole team, and make a very difficult decision, stick to it, and then try to be unemotional. But that's almost, almost impossible. Now, we are currently actually going to do an estimate. One of the GMs had a few estimates on their plate today. I was like, hey, don't worry, I'll take it over the vlog and I, we're gonna do the estimates together. So let's knock them out. So this property is pretty interesting. We got five condos that are actually here and they want monthly maintenance. So a quick tip for everyone is when you're Doing maintenance, even if it's commercial property or like full service maintenance on a residential property, you want to make sure that the initial, initial service is going to get it up to standard and you charge separately from what you would charge for like a monthly or bi weekly maintenance. So for example, when I come here the very first time, we got weeds that are underneath these bushes. We got stuff coming through here. If you look at this ground cover, it's going to have actually a lot of work because you got all these weeds popping through and little starters of trees and everything. You got to trim away the ground cover away from the base of these plants. There's a lot of work on the very first service. But then after the first service service, it won't take, you know, not even half as long. So what I recommend, you're doing full service, weeding, bush trimming, like this one. We're blow off every single time. Your first service needs to be a separate service that they have to accept in order to get on the recurring service. That is going to be much more manageable in terms of time and affordability. So here for example, we'll get this off the sidewalk, clean this up. It looks so much better. You got a comment below how much you would charge for that property for a one time cleanup? Trim all the bushes, brushes, pull all the weeds, blow everything off and haul the debris out of there. Comment below what you would charge.

Well, what do we have here? An overgrown mow.

So sorry, I'm on my phone for work. What you need? No, totally fine. I'm just here to do the estimate. So if you see me walking around, don't worry about it. That's great. So it's all the front and then this side.

Okay.

A little skinny part on the side and then the back is mulch. So you have need to worry about tomorrow. Perfect. I'll make a video for them and I'll email you. If not tonight, tomorrow morning. That'd be wonderful. Yeah, I was gonna wait, but it looks. It's pretty long. I was doing the all meadow approach. Do you just need us to do it one time to kind of get down for you? Get down. Okay. Add on services would be like the prune and the hedges to do. Oh, the bushes and things. I'll have them throw in there as an extra option. Yeah, I mean if I can't do the line item of the hedges, that's cool. It's just basically the grass.

Yeah.

Get down for you. Manageable. It's, it's. Hey, if I had a Horse, you could give me the hay. Let's go. Take care. Okay. She was not kidding. So this is the front yard, completely overgrown. How long do you think this is going to take? Now this is the thing. You got stairs, you got a bunch of lights and you got a bunch of rocks all around the perimeter of those lawn areas and then a small gate to get in the backyard. So you're probably going to have to do most of it's a push mower, honestly. You got your front yard over there, there. And this is the kind of backyard side area, mostly weeds. These are like 2 or 3ft tall, but then they're pretty thin. But all of this is super overgrown. We typically don't do one time mows, but she kind of called and asked for other things so we kind of got pulled into it. I'm here. I might as well give it to him. Got grass all the way here. All the way here. How long is this going to take With a push mower and a weed whacker and it's going to take like full. This will fill up an entire pickup truck with debris, honestly. So now the reason we don't typically do one time mows is because you're dealing with a property that is going to have a whole bunch of maintenance on your equipment. Because it's just tall grass, there's a lot of wear and tear. It's very difficult on your engines and your mowers. It's also super demoralizing in really hot weather to be mowing grass that is super tall like that. It's also where we get the most callbacks and yellow slips. Because mowing on grass after it's been two feet tall never looks very good. So you get a lot of people complaining about, oh, it doesn't look good, it looks dead, didn't get cut, right? Well, if you've cut it five times, it's not going to look super fantastic with nice straight lines afterwards. It's been overgrown, probably not been cut for eight months. That's why we don't typically do one time mows, but we will do one time mows, our initial mows, if they plan on doing recurring service. So she kind of got away with it because she asked for a property cleanup and then also said that she would do recurring mows. So I'm going to give her the price. I'm here. I might as well give her a price for everything. Price for an initial mow, recurring mows, the trimming of the bushes, I'm going to give her the whole Nine yards just in different options of the estimate.

Now, on the flip side, there is good with the bad. For example, the other day, I was very proud because one of our team members got $28 per hour on their fourth paycheck. So typically it takes a few paychecks for them to kind of figure out P4P how to be more efficient and profitable. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out p4psoftware.com training. It talks all about it. But on P4P, it usually takes them a little bit of time to figure out how to be most efficient and actually make above base pay. Our base pay at this location was $18 per hour. And on his third paycheck, I think he did like 23, $24 per hour. That was great. But then yesterday he blew it away. He did like $28 per hour. So there's definitely highs and lows and moments. I'm like, so happy. I'm so thrilled for them to be able to provide better. And they deserve every single penny because they kick butt. Like to make $28 an hour mowing lawns. You are hustling all day long like you are figuring out the most efficient way to get in and out of the door. And very proud in those moments to be able to offer a position in a job where they can make that much money if they work hard and they apply themselves to.

Well, well, what do we have here?

All right, so this day two out here at the property, you can see it's taking pretty good shape here. This is where all the gravel is going to be at. Fence will be going in next week. They're right now they're installing the secondary driveway. So we have our own separate driveway that'll come in here. Pretty cool idea. They actually got here the excavator. They got a big piece of wood and they're using that to kind of level it all out. So it'll come back in here and then. Yeah, plenty of space here to grow. Park all the trucks, the trailers, dump all the debris in the back there. So really looking forward to it. Starting to take shape and look pretty good. So what the plan will be is once the people enter in here, this is where we'll be able to keep all the debris and the material. We'll keep all the employee parking over there. And then this whole corner will end up being trucks, trailers, and where the equipment goes, we'll have a storage container probably somewhere at front just to have all the mowers to where the Guys can grab those right before they're heading out in the morning. But this is where they are prepping for the tiny house. And then what we're going to do is make a ditch, like a one foot ditch. We'll have to cut through this concrete, and that way we can hook up to the electric panel here. And fortunately, this has already been permitted and it's zoned for an adu. So this electricity is already ready to go for an actual secondary hookup. So we'll come over there through the driveway, connect to this bad boy right here.

I remember before P4P, before pay for performance, when we did hourly, I always thought like, man, I just wish I could pay like 25, $30 an hour where someone could actually make a really good wage and provide for their family. And no matter what math I did, I could never make it work on hourly. But if someone really kicks butt on P4P, they can make that kind of money. It's just a matter of them figuring the processes and then refining their systems throughout the day of how to be more efficient. But there is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone consistently do 25, $30 an hour, where I feel like that's a livable wage and they earn every single dollar of it. And I can only afford to pay that because they kick butt all day long. You got to remember, we're not like in the software industry where we have 90% margins, lawn care and landscaping. We're never going to be able to charge $5,000 for an hour's worth of work. Therefore, it's not easy to pay someone 50, $60,000 a year when we're doing low margin work.

Hi, how's it going? Yeah, you might. I am. Hi, Mike.

Hello.

Good to meet you. This is our third property here. And this one is kind of like a once a year, twice a year type of cleanup. The first is to trim these two bushes up here in the front yard. A rhododendron, and I think it's a Magnolia. I'm not 100 sure on that. She hasn't been able to deadhead for quite some some time. So it's really taken off. So what we'll do is we'll remove the branches that are the lowest and we'll try to remove them right up against the base of the plant. Just go back underneath and make sure we can either use a hand saw or chainsaw to get those because they're pretty thick. Got some edging, weed, whacking, trimming this area here. She can't get to underneath all these trees with a the mower. So we're just going to weed whack this really all the way to that ditch right there. Is all this weed whacked as well as we will define these edges. Just put the the metal edger on and just try to trim these up. Make this really nice clean and defined around the deck. And this front flower bed. Got a bunch of blackberries in the back of the yard that need cleared out. Weed whack this down really, really nice and short. This patch right here, this whole patch. She wants us cleared out and then sprayed. We'll get down maybe down to like 3 inches or less if I, if we can and then spray it. So that's number three for the day.

So right now I am calling Sam. She's the events director for a restaurant locally that I'm trying to book the entire restaurant for all of Augusta Nation to meet at the night before and after Landscape Summit 2023 which if you haven't booked your tickets already go to mikeandys.comsummit come visit us for three days. It's gonna be an absolute game changer if you're here.

You know Mike has tons of learned advice and answers to some of businesses. Toughest questions. If you own a business and find yourself in a dile. Mike Andes is directly available for one on one coaching sessions. However, please don't buy this call if you haven't watched all of his free content. Mike gives away most of his industry knowledge through YouTube, podcasts and online courses, which are much cheaper by the way. This call is absolutely overpriced and continues to go up but is honestly the only feasible way of getting meaningful one on one advice directly from Mike. If this sounds like what you need, head over to mikeandys.com call to book your consulting call today. Finally, we've said it before and we'll say it again. If you're not charging $100 per hour for your lawn care services, it's time to make the change.

Good morning. Down at the property here for headquarters where all the material is delivered earlier this week and just kind of spend some time. Had some work to do on emails and I was like you know what, might as well hang out here. It's so peaceful. I really love it out here. It's quiet. This is gonna be a great spot for us and I'm really looking forward to it. But yeah, just spending some time sitting next to this massive forklift thing that I have really no idea what it's called and answering emails it's gonna be pretty cool when all of this stuff gets turned into something actually looking like a building. I don't know how people do this like this. This is beyond my pay grade. Telling you what, man.

All right, I'm running late.

Two minutes till I need to be at the gym. Anytime fitness needs a new gym manager, new office manager. So I gotta do a couple interviews and knock that out right now. A couple really good meetings this morning. The first was the mastermind with franchisees, and it was like 45 minutes long, a little bit longer than usual. But we actually went over a couple different properties that one of the franchisees is considering for either buying a house and doing some investing or potentially getting a shop space. So we actually looked through three different options and it was super insightful. 78 acres. Oh, my word. I love this deal. You're going to have a little bit harder time financing this, probably because it is a double wide, but, dude, I like this property. You could get into this deal for less than $1,500 a month for your mortgage. Oh, look at that. $1500. 22 per month on your mortgage. If you got a FHA loan, you'd come down with what, 3%? So we're looking at like, you know, 8, 9 grand. You could probably get it on this property. I like that. This one I like right off the bat. When I look at this property here, I think that you might have issues with neighbors because you're next to a main road. This is all residential, single family around you, and this kind of exposure to like, you probably have some issues with theft. It's been on the market for 74 days or 64 days. Dude, we should get this for 200 grand all day, every day. The next call was with my GM out in North Carolina, which is Chuck, and he's actually becoming my regional manager as well as a franchise business consultant. So he's gonna travel the country and manage my locations that I own personally for Augusta Lawn Care. And he's also going to help from a corporate side with coaching the franchisees on their. Their coaching calls. So talk to him a little bit as well, because there's transition for the new GM that's going to take over that location. You know how it is. Like in three, four weeks, you could have two new guys and two guys have left.

Right?

It's like, I'm of the opinion now where it's like, if you're in the middle space, just hire and like, at the very worst, you don't have enough to do like on Thursday or something. It's like, okay, well then you're just gonna come with me and we're gonna do estimates together.

Because ultimately I want him to, to work with these guys to build that bond in that relationship. I don't want to say start to separate myself out of it, but at least like, let him get that in the field. They respect him. They like that there's not that division. When he comes back from training in September, like we're now, they're already like, oh man, it's just one of those things. Like, I want him in the field as much as possible right now. Learn the yards, learn the equipment, learn the guys, learn all of that. How, how the apps work and things like that. What, what I'm looking for things like that so that he can just be with the guys as one of the guys, but then pull him, operate them out kind of thing.

But yeah, it's basically like either buy, either buy or start new, right? And I think what I want to do with you and my, my, my goal with having you as a regional manager is I want to systematize the, the process of, of opening up multiple locations. If we just start 10 tomorrow, we can be confidently able to say, here's the steps to do that. You need a regional Manager, you need 10 GMs. And here's how this is going to look. Here's how much your money you're going to need. Here's how much revenue you can expect the first year, year, second and third year and really start to build up a business model for something that doesn't exist right now.

You probably were really good at hand.

Stakes.

Or flipping stuff like that. Acrobatics. I think I could do pretty good at that stuff. What is this stuff? Raw protein. Now we're talking baby.

Syntha 6. Oh, yeah, this is good stuff.

Dark chocolate. Let's go. New supplements come in the box.

Good stuff. I like this brand right here. Haven't even tried it, but just looks good. It's a fire sale. Get rid of it fast. Mercy. Gotta get rid of this stuff. 50% off. Looks like we found ourselves a manager finally. What we're gonna do is have her start for one day. A lot of times people think like, oh, I'm gonna work at work at the gym and I'm just gonna be like, lift weights all day long and play with my friends. Like, no, it's a job. You do accounting and you clean the gym and you have to talk to people and do sales and you do calls and you do emails. It's a job. So have them try out for one day, make sure they like it, and then we offer them a full time position.

Okay, this is nuts. So you won't believe this.

So thanks for reaching out about your course about how to turn your hobby into a business. Unfortunately, your class still doesn't meet our class guidelines since we found the merchandising is very monetarily focused.

Skillshare literally is not letting us post a course on their platform because of how I'm explaining return on investment roi.

Why classes may not reference monetary compensation in their title or description, or focus too much on earnings within their content, which is like kind of what a.

Business basically, like, don't make money.

Yeah. Don't make money following your passion. Which I feel like is so weird. Like, why would you even put a business like category on skillshare?

I'm going to show you on this whiteboard what they literally. So they say, we can't have you on the platform. Like, okay, give us specifics. And like, well, you can't be telling people they're going to lose a bunch of weight or make a bunch of money. It's like, okay, great, all right, that's fine. Where in the world do we say that? In the MBA for entrepreneurs.

But yeah, then they're like, moreover, classes should not focus on passive income strategies.

Promise fast followers. We don't do that. We don't talk about passive income.

We don't. Or guarantee or promise specific outcomes for students.

We don't.

Which.

We don't. Weight loss income.

Yeah.

Rank or follower count on a platform. Okay, we don't do that.

Yeah.

And then we're just talking about like, what business? Like how to choose a business.

Yeah. If you look at our course, it's literally like how to choose how to choose which business is right for you.

And how to do business plan.

How to do business plan how to get started. Just finding like what you're passionate about slash, what can actually make money. And then specifically I emailed them back about, I was like, in lesson five, we're like, do not fall for the scams about fast cash earning money, like easy money. I was like, we literally talked about that in one of our lessons.

Like, well, they'll give you an exact quote. And literally this is the part where they said that I am falsifying the ability to make money.

So I was like, could you point out exactly what I need to change? Because it just sounds like you can't.

Have a class about, we're gonna keep you all poor. So you just keep coming back for more basically useless skills.

We're pointing you to becoming a struggling artist.

Yeah. We want you to learn how to be really good at your crap but not be a model.

But no money.

No, no money.

Art should be free according to Skillshare.

So we're gonna make you pay for this service.

Yeah.

But we are against capitalism. No money.

Yeah. So, yeah. How to turn your lobby into a business. How you should start a business. Good qualities of an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial trap. That's the one where I'm like, we tell them to watch out for stuff like that. I feel like that's. That's a pretty clean, regular course on just like how to start business.

This is what exactly I said inside the course. Okay. And this, remember this course? I don't make any money to put this course on Skillshare. It's like top of the funnel awareness for the brand, but more importantly, just walking people through how they can take their hobby and turn it into a business. Okay? So I said if you spend $1,000 on marketing, okay, Cost in your business, and you're able to get a 10x return in terms of revenue and make $10,000 in revenue, and you're able to have a total 20% profit margin, that would mean that you get $2,000 in profit off of that $10,000 in revenue. What that means is you just doubled your money. You took $1,000 in marketing expense, and you turn that into $2,000 worth of profit. And they said, they said that I was promising money and that I'm like, look, this is basic roi. And then we wonder why everyone just like, oh, I'm just going to, like, put my money in a 401k for the rest of my, my life. I'm not going to invest money because they don't learn how to actually take money and multiply it using a business. Okay? And the entire course is about making this happen. Taking a thousand dollars, turning into $1,000. How is this a scam? I don't talk about promise of earnings. I don't talk about anything but just simply trying to give you the tools to actually make a machine. That is a business, that when you spend $1,000 in marketing, you get $10,000 in revenue. And when you get $10,000 in Revenue, you actually have a profit margin of 20% where you can earn $2,000 in profit. I just don't see how this is against their rules and regulations. And I also, it's just like, hey, we want you to teach about creativity. It's like, okay, fine, but the biggest problem that creatives have is monetizing their skills. And that's why most of them always just stay broke. Very skillful, but never know how to actually monetize. And yet somehow skillshare doesn't think that this type of information is what needs to be on their platform. Platform just blows my mind. Like this is the, this is the extent of why I can't be on a course on skillshare is because I'm explaining return on investment and profit margins and how you have a return on your capital when it comes to your marketing spend. I don't get it. So what should the viewers do if they would like this content?

Yeah, if you like this content and actually more of this content go to the NBA for entrepreneurs. It's literally just like, like cherry pick first.

It's the first module, right?

Yeah. Well, this is just a cherry picked piece of the lesson to like kind of break it down for people. Cuz apparently skillshare does not want us to share this course or the stuff that we're teaching. So if you guys want access to it, skillshare can't stop us from posting it on our own. Teachable. So check that it's in the description.

Now if we want to talk about content, controversial things, I can do that. So let's go ahead and get started. First, let's turn the lights on and let's get the recording studio ready to roll. I literally can do it in about three steps. Turn on the lights, turn on the recorder, and turn on the camera, like so. All right, we still gotta turn more lights on. Boom, boom, boom. Yes. Very fancy landscape lights. Fantastic. $25 on Amazon. Okay, let's go ahead and sit down. Whenever you're gonna make a serious video, you must do it in a studio. Studio. Oh, that light's backwards. See this light in the middle here? The. The headlight or hair light, it's called up above. I use that for both. This one, this set right here. And then what I do is I spit it around.

Not tall enough. Mercy. And I spin it around. And now it is a hair light. For the other set, turn on the recording device. Action. Check one, two. All right, we're good. Good. All right. Oh man. No card and camera. What in the world? See, this is the problem with the vlog. Now we have to transport video files every single day and trying to do them across what we call the intern or it's like a server takes forever. So what I do is I Take these little SD cards right here. And I put them in the same spot every time in my car. And I transport them to and from the office so that Steven can edit them in the afternoon. Afternoon. Big thumbs up for Steven. Okay, let's close the door. Let's put this SD card back into the camera because we're going to talk about controversial things. Actually controversial things such as?

Okay, cool. Action. All right, so I believe that everyone watching this video that's in the home improvement industry, whether you landscaping, lawn care, roofing, fencing, cleaning houses, whatever it is, I truly believe that over the next few years, we need to focus on one thing and one thing alone, and that is charging $100 per man hour. Now, you might be thinking, that's crazy. You can never charge $100 per hour for mowing grass or cleaning windows or whatever it is. But I truly believe that is what we must focus on in all of our industries, is how do we charge $100 per hour that any crew member is on that property? And I'm talking about $100 per hour for the low level skill stuff, not the complicated driving an excavator, building massive retaining walls. You should already be over $100 per hour for that stuff. I'm talking about basic stuff like mowing grass, wiping up floors, cleaning windows. The basics. You need to be at $100 per hour. I truly believe this. And we need to be focused. 100% of our time needs to be focused on how do you provide value to the customer in such a sense, in such a manner that, that there is absolutely no comparison to us and the guy that's charging $30 per hour. It's very, very clear that our prices are way different and our value propositions are very, very different. They're going to show up whenever they want. They're not going to communicate well. They're not going to have a professional website, uniforms or trained staff. We're going to have all of those things and deliver a great customer experience. And that's why we're going to charge 100 plus dollars per hour and they're going to charge 30, $100 per hour. We got to make $100 per hour. Why? Well, because of inflation, wage inflation. The cost of all of our goods and materials are going up, fuel is going up. And if you're not charging $100 per hour, in my opinion, in the next few years, you're not going to afford the wages that you are going to need to be able to pay in order for people to be able to do labor's work. People are not going to want to work hard, they're not going to work, want to work outside, they're not going to want to do dirty work. And therefore the only way to get them to do the work is to be able to pay them 25, $30 per hour. And the only way you'll be able to afford to pay them 25 or $30 per hour is to be charged charging 100 plus dollars per hour to the customer. And everyone's like, well, if you're only paying the employee $30 per hour and you're making $100 per hour, that means you're making $70 per hour. No, you're not. You have to pay for all the overhead, the insurance, the cost of all the materials, you have to pay for all the uniforms and the marketing and the licensing and the taxes. And guess what? Taxes are going to be going up. So all of that to say, if you're not charging $100 per hour, you got to have one focus, one singular thing in your mind, and that is, how do I provide value enough to be able to charge that kind of money? Because guess what? In every single industry, there is the Honda and there's their Mercedes. That is the Honda gets you from point A to point B, does the exact same thing. Yet it only costs 25 or $30,000 to buy a Honda Civic like my car out there. It's $22,000. Let's go. Now a similar model of a Mercedes will literally cost you 70, 80, $90,000. And guess what? It still gets you from point A to point B. And the reason there's a difference is because the way it makes a person feel while they're driving the Mercedes, look at that warm fuzzy feel feeling. It's a little bit quieter on the ears, it drives a little bit nicer, you get that nice torque in the wheel. All those good fuzzy feelings is why people pay 3 to 4x on a vehicle. You can say the same thing about Whole Foods versus Walmart and a whole bunch of other brands. And we've got to focus on an industry. How do we become the Whole Foods and the Mercedes of our industry? Because they're the ones that will survive. They're the ones that will be able to afford the type of wages that are going to be required to hire and employ people. And when I did that, I felt like Bernie Sanders. No Bernie Sanders. Alright, that's enough for the rant. Ending it off on a strong note.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. I hope that you learned something interesting today. Once more, if you're interested in becoming a GM for an Augusta location, you can look in the link in the podcast description to apply. If you like these, we have tons of lectures, interviews and more over on the Mike Andy's YouTube channel that'll be right up your alley. That's all we got for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.