Become a Millionaire, One Star Reviews, Gas Prices

Hey everybody, welcome back to the lawn care business course podcast. Listen while you work edition. We have three great segments for you. Today we're going to go over the most underrated business that you can start to become a millionaire. We're going to be talking about how a fired employee can actually become the greatest opportunity for your business. And we're going to talk about gas prices, we all know they're going up and how you should react to make sure you stay profitable. You're not going to want to miss these. And make sure you head over to Mike Andy's on YouTube to check out the full video versions. So let's get into this first segment on the most underrated business to make you a millionaire.

So I'm responding today to the people in my comments that constantly say, you can't get rich mowing lawns. You can't get rich building a service based business. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 85 locations around North America. And today I'm talking to you about the most underrated way to become a millionaire in America and really any country in the world. And that is because to be in a four step process. The first step is it's going to be in a service business.

Okay?

This is not going to be high tech. This is not going to be some flashy something. It's going to be service businesses. Now, service businesses can come in all shapes and sizes. It's really, at the end of the day, I'm doing a service for usually a homeowner and these are going to be like low barrier to entry. They don't cost a lot to get started. Things like painting, cleaning, lawn care, gutter cleanouts. Like there's so many things that you can do inside someone's house. It doesn't take a lot of money to get started. And it's just a service business. You say, well, there's much better ways to become a millionaire. You gotta build an app and you gotta build a website. No, most millionaires in America, from a percentage standpoint, built a service based business. Now they're not gonna get a TV show about them or be in the front of Forbes magazine or Fast Company or Entrepreneur magazine. No, that's not happening. But the highest probability and most underrated way is to build a service business. Now let's just be clear too. Another characteristic about the most underrated way to become a millionaire is the fact that it's not new. Okay? Everyone's looking for new, better, best innovation. We have technology this is the world of technology. We gotta scale infinitely. We, that is great. And there are absolutely unicorns and great billion dollar businesses that can build those type of applications and web softwares and social networks and all the rest of it. But guess what? Most millionaires and the highest probability of becoming a millionaire is something that's not new. You're simply taking a normal business, a normal industry and producing it and giving it to a customer. Because the reason why most businesses are unsuccessful is cause there's no product market fit. There is no market and customer, there's no demand for the product that's created. And the thing about new, new technology, new service, new product, the problem with that is you do not know if the customer is even going to be willing to buy and you have absolutely no data if it's new as to whether or not they're going to actually purchase from you in the long term. So therefore I would like to, I would much rather depend on someone who's building a service business that is building something that's not new. It's been done 100 times before and there's plenty of people to look at and say they've done it before. The reason people don't do this is it's not flashy, it's not fun, it's not exciting that you don't get articles written about them. But the most sure fire underrated way to become a millionaire is build something that's not new, that everyone needs that it's tried and true for decades that people need that service. People need their septic tanks cleaned out. People, people need their house painted, people need their chimney swept. These are things that have to be done. Janitorial services have to be done, the lawn must be cut. These are things that have to be done and it's not new. And you can have decades worth of successful businesses to look back at and see what they've done in that specific industry. All right, the next thing, this is also something that's very important. And at the end of the day, all you're doing in most of these businesses is you are selling labor. All you're doing is trying to create a system to efficiently produce a service or product for a customer in exchange for money at a price that they cannot achieve if they were to do.

It on their own.

What that means is I'm gonna take a $20 per hour employee and I'm gonna sell that to the customer at let's just say $80. So what you've done is you've created, this is the value to the customer. This because you. And now you got the employee, you got the trucks, the equipment, you got all the infrastructure, the admin to actually produce this product. And so because of that, you are rewarded with a $60 markup on that labor. That labor of the employee went from $20. And you, because of your optimization of systems, and you had equipment and you had all of these assets that you've now pumped into the business, you turn that $20 per hour labor into $80 of value to the customer. That is the arbitrage that you arbitrage of labor by having a system and having assets and equipment and tools that allow you to sell labor at a higher rate than they could. Go just find an employee, because they don't have the time to go find the employees, get the equipment, get the truck. So what do you do? You provide those things and all you're doing is you're basically selling, you're upselling, you are increasing the price of labor by having all of those assets in place. The same way that someone would go onto Alibaba or go to Walmart, buy a bunch of stuff and then sell it on Amazon for a higher price. That's called retail arbitrage. Take something that's sold for a lower price and usually in bulk quantities, and then sell it to people for a higher price. Retail arbitrage. What you're doing here when you're selling labor is you're doing labor arbitrage. You're taking bulk, you're taking someone that's full time, you're taking a bunch of employees, labor, and you're trying to sell that. You're piecing it out to customers at a higher rate. That is what I call labor arbitrage. The fourth thing that you want to keep in mind if you're wanting to create a million dollar business, is selling to baby boomers. Okay? Baby boomers right now are between the ages about 55 and 65, right? In that age where the baby boomers are aging, they're getting to the point where they cannot paint their house, mow their lawn, clean out the chimney, do their floors, pick up the floor and get new carpet, all of these things, cleaning their windows. These are the businesses that can absolutely take advantage of the fact that these baby boomers are not just getting to the point where they want to have someone do these services, but they actually have to physically, because it's actually dangerous for them to get on a ladder. It's dangerous for them to be operating a piece of equipment. And they will need People to actually perform these services for them. And by the way, the wealth of our country is held in the hands of these baby boomers. These are the people that own the massive majority of real estate stocks. The wealth, the net worth of our country is locked up in these baby boomers. They have the real estate that need these services done on them. The painting, the mowing, the cleaning, all of these things have to be done to these baby boomers and the assets that they've collected over the course of time, they hold the money. And they are also the ones that are willing to pay a premium price for a premium service. So instead of just being the guy who paints every single house, they're willing to pay a 20, 30% premium to get the person that paints the house that's insured. Bonded has a great brand, a great website, answers the phone when they actually call them and responds quickly, gets a quote to them. Exactly. Has a bunch of references, a bunch of online reviews, great website, all of that. They are willing to pay for a premium price in exchange for a premium product. Why? Because they don't have the time to go at 5, 6 estimates from a bunch of random people. They just want one solid provider and they're gonna be loyal to that person and they're willing to pay a premium price that allows you to have better margins in this business. If you create the type of business that's actually going to market and, and is going to appeal to these baby boomers that are willing to pay a premium price. And furthermore, they're going to value your labor arbitrage even greater. Because the one thing they know is limited in their life is time. They know they only have 5, 10, 15 years left of life and they have plenty of money. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to trade money for time. How do they do that? They make sure that they're not the ones cleaning the windows and mowing the lawns and installing the mulch and trimming the bushes and, and cleaning their floors. And that is why these businesses are such a great opportunity. So for all the people out there that say you can't become rich cleaning up septic tanks, trimming bushes, cutting down trees, and doing manual hard physical labor are absolutely wrong. Whether you are a business owner or you're employed and you're just getting started and you want to get your foot in the door, go learn a service based business, go to a business in your area and just work as an employee. Maybe you spend two, three, four, five years or working as an entry level employee in one of these service based businesses. But your ultimate goal is to get the skills required to actually be able to do these things. That is sell. How do I sell? Learn how to sell, learn the ability to be able to sell. These baby boomers understand the psychology of selling. Next. How do I actually create this arbitrage where I create value enough to make a profit? How do I create brand and a website and have great marketing to be able to make this arbitrage correct? Once you've learned that industry and you're not to it and you understand it, it's not rocket science to you, then you can literally choose that service business and build a million dollar company. It's absolutely possible. It's underrated and absolutely is going to have a higher percentage of success compared to creating the next big thing, the next app, the next website. Start with this, create a financial pillar and if you want to go do other things afterwards, if you want to go and create something and scratch that entrepreneurial someplace else, that's fine. But this is a great way to start your business. Spend the next 10, 15 years building a service based business that pumps out a bunch of cash and then you can go do something else if you want.

I hope that was informative for you guys and I hope you guys have a plan now for the next 10 to 15 years to lock in and become a millionaire. Let's hear about how a fired employee can actually become one of the greatest opportunities for your business. But before that, I encourage you guys to check out P4P software. It's a great way to pay your employees based on performance and not just on an hourly rate. So check that out. P4psoftware.com but let's get into how one star reviews actually affect your business.

That type of response, I could care less about whoever wrote the review, I could care less about what they think.

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 85 locations around North America and at one of those locations in the past week we had someone that was fired and they went ahead and left us a Google review that was scathing in one star. But not only did they leave a review, they made sure that they got their family members involved and their relatives to also leave one star reviews for the company. When I got this, because I got notified every single time a one star review comes across, any location in North America, I get an email. So this specific location, I actually own this one because I own three locations, one on the east coast one little more in the center of the US and then I'm obviously in Washington state where we have our first location. So I own three of them. The other 85 are franchised. What's important to know here is that your response to that online review is extremely, extremely important. Because a lot of times we look at as very negative. We see that one star review, our heart drops, we feel sick to our stomach and immediately we want to lash out because this is in this case, we didn't do anything wrong and we literally just fired someone and now they're lashing back online and trying to tear the company down. Now the emotional response to this, this is absolutely warranted. Like I get it, you feel immediately mad. But you have to realize this is one of the best opportunities for your business. Why? Because that's where people are actually going to look is the one star reviews. And then they're going to look how you responded. Now think of it. You were looking to go to a mechanic or to a restaurant or any sort of service based business and you were trying to determine whether or not you should go based upon the online reviews. Now if there's a thousand five star reviews and two one star reviews and you have two minutes to determine whether or not you're going to go to this business, what are you going to do? You're going to read the two one star reviews. So in my opinion, this is a great opportunity. Whenever someone leaves, a one star review in your business is a massive opportunity. Let's go through some of the scenarios. We're going to get to the one about the employees in just a second. First and foremost, you did a bad job and you do a really bad job and the person's literally venting and they're telling all the true facts of what happened in this case, you are going to take the high road. You are going to make sure that, that in your response to this customer's one star review, you outline the fact that you tried to rectify it. You might went back to their house three or four times, you fixed it, maybe you gave them their money back. That's important. That's the one time that we will get money back is when we are actually wrong. We did something, we made a mistake. Maybe you gave them their money back and make that clear in the review that you tried to make it right. You did make it right and you gave the money back for the service. So if you're actually wrong, just admit it. Don't try to cover it up. Just be completely honest and Say we messed up, we very much apologize and be open and transparent. So that's the first kind of one star horrible review that can come across. The next one star review from a customer could be just that they are out of their tree. And this customer is just so hard to deal with. And you tried to make them happy, but they still like, they do not see this as being rectified. Even if you gave them their money back, they wouldn't be happy. And whether or not you gave them money back or not doesn't solve the problem here. It's just, there's mad, there's going to, there's, there's looking for an opportunity to leave a one star review. And if you look on their reviews that they left in the past for every other business, it's one star views. Now this type of person, you just have to again be very, very professional. Because most customers, when they look at one star views, they kind of have a brain too. And if this person's out of their tree and cussing at you and saying all sorts of horrible things about your business and you respond in a very professional way, this could be an actual real positive for your business and a good look if someone is potentially looking to use your product or services. So if someone's just freaking out, you're going to come very professional. You're going to state facts, you're not going to project any sort of opinion about them, their character, how they treated you. Do not become the victim. Allow yourself to be, remain the consummate professional in the relationship. Because anyone that's reading this, the only thing I care about one star reviews is a person that's going to read the review. And guess what? People read those one star reviews most often. Therefore, I need to make sure that my response is the type of thing that when someone reads it, they might say, okay, they made a mistake, but they apologized. Okay, now here, there might have been a misunderstanding, but this customer thinks they're the worst thing since sliced bread. And the way that the company handled this and responded was excellent. Now this case where we have an employee that's writing a one star review, what is the inclination and possibly even potentially the right thing to do is just tell the honest truth in your response and then say, hey, look, this is a disgruntled employee that was fired and is simply lashing back out of the business. Now you could do that. But what the problem with this is, then it still adds some validity to their argument. But in my mind, the best way to handle this type of Review is simply say as the response that you did not service their property, that you did not give your product or service to them. Because at the end of the day, that's all that happened. They were trying to feign as someone that was a customer. They had never gotten service from us. Therefore, I'm simply going to respond back with a response that says, look, we've never serviced your property. If we have, please contact us. We'd love to make it right. We don't like customers to be disappointed and we love to make that right with you. So give us a call, give them your contact information. Now, you might know that it's your employee or potentially a customer that hates your guts or a competitor or something like that. But instead of being triggered by that, realize that customers are going to be going to their first and your response to that is going to be tremendous. And if you literally say, like this is random, you know, sometimes random, you know, Sally Pants 49 or Cherry, Cherry Picker 36 is the name of the username that's leaving a review and you have no idea who it is. And if they're not willing to, who have the guts to put their name on the review, I am going to use that response. And that is, look, we've never done service for you. We have no record of you inside of our system. We've looked up your property name and we cannot find you. If we have let you down, we've done service, please reach out to us. Here's our contact information. We do not want customers to be unhappy and we want to make it right if we've done something wrong. That type of response, I could care less about whoever wrote the review. I could care less about what they think. I'm caring about the other hundred thousand people. They're going to read that review and then my response to it, and then make a judgment as to whether or not they want to do business with my company. Remaining professional, telling the truth, admitting fault when you actually did make a failure, and proving to the rest of customers that when you make do something wrong, you're going to make it right. And then for everyone else, for everyone that you did not do service for, that is lying, is trying to just tear your company down and they're a competitor, a past employee, or some random person, you have no idea who they are. So simply reply back saying, hey, if we did mess up, please contact us. But we have no record of doing service for you inside of our system based upon your name and your ad and name and your contact Information provided here, we cannot find you in our system. In my opinion, that's the best way to handle it.

Hopefully that equips you guys to deal with one star reviews coming into your business business. Now let's hear about how gas prices skyrocketing can actually affect your day to day business. But before that, as we're going into the spring rush, you're going to need some quality marketing material. So I would check out lawncaremedia.com It's a great place to get door hangers, flyers, postcards and so much more. So check that out for this spring rush. Get your marketing on point@lawn caremedia.com but let's jump into it and hear how you need to prepare for for the rising gas prices.

These are your new prices. Here we go.

Hey everyone, my name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 85 locations around North America and today I'm talking about this massive inflation and fuel prices going through the roof. And I'm not getting on the bandwagon of this is a horrible thing. We need to charge extra fees. I'm going to be showing the rationale why unfortunately a lot of people have not ran the numbers and they're overreacting to something that's extremely minuscule to what actually is moving the needle in their business. And so every single Facebook group, every single channel that is in the lawn care landscape community home service improvement where we have vehicles and trucks going out, every single one of these right now is blowing up with like what's your fuel surcharge and what are you charging extra right now? Are you raising prices because of the fuel costs? I'm gonna prove to you today that fuel costs going up even dramatically is not moving the needle very much in your business. And you'd be much better off spending that time, energy and money that you're going into like figuring out all these systems for improving your fuel consumption and just focusing on improving your sales and your hiring. That would be much better use of your time. And people are just spending way too much thought and time and energy into something that's short term. This is going to go away. And honestly it just does not move the needle much in their business. Alright, the one local Augusta Lawn Care that we have has 15 vehicles. And yeah, we'll probably spend an extra $500, $600 a month in fuel, but that should not be a make or break in your business. If a half a percent or 1% of your revenue going out the door to fuel is Breaking the business, you have bigger problems, you have bigger fish to fry and bigger problems that should be dealt with than just fuel. Like if your margins are so slim, you can't go from 20% profit to 19 and a half percent profit without breaking the business. We got bigger problems that we got to deal with. So I'm going to actually break down the numbers because unfortunately I know most people have not done this. And I know this because they keep freaking out about fuel and I need to have fuel surcharge and they're saying long emails about fuel surcharges to their customers and it doesn't even matter. So let's do the math. Let's assume per vehicle, we're going to have 20 miles per day on this vehicle. Now I'm just going to assume one person's in this truck. If you wanted to do two people in this truck, the impact that fuel has even less. But let's just, just follow me for a second here, alright? We're gonna do 20 miles per day on this vehicle. Now what this assumes is that you have a relatively tight route. And I'm assuming either go 10 miles to a landscape job and then 10 miles back, that would mean 20 miles. Or it would could also potentially mean that if you have a mowing route and you do like five or six miles away from your shop, you do a mowing route, you're doing, you're driving a few miles around and you come back. I feel like this is actually really liberal. 20 miles in a day on a truck, you're doing more than that per truck. Your route is not dense enough. You really start honing in your marketing on several neighborhoods, a smaller radius. I want to focus on like 1, maybe 2 mile radius for my marketing. And it's not just because of drive time and windshield time and all the rest of it. It's also a matter of fuel if we're going to dive into it. So let's just assume 20 miles per day that we're going to drive on this truck. We're going to start assume that we make 10 miles per gallon on this truck. So therefore it's gonna cost us an extra 2 gallons of fuel or it's gonna take 2 gallons of fuel for us to drive these 20 miles in that day. So if we assume that there's an increase of $2 per gallon of fuel. So increase of $2 per gallon in fuel. So fuel prices went up by $2 per gallon, maybe from $3 to now $5 per gallon. Insane. Crazy. It is. But that's really just a $4 increase of extra expense on the day. 2 gallons of fuel, $2 per gallon extra $4 in expense. If we actually break this down to one employee, again, we're just talking about one employee in this truck, that means that half a dollar or 50 cents per labor hour. So if he works eight budgeted hours or eight labor hours out in the field, this individual, we literally just need 50 cents per per hour of labor is to make up this cost. So it's insane. So like let's say here for example, that this person is charging $50 per hour to the customer. Relatively low. But if you're charging the customer $50 per hour in terms of labor rate, that literally means that 1% of your labor rate, 1% of your labor is going to the extra cost of fuel. 1%. So we're all like focused on like gotta get fees. And I would just raise your prices because guess what, look what happens here if I just raise this $50, all right, this $50 per hour, if I just raise this to $55 per hour, you know, a 10% increase, 10 times 10x impact compared to just charging someone for the extra cost of the fuel. So I think people just like freaking out about fuel right now and they're doing surcharges and $2 surcharges here and all the rest of it. Just tell your customers that due to the inflation, due to things going up in price and due to fuel and wages and all the rest of it. You don't even have to tell them that. Just tell them, hey, these are new prices. People are becoming numb to the fact that everything is going up in price. You do not need to give them a long explanation. Tell them, hey, these are your new prices. Here we go. And if you're starting, if you're doing landscape and one time projects, just raise your labor rate and roll. Doing that takes a lot faster than figuring out what surcharge is gonna be. $2 or $4. Am I gonna charge a temporary increase in price because of fuel? Like it doesn't matter. And at the end of the day, even if you didn't move your prices, if 1% of your labor rate going out the door to extra cost of fuel is gonna sink your business, we got bigger problems. And if you put two people in this truck, it goes down half. So I think people are miscontrued. And if you really need help raising your prices, landscapebusinesscourse.com has a bunch of templates in there that will help you one of them is the price increase letter that we have used hundreds of times and had a massive success rate. Literally only a couple percent of our customers that we raise prices on end up leaving and we raise prices significantly at times and we almost do it every single year. So there's a price increase letter inside the course. There's also a whole bunch of other templates. Like there's one in there. It's an employee handbook, has 30 pages of what we use for our employees handbook and covers every policy you could possibly think of. If you're trying to hire someone, you want to make sure it's done legally. And you have everything in writing in terms of breaks and start times and how uniforms work and you know, everything from lactation breaks to smoke breaks to how being late is handled. All of that's inside of those manuals. And that's just two templates I mentioned there. There's a whole bunch of other ones in there. I think they'll be really helpful for you. I don't talk a lot about a lot about it, but landscape business, businesscourse.com is a great resource. Check that out today. Also, if you want to talk more about raising your prices, check this video out here. It's a great guide for how to do that, why you should be doing that right now. And I am a proponent of raising prices. Just don't freak out because of a 1% tiny increase of fuel. It's not a big impact to your business. I do believe you should be raising your prices because another 10 other things like fuel that are going up in price like labor, cost of the trucks, etc. But just freaking out about fuel right now and adding fuel surcharges and spending time and energy on that is an absolute waste of time. We'll see you tomorrow.

Hopefully that puts you a little bit more at ease about these gas prices. And as always, check out Mike Andes on YouTube or we're putting out daily videos and you can always catch them here on the Lawn Care Business course podcast Listen while you work Edition.