Benefits of Joining Augusta - with Existing LARGE Business!

Now admittedly, this is not the type of video I really enjoy making. Typically I talk about numbers and the business. Today I'm talking about Augusta Lawn Care because this was the most upvoted comment on a recent post I made asking what type of video you wanted me to make on the whiteboard. And I said I would make the video for the person that had the most up comments. And Brent the Great had a great comment because he's Brent the Great. So he made a great comment and the comment was why should someone join Augusta Lawn Care that already has a big business? And so first and foremost, let me just say right up front, I am extremely biased by you doing what I'm going to talk about in this video. I have financial incentive for you to join Augusta Lawn care. I own 100% of the company, so that's the first thing. Second thing is the best thing, the best way to figure this out is talk to other franchisees because a lot of them had businesses before joining Augusta and some of them had million dollar businesses before joining Augusta Lawn Care. So, so talk to them. Now I would typically say names, but I don't want to overburden them with calls and things like they gotta run their own business too. So if you're gonna reach out to franchisees, please just be respectful of their time. They're all very, very kind, but they're trying to run their business too. But let's go ahead and jump through the five things that I thought of really quickly this morning like two seconds ago, of why someone would join if they already have an existing business that's doing 5, 600,000 in revenue or even millions in annual revenue. Why would you join Augusta Lawn Care? Alright, number one, again, I don't like talking about stuff because it just makes me, I feel like I'm selling stuff. I promise you I'm answering the question to the best of my ability and I feel like I have a good understanding because I have eight locations, I have big locations, I have small locations. But please talk to other franchisees. Number one is the valuation and financing. From a valuation perspective, your business is going to have a higher valuation being part of a franchise. The bottom line is until you get about to 10 to $15 million in annual revenue, your valuation will be better with a franchise. The reason for that is because it really takes $10 to $15 million in annual revenue to build systems out in terms of the office and admin and the backend systems for marketing. To be able to actually present this to someone who is wanting to Buy your business and say, oh, it's worth a lot of money. Until then, it's usually not worth much more than the assets of the trucks and vehicles. Honestly, if you look at how many small businesses are sold, it's usually for about.

A touch above that for goodwill and for branding or client list or contact list. But valuation is higher for franchising because the potential buyer has more confidence that, number one, the systems are in place and that when the owner is removed from the business that the business can still operate. They're not as concerned about, okay, if it's Larry's lawn care and Larry leave, what happens to the business? Or what is Larry not telling me? Because he has the advantage of knowing all the information, whereas the potential buyer doesn't have the information. As a franchisor, we're able to give the buyer a lot of just peace of mind knowing, hey, like, we can vet these numbers, we can validate these numbers as a third party and give you all the information because we don't have any financial incentive whether you join as a franchisee or if the current franchisee continues their term, we simply can validate the numbers for a potential buyer and give a huge amount of trust. I personally bought into a franchise, Anytime Fitness before I started Augusta Lawn Care. And the number one reason was because the franchisor could validate all the numbers. The number of members, the number of members, the number of training clients, all the revenues for the past three years, they could validate all of that for me. So it put me at ease and I was willing to pay a top dollar back then, top dollar to be able to buy and do a gym franchise. We've now doubled that revenue. And if I were to ever go sell the business, the same thing would apply. I would be asking for probably the top half percent of valuations of gyms in America. But I would be able to get that because my franchisor would be able to validate all the numbers and be able to show it to the potential buyer. The financing is the same exact thing is true when you have an operating agreement and a franchise agreement to be able to show to a bank, they are much more likely to give you financing because it improves the confidence level of them. Just knowing that you're following systems, you have procedures, there's back end systems in place and that if you get hit by a bus, their financing, the loan that they give to you is more secure because there is back end systems in place to help support the business. It's also when you have the SBA Small Business Administration much more friendly to franchising when it comes to SBA loans. For S7A or 504 loans, mostly 7As or micro loans. There's a micro loan, there's a 7A program. They're much more lenient to give financing to a franchise business. And I know this for a fact because I applied for the locations that I am starting just to see how the process went. And as soon as I was able to say, look, if I sign all these franchise agreements, is this going to help me? And I said, yes, please sign them. I never got the loan, but I went through the process and trust me, when they saw the franchise agreement, they made sure that it was in my financing packet because it definitely helps me in the whole process of finding financing. So it's much simpler. I wouldn't say simpler. It gives the financing team and the underwriters a lot of confidence knowing that you have dozens of legal papers, you have things in place and systems behind you and you're not just making things up on the fly. Okay, number two is for multiple locations. I have eight locations. We have several owners that have multiple locations inside of Augusta Lawn Care. I think next year will probably be the first time we get three plus locations, but there's quite a few that already have two. But if you're joining, you already have a million dollar business. Multiple locations is what I would be the main reason I personally, from a financial perspective would be joining Augusta Lawn Care. And that's the ability to be able to have a regional chain of 10, 15 locations and being able to have. Not have to go buy a shop space and an office. You can literally buy or rent some land behind a store that you can park your stuff because you don't need an office with utilities and computers and phones and finding an office team and training an office team. You have Command center on the back end to be able to help with all of that. And we can do everything from emails to payroll to estimates to literally manage everything. And so when I go out and get my general managers, I don't have to worry about them understanding backend systems and advertising and how to put their website, website together and anything like that, because that's all handled by Command center in the back end and so I can scale much faster. It'd be very difficult to start two or three locations independently by yourself with goes to Lawn Care. I'm starting four new locations in like the same couple weeks. Right. I just did right now. And the reason that's possible is cause I just gotta find the GMs and plug them into the system. And that leads me to number three, and that's training for your general managers. So as you get multiple locations, you can just send your general managers to training and in one week they're gonna get caught up on everything that an owner would otherw. A regular franchisee would otherwise be trained for our initial training. So you can literally just send them here and if they work out, great. If not, you find a new gm, you throw them here for another week of training and they come back and they're ready to go. So it's way better than you having to find somebody and then train them up for three, four weeks trying to kind of put things together and then they don't work out and you're like, oh man, I'll just wait till next year. It's easier to find a GM and then just send them to training. And then they have to pass certain tests at training just to be qualified to run your location. So they have to pass a software test as well as a overall systems test. And if they don't do those things, they can't ever actually start a location. So it's a great way to vet your GMs and make sure they're caught up to a certain level to be able to actually run the location efficiently. Number four, if you're joining and you already have an existing business that's pretty established, teaching other people and being part of the community is probably very important, I would say. And a reason why you would join Augusta is when you start teaching the guys who are new, there's definitely a level of number one, just fulfillment because you're able to help other people do what you've done. And number two, there is definitely you iron out the systems and understand the systems more when you teach other people. And the advantage we have inside of Augusta Lawn Care is we're all using the same systems. We're all using the same email templates and automations and we use all command center because we use all the same stuff, P4P. And we use all that. The language that we use is the same. So when you're teaching other people, you actually begin to understand and learn the systems much more. And you're better at then training your crew and your team because you are constantly training new owners on how to do these systems. I know this for a fact because when I was really young, I skipped grades in school. And the reason I attribute that to is because I did kindergarten three times. And by doing that I Got the fundamentals down so much that from grade one and on, I was always the one that would be training and teaching my peers. And, you know, when I was finished my math, I would then help everyone else do their math. And what actually happened? I ingrained the skills and the fundamentals of, you know, Common Core, English and math and all these other things that I. It became much more part of me. Because teaching it just takes the system that you learn to a whole other level instead of just doing it yourself. Teaching, you have to figure out, okay, there's. They come back with certain objections or problems that you didn't think of, and then you gotta kinda think on your feet and come up with a solution. By doing that and teaching other owners and being part of the community, that's what really unlocks a lot of learning in my opinion. And honestly, the community, Augusta Lawn Care is nothing to do with me. It's simply the greatest community, in my opinion, in the lawn care landscaping industry. There's a great group of people and we weed people out simply if they are not good community members. And we've closed two locations because they were not embodying the values of Augusta Nation. They were paying their fees, they were actually growing their business, but they weren't good people in the community and we went ahead and let them go regardless with our life. Number five is the financial sense. It makes a lot of sense to join Augusta Lawn Care. If you're making a million dollars in annual revenue and it's a $1,200 per month commitment, that's all it is. If you want to use Command center, you can, and that's an extra cost. But the actual monthly fee, the $1,200 that you're going to pay, makes a lot of sense. When you're doing a million plus, it makes more and more sense the bigger you get because at a million dollars in annual revenue, you're going to spend $14,400, that. Right, $14,400 in a year on franchise fees, which is like 1.4% of your revenue. So it makes a lot of sense. And for that 1.4%, you're getting your website, you're getting access to Command center, you're getting all these different tools and trainings in terms of the academy, all of your marketing material, all this stuff is done for you. And the ability to send people to training, all that stuff for like 1.4% of your revenue. It's a great royalty. Okay? The math makes more and more sense the bigger you get because we don't charge a royalty. We don't charge 5, 6% plus a marketing spend. We don't do that. We charge $1,200 a month, and that's it. So makes more sense, especially if you're using like p4psoftware.com because you get that for free. Everyone inside of Augusta Nation gets P4P for free. That's $200 a month right there. And so if you do that and then like even Lawn care web design, that's $400 a month. So, well, $400 plus $200 for P4P, just the software and the website, immediately you save yourself $600 a month if you would just go get those services elsewhere. So it just makes more and more financial sense, honestly. And that leads me in the vertical integration part of things. As Augusta grows over the next several years, you're gonna see more and more vertical integration, whether it be the tax side of things that we offer at home, service cpa, whether it be the media side and the marketing side, whether it be p4psoftware.com or copilot CRM.com these are all things I'm building out to vertically integrate for our franchisees. Down the road we'll have a bank. Down the road we'll have a whole bunch of other services. But being part of Augusta will always give you the vertical integration where everything fits together the most seamless. For example, with p4psoftware.com the majority of users are still Augusta Lawn Care franchisees. Why? Because all aspects of our business model is built around P4P. So it makes it easier for them to adopt things like pay for performance, because our whole business model is built around it. And so it's easier for them to use our tax service because command center runs all their invoices and they run runs all of their books and their expense categorization and their P&Ls and their quarterly reports. They do all of that. So it's really easy to run their taxes. We can give them a discount. They don't have to pay what we have to charge at home. Service cpa because they're vertically integrated. Everything is being done inside the system. And as we begin to scale up Augusta Nation and we begin to have more and more services that we can offer, the bulk of those discounts and the bulk of the efficiencies gained will come through Augusta Nation because they're vertically integrated. So copilot CRM.com will vertically integrate with P4P. P4P will integrate with the website, all these things will integrate. But I guarantee you that less than a quarter percent of people outside of Augusta Nation are going to actually get all these services. And if they did, if they did, it would make absolutely no financial sense. They should just join as being a part of Augusta nation for the 1,200 bucks a month. But from a vertical integration standpoint, I truly believe that all of these pieces that we put together, whether it be the CRM, whether it be P4P, all these things that we're building, I believe putting it all together is what is going to make an incredible business model that in five years will be looked at as like, that's unique. And furthermore, it's very hard to compete with because putting it all together is the magic. Taking one piece out, taking one part of the system out, like Profit sharing or P4P, taking one part of that out is gonna break the whole thing, in my opinion. And so vertical integration of all these different things that we're building with software and the systems that we have at Augusta Nation together is where the power is at. And we'll always offer these to the public for a premium that we can fund these sort of developments. But it makes a lot more financial sense the bigger you get to be able to just tap into the program, pay the $1,200 a month, be part of the community, have the training, the resources, all the marketing material, website being taken care of. That's really what augustination is all about. And I hope they answered your question. So that was the highest ranked question I got through it. Comment below if you have any more questions about that specifically. But going forward, we can go to the other questions that were asked on that question post that aren't about Augusta. So if that was really boring to you, I apologize. If it wasn't boring to you, Watch this video here. Talks more about why you might want to join Augusta. And until then, we'll see you.