BIG DEBT is DROWNING this $1M Business

We're above lawn care in the technical sense.

This is a joke. Today we're in North Carolina visiting Phil and Patrick with proactive pool solutions.

Truthfully, I just want answers. Guys. Count on us. That's a real thing.

The business is on Track to do $1 million in revenue this year. Right now, you have this huge vision of making strong men.

It's okay to be a man, and.

You have absolutely no plan of how.

To make that happen.

I burdened myself with the responsibility of, like, getting married.

But cash is tight.

Revenue does drop.

Payroll is tight. Every time we need to push this.

Year, we have problems up front.

On day, they are $160,000 in debt. That is 24% interest.

Big, big boy.

And they're trying to get a $250,000 loan from the SBA. This is just business. There's no definition. So the mission means nothing. That word is important. Making strong men is different.

A little bit insecure. It's, like, shameful.

This is the business Turnaround show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, where we have over 190 locations around the world. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. I just think in the media. I know within a week we could this problem from a cash perspective. Our goal is to give Phil and Patrick a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks.

It takes way longer than you ever think. It's way harder. It's way more humbling. We'll do it this week. 100% put on camera.

I've been running proactive by myself, basically, since 2019. We need a second. A second set of hands doing all the extra stuff that I don't have time for. We're supporting two families with five people off the same business that we were supporting just my family last year.

I don't know how much of a cash draft there is, but it seems like mostly this is they hit a plateau of growth because their churn customers leaving got as high as new customers coming in, and they plateaued in terms of the number of customers they have. Then they started dumping money into Facebook ads, Google Ads, et cetera. And it really still hasn't re energized their growth.

We are going through a period of growth that is definitely challenging. And it seems like every. Every month we're running, we're running into the end of our end of our budget before. Before. Once done, we're always running into cash flow. We're always razor thin.

So this is kind of like very classic. $700,750,000 business and plateaued because our churn equals now new customers. And so the question is either a, I can get more customers, or B, I can stop existing customers from leaving. Either you need to improve your service, that is your churn, so people stop leaving, or b, we need to get more customers at a faster clip.

750 in annual revenue. We spend every dollar that comes in. We're focused on growth, and we were pret.

Break even.

We've been pretty much break even for about. About three years.

Between 750,000 annual revenue and 1.5 million, they've really got to make the jump to 1.5. The reason, because, like, at 750, it's not big enough of a business to have two owners. An admin person, and they hire a general manager. I don't know what's up with that. The business is not big enough to be able to sustain them both. So I see that probably is the problem we're going to be facing. How's it going, man? How you doing, brother?

Good to meet you.

Good to see you, brother.

Good to see you. I'm Phil. This is Patrick.

Cool.

Is this your house then?

This is my house, yeah.

Super nice.

Yeah. Keeping expenses low, operating out of.

If I had to guess, we're gonna get there, and there's not gonna be clear roles. They're gonna be kind of stepping each other's toes. Some of them, they're gonna be a little bit of sales, a little bit of operations, or a little bit of admin. Some of them lead the team meeting. Some do the hiring. Like, it's gonna be a little bit of all everything, if I had to guess. And a lot of times that is just a result of having two owners that have the same skill set.

Patrick lives 30 houses down.

Oh, cool.

He just moved down last year. Trying to bring two families together and make it work. So it's a big, big thing.

Hey, Patrick. Good to meet you, man. Absolutely.

So that lets us know, like, what is the problem they solve? How technical are they? And are they going to send a video and put themselves out there?

And that's why now we're at this problem where this business is doing $750,000 annual revenue and still not big enough for two owners to be able to coexist.

We don't have seven trucks here normally. Just so my neighbors know.

Just Monday morning, we all meet here, and then we go from there, and they all take the trucks home.

So most like pool supplies inside here and then office.

We try to Keep. We have like back on the back. We're working on it. Making it somewhere that they can stock up once a week and get everything they need for the week.

Water blocks. So those are going to be for the closings. So when you come back to grab those, there's a blue slip in for the water blocks and Glova's cleaner. Okay. So you'll come back tomorrow to grab those two things.

Don't take them today.

It's difficult though, because the trucks are kind of a limiting capacity. We can't say you have to have what you need for the week because it really depends whether. Did we get a lot of rain? We're gonna need more salt. Like, we can't. We run smaller, smaller trucks. The F150 is an anomaly. We run like Tacomas and we have one small ranger, so we can't have 2,000 pounds of chemicals on us.

Can I see the. Yeah, come on in. Yeah.

I'll say a lot of. Lot of chairs from our meeting this morning. We pack them inside.

This is the part of, like running the process. Like, we want to keep getting better and like no change can be too big or too small. And what's our vision? What are we doing to say all on three. One, two, three.

Making men.

Right?

But we're here, right? We want to get tough. We want to do the right thing. We want to be capable, capable men who fix and solve problems.

Sound good?

Let's get loaded up. We want people to be strong and capable, and we want them not to shirk to the lowest possible expectations. I like to tell people I was a late bloomer. I was not a go getter in college. I went through all my four years of college without a job until I burdened myself with responsibility of like, getting married, having a family. That's when like the burden, the yoke is what makes the man go.

Bear the burden. And that's okay. And it is going to be hard, and you are going to struggle through that. That's the point of it. That's the point of everything. It is hard.

Next we have a repair technician who does just repairs. And that's something that we've gone back and forth on. We obviously want to teach the techs to be more capable. The vision is like, we want to men who are capable problem solvers in the world. We don't want them to just be stuck at this maintenance technician where all they do is check chemicals, clean the pool. And we've gone back and forth about, like having them learn and do and then Tracking, like, who's qualified to do what. It's just like a big, big headache for us to track and figure out. We started thinking about it really, like, needing to have a kind of thing to point people to.

If we're looking for unicorns who can do that. Right. The reality of that equation is we build less men. We have figured some things out, and we just want to share that with our guys and as many guys as we come into contact with to just say, like, it's okay, it's okay to be a man.

And if you're making the primary goal of the business to make strong men, then technically this business could be super successful and not make any money. If you need a turnaround and you're accomplishing that goal. What about the money part?

We want to build men, right? So that's why we want to get bigger. We think we have something where we can affect change. We just happen to clean pools, right? Our vision, which I messed up forever. Our vision, right, Is building men. Our mission is we do carefree pool. We wanna serve the clients which happen to clean pools.

The secondary goal becomes in jeopardy if the first one doesn't happen, which is making money. I don't know how, like, how much thought they put into, like, their goal. And then more importantly, it's a function of are they super happy because they're hitting that secondary goal of making strong men and not make money.

Carry heavy things, pick things up and put rocks down.

Yeah.

Defeating the village, right? That's real. That's real. You have to go hunt. If you do not produce, the village doesn't eat. We're not far from that. We have stuff, but we're not far from that. And when men don't do that, that's why everyone's lost. That's how things get lost.

What's our secondary goal?

I don't really have a secondary goal because it gets confusing. Everyone should know what the goal is very simply. So for Augusta's change level professional in the industry, for the media teams make home service business owners rich. It's like, oh, that's like, we can make sense of that. At Proactive Pool Solutions, their goal is to build strong men. If you want to build a strong bank account, go to mikeandys.com blackfri It's a completely free training event where I'm showing you how to grow a business from zero to three million dollars in any home service industry. Go to mikeandies.com blackfriday sign up and everyone that shows up gets a 597.

Dollar gift, the more men we can bring in to that entry level and execute that job well. But also we need the repair tech to be firing and executing because we need like a path to six figures. Right. We're competing like it's a weird, we're above lawn care in the technical sense, but like we're competing with Plumbing H Vac. Like, how do we get a guy to make 100 grand?

We lost two techs this summer.

Yes.

One of them went to become an electrician. One of them went to become an H vac tech.

I think it needs to change one word. I know it seems small, but it's tripping me up to say that we want to create easy pool ownership by.

Creating strong men. That's a big statement versus just being. We want to create easy pool ownership and strong men. By saying buy it means that we need to create strong men in order for easy pool ownership to happen. So that needs to occur first. Which means if you have churn, which they do at the employee level, it means it's very unlikely you're ever going to be able to get to the second part of your mission, which is to create easy pool ownership, which is also the way you make money. So I would rather that be like the primary thing is like the business exists to make the pools clean and make that like the. And then a byproduct of that is that we create strong men. But it's just like maybe to them it's more important to create strong men.

Great.

Well, as it currently states, in order for them to make easy pool ownership easy, they have to have strong men. That's a much harder thing to accomplish.

This is a career path like you can grow into and you can make six figures and you can, you can make this, you can build a family in this industry.

Right.

It's like communicating that to the guys coming in is like our bottleneck where like we don't have that solidified. The repair tech is like, we want everybody to come in and learn how to clean pools and do the important chemistry stuff to build the proactive process to understand it.

Is it usually a day or two of training before you pull out? How long? How long?

For this company it takes like two months. It's a long training time because they want people to really know what they're doing. Most companies might be like two weeks and you kind of just gotta fill in the gaps.

Yeah, we're trying to extend it, we're trying to get better. Caleb was in the truck.

He's trying To I'm trying to cut it down.

We had a talk, right? If we can fix these problems, like that is the singular missing thing. If we said if we have 100 fills, everything gets fixed. Right. That's our thing.

Yeah, it's difficult whenever one partner just leaves for a couple years because all the team starts to rely on the one partner. And then when that person comes back. Now one partner is kind of holding all of the cards and like doing all the work. So it'll be interesting to see like what the circumstances were that you'd leave your business for two years, come back and then just expect to be able to still be a partner at 50. 50, if that's what it is. Give me kind of the rundown. So 2019, y' all started. Did Patrick start with you or did he come halfway through?

No. So Patrick, basically we were talking. I was working for another pool company. We've been friends for years beforehand. Funny story, he was like, talk to me about pools. And I'm like, oh, you don't, you don't want a pool so much to do and you don't want that. And he's like, no, no, no. I mean, like, would you ever do this as a business? And I was like, oh, yeah, definitely. It's a really good business. So like, that's how he kind of started. I was working in the pool industry. Patrick basically has always been business minded and thinking of things to do.

I was in an investor mode. Yeah, I made one good one.

He basically provided the seed capital for us to get started. He was in New York, remote, so it's just me, me on the ground by myself. Basically. That first year, last year, he started coming down once a month. Basically he would fly into town, we would do 48 hours of work, basically sleep a couple hours in there and then he would fly home. So we did that for almost a whole year. Was a whole year.

It was like a year and a half.

Hired our first employee in like November, fired that guy in three weeks. It was like not the right fit. Figured it out, then hired somebody again. And we've had employees ever since.

We have family, you know, a couple other businesses. Like, how do we do this? We just started Getting up earlier, 3:30, 4:00', clock, try to get it a couple hours in before the families get up to just get a half day before everybody's going to try to get progressively better the first year.

136. Yeah, 139, something like that. We've been at like 400 to 600 for the last two or three years.

Last year they had a negative profit on the profit and loss statement. This year they seem to be doing better, but cash is still very tight. Looks like they're trying to do profit first. So they have like five different bank accounts. The OPEX account has a little bit of money, like 25, 30 grand, but everything else is pretty much nothing.

We've recognized our biggest thing is people. Like, how do we train people? How do we get people to understand what our process is? Because we do things very differently than the industry. That's currently what we believe is our limit right now. It's like, how do we streamline the process to get somebody in to understand what we do differently, why we do it differently. 85% of the pool industry is just one guy in a truck. That's not what we're trying to do.

The business is not big enough to sustain that kind of overhead. If you go to 1.5 million, it can. They're gonna have to grow to that size in order to keep two owners in the business, not on the trucks. As it stands, you have two owners. So three overhead people, four people out in the field. That's not great. I would like to see at least. At least 6 people in the field to 3 people in admin and overhead. The fact that we're near one to one and we're not even close to one to two, like, I'd be pushing them very hard to get. Try to get to a one to two ratio as soon as possible. It's just gonna be very difficult to have that many overhead and admin people with so few techs.

We do things very differently.

So what's different that you do compared to what they've learned in the past?

So like most. Most companies like Splash and Dash, they just. They keep the pool blue. Our whole idea is like, we want to provide carefree pool ownership. Right? We want to make it so like everybody says, pools, money pit, you don't want that. But the main reason that happens is because pool companies just aren't doing the things they need to do to. To make sure that the pool water itself isn't degrading the equipment and causing problems. So the way that we take super.

Aggressive water, nothing can grow in that. Of course, it can be blue. Yes, perfect, but perfectly blue. It's going to die.

One thing that makes our company different than, like, almost all the companies around here, at least we do lsi. So we're like balancing the whole water to try to prevent it from becoming corrosive. Or scale forming. This company is like the best I've been at from a quality standpoint. The last company I was working at, like you had to be in and out for like in 30 minutes. So you can't really do anything.

We do a chemical process a little different.

This is basically like taking a small sample from the pool. Like right here I'm measuring the chlorine and the ph level. We can see the, this is the chlorine level and this is the ph. And based off the color it aligns with, that's your reading. This has high chlorine and high ph. And that's the thing that makes this company different. Most companies don't balance it like that. They'll just keep it at a standard range. The ranges were made for like Southern California, which obviously different climates across the US is all different. You can't really balance it like that because you. The pool could look really good, but it could be also like super corrosive to all the equipment and start taking minerals out of the grout and out of the plaster. This is another thing most places don't do is like we actually measure it out and dilute it before putting it in the water because the acid is dense, it'll sink straight down and start destroying the plaster. If you don't do this, most companies just pour it straight into the water, which can damage the plaster and leave all sorts of marks. There's a lot of nuanced things that people don't realize.

We try to make it as easy for the homeowner as possible.

And we want to get that process done quickly, identify it, execute it, you know, the whole process. And that's multi layered. That's what we've, that's been a big challenge growing from like Phil just doing that whole process to now layers of the team doing that process. What's lost in the communication? Telephone, who's doing what, like streamlining that.

When you have two partners, you have to keep growing, otherwise there's not enough meat on the bone. Like this is an ideal business to have $750,000 in annual revenue, five, six employees and one owner. When you have two owners that are both going to be taking a seventy, eighty thousand dollar a year salary, now all of a sudden it gets a little skinny.

And to be honest, we're balancing right because like we are each married, we're trying to be good husbands also and be good fathers. And that isn't just working. 24, that wouldn't work. How do we do it? And like we've already started at 4:00'. Clock. There's no more candle left to burn. Right. Can't go later. Can't go. Can't not sleep. We've tried a couple times. Doesn't work.

I'll be interested to see how much they make. What percentage of revenue is from repair versus maintenance? Because they make double the hourly rate for repair. But I know they're also trying to simplify services, et cetera. What percentage of the revenue right now is from, like, the maintenance versus the repairs?

It's like 55% maintenance and then like 45% is repairs.

And so do you get a lot of customers that are saying, hey, can you just turn on my pool, get it up to spec and I'll take over?

We try not to do that.

Yeah, we get the calls, but that's.

Not our client, so we don't really do one offs. We're looking to build a relationship with a homeowner who wants someone to. Who wants carefree pool ownership.

The 4L framework talks about the four different reasons why every home service business will stop growing. It's either because of a lack of liquidity or cash. A lack of leads, a lack of labor, or a lack of leadership. So we'll start with liquidity. We'll go through each one, kind of find us some bottlenecks, and then from there figure out, okay, which of these ones can we actually attack and create a plan around? From a cash perspective, we're pretty tight because we're probably about two weeks worth of cash flow. Does that ebb and flow with the season? Like, I feel like this is usually our time where we should be the highest.

Our problem with liquidity is we've incorporated two families now. Yeah. So, like, we're tight. Our expenses are always one step ahead of our growth. Right now, yeah, we're about two weeks of cash flow. Payroll is tight every time we don't have a month's revenue.

When it comes to liquidity, I see any business that has less than one month of revenue in the bank as a constraint. And right now they have less than two weeks of revenue as cash in the bank, leading to a lot of problems when it comes to payroll and getting really tight on cash.

We realized too, like, getting Phil out to help build the business is like paramount. Right. Like I said, like a week ago, I'm like, you can never clean a pool again. Repairs we still need here and there. But like, never ever clean a pool.

Again if the repairs are firing. That's the thing. It's like cash flow is Good. So like our maintenance covers payroll, Right. But then all the other expenses have to be covered by the repairs portion. So it's like if we're not doing 6,000 a week in repairs, it gets really tight. Our expenses are just always one step ahead.

Are those at $6,000 a week? Is that coming in from one off, like, hey, my heater's broken or is that from your existing clients?

Existing clients finding issues.

Yeah, we very rarely like at this point take outside problems in the business. We've realized like this bottleneck, our repair process bottleneck. It's been the problem for forever, since Phil was not the person doing it. So like we finally just came into it like Phil being the estimator now in this process of like, okay, guys, give all the feedback, all the problems that they find in the field, we'll write up the estimates, call the clients, execute, and then fill the repairs.

The client calls do come in where it's like people looking for recurring maintenance, they do come in. Our current problem is like we can't train people fast enough and just keep them around long enough to make it so that we have that excess capacity. We're always like one, one step below where we need to be when it.

Comes to the next L in the 4L framework leads. The biggest problem I see is that more than half of the leads that are coming in, they're turning away because the customer thinks they only want a one time service.

We want to get to the point where we have capacity, extra capacity for growth. The timeline to train people takes us so long that like by the time we get one person trained, one person left to become an electrician, we get the next person trained, next person leaves to become an H vac.

Tech leads aren't the problem. Phone rings.

The fact that we're just turning them away or saying that we don't do that service is a huge opportunity to be able to capitalize on that revenue and get more customers with the revenue we get from those leads. From a liquidity perspective, we're consolidating kind of all the truck loans, I'm assuming.

Yes.

Into an SBA loan.

Yeah, we're working through that.

Is that a 7?

A 7A. Yeah.

And that is 160 total.

It's 325. Oh, so you're gonna get quite more capital. Yes.

Because you're about 160 currently in debt. Mostly truck debt. Yeah.

Actually have that right here.

And like the big plan is like we just this winter we realized too like where we are, we need to be able to push this winter revenue does drop a little bit.

One thing to keep in mind is that last year they actually lost money. On paper, they lost $5,000 on the P&L in 2024. In 2025, they've been able to grow their way sort of out of this problem and be a little bit more profitable.

75% stay year round. But some of those that stay year round do decrease frequency and service. Right now, they can't just fully execute because there's. There's barriers on every level. So, like, part of that extra is like, we are gonna increase our standards in the field, not only training wise, but like this goes into training. Like, if their environment is more controlled, they'll be able to execute. So it's like that would be like the four of us. Three of us, Phil, Kamil, Joshua and I, like going out into the field, making sure every set of our 180 clients is proactive, standard, labeled. So our maintenance technicians can just go execute next year.

We have responsibilities now that are bigger than just we can burden. We can't shoulder it by ourselves. Like, we need our team to help us.

Right.

There's no. We can't go back.

From the debt perspective, we have four trucks, it looks like, that have debt on them. Mostly new stuff. Tacoma's. That growth sucks cash. Getting three more trucks sucks cash. Having seven trucks and four employees sucks cash. And so right now, that's why they have this cash crunch. The web bank, you paid off a lot of that.

That's good.

Good chunk. Yeah. So we literally. We literally have like.

We.

I think we borrowed 75 and we have like 2020. It's even 23 now.

Awesome. And that was high interest. So good thing. Yeah, that's the one killing us. Yeah, let's go.

And that's the thing.

It's like, if this money is the.

Same cash flow, that was 24%.

Yeah.

Big, big boy QuickBooks, man.

They get you. Is that what it was? Oh, man.

Yeah.

That's $4,900 a month. But with everything at 7,300amonth, I'm assuming if you even got 260 or so for your SBA, you'd probably be at 3, 4, 9.

Yeah, I think it's about the same payment.

Okay.

Right now they're paying over $7,000 each month to loan payments. If they are able to get this SBA loan, it would extend the term out for 10 years and their monthly payment would go down to $4,000. This was giving them a Little more free cash flow to be able to grow the business. You would have an additional like, like 90,000. Correct. So you would use that as work.

Like to working capital, get through and to hire.

Yeah, because right now, this is the thing siphoning all the time for sure. If we just wipe this all out, we'd have an extra hundred grand.

Of course.

I think it's really interesting that if you just took away the $7,500 that they're paying every month right now in loan payments, there's actually a really profitable business. And this is really the decision you have to make in terms of growing really fast versus do I grow a little bit slower but more profitably? Because if they would have just taken an extra few years and just grown slower and not bought the new trucks not growing as fast, they might be in a position where they're only doing six or seven hundred thousand dollars this year, but have no debt and be making more in profit. Now, am I saying that everyone should do that?

No.

And debt is a great tool to grow fast. Just know that it's going to come at the cost of future profits because right now they're paying $100,000 a year in loan payments. So if we're at capacity and we have a bunch of leads, why don't we raise prices?

If we raise prices and we lose 25% of our clients, are we on top like I think? But we did, we went through this this spring. Raised prices. We didn't do everybody because there's clients.

Who did our 40 worst pools time wise.

40 out of the. Was it 200? We have no, we hit like 150 at the time.

40 out of 150.

Okay, so we raised price about 25%.

Yeah, correct. And like again, to your point, every business like crazy.

Yeah.

Two left. Two. We gave them an option to pay in full, keep that price. Two paid in full. Two left, 36. Fine, yes, we can get more profitable, but like, can we afford to lose 10, 15, 20 people? Like, truthfully, no.

We're in that, that tight zone.

Right. Well, here's the thing. You're either supply constrained or demand constraint. And right now you have no demand constraint because you have tons of leads coming in. I have heard there is no problem with that. And I happen to believe we can convert way more of those by using a better mechanism up front for these people that call for one offs. Because I would imagine it's probably 50% or 60% of people are just like, oh, I don't want maintenance, okay. Well, we can figure that out. We haven't really put any energy towards that because we've been supply constrained with labor. And so if this is the problem and we have no demand concern, we should raise prices. The reason I say that is because that extra profit is the thing that gives you the breathing room to feel like we can go expand. You're like, oh, no, no. Like once you get more customers, then we'll be expanding. You won't be profitable on those enough. Profitable enough on those customers.

We just still don't have the technique and the training to execute more leads that come in. Right. Like that's the focus.

Well, because if we got to the point where we lost 25% of our customers, which I don't think would happen, I think 5% will. But if that happened, you immediately switch from supply constraint to oh, we need more leads.

Right, yeah.

And then we could actually put some firepower towards that because right now it's harder from what I've heard, to train people, get and find people the supply side than it is to go out and get new customers.

Definitely.

Right.

And so is in that shifting just back to like, okay, shoot, now we need to go find customers instead of train our guys and execute day to day.

We can do both, right?

For sure.

I just mean in the media, I know within a week we can. You could solve this problem from a cash perspective. Like if you raise prices on 75% of people, but let's just call it, what would you raise price on the lowest 25%. So if you did 20 to 25%, if you lost 25% of customers, you'd get the same amount of money. But then you're like, well, we wouldn't have enough leads to keep the crew busy. Great, we will go solve that problem next. To solve the liquidity problem, we've gotta raise prices not just in our bottom 20 customers, but all other 80%. If you're telling me that the only reason you, you can't go out and get more leads and advertise is because you don't have enough employees to do the work. Well, let's reduce the work or make it more profitable. If you're at capacity, you either raise prices or you need to be going out and going into growth mode advertising, getting more customers. If you're trying to grow the business. I know, it's scary, no? Yeah. But like everything.

I just don't want to focus. Like, again, I feel like training the guys. Right. There's a gap. Like we've a simple metric in our what we do, our process, we realize the guys for years now weren't doing it. It's unfathomable. It's like not weed whacking.

Right. So why do you not train the guys though? When you're like, okay, I need to do X all these other things and train the guys. Why is it that we don't train the guys? It's cause all these other things need to get done so that we can make payroll this week.

Sure.

And so by taking away the stress financially on liquidity, it enables you to be like, oh, I don't, I don't. I have the cash to be able to go spend an extra couple days with this technician or do a one stop at all my customers house and label everything.

Right, right.

Because now I have the cash.

Right, Right.

You see, I'm saying yes.

Yes.

So that financial pressure, that financial pressure can cause what we think is the problem. Labor. Labor.

Labor.

No, no, no. If you had plenty of money in the bank, you would all probably have a longer meeting. You would probably talk about to each person a little bit more. You probably go with all of them, do better spot checking. You probably label everything better.

Don't tell me. We could have a longer meeting.

That's awesome.

Tremendous.

I'm on board.

I'm on board.

But financially afford the long meeting. Right?

Sure.

So it is a little bit of a chicken and egg thing, but I would say whenever someone is just yelling that we do not need leave, this is not a problem. But we can't get people and we can't keep them in terms of employees. We need to raise prices.

We know that, we hear that we did that and I feel like we probably just like we did that. But like maybe we didn't do it enough. That's what's tricky. Feel like we did. We really didn't. And it's like, what do we raise?

Like you said 1500amonth. It needs to be six.

That's the difference. We didn't do the whole list.

If I'm going into a demand constrained business, I would agree raise the bottom 25%. Because if some of them leave, it's like, okay, not a big deal. They were our worst customers anyways. But if you're, if you're supply constrained, which would mean you can't find enough technicians and we can't train them, they're leaving. I say raise all of them because your best customers look to you as the best vendor and your best customer is a person who is, as you said, price insensitive.

Yeah, absolutely.

So they should be able to have a price increase, and then by you having that extra liquidity, the extra cash, you do a much better service. Because to them, that ideal customer, they don't want terms.

Yeah, for sure.

They do not want a whole bunch of new technicians all the time. They don't want to be answering the phone by feedback. And so they are willing to pay raise prices.

Yeah, sure.

Across the board. 20%.

We'll do it this week.

100%.

Put on camera.

Let's go.

100%.

All right, let's go.

Still a little scary. I said. I was like. This week, you were like, dude, so hopefully we push a little quicker, but we also have some structure.

We'll come back to that. But I do think that it'll become then a leap, and I think we can solve that problem.

Yes.

All right. Labor. The next L in the 4L framework is labor. And right now, they see this is the constraint for them growing the business because they got lots of leads, or so they say. But right now, we can't get enough laborers and technicians to actually go do the work out in the field. At a high level, I have heard. I want a longer sales training process, and I want a slower training process. I'm this. I'm on this camp for certain services, and I think the. I think there's actually a way to kind of bifurcate this. But how long does it take right now if someone comes in here completely green?

We just did five weeks. Okay, five weeks. With a trainer in the truck.

With a trainer in the truck.

Correct.

And that's before they can do maintenance on their own.

Yeah. Okay.

What level of training is required in addition to that for them to do repairs? Like, a couple years haven't even gone there. Okay. All right, cool. This is where you have this gap right now. You have this huge vision of making strong men, and you have absolutely no plan, from what I've heard, how to make that happen. You've got to create a process to create someone that's green into a technician that can make a hundred grand. And there needs to be clear steps to do that.

Yes.

The reason people leave is because they feel like they're just a tech here for a year, two years, and they're doing the same thing. I'm gonna give them a stage by which they can move up in their career, and then they have the place where they're going. Otherwise, they do just look as like, I'm a technician, and then there's this repair person that I might Be.

Down the road. And they keep putting that in front of me, like, oh, yeah, you'll make a bunch of money. Well, that's years down the road.

Right?

Well, and then you create the same stages for that next level, right? It's like, here are the levels for the technician, here's the levels for a repair person. And like, then, then you're probably looking around 100 grand. Like, if you finish all of it, you know, it probably could take them four to five years to get there, right? But you're gonna create 15 stops along the way. And a certificate, a certificate that they can frame in their bedroom every single, single time they pass.

Next one surmountable task of like, I have to wait four years. Like humans can't do that.

Right.

I need to win this one month.

And even more so they just think you're lying.

Yeah, yeah.

What does it mean to have a strong man?

Yeah.

We have not defined this word. And if we have not defined this, like, is it making 100 grand that I'm a strong man? Is it, is it a function of like, muscle? Is it a function of person? There's no definition. So the mission means nothing because we have no definitions to it.

Like, I've done manly things and good things have happened. I have a wife, I have a beautiful family. We do need to define them better. That's a great point. You should learn something every day, you should sweat every day and you should put your hands on something, fix something every day. Like something like that. When I've not done those things as a man, bad things have happened.

Our goal, if it's to make strong men, we need to find what that is. That is what is the diploma, what is the certification, and then what is the steps all along the line to get there? So I'm gonna put, for the six week plan, I'm gonna create stages of success.

For tech and for repair person. That could be like five to 10 for each. I would do more than less. And I would also say that within five weeks is too long to wait for someone to go for stage one and stage two.

Yeah.

My question is, like, for that five week process, can we consolidate it down to three in any way, sh, shape or form?

Probably, yeah.

The same way I think about customers and getting them in the funnel and getting them through that as quick as possible, using over the phone estimates or instant quotes. I've got to think about great candidates that are out in the labor pool. How do I get them in my business as fast as possible, adding a whole bunch of Time to the equation and an entire week you could be losing out on those great employees.

You talk to every business owner like can't hire anyone, can't find good. That's ridiculous. We got 800 applications, applicants for our posts when we post it. And we want to dial that down. Like there's good people out there who want to work. Like we believe business owners aren't putting in the work to find the good people. Like we probably spend 10 hours before we even say are you a good fit for our company? And that's like to get that down to that guy. Like there's three of those, you know, the 30 hours to find one guy. So we believe there's plenty of those guys out there and we have them, they're good guys on our team. We just haven't had the system fully yet to plug them in. We can take a guy instead of going to school. You make 50 to 60 grand for a couple years while you learn and then you know you're on a path to that next step. Make six figures. We can progress someone in a career to then be the gm, you know, managing a few million dollar business. Once our process is great and our people process is great, then we can run.

We can't just go hire five people, right? It has to be at the right time in the right season with the right demand. And like that's where training comes in. It's like if we can know that we can hire somebody, spin them up in four weeks, we can hire someone and spin up ads at the same time to then have the demand for them to fill in. It's like you got to do, you're juggling, you got to do two or three things at the same time.

Yeah, definitely. It's like there was a human factor to it. It's like we couldn't do five people anyway. So my thought was I don't care if we lose five good people, we couldn't hire them anyway. So like if I can just find one good person at the end of this, let's put the hurdles up.

We used to take two to three weeks train, but we also would lose 30, 40 clients a year because we weren't providing the proactive process that I wanted.

One thing that I think can make it though, where you get the same level of training in five weeks, but you get it in two or three is if you have the cash ability to free you guys up to feel like you can go do better training. Because now instead of them just bumping along with a chance trainer For a week, where like maybe 20% of it is new information they're learning. You would actually like, hey, you're actually with me, and all we're doing is training. You could just create your training system and process to be much more quality control for you. And upsells, like talking to the customer. You could do the whole nine yards and make it seem very, very professional. But while doing that, they are getting trained. That goes back to the stages of success. One of our stages towards the end is that you train three other technicians through their first couple phases. So if you're trying to create a brotherhood or. And they're trying to create this. This aspect of the mission, it's like, well, training other people is actually part of that mission. And then I've got to. In order to say, like, you're trained and set the stamp, I need to have, like, actual processes, like stages for them to go through. And I would say, okay, let's just say it is five weeks. What are they learning to stay in week one? What are they learning in week two? What are they wearing? We need to have a curriculum.

Yes, yes.

Right. Let's just say it takes five weeks. But now we actually have a process that the trainer has to sign off on. And they're incentivized because it gives them the next stage of their career. And the tech trainee is incentivized to make sure they sign it so that they get the next stage of their career. And then you'd actually create an internal certification process. Like, you can name this, like, proactive. Like, because you guys have more of a technical thing, you could actually create certification in house. Yeah, Right. After five weeks, they should. There should be absolutely a diploma that they can frame at home that says they're a certain technician and has your name on it. Like, they're gonna go put it in their house, and that's something that's gonna go, like, on their resume. So it helps them.

Right.

If your goal is like, hey, we don't need to keep them here. We just want them to grow, Then give each of those five weeks a certain certification name and revolve around proactive. I think that would be huge from a retention perspective, then it's just a function of how do we get more people in that funnel. And right now, like, you're getting a lot of people to apply. What's that process look like when they come in from. Indeed, for example? Is that where you're running ads?

Yeah. So Indeed, basically our process, they. They get an automated text to go watch A video on our website. They watch the video. It's like four minutes long. We ask them at the end of the video, we ask them basically, what's your favorite move off the diving board? We just want to confirm that we've watched this. So they have to put that into the form.

I made a video myself and sent it to them. I move on to the next part of the process, which is I went through to an in person interview and then they had me do a ride along with Phil and that's when they gave me the offer letter.

So like 58% went through, actually filled it out. Right. They answered the question down to 22%. So like indeed, leads. We had 331 this last spring. 193 actually filled out the form. 25%, 23% filled it out correctly. So then from there, this is where we pick up the process. Like go from there.

The video request. What are you asking them again?

I send them a video from me this time. So their first video is from Phil explaining proactive and P4P. And then I send them a video. Basically. I'll send you a copy of it. Basically saying like, hey, you know, we're looking for strong, capable men. You know, people can solve problems, you know, out in the world. Like, what's the last thing that you've fixed or repaired, you know, in your life? So there's layers to try to pre qualify. Like a. Right, a capable person.

That's where your big drop is, right there.

Yeah.

They're not sending a video.

Yes.

How long does it take, like from the time that they get an interview ad to like start to finish is.

Like, it's usually like a week, six days.

Yeah. The challenging part is the good ones are gone. We used to be around a week to two weeks. And then once 2020 hit, like we just had to change everything. Everything is like, look, if this person is good, we will actually negate reference checks. Because like, see, if you look at your reference checks, there's not a big drop off there.

Yeah.

Like out of seven, six of them passed. Right. So like I'm trying to like, we're gonna get the most bang in terms of filtration as much as possible. But someone who's really good, they're gonna have five job offers today. And so sometimes your best people won't even do the next step of the process. Not because they don't want to, not because they're not good. They just already got a job. They know how good they are and they're not going to answer questions. Questions, yeah. Right now there's a good chance that Proactive is actually losing great candidates and employees because of the filtering system they put in place for hiring. If it takes you a week or two weeks to get a candidate in the door and give them a job, there's a good chance that they're an A player. They could have five other jobs given to them in that time period. It's a matter of like, how can we automate this so that we still get the best people that want to work here that don't feel like, hey, look, why do I wait for week when I got five people calling me trying to offer me a job?

It's not.

And that's the thing.

We do our best to get back to them. It's just there is a seven, eight step process.

And you're waiting on references too. You gotta wait on references sometimes.

So you're saying maybe just okay, that makes a lot of sense. It's like, send the video. Send your references on that Google list. So if we do decide to go next step. I'm not waiting for the references. I'm not waiting. I just call.

Yeah, because indeed, you already have their resume. Typically some of them will have references on there, but I usually don't like to call them anyways. I like. You can just make one very short form. Don't make it 10 questions. Like a couple questions. And in the video. And that'd be the one weeding out. That will weed out 90% of people.

Instead of doing three back and forth.

Yes, just do it all.

Because a really good person, they apply, they really want to work here. They get a message immediately back asking, they'll do that, but they're not gonna wait for references. And then in person, and then a video and then a form, they're just like, all right, I'm out. And so I would just reduce all that to one filtration system, which is like indeed form with a video attachment. And then from there we can make a decision. Hey, thanks so much for watching the video. Real quick. I wanted to invite you to a private event that I'm hosting online@mikeandys.com Black Friday. That's right. It's on Black Friday. It's gonna be a live stream that includes a whole bunch of training that I've been working on for over a year. It's gonna be completely free for the first 500 people that sign up. So go to mike, mike andes.com Black Friday sign up for the registration. And there's also three massive announcements that I haven't even shared with my team that I'm gonna be sharing at the.

End of that live stream.

So you'll definitely want to be there. Mikeandys.com BlackFriday we'll see you there. We're now going to make the interview process from six or seven filters to maybe one or two.

Right. So it's like we can get a lot of that.

Hit the video, do an in person and we can get them in the truck. Part of it is again, like if you look at how many people you're to sticking once they get past that video, they're coming all the way through. Once they get through a video, an in person interview.

Sure. And they're going through for a year.

Yeah. Honestly, I'm just, I'm just concerned that like the three people you got, there were two or three other really good all stars that just didn't get past the first one. They had five job offers.

You're right. Phil said that and I was like, ah, it doesn't matter if we find the right guy, but why not have more right guys, right?

When you have 200 candidates coming in for a job application, you do need to put certain filters in place to ensure you have a good quality candidate. However, adding too many, or more importantly, adding a whole bunch of time to the equation means that there's good employees that you're leaving on the table because they go get a job tomorrow.

It does make so much sense. I'm trying to extend. I get. It's like an ego thing of just like, I know what we have to offer is good. Like, I want the process to be longer because if we get it right, I know we win.

Think about it like college admissions, right? Everyone almost gets in, hey, college so much, right? But the reason the business model works, right? And that is you apply, you get accepted very quickly and then you get in and you have all these stages to get this piece of paper at the end. The same thing is true when it comes to the business. We want them. If your goal and your mission is to make more strong men, we need to find pleasure in the fact that we can take weak men and make them strong. We don't need strong men to stay here and become strong. Like, the mission is actually accomplished by taking people who aren't strong and making that word is important. Making strong men is different. Yeah.

Finding strong men, Right?

Right. If you're just finding strong man, it's like, great, then we will do a very different. If your goal is to make like Produce them like a conveyor belt. We need to create the conveyor belt, knowing that when they come in, they aren't gonna be a strong man.

We're trying not to, like, lose what matters in this. And that's like. That's the vision, right? That's to show the guys, like, you gotta do good, you gotta work hard, you gotta be the guy. But this is what actually being the guy looks like.

Well, this is like, the least amount of numbers I've ever talked about in a turnaround is because you guys actually, this means something to you. And I could tell. So it's like, instead of me being like, I usually attack this stuff, be like, oh, that's a facade. Just get past it. Make more money. I actually think it matters something to you. That's why I think you doing it and creating a system and process for it will unlock the business side. Personally, I think, like, make it more about money. Money, because then you can do whatever. Like, things will change, like, as they get older and things. Like, you're like, that sort of, like, what you think is important might change. So I like money because it's easier for everyone to understand. Also, you create this bond, like, for which everyone in the organization has to kind of agree with this other thing. Personally, I wouldn't do it, but, like, that means a lot to them. And I respect anyone whose mission actually they care about. Like, if they would have said, like, strongman and I get there and, like, they're just, like, they can't figure out the numbers. And they never mentioned this mission thing. I wouldn't even acknowledge it. I'm like, okay, let's make more money, because that's all you really care about. So some people will listen to what I talk about with them and think that, like, oh, I should do the same thing in my business. I should make it all about, like, building certain. If you don't care about that, everyone knows. And so just make it about making money. And so if in doubt, make it about money. If you have a really strong passion and vision that you know you're going to forever want to be caring about this, make sure it's very, very clear so that people know if you're actually hitting money, that goal. So, like, for example, like, with Augusta, it's like, our goal is to change the level of professionals in the industry, but, like, we've made it tangible, saying, we need a thousand locations. So we know. Okay, where are we at on the progress to meeting that goal? One thing that we've done is actually created Stages for the owners. So that way we can be on the same board and say, oh, we are trying to get to the next stage also.

Right.

That'd be down the road for you all. But, like, it's definitely something to think about. Because the whole point is, like, hey, we are. We aren't. Like, the strong word is tough. That's. You want to create definition around that because you don't want to make this, like, we are perfect. Because.

Right.

You aren't. And making that very clear in that messaging is like, hey, we're all like, this is never. Yeah, there's never. There's never actually a finish line.

Right.

Like, there's always a constant evolution and constant improvement towards this. What this strong man looks like. Because then you'll be able to get people in the door faster and then. And you'll be more fulfilled taking someone that's, like, not a strong man and making them that.

You want to know who the vision's most important for us, truthfully, we know we need to be better.

If you're gonna have a mission statement or you're gonna have a vision, make sure it's very clear. Don't have nebulous terms that we can't define. If I want to create strong men, I should probably know how to measure what a strong man is and then calculate how many strong men I create. The ability to be able to do that makes things much more concrete for your team and gives them a road map to be able to work towards.

We are the first that needs the.

Help, and that goes right into leadership.

Yeah.

Okay. So right now, from what I have seen from afar, correct me if I'm wrong, there's a lot of crossover between your two rules.

Yeah.

Do we want to solve that problem, or is that something that we actually have built in order to be able to kind of be, like, really replace each other in the business?

I don't, like, we cannot replace.

That's like, it's weirdly crossover, but it's like, it's crossover because of camaraderie.

The way that I look at it is like, for the past five years, I've been doing leadership, and I've been doing technical process. My ideal is, like, I'm a process guy. It's like, what I have fun doing. So it's like my role, I feel like, is more of a what's the process? Patrick's role is like, how do we actually make that process happen?

Right.

How do we actually get that implemented? So I think we need to be delineated yes, it needs to be clearer.

The last constraint for any home service business is leadership. And as they get to a million plus in revenue, this becomes even more important.

I would say incoming is pat and then like internal sales is me.

So, like upsells and stuff?

Yes.

Yeah. Just writing the estimates right now.

It might be helpful to separate as you grow, maintenance versus repairs.

Yeah, I think so.

I feel like you could handle all the operational stuff for maintenance, chemicals, stuff like that. As soon as something breaks or something big happens. Yeah, you're getting pulled in. That's where I think it's like, I know you guys have made an org chart, but I think it's like a matter of.

Creating one that right now you might have five positions on. Right. And so, like, I do think like a GM at the top of everything is probably what this looks like at 1.5 million.

Yes.

And then you're gonna have sales, like a sales manager. Then you're gonna have an admin manager. Office manager. Oh, you have one? Yeah, definitely.

I just want to show you how much do you think about that? So you've had a small business. You've done it now starting copilot, you start a bigger business in a bigger position. How much do you. How do you balance between the day to day of like, we are. You know, it's funny, em, if you have 10 positions, we're all of them. You know, put your name on it. But with that in mind of the growth, you know, like, how do you. And is it something like you progress towards? Like, did you start copilot in the same way? Of like, I'm okay, I'm Mike. I'm doing everything. We hire, my names are on there and then I hire for it. Or it just starts at a different place. Like, when do you reach that threshold?

Obviously, if you have a ton of capital. This is why, like, fixing the money problem is always because, like, the reason you don't delegate out roles is because, like, oh, I don't have the money. Like, if you had $200,000 in the bank right now, you'd be like, okay, we're going to go higher an estimated that that has tons of experience. We're gonna hire an office person and we're gonna go out and just crush, like, operations and just keep growing this business. So sorry, I lost you again. My bad. I just didn't touch it.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like. But both times, like, in all ways, I've always done where, like, I am very hands on at the beginning. And then as the business makes money And I'm like, okay, this is taking up 40% on a day. How do I dialogue it? Okay, this is taking 20% on a day. This is 10% of my day to the point where like I can do these and like, like things will run okay. But it didn't start that way. Like it's always gonna start like this. Like don't feel, don't feel bad. It's just a function of like it's just like as you grow knowing that like you answering the phone is like a poor use of someone's time. Right. And then being like, okay, eventually that's 20% of my day. Does it make sense financially now to go delegate and hire someone full time to just do that so I can unlock half of my day and go do something? Higher leverage.

So that's the brief structure of like we have a handful of mean maintenance technicians, they run in the field. We identify people who can be on that repair level, they work towards that. And then you learn human levels to train to new businesses knocking sales. Like and that brings a candidate qualified up to estimator. If like you have a guy who just doesn't want to be a GM grow, you know, and just wants a job, that's cool, that's like. But like if you want to grow GM and then like you grow that next piece of like learning business. Running the P and L we know chemistry industry is not right. No companies aren't doing it. How do we have a qualitative person do it and then when someone says yes, be ready to do it. Like that's another problem.

I would say you're thinking like five years ahead versus thinking okay, what could I do? What am I doing now that's preventing me from doing that? Because I agree that that sort of person is the thing that unlocks your growth. The question becomes what are you doing now? That is not that. And that becomes in question as to to should I be delegating those tasks?

Yeah.

So like things like admin is things that we need to get off our plate.

Yeah.

Because I do believe that new business development and doing exactly you just mentioned and I'll talk about in a second, like how do we get people that say they just need a one time service? How do we get them in the door and make them very profitable. Yeah, we can do that if we were unable to unlock a little bandwidth for us.

Yeah.

So this goes back to what we were saying. Like I immediately go hire someone that was hundreds of thousands of dollars to help me run copilot. But Like, I built up the phone. Okay. Now they're like 40% on my day. I need to get rid of this offline. Now I go hire someone.

Yeah.

I would say the same thing is true with your admin. You're doing a $25 an hour task by answering the phone, doing emails, et cetera, even running reports that if you just delegated that it would give you the bandwidth to go do one step above, which is the new business development.

Right, right, right. It makes so much sense. We wouldn't, truthfully, without my few guys, we would not be where we are, hopefully in a good place, ready to break through. Without those guys, we would have. We wouldn't be there without. But then to like, just to hear it again in person, it's nothing new. It's like raised price, like, cool, you didn't do enough. Raise them all. It's like, that's what admin. We know that.

We know that.

It's so silly, but it's like sometimes hearing it and then like, I'm always gonna poke. It's like, work through that more. And it's like, okay, yeah, no, that's okay back. That makes sense. Yeah.

Pat needs to hear things three or four times.

Three, four times. My mother will tell you that for sure.

Admin delegated is important because then the next, like, I'd say admin right above that is operations. By you getting more time on in your day because you delegate admin, operations will go smoother because now you have time to go out there and get with these guys.

Yeah.

You have time to develop stages of growth. Like, you have that. And then as time goes on, you eventually do the same thing with sales. Like, that becomes the new business, development in sales.

And then we figure out finance the next layer of growth. Yes. Yeah.

Right. And so I think admin delegation, like any task that's like in the office answering the phone, you guys do instant quotes on your website. So you're already like there. Like, if you guys spend more time, spend internal, like doing upsells and like at the customer's property and getting these larger tickets. Like, that's higher value than internal answer.

Literally. Yeah.

So instead of like, how do we hire an ad or hire someone to go do business, you spend more of your time doing that and go get someone that's 25 bucks an hour to answer the phone. Having Patrick and Phil doing the exact same things in the business is a big problem. We need clear roles of sales, operations and admin. And right now, the lowest hanging fruit I see is the fact that they're both doing admin tasks, answering the email and answering phone calls. Get someone else to do that.

If that was just done, like why don't we go do it? Because we have to do it. If we're just say like, hey, can we get, get this done? And then it's done. And then the guys have a checklist to do better.

And the reason too is again, it comes back to like, we can't afford someone. Okay. But if we had the 5 minutes here and the 10 minutes here and the 15 minutes on the email and then calling this customer, if I was all taken on my plate, I had an extra two hours a day and I just went to business development. So we know that's the thing that's going to grow this business to 1.5. Then we should make the trade.

Yeah. How do we do it? We raise prices.

Yeah. Getting the admin person allows you all to spend more of your time doing sales, being out the team, upselling, like that's the business development. The business starts to grow. The question becomes if we raise prices and we lose a bunch of customers or we do all this, we get a great admin person and now we have nothing to do, what are we supposed to do next? Because then leads will become the constraint.

Yes.

Right now if we get this loan and everything gets kind of like our monthly payments are down, we have more cash, how do we actually use 100 grand to go grow the business? Right now there's like 50 to 60% of people coming in that we can't serve.

Yeah.

And we're handing them off.

Yeah.

I think we can monetize them. Is it very difficult to do repairs? Yes. Much higher technical ability. I also think that there could be a, again, we have different levels, a technician's role that our repair tech role that is significantly paid more and also gives all the entry level guys something to aspire to be. Is that person be expensive?

Yes.

But I also think that right now we're turning away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work every year that could also be converted into recurring. So this is what my thought. The offer for these people that are asking for one time services, bending that instead of saying no and offering someone else, making it so good for you financially where you're like, I'm willing to do it and go get a repair tech to be able to cover this cost and I think I can convert 50% of them into maintenance with my offer.

Yes.

Yeah.

If someone said, hey, I just moved in, I need someone to come Figure this out. It's not working. Okay, great. We usually say no, we do not have the time. But if we said you pay a thousand dollar deposit and that allows us to come out and that thousand dollar deposit goes towards your maintenance in the future. But then on top of the thousand dollars is any repairs that we're gonna have to do. And then again you would have to your point, very difficult to schedule someone that is like basically how has to show up and figure things out and fix them. It's gonna be a lot more difficult. But that thousand dollars recoups the cost of acquisition as well as it baits them to get onto recurring.

Yep.

So either we're gonna get $1,000 that immediately be profitable on the customer because it doesn't cost $1,000 to get the customer, or we're gonna get that thousand dollars, give it back to them in the form of a credit towards recurring.

Which just like spreads out cash flow 100%.

And then that way we can run ads knowing that. Because the reason ads hurt in the past. But seven grand is half of that. Probably more than that.

Yeah.

Is people that don't need recurring service, they just see the pool ad and like, oh, I need someone to fix my filter. Right.

Pay for the next lead.

Right. And so if you can get the thousand dollars, like will some people say no? Yes. But in the middle of spring when everyone, they'll say yes and then you will convert them into the recurring. Instead of saying no to customers that don't want recurring service from day one, I want to monetize those customers. Since when I go out and spend money on ads, 60, 70% of them are going to be for one time jobs. I'm going to set the filtration system of if you give me $1,000, I'm going to then be able to do that one time service. And to make it sound really easy for them, it's like, hey look, we can give you some referrals for smaller guys, but like in order for us to really serve our clients, we expect we get 999 down. And if you do end up having us recurring, that'll just go towards that. So it doesn't really cost you anything. But in order for us to serve you the way we know we need to, that's what that initial deposit goes towards. I'm Gonna sell that $1,000 initial fee as a consultation fee. That is a credit towards future recurring services. That way, if they just want their filter changed, if they just want the one time job, I keep the $1,000 and use that $1,000 to go go do marketing and advertising and get more recurring customers.

Now would you only do that towards future maintenance or would you do that towards the repair they made?

I would not do it to the repair.

Right.

It's like I need that money because that's what allows me to go hire a repair tech, spread it out because it's so expensive. But bottom line is as long as you can get, let's call it 80 customers a year to say yes to you. You just paid with the thousand dollars for that repair tech. And that repair tech is going to go down $300,000. And I go straight to the bottom line. And there will be people saying no.

The 999, of course, but they're saying no right now. I'm giving them to Sean. Yeah, I'm already saying no to them. They're saying no to us.

You need two people a week to say yes to that offer to pay for a full time repair tech that unlocks 300 grand for the business and by the way, greases the gears to get more maintenance. Yes, that right now they're saying no to maintenance, but they don't even know what maintenance is because they just bought a house. They'll put pool for the first time. Correct?

Correct.

If the vision is to create more strong men, we need to create a bigger business.

Big pull.

We need pools.

Amen.

Okay, so I got six things. Six weeks, six things. Stages of success for a trainer, a technician and a repair tech. This one you can get done like six to 12 months. This one can take you two to three years. This one can take you five to 10 years. That's number one. Reduce hiring filters to just the video and the in person interview. Define what a strong man is. Next thing number four is admin delegation. This one could be done as soon as possible. I know it's a scary one. Raise prices across the board 20%. It'll give you the confidence. Okay, we can hire an admin person, no problem. So we're getting a thousand dollar consultation Credit. Sell the 999, don't pay it. It's a credit. Don't worry about it.

Sell it.

It's a service. And then if you use this for maintenance, we just credit that towards that in the future.

Yeah, that's such a home run.

You know, we're here. We wanted to show you guys we were extremely serious. We value Mike's time and tutelage and we were trying to implement everything we could that, you know, he blessed us with we unbelievably thankful for the time with you guys.

We first thing we addressed was liquidity. We had basically two weeks cash flow and we did end up having an SBA loan closed. So we basically got enough to put a month and a half of cash flow or revenue in the bank. And we have kind of like a war chest for the spring when we come up to. I'm trying to grow and put, put money into marketing. Another thing he said was repairs are where the profit are. And we have kind of revamped our estimating process for the repair side of the business. Kind of separated it out to allow the repair technician and just go execute repairs. So that's kind of going to help there. The other thing we, we talked about was the thousand dollars, thousand dollar initial visit to kind of get cash up front. That's one, one place we implemented literally the day after you guys left. What it did is basically we're pulling up two and a half months of revenue every time somebody new signs up. So it just pulled that cash flow.

Up to segue into leads is what it did for us. After a couple conversations with clients calling in looking for services who happen to be looking for regular maintenance, the one lady put it perfectly. She was like, oh, I understand. Like you just want to make sure someone's signing on for regular service, not having you come out, do all the work and then not continuing with services. And we're like, yeah. So what it's really done for our leads is it's qualified our leaves for our ideal client who is just looking for carefree pool maintenance wants to be hands off. So that's someone who will just pay $1,000. So it's given confidence to a few clients coming on board, which has been great. Yeah.

Another thing that it did, honestly that we didn't even think about is we've always had this awkward invoicing of like if someone comes on mid month, we're like, do we bill them half a month? Do we send them another invoice? So that just totally disappeared, which was awesome because now it's just like they pay the thousand dollars, we get the invoicing right. And then just when that credit rolls over, then it just, they roll right into billing, which is great.

They're like, this is great.

We're not paying up their right. Yeah.

So win, win, win.

Moving on labor. This is where we really felt we are constrained. We need more people. We need a faster process for getting people up and running. So basically we spent a lot of time really diving into our training process. We've got a whole new process for that that's actionable on, on like a day to day basis. It's not just a nice packet. Yeah, nice 45 page packet. That's really, we, we broke it down to a couple different things. I don't know if you can see, but yeah, the big, the big thing was getting that, getting that written down and something that we can actually action.

On, also attacking it. Two prong Mike. When we had talked about the hiring funnel, Mike made a very keen observation of like this was very drawn out. We're losing eight players. Those are one of the points he said, can we condense, you know, look in the hiring funnel where like if they make it past a certain point, you're probably doing an in person interview and hiring them. So we condensed that first step for getting a video, two references and their contact information all up front in that first step which led us to this candidate quicker. The process was much faster. He was great.

Next up leadership. We had basically a lot of, a lot of crossover between our responsibilities and roles. Gone through the process of like putting our names, email style, putting our names on the role, signing the sheet, getting that kind of clear, clear definition of who's responsible for what to make sure, to make sure that we're all, we're all on the same page. We all know who's responsible for what and just acknowledging and signing and saying yes, putting your name on that and being responsible for it. Next thing, stages for success we touched on. We kind of have broken it down to four different stages and then we're in the process of developing six different training programs for the next level up of repair technician, getting certified and all these things along the way.

Yeah. Mike made a really good observation again and that's literally what we're missing. Right. So this is the Orenda certificate that they give us. So we know they're certified in the four pillars and the Orenda Chemistry Academy. So we're going to create the same thing along the lines when they become a maintenance technician and they're certified after doing training. So it'll be a little bit of that dopamine hit that they, as they hit stages, they're going to actually get a certificate acknowledging.

Yeah. It's not just wait, wait a year and a half and be good. Yeah. So having those along the way.

Great freaking point. Yeah.

Another thing he touched on is like defining our mission and making sure like we've, we've, we worked a while on this and we realized doesn't have to, it doesn't have to necessarily be strong men that we're trying to create. Right. We're trying to create people who have a certain mindset. And it's like we're not, we're not victims in the world. Like we can cause change to know whatever, whatever scenario we're in, we can, we can cause a good thing to happen in the world. It's, it's more, it's more about creating that mindset than it is. Is a specific like or only. Only men or only that. But we want to create something that changes the way a person thinks.

So we got a little more clarity on that, which is good.

Raise prices.

That kind of goes to liquidity and leads a little bit being labor constrained. So shortly after we raised prices 74, 99 per client, we lost four people. The revenue in October with 154 clients was $52,917.15. And with the price increase, even with the decrease in clients, which you guys know is how it works, 149, we only dropped off four clients. Revenue went up to 57.976.62. So we had a $5,000 increase with a few less clients.

We did a lot.

Yeah, we took it very seriously and we definitely, we definitely.

Followed the plan. And there's something about having somebody who's ahead of you in the process look back. Oh no, dude, you're just. Just do these couple things and it's like, it kind of lifts that fear of like the unknown. It's like, nah, if Mike walked this path before, it's a lot easier. It's like the four minute mile, right? Four minute mile. Everybody thought it was impossible. And that one guy does it and it's, it's so much easier to follow in someone else's footsteps. It's the crazy, the crazy thing.