Bleeding Money, Building the Perfect Home Service Business, Tech Layoffs are an Opportunity

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. For those of you in the home service business industry out there, you're going to want to pay special attention to this episode. Today is going to be number heavy and it's all about finding the health of your business. First off, Mike takes a look at all the financial statements of a company that is bleeding money and could even potentially go bankrupt. You're set a spot when a company is in trouble and how to turn things around before it's too late. Next up, Mike's made a guide to building the perfect home service business of 2023. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to completely change the way you do your business, this is the guide to follow. And lastly, why the recent climate of massive layoffs is actually an opportunity for anyone in a small business. That means you as always, you can find all this and more over at the Mike Andes YouTube channel. Let's get into it. Here are some financial statements exposed.

Today. I'm going to show you a company and their real balance sheet and income statement and statement of cash flows and show you a company that's bleeding money and in my opinion could potentially go bankrupt if they don't change something very, very quickly. Now this company I'm talking about is Rivian, but this applies to any small business. I want to bring this down and actually show you their financial statements of why I believe this is going to happen. So Rivian is cutting its workforce by 6%. Electric vehicle maker Rivian Automotive said Wednesday that is reducing its workforce. This isn't like other, like other cuts. It doesn't say anything about the economy or EV demand. I think it's a bunch, there's a bunch of garbage. Honestly, it's so funny how I think that like the media has somehow sided with Rivian and they got like the deal with Amazon and everyone just is like big fanboys of them. Let's look at the numbers though in just a second. Rivian told employees Wednesday that it will be laying off 6% of its staff, according to a company email reviewed by Barons. Riven declined to comment. Beyond the contents of the email, this is what said to deliver over the long term we must focus our resources on ramp and our path to profitability while ensuring we have the have the right set of future products, services and technology that will continue to challenge convention CEO RJ Scarringe wrote, the layoffs won't affect manufacturing jobs. Again, like we talked about before, white collar jobs getting laid off instead of blue collar jobs. The electric car. The electric truck maker is focused on increasing vehicle production in 2023. Rivian produced and manufactured more than 24,000 vehicles in 2022. Wall street projects production of about 65,000 units in 2023. So about 150% increase in production they're planning on in the upcoming year. And in my mind, that might be the worst thing for them. Rivian ended 2021 with 10,400 employees. The number likely grew throughout 2022. An updated number should be included in the company's 2022 annual report.

The layoffs are probably a reflection of a startup trying to manage growth. Rivian had essentially no sales in 2021. Sales in 2022 and 2023 are projected to be 1.7 billion and 5.7 billion, respectively. The layoffs don't appear to be a reflection of EV demand. Wall street expects at least 1.1 million battery electric vehicles to be sold in 2023. I think this number is way low. I think it'd be more like 1.5 million, up from about 810,000 sold in 2022. And I also know that's wrong because I know that Tesla sold over 600 or, sorry, over 900,000 in 2022. So I think those two numbers are wrong. By the way, EV sales are getting a boost from the government. Many EVs, including Rivian's trucks, qualify for a 7, 500 purchase tax credit. For that reason, I think we'll sell over 1.5, potentially even 2 million all electric vehicles, I believe, in the United States in 2023. All right, so their stock is literally down like 60, 70, 80% since it was. Had its high in early 2022 and late 2021. But let's look at this. All right, this is what's so cool about publicly traded companies. You can look at their financial statements and you can actually dig into what is going on in the company. So this is Rivian, if I remember correctly, their market cap's like 17 or 18 billion dollars. Okay. But let's look at actually what the. How the. How the company is doing. All right, so if we look at, let's see here. End cash position. So right now we're looking at the statement of cash flow. So you got three really important documents when it comes to someone's financial statements. You got statement of cash flows, you have your balance sheet, and you have your income statement. Income statement is also sometimes known as your P and L or profit and loss. All right, so this is your statement of cash flows. Their ending cash position here is $13 billion. Remember that these are represented in thousands. So 13 million on here means 13 billion when it actually comes to dollars. So $13 billion in end cash, fantastic, right? Not until you look at the fact that in this year they lost $6.2 billion, which means at their current run rate, at their current burn rate, I should say in two years they will be facing bankruptcy. Now this is the part that freaks me out, is it's not only the fact that I take, you know, 13,013, a billion dollars in cash, say, okay, there's $6 billion they're burning every year. We got two years left. What's more alarming is the more cars they make, the more money they're burning. It's not going the other way around. And for that reason, by them ramping up production, I actually think they potentially might actually increase their losses instead of just having a $6 billion loss. So check this out. That was our balance sheet, or sorry, that was our cash flows. This is our balance sheet. You have $22 billion worth of total assets. Now a lot of that is like plant, equipment, they have factories and all the rest of it. Their actual cash in the bank, like we already saw, is about 6, $6 billion. All right, so this is your, your cap table, this is your balance sheet is, you know, total debt. They only have about 1.5 billion. Not so bad honestly, compared to how much cash they have, which is, you know, 13 billion. So what is that? Almost eight, nine times as much cash compared to the debt. So not bad in terms of cash. They have a lot of, of common stock. They, they do some stock repurchases for their, their employees, stock based compensation. But here, you got this, this is what I'm concerned about. Okay? Their revenue is $1 billion approximately for the year. And their cost of revenue is literally three and a half times as much. Their gross profit is negative $2.5 billion, which means for every dollar of revenue they got, they were spending two and a half dollars to get that money. That boggles my mind. Like, think about it like this. If I pitch to you, I proposed to you, hey, look, we're going to build this company. It's going to be revolutionary. It's going to change the world. And you're going to lose for every dollar. As we scale up this, for every dollar you put in, you're going to you're going to, for every dollar that comes out, I should say, and revenue that is produced, you're going to have to pay two dollars, two and a half dollars. Sounds brilliant, right? I actually think this works if you're on a fast growth trajectory and you're seeing economies of scale as you begin to ramp up. And instead of, you know, two and a half dollars per $1, now it becomes $2, then $1.50 for every dollar of revenue. And then eventually you break even, you start becoming profitable. If there's a path to profitability, that's what the CEO, in his wise words, is emailing to his employees saying, we got to cut staff, we got to cut expenses here because we've got to get to profitability. What he's saying is we can't spend two and a half dollars for every one dollar of revenue that we're getting in the door. All right, smart move. They got, they have to do this. But I'm going to prove to you, I think that this is not going to be enough to save the company. Because if you look at over the course of their last few years, right, 2019-2020-2021-2020 22, although they got a billion dollars in more revenue this past year, their total operating expense went up 1 and a $1.33 billion. So there's, as they're scaling, they're getting more expenses for every dollar of revenue that's coming in the door. And they're just losing money hand over fist. It's incredible. Like if you want to look through the EBITDA's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, when you start looking at all this stuff, it's just absolutely incredible of what's happening with a company like this that is really. Everyone has bought into the hype of what's going on. They're losing money hand over fist. And this is the part I want you to look at. Where did I see this? Where's the sga? There it is. Okay, so SGA expense, I just pulled it up. Here is operating expenses, also known as selling general and administration. That's sga Selling general and administrative expenses. SGNA are the costs of doing business. They include rent, utilities, marketing and advertising, sales and accounting, management and administrative salaries. So when I go back here and I'm looking at the sga, I can look at my operating expense. It's underneath this. There it is. Selling General Administrative. That's $2 billion, which means just an SGA. They are spending $2 on SGA for every $1 revenue, right? So $2 billion in SG and A compared to $1 billion in revenue. But this is the thing. If you cut out 6% of your workforce because if we go back to here, they're reducing their workforce by a whopping 6%. Let's assume that these are like some higher paid employees, paid team members and it's going to, it's going to increase or reduce their expend on salaries by 10%. Now I'm also going to assume that 100% of this SGA which is not the case, let's assume that a 100% of this is just salaries. It's not, but let's just assume it is. If we take 10% off of this, that is $200 million saving $200 million when you are literally bleeding two and a half billion dollars. It's not even a dent in what their, what their losses are. So I really feel like this is a company that is doing the right things. What the CEO is saying is correct and that is the hype that they've, they've been on the grow, grow, grow. You know, just grow at all costs. That has to end. That has to stop when you go into recession, when debt starts to get expensive and when the capital markets Wall street is not willing to, to to value your company at 5x what it currently is. So I think there's going to be a rude awakening for companies like but had a whole bunch of hype from the past few years. They've bought into grow, grow, grow, get more equipment, growth, expansion, more, more. And now all of a sudden we're have a rude awakening for any size company whether it be small or massive. Companies like this that have been fueled by Wall street regardless if you have a grow, grow, grow mentality, grow at all costs. I don't care about debt, I don't care about expenses, I don't care about profit margins. If you do that, that works just fine in a bull market. And we've been there for 14 years. But when we hit a recession, you're caught with your pants down. And that's why I'm very worried about many small business owners that went to deb expenses. I'm going to grow 50% this year and then 100%. And all they talk about is grow, grow, grow. And they never talk how much profit are you actually bringing to the bottom line? Because in a recession that's what really matters.

The smartest business decisions aren't always the most obvious ones. You can go out there and learn entrepreneurship by trial and error if you want to, or you can learn it from Mike. Whether you're starting, growing or saving your business, the MBA for Entrepreneurs teaches the principles of small business ownership at every experience level. With over 350 plus in depth lessons and new monthly lectures, you'll have access from anywhere through the teachable app. Do the right thing for your business and sign up for the MBA for entrepreneurs by heading to mba4entrepreneurs.com that's MBA the number4entrepreneurs.com Next up, here's the model you want to follow. If you're building the next great home service business, pay close attention.

Hey everyone. Today I'm going to be sharing with you how to build the perfect service based business. Regardless of what home service industry you're in. I'm going to use landscaping and lawn care as an example. This works for any home service business. Any business has seasonal work and you have recurring and project based jobs. Let's go and get started. So we're going to go ahead and assume that we have $1,000 in ad spend on this theoretical landscaping, lawn care, home service business. We're going to assume we have $50 cost per lead. Now each of these single KPIs or key performance indicators that I talk about are very important. I could spend an entire hour talking about them. More information is on them in the links in the description down below. But $1,000 we're going to spend on ads. We're at $50 cost per lead. Which means for every $50 I spend, I'm gonna get one estimate or one quote that I am going to need to perform on someone filling out estimate request form, someone wanting service. $50 cost per lead. I have talked about in the past that there being before the cost per lead, a cost per click and a way of determining other sort of KPIs before that. But let's just assume we spend $1,000 get $50 cost per lead. That would lead to 20 leads. 20 leads times $50 cost per lead. There's our $1,000 spend. Now we're gonna assume that we have a 50% close ratio. Now I could talk for hours about close ratio. It's extremely important. It's essentially the percentage of estimates that are one that you give out to people. So if I give out 100 estimates and I get 60 of them accepted, I would have a 60% close ratio. Let's assume in this case that I have a 50% close ratio because it's kind of a middle of the road. You're not like super profit mode where you're just very high prices and a lower close ratio. But you're also not in massive growth mode where you're lower prices and you're going to be closing 80, 90% of your jobs. Let's assume 50% close ratio. Now what that means is we have a hundred dollar customer acquisition cost. Why? Because if we have 20 leads and 50% of them accept the proposal, that means we have 10 clients. And if we have 10 clients based on $1,000 worth of ad spend, that means we have $100 customer acquisition cost. Which means if I spend $100 on ads, I expect to be to be able to get one customer. Again, very important number. Knowing what your customer acquisition cost is allows you to know what you can spend on marketing over the course of your business. Now, what we're going to try to achieve in the first year is a very, very, very conservative number, and that is 10x multiple on our marketing spend in the first year. Watch this. So in the first year, I want to be able to get 10x what I spent on my customer acquisition cost, which means I'm going to be trying to get $1,000 in recurring revenue in the first year from the customers that I get for mowing, for example. Now again, if you're in any other business, put in any sort of recurring maintenance type work in this scenario, I'm trying to get $1,000 per year per customer. And if I do that, I'm going to have a 10x multiple on my marketing spend in the first year. Now the beautiful thing about recurring work and having jobs that you go back every week, every month, every quarter, is you're able to, over the course of time, extrapolate how much actual value that customer has to you. But in order to be able to know that, you need to know your retention. That is the percentage of customers that you're going to keep from year to year. Now, if you have a 20% attrition rate, which means you lose 20% of your customers every year because they move, they pass away, they're not happy with your service, that would assume that you have an 80% retention rate. So 80% retention would assume a 20% attrition. So if we keep 80% of our customers on an annual basis, that would mean that in year one, if we make $1,000 in the recurring work, that in year two, we're also going to make $800 of revenue on average on those first 10 customers. Now, of course, we're not going to actually lower the price or anything like that, we're just going to probably lose two customers out of the 10, therefore leading to eight. Now, of course, over the course of averages as we move out across in time every year, we're going to lose 20% or only going to retain 80% of the revenue from these customers. But you can extrapolate over the course of the next five years that in year number two, you're going to have 640 of revenue. Year three, you're at $512 of revenue, year four, year five, et cetera. And in the first five years, we're not even going beyond that. We can assume that we're actually going to make $3,691 from that one customer that we originally spent $100 for. So although we only have a 10x multiple in marketing spend in the first year, we can actually say that we have a 36 times, almost 37 times multiple on our marketing spend in the first five years. This is the beautiful thing about recurring revenue, because as long as I have good customer service and I keep my customers for a long period of time, this number continues to extend very far out into the future. And I'm able to trap a lot of lifetime value LTV from the customer. And in this case, the five year value of my customer for this recurring client would be $3,691. So theoretically, I could say, okay, if I got 10 customers and I got them all for $1,000 on my marketing, I'd be able to get 10,000 or 10x multiple on that recurring revenue in year one. And then over the course of the next five years, I would then expect to have 36,000, almost $37,000 from just those 10 customers. Not a bad deal getting $37,000 from spending $1,000. Now you say you're not getting actually 37. It's not a 37 times return. You're right. You're going to also have other costs now. You might only be 20% profitable on this revenue. So if we take this number and we say, okay, well, let's multiply that by 2 or 20% profit margin, you're right, you're probably going to end up with about $720. I'm just rounding in my head right now 720, $20 worth of profit. But again, not a bad deal over the course of five years to go from spending $100 on a customer to them getting you 720, that's a 7x return on your money. 7x, that's an 800% return literally in five years. Money spent into a very conservative spend of marketing cost per lead, a very conservative close ratio, an extremely conservative marketing speaker spend a multiple. You're able to literally 7x your money over the next 5 years. Fantastic. If you look at the annual return, that's probably like 50, 60% just by using a service based business because you have recurring revenue. Now the reason why most people will go after projects and the elusive thing in service based business is going after projects is because you can very quickly grow your business. Because notice this, if we look at project based, we're going to assume a 20x marketing spend, which means in the first year I'm not going to make $1,000 per customer, I'm going to make $2,000 on average per customer. Now this is very common. This is why most people actually go into projects a lot sooner in their business. And it's because you can grow revenue much faster using large projects. Now it's not to say that projects are bad, but keep in mind, once that one time project is done, it's over. There is no more money to be had for that customer. And the thing is, it's going to take me a few years to make that money on that same amount of money on that customer for recurring revenue. Whereas I could do that in the next month for one customer if I get them on a project based job. That's why so many people in service based businesses get allured in doing project based work. Because you can grow much faster. You're able to capture a lot of this revenue in your first year because one project might be a 5, 10, $15,000 job, whereas it might take four or five years to make that much money if you're doing it on recurring base work or maintenance. That's why most people as a function of revenue, a healthy business that is trying to run without the business owner being in daily operations is gonna look something like this. Which means on the bottom here on the x axis we have the number of years that goes by. I typically see year five and six is when people start to have a good equilibrium when it comes to the amount of work that comes from recurring jobs. Now this is just my opinion, but a business that has more recurring revenue is typically easier for the business owner to get out of daily operations, start managing the business and working on the business instead of in the business. There's less havoc, there's less project management. Because these big jobs, although you can make a lot of money up front, they do take more project management. Higher skill level, more organization, further from the owner and the manager, instead of being able to have it run on systems as easily. Not to say you can't do its projects, but for a service based business that wants to run without the owner and on systems without the owner in the daily operations, this is typically what I see. And as at the beginning, the percentage of their revenue that comes from recurring work is actually pretty low. Now, it's not to say that their revenue is necessarily doing this. Their revenue, for all I care, could actually be looking something more along the lines of this. And that is at the very beginning, the vast majority of their revenue might actually come from projects. But over the course of time their revenue is growing, but more importantly a function of a percentage of their revenue. Now this might look like 70 to 80% of their revenue is coming from recurring work, versus only 20 or 30% now coming from projects. And at the beginning it's the flip, it's the inverse. 70, 80% of work is going to come from projects. Why? Because it's easier and faster to get those. You're going to be able to spend that $1,000 and in year number one, make $20,000 worth of revenue much faster, a doubling of the revenue compared to your top scenario here with the recurring, where you're only going to have $10,000 worth of work. That's why so many people will start off with projects and it's a much faster ramp to growth. However, for the business owner that's trying to create a business that runs without them, this is the route they're going to take. Yes, you're going to get more revenue up front that are project based. You're going to be able to scale up, get a couple employees, et cetera. But the objective should be that over time, as time goes on, that more and more of your revenue comes from recurring based work. Now this is not to say that you need to do very low skilled labor like just, or just pulling weeds. However, if you're doing big hardscape installs, what you'll try to start doing is as you build your database, what you'll start doing is starting to have maintenance packages, times where you go back to the customer house and reseal the driveway, or you make sure that you clean out the water feature that you install. Whatever service you're installing, whether it be H Vac, roofing, et cetera, the goal is to try to build this base of recurring revenue so that over time this cascading effect of recurring revenue starts to compound itself. You get more and more and more customers that over time. Now you don't need to start cheap spending this. You don't need to spend money on marketing because you have this massive database of recurring revenue that keeps pumping in more work. And what's cool about recurring revenue? What's cool about these customers that stick around for a long time, they're perfect candidates to keep reselling into this option for more projects. So I might have them on recurring, but ultimately I can still upsell them into more project based work and increase their lifetime value of this customer even more. Now what I do like about projects is the fact that it can fill in the times of the year when we as seasonal business owners need to put work on the schedule. Because the thing about recurring and seasonal recurring work, like mowing for example, is it is very, very cyclical. You can see in the dotted line of the black line here. This is kind of what I would say a lot of people's seasonality look like when it comes to recurring or maintenance type work. This for example would be the spring rush. This part here where the black line goes up here, this would be spring rush. Very, very busy. But then you kind of go into the drought in the summer, might slow down a little bit. Obviously everyone's climate is a little bit different. Then we got a little bit of a bump in fall and it drops off once we hit winter. End of the year.

Year.

What's really cool about projects is now because I have this massive recurring base of revenue as my business has grown over the course of five, six, seven years and the majority of it's coming from recurring revenue. This massive bulk of customers in my database, I can upsell them on project based jobs when I am slower in my business. So now instead of having this ramp of just recurring revenue only, I like the mix of a little bit of projects in there so that when there's not a lot of recurring revenue, I focus on projects. During the drought in the middle of summer when mowing is very low, I'm able to sell more projects, do a little bit of mulch installations or bush trimming or other types of projects that would fill in my schedule, thereby allowing my revenue to be a little bit more consistent compared to if I was just doing projects or if I was just doing recurring revenue. So this is the perfect service based business in my mind. If you want more advice and thoughts on this, go to mikeandies.com check out the other videos on this channel on to build your service based business into a million plus that's built on systems and procedures and not your personality as the business owner. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you tomorrow.

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Unemployed Americans find job searches take longer as labor market cools. The number of workers out of a job for about three and a half to six months has risen sharply since last spring. All right, so I believe this is going to be a window of opportunity for small business owners to be able to hire. And it's perfect for the spring rush in terms of us needing more team members during a seasonal time in our business. I'm going to show you the data and talk about what I said last year about the same exact thing happening and why it worked out well. So check this out. This is a news article from the Wall Street Journal. Obviously, as most of you know as business owners, it's been very difficult to find employees, especially since the beginning of the pandemic. Let's go ahead and read a little bit of this. Come in mid January, Mr. Duante, this gentleman that he was working at a financial tech company in August. He hoped he could land a new job in November. He was a product manager and he's looking, still searching for a new job. Unemployed Americans across the US Are spending more time out of work as employers slow down hiring from a red hot pace. Earlier in the pandemic in December, 826,000 unemployed workers had been out of a job for about three and a half to six months, up from 526,000 in April of 2022. So from, from 526,000 people in, in April to now in December, the end of the year, what is it six months later, seven months later, we got 826,000 people. That's more than 50% more people unemployed that have been unemployed for three to six months. So it's just harder for them to find a job now. This is My opinion, the unemployment that's currently happening is due to white collar workers. And we're going to see this later in the article. It's the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and Google laying off right now. But the blue collar workers, landscapers, roofers, construction, the vast majority of small business owners are still really struggling to find employees, or should I say they still need more employees. It's not as bad as it was even six to 12 months ago in terms of finding team members, which I feel is a great opportunity for small businesses. And for those of you, you know, back throughout the pandemic and everything, I was calling foul when all the politicians were talking about how many new jobs were being added and I was like, wait a second, these, all these jobs are going to these massive Fortune 500 companies. Small businesses are literally like losing employees because they're closing down. And we can't compete with these massive conglomerates that can spend all this money. Well now guess what, things have changed. And now those massive conglomerates and massive tech companies are laying people off because they no longer can afford those infl wages they paid them and all the free benefits they gave them in stock compensation, all the other garbage they gave them, that this allowed us as small business owners to compete in the labor market and they sucked up all the talent. Well, guess what? Now small businesses have the opportunity to be able to take that talent and hire them. And I think there's gonna be some changes though to the way that we need to think about labor going forward if we're going to take advantage of it. So Mr. Duarte, I'm sorry if I'm saying his name wrong, has brought in his search from tech companies to include firms across several industries. The 28 year old, who resides in the Washington D.C. area said he interviewed with five companies that told him they were putting the positions on hold amid budget cuts and hiring freezes. He was encouraged that companies could see his value, but the news hurt. So I truly believe that this is going to continue happening in white collar work. It says companies hired 8% fewer workers from December 2007 to May of 2008 as the recession began, while layoffs ticked up at a slower pace of 2%. So what we saw going into the previous recession is kind of what we're seeing now. We're starting to see an uptrend, uptick in unemployment. Now the reason I don't actually believe this a whole lot in terms of comparing 2007, 2008 is because we are historically like 50 year lows of unemployment, but this is the glimmer of hope that I have, it says. But demand for labor is weakening fastest in white collar industries. Large companies like Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and Google parent Alphabet Incorporated have announced layoffs. Layoffs in finance, real estate and tech are beginning to rise from historically low levels as companies that bulked up their staffs early in the pandemic shed employees. So here's the thing. I was listening to a Gary Vee video a couple months back and I shared this at Landscape Summit and he was talking to a company that did moving, lots of labor, hard to find employees. And they were saying like, one of the biggest struggles they have is finding employees. I believe they're doing like 20 million in revenue. And they said the hardest thing is just finding team members. And Gary cuts them off as he typically does, and it's like, that's not gonna be a problem. Six months. That's not gonna be a problem in six months. Or sorry, six weeks. He said six weeks. Six weeks. Well, I don't believe that is true because these white collar workers that are getting laid off, like the people who got laid off from Twitter are not gonna come mow grass for me. Cause I'm hiring and I need employees and I'm happy to hire. We just hired 20 people at command center, but I don't feel like someone from Twitter is gonna come and work in my office where we take a scooter to down the way to go to the bathroom because we only have one, one bathroom in the office. They're not going to like the fact that they don't get free kombucha and free buffets. And guess what? Those things aren't sustainable. And that's why they're getting laid off from these companies that can no longer afford to be able to offer all these perks and benefits because that's not what drives results for the customer or for the business. Those things don't. And so everyone will talk about culture and how we can add all these things and perks and massage parlors and free gyms for our employees and all the rest of it until, until a rece hits and for 14 years we haven't had a recession. And therefore adding all those perks and benefits is fine because Wall street loves growth. So if we can just grow, grow, grow and hire all the best talent by giving all these useless perks, this is, trust me, these are the conversations happening in the boardrooms of these Fortune 500 companies. And that is okay. All we got to focus on is growth and expansion and top line Revenue growth. That's why Google grew like 40% last year, year over year. Well now all of a sudden when that's become 10%, guess what they do? They cut off all of perks. They lay off 12000 people for no reason whatsoever. Not based upon performance, not based upon who was doing good. They simply just cut everybody. All right, so the realities of, is when a recession happens, it shows what we've been doing. Like the tide goes out, shows who wasn't wearing any pants. All right, so that's what's happening. Now Check this, this, this, this chart out here. I think this is really interesting. So for ongoing benefits, continuing claims for, for unemployment benefits, you can see here throughout 2022, we had as low as 1.3 million. Well now it's like 1.6, 1.7. And you can see in the past few months, this chart going up. This is as, as the interest rates from the Fed have gone up, we are now seeing unemployment go up as well. This is what happens when you raise rates. And this is what the Fed should have done months ago in order to tame down inflation. All right, so let me go ahead and show you this. Now this is a claims for unemployment. These are new claims for unemployment. This is what's happening right now. And it doesn't look like a lot on this graph because this massive thing in Covid really skews the results. But if you look here, you're going from 1.3 million just a few months ago, I can get my, there 1.3 in October, 1.3 million new unemployment insurance claims. Whereas now we are almost at 2 million. So almost a 50% increase in the amount of unemployment insurance claims. And again, if you actually were to zoom in on this, this graph here, it would be a 50% increase almost over the past several months. I truly believe that this is going to lead to a window of opportunity over the next. I'm going to give it one to two months to be able to hire people. Now last year, check this out. Last year at Landscape Summit, I said the exact, exact same thing. I said, look, Omicron came, Omnicron virus, the second wave, whatever we want to call it. Last year we almost had to shut down our conference. And technically in our state, we still weren't supposed to have gatherings over like a hundred people. And we did it anyways. Anyways, all of that to say is, check this out. If you look back at last year, last January and February, look at this little spike right here. That was the four to six weeks I Said we had a window of opportunity because all of a sudden Omicron showed up and people started laying people off again. And of course, I'm not showing the graph. Shame on me. But check this out, all right, January 2021, look at this little spike here. January and February, I said we got about six weeks and then I don't expect there to be window of opportunity. And for sure, that was exactly what happened. There was this window of opportunity after Omnicron, people getting laid off. We were able to hire into that because unemployment did that little bump there. And we were able to get a lot of team members for the spring rush. And the reason I'm talking about this right now is I truly believe that this is going to be an opportunity for small business owners to actually now have the ability to actually find employees. Because no longer are these big tech companies sucking up talent. In fact, they're laying people off. And these white collar jobs that are have been bloated for the past 10 to 12, 14 years because Wall Street's just been pumping money into them like crazy, they are no longer going to have that opportunity. This is an opportunity for you as a small business owner to be able to get some employees. Now check this out. This is what I'm super excited about. And this is the thing everyone gets all fired about Wall street, when in my opinion, to this day, I still believe that small business owners are the backbone of our economy. And now this is becoming in focus because we're literally going into recession. Guess what? These big tech firms laying off hundreds of thousands of people at the exact same time, small business in America are hiring faster than ever before, basically taking that talent. Because in a recession, in my opinion, a small business can be more effective and efficient than a big bloated company that has massive offices and hierarchy and headquarters and overhead. So that's just my opinion. All right, let's jump into this chart here. This is from Wall Street Journal as well. We got the share of small business owners who said it got easier versus more difficult to find workers. This makes me very, very happy. Okay, we're down here at 15, 16, 17% of people that said it was easier to find employees back earlier in 2022. Guess what? It's now above. Almost 24% of small business owners are saying it's easier to find employees and workers now than it was previously in 2022. Check this out. 32% of people were saying it was more difficult to find employees back in October. And literally just a few months later, that number has dropped down to 20%. So a 30% reduction on the amount of people saying it's more difficult to find employees. And this is based on a survey of 650 small business owners. So I feel like this is amazing. I'm very happy about this. For the sake of the small business owner. I also feel like this is what the economy needs, is a shift away from these massive conglomerates that have been sucking cash out of investors pockets and putting it lining the pockets of their corporate executives and their fancy offices. And now we're going to see really who has the innovation, who really has the work ethic, who really has the ability to be able to build teams that will actually build the products and services and products that customers really need. And that's what's going to happen. So I'm really happy about this. I think it's a good step in the right direction and I truly believe next couple months is a great opportunity if you're a seasonal business, if you're a small business to start hiring. That's what we're built for. That's what built America. And this is the time when small businesses can shine.

This has been the Mike Candies podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. And if you like what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews, reviews and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. That'll be right up your alley. That's all we have time for today. We'll see you next time.