Book Launch and LAST CHANCE

Hey everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com today. I have a bunch of really awesome announcements. If you're not looking for announcements, I will get back to regularly scheduled programming next week. But today I have some big announcements because my book just launched launched yesterday. So you can go to Amazon, you can search my name, Mike Andes, or just put in Zero Turn. Mike Andes. Are zero Turn Lawn care, Mike Andy's lawn Care. However you want to find it. It's Zero Turn and the subtitle is how to build a successful lawn care business. So I know you've heard me talk about it a lot. It's a very easy read. It's more of a story format. It's not a textbook format. It's not a checklist format. It's more of a storyline of a lawn care entrepreneur that quits his day job as a project manager, ends up becoming starts his own business, starts at the wrong way and ends up scaling it back because he's just frustrated with employees and all of those things, customer complaints, all that scales it back, gets injured after scaling it back and then realizes that he doesn't own a business, he owns a job. And then he basically has to rebuild from start and starts his business the correct way with systems and procedures and, and professionalism. So check it out. It's just 8.99. I made as cheap as I possibly could to get the message out. So feel free to buy a couple of those copies. It's just 140 pages. You could sit down in an evening, in a few hours and read the book. So check it out, the audio portion. The audio book will be coming out probably in a few months. We just gotta get to the conference and things and then I'll be working on that. So that's the big announcement today. Another big announcement. Facebook group. You definitely wanna join the Facebook group if you are coming to the conference. Absolutely. You want to be on the Facebook group because we're going to be sharing things there. But if you haven't already, join the Facebook group. It's a private group just for listeners of the podcast that register and then I accept. So just go to Facebook and search landscape business course and we'll pop up. There's only like 40 or 50 people in. We launched a couple days ago, so definitely want to jump in there and get notifications, ask questions and get input from everyone else. So that's the next announcement. The next announcement. Which by the way, if you're coming to the conference, you can expect an email from Me this weekend.

Going again over some of the things that we have in terms of schedule and what you should be expecting and things like that. I know it's the first conference, so some people have been emailing about like what should I wear and all the other things like food and all that. So I will spell all that out in detail in an email to the attend of the conference. Now, that being said, I also wanted to make it public knowledge that the breakfasts and lunches I've decided to have catered for everyone at the conference. So you don't need to worry about that. We were going to leave the food up to you all just because we didn't obviously charge as if we were going to be feeding everybody. But I decided I wanted to keep everyone together so you can network, especially during breakfast and lunch. During dinner you can go out to the town, get an Uber somewhere. There's a really nice restaurant at the conference center. But I wanted to make sure that the morning and the afternoon, the breakfast and lunch were covered. So I was able to get that catered. So that will be completely taken care of. And then you can plan your dinner reservations and all that in the evening once you start to network with other individuals. So that is pretty cool. It is going to be a good breakfast, good lunch, It'll definitely fill you up, maybe bring some snacks for in between on a couple of breaks. What else? The schedule for the conference, I wanted to go over the schedule and I wanted to share it with you because there is still a couple more spots and you can get in. So for the next couple days I'm going to leave registration open. We are officially fully booked. But I asked the hotel because there's another big basketball tournament happening in our town that same week, so there's other people wanting rooms and I asked could we get a couple more? And they said yes. So there is a few more spots available, but we are just over the 50 person marker. So I don't know if we're going to 60, 65 people maybe, I don't know. But however many rooms, if you can go to the registration and book, it means that there's a room available for you using that link and so you can go ahead and register for the conference. So it should be available for the next few days. If you register at the very last minute, you might not get like a name tag and a binder, all the things that we're customizing for everyone. But you will definitely get all the value and I'll still provide all the meals for the breakfast and lunches. This is the schedule. I know we've gone over this before, but I wanted to go over last time to make sure that you know exactly what we're doing. Thursday we are going to be doing a keynote and I'm going to be talking about what holds you back. That's one of the biggest things about this conference is we're going to be tackling the things that are holding you back. After that, we're going to do an introduction game. Get to know everyone. This is a big part of the event, is the networking. Getting to know other lawn care landscapers that are serious enough to travel across the country to this event. And they're not just, you know, into their equipment. They want to know about their business. They want to know strategies, they want to know tactical things. Introducing yourself to them. We're going to be getting to know each other there. And then that Thursday evening we're going to talk about changes, changes in technology, changes in our industry, changes in labor, so many different changes in regulation, taxes, all the things that are changing in our environment, in our businesses. How do we adapt, how do we evolve and how do we capitalize on those opportunities? Friday we're going to be talking about why the Internet thing matters. I'm going to be talking about how that exposes so many different failures of our industry and how you can use those to beat out the low price competition. That's going to be on Friday morning. Then we're going to do a, then we're going to jump into workshops. We're going to do a financial planning workshop until lunch on Friday morning. A couple hours there you're going to get your master plan, your five year plan, your one year plan nailed down with action items for each. We're gonna do a marketing workshop in the afternoon on Friday. We're gonna create exactly what your plan is for 2019 and your budget for each month. We're gonna be talking at a keynote that afternoon on how to grow during the recession. As you all saw a couple episodes ago, I talked about this from a very high level view and we're gonna go very deep into this. We're gonna do some Q and A and talk about some of the areas that we feel are weak in your business and that you can really actually use recession to capitalize on an opportunity and beat out the competition as they all wrap up and fail their businesses in their businesses. That evening. Friday evening we're doing a special viewing of season two of zero Turn. This is one I'm really looking Forward to. It's a company that we visited in Mississippi for a couple days and they're trying to go from, you know, they got past half a million dollar in revenue in the annual revenue, they're trying to get past a million. And so in this video, the couple days we spend with them and there's multiple owners and a lot of moving parts with them, we try to get them past a million dollars in revenue. And so you'll be able to watch live with all of us, exactly how we walk them through that and what they are able to improve in their business to get it to the level of efficiency that is desired. They are going to be there, which is going to be very special. I'm hoping we can get them to answer some questions, check in with them how they have been doing the past few months since our visit. So that Friday evening we're gonna watch the video together because it's gonna premiere that night. It'll be available online later after the conference. However, we're gonna watch it together and then you're gonna actually get to meet the people in the, in the episode, in the series and see what has been implemented, what their struggles have been since we visited and the changes they have made. Saturday, the last day of the conference, we are going to be starting off in the morning about creating a world class team. I'm going to have my team members there. You're going to see them live and in person. Creating a world class team. Why that's important, how to do it. Then we're going to jump right into a workshop around that kind of general subject of teamwork and hiring. We're going to do live interviews, we're going to do some mock interviews. I'm going to show you exactly how I do my career fair and attract great people and how we get people together for that evening and walk them through all about us and getting those great applicants for your labor force. That afternoon we're going to do something very special. Project Management workshop is going to. This is literally something that I feel is going to change people's businesses and at least get them to think a lot differently. This project Management workshop is going to be absolute gold that we're going to do some actual activities where you're going to see the numbers of other businesses on a particular job. We're all going to bid on the same job. It's going to be absolutely fantastic. That Project Management Workshop, this whole conference could be for that one session right there. Especially if you're starting to grow your business into doing Mulch installs and small landscaping hardscaping. That's going to be absolute gold for you right there. Then we're going to close out that Saturday evening with a keynote on customer experience, followed up by a special announcement I have for all the attendees. But customer experience is something we've been fanatical about at my company this past year. Every single aspect of the customer experience, right from being a prospect to a customer, to being a recurring and referral customer, we're going to be talking about that in customer experience. And then we're going to close the entire conference off Saturday, which is a massive Q and A session, Couple hours that I will spend answering any and all questions to make sure that when you leave the conference, you're able to implement all the things that you have learned. And so I really look forward to meeting so many of you. I've never done a conference. I'm not by no means perfect, but I've built a business, scale it pretty fast, it's profitable, it's growing, have a great team in place. Like I'm gonna hold this conference and my team's gonna be working and in the field and doing jobs and we're halfway through a move moving our offices. Like they're doing all of that because I have an absolute phenomenal staff. It's nothing to do with me, that's them. And I'm just trying to implement the culture that you can take some of those ideas and implement in your business and you're gonna see some of my team members, you're gonna see how we interact, you're gonna see how we hire them and how we attract that great talent. And so some of the biggest takeaways I think from this are gonna be really you focusing on the value and getting rid of those low priced competitors in your market that you feel are a threat to you. How do you differentiate yourself? How do you differentiate yourself? So you attract incredible talent from your competitors from other industries like electricians and plumbers and contractors. How do you actually be able to pay enough to get them to come and work for you and create a culture that they're willing to take a pay cut to come work for you. So these are some of the things we're going to be talking about. And it's gonna be, it's the conference I've always wanted the same. This is something I haven't really said. The same way that I still remember five and a half years ago sitting at Google and typing in landscape business course, trying to find a course that would walk me through starting my business in a very symmetrical or sorry, very like step by step guide. That's what I searched. Landscape Business course on Google. Nothing was there. There was a bunch of academic stuff from colleges and horticultural things, but nothing that was just step by step. I saw tips and I saw things kind of all over the place, but I wanted step by step, chronologically, how to start a business. That's why I named it Landscape Business Course. I still remember sitting down in my bedroom on my Mac computer and typing in Landscape Business course and nothing coming up. So that's why I started the course. This is also why I'm starting Landscape Summit, the conference. It's what I've always wanted. I've been to a lot of landscaping conferences, I've been to a lot of business conferences. I've been to podcasting conferences and like fincon. Like, I've been to a bunch of pot of different conferences. This is the conference I've always wanted. Just really solid business advice with people that are there to grow their businesses and without all the fluff, without the trade shows and the vendors and the advertisers. Just really straight, like long days, lots of advice, lots of actionable tips. And that's why I created Landscape Summit. So. So if you haven't already, I promise you it'll be worth it. This is a. We just have a few more days for you to register. If you're tired of me talking about the conference, I promise it'll all be done in a week. I won't be talking about it for another six or seven months. But for sure, if this is something that you're serious about, 2019, growing your business, this is the place you want to be. I just really look forward to meeting the podcast listeners, the video from Facebook and YouTube. I want to meet you all in person and actually get to see the faces behind all the emails, the phone calls, the webinars, the chats, all the things that I do, the questions online that I try to answer. I can't wait to see your faces and I can't wait to get the dialogue and answer your questions throughout the entire conference. There will be Q and A every single session. If you have questions, I will answer them. If you have questions afterwards, late in the night, I will answer those. I'll be up early. I'll be staying at the hotel and in order to be around in the lobby, in the lounge, in the conference center as much as I can to answer all your questions. So I can't wait to see you. If you haven't already check it out. Go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference if the page is still up, registration's still available. There's still a few more spots. I don't think I can go past 60. So we have a few more spots, but I don't know, maybe 65 if the hotel allows us. But if that page is still up, it means the hotel rooms are still available. So definitely, definitely, definitely check that out right away. And I cannot wait to see you. If you are not coming to the conference, make sure you check out the book. It's Zero Turn how to Build a Successful Lawn Care Business. I'm Mike Andes from landscapebusinesscourse.com I'll see you next week at Landscape Summ.