Brother QUITS and his Landscape Business CRASHES!

Spring rush. My brother just quit. Now I'm in the hospital with his emergency surgery. I'm still thinking I can still go to work tomorrow. I just won't sleep today. It's fine.

Today we're in Texas, visiting Efren from native scenery, landscapes.

I wish I had, like, structure. This is not what I envisioned when I first started doing this.

That means I need to fix it now because it's going to break.

Give me my language. It's kind of a show. I think it's getting worse.

Efren made over $380,000 in revenue last year.

This year, my goal was 450. I would tell people, yeah, I'm going to landscape. And they're like, what's wrong with you?

You're in all these different spots, and it's working. You're profitable enough to grow the business past $500,000. But he can't figure out how.

I don't want to grow it with a broken system and everything falls and crashes. My whole identity has become this, which is cool, I thought. But no, it's not. I'm just kind of driving this with my eyes closed.

He spends his day jumping from task to task without any clear direction or priority.

I can't imagine my dad working like this for 30 years by himself, going on seven years of chaos. I've frankly had enough. He set the bar, so I can't complain until my year 25.

Do you have email coming your phone right now?

I do, yeah. And when I open the app, I get an anxiety attack. Well, these guys just showed up yesterday, and I have a whole what are we doing wrong?

This is the business Turnaround show. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 175 locations around the world, and I travel the country fixing struggling businesses.

I just didn't have the clarity on where to start.

If you do all of those things in the next six weeks, we'll be in a good spot.

This is perfect. This is exactly what I need.

Our goal is to give Efren a strategy to turn around the company in the next six weeks.

Like any family, business is tough when you've taken over from your dad or whatever. So it's very interesting dynamic that now his dad works for him. That's always tough, honestly. But then it sounds like there's been more of an issue with his brother and that kind of those expectations from a family business perspective. This beautiful Texas weather. We're supposed to be the one with all the rain.

We stole it from you today. How's it going, Wayne? Good, man. My name is Efren Loyola and I'm the owner operator of Native City Scenery Landscapes. We provide what I consider small scope projects. Mulch installation, plants, gravel.

This is a nice little shop space. I saw actually on your Instagram.

Yeah. So as you see, this is our workspace and we have plenty of space. And I say that because our previous spot sucked. It was expensive. We started at my parents house. After two years we went to this storage space kind of sort of more central. And it was nice. It was like a garage like this with an office space. And I was like, oh, this is great. But turned out it was just expensive and not usable. But we were stuck there for three years.

And what do you have to pay for this area?

700, 750.

Okay.

To give you some context, I was paying 2,000 for three years over there.

Mercy.

For my office space that wasn't insulated. So you can imagine in the summer, oh my God. My brother, myself, we would go and it was in the summers he would go and mow lawns with my dad. That's all it really was, was mowing lawns. Sometimes he would have these, these clients where he just kind of goes there all day and does more of like just groundskeeping, general stuff. My brother and I would go and we're like 8 or 9, 10 years old. And I didn't think anything of it because I'm like 10 years old. My brother was always so far, he's like, man, this sucks. And I'm like, this is fun.

A lot of times when you have a generational business, the challenging part is the person that it gets handed off to never built the company. They weren't the founder and that they're given the responsibility of the CEO. And it's rare that you have a random kid of an owner that is a good CEO mater material. Like maybe they, maybe they are. But it's. It's rare that they are actually the best candidate for that job because they're not the founder. So if you look at the whole business, what percentage of it is you think mowing, landscaping and then the other which would be like irrigation and.

Yeah. 75. Lawn service.

Got it.

Kind of break the other three or maybe a little another. Then projects and then we control audits are like the small two ones. Yeah. But I would say if I had to guess on like margin wise and profitability, they're higher profitable services.

And you're doing all.

I just haven't scaled it up like A system around it. And that's what I'm working on.

They might not have the cultural kind of vision for the business or like what the vision for what the brand should be or they just. A lot of times you'll burn through employees because they don't have the ability to attract people to what they're trying to do. But also there's people like Efren that take over the business and then things go super successful and just you double or triple the business most time because you take on technology and you upgrade the tech stack of what you're working with.

I just feel I see the end result of potentially retiring my parents and having something sustainable and long term. And it may work out, may not, but so far it's been working out and yeah.

Did you work for your dad before taking it over then?

So he's been doing that for as long as I remember.

Okay.

Mowing lawns and he's always been like a one man crew. Go back to work and help my dad. Like I said, he's working by himself. He's getting older. Seven years ago is when I came on. I'm like, initially I just came on just to help. I was in between transition, in between careers. And once I started helping, I was like, why are we doing this? Like the hardest way possible. Why don't we make things easier? And seven years later, now I'm here and we're still here.

Oh, wow.

Let me introduce you to my dad. He's the guy that started it all. This is my dad, Efren Sr.

When did he start it? Like 20 years ago.

So I'm 34. So when I was like 1 or 2 when he started mowing. It has a sense of like a means of an income really, as full.

His full time thing. Wow.

I can't imagine my dad working like this for 30 years by himself. And I'm over here like year eight and I'm like crying. He set the bar. So I can't complain until you're 25. That's when I'll think about giving up. 25 years later I was in between careers, you could say a registered nurse actually. So it's kind of super random. People always ask me, I was like, how the hell did you end up here? When I was working at the hospital, I would tell people, yeah, I'm going to landscape. And they're like, what's wrong with you?

And but it's like, because all that background, I told you, it's just what I know. And it's just Very natural to me. I went back home to kind of reevaluate my life. Like, who? What do I want to do next? So I started helping my dad out again. He's getting older. I feel a sense of pride that me, my dad and my brother did this together. I started first maybe two years later. Yeah, I was working security at the time. And then he told me about the company. I pretty much jumped on board around, like, 2019. Yeah, about two years. Yeah. Yeah. Been on ever since then. Eventually, we branded ourselves where I branded us. So I'm like 100% owner of this company of native scenery landscapes. Yeah, doing. So we kind of grandfathered in that clientele list. Fast forward to now. We manage about 50 clients or so. And we're just building sort of kind of these different departments of our business. And one thing, one of the big things I noticed at that time, every day we're out here, there's two or three new companies I've never seen before, lawn service wise. I mean, some of these things are like, my dad's original tools from, like 25, 30 years ago. And I'm seeing these guys pull up in, like, new trucks, completely wrapped, these new skags. And I'm like, what are we doing wrong? Like, well, these guys just showed up yesterday, and I have a whole setup, and I'm like, what's going on? And that's when I started kind of just learning more about business just on my own. And once you open that can of worms, it's never ending. Seven years later, and I'm still here learning. And I mean, I reached out to y', all, so there's still plenty, plenty more to learn. So you saw this car already? This is our. This is our daily driver. We have our utility trailer in the back. This is our big boy here. So when we do projects. Exactly. Our dump trailer. I bought this pre Covid. So since then, it's. That's, I think, tripled in price. I got lucky there. All my irrigation stuff's in here. And that's really helped in optimizing and just being efficient.

And how much of your week is usually spent doing irrigation in terms of actually in the field doing that?

Since I've had this, I will say, yeah, like 10 hours, and it could easily double, triple. Just. I haven't really leaned into it because since I'm the only one doing that, yeah, if I do that full time, nothing else in regards to, like, back end stuff, this and the weed control stuff, I want them to be big, equal parts of the business. Just like everything else, I like for everything to be kind of equal in regards to lawn service projects, irrigation, weed control, just having it diversified. I think it makes sense to me.

Yeah, no it's good.

I'm leaning more towards sort of like a full property maintenance type of company. So long service, my irrigation, weeds planting. So guess what? We do all that stuff in house seems to be very profitable.

So you're in this limbo of like I know I need to work on the business, but I can't afford, afford to work on the business. I'll stay in the business. So the only way to really navigate that is either a work 20 hours a day to try to do both, or you gotta kinda take a short term step back profitability wise so you can focus on growing the business. So like scaling that side, do you eventually need to hire someone for those? Cause like obviously like you said, if you're doing more of that then you can't be doing the rest of the business. So what's your kind of long term.

Plan on that side in general would be to systematize some of these departments, I guess we want to call them.

Yeah.

Like you said, I can't go out there and put down the fertilizer. I also want to kind of build the system like I can be in it and I'm working at the same time.

He's still producing revenue and that's where he's going to hit a challenge right now is if he wants to grow the business, it'll require more of his time to not be in the field. However, by not being in the field, probably take away all his most profitable labor which is irrigation and weed control because that's what he's been doing.

I don't want to grow it with a broken system and everything falls and crashes.

Yeah.

This year my goal is 450.

Okay.

Last year we did 380.

There's four of them including the owner. And if they can do 450, 480 this year like that make checks out.

We'll say 315.

Okay.

The year before that 220. So big jump there.

Got it.

And then 220, 2019 is about around 200 I think kind of floated.

Got it.

So we've always sort of grown. I feel like we're now we're just. I'm just kind of driving this with my eyes closed. I kind of know what I want, but I don't have like these top things where I should work on these things to really take me to the Next level. We'll try to figure that out for sure.

I wanted to just take a second to show you how. So this is what we started. This is what my dad started. This is what we worked out of. This is where I grew up, this is my home and this is where my dad worked his business. So every morning we would just come out through here. This is what my dad built a long time ago. This is kind of the original shop.

That's awesome.

Since then, we've sort of transitioned out to now the storage. And now my dad just kind of uses this too for his own stuff.

So you're here usually most of the day and then you kind of. You'll take the afternoons and head out with like irrigation, chemicals, stuff like that.

Then yes, if I plan it out that way. The ideal day is go to the storage, get the guys ready and touch on anything that we need to touch on. I'll come here, catch up on like emails or just quotes I need to work on. Just kind of back in admin stuff. I wish I had like structure.

Right.

And this is like Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. This is what I'm doing. And the other day I'm doing this like. No, it's sort of seems to be up in the air, kind of juggling different things depending on the week.

Got it. What's the next thing for you, in your opinion, to like either delegate or get rid of so you can continue to scale the business?

I feel like I'm missing systemization and organization. I'd hate to kind of get influx of marketing or sales or leads when I don't have any way of organizing it. It'll just add to the chaos going on. Seven years of chaos. I've frankly had enough. My life has completely just only become this. This is my whole identity now. Yeah. And I don't like that. You know, I'm married. I recently got married. I want to have a family. I want to just be able to do other things other than just worry about emails and clients. I've been in this long enough to now see patterns and trends. And what has really gone to the wayside is my own personal life. Like I said, I recently got married. I didn't do any more hobbies. I don't hang out. Like, I don't. And it's. That allows me to kind of like refresh myself to continue doing business. So if I cut that out of my life, my business time is now limited. So I need to just get that back. My whole identity has become this, which is cool. I Thought. But no, it's not. It just needs to be a part of my life, not my entire life. My wife is very patient. I don't know. There comes a point where it's like, come on, what are we doing here?

All right, so you probably see me use the 4L framework a little bit.

I love that.

Okay, cool. The 4L framework identifies the four reasons why every single business will stop growing. These four constraints are liquidity, leads, labors, and leadership. A lack of any one of those things can cause the business to stop growing. From a liquidity perspective, the business looks relatively profitable from what I can see. Like, and you've been able to take a decent paycheck. Like, is there cash crunches that I am not seeing?

I think off the top of my head, one of them was our rent. It was a huge thing that we would deal with all the time.

The $2,000 a month.

Yeah. And then also having storage because there wasn't enough space in one spot. And that was like, three years long. The more recent I think it was how I'm paying guys in regards to payroll. It's like, I don't know what way is best. So we've tried different things. At a certain point, I was just paying guys just to kind of be around because I didn't know what else to do. This is not what I envisioned when I first started doing this. I wanted freedom. I wanted the ability to be there for my friends and family. And, yeah, where I was headed was not. Was the opposite of that. And it's just that whole little time frame, which is the accumulation of everything kind of going bad. No systems, everything being like, last minute, I'm stuck in one spot. Like, it just all kind of came crumbling down. I think I've narrowed that down more. Almost similar to what I think you do. I'm paying them based off our budgeted scheduled hours. So if there's eight hours, I'm paying them eight hours. If they finish in six, they're still getting paid eight.

So that's basically a day rate. Is that kind of what you're using right now?

Yeah, kind of just. But also kind of based on what the day is. Right. I feel like that's lessen the bleed in regards to any kind of bleed that I'm aware of.

So from a debt perspective, is there any debt in the business right now?

The only thing is one truck. $24,000.

That's the landscape truck.

I assume that's my own personal truck, which I use for landscape.

Right. Okay. And then in Terms of cash, usually I'm trying to hit like about one month worth of revenue, which in this case, you're probably around 40,000. Are we at that level in terms of cash in the bank right now?

35.

Okay. So it's healthy enough.

Yeah.

There are three reasons why I don't see liquidity as the big constraint for the growth of the business. First off, we have about a month's worth of revenue in the bank. Secondly, we don't have a lot of debt. He only has a small loan on one of the trucks. And third, Efrain doesn't have a lot of overhead. He doesn't have a fancy office space with utilities, and he's recently been able to downsize his shop space from 2000amonth all the way down to 700. Really, there's not much of a liquidity. You know, I don't see that as a huge constraint.

Okay.

As long as someone's making has a one month of revenue in the bank, I'm like, green lights to grow, and we keep moving forward. Now, the next constraint of growth, since we've addressed the fact that liquidity is not the problem, is leads. And ultimately leads will solve everything. It'll force the business to grow. If tons of people are banging down the door saying they need services, the next, like, constraint is usually, well, I need more customers. And right now, from what I'm hearing, you're like, hey, I'm pretty confident if I can just not have to do all this admin work and not be out in the field, I can go get more leads. That is also upsell my existing customers more services. In terms of your current website, did you build that or. It looks really good.

Been there, done that with the website. Right. I started doing it myself. This sucks. I don't know what I'm doing. So I had that one built three, four years ago. I've started from doing it myself. You got Squarespace or whatever and you do things. You're like, oh, it looks pretty good, but it sucks. But you don't know that because you're the one doing it. But it's been outdated, and I kind of lost contact with the guy that made it. I was taking advice from a professional, but, like, it didn't work out. That's a big lesson you learn when you're doing business. It's. It takes multiple iterations. I see your show and I really like your mindset behind the website, how it should look, feel, and you sold me on that. So I've actually, a couple weeks ago Now I signed up for the website design.

Okay.

So that's getting built as we speak.

Oh, good.

And Mike just is speaking my language here. He's thinking. He's speaking what I'm thinking. I'm like, this just only makes sense. I'm really excited to see how it turns out. It's only been about probably two, three weeks since we initially sent over everything.

Another opportunity when it comes to leads in the 4L framework for native scenery landscapes is their website. And the website actually looks pretty decent, but it was built a long time ago and there's not been a lot of Updates. There are URLs that are missing, pages that are missing, there's scripts that are missing. It's a very slow site, even though it looks half decent. That's why it's so important to keep your website updated. Constantly change the pictures, the video, and make it seasonally relevant. During the middle of winter, I'm not going to be pitching mowing during the middle of spring rush, I'm not going to be pitching winter services. And so constantly making updates to a site is very important. And this is why I'm so happy that effort has reached out to Tory and the team at Lawn Care Web Design, where we actually help build the site and keep it updated on an ongoing basis for search engine optimization as well as the actual design of the website. The reason I think I'm really happy you're thinking about now is because once you fix the other things, this will become a constraint.

Yes.

Because in part, if you had 20 leads coming in day, you would be forced to like, oh, I have to get an office person. I have to focus on just doing the sales. Oh, I can't even do the irrigation in the chemicals because I have 20 leads today. Ultimately, like, if you have enough leads, you can raise prices. And if you raise prices, you then have the capital to be able to spend more money on marketing, hire more people, solve other problems in the business. So really money solves everything. But usually you make more money if you have so many leads that you literally will indiscriminately raise prices. Everyone always says, like, ah, this isn't, isn't a problem because like, they feel busy. But ultimately, if we delegate a whole bunch of other things to business and you, it would become the constraint. And also if you had five times as many leads, you would immediately have to figure out delegation and systemization of everything else.

Him saying that was not. I didn't expect that. That seems counterintuitive to me. Right. Because I'm like, looking the opposite. I want to relieve pressure.

And so I don't think leads is the current constraint, but just know it will become the constraint as you continue through this process.

Organized and structured, streamlined. Yeah, we are going to need that flow of leads. Totally makes sense.

Yeah. So if you think about, like a funnel, if you have certain bottlenecks in the funnel, there'll be backups of fluid if you're pouring water through. And sometimes we as business owners are good at dealing with pain. And so we'll deal with a little bit of a bottle and that's going to be fine. One way to really accentuate though, and identify the bottle, like, is just dump more in the top. And so a lot of times when you dump more leads on something, immediately you can like, oh, like this is a constraint. Because I will never be able to process this many leads. And so especially in a business like his, where he's been working off of most just referrals and in, you know, upselling his existing customers, you pour a whole bunch of new customers in that funnel and all of a sudden, like, oh, my word, I need someone to answer the phone. Oh, my goodness. Like, I can't get to all these estimates. Oh, my goodness, like, I'm getting all these irrigation leads. Maybe I can't do the irrigation myself. And so you identify the constraint many times by testing it. So even in software, we will put 10 times the amount of traffic on the site in order to be able to identify where are the bottlenecks, where are the breakage points, where are the weak points of the software. The same thing is true in business, in my opinion. Lead solves everything. It pushes you.

It does. It forces growth.

Exactly. The website will be improved then. It's a function of, like, right now. We have never done any sort of marketing. It's always been a matter of upselling our existing customers.

Yeah, it's this. It's our branding, in a sense, it's our word of mouth. But no, like, X amount of dollars goes into marketing and this is what we got. Like, that's never happened.

Which is fine. Which is fine because I don't think we've even squeezed the juice out of our existing customers.

I agree.

Right. You've been focused on this. You have not actually even, like, pitched irrigation to some of them or like, chemical weakening because you're like, I don't really have the time to do that. I gotta do this. Yeah.

They just ask. I'm like, yeah, I do it. Yeah.

So then, so really then I believe, like, Right now we go from 380 to 600 by simply you focusing on upselling higher margin services. There's one thing that we want to focus on first and that is upsells. Those are the custom that are already inside their database. They're already serving their property. But he hasn't even told them about weed control. He hasn't even told them about the fact that they do irrigation. And these are their highest margin services. And so we want to focus on telling our customers via text, email and phone calls that hey, there's not just mowing that we do. We do these other services and we can increase the lifetime value of the customer. And if they're spending $1,000 a year, if we get that $2,000 a year, we can effectively double the size of the business without any new customers. The low hanging fruit is from a leads perspective, we gotta get more upsells. And that's going to be the higher margin services of irrigation and weed control. And so right now, customers might call, hey, I have this problem. I can fix this. No problem. And you got an irrigation job. Have we done any sort of campaigns around email or text blasts to our existing customers around those services?

No.

By increasing his lead flow using his website, as well as increasing the upsells to his existing customers, I think that the business could literally double without spending a single dollar on marketing. So like that's low hanging fruit. I think we go from 380 last year to 500 just by you being able to focus on that.

That's a great idea. You know, I've done, I've signed up to other companies newsletters and they'll send like seasonal things. And I'm like, this is a great idea. Sometimes I'll print them out so I can copy them for later. This is a great idea. And so that's essentially what Mike's talking about. Just having these seasonal kind of reminders, awareness.

Because it's not always at the top of mind for clients. And that's what we're here for to take care of these needs.

When it comes to labor, the third constraint inside the 4L framework, I need Efren to understand where he's actually spending his time right now. From a labor perspective, I know you're paying kind of like by the budget hour slash, how much work is getting done right now. You have your dad, you have your brother, and then you have Ricardo, who's been with you for a few years.

My brother quit week two of spring rush.

This year.

Yeah, this year.

Oh man.

My Brother left. I mean, it was already pressure. And then my brother leaving, it just doubled it. Like a few months ago. I did quit for a month because I didn't know if I wanted to do this anymore and even get me started. He quit week two with spring rush. When that happened, it forced me to go and do hiring. Forgive my language, but it's kind of a joke, mind you. Spring rush, my brother just quit. Now I'm in the hospital with his emergency surgery. And like I said, I have projects in the schedule with already deposits ready to go. I'm still thinking I can still go to work tomorrow. I just won't sleep today. It's fine because it's like, you get all kinds of people and it's just so much so time consuming. I'll get applicants. Two weeks later, I'm trying to interview them. They already got a job. And I was like, yeah, I'm not coming on Monday. And I'm like, what do you mean you're not coming on Monday? But anyway, he's here. So it worked out. So that just went to hell. My brother ended up coming back and sort of kind of saved the day. And for now, we've been good. So we're kind of back to where we were. We're not maxed out on our work. We can probably add in 30 more hours per week of work. Friends and family say, you just need higher, higher, but hire for what to do what? Like, I'm not just gonna have a body here. I need to have direction.

It seems counterintuitive, but the reason that you don't feel that pain is because you don't have enough leak needs. You can't afford to go hire an office person, but you also need to go get some estimates. And you also also need, like, be doing irrigation and weed control. Like, you're in all these different spots and it's working like you're profitable enough.

Yeah, that seems counterintuitive to me. Right. Because I'm like, looking the opposite. I want to relieve pressure. But, like, no, it makes sense. And I'm glad that he brought that up or saw that because I do understand how that would work is I'm creating pressure on this side to force me on that end. Because I left to my own device, I would just sit on it and not do anything. But if I'm forced to, just like with the first time I tried hiring, I did it because I was forced to. I could have done it at any point. But no, I did it when I absolutely needed someone today. Yeah. Right. Sometimes you gotta be forced. So that's great insight and it makes a lot of sense.

Can we get systems on the admin side so that we can spend any. Spend a little bit more time on the sales side and then that way we actually push irrigation. Because right now I don't believe I'm gonna going to convince you to get an office person and you go do more estimates. We don't even have enough leads to do that. But what we could do is you focus more upselling irrigation doing $120 an hour task and delegating a $20 an hour task. Yeah, because it sounds like a decent trade to me.

Yeah, it's just kind of math at that point. It just makes so much sense.

Then the thing is I go, well, what about all these other things I gotta get done throughout the day? That's the part that we can delegate out. Right. So from a labor perspective, I actually think then this becomes admin. Admin delegation. Because in my opinion this, as cool as it is not a good use of your time. Especially when you know you can go out and make $120.

Sure. No, I agree. I do feel when I'm here, I'm lost. What am I doing? This is not what I'm made for. Delegate and systematize that admin role and have that completely. Not completely, but like really off my shoulders to the point where I'm like, not like if I don't have my phone and someone else has that and if I'm not looking at my emails, I mean that right there is such a huge game changer. It just frees up. I feel like it'll free up half my brain to do other things. So I would say that's probably the number one thing is admin role taking it off me. And that's someone's responsibility now. And all I'm doing is kind of like overseeing it.

Yeah. There's nothing wrong with choosing a certain size of business and then being profitable at it, as long as it serves your goals. The reason I did not hamper down the fact that he could just optimize the current business, make it more efficient in sales operations and admin, tighten up his schedule, do some time blocking. Because I felt like it was sucking the life out of him to do admin and he would just much rather be doing other things. And even the fact that him saying like he gets anxiety every time he opens his email inbox. If you grow the business by 20 or 30%, it's just going to get 20, 30% more anxiety and more problems and more issues. My objective is to give that role to someone that loves opening an email, loves categorizing things, loves checklists. That might not be his strength, but it's someone else's strength. And what's cool is there's people who, like, is the opposite. They can never do irrigation. They can never lead a team. They don't have anything. But they step in here like, oh, yeah, I just, like, change this and make this better and improve this and make this way better. If you just spend that time upselling and doing irrigation, weed control, let alone sales and hiring and everything else, if you just did that, you would be able to add another hundred thousand dollars Rest.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so putting them in a role where they're going to succeed and then allowing him the time to go focus on something else that he will also succeed, in, which in this case is, first off, operations, doing more of the work that's really profitable. And then down the road, sales leading the team, hiring, which I actually think he's going to do a really good job at when the time comes for that. From an admin perspective, before we talk about the system of it, is there anyone that immediately is jumping your mind, like, oh, yeah, they could do my admin right tomorrow. Is there someone already that, like, has helped you?

What's our current exactly, team or just people? You know, I've always felt about, like, oh, my wife, or I have a cousin that he's a little younger than me. He's asked me about stuff like that. My hesitation has always been like, I don't even know what I would give you. How can I hand something off when I don't even know what I'm doing? I'm like, yeah, I kind of do this and I kind of do that. Take care of it. Like, what?

So this is what I would recommend doing. I would do a time audit for a week. I want to know everything you're doing every 15 minutes. It's a pain in the butt to do a time audit. I've done it twice, but then it.

Turns in and I'm like, this is.

It hurts. So you could. You could scan into your phone or I did it just with paper because it's actually really painful. But then what you start to realize is like, oh, I. I spent 15 minutes answering one email. Okay. I spent another 15 minutes literally just waiting on the crew to get back to a job site and drop something off. Like, you start to see all these massive holes in your day. Every 15 minutes, having an alert go off and you have to like write down what you're doing and then categorizing that in terms of, is that sales, operations or administration, that's extremely time consuming. But what it does is open your eyes to how long you're wasting time waiting for someone. You are randomly looking at your inbox and there's no emails, waiting for an email, looking at your phone and scrolling on social media. There are so many different wastes of time throughout our day. And you can become 30, 40% more efficient, just like squeezing the time out of the eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours that you're working. Also what you start to realize is like, oh my word, I'm switching different tasks throughout the day. A bazillion times there are switching costs. I would take three colors and I just be like, okay, so if these, these are my time log. Okay, these admin, these were sales, these were operations, and I just break it all into sales, operations and admin.

Right.

Those are the three functions that you're serving right now. You're doing some sales, some estimates, et cetera. You're doing some operations out in the field, doing of the work, and then you're doing some admin. Anything here, there's 10, 15, 20 seconds associated with this, like focusing on this thing. Okay, now I'm switching to this thing. Now I'm switching to this thing. The more times you do that and all of a sudden that 15, 20 seconds becomes a real meaningful part of your day and can absolutely be more prioritized, more time blocked, and then just be more efficient. And that's like the next level of entrepreneurship is like, I need to do more work, but then I need to be more efficient at the work I'm doing. I want to know what percentage of my day am I doing these things? Knowing that right now this is your lowest leverage task.

Task.

This is your next highest leverage, and this eventually will be your highest leverage. Right. So you're doing all this admin work that is probably on average $25 per hour tasks. Right. If you go out and do operations right now, you would earn a hundred plus dollars per hour. So it makes sense we should be moving from admin to operations.

It pays for itself.

And down the road, once you get a bigger team, you start to grow. And now you've hired out people to do irrigation and weed control. Now sales starts to become like a 200 an hour task.

Yeah. So doing the time audit and categorizing it into sales, operations and admin, I think just gives Me a framework to really try again and just succeed at it this time.

And I would make a list in addition to your time out of just like the random tasks you're doing. I check the bank, I cash checks, I open up the email, I check the phone. Like, just make a list of them all. And then I've got to create a system so that someone else, I give this to someone else and they're like, like, do it.

That's kind of been one of the issues I've been having is these random tasks. It seems kind of off. But you're saying that's just what people do. Yeah, One person will do. Check the mail, check or check the PO Box, enter the email, follow up on this quote. Like, just. They're so random. But I guess they're all, well, going.

Back to like, your education, like, is like nursing. Like, there's one time you're gonna be cleaning someone's instruments, another one you're taking their blood pressure. It seems random.

You're 100% right.

But every time you walk into that room, there's a checklist. Every single time you're signing off on things, there's a process in place to organize the madness. Otherwise it would be madness if every time you just walked in a patient's room and just like, yeah, help them. It's like, whoa, I need records. I know who did what, I know what was administered, what time. Like, that's what we need to do for the business.

I see.

So when someone walks in here, they know. Okay, I have X amount of emails. Okay. I immediately know. These ones I can put aside, which ones are actually important, what tasks are most important, and then which. What's the checklist I work through?

Okay, Right.

So right now you are doing the checklist. You're just kind of like randomly throughout the day. It's all in your head. I need to figure out what's the most important thing when you walk in here. Like, okay, is it first I need to make sure the emails are checked, see if there's any fires.

Exactly.

Great. That's rule number one. Two, check the voicemail in case there's anyone needs to change their schedule for today so I can notify the crew. Step three, Are there any overdue payments? Like, you just start creating a checklist of all the things you're doing, but you need to rank them in priority.

Well, interesting. I created this issue that was non existent. Me thinking like, no, these things are too random for one person to do. It's too random. But you're Right. As a nurse, you walk in, you're doing the blood pressure, but also cleaning the room. They're two random things, but it all within the same scope of work.

Yeah.

So yeah, that did completely clear it up for me.

When I'm doing coaching, I'm always trying to look for like, where's the unlock? And I wasn't getting it. And so I felt like I was sporadically hitting him at a bunch of different points and it wasn't clicking. And so I always go back to what can they recognize? And if you went to four years and got your bachelor's in science in nursing and then did nursing for several years, you are in that world. So I just stepped back to what was familiar to him and that was his aha moment. First we need to create the demand. So you get convinced I have to delegate this. Then we have to create systems around that admin side using our task list, using checklists, and literally just keep thinking about, hey, as a nurse, what did I do? What did I prioritize? What is the measurements of success as an admin person? And then you create those benchmarks.

Okay.

And then it's a function of, okay, now I got the check mark the checklist. I gotta train someone to do this. I'm gonna make a video screen recording of every single task. And these are one to four minute videos of every single one of the tasks you just wrote down.

Okay.

How to do your email, how to send out invoices, how do you do scheduling? It sounds to me like Ricardo down the road will probably become more of an operations manager.

Manager.

Right. Like making sure the crews are set up in the morning, making sure that the equipment is ready to roll, etc. I can see that he can grow into that role. And then that's what. Eventually you will be able to hand more and more of an operations to him so you can move into sales. Just unlocking upsells will create so much pressure. You will be forced to get an admin person. I would like though that when that happens, we have systems in place to be able to delegate it. We're able to hand it off to someone else.

That gives me the confidence to just jump into it. And you don't think about that initially. In the beginning, it's like, I mean, you listen to all like the.

Motivational, whatever, podcast videos. It's like, how long can you sprint without knowing that? Whatever. How long can you hold the. Can you hold your breath, carry the boats or whatever? And it's like, man, it's been seven Years, man, I need to, like, I need some help.

How much longer can I hold my breath for? How long? How much longer can I sprint? I've been out 100% for the last five years. Like, like. And that's what I felt alone in. I felt like, what? Everything I saw around me was like, yeah, I'm year three and I have 15 employees and this and that, and I'm, I'm working to gross $3 million. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? I'm like, double that amount of time and I have nothing even close to this. So it does make you feel alone. But that's like, you know, that's looking at life through an Instagram filter. So it's hard to know what's real, what's not. That's their story, that's their whatever. I have to focus on mine and what I can do. You know, my variables. I can't.

Compare my life to someone else's life. Who knows what they're upbringing was it just. So I, I kind of come back to that and it kind of helps me be a little bit more patient.

It is literally a function of like, okay, I walk in the door and I am like, okay, email.

Yeah. All right.

And then what does that entail? A lot of things, right? We got to organize the email, we got to archive emails, we have to address and respond to emails. So each of these are going to be videos, right? So it's like, okay, here's your checklist.

And then here's your video training and you're going to make it a loom account or Google Drive and just literally have folders of email number one. So here's how I organize. It could be a 60 second video, like right now. It can't just be I open that one. I already addressed that one. No, it's like we have a folder for archived, we have a folder for completed, we have a folder for all the payment ones. Or there has to be a system in place. And so you're going to make this list and it's going to be 30 to 50 things and then you have to ask, okay, reasonably, which ones can I. Can he handle?

True. I know the client, the rapport and the history. He doesn't. So it's like you prioritize based on like that knowledge of that specific client or not.

Because let's assume for a moment that you, no one else will ever know the customers the way you do and so they will always do a lesser job than you 100% of the time. There will be times that if you have your cousin or anyone else in admin, they will answer the phone wrong. They will say something wrong like, oh, that one customer doesn't like that said that way or they want it this way. They don't like weekly. They like bi weekly. You're going to have that. I know. I need to delegate admin so I can focus on doing more operations.

I understand what you're saying. Okay.

And the same thing will happen with Ricardo down the road if you start handing more operations stuff off to him that gets, ah, it should have been done that way, but who cares? I'm focused on sales now. And so as I delegate things, I'm okay with it like 80, 90% of what they could have done myself.

I see. Okay.

Also, I'm gonna set them up for success with, hey, here's the checklist, here's the video training on how to do it. You don't wanna tie the incentive or like their paycheck to watching the videos. Cause that's not actually the outcome you want. You wanna tie the incentive to the outcome. The outcome is, I don't want voicemails. I want every call answered. I want emails process in a timely fashion. So then I create success metrics around that. And those metrics are the thing I incentivize. So for example, whether it be bonusing, like giving them the carrot, hey, if there's no voicemails this week, you'll get X amount of a bonus. Or just saying in order to retain your job, if this metric is not above this, we got a problem determining the success metrics. And being clear on those is important. And are those the actual success metrics for that role. And that's what I tie back to him and said, like, these are the things that if you just knew them, you wouldn't be questioning whether or not they're doing a good job. Like for my team on the field, I'm just looking at budget hours and their actual hours. Like what's their efficiency score? Budget hours divided by clocked hours. If I know that number. And I also know that they're not getting a bunch of yellow slips and callbacks. That's all I need to know. Those are the success metrics. I need to know that they're doing a good job for a salesperson, might be their close ratio or the dollar per hour that they're selling at. These are the type of things that if you create success metrics for a department, you don't need to micromanage them and you're not always wondering and looking over their shoulder, are they actually doing their job? Because the success metrics tell you that story. There should theoretically be no excuse for your cousin or anyone else doing admin to ever say, I don't know how to do this. Because you have created a checklist and then you have created, hey, here's the prioritization and here's the success metrics. Right. So the other thing we haven't talked about is prioritization or I can't spell prioritization.

And then I'm gonna have my success metrics. Right. So like the success metrics for an admin person gonna be things like all the phone calls are answered, all the voicemails are responded to, all the emails are responded within 24 hours. And then I have successful metrics, right. So checklist with training priorities. So like, which of these do I do first? And then success metrics. If you create those for each of those things, you should be able to literally hand someone a folder of videos and be like, go.

I see, interesting. And now that just allows autonomy. And like, let's see if you, let's see if we can do this.

And what's crazy is you do this without hiring someone else and probably get 30% more efficient admin. You're like, oh, my checklist. That I should be doing this right now.

Yeah.

Instead of right now. You feel like you're just kind of firefighting.

Yeah.

There is no process for it.

Okay.

The big thing is, yes, you having insights to one customer today will serve them better. But if you take out the natural extreme of this business growing by double or triple, you will not be able to do that.

Understood.

You will not be able to handle this many emails, you will not be handled as many estimates, you will not be able to handle this many phone calls. And so sometimes think about the end game asking like, will the system break? Like, oh, so that means I need to fix it now because it's going to break. And in you doing all of this yourself and doing the irrigation and the weed control, not going to work in a million dollar business.

No, no, Yeah. I mean, I was coming in blind. I mean, I don't know. I've never done anything like this. I don't know nothing. And like, but like I said, I'm not scared of anything. And I've seen the other turnaround shows. It's like y' all don't do a hit piece or anything. So it's like, I think we're fine. And at the same time, what would they Say I have nothing to hide.

So I think y' all are extremely personable and that helps a lot.

This is low hanging fruit. We're going to delegate admin. We use the time audit. We are then going to do these three things which is checklist. Now I'm getting ahead of myself, but here we go. Checklist.

Then we're going to do a prioritization.

And then we're going to do success.

Metrics.

Through prioritization. You mean by like this task ahead of this task?

Correct. Cause what's really annoying is when you give someone, here's a checklist of all the stuff you need to get done. And they're like, yeah, I got all the invoices sent out. Couldn't quite get to the email today. And you're like, what? Mr. Jones was freaking out this morning at 6:00am you didn't respond to him. Right. So the reason is because like for example, using the nurse analogy, there's times you didn't get to clean the floor. Cause there were people bleeding out in the er.

Yep, exactly.

And so I need to focus on the er. Don't worry about that petty little thing. But the admin person you hire will not know what is petty versus what is high priority. And so you're going to give them.

A prioritization and that's just through time they pick up on those.

No, that's through telling them you do this.

I'm saying after I tell them through time, I'm assuming they just learn how.

I learned they would get better. Yes, that's how you learn. But again, we don't have six years to get them efficient.

Fair. Yeah, right.

It took us six years to like, like figure out these current process. We do not have six years. We have like six days.

Yes. My kind of help me kind of reset my mind in regards to time frame, in regards to hiring. I'm over here thinking like, oh yeah, it'll take a month or a couple months. It's like, no, it's hire, teach six days, get it done. And I'm like, oh, I mean, yeah, ideally I would love that. So. But I guess in our head we think it's going to take so much longer because it's taking me seven years to get here. So if I do you in three months, that's perfect. Like no, that's too, that's too, that's too much. We need to do this fast. So kind of resetting my expectation with that also it's just going to turn things around a lot faster.

Fortunately, admin Tasks are relatively simple as long as you make them simple.

Yeah.

And then what's going to happen as you start having train someone you realize like oh my estimates are an absolute guessing game.

They are great.

Then I create a system around that. But that's a higher leverage task sales systems than me answering the phone right now. And so that's a good problem to have. Is like okay, now I have time because he's handling the email and he's handling the phones. I am going to create a better pricing system. When I look at a job and I make a video and I put the notes together, I follow a certain system. Yeah, right now we don't have the time to think about that because you're answering phone calls and emails.

That's exactly right. Right.

So like yes, we could figure out a pricing system. I think that's a great thing. But right now I need you to get time. I think you will figure that out. Talk to ChatGPT, listen the content. You will be able to come up with a pricing system. But right now we're just focused on all this firefighting.

Yeah, that's low level tasks. This is perfect. I mean I knew my issue wasn't necessarily leads, it was like, like we're digging down to admin now being like the low hanging fruit almost. Yeah, that's going to be allow. It's almost like that first block to build on which will just free up the rest of my things.

Yeah. And the reason I talk about the lead so much is because like you're in this weird spot where you can't afford what I'm talking about. So I need to push you to the point where like okay, we were going to do like 600,000 this. I definitely need someone to do admin for me. Yeah, right, Cool. We'll come back to kind of the six week plan and some of the action items. But in terms of leadership, what do you feel as a leader is the.

Lack leadership in regards to my own leadership.

What is that disconnect? Because that was something that you mentioned in your application video.

In regards to business leadership scaling, having a team managing, I never seen that. I've never. I don't know what that looks like. Yeah, you can look at videos online but it's, it's different versus having like very visceral in around you. I feel that I've always just kind of freestyled or guessed and tried different things over the years. I just feel like I'm just kind of pulling it in the air for lifelines to try to Figure out what works and what doesn't.

The last L in the 4L framework and the last constraint that we're going to talk about is leadership. And right now, Efren hasn't really shared the vision of the company with the team. And furthermore, he doesn't really know what the future of the company is. He hasn't got a clear goal or vision for what that's going to look like in the next few years. Right. Sometimes it's just a matter of like knowing, like uncertainty of what the future looks like. So, like how I kind of look at any business, as we've already mentioned, like sales, operations and admin. Right now, if we put like the name of who's managing these things, it is Efren, Efren and Efren. As the business scales, what you'll end up doing, you'll find a manager for sales, a manager for operations, and a manager for advertising admin. And then you will become an actual CEO.

Right?

That's now really where it's focusing on strategy, hiring. You're thinking about the next level, another location, pricing increases, etc. Right now you are all these four things, and that's fine at your side of business, that's very normal. But the reason people stall out here is because going from passing 500,000, you usually need to start replacing yourself somewhere in the business below operations. Many times you'll have like different departments or divisions like irrigation division, weed control division crews, et cetera. Right now what I'm asking you to do is replace Efren as the admin manager. As the business grows, you get 7, 800,000. The next thing that's probably gonna happen is you're gonna replace yourself on the operations level. So now everyone reporting each morning is probably gonna talk to Ricardo. Right? And that also might mean him having to do like some ESL or some other form of figuring out how do I delegate things to him so he can take those things over, Over.

Right.

That's probably going to be like a one, two years from now. And then eventually once you crash like million, million two. And you should, if you still are willing to grow the business, eventually you'll replace yourself as a sales manager.

Okay.

And so right now the reason it feels somewhat just chaotic is because you're bouncing around from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. Right? And that's normal. You can't afford managers at that level at this size.

But which is why you're asking to push the leads to.

Yeah, we're going to try to delegate this admin one first and the same thing that we did here, checklist, prioritize and success metrics, is the exact same thing you're going to give Ricardo in a year or two when you start delegating operations. So the exact same process will be used to delegate operations and eventually sales. Because in three to four or five years when you're handing us off sales, you're going to actually have a pricing method in place, you're going to have success metrics of close ratio and what percentage of the people we are upselling, etc. You'll get there. Don't worry about it. Right now I'm just trying to ask you to let this one thing go and minimize the chaos of you currently hopping around from one to one.

Wow. Yeah. And that's. I like the idea long term because it sounds like it's just copy paste.

Yeah.

Once you kind of get this framework.

Figured out, it's a tough one.

Right.

It's going through this process, create the checklist. I'm going to create the training videos for them, I'm going to prioritize them for them so they know what actually they're supposed to be doing today because it gets really frustrating when they work on the wrong thing. And then third, success metrics, if you do that for each of these rules, that's how you delegate, get them out.

You talk a lot about doing the videos of the different tasks. Is that just like your go to method or is that you mean also just showing them in person or saying video is just better because they can see it again and again and again?

They can see it again because I don't want them to be calling me a week later like, hey, Efren, the invoice thing, I remember you showed to me. I forget how to send out the invoice.

You're getting ahead of it.

Right. And, and then also what will happen? They'll ask you a question a week later, like, sick. I don't have a chat, I don't have a video for that. Great. That night you're making a video for that. And then when they quit in six months, because something in life there happens, you are simply able to copy and paste that to the next person.

Wow. So the key is having the video instructional.

It's not a matter of I have to train someone. It is a function of I have a role, I have a responsibility, I have tasks, I have checklist training and the ability to be able to measure someone's success.

I want my business to be process driven, not People driven. And right now it's so. People driven. Yeah. The weight's on me, the weight's on record the weights on whatever. But if someone leaves I can just drag and drop the instructions and they can just pick it up from there. That's great. Yeah. I'm just excited to get started and.

Knock these things out over the next six weeks. Our plan for Efren to turn around the business is number one, get the website built from lawn care web design so his website generates more leads. You have a decent amount of reviews. I would definitely look into getting automation set up to ask for reviews.

Yes.

From. For Google. I think you had 28 reviews.

29.

29. I'd love to see that over 50, especially in South Austin. You need that just to start. So website's going to be optimized for conversion. That's really the part that I saw as a lack and I'm glad the team don't look at this in terms of the essence request form being on the home page, not being on the back end, a couple buttons and different scripts that were being ran. It'll be improved. That one's relatively passive because now you have someone doing it. The upsells. This is the part we want to get jump on asap. We want to email and text message and or call all of our customers. You have 50 customers. You could technically call every single one.

I could, Yeah. I know them by name.

Right. Yeah. Eventually we won't, which is fine, but for now let's use it. The second thing in the six week plan is for efferent to call, text or email existing customers and upsell them into weed control and irrigation. Do you have campaigns set up in Java for mass email or not yet.

I've never done it, so I don't know if it's already kind of pre made with everybody's emails, but.

Right.

I mean.

Okay, so we're going to try. I'm going to put send we control slash irrigation upsell. Stage two of that is offer like make an offer. So for example, hey everyone, this is the perfect time of year for pre emergent boom. And then next month like I would create a 12 month calendar for upsell. So right now I have the six week plan to send the weed control irrigation upsell all clients. But also.

It also is a 12 month calendar. This will be part of his 12 month upsell calendar where every single month we have an offer for our customers to sell them more services.

Would that be like a marketing calendar?

Almost exactly. Okay, right. So right now we are even thinking about like marketing to cold traffic. We're just thinking about how do we market our existing services to our existing clients and how do we get someone from paying $1,000 a year to $2,000 a year with us. So upsells super important. We're trying to get irrigation and weed control specifically because we know it's high margin and it gets you out of doing admin and into operations. This massive increase in new leads and new jobs coming in could be the pressure that EFRA needs to actually force him to delegate the admin role. So that's gonna lead us into next step, which is is we're going to hire.

Admin.

Admin, yeah.

And at first, maybe that's four hours a day and you say, hey, look, in the morning I need you to like do these things, make sure we're good. And then throughout the day, whenever you can get to it, these are the other things I need you to do. The third thing in the next six weeks is to hire an admin person. For that to happen, we gotta create a checklist, prioritize what they need to be doing and create success metrics for that role. But we've got to hire someone so we can get back in the field doing those high margin tasks. You are going to feel out of control when you do this.

Definitely.

Once you have defined success metrics, you only need to know that metric in order to be able to know whether or not they're doing their job. Do you have Emil coming your phone right now?

I do, yeah. And when I open the app, I get an anxiety attack.

Yeah, 100%. So no more email on your phone. The fourth thing that Efren can do in the next six weeks to turn around the business is get his email off of his personal phone, let the admin handle that. And furthermore, that time motion study number five, I need him to do it so that he can actually prove to himself that this constant back and forth from email to phone to doing work on the field and switching back and forth is causing a lot of wasted time. And if he just focus and get that email off of his phone, he'd be able to be much more productive. This would reduce the chaos and allow him to focus on growing the business. Actually, let's just make part of the six week plan. No email on phone. We can't have no. No email on phone. We don't got time for anxiety. Every time you pick up your phone, I know it's like if I can.

Touch on something, I know one of the big things that kind of was a realization for me was being too. I'm kind of scared to fail, which is weird because I try fail, try fail on a lot of different things. But for whatever reason, I'm like, I can't pass this on because this isn't perfect. This isn't the perfect checklist of things. Well, you figure out as you go, like, for example, taking the email off my phone, I'm like, that seems scary to do, but I'm like, yeah, but you figure it out. They miss an email, someone gets mad. Well, you figure it out, problem solved. It's not the end of the world. It's okay if things break a little bit. And being okay with that, being okay with that is, I think, a big breaking point. To get to the next level, you.

Could just have it, like, I'm assuming when there's a voicemail, it goes on your phone.

Phone. Yeah.

Yeah. So you could literally just run a filter of, like, last week, how many missed calls, how many voicemails. Yeah. Every time we miss a call or a voicemail, that's a loss. So something messed up. Sure. And so I would recommend, even if you have someone working, say, four or five hours a day, I would then incentivize them extra for not having a voicemail. Hey, if there's no voicemails for the whole week, you like, 100 extra. That way, even if they're off the clock, maybe they'll answer the phone because the two minutes that call and. But you have phone calls getting answered.

Yeah. Wow. It's so cool to hear your perspective because coming from like a W2 background, like, structured this, you work from this time to this time, and this is your role in business. Everything's just. You just make it up from thin air. Like this job role, like. Yeah. In this job, you're going to work X amount of hours in the morning. X amount hours afternoon. These are the metrics. And it's like, kind of just when you come from, like a corporate job, it's just kind of unheard of from my perspective.

Yeah.

Because you just. You just made the job.

Yeah.

From scratch, depending on your needs.

Yeah.

And that's cool to, like, know that we can do that. I guess I just needed to hear it from you.

Yeah. That's cool. I love it.

Honestly taught or raised to just kind of fall into a role that's been created. And we just think that's how it's always been. But when you're on this side and more of the architect side, it's like, oh, you're creating something from nothing that fits your needs and your business needs, and. And hopefully someone kind of likes that. I say permission, but, like, kind of hear Mike talk about that. I'm like, oh, it kind of does give me that permission to be like, it's not weird. I can't create this weird job, because that's what I need. The end.

If you do all of those things in the next six weeks, we'll be in a good spot.

I think I have the time to do it. I just didn't have the clarity on where to start and having, like, you know, here I have, like, one through six steps. Steps. And I'm like, a systems guy. This is perfect. This is exactly what I need. I can just kind of knock them off. So my hope is that within six weeks, you know, when we talk, I'm like, all right, guess what? I got everything done. Or I'm on the last step. Like, yeah, I'm just knocking them down one by one. So I. I see it as completely doable. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I have the roadmap here. I've been looking at it kind of since I've. Since y' all left. I have it up on the wall there. That's the. The first thing I really worked on. I've done a time audit before. This is probably the fifth time I've tried to do it. But for whatever reason, after speaking with Mike and him also mentioning, like, yeah, it is difficult. I'm like, oh, okay, well, if he thinks it's hard, then. Then I must be doing it right. And I guess it's not just me. So after I did it this first time, I did it for seven days straight. I was able to really see where I was wasting my time and what kept coming up in regards to, like, a admin task. So after that seven days, I was able to sort of get that list and narrow to, like, two or three different things that I thought, okay, these things I can delegate to an admin personnel. And which was. Ended up being my next step. So I actually did delegate the admin stuff to a virtual assistant. So she's been on with us now for probably about a month. And, man, I'll tell you right now, that's a game changer that. I mean, I cracked the code that really opened up the floodgates for me to. To, you know, primarily buy my time back and then just kind of divert my attention to way more important, important things. So, yes, I. I can safely check. Say that I can check that off. My list of, you know, don't look at my emails as, as often to me doing the admin stuff is like if I felt like if that was the only thing I did for this year that was such a game changer because it's allowed me to buy like 15 hours of my time back a week and that's a good big chunk. And I've been running on treadmill stage for like seven years at this point. So just, just I'm still kind of like, I feel like I'm in, in limbo. Like I was living this lifestyle for so long now that it's different. I'm like, what do I do now? So I'm still getting used to it. But yes, the next thing was the website which I use longer. Web design. I wasn't necessarily happy with kind of my old website. It just felt a little outdated and I have it now, so it's live now and it's awesome because they have our request form on the website. A client can go in, fill it out and that goes directly to our inbox or jobber and we can just go through a process. It's way more streamlined, it's just modernized. The interface is great. So yeah, that's a big check off, check off the list of things to do. No complaints there. But the next one is yeah, the upselling the services. I think now that I have a lot more clarity on how I'm going to do it or just the fact that I have clarity, I have mental bandwidth. I can now say like, oh hey, let's, let's. How do I build up like a seasonal marketing calendar, if you want to call it that. So now that I have this time back, I've really been in like I was out there today actually we had irrigation quotes that I sent out and they were accepted and we spent the whole day today just getting that done. And now I'm kind of learning the process of like how to go about just scheduling my day around that. In the past I tried to but it was always so frustrating because I would get these phone calls or I'm looking at my email because there's something that I have to check. Now I like today I spent the whole day during just doing just purely irrigation work. And that's like I said, that's a game changer and I'm really looking forward to just build on that and then build up these departments of irrigation and we control fertilizer just kind of implemented into, into my company so we can sell sort of full service programs versus just the bi weekly lawn service. Maybe that's why I haven't spent so much time doing the marketing stuff. Stuff is because I had been still working in the field just on things that I should have built up and I just haven't had the time to. There's days where I'm like, and my alarms are like 5:20am and I'm like, you know, actually I can sleep in tonight. So I could sleep in till 6. I don't have to be at the storage at 6:30 today. I can sleep in a little bit. So just having that like a little bit of margin in my life after, like I said, seven years of just treadmill operator, it's I, I'm still kind of just soaking it in and appreciating it. That weather is how I felt at that time. Like physically, mentally, like here in the org chart, I mean in the leadership section. Clarity was one that was lacking. I didn't really understand what Mike was telling me at the time until later. And you know, I was lacking a sense of clarity, not only for me personally as a business owner and like what's next? What do I do? I was just kind of stuck in the hurricane of things that, that just felt like it was never getting better. And in doing so I was also causing a lot of confusion within my team members. They didn't have any clarity within their roles. So that's one of the big things aside from everything else that I've really been spending a lot of time sort of kind of working on is having more clarity for myself in regards to this business. Now that I have my time back, I can spend some time to kind of think. And in doing so, I really feel a lot more confident in bringing clarity to the guys, my brother and Ricardo, and in their role so they can really, you know, take the lawn care leader and project manager roles and just run with them. I've done this before in the past, but it just, it fell apart because I didn't have anything really set in mind and I was just all over the place. I wasn't in the right headspace. But now, yeah, I just, I feel just a lot more confident as a business owner and in doing so, like, I think the guys also feel that confidence. So they also feel confident in their own roles. Not that they have like guidelines and just clarity in general.