Brutally Honest Advice for Men in Their 20's from $50M CEO

Hey everyone, My name is Mike Andes. And while I was in my twenties, over the past ten years I was able to grow Augusta lawn care from one to 150 locations around the world. Today, I want to share with you exactly the secrets that I learned to be able to grow the business to over $50 million in annual revenue and write this book, Total Business Turnaround, where I went and traveled the country for a year and turned around 30 different small businesses. Now, as a caveat, just remember that I'm only 29, I don't know everything, and I even doubt my own thoughts sometimes. So if you don't agree with everything, just remember it's my opinion. Also keep in mind that throughout my 20s, a big inspiration to me was Dr. Trevor Cashe, the thinking cap is now on. And Alex Hormozi. And so they've influenced a lot of my thoughts around life and business. Number one is to pursue excellence instead of women. People want the respect that comes with an incredible relationship, but they are not willing to sacrifice to earn that respect. And what you're trying to achieve with those sacrifices, in my opinion, is what makes up you as a human. And that's three things. Your body, your spirit and your soul. And I've just stayed focused the past 10 years on these three things. So when it comes to body, spirit and soul, I can gain excellence in these three areas using the three Ps which for the body is perspiration, for the spirit is paper or money, and for the soul is prayer. It can be very lonely. No, it is very lonely to be alone. And it's hard and it's difficult. But being, being lonely with many shallow friends stinks worse. And being someone that is high value will attract deeper friends and relationships. I'm really, really blessed to have a few very, very high quality friends and relationships that I cherish a lot. These are people that push me to become better. I respect and they respect me. I want them to succeed and they want me to succeed. And ultimately these type of individuals and these friendships that I cherish very much would not be attracted into my life if I had not done the past 10 years of work on myself in these. And whether or not you like it, that's why a 70 year old guy that's a billionaire gets a 25 year old girl. This is the thing. If you're a guy and you're trying to get the right woman or you're trying to attract a higher quality woman into your life, I can guarantee you, if you can perspire every Single day. You can pray every single day and you can make money every single day. You will gain the skills required. You will become high value enough that someone else wants to be in your life. Hi, my name is Liz, the operations manager here at Augusta Lawn Care. Hey everybody, this is Lee. Welcome to the C Suite unfiltered podcast on air. I have this thing, eat meat, lift heavy things. It's basic when it comes to health, but it's like eat a lot of meat. And if you lift heavy things and you're a young guy, you're going to get a good build. You don't need steroids, you don't need any sort of other garbage. If you just lift heavy things and eat a ton of protein, you will look good. And if you do that, the perspiration part, along with making a bunch of money, you're going to attract high value people into your life. And if you do that also by having and making sure that your soul, you're gaining excellence in the soul realm, you're gonna be a very balanced individual. And it's not easy to do that for year after year after year. When you see all of your friends getting relationships, getting married, having kids, et cetera, and you still are trying to just pursue excellence in those three areas, it's easier said than done. But doing that will attract the highest quality people into your life. And instead of you going out and trying to pursue them, they'll be attracted to you. Number two is sacrifice or regret. You choose. Ultimately, during your 20s, you're either going to sacrifice for the next five to 10 years and reap the rewards of that sacrifice for the rest of your life, or you're going to wake up when you're 35, 40, 45, 50 years old and regret not making those sacrifices earlier on. But when I was in my 20s, this is actually where I lived in the studio where I'm currently recording. For three years I lived in this closet. Now next door to me right here is the gym anytime fitness that I own. And you will hear people drop deadlifting plates all the time because there's no insulation in that wall. On this side there's a veterinary clinic thing and I'll hear dogs barking ever so often. But this is actually where I slept and there's no shower over here, so I would go to the gym and shower there. You can kind of see it, just a bed and there's no hot water in here. So this is basically kind of where I lived and operated out of. And yes, this is kind of like My living room, also known as where we train all the franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care. Until you hit 100 locations, it's very difficult to be profitable. Those three years I stayed here, I didn't have the money to go out and lease my own apartment. You got the railroad. Well, six times every single night, the railroad crossing would open up and this train would blow the horn. I5 like, our main interstate is right over here. And so it's loud, it's not fun, it's not exciting. And I had to put this black paint and then those little squares up top there because people would look through this, this all the time. And so it was weird because, like, my friends, family, people that know me would drive by like, hey, you're up late at night. It's like, oh my word. Seriously, I'm living in this fishbowl. But the whole point objective of doing that was to be able to live on less than I could afford. So that way I could sacrifice then and then be able to reap the rewards later on down the road. And even to this day, I'm 29 years old. I live in a one bedroom apartment in a 10 plex that I own. And it's not like anything fancy or elaborate, but the goal is to be able to sacrifice now, the next five or 10 years, when you're in your 20s, for the next 30 or 40 years, for the eventual output. And the reward of that sacrifice down the road, number three, is to create more finish lines. Now, if you're running a marathon, yes, there's 26.2 miles before the finish line. However, if I can make every single mile marker a separate finish line, I can gain more success by hitting those finish lines and building my confidence. And so whether it be from coaches or players, successful executives, people want to recruit from teams that have won in the past and players that have won in the past. And that is because winning begets confidence. If you can take your goal, if you can take your aspiration or dream and chunk it down into smaller parts can be super helpful. So that as you cross each of those finish lines, you gain the confidence required to get to the eventual, more long term goal down the road, it'll also be the thing that kind of just keeps your head in the game. Because sometimes it can just be a long, lonely road and breaking it up into smaller chunks can be helpful just to stay in the game. And so for me, I'm not a huge fan of goal sessions, just the terminology. Changing it to targets allows me to think much more metric Driven and allows me to think about, like, what are the benchmarks that I must hit? And that is my form of breaking up the larger goal or the larger finish line into smaller chunks. Those targets, if I hit them, will eventually lead to the big outcome that I want to have down the road. So, for example, CoPilot, the past seven, eight months has been absolutely brutal because we more than tripled the business in a matter of a couple of months. The software was not ready for it. A lot of the stuff that we were doing was all in the back end. But when we first started in January, we had recorded, documented over 250 bugs inside the software. And it felt like a monumental, mammoth task that I was going to have to go through to get this thing back on track. And it was. This is cost millions of dollars. It's going to take months of time. None of the users are going to see these improvements on the front end because these are mostly back end changes that are required. I had to chunk it all down to actually keep my head in the game. And so sometimes it's not even a matter of gaining confidence by making more finish lines. It's a matter of just like, keeping your head in the game when what you need to happen is extremely long term. And not chunking it down will just cause you to get delusional. Number four is still. Waters run deep. This is shallow water. If I was at the falls just a little bit higher up, which is too loud to record at, you'd hear it a lot. And what I found when it comes to business or in life is the people that make all the noise and have fancy things and show it off all on social media, they actually don't have a lot of depth to them. They're usually shallow and they make a bunch of noise, but they're shallow. If you looked out at a river that was 50, 60ft deep, it's really still and it just moves slowly. The first six to seven years of owning Augusta Lawn Care, like, I just drove a company vehicle and a couple years ago I got a Honda Civic and now I drive a Honda Accord because, like, look, for less than 1% of all the revenues from the businesses, I could have the appearance of a very flashy lifestyle. I could buy a very fancy sports car and rent out a very nice penthouse for less than like 100, $120,000 a year. You can have that lifestyle to really wealthy, rich people. People have been really successful. That does not impress them. And the type of people they want to be around are usually the People with depth and on the top, they're just stable. And this is easier said than done. When you're looking on social media and you have peers or other people and they have a very flashy, loud lifestyle, typically those are the people that don't have a lot of depth. And that's a very broad generalization because there are some people that enjoy having a fancy car or a fancy watch or a fancy house. And nothing against that they're gonna get loud with it usually will attract the wrong type of people into your life. People that want your money, they enjoy being with you because of your money, they want relationships with you because of your money. And so showing it off is usually just a bad move. In general, one thing I like to say is let your game performance prove how hard you practiced. I don't need to tell everyone on my social media or my friends about how hard I'm working or what I'm achieving. The results speak for themselves. Number five is to avoid obligations. This could be everything from weddings, graduations, to funerals. People asking you from way back when to come back to your school and do events, parties. It could be people that, like, used to know you. The big one that kills you is family events, tertiary friendships of the people that don't just know you, but know the people you know. You will literally spend your entire weekend, every weekend, every evening, every and every holiday just going to events. If being there takes you away from the goals that you have, if it takes away from the purpose you have for your life and the way that you're trying to take the direction of your life and pursuing excellence in paper, perspiration and prayer. If it's going to take you away from those things during your 20s, might be a good idea to buckle down and not go to those events. And even things like gifting. I stopped gifting people things like for their birthday, not because I didn't have the money, but it was completely out of obligation. When it comes to events, one thing you can say is, like, I will not be there. And then if they judge me on the fact that I do not want to be there, it's simply a matter of I probably don't want to invest my time or energy into the relationship. If you're going to judge me based upon me doing something only to satisfy the way you feel about me. I would rather have a handful of very deep, meaningful relationships that I feel responsible for, loved and cared for. They are a priority to me instead of like hundreds look at and dissect and break apart and pull out a microscope and ask yourself, the things that you are currently labeling as a priority, are they really a priority? Are they really your responsibility? Staying hungry. But then staying humble is so important because you've got to be humble enough to realize you don't have the skills. You have to be humble enough to realize that someone else has the skills that you want. And then you have to be humble enough to sit at their feet and gain the skills that they have. And you need to be able to have enough of a relationship with them where they want to give you the skills, because the skills are out there. Like the solution to every problem you have in business or in life has already been figured out. It's a matter of how do I unlock that from somebody else? And so whether that be getting in the same circles as them, whether it be getting in the same conference rooms as them, figuring out a way to unlock those secrets is a massive life hack that will give you the skills. Because the only thing separating from where you're at today and what, what you want to become is the skills required along the way. All right, the seventh thing that I learned in my 20s that served me well, is that no one cares about you now. Oh, here comes the nihilism. Think about like this. If you have 50 friends, if they think about you for 1% of the day, 15 minutes a day, it's going to seem like a lot to you because you are going to get all of those thoughts directed towards you, and they're going to send you texts and they're going to send you a call. But it's literally 50 people out of 8 million and they're literally spending 1% of their day thinking about you. But yet you're going to change 24 hours of your day and 100% of your life based upon the thoughts of what people are thinking about you for 1% of their day. For me, it helps a lot to relax and just zoom out. Like, just in picture the world like this little tiny globe. Zoom out. There's 8 billion people down on this earth, and here I am locked in to what someone's thinking about me on this planet. That is bonkers. And saying your opinions like this on, on social media and having businesses where you have to work with a lot of people and employees and franchisees and people that you support in software, like, you make mistakes and there's going to be a lot of people have an opinion of every single decision that you make. The only way to be able to actually continue moving forward and taking Action is realizing that they really don't care a lot about you. And that's okay. I want to provide as much value as possible to my customers, to my employees, to the people surrounding me. I want to be able to provide value to them. However, they don't think about you as much as you thinking about them and their thoughts of you. For example, Charlie Munger died less than one year ago. Charlie Munger was the business partner to Warren Buffett. He was a billionaire. Less than a year later, we hardly talk about him. It's not a big deal. I don't care about what other people think because most of the time the only thing they're reflecting towards me is the fact that they don't want me to win. And me winning, me shining, me doing well simply makes them look bad because they're in this comparison game. You could also say that how I'm doing compared to someone leagues ahead of me, I could also feel inferior. It's all just relative when it comes to success. I get massively affected by people's thoughts about me. Usually it hurts most when there's a kernel of truth to it. So, for example, if you have a weird nose and someone says you have a weird nose online, it's going to hurt because there's a kernel of truth to it. If someone told me, like, and started just mocking me online, saying I was short, like, there's a kernel of truth to it. They said we should have named the business Obnoxious Midget Lawn Care. I thought it had a nice string to it. You know, honestly, like, if Augusta Lawn Care, everyone out of business. I think Obnoxious Midget Lawn Care would do well. Think of the marketing opportunities. There's no job too small. Noxious Midget Laundry, by the way, doesn't affect me at all. The short thing doesn't matter. You're not the only landscaper. You're not the only roofing company. And if they hated your guts that much, they could use someone else. When I'm doing very, very bad, and when it's easy to spit on me because of the mistakes I have made, the person that actually cares for me won't. To me, the person that when I am doing very well, will not be in their back of their mind wishing that I would slip up. And then when I am doing very poorly and it's easy, it's easy to jump on the bandwagon against me, they don't that person, to me, they care a lot. And that's the person that I will probably make a priority or my responsibility to actually care for what they think about me. If you think that no one cares about you because there's so much social pressure to care about what other people think, you'll be misunderstood. And that's okay. Number eight is you will get rejected and disappointed. Setting your expectation low of others is going to help because if you have it too high, you're just going to constantly be disappointed. You're going to get rejected. When you're trying to do sales and you're trying to do follow up phone calls and you're knocking on people's doors, you're going to get rejected. You're going to get disappointed with relationships that you thought you went into and people loved you or you love them and you're going to get disappointed. There's going to be times where like employees, they get fired, they leave all of a sudden, say really bad things about you. And I still remember my very first employee that I hired that wasn't acquaintance of mine, I hadn't known previously. Their second day on the job, they kind of faked that they fell and slipped. They were hurt. Okay, I have to be careful because we settled outside of court. The person that was working with their trainer was with them the entire time and said they never fell. So they make this story up. Well, I want to fire them. Not because of that, because their performance the entire two days was horrible. And then on my way back, I told him that, hey, because you're hurting things, like I'm going to let you go. You can't do that. You can't fire someone because they got hurt. And just thinking, this is absolutely insane that I am having to give this person money. They're obviously using the system. And I just remember thinking like, I will not let this disappointment and this rejection caused me to not trust employees in the future. Cause I knew, I knew what the vision I had in the future would not be possible without a team. And if I treated everyone with such a lack of respect or a lack of trust because of this one isolated instance and this one isolated bad actor, that I would never be able to achieve my goals and dreams. And then by that happening, they would have won the game. Despite the employee that you have that's slacking off, despite a friend that is rejecting you, despite all of these things going against you, despite the customer that says no, despite the customer that slams the door in your face, despite the contract that you thought was signed and they had paid the invoice on the deposit and then they back out of it. Despite all of those things I will win. Number nine is do it with all your might. This comes from the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastes, which says whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. In other words, like all or nothing. Like if you're going to do it, do it 100%. It's electric mower. Okay, so we're driving around, we're giving out some of the food to some of the homeless people. If you're going to have a business, go all in. If you're going to work on a project or you're going to get a job, go all in on it.

You break, we broke it. If you're going to start a family or a relationship, go all in. Like 110% all in. You say, well, that's not what it means to me. That's how I've taken it and it has served me well. Whatever I am going to put my hand to, I'm going to do with all my might, which means I can't put my hand on many things. Instead, I'm going to put my hand on one thing. I'm going to do it with all of my might, which means other things are not going to get my hand put on them. I need to be able to delineate between those two because I'm going to grab the priorities and I'm going to do it with all of my might. I'm not like changing the universe here. If you want to strip away all the foo foo stuff about like, I'm going to make this goal and I'm going to do this in the community. If your goal is actually just to make a bunch of money, that's fine because in order to make all that money, you will have to adopt much more skills around marketing, sales, hiring, leadership, projections. Like all the different aspects of making money will change you as a person. I want to change the level of professionalism in the industry. I want to become a billionaire. I want to meet the man that I must become to do those things. Because right now I do not have the skills to do that. Right now I am incapable of making that happen. I haven't changed the industry and I have not become a billionaire. And once I do those two things, the level of skill I have then compared to now, like completely revolutionized. And so in my opinion, I'm thinking about micro. I'm going to be out of balance. You know what I'm doing this day, this month, this week, it's micro is going to be out of Balance, but macro in balance. The reason I say that is think about like a gymnast. If they're just balancing on a beam, like standing there and they're like, they're not teetering, that isn't impressive. What's actually impressive is getting out of balance, them doing a massive spin and then landing it and staying balanced. That is impressive. A snapshot in time or in the micro, they could literally be upside down in a very compromised position. In a position where that even like might be horizontal to the ground, they're doing a massive spin or a flip if you took a snapshot or a micro in time. They could actually do a lot of damage to themselves if they stayed that way. But it is the return to being balanced and landing. It is what we're all impressed by. And so there's going to be times in your business where you're upside down, you don't have money. There's many times when you're upside down or you're horizontal and like you're completely all in working 70, 80 hours a week on your business. There's going to be times where you miss family events and things that are important. You're going to miss them because you're all in on this thing. That's high risk. But is the landing, is the returning back to the median that is allows you to gain success and is what is elevated in our society. For example, LeBron or Kobe or Michael Jordan, we elevate them to such a degree because they were able to go so far and so deep and do something like basketball, like shooting a ball into a hoop with all of their might.

In case you didn't know, I didn't play much basketball in my day. To the extent that they make billions of dollars doing it and we all recognize them, but in the meantime, they didn't go blow their brains out because that's all they did. And they had to miss other events and they did sacrifice so much for it. But it is the return back to balance that we really do admire. My 30s will likely be out of balance towards a few things like technology and what that's going to do for our industry, recruiting talent and probably starting a family. If right now your season is doing the hard work, that's fine. It took me 10 years to go through that season and so in that stage I was completely out of balance in those other areas like hiring executives, getting technical talent, any sort of relationships, family or friendships completely under indexed on during that period of time. At the end of the day, balance begets average. And so if you're always going to be trying to do balance in every single aspect of your life, you will simply get average results. And so if you're going to have massive goals, aspirations, dreams and targets, said it in Ecclesiastes, the wisest man in the world, Solomon. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Number 10 is to build the factory for scale. You're never going to have a perfect launch and you're never going to have a perfect rollout. You never have a perfect acquisition or a perfect deal. It's never going to be that way. Focusing on the factory or the pre production will cause the result, the end product, to be much more scalable and much more refined. And even Elon, who went through this with the Model 3, then doing it with the Cybertruck, had four years of delay to try to get it perfect and still made mistakes. It's never going to be perfect. But he's learned that the factory and the production and the difference between prototype to a fully production ready vehicle, that is where the difficult part is. So focus on the factory, everything else, all the opportunities that you want to plug into that factory down the road, you can absolutely take advantage of them. If you have the people around you with tons of skill, you have the skill of negotiation and sales and the ability to be able to do marketing, gain those skills now. So whether you got to go to conferences, read books, listen to audio programs, get into a franchise or some sort of networking or mastermind, do whatever is required to gain the skills and that will be the factory that in your 30s and 40s, when opportunities arise, they'll be far more successful and you'll get 10 to 20 times the leverage because you have the factory to plug it into and actually make it profitable.