Mike Andes grew Augusta Lawn Care from one location to 150 worldwide, hitting $50 million in revenue while living in a closet for three years. He worked nearby businesses like a gym, trained franchisees constantly, and argues the sacrifice in your 20s pays off later.
While I was in my 20s, over the past 10 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. Ultimately, during your 20s, you're either going to sacrifice for the next five to 10 years or you're going to wake up when you're 35, 40, 40, 45, 50 years old and regret not making those sacrifices earlier on. For three years I lived in this closet. 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 room. 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 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, 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.
