Can STARTING OVER Save this $3M Business

My main guy embezzled. 40 people lost their jobs in one day, and it took me six months losing everything I had.

My name is Mike Andes, and I.

Travel around the country turning around small.

Businesses that are struggling.

I had my leaders not cash their checks for a couple of months.

There's no money in the bank.

Businesses all have cash flow issues.

We die without money.

I think he had like 15 grand in checks piled up, just not cashing them.

This handyman service does over a million dollars in annual revenue, but has 22 employees and has over $600,000 in debt.

And l house caught fire.

Her husband died in that fire.

So that was a $200,000 loss on that job.

My guys are making more money than I do.

It's going to get messy.

It's going to be tough, but let's see if we can turn this thing around.

To be in business, you have to be either crazy or stupid.

Mike.

How's it going, brother?

Good to finally meet you.

Yeah, man.

My name is Vitaly Tormazov, and as a company, we fill the gap between handyman and contractors, and so we mostly focus on the small repairs and remodels.

So how long have you been at this shop?

We moved in last spring.

Okay.

We were renting a 40 by 40 just down the street from here. The people moved out, abandoned this place, and they moved out and they go, can you help me look through this place? I go, wow, this would be an amazing place for allfix. But about two years from now, you know, because we were just not capable.

So he comes back a month later. He goes, I'll let you have it for $4,000. I'm thinking, well, this is way too early.

This is still, hey, Daniel, take it.

But we got almost 9,000 square feet here of floor space. Our real focus is the speed, being able to get in and get out of the house fast. With that, we ended up adding the building supply division, which allows us to supply materials faster and more accurately, keep our technicians out of the stores. We had an issue with guys sitting at the store way too much. And we still had to pay somebody to buy the materials. And then we have leftover materials that we have to deal with. Either return them or store them. So we go, okay, so if we're going to move in here, let's go ahead and open up the building supply store and use that margin by buying wholesale.

Got it.

To cover those guys buying and dealing with materials.

How much of it do you do where you're selling at retail?

Retail, nothing Yet.

Oh, nothing.

Okay, got it.

Nothing yet.

But you're buying it wholesale.

So the whole point of the supply store would be to serve remodelers to be able to fill that gap and keep the guys out of the stores.

Got it.

Switching from a service business to then being retail, where you're actually selling products, is a completely different business. It's not even like adjacent to the service they're offering.

It's like, well, we have to have it, so we should sell it to the customers.

Yes, you should have it as inventory, but do we really need to sell.

It to the customer? That's a totally different business.

So the systems that we're putting in into supply is once the material list gets approved, 24 hours to put the material kit together in 15 minutes to load.

Got it.

We're awfully close. The hardest part that we found in the supply side is the vendor acquisition. All our vendors are able to bring us material, deliver material within a week. So the goal is without overloading it, and we're trying to make this whole thing scalable to be about 3,000 square foot places that we can restock easily and get guys started fast.

So the goal is like, don't let them go to the stores.

That's correct.

What I'm hearing a lot.

That's correct. So unless there's a po, don't go to the store.

I think we use that logic as small business owners based upon Fortune 500 companies that will go build their own solution to their problem.

It's like, look, if you have a.

Small business and you have a problem, instead of going and building a new business business to solve one small problem, which is literally the time it takes.

For people to go pick up materials.

Okay. We still have to put the materials in the truck. So the only thing we're saving is the time in the store. And so instead of figuring out a whole business to fix that problem, should we just compensate the guys based upon efficiency to get in and out of.

The store as fast as possible?

This is kind of a stock area where they're prepping for the jobs and so on. In the morning, the supply guy is pretty much going to take the stuff out and get them out of here. So we were kind of hoping to be able to go to public this spring, and we did not have a product that we could feel that we could market.

And it's tough sometimes blending it too, like bringing other contractors in. Yeah.

I question whether or not the building supply division is a distraction from the core business, because what we're not taking into account is the fact that it takes a couple employees to manage this retail division as well as this entire building. We have to rent it, we have to heat and get the utilities to actually warehouse and store all of this inventory. There's actual cost to that. And yes, it could also be inventory at Home Depot or at Lowe's. And yes, it'll take time for me to drive there, but that's a lot of time that is otherwise spent on wages is now being spent on rent, utilities and team members just to manage the inventory.

Also, these trucks. How many trucks do you have total right now between the vans and the trucks?

So between the vans I think there's total of 15. We just had one that got wrecked. One of the guys relapses and when we hired him, I gave him my personal truck because we were just short on vehicles already. He wrecked that one. So I don't have a truck. It was one of those. We came in tough and then we had one of those country songs, bad country songs. We had one of our best guys skip a step and we spent two weeks, the entire crew, scrubbing cabinets and scrubbing the paint off and repainting them.

That was a 200,000 DOL loss on that job.

We were repainting kitchen cabinets and my main guy, my most experienced guy, decided to change a step. Instead of doing it the way we did the bond test, painted it his way, and it peeled the labor that costed two weeks to scrape that off and redo it. You know, that was between loss of opportunity and labor cost. That was almost $60,000 for a $5,000 job. And then the other thing is, we ended up. We had a whole bunch of this influ Ukrainian refugees and we ended up bringing on seven. So then we ended up. Some of the people from last year, they just could not. They could not adjust. So we, we ended up with 15 brand new people this year. We ended up with some rock stars out of there. Just some really, really amazing guys. Just talented tile guys and, and. And carpenters. And we added some drywallers through that too. So it was. It was a good experience. It was really hard, but it was worth it.

Right now there's about 15 trucks, 22 guys working.

Well, that's between the three companies.

Okay, okay, so where are those three?

The two guys are on the supply.

Okay.

One is vendor acquisitions and vendor relationships. And the other one is supply management.

Got it.

Then we have electric and plumbing, which we lost our plumber. So we're kind of screwed a Little bit there. So. But we have our electrician. He's my oldest son. He's not planning on going anywhere, so thank God.

And then, then the third part is more of the maintenance side of things.

Yeah, property maintenance and repair.

Got it. And so if you look at those three parts, what do you think? Expect like 2024's revenue to be across those three divisions.

So we were supposed to be at 3 mil. Between the three, I think we'll probably 2.4 is where we're. And that's, to me, that's about $600,000 loss on training.

The main thing when I went into.

This turnaround was really like, there were.

So many different divisions of the business.

Even though it was big in terms of revenue there, from the finishing department.

To the painting, the electrical to the plumbing.

There's so many different aspects that each.

Of those could have been a million.

Dollar business or more.

But when you have that many businesses in one entity and then you have retail and all these other aspects, that just scares me.

Throughout the last seven years, every time we would bring a new person on, it would be a drop in our efficiency or revenue, about 60 to 80 grand. So that's kind of what I've been figuring on our training costs.

Got it.

You know, when you bring in 17 or 15 new guys, that's a lot of money.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, so 60 to $80,000 to train up one new team member is a lot. Now let's just say that we're hiring entry level, no skills, very green team members. I want to make sure I'm doing simpler services that I can get them to profitable for the business within a matter of a few weeks. Because what happens if I train someone up over the course of six or 12 months and I spend 60 or $80,000 and they're a great employee and they leave after six months, I'm in the hole 60 grand. We cannot build a sustainable business relying on people staying as laborers for decades on end. They're going to usually be 6, 12, 18 months at our business. And if we can't make them profitable in that amount of time, we're never gonna be able to grow the business.

When you look at the normal training cost of 60 to 80,000 and we're $300,000 in the hole, all of a sudden that hole doesn't look all that big when it could have been way worse, you know, if. If it wasn't for God's mercy.

So this is our fab shop.

Okay.

This is, this allows us to fabricate anything that you can't buy.

Got it.

So this area is kind of our catch all. We have a mechanic, he's kind of got engineering mind, so he's bringing in and servicing our equipment. And you know, we got engine to replace right now. So he's going to be pulling that in hopefully today.

Good for painting too.

Yeah. So that we drop this and we do our painting in here. And so any of the assembly. Then over here it's more of woodworking only. And anything that's, you know, they're building cabinets or something, you know, because sometimes you're remodeling kitchen and you got same cabinets throughout the house, but they want to just add a little bit. Yeah. So we end up.

You can't find those anyway. You can't.

Yeah, you can't. And this is more of when any of the equipment, shared equipment comes in, it comes into here, it gets serviced here, and before it gets put on the shelf.

Got it. That's very.

Pretty much it.

This is kind of like the whole shop space, basically.

This is. Yeah, this is kind of the shop.

Yeah.

Okay. I like it, man. So this is one building, number one.

There you go. That's Aaron. Aaron, good to see you, man. And what do you do here?

Estimate.

Okay, Very cool. What percentage of the projects do you have to do estimates on versus just like sending the crew there?

About 100. Really?

Really try to put our eyes on everything, make sure things going smoothly.

Yeah.

Cool, Cool. And what. Approximately what percentage of your jobs that you send out estimates get accepted? Do you know? Approximately, like 50.

So right.

Right around there.

You've been with us for how long now?

Three and a half, four months.

Yeah.

Okay.

So his conversion rate's really good.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Probably closer to 50.

Okay, cool. Good stuff. Good to meet you, man. Absolutely.

What's kind of like the blended hourly rate, do you think? If you had to.

We're 120.

Okay. 120. Okay.

Yeah. This is Max. He's a supply guy.

Great work. Thanks, brother.

So that's Cameron. He's the bookkeeping.

Let's go.

That's Garrett. He's the dispatch and customer relationships.

Cool.

Awesome. And that's John.

Hey, John.

He's the vendor at acquisition.

Good to meet you. How's it going? My name's Mike.

Cool.

Good stuff.

Ed lives over here.

Ed, how's it going? I'm Mike. Good to meet you, Mike. Absolutely.

My name is Ed. Been working here for about five years or so. Started off as a mechanic and then.

Just worked my Way up.

I'm a project manager now.

In terms of the. Like, from your perspective, when you look at the operational side, where do you see a lot of the waste? Like, I know we're really trying to keep guys from stopping at the convenience store, but. And like getting the supplies to them, et cetera. Like, where are you seeing that as kind of a bottleneck? Is there anything specific?

I want to say anything specific? It's just, I think just a lot of little.

Little things.

Little things that add up.

Okay. Yeah. Because when I see. When I see we have like our hourly rate being like that $120 marker and I look at how many labor hours we're actually producing, there's a big drop of how many billable hours are we getting out of an eight hour day. Right. Just from a math perspective, if you take, you know, 2 million divided by how many labor hours there are, you're more like like $60 an hour, like the effective hourly rate. And so it's like there's a big chunk of time we're not billing to the customer.

Exactly.

So does it go estimator then to. Then you, and then you go to the leads? Is that kind of how the flow works?

Okay, cool. Right now we're doing that only on bigger jobs. On the smaller jobs, we're trying to have the estimators just go directly to the leads.

Got it. Cool. Very, very good to meet you. Awesome, man.

Whether it be a percentage of the job revenue, whether it be based upon how fast they get from the shop to the job site and doing some sort of compensation there, or like, do something, make it a game. Do something other than create a whole nother business to solve the problem. It's just a matter of like, fix the actual root of the problem, which is you have waste when it comes to labor.

This past year, I know we had that couple jobs that went south, but like the debt, why did it bloom this past year? Mostly like this year?

Yeah, I think it's the training.

All the new team.

All the new team. Because, yeah, no matter how much I look, we, you know, we had that big old dip in the spring. So commonly during the winter, we hit break even about May. And this year we still haven't even hit it. And to me, that's the only biggest expense that we've been finding is that training.

Was it kind of like a one time, like you had to kind of clear house, or was it a matter of like just massive amounts of churn happening consistently?

I was clearhouse type of really.

Okay.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Getting rid of kind of the old culture, you have to refresh everything.

Yeah, got it. As we grow, as we develop, we learn to look for a different talent. And up to beginning of last year, like my administrative assistant slash dispatcher, her personality just would clash with everyone in the office. She was doing such a good job, but the personality would just clash. At that point, our estimator quit because of that personality conflict. And then we had to part with her. So that all of a sudden that put a lot of strain on few guys that were here.

It's rare that a business that is this old and this large actually has to go through a cultural reset. Like it happens. Like we all know the stories of big companies that get bought out, for example, and everyone just gets, the deck gets clear.

We went into over time trying to see how we can fill that gap or that void that was left by those two positions. So trying to distribute the weight and that was, that was tough. So they saw the financial strain of moving into this location. The administrative assistant went into panic and just became.

Really not compliant on a lot of things. So when you're already in that kind of situation, it's already hard. And some people can't handle hard.

And this is usually a result of a leader coming to the realization that they're way behind the times on systems, procedures, software, they're running a very unprofitable business. And that's what he woke up to and has already made a lot of these changes. But in order to make those changes, sometimes you do have to just clear the deck.

And the current team is now on basically all brand new.

So we have five that are original.

And what was the main reason for having to do that? Was it just a matter of cultural misfits? Was it just kind of inefficiencies? What was like the main driver of that?

It was.

It'S kind of like, I have a couple of guys here.

Yeah.

You know, he's gone now.

Right.

But this guy and this guy, I can't get them to, to grow can. You know, they're just, they're, they're good, but not excellent.

Right.

You know, so. So in other words, if somebody comes along, that's better.

Right.

You know, we'll be swapping. In the process, we end up just parting with anyone who just wasn't growing, with the company who wasn't improving. They were good at certain things, but they just couldn't make it to that excellent, excellent stage. Because we are faith based and people are important to us. We take that really hard.

Yeah. Like, in the perfect world, you would have, you know, three or four new employees that are good, you train them up correctly, and then you push out the three or four bottom performers and.

You do that over the course of.

A year or two, and everything would go smoothly. But usually that doesn't work because if I'm going to replace the software and I have half my team that doesn't want to do it, I'm have to.

Let them all go.

And so sometimes, like, you got to tear the band aid off. And for most small businesses, unless you have a ton of debt and loans, you can go get to kind of float the boat. In the meantime, you've got to do things quickly. And all fix doesn't have the money to be like, okay, over the next two years, we're going to continue losing money, we're going to continue being super inefficient, and then we'll slowly migrate in this more efficient business. We don't have the money for that.

Because, like, what I'm trying to prevent is like a spring like we had this year will kill us for two to three years, like in terms of just the hole that it builds. And so if the Achilles heel that caused this past spring is finding great laborers that are super skilled, the question is, can we reduce the threshold of skill required for people to be profitable?

That's a tough one because we pretty much been weeding out our low skill, which isn't bad.

It just. It's more a matter of like, for example, if you only have one or two people that can do one service and one person leaves, you just bottleneck the entire organization if they're waiting on that one person for different projects, for example.

And we're not in a way, because we're cross training everything.

Okay. So everyone is kind of cross trained.

Everyone is cross trained.

Got it.

Okay.

We just have experts.

Got it. Okay.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

But if the cost to train someone to be that jack of all trades is to your point, 50, 60, 70 grand, is there certain one or two services that take the majority of that time? Because that's a huge cost of onboarding somebody.

I think we already reduced it just. Just by changing the way.

Yeah.

The way we're approaching and having multiple people to train.

Got it. So it kind of batching them and.

That'S kind of something, you know, last couple of quarters I've been talking about, we got to get this down to about 10, 10 grand.

Yeah.

So we can. So we can onboard.

So what's the retention like with someone, if you train someone up, do they usually. So at least this year, have they been sticking around the whole time or is there a pretty good fall off after a few weeks?

We had only two people quit in seven years. Okay, well we noticed and parted with quite a few.

Right, right. So like how delicately you say we parted with them. That's a much better way of saying fire.

We parted ways. We found that our paths did not.

Cross anymore.

By fir all the employees at the exact same time. There's massive inefficiencies because you have people getting trained that don't really know what they're doing. Leads to callbacks, inefficient labor. And ultimately this is what caused a huge amount of debt being required dumped on the business.

Is the current team here, even at like just the leadership level, know kind of financially where the company's at?

Absolutely. Everything's open.

Okay.

Everything's wide open. That's one thing I won't hide.

And so, so right now, like I looked at the balance sheet, but from a, from just like a top level view from a debt perspective, where are we at?

Probably about 400. Let's see. So this is the last quarter.

Okay.

The improvement has.

Yeah, dramatically since the first two quarters.

And then we look at, you know, the first two quarters, that's where it was. You know, it was really the first quarter that really made a big hole in the hole.

Yeah. And on that 400,000 on the debt side, what's the monthly. Just payments straight on that per month.

I think probably about three grand. Yeah, it's not bad.

So is it most of these all 0% interest stuff?

Well, so one of our landlord has been awesome. Okay. He's let us default for a while, pretty much giving us an interest free loan.

So that was kind of like the personal loan side of things.

Well, no, he just said, you know, just keep trying, keep paying and then we'll catch up later. So there's about 30 grand on that. And then we ended up to be able to fund this whole thing. We sold our rental properties, we took out a line of credit from under a house and yeah, so it's this year.

So I think we're probably running out of borrowable money. So we got to make this work.

Right. From the positive aspect, this past quarter has been far better than the first few.

Oh yeah.

The first few is really, really concerning your gross margin. Oh yeah, 400. And most of that will be on five year terms then because like how are we only paying $3,000 a month?

Well, I missed the SBA.

Okay.

We have a 30. $30,000.

So you're leaving that one?

For now, we're just making the minimum payments on that. Yeah. Just so we're pretty much just kind of defaulted to minimum right now.

Credit cards.

Yeah. As far as monthly, I don't think it has been over five grand. Oh, the weight is heavy. The weight is heavy. But one thing I've done is really make sure I have weekly communication with everyone I owe. And it's been incredible how they've come around us. Most of the people you owe, most of the vendors, as long as you're working, as long as they see you working your butt off, just constant communication that, you know, this is where we're at. Sorry, we can't quite fulfill our commitment. It's just been cool to see we had a store, you know, once we got behind on paying that off, they actually paused our account and paid that account off. The CEO of that store sent us a letter and a check back for all the interest, interest and late fees saying thank you for pushing through and making it happen. Yeah. So when. When we're communicating and. And making that minimum payment, just sending them a check with a thank you for. For your patience. You know, even if it's a 20 dol jack.

My concern is actually like, what happens in the winter when you don't have all the work coming.

That's my concern.

Yeah. And so what's been the strategy in the past? Has it been like, hey, we kind of just do as much as we can, whatever leads come in. So.

So as far as workload, we never really slowed down. It's the efficiency that, that hurts because of the weather. Because what we do is right about this time, we start scheduling indoor work, and we have lots of it. So. So right now, like this project, we're. It's in the planning stages right now because we're waiting on permits. This is a $600,000 remodel.

Right.

And so by December, we're going to be inside.

Okay.

You know, it's addition. It's. We're redoing the roof and everything else. You know, one of the things that we've been trying to do for last few years is a, is a service contract. I'll show you what, what it looks like. It's a.4 quarterly visits. We got a quarterly meeting coming up, and we're going to try implementing that and really putting the fall service in fall inspections.

This would be sold basically as kind of like a year round. Checkups, quarterly on Your property. Here's everything we're hitting. Got it?

Yeah. So just really just preventative maintenance. Yeah, you know, mostly inspections and touch ups and any of the repairs would be the upsell.

Got it.

Even if we fix all those mistakes and then we fix the off season, the amount of debt that's currently on the business is going to take a few years just to pay it all off and really establish the business financially. But right now we have a cash crunch. We don't have a lot of money in the bank. So how do we solve that in the short term? Well, first off, we could sell off all the supplies that we have as inventory inside of our warehouse. We could sell off some of the trucks that we aren't using because there's a bunch of them sitting around outside in the yard. Or we could look at the accounts receivable and see if we can't collect on some of the money that customers owe us.

There's no money in the bank. So like, like we die without money. So I think the short term fix is probably gonna go after his receivables, which is $130,000 that people owe him. So I think like a relentless program over the next 14 days to get at least 60 grand from customers that owe him something. But that's like a short term fix. You gotta solve the profitability problem too. I think there's a lot of good positive things where the company is going. Honestly, I really do. I'm mostly concerned in two things. One is the short term, like just on the cash. Cash position. And then secondly is how do we prevent this past spring from ever happening?

That's, that's where I'm at with you.

Because it will sink a business for literally three years. What happened? This room will take us two to three years to financially recover.

Absolutely.

And so then it's a matter of like how do we build the business in a way that will never happen again?

Yeah, that's why you're here from a.

Short term cash position because I know there's like a lot of stress in that area right now. What's the kind of strategy around receivables? Because there's, there's a good chunk there that we could get a little bit of breathing room on.

Well, and yeah, so 140. But realistically it's probably minus.

Minus 36 over 90 days.

Yeah.

You're not going to get it. Basically.

No. So every, everything is here.

Got it.

We don't have a whole lot of bad debt coming up.

Okay.

Okay.

You know we got one that we are going to write off which isn't all that big. You know, after the job was done, we did some work outside their house, caught fire. Her husband died in that fire. She, sweet thing, she tried making payments and we go, yeah, that's enough. You know, so it just, just those kind of things. And then because like from a short.

Term perspective, even though a lot of it's not gonna go bad debt, we're collecting it in 60 to 90 days, a big chunk of it. And that, that will, that is like gonna really hurt mostly when you, you do have that winter lullaby. Because now the 36 a day will catch up to you. Yeah. And so like if you, if you're starting to change it now, like one thing we, we will do with projects is like look, when you do the walkthrough, you collect the final check and then dispatch isn't having to worry about the admin time required to collect on. It's like the lead is required to collect final check and final payment at the walkthrough.

So we did that with the sales guys right now. So the estimators to do that, 10, 80, 10. So that the final 10, they come.

Back to the project.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

What percentage, what percentage of the project's total do you think the estimator is actually going back to? Pretty much that's like standard operating procedure. Estimator goes back to the end of the job.

That's, that's been new.

Okay. Yeah, I really like that because the thing with handymans is that there's unending things they can do.

That's correct.

And so like that walkthrough process I think can become collections and then it becomes this thing.

Yes. And that's, that's, that's something that we've been working on this month.

With a handyman business, there is an endless amount of work that can be done on someone's property. And when you just solve their biggest pain point like the roof leak, there's probably five other things that also need done around their house. And so if I can solve the problem and then while I'm collecting the final payment, the estimator can give them a bid for the other five problems they also see that could be fixed. This would be a great option to be able to upsell the customer and improve the lifetime value that we get from them.

I really like this because like I would love to see some recurring revenue and what's nice about all these projects like the install, etc. Like everyone wants a warranty on stuff. And so your warranty becomes your maintenance package. Like we will warranty all our work. As long as you're on this maintenance package. We're coming every quarter.

Yeah.

And I would assume you probably have thousands of contacts in your database, all of which you've done projects for.

Yes.

And all those one time projects can be sold into.

We have about 70% retention from all the people that we've done projects for. They keep going, keep calling us back. We partially lost a few last fall, last winter, just because with us changing people.

Our customer care went down quite a bit.

So we have a similar thing, but it's for outdoor only and that's like basically winter services. And it's like, hey, we're gonna do all these things, we're gonna come up every two weeks, here's the price. And then what we've done is like a price comparison. And like, hey, if we come to your property literally twice, it's going to cost more than we come every other week and do all of these things. I think to your database that has never seen this product, it's a way to upsell them which is like, hey look, we've serviced you for five years. We appreciate your business. We've created a budget friendly way of making sure property always looks good. And we can do this because we're coming more frequently. And so it's a volume discount to you and here's the price for your house and here's all the things that we're going to cover. And then I would just put, put a limit on your time there. So for example, if you're charging, you know, $215 every month, you know, okay, that's like about two hours a month that I bill for. That's 24 hours in a year. And you can just simply say like if, if your quarterly visit is going to be more than six hours, then we'll do an estimate or something like that. Or this, this includes up to six hours worth of work.

And, and I'm, I'm guessing your first month we won't be as efficient.

Right.

But once we sell enough of them because we got filters, lights, batteries at that point seasonally. And I broke them up into seasonally. So, so we can stock material, we can buy bulk and stock material for that season. You know, batteries, you know, smoke alarms, you know, filters and things like that, I'm thinking what's, what's the repetition in the services I think will be a lot more efficient. But I also think the, the amount of upsell from those is going to be way more.

Yeah.

Because at that point we're inspecting, we're creating recommendations.

Right.

Of what things need to be replaced.

If we can take a one time job and sell them into a recurring service that we come back to their property every month or every quarter, that would be ideal. Well, I like the idea of monthly.

Pricing and then quarterly inspections and then, then it's a matter of like every single estimate goes to a project. Once completed. It's yes, we're collecting final payment, but we're also selling them this. And we already know the price going into it. Like this is like just a fantastic value proposition. Honestly, like the amount of stuff that you're checking, every single one of these maintenance is huge. You're checking your roof, you're checking your gutters, you're cutting crawl spaces. Like it's a significant amount of value add.

Yeah.

And the monthly price to someone that just paid $30,000 for a new model is not bad.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking.

Because it would really help during the slow season to have that base of. Even if it was like 50,000amonth, what is it, five? It's like two. If you got 200 customers on this and there's gonna be people like to Garrett's point that will call in just for this service. And then to your point, it's like you're not selling just $3,000 a year, you're gonna sell two big projects to them because they actually have a roof leak.

Yeah.

Currently almost 100% of all fixes revenue.

Is coming from projects.

And it's not that I'm against projects.

Or that one time jobs are a bad thing.

There's actually three different ways to make revenue in a home service business when it comes to the jobs that you do. The first is what all fix is.

Doing and that is one time projects, you serve the customer, one time, it's all done.

The second type of revenue is reoccurring revenue. This is where you're going to serve the customer again. But there's no frequency that's set. It's like once in a while they'll call you again. But the best type of revenue in.

My opinion is recurring revenue.

That's where I have them on a.

Schedule weekly or bi weekly or monthly.

Or quarterly to be able to know in the future and project exactly how.

Much revenue I'm going to make.

This increases the valuation of my business and make sure I don't have massive.

Ebbs and flow in revenue throughout the Year. And then my thought is like, from a marketing perspective is we actually pitch this because we know this will bring in the leads for all the other services, but we get them. And even if we don't make a ton of money on this, like, if you're worried about the prices, this is your lead gen because you just make them happy. They're satisfied with the service.

I've been excited to get this thing going. For some reason. I've been just. I kind of been waiting for somebody to look at it and to kind of give us a little guidance on, you know, especially like you, you've been in repetition service. That's kind of why I had this.

Thing most of the time. We as business owners have so many things on our plate to do that in the name of efficiency and getting things done, we knock out all the small things. What if we just attack the largest problem that we kind of keep putting on the back burner that we know needs to happen, but if we just attacked it and spent six months ripping the band aid, doing like open heart surgery on the business, it would fix a lot of the other things.

Well, it's crazy. If you had. If you have. Do you know how many contacts in your database you have?

So it's probably about 2,000.

Yeah. Like, let's say out of 2,000, you probably have a thousand that have done work relatively recently and love you.

1500.

Okay.

Yep. I just send out stuff.

If we can get a hundred of those to convert to this, that's, that's, that's 30, 40 grand a month.

Yeah.

If we can eventually get to the 50 or 60. I think you solve your winter issue.

Yeah.

And then you've solved your lead flow issue. Because if you're paying home advisor for anything.

Yeah.

We want that capped by the fact that we know we have 200 people that we. We just gotta go to their inspections and we're gonna get three other four or five other jobs.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

So. Okay. I like that a lot.

Yeah.

Winter issue is just gonna kill us.

So in the name of efficiency, because we can get this one done in a week and this one done in three days, we knock all the small stuff. It's just like tackle this, which we usually know what it is, but it's daunting. We're afraid of it. It usually means systemic change in the entire business.

And that's freaky. I think it's a matter of like executing on some of the things that you've kind of just gotten started. Like this is something I would go all in on from, from. So I have real estate and if someone, if my contractors would have come in when I do my remodels, and I'm usually paying between 30 and $50,000 a door for them to come and remodel everything. If they give me a warranty like this, I would don every single property. Because if I'm, if I'm getting $3,000 a month in rent and for my apartments, I'm probably paying $165 a month just to make sure everything is like gonna be looking good. That's a whole lot cheaper than me calling a plumber out once a year. Like my, like just the cost of something like 3 or $400 for a middle of the night service call. Or like they don't change out the stinking vents for the heater and all of a sudden I'm changing out the heater.

Yeah.

And so like, I think this is huge because you have 1500 people in your database that have loved you. If you can sell 100 of them, that's 30, 40 grand a month in recurring revenue and then that 34,000 becomes twice as much because then you start upselling them. You get back into their properties, you find all the problems and then give them the solutions.

Yeah.

Once these service contracts are set up, this allows all fix to be able to get and generate their own leads. Instead of paying for the leads from Angie's List, Facebook, Google and other third party sources, we control the lead flow. And furthermore, we're getting these leads and these new jobs for customers we've already done service for in the past. They're in our database. These are warm leads, not cold leads.

The cost really that they're preventing here is what would be a $300 quick roof patch preventing that from a $15,000 repair.

It might be worth going customer by customer.

That's what I'm thinking.

Yeah.

I think this is like an all out campaign to be like, okay, this is the goal. Like if we get 100, like I would probably either.

Do you mind if I get Tim over here?

Yeah, it's fine, Go ahead.

It's. Can you come down here? All right.

Do people ask for that sometimes just.

On the upfront, Tim, like when you're going to a job site, like, hey, can like do you warranty this or is there anything like they want you to come back and check it or anything like that?

Well, so a lot of questions we get is, you know, you guys do inspections, inspection, addict inspections. And then usually when they Request that I do. Oh, hey, we also have a service contract stating, you know, that we can take care of all your service needs, such as inspecting battery swaps, just the full nine yards to make sure that your home is in tip top shape.

We're thinking about the fact that we have like 1500, 2000 people in the contact database. How can we pitch them who are happy with our current service at a one time project and do the recurring revenue of this. Right. And then obviously like every quarter having the ability to upsell them when we find a roof leak. When we find this issue, it's like, hey, now we have other options. Like if we were to go after one by one for existing customers, which would be quite time intensive. But like is the return there could probably be determined if we did say a sample size of 30 or 40 customers. How, what's the pitch look like? There's two things that they save money on. One is you coming out on a service call, there's a cost already. And then secondly is them preventing a $15,000, you know, mistake or error in the house by simply having this program.

I actually just pitched one of these yesterday.

Okay, cool. To an existing customer or like brand new.

The brand new customer, but they've known about us for years.

Yeah.

And then they have their mother who lives in a trailer park. The house is kind of falling apart. After I did a full inspection, you know, exactly what they wanted to do. Then I go, well, with her being here and you guys being across town, did you want to maybe you know, do a service contract as well? We provide that smoke alarm swaps.

And we break it down into four quadrants.

Right.

So what Mike is suggesting that we go one by one and actually pitch. Okay, so this, these are the services we have been doing for you. This is what it costed, what you spent this right here annual would prevent some of this and things like that.

You can just protect your downside too. Because what everyone always will not do this for is like, well what if there's a massive project that we gotta like go fix these things? Like this is an inspection, right. We're tuning up, we're inspecting, we're making sure. And then the value prop to the customer is a little bit of savings because they're not gonna have the service calls. But more importantly, you are preventing the massive repairs. And so I think it's a matter of like even if you took your, your latest 50 projects that were completed and be like, hey, let's go try to pitch this and like refine the Pitch. Because then eventually the goal would be every single time we do a walkthrough with a customer, it's like you're just going right into this.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So like Christine, I think that would be the first pitch. We've been going over there and fixing stuff for last seven years. You know, she would probably be the first one. One that. Well, so, you know, so it has to be refined to her.

When I already mentioned, because of pretty much every single one of our clients that are super happy, I always kind of segue into the service contracts. It's a kind of a developing thing. So now since we got it refined, I can actually go back to 80 of them and give it to them properly.

And even if you kind of like, as you like, refine the pitch, start branding it, right? So it's like we call this our certain package. We call this our certain package, they can upgrade to a different one. It's like, well, if you want the roof included, that's going to be this additional. But you brand it all around the all fixed part. So like your biggest, but your premium package would be called all fix. And then it's like half fix or.

Like whatever you want to do.

You just brand it as packages, right? Because then the all fix is like, hey, this is our guaranteed. And then you put some sort of warranty around that. It's like, hey, if anything happens in the quarter after we inspect your roof, we cover it. And with that, that extra all fixed stamp, you're going to get a premium price on that. You're basically selling insurance now, right? But insurance has great margins, right? Fixing like, you know what, we've. Our service in general doesn't have a great margin on it, but if we can sell to the insurance, that's a whole different business model. And then it's just a matter of like, okay, out of 1500, could we get 100 people? That's a stretch. But like, there's definitely people that are happy.

100 people is very realistic. Really, a lot of people are very interested, especially when it comes to people that have their parents still living in home.

And the snowbirds.

They show up in the spring and that's the thing that keeps them up is what is our house gonna look like when we come back.

So even if you took your current database and you segmented them so it's like, okay, these are the snowbirds, these are the people that are secondary homes, etc, etc, and then you pitched it slightly differently to each. So like the snowbirds, like, hey, have the peace of Mind that your property is looking good while you're away and you're not coming back to a property. Like, so I have like a little secondary, little tiny house. I hate going there after like three or four weeks, I'm like, I know the pool is going to need maintenance. I'm just hoping I. When I walk in the door, there's not a broken window. Right. That's what they don't want to see when they come back from their vacation. Right. And so that's. You'd segment to them then the people that, like, are needy, like, you always have been going to their property anyways. It's like, hey, you can actually save money doing this. You know, when you get there, you're gonna sell them one or two other big projects. But now it's on this recurring revenue. If you think you can get a hundred people on this, that's 30, 40 grand a month. And a lot of that straight margin. Because you go to these properties, you know, you have budgeted three hours or four hours, and it took 30 minutes because everything checked out.

Exactly.

Yeah.

After the first two visits, everything's pretty well checked out.

And the customer's paying for the peace of mind. They're literally paying for insurance. And then, then it starts to become just a matter of when you do work. Now, the warranty is our service plan, so we will guarantee 100% in perpetuity that this sink will never leak as long as this is signed. And so if someone asks like, well, what happens if there's a problem? Everything's covered 100%. You just have to get on our service plan because, you know, in maybe six or seven years, yes, it'll need a replacement, but they've been paying you $300 a month, and you can cover it.

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

And then, and then you start pitching the warranty like the aspect of a remodel. But, like, all of the plumbing, all the electrical, everything's warrantied. And I as a homeowner, never have to worry about a short circuit, something blowing out. Like, any of that is nice. And then their point of active, highest point of activation is right after the job is done. And they're like, whoa, this is great. This is amazing. That's when you sell the them.

This, right, Q4 collapse is essentially what every home service business struggles with when.

It comes to seasonality.

There's one quarter in the year, a period of three months where revenues drop, leads drop, and we actually lose money throughout those months. If you're tired of saving up all of your profits for the entire year, but then them all getting completely wasted during your off season. Come to Blue Collar Summit. Blue Collar Summit is a three day event with John Taffer from Bar Rescue, Myself and a host of other seven and eight figure entrepreneurs. But on the Friday of the event is an entire day, a workshop with just myself. We're gonna go over five different options for you to be able to solve Q4 collapse just like All Fix. How do we fix this problem of having seasonality in your business? Go to bluecolorsummit.com and book your tickets today.

If you've got a home services business, come to Seattle. We'll see you there at the Blue Collar Summit.

I think it's definitely an opportunity. Going into our kind of our slower season is taking the 1500 people, really segmenting them and then starting like going pitching this differently to them. It's really how we found it is like we've got to be able to explain this in one sentence. Like this is like a packaging problem. If I'm trying to sell someone after the job, what do I say? We will warranty our work work forever as long as you're in one of our service plans. And here's the three options. It's our XYZ package, our Z package, and our all fix package. Which one do you want? And forever. This is warrantied. Or maybe the all fix package is the one that we forever will fix. Anything that we we have touched will be warrantied. If there's a nick on the wall and we painted the wall, we'll attach it up. That's the all fix package. Also what's nice with the warranty is if there are things that you have to actually do repairs on, you get a to move those where you're slowest. Yeah, yeah. Right. It's not like it needs to be done right now.

Yeah.

So you can kind of move where the projects fit in.

Yeah.

When All Fix does the warranty inspections, it doesn't mean that all of the problems they find have to be fixed right away. This allows them to do these quarterly inspections, but then schedule the projects to get completed during their off season.

Yeah. Like, I think it's just a matter of like we create three packages. Like basically good, better and best models for the this and then we take that same, the same three packages and then just wrap them slightly differently for our different customer segments. So the Airbnb people, the people who are snowbirds, the people have a second house, the people that are taking care of their family. Right. Like if I'm taking care of my family's house, like I would be doing this in a heartbeat. Cuz like I know their AC breaks all the time. I know there's always a leak.

Like they're going to call you in the middle of the night and I'm.

Going to pay 500 bucks for someone.

To go there in the middle night when.

Whereas if this like I don't have to think about it and then if there's mistake, if there's our problems, like you're just gonna send me, hey, there's the estimate that we think this should be done. It probably has another 6 to 12 months in it. But if you wanna take care of it now, we can get it done. Right. You start governing your lead flow too.

Yeah.

You determine when leads come in like, cause oh, we need more leads. Okay, let's go do more of the inspections this week. We do more inspections, it's gonna bring up how many leads we got and then you go with that. Yeah. And ultimately like even if you're good, better, best model you have, even if the good one is like ridiculously cheap in your mind, like we can never make money on this. The objective is to upsell them. And so if you have it as like you name it the packages differently. But you also like this is like when you go to a mechanic, it's like these are 70 point inspection. Use up different points on each of these. Right. So like the all fix is like your 75 point inspection on your house and here's all the stuff you're going to get for it. This one's a 50, this one's a 25 and you know the 25 one is basically walking around the house and taking pictures. And you know it's going to be less than an hour in and out, but they're not going on the roof, they're not checking underneath the crawl space. It's like this is the 25 point package and you're basically showing up to their house. Well, and I would incentivize like crazy your upsell after projects because the, the, the level of conversion from a one time project into recurring is a direct implication of how satisfied the customer is. Because they're happy with your job, they liked your crew and an estimator comes up right at the highest point of activation. It says why don't we just warranty this forever. They should be able to close a lot of these. And then we have this like instead of revenue going like this, there's gonna be this slow Recurring build until finally can make 60, 70% of revenue is just from this program.

Yeah.

Right. So I like it.

So I have people.

Yeah.

All the way 30 minutes away. They'll call us for any little thing.

Yeah.

Something breaks or the ones that they.

We have people calling us to replace a doorknob.

Yeah, that's me.

Dude, I stink. And we have a $250 minimum.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, yeah, they're okay with it. We have people calling us to replace a battery and a smoke alarm. That's $250 minimum.

And you pitch all those people like.

Hey, it's 250 bucks a month. You just. You're gonna basically take that money that we would otherwise have just for a service call.

You don't have to call in.

We're just gonna show up. You got your scheduled time. The automation is going to tell you a week before that we're showing up. And you don't have to worry about the $250 minimum for a doorknob. Just get the doorknob, put it next to them, we'll pop it in there. And I really think that your big package is all fixed.

Garrett, you're hearing all this, right?

Yeah, this is.

This is great. What we're kind of talking about is like, how do we simplify it really easy for a customer and then make it like packages? And so my thought is. And again, you all know my much better, like, timing and all that sort of thing, but, like, for a customer, it's like, we can protect your roof, like above here. We can talk. We can cover from your roof to your ceiling inside of your house. We can cover underneath, basically your crawl space. And then we can cover outside and even, I guess, include foundation, too, if they're not on a crawl space.

That kind of would also fit in with this phrase I use a lot with new customers. As I say, we have a team of 10 technicians who can take care of your foundation to your roof and everything in between. It's pretty much the same thing you're saying for that.

Because then what someone could do is like, hey, I want to have the year round package. But I only really want. I'm focused mostly on my roof. I've had a lot of problems with it. I've had to replace it a couple times. I am tired of these massive bills. Can you just come inspect that? That'd be at the one point package, then, like the two point package. I want the roof and then I want the crawl space, because I hate going down there. And then you have the three point package which is. And the four point would be like the all fixed package. And that's the one you warranty, that's the one. If anything goes wrong, we will cover it. And then you mark that up and you're selling insurance. Right.

So we could even go up higher on the, on the full warranty one.

Yeah, quite a bit. Yeah. And then if you brand it all fix, it becomes like the de facto package. And then every estimator when they're collecting.

The all fixed package.

Yeah.

Instead of the home service plan, the all fixed package that would be.

Oh, it's ultimate home service plan.

Well think, think about it like that. Think about it too. Like from a customer's perspective. I am literally using all fix if I don't use their package. Yeah, well like I'm not getting the full deal.

Yeah. You know, that's a good point.

It's a matter of packaging what are our customer segments. And then if we have a, like a really nail that I'd go after the 1500 people just ruthlessly because if you can get a hundred, if you really think you get 100 people that changes this whole business easily.

You can get 100 people.

Yeah. Then it's a matter of okay, can we do 100, 100, 150 and then 200. And then it's. We track the conversion of one time jobs into these packages forever. It just, it's the natural progression. At highest point of activation we collect invoice and immediately are going to this.

They just give you $40,000.

Now you're asking for 250 bucks a month. This is an easy sell.

So I was, I was really encouraged service plan we've been working on for the last few years. You know, Mike really encouraged us to, to launch it and get aggressive with it. He's been with the service side and contracts for a while so. So I was kind of hoping to hear his feedback. So really that kind of changes the focus for this quarter. We got quarterly meeting coming up. So this is definitely going to be the, the focal point for this quarter.

Because what's killing the business is the seasonality.

Absolutely.

It's that one quarter a year. We call it Q4 collapse in Q4 stuff drops leads, efficiency for the crew, revenue, profit, all off the board. And if we take out that 1/4 of even this year, it's not bad. It's that one quarter, it's sinking us. Because if Tim can nail down the packaging and what the pat the, you know, the three or four options are going to be who is our segments then be able to hand that to Garrett. I think there's gonna be plenty of people that will just call in and you sell them on the phone.

Yeah, yeah.

We already have a good handful of them that want it already.

Yeah. And if you start putting on the trucks, that's your lead magnet.

Yeah.

Right. You're getting people on this entry level that everyone wants and needs as dumb homeowners like myself. You get them in on that, and then you sell, upsell them just consistently every quarter. And one thing that's super valuable, especially for people that aren't at the house, is doing a video. Video recap on the property. Being like, hey, just finished up the inspection. I went through all X wines. And you're basically reinforcing the value every time you're there.

But then you're also like, this one, it's leaking.

But you probably got six more months.

Right.

That's where you can do the same.

Exactly. And then even if there's nothing to sell, it's providing the value to the customer. They're like, okay, good. I can just like, not think about that. It's taken care of. And in your mind, like, dude, I spent an hour there and we made 250 bucks. In their mind, I don't have to think about it for next quarter. Let's go. And that's what they're buying, is peace of mind. Like, you pay for insurance every single month on your car and never use it.

Oh, yeah, we spend $35,000 on insurance a year.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And we wrecked two trucks, and we couldn't go use it because we had liability.

And see, that's the thing.

Like, the customer, they will find problems as part of the insurance, and then you will literally charge them to go fix the problem. You are going out and finding your leads. Now you're getting paid to go do marketing, which if they, like, if any handyman service doesn't do this. What are you doing from a brochure perspective? If you want to design, like, make this really simple. Like, there's like a point font that you don't want to go under. Like, you want to make a super basic, and then it can eventually be sold on the upfront. Customers calling in about, do you guys do inspections? We're not going to go out and send one person. We're going to sell them on the phone for one of these packages. And you're like, well, we got to do an estimate. No, we're going to sell them the.

Package and the first visit is the.

Estimate and be like, hey, we can do a one time inspection, it's a $250 cost. Or here's this package thing and this is all it's going to cover. You're not charging for the estimate. We're actually doing an inspection with there. What you do anyways.

On an estimate.

Yeah, anyways, on an estimate.

Exactly.

So it really, it really will just become leads.

Paying 100, paying us to like the value.

You go to free estimates, right?

Well, yes and no. So, so one of the things that we've been pushing and we struggling is the design fee. We will probably be bringing in a designer, if we had a proper designer.

Because currently the designer is the estimators.

And right now that's sunk cost if they don't accept the job. Whereas now we don't even sell estimates. We sell these programs and then a first visit is the estimate and we're gonna get them the five things and the options they can have. Now the designer's paid for.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And we don't do an estimate. And so the design fee is paid.

Yep. And you can have, you can have like even the course of selling these for the first like 10 or 20 and having the package, you'll refine it several times, then you'll kind of scale it across all 1500. And then it gets handed off to Garrett where he can sell it on the phone. And it's literally right in front of his desk like, okay, which package, which size of property? You're looking up their house, getting their square footage. There's no more time wasted of the estimated driver doing zero revenue. You turn the sales position into a revenue producing team member.

Yeah.

And that's when you scale a sales team. Because now you act, they're not a cost to the business.

Exactly.

Businesses all have cash flow issues, some harder than the other. We look on news all the time, big old companies going bankrupt. So nobody's immune, you know. And that's why I say to be in business you have to be either crazy or stupid because anybody smart would just stick to a job.

You have already turned the business around.

I would say now it's a matter of fixing that four thing.

It's. Yeah.

What we came up with this year was amazing. Bunch of rock stars.

Right.

And you know, the, the hole is just too deep to fill.

And.

As long as, as long as we can keep hitting our margins, it'll get filled.

Yeah.

But going through the winter, I'm kind of warning everybody and you know, I'll tell you how awesome my team is.

During the, during some of the really lows I had, my leaders say not cash their checks for a couple of months. You know, and Tim, I think, I think he had like 15 grand in checks piled up, just not cashing them. They just stepped up. They just stepped up and just, you know, it's one of those, you just say, lord, thank you.

Well, let's make some more money so they don't have to do that.

Good. Exactly. Exactly. My guys are making more money than I do. You know.

I think probably that's what kept.

Me alive really.

And decent with my wife and strong, I guess, with my wife is that from very beginning, from the day we started the company, we got a small salary and we just kept that salary throughout the years. You know, we haven't given ourselves a raise. We don't take any draws. We don't, you know, we've just been leaving everything in the company.

And.

Probably if I was robbing the company a little bit more, it would probably hurt a lot more. So we didn't increase our lifestyle to be able to do that.

Before Mike, we were trying to figure out how to implement P4P, you know, so we finally got that implemented that's working in one of our companies. And the other one, we're still struggling with the way the data is coming in and all that stuff. You know, we got some amazing payouts. I got, you know, one of my guys is getting that extra 1100 a week. But that, you know, he's got some of the, you know, bigger projects getting done a lot faster. So now we're using him as an example. Okay, so this is, this is what he's doing. You know.

I think where, where we did improve is we, we now have a team that has almost worked a whole year together and we're, we're hitting those efficiencies. So the new people should be able to flow right in. You know, as far as the training processes, we still don't have an ideal training process. You know, just because we got so many trades that we, we work with. You know, kind of like our dispatcher, he was trying to get hired for an electrical apprentice, you know, totally different. Yeah. But you know, with the personality test, we were able to see that he's, he's going to be a lot better in dispatch. Yeah. So. So, so sometimes you, you got guys looking for one type of jobs, but their personalities don't fit that job and we're able to use them somewhere else. So. So not quite sure on if if we improved on that yet or not that, the time will tell. This year was probably the hardest of my life, just with that many brand new people.

We did find the plumber. He's very well experienced and Mikey's got a personality that's kind of hard to work with, but plumbers are kind of hard to work with no matter what. So getting him on boarded and he's gonna end up leading that, the plumbing division and hopefully it works out.

A lot of our issues were replacing team, a lot of team members in spring. So we had a lot of training that had to go in. And having Mike come in, it was more encouraging because sometimes you just kind of end up feeling like, am I failing that sort of thing? And being able to have him look at it and say, okay, so you already implemented this. You know, this is, you know, the biggest thing that he suggested is, well, more encouraged. We've been working on the service plans and getting those implemented for about four years and we now have, I think, I think only three sold. So it was, it was pretty complicated. We had to revise it twice since, you know, to make it, to make it more, you know, more accurate and easier to sell and things, things like that. So so far we got good interest and, and that's going. So time will tell. We went from 300amonth, you know, inspection to, you know, we broke it down into a smaller $79 option to pretty much get in the door and then added the, the add ons. So, so by, by doing that, it just really gives us the ability to come in with add ons instead of, of trying to sell a big, big price point item.

Tim, he's, he's the one that's focused on the service contracts. He's optimistic that he can sell 100 this year. So right now we're still to a slow start. We're planning a marketing campaign. Soon as the plumber gets onboarded and all the light licensing gets figured out, we'll do a marketing campaign for and try to, you know, loop a lot of these things into it. So. But as far as a cash flow, our margins have been really good, you know, so now filling the hole, we still haven't filled the hole from spring. It's, it's kind of scary either way. I'm going into the winter with a worst cash position, but best team ever.

When I first came up with ideas to submit, I talked to my team. I go, we're keeping everything transparent anyway, why not, you know, and you know, at least we get another set of eyes on everything and whether we can get some new information or encouragement, one or the other, it's going to be effective no matter how. If you're on the fence, I think it's idle to be able to get another set of eyes on what you're doing. Because when you are in the grind and don't step back far enough to see, see where you are, you will be running around in circles, chasing tail and getting nowhere. You know, surrounding yourself with people who can tell you you're doing something wrong is probably the most crucial thing you can do in business.