Chuck Makes $22K in 4 Hours, What to Do When an Employee Is Hospitalized

Welcome back to the Mike Andes Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andes Podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. When's the last time we checked in with Chuck? He's the regional manager of eight Augusta locations out in North Carolina. Not only is he holding it down for Augusta Nation out there, but he's also been showing us how our new Augusta executive franchise model works from the inside out. Today's all about the basics, though. Chuck is going to answer some questions, such do door hangers really still work in the modern world? How much money can you make in your first month of lawn care? And what do you do when your general manager has to go to the hospital and you have to take over? We're here to give you the drama you crave, but we're also here to give you the education you need. As always, you can find Aldous and more over at the MyCandy's YouTube channel. Here's Chuck with how to make 22k in just four hours of mowing lawns.

Boom.

You can't beat that, baby.

Today I'm going to show you exactly how to get more lawn care customers. And I'm not just going to tell you about it. I'm going to show you it in action.

It's like Top Secret Squirrel stuff.

Michael Jordan lives in this neighborhood now.

Last month, we checked in with Chuck. He's my regional manager. He helps me run eight of my locations that I own of Augusta Lawn Care.

I'm gonna become a videographer at some point.

Now we're starting four brand new ones all in one month. And today we're gonna show you exactly what they do in the first few weeks to get new customers.

$16 customer acquisition costs.

Buckle up. Let's head to North Carolina and check in with Chuck.

No time for this. I don't have time for this. I don't have time for this.

How you doing, guys? Okay, so it's a Friday afternoon. Beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky. 82 degrees. Here we go. So we are in this neighborhood already. We have six clients in this neighborhood. So what we're trying to do is build great route density. So typically our. Our minimum mow we run is $40. So what I'm trying is I'm gonna try to go with a instant door quote, and I'm gonna run it 39 weekly, 59 bi weekly, and see if I can get as many customers as I can. The goal is I ultimately want to have 20 to 25 customers in this neighborhood. One guy can come out here, make $800, you know, seven, $800, and just destroy P4P, because the truck's not gonna move a whole lot. Normally we do 40. I'm gonna drop it to 39. Just from a mental aspect of it to get that. Drop that four, nine, three. Then we're gonna see how.

As you kind of see behind me back there, not very big properties. So last week, I did 83 door hangers and got two mowing customers.

They're all new builds.

You see, like, right here, they're still putting in around the mailboxes and patios and stuff, so. And people say door hangers are dead, mailers are dead, all these other things. You know, if we can build out a route here, it's worth it. All day long, I'll spend the money, because literally, to get two customers, 80 door hangers cost me $6 and 50 cents, plus my hour of. Or 50 minutes, to be exact.

We're gonna see how this plays out.

Continue to build this route. I'll keep you guys all updated as we run along. But we don't just Google and Facebook and be done. Like, we're trying door hangers and different things. So we'll see. And anybody I see, I talk to.

I'll stop.

And if the garage is open, if they're in the front yard, I don't just hang a door hanger and leave. I'll actually speak to them and try to sell them.

So we'll see.

Man. So I had a yard sign up outside this neighborhood that I've been pounding with door hangers. And you see somebody went by and.

Kicked it, thinking they're funny.

Put it on a corner by a stop sign out of the way of.

The mowers for the hoa.

Now I gotta fix it. Now we're good. We're good. You can see it right there. Got the stop sign here. Basically, you see when you pull up the stop sign, boom. Gusta. Lawn care, mowing cleanups, landscaping.

Perfect.

All right, guys, this is how you grow quickly. This house right here, we did the initial mow last week. I did some five rounds. Actually did seven rounds. The two houses to the right, to the left, and then the. What is it, three across the street or something like that. Anyways, now we're doing an initial mow on this one today. So we got both of these today. Getting that density up.

Let's go.

So today we're doing eddm. We got to put all these facing Slips on bundles of 100 of the mailers. We got 2900 of these to do. So let's get going.

Door hangers are working.

I've handed out 250 door hangers in the past less than a week and gained six customers.

And as you see the email there.

Those are accepted jobs, accepted mowing customers, all from door hangers. It's unbelievable. If you're willing to put in a little bit of time. Absolutely. Door hangers, like right now, they seem to be working now. Is it an every time thing? No, absolutely not. I understand all of that. Maybe I'm hitting it on good days.

Like it's 75 and sunny today.

I've gone out three times three hours and got six customers. Like we're, we're talking literally two customers every time I go out for mowing, for mowing customers. So don't be afraid to do the extra work. Pay a high school kid, whatever it is. Route. Our route density is going to be great. We've now got 12 customers in the neighborhood. That's a lot of, that's a lot of work and not having to move.

The truck a whole lot.

So just keep hanging out these door.

Hangers and things like that.

I think you guys would be surprised that print marketing does work when you're trying to get route density. Get after it. It's kind of my, my thing right now. That's my, my shtick. My, my go to right now is door hanger.

Door hanger, door hanger, door hanger.

Because it is working.

I'm doing this in mooresville.

The other GMs are doing door hangers. They' with it.

We're at home. It is almost 7:30 in the afternoon. But you know, the grind never stops. We got to keep growing. So let me show you a little quick something, something that Chuck figured out. These instant quote door hangers just write the price on there cookie cutter neighborhoods, you know, just make them all, all the same. That way you can just grind them out, write them all out and then you can run door to door, hang them all up. We got 15 of 100 of them here. We got some thank you cards too. But we got 1500 door hangers here. Got a little operation going, eating dinner. We're going to get it done. We're going to get these all written out and we're going to get them hung up.

There's really no reason why you shouldn't. If you can spend an hour, a couple times a week, we're going to make $115 to $120 per hour. While we're in this neighborhood, you can't beat it. Guys.

Cranking out estimates. Had a meeting with Chuck this morning. Spent two hours in a Panera talking to him. Just going over stuff. What we got to do, we got to close some jobs. You know, we're. We're sitting at, like, just over six grand for the month, so.

Got half.

The month to go.

Delivery day. Let's see what we got. We got business cards for all the guys.

Adam Dean, he's one of our technicians, as you see.

Dean, lawn care technician. That's the number. We give these to the crew, and then they can give these to customers as they're walking by. They're walking their dog, whatever. They can hand these out for referrals.

And if a customer goes with it.

Says, yeah, hey, Adam, give me his card. And they accept that quote, $50 in their pocket, cash. Door hangers. Everybody likes door hangers. Lawn care media. But being a part of Augusta, we do get the added benefit of having all these templates. Lawn mowing, custom kayak, mow Limer, Mooresville. Weekly price, bi weekly price, some notes. Customer can take a photo of this, give it to, take a picture, email it to command center. Gas cans, 2, 5 gallons. We like the Noseville I found. They're the best. Now, I got door hangers, got the business cards for the crew members, and we'll get those handed out to the guys.

I always get them 500 because it's.

250 is 10 bucks or 500 is 12.

So I just give it 500.

Makes me feel good.

Hello.

Pull the goodies, right? So meeting the guys today, Friday. I typically try to meet with the North Carolina GMs in person. See, you know, go to the shops, hand them supplies, whatever they need. So I got uniforms, print marketing for Mooresville, kind of a little bit, everything.

Because they're starting to hire their first crew.

They need uniforms, so we get a discount.

We buy them bulk.

That's kind of one of the benefits, right, of having multiple locations. So close is we can buy 50, 60, 70 shirts and get a much better deal.

We'll load them all up.

Before all you YouTube people in the world there cry about this. There's no gas in these guys. Use your common sense, please. People are complaining. Oh, there's gas. You can't keep gas in the storage, and you can't keep gas in the truck. Listen, calm down. We don't store it. Those were brand new cans. These are brand new cans of gas in them. Gaskets stored in the containers on the trucks. And these are just moving them to the storage facility. So we're good to go there. We do practice safety here.

This is a full load.

It's got five gallon cans, hoodies, uniforms, box of uniforms.

Slick Augusta ride print marketing, more gas cans.

So we are in this neighborhood again. This will be the third time I've been in here with these. Instinct boat door hangers. They're great. Now with that being said, we're going to hammer these out. But as you can see.

You can't see it.

Can't see it. I'm going to become a videographer at some point anyways. Gotta put the tennis shoes on, right? So right now I was doing estimates, walking around properties, things like that. You can't do that in cowboy boots. You can, but I'm about comfort, right? I want to be comfortable. So I'm gonna swap these out, take these off, put out another 80 to 100 door hangers and that's what I can do in about an hour. A lot of it depends on how many customers stop me, how many people are out. Again, we're gonna try to get these going. Four new mowing customers. One of the mowing customers is actually going to be a pine straw installation, which is awesome. Recurring bed maintenance, which is awesome. Just by upsells. Always do your upsells. You can get so much work by just doing upsells. Make sure you guys are taking advantage of those. They're already your customers. They're already people that you should be doing business with already. People that trust you. So just make sure you're doing them. It's just such a simple way to get business.

Boom. You can't beat that, baby.

425 door hangers. 11 accepted estimates.

One neighborhood.

Customer acquisition cost of $16.

You can't beat that. Boys and girls. Get after it.

People are telling me they can't find work. They can't do this, they can't do that. I don't want to bash anybody, but nine times out of 10 that's because you're not working hard enough, right? You cannot sit there and just say, I'm going to put $2,000 in the Google machine and just wait and not close jobs and not do this, right? So I put my money where my mouth is and here we go. I've. I've handed out 425 door hangers as of today. I started Friday. So five days I've done 425 door hangers. I've done taken me about four hours to write them and hand them out. Instant quote door hangers. What I'm doing is it's one neighborhood cookie cutter. All of the yards are anywhere from as small like when I measured one as small as 2500 up to about 6000. So what I did is I just, I. I don't care what the yard looks like. I don't care about the size. I care none of that. Right? When you're making money and you're trying to build route density, it literally that extra couple thousand square feet doesn't matter because that 2000, that 2500,000 square foot lot is going to take you 12 to 15 minutes to mow. Even the 6000, you can still be under 30 minutes, right? So if you go there, price them all the same, which is what I've done. Every house in this neighborhood is exactly the same price. Like I don't care a thousand feet one way or the other. Every house in the neighborhood, every single home corner lot, inside lot. I don't care. 425 door hangers. Okay, 11 have been accepted. Just mowing guys. We're not. We'll get into that in a second. Just the mowing. 11 accepted off of 425 instant quote door hangers. That is a customer acquisition cost. 8 cents. My hourly rate. What if you would break it down? If I was paid hourly, I'm salary. But if you broke my base pay hourly rate down plus the door hangers at 8 cents a piece, 16 per customer. Think about that right there.

$16 per customer acquisition cost just for the mowing. Okay, now four, I think maybe five got mulch, pine straw installation. One we're ripping the pine straw out and installing mulch. Four or five of those we're doing 400 projects for. So there's another 1600 to $2,000 on top of the elect. Like the 11 customers that are mowing, three of them. Our bed maintenance recurring $15 per visit from a mulch bed that literally Guys. Holds one yard next to nothing guys, right? So when you guys are like man, I can't find the work, I can't do this. Go out pound pavement hang door hangers. If you don't have money, great. That's okay. Spend a couple hundred dollars and get a few thousand instant quote door hangers and just hammer in these neighborhoods. Because these are one neighborhood. This is all one neighborhood. One neighborhood. Come on. Gotta get after it. You just gotta go work for it, man. Like this is you will, you won't get this better customer Acquisition cost. You can't beat it. Like, you just can't beat it, right? So for a total of like, I don't know, 200 something dollars or whatever it is. 200 bucks. I'm gonna get $2,000 in projects minimum, plus another 1500 dollars per year in mowing if we retain them all season. Like, that is asinine. That's like a hundred times 100x multiple. It's crazy. Guys like you, if it's working, go get it, go out there, find a neighborhood cookie cutter, put the money in and go to work. Simple.

Good little stripe right there. But you can see Bermuda with warm season, cool season. That's why I think the Charlotte market is so good, because it has cool season and warm season. So as it ramps up, warm season, season ramps up. In the summer, fescue cools down this beautiful backyard. Start that. All is well. We got some pinion quotes for bush trimming. Nice, solid stripe. Look at that stripe uphill.

Perfect.

Bam.

So we do have some other quotes out for this. This is the Cornelius location. It's obviously a lake community. That's what they're known for, high end homes. For example, in this, this neighborhood you have Greg Olson who played for the Panthers for years. Michael Jordan lives in this neighborhood. There's some high rollers in this neighborhood. We now have like five or six clients in here, so it's just a matter of time. But we'll start pounding.

I did.

All the neighbors got door hangers today. Every mow right now for me that I do for these guys, because I have the time, I will.

I'll put.

A door hanger up like five rounds. And then as you see all ramp rack, V6, all the haters. Does just fine on my own. Six hours, 10 yards and five estimates.

So.

The V6 does just fine. Everybody says you can't.

Can't do a V6, can't pull a V6, can't do.

That's just fine. Bunch of excuses in my mind. So, all right, it's Friday, I'm done.

If you want door hangers, yard signs, flyers, postcards, and all these other designs like we've been using in this video, you can just go buy them@lawn caremedia.com get in Photoshop files, JPEG and PNG files so you can make edits, throw them up on Vistaprint, make the changes you need with your phone number so you get more customers for your lawn care business.

Anyone telling you that you can get rich quick is lying through their teeth. Getting rich slowly. However, that's totally doable. Presenting Mike Andy's Get Rich Slow scheme, a completely free course you can take right now. This course is a beginner's guide and overview to starting a small business. From idea to implementation, we cover the entire checklist of setting up your new business for success. The truth is, good businesses take time to grow, mature and become great. And no shortcut can ever compare to having a strong foundation for your company. So get yourself started by going to mycandies.com and/start and start building your business empire right away. Up next, we have more Chuck with what do you do when your GM gets hospitalized?

If we don't fix it, we will not be successful.

Last month I showed us getting four brand new lawn care businesses started just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.

It's just frustrating. I have no idea.

My regional manager, Chuck, has been getting the businesses off the ground and helping my general managers get their business started.

Now I get to be mower repair guy as well.

We've been pounding on doors, we've been putting up door hangers, we've been getting new customers.

Boom.

But today we're going to show the behind the scenes. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Who sliced his leg open with a pair of hedge trimmers. Downtime is the death of us in this industry.

Things happen that are bad and today we're going to be going over all the drama.

He's at the emergency room right now. Managing people will be one of the.

Toughest things that you will ever do.

What other equipment would I use?

And some people in the comments are.

Gonna be like, you're such a bad manager. You should be doing X, Y and Z. Okay, well you go start four locations and see how well it goes for you.

I am trying to stay professional and.

Not.

So I'm stealing this from Brian Connor, Augusta, Georgia and North Augusta franchisee. I'm out doing door hangers and estimates you gotta use the restroom. We get to use these fantastic things. So let's go in here and kind of check it out and see what we're working with.

Overall, not too bad.

Got a little graffiti on the door. You know, no worries there.

Got some.

You know, nastiness going on.

Smells terrible.

But we're gonna go in here and get it done.

So I got quit.

You know, of course the old text message, Eduardo text message and then takes off, says he left his card and his uniforms in the back of the dump trailer. So I'm going to go check that out and see if that is in fact true because typically they Don't.

Right. Like you ask them. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll do that.

And then they don't. Right.

So.

Bag of groceries. Muchas gracias. Thank you for shopping here.

Andy left his card, so that's fantastic.

So we'll wash these. I. I personally don't reissue these to new employees, but I do give. I do let everybody know what we have available.

This gentleman was only with us for.

Two weeks, so what I will do.

Is I will personally wash them myself. I know they're clean.

I won't.

My wonderful wife, she's a rock star.

She.

It'll mix and. Can't mix clothes and colors and all these other shenanigans.

So I won't.

My wonderful wife will. Because I don't do it right, I.

Guess, apparently, because there's a science to.

It, instead of just pouring things into the washer. But I digress. My apologies. Now we'll go back to hiring.

He wanted. He wanted 60 hours a week, which I could not. You know, I'm not.

I'm not giving that to him. And he was just average, right? Like, whatever.

And then he said, or you could.

Pay me like, 22 or $23 an.

Hour, and that would balance out. Well, my.

My whole thing with that is like, show me a 22 or $23 an hour resume. Crew worker is not 22 or $23 an hour. There are no landscape companies around here that pay their crew members more than 18 bucks an hour. $18 an hour is the highest that I've seen. We are definitely in the highest. I'd say the high highest.

25%, you know, and for two or.

Three minutes, I'm like, man, this sucks.

I don't want to hire again.

I don't want to do this, but it's just part of the business, right? Like, it's kind of what we've all become used to over these past couple of years of people just not sticking around because they have options to continue to move forward.

A lot more employers looking for employees.

Than there are employees looking for employers.

So a lot of jobs out there.

Not enough people to fill the job. So thankfully, if the guys stay on task and pick it up here or there, you know, an extra MO here, an extra mow there will be just fine.

We'll keep moving forward, keep hiring.

I'm sure it'll happen again in a couple weeks. One of these guys, statistically speaking, you will lose a guy generally once a month, once every three weeks. So just stay ahead of it. Just keep hiring.

Hey, guys. So we're out here doing some estimates for a GM. Unfortunately, he fell behind. So it is March 14th. Right now he's got about 35 or 40 budgeted hours on the schedule and he's just getting crushed of just fieldwork. Plus he's done 50 estimates plus the nine that I'm going to do today. So he'll have 59 estimates by March 14th on a brand new location. So I'm going to jump in and give him a hand today and knock out these nine. Mowing the grass and doing the work is honestly secondary. What I am finding is you got to be able to manage your time, the scheduling, moving things around, communicating with customers, sticking to the schedule that is on the books and just rolling with it. Trying to get cute with things and move things around doesn't work, guys. The most important thing I'm finding with managers is the ability to manage your time and budget your hours and your schedule fell behind. But again, he's already invoiced $8,000 and it's March 14, so we still have two weeks left. So I, I'm going to guess this will probably do. He'll hit $12,000 in his first month and we'll do a recap as the month goes to kind of check in on things. But I'm gonna get out of here and just knock out these nine estimates.

Well, guys, this is spring rush. Just finished my route for the day. It is almost 3 o'.

Clock.

We got about two hours left in the day. So I'm gonna go drop off the smelling truck at the shop. I'm gonna go grab the landscaping truck and we're gonna go help Matthew on some projects because he is getting slammed right now. Chuck had to do nine estimates for him the other day, but he's got a backlog of work he needs to bring on a guy.

Madness.

Here we go.

This is for Brian Connor.

We're gonna do a porta potty check.

Before I get in here and get all shivering.

Oh, let's see.

Look at that. That's gonna be fantastic. Oh yeah, gotta love those. Staying from a distance.

Well, unfortunately I got a phone call from one of our general managers who sliced his leg open with a pair of hedge trimmers. So he's on a bush trimming cleanup project. Sliced his leg open. He's at the emergency room right now as we speak getting stitches.

So I am driving to the site swing, buying urgent care, checking on him, going to get the dump trailer, loading it up with all the tools because it's just Laying in the client's yard, taking it, the storage unit all. Meanwhile I'm going to do a coaching call here in 14 minutes from the car, from the well truck. Cuz I had to pick up dump trailer and old tools.

Yeah man.

So update on the gm trimming bushes. Cut his leg, bumped it off his knee, right on his kneecap, kind of like off a little bit to the side I guess they apparently there's muscle over top of your kneecap in that area apparently. But he, yeah, got stitches. So he is off work the remainder of the week. So I gotta figure that out. I figure out how to finish the project, how to do the Mohs, how to do estimates in Cornelius and Morrisville and coaching calls.

It's going to be an enjoyable few days. Make it work, learn how to budget the time and manage everything. But most importantly, nothing serious. Past disappointed, just stitches.

Right.

They gave him some antibiotics to fight infection, obviously hedge trimmers, trimming bushes, all that kind of shenanigans. So you know, they worry about that kind of stuff. So they are going to give him medicine and all that stuff. But overall he was able to walk out of there. So that's a positive thing. Health is number one. That's the most important thing. Should be back to work on Monday. We'll figure out the next two days. I mean he's doing 10, $11,000 a month in revenue. So it's a full schedule for one guy. And he's growing so he's in the process of hiring. So awesome.

So not only am I a regional manager, franchise business consultant, general manager of Mooresville since like the middle of February, we'll probably do 45,000 this month. Now I get to be mower repair guy as well. So you guys have all experienced this wonderful belt broke, snapped right in the middle of a yard. Of course. So now with this being snapped in half, now I'm going to try to repair. So they've got these fancy directions, right? Like there's this nice diagram. When you open up with if any of you guys have rights, it's got this little diagram, undo this bolt and do this.

And you know, the mechanic at the.

Mower shop said, oh, it's easy Chuck, don't worry about it. So I'm gonna try to figure out how to do this. As you guys know, downtime is the death of us in this industry. So yes, we have to have employees, but if your equipment isn't working, then.

This is what it is. Now we've got a mower just sitting.

Here and the Guys are all push mowing everything. Our average yard is probably 12 to 15,000 square feet and that's a lot to push mow. So I'm gonna try to figure this out and put this together.

So wish me luck.

Trying to play mechanic and you don't.

Have a clue what you're doing.

Always works out well, right?

I have no idea. No clue. And this is probably everybody's going to laugh.

I'm not a mechanic.

Whatever. I'm comfortable in my skin.

Back at Hoover's. Got to get some some pieces for this for the edger and going to get the mower all maintenanced up. When they're new you need need to get the oil changed and such so suspension some money.

I just need to move this pulley to put this belt on. And I know there's a trick, right? Like I'm not that naive to figure to think that.

Not working out for me.

Now the problem is I'm fat. And when you're fat you can't fit in these spots.

Right?

That's what's awesome about this. Not a big guy at the game.

I'll tell you that right now.

Tight spaces, man. We're gonna see if this works or not. Everybody, we're good. I think we're good. I think it took 26 minutes to swap the belt out. I'm sure you pros out there, all you guys in the YouTube world and Augusta and all you fancy pants dudes think whatever, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever. I don't really care.

We're good.

Time to go work, make money.

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I'm a little frustrated.

Work with all these gms. You give them all these directives and.

You just expect them to be followed, right?

Like and not hard make A spare key.

Over a month ago. Is that done?

Nope.

Open up the container. I'm doing the fuel work for this individual today.

No key in the container. Why? It's on the key ring at his house.

Okay.

Where's the mixed fuel jug?

In the truck at his house.

He was injured, so he was at the hospital. I told him, hey, just go home tonight.

Get some rest.

Go.

Just go straight home.

So now I come to drop off his trailer, go finish a project. In between calls, I have a meeting with another gm. It's just frustrating. Managing people will be one of the.

Toughest things that people ever.

I don't even know what to say.

You know, it's like one of those things. Like what. What do you do? Complain and whine, Which. Which I'm doing. Pouting, which I'm doing right now. But here's the thing. All I can do is not just go to work. Do what you can. Like, I'm frustrated. I'm gonna take my five minutes and sulk and be angry and just disappointed in all of these things and then move on. I mean, that's all I can do. So I'm ahead to this meeting, give my full attention to that, and then off I go. I'm going to grab this key again. There's no mixed fuel, which means now I have to stop and find non ethanol around here because we don't have any.

Here we go. The day in the life. Thumbs up.

I'm going to work, everybody.

We're going to muscle grass.

I really do appreciate being a part of Augusta, though.

It's.

It's been really awesome being able to help each other out, being close here to other locations that are starting and going through the same thing. I know the Cornelius GM has kind of been having a tough time.

Sorry.

We're here looking at some materials. Need to make sure that this is the right stuff, and so we're gonna order a bunch of this. But, yeah, you know, there was an injury with the team, and so luckily we were able to hop out the regional. Chuck was. He was able to do a bunch of work. You know, I went and did a little bit. So it was nice being able to help him out and knowing that. That if something happened to me, that my location could run for a little while, too, without me there. It's just. It's nice having the community and then having the. The whole Augusta group just talk to everybody across the country and see what's going on and see what's working. It's definitely helping out for as far as marketing and finding customers and acquiring them.

Out mowing some grass. Clearly right there you can see. I mean, so myself, a little quote action. Customer driving by.

Stop.

She goes, hey, yard looks great. Can I get a quote? Absolutely. She goes, I need one bad. It's a little overgrown.

It's over. But that's all right. We'll get her a quote. We'll get her squared away. It's always a good thing when you're out working and somebody says, good work. You guys look good.

Can I get a quote?

So keep after it.

We just got to the shop. It's 6:30. We had to go help out the Cornelius location. It's been a long day. Had to let a guy go, some chaos. Had to help out another shop. But you know what this is? This is. What is it destinations about? We help our boys in yellow, making sure they're getting stuff done. We got a pretty light load tomorrow, too, so we'll probably. Probably knock out some Moe's for Cornelius again. All right. I'm gonna not jackknife this trailer.

Another problem here. You know, you go to help somebody out, they're injured, right? Oh, I can't straighten my leg. Okay, great. Just drive the truck home. You know, say if you are the er, all that want to help person out.

Get to the shop, try to switch out the edger blade. Can't. Where are the tools? Well, the socket sets in the. In the truck. Why is a socket set in the truck and not at the shop? Why is the spare key or the only key to the mowing truck in the landscape truck? Like. Like it. It doesn't make sense. Keep your spaces organized, everybody. That is. That is, like, my biggest tip right now is keep your spaces organized. Organization will put you so far ahead in life. Not just work, but in life, when you are disorganized, it just breeds chaos. Keep everything organized.

This is why you can't be solo. I'm gonna be honest with you. You join Augusta so that you can grow. Yes. You start out solo, but you got to plow through being solo as quick as possible. We've got a GM that's down and out, right? Stitches in his leg. Hit himself with a hedge trimmer about mowing. I can't do my normal stuff. Like, I'm having to try to fit it in, which I'm making do. But it takes away from your ultimate goal.

Right?

So as the business owner, what you have to do is try to plow through this beginning as quickly as possible to get you an employee. If something were to happen. Worst case scenario, they can go out.

Alone and they can get the work done.

Not to mention man, my allergies are just destroying me. My eyes are burning snot and everywhere I got snot all over my sleeves.

It's great.

Lovely.

So just did a team meeting, GMT meeting. After doing a few individuals over this past week like one on ones and I don't think they're getting it.

First thing is our close ratios. So we don't have any locations except for one of the seven that are booked out more than two weeks. And our highest close ratio is Mount Vernon of 48%. Everybody needs to get their close ratio up. There's not a single location that has too much work that our close ratio is not higher than what it is. It does not matter if you are in profitability mode. It does not matter if you are in growth mode and you're trying to grow. Everybody has room in their schedule and has extra people. There is no reason why our close ratio is not high. I'm going to run through some of these numbers and they're just, they're not, they're not good enough.

Right Estimate follow ups is a very simple, simple, simple and I can't emphasize enough simple process. You call, you text message, you email.

41%, 37%, 27%, 30%, 23%, 34%. None of us are booked out except for one location more than two weeks. We need to follow a text message, follow up phone calls, follow up emails. We cannot just rely on command center to do our follow ups.

It's wonderful because command center will do it for us. They do it after one day, three days and then on day five they call. But some people just don't understand like they don't understand the lingo, right? Like they don't understand our lingo that they get from a lawn care professional. They might not understand what does the people are in different parts of the country. It's weed eating, it's weed whacking, it's weed eating, it's trimming. Like it's all these different things. They call it all different things, right? So why is it that we can't make follow ups and close deals?

Some people just want to be talked to. They don't want an automation, they want more. They want to pay. What does this mean? How can I pay my deposit? How does this like they have a simple question, they need a simple answer.

We need to get more jobs booked on the schedule for every location across the board. There's not a single location, corporately speaking, that has so much work that we just can't keep up and can't do it, period. Like we need to fix it. If we don't fix it, we will not be successful.

The next thing I want to address is the amount of lead flow. So we have a brand new location that has almost done more estimates than everybody, including you guys in Bellingham. That to me, again, unacceptable. Why is a new location having more estimates than our three biggest heaviest hitters?

Right.

They're new GMs. So it's a matter of getting them squared away. It's a learning curve. I understand. It's. It's go time. Like there's no. There just isn't. We're just not there. We're not where we need to be.

And we need to continue progressing forward.

So we'll see how we shaped up. I'm pushing them a little bit and it's easy to tell who's doing it and who's not doing it. It's very simple to just kind of.

Keep pushing and see where we're at.

So just keep keeping progress, just keeping chabs on it. We'll just keep moving along.

Next time we're gonna be doing the actual numbers and the revenues and the profits from these locations after their first month in business. Now if you enjoyed today's episode, just you wait. Cause in June 2023, I'm gonna moving across the country and starting my own Augusta lawn care location from scratch. I'm gonna do it in 30 days. Subscribe to the channel and in the comments below, let me know what you would like to see me do in my first 30 days in business.

Foreign.

This has been the Mike Andy's podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. And if you liked what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews and more over at the Mike Andy's YouTube channel. That'll be right up your alley. But that's all we have for you today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.