Coaching Call w/ Mike Andes for a $250K Business!

So obviously look at your website, look at the form so we can just jump right in.

It's a reoccurring customers. So the more reoccurring customers obviously the more money you make. Right now we're doing Facebook ads since there's not enough search volume on Google. We tried eddm, but it was never really consistent. I wanted your thoughts on trying to grow the fastest way out. 400 customers. This season we're spending about $2,000 a month on Facebook.

Okay. And when you say 400 pro, like net, so you're doing 400 then 400, like 800, 1200.

It would be about now. Right now we're at like a 10 to 12% churn. So we're only nine month operating of garbage can cleaning because since we travel with the water, it freezes.

Got it. Okay, random question. How much it cost to fix that problem?

I don't know if we can eat it because what will happen is the lines will keep the machine on. It will drive to people's houses. The 500 gallon tank doesn't freeze, but the line will freeze because there's not constant water flowing. And it was a headache and it would cause things to crack and break and, and ice would get on the trailer. There is another company that does it year round and they're a bigger company that invested a lot into this. I don't know how big the demand would be year round. I think our churn would go up, but I don't know how much we would actually profit by doing it, if that makes sense.

Yeah. The thing is, if someone signed up for this service, they're not going to cancel during the winter because they want the service. So it really comes down. Can we deliver it during those months? And I like the idea, like you said, if the Temperature is under 40 degrees, we go out. And you could just have it in your service agreement. Hey, this is a year round service. But during these months we only show up if it's above 40 degrees. We can immediately increase our revenue by 33%. Go ahead.

I was just, I was going to say. So it's like months because it's very hard. Like this is five days a week. It's very hard since we only have two machines doing it. If there's a day like Memorial Day, it's hard to reschedule customers because our service zone is so big. We're like 45 minutes from Southline. But we have because we bought a company out in customers in Southline. So like in Michigan. So we'll drive all the way to Southline and then say the next week we're in. Like, I don't. It's probably not, but it's like a 30 minute away because we're in a whole different city. On the website, there's like service zones and we have a huge service zone. And so people will say, hey, I'm out of town, but can you come next week? I didn't know how to. How do I deal with that? You know what I mean too, Going in and going. So with winter rescheduling, we already deal with it a lot in the. So the, like the summertime, like, how would you do that based upon your.

Pricing on your site? My thought is really making this more of a monthly subscription.

That's what we just added quarterly. Like just added it.

We.

I thought maybe that was the plan from the start, trying to do a monthly subscription rather than the quarterly, but I didn't know like at a. Trying to, like at the long term, maybe trying to sell it in more customers means more. More reoccurring customers.

Your pricing is if you do it monthly, if you do it quarterly, or if you do it one time. And instead of. I don't mind that. I think it's more a matter of on the monthly and quarterly. Making it very clear this is a subscription. One second. Because I'm guessing you're guaranteeing timing, right? You're saying, hey, we will be there on this day. Is that kind of what you're currently doing?

Yeah, we're guaranteeing that we're going to be there. If they really look into it, they'll know that if they're in Southline, that's the first week of the month. So we're going to be there the first week of the month. Every month other than the winter time, they get reminders, they get text messages, unless they need to switch it. We are guaranteeing that we will be there the first week of the month.

Because the tough part is that you have to have the garbage empty. I would assume in the worst case scenario you're taking garbage out, cleaning and putting it back.

It's hard tried it and we're like, okay, if the can is empty, maybe we can just charge them to empty out their can. But it takes a lot of space on the truck. It's very hard because you think, oh, it's just a couple bags. People lose trash in there. They'll put shoes, dog, feces, whole bunch of stuff. And it's very hard to do. Especially asking an employee to start digging through some Garbage. That's why I don't know how scalable to go to the next level it is when we have such a big service zone. But you need a big service zone to get the amount of customers to really make it worth it. Because when we are in the areas, it is profitable, it is making money. But then as soon as someone say, come back tomorrow or come back next week, it's hard to pay somebody and keep doing it just for that.

If it's just a couple of customers, I cut those ones out. I think you just change operations, charge this amount per month or per quarter. We're going to give you heads up at one week, 24 hours and one hour when we're on our way. For example, if there's trash in the can, it's going to be extra five bucks. And that five buck goes directly to our drivers. We're not collecting any of that. It's going straight to our drivers. So that way they don't feel as horrible. It's not like the greedy company trying to make money off of their back. Hey, look, no one wants to dig through garbage. If we show up and there's garbage in there, we will remove it, we will clean it, and then we will put the garbage right back in. And then that five bucks or whatever just goes right to your team. And then they'll be less inclined to worry about having to spend a few minutes to pull out the garbage. Definitely. Yeah.

Because we right now will struggle with that. The drivers get too quick, and they're just skipping people because they're like, oh, it's halfway full because they don't want to deal with it. And then they're calling, hey, the can wasn't even that empty. It literally just happened. I'm like, I don't even know what to do.

Skipping visits is horrible. We have a hard policy against this. I would do the same thing on your end. You do not skip a house if it's on a schedule. And if there's garbage inside, you're going to take it all out, clean the thing, and then put the garbage back into the dumpster.

That's what we were trying to do. Refilling with a contractor bag, putting their loose trash in there, and then just charging $5 and having them agree to it that it's going to be a $5 charge and making sure just charging the car that additional $5, rebagging trash or taking trash. So same kind of fee.

Have you already been doing that?

We have a little bit, but not like where the customer agrees to it. You know what I mean? So not like this is we'll come back and say if you want us to clean it, we're going to. And it wasn't always five.

I would make like terms of service. Right. So it'd just be like when they add to cart and they check out. Okay, terms of service. This is a year round service. We only show up if the temperature is above 38 degrees for example. And then what I would be doing those three months is your off season. I just be looking at your temperature for the next 14 days. When are we approximately going to. Because if you're looking at 38, 40 degrees next three weeks we're off. Like we can't do anything versus we got three days. We're going to work around the clock to get everyone done. And then I would probably do some sort of surge pricing for your team during those hours. But you're okay with it because you're going to make 33% more revenue on the same exact customers.

Okay. And that would turn into the year round. We got a little lucky with bringing some people back. But keeping the people on the year round I think would definitely help. I'm thinking how many people are going to cancel because we're doing year round?

You don't think so? Because the actual problem exists even during those months which is their trash cans still get dirty and they still look bad and they're hiring you to solve that problem. The pain hasn't gone away. So they still want your service because they signed up for you in the first place. I would actually think from their perspective, like if they care enough to have you do monthly for the rest of the year for you not to show up for three months. They hate it. I don't think people would cancel because the problem exists. They're having you clean their trash can. They want to clean those other three months for mowing. For example. Our grass starts declining in terms of gross there people that's valid to cancel. But if, if the grass kept growing, I'd be like I just keep mowing.

I agree with that. I think that's what I would try to figure out the terms of service and adding that in and then trying to go year round.

You can reduce a lot of operational drag by simply being like this year round service. We only come over this temperature and if you're there's garbage in your trash bin when we show up, you're going to have the $5 charge which goes directly to our employees. If you're handing that five bucks straight to the team, I would let the.

Customer know, okay, yeah, I think I'm gonna try to put that in and go from there. And what do you think about. Should I only be thinking about garbage cans? Because we have a good customer list where we can text them. Like, we have a good amount of already booked Christmas lighting jobs. What do you think about doing two things at once? I don't know what to do about that because I go back and forth. I feel like I'm doing everything. But should I just be doing garbage cans?

I don't believe you have an off season. People create garbage year round. It's really a matter of how we adjust operations around the months where it freezes, your revenue can stay within 90%. I don't think that's a problem. I wouldn't add something like Christmas lights because you're doing that now with the mentality of I need to do that during my off season. I actually don't think you have an off season because the garbage doesn't go away. You'll just have to change operations. In terms of how you remind customers, how do we notify them of this? How do we make sure our team is okay with the scheduling of that service? It's going to be three days this week, not five days. And we're going to work 12 hours a day. Do you have a different pay structure? For example, if they work anytime between 6pm and 6am do they get extra time? I know you talk about pay for performance. Like you'd create a whole model around that. And if you create something that paid for performance around this, they're not going to want to skip bins. It's wasted time on their part.

You think getting rid of the zone system or how should I do that? You know what I mean?

Or is the zone mostly just for the sake of creating good routes?

Since it's so big, it creates the best routes. We're only in like certain zip codes for the out of the month. Like the first week we're in said zip codes and the next week we're only in those zip codes. And we try to organize it that way since there's a lot of people. So we try to just go from there.

Yeah, I think having routes and zones is important. I think it's a matter of if they have to go back into a zone. I'm assuming it's because they made a mistake.

Or it could be from a customer needing to move the cleaning, but it could be from the customer calling and saying, hey, the garbage can doesn't look as nice as it should be. Can you guys come out re clean it?

I would probably also do some sort of tagging system for proof that you showed up for those sort of customers. Like when you open up the thing, you clean the thing. And a little sticky note almost that you would customize. It says your business name the date of service, and stick it on the inside and close it.

That would probably slow it down a little bit, but it's probably worth it.

Increase the speed of your crew by 20 to 30% with pay for performance. I would do more along the lines of what the porta potties do, where it's a sticker you put on the inside of the trash can, and then your guys just put the date of service. That way it's like a record for the customer to know when you're coming. That's like a sticker inside the bottom of the lid.

I'm gonna order some, and we'll start putting those on so we can stop getting people from hated you come. Or. Because sometimes drivers will get confused with, like, addresses and things like that. I don't know how many times I have to make sure it's the right address. Because somebody say, neighbor leaves out the. The can on the curb, but the other customer doesn't. They think it's that, and they just. It's right next door. And they clean the neighbor's can, and then they move on. And then they'll be like, you guys never came.

So it's each of these things I would try to solve the operations, for example, that could be solved with a picture of every single property. Right when the crew shows up, when. When the driver shows up, they have a picture of the house. You know exactly what's going on.

And that's where they say, right now we use Jobber, which is really good with routing and things like that. And you can send invoicing if we want to do other things. But there are, like, other softwares that are just coming out where, like, you can take pictures. Full garbage can to send to the customer. Or a picture of the house where there are no cans. What do you think about changing software? Do you think keeping jobber? Because then we'll have to recapture the file or the cards. Because I don't think jobber will give us the tokens.

I wouldn't change softwares over just that one thing. I think I'd create a system around it, Even if it's external to Jobber. When we take pictures, some of our owners, like, for long hair, same thing Happens, people say they didn't come. They just make it standard. You take a picture when you're done and they attach it to the client profile and the client can go into their profile and see all their pictures. You could use something like company cam, which does integrate with Jobber. It's a little expensive of with having both, but you can take pictures of people's property and it syncs to their profile like their address. That would be useful. I believe. They allow you to share it with customers. They have a place to search it and I think it's. I know it syncs with Jobber, so you might be able to fix something there without having to switch softwares. Just buy that add on. I know it's a little pricey having both, but it's probably easier than switching to a whole different CRM. I think our time is better spent on things like fixing the winter problem, fixing the scheduling problem of the trash being in the bins, figuring out paper performance for the crew. There's like bigger chunks than just switching software.

Okay, perfect. Going into the big question I have in my head because I've been doing this is year number four, it's do I keep going with this or is there a better opportunity for me to making money and trying to build a business as like number standpoint, profitability standpoint, things like that, like where do I, where could you see this business in five to 10 years of just doing what I've been doing?

You have hundreds of customers. We know that they do not want to handle their garbage bin. There's so many ways to upsell that customer because we know that they obviously have someone taking the garbage out. A natural move down the road could be garbage collection. But I would do that. Once you have massive route density, once you have tons of customers for you to be able to click a button, okay, if I buy a couple trucks, I literally am going to have a million dollar business just in garbage collection because it's such a natural crossover. And then you can create some sort of thing like, hey, we will actually clean your bins for free if you take your garbage every week. There's so many ways to upsell that I think the thing that you're limited to right now is you can only upsell. You can't cross sell. You can upsell people into more services going from quarterly to monthly, but right now you don't have anything to cross sell into. So whether it be recycling bins, whether it be cleaning other things, think of yourself as more of a sanitation company and even if you started doing things like hazardous materials and hazardous cleanups, that would be a really easy extension. It'd be more on the commercial side. But there's a huge amount of money in that area because people do not want to do it. And then you can become very specialized in it too. So I think my biggest thing for you, like what's your total revenue right now?

Just garbage cans will probably be right around like for a year to date, from March to September, about 185,000.

For right now, I think we can immediately adjust that by 33% by just really figuring out the winter. So there's that one lever and then I'd just be like, okay, what size can I grow to? Do I do you think you can grow to before you have to add a cross sell? Because I would just focus on your current thing until you had a certain size. Okay, I haven't. I would probably stop expanding your surface area. What's your current surface area now? Is it 20 mile radius? 30 mile radius?

If you think about a square, probably 30 miles.

Even if it was okay, we know we can pull 33% right off the bat. That's when you're putting us at this, call it 250. And then we think, okay, I think we could double that if we just focus on advertising, marketing a little bit more. Let's just say at 500,000 annual revenue, that's when I think I'm going to tap out and I'm going to have to figure out a cross sell. And I, I think your cross sell is actually down the road where you make your money. So if you think of it right now you're figuring out these systems, you're thinking of these procedures, you're figuring out this basic service. And then down the road your cross sells could be bigger ticket items. Because the thing that really pigeonholes you is the ticket size. 22 bucks a month is just tough to scale. You have 5,000 customers and still be struggling to make a million dollar business. I'd really be tracking what is my, the lifetime value of a customer just based on turn and then what is my average ticket? So like your average ticket is low. That's tough because from a marketing perspective, if you could charge twice as much in terms of their lifetime value, you can theoretically then pay twice as much for that lead. And right now what's going to be tough is if you're paying 50, 60 bucks a lead, it could literally take a year to recoup the cost of that customer acquisition cost.

We get a lot of Leads that maybe were not all the way interested. But we do get a lot of people though with the one time cleanings where the one time cleaning does go up to $60 to $100. We try to spend a lot on advertisements and get the money on the back end, trying to keep them as a customer for a higher lifetime value and just keeping them on and just growing that way. I think Facebook are probably still the best option. Just maybe spending more money.

Yeah. 11 bucks a lead is literally going to be 5%. If you're paying 50 cents per beat that. You're going to need one out of five to respond to you.

In some days it's even lower. We have people that are interested. I think we need to put systems in place to have a better salesman. A lot of times I'll have to be out cleaning the garbage cans because if someone didn't show up or I had a person quit this year and it's very hard with employee scaling because they need to be there five days a week and if they're sick then there's nobody. We don't have a backup garbage can cleaning. So it's my that will go out like this year during busy time, I was out there cleaning garbage cans and trying to scale the company. It was just terrible timing.

That will come with scale though. Like any business at 200,000 or so in revenue, if anything happens to any one employee, the business owner is going to help out there. So I think it's a matter of when you get to 5, 6, 700,000. You do have redundancies, Right. So you have, you know, three drivers and if one goes down, everyone else is going to have to work a long day.

That makes sense.

If you're getting 8 to $11 per lead and close half of those leads are people checking out on your website giving you card. Yeah.

So we'll get their card information on the website through Stripe. We can capture a card and file where we actually charge their card.

So basically they're filling this out, it's going into stripe and then they're have. Are they having to put that information again into Jobber later on?

If they want to be like, I have three cans, I want to go to four cans. Then we'll send them it on Jobber and then they'll put their card information again on Jobber. Like Jobber has that easy link where you can get their, their card info. So a lot of people, we don't have too much with that right now.

You're basically getting their card information. So that way it's like skin in the game. And then it's going to stripe. But then they're gonna have to put that card information again once they're in Jobber.

No, for the lead. When we're getting the leads, they're going.

To a opt in page.

They're doing their name, email, phone number, garbage date. Then they get an automatic text message, and then they have to sell them.

They're not actually putting card info.

We're not getting card info on the Facebook info.

Just without card info from your website where it says payment information when I'm checking out.

Yeah, you have to get card info on there. So if you book online on the website, you pay. It goes to our Webla store. That's where 80% of subscriptions are on our website. People pay and the subscription comes out. You can check out right now. It'll take your money and it will be a subscription or a one time, if you got a one time. So we do get money. Like, we don't have to contact them again. So, like, people.

Why not just drive people to that?

I think we tried.

We.

We've done that before. Like, we created a landing page that was like, optimized to sell them, try to have a higher conversion rate rather than just selling them to the website. But the cost per acquisition was just too high where we were like breaking even or even losing like 50, 100 bucks on every sale. So we didn't track the numbers where we can see, like, all right, we get 100 leads and we paid this amount and we have this many conversions. Or would it make more sense to go straight to having a purchase rather than a lead?

I understand. So basically, if they have to put a card on file and pay during the lead process, it dramatically decreased.

We're not selling 50% of the leads, and I don't know what that rate is, but maybe 20% of the leads.

That come through, probably I would say 15 to 20. It might even be like. That's why a lot of our leads, because I don't think it's. It's not like the lead quality because I think we could get better. 100%. We can get better. But I think it's a lot of like, instant op outs are like, just looking for price. Don't even call me. I was checking out the service. It was a new service. I thought it was cool. I cleaned my. My own. Don't even call me. It's very hard to get on the phone with them. They only want to text and they don't ever want to get on the phone. We just have to lose them. We don't know what else to do. I think we probably need a better sales system in place.

The holiday lighting ads where we say we have a $500 minimum.

I think starting as like in your ad saying starting as low as $22 for cleaning, you know, that is for someone who doesn't have garbage inside of there, it'll probably go up to 22 or $25. But I think your close ratio dramatically go up, I think because people are probably filling that form out to get info. And the thing I'm mostly concerned about, Emmanuel, is by having so many leads, you're not taking the time required for the ones that are valid to follow up with them or focus on them because you had one out of seven that you're closing.

We probably haven't followed up with any leads from June, July and all like we. Because there's so much lead flow coming in.

So increase lead quality. Another question is, should our salespeople try to sell them on a piff for the year and then they pay upfront for the year and then they're on a subscription that way or for cash flow, have them pay subscription.

I would really lean into subscription mostly because I assume if someone pays in full for the whole year, that there is a percentage of them that want to cancel halfway through. So it creates admin hassle. It also reduces your margins. It's also a higher ticket. So it requires a more sophisticated salesperson versus being like, let's just get you on the schedule. It's 22 bucks versus okay, this is going to cost you $500. Like it's a total different sales process for someone that is just trying to like it's high volume. Okay.

And what do you think about even during those slow times, like going into January, February and December, you think keeping the ads on and keep running everything and trying to just keep it the same. But it's maybe a little bit lower budget.

There's huge opportunity because I think there's going to be some really funny ads you make around Thanksgiving and Christmas. People throwing stuff out in the garbage, all the stuff piled up. You could really make some funny ads, but show the cost of it starting at $22 would cut your leads by more than half. But it would probably increase your close ratio by 3x. Cause if you lose 50% instead of 15 and get half as many leads, you're still on the upside. I believe you'll do better than that increase in close ratio because you have more qualified leads that now you're focused on only half as many people. So you actually would follow up phone call with people, you'd really train the team and then that sale is easier if it's a lower ticket. You've got to talk to them about the winter. You've got to talk to them. What happens if you cancel? You've got to cancellation clause like all this other stuff. A bunch of your leads are probably one timers when you're talking about that. You're barely covering customer acquisition costs because you got $11 lead at 15, 20% of them are closing. So I'd really be pushing the $22 because it comes down to if I can keep them for again 10, 12% churn 5, 10 years, I can make sense of spending money on ads. Now I have the opportunity for a relatively low lead cost to upsell them to other services that are are much higher cost. You could really literally move into sanitation around things like bathrooms, septic systems, like you can move that direction too.

So basically the vision is getting to $500,000 annual revenue with just garbage cans and then trying to cross sell into something more high ticket.

I think you could easily do that without getting outside your surface area. That's a matter of increasing it by 33% by figuring out the winter for people that have garbage. Like if you have 1 out of 10 people are doing that and you had $5, $5 on $22 services, increase of revenue by 25%. You have these certain benchmarks, hey, if we hit 500,000, then what are the next cross sells that we can offer? That's going to take some more time, but I would spend most of your time just on scaling and doing more of what you're currently doing.

What would your thought process be on increasing the prices and then shrinking the radius?

I would really focus on your strategy first of increasing like the density. Because if you doubled your dents like number of customers in your current density, a lot of these customers are currently far away. If you did something like yard signs, that might be more useful too because people see you there, then the neighbor wants to see it. I'm assuming your trucks are like wrapped really well. If you get people right next door, the truck doesn't move right. I would be putting door hands, hey, your first one free. It sounds like a crazy offer, But I think 20% of people will take you up on it. And to you it's literally just the labor.

The cleanings don't take that long. It's taking less than 10 minutes.

I would offer your first service free. I genuinely believe if you have a good sales process, let's say one in three people end up signing up. That's 30 minutes of labor that you're basically wasting, quote unquote here. And so if that's 25 bucks an hour, you're probably wasting 15 to $20 to get that, that new paying customer. That's a pretty good customer acquisition cost.

Thinking about it like that definitely makes sense.

How much should he increase the prices each year?

So we started it for the year was it was for 10 cleanings. Then we went to. So it was 160. Then we went to 175. What do you think I should be raising it every year? Yeah, because I feel like people will pay because I just don't know what the sweet spot is. And even like a $22.

Yeah, even. Yeah.

What should we be going up each year even with this? Like every cost going up as well too?

Like, I think you have a lot of excess capacity in that. You could probably get like how many trucks do you have now?

We have two right now.

Assuming that they were always in operation, how could you grow to 500,000, which is 2 being used?

I think we could grow to. If they were always being used. We're out five days a week and we have about 60 or 70 people a day. A truck could do 50, so probably 100 a day. So 500 is probably going to 2,000. So I think we could double with two trucks. But it would be hard and it would be asking people to do a lot. But I think if the route was tighter, you could do 50 like 8 to 9 hour days.

If we increase our revenue by 33% too, because we added the winter now at 250. If you think you can double, then it's a matter of, okay, this is all an operations game. It's like, how do we hone in terms of service? Can we actually double without getting an extra truck? So then it becomes like, how do we have a third person to back us up in the truck? Like making sense of that financially.

Is it worth it to get the third truck and spend all that money? The trucks aren't cheap. A trailer might cost $50,000 plus a new truck to pull it. Is it worth it to get that? Just to make it easier for the employees?

You take the cost of a truck and that trailer is probably looking at 1500 bucks a month with insurance and all the rest of it. I think if you put that $1,500 towards the wages of the team. Team. They'd stay longer and be okay with the longer hours. And then that you're going to be asking them a more flexible hours. Especially during the winter when it's like hey, if it's under this temperature, we're all hands on deck.

I think that makes sense.

Okay, I'm gonna use you guys more, but I'm gonna pay you guys more. Or how would you manage and lead the team?

It's going to be your winter time, right? Because it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be miserable. Also it's gonna be flexible hours because if it's above 40, we are all hands on deck and we're gonna work 14, 16 hours a day. But I'm gon months. I'm going to pay you a higher rate.

Okay, so give everybody a little raise, trying to keep them happy.

Right now you have two trucks sitting idle for three months. You have fixed expenses that can immediately change the economics of this business. You're not anywhere close to capacity. And typically I only want to raise price when I'm at capacity. So I'm more focused on how do I increase revenue by just serving them longer per year, which is the winter time. And then secondly, how do we actually get more customers to double the revenue or double the number of customers, I should say. And then when we get to that level of customers, 2000 or whatever, it's okay. Now we have this decision, do we go buy another truck or do we increase prices? But I think there's so much lost opportunity in your excess capacity right now that you'll make more profit if you just get more customers in your current base and then increase literally by 32% the revenue by just focusing on that winter operations.

But Mike, what about this? What if doing the holiday lighting generates more in sales?

Now we already have about $55,000 booked in holiday lightings.

It will, you will make more money if you do that because it's a higher ticket item. You can't do it 12 months of the year. I think you're plugging a hole that actually doesn't exist in your business model and that is the winter operations. I think it is a matter of just adapting the way that you do service and adjusting the customer's expectations to have year round revenue. And that is far more valuable revenue and scalable revenue than something one off like Christmas lights. We do Christmas lights because our grass does not grow. Your customers garbage cans still get dirty during the winter. And then secondly, there's Always going to be an opportunity to add more services. The first 150 to $200,000 in revenue in any service is the easiest scaling. It is the trouble as you grow your business, you know how to grow a business to about 200,000 revenue. Any business you start right now, you'll probably go to 200,000 very quickly because you've already conquered that mountain. The harder part is increasing above that, going from here to 500,000 and then to a million. I would really encourage you, like you have a really good model, you have low churn, you have a recurring service that revenue from a valuation perspective is way more valuable than one off services. Or even something like Christmas lights happens reoccurring maybe three to four times over the course of several years.

I do get offers and things like that. I mean this for the long haul, but it's like, what would you value a customer at? If you were looking to buy the business or you were looking to sell it, what would you think? Because I have no idea. And there's not a lot of presented on like how much people are selling their customers for. What would you value a reoccurring customer at?

I'm looking at my lifetime value versus my customer acquisition costage, what I'm willing to spend to get a customer. When you're purchasing, then you're looking at what strategically can I do with the business now, I don't think there's a huge market for competition buying out each other in this market. But if you build a solid business, anyone will want to buy it. If you build a business doing a million dollars, have four to five trucks and it runs with a manager and it's printing 150 to $200,000 in net free cash flow. All of a sudden you have a business worth selling to anybody. If you're in it for the long term, I'd focus more on what is the customer value to me now based upon the lifetime value and make a really solid business.

Okay, that makes sense.

Pool cleaning, for example. You buy routes. Everyone knows exactly how much you spend. This is not going to be like that in this market.

I was curious because we did buy one company and another company reached out. I was like, I Nick, because there's so much money like that, like I said, it won't even be worth it for me to sell right now. But I was just like, I was curious on what, like, what do you value? Are you valuing a customer for the year?

Stay on the aggressive offense during three months of the year. Right now you Basically shut down and pay for the trucks to sit, do nothing. Now you're in the offense. I think you go into next year much bigger because you're going to keep advertising. You're going to really focus on Thanksgiving, Christmas, all the holidays. They're new funny ads. You're going to show the $22 cleaning and you're going to show before and after. That's the type of thing I've been thinking about. I've been doing funny stuff like dumping turkeys into the thing and getting all, getting all messy and gross. Make it funny. I think you lean into that during the off season. But I genuinely believe you don't have an off season because demand isn't going to go away. It's just that you're going to have to change your operational structure to accommodate the weather.

If you were the owner of the business, what would the next year goal be and yearly revenue?

First off, let's just say we did 180 this year. I know immediately I'd be shooting for 240 based upon focusing on winter. Then I would be baking the fact that I think you staying aggressive, I think ads, sales, you're gonna have better retention year round. Also for your team members, you'll be able to focus on growth during those three months instead of zero revenue and digging a hole. And that's what I'm afraid of. If those trucks are sitting, you're not making any money. And so I think a very realistic goal next year would be at least 350. And if you want to be aggressive, I really don't see you not being able to hit 500,000. If you figure out winter and operations around hiring, you can't keep skipping garbage cans. And if you give them a percentage of revenue, like they're not going to want to skip them either. Okay.

Yeah.

And then thirdly, I'd be focusing on are the cross sells that I will offer that is going to get me past half a million. The difference between you making 350 next year and 500 is whether or not you, you figure out your cross sell. I would personally stay in sanitation. I would try to see what other problems do my customers have that I could solve for them. And a great way to do that, Emmanuel, is just ask them if you send a note out to customers on cancellation calls, for example, they do do a call for every person that cancels. Yeah, hey, why are you leaving? Et cetera. But keep your ears out for what are the other problems they're facing. Could you do anything in the Bathroom or septic or any sort of sanitation thing where those margins are huge because no one wants to touch it and there's not a lot of competition. Question.

Okay, I appreciate that.

What are other things that you can just think of off the top of your head that would be good?

Cross sell, easy cross sell. You're going to be more into the business to business side of things but you're also going to have like landlords, property managers. That'd be my target. I'd be screen who are the multi family operators because they're going to be very constant restaurants. They don't want the smell. It's like you can target correctly and then run ads or, or go in person to these businesses. I would immediately do what you've done with residential. I do in commercial. So like with like a checkout process, the pricing I do it. Hey, this is a one yard, this is a two yard, the five yard dumpster. Up to 40 yards you could have people willing to pay hundred. Like actually the companies take the garbage, they don't want to do the cleaning. Sometimes for example I would focus on what can I sell without having any more equipment, any more trucks, any more training in my crew and the next, next like the dumpster cleaning is the next thing I've done. A loan could take you from 350 to 500,000 next year if you just target the right people. And that's going to be restaurateurs and it's going to be property managers. I would do that immediately because it has no operational drag. It's just a matter of focusing on two different segments of the market and you already have in your site. It's just a matter of like how do we take what we've done with residential and make that into the commercial. It's all it's going to be is like the dumpster size.

Right.

And these people make money off of having a clean dumpster. You have way less price sensitivity.

And what about the window cleaning next year?

I genuinely believe if you fix winter and just go do dumpsters. Look at the top 15 to 20 property management companies, go individually in person to them and do a presentation. Go to the back of restaurants, talk to the owners, go during the slow time. So if you have a really busy dinner place, I'd be going at between 1 and 3pm and be like hey, I just want to talk to the manager. We do cleaning dumpsters. I know it's pretty bad. We can help with that.

Should we focus on getting the P4P installed ASAP? Or if our labor cost is around 30% right now we're good.

I think you're probably more like 25% honestly in terms of the P4P side because your crew is going to be move way faster because you have so many stops in a day. So the biggest changes we see in P4P is when you have a lot of stops. We usually have between 10 and 20. You literally have 40 to 50. I genuinely believe you're going to see a huge improvement on labor because every time they get in on the truck it's literally going to get 30% faster. They will compound. You could definitely do P4P. This is more of a defensive measure from an offensive measure. You could try the one month trial P4P software and just throw their numbers in there and see what they're coming out as. Basically let's assume that you do P4Pmore of a defensive measure. I think you increase profits there. Then from an aggressive standpoint, we're adding the revenues in the winter and we are adding in the dumpster right off the rip. I think in a year we're thinking about another service potentially. If you haven't done dumpsters, this is just an easy from garbage bins. What you could also do do for the winter if you're doing P4P is just adjust it from 25 to 35 during the three months we have the same base pay but we increase the percentage because it's not fun to work out there. It's going to be more difficult and you're going to have variable hours. So we're just going to increase it from 25 to 35 and you can do that in one click on the software.

I think that's the question. The P4P. If say their base rate right now is like 1825 on the P4 fee, do I take that base pay down or is that the same base pay and then I add like the incentives or how does that work or do I basically create a whole new system, my P4P.

What if the labor is at 25%.

Switching it to oh yeah.

Then it's just a matter of do you want to make more money or do you want to give more to your crew? So if you're at 25% now and our margins aren't great, I think you'd then go down to 20%. They would still make more money because they're going to be way more efficient and you'd make more bottom line profit. Do the one month free and run the numbers in the background. You don't have to tell them. You can just do the clock ins yourself.

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. And definitely going to try to input this thing and go from there or probably do another call soon. Maybe in a couple of months.

You guys got it? Awesome, guys. You have a good one. Have a great weekend. Take care. Bye.