Copy and Paste Millionaire: The Home Service Blueprint to Make $3M (FULL AUDIOBOOK)

Copy and Paste the Home Service Blueprint to make $3 million written by Mike Andes read by MikeAndys dedication to my wife Brianna. Thank you for supporting my goals. I hope only to do the same for you. Thank you for understanding the love I have for the work I do. Crazy travel schedules, short nights, long hours. It's all better with you at my side. Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and I'll be reading the book to you here on the podcast. But I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to listen to the Copy and Paste Millionaire. I also wanted to point in the direction if you do want the physical copy you can go to mikeandy.com cpm and they'll take you to Amazon. You can buy the hardcover or the soft cover I've personally found when I listen to a book, if I actually have the physical copy and I read along with it sometimes sticks a lot more. And in the physical copy of the book we do have a lot of charts, graphs and areas for you to fill in and take notes. And it's much more like a textbook so I would highly recommend it at the very least to go check that out. Even if you do the Kindle version, it's a couple bucks. But highly recommend mikeandys.com cpm you can find it on Amazon without any further delay. We without any extra cost for free. I wanted to give away the audio version of the book, so let's go ahead and get this thing started. Introduction from office closet to $50 million empire a loud bang jolted me awake. I could hear loud music and laughter coming from the other side of the wall. I got up and listened. I looked down at my iPad. I checked the security cameras. I was sleeping in the closet. I was in the room over from the Anytime Fitness gym I owned in Blaine, Washington. I was 26 years old. Augusta Long Hair had over 90 locations around the USA and Canada, but I still lived here. It was often that a drop deadlift would wake me. If it wasn't that, it would be the train that went by six times each night. The railroad crossing was less than 100 yards from my pillow. Freight trains loaded with coal rolled down the track from Canada into the usa. I used white noise and earplugs to block the train horn. Still, the ground shook and woke me up. I walked outside the office and into the cold night. The gas station across the street and its bright LED lights hurt my tired eyes. I walked next door in the strip mall, the gym. I saw the regular homeless person on my way Over. I had started Anytime Fitness as a trainer but now owned the club. I entered and saw four teenagers in the weight room. They had a jukebox blaring music. They had protein powder everywhere. One of them was throwing up in the bathroom from having too much C4 pre work powder. I realized that one of them had scanned his key fob and let all his friends in. This was against member policy. I turned the music off on the jukebox. Immediately I had their attention. I went up to the one teenager who was the member. He was much larger than I. I asked for his key fob. I took it out of his hand and told him he would no longer be a member of the club. He needed to leave with his friends or I would call the police. It was 3am the day had started early. I started Augusta Lawn Care at the age of 18. At night I went to Western Washington University to get my mba. Why did I start Augusta? Landscaping was all I knew since I was 11 years old. I mowed grass. I used that money to pay my way through college. I started college at the age of 13. I had complete confidence in my future as a surgeon. I thought starting early would help since it takes more than 10 years of school. A couple of years into Augusta, I had a workplace accident. I was on a job site with an old L7000 Ford dump truck. The PTO lever from inside the cab had broken the pto. Power takeoff lets thousands of pounds of torque lift the heavy load. For about a week, I had been engaging the PTO lever under the truck by hand. On August 4, 2016, I drove the truck to a job site. I showed the crew the job. I crawled under the truck to engage the pto. Then I dumped three yards of cobble rock on the customer's driveway. As I crawled back out from under the dump truck, my hoodie got caught on the spinning pto. In an instant, my shirt and hoodie bunched around my neck. The PTO tried to suck me in. My shoulder and bicep got stuck against the gearbox. I couldn't spin around. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground fighting for air. I looked up to see my T shirt and hoodie spinning in shreds around the pto. A few hours later, I lay in the hospital. They did X rays and CAT scans. I was more worried about the fact that my crew had more jobs on the schedule and they didn't know what to do. They finished the small landscaping job I had shown them that morning. I FaceTimed them and guided them on the next landscape job scheduled over the next couple of weeks, I spent a lot of time lying in bed healing. I had a lot of time to think. I had been working 80 to 90 hours per week in the business. I had very little to show for it. I had a bunch of trucks and equipment, but my bank account was skinny. I made no profit. I had no systems. Everything relied on me. My accident brought this to light. The funny thing is I learned about Systems, numbers and SOPs in business school. But I had never used that knowledge in my long running. The systems I had learned in my MBA classes. After I got back to work, I started implementing the changes over the next 12 months. I implemented pay for performance P4P. I started a system for estimate videos. I created templates. I created a pricing matrix. I made sure that if the accident happened again, my business and team could stand on their own. I was lucky. If I had a wife, kids or family depending on my paycheck, that accident would be a financial disaster for me. A few weeks after my injury, I started Landscape Business Course is a free training course. It documents all the changes I made to the business. I changed my sales process. I changed my marketing. I changed my website. A year later, my business paid me $280,000 in owner distributions. I worked in the business one to two hours each week. I had a management team that ran the business. I felt frustrated. People were not heeding the videos I made on YouTube. People looked to me as a social media creator. They saw me as a consultant. They saw me as a third party with no skin in the game. I wanted to see them win. I wanted them to avoid the pain I had endured. Years of unprofitability, Months of wasted time. Massive amounts of frustration. That is when I decided to franchise Augusta Lawn Care. Now I would have skin in the game. The franchise owners would know I have their best interests at heart. They would set up the systems that help my business make money. They would compete against many other landscapers. Competitors needed to answer phones. They must accept credit cards and wrap their trucks. Businesses must pay employees more. Use, pay for performance, give profit sharing. They also need to provide insurance. That is why Augusta Lawn Care was born. Our goal is to change the level of professionalism in the lawn care industry. How? By changing the expectation of the customer. The customer expects their landscaper to answer the phone 24, 7. The customer expects qualified and professional staff. The customer expects seamless checkout online. The customer expects software and automation. Customers want businesses to be licensed and insured. Today, Augusta Nation has grown to 200 locations. We are in the USA, Canada and Australia. I travel the country fixing struggling businesses. We make YouTube videos and call it the Turnaround Show. I visited more than 100 companies. I helped them recover from near collapse. I have seen the common pitfalls that lead to business ruin. I have taken note of of who turned around their business and succeeded. I have taken note of those who did not listen and ended up in failure. I wrote the book Total Business Turnaround. It gives the 13 fundamental frameworks I use on the Turnaround Show. The goal was to provide a roadmap for struggling businesses. These businesses needed help, but they didn't want to be on the Turnaround show with all the cameras. It cost tens of thousands to fly out, film and edit each episode. I could never reach all the applicants who asked for help. That's why I wrote the book. But for many, four hours of reading was still too much of a hurdle. I needed a way to scale the Turnaround Show. I needed a way to connect with thousands of entrepreneurs. So I started Homeworks. Previously known as Copilot CRM. It is a software built for home service businesses. It handles estimates, invoicing and automation. It sends messages to clients, collects payments and finds the best routes with all that data. I aim to offer personal advice to each Homeworks member. Homeworks will learn about their close ratio, efficiency, score and speed to lead. Homeworks will provide personalized advice. By accessing these metrics, it feels like I'm there in person on the Turnaround Show. The goal is to help owners understand when to hire. Homeworks shows which services make the most profit. The software will be able to show which customers need a price increase. So who is this book for? Simple it's here for the home service business owner who wants to start and grow a 3 million plus dollar business. A business that runs even if the business owner is not there. 70 hour work weeks are not required. This book serves as a roadmap for sustainable growth. We as home service business owners love the idea of ramping up fast. That's great when you've planned for it, but building fast on a poor foundation can be lethal. Building a smooth running, self sustaining business is tough but is not impossible. To get there. You need systems, careful bookkeeping, clear goals and a plan to make sure you reach them. If you're already running a business that feels broken, you may need to take a few steps back. Rebuild the seals have a saying. Slow is steady, steady is smooth. Smooth is fast. When your business feels fragile or chaotic, success can feel distant, remote, impossible but it isn't. Step back. Reboot. Rebuild. With a solid foundation and clear goals, you can change your company. It can shift from a job you dislike to a business that runs on its own. Are you ready? Let's go. Quick note I aim to donate 100,000 of these books to home service business owners nationwide. Read the book. I'd appreciate it if you share this with other home service business owners. If you would join me on that mission and donate 10 books, I would like to give you a gift. There are two options if you are in the green industry, lawn care and landscaping. You'll get access to over 80 print marketing templates. This gift is worth $499. I've sold thousands of designs to landscapers through Lawn CareMedia.com this gift includes designs for door hangers, yard signs, postcards and flyers. You can customize them. The designs are in Canva and Photoshop. I have used these designs myself. They have helped me grow a $54 million lawn care business. They will send your lead count through the roof and you will help a fellow home service entrepreneur along the way. 2. If you are not in the green industry but but in some other home service, you will get a one on one phone call with my team. It'll be for 15 minutes long. They will analyze your website. They will give you advice on how to optimize it. This will unlock more leads for your business. They will give you tangible ways to improve conversion, SEO and design. They have built over 1000 websites with me. The average client we work with d doubles their lead count in one year. How to Earn the Gift Search Amazon for Mike Andy's Copy and paste. You will find it there or scan the QR code below. Buy 10 books on Amazon. Give them away. Screenshot your purchase of the 10 books. Send that screenshot to bookikeandys.com for the email subject. Say gift in the email. Please tell me if you prefer the landscape marketing templates or the website consultation. Within seven days we will email access to you. Chapter 1 the four leadership hats and the Trifecta of Trades Every home service business uses a simple three step process. Get work, do work, get paid. It seems simple, but many owners overlook at least one of these basics. This mistake often keeps them stuck. I call it the trifecta of Home Service Business Sales, Operations and Admin. Sales is getting the work. Operations is doing the work. Admin is getting paid for the work. Admin greases the gears, handles payroll, takes calls and sends invoices. After 19 years in this industry administration, I've learned this. Each business needs a unique approach for these three departments. How you handle sales, operations and admin depends a lot on your business's size. I see four clear sizes where home service businesses can make money. I call them the four leadership hats. @ each stage you wear different hats. Each hat needs different skills to succeed. The solo operator handles everything on their own. You sell the jobs, you do the work. You spend evenings doing paperwork. The working GM usually manages one to eight full time employees and takes part in the work. You still do all aspects of the business including some in field labor. Next is the full time GM. They oversee 5 to 15 employees and step away from daily tasks. This is when you are out of the field or off the truck. You spend none of your time in operations doing the work. And finally there's the GM plus, usually running 10 to 30 employees. You have managers in each department of the trifecta. A sales manager, an operations manager and an office and admin manager. At this point you are out of daily operations. Hey everyone, it's Mike and I just wanted to tell you really quickly about homeworks. It used to be called Copilot CRM. We've changed the name to Home Works. You can go check out the website and our slogan is to grow without breaking. And the logo is actually a chain and the chain has three links and like we talk about in the books, it's sales, operations and administration. Those are the three links that we try within the software to make as solid and dependable and reliable as possible. And the reason we use a chain is because the chain is something that you use in your business when a truck gets stuck, when something goes wrong and to tie things down, you need that reliable chain. And that's really what we want to build with homeworks and with the software to be able to allow you to grow your business without breaking. Also, if you join the enterprise level, there's a 365 day money back guarantee that we will give you all your money back for your first year dues if you don't grow your revenue or your profit by at least 10%. So go check out Home Works, see what subscription works for you. And I'll be telling you a little bit about homeworks throughout the rest of the chapters just so you can get broad up to speed and see if it'd be a great tool for growing your business. Here are some very rough revenue ranges I see for each leadership hat they overlap because of industry differences. Solo Operator Annual revenue of up to $250,000. No employees working GM annual revenue from $250,000 to $750,000 1 to 8 employees full time GM annual revenue from $750,000 to $1.5 million 5 to 15 employees GM annual revenue from $1.5 million to $3 million 10 to 30 employees in this book I will refer to the revenue and employee ranges for each stage. But home service industries each operate in their own ways. Material and subcontractor markups can affect your revenue. Inflation changes everything over time. I want this book to be useful regardless of whether you read it today or or 20 years from now. A cleaning business with $500,000 in annual revenue might need five to six employees. A plumbing business with $500,000 in Annual Revenue might only need two employees. A $500,000 annual revenue concrete business could be a solo operator. I'll focus on employee count and the structure of each business stage instead of revenue. That is the key number how many people do you manage? What does your role involve? What systems do you need for everything to operate without issues? Your leadership hat depends on how many people are on the team. Keep in mind I'm not saying that you need to hire a general manager. I am naming the leadership hat that the leader of the business wears. If you're the owner of the company, you can be a solo operator. As you grow, you serve in the role of general manager. An owner may not officially hire a general manager, but they take on that role. If you were to replace the owner with an employee, you would be hiring a general manager. I'll show you how to make your business bigger how to get to the next leadership hat how to grow revenue, get more customers, make your business more profitable how to stop growing, raise prices and print cash. See the image below. We will work through each of the four leadership hats left to right. We will go over what sales, operations and admin look like at each size of business, top to bottom. Then we will go over the doubts and struggles you will have. Then I will share steps to solve those problems and keep growing. Even if you have built a larger business, I recommend reading from the start. You might discover some systems or advice you skipped at first. If missed, those could lead to trouble later on. This information will lay a foundation. Later in the book we will show what the copy and paste millionaire method is. We will cover how you can use IT to achieve $3 million in revenue on on a regular basis, your profits and sanity intact. Let's start with sales and what it looks like as a solo operator. Chapter two Solo Operator. You are in the first inning of a long game. You are alone. You have everything in the business. You are somewhere between 0 and $250,000 in annual sales. What sales looks like As a solo operator, you don't have a sales process. You are reactive. You seek jobs with great effort and enthusiasm. You wake up early. You load your truck. You don't have an advertising budget, so you knock on doors. When you get work, you do it yourself. While you're doing it, you're answering calls from new leads, sending quotes from your phone. Sweat is still dripping off your chin. Here's what you have going for time. Because there's nothing to manage. Because there's no administrative tasks, you can focus all your effort on growing the business. If you're not using every moment available to get work done, you're not very serious about your business. You are running a side hustle. Your diligence and commitment to selling will determine whether you get past being a solo operator. The process that most solo operators use at this stage is guerrilla marketing. Rarely do they invest in Google Ads, Facebook ads or a professional website. This keeps them small. Those marketing channels work well, but they're also for businesses that have money to spend. Right now, you might not have the cash. This means knocking on doors, putting out yard signs, or using door hangers. Don't say you can't afford marketing while you're on your couch. If you have time, use it. No systems. You're feeling things out. You have no systems. You don't exactly have a sales process. You have chats with homeowners in their driveway. You also don't have a pricing system. You have a good idea of what to make, but you often abandon it when work slows down. Often, you make wild guesses. Your quotes fluctuate. They aren't based on how much you should be charging. They're based on whether you have a big job lined up. When things are slow, your quotes are a race to the bottom. When work is a little steadier, you ask for what you are worth. But if the customer says no, you are quick to backtrack. You're guessing. You base it on what you charged for a similar service last month. It's hard to say for sure because you often don't write your quotes down. You say them out loud to the customer and hope you'll remember. When you have those driveway chats or phone calls, you likely don't use service agreements. You don't use emails. CRM is three letters that seem out of order to you. Your agreement is Very simple. You say the price, they say yes via text, voicemail or email. Hopefully. This stage is risky. You don't have systems or documentation in place. If a homeowner refuses to pay, there's very little you can do about it. There's a small claims court, but again, you have no proof of agreement. If you did, can you afford the filing fees for a lawsuit? Or the time it takes to make your case? Not for the sake of collecting a $100 invoice. Most of what you do relies not on math or margins, but on vibes. What you think sounds right at the moment. If you end up earning $15 an hour due to an inaccurate quote process, at least you're employed. You have no employees. You have no overhead. So you tell yourself that you can't lose money on a job at this stage. You flip flop from feast to famine. On days when your leads convert, you might put in 10 hours beneath the sun. But when you complete those jobs, there's nothing else lined up. You're back to knocking on doors or waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for someone to reach out. All these things said, you can make good money. As a solo operator, you may have more flexibility than someone with a 10 person crew. The business starts and stops with you, which is a blessing and a curse. Working when you want to sounds good. You are answerable to no one. But what you don't do doesn't get done. At this point, you don't have a business. You have a job. Leaving this fine leads on your own. This means working hard by day and then building processes at night. Doubts and struggles in sales. As a solo operator, you don't exactly hate sales. You lack confidence in your ability to do it. There's no sales process. There's no pricing convention. Quotes vary from job to job. They're often based on the amount you believe the client will accept. The bigger the house, the bigger the budget. That is your assessment. You have a close rate that is relatively high. At least you think so. You don't measure it. It seems like most people say yes to estimates. You don't feel confident talking to customers in client meetings. You feel nervous. This makes it hard to show your value and quality. You get all the leads the big boys in town don't want. That's why your estimates get accepted. No one else wants to take those jobs. Am I charging too much? This is your number one fear. You worry because you know you only get a limited number of leads per week, sometimes none for a week. Bid high and you will likely lose the job. When you do send a quote for a big job, you spend the next few hours filled with anxiety. To make matters worse, you are also never happy when your quotes get accepted. When customers agree quickly, you you might worry you've set the price too low. This is what happens when you have no pricing system. No math, no markup, just gut feelings. This can lead to on the fly discounts. You negotiate yourself down on price. If that sounds too high, we can circle back and talk about the price. You say it and you realize this statement undermines your credibility with your customers. You also know that you don't have much of a choice. When quotes don't get accepted, there's no work to do. If there's no work, you'll need to face the unopened loan statements and messy office tasks. I'm not a salesperson seems to be your mantra. You don't identify with the sales side of your business. You view yourself as a craftsman technician, a hard worker. Sales can be tough even when things go well. It can feel pushy when it's not. You don't want to be that guy. You think, well, if they wanted the work done, they would call me. And so you avoid following up after sending quotes. You base much of your sales process on hope. Unfortunately, hope is not a system. I lost a job. Must have been my price. You always fear that any rejection is the result of your price. You do not wonder for even a moment if it was because the customer forgot, because you didn't follow up, because you were too slow to respond to the initial outreach, because your presentation was awkward or unclear, because the crumpled up estimate got thrown out with the trash, because your email got caught in the spam filter. It might be that the competition has a better pitch. Or they might solve more of the customer's problems. When quotes aren't getting accepted, you cut your price and you cut it again. Then you cut it again. You end up earning less than a day labor. The race to the bottom begins. Where should I advertise? Here you feel overwhelmed. You have a vague idea of your options. You wonder, should I run Facebook ads? Try local services ads? Figure out what SEO means. Should you buy leads from Angie's or HomeAdvisor? Do you need to hire a marketing agency? Do you need a website? Is printing off flyers or postcards a move? You heard someone say that on YouTube. A competitor is doing yard signs and door hangers. An influencer said they knocked on doors. Your relative said it's all about referrals. Ads are dead Every day, there's a new marketing solution proposed. Many people are providing marketing services. Every day, someone calls or emails you to pitch their services. You have no idea what works. One of two things happens. The first, you become too nervous to pick any marketing channel. All these options have one thing in common. They sound expensive. You check your bank balance often. There's no way you could afford to spend thousands each month on advertising. You believe that your work will speak for itself. Or you take the opposite route. You try every marketing channel. Without a clear strategy, you don't have time to research and understand your choices. Instead, you make many hasty attempts at trying all of them. You waste lots of money. You hire agencies. You print 500 door hangers, 500 flyers and 5, 500 postcards. You see no results. Now the bank balance is low. You're stressed. Back to rock bottom Pricing jobs need to get on the schedule asap. You distrust marketing, but you lack other ways to get steady leads. So you stagnate. The leads are bad. You blame the quality of calls that are coming in. With business slows. You might blame the economy or a politician. Maybe it's the season. Maybe it's the city. You rage against your competitors. Your industry has problems. You don't have a system that brings in consistent leads. This means that when jobs slow down, you panic. But when you're busy, you stop marketing. Since you're always on the go, you haven't paused to see how those two facts connect. You complain about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, but you don't see that you can get off this roller coaster. When do I even send quotes? When you're always in the job, fast responses to new leads become difficult. Your face is still covered in sweat when you answer the phone. You finish the quotes while still out of breath. At the end of a long day, when you miss a call, an email, an estimate request, you usually don't get back to it for hours or days. By this point, the lead has already gone with a different provider. You exited the race before you had a chance, but it's the economy's fault anyway. Confidence Gap Everything hinges on your confidence. If you doubt your pricing processes or product, selling can feel like lying. You can't imagine customers saying yes because you feel like a fraud. Why would someone pay $600 for you to trim their bushes? You doubt the value of your service. You struggle to sell it. This makes you seem awkward and unprofessional on the phone. You freeze up. You stammer, and you have no process to fall back on. When A lead dislikes your quote, you pull back. You lowball and sound desperate. Some people may still say no. They doubt your professionalism. When customers complain, object or ask for something free, you give in. You negotiate against yourself. When the lead says, give me a day to think about it, they never call you back. You chalk it up as a loss. You don't follow up. You play small, never pushing for upsells or cross sells. You never ask for the contacts of neighbors who might need your services. You don't have the confidence. None of these qualities is a character flaw. It's not that you are incapable of being a business owner. They signal something else. You need systems, processes, pricing models, closing strategies. You need a follow up process. You need a new identity. You're not a technician anymore. You're a business owner. Business owners have to sell and believe in their services. Instructions for Sales As a solo operator, all these problems beg the question, what are you going to do about it? The solution is to get tactical. If you're doing all the work and all the selling, you're in a tough spot. This means that during this time, sales is a full time side hustle. You want to win more work, close jobs faster and break free from being a solo operator. To do this, you're going to need to pick a path. Are you going to use your time or your money? Usually it works like this. You have one in plenty and about none of the other. If you got money, use it to pay for speed. This means running ads, paying for traffic, hiring extra help. If you have time, use it to get more customers. Knock on doors, make posts on local Facebook groups the nextdoor app. Look for online groups that you can share about your services in a non salesy way. These groups can target local neighborhoods, schools or community organizations. You'll spread the word as much as you can. You'll take any referral, scrap you can get. Any method that doesn't cost money but does get leads is fair game. Hang door hangers. Hustle until things pick up. What you can't do is sit back and expect growth to happen without spending time or money. For right now, your goal should be to stack the schedule. You'll pay for that either in sweat or cash. Either way, the goal is to maximize the work you can do. This isn't about profit margins yet, it's about momentum. The only thing to worry about is the close rate. Why is that important? Because once you're booked out, you can justify having a crew. You'll have enough work for them to do. You'll Graduate to the next leadership hat you'll have the option to raise prices to get your profitability in check. But this can only happen when you pack the schedule. Free and high ROI channels Filling your schedule is your top priority now. You need to do it fast and cheap. Digital marketing is good. It's also expensive. You don't need to pay $100 a lead if you have time in your day to knock on doors. There are a few things people don't like about pounding the pavement. It's awkward. There's a high emphasis on being a good salesperson. You deal with constant rejection. Rejection happens online too, but in much quieter ways. If someone looks at your website but doesn't submit a request, no biggie. When they slam the door in your face, it hits different. Still get out there. Here's why Knocking on doors targets specific people. You can pick high income neighborhoods, properties that need professional help. Properties in your target market. It's more personal. It's harder to say no to a person than it is to a Facebook ad or a mailer. Door hangers and yard signs are also good. They aren't free, but they're cheap. They also pair nicely with other guerrilla marketing methods. Scan this QR code to get instant access to a document. A copy and paste millionaire in Augusta Nation created it. He delivered over 20,000 door hangers in one spring. It will show 15 tactics that he learned. I highly recommend do free work for hoas roundabouts, main neighborhood entrances. Trade this work for a lasting sign with your logo and phone number. Social media platforms can also be a good source of fast, free leads. Make a post on Facebook or nextdoor DM people in your community who need help with housework. You can also tap into your existing customer base with referral and review incentives. None of these methods is fast on their own. Combined, they will add up. Here's what you'll find In a week of going door to door, you might have 200 conversations. From them, you add 10 new customers. That's not rapid growth, but it's steady and it will get you to your desired destination in due time. Especially if those leads begin to refer others marketing compounds over time, especially when you're growing a loyal group of repeat customers. After a month of working on your customer list, you will see progress. Other forms of payment Money is not the only way for a customer to pay you. Some people hate when I say to do discounted or free work. If you have no work. The alternative is to make $0. Something is better than nothing by getting out in the Community and doing work. You open up the chance for neighbors walking by to ask for an estimate. Homeowners see your truck around town. Also, a customer can pay with a referral, an online review or an upsell. I was in North Carolina in summer 2023. I documented the first 30 days of starting up an Augusta lawn care location. The first couple of weeks I was striking out every door. Direct mail wasn't working. Yard signs were being stolen. Facebook and Google Ads were slow. The season for new mowing customers was already over until I started doing door hangers. I did instant quote Door hangers I discounted heavily. I was 40 to 60% less than my target rate. I was offering full property clamps for $299. But in a few days I turned things around. The next week I hired my first employee. By the end of the month we had work booked out for six weeks. What changed? The discounted prices got people calling. I would break even on the initial job, but I would ask every customer for a Google review. I would also sell them one or two other services, recurring services at full price. I would also ask them to introduce me to their neighbors in person. Right then and there, every door hanger I sold at the cheap price led to two or three more jobs. Don't think that money is the only form of payment customers can pay with online reviews. These bring in more leads via your website and better SEO. Customers have other issues at their properties that you can fix. You need to find them and then prove your worth. Make an upsell. Customers know their neighbors. They gain status if they refer you. You get customers from their referrals. Fix your website before you pay for leads. Let's say all that door to door effort has finally paid off. Your bank balance is looking better than ever. With so many new customers, you can't go out like you used to. Less door hangers, less door knocking. In this case it is appropriate to pay for leads, but only if your website is good. Running digital ads to draw people to a broken website is a waste. It doesn't make sense. Think of your website as a salesperson that works 24 7. That sounds nice. But some salespeople can be terrible. They can scare away customers. You want your digital salesperson to website to be good? Check for major conversion bottlenecks. Do that before spending money on ad traffic. At the very least you need fast load speed mobile optimization, a clear request estimate form above the fold of the homepage. Google reviews displayed photos of your vehicles and uniforms, Web pages for each service and a clickable phone number. There are different ways to get this done. You can create your own website using easy platforms like Wix, GoDaddy or Squarespace. These are cheap and usually do good for new businesses. Most of them cost less than $50 a month in subscriptions and will even come with domain hosting. You can hire an agency that will cost around 5,000 to $10,000 or more depending on the complexity of what you're looking for. The benefit here is that they will customize your website to your brand. Assuming you picked the right agency, it will also look awesome. Your other option is to subscribe to homeservicewebdesign.com we create websites for home service entrepreneurs. We focus on their specific needs. Our flat rate is $499 per month. This covers your custom website build, ongoing SEO and unlimited design changes. Go to our website to see a sample of the thousand plus home service websites we have built. If you're in the green industry, you can also view lawncarewebdesign.com youm can book a free 15 minute consultation with my web team. Scan this QR code or go to homeservicewebdesign.com call. You can find success with any of these options and as your business needs evolve, you may find that your website does as well. Here's what you shouldn't do. Pay for ads that go to a lousy site. This would be like running ads for a restaurant that has horrible food. You will achieve one thing more people will know about how horrible your food is. Once you have a great website, it will generate leads while you sleep. Speed to lead the 24 hour rule to send out estimates and close new deals. Aim to respond in under 24 hours. The faster the better. Keep in mind that many people aren't messaging you only. They'll be talking to three, four or five of your competitors. The faster you move, the more likely it is they will choose you. A study from Invoca and Angie's found that over 70% of homeowners accept the first estimate they receive. Many business owners believe that low prices are the key to high conversion rates. There is a bit of truth in that. Bargain discounts can change some nos into yeses, but that's not your ideal customer. Homeowners who value your service will love speed, professionalism, clean branding, online reviews, a great website and social media presence. A good lead knows this could be a long term relationship. They aren't just searching for the lowest price on Facebook Marketplace. They want someone who will show up on time, do the job the right way, and be consistent year after year. Prove that that's you with a fast response time. As a solo operator, you are the only one handling customer inquiries. Speed is your superpower. It might be your only competitive advantage. Use it. Send quotes the right way. Create a repeatable process for your quotes instead of doing them on the fly. To begin with, you need a pricing template. Start with a target hourly rate. In other words, how much do you want to be making per hour? To do this work, multiply that number by the number of hours you expect the job to take. These I call budgeted hours. You also need to add materials, equipment rental charges, dump fees, the amount of time it takes to get to the property, the wear and tear it takes on your tools. Develop a specific price for each of these points and and add that to your fee structure. The math doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be consistent. Create an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets doc. Put the unit square feet, cubic yard, linear foot next to each item or service you offer. Better yet, enter this into your homework's price book. Build out estimates with accuracy and detail. You don't have to guess what to charge. You know how long the job should take. Budgeted hours. You know which materials or supplies the job needs. That is all you need to create a pricing system. You then send your quote to the customer in two ways. Via text and email. Text has a big edge over email communication. Emails get open 30 to 40% on average. Text messages get opened up 99% of the time. And in this case, it's a good way to ensure that they see your quote first. That is the goal. Want a fast way to double your close rate? Send the estimate via text in addition to email. Track these interactions in homeworks. If you don't have software, make sure to list prices in a spreadsheet. What you don't want to do is bury your prices in private DMs or lost text threads on your iPhone. By using a template, you standardize your quote process. You also optimize it for efficiency. Your quotes are accurate so you can create them much faster. Follow up with purpose following up on quotes you have sent is great, but don't ask. Hey, did you get the quote? Any questions? Instead, follow up with purpose. We're booked out, but I have an open slot on Friday. Do you want it? We're offering 10% off this week only on insert service. We need images of this service for our marketing materials. Your property is perfect. I'm scheduling other work in your neighborhood. I'd like to group it together. That route is filling up. We have two more spots available. Be proactive and personal in your communications. These follow ups are effective. They provide the lead with new information to think about. If you're only asking if they got your quote, there's not much to consider. They received it. They're busy with something else. If you say want this done on Friday? They must decide if they're ready to schedule and if they want to choose you. If they say no, you can call them back again in a few days with another offer. The last thing you want to hear is a I will call you back if we want to move forward. You are out of ammo to avoid this. Have a reason for calling and an offer in your back pocket to close the deal. The Sales Process here's the short version of what it looks like to turn your sales system around. Note that I have a much deeper version of this in my book. The Total Business Turnaround for your Cliff Notes Here we go. The lead comes in. This could be on an online form submission, a call or direct message. You give them a price proposal within 24 hours. You follow up via text, email and phone calls. The customer accepts the estimate. You collect the deposit or the credit card on file. The job gets scheduled. Track everything that happens along the way. Otherwise the lead will get lost and so will your revenue. Your Target close rate 70% I assume you are trying to grow your business past being a solo operator. If you are going to stay small, raise prices and increase profits, do this until your close rate is under 40%. I doubt you would be reading this book if your goal were to stay a solo operator. Keep your close ratio near 70%. You're not running a massive team. You don't have overhead. Your profit margins are good because you do all the work yourself. Your main job is to fill the calendar with jobs. Period. You can do that by closing estimates. Often you don't have to take every silly job that comes your way. It means using a clear quoting system. Prices should fit your business stage. You don't need to work for pennies on the dollar. You do need to be competitive enough to close on lots of jobs. No one cares if your Profit margins are 70% on a business that produces $100,000 per year in revenue, that is $70,000 in net profit. I would rather make 20% margins on an $800,000 business that is $160,000 in net profit. Once you're completely booked out for four plus weeks, then you can do one of two things. 1 Hire someone. Buy more equipment and trucks keep growing. 2. Stay small, raise prices and boost profits. Options open up after you fill your schedule. Get there as fast as possible by focusing on your close rate. Some business owners will do this in two months. Others will spend 10 years planning work for the next week. They will stay a solo operator forever. Your sales edge you. You do have a bit of an edge against the other bigger companies. Because you are a lean operation. You can offer a more personal customer experience that means a lot to some people. They like that you're the one answering the phone and doing the work. They want a single point of contact for all their communication with the company. They know they can text you and they'll get a quick response. These are things you can use to your advantage. Don't pretend that you're a big company. Embrace what sets you apart from your competitors. Do follow up phone calls and play the role of estimator. Tell the customer you want to do the job yourself. Use this to get them to accept a specific day you offered. Warning. If you plan to grow beyond being a solo operator, you keep your personal phone number private from customers. This will become a bottleneck later on. What operations look like As a solo operator. You are the business. When you don't work, you don't make money. Every square foot, every invoice sent, every phone call that gets answered, it's you behind the wheel. You're the labor. You're the management. You are the machine itself. Because of this, you develop a chaotic routine. You wake up in the morning. Your back is aching. Your hands feel tight. You have had a restless night. Good rest is foreign to you. Your brain never shuts off. And the very first thing you do in the morning is check your phone. You want to see if there are any cancellations, if any potential leads have reached out to book a service, if you've gotten any complaints, or, God forbid, a bad online review. Once you're done looking for potential fires, you get going. You grab your tools, most likely out of your home, garage or shed. You hope your HOA hasn't towed your trailer. They are not happy. You park it in the driveway. Then you go one job to the next, answering the phone, sending invoices from your car, never stopping to catch your breath. In this chaotic environment, there is no calendar system. There is no dispatch software. You keep scrolling through text messages and notes, looking for your next job. You can't find the original estimate. In this system of doing business, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. You schedule jobs not for route optimization but based on who is the most irritated with you that day, Weather delays are a nightmare. You're not making money, and you also need to reschedule all your appointments. It can take you 14 hours of consecutive work to catch up. Even then, you're overbooked everywhere you have jobs. Losing profit. This happens because you lack a pricing system. And the only solution that you can think of is to work more. At the very least, you'll bring in more revenue. Everything is running behind. Email, voicemail, text. You feel stressed out, but you focus on doing the work. So revenue continues to flow in. But how long can things continue like this? Can your workflow handle adding more technicians? Your tools? You started with whatever you had in your garage or shed you bought from Home Depot or a local hardware store. Facebook Marketplace came in clutch. Everything is cheap, used, and near the point of breaking. And that's a big concern. If a tool does break, it's not only a new expense, it's a loss of opportunity. You could lose an entire day of work because of a piece of equipment that doesn't start. Many solo operators look for better tools when they notice this. This happens over time as they begin to fill their schedules. You choose new tools with a discerning eye. Your goal is always to find something that will save you time. A new truck or tool will pay for itself over time thanks to better efficiency. Your workflow. You're always switching hats. Doing the work isn't the problem. You like the job. After all, you chose the industry. It's always changing gears. It gets tough. You're out digging weeds. And then the phone rings. Now you need to get your bearings while trying to give a quote over the phone. And while you do that, the neighbor's dog starts barking. A lawn mower from a nearby yard turns on. You're edging the lawn when the customer comes up and asks you a question. 10 minutes talking. During the day, something might come up. 15 minutes delay. You may need to pause, shift gears and start a new workflow. Because of this, you're always forgetting things. Jobs are taking longer than they need to. Your efficiency is lagging. So is the quality of work. Because of this, you're always feeling overwhelmed. And behind your customer service youe spend a ton of time on directionless conversations. Customer service comes at the cost of your efficiency. Your impulse is to give customers access. They want to talk. They have a special request or a complaint. They're friendly and they want to thank you for your work. They give you a drink. They gab about the weather. You're spending a ton of time talking to people. This can be good. It helps you establish trust. It builds a strong, lasting relationship with customers. Avoiding poor customer service is a must. Here's the problem. Those conversations don't get documented. There's no telling who said what. You don't enter those notes anywhere for that reason. It's very easy to get mixed up. You think, who wanted extra attention paid to the hedges? Do they want brown mulch or red mulch? When your operations rely on memory, they are likely to fail your inefficiency. You do the work fast, but not efficiently. It's easy to think that you are efficient when you are always hustling. But the number of times you go to Lowe's or Home Depot tells a different story. Anytime you forget a tool, pick the wrong part, or misquote a job, you lose money. Things start off with momentum, but little things eat at your efficiency all day. A lack of route optimization leads to long drive times. You can't say no to customers even if they are one plus hours drive away. Frequent calls or interactions with customers slow you down. Even though you're always in motion, you're wasting a lot of effort. It's this leakage that kills profit. At the solo stage, quality is your superpower. The upside? Your business has many benefits. Even with some inefficiencies. The biggest no one matches your quality. It's your hands on every job. You know what's at stake because every single job ties to your success. You. You focus on details. You care. You act like your name is on the work because it is. Customers appreciate that. It's why you have excellent online reviews. It's how your business begins to build momentum. You're gaining traction, so you're always looking for ways to grow your capacity. That means hiring someone else. That person doesn't have your attention to detail. They don't have your skills. They lack your level of commitment to the business. It's at this point that mistakes start occurring. Bad reviews start coming in. Solo operators begin to panic. Your quality and personalization have set you apart for years. You've crushed your competition. What do you have now? Hey everyone, it's Mike here. Real quick. If you join homeworks, you can actually get up to your first 50 clients completely free. So as a solo operator, if you're just getting started, you're reading the book, and you're just getting the business off the ground, you can actually Input up to 50 customers customers inside of homeworks and not pay a single penny. So if you're Just getting started. You're a weekend warrior. You're trying this out on the side. You're doing this as a side hustle. Go sign up homeworks. It's completely free forever. And you're able to get started using software. And then down the road, as you grow, you can always upgrade. Use the other subscription features such as texting and automations. But for now, if you're just getting started as a solo operator, it's a great tool and it's completely free. Go to home Works today Tool Organization Organized chaos. Your truck is a mix of order and chaos. It's a mess, but it's your mess. You've arranged items not by how they relate, but how easy they are to reach. You know your tools. You know which ones work well, which one needs maintenance. You know which tool breaks and which one vibrates in an unusual manner. There's no inventory system at all. You don't use barcode tracking. You're not sure what barcode tracking is. You don't have a standard operating procedure sop. You don't track maintenance. You forget. You don't tag or label broken equipment. It's all you and your muscle memory that works up until a point. You lose minutes every day to disorganization. If you tidy up, you could save an hour or two each week. Still, there's not all that much fat to trim. It works for you, but once you start adding more people into the mix, it will become a problem. For one thing, they won't understand your. Well, let's call it a system. This means that they're losing time rooting around in the mess. Now the organized chaos is disorganized. You don't know where anything is. Your new hire doesn't know where anything is. Your whole organizational process has fallen apart. Disruptions kill the day worse than anything else. You are reactive. Things go fine until they don't. You feel on top of the world when you're getting jobs, getting paid. Your bank account is increasing. A small setback can completely throw you off balance. A customer leaves a bad review. Someone starts complaining. A tool breaks. Leads slow down. And you find yourself one Wednesday with no work to do. Sure, you can take care of errands and finish up equipment maintenance. But then a week goes by. No work. These interruptions can throw your whole day off track. To make things worse, there is also no one you can bounce your problems off of. You are alone. The 1099 subcontractor who works with you when things are busy isn't around even if he Were you've never exactly found much success in picking his brain. He's been a solo operator for 20 years. You do not have anyone to help with the office. Work problems snowball. A small setback becomes a big disaster. This is because you're wearing all your business's hats and you're wearing them all at the same time. That's what makes this stage so difficult. Doubts and struggles in operations As a solo operator. At this stage, operations are yours. And that's the problem. Because you have no one to lean on when something bad happens. The buck stops with you. There's no one to back you up or pick up the slack. When your body begins to tense and tire. You are the last line of defense. My body can't take this forever. This is a wall that every solo operator encounters at some point. You're working 12 hour days. You do this in 100 degree heat. In the fall and winter. You wake up and head out into the cold. You face regular exposure to rain or snow, heat waves, allergens. Over time, your body starts to send you warning signals. The fact that you're tired all the time is the very least of it. Your back is sore all the time. Your knees protest even when walking to the truck in the morning. Your hands are so stiff it's almost a struggle to curl your fingers. You're sore in the morning when you wake up. You're sore at night when you go to bed. You rely on caffeine and nicotine to manage the pain. What else is there to do? Your income and business rely on pushing through this pain. Your whole livelihood depends on it. But in the back of your head there's always the question, how long can I keep this up? You don't have an answer. Nor do you know what you'll do when your body fails you. What happens if you do get hurt in a way that will prevent you from doing the work? It's the fear that no solo operator wants to speak out loud. But it's always in the back of your head because you know the answer. If you can't run a lawnmower, climb a ladder, lift a sheet of plywood, you don't have a business. There's no crew you can use to fill in. You might have a few 1099 technicians on hand for emergencies, but you don't trust them to run your business like you do. You do not have a clear way to reschedule jobs when disruptions occur in operations. You know that if you get hurt, it won't work. Your customers might Move on. Insurance payments, credit card bills and loan payments will empty your bank account. You will be working on your physical rehab. I know this feeling. After my accident in the PTO of the dump truck, I had these same thoughts. I forgot again. You're often in the field focused on one task at the same time. You're juggling 12 others in your mind. No one can do this with consistent excellence. You're no exception. You forget things all the time. You're supposed to be on the other side of town doing a job. But you got caught up. You had drafted a quote several days ago that never got sent. The customer emailed in anger. Balls begin to drop. Missing an appointment hurts your credibility. Every botched quote is a lost opportunity. These misses are eroding your sanity. One more thing to think about and there's no easy solution in sight. This job is taking too long. You got that $600 job you were hoping for. Only when you arrive at the property, things aren't going right. It takes a long time to figure out the property line. The owner comes out and bombards you with many requests. They want to make changes. You know these extra tasks will likely add hours to the job. You should include them in your quote. But you feel shy. You're worried the customer might back out. That would leave you with a truck full of materials you can't use and know where to store them. A tool breaks mid job. Now you're running the hardware store. The customer is unhappy. The work is taking longer than he expected. You're unhappy because you should be on the other side of town meeting a different customer. What you thought would be a great project has become a logistical mess. It's wasting your time, opportunities and a lot of your sanity. I can't keep this schedule. On the one hand, you want to stay booked. That's when the revenue comes in. Your bank account looks nice. You sleep a little easier at night. At the same time, you know there are problems with staying booked all the time. Your protesting body is one of the many problems. You're worried that you'll over promise and under deliver. Quality has a way of declining the more rushed you feel. The schedule is a delicate balancing act. Any delay at all could mean missing appointments. What if the weather changes? What if something goes wrong? What if the customer talks too long, sending you back an hour? One small hiccup can ruin your whole day. You're already stretched thin, working 12 to 14 hours daily with no time to breathe. Rain ruined my week. If you work outdoors, one day of bad weather can Throw off your entire schedule. Now you're moving jobs around, catching up on what you missed yesterday. The problem is you don't have any space to put more jobs. Now you're scrambling to keep everyone happy. Every communication starts and ends with an apology. You find yourself thanking people for their patience after every phone call. You're worried you might run out of daylight or patience before finishing your work. Making the schedule has become a nightmare for you. You hate it. This is not because you're unprofessional. It's because you know that it's a lot of work that might not go anywhere. You think, what's the point? Things fall apart with a little resistance. When they do, you end up eating the cost. This is not because you're unprofessional. It's because you know it's a lot of work that might not go anywhere. You think, what's the point? Things fall apart with little resistance. When they do, you end up eating the cost. I'm alone out here. This is one of the things that people don't talk about very much. But the longer you do the work of a solo operator, the more it begins to creep up on you. You're alone all day. You talk to the customers, sure, but that's not a real conversation. It lacks true thought or vulnerability. It's about closing sales and keeping them happy. There's no one in your life you can bounce ideas off of or express doubts too. You're always thinking, so you often overthink. When you're alone, your mind can wander to worst case scenarios. This way of thinking is harmful and does not help. You're not working on systems. You're second guessing your choices, your pricing, your business, your industry, your commitment. You don't have a team. You don't have any shop banter. There's no one you can offload to. There's no culture. Everything feels heavy on your shoulders. When customers complain something went wrong. When something breaks, you can't help but feel like it's your fault. Even if it's not your fault, it's still your problem. The job becomes lonely. You have no one around you. No one understands what you're going through. No support, no community instructions for operations. As a solo operator, you've got to work hard. When you don't, the business makes no revenue. The activity is physically demanding. It's also necessary for growth. Start tracking your time on every job. You need to know how long things take before you have employees. This way, as you scale, you can budget labor hours for all your services. Develop backup plans. You're on your own. That doesn't mean you don't need insurance. A broken foot, a family emergency, or a vacation shouldn't halt your business. Find a friend or competitor who knows your industry. Build strong connections with a few subcontractors. Have options in place to ensure that work still gets done even when you aren't able to do it. Make the handoff as seamless as possible. Job notes checklists a 1099 worker or a family friend can't match your passion and commitment, but simple systems can help standardize your quality. Better Tools or Marketing Better tools make a major difference in the solo operator phase. They will speed up your load time, improve your efficiency, make you more money. You will need them at some point if you want to grow fast. Focus on marketing instead of acquiring new gear. Get more customers. Get out of the of the solo operator phase, then get better equipment. Better equipment management will still be key. The biggest time wasters in your day are often due to equipment issues. You don't have to buy better things. You can invest your time in creating better systems instead. Create checklists for loading tools. Make a checklist for equipment maintenance. This will cut down on broken gear and drive backs to get forgotten tools. If you want to be a solo operator for the long haul, invest in your professional appearance. Better equipment. Better apparel Stronger branding Schedule through software. Software like Homeworks makes it easy to manage your schedule. Forecast budgeted hours. This will help you keep from getting overbooked. It'll also allow you to block off time for admin and sales. Go to home Works for a free account. It is free for up to 50 contacts. That's all you need to get started. You can handle bad weather better by keeping a close eye on your schedule. Software based scheduling helps manage jobs even with weather delays. Send a message to rescheduled customers. Software based scheduling helps manage jobs even with weather delays. Send a bulk message to rescheduled customers. One click pull forward Less weather sensitive jobs on the calendar. Even small delays can be very difficult to manage at this stage. Better organization and planning will make a huge difference. Protect your health. At this stage you might be working 50, 60 or 80 hour weeks. Getting hurt can put your business at existential risk. A bad enough injury could put you out of business. Invest in personal protective equipment. Eyeglasses, boots, gloves. Develop good safety protocols. They will keep you healthy. They will also be useful reference points for when you start hiring new people. Document and systematize everything. You likely don't think in sops by instinct yet but getting your processes down in writing is going to be a major advantage as you scale. You don't want to hire someone and then find out you're unsure of their task or how to guide them. Write down and record everything you do. Set clear success benchmarks and expectations. This will help your business grow. It will standardize your work as you define roles. Simplify your processes. Will it scale? Will it work at 10 times more revenue? You might like chatting with the customers. You accommodate the special request. You consider these things to be part of your customer service problem. They don't scale well. The busier you get, the more messed up your schedule will become with freebies. Optimize your day. You're doing three jobs as a solo operator. Sales, Operations, admin. All three are important. All three need their own time blocked off. When is it daylight? That's your operations window. In the early hours of the morning or when the sun has gone down at night. That's when you can start tackling admin tasks. The key is to divide your time into well organized segments. A place for each task and each task in its place. End of day routine. Create a checklist for the task you need to complete the next day. This will help keep you out of the reactive death loop. 20 minutes of planning can save you hours of frustration. The next day. Time is money. It's a cliche. It's also true. Every misplaced tool and wasted minute eats into your profits and reputation. Your sanity. It doesn't take long to set yourself up for success. Those 20 minutes will allow you to sleep better. Having a plan helps. Stop overthinking what admin looks like. As a solo operator at this stage, you are the admin. Every message, call and voicemail reflects your hard work. You handle them on your phone. You use nothing more sophisticated than the Apple Notes app. You'll be playing phone tag with one customer. At the same time you'll be yelling into the speakerphone for payment from another. Communication and follow ups will happen via text message, email or spoken conversations. Sporadic at best. Your memory is key for remembering customer details, special requests and pricing. You keep going through text threads, voice notes, voicemails, emails and notes on your truck dashboard. This worked fine when you were only getting a few bookings a week. As things began to ramp up, you felt overwhelmed. Things get forgotten when they do. Work fails to get done, and when you miss opportunities, they're gone for good. You often miss calls not because you don't care, but because you're always busy. It's difficult to hear the Phone ring. When you're running a tool, it's tough to reply to texts. When you spend hours driving. Each day, you go from the job site to the hardware store, then to client meetings. It's tough to keep up with all the different communication channels. Did that client reach out through Instagram, Facebook, through a call or email? Did he come up to me while I was working on another customer's property? The issue is not that you don't care. It's that you don't run your day. Your day runs you Billing is reactive. Your billing system is reactive. It's tough to track final prices due to communication leaks. Who did you tell? What? There's no record. Even if there were, it was never formalized in a service agreement. So your billing process is like that of a 16 year old babysitter. You're sending Venmo requests, Zelle requests, cashapp codes, sliding handwritten invoices under doormats. Often invoices go uncollected. You forget to send the bill. Or you remember to send the bill, but you forget to follow up. Or you remember to follow up, but the customer ghosts you and you have no idea what to do about it. You have almost no time to answer the phone. You don't have time to set up a complex system to get a $75 unpaid invoice. You often work without pay. Payments are a mess. Cash checks, virtual wallets. Sometimes customers ask to pay by credit card. You accept it with hesitation. That 3% card processing fee feels unfair. It may not sound like much, but you know it adds up. Here's what you're missing. That 3% would save you 30% in headaches. Credit card payments may cost money, but they buy efficiency. You have a big issue with customers being too familiar. They know you are the owner. They treat you not like a business person, but like a guy with a truck that has tools in the flatbed. They stall payments. They try to negotiate. After you have already completed the job, your collection process faces frequent delays. You can never be sure that the price you quoted is the amount you will actually get paid. Bank balance bookkeeping. You have no financial data. Expenses are not tracked on a profit and loss statement. You do not have a budget or balance sheet. You might not even have a business checking account. You do check your account balance constantly. If the account looks good, you spend freely. When the balance dips, you feel more stressed. A million people have told you to always charge what you're worth. But that advice seems silly. Easy for them to say. They built their business over Many years, you can't get anyone to accept a job without complaining about the price. Let's not even talk about taxes. You prefer to avoid thinking about them. You have no clue what you owe. You ignore quarterly estimated tax payments. By the time tax season rolls around, you're scrambling. You know your bank how much you procrastinated on filing last year's taxes. Fees and interest pile up. You're likely overpaying or underpaying. You don't know which. Right now, there's no CPA checking your books. They can't confirm your deductions or help with your totals. Your primary system involves a lot of praying that things will work out. Unfortunately, this is not a strategy that the IRS is sympathetic to. The fear of an audit keeps you up at night. Job notes live in your head. You used to know exactly what all your customers wanted. You got that information the old fashioned way, by asking them often. While unloading your tools, you remembered all the special requests you got, so you never had to write them down. With five or 10 customers, it was easy to provide personalized service. Now you're busier. It's hard to keep track of who wants what, especially when. When you're always in a rush. When the customer claims you failed to fulfill your promise, you don't have a paper trail. Even if you are correct, you can't prove it. Which means you're always at their mercy, willing to go the extra mile to keep them happy, even if it hurts job profits. Anything to avoid the dreaded bad online review. Your brain is your CRM. Unfortunately, this system has certain limitations. Every day you lose more information. The mental load is crushing. All these things pile up on you too often at the same time. You're always scrambling to remember job notes, invoicing details, payment collection schedules. You worry about bank balances all the time, credit card deadlines, stressing over tax bills, wondering where the next lead is going to come from. Because of all this stress and mental overload, you can't sleep. Even when business is good, your mind is still racing. When does admin happen? You hate doing paperwork. Office work happens at night, on weekends, holidays. When your body begins to hurt to the point that you can no longer work. That's when you handle admin tasks. This creates another reactive cycle. You don't have a specific set of tasks. You respond to whatever is directly in front of you. If your bank balance is low, you begin to panic about outstanding invoices. When it seems healthy, you set that fear aside for now. You focus on searching for new Jobs, doubts and struggles of Admin As a solo operator if operations drain your body, admin fries your brain. You started this business because you love the service. You like working outside. You like being active. You might even enjoy working with the customers. But you didn't get into the business to do paperwork. The busier you get with operations, the more admin work piles up at home. That's why so many of your evenings end with you at the kitchen table at 9pm you're sorting through unpaid invoices and a cluttered email inbox. You're trying to organize your receipts. You're checking customer texts to see if it's too late to respond. You're exhausted, and that exhaustion makes it even harder to organize. It's the administrative aspect of your work that might cause you the most doubt. You might wonder, even if things go well and I find work, do I want to spend my nights like this? And with that thought, you worry that you should never have left your job. I think I forgot to bill someone. It happens. You do the job, then you forget to hand off the invoice. Now you really don't know what to do. Or you did give them the bill and they have not paid it yet. Either way, money is slipping through the cracks. You have no method for retrieving it. You also feel uneasy about chasing people for money. You don't want to sound pushy. You don't want to sour the relationship. This is someone you hope to keep as a customer. Bugging them for money won't get you a five year relationship. Then there's the desperation factor. You don't want to sound like you need the money as much as you do. And so you wait and you hope that the customer will pay. And if they don't, you absorb the expense. Not only does this make you feel powerless, but it also embarrasses you. This doesn't seem like the sort of problem a real business owner should have. And that's true. Successful businesses focus on growth, not chasing checks. They use homework software to have cards on file. They charge customers right when the job is complete automatically. They have systems to make quoting contracts and collections easy. You have none of these things. You're unsure about what they even are. Am I even doing this right? You have only a vague awareness of many legal and financial issues. Sales tax, property tax, income tax and payroll tax. These words cross your mind, but never for more than a moment. You don't understand how they work. You've heard terms and phrases from other business owners before. Phrases like cash flow statements, Profit accounts, Tax reserves, working capital. You know software exists to help. These programs appear almost as complex as the problems they aim to solve. They also look expensive. Your business expenses mix with your personal finances. You can't start a business bank account because you haven't registered as a sole proprietorship or llc. When you go to Home Depot, you you always end up swiping your personal credit card. It has a larger limit. You don't save your receipts. You also don't always deduct business expenses. Your numbers are a mess and your only real response is to hope that the IRS never comes by expecting to take a peek. I don't even know if I'm profitable. Poor bookkeeping makes it hard. You cannot understand your business's profitability. Money comes in, but does it exceed the amount that goes out? You have no way of knowing. You don't have a record of what you did last week, let alone the last several months. You keep all information on your phone and in your head, so you're guessing how much you earn from each job. You don't think about how much you earn per hour. Why bother? It's too depressing. You're thinking about different software options, QuickBooks, Gusto Homeworks, Stripe and P4P. But you're unsure about what to choose. You don't want to spend money on something that may not be a suitable fit. It's the sort of thing you believe you will do in time. One day. Maybe when you have the time. But of course that moment never arrives. And so every day the gap between where you are and where you need to be grows wider. I feel like I'm not a real business owner. All these doubts begin to culminate in an identity crisis. On the one hand, you're good at the work. You do have a knack for keeping customers satisfied, particularly when things are going well. But you're also not tech savvy. You don't like looking at spreadsheets. Paperwork, emails. Follow up tasks begin to pile up and overwhelm you. And so you procrastinate on the things that aren't hands on. This makes you wonder if you're really cut out for business. Doubts hit you the hardest online. You see one million dollar companies in your industry thriving. Meanwhile, you're sending invoices from your phone at 10pm Social media influencers make this look easy. YouTube videos titled How I made $100,000 in my first Year fill your watch history. You feel guilty, inadequate. You reflect on the time spent on the business. Your revenue is up, but your operations are still the same. Every step you take forward seems to push you back to more the more time you spend working in the business, the less time you have to work on it. And someone told you that was a bad thing. Is this business ownership thing really worth the effort? Maybe I am the problem Instructions for Admin As a solo operator, it's the admin work that loses a lot of solo operators. It's not exactly hard. It's just not what you like to do. You don't want to open QuickBooks. You get impatient sending invoices. You're definitely not thinking about taxes. The boring or complicated parts of this work repel a lot of people. It's on the admin side, where money gets lost. If you're serious about what you're doing, you need to get this right. Stop saying things like I'm not good at math. I can't figure this computer stuff out. I hate paperwork. Other people in your situation have figured it out. You need to scale up beyond being a solo operator, I say this with love in my heart. Man up. Figure it out. Set up a CRM immediately. If your goal is to scale, you must do it. It is not optional. If your goal is to grow, you need to grow in an organized way. Your brain isn't a filing cabinet. Your cluttered digital notes and messages won't help you. Even one missed job or failed invoice can hurt your business. Installing a CRM can help you avoid that. Use homeworks. I built it for one clear reason to help home service businesses. You can also use Jobber Service, Autopilot Service Titan, or housecall Pro. If you are planning to grow, do yourself a favor. Get organized now. This will save a lot of headaches in the future when you have hundreds of clients. The point is that having a system is always better than relying on your memory. Using automation reduces your stress. Automating reminders helps you avoid mistakes. Your CRM can handle all these things at the bare minimum. You need a set of virtual tools that allow you send and track your estimates. Document your customer communication. Store important job notes and pictures automatically Send reminders to your customers. Optimize your route for reduced drive time. Collect and store payment information on a customer portal. Create templates for emails and texts. Send mass messages for marketing. Better tools mean more chances to automate admin tasks. You want to see how far you can take automation before you hire help. After all, why pay someone $30 an hour to do something that a better software program will do? Some people choke over spending $500 per month for software. They spend hours each night on tasks that the software can perform in seconds. Assume your hourly rate is $100 and you spend a couple of hours each night on admin tasks. You're wasting more than $4,000 a month by not using software. I remember using Amazon Payments to process credit card payments. I was a solo operator. I processed them manually, entering the card numbers by hand on the iPad for every transaction. I did that because the processing fees were cheaper than Stripe in the CRM. I was cheap. It would take four to six hours every Sunday night to do billing for the week. I remember coming home from church knowing that I would be up all night, then wake up early to go mow lawns. That was crazy. I was thinking like a poor person. You can automate this process in homeworks. Zero human effort required. Set it and forget it. Hundreds of invoices get created, sent and charged instantly. P.S. there's a reason Amazon Payments was so cheap. They shut down the payment service. It no longer exists. You get what you pay for, automate invoicing and collections. You don't need to spend the rest of your life chasing down old bills. The system can do it for you. To create admin tools, begin by automating invoice delivery. You can also automate follow ups for unpaid bills and store credit cards or ACH on file. Yes, you'll need to pay a 1 to 3% fee. Unpleasant, but it's the price of convenience and efficiency and professionalism. If you hate paying that fee, you can pass it on to customers at Homeworks. They pay the processing fee. Track your money weekly. Stay compliant with laws and taxes. An audit can go back years. Thinking that you will get numbers in order is small thinking. If you succeed and face an audit in five years, poor accounting now could come back to bite you. Many entrepreneurs dislike this part of owning a business. If that's you, you can hire a bookkeeper. It's not super expensive. Home Service CPA is the firm I run. You can also do it yourself. At the very least, update a spreadsheet every Saturday night. You need to know your revenue for this week, your expenses, and your profit. This might be a lot for someone who used to check the bank balance from time to time. The thing is, just because you have money in the bank doesn't mean you're profitable. The only way to know how well you're doing is to track your money weekly. If you don't, someone else will own your business soon. I started a bookkeeping, payroll and tax prep company. If you need help, HomeServiceCPA.com offers a free course. It covers everything you need to know about taxes, payroll, and accounting. Block out time for Admin Doing admin work will save you time and boost your business in many ways. Make it a priority. Your approach to admin can't be I'll get to it later. You know you won't. There is no later. You work all the time. If morning doesn't feel right for admin tasks, afternoon won't feel better either. You must schedule admin time for yourself each day. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't need to take place at a certain time. It could be in the early morning hours, during your lunch break or after the sun sets. The important thing is that you make it consistent. Use this time to answer emails, respond to voicemails, send estimates, schedule jobs, document your expenses, send your invoices. Get everything done so it doesn't back up. If you don't keep up with admin tasks, your business will feel chaotic. Simplify everything. At this point, your admin work should be lightweight and fast. You don't need to build a corporate office. You just need to stay organized enough to grow. Your business can only grow if you have strong processes. These processes should work as well with five customers as they do with 500. Here's what matters. Use one system, not five different apps. Standardize your estimate format use Save replies for emails and texts. Build checklists screen record everything you do. The more you systematize now, the easier it will be to delegate later as your business grows. Don't hire admin staff. Begin by delegating tasks on a smaller scale. A call answering service might be a good option. A virtual assistant can send invoices and respond to emails. Do the math. Is making $100 an hour in the field worth spending three hours on paperwork? That is $300 of lost revenue. Offload what you can. Delegate what you don't like to do. Use money as a tool, saving you time and allowing you to focus. Even if you pay someone $2 per minute, that seems like a lot. $120 per hour. You spread that time out over the day as you answer 14 calls and respond to nine emails. You save 23 interruptions today for only $80. That helps you stay focused on your tasks all day. You won't feel reactive. Reduce your mental load. Feeling overwhelmed kills growth. At this stage, you have too many details in your mind. There are admin tasks that distract you. There are endless messages to handle the important thing is to build the system once and then trust it. Use your CRM like a second brain. Make scheduling processes sacred. You will produce more consistent results. This is important for you. It reduces stress. It saves time, it creates stability. It's also good for the customer. Their main focus is consistency and quality. Good admin processes make both easier to deliver. Look professional. Your website, uniform and logo all impact your credibility. You don't need to look fancy, you need to look legitimate. The goal is to signal value to your customers. If your branding is a blurry yard sign and a Gmail address, people won't see you as premium. They call your personal cell and the voicemail box is full. Email signatures say sent from iPhone. Sometimes the wheels will still feel like they're coming off. When that happens, slow down. Build systems that take the pain out of growth. Consider raising prices. Reduce your workload. Get proper infrastructure in place in the admin role. Then grow. Don't let admin sink your ship. Solo Operator Summary Sales what's broken? Pricing based on gut feelings and fear of rejection the fix Create a pricing template with budgeted hours and materials. Send quotes via CRM text and follow up with purpose operations. What's broken Constantly reactive with no scheduling system. The fix Track time on every job. Use scheduling software and build backup plans with subcontractors or friends for disruptions. Admin what's broken Memory based systems, missed invoices and lost payments the fix Install a CRM immediately. Automate invoicing collections and separate business finances from personal Solo Operator Checklist Goal Survive get momentum Book out schedule Raise prices to a simple formula, hourly rate plus materials. Install homework software and stop running the business out of your head. Collect deposits before starting jobs. Track time on every job budgeted versus actual send 100% of estimates through your CRM. No verbal pricing follow up three plus times on every estimate. Get 30 Google reviews as fast as possible. Book yourself out two to three weeks in the future. Then hire an employee. Open separate business checking account. Pay yourself a set weekly draw. Stop draining cash randomly. Chapter three the Working gm. You are no longer a guy with a truck. You have one to eight employees, $250,000 to $750,000 in annual revenue. A growing customer list. More jobs, more money, more headaches. Right now you're making more revenue than before, but sometimes it doesn't show in your bank account. Remember, an owner might be a working GM. It is a leadership hat that is the role of the leader of the company. Working GMs are closer than they realize to freedom. They can scale a business that runs without them. This demands the right systems. So why do they spend so much time wishing they were a solo operator again? In this section, I'll cover common issues that working GM's face and how to handle them. What Sales look Like As a working gm, hustle is not the only ingredient. You have a team. You have more than one truck. You have a consistent stream of leads. New potential customers reach out while you sleep. Still you're stuck. You try to close deals while juggling operations. While putting out fires. Responding to customer texts on the job site. This is the working GM phase. You no longer do all the labor, but you're still responsible for all the revenue. Your skills as a salesperson are more important than ever. Let's break down what the stage looks like. You still do all the estimates. Every once in a while you might delegate a simple drive by estimate. Send an employee to shoot a video or make a rough estimate from a property. But you're the one slapping together a quote from your truck. You're still the sales team. Why? At this point, hiring a full time salesperson usually doesn't make financial sense. They're expensive. They're not as passionate as you. They don't know the business. They are overhead. It is rare to find an employee who can outsell the owner. You might not have days only devoted to sales, but you at least have sales moments. Sending quotes from your truck between jobs. Following up after dinner with prospective customers. Estimating early on Saturday morning before your kid's soccer game. As a working gm, you will still have a chopped up and messy sales process. It is still reactive. You fit estimates wherever you can. It may seem like what a solo operator experiences, but there's a difference. You're still involved in every sale, but now you're making it more systematic. There are no more messy guesses. You have budget hours. You have pricing rules. There are structures and systems where gut feelings used to be in charge. You know the difference between a good customer and a bad one. You don't worry about saying no to odd custom jobs that don't fit your systems. You've learned to protect your time. It's your most valuable asset. You no longer have to knock on every door. You have some paid ads, local services ads, Google Ads and Facebook ads. You're trying out different platforms and spending money on marketing. This pulls you out of obscurity. This propels you past being a solo operator. You're not spending thousands on every marketing channel right now. You're sampling from each. You're Looking for what works best. Many of your leads should originate from your website. The key is to respond to them fast. Have a process. Here's a good sequence that you should follow for your sales process. Send the quote as fast as you can within 24 hours. Follow up by phone. Within a day of sending the quote, use the phone to follow up at least two more times, always with a good reason. Automate emails and text follow ups for at least seven days after you send the estimate. That's the best way to close deals without compromising on price. Speaking of price, this is where you might see your confidence get rattled. You're not a solo operator anymore. You can't discount jobs and make up the difference by working faster. You're paying for labor. You have actual overhead. There is a possibility you lose money on jobs. You can't outwork a bad estimate now with more overtime. At this point, your focus is on value. That might mean turning down bad jobs who always had a special request they're not willing to pay for. You'll begin telling them no. Why? Because right now, the cost of saying yes to the wrong job can be too high. Not all good leads are good customers. You've built a brand. Local folks know your business. They remember your trucks and trailers. You're more than a logo on a shirt. Locals recognize your brand. Strangers will say, oh, I see your trucks everywhere. People will choose you not for being the cheapest, but because you appear to be a real company. You might have branded vehicles, polished estimates, a strong online presence, clean uniforms that people see around town. Once you build your brand and gain trust, step aside and let it shine. You don't need to involve yourself with every touch in the sales process. Focus on more valuable tasks. This doesn't include formatting quotes or answering emails. It's time to figure out what parts of the admin and sales work you can delegate. That doesn't mean hiring someone to do everything. It means carving it up. It means trimming off parts of the process a little at a time. For example, your admin might format and send quotes. They could also follow up with new customers. You figure out how to automate email sequences. You use AI to answer missed calls. You've realized your job is to build systems, not do the work all day, every day. Halfway to freedom. You're nearing a point where you can leave your business without it collapsing. Sales is still a bottleneck. The problem by now is not that you're bad at sales. It's that you're doing every part of it. Once you systematize your sales process and delegate tasks. You can start the next stage of your business. Doubts and struggles of sales. As a working gm, you're likely losing sales due to slow response times. Even though you're spending more time on sales, things still get in the way. You are ready to send an estimate. Then five text messages come in from your crew. Equipment breaks down. Then a frustrated call from one of your customers. Sales gets pushed to the side because it feels less immediate. And while you're delayed, another competitor isn't. You lose sales because your response time is slow. Because of this, your close rate begins to tank. You pursue new leads but ignore why you lose them to faster competitors. Thoughts cross your mind. I should add more services. The shiny service syndrome strikes. Your schedule is light and crews are idle. You start thinking about offering other services. This is especially true if you notice your competitors doing the same. You don't boost your lead volume. Instead, you add more variables to manage. You used to excel at three tasks, but now you're struggling with eight tasks. You feel wore out. The other issue is that you're always changing gears. You go from selling one minute to checking in on your cruise route the next. At any time of the day, you might receive a phone call requiring you to put out a fire. You're managing expectations. You're setting schedules. You're losing momentum because you can't finish tasks in one go. Plus, your brain feels worn out. Constant switching from task to task. Mental fatigue sets in. You feel this every day at work. Your margins drop. You have more overhead now because of this, components of your sales process no longer work. When you did the job yourself, all the money went into your savings so you could offer a 10% discount to win the sale. Now you have a lot of recurring jobs locked in at your old pricing structure. Low rates made sense when your costs were a monthly insurance fee and a storage unit that won't cut it anymore. When you discount a job by 10%, you are throwing away your profit. You know that you need to raise prices, but you're afraid to do so. Without low prices, closing sales is uncertain. Keeping your current customers is even harder. Quality is dropping. Raising prices on ongoing jobs could cause a disaster. Lead quality fluctuates. The feast or famine cycle hasn't gone away. During the busy season, you ignore difficult leads. People who want a ballpark price. High quality accounts are easier to come by. You drown in new work. But when things dry up, the same familiar panic returns. Now you're willing to slash prices to the bone. You're frustrated with everyone and everything. What's wrong with my marketing channels? Do I need to fire the marketing agency I hired? Should I try to figure it out myself? To make matters worse, there's the constant pressure to keep your crew busy. This makes you focus more on volume than on margins. You begin, once again the race to the bottom. So begins your return to old habits. Hasty quotes from your truck. Forgotten pricing formulas, instructions for sales. As a working gm, standardize everything, you still rely on gut feelings. These pricing choices can be hard to explain or teach to others. You have a formula, but you make quotes based on instinct. Often it works for you, but it is impossible to teach. For another thing, you're open to reactive pricing still. In other words, if you don't have work, you drop the price. If you do have work, you raise it. You don't adjust the budget, hours or supplies. You don't adjust the scope of work, you discount the price. Having some flexibility in your pricing is smart. When leads are scarce, you could reduce your hourly rate or remove material markup. A pricing strategy needs structure. At this stage of business, it's not acceptable to have a disorganized approach. You need a template, something that anyone can use. Clear guidelines show cost and the language to use for sales. This includes how a salesperson makes a pitch. It includes the words they use in a follow up call. You can automate aspects of this. This is especially true for texts and email follow ups. You need a process for estimating that is clear, quick and easy. Include as many details as you can in your estimates. Ensure the client knows the timeline, pricing and upsell options. Sometimes people surprise you. They seek ways to give you more money. Create upsell systems that let this occur. Do that on the estimate template. The estimate descriptions should have details. Be specific. There should be no room for misinterpretation. There is nothing more frustrating. A customer doesn't understand what they are buying. This leads to mad clients and bad reviews. Your estimates become your job notes. This is so that your crew and the customer are looking at the same job details. No miscommunication. No need to call you for every question. Use clear language so any employee can understand your process and complete the job notes. Prioritize speed. It's also important to work quicker. In the early days of your business, you could drive to every property you met potential customers face to face and spend as much time as needed on quotes. If it took three hours, that was fine. You only had a few leads each week. As your overhead rises, your time gets more expensive. A free in person Estimate is not free for you. It costs a lot. You need to consider vehicle costs, insurance, fuel and time. There are different levels of estimate speed that you should be aware of. In person, estimates take the longest drive by. Estimates are quicker over the phone. Estimates can be quick. Instant quotes on your website are, well, instant. Move up the estimate ladder. As mentioned, there are four ways to give estimates. The first is to do it in person. This is the slowest, but it's also the most accurate way to quote the job. You arrive at the property. Then you determine the time and cost of your service. Finally, you charge according to the margin you want to reach. The second is to drive by. You're not walking the property with the customer, but you get a pretty good idea of what it's like. You might walk around on your own time schedule. They have not scheduled any meeting. The third is over the phone. In this case, you listen as the customer explains what work needs to be done. You look at their property. You measure it using Google Maps. You take measurements from property databases. You give prices and close the job. Fourth option is instant quotes. They can fill out a form on your website. It generates an immediate quote based on the info they provide. They put a card on file and accept the job. The slower the method, the more accurate it is. But that accuracy slows you down, which stifles growth. Remember, you're not the technician anymore. Your job is growth and offense. To that end, you need to push phone and instant pricing as much as possible. This is especially true for recurring services. You can raise your rate later on. The lower the average ticket, the quicker we can show pricing. This requires less time spent on sales and estimates in person. Estimates can be useful in some situations. For example, complex commercial contracts or large construction projects. Most jobs, especially residential ones, can use instant quote forms. The customer receives the price on your website, you might worry about accuracy. Customers may misrepresent their property. This could lead to you earning less money than you deserve. That will happen. Sometimes the opposite happens too. Customers often accept higher prices than what you'd quote in person. It averages out. Here's another point. If your accuracy drops, your efficiency will go up. This can help make up for any lost revenue. You get. A couple lower priced jobs, but you get more accepted. You avoid having to meet 10 customers for estimates each week. You now have 15 hours per week given back to you. The other thing, you're scaling up quicker in growth mode. Profit isn't the main focus right now. You still want to fill up your schedule and make sure you're busy enough. After completing that task, you can raise prices on the jobs that were under bid. Until then, do a quality service. Keep your customers happy. Get positive reviews. Let's imagine the worst case if you don't visit the property. You show up at the property after someone accepts an OTP over the phone or IQ price and realize that you are way under bid. You tell the customer the price will need to change. Last year at Augusta lawn care, under 1% of accepted IQs instant quotes needed a price change. PS Homeworks is rolling out the Instant Quote feature. You can copy the IQ forms and and place them on your website without any modifications. Get accepted estimates Customer payment info will be copied into your Homeworks account. No sales or admin time required. Time block Like a pro, it's time to end the random sales chaos. That means blocking off time on your calendar for estimates. Your admin or virtual assistant can book appointments. They are confident in the schedule. No more vague phrases like sometime after three or I'll swing by when I can. Now you have well defined time windows. For example, mornings are for fieldwork. Afternoons are for estimates. You could earmark two full days out of your week only for sales appointments, three days for fieldwork. Why is this important? It ensures continuity. It builds consistency. It makes processes easy to replicate. Know your close rate and what to do with it for most working GMs, finding the right close rate is tough. It often changes depending on your business size. Here's a breakdown. If your close rate is over 70%, you're undercharging only. Stay here if you have cash to grow very fast between 50 to 70%, you're in growth mode. Stay put to keep profits but grow in a sustainable way. At 30 to 50%, you're stabilizing. You are in profit mode. If the close rate drops below 30%, something is broken. You need to improve your speed. Follow up, process formatting and offers. Then check if your prices are too high. But I never lower prices. I focus on increasing value. Your close rate is the speedometer of your sales system. When your close rate drops, it's usually not about price. It's more about how you present or the timing to know where you stand. Track why people say no homeworks automates this. Use this info to have a second swing at closing the deal. Here are a couple of the most common reasons customers decline. Price is too high. You can automate a discount sequence or offer fewer services at a lower price. Adjust the scope of work downsell or you might offer a discount for getting work done in the off season, timing or scheduling. This could lead to an upsell if you need to rush the job and get it done fast. Customers may want recurring service on a certain day each week. I am happy to accommodate for the right price. No's can be frustrating, but they don't have to last forever. You're paying for every lead you get, either in effort or ad spend. Make the very most of every one. Qualify or die. Don't treat every lead like it's a golden opportunity. Here's the truth. 20% of your customers will cause 80% of your problems. It's important to filter. If a customer complains and badmouth their last contractor, it's a red flag. If they ask for an exact time or very specific instructions, that's a red flag. Or they're asking to add five extra freebies to the original quote. You guessed it. Red flag. Filter out tough customers using screener questions on your website. Use scripts for the leads that come through the phone. Give yourself or your admin the power to say no. You want to weed out the time wasters and tire kickers. Remember that always be Closing has its limits. Avoid the wrong customers. You'll also need to feel at ease. Saying you're not a fit. That feels counterintuitive to many business owners. In the beginning, you hunted down every lead, no matter what. Sometimes you did the job for below minimum wage. You don't want to return to that. Still, it feels crazy to say no. Get used to it. Some customers have unreasonable expectations. They aren't your ideal customers. Be polite, but refer them to someone else. Delegate what you can while holding the line. Now you should have someone managing some sales tasks. This could be an admin, team member, spouse, virtual assistant, or part time support. They can do the estimate and price formatting, sending follow ups, tracking declined estimates, inputting notes into the CRM, scheduling appointments. Your job is to use the system, set the budget hours, calculate the needed materials and supplies, then walk away. You are complete. Don't waste a minute typing descriptions or designing the quote. Systemize, Delegate. Automate. Use your time for more valuable tasks. Professionalize or be replaced. Your quote needs to look amazing. It's your first impression. It's how the customer will decide if you are a serious business or a chuck in a truck. The template should look great and work well on mobile devices. It needs to reflect the brand image you aim to promote. Your professionalism becomes a part of the pitch. It's an important part of building community recognition. Set prices based on value, not what competitors are charging. Make sure your Estimate looks professional. Now you shift from hustler to builder, from freelancer to founder. It is a place where process and planning take the place of gut feelings and and emotional choices. Standardizing and systemizing will make your business more efficient. Remember that time is not free. The hours you spend on the job are valuable. Treat them that way. If your sales process is broken, it will cause everything else to break as well. What operations look like as a working GM. Here's a snapshot of the working GM's life. At any given moment, you are in the truck. Your face is still covered in sweat from your last job. You try to call your crew. You juggle tools and wipe grease and sweat from your phone screen. In other words, you still have your hands on everything. You do manage people, but you're also still doing the work at this point. You may have hired people, but they haven't freed you up yet. They may even have multiplied your chaos. Why? Because you're now managing people and doing the work yourself at the same time. Are employees assets or anchors? Short answer, it depends. At this stage in your business, anytime you hire someone new, it feels like a risk. Labor supply is a rollercoaster. You have one employee and hire a second. That boosts your business capacity by 50%. But if they quit or they aren't good, you lose 33% of potential production. Because the risks are high, you might hedge your bets a little with new hires. This might involve hiring part time workers or on demand staff subcontractors. 1099s instead of W2s. This allows you to give them a trial period. The problem is that no one completes the onboarding process in the right way. Why? Your training is all done by you. You don't have a process behind your approach to hiring that keeps you from getting good results. A clear hiring system is important. Without it, adding new employees can create more problems. The problems outweigh the work they complete. The logistics become very messy. You keep answering texts from other crews while you work. You're facing issues because of others. Carelessness. Someone showing up late, called in sick. They made a mistake. They forgot the keys. Their car broke down. Their brother is in town. Their child is sick. There's always some issue and sometimes the customers feel it. Working GMs usually face their first bad reviews when they begin hiring new employees. People are working under your name, but they don't share your standards. Quality control slips. You're getting complaints about work quality. You know you need accountability. The problem is you can't figure out a way to make it Happen. You try photo uploads. You may even give your crews a checklist. Even so, the results aren't up to par. You can't check on your crew's work in person. Still, you can't ignore the growing problems. You believe the issue is that your crew lacks the same level of care as you do. Which is probably true. But why would they? The solution is not to find 10 people who love your business as much as you do. It's to create systems and processes that ensure consistent service. Customers are happy. They keep buying. You started tracking, sort of at this stage, you know how long jobs take. Your employees clock in and out of each job to track time. You're a little less clear on how long they should take. Your budget hours aren't very accurate. Each job feels a little different to you. You haven't done enough volume to have zeroed in on what is average. Your pricing system has flaws. You can't always predict how long the work will take. You do have guidelines, but most project estimates feel like guesswork. Constant tension. On the one hand, you want to book more work. You want to grow your business. But even another job or two could break your schedule. You're busy running around. You want to finish the jobs and keep customers happy. When anything goes wrong at all, you are rushing out to fix it. How can you take on more tasks while also growing? How can you think about hiring someone when everything feels chaotic? You want to raise standards and boost job performance. But if one or two people in your crew quit, your situation becomes critical. There is no way you can do all the work yourself now. You're making more money than before, but it all feels shaky. There are gaps in every aspect of your business and your best solution for filling them is still to work harder. Grinding and putting in more time is good, but it will never be a long term solution. As you scale up at this stage, you start to see the fine line between a working GM and a full time gm. How do you make the transition? By building systems that level up your workflow and take you out of the daily grind. Until you do those things, you'll never have a business that runs without you. Doubts and struggles of operations As a working gm. More people, more problems. Their attention to detail isn't the same. Their drive and passion doesn't come close to matching yours. They make mistakes that alter your business's core. Because before, you were the person who made every customer happy. The more people you have, the more your issues multiply. Vehicle maintenance, fixing equipment, handling tough customers. Every problem you had at first gets three or four times worse than as you add more employees. Even if others are making mistakes, blame falls on you. No one's going to blame Eddie, the high school dropout you hired from Home Depot. In a Google review, they're going to say that your company is horrible. Your name intertwines with the business. Part of the problem is that you don't have a screening process. You don't have an onboarding process. You lack checklists or sops to help new hires learn the ropes. Well, you figure, I have 30 things to do. Why should I invest in onboarding when this person might leave in a week? You are at the mercy of the labor market. You are at the roulette wheel, hoping to get great applicants. The more pressure you feel, the harder it is to see a path forward. What does that leave you? Well, you start looking back. You imagine being solo again and the math appears favorable. You see that when you were doing all the work, you were making more money. Now you spend most of your time on the parts of the job you dislike, customer service and selling. If you're struggling with inefficiency or feeling burnt out, you're not alone. Many others share your experience. These are basic components of the working GM phase. You've reached a point where you can't keep doing it all, but you still haven't found a way to let things go. Instructions for Operations as a Working GM As a working gm, your operations need to evolve with the business. Here's a simple test to check your system's health. If a crew needs you to come and explain the job, then you don't have a solid system. You need estimate videos, job notes checklists. How do you make estimate videos? Film them on the property right after the customer visit. Walk the property, explain the scope, and show key details. Tell the crew what they need to know. Attach the video to the Homeworks mobile app known as Fieldforce. It will compress the file the videos on the customer profile as an attachment. You don't need any other software. No link sharing, no texting videos to your crew. It's all inside Homeworks. These videos end the need for you to return to the job site. If you're showing up the morning of the job to talk things over with the crew, you're wasting time. This leads to forgetting job details and confusion for your crew. If you need to show up, that is a system failure. Something in the system is broke. You also need to develop checklists for your different job types. This covers how to load the truck, how to perform a service how to do a post job Walkthrough with the customer why are checklists important? They standardize output and reduce mistakes. Add accountability systems for your operations team One of the best that we use at Augusta is the yellow slip system. When a customer complains or you need to revisit the property, someone fills out a yellow slip. They then present that slip at the next team meeting. The goal is not to blame them, it's to share learning. Once the team members share the yellow slip, the team reviews the mistake. Team members explain how to prevent that issue from showing up again. Employees double check quality before leaving the job. It builds a culture of accountability. This is your quality control, not you driving around. Hey everyone, it's Mike here and one of the things I love most about homeworks and using the software is actually the mobile app. It's called Fieldforce and the reason I love it is because it allows for massive video files to be attached directly from the app and to be compressed and then attached to visits the property and allows you to be able to do file management for large video files. This is super valuable for estimate videos like we talk about inside of the book as well as property updates. The ability to have project updates to your customers and then give it directly to the customer portal right from the app. And so it can actually attach over 10 minutes of high definition video directly to the app. So in the past if you use company Cam or other video file sharing platforms, they're really expensive. This is all included inside of the Fieldforce mobile app that is used by Homeworks. So go check out Home Works today and start using the video to upsell customers. Do maintenance on your equipment as well as being able to do estimate videos so you don't have to return back to a job site after the initial visit with the customer. Track your efficiency scores to do this, divide your budgeted hours by the actual hours clocked. This gives you a good sample of how much of their day the crew is producing revenue. Long drive times, long load times and multiple fuel stops add up bathroom breaks, forgotten supplies and callbacks all use up time. All these factors lead to less revenue and lower efficiency scores. At this point Managing your KPIs is next to impossible. You are attempting to do it by hand. Printed route sheets clutter your desk. You need software such as Fieldforce by Homeworks. This will keep your field team connected to the office. It should display job clock ins before and after photos, estimate videos, attached job notes and property details. Dispatcher updates. The crew can view everything through the mobile app. The way you spend your time matters. If you manage the crew all day, you won't generate labor revenue. Your margins will suffer. This is the most important thing as a working gm. The business's profit depends on how much of your day you spend making money. This is particularly true if you only have one to four employees. This work helps you stay profitable during the tricky middle stage of growth. You are still on the truck. Yes, you need to handle admin and sales tasks, but operations. Doing the work is what drives revenue. You can't afford to be working on the business full time at this stage. You want to maximize the time you spend making money and being on the truck. I've seen businesses in the working GM stage make $200,000 in annual profits. A similarly sized business was struggling to make $40,000 in profit. Their service areas were right next to each other. Their pricing was the same. Their equipment was the same. Their services were the same. Their top line revenue was the same. There was only one difference. The general manager of the successful location worked in the field. The general manager at the second location spent the whole day on sales and admin. He didn't generate any labor revenue. You are at the working GM stage. Generating revenue in the field is key to staying profitable. Do team huddles in the morning. Keep them short. Have everyone stand instead of sitting. Set expectations. Review wins. Discuss their routes and gear for the day. During these meetings, highlight what people are doing well. Reinforce their successes. Don't harp on mistakes. Don't berate the team for callbacks, mistakes and yellow slips. The goal is to set up systems for your team. This way, you won't need to clean up after them all the time. Use a tagging system to organize your equipment maintenance. Put broken tools in a designated area with a red tag. Include the date. Specify what is broken and identify who reported it. This will prevent crews from loading up broken gear. It also ensures you don't end up at the shop at 6am Fixing things that someone should have noticed days before. Don't only track jobs. Track the gaps between them. That includes shop time, load time and drive time. In other words, the spots where your profit leaks. Efficiency score factors in all clocked hours. Not only budget hours and time on the project. A job can look efficient on paper until you take into account the 90 minutes wasted in transit. Expect your crew to clock in and out of each job. Take before and after photos. Add notes to the dispatch board. Add videos to the visit for upsell opportunities on the property. Homeworks will allow admins to see this in real time, you can share photos with clients using the customer portal. This builds trust and shows professionalism. It's something they'll share with friends. An efficient, timely and accurate team cuts down on callbacks, complaints and chaos. At this point, you don't want to be the best worker. You want to produce amazing workers. You get there with onboarding systems. The first day of any new employee's time on the job should be clear and well defined. Same with the first week and the first month. You can use checklists and SOPs to outline expectations and benchmarks. Include videos for training purposes. Many blue collar workers want hands on infield training. Set milestones for new hires to track their progress. Unlock bonuses along with new responsibilities. This not only clarifies training but also encourages the new hire to stay long term. We will cover more of this later in the book. Your budget hours will help you see your capacity. It's important to know how booked you are. There's a big difference between being 80% and 100% booked. Knowing your status helps you avoid burnout. It also prevents scheduling backlogs. Plus it shows you when to hire new people. Use the budget hour capacity chart in homeworks. Also, the calendar will show you if you are overbooked. If you are booked four weeks ahead, it is likely that you are ready to hire. Interview now. Don't let yourself get caught flat footed. Get trained, efficient workers ready for when more work arrives. At no point should you feel desperate. That is when the quality starts to go downhill. At this stage of operations, things can spiral out of control quickly. You have a fragile and small team. Avoid this spiral. Use systems, standards and scoreboards. What Admin looks like as a working GM As a working gm, you likely face an overwhelming number of admin tasks. The problem isn't laziness. You're overworked. At this point. You still wear too many hats at once in the field. Doing sales, working with your crew, managing phone calls, scheduling, invoicing, taxes, payroll, everything else. You're in a tough admin spot, unable to keep up, incapable of paying someone else to do it the right way. A full time office manager and building can drain your profits. A part time employee can't handle the chaotic and random situations. Some days the phone doesn't ring for hours. Other times you have three calls at the same time. You often do everything yourself because asking for help hasn't worked before. The solution is to cut interruptions. This will clear your mind and speed up your work. The problem is that you'll need to delegate to make this happen. How can you do that when you don't trust the people around you enough to do what they're supposed to do? A lack of systems is your kryptonite. Everything is manual and inefficient. Delegate or die. The wheels start coming off. You're trying to work full time in the field and the office. It's time to offload. Delegate admin. That's the bottom line. If you don't get some help in the office, you will burn out. You will never grow. You will begin to second guess everything. Many business owners start to regret their growth at this stage. They miss the days when the work was simple. This doesn't mean that you were never fit for real business ownership. It means you're experiencing growth pains. Growth creates chaos. These are symptoms of growth. The good news is that better technology can solve many of your problems. Software can handle text confirmations, email reminders, job notes, routing information, scheduling details, manage your invoicing and follow ups. No manual entry. Make it automatic. It's your system that will get your crew where they need to be on time. They will help you avoid those angry customers and one star reviews. Yes, it does take time and effort on the front end. You either need to commit to working hard to build systems yourself or pay someone else to do it. Remember this. If you can document a task, you can delegate it. If someone repeats a task, you can automate it. Delegate and automate as much as possible. Once you put these two ideas into action for your business, you will gain more freedom. This will offload a ton of stress, but it will also pave the way for future growth. You can't grow into a big, successful business without smooth, repeatable systems. These systems need to run with little oversight from you. Struggles and Doubts in Admin As a working gm at the beginning of the week, your bank balance is healthy. You have $20,000 on Monday. Changes are rapid. By Wednesday, your bank balance is halved. Come Friday, it's time to make payroll. Your account is almost empty. Now you're scrambling to cut checks, hoping they won't bounce. You aren't used to these intense cash flow fluctuations. Are they your new normal? A natural part of all this new overhead? You have no faith in your accounting software. Numbers don't match up. Tracking expenses. It's a nightmare Without a bookkeeper, you often lose track of receipts. A few days go by without expense tracking, you open up QuickBooks, 34 Uncategorized transactions. You feel overwhelmed. From there, it's easy to default to not tracking your Finances at all. Getting several weeks behind is a recipe for chaos. You start to worry all the time about paying your bills. An ugly doubt begins to creep in. Is this business even profitable? You have software, you don't know what to do with it. Time has not been on your side. You have been busy growing your business. All that growth, it hasn't left you with much time to explore your software in depth. You have a CRM. You don't know how to use it, not to its full potential. It's easy to push admin off when you are busy. It doesn't create work. It doesn't generate money in a straightforward manner. Important tasks are slipping through the cracks due to this lack of focus. Systemization, route optimization, even collections. Effective use of your CRM is crucial right now. Bookkeeping software is also essential. By this time, you've developed skills in selling and completing jobs. How skilled are you at securing payment? All those cash flow problems I mentioned. They often occur due to an inefficient collection system. You need to fix that. Admin overload. You're drowning in communication. Inbox explosions disrupt your day. Calls, texts, emails. When you're out for estimates or at job sites, notifications stack up. The ding of an email. The sound of your phone ringing sets your teeth on edge. Tasks outside of doing work often get set aside. This includes communication, sending out customer surveys, invoicing, asking for reviews, making social media posts. Checking your numbers can add stress, so you choose to avoid it. Even when you do get P and L sheets, you only look at the top line revenue. Then you wonder, why isn't there more money in my account? You know you need more help with admin. This knowledge is yet another source of stress. You don't know what to do. You can onboard a new person and bring them up to speed with your systems. It could be a worthwhile investment. It could also be a big waste of time and money if they leave after two months. If their performance is unsatisfactory. Both are real possibilities. Many business owners will hire their spouse. Free help, they think. Plus they're not going to leave you high and dry without warning one day. But what if it creates tension in your relationship? Bottom line, you can't stay where you're at. Bottom line, you can't stay where you are. You also don't see a clear way ahead. This is where many working GMs hit their ceiling. You know you need to grow, but growth requires time. And right now, admin is stealing. All yours. You can't scale without help, but you can't afford help until you're already scaling Instructions for Admin As a working gm, you're in a tough spot. You're out in the field making sales, but you're overwhelmed with admin work. This creates an enormous bottleneck at this stage. Many businesses hit a wall. They struggle right before they can thrive. All admin gets delegated or automated. Stop being a secretary. Start being a business owner. That means handing off as many admin tasks as possible. The only exception may be scheduling. This is especially true for big jobs or tricky routes. A scheduling mistake can waste a lot of your time, especially since you're still on job sites. Even without handing scheduling off to someone else, you can systematize it. At this point in your business, guesswork needs to be a thing of the past. Schedule recurring services on specific days depending on the area of town. The goal is for the routes to be as tight as possible. This also allows you to give a date of service quickly after an estimate is accepted. Use budgeted hours to schedule project based jobs weeks in advance. There are also many things you can automate. Homeworks can automate your estimates, follow ups and invoicing. You can use QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Xero, and similar programs for accounting. You can use Gusto for payroll. Teams can use WhatsApp for communication. The goal should be to ensure that you never touch the same task twice. If someone repeats something, they can automate it. Make sure admin overhead is under 15% of revenue. That budget should Admin wages Office Rent Utilities Internet Water Sewer Gas Garbage Office equipment Software subscriptions if you want to be profitable. There's no flexibility in this rule. You're now paying employees in the field. The only way to maintain profitability is to keep your overhead tight. The easiest way to do this is to avoid an office lease until you're scaling up to the next stage. A virtual assistant or a permanent remote office service is a good choice. They are often more efficient than hiring in house staff. You don't need to pay someone to sip coffee and take lunch breaks when the business revenue slows. I prefer that my admin costs drop as well. In a perfect world, I want my admin costs to be a variable expense. The more revenue I have, the more calls I get and the more I pay, the less revenue and fewer leads I get. The less I pay. I want to avoid fixed costs like salaries, leases, and subscriptions. In person versus Remote. Here are three common types of admin roles for businesses at this stage. The spouse. You trust them. Awesome. It can also be stressful working with them. It can hurt your personal relationship and make work life balance harder. It's great if they excel at their job, but mixing personal and professional boundaries can be risky. The virtual assistant VAs seem cheap at first, but managing and training them can be costly. If they are overseas, it can take two to three times longer to train them. They may not comprehend the names or terms for your services. It can take four to six weeks before they're effective. This is time that you could be growing the business or getting paid to perform work. If your VA churns out, you're back to square one and wasting a lot of money. 3. Remote office support Charged per minute the remote office support worker gives you the best of both worlds. You only pay when they're being productive. This means you're not losing revenue from the break room, water cooler or coffee break. As you grow, it will become sensible to hire full time employees. Beware of flat fee or bundled hours services. These fixed expenses during your off season can crush profits. Beware of services that round up calls to the next whole minute. We charged down to the nearest second at the command center for Augusta Lawn Care. In the past we rounded everything to the next minute. The cost savings of per second pricing were 20% or more for most owners. Most tasks emails, calls, texts, etc. Take a few minutes. Any sort of rounding can hide costs to you. Cut Reactive Admin Stop getting interrupted all day. Stop playing receptionist Admin support must handle phone calls, texts and emails from customers. At this point, your time is worth almost $200 an hour. You're managing people who produce $100 an hour. Your time is worth much More than the $30 an hour it costs for an admin to help you. Every minute spent on secretarial tasks takes away your business's growth. Why would you do a $30 an hour task when you could be doing a hundred dollar an hour task by working the field? Every minute spent on admin takes away from operations. As a working gm, you want to focus on making money. You should spend less time on phone calls and emails. Organize the back office Eliminate paper Use a Password Manager LIKE1Password or LastPass to manage your logins. Set up Google Drive folders for your documents. Use QuickBooks to track expenses online. Why is this important? If your admin leaves and all the knowledge is in their head, your business faces big problems. Your business shouldn't rely on any one person. Organization and systems ensure continuity. Cash flow is king. How fast do you collect payment? How slow do you pay out expenses that in and out of money in your bank account. Is cash flow working? GMs don't go broke because of low quality. It happens because of bad cash flow. They face delays in getting paid for their completed work. Here's what you can do to fix cash Slow the payment of expenses. Use credit cards to defer cash outflow by 30 days. Collect faster Collect card information. Charge down payments before starting projects. Check how long it takes to collect on sent invoices. The Target is under 7 days. Set up automatic reminders by text and email for late invoices. Use Homework's dashboard to track open invoices and overdue balances. Two businesses can show the same revenue and profit margins, but one might have $100,000 cash in the bank. Other could be bouncing checks. The difference is in their collection process. Get paid for the work you do. Accounts receivable will stifle your growth. Train your admin to think in systems this is a tipping point for business owners. It's the factor that helps get you out of day to day tasks. Many admins work is reactive. They have a laundry list of to dos. The largest fire gets attention. Your admin should create standard operating procedures for tasks that happen often. This includes invoices, insurance, audits, permits, licensing, tax filings, file storage. They document and record processes. This way if they leave the business, someone can replace them right away. This also enables them to move up in the company. They communicate any problems or updates with your bookkeeper, tax preparer or vendors. They aren't calling you. They also make templated messages and email campaigns. They create survey requests and ask for online reviews. They can save these in homeworks. Then they create a wiki with all the standard procedures for answering phones, responding to emails and more. You do not need to create every system. Make it their job to create developers and record systems for everything they do. Get your time back. Your goal now is to step back from daily admin tasks. This means that you no longer use your inbox as a to do list, your phone as a task manager, or your brain as a CRM. Turn off work email and text alerts on your phone. To remove your business email from your mobile Device, follow these steps. 1. Open your email app. 2. Go to Settings. 3. Select your business email account. 4. Choose the option to delete or remove the account. 5. Confirm the action now your business email is gone from your device. Have your admin send daily or weekly updates. This way you stay updated without having to search for info all the time. Use WhatsApp or Slack to stay connected with your team they help keep your team's communication clear and organized. Don't worry if customer communication quality drops a bit. It will. But you don't need to aim for 100% perfection. Instead, optimize towards delegation. Settle for 80% of perfect. I don't need the phone call to be perfect. I need it answered. I don't need the email to be perfect. I need the inbox cleared. The 20% you lose in precision you more than make up for in freedom. Someone else's 80% is better than your burnout. As a working GM, you can now drive revenue and focus on sales to grow the business. Sales, operations, admin, delegate admin. First, this is the lowest value task focus on generating revenue and operations focus on generating more sales. If it doesn't include those two things, that task is not yours to do. Let your admin person cook. Final word Admin is important, but it's not yours anymore. Now your job is sales and operations. If you can't hand off admin, you'll stay stuck at three to five employees forever. That's okay if it's the business you want to. If you want to grow and value freedom, you need systems. You should delegate tasks and automate processes. In other words, you need to build a back office that doesn't need you. That's how you grow past being a working gm. Case study Efren from Native Scenery Landscapes. It was spring rush. His main employee, his brother, quit. Then he needed emergency surgery. Efren's in a hospital bed telling himself he'll still work tomorrow. No sleep, no plan, just chaos. He runs Native Scenery Landscapes in Texas. It's a family business. His dad started it about 20 years ago as a one man mowing crew. Now it's Efren, 34, his dad, his brother and his employee Ricardo. I showed up on the turnaround show. Here's the number snapshot last year, about $380,000 in revenue. He was wearing the working GM leadership hat. The service mix was about 75%. Mowing, irrigation and weed control made up a small slice, but they had the highest margin. The reality was that Efren had no structure. He felt anxious from his inbox and jumped between tasks all day. He knows the profit will work. Irrigation at 120 to $150 per hour. But most days he's in the office. He works on emails, quotes, scheduling and phone tag. Low leverage tasks worth 20 to $25 per hour. That gap is the whole story of the working GM. Efren wants to blow past $500,000. But he's stuck doing admin because no one else can do it and there's no system. He's juggling, setting crews in the morning, answering every email, DM and voicemail, random quotes and follow ups and doing irrigation work. Leads aren't even the chokepoint yet. Time is he could double the amount of irrigation work. There are plenty of jobs coming in. If Efren swaps office hours for field hours irrigation at $150 per hour. The math hits hard. 15 hours per week reclaimed from admin means that there's $2,250 per week in high margin fieldwork. That's $9,000 a month in revenue. Unlocked. That could fund a part time admin. They could answer phones, process emails, send invoices and manage scheduling. But that only works if he makes admin turnkey. We arrive for the turnaround. To support him in the next six weeks, Efren took action. He did everything we discussed in this chapter. Result. He hired a VA admin. This saved him about 15 hours a week. Now he spends full days on irrigation and weed control. That alone cracked the code. With admin covered, he focused on driving more leads. He rebuilt the website using lawn carewebdesign.com he focused on upselling high margin services. He texted, emailed and called current mowing customers. He shared offers for irrigation and weed control with more leads and upsells. The business pushed him out of the email inbox. Now he generates $150 an hour at 250 to $750,000 in annual revenue. Your profit isn't made in the office. It's about driving high margin work in the field. Also, it involves systems that let others handle the admin task. Efren's pivot proves it. Efren trimmed monthly overhead. Rent went from $2,000 a month to $700 per month. He was able to stack $35,000 of cash in the bank. He upsold profitable services. He systematized admin so he could bill $9,000 more per month. Stop hiding in the inbox, Build process, delegate admin. Go make money working. GM Summary Sales what's broken? Owner still does all sales reactively. Slow response times to fix, standardize estimates, delegate formatting and follow up to the admin and use IQ forms and OTP estimates for speed operations. What's broken? Employees cause slip in quality to fix. Use estimate videos, checklists and a yellow slip accountability system to standardize output admin. What's broken? Overloaded and chaotic. Owner still does most Admin the fix, delegate or automate all admin except scheduling. Keep overhead under 15% of revenue with per minute or VA support. Working GM checklist goal build systems stabilize operations get first layer of team running without you. Film estimate walkthrough videos for every job. Use the yellow Slip accountability system for callbacks and errors. Train crew to run jobs without you. Present route jobs and schedule using CRM Calendar. No more whiteboards or sticky notes. Create estimate templates in CRM. No custom quotes each time Fire poor performers quickly stop carrying dead weight. Document top five admin tasks. Delegate to virtual admin or seasonal office staff. Hit 50% of revenue from recurring work. Take a set salary. Reinvest remainder into marketing and growth. Chapter 4 the Full Time GM finally, you are off the truck. Off the physical grind. The million dollar mark is within range. You are over $750,000 in annual sales. You are shooting for 1.5 million. You have five to 15 employees in the organization. What sales looks like as a full time gm. Now the GM has one job sell. That's it. At this point, you are out of the field. A trained office worker or virtual assistant takes care of admin tasks. The bottleneck that's left is sales. Recall that the full time GM is a leadership. Hat is the role the leader of the business has. This could be an owner or an employee. If you're the owner, you're still the one doing sales and estimates. This is usually the last seat that the founder lets go of. Why? Because it's high leverage? Because they're good at it? Because handing off the sales feels like letting go of control. To grow a 3 million plus dollar business that runs on its own, you need to focus on sales. Leads are no longer the problem. The business is big enough that you're paying for ads. You run promotions, print marketing, online ads and more. Now there's pressure. In the spring, leads pour in. All of a sudden you're buried in quotes. That's why there has to be a system. Winging sales doesn't work anymore. Tracking leads and following up on quotes daily is important. If you don't follow up, you're missing opportunities. You're likely spending thousands of dollars each month to get leads. If you can't close them, well, you're wasting that money. The sales machine Nothing can be random. You're not improvising your script. You're not guessing prices from the seat of your truck. No way are you sending your proposals from a personal Gmail account. Instead, you have the office schedule sales meetings. They use clear Scripts and time blocks. Brand estimates with consistent formatting. Have it linked to a customer portal. Automate follow up sequences with text, emails and phone calls. When you lose estimates, you track the reason in homeworks. Gone is your assumption that they don't like the price. Now you have data. You use it to improve the sales process a regular basis. Your pricing system exists in the price book. It's the byproduct of tracking expenses. You know about budgeted hours. You understand material costs. You know the price of delivering services. You know your overhead expenses. You review your prices quarterly. You adjust them to reflect your margins. Close rates and goals. As mentioned earlier, there's a range that you need to be very aware of. If your close rate is below 30%, that means something is wrong. Your price might be too high or your follow up system isn't working. It could also mean that you are taking too long to get the quote to customers. Before I look at price reductions, I first look at every step of the sales process for leaks. Are emails not getting delivered? Do I need to send estimates via text? Should my pricing be over the phone instead of in person? Should I give pricing right away or within 24 hours? I know I said this before. It is worth the reminder. So many businesses go broke because they fail. Here. If you're closing more than 70% of your jobs, it means you're leaving money on the table. Raise prices by at least 15% and you will likely see very little impact on your close ratio sales. Adjust with the season. When you're busy, the goal is to walk away from one time jobs. Increase the recurring work density. This keeps you busy and makes revenue predictable all year long. During the off season and lulls of work, use one time projects. Those fill in the gaps. At this point you are using upsell campaigns. You offer discounts and promotions to your existing customers. Tie any discounts to the slow season dates. You can't give those discounts during the busy season. Never slash prices without careful consideration. Fewer jobs require a property visit. Many jobs are now priced over the phone or on your website. You have a system that qualifies leads before they even enter your funnel. Screening questions help to find out the lead's budget. Customers can send photos or videos of their property. Scheduling uses a process based on budget hour capacity. You can get credit cards on file from your website. This uses instant quotes from homeworks. You're not wasting time on bad leads anymore. It scares away tire kickers and bargain hunters. There's a handoff system. Sales don't touch operations as a Working gm, you wore every hat. You sold the job, walked the property and talked to the customer. Sometimes you even did the work yourself. That's over sales now transfer to ops without any issues. Every job comes with estimate. Videos recorded on site, job notes built out in homeworks, prepared material, lists locked in, crew assignments, admin notes on what to invoice. After the estimating process, you never have to visit the site again. That's the goal. Your brand sells now. You have wrapped your trucks. Your team wears branded uniforms. The artistic details of your website match the trucks and your yard signs. At this point, your marketing engine is powerful enough to create its own leads. People recognize your brand. Your trucks are like rolling billboards. You're building equity. Professionalism is no longer optional. It's expected. Customers pick your premium service. They ignore cheaper options. You have a professional website, professional vehicles, professional office staff to answer phones, doubts and struggles of sales. As a full time gm, you do estimates all day, while out in your truck, you're fielding constant texts from your crew. Your office manager is calling you with questions and your bank balance never seems to look the way you'd like it. This is the full time GM phase where sales are the main role and your biggest bottleneck. This is where I see many people bumping into unexpected walls. They worked for years to get to the million dollar revenue stage, only to find out that the grass was not greener on the other side. Now they're busier than ever, but they are no longer profitable. The worst part is that even now, your basic business worries can sneak back in. Leads are feast or famine. When you hit the seven figure mark, you raise prices. This protects your margins and helps you manage capacity. But leads begin to slow down. That's when the fear creeps back in. You have many marketing channels, but are you sure which ones work best? You're spending money on Facebook and Google. You still deliver door hangers and mailers. You haven't set up a system to track where your leads come from. You don't have a how did you hear about us? Kind of process. You don't have Google tracking or Facebook pixels set up. So you're unsure which marketing channels to focus on and which to cut. As a result, you guess. You pump out new ads and pray they work. Need more leads, spend more money on ads. Which ones? All of them. Sales becomes a full time job. Congrats. You're the top salesperson in your company. You're also the only one. This means that if you take the day off, everything stops. There are no estimates which means there are no new jobs. No new jobs means no more revenue. This also means that the infrastructure you've built grinds to a halt. Admin has no invoices to send operations, has no jobs to do. You are both the top of the funnel and its bottleneck. The way out, of course, is to delegate. But you're afraid to do it. You know that if someone messes up a quote, it costs you money. If they bid too low, you're the one paying for the loss. If they misjudged the project scope, your ops team may fail. Then your brand suffers. You're back to that old concern. No one else cares as much as you do, so you can't trust them. You stay in the sales seat, and it begins to feel a lot like a cage. You finally made it so you don't have to work in the field anymore. That sounds a lot less stressful. Now. You start underbidding to keep people busy. Now you have more employees than ever. You begin to get very worried about staying busy. When the slow season hits, your calendar empties. All of a sudden, employees are looking your way for more work. You cut your prices and seek ways to keep the crew busy at all times. Your goal is no longer about growth or revenue benchmarks. It's about covering payroll. If you let all these people go in the off season, you'll be starting fresh in the spring with a new team. Your job interview sets the expectation for your team to have work all year. You're also training customers to seek discounts. This sets up for a very unprofitable off season. You waste time quoting the wrong people. Your admin isn't as good at qualifying leads. You're wasting time sending quotes to people who would never convert. The tire kickers, the price shoppers, and the just curious types. They never intended to book your service. This wastes time and money. It's also discouraging since you manage all the sales. You're suffering from poor lead quality. You want to stop paying for ads. It brings in all the cheap customers. You are the bottleneck. When you're the only one making money, you turn into a bottleneck. Your company's growth depends on how much work you can get done. You can't imagine handing off sales, and so you stay stuck. You can't train your replacement. You're too busy selling. It's this lag that creates an invisible wall between 1 million and $2 million. It's where the vast majority of home service businesses peak. You can't delegate sales without Trust. But how can you trust a person when there isn't a clear process for them to follow? You feel trapped. You're completely tied to your business. The money is good, but your freedom is non existent. Even though you're more successful than ever, you're also more stressed. You can't go on vacation without things falling apart. Even missing a day feels like an insane choice. Even with a better bank balance, you're more stressed than when you were broke. Why become successful if it feels worse than before? On the one hand, you want to keep growing the business, see how big it can become. But you're sometimes tempted to burn it to the ground. Get rid of the cumbersome components that have cost you your sanity. You'll make less money, but you'll feel happier. And isn't that worth it? Despite this, you feel like there should be another way. Instructions for Sales As a full time gm, your job is to keep the calendar full. Your primary goal at this point is to close deals and increase revenue. The faster you close, the faster your business grows. But you need to do it right with systems. Without systems, you guessed it, you're still in a bottleneck. Here's how to do that. Track your numbers religiously. You need a well defined weekly sales scorecard. This is non negotiable. Check your close rate. Look at your number of leads and your outbound activity. This includes door hangers, cold calls, emails and more. Know the cost of each lead and the amount of revenue produced by each customer. Without these numbers, you're guessing. You can't scale guessing. You can track leads better using QR codes or landing pages. Send customers to specific offers. You'll have easy access to data about your marketing channels. Scale the upsell system. You don't want to only drive revenue through new leads. You also need to maximize the value of your existing customer base. This could involve several steps. Create a monthly upsell calendar. It should reflect seasonal trends. Identify which services are most popular in each month. Create a promotion around that service. You can notify customers through mass text and emails. In homeworks. Train your crew how to sell on site. They'll notice things when they're out in the field. Give them the power to make recommendations and increase revenue right there on the spot. When you were on the truck, you always got upsells. You'd see what customers needed and reach out to them. Many of them accepted more services. Now you are not doing the work. We need upsells to keep revenue coming in. This way we won't have to spend money on ads to find every new customer. The customer has already given you money. The likelihood that they will give you more is high. You only need to ask. Most contractors don't upsell. Thus most contractors are poor. It makes me furious that home service business owners are broke. They spend over 10% of their revenue on marketing year after year. That's all their profit going to big corporations like Google, Facebook and the Postal Service. It is hard to double leads. It is easy to present upsell offers to current customers. This will help you double the average revenue you make per customer. That will double your revenue. No ad spend required. When a customer buys more services, they are less likely to leave. Your churn will go down. Customers leaving, stop cutting prices. Sell them more services. Become hard to replace. Home service is all about solving customers problems. Teaching your crew to find problems they can solve will boost revenue. Don't expect them to do it out of the goodness of their heart. Create an incentive program. Reward them for bringing in work. Keep track of upsells from your crew on the homework's dispatch board. They're taking sales off your plate and driving revenue in the process that deserves compensation. Automate everything except for the close. You should not give your valuable time to menial tasks. Focus on high impact tasks. Follow up phone calls, client meetings, closing deals and upselling. Automate or delegate the other tasks, reminders, formatting and email follow ups. You can use your CRM to set up email and SMS automations. You can create templates for estimate descriptions, layouts and pricing. Use a saved library of sales messages and templates for your admin to send Build a real sales pipeline. You as a GM should be analyzing your close ratio across services and regions. Here's what a basic sales pipeline looks like. The lead comes in, we send the estimate. We start the follow up cycle. The job is either won or lost or we get ghosted and lose a job. As a full time GM you need to track the reasons why estimates decline. Second swing offers for declined estimates. This could be a discount or an upgrade to the service you offer. Create the language of execution. Create the language the entire company will use to do its work. These are the estimate notes and estimate videos. It needs to be clear to the admin, the crew and the customer if the estimator has to go back to site. If the crew doesn't understand the scope of work, that's a system failure. Estimate videos and notes are the standard. Full time sales equals full time follow up when the schedule is full far into the future you can take your foot off the gas Let work come to you when the schedule is lighter. Follow up More personalized follow up will improve your close rate. You can do this with texts, calls and even videos. Sending a personal selfie video via imessage will knock the socks off your customer. You will stand out. They will respond. They will not ghost your estimate. Send a screen recording to explain the proposal to the customer in detail. You could show their property on your screen using Google Earth. This is how you separate yourself from the pack. This is how you increase the close rate with higher prices. You want to speed up the delivery of estimates, but also keep them personal. The systems must be flexible. I still do this. Here's an example of a personal video I sent to a lead named Scott. He expressed interest in joining Augusta Lawn Care as a franchise owner. I still do personal follow up. It works. Eliminate bottlenecks to scale. You need to reduce the business's reliance on you. This means automating as much as possible. It also means the admin is taking care of estimate formatting. This is not a sales function. If a customer calls in, the admin team qualifies leads at the top of the funnel. People using your instant quote form will see the cost and scope of services. The admin team inputs data into software. This cuts down on time spent with customers who waste it. Shifting from in person estimates is essential. The time of the estimator salesperson is most valuable. Case study from the turnaround show Cody runs Trinity Tree Care in New Orleans. He's been in business for three years. On paper it looks like a decent tree outfit. But when I arrived for the turnaround, he was in the middle of a slow motion train wreck. First problem, no profit. Whatever revenue came in went straight out the back door. Second problem, $120,000 in new equipment all financed. And third, he had hired a salesperson six months earlier. He thought bringing in a pro would take sales off his plate. That move almost killed the business. The new hire was costing him 25% of revenue in salary, commissions and perks. Jobs were underbid, close rates stayed at 20% and she often earned less than her wage. Cody told me she's great with people, but charm doesn't pay payroll. Sales is the heartbeat of a service business. Every dollar flows through it. Letting go too soon means risking the whole company. If you don't have systems, you depend on someone else's skills, confidence and judgment. And most of the time that gamble doesn't pay off. I told Cody straight fire her. Not because she's a bad person, but because the numbers don't lie. Keeping her meant bleeding cash every month. If he takes sales back himself, he could double his close ratio overnight. No one knows the work, the customers and the pricing better than the owner. He finally did it. Letting her go saved out four to $5,000 a month. That alone stabilized his cash flow. And once he stepped back into sales, close rates jumped and jobs got priced right. The average ticket value doubled. The warning is simple. Don't give up sales too early. As a full time gm, you're still a closer. Don't outsource your company's key function until you have solid systems in place. Cody's mistake is common. Owners want relief. They want to buy back their time. But sales are the last hat you take off, not the first. What operations look like. As a full time gm, you are now off the truck. Your crews work every day. You always have trucks on the road. The jobs are rolling in. You've got several crews. Your total employee count is under 15. You're not big enough for middle managers, but you're too big to do everything yourself. Some owners try to force their way out of this stage. They do it by working 14 plus hour days that will work. Unless you burn out at this point in this workflow, you will still get involved in large projects. You still manage equipment breakdowns and move materials. And if a new hire doesn't show up, it becomes your problem. Your training process might also be a bit patchy. Instead of creating a system for new hires, you pair them with your top employee and hope for the best. Unfortunately, because a guy is good in the field doesn't mean he's a good trainer. Employee onboarding exists but hasn't scaled. You lean on veterans instead of a repeatable program. You focus on sales. But you often text your field crews during the day. At this point, communication is a matter of life or death. You need a morning huddle. Set aside 10 minutes every day, set expectations, review job notes and assign responsibilities. This is your chance to align the crew before they mobilize for the day. Project debriefs are great in theory. In practice, they rarely happen. Your crews finish at different times and often in various locations. So communication usually happens through text. If it happens at all. At this point, you better have your CRM and mobile app locked in. You need real time clock ins and job updates. You need access to budgeted hours versus actual time for every job, for every task. If you don't track these things, your profit will leak away like water from a cracked bucket. Your crews must be self contained. They need to have access to job notes and estimate videos from inside the app. If you need to show up to brief them, the job, that's a system failure. And yet, without you on site, quality is suffering. Crews with low quality training produce low quality work. Callbacks become more frequent. Churn becomes a real risk. If it's left unchecked, it can destroy your business. Recurring customers aren't the only ones leaving. New hires take a long time to get trained up. But it seems like the moment they get good, they leave too. Employee retention is abysmal. Here's what you need to know. What you need is to develop career paths and training systems. You'll keep wasting time, effort and money on training with no results. This is the bottleneck. Your business has more people than ever. Still, it's linked to you in many ways. You're the gm, but you feel like a babysitter. And if you can't find your way out of the stage, your business will plateau like most businesses do. Struggles and doubts in operations As a full time gm at this stage, operations can begin to feel like quicksand. The harder you work, the deeper the hole beneath you seems to become. You're working hard, chasing leads, growing your team and booking more jobs. You've likely formed strong teams with five to 15 good workers. But quality may begin to decline. Before, you checked everything by yourself. Now you're busy with many parts of your business. You might be lucky to visit a work site once a week. Without systems, your crews run wild. Training and management run on tribal knowledge. Word of mouth instructions pass from one person to another. The game of telephone is painful. Vague success metrics skip checklists. The crew forgot the job notes. Training is a joke. The company throws new hires into a truck. No orientation. You aren't proud of this. You also don't know how to fix it. Well, you do, but you have no time. Your schedule is full of meetings and estimates. You used to run training yourself. Now crew leaders handle it. People who were never trained to train. The result? Inconsistent quality, frustrated customers, a growing stack of yellow slips. Callbacks piling up. You start to wonder, what if I fire the whole crew and start fresh? Equipment is a black hole. Safety gear goes missing. Equipment disappears. Tools break. No one knows when, why or how. Without systems, managing, equipment relies on duct tape and hope. No tracking, no assignments. No accountability. You focus so much on keeping people busy that you miss the slow financial leak. It's from missing gear, wasted time and lost productivity. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. Thank you so much for listening. And one of the things I love about homeworks that we've recently instituted is the waitlist and unscheduled work feature. Now there's times that you get a job accepted and you don't know exactly where to put it on the schedule. You know it generally needs to get done during certain time of the year, but you don't know exactly where to put it on the calendar. That's what the wait list is for. This could be for something like blowing out a irrigation system, or it could be for core aerations or something that you know you do for a bunch of your customers, but it's kind of weather dependent and you don't know where to slot it in. That's what the wait list for. It's super powerful feature to be able to very quickly move jobs onto the schedule. Like if your crew gets finished really early this week, just pull from the waitlist and fill up the rest of the week. Unscheduled work is probably my favorite page though. Every single time right now, if you're using a different software, an estimate gets accepted. You might get an email notification or a text message or an alert, or you just go to the estimate list, filter down by which estimates are accepted, then you click into the estimate and then you schedule each line item that was accepted. That's a long process. All of that is now on one page called unscheduled work inside of homeworks from one page. Your admin person, if they're a remote VA or someone that is part time, they just go to one page every day and just know that anything that needs to get scheduled shows up on that page. And from that one page you can individually schedule line items or attach it to existing visits automatically. It's super slick. Go check it out. Go to Home Works, book a call with the team and they'll give you a demo of exactly how to use the waitlist and unscheduled work to make sure that you as a full time GM are able to focus on sales and not operations. Firefighting has replaced leadership. You're not managing your crews anymore. You're reacting to their endless issues. If a mower breaks, you get the call. If someone calls off, you fix the schedule. If a customer complains, it's your phone that rings. You're the one who handles the bad review. You're the one who issues the refund. Stepping out of the field didn't give you breathing room. It gave you more problems. You traded a drill and hammer for a smartphone. You run your business from your truck. You reply to crew Messages. You take customer calls. You also solve problems all day. You're always busy in the chaos. The little things often get ignored. This includes follow ups, review requests, surveys and job photos. Delegation should be the solution. But there's a problem. You don't trust your crew. Every time you hand something off, it falls apart. Even the systems you've tried to build don't hold up. Sops get ignored. Checklists go unchecked. And to be honest, you're still making a lot of it up as you go. Even with a growing team, you are still the key driver of your business. Your effort drives everything. Your willpower fuels it. Your adrenaline powers it. If you step away for 48 hours, the whole thing collapses. Decision fatigue has set in. Every single choice comes down to you. Small problems can feel overwhelming even if you know how to solve them. You don't get five interrupted minutes in a day. You're buried in chaos. And your biggest ambition? Getting to Friday without losing your top employee or upsetting the wrong customer. You are the bottleneck. You handle every job, you hear every problem you make every solution. Your personal capacity caps your business. It's not sustainable. It's not healthy. You remain in this role because of your fear. You know if you take a vacation, your business will suffer. If you take a single day off. Estimate Stop sales. Stop admin stops. The business you built, the thing you once loved, is now consuming your life. The money is good. That's the only silver lining. You gained more financial padding. You've lost your sleep, your peace and your sanity. Now you're stuck with the hardest question. Should you keep scaling up or burn it all down? You're too big to go back to the simplicity you once had. Your current structure can't handle more growth. You know that every day, one wrong move could make everything fall apart. Instructions for operations as a full time gm. Pay for performance needs to be in place. Pay for performance P4P should have two parts. The first part is base pay, guaranteed dollars per hour and overtime pay. The second part is a bonus that employees earn. This means that employees get paid based on the revenue they produce. When they work harder, they get paid more. The system should encourage efficiency, but quality is also factored in. That's where the yellow slip system comes into play. Lots of yellow slips lead to firing. The system should allow non billable time for training, equipment, maintenance, shop work. Make it fun with scoreboards and leaderboards. Show your top performers. Make yellow slips public. All this is possible using p4psoftware.com all the training for the P4P system is free on the website. Integrate it directly into homeworks. You can get my book on Amazon. Pay for performance why Hourly is a failing formula. If you have fewer than three employees, you could use Excel to track the numbers. You can trial this offer for 30 days free. The larger the team, the more impact P4Pmakes. The goal is to incentivize your employees to think like you as much as possible. This will create a system where people work harder. It also makes it easier for you to track efficiency. Who does the job well? Who is wasting time? Who is making the business money? Who is siphoning off your profits? An efficiency score is budget hours divided by actual hours. In other words, what percent of the work your crews do can you bill to the customer? A typical efficiency score is around 70 to 90%. If it's above 90%, you have an elite crew. If it's under 70%, it's a major red flag. A good efficiency score is around 70 to 90%. If it's above 90%, you have an elite crew. If it's under 50%, it's a major red flag. The efficiency score is also beneficial for the crew. They need to know their goals and how to boost their earning potential. One area to look at for inefficiency is vehicle loading and equipment maintenance. I've been to shops where it takes crews the better part of an hour to get started. Streamlining the process can save time. Tools have a designated place. Materials have labels. Each truck setup has corresponding supplies. There is a workflow for loading the trucks, loading materials, doing a safety check. Over time, this will boost your efficiency score. The key is always to reduce the amount of time spent on non billable tasks. I did not want to install P4P. I had to. I was running a $1.2 million business. I was working 80 hour weeks. I was running around doing estimates. I was a full time gm. I had no money during the winter. Margins were tight. Yet my crew still asked for raises. Some of them deserved them. My pay scale was all over the place. Hourly rates were random. If they asked for more money, they received a larger amount. I based the rate on how badly I needed laborers and when they asked. Paying hourly is unfair. Having no compensation model is unfair. It had nothing to do with who produced the most money for the business. Since implementing P4P, I have not had a single crew member ask me for a raise. They see the top performers inside the P4P software mobile app. If someone did ask me for a raise, I would point them to the leaderboard. I would tell them to watch the highest paid team members. They get in early. They plan ahead. They don't loiter. They use the bathroom and get food while fueling up. They fuel up at the end of the day. They view their job notes the night before. They pack lunch. They don't take extended breaks. They don't forget equipment at the shop. P4P is a must. It saved my business. If you are a full time gm, I beg of you, do it. It will be hard to install. It will change your business. Guaranteed. The trifecta P4P open book management profit sharing the trinity P4P open book management plus profit sharing profit sharing Open Book Management and Pay for Performance Work together to drive results. Open Book management means you open your finances up to the team. You show your income statement. You show expenses. You show prices. You show everything. You hide nothing. The thought of this might be scary to you. This is key for pay for performance. Without it, the team won't trust the numbers you provide. Pay for performance drives performance. Open books establish a line of trust. Profit sharing creates loyalty. It also encourages employees to think like owners. Some people try to hybridize this system. They use one or two of these. Something breaks. Then they say P4P doesn't work. You must install the full trinity. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk. Understanding Seasonal labor if you have seasonal work, you need to have seasonal labor. This might involve hiring seasonal workers when business is booming. It could also mean letting staff go for a few months each year. Consider the off season when optimizing efficiency. I've talked a lot about off season factors in my book the why Home Service Is a Terrible Business. I give five tracks to use during the off season to make more money. Here's the bottom if your revenue is seasonal, your labor needs to be too. This might mean hiring people who know right away they'll only be around for a few months. I'm not saying that you need an off season, but if you have one, labor supply must match it. Estimate Videos for any job Operations run well. When the crew gets clear estimate notes and a video and homeworks, they complete the job from start to finish without needing management's help. They should know what equipment they need for the job, the customer's expectations, how long it will take, where to park the truck, where to store materials, areas of caution. They can do the job based on the estimate notes and videos. They should not need any follow up questions. The estimate video is stored in homeworks. Yellow slips Equal accountability. Mistakes lead to yellow slips. A job is on the schedule and a crew goes out and does the work. Later, there's a complaint or callback. A yellow slip is born. The team will discuss the problem at the next meeting. The idea is not to treat anyone like a child, but to prevent repeated mistakes. We don't frame them as negatives. We use them as a way to flag callbacks when they come up. At the end of the day, someone posts the yellow slips on the board. The manager sends the responsible team member back to the job site. They must talk to the customer and fix the issue. Many people have trouble with pay for performance. They find it tough to manage the quality of work. The yellow slip system is the key that enforces this. It's about trusting your crew instead of wasting 40 hours a week fixing errors. Job site pop ins. Some full time GMs still want to show up unannounced at job sites to check on the work. This can be acceptable in certain contexts. It helps your crews know you're present. You also get to interact with the customer in a personal way. You could upsell them on another service. If your pop ins are causing tension with your operations team, that's a problem. Your goal should be to avoid micromanagement. It erodes trust and wastes your time. Avoid cameras and audio equipment in your trucks. This is detrimental to the culture of the business. No one wants to feel like they're being monitored all the time. If they don't like you, they might damage the business and take away customers. It's a cultural problem. Dash cams that look out the window are acceptable. The plug in trackers are okay. They serve as a way to manage assets, ensuring the crew and vehicle stay safe. They provide diagnostic tools and safety measures. Only use truck trackers to know where the trucks are on the map. Monitoring the crew members often does more harm than good. Top performers have options they might leave if a culture of mistrust reigns. Most employees don't like the owner watching over their shoulders. Video and audio recording. The crew crosses the line. Use your CRM to track key performance indicators. You don't always need to have your eyes on your crew. You only need to know their efficiency score. If the crews are efficient and customers are happy, you don't need to stress about the details. If the crew is on P4P, they can stop at gas stations all they want. They can be on their phone all they want. I don't care. The harder they work, the more money they make. Final word. If you keep getting pulled back into the field, you won't do the work needed to move your business forward. Sales is the highest leverage position in a $1 million home service company. Avoid micromanaging operations. This way you can focus more on sales. This is only possible if you have systems. Yes, your team will benefit from daily or weekly huddles. Make sure everyone has what they need to do their jobs well. This doesn't involve constant oversight. It's about creating systems that inspire people to work hard. With pay for performance, you can achieve this. What Admin looks like as a full time gm at this point, you've hired someone full time for admin. It could be an office manager. It could be your spouse or a virtual assistant. Whatever the situation, office work is out of your hands. Or at least you like to think it is the reality. You have some doubts about your system. Your monthly profit and loss statement doesn't match your bank balance. Receipts are missing. Invoices aren't getting paid on time. No one follows up on receivables. Your admin should handle these things, but your mind is always racing. You're busy with your tasks, but you're worried they aren't doing theirs. You often think about tasks you pay others to handle, such as invoicing payroll and answering calls. What's the problem? You pass the task to someone else, but you still feel responsible for it. This often happens when you lack systems to support your office team. You're freeing up time on paper, but you haven't reduced your mental load. You still have one foot in admin. If they hit a roadblock, they call you. If they need to order a new checkbook, they contact you. If a problem arises with quarterly payroll taxes, they contact you. This can create a lot of friction at this point. You're reactive. You're still absorbing problems. You're not building systems for peace of mind. Instead, you're always putting out fires and cleaning up others messes. The admin doesn't know how to prioritize tasks. They don't see how scheduling jobs connects to budgeted hours. They have no perspective on what tasks create revenue. They focus on small details like tagging accounts. They do not address overdue invoices. They might be trying hard. Without structure and clear priorities, they are bound to fail. They are an essential component of your entire business. They have passwords, account details and customer contacts. If they quit tomorrow, your whole business would collapse. There's an issue of tribal knowledge. Your business is still personality dependent. It's not your personality anymore. You have key man risk. If they leave, you're dead. Doubts and struggles of admin As a full time gm, the point of hiring a full time office employee was to get your life back. You didn't want to spend more time on routine tasks like emails and billing. You wanted to move into higher value areas. Sales and leadership. That was the dream. But it hasn't panned out that way. Chances are you're still buried in work, every bit as stressed as ever. You check someone else's work while they handle admin tasks. You look for mistakes and often find them. The scheduling spiral. Your calendar is chaotic. Crews call out. The phone never stops ringing. It's hard to run the business with someone else in charge of scheduling. Why is that? Simple answer. Your new hire hasn't learned the business yet. They don't understand budgeted hours. They have no grasp of how much the weather can influence the schedule. They don't know how to push work out in a way that avoids angering customers. Sometimes the schedule shows confusing job placements. Some crews have nothing to do one day and then get booked to the teeth the next. You find yourself putting out fires left and right. In the back of your head. You wonder, is this what a million dollar business feels like? Well, is it? You're making an incredible amount of revenue. The thought of a million dollars flowing through your business each year is pretty amazing. But you keep checking your bank balance. You wonder where is all the money going? Despite your success, you feel broke. You have full time employees. You have an office, software, phones and utilities. Not only is it all expensive, but it's creating headaches for you left and right. You micromanage the people that are meant to save you time. Here's the crazy thing. Everyone on your payroll is busy. They never stop moving. You don't think they are lazy. They're inefficient. They do the work, but not in the way you would do it. This creates a trust gap. You start to resent your staff. Every missed call, late invoice and awkward customer chat adds to your frustration. These issues wouldn't occur if you were in control. Out of control. Your office manager can access everything. QuickBooks, Payroll, CRM, Customer Accounts, Emails, bank logins and vendor accounts. They have their own methods. They create processes without informing you. The truth is, you don't even know how the work gets done anymore. You have emails you haven't seen, invoices you didn't check, and a follow up sequence you know little about. You wonder, if my admin quit today, would the business fall apart? The answer? Probably. Without your admin, you'll be back on the phones Tomorrow you'll answer every call and send every invoice. Plus you'll juggle your other executive duties. Your admin has a lot of power. You begin to worry that they will use it against you. Reactive, not proactive. Sound familiar? This was an issue in the early days of your business and you know it's still a problem now. Your admin is not building systems, they are triaging issues and then passing them to you. Customer complaints, emails and questions from your admin. Also texts from the crew. You were supposed to delegate these things, but there they are on your phone. The problem is worse since the admin and office carry huge overhead costs. Micromanagement for survival. You know you're micromanaging. You are aware of the phrases around this problem from books and podcasts. You're aware that the goal is to delegate outcomes, not tasks. But you know that when you step away, customers get upset. Information is lost, estimates get messed up, invoices are delayed. What else is there to do but step in and handle things yourself? You're afraid that if you lower your guard, everything will fall apart. You're worried about getting blindsided. Your business is still fragile and you know it. Deep down, mistakes can be very costly due to its size. The Admin Paradox without your admin, you'd have to do everything on your own. But with them, you're still doing an awful lot. And this makes you wonder if they're even worth the expense. That's the paradox. It's also a problem that keeps many full time GMs stuck much longer than they should be. It's not that they love administrative work. Trusting someone to manage their business can feel risky. Here's the if everything falls apart in the absence of one person, you don't have a business. You have a house of cards. You don't need more control, you need better systems. It's not about doing the work yourself. It's about having processes that make sure it gets done. The idea that you need perfection is what keeps you stuck. The key is to let go, but not immediately or right away. Instructions for Admin As a full time GM at this point, scheduling is no longer on a first come, first served basis. The way that you book jobs needs to align with the goals of your business. In peak season, when leads are pouring in, grow your base of repeat customers. Focus on recurring revenue. This will keep you busy throughout the slow season. It will also give you a large pool of people you can upsell and cross sell. Time sensitive tasks still take priority. You can't tell someone sure we'll cut your yard in four weeks. The grass will be up to your knees. It is time sensitive. You can't tell someone you will be there to fix the leaking toilet in two months. It is time sensitive, but we can move less time sensitive jobs out even if we need to offer them at a discount. Having consistent work year round is valuable. You can use flexible pricing to make that happen. For example, use surge pricing. Once your backlog hits a certain point, you can set up systems to increase your quoted price when your schedule is busy enough. Keeping the right amount of work scheduled is key to profit and sustainable growth. How Much should Admin cost? You don't want to spend more than 15% of revenue on your admin costs. This includes your wages for your admin manager. It also includes rent, utilities, Internet furniture and other office expenses. When your numbers hit the 15 to 20% marker, you're burning through profit. Here are some benchmarks under 15% of revenue spent on admin is elite, 5 to 10% is very good, 10 to 15% is is good, 15 to 20% is bad and 20% plus is very bad. High lease or mortgage costs can hurt businesses. They would be very profitable otherwise. If you can use a virtual admin, it's a good way to save money. As a rule of thumb, once you get over the $750,000 annual revenue marker, you can afford full time help. The key is to make sure there is the key is to make sure that they are efficient. You want your invoicing and billing to be done the same every time. The office manager should use templates. Use homeworks to automate invoices. It can create them, send them, and charge payments. You also need your collections process to be airtight. Keep credit cards on file. Send invoices the same day. Require deposits. Good systems make chasing payments very rare. You also need your profit and loss reports each month. They should be accurate and well categorized. The balance sheet needs to reflect what is in your bank accounts. Remember, there's no value created in paying someone to take out the trash. An office manager can waste 75% of their day looking busy the entire time doing overhead tasks. Cleaning the office is good. Turning on the coffee pot is good. Replacing the toilet paper is good. Choosing music for the office is good. Talking to the crew is good. Filling up the soap dispenser is good. Organizing desktop icons is good. Warning none of these things bring value to the business. Admin is a cost to the business. They do not generate revenue. They must be efficient every single minute. Develop good communication systems. What should they do first? Should they address the 50 waiting emails? What about the 20 voicemails? Or the 20 pending estimates? Admin needs to know how to prioritize and execute on tasks. There is a tsunami of tasks they must complete. Admin tasks are sporadic. They come in waves. Which one is most important? Which one should we complete first? Which ones are time sensitive? Later we will talk about the four things every manager needs. Spoiler alert. One of them is clear prioritization. You don't need a unicorn, you need a system. We all wish we could hire a rock star office person. Let's assume you don't get that person. Instead, build a set of systems that anyone can pick up and use. As long as a person has a reasonable level of competence, they can do the job. They don't need to have a natural talent or enthusiasm for office work. They don't need 10 years of industry experience. They need to follow clear, simple instructions. That means you need to write SOPs for every single admin task. Create templates for repeatable work. This includes follow ups, collections and client communication. Set up password managers and share digital vaults. Create dashboards to track payment times and accounts receivable. Write scripts for everything. How to answer the phone. How to reply to emails. Hint Lean on AI. At this stage, your margins are already going to be thinner. Your team is bigger. The overhead is bigger. Admin alone is taking up 10% of your revenue. That is half of your profits. We must stay vigilant. That means ensuring that admin is a tight ship dialed in even when you're not the one doing it. Final warning. Don't get comfortable. You're not the one doing admin anymore. That doesn't mean it can't drag your business down if you have to check every invoice your admin handles. If they ask you questions before responding to any email. If you screen voicemails before the office manager gets in each morning, you're not delegating. You're outsourcing anxiety temporarily. It will end up back in your lab. Clean up your office. Work. Fix systems. Build out a clear playbook. Make sure that your business is not dependent on any specific person. Your office shouldn't fall apart when your manager goes on vacation for a full time gm. The key is clear for the admin department. Stay out of the weeds, but never lose control. Organization systems Systems are as important for admin as any other task. You need video training checklists and clear SOPs. Upload these to cloud services. These could be Google Drive, Loom or a private YouTube playlist. They should cover every possible task. This includes charging credit cards, weather delays, approving automated messages, answering phone calls, routing jobs, making estimate follow ups, creating callbacks in yellow slips, running P4P software for pay for performance reports, handling unhappy clients, refund and overdue policy, inputting estimate request forms, scheduling jobs, formatting estimates and the list goes on. Every task the admin takes on should be clear. Break the workflows into bite sized videos, not two hour monoliths of how to dispatch. Title each video using keywords. Categorize the videos into folders. These could include invoicing, scheduling, billing, emails, and answering the phone. This will make it easy for employees to find relevant training. Have your office manager update training for all software platforms on a continuous basis. Make it part of their job description. Admin helps you get paid. Your admin can help by setting up systems that speed up collections. You should collect deposits before starting any work net 30 needs to be a thing of the past. That means customers have 30 days to pay you after you send an estimate. It hurts cash flow. From the time you do the work in the first week of the month to the time you get paid could be 50 to 60 days. That's horrible. To that end, you should track the amount of time it takes you to get paid. A slow collection cycle can hurt your business's ability to grow, ramping up your overhead. For some businesses, this stage can be tricky. The workload might suggest hiring more staff, but the profit isn't there yet. Remember that you want to keep the administrative cost at 15% or less. Hiring a second admin may be too expensive for a business of this size. You can help your office staff by using a virtual assistant or seasonal assistant when necessary during the busy season. Before doing that, make sure your SOPs are solid. Also, ensure your efficiency is good. It may be that it's not a lack of help, but an inefficient system. That's the problem. I want at least 50% of an admin's day to be productive. Doing tasks on the phone, running payroll, writing emails, not doing office chores or chatting it up. Adding a second office employee can slow things down. Before you hire a second admin person, focus on automations. Automating tasks will benefit your one full time office manager. The goal is always to reduce dependency as much as possible. Automations fire off 247 regardless of who is in the office, homeworks will take care of many manual admin tasks. This helps your business not rely too much on one person without having to hire a second admin Overhead role critical Admin metrics. You need clear expectations for response times. How long is too long to respond to a customer's voicemail? How many seconds before the phone gets picked up? What is an acceptable wait period for responding to a customer's voicemail? An estimate, an email or a complaint? Every system you create must include accountability. Who is responsible for each metric? Full time GM Summary Sales what's Broken Owner is the bottleneck. No one else sells the fix Build a pipeline in the CRM Automate everything but the close and begin training a salesperson with KPIs and benchmarks operations what's Broken Crews lack training and retention callbacks Increase the Fix Implement P4P Pay for Performance systematize onboarding and use efficiency scores and yellow slips for accountability Admin what's Broken Admin is reactive, fragile and holds keyman risk The Fix Write SOPs for every task. Write automate billing and collections and create a digital training library to reduce dependency. Full time GM Checklist Goal Remove yourself from daily ops business runs on systems and leadership not you Build SOP library sales operations Admin Digital and repeatable Hire dedicated full time admin support in house or virtual Automate invoicing, billing and collections in CRM Pay for performance P4P scoreboards and efficiency tracking across all crews. Reduce service menu standardize offerings and cut complexity. Get 75% plus of revenue from recurring maintenance services unfortunately, people judge a book by its cover. Reviews help Amazon, Spotify, Audible and other platforms rank books to help struggling business owners. We need more reviews for this book. My goal is to get this book in the hands of my 18 year old self. I want to prevent the pain I had to go through. I am donating 100,000 books to entrepreneurs. If you can do me a favor and give the book a review on Amazon, I would appreciate your help. Chapter 5 GM plus things are rolling. The million dollar mark is in the rearview mirror. You now have over $1.5 million in annual sales. You are on your way to exceeding $3 million. You have 10 to 30 employees in the organization. The owner acts as the GM but has a middle management team. What sales looks like As a GM plus you have a dedicated sales manager. That means you're no longer doing the estimates yourself. As your business grows past $3 million in revenue, you might have more than one salesperson. Marketing is now multi channel truck wraps, referral programs online marketing. You track many customer acquisition cost metrics. You know the cost per customer of every service, every channel, every every time of year. You understand the seasonality of each platform. Facebook ads, local service ads, Google Ads, door hangers, mail marketing. All divided up into neat, tidy KPIs. You have well defined benchmarks. Time, from estimate requests to meeting a customer proposal. Delivery speed. Your sales pipeline is super slick. Tune for speed and efficiency. You track these KPIs weekly without fail. The marketing budget is much bigger. The business is bigger. Bigger revenue, bigger expenses. A single mistake might cost a lot. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. The days when your phone would ring once or twice in an afternoon are but a distant memory. You're drowning in leads. Most of them are inbound. People come looking for your business. You do a little bit of outbound marketing. You call commercial property managers and contractors. But the majority of the time, leads come inbound from your website, from upsells, from referrals, from word of mouth. To handle the huge number of leads, you adjust your marketing. The goal is to bring leads in through your webpage, Automate sales, weed out bad customers. Homeworks is being used to manage the entire sales funnel. Automations are crucial at every stage of the sales funnel. At this point, it covers everything from initial outreach to appointment confirmation. It automates follow up and invoice collections. Your business develops its own gravity. By now, you should ask every customer how they found you. You'll find often that the point of activation was not the point of exposure. Your business is everywhere. Trucks, billboards, yard signs, Facebook ads. Someone might have clicked on your Facebook ad to make the call. But they have seen your crew and truck working at their neighbor's house every week for two years. They saw your yard sign. They got two door hangers. Doubts and struggles in sales. As a gm plus, you're searching for optimization in sales. At this stage, your costs for marketing are ballooning. You're throwing money at lots of ads during slow seasons, leads are still flat. You start questioning whether the spending is worth it. You wonder if you should fire ad agency. Are they doing something wrong? Redo the website? You worry about artificial intelligence. Is it changing the way Google filters traffic? Is SEO dead? Is that why leads are slowing down? You're overwhelmed with options. Now that you're out of the field, you finally have the time to explore them. This, unfortunately, is a blessing and a curse. Exploration can bring your business to a new level. The right offer, the right creative. Bam. A new level of leads unlocked. But you are spending a large chunk of profits on ads. You hired an agency. You hired an SEO expert. You hired a social media company. They all claim good results, but you aren't so sure, the idea of large commercial or even government contracts begins to nag at you. Jobs you never thought possible while making $500,000 a year now seem within reach. This type of thinking can bring your business to wonderful new places. It can also be dangerous. If you aren't careful, you can lose sight of the things that got you where you are. The new Shiny service. The new shiny ad campaign. The new Shiny marketing channel. The new Shiny pricing system. The new Shiny sales training. They could all be good. They could all work. But you don't know which one. Uncertain infrastructure. A thought burns in the back of your mind. Did I build a house of cards? When your close rate dips, you take a closer look at your sales team. Why are they so much slower than you were? To make matters worse, you're still getting pulled back into the weeds from time to time. Particularly if you only have one salesperson. If they quit, get sick or go out of town, you pick up the slack. When they take a two week vacation, it turns into a month long headache for you. You're still managing the jobs you quoted while they were away, even when they returned. Then there were tasks your sales team didn't seem to handle. Nitpicky. Long time customers. Complex quotes. Handoffs between sales, admin and operations. Balls keep getting dropped. No one can say why. There's a lot of finger pointing and only you can pick up the slack. And so you keep one foot in sales. And you don't exactly mind. You like selling. But in the back of your mind you know that there should be systems for this. Systems that don't rely on you. Pricing uncertainty. You start to doubt your pricing. First it's the declining close rate. Then a bad online review. Way overpriced. Way undervalued. Not that every review is completely accurate. But you take another look. Pull up the customer's information. Sure enough, the review was right. The price quoted was too high. You're worried about a lot more than one bad review. You start to panic about your entire reputation. This fear keeps you in the trenches. The truth. Don't panic about your sales delegation process. Don't rush to take control again. It's time to build a better engine. Your sales manager is slow. Don't blame them. Blame a lack of benchmarks, improper training, failure of systems. These are things you can control. These are things you can take ownership of if you hired the right person. But they aren't getting results. The problem might be with your onboarding or training. It could be a problem with your metrics and tracking if you hired the wrong person, it's an issue with your hiring process. No matter what, the buck stops with you. That level of accountability can be difficult, frustrating, but it's what transforms you from a manager to an architect. An architect steps away from the building. They do not lay brick. They do not raise a hammer. They analyze from afar. They look for points of failure, areas of improvement. They do not roll up their sleeves and do the work every day. Instructions for sales as a GM, if you've scaled to the 1.5 million to 3 million dollar range, you will have a sales manager or estimator. You're no longer the one selling. Your job is to enhance systems, verify data and simplify processes. At this size, businesses have several core considerations. They need to begin thinking about geographic expansion versus centralized scaling. Now you face a choice. You can build a giant business and keep growing with a three headed leadership system, sales, operation and admin. All report to one gm. This is the GM model. Or you can begin breaking off into many locations using what I call a hub and spoke model. This means one command center, a central system that manages admin and sales for all your locations. Working GMs of the branch locations handle operations for the hub and spoke model. Expand into new service areas gradually. Unless you have plenty of investment capital. If you have lots of money, you can dive in and have some losses. At the beginning. You will grow faster. But if you want to be more conservative, use this method. Start accepting jobs in the new city or service area. Build out a route. Aim to build a monthly recurring revenue of at least $20,000. Then break off that location. Get a shop space and hire a general manager. This reduces drive time. It prevents the hub location from growing too large which needs mid level management. Grow using this hub and spoke model. Or grow one GM location to $3 million. Both options can work, but you need to pick a clear path. The route you choose will have a significant impact on the systems you develop. In the GM model, with one location, you can specialize. You have a sales manager. You have an operations manager. You have an admin or office manager. Your sales team also specializes. As you pass 3 million, your sales manager may need help. They could hire an account manager or estimator. Each department manager needs an assistant or mid level manager. In the GM model, the owner usually serves as the gm. They have three managers that report to sales, operations and admin. They centralize it. It is easy to control. This works well as long as there is a strong leader. In this case the GM in the organization. In the GM plus model. You will begin dividing your teams based on services. Management divides project crews from maintenance crews. KPI breakdown. Your KPIs at this level need sharp refinement and close monitoring. Every metric needs to have a name, a face and a dollar value attached to it. You need to track close rate by service. For example, what is your close rate for maintenance jobs versus one time installs? I don't want a blended average. This could hide flaws. Close rate by customer type how often do you close commercial jobs compared to residential ones? Again, I don't want a blended average. That could lead me to make pricing decisions based on bad data. Customer acquisition cost broken out by city or zip and service. I want to know where in my service area leads are coming from. I want to know what they are buying. CAC by source Facebook Google Yard signs mailers Door hangers Layer in seasonality so you see time of year swings by channel and service for each project. I want to track these metrics. These metrics are visible to the estimator or sales team. Time to estimate speed to lead from lead received to meeting with the client Time to proposal from meeting the client to the price delivered Job revenue Job expenses Job profit Were the budget hours Accurate? Set these KPIs for each sales rep and if needed for each division, get detailed to get accurate. Don't incentivize bad work if you're in profit mode. Watch out when giving commissions to sales managers based only on top line revenue. Why? Because it's not always profitable. If your sales team gets paid based on total sales, they might under quote hours and prices. They may also over promise to secure jobs. That creates perverse incentives. Deep discounting Shaved budgeted hours Low margin work that sets crews up to fail. Instead tie bonuses to hitting budgeted hours. Accurate profitable jobs are the goal. Profit margin targets Upsells cross sells High close rates Low callback ratios Incentives must be well thought out to achieve the results you want. A person you meet on indeed will never want the same things you do. It's through strong incentives that you can change that. Get alignment of their goals and the business. External coaching and training Training keeps sales managers from getting complacent. A third party sales coach or a trade specific mastermind can keep things fresh. Monthly refreshers encourage forward momentum. A neutral coach can adjust grips and body language. This helps the sales manager feel safe from their owner's criticism. It also breaks their old habits. It's helpful to bring someone else in if you don't have an outside coach for your sales manager Consider doing ride alongs. Let them shadow you for better learning. You do the estimate. Demonstrate what a good client meeting looks like. They analyze the property, they create the estimate, Then compare notes monthly 1 on ones and pipeline reviews. The GM should meet with the sales manager to go over the sales pipeline. Review the pipeline weekly. Hold short daily huddles for pending estimates and major projects. Once a month, have a deeper one on one meeting. Review close rates and discuss team performance in detail. The idea is to refine processes and get ahead of problems before they develop. Every project finished is a chance to teach the sales team. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? How could we make the process smoother? Did we set up operations and admin for success? Define the perfect estimate Handoff what does a perfect job handoff look like? If you don't know the answer to that question, your sales manager doesn't either. You need to define it, document it, enforce it. Every estimate must have notes about the job. Use the right template labeled photos and when needed, estimate videos, a description that provides a clear outline of the work's scope. If needed, provide drawings or plans. Apply the correct tags and workflows in homeworks. They should include realistic budgeted hours. Set clear rules for lead response time and follow up frequency. Use automations to ensure compliance. This is how you keep sales, admin and operations in harmony. Operations and admin will hate sales if this handoff is not refined. The salesperson won't get the blame if the project goes south. Admin and ops will. Systematized Lead Generation Sales managers aren't usually good at marketing. Most applicants won't have experience creating ad sets, videos or pictures. They likely won't know how to create offers. They likely have never run a campaign or managed an ad budget. If you don't have a full time marketing professional on your team, this responsibility falls to you. You develop the lead generation strategy. You select the ad spend, you build the playbook. You create the ads you set up. Tracking this might mean hiring an agency to run the ads for you. Once you have a marketing system in place, teach the sales manager how to turn the faucet on. By increasing or decreasing the ad budget, they can govern the number of leads they get. If they are super busy, they can reduce the ad spend. If they don't have any estimates this week, they can increase the budget. Create boundaries, but give them the autonomy to make changes. Advertising to warm traffic. Use homeworks to re engage former customers. Reach out with texts, emails, all through an automated cadence, at least monthly. This makes your estimate Count more consistent makes lead flow more predictable. I want to avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars on marketing. This is the result of lead flow that goes from firehose pressure to a trickle in a few weeks. For the Augusta locations I own, I refuse to spend $1 on marketing. That is, if we have not first sent an email and text blast to all our contacts. Every contact in the database is an opportunity. Why spend money on ads if I haven't first sent free marketing to my database? Unhappy customers change their mind and come back. New customers need more services sold to them. Recurring customers need projects done one time. Projects need maintenance packages. Don't neglect these free leads. At the GM size, you could spend six figures on keeping lead flow consistent. Exhaust your warm audience outreach before spending on cold traffic. Cross training for coverage. Your sales manager will take a vacation. They will have a sick day. In some cases they'll walk off the job or get fired. It happens, but it doesn't have to be destructive. Your pipeline shouldn't halt if one person leaves. If it does, you have a very fragile business. At the GMP level. Your sales system needs to include at least one trained backup. This can be an assistant estimator or even a seasoned crew leader who can step in. They would get access to clear sops and short video tutorials. Have clear video tutorials for creating estimates. This prevents the GM from having to step into the sales manager's role. It will also force systems and simplification. The sales manager creates the training videos. This will allow them the flexibility to take a vacation. New jobs don't come grind to a stop when they do postmortem reviews. If a job goes off the rails, you need to know why. Sit down with everyone involved. Sales admin ops. Review the notes, watch the estimate video and figure out what went wrong. Was it something with the budget hours? Was there a communication breakdown? What happened? Figure it out. Develop and refine your system so it doesn't happen again. You will feel out of control. It comes with the territory. The hands off feelings linked to the GM model are normal. It's a feature, not a bug. Managers are making key decisions for the business. They are identifying problems and creating solutions. Your job at this point is to give up control and focus on scale. You don't plug holes. You work to build a boat that doesn't leak. I see the sales department as the place that many owners serving as the GM get pulled back into. If you have to plug the holes, you will have a hard time scaling past 3 million. You will stall out around 2 million. You are the architect, not the manager. What operations looks like As a GM plus, you now have an operations manager in place, which means that you no longer go to job sites. Your teams segment by region or based on the services. For example, the north and south segments of your service area. If you offer many services, you can split your crews into departments based on their work type. Middle management influences how well your operations run. They ensure that SOPs are followed. They monitor checklists, pay attention to the systems, train the team. Smooth operations rely on managers who love perfecting systems. It's not glamorous work. It is a lot of the same. The work is monotonous for some. This is where we make or break efficiency. This is where we are profitable or generate losses. Your operations manager ensures quality. They use customer follow ups, site visits, surveys, requests for reviews. Finding areas of improvement should be constant. This includes a regular review of crew KPIs. We will keep refining processes to boost these scores. KPIs include budgeted hours, efficiency scores, the percentage of jobs getting completed on time, the average load time, the average drive time, broken equipment reports. These reviews involve the GM and the operations manager. They discuss feedback from customers. They recap survey responses and online reviews. These feedback loops hold your operations manager accountable. Technicians go through formal onboarding and training. The operations manager is responsible. This will include checklists and benchmarks to help new employees get up to speed. New hires are learning how to do the work and how to manage internal processes. The operations manager might conduct this training. Senior technicians can also be trainers. If the owner serving as GM does the training, they will likely share a lot of tribal knowledge. Tribal knowledge works for less than 10 employees, not for 20. At this level, training must run like a course curriculum. When crew leaders have the right systems and checklists for onboarding, training becomes more standardized and efficient. For big projects, the operation manager holds a recon with their crew. Their goal? To find processes that need improvement. During these recons, they will go over the project timeline, the budgeted hours, the efficiency score, always with the goal of looking for improvements. Where could we store materials to make things faster? What rental equipment was not used enough? When did we have to wait for a subcontractor? How could we have saved time? The operations manager is looking to optimize. Could we park the trucks better? Could we maintain the equipment better? Can we improve safety training? How can we reduce midday trips back to the shop? Sales, operations and admin departments will each have their own communication channels and chats. For growth to continue, handoffs must be flawless. Your Time is protected by metrics. Mid level managers are there to guard your time. You're not popping out to job sites. You are not a crew member. You do still support your team. Show up at huddles, weekly meetings, one on ones. But you're not the core source of crew leadership anymore. It's good middle management that makes this possible. It's also about the numbers metrics you can look at in place of physical oversight. The challenges of the GM stage are less about what you do and more about what you do not do. You're no longer hovering. You're trusting your systems, standards and people. A lot of struggles and doubts in operations. As a gm. You built this business, bled for it, trained early crews yourself. You used to know every truck, every property, every customer. Now you're out of the field. An operations manager handles your crews. The crews report to him. Your manager takes care of the morning dispatch. They also conduct all the applicant interviews. At this point, you don't recognize the new hires. It feels like your company is slipping away. Disconnection is now your biggest enemy. You're not involved in daily operations. You're not the one handling every callback, delay or bad review. You still feel the physical stress from them. This is tough. The issues you see come from factors you no longer control. You're on the sidelines. You watch new hires you don't know mess up the business you built. Culture is shifting. You can't stop it. You see the warning signs everywhere. Late crews, trucks you're paying for, are sitting idle at gas stations. Equipment is going missing. Job photos don't get uploaded the way they're supposed to. There's a lot of customer complaints and no one is willing to own up to the problems. Your operations manager responds with vague assurances they're handling things. But it doesn't feel like problems are being handled. Not when you see the same issues come up day after day. You start to wonder, does anyone care about this business as much as I do? And you know the answer. Of course not. Why would they? Tribal training. Training is tribal, not systematized. Onboarding is not well structured. The team follows it sporadically. Some sops that should be there aren't. No one seems to know how to load a truck. There's no standard for quality control. There's no structure for safety. There are no checklists for equipment management. There is no standardized method of accountability. You used to handle things with your experience and knowledge. Now you're hiring operations manager to do that for you. The problem? They're winging it. And they never stop complaining. Flat tires, broken equipment, drama within the crews. They feel overwhelmed, often in many of the same ways you felt overwhelmed when you were in their shoes. No one is using scalable, standardized solutions. When tasks finally get done, it's your operations manager muscling through the chaos. You're micromanaging, but from a distance. You don't want to babysit your ops manager. You paid them a good salary so they can remove you from this side of the business. But there are problems and you can't ignore them. You don't have data. You don't have dashboards. You don't have physical visibility. You're combing through job notes, checking WhatsApp chats at night when you should be unwinding with family, looking for subtext in Slack messages. What is actually getting done? That's what you're trying to find out. All this worry and micromanagement makes it feel like you're back in the field. The worst part is that you're not effective at all. You're still several steps removed. You have all the stress, all this anxiety, and it's getting you nowhere. Key Man Risk is now a company wide threat. As tough as things are, you know they could be much, much worse. What would happen if your operations manager quit tomorrow? You know the answer to that question and it keeps you up at night. It's not that you would lose the person. Your operations manager hired every crew member. They trained them. Not always well, but they did. They know the quirks of all your job sites and equipment. Above all, they are the person your technicians trust. They play a key role in maintaining your business's morale. Without them, you're dead. Even if you did step in, it wouldn't be the same. No one looks to you anymore. You're like a substitute teacher entering a room of strangers whenever you meet with your team. Now you see how fragile your operations are. You need metrics. Perfection is not the standard. It hasn't been since the day you started hiring new people and stepping off the truck. What you need now is clarity. You should understand what's going weekly. Efficiency summaries, callback and yellow slip counts, quality scores from customer surveys, job completion timelines and work backlog. Knowing these numbers will tell you all you need to know. Is there enough work on the schedule? Is the work getting done efficiently? Are the customers happy? That's it. With the right data, knowing these numbers will tell you all you need to know. 1. Is there enough work on the schedule? 2. Is the work getting done efficiently? 3. Are customers happy. That's it. With the right data, there's no more need for micromanagement. Without it, guessing is all you have. Not only can that exhaust you, but it can also destroy your business from the inside out. The truth is, letting go of control is the toughest part of the GM transition. You're no longer in daily operation. You're betting it all, your livelihood, your legacy and your brand, on another person's skill to lead, train and safeguard your reputation. Cracks can form without notice when you don't know how to look for them. They can appear as missing equipment, messy work, or a slow leak in efficiency and team spirit. Here's the problem. The longer it takes for you to address these issues, the worse they become. The worse they get, the more you'll want to jump in and fix them yourself. But when you do that, it undoes all the hard work you put into delegating. This is a make or break point for many business owners. Can you build systems, create dashboards and develop strong training tools? These things will make you less needed. Until that happens, you're always going to be the emergency brake. P.S. no one is happy when a driver pulls the emergency brake going 70 miles per hour. Your team, the passengers, will abandon the car. Hey, what's Mike here? One of the things that I see businesses that cross 1.5 million doing so often times is spending tens of thousand dollars on marketing and advertising. And what tears my heart out is the fact that we can just advertise and market better to our existing customers that are already inside of our database. One of the things I love most about homeworks is the ability to do mass text messages and mass emails. The text messages though really awesome because the open rate is like 98% compared to email at 30 to 40%. And we have seen a massive explosion of use of text messages because the open rate is better, the click through rate is better, and we're able to get customers to respond back to our personalized messages. And so we just last week actually sent out over 15,000 text messages from my one location. Within 24 hours we had sold 18 accepted estimates. We had over $8,000 worth of scheduled work and that was just within 24 hours. Over the next seven days, the next week we were able to close more jobs and almost $20,000 of one time projects. So if you're tired of spending money on Google and on Facebook and just pouring money towards agencies, instead of that, spend money on just marketing to your existing customers. And from homeworks you can just click a button and text Everyone click a button and email everyone and immediately get a upsells and cross sells to other services to your existing customers that already know, like and trust you. And you have their credit card on file already, so go check it out. Go to Home Works, schedule a call with the team and see how mass texts and mass emails can alleviate you from the black hole of death when it comes to ads on Google and Facebook. Instructions for Operations As a gm, your role now is not to manage crews, but to manage the people who are managing the crews. It's a significant distinction. You no longer go to any job sites. You create systems and train leaders to manage them well for you. Here's how you can make it work. At this point, you as the general manager will train the operations manager on leadership. Teach them to lead people, train people, hold team meetings. In other words, keep yourself out of operations. Cut the complexity of your service. The more simplified the mix of your services you provide, the easier it will be to manage. You can't put up with low margin services anymore, especially when they come with big headaches. The 8020 rule suggests that a small portion of your services lead to the majority of your problems. The simplest solution? Drop them. If a service keeps causing callbacks, crew confusion, scheduling chaos or low margins, let it go. Your business doesn't need to focus on every service it is capable of providing. It should focus on the options that make the most sense for operations or profit. You can use adding new services as a way to combat the off season, but you don't want to add them as a way of increasing leads and revenue. Especially not during your busiest times of the year. Let me tell you a story. I grew my first location to $1.5 million. I was serving as the GM. We were doing everything. Putting greens, artificial turf, walls, patios, grading, excavation, tree chipping. The whole nine yards. It was outdoors. We did it. One day we installed a putting green. It did not look good. We lacked the skill to build it in the proper way. We had finished the job, but it looked horrible. Like a high schooler's side project. Not professional. The customer complained. I met the property owner. They were not happy. I assured them that we would return. We would stretch the turf. We would get out the wrinkles. We would make it right. I left the property two miles away. I parked my car. I knew what I needed to do. The crew had no business trying to install putting greens. We were not the best option for customers. That moment marked the start of a painful two year process. To simplify services. We removed everything that we were not the best at. But I still had a problem. That putting green looked bad. I drove back to the office. I asked Liz, my office manager, for the checkbook. I wrote out the full 100% amount for the putting green. It was almost $10,000. That was one third of the money I had in the bank. I drove to the customer's house, gave them the check and told them we would not be returning to fix the job. We didn't know how we needed to reset the business. The customer said thank you. He was very kind and thankful. But that wasn't the end of it. The day before, I collected a $30,000 deposit for an accepted estimate on another putting green. We were going to build a kidney bean shaped putting green. We would elevate it two to three feet above grade. A block wall around the perimeter stone steps up to it. There was no way it would go well. I called the customer and canceled the job. I did not deposit the check. They were furious. A negative Google review resulted. I deserved it. I had over promised that job had been hours of design work, many meetings now canceled with a negative post about my company. To top it all off, by the way, I had $35,000 worth of turf and turf supplies in storage. I sold it for pennies on the dollar. I had spent thousands on turf installation, training for my team. My operations manager was not happy. He left for another job. Simplifying services and processes is not easy. It is painful. Over the next two years we had to cut back. We sold off dump trucks, tree chippers, track loaders and skid steers. It was no accident that my profits soared the year after we simplified everything and started P4P. I made more profit in that year than I did in the first five years since opening the business. Scan this QR code. It is a webinar. It's about what I did to transform my business and make $280,000 in owner's distributions in one year. Equipment tracking and Management Be careful with tracking and managing equipment here. You can't afford to pump $3,000 into repairs for a $1,000 piece of equipment. You need to know when things go missing. When do people neglect equipment maintenance? If you're not tracking these metrics, you could be leaking an enormous amount of money. Your operations manager should be monitoring this. It starts to make sense to buy new trucks and equipment at this stage. The bigger you get, the more expensive delays. Become a large crew going stagnant for a week costs a lot. A truck going down wrecks the schedule. Use section 179 and accelerated depreciation to ensure you don't pay a lot of taxes. Talk to your accountant at Home Service EPA about buying new trucks. Equipment utilization metrics are more important than ever. I've seen lots of businesses at this size get piles and piles of equipment. They don't use the equipment graveyard grows. Selling it would free up cash they could use to get themselves to the next level. Buy more of what you need. Do it with careful consideration and only when your data indicates a need. I want teams to use trucks and equipment for at least 50% of working hours each week. Otherwise the insurance, storage and maintenance costs aren't worth it. I would rather rent the equipment. Pay for Performance Starts with operations I mentioned earlier in the book how important it is to pay people based on their output. Create systems and processes that inspire them to care about the service's outcome. Like you do. You want happy customers. You want efficient work. Make that their goal too. P4P should extend the operations manager's compensation plan. Why reward tenor when output is what actually matters? Here's the core metric Efficiency score Budget hours divided by clocked hours. If it drops, it means that your training is poor, your crews are sloppy and turnover is high. Planning and execution are poor. This is the North Star for operational excellence. Strong KPIs mean you do not have to micromanage every action. You need to look at the scores. If the numbers are right, things are going well. If they're dipping, you need to intervene. Failing to do so can lead to catastrophe within weeks. Build the perfect job completion loop from clock in to invoice Every job needs to follow the same process. This will be your business's definition of a perfect job. Everyone needs to understand the expectation and know how to meet it. The perfect job loop looks like 1. The crew clocks in. 2. They loaded the trucks and trailers. 3. They complete the work on site. 4. They do a walkthrough with the customer. 5. They take photos and videos. 6. They mark the job as complete in homeworks, Admin is now responsible for payment. It should run like a conveyor belt. If something drags you in, it breaks the loop. Someone needs to fix it. Empower your operations manager. You want your operations manager to make decisions. You don't want to get text messages about minor inconveniences. You can fix this issue by giving them enough decision making power and clear limits. This means they will still involve you in important decisions, but they will learn to handle issues on their own without needing constant supervision. Well defined benchmarks are Essential. For example, training new employees is important. If I don't have a system, I will critique new employees. I will critique how they train. I will look over the shoulder of my operations manager. Instead, we have a system. Onboarding new hires follows a standard and gradual process. At Augusta Lawn Care, trainees gradually take on new tasks. The process is clear and structured. Day one, they only pick up a string trimmer. Day two, a blower. Day three, a push mower. It's not until week two, they drive the trucks. Each day has checklists. At the end of each day, the trainer has to sign off on those tasks. I don't need to make decisions in the business. I don't need to manage my manager. I manage the systems. The goal is to help your operations manager understand what they can handle alone and when to bring you in. Even when you know how to resolve a problem, first ask them what they would do. This will get them into the habit of assuming a leadership mindset. P.S. give them a company credit card. Give them a spending limit. Anything under that they can make the call on. For my managers, I do not set a spending limit. This gives them confidence to make the call. They don't need my input. I pay them to solve problems, not bring them to me. Efficiency is all important. You want your operations manager to focus on long term goals instead of putting out daily fires. When mistakes come up. The job isn't only to fix them. It's to identify the system issue that caused the problem. View crew efficiency insights on your homework's dispatch board. In operations, efficiency matters most. Track performance at the employee level. This will give the operations manager a lot of information. It also lets you see the progress of people you didn't hire, train or meet, all from a distance. At this level, your main influence isn't on specific jobs or people. Instead, it's on the systems they work in. Your job is to ensure that the operations manager has all the tools they need to succeed. This is the difference between running a crew and running a company. Applicant tracking and video screening software. At this size of business, you have 10 to 30 employees every month. Some employees will leave. This creates a constant need for more team members. The GM or operations manager often spends their time calling applicants. They set up interviews and deal with no shows. To avoid this, use an ATS applicant tracking software. All our owners at Augusta Lawn Care use it for free. It's called Sparkhire and It usually costs $499 per month. This helps us filter out unqualified applicants without wasting the time of a manager. After an applicant submits their application. They get an automated message. That message contains a link. They click the link and answer the questions with their smartphone's video camera. Most applicants never take the time to answer the questions. They apply to 50 jobs at the same time on a hiring platform such as indeed they are working to meet unemployment requirements. But the Serious applicants take five to 10 minutes to complete the interview questions. This weeds down the number of applicants. The ones that would ghost you for an interview won't submit a video score and rank them. In the past, you might have had 50 applications to look through. Now only 12 applicants sent in their video interviews. You know that five of them are useless. Three of them look super solid. You set up an in person interview with those three. You don't spend two days lining up interviews for people who would waste your time. What Admin Looks like as a GM plus after you pass the $1.5 million revenue marker, it's not practical for one office manager to handle all the admin tasks. Once you hit $3 million, start splitting administrative tasks by responsibility. This is where roles like accounts receivable begin to develop. For businesses with multiple locations, having a command center for admin is best. It helps manage all admin tasks efficiently. We will discuss more about setting up a command center later in the book. An office manager might be handling payroll and basic bank deposits. They have an assistant or two who answer the phone, respond to emails, and so on. Redundancies help ensure that urgent tasks get done. This includes payroll and invoicing. Having all that lien on one person is too high risk. At $3 million in revenue, admin work is more important now than ever. They are the first point of contact for the customer. They might be making estimates over the phone or setting up meetings with an estimator. They introduce leads to your business. They gather contact info from the instant quote form on the website. They send invoices and ensure they collect payments. They will often talk with the operations manager during the day. Customers call the admin team for callbacks for work change orders for complaints. Homeworks can double the output of an admin person. It's easy to freak out about software costs. It's key to note that $500 a month in subscriptions can keep you from needing another admin. That's $5,000 per month in salary saved, plus rent, utilities and office equipment. Complicated Miscellaneous Tasks the irregular tasks are where you get pulled back into admin. Tasks like tax payments and license renewals happen once a year. This adds to the complexity of admin work as a business develops. These occur on an infrequent basis throughout the year. It's tough to set up training and systems for events that happen every 12 to 24 months. This is the only admin area the general manager sometimes works on because the tasks are still one off. There won't always be an SOP in place for tax and insurance audits. They are occasional but important tasks. When something happens less than once a month, it's harder to delegate. That is okay. The bigger you get, the more often they will come up soon. Even one offs will find a rhythm that make delegation worthwhile. Admin is customer Facing mistakes can really hurt your business. The key is to be thoughtful in your KPIs, mindful of your software and AI integrations. The aim is to allow the owner to skip reviewing every invoice or customer message. Don't get sucked into the complex of feeling useful. This will drag you into client disputes and communication. Set up dashboards and metrics to track admin from afar. Doubts and struggles of Admin As a GM overhead is getting expensive, you begin to wonder, should I outsource this overseas? Can I automate using AI? Why am I paying so much for office space? Computers, people? These concerns are at their worst during the off season. Salaries don't change based on how busy you are. When you're paying over 10% of revenue on admin overhead, your margins are fragile. You also wonder, should I open multiple locations, develop a centralized command center hub, or create multiple offices, each with its own admin? It is hard to find a good office and shop space close to my service area. Spot checking Admin is actually one of the easiest components of a business to manage. There are many KPIs that you can review. Most admin tasks are on a computer. It's not like the crew that goes out into the field remotely. You can create scripts for communications. You can track average hold time and speed to answer phone calls. You can track missed calls and voicemail replies. Yet you still feel the need to provide oversight. You worry that if your admin worker walked out, it would be a major blow to your entire business. They take institutional knowledge with them. Passwords, job notes, communication protocol. There's a good chance you are correct. You're tired of getting dragged back in. Despite all this admin, you still get called in to handle the odd menial task. Insurance reviews, license renewals, random audits. Things that don't happen often enough to have their own SOPs. And while these little tasks aren't consuming much of your time they still feel like gaps in your business's systems. Anyway, for the money you're spending on admin, shouldn't someone else be handling this? Why am I going to deposit checks at the bank? Isn't that task below me? Isn't there something else I should be doing? The admin bloat. Now you have one office manager, but they have one or two assistants. You're still answering questions. Even with the extra overhead, the handoff between admin and operations keeps failing. More admin staff, more miscommunication in the trifecta. Sales operations admin Admin gets payment for the work. Admin greases the gears. When they aren't communicating well, it feels like they're grinding the gears. You still jump on the phone when the business misses calls. You still see constant evidence of sloppy work. You pay for more, but it always feels like you're getting less. Why are you doing the job of the office assistant? You don't trust the reports you should now be leading from a dashboard. You're always logging into QuickBooks to check numbers. Then you look at the timestamps and communication channels. When did the manager email that to you? Did they text it to you? Or Was that in WhatsApp? You don't trust the data. This means you're back to monitoring everything, even if you're not in the office. You begin to doubt the profitability of your business. You wonder why overdue invoices are climbing. You worry about missed calls. Emails aren't getting addressed. Looking at these problems, you wonder if you should hire more office workers. You know there should be systems in place to handle temporary spikes and calls. You have three bodies in the office and they can't handle this. You feel like admin is reactive rather than proactive. They wait for problems to pile up, then they look for band aids to fix them. They find it hard to pinpoint the root cause of issues. Then they turn to you to come up with solutions. The biggest problem is that no one on your team seems to be able to give you a straight answer. You start to notice signs that service is getting worse. Customers complain. A friend who uses your business texts you to share a problem. They notice service is not like it used to be. They mention your office, taking days to reply. They tell you with good intentions. It rips your heart out. You are making a frantic effort to work on the business and it's not working. How many other problems are happening behind the scenes? What are these problems costing you? Is admin now a liability? Bottom line, admin is the backbone of your business at this point. It can either give you freedom or make everything feel very fragile. The difference is all in how you standardize, systematize, automate, track performance Instructions for Admin As a gm, the admin function at this stage of your business is its own department. This is true no matter your scaling choice. It applies if you're a large branch. It applies if you're a hub and spoke model with multiple locations. You need a precision based admin system. Without that, everything else will fall apart. Choose your structure. There are two core models that I've described already. Single site scaling means having one big location with many admin team members there, or the hub and spoke model. Smaller locations handled by a centralized admin command center. Both work, but they are distinct. Compensation must drive retention if you keep losing admin staff, you'll lose momentum. It's not efficient to spend months training someone on admin systems, then more on communication standards. It's also very costly when they quit. Retention based pay can include tenor bonuses. The longer someone stays, the more they earn. Role stacking pay Retention based pay can include tenor bonuses. The longer someone stays, the more they earn Role based pay. In other words, when they take on more tasks, they gain more income. Use compensation to boost speed, efficiency and continuity it's hard to train admins towards efficiency. Incentivizing longevity is very important. Use compensation to boost speed, efficiency and continuity. It takes time to train admins toward efficiency. Incentivizing longevity is very important. Generalist first, specialist later the size of your business will determine if you need a generalist or a specialist until you exceed $1 million in revenue. The answer is likely that you need a generalist. Someone that can do everything in the office. One person handles everything. This includes invoices, payroll, emails, phones, and ordering replacement parts for the truck. At this point, the admin should have time to manage everything. Being organized and efficient will allow this to happen. Once you hit $3 million in revenue, the workload is too much for one person to manage. You need accounts payable and receivable. You need scheduling and dispatch help. You need customer communications specialists. You need someone to manage both inbound and outbound calls. You might also have HR or payroll roles. The bigger you are, the more specialized you need to be. Generalists can create useful redundancies, but specialists bring better quality controls. They reduce keyman risk. Admin costs can creep Naturally, your admin costs can creep as your business grows. You might go from 10 fuel workers and 1 admin to 30 fuel workers and 10 admins. Do you See the problem? Your ratio of revenue generating staff to overhead employees is out of balance. The ideal admin load should stay under 15% of your total revenue. As I've noted before, this will include everything from office salaries to rent, sewer, water, electric, trash, Internet and furniture. With an efficient best in class command center, it is possible to maintain costs within a range of 4 to 8%. We will discuss more of that later in the book. The more admin you add, the more efficient you need to become. If not, admin costs will eat into your profit margins. Real Time Performance Tracking Admin is often the hidden Missed calls Long hold times forgotten invoices Slow response times. They erode customer trust. They crush your efficiency. Track every metric Call Wait time Target less than 10 seconds missed call rate target less than 10% time to invoice target less than 24 hours time to collect payment target less than 7 days email inbox zero frequency target twice daily customer surveys after phone calls target 95% plus positive reviewing your numbers will help you stay efficient. This way you can prevent small problems from becoming big ones. If you are missing 40% of your calls, we have a problem. Stop marketing. Stop thinking about sales. Answer the phone. Only 37% of missed calls Leave a voicemail Said another way. Pick up the phone and double your lead flow. I am amazed at turnarounds. The phone is ringing. Ignored entirely. Yet we are discussing the new ad campaign to get more leads. Crazy talk. You don't want to make your targets unrealistic. We need benchmarks that show early warning signs. A small degree of error can lead to catastrophe if left unchecked. If you are missing 30% of calls. If callers are waiting 30 seconds to get their phone call answered, start here first. Do not get sucked into the new shiny customer fallacy. Stop spending money on ads. Just pick up the phone every time fast. Automate first. Before you hire anyone else, seek ways to automate the task. There are so many options now. Phone systems with AI routing overflow call centers. Homework's automations that can handle follow ups and billing password managers that streamline access. Internal communication tools that can reign in email chaos. You don't need to hire people for peak hour traffic automation or on demand help will absorb spikes. This can include AI or third party admin services. At Augusta, there are hours when we have three times the typical call volume. We do not staff based on our busiest hour of the day. We use overflow redundancies to manage excess demand. This keeps admin costs in check, but it ensures we still answer the phone every time and hit our KPI targets. When to outsource and when not to Outsourcing is good for specialized low frequency tasks. Outsource your bookkeeping, payroll taxes, licensing and audits in house. Teams should handle tasks with high touch and frequency at the GM size. Don't outsource phone calls, scheduling, payments and invoicing. You have enough of these core admin functions to keep someone busy full time. Their value is worth their weight in gold. Admin done right is a unique selling point. Done wrong, it keeps your business from growing. Evaluating the Perfect Phone Call in the past, we used 40 data points on every admin call. We track tons of little things valuable, perhaps memorable? No? Now we measure three an upbeat tone, a thoughtful upsell and asking the 10 out of 10 question what would make working with Augusta a 10 out of 10 experience? If each call achieves these, it's a big win. The easier you make your review process, the more effective it will be. Employees can remember three to four KPIs. Anything above that is hard to recall. Sometimes you need to review calls and provide more training. But focusing on the basics of admin will boost efficiency. I want to turn admin into an offensive department. They're not only defense, this requires training office workers. They can cover their cost through upsells and reducing churn. Admin does not need to be a financial burden on the business. Can admin be profitable? Admin is an overhead expense, but it can power your sales engine. When you answer calls quickly and upsell with empathy, you add a revenue generating part to your admin process. You can prevent customer churn with proactive outreach. Great emails save customers from leaving admin employees can recover failed payments. They can encourage recurring work. It's tempting to cut admin costs by switching to automation or overseas labor. Software, AI and cheap outsourced help can assist a business. But don't overlook the value of a skilled, well trained and well paid admin team. When teams hit metrics and use good systems, the admin plays a key role that is hard to replace. It's what sets you apart from the competition. At the GM level, your admin system needs to be scalable. There's no faking it at this stage. Admin is a true and complete department. Your profitability depends on its efficiency. Case Study from the Turnaround TLC Lawn Care on my turnaround show, I visited a lawn care company called TLC Lawn Care in Washington State. Trent, the owner, had grown revenue fast. On an Excel sheet, He listed almost $800,000 in profit with no Expenses. Was Trent running a business with a very high profit margin? What was really going on? He didn't know his numbers. Expenses were there. They just weren't tracking them. His company was growing fast, but it had a shaky foundation. When I visited them, they were on pace to hit $2 million that year. They had not developed the systems and documented processes and that would support this growth. They did not have profit and loss sheets. Their scheduling system was paper sheets stuck to the wall. The office manager drew up leads in the office and placed them on the wall. The owner would take the lead off the wall, create the estimate in Excel and move it to the done column. The office manager could then format and send the estimate. They used the same process for scheduling. They pinned accepted estimates on the wall. They could sit there for months. When they got around to it, they would move them to the scheduled column. I asked how they determined who got on the schedule. Trent said, it depends on which customers call and complain the most about being delayed. Instead of a CRM, they had a notebook. They used different software for invoicing, estimating and dispatching. The crew used a different app in the field. It wasn't connected. No one recorded anything. No one estimated the budget hours. No one tracked the hours on the job. The office lady couldn't do estimates over the phone. The prices were all given by Trent. She couldn't schedule jobs. She didn't know how far their backlog was. I suggested a pricing matrix. Now the office manager can give prices over the phone. They would use that for simple services like mowing. I also advise them to use Homeworks to convert estimates into jobs, jobs into invoices. One simple workflow in one software system. Homeworks logo is three chain links. Why? Homeworks connects sales, operations and admin. It allows you to grow without breaking. I also suggested pay for performance. This model would encourage the crews to think like owners. What happened? Trent got organized. Last time we talked, he was adding budgeted hours to his business. Every job, every task, every meeting, they all had budgeted hours. Now he knew how far they were booked out. Scheduling was easier. Trent tracked his team's efficiency scores using budgeted hours. Scoreboards were now shown to the team. TLC had an awesome product. They did a great job. They worked hard. Sales were strong. They dialed the operations. But without admin systems, they were flying blind. Without software automation and clear metrics, doing this at the GM plus size is a risky endeavor. It has led to the collapse of many large businesses. GM Summary Sales what's broken? Ad spend is bloated. Focus is on cold traffic over warm leads the fix Track CAC and close rate by service and channel Create benchmarks and run postmortems to refine the sales engine Focus on upselling existing contacts Operations what's broken Middle managers firefight instead of systematize the fix train ops Manager to enforce SOPS monitor crew KPIs weekly and refine systems instead of reacting admin what's broken still personality dependent one admin holds tribal knowledge the fix build SOP playbooks, shared Google Drives and password Managers cross train backups so no one person is a single point of failure GM checklist goal scale up to $3 million become manager of managers Promote leaders into managers Develop leadership Bench Cross train admin staff Eliminate key man risk Create manager scorecards labor efficiency gross margin Churn NPS net promoter score Establish quarterly profit share or incentive plan for managers Use lead tracking for online ads Create a monthly template for email and text blasts Upsell all contacts and homeworks database Standardize trucks, tools, uniforms and equipment decide model GM plus single $1.5 to $3 million shop versus the multi unit under $1 million location build org charts with clear GM department managers, assistant managers and techs Create recruiting and training pipeline Ongoing farm system for future managers Shift owner focus to strategy, acquisitions real estate and capital allocation automate reporting dashboards p and L KPIs cash flow no more gut feel Lock in personal time Vacation without calls Business runs without you Chapter six the Cash on Hand Framework Cash is Oxygen I see many people grow their home service business too fast. A fast growing, profitable business can still go bankrupt. They speed through the four leadership hats. They go from no employees to 10 employees in one year. In doing so, they saddle themselves down with loads of debt. They have very little cash in the bank. They have cash flow problems. In other words, money coming in is too slow and money going out is too fast. Growth sucks. Cash growing too fast is dangerous if you're low on cash. So the question becomes, should I continue growing or should I focus on profits and stacking cash aside? For this reason I created the Cash on Hand Framework. Frameworks give me clarity when making decisions. A home service business needs one month of revenue as cash reserves minimum. Anything under that we are increasing risk. I know some people will say three months of expenses. Many small business owners aren't aware of their expenses. They don't get monitored. They don't know their numbers. But they do know their monthly revenue. So in the spirit of getting max utility, I use revenue as the benchmark. One month of revenue in cash in the bank. That's the goal. The same is true for the solo operator, the working gm, the full time gm, and the GM business model. The framework scales. As your revenue grows, you'll need more cash on hand in the bank. Each business owner has a unique risk tolerance. Every business owner has unique goals. Some want their business to grow big, while others prefer smaller sizes. But the likelihood of you hitting your goal hinges on staying in the game. I see many people quit because of the stress that low cash causes. Quitting guarantees you won't hit your goals. Quitting is the only fatal mistake in business. So we should avoid the temptation to quit as much as we can. Having enough cash on hand makes it easier to avoid the temptation to quit. It keeps our heads in the game. If you have more than one month of revenue in the bank, I say go for it. Keep growing and expanding. This means hiring more workers and getting more trucks. Invest in marketing, branding and advertising campaigns. This unlocks the next leadership hat. Using the cash on hand framework, we can define profit mode and growth mode. Let's also look at how much cash you need to grow your business. When you have hit capacity, you have the decision to go into profit mode or growth mode. It is one or the other. You must choose. You reach capacity when you max out with work. All your trucks and equipment are being used full time. All your employees are working full time. To take on more customers, you must hire more employees or buy more trucks and equipment. You are at capacity. You can do one of two things. One, enter growth mode. These are the quadrants on the right side of the cash on hand framework. Buy more trucks and equipment, hire more employees and increase capacity to service more customers. Or two. Enter profit mode. Do not buy more trucks and equipment. Do not hire more employees. Raise prices on new and existing customers. This is the quadrant in the top left of the cash on hand framework. Do you have financial stress? Don't have one month of cash in the bank? You are in the bottom part of the framework. Grow customers to capacity and raise prices. Enter profit mode. Stack cash. After that, speed up growth by marketing and investing in employees and equipment. Too hard to grow customers. Sell off unused trucks. Lay off part time employees. Cut until you are at capacity, then raise prices. Enter profit mode. A home service business should maintain a reserve of at least one month of revenue in the bank. To find the ideal number, average the revenue from the last three months. If the last three months revenue was 95,000, $115,090,000, you averaged $100,000 per month. I want at least that much cash in the bank. So let's say now that you have more than one month of revenue in the bank. This is what I would describe as distributable cash. This cash can be distributed to the owner. We will talk more about distributable cash later on. I averaged $100,000 in monthly revenue. If there is $140,000 in the bank at the end of the quarter, I see $40,000 as distributable cash. We will talk a lot more about the system, but when we discuss GM compensation, if you have big seasonal changes in revenue, don't distribute cash during your slow season to improve your off season and avoid cash flow issues. Read my book the why Home Services Is a Terrible Business. You can also get free training on the off season@mikeandys.com workshop. The worst case scenario is you have low cash on hand and and low growth, the bottom left hand quadrant of the cash on hand framework. In that case you have no money in the bank. Growth in customer count and revenue is a result of having demand for your services. I need that demand so I can raise prices and become profitable. Without new customers and strong demand, raising prices becomes tough. It is harder to solve the profit problem. But let's say that you have lots of money in the bank but no growth. In that case, businesses can use cash to produce growth. They can grow by advertising, hiring and buying equipment. They would enter growth mode. You can also decide to remain in a high cash on hand, low growth position. That would be the top left corner of the cash on hand framework. This is a low risk approach. Or to put another way, it's profit mode. You focus more on stacking cash than on growing your business. Keep it simple. This is the goal of every home service business. 1. Create a world class customer experience. 2. Raise prices. 3. Current customers stick around. 4. New customers keep buying. For the people saying that this is crony capitalism or greedy stay poor. If you want to be rich, follow this recipe. Focus on serving. Most businesses never deliver a world class experience so they never raise prices. Customers turn new customers. Do not keep buying. This keeps businesses small and broke. Let's fix that to grow your business. The best position in the cash on hand framework is the upper right corner of the diagram. Built to scale Cash is not a constraint on growth. It's here that you have over one month of revenue in the bank and are still growing. This place feels more comfortable and it shows that things are working as they should. Your marketing engine is functioning well Customers are coming in and filling capacity. Even when you don't spend money on ads, organic leads from your website, word of mouth and your trucks create enough work to offset churn. Jobs are profitable enough to pad your bank account. Stress is lower. Having over one month of revenue in the bank, you have a strong demand for your services. You can raise prices, switch to profit mode and boost cash reserves during an emergency. Why do many home service business owners have low cash on hand? Why do business owners not have enough cash to continue growing their company? As a business owner, your job is to get the work, do the work and get paid for the work. Businesses often overlook the third factor. They have lots of unpaid invoices piling up. They pay expenses right away, but it takes 60 to 90 days for them to get paid for the work they completed. This leads to a horrible cash crunch. If cash is oxygen, they are suffocating. It is a constant treadmill of chasing the money you have already earned. Why they have bad systems in place to get paid on the turnaround show, I visited Good Hands Roofing. The company had $278,000 in overdue invoices. They produced $1.6 million a year in revenue the year before. They were on pace to do $3 million in revenue the year I showed up. That is almost 100% growth rate year over year. But they had less than $40,000 in the bank. They were in the bottom right hand corner of the cash on hand framework. They were growing fast but had less than one month of revenue in the bank. They had a cash crunch. They felt uneasy about asking for money up front. They compared it to Robin Peter to pay Paul. When I showed up for the turnaround they were collecting 30% deposits. I recommended collecting 50% up front. They sent the final invoice once they finished the project. The customers would take weeks or months to make the final payment. I suggested that they collect all the money during the final walkthrough. We will collect payment right after we finish the service. I suggested a fee structure to encourage customers to pay on time. Every state is different so check your local laws. But if a customer doesn't pay me on time, I am going to charge them penalties. I am not a bank. In your homework's settings you can adjust what your overdue fees are going to be. They are added automatically if customers don't pay by the due date. Why are systems like this important? They put you in the top half of the cash on hand framework. You stop suffocating from a lack of cash. Customers pay on time. As you can see from the graphic, you can grow at a rapid pace and still be in hot water. If you're in the lower right corner of the quadrant, some parts of your business are doing well. You are growing. Let's say you're hitting that 80 to 90, 100% annual revenue growth mark. You are buying trucks and hiring more people. But if your cash on hand is in the one to two week revenue range, it also means you're in a very risky position. Even a successful business like Good Hands Roofing can fail in this quadrant. You are one bad project. One unpaid invoice away from bankruptcy. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. One of the things I love most about homeworks is the ability to be able to solve these problems around cash on hand and the cash flow problems that we experience in our business. The one I like the most, deposit thresholds to where you set a percentage of the estimate that must be paid prior to you ever accepting an estimate. So if you want 50% down by the time you get a notification saying, hey, this estimate was accepted, you know the deposit has been paid. Same thing with credit cards on file. If you require that, you know when an estimate is accepted, they already have attached a credit card on file. Just make it a checkbox in the settings. Also, if you really want to, you can pass along credit card fees. So like I don't want them to do credit card fees, I just want them to ach. So it's way cheaper. At Homeworks we have it where you on ACH or bank fees, it caps out at five bucks and it's only 1%. So if you have a $200,000 job, other software systems are going to charge you 1% for ACH, that's $2,000. We cap it at five bucks. That's exactly what stripe charges us and we pass that exact same fee along to you. Also, you're able to charge overdue fees inside of homeworks. So you can automatically set where after seven or 14 or 30 days that if a customer's overdue on their invoice, it automatically charges a fee. If you, if you start doing that all of a sudden, people all of a sudden come with the money and start paying you on time. Go check it out, go to home works, schedule a call with the team. And we'd love to walk you through exactly how you can use the features to make sure that your cash flow stays healthy. If you are growing, but without cash on hand, you can survive incidentals through lines of credit. It will bridge the Gap. See the chart below. Example one is what Good Hands Roofing was doing. They collected 30% down on projects. Their profit margin was 20%. That meant that 80% of the revenue from a job went to expenses. The basic math is that they collected 30% of their job revenue. Then they spent 80% of the job total on expenses. Then they collected 70% of the job revenue after they were complete. That leaves them with a 20% net profit margin on the job. The problem is that they waited 60 days to get paid the final invoice. After completing the job, they had a negative 50% profit on it. They had paid all the expenses on the job but had not yet received 70% of the revenue. This caused the cash crunch they were in. For a $100,000 roof install, you'd make $20,000 in profit. Awesome. But you would need to cover a $50,000 loss for 60 days during the project. The big problem? The faster they grew the business, the more jobs they took on. The more crews they had, the more customers they served. That 50% compounded with each project. They needed large lines of credit to tie them over until they got paid. They would need bigger and bigger lines of credit as they grew. I never want to have a negative cash position on a project. I want to collect as much up front before I buy materials, supplies and the labor for my crew. I want installment payments on large jobs to make sure I never go negative on a job. See this Exemplified in example 2. In this example, the same project never hits negative cash flow. We collect 50% up front. We collect 30% halfway through the job. We collect the final 20% upon completion. Same end result, 20% profit. But now I am using the customer's cash to buy materials and pay my employees, not mine. I am not a bank giving out interest free loans. Bad customers will balk at these payment terms. Good customers will understand. Good customers will be happy to pay up front and midway through. Credit cards and lines of credit are expensive solutions. They incur interest rates ranging from 10 to 30%. Collecting deposits up front helps. Also, storing credit cards on file is important. Finally, having overdue penalties will prevent this. It boggles my mind that people don't accept credit cards. They are afraid to pay 3% in card processing fees. At the same time, they are happy to pay bank of America 15% interest on a credit line to solve their cash flow problem. Accepting the 3% card processing fee is simpler and costs less. You can get your money in one two business days instead of waiting 60 to 90 days after sending the invoice. At Homeworks, there is no excuse. You can even have a bank account on file for customers. That option only costs 0.8% in fees. It is capped at $5 per transaction. Plus you can pass any processing fees along to your customers if you want to. If you do the work, get paid fast. A good collection system begins with your estimates and payment terms. Make your payment terms due upon receipt. Instead of net 30, net 30 means the customer has 30 days to pay invoices. After that, the invoices are due. Set up deposit thresholds. In your Homework's settings. You can set a dollar amount as the threshold for accepted estimates. If the amount exceeds that threshold, the customer must pay a set percentage or dollar deposit. In a perfect world, everyone would make complete payments in advance. But we don't require this as it could lead to job losses. The happy medium is giving customers the option to pay in full instead of a deposit. At Homeworks, when we ask for a down payment, we also offer to pay the full invoice. It is optional. About 10 to 15% of customers prefer to pay their whole invoice at once. They have been long time customers and trust you. The business gets 100% of the cash up front. The approach to improving cash flow is simple. Bring in revenue as fast as possible. Delay paying expenses as long as possible. A credit card or bank account on file is non negotiable. Storing payment methods makes collecting payments easy. You won't have to chase down payment details. In Homework's settings. You can check a box. This requires customers to have payment on file before they accept an estimate. When someone accepts an estimate, it means they have paid a deposit. The payment method is also stored on file. This cuts down on unpaid invoices. This saves you the hassle of asking customers for payment details before adding them to the schedule. Before Homeworks, we would get an accepted estimate. We would send a separate invoice to collect a 50% deposit on projects over $3,000. Sometimes we got ghosted. It made it hard to schedule jobs. We had an accepted estimate but no deposit and the job remained in limbo. For mowing customers. We required credit cards on file, but the same thing happened. We had an accepted estimate. Then we needed to email and text the customer to get their payment method on file. If they failed to put a card on file, we would be waiting before we would put them on the route. We risked not getting paid if we put them on the schedule. We got ghosted. We didn't get paid or we lost out on accepted estimates. Now with Homeworks, we collect deposits right away for jobs over $500. Customers must provide a card on file before accepting the estimate. The process is easy for them. We never wait to get paid deposits. We never wait to collect payment methods. We never wait to get invoices paid. You should never have an overdue invoice if a card declines or a bank account gets overcharged. Use Homework's automations. Send text and email reminders. Collections on unpaid invoices can become effortless. Set up payment thresholds, pay in full options and card on file systems in Homeworks. If you do this, you won't often need automated reminders. There won't be any overdue invoices. Bottom line A solid collection system keeps your cash on hand strong. You live in the top part of the cash on hand framework. You have more than one month of revenue in the bank. If you have under one month of cash saved, stay in your current leadership role. Stop growing. There is no pride in scaling an unprofitable home service business. It ruins team culture. It ruins families. It ruins lives. Each of the four sizes of business I have outlined can be profitable. A solo operator can be very profitable with low overhead. They don't have very many expenses. A small team with the owner acting as a working GM in the field can also be very profitable. Every team member produces revenue. A full time GM focused only on sales can be very profitable. No overhead managers. Enter profit mode. Raise prices, stack cash. Then use that cash to accelerate to the next level. You can break through the $1.5 million ceiling. You can afford great managers for these departments, Sales, operations and Admin. Then you can enter the GM plus model and scale up to over $3 million. Be patient. Be profitable. Stay in the game. Running out of cash is a sure fire way to quit. Cash on Hand Framework Checklist Set your benchmark. Calculate your average revenue from the past three months. Make that number your minimum cash reserve target. $100,000 per month. Average revenue equals $100,000 in the bank minimum. Check your cash position weekly against this benchmark. Collections and payments require 50% deposit upfront on projects with option for customers to pay in full. Check local laws for large jobs. Collect a deposit up front. Cover your direct costs. Make payment terms due upon receipt. Not net 30 or 60 store card or bank account on file for every customer. Non negotiable. Enable overdue penalties in your CRM homeworks. Auto applies late fees, automate reminders, text and email for any declined or unpaid invoices. Capacity and growth decisions Identify if you're at capacity all trucks, equipment and crews fully utilized. If under one month of cash, stop growth. Enter profit mode Raise prices Sell unused equipment Cut unprofitable services and employees Stack cash until reserves exceed one month of revenue. If over one month of cash, consider entering profit mode. Hire new employees Buy more trucks and equipment Increase marketing and advertising Spend expense management Switch fixed cost leases Salaries to variable where possible Subs Part time contractors Delay paying expenses as long as legally allowed Keep overhead lean. Avoid unnecessary debt if debt is used, secure favorable lines of credit before a crisis. Distributable cash Only Count cash above one month of revenue as distributable. Distribute excess quarterly, not during off season Document distribution Rules for clarity with partners or GM compensation mindset and survival Cash is oxygen. Never let reserves fall below one month. Quitting is the only fatal mistake. Cash keeps you in the game. Remember, growth sucks. Cash Profit mode comes before scale Built to leave a simple system, Business owners enjoy setting their own schedules. They become entrepreneurs for the freedom it promises. And yet, very few people actually build a business that gives back. In fact, the opposite happens. It sucks the life out of them. They cannot separate themselves from the business. Why? They feel important when solving problems, they feel needed. The sense of self importance keeps them on the treadmill fighting fires, saving the day. It's addicting. The exhaustion they feel is a point of pride. Some believe that working 14 hour days means you're a successful business owner. But here's the problem. The more your business needs you as the founder, the less stable it becomes. A healthy business isn't tied to any one person. Filling all the efficiency gaps in your business alone. That chaos fuels your entire company. Not only is it not sustainable. A healthy business isn't tied to any one person. Filling all the efficiency gaps in your business alone. That chaos fuels your entire company. Not only is it not sustainable or scalable, but it can also lead to burnout in the long run. This chapter fixes that. You don't need to work more hours to run a healthy and successful business. What you need is a playbook full of systems and processes that will get you where you want to be. People use the terms like SOPs, checklists and systems. Let's define them. A system is a process that users can repeat. It gives the same result every time. You can think of it like a conveyor belt in a factory. The team organizes all materials and equipment. This way the end product stays consistent each time. That is the goal. We can build a system for answering the phone. The goal is to book the Appointment or to win the job. We can build a system for doing an in person estimate. The goal is to build an accurate quote. Also create job notes and a video for the project manager. We can build a system for following up on the estimate. The goal is for the customer to accept the proposal. Okay, we know what a system is. We know we need systems. But how do we build systems? The four Laws of System Building a system has the potential to make your life much easier. It depends on how well it's developed. It would be hard to tell you how to create a system for every aspect of the business. Building systems becomes easier under two conditions. Building systems becomes harder under two conditions. The Simple System framework has four key principles. It is easier to create systems for simple processes. Simple means basic, clear and minimal. Number one it is easier to create systems for simple processes. Simple means basic, clear and minimal. Number two it is easier to create systems for standardized processes. Standardized means doing it the same way each time with little change. Number three it is harder to create systems for complex processes. Complex is the opposite of simple. Number four it is harder to create systems for custom processes. Custom is the opposite of standardized. Make your process repeatable. Cut guesswork and pour decisions. Custom equals chaos. Customers ask for custom requests all the time. Your instinct might be to say yes to keep them happy and the revenue coming in. The scalability of complex and custom is next to impossible. If you want to grow, get used to saying no to special requests for unique one time tasks. The first steps to creating a system. Number 1 Remove complexity. Number 2 Remove customization. Number 3 Simplify. 4. Standardize. Let's take service offerings as an example to show what systems we want to create. In short, it is easier to create systems for simple services. Jobs where you can train new employees to be effective and profitable fast. Avoid complex jobs. These jobs need very skilled labor that can be hard to find on a consistent basis. It is easier to create systems for standardized services. There are fewer mistakes made and the sales process is faster. Avoid custom jobs. Every job is unique. This leads to employee mistakes and a long sales cycle. Simple and standardized services. Simple and standardized sales scripts. Simple and standardized materials. Simple and standardized designs. Everything is simple and standardized. Why? So we can build systems for every part of the business. This doesn't mean you can only mow lawns. This doesn't mean you can only use a mop. This doesn't mean you should use a shovel instead of an excavator. Simple doesn't mean small. You can build a whole house with standard materials and Systems. Lennar and Dr. Horton build massive numbers of homes. They keep using the same flooring, the same windows, and the same blueprints again and again. This is standardization at its finest. There are two ways to run a business. Your business runs on your grit, determination and hustle. Or it runs on systems. Take the business owner out and things fall apart. Projects fall through the cracks. Training for new hires stops. Preventative maintenance on the equipment isn't done. Estimates don't get a follow up. The team holds disorganized meetings. We need solid systems to keep the business running well, even if you're away. The Simple Systems framework. Every system within your business needs to fit this matrix. Complex custom Treadmill junkie. Complex Standardized Master juggler Simple Custom Jack of all trades simple standardized, built to scale. Let's unpack them. The Treadmill Junkie in this case, you do custom work and accept the need for complex processes. Customization and complexity demand your attendance. It requires solving every problem by yourself. You are the only person qualified to manage the job. You will impress the client and you will take pride in your work, but you will burn out. You have your fingerprints on every job. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. One of the things I love most about systems is the ability to be able to save time on admin. And so we've talked a lot about creating a simple system and using this framework. The best thing that I love about homeworks is you can just automate so much of this stuff and the software does it every single time the same way I don't have to pay anyone to do it. One of the things that costs so much time in admin is invoicing and billing. That is creating the invoices and then actually charging all the cards, charging all the ach, sending all, all the invoices to customers via email and text. Like all of that inside of homeworks gets completely automated. You can set a daily, weekly, monthly billing, daily, weekly, monthly invoicing and automatically everything gets sent to customers. You set it up one time, you set it and you forget it. This saves you hours, if not days. As your business grows on these simple tasks like invoicing and billing. And if you're doing the copy and paste millionaire method, where you're doing multiple locations and you're having a virtual assistant, you spend way less time of theirs working on your account. So if you're they're charging you by the minute, you want to reduce that amount of time as much as possible. This will save you far more in admin savings than what your cost of the Subscription is. So go check out Home Home Works. Book a call with the team and see how you're able to create simple systems like auto invoice and auto billing in your business today. Master juggler jobs are complex but at least standardized. In other words, this is not easy to teach to an entry level employee. Laborers need both certification and experience to do the job. But you have productized your service offerings. You don't offer everything to everyone. You make sure you stay in your lane. You are a top tier project manager. You take pride in your craftsmanship and perfectionism. There are big installations and construction projects. Planning and organization are crucial. It's hard to scale, but it's not impossible. If you're thoughtful. Jack of all trades. The work is simple, but is always open to customization or special requests. Call this the handyman business model. Many times this includes solo operators. You hang doors and fix faucets and paint sheds. If someone's willing to pay, you're willing to do it. Landscaping, pressure washing, roofing. You name it. If it doesn't require a licensed electrician or plumber, you've got it handled. Simple, yes. But every job is different from the last. In this model, you stay stuck forever as a technician. You set your own hours, but you lack a legitimate business. Built to scale. Everything is simple. They standardize everything. Everything is repeatable. They do the jobs the same way every time. They simplified them to make it easy to train new employees. Nothing is complex or custom. You say no to jobs outside your service area. Expertise and training MANUAL Every task in this framework runs like an assembly line. Your goal should be to move all your systems into the built to scale category. Remove complexity. Remove customization. Focus on simplifying every process. Focus on standardizing every process. This business owner can scale to multiple locations. The built to leave mindset. But the copy and paste millionaire takes it to another level. They reach built to scale status, but they continue to simplify and standardize. They reach the upper echelons of systematization. This business owner is a rare breed. Systems are not always designed to simplify your life. Today. They're built with the future in mind. Systems are the recipe for building a business that runs without you. The purpose? To develop a business that will operate well in your absence. These systems let you take vacations. They allow you to rush to your kid's school when the nurse calls about an accident. Here's how you know you've arrived at built to leave status. You can take a two week vacation and not worry about anything breaking. You're not checking communication threads. The team completes the jobs. You have a GM who oversees everything. Estimates come in, payroll runs and customers are happy. I call that built to leave. These systems give business owners freedom. They also create a sellable asset. Built to leave is for the absentee owner. It is for the copy and paste millionaire. A business can be difficult to sell without good systems. If you don't have a self supporting setup, you're only selling a job. No one wants to buy that. Even if you don't plan to sell, make sure your business can thrive without you. Why? Well, for one thing, life happens. Sickness, family and life events can pull you away from the business. I don't want this to harm the business for good. It will if you have no systems and if the business relies on your 80 hour work weeks. You might not plan to leave the driver's seat for good. But you still need freedom and flexibility. Systems will get you there if your business dies the moment you leave. It was never healthy to begin with the framework in the real world let's dive deep into home services and look at examples. We will use the Simple System framework to see how it relates to estimating, scheduling and project management. You can use these models to find out where you fit in the Simple Systems framework. Example one estimates at the treadmill junkie stage. You make 3D designs for customers. You charge nothing. The team completes all the drawings before the client approves the estimate. You need complicated software to show the intricate details of the job. You have to meet customers several times to get them to decide. You arrive loaded with product catalogs and choices. The master juggler will have a project book with two to three designs and options. They will arrive on the property for an on site consultation and have pictures of jobs they have completed in the past. By the time they leave the property, they will know what the pricing is. These are large complex jobs, but they only offer a few options. They limit customization. The jack of all trades will do drive by estimates for any job at all. Nothing is too difficult, so the estimate only takes a few minutes. If it requires elbow grease, they've got you covered. They can do any simple service. Every job is different. They will give a verbal price or make one up. Every job varies so it's hard to give exact prices. The built to scale operator will leverage over the phone pricing. You do not need to visit the property. They can delegate the phone calls to someone remote. The built to leave business offers instant quote forms on its website. No one needs to answer the phone. Their website is selling 247365 the customer gets a price and puts a card on file using homeworks. The copy and paste millionaire uses instant quote forms. Example 2 Project management for treadmill junkies, project management means being present on the job. They tackle problems head on. That's how they ensure everything operates without issues. They are on the job all day long. Only they can handle a custom and complex work. The master juggler will check in daily and use clear project timelines. They move from one project to another. They transport materials and equipment. They have a pulse on everything. Their phone never stops ringing. They are always busy. The jack of all trades does morning walkthroughs with each crew in person. He needs to show them the job in person since everything is so custom and one off. The built to scale operator gives a detailed video estimate and job notes. No walkthrough needed. The built to leave business owner focuses on recurring revenue. He doesn't need to show his crew complex projects. The majority of revenue is from simple standardized maintenance jobs. They print money every month. Even if he leaves town. Jobs get done. Money comes in. The copy and paste millionaire focuses on recurring revenue tools to build simple systems. So how can you make these systems efficient? Standardizing and documenting everything in a business can be tough, but it allows any team member to follow your workflow with ease. It is one that will take time, but you can use digital technology to speed things up. Here are some actionable steps to create systems and a business that is built to leave. Use ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI tool to create your SOPs, sales scripts and interview processes. Use the voice feature to share a 5 minute rant. Then let the AI tidy it up for you. Standardize your products. Create a product book in Canva. Laminate each page so it is weatherproof. Highlight your past projects to show customers your options. As a side benefit, this shows proof of your workmanship and speeds up the sales process. No more decision fatigue. Simplify your services. Remove the jobs that need your presence on site, the ones your admin keeps calling you about. For clarification, 20% of your services create 80% of your headaches. Cut them. Build recurring revenue and maintenance type work use estimate videos and job notes. Avoid walking crews around job sites each morning. Automate your admin through CRM tools. Use text, email, estimate and invoice templates. Each one of these steps will pull you closer and closer to the built to leave model. Your next steps Want your business to earn money while you step back? Here are some things you can do this week to get closer to that goal. Step one List every major system in your business. This will include estimates, hiring and interviewing, sales scheduling, email management, phone answering, employee training, and running payroll. Step 2 Plot each system on the simple System framework. Which business owner Persona do these systems represent? Jack of all trades, Master juggler, Treadmill junkie, or built to scale? Better yet, can you create a built to leave system? It would allow you to leave the business and be absentee. Step 3 Pick one system and simplify and standardize it this week. Use the quadrant to guide your improvements. Always work toward the built to leave corner. Finally, say no more often. Don't add more services. Stop customizing everything. Stop seeing yourself as in the service business. Think of yourself as being in the systems business instead. Build things so they can run without you. Chapter 8 Building a One Million Dollar Business is a terrible idea. Someone has lied to you. The million dollar business. It's not the finish line. It's a trap. Sure, it sounds sexy. Rolls off the tongue. Seven figure business Owner makes your Instagram bio stand out. Chasing a seven figure dream can wear you out. It might even make you go broke. I know because I chased it. And I was wrong. Let's rewind. I've spent the past 19 years in home services. I've reviewed the financials of thousands of businesses. During that time, I've seen many home service business owners struggle to reach the promised land. If you watch the 100 plus turnaround episodes on my YouTube channel, you will notice a trend. Many of the businesses that are struggling are right above $1 million in annual revenue. They reached the seven figure benchmark, but they had debt, low profits and no cash. They had high costs, pricey offices and too many trucks. Here's what I learned. The one million dollar benchmark is a poor target. Why? We'll get into that in the pages below. We'll also examine what to aim for instead. The Instagram Illusion here's what the one million dollar figure has going for it. It's a great round number. It sounds impressive. It looks clean. It's a clear aspiration. Most small business owners, no matter the industry, see it as the holy grail. Only 9% of businesses hit $1 million in annual revenue. For comparison, 13% of Americans will get divorced twice in their lifetime. In other words, someone that is madly in love has a better chance of getting divorced, falling in love and then divorcing again. Then an entrepreneur has to start a business and grow it to $1 million. You run into problems when you chase revenue over profit, vanity metrics over freedom and scalability Building a million dollar business is a terrible goal. I used to have this goal. I thought all my problems would go away if I hit that elusive revenue number. I realized the goal should be to create something sellable. A high profit margin business. Consistent revenue keeps flowing in. Someone else can handle the business. You can hand it off to your children when you decide to retire. The problem for many industries, once you get to about $750,000 in annual revenue, there is a profit desert until you hit 1.5 million. When you reach around 750,000, you face more overhead. Complexity increases, management balloons. Margins compress. Why? It's not necessarily the revenue number. It's the number of employees that it takes to build a million dollar business. You need other management staff. You need a salesperson, you need an office worker. You need more shop space. You have more insurance expenses. It is not that a $1 million business cannot be profitable. It's just that it's big enough to need more overhead, staff and facilities. But it is just small enough to not be able to afford great talent for those roles. Almost 50% of the businesses we visit on the turnaround show make between $900,001.3 million in revenue. They are in a tricky phase of growth. They have so many customers, they need an office person. They have so many leads during the busy season, they need a full time salesperson. They have so many trucks and so much equipment, they need a mechanic. Everything needs storage. So they find costly office and shop space. All this overhead is crushing their profits. The alternative is that the owner juggles the roles of an office worker, a salesperson and a Mechanic. They have 10 plus technicians. They work 60 plus hours every week trying to keep everything juggled. Don't get me wrong, a seven figure business is great. But hitting that number is not magic. Nothing changes. I remember the day I showed up to Attaboy Landscaping in Johnson City, Tennessee. The day I showed up, they crossed $1 million in sales for the year. That was the first time they had achieved that. There was no celebration. There was no party. In fact, the business was very close to going under. There was no cash. Broken trucks and unused gear filled the shop. The office had four overhead employees. There were two office managers, one operations manager and the owner. But the business at $1 million could not afford all this overhead. There was a safe way to grow a million dollar business. Sustainable growth. Making healthy profits. Take profits and reinvest into the business. It takes 10 to 20 years to grow to seven figures. If you are like me, you don't want to take 10 to 20 years to grow a business. If you want to grow faster, these are three steps. Stage one get to working GM ASAP Starting out Things are pretty simple. Don't focus on margins. Don't obsess over your profits. Instead, develop as much revenue as you can. At this stage, your goal is volume. You need enough work to justify hiring a team. At this stage, you lack a business. You have a job. You are a solo operator. It isn't until you are able to replace yourself with a general manager that you can begin offloading daily tasks. I know I am aging this book, but for some they need specifics. $500,000 in annual revenue is the minimum. Several employees are enough to do this. So how do you get there? The formula is simple. Focus on your close rate. If you convert 70% of your estimates, that's a solid starting point. We could raise prices to boost profits, but we're chasing growth instead, aiming for a close rate of 70%. You also want to focus on recurring revenue. If possible. You want your numbers to stay predictable and consistent each month. One time jobs are great. They're profitable. They tend to have better margins, but they're volatile. Recurring work is generally shielded from recessions and it makes managing your finances much easier. Sell work that stacks. Offer services that can be upsold, cross sold and followed up on. This is a survival stage. Not everything needs to be perfect. It's about building momentum. Get the sales motor running. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. One of the things that as I was growing a million dollar business was really difficult was the the ability to be able to get my team on the mobile app. Cause I was living up in Blaine, Washington and we were up against Canadian border and sometimes the cell service would drop in and out for our team. And so when we created the Field Force mobile app from Homeworks, we made sure that even if your cell phone goes offline, you can still clock in and out of the job. Add job notes, add pictures, add video, and then once you get back to service, it syncs up with the cloud. But this means that my crew doesn't get completely handicapped if they go into a bad area of service. If you live in a hilly area or like me, I was up against the Canadian border and sometimes their phone carrier would change over to Canadian network and they literally couldn't see their job notes, they couldn't clock in and out, they could not get directions and it was really, really painful. So go check out Home Dot Works, the Field Force mobile app that we've Created works offline and is super powerful. Track your time. Add job notes. Add dispatcher notes. Add pictures and video everything inside the app, even if you lose Internet connection. Step 2. Optimize for profit. Between 500,000 and $750,000 in annual revenue, you begin to see profit. At this point, you'll have a team of up to 8 employees max. During peak season, you'll have traction. Now it's time to get paid. Most people have a natural desire to scale up, continue on their journey to $1 million. Buying more trucks, hiring more people and leasing a bigger shop that will increase revenue. If you slow growth at this size of business, you can focus on profits. Stack cash. That is what will keep you from running out of cash on the next big jump to 1.5 million. When you need more overhead, here's the recipe. 1. Raise your prices. 2. Cut the fat. Bad customers headache services. 3. Pause hiring. Ensure that you use all your vehicles and equipment every day. Let's say you're at capacity mowing 200 lawns a week at $90 an hour. To do any more properties, you would need to buy a new truck, add new team members. What should you do when you get your 201st lawn? If your goal is to maximize profit, you should not hire more employees or buy more trucks. Instead, raise your prices to $110 an hour for new and existing customers. Some customers will leave if you produce a high quality service. Most will stay. When you hit your capacity again, charge $130 an hour. Some customers will leave, most will not. And because you are improving your margins, you won't miss the customers who leave. You'll make more money doing less work. With this approach, you can increase from $500,000 to over $750,000 annual revenue. You won't need to add any trucks or employees during this stage. You're also going to want to simplify. This means cutting low margin services, removing customers outside your service area, focusing on recurring jobs, standardizing everything, trucks, equipment, training. The goal here is to build an $800,000 plus machine that produces $200,000 in profit. That's a 25% margin. Absolutely possible. You're optimizing for profit. This is the perfect sized business. We call this the Augusta model at Augusta Lawn Care. Big enough to get the owner out of the field. The small size of the crew requires only one manager less than eight technicians. Step 3. Scale. The space between $750,000 and $1.5 million is both vast and difficult. I call it the Wilderness we want to have plenty of cash if we are going to grow into this size. At this stage, one person cannot manage the field workers. We need an operations manager to lead the crew. The office requires full time help. We also need full time help doing sales and estimates. The trucks and equipment need more space. The admin team needs an office building. This adds the overhead of the business. This crushes profit margins. The drop in revenue during the off season leads to negative cash flow for the business. They lose money for three to four months every year. This is something I see during many episodes on my turnaround show. Recently, I visited Luke of J and L Landscaping. Operating out of Ohio. Luke has almost 30 years of experience in the landscaping market. He turned his small business into a big company, making $1.7 million a year. Despite his success, problems were piling up. He had more credit card debt than he had money in the bank. He had constant employee turnover. Before my visit, employees had lost a mower. He worked long hours. He dealt with customer complaints. He felt burnt out. He wanted to quit. Plain and straightforward. Luke had 12 people working in the field. He also had an office manager, an operations manager and a shop mechanic. All overhead roles. Well, he did. The week I showed up, he fired the office lady and the mechanic. They had been spreading poisonous rumors to the team. At the time I visited, he had only two employees who had been with him for more than a year. This volatility causes a lot of stress. There was more to handle. Costs were rising and uncertainty grew. I don't enjoy my business anymore. I used to love what I did, Luke explained. I kind of wake up every morning and hate my job. After 25 years, Luke couldn't leave his business for even one day. Everything fell apart. If he did. Something was very wrong. Looking at Luke's situation, I told him he had to fix his leadership style. He was harsh. He interrupted others in conversation. He was dismissive. The communication breakdowns were obvious. I suggested he hold an open forum for his team to air their grievances and listen. Luke talked with his team without his operations manager, Brian. He replied each time they shared feedback. He couldn't help himself. A few weeks later, Brian left. After 23 years of struggle, I doubted whether Luke would learn the leadership and communication skills needed to grow. I suggested he reduce his team to six to eight employees. This way, he could manage them himself. No office manager, no operations manager, no mechanic. Why scale down? Because it would be more manageable. He would not need an office manager or an operations manager. He would not even need a mechanic. He could run the business without burning himself out. He could focus on the work instead of always putting out fires. His team was too big for his skill set. What struck me most was Luke's constant explanation of why he worked hard. His family. He had spent 23 years building his business, yet he still wasn't spending time with them. He has a family of 10 kids. One was a newborn, but he usually arrived home from work between 8 and 9pm Something was wrong. His wife was doubting. She grew tired of not having him home. Luke said he had trouble connecting with his employees. He noted that they were usually broken and made regular requests for advances to cover basic expenses. He also referred to a recent random drug test that only two employees passed. They keep bringing their problems to work. I used to love this business, but now it feels like a parasite. Owning a big business can be thrilling, but it may not suit everyone's balanced life. Luke was a father to 10 children working 15 hour days. Yes, his business was generating a lot of revenue, but to what end? Final word. The $1 million dream for many people turns out to be a seven figure nightmare. If you want freedom, if you want a profitable sellable business, you grow your business with the Copy and paste millionaire model. The goal isn't to maximize revenue. It's to generate as much profit as you can. The goal is for the business to run without you. Building beyond a million dollars can help, but that revenue isn't the ultimate goal. Often it's the worst route available to you. The goal needs to be clear. What size of business do you need to build that serves your goals? You don't want to serve the business, you want it to serve you. The copy and paste millionaire model provides clarity. It shows you the fastest and safest way to grow a home service business past $3 million in annual revenue. But do it without losing your sanity. Do it without losing your health. Do it without missing every evening and weekend with your family. Chapter 9 the copy and Paste Millionaire Blueprint. You could stop before this chapter. Build one location, remain the operator and wear the working GM hat. Keep overhead low. Stay in profit mode. Keep raising prices as you hit capacity over the course of 10 to 20 years. Buy your own shop and pay it off. Keep raising prices until you can afford a GM to run operations. Choose to take on the full time GM role or step back from daily operations. This is an excellent lifestyle and business for 90% of business owners. To boost your chances of earning a six figure salary as a business owner, follow this path. I have a strong belief that Most people should stay here. They should not grow fast past $1 million. They should not hire middle management. They should not get expensive office spaces. They should not hire salespeople and office managers. Not because they lack the skill. Not because they are dumb. Here's a smaller, more profitable business would serve their life goals. The addiction to growth and expansion kills many. Collateral damage occurs. It results in damage to physical and mental health. People discard relationships and marriages pursuing the goal of more revenue. They believe a new crew, a different service or another customer will solve everything. But the copy and paste millionaire is trying to build an empire. They were a small group, just a single digit percentage that exceed $1 million in annual revenue. They know it will mean more headaches, financial struggles and a heavy workload to reach $3 million. They know that hiring management and taking on more overhead is a huge risk. Managing managers requires a different skill set than managing technicians. They know their margins will shrink because of higher rent, higher insurance and higher payroll. They still decide to press forward. They do not want to take 20 years to get out of daily operations. They do not want to create dead end jobs for their technicians. They want to create career paths for their team. They want to scale up and build a business that they can sell and that has enterprise value. This to the Copy and Paste Millionaire method. The Augusta business model is the blueprint we use at Augusta Lawn Care. We start a location and grow as fast as possible. Past $500,000 in annual revenue. We shift to profit mode. We raise prices and focus on recurring services. We reach over $800,000 a year in revenue by raising prices. This includes one working GM and fewer than eight field workers during peak season. Plus, the owner isn't involved daily. I'll say that again. No daily involvement. You're not answering phones. You're not dispatching trucks. You're not hiring or firing anyone. You check your bank balance. You run a scorecard. That's it. The full time GM or GM model. We keep locations at the working GM size. We have no full time overhead employees at any location. No office manager, no operations manager, no sales manager. The general manager provides revenue and works in the field when we are not in peak season. I have tested this thesis at Augusta Lawn Care. I have tested it on 100 plus turnaround episodes. I've noticed this trend in thousands of home service businesses. Many successful businesses make high profits with low owner involvement. They often share similar structures. They use the copy and paste millionaire blueprint. You can use it too. What the copy and paste millionaire model looks like. Make sure, your first location is airtight before you duplicate anything. Jumping the gun on starting a second location will cause chaos. Here's how to nail the process for the first. Develop a team of six to eight fuel workers. Motivated by pay for performance. P4P filled to capacity. Every truck and employee is working full time. Employees take company vehicles home or park them at the shop. The shop does not have an office building. It serves as equipment storage. The company spends less than 3% of its revenue on rent. Have one general manager and zero middle managers. Outsource admin. Use virtual assistants or answering services for now, build a command center once you have three or more locations. Automate sales. Use IQ instant quote forms from homeworks. You can also use over the phone sales. The working GM runs operations. They manage the team hiring and training. If they can't do scheduling, you will need to simplify services and systems more. At this point, the owner can leave daily operations. They'll only need to work one to two hours a week at the location or remain the operator in the business and serve as the working gm. The target is to build a business that generates six figures in owner distributions. This should happen without needing the owner to take on any operational role. The general manager and team are getting profit sharing. The team is full of motivation. They have incentives to make the business more profit even when the owner is absent. Some online critics claim that $100,000 in annual owner distributions is not a big deal. What they fail to see is that I can copy and paste this model over and over again. I am an absentee owner. I can scale the business. It is only limited by my access to capital and finding great general managers. Once you've achieved this framework, you can copy it. The problem? If you're going to copy and scale a business model, it needs to be perfect. Scale garbage. You get garbage back. Don't move on until you've mastered the blueprint at one location. That could take years. Copy and paste this five times for different locations. Then hire a regional manager to replace yourself. The regional manager manages the general managers. The regional manager must live within 12 hours drive of the locations. If something unexpected occurs at a location or with a gm, the regional manager must go there and take action. After hiring a regional manager, the combined locations generate over $3 million each year. The goal of hiring a regional manager is to act as a buffer between the owner and the working GMs. No issue or decision should go to the owner unless it's a huge emergency. The importance of the GM in this model, you're Completely out of the weeds. No more estimating. No more micromanagement. You hire, train and manage GMs. You review scorecards and P and L statements monthly. You make strategic decisions quarterly. You withdraw completely from daily operations. The success of each location will hinge completely on the working GMs. I will say it again. The success of the location depends entirely on the skills of the general manager you hire. The copy and paste millionaire method focuses on finding and nurturing top talent. You must hone your leadership skills. I've seen many entrepreneurs try to open multiple locations. They fail. They say it doesn't work. The hard truth? They do not have the skills to be a leader. Leadership is a skill, like riding a bike. Someone can learn it. Attract, find, train and keep. General managers. Failure to do so is catastrophic. A manager needs four things from you as the 1. Clear expectations. Be clear about what winning looks like. These are qualitative. No numbers. This is what an optimized route looks like. This is what a good morning meeting looks like. This is what a good one on one employee meeting looks like. If you don't show them what good looks like, they will think they are winning. You will think they are losing. Be specific. Telling a GM to be more efficient is useless. This is a bundled term. Instead, ask what key metrics will make this location profitable? Number three, Clear compensation. Here is your incentive for winning. This includes bonuses, incentives and profit sharing. When will they get paid? How much is average? What are the on target earnings? Be specific. Telling a GM they will make more money if the business makes more money is useless. Instead, ask yourself what are their goals? How do I align the goals of the business with the incentives of the gm? What would have to be true for me to feel thrilled whenever my GM makes more money? Create bonuses and incentives based on that. Number four, Clear prioritization. What should they do first? There are a million things they could be doing. Which one has the biggest impact? Now I follow rule number one and set clear expectations that the team cleans the trucks every day. I also told the GM to call any customer with overdue invoices. I followed rule number two. I stated that if overdue invoices totaled more than $10,000, this indicated a serious problem. I followed rule number three. I told them that if their overdue stayed under $10,000, they could get a $500 bonus at the month's end. Now the overdue invoices sit $24,000. I drove into the shop and he was cleaning the trucks. What? I don't want my GMs doing the right things in the wrong order. Be specific. Telling a GM to do everything that's on that list is less useful. Instead, tell them what is most important. What is the order of operations for that list to get completed? What should they do first? The two types of General Managers There are two types of general managers. Which one you should choose will depend on the stage you are in. If you are in growth mode, you'll want a sales focused GM. This is great for businesses with annual revenue under $500,000 or those growing over 50% each year. They focus on leads, estimates, upsells door hangers, sales and boosting revenue. There are key performance indicators to track a sales focused gm. These include revenue growth, close rate and budget hours scheduled. I expect the GM to complete 30 budget hours of work each week minus one budget hour for each in person estimate or applicant interview. Sales focused GMs often fill their schedules with estimates and spend less time in the field. They should have a background in outbound sales. Outbound sales means they have to cold call. They have to hunt. They have to go out and find leads. Inbound sales would be a sales associate at a retail store. Customers come to them. They are not responsible for going out and finding new customers. That is why I want someone with outbound experience. We prefer skills and home services, but it's not a must. This general manager thrives in the chaos of growth. But they rarely excel in profit mode. When a business stops growing its revenue and customers, the GM might feel stuck. They love the chase. They love growth. To them, profit mode is boring. A sales focused GM is ideal for growth mode. The alternative is an operations focused gm. This is the role you'll want once your business is in profit mode. You're currently earning between 500,000 and a million dollars each year. Your next goal is to boost your profit. This requires operational excellence. The focus is on team training, dispatch and maintenance. We are tracking key performance indicators. These include labor efficiency, budget hour accuracy and customer churn. The operations focused GM plans to finish 30 budget hours of fieldwork each week, same as the sales focused gm. We lowered the weekly expectation by one budget hour for each in person estimate or employee interview. They do remember the profit of a working GM location hinges on the general manager producing revenue. I want them doing field work. They can stay back for estimates or team interviews. With a GM focused on operations, the location is in profit mode. Companies spend less money on marketing. Fewer leads come in. They spend more of their time producing revenue in the field, especially during the slow season. An operations focused GM is ideal for profit mode. What is the background of a GM strong in operations? You should aim to fill this position with an internal hire who has earned respect in the field. The best operational GMs often start as technicians. They stay in that role for over six months before becoming managers. The operational GM brings stability to your business. They will do well with rhythm and routine. They like to find 1% optimizations. They won't want to hang door hangers, cold call customers or work 80 hour weeks. They don't care about being the biggest operation in town. They care about their team efficiency and profits. How to find the right GM for Growth Mode as you might have guessed from the description, you're looking for someone outside your technicians. Most employees hired for labor do not wake up one morning with the desire to work in sales. Different skill sets, different personalities. Usually that person is not currently a technician. That means picking someone who has a proven track record in sales. We're not talking about phone reps or door knockers. They did outbound sales. Yes, but this person also needs to be a leader, a general manager. Someone with work experience. They will expect a high base pay. They might also want bonuses linked to revenue goals. The best salespeople already have great jobs. You will be competing with many others for the sales focused gm. When you're in profit mode, you can pick a trusted employee from your team. Choose someone whom your team respects. They should have worked in your business for at least six months. They should be ambitious. They should show initiative. Someone who reads business or self development books, listens to podcasts and focuses on processes. They enjoy finding inefficiencies. They make great money as a technician on Pay for performance. P4P. They teach new technicians about P4P. Try to find a crew leader who already acts like a manager but hasn't had the title yet. If you show up at a project and there is a crew who takes charge, who talks to the customer, who organizes the materials, who maintains the equipment, that person could be your next working gm. Paying your general manager how you pay your general manager depends on your goals. For growth mode. Create revenue based bonuses. You can use these when you're starting from zero or growing revenue by more than 50% year over year. Right now you want strong top line growth even if it means lower margins. For example, you might in this context be looking at a base pay of $70,000 a year. You had bonus incentives of $500 a month if revenue is over $20,000. $1000 bonus for a month of $40,000 in revenue. $1500 bonus for a month of $60,000 in revenue. $2000 bonus for a month of $80,000 in revenue. You could do a commission percentage. If you don't like the tiered revenue model, you can add other growth benchmarks, not just revenue. These could be the number of customers or the amount of recurring revenue. Bottom line, the more growth, the bigger the bonus. Why? A revenue based incentive keeps your GM motivated to grow at your desired rate. Caution. This could lead to negative cash flow. Be prepared to fund this rapid growth rate. Lots of growth means more marketing, more trucks, more employees. It also means more leads, which means less time that your working GM is producing labor revenue. Profitability hinges on that key factor. Once the location leaves growth mode and enters profit mode, you can switch from revenue based incentives to profit sharing. Lock in their pay. When the company incentivizes them based on revenue and growth. They should not receive a pay cut when they enter profit mode. For profit mode, you'll optimize pay. For quarterly profit sharing, you can swap to monthly profit sharing if you have an entire year where every quarter is profitable. Profit sharing works well for businesses earning $500,000 or more each year. It's best for those with steady profits and revenue growth below 50% year over year. In this model, the GM will receive between 5% and 40% of the net profit. This is determined by the profit and loss statement. This is the bottom line on QuickBooks reports. Their profit share percentage should start low and grow over time. This is how I retain a great gm. Profit sharing is ideal for businesses that have low debt and healthy margins. They are in profit mode. Let's take it one step further. We talked about using revenue incentives. We talked about profit sharing. This is how we compensate GMs. But there is a better way. It is the copy and paste millionaire method. It is a system that is built to leave distributable cash model. If you want to be completely out of operations, this is the approach for you. In this version, your GM has full control of operations, hiring and firing. You are in profit mode. Profit sharing can be tricky. You might show a strong profit and loss statement. But if you have debt payments, depreciation or one time expenses, you could end up with no cash in the bank. I don't like paying profit sharing to a GM and I am not making any money from the business. As an absentee owner, I only care about one thing. Free cash flow. How much can I take out of the business? Recall back to creating clear metrics for a GM to Be successful. This is it. The copy and paste millionaire only cares about free cash flow. This is the one metric that matters. Everything flows down to that. Trucks, advertising, long lunch breaks, poor equipment, maintenance, theft. All that affects how much money is in the bank. All that plays into the equation of how much free cash flow the business can generate for me, the owner. You need the GM to think like an owner. You need them to lose sleep at night over how much cash is in the bank. Here's how to make it work. Begin by calculating the average monthly revenue over the last three months. Hold that amount as working capital. Anything above that is what I call distributable cash. Your GM will get a percent cut of that, not the financial statement. When you take $1 out of the business, they get 20 cents. This turns your GM into a cash flow machine. You both win. We align incentives. For example, let's say the last three months of revenue were 60,000, $70,080,000. The average monthly revenue of the past three months is $70,000. If there is $100,000 in the bank at the end of the quarter, that means that there is $30,000 of distributable cash. Let's say in this example that the GM gets 33% of the distributable cash at the end of the quarter. The distributable cash is $30,000. $20,000 goes to the owners and 33% or $10,000 goes to goes to the GM for his bonus. When a location shows steady profits for a few years, it's easier to attract general managers. Why? You should have a good idea of what their total compensation will be. When a location grows fast, profits can be unstable and growth isn't guaranteed. But when a location has been in profit mode for several years, we have a track record. A large percentage of the revenue is from recurring jobs. I am confident that revenue will continue. We create on target earnings. This shows the expected total compensation for a gm. We use this during the interview process and throughout the year to benchmark success. We use this when trying to find a working GM to replace the owner or an existing gm. Remember, if you are in daily operations, you need to take a salary as a W2 employee. That is not distributions. Let's say that last year the business did $900,000 in revenue. The owner was able to take $180,000 in distributions. We are in profit mode. We haven't purchased new trucks or increased employee count for three years. I am finding a new general manager. I am offering 25% of distributable cash As a bonus, their base pay is $70,000 per year. In this example, the on target earnings would be as base pay equals $70,000. Bonus equals $45,000. This assumes that we repeat last year's profit numbers. I could show what changes the business could make and how they would impact their pay. For example, they can increase prices. We are in profit mode. If they can raise prices by 10% and keep all the customers, revenue would go up to $990,000. The next year, profits would increase by $90,000. Distributable cash would go from $180,000 to $270,000. That would increase their bonus from $45,000 to $67,500. $67,500 is 25% of the $270,000 in distributable cash. Attached is a chart that we use at Augusta Lawn Care. We use a simple spreadsheet as a way to show GMs what their on target earnings are. We base it on last year's performance. We also show them the ways to boost their pay. If they boost profits, grow revenue or improve other metrics, their earnings can increase. How to measure a GM's performance here's the scary part about giving your business to someone else. Things can go wrong quickly. Bad GM In a good location, it will fall apart in two months. The opposite is true. A bad location. With a great gm, it can be super profitable. You don't want to wait for an annual tax return sheet to find out that you're in trouble. Here's how a copy and paste millionaire tracks location performance. They use a weekly, monthly and quarterly meeting cadence to show this. Here are two monthly income statements from one of my locations in Augusta. Notice that revenue skyrockets, but labor costs don't. Labor efficiency went up big time. There was only one change between these two months. We swapped out the gm. The previous GM was a good person, but they lacked the push and drive to be great. They were on cruise control, buddies with the crew, not a strong leader. I was out of town during this time. I was in North Carolina starting another location. The regional manager in Washington made the switch and selected a new gm. The results speak for themselves. The profit of the location, the revenue of the location, the morale of the team completely flipped again. The success of a location hinges on the GM become the person that great GMs want to work with. Weekly Scorecard the weekly scorecard focuses on operations doing the work. We need to know if the work is on schedule what projects are upcoming The GM must fill out a weekly scorecard. It will include the number of estimates accepted divided by the number one, also known as the close rate. Budget hours for jobs divided by the actual hours they took. Also known as the efficiency score. Monthly revenue and year to date pace, Crew count and employee churn. GM time 30 budget hours of expected fieldwork minus one per estimate or interview. If your GM has a close ratio of under 30%, it's a red flag. If the location's efficiency score is under 50%, it's a red flag. If year to date revenue is down 10%, it's a red flag. If employees are leaving every week, it's a red flag. If your GM is producing less than 10 budget hours of fieldwork with only 5 estimates, it's a red flag. You should never wait for more than a week to know exactly what the health of a location is. Catch early warning signs and act now Course correct to prevent a train wreck in a couple months. The weekly scorecard shown below is from Augusta Lawn Care. If you are in growth mode, you may focus more on sales related metrics. Use the editable template to make changes for your business. The number of follow up phone calls and door hangers delivered can be more helpful. Monthly Coaching Call the copy and paste millionaire has a monthly coaching call with their GM at Augusta. A third party conducts this monthly call. Someone outside the company. We have a coaching program. The GM can talk to other GMs or owners in Augusta Nation. They can get blunt feedback and advice. Sometimes hearing it from someone other than the owner is a good thing. You don't want to have to be the bad guy. Critiques are well received. Focus on close rates. Consider profit levers. Improve leadership skills. We track the monthly revenue compared to last year. We count the number of Google reviews. We check what percentage of the month's revenue came from recurring services. We track what percentage of revenue goes to wages. Here are the monthly metrics we have at Augusta. This is part of our coaching program and software platform. Use this as a guide for what numbers to review with your GM every month Quarterly PL Review Sit down with the GM to review profit and loss statements Distributable cash calculations GM bonus and incentive payout Quarterly targets versus Actual numbers Recon on large jobs the quarterly review focuses on finances. This topic arises naturally. Companies usually calculate profit sharing and bonuses every quarter. Use financial statements that match your bank account. Use homeservicecpa.com to get these done for you. Reconcile every month. By the 15th you have clean Reports you get an executive summary for the quarterly review with your gm. The weekly scorecard, monthly coaching call and quarterly review are key. They lay the groundwork for clear communication with the gm. This meeting rhythm gives your GM clarity and focus. This meeting rhythm gives you confidence as the owner. The location is profitable and running well. You don't need to micromanage the systems scale. The systems are built to leave. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. One of the things I love most about homeworks is the ability to be able to have the command center feature. So we've talked about building out a command center and one of the biggest parts of that is if you have multiple locations, I want to be able to quickly access all the locations without having to log out and then log back in and log back out and log back in. Inside of homeworks, your admin person has one login and then is able to go into multiple different accounts and multiple locations. What's also cool, if you have a spread out location, you start getting a big chain. You might actually cross into different time zones. And so inside of the command center login, they'll actually get a floating window that shows the time zone of that location and the address of the shop. Super useful. We use it Augusta Lawn Care where we have over 200 locations around the world. And this allows us to be able to give personalized feedback to the customer and really feel like we are in person and at the office in their local area. So one of the reasons to use homeworks is that as you do the copy and paste millionaire method, you use the single sign on access for your admin person. Saves them a huge amount of time and a lot of pain when it comes to having a whole bunch of multiple tabs and logging in and out from each location. Go check it out, get a actual demo of this and talk to the team over at home. DOT works today building the field team. For a working gm. You want six to eight fuel workers. That is ideal. They should all follow a pay for performance model. This averages earnings of 25 to $40 per hour. This depends on their efficiency and work ethic. For complex jobs, each truck will have one crew leader. They'll have helpers who are cross trained for recurring routes. We simplify everything this way, any crew member can do any job. If someone is sick or misses a day of work, no problem. Promote from within. When you need a gm, use a technician. The technicians see the copy and paste millionaire method as a way to move up and manage the location. No dead end jobs. Weekly team meetings Shape the culture. Daily huddles are helpful if you do large projects. Yellow slips go to team members who have callbacks. This creates accountability at the technician level. I don't want my GM running around doing quality control all day long. I need them producing revenue. The GM handles the training and retention of the team. Profit sharing with the crew aligns the goals of both the owner and the employees. We give 10% of quarterly profits to our technicians. Cultural standards are in place. They make sure your service meets your standards, even when you're not looking. Automating Admin Absentee owners don't manage scheduling, answering phones or handling billing. Here's what they do instead. They use homeworks to automate everything possible. This includes creating invoices, charging credit cards, scheduling services, reminding clients about upcoming services, collecting deposits and putting cards on file, following up on estimates, optimizing routes, sending reminders for overdue invoices. They use a virtual assistant or answering service for manual admin tasks. These include answering the phone, responding to emails, running payroll, managing text inbox, answering web chats, and sending daily reports to the crew on p4psoftware.com as the business exceeds $3 million in annual revenue, it starts to make sense to build a command center. Building a command center at Augusta Lawn Care. Our command center serves over 200 locations. They operate seven days a week to serve the U.S. canada and Australian locations. The company collects over $1 million in revenue per week. We have 30 to 60 agents serving our owners. This depends on the time of year. We have one command center manager, two assistant managers. We keep it lean and a flat org. We reduce and cut back on bloat wherever possible. We provide incentives for agents to take the off season off. We pay them bonuses and cover healthcare insurance. Then they can return for spring rush. Leads are seasonal. Even if our locations do winter services, the phone calls come in earlier in the year. We must reduce overhead. We must keep a tight ship. We cannot let bloated admin costs sink us. Your command center will start with two to three office workers. You will have to pay their salaries and the office rent, utilities and computer equipment. This can surpass $20,000 per month, fast. This is overhead and a fixed expense. That is why I avoid this until absolutely necessary. I am fine with a virtual service that can do 90% quality. I do not want overhead. But Once I hit $3 million in annual revenue and have four to six locations, I will want my own office. As we grow big enough, the quality increase outweighs the cost. I can customize systems I don't have to rely on third party vendors. The office workers you hire will be generalists. You will need to train them on 10 to 20 different tasks and departments. As you scale from 3 million to $5 million in annual revenue, you will start to specialize the roles of the admin team. You will have a phones department, a billing department, a scheduling department, an HR department, among others. Some departments, such as phones will have a lot of people on them. As you grow the business, more specialized departments such as payroll will have one person in charge. They will cross train one other person. This reduces key man risk and the impact of someone leaving. Churn at the admin position when you only have one to two employees in the office is brutal. It can take six to eight weeks for an office person to become efficient. As a generalist, they have many things they need to learn. If you churn even one or two admin employees each year, you might as well do the work yourself. This is why many business owners have their spouses do the admin work. At least they know they aren't going anywhere or at least not for now. But I would challenge this notion. Is this a copy and paste method? Is it smart to have a spouse be the crucial pillar that holds up the business? That is not a system that is built to leave. You can't go on vacation with your spouse without collapse. Be careful to think that you can hire overseas talent for a fraction of the cost. They will cost less, but they can take three to five times more training. They also demand more management and tracking, more video calls, more virtual education and more remote meetings. Lots of management means lots of expense. If you get dragged into anything admin related, it's bad news. It's a bad use of time. We track customer satisfaction and our in house agents set the standard. AI, overseas and remote admin don't come close. I hope that changes one day. It would save me hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for now we continue to hire in office agents. If the extra cost is too high for you, keep hiring agencies, virtual assistants or answering services. This can help until you can afford the office. There are several key parts to scaling up a command center. Number one training system. You need a two to four week program for training new agents. We need a curriculum. A training manual and checklist are important. Identify low performers during training weeks. Weed them out. Use testing. Use role playing exercises. If they can't perform now, they won't perform when they are on the phone with a mad customer number two reporting system. We need to know all the KPIs of the team. We need to be able to drill down and know the efficiency of every team member. What percent of their day is effective, what percent is waste. Track every single second. Number three Coaching system. We use a system called Gameday. That is where the entire team listens to a call from a team member. The team breaks down, analyzes and then shares the call with the entire group. Practice makes perfect. We record the training. This becomes a future training for new agents. We also train AI on the game day. Coaching call transcripts. The AI analyzes every call transcript. AI will coach every agent on many aspects of answering the phone. This includes tonality and personality as well compensation. At command center, I recommend paying office workers based on tenor. It is very valuable to have consistency in the admin role. Once team members become specialists, I can make the compensation plan more specific. I can figure out the metric that is most important. For example, over 40% of clock time on the phone is the expectation for our phone agents. If they clocked 10 hours and they only had three hours of call time, it's a red flag. We expect someone to pick up calls within eight seconds. Two rings missing more than 5% of calls is unacceptable. This could demand hiring more phone agents. The agent might need coaching. Or it could mean that we need to adjust hours during peak calling times. You could incentivize the speed of sending quotes. This would be for your email, text and web chat department. Like the field crew, we use yellow slips for our office team. This is the counterweight to speed. Anyone who makes a mistake receives a yellow slip. You can track, measure and incentivize upsells. Turn your overhead in the office into SalesPeople. We use AI to track how many upsells agents sell. The AI analyzes every word of the call. We use AI to track the tonality of phone agents. Turn your overhead in the office into SalesPeople. We use AI to track how many upsells agents sell. The AI analyzes every word of the call. We use AI to back up agents in case they miss calls. Be careful not to create bad incentives for your command center agents. What you incentivize will get more attention. If you have generalists in the office. They handle many tasks. By putting an incentive on one task, you might pull them away from other tasks. Hold off on making your command center compensation plans too fancy. First you need specialists. They stick with one department and task all day. Until then, use base pay and benefits that align with tenor. The longer they stay on and hit minimum requirements, the more money they make. If they start to lead a department or manage, they can unlock more compensation. The copy and paste millionaire does not want to become an office manager. Find an excellent admin person. The same way that you find great GMs for the locations. You need to find a great office manager. Give them profit sharing. You could tie this to the profitability of the locations. You could also urge them to reduce command center costs in relation to the company's revenue. The lower the percentage, the greater their bonus. They need to be looking for efficiencies all day. Waste riddles the office role every day. An admin person could have 200 to 300 tasks. Every single time they switch, they waste time. Inefficiencies stack up fast. The same is true for your field crew. Every time they stop, there is unloading, loading, waiting. Think about that number of stops, but 10 to 20 times more in the office. You need to have someone who tracks the numbers at all times. Do not skimp on paying the manager of your command center. Give them steep incentives and profit sharing. Why? They can make or break your bottom line without a reason to improve the office can become a big profit drain. I need someone to work evenings and weekends. This way I won't get pulled into admin tasks when fires happen. When to expand to multiple locations. Once everything is set up in one location, you'll want to repeat the process. Copy and paste. Don't scale until you dial everything in. This means that you have one working GM. Profit margins are over 20% for the year. You take 10% of revenue out for yourself as owner's distributions. After giving a cut to the gm, you can be out of daily ops. You begun the weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings. If you're still entering the phone, you can't open a second location. Once your model is clean, you can copy it. Finding a sales focused GM is hard. Keeping them once you switch their location to profit mode is also hard. They are usually entrepreneurial. If they can start locations in a low barrier industry, why not do it themselves? That's why the owner or regional manager should open new locations. Ramp location number two up to $500,000 in annual revenue as fast as possible. Then promote a technician to be the working gm. They could be from location one which is already running in profit mode. Put location two into profit mode. Raise prices. Turn off marketing. This means the working GM can be operations focused. They do not need the skill set of sales. They enjoy optimizing the systems and profits of the location. Start your next location in a nearby city or service area. Don't Start it on the other side of the country. By starting it next to the existing location, you can reduce risk. Once location number one is in profit mode and a GM is running it, you can test the new market. Run ads, create a Google listing and a website. HomeServicesWebDesign.com specializes in multi unit businesses. We can nail your search engine optimization and web design. Expand your service area into the new area. For now, that route and jobs won't be as profitable. They are not inside your tight radius that you have for location number one. But that's okay for now. Test the market. Find which marketing channels work. Door hangers, Facebook ads, Google Ads. What is working? Get a full 30 plus budget hours of weekly work. This should be recurring revenue. Now you have full confidence that you can at least cover expenses. From day one of location number two. Most GM run locations can break even around $20,000 per month. Since the GM is in the field, overhead is low. Starting a second location the next season is a great option. You have a solid base of recurring work. You have a website that is ranking online. You have customer reviews. You have word of mouth and referrals happening. The likelihood of success is much higher. This is the method of the copy and paste millionaire. Your new business motto. You can enjoy a two week vacation with no fires. Review a scorecard each week. Get one P&L email monthly plus receive one distribution check every quarter. If you can do that, you own a business. At this point, it's time to copy and paste again and again and again. This is not the time to get distracted. So many home service business owners think that some other industry is better. Let me be clear. If you have figured out the systems to copy and paste your business model, you should keep doing it over and over again. Raising Cane's has almost 1,000 locations. They sell the same few items. Chicken fingers, toast, coleslaw, fries. Simple, standardized. Most small business owners would have added more items to the menu. More revenue would have been too strong of a temptation. Many entrepreneurs would have created 10 locations. Then they would have gotten distracted by stocks or real estate. The next meme Coin. The next shiny industry. The next shiny service. Stop trying to get out of home services. If you have Systems to find GMs and copy and paste the model, keep doing it. You are in the top 1% of the home service industry. Your returns will likely be better than if you tried to become an investor. If you try to invest in real estate, stocks or private equity, you won't have that sort of advantage. Many investors don't get the same returns from their investments as they did with their first cash generating business. They would be better off if they doubled down on what they knew best. One Location versus Many the Big Decision here's the question everyone asks once their first location is up and running. Should I grow one big location or expand into several smaller ones? Both work. They also come with tradeoffs. If you're at the shop every day, building a business in one location is easier. You're still seeing everything. The team is seeing you. You have tight control over all your systems. Everything is centralized. Everything is in one place. This makes communication simple. You can use all the systems in this book to make that location more profitable. Simplify and standardize operations. Create a command center for admin use Sales automation I am not against using the GM model. Some owners prefer being the GM of a $3 million business. They find it easier than managing general managers at distant locations. It is after $1 million in revenue that I start to see cracks forming. I see this over and over again on the turnaround show. You need middle management. You also need an operations manager, an office manager and an estimator. A mechanic might be necessary too. If you lose one, then everything wobbles. You are too big to not need a manager for sales, operations and admin. You are too small to have backup for these people. If you hire a general manager to run everything for you, awesome. They will lead the sales, operations and admin managers. But your general manager is hard to replace. They are managing 20 or more people. They're handling operations, they're handling fires, they're making schedules and so on. If you lose them, you create a challenging hole to fill and you need to fill it fast. This is the hidden fragility of the GM key man Risk. It is hard to find someone who has the skill to run a 15 to 30 person team. They would rather own the business themselves. They are very expensive. If they leave, you are right back to being the general manager. No one else can fill their shoes. This size of business is hard to leave. What's the alternative? You cap your first location at the working GM size. You lock in six to eight field staff. You automate admin. You run sales through instant quote forms and over the phone sales. Then you hire a working GM focused on operations, not sales or admin. Their priority is to run a tight ship. Then do it again somewhere else. New city, new zip code, same rules, same pricing sheets, same CRM, same scorecard, same compensation model, same equipment, same systems, same expectations. Instead of having a skyscraper, you have many Brick houses. Each is self contained and if one burns down, the others keep going. You diversify risk. You can scale by stacking five of them. Hire a regional manager. This way you can bill the company to over $5 million a year. You also skip the drama and risk that come with layers of middle management. Why smaller locations win. Small teams can be profitable. Here's why. Drive time kills efficiency. The infamous windshield time. It crushes profits in home services. Crews that stick to tight routes can finish more recurring jobs. This saves gas and cuts down on non billable hours. For crews that work on projects, they are always close to the shop. Forgotten materials or equipment. Don't waste hours of the day. Jobs are not one plus hours from the storage yard. Finding a leader for a 4 million dollar business with 30 employees, many services offered and complex projects, it is much tougher than for a $900,000 location with six crew members. Simple recurring services. Only smaller locations decrease your exposure. Remember, the goal is to build, to leave. If you lose a GM at a $4 million shop, you're in big trouble. If you lose the GM of a $900,000 branch, you can step in for a week and promote someone from within. A long tenured employee with leadership skills can fill in. No problem. This model also allows you to avoid the second profit dip. What is that? Once your location has more than eight employees, it's harder to manage. All of a sudden you have a lot more headaches, but you aren't making more money. In fact, you might be making less. You've outgrown the working GM model, but you lack the systems for an organizational chart. You're stuck in a very uncomfortable middle. Too big for simple, too small for corporate. Instead of pushing through the profit wilderness, find a way around it. Spin off another location and keep your first location lean. Raise prices at your first location. Go into profit mode. Who this model isn't for. Let's be real. Not everyone can do this. Replicating a complex custom service can be tough. You need a skilled tradesperson for it. Your quality will dip. Training will break your systems. Don't scale. This model works well for companies that can streamline and standardize their services. It works best when we clarify the scope and automate the pricing. Here are some Lawn care Mowing, Fertilization Weed control House cleaning Maid services Pressure washing Driveways, sidewalks and decks Junk removal Exterior soft washing Window cleaning Solar panel cleaning Pool cleaning and maintenance Carpet and upholstery cleaning Gutter cleaning Pest control Snow removal Mobile car detailing Pet waste removal Dryer vent Air duct Cleaning trash bin cleaning Leaf cleanup Christmas light installation and takedown Mulch refresh Lawn aeration and overseeding Driveway ceiling mattress cleaning and sanitization Mobile trash can Curb service Mailbox and fence Painting Staining Appliance cleaning Portable restroom cleaning Firewood delivery Now here's a list of home services that would not be a great fit for the copy and paste method. They usually do better in larger single locations. The GM model the six to eight person team might not be as profitable. We need more admin people. We need more salespeople. Custom home building Remodeling and renovations Electrical contracting Plumbing contracting H VAC installation and repair Roofing, Masonry and concrete work Flooring installation Drywall and framing Deck and fence construction Specialty landscaping Hardscaping such as water features and outdoor kitchens Tree removal that's dangerous skill intensive One time services Garage door installation and repair Major appliance repairs Solar panel installation with engineering and electrical permitting Septic system installation and repair Excavation and grading Fire and water damage Restoration mold remediation Asbestos and lead abatement compliance Heavy specialized labor. Many of these businesses require certifications and skilled labor. But I do believe that even they can sell recurring jobs. They can sell warranties and inspections. They can simplify, standardize and have systems. They can become the GM model. I outline more of this in a free workshop I made on my website mikeandys.com workshop the copy and paste millionaire is for owners who can develop GMs. If you can't, then you're not ready. This isn't the blueprint for a big business. It's the blueprint for freedom. Built to sell, built to scale. Built to leave. Here's your final fork in the road. You have a profitable business. Each location earns $900,000 a year. It has over a 20% profit margin. The owner doesn't need to get involved in operations. There is a solid team of GMs. Now what? You could sell it for three to five times the annual profit and retirement. Or you could keep it and scale, copy and paste until you got 3 million plus. Then hired regional manager to oversee the GMs. Then do that again. Create a chain of 2030 locations. Increase cash flow. Increase the valuation multiple. The answer depends on your goals. If you need cash now, you can sell. If you want wealth later, you can stack many locations. The best part is that you're not locked in. You can build three to four units, sell one and keep two. You can run five, keep three and sell two. You can stack 20 and walk away from everything with an eight figure check. None of that happens until you build the first location right. Don't reinvent the wheel. Stop tinkering. Don't chase other industries and business models. The grass is always greener on the other side. Don't get cute. Nail the model right and then copy and paste again and again benchmarks to copy and paste. You may want clearer guidelines. When is your business ready to expand to more locations? I will show you the guidelines we have at Augusta Longcare. A big variable is the amount of capital you have to invest. These pictures show the key metrics for a location to reach profit mode and prepare for another location. If you have less than $100,000 in cash, expect this to take five plus years. You can get there faster if you have more money. Notice some highlights with more cash. I spend more on advertising. I grow faster. I start with employees. I skip the solo operator stage. I might hire a GM from day one. As time goes on, I try to get more recurring revenue. Less one time jobs. Once I hit $500,000 in annual revenue, I go into profit mode. I raise prices. Close ratio goes down. I do not hire more employees. I don't want this to remain a theory. I want to show a real business with real numbers. Here is the full income statement from one of my Augusta Lawn Care locations. This is an Augusta Lawn care location in Mount Vernon, Washington. I started it in 2020 with 60 to $70,000 in working capital. Right in the middle of COVID From day one I hired a general manager. Years one and two we were in growth mode. The GM earned less than $60,000 in salary. Profit was thin, only 3 to 5%. He was grinding door hangers, ads, every door, direct mail, everything to grow the customer base. Year three we switched to profit mode. We raised prices. We stopped buying trucks and equipment. The GM moved the location out of a storage unit and onto a farm. Rent was cheap. $600 a month to park trucks, store equipment and dump debris. They also brought in shipping containers for secure storage. Since they use Augusta's command center, they had no office staff. They pay for admin on a per minute basis. It costs about 4% of revenue. Years four and five the location hit its stride. They run with four to eight employees in the field depending on the season and five trucks. Revenue for the past 12 months was $844,767. Profit on the income statement show, $130,446. That's after paying the GM and regional manager bonuses which are categorized under wages. The GM made a $70,000 base salary plus more than $73,000 in profit distributions since he started the location. From day one he receives 35% of profits. The regional manager gets 15%. In the early years, their bonuses weren't much. By year five, they're substantial. I as the owner took $86,420 out of the business. What's wild is I have never visited this location's current shop. I've never met the technicians. The GM hired the entire team. The regional manager oversees the gm weekly meetings and a monthly coaching call keeps things on track. They even bought a truck recently. I just signed a document giving them purchase authority. This is the copy and paste millionaire model. In one year, I personally took more cash out of this one location than than I originally invested to start it. The ROI is incredible. My first location was in profit mode. I paid almost no taxes. I used profits from my first location to start a second location. Copy and paste. As long as I'm not involved in day to day operations, I want a 20% profit margin and at least 10% of revenue flowing back to me. Free cash flow. I'm fine giving up half the profits. If the GM and regional manager run everything. This location exemplified that exactly. Here is another income statement breakdown. This video shows a comparison of two Augusta locations. They have nearly identical revenues and profits in the month I wrote this book. Chapter 10 the Stages of Wealth and Success. You feel like you're doing the same simple jobs every day. Monotony, Mow, edge, blow, repeat, strip, paint, clean, repeat, quote, work, invoice, repeat. But under the surface, you're either building a cash printing machine or you're stuck working 14 hour days for life. This chapter gives you the scoreboard. It gives you the stages from entry level employee to becoming a copy and paste millionaire. 7 stages for technicians. 7 stages for general managers. 7 stages for owners. 21 steps from new hire to multi location owner with a wealth plan. Clear finish lines, no confusion, no dead end jobs. Everyone knows where they stand and what comes next. The seven stages of wealth for owners. These are the owner stages inside Augusta Nation. Use them to track progress on your path to becoming a copy and paste millionaire. Stage one growth. Get past $500,000 in revenue. You are a working GM with a small crew. You grow fast using instant quote door hangers, local SEO, Google reviews and clean direct online ads. Simple standardized services. You're scrappy and fast, focused on close ratio and filling the schedule. Break $500,000 in annual revenue without bloating overhead. Lean on Command center for admin. Stage 2. Profit. Enter profit mode and raise prices. You stop chasing every job. You tighten your service area. You raise prices. Depending on your cash position, you might sprint to stage four. Or if you're light on cash, you might sit in stage two for a year or two and stack cash reserves. Either path is fine as long as you're building a war chest. Clean margins, a rising bank balance. Disciplined pricing. Stage 3 systems simplify services and focus on recurring revenue. Cut complexity. Kill one off. Custom projects that eat your time. Burn your crew and choke cash. Build the business to leave by focusing on recurring work. Instant pricing. Standard SOPs pay for performance. Homework software. Command center for admin tasks and calls. This structure will simplify operations and facilitate seamless transitions. More than 75% of revenue from simple and recurring services. Stage 4 scale push to 800,000. Run the playbook until you hit capacity. Then raise prices again and again. Owners can exceed 800k if they stay disciplined in profit mode. They keep raising prices when crews hit capacity. Goal around 800,000 annual revenue, low overhead and increasing profit. Stage 5 GM hire a working general manager. You exit daily operations. You install a working GM who manages up to eight employees in peak season. Works in the field more during the off season. Focuses on operations, training and scheduling. Relies on the command center for admin and instant quote phone sales. Goal owner out. Business runs daily without you. Stage 6 repeat copy and paste. This is where the copy and paste millionaire model is born. This is the secret sauce. You open more locations and run the loop. 1. Grow to 500k 2. Enter profit mode. 3. Simplify to recurring services. 4. Revenue grows to over 800k due to price increases. 5. 5. Hire a general manager. Number 6. Repeat goal. A system that works in many locations using the same tools and playbooks. Stage 7 Invest, diversify and protect. You join the seven figure club. You invest in stocks, real estate and tax advantaged assets. You build a revocable living trust. You get your living will together. You plan your estate. You learn tax strategies for 401ks, IRAs, HSAs and how to manage a portfolio. At our last Seven Figure Club, we gathered in a barndoninium. We hired a chef and spent the day learning about stewardship. We focused on the management of time, resources and relationships. We realized something big. We had stages of wealth for the owners. But our technicians and GMs had no roadmap that creates churn. People leave when they can't see the next step. So we built it. The seven stages of success for technicians. These give field team members real near term wins Most complete them in six to 12 months. Early momentum is important. If the jobs are simple and standardized, it can become monotonous. Learn Complete infield training with a trainer. Pass the basics 2. Earn Hit two consecutive pay periods above base pay on P4P 3. Shine Earn 5. Online reviews that mention your crew or your work. 4. Lead Lead 2. Morning team meetings 5. Train Train a new technician. You learn the most when you teach. Number six Profit Earn two. Profit sharing checks. We distribute these quarterly. Seven. Mentor Guide three new technicians through stages one through four. Why this works New hires get early wins in weeks, not years. Everyone speaks a common language. I'm in stage three. She just hit stage six. We can celebrate real finish lines during team meetings all year. Technicians see a path to GM and beyond instead of a dead end job. Mentorship in a team is key to culture. The best way to learn a concept is to teach it. A technician can get promoted to GM after finishing all seven stages. This can happen in their current location or at a new location. Hey everyone, it's Mike here. As you go through the different stages of success as an owner, one of the things I find most important is to be able to start automating all aspects of the business, whether it be sending reports, sending notifications and making sure the KPIs of the business are on point. And to do this I use Home works. One of the things I love most about homeworks is the custom automations. The ability to be able to text, email my customers, my team members, set up automatic reminders, set up reminders for estimates and invoices that are overdue. These are all things that are completely customized and you can connect to Zapier. So if you have other software, if you have a phone system that you want to connect. So for example, I was talking to someone today. Every single time a new customer is set up inside of homeworks they have Zapier talk to Ringcentral. And Ringcentral actually automatically calls the customer and confirms the appointment. These are little things that you can do like automations inside of homeworks, using Zapier and connecting with other software that's super powerful. You might spend a couple hours building automation, a couple hours building the templates and the text messages, or connecting it to Zapier and your other software. But doing that one time allows you to copy and paste and save hours, if not days of admin time, of sales time, and increases your close rate across the board. So go check it out today. Go to Home Dot Works and if you're a Zapier power user and you love billing out automations. You can also go to Zapier, look up homeworks and you'll actually see all the different triggers and actions that you can perform inside of their platform. The seven Stages of Success For General Managers this is the pipeline for the operators who run the machine. We train GMs in person at Augusta the same level of rigor that we give owners. We provide a playbook for managing daily operations at a location with up to eight employees. 1. Learn. Complete all foundational GM training at HQ and pass the test. 2. Hire, recruit and retain two team members for at least 90 days. 3. Crush the rush. Lead the team through a busy season without breaking. 4. No off season. Maintain at least 50% of peak monthly revenue during slow months. Number 5 consistency. Generate profit distributions for four consecutive quarters. 6. Mentor support a new GM and guide them through stages 1. 4. Stage 7 3. F program franchise fee Forgiveness to start your own Augusta location, save over $24,000 on the initial fee and become an owner. A GM isn't a glorified foreman. They're leaders focused on profit. They lead their team through spring chaos and protect winter value. When they prove it, we invest in them. Upper mobility that's real, not lip service. The 21 stages of success technician GM owner seven stages each. We print these. We put them on the wall. We track each member of the team. We celebrate every step forward, stickers, shoutouts, bonuses and jumbo checks. This creates a talent magnet. New hires get excited. A Stage six Tech can train a stage three tech. A stage five GM can coach. A Stage two GM an owner at Stage six or Stage seven can guide rising technicians into ownership. Everyone is on the same game board that includes the owner. No one can say there's no path here. The path is on the wall once you hit stage six and seven. If you're reading this, you might have copied and pasted Stage six for owners or be diversifying. Stage seven now is when wealth strategy really clicks. This is why we launched the Seven Figure Club. This is an annual event focused on stewardship, trust, estate planning, tax strategy, portfolio building and creating a legacy. This event is for Augusta Lawn Care owners to see if joining Augusta Nation is right for you. Visit augustalawncareservices.com franchise and book a call. Use the systems to become a Copy and Paste Millionaire. After five years as an owner, you receive credit for your initial franchise fee. This applies to your next location. Copy and Paste we also launched a Copy and Paste Millionaire Workshop. It's a two day in person event at our new headquarters building. It is for home service business owners of all industries. Build a 3 million plus dollar empire. Learn how to find and hire GMs from multiple locations. Scale the hub and spoke model Build a management team for sales, operations and admin. Build a command center admin team install instant quotes and recurring revenue and how to have grand opening launches for new locations. You can get more info@mikeandys.com HQ and reserve your seat. If you come and you feel it isn't worth the ticket price, I'll refund you. Before you leave you will see the command center in action. You will hear from my General Managers and Regional Manager. We will work with you to customize your copy and Paste Millionaire roadmap. In Stage seven of wealth, we also look to create an exit strategy. How do you keep the legacy going? At the workshop we will also discuss Family Succession the Smart Way plan for third party sales Looking into seller financing focusing on maximizing valuation. We'll also talk about ESOPs employee stock ownership plans to help you sell your business to your team Trust structures to transfer assets Tax efficiently if this book gets 1000Amazon reviews, I will write another book. It will be named Copy and Paste Millionaire Wealth Strategy. Then I will give you the full wealth playbook. It will teach you how to turn active income from your home service business into passive assets. You can build tax advantaged wealth to pass on to the next generation. When you leave the Amazon review, I will give you access to online training. Screenshot your Amazon review and email it to bookikeandys.com then you will get access to the training. What this changes the Copy and Paste Millionaire is more than just copying and pasting money. It's about copying and pasting opportunities. Your team can't resent your income when they can follow the same steps and earn their own. Your GMs can't stagnate when they have a clear ladder to ownership. You can't drift when someone defines and dates your next stage. Our mission at Augusta Lawn Care is simple. Raise the level of professionalism in this industry. We do it by giving everyone techs GM's owners a path and the pressure to keep climbing. Constant improvement is not only a value on our wall, it's what we live by. Being a business owner is lonely, but you don't need more hype. You need the next stage. You need something to strive for. Constant improvement is the goal. Chapter 11 P.S. important warning this will not be easy. I almost changed the title of this book. The words Copy and paste give the illusion that this is easy. This is not true. If you plan to exceed a million dollars in revenue, be aware that you're entering tough territory. Most entrepreneurs over 90% will never explore this area. They will stay in six figure territory. Opening more locations brings many challenges. You will have to learn how to manage leaders. Your working GMs. You have to create systems with multiple locations. You can't be in all of them at once. This forces you to build systems. Systems for sales. Systems for operations. Systems for admin. Systems that allow you to leave. You must standardize your products and services. This forces you to simplify. This forces you to create recurring revenue. This increases the chance that you can sell the business. This increases the chances you will be able to take a vacation. This increases the chances that you will be profitable. You can replicate this over and over again. I created the copy and paste millionaire method. I found that the four to eight person business model is effective for making money. It is the sweet spot. I hate to see the pressure on business owners to build a seven figure business. I hate the notion that a million dollar business is the starting point for success. This idea leads business owners to create a less profitable business. It pushes them to go into debt. Some never survive. Some quit. Most owners who build a copy and paste business should stop at one location. If you have a 3 million plus location, awesome. I do not disqualify your business model. You are killing it. You have done what very few can do. You have figured out the hardest part of entrepreneurship. Leadership. If you have built a seven figure business and it is unprofitable, you are in debt. You work 80 plus hour weeks. You have no systems. All your work is one time projects. Every project requires you to. You can't take vacations. I wrote this book for you. I remember the fear I felt as I was going into the CAT scan. They believed I had broken my neck. Everything in my business relied on me. I was afraid I was broke. The copy and paste methods prevent this from happening to you. Using the copy and paste millionaire method, you can set up systems. You can use software, cut out unnecessary overhead, sales staff and office workers. You can hit capacity and raise prices. You can double profits within six weeks. You can reclaim your life. You can empower your team. Your business can serve you, not you serve it. If you have made it this far, I would like to invite you to come and meet in person. Using the funds from these offers to donate 100,000 books to home service business owners. You have two options. The copy and paste millionaire Intensive. I mentioned this in the last Chapter. It allows me to send 100 copies of the book to those who need it. It is a two day workshop at my headquarter building. Hear from my general managers and regional managers. Learn from my command center manager. She manages over 200 locations. Her from a distance. Here from my sales manager and estimator. See 100 person HQ in Operation Media Software Franchising. You will create a plan to start multiple locations or optimize your GM location. We will create a budget and roadmap benchmarks to copy and paste. We will dive deep into the copy and paste method and how to create systems. If you want to hire GMs, start a command center and grow. You will love this event. The first day will be very practical. On the second day you will explore your personal wealth. You will see how the copy and paste millionaire invests their money and time. We will cover estate planning, tax strategies and diversifying your assets. These tactics will show the systems to achieve a 5 million dollar net worth or more. Go to mikeandys.comhq to register now for the Ballers, the franchise advisory service. It allows me to send 400 copies of franchise consulting. Augusta Lawn Care stands out from other franchisors. We have no private equity. We have no debt. We have no royalties. We give our initial franchise fee back to owners. We have no national marketing fund. We don't take a kickback from our preferred vendor discounts. We allow owners to leave at any time without penalty with their customer base. Every consultant advised against these practices. Well, Somehow we've surpassed 200 locations. We're on our way to a thousand locations. I believe in franchising. I believe in the community it builds. I believe owning a business is safer. When you join a brand and a group of entrepreneurs, you have buying power. You have coaching. You have brand recognition. The likelihood of success is better. There is a problem. Private equity owns most big franchisors. They do not act in the best interest of the franchisees. They are full of fees. The franchisees get raked over the coals. I hate this. I want to put pressure on these brands. I want to show that doing what is right for the owners works in the long run. For the first time ever, I am pulling back the curtain. This intimate event will be at our hq. In person. I am showing how to make an unbeatable offer to franchise leads. I will show you how I made our franchise disclosure documents. I will give you access to and training from my legal counsel and attorneys. I will show you everything I have learned about franchising insurance traps that no one tells you about how to fund growth without debt or private equity compliance pitfalls I fell into and how to avoid them Setting up a Franchise Advisory Board why daily communication with owners is key how to set up a preferred vendor and coaching program why we give the initial franchise fee back how we achieved an MPS score of 87 that's higher than Apple how to train new owners and create a learning management system how to manage social media and marketing for franchisees how we ranked in the top 300 franchises according to entrepreneur.com how we set up a franchise fee forgiveness program for technicians how to maximize enterprise value for an exit the franchise advisory practice costs a lot. This is for ballers only. You need a seven to eight figure business to make this worth it. I've invested a lot in franchise lawyers and consultants to learn these secrets. I am doing it now, not in the past. Now. I don't believe there is anyone else offering the service. The advisory service has a price that reflects its value. Go to mikeandys.comadvisory to register. I'm using these funds to buy more books. I'll donate them to home service business owners who who can't afford to attend the workshops. I want to reach 100,000 of them. The goal is to make home service business owners rich one book at a.